the angels of mons the bowmen and other legends of the war by arthur machen introduction i have been asked to write an introduction to the story of "the bowmen", on its publication in book form together with three other tales of similar fashion. and i hesitate. this affair of "the bowmen" has been such an odd one from first to last, so many queer complications have entered into it, there have been so many and so divers currents and cross-currents of rumour and speculation concerning it, that i honestly do not know where to begin. i propose, then, to solve the difficulty by apologising for beginning at all. for, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced. if, for example, a man has made an anthology of great poetry, he may well write an introduction justifying his principle of selection, pointing out here and there, as the spirit moves him, high beauties and supreme excellencies, discoursing of the magnates and lords and princes of literature, whom he is merely serving as groom of the chamber. introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and i am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in _the evening news_ about ten months ago. i appreciate the absurdity, nay, the enormity of the position in all its grossness. and my excuse for these pages must be this: that though the story itself is nothing, it has yet had such odd and unforeseen consequences and adventures that the tale of them may possess some interest. and then, again, there are certain psychological morals to be drawn from the whole matter of the tale and its sequel of rumours and discussions that are not, i think, devoid of consequence; and so to begin at the beginning. this was in last august, to be more precise, on the last sunday of last august. there were terrible things to be read on that hot sunday morning between meat and mass. it was in _the weekly dispatch_ that i saw the awful account of the retreat from mons. i no longer recollect the details; but i have not forgotten the impression that was then on my mind, i seemed to see a furnace of torment and death and agony and terror seven times heated, and in the midst of the burning was the british army. in the midst of the flame, consumed by it and yet aureoled in it, scattered like ashes and yet triumphant, martyred and for ever glorious. so i saw our men with a shining about them, so i took these thoughts with me to church, and, i am sorry to say, was making up a story in my head while the deacon was singing the gospel. this was not the tale of "the bowmen". it was the first sketch, as it were, of "the soldiers' rest". i only wish i had been able to write it as i conceived it. the tale as it stands is, i think, a far better piece of craft than "the bowmen", but the tale that came to me as the blue incense floated above the gospel book on the desk between the tapers: that indeed was a noble story--like all the stories that never get written. i conceived the dead men coming up through the flames and in the flames, and being welcomed in the eternal tavern with songs and flowing cups and everlasting mirth. but every man is the child of his age, however much he may hate it; and our popular religion has long determined that jollity is wicked. as far as i can make out modern protestantism believes that heaven is something like evensong in an english cathedral, the service by stainer and the dean preaching. for those opposed to dogma of any kind--even the mildest--i suppose it is held that a course of ethical lectures will be arranged. well, i have long maintained that on the whole the average church, considered as a house of preaching, is a much more poisonous place than the average tavern; still, as i say, one's age masters one, and clouds and bewilders the intelligence, and the real story of "the soldiers' rest", with its "sonus epulantium in æterno convivio", was ruined at the moment of its birth, and it was some time later that the actual story got written. and in the meantime the plot of "the bowmen" occurred to me. now it has been murmured and hinted and suggested and whispered in all sorts of quarters that before i wrote the tale i had heard something. the most decorative of these legends is also the most precise: "i know for a fact that the whole thing was given him in typescript by a lady-in-waiting." this was not the case; and all vaguer reports to the effect that i had heard some rumours or hints of rumours are equally void of any trace of truth. again i apologise for entering so pompously into the minutiæ of my bit of a story, as if it were the lost poems of sappho; but it appears that the subject interests the public, and i comply with my instructions. i take it, then, that the origins of "the bowmen" were composite. first of all, all ages and nations have cherished the thought that spiritual hosts may come to the help of earthly arms, that gods and heroes and saints have descended from their high immortal places to fight for their worshippers and clients. then kipling's story of the ghostly indian regiment got in my head and got mixed with the mediævalism that is always there; and so "the bowmen" was written. i was heartily disappointed with it, i remember, and thought it--as i still think it--an indifferent piece of work. however, i have tried to write for these thirty-five long years, and if i have not become practised in letters, i am at least a past master in the lodge of disappointment. such as it was, "the bowmen" appeared in _the evening news_ of september th, . now the journalist does not, as a rule, dwell much on the prospect of fame; and if he be an evening journalist, his anticipations of immortality are bounded by twelve o'clock at night at the latest; and it may well be that those insects which begin to live in the morning and are dead by sunset deem themselves immortal. having written my story, having groaned and growled over it and printed it, i certainly never thought to hear another word of it. my colleague "the londoner" praised it warmly to my face, as his kindly fashion is; entering, very properly, a technical caveat as to the language of the battle-cries of the bowmen. "why should english archers use french terms?" he said. i replied that the only reason was this--that a "monseigneur" here and there struck me as picturesque; and i reminded him that, as a matter of cold historical fact, most of the archers of agincourt were mercenaries from gwent, my native country, who would appeal to mihangel and to saints not known to the saxons--teilo, iltyd, dewi, cadwaladyr vendigeid. and i thought that that was the first and last discussion of "the bowmen". but in a few days from its publication the editor of _the occult review_ wrote to me. he wanted to know whether the story had any foundation in fact. i told him that it had no foundation in fact of any kind or sort; i forget whether i added that it had no foundation in rumour but i should think not, since to the best of my belief there were no rumours of heavenly interposition in existence at that time. certainly i had heard of none. soon afterwards the editor of _light_ wrote asking a like question, and i made him a like reply. it seemed to me that i had stifled any "bowmen" mythos in the hour of its birth. a month or two later, i received several requests from editors of parish magazines to reprint the story. i--or, rather, my editor-- readily gave permission; and then, after another month or two, the conductor of one of these magazines wrote to me, saying that the february issue containing the story had been sold out, while there was still a great demand for it. would i allow them to reprint "the bowmen" as a pamphlet, and would i write a short preface giving the exact authorities for the story? i replied that they might reprint in pamphlet form with all my heart, but that i could not give my authorities, since i had none, the tale being pure invention. the priest wrote again, suggesting--to my amazement--that i must be mistaken, that the main "facts" of "the bowmen" must be true, that my share in the matter must surely have been confined to the elaboration and decoration of a veridical history. it seemed that my light fiction had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if i had failed in the art of letters, i had succeeded, unwittingly, in the art of deceit. this happened, i should think, some time in april, and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a monstrous size. it was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be told as authentic histories. at first, these tales betrayed their relation to their original. in several of them the vegetarian restaurant appeared, and st. george was the chief character. in one case an officer--name and address missing--said that there was a portrait of st. george in a certain london restaurant, and that a figure, just like the portrait, appeared to him on the battlefield, and was invoked by him, with the happiest results. another variant--this, i think, never got into print--told how dead prussians had been found on the battlefield with arrow wounds in their bodies. this notion amused me, as i had imagined a scene, when i was thinking out the story, in which a german general was to appear before the kaiser to explain his failure to annihilate the english. "all-highest," the general was to say, "it is true, it is impossible to deny it. the men were killed by arrows; the shafts were found in their bodies by the burying parties." i rejected the idea as over-precipitous even for a mere fantasy. i was therefore entertained when i found that what i had refused as too fantastical for fantasy was accepted in certain occult circles as hard fact. other versions of the story appeared in which a cloud interposed between the attacking germans and the defending british. in some examples the cloud served to conceal our men from the advancing enemy; in others, it disclosed shining shapes which frightened the horses of the pursuing german cavalry. st. george, it will he noted, has disappeared--he persisted some time longer in certain roman catholic variants--and there are no more bowmen, no more arrows. but so far angels are not mentioned; yet they are ready to appear, and i think that i have detected the machine which brought them into the story. in "the bowmen" my imagined soldier saw "a long line of shapes, with a shining about them." and mr. a.p. sinnett, writing in the may issue of _the occult review_, reporting what he had heard, states that "those who could see said they saw 'a row of shining beings' between the two armies." now i conjecture that the word "shining" is the link between my tale and the derivative from it. in the popular view shining and benevolent supernatural beings are angels, and so, i believe, the bowmen of my story have become "the angels of mons." in this shape they have been received with respect and credence everywhere, or almost everywhere. and here, i conjecture, we have the key to the large popularity of the delusion--as i think it. we have long ceased in england to take much interest in saints, and in the recent revival of the cultus of st. george, the saint is little more than a patriotic figurehead. and the appeal to the saints to succour us is certainly not a common english practice; it is held popish by most of our countrymen. but angels, with certain reservations, have retained their popularity, and so, when it was settled that the english army in its dire peril was delivered by angelic aid, the way was clear for general belief, and for the enthusiasms of the religion of the man in the street. and so soon as the legend got the title "the angels of mons" it became impossible to avoid it. it permeated the press: it would not be neglected; it appeared in the most unlikely quarters--in _truth_ and _town topics_, _the new church weekly_ (swedenborgian) and _john bull_. the editor of _the church times_ has exercised a wise reserve: he awaits that evidence which so far is lacking; but in one issue of the paper i noted that the story furnished a text for a sermon, the subject of a letter, and the matter for an article. people send me cuttings from provincial papers containing hot controversy as to the exact nature of the appearances; the "office window" of _the daily chronicle_ suggests scientific explanations of the hallucination; the _pall mall_ in a note about st. james says he is of the brotherhood of the bowmen of mons--this reversion to the bowmen from the angels being possibly due to the strong statements that i have made on the matter. the pulpits both of the church and of non-conformity have been busy: bishop welldon, dean hensley henson (a disbeliever), bishop taylor smith (the chaplain-general), and many other clergy have occupied themselves with the matter. dr. horton preached about the "angels" at manchester; sir joseph compton rickett (president of the national federation of free church councils) stated that the soldiers at the front had seen visions and dreamed dreams, and had given testimony of powers and principalities fighting for them or against them. letters come from all the ends of the earth to the editor of _the evening news_ with theories, beliefs, explanations, suggestions. it is all somewhat wonderful; one can say that the whole affair is a psychological phenomenon of considerable interest, fairly comparable with the great russian delusion of last august and september. * * * * * now it is possible that some persons, judging by the tone of these remarks of mine, may gather the impression that i am a profound disbeliever in the possibility of any intervention of the super-physical order in the affairs of the physical order. they will be mistaken if they make this inference; they will be mistaken if they suppose that i think miracles in judæa credible but miracles in france or flanders incredible. i hold no such absurdities. but i confess, very frankly, that i credit none of the "angels of mons" legends, partly because i see, or think i see, their derivation from my own idle fiction, but chiefly because i have, so far, not received one jot or tittle of evidence that should dispose me to belief. it is idle, indeed, and foolish enough for a man to say: "i am sure that story is a lie, because the supernatural element enters into it;" here, indeed, we have the maggot writhing in the midst of corrupted offal denying the existence of the sun. but if this fellow be a fool--as he is-- equally foolish is he who says, "if the tale has anything of the supernatural it is true, and the less evidence the better;" and i am afraid this tends to be the attitude of many who call themselves occultists. i hope that i shall never get to that frame of mind. so i say, not that super-normal interventions are impossible, not that they have not happened during this war--i know nothing as to that point, one way or the other--but that there is not one atom of evidence (so far) to support the current stories of the angels of mons. for, be it remarked, these stories are specific stories. they rest on the second, third, fourth, fifth hand stories told by "a soldier," by "an officer," by "a catholic correspondent," by "a nurse," by any number of anonymous people. indeed, names have been mentioned. a lady's name has been drawn, most unwarrantably as it appears to me, into the discussion, and i have no doubt that this lady has been subject to a good deal of pestering and annoyance. she has written to the editor of _the evening news_ denying all knowledge of the supposed miracle. the psychical research society's expert confesses that no real evidence has been proffered to her society on the matter. and then, to my amazement, she accepts as fact the proposition that some men on the battlefield have been "hallucinated," and proceeds to give the theory of sensory hallucination. she forgets that, by her own showing, there is no reason to suppose that anybody has been hallucinated at all. someone (unknown) has met a nurse (unnamed) who has talked to a soldier (anonymous) who has seen angels. but _that_ is not evidence; and not even sam weller at his gayest would have dared to offer it as such in the court of common pleas. so far, then, nothing remotely approaching proof has been offered as to any supernatural intervention during the retreat from mons. proof may come; if so, it will be interesting and more than interesting. but, taking the affair as it stands at present, how is it that a nation plunged in materialism of the grossest kind has accepted idle rumours and gossip of the supernatural as certain truth? the answer is contained in the question: it is precisely because our whole atmosphere is materialist that we are ready to credit anything--save the truth. separate a man from good drink, he will swallow methylated spirit with joy. man is created to be inebriated; to be "nobly wild, not mad." suffer the cocoa prophets and their company to seduce him in body and spirit, and he will get himself stuff that will make him ignobly wild and mad indeed. it took hard, practical men of affairs, business men, advanced thinkers, freethinkers, to believe in madame blavatsky and mahatmas and the famous message from the golden shore: "judge's plan is right; follow him and _stick_." and the main responsibility for this dismal state of affairs undoubtedly lies on the shoulders of the majority of the clergy of the church of england. christianity, as mr. w.l. courtney has so admirably pointed out, is a great mystery religion; it is _the_ mystery religion. its priests are called to an awful and tremendous hierurgy; its pontiffs are to be the pathfinders, the bridge-makers between the world of sense and the world of spirit. and, in fact, they pass their time in preaching, not the eternal mysteries, but a twopenny morality, in changing the wine of angels and the bread of heaven into gingerbeer and mixed biscuits: a sorry transubstantiation, a sad alchemy, as it seems to me. the bowmen it was during the retreat of the eighty thousand, and the authority of the censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. but it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over london far away; and, without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls. on this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little english company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. with the permission of the censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the english force as a whole would be shattered, the allied left would be turned, and sedan would inevitably follow. all the morning the german guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. the men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. but the shells came on and burst, and tore good englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. there was no help, it seemed. the english artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron. there comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, "it is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. so it was in these british trenches. there were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the german cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. and at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the german infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards. there was no hope at all. they shook hands, some of them. one man improvised a new version of the battlesong, "good-bye, good-bye to tipperary," ending with "and we shan't get there". and they all went on firing steadily. the officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the germans dropped line after line; the tipperary humorist asked, "what price sidney street?" and the few machine guns did their best. but everybody knew it was of no use. the dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond. "world without end. amen," said one of the british soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. and then he remembered--he says he cannot think why or wherefore--a queer vegetarian restaurant in london where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. on all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of st. george in blue, with the motto, _adsit anglis sanctus geogius_--may st. george be a present help to the english. this soldier happened to know latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass-- yards away--he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. he went on firing to the end, and at last bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the king's ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead germans. for as the latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. the roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, "array, array, array!" his heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. he heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: "st. george! st. george!" "ha! messire; ha! sweet saint, grant us good deliverance!" "st. george for merry england!" "harow! harow! monseigneur st. george, succour us." "ha! st. george! ha! st. george! a long bow and a strong bow." "heaven's knight, aid us!" and as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. they were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the german hosts. the other men in the trench were firing all the while. they had no hope; but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at bisley. suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest english, "gawd help us!" he bellowed to the man next to him, "but we're blooming marvels! look at those grey... gentlemen, look at them! d'ye see them? they're not going down in dozens, nor in 'undreds; it's thousands, it is. look! look! there's a regiment gone while i'm talking to ye." "shut it!" the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, "what are ye gassing about!" but he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the grey men were falling by the thousands. the english could hear the guttural scream of the german officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the earth. all the while the latin-bred soldier heard the cry: "harow! harow! monseigneur, dear saint, quick to our aid! st. george help us!" "high chevalier, defend us!" the singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air; the heathen horde melted from before them. "more machine guns!" bill yelled to tom. "don't hear them," tom yelled back. "but, thank god, anyway; they've got it in the neck." in fact, there were ten thousand dead german soldiers left before that salient of the english army, and consequently there was no sedan. in germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the great general staff decided that the contemptible english must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead german soldiers. but the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that st. george had brought his agincourt bowmen to help the english. the soldiers' rest the soldier with the ugly wound in the head opened his eyes at last, and looked about him with an air of pleasant satisfaction. he still felt drowsy and dazed with some fierce experience through which he had passed, but so far he could not recollect much about it. but--an agreeable glow began to steal about his heart--such a glow as comes to people who have been in a tight place and have come through it better than they had expected. in its mildest form this set of emotions may be observed in passengers who have crossed the channel on a windy day without being sick. they triumph a little internally, and are suffused with vague, kindly feelings. the wounded soldier was somewhat of this disposition as he opened his eyes, pulled himself together, and looked about him. he felt a sense of delicious ease and repose in bones that had been racked and weary, and deep in the heart that had so lately been tormented there was an assurance of comfort--of the battle won. the thundering, roaring waves were passed; he had entered into the haven of calm waters. after fatigues and terrors that as yet he could not recollect he seemed now to be resting in the easiest of all easy chairs in a dim, low room. in the hearth there was a glint of fire and a blue, sweet-scented puff of wood smoke; a great black oak beam roughly hewn crossed the ceiling. through the leaded panes of the windows he saw a rich glow of sunlight, green lawns, and against the deepest and most radiant of all blue skies the wonderful far-lifted towers of a vast, gothic cathedral--mystic, rich with imagery. "good lord!" he murmured to himself. "i didn't know they had such places in france. it's just like wells. and it might be the other day when i was going past the swan, just as it might be past that window, and asked the ostler what time it was, and he says, 'what time? why, summer-time'; and there outside it looks like summer that would last for ever. if this was an inn they ought to call it _the soldiers' rest_." he dozed off again, and when he opened his eyes once more a kindly looking man in some sort of black robe was standing by him. "it's all right now, isn't it?" he said, speaking in good english. "yes, thank you, sir, as right as can be. i hope to be back again soon." "well well; but how did you come here? where did you get that?" he pointed to the wound on the soldier's forehead. the soldier put his hand: up to his brow and looked dazed and puzzled. "well, sir," he said at last, "it was like this, to begin at the beginning. you know how we came over in august, and there we were in the thick of it, as you might say, in a day or two. an awful time it was, and i don't know how i got through it alive. my best friend was killed dead beside me as we lay in the trenches. by cambrai, i think it was. "then things got a little quieter for a bit, and i was quartered in a village for the best part of a week. she was a very nice lady where i was, and she treated me proper with the best of everything. her husband he was fighting; but she had the nicest little boy i ever knew, a little fellow of five, or six it might be, and we got on splendid. the amount of their lingo that kid taught me--'we, we' and 'bong swot' and 'commong voo potty we' and all--and i taught him english. you should have heard that nipper say ''arf a mo', old un!' it was a treat. "then one day we got surprised. there was about a dozen of us in the village, and two or three hundred germans came down on us early one morning. they got us; no help for 'it. before we could shoot. "well there we were. they tied our hands behind our backs, and smacked our faces and kicked us a bit, and we were lined up opposite the house where i'd been staying. "and then that poor little chap broke away from his mother, and he run out and saw one of the boshes, as we call them, fetch me one over the jaw with his clenched fist. oh dear! oh dear! he might have done it a dozen times if only that little child hadn't seen him. "he had a poor bit of a toy i'd bought him at the village shop; a toy gun it was. and out he came running, as i say, crying out something in french like 'bad man! bad man! don't hurt my anglish or i shoot you'; and he pointed that gun at the german soldier. the german, he took his bayonet, and he drove it right through the poor little chap's throat." the soldier's face worked and twitched and twisted itself into a sort of grin, and he sat grinding his teeth and staring at the man in the black robe. he was silent for a little. and then he found his voice, and the oaths rolled terrible, thundering from him, as he cursed that murderous wretch, and bade him go down and burn for ever in hell. and the tears were raining down his face, and they choked him at last. "i beg your pardon, sir, i'm sure," he said, "especially you being a minister of some kind, i suppose; but i can't help it, he was such a dear little man." the man in black murmured something to himself: "_pretiosa in conspectu domini mors innocentium ejus_"--dear in the sight of the lord is the death of his innocents. then he put a hand very gently on the soldier's shoulder. "never mind," said he; "i've seen some service in my time, myself. but what about that wound?" "oh, that; that's nothing. but i'll tell you how i got it. it was just like this. the germans had us fair, as i tell you, and they shut us up in a barn in the village; just flung us on the ground and left us to starve seemingly. they barred up the big door of the barn, and put a sentry there, and thought we were all right. "there were sort of slits like very narrow windows in one of the walls, and on the second day it was, i was looking out of these slits down the street, and i could see those german devils were up to mischief. they were planting their machine-guns everywhere handy where an ordinary man coming up the street would never see them, but i see them, and i see the infantry lining up behind the garden walls. then i had a sort of a notion of what was coming; and presently, sure enough, i could hear some of our chaps singing 'hullo, hullo, hullo!' in the distance; and i says to myself, 'not this time.' "so i looked about me, and i found a hole under the wall; a kind of a drain i should think it was, and i found i could just squeeze through. and i got out and crept, round, and away i goes running down the street, yelling for all i was worth, just as our chaps were getting round the corner at the bottom. 'bang, bang!' went the guns, behind me and in front of me, and on each side of me, and then--bash! something hit me on the head and over i went; and i don't remember anything more till i woke up here just now." the soldier lay back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. when he opened them he saw that there were other people in the room besides the minister in the black robes. one was a man in a big black cloak. he had a grim old face and a great beaky nose. he shook the soldier by the hand. "by god! sir," he said, "you're a credit to the british army; you're a damned fine soldier and a good man, and, by god! i'm proud to shake hands with you." and then someone came out of the shadow, someone in queer clothes such as the soldier had seen worn by the heralds when he had been on duty at the opening of parliament by the king. "now, by _corpus domini_," this man said, "of all knights ye be noblest and gentlest, and ye be of fairest report, and now ye be a brother of the noblest brotherhood that ever was since this world's beginning, since ye have yielded dear life for your friends' sake." the soldier did not understand what the man was saying to him. there were others, too, in strange dresses, who came and spoke to him. some spoke in what sounded like french. he could not make it out; but he knew that they all spoke kindly and praised him. "what does it all mean?" he said to the minister. "what are they talking about? they don't think i'd let down my pals?" "drink this," said the minister, and he handed the soldier a great silver cup, brimming with wine. the soldier took a deep draught, and in that moment all his sorrows passed from him. "what is it?" he asked? "_vin nouveau du royaume_," said the minister. "new wine of the kingdom, you call it." and then he bent down and murmured in the soldier's ear. "what," said the wounded man, "the place they used to tell us about in sunday school? with such drink and such joy--" his voice was hushed. for as he looked at the minister the fashion of his vesture was changed. the black robe seemed to melt away from him. he was all in armour, if armour be made of starlight, of the rose of dawn, and of sunset fires; and he lifted up a great sword of flame. full in the midst, his cross of red triumphant michael brandished, and trampled the apostate's pride. the monstrance then it fell out in the sacring of the mass that right as the priest heaved up the host there came a beam redder than any rose and smote upon it, and then it was changed bodily into the shape and fashion of a child having his arms stretched forth, as he had been nailed upon the tree.--old romance. so far things were going very well indeed. the night was thick and black and cloudy, and the german force had come three-quarters of their way or more without an alarm. there was no challenge from the english lines; and indeed the english were being kept busy by a high shell-fire on their front. this had been the german plan; and it was coming off admirably. nobody thought that there was any danger on the left; and so the prussians, writhing on their stomachs over the ploughed field, were drawing nearer and nearer to the wood. once there they could establish themselves comfortably and securely during what remained of the night; and at dawn the english left would be hopelessly enfiladed--and there would be another of those movements which people who really understand military matters call "readjustments of our line." the noise made by the men creeping and crawling over the fields was drowned by the cannonade, from the english side as well as the german. on the english centre and right things were indeed very brisk; the big guns were thundering and shrieking and roaring, the machine-guns were keeping up the very devil's racket; the flares and illuminating shells were as good as the crystal palace in the old days, as the soldiers said to one another. all this had been thought of and thought out on the other side. the german force was beautifully organised. the men who crept nearer and nearer to the wood carried quite a number of machine guns in bits on their backs; others of them had small bags full of sand; yet others big bags that were empty. when the wood was reached the sand from the small bags was to be emptied into the big bags; the machine-gun parts were to be put together, the guns mounted behind the sandbag redoubt, and then, as major von und zu pleasantly observed, "the english pigs shall to gehenna-fire quickly come." the major was so well pleased with the way things had gone that he permitted himself a very low and guttural chuckle; in another ten minutes success would be assured. he half turned his head round to whisper a caution about some detail of the sandbag business to the big sergeant-major, karl heinz, who was crawling just behind him. at that instant karl heinz leapt into the air with a scream that rent through the night and through all the roaring of the artillery. he cried in a terrible voice, "the glory of the lord!" and plunged and pitched forward, stone dead. they said that his face as he stood up there and cried aloud was as if it had been seen through a sheet of flame. "they" were one or two out of the few who got back to the german lines. most of the prussians stayed in the ploughed field. karl heinz's scream had frozen the blood of the english soldiers, but it had also ruined the major's plans. he and his men, caught all unready, clumsy with the burdens that they carried, were shot to pieces; hardly a score of them returned. the rest of the force were attended to by an english burying party. according to custom the dead men were searched before they were buried, and some singular relies of the campaign were found upon them, but nothing so singular as karl heinz's diary. he had been keeping it for some time. it began with entries about bread and sausage and the ordinary incidents of the trenches; here and there karl wrote about an old grandfather, and a big china pipe, and pinewoods and roast goose. then the diarist seemed to get fidgety about his health. thus: april .--annoyed for some days by murmuring sounds in my head. i trust i shall not become deaf, like my departed uncle christopher. april .--the noise in my head grows worse; it is a humming sound. it distracts me; twice i have failed to hear the captain and have been reprimanded. april .--so bad is my head that i go to see the doctor. he speaks of tinnitus, and gives me an inhaling apparatus that shall reach, he says, the middle ear. april .--the apparatus is of no use. the sound is now become like the booming of a great church bell. it reminds me of the bell at st. lambart on that terrible day of last august. april .--i could swear that it is the bell of st. lambart that i hear all the time. they rang it as the procession came out of the church. the man's writing, at first firm enough, begins to straggle unevenly over the page at this point. the entries show that he became convinced that he heard the bell of st. lambart's church ringing, though (as he knew better than most men) there had been no bell and no church at st. lambart's since the summer of . there was no village either--the whole place was a rubbish-heap. then the unfortunate karl heinz was beset with other troubles. may .--i fear i am becoming ill. to-day joseph kleist, who is next to me in the trench, asked me why i jerked my head to the right so constantly. i told him to hold his tongue; but this shows that i am noticed. i keep fancying that there is something white just beyond the range of my sight on the right hand. may .--this whiteness is now quite clear, and in front of me. all this day it has slowly passed before me. i asked joseph kleist if he saw a piece of newspaper just beyond the trench. he stared at me solemnly--he is a stupid fool--and said, "there is no paper." may .--it looks like a white robe. there was a strong smell of incense to-day in the trench. no one seemed to notice it. there is decidedly a white robe, and i think i can see feet, passing very slowly before me at this moment while i write. there is no space here for continuous extracts from karl heinz's diary. but to condense with severity, it would seem that he slowly gathered about himself a complete set of sensory hallucinations. first the auditory hallucination of the sound of a bell, which the doctor called tinnitus. then a patch of white growing into a white robe, then the smell of incense. at last he lived in two worlds. he saw his trench, and the level before it, and the english lines; he talked with his comrades and obeyed orders, though with a certain difficulty; but he also heard the deep boom of st. lambart's bell, and saw continually advancing towards him a white procession of little children, led by a boy who was swinging a censer. there is one extraordinary entry: "but in august those children carried no lilies; now they have lilies in their hands. why should they have lilies?" it is interesting to note the transition over the border line. after may there is no reference in the diary to bodily illness, with two notable exceptions. up to and including that date the sergeant knows that he is suffering from illusions; after that he accepts his hallucinations as actualities. the man who cannot see what he sees and hear what he hears is a fool. so he writes: "i ask who is singing 'ave maria stella.' that blockhead friedrich schumacher raises his crest and answers insolently that no one sings, since singing is strictly forbidden for the present." a few days before the disastrous night expedition the last figure in the procession appeared to those sick eyes. the old priest now comes in his golden robe, the two boys holding each side of it. he is looking just as he did when he died, save that when he walked in st. lambart there was no shining round his head. but this is illusion and contrary to reason, since no one has a shining about his head. i must take some medicine. note here that karl heinz absolutely accepts the appearance of the martyred priest of st. lambart as actual, while he thinks that the halo must be an illusion; and so he reverts again to his physical condition. the priest held up both his hands, the diary states, "as if there were something between them. but there is a sort of cloud or dimness over this object, whatever it may be. my poor aunt kathie suffered much from her eyes in her old age." * * * * * one can guess what the priest of st. lambart carried in his hands when he and the little children went out into the hot sunlight to implore mercy, while the great resounding bell of st. lambart boomed over the plain. karl heinz knew what happened then; they said that it was he who killed the old priest and helped to crucify the little child against the church door. the baby was only three years old. he died calling piteously for "mummy" and "daddy." * * * * * and those who will may guess what karl heinz saw when the mist cleared from before the monstrance in the priest's hands. then he shrieked and died. the dazzling light the new head-covering is made of heavy steel, which has been specialty treated to increase its resisting power. the walls protecting the skull are particularly thick, and the weight of the helmet renders its use in open warfare out of the question. the rim is large, like that of the headpiece of mambrino, and the soldier can at will either bring the helmet forward and protect his eyes or wear it so as to protect the base of the skull . . . military experts admit that continuance of the present trench warfare may lead to those engaged in it, especially bombing parties and barbed wire cutters, being more heavily armoured than the knights, who fought at bouvines and at agincourt.--_the times_, july , the war is already a fruitful mother of legends. some people think that there are too many war legends, and a croydon gentleman--or lady, i am not sure which--wrote to me quite recently telling me that a certain particular legend, which i will not specify, had become the "chief horror of the war." there may be something to be said for this point of view, but it strikes me as interesting that the old myth-making faculty has survived into these days, a relic of noble, far-off homeric battles. and after all, what do we know? it does not do to be too sure that this, that, or the other hasn't happened and couldn't have happened. what follows, at any rate, has no claim to be considered either as legend or as myth. it is merely one of the odd circumstances of these times, and i have no doubt it can easily be "explained away." in fact, the rationalistic explanation of the whole thing is patent and on the surface. there is only one little difficulty, and that, i fancy, is by no means insuperable. in any case this one knot or tangle may be put down as a queer coincidence and nothing more. here, then, is the curiosity or oddity in question. a young fellow, whom we will call for avoidance of all identification delamere smith-- he is now lieutenant delamere smith--was spending his holidays on the coast of west south wales at the beginning of the war. he was something or other not very important in the city, and in his leisure hours he smattered lightly and agreeably a little literature, a little art, a little antiquarianism. he liked the italian primitives, he knew the difference between first, second, and third pointed, he had looked through boutell's "engraved brasses." he had been heard indeed to speak with enthusiasm of the brasses of sir robert de septvans and sir roger de trumpington. one morning--he thinks it must have been the morning of august , --the sun shone so brightly into his room that he woke early, and the fancy took him that it would be fine to sit on the cliffs in the pure sunlight. so he dressed and went out, and climbed up giltar point, and sat there enjoying the sweet air and the radiance of the sea, and the sight of the fringe of creaming foam about the grey foundations of st. margaret's island. then he looked beyond and gazed at the new white monastery on caldy, and wondered who the architect was, and how he had contrived to make the group of buildings look exactly like the background of a mediæval picture. after about an hour of this and a couple of pipes, smith confesses that he began to feel extremely drowsy. he was just wondering whether it would be pleasant to stretch himself out on the wild thyme that scented the high place and go to sleep till breakfast, when the mounting sun caught one of the monastery windows, and smith stared sleepily at the darting flashing light till it dazzled him. then he felt "queer." there was an odd sensation as if the top of his head were dilating and contracting, and then he says he had a sort of shock, something between a mild current of electricity and the sensation of putting one's hand into the ripple of a swift brook. now, what happened next smith cannot describe at all clearly. he knew he was on giltar, looking across the waves to caldy; he heard all the while the hollow, booming tide in the caverns of the rocks far below him, and yet he saw, as if in a glass, a very different country--a level fenland cut by slow streams, by long avenues of trimmed trees. "it looked," he says, "as if it ought to have been a lonely country, but it was swarming with men; they were thick as ants in an anthill. and they were all dressed in armour; that was the strange thing about it. "i thought i was standing by what looked as if it had been a farmhouse; but it was all battered to bits, just a heap of ruins and rubbish. all that was left was one tall round chimney, shaped very much like the fifteenth-century chimneys in pembrokeshire. and thousands and tens of thousands went marching by. "they were all in armour, and in all sorts of armour. some of them had overlapping tongues of bright metal fastened on their clothes, others were in chain mail from head to foot, others were in heavy plate armour. "they wore helmets of all shapes and sorts and sizes. one regiment had steel caps with wide trims, something like the old barbers' basins. another lot had knights' tilting helmets on, closed up so that you couldn't see their faces. most of them wore metal gauntlets, either of steel rings or plates, and they had steel over their boots. a great many had things like battle-maces swinging by their sides, and all these fellows carried a sort of string of big metal balls round their waist. then a dozen regiments went by, every man with a steel shield slung over his shoulder. the last to go by were cross-bowmen." in fact, it appeared to delamere smith that he watched the passing of a host of men in mediæval armour before him, and yet he knew--by the position of the sun and of a rosy cloud that was passing over the worm's head--that this vision, or whatever it was, only lasted a second or two. then that slight sense of shock returned, and smith returned to the contemplation of the physical phenomena of the pembrokeshire coast--blue waves, grey st. margaret's, and caldy abbey white in the sunlight. it will be said, no doubt, and very likely with truth, that smith fell asleep on giltar, and mingled in a dream the thought of the great war just begun with his smatterings of mediæval battle and arms and armour. the explanation seems tolerable enough. but there is the one little difficulty. it has been said that smith is now lieutenant smith. he got his commission last autumn, and went out in may. he happens to speak french rather well, and so he has become what is called, i believe, an officer of liaison, or some such term. anyhow, he is often behind the french lines. he was home on short leave last week, and said: "ten days ago i was ordered to ----. i got there early in the morning, and had to wait a bit before i could see the general. i looked about me, and there on the left of us was a farm shelled into a heap of ruins, with one round chimney standing, shaped like the 'flemish' chimneys in pembrokeshire. and then the men in armour marched by, just as i had seen them--french regiments. the things like battle-maces were bomb-throwers, and the metal balls round the men's waists were the bombs. they told me that the cross-bows were used for bomb-shooting. "the march i saw was part of a big movement; you will hear more of it before long." the bowmen and other noble ghosts by "the londoner" there was a journalist--and the _evening news_ reader well knows the initials of his name--who lately sat down to write a story. * * of course his story had to be about the war; there are no other stories nowadays. and so he wrote of english soldiers who, in the dusk on a field of france, faced the sullen mass of the oncoming huns. they were few against fearful odds, but, as they sent the breech-bolt home and aimed and fired, they became aware that others fought beside them. down the air came cries to st. george and twanging of the bow-string; the old bowmen of england had risen at england's need from their graves in that french earth and were fighting for england. * * he said that he made up that story by himself, that he sat down and wrote it out of his head. but others knew better. it must really have happened. there was, i remember, a clergyman of good credit who told him that he was clean mistaken; the archers had really and truly risen up to fight for england: the tale was all up and down the front. for my part i had thought that he wrote out of his head; i had seen him at the detestable job of doing it. i myself have hated this business of writing ever since i found out that it was not so easy as it looks, and i can always spare a little sympathy for a man who is driving a pen to the task of putting words in their right places. yet the clergyman persuaded me at last. who am i that i should doubt the faith of a clerk in holy orders? it must have happened. those archers fought for us, and the grey-goose feather has flown once again in english battle. * * since that day i look eagerly for the ghosts who must be taking their share in this world-war. never since the world began was such a war as this: surely marlborough and the duke, talbot and harry of monmouth, and many another shadowy captain must be riding among our horsemen. the old gods of war are wakened by this loud clamour of the guns. * * all the lands are astir. it is not enough that asia should be humming like an angry hive and the far islands in arms, australia sending her young men and canada making herself a camp. when we talk over the war news, we call up ancient names: we debate how rome stands and what is the matter with greece. * * as for greece, i have ceased to talk of her. if i wanted to say anything about greece i should get down the poetry book and quote lord byron's fine old ranting verse. "the mountains look on marathon--and marathon looks on the sea." but "standing on the persians' grave" greece seems in the same humour that made lord byron give her up as a hopelessly flabby country. * * "'tis greece, but living greece no more" is as true as ever it was. that last telegram of the kaiser must have done its soothing work. you remember how it ran: the kaiser was too busy to make up new phrases. he telegraphed to his sister the familiar potsdam sentence: "woe to those who dare to draw the sword against me." i am sure that i have heard that before. and he added--delightful and significant postscript!--"my compliments to tino." * * and tino--king constantine of the hellenes--understood. he is in bed now with a very bad cold, and like to stay in bed until the weather be more settled. but before going to bed he was able to tell a journalist that greece was going quietly on with her proper business; it was her mission to carry civilisation to the world. truly that was the mission of ancient greece. what we get from tino's modern greece is not civilisation but the little black currants for plum-cake. * * but rome. greece may be dead or in the currant trade. rome is alive and immortal. do not talk to me about signor giolitti, who is quite sure that the only things that matter in this new italy, which is old rome, are her commercial relations with germany. rome of the legions, our ancient mistress and conqueror, is alive to-day, and she cannot be for an ignoble peace. here in my newspaper is the speech of a poet spoken in rome to a shouting crowd: i will cut out the column and put it in the poetry book. * * he calls to the living and to the dead: "i saw the fire of vesta, o romans, lit yesterday in the great steel works of liguria, the fountain of juturna, o romans, i saw its water run to temper armour, to chill the drills that hollow out the bore of guns." this is poetry of the old roman sort. i imagine that scene in rome: the latest poet of rome calling upon the romans in the name of vesta's holy fire, in the name of the springs at which the great twin brethren washed their horses. i still believe in the power and the ancient charm of noble words. i do not think that giolitti and the stockbrokers will keep old rome off the old roads where the legions went. postscript while this volume was passing through the press, mr. ralph shirley, the editor of "the occult review" called my attention to an article that is appearing in the august issue of his magazine, and was kind enough to let me see the advance proof sheets. the article is called "the angelic leaders" it is written by miss phyllis campbell. i have read it with great care. miss campbell says that she was in france when the war broke out. she became a nurse, and while she was nursing the wounded she was informed that an english soldier wanted a "holy picture." she went to the man and found him to be a lancashire fusilier. he said that he was a wesleyan methodist, and asked "for a picture or medal (he didn't care which) of st. george... because he had seen him on a white horse, leading the british at vitry-le-françois, when the allies turned" this statement was corroborated by a wounded r.f.a. man who was present. he saw a tall man with yellow hair, in golden armour, on a white horse, holding his sword up, and his mouth open as if he was saying, "come on, boys! i'll put the kybosh on the devils" this figure was bareheaded--as appeared later from the testimony of other soldiers--and the r.f.a. man and the fusilier knew that he was st. george, because he was exactly like the figure of st. george on the sovereigns. "hadn't they seen him with his sword on every 'quid' they'd ever had?" from further evidence it seemed that while the english had seen the apparition of st. george coming out of a "yellow mist" or "cloud of light," to the french had been vouchsafed visions of st. michael the archangel and joan of arc. miss campbell says:-- "everybody has seen them who has fought through from mons to ypres; they all agree on them individually, and have no doubt at all as to the final issue of their interference" such are the main points of the article as it concerns the great legend of "the angels of mons." i cannot say that the author has shaken my incredulity--firstly, because the evidence is second-hand. miss campbell is perhaps acquainted with "pickwick" and i would remind her of that famous (and golden) ruling of stareleigh, j.: to the effect that you mustn't tell us what the soldier said; it's not evidence. miss campbell has offended against this rule, and she has not only told us what the soldier said, but she has omitted to give us the soldier's name and address. if miss campbell proffered herself as a witness at the old bailey and said, "john doe is undoubtedly guilty. a soldier i met told me that he had seen the prisoner put his hand into an old gentleman's pocket and take out a purse"--well, she would find that the stout spirit of mr. justice stareleigh still survives in our judges. the soldier must be produced. before that is done we are not technically aware that he exists at all. then there are one or two points in the article itself which puzzle me. the fusilier and the r.f.a. man had seen "st, george leading the british at vitry-le-françois, when the allies turned." thus the time of the apparition and the place of the apparition were firmly fixed in the two soldiers' minds. yet the very next paragraph in the article begins:-- "'where was this ?' i asked. but neither of them could tell" this is an odd circumstance. they knew, and yet they did not know; or, rather, they had forgotten a piece of information that they had themselves imparted a few seconds before. another point. the soldiers knew that the figure on the horse was st. george by his exact likeness to the figure of the saint on the english sovereign. this, again, is odd. the apparition was of a bareheaded figure in golden armour. the st. george of the coinage is naked, except for a short cape flying from the shoulders, and a helmet. he is not bareheaded, and has no armour--save the piece on his head. i do not quite see how the soldiers were so certain as to the identity of the apparition. lastly, miss campbell declares that "everybody" who fought from mons to ypres saw the apparitions. if that be so, it is again odd that nobody has come forward to testify at first hand to the most amazing event of his life. many men have been back on leave from the front, we have many wounded in hospital, many soldiers have written letters home. and they have all combined, this great host, to keep silence as to the most wonderful of occurrences, the most inspiring assurance, the surest omen of victory. it may be so, but-- arthur machen. [transcriber's note: footnotes have been relocated to the end of the text. footnote anchors have been labeled with the original page and footnote numbers.] the lost gospel and its contents; or, the author of "supernatural religion" refuted by himself. by the rev. m.f. sadler, m.a., rector of honiton. london: george bell and sons, york street, covent garden. . preface. this book is entitled "the lost gospel" because the book to which it is an answer is an attempt to discredit the supernatural element of christianity by undermining the authority of our present gospels in favour of an earlier form of the narrative which has perished. it seemed to me that, if the author of "supernatural religion" proved his point, and demonstrated that the fathers of the second century quoted gospels earlier than those which we now possess, then the evidence for the supernatural itself, considered as apart from the particular books in which the records of it are contained, would be strengthened; if, that is, it could be shown that this earlier form of the narrative contained the same supernatural story. the author of "supernatural religion," whilst he has utterly failed to show that the fathers in question have used earlier gospels, has, to my mind, proved to demonstration that, if they have quoted earlier narratives, those accounts contain, not only substantially, but in detail, the same gospel which we now possess, and in a form rather more suggestive of the supernatural. so that, if he has been successful, the author has only succeeded in proving that the gospel narrative itself, in a written form, is at least fifty or sixty years older than the books which he attempts to discredit. with respect to justin martyr, to the bearing of whose writings on this subject i have devoted the greater part of my book, i can only say that, in my examination of his works, my bias was with the author of "supernatural religion." i had hitherto believed that this father, being a native of palestine, and living so near to the time of the apostles, was acquainted with views of certain great truths which he had derived from traditions of the oral teaching of the apostles, and the possession of which made him in some measure an independent witness for the views in question; but i confess that, on a closer examination of his writings, i was somewhat disappointed, for i found that he had no knowledge of our lord and of his teaching worth speaking of, except what he might be fairly assumed to have derived from our present new testament. i have to acknowledge my obligations to messrs. clark, of edinburgh, for allowing me to make somewhat copious extracts from the writings of justin in their ante-nicene library. this has saved a parish priest like myself much time and trouble. i believe that in all cases of importance in which i have altered the translation, or felt that there was a doubt, i have given the original from otto's edition (jena, ). contents. page section i.--introductory section ii.--the way cleared section iii.--the principal witness--his religious views section iv.--the principal witness--the sources of his knowledge respecting the birth of christ section v.--the principal witness--his testimony respecting the baptism of christ section vi.--the principal witness--his testimony respecting the death of christ section vii.--the principal witness--his testimony respecting the moral teaching of our lord section viii.--the principal witness--his testimony to st. john section ix.--the principal witness--his further testimony to st. john section x.--the principal witness--his testimony summed up section xi.--the principal witness on our lord's godhead section xii.--the principal witness on the doctrine of the logos section xiii.--the principal witness on our lord as king, priest, and angel section xiv.--the principal witness on the doctrine of the trinity section xv.--justin and st. john on the incarnation section xvi.--justin and st. john on the subordination of the son section xvii.--justin and philo section xviii.--discrepancies between st. john and the synoptics section xix.--external proofs of the authenticity of our four gospels note on section xix.--testimonies of irenaeus, clement of alexandria, and tertullian to the use of the four gospels in their day section xx.--the evidence for miracles section xxi.--objections to miracles section xxii.--jewish credulity section xxiii.--demoniacal possession section xxiv.--competent witnesses section xxv.--date of testimony the lost gospel. section i. introductory. in the following pages i have examined the conclusions at which the author of a book entitled "supernatural religion" has assumed to have arrived. the method and contents of the work in question may be thus described. the work is entitled "supernatural religion, an inquiry into the reality of divine revelation." its contents occupy two volumes of about pages each, so that we have in it an elaborate attack upon christianity of very considerable length. the first pages of the first volume are filled with arguments to prove that a revelation, such as the one we profess to believe in, supernatural in its origin and nature and attested by miracles, is simply incredible, and so, on no account, no matter how evidenced, to be received. but, inasmuch as the author has to face the fact, that the christian religion professes to be attested by miracles performed at a very late period in the history of the world, and said to have been witnessed by very large numbers of persons, and related very fully in certain books called the canonical gospels, which the whole body of christians have, from a very early period indeed, received as written by eye-witnesses, or by the companions of eye-witnesses, the remaining pages are occupied with attempts at disparaging the testimony of these writings. in order to this, the christian fathers and heretical writers of a certain period are examined, to ascertain whether they quoted the four evangelists. the period from which the writer chooses his witnesses to the use of the four evangelists, is most unwarrantably and arbitrarily restricted to the first ninety years of the second century ( - or so). we shall have ample means for showing that this limitation was for a purpose. the array of witnesses examined runs thus: clement of rome, barnabas, hermas, ignatius, polycarp, justin martyr, hegesippus, papias of hierapolis, the clementines, the epistle to diognetus, basilides, valentinus, marcion, tatian, dionysius of corinth, melito of sardis, claudius apollinaris, athenagoras, epistle of vienne and lyons, ptolemaeus and heracleon, celsus and the canon of muratori. the examination of references, or supposed references, in these books to the first three gospels fills above pages, and the remainder (about ) is occupied with an examination of the claims of the fourth gospel to be considered as canonical. the writer conducts this examination with an avowed dogmatical bias; and this, as the reader will soon see, influences the manner of his examination throughout the whole book. for instance, he never fails to give to the anti-christian side the benefit of every doubt, or even suspicion. this leads him to make the most of the smallest discrepancy between the words of any supposed quotation in any early writer from one of our canonical gospels, and the words as contained in our present gospels. if the writer quotes the evangelist freely, with some differences, however slight, in the words, he is assumed to quote from a lost apocryphal gospel. if the writer gives the words as we find them in our gospels, he attempts to show that the father or heretic need not have even seen our present gospels; for, inasmuch as our present gospels have many things in common which are derived from an earlier source, the quoter may have derived the words he quotes from the earlier source. if the quoter actually mentions the name of the evangelist whose gospel he refers to (say st. mark), it is roundly asserted that his st. mark is not the same as ours. [endnote : ] the reader may ask, "how is it possible, against such a mode of argument, to prove the genuineness or authenticity of any book, sacred or profane?" and, of course, it is not. such a way of conducting a controversy seems absurd, but on the author's premises it is a necessity. he asserts the dogma that the governor of the world cannot interfere by way of miracle. he has to meet the fact that the foremost religion of the world appeals to miracles, especially the miracle of the resurrection of the founder. for the truth of this miraculous resurrection there is at least a thousand times more evidence than there is for any historical fact which is recorded to have occurred , years ago. of course, if the supernatural in christianity is impossible, and so incredible, all the witnesses to it must be discredited; and their number, their age, and their unanimity upon the principal points are such that the mere attempt must tax the powers of human labour and ingenuity to the uttermost. how, then, is such a book to be met? it would take a work of twice the size to rebut all the assertions of the author, for, naturally, an answer to any assertion must take up more space than the assertion. fortunately, in this case, we are not driven to any such course; for, as i shall show over and over again, the author has furnished us with the most ample means for his own refutation. no book that i have over read or heard of contains so much which can be met by implication from the pages of the author himself, nor can i imagine any book of such pretensions pervaded with so entire a misconception of the conditions of the problem on which he is writing. these assertions i shall now, god helping, proceed to make good. section ii. the way cleared. the writers, whose testimonies to the existence or use of our present gospels are examined by the author, are twenty-three in number. five of these, namely, hegesippus, papias, melito, claudius apollinaris, and dionysius of corinth are only known to us through fragments preserved as quotations in eusebius and others. six others--basilides, valentinus, marcion, ptolemaeus, heracleon, and celsus--are heretical or infidel writers whom we only know through notices or scraps of their works in the writings of the christian fathers who refuted them. the epistle of the martyrs of vienne and lyons is only in part preserved in the pages of eusebius. the canon of muratori is a mutilated fragment of uncertain date. athenagoras and tatian are only known through apologies written for the heathen, the last of all christian books in which to look for definite references to canonical writings. the epistle to diognetus is a small tract of uncertain date and authorship. the clementine homilies is an apocryphal work of very little value in the present discussion. these are all the writings placed by the author as subsequent to justin martyr. the writers previous to justin, of whom the author of "supernatural religion" makes use, are clement of rome (to whom we shall afterwards refer), the epistle of barnabas, the pastor of hermas, the epistles of ignatius, and that of polycarp. as i desire to take the author on his own ground whenever it is possible to do so, i shall, for argument's sake, take the author's account of the age and authority of these documents. i shall consequently assume with him that "none of the epistles [of ignatius] have any value as evidence for an earlier period than the end of the second or beginning of the third century [from about to or so], if indeed they possess any value at all." [ : ] (vol. i. p. .) with respect to the short epistle of polycarp, i shall be patient of his assumption that "instead of proving the existence of the epistles of ignatius, with which it is intimately associated, it is itself discredited in proportion as they are shown to be inauthentic." (vol. i. p. ) and so he "assigns it to the latter half of the second century, in so far as any genuine part of it is concerned." (p. ) similarly, i shall assume that the pastor of hermas "may have been written about the middle of the second century" (p. ), and, with respect to the epistle of barnabas, i shall take the latest date mentioned by the author of "supernatural religion," where he writes respecting the epistle-- "there is little or no certainty how far into the second century its composition may not reasonably be advanced. critics are divided upon the point, a few are disposed to date the epistle about the end of the first century; others at the beginning of the second century; while a still greater number assign it to the reign of adrian (a.d. - ); and others, not without reason, consider that it exhibits marks of a still later period." (vol. i. p. .) the way, then, is so far cleared that i can confine my remarks to the investigation of the supposed citations from the canonical gospels, to be found in the works of justin martyr. before beginning this, it may be well to direct the reader's attention to the real point at issue; and this i shall have to do continually throughout my examination. the work is entitled "supernatural religion," and is an attack upon what the author calls "ecclesiastical christianity," because such christianity sets forth the founder of our religion as conceived and born in a supernatural way; as doing throughout his life supernatural acts; as dying for a supernatural purpose; and as raised from the dead by a miracle, which was the sign and seal of the truth of all his supernatural claims. the attack in the book in question takes the form of a continuous effort to show that all our four gospels are unauthentic, by showing, or attempting to show, that they were never quoted before the latter part of the second century: but the real point of attack is the supernatural in the records of christ's birth, life, death, and resurrection. section iii. the principal witness.--his religious views. the examination of the quotations in justin martyr of the synoptic gospels occupies nearly one hundred and fifty pages; and deservedly so, for the acknowledged writings of this father are, if we except the clementine forgeries and the wild vision of hermas, more in length than those of all the other twenty-three witnesses put together. they are also valuable because no doubts can be thrown upon their date, and because they take up, or advert to, so many subjects of interest to christians in all ages. the universally acknowledged writings of justin martyr are three:--two apologies addressed to the heathen, and a dialogue with trypho a jew. the first apology is addressed to the emperor antoninus pius, and was written before the year a.d. the second apology is by some supposed to be the first in point of publication, and is addressed to the roman people. the contents of the two apologies are remarkable in this respect, that justin scruples not to bring before the heathen the very arcana of christianity. no apologist shows so little "reserve" in stating to the heathen the mysteries of the faith. at the very outset he enunciates the doctrine of the incarnate logos:-- "for not only among the greeks did logos (or reason) prevail to condemn these things by socrates, but also among the barbarians were they condemned by the logos himself, who took shape and became man, and was called jesus christ." [ : ] (apol. i. .) in the next chapter he sets forth the doctrine and worship of the trinity:-- "but both him [the father] and the son, who came forth from him and taught these things to us and the host of heaven, the other good angels who follow and are made like to him, and the prophetic spirit, we worship and adore, knowing them in reason and truth." [ : ] again:-- "our teacher of these things is jesus christ, who was also born for this purpose, and was crucified under pontius pilate, procurator of judaea, in the time of tiberius caesar; and that we reasonably worship him, having learned that he is the son of the true god himself, and holding him in the second place, and the prophetic spirit in the third." (apol. i. ch. x. .) again, a little further on, he claims for christians a higher belief in the supernatural than the heathen had, for, whereas the heathen went no further than believing that souls after death are in a state of sensation, christians believed in the resurrection of the body:-- "such favour as you grant to these, grant also unto us, who not less but more firmly than they believe in god; since we expect to receive again our own bodies, though they be dead and cast into the earth, for we maintain that with god nothing is impossible." (apol. i. ch. xviii.) in the next chapter (xix.) he proceeds to prove the resurrection possible. this he does from the analogy of human generation, and he concludes thus:-- "so also judge ye that it is not impossible that the bodies of men after they have been dissolved, and like seeds resolved into earth, should in god's appointed time rise again and put on incorruption." in another place in the same apology he asserts the personality of satan:-- "for among us the prince of the wicked spirits is called the serpent, and satan, and the devil, as you can learn by looking into our writings, and that he would be sent into the fire with his host, and the men who followed him, and would be punished for an endless duration, christ foretold." (apol. i. ch. xxviii.) in the same short chapter he asserts in very weighty words his belief in the ever-watchful providence of god:-- "and if any one disbelieves that god cares for these things (the welfare of the human race), he will thereby either insinuate that god does not exist, or he will assert that though he exists he delights in vice, or exists like a stone, and that neither virtue nor vice are anything, but only in the opinion of men these things are reckoned good or evil, and this is the greatest profanity and wickedness." (apol. i. ch. xxviii.) shortly after this he tells the heathen emperor that the mission and work of jesus christ had been predicted:-- "there were amongst the jews certain men who were prophets of god, through whom the prophetic spirit published beforehand things that were to come to pass, ere ever they happened. and their prophecies, as they were spoken and when they were uttered, the kings who happened to be reigning among the jews at the several times carefully preserved in their possession, when they had been arranged in books by the prophets themselves in their own hebrew language.... in these books, then, of the prophets, we found jesus christ foretold as coming, born of a virgin, growing up to man's estate, and healing every disease and every sickness, and raising the dead, and being hated, and unrecognized, and crucified, and dying and rising again, and ascending into heaven, and being, and being called, the son of god. we find it also predicted that certain persons should be sent by him into every nation to publish these things, and that rather among the gentiles (than among the jews) men should believe on him. and he was predicted before he appeared, first , years before, and again , , then , , then , , and yet again ; for in the succession of generations prophets after prophets arose." (apol. i. ch. xxxi.) then he proceeds to show how certain particular prophecies which he cites were fulfilled in the jews having a lawgiver till the time of christ, and not after; in christ's entry into jerusalem; in his birth of a virgin; in the place of his birth; in his having his hands and feet pierced with the nails. (ch. xxxiii., xxxiv., xxxv.) again, immediately afterwards, he endeavours to classify certain prophecies as peculiarly those of god the father, certain others as peculiarly those of god the son, and others as the special utterance of the spirit. (ch. xxxvi.-xl.) then he proceeds to specify certain particular prophecies as fulfilled in our lord's advent (ch. xl.); certain others in his crucifixion (xli.); in his session in heaven (xlv.); in the desolation of judaea (xlvii.); in the miracles and death of christ (xlviii.); in his rejection by the jews (xlix.); in his humiliation (l.) he concludes with asserting the extreme importance of prophecy, as without it we should not be warranted in believing such things of any one of the human race:-- "for with what reason should we believe of a crucified man that he is the first-born of the unbegotten god, and himself will pass judgment on the whole human race, unless we have found testimonies concerning him published before he came, and was born as man, and unless we saw that things had happened accordingly,--the devastation of the land of the jews, and men of every race persuaded by his teaching through the apostles, and rejecting their old habits, in which, being deceived, they had had their conversation." (ch. liii.) after this he speaks (ch. lxi.) of christian baptism, as being in some sense a conveyance of regeneration, and of the eucharist (ch. lxvi.), as being a mysterious communication of the flesh and blood of christ, and at the conclusion he describes the worship of christians, and tells the emperor that in their assemblies the memoirs of the apostles (by which name he designates the accounts of the birth, life, and death of christ), or the writings of the prophets were read, as long as time permits, putting the former on a par with the latter, as equally necessary for the instruction of christians. besides this, we find that justin holds all these views of scripture truths which are now called evangelical. he speaks of men now being "purified no longer by the blood of goats and sheep, or by the ashes of an heifer, or by the offerings of fine flour, but by faith through the blood of christ, and through his death, who died for this very reason." (dial.) and again: "so that it becomes you to eradicate this hope (_i.e._ of salvation by jewish ordinances) from your souls, and hasten to know in what way forgiveness of sins, and a hope of inheriting the promised good things, shall be yours. but there is no other way than this to become acquainted with this christ, to be washed in the fountain spoken of by isaiah for the remission of sins, and for the rest to lead sinless lives." (dial. xliv.) so that from this apology alone, though addressed to the heathen, we learn that justin cordially accepted every supernatural element in christianity. he thoroughly believed in the trinity, the incarnation of the logos, the miraculous conception, birth, life, miracles, death, resurrection, and ascension of christ. he firmly believed in the predictive element in prophecy, in the atoning virtue of the death of christ, in the mysterious inward grace or inward part in each sacrament, in the heart-cleansing power of the spirit of god, in the particular providence of god, in the resurrection of the body, in eternal reward and eternal punishment. whatever, then, was the source of his knowledge, that knowledge made him intensely dogmatic in his creed, and a firm believer in the supernatural nature of everything in his religion. the second apology is of the same nature as the first. a single short extract or two from it will show how firmly the author held the supernatural:-- "our doctrines, then, appear to be greater than all human teaching; because christ, who appeared for our sakes, became the whole rational being, both body, and reason, and soul.... these things our christ did through his own power. for no one trusted in socrates so as to die for this doctrine; but in christ, who was partially known even by socrates (for he was and is the word who is in every man, and who foretold the things that were to come to pass both through the prophets and in his own person when he was made of like passions, and taught these things); not only philosophers and scholars believed, but also artizans and people entirely uneducated, despising both glory, and fear, and death; since he is a power of the ineffable father, and not the mere instrument of human reason." (apol. ii. ch. x.) the dialogue with trypho is the record of a lengthy discussion with a jew for the purpose of converting him to the christian faith. the assertion of the supernatural is here, if possible, more unreserved than in the first apology. in order to convert trypho, justin cites every prophecy of the old testament that can, with the smallest show of reason, be referred to christ. having, first of all, vindicated the christians from the charge of setting aside the jewish law or covenant, by an argument evidently derived from the epistle to the hebrews, [ : ] and vindicated for christians the title of the true spiritual israel, [ : ] he proceeds to the prophetical scriptures, and transcribes the whole of the prophecy of isaiah from the fifty-second chapter to the fifty-fourth, and applies it to christ and his kingdom. (dial. ch. xiii.) shortly after, he applies to the second advent of christ the prophecy of daniel respecting the son of man, brought before the ancient of days. (ch. xxxi.) then he notices and refutes certain destructive interpretations of prophecies which have been derived from the unbelieving jews by our modern rationalists, as that psalm cx. is spoken of hezekiah, and psalm lxxii. of solomon. then he proceeds to prove that christ is both god and lord of hosts; and he first cites psalm xxiv., and then psalms xlvi., xcviii., and xlv. (ch. xxxvi., xxxvii., xxxviii.) then, after returning to the mosaic law, and proving that certain points in its ritual wore fulfilled in the christian system (as the oblation of fine flour in the eucharist--ch. xli.), he concludes this part of his argument with the assertion that the mosaic law had an end in christ:-- "in short, sirs," said i, "by enumerating all the other appointments of moses, i can demonstrate that they were types, and symbols, and declarations of those things which would happen to christ, of those who, it was foreknown, were to believe in him, and of those things which would also be done by christ himself." (ch. xlii.) then he again proves that this christ was to be, and was, born of a virgin; and takes occasion to show that the virgin mentioned in isaiah vii. was not a young married woman, as rationalists in germany and among ourselves have learnt from the unbelieving jews. (ch. xliii.) to go over more of justin's argument would be beside my purpose, which is at present simply to show how very firmly his faith embraced the supernatural. i shall mention one more application of prophecy. when trypho asks that justin should resume the discourse, and show that the spirit of prophecy admits another god besides the maker of all things, [ : ] justin accepts his challenge, and commences with the appearance of the three angels to abraham, and devotes much space and labour to a sifting discussion of the meaning of this place. the conclusion is thus expressed:-- "and now have you not perceived, my friends, that one of the three, who is both god and lord, and ministers to him who is [remains] in the heavens, is lord of the two angels? for when [the angels] proceeded to sodom he remained behind, and communed with abraham in the words recorded by moses; and when he departed after the conversation abraham went back to his place. and when he came [to sodom] the two angels no longer converse with lot, but himself, as the scripture makes evident; and he is the lord who received commission from the lord who [remains] in the heavens, i.e. the maker of all things, to inflict upon sodom and gomorrah the [judgments] which the scripture describes in these terms: 'the lord rained upon sodom sulphur and fire from the lord out of heaven.'" (ch. lvi.) it is clear from all this that justin martyr looked upon prophecy as a supernatural gift, bestowed upon men in order to prepare them to receive that christ whom god would send. instead of regarding it as the natural surmising of far-seeing men who, from their experience of the past, and from their knowledge of human nature, could in some sort guess what course events are likely to take, he regarded it as a divine influence emanating from him who knows the future as perfectly as he knows the past, and for his own purposes revealing events, and in many cases what we should call _trifling_ events, which would be wholly out of the power of man to guess or even to imagine. i am not, of course, concerned to show that justin was right in his views of prophecy; all i am concerned to show is, that justin regarded prophecy as the highest of supernatural gifts. such, then, was the view of justin respecting christ and the religion he established. christ, the highest of supernatural beings, his advent foretold by men with supernatural gifts to make known the future, coming to us in the highest of supernatural ways, and establishing a supernatural kingdom for bringing about such supernatural ends as the reconciliation of all men to god by his sacrifice, the resurrection of the body, and the subjugation of the wills of all men to the will of god. section iv. the principal witness.--the sources of his knowledge respecting the birth of christ. the question now arises, and i beg the reader to remember that it is the question on which the author of "supernatural religion" stakes all,--from what source did justin derive this supernatural view of christianity? with respect to the incarnation, birth, life, death, and resurrection of christ, he evidently derives it from certain documents which he repeatedly cites, as "the memoirs of the apostles" ([greek: apomnêmoneumata tôn apostolôn]). these are the documents which he mentions as being read, along with the prophets, at the meetings of christians. on one occasion, when he is seemingly referring to the [bloody] sweat of our lord, which is mentioned only in st. luke, who is not an apostle, he designates these writings as the "memoirs which were drawn up by the apostles _and those who followed them_." [ : ] again, on another occasion, he seems to indicate specially the gospel of st. mark as being the "memoirs of peter." it is a well-known fact that all ecclesiastical tradition, almost with one voice, has handed down that st. mark wrote his gospel under the superintendence, if not at the dictation, of st. peter; and when justin has occasion to mention that our lord gave the name of boanerges to the sons of zebedee, an incident mentioned only by st. mark, he seems at least to indicate the gospel of st. mark as being specially connected with st. peter as his memoirs when he writes: [ : ]-- "and when it is said that he changed the name of one of the apostles to peter; and when it is written in his memoirs that this so happened, as well as that he changed the names of two other brothers, the sons of zebedee, to boanerges, which means 'sons of thunder;' this was an announcement," &c. (ch. cvi.) with the exception of these two apparent cases, justin never distinguishes one memoir from another. he never mentions the author or authors of the memoirs by name, and for this reason--that the three undoubted treatises of his which have come down to us are all written for those outside the pale of the christian church. it would have been worse than useless, in writing for such persons, to distinguish between evangelist and evangelist. so far as "those without" were concerned, the evangelists gave the same view of christ and his work; and to have quoted first one and then another by name would have been mischievous, as indicating differences when the testimony of all that could be called memoirs was, in point of fact, one and the same. according to the author of "supernatural religion" justin ten times designates the source of his quotations as the "memoirs of the apostles," and five times as simply the "memoirs." now the issue which the writer of "supernatural religion" raises is this: "were these memoirs our present four gospels, or were they some older gospel or gospels?" to which we may add another: "did justin quote any other lost gospel besides our four?" * * * * * i shall now give some instances of the use which justin makes of the writings which he calls "memoirs," and this will enable the reader in great measure to judge for himself. first of all, then, i give one or two extracts from justin's account of our lord's nativity. let the reader remember that, with respect to the first of these, the account is not introduced in order to give trypho an account of our lord's birth, but to assure him that a certain prophecy, as it is worded in the septuagint translation of isaiah--viz., "he shall take the powers of damascus and the spoil of samaria," was fulfilled in christ. and indeed almost every incident which justin takes notice of he relates as a fulfilment of some prophecy or other. trifling or comparatively trifling incidents in our lord's life are noticed at great length, because they are supposed to be the fulfilment of some prophecy; and what we should consider more important events are passed over in silence, because they do not seem to fulfil any prediction. the first extract from justin, then, shall be the following:-- "now this king herod, at the time when the magi came to him from arabia, and said they knew from a star which appeared in the heavens that a king had been born in your country, and that they had come to worship him, learned from the elders of your people, that it was thus written regarding bethlehem in the prophet: 'and thou, bethlehem, in the land of judah, art by no means least among the princes of judah; for out of thee shall go forth the leader, who shall feed my people.' accordingly, the magi from arabia came to bethlehem, and worshipped the child, and presented him with gifts, gold, and frankincense, and myrrh; but returned not to herod, being warned in a revelation after worshipping the child in bethlehem. and joseph, the spouse of mary, who wished at first to put away his betrothed mary, supposing her to be pregnant by intercourse with a man, _i.e._ from fornication, was commanded in a vision not to put away his wife; and the angel who appeared to him told him that what is in her womb is of the holy ghost. then he was afraid and did not put her away, but on the occasion of the first census which was taken in judea under cyrenius, he went up from nazareth, where he lived, to bethlehem, to which he belonged, to be enrolled; for his family was of the tribe of judah, which then inhabited that region. then, along with mary, he is ordered to proceed into egypt, and remain there with the child, until another revelation warn them to return to judea. but when the child was born in bethlehem, since joseph could not find a lodging in that village, he took up his quarters in a certain cave near the village; and while they were there mary brought forth the christ and placed him in a manger, and here the magi who came from arabia, found him. 'i have repeated to you,' i continued, 'what isaiah foretold about the sign which foreshadowed the cave; but, for the sake of those which have come with us to-day, i shall again remind you of the passage.' then i repeated the passage from isaiah which i have already written, adding that, by means of those words, those who presided over the mysteries of mithras were stirred up by the devil to say that in a place, called among them a cave, they were initiated by him. 'so herod, when the magi from arabia did not return to him, as he had asked them to do, but had departed by another way to their own country, according to the commands laid upon them; and when joseph, with mary and the child, had now gone into egypt, as it was revealed to them to do; as he did not know the child whom the magi had gone to worship, ordered simply the whole of the children then in bethlehem to be massacred. and jeremiah prophesied that this would happen, speaking by the holy ghost thus: 'a voice was heard in ramah, lamentation and much wailing, rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they are not.'" (dial. ch. lxxviii.) now any unprejudiced reader, on examining this account, would instantly say that justin had derived every word of it from the gospels of st. matthew and st. luke, but that, instead of quoting the exact words of either evangelist, he would say that he (justin) "reproduced" them. he reproduced the narrative of the nativity as it is found in each of these two gospels. he first reproduces the narrative in st. matthew in somewhat more colloquial phrase than the evangelist used, interspersing with it remarks of his own; and in order to account for the birth of christ in bethlehem he brings in from st. luke the matter of the census, (not with historical accuracy but) sufficiently to show that he was acquainted with the beginning of luke ii.; and in order to account for the fact that christ was not born in the inn, but in a more sordid place (whether stable or cave matters not, for if it was a cave it was a cave used as a stable, for there was a "manger" in it), he reproduces luke ii. - . justin then, in a single consecutive narrative, expressed much in his own words, gives the whole account, so far as it was a fulfilment of prophecy, made up from two narratives which have come down to us in the gospels of st. matthew and st. luke, and in these only. it would have been absurd for him to have done otherwise, as he might have done if he had anticipated the carpings of nineteenth century critics, and assumed that trypho, an unconverted jew, had a new testament in his hand with which he was so familiar that he could be referred to first one narrative and then the other, in order to test the correctness of justin's quotations. against all this the author of "supernatural religion" brings forward a number of trifling disagreements as proofs that justin need not have quoted one of the evangelists--probably did not--indeed, may not have ever seen our synoptics, or heard of their existence. but the reader will observe that he has given the same history as we find in the two synoptics which have given an account of the nativity, and he apparently knew of no other account of the matter. we are reminded that there were numerous apocryphal gospels then in use in the church, and that justin might have derived his matter from these; but, if so, how is it that he discards all the lying legends with which those gospels team, and, with the solitary exception of the mention of the cave, confines himself to the circumstances of the synoptic narrative. the next place respecting the nativity shall be one from ch. c.:-- "but the virgin mary received faith and joy, when the angel gabriel announced the good tidings to her that the spirit of the lord would come upon her, and the power of the highest would overshadow her; wherefore also the holy thing begotten of her is the son of god: and she replied, 'be it unto me according to thy word.'" here both the words of the angel and the answer of the virgin are almost identical with the words in st. luke's gospel; justin, however, putting his account into the oblique narrative. we will put the two side by side that the reader may compare them. [greek table] pistin de kai charan labousa | maria hê parthenos euangelizomenou | autê gabriêl angelou, hoti pneuma | pneuma hagion epeleusetai epi kyriou ep' autên epeleusetai, | se, kai dynamis hypsistou kai dunamis hypsistou episkiasei | episkiasei soi, dio kai to gennômenon autên, dio kai to gennômenon | hagion klêthêsetai hyios theou. ex autês hagion estin hyios theou, | * * * * * apekrinato, genoito moi kata to | genoito moi kaia to rhêma sou. rhêma sou. | now of these words, _as existing in st. luke_, the author of "supernatural religion" takes no notice. was he, then, acquainted with the fact that justin's words _in this place_ so closely correspond with st. luke's? we cannot say. we only know that he calls his readers' particular attention to a supposed citation of the previous words of the angel gabriel, cited in another place:-- "behold thou shalt conceive of the holy ghost, and shalt bear a son, and he shall be called the son of the highest, and thou shalt call his name jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins." (apol. i. ch. xxxiii.) the ordinary unprejudiced reader would say that justin here reproduces st. matthew and st. luke, weaving into st. luke's narrative the words of the angel to st. joseph; but our author will not allow this for a moment. he insists that justin knew nothing, or need have known nothing, of st. luke. he shows that the words of the angel, "he shall save his people," &c., which seem to be introduced from st. matthew, "are not accidentally inserted in this place, for we find that they are joined in the same manner to the address of the angel to mary in the protevangelium of st. james." but how about those words which succeed them in answer to the question of the virgin, "how shall these things be?" i mean those quoted in the "dialogue" beginning "the holy ghost shall come upon thee," &c. if ever one author quotes another, justin in this place quotes st. luke. they cannot be taken from the protevangelium, because the corresponding words in the protevangelium are very different from those in st. luke; and the only real difference between justin's quotation and st. luke is that st. luke reads, "shall be called the son of god;" whereas justin has "is the son of god." now in this justin differs from the protevangelium, which reads, "shall be called the son of the highest;" so the probability is still more increased that in the quotation from the "dialogue" he did not quote the protevangelium, and did quote st. luke. however, we will make the author a present of these words, because we want to assume for a moment the truth of his conclusion, which he thus expresses:-- "justin's divergencies from the protevangelium prevent our supposing that, in its present form, it could have been the actual source of his quotations; but the wide differences which exist between the extant mss. of the protevangelium show that even the most ancient does not present it in its original form. it is much more probable that justin had before him a still older work, to which both the protevangelium and the third gospel were indebted." ("supernatural religion," vol. i. p. .) assuming, then, the correctness of this, justin had a still older gospel than that of st. luke; and we shall hereafter show that st. luke's gospel was used in all parts of the world in justin's day, and long before it. now justin himself lived only years after the resurrection; and this is no very great age for the copy of a book, still less for the book itself, of which any one may convince himself by a glance around his library. we may depend upon it that justin would have used the oldest sources of information. a book so old in justin's days may have been published at the outset of christianity. the author himself surmises that it may have been the work of one of st. luke's [greek: polloi]. anyhow it is an older and therefore, according to the writer's own line of argument all through his book, a more reliable witness to the things of christ, and its witness is to the supernatural in his birth. are we, then, able to form any conjecture as to the name of this most ancient gospel? yes. the author of "supernatural religion" identifies it with the lost gospel to the hebrews, in the words:-- "much more probably, however, justin quotes from the more ancient source from which the protevangelium and perhaps st. luke drew their narrative. there can be little doubt that the gospel according to the hebrews contained an account of the birth in bethelehem, and as it is, at least, certain that justin quotes other particulars from it, there is fair reason to believe that he likewise found this fact [ : ] in that work." (vol. ii. p. .) if, then, this be the gospel from which justin derived his account of the nativity, it seems to have contained all the facts for which we have now to look into st. matthew and st. luke. it combined the testimonies of both evangelists to the supernatural birth of jesus. section v. the principal witness.--his testimony respecting the baptism of christ. the next extract from justin which i shall give is one describing our lord's baptism. this account, like almost every other given in the dialogue with trypho, is mentioned by him, not so much for its own sake, but because it gave him opportunity to show the fulfilment, or supposed fulfilment, of a prophecy--in this case the prophecy of isaiah that the "spirit of the lord should rest upon him." "even at his birth he was in possession of his power; and as he grew up like all other men, by using the fitting means, he assigned its own [requirements] to each development, and was sustained by all kinds of nourishment, and waited for thirty years, more or less, until john appeared before him as the herald of his approach, and preceded him in the way of baptism, as i have already shown. and then, when jesus had gone to the river jordan, where john was baptizing, and when he had stepped into the water, a fire was kindled in the jordan; and when he came out of the water, the holy ghost lighted on him like a dove [as] the apostles of this very christ of ours wrote.... for when john remained (literally sat) [ : ] by the jordan, and preached the baptism of repentance, wearing only a leathern girdle and a vesture made of camel's hair, eating nothing but locusts and wild honey, men supposed him to be christ; but he cried to them--'i am not the christ, but the voice of one crying; for he that is stronger than i shall come, whose shoes i am not worthy to bear....' the holy ghost, and for man's sake, as i formerly stated, lighted on him in the form of a dove, and there came at the same instant from the heavens a voice, which was uttered also by david when he spoke, personating christ, what the father would say to him, 'thou art my son, this day have i begotten thee;' [the father] saying that his generation would take place for men, at the time when they would become acquainted with him. 'thou art my son; this day have i begotten thee.'" (ch. lxxxviii.) the author of "supernatural religion" lays very great stress upon this passage, as indicating throughout sources of information different from our gospels. he makes the most of the fact that john is said to have "sat" by the jordan, not apparently remembering that sitting was the normal posture for preaching and teaching (matthew v. ; luke iv. ). he, of course, dwells much upon the circumstance that a fire was kindled in the jordan at the time of our lord's baptism, which additional instance of the supernatural justin may have derived either from tradition or from the gospel to the hebrews. above all, he dwells upon the fact--and a remarkable fact it is--that justin supposes that the words of the father wore not "thou art my beloved son, in thee i am well pleased," but "thou art my son, this day have i begotten thee." now i do not for a moment desire to lessen the importance of the difficulty involved in a man, living in the age of justin, giving the words, of the father so differently to what they appear in our gospels. but what is the import of the discrepancy? it is simply a theological difficulty, the same in all respects with that which is involved in the application of these very words to the resurrection of christ by st. paul, in acts xiii. . it is in no sense a difficulty having the smallest bearing on the supernatural; for it is equally as supernatural for the father to have said, with a voice audible to mortal ears, "this day have i begotten thee," as it is for him to have said, "in thee i am well pleased." what, then, is the inference which the author of "supernatural religion" draws from these discrepancies? this,--that justin derived his information from the lost gospel to the hebrews. "in the scanty fragments of the 'gospel according to the hebrews,' which have been preserved, we find both the incident of the fire kindled in jordan, and the words of the heavenly voice, as quoted by justin:--'and as he went out of the water, the heavens opened, and he saw the holy spirit of god in the form of a dove descend and enter into him. and a voice was heard from heaven, saying, 'thou art my beloved son, in thee i am well pleased;' and again, 'this day have i begotten thee.' and immediately a great light shone in that place.' epiphanius extracts this passage from the version in use among the ebionites, but it is well known that there were many other varying forms of the same gospel; and hilgenfeld, with all probability, conjectures that the version known to epiphanius was no longer in the same purity as that used by justin, but represents the transition stage to the canonical gospels, adopting the words of the voice which they give without yet discarding the older form." ("supernatural religion," vol. i. p. .) here, then, are the remains of an older gospel used by justin, taken from copies which rationalists assert to have been, when used by him, in a state of greater purity than a subsequent recension, which subsequent recension was anterior to our present gospels, and being older was purer, because nearer to the fountain-head of knowledge: but this older and purer form is characterized by a more pronounced supernatural element--to wit, the 'fire' in jordan and the 'light'--so that, the older and purer the tradition, the more supernatural is its teaching. section vi. the principal witness.--his testimony respecting the death of christ. we have now to consider the various notices in justin respecting our lord's crucifixion, and the events immediately preceding and following it. justin notices our lord's entry into jerusalem:-- "and the prophecy, 'binding his foal to the vine and washing his robe in the blood of the grape,' was a significant symbol of the things which were to happen to christ, and of what he was to do. for the foal of an ass stood bound to a vine at the entrance of a village, and he ordered his acquaintances to bring it to him then; and when it was brought he mounted and sat upon it, and entered jerusalem." (apol. i. ch. xxxii.) justin in a subsequent place (dial. ch. liii.) notices the fact only mentioned in st. matthew, that jesus commanded the disciples to bring both an ass and its foal:-- "and truly our lord jesus christ, when he intended to go into jerusalem, requested his disciples to bring him a certain ass, along with its foal, which was bound in an entrance of a village called bethphage; and, having seated himself on it, he entered into jerusalem." justin thus describes the institution of the eucharist:-- "for the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that jesus took bread, and, when he had given thanks, said, 'this do ye in remembrance of me, this is my body;' and that after the same manner, having taken the cup and given thanks, he said, 'this is my blood;' and gave it to them alone." (apol. i. ch. lxvi.) he thus adverts to the dispersion of the apostles:-- "moreover, the prophet zechariah foretold that this same christ would be smitten and his disciples scattered: which also took place. for after his crucifixion the disciples that accompanied him were dispersed." (dial. ch. liii.) he mentions our lord's agony as the completion of a prophecy in psalm xxii.:-- "for on the day on which he was to be crucified, having taken three of his disciples to the hill called olivet, situated opposite to the temple at jerusalem, he prayed in these words: 'father, if it be possible, lot this cup pass from me.' and again he prayed, 'not as i will, but as thou wilt.'" (dial. xcix.) his sweating great drops of blood (mentioned only in st. luke), also in fulfilment of psalm xxii.-- "for in the memoirs which i say were drawn up by his apostles, and those who followed them [it is recorded] that his sweat fell down like drops of blood while he was praying, and saying, 'if it be possible, let this cup pass.'" [ : ] (ch. ciii.) his being sent to herod (mentioned only in st. luke):-- "and when herod succeeded archelaus, having received the authority which had been allotted to him, pilate sent to him by way of compliment jesus bound; and god, foreknowing that this would happen, had thus spoken, 'and they brought him to the assyrian a present to the king.'" (ch. ciii.) his silence before pilate, also quoted by justin, in fulfilment of psalm xxii.:-- "and the statement, 'my strength is become dry like a potsherd, and my tongue has cleaved to my throat,' was also a prophecy of what would be done by him according to the father's will. for the power of his strong word, by which he always confuted the pharisees and scribes, and, in short, all your nation's teachers that questioned him, had a cessation like a plentiful and strong spring, the waters of which have been turned off, when he kept silence, and chose to return no answer to any one in the presence of pilate; as has been declared in the memoirs of his apostles." (dial. ch. cii.) his crucifixion: "and again, in other words, david in the twenty-first psalm thus refers to the suffering and to the cross in a parable of mystery: 'they pierced my hands and my feet; they counted all my bones; they considered and gazed upon me; they parted my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.' for when they crucified him, driving in the nails, they pierced his hands and feet; and those who crucified him parted his garments among themselves, each casting lots for what he chose to have, and receiving according to the decision of the lot." (ch. xcvii.) the mocking of him by his enemies:-- "and the following: 'all they that see me laughed me to scorn; they spake with the lips; they shook the head: he trusted in the lord, let him deliver him since he desires him;' this likewise he foretold should happen to him. for they that saw him crucified shook their heads each one of them, and distorted their lips, and, twisting their noses to each other, they spake in mockery the words which are recorded in the memoirs of his apostles, 'he said he was the son of god: let him come down; let god save him.'" (ch. ci.) his saying, "my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?" (reported only in ss. matthew and mark):-- "for, when crucified, he spake, 'o god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?'" (ch. xcix.) his saying, "father, into thy hands i commend my spirit," reported only in st. luke:-- "for, when christ was giving up his spirit on the cross, he said, 'father, into thy hands i commend my spirit,' as i have learned also from the memoirs." (ch. cv.) his resurrection and appearance to his apostles gathered together (found only in ss. luke and john), and his reminding the same apostles that before his death he had foretold it (found only in st. luke):-- "and that he stood in the midst of his brethren, the apostles (who repented of their flight from him when he was crucified, after he rose from the dead, and after they were persuaded by him that before his passion he had mentioned to them that he must suffer these things, and that they were announced beforehand by the prophets)." [ : ] (ch. cvi.) the jews spreading the report that his disciples had stolen away his body by night (recorded only by st. matthew):-- "yet you not only have not repented, after you learned that he rose from the dead, but, as i said before, you have sent chosen and ordained men throughout all the world to proclaim that a godless and lawless heresy had sprung from one jesus, a galilean deceiver, whom we crucified, but his disciples stole him by night from the tomb, where he was laid when unfastened from the cross." (ch. cviii.) the apostles seeing the ascension, and afterwards receiving power from him in person, and going to every race of men:-- "and when they had seen him ascending into heaven, and had believed, and had received power sent thence by him upon them, and went to every race of men, they taught these things, and were called apostles." (apol. i. ch. l.) from all this the reader will see at a glance that justin's view of the crucifixion and the events attending it was exactly the same as ours. he will notice that all the events related in justin are the same as those recorded in the evangelists matthew and luke; and that the circumstances related by justin, and not to be found in the synoptics, are of the most trifling character, as, for instance, that the blaspheming bystanders at the cross "screwed up their noses." i think this is the only additional circumstance to which the writer of "supernatural religion" draws attention. he will notice that justin records some events only to be found in st. matthew and some only in st. luke. he will notice also how frequently justin reproduces the narrative rather than quotes it. the ordinary reader would account for all this by supposing that justin had our synoptics (at least the first and third) before him, and reproduced incidents first from one and then from the other as they suited his purpose, and his purpose was not to give an account of the crucifixion, but to elucidate the prophecies respecting the crucifixion. the author of "supernatural religion," however, goes through those citations, or supposed citations, seriatim, and attempts to show that each one must have been taken from some lost gospel, most probably the gospel of the hebrews. be it so. here, then, was a gospel which contained all the separate incidents recorded in ss. matthew and luke, and, of course, combined them in one narrative. how is it that so inestimably valuable a christian document was irretrievably lost, and its place supplied by three others, each far its inferior, each picking and choosing separate parts from the original; and that, about years after the original promulgation of the gospel, these three forged narratives superseded a gospel which would have been, in the matter of our lord's birth, death, and resurrection, a complete and perfect harmony? i leave the author of "supernatural religion" to explain so unlikely a fact. one explanation is, however, on our author's own showing, inadmissible, which is, that our present synoptics were adopted because they pandered more than the superseded one to the growing taste for the supernatural, for the earlier gospel or gospels contained supernatural incidents which are wanting in our present synoptics. section vii. the principal witness.--his testimony respecting the moral teaching of our lord. one more class of apparent quotations from our synoptic gospels must now be considered, viz., the citations in justin of the moral teaching or precepts of christ. those are mostly to be found in one place, in one part of the first apology (chapters xv.-xviii.), and they are introduced for the express purpose of convincing the emperor of the high standard of christ's moral teaching. the author of "supernatural religion" gives very considerable extracts from these chapters, which i shall give in his own translation:-- "he (jesus) spoke thus of chastity: 'whosoever may have gazed on a woman, to lust after her, hath committed adultery already in the heart before god.' and, 'if thy right eye offend thee cut it out, for it is profitable for thee to enter into the kingdom of heaven with one eye (rather) than having two to be thrust into the everlasting fire.' and, 'whosoever marrieth a woman, divorced from another man, committeth adultery.'" * * * * * "and regarding our affection for all he thus taught: 'if ye love them which love you what new thing do ye? for even the fornicators do this; but i say unto you, pray for your enemies, and love them which hate you, and bless them which curse you, and offer prayer for them which despitefully use you.' and that we should communicate to the needy, and do nothing for praise, he said thus: 'give ye to every one that asketh, and from him that desireth to borrow turn not ye away, for, if ye lend to them from whom ye hope to receive, what new thing do ye? for even the publicans do this. but ye, lay not up for yourselves upon the earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and robbers break through, but lay up for yourselves in the heavens, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. for what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world but destroy his soul? or what shall he give in exchange for it? lay up, therefore, in the heavens, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.' and, 'be ye kind and merciful as your father also is kind and merciful, and maketh his sun to rise on sinners, and just and evil. but be not careful what ye shall eat and what ye shall put on. are ye not better than the birds and the beasts? and god feedeth them. therefore be not careful what ye shall eat or what ye shall put on, for your heavenly father knoweth that ye have need of these things; but seek ye the kingdom of the heavens, and all these things shall be added unto you, for where the treasure is there is also the mind of the man. and 'do not these things to be seen of men, otherwise ye have no reward of your father which is in heaven.' and regarding our being patient under injuries, and ready to help all, and free from anger, this is what he said: 'unto him striking thy cheek offer the other also; and him who carrieth off thy cloak, or thy coat, do not thou prevent. but whosoever shall be angry is in danger of the fire. but every one who compelleth thee to go a mile, follow twain. and let your good works shine before men, so that, perceiving, they may adore your father, which is in heaven.' ... and regarding our not swearing at all, but ever speaking the truth, he thus taught: 'ye may not swear at all, but let your yea be yea, and your nay nay, for what is more than these is of the evil one.'" * * * * * "'for not those who merely make profession, but those who do the work,' as he said, 'shall be saved.' for he spake thus: 'not every one that saith unto me, lord, lord, shall (enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my father, which is in heaven). for whosoever heareth me, and doeth what i say, heareth him that sent me. but many will say to me, lord, lord, have we not eaten and drunk in thy name, and done wonders? and then will i say unto them, 'depart from me, workers of iniquity.' there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when indeed the righteous shall shine as the sun, but the wicked are sent into everlasting fire. for many shall arrive in my name, outwardly, indeed, clothed in sheep-skins, but inwardly being ravening wolves. ye shall know them from their works, and every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire." * * * * * "as christ declared, saying, 'to whom god has given more, of him shall more also be demanded again.'" the ordinary reader, remembering that justin was writing for the heathen, would suppose, after reading the above, that justin reproduced from ss. matthew and luke the moral precepts of christ, or rather those which suited his purpose, and his purpose was to show to the heathen emperor that christianity would make the best members of a community. to this end he reproduces the precepts respecting chastity, respecting love to all, and communicating to the needy--being kind and merciful--not caring much for material things--being patient and truthful--and above all, being sincere. he did not reproduce the precepts respecting prayer, simply because immoral men among the heathen worshipped their gods as devoutly as moral men did. he did not reproduce the lord's prayer, because he would not consider that it belonged to the heathen, or the promises that god would hear prayer, simply because these would belong to christians only. again, he evidently altered and curtailed what the heathen would not understand, as for instance, in quoting our lord's saying respecting "anger," he quoted it very shortly, because to have quoted at length the gradations of punishment for being "angry without a cause," for "calling a brother raca" and "fool," would have been almost unintelligible to those unacquainted with jewish customs. the author of "supernatural religion" repudiates the idea that justin, in any of these quotations, makes use of our present gospels. he examines these [so-called] quotations seriatim at considerable length, for the purpose of showing that justin's variations from our present gospels imply another source of information. he considers (and in this i cannot agree with him, though i shall, for argument's sake, yield the point) that-- "the hypothesis that these quotations are from the canonical gospels requires the acceptance of the fact that justin, with singular care, collected from distant and scattered portions of these gospels a series of passages in close sequence to each other, forming a whole unknown to them, but complete in itself." ("supernatural religion," vol. i. p. ) i say i cannot agree with this, because i think that the extracts i have given have all the signs of a piece of patchwork by no means well put together, but i will assume that he is right in his view. here, then, we have, according to his hypothesis, another sermon of christ's, which, owing to the "close sequence" of its various passages, and its completeness as a whole, must take its place alongside of the sermon on the mount. where does it come from?-- "the simple and natural conclusion, supported by many strong reasons, is that justin derived his quotations from a gospel which was different from ours, though naturally by subject and design it must have been related to them." (vol. i. p. .) and in page our author traces one of the passages of this "consecutive" discourse through an epistle ascribed to clement of rome to the "gospel according to the egyptians," which was in all probability a version of the "gospel according to the hebrews." here, then, is a gospel, the gospel to the hebrews, which not only contained, as the author has shown, a harmony of the histories in ss. matthew and luke, so far, at least, as the birth and death of christ are concerned, but also such a full and consecutive report of the moral teaching of christ, that it may not unfitly be described as "a series of passages in close sequence to each other," collected "with singular care" "from distant and scattered portions of these gospels." how, we ask, could such a gospel have perished utterly? a gospel, which, besides containing records of the historical and supernatural much fuller than any one of the surviving gospels, contained also a sort of sermon on the mount, amalgamating in one whole the moral teaching of our lord, ought surely (if it ever was in existence) to have won its place in the canon. section viii. the principal witness.--his testimony to st. john. we have now to consider the citations (or supposed citations) of justin from the fourth gospel. these, as i have mentioned, are treated by the author of "supernatural religion" separately at the conclusion of his work. whatever internal coincidences there are between the contents of st. john and those of the synoptics, the external differences are exceedingly striking, and it is not at all to my present purpose to keep this fact out of sight. the plan of st. john's gospel is different, the style is different, the subjects of the discourses, the scene of action, the incidents, and (with one exception) the miracles, all are different. now this will greatly facilitate the investigation of the question as to whether any author had st. john before him when he wrote. there may be some uncertainty with respect to the quotations from the synoptics, as to whether an early writer quotes one or other, or derives what he cites from some earlier source, as for instance from one of st. luke's [greek: polloi]. but it cannot be so with st. john. a quotation of, or reference to, any words of any discourse of our lord, or an account of any transaction as reported by st. john, can be discerned in an instant. at least it can be at once seen that it cannot have been derived from the synoptics, or from any supposed apocryphal or traditional sources from which the synoptics derived their information. the special object of this gospel is the identification of the pre-existent nature of our lord with the eternal word, and following upon this, his relation to his father on the one side, and to mankind on the other. he is the only begotten of the father, god being his own proper father [greek: idios], and so he is equal to the father in nature (john v. ), and yet, as being a son, he is subordinate, so that he represents himself throughout as sent by the father to do his will and speak his words. with reference to mankind he is, before his incarnation, the "light that lighteth every man." after and through his incarnation he is to man all in all. he is even in death the object of their faith. he is the mediator through whose very person god sends the spirit. he is the life, the light, the living water, the spiritual food. justin martyr repeatedly reproduces in various forms of expression the truth that christ is the eternal "word made flesh" and revealed as the "only-begotten son of god," thus:-- "the first power after god the father and lord of all is the word, who is also the son, and of him we will, in what follows, relate how he took flesh and became man." (apol. i. ch. xxxii.) again:-- "i have already proved that he was the only-begotten of the father of all things, being begotten in a peculiar manner [greek: idiôs], word and power by him, and having afterwards become man through the virgin." (dial. ch. cv.) now, we have in these two passages four or five characteristic expressions of st. john relating to our lord, not to be found in any other scripture writer. i say "in any other," for i believe that not only the epistles of st. john, but also the apocalypse, notwithstanding certain differences in style, are to be ascribed to st. john. we have the term "word" united with "the son," and with "only begotten," and said to be "properly (propriè; [greek: idiôs]) begotten;" a reminiscence of john v. , the only place in the new testament where the adjective [greek: idios] or its adverb [greek: idiôs] is applied to the relations of the father and the son, and we have this word becoming flesh and man. now justin, in one of the places, writes to convince an heathen emperor; and, in the other, an unbelieving jew; and so in each case he reproduces the sense of john i. and , and not the exact words. it would have been an absurdity for him to have quoted st. john exactly, for, in such a case, he must have retained the words "we beheld his glory, the glory as," which would have simply detracted from the force of the passage, being unintelligible without some explanation. again, we have in the dialogue (ch. lxi.) the words "the word of wisdom, who is himself this god begotten of the father of all things." now here there seems to be a reproduction of the old and very probably original reading of john i. , [ : ] "the only begotten god who is in the bosom of the father." certainly this reading of john i. is the only place where the idea of being begotten is associated with the term "god." we next have to notice that justin repeatedly uses the words "god" and "lord" in collocation as applied to jesus christ; not "the lord god," the usual old testament collocation, but god and lord, thus: "for christ is king and priest and god and lord," &c. (dial. ch. xxxiv.) again:-- "there is, and there is said to be, another god and lord subject to the maker of all things." (dial. lvi.) now the only gospel in which these words are to be found together and applied to christ is that according to st. john, where he records the confession of st. thomas, "my lord and my god" (john xx. ). again: st. john alone of the evangelists speaks of our lord as he that cometh from above [greek: ho anôthen erchomenos], as coming from heaven, as "leaving the world and going to the father" (john iii. ; xvi. ), and justin reproduces this in the words:-- "it is declared [by david in prophecy,] that he would come forth from the highest heavens, and again return to the same places, in order that you may recognize him as god coming forth from above and man living among men." (dial. ch. lxiv.) again: though st. john asserts by implication the equality in point of nature of the father and the son (john v. ), yet he also very repeatedly records words of christ which assert his subordination to the father. nowhere in the synoptics do we read such words as "i can of mine own self do nothing." "i seek not mine own will, but the will of the father which hath sent me" (john v. ): "my meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work" (iv. ; also john vi. ): "i have not spoken of myself; but the father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what i should say, and what i should speak." (xii. ) now justin martyr reproduces these intimations of the subordination of the son:-- "who is also called an angel, because he announces to men whatsoever the maker of all things, above whom there is no other god, wishes to announce to them." (dial. ch. lvi.) again:-- "i affirm that he has never at any time done anything which he who made the world, above whom there is no other god, has not wished him both to do and to engage himself with." (dial. lvi.) again:-- "boasts not in accomplishing anything through his own will or might." (ch. ci.) let the reader clearly understand that i do not lay any stress whatsoever on these passages taken by themselves or together; but taken in connection with the intimation of the word and sonship asserted in st. john, and reproduced by justin, they are very significant indeed. st. john asserts that jesus is the word and the only begotten--that he is "lord" and "god," and equal with the father as being his son (v. ); but, lest men conceive of the word as an independent god, he asserts the subordination of the son as consisting, not in inferiority of nature, but in submission of will. justin reproduces in the same terms the teaching of st. john respecting the logos--that the logos was the only begotten, god-begotten, lord and god. and then, lest his adversaries should assume from this that christ was an independent god, he guards it by the assertion of the same doctrine of subordination of will; neither the doctrine nor the safeguard being expressly stated in the synoptics, but contained in them by that wondrous implication by which one part of divine truth really presupposes and involves all truth. we have now to consider st. john's teaching respecting the relation of the logos to man. one aspect of this doctrine is peculiar to st. john, and is as mysterious and striking a truth as we have in the whole range of christian dogma. it is contained in certain words in the exordium of the fourth gospel: "that [word] was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." this passage embodies a truth which is unique in scripture: that in the word was life, that the life was the light of men, and that that light was (even before the incarnation) the true light which lighteth every man. this, i say, is a truth which is not, that i am aware of, to be found, except by very remote implication, in the rest of scripture. and yet it is continually reproduced by justin in a way which shows that he had drunk it in, as it were, and he used it continually as the principle on which to explain the vestiges of truth which existed among the heathen. thus:-- "we have been taught that christ is the first-born of god, and we have declared above that he is the word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably (or with the logos, [greek: hoi meta logou biôsantes]) are christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as among the greeks, socrates and heraclitus, and men like them." (apol. i. ch. xlvi.) again:-- "no one trusted in socrates so as to die for this doctrine, but in christ, who was partially known even by socrates (for he was and is the word who is in every man)," &c. (apol. ii. ch. x.) again, in a noble passage:-- "for each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic divine word, [ : ] seeing what was related to it. but they who contradict themselves in the more important points appear not to have possessed the heavenly wisdom, and the knowledge which cannot be spoken against. whatever things were rightly said among all men are the property of us christians." (apol. ii. xiii.) there cannot, then, be the smallest doubt but that justin's mind was permeated by a doctrine of the logos exactly such as he would have derived from the diligent study of the fourth gospel. but may he not have derived all this from philo? no; because, if so, he would have referred trypho, a jew, to philo, his brother jew, which he never does. the speciality of st. john's teaching is not that he, like plato or philo, elaborates a logos doctrine, but that once for all, with the authority of god, he identifies the logos with the divine nature of our lord. no other evangelist or sacred writer does this, and he does. section ix. the principal witness.--his further testimony to st. john. we now come to justin's account of christian baptism, which runs thus:-- "i will also relate the manner in which we dedicated ourselves to god when we had been made new through christ, lest, if we omit this, we seem to be unfair in the explanation we are making. as many as are persuaded and believe that what we teach and say is true, and undertake to be able to live accordingly, are instructed to pray and to entreat god with fasting, for the remission of their sins that are past, we praying and fasting with them. then they are brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we were ourselves regenerated. for in the name of god, the father and lord of the universe, and of our saviour jesus christ, and of the holy spirit, they then receive the washing with water. for christ also said, 'except ye be born again, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' now, that it is impossible for those who have once been born to enter into their mothers' wombs, is manifest to all." (apol. i. ch. lxi.) now, taking into consideration the fact that st. john is the only writer who sets forth our lord as connecting a birth with water [except a man be born of water and of the spirit]; that when our lord does this it is (according to st. john, and st. john only) following upon the assertion that he must be born again, and that st. john alone puts into the mouth of the objector the impossibility of a natural birth taking place twice, which justin notices; taking these things into account, it does seem to me the most monstrous hardihood to deny that justin was reproducing st. john's account. to urge trifling differences is absurd, for justin, if he desired to make himself understood, could not have quoted the passage verbatim, or anything like it. for, if he had, he must have prefaced it with some account of the interview with nicodemus, and he would have to have referred to another gospel to show that our lord alluded to baptism; for, though our lord mentions water, he does not here categorically mention baptism. so, consequently, justin would have to have said, "if you refer to one of our memoirs you will find certain words which lay down the necessity of being born again, and seem to connect this birth in some way with water, and if you look into another memoir you will see how this can be, for you will find a direction to baptize with water in the name of the godhead, and if you put these two passages together you will be able to understand something of the nature of our dedication, and of the way in which it is to be performed, and of the blessing which we have reason to expect in it if we repent of our sins." well, instead of such an absurd and indirect way of proceeding, which presupposes that antoninus pius was well acquainted with the diatessaron, he simply reproduces the substance of the doctrine of st. john, and interweaves with it the words of institution as found in st. matthew. i shall afterwards advert to the hypothesis that this account was taken from an apocryphal gospel. again, st. john is the only evangelist who, in apparent allusion to the devout and spiritual reception of the inward part of the lord's supper, speaks of it as eating the flesh of christ, and drinking his blood; the synoptics and st. paul in i cor. x. , always speaking of it as his _body_ and blood. now justin, in describing the sacrament of the lord's supper, uses the language peculiar to st. john as well as that of the synoptics:-- "so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of his word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that jesus who was made flesh. for the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, said, 'this do ye in remembrance of me. this is my body,'" &c. (apol. i. ch. lxvi.) this, of course, would be a small matter itself, but, taken in connection with the adoption of st. john's language in regard of the other sacrament a very short time before, it is exceedingly significant. again, st. john is the only evangelist who records our lord's reference to the brazen serpent as typical of himself lifted up upon the cross. justin cites the same incident as typical of christ's death, and, moreover, cites our lord's language as it is recorded in st. john, respecting his being lifted up that men might believe in him and be saved:-- "for by this, as i previously remarked, he proclaimed the mystery, by which he declared that he would break the power of the serpent which occasioned the transgression of adam, and [would bring] to them that believe on him by this sign, i.e., him who was to be crucified, salvation from the fangs of the serpent, which are wicked deeds, idolatries, and other unrighteous acts. unless the matter be so understood, give me a reason why moses set up the brazen serpent for a sign, and bade those that were bitten gaze at it, and the wounded were healed." (dial. ch. xciv.) again, st. john is the only evangelist who records that the baptist "confessed, and denied not, but confessed, 'i am not the christ.'" justin cites these very-words as said by the baptist:-- "for when john remained (or sat) by the jordan ... men supposed him to be christ, but he cried to them, 'i am not the christ, but the voice of one crying,'" &c. (dial. ch. lxxxviii.) again, st. john is the only evangelist who puts into the mouth of our blessed lord, when he was accused of breaking the sabbath, the retort that the jews on the sabbath day circumcise a man ... that the law of moses should not be broken. (john vii. ) and justin also reproduces this in his dialogue:-- "for, tell me, did god wish the priests to sin when they offer the sacrifices on the sabbaths? or those to sin who are circumcised, or do circumcise, on the sabbaths; since he commands that on the eighth day--even though it happen to be a sabbath--those who are born shall be always circumcised?" (dial. ch. xxvii.) again, st. john represents our lord, when similarly harassed by the jews, as appealing to the upholding of all things by god on the sabbath as well as on any other day, in the words, "my father worketh hitherto, and i work." (john v. .) and justin very shortly after uses the same argument:-- "think it not strange that we drink hot water on the sabbath, since god directs the government of the universe on this day, equally as on all others; and the priests on other days, so on this, are ordered to offer sacrifices." (dial. ch. xxix.) it is very singular that justin, whilst knowing nothing of st. john, should, on a subject like this, use two arguments peculiar to st. john, and not to be found in disputes on the very same subject in the synoptics. again, st. john alone records that jesus healed a man "blind from his birth," and notices that the jews themselves were impressed with the greatness of the miracle. (john ix. , ) justin remarks, "in that we say that he made whole the lame, the paralytic, and those born blind." (apol. i. ch. xxii.) again, st. john is the only evangelist who makes our lord to say, "now i tell you before it come, that when it is come to pass ye may believe." (john xiii. ; xiv. ; xvi. ) and justin adopts and amplifies this very sentiment with reference to the use of prophecy:-- "for things which were incredible, and seemed impossible with men, these god predicted by the spirit of prophecy as about to come to pass, in order that, when they came to pass, there might be no unbelief, but faith, because of their prediction." (apol. i. ch. xxxiii.) again, st. john alone of the evangelists records that our lord used with the unbelieving jews the argument that they believed not moses, for, had they believed moses, they would have believed him, for moses wrote of him. (john, v. , ) and justin reproduces in substance the same argument:-- "for though ye have the means of understanding that this man is christ from the signs given by moses, yet you will not." (dial. xciii.) again, st. john is the only sacred writer who speaks of our lord "giving the living water," and causing that water to flow from men's hearts, and justin (somewhat inaccurately) reproduces the figure:-- "and our hearts are thus circumcised from evil, so that we are happy to die for the name of the good rock, which causes living water to burst forth for the hearts of those who by him have loved the father of all, and which gives those who are willing to drink of the water of life." (dial. ch. cxiv.) again, st. john alone records that christ spake of himself as the light, and justin speaks of him as "the only blameless and righteous light sent by god." (dial. ch. xvii.) again, st. john alone speaks of our lord as representing himself to be the true vine, and his people as the branches. justin uses the same figure with respect to the people or church of god:-- "just as if one should eat away the fruit-bearing parts of it vine, it grows up again, and yields other branches flourishing and fruitful; even so the same thing happens to us. for the vine planted by god and christ the saviour is his people." (dial. ch. cx.) again, st. john alone represents our saviour as saying, "i have power to lay [my life] down, and i have power to take it again. this commandment have i received of my father." (john x. ) and justin says of christ that, in fulfilment of a certain prophecy,-- "he is to do something worthy of praise and wonderment, being about to rise again from the dead on the third day after the crucifixion, and this he has obtained from the father." (dial. ch. c.) some of these last instances which i have given are reminiscences rather than reproductions; but like all other reminiscences they imply things remembered, sometimes not perfectly correctly, and so not applied as applied in the original; but they are all real reminiscences of words and things to be found only in our fourth gospel. section x. the principal witness.--his testimony summed up. from all this it is clear that justin had not only seen and reverenced st. john's gospel, but that his mind was permeated with its peculiar teaching. i hesitate not to say that, if a man rejects the evidence above adduced, he rejects it because on other grounds he is determined, cost what it may, to discredit the fourth gospel. let us briefly recapitulate. justin reproduced the doctrine of the logos, using the words of st. john. he asserted the divine and human natures of the son of god in the words of st. john, or in exactly similar words. he reproduced that peculiar teaching of our lord, to be found only in st. john, whereby we are enabled to hold the true and essential godhead of christ without for a moment holding that he is an independent god. he reproduced the doctrine of the logos being, even before his incarnation, in _every_ man as the "true light" to enlighten him. he reproduces the doctrine of the sacraments in terms to be found only in the fourth gospel. he reproduces, or alludes to, arguments and types and prophecies and historical events, only to be found in st. john's gospel. it seems certain, then, that if justin was acquainted with any one of our four gospels, that gospel was the one according to st. john. what answer, the reader will ask, does the author of "supernatural religion" give to all this? why, he simply ignores the greater part of these references (we trust through ignorance of their existence), and takes notice of some three or four, in which, to use the vulgar expression, he picks holes, by drawing attention to discrepancies of language or application, and dogmatically pronounces that justin could not have known the fourth gospel. well, then, the reader will ask, from whom did justin derive the knowledge of doctrines and facts so closely resembling those contained in st. john? again, we have reference to supposed older sources of information which have perished. with respect to the logos doctrine, the author of "supernatural religion" asserts:-- "his [justin's] doctrine of the logos is precisely that of philo, and of writings long antecedent to the fourth gospel, and there can be no doubt, we think, that it was derived from them." ("supernatural religion," vol. ii. p. .) it may be well here to remark that, strictly speaking, there is no logos _doctrine_ in st. john's gospel,--by doctrine meaning "scientifically expressed doctrine," drawn out, and expounded at length, as in philo. the gospel commences with the assertion that the logos, whoever he be, is god, and is the pre-existent divine nature of jesus; he does this once and once only, and never recurs to it afterwards. the next passage referred to is the assertion of the baptist, "i am not the christ," and the conclusion of the author is that "there is every reason to believe that he derived it from a particular gospel, in all probability the gospel according to the hebrews, different from ours." (vol. ii. p. .) the last place noticed is justin's reproduction of john iii. - , in connection with the institution of baptism. after discussing this at some length, for the purpose of magnifying the differences and minimizing the resemblances, his conclusion is:-- "as both the clementines and justin made use of the gospel according to hebrews, the most competent critics have, with reason, adopted the conclusion that the passage we are discussing was derived from that gospel; at any rate it cannot for a moment he maintained as a quotation from our fourth gospel, and it is of no value as evidence for its existence." ("supernatural religion," vol. ii. p. .) we have now tolerably full means of judging what a wonderful gospel this gospel to the hebrews must have been, and what a loss the church has sustained by its extinction. here was a gospel which contained a harmony of the history, moral teaching, and doctrine of all the four. as we have seen, it contained an account of the miraculous birth and infancy, embodying in one narrative the facts contained in the first and third gospels. it contained a narrative of the events preceding and attending our lord's death, far fuller and more complete than that of any single gospel in the canon. it contained a record of the teaching of christ, similar to our present sermon on the mount, embodying the teaching scattered up and down in all parts of ss. matthew and luke, and in addition to all this it embodied the very peculiar tradition, both in respect of doctrine and of history, of the fourth gospel. how could it possibly have happened that a record of the highest value, on account both of its fulness and extreme antiquity, should have perished, and have been superseded by four later and utterly unauthentic productions, one its junior by at least years, and each one of these deriving from it only a part of its teaching; the first three, for no conceivable reason, rejecting all that peculiar doctrine now called johannean, and the fourth confining itself to reproducing this so-called johannean element and this alone? it is only necessary to state this to show the utter absurdity of the author's hypothesis. but the marvel is that a person assuming such airs of penetration and research [ : ] should not have perceived that, if he has proved his point, he has simply strengthened the evidence for the supernatural, for he has proved the existence of a fifth gospel, far older and fuller than any we now possess, witnessing to the supernatural birth, life, death, and resurrection of jesus. the author strives to undermine the evidence for the authenticity of our present gospels for an avowedly dogmatic purpose. he believes in the dogma of the impossibility of the supernatural; he must, for this purpose, discredit the witness of the four, and he would fain do this by conjuring up the ghost of a defunct gospel, a gospel which turns out to be far more emphatic in its testimony to the supernatural and the dogmatic than any of the four existing ones, and so the author of this pretentious book seems to have answered himself. his own witnesses prove that from the first there has been but one account of jesus of nazareth. section xi. the principal witness on our lord's godhead. the author of "supernatural religion" has directed his attacks more particularly against the authenticity of the gospel according to st. john. his desire to discredit this gospel seems at times to arise out of a deep personal dislike to the character of the disciple whom jesus loved. (vol. ii. pp. - , , , &c.) on the author's principles, it is difficult to understand the reason for such an attack on this particular gospel. he is not an arian or socinian (as the terms are commonly understood), who might desire to disparage the testimony of this gospel to the pre-existence and godhead of our lord. his attack is on the supernatural generally, as witnessed to by any one of the four gospels; and it is allowed on all hands that the three synoptics were written long before the johannean; and, besides this, he has proved to his own satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of the reviewers who so loudly applauded his work, that there existed a gospel long anterior to the synoptics, which is more explicit in its declarations of the supernatural than all of them put together. however, as he has made a lengthened and vigorous attempt to discredit this gospel especially, it may be well to show his extraordinary misconceptions respecting the mere contents of the fourth gospel, and the opinions of the fathers (notably justin martyr) who seem to quote from it, or to derive their doctrine from it. the first question--and by far the most important one which we shall have to meet--is this: is the doctrine respecting the person of jesus more fully developed in the pages of justin martyr, or in the fourth gospel? we mean by the doctrine respecting the person of jesus, that he is, with reference to his pre-existent state, the logos and only-begotten son of god; and that, as being such, he is to be worshipped and honoured as lord and god; and that, in order to be our mediator, and the sacrifice for our sin, he took upon him our nature. the author of "supernatural religion" endeavours to trace the doctrine of the logos, as contained in justin, to older sources than our present fourth gospel, particularly to philo and the gospel according to the hebrews. the latter is much too impalpable to enable us to verify his statements by it; but we shall have to show his misconceptions respecting the connection of justin's doctrine with the former. what we have now to consider is the following statement:-- "it is certain, however, that, both justin and philo, unlike the prelude to the fourth gospel (i. ), place the logos in a secondary position to god the father, another point indicating a less advanced stage of the doctrine." from this we must, of course, infer that the author of "supernatural religion" considers that justin does not state the essential godhead of the second person as distinctly and categorically as it is stated in the fourth gospel. and as it is assumed by rationalists that there was in the early church a constantly increasing development of the doctrine of the true godhead of our lord, gradually superseding some earlier doctrine of an arian, or humanitarian, or sadducean type; therefore, the more fully developed doctrine of the godhead of our lord in any book proves that book to be of later origin than another book in which it is not so fully developed. the author of "supernatural religion" cannot deny that justin ascribes the names "lord" and "god" and pre-existence before all worlds to jesus as the logos, but he fastens upon certain statements or inferences respecting the subordination of the son to the father, and his acting for his father, or under him, in the works of creation and redemption, which justin, as an orthodox believer who would abhor tritheism, was bound to make, and most ignorantly asserts that such statements are contrary to the spirit of the fourth gospel. i shall now set before the reader the statements of both st. john and justin respecting the divine nature of our lord, so that he may judge for himself which is the germ and which the development. the fourth gospel once, and once only, sets forth the godhead and pre-existence of the logos, and this is in the exordium or prelude:-- "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god." the fourth gospel once, and once only, identifies this word with the pre-existent nature of jesus, in the concluding words of the same exordium:-- "the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we behold his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the father, full of grace and truth." except in these two places (and, of course, i need not say that they are all-important as containing by implication the whole truth of god respecting christ), there is no mention whatsoever of the "word" in this gospel. the fourth gospel gives to jesus the name of god only in two places, _i.e._ in the narrative of the second appearance of our lord to his apostles assembled together after his resurrection, where thomas is related to have said to him the words, "my lord and my god;" and in the words "the word was god" taken in connection with "the word was made flesh." the indirect, but certain, proofs by implication that jesus fully shared with his father the divine nature are numerous, as, for instance, that he wields all the power of godhead, in that "whatsoever things [the father] doeth these doeth the son likewise"--that he is equal in point of nature with the father, because god is his own proper father ([greek: idios])--that he raises from the dead whom he wills--that he and the father are one--that when esaias saw the glory of god in the temple he saw christ's glory; and, because of all this, he is the object of faith, even of the faith which saves. but, as my purpose is not to show that either justin or st. john hold the godhead of our lord, but rather to compare the statements of the one with the other; and, inasmuch as to cite the passages in which justin martyr assumes that our blessed lord possesses all divine attributes would far exceed the limits which i have proposed to myself, i shall not further cite the passages in st. john, which only _imply_ our lord's godhead, but proceed to cite the _direct_ statements of justin (or rather some of them) on this head. whereas, then, st. john categorically asserts the godhead of our lord in one, or, at the most, two places, justin directly asserts it nearly forty times. the following are noticeable:-- "and trypho said, you endeavour to prove an incredible and well-nigh impossible thing; [namely] that god endured to be born and become man. [ : ] if i undertook, said i, [justin] to prove this by doctrines or arguments of men, you should not bear with me. but if i quote frequently scriptures, and so many of them, referring to this point, and ask you to comprehend them, you are hard-hearted in the recognition of the mind and will of god." (dial. ch. lxviii.) again:-- "this very man who was crucified is proved to have been set forth expressly as god and man, and as being crucified and as dying." [ : ] (dial. ch. lxxi.) again, justin accuses the jews of having mutilated the prophetical scriptures, by having cut out of them the following prophecy respecting our lord's descent into hell:-- "the lord god remembered his dead people of israel who lay in the graves; and he descended to preach to them his own salvation." (dial. ch. lxxii.) again:-- "for christ is king, and priest, and god, and lord, and angel, and man, and captain, and stone, and a son born, and first made subject to suffering, then returning to heaven, and again coming with glory." (dial. xxxiv.) again:-- "now you will permit me first to recount the prophecies, which i wish to do in order to prove that christ is called both god, and lord of hosts, and jacob in parable, by the holy spirit." (dial. ch. xxxvi.) again, justin makes trypho to say:-- "when you [justin] say that this christ existed as god before the ages, then that he submitted to be born, and become man, yet that he is not man of man, this [assertion] appears to me to be not merely paradoxical, but also foolish. and i replied to this, i know that the statement does appear to be paradoxical, especially to those of your race, who are ever unwilling to understand or to perform the [requirements] of god." (dial. ch. xlviii.) again, justin makes trypho demand:-- "answer me then, first, how you can show that there is another god besides the maker of all things; [ : ] and then you will show [further], that he submitted to be born of the virgin. "i replied, give me permission first of all to quote certain passages from the prophecy of isaiah which refer to the office of forerunner discharged by john the baptist." (dial. i.) lastly:-- "now, assuredly, trypho, i shall show that, in the vision of moses, this same one alone, who is called an angel, and who is god, appeared to and communed with moses.... even so here, the scriptures, in announcing that the angel of the lord appeared unto moses, and in afterwards declaring him to be lord and god, speaks of the same one, whom it declares by the many testimonies already quoted to be minister to god, who is above the world, above whom there is no other." (dial. ch. lx.) in order not to weary the reader, i give the remainder in a note. [ : ] the reader will observe that the assertions of justin, which i have given, are the strongest that could be made by any one who holds the godhead of christ, and yet holds that that godhead is not an independent divine existence, but derived from the father who begat him, and, by begetting, fully communicated to his son or offspring his own godhead. from these extracts the reader will be able to judge for himself whether the doctrine of st. john is the expansion or development of that of justin, or the doctrine of justin the development of that of st. john. he will also be able to judge of the absurdity of supposing that after the time of justin the cause of orthodoxy demanded the forgery of a gospel, in order to set forth more fully the divine glory of the redeemer. section xii. the principal witness on the doctrine of the logos. we have now to compare justin's doctrine of the logos with that of the fourth gospel. the doctrine or dogma of the logos is declared in the fourth gospel in a short paragraph of fourteen verses, a part of which is occupied with the mission of the baptist. the doctrine, as i have said before, is rather oracular enunciation than doctrine; _i.e._ it is not doctrine elaborately drawn out and explained and guarded, but simply laid down as by the authority of almighty god. it is contained in four or five direct statements:-- "in the beginning was the logos." in the beginning--that is, before all created things--when there was no finite existence by which time could be measured; in that fathomless abyss of duration when there was god only:-- "the logos was with god." though numerically distinct from him, [ : ] he was so "by" or "with" him as to be his fellow:-- "the logos was god." that is, though numerically distinct, he partook of the same divine nature: "all things were made by him." because, partaking fully of the nature, he partook fully of the power of god, and so of his creating power. "that was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." "the logos was made flesh." he was incarnate by the holy ghost of the virgin mary, and was made man. the first enunciation, then, of st. john is that-- "in the beginning was the word." in justin we read:-- "his son, who alone is properly called son, the word, who also was with him, and was begotten before the works." (apol. ii. ch. vi.) again:-- "when you [justin] say that this christ existed as god before the ages." (dial. ch. xlviii.) again:-- "god begat before all creatures a beginning, [ : ] [who was] a certain rational power from himself, who is called by the holy spirit, now the glory of the lord, now the son, again wisdom, again an angel, then god, and then lord and logos." (dial. ch. lxi.) now it is to be here remarked, that though the logos is continually declared to be "begotten of," "derived from," "an offspring of" the father, yet in no case is he declared to be "created" or "made," anticipating the declaration which we confess in our creed, "the son is of the father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten." st. john proceeds:-- "the word was with god." in justin we read:-- "this offspring, which was truly brought forth from the father, was with the father before all the creatures, and the father communed with him." (dial. ch. lxii.) again, a little before, in the same chapter:-- "from which we can indisputably learn that god conversed with some one who was numerically distinct from himself." again:-- "the word, who also was with him." (apol. ii. ch. vi.) again, trypho says:-- "you maintain him to be pre-existent god." (ch. lxxxvii.) again:-- "i asserted that this power was begotten from the father, by his power and will, but not by abscission, as if the essence of the father were divided; as all other things partitioned and divided are not the same after as before they were divided; and for the sake of example i took the case of fires kindled from a fire, which we see to be distinct from it," &c. (dial. cxxviii.) "the word was god." justin writes:-- "the word of wisdom, who is himself this god begotten of the father of all things" (dial. ch. lxi.) (see previous page.) again:-- "they who affirm that the son is the father are proved neither to have become acquainted with the father, nor to know that the father of the universe has a son; who also, being the first-begotten word of god, is even god." (apol. i. ch. lxiii.) again:-- "it must be admitted absolutely that some other one is called lord by the holy spirit besides him who is considered maker of all things." (dial. ch. lvi.) but it is useless to multiply quotations, seeing that all those in pages - are the echoes of this declaration of the fourth evangelist. st. john writes:-- "all things were made by him." and justin writes:-- "knowing that god conceived and made the world by the word." (apol. i. ch. lxiv.) again:-- "when at first he created and arranged all things by him." (apol. ii. ch. vi.) again st. john writes:-- "that (_i.e._ the word) was the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world." i have given above (p. ) sufficient illustrations from justin of this truth. i again draw attention to:-- "he is the word of whom every race of men were partakers." (apol. i. ch. xlvi.) again:-- "he was and is the word who is in every man." (apol. ii. ch. x.) "for whatever either lawgivers or philosophers uttered well, they elaborated by finding and contemplating some part of the word. but since they did not know the whole of the word which is christ, they often contradicted themselves." [ : ] (apol. ii. ch. x.) again:-- "these men who believe in him, in whom [greek: en hois] abideth the seed of god, the word." (apol. i. ch. xxxii.) again:-- "i confess that i both boast and with all my strength strive to be found a christian; not because the teachings of plato are different from those of christ, but because they are not in all respects similar, as neither are those of the others, stoics, and poets, and historians. for each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word." [ : ] (apol. ii. ch. xiii.) lastly, st. john writes:-- "the word was made flesh." and justin writes:-- "the logos himself, who took shape and became man and was called jesus christ." (apol. ii. ch. v.) again:-- "the word, who is also the son; and of him we will in what follows relate how he took flesh, and became man." (apol. ii. ch. xxxii.) "jesus christ is the only proper son who has been begotten by god, being his word, and first-begotten, and power, and becoming man according to his will he taught us these things," &c. (apol. i. ch. xxiii.) again:-- "in order that you may recognize him as god coming forth from above, and man living among men." (dial. lxiv.) again:-- "he was the only-begotten of the father of all things, being begotten in a peculiar manner word and power by him, and having afterwards become man through the virgin." (dial. ch. cv.) after considering the above extracts, the reader will be able to judge of the truth of some assertions of the author of "supernatural religion," as, for instance:-- "we are, in fact, constantly directed by the remarks of justin to other sources of the logos doctrine, and never to the fourth gospel, with which his tone and terminology in no way agree." (vol. ii. p. ) again:-- "we must see that justin's terminology, as well as his views of the word become man, is thoroughly different from that gospel." (vol. ii. p. ) also:-- "it must be apparent to every one who seriously examines the subject, that justin's terminology is thoroughly different from, and in spirit opposed to, that of the fourth gospel, and in fact that the peculiarities of the gospel are not found in justin's writings at all." (!!) (p. .) [ : ] on the contrary, we assert that every divine truth respecting the logos, which appears in the germ in st. john, is expanded in justin. st. john's short and pithy sentences are the text, and justin's remarks are the exposition of that text, and of nothing less or more. so far from justin's doctrine being contrary to the spirit of st. john's, justin, whilst deviating somewhat from the strict letter, seizes and reproduces the very spirit. i will give in the next section two or three remarkable instances of this; which instances, strange to say, the author of "supernatural religion" quotes for the purpose of showing the absolute divergence and opposition between the two writers. section xiii. the principal witness on our lord as king, priest, and angel. the author of "supernatural religion" quotes the passage in dial. xxxiv.:-- "for christ is king, and priest, and god, and lord, and angel, and man, and captain, and stone, and a son born," &c. and he remarks, with what i cannot but characterize as astonishing effrontery, or (to use his own language with respect to tischendorf) "an assurance which can scarcely be characterized otherwise than an unpardonable calculation upon the ignorance of his readers." (vol. ii. p. .) "now these representations, which are constantly repeated throughout justin's writings, are quite opposed to the spirit of the fourth gospel." (vol. ii. p. .) he first of all takes the title "king," and arbitrarily and unwarrantably restricts justin's derivation of it to the seventy-second psalm, apparently being ignorant of the fact that st. john, in his very first chapter, records that christ was addressed by nathanael as "king of israel"--that the fourth gospel alone describes how the crowd on his entry into jerusalem cried, "osanna, blessed be the king of israel, who cometh in the name of the lord" (xii. )--that this gospel more fully than any other records how pilate questioned our lord respecting his kingship, and recognized him as king, "behold your king;" and that those who mocked our lord are recorded by st. john to have mocked him as the "king of israel." so that this term king, so far from being contrary to the spirit of the fourth gospel, is not even contrary to its letter. but this, gross though it seems, is to my mind as nothing to two other assertions founded on this passage of justin:-- "if we take the second epithet, the logos as priest, which is quite foreign to the fourth gospel, we find it repeated by justin." now, it is quite true that the title "priest" is not given to our lord in st. john, just as it is not given to him in any one of the three synoptics, or indeed in any book of the new testament, except the epistle to the hebrews: yet, notwithstanding this, of all the books of the new testament, this gospel is the one which sets forth the reality of christ's priesthood. for what is the distinguishing function of the priesthood? is it not mediation and intercession, and the fourth gospel more than all sets forth christ as mediator and intercessor? as mediator when he says so absolutely: "no man cometh unto the father but by me;" "as my father sent me so send i you; whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them." again, the idea of priesthood is actually inherent in the figure of the good shepherd "who giveth his life for the sheep;" for how does he give his life?--not in the way of physical defence against enemies, as an earthly "good shepherd" might do, but in the way of atoning sacrifice, as the author of "supernatural religion" truly asserts, where he writes (vol. ii. p. ):-- "the representation of jesus as the lamb of god taking away the sins of the world is the very basis of the fourth gospel." again, in the same page:-- "he died for the sin of the world, and is the object of faith, by which alone forgiveness and justification before god can be secured." again, with reference to his intercession, we have not only the truth set forth in such expressions as "i will pray the father," but we have the actual exercise of the great act of priestly intercession, as recorded in the seventeenth chapter of the fourth gospel. if we look to words only (which the author of "supernatural religion" too often does), then, of course, we allow that the epithet "priest" is quite foreign not only to the fourth gospel, but to every other book of the new testament, except the epistle to the hebrews; but if we look to the things implied in the idea of priesthood, such as mediation and intercession, in fact intervention between god and man, then we find that the whole new testament is pervaded with the idea, and it culminates in the fourth gospel. the next assertion of the author of "supernatural religion" on the same passage betrays still more ignorance of the contents of st. john's gospel, and a far greater eagerness to fasten on a seeming omission of the letter, and to ignore a pervadence of the spirit. he asserts:-- "it is scarcely necessary to point out that this representation of the logos as angel, is not only foreign to, but opposed to, the spirit of the fourth gospel." (vol. ii. p. ) now just as in the former case we had to ask, "what is the characteristic of the priest?" so in order to answer this we have only to ask, "what is the characteristic of the angel?" an angel is simply "one sent." such is the meaning of the word both in the old and new testament. the hebrew word [hebrew: mlakh] is applied indifferently to a messenger sent by man (see job i. ; sam. xi. ; sam. xi. - ), and to god's messengers the holy angels, that is, the holy messengers, the holy ones sent. and similarly, in the new testament, the word [greek: angelos] is applied to human messengers in luke vii. , [greek: apelthontôn de tôn angelôn iôannou], also in luke ix. , and james ii. . that the characteristic of the angel is to be "sent" is implied in such common phrases as, "the lord _sent_ his angel," "i will _send_ mine angel," "are they not all ministering spirits _sent_ forth to minister?" &c. now one of the characteristic expressions of the fourth gospel--we might almost have said _the_ characteristic expression--respecting jesus, is that he is "sent." to use the noun instead of the verb, he is god's special messenger, his [greek: angelos], sent by him to declare and to do his will: but this does not imply that he has, or has assumed, the nature of an angel; just as the application of the same word [greek: angelos] to mere human messengers in no way implies that they have any other nature than human nature. just as men sent their fellow-men as their [greek: angeloi], so god sends one who, according to justin, fully partakes of his nature, to be his [greek: angelos]. this sending of our lord on the part of his father is one of the chief characteristics of the fourth gospel, and the reader, if he cannot examine this gospel for himself, comparing it with the others, has only to turn to any concordance, greek or english, to satisfy himself respecting this matter. jesus christ is said to be "sent of god," _i.e._ to be his [greek: angelos], only once in st. matthew's gospel (matthew x. : "he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me"), only once in st. mark (ix. ), only twice in st. luke (ix. ; xx. ), but in the fourth gospel he is said to be sent of god about forty times. [ : ] in one discourse alone, that in john vi., jesus asserts no less than six times that he is sent of god, or that god sent him; so that the dictum, "this representation of the logos as angel is not only foreign to, but opposed to, the spirit of the fourth gospel," is absolutely contrary to the truth. section xiv. the principal witness on the doctrine of the trinity. the author of "supernatural religion" asserts:-- "the fourth gospel proclaims the doctrine of an hypostatic trinity in a more advanced form than any other writing of the new testament." [ : ] this is hardly true if we consider what is meant by the proclamation of the doctrine of a trinity. such a doctrine can be set forth by inference, or it can be distinctly and broadly stated, as it is, for instance, in the first article of the church of england, or in the creed of st. athanasius. the doctrine of the trinity is set forth by implication in every place in scripture where the attributes or works of god are ascribed to two other persons besides the father. but it is still more directly set forth in those places where the three persons are mentioned together as acting conjointly in some divine work, or receiving conjointly some divine honour. in this sense the most explicit declarations of the doctrine of the trinity are the baptismal formula at the end of st. matthew's gospel, and the "grace," as it is called, at the end of st. paul's second epistle to the corinthians. st. john, by asserting in different places the godhead of the word, and the divine works of the holy ghost, implicitly proves the doctrine of the trinity, but, as far as i can remember, he but twice mentions the three adorable persons together: once in the words, "i will pray the father and he shall give you another comforter." and again, "but the paraclete, which is the holy ghost, whom the father shall send in my name, he shall teach you all things." now, in respect of the explicit declaration of the doctrine of the trinity, the statements of justin are the necessary [ : ] developments not only of st. john's statements, but of those of the rest of the new testament writers. i have given two passages in page . one of these is in the first apology, and reads thus:-- "our teacher of these things is jesus christ, who also was born for this purpose, and was crucified under pontius pilate, procurator of judea in the times of tiberius caesar; and that we reasonably worship him, having learned that he is the son of the true god himself, and holding him in the second place, and the prophetic spirit in the third, we will prove." (apol. i. ch. xiii.) again, he endeavours to show that plato held the doctrine of a trinity. he is proving that plato had read the books of moses:-- "and, as to his speaking of a third, he did this because he read, as we said above, that which was spoken by moses, 'that the spirit of god moved over the waters.' for he gives the second place to the logos which is with god, who he (plato) said, was placed crosswise in the universe; and the third place to the spirit who was said to be borne upon the water, saying, 'and the third around the third.'" (apol. i. ch. lx.) now unquestionably, so far as expression of doctrine is concerned, these passages from justin are the developments of the johannean statements. the statements in st. john contain, in germ, the whole of what justin develops; but it is absurd to assert that, after justin had written the above, it was necessary, in order to bolster up a later, and consequently, in the eyes of rationalists, a mere human development, to forge a now gospel, containing nothing like so explicit a declaration of the trinity as we find in writings which are supposed to precede it, and weighting its doctrinal statements with a large amount of historical matter very difficult, in many cases, to reconcile perfectly with the history in the older synoptics. section xv. justin and st. john on the incarnation. two further matters, bearing upon the relations of the doctrine of justin to that of st. john, must now be considered. the author of "supernatural religion" asserts that the doctrine of justin respecting the incarnation of the word is essentially different from that of st. john:-- "it must be borne in mind that the terminology of john i. , 'and the word became flesh ([greek: sarx egeneto]) is different from that of justin, who uses the word [greek: sarkopoiêtheis]." (vol. ii. p. .) again, with reference to the word [greek: monogenês], he writes:-- "the phrase in justin is quite different from that in the fourth gospel, i. , 'and the word became flesh' ([greek: sarx egeneto]) and tabernacled among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the father' ([greek: hôs monogenous para patros], &c.) in justin he is 'the only-begotten of the father of all' ([greek: monogenês tô patri tôn holôn)], 'and he became man' ([greek: anthrôpos genomenos]) 'through the virgin,' and justin never once employs the peculiar terminology of the fourth gospel, [greek: sarx egeneto], in any part of his writings." (vol. ii. p. .) again:-- "he [justin] is, in fact, thoroughly acquainted with the history of the logos doctrine and its earlier enunciation under the symbol of wisdom, and his knowledge of it is clearly independent of, and antecedent to, the statements of the fourth gospel." (vol. ii. p. ) this passage is important. i think we cannot be wrong in deducing from it that the author of "supernatural religion" considers that the gospel of st. john was published subsequently to the time of justin martyr, that is, some time after a.d. or . again:-- "the peculiarity of his terminology in all these passages [all which i have given above in pages - ], so markedly different, and even opposed to that of the fourth gospel, will naturally strike the reader." (vol. ii. p. .) again, and lastly:-- "we must see that justin's terminology, as well as his views of the word become man, is thoroughly different from that gospel. we have remarked that, although the passages are innumerable in which justin speaks of the word having become man through the virgin, he never once throughout his writings makes use of the peculiar expression of the fourth gospel: 'the word became flesh' ([greek: ho logos sarx egeneto]). on the few occasions on which he speaks of the word having been _made_ flesh, he uses the term, [greek: sarkopoiêtheis.] in one instance he has [greek: sarka echein], and speaking of the eucharist, justin once explains that it is in memory of christ being made _body_, [greek: sômatopoiêsasthai]. justin's most common phrase, however, and he repeats it in numberless instances, is that the logos submitted to be born, and become man [greek: gennêthênai anthrôpon genomenon hypemeinen] by a virgin, or he uses variously the expressions: [greek: anthrôpos gegone, anthrôpos genomenos, genesthai anthrôpon.]" (vol. ii. p. .) here, then, we have the differences specified by which the author of "supernatural religion" thinks that he is justified in describing the terminology and views of justin respecting the incarnation as "markedly different and even opposed to," and as "thoroughly different from," those of the fourth gospel. so that, because justin, instead of embodying the sentence, [greek: ho logos sarx egeneto], substitutes for it the participle, [greek: sarkopoiêtheis], or the phrase, [greek: sarka echein], or the infinitive, [greek: sômatopoiêsasthai], or the expression, [greek: anthrôpos gegone] he holds views thoroughly different from those of st. john respecting the most momentous of christian truths. this is a fair specimen of the utterly reckless assertions in which this author indulges respecting the foundation truth of christianity. if such terms, implying such divergences, can be applied to these statements of justin's _belief_ in the incarnation, what words of human language could be got to express his flat denial of the truth held in common by him and by st. john, if he had been an unbeliever? if justin, with most other persons, considers that being "in the flesh" is the characteristic difference between men and spirits such as the angels, and expresses himself accordingly by saying that the word "became man," what sense is there in saying that he "is opposed to the spirit of the fourth gospel," in which we have the word not only as the "son of man," but possessing all the sinless weaknesses of human nature, so that he is weary, and weeps, and groans, and is troubled in spirit? and now we will make, if the reader will allow, a supposition analogous to some which the author of "supernatural religion" has made in pages and following of his first volume. we will suppose that all the ecclesiastical literature, inspired and uninspired, previous to the council of nice, had been blotted out utterly, and the four gospels alone preserved. and we will suppose some critic taking upon himself to argue that the gospel of st. john was written after the nicene creed. on the principles and mode of argument of the author of "supernatural religion," he would actually be able to prove his absurdity, for he would be able to allege that the doctrine and terminology of the fathers of the first general council was "opposed to" that of the fourth gospel; and so they could not possibly have acknowledged its authority if they had even "seen" it. for he (the critic) would allege that the words of st. john respecting the incarnation are not adopted by the creed which the nicene fathers put forth; instead of inserting into the creed the words [greek: ho logos sarx egeneto], which, the critic would urge, they _must have done_ if they would successfully oppose foes who appealed to the letter of scripture, they used other terms, as the participles [greek: sarkôthenta] and [greek: enanthrôpêsanta]. [ : ] again, the supposed critic would urge, they applied to our lord the phrase [greek: gennêthenta pro pantôn tôn aiônôn], a phrase "so markedly different and indeed opposed to that of the fourth gospel," as the author of "supernatural religion" urges with respect to [greek: gennêma pro pantôn tôn poiêmaton], and [greek: apo tou patros tôn holôn gennêtheis.] again, the critic would urge that instead of calling the son "god" absolutely, as in the sentence "the word was god," they confess him only as [greek: theos ek theou], and this because he is [greek: gennêtheis], and so he would say, with the author of "supernatural religion," "this is a totally different view from that of the fourth gospel, which in so emphatic a manner enunciates the doctrine, 'in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and god was the word;'" and so our supposed critic will exclaim, "see what abundant proof that these fathers had 'never even seen' the fourth gospel;" and according to all rules of rationalistic criticism they had not, or, at least, they thought nothing of its authenticity; whilst all the time this same gospel was open before them, and they devoutly reverenced every word as the word of the holy ghost, and would have summarily anathematized any one who had expressed the smallest doubt respecting its plenary inspiration. section xvi. justin and st. john on the subordination of the son. the second matter connected with the relations of the doctrine of justin martyr to that of st. john, is the subordination of the son to the father. i have already noticed this truth (page ), but, owing to its importance it may be well to devote to it a few further remarks. the author of "supernatural religion" does not seem to realize that in perfect sonship two things are inherent, viz., absolute sameness (and therefore equality) of nature with the father, and perfect subordination in the submission of his will to that of the father. he consequently asserts:-- "it is certain, however, that both justin and philo, unlike the prelude to the fourth gospel, place the logos in a secondary position to god the father, another point indicating a less advanced stage of the doctrine. both justin and philo apply the term [greek: theos] to the logos without the article. justin distinctly says, that christians worship jesus christ as the son of the true god, holding him in the second place [greek: en deutera chôra echontes], and this secondary position is systematically defined through justin's writings in a very decided way, as it is in the works of philo, by the contrast of the begotten logos with the unbegotten god. justin speaks of the word as the 'first born of the unbegotten god' ([greek: prôtotokos tô agennêtô theô]), and the distinctive appellation of the 'unbegotten god,' applied to the father, is most common in all his writings." (vol. ii. p. ) now, when justin speaks of holding christ "in the second place," he does no more nor less than any trinitarian christian of the present day, when such an one speaks of the son as the _second_ person of the trinity, and as the only begotten son and the word of the father. when we speak of him as being the second person, we necessarily rank him in the second place in point of numerical order. when we speak of him as being the son, we naturally place him as, in the order of conception, second to, or after, him that begat him; [ : ] and, when we speak of him as the word, we also place him in order of conception as after him who utters or gives forth the word. justin says no more than this in any expression which he uses. when he speaks of the father as the unbegotten god, and the son as the begotten god, he does no more than the most uncompromising believer in the doctrine of the ever-blessed trinity in the present day does, when, in the words of the creed of st. athanasius, that believer confesses that "the father is made of none, neither created nor begotten. "the son is of the father alone, neither made, nor created, but begotten." but we have not now so much to do with the orthodoxy of justin as with the question as to whether his doctrine is anterior to st. john's, as being less decided in its assertions of our lord's equality. now there are no words in justin on the side of our lord's subordination at all equal to the words of christ as given in st. john, "my father is greater than i." the gospel of st. john is pervaded by two great truths which underlie every part, and are the necessary complements of one another; these are, the perfect equality or identity of the nature of the son with that of the father, because he is the true begotten son of his father; and the perfect submission of the will of the son to that of the father because he is his father. the former appears in such assertions as "the word was with god," "the word was god," "my lord and my god," "i and the father are one," "he that hath seen me hath seen the father," "the glory which i had with thee before the world was," "all things that the father hath are mine," &c. the latter is inherent in the idea of perfect sonship, and is asserted in such statements as god "gave his only begotten son" (iii. ). "the father loveth the son, and hath given all things into his hands" (iii. ). "the son can do nothing of himself" (v. ). "the father loveth the son, and showeth him all things that himself doeth" (v. ). the father hath "given to the son to have life in himself" (v. ). the father "hath given him authority to execute judgment also" (v. ). "i seek not mine own will, but the will of the father" (v. ). "the works which the father hath given me to finish" (v. ). "i am come in my father's name" (v. ). "him [the son of man] hath god the father sealed" (vi. ). "i live by the father" (v. ). "my doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me" (vii. ). "he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true" (vii. ). "i am from him, and he hath sent me" (vii. ). "i do nothing of myself, but as my father hath taught me, i speak these things" (viii. ). "neither came i of myself, but he sent me" (viii. ). "i have power to take it [my life] again; this commandment have i received of my father" (x. ). "my father, which gave them me, is greater than all" (x. ). "i have kept my father's commandments, and abide in his love" (xv. ). i have read justin carefully for the purpose of marking every expression in his writings bearing upon the relations of the son to the father, and i find none so strongly expressing subordination as these, and the declarations of this kind in the works of justin are nothing like so numerous as they are in the short gospel of st. john. the reader who knows anything about the history of christian doctrine will see at a glance how impossible it would have been for a gospel ascribing these expressions to jesus to have been received by the christian church long before justin's time, except that gospel had been fully authenticated as the work of the last surviving apostle. section xvii. justin and philo. the writer of "supernatural religion" asserts that justin derived his logos doctrine from philo, and also that his doctrine was identical with that of philo and opposed to that of st. john. but respecting this assertion two questions may be asked. from whom did philo derive _his_ doctrine of the logos? and from whom did justin derive his identification of the logos with jesus? the christian, all whose conceptions of salvation rest ultimately upon the truth that "the word was god," believes (if, that is, he has any knowledge of the history of human thought), that god prepared men for the reception of so momentous a truth long before that truth was fully revealed. he believes that god prepared the gentiles for the reception of this truth by familiarizing them with some idea of the logos through the speculations of plato; and he also believes that god prepared his chosen people for receiving the same truth by such means as the personification of wisdom in the book of proverbs, and in the apocryphal moral books, and, above all, by the identification of the active presence and power of god with the meymera or word, as set forth in the chaldee paraphrases. both these lines of thought seem to have coalesced and to have reached their full development (so far as they could, at least, apart from christianity) in alexandrian judaism, which is principally known to us in the pages of philo; but how much of philo's own speculation is contained in the extracts from his writings given by the author of "supernatural religion" it is impossible to say, as we know very little of the alexandrian jewish literature except from him. he seems, however, to write as if what he enunciated was commonly known and accepted by those for whom he wrote. there are two reasons which make me think that justin, if he derived any part of his logos doctrines from alexandrian sources (which i much doubt), derived them from writings or traditions to which philo, equally with himself, was indebted. one is that, in his dialogue with trypho, a jew, he never mentions philo, whose name would have been a tower of strength to him in disputing with a jew, and convincing him that there might be another person who might be rightly called god besides the father. surely if justin had known that philo had spoken of god "appointing his true logos, his first begotten son, to have the care of this sacred flock as the substitute of the great king" (quoted in p. ); and that-- "the most ancient word is the image of god" (p. ); and that "the word is the image of god by which the whole world was created" (p. ); surely, i say, he would have used the name of one who had been in his day such a champion of the jewish people, and had suffered such insults from caligula on their account. [ : ] nothing seems more appropriate for the conversion of trypho than many of the extracts from philo given by the author of "supernatural religion." herein, too, in this matter of philo and justin, the author of "supernatural religion" betrays his surprising inconsistency and refutes himself. he desires it to be inferred that justin need not have seen--probably had not seen, even one of our present gospels, because he does not name the authors, though there is abundant reason why the names of four authors of the memoirs should not be paraded before unbelievers as suggesting differences in the testimony; whereas it would have been the greatest assistance to him in his argument with trypho to have named philo; and he does not. we would not infer from this, as the author of "supernatural religion" does most absurdly in parallel cases, that justin "knew nothing" of philo; had not even seen his books, and need not have heard of him; but we must gather from it that justin did not associate the name of philo with the logos doctrine in its most advanced stage of development. many other facts tend to show that justin made little or no use of philo. in the extracts given by the author of "supernatural religion" from philo, all culled out to serve his purpose, the reader will notice many words and phrases "foreign" to justin; for instance, [greek: deuteros theos, organon de logon theou, di' hou sympas ho kosmos edêmiourgeito]. more particularly the reader will notice that such adjectives as [greek: orthos, hieros (hierôtatos)] and [greek: presbys (presbytatos)] are applied to the word in the short extracts from philo given by the author of "supernatural religion," which are never applied to the second person of the trinity in justin. in fact, though there are some slight resemblances, the terminology of philo is, to use the words of "supernatural religion," "totally different from" and "opposed to" that of justin, and the more closely it is examined, the more clearly it will be seen that justin cannot have derived his logos doctrine from philo. the other question is, "from whom did justin derive his identification of the logos with jesus?" not from philo, certainly. we have shown above how st. john lays down with authority the identity of the logos with the pre-existent divine nature of jesus, not in long, elaborate, carefully reasoned philosophical dissertation, but in four short, clear, decisive enunciations. "in the beginning was the word"--"the word was with god"--"the word was god"--"the word was made flesh." we have seen how these were the manifest germs of justin's teaching. now, if at the time when justin wrote the fourth gospel, as we shall shortly prove, must have been in use in the church in every part of the world, why should justin be supposed to derive from philo a truth which he, being a jew, would repudiate? justin himself most certainly was not the first to identify the logos with jesus. the identification was asserted long before in the apocalypse, which the author of "supernatural religion" shows to have been written about a.d. , or so. in fact, he ascertains its date to "a few weeks." supposing, then, that the apocalypse was anterior to st. john, on whose lines, so to speak, does justin develope the logos doctrine? most assuredly not on philo's lines (for his whole terminology essentially differs from that of the alexandrian), but on the lines of the fourth gospel, and on no other. let the reader turn to some extracts which the author of "supernatural religion" gives out of philo. in p. , he gives some very striking passages indeed, in which philo speaks of the logos as the bread from heaven:-- "he is 'the substitute ([greek: hyparchos]) of god,' 'the heavenly incorruptible food of the soul,' 'the bread from heaven.' in one place he says, 'and they who inquire what nourishes the soul ... learnt at last that it is the word of god, and the divine reason' ... this is the heavenly nourishment to which the holy scripture refers ... saying, 'lo i rain upon you bread ([greek: artos]) from heaven' (exod. xvi. ). 'this is the bread ([greek: artos]) which the lord has given them to eat.'" (exod. xvi. ) and again:-- "for the one indeed raises his eyes to the sky, perceiving the manna, the divine word, the heavenly incorruptible food of the longing soul." elsewhere ... "but it is taught by the initiating priest and prophet moses, who declares, 'this is the bread ([greek: artos]), the nourishment which god has given to the soul.' his own reason and his own word which he has offered; for this bread ([greek: artos]) which he has given us to eat is reason." (vol. ii. p. .) now the fourth gospel also makes jesus speak of himself as the "bread of life," and "given by the father;" but what is the bread defined by jesus himself to be? not a mere intellectual apprehension, _i.e._ reason, as philo asserts; but the very opposite, no other than "his flesh;" the product of his incarnation. "the bread that i will give is my flesh," and he adds to it his blood. "except ye eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." now this also justin reproduces, not after the conception of philo, which is but a natural conception, but after the conception of jesus in the fourth gospel, which is an infinitely mysterious and supernatural one. "in like manner as jesus christ our saviour, having been made flesh by the word of god, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of his word, and from which our blood and flesh are by transmutation nourished is the flesh and blood of that jesus who was made flesh." (apol. i. ch. lxvi.) i trust the reader will acquit me, in making this quotation, of any desire to enunciate any eucharistic theory of the presence of christ's flesh in the eucharist. all i have to do with is the simple fact that both philo and st. john speak of the word as the bread of life; but philo explains that bread to be "reason," and st. john makes our lord to set it forth as his flesh, and justin takes no notice of the idea of philo, and reproduces the idea of the fourth gospel. and yet we are to be told that justin "knew nothing" of the fourth gospel, and that his logos doctrine was "identical" with that of philo. section xviii. discrepancies between st. john and the synoptics. the author of "supernatural religion" devotes a large portion of his second volume to setting forth the discrepancies, real or alleged, between the synoptics and the fourth gospel. in many of these remarks he seems to me to betray extraordinary ignorance of the mere contents of the fourth gospel. i shall notice two or three remarkable misconceptions; but, before doing this, i desire to call the reader's attention to the only inference respecting the authorship of this gospel which can be drawn from these discrepancies. st. john's gospel is undoubtedly the last gospel published; in fact, the last work of the sacred canon. the more patent, then, the differences between st. john and the synoptics, the more difficult it is to believe that a gospel, containing subject-matter so different from the works already accepted as giving a true account of christ, should have been accepted by the whole church at so comparatively recent a date, unless that church had every reason for believing that it was the work of the last surviving apostle. take, for instance, the [apparent] differences between st. john and the synoptics respecting the scene of our lord's ministry, the character of his discourses, the miracles ascribed to him, and the day of his crucifixion, or rather of his partaking of the paschal feast. the most ignorant and unobservant would notice these differences; and the more labour required to reconcile the statements or representations of the last gospel with the three preceding ones, the more certain it is that none would have ventured to put forth a document containing such differences except an apostle who, being the last surviving one, might be said to inherit the prestige and authority of the whole college. it would far exceed the limits which i have prescribed to myself to examine the fourth gospel with the view of reconciling the discrepancies between it and the synoptics, and also of bringing out the numberless undesigned coincidences between the earlier and the later account, of which the writer of "supernatural religion," led away by his usual dogmatic prejudices, has taken not the smallest notice. the reader will find this very ably treated in mr. sanday's "authorship of the fourth gospel" (macmillan). my object at present is of a far humbler nature, simply to show the utter untrustworthiness of some of the most confidently asserted statements of the writer of "supernatural religion." i shall take two: . the difference between christ's mode of teaching and the structure of his discourses, as represented by st. john and the synoptics respectively. . the intellectual impossibility that st. john should have written the fourth gospel. . respecting the difference of christ's mode of teaching as recorded in st. john and in the synoptics, he remarks:-- "it is impossible that jesus can have had two such diametrically opposed systems of teaching; one purely moral, the other wholly dogmatic; one expressed in wonderfully terse, clear, brief sayings and parables, the other in long, involved, and diffuse discourses; one clothed in the great language of humanity, the other concealed in obscure, philosophic terminology; and that these should have been kept so distinct as they are in the synoptics, on the one hand, and the fourth gospel on the other. the tradition of justin martyr applies solely to the system of the synoptics, 'brief and concise were the sentences uttered by him: for he was no sophist, but his word was the power of god.'" [ : ] (vol. ii. p. ) to take the first of those assertions. so far from its being "impossible" that jesus "can have had two such diametrically opposite modes of teaching," it is not only possible, but we have undeniable proof of the fact in that remarkable saying of christ recorded by both st. matthew and st. luke: "all things are delivered unto me of my father, and no man knoweth the son, but the father; neither knoweth any man the father, save the son, and he to whomsoever the son will reveal him." (matth. xi. ). the author of "supernatural religion" has studied the letter of this passage very carefully, for he devotes no less than ten pages to a minute examination of the supposed quotations of it in justin and other fathers (vol. i. pp. - ); but he does not draw attention to the fact that it is conceived in the spirit and expressed in the terms of the fourth gospel, and totally unlike the general style of the discourses in the synoptics. [ : ] the fourth gospel shows us that such words as these, almost unique in the synoptics, are not the only words uttered in a style so different from the usual teaching of our lord--that at times, when he was on the theme of his relations to his father, he adopted other diction more suited to the nature of the deeper truths he was enunciating. then take the second assertion:-- "one [system] expressed in wonderfully terse, clear, brief sayings and parables, the other in long, involved, and diffuse discourses." again:-- "the description which justin gives of the manner of teaching of jesus excludes the idea that he knew the fourth gospel. 'brief and concise were the sentences uttered by him, for he was no sophist, but his word was the power of god.' (apol. i. ) no one could for a moment assert that this description applies to the long and artificial discourses of the fourth gospel, whilst, on the other hand, it eminently describes the style of teaching with which we are acquainted in the synoptics, with which the gospel according to the hebrews, in all its forms, was so closely allied." (vol. ii. p. ) now i assert, and the reader can with very little trouble verify the truth of the assertion, that the mode of our lord's teaching, as set forth in st. john, is more terse, axiomatic, and sententious--more in accordance with these words of justin, "brief and concise were the sentences uttered by him," than it appears in the synoptics. to advert for a moment to the mere length of the discourses. the sermon on the mount is considerably longer than the longest discourse in st. john's gospel (viz., that occupying chapters xiv., xv., xvi.). this is the only unbroken discourse of any length in this gospel. the others, viz., those with nicodemus, with the woman at sychem, with the jews in the temple, and the one in the synagogue at capernaum, are much shorter than many in the synoptics, and none of them are continuous discourses, but rather conversations. and, with respect to the composition, those in st. john are mainly made up of short, terse, axiomatic deliverances just such as justin describes. take, for instance, the sentences in the sixth chapter:-- "i am the bread of life." "he that believeth on me hath everlasting life." "i am that bread of life." "this is the bread that cometh down from heaven, that a man should eat thereof and not die." "my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." "it is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing." and those in the tenth:-- "i am the door of the sheep." "i am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." "i am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine." then, if we compare parables, the passage in the fourth gospel most resembling a parable, viz., the similitude of the vine and the branches, is made up of detached sentences more "terse" and "concise" than those of most parables in the synoptics. the discourses in st. john are upon subjects very distasteful to the author of "supernatural religion," and he loses no opportunity of expressing his dislike to them; but it is a gross misrepresentation to say that the instruction, whatever it be, is conveyed in other than sentences as simple, terse, and concise as those of the synoptics, though the subject-matter is different. we will now proceed to the last assertion:-- "one [system of teaching] clothed in the great language of humanity, the other concealed in obscure philosophic terminology." what can this writer mean by the "philosophic terminology" of our lord's sayings as reported in the fourth gospel? if the use of the term "logos" be "philosophic terminology," it is confined to four sentences; and these not the words of jesus himself, but of the evangelist. i do not remember throughout the rest of the gospel a single sentence which can be properly called "philosophical." the author must confound "philosophical" with "mysterious." each and every discourse in the fourth gospel is upon, or leads to, some deep mystery; but that mystery is in no case set forth in philosophical, but in what the author of "supernatural religion" calls the "great language of humanity." take the most mysterious by far of all the enunciations in st. john's gospel, "except ye eat the flesh of the son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." what are the words of which this sentence is composed? "eat," "flesh," "blood," "son of man," "life." are not these the commonest words of daily life? but, then, their use and association here is the very thing which constitutes the mystery. again, take the salient words of each discourse--"except a man be born again"--"be born of water and of the spirit." "whosoever drinketh of the water that i shall give him shall never thirst." "as the father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the son to have life in himself." "all that are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth." "the bread that i will give is my flesh." "if ye believe not that i am he, ye shall die in your sins." "as the father knoweth me, even so know i the father." "i am the resurrection and the life." "whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will i do." "if i go not away, the comforter will not come unto you but: if i depart, i will send him unto you." it is the deepest of all mysteries that one in flesh and blood can say such things of himself; but it is a perversion of language to speak of these sayings as "philosophical terminology." they are in a different sphere from all more _human_ philosophy, and, indeed, are opposed to every form of it. philosophy herself requires a new birth before she can so much as see them. i must recur, however, to the author's first remark, in which he characterizes the discourses of the synoptics as "purely moral," and those of st. john as "wholly dogmatic." this is by no means true. the discourses in the synoptics are on moral subjects, but they continually make dogmatic assertions or implications as pronounced as those in the fourth gospel. in the sermon on the mount, for instance, the preacher authoritatively adds to and modifies the teaching of the very decalogue itself. "ye have heard that it was said to them of old time" (for so [greek: errhethê tois archaiois] must properly be translated); "but i say unto you." again, jesus assumes in the same discourse to be the object of worship and the judge of quick and dead, and that his recognition is salvation itself, when he says, "not every one that saith unto me lord, lord, shall enter," &c. "many shall say to me in that day, lord, lord," &c., "then will i profess unto them, i never knew you, depart from me all ye that work iniquity." take the following expressions out of a number of similar ones in st. matthew:-- "i will make you (ignorant fishermen) fishers of men" (implying, i will give you power over souls such as no philosopher or leader of men has had before you). (iv. .) "blessed are ye when men shall persecute you for my sake." (v. .) "if they have called the master of the house (_i.e._ jesus) beelzebub, how much wore shall they call them of his household." (x. .) "he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me" (so that the holiest of human ties are to give way to his personal demands on the human heart). (x. .) "he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." (x. ) "no man knoweth the son, but the father." (xi. .) "in this place is one greater than the temple." (xii. .) "the son of man is lord even of the sabbath day." (xii. .) "in his (christ's) name shall the gentiles trust." (xii. .) "in the time of harvest i will say to the reapers," _i.e._ the angels. (xiii. .) "the son of man shall send forth his angels." (xiii. .) "i will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." (xvi. .) "where two or three are gathered together in my name there am i in the midst of them." (xviii. .) "he, [god], sent his servants--he sent other servants--last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, they will reverence my son." (xxi. .) these places assert, by implication, the highest dogma respecting the person of christ. who is he who has such power in heaven and earth that he commands the angels in heaven, and gives the keys of the kingdom of god to his servant on earth? what son is this whom none but the father knoweth, and who alone knoweth the father, and who reveals the father to whomsoever he will? what son is this compared with whom such saints as moses, david, elijah, isaiah, and daniel are "servants?" those dogmatic assertions of the first gospel suggest the question; and the fourth gospel gives the full and perfect answer--that he is the word with god, that he is god, and the only-begotten of the father. the epistles assume the answer where one speaks of "jesus, who, being in the form of god, thought it not a thing to be tenaciously grasped to be equal with god," and another speaks of god's own son, and another compares moses the servant with christ the son; but the fullest revelation is reserved to the last gospel. and herein the order of god's dealings is observed, who gives the lesser revelation to prepare for the fuller and more perfect. the design of the gospel is to restore men to the image of god by revealing to them god himself. but, before this can be done, they must be taught what goodness is, their very moral sense must be renewed. hence the moral discourses of the synoptics. till this foundation is laid, first in the world, and then in the soul, the gospel has nothing to lay hold of and to work upon; so it was laid first in the sermon on the mount, which, far beyond all other teaching, stops every mouth and brings in all the world guilty before god; and then the way is prepared for fuller revelations, such as that of the atonement by the death of christ as set forth in the epistles of st. peter and st. paul, and the revelation culminates in the knowledge of the father and the son in the fourth gospel. with respect to the assertion of the author of "supernatural religion," that the discourses in this gospel are, as compared with those in the synoptics, _wholly_ dogmatic, as opposed to moral, the reader may judge of the truth of this by the following sayings of the fourth gospel:-- "every one that doeth evil hateth the light." "he that doeth truth cometh to the light." "god is a spirit, and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." "they that have done good [shall come forth] to the resurrection of life." "how can ye believe who receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh of god only?" "if any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of god." "the truth shall make you free," coupled with "whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin." "if i your lord and master have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another's feet." "a new commandment i give unto you, that ye love one another as i have loved you." "he that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me." these sayings, the reader will perceive, embody the deepest and highest moral teaching conceivable. one more point remains to be considered--the impossibility that st. john, taking into account his education and intellect, should have been the author of the fourth gospel. this is stated in the following passage:-- "the philosophical statements with which the gospel commences, it will be admitted, are anything but characteristic of the son of thunder, the ignorant and unlearned fisherman of galilee, who, to a comparatively late period of life, continued preaching in his native country to his brethren of the circumcision.... in the alexandrian philosophy, everything was prepared for the final application of the doctrine, and nothing is more clear than the fact that the writer of the fourth gospel was well acquainted with the teaching of the alexandrian school, from which he derived his philosophy, and its elaborate and systematic application to jesus alone indicates a late development of christian doctrine, which, we maintain, could not have been attained by the judaistic son of zebedee." (vol. ii. p. ) again, in the preceding page:-- "now, although there is no certain information as to the time when, if ever, the apostle removed into asia minor, it is pretty certain that he did not leave palestine before a.d. . ... if we consider the apocalypse to be his work, we find positive evidence of such markedly different thought and language actually existing when the apostle must have been at least sixty or seventy years of age, that it is quite impossible to conceive that he could have subsequently acquired the language and mental characteristics of the fourth gospel." this, though written principally with reference to the diction, applies still more to the philosophy of the author of the fourth gospel. and, indeed, from his using the words "mental characteristics," we have no doubt that he desires such an application. now, what are the facts? we must assume that st. john, though "unlearned and ignorant," compared with the leaders of the jewish commonwealth, at the commencement of his thirty years' sojourn in the jewish capital, was a man of average intellect. here, then, we have a member of a sect more aggressive than any before known in the promulgation of its opinions, taking the lead in the teaching and defence of these opinions in a city to which the jews of all nationalities resorted periodically to keep the great feasts. if the holding of any position would sharpen a man's natural intellect and give him a power over words, and a mental grasp of ideas to which in youth he had been a stranger, that position would be the leading one he held in the church of such a city as jerusalem. in the course of the thirty years which, according to the author of "supernatural religion," he lived there, he must have constantly had intercourse with alexandrian jews and christians. it is as probable as not that during this period he had had converse with philo himself, for the distance between jerusalem and alexandria was comparatively trifling. at pentecost there were present jews and proselytes from egypt and the parts of libya about cyrene. there was also a synagogue of the alexandrians. now i assert that a few hours' conversation with any alexandrian jew, or with any christian convert from alexandrian judaism, would have, _humanly speaking_, enabled the apostle, even if he knew not a word of the doctrine before, to write the four sentences in which are contained the whole logos expression of the fourth gospel. st. john must have been familiar with the teaching of traditional interpretation respecting the meymera as contained in the chaldee paraphrases; indeed, the more "unlearned" and "ignorant" he was, the more he must have relied upon the chaldee paraphrases for the knowledge of the old testament, the hebrew having been for centuries a dead language. we have a chaldee paraphrase of great antiquity on so early and familiar a chapter as the third of genesis, explaining the voice of the lord god by the voice of the meymera, or word of the lord god (genesis iii.). the natural rendering of this word into greek would be logos. i repeat, then, that, humanly speaking, if he had never entertained the idea before, a very short conversation with an alexandrian jew would have furnished him with all the "philosophy" required to make the four statements in which he simply identifies the logos with the divine nature of his lord. of course, i do not for a moment believe that the apostle was enabled to write the exordium of his gospel by any such inspiration. there is not a more direct utterance of the holy spirit in all scripture than that which we have in the prelude to the fourth gospel. but in the eyes of a christian the grace of the holy spirit is shown in the power and explicitness, and above all in the simplicity of the assertions which identify the human conception, if such it can be called, of platonism, or judaism, with the highest divine truth. i believe that if the apostle wrote those sentences at the time handed down by the church's tradition, that is, when cerinthian and other heresies respecting our lord's nature were beginning to be felt, the power of the holy spirit was put forth to restrict him to these few simple utterances, and to restrain his human intellect from overloading them with philosophical or controversial applications of them, which would have marred their simplicity and diminished their power. [ : ] section xix. external proofs of the authenticity of our four gospels. we have now shown that justin martyr, the principal witness brought forward by the author of "supernatural religion" to discredit the four evangelists, either made use of the very books which we now possess, or books which contain exactly the same information respecting our lord's miraculous birth, death, resurrection, and moral teaching. we have seen, also, that justin gives us, along with the teaching of the synoptics, that peculiar teaching respecting the pre-existent divine nature of jesus which, as far as can be ascertained, was to be found only in the fourth gospel, and which is consequently called johannean; and that, besides this, he refers to the history, and adopts the language, and urges the arguments which are to be found only in st. john. we have also shown that there are no internal considerations whatsoever for supposing that justin did not make use of the fourth gospel. instead, for instance, of the doctrine of st. john being a development of that held by justin martyr, the facts of the case all point to the contrary. we must now see whether there is external evidence which makes it not only probable, but as certain as any fact in literary history can be, that justin must have known and made use of our present evangelists; that if he was a teacher in such an acknowledged centre of ecclesiastical information or tradition as rome, and _appears_ to quote our gospels (with no matter what minor variations and inaccuracies), he did actually quote the same and no other; and if his inaccuracies, and discrepancies, and omissions of what we suppose he ought to have mentioned, were doubled or trebled, it would still be as certain as any fact of such a nature can be, that he quoted the four evangelists, because they must have been read and commented on in his day and in his church as the memoirs of the apostles, which took their place by the side of the prophets of the old testament in the public instruction of the church. in order to this i shall have to examine the external evidence for the canon of the new testament--so far, that is, as the four gospels are concerned. in doing this i shall not take the usual method of tracing the evidence for the various books in question downwards from the apostolic time--the reader will find this treated exhaustively in "dr. westcott on the canon"--but i shall trace it upwards, beginning at a time at which there cannot be the smallest doubt that the new testament was exactly the same as that which we now possess. for this purpose i shall take the ecclesiastical history of eusebius as the starting-point. the reader is, of course, aware that he is the earliest ecclesiastical writer whose history has come down to us, the historians who wrote before his time being principally known to us through fragments preserved in his book. he was born of christian parents about the year a.d. , and died about . he probably wrote his history about or before the year . the reader, though he may not have read his history, will be aware, from the quotations from it in "supernatural religion," that eusebius carefully investigated the history of the canon of scripture, and also the succession of ecclesiastical writers. his history is, in fact, to a great extent, a sketch of early church literature. in dealing with the history of the canon, he particularly notices whether a large number of writers have quoted certain books of scripture, of whose acceptance by the whole church doubts were entertained. this is important, as it shows that not only himself, but the church, during the three ages whose history he has recorded, did not receive books of scripture except upon what they deemed to be sufficient evidence, and that evidence was the reception of each book from apostolic times by the whole church. i will now give the testimony of eusebius to the authenticity of the four gospels. first of all he describes the origin of the gospel of st. mark in the following words:-- "so greatly, however, did the splendour of piety enlighten the minds of peter's hearers, that it was not sufficient to hear but once, nor to receive the unwritten doctrine of the gospel of god, but they persevered, in every variety of entreaties, to solicit mark as the companion of peter, and whose gospel we have, that he should leave them a monument of the doctrine thus orally communicated, in writing. nor did they cease with their solicitations until they had prevailed with the man, and thus become the means of that history which is called the gospel according to mark. they say also, that the apostle (peter), having ascertained what was done by the revelation of the spirit, was delighted with the zealous ardour expressed by these men, and that the history obtained his authority for the purpose of being read in the churches. this account is given by clement in the sixth book of his institutions, whose testimony also is corroborated by that of papias, bishop of hierapolis." (bk. ii. chap. xv. crusé's translation.) this is narrated as having taken place in the reign of claudius, _i.e._, between a.d. and a.d. . the next gospel whose origin he describes is that of st. luke, in the following words:-- "but luke, who was born at antioch, and by profession a physician, being for the most part connected with paul, and familiarly acquainted with the rest of the apostles, has left us two inspired books, the institutes of that spiritual healing art which he obtained from them. one of these is his gospel, in which he testifies that he has recorded, 'as those who were from the beginning eye-witnesses and ministers of the word,' delivered to him, whom also, he says, he has in all things followed. the other is his acts of the apostles, which he composed, not from what he had heard from others, but from what he had seen himself. it is also said that paul usually referred to his gospel, whenever in his epistles he spoke of some particular gospel of his own, saying, 'according to my gospel.'" (bk. iii. ch. iv. crusé's translation.) further on, he describes the publication of the first and fourth gospels, thus:-- "of all the disciples, matthew and john are the only ones that have left us recorded comments, and even they, tradition says, undertook it from necessity. matthew also, having first proclaimed the gospel in hebrew, when on the point of going also to other nations, committed it to writing in his native tongue, and thus supplied the want of his presence to them by his writings. but after mark and luke had already published their gospels they say that john, who, during all this time, was proclaiming the gospel without writing, at length proceeded to write it on the following occasion. the three gospels previously written had been distributed among all, and also handed to him; they say that he admitted them, giving his testimony to their truth; but that there was only wanting in the narrative the account of the things done by christ among the first of his deeds, and at the commencement of the gospel. and this was the truth. for it is evident that the other three evangelists only wrote the deeds of our lord for one year after the imprisonment of john the baptist, and intimated this in the very beginning of their history. for after the fasting of forty days, and the consequent temptation, matthew indeed specifies the time of his history in these words, 'but, hearing that john was delivered up, he returned from judea into galilee.' mark in like manner writes: 'but, after john was delivered up, jesus came into galilee.' and luke, before he commenced the deeds of jesus, in much the same way designates the time, saying, 'herod thus added this wickedness above all he had committed, and that he shut up john in prison.' for these reasons the apostle john, it is said, being entreated to undertake it, wrote the account of the time not recorded by the former evangelists, and the deeds done by our saviour, which they have passed by (for these were the events that occurred before the imprisonment of john), and this very fact is intimated by him when he says, 'this beginning of miracles jesus made,' and then proceeds to make mention of the baptist, in the midst of our lord's deeds, as john was at that time 'baptizing at aenon, near to salim.' he plainly also shows this in the words, 'john was not yet cast into prison.' the apostle, therefore, in his gospel, gives the deeds of jesus before the baptist was cast into prison, but the other three evangelists mention the circumstances after that event," &c. (bk. iii. c. xxiv.) the last extract which i shall give is from the next chapter, when he mentions "the sacred scriptures which are acknowledged as genuine, and those that are not:"-- "this appears also to be the proper place to give a summary statement of the books of the new testament already mentioned. and here among the first must be placed _the holy quaternion of the gospels_; these are followed by the book of the acts of the apostles; after this must be mentioned the epistles of paul, which are followed by the acknowledged first epistle of john, also the first of peter to be admitted in like manner. after these are to be placed, if proper, the revelation of john, concerning which we shall offer the different opinions in due time. these, then, are acknowledged as genuine. among the disputed books, although they are well known and approved by many, is reputed that called the epistle of james and [that] of jude. also the second epistle of peter, and those called the second and third of john, whether they are of the evangelist, or of some other of the same name. among the spurious must be numbered both the books called the acts of paul, and that called pastor, and the revelation of peter. besides these, the books called the epistle of barnabas, and what are called the institutions of the apostles. moreover, as i said before, if it should appear right, the revelation of john, which some, as before said, reject, but others rank among the genuine. but there are also some who number among these the gospel according to the hebrews, with which those of the hebrews that have received christ are particularly delighted." (bk. iii. ch. xxv.) such are the statements of the oldest ecclesiastical historian whose work has come down to us. with respect to the gospels, he knows but four as canonical, and has never heard of any other as accepted by the church. he mentions apocryphal and disputed books. amongst the latter he mentions the gospel to the hebrews as acceptable to a local church; but he is wholly ignorant of any doubt having ever been cast upon the authority of the four in any branch of the catholic church. now let the reader remember, that however eusebius, like all other writers, _might_ be liable to be mistaken through carelessness, or prejudice, or any other cause of inaccuracy; yet that each of these statements respecting the authorship of the various gospels is, on all principles of common sense, worth all the conjectural criticisms of the german and other writers, so copiously cited in "supernatural religion," put together. for, in the first place, eusebius flourished about years nearer to the original source of the truth than these critics, and had come to man's estate within years of the publication of the fourth gospel. now, at a time when tradition was far more relied upon, and so much more perfectly preserved and transmitted than in such an age of printed books and public journals as the present, this alone would make an enormous difference between a direct statement of eusebius and the conjecture of a modern theorist. but far more than this, eusebius had access to, and was well acquainted with, a vast mass of ecclesiastical literature which has altogether perished; and the greater part of which is only known to have existed through notices or extracts to be found in his work. for instance, in a few pages he gives accounts of writings which have perished of papias (iii. c. ), quadratus and aristides (iv. ch. ), hegesippus (iv. ch. and ), tatian (iv. ch. ), dionysius of corinth (iv. ch. ), pinytus (iv. ch. ), philip and modestus (ch. ), melito (ch. ), apollinaris (ch. ), bardesanes (ch. ). these are all writers who flourished in the first three quarters of the second century, and i have only mentioned those whose writings, from the wording of his notices, eusebius appears to have seen himself. it is clear, i repeat, that the evidence of such an one on the authorship of the gospels is worth all the conjectures and theories of modern critics of all classes put together. we shall pass over very briefly the first sixty years of the third century, _i.e._ between a.d. and the time of eusebius. during these years flourished cyprian, martyred a.d. ; hippolytus, martyred about a.d. ; and origen, died a.d. . respecting the latter, it appears from eusebius that he published commentaries on the gospels of st. matthew and st. john. of the latter eusebius says the first five books wore composed at alexandria, but of the whole work on st. john only twenty-two books have come down to us. (bk. vi. ch. .) now origen was born a few years (at the most twenty) after the death of justin; and we have seen how the author of "supernatural religion" evidently considers the works of justin to be anterior to the fourth gospel. is it credible, or oven conceivable, that a man of origen's intellect, learning, and research should write twenty or thirty books of commentaries on a false gospel which was forged shortly before his own time? he expressly states that the church knew of but four gospels:-- "as i have understood from tradition respecting the four gospels, which are the only undisputed ones in the whole church of god throughout the world. the first is written according to matthew, the same that was once a publican, but afterwards an apostle of jesus christ, who, having published it for the jewish converts, wrote it in hebrew. the second is according to mark, who composed it as peter explained to him, whom he [peter] also acknowledged as his son in his general epistle, saying, 'the elect church in babylon salutes you, as also mark, my son.' and the third according to luke, the gospel commended by paul, which was written for the converts from the gentiles; and, last of all, the gospel according to john." extract from origen's first book of his commentaries on st. matthew, quoted by eusebius (vi. ) as regards cyprian, the following quotation will suffice:-- "the church, setting forth the likeness of paradise, includes within her walls fruit-bearing trees, whereof that which does not bring forth good fruit is cut off and is cast into the fire. these trees she waters with four rivers, that is, with the four gospels, wherewith, by a celestial inundation, she bestows the grace of saying baptism." cyprian, letter lxxii. to jubaianus. as regards hippolytus i have counted above fifty references to st. matthew and forty to st. john, in his work on the "refutation of heresies," and "fragments." i append in a note a passage taken from his comment on the second psalm, preserved to us by theodoret. the reader will be able to judge from it from what sources he derived his knowledge of christ. i give it rather for its devotional spirit than its evidence for the four. [ : ] we now come to the conclusion of the second century. between the years and or a.d., there flourished three writers of whom we possess somewhat voluminous remains. irenaeus, who was born about at the latest, who was in youth the disciple of polycarp, who was himself the disciple of st. john. irenaeus wrote his work against heresies about the year , a little after he had succeeded pothinus as bishop of lyons, and was martyred at the beginning of the next century ( ). clement of alexandria, the date of whose birth or death is uncertain, flourished long before the end of the second century, for he became head of the catechetical school of alexandria about the year . tertullian was born about , was converted to christianity about , was admitted to the priesthood in , and adopted the opinions of montanus about the end of the century. i shall first of all give the testimony of these three writers to the universal reception of the four gospels by the church, and consider to what time previous to their own day their testimony upon such a subject must, of necessity, reach. first of all, irenaeus, in a well-known passage, asserts that-- "it is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are." he then refers to the four zones of the earth, and the four principal winds, and remarks that, in accordance with this, "he who was manifest to men has given us the gospel under four aspects, but bound together by one spirit." then he refers to the four living creatures of the vision in the revelation, and proceeds,-- "and, therefore, the gospels are in accord with these things, among which christ is seated. for that according to john relates his original effectual and glorious generation from the father, thus declaring, 'in the beginning was the word,' &c.... but that according to luke, taking up his priestly character, commences with zacharias the priest offering sacrifice to god. for now was made ready the fatted calf, about to be immolated for the finding again of the younger son. matthew again relates his generation as a man, saying, 'the book of the generation of jesus christ, the son of david, the son of abraham;' and also, 'the birth of jesus christ was on this wise.' this, then, is the gospel of his humanity, for which reason it is, too, that the character of an humble and meek man is kept up through the whole gospel. mark, on the other hand, commences with a reference to the prophetical spirit coming down from on high to men, saying, 'the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ, as it is written in esaias the prophet,' pointing to the winged aspect of the gospel: and on this account he made a compendious and cursory narrative, for such is the prophetical character." (iren., bk. iii. ch. xi.) clement of alexandria, speaking of a saying ascribed to our lord, writes:-- "in the first place, then, in the four gospels handed down amongst us, we have not this saying; but in that which is according to the egyptians." (miscellanies, iii. ch. xiii.) tertullian writes thus:-- "of the apostles, therefore, john and matthew first instil faith into us; whilst, of apostolic men, luke and mark renew it afterwards. these all start with the same principles of the faith, so far as relates to the one only god the creator, and his christ, how that he was born of the virgin, and came to fulfil the law and the prophets. never mind if there does occur some variation in the order of their narratives, provided that there be agreement in the essential matter of the faith in which there is disagreement with marcion." (tertullian against marcion, iv. c. ii.) such are the explicit declarations of these three writers respecting the number and authorship of the four. i shall give at the conclusion of this section some of the references to be found in these writers to the first two or three chapters in each gospel. it is but very little to say that they quote the four as frequently, and with as firm a belief in their being the scriptures of god, as any modern divine. they quote them far more copiously, and reproduce the history contained in them far more fully than any modern divine whom i have ever read, who is not writing specifically on the life of our lord, or on some part of his teaching contained in the gospels. but i have now to consider the question, "to what time, previous to their own day, or rather to the time at which they wrote, does their testimony to such a matter as the general reception of the four gospels of necessity reach back?" clement wrote in alexandria, tertullian in rome or africa, irenaeus in gaul. they all flourished about a.d. . they all speak of the gospels, not only as well known and received, but as being the only gospels acknowledged and received by the church. one of them uses very "uncritical" arguments to prove that the gospels could only be four in number; but the very absurdity of his analogies is a witness to the universal tradition of his day. to what date before their time must this tradition reach, so that it must be relied upon as exhibiting the true state of things? now this tradition is not respecting a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact--the fact being no other than the reading of the gospels or memoirs of our lord in the public service of the church. the "memoirs of our lord," with other books, formed the lectionary of the church. so that every christian, who attended the public assemblies for worship, must know whether he heard the gospels read there or not. now any two men who lived successively to the age of sixty-five would be able to transmit irrefragable testimony, which would cover a hundred years, to the use of the gospels in the lectionary of the church. during the last five years we have had a change in our lectionary, which change only affects the rearrangement of the portions read each day out of the same gospels, and every boy and girl of fifteen years old at the time would recognize the alteration when it took place. if it had occurred fifty years ago, any man or woman of sixty-five would perfectly remember the change. if it had occurred within the last hundred years, any person of sixty-five could bear testimony to the fact that, when he first began to be instructed in the nature of the church services he was told by his elders that up to a time which they could perfectly recollect certain selections from scripture had been read in church, but that at such a period during their lifetime a change had been brought about after certain public debates, and that it received such or such opposition and was not at once universally adopted, which change was the reading in public of the present selection. it is clear then, that if all public documents were destroyed, yet any two men, who could scarcely be called old men, would be able to transmit with perfect certainty the record of any change in the public reading of scripture during the last one hundred years. but, supposing that instead of a change in the mere selections from the gospels, the very gospels themselves had been changed, could such a thing have occurred unnoticed, and the memory of it be so absolutely forgotten that neither history nor tradition preserved the smallest hint of it at the end of a short century? now this, and far more than this, is what the author of "supernatural religion" asks his readers to believe throughout his whole work. we have seen how, before the end of this century, no other authoritative memoirs of christ were known by the church, and these were known and recognized as so essential a part of the christian system, that their very number as four, and only four, was supposed to be prefigured from the very beginning of the world. now justin lived till the year in this century. he was martyred when irenaeus must have been twenty-five years old. both clement and tertullian must have been born before his martyrdom, perhaps several years, and yet the author of "supernatural religion" would have us believe that the books of christians which were accounted most sacred in the year , and used in that year as frequently, and with as firm a belief in their authenticity as they are by any christians now, were unused by justin martyr, and that one of the four was absolutely unknown to him--in all probability forged after his time. we are persistently told all this, too, in spite of the fact that he reproduces the account of the birth, teaching, death, and resurrection of christ exactly as they are contained in the four, without a single additional circumstance worth speaking of, making only such alterations as would be natural in the reproduction of such an account for those who were without the pale of the church. but even this is not the climax of the absurdity which we are told that, if we are reasonable persons, we must accept. it appears that the "memoirs" which, we are told, justin heard read every sunday in the place of assembly in rome or ephesus which he frequented, was a palestinian gospel, which combined, in one narrative, the accounts of the birth, life, death, and moral teaching of jesus, together with the peculiar doctrine and history now only to be found in the fourth gospel. consequently this gospel was not only far more valuable than any one of our present evangelists, but, we might almost say, more worthy of preservation than all put together, for it combined the teaching of the four, and no doubt reconciled their seeming discrepancies, thus obviating one of the greatest difficulties connected with their authority and inspiration; a difficulty which, we learn from history, was felt from the first. and yet, within less than twenty years, this gospel had been supplanted by four others so effectually that it was all but forgotten at the end of the century, and is referred to by the first ecclesiastical historian as one of many apocrypha valued only by a local church, and has now perished so utterly that not one fragment of it can be proved to be authentic. but enough of this absurdity. taking with us the patent fact, that before the end of the second century, and during the first half of the third, the four gospels were accepted by the church generally, and quoted by every christian writer as fully as they are at this moment, can there be the shadow of a doubt that when justin wrote the account of our lord's birth, which i have given in page , he had before him the first and third evangelists, and combined these two accounts in one narrative? whether he does this consciously and of set purpose i leave to the author of "supernatural religion," but combine the two accounts he certainly does. again, when, in the accounts of the events preceding our lord's death, justin notices that jesus commanded the disciples to bring forth an ass and its foal (page ), can any reasonable man doubt but that he owed this to st. matthew, in whose gospel alone it appears? or when, in the extract i have given in page , he notices that our lord called the sons of zebedee boanerges, can there be any reasonable doubt that he derived this from st. mark, the only evangelist who records it, whose gospel (in accordance with universal tradition), he there designates as the "memoirs of peter?" or again, when, in the extract i have given in page , he records that our lord in his agony sweat great drops [of blood], can there be a doubt but that he made use of st. luke, especially since he mentions two or three other matters connected with our lord's death, only to be found in st. luke? or, again, why should we assume the extreme improbability of a defunct gospel to account for all the references to, and reminiscences of, st. john's gospel, which i have given in sections viii. and ix. of this work? so far for justin martyr. we will now turn to references in three or four other writers. in the epistle of vienne and lyons we find the following:-- "and thus was fulfilled the saying of our lord: 'the time shall come in which every one that killeth you shall think that he offereth a service to god.'" this seems like a reference to john xvi. . the words, with some very slight variation, are to be found there and not to be found elsewhere. the letter of the churches was written about a.d. "at the earliest," we are told by the author of "supernatural religion." well, we will make him a present of a few years, and suppose that it was written ten or twelve years later, _i.e._ about a.d. . now we find that irenaeus had written his great work, "against heresies," before this date. surely, then, the notion of the writer of "supernatural religion," that we are to suppose that this was taken from some lost apocryphal gospel when irenaeus, bishop of lyons, had actually used a written gospel which contains it, refutes itself. we turn to athenagoras. we find in his work, "plea (or embassy) for the christians" (ch. x.), the following:-- "but the son of god is the logos of the father in idea and in operation, for after the pattern of him and by him were all things made, the father and the son being one [i and my father are one], and the son being in the father, and the father in the son, in oneness and power of spirit," &c. (john xiv. .) again (ch. xii.):-- "men who reckon the present life of very small worth indeed, and who are conducted to the future life by this one thing alone, that they know god and his logos." [this is life eternal, that they may know thee the only true god, and jesus christ whom thou hast sent.] can the writer of "supernatural religion" be serious when he writes, "he nowhere identifies the logos with jesus?" does the writer of "supernatural religion" seriously think that a christian writer, living in , and presenting to the emperor a plea for christians, would have any difficulty about identifying jesus with that son of god whom he expressly states to be the logos of god? the following also are seeming quotations from the synoptics in athenagoras. "what, then, are those precepts in which we are instructed? 'i say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse, pray for them that persecute you, that ye may be sons of your father which is in the heavens, who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.' "'for if ye love them which love you, and lend to them which lend to you, what reward shall ye have?' "'for whosoever, he says, looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery already in his heart.' "'for whosoever, says he, putteth away his wife and marrieth another, committeth adultery.'" when we consider that in the time of athenagoras, or very soon after, there were three authors living who spoke of the gospels in the way we have shown, and quoted them in the way we shall now show, why assign these quotations to defunct gospels of whose contents we are perfectly ignorant, when we have them substantially in gospels which occupied the same place in the church then as now? note on section xix. i have asserted that the three authors, tertullian, clement of alexandria, and irenaeus, all flourishing before the close of the second century, quote the four gospels, if anything, more frequently than most modern christian authors do. i append, in proof of this, some of the references in these authors to the first two or three chapters of our present gospels. irenaeus. matthew, i. "and matthew, too, recognizing one and the same jesus christ, exhibiting his generation as a man from the virgin ... says, 'the book of the generation of jesus christ the son of david, the son of abraham.' then, that he might free our mind from suspicion regarding joseph, he says, 'but the birth of christ was on this wise: when his mother was espoused,'" &c. (iii. xvi.) then he proceeds to quote and remark upon the whole of the remainder of the chapter. "matthew again relates his generation as a man." for remainder, see page . "for joseph is shown to be the son of joachim and jeconiah, as also matthew sets forth in his pedigree." (iii. , .) "born emmanuel of the virgin. to this effect they testify that before joseph had come together with mary, while she therefore remained in virginity, she was found with child of the holy ghost." (iii. , .) "then again matthew, when speaking of the angel, says, 'the angel of the lord appeared to joseph in sleep.' (iii. , .) "the angel said to him in sleep, 'fear not to take to thee mary, thy wife'" (and proceeding with several other verses of the same chapter). (iv. , l.) matthew, ii. "but matthew says that the magi, coming from the east, exclaimed, 'for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.'" (iii. , .) "and that having been led by the star unto the house of jacob to emmanuel, they showed, by those gifts which they offered, who it was that was worshipped; myrrh, because it was he who should die and be buried for the human race; gold, because he was a king," &c., &c. (iii. , ) "he, since he was himself an infant, so arranging it that human infants should be martyrs, slain, according to the scriptures, for the sake of christ." (iii. , .) matthew, iii. "for matthew the apostle ... declares that john, when preparing the way for christ, said to them who were boasting of their relationship according to the flesh, &c., 'o generation of vipers, who hath shown you to flee from ... raise up children unto abraham.' (iii. , .) "as john the baptist says, 'for god is able from these stones to raise up children unto abraham.'" (iv. , .) there are no less than six quotations or references to the ninth and tenth verses of this chapter, viz., iv. , ; v. , ; iv. , ; iv. , ; v. , . "now who this lord is that brings such a day about, john the baptist points out when he says of christ, 'he shall baptize you with the holy ghost and with fire, having his fan in his hand,'" &c. (iv. , .) "having a fan in his hands, and cleansing his floor, and gathering the wheat,'" &c. (iv. , .) "who gathers the wheat into his barn, but will burn up the chaff with fire unquenchable." (iv. , ll.) "then, speaking of his baptism, matthew says, 'the heavens were opened, and he saw the spirit of god,'" &c. (iii. , .) mark, i. "wherefore mark also says, 'the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ the son of god, as it is written in the prophets.'" (iii. , .) "yea, even the demons exclaimed, on beholding the son, 'we know thee who thou art, the holy one of god.'" (iv. , .) mark iv. . "his word, through whom the wood fructifies, and the fountains gush forth, and the earth gives 'first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.'" (iv. , .) luke, i. "thus also does luke, without respect of persons, deliver to us what he had learned from them, as he has himself testified, saying, 'even as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eye-witnesses and ministers of the word.'" (iii. , .) another reference to same in preface to book iv. "luke, also, the follower and disciple of the apostles, referring to zacharias and elizabeth, from whom, according to promise, john was born, says, 'and they were both righteous before god, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the lord blameless,'", &c. (iii. , .) "and again, speaking of zacharias, 'and it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office,'" &c. (_ibid._) "and then, speaking of john, he (the angel) says: 'for he shall be great in the sight of the lord,'" &c. (_ibid._) "in the spirit and power of elias." (iii. , .) "truly it was by him of whom gabriel was the angel who also announced the glad tidings of his birth ... in the spirit and power of elias." (iii. , .) "but at that time the angel gabriel was sent from god, who did also say to the virgin, 'fear not, mary, for thou hast found favour with god.'" (iii. , .) "he shall be great, and shall be called the son of the highest," &c. (iii. , .) "and mary, exulting because of this, cried out; prophesying on behalf of the church, 'my soul doth magnify the lord.'" (iii. , .) "and that the angel gabriel said unto her, 'the holy ghost shall come upon thee,'" &c. (iii. , .) "in accordance with this design mary the virgin is found obedient, saying, 'behold the handmaid of the lord, be it unto me according to thy word.'" (iii. , .) "as elizabeth testified when fitted with the holy ghost, saying to mary, 'blessed art thou among women,'" &c. (iii. , .) "wherefore the prophets ... announced his advent ... in freeing us from the hands of all that hate us, that is, from every spirit of wickedness, and causing us to serve him in holiness and righteousness all our days.'" (iv. , .) luke, ii. "wherefore simeon also, one of his descendants, carried fully out the rejoicing of the patriarch, and said, 'lord, now lettest thou thy servant,'" &c. (iv. , l.) "and the angel in like manner announced tidings of great joy to the shepherds who were keeping watch by night." (iv. , .) "wherefore he adds, 'the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising god for all which they had seen and heard.'" (iii. , .) "and still further does luke say in reference to the lord, 'when the days of purification were accomplished they brought him up to jerusalem to present him before the lord.'" (iii. , .) "they say also that simeon, 'who took christ into his arms and gave thanks to god,'" &c. (i. , .) "they assert also that by anna, who is spoken of in the gospel as a prophetess, and who after living seven years with her husband, passed all the rest of her life in widowhood till she saw the saviour." (i. , .) "the production, again, of the duodecad of the aeons is indicated by the fact that the lord was twelve years of age when he disputed with the teachers of the law," &c. (i. , .) "some passages, also, which occur in the gospels receive from them a colouring of the same kind, as the answer which he gave his mother when he was twelve years old, 'wist ye not that i must be about my father's business?'" (i. , .) luke, iii. "for because he knew that we should make a good use of our substance which we should possess by receiving it from another, he says, 'he that hath two coats let him impart to him that hath none, and he that hath meat let him do likewise.'" (iv. , .) "for when he came to be baptized he had not yet completed his thirtieth year, but was beginning to be about thirty years of age; for thus luke, who has mentioned his years, has expressed it." (ii. , .) john, i. "[john] thus commenced his teaching in the gospel, 'in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god,'" &c. (iii. , .) "he (st. john) expresses himself thus: 'in the beginning was the word,'" &c. (i. , .) "thus saith the scripture, 'by the word of the lord were the heavens made,' &c. and again, 'all things were made by him, and without him was nothing made that was made.'" (i. , .) "for he styles him 'a light which shineth in darkness, and which was not comprehended by it.'" (i. , .) "and that we may not have to ask 'of what god was the word made flesh?' he does himself previously teach us, saying, 'there was a man sent from god whose name was john. the same came as a witness that he might bear witness of that light. he was not that light, but that he might testify of the light.'" (iii. , .) "while the gospel affirms plainly that by the word, which was in the beginning with god, all things were made, which word, he says, was made flesh and dwelt among us." (iii. , .) to john i. , "the word was made flesh," the references are absolutely innumerable. those i have given already will suffice. "for this is the knowledge of salvation which was wanting to them, that of the son of god, which john made known, saying, 'behold the lamb of god, who taketh away the sin of the world. this is he of whom i said, after me cometh a man who was made before me, because he was prior to me.'" (iii. , .) "by whom also nathaniel, being taught, recognized him; he to whom also the lord bare witness that he was an israelite indeed, in whom was no guile. the israelite recognized his king, therefore did he cry out to him, 'rabbi, thou art the son of god. thou art the king of israel.'" (iii. , .) john, ii. "but that wine was better which the word made from water, on the moment, and simply for the use of those who had been called to the marriage." (iii. , .) "as also the lord speaks in reference to himself, 'destroy this temple, and in three days i will raise it up.' he spake this, however, it is said, of the temple of his body." (v. , .) clement of alexandria. matthew, i. "and in the gospel according to matthew the genealogy which begins with abraham is continued down to mary, the mother of the lord. 'for,' it is said, 'from abraham to david are fourteen generations, and from david to the carrying away into babylon," &c. (miscellanies, i. .) matthew, iii. "for the fan is in the lord's hand, by which the chaff due to the fire is separated from the wheat." (instructor, i. .) matthew, iv. "therefore he himself, urging them on to salvation, cries, 'the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'" (exhortation to heathen, ch. ix.) matthew, v. "and because he brought all things to bear on the discipline of the soul, he said, 'blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.'" (miscellanies, iv. .) mark, i. "for he also 'ate locusts and wild honey.'" [in st. matthew the corresponding expression being 'his food was locusts and wild honey.'] (instructor, ii. .) luke, iii. "and to prove that this is true it is written in the gospel by luke as follows: 'and in the fifteenth year, in the reign of tiberius caesar, the word of the lord came to john, the son of zacharias.' and again, jesus was coming to his baptism, being about thirty years old,' and so on." (miscellanies, i. .) there are at least twenty more references to the accounts of the preaching of st. john in the third of st. matthew, first of st. mark, and third of st. luke, in clement's writings, which i have not given simply because it is difficult to assign the quotation to a particular evangelist, as the account is substantially the same in the three. luke xii. - . "of this man's field (the rich fool) the lord, in the gospel, says that it was fertile, and afterwards, when he wished to lay by his fruits and was about to build greater barns," &c. (miscellanies, iii. .) luke xiii. . "thus also in reference to herod, 'go tell that fox, behold, i cast out devils,'" &c. (miscellanies, iv. .) luke xiv. , . "he says accordingly, somewhere, 'when thou art called to a wedding recline not on the highest couch.' ... and elsewhere, 'when thou makest a dinner or a supper,' and again, 'but, when thou makest an entertainment, call the poor.'" (instructor, ii. .) luke, xv. parable of prodigal son. "for it were not seemly that we, after the fashion of the rich man's son in the gospel, should, as prodigals, abuse the father's gifts." (instructor, ii. ch. i.) john, i. "you have then god's promise; you have his love: become partakers of his grace. and do not suppose the song of salvation to be new, as a vessel or a house is new; for ... in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god." (exhortation to heathen, ch. i.) "for he has said, 'in the beginning the word was in god, and the word was god." (instructor, viii.) "wherefore it (the law) was only temporary; but eternal grace and truth were by jesus christ. mark the expressions of scripture; of the law only is it is said 'was given;' but truth, being the grace of the father, is the eternal work of the word, and it is not said to _be given_, but _to be_ by jesus, _without whom nothing was_." (instructor, i. .) "the divine instructor is trustworthy, adorned as he is with three of the fairest ornaments ... with authority of utterance, for he is god and creator; for all things were made by him, and without him was not anything made: and with benevolence, for he alone gave himself a sacrifice for us, 'for the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.'" (john x. .) (instructor, i. .) "for the darkness, it is said, comprehendeth it not." (instructor, ii. .) "having through righteousness attained to adoption, and therefore 'have received power to become the sons of god.'" (miscellanies, iv. .) "for of the prophets it is said, 'we have all received of his fulness,' that is, of christ's." (miscellanies, i. .) "and john the apostle says, 'no man hath seen god at any time. the only begotten god,' [oldest reading,] 'who is in the bosom of the father, he hath declared him." (miscellanies, v. .) john, iii. "he that believeth not is, according to the utterance of the saviour, condemned already." (miscellanies, iv. .) "enslaved as you are to evil custom, and clinging to it voluntarily till your last breath, you are hurried to destruction; because light has come into the world, and men have loved the darkness rather than the light." (exhortation to heathen, .) "'i must decrease,' said the prophet john." (miscellanies, vi. ii.) tertullian. matthew, i. "there is, first of all, matthew, that most faithful chronicler of the gospel, because the companion of the lord; for no other reason in the world than to show us clearly the fleshy original of christ, he thus begins, 'the book of the generation of jesus christ, the son of david the son of abraham.'" (on the flesh of christ, ch. xxii.) "it is, however, a fortunate circumstance that matthew also, when tracing down the lord's descent from abraham to mary, says, 'jacob begat joseph, the husband of mary, _of whom_ was born jesus." (on the flesh of christ, ch. xx.) "you [the heretic] say that he was born _through_ a virgin, not _of_ a virgin, and _in_ a womb, not _of_ a womb; because the angel in the dream said to joseph, 'that which is born in her is of the holy ghost.'" (_ibid._ ch. xx.) matthew, ii. "for they therefore offered to the then infant lord that frankincense, and myrrh, and gold, to be, as it were, the close of worldly sacrifice and glory, which christ was about to do away." (on idolatry, ch. ix.) mark i. . "for, in that john used to preach 'baptism _for_ the remission of sins,' the declaration was made with reference to a future remission." (on baptism, x.) mark i. . "this accordingly the devils also acknowledge him to be: 'we know thee who thou art, the son of god.'" (against praxeas, ch. xxvi.) let the reader particularly remark this phrase. tertullian quotes the last clauses differently from the reading in our present copies, "the holy one of god." if such a quotation had occurred in justin, the author of "supernatural religion" would have cited the phrase as a quotation from a lost gospel, and asserted that the author had not even seen st. mark. luke, i. "elias was nothing else than john, who came 'in the power and spirit of elias.'" (on monogamy, ch. viii.) "i recognize, too, the angel gabriel as having been sent to a virgin; but when he is blessing her, it is 'among women.'" (on the veiling of virgins, ch. vi.) "will not the angel's announcement be subverted, that the virgin should 'conceive in her womb and bring forth a son?' ... therefore even elizabeth must be silent, although she is carrying in her womb the prophetic babe, which was already conscious of his lord, and is, moreover, filled with the holy ghost. for without reason does she say, 'and whence is this to me that the mother of my lord should come to me?' if it was not as her son, but only as a stranger, that mary carried jesus in her womb, how is it she says, 'blessed is the fruit of thy womb?'" (on the flesh of christ, ch. xxi.) "away, says he [he is now putting words into the mouth of the heretic], with that eternal plaguy taxing of caesar, and the scanty inn, and the squalid swaddling clothes, and the hard stable. we do not care a jot for that multitude of the heavenly host which praised their lord at night. let the shepherds take better care of their flock ... spare also the babe from circumcision, that he may escape the pains thereof; nor let him be brought into the temple, lest he burden his parents with the expense of the offering; nor let him be handed to simeon, lest the old man be saddened at the point of death." (on the flesh of christ, ch. ii.) "this he himself, in those other gospels also, testifies himself to have been from his very boyhood, saying, 'wist ye not, says he, that i must be about my father's business?'" (against praxeas, xxvi.) john, i. "in conclusion, i will apply the gospel as a supplementary testimony to the old testament ... it is therein plainly revealed by whom he made all things. 'in the beginning was the word,'--that is, the same beginning, of course, in which god made the heaven and the earth--'and the word was with god, and the word was god,'" &c. (against hermogenes, ch. xx.) i give only one reference to the first few verses, as the number in tertullian's writings is enormous. "it is written, 'to them that believed on him, gave he power to be called sons of god.'" (on prayer, ch. ii.) "but by saying 'made,' he [st. paul] not only confirmed the statement 'the word was made flesh,' but he also asserted the reality," &c. (on the flesh of christ, ch. xx.) john, ii. "[he jesus] inaugurates in _water_ the first rudimentary displays of his power, when invited to the nuptials." (on baptism, ch. ix.) the twenty-first chapter of the "discourse against praxeas" is filled with citations from st. john. i will give a small part. "he declared what was in the bosom of the father alone; the father did not divulge the secrets of his own bosom. for this is preceded by another statement: 'no man hath seen god at any time.' then again, when he is designated by john as 'the lamb of god.' ... this [divine relationship] nathanael at once recognized in him, even as peter did on another occasion: 'thou art the son of god.' and he affirmed himself that they were quite right in their convictions, for he answered nathanael, 'because i said i saw thee under the fig-tree, dost thou believe?' ... when he entered the temple he called it 'his father's house,' [speaking] as the son. in his address to nicodemus he says, 'so god loved the world,' &c.... moreover, when john the baptist was asked what he happened [to know] of jesus, he said, 'the father loveth the son, and hath given all things into his hands. he that believeth,' &c. whom, indeed, did he reveal to the woman of samaria? was it not 'the messias which is called christ?' ... he says, therefore, 'my meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work,'" &c. &c. (against praxeas, ch. xxi.) section xx. the evidence for miracles. it does not come within the scope of this work to examine at any length the general subject of miracles. the assertion that miracles, such as those recorded in scripture, are absolutely impossible, and so have never taken place, must be met by the counter assertion that they are possible, and have taken place. they are possible to the supreme being, and have taken place by his will or sufferance at certain perfectly historical periods; especially during the first century after the birth of christ. when to this it is replied that miracles are violations of natural law or order, and that it is contrary to our highest idea of the supreme being to suppose that he should alter the existing order of things, we can only reply that it is in accordance with our highest idea of him that he should do so; and we say that in making these assertions we are not unreasonable, but speak in accordance with natural science, philosophy, and history. and, in order to prove this, we have only to draw attention to the inaccuracy which underlies the use of the term "law" by the author of "supernatural religion," and those who think as he does. the author of "supernatural religion" strives to bring odium on the miracles of the gospel by calling them "violations of law," and by asserting that it is a false conception of the supreme being to suppose that he should have made an universe with such elements of disorder within it that it should require such things as the violation, or even suspension, of laws to restore it to order, and that our highest and truest idea of god is that of one who never can even so much as make himself known except through the action of the immutable laws by which this visible state of things is governed. now what is a law? the laws with which in this discussion we are given to understand we have to do, are strictly speaking limitations--the limitations of forces or powers which, in conception at least, must themselves be prior to the limitations. take the most universal of all so-called "laws," the law of gravitation. the law of gravitation is the limitation imposed upon that mysterious force which appears to reside in all matter, that it should attract all other matter. this power of attraction is called gravitation; but instead of acting at random, as it were, it acts according to certain well-known rules which only are properly the "laws" of gravitation. now the very existence of our world depends upon the force of attraction being counteracted. if, from a certain moment, gravitation were to become the only force in the solar system, the earth would fall upon the surface of the sun, and be annihilated; but the earth continues in existence because of the action of another force--the projectile force--which so far counteracts the force of the sun's attraction, that the earth revolves around the sun instead of falling upon its surface. in this case the _law_ of gravitation is not violated, or even suspended, but the force of gravitation is counteracted or modified by another force. again, the blood circulates through our bodies by means of another power or force counteracting the force of gravitation, and this is the vital power or force. but why do we lift up our feet from the ground to go about some daily duty? here comes another force--the force of will, which directs the action of some of the vital forces, but not that of others. but, again, two courses of action are open to us, and we deliberately choose the one because we think that it is our duty, though it may entail danger or pain, or even death. here is a still deeper force or power, the force of conscience--the moral power which is clearly the highest power within us, for it governs the very will, and sits in judgment upon the whole man, and acquits or condemns him according to its rule of right and wrong. here, then, are several gradations of power or force--any one of them as real as the others; each one making itself felt by counteracting and modifying the action of the one below it. now the question arises, is there any power or force clearly above the highest controlling power within us, _i.e._ above our conscience? we say that there is. there are some who on this point can reverently take up the words of our great master, "we speak that we do know." we believe, as firmly as we believe in our own existence, that this our conscience--the highest power within us--has been itself acted upon by a higher power still, a moral and spiritual power, which has enlightened it, purified it, strengthened it, in fact renewed it. now, this purifying or enlightening of our moral powers has one remarkable effect. it makes those who have been acted upon by it to look up out of this present state of things for a more direct revelation of the character and designs of the supreme being. minds who have experienced this action of a superior power upon them cannot possibly look upon the supreme being as revealing himself merely by the laws of gravitation, or electricity, or natural selection. we look for, we desire a further and fuller revelation of god, even though the revelation may condemn us. we cannot rest without it. it is intolerable to those who have a sense of justice, for instance, to think that, whilst led by their sense of what is good and right, men execute imperfect justice, there is, after all, no supreme moral governor who will render to each individual in another life that just retribution which is assuredly not accorded to all in this life. [ : ] now this, i say, makes us desire a revelation of the supreme moral governor which is assuredly not to be found in the laws which control mere physical forces. as dr. newman has somewhere said, men believe what they wish to believe, and assuredly we desire to believe that there is a supreme moral governor, and that he has not left us wholly in the dark respecting such things as the laws and sanctions of his moral government. but has he really revealed these? we look back through the ages, and our eyes are arrested by the figure of one who, according to the author of "supernatural religion," taught a "sublime religion." his teaching "carried morality to the sublimest point attained, or even attainable, by humanity. the influence of his spiritual religion has been rendered doubly great by the unparalleled purity and elevation of his own character. he presented the rare spectacle of a life, so far as we can estimate it, uniformly noble and consistent with his own lofty principles, so that the 'imitation of christ' has become almost the final word in the preaching of his religion, and must continue to be one of the most powerful elements of its permanence." (vol. ii. p. .) it is quite clear from this testimony of an enemy to the christian religion, as it appears in the scriptures, that if the supreme moral governor had desired to give to man a revelation of the principles and sanctions of his moral government, he could not have chosen a more fitting instrument. such a character seems to have been made for the purpose. if he has not revealed god, no one has. now, who is this man whose figure stands thus prominent above his fellows? we believe him to be our redeemer; but before he redeemed, he laid down the necessity of redemption by making known to men the true nature of sin and righteousness, and the most just and inevitable judgment of god. he revealed to us that there is one above us who is to the whole race, and to every individual of the race, what our consciences are to ourselves--a judge pronouncing a perfect judgment, because he perfectly knows the character of each man, perfectly observes and remembers his conduct, and, moreover, will mete out to each one a just and perfect retribution. but still, how are we to know that he has authority to reveal to us such a thing as that god will judge the race and each member of it by a just judgment? natural laws reveal to us no such judgment. nature teaches us that if we transgress certain natural laws we shall be punished. but it teaches no certain judgement either in this life or in any future life which will overtake the transgression of moral laws. a man may defraud, oppress, and seduce, and yet live a prosperous life, and die a quiet, painless death. how, then, are we to know that jesus of nazareth had authority to reveal that god will set all this right in a future state, and that he himself will be the direct agent in bringing the rectification about? how are we to know that what he says is true respecting a matter of such deep concern to ourselves, and yet so utterly unknown to mere physical nature, and so out of the reach of its powers? what proof have we of his revelation, or that it is a revelation? the answer is, that as what he revealed is above mere physical nature, so he attested it by the exhibition of power above physical nature--the exhibition of the direct power of god. he used miracles for this purpose; more particularly he staked the truth of his whole message on the miracle of his own resurrection. [ : ] the resurrection was to be the assurance of the perfection of both his redemption and his judgment. now, against all this it is persistently alleged that even if he had the power he could not have performed miracles, because miracles are violations of law, and the lawgiver cannot violate even mere physical laws; but this specious fallacy is refuted by the simple assertion that he introduced a new power or force to counteract or modify others, which counteraction or modification of forces is no more than what is taking place in every part of the world at every moment. before proceeding further we will illustrate the foregoing by testing some assertions of the author of "supernatural religion." "man," he asserts, "is as much under the influence of gravitation as a stone is" (vol. i. p. ). well, a marble statue is a stone. can a marble statue, after it is thrown down, rise up again of itself, and stand upon its feet? again-- "the law of gravitation suffers no alteration, whether it cause the fall of an apple or shape the orbit of a planet" (p. ). of course the "law" suffers no alteration, but the force of gravitation suffers considerable modification if you catch the apple in your hand, or if the planet has an impulse given to it which compels it to career round the sun instead of falling upon his surface. again (page ):-- "the harmonious action of physical laws, and their adaptability to an infinite variety of forms, constitutes the perfection of that code which produces the order of nature. the mere superiority of man over lower forms of organic and inorganic matter does not lift him above physical laws, and the analogy of every grade in nature forbids the presumption that higher forms may exist which are exempt from their control." the number of fallacies in this short passage is remarkable. in the first place laws never act, _i.e._ of themselves. they have to be administered. forces or powers act under the restraint of laws. i think i am right in saying that all physical _laws_, as distinguished from forces, are limitations of force. no man can conceive of a law acting by itself. there is no such thing, for instance, as a "reign of law." a power acts or, if you please, reigns, according to a law, but laws of themselves can do nothing. again, the author says, "the mere superiority of man over lower forms of organic and inorganic matter does not lift him above physical laws." yes, it does, partially at least, for it enables him, in his sphere, to control the very forces whose action is limited by laws. the superiority of man is shown in his control of the powers of nature, and making them obey his will. all such inventions as the steam engine or the electric telegraph lift man above certain physical laws, by enabling him to control the forces with which those laws have to do. again, he writes: "the analogy of every grade in nature forbids the presumption that higher forms may exist which are exempt from their control." on the contrary, we assert that the analogy of every grade in nature encourages the presumption that higher forms may exist which can control these forces of nature far more directly and perfectly than we can. to proceed. in page we read:-- "if in animated beings we have the solitary instance of an efficient cause acting among the forces of nature, and possessing the power of initiation, this efficient cause produces no disturbance of physical law." i cite this place, in order to draw attention to what i suppose must have struck the careful reader, which is the application of the term "solitary instance" to the action of animated beings amongst the forces of nature. if there had been but one animated being in existence, such an epithet might not have been out of place; but when one considers that the world teems with such beings, and that by their every movement they modify or counteract, in their own case at least, the mightiest of all nature's forces, and that no inconsiderable portion of the earth's surface owes its conformation to their action, we are astonished at finding all this characterized as the solitary instance of an efficient cause. but by a sentence at the bottom of this page we are enlightened as to the real reason for so strange a view of the place of vital powers in the universe. in the eyes of those who persist in, as far as possible, ignoring all laws except physical laws, even to the extent of endeavouring to prove that moral forces themselves are but mere developed forms of physical ones, all manifestations of powers other than those of electricity, gravitation, magnetism, and so forth are anomalous, and we have the very word "anomaly" applied to them. "the only anomaly," he writes, "is our ignorance of the nature of vital force. [ : ] but do we know much more of the physical?" men who thus concentrate their attention upon mere physical laws or phenomena, get to believe in no others. they are impatient of any things in the universe except what they can number, or measure, or weigh. they are in danger of regarding the supreme being himself as an "anomaly." they certainly seem to do so, when they take every pains to show that the universe can get on perfectly well without his superintending presence and control. whatever odium, then, may be attached to the violation of a natural _law_, cannot be attached to the action of a superior _force_, making itself felt amongst lower grades of natural forces. if it be rejoined that this superior force must act according to law, we answer, certainly, but according to what law? not, of course, according to the law of the force which it counteracts, but according to the law under which itself acts. the question of miracles, then, is a matter of evidence; but we all know what a power human beings have of accepting or rejecting evidence according as they look for it or are prejudiced against it. if men concentrate their thought upon the lower forces of the universe, and explain the functions of life, and even such powers as affection, will, reason, and conscience, as if they were modifications of mere physical powers, and ignore a higher will, and an all-controlling mind, and a personal superintending providence, what wonder if they are indisposed to receive any such direct manifestation of god as the resurrection of jesus, for the resurrection of jesus is the pledge of a righteous judgment and retribution which, however it takes place, will be the most astounding "anomaly" amidst the mere physical phenomena of the universe, whilst it will be the necessary completion of its moral order. the proof of miracles is then, as i said, a matter of evidence. when hume asserts that "a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature," we meet him with the counter-assertion that it is rather the new manifestation in this order of things of the oldest of powers, that which originally introduced life into a lifeless world. when he says that "a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws," we say that science teaches us that there must have been epochs in the history of the world when new forces made their appearance on the scene, for it teaches us that the world was once incandescent, and so incapable of supporting any conceivable form of animal life, but that at a certain geological period life made its appearance. now, we believe that it is just as wonderful, and contrary to the experience of a lifeless world, that life should appear on that world, as that it is contrary to the experience of the present state of things, that a dead body should be raised. when he asserts that a miraculous event is contrary to uniform experience, we can only reply that it is not contrary to the experience of the evangelists, of st. peter and st. paul, and of the other apostles and companions of the lord; that it was not contrary to the experience of the multitudes who were miraculously fed, and of the multitudes who were miraculously healed. when it is replied to this, that we have insufficient evidence of the fact that these persons witnessed miracles, we rejoin that there is far greater evidence, both in quality and amount, for these miracles, especially for the crowning one, than there is for any fact of profane history; but, if there was twice the evidence that there is, its reception must depend upon the state of mind of the recipient himself. if a man, whilst professing to believe in "a god under whose beneficent government we know that all that is consistent with wise and omnipotent law is prospered and brought to perfection," yet has got himself to believe that such a god cannot introduce into any part of the universe a new power or force, as for instance that he is bound not to introduce vital force into a lifeless world, or mental power into a reasonless world, or moral power into a world of free agents, but must leave these forces to work themselves out of non-existence;--if it man, i say, has got himself to believe in such a being, he will not, of course, believe in any testimony to miracles as accrediting a revelation from him, and so he will do his best to get rid of them after the fashion in which we have seen the author of "supernatural religion" attempt to get rid of the testimony of justin martyr to the use of the four gospels in his day. section xxi. objections to miracles. i will now briefly dispose of two or three of the collateral objections against miracles. . the author of "supernatural religion" makes much of the fact that the scripture writers recognize that there may be, and have been, satanic as well as divine miracles, and he argues that this destroys all the evidential value of a miracle. he writes:-- "even taking the representation of miracles, therefore, which divines themselves give, they are utterly incompetent to perform their contemplated functions. if they are super-human, they are not super-satanic, and there is no sense in which they can be considered miraculously evidential of anything." (vol. i. p. ) now, this difficulty is the merest theoretical one,--a difficulty, as the saying is, on paper; and never can be a practical one to any sincere believer in the holiness of god and the reality of goodness. take the miracle of miracles, the seal of all that is supernatural in our religion, the resurrection of christ. if there be a conflict now going on between god and satan, can there be a doubt as to the side to which this miracle is to be assigned? it is given to prove the reality of a redemption which all those who accept it know to be a redemption from the power of satan. it is given to confirm the sanctions of morality by the assurance of a judgment to come. if satan had performed it, he would have been simply casting out himself. if this miracle of the resurrection be granted, all else goes along with it, and the children of god are fortified against the influence, real or counterfeit, of any diabolical miracle whatsoever. the miracles of the new testament are not performed, as far as i can remember, in any single instance, to prove the truth of any one view of doctrinal christianity as against another, but to evidence the reality of the mission of the divine founder as the son of god, and "the son of god was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil." . with respect to what are called ecclesiastical miracles, _i.e._ miracles performed after the apostolic age, the author of "supernatural religion" recounts the notices of a considerable number, assumes that they are all false, and uses this assumed falsehood as a means of bringing odium on the accounts of the miracles of christ. more particularly he draws attention to certain miracles recorded in the works of st. augustine, of one at least of which he (augustine) declares he was an eye-witness. now, the difficulty raised upon these and similar accounts appears to me to be as purely theoretical as the one respecting satanic miracles. if there be truth in the new testament, it is evident that the founder of christianity not only worked miracles himself, but gave power to his followers to do the same. when was this power of performing miracles withdrawn from the church? our lord, when he gave the power, gave no intimation that it would ever be withdrawn, rather the contrary. however, even in apostolic times, the performance of them seems to have become less frequent as the church became a recognized power in the world. for instance, in the earlier epistles of st. paul the exercise of miraculous gifts seems to have been a recognized part of the church's system, and in the later ones ( and timothy and titus) they are scarcely noticed. [ : ] if we are to place any credence whatsoever in ecclesiastical history, the performance of miracles seems never to have ceased, though in later times very rare in comparison with what they must have been in the first age. now, if the miracles recorded by augustine, or any of them, were true and real, the only inference is that the action of miraculous power continued in the church to a far later date than some modern writers allow. if, on the contrary, they are false, then they take their place among hosts of other counterfeits of what is good and true. they no more go to prove the non-existence of the real miracles which they caricature, than any other counterfeit proves the non-existence of the thing of which it is the counterfeit. nay, rather, the very fact that they are counterfeits proves the existence of that of which they are counterfeits. the ecclesiastical miracles are clearly not independent miracles; true or false, they depend upon the miraculous powers of the early church. if any of them are true, then these powers continued in the church to a late date; if they are false accounts (whether wilfully or through mistake, makes no difference), their falsehood is one testimony out of many to the miraculous origin of the dispensation. those recorded by augustine are in no sense evidential. nothing came of them except the relief, real or supposed, granted to the sufferers. no message from god was supposed to be accredited by them. no attempt was made to spread the knowledge of them; indeed, so far from this, in one case at least, augustine is "indignant at the apathy of the friends of one who had been miraculously cured of a cancer, that they allowed so great a miracle to be so little known." (vol. ii. p. .) in every conceivable respect they stand in the greatest contrast to the resurrection of christ. each case of an ecclesiastical miracle must be examined (if one cares to do so) apart, on its own merits. i can firmly believe in the reality of some, whilst the greater part are doubtful, and many are wicked impostures. these last, of course, give occasion to the enemy to disparage the whole system of which they are assumed to be a part, but they tell against christianity only in the same sense in which all tolerated falsehood or evil in the church obscures its witness to those eternal truths of which it is "the pillar and the ground." now, all this is equally applicable to superstition generally in relation to the supernatural. as the counterfeit miracles of the later ages witness that there must have been true ones to account for the very existence of the counterfeit, so the universal existence of superstition witnesses to the reality of those supernatural interpositions of which it is the distorted image. if hume's doctrine be true, that a miracle, _i.e._ a supernatural interposition, is contrary to universal experience and so incredible--if from the first beginning of things there has been one continuous sequence of natural cause and effect, unbroken by the interposition of any superior power, how is it that mankind have ever formed a conception of a supernatural power? and yet the conception, in the shape of superstition at least, is absolutely universal. tribes who have no idea of the existence of god, use charms and incantations to propitiate unseen powers. now, the distortion witnesses to the reality of that of which it is the distortion; the caricature to the existence of the feature caricatured. and so the universality of the existence of superstition witnesses to the reality of these supernatural revelations and interpositions to which alone such a thing can be referred as its origin. section xxii. jewish credulity. another argument which the author of "supernatural religion" uses to discredit miracles, is the superstition of the jews, especially in our lord's time, and their readiness to believe any miraculous story. he seems to suppose that this superstition reached its extreme point in the age in which christ lived, which he calls "the age of miracles." he also assumes that it was an age of strong religious feeling and excitement. he says:-- "during the whole life of christ, and the early propagation of the religion, it must be borne in mind that they took place in an age, and among a people, which superstition had made so familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events, that wonders awakened no emotion, or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the ever ready belief." (vol. i. p. .) he proceeds to devote above twenty pages to instances of the superstition and credulity of the jews about the time of christ. the contents of these pages would be amusing if they did not reveal such deep mental degradation in a race which christians regard as sacred, because of god's dealings with their fathers. most readers, however, of these pages on the demonology and angelology of the jews will, i think, be affected by them in a totally different way, and will draw a very different inference, from what the writer intends. the thoughtful reader will ask, "how could the evangelical narratives be the outcome of such a hotbed of superstition as the author describes that time to have been?" it is quite impossible, it is incredible that the same natural cause, _i.e._ the prevalence of superstition, should have produced about the same time the book of enoch and the gospel according to st. matthew. and this is the more remarkable from the fact that the gospels are in no sense more sadducean than the book of enoch. the being and agency of good and evil spirits is as fully recognized in the inspired writings as in the apocryphal, but with what a difference! i append in a note a part of the author's reproduction of the book of enoch, that the reader may see how necessary it is, on all principles of common sense, to look for some very different explanation of the origin of the evangelical narratives than that given by the author of "supernatural religion." [ : ] in the evangelical narratives i need hardly say the angels are simply messengers, as their name imports, and absolutely nothing more. when one describes himself it is in the words, "i am gabriel that stand in the presence of god, and am sent to speak unto thee and to show thee these glad tidings." on the credulity of the jews in our lord's time, i repeat the author's remarks:-- "during the whole life of christ, and the early propagation of the religion, it must be borne in mind that they took place in an age, and among a people, which superstition had made so familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events, that wonders awakened no emotion, or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the ever-ready belief." (vol. i. p. .) now, if the records of our lord's life in the gospels are not a tissue of falsehoods from beginning to end, this account of things is absolutely untrue. the miracles of jesus awakened the greatest astonishment, betokening a time as unfamiliar with the actual performance of such things as our own. for instance, after the first casting out of a devil recorded in st. mark, it is said.-- "they were all amazed, insomuch that they questioned among themselves, saying, what thing is this? what new doctrine is this? for with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him." (mark i. .) in the next chapter, after the account of the healing of the sick of the palsy, it is said:-- "they were all amazed and glorified god, saying, we never saw it on this fashion." (ii. .) again (st. luke v. ), after the casting out of a devil: "they were all amazed." again, luke ix. (also after the casting out of a devil), "they were all amazed at the mighty power of god." [ : ] from the account in st. john, the miracle of the opening of the eyes of the man born blind seems to have excited unbounded astonishment:-- "since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind." "can a devil open the eyes of the blind?" (john ix. , x. .) but more than this. if there be any truth whatsoever in the gospel narrative, the disciples themselves, instead of exhibiting anything approaching to the credulity with which the author of "supernatural religion" taxes the contemporaries of christ, exhibited rather a spirit of unbelief. if they had transmitted to us "cunningly devised fables," they never would have recorded such instances of their own slowness of belief as is evinced by their conduct respecting the feeding of the four thousand following upon the feeding of the five thousand, when they ask the same question in the face of the same difficulty respecting the supply of food. above all, their slowness of belief in the resurrection of christ after their master's direct assertion that he would rise again, is directly opposed to the idea suggested by the author of "supernatural religion," that they were ready to believe anything which seemed to favour his pretensions. now, it may be alleged that these instances of the slowness of belief on the part of our lord's immediate followers, and the conduct of the multitudes who expressed such wonder at his miracles, are contrary to one another, but, they are not; for the astonishment of the multitudes did not arise from credulity in the least, but was the expression of that state of mind which must exist (no matter how carefully it is concealed), when some unlooked-for occurrence, totally inexplicable on any natural principles, presents itself. i cite it to show how utterly unfamiliar that age was with even the pretence of the exhibition of miraculous powers. if there be any substratum of truth whatsoever in the accounts of the slowness of belief on the part of the apostles, it is a proof that our lord's most familiar friends were anything but the superstitious persons which certain writers assume them to have been. section xxiii. demoniacal possession. the question of demoniacal possession now demands a passing notice. the author of "supernatural religion" ascribes all such phenomena to imposture or delusion; and, inasmuch as these supposed miracles of casting out of evil spirits are associated with other miracles of christ in the same narrative, he uses the odium with which this class of miracles is in this day regarded, for the purpose of discrediting the miracles of healing and the resurrection of jesus. i cannot help expressing my surprise at the difficulty which some writers, who desire fully and faithfully to uphold the supernatural, seem to have respecting demoniacal possession. the difficulty seems to me to be not in the action of evil spirits in this or in that way, but in their existence. and yet the whole analogy of nature, and the state of man in this world, would lead us to believe, not only in the objective existence of a world of spirits, but in the separation of their characters into good and evil. those who deny the fact of an actually existing spiritual world of angels, if they are atheists, must believe that man is the highest rational existence in the universe; but this is absurd, for the intellect of man in plainly very circumscribed, and he is slowly discovering laws which account for the phenomena which he sees, which laws were operative for ages before he discovered them, and imply infinitely more intellect in their invention, so to speak, and imposition and nice adjustment with one another, than he shows in their mere discovery. a student, for instance, has a problem put before him, say upon the adjustments of the forces of the heavenly bodies. the solution, if it evinces intelligence in him, must evince more and older intelligence in the man who sets him the problem; but if the conditions of the problem truly represent the acts of certain forces and their compensations, can we possibly deny that there is an intellect infinitely above ours who calculated beforehand their compensations and adjustments. all the laws of the universe must be assumed to be, even if they are not believed to be, the work of a personal intellect absolutely infinite, whose operations cannot be confined to this world, for it gives laws to all bodies, no matter how distant. the same reasoning, then, which shows that there is an intelligent will, because it can solve a problem, necessitates an infinitely higher intelligence which can order the motions of distant worlds by laws of which our highest calculative processes are perhaps very clumsy representations. those who, like the author of "supernatural religion," are good enough to admit (with limitations) the existence of a supreme being, and yet deny the existence of a spiritual world above ours, seem to me to act still more absurdly. for the whole analogy of the world of nature would lead as to infer that, as there is a descending scale of animated beings below man reaching down to the lowest forms of life, so there is an ascending scale above him, between him and god. the deniers of the existence of such beings as angels undertake to assert that there are no beings between ourselves and the supreme being, because nature (meaning by nature certain lower brute forces, such as gravitation and electricity), "knows nothing" of them. the scriptures, on the contrary, would lead us to believe that just as in the natural world there are gradations of beings between ourselves and the lowest forms of life, so in the spiritual world (and we belong to both worlds) there are gradations of beings between ourselves and god who created all things. the scriptures would lead us to believe that these beings are intelligent free agents, and, as such, have had their time of probation--that some fell under their trial, and are now the enemies of god as wicked men are, and that others stood in the time of trial and continue the willing servants of god. the scriptures reveal that good angels act as good men do; they endeavour, as far as lies in their power, to confirm others in goodness and in the service of god; and that evil angels act as evil men act, they endeavour to seduce others and to involve them in their own condemnation. the scriptures say nothing to satisfy our curiosity about these beings, as apocryphal books do. they simply describe the one as sent on errands of mercy, and the other as delighting in tempting men and inflicting pain. the mystery of the fall of some of these angels, and their consequent opposition to god, is no difficulty in itself. it is simply the oldest form of that which is to those who believe in the reality of the holiness and goodness of god the great problem of the universe--the origin and continuance of evil. it is simply the counterpart amongst a world of free agents above us of what takes place according to the [so-called] natural order of things amongst ourselves. that evil angels can tempt the souls of men, and in some cases injure their bodies, is not a whit more difficult than that evil men can do the same under the government of a god who exerts so universal a providence as is described in the bible, and allowed to some extent by the author of "supernatural religion." i confess that i cannot understand the difficulty which some christian writers evidently feel respecting the existence of such a thing as demoniacal _possession_, whilst they seem to feel, or at least they _express_ no difficulty, respecting demoniacal _temptation_. demoniacal possession is the infliction of a physical evil for which the man is not accountable, but demoniacal temptation is an attempt to deprive a man of that for the keeping of which he is accountable, viz. his own innocence. demoniacal possession is a temporal evil. the yielding to demoniacal temptation may cast a man for ever out of the favour of god. and yet demoniacal temptation is perfectly analogous to human temptation. a human seducer has it in his power, if his suggestions are received, to corrupt innocence, render life miserable, undermine faith in god and in christ, and destroy the hopes of eternity--and a diabolical seducer can do no more. again, the scriptures seem to teach us that these wicked spirits are the authors of certain temporal evils, and i do not see that there is anything unreasonable in the fact, if it be granted, that there are spirits who exist independent of bodily frames--that these spirits are free agents, and have different characters, and act according to their characters, and also that, according to the laws (_i.e._ within the limitations) of their nature, they have power to act upon those below them in the scale of being, just as we can act upon creatures below us according to the limitations, _i.e._ the laws, of our nature. we are in our way able to inflict evil or to ward off evil from our fellow creatures, under the limitations, or laws which a higher power has set over us; and the scriptures teach us that there are other beings in the great spiritual kingdom of god who are able to do us good or mischief under the conditions which the same supreme power has imposed on their action. so that the one thing which the scriptures reveal to us is, that there is a far vaster spiritual kingdom of god than the human race. with respect to demoniacal possession, our difficulties arise from two things--from our utter ignorance of the nature and real causes of mental diseases, and from our ignorance of the way in which purely spiritual beings can act upon beings such as ourselves, who ordinarily receive impressions only through our bodily organs. we know not, for instance, how god himself acts upon our spirits, and yet, if he cannot, he has less power over us than we have over one another. respecting the fact of god permitting such a thing as possession, there is no more real difficulty than is involved in his permitting such a thing as madness. the symptoms of possession seem generally to have resembled mania, and ascribing certain sorts of mania to evil spirits is only assigning one cause rather than another to a disease of whose nature we are profoundly ignorant. [ : ] again, if we take into consideration the fact that in not a few cases madness is produced by moral causes, by yielding to certain temptations, as, for instance, to drunkenness, there will be still less difficulty in believing that madness, arising from the action of an evil being, may be the punishment of yielding to the seductions of that evil being. the miraculous cure of demoniacal possession presents, i need hardly say, less physical difficulty than any other cure performed by our lord. assuming the presence of an evil spiritual existence in the possessed person coming face to face with the most exalted spiritual power and goodness, the natural result is that the one quails before the other. but, in truth, all the difficulties respecting possession arise not so much from our ignorance, as from our dogmatism. we assert the dogma, or at least we quietly assume the dogma, that there are no spiritual or intellectual beings between ourselves and god; or, if we shrink from an assertion which so nearly implies our own omniscience, we lay down that these superior beings, of whose laws we know nothing, can only act upon us in ways precisely similar to those on which we act upon one another. section xxiv. competent witnesses. another objection which the author of "supernatural religion" urges against the credibility of our lord's miracles, is that they were not performed before what he considers competent witnesses. "their occurrence [he writes] is limited to ages which were totally ignorant of physical laws." (vol. i. p. .) again, he speaks of the age as one "in which not only the grossest superstition and credulity prevailed, but in which there was such total ignorance of natural laws that men were incapable of judging of that reality [_i.e._ of miracles]." (p. .) again:-- "the discussion of miracles, then, is not one regarding miracles actually performed within our own knowledge, but merely regarding miracles said to have been performed eighteen hundred years ago, the reality of which was not verified at the time by any scientific examination." (p. .) from this we gather that the author of "supernatural religion" considers that the miracles of christ should have been tested by scientific men; but we ask, by what scientific men? it is clear that if the testing was to have been satisfactory to those who think like the author of "supernatural religion," they must have been scientific men who approached the whole matter in a spirit of scepticism. our blessed lord (i speak it with all reverence), if he cared to satisfy such men, should have delayed his coming to the present time, or should have called up out of the future, or created for this purpose, men who had doubts respecting the personality of god, who held him to be fitly described as the unknown and the unknowable; who, to say the least, were in a state of suspense as to whether, if there be a supreme being, he can reveal himself or make his will known. in fact, he must have called up, or created for the purpose, some individuals of a school of physicists which had no existence till , years after his time. for, if he had called into existence such witnesses as sir isaac newton, or sir humphrey davy, or cuvier, or faraday, they would have fallen down and worshipped. but, in truth, such witnesses, whether believing or sceptical, would have found no place for their science, for the miracles of christ were of such a kind that the most scientific doubter could have no more accounted for them than the most ignorant. the miracle of which, next to our lord's own resurrection, we have the fullest evidence, is that of the feeding of the , ; for it is recorded by each one of the four evangelists. now, if this miracle had been performed in the presence of the members of all the scientific societies now in existence, their knowledge of natural laws could have contributed nothing to its detection or explanation. they could have merely laid it down to trick or deception, just as any of the unscientific persons present could have done, and perhaps did. the miracle was performed in the open. our lord must have been on some elevated ground where his voice could have reached some considerable part of the multitude, and on which every act of his could be observed. more than a thousand loaves would have been necessary, requiring the assistance of, say a hundred men, to collect them and bring them from a distance. this, too, is not one of those miracles which can be explained by the convenient hypothesis of a "substratum of truth." it is either a direct exhibition of the creative power of god, or a fiction as unworthy of a moment's serious consideration as a story in the "arabian nights." it is folly to imagine that such an act required scientific men to verify it. if the matter was either a reality, or presented that appearance of reality which the narrative implies, then the scientific person would have been stupefied, or in trembling and astonishment he would have fallen on his face like another opponent of the truth; or, may be, his very reason would have been shattered at the discovery that here before him was that very supernatural and divine working in whose existence he had been doing his best to persuade his fellow creatures to disbelieve. the scripture narratives, if they are not altogether devoid of truth, lead us to believe that our lord performed his miracles in the face of three sects or parties of enemies, pharisees, sadducees, and herodians; each one rejecting his claims on grounds of its own. they were also performed in a populous city, of which all the rulers and the mass of the inhabitants were hostile to his pretensions. such a place could never have been chosen as the scene of a miraculous event, known by those who promulgated it to have had no foundation in truth, and withal assumed to have been known throughout the city at the time, and to have been productive of a series of results, miraculous and ordinary, which were asserted to have commenced at the moment of its occurrence. the writer of "supernatural religion" would disparage the accounts of our lord's supernatural works and resurrection, because such accounts are to be found only in the writings of "enthusiastic followers," not in those of indifferent persons; but the nature of the case almost excludes all other testimony: for the miracles of our lord were wrought for an evidential purpose,--to convince the jews especially that he was the christ, the hope of their fathers, and, as such, was not only to be believed in, but to be obeyed and followed. the only sign of real true belief was that the man who professed to believe joined that society which was instituted for the purpose of propagating and keeping alive the truth of his messiahship. if any one who professed to believe stopped short of joining this society, his testimony to miracles would have been valueless, for the miracles were wrought to convince him of the truth of a matter in which, if he believed, he was bound to profess his belief, and, if he did not, he laid himself open to the charge of not really believing the testimony. now, of course, the reader is aware that we have a signal proof of the validity of this argument in the well-known passage in josephus which relates to our lord. josephus was the historian, and the only historian, of the period in which our lord flourished. the eighteenth book of his "antiquities of the jews" covers the whole period of our lord's life. if our lord had merely attracted attention as a teacher of righteousness, which it is allowed on all hands that he did, it was likely that he would have been mentioned in this book along, with others whose teaching produced far less results. mention appears to be made of him in the following words:-- "now there was about this time jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. he drew over to him both many of the jews and many of the gentiles. he was [the] christ. and when pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. and the tribe of christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day." now, on external grounds there seems little doubt of the genuineness of this passage. it is in all copies of the historian's work, and is quoted in full by eusebius, though not alluded to by fathers previous to his day. [ : ] if it is an interpolation, it must have been by the hand of a christian; and yet it is absolutely inconceivable that any christian should have noticed the christian church in such words as "the tribe of christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day." it would have been absurd beyond measure to have described the christians, so early as justin's time even, as "not extinct," when they were filling the world with their doctrine, and their increase was a source of great perplexity and trouble to the roman government. it is just what a jew of josephus' time would have written who really believed that jesus wrought miracles, but expected that nothing permanent would result from them. and yet there can be no doubt but that the passage is open to this insurmountable objection, that if josephus had written it he would have professed himself a christian, or a man of incredible inconsistency. setting aside the difficulty connected with the acknowledgment of jesus as the christ, inasmuch as this name was frequently given to him by those who did not believe in him, yet how could josephus state that his resurrection was predicted by the prophets of his nation, and continue in appearance an unbeliever? but, whether genuine or not, this passage is decisive as to the impossibility of what is styled an independent testimony to our lord: "he that is not with me is against me." the facts of our lord's chief miracles and resurrection were such, that the nearer men lived to the time the more impossible it would have been for them to have suspended their judgment. so that, instead of having the witness of men who, by their prudent suspension of judgment, betrayed their lurking unbelief, we have the testimony of men who, by their surrender of themselves, soul and body, evinced their undoubting faith in a matter in which there could be really no middle opinion. section xxv. date of testimony. one point remains--the time to which the testimony to our lord's miracles reaches back. can it be reasonably said to reach to within fifty years of his death, or to within twenty, or even nearer? the author of "supernatural religion" asserts that it was not contemporaneous or anything like it. in fact, one might infer from his book that the miracles of christ were not heard of till say a century, or three quarters of a century, after his time, for he says, "they were never heard of out of palestine until long after the events are said to have occurred." [ : ] (p. .) in such a case, "long after" is very indefinite. it may be a century, or three quarters of a century, or perhaps half a century. it cannot be less, for every generation contains a considerable number of persons whose memories reach back for forty or fifty years. in a place of , inhabitants, in which i am now writing, there are above fifty persons who can perfectly remember all that took place in . there are some whose memories reach to twenty years earlier. now let the reader try and imagine, if he can, the possibility of ascribing a number of remarkable acts--we will not say miraculous ones--to some one who died in , and assuming also that these events were the basis of a society which had commenced with his death, and was now making way, and that the chief design of the society was to make known or keep up the memory of these events, and that there had been a literature written between the present time and the time of the said man's death, every line of which had been written on the assumption that the events in question were true, and yet these events had never really taken place. we must also suppose that the person upon whom these acts are attempted to be fastened was regarded with intense dislike by the great majority of his contemporaries, who did all they could to ruin him when alive, and blacken his memory after he had died, and who looked with especial dislike on the idea that he was supposed to have done the acts in question. let the reader, i say, try and imagine all this, and he will see that, in the case of our lord, the author's "long after" must be sixty or seventy years at the least; more likely a hundred. let us now summon another witness to the supernatural, whose testimony we promised to consider, and this shall be clement of rome--the earliest author to whom it has suited the purpose of the author of "supernatural religion" to refer. if we are to rely upon the almost universal consent of ancient authors rather than the mere conjectures of modern critics, he is the person alluded to by st. paul in the words, "with clement also, and with other my fellow labourers, whose names are written in the book of life." (phil. iv. .) of this man eusebius writes:-- "in the twelfth year of the same reign (domitian's), after anecletus had been bishop of rome twelve years, he was succeeded by clement, whom the apostle, in his epistle to the philippians, shows had been his fellow-labourer in these words: 'with clement also and the rest of my fellow-labourers, whose names are in the book of life.' of this clement there is one epistle extant, acknowledged as genuine, of considerable length and of great merit, which he wrote in the name of the church at rome, to that of corinth, at the time when there was a dissension in the latter. this we know to have been publicly read for common benefit, in most of the churches both in former times and in our own." (eccles. hist. b. iii. xv. xvi.) origen confirms this. clement of alexandria reproduces several pages from his epistle, calling him "the apostle clement," [ : ] and irenaeus speaks of him as the companion of the apostles:-- "this man, as he had seen the blessed apostles and been conversant with them, might be said to have the preaching of the apostles still echoing [in his ears], and their traditions before his eyes." (bk. iii. ch. iii. ) irenaeus, it is to be remembered, died at the end of the second century, and his birth is placed within the first quarter of it, so that, in all probability, he had known numbers of christians who had conversed with clement. according to the author of "supernatural religion," the great mass of critics assign the epistle of clement to between the years a.d. - . in dealing with this epistle i shall, for argument's sake, assume that clement quoted from an earlier gospel than any one of our present ones, and that the one he quoted might be the gospel according to the hebrews, and i shall ask the same question that i asked respecting justin martyr--what views of christ's person and work and doctrine did he derive from this gospel of his? the epistle of clement is one in which we should scarcely expect to find much reference to the supernatural, for it is written throughout for the one practical purpose of healing the divisions in the church of corinth. these the writer ascribes to envy, and cites a number of scripture examples of the evil effects of this disposition and the good effects of the contrary one. he adheres to this purpose throughout, and every word he writes bears more or less directly on his subject. yet in this document, from which, by its design, the subject of the supernatural seems excluded, we have all the leading features of supernatural christianity. we have the father sending the son (ch. xlii.); we have the son coming of the seed of jacob according to the flesh (ch. xxxii.); we have the words, "our lord jesus christ, the sceptre of the majesty of god, did not come in the pomp of pride and arrogance, although he might have done so, but in a lowly condition, as the holy spirit had declared regarding him" (ch. xvi.); and at the end of the same we have:-- "if the lord thus humbled himself, what shall we do who have through him come under the yoke of his grace?" clement describes him in the words of the epistle to the hebrews as one-- "who, being the brightness of his [god's] majesty, is by so much greater than the angels as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." (ch. xxxvi.) we have clement speaking continually of the death of jesus as taking place for the highest of supernatural purposes,--the reconciliation of all men to god. "let us look," he writes, "steadfastly to the blood of christ, and see how precious that blood is to god, which, having been shed for our salvation, has set the grace of repentance before the whole world." (ch. vii.) again, "and thus they made it manifest that redemption should flow through the blood of the lord to all them that believe and hope in god." (ch. xii.) again, "on account of the love he bore us, jesus christ our lord gave his blood for us by the will of god, his flesh for our flesh, and his soul for our souls." (ch. xlix.) his sufferings are apparently said by clement to be the sufferings of god. (ch. ii.) but, above all, the statement of the truth of our lord's resurrection, and of ours through his, is as explicit as possible:-- "let us consider, beloved, how the lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection, of which he has rendered the lord jesus the first fruits by raising him from the dead." (ch. xxiv.) "[the apostles] having therefore received their orders, and being fully assured by the resurrection of our lord jesus christ, and established in the word of god, with full assurance of the holy ghost, they went forth proclaiming that the kingdom of god was at hand." (ch. xlii.) when we look to clement's theology, we find it to have been what would now be called, in the truest and best sense of the word, "evangelical," thus:-- "we too, being called by his will in christ jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which from the beginning almighty god has justified all men." (ch. xxxii.) again:-- "all these the great creator and lord of all has appointed to exist in peace and harmony; while he does good to all, but most abundantly to us who have fled for refuge to his compassion through jesus christ our lord." and he ends his epistle with the following prayer:-- "may god, who seeth all things, and who is the ruler of all spirits and the lord of all flesh--who chose our lord jesus, and us through him to be a peculiar people--grant to every soul that calleth upon his glorious and holy name, faith, fear, peace, patience, long suffering, self-control, purity and sobriety, to the well pleasing of his name through our high priest and protector jesus christ." (ch. lviii.) but with all this his christianity seems to have been ecclesiastical, in the technical sense of the word. he seems to have had a much clearer and firmer hold than justin had of the truth that christ instituted, not merely a philosophy or system of teaching, but a mystical body or visible church, having its gradations of officers corresponding to the officers of the jewish ecclesiastical system, and its orderly arrangements of worship. (ch. xl-xlii.) now this is the christianity of a man who lived at least sixty or seventy years nearer to the fountain head of christian truth than did justin martyr, whose witness to dogmatical or supernatural christianity we have shown at some length. it is also gathered out of a comparatively short book, not one sixth of the length of the writings of justin, and composed solely for an undogmatic purpose. his views of christ and his work are precisely the same as those of justin. by all rule of rationalistic analogy they ought to have been less "ecclesiastical," but in some respects they are more so. clement certainly seems to bring out more fully our lord's resurrection (taking into consideration, that is, the scope of his one remaining book and its brevity), and the resurrection of christ is the crowning miracle which stamps the whole dispensation as supernatural. so far, then, as the supernatural is concerned, it makes no difference whatsoever whether clement used the gospel according to st. matthew or the gospel according to the hebrews. his gospel, whatever it was, not only filled his heart with an intense and absorbing love of christ, and a desire that all men should imitate him, but it filled his mind with that view of the religion of christ which we call supernatural and evangelical, but which the author of "supernatural religion" calls ecclesiastical. the question now arises, not so much from whom, but when, did he receive this view of christ and his system. i do not mean, of course, the more minute features, but the substance. to what period must his reminiscences as a christian extend? what time must his experiences cover? irenaeus, in the place i have quoted, speaks of him as the companion of apostles, clement of alexandria as an apostle, eusebius and origen as the fellow-labourer of st. paul. now, i will not at present insist upon the more than likelihood that such was the fact. i will, for argument's sake, assume that he was some other clement; but, whoever he was, one thing respecting him is certain--that the knowledge of christianity was not poured into him at the moment when he wrote his epistle, nor did he receive it ten--twenty--thirty years before. st. peter and st. paul were martyred in a.d. ; the rest of the apostolic college were dispersed long before. this epistle shows little or no trace of the peculiar johannean teaching or tradition of the apostle who survived all the others; so, unless he had received his christian teaching some years before the martyrdom of the two apostles peter and paul, that is, some time before a.d. , probably many years, i do not see that there can have been the smallest ground even for the tradition of the very next generation after his own that he knew the apostles. such a tradition could not possibly have been connected with the name of a man who became a christian late in the century. now, supposing that he was sixty-five years old when he wrote his epistle, he was born about the time of our lord's death: he was consequently a contemporary of the generation that had witnessed the death and resurrection of christ and the founding of the church. if he had ever been in jerusalem before its destruction, he must have fallen in with multitudes of surviving christians of the , who were converted on and just after the day of pentecost. his christian reminiscences, then, must have extended far into the age of the contemporaries of christ. a man who was twenty-five years old at the time of the resurrection of christ would scarcely be reckoned an old man at the time of the destruction of jerusalem. clement consequently might have spent twenty of the best years of his life in the company of persons who were old enough to have seen the lord in the flesh. [ : ] so that his knowledge of the death and resurrection of christ, and the founding of the church, even if he had never seen st. paul or any other apostle, must have been derived from a generation of men, all the older members of which wore christians of the pentecostal period. now when we come to compare the epistle of clement with the only remaining christian literature of the earliest period, _i.e._ the earlier epistles of st. paul, we find both the account of christ and the theology built upon that account, to be the same in the one and in the other. the supernatural fact respecting christ to which the earliest epistles of st. paul most prominently refer, was his resurrection as the pledge of ours, and this is the fact respecting christ which is put most prominently forward by clement, and for the same purpose. the first epistle to the corinthians is referred to by clement in the words:-- "take up the epistle of the blessed apostle paul. what did he write to you at the time when the gospel first began to be preached? truly, under the inspiration of the spirit ([greek: pneumatikôs]) he wrote to you concerning himself and cephas and apollos, because even then parties had been formed among you." (ch. xlvii.) the other reproductions of the language of st. paul's epistles are numerous, and i give them in a note. [ : ] the reader will see at a glance that the theology or christology of clement was that of the earliest writings of the church of which we have any remains, and to these he himself frequently and unmistakably refers. the earlier epistles of st. paul, as those to the thessalonians, galatians, corinthians, and romans, are acknowledged on all hands, even by advanced german rationalists, to be the genuine works of the apostle paul; indeed one might as well deny that such a man ever existed as question their authenticity. the first epistle to the corinthians, which is the longest and most dogmatic of the earlier ones, cannot have been written after the year . in a considerable number of chronological tables to which i have referred, the earliest date is the year , and the latest . to the first epistle to the thessalonians, which is undoubtedly the earliest of all, the earliest date assigned is , and the latest . now it is ever to be remembered that in each of these--the first to the thessalonians and the first to the corinthians--we have enunciations of the great crowning supernatural event of scripture--the resurrection of christ and our resurrection as depending upon it, which are unsurpassed in the rest of scripture. so that in the first christian writing which has come down to us, we have the great fact of supernatural religion, which carries with it all the rest. the fullest enunciation of the evidences of the resurrection is in a writing whose date cannot be later than , and runs thus:-- "moreover, brethren, i declare unto you the gospel which i preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what i preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. for i delivered unto you first of all that which i also received, how that christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. and that he was seen of cephas, then of the twelve. after that [ : ] he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present [twenty-five years after the event] but some are fallen asleep. after that he was seen of james, then of all the apostles, and last of all he was seen of me also." ( cor. xv. .) if the reader compares this with the accounts in any one of the four, he will find that it gives the fullest list of our lord's appearances which has come down to us, and this, be it remembered, forming part of the most categorical declaration of what the gospel is, to be found in the new testament. [ : ] a man, then, writes in a.d. or earlier, that another, who had died in a.d. had been seen by a number of persons, and among these, by persons at once, of whom the greater part were alive when he wrote, and implying that the story had been believed ever since, and received by him (the writer) from those who had seen this jesus, and that the fact was so essential to the religion that it was itself called "the gospel," a name continually given to the whole system of christianity, and moreover that he himself, when in company with others, had seen this jesus at noon-day, and, the history asserts, had been blinded by the sight. now let the reader recall to his mind any public man who died twenty-five years ago, that is, in , and imagine this man appearing, not as a disembodied spirit, but in his resuscitated body to first one of his friends, then to eleven or twelve, then to another, then to five hundred persons at one time, and a flourishing and aggressive institution founded upon this his appearance, and numbers of persons giving up their property, and breaking with all their friends, and adopting a new religion, and a new course of life of great self-denial, and even encountering bitter persecution and death, simply because they believed this man to be alive from the dead, and moreover some professing to do miracles, and to confer the power of doing miracles in the name and by the power of this risen man. let the reader, i say, try to imagine all this, and then he will be able to judge of the credulity with which the author credits his readers when he writes:-- "all history shows how rapidly pious memory exaggerates and idealizes the traditions of the past, and simple actions might readily be transformed into miracles as the narrative circulated, in a period so prone to superstition, and so characterized by love of the marvellous." (vol. ii. p. .) "all history," the author says; but why does he not give us a few instances out of "all history," that we might compare them with this gospel account, and see if there was anything like it? such a story, if false, is not a myth. a myth is the slow growth of falsehood through long ages, and this story of the resurrection was written circumstantially within twenty years of its promulgation, by one who had been an unbeliever, and who had conferred with those who must have been the original promoters of the falsehood, if it be one. to call such a story a myth, is simply to shirk the odium of calling it by its right name, or more probably to avoid having to meet the astounding historical difficulty of supposing that men endured what the apostles endured for what they must have known to have been a falsehood, and the still more astounding difficulty that one whom the author of "supernatural religion" allows to have been a teacher who "carried morality to the sublimest point attained or even attainable by humanity," and whose "life, as far as we can estimate it, was uniformly noble and consistent with his lofty principles," should have impressed a character of such deep-rooted fraud and falsehood on his most intimate friends. the author of "supernatural religion" has, however, added another to the many proofs of the truth of the gospel. in his elaborate book of , pages of attack on the authenticity of the evangelists he has shown, with a clearness which, i think, has never been before realized, the great fact that from the first there has been but one account of jesus christ. in the writings of heathens, of jews, of heretics, [ : ] in lost gospels, in contemporary accounts, in the earliest traditions of the church, there appears but one account, the account called by its first proclaimers the gospel; and the only explanation of the existence of this gospel is its truth. the end. [footnotes] [ : ] papias, for instance, actually mentions st. mark by name as writing a gospel under the influence of st. peter. the author of "supernatural religion" devotes ten pages to an attempt to prove that this st. mark's gospel could not be ours. (vol. i. pp. - .) [ : ] i need hardly say that i myself hold the genuineness of the greek recension. the reader who desires to see the false reasonings and groundless assumptions of the author of "supernatural religion" respecting the ignatian epistles thoroughly exposed should read professor lightfoot's article in the "contemporary review" of february, . in pages - of this article there is an examination of the nature and trustworthiness of the learning displayed in the footnotes of this pretentious book, which is particularly valuable. i am glad to see that the professor has modified, in this article, the expression of his former opinion that the excerpta called the curetonian recension is to be regarded as the only genuine one. "elsewhere," the professor writes (referring to an essay in his commentary on the philippians), "i had acquiesced in the earlier opinion of lipsius, who ascribed them (_i.e._, the greek or vossian recension) to an interpolator writing about a.d. . now, however, i am obliged to confess that i have grave and increasing doubts whether, after all, they are not the genuine utterances of ignatius himself." [ : ] [greek: ou gar monon en hellêsi dia sôkratous hypo logou êlenchthê tauta, alla kai en barbarois hyp' autou tou logou morphôthentos kai anthrôpou genomenou kai iêsou christou klêthentous.] [ : ] such is a perfectly allowable translation of [greek: kai ton par' autou hyion elthonta kai didaxanta hêmas tauta, kai ton tôn allôn hepomenôn kai exomoioumenôn agathôn angelôn straton, pneuma te to prophêtikon sebometha kai proskynoumen.] as there is nothing approaching to angel worship in justin, such a rendering seems absolutely necessary. [ : ] "for the law promulgated in horeb is now old, and belongs to you alone; but this is for all universally. now law placed against law has abrogated that which is before it, and a covenant which comes after in like manner has put an end to the previous one; and an eternal and final law--namely, christ--has been given to us." (heb. viii. - ; dial. ch. xi.) [ : ] "for the true spiritual israel and descendants of judah, jacob, isaac, and abraham (who in uncircumcision was approved of and blessed by god on account of his faith, and called the father of many nations) are we who have been led to god through this crucified christ, as shall be demonstrated while we proceed." (phil. iii. , compared with romans, iv. - ; dial. ch. xi.) [ : ] this, of course, was a jewish adversary's view of the christian doctrine of the godhead of christ, which justin elsewhere modifies by showing the subordination of the son to the father in all things. [ : ] [greek: en gar tois apomnêmoneumasi, ha phêmi hypo tôn apostolôn autou kai tôn ekeinois parakolouthêsantôn syntetachthai, hoti hidrôs hôsei thromboi katecheito autou euchomenou.] (dial. ch. ciii.) [ : ] [greek: kai to eipein metônomakenai auton petron hena tôn apostolôn, kai gegraphthai en tois apomnêmoneumasin autou gegenêmenon kai touto, k.t.l.] on this question the author of "supernatural religion" remarks, "according to the usual language of justin, and upon strictly critical grounds, the [greek: autou] in this passage must be ascribed to peter; and justin therefore seems to ascribe the memoirs to that apostle, and to speak consequently of a gospel of peter." (vol. i. p. .) [ : ] that of our lord being born in a cave. [ : ] [greek: iôannou gar kathezomenou.] [ : ] justin has [greek: hidrôs hôsei thromboi]; st. luke, [greek: ho hidrôs autou hôsei thromboi haimatos]. the author of "supernatural religion" lays great stress upon the omission of [greek: haimatos], as indicating that justin did not know anything about st. luke; but we have to remember, first, that st. luke alone mentions _any_ sweat of our lord in his agony; secondly, that the account in justin is said to be taken from "memoirs drawn up by apostles and _those who followed them_," _st. luke being only one of those who followed_; thirdly, justin and st. luke both use a very scarce word, [greek: thromboi]; fourthly, justin and st. luke both qualify this word by [greek: hôsei]. if we add to this the fact that [greek: thromboi] seems naturally associated with blood in several authors, the probability seems almost to reach certainty, that justin had st. luke's account in his mind. the single omission is far more easy to be accounted for than the four coincidences. [ : ] and he said unto them, "these are the words which i spake unto you while i was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms concerning me." (luke xxiii. .) [ : ] it is the reading of codices b and c of the codex sinaiticus of the syriac, and of a number of fathers and versions. [ : ] [greek: hekastos gar tis apo merous tou spermatikou theiou logou to syngenes horôn kalôs ephthenxato.] [ : ] for instance, in vol. ii. p. , &c., he speaks of one of tischendorf's assertions as "a conclusion the audacity of which can scarcely be exceeded."--then, "this is, however, almost surpassed by the treatment of canon westcott."--then, "the unwarranted inference of tischendorf."--"there is no ground for tischendorf's assumption."--"tischendorf, the self-constituted modern defensor fidei, asserts with an assurance which can scarcely be characterized otherwise than as an unpardonable calculation upon the ignorance of his readers."--"canon westcott says, with an assurance which, considering the nature of the evidence, is singular."--"even dr. westcott states," &c.--for tertullian his contempt seems unbounded: indeed we way say the same of all the fathers. numberless times does he speak of their "uncritical spirit." the only person for whom he seems to have a respect is the heretic marcion. even rationalists, such as credner and ewald, are handled severely when they differ from him. the above are culled from a few pages. [ : ] [greek: hoti theos hypemeine gennêthênai kai anthrôpos genesthai.] [ : ] [greek: ex hôn diarrhêdên outous autos ho staurotheis hoti theos kai anthrôpos, kai stauroumenos kai apothnêskôn kekêrygmenos apodeiknytai.] [ : ] the reader must remember that justin puts this expression, which seems to imply a duality of godhead, into the mouth of an adversary. in other places, as i shall show, he very distinctly guards against such a notion, by asserting the true and proper sonship of the word and his perfect subordination to his father. there is a passage precisely similar in ch. lv. [ : ] "i continued: moreover, i consider it necessary to repeat to you the words which narrate how he is both angel and god and lord, and who appeared as a man to abraham." (dial. ch. lviii.) "permit me, further, to show you from the book of exodus, how this same one, who is both angel, and god, and lord, and man." (dial. ch. lix.) "god begat before all creatures, a beginning, a certain rational power from himself, who is called by the holy spirit, now the glory of the lord, now the son, again wisdom, again an angel, then god, and then lord and logos." (dial. ch. lxi.) "the word of wisdom, who is himself this god, begotten of the father of all things, and word, and wisdom, and power, and the glory of the begetter, will bear evidence to me," &c. (dial. lxi.) "therefore these words testify explicitly that he is witnessed to by him who established these things [_i.e._ the father] as deserving to be worshipped, as god and as christ." (dial. lxiii.) the reader will find other declarations, most of which are equally explicit, in dial. ch. lvi. (at the end), ch. lvii. (at the end), lxii. (middle), lxviii. (at middle and end), lxxiv. (middle), lxxv., lxxvi. (made him known, being christ, as god strong and to be worshipped), lxxxv. (twice called the lord of hosts), lxxxvii. (where christ is declared to be pre-existent god), cxiii. (he [joshua] was neither christ, who is god, nor the son of god), cxv. (our priest, who is god, and christ, the son of god, the father of all), cxxiv. (now i have proved at length that christ is called god), cxxv. (he ministered to the will of the father, yet nevertheless is god), cxxvi. (thrice in this chapter), cxxvii., cxxviii., cxxix. [ : ] i adopt this phrase because, it is used by justin. his words are [greek: arithmô onta heteron]. (dial. ch. lxii.) [ : ] [greek: hoti archên pro pantôn tôn ktismatôn ho theos gegennêke dynamin tina ex heautou logikên, k.t.l.] [ : ] dr. pusey translates this passage thus:--"for all that the philosophers and legislators at any time declared or discovered aright, they accomplished according to their portion of discovery and contemplation of the word; but as they did not know all the properties of the word which is christ," &c. [ : ] translated by dr. pusey, "seminal divine word." [ : ] a few pages further on i shall show that the mode of reasoning adopted by the author of "supernatural religion," in drawing inferences from the ways in which justin expresses the idea of st. john's [greek: ho logos sarx egeneto] would, if we adopted it, lead us to some very startling conclusions. [ : ] the following are some instances:--"god sent not his son into the world to condemn the world." "he whom god sent."--john iii. , . "my meat is to do the will of him that sent me." "jesus christ, whom thou hast sent." "as my father sent me, so send i you," &c. [ : ] this passage does not occur among the remarks upon justin martyr's quotations, but among those on the clementine homilies. however, it seems to be used to prove that the gospel of st. john was published after the writing of the clementines, which the author seems to think were themselves posterior to justin. [ : ] i say the "necessary" developments, because holy scripture is given to the church to be expounded and applied, and in order to this its doctrine must be collected out of many scattered statements, and stated and guarded, and this is its being developed. the persons, the attributes, and the works of the three persons of the godhead are so described in holy scripture as divine, and they are so conjoined in the works of creation, providence, and grace, that we cannot but contemplate them as associated together, and cannot but draw an impassable gulf between their existence and that of all creatures, and we cannot but adoringly contemplate their relations one to another, and hence the necessary development of the christian dogma as contained in the creeds. [ : ] [greek: ton di' hêmas tou anthrôpous kai dia tên hêmeteran sôtêrian katelthonta ek tôn ouranôn, kai sarkôthenta ek pneumatos hagiou kai marias tês parthenou, kai enanthrôpêsanta, k.t.l.] [ : ] though of course not as regards _time_, for all catholics hold the eternal generation, that there never was a time in which the father was not a father; nor as regards power or extension, for whatever the father does that the son does also, and wherever the father is there is the son also. [ : ] eusebius, b. ii. ch. v. [ : ] apol. i. . [ : ] the spirit of this verse, and its form of expression, are quite those of the gospel of st. john; and it serves to form a link of union between the three synoptic gospels and the fourth, and to point to the vast and weighty mass of discourses of the lord which are not related except by st. john. alford in loco. [ : ] if the reader desires to see logos doctrine expressed in philosophic terminology, he can find it in some of the extracts from philo given in the notes of "supernatural religion" vol. ii. pp. - . can there be a greater contrast than that between st. john's terse, concise, simple, enunciations and the following: [greek: kai ou monon phôs, alla kai pantos heterou phôtos archetypon mallon de archetypou presbyteron kai anôteron, logon echon paradeigmatos to men gar paradeigma ho plêrestatos ên autou logos, k.t.l.]--de somniis, i. , mang. i. . there is no particularly advanced philosophic terminology here, and yet there is a profound difference between both the thought and wording of this sentence of philo and st. john's four enunciations of the logos. again, [greek: dêlon de hoti kai hê archetypos sphragis, hon phamen einai kosmon noêton, autos an eiê to archetypon paradeigma, idea tôn ideôn, ho theou logos.]--de mundi opificio mang. vol. i. p. . "it is manifest also that the archetypal seal, which we call that world which is perceptible only to the intellect, must itself be the archetypal model, the idea of ideas, the word of god." (yonge's translation.) [ : ] "when he came into the world he was manifested as god and man. and it is easy to perceive the man in him when he hungers and shows exhaustion, and is weary and athirst, and withdraws in fear, and is in prayer and in grief, and sleeps on a boat's pillow, and entreats the removal of the cup of suffering, and sweats in an agony, and is strengthened by an angel, and betrayed by a judas, and mocked by caiaphas, and set at naught by herod, and scourged by pilate, and derided by the soldiers, and nailed to the tree by the jews, and with a cry commits his spirit to his father, and drops his head and gives up the ghost, and has his side pierced by a spear, and is wrapped in linen and laid in a tomb, and is raised by the father from the dead. and the divine in him, on the other hand, is equally manifest when he is worshipped by angels, and seen by shepherds, and waited for by simeon, and testified of by anna, and inquired after by wise men, and pointed out by a star, and at a marriage makes wine of water, and chides the sea when tossed by the violence of winds, and walks upon the deep, and makes one see who was blind from birth, and raises lazarus when dead for four days, and works many wonders, and forgives sins, and grants power to his disciples." [ : ] history affords multitudes of instances, but an example may be selected from one of the most critical periods of modern history. let it be granted that louis the sixteenth of france and his queen had all the defects attributed to them by the most hostile of serious historians; let all the excuses possible be made for his predecessor, louis the fifteenth, and also for madame de pompadour, can it be pretended that there are grounds for affirming that the vices of the two former so far exceeded those of the latter, that their respective fates were plainly and evidently just? that whilst the two former died in their beds, after a life of the most extreme luxury, the others merited to stand forth through coming time, as examples of the most appalling and calamitous tragedy. (mivart's "genesis of species," ch. ix.) [ : ] what sign showest thou us? destroy this temple, and in three days i will raise it up: but he spake of the temple of his body. (john ii. - ) an evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of the prophet jonas, for as jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. (matt. xii. , ) god commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because he hath appointed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath chosen, whereof he hath given assurance unto all men in that he raised him from the dead. (acts xvii. .) [ : ] this sentence seems extremely carelessly worded. the author cannot possibly mean that our ignorance is the anomaly, for throughout his whole work he assumes that ignorance is the rule in all matters, moral, physical, historical. the fathers of the second century knew nothing of the evangelists. st. john knows nothing of the writings of his brother evangelists. they are all assumed to be ignorant of what they have not actually recorded. we know nothing of vital force, or physical force, or of a revelation. in fact, god himself is the unknowable. [ : ] perhaps tim. i. , iv. ; tim i. , may refer to such gifts; but the contrast between such slight intimations and the full recognition in cor. xii. and xiv. is very great. [ : ] "the author [of the book of enoch] not only relates the fall of the angels through love for the daughters of men, but gives the names of twenty-one of them, and their leaders, of whom jequn was he who seduced the holy angels, and ashbeel it was who gave them evil counsel and corrupted them. a third, gadreel, was he who seduced eve. he also taught to the children of men the use and manufacture of all murderous weapons, of coats of mail, shields, swords, and of all the implements of war. another evil angel, named penemue, taught them many mysteries of wisdom. he instructed men in the art of writing, with paper and ink, by means of which, the author remarks, many fall into sin, even to the present day. kaodejâ, another evil angel, taught the human race all the wicked practices of spirits and demons, and also magic and exorcism. the offspring of the fallen angels and of the daughters of men, were giants whose height was , ells, of these are the demons working evil upon earth. azayel taught men various arts, the making of bracelets and ornaments, the use of cosmetics, the way to beautify the eyebrows, precious stones and all dye-stuffs and metals, &c. the stars are represented as animated beings. enoch sees seven stars bound together in space like great mountains, and flaming with fire, and he enquires of the angel who leads him on account of what sin they are so bound. uriel informs him that they are stars which have transgressed the commands of the most high, and they are thus bound until ten thousand worlds, the number of the days of their transgression, shall be accomplished." so far for the "angelology." as to the demons, "their number is infinite ... they are about as close as the earth thrown up out of a newly made grave. it is stated that each man has , demons at his right hand, and , on his left. the crush in the synagogue on the sabbath arises from them, also the dresses of the rabbins become so old and torn through their rubbing; in like manner also they cause the tottering of the feet. he who wishes to discover these spirits must take sifted ashes and strew them about his bed, and in the morning he will perceive their footprints upon them like a cock's tread. if any one wish to see them, he must take the after-birth of a black cat, which has been littered by a first-born black cat, and whose mother was also a first-birth, burn and reduce it to powder, and put some of it on his eyes, and he will see them." (vol. i. pp. and ). and this is the stuff which the author would have us believe was the real origin of the supernatural in the life of jesus! [ : ] see also mark v. (healing of jairus' daughter), "they were astonished with a great astonishment." mark vii. (healing of deaf man with impediment in his speech), "they were beyond measure astonished." luke v. , "he was astonished at the draught of fishes;" viii. , "her parents were astonished." [ : ] there cannot be the slightest doubt but that certain cases of madness or mania present all the appearances of possession as it is described in scripture. another personality, generally intensely evil, has possession of the mind, speaks instead of the afflicted person, throws the patient into convulsions,--in fact, exhibits all the symptoms of the ancient demoniacs. i have now before me the record of five or six such cases attested by german physicians. [ : ] the reader will find the references to it discussed in a dissertation at the end of whiston's "josephus." lardner utterly denies its authenticity. daubuz, however, has, i think, clearly proved its style and phraseology to be those of josephus. [ : ] singular that he should say "out of palestine," for if they were false they would be first heard of at a distance from the scene of their supposed occurrence. jerusalem, so full of bitter enemies of christ, was the last place in which his resurrection was likely to be promulgated. [ : ] miscellanies, iv. ch. xvii. [ : ] let the reader remember that, if this be an assumption, the contrary assumption is infinitely the more unlikely. our assumption is founded on the direct assertion of two writers of the second century, one of whom asserts that clement was a close companion of apostles, another that he was an apostle: meaning, of course, such an one as barnabas. a writer of the early part of the next century, origen, asserts that he was the person mentioned in st. paul's epistle, and the principal ecclesiastical historian who lived within two hundred years of his time corroborates this. [ : ] "ye ... were more willing to give than to receive" (ch. ii.). a reminiscence of st. paul's quotation of christ's words to be found in acts xx. . "ready to every good work" (ch. ii). titus iii. . "every kind of honour and happiness was bestowed upon you (ch. iii). reminiscence of i corinth. iv. . "let us be imitators of them who in goat skins and sheep skins went about proclaiming the coming of christ" (ch. xvii). heb. xi. . "to us who have fled for refuge to his compassions" (ch. xx.). reminiscence of heb. vii. "let us esteem those who have the rule over us." i thess. v. , ; heb. xiii. . "not by preferring one to another." tim. v. . "a future resurrection, of which he has rendered the lord jesus the first fruits by raising him from the dead" (ch. xxiv.). cor. xv. ; col. i. . "nothing is impossible with god except to lie" (ch. xxvii.). tit. i. ; heb. vi. . "from whom [jacob] was descended our lord jesus christ according to the flesh" (ch. xxxii.). rom. ix. . "for [scripture] saith, 'eye hath not seen,'" &c. (ch. xxxiv.). cor. ii. . "not only they that do them, but also those that take pleasure in them that do them" (ch. xxxv.). rom. i. . ch. xxxvi. contains distinct reference to heb. i. i gave an extract above. "let us take our body for an example. the head is nothing without the feet ... yea, the very smallest members of our body are necessary and useful" (ch. xxxvii.), corinth. xii. , &c. "let every one be subject to his neighbour according to the special gift bestowed upon him" ([greek: kathôs kai etethê en tô charismati autou]) (ch. xxxviii.). rom. xii. - ; ephes. iv. - . "the blessed moses, also, 'a faithful servant in all his house'" (ch. xliii.). heb. iii. . "have we not all one god and one christ? is there not one spirit of grace poured upon us? have we not one calling in christ?" (ch. xlvi.). ephes. iv. - . "and have reached such a height of madness as to forget that we are members one of another" (ch. xlvi.). rom. xii. . "love beareth all things ... is long suffering in all things" (ch. xlix.). cor. xiii. . [ : ] one is in amazement when one reads, in the work of a man who professes to have such a love of truth, the words, "the fact is, that we have absolutely no contemporaneous history at all as to what the first promulgators of christianity actually asserted" (vol. i. p. ). this writer, as far as i remember, gives us no reason to believe that he doubts the authenticity of st. paul's earlier epistles. again, what is "contemporary history?" surely, if a man was now to write the history of the crimean war in - , it would be a contemporary history. [ : ] celsus, for instance, who had been some time dead when origen refuted him, knew no other account than the one which he calumniated; josephus the jew knew no other, trypho suggests no counter story. the wild exaggerations of the heretics refuted by irenaeus all presupposed the one narrative, and can have had no other basis. the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde the preface the artist is the creator of beautiful things. to reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. the critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. the highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. this is a fault. those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. for these there is hope. they are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. books are well written, or badly written. that is all. the nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of caliban seeing his own face in a glass. the nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. the moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. no artist desires to prove anything. even things that are true can be proved. no artist has ethical sympathies. an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. no artist is ever morbid. the artist can express everything. thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. from the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. from the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. all art is at once surface and symbol. those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. those who read the symbol do so at their peril. it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. when critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. we can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. the only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. all art is quite useless. oscar wilde chapter the studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. from the corner of the divan of persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, lord henry wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. the sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. the dim roar of london was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. in the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, basil hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures. as the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. but he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. "it is your best work, basil, the best thing you have ever done," said lord henry languidly. "you must certainly send it next year to the grosvenor. the academy is too large and too vulgar. whenever i have gone there, there have been either so many people that i have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that i have not been able to see the people, which was worse. the grosvenor is really the only place." "i don't think i shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at oxford. "no, i won't send it anywhere." lord henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. "not send it anywhere? my dear fellow, why? have you any reason? what odd chaps you painters are! you do anything in the world to gain a reputation. as soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. it is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. a portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in england, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion." "i know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but i really can't exhibit it. i have put too much of myself into it." lord henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed. "yes, i knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same." "too much of yourself in it! upon my word, basil, i didn't know you were so vain; and i really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. why, my dear basil, he is a narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. but beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. the moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. how perfectly hideous they are! except, of course, in the church. but then in the church they don't think. a bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. i feel quite sure of that. he is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. don't flatter yourself, basil: you are not in the least like him." "you don't understand me, harry," answered the artist. "of course i am not like him. i know that perfectly well. indeed, i should be sorry to look like him. you shrug your shoulders? i am telling you the truth. there is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. it is better not to be different from one's fellows. the ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. they can sit at their ease and gape at the play. if they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. they live as we all should live--undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. they neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. your rank and wealth, harry; my brains, such as they are--my art, whatever it may be worth; dorian gray's good looks--we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly." "dorian gray? is that his name?" asked lord henry, walking across the studio towards basil hallward. "yes, that is his name. i didn't intend to tell it to you." "but why not?" "oh, i can't explain. when i like people immensely, i never tell their names to any one. it is like surrendering a part of them. i have grown to love secrecy. it seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. the commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. when i leave town now i never tell my people where i am going. if i did, i would lose all my pleasure. it is a silly habit, i dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. i suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?" "not at all," answered lord henry, "not at all, my dear basil. you seem to forget that i am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. i never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what i am doing. when we meet--we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the duke's--we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. my wife is very good at it--much better, in fact, than i am. she never gets confused over her dates, and i always do. but when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. i sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me." "i hate the way you talk about your married life, harry," said basil hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. "i believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. you are an extraordinary fellow. you never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. your cynicism is simply a pose." "being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose i know," cried lord henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the garden together and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that stood in the shade of a tall laurel bush. the sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. in the grass, white daisies were tremulous. after a pause, lord henry pulled out his watch. "i am afraid i must be going, basil," he murmured, "and before i go, i insist on your answering a question i put to you some time ago." "what is that?" said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground. "you know quite well." "i do not, harry." "well, i will tell you what it is. i want you to explain to me why you won't exhibit dorian gray's picture. i want the real reason." "i told you the real reason." "no, you did not. you said it was because there was too much of yourself in it. now, that is childish." "harry," said basil hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. it is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. the reason i will not exhibit this picture is that i am afraid that i have shown in it the secret of my own soul." lord henry laughed. "and what is that?" he asked. "i will tell you," said hallward; but an expression of perplexity came over his face. "i am all expectation, basil," continued his companion, glancing at him. "oh, there is really very little to tell, harry," answered the painter; "and i am afraid you will hardly understand it. perhaps you will hardly believe it." lord henry smiled, and leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy from the grass and examined it. "i am quite sure i shall understand it," he replied, gazing intently at the little golden, white-feathered disk, "and as for believing things, i can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible." the wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. a grasshopper began to chirrup by the wall, and like a blue thread a long thin dragon-fly floated past on its brown gauze wings. lord henry felt as if he could hear basil hallward's heart beating, and wondered what was coming. "the story is simply this," said the painter after some time. "two months ago i went to a crush at lady brandon's. you know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. with an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. well, after i had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious academicians, i suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me. i turned half-way round and saw dorian gray for the first time. when our eyes met, i felt that i was growing pale. a curious sensation of terror came over me. i knew that i had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if i allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. i did not want any external influence in my life. you know yourself, harry, how independent i am by nature. i have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till i met dorian gray. then--but i don't know how to explain it to you. something seemed to tell me that i was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life. i had a strange feeling that fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. i grew afraid and turned to quit the room. it was not conscience that made me do so: it was a sort of cowardice. i take no credit to myself for trying to escape." "conscience and cowardice are really the same things, basil. conscience is the trade-name of the firm. that is all." "i don't believe that, harry, and i don't believe you do either. however, whatever was my motive--and it may have been pride, for i used to be very proud--i certainly struggled to the door. there, of course, i stumbled against lady brandon. 'you are not going to run away so soon, mr. hallward?' she screamed out. you know her curiously shrill voice?" "yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said lord henry, pulling the daisy to bits with his long nervous fingers. "i could not get rid of her. she brought me up to royalties, and people with stars and garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and parrot noses. she spoke of me as her dearest friend. i had only met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me. i believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. suddenly i found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. we were quite close, almost touching. our eyes met again. it was reckless of me, but i asked lady brandon to introduce me to him. perhaps it was not so reckless, after all. it was simply inevitable. we would have spoken to each other without any introduction. i am sure of that. dorian told me so afterwards. he, too, felt that we were destined to know each other." "and how did lady brandon describe this wonderful young man?" asked his companion. "i know she goes in for giving a rapid _precis_ of all her guests. i remember her bringing me up to a truculent and red-faced old gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to everybody in the room, the most astounding details. i simply fled. i like to find out people for myself. but lady brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. she either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one wants to know." "poor lady brandon! you are hard on her, harry!" said hallward listlessly. "my dear fellow, she tried to found a _salon_, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant. how could i admire her? but tell me, what did she say about mr. dorian gray?" "oh, something like, 'charming boy--poor dear mother and i absolutely inseparable. quite forget what he does--afraid he--doesn't do anything--oh, yes, plays the piano--or is it the violin, dear mr. gray?' neither of us could help laughing, and we became friends at once." "laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one," said the young lord, plucking another daisy. hallward shook his head. "you don't understand what friendship is, harry," he murmured--"or what enmity is, for that matter. you like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one." "how horribly unjust of you!" cried lord henry, tilting his hat back and looking up at the little clouds that, like ravelled skeins of glossy white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the summer sky. "yes; horribly unjust of you. i make a great difference between people. i choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. i have not got one who is a fool. they are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. is that very vain of me? i think it is rather vain." "i should think it was, harry. but according to your category i must be merely an acquaintance." "my dear old basil, you are much more than an acquaintance." "and much less than a friend. a sort of brother, i suppose?" "oh, brothers! i don't care for brothers. my elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else." "harry!" exclaimed hallward, frowning. "my dear fellow, i am not quite serious. but i can't help detesting my relations. i suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. i quite sympathize with the rage of the english democracy against what they call the vices of the upper orders. the masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself, he is poaching on their preserves. when poor southwark got into the divorce court, their indignation was quite magnificent. and yet i don't suppose that ten per cent of the proletariat live correctly." "i don't agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is more, harry, i feel sure you don't either." lord henry stroked his pointed brown beard and tapped the toe of his patent-leather boot with a tasselled ebony cane. "how english you are basil! that is the second time you have made that observation. if one puts forward an idea to a true englishman--always a rash thing to do--he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. the only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself. now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. however, i don't propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. i like persons better than principles, and i like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. tell me more about mr. dorian gray. how often do you see him?" "every day. i couldn't be happy if i didn't see him every day. he is absolutely necessary to me." "how extraordinary! i thought you would never care for anything but your art." "he is all my art to me now," said the painter gravely. "i sometimes think, harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world's history. the first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. what the invention of oil-painting was to the venetians, the face of antinous was to late greek sculpture, and the face of dorian gray will some day be to me. it is not merely that i paint from him, draw from him, sketch from him. of course, i have done all that. but he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. i won't tell you that i am dissatisfied with what i have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. there is nothing that art cannot express, and i know that the work i have done, since i met dorian gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. but in some curious way--i wonder will you understand me?--his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. i see things differently, i think of them differently. i can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before. 'a dream of form in days of thought'--who is it who says that? i forget; but it is what dorian gray has been to me. the merely visible presence of this lad--for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty--his merely visible presence--ah! i wonder can you realize all that that means? unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is greek. the harmony of soul and body--how much that is! we in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. harry! if you only knew what dorian gray is to me! you remember that landscape of mine, for which agnew offered me such a huge price but which i would not part with? it is one of the best things i have ever done. and why is it so? because, while i was painting it, dorian gray sat beside me. some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life i saw in the plain woodland the wonder i had always looked for and always missed." "basil, this is extraordinary! i must see dorian gray." hallward got up from the seat and walked up and down the garden. after some time he came back. "harry," he said, "dorian gray is to me simply a motive in art. you might see nothing in him. i see everything in him. he is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. he is a suggestion, as i have said, of a new manner. i find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours. that is all." "then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" asked lord henry. "because, without intending it, i have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, i have never cared to speak to him. he knows nothing about it. he shall never know anything about it. but the world might guess it, and i will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. my heart shall never be put under their microscope. there is too much of myself in the thing, harry--too much of myself!" "poets are not so scrupulous as you are. they know how useful passion is for publication. nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "i hate them for it," cried hallward. "an artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. we live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. we have lost the abstract sense of beauty. some day i will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of dorian gray." "i think you are wrong, basil, but i won't argue with you. it is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. tell me, is dorian gray very fond of you?" the painter considered for a few moments. "he likes me," he answered after a pause; "i know he likes me. of course i flatter him dreadfully. i find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that i know i shall be sorry for having said. as a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. then i feel, harry, that i have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day." "days in summer, basil, are apt to linger," murmured lord henry. "perhaps you will tire sooner than he will. it is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. that accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. in the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. the thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. and the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. it is like a _bric-a-brac_ shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. i think you will tire first, all the same. some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something. you will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. the next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. it will be a great pity, for it will alter you. what you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic." "harry, don't talk like that. as long as i live, the personality of dorian gray will dominate me. you can't feel what i feel. you change too often." "ah, my dear basil, that is exactly why i can feel it. those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies." and lord henry struck a light on a dainty silver case and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and satisfied air, as if he had summed up the world in a phrase. there was a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like swallows. how pleasant it was in the garden! and how delightful other people's emotions were!--much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. one's own soul, and the passions of one's friends--those were the fascinating things in life. he pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with basil hallward. had he gone to his aunt's, he would have been sure to have met lord goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the necessity for model lodging-houses. each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. the rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. it was charming to have escaped all that! as he thought of his aunt, an idea seemed to strike him. he turned to hallward and said, "my dear fellow, i have just remembered." "remembered what, harry?" "where i heard the name of dorian gray." "where was it?" asked hallward, with a slight frown. "don't look so angry, basil. it was at my aunt, lady agatha's. she told me she had discovered a wonderful young man who was going to help her in the east end, and that his name was dorian gray. i am bound to state that she never told me he was good-looking. women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not. she said that he was very earnest and had a beautiful nature. i at once pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair, horribly freckled, and tramping about on huge feet. i wish i had known it was your friend." "i am very glad you didn't, harry." "why?" "i don't want you to meet him." "you don't want me to meet him?" "no." "mr. dorian gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler, coming into the garden. "you must introduce me now," cried lord henry, laughing. the painter turned to his servant, who stood blinking in the sunlight. "ask mr. gray to wait, parker: i shall be in in a few moments." the man bowed and went up the walk. then he looked at lord henry. "dorian gray is my dearest friend," he said. "he has a simple and a beautiful nature. your aunt was quite right in what she said of him. don't spoil him. don't try to influence him. your influence would be bad. the world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him. mind, harry, i trust you." he spoke very slowly, and the words seemed wrung out of him almost against his will. "what nonsense you talk!" said lord henry, smiling, and taking hallward by the arm, he almost led him into the house. chapter as they entered they saw dorian gray. he was seated at the piano, with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of schumann's "forest scenes." "you must lend me these, basil," he cried. "i want to learn them. they are perfectly charming." "that entirely depends on how you sit to-day, dorian." "oh, i am tired of sitting, and i don't want a life-sized portrait of myself," answered the lad, swinging round on the music-stool in a wilful, petulant manner. when he caught sight of lord henry, a faint blush coloured his cheeks for a moment, and he started up. "i beg your pardon, basil, but i didn't know you had any one with you." "this is lord henry wotton, dorian, an old oxford friend of mine. i have just been telling him what a capital sitter you were, and now you have spoiled everything." "you have not spoiled my pleasure in meeting you, mr. gray," said lord henry, stepping forward and extending his hand. "my aunt has often spoken to me about you. you are one of her favourites, and, i am afraid, one of her victims also." "i am in lady agatha's black books at present," answered dorian with a funny look of penitence. "i promised to go to a club in whitechapel with her last tuesday, and i really forgot all about it. we were to have played a duet together--three duets, i believe. i don't know what she will say to me. i am far too frightened to call." "oh, i will make your peace with my aunt. she is quite devoted to you. and i don't think it really matters about your not being there. the audience probably thought it was a duet. when aunt agatha sits down to the piano, she makes quite enough noise for two people." "that is very horrid to her, and not very nice to me," answered dorian, laughing. lord henry looked at him. yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. there was something in his face that made one trust him at once. all the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity. one felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. no wonder basil hallward worshipped him. "you are too charming to go in for philanthropy, mr. gray--far too charming." and lord henry flung himself down on the divan and opened his cigarette-case. the painter had been busy mixing his colours and getting his brushes ready. he was looking worried, and when he heard lord henry's last remark, he glanced at him, hesitated for a moment, and then said, "harry, i want to finish this picture to-day. would you think it awfully rude of me if i asked you to go away?" lord henry smiled and looked at dorian gray. "am i to go, mr. gray?" he asked. "oh, please don't, lord henry. i see that basil is in one of his sulky moods, and i can't bear him when he sulks. besides, i want you to tell me why i should not go in for philanthropy." "i don't know that i shall tell you that, mr. gray. it is so tedious a subject that one would have to talk seriously about it. but i certainly shall not run away, now that you have asked me to stop. you don't really mind, basil, do you? you have often told me that you liked your sitters to have some one to chat to." hallward bit his lip. "if dorian wishes it, of course you must stay. dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself." lord henry took up his hat and gloves. "you are very pressing, basil, but i am afraid i must go. i have promised to meet a man at the orleans. good-bye, mr. gray. come and see me some afternoon in curzon street. i am nearly always at home at five o'clock. write to me when you are coming. i should be sorry to miss you." "basil," cried dorian gray, "if lord henry wotton goes, i shall go, too. you never open your lips while you are painting, and it is horribly dull standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant. ask him to stay. i insist upon it." "stay, harry, to oblige dorian, and to oblige me," said hallward, gazing intently at his picture. "it is quite true, i never talk when i am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully tedious for my unfortunate sitters. i beg you to stay." "but what about my man at the orleans?" the painter laughed. "i don't think there will be any difficulty about that. sit down again, harry. and now, dorian, get up on the platform, and don't move about too much, or pay any attention to what lord henry says. he has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the single exception of myself." dorian gray stepped up on the dais with the air of a young greek martyr, and made a little _moue_ of discontent to lord henry, to whom he had rather taken a fancy. he was so unlike basil. they made a delightful contrast. and he had such a beautiful voice. after a few moments he said to him, "have you really a very bad influence, lord henry? as bad as basil says?" "there is no such thing as a good influence, mr. gray. all influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view." "why?" "because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. he does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. his virtues are not real to him. his sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. he becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. the aim of life is self-development. to realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. people are afraid of themselves, nowadays. they have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. of course, they are charitable. they feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. but their own souls starve, and are naked. courage has gone out of our race. perhaps we never really had it. the terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of god, which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us. and yet--" "just turn your head a little more to the right, dorian, like a good boy," said the painter, deep in his work and conscious only that a look had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before. "and yet," continued lord henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his eton days, "i believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--i believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the hellenic ideal--to something finer, richer than the hellenic ideal, it may be. but the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. the mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. we are punished for our refusals. every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. the body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. it has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. it is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. you, mr. gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame--" "stop!" faltered dorian gray, "stop! you bewilder me. i don't know what to say. there is some answer to you, but i cannot find it. don't speak. let me think. or, rather, let me try not to think." for nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted lips and eyes strangely bright. he was dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. the few words that basil's friend had said to him--words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in them--had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. music had stirred him like that. music had troubled him many times. but music was not articulate. it was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. words! mere words! how terrible they were! how clear, and vivid, and cruel! one could not escape from them. and yet what a subtle magic there was in them! they seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. mere words! was there anything so real as words? yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. he understood them now. life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him. it seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. why had he not known it? with his subtle smile, lord henry watched him. he knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing. he felt intensely interested. he was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen, a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he wondered whether dorian gray was passing through a similar experience. he had merely shot an arrow into the air. had it hit the mark? how fascinating the lad was! hallward painted away with that marvellous bold touch of his, that had the true refinement and perfect delicacy that in art, at any rate comes only from strength. he was unconscious of the silence. "basil, i am tired of standing," cried dorian gray suddenly. "i must go out and sit in the garden. the air is stifling here." "my dear fellow, i am so sorry. when i am painting, i can't think of anything else. but you never sat better. you were perfectly still. and i have caught the effect i wanted--the half-parted lips and the bright look in the eyes. i don't know what harry has been saying to you, but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression. i suppose he has been paying you compliments. you mustn't believe a word that he says." "he has certainly not been paying me compliments. perhaps that is the reason that i don't believe anything he has told me." "you know you believe it all," said lord henry, looking at him with his dreamy languorous eyes. "i will go out to the garden with you. it is horribly hot in the studio. basil, let us have something iced to drink, something with strawberries in it." "certainly, harry. just touch the bell, and when parker comes i will tell him what you want. i have got to work up this background, so i will join you later on. don't keep dorian too long. i have never been in better form for painting than i am to-day. this is going to be my masterpiece. it is my masterpiece as it stands." lord henry went out to the garden and found dorian gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. he came close to him and put his hand upon his shoulder. "you are quite right to do that," he murmured. "nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." the lad started and drew back. he was bareheaded, and the leaves had tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded threads. there was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are suddenly awakened. his finely chiselled nostrils quivered, and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling. "yes," continued lord henry, "that is one of the great secrets of life--to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. you are a wonderful creation. you know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know." dorian gray frowned and turned his head away. he could not help liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. his romantic, olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him. there was something in his low languid voice that was absolutely fascinating. his cool, white, flowerlike hands, even, had a curious charm. they moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their own. but he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid. why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? he had known basil hallward for months, but the friendship between them had never altered him. suddenly there had come some one across his life who seemed to have disclosed to him life's mystery. and, yet, what was there to be afraid of? he was not a schoolboy or a girl. it was absurd to be frightened. "let us go and sit in the shade," said lord henry. "parker has brought out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare, you will be quite spoiled, and basil will never paint you again. you really must not allow yourself to become sunburnt. it would be unbecoming." "what can it matter?" cried dorian gray, laughing, as he sat down on the seat at the end of the garden. "it should matter everything to you, mr. gray." "why?" "because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having." "i don't feel that, lord henry." "no, you don't feel it now. some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. now, wherever you go, you charm the world. will it always be so? ... you have a wonderfully beautiful face, mr. gray. don't frown. you have. and beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. it is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. it cannot be questioned. it has its divine right of sovereignty. it makes princes of those who have it. you smile? ah! when you have lost it you won't smile.... people say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. that may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. to me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.... yes, mr. gray, the gods have been good to you. but what the gods give they quickly take away. you have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. when your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. you will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. you will suffer horribly.... ah! realize your youth while you have it. don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. these are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. live! live the wonderful life that is in you! let nothing be lost upon you. be always searching for new sensations. be afraid of nothing.... a new hedonism--that is what our century wants. you might be its visible symbol. with your personality there is nothing you could not do. the world belongs to you for a season.... the moment i met you i saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. there was so much in you that charmed me that i felt i must tell you something about yourself. i thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. for there is such a little time that your youth will last--such a little time. the common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. the laburnum will be as yellow next june as it is now. in a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. but we never get back our youth. the pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. our limbs fail, our senses rot. we degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. youth! youth! there is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!" dorian gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. the spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. a furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. he watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. after a time the bee flew away. he saw it creeping into the stained trumpet of a tyrian convolvulus. the flower seemed to quiver, and then swayed gently to and fro. suddenly the painter appeared at the door of the studio and made staccato signs for them to come in. they turned to each other and smiled. "i am waiting," he cried. "do come in. the light is quite perfect, and you can bring your drinks." they rose up and sauntered down the walk together. two green-and-white butterflies fluttered past them, and in the pear-tree at the corner of the garden a thrush began to sing. "you are glad you have met me, mr. gray," said lord henry, looking at him. "yes, i am glad now. i wonder shall i always be glad?" "always! that is a dreadful word. it makes me shudder when i hear it. women are so fond of using it. they spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. it is a meaningless word, too. the only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer." as they entered the studio, dorian gray put his hand upon lord henry's arm. "in that case, let our friendship be a caprice," he murmured, flushing at his own boldness, then stepped up on the platform and resumed his pose. lord henry flung himself into a large wicker arm-chair and watched him. the sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas made the only sound that broke the stillness, except when, now and then, hallward stepped back to look at his work from a distance. in the slanting beams that streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden. the heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything. after about a quarter of an hour hallward stopped painting, looked for a long time at dorian gray, and then for a long time at the picture, biting the end of one of his huge brushes and frowning. "it is quite finished," he cried at last, and stooping down he wrote his name in long vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of the canvas. lord henry came over and examined the picture. it was certainly a wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well. "my dear fellow, i congratulate you most warmly," he said. "it is the finest portrait of modern times. mr. gray, come over and look at yourself." the lad started, as if awakened from some dream. "is it really finished?" he murmured, stepping down from the platform. "quite finished," said the painter. "and you have sat splendidly to-day. i am awfully obliged to you." "that is entirely due to me," broke in lord henry. "isn't it, mr. gray?" dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture and turned towards it. when he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. a look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. he stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. the sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. he had never felt it before. basil hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be merely the charming exaggeration of friendship. he had listened to them, laughed at them, forgotten them. they had not influenced his nature. then had come lord henry wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity. that had stirred him at the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him. yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. the scarlet would pass away from his lips and the gold steal from his hair. the life that was to make his soul would mar his body. he would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth. as he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a knife and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. his eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. he felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart. "don't you like it?" cried hallward at last, stung a little by the lad's silence, not understanding what it meant. "of course he likes it," said lord henry. "who wouldn't like it? it is one of the greatest things in modern art. i will give you anything you like to ask for it. i must have it." "it is not my property, harry." "whose property is it?" "dorian's, of course," answered the painter. "he is a very lucky fellow." "how sad it is!" murmured dorian gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "how sad it is! i shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. but this picture will remain always young. it will never be older than this particular day of june.... if it were only the other way! if it were i who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! for that--for that--i would give everything! yes, there is nothing in the whole world i would not give! i would give my soul for that!" "you would hardly care for such an arrangement, basil," cried lord henry, laughing. "it would be rather hard lines on your work." "i should object very strongly, harry," said hallward. dorian gray turned and looked at him. "i believe you would, basil. you like your art better than your friends. i am no more to you than a green bronze figure. hardly as much, i dare say." the painter stared in amazement. it was so unlike dorian to speak like that. what had happened? he seemed quite angry. his face was flushed and his cheeks burning. "yes," he continued, "i am less to you than your ivory hermes or your silver faun. you will like them always. how long will you like me? till i have my first wrinkle, i suppose. i know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. your picture has taught me that. lord henry wotton is perfectly right. youth is the only thing worth having. when i find that i am growing old, i shall kill myself." hallward turned pale and caught his hand. "dorian! dorian!" he cried, "don't talk like that. i have never had such a friend as you, and i shall never have such another. you are not jealous of material things, are you?--you who are finer than any of them!" "i am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. i am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. why should it keep what i must lose? every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. oh, if it were only the other way! if the picture could change, and i could be always what i am now! why did you paint it? it will mock me some day--mock me horribly!" the hot tears welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying. "this is your doing, harry," said the painter bitterly. lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "it is the real dorian gray--that is all." "it is not." "if it is not, what have i to do with it?" "you should have gone away when i asked you," he muttered. "i stayed when you asked me," was lord henry's answer. "harry, i can't quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work i have ever done, and i will destroy it. what is it but canvas and colour? i will not let it come across our three lives and mar them." dorian gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with pallid face and tear-stained eyes, looked at him as he walked over to the deal painting-table that was set beneath the high curtained window. what was he doing there? his fingers were straying about among the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something. yes, it was for the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel. he had found it at last. he was going to rip up the canvas. with a stifled sob the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end of the studio. "don't, basil, don't!" he cried. "it would be murder!" "i am glad you appreciate my work at last, dorian," said the painter coldly when he had recovered from his surprise. "i never thought you would." "appreciate it? i am in love with it, basil. it is part of myself. i feel that." "well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and sent home. then you can do what you like with yourself." and he walked across the room and rang the bell for tea. "you will have tea, of course, dorian? and so will you, harry? or do you object to such simple pleasures?" "i adore simple pleasures," said lord henry. "they are the last refuge of the complex. but i don't like scenes, except on the stage. what absurd fellows you are, both of you! i wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. it was the most premature definition ever given. man is many things, but he is not rational. i am glad he is not, after all--though i wish you chaps would not squabble over the picture. you had much better let me have it, basil. this silly boy doesn't really want it, and i really do." "if you let any one have it but me, basil, i shall never forgive you!" cried dorian gray; "and i don't allow people to call me a silly boy." "you know the picture is yours, dorian. i gave it to you before it existed." "and you know you have been a little silly, mr. gray, and that you don't really object to being reminded that you are extremely young." "i should have objected very strongly this morning, lord henry." "ah! this morning! you have lived since then." there came a knock at the door, and the butler entered with a laden tea-tray and set it down upon a small japanese table. there was a rattle of cups and saucers and the hissing of a fluted georgian urn. two globe-shaped china dishes were brought in by a page. dorian gray went over and poured out the tea. the two men sauntered languidly to the table and examined what was under the covers. "let us go to the theatre to-night," said lord henry. "there is sure to be something on, somewhere. i have promised to dine at white's, but it is only with an old friend, so i can send him a wire to say that i am ill, or that i am prevented from coming in consequence of a subsequent engagement. i think that would be a rather nice excuse: it would have all the surprise of candour." "it is such a bore putting on one's dress-clothes," muttered hallward. "and, when one has them on, they are so horrid." "yes," answered lord henry dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. it is so sombre, so depressing. sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life." "you really must not say things like that before dorian, harry." "before which dorian? the one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?" "before either." "i should like to come to the theatre with you, lord henry," said the lad. "then you shall come; and you will come, too, basil, won't you?" "i can't, really. i would sooner not. i have a lot of work to do." "well, then, you and i will go alone, mr. gray." "i should like that awfully." the painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. "i shall stay with the real dorian," he said, sadly. "is it the real dorian?" cried the original of the portrait, strolling across to him. "am i really like that?" "yes; you are just like that." "how wonderful, basil!" "at least you are like it in appearance. but it will never alter," sighed hallward. "that is something." "what a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed lord henry. "why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. it has nothing to do with our own will. young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say." "don't go to the theatre to-night, dorian," said hallward. "stop and dine with me." "i can't, basil." "why?" "because i have promised lord henry wotton to go with him." "he won't like you the better for keeping your promises. he always breaks his own. i beg you not to go." dorian gray laughed and shook his head. "i entreat you." the lad hesitated, and looked over at lord henry, who was watching them from the tea-table with an amused smile. "i must go, basil," he answered. "very well," said hallward, and he went over and laid down his cup on the tray. "it is rather late, and, as you have to dress, you had better lose no time. good-bye, harry. good-bye, dorian. come and see me soon. come to-morrow." "certainly." "you won't forget?" "no, of course not," cried dorian. "and ... harry!" "yes, basil?" "remember what i asked you, when we were in the garden this morning." "i have forgotten it." "i trust you." "i wish i could trust myself," said lord henry, laughing. "come, mr. gray, my hansom is outside, and i can drop you at your own place. good-bye, basil. it has been a most interesting afternoon." as the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face. chapter at half-past twelve next day lord henry wotton strolled from curzon street over to the albany to call on his uncle, lord fermor, a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by society as he fed the people who amused him. his father had been our ambassador at madrid when isabella was young and prim unthought of, but had retired from the diplomatic service in a capricious moment of annoyance on not being offered the embassy at paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good english of his dispatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure. the son, who had been his father's secretary, had resigned along with his chief, somewhat foolishly as was thought at the time, and on succeeding some months later to the title, had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. he had two large town houses, but preferred to live in chambers as it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at his club. he paid some attention to the management of his collieries in the midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth. in politics he was a tory, except when the tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of radicals. he was a hero to his valet, who bullied him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn. only england could have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to the dogs. his principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices. when lord henry entered the room, he found his uncle sitting in a rough shooting-coat, smoking a cheroot and grumbling over _the times_. "well, harry," said the old gentleman, "what brings you out so early? i thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible till five." "pure family affection, i assure you, uncle george. i want to get something out of you." "money, i suppose," said lord fermor, making a wry face. "well, sit down and tell me all about it. young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything." "yes," murmured lord henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; "and when they grow older they know it. but i don't want money. it is only people who pay their bills who want that, uncle george, and i never pay mine. credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly upon it. besides, i always deal with dartmoor's tradesmen, and consequently they never bother me. what i want is information: not useful information, of course; useless information." "well, i can tell you anything that is in an english blue book, harry, although those fellows nowadays write a lot of nonsense. when i was in the diplomatic, things were much better. but i hear they let them in now by examination. what can you expect? examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. if a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him." "mr. dorian gray does not belong to blue books, uncle george," said lord henry languidly. "mr. dorian gray? who is he?" asked lord fermor, knitting his bushy white eyebrows. "that is what i have come to learn, uncle george. or rather, i know who he is. he is the last lord kelso's grandson. his mother was a devereux, lady margaret devereux. i want you to tell me about his mother. what was she like? whom did she marry? you have known nearly everybody in your time, so you might have known her. i am very much interested in mr. gray at present. i have only just met him." "kelso's grandson!" echoed the old gentleman. "kelso's grandson! ... of course.... i knew his mother intimately. i believe i was at her christening. she was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, margaret devereux, and made all the men frantic by running away with a penniless young fellow--a mere nobody, sir, a subaltern in a foot regiment, or something of that kind. certainly. i remember the whole thing as if it happened yesterday. the poor chap was killed in a duel at spa a few months after the marriage. there was an ugly story about it. they said kelso got some rascally adventurer, some belgian brute, to insult his son-in-law in public--paid him, sir, to do it, paid him--and that the fellow spitted his man as if he had been a pigeon. the thing was hushed up, but, egad, kelso ate his chop alone at the club for some time afterwards. he brought his daughter back with him, i was told, and she never spoke to him again. oh, yes; it was a bad business. the girl died, too, died within a year. so she left a son, did she? i had forgotten that. what sort of boy is he? if he is like his mother, he must be a good-looking chap." "he is very good-looking," assented lord henry. "i hope he will fall into proper hands," continued the old man. "he should have a pot of money waiting for him if kelso did the right thing by him. his mother had money, too. all the selby property came to her, through her grandfather. her grandfather hated kelso, thought him a mean dog. he was, too. came to madrid once when i was there. egad, i was ashamed of him. the queen used to ask me about the english noble who was always quarrelling with the cabmen about their fares. they made quite a story of it. i didn't dare show my face at court for a month. i hope he treated his grandson better than he did the jarvies." "i don't know," answered lord henry. "i fancy that the boy will be well off. he is not of age yet. he has selby, i know. he told me so. and ... his mother was very beautiful?" "margaret devereux was one of the loveliest creatures i ever saw, harry. what on earth induced her to behave as she did, i never could understand. she could have married anybody she chose. carlington was mad after her. she was romantic, though. all the women of that family were. the men were a poor lot, but, egad! the women were wonderful. carlington went on his knees to her. told me so himself. she laughed at him, and there wasn't a girl in london at the time who wasn't after him. and by the way, harry, talking about silly marriages, what is this humbug your father tells me about dartmoor wanting to marry an american? ain't english girls good enough for him?" "it is rather fashionable to marry americans just now, uncle george." "i'll back english women against the world, harry," said lord fermor, striking the table with his fist. "the betting is on the americans." "they don't last, i am told," muttered his uncle. "a long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a steeplechase. they take things flying. i don't think dartmoor has a chance." "who are her people?" grumbled the old gentleman. "has she got any?" lord henry shook his head. "american girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as english women are at concealing their past," he said, rising to go. "they are pork-packers, i suppose?" "i hope so, uncle george, for dartmoor's sake. i am told that pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in america, after politics." "is she pretty?" "she behaves as if she was beautiful. most american women do. it is the secret of their charm." "why can't these american women stay in their own country? they are always telling us that it is the paradise for women." "it is. that is the reason why, like eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it," said lord henry. "good-bye, uncle george. i shall be late for lunch, if i stop any longer. thanks for giving me the information i wanted. i always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones." "where are you lunching, harry?" "at aunt agatha's. i have asked myself and mr. gray. he is her latest _protege_." "humph! tell your aunt agatha, harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals. i am sick of them. why, the good woman thinks that i have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads." "all right, uncle george, i'll tell her, but it won't have any effect. philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. it is their distinguishing characteristic." the old gentleman growled approvingly and rang the bell for his servant. lord henry passed up the low arcade into burlington street and turned his steps in the direction of berkeley square. so that was the story of dorian gray's parentage. crudely as it had been told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance. a beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. a few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. the mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. yes; it was an interesting background. it posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it were. behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow.... and how charming he had been at dinner the night before, as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. he answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.... there was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. no other activity was like it. to project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.... he was a marvellous type, too, this lad, whom by so curious a chance he had met in basil's studio, or could be fashioned into a marvellous type, at any rate. grace was his, and the white purity of boyhood, and beauty such as old greek marbles kept for us. there was nothing that one could not do with him. he could be made a titan or a toy. what a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade! ... and basil? from a psychological point of view, how interesting he was! the new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was! he remembered something like it in history. was it not plato, that artist in thought, who had first analyzed it? was it not buonarotti who had carved it in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence? but in our own century it was strange.... yes; he would try to be to dorian gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. he would seek to dominate him--had already, indeed, half done so. he would make that wonderful spirit his own. there was something fascinating in this son of love and death. suddenly he stopped and glanced up at the houses. he found that he had passed his aunt's some distance, and, smiling to himself, turned back. when he entered the somewhat sombre hall, the butler told him that they had gone in to lunch. he gave one of the footmen his hat and stick and passed into the dining-room. "late as usual, harry," cried his aunt, shaking her head at him. he invented a facile excuse, and having taken the vacant seat next to her, looked round to see who was there. dorian bowed to him shyly from the end of the table, a flush of pleasure stealing into his cheek. opposite was the duchess of harley, a lady of admirable good-nature and good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and of those ample architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses are described by contemporary historians as stoutness. next to her sat, on her right, sir thomas burdon, a radical member of parliament, who followed his leader in public life and in private life followed the best cooks, dining with the tories and thinking with the liberals, in accordance with a wise and well-known rule. the post on her left was occupied by mr. erskine of treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to lady agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty. his own neighbour was mrs. vandeleur, one of his aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book. fortunately for him she had on the other side lord faudel, a most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a ministerial statement in the house of commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of them ever quite escape. "we are talking about poor dartmoor, lord henry," cried the duchess, nodding pleasantly to him across the table. "do you think he will really marry this fascinating young person?" "i believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, duchess." "how dreadful!" exclaimed lady agatha. "really, some one should interfere." "i am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an american dry-goods store," said sir thomas burdon, looking supercilious. "my uncle has already suggested pork-packing, sir thomas." "dry-goods! what are american dry-goods?" asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. "american novels," answered lord henry, helping himself to some quail. the duchess looked puzzled. "don't mind him, my dear," whispered lady agatha. "he never means anything that he says." "when america was discovered," said the radical member--and he began to give some wearisome facts. like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners. the duchess sighed and exercised her privilege of interruption. "i wish to goodness it never had been discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "really, our girls have no chance nowadays. it is most unfair." "perhaps, after all, america never has been discovered," said mr. erskine; "i myself would say that it had merely been detected." "oh! but i have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the duchess vaguely. "i must confess that most of them are extremely pretty. and they dress well, too. they get all their dresses in paris. i wish i could afford to do the same." "they say that when good americans die they go to paris," chuckled sir thomas, who had a large wardrobe of humour's cast-off clothes. "really! and where do bad americans go to when they die?" inquired the duchess. "they go to america," murmured lord henry. sir thomas frowned. "i am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country," he said to lady agatha. "i have travelled all over it in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters, are extremely civil. i assure you that it is an education to visit it." "but must we really see chicago in order to be educated?" asked mr. erskine plaintively. "i don't feel up to the journey." sir thomas waved his hand. "mr. erskine of treadley has the world on his shelves. we practical men like to see things, not to read about them. the americans are an extremely interesting people. they are absolutely reasonable. i think that is their distinguishing characteristic. yes, mr. erskine, an absolutely reasonable people. i assure you there is no nonsense about the americans." "how dreadful!" cried lord henry. "i can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. there is something unfair about its use. it is hitting below the intellect." "i do not understand you," said sir thomas, growing rather red. "i do, lord henry," murmured mr. erskine, with a smile. "paradoxes are all very well in their way...." rejoined the baronet. "was that a paradox?" asked mr. erskine. "i did not think so. perhaps it was. well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. to test reality we must see it on the tight rope. when the verities become acrobats, we can judge them." "dear me!" said lady agatha, "how you men argue! i am sure i never can make out what you are talking about. oh! harry, i am quite vexed with you. why do you try to persuade our nice mr. dorian gray to give up the east end? i assure you he would be quite invaluable. they would love his playing." "i want him to play to me," cried lord henry, smiling, and he looked down the table and caught a bright answering glance. "but they are so unhappy in whitechapel," continued lady agatha. "i can sympathize with everything except suffering," said lord henry, shrugging his shoulders. "i cannot sympathize with that. it is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. there is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. one should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. the less said about life's sores, the better." "still, the east end is a very important problem," remarked sir thomas with a grave shake of the head. "quite so," answered the young lord. "it is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves." the politician looked at him keenly. "what change do you propose, then?" he asked. lord henry laughed. "i don't desire to change anything in england except the weather," he answered. "i am quite content with philosophic contemplation. but, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure of sympathy, i would suggest that we should appeal to science to put us straight. the advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional." "but we have such grave responsibilities," ventured mrs. vandeleur timidly. "terribly grave," echoed lady agatha. lord henry looked over at mr. erskine. "humanity takes itself too seriously. it is the world's original sin. if the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different." "you are really very comforting," warbled the duchess. "i have always felt rather guilty when i came to see your dear aunt, for i take no interest at all in the east end. for the future i shall be able to look her in the face without a blush." "a blush is very becoming, duchess," remarked lord henry. "only when one is young," she answered. "when an old woman like myself blushes, it is a very bad sign. ah! lord henry, i wish you would tell me how to become young again." he thought for a moment. "can you remember any great error that you committed in your early days, duchess?" he asked, looking at her across the table. "a great many, i fear," she cried. "then commit them over again," he said gravely. "to get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies." "a delightful theory!" she exclaimed. "i must put it into practice." "a dangerous theory!" came from sir thomas's tight lips. lady agatha shook her head, but could not help being amused. mr. erskine listened. "yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." a laugh ran round the table. he played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. the praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow silenus for being sober. facts fled before her like frightened forest things. her white feet trod the huge press at which wise omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. it was an extraordinary improvisation. he felt that the eyes of dorian gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination. he was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. he charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe, laughing. dorian gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes. at last, liveried in the costume of the age, reality entered the room in the shape of a servant to tell the duchess that her carriage was waiting. she wrung her hands in mock despair. "how annoying!" she cried. "i must go. i have to call for my husband at the club, to take him to some absurd meeting at willis's rooms, where he is going to be in the chair. if i am late he is sure to be furious, and i couldn't have a scene in this bonnet. it is far too fragile. a harsh word would ruin it. no, i must go, dear agatha. good-bye, lord henry, you are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing. i am sure i don't know what to say about your views. you must come and dine with us some night. tuesday? are you disengaged tuesday?" "for you i would throw over anybody, duchess," said lord henry with a bow. "ah! that is very nice, and very wrong of you," she cried; "so mind you come"; and she swept out of the room, followed by lady agatha and the other ladies. when lord henry had sat down again, mr. erskine moved round, and taking a chair close to him, placed his hand upon his arm. "you talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "i am too fond of reading books to care to write them, mr. erskine. i should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a persian carpet and as unreal. but there is no literary public in england for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. of all people in the world the english have the least sense of the beauty of literature." "i fear you are right," answered mr. erskine. "i myself used to have literary ambitions, but i gave them up long ago. and now, my dear young friend, if you will allow me to call you so, may i ask if you really meant all that you said to us at lunch?" "i quite forget what i said," smiled lord henry. "was it all very bad?" "very bad indeed. in fact i consider you extremely dangerous, and if anything happens to our good duchess, we shall all look on you as being primarily responsible. but i should like to talk to you about life. the generation into which i was born was tedious. some day, when you are tired of london, come down to treadley and expound to me your philosophy of pleasure over some admirable burgundy i am fortunate enough to possess." "i shall be charmed. a visit to treadley would be a great privilege. it has a perfect host, and a perfect library." "you will complete it," answered the old gentleman with a courteous bow. "and now i must bid good-bye to your excellent aunt. i am due at the athenaeum. it is the hour when we sleep there." "all of you, mr. erskine?" "forty of us, in forty arm-chairs. we are practising for an english academy of letters." lord henry laughed and rose. "i am going to the park," he cried. as he was passing out of the door, dorian gray touched him on the arm. "let me come with you," he murmured. "but i thought you had promised basil hallward to go and see him," answered lord henry. "i would sooner come with you; yes, i feel i must come with you. do let me. and you will promise to talk to me all the time? no one talks so wonderfully as you do." "ah! i have talked quite enough for to-day," said lord henry, smiling. "all i want now is to look at life. you may come and look at it with me, if you care to." chapter one afternoon, a month later, dorian gray was reclining in a luxurious arm-chair, in the little library of lord henry's house in mayfair. it was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high panelled wainscoting of olive-stained oak, its cream-coloured frieze and ceiling of raised plasterwork, and its brickdust felt carpet strewn with silk, long-fringed persian rugs. on a tiny satinwood table stood a statuette by clodion, and beside it lay a copy of les cent nouvelles, bound for margaret of valois by clovis eve and powdered with the gilt daisies that queen had selected for her device. some large blue china jars and parrot-tulips were ranged on the mantelshelf, and through the small leaded panes of the window streamed the apricot-coloured light of a summer day in london. lord henry had not yet come in. he was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. so the lad was looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers he turned over the pages of an elaborately illustrated edition of manon lescaut that he had found in one of the book-cases. the formal monotonous ticking of the louis quatorze clock annoyed him. once or twice he thought of going away. at last he heard a step outside, and the door opened. "how late you are, harry!" he murmured. "i am afraid it is not harry, mr. gray," answered a shrill voice. he glanced quickly round and rose to his feet. "i beg your pardon. i thought--" "you thought it was my husband. it is only his wife. you must let me introduce myself. i know you quite well by your photographs. i think my husband has got seventeen of them." "not seventeen, lady henry?" "well, eighteen, then. and i saw you with him the other night at the opera." she laughed nervously as she spoke, and watched him with her vague forget-me-not eyes. she was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. she was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. she tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. her name was victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church. "that was at lohengrin, lady henry, i think?" "yes; it was at dear lohengrin. i like wagner's music better than anybody's. it is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. that is a great advantage, don't you think so, mr. gray?" the same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips, and her fingers began to play with a long tortoise-shell paper-knife. dorian smiled and shook his head: "i am afraid i don't think so, lady henry. i never talk during music--at least, during good music. if one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation." "ah! that is one of harry's views, isn't it, mr. gray? i always hear harry's views from his friends. it is the only way i get to know of them. but you must not think i don't like good music. i adore it, but i am afraid of it. it makes me too romantic. i have simply worshipped pianists--two at a time, sometimes, harry tells me. i don't know what it is about them. perhaps it is that they are foreigners. they all are, ain't they? even those that are born in england become foreigners after a time, don't they? it is so clever of them, and such a compliment to art. makes it quite cosmopolitan, doesn't it? you have never been to any of my parties, have you, mr. gray? you must come. i can't afford orchids, but i spare no expense in foreigners. they make one's rooms look so picturesque. but here is harry! harry, i came in to look for you, to ask you something--i forget what it was--and i found mr. gray here. we have had such a pleasant chat about music. we have quite the same ideas. no; i think our ideas are quite different. but he has been most pleasant. i am so glad i've seen him." "i am charmed, my love, quite charmed," said lord henry, elevating his dark, crescent-shaped eyebrows and looking at them both with an amused smile. "so sorry i am late, dorian. i went to look after a piece of old brocade in wardour street and had to bargain for hours for it. nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing." "i am afraid i must be going," exclaimed lady henry, breaking an awkward silence with her silly sudden laugh. "i have promised to drive with the duchess. good-bye, mr. gray. good-bye, harry. you are dining out, i suppose? so am i. perhaps i shall see you at lady thornbury's." "i dare say, my dear," said lord henry, shutting the door behind her as, looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the rain, she flitted out of the room, leaving a faint odour of frangipanni. then he lit a cigarette and flung himself down on the sofa. "never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair, dorian," he said after a few puffs. "why, harry?" "because they are so sentimental." "but i like sentimental people." "never marry at all, dorian. men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed." "i don't think i am likely to marry, harry. i am too much in love. that is one of your aphorisms. i am putting it into practice, as i do everything that you say." "who are you in love with?" asked lord henry after a pause. "with an actress," said dorian gray, blushing. lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "that is a rather commonplace _debut_." "you would not say so if you saw her, harry." "who is she?" "her name is sibyl vane." "never heard of her." "no one has. people will some day, however. she is a genius." "my dear boy, no woman is a genius. women are a decorative sex. they never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals." "harry, how can you?" "my dear dorian, it is quite true. i am analysing women at present, so i ought to know. the subject is not so abstruse as i thought it was. i find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. the plain women are very useful. if you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. the other women are very charming. they commit one mistake, however. they paint in order to try and look young. our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly. _rouge_ and _esprit_ used to go together. that is all over now. as long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. as for conversation, there are only five women in london worth talking to, and two of these can't be admitted into decent society. however, tell me about your genius. how long have you known her?" "ah! harry, your views terrify me." "never mind that. how long have you known her?" "about three weeks." "and where did you come across her?" "i will tell you, harry, but you mustn't be unsympathetic about it. after all, it never would have happened if i had not met you. you filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life. for days after i met you, something seemed to throb in my veins. as i lounged in the park, or strolled down piccadilly, i used to look at every one who passed me and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. others filled me with terror. there was an exquisite poison in the air. i had a passion for sensations.... well, one evening about seven o'clock, i determined to go out in search of some adventure. i felt that this grey monstrous london of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me. i fancied a thousand things. the mere danger gave me a sense of delight. i remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening when we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life. i don't know what i expected, but i went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black grassless squares. about half-past eight i passed by an absurd little theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. a hideous jew, in the most amazing waistcoat i ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. he had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. 'have a box, my lord?' he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an air of gorgeous servility. there was something about him, harry, that amused me. he was such a monster. you will laugh at me, i know, but i really went in and paid a whole guinea for the stage-box. to the present day i can't make out why i did so; and yet if i hadn't--my dear harry, if i hadn't--i should have missed the greatest romance of my life. i see you are laughing. it is horrid of you!" "i am not laughing, dorian; at least i am not laughing at you. but you should not say the greatest romance of your life. you should say the first romance of your life. you will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. a _grande passion_ is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. that is the one use of the idle classes of a country. don't be afraid. there are exquisite things in store for you. this is merely the beginning." "do you think my nature so shallow?" cried dorian gray angrily. "no; i think your nature so deep." "how do you mean?" "my dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. what they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, i call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failure. faithfulness! i must analyse it some day. the passion for property is in it. there are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. but i don't want to interrupt you. go on with your story." "well, i found myself seated in a horrid little private box, with a vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. i looked out from behind the curtain and surveyed the house. it was a tawdry affair, all cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding-cake. the gallery and pit were fairly full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and there was hardly a person in what i suppose they called the dress-circle. women went about with oranges and ginger-beer, and there was a terrible consumption of nuts going on." "it must have been just like the palmy days of the british drama." "just like, i should fancy, and very depressing. i began to wonder what on earth i should do when i caught sight of the play-bill. what do you think the play was, harry?" "i should think 'the idiot boy', or 'dumb but innocent'. our fathers used to like that sort of piece, i believe. the longer i live, dorian, the more keenly i feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. in art, as in politics, _les grandperes ont toujours tort_." "this play was good enough for us, harry. it was romeo and juliet. i must admit that i was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place. still, i felt interested, in a sort of way. at any rate, i determined to wait for the first act. there was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young hebrew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the drop-scene was drawn up and the play began. romeo was a stout elderly gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky tragedy voice, and a figure like a beer-barrel. mercutio was almost as bad. he was played by the low-comedian, who had introduced gags of his own and was on most friendly terms with the pit. they were both as grotesque as the scenery, and that looked as if it had come out of a country-booth. but juliet! harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little, flowerlike face, a small greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose. she was the loveliest thing i had ever seen in my life. you said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears. i tell you, harry, i could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that came across me. and her voice--i never heard such a voice. it was very low at first, with deep mellow notes that seemed to fall singly upon one's ear. then it became a little louder, and sounded like a flute or a distant hautboy. in the garden-scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing. there were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of violins. you know how a voice can stir one. your voice and the voice of sibyl vane are two things that i shall never forget. when i close my eyes, i hear them, and each of them says something different. i don't know which to follow. why should i not love her? harry, i do love her. she is everything to me in life. night after night i go to see her play. one evening she is rosalind, and the next evening she is imogen. i have seen her die in the gloom of an italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover's lips. i have watched her wandering through the forest of arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap. she has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king, and given him rue to wear and bitter herbs to taste of. she has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her reedlike throat. i have seen her in every age and in every costume. ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. they are limited to their century. no glamour ever transfigures them. one knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. one can always find them. there is no mystery in any of them. they ride in the park in the morning and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. they have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable manner. they are quite obvious. but an actress! how different an actress is! harry! why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?" "because i have loved so many of them, dorian." "oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces." "don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. there is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes," said lord henry. "i wish now i had not told you about sibyl vane." "you could not have helped telling me, dorian. all through your life you will tell me everything you do." "yes, harry, i believe that is true. i cannot help telling you things. you have a curious influence over me. if i ever did a crime, i would come and confess it to you. you would understand me." "people like you--the wilful sunbeams of life--don't commit crimes, dorian. but i am much obliged for the compliment, all the same. and now tell me--reach me the matches, like a good boy--thanks--what are your actual relations with sibyl vane?" dorian gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes. "harry! sibyl vane is sacred!" "it is only the sacred things that are worth touching, dorian," said lord henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice. "but why should you be annoyed? i suppose she will belong to you some day. when one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. that is what the world calls a romance. you know her, at any rate, i suppose?" "of course i know her. on the first night i was at the theatre, the horrid old jew came round to the box after the performance was over and offered to take me behind the scenes and introduce me to her. i was furious with him, and told him that juliet had been dead for hundreds of years and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in verona. i think, from his blank look of amazement, that he was under the impression that i had taken too much champagne, or something." "i am not surprised." "then he asked me if i wrote for any of the newspapers. i told him i never even read them. he seemed terribly disappointed at that, and confided to me that all the dramatic critics were in a conspiracy against him, and that they were every one of them to be bought." "i should not wonder if he was quite right there. but, on the other hand, judging from their appearance, most of them cannot be at all expensive." "well, he seemed to think they were beyond his means," laughed dorian. "by this time, however, the lights were being put out in the theatre, and i had to go. he wanted me to try some cigars that he strongly recommended. i declined. the next night, of course, i arrived at the place again. when he saw me, he made me a low bow and assured me that i was a munificent patron of art. he was a most offensive brute, though he had an extraordinary passion for shakespeare. he told me once, with an air of pride, that his five bankruptcies were entirely due to 'the bard,' as he insisted on calling him. he seemed to think it a distinction." "it was a distinction, my dear dorian--a great distinction. most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. to have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour. but when did you first speak to miss sibyl vane?" "the third night. she had been playing rosalind. i could not help going round. i had thrown her some flowers, and she had looked at me--at least i fancied that she had. the old jew was persistent. he seemed determined to take me behind, so i consented. it was curious my not wanting to know her, wasn't it?" "no; i don't think so." "my dear harry, why?" "i will tell you some other time. now i want to know about the girl." "sibyl? oh, she was so shy and so gentle. there is something of a child about her. her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when i told her what i thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious of her power. i think we were both rather nervous. the old jew stood grinning at the doorway of the dusty greenroom, making elaborate speeches about us both, while we stood looking at each other like children. he would insist on calling me 'my lord,' so i had to assure sibyl that i was not anything of the kind. she said quite simply to me, 'you look more like a prince. i must call you prince charming.'" "upon my word, dorian, miss sibyl knows how to pay compliments." "you don't understand her, harry. she regarded me merely as a person in a play. she knows nothing of life. she lives with her mother, a faded tired woman who played lady capulet in a sort of magenta dressing-wrapper on the first night, and looks as if she had seen better days." "i know that look. it depresses me," murmured lord henry, examining his rings. "the jew wanted to tell me her history, but i said it did not interest me." "you were quite right. there is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies." "sibyl is the only thing i care about. what is it to me where she came from? from her little head to her little feet, she is absolutely and entirely divine. every night of my life i go to see her act, and every night she is more marvellous." "that is the reason, i suppose, that you never dine with me now. i thought you must have some curious romance on hand. you have; but it is not quite what i expected." "my dear harry, we either lunch or sup together every day, and i have been to the opera with you several times," said dorian, opening his blue eyes in wonder. "you always come dreadfully late." "well, i can't help going to see sibyl play," he cried, "even if it is only for a single act. i get hungry for her presence; and when i think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, i am filled with awe." "you can dine with me to-night, dorian, can't you?" he shook his head. "to-night she is imogen," he answered, "and to-morrow night she will be juliet." "when is she sibyl vane?" "never." "i congratulate you." "how horrid you are! she is all the great heroines of the world in one. she is more than an individual. you laugh, but i tell you she has genius. i love her, and i must make her love me. you, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm sibyl vane to love me! i want to make romeo jealous. i want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter and grow sad. i want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. my god, harry, how i worship her!" he was walking up and down the room as he spoke. hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. he was terribly excited. lord henry watched him with a subtle sense of pleasure. how different he was now from the shy frightened boy he had met in basil hallward's studio! his nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. out of its secret hiding-place had crept his soul, and desire had come to meet it on the way. "and what do you propose to do?" said lord henry at last. "i want you and basil to come with me some night and see her act. i have not the slightest fear of the result. you are certain to acknowledge her genius. then we must get her out of the jew's hands. she is bound to him for three years--at least for two years and eight months--from the present time. i shall have to pay him something, of course. when all that is settled, i shall take a west end theatre and bring her out properly. she will make the world as mad as she has made me." "that would be impossible, my dear boy." "yes, she will. she has not merely art, consummate art-instinct, in her, but she has personality also; and you have often told me that it is personalities, not principles, that move the age." "well, what night shall we go?" "let me see. to-day is tuesday. let us fix to-morrow. she plays juliet to-morrow." "all right. the bristol at eight o'clock; and i will get basil." "not eight, harry, please. half-past six. we must be there before the curtain rises. you must see her in the first act, where she meets romeo." "half-past six! what an hour! it will be like having a meat-tea, or reading an english novel. it must be seven. no gentleman dines before seven. shall you see basil between this and then? or shall i write to him?" "dear basil! i have not laid eyes on him for a week. it is rather horrid of me, as he has sent me my portrait in the most wonderful frame, specially designed by himself, and, though i am a little jealous of the picture for being a whole month younger than i am, i must admit that i delight in it. perhaps you had better write to him. i don't want to see him alone. he says things that annoy me. he gives me good advice." lord henry smiled. "people are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. it is what i call the depth of generosity." "oh, basil is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit of a philistine. since i have known you, harry, i have discovered that." "basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. the consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. the only artists i have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. a great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. but inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. the worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. the mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. he lives the poetry that he cannot write. the others write the poetry that they dare not realize." "i wonder is that really so, harry?" said dorian gray, putting some perfume on his handkerchief out of a large, gold-topped bottle that stood on the table. "it must be, if you say it. and now i am off. imogen is waiting for me. don't forget about to-morrow. good-bye." as he left the room, lord henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began to think. certainly few people had ever interested him so much as dorian gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy. he was pleased by it. it made him a more interesting study. he had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. and so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. compared to it there was nothing else of any value. it was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. there were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. there were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. and, yet, what a great reward one received! how wonderful the whole world became to one! to note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord--there was a delight in that! what matter what the cost was? one could never pay too high a price for any sensation. he was conscious--and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his brown agate eyes--that it was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that dorian gray's soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. to a large extent the lad was his own creation. he had made him premature. that was something. ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. but now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. yes, the lad was premature. he was gathering his harvest while it was yet spring. the pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was becoming self-conscious. it was delightful to watch him. with his beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at. it was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end. he was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses. soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! there was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. the senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? how shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! and yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? or was the body really in the soul, as giordano bruno thought? the separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. he began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. as it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. experience was of no ethical value. it was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. but there was no motive power in experience. it was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. all that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy. it was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and certainly dorian gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results. his sudden mad love for sibyl vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. there was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences, yet it was not a simple, but rather a very complex passion. what there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous. it was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. it often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. while lord henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the door, and his valet entered and reminded him it was time to dress for dinner. he got up and looked out into the street. the sunset had smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite. the panes glowed like plates of heated metal. the sky above was like a faded rose. he thought of his friend's young fiery-coloured life and wondered how it was all going to end. when he arrived home, about half-past twelve o'clock, he saw a telegram lying on the hall table. he opened it and found it was from dorian gray. it was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to sibyl vane. chapter "mother, mother, i am so happy!" whispered the girl, burying her face in the lap of the faded, tired-looking woman who, with back turned to the shrill intrusive light, was sitting in the one arm-chair that their dingy sitting-room contained. "i am so happy!" she repeated, "and you must be happy, too!" mrs. vane winced and put her thin, bismuth-whitened hands on her daughter's head. "happy!" she echoed, "i am only happy, sibyl, when i see you act. you must not think of anything but your acting. mr. isaacs has been very good to us, and we owe him money." the girl looked up and pouted. "money, mother?" she cried, "what does money matter? love is more than money." "mr. isaacs has advanced us fifty pounds to pay off our debts and to get a proper outfit for james. you must not forget that, sibyl. fifty pounds is a very large sum. mr. isaacs has been most considerate." "he is not a gentleman, mother, and i hate the way he talks to me," said the girl, rising to her feet and going over to the window. "i don't know how we could manage without him," answered the elder woman querulously. sibyl vane tossed her head and laughed. "we don't want him any more, mother. prince charming rules life for us now." then she paused. a rose shook in her blood and shadowed her cheeks. quick breath parted the petals of her lips. they trembled. some southern wind of passion swept over her and stirred the dainty folds of her dress. "i love him," she said simply. "foolish child! foolish child!" was the parrot-phrase flung in answer. the waving of crooked, false-jewelled fingers gave grotesqueness to the words. the girl laughed again. the joy of a caged bird was in her voice. her eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance, then closed for a moment, as though to hide their secret. when they opened, the mist of a dream had passed across them. thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense. she did not listen. she was free in her prison of passion. her prince, prince charming, was with her. she had called on memory to remake him. she had sent her soul to search for him, and it had brought him back. his kiss burned again upon her mouth. her eyelids were warm with his breath. then wisdom altered its method and spoke of espial and discovery. this young man might be rich. if so, marriage should be thought of. against the shell of her ear broke the waves of worldly cunning. the arrows of craft shot by her. she saw the thin lips moving, and smiled. suddenly she felt the need to speak. the wordy silence troubled her. "mother, mother," she cried, "why does he love me so much? i know why i love him. i love him because he is like what love himself should be. but what does he see in me? i am not worthy of him. and yet--why, i cannot tell--though i feel so much beneath him, i don't feel humble. i feel proud, terribly proud. mother, did you love my father as i love prince charming?" the elder woman grew pale beneath the coarse powder that daubed her cheeks, and her dry lips twitched with a spasm of pain. sybil rushed to her, flung her arms round her neck, and kissed her. "forgive me, mother. i know it pains you to talk about our father. but it only pains you because you loved him so much. don't look so sad. i am as happy to-day as you were twenty years ago. ah! let me be happy for ever!" "my child, you are far too young to think of falling in love. besides, what do you know of this young man? you don't even know his name. the whole thing is most inconvenient, and really, when james is going away to australia, and i have so much to think of, i must say that you should have shown more consideration. however, as i said before, if he is rich ..." "ah! mother, mother, let me be happy!" mrs. vane glanced at her, and with one of those false theatrical gestures that so often become a mode of second nature to a stage-player, clasped her in her arms. at this moment, the door opened and a young lad with rough brown hair came into the room. he was thick-set of figure, and his hands and feet were large and somewhat clumsy in movement. he was not so finely bred as his sister. one would hardly have guessed the close relationship that existed between them. mrs. vane fixed her eyes on him and intensified her smile. she mentally elevated her son to the dignity of an audience. she felt sure that the _tableau_ was interesting. "you might keep some of your kisses for me, sibyl, i think," said the lad with a good-natured grumble. "ah! but you don't like being kissed, jim," she cried. "you are a dreadful old bear." and she ran across the room and hugged him. james vane looked into his sister's face with tenderness. "i want you to come out with me for a walk, sibyl. i don't suppose i shall ever see this horrid london again. i am sure i don't want to." "my son, don't say such dreadful things," murmured mrs. vane, taking up a tawdry theatrical dress, with a sigh, and beginning to patch it. she felt a little disappointed that he had not joined the group. it would have increased the theatrical picturesqueness of the situation. "why not, mother? i mean it." "you pain me, my son. i trust you will return from australia in a position of affluence. i believe there is no society of any kind in the colonies--nothing that i would call society--so when you have made your fortune, you must come back and assert yourself in london." "society!" muttered the lad. "i don't want to know anything about that. i should like to make some money to take you and sibyl off the stage. i hate it." "oh, jim!" said sibyl, laughing, "how unkind of you! but are you really going for a walk with me? that will be nice! i was afraid you were going to say good-bye to some of your friends--to tom hardy, who gave you that hideous pipe, or ned langton, who makes fun of you for smoking it. it is very sweet of you to let me have your last afternoon. where shall we go? let us go to the park." "i am too shabby," he answered, frowning. "only swell people go to the park." "nonsense, jim," she whispered, stroking the sleeve of his coat. he hesitated for a moment. "very well," he said at last, "but don't be too long dressing." she danced out of the door. one could hear her singing as she ran upstairs. her little feet pattered overhead. he walked up and down the room two or three times. then he turned to the still figure in the chair. "mother, are my things ready?" he asked. "quite ready, james," she answered, keeping her eyes on her work. for some months past she had felt ill at ease when she was alone with this rough stern son of hers. her shallow secret nature was troubled when their eyes met. she used to wonder if he suspected anything. the silence, for he made no other observation, became intolerable to her. she began to complain. women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders. "i hope you will be contented, james, with your sea-faring life," she said. "you must remember that it is your own choice. you might have entered a solicitor's office. solicitors are a very respectable class, and in the country often dine with the best families." "i hate offices, and i hate clerks," he replied. "but you are quite right. i have chosen my own life. all i say is, watch over sibyl. don't let her come to any harm. mother, you must watch over her." "james, you really talk very strangely. of course i watch over sibyl." "i hear a gentleman comes every night to the theatre and goes behind to talk to her. is that right? what about that?" "you are speaking about things you don't understand, james. in the profession we are accustomed to receive a great deal of most gratifying attention. i myself used to receive many bouquets at one time. that was when acting was really understood. as for sibyl, i do not know at present whether her attachment is serious or not. but there is no doubt that the young man in question is a perfect gentleman. he is always most polite to me. besides, he has the appearance of being rich, and the flowers he sends are lovely." "you don't know his name, though," said the lad harshly. "no," answered his mother with a placid expression in her face. "he has not yet revealed his real name. i think it is quite romantic of him. he is probably a member of the aristocracy." james vane bit his lip. "watch over sibyl, mother," he cried, "watch over her." "my son, you distress me very much. sibyl is always under my special care. of course, if this gentleman is wealthy, there is no reason why she should not contract an alliance with him. i trust he is one of the aristocracy. he has all the appearance of it, i must say. it might be a most brilliant marriage for sibyl. they would make a charming couple. his good looks are really quite remarkable; everybody notices them." the lad muttered something to himself and drummed on the window-pane with his coarse fingers. he had just turned round to say something when the door opened and sibyl ran in. "how serious you both are!" she cried. "what is the matter?" "nothing," he answered. "i suppose one must be serious sometimes. good-bye, mother; i will have my dinner at five o'clock. everything is packed, except my shirts, so you need not trouble." "good-bye, my son," she answered with a bow of strained stateliness. she was extremely annoyed at the tone he had adopted with her, and there was something in his look that had made her feel afraid. "kiss me, mother," said the girl. her flowerlike lips touched the withered cheek and warmed its frost. "my child! my child!" cried mrs. vane, looking up to the ceiling in search of an imaginary gallery. "come, sibyl," said her brother impatiently. he hated his mother's affectations. they went out into the flickering, wind-blown sunlight and strolled down the dreary euston road. the passersby glanced in wonder at the sullen heavy youth who, in coarse, ill-fitting clothes, was in the company of such a graceful, refined-looking girl. he was like a common gardener walking with a rose. jim frowned from time to time when he caught the inquisitive glance of some stranger. he had that dislike of being stared at, which comes on geniuses late in life and never leaves the commonplace. sibyl, however, was quite unconscious of the effect she was producing. her love was trembling in laughter on her lips. she was thinking of prince charming, and, that she might think of him all the more, she did not talk of him, but prattled on about the ship in which jim was going to sail, about the gold he was certain to find, about the wonderful heiress whose life he was to save from the wicked, red-shirted bushrangers. for he was not to remain a sailor, or a supercargo, or whatever he was going to be. oh, no! a sailor's existence was dreadful. fancy being cooped up in a horrid ship, with the hoarse, hump-backed waves trying to get in, and a black wind blowing the masts down and tearing the sails into long screaming ribands! he was to leave the vessel at melbourne, bid a polite good-bye to the captain, and go off at once to the gold-fields. before a week was over he was to come across a large nugget of pure gold, the largest nugget that had ever been discovered, and bring it down to the coast in a waggon guarded by six mounted policemen. the bushrangers were to attack them three times, and be defeated with immense slaughter. or, no. he was not to go to the gold-fields at all. they were horrid places, where men got intoxicated, and shot each other in bar-rooms, and used bad language. he was to be a nice sheep-farmer, and one evening, as he was riding home, he was to see the beautiful heiress being carried off by a robber on a black horse, and give chase, and rescue her. of course, she would fall in love with him, and he with her, and they would get married, and come home, and live in an immense house in london. yes, there were delightful things in store for him. but he must be very good, and not lose his temper, or spend his money foolishly. she was only a year older than he was, but she knew so much more of life. he must be sure, also, to write to her by every mail, and to say his prayers each night before he went to sleep. god was very good, and would watch over him. she would pray for him, too, and in a few years he would come back quite rich and happy. the lad listened sulkily to her and made no answer. he was heart-sick at leaving home. yet it was not this alone that made him gloomy and morose. inexperienced though he was, he had still a strong sense of the danger of sibyl's position. this young dandy who was making love to her could mean her no good. he was a gentleman, and he hated him for that, hated him through some curious race-instinct for which he could not account, and which for that reason was all the more dominant within him. he was conscious also of the shallowness and vanity of his mother's nature, and in that saw infinite peril for sibyl and sibyl's happiness. children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. his mother! he had something on his mind to ask of her, something that he had brooded on for many months of silence. a chance phrase that he had heard at the theatre, a whispered sneer that had reached his ears one night as he waited at the stage-door, had set loose a train of horrible thoughts. he remembered it as if it had been the lash of a hunting-crop across his face. his brows knit together into a wedge-like furrow, and with a twitch of pain he bit his underlip. "you are not listening to a word i am saying, jim," cried sibyl, "and i am making the most delightful plans for your future. do say something." "what do you want me to say?" "oh! that you will be a good boy and not forget us," she answered, smiling at him. he shrugged his shoulders. "you are more likely to forget me than i am to forget you, sibyl." she flushed. "what do you mean, jim?" she asked. "you have a new friend, i hear. who is he? why have you not told me about him? he means you no good." "stop, jim!" she exclaimed. "you must not say anything against him. i love him." "why, you don't even know his name," answered the lad. "who is he? i have a right to know." "he is called prince charming. don't you like the name. oh! you silly boy! you should never forget it. if you only saw him, you would think him the most wonderful person in the world. some day you will meet him--when you come back from australia. you will like him so much. everybody likes him, and i ... love him. i wish you could come to the theatre to-night. he is going to be there, and i am to play juliet. oh! how i shall play it! fancy, jim, to be in love and play juliet! to have him sitting there! to play for his delight! i am afraid i may frighten the company, frighten or enthrall them. to be in love is to surpass one's self. poor dreadful mr. isaacs will be shouting 'genius' to his loafers at the bar. he has preached me as a dogma; to-night he will announce me as a revelation. i feel it. and it is all his, his only, prince charming, my wonderful lover, my god of graces. but i am poor beside him. poor? what does that matter? when poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. our proverbs want rewriting. they were made in winter, and it is summer now; spring-time for me, i think, a very dance of blossoms in blue skies." "he is a gentleman," said the lad sullenly. "a prince!" she cried musically. "what more do you want?" "he wants to enslave you." "i shudder at the thought of being free." "i want you to beware of him." "to see him is to worship him; to know him is to trust him." "sibyl, you are mad about him." she laughed and took his arm. "you dear old jim, you talk as if you were a hundred. some day you will be in love yourself. then you will know what it is. don't look so sulky. surely you should be glad to think that, though you are going away, you leave me happier than i have ever been before. life has been hard for us both, terribly hard and difficult. but it will be different now. you are going to a new world, and i have found one. here are two chairs; let us sit down and see the smart people go by." they took their seats amidst a crowd of watchers. the tulip-beds across the road flamed like throbbing rings of fire. a white dust--tremulous cloud of orris-root it seemed--hung in the panting air. the brightly coloured parasols danced and dipped like monstrous butterflies. she made her brother talk of himself, his hopes, his prospects. he spoke slowly and with effort. they passed words to each other as players at a game pass counters. sibyl felt oppressed. she could not communicate her joy. a faint smile curving that sullen mouth was all the echo she could win. after some time she became silent. suddenly she caught a glimpse of golden hair and laughing lips, and in an open carriage with two ladies dorian gray drove past. she started to her feet. "there he is!" she cried. "who?" said jim vane. "prince charming," she answered, looking after the victoria. he jumped up and seized her roughly by the arm. "show him to me. which is he? point him out. i must see him!" he exclaimed; but at that moment the duke of berwick's four-in-hand came between, and when it had left the space clear, the carriage had swept out of the park. "he is gone," murmured sibyl sadly. "i wish you had seen him." "i wish i had, for as sure as there is a god in heaven, if he ever does you any wrong, i shall kill him." she looked at him in horror. he repeated his words. they cut the air like a dagger. the people round began to gape. a lady standing close to her tittered. "come away, jim; come away," she whispered. he followed her doggedly as she passed through the crowd. he felt glad at what he had said. when they reached the achilles statue, she turned round. there was pity in her eyes that became laughter on her lips. she shook her head at him. "you are foolish, jim, utterly foolish; a bad-tempered boy, that is all. how can you say such horrible things? you don't know what you are talking about. you are simply jealous and unkind. ah! i wish you would fall in love. love makes people good, and what you said was wicked." "i am sixteen," he answered, "and i know what i am about. mother is no help to you. she doesn't understand how to look after you. i wish now that i was not going to australia at all. i have a great mind to chuck the whole thing up. i would, if my articles hadn't been signed." "oh, don't be so serious, jim. you are like one of the heroes of those silly melodramas mother used to be so fond of acting in. i am not going to quarrel with you. i have seen him, and oh! to see him is perfect happiness. we won't quarrel. i know you would never harm any one i love, would you?" "not as long as you love him, i suppose," was the sullen answer. "i shall love him for ever!" she cried. "and he?" "for ever, too!" "he had better." she shrank from him. then she laughed and put her hand on his arm. he was merely a boy. at the marble arch they hailed an omnibus, which left them close to their shabby home in the euston road. it was after five o'clock, and sibyl had to lie down for a couple of hours before acting. jim insisted that she should do so. he said that he would sooner part with her when their mother was not present. she would be sure to make a scene, and he detested scenes of every kind. in sybil's own room they parted. there was jealousy in the lad's heart, and a fierce murderous hatred of the stranger who, as it seemed to him, had come between them. yet, when her arms were flung round his neck, and her fingers strayed through his hair, he softened and kissed her with real affection. there were tears in his eyes as he went downstairs. his mother was waiting for him below. she grumbled at his unpunctuality, as he entered. he made no answer, but sat down to his meagre meal. the flies buzzed round the table and crawled over the stained cloth. through the rumble of omnibuses, and the clatter of street-cabs, he could hear the droning voice devouring each minute that was left to him. after some time, he thrust away his plate and put his head in his hands. he felt that he had a right to know. it should have been told to him before, if it was as he suspected. leaden with fear, his mother watched him. words dropped mechanically from her lips. a tattered lace handkerchief twitched in her fingers. when the clock struck six, he got up and went to the door. then he turned back and looked at her. their eyes met. in hers he saw a wild appeal for mercy. it enraged him. "mother, i have something to ask you," he said. her eyes wandered vaguely about the room. she made no answer. "tell me the truth. i have a right to know. were you married to my father?" she heaved a deep sigh. it was a sigh of relief. the terrible moment, the moment that night and day, for weeks and months, she had dreaded, had come at last, and yet she felt no terror. indeed, in some measure it was a disappointment to her. the vulgar directness of the question called for a direct answer. the situation had not been gradually led up to. it was crude. it reminded her of a bad rehearsal. "no," she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life. "my father was a scoundrel then!" cried the lad, clenching his fists. she shook her head. "i knew he was not free. we loved each other very much. if he had lived, he would have made provision for us. don't speak against him, my son. he was your father, and a gentleman. indeed, he was highly connected." an oath broke from his lips. "i don't care for myself," he exclaimed, "but don't let sibyl.... it is a gentleman, isn't it, who is in love with her, or says he is? highly connected, too, i suppose." for a moment a hideous sense of humiliation came over the woman. her head drooped. she wiped her eyes with shaking hands. "sibyl has a mother," she murmured; "i had none." the lad was touched. he went towards her, and stooping down, he kissed her. "i am sorry if i have pained you by asking about my father," he said, "but i could not help it. i must go now. good-bye. don't forget that you will have only one child now to look after, and believe me that if this man wrongs my sister, i will find out who he is, track him down, and kill him like a dog. i swear it." the exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid to her. she was familiar with the atmosphere. she breathed more freely, and for the first time for many months she really admired her son. she would have liked to have continued the scene on the same emotional scale, but he cut her short. trunks had to be carried down and mufflers looked for. the lodging-house drudge bustled in and out. there was the bargaining with the cabman. the moment was lost in vulgar details. it was with a renewed feeling of disappointment that she waved the tattered lace handkerchief from the window, as her son drove away. she was conscious that a great opportunity had been wasted. she consoled herself by telling sibyl how desolate she felt her life would be, now that she had only one child to look after. she remembered the phrase. it had pleased her. of the threat she said nothing. it was vividly and dramatically expressed. she felt that they would all laugh at it some day. chapter "i suppose you have heard the news, basil?" said lord henry that evening as hallward was shown into a little private room at the bristol where dinner had been laid for three. "no, harry," answered the artist, giving his hat and coat to the bowing waiter. "what is it? nothing about politics, i hope! they don't interest me. there is hardly a single person in the house of commons worth painting, though many of them would be the better for a little whitewashing." "dorian gray is engaged to be married," said lord henry, watching him as he spoke. hallward started and then frowned. "dorian engaged to be married!" he cried. "impossible!" "it is perfectly true." "to whom?" "to some little actress or other." "i can't believe it. dorian is far too sensible." "dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear basil." "marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, harry." "except in america," rejoined lord henry languidly. "but i didn't say he was married. i said he was engaged to be married. there is a great difference. i have a distinct remembrance of being married, but i have no recollection at all of being engaged. i am inclined to think that i never was engaged." "but think of dorian's birth, and position, and wealth. it would be absurd for him to marry so much beneath him." "if you want to make him marry this girl, tell him that, basil. he is sure to do it, then. whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives." "i hope the girl is good, harry. i don't want to see dorian tied to some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his intellect." "oh, she is better than good--she is beautiful," murmured lord henry, sipping a glass of vermouth and orange-bitters. "dorian says she is beautiful, and he is not often wrong about things of that kind. your portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal appearance of other people. it has had that excellent effect, amongst others. we are to see her to-night, if that boy doesn't forget his appointment." "are you serious?" "quite serious, basil. i should be miserable if i thought i should ever be more serious than i am at the present moment." "but do you approve of it, harry?" asked the painter, walking up and down the room and biting his lip. "you can't approve of it, possibly. it is some silly infatuation." "i never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. it is an absurd attitude to take towards life. we are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. i never take any notice of what common people say, and i never interfere with what charming people do. if a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. dorian gray falls in love with a beautiful girl who acts juliet, and proposes to marry her. why not? if he wedded messalina, he would be none the less interesting. you know i am not a champion of marriage. the real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. and unselfish people are colourless. they lack individuality. still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. they retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. they are forced to have more than one life. they become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, i should fancy, the object of man's existence. besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience. i hope that dorian gray will make this girl his wife, passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become fascinated by some one else. he would be a wonderful study." "you don't mean a single word of all that, harry; you know you don't. if dorian gray's life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier than yourself. you are much better than you pretend to be." lord henry laughed. "the reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. the basis of optimism is sheer terror. we think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. we praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. i mean everything that i have said. i have the greatest contempt for optimism. as for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. if you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. as for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. i will certainly encourage them. they have the charm of being fashionable. but here is dorian himself. he will tell you more than i can." "my dear harry, my dear basil, you must both congratulate me!" said the lad, throwing off his evening cape with its satin-lined wings and shaking each of his friends by the hand in turn. "i have never been so happy. of course, it is sudden--all really delightful things are. and yet it seems to me to be the one thing i have been looking for all my life." he was flushed with excitement and pleasure, and looked extraordinarily handsome. "i hope you will always be very happy, dorian," said hallward, "but i don't quite forgive you for not having let me know of your engagement. you let harry know." "and i don't forgive you for being late for dinner," broke in lord henry, putting his hand on the lad's shoulder and smiling as he spoke. "come, let us sit down and try what the new _chef_ here is like, and then you will tell us how it all came about." "there is really not much to tell," cried dorian as they took their seats at the small round table. "what happened was simply this. after i left you yesterday evening, harry, i dressed, had some dinner at that little italian restaurant in rupert street you introduced me to, and went down at eight o'clock to the theatre. sibyl was playing rosalind. of course, the scenery was dreadful and the orlando absurd. but sibyl! you should have seen her! when she came on in her boy's clothes, she was perfectly wonderful. she wore a moss-coloured velvet jerkin with cinnamon sleeves, slim, brown, cross-gartered hose, a dainty little green cap with a hawk's feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak lined with dull red. she had never seemed to me more exquisite. she had all the delicate grace of that tanagra figurine that you have in your studio, basil. her hair clustered round her face like dark leaves round a pale rose. as for her acting--well, you shall see her to-night. she is simply a born artist. i sat in the dingy box absolutely enthralled. i forgot that i was in london and in the nineteenth century. i was away with my love in a forest that no man had ever seen. after the performance was over, i went behind and spoke to her. as we were sitting together, suddenly there came into her eyes a look that i had never seen there before. my lips moved towards hers. we kissed each other. i can't describe to you what i felt at that moment. it seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect point of rose-coloured joy. she trembled all over and shook like a white narcissus. then she flung herself on her knees and kissed my hands. i feel that i should not tell you all this, but i can't help it. of course, our engagement is a dead secret. she has not even told her own mother. i don't know what my guardians will say. lord radley is sure to be furious. i don't care. i shall be of age in less than a year, and then i can do what i like. i have been right, basil, haven't i, to take my love out of poetry and to find my wife in shakespeare's plays? lips that shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. i have had the arms of rosalind around me, and kissed juliet on the mouth." "yes, dorian, i suppose you were right," said hallward slowly. "have you seen her to-day?" asked lord henry. dorian gray shook his head. "i left her in the forest of arden; i shall find her in an orchard in verona." lord henry sipped his champagne in a meditative manner. "at what particular point did you mention the word marriage, dorian? and what did she say in answer? perhaps you forgot all about it." "my dear harry, i did not treat it as a business transaction, and i did not make any formal proposal. i told her that i loved her, and she said she was not worthy to be my wife. not worthy! why, the whole world is nothing to me compared with her." "women are wonderfully practical," murmured lord henry, "much more practical than we are. in situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us." hallward laid his hand upon his arm. "don't, harry. you have annoyed dorian. he is not like other men. he would never bring misery upon any one. his nature is too fine for that." lord henry looked across the table. "dorian is never annoyed with me," he answered. "i asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question--simple curiosity. i have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. except, of course, in middle-class life. but then the middle classes are not modern." dorian gray laughed, and tossed his head. "you are quite incorrigible, harry; but i don't mind. it is impossible to be angry with you. when you see sibyl vane, you will feel that the man who could wrong her would be a beast, a beast without a heart. i cannot understand how any one can wish to shame the thing he loves. i love sibyl vane. i want to place her on a pedestal of gold and to see the world worship the woman who is mine. what is marriage? an irrevocable vow. you mock at it for that. ah! don't mock. it is an irrevocable vow that i want to take. her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good. when i am with her, i regret all that you have taught me. i become different from what you have known me to be. i am changed, and the mere touch of sibyl vane's hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories." "and those are ...?" asked lord henry, helping himself to some salad. "oh, your theories about life, your theories about love, your theories about pleasure. all your theories, in fact, harry." "pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about," he answered in his slow melodious voice. "but i am afraid i cannot claim my theory as my own. it belongs to nature, not to me. pleasure is nature's test, her sign of approval. when we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy." "ah! but what do you mean by good?" cried basil hallward. "yes," echoed dorian, leaning back in his chair and looking at lord henry over the heavy clusters of purple-lipped irises that stood in the centre of the table, "what do you mean by good, harry?" "to be good is to be in harmony with one's self," he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. "discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. one's own life--that is the important thing. as for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. besides, individualism has really the higher aim. modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. i consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality." "but, surely, if one lives merely for one's self, harry, one pays a terrible price for doing so?" suggested the painter. "yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. i should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich." "one has to pay in other ways but money." "what sort of ways, basil?" "oh! i should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in ... well, in the consciousness of degradation." lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "my dear fellow, mediaeval art is charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date. one can use them in fiction, of course. but then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is." "i know what pleasure is," cried dorian gray. "it is to adore some one." "that is certainly better than being adored," he answered, toying with some fruits. "being adored is a nuisance. women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. they worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them." "i should have said that whatever they ask for they had first given to us," murmured the lad gravely. "they create love in our natures. they have a right to demand it back." "that is quite true, dorian," cried hallward. "nothing is ever quite true," said lord henry. "this is," interrupted dorian. "you must admit, harry, that women give to men the very gold of their lives." "possibly," he sighed, "but they invariably want it back in such very small change. that is the worry. women, as some witty frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out." "harry, you are dreadful! i don't know why i like you so much." "you will always like me, dorian," he replied. "will you have some coffee, you fellows? waiter, bring coffee, and _fine-champagne_, and some cigarettes. no, don't mind the cigarettes--i have some. basil, i can't allow you to smoke cigars. you must have a cigarette. a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. it is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. what more can one want? yes, dorian, you will always be fond of me. i represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit." "what nonsense you talk, harry!" cried the lad, taking a light from a fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table. "let us go down to the theatre. when sibyl comes on the stage you will have a new ideal of life. she will represent something to you that you have never known." "i have known everything," said lord henry, with a tired look in his eyes, "but i am always ready for a new emotion. i am afraid, however, that, for me at any rate, there is no such thing. still, your wonderful girl may thrill me. i love acting. it is so much more real than life. let us go. dorian, you will come with me. i am so sorry, basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham. you must follow us in a hansom." they got up and put on their coats, sipping their coffee standing. the painter was silent and preoccupied. there was a gloom over him. he could not bear this marriage, and yet it seemed to him to be better than many other things that might have happened. after a few minutes, they all passed downstairs. he drove off by himself, as had been arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little brougham in front of him. a strange sense of loss came over him. he felt that dorian gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. life had come between them.... his eyes darkened, and the crowded flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. when the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older. chapter for some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily tremulous smile. he escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands and talking at the top of his voice. dorian gray loathed him more than ever. he felt as if he had come to look for miranda and had been met by caliban. lord henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him. at least he declared he did, and insisted on shaking him by the hand and assuring him that he was proud to meet a man who had discovered a real genius and gone bankrupt over a poet. hallward amused himself with watching the faces in the pit. the heat was terribly oppressive, and the huge sunlight flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of yellow fire. the youths in the gallery had taken off their coats and waistcoats and hung them over the side. they talked to each other across the theatre and shared their oranges with the tawdry girls who sat beside them. some women were laughing in the pit. their voices were horribly shrill and discordant. the sound of the popping of corks came from the bar. "what a place to find one's divinity in!" said lord henry. "yes!" answered dorian gray. "it was here i found her, and she is divine beyond all living things. when she acts, you will forget everything. these common rough people, with their coarse faces and brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage. they sit silently and watch her. they weep and laugh as she wills them to do. she makes them as responsive as a violin. she spiritualizes them, and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self." "the same flesh and blood as one's self! oh, i hope not!" exclaimed lord henry, who was scanning the occupants of the gallery through his opera-glass. "don't pay any attention to him, dorian," said the painter. "i understand what you mean, and i believe in this girl. any one you love must be marvellous, and any girl who has the effect you describe must be fine and noble. to spiritualize one's age--that is something worth doing. if this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. this marriage is quite right. i did not think so at first, but i admit it now. the gods made sibyl vane for you. without her you would have been incomplete." "thanks, basil," answered dorian gray, pressing his hand. "i knew that you would understand me. harry is so cynical, he terrifies me. but here is the orchestra. it is quite dreadful, but it only lasts for about five minutes. then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl to whom i am going to give all my life, to whom i have given everything that is good in me." a quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil of applause, sibyl vane stepped on to the stage. yes, she was certainly lovely to look at--one of the loveliest creatures, lord henry thought, that he had ever seen. there was something of the fawn in her shy grace and startled eyes. a faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver, came to her cheeks as she glanced at the crowded enthusiastic house. she stepped back a few paces and her lips seemed to tremble. basil hallward leaped to his feet and began to applaud. motionless, and as one in a dream, sat dorian gray, gazing at her. lord henry peered through his glasses, murmuring, "charming! charming!" the scene was the hall of capulet's house, and romeo in his pilgrim's dress had entered with mercutio and his other friends. the band, such as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began. through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily dressed actors, sibyl vane moved like a creature from a finer world. her body swayed, while she danced, as a plant sways in the water. the curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory. yet she was curiously listless. she showed no sign of joy when her eyes rested on romeo. the few words she had to speak-- good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this; for saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss-- with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly artificial manner. the voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. it was wrong in colour. it took away all the life from the verse. it made the passion unreal. dorian gray grew pale as he watched her. he was puzzled and anxious. neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. she seemed to them to be absolutely incompetent. they were horribly disappointed. yet they felt that the true test of any juliet is the balcony scene of the second act. they waited for that. if she failed there, there was nothing in her. she looked charming as she came out in the moonlight. that could not be denied. but the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew worse as she went on. her gestures became absurdly artificial. she overemphasized everything that she had to say. the beautiful passage-- thou knowest the mask of night is on my face, else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek for that which thou hast heard me speak to-night-- was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. when she leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines-- although i joy in thee, i have no joy of this contract to-night: it is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say, "it lightens." sweet, good-night! this bud of love by summer's ripening breath may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet-- she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her. it was not nervousness. indeed, so far from being nervous, she was absolutely self-contained. it was simply bad art. she was a complete failure. even the common uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their interest in the play. they got restless, and began to talk loudly and to whistle. the jew manager, who was standing at the back of the dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage. the only person unmoved was the girl herself. when the second act was over, there came a storm of hisses, and lord henry got up from his chair and put on his coat. "she is quite beautiful, dorian," he said, "but she can't act. let us go." "i am going to see the play through," answered the lad, in a hard bitter voice. "i am awfully sorry that i have made you waste an evening, harry. i apologize to you both." "my dear dorian, i should think miss vane was ill," interrupted hallward. "we will come some other night." "i wish she were ill," he rejoined. "but she seems to me to be simply callous and cold. she has entirely altered. last night she was a great artist. this evening she is merely a commonplace mediocre actress." "don't talk like that about any one you love, dorian. love is a more wonderful thing than art." "they are both simply forms of imitation," remarked lord henry. "but do let us go. dorian, you must not stay here any longer. it is not good for one's morals to see bad acting. besides, i don't suppose you will want your wife to act, so what does it matter if she plays juliet like a wooden doll? she is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience. there are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic! the secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. come to the club with basil and myself. we will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of sibyl vane. she is beautiful. what more can you want?" "go away, harry," cried the lad. "i want to be alone. basil, you must go. ah! can't you see that my heart is breaking?" the hot tears came to his eyes. his lips trembled, and rushing to the back of the box, he leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands. "let us go, basil," said lord henry with a strange tenderness in his voice, and the two young men passed out together. a few moments afterwards the footlights flared up and the curtain rose on the third act. dorian gray went back to his seat. he looked pale, and proud, and indifferent. the play dragged on, and seemed interminable. half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots and laughing. the whole thing was a _fiasco_. the last act was played to almost empty benches. the curtain went down on a titter and some groans. as soon as it was over, dorian gray rushed behind the scenes into the greenroom. the girl was standing there alone, with a look of triumph on her face. her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. there was a radiance about her. her parted lips were smiling over some secret of their own. when he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy came over her. "how badly i acted to-night, dorian!" she cried. "horribly!" he answered, gazing at her in amazement. "horribly! it was dreadful. are you ill? you have no idea what it was. you have no idea what i suffered." the girl smiled. "dorian," she answered, lingering over his name with long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to the red petals of her mouth. "dorian, you should have understood. but you understand now, don't you?" "understand what?" he asked, angrily. "why i was so bad to-night. why i shall always be bad. why i shall never act well again." he shrugged his shoulders. "you are ill, i suppose. when you are ill you shouldn't act. you make yourself ridiculous. my friends were bored. i was bored." she seemed not to listen to him. she was transfigured with joy. an ecstasy of happiness dominated her. "dorian, dorian," she cried, "before i knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. it was only in the theatre that i lived. i thought that it was all true. i was rosalind one night and portia the other. the joy of beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of cordelia were mine also. i believed in everything. the common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. the painted scenes were my world. i knew nothing but shadows, and i thought them real. you came--oh, my beautiful love!--and you freed my soul from prison. you taught me what reality really is. to-night, for the first time in my life, i saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which i had always played. to-night, for the first time, i became conscious that the romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words i had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what i wanted to say. you had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. you had made me understand what love really is. my love! my love! prince charming! prince of life! i have grown sick of shadows. you are more to me than all art can ever be. what have i to do with the puppets of a play? when i came on to-night, i could not understand how it was that everything had gone from me. i thought that i was going to be wonderful. i found that i could do nothing. suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant. the knowledge was exquisite to me. i heard them hissing, and i smiled. what could they know of love such as ours? take me away, dorian--take me away with you, where we can be quite alone. i hate the stage. i might mimic a passion that i do not feel, but i cannot mimic one that burns me like fire. oh, dorian, dorian, you understand now what it signifies? even if i could do it, it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. you have made me see that." he flung himself down on the sofa and turned away his face. "you have killed my love," he muttered. she looked at him in wonder and laughed. he made no answer. she came across to him, and with her little fingers stroked his hair. she knelt down and pressed his hands to her lips. he drew them away, and a shudder ran through him. then he leaped up and went to the door. "yes," he cried, "you have killed my love. you used to stir my imagination. now you don't even stir my curiosity. you simply produce no effect. i loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. you have thrown it all away. you are shallow and stupid. my god! how mad i was to love you! what a fool i have been! you are nothing to me now. i will never see you again. i will never think of you. i will never mention your name. you don't know what you were to me, once. why, once ... oh, i can't bear to think of it! i wish i had never laid eyes upon you! you have spoiled the romance of my life. how little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! without your art, you are nothing. i would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. the world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. what are you now? a third-rate actress with a pretty face." the girl grew white, and trembled. she clenched her hands together, and her voice seemed to catch in her throat. "you are not serious, dorian?" she murmured. "you are acting." "acting! i leave that to you. you do it so well," he answered bitterly. she rose from her knees and, with a piteous expression of pain in her face, came across the room to him. she put her hand upon his arm and looked into his eyes. he thrust her back. "don't touch me!" he cried. a low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet and lay there like a trampled flower. "dorian, dorian, don't leave me!" she whispered. "i am so sorry i didn't act well. i was thinking of you all the time. but i will try--indeed, i will try. it came so suddenly across me, my love for you. i think i should never have known it if you had not kissed me--if we had not kissed each other. kiss me again, my love. don't go away from me. i couldn't bear it. oh! don't go away from me. my brother ... no; never mind. he didn't mean it. he was in jest.... but you, oh! can't you forgive me for to-night? i will work so hard and try to improve. don't be cruel to me, because i love you better than anything in the world. after all, it is only once that i have not pleased you. but you are quite right, dorian. i should have shown myself more of an artist. it was foolish of me, and yet i couldn't help it. oh, don't leave me, don't leave me." a fit of passionate sobbing choked her. she crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and dorian gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain. there is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. sibyl vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. her tears and sobs annoyed him. "i am going," he said at last in his calm clear voice. "i don't wish to be unkind, but i can't see you again. you have disappointed me." she wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer. her little hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him. he turned on his heel and left the room. in a few moments he was out of the theatre. where he went to he hardly knew. he remembered wandering through dimly lit streets, past gaunt, black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses. women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. he had seen grotesque children huddled upon door-steps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts. as the dawn was just breaking, he found himself close to covent garden. the darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed itself into a perfect pearl. huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. the air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain. he followed into the market and watched the men unloading their waggons. a white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. he thanked him, wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly. they had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them. a long line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge, jade-green piles of vegetables. under the portico, with its grey, sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over. others crowded round the swinging doors of the coffee-house in the piazza. the heavy cart-horses slipped and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings. some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. iris-necked and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds. after a little while, he hailed a hansom and drove home. for a few moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent square, with its blank, close-shuttered windows and its staring blinds. the sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it. from some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke was rising. it curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air. in the huge gilt venetian lantern, spoil of some doge's barge, that hung from the ceiling of the great, oak-panelled hall of entrance, lights were still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals of flame they seemed, rimmed with white fire. he turned them out and, having thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library towards the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the ground floor that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had decorated for himself and hung with some curious renaissance tapestries that had been discovered stored in a disused attic at selby royal. as he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait basil hallward had painted of him. he started back as if in surprise. then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. after he had taken the button-hole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate. finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. in the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. the expression looked different. one would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. it was certainly strange. he turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. the bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. but the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. the quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. he winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory cupids, one of lord henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. no line like that warped his red lips. what did it mean? he rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. there were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered. it was not a mere fancy of his own. the thing was horribly apparent. he threw himself into a chair and began to think. suddenly there flashed across his mind what he had said in basil hallward's studio the day the picture had been finished. yes, he remembered it perfectly. he had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. surely his wish had not been fulfilled? such things were impossible. it seemed monstrous even to think of them. and, yet, there was the picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in the mouth. cruelty! had he been cruel? it was the girl's fault, not his. he had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he had thought her great. then she had disappointed him. she had been shallow and unworthy. and, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. he remembered with what callousness he had watched her. why had he been made like that? why had such a soul been given to him? but he had suffered also. during the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture. his life was well worth hers. she had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age. besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. they lived on their emotions. they only thought of their emotions. when they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes. lord henry had told him that, and lord henry knew what women were. why should he trouble about sibyl vane? she was nothing to him now. but the picture? what was he to say of that? it held the secret of his life, and told his story. it had taught him to love his own beauty. would it teach him to loathe his own soul? would he ever look at it again? no; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. the horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that makes men mad. the picture had not changed. it was folly to think so. yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile. its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. its blue eyes met his own. a sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him. it had altered already, and would alter more. its gold would wither into grey. its red and white roses would die. for every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness. but he would not sin. the picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. he would resist temptation. he would not see lord henry any more--would not, at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in basil hallward's garden had first stirred within him the passion for impossible things. he would go back to sibyl vane, make her amends, marry her, try to love her again. yes, it was his duty to do so. she must have suffered more than he had. poor child! he had been selfish and cruel to her. the fascination that she had exercised over him would return. they would be happy together. his life with her would be beautiful and pure. he got up from his chair and drew a large screen right in front of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. "how horrible!" he murmured to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it. when he stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath. the fresh morning air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions. he thought only of sibyl. a faint echo of his love came back to him. he repeated her name over and over again. the birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her. chapter it was long past noon when he awoke. his valet had crept several times on tiptoe into the room to see if he was stirring, and had wondered what made his young master sleep so late. finally his bell sounded, and victor came in softly with a cup of tea, and a pile of letters, on a small tray of old sevres china, and drew back the olive-satin curtains, with their shimmering blue lining, that hung in front of the three tall windows. "monsieur has well slept this morning," he said, smiling. "what o'clock is it, victor?" asked dorian gray drowsily. "one hour and a quarter, monsieur." how late it was! he sat up, and having sipped some tea, turned over his letters. one of them was from lord henry, and had been brought by hand that morning. he hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside. the others he opened listlessly. they contained the usual collection of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes of charity concerts, and the like that are showered on fashionable young men every morning during the season. there was a rather heavy bill for a chased silver louis-quinze toilet-set that he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities; and there were several very courteously worded communications from jermyn street money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest. after about ten minutes he got up, and throwing on an elaborate dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool, passed into the onyx-paved bathroom. the cool water refreshed him after his long sleep. he seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through. a dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once or twice, but there was the unreality of a dream about it. as soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat down to a light french breakfast that had been laid out for him on a small round table close to the open window. it was an exquisite day. the warm air seemed laden with spices. a bee flew in and buzzed round the blue-dragon bowl that, filled with sulphur-yellow roses, stood before him. he felt perfectly happy. suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of the portrait, and he started. "too cold for monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the table. "i shut the window?" dorian shook his head. "i am not cold," he murmured. was it all true? had the portrait really changed? or had it been simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where there had been a look of joy? surely a painted canvas could not alter? the thing was absurd. it would serve as a tale to tell basil some day. it would make him smile. and, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing! first in the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn, he had seen the touch of cruelty round the warped lips. he almost dreaded his valet leaving the room. he knew that when he was alone he would have to examine the portrait. he was afraid of certainty. when the coffee and cigarettes had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a wild desire to tell him to remain. as the door was closing behind him, he called him back. the man stood waiting for his orders. dorian looked at him for a moment. "i am not at home to any one, victor," he said with a sigh. the man bowed and retired. then he rose from the table, lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on a luxuriously cushioned couch that stood facing the screen. the screen was an old one, of gilt spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a rather florid louis-quatorze pattern. he scanned it curiously, wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a man's life. should he move it aside, after all? why not let it stay there? what was the use of knowing? if the thing was true, it was terrible. if it was not true, why trouble about it? but what if, by some fate or deadlier chance, eyes other than his spied behind and saw the horrible change? what should he do if basil hallward came and asked to look at his own picture? basil would be sure to do that. no; the thing had to be examined, and at once. anything would be better than this dreadful state of doubt. he got up and locked both doors. at least he would be alone when he looked upon the mask of his shame. then he drew the screen aside and saw himself face to face. it was perfectly true. the portrait had altered. as he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest. that such a change should have taken place was incredible to him. and yet it was a fact. was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? could it be that what that soul thought, they realized?--that what it dreamed, they made true? or was there some other, more terrible reason? he shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in sickened horror. one thing, however, he felt that it had done for him. it had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to sibyl vane. it was not too late to make reparation for that. she could still be his wife. his unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that basil hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of god to us all. there were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. but here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls. three o'clock struck, and four, and the half-hour rang its double chime, but dorian gray did not stir. he was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering. he did not know what to do, or what to think. finally, he went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had loved, imploring her forgiveness and accusing himself of madness. he covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. there is a luxury in self-reproach. when we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. it is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. when dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven. suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard lord henry's voice outside. "my dear boy, i must see you. let me in at once. i can't bear your shutting yourself up like this." he made no answer at first, but remained quite still. the knocking still continued and grew louder. yes, it was better to let lord henry in, and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead, to quarrel with him if it became necessary to quarrel, to part if parting was inevitable. he jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the picture, and unlocked the door. "i am so sorry for it all, dorian," said lord henry as he entered. "but you must not think too much about it." "do you mean about sibyl vane?" asked the lad. "yes, of course," answered lord henry, sinking into a chair and slowly pulling off his yellow gloves. "it is dreadful, from one point of view, but it was not your fault. tell me, did you go behind and see her, after the play was over?" "yes." "i felt sure you had. did you make a scene with her?" "i was brutal, harry--perfectly brutal. but it is all right now. i am not sorry for anything that has happened. it has taught me to know myself better." "ah, dorian, i am so glad you take it in that way! i was afraid i would find you plunged in remorse and tearing that nice curly hair of yours." "i have got through all that," said dorian, shaking his head and smiling. "i am perfectly happy now. i know what conscience is, to begin with. it is not what you told me it was. it is the divinest thing in us. don't sneer at it, harry, any more--at least not before me. i want to be good. i can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous." "a very charming artistic basis for ethics, dorian! i congratulate you on it. but how are you going to begin?" "by marrying sibyl vane." "marrying sibyl vane!" cried lord henry, standing up and looking at him in perplexed amazement. "but, my dear dorian--" "yes, harry, i know what you are going to say. something dreadful about marriage. don't say it. don't ever say things of that kind to me again. two days ago i asked sibyl to marry me. i am not going to break my word to her. she is to be my wife." "your wife! dorian! ... didn't you get my letter? i wrote to you this morning, and sent the note down by my own man." "your letter? oh, yes, i remember. i have not read it yet, harry. i was afraid there might be something in it that i wouldn't like. you cut life to pieces with your epigrams." "you know nothing then?" "what do you mean?" lord henry walked across the room, and sitting down by dorian gray, took both his hands in his own and held them tightly. "dorian," he said, "my letter--don't be frightened--was to tell you that sibyl vane is dead." a cry of pain broke from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his feet, tearing his hands away from lord henry's grasp. "dead! sibyl dead! it is not true! it is a horrible lie! how dare you say it?" "it is quite true, dorian," said lord henry, gravely. "it is in all the morning papers. i wrote down to you to ask you not to see any one till i came. there will have to be an inquest, of course, and you must not be mixed up in it. things like that make a man fashionable in paris. but in london people are so prejudiced. here, one should never make one's _debut_ with a scandal. one should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age. i suppose they don't know your name at the theatre? if they don't, it is all right. did any one see you going round to her room? that is an important point." dorian did not answer for a few moments. he was dazed with horror. finally he stammered, in a stifled voice, "harry, did you say an inquest? what did you mean by that? did sibyl--? oh, harry, i can't bear it! but be quick. tell me everything at once." "i have no doubt it was not an accident, dorian, though it must be put in that way to the public. it seems that as she was leaving the theatre with her mother, about half-past twelve or so, she said she had forgotten something upstairs. they waited some time for her, but she did not come down again. they ultimately found her lying dead on the floor of her dressing-room. she had swallowed something by mistake, some dreadful thing they use at theatres. i don't know what it was, but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it. i should fancy it was prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously." "harry, harry, it is terrible!" cried the lad. "yes; it is very tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself mixed up in it. i see by _the standard_ that she was seventeen. i should have thought she was almost younger than that. she looked such a child, and seemed to know so little about acting. dorian, you mustn't let this thing get on your nerves. you must come and dine with me, and afterwards we will look in at the opera. it is a patti night, and everybody will be there. you can come to my sister's box. she has got some smart women with her." "so i have murdered sibyl vane," said dorian gray, half to himself, "murdered her as surely as if i had cut her little throat with a knife. yet the roses are not less lovely for all that. the birds sing just as happily in my garden. and to-night i am to dine with you, and then go on to the opera, and sup somewhere, i suppose, afterwards. how extraordinarily dramatic life is! if i had read all this in a book, harry, i think i would have wept over it. somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears. here is the first passionate love-letter i have ever written in my life. strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. can they feel, i wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? sibyl! can she feel, or know, or listen? oh, harry, how i loved her once! it seems years ago to me now. she was everything to me. then came that dreadful night--was it really only last night?--when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke. she explained it all to me. it was terribly pathetic. but i was not moved a bit. i thought her shallow. suddenly something happened that made me afraid. i can't tell you what it was, but it was terrible. i said i would go back to her. i felt i had done wrong. and now she is dead. my god! my god! harry, what shall i do? you don't know the danger i am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. she would have done that for me. she had no right to kill herself. it was selfish of her." "my dear dorian," answered lord henry, taking a cigarette from his case and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. if you had married this girl, you would have been wretched. of course, you would have treated her kindly. one can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. but she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. and when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. i say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject--which, of course, i would not have allowed--but i assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure." "i suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room and looking horribly pale. "but i thought it was my duty. it is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right. i remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions--that they are always made too late. mine certainly were." "good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. their origin is pure vanity. their result is absolutely _nil_. they give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. that is all that can be said for them. they are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account." "harry," cried dorian gray, coming over and sitting down beside him, "why is it that i cannot feel this tragedy as much as i want to? i don't think i am heartless. do you?" "you have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, dorian," answered lord henry with his sweet melancholy smile. the lad frowned. "i don't like that explanation, harry," he rejoined, "but i am glad you don't think i am heartless. i am nothing of the kind. i know i am not. and yet i must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. it seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. it has all the terrible beauty of a greek tragedy, a tragedy in which i took a great part, but by which i have not been wounded." "it is an interesting question," said lord henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism, "an extremely interesting question. i fancy that the true explanation is this: it often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. they affect us just as vulgarity affects us. they give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. if these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. or rather we are both. we watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. in the present case, what is it that has really happened? some one has killed herself for love of you. i wish that i had ever had such an experience. it would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life. the people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there have been some--have always insisted on living on, long after i had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. they have become stout and tedious, and when i meet them, they go in at once for reminiscences. that awful memory of woman! what a fearful thing it is! and what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! one should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. details are always vulgar." "i must sow poppies in my garden," sighed dorian. "there is no necessity," rejoined his companion. "life has always poppies in her hands. of course, now and then things linger. i once wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic mourning for a romance that would not die. ultimately, however, it did die. i forget what killed it. i think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. that is always a dreadful moment. it fills one with the terror of eternity. well--would you believe it?--a week ago, at lady hampshire's, i found myself seated at dinner next the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future. i had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel. she dragged it out again and assured me that i had spoiled her life. i am bound to state that she ate an enormous dinner, so i did not feel any anxiety. but what a lack of taste she showed! the one charm of the past is that it is the past. but women never know when the curtain has fallen. they always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. if they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. they are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. you are more fortunate than i am. i assure you, dorian, that not one of the women i have known would have done for me what sibyl vane did for you. ordinary women always console themselves. some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. it always means that they have a history. others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands. they flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. religion consoles some. its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me, and i can quite understand it. besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. conscience makes egotists of us all. yes; there is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life. indeed, i have not mentioned the most important one." "what is that, harry?" said the lad listlessly. "oh, the obvious consolation. taking some one else's admirer when one loses one's own. in good society that always whitewashes a woman. but really, dorian, how different sibyl vane must have been from all the women one meets! there is something to me quite beautiful about her death. i am glad i am living in a century when such wonders happen. they make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with, such as romance, passion, and love." "i was terribly cruel to her. you forget that." "i am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. they have wonderfully primitive instincts. we have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. they love being dominated. i am sure you were splendid. i have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but i can fancy how delightful you looked. and, after all, you said something to me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely fanciful, but that i see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key to everything." "what was that, harry?" "you said to me that sibyl vane represented to you all the heroines of romance--that she was desdemona one night, and ophelia the other; that if she died as juliet, she came to life as imogen." "she will never come to life again now," muttered the lad, burying his face in his hands. "no, she will never come to life. she has played her last part. but you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from webster, or ford, or cyril tourneur. the girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. to you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy. the moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. mourn for ophelia, if you like. put ashes on your head because cordelia was strangled. cry out against heaven because the daughter of brabantio died. but don't waste your tears over sibyl vane. she was less real than they are." there was a silence. the evening darkened in the room. noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. the colours faded wearily out of things. after some time dorian gray looked up. "you have explained me to myself, harry," he murmured with something of a sigh of relief. "i felt all that you have said, but somehow i was afraid of it, and i could not express it to myself. how well you know me! but we will not talk again of what has happened. it has been a marvellous experience. that is all. i wonder if life has still in store for me anything as marvellous." "life has everything in store for you, dorian. there is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do." "but suppose, harry, i became haggard, and old, and wrinkled? what then?" "ah, then," said lord henry, rising to go, "then, my dear dorian, you would have to fight for your victories. as it is, they are brought to you. no, you must keep your good looks. we live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. we cannot spare you. and now you had better dress and drive down to the club. we are rather late, as it is." "i think i shall join you at the opera, harry. i feel too tired to eat anything. what is the number of your sister's box?" "twenty-seven, i believe. it is on the grand tier. you will see her name on the door. but i am sorry you won't come and dine." "i don't feel up to it," said dorian listlessly. "but i am awfully obliged to you for all that you have said to me. you are certainly my best friend. no one has ever understood me as you have." "we are only at the beginning of our friendship, dorian," answered lord henry, shaking him by the hand. "good-bye. i shall see you before nine-thirty, i hope. remember, patti is singing." as he closed the door behind him, dorian gray touched the bell, and in a few minutes victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds down. he waited impatiently for him to go. the man seemed to take an interminable time over everything. as soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen and drew it back. no; there was no further change in the picture. it had received the news of sibyl vane's death before he had known of it himself. it was conscious of the events of life as they occurred. the vicious cruelty that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was. or was it indifferent to results? did it merely take cognizance of what passed within the soul? he wondered, and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he hoped it. poor sibyl! what a romance it had all been! she had often mimicked death on the stage. then death himself had touched her and taken her with him. how had she played that dreadful last scene? had she cursed him, as she died? no; she had died for love of him, and love would always be a sacrament to him now. she had atoned for everything by the sacrifice she had made of her life. he would not think any more of what she had made him go through, on that horrible night at the theatre. when he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic figure sent on to the world's stage to show the supreme reality of love. a wonderful tragic figure? tears came to his eyes as he remembered her childlike look, and winsome fanciful ways, and shy tremulous grace. he brushed them away hastily and looked again at the picture. he felt that the time had really come for making his choice. or had his choice already been made? yes, life had decided that for him--life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins--he was to have all these things. the portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all. a feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration that was in store for the fair face on the canvas. once, in boyish mockery of narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. morning after morning he had sat before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times. was it to alter now with every mood to which he yielded? was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair? the pity of it! the pity of it! for a moment, he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that existed between him and the picture might cease. it had changed in answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain unchanged. and yet, who, that knew anything about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught? besides, was it really under his control? had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution? might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? if thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity? but the reason was of no importance. he would never again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. if the picture was to alter, it was to alter. that was all. why inquire too closely into it? for there would be a real pleasure in watching it. he would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. this portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. as it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. and when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer. when the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood. not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. not one pulse of his life would ever weaken. like the gods of the greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. what did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? he would be safe. that was everything. he drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture, smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was already waiting for him. an hour later he was at the opera, and lord henry was leaning over his chair. chapter as he was sitting at breakfast next morning, basil hallward was shown into the room. "i am so glad i have found you, dorian," he said gravely. "i called last night, and they told me you were at the opera. of course, i knew that was impossible. but i wish you had left word where you had really gone to. i passed a dreadful evening, half afraid that one tragedy might be followed by another. i think you might have telegraphed for me when you heard of it first. i read of it quite by chance in a late edition of _the globe_ that i picked up at the club. i came here at once and was miserable at not finding you. i can't tell you how heart-broken i am about the whole thing. i know what you must suffer. but where were you? did you go down and see the girl's mother? for a moment i thought of following you there. they gave the address in the paper. somewhere in the euston road, isn't it? but i was afraid of intruding upon a sorrow that i could not lighten. poor woman! what a state she must be in! and her only child, too! what did she say about it all?" "my dear basil, how do i know?" murmured dorian gray, sipping some pale-yellow wine from a delicate, gold-beaded bubble of venetian glass and looking dreadfully bored. "i was at the opera. you should have come on there. i met lady gwendolen, harry's sister, for the first time. we were in her box. she is perfectly charming; and patti sang divinely. don't talk about horrid subjects. if one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. it is simply expression, as harry says, that gives reality to things. i may mention that she was not the woman's only child. there is a son, a charming fellow, i believe. but he is not on the stage. he is a sailor, or something. and now, tell me about yourself and what you are painting." "you went to the opera?" said hallward, speaking very slowly and with a strained touch of pain in his voice. "you went to the opera while sibyl vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging? you can talk to me of other women being charming, and of patti singing divinely, before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in? why, man, there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!" "stop, basil! i won't hear it!" cried dorian, leaping to his feet. "you must not tell me about things. what is done is done. what is past is past." "you call yesterday the past?" "what has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? it is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. a man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. i don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. i want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them." "dorian, this is horrible! something has changed you completely. you look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come down to my studio to sit for his picture. but you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. you were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. now, i don't know what has come over you. you talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. it is all harry's influence. i see that." the lad flushed up and, going to the window, looked out for a few moments on the green, flickering, sun-lashed garden. "i owe a great deal to harry, basil," he said at last, "more than i owe to you. you only taught me to be vain." "well, i am punished for that, dorian--or shall be some day." "i don't know what you mean, basil," he exclaimed, turning round. "i don't know what you want. what do you want?" "i want the dorian gray i used to paint," said the artist sadly. "basil," said the lad, going over to him and putting his hand on his shoulder, "you have come too late. yesterday, when i heard that sibyl vane had killed herself--" "killed herself! good heavens! is there no doubt about that?" cried hallward, looking up at him with an expression of horror. "my dear basil! surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident? of course she killed herself." the elder man buried his face in his hands. "how fearful," he muttered, and a shudder ran through him. "no," said dorian gray, "there is nothing fearful about it. it is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. as a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. they are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. you know what i mean--middle-class virtue and all that kind of thing. how different sibyl was! she lived her finest tragedy. she was always a heroine. the last night she played--the night you saw her--she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. when she knew its unreality, she died, as juliet might have died. she passed again into the sphere of art. there is something of the martyr about her. her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. but, as i was saying, you must not think i have not suffered. if you had come in yesterday at a particular moment--about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six--you would have found me in tears. even harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what i was going through. i suffered immensely. then it passed away. i cannot repeat an emotion. no one can, except sentimentalists. and you are awfully unjust, basil. you come down here to console me. that is charming of you. you find me consoled, and you are furious. how like a sympathetic person! you remind me of a story harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered--i forget exactly what it was. finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. he had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of _ennui_, and became a confirmed misanthrope. and besides, my dear old basil, if you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it from a proper artistic point of view. was it not gautier who used to write about _la consolation des arts_? i remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase. well, i am not like that young man you told me of when we were down at marlow together, the young man who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. i love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp--there is much to be got from all these. but the artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to me. to become the spectator of one's own life, as harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. i know you are surprised at my talking to you like this. you have not realized how i have developed. i was a schoolboy when you knew me. i am a man now. i have new passions, new thoughts, new ideas. i am different, but you must not like me less. i am changed, but you must always be my friend. of course, i am very fond of harry. but i know that you are better than he is. you are not stronger--you are too much afraid of life--but you are better. and how happy we used to be together! don't leave me, basil, and don't quarrel with me. i am what i am. there is nothing more to be said." the painter felt strangely moved. the lad was infinitely dear to him, and his personality had been the great turning point in his art. he could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more. after all, his indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away. there was so much in him that was good, so much in him that was noble. "well, dorian," he said at length, with a sad smile, "i won't speak to you again about this horrible thing, after to-day. i only trust your name won't be mentioned in connection with it. the inquest is to take place this afternoon. have they summoned you?" dorian shook his head, and a look of annoyance passed over his face at the mention of the word "inquest." there was something so crude and vulgar about everything of the kind. "they don't know my name," he answered. "but surely she did?" "only my christian name, and that i am quite sure she never mentioned to any one. she told me once that they were all rather curious to learn who i was, and that she invariably told them my name was prince charming. it was pretty of her. you must do me a drawing of sibyl, basil. i should like to have something more of her than the memory of a few kisses and some broken pathetic words." "i will try and do something, dorian, if it would please you. but you must come and sit to me yourself again. i can't get on without you." "i can never sit to you again, basil. it is impossible!" he exclaimed, starting back. the painter stared at him. "my dear boy, what nonsense!" he cried. "do you mean to say you don't like what i did of you? where is it? why have you pulled the screen in front of it? let me look at it. it is the best thing i have ever done. do take the screen away, dorian. it is simply disgraceful of your servant hiding my work like that. i felt the room looked different as i came in." "my servant has nothing to do with it, basil. you don't imagine i let him arrange my room for me? he settles my flowers for me sometimes--that is all. no; i did it myself. the light was too strong on the portrait." "too strong! surely not, my dear fellow? it is an admirable place for it. let me see it." and hallward walked towards the corner of the room. a cry of terror broke from dorian gray's lips, and he rushed between the painter and the screen. "basil," he said, looking very pale, "you must not look at it. i don't wish you to." "not look at my own work! you are not serious. why shouldn't i look at it?" exclaimed hallward, laughing. "if you try to look at it, basil, on my word of honour i will never speak to you again as long as i live. i am quite serious. i don't offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any. but, remember, if you touch this screen, everything is over between us." hallward was thunderstruck. he looked at dorian gray in absolute amazement. he had never seen him like this before. the lad was actually pallid with rage. his hands were clenched, and the pupils of his eyes were like disks of blue fire. he was trembling all over. "dorian!" "don't speak!" "but what is the matter? of course i won't look at it if you don't want me to," he said, rather coldly, turning on his heel and going over towards the window. "but, really, it seems rather absurd that i shouldn't see my own work, especially as i am going to exhibit it in paris in the autumn. i shall probably have to give it another coat of varnish before that, so i must see it some day, and why not to-day?" "to exhibit it! you want to exhibit it?" exclaimed dorian gray, a strange sense of terror creeping over him. was the world going to be shown his secret? were people to gape at the mystery of his life? that was impossible. something--he did not know what--had to be done at once. "yes; i don't suppose you will object to that. georges petit is going to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in the rue de seze, which will open the first week in october. the portrait will only be away a month. i should think you could easily spare it for that time. in fact, you are sure to be out of town. and if you keep it always behind a screen, you can't care much about it." dorian gray passed his hand over his forehead. there were beads of perspiration there. he felt that he was on the brink of a horrible danger. "you told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it," he cried. "why have you changed your mind? you people who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. the only difference is that your moods are rather meaningless. you can't have forgotten that you assured me most solemnly that nothing in the world would induce you to send it to any exhibition. you told harry exactly the same thing." he stopped suddenly, and a gleam of light came into his eyes. he remembered that lord henry had said to him once, half seriously and half in jest, "if you want to have a strange quarter of an hour, get basil to tell you why he won't exhibit your picture. he told me why he wouldn't, and it was a revelation to me." yes, perhaps basil, too, had his secret. he would ask him and try. "basil," he said, coming over quite close and looking him straight in the face, "we have each of us a secret. let me know yours, and i shall tell you mine. what was your reason for refusing to exhibit my picture?" the painter shuddered in spite of himself. "dorian, if i told you, you might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at me. i could not bear your doing either of those two things. if you wish me never to look at your picture again, i am content. i have always you to look at. if you wish the best work i have ever done to be hidden from the world, i am satisfied. your friendship is dearer to me than any fame or reputation." "no, basil, you must tell me," insisted dorian gray. "i think i have a right to know." his feeling of terror had passed away, and curiosity had taken its place. he was determined to find out basil hallward's mystery. "let us sit down, dorian," said the painter, looking troubled. "let us sit down. and just answer me one question. have you noticed in the picture something curious?--something that probably at first did not strike you, but that revealed itself to you suddenly?" "basil!" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with trembling hands and gazing at him with wild startled eyes. "i see you did. don't speak. wait till you hear what i have to say. dorian, from the moment i met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. i was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. you became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. i worshipped you. i grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. i wanted to have you all to myself. i was only happy when i was with you. when you were away from me, you were still present in my art.... of course, i never let you know anything about this. it would have been impossible. you would not have understood it. i hardly understood it myself. i only knew that i had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes--too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them.... weeks and weeks went on, and i grew more and more absorbed in you. then came a new development. i had drawn you as paris in dainty armour, and as adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boar-spear. crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on the prow of adrian's barge, gazing across the green turbid nile. you had leaned over the still pool of some greek woodland and seen in the water's silent silver the marvel of your own face. and it had all been what art should be--unconscious, ideal, and remote. one day, a fatal day i sometimes think, i determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time. whether it was the realism of the method, or the mere wonder of your own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or veil, i cannot tell. but i know that as i worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. i grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry. i felt, dorian, that i had told too much, that i had put too much of myself into it. then it was that i resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. you were a little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to me. harry, to whom i talked about it, laughed at me. but i did not mind that. when the picture was finished, and i sat alone with it, i felt that i was right.... well, after a few days the thing left my studio, and as soon as i had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence, it seemed to me that i had been foolish in imagining that i had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good-looking and that i could paint. even now i cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. art is always more abstract than we fancy. form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. it often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. and so when i got this offer from paris, i determined to make your portrait the principal thing in my exhibition. it never occurred to me that you would refuse. i see now that you were right. the picture cannot be shown. you must not be angry with me, dorian, for what i have told you. as i said to harry, once, you are made to be worshipped." dorian gray drew a long breath. the colour came back to his cheeks, and a smile played about his lips. the peril was over. he was safe for the time. yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for the painter who had just made this strange confession to him, and wondered if he himself would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend. lord henry had the charm of being very dangerous. but that was all. he was too clever and too cynical to be really fond of. would there ever be some one who would fill him with a strange idolatry? was that one of the things that life had in store? "it is extraordinary to me, dorian," said hallward, "that you should have seen this in the portrait. did you really see it?" "i saw something in it," he answered, "something that seemed to me very curious." "well, you don't mind my looking at the thing now?" dorian shook his head. "you must not ask me that, basil. i could not possibly let you stand in front of that picture." "you will some day, surely?" "never." "well, perhaps you are right. and now good-bye, dorian. you have been the one person in my life who has really influenced my art. whatever i have done that is good, i owe to you. ah! you don't know what it cost me to tell you all that i have told you." "my dear basil," said dorian, "what have you told me? simply that you felt that you admired me too much. that is not even a compliment." "it was not intended as a compliment. it was a confession. now that i have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. perhaps one should never put one's worship into words." "it was a very disappointing confession." "why, what did you expect, dorian? you didn't see anything else in the picture, did you? there was nothing else to see?" "no; there was nothing else to see. why do you ask? but you mustn't talk about worship. it is foolish. you and i are friends, basil, and we must always remain so." "you have got harry," said the painter sadly. "oh, harry!" cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter. "harry spends his days in saying what is incredible and his evenings in doing what is improbable. just the sort of life i would like to lead. but still i don't think i would go to harry if i were in trouble. i would sooner go to you, basil." "you will sit to me again?" "impossible!" "you spoil my life as an artist by refusing, dorian. no man comes across two ideal things. few come across one." "i can't explain it to you, basil, but i must never sit to you again. there is something fatal about a portrait. it has a life of its own. i will come and have tea with you. that will be just as pleasant." "pleasanter for you, i am afraid," murmured hallward regretfully. "and now good-bye. i am sorry you won't let me look at the picture once again. but that can't be helped. i quite understand what you feel about it." as he left the room, dorian gray smiled to himself. poor basil! how little he knew of the true reason! and how strange it was that, instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend! how much that strange confession explained to him! the painter's absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his curious reticences--he understood them all now, and he felt sorry. there seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance. he sighed and touched the bell. the portrait must be hidden away at all costs. he could not run such a risk of discovery again. it had been mad of him to have allowed the thing to remain, even for an hour, in a room to which any of his friends had access. chapter when his servant entered, he looked at him steadfastly and wondered if he had thought of peering behind the screen. the man was quite impassive and waited for his orders. dorian lit a cigarette and walked over to the glass and glanced into it. he could see the reflection of victor's face perfectly. it was like a placid mask of servility. there was nothing to be afraid of, there. yet he thought it best to be on his guard. speaking very slowly, he told him to tell the house-keeper that he wanted to see her, and then to go to the frame-maker and ask him to send two of his men round at once. it seemed to him that as the man left the room his eyes wandered in the direction of the screen. or was that merely his own fancy? after a few moments, in her black silk dress, with old-fashioned thread mittens on her wrinkled hands, mrs. leaf bustled into the library. he asked her for the key of the schoolroom. "the old schoolroom, mr. dorian?" she exclaimed. "why, it is full of dust. i must get it arranged and put straight before you go into it. it is not fit for you to see, sir. it is not, indeed." "i don't want it put straight, leaf. i only want the key." "well, sir, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you go into it. why, it hasn't been opened for nearly five years--not since his lordship died." he winced at the mention of his grandfather. he had hateful memories of him. "that does not matter," he answered. "i simply want to see the place--that is all. give me the key." "and here is the key, sir," said the old lady, going over the contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands. "here is the key. i'll have it off the bunch in a moment. but you don't think of living up there, sir, and you so comfortable here?" "no, no," he cried petulantly. "thank you, leaf. that will do." she lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail of the household. he sighed and told her to manage things as she thought best. she left the room, wreathed in smiles. as the door closed, dorian put the key in his pocket and looked round the room. his eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century venetian work that his grandfather had found in a convent near bologna. yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. it had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. what the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. they would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. they would defile it and make it shameful. and yet the thing would still live on. it would be always alive. he shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told basil the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away. basil would have helped him to resist lord henry's influence, and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. the love that he bore him--for it was really love--had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. it was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the senses tire. it was such love as michelangelo had known, and montaigne, and winckelmann, and shakespeare himself. yes, basil could have saved him. but it was too late now. the past could always be annihilated. regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. but the future was inevitable. there were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real. he took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen. was the face on the canvas viler than before? it seemed to him that it was unchanged, and yet his loathing of it was intensified. gold hair, blue eyes, and rose-red lips--they all were there. it was simply the expression that had altered. that was horrible in its cruelty. compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow basil's reproaches about sibyl vane had been!--how shallow, and of what little account! his own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgement. a look of pain came across him, and he flung the rich pall over the picture. as he did so, a knock came to the door. he passed out as his servant entered. "the persons are here, monsieur." he felt that the man must be got rid of at once. he must not be allowed to know where the picture was being taken to. there was something sly about him, and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes. sitting down at the writing-table he scribbled a note to lord henry, asking him to send him round something to read and reminding him that they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening. "wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the men in here." in two or three minutes there was another knock, and mr. hubbard himself, the celebrated frame-maker of south audley street, came in with a somewhat rough-looking young assistant. mr. hubbard was a florid, red-whiskered little man, whose admiration for art was considerably tempered by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of the artists who dealt with him. as a rule, he never left his shop. he waited for people to come to him. but he always made an exception in favour of dorian gray. there was something about dorian that charmed everybody. it was a pleasure even to see him. "what can i do for you, mr. gray?" he said, rubbing his fat freckled hands. "i thought i would do myself the honour of coming round in person. i have just got a beauty of a frame, sir. picked it up at a sale. old florentine. came from fonthill, i believe. admirably suited for a religious subject, mr. gray." "i am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round, mr. hubbard. i shall certainly drop in and look at the frame--though i don't go in much at present for religious art--but to-day i only want a picture carried to the top of the house for me. it is rather heavy, so i thought i would ask you to lend me a couple of your men." "no trouble at all, mr. gray. i am delighted to be of any service to you. which is the work of art, sir?" "this," replied dorian, moving the screen back. "can you move it, covering and all, just as it is? i don't want it to get scratched going upstairs." "there will be no difficulty, sir," said the genial frame-maker, beginning, with the aid of his assistant, to unhook the picture from the long brass chains by which it was suspended. "and, now, where shall we carry it to, mr. gray?" "i will show you the way, mr. hubbard, if you will kindly follow me. or perhaps you had better go in front. i am afraid it is right at the top of the house. we will go up by the front staircase, as it is wider." he held the door open for them, and they passed out into the hall and began the ascent. the elaborate character of the frame had made the picture extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the obsequious protests of mr. hubbard, who had the true tradesman's spirited dislike of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful, dorian put his hand to it so as to help them. "something of a load to carry, sir," gasped the little man when they reached the top landing. and he wiped his shiny forehead. "i am afraid it is rather heavy," murmured dorian as he unlocked the door that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious secret of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men. he had not entered the place for more than four years--not, indeed, since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child, and then as a study when he grew somewhat older. it was a large, well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last lord kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance. it appeared to dorian to have but little changed. there was the huge italian _cassone_, with its fantastically painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which he had so often hidden himself as a boy. there the satinwood book-case filled with his dog-eared schoolbooks. on the wall behind it was hanging the same ragged flemish tapestry where a faded king and queen were playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists. how well he remembered it all! every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked round. he recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here the fatal portrait was to be hidden away. how little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store for him! but there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as this. he had the key, and no one else could enter it. beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. what did it matter? no one could see it. he himself would not see it. why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? he kept his youth--that was enough. and, besides, might not his nature grow finer, after all? there was no reason that the future should be so full of shame. some love might come across his life, and purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh--those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm. perhaps, some day, the cruel look would have passed away from the scarlet sensitive mouth, and he might show to the world basil hallward's masterpiece. no; that was impossible. hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. it might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. the cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. yellow crow's feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. the hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. there would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. the picture had to be concealed. there was no help for it. "bring it in, mr. hubbard, please," he said, wearily, turning round. "i am sorry i kept you so long. i was thinking of something else." "always glad to have a rest, mr. gray," answered the frame-maker, who was still gasping for breath. "where shall we put it, sir?" "oh, anywhere. here: this will do. i don't want to have it hung up. just lean it against the wall. thanks." "might one look at the work of art, sir?" dorian started. "it would not interest you, mr. hubbard," he said, keeping his eye on the man. he felt ready to leap upon him and fling him to the ground if he dared to lift the gorgeous hanging that concealed the secret of his life. "i shan't trouble you any more now. i am much obliged for your kindness in coming round." "not at all, not at all, mr. gray. ever ready to do anything for you, sir." and mr. hubbard tramped downstairs, followed by the assistant, who glanced back at dorian with a look of shy wonder in his rough uncomely face. he had never seen any one so marvellous. when the sound of their footsteps had died away, dorian locked the door and put the key in his pocket. he felt safe now. no one would ever look upon the horrible thing. no eye but his would ever see his shame. on reaching the library, he found that it was just after five o'clock and that the tea had been already brought up. on a little table of dark perfumed wood thickly incrusted with nacre, a present from lady radley, his guardian's wife, a pretty professional invalid who had spent the preceding winter in cairo, was lying a note from lord henry, and beside it was a book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled. a copy of the third edition of _the st. james's gazette_ had been placed on the tea-tray. it was evident that victor had returned. he wondered if he had met the men in the hall as they were leaving the house and had wormed out of them what they had been doing. he would be sure to miss the picture--had no doubt missed it already, while he had been laying the tea-things. the screen had not been set back, and a blank space was visible on the wall. perhaps some night he might find him creeping upstairs and trying to force the door of the room. it was a horrible thing to have a spy in one's house. he had heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a letter, or overheard a conversation, or picked up a card with an address, or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a shred of crumpled lace. he sighed, and having poured himself out some tea, opened lord henry's note. it was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper, and a book that might interest him, and that he would be at the club at eight-fifteen. he opened _the st. james's_ languidly, and looked through it. a red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye. it drew attention to the following paragraph: inquest on an actress.--an inquest was held this morning at the bell tavern, hoxton road, by mr. danby, the district coroner, on the body of sibyl vane, a young actress recently engaged at the royal theatre, holborn. a verdict of death by misadventure was returned. considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of dr. birrell, who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased. he frowned, and tearing the paper in two, went across the room and flung the pieces away. how ugly it all was! and how horribly real ugliness made things! he felt a little annoyed with lord henry for having sent him the report. and it was certainly stupid of him to have marked it with red pencil. victor might have read it. the man knew more than enough english for that. perhaps he had read it and had begun to suspect something. and, yet, what did it matter? what had dorian gray to do with sibyl vane's death? there was nothing to fear. dorian gray had not killed her. his eye fell on the yellow book that lord henry had sent him. what was it, he wondered. he went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. after a few minutes he became absorbed. it was the strangest book that he had ever read. it seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed. it was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. the style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the french school of _symbolistes_. there were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. the life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. one hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. it was a poisonous book. the heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. the mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows. cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed through the windows. he read on by its wan light till he could read no more. then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the lateness of the hour, he got up, and going into the next room, placed the book on the little florentine table that always stood at his bedside and began to dress for dinner. it was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found lord henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very much bored. "i am so sorry, harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your fault. that book you sent me so fascinated me that i forgot how the time was going." "yes, i thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his chair. "i didn't say i liked it, harry. i said it fascinated me. there is a great difference." "ah, you have discovered that?" murmured lord henry. and they passed into the dining-room. chapter for years, dorian gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. he procured from paris no less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control. the hero, the wonderful young parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. and, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. in one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic hero. he never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still water which came upon the young parisian so early in his life, and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beau that had once, apparently, been so remarkable. it was with an almost cruel joy--and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its really tragic, if somewhat overemphasized, account of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world, he had most dearly valued. for the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated basil hallward, and many others besides him, seemed never to leave him. even those who had heard the most evil things against him--and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through london and became the chatter of the clubs--could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. he had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. men who talked grossly became silent when dorian gray entered the room. there was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. his mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. they wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual. often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that basil hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. the very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. he grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. he would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. he would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. he mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs. there were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed tavern near the docks which, under an assumed name and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish. but moments such as these were rare. that curiosity about life which lord henry had first stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase with gratification. the more he knew, the more he desired to know. he had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them. yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to society. once or twice every month during the winter, and on each wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. his little dinners, in the settling of which lord henry always assisted him, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver. indeed, there were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in dorian gray the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed in eton or oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. to them he seemed to be of the company of those whom dante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty." like gautier, he was one for whom "the visible world existed." and, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him. his mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the mayfair balls and pall mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies. for, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the london of his own day what to imperial neronian rome the author of the satyricon once had been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere _arbiter elegantiarum_, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a cane. he sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization. the worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. but it appeared to dorian gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. as he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. so much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! there had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape; nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions. yes: there was to be, as lord henry had prophesied, a new hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. it was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. but it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment. there are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. in black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. the wan mirrors get back their mimic life. the flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. nothing seems to us changed. out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. we have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain. it was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to dorian gray to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it. it was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the roman catholic communion, and certainly the roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. the daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. he loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled, lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the "_panis caelestis_," the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the passion of christ, breaking the host into the chalice and smiting his breast for his sins. the fuming censers that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their subtle fascination for him. as he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives. but he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the _darwinismus_ movement in germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. he felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. he knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal. and so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums from the east. he saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers; of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul. at another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gipsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass and charmed--or feigned to charm--great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. the harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when schubert's grace, and chopin's beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear. he collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them. he had the mysterious _juruparis_ of the rio negro indians, that women are not allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human bones such as alfonso de ovalle heard in chile, and the sonorous green jaspers that are found near cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness. he had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken; the long _clarin_ of the mexicans, into which the performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the harsh _ture_ of the amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a distance of three leagues; the _teponaztli_, that has two vibrating tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the _yotl_-bells of the aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one that bernal diaz saw when he went with cortes into the mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description. the fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with lord henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul. on one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a costume ball as anne de joyeuse, admiral of france, in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls. this taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him. he would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wirelike line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous, four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. he loved the red gold of the sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. he procured from amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness of colour, and had a turquoise _de la vieille roche_ that was the envy of all the connoisseurs. he discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. in alphonso's clericalis disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of alexander, the conqueror of emathia was said to have found in the vale of jordan snakes "with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs." there was a gem in the brain of the dragon, philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep and slain. according to the great alchemist, pierre de boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of india made him eloquent. the cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. the garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her colour. the selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. leonardus camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. the bezoar, that was found in the heart of the arabian deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. in the nests of arabian birds was the aspilates, that, according to democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire. the king of ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand, as the ceremony of his coronation. the gates of the palace of john the priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." over the gable were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the gold might shine by day and the carbuncles by night. in lodge's strange romance 'a margarite of america', it was stated that in the chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste ladies of the world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrours of chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults." marco polo had seen the inhabitants of zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in the mouths of the dead. a sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to king perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss. when the huns lured the king into the great pit, he flung it away--procopius tells the story--nor was it ever found again, though the emperor anastasius offered five hundred-weight of gold pieces for it. the king of malabar had shown to a certain venetian a rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god that he worshipped. when the duke de valentinois, son of alexander vi, visited louis xii of france, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to brantome, and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light. charles of england had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and twenty-one diamonds. richard ii had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies. hall described henry viii, on his way to the tower previous to his coronation, as wearing "a jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses." the favourites of james i wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane. edward ii gave to piers gaveston a suit of red-gold armour studded with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap _parseme_ with pearls. henry ii wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-two great orients. the ducal hat of charles the rash, the last duke of burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls and studded with sapphires. how exquisite life had once been! how gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful. then he turned his attention to embroideries and to the tapestries that performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of the northern nations of europe. as he investigated the subject--and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up--he was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things. he, at any rate, had escaped that. summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame, but he was unchanged. no winter marred his face or stained his flowerlike bloom. how different it was with material things! where had they passed to? where was the great crocus-coloured robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked by brown girls for the pleasure of athena? where the huge velarium that nero had stretched across the colosseum at rome, that titan sail of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and apollo driving a chariot drawn by white, gilt-reined steeds? he longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for the priest of the sun, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the mortuary cloth of king chilperic, with its three hundred golden bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the bishop of pontus and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests, rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature"; and the coat that charles of orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "_madame, je suis tout joyeux_," the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread, and each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four pearls. he read of the room that was prepared at the palace at rheims for the use of queen joan of burgundy and was decorated with "thirteen hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked in gold." catherine de medicis had a mourning-bed made for her of black velvet powdered with crescents and suns. its curtains were of damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver. louis xiv had gold embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment. the state bed of sobieski, king of poland, was made of smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses from the koran. its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. it had been taken from the turkish camp before vienna, and the standard of mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its canopy. and so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting the dainty delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the east as "woven air," and "running water," and "evening dew"; strange figured cloths from java; elaborate yellow chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks and wrought with _fleurs-de-lis_, birds and images; veils of _lacis_ worked in hungary point; sicilian brocades and stiff spanish velvets; georgian work, with its gilt coins, and japanese _foukousas_, with their green-toned golds and their marvellously plumaged birds. he had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the church. in the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house, he had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the bride of christ, who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for and wounded by self-inflicted pain. he possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask, figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side was the pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls. the orphreys were divided into panels representing scenes from the life of the virgin, and the coronation of the virgin was figured in coloured silks upon the hood. this was italian work of the fifteenth century. another cope was of green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves, from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of which were picked out with silver thread and coloured crystals. the morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work. the orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was st. sebastian. he had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with representations of the passion and crucifixion of christ, and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins and _fleurs-de-lis_; altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria. in the mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that quickened his imagination. for these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne. upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain. for weeks he would not go there, would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in mere existence. then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to dreadful places near blue gate fields, and stay there, day after day, until he was driven away. on his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own. after a few years he could not endure to be long out of england, and gave up the villa that he had shared at trouville with lord henry, as well as the little white walled-in house at algiers where they had more than once spent the winter. he hated to be separated from the picture that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid that during his absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite of the elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door. he was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing. it was true that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and ugliness of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could they learn from that? he would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him. he had not painted it. what was it to him how vile and full of shame it looked? even if he told them, would they believe it? yet he was afraid. sometimes when he was down at his great house in nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not been tampered with and that the picture was still there. what if it should be stolen? the mere thought made him cold with horror. surely the world would know his secret then. perhaps the world already suspected it. for, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him. he was very nearly blackballed at a west end club of which his birth and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and it was said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the churchill, the duke of berwick and another gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out. curious stories became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. it was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade. his extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret. of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice, and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer to the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about him. it was remarked, however, that some of those who had been most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him. women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if dorian gray entered the room. yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of many his strange and dangerous charm. his great wealth was a certain element of security. society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. it feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good _chef_. and, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life. even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold _entrees_, as lord henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject, and there is possibly a good deal to be said for his view. for the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. form is absolutely essential to it. it should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. is insincerity such a terrible thing? i think not. it is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. such, at any rate, was dorian gray's opinion. he used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. to him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. he loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins. here was philip herbert, described by francis osborne, in his memoires on the reigns of queen elizabeth and king james, as one who was "caressed by the court for his handsome face, which kept him not long company." was it young herbert's life that he sometimes led? had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own? was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance, in basil hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed his life? here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wristbands, stood sir anthony sherard, with his silver-and-black armour piled at his feet. what had this man's legacy been? had the lover of giovanna of naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame? were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize? here, from the fading canvas, smiled lady elizabeth devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves. a flower was in her right hand, and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses. on a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple. there were large green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes. he knew her life, and the strange stories that were told about her lovers. had he something of her temperament in him? these oval, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him. what of george willoughby, with his powdered hair and fantastic patches? how evil he looked! the face was saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain. delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that were so overladen with rings. he had been a macaroni of the eighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of lord ferrars. what of the second lord beckenham, the companion of the prince regent in his wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with mrs. fitzherbert? how proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and insolent pose! what passions had he bequeathed? the world had looked upon him as infamous. he had led the orgies at carlton house. the star of the garter glittered upon his breast. beside him hung the portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black. her blood, also, stirred within him. how curious it all seemed! and his mother with her lady hamilton face and her moist, wine-dashed lips--he knew what he had got from her. he had got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty of others. she laughed at him in her loose bacchante dress. there were vine leaves in her hair. the purple spilled from the cup she was holding. the carnations of the painting had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth and brilliancy of colour. they seemed to follow him wherever he went. yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. there were times when it appeared to dorian gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. he felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. it seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own. the hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had himself known this curious fancy. in the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as tiberius, in a garden at capri, reading the shameful books of elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as domitian, had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible _taedium vitae_, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the circus and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the street of pomegranates to a house of gold and heard men cry on nero caesar as he passed by; and, as elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the moon from carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the sun. over and over again dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made monstrous or mad: filippo, duke of milan, who slew his wife and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled; pietro barbi, the venetian, known as paul the second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the price of a terrible sin; gian maria visconti, who used hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the borgia on his white horse, with fratricide riding beside him and his mantle stained with the blood of perotto; pietro riario, the young cardinal archbishop of florence, child and minion of sixtus iv, whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who received leonora of aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as ganymede or hylas; ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine--the son of the fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; giambattista cibo, who in mockery took the name of innocent and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a jewish doctor; sigismondo malatesta, the lover of isotta and the lord of rimini, whose effigy was burned at rome as the enemy of god and man, who strangled polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to ginevra d'este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a shameful passion built a pagan church for christian worship; charles vi, who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by saracen cards painted with the images of love and death and madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls, grifonetto baglioni, who slew astorre with his bride, and simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep, and atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him. there was a horrible fascination in them all. he saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day. the renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. dorian gray had been poisoned by a book. there were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. chapter it was on the ninth of november, the eve of his own thirty-eighth birthday, as he often remembered afterwards. he was walking home about eleven o'clock from lord henry's, where he had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold and foggy. at the corner of grosvenor square and south audley street, a man passed him in the mist, walking very fast and with the collar of his grey ulster turned up. he had a bag in his hand. dorian recognized him. it was basil hallward. a strange sense of fear, for which he could not account, came over him. he made no sign of recognition and went on quickly in the direction of his own house. but hallward had seen him. dorian heard him first stopping on the pavement and then hurrying after him. in a few moments, his hand was on his arm. "dorian! what an extraordinary piece of luck! i have been waiting for you in your library ever since nine o'clock. finally i took pity on your tired servant and told him to go to bed, as he let me out. i am off to paris by the midnight train, and i particularly wanted to see you before i left. i thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as you passed me. but i wasn't quite sure. didn't you recognize me?" "in this fog, my dear basil? why, i can't even recognize grosvenor square. i believe my house is somewhere about here, but i don't feel at all certain about it. i am sorry you are going away, as i have not seen you for ages. but i suppose you will be back soon?" "no: i am going to be out of england for six months. i intend to take a studio in paris and shut myself up till i have finished a great picture i have in my head. however, it wasn't about myself i wanted to talk. here we are at your door. let me come in for a moment. i have something to say to you." "i shall be charmed. but won't you miss your train?" said dorian gray languidly as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his latch-key. the lamplight struggled out through the fog, and hallward looked at his watch. "i have heaps of time," he answered. "the train doesn't go till twelve-fifteen, and it is only just eleven. in fact, i was on my way to the club to look for you, when i met you. you see, i shan't have any delay about luggage, as i have sent on my heavy things. all i have with me is in this bag, and i can easily get to victoria in twenty minutes." dorian looked at him and smiled. "what a way for a fashionable painter to travel! a gladstone bag and an ulster! come in, or the fog will get into the house. and mind you don't talk about anything serious. nothing is serious nowadays. at least nothing should be." hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed dorian into the library. there was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open hearth. the lamps were lit, and an open dutch silver spirit-case stood, with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers, on a little marqueterie table. "you see your servant made me quite at home, dorian. he gave me everything i wanted, including your best gold-tipped cigarettes. he is a most hospitable creature. i like him much better than the frenchman you used to have. what has become of the frenchman, by the bye?" dorian shrugged his shoulders. "i believe he married lady radley's maid, and has established her in paris as an english dressmaker. anglomania is very fashionable over there now, i hear. it seems silly of the french, doesn't it? but--do you know?--he was not at all a bad servant. i never liked him, but i had nothing to complain about. one often imagines things that are quite absurd. he was really very devoted to me and seemed quite sorry when he went away. have another brandy-and-soda? or would you like hock-and-seltzer? i always take hock-and-seltzer myself. there is sure to be some in the next room." "thanks, i won't have anything more," said the painter, taking his cap and coat off and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in the corner. "and now, my dear fellow, i want to speak to you seriously. don't frown like that. you make it so much more difficult for me." "what is it all about?" cried dorian in his petulant way, flinging himself down on the sofa. "i hope it is not about myself. i am tired of myself to-night. i should like to be somebody else." "it is about yourself," answered hallward in his grave deep voice, "and i must say it to you. i shall only keep you half an hour." dorian sighed and lit a cigarette. "half an hour!" he murmured. "it is not much to ask of you, dorian, and it is entirely for your own sake that i am speaking. i think it right that you should know that the most dreadful things are being said against you in london." "i don't wish to know anything about them. i love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. they have not got the charm of novelty." "they must interest you, dorian. every gentleman is interested in his good name. you don't want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded. of course, you have your position, and your wealth, and all that kind of thing. but position and wealth are not everything. mind you, i don't believe these rumours at all. at least, i can't believe them when i see you. sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. it cannot be concealed. people talk sometimes of secret vices. there are no such things. if a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. somebody--i won't mention his name, but you know him--came to me last year to have his portrait done. i had never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the time, though i have heard a good deal since. he offered an extravagant price. i refused him. there was something in the shape of his fingers that i hated. i know now that i was quite right in what i fancied about him. his life is dreadful. but you, dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth--i can't believe anything against you. and yet i see you very seldom, and you never come down to the studio now, and when i am away from you, and i hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, i don't know what to say. why is it, dorian, that a man like the duke of berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? why is it that so many gentlemen in london will neither go to your house or invite you to theirs? you used to be a friend of lord staveley. i met him at dinner last week. your name happened to come up in conversation, in connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the dudley. staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. i reminded him that i was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant. he told me. he told me right out before everybody. it was horrible! why is your friendship so fatal to young men? there was that wretched boy in the guards who committed suicide. you were his great friend. there was sir henry ashton, who had to leave england with a tarnished name. you and he were inseparable. what about adrian singleton and his dreadful end? what about lord kent's only son and his career? i met his father yesterday in st. james's street. he seemed broken with shame and sorrow. what about the young duke of perth? what sort of life has he got now? what gentleman would associate with him?" "stop, basil. you are talking about things of which you know nothing," said dorian gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt in his voice. "you ask me why berwick leaves a room when i enter it. it is because i know everything about his life, not because he knows anything about mine. with such blood as he has in his veins, how could his record be clean? you ask me about henry ashton and young perth. did i teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery? if kent's silly son takes his wife from the streets, what is that to me? if adrian singleton writes his friend's name across a bill, am i his keeper? i know how people chatter in england. the middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander. in this country, it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. and what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? my dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite." "dorian," cried hallward, "that is not the question. england is bad enough i know, and english society is all wrong. that is the reason why i want you to be fine. you have not been fine. one has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. you have filled them with a madness for pleasure. they have gone down into the depths. you led them there. yes: you led them there, and yet you can smile, as you are smiling now. and there is worse behind. i know you and harry are inseparable. surely for that reason, if for none other, you should not have made his sister's name a by-word." "take care, basil. you go too far." "i must speak, and you must listen. you shall listen. when you met lady gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever touched her. is there a single decent woman in london now who would drive with her in the park? why, even her children are not allowed to live with her. then there are other stories--stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in london. are they true? can they be true? when i first heard them, i laughed. i hear them now, and they make me shudder. what about your country-house and the life that is led there? dorian, you don't know what is said about you. i won't tell you that i don't want to preach to you. i remember harry saying once that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always began by saying that, and then proceeded to break his word. i do want to preach to you. i want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect you. i want you to have a clean name and a fair record. i want you to get rid of the dreadful people you associate with. don't shrug your shoulders like that. don't be so indifferent. you have a wonderful influence. let it be for good, not for evil. they say that you corrupt every one with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house for shame of some kind to follow after. i don't know whether it is so or not. how should i know? but it is said of you. i am told things that it seems impossible to doubt. lord gloucester was one of my greatest friends at oxford. he showed me a letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in her villa at mentone. your name was implicated in the most terrible confession i ever read. i told him that it was absurd--that i knew you thoroughly and that you were incapable of anything of the kind. know you? i wonder do i know you? before i could answer that, i should have to see your soul." "to see my soul!" muttered dorian gray, starting up from the sofa and turning almost white from fear. "yes," answered hallward gravely, and with deep-toned sorrow in his voice, "to see your soul. but only god can do that." a bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man. "you shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from the table. "come: it is your own handiwork. why shouldn't you look at it? you can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose. nobody would believe you. if they did believe you, they would like me all the better for it. i know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously. come, i tell you. you have chattered enough about corruption. now you shall look on it face to face." there was the madness of pride in every word he uttered. he stamped his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner. he felt a terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret, and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the hideous memory of what he had done. "yes," he continued, coming closer to him and looking steadfastly into his stern eyes, "i shall show you my soul. you shall see the thing that you fancy only god can see." hallward started back. "this is blasphemy, dorian!" he cried. "you must not say things like that. they are horrible, and they don't mean anything." "you think so?" he laughed again. "i know so. as for what i said to you to-night, i said it for your good. you know i have been always a stanch friend to you." "don't touch me. finish what you have to say." a twisted flash of pain shot across the painter's face. he paused for a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him. after all, what right had he to pry into the life of dorian gray? if he had done a tithe of what was rumoured about him, how much he must have suffered! then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fire-place, and stood there, looking at the burning logs with their frostlike ashes and their throbbing cores of flame. "i am waiting, basil," said the young man in a hard clear voice. he turned round. "what i have to say is this," he cried. "you must give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against you. if you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to end, i shall believe you. deny them, dorian, deny them! can't you see what i am going through? my god! don't tell me that you are bad, and corrupt, and shameful." dorian gray smiled. there was a curl of contempt in his lips. "come upstairs, basil," he said quietly. "i keep a diary of my life from day to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written. i shall show it to you if you come with me." "i shall come with you, dorian, if you wish it. i see i have missed my train. that makes no matter. i can go to-morrow. but don't ask me to read anything to-night. all i want is a plain answer to my question." "that shall be given to you upstairs. i could not give it here. you will not have to read long." chapter he passed out of the room and began the ascent, basil hallward following close behind. they walked softly, as men do instinctively at night. the lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. a rising wind made some of the windows rattle. when they reached the top landing, dorian set the lamp down on the floor, and taking out the key, turned it in the lock. "you insist on knowing, basil?" he asked in a low voice. "yes." "i am delighted," he answered, smiling. then he added, somewhat harshly, "you are the one man in the world who is entitled to know everything about me. you have had more to do with my life than you think"; and, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in. a cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in a flame of murky orange. he shuddered. "shut the door behind you," he whispered, as he placed the lamp on the table. hallward glanced round him with a puzzled expression. the room looked as if it had not been lived in for years. a faded flemish tapestry, a curtained picture, an old italian _cassone_, and an almost empty book-case--that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and a table. as dorian gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was standing on the mantelshelf, he saw that the whole place was covered with dust and that the carpet was in holes. a mouse ran scuffling behind the wainscoting. there was a damp odour of mildew. "so you think that it is only god who sees the soul, basil? draw that curtain back, and you will see mine." the voice that spoke was cold and cruel. "you are mad, dorian, or playing a part," muttered hallward, frowning. "you won't? then i must do it myself," said the young man, and he tore the curtain from its rod and flung it on the ground. an exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. there was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. good heavens! it was dorian gray's own face that he was looking at! the horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvellous beauty. there was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. the sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat. yes, it was dorian himself. but who had done it? he seemed to recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his own design. the idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. he seized the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. in the left-hand corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion. it was some foul parody, some infamous ignoble satire. he had never done that. still, it was his own picture. he knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. his own picture! what did it mean? why had it altered? he turned and looked at dorian gray with the eyes of a sick man. his mouth twitched, and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate. he passed his hand across his forehead. it was dank with clammy sweat. the young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. there was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. there was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes. he had taken the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so. "what does this mean?" cried hallward, at last. his own voice sounded shrill and curious in his ears. "years ago, when i was a boy," said dorian gray, crushing the flower in his hand, "you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. one day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. in a mad moment that, even now, i don't know whether i regret or not, i made a wish, perhaps you would call it a prayer...." "i remember it! oh, how well i remember it! no! the thing is impossible. the room is damp. mildew has got into the canvas. the paints i used had some wretched mineral poison in them. i tell you the thing is impossible." "ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to the window and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained glass. "you told me you had destroyed it." "i was wrong. it has destroyed me." "i don't believe it is my picture." "can't you see your ideal in it?" said dorian bitterly. "my ideal, as you call it..." "as you called it." "there was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. you were to me such an ideal as i shall never meet again. this is the face of a satyr." "it is the face of my soul." "christ! what a thing i must have worshipped! it has the eyes of a devil." "each of us has heaven and hell in him, basil," cried dorian with a wild gesture of despair. hallward turned again to the portrait and gazed at it. "my god! if it is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!" he held the light up again to the canvas and examined it. the surface seemed to be quite undisturbed and as he had left it. it was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. the rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful. his hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor and lay there sputtering. he placed his foot on it and put it out. then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table and buried his face in his hands. "good god, dorian, what a lesson! what an awful lesson!" there was no answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window. "pray, dorian, pray," he murmured. "what is it that one was taught to say in one's boyhood? 'lead us not into temptation. forgive us our sins. wash away our iniquities.' let us say that together. the prayer of your pride has been answered. the prayer of your repentance will be answered also. i worshipped you too much. i am punished for it. you worshipped yourself too much. we are both punished." dorian gray turned slowly around and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes. "it is too late, basil," he faltered. "it is never too late, dorian. let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. isn't there a verse somewhere, 'though your sins be as scarlet, yet i will make them as white as snow'?" "those words mean nothing to me now." "hush! don't say that. you have done enough evil in your life. my god! don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?" dorian gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for basil hallward came over him, as though it had been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his ear by those grinning lips. the mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything. he glanced wildly around. something glimmered on the top of the painted chest that faced him. his eye fell on it. he knew what it was. it was a knife that he had brought up, some days before, to cut a piece of cord, and had forgotten to take away with him. he moved slowly towards it, passing hallward as he did so. as soon as he got behind him, he seized it and turned round. hallward stirred in his chair as if he was going to rise. he rushed at him and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man's head down on the table and stabbing again and again. there was a stifled groan and the horrible sound of some one choking with blood. three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively, waving grotesque, stiff-fingered hands in the air. he stabbed him twice more, but the man did not move. something began to trickle on the floor. he waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. then he threw the knife on the table, and listened. he could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet. he opened the door and went out on the landing. the house was absolutely quiet. no one was about. for a few seconds he stood bending over the balustrade and peering down into the black seething well of darkness. then he took out the key and returned to the room, locking himself in as he did so. the thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table with bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms. had it not been for the red jagged tear in the neck and the clotted black pool that was slowly widening on the table, one would have said that the man was simply asleep. how quickly it had all been done! he felt strangely calm, and walking over to the window, opened it and stepped out on the balcony. the wind had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. he looked down and saw the policeman going his rounds and flashing the long beam of his lantern on the doors of the silent houses. the crimson spot of a prowling hansom gleamed at the corner and then vanished. a woman in a fluttering shawl was creeping slowly by the railings, staggering as she went. now and then she stopped and peered back. once, she began to sing in a hoarse voice. the policeman strolled over and said something to her. she stumbled away, laughing. a bitter blast swept across the square. the gas-lamps flickered and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their black iron branches to and fro. he shivered and went back, closing the window behind him. having reached the door, he turned the key and opened it. he did not even glance at the murdered man. he felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation. the friend who had painted the fatal portrait to which all his misery had been due had gone out of his life. that was enough. then he remembered the lamp. it was a rather curious one of moorish workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished steel, and studded with coarse turquoises. perhaps it might be missed by his servant, and questions would be asked. he hesitated for a moment, then he turned back and took it from the table. he could not help seeing the dead thing. how still it was! how horribly white the long hands looked! it was like a dreadful wax image. having locked the door behind him, he crept quietly downstairs. the woodwork creaked and seemed to cry out as if in pain. he stopped several times and waited. no: everything was still. it was merely the sound of his own footsteps. when he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner. they must be hidden away somewhere. he unlocked a secret press that was in the wainscoting, a press in which he kept his own curious disguises, and put them into it. he could easily burn them afterwards. then he pulled out his watch. it was twenty minutes to two. he sat down and began to think. every year--every month, almost--men were strangled in england for what he had done. there had been a madness of murder in the air. some red star had come too close to the earth.... and yet, what evidence was there against him? basil hallward had left the house at eleven. no one had seen him come in again. most of the servants were at selby royal. his valet had gone to bed.... paris! yes. it was to paris that basil had gone, and by the midnight train, as he had intended. with his curious reserved habits, it would be months before any suspicions would be roused. months! everything could be destroyed long before then. a sudden thought struck him. he put on his fur coat and hat and went out into the hall. there he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of the policeman on the pavement outside and seeing the flash of the bull's-eye reflected in the window. he waited and held his breath. after a few moments he drew back the latch and slipped out, shutting the door very gently behind him. then he began ringing the bell. in about five minutes his valet appeared, half-dressed and looking very drowsy. "i am sorry to have had to wake you up, francis," he said, stepping in; "but i had forgotten my latch-key. what time is it?" "ten minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock and blinking. "ten minutes past two? how horribly late! you must wake me at nine to-morrow. i have some work to do." "all right, sir." "did any one call this evening?" "mr. hallward, sir. he stayed here till eleven, and then he went away to catch his train." "oh! i am sorry i didn't see him. did he leave any message?" "no, sir, except that he would write to you from paris, if he did not find you at the club." "that will do, francis. don't forget to call me at nine to-morrow." "no, sir." the man shambled down the passage in his slippers. dorian gray threw his hat and coat upon the table and passed into the library. for a quarter of an hour he walked up and down the room, biting his lip and thinking. then he took down the blue book from one of the shelves and began to turn over the leaves. "alan campbell, , hertford street, mayfair." yes; that was the man he wanted. chapter at nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate on a tray and opened the shutters. dorian was sleeping quite peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his cheek. he looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study. the man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he had been lost in some delightful dream. yet he had not dreamed at all. his night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain. but youth smiles without any reason. it is one of its chiefest charms. he turned round, and leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his chocolate. the mellow november sun came streaming into the room. the sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air. it was almost like a morning in may. gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. he winced at the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for basil hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. the dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. how horrible that was! such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. he felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken or grow mad. there were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. but this was not one of them. it was a thing to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself. when the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead, and then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and scarf-pin and changing his rings more than once. he spent a long time also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made for the servants at selby, and going through his correspondence. at some of the letters, he smiled. three of them bored him. one he read several times over and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his face. "that awful thing, a woman's memory!" as lord henry had once said. after he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his lips slowly with a napkin, motioned to his servant to wait, and going over to the table, sat down and wrote two letters. one he put in his pocket, the other he handed to the valet. "take this round to , hertford street, francis, and if mr. campbell is out of town, get his address." as soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette and began sketching upon a piece of paper, drawing first flowers and bits of architecture, and then human faces. suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to basil hallward. he frowned, and getting up, went over to the book-case and took out a volume at hazard. he was determined that he would not think about what had happened until it became absolutely necessary that he should do so. when he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page of the book. it was gautier's emaux et camees, charpentier's japanese-paper edition, with the jacquemart etching. the binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates. it had been given to him by adrian singleton. as he turned over the pages, his eye fell on the poem about the hand of lacenaire, the cold yellow hand "_du supplice encore mal lavee_," with its downy red hairs and its "_doigts de faune_." he glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon venice: sur une gamme chromatique, le sein de perles ruisselant, la venus de l'adriatique sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc. les domes, sur l'azur des ondes suivant la phrase au pur contour, s'enflent comme des gorges rondes que souleve un soupir d'amour. l'esquif aborde et me depose, jetant son amarre au pilier, devant une facade rose, sur le marbre d'un escalier. how exquisite they were! as one read them, one seemed to be floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. the mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the lido. the sudden flashes of colour reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall honeycombed campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the dim, dust-stained arcades. leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself: "devant une facade rose, sur le marbre d'un escalier." the whole of venice was in those two lines. he remembered the autumn that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to mad delightful follies. there was romance in every place. but venice, like oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. basil had been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over tintoret. poor basil! what a horrible way for a man to die! he sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. he read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little _cafe_ at smyrna where the hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the obelisk in the place de la concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered nile, where there are sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those verses which, drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious statue that gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "_monstre charmant_" that couches in the porphyry-room of the louvre. but after a time the book fell from his hand. he grew nervous, and a horrible fit of terror came over him. what if alan campbell should be out of england? days would elapse before he could come back. perhaps he might refuse to come. what could he do then? every moment was of vital importance. they had been great friends once, five years before--almost inseparable, indeed. then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end. when they met in society now, it was only dorian gray who smiled: alan campbell never did. he was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from dorian. his dominant intellectual passion was for science. at cambridge he had spent a great deal of his time working in the laboratory, and had taken a good class in the natural science tripos of his year. indeed, he was still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his own in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions. he was an excellent musician, however, as well, and played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. in fact, it was music that had first brought him and dorian gray together--music and that indefinable attraction that dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished--and, indeed, exercised often without being conscious of it. they had met at lady berkshire's the night that rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always seen together at the opera and wherever good music was going on. for eighteen months their intimacy lasted. campbell was always either at selby royal or in grosvenor square. to him, as to many others, dorian gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life. whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one ever knew. but suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when they met and that campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at which dorian gray was present. he had changed, too--was strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing music, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time left in which to practise. and this was certainly true. every day he seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews in connection with certain curious experiments. this was the man dorian gray was waiting for. every second he kept glancing at the clock. as the minutes went by he became horribly agitated. at last he got up and began to pace up and down the room, looking like a beautiful caged thing. he took long stealthy strides. his hands were curiously cold. the suspense became unbearable. time seemed to him to be crawling with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. he knew what was waiting for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. it was useless. the brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. then, suddenly, time stopped for him. yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. he stared at it. its very horror made him stone. at last the door opened and his servant entered. he turned glazed eyes upon him. "mr. campbell, sir," said the man. a sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back to his cheeks. "ask him to come in at once, francis." he felt that he was himself again. his mood of cowardice had passed away. the man bowed and retired. in a few moments, alan campbell walked in, looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his coal-black hair and dark eyebrows. "alan! this is kind of you. i thank you for coming." "i had intended never to enter your house again, gray. but you said it was a matter of life and death." his voice was hard and cold. he spoke with slow deliberation. there was a look of contempt in the steady searching gaze that he turned on dorian. he kept his hands in the pockets of his astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted. "yes: it is a matter of life and death, alan, and to more than one person. sit down." campbell took a chair by the table, and dorian sat opposite to him. the two men's eyes met. in dorian's there was infinite pity. he knew that what he was going to do was dreadful. after a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of him he had sent for, "alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table. he has been dead ten hours now. don't stir, and don't look at me like that. who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do not concern you. what you have to do is this--" "stop, gray. i don't want to know anything further. whether what you have told me is true or not true doesn't concern me. i entirely decline to be mixed up in your life. keep your horrible secrets to yourself. they don't interest me any more." "alan, they will have to interest you. this one will have to interest you. i am awfully sorry for you, alan. but i can't help myself. you are the one man who is able to save me. i am forced to bring you into the matter. i have no option. alan, you are scientific. you know about chemistry and things of that kind. you have made experiments. what you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs--to destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left. nobody saw this person come into the house. indeed, at the present moment he is supposed to be in paris. he will not be missed for months. when he is missed, there must be no trace of him found here. you, alan, you must change him, and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes that i may scatter in the air." "you are mad, dorian." "ah! i was waiting for you to call me dorian." "you are mad, i tell you--mad to imagine that i would raise a finger to help you, mad to make this monstrous confession. i will have nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is. do you think i am going to peril my reputation for you? what is it to me what devil's work you are up to?" "it was suicide, alan." "i am glad of that. but who drove him to it? you, i should fancy." "do you still refuse to do this for me?" "of course i refuse. i will have absolutely nothing to do with it. i don't care what shame comes on you. you deserve it all. i should not be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced. how dare you ask me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror? i should have thought you knew more about people's characters. your friend lord henry wotton can't have taught you much about psychology, whatever else he has taught you. nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you. you have come to the wrong man. go to some of your friends. don't come to me." "alan, it was murder. i killed him. you don't know what he had made me suffer. whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or the marring of it than poor harry has had. he may not have intended it, the result was the same." "murder! good god, dorian, is that what you have come to? i shall not inform upon you. it is not my business. besides, without my stirring in the matter, you are certain to be arrested. nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid. but i will have nothing to do with it." "you must have something to do with it. wait, wait a moment; listen to me. only listen, alan. all i ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment. you go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don't affect you. if in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. you would not turn a hair. you would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. on the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind. what i want you to do is merely what you have often done before. indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you are accustomed to work at. and, remember, it is the only piece of evidence against me. if it is discovered, i am lost; and it is sure to be discovered unless you help me." "i have no desire to help you. you forget that. i am simply indifferent to the whole thing. it has nothing to do with me." "alan, i entreat you. think of the position i am in. just before you came i almost fainted with terror. you may know terror yourself some day. no! don't think of that. look at the matter purely from the scientific point of view. you don't inquire where the dead things on which you experiment come from. don't inquire now. i have told you too much as it is. but i beg of you to do this. we were friends once, alan." "don't speak about those days, dorian--they are dead." "the dead linger sometimes. the man upstairs will not go away. he is sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms. alan! alan! if you don't come to my assistance, i am ruined. why, they will hang me, alan! don't you understand? they will hang me for what i have done." "there is no good in prolonging this scene. i absolutely refuse to do anything in the matter. it is insane of you to ask me." "you refuse?" "yes." "i entreat you, alan." "it is useless." the same look of pity came into dorian gray's eyes. then he stretched out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it. he read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table. having done this, he got up and went over to the window. campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and opened it. as he read it, his face became ghastly pale and he fell back in his chair. a horrible sense of sickness came over him. he felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow. after two or three minutes of terrible silence, dorian turned round and came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder. "i am so sorry for you, alan," he murmured, "but you leave me no alternative. i have a letter written already. here it is. you see the address. if you don't help me, i must send it. if you don't help me, i will send it. you know what the result will be. but you are going to help me. it is impossible for you to refuse now. i tried to spare you. you will do me the justice to admit that. you were stern, harsh, offensive. you treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me--no living man, at any rate. i bore it all. now it is for me to dictate terms." campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him. "yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, alan. you know what they are. the thing is quite simple. come, don't work yourself into this fever. the thing has to be done. face it, and do it." a groan broke from campbell's lips and he shivered all over. the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne. he felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already come upon him. the hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead. it was intolerable. it seemed to crush him. "come, alan, you must decide at once." "i cannot do it," he said, mechanically, as though words could alter things. "you must. you have no choice. don't delay." he hesitated a moment. "is there a fire in the room upstairs?" "yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos." "i shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory." "no, alan, you must not leave the house. write out on a sheet of notepaper what you want and my servant will take a cab and bring the things back to you." campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope to his assistant. dorian took the note up and read it carefully. then he rang the bell and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as soon as possible and to bring the things with him. as the hall door shut, campbell started nervously, and having got up from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. he was shivering with a kind of ague. for nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke. a fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was like the beat of a hammer. as the chime struck one, campbell turned round, and looking at dorian gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. there was something in the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him. "you are infamous, absolutely infamous!" he muttered. "hush, alan. you have saved my life," said dorian. "your life? good heavens! what a life that is! you have gone from corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. in doing what i am going to do--what you force me to do--it is not of your life that i am thinking." "ah, alan," murmured dorian with a sigh, "i wish you had a thousandth part of the pity for me that i have for you." he turned away as he spoke and stood looking out at the garden. campbell made no answer. after about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously shaped iron clamps. "shall i leave the things here, sir?" he asked campbell. "yes," said dorian. "and i am afraid, francis, that i have another errand for you. what is the name of the man at richmond who supplies selby with orchids?" "harden, sir." "yes--harden. you must go down to richmond at once, see harden personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as i ordered, and to have as few white ones as possible. in fact, i don't want any white ones. it is a lovely day, francis, and richmond is a very pretty place--otherwise i wouldn't bother you about it." "no trouble, sir. at what time shall i be back?" dorian looked at campbell. "how long will your experiment take, alan?" he said in a calm indifferent voice. the presence of a third person in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage. campbell frowned and bit his lip. "it will take about five hours," he answered. "it will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven, francis. or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. you can have the evening to yourself. i am not dining at home, so i shall not want you." "thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room. "now, alan, there is not a moment to be lost. how heavy this chest is! i'll take it for you. you bring the other things." he spoke rapidly and in an authoritative manner. campbell felt dominated by him. they left the room together. when they reached the top landing, dorian took out the key and turned it in the lock. then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his eyes. he shuddered. "i don't think i can go in, alan," he murmured. "it is nothing to me. i don't require you," said campbell coldly. dorian half opened the door. as he did so, he saw the face of his portrait leering in the sunlight. on the floor in front of it the torn curtain was lying. he remembered that the night before he had forgotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas, and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder. what was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? how horrible it was!--more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it. he heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with half-closed eyes and averted head, walked quickly in, determined that he would not look even once upon the dead man. then, stooping down and taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it right over the picture. there he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. he heard campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other things that he had required for his dreadful work. he began to wonder if he and basil hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had thought of each other. "leave me now," said a stern voice behind him. he turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been thrust back into the chair and that campbell was gazing into a glistening yellow face. as he was going downstairs, he heard the key being turned in the lock. it was long after seven when campbell came back into the library. he was pale, but absolutely calm. "i have done what you asked me to do," he muttered. "and now, good-bye. let us never see each other again." "you have saved me from ruin, alan. i cannot forget that," said dorian simply. as soon as campbell had left, he went upstairs. there was a horrible smell of nitric acid in the room. but the thing that had been sitting at the table was gone. chapter that evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large button-hole of parma violets, dorian gray was ushered into lady narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants. his forehead was throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as ever. perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part. certainly no one looking at dorian gray that night could have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our age. those finely shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on god and goodness. he himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life. it was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by lady narborough, who was a very clever woman with what lord henry used to describe as the remains of really remarkable ugliness. she had proved an excellent wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed, and married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she devoted herself now to the pleasures of french fiction, french cookery, and french _esprit_ when she could get it. dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him that she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life. "i know, my dear, i should have fallen madly in love with you," she used to say, "and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake. it is most fortunate that you were not thought of at the time. as it was, our bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were so occupied in trying to raise the wind, that i never had even a flirtation with anybody. however, that was all narborough's fault. he was dreadfully short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who never sees anything." her guests this evening were rather tedious. the fact was, as she explained to dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her. "i think it is most unkind of her, my dear," she whispered. "of course i go and stay with them every summer after i come from homburg, but then an old woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, i really wake them up. you don't know what an existence they lead down there. it is pure unadulterated country life. they get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about. there has not been a scandal in the neighbourhood since the time of queen elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep after dinner. you shan't sit next either of them. you shall sit by me and amuse me." dorian murmured a graceful compliment and looked round the room. yes: it was certainly a tedious party. two of the people he had never seen before, and the others consisted of ernest harrowden, one of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in london clubs who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; lady ruxton, an overdressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose, who was always trying to get herself compromised, but was so peculiarly plain that to her great disappointment no one would ever believe anything against her; mrs. erlynne, a pushing nobody, with a delightful lisp and venetian-red hair; lady alice chapman, his hostess's daughter, a dowdy dull girl, with one of those characteristic british faces that, once seen, are never remembered; and her husband, a red-cheeked, white-whiskered creature who, like so many of his class, was under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas. he was rather sorry he had come, till lady narborough, looking at the great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy curves on the mauve-draped mantelshelf, exclaimed: "how horrid of henry wotton to be so late! i sent round to him this morning on chance and he promised faithfully not to disappoint me." it was some consolation that harry was to be there, and when the door opened and he heard his slow musical voice lending charm to some insincere apology, he ceased to feel bored. but at dinner he could not eat anything. plate after plate went away untasted. lady narborough kept scolding him for what she called "an insult to poor adolphe, who invented the _menu_ specially for you," and now and then lord henry looked across at him, wondering at his silence and abstracted manner. from time to time the butler filled his glass with champagne. he drank eagerly, and his thirst seemed to increase. "dorian," said lord henry at last, as the _chaud-froid_ was being handed round, "what is the matter with you to-night? you are quite out of sorts." "i believe he is in love," cried lady narborough, "and that he is afraid to tell me for fear i should be jealous. he is quite right. i certainly should." "dear lady narborough," murmured dorian, smiling, "i have not been in love for a whole week--not, in fact, since madame de ferrol left town." "how you men can fall in love with that woman!" exclaimed the old lady. "i really cannot understand it." "it is simply because she remembers you when you were a little girl, lady narborough," said lord henry. "she is the one link between us and your short frocks." "she does not remember my short frocks at all, lord henry. but i remember her very well at vienna thirty years ago, and how _decolletee_ she was then." "she is still _decolletee_," he answered, taking an olive in his long fingers; "and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an _edition de luxe_ of a bad french novel. she is really wonderful, and full of surprises. her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. when her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief." "how can you, harry!" cried dorian. "it is a most romantic explanation," laughed the hostess. "but her third husband, lord henry! you don't mean to say ferrol is the fourth?" "certainly, lady narborough." "i don't believe a word of it." "well, ask mr. gray. he is one of her most intimate friends." "is it true, mr. gray?" "she assures me so, lady narborough," said dorian. "i asked her whether, like marguerite de navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and hung at her girdle. she told me she didn't, because none of them had had any hearts at all." "four husbands! upon my word that is _trop de zele_." "_trop d'audace_, i tell her," said dorian. "oh! she is audacious enough for anything, my dear. and what is ferrol like? i don't know him." "the husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes," said lord henry, sipping his wine. lady narborough hit him with her fan. "lord henry, i am not at all surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked." "but what world says that?" asked lord henry, elevating his eyebrows. "it can only be the next world. this world and i are on excellent terms." "everybody i know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady, shaking her head. lord henry looked serious for some moments. "it is perfectly monstrous," he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true." "isn't he incorrigible?" cried dorian, leaning forward in his chair. "i hope so," said his hostess, laughing. "but really, if you all worship madame de ferrol in this ridiculous way, i shall have to marry again so as to be in the fashion." "you will never marry again, lady narborough," broke in lord henry. "you were far too happy. when a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. when a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. women try their luck; men risk theirs." "narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady. "if he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady," was the rejoinder. "women love us for our defects. if we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects. you will never ask me to dinner again after saying this, i am afraid, lady narborough, but it is quite true." "of course it is true, lord henry. if we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? not one of you would ever be married. you would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. not, however, that that would alter you much. nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men." "_fin de siecle_," murmured lord henry. "_fin du globe_," answered his hostess. "i wish it were _fin du globe_," said dorian with a sigh. "life is a great disappointment." "ah, my dear," cried lady narborough, putting on her gloves, "don't tell me that you have exhausted life. when a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him. lord henry is very wicked, and i sometimes wish that i had been; but you are made to be good--you look so good. i must find you a nice wife. lord henry, don't you think that mr. gray should get married?" "i am always telling him so, lady narborough," said lord henry with a bow. "well, we must look out for a suitable match for him. i shall go through debrett carefully to-night and draw out a list of all the eligible young ladies." "with their ages, lady narborough?" asked dorian. "of course, with their ages, slightly edited. but nothing must be done in a hurry. i want it to be what _the morning post_ calls a suitable alliance, and i want you both to be happy." "what nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed lord henry. "a man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her." "ah! what a cynic you are!" cried the old lady, pushing back her chair and nodding to lady ruxton. "you must come and dine with me soon again. you are really an admirable tonic, much better than what sir andrew prescribes for me. you must tell me what people you would like to meet, though. i want it to be a delightful gathering." "i like men who have a future and women who have a past," he answered. "or do you think that would make it a petticoat party?" "i fear so," she said, laughing, as she stood up. "a thousand pardons, my dear lady ruxton," she added, "i didn't see you hadn't finished your cigarette." "never mind, lady narborough. i smoke a great deal too much. i am going to limit myself, for the future." "pray don't, lady ruxton," said lord henry. "moderation is a fatal thing. enough is as bad as a meal. more than enough is as good as a feast." lady ruxton glanced at him curiously. "you must come and explain that to me some afternoon, lord henry. it sounds a fascinating theory," she murmured, as she swept out of the room. "now, mind you don't stay too long over your politics and scandal," cried lady narborough from the door. "if you do, we are sure to squabble upstairs." the men laughed, and mr. chapman got up solemnly from the foot of the table and came up to the top. dorian gray changed his seat and went and sat by lord henry. mr. chapman began to talk in a loud voice about the situation in the house of commons. he guffawed at his adversaries. the word _doctrinaire_--word full of terror to the british mind--reappeared from time to time between his explosions. an alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. he hoisted the union jack on the pinnacles of thought. the inherited stupidity of the race--sound english common sense he jovially termed it--was shown to be the proper bulwark for society. a smile curved lord henry's lips, and he turned round and looked at dorian. "are you better, my dear fellow?" he asked. "you seemed rather out of sorts at dinner." "i am quite well, harry. i am tired. that is all." "you were charming last night. the little duchess is quite devoted to you. she tells me she is going down to selby." "she has promised to come on the twentieth." "is monmouth to be there, too?" "oh, yes, harry." "he bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her. she is very clever, too clever for a woman. she lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. it is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. white porcelain feet, if you like. they have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. she has had experiences." "how long has she been married?" asked dorian. "an eternity, she tells me. i believe, according to the peerage, it is ten years, but ten years with monmouth must have been like eternity, with time thrown in. who else is coming?" "oh, the willoughbys, lord rugby and his wife, our hostess, geoffrey clouston, the usual set. i have asked lord grotrian." "i like him," said lord henry. "a great many people don't, but i find him charming. he atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely over-educated. he is a very modern type." "i don't know if he will be able to come, harry. he may have to go to monte carlo with his father." "ah! what a nuisance people's people are! try and make him come. by the way, dorian, you ran off very early last night. you left before eleven. what did you do afterwards? did you go straight home?" dorian glanced at him hurriedly and frowned. "no, harry," he said at last, "i did not get home till nearly three." "did you go to the club?" "yes," he answered. then he bit his lip. "no, i don't mean that. i didn't go to the club. i walked about. i forget what i did.... how inquisitive you are, harry! you always want to know what one has been doing. i always want to forget what i have been doing. i came in at half-past two, if you wish to know the exact time. i had left my latch-key at home, and my servant had to let me in. if you want any corroborative evidence on the subject, you can ask him." lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "my dear fellow, as if i cared! let us go up to the drawing-room. no sherry, thank you, mr. chapman. something has happened to you, dorian. tell me what it is. you are not yourself to-night." "don't mind me, harry. i am irritable, and out of temper. i shall come round and see you to-morrow, or next day. make my excuses to lady narborough. i shan't go upstairs. i shall go home. i must go home." "all right, dorian. i dare say i shall see you to-morrow at tea-time. the duchess is coming." "i will try to be there, harry," he said, leaving the room. as he drove back to his own house, he was conscious that the sense of terror he thought he had strangled had come back to him. lord henry's casual questioning had made him lose his nerve for the moment, and he wanted his nerve still. things that were dangerous had to be destroyed. he winced. he hated the idea of even touching them. yet it had to be done. he realized that, and when he had locked the door of his library, he opened the secret press into which he had thrust basil hallward's coat and bag. a huge fire was blazing. he piled another log on it. the smell of the singeing clothes and burning leather was horrible. it took him three-quarters of an hour to consume everything. at the end he felt faint and sick, and having lit some algerian pastilles in a pierced copper brazier, he bathed his hands and forehead with a cool musk-scented vinegar. suddenly he started. his eyes grew strangely bright, and he gnawed nervously at his underlip. between two of the windows stood a large florentine cabinet, made out of ebony and inlaid with ivory and blue lapis. he watched it as though it were a thing that could fascinate and make afraid, as though it held something that he longed for and yet almost loathed. his breath quickened. a mad craving came over him. he lit a cigarette and then threw it away. his eyelids drooped till the long fringed lashes almost touched his cheek. but he still watched the cabinet. at last he got up from the sofa on which he had been lying, went over to it, and having unlocked it, touched some hidden spring. a triangular drawer passed slowly out. his fingers moved instinctively towards it, dipped in, and closed on something. it was a small chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought, the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with round crystals and tasselled in plaited metal threads. he opened it. inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and persistent. he hesitated for some moments, with a strangely immobile smile upon his face. then shivering, though the atmosphere of the room was terribly hot, he drew himself up and glanced at the clock. it was twenty minutes to twelve. he put the box back, shutting the cabinet doors as he did so, and went into his bedroom. as midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, dorian gray, dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat, crept quietly out of his house. in bond street he found a hansom with a good horse. he hailed it and in a low voice gave the driver an address. the man shook his head. "it is too far for me," he muttered. "here is a sovereign for you," said dorian. "you shall have another if you drive fast." "all right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an hour," and after his fare had got in he turned his horse round and drove rapidly towards the river. chapter a cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly in the dripping mist. the public-houses were just closing, and dim men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors. from some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. in others, drunkards brawled and screamed. lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead, dorian gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great city, and now and then he repeated to himself the words that lord henry had said to him on the first day they had met, "to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul." yes, that was the secret. he had often tried it, and would try it again now. there were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new. the moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. from time to time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it. the gas-lamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy. once the man lost his way and had to drive back half a mile. a steam rose from the horse as it splashed up the puddles. the sidewindows of the hansom were clogged with a grey-flannel mist. "to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul!" how the words rang in his ears! his soul, certainly, was sick to death. was it true that the senses could cure it? innocent blood had been spilled. what could atone for that? ah! for that there was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one. indeed, what right had basil to have spoken to him as he had done? who had made him a judge over others? he had said things that were dreadful, horrible, not to be endured. on and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him, at each step. he thrust up the trap and called to the man to drive faster. the hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw at him. his throat burned and his delicate hands twitched nervously together. he struck at the horse madly with his stick. the driver laughed and whipped up. he laughed in answer, and the man was silent. the way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black web of some sprawling spider. the monotony became unbearable, and as the mist thickened, he felt afraid. then they passed by lonely brickfields. the fog was lighter here, and he could see the strange, bottle-shaped kilns with their orange, fanlike tongues of fire. a dog barked as they went by, and far away in the darkness some wandering sea-gull screamed. the horse stumbled in a rut, then swerved aside and broke into a gallop. after some time they left the clay road and rattled again over rough-paven streets. most of the windows were dark, but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some lamplit blind. he watched them curiously. they moved like monstrous marionettes and made gestures like live things. he hated them. a dull rage was in his heart. as they turned a corner, a woman yelled something at them from an open door, and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred yards. the driver beat at them with his whip. it is said that passion makes one think in a circle. certainly with hideous iteration the bitten lips of dorian gray shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense, till he had found in them the full expression, as it were, of his mood, and justified, by intellectual approval, passions that without such justification would still have dominated his temper. from cell to cell of his brain crept the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible of all man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling nerve and fibre. ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. ugliness was the one reality. the coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song. they were what he needed for forgetfulness. in three days he would be free. suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane. over the low roofs and jagged chimney-stacks of the houses rose the black masts of ships. wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly sails to the yards. "somewhere about here, sir, ain't it?" he asked huskily through the trap. dorian started and peered round. "this will do," he answered, and having got out hastily and given the driver the extra fare he had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay. here and there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman. the light shook and splintered in the puddles. a red glare came from an outward-bound steamer that was coaling. the slimy pavement looked like a wet mackintosh. he hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see if he was being followed. in about seven or eight minutes he reached a small shabby house that was wedged in between two gaunt factories. in one of the top-windows stood a lamp. he stopped and gave a peculiar knock. after a little time he heard steps in the passage and the chain being unhooked. the door opened quietly, and he went in without saying a word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened itself into the shadow as he passed. at the end of the hall hung a tattered green curtain that swayed and shook in the gusty wind which had followed him in from the street. he dragged it aside and entered a long low room which looked as if it had once been a third-rate dancing-saloon. shrill flaring gas-jets, dulled and distorted in the fly-blown mirrors that faced them, were ranged round the walls. greasy reflectors of ribbed tin backed them, making quivering disks of light. the floor was covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here and there into mud, and stained with dark rings of spilled liquor. some malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove, playing with bone counters and showing their white teeth as they chattered. in one corner, with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled over a table, and by the tawdrily painted bar that ran across one complete side stood two haggard women, mocking an old man who was brushing the sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust. "he thinks he's got red ants on him," laughed one of them, as dorian passed by. the man looked at her in terror and began to whimper. at the end of the room there was a little staircase, leading to a darkened chamber. as dorian hurried up its three rickety steps, the heavy odour of opium met him. he heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure. when he entered, a young man with smooth yellow hair, who was bending over a lamp lighting a long thin pipe, looked up at him and nodded in a hesitating manner. "you here, adrian?" muttered dorian. "where else should i be?" he answered, listlessly. "none of the chaps will speak to me now." "i thought you had left england." "darlington is not going to do anything. my brother paid the bill at last. george doesn't speak to me either.... i don't care," he added with a sigh. "as long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends. i think i have had too many friends." dorian winced and looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. the twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. he knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy. they were better off than he was. he was prisoned in thought. memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. from time to time he seemed to see the eyes of basil hallward looking at him. yet he felt he could not stay. the presence of adrian singleton troubled him. he wanted to be where no one would know who he was. he wanted to escape from himself. "i am going on to the other place," he said after a pause. "on the wharf?" "yes." "that mad-cat is sure to be there. they won't have her in this place now." dorian shrugged his shoulders. "i am sick of women who love one. women who hate one are much more interesting. besides, the stuff is better." "much the same." "i like it better. come and have something to drink. i must have something." "i don't want anything," murmured the young man. "never mind." adrian singleton rose up wearily and followed dorian to the bar. a half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a hideous greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers in front of them. the women sidled up and began to chatter. dorian turned his back on them and said something in a low voice to adrian singleton. a crooked smile, like a malay crease, writhed across the face of one of the women. "we are very proud to-night," she sneered. "for god's sake don't talk to me," cried dorian, stamping his foot on the ground. "what do you want? money? here it is. don't ever talk to me again." two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman's sodden eyes, then flickered out and left them dull and glazed. she tossed her head and raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers. her companion watched her enviously. "it's no use," sighed adrian singleton. "i don't care to go back. what does it matter? i am quite happy here." "you will write to me if you want anything, won't you?" said dorian, after a pause. "perhaps." "good night, then." "good night," answered the young man, passing up the steps and wiping his parched mouth with a handkerchief. dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face. as he drew the curtain aside, a hideous laugh broke from the painted lips of the woman who had taken his money. "there goes the devil's bargain!" she hiccoughed, in a hoarse voice. "curse you!" he answered, "don't call me that." she snapped her fingers. "prince charming is what you like to be called, ain't it?" she yelled after him. the drowsy sailor leaped to his feet as she spoke, and looked wildly round. the sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his ear. he rushed out as if in pursuit. dorian gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain. his meeting with adrian singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door, as basil hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult. he bit his lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad. yet, after all, what did it matter to him? one's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. the only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. one had to pay over and over again, indeed. in her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts. there are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. they move to their terrible end as automatons move. choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm. for all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. when that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell. callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind, and soul hungry for rebellion, dorian gray hastened on, quickening his step as he went, but as he darted aside into a dim archway, that had served him often as a short cut to the ill-famed place where he was going, he felt himself suddenly seized from behind, and before he had time to defend himself, he was thrust back against the wall, with a brutal hand round his throat. he struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched the tightening fingers away. in a second he heard the click of a revolver, and saw the gleam of a polished barrel, pointing straight at his head, and the dusky form of a short, thick-set man facing him. "what do you want?" he gasped. "keep quiet," said the man. "if you stir, i shoot you." "you are mad. what have i done to you?" "you wrecked the life of sibyl vane," was the answer, "and sibyl vane was my sister. she killed herself. i know it. her death is at your door. i swore i would kill you in return. for years i have sought you. i had no clue, no trace. the two people who could have described you were dead. i knew nothing of you but the pet name she used to call you. i heard it to-night by chance. make your peace with god, for to-night you are going to die." dorian gray grew sick with fear. "i never knew her," he stammered. "i never heard of her. you are mad." "you had better confess your sin, for as sure as i am james vane, you are going to die." there was a horrible moment. dorian did not know what to say or do. "down on your knees!" growled the man. "i give you one minute to make your peace--no more. i go on board to-night for india, and i must do my job first. one minute. that's all." dorian's arms fell to his side. paralysed with terror, he did not know what to do. suddenly a wild hope flashed across his brain. "stop," he cried. "how long ago is it since your sister died? quick, tell me!" "eighteen years," said the man. "why do you ask me? what do years matter?" "eighteen years," laughed dorian gray, with a touch of triumph in his voice. "eighteen years! set me under the lamp and look at my face!" james vane hesitated for a moment, not understanding what was meant. then he seized dorian gray and dragged him from the archway. dim and wavering as was the wind-blown light, yet it served to show him the hideous error, as it seemed, into which he had fallen, for the face of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom of boyhood, all the unstained purity of youth. he seemed little more than a lad of twenty summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all, than his sister had been when they had parted so many years ago. it was obvious that this was not the man who had destroyed her life. he loosened his hold and reeled back. "my god! my god!" he cried, "and i would have murdered you!" dorian gray drew a long breath. "you have been on the brink of committing a terrible crime, my man," he said, looking at him sternly. "let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your own hands." "forgive me, sir," muttered james vane. "i was deceived. a chance word i heard in that damned den set me on the wrong track." "you had better go home and put that pistol away, or you may get into trouble," said dorian, turning on his heel and going slowly down the street. james vane stood on the pavement in horror. he was trembling from head to foot. after a little while, a black shadow that had been creeping along the dripping wall moved out into the light and came close to him with stealthy footsteps. he felt a hand laid on his arm and looked round with a start. it was one of the women who had been drinking at the bar. "why didn't you kill him?" she hissed out, putting haggard face quite close to his. "i knew you were following him when you rushed out from daly's. you fool! you should have killed him. he has lots of money, and he's as bad as bad." "he is not the man i am looking for," he answered, "and i want no man's money. i want a man's life. the man whose life i want must be nearly forty now. this one is little more than a boy. thank god, i have not got his blood upon my hands." the woman gave a bitter laugh. "little more than a boy!" she sneered. "why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since prince charming made me what i am." "you lie!" cried james vane. she raised her hand up to heaven. "before god i am telling the truth," she cried. "before god?" "strike me dumb if it ain't so. he is the worst one that comes here. they say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. it's nigh on eighteen years since i met him. he hasn't changed much since then. i have, though," she added, with a sickly leer. "you swear this?" "i swear it," came in hoarse echo from her flat mouth. "but don't give me away to him," she whined; "i am afraid of him. let me have some money for my night's lodging." he broke from her with an oath and rushed to the corner of the street, but dorian gray had disappeared. when he looked back, the woman had vanished also. chapter a week later dorian gray was sitting in the conservatory at selby royal, talking to the pretty duchess of monmouth, who with her husband, a jaded-looking man of sixty, was amongst his guests. it was tea-time, and the mellow light of the huge, lace-covered lamp that stood on the table lit up the delicate china and hammered silver of the service at which the duchess was presiding. her white hands were moving daintily among the cups, and her full red lips were smiling at something that dorian had whispered to her. lord henry was lying back in a silk-draped wicker chair, looking at them. on a peach-coloured divan sat lady narborough, pretending to listen to the duke's description of the last brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection. three young men in elaborate smoking-suits were handing tea-cakes to some of the women. the house-party consisted of twelve people, and there were more expected to arrive on the next day. "what are you two talking about?" said lord henry, strolling over to the table and putting his cup down. "i hope dorian has told you about my plan for rechristening everything, gladys. it is a delightful idea." "but i don't want to be rechristened, harry," rejoined the duchess, looking up at him with her wonderful eyes. "i am quite satisfied with my own name, and i am sure mr. gray should be satisfied with his." "my dear gladys, i would not alter either name for the world. they are both perfect. i was thinking chiefly of flowers. yesterday i cut an orchid, for my button-hole. it was a marvellous spotted thing, as effective as the seven deadly sins. in a thoughtless moment i asked one of the gardeners what it was called. he told me it was a fine specimen of _robinsoniana_, or something dreadful of that kind. it is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. names are everything. i never quarrel with actions. my one quarrel is with words. that is the reason i hate vulgar realism in literature. the man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. it is the only thing he is fit for." "then what should we call you, harry?" she asked. "his name is prince paradox," said dorian. "i recognize him in a flash," exclaimed the duchess. "i won't hear of it," laughed lord henry, sinking into a chair. "from a label there is no escape! i refuse the title." "royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips. "you wish me to defend my throne, then?" "yes." "i give the truths of to-morrow." "i prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered. "you disarm me, gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood. "of your shield, harry, not of your spear." "i never tilt against beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand. "that is your error, harry, believe me. you value beauty far too much." "how can you say that? i admit that i think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. but on the other hand, no one is more ready than i am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly." "ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the duchess. "what becomes of your simile about the orchid?" "ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, gladys. you, as a good tory, must not underrate them. beer, the bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our england what she is." "you don't like your country, then?" she asked. "i live in it." "that you may censure it the better." "would you have me take the verdict of europe on it?" he inquired. "what do they say of us?" "that tartuffe has emigrated to england and opened a shop." "is that yours, harry?" "i give it to you." "i could not use it. it is too true." "you need not be afraid. our countrymen never recognize a description." "they are practical." "they are more cunning than practical. when they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy." "still, we have done great things." "great things have been thrust on us, gladys." "we have carried their burden." "only as far as the stock exchange." she shook her head. "i believe in the race," she cried. "it represents the survival of the pushing." "it has development." "decay fascinates me more." "what of art?" she asked. "it is a malady." "love?" "an illusion." "religion?" "the fashionable substitute for belief." "you are a sceptic." "never! scepticism is the beginning of faith." "what are you?" "to define is to limit." "give me a clue." "threads snap. you would lose your way in the labyrinth." "you bewilder me. let us talk of some one else." "our host is a delightful topic. years ago he was christened prince charming." "ah! don't remind me of that," cried dorian gray. "our host is rather horrid this evening," answered the duchess, colouring. "i believe he thinks that monmouth married me on purely scientific principles as the best specimen he could find of a modern butterfly." "well, i hope he won't stick pins into you, duchess," laughed dorian. "oh! my maid does that already, mr. gray, when she is annoyed with me." "and what does she get annoyed with you about, duchess?" "for the most trivial things, mr. gray, i assure you. usually because i come in at ten minutes to nine and tell her that i must be dressed by half-past eight." "how unreasonable of her! you should give her warning." "i daren't, mr. gray. why, she invents hats for me. you remember the one i wore at lady hilstone's garden-party? you don't, but it is nice of you to pretend that you do. well, she made it out of nothing. all good hats are made out of nothing." "like all good reputations, gladys," interrupted lord henry. "every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. to be popular one must be a mediocrity." "not with women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule the world. i assure you we can't bear mediocrities. we women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all." "it seems to me that we never do anything else," murmured dorian. "ah! then, you never really love, mr. gray," answered the duchess with mock sadness. "my dear gladys!" cried lord henry. "how can you say that? romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. it merely intensifies it. we can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible." "even when one has been wounded by it, harry?" asked the duchess after a pause. "especially when one has been wounded by it," answered lord henry. the duchess turned and looked at dorian gray with a curious expression in her eyes. "what do you say to that, mr. gray?" she inquired. dorian hesitated for a moment. then he threw his head back and laughed. "i always agree with harry, duchess." "even when he is wrong?" "harry is never wrong, duchess." "and does his philosophy make you happy?" "i have never searched for happiness. who wants happiness? i have searched for pleasure." "and found it, mr. gray?" "often. too often." the duchess sighed. "i am searching for peace," she said, "and if i don't go and dress, i shall have none this evening." "let me get you some orchids, duchess," cried dorian, starting to his feet and walking down the conservatory. "you are flirting disgracefully with him," said lord henry to his cousin. "you had better take care. he is very fascinating." "if he were not, there would be no battle." "greek meets greek, then?" "i am on the side of the trojans. they fought for a woman." "they were defeated." "there are worse things than capture," she answered. "you gallop with a loose rein." "pace gives life," was the _riposte_. "i shall write it in my diary to-night." "what?" "that a burnt child loves the fire." "i am not even singed. my wings are untouched." "you use them for everything, except flight." "courage has passed from men to women. it is a new experience for us." "you have a rival." "who?" he laughed. "lady narborough," he whispered. "she perfectly adores him." "you fill me with apprehension. the appeal to antiquity is fatal to us who are romanticists." "romanticists! you have all the methods of science." "men have educated us." "but not explained you." "describe us as a sex," was her challenge. "sphinxes without secrets." she looked at him, smiling. "how long mr. gray is!" she said. "let us go and help him. i have not yet told him the colour of my frock." "ah! you must suit your frock to his flowers, gladys." "that would be a premature surrender." "romantic art begins with its climax." "i must keep an opportunity for retreat." "in the parthian manner?" "they found safety in the desert. i could not do that." "women are not always allowed a choice," he answered, but hardly had he finished the sentence before from the far end of the conservatory came a stifled groan, followed by the dull sound of a heavy fall. everybody started up. the duchess stood motionless in horror. and with fear in his eyes, lord henry rushed through the flapping palms to find dorian gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a deathlike swoon. he was carried at once into the blue drawing-room and laid upon one of the sofas. after a short time, he came to himself and looked round with a dazed expression. "what has happened?" he asked. "oh! i remember. am i safe here, harry?" he began to tremble. "my dear dorian," answered lord henry, "you merely fainted. that was all. you must have overtired yourself. you had better not come down to dinner. i will take your place." "no, i will come down," he said, struggling to his feet. "i would rather come down. i must not be alone." he went to his room and dressed. there was a wild recklessness of gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of james vane watching him. chapter the next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself. the consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him. if the tapestry did but tremble in the wind, he shook. the dead leaves that were blown against the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild regrets. when he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor's face peering through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once more to lay its hand upon his heart. but perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out of the night and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him. actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. it was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. it was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. in the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. that was all. besides, had any stranger been prowling round the house, he would have been seen by the servants or the keepers. had any foot-marks been found on the flower-beds, the gardeners would have reported it. yes, it had been merely fancy. sibyl vane's brother had not come back to kill him. he had sailed away in his ship to founder in some winter sea. from him, at any rate, he was safe. why, the man did not know who he was, could not know who he was. the mask of youth had saved him. and yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them visible form, and make them move before one! what sort of life would his be if, day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep! as the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror, and the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder. oh! in what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! how ghastly the mere memory of the scene! he saw it all again. each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin. when lord henry came in at six o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will break. it was not till the third day that he ventured to go out. there was something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life. but it was not merely the physical conditions of environment that had caused the change. his own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm. with subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so. their strong passions must either bruise or bend. they either slay the man, or themselves die. shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. the loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. besides, he had convinced himself that he had been the victim of a terror-stricken imagination, and looked back now on his fears with something of pity and not a little of contempt. after breakfast, he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party. the crisp frost lay like salt upon the grass. the sky was an inverted cup of blue metal. a thin film of ice bordered the flat, reed-grown lake. at the corner of the pine-wood he caught sight of sir geoffrey clouston, the duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of his gun. he jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken and rough undergrowth. "have you had good sport, geoffrey?" he asked. "not very good, dorian. i think most of the birds have gone to the open. i dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new ground." dorian strolled along by his side. the keen aromatic air, the brown and red lights that glimmered in the wood, the hoarse cries of the beaters ringing out from time to time, and the sharp snaps of the guns that followed, fascinated him and filled him with a sense of delightful freedom. he was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high indifference of joy. suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in front of them, with black-tipped ears erect and long hinder limbs throwing it forward, started a hare. it bolted for a thicket of alders. sir geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was something in the animal's grace of movement that strangely charmed dorian gray, and he cried out at once, "don't shoot it, geoffrey. let it live." "what nonsense, dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare bounded into the thicket, he fired. there were two cries heard, the cry of a hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony, which is worse. "good heavens! i have hit a beater!" exclaimed sir geoffrey. "what an ass the man was to get in front of the guns! stop shooting there!" he called out at the top of his voice. "a man is hurt." the head-keeper came running up with a stick in his hand. "where, sir? where is he?" he shouted. at the same time, the firing ceased along the line. "here," answered sir geoffrey angrily, hurrying towards the thicket. "why on earth don't you keep your men back? spoiled my shooting for the day." dorian watched them as they plunged into the alder-clump, brushing the lithe swinging branches aside. in a few moments they emerged, dragging a body after them into the sunlight. he turned away in horror. it seemed to him that misfortune followed wherever he went. he heard sir geoffrey ask if the man was really dead, and the affirmative answer of the keeper. the wood seemed to him to have become suddenly alive with faces. there was the trampling of myriad feet and the low buzz of voices. a great copper-breasted pheasant came beating through the boughs overhead. after a few moments--that were to him, in his perturbed state, like endless hours of pain--he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. he started and looked round. "dorian," said lord henry, "i had better tell them that the shooting is stopped for to-day. it would not look well to go on." "i wish it were stopped for ever, harry," he answered bitterly. "the whole thing is hideous and cruel. is the man ...?" he could not finish the sentence. "i am afraid so," rejoined lord henry. "he got the whole charge of shot in his chest. he must have died almost instantaneously. come; let us go home." they walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly fifty yards without speaking. then dorian looked at lord henry and said, with a heavy sigh, "it is a bad omen, harry, a very bad omen." "what is?" asked lord henry. "oh! this accident, i suppose. my dear fellow, it can't be helped. it was the man's own fault. why did he get in front of the guns? besides, it is nothing to us. it is rather awkward for geoffrey, of course. it does not do to pepper beaters. it makes people think that one is a wild shot. and geoffrey is not; he shoots very straight. but there is no use talking about the matter." dorian shook his head. "it is a bad omen, harry. i feel as if something horrible were going to happen to some of us. to myself, perhaps," he added, passing his hand over his eyes, with a gesture of pain. the elder man laughed. "the only horrible thing in the world is _ennui_, dorian. that is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness. but we are not likely to suffer from it unless these fellows keep chattering about this thing at dinner. i must tell them that the subject is to be tabooed. as for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. destiny does not send us heralds. she is too wise or too cruel for that. besides, what on earth could happen to you, dorian? you have everything in the world that a man can want. there is no one who would not be delighted to change places with you." "there is no one with whom i would not change places, harry. don't laugh like that. i am telling you the truth. the wretched peasant who has just died is better off than i am. i have no terror of death. it is the coming of death that terrifies me. its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me. good heavens! don't you see a man moving behind the trees there, watching me, waiting for me?" lord henry looked in the direction in which the trembling gloved hand was pointing. "yes," he said, smiling, "i see the gardener waiting for you. i suppose he wants to ask you what flowers you wish to have on the table to-night. how absurdly nervous you are, my dear fellow! you must come and see my doctor, when we get back to town." dorian heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the gardener approaching. the man touched his hat, glanced for a moment at lord henry in a hesitating manner, and then produced a letter, which he handed to his master. "her grace told me to wait for an answer," he murmured. dorian put the letter into his pocket. "tell her grace that i am coming in," he said, coldly. the man turned round and went rapidly in the direction of the house. "how fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed lord henry. "it is one of the qualities in them that i admire most. a woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on." "how fond you are of saying dangerous things, harry! in the present instance, you are quite astray. i like the duchess very much, but i don't love her." "and the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you are excellently matched." "you are talking scandal, harry, and there is never any basis for scandal." "the basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty," said lord henry, lighting a cigarette. "you would sacrifice anybody, harry, for the sake of an epigram." "the world goes to the altar of its own accord," was the answer. "i wish i could love," cried dorian gray with a deep note of pathos in his voice. "but i seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the desire. i am too much concentrated on myself. my own personality has become a burden to me. i want to escape, to go away, to forget. it was silly of me to come down here at all. i think i shall send a wire to harvey to have the yacht got ready. on a yacht one is safe." "safe from what, dorian? you are in some trouble. why not tell me what it is? you know i would help you." "i can't tell you, harry," he answered sadly. "and i dare say it is only a fancy of mine. this unfortunate accident has upset me. i have a horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen to me." "what nonsense!" "i hope it is, but i can't help feeling it. ah! here is the duchess, looking like artemis in a tailor-made gown. you see we have come back, duchess." "i have heard all about it, mr. gray," she answered. "poor geoffrey is terribly upset. and it seems that you asked him not to shoot the hare. how curious!" "yes, it was very curious. i don't know what made me say it. some whim, i suppose. it looked the loveliest of little live things. but i am sorry they told you about the man. it is a hideous subject." "it is an annoying subject," broke in lord henry. "it has no psychological value at all. now if geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! i should like to know some one who had committed a real murder." "how horrid of you, harry!" cried the duchess. "isn't it, mr. gray? harry, mr. gray is ill again. he is going to faint." dorian drew himself up with an effort and smiled. "it is nothing, duchess," he murmured; "my nerves are dreadfully out of order. that is all. i am afraid i walked too far this morning. i didn't hear what harry said. was it very bad? you must tell me some other time. i think i must go and lie down. you will excuse me, won't you?" they had reached the great flight of steps that led from the conservatory on to the terrace. as the glass door closed behind dorian, lord henry turned and looked at the duchess with his slumberous eyes. "are you very much in love with him?" he asked. she did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape. "i wish i knew," she said at last. he shook his head. "knowledge would be fatal. it is the uncertainty that charms one. a mist makes things wonderful." "one may lose one's way." "all ways end at the same point, my dear gladys." "what is that?" "disillusion." "it was my _debut_ in life," she sighed. "it came to you crowned." "i am tired of strawberry leaves." "they become you." "only in public." "you would miss them," said lord henry. "i will not part with a petal." "monmouth has ears." "old age is dull of hearing." "has he never been jealous?" "i wish he had been." he glanced about as if in search of something. "what are you looking for?" she inquired. "the button from your foil," he answered. "you have dropped it." she laughed. "i have still the mask." "it makes your eyes lovelier," was his reply. she laughed again. her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet fruit. upstairs, in his own room, dorian gray was lying on a sofa, with terror in every tingling fibre of his body. life had suddenly become too hideous a burden for him to bear. the dreadful death of the unlucky beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal, had seemed to him to pre-figure death for himself also. he had nearly swooned at what lord henry had said in a chance mood of cynical jesting. at five o'clock he rang his bell for his servant and gave him orders to pack his things for the night-express to town, and to have the brougham at the door by eight-thirty. he was determined not to sleep another night at selby royal. it was an ill-omened place. death walked there in the sunlight. the grass of the forest had been spotted with blood. then he wrote a note to lord henry, telling him that he was going up to town to consult his doctor and asking him to entertain his guests in his absence. as he was putting it into the envelope, a knock came to the door, and his valet informed him that the head-keeper wished to see him. he frowned and bit his lip. "send him in," he muttered, after some moments' hesitation. as soon as the man entered, dorian pulled his chequebook out of a drawer and spread it out before him. "i suppose you have come about the unfortunate accident of this morning, thornton?" he said, taking up a pen. "yes, sir," answered the gamekeeper. "was the poor fellow married? had he any people dependent on him?" asked dorian, looking bored. "if so, i should not like them to be left in want, and will send them any sum of money you may think necessary." "we don't know who he is, sir. that is what i took the liberty of coming to you about." "don't know who he is?" said dorian, listlessly. "what do you mean? wasn't he one of your men?" "no, sir. never saw him before. seems like a sailor, sir." the pen dropped from dorian gray's hand, and he felt as if his heart had suddenly stopped beating. "a sailor?" he cried out. "did you say a sailor?" "yes, sir. he looks as if he had been a sort of sailor; tattooed on both arms, and that kind of thing." "was there anything found on him?" said dorian, leaning forward and looking at the man with startled eyes. "anything that would tell his name?" "some money, sir--not much, and a six-shooter. there was no name of any kind. a decent-looking man, sir, but rough-like. a sort of sailor we think." dorian started to his feet. a terrible hope fluttered past him. he clutched at it madly. "where is the body?" he exclaimed. "quick! i must see it at once." "it is in an empty stable in the home farm, sir. the folk don't like to have that sort of thing in their houses. they say a corpse brings bad luck." "the home farm! go there at once and meet me. tell one of the grooms to bring my horse round. no. never mind. i'll go to the stables myself. it will save time." in less than a quarter of an hour, dorian gray was galloping down the long avenue as hard as he could go. the trees seemed to sweep past him in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his path. once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly threw him. he lashed her across the neck with his crop. she cleft the dusky air like an arrow. the stones flew from her hoofs. at last he reached the home farm. two men were loitering in the yard. he leaped from the saddle and threw the reins to one of them. in the farthest stable a light was glimmering. something seemed to tell him that the body was there, and he hurried to the door and put his hand upon the latch. there he paused for a moment, feeling that he was on the brink of a discovery that would either make or mar his life. then he thrust the door open and entered. on a heap of sacking in the far corner was lying the dead body of a man dressed in a coarse shirt and a pair of blue trousers. a spotted handkerchief had been placed over the face. a coarse candle, stuck in a bottle, sputtered beside it. dorian gray shuddered. he felt that his could not be the hand to take the handkerchief away, and called out to one of the farm-servants to come to him. "take that thing off the face. i wish to see it," he said, clutching at the door-post for support. when the farm-servant had done so, he stepped forward. a cry of joy broke from his lips. the man who had been shot in the thicket was james vane. he stood there for some minutes looking at the dead body. as he rode home, his eyes were full of tears, for he knew he was safe. chapter "there is no use your telling me that you are going to be good," cried lord henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled with rose-water. "you are quite perfect. pray, don't change." dorian gray shook his head. "no, harry, i have done too many dreadful things in my life. i am not going to do any more. i began my good actions yesterday." "where were you yesterday?" "in the country, harry. i was staying at a little inn by myself." "my dear boy," said lord henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the country. there are no temptations there. that is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. there are only two ways by which man can reach it. one is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate." "culture and corruption," echoed dorian. "i have known something of both. it seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found together. for i have a new ideal, harry. i am going to alter. i think i have altered." "you have not yet told me what your good action was. or did you say you had done more than one?" asked his companion as he spilled into his plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded strawberries and, through a perforated, shell-shaped spoon, snowed white sugar upon them. "i can tell you, harry. it is not a story i could tell to any one else. i spared somebody. it sounds vain, but you understand what i mean. she was quite beautiful and wonderfully like sibyl vane. i think it was that which first attracted me to her. you remember sibyl, don't you? how long ago that seems! well, hetty was not one of our own class, of course. she was simply a girl in a village. but i really loved her. i am quite sure that i loved her. all during this wonderful may that we have been having, i used to run down and see her two or three times a week. yesterday she met me in a little orchard. the apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was laughing. we were to have gone away together this morning at dawn. suddenly i determined to leave her as flowerlike as i had found her." "i should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real pleasure, dorian," interrupted lord henry. "but i can finish your idyll for you. you gave her good advice and broke her heart. that was the beginning of your reformation." "harry, you are horrible! you mustn't say these dreadful things. hetty's heart is not broken. of course, she cried and all that. but there is no disgrace upon her. she can live, like perdita, in her garden of mint and marigold." "and weep over a faithless florizel," said lord henry, laughing, as he leaned back in his chair. "my dear dorian, you have the most curiously boyish moods. do you think this girl will ever be really content now with any one of her own rank? i suppose she will be married some day to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman. well, the fact of having met you, and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband, and she will be wretched. from a moral point of view, i cannot say that i think much of your great renunciation. even as a beginning, it is poor. besides, how do you know that hetty isn't floating at the present moment in some starlit mill-pond, with lovely water-lilies round her, like ophelia?" "i can't bear this, harry! you mock at everything, and then suggest the most serious tragedies. i am sorry i told you now. i don't care what you say to me. i know i was right in acting as i did. poor hetty! as i rode past the farm this morning, i saw her white face at the window, like a spray of jasmine. don't let us talk about it any more, and don't try to persuade me that the first good action i have done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice i have ever known, is really a sort of sin. i want to be better. i am going to be better. tell me something about yourself. what is going on in town? i have not been to the club for days." "the people are still discussing poor basil's disappearance." "i should have thought they had got tired of that by this time," said dorian, pouring himself out some wine and frowning slightly. "my dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks, and the british public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months. they have been very fortunate lately, however. they have had my own divorce-case and alan campbell's suicide. now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist. scotland yard still insists that the man in the grey ulster who left for paris by the midnight train on the ninth of november was poor basil, and the french police declare that basil never arrived in paris at all. i suppose in about a fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in san francisco. it is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at san francisco. it must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world." "what do you think has happened to basil?" asked dorian, holding up his burgundy against the light and wondering how it was that he could discuss the matter so calmly. "i have not the slightest idea. if basil chooses to hide himself, it is no business of mine. if he is dead, i don't want to think about him. death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. i hate it." "why?" said the younger man wearily. "because," said lord henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt trellis of an open vinaigrette box, "one can survive everything nowadays except that. death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. let us have our coffee in the music-room, dorian. you must play chopin to me. the man with whom my wife ran away played chopin exquisitely. poor victoria! i was very fond of her. the house is rather lonely without her. of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. but then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. perhaps one regrets them the most. they are such an essential part of one's personality." dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and passing into the next room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the white and black ivory of the keys. after the coffee had been brought in, he stopped, and looking over at lord henry, said, "harry, did it ever occur to you that basil was murdered?" lord henry yawned. "basil was very popular, and always wore a waterbury watch. why should he have been murdered? he was not clever enough to have enemies. of course, he had a wonderful genius for painting. but a man can paint like velasquez and yet be as dull as possible. basil was really rather dull. he only interested me once, and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration for you and that you were the dominant motive of his art." "i was very fond of basil," said dorian with a note of sadness in his voice. "but don't people say that he was murdered?" "oh, some of the papers do. it does not seem to me to be at all probable. i know there are dreadful places in paris, but basil was not the sort of man to have gone to them. he had no curiosity. it was his chief defect." "what would you say, harry, if i told you that i had murdered basil?" said the younger man. he watched him intently after he had spoken. "i would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that doesn't suit you. all crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. it is not in you, dorian, to commit a murder. i am sorry if i hurt your vanity by saying so, but i assure you it is true. crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. i don't blame them in the smallest degree. i should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations." "a method of procuring sensations? do you think, then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? don't tell me that." "oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," cried lord henry, laughing. "that is one of the most important secrets of life. i should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. one should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner. but let us pass from poor basil. i wish i could believe that he had come to such a really romantic end as you suggest, but i can't. i dare say he fell into the seine off an omnibus and that the conductor hushed up the scandal. yes: i should fancy that was his end. i see him lying now on his back under those dull-green waters, with the heavy barges floating over him and long weeds catching in his hair. do you know, i don't think he would have done much more good work. during the last ten years his painting had gone off very much." dorian heaved a sigh, and lord henry strolled across the room and began to stroke the head of a curious java parrot, a large, grey-plumaged bird with pink crest and tail, that was balancing itself upon a bamboo perch. as his pointed fingers touched it, it dropped the white scurf of crinkled lids over black, glasslike eyes and began to sway backwards and forwards. "yes," he continued, turning round and taking his handkerchief out of his pocket; "his painting had quite gone off. it seemed to me to have lost something. it had lost an ideal. when you and he ceased to be great friends, he ceased to be a great artist. what was it separated you? i suppose he bored you. if so, he never forgave you. it's a habit bores have. by the way, what has become of that wonderful portrait he did of you? i don't think i have ever seen it since he finished it. oh! i remember your telling me years ago that you had sent it down to selby, and that it had got mislaid or stolen on the way. you never got it back? what a pity! it was really a masterpiece. i remember i wanted to buy it. i wish i had now. it belonged to basil's best period. since then, his work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative british artist. did you advertise for it? you should." "i forget," said dorian. "i suppose i did. but i never really liked it. i am sorry i sat for it. the memory of the thing is hateful to me. why do you talk of it? it used to remind me of those curious lines in some play--hamlet, i think--how do they run?-- "like the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart." yes: that is what it was like." lord henry laughed. "if a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart," he answered, sinking into an arm-chair. dorian gray shook his head and struck some soft chords on the piano. "'like the painting of a sorrow,'" he repeated, "'a face without a heart.'" the elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes. "by the way, dorian," he said after a pause, "'what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose--how does the quotation run?--his own soul'?" the music jarred, and dorian gray started and stared at his friend. "why do you ask me that, harry?" "my dear fellow," said lord henry, elevating his eyebrows in surprise, "i asked you because i thought you might be able to give me an answer. that is all. i was going through the park last sunday, and close by the marble arch there stood a little crowd of shabby-looking people listening to some vulgar street-preacher. as i passed by, i heard the man yelling out that question to his audience. it struck me as being rather dramatic. london is very rich in curious effects of that kind. a wet sunday, an uncouth christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly white faces under a broken roof of dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful phrase flung into the air by shrill hysterical lips--it was really very good in its way, quite a suggestion. i thought of telling the prophet that art had a soul, but that man had not. i am afraid, however, he would not have understood me." "don't, harry. the soul is a terrible reality. it can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. it can be poisoned, or made perfect. there is a soul in each one of us. i know it." "do you feel quite sure of that, dorian?" "quite sure." "ah! then it must be an illusion. the things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. that is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance. how grave you are! don't be so serious. what have you or i to do with the superstitions of our age? no: we have given up our belief in the soul. play me something. play me a nocturne, dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept your youth. you must have some secret. i am only ten years older than you are, and i am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow. you are really wonderful, dorian. you have never looked more charming than you do to-night. you remind me of the day i saw you first. you were rather cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary. you have changed, of course, but not in appearance. i wish you would tell me your secret. to get back my youth i would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. youth! there is nothing like it. it's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. the only people to whose opinions i listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. they seem in front of me. life has revealed to them her latest wonder. as for the aged, i always contradict the aged. i do it on principle. if you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in , when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and knew absolutely nothing. how lovely that thing you are playing is! i wonder, did chopin write it at majorca, with the sea weeping round the villa and the salt spray dashing against the panes? it is marvellously romantic. what a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative! don't stop. i want music to-night. it seems to me that you are the young apollo and that i am marsyas listening to you. i have sorrows, dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of. the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. i am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity. ah, dorian, how happy you are! what an exquisite life you have had! you have drunk deeply of everything. you have crushed the grapes against your palate. nothing has been hidden from you. and it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. it has not marred you. you are still the same." "i am not the same, harry." "yes, you are the same. i wonder what the rest of your life will be. don't spoil it by renunciations. at present you are a perfect type. don't make yourself incomplete. you are quite flawless now. you need not shake your head: you know you are. besides, dorian, don't deceive yourself. life is not governed by will or intention. life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. you may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. but a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play--i tell you, dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us. there are moments when the odour of _lilas blanc_ passes suddenly across me, and i have to live the strangest month of my life over again. i wish i could change places with you, dorian. the world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. it always will worship you. you are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. i am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! life has been your art. you have set yourself to music. your days are your sonnets." dorian rose up from the piano and passed his hand through his hair. "yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but i am not going to have the same life, harry. and you must not say these extravagant things to me. you don't know everything about me. i think that if you did, even you would turn from me. you laugh. don't laugh." "why have you stopped playing, dorian? go back and give me the nocturne over again. look at that great, honey-coloured moon that hangs in the dusky air. she is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth. you won't? let us go to the club, then. it has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly. there is some one at white's who wants immensely to know you--young lord poole, bournemouth's eldest son. he has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. he is quite delightful and rather reminds me of you." "i hope not," said dorian with a sad look in his eyes. "but i am tired to-night, harry. i shan't go to the club. it is nearly eleven, and i want to go to bed early." "do stay. you have never played so well as to-night. there was something in your touch that was wonderful. it had more expression than i had ever heard from it before." "it is because i am going to be good," he answered, smiling. "i am a little changed already." "you cannot change to me, dorian," said lord henry. "you and i will always be friends." "yet you poisoned me with a book once. i should not forgive that. harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. it does harm." "my dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. you will soon be going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired. you are much too delightful to do that. besides, it is no use. you and i are what we are, and will be what we will be. as for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. art has no influence upon action. it annihilates the desire to act. it is superbly sterile. the books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. that is all. but we won't discuss literature. come round to-morrow. i am going to ride at eleven. we might go together, and i will take you to lunch afterwards with lady branksome. she is a charming woman, and wants to consult you about some tapestries she is thinking of buying. mind you come. or shall we lunch with our little duchess? she says she never sees you now. perhaps you are tired of gladys? i thought you would be. her clever tongue gets on one's nerves. well, in any case, be here at eleven." "must i really come, harry?" "certainly. the park is quite lovely now. i don't think there have been such lilacs since the year i met you." "very well. i shall be here at eleven," said dorian. "good night, harry." as he reached the door, he hesitated for a moment, as if he had something more to say. then he sighed and went out. chapter it was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm and did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. as he strolled home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. he heard one of them whisper to the other, "that is dorian gray." he remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about. he was tired of hearing his own name now. half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was. he had often told the girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. he had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him and answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. what a laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing. and how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! she knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost. when he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. he sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began to think over some of the things that lord henry had said to him. was it really true that one could never change? he felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood--his rose-white boyhood, as lord henry had once called it. he knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. but was it all irretrievable? was there no hope for him? ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! all his failure had been due to that. better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it. there was purification in punishment. not "forgive us our sins" but "smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a most just god. the curiously carved mirror that lord henry had given to him, so many years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed cupids laughed round it as of old. he took it up, as he had done on that night of horror when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished shield. once, some one who had terribly loved him had written to him a mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: "the world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. the curves of your lips rewrite history." the phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself. then he loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. it was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. but for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. his beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. what was youth at best? a green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. why had he worn its livery? youth had spoiled him. it was better not to think of the past. nothing could alter that. it was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think. james vane was hidden in a nameless grave in selby churchyard. alan campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know. the excitement, such as it was, over basil hallward's disappearance would soon pass away. it was already waning. he was perfectly safe there. nor, indeed, was it the death of basil hallward that weighed most upon his mind. it was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. he could not forgive him that. it was the portrait that had done everything. basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. the murder had been simply the madness of a moment. as for alan campbell, his suicide had been his own act. he had chosen to do it. it was nothing to him. a new life! that was what he wanted. that was what he was waiting for. surely he had begun it already. he had spared one innocent thing, at any rate. he would never again tempt innocence. he would be good. as he thought of hetty merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed. surely it was not still so horrible as it had been? perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face. perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away. he would go and look. he took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. as he unbarred the door, a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face and lingered for a moment about his lips. yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. he felt as if the load had been lifted from him already. he went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. a cry of pain and indignation broke from him. he could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. the thing was still loathsome--more loathsome, if possible, than before--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. then he trembled. had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? or the desire for a new sensation, as lord henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? or, perhaps, all these? and why was the red stain larger than it had been? it seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. there was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. confess? did it mean that he was to confess? to give himself up and be put to death? he laughed. he felt that the idea was monstrous. besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? there was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. everything belonging to him had been destroyed. he himself had burned what had been below-stairs. the world would simply say that he was mad. they would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. there was a god who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. his sin? he shrugged his shoulders. the death of basil hallward seemed very little to him. he was thinking of hetty merton. for it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. vanity? curiosity? hypocrisy? had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? there had been something more. at least he thought so. but who could tell? ... no. there had been nothing more. through vanity he had spared her. in hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. for curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. he recognized that now. but this murder--was it to dog him all his life? was he always to be burdened by his past? was he really to confess? never. there was only one bit of evidence left against him. the picture itself--that was evidence. he would destroy it. why had he kept it so long? once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. of late he had felt no such pleasure. it had kept him awake at night. when he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. it had brought melancholy across his passions. its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. it had been like conscience to him. yes, it had been conscience. he would destroy it. he looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed basil hallward. he had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. it was bright, and glistened. as it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. it would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free. it would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. he seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it. there was a cry heard, and a crash. the cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke and crept out of their rooms. two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped and looked up at the great house. they walked on till they met a policeman and brought him back. the man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was all dark. after a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico and watched. "whose house is that, constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen. "mr. dorian gray's, sir," answered the policeman. they looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered. one of them was sir henry ashton's uncle. inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. old mrs. leaf was crying and wringing her hands. francis was as pale as death. after about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept upstairs. they knocked, but there was no reply. they called out. everything was still. finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they got on the roof and dropped down on to the balcony. the windows yielded easily--their bolts were old. when they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. he was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. it was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was. four weird tales by algernon blackwood including: "the insanity of jones" "the man who found out" "the glamour of the snow" and "sand" a note on the text these stories first appeared in blackwood's story collections: "the insanity of jones" in _the listener and other stories_ ( ); "the man who found out" in _the wolves of god and other fey stories_ ( ); "the glamour of the snow," and "sand" in _pan's garden_ ( ). * * * * * _the insanity of jones_ (a study in reincarnation) adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind. for only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier. some, however, are born with this awful certainty in their hearts, and are called to no apprenticeship, and to this select company jones undoubtedly belonged. all his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of _real_ things behind the curtain--things he was for ever trying to get at, and that sometimes he actually did get at. he had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderland of another region, a region where time and space were merely forms of thought, where ancient memories lay open to the sight, and where the forces behind each human life stood plainly revealed and he could see the hidden springs at the very heart of the world. moreover, the fact that he was a clerk in a fire insurance office, and did his work with strict attention, never allowed him to forget for one moment that, just beyond the dingy brick walls where the hundred men scribbled with pointed pens beneath the electric lamps, there existed this glorious region where the important part of himself dwelt and moved and had its being. for in this region he pictured himself playing the part of a spectator to his ordinary workaday life, watching, like a king, the stream of events, but untouched in his own soul by the dirt, the noise, and the vulgar commotion of the outer world. and this was no poetic dream merely. jones was not playing prettily with idealism to amuse himself. it was a living, working belief. so convinced was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great building like st. paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound--the spiritual idea--which it represented in stone. for something in this way it was that his mind worked. yet, to all appearances, and in the satisfaction of all business claims, jones was normal and unenterprising. he felt nothing but contempt for the wave of modern psychism. he hardly knew the meaning of such words as "clairvoyance" and "clairaudience." he had never felt the least desire to join the theosophical society and to speculate in theories of astral-plane life, or elementals. he attended no meetings of the psychical research society, and knew no anxiety as to whether his "aura" was black or blue; nor was he conscious of the slightest wish to mix in with the revival of cheap occultism which proves so attractive to weak minds of mystical tendencies and unleashed imaginations. there were certain things he _knew_, but none he cared to argue about; and he shrank instinctively from attempting to put names to the contents of this other region, knowing well that such names could only limit and define things that, according to any standards in use in the ordinary world, were simply undefinable and illusive. so that, although this was the way his mind worked, there was clearly a very strong leaven of common sense in jones. in a word, the man the world and the office knew as jones _was_ jones. the name summed him up and labelled him correctly--john enderby jones. among the things that he _knew_, and therefore never cared to speak or speculate about, one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution, always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each determined by the behaviour of the preceding one. the present john jones was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of john jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries. he pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions. and one result of this belief was that his thoughts dwelt upon the past rather than upon the future; that he read much history, and felt specially drawn to certain periods whose spirit he understood instinctively as though he had lived in them; and that he found all religions uninteresting because, almost without exception, they start from the present and speculate ahead as to what men shall become, instead of looking back and speculating why men have got here as they are. in the insurance office he did his work exceedingly well, but without much personal ambition. men and women he regarded as the impersonal instruments for inflicting upon him the pain or pleasure he had earned by his past workings, for chance had no place in his scheme of things at all; and while he recognised that the practical world could not get along unless every man did his work thoroughly and conscientiously, he took no interest in the accumulation of fame or money for himself, and simply, therefore, did his plain duty, with indifference as to results. in common with others who lead a strictly impersonal life, he possessed the quality of utter bravery, and was always ready to face any combination of circumstances, no matter how terrible, because he saw in them the just working-out of past causes he had himself set in motion which could not be dodged or modified. and whereas the majority of people had little meaning for him, either by way of attraction or repulsion, the moment he met some one with whom he felt his past had been _vitally_ interwoven his whole inner being leapt up instantly and shouted the fact in his face, and he regulated his life with the utmost skill and caution, like a sentry on watch for an enemy whose feet could already be heard approaching. thus, while the great majority of men and women left him uninfluenced--since he regarded them as so many souls merely passing with him along the great stream of evolution--there were, here and there, individuals with whom he recognised that his smallest intercourse was of the gravest importance. these were persons with whom he knew in every fibre of his being he had accounts to settle, pleasant or otherwise, arising out of dealings in past lives; and into his relations with these few, therefore, he concentrated as it were the efforts that most people spread over their intercourse with a far greater number. by what means he picked out these few individuals only those conversant with the startling processes of the subconscious memory may say, but the point was that jones believed the main purpose, if not quite the entire purpose, of his present incarnation lay in his faithful and thorough settling of these accounts, and that if he sought to evade the least detail of such settling, no matter how unpleasant, he would have lived in vain, and would return to his next incarnation with this added duty to perform. for according to his beliefs there was no chance, and could be no ultimate shirking, and to avoid a problem was merely to waste time and lose opportunities for development. and there was one individual with whom jones had long understood clearly he had a very large account to settle, and towards the accomplishment of which all the main currents of his being seemed to bear him with unswerving purpose. for, when he first entered the insurance office as a junior clerk ten years before, and through a glass door had caught sight of this man seated in an inner room, one of his sudden overwhelming flashes of intuitive memory had burst up into him from the depths, and he had seen, as in a flame of blinding light, a symbolical picture of the future rising out of a dreadful past, and he had, without any act of definite volition, marked down this man for a real account to be settled. "with _that_ man i shall have much to do," he said to himself, as he noted the big face look up and meet his eye through the glass. "there is something i cannot shirk--a vital relation out of the past of both of us." and he went to his desk trembling a little, and with shaking knees, as though the memory of some terrible pain had suddenly laid its icy hand upon his heart and touched the scar of a great horror. it was a moment of genuine terror when their eyes had met through the glass door, and he was conscious of an inward shrinking and loathing that seized upon him with great violence and convinced him in a single second that the settling of this account would be almost, perhaps, more than he could manage. the vision passed as swiftly as it came, dropping back again into the submerged region of his consciousness; but he never forgot it, and the whole of his life thereafter became a sort of natural though undeliberate preparation for the fulfilment of the great duty when the time should be ripe. in those days--ten years ago--this man was the assistant manager, but had since been promoted as manager to one of the company's local branches; and soon afterwards jones had likewise found himself transferred to this same branch. a little later, again, the branch at liverpool, one of the most important, had been in peril owing to mismanagement and defalcation, and the man had gone to take charge of it, and again, by mere chance apparently, jones had been promoted to the same place. and this pursuit of the assistant manager had continued for several years, often, too, in the most curious fashion; and though jones had never exchanged a single word with him, or been so much as noticed indeed by the great man, the clerk understood perfectly well that these moves in the game were all part of a definite purpose. never for one moment did he doubt that the invisibles behind the veil were slowly and surely arranging the details of it all so as to lead up suitably to the climax demanded by justice, a climax in which himself and the manager would play the leading _roles_. "it is inevitable," he said to himself, "and i feel it may be terrible; but when the moment comes i shall be ready, and i pray god that i may face it properly and act like a man." moreover, as the years passed, and nothing happened, he felt the horror closing in upon him with steady increase, for the fact was jones hated and loathed the manager with an intensity of feeling he had never before experienced towards any human being. he shrank from his presence, and from the glance of his eyes, as though he remembered to have suffered nameless cruelties at his hands; and he slowly began to realise, moreover, that the matter to be settled between them was one of very ancient standing, and that the nature of the settlement was a discharge of accumulated punishment which would probably be very dreadful in the manner of its fulfilment. when, therefore, the chief cashier one day informed him that the man was to be in london again--this time as general manager of the head office--and said that he was charged to find a private secretary for him from among the best clerks, and further intimated that the selection had fallen upon himself, jones accepted the promotion quietly, fatalistically, yet with a degree of inward loathing hardly to be described. for he saw in this merely another move in the evolution of the inevitable nemesis which he simply dared not seek to frustrate by any personal consideration; and at the same time he was conscious of a certain feeling of relief that the suspense of waiting might soon be mitigated. a secret sense of satisfaction, therefore, accompanied the unpleasant change, and jones was able to hold himself perfectly well in hand when it was carried into effect and he was formally introduced as private secretary to the general manager. now the manager was a large, fat man, with a very red face and bags beneath his eyes. being short-sighted, he wore glasses that seemed to magnify his eyes, which were always a little bloodshot. in hot weather a sort of thin slime covered his cheeks, for he perspired easily. his head was almost entirely bald, and over his turn-down collar his great neck folded in two distinct reddish collops of flesh. his hands were big and his fingers almost massive in thickness. he was an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will, without enough imagination to confuse his course of action by showing him possible alternatives; and his integrity and ability caused him to be held in universal respect by the world of business and finance. in the important regions of a man's character, however, and at heart, he was coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others, and as a result often cruelly unjust to his helpless subordinates. in moments of temper, which were not infrequent, his face turned a dull purple, while the top of his bald head shone by contrast like white marble, and the bags under his eyes swelled till it seemed they would presently explode with a pop. and at these times he presented a distinctly repulsive appearance. but to a private secretary like jones, who did his duty regardless of whether his employer was beast or angel, and whose mainspring was principle and not emotion, this made little difference. within the narrow limits in which any one _could_ satisfy such a man, he pleased the general manager; and more than once his piercing intuitive faculty, amounting almost to clairvoyance, assisted the chief in a fashion that served to bring the two closer together than might otherwise have been the case, and caused the man to respect in his assistant a power of which he possessed not even the germ himself. it was a curious relationship that grew up between the two, and the cashier, who enjoyed the credit of having made the selection, profited by it indirectly as much as any one else. so for some time the work of the office continued normally and very prosperously. john enderby jones received a good salary, and in the outward appearance of the two chief characters in this history there was little change noticeable, except that the manager grew fatter and redder, and the secretary observed that his own hair was beginning to show rather greyish at the temples. there were, however, two changes in progress, and they both had to do with jones, and are important to mention. one was that he began to dream evilly. in the region of deep sleep, where the possibility of significant dreaming first develops itself, he was tormented more and more with vivid scenes and pictures in which a tall thin man, dark and sinister of countenance, and with bad eyes, was closely associated with himself. only the setting was that of a past age, with costumes of centuries gone by, and the scenes had to do with dreadful cruelties that could not belong to modern life as he knew it. the other change was also significant, but is not so easy to describe, for he had in fact become aware that some new portion of himself, hitherto unawakened, had stirred slowly into life out of the very depths of his consciousness. this new part of himself amounted almost to another personality, and he never observed its least manifestation without a strange thrill at his heart. for he understood that it had begun to _watch_ the manager! ii it was the habit of jones, since he was compelled to work among conditions that were utterly distasteful, to withdraw his mind wholly from business once the day was over. during office hours he kept the strictest possible watch upon himself, and turned the key on all inner dreams, lest any sudden uprush from the deeps should interfere with his duty. but, once the working day was over, the gates flew open, and he began to enjoy himself. he read no modern books on the subjects that interested him, and, as already said, he followed no course of training, nor belonged to any society that dabbled with half-told mysteries; but, once released from the office desk in the manager's room, he simply and naturally entered the other region, because he was an old inhabitant, a rightful denizen, and because he belonged there. it was, in fact, really a case of dual personality; and a carefully drawn agreement existed between jones-of-the-fire-insurance-office and jones-of-the-mysteries, by the terms of which, under heavy penalties, neither region claimed him out of hours. for the moment he reached his rooms under the roof in bloomsbury, and had changed his city coat to another, the iron doors of the office clanged far behind him, and in front, before his very eyes, rolled up the beautiful gates of ivory, and he entered into the places of flowers and singing and wonderful veiled forms. sometimes he quite lost touch with the outer world, forgetting to eat his dinner or go to bed, and lay in a state of trance, his consciousness working far out of the body. and on other occasions he walked the streets on air, half-way between the two regions, unable to distinguish between incarnate and discarnate forms, and not very far, probably, beyond the strata where poets, saints, and the greatest artists have moved and thought and found their inspiration. but this was only when some insistent bodily claim prevented his full release, and more often than not he was entirely independent of his physical portion and free of the real region, without let or hindrance. one evening he reached home utterly exhausted after the burden of the day's work. the manager had been more than usually brutal, unjust, ill-tempered, and jones had been almost persuaded out of his settled policy of contempt into answering back. everything seemed to have gone amiss, and the man's coarse, underbred nature had been in the ascendant all day long: he had thumped the desk with his great fists, abused, found fault unreasonably, uttered outrageous things, and behaved generally as he actually was--beneath the thin veneer of acquired business varnish. he had done and said everything to wound all that was woundable in an ordinary secretary, and though jones fortunately dwelt in a region from which he looked down upon such a man as he might look down on the blundering of a savage animal, the strain had nevertheless told severely upon him, and he reached home wondering for the first time in his life whether there was perhaps a point beyond which he would be unable to restrain himself any longer. for something out of the usual had happened. at the close of a passage of great stress between the two, every nerve in the secretary's body tingling from undeserved abuse, the manager had suddenly turned full upon him, in the corner of the private room where the safes stood, in such a way that the glare of his red eyes, magnified by the glasses, looked straight into his own. and at this very second that other personality in jones--the one that was ever _watching_--rose up swiftly from the deeps within and held a mirror to his face. a moment of flame and vision rushed over him, and for one single second--one merciless second of clear sight--he saw the manager as the tall dark man of his evil dreams, and the knowledge that he had suffered at his hands some awful injury in the past crashed through his mind like the report of a cannon. it all flashed upon him and was gone, changing him from fire to ice, and then back again to fire; and he left the office with the certain conviction in his heart that the time for his final settlement with the man, the time for the inevitable retribution, was at last drawing very near. according to his invariable custom, however, he succeeded in putting the memory of all this unpleasantness out of his mind with the changing of his office coat, and after dozing a little in his leather chair before the fire, he started out as usual for dinner in the soho french restaurant, and began to dream himself away into the region of flowers and singing, and to commune with the invisibles that were the very sources of his real life and being. for it was in this way that his mind worked, and the habits of years had crystallised into rigid lines along which it was now necessary and inevitable for him to act. at the door of the little restaurant he stopped short, a half-remembered appointment in his mind. he had made an engagement with some one, but where, or with whom, had entirely slipped his memory. he thought it was for dinner, or else to meet just after dinner, and for a second it came back to him that it had something to do with the office, but, whatever it was, he was quite unable to recall it, and a reference to his pocket engagement book showed only a blank page. evidently he had even omitted to enter it; and after standing a moment vainly trying to recall either the time, place, or person, he went in and sat down. but though the details had escaped him, his subconscious memory seemed to know all about it, for he experienced a sudden sinking of the heart, accompanied by a sense of foreboding anticipation, and felt that beneath his exhaustion there lay a centre of tremendous excitement. the emotion caused by the engagement was at work, and would presently cause the actual details of the appointment to reappear. inside the restaurant the feeling increased, instead of passing: some one was waiting for him somewhere--some one whom he had definitely arranged to meet. he was expected by a person that very night and just about that very time. but by whom? where? a curious inner trembling came over him, and he made a strong effort to hold himself in hand and to be ready for anything that might come. and then suddenly came the knowledge that the place of appointment was this very restaurant, and, further, that the person he had promised to meet was already here, waiting somewhere quite close beside him. he looked up nervously and began to examine the faces round him. the majority of the diners were frenchmen, chattering loudly with much gesticulation and laughter; and there was a fair sprinkling of clerks like himself who came because the prices were low and the food good, but there was no single face that he recognised until his glance fell upon the occupant of the corner seat opposite, generally filled by himself. "there's the man who's waiting for me!" thought jones instantly. he knew it at once. the man, he saw, was sitting well back into the corner, with a thick overcoat buttoned tightly up to the chin. his skin was very white, and a heavy black beard grew far up over his cheeks. at first the secretary took him for a stranger, but when he looked up and their eyes met, a sense of familiarity flashed across him, and for a second or two jones imagined he was staring at a man he had known years before. for, barring the beard, it was the face of an elderly clerk who had occupied the next desk to his own when he first entered the service of the insurance company, and had shown him the most painstaking kindness and sympathy in the early difficulties of his work. but a moment later the illusion passed, for he remembered that thorpe had been dead at least five years. the similarity of the eyes was obviously a mere suggestive trick of memory. the two men stared at one another for several seconds, and then jones began to act _instinctively_, and because he had to. he crossed over and took the vacant seat at the other's table, facing him; for he felt it was somehow imperative to explain why he was late, and how it was he had almost forgotten the engagement altogether. no honest excuse, however, came to his assistance, though his mind had begun to work furiously. "yes, you _are_ late," said the man quietly, before he could find a single word to utter. "but it doesn't matter. also, you had forgotten the appointment, but that makes no difference either." "i knew--that there was an engagement," jones stammered, passing his hand over his forehead; "but somehow--" "you will recall it presently," continued the other in a gentle voice, and smiling a little. "it was in deep sleep last night we arranged this, and the unpleasant occurrences of to-day have for the moment obliterated it." a faint memory stirred within him as the man spoke, and a grove of trees with moving forms hovered before his eyes and then vanished again, while for an instant the stranger seemed to be capable of self-distortion and to have assumed vast proportions, with wonderful flaming eyes. "oh!" he gasped. "it was there--in the other region?" "of course," said the other, with a smile that illumined his whole face. "you will remember presently, all in good time, and meanwhile you have no cause to feel afraid." there was a wonderful soothing quality in the man's voice, like the whispering of a great wind, and the clerk felt calmer at once. they sat a little while longer, but he could not remember that they talked much or ate anything. he only recalled afterwards that the head waiter came up and whispered something in his ear, and that he glanced round and saw the other people were looking at him curiously, some of them laughing, and that his companion then got up and led the way out of the restaurant. they walked hurriedly through the streets, neither of them speaking; and jones was so intent upon getting back the whole history of the affair from the region of deep sleep, that he barely noticed the way they took. yet it was clear he knew where they were bound for just as well as his companion, for he crossed the streets often ahead of him, diving down alleys without hesitation, and the other followed always without correction. the pavements were very full, and the usual night crowds of london were surging to and fro in the glare of the shop lights, but somehow no one impeded their rapid movements, and they seemed to pass through the people as if they were smoke. and, as they went, the pedestrians and traffic grew less and less, and they soon passed the mansion house and the deserted space in front of the royal exchange, and so on down fenchurch street and within sight of the tower of london, rising dim and shadowy in the smoky air. jones remembered all this perfectly well, and thought it was his intense preoccupation that made the distance seem so short. but it was when the tower was left behind and they turned northwards that he began to notice how altered everything was, and saw that they were in a neighbourhood where houses were suddenly scarce, and lanes and fields beginning, and that their only light was the stars overhead. and, as the deeper consciousness more and more asserted itself to the exclusion of the surface happenings of his mere body during the day, the sense of exhaustion vanished, and he realised that he was moving somewhere in the region of causes behind the veil, beyond the gross deceptions of the senses, and released from the clumsy spell of space and time. without great surprise, therefore, he turned and saw that his companion had altered, had shed his overcoat and black hat, and was moving beside him absolutely _without sound_. for a brief second he saw him, tall as a tree, extending through space like a great shadow, misty and wavering of outline, followed by a sound like wings in the darkness; but, when he stopped, fear clutching at his heart, the other resumed his former proportions, and jones could plainly see his normal outline against the green field behind. then the secretary saw him fumbling at his neck, and at the same moment the black beard came away from the face in his hand. "then you _are_ thorpe!" he gasped, yet somehow without overwhelming surprise. they stood facing one another in the lonely lane, trees meeting overhead and hiding the stars, and a sound of mournful sighing among the branches. "i am thorpe," was the answer in a voice that almost seemed part of the wind. "and i have come out of our far past to help you, for my debt to you is large, and in this life i had but small opportunity to repay." jones thought quickly of the man's kindness to him in the office, and a great wave of feeling surged through him as he began to remember dimly the friend by whose side he had already climbed, perhaps through vast ages of his soul's evolution. "to help me _now_?" he whispered. "you will understand me when you enter into your real memory and recall how great a debt i have to pay for old faithful kindnesses of long ago," sighed the other in a voice like falling wind. "between us, though, there can be no question of _debt_," jones heard himself saying, and remembered the reply that floated to him on the air and the smile that lightened for a moment the stern eyes facing him. "not of debt, indeed, but of privilege." jones felt his heart leap out towards this man, this old friend, tried by centuries and still faithful. he made a movement to seize his hand. but the other shifted like a thing of mist, and for a moment the clerk's head swam and his eyes seemed to fail. "then you are _dead_?" he said under his breath with a slight shiver. "five years ago i left the body you knew," replied thorpe. "i tried to help you then instinctively, not fully recognising you. but now i can accomplish far more." with an awful sense of foreboding and dread in his heart, the secretary was beginning to understand. "it has to do with--with--?" "your past dealings with the manager," came the answer, as the wind rose louder among the branches overhead and carried off the remainder of the sentence into the air. jones's memory, which was just beginning to stir among the deepest layers of all, shut down suddenly with a snap, and he followed his companion over fields and down sweet-smelling lanes where the air was fragrant and cool, till they came to a large house, standing gaunt and lonely in the shadows at the edge of a wood. it was wrapped in utter stillness, with windows heavily draped in black, and the clerk, as he looked, felt such an overpowering wave of sadness invade him that his eyes began to burn and smart, and he was conscious of a desire to shed tears. the key made a harsh noise as it turned in the lock, and when the door swung open into a lofty hall they heard a confused sound of rustling and whispering, as of a great throng of people pressing forward to meet them. the air seemed full of swaying movement, and jones was certain he saw hands held aloft and dim faces claiming recognition, while in his heart, already oppressed by the approaching burden of vast accumulated memories, he was aware of the _uncoiling of something_ that had been asleep for ages. as they advanced he heard the doors close with a muffled thunder behind them, and saw that the shadows seemed to retreat and shrink away towards the interior of the house, carrying the hands and faces with them. he heard the wind singing round the walls and over the roof, and its wailing voice mingled with the sound of deep, collective breathing that filled the house like the murmur of a sea; and as they walked up the broad staircase and through the vaulted rooms, where pillars rose like the stems of trees, he knew that the building was crowded, row upon row, with the thronging memories of his own long past. "this is the _house of the past_," whispered thorpe beside him, as they moved silently from room to room; "the house of _your_ past. it is full from cellar to roof with the memories of what you have done, thought, and felt from the earliest stages of your evolution until now. "the house climbs up almost to the clouds, and stretches back into the heart of the wood you saw outside, but the remoter halls are filled with the ghosts of ages ago too many to count, and even if we were able to waken them you could not remember them now. some day, though, they will come and claim you, and you must know them, and answer their questions, for they can never rest till they have exhausted themselves again through you, and justice has been perfectly worked out. "but now follow me closely, and you shall see the particular memory for which i am permitted to be your guide, so that you may know and understand a great force in your present life, and may use the sword of justice, or rise to the level of a great forgiveness, according to your degree of power." icy thrills ran through the trembling clerk, and as he walked slowly beside his companion he heard from the vaults below, as well as from more distant regions of the vast building, the stirring and sighing of the serried ranks of sleepers, sounding in the still air like a chord swept from unseen strings stretched somewhere among the very foundations of the house. stealthily, picking their way among the great pillars, they moved up the sweeping staircase and through several dark corridors and halls, and presently stopped outside a small door in an archway where the shadows were very deep. "remain close by my side, and remember to utter no cry," whispered the voice of his guide, and as the clerk turned to reply he saw his face was stern to whiteness and even shone a little in the darkness. the room they entered seemed at first to be pitchy black, but gradually the secretary perceived a faint reddish glow against the farther end, and thought he saw figures moving silently to and fro. "now watch!" whispered thorpe, as they pressed close to the wall near the door and waited. "but remember to keep absolute silence. it is a torture scene." jones felt utterly afraid, and would have turned to fly if he dared, for an indescribable terror seized him and his knees shook; but some power that made escape impossible held him remorselessly there, and with eyes glued on the spots of light he crouched against the wall and waited. the figures began to move more swiftly, each in its own dim light that shed no radiance beyond itself, and he heard a soft clanking of chains and the voice of a man groaning in pain. then came the sound of a door closing, and thereafter jones saw but one figure, the figure of an old man, naked entirely, and fastened with chains to an iron framework on the floor. his memory gave a sudden leap of fear as he looked, for the features and white beard were familiar, and he recalled them as though of yesterday. the other figures had disappeared, and the old man became the centre of the terrible picture. slowly, with ghastly groans; as the heat below him increased into a steady glow, the aged body rose in a curve of agony, resting on the iron frame only where the chains held wrists and ankles fast. cries and gasps filled the air, and jones felt exactly as though they came from his own throat, and as if the chains were burning into his own wrists and ankles, and the heat scorching the skin and flesh upon his own back. he began to writhe and twist himself. "spain!" whispered the voice at his side, "and four hundred years ago." "and the purpose?" gasped the perspiring clerk, though he knew quite well what the answer must be. "to extort the name of a friend, to his death and betrayal," came the reply through the darkness. a sliding panel opened with a little rattle in the wall immediately above the rack, and a face, framed in the same red glow, appeared and looked down upon the dying victim. jones was only just able to choke a scream, for he recognised the tall dark man of his dreams. with horrible, gloating eyes he gazed down upon the writhing form of the old man, and his lips moved as in speaking, though no words were actually audible. "he asks again for the name," explained the other, as the clerk struggled with the intense hatred and loathing that threatened every moment to result in screams and action. his ankles and wrists pained him so that he could scarcely keep still, but a merciless power held him to the scene. he saw the old man, with a fierce cry, raise his tortured head and spit up into the face at the panel, and then the shutter slid back again, and a moment later the increased glow beneath the body, accompanied by awful writhing, told of the application of further heat. there came the odour of burning flesh; the white beard curled and burned to a crisp; the body fell back limp upon the red-hot iron, and then shot up again in fresh agony; cry after cry, the most awful in the world, rang out with deadened sound between the four walls; and again the panel slid back creaking, and revealed the dreadful face of the torturer. again the name was asked for, and again it was refused; and this time, after the closing of the panel, a door opened, and the tall thin man with the evil face came slowly into the chamber. his features were savage with rage and disappointment, and in the dull red glow that fell upon them he looked like a very prince of devils. in his hand he held a pointed iron at white heat. "now the murder!" came from thorpe in a whisper that sounded as if it was outside the building and far away. jones knew quite well what was coming, but was unable even to close his eyes. he felt all the fearful pains himself just as though he were actually the sufferer; but now, as he stared, he felt something more besides; and when the tall man deliberately approached the rack and plunged the heated iron first into one eye and then into the other, he heard the faint fizzing of it, and felt his own eyes burst in frightful pain from his head. at the same moment, unable longer to control himself, he uttered a wild shriek and dashed forward to seize the torturer and tear him to a thousand pieces. instantly, in a flash, the entire scene vanished; darkness rushed in to fill the room, and he felt himself lifted off his feet by some force like a great wind and borne swiftly away into space. when he recovered his senses he was standing just outside the house and the figure of thorpe was beside him in the gloom. the great doors were in the act of closing behind him, but before they shut he fancied he caught a glimpse of an immense veiled figure standing upon the threshold, with flaming eyes, and in his hand a bright weapon like a shining sword of fire. "come quickly now--all is over!" thorpe whispered. "and the dark man--?" gasped the clerk, as he moved swiftly by the other's side. "in this present life is the manager of the company." "and the victim?" "was yourself!" "and the friend he--_i_ refused to betray?" "i was that friend," answered thorpe, his voice with every moment sounding more and more like the cry of the wind. "you gave your life in agony to save mine." "and again, in this life, we have all three been together?" "yes. such forces are not soon or easily exhausted, and justice is not satisfied till all have reaped what they sowed." jones had an odd feeling that he was slipping away into some other state of consciousness. thorpe began to seem unreal. presently he would be unable to ask more questions. he felt utterly sick and faint with it all, and his strength was ebbing. "oh, quick!" he cried, "now tell me more. why did i see this? what must i do?" the wind swept across the field on their right and entered the wood beyond with a great roar, and the air round him seemed filled with voices and the rushing of hurried movement. "to the ends of justice," answered the other, as though speaking out of the centre of the wind and from a distance, "which sometimes is entrusted to the hands of those who suffered and were strong. one wrong cannot be put right by another wrong, but your life has been so worthy that the opportunity is given to--" the voice grew fainter and fainter, already it was far overhead with the rushing wind. "you may punish or--" here jones lost sight of thorpe's figure altogether, for he seemed to have vanished and melted away into the wood behind him. his voice sounded far across the trees, very weak, and ever rising. "or if you can rise to the level of a great forgiveness--" the voice became inaudible.... the wind came crying out of the wood again. * * * * * jones shivered and stared about him. he shook himself violently and rubbed his eyes. the room was dark, the fire was out; he felt cold and stiff. he got up out of his armchair, still trembling, and lit the gas. outside the wind was howling, and when he looked at his watch he saw that it was very late and he must go to bed. he had not even changed his office coat; he must have fallen asleep in the chair as soon as he came in, and he had slept for several hours. certainly he had eaten no dinner, for he felt ravenous. iii next day, and for several weeks thereafter, the business of the office went on as usual, and jones did his work well and behaved outwardly with perfect propriety. no more visions troubled him, and his relations with the manager became, if anything, somewhat smoother and easier. true, the man _looked_ a little different, because the clerk kept seeing him with his inner and outer eye promiscuously, so that one moment he was broad and red-faced, and the next he was tall, thin, and dark, enveloped, as it were, in a sort of black atmosphere tinged with red. while at times a confusion of the two sights took place, and jones saw the two faces mingled in a composite countenance that was very horrible indeed to contemplate. but, beyond this occasional change in the outward appearance of the manager, there was nothing that the secretary noticed as the result of his vision, and business went on more or less as before, and perhaps even with a little less friction. but in the rooms under the roof in bloomsbury it was different, for there it was perfectly clear to jones that thorpe had come to take up his abode with him. he never saw him, but he knew all the time he was there. every night on returning from his work he was greeted by the well-known whisper, "be ready when i give the sign!" and often in the night he woke up suddenly out of deep sleep and was aware that thorpe had that minute moved away from his bed and was standing waiting and watching somewhere in the darkness of the room. often he followed him down the stairs, though the dim gas jet on the landings never revealed his outline; and sometimes he did not come into the room at all, but hovered outside the window, peering through the dirty panes, or sending his whisper into the chamber in the whistling of the wind. for thorpe had come to stay, and jones knew that he would not get rid of him until he had fulfilled the ends of justice and accomplished the purpose for which he was waiting. meanwhile, as the days passed, he went through a tremendous struggle with himself, and came to the perfectly honest decision that the "level of a great forgiveness" was impossible for him, and that he must therefore accept the alternative and use the secret knowledge placed in his hands--and execute justice. and once this decision was arrived at, he noticed that thorpe no longer left him alone during the day as before, but now accompanied him to the office and stayed more or less at his side all through business hours as well. his whisper made itself heard in the streets and in the train, and even in the manager's room where he worked; sometimes warning, sometimes urging, but never for a moment suggesting the abandonment of the main purpose, and more than once so plainly audible that the clerk felt certain others must have heard it as well as himself. the obsession was complete. he felt he was always under thorpe's eye day and night, and he knew he must acquit himself like a man when the moment came, or prove a failure in his own sight as well in the sight of the other. and now that his mind was made up, nothing could prevent the carrying out of the sentence. he bought a pistol, and spent his saturday afternoons practising at a target in lonely places along the essex shore, marking out in the sand the exact measurements of the manager's room. sundays he occupied in like fashion, putting up at an inn overnight for the purpose, spending the money that usually went into the savings bank on travelling expenses and cartridges. everything was done very thoroughly, for there must be no possibility of failure; and at the end of several weeks he had become so expert with his six-shooter that at a distance of feet, which was the greatest length of the manager's room, he could pick the inside out of a halfpenny nine times out of a dozen, and leave a clean, unbroken rim. there was not the slightest desire to delay. he had thought the matter over from every point of view his mind could reach, and his purpose was inflexible. indeed, he felt proud to think that he had been chosen as the instrument of justice in the infliction of so well-deserved and so terrible a punishment. vengeance may have had some part in his decision, but he could not help that, for he still felt at times the hot chains burning his wrists and ankles with fierce agony through to the bone. he remembered the hideous pain of his slowly roasting back, and the point when he thought death _must_ intervene to end his suffering, but instead new powers of endurance had surged up in him, and awful further stretches of pain had opened up, and unconsciousness seemed farther off than ever. then at last the hot irons in his eyes.... it all came back to him, and caused him to break out in icy perspiration at the mere thought of it ... the vile face at the panel ... the expression of the dark face.... his fingers worked. his blood boiled. it was utterly impossible to keep the idea of vengeance altogether out of his mind. several times he was temporarily baulked of his prey. odd things happened to stop him when he was on the point of action. the first day, for instance, the manager fainted from the heat. another time when he had decided to do the deed, the manager did not come down to the office at all. and a third time, when his hand was actually in his hip pocket, he suddenly heard thorpe's horrid whisper telling him to wait, and turning, he saw that the head cashier had entered the room noiselessly without his noticing it. thorpe evidently knew what he was about, and did not intend to let the clerk bungle the matter. he fancied, moreover, that the head cashier was watching him. he was always meeting him in unexpected corners and places, and the cashier never seemed to have an adequate excuse for being there. his movements seemed suddenly of particular interest to others in the office as well, for clerks were always being sent to ask him unnecessary questions, and there was apparently a general design to keep him under a sort of surveillance, so that he was never much alone with the manager in the private room where they worked. and once the cashier had even gone so far as to suggest that he could take his holiday earlier than usual if he liked, as the work had been very arduous of late and the heat exceedingly trying. he noticed, too, that he was sometimes followed by a certain individual in the streets, a careless-looking sort of man, who never came face to face with him, or actually ran into him, but who was always in his train or omnibus, and whose eye he often caught observing him over the top of his newspaper, and who on one occasion was even waiting at the door of his lodgings when he came out to dine. there were other indications too, of various sorts, that led him to think something was at work to defeat his purpose, and that he must act at once before these hostile forces could prevent. and so the end came very swiftly, and was thoroughly approved by thorpe. it was towards the close of july, and one of the hottest days london had ever known, for the city was like an oven, and the particles of dust seemed to burn the throats of the unfortunate toilers in street and office. the portly manager, who suffered cruelly owing to his size, came down perspiring and gasping with the heat. he carried a light-coloured umbrella to protect his head. "he'll want something more than that, though!" jones laughed quietly to himself when he saw him enter. the pistol was safely in his hip pocket, every one of its six chambers loaded. the manager saw the smile on his face, and gave him a long steady look as he sat down to his desk in the corner. a few minutes later he touched the bell for the head cashier--a single ring--and then asked jones to fetch some papers from another safe in the room upstairs. a deep inner trembling seized the secretary as he noticed these precautions, for he saw that the hostile forces were at work against him, and yet he felt he could delay no longer and must act that very morning, interference or no interference. however, he went obediently up in the lift to the next floor, and while fumbling with the combination of the safe, known only to himself, the cashier, and the manager, he again heard thorpe's horrid whisper just behind him: "you must do it to-day! you must do it to-day!" he came down again with the papers, and found the manager alone. the room was like a furnace, and a wave of dead heated air met him in the face as he went in. the moment he passed the doorway he realised that he had been the subject of conversation between the head cashier and his enemy. they had been discussing him. perhaps an inkling of his secret had somehow got into their minds. they had been watching him for days past. they had become suspicious. clearly, he must act now, or let the opportunity slip by perhaps for ever. he heard thorpe's voice in his ear, but this time it was no mere whisper, but a plain human voice, speaking out loud. "now!" it said. "do it now!" the room was empty. only the manager and himself were in it. jones turned from his desk where he had been standing, and locked the door leading into the main office. he saw the army of clerks scribbling in their shirt-sleeves, for the upper half of the door was of glass. he had perfect control of himself, and his heart was beating steadily. the manager, hearing the key turn in the lock, looked up sharply. "what's that you're doing?" he asked quickly. "only locking the door, sir," replied the secretary in a quite even voice. "why? who told you to--?" "the voice of justice, sir," replied jones, looking steadily into the hated face. the manager looked black for a moment, and stared angrily across the room at him. then suddenly his expression changed as he stared, and he tried to smile. it was meant to be a kind smile evidently, but it only succeeded in being frightened. "that _is_ a good idea in this weather," he said lightly, "but it would be much better to lock it on the _outside_, wouldn't it, mr. jones?" "i think not, sir. you might escape me then. now you can't." jones took his pistol out and pointed it at the other's face. down the barrel he saw the features of the tall dark man, evil and sinister. then the outline trembled a little and the face of the manager slipped back into its place. it was white as death, and shining with perspiration. "you tortured me to death four hundred years ago," said the clerk in the same steady voice, "and now the dispensers of justice have chosen me to punish you." the manager's face turned to flame, and then back to chalk again. he made a quick movement towards the telephone bell, stretching out a hand to reach it, but at the same moment jones pulled the trigger and the wrist was shattered, splashing the wall behind with blood. "that's _one_ place where the chains burnt," he said quietly to himself. his hand was absolutely steady, and he felt that he was a hero. the manager was on his feet, with a scream of pain, supporting himself with his right hand on the desk in front of him, but jones pressed the trigger again, and a bullet flew into the other wrist, so that the big man, deprived of support, fell forward with a crash on to the desk. "you damned madman!" shrieked the manager. "drop that pistol!" "that's _another_ place," was all jones said, still taking careful aim for another shot. the big man, screaming and blundering, scrambled beneath the desk, making frantic efforts to hide, but the secretary took a step forward and fired two shots in quick succession into his projecting legs, hitting first one ankle and then the other, and smashing them horribly. "two more places where the chains burnt," he said, going a little nearer. the manager, still shrieking, tried desperately to squeeze his bulk behind the shelter of the opening beneath the desk, but he was far too large, and his bald head protruded through on the other side. jones caught him by the scruff of his great neck and dragged him yelping out on to the carpet. he was covered with blood, and flopped helplessly upon his broken wrists. "be quick now!" cried the voice of thorpe. there was a tremendous commotion and banging at the door, and jones gripped his pistol tightly. something seemed to crash through his brain, clearing it for a second, so that he thought he saw beside him a great veiled figure, with drawn sword and flaming eyes, and sternly approving attitude. "remember the eyes! remember the eyes!" hissed thorpe in the air above him. jones felt like a god, with a god's power. vengeance disappeared from his mind. he was acting impersonally as an instrument in the hands of the invisibles who dispense justice and balance accounts. he bent down and put the barrel close into the other's face, smiling a little as he saw the childish efforts of the arms to cover his head. then he pulled the trigger, and a bullet went straight into the right eye, blackening the skin. moving the pistol two inches the other way, he sent another bullet crashing into the left eye. then he stood upright over his victim with a deep sigh of satisfaction. the manager wriggled convulsively for the space of a single second, and then lay still in death. there was not a moment to lose, for the door was already broken in and violent hands were at his neck. jones put the pistol to his temple and once more pressed the trigger with his finger. but this time there was no report. only a little dead click answered the pressure, for the secretary had forgotten that the pistol had only six chambers, and that he had used them all. he threw the useless weapon on to the floor, laughing a little out loud, and turned, without a struggle, to give himself up. "i _had_ to do it," he said quietly, while they tied him. "it was simply my duty! and now i am ready to face the consequences, and thorpe will be proud of me. for justice has been done and the gods are satisfied." he made not the slightest resistance, and when the two policemen marched him off through the crowd of shuddering little clerks in the office, he again saw the veiled figure moving majestically in front of him, making slow sweeping circles with the flaming sword, to keep back the host of faces that were thronging in upon him from the other region. * * * * * _the man who found out_ (a nightmare) professor mark ebor, the scientist, led a double life, and the only persons who knew it were his assistant, dr. laidlaw, and his publishers. but a double life need not always be a bad one, and, as dr. laidlaw and the gratified publishers well knew, the parallel lives of this particular man were equally good, and indefinitely produced would certainly have ended in a heaven somewhere that can suitably contain such strangely opposite characteristics as his remarkable personality combined. for mark ebor, f.r.s., etc., etc., was that unique combination hardly ever met with in actual life, a man of science and a mystic. as the first, his name stood in the gallery of the great, and as the second--but there came the mystery! for under the pseudonym of "pilgrim" (the author of that brilliant series of books that appealed to so many), his identity was as well concealed as that of the anonymous writer of the weather reports in a daily newspaper. thousands read the sanguine, optimistic, stimulating little books that issued annually from the pen of "pilgrim," and thousands bore their daily burdens better for having read; while the press generally agreed that the author, besides being an incorrigible enthusiast and optimist, was also--a woman; but no one ever succeeded in penetrating the veil of anonymity and discovering that "pilgrim" and the biologist were one and the same person. mark ebor, as dr. laidlaw knew him in his laboratory, was one man; but mark ebor, as he sometimes saw him after work was over, with rapt eyes and ecstatic face, discussing the possibilities of "union with god" and the future of the human race, was quite another. "i have always held, as you know," he was saying one evening as he sat in the little study beyond the laboratory with his assistant and intimate, "that vision should play a large part in the life of the awakened man--not to be regarded as infallible, of course, but to be observed and made use of as a guide-post to possibilities--" "i am aware of your peculiar views, sir," the young doctor put in deferentially, yet with a certain impatience. "for visions come from a region of the consciousness where observation and experiment are out of the question," pursued the other with enthusiasm, not noticing the interruption, "and, while they should be checked by reason afterwards, they should not be laughed at or ignored. all inspiration, i hold, is of the nature of interior vision, and all our best knowledge has come--such is my confirmed belief--as a sudden revelation to the brain prepared to receive it--" "prepared by hard work first, by concentration, by the closest possible study of ordinary phenomena," dr. laidlaw allowed himself to observe. "perhaps," sighed the other; "but by a process, none the less, of spiritual illumination. the best match in the world will not light a candle unless the wick be first suitably prepared." it was laidlaw's turn to sigh. he knew so well the impossibility of arguing with his chief when he was in the regions of the mystic, but at the same time the respect he felt for his tremendous attainments was so sincere that he always listened with attention and deference, wondering how far the great man would go and to what end this curious combination of logic and "illumination" would eventually lead him. "only last night," continued the elder man, a sort of light coming into his rugged features, "the vision came to me again--the one that has haunted me at intervals ever since my youth, and that will not be denied." dr. laidlaw fidgeted in his chair. "about the tablets of the gods, you mean--and that they lie somewhere hidden in the sands," he said patiently. a sudden gleam of interest came into his face as he turned to catch the professor's reply. "and that i am to be the one to find them, to decipher them, and to give the great knowledge to the world--" "who will not believe," laughed laidlaw shortly, yet interested in spite of his thinly-veiled contempt. "because even the keenest minds, in the right sense of the word, are hopelessly--unscientific," replied the other gently, his face positively aglow with the memory of his vision. "yet what is more likely," he continued after a moment's pause, peering into space with rapt eyes that saw things too wonderful for exact language to describe, "than that there should have been given to man in the first ages of the world some record of the purpose and problem that had been set him to solve? in a word," he cried, fixing his shining eyes upon the face of his perplexed assistant, "that god's messengers in the far-off ages should have given to his creatures some full statement of the secret of the world, of the secret of the soul, of the meaning of life and death--the explanation of our being here, and to what great end we are destined in the ultimate fullness of things?" dr. laidlaw sat speechless. these outbursts of mystical enthusiasm he had witnessed before. with any other man he would not have listened to a single sentence, but to professor ebor, man of knowledge and profound investigator, he listened with respect, because he regarded this condition as temporary and pathological, and in some sense a reaction from the intense strain of the prolonged mental concentration of many days. he smiled, with something between sympathy and resignation as he met the other's rapt gaze. "but you have said, sir, at other times, that you consider the ultimate secrets to be screened from all possible--" "the _ultimate_ secrets, yes," came the unperturbed reply; "but that there lies buried somewhere an indestructible record of the secret meaning of life, originally known to men in the days of their pristine innocence, i am convinced. and, by this strange vision so often vouchsafed to me, i am equally sure that one day it shall be given to me to announce to a weary world this glorious and terrific message." and he continued at great length and in glowing language to describe the species of vivid dream that had come to him at intervals since earliest childhood, showing in detail how he discovered these very tablets of the gods, and proclaimed their splendid contents--whose precise nature was always, however, withheld from him in the vision--to a patient and suffering humanity. "the _scrutator_, sir, well described 'pilgrim' as the apostle of hope," said the young doctor gently, when he had finished; "and now, if that reviewer could hear you speak and realize from what strange depths comes your simple faith--" the professor held up his hand, and the smile of a little child broke over his face like sunshine in the morning. "half the good my books do would be instantly destroyed," he said sadly; "they would say that i wrote with my tongue in my cheek. but wait," he added significantly; "wait till i find these tablets of the gods! wait till i hold the solutions of the old world-problems in my hands! wait till the light of this new revelation breaks upon confused humanity, and it wakes to find its bravest hopes justified! ah, then, my dear laidlaw--" he broke off suddenly; but the doctor, cleverly guessing the thought in his mind, caught him up immediately. "perhaps this very summer," he said, trying hard to make the suggestion keep pace with honesty; "in your explorations in assyria--your digging in the remote civilization of what was once chaldea, you may find--what you dream of--" the professor held up his hand, and the smile of a fine old face. "perhaps," he murmured softly, "perhaps!" and the young doctor, thanking the gods of science that his leader's aberrations were of so harmless a character, went home strong in the certitude of his knowledge of externals, proud that he was able to refer his visions to self-suggestion, and wondering complaisantly whether in his old age he might not after all suffer himself from visitations of the very kind that afflicted his respected chief. and as he got into bed and thought again of his master's rugged face, and finely shaped head, and the deep lines traced by years of work and self-discipline, he turned over on his pillow and fell asleep with a sigh that was half of wonder, half of regret. it was in february, nine months later, when dr. laidlaw made his way to charing cross to meet his chief after his long absence of travel and exploration. the vision about the so-called tablets of the gods had meanwhile passed almost entirely from his memory. there were few people in the train, for the stream of traffic was now running the other way, and he had no difficulty in finding the man he had come to meet. the shock of white hair beneath the low-crowned felt hat was alone enough to distinguish him by easily. "here i am at last!" exclaimed the professor, somewhat wearily, clasping his friend's hand as he listened to the young doctor's warm greetings and questions. "here i am--a little older, and _much_ dirtier than when you last saw me!" he glanced down laughingly at his travel-stained garments. "and _much_ wiser," said laidlaw, with a smile, as he bustled about the platform for porters and gave his chief the latest scientific news. at last they came down to practical considerations. "and your luggage--where is that? you must have tons of it, i suppose?" said laidlaw. "hardly anything," professor ebor answered. "nothing, in fact, but what you see." "nothing but this hand-bag?" laughed the other, thinking he was joking. "and a small portmanteau in the van," was the quiet reply. "i have no other luggage." "you have no other luggage?" repeated laidlaw, turning sharply to see if he were in earnest. "why should i need more?" the professor added simply. something in the man's face, or voice, or manner--the doctor hardly knew which--suddenly struck him as strange. there was a change in him, a change so profound--so little on the surface, that is--that at first he had not become aware of it. for a moment it was as though an utterly alien personality stood before him in that noisy, bustling throng. here, in all the homely, friendly turmoil of a charing cross crowd, a curious feeling of cold passed over his heart, touching his life with icy finger, so that he actually trembled and felt afraid. he looked up quickly at his friend, his mind working with startled and unwelcome thoughts. "only this?" he repeated, indicating the bag. "but where's all the stuff you went away with? and--have you brought nothing home--no treasures?" "this is all i have," the other said briefly. the pale smile that went with the words caused the doctor a second indescribable sensation of uneasiness. something was very wrong, something was very queer; he wondered now that he had not noticed it sooner. "the rest follows, of course, by slow freight," he added tactfully, and as naturally as possible. "but come, sir, you must be tired and in want of food after your long journey. i'll get a taxi at once, and we can see about the other luggage afterwards." it seemed to him he hardly knew quite what he was saying; the change in his friend had come upon him so suddenly and now grew upon him more and more distressingly. yet he could not make out exactly in what it consisted. a terrible suspicion began to take shape in his mind, troubling him dreadfully. "i am neither very tired, nor in need of food, thank you," the professor said quietly. "and this is all i have. there is no luggage to follow. i have brought home nothing--nothing but what you see." his words conveyed finality. they got into a taxi, tipped the porter, who had been staring in amazement at the venerable figure of the scientist, and were conveyed slowly and noisily to the house in the north of london where the laboratory was, the scene of their labours of years. and the whole way professor ebor uttered no word, nor did dr. laidlaw find the courage to ask a single question. it was only late that night, before he took his departure, as the two men were standing before the fire in the study--that study where they had discussed so many problems of vital and absorbing interest--that dr. laidlaw at last found strength to come to the point with direct questions. the professor had been giving him a superficial and desultory account of his travels, of his journeys by camel, of his encampments among the mountains and in the desert, and of his explorations among the buried temples, and, deeper, into the waste of the pre-historic sands, when suddenly the doctor came to the desired point with a kind of nervous rush, almost like a frightened boy. "and you found--" he began stammering, looking hard at the other's dreadfully altered face, from which every line of hope and cheerfulness seemed to have been obliterated as a sponge wipes markings from a slate--"you found--" "i found," replied the other, in a solemn voice, and it was the voice of the mystic rather than the man of science--"i found what i went to seek. the vision never once failed me. it led me straight to the place like a star in the heavens. i found--the tablets of the gods." dr. laidlaw caught his breath, and steadied himself on the back of a chair. the words fell like particles of ice upon his heart. for the first time the professor had uttered the well-known phrase without the glow of light and wonder in his face that always accompanied it. "you have--brought them?" he faltered. "i have brought them home," said the other, in a voice with a ring like iron; "and i have--deciphered them." profound despair, the bloom of outer darkness, the dead sound of a hopeless soul freezing in the utter cold of space seemed to fill in the pauses between the brief sentences. a silence followed, during which dr. laidlaw saw nothing but the white face before him alternately fade and return. and it was like the face of a dead man. "they are, alas, indestructible," he heard the voice continue, with its even, metallic ring. "indestructible," laidlaw repeated mechanically, hardly knowing what he was saying. again a silence of several minutes passed, during which, with a creeping cold about his heart, he stood and stared into the eyes of the man he had known and loved so long--aye, and worshipped, too; the man who had first opened his own eyes when they were blind, and had led him to the gates of knowledge, and no little distance along the difficult path beyond; the man who, in another direction, had passed on the strength of his faith into the hearts of thousands by his books. "i may see them?" he asked at last, in a low voice he hardly recognized as his own. "you will let me know--their message?" professor ebor kept his eyes fixedly upon his assistant's face as he answered, with a smile that was more like the grin of death than a living human smile. "when i am gone," he whispered; "when i have passed away. then you shall find them and read the translation i have made. and then, too, in your turn, you must try, with the latest resources of science at your disposal to aid you, to compass their utter destruction." he paused a moment, and his face grew pale as the face of a corpse. "until that time," he added presently, without looking up, "i must ask you not to refer to the subject again--and to keep my confidence meanwhile--_ab--so--lute--ly_." a year passed slowly by, and at the end of it dr. laidlaw had found it necessary to sever his working connexion with his friend and one-time leader. professor ebor was no longer the same man. the light had gone out of his life; the laboratory was closed; he no longer put pen to paper or applied his mind to a single problem. in the short space of a few months he had passed from a hale and hearty man of late middle life to the condition of old age--a man collapsed and on the edge of dissolution. death, it was plain, lay waiting for him in the shadows of any day--and he knew it. to describe faithfully the nature of this profound alteration in his character and temperament is not easy, but dr. laidlaw summed it up to himself in three words: _loss of hope_. the splendid mental powers remained indeed undimmed, but the incentive to use them--to use them for the help of others--had gone. the character still held to its fine and unselfish habits of years, but the far goal to which they had been the leading strings had faded away. the desire for knowledge--knowledge for its own sake--had died, and the passionate hope which hitherto had animated with tireless energy the heart and brain of this splendidly equipped intellect had suffered total eclipse. the central fires had gone out. nothing was worth doing, thinking, working for. there _was_ nothing to work for any longer! the professor's first step was to recall as many of his books as possible; his second to close his laboratory and stop all research. he gave no explanation, he invited no questions. his whole personality crumbled away, so to speak, till his daily life became a mere mechanical process of clothing the body, feeding the body, keeping it in good health so as to avoid physical discomfort, and, above all, doing nothing that could interfere with sleep. the professor did everything he could to lengthen the hours of sleep, and therefore of forgetfulness. it was all clear enough to dr. laidlaw. a weaker man, he knew, would have sought to lose himself in one form or another of sensual indulgence--sleeping-draughts, drink, the first pleasures that came to hand. self-destruction would have been the method of a little bolder type; and deliberate evil-doing, poisoning with his awful knowledge all he could, the means of still another kind of man. mark ebor was none of these. he held himself under fine control, facing silently and without complaint the terrible facts he honestly believed himself to have been unfortunate enough to discover. even to his intimate friend and assistant, dr. laidlaw, he vouchsafed no word of true explanation or lament. he went straight forward to the end, knowing well that the end was not very far away. and death came very quietly one day to him, as he was sitting in the arm-chair of the study, directly facing the doors of the laboratory--the doors that no longer opened. dr. laidlaw, by happy chance, was with him at the time, and just able to reach his side in response to the sudden painful efforts for breath; just in time, too, to catch the murmured words that fell from the pallid lips like a message from the other side of the grave. "read them, if you must; and, if you can--destroy. but"--his voice sank so low that dr. laidlaw only just caught the dying syllables--"but--never, never--give them to the world." and like a grey bundle of dust loosely gathered up in an old garment the professor sank back into his chair and expired. but this was only the death of the body. his spirit had died two years before. the estate of the dead man was small and uncomplicated, and dr. laidlaw, as sole executor and residuary legatee, had no difficulty in settling it up. a month after the funeral he was sitting alone in his upstairs library, the last sad duties completed, and his mind full of poignant memories and regrets for the loss of a friend he had revered and loved, and to whom his debt was so incalculably great. the last two years, indeed, had been for him terrible. to watch the swift decay of the greatest combination of heart and brain he had ever known, and to realize he was powerless to help, was a source of profound grief to him that would remain to the end of his days. at the same time an insatiable curiosity possessed him. the study of dementia was, of course, outside his special province as a specialist, but he knew enough of it to understand how small a matter might be the actual cause of how great an illusion, and he had been devoured from the very beginning by a ceaseless and increasing anxiety to know what the professor had found in the sands of "chaldea," what these precious tablets of the gods might be, and particularly--for this was the real cause that had sapped the man's sanity and hope--what the inscription was that he had believed to have deciphered thereon. the curious feature of it all to his own mind was, that whereas his friend had dreamed of finding a message of glorious hope and comfort, he had apparently found (so far as he had found anything intelligible at all, and not invented the whole thing in his dementia) that the secret of the world, and the meaning of life and death, was of so terrible a nature that it robbed the heart of courage and the soul of hope. what, then, could be the contents of the little brown parcel the professor had bequeathed to him with his pregnant dying sentences? actually his hand was trembling as he turned to the writing-table and began slowly to unfasten a small old-fashioned desk on which the small gilt initials "m.e." stood forth as a melancholy memento. he put the key into the lock and half turned it. then, suddenly, he stopped and looked about him. was that a sound at the back of the room? it was just as though someone had laughed and then tried to smother the laugh with a cough. a slight shiver ran over him as he stood listening. "this is absurd," he said aloud; "too absurd for belief--that i should be so nervous! it's the effect of curiosity unduly prolonged." he smiled a little sadly and his eyes wandered to the blue summer sky and the plane trees swaying in the wind below his window. "it's the reaction," he continued. "the curiosity of two years to be quenched in a single moment! the nervous tension, of course, must be considerable." he turned back to the brown desk and opened it without further delay. his hand was firm now, and he took out the paper parcel that lay inside without a tremor. it was heavy. a moment later there lay on the table before him a couple of weather-worn plaques of grey stone--they looked like stone, although they felt like metal--on which he saw markings of a curious character that might have been the mere tracings of natural forces through the ages, or, equally well, the half-obliterated hieroglyphics cut upon their surface in past centuries by the more or less untutored hand of a common scribe. he lifted each stone in turn and examined it carefully. it seemed to him that a faint glow of heat passed from the substance into his skin, and he put them down again suddenly, as with a gesture of uneasiness. "a very clever, or a very imaginative man," he said to himself, "who could squeeze the secrets of life and death from such broken lines as those!" then he turned to a yellow envelope lying beside them in the desk, with the single word on the outside in the writing of the professor--the word _translation_. "now," he thought, taking it up with a sudden violence to conceal his nervousness, "now for the great solution. now to learn the meaning of the worlds, and why mankind was made, and why discipline is worth while, and sacrifice and pain the true law of advancement." there was the shadow of a sneer in his voice, and yet something in him shivered at the same time. he held the envelope as though weighing it in his hand, his mind pondering many things. then curiosity won the day, and he suddenly tore it open with the gesture of an actor who tears open a letter on the stage, knowing there is no real writing inside at all. a page of finely written script in the late scientist's handwriting lay before him. he read it through from beginning to end, missing no word, uttering each syllable distinctly under his breath as he read. the pallor of his face grew ghastly as he neared the end. he began to shake all over as with ague. his breath came heavily in gasps. he still gripped the sheet of paper, however, and deliberately, as by an intense effort of will, read it through a second time from beginning to end. and this time, as the last syllable dropped from his lips, the whole face of the man flamed with a sudden and terrible anger. his skin became deep, deep red, and he clenched his teeth. with all the strength of his vigorous soul he was struggling to keep control of himself. for perhaps five minutes he stood there beside the table without stirring a muscle. he might have been carved out of stone. his eyes were shut, and only the heaving of the chest betrayed the fact that he was a living being. then, with a strange quietness, he lit a match and applied it to the sheet of paper he held in his hand. the ashes fell slowly about him, piece by piece, and he blew them from the window-sill into the air, his eyes following them as they floated away on the summer wind that breathed so warmly over the world. he turned back slowly into the room. although his actions and movements were absolutely steady and controlled, it was clear that he was on the edge of violent action. a hurricane might burst upon the still room any moment. his muscles were tense and rigid. then, suddenly, he whitened, collapsed, and sank backwards into a chair, like a tumbled bundle of inert matter. he had fainted. in less than half an hour he recovered consciousness and sat up. as before, he made no sound. not a syllable passed his lips. he rose quietly and looked about the room. then he did a curious thing. taking a heavy stick from the rack in the corner he approached the mantlepiece, and with a heavy shattering blow he smashed the clock to pieces. the glass fell in shivering atoms. "cease your lying voice for ever," he said, in a curiously still, even tone. "there is no such thing as _time_!" he took the watch from his pocket, swung it round several times by the long gold chain, smashed it into smithereens against the wall with a single blow, and then walked into his laboratory next door, and hung its broken body on the bones of the skeleton in the corner of the room. "let one damned mockery hang upon another," he said smiling oddly. "delusions, both of you, and cruel as false!" he slowly moved back to the front room. he stopped opposite the bookcase where stood in a row the "scriptures of the world," choicely bound and exquisitely printed, the late professor's most treasured possession, and next to them several books signed "pilgrim." one by one he took them from the shelf and hurled them through the open window. "a devil's dreams! a devil's foolish dreams!" he cried, with a vicious laugh. presently he stopped from sheer exhaustion. he turned his eyes slowly to the wall opposite, where hung a weird array of eastern swords and daggers, scimitars and spears, the collections of many journeys. he crossed the room and ran his finger along the edge. his mind seemed to waver. "no," he muttered presently; "not that way. there are easier and better ways than that." he took his hat and passed downstairs into the street. it was five o'clock, and the june sun lay hot upon the pavement. he felt the metal door-knob burn the palm of his hand. "ah, laidlaw, this is well met," cried a voice at his elbow; "i was in the act of coming to see you. i've a case that will interest you, and besides, i remembered that you flavoured your tea with orange leaves!--and i admit--" it was alexis stephen, the great hypnotic doctor. "i've had no tea to-day," laidlaw said, in a dazed manner, after staring for a moment as though the other had struck him in the face. a new idea had entered his mind. "what's the matter?" asked dr. stephen quickly. "something's wrong with you. it's this sudden heat, or overwork. come, man, let's go inside." a sudden light broke upon the face of the younger man, the light of a heaven-sent inspiration. he looked into his friend's face, and told a direct lie. "odd," he said, "i myself was just coming to see you. i have something of great importance to test your confidence with. but in _your_ house, please," as stephen urged him towards his own door--"in your house. it's only round the corner, and i--i cannot go back there--to my rooms--till i have told you. "i'm your patient--for the moment," he added stammeringly as soon as they were seated in the privacy of the hypnotist's sanctum, "and i want--er--" "my dear laidlaw," interrupted the other, in that soothing voice of command which had suggested to many a suffering soul that the cure for its pain lay in the powers of its own reawakened will, "i am always at your service, as you know. you have only to tell me what i can do for you, and i will do it." he showed every desire to help him out. his manner was indescribably tactful and direct. dr. laidlaw looked up into his face. "i surrender my will to you," he said, already calmed by the other's healing presence, "and i want you to treat me hypnotically--and at once. i want you to suggest to me"--his voice became very tense--"that i shall forget--forget till i die--everything that has occurred to me during the last two hours; till i die, mind," he added, with solemn emphasis, "till i die." he floundered and stammered like a frightened boy. alexis stephen looked at him fixedly without speaking. "and further," laidlaw continued, "i want you to ask me no questions. i wish to forget for ever something i have recently discovered--something so terrible and yet so obvious that i can hardly understand why it is not patent to every mind in the world--for i have had a moment of absolute _clear vision_--of merciless clairvoyance. but i want no one else in the whole world to know what it is--least of all, old friend, yourself." he talked in utter confusion, and hardly knew what he was saying. but the pain on his face and the anguish in his voice were an instant passport to the other's heart. "nothing is easier," replied dr. stephen, after a hesitation so slight that the other probably did not even notice it. "come into my other room where we shall not be disturbed. i can heal you. your memory of the last two hours shall be wiped out as though it had never been. you can trust me absolutely." "i know i can," laidlaw said simply, as he followed him in. an hour later they passed back into the front room again. the sun was already behind the houses opposite, and the shadows began to gather. "i went off easily?" laidlaw asked. "you were a little obstinate at first. but though you came in like a lion, you went out like a lamb. i let you sleep a bit afterwards." dr. stephen kept his eyes rather steadily upon his friend's face. "what were you doing by the fire before you came here?" he asked, pausing, in a casual tone, as he lit a cigarette and handed the case to his patient. "i? let me see. oh, i know; i was worrying my way through poor old ebor's papers and things. i'm his executor, you know. then i got weary and came out for a whiff of air." he spoke lightly and with perfect naturalness. obviously he was telling the truth. "i prefer specimens to papers," he laughed cheerily. "i know, i know," said dr. stephen, holding a lighted match for the cigarette. his face wore an expression of content. the experiment had been a complete success. the memory of the last two hours was wiped out utterly. laidlaw was already chatting gaily and easily about a dozen other things that interested him. together they went out into the street, and at his door dr. stephen left him with a joke and a wry face that made his friend laugh heartily. "don't dine on the professor's old papers by mistake," he cried, as he vanished down the street. dr. laidlaw went up to his study at the top of the house. half way down he met his housekeeper, mrs. fewings. she was flustered and excited, and her face was very red and perspiring. "there've been burglars here," she cried excitedly, "or something funny! all your things is just any'ow, sir. i found everything all about everywhere!" she was very confused. in this orderly and very precise establishment it was unusual to find a thing out of place. "oh, my specimens!" cried the doctor, dashing up the rest of the stairs at top speed. "have they been touched or--" he flew to the door of the laboratory. mrs. fewings panted up heavily behind him. "the labatry ain't been touched," she explained, breathlessly, "but they smashed the libry clock and they've 'ung your gold watch, sir, on the skelinton's hands. and the books that weren't no value they flung out er the window just like so much rubbish. they must have been wild drunk, dr. laidlaw, sir!" the young scientist made a hurried examination of the rooms. nothing of value was missing. he began to wonder what kind of burglars they were. he looked up sharply at mrs. fewings standing in the doorway. for a moment he seemed to cast about in his mind for something. "odd," he said at length. "i only left here an hour ago and everything was all right then." "was it, sir? yes, sir." she glanced sharply at him. her room looked out upon the courtyard, and she must have seen the books come crashing down, and also have heard her master leave the house a few minutes later. "and what's this rubbish the brutes have left?" he cried, taking up two slabs of worn gray stone, on the writing-table. "bath brick, or something, i do declare." he looked very sharply again at the confused and troubled housekeeper. "throw them on the dust heap, mrs. fewings, and--and let me know if anything is missing in the house, and i will notify the police this evening." when she left the room he went into the laboratory and took his watch off the skeleton's fingers. his face wore a troubled expression, but after a moment's thought it cleared again. his memory was a complete blank. "i suppose i left it on the writing-table when i went out to take the air," he said. and there was no one present to contradict him. he crossed to the window and blew carelessly some ashes of burned paper from the sill, and stood watching them as they floated away lazily over the tops of the trees. * * * * * _the glamour of the snow_ i hibbert, always conscious of two worlds, was in this mountain village conscious of three. it lay on the slopes of the valais alps, and he had taken a room in the little post office, where he could be at peace to write his book, yet at the same time enjoy the winter sports and find companionship in the hotels when he wanted it. the three worlds that met and mingled here seemed to his imaginative temperament very obvious, though it is doubtful if another mind less intuitively equipped would have seen them so well-defined. there was the world of tourist english, civilised, quasi-educated, to which he belonged by birth, at any rate; there was the world of peasants to which he felt himself drawn by sympathy--for he loved and admired their toiling, simple life; and there was this other--which he could only call the world of nature. to this last, however, in virtue of a vehement poetic imagination, and a tumultuous pagan instinct fed by his very blood, he felt that most of him belonged. the others borrowed from it, as it were, for visits. here, with the soul of nature, hid his central life. between all three was conflict--potential conflict. on the skating-rink each sunday the tourists regarded the natives as intruders; in the church the peasants plainly questioned: "why do you come? we are here to worship; you to stare and whisper!" for neither of these two worlds accepted the other. and neither did nature accept the tourists, for it took advantage of their least mistakes, and indeed, even of the peasant-world "accepted" only those who were strong and bold enough to invade her savage domain with sufficient skill to protect themselves from several forms of--death. now hibbert was keenly aware of this potential conflict and want of harmony; he felt outside, yet caught by it--torn in the three directions because he was partly of each world, but wholly in only one. there grew in him a constant, subtle effort--or, at least, desire--to unify them and decide positively to which he should belong and live in. the attempt, of course, was largely subconscious. it was the natural instinct of a richly imaginative nature seeking the point of equilibrium, so that the mind could feel at peace and his brain be free to do good work. among the guests no one especially claimed his interest. the men were nice but undistinguished--athletic schoolmasters, doctors snatching a holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various--the clever, the would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women "who understood," and the usual pack of jolly dancing girls and "flappers." and hibbert, with his forty odd years of thick experience behind him, got on well with the lot; he understood them all; they belonged to definite, predigested types that are the same the world over, and that he had met the world over long ago. but to none of them did he belong. his nature was too "multiple" to subscribe to the set of shibboleths of any one class. and, since all liked him, and felt that somehow he seemed outside of them--spectator, looker-on--all sought to claim him. in a sense, therefore, the three worlds fought for him: natives, tourists, nature.... it was thus began the singular conflict for the soul of hibbert. _in_ his own soul, however, it took place. neither the peasants nor the tourists were conscious that they fought for anything. and nature, they say, is merely blind and automatic. the assault upon him of the peasants may be left out of account, for it is obvious that they stood no chance of success. the tourist world, however, made a gallant effort to subdue him to themselves. but the evenings in the hotel, when dancing was not in order, were--english. the provincial imagination was set upon a throne and worshipped heavily through incense of the stupidest conventions possible. hibbert used to go back early to his room in the post office to work. "it is a mistake on my part to have _realised_ that there is any conflict at all," he thought, as he crunched home over the snow at midnight after one of the dances. "it would have been better to have kept outside it all and done my work. better," he added, looking back down the silent village street to the church tower, "and--safer." the adjective slipped from his mind before he was aware of it. he turned with an involuntary start and looked about him. he knew perfectly well what it meant--this thought that had thrust its head up from the instinctive region. he understood, without being able to express it fully, the meaning that betrayed itself in the choice of the adjective. for if he had ignored the existence of this conflict he would at the same time, have remained outside the arena. whereas now he had entered the lists. now this battle for his soul must have issue. and he knew that the spell of nature was greater for him than all other spells in the world combined--greater than love, revelry, pleasure, greater even than study. he had always been afraid to let himself go. his pagan soul dreaded her terrific powers of witchery even while he worshipped. the little village already slept. the world lay smothered in snow. the chalet roofs shone white beneath the moon, and pitch-black shadows gathered against the walls of the church. his eye rested a moment on the square stone tower with its frosted cross that pointed to the sky: then travelled with a leap of many thousand feet to the enormous mountains that brushed the brilliant stars. like a forest rose the huge peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens. they beckoned him. and something born of the snowy desolation, born of the midnight and the silent grandeur, born of the great listening hollows of the night, something that lay 'twixt terror and wonder, dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart--and called him. very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could compass, it laid its spell upon him. fingers of snow brushed the surface of his heart. the power and quiet majesty of the winter's night appalled him.... fumbling a moment with the big unwieldy key, he let himself in and went upstairs to bed. two thoughts went with him--apparently quite ordinary and sensible ones: "what fools these peasants are to sleep through such a night!" and the other: "those dances tire me. i'll never go again. my work only suffers in the morning." the claims of peasants and tourists upon him seemed thus in a single instant weakened. the clash of battle troubled half his dreams. nature had sent her beauty of the night and won the first assault. the others, routed and dismayed, fled far away. ii "don't go back to your dreary old post office. we're going to have supper in my room--something hot. come and join us. hurry up!" there had been an ice carnival, and the last party, tailing up the snow-slope to the hotel, called him. the chinese lanterns smoked and sputtered on the wires; the band had long since gone. the cold was bitter and the moon came only momentarily between high, driving clouds. from the shed where the people changed from skates to snow-boots he shouted something to the effect that he was "following"; but no answer came; the moving shadows of those who had called were already merged high up against the village darkness. the voices died away. doors slammed. hibbert found himself alone on the deserted rink. and it was then, quite suddenly, the impulse came to--stay and skate alone. the thought of the stuffy hotel room, and of those noisy people with their obvious jokes and laughter, oppressed him. he felt a longing to be alone with the night; to taste her wonder all by himself there beneath the stars, gliding over the ice. it was not yet midnight, and he could skate for half an hour. that supper party, if they noticed his absence at all, would merely think he had changed his mind and gone to bed. it was an impulse, yes, and not an unnatural one; yet even at the time it struck him that something more than impulse lay concealed behind it. more than invitation, yet certainly less than command, there was a vague queer feeling that he stayed because he had to, almost as though there was something he had forgotten, overlooked, left undone. imaginative temperaments are often thus; and impulse is ever weakness. for with such ill-considered opening of the doors to hasty action may come an invasion of other forces at the same time--forces merely waiting their opportunity perhaps! he caught the fugitive warning even while he dismissed it as absurd, and the next minute he was whirling over the smooth ice in delightful curves and loops beneath the moon. there was no fear of collision. he could take his own speed and space as he willed. the shadows of the towering mountains fell across the rink, and a wind of ice came from the forests, where the snow lay ten feet deep. the hotel lights winked and went out. the village slept. the high wire netting could not keep out the wonder of the winter night that grew about him like a presence. he skated on and on, keen exhilarating pleasure in his tingling blood, and weariness all forgotten. and then, midway in the delight of rushing movement, he saw a figure gliding behind the wire netting, watching him. with a start that almost made him lose his balance--for the abruptness of the new arrival was so unlooked for--he paused and stared. although the light was dim he made out that it was the figure of a woman and that she was feeling her way along the netting, trying to get in. against the white background of the snow-field he watched her rather stealthy efforts as she passed with a silent step over the banked-up snow. she was tall and slim and graceful; he could see that even in the dark. and then, of course, he understood. it was another adventurous skater like himself, stolen down unawares from hotel or chalet, and searching for the opening. at once, making a sign and pointing with one hand, he turned swiftly and skated over to the little entrance on the other side. but, even before he got there, there was a sound on the ice behind him and, with an exclamation of amazement he could not suppress, he turned to see her swerving up to his side across the width of the rink. she had somehow found another way in. hibbert, as a rule, was punctilious, and in these free-and-easy places, perhaps, especially so. if only for his own protection he did not seek to make advances unless some kind of introduction paved the way. but for these two to skate together in the semi-darkness without speech, often of necessity brushing shoulders almost, was too absurd to think of. accordingly he raised his cap and spoke. his actual words he seems unable to recall, nor what the girl said in reply, except that she answered him in accented english with some commonplace about doing figures at midnight on an empty rink. quite natural it was, and right. she wore grey clothes of some kind, though not the customary long gloves or sweater, for indeed her hands were bare, and presently when he skated with her, he wondered with something like astonishment at their dry and icy coldness. and she was delicious to skate with--supple, sure, and light, fast as a man yet with the freedom of a child, sinuous and steady at the same time. her flexibility made him wonder, and when he asked where she had learned she murmured--he caught the breath against his ear and recalled later that it was singularly cold--that she could hardly tell, for she had been accustomed to the ice ever since she could remember. but her face he never properly saw. a muffler of white fur buried her neck to the ears, and her cap came over the eyes. he only saw that she was young. nor could he gather her hotel or chalet, for she pointed vaguely, when he asked her, up the slopes. "just over there--" she said, quickly taking his hand again. he did not press her; no doubt she wished to hide her escapade. and the touch of her hand thrilled him more than anything he could remember; even through his thick glove he felt the softness of that cold and delicate softness. the clouds thickened over the mountains. it grew darker. they talked very little, and did not always skate together. often they separated, curving about in corners by themselves, but always coming together again in the centre of the rink; and when she left him thus hibbert was conscious of--yes, of missing her. he found a peculiar satisfaction, almost a fascination, in skating by her side. it was quite an adventure--these two strangers with the ice and snow and night! midnight had long since sounded from the old church tower before they parted. she gave the sign, and he skated quickly to the shed, meaning to find a seat and help her take her skates off. yet when he turned--she had already gone. he saw her slim figure gliding away across the snow ... and hurrying for the last time round the rink alone he searched in vain for the opening she had twice used in this curious way. "how very queer!" he thought, referring to the wire netting. "she must have lifted it and wriggled under ...!" wondering how in the world she managed it, what in the world had possessed him to be so free with her, and who in the world she was, he went up the steep slope to the post office and so to bed, her promise to come again another night still ringing delightfully in his ears. and curious were the thoughts and sensations that accompanied him. most of all, perhaps, was the half suggestion of some dim memory that he had known this girl before, had met her somewhere, more--that she knew him. for in her voice--a low, soft, windy little voice it was, tender and soothing for all its quiet coldness--there lay some faint reminder of two others he had known, both long since gone: the voice of the woman he had loved, and--the voice of his mother. but this time through his dreams there ran no clash of battle. he was conscious, rather, of something cold and clinging that made him think of sifting snowflakes climbing slowly with entangling touch and thickness round his feet. the snow, coming without noise, each flake so light and tiny none can mark the spot whereon it settles, yet the mass of it able to smother whole villages, wove through the very texture of his mind--cold, bewildering, deadening effort with its clinging network of ten million feathery touches. iii in the morning hibbert realised he had done, perhaps, a foolish thing. the brilliant sunshine that drenched the valley made him see this, and the sight of his work-table with its typewriter, books, papers, and the rest, brought additional conviction. to have skated with a girl alone at midnight, no matter how innocently the thing had come about, was unwise--unfair, especially to her. gossip in these little winter resorts was worse than in a provincial town. he hoped no one had seen them. luckily the night had been dark. most likely none had heard the ring of skates. deciding that in future he would be more careful, he plunged into work, and sought to dismiss the matter from his mind. but in his times of leisure the memory returned persistently to haunt him. when he "ski-d," "luged," or danced in the evenings, and especially when he skated on the little rink, he was aware that the eyes of his mind forever sought this strange companion of the night. a hundred times he fancied that he saw her, but always sight deceived him. her face he might not know, but he could hardly fail to recognise her figure. yet nowhere among the others did he catch a glimpse of that slim young creature he had skated with alone beneath the clouded stars. he searched in vain. even his inquiries as to the occupants of the private chalets brought no results. he had lost her. but the queer thing was that he felt as though she were somewhere close; he _knew_ she had not really gone. while people came and left with every day, it never once occurred to him that she had left. on the contrary, he felt assured that they would meet again. this thought he never quite acknowledged. perhaps it was the wish that fathered it only. and, even when he did meet her, it was a question how he would speak and claim acquaintance, or whether _she_ would recognise himself. it might be awkward. he almost came to dread a meeting, though "dread," of course, was far too strong a word to describe an emotion that was half delight, half wondering anticipation. meanwhile the season was in full swing. hibbert felt in perfect health, worked hard, ski-d, skated, luged, and at night danced fairly often--in spite of his decision. this dancing was, however, an act of subconscious surrender; it really meant he hoped to find her among the whirling couples. he was searching for her without quite acknowledging it to himself; and the hotel-world, meanwhile, thinking it had won him over, teased and chaffed him. he made excuses in a similar vein; but all the time he watched and searched and--waited. for several days the sky held clear and bright and frosty, bitterly cold, everything crisp and sparkling in the sun; but there was no sign of fresh snow, and the ski-ers began to grumble. on the mountains was an icy crust that made "running" dangerous; they wanted the frozen, dry, and powdery snow that makes for speed, renders steering easier and falling less severe. but the keen east wind showed no signs of changing for a whole ten days. then, suddenly, there came a touch of softer air and the weather-wise began to prophesy. hibbert, who was delicately sensitive to the least change in earth or sky, was perhaps the first to feel it. only he did not prophesy. he knew through every nerve in his body that moisture had crept into the air, was accumulating, and that presently a fall would come. for he responded to the moods of nature like a fine barometer. and the knowledge, this time, brought into his heart a strange little wayward emotion that was hard to account for--a feeling of unexplained uneasiness and disquieting joy. for behind it, woven through it rather, ran a faint exhilaration that connected remotely somewhere with that touch of delicious alarm, that tiny anticipating "dread," that so puzzled him when he thought of his next meeting with his skating companion of the night. it lay beyond all words, all telling, this queer relationship between the two; but somehow the girl and snow ran in a pair across his mind. perhaps for imaginative writing-men, more than for other workers, the smallest change of mood betrays itself at once. his work at any rate revealed this slight shifting of emotional values in his soul. not that his writing suffered, but that it altered, subtly as those changes of sky or sea or landscape that come with the passing of afternoon into evening--imperceptibly. a subconscious excitement sought to push outwards and express itself ... and, knowing the uneven effect such moods produced in his work, he laid his pen aside and took instead to reading that he had to do. meanwhile the brilliance passed from the sunshine, the sky grew slowly overcast; by dusk the mountain tops came singularly close and sharp; the distant valley rose into absurdly near perspective. the moisture increased, rapidly approaching saturation point, when it must fall in snow. hibbert watched and waited. and in the morning the world lay smothered beneath its fresh white carpet. it snowed heavily till noon, thickly, incessantly, chokingly, a foot or more; then the sky cleared, the sun came out in splendour, the wind shifted back to the east, and frost came down upon the mountains with its keenest and most biting tooth. the drop in the temperature was tremendous, but the ski-ers were jubilant. next day the "running" would be fast and perfect. already the mass was settling, and the surface freezing into those moss-like, powdery crystals that make the ski run almost of their own accord with the faint "sishing" as of a bird's wings through the air. iv that night there was excitement in the little hotel-world, first because there was a _bal costume_, but chiefly because the new snow had come. and hibbert went--felt drawn to go; he did not go in costume, but he wanted to talk about the slopes and ski-ing with the other men, and at the same time.... ah, there was the truth, the deeper necessity that called. for the singular connection between the stranger and the snow again betrayed itself, utterly beyond explanation as before, but vital and insistent. some hidden instinct in his pagan soul--heaven knows how he phrased it even to himself, if he phrased it at all--whispered that with the snow the girl would be somewhere about, would emerge from her hiding place, would even look for him. absolutely unwarranted it was. he laughed while he stood before the little glass and trimmed his moustache, tried to make his black tie sit straight, and shook down his dinner jacket so that it should lie upon the shoulders without a crease. his brown eyes were very bright. "i look younger than i usually do," he thought. it was unusual, even significant, in a man who had no vanity about his appearance and certainly never questioned his age or tried to look younger than he was. affairs of the heart, with one tumultuous exception that left no fuel for lesser subsequent fires, had never troubled him. the forces of his soul and mind not called upon for "work" and obvious duties, all went to nature. the desolate, wild places of the earth were what he loved; night, and the beauty of the stars and snow. and this evening he felt their claims upon him mightily stirring. a rising wildness caught his blood, quickened his pulse, woke longing and passion too. but chiefly snow. the snow whirred softly through his thoughts like white, seductive dreams.... for the snow had come; and she, it seemed, had somehow come with it--into his mind. and yet he stood before that twisted mirror and pulled his tie and coat askew a dozen times, as though it mattered. "what in the world is up with me?" he thought. then, laughing a little, he turned before leaving the room to put his private papers in order. the green morocco desk that held them he took down from the shelf and laid upon the table. tied to the lid was the visiting card with his brother's london address "in case of accident." on the way down to the hotel he wondered why he had done this, for though imaginative, he was not the kind of man who dealt in presentiments. moods with him were strong, but ever held in leash. "it's almost like a warning," he thought, smiling. he drew his thick coat tightly round the throat as the freezing air bit at him. "those warnings one reads of in stories sometimes ...!" a delicious happiness was in his blood. over the edge of the hills across the valley rose the moon. he saw her silver sheet the world of snow. snow covered all. it smothered sound and distance. it smothered houses, streets, and human beings. it smothered--life. v in the hall there was light and bustle; people were already arriving from the other hotels and chalets, their costumes hidden beneath many wraps. groups of men in evening dress stood about smoking, talking "snow" and "ski-ing." the band was tuning up. the claims of the hotel-world clashed about him faintly as of old. at the big glass windows of the verandah, peasants stopped a moment on their way home from the _cafe_ to peer. hibbert thought laughingly of that conflict he used to imagine. he laughed because it suddenly seemed so unreal. he belonged so utterly to nature and the mountains, and especially to those desolate slopes where now the snow lay thick and fresh and sweet, that there was no question of a conflict at all. the power of the newly fallen snow had caught him, proving it without effort. out there, upon those lonely reaches of the moonlit ridges, the snow lay ready--masses and masses of it--cool, soft, inviting. he longed for it. it awaited him. he thought of the intoxicating delight of ski-ing in the moonlight.... thus, somehow, in vivid flashing vision, he thought of it while he stood there smoking with the other men and talking all the "shop" of ski-ing. and, ever mysteriously blended with this power of the snow, poured also through his inner being the power of the girl. he could not disabuse his mind of the insinuating presence of the two together. he remembered that queer skating-impulse of ten days ago, the impulse that had let her in. that any mind, even an imaginative one, could pass beneath the sway of such a fancy was strange enough; and hibbert, while fully aware of the disorder, yet found a curious joy in yielding to it. this insubordinate centre that drew him towards old pagan beliefs had assumed command. with a kind of sensuous pleasure he let himself be conquered. and snow that night seemed in everybody's thoughts. the dancing couples talked of it; the hotel proprietors congratulated one another; it meant good sport and satisfied their guests; every one was planning trips and expeditions, talking of slopes and telemarks, of flying speed and distance, of drifts and crust and frost. vitality and enthusiasm pulsed in the very air; all were alert and active, positive, radiating currents of creative life even into the stuffy atmosphere of that crowded ball-room. and the snow had caused it, the snow had brought it; all this discharge of eager sparkling energy was due primarily to the--snow. but in the mind of hibbert, by some swift alchemy of his pagan yearnings, this energy became transmuted. it rarefied itself, gleaming in white and crystal currents of passionate anticipation, which he transferred, as by a species of electrical imagination, into the personality of the girl--the girl of the snow. she somewhere was waiting for him, expecting him, calling to him softly from those leagues of moonlit mountain. he remembered the touch of that cool, dry hand; the soft and icy breath against his cheek; the hush and softness of her presence in the way she came and the way she had gone again--like a flurry of snow the wind sent gliding up the slopes. she, like himself, belonged out there. he fancied that he heard her little windy voice come sifting to him through the snowy branches of the trees, calling his name ... that haunting little voice that dived straight to the centre of his life as once, long years ago, two other voices used to do.... but nowhere among the costumed dancers did he see her slender figure. he danced with one and all, distrait and absent, a stupid partner as each girl discovered, his eyes ever turning towards the door and windows, hoping to catch the luring face, the vision that did not come ... and at length, hoping even against hope. for the ball-room thinned; groups left one by one, going home to their hotels and chalets; the band tired obviously; people sat drinking lemon-squashes at the little tables, the men mopping their foreheads, everybody ready for bed. it was close on midnight. as hibbert passed through the hall to get his overcoat and snow-boots, he saw men in the passage by the "sport-room," greasing their ski against an early start. knapsack luncheons were being ordered by the kitchen swing doors. he sighed. lighting a cigarette a friend offered him, he returned a confused reply to some question as to whether he could join their party in the morning. it seemed he did not hear it properly. he passed through the outer vestibule between the double glass doors, and went into the night. the man who asked the question watched him go, an expression of anxiety momentarily in his eyes. "don't think he heard you," said another, laughing. "you've got to shout to hibbert, his mind's so full of his work." "he works too hard," suggested the first, "full of queer ideas and dreams." but hibbert's silence was not rudeness. he had not caught the invitation, that was all. the call of the hotel-world had faded. he no longer heard it. another wilder call was sounding in his ears. for up the street he had seen a little figure moving. close against the shadows of the baker's shop it glided--white, slim, enticing. vi and at once into his mind passed the hush and softness of the snow--yet with it a searching, crying wildness for the heights. he knew by some incalculable, swift instinct she would not meet him in the village street. it was not there, amid crowding houses, she would speak to him. indeed, already she had disappeared, melted from view up the white vista of the moonlit road. yonder, he divined, she waited where the highway narrowed abruptly into the mountain path beyond the chalets. it did not even occur to him to hesitate; mad though it seemed, and was--this sudden craving for the heights with her, at least for open spaces where the snow lay thick and fresh--it was too imperious to be denied. he does not remember going up to his room, putting the sweater over his evening clothes, and getting into the fur gauntlet gloves and the helmet cap of wool. most certainly he has no recollection of fastening on his ski; he must have done it automatically. some faculty of normal observation was in abeyance, as it were. his mind was out beyond the village--out with the snowy mountains and the moon. henri defago, putting up the shutters over his _cafe_ windows, saw him pass, and wondered mildly: "un monsieur qui fait du ski a cette heure! il est anglais, done ...!" he shrugged his shoulders, as though a man had the right to choose his own way of death. and marthe perotti, the hunchback wife of the shoemaker, looking by chance from her window, caught his figure moving swiftly up the road. she had other thoughts, for she knew and believed the old traditions of the witches and snow-beings that steal the souls of men. she had even heard, 'twas said, the dreaded "synagogue" pass roaring down the street at night, and now, as then, she hid her eyes. "they've called to him ... and he must go," she murmured, making the sign of the cross. but no one sought to stop him. hibbert recalls only a single incident until he found himself beyond the houses, searching for her along the fringe of forest where the moonlight met the snow in a bewildering frieze of fantastic shadows. and the incident was simply this--that he remembered passing the church. catching the outline of its tower against the stars, he was aware of a faint sense of hesitation. a vague uneasiness came and went--jarred unpleasantly across the flow of his excited feelings, chilling exhilaration. he caught the instant's discord, dismissed it, and--passed on. the seduction of the snow smothered the hint before he realised that it had brushed the skirts of warning. and then he saw her. she stood there waiting in a little clear space of shining snow, dressed all in white, part of the moonlight and the glistening background, her slender figure just discernible. "i waited, for i knew you would come," the silvery little voice of windy beauty floated down to him. "you _had_ to come." "i'm ready," he answered, "i knew it too." the world of nature caught him to its heart in those few words--the wonder and the glory of the night and snow. life leaped within him. the passion of his pagan soul exulted, rose in joy, flowed out to her. he neither reflected nor considered, but let himself go like the veriest schoolboy in the wildness of first love. "give me your hand," he cried, "i'm coming ...!" "a little farther on, a little higher," came her delicious answer. "here it is too near the village--and the church." and the words seemed wholly right and natural; he did not dream of questioning them; he understood that, with this little touch of civilisation in sight, the familiarity he suggested was impossible. once out upon the open mountains, 'mid the freedom of huge slopes and towering peaks, the stars and moon to witness and the wilderness of snow to watch, they could taste an innocence of happy intercourse free from the dead conventions that imprison literal minds. he urged his pace, yet did not quite overtake her. the girl kept always just a little bit ahead of his best efforts.... and soon they left the trees behind and passed on to the enormous slopes of the sea of snow that rolled in mountainous terror and beauty to the stars. the wonder of the white world caught him away. under the steady moonlight it was more than haunting. it was a living, white, bewildering power that deliciously confused the senses and laid a spell of wild perplexity upon the heart. it was a personality that cloaked, and yet revealed, itself through all this sheeted whiteness of snow. it rose, went with him, fled before, and followed after. slowly it dropped lithe, gleaming arms about his neck, gathering him in.... certainly some soft persuasion coaxed his very soul, urging him ever forwards, upwards, on towards the higher icy slopes. judgment and reason left their throne, it seemed, completely, as in the madness of intoxication. the girl, slim and seductive, kept always just ahead, so that he never quite came up with her. he saw the white enchantment of her face and figure, something that streamed about her neck flying like a wreath of snow in the wind, and heard the alluring accents of her whispering voice that called from time to time: "a little farther on, a little higher.... then we'll run home together!" sometimes he saw her hand stretched out to find his own, but each time, just as he came up with her, he saw her still in front, the hand and arm withdrawn. they took a gentle angle of ascent. the toil seemed nothing. in this crystal, wine-like air fatigue vanished. the sishing of the ski through the powdery surface of the snow was the only sound that broke the stillness; this, with his breathing and the rustle of her skirts, was all he heard. cold moonshine, snow, and silence held the world. the sky was black, and the peaks beyond cut into it like frosted wedges of iron and steel. far below the valley slept, the village long since hidden out of sight. he felt that he could never tire.... the sound of the church clock rose from time to time faintly through the air--more and more distant. "give me your hand. it's time now to turn back." "just one more slope," she laughed. "that ridge above us. then we'll make for home." and her low voice mingled pleasantly with the purring of their ski. his own seemed harsh and ugly by comparison. "but i have never come so high before. it's glorious! this world of silent snow and moonlight--and _you_. you're a child of the snow, i swear. let me come up--closer--to see your face--and touch your little hand." her laughter answered him. "come on! a little higher. here we're quite alone together." "it's magnificent," he cried. "but why did you hide away so long? i've looked and searched for you in vain ever since we skated--" he was going to say "ten days ago," but the accurate memory of time had gone from him; he was not sure whether it was days or years or minutes. his thoughts of earth were scattered and confused. "you looked for me in the wrong places," he heard her murmur just above him. "you looked in places where i never go. hotels and houses kill me. i avoid them." she laughed--a fine, shrill, windy little laugh. "i loathe them too--" he stopped. the girl had suddenly come quite close. a breath of ice passed through his very soul. she had touched him. "but this awful cold!" he cried out, sharply, "this freezing cold that takes me. the wind is rising; it's a wind of ice. come, let us turn ...!" but when he plunged forward to hold her, or at least to look, the girl was gone again. and something in the way she stood there a few feet beyond, and stared down into his eyes so steadfastly in silence, made him shiver. the moonlight was behind her, but in some odd way he could not focus sight upon her face, although so close. the gleam of eyes he caught, but all the rest seemed white and snowy as though he looked beyond her--out into space.... the sound of the church bell came up faintly from the valley far below, and he counted the strokes--five. a sudden, curious weakness seized him as he listened. deep within it was, deadly yet somehow sweet, and hard to resist. he felt like sinking down upon the snow and lying there.... they had been climbing for five hours.... it was, of course, the warning of complete exhaustion. with a great effort he fought and overcame it. it passed away as suddenly as it came. "we'll turn," he said with a decision he hardly felt. "it will be dawn before we reach the village again. come at once. it's time for home." the sense of exhilaration had utterly left him. an emotion that was akin to fear swept coldly through him. but her whispering answer turned it instantly to terror--a terror that gripped him horribly and turned him weak and unresisting. "our home is--_here_!" a burst of wild, high laughter, loud and shrill, accompanied the words. it was like a whistling wind. the wind _had_ risen, and clouds obscured the moon. "a little higher--where we cannot hear the wicked bells," she cried, and for the first time seized him deliberately by the hand. she moved, was suddenly close against his face. again she touched him. and hibbert tried to turn away in escape, and so trying, found for the first time that the power of the snow--that other power which does not exhilarate but deadens effort--was upon him. the suffocating weakness that it brings to exhausted men, luring them to the sleep of death in her clinging soft embrace, lulling the will and conquering all desire for life--this was awfully upon him. his feet were heavy and entangled. he could not turn or move. the girl stood in front of him, very near; he felt her chilly breath upon his cheeks; her hair passed blindingly across his eyes; and that icy wind came with her. he saw her whiteness close; again, it seemed, his sight passed through her into space as though she had no face. her arms were round his neck. she drew him softly downwards to his knees. he sank; he yielded utterly; he obeyed. her weight was upon him, smothering, delicious. the snow was to his waist.... she kissed him softly on the lips, the eyes, all over his face. and then she spoke his name in that voice of love and wonder, the voice that held the accent of two others--both taken over long ago by death--the voice of his mother, and of the woman he had loved. he made one more feeble effort to resist. then, realising even while he struggled that this soft weight about his heart was sweeter than anything life could ever bring, he let his muscles relax, and sank back into the soft oblivion of the covering snow. her wintry kisses bore him into sleep. vii they say that men who know the sleep of exhaustion in the snow find no awakening on the hither side of death.... the hours passed and the moon sank down below the white world's rim. then, suddenly, there came a little crash upon his breast and neck, and hibbert--woke. he slowly turned bewildered, heavy eyes upon the desolate mountains, stared dizzily about him, tried to rise. at first his muscles would not act; a numbing, aching pain possessed him. he uttered a long, thin cry for help, and heard its faintness swallowed by the wind. and then he understood vaguely why he was only warm--not dead. for this very wind that took his cry had built up a sheltering mound of driven snow against his body while he slept. like a curving wave it ran beside him. it was the breaking of its over-toppling edge that caused the crash, and the coldness of the mass against his neck that woke him. dawn kissed the eastern sky; pale gleams of gold shot every peak with splendour; but ice was in the air, and the dry and frozen snow blew like powder from the surface of the slopes. he saw the points of his ski projecting just below him. then he--remembered. it seems he had just strength enough to realise that, could he but rise and stand, he might fly with terrific impetus towards the woods and village far beneath. the ski would carry him. but if he failed and fell ...! how he contrived it hibbert never knew; this fear of death somehow called out his whole available reserve force. he rose slowly, balanced a moment, then, taking the angle of an immense zigzag, started down the awful slopes like an arrow from a bow. and automatically the splendid muscles of the practised ski-er and athlete saved and guided him, for he was hardly conscious of controlling either speed or direction. the snow stung face and eyes like fine steel shot; ridge after ridge flew past; the summits raced across the sky; the valley leaped up with bounds to meet him. he scarcely felt the ground beneath his feet as the huge slopes and distance melted before the lightning speed of that descent from death to life. he took it in four mile-long zigzags, and it was the turning at each corner that nearly finished him, for then the strain of balancing taxed to the verge of collapse the remnants of his strength. slopes that have taken hours to climb can be descended in a short half-hour on ski, but hibbert had lost all count of time. quite other thoughts and feelings mastered him in that wild, swift dropping through the air that was like the flight of a bird. for ever close upon his heels came following forms and voices with the whirling snow-dust. he heard that little silvery voice of death and laughter at his back. shrill and wild, with the whistling of the wind past his ears, he caught its pursuing tones; but in anger now, no longer soft and coaxing. and it was accompanied; she did not follow alone. it seemed a host of these flying figures of the snow chased madly just behind him. he felt them furiously smite his neck and cheeks, snatch at his hands and try to entangle his feet and ski in drifts. his eyes they blinded, and they caught his breath away. the terror of the heights and snow and winter desolation urged him forward in the maddest race with death a human being ever knew; and so terrific was the speed that before the gold and crimson had left the summits to touch the ice-lips of the lower glaciers, he saw the friendly forest far beneath swing up and welcome him. and it was then, moving slowly along the edge of the woods, he saw a light. a man was carrying it. a procession of human figures was passing in a dark line laboriously through the snow. and--he heard the sound of chanting. instinctively, without a second's hesitation, he changed his course. no longer flying at an angle as before, he pointed his ski straight down the mountain-side. the dreadful steepness did not frighten him. he knew full well it meant a crashing tumble at the bottom, but he also knew it meant a doubling of his speed--with safety at the end. for, though no definite thought passed through his mind, he understood that it was the village _cure_ who carried that little gleaming lantern in the dawn, and that he was taking the host to a chalet on the lower slopes--to some peasant _in extremis_. he remembered her terror of the church and bells. she feared the holy symbols. there was one last wild cry in his ears as he started, a shriek of the wind before his face, and a rush of stinging snow against closed eyelids--and then he dropped through empty space. speed took sight from him. it seemed he flew off the surface of the world. * * * * * indistinctly he recalls the murmur of men's voices, the touch of strong arms that lifted him, and the shooting pains as the ski were unfastened from the twisted ankle ... for when he opened his eyes again to normal life he found himself lying in his bed at the post office with the doctor at his side. but for years to come the story of "mad hibbert's" ski-ing at night is recounted in that mountain village. he went, it seems, up slopes, and to a height that no man in his senses ever tried before. the tourists were agog about it for the rest of the season, and the very same day two of the bolder men went over the actual ground and photographed the slopes. later hibbert saw these photographs. he noticed one curious thing about them--though he did not mention it to any one: there was only a single track. * * * * * _sand_ i as felix henriot came through the streets that january night the fog was stifling, but when he reached his little flat upon the top floor there came a sound of wind. wind was stirring about the world. it blew against his windows, but at first so faintly that he hardly noticed it. then, with an abrupt rise and fall like a wailing voice that sought to claim attention, it called him. he peered through the window into the blurred darkness, listening. there is no cry in the world like that of the homeless wind. a vague excitement, scarcely to be analysed, ran through his blood. the curtain of fog waved momentarily aside. henriot fancied a star peeped down at him. "it will change things a bit--at last," he sighed, settling back into his chair. "it will bring movement!" already something in himself had changed. a restlessness, as of that wandering wind, woke in his heart--the desire to be off and away. other things could rouse this wildness too: falling water, the singing of a bird, an odour of wood-fire, a glimpse of winding road. but the cry of wind, always searching, questioning, travelling the world's great routes, remained ever the master-touch. high longing took his mood in hand. mid seven millions he felt suddenly--lonely. "i will arise and go now, for always night and day i hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; while i stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, i hear it in the deep heart's core." he murmured the words over softly to himself. the emotion that produced innisfree passed strongly through him. he too would be over the hills and far away. he craved movement, change, adventure--somewhere far from shops and crowds and motor-'busses. for a week the fog had stifled london. this wind brought life. where should he go? desire was long; his purse was short. he glanced at his books, letters, newspapers. they had no interest now. instead he listened. the panorama of other journeys rolled in colour through the little room, flying on one another's heels. henriot enjoyed this remembered essence of his travels more than the travels themselves. the crying wind brought so many voices, all of them seductive: there was a soft crashing of waves upon the black sea shores, where the huge caucasus beckoned in the sky beyond; a rustling in the umbrella pines and cactus at marseilles, whence magic steamers start about the world like flying dreams. he heard the plash of fountains upon mount ida's slopes, and the whisper of the tamarisk on marathon. it was dawn once more upon the ionian sea, and he smelt the perfume of the cyclades. blue-veiled islands melted in the sunshine, and across the dewy lawns of tempe, moistened by the spray of many waterfalls, he saw--great heavens above!--the dancing of white forms ... or was it only mist the sunshine painted against pelion?... "methought, among the lawns together, we wandered underneath the young grey dawn. and multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind...." and then, into his stuffy room, slipped the singing perfume of a wall-flower on a ruined tower, and with it the sweetness of hot ivy. he heard the "yellow bees in the ivy bloom." wind whipped over the open hills--this very wind that laboured drearily through the london fog. and--he was caught. the darkness melted from the city. the fog whisked off into an azure sky. the roar of traffic turned into booming of the sea. there was a whistling among cordage, and the floor swayed to and fro. he saw a sailor touch his cap and pocket the two-franc piece. the syren hooted--ominous sound that had started him on many a journey of adventure--and the roar of london became mere insignificant clatter of a child's toy carriages. he loved that syren's call; there was something deep and pitiless in it. it drew the wanderers forth from cities everywhere: "leave your known world behind you, and come with me for better or for worse! the anchor is up; it is too late to change. only--beware! you shall know curious things--and alone!" henriot stirred uneasily in his chair. he turned with sudden energy to the shelf of guide-books, maps and time-tables--possessions he most valued in the whole room. he was a happy-go-lucky, adventure-loving soul, careless of common standards, athirst ever for the new and strange. "that's the best of having a cheap flat," he laughed, "and no ties in the world. i can turn the key and disappear. no one cares or knows--no one but the thieving caretaker. and he's long ago found out that there's nothing here worth taking!" there followed then no lengthy indecision. preparation was even shorter still. he was always ready for a move, and his sojourn in cities was but breathing-space while he gathered pennies for further wanderings. an enormous kit-bag--sack-shaped, very worn and dirty--emerged speedily from the bottom of a cupboard in the wall. it was of limitless capacity. the key and padlock rattled in its depths. cigarette ashes covered everything while he stuffed it full of ancient, indescribable garments. and his voice, singing of those "yellow bees in the ivy bloom," mingled with the crying of the rising wind about his windows. his restlessness had disappeared by magic. this time, however, there could be no haunted pelion, nor shady groves of tempe, for he lived in sophisticated times when money markets regulated movement sternly. travelling was only for the rich; mere wanderers must pig it. he remembered instead an opportune invitation to the desert. "objective" invitation, his genial hosts had called it, knowing his hatred of convention. and helouan danced into letters of brilliance upon the inner map of his mind. for egypt had ever held his spirit in thrall, though as yet he had tried in vain to touch the great buried soul of her. the excavators, the egyptologists, the archaeologists most of all, plastered her grey ancient face with labels like hotel advertisements on travellers' portmanteaux. they told where she had come from last, but nothing of what she dreamed and thought and loved. the heart of egypt lay beneath the sand, and the trifling robbery of little details that poked forth from tombs and temples brought no true revelation of her stupendous spiritual splendour. henriot, in his youth, had searched and dived among what material he could find, believing once--or half believing--that the ceremonial of that ancient system veiled a weight of symbol that was reflected from genuine supersensual knowledge. the rituals, now taken literally, and so pityingly explained away, had once been genuine pathways of approach. but never yet, and least of all in his previous visits to egypt itself, had he discovered one single person, worthy of speech, who caught at his idea. "curious," they said, then turned away--to go on digging in the sand. sand smothered her world to-day. excavators discovered skeletons. museums everywhere stored them--grinning, literal relics that told nothing. but now, while he packed and sang, these hopes of enthusiastic younger days stirred again--because the emotion that gave them birth was real and true in him. through the morning mists upon the nile an old pyramid bowed hugely at him across london roofs: "come," he heard its awful whisper beneath the ceiling, "i have things to show you, and to tell." he saw the flock of them sailing the desert like weird grey solemn ships that make no earthly port. and he imagined them as one: multiple expressions of some single unearthly portent they adumbrated in mighty form--dead symbols of some spiritual conception long vanished from the world. "i mustn't dream like this," he laughed, "or i shall get absent-minded and pack fire-tongs instead of boots. it looks like a jumble sale already!" and he stood on a heap of things to wedge them down still tighter. but the pictures would not cease. he saw the kites circling high in the blue air. a couple of white vultures flapped lazily away over shining miles. felucca sails, like giant wings emerging from the ground, curved towards him from the nile. the palm-trees dropped long shadows over memphis. he felt the delicious, drenching heat, and the khamasin, that over-wind from nubia, brushed his very cheeks. in the little gardens the mish-mish was in bloom.... he smelt the desert ... grey sepulchre of cancelled cycles.... the stillness of her interminable reaches dropped down upon old london.... the magic of the sand stole round him in its silent-footed tempest. and while he struggled with that strange, capacious sack, the piles of clothing ran into shapes of gleaming bedouin faces; london garments settled down with the mournful sound of camels' feet, half dropping wind, half water flowing underground--sound that old time has brought over into modern life and left a moment for our wonder and perhaps our tears. he rose at length with the excitement of some deep enchantment in his eyes. the thought of egypt plunged ever so deeply into him, carrying him into depths where he found it difficult to breathe, so strangely far away it seemed, yet indefinably familiar. he lost his way. a touch of fear came with it. "a sack like that is the wonder of the world," he laughed again, kicking the unwieldy, sausage-shaped monster into a corner of the room, and sitting down to write the thrilling labels: "felix henriot, alexandria _via_ marseilles." but his pen blotted the letters; there was sand in it. he rewrote the words. then he remembered a dozen things he had left out. impatiently, yet with confusion somewhere, he stuffed them in. they ran away into shifting heaps; they disappeared; they emerged suddenly again. it was like packing hot, dry, flowing sand. from the pockets of a coat--he had worn it last summer down dorset way--out trickled sand. there was sand in his mind and thoughts. and his dreams that night were full of winds, the old sad winds of egypt, and of moving, sifting sand. arabs and afreets danced amazingly together across dunes he could never reach. for he could not follow fast enough. something infinitely older than these ever caught his feet and held him back. a million tiny fingers stung and pricked him. something flung a veil before his eyes. once it touched him--his face and hands and neck. "stay here with us," he heard a host of muffled voices crying, but their sound was smothered, buried, rising through the ground. a myriad throats were choked. till, at last, with a violent effort he turned and seized it. and then the thing he grasped at slipped between his fingers and ran easily away. it had a grey and yellow face, and it moved through all its parts. it flowed as water flows, and yet was solid. it was centuries old. he cried out to it. "who are you? what is your name? i surely know you ... but i have forgotten ...?" and it stopped, turning from far away its great uncovered countenance of nameless colouring. he caught a voice. it rolled and boomed and whispered like the wind. and then he woke, with a curious shaking in his heart, and a little touch of chilly perspiration on the skin. but the voice seemed in the room still--close beside him: "i am the sand," he heard, before it died away. * * * * * and next he realised that the glitter of paris lay behind him, and a steamer was taking him with much unnecessary motion across a sparkling sea towards alexandria. gladly he saw the riviera fade below the horizon, with its hard bright sunshine, treacherous winds, and its smear of rich, conventional english. all restlessness now had left him. true vagabond still at forty, he only felt the unrest and discomfort of life when caught in the network of routine and rigid streets, no chance of breaking loose. he was off again at last, money scarce enough indeed, but the joy of wandering expressing itself in happy emotions of release. every warning of calculation was stifled. he thought of the american woman who walked out of her long island house one summer's day to look at a passing sail--and was gone eight years before she walked in again. eight years of roving travel! he had always felt respect and admiration for that woman. for felix henriot, with his admixture of foreign blood, was philosopher as well as vagabond, a strong poetic and religious strain sometimes breaking out through fissures in his complex nature. he had seen much life; had read many books. the passionate desire of youth to solve the world's big riddles had given place to a resignation filled to the brim with wonder. anything _might_ be true. nothing surprised him. the most outlandish beliefs, for all he knew, might fringe truth somewhere. he had escaped that cheap cynicism with which disappointed men soothe their vanity when they realise that an intelligible explanation of the universe lies beyond their powers. he no longer expected final answers. for him, even the smallest journeys held the spice of some adventure; all minutes were loaded with enticing potentialities. and they shaped for themselves somehow a dramatic form. "it's like a story," his friends said when he told his travels. it always was a story. but the adventure that lay waiting for him where the silent streets of little helouan kiss the great desert's lips, was of a different kind to any henriot had yet encountered. looking back, he has often asked himself, "how in the world can i accept it?" and, perhaps, he never yet has accepted it. it was sand that brought it. for the desert, the stupendous thing that mothers little helouan, produced it. ii he slipped through cairo with the same relief that he left the riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of the desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little helouan. the hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been formerly a khedivial palace. it had the air of a palace still. he felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ceilings, cool and airy corridors, spacious halls. soft-footed arabs attended to his wants; white walls let in light and air without a sign of heat; there was a feeling of a large, spread tent pitched on the very sand; and the wind that stirred the oleanders in the shady gardens also crept in to rustle the palm leaves of his favourite corner seat. through the large windows where once the khedive held high court, the sunshine blazed upon vistaed leagues of desert. and from his bedroom windows he watched the sun dip into gold and crimson behind the swelling libyan sands. this side of the pyramids he saw the nile meander among palm groves and tilled fields. across his balcony railings the egyptian stars trooped down beside his very bed, shaping old constellations for his dreams; while, to the south, he looked out upon the vast untamable body of the sands that carpeted the world for thousands of miles towards upper egypt, nubia, and the dread sahara itself. he wondered again why people thought it necessary to go so far afield to know the desert. here, within half an hour of cairo, it lay breathing solemnly at his very doors. for little helouan, caught thus between the shoulders of the libyan and arabian deserts, is utterly sand-haunted. the desert lies all round it like a sea. henriot felt he never could escape from it, as he moved about the island whose coasts are washed with sand. down each broad and shining street the two end houses framed a vista of its dim immensity--glimpses of shimmering blue, or flame-touched purple. there were stretches of deep sea-green as well, far off upon its bosom. the streets were open channels of approach, and the eye ran down them as along the tube of a telescope laid to catch incredible distance out of space. through them the desert reached in with long, thin feelers towards the village. its being flooded into helouan, and over it. past walls and houses, churches and hotels, the sea of desert pressed in silently with its myriad soft feet of sand. it poured in everywhere, through crack and slit and crannie. these were reminders of possession and ownership. and every passing wind that lifted eddies of dust at the street corners were messages from the quiet, powerful thing that permitted helouan to lie and dream so peacefully in the sunshine. mere artificial oasis, its existence was temporary, held on lease, just for ninety-nine centuries or so. this sea idea became insistent. for, in certain lights, and especially in the brief, bewildering dusk, the desert rose--swaying towards the small white houses. the waves of it ran for fifty miles without a break. it was too deep for foam or surface agitation, yet it knew the swell of tides. and underneath flowed resolute currents, linking distance to the centre. these many deserts were really one. a storm, just retreated, had tossed helouan upon the shore and left it there to dry; but any morning he would wake to find it had been carried off again into the depths. some fragment, at least, would disappear. the grim mokattam hills were rollers that ever threatened to topple down and submerge the sandy bar that men called helouan. being soundless, and devoid of perfume, the desert's message reached him through two senses only--sight and touch; chiefly, of course, the former. its invasion was concentrated through the eyes. and vision, thus uncorrected, went what pace it pleased. the desert played with him. sand stole into his being--through the eyes. and so obsessing was this majesty of its close presence, that henriot sometimes wondered how people dared their little social activities within its very sight and hearing; how they played golf and tennis upon reclaimed edges of its face, picnicked so blithely hard upon its frontiers, and danced at night while this stern, unfathomable thing lay breathing just beyond the trumpery walls that kept it out. the challenge of their shallow admiration seemed presumptuous, almost provocative. their pursuit of pleasure suggested insolent indifference. they ran fool-hardy hazards, he felt; for there was no worship in their vulgar hearts. with a mental shudder, sometimes he watched the cheap tourist horde go laughing, chattering past within view of its ancient, half-closed eyes. it was like defying deity. for, to his stirred imagination the sublimity of the desert dwarfed humanity. these people had been wiser to choose another place for the flaunting of their tawdry insignificance. any minute this wilderness, "huddled in grey annihilation," might awake and notice them ...! in his own hotel were several "smart," so-called "society" people who emphasised the protest in him to the point of definite contempt. overdressed, the latest worldly novel under their arms, they strutted the narrow pavements of their tiny world, immensely pleased with themselves. their vacuous minds expressed themselves in the slang of their exclusive circle--value being the element excluded. the pettiness of their outlook hardly distressed him--he was too familiar with it at home--but their essential vulgarity, their innate ugliness, seemed more than usually offensive in the grandeur of its present setting. into the mighty sands they took the latest london scandal, gabbling it over even among the tombs and temples. and "it was to laugh," the pains they spent wondering whom they might condescend to know, never dreaming that they themselves were not worth knowing. against the background of the noble desert their titles seemed the cap and bells of clowns. and henriot, knowing some of them personally, could not always escape their insipid company. yet he was the gainer. they little guessed how their commonness heightened contrast, set mercilessly thus beside the strange, eternal beauty of the sand. occasionally the protest in his soul betrayed itself in words, which of course they did not understand. "he is so clever, isn't he?" and then, having relieved his feelings, he would comfort himself characteristically: "the desert has not noticed them. the sand is not aware of their existence. how should the sea take note of rubbish that lies above its tide-line?" for henriot drew near to its great shifting altars in an attitude of worship. the wilderness made him kneel in heart. its shining reaches led to the oldest temple in the world, and every journey that he made was like a sacrament. for him the desert was a consecrated place. it was sacred. and his tactful hosts, knowing his peculiarities, left their house open to him when he cared to come--they lived upon the northern edge of the oasis--and he was as free as though he were absolutely alone. he blessed them; he rejoiced that he had come. little helouan accepted him. the desert knew that he was there. * * * * * from his corner of the big dining-room he could see the other guests, but his roving eye always returned to the figure of a solitary man who sat at an adjoining table, and whose personality stirred his interest. while affecting to look elsewhere, he studied him as closely as might be. there was something about the stranger that touched his curiosity--a certain air of expectation that he wore. but it was more than that: it was anticipation, apprehension in it somewhere. the man was nervous, uneasy. his restless way of suddenly looking about him proved it. henriot tried every one else in the room as well; but, though his thought settled on others too, he always came back to the figure of this solitary being opposite, who ate his dinner as if afraid of being seen, and glanced up sometimes as if fearful of being watched. henriot's curiosity, before he knew it, became suspicion. there was mystery here. the table, he noticed, was laid for two. "is he an actor, a priest of some strange religion, an enquiry agent, or just--a crank?" was the thought that first occurred to him. and the question suggested itself without amusement. the impression of subterfuge and caution he conveyed left his observer unsatisfied. the face was clean shaven, dark, and strong; thick hair, straight yet bushy, was slightly unkempt; it was streaked with grey; and an unexpected mobility when he smiled ran over the features that he seemed to hold rigid by deliberate effort. the man was cut to no quite common measure. henriot jumped to an intuitive conclusion: "he's not here for pleasure or merely sight-seeing. something serious has brought him out to egypt." for the face combined too ill-assorted qualities: an obstinate tenacity that might even mean brutality, and was certainly repulsive, yet, with it, an undecipherable dreaminess betrayed by lines of the mouth, but above all in the very light blue eyes, so rarely raised. those eyes, he felt, had looked upon unusual things; "dreaminess" was not an adequate description; "searching" conveyed it better. the true source of the queer impression remained elusive. and hence, perhaps, the incongruous marriage in the face--mobility laid upon a matter-of-fact foundation underneath. the face showed conflict. and henriot, watching him, felt decidedly intrigued. "i'd like to know that man, and all about him." his name, he learned later, was richard vance; from birmingham; a business man. but it was not the birmingham he wished to know; it was the--other: cause of the elusive, dreamy searching. though facing one another at so short a distance, their eyes, however, did not meet. and this, henriot well knew, was a sure sign that he himself was also under observation. richard vance, from birmingham, was equally taking careful note of felix henriot, from london. thus, he could wait his time. they would come together later. an opportunity would certainly present itself. the first links in a curious chain had already caught; soon the chain would tighten, pull as though by chance, and bring their lives into one and the same circle. wondering in particular for what kind of a companion the second cover was laid, henriot felt certain that their eventual coming together was inevitable. he possessed this kind of divination from first impressions, and not uncommonly it proved correct. following instinct, therefore, he took no steps towards acquaintance, and for several days, owing to the fact that he dined frequently with his hosts, he saw nothing more of richard vance, the business man from birmingham. then, one night, coming home late from his friend's house, he had passed along the great corridor, and was actually a step or so into his bedroom, when a drawling voice sounded close behind him. it was an unpleasant sound. it was very near him too-- "i beg your pardon, but have you, by any chance, such a thing as a compass you could lend me?" the voice was so close that he started. vance stood within touching distance of his body. he had stolen up like a ghostly arab, must have followed him, too, some little distance, for further down the passage the light of an open door--he had passed it on his way--showed where he came from. "eh? i beg your pardon? a--compass, did you say?" he felt disconcerted for a moment. how short the man was, now that he saw him standing. broad and powerful too. henriot looked down upon his thick head of hair. the personality and voice repelled him. possibly his face, caught unawares, betrayed this. "forgive my startling you," said the other apologetically, while the softer expression danced in for a moment and disorganised the rigid set of the face. "the soft carpet, you know. i'm afraid you didn't hear my tread. i wondered"--he smiled again slightly at the nature of the request--"if--by any chance--you had a pocket compass you could lend me?" "ah, a compass, yes! please don't apologise. i believe i have one--if you'll wait a moment. come in, won't you? i'll have a look." the other thanked him but waited in the passage. henriot, it so happened, had a compass, and produced it after a moment's search. "i am greatly indebted to you--if i may return it in the morning. you will forgive my disturbing you at such an hour. my own is broken, and i wanted--er--to find the true north." henriot stammered some reply, and the man was gone. it was all over in a minute. he locked his door and sat down in his chair to think. the little incident had upset him, though for the life of him he could not imagine why. it ought by rights to have been almost ludicrous, yet instead it was the exact reverse--half threatening. why should not a man want a compass? but, again, why should he? and at midnight? the voice, the eyes, the near presence--what did they bring that set his nerves thus asking unusual questions? this strange impression that something grave was happening, something unearthly--how was it born exactly? the man's proximity came like a shock. it had made him start. he brought--thus the idea came unbidden to his mind--something with him that galvanised him quite absurdly, as fear does, or delight, or great wonder. there was a music in his voice too--a certain--well, he could only call it lilt, that reminded him of plainsong, intoning, chanting. drawling was _not_ the word at all. he tried to dismiss it as imagination, but it would not be dismissed. the disturbance in himself was caused by something not imaginary, but real. and then, for the first time, he discovered that the man had brought a faint, elusive suggestion of perfume with him, an aromatic odour, that made him think of priests and churches. the ghost of it still lingered in the air. ah, here then was the origin of the notion that his voice had chanted: it was surely the suggestion of incense. but incense, intoning, a compass to find the true north--at midnight in a desert hotel! a touch of uneasiness ran through the curiosity and excitement that he felt. and he undressed for bed. "confound my old imagination," he thought, "what tricks it plays me! it'll keep me awake!" but the questions, once started in his mind, continued. he must find explanation of one kind or another before he could lie down and sleep, and he found it at length in--the stars. the man was an astronomer of sorts; possibly an astrologer into the bargain! why not? the stars were wonderful above helouan. was there not an observatory on the mokattam hills, too, where tourists could use the telescopes on privileged days? he had it at last. he even stole out on to his balcony to see if the stranger perhaps was looking through some wonderful apparatus at the heavens. their rooms were on the same side. but the shuttered windows revealed no stooping figure with eyes glued to a telescope. the stars blinked in their many thousands down upon the silent desert. the night held neither sound nor movement. there was a cool breeze blowing across the nile from the lybian sands. it nipped; and he stepped back quickly into the room again. drawing the mosquito curtains carefully about the bed, he put the light out and turned over to sleep. and sleep came quickly, contrary to his expectations, though it was a light and surface sleep. that last glimpse of the darkened desert lying beneath the egyptian stars had touched him with some hand of awful power that ousted the first, lesser excitement. it calmed and soothed him in one sense, yet in another, a sense he could not understand, it caught him in a net of deep, deep feelings whose mesh, while infinitely delicate, was utterly stupendous. his nerves this deeper emotion left alone: it reached instead to something infinite in him that mere nerves could neither deal with nor interpret. the soul awoke and whispered in him while his body slept. and the little, foolish dreams that ran to and fro across this veil of surface sleep brought oddly tangled pictures of things quite tiny and at the same time of others that were mighty beyond words. with these two counters nightmare played. they interwove. there was the figure of this dark-faced man with the compass, measuring the sky to find the true north, and there were hints of giant presences that hovered just outside some curious outline that he traced upon the ground, copied in some nightmare fashion from the heavens. the excitement caused by his visitor's singular request mingled with the profounder sensations his final look at the stars and desert stirred. the two were somehow inter-related. some hours later, before this surface sleep passed into genuine slumber, henriot woke--with an appalling feeling that the desert had come creeping into his room and now stared down upon him where he lay in bed. the wind was crying audibly about the walls outside. a faint, sharp tapping came against the window panes. he sprang instantly out of bed, not yet awake enough to feel actual alarm, yet with the nightmare touch still close enough to cause a sort of feverish, loose bewilderment. he switched the lights on. a moment later he knew the meaning of that curious tapping, for the rising wind was flinging tiny specks of sand against the glass. the idea that they had summoned him belonged, of course, to dream. he opened the window, and stepped out on to the balcony. the stone was very cold under his bare feet. there was a wash of wind all over him. he saw the sheet of glimmering, pale desert near and far; and something stung his skin below the eyes. "the sand," he whispered, "again the sand; always the sand. waking or sleeping, the sand is everywhere--nothing but sand, sand, sand...." he rubbed his eyes. it was like talking in his sleep, talking to someone who had questioned him just before he woke. but was he really properly awake? it seemed next day that he had dreamed it. something enormous, with rustling skirts of sand, had just retreated far into the desert. sand went with it--flowing, trailing, smothering the world. the wind died down. and henriot went back to sleep, caught instantly away into unconsciousness; covered, blinded, swept over by this spreading thing of reddish brown with the great, grey face, whose being was colossal yet quite tiny, and whose fingers, wings and eyes were countless as the stars. but all night long it watched and waited, rising to peer above the little balcony, and sometimes entering the room and piling up beside his very pillow. he dreamed of sand. iii for some days henriot saw little of the man who came from birmingham and pushed curiosity to a climax by asking for a compass in the middle of the night. for one thing, he was a good deal with his friends upon the other side of helouan, and for another, he slept several nights in the desert. he loved the gigantic peace the desert gave him. the world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it. everything faded out. the soul turned inwards upon itself. an arab boy and donkey took out sleeping-bag, food and water to the wadi hof, a desolate gorge about an hour eastwards. it winds between cliffs whose summits rise some thousand feet above the sea. it opens suddenly, cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and undulating hills. it moves about too; he never found it in the same place twice--like an arm of the desert that shifted with the changing lights. here he watched dawns and sunsets, slept through the mid-day heat, and enjoyed the unearthly colouring that swept day and night across the huge horizons. in solitude the desert soaked down into him. at night the jackals cried in the darkness round his cautiously-fed camp fire--small, because wood had to be carried--and in the day-time kites circled overhead to inspect him, and an occasional white vulture flapped across the blue. the weird desolation of this rocky valley, he thought, was like the scenery of the moon. he took no watch with him, and the arrival of the donkey boy an hour after sunrise came almost from another planet, bringing things of time and common life out of some distant gulf where they had lain forgotten among lost ages. the short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the silence that was a little less than comfortable. full light or darkness he could manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his eyes and hide. its effect stepped over imagination. the mind got lost. he could not understand it. for the cliffs and boulders of discoloured limestone shone then with an inward glow that signalled to the desert with veiled lanterns. the misshappen hills, carved by wind and rain into ominous outlines, stirred and nodded. in the morning light they retired into themselves, asleep. but at dusk the tide retreated. they rose from the sea, emerging naked, threatening. they ran together and joined shoulders, the entire army of them. and the glow of their sandy bodies, self-luminous, continued even beneath the stars. only the moonlight drowned it. for the moonrise over the mokattam hills brought a white, grand loveliness that drenched the entire desert. it drew a marvellous sweetness from the sand. it shone across a world as yet unfinished, whereon no life might show itself for ages yet to come. he was alone then upon an empty star, before the creation of things that breathed and moved. what impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous vitality that rose out of all this apparent death. there was no hint of the melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness of wide, monotonous landscape was not here. the endless repetition of sweeping vale and plateau brought infinity within measurable comprehension. he grasped a definite meaning in the phrase "world without end": the desert had no end and no beginning. it gave him a sense of eternal peace, the silent peace that star-fields know. instead of subduing the soul with bewilderment, it inspired with courage, confidence, hope. through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological ages, rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. here was the stillness of eternity. behind the spread grey masque of apparent death lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point. in the desert he felt himself absolutely royal. and this contrast of life, veiling itself in death, was a contradiction that somehow intoxicated. the desert exhilaration never left him. he was never alone. a companionship of millions went with him, and he _felt_ the desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand. it was the khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him in--with the feeling that these few days and nights had been immeasurable, and that he had been away a thousand years. he came back with the magic of the desert in his blood, hotel-life tasteless and insipid by comparison. to human impressions thus he was fresh and vividly sensitive. his being, cleaned and sensitized by pure grandeur, "felt" people--for a time at any rate--with an uncommon sharpness of receptive judgment. he returned to a life somehow mean and meagre, resuming insignificance with his dinner jacket. out with the sand he had been regal; now, like a slave, he strutted self-conscious and reduced. but this imperial standard of the desert stayed a little time beside him, its purity focussing judgment like a lens. the specks of smaller emotions left it clear at first, and as his eye wandered vaguely over the people assembled in the dining-room, it was arrested with a vivid shock upon two figures at the little table facing him. he had forgotten vance, the birmingham man who sought the north at midnight with a pocket compass. he now saw him again, with an intuitive discernment entirely fresh. before memory brought up her clouding associations, some brilliance flashed a light upon him. "that man," henriot thought, "might have come with me. he would have understood and loved it!" but the thought was really this--a moment's reflection spread it, rather: "he belongs somewhere to the desert; the desert brought him out here." and, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a movement running below water--"what does he want with it? what is the deeper motive he conceals? for there is a deeper motive; and it _is_ concealed." but it was the woman seated next him who absorbed his attention really, even while this thought flashed and went its way. the empty chair was occupied at last. unlike his first encounter with the man, she looked straight at him. their eyes met fully. for several seconds there was steady mutual inspection, while her penetrating stare, intent without being rude, passed searchingly all over his face. it was disconcerting. crumbling his bread, he looked equally hard at her, unable to turn away, determined not to be the first to shift his gaze. and when at length she lowered her eyes he felt that many things had happened, as in a long period of intimate conversation. her mind had judged him through and through. questions and answer flashed. they were no longer strangers. for the rest of dinner, though he was careful to avoid direct inspection, he was aware that she felt his presence and was secretly speaking with him. she asked questions beneath her breath. the answers rose with the quickened pulses in his blood. moreover, she explained richard vance. it was this woman's power that shone reflected in the man. she was the one who knew the big, unusual things. vance merely echoed the rush of her vital personality. this was the first impression that he got--from the most striking, curious face he had ever seen in a woman. it remained very near him all through the meal: she had moved to his table, it seemed she sat beside him. their minds certainly knew contact from that moment. it is never difficult to credit strangers with the qualities and knowledge that oneself craves for, and no doubt henriot's active fancy went busily to work. but, none the less, this thing remained and grew: that this woman was aware of the hidden things of egypt he had always longed to know. there was knowledge and guidance she could impart. her soul was searching among ancient things. her face brought the desert back into his thoughts. and with it came--the sand. here was the flash. the sight of her restored the peace and splendour he had left behind him in his desert camps. the rest, of course, was what his imagination constructed upon this slender basis. only,--not all of it was imagination. now, henriot knew little enough of women, and had no pose of "understanding" them. his experience was of the slightest; the love and veneration felt for his own mother had set the entire sex upon the heights. his affairs with women, if so they may be called, had been transient--all but those of early youth, which having never known the devastating test of fulfilment, still remained ideal and superb. there was unconscious humour in his attitude--from a distance; for he regarded women with wonder and respect, as puzzles that sweetened but complicated life, might even endanger it. he certainly was not a marrying man! but now, as he felt the presence of this woman so deliberately possess him, there came over him two clear, strong messages, each vivid with certainty. one was that banal suggestion of familiarity claimed by lovers and the like--he had often heard of it--"i have known that woman before; i have met her ages ago somewhere; she is strangely familiar to me"; and the other, growing out of it almost: "have nothing to do with her; she will bring you trouble and confusion; avoid her, and be warned";--in fact, a distinct presentiment. yet, although henriot dismissed both impressions as having no shred of evidence to justify them, the original clear judgment, as he studied her extraordinary countenance, persisted through all denials the familiarity, and the presentiment, remained. there also remained this other--an enormous imaginative leap!--that she could teach him "egypt." he watched her carefully, in a sense fascinated. he could only describe the face as black, so dark it was with the darkness of great age. elderly was the obvious, natural word; but elderly described the features only. the expression of the face wore centuries. nor was it merely the coal-black eyes that betrayed an ancient, age-travelled soul behind them. the entire presentment mysteriously conveyed it. this woman's heart knew long-forgotten things--the thought kept beating up against him. there were cheek-bones, oddly high, that made him think involuntarily of the well-advertised pharaoh, ramases; a square, deep jaw; and an aquiline nose that gave the final touch of power. for the power undeniably was there, and while the general effect had grimness in it, there was neither harshness nor any forbidding touch about it. there was an implacable sternness in the set of lips and jaw, and, most curious of all, the eyelids over the steady eyes of black were level as a ruler. this level framing made the woman's stare remarkable beyond description. henriot thought of an idol carved in stone, stone hard and black, with eyes that stared across the sand into a world of things non-human, very far away, forgotten of men. the face was finely ugly. this strange dark beauty flashed flame about it. and, as the way ever was with him, henriot next fell to constructing the possible lives of herself and her companion, though without much success. imagination soon stopped dead. she was not old enough to be vance's mother, and assuredly she was not his wife. his interest was more than merely piqued--it was puzzled uncommonly. what was the contrast that made the man seem beside her--vile? whence came, too, the impression that she exercised some strong authority, though never directly exercised, that held him at her mercy? how did he guess that the man resented it, yet did not dare oppose, and that, apparently acquiescing good-humouredly, his will was deliberately held in abeyance, and that he waited sulkily, biding his time? there was furtiveness in every gesture and expression. a hidden motive lurked in him; unworthiness somewhere; he was determined yet ashamed. he watched her ceaselessly and with such uncanny closeness. henriot imagined he divined all this. he leaped to the guess that his expenses were being paid. a good deal more was being paid besides. she was a rich relation, from whom he had expectations; he was serving his seven years, ashamed of his servitude, ever calculating escape--but, perhaps, no ordinary escape. a faint shudder ran over him. he drew in the reins of imagination. of course, the probabilities were that he was hopelessly astray--one usually is on such occasions--but this time, it so happened, he was singularly right. before one thing only his ready invention stopped every time. this vileness, this notion of unworthiness in vance, could not be negative merely. a man with that face was no inactive weakling. the motive he was at such pains to conceal, betraying its existence by that very fact, moved, surely, towards aggressive action. disguised, it never slept. vance was sharply on the alert. he had a plan deep out of sight. and henriot remembered how the man's soft approach along the carpeted corridor had made him start. he recalled the quasi shock it gave him. he thought again of the feeling of discomfort he had experienced. next, his eager fancy sought to plumb the business these two had together in egypt--in the desert. for the desert, he felt convinced, had brought them out. but here, though he constructed numerous explanations, another barrier stopped him. because he _knew_. this woman was in touch with that aspect of ancient egypt he himself had ever sought in vain; and not merely with stones the sand had buried so deep, but with the meanings they once represented, buried so utterly by the sands of later thought. and here, being ignorant, he found no clue that could lead to any satisfactory result, for he possessed no knowledge that might guide him. he floundered--until fate helped him. and the instant fate helped him, the warning and presentiment he had dismissed as fanciful, became real again. he hesitated. caution acted. he would think twice before taking steps to form acquaintance. "better not," thought whispered. "better leave them alone, this queer couple. they're after things that won't do you any good." this idea of mischief, almost of danger, in their purposes was oddly insistent; for what could possibly convey it? but, while he hesitated, fate, who sent the warning, pushed him at the same time into the circle of their lives: at first tentatively--he might still have escaped; but soon urgently--curiosity led him inexorably towards the end. iv it was so simple a manoeuvre by which fate began the innocent game. the woman left a couple of books behind her on the table one night, and henriot, after a moment's hesitation, took them out after her. he knew the titles--_the house of the master_, and _the house of the hidden places_, both singular interpretations of the pyramids that once had held his own mind spellbound. their ideas had been since disproved, if he remembered rightly, yet the titles were a clue--a clue to that imaginative part of his mind that was so busy constructing theories and had found its stride. loose sheets of paper, covered with notes in a minute handwriting, lay between the pages; but these, of course, he did not read, noticing only that they were written round designs of various kinds--intricate designs. he discovered vance in a corner of the smoking-lounge. the woman had disappeared. vance thanked him politely. "my aunt is so forgetful sometimes," he said, and took them with a covert eagerness that did not escape the other's observation. he folded up the sheets and put them carefully in his pocket. on one there was an ink-sketched map, crammed with detail, that might well have referred to some portion of the desert. the points of the compass stood out boldly at the bottom. there were involved geometrical designs again. henriot saw them. they exchanged, then, the commonplaces of conversation, but these led to nothing further. vance was nervous and betrayed impatience. he presently excused himself and left the lounge. ten minutes later he passed through the outer hall, the woman beside him, and the pair of them, wrapped up in cloak and ulster, went out into the night. at the door, vance turned and threw a quick, investigating glance in his direction. there seemed a hint of questioning in that glance; it might almost have been a tentative invitation. but, also, he wanted to see if their exit had been particularly noticed--and by whom. this, briefly told, was the first manoeuvre by which fate introduced them. there was nothing in it. the details were so insignificant, so slight the conversation, so meagre the pieces thus added to henriot's imaginative structure. yet they somehow built it up and made it solid; the outline in his mind began to stand foursquare. that writing, those designs, the manner of the man, their going out together, the final curious look--each and all betrayed points of a hidden thing. subconsciously he was excavating their buried purposes. the sand was shifting. the concentration of his mind incessantly upon them removed it grain by grain and speck by speck. tips of the smothered thing emerged. presently a subsidence would follow with a rush and light would blaze upon its skeleton. he felt it stirring underneath his feet--this flowing movement of light, dry, heaped-up sand. it was always--sand. then other incidents of a similar kind came about, clearing the way to a natural acquaintanceship. henriot watched the process with amusement, yet with another feeling too that was only a little less than anxiety. a keen observer, no detail escaped him; he saw the forces of their lives draw closer. it made him think of the devices of young people who desire to know one another, yet cannot get a proper introduction. fate condescended to such little tricks. they wanted a third person, he began to feel. a third was necessary to some plan they had on hand, and--they waited to see if he could fill the place. this woman, with whom he had yet exchanged no single word, seemed so familiar to him, well known for years. they weighed and watched him, wondering if he would do. none of the devices were too obviously used, but at length henriot picked up so many forgotten articles, and heard so many significant phrases, casually let fall, that he began to feel like the villain in a machine-made play, where the hero for ever drops clues his enemy is intended to discover. introduction followed inevitably. "my aunt can tell you; she knows arabic perfectly." he had been discussing the meaning of some local name or other with a neighbour after dinner, and vance had joined them. the neighbour moved away; these two were left standing alone, and he accepted a cigarette from the other's case. there was a rustle of skirts behind them. "here she comes," said vance; "you will let me introduce you." he did not ask for henriot's name; he had already taken the trouble to find it out--another little betrayal, and another clue. it was in a secluded corner of the great hall, and henriot turned to see the woman's stately figure coming towards them across the thick carpet that deadened her footsteps. she came sailing up, her black eyes fixed upon his face. very erect, head upright, shoulders almost squared, she moved wonderfully well; there was dignity and power in her walk. she was dressed in black, and her face was like the night. he found it impossible to say what lent her this air of impressiveness and solemnity that was almost majestic. but there _was_ this touch of darkness and of power in the way she came that made him think of some sphinx-like figure of stone, some idol motionless in all its parts but moving as a whole, and gliding across--sand. beneath those level lids her eyes stared hard at him. and a faint sensation of distress stirred in him deep, deep down. where had he seen those eyes before? he bowed, as she joined them, and vance led the way to the armchairs in a corner of the lounge. the meeting, as the talk that followed, he felt, were all part of a preconceived plan. it had happened before. the woman, that is, was familiar to him--to some part of his being that had dropped stitches of old, old memory. lady statham! at first the name had disappointed him. so many folk wear titles, as syllables in certain tongues wear accents--without them being mute, unnoticed, unpronounced. nonentities, born to names, so often claim attention for their insignificance in this way. but this woman, had she been jemima jones, would have made the name distinguished and select. she was a big and sombre personality. why was it, he wondered afterwards, that for a moment something in him shrank, and that his mind, metaphorically speaking, flung up an arm in self-protection? the instinct flashed and passed. but it seemed to him born of an automatic feeling that he must protect--not himself, but the woman from the man. there was confusion in it all; links were missing. he studied her intently. she was a woman who had none of the external feminine signals in either dress or manner, no graces, no little womanly hesitations and alarms, no daintiness, yet neither anything distinctly masculine. her charm was strong, possessing; only he kept forgetting that he was talking to a--woman; and the thing she inspired in him included, with respect and wonder, somewhere also this curious hint of dread. this instinct to protect her fled as soon as it was born, for the interest of the conversation in which she so quickly plunged him obliterated all minor emotions whatsoever. here, for the first time, he drew close to egypt, the egypt he had sought so long. it was not to be explained. he _felt_ it. beginning with commonplaces, such as "you like egypt? you find here what you expected?" she led him into better regions with "one finds here what one brings." he knew the delightful experience of talking fluently on subjects he was at home in, and to some one who understood. the feeling at first that to this woman he could not say mere anythings, slipped into its opposite--that he could say everything. strangers ten minutes ago, they were at once in deep and intimate talk together. he found his ideas readily followed, agreed with up to a point--the point which permits discussion to start from a basis of general accord towards speculation. in the excitement of ideas he neglected the uncomfortable note that had stirred his caution, forgot the warning too. her mind, moreover, seemed known to him; he was often aware of what she was going to say before he actually heard it; the current of her thoughts struck a familiar gait, and more than once he experienced vividly again the odd sensation that it all had happened before. the very sentences and phrases with which she pointed the turns of her unusual ideas were never wholly unexpected. for her ideas were decidedly unusual, in the sense that she accepted without question speculations not commonly deemed worth consideration at all, indeed not ordinarily even known. henriot knew them, because he had read in many fields. it was the strength of her belief that fascinated him. she offered no apologies. she knew. and while he talked, she listening with folded arms and her black eyes fixed upon his own, richard vance watched with vigilant eyes and listened too, ceaselessly alert. vance joined in little enough, however, gave no opinions, his attitude one of general acquiescence. twice, when pauses of slackening interest made it possible, henriot fancied he surprised another quality in this negative attitude. interpreting it each time differently, he yet dismissed both interpretations with a smile. his imagination leaped so absurdly to violent conclusions. they were not tenable: vance was neither her keeper, nor was he in some fashion a detective. yet in his manner was sometimes this suggestion of the detective order. he watched with such deep attention, and he concealed it so clumsily with an affectation of careless indifference. there is nothing more dangerous than that impulsive intimacy strangers sometimes adopt when an atmosphere of mutual sympathy takes them by surprise, for it is akin to the false frankness friends affect when telling "candidly" one another's faults. the mood is invariably regretted later. henriot, however, yielded to it now with something like abandon. the pleasure of talking with this woman was so unexpected, and so keen. for lady statham believed apparently in some egypt of her dreams. her interest was neither historical, archaeological, nor political. it was religious--yet hardly of this earth at all. the conversation turned upon the knowledge of the ancient egyptians from an unearthly point of view, and even while he talked he was vaguely aware that it was _her_ mind talking through his own. she drew out his ideas and made him say them. but this he was properly aware of only afterwards--that she had cleverly, mercilessly pumped him of all he had ever known or read upon the subject. moreover, what vance watched so intently was himself, and the reactions in himself this remarkable woman produced. that also he realised later. his first impression that these two belonged to what may be called the "crank" order was justified by the conversation. but, at least, it was interesting crankiness, and the belief behind it made it even fascinating. long before the end he surprised in her a more vital form of his own attitude that anything _may_ be true, since knowledge has never yet found final answers to any of the biggest questions. he understood, from sentences dropped early in the talk, that she was among those few "superstitious" folk who think that the old egyptians came closer to reading the eternal riddles of the world than any others, and that their knowledge was a remnant of that ancient wisdom religion which existed in the superb, dark civilization of the sunken atlantis, lost continent that once joined africa to mexico. eighty thousand years ago the dim sands of poseidonis, great island adjoining the main continent which itself had vanished a vast period before, sank down beneath the waves, and the entire known world to-day was descended from its survivors. hence the significant fact that all religions and "mythological" systems begin with a story of a flood--some cataclysmic upheaval that destroyed the world. egypt itself was colonised by a group of atlantean priests who brought their curious, deep knowledge with them. they had foreseen the cataclysm. lady statham talked well, bringing into her great dream this strong, insistent quality of belief and fact. she knew, from plato to donelly, all that the minds of men have ever speculated upon the gorgeous legend. the evidence for such a sunken continent--henriot had skimmed it too in years gone by--she made bewilderingly complete. he had heard baconians demolish shakespeare with an array of evidence equally overwhelming. it catches the imagination though not the mind. yet out of her facts, as she presented them, grew a strange likelihood. the force of this woman's personality, and her calm and quiet way of believing all she talked about, took her listener to some extent--further than ever before, certainly--into the great dream after her. and the dream, to say the least, was a picturesque one, laden with wonderful possibilities. for as she talked the spirit of old egypt moved up, staring down upon him out of eyes lidded so curiously level. hitherto all had prated to him of the arabs, their ancient faith and customs, and the splendour of the bedouins, those princes of the desert. but what he sought, barely confessed in words even to himself, was something older far than this. and this strange, dark woman brought it close. deeps in his soul, long slumbering, awoke. he heard forgotten questions. only in this brief way could he attempt to sum up the storm she roused in him. she carried him far beyond mere outline, however, though afterwards he recalled the details with difficulty. so much more was suggested than actually expressed. she contrived to make the general modern scepticism an evidence of cheap mentality. it was so easy; the depth it affects to conceal, mere emptiness. "we have tried all things, and found all wanting"--the mind, as measuring instrument, merely confessed inadequate. various shrewd judgments of this kind increased his respect, although her acceptance went so far beyond his own. and, while the label of credulity refused to stick to her, her sense of imaginative wonder enabled her to escape that dreadful compromise, a man's mind in a woman's temperament. she fascinated him. the spiritual worship of the ancient egyptians, she held, was a symbolical explanation of things generally alluded to as the secrets of life and death; their knowledge was a remnant of the wisdom of atlantis. material relics, equally misunderstood, still stood to-day at karnac, stonehenge, and in the mysterious writings on buried mexican temples and cities, so significantly akin to the hieroglyphics upon the egyptian tombs. "the one misinterpreted as literally as the other," she suggested, "yet both fragments of an advanced knowledge that found its grave in the sea. the wisdom of that old spiritual system has vanished from the world, only a degraded literalism left of its undecipherable language. the jewel has been lost, and the casket is filled with sand, sand, sand." how keenly her black eyes searched his own as she said it, and how oddly she made the little word resound. the syllable drew out almost into chanting. echoes answered from the depths within him, carrying it on and on across some desert of forgotten belief. veils of sand flew everywhere about his mind. curtains lifted. whole hills of sand went shifting into level surfaces whence gardens of dim outline emerged to meet the sunlight. "but the sand may be removed." it was her nephew, speaking almost for the first time, and the interruption had an odd effect, introducing a sharply practical element. for the tone expressed, so far as he dared express it, disapproval. it was a baited observation, an invitation to opinion. "we are not sand-diggers, mr. henriot," put in lady statham, before he decided to respond. "our object is quite another one; and i believe--i have a feeling," she added almost questioningly, "that you might be interested enough to help us perhaps." he only wondered the direct attack had not come sooner. its bluntness hardly surprised him. he felt himself leap forward to accept it. a sudden subsidence had freed his feet. then the warning operated suddenly--for an instant. henriot _was_ interested; more, he was half seduced; but, as yet, he did not mean to be included in their purposes, whatever these might be. that shrinking dread came back a moment, and was gone again before he could question it. his eyes looked full at lady statham. "what is it that you know?" they asked her. "tell me the things we once knew together, you and i. these words are merely trifling. and why does another man now stand in my place? for the sands heaped upon my memory are shifting, and it is _you_ who are moving them away." his soul whispered it; his voice said quite another thing, although the words he used seemed oddly chosen: "there is much in the ideas of ancient egypt that has attracted me ever since i can remember, though i have never caught up with anything definite enough to follow. there was majesty somewhere in their conceptions--a large, calm majesty of spiritual dominion, one might call it perhaps. i _am_ interested." her face remained expressionless as she listened, but there was grave conviction in the eyes that held him like a spell. he saw through them into dim, faint pictures whose background was always sand. he forgot that he was speaking with a woman, a woman who half an hour ago had been a stranger to him. he followed these faded mental pictures, though he never caught them up.... it was like his dream in london. lady statham was talking--he had not noticed the means by which she effected the abrupt transition--of familiar beliefs of old egypt; of the ka, or double, by whose existence the survival of the soul was possible, even its return into manifested, physical life; of the astrology, or influence of the heavenly bodies upon all sublunar activities; of terrific forms of other life, known to the ancient worship of atlantis, great potencies that might be invoked by ritual and ceremonial, and of their lesser influence as recognised in certain lower forms, hence treated with veneration as the "sacred animal" branch of this dim religion. and she spoke lightly of the modern learning which so glibly imagined it was the animals themselves that were looked upon as "gods"--the bull, the bird, the crocodile, the cat. "it's there they all go so absurdly wrong," she said, "taking the symbol for the power symbolised. yet natural enough. the mind to-day wears blinkers, studies only the details seen directly before it. had none of us experienced love, we should think the first lover mad. few to-day know the powers _they_ knew, hence deny them. if the world were deaf it would stand with mockery before a hearing group swayed by an orchestra, pitying both listeners and performers. it would deem our admiration of a great swinging bell mere foolish worship of form and movement. similarly, with high powers that once expressed themselves in common forms--where best they could--being themselves bodiless. the learned men classify the forms with painstaking detail. but deity has gone out of life. the powers symbolised are no longer experienced." "these powers, you suggest, then--their kas, as it were--may still--" but she waved aside the interruption. "they are satisfied, as the common people were, with a degraded literalism," she went on. "nut was the heavens, who spread herself across the earth in the form of a woman; shu, the vastness of space; the ibis typified thoth, and hathor was the patron of the western hills; khonsu, the moon, was personified, as was the deity of the nile. but the high priest of ra, the sun, you notice, remained ever the great one of visions." the high priest, the great one of visions!--how wonderfully again she made the sentence sing. she put splendour into it. the pictures shifted suddenly closer in his mind. he saw the grandeur of memphis and heliopolis rise against the stars and shake the sand of ages from their stern old temples. "you think it possible, then, to get into touch with these high powers you speak of, powers once manifested in common forms?" henriot asked the question with a degree of conviction and solemnity that surprised himself. the scenery changed about him as he listened. the spacious halls of this former khedivial palace melted into desert spaces. he smelt the open wilderness, the sand that haunted helouan. the soft-footed arab servants moved across the hall in their white sheets like eddies of dust the wind stirred from the libyan dunes. and over these two strangers close beside him stole a queer, indefinite alteration. moods and emotions, nameless as unknown stars, rose through his soul, trailing dark mists of memory from unfathomable distances. lady statham answered him indirectly. he found himself wishing that those steady eyes would sometimes close. "love is known only by feeling it," she said, her voice deepening a little. "behind the form you feel the person loved. the process is an evocation, pure and simple. an arduous ceremonial, involving worship and devotional preparation, is the means. it is a difficult ritual--the only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual. ritual is the passage way of the soul into the infinite." he might have said the words himself. the thought lay in him while she uttered it. evocation everywhere in life was as true as assimilation. nevertheless, he stared his companion full in the eyes with a touch of almost rude amazement. but no further questions prompted themselves; or, rather, he declined to ask them. he recalled, somehow uneasily, that in ceremonial the points of the compass have significance, standing for forces and activities that sleep there until invoked, and a passing light fell upon that curious midnight request in the corridor upstairs. these two were on the track of undesirable experiments, he thought.... they wished to include him too. "you go at night sometimes into the desert?" he heard himself saying. it was impulsive and miscalculated. his feeling that it would be wise to change the conversation resulted in giving it fresh impetus instead. "we saw you there--in the wadi hof," put in vance, suddenly breaking his long silence; "you too sleep out, then? it means, you know, the valley of fear." "we wondered--" it was lady statham's voice, and she leaned forward eagerly as she said it, then abruptly left the sentence incomplete. henriot started; a sense of momentary acute discomfort again ran over him. the same second she continued, though obviously changing the phrase--"we wondered how you spent your day there, during the heat. but you paint, don't you? you draw, i mean?" the commonplace question, he realised in every fibre of his being, meant something _they_ deemed significant. was it his talent for drawing that they sought to use him for? even as he answered with a simple affirmative, he had a flash of intuition that might be fanciful, yet that might be true: that this extraordinary pair were intent upon some ceremony of evocation that should summon into actual physical expression some power--some type of life--known long ago to ancient worship, and that they even sought to fix its bodily outline with the pencil--his pencil. a gateway of incredible adventure opened at his feet. he balanced on the edge of knowing unutterable things. here was a clue that might lead him towards the hidden egypt he had ever craved to know. an awful hand was beckoning. the sands were shifting. he saw the million eyes of the desert watching him from beneath the level lids of centuries. speck by speck, and grain by grain, the sand that smothered memory lifted the countless wrappings that embalmed it. and he was willing, yet afraid. why in the world did he hesitate and shrink? why was it that the presence of this silent, watching personality in the chair beside him kept caution still alive, with warning close behind? the pictures in his mind were gorgeously coloured. it was richard vance who somehow streaked them through with black. a thing of darkness, born of this man's unassertive presence, flitted ever across the scenery, marring its grandeur with something evil, petty, dreadful. he held a horrible thought alive. his mind was thinking venal purposes. in henriot himself imagination had grown curiously heated, fed by what had been suggested rather than actually said. ideas of immensity crowded his brain, yet never assumed definite shape. they were familiar, even as this strange woman was familiar. once, long ago, he had known them well; had even practised them beneath these bright egyptian stars. whence came this prodigious glad excitement in his heart, this sense of mighty powers coaxed down to influence the very details of daily life? behind them, for all their vagueness, lay an archetypal splendour, fraught with forgotten meanings. he had always been aware of it in this mysterious land, but it had ever hitherto eluded him. it hovered everywhere. he had felt it brooding behind the towering colossi at thebes, in the skeletons of wasted temples, in the uncouth comeliness of the sphinx, and in the crude terror of the pyramids even. over the whole of egypt hung its invisible wings. these were but isolated fragments of the body that might express it. and the desert remained its cleanest, truest symbol. sand knew it closest. sand might even give it bodily form and outline. but, while it escaped description in his mind, as equally it eluded visualisation in his soul, he felt that it combined with its vastness something infinitely small as well. of such wee particles is the giant desert born.... henriot started nervously in his chair, convicted once more of unconscionable staring; and at the same moment a group of hotel people, returning from a dance, passed through the hall and nodded him good-night. the scent of the women reached him; and with it the sound of their voices discussing personalities just left behind. a london atmosphere came with them. he caught trivial phrases, uttered in a drawling tone, and followed by the shrill laughter of a girl. they passed upstairs, discussing their little things, like marionettes upon a tiny stage. but their passage brought him back to things of modern life, and to some standard of familiar measurement. the pictures that his soul had gazed at so deep within, he realised, were a pictorial transfer caught incompletely from this woman's vivid mind. he had seen the desert as the grey, enormous tomb where hovered still the ka of ancient egypt. sand screened her visage with the veil of centuries. but she was there, and she was living. egypt herself had pitched a temporary camp in him, and then moved on. there was a momentary break, a sense of abruptness and dislocation. and then he became aware that lady statham had been speaking for some time before he caught her actual words, and that a certain change had come into her voice as also into her manner. v she was leaning closer to him, her face suddenly glowing and alive. through the stone figure coursed the fires of a passion that deepened the coal-black eyes and communicated a hint of light--of exaltation--to her whole person. it was incredibly moving. to this deep passion was due the power he had felt. it was her entire life; she lived for it, she would die for it. her calmness of manner enhanced its effect. hence the strength of those first impressions that had stormed him. the woman had belief; however wild and strange, it was sacred to her. the secret of her influence was--conviction. his attitude shifted several points then. the wonder in him passed over into awe. the things she knew were real. they were not merely imaginative speculations. "i knew i was not wrong in thinking you in sympathy with this line of thought," she was saying in lower voice, steady with earnestness, and as though she had read his mind. "you, too, know, though perhaps you hardly realise that you know. it lies so deep in you that you only get vague feelings of it--intimations of memory. isn't that the case?" henriot gave assent with his eyes; it was the truth. "what we know instinctively," she continued, "is simply what we are trying to remember. knowledge is memory." she paused a moment watching his face closely. "at least, you are free from that cheap scepticism which labels these old beliefs as superstition." it was not even a question. "i--worship real belief--of any kind," he stammered, for her words and the close proximity of her atmosphere caused a strange upheaval in his heart that he could not account for. he faltered in his speech. "it is the most vital quality in life--rarer than deity." he was using her own phrases even. "it is creative. it constructs the world anew--" "and may reconstruct the old." she said it, lifting her face above him a little, so that her eyes looked down into his own. it grew big and somehow masculine. it was the face of a priest, spiritual power in it. where, oh where in the echoing past had he known this woman's soul? he saw her in another setting, a forest of columns dim about her, towering above giant aisles. again he felt the desert had come close. into this tent-like hall of the hotel came the sifting of tiny sand. it heaped softly about the very furniture against his feet, blocking the exits of door and window. it shrouded the little present. the wind that brought it stirred a veil that had hung for ages motionless.... she had been saying many things that he had missed while his mind went searching. "there were types of life the atlantean system knew it might revive--life unmanifested to-day in any bodily form," was the sentence he caught with his return to the actual present. "a type of life?" he whispered, looking about him, as though to see who it was had joined them; "you mean a--soul? some kind of soul, alien to humanity, or to--to any forms of living thing in the world to-day?" what she had been saying reached him somehow, it seemed, though he had not heard the words themselves. still hesitating, he was yet so eager to hear. already he felt she meant to include him in her purposes, and that in the end he must go willingly. so strong was her persuasion on his mind. and he felt as if he knew vaguely what was coming. before she answered his curious question--prompting it indeed--rose in his mind that strange idea of the group-soul: the theory that big souls cannot express themselves in a single individual, but need an entire group for their full manifestation. he listened intently. the reflection that this sudden intimacy was unnatural, he rejected, for many conversations were really gathered into one. long watching and preparation on both sides had cleared the way for the ripening of acquaintance into confidence--how long he dimly wondered? but if this conception of the group-soul was not new, the suggestion lady statham developed out of it was both new and startling--and yet always so curiously familiar. its value for him lay, not in far-fetched evidence that supported it, but in the deep belief which made it a vital asset in an honest inner life. "an individual," she said quietly, "one soul expressed completely in a single person, i mean, is exceedingly rare. not often is a physical instrument found perfect enough to provide it with adequate expression. in the lower ranges of humanity--certainly in animal and insect life--one soul is shared by many. behind a tribe of savages stands one savage. a flock of birds is a single bird, scattered through the consciousness of all. they wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey the deep intelligence called instinct--all as one. the life of any one lion is the life of all--the lion group-soul that manifests itself in the entire genus. an ant-heap is a single ant; through the bees spreads the consciousness of a single bee." henriot knew what she was working up to. in his eagerness to hasten disclosure he interrupted-- "and there may be types of life that have no corresponding bodily expression at all, then?" he asked as though the question were forced out of him. "they exist as powers--unmanifested on the earth to-day?" "powers," she answered, watching him closely with unswerving stare, "that need a group to provide their body--their physical expression--if they came back." "came back!" he repeated below his breath. but she heard him. "they once had expression. egypt, atlantis knew them--spiritual powers that never visit the world to-day." "bodies," he whispered softly, "actual bodies?" "their sphere of action, you see, would be their body. and it might be physical outline. so potent a descent of spiritual life would select materials for its body where it could find them. our conventional notion of a body--what is it? a single outline moving altogether in one direction. for little human souls, or fragments, this is sufficient. but for vaster types of soul an entire host would be required." "a church?" he ventured. "some body of belief, you surely mean?" she bowed her head a moment in assent. she was determined he should seize her meaning fully. "a wave of spiritual awakening--a descent of spiritual life upon a nation," she answered slowly, "forms itself a church, and the body of true believers are its sphere of action. they are literally its bodily expression. each individual believer is a corpuscle in that body. the power has provided itself with a vehicle of manifestation. otherwise we could not know it. and the more real the belief of each individual, the more perfect the expression of the spiritual life behind them all. a group-soul walks the earth. moreover, a nation naturally devout could attract a type of soul unknown to a nation that denies all faith. faith brings back the gods.... but to-day belief is dead, and deity has left the world." she talked on and on, developing this main idea that in days of older faiths there were deific types of life upon the earth, evoked by worship and beneficial to humanity. they had long ago withdrawn because the worship which brought them down had died the death. the world had grown pettier. these vast centres of spiritual power found no "body" in which they now could express themselves or manifest.... her thoughts and phrases poured over him like sand. it was always sand he felt--burying the present and uncovering the past.... he tried to steady his mind upon familiar objects, but wherever he looked sand stared him in the face. outside these trivial walls the desert lay listening. it lay waiting too. vance himself had dropped out of recognition. he belonged to the world of things to-day. but this woman and himself stood thousands of years away, beneath the columns of a temple in the sands. and the sands were moving. his feet went shifting with them ... running down vistas of ageless memory that woke terror by their sheer immensity of distance.... like a muffled voice that called to him through many veils and wrappings, he heard her describe the stupendous powers that evocation might coax down again among the world of men. "to what useful end?" he asked at length, amazed at his own temerity, and because he knew instinctively the answer in advance. it rose through these layers of coiling memory in his soul. "the extension of spiritual knowledge and the widening of life," she answered. "the link with the 'unearthly kingdom' wherein this ancient system went forever searching, would be re-established. complete rehabilitation might follow. portions--little portions of these powers--expressed themselves naturally once in certain animal types, instinctive life that did not deny or reject them. the worship of sacred animals was the relic of a once gigantic system of evocation--not of monsters," and she smiled sadly, "but of powers that were willing and ready to descend when worship summoned them." again, beneath his breath, henriot heard himself murmur--his own voice startled him as he whispered it: "actual bodily shape and outline?" "material for bodies is everywhere," she answered, equally low; "dust to which we all return; sand, if you prefer it, fine, fine sand. life moulds it easily enough, when that life is potent." a certain confusion spread slowly through his mind as he heard her. he lit a cigarette and smoked some minutes in silence. lady statham and her nephew waited for him to speak. at length, after some inner battling and hesitation, he put the question that he knew they waited for. it was impossible to resist any longer. "it would be interesting to know the method," he said, "and to revive, perhaps, by experiment--" before he could complete his thought, she took him up: "there are some who claim to know it," she said gravely--her eyes a moment masterful. "a clue, thus followed, might lead to the entire reconstruction i spoke of." "and the method?" he repeated faintly. "evoke the power by ceremonial evocation--the ritual is obtainable--and note the form it assumes. then establish it. this shape or outline once secured, could then be made permanent--a mould for its return at will--its natural physical expression here on earth." "idol!" he exclaimed. "image," she replied at once. "life, before we can know it, must have a body. our souls, in order to manifest here, need a material vehicle." "and--to obtain this form or outline?" he began; "to fix it, rather?" "would be required the clever pencil of a fearless looker-on--some one not engaged in the actual evocation. this form, accurately made permanent in solid matter, say in stone, would provide a channel always open. experiment, properly speaking, might then begin. the cisterns of power behind would be accessible." "an amazing proposition!" henriot exclaimed. what surprised him was that he felt no desire to laugh, and little even to doubt. "yet known to every religion that ever deserved the name," put in vance like a voice from a distance. blackness came somehow with his interruption--a touch of darkness. he spoke eagerly. to all the talk that followed, and there was much of it, henriot listened with but half an ear. this one idea stormed through him with an uproar that killed attention. judgment was held utterly in abeyance. he carried away from it some vague suggestion that this woman had hinted at previous lives she half remembered, and that every year she came to egypt, haunting the sands and temples in the effort to recover lost clues. and he recalled afterwards that she said, "this all came to me as a child, just as though it was something half remembered." there was the further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they, too, had met before. but this, compared to the grave certainty of the rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. he answered, hardly knowing what he said. his preoccupation with other thoughts deep down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty phrases, with his mind elsewhere. his one desire was to escape and be alone, and it was with genuine relief that he presently excused himself and went upstairs to bed. the halls, he noticed, were empty; an arab servant waited to put the lights out. he walked up, for the lift had long ceased running. and the magic of old egypt stalked beside him. the studies that had fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had subdued his mind in boyhood. the cult of osiris woke in his blood again; horus and nephthys stirred in their long-forgotten centres. there revived in him, too long buried, the awful glamour of those liturgal rites and vast body of observances, those spells and formulae of incantation of the oldest known recension that years ago had captured his imagination and belief--the book of the dead. trumpet voices called to his heart again across the desert of some dim past. there were forms of life--impulses from the creative power which is the universe--other than the soul of man. they could be known. a spiritual exaltation, roused by the words and presence of this singular woman, shouted to him as he went. then, as he closed his bedroom door, carefully locking it, there stood beside him--vance. the forgotten figure of vance came up close--the watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detective mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringing darkness. vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentity for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding an explanation of his presence. and, with an equal suddenness, explanation offered itself then and there. it came unsought, its horror of certainty utterly unjustified; and it came in this unexpected fashion: behind the interest and acquiescence of the man ran--fear: but behind the vivid fear ran another thing that henriot now perceived was vile. for the first time in his life, henriot knew it at close quarters, actual, ready to operate. though familiar enough in daily life to be of common occurrence, henriot had never realised it as he did now, so close and terrible. in the same way he had never _realised_ that he would die--vanish from the busy world of men and women, forgotten as though he had never existed, an eddy of wind-blown dust. and in the man named richard vance this thing was close upon blossom. henriot could not name it to himself. even in thought it appalled him. * * * * * he undressed hurriedly, almost with the child's idea of finding safety between the sheets. his mind undressed itself as well. the business of the day laid itself automatically aside; the will sank down; desire grew inactive. henriot was exhausted. but, in that stage towards slumber when thinking stops, and only fugitive pictures pass across the mind in shadowy dance, his brain ceased shouting its mechanical explanations, and his soul unveiled a peering eye. great limbs of memory, smothered by the activities of the present, stirred their stiffened lengths through the sands of long ago--sands this woman had begun to excavate from some far-off pre-existence they had surely known together. vagueness and certainty ran hand in hand. details were unrecoverable, but the emotions in which they were embedded moved. he turned restlessly in his bed, striving to seize the amazing clues and follow them. but deliberate effort hid them instantly again; they retired instantly into the subconsciousness. with the brain of this body he now occupied they had nothing to do. the brain stored memories of each life only. this ancient script was graven in his soul. subconsciousness alone could interpret and reveal. and it was his subconscious memory that lady statham had been so busily excavating. dimly it stirred and moved about the depths within him, never clearly seen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable knowledge. against the darker background of vance's fear and sinister purpose--both of this present life, and recent--he saw the grandeur of this woman's impossible dream, and _knew_, beyond argument or reason, that it was true. judgment and will asleep, he left the impossibility aside, and took the grandeur. the belief of lady statham was not credulity and superstition; it was memory. still to this day, over the sands of egypt, hovered immense spiritual potencies, so vast that they could only know physical expression in a group--in many. their sphere of bodily manifestation must be a host, each individual unit in that host a corpuscle in the whole. the wind, rising from the lybian wastes across the nile, swept up against the exposed side of the hotel, and made his windows rattle--the old, sad winds of egypt. henriot got out of bed to fasten the outside shutters. he stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behind the sakkara pyramids. the pleiades and orion's belt hung brilliantly; the great bear was close to the horizon. in the sky above the desert swung ten thousand stars. no sounds rose from the streets of helouan. the tide of sand was coming slowly in. and a flock of enormous thoughts swooped past him from fields of this unbelievable, lost memory. the desert, pale in the moon, was coextensive with the night, too huge for comfort or understanding, yet charged to the brim with infinite peace. behind its majesty of silence lay whispers of a vanished language that once could call with power upon mighty spiritual agencies. its skirts were folded now, but, slowly across the leagues of sand, they began to stir and rearrange themselves. he grew suddenly aware of this enveloping shroud of sand--as the raw material of bodily expression: form. the sand was in his imagination and his mind. shaking loosely the folds of its gigantic skirts, it rose; it moved a little towards him. he saw the eternal countenance of the desert watching him--immobile and unchanging behind these shifting veils the winds laid so carefully over it. egypt, the ancient egypt, turned in her vast sarcophagus of desert, wakening from her sleep of ages at the belief of approaching worshippers. only in this insignificant manner could he express a letter of the terrific language that crowded to seek expression through his soul.... he closed the shutters and carefully fastened them. he turned to go back to bed, curiously trembling. then, as he did so, the whole singular delusion caught him with a shock that held him motionless. up rose the stupendous apparition of the entire desert and stood behind him on that balcony. swift as thought, in silence, the desert stood on end against his very face. it towered across the sky, hiding orion and the moon; it dipped below the horizons. the whole grey sheet of it rose up before his eyes and stood. through its unfolding skirts ran ten thousand eddies of swirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes smoothed themselves out in moonlight. and a bleak, scarred countenance, huge as a planet, gazed down into his own.... through his dreamless sleep that night two things lay active and awake ... in the subconscious part that knows no slumber. they were incongruous. one was evil, small and human; the other unearthly and sublime. for the memory of the fear that haunted vance, and the sinister cause of it, pricked at him all night long. but behind, beyond this common, intelligible emotion, lay the crowding wonder that caught his soul with glory: the sand was stirring, the desert was awake. ready to mate with them in material form, brooded close the ka of that colossal entity that once expressed itself through the myriad life of ancient egypt. vi next day, and for several days following, henriot kept out of the path of lady statham and her nephew. the acquaintanceship had grown too rapidly to be quite comfortable. it was easy to pretend that he took people at their face value, but it was a pose; one liked to know something of antecedents. it was otherwise difficult to "place" them. and henriot, for the life of him, could not "place" these two. his subconsciousness brought explanation when it came--but the subconsciousness is only temporarily active. when it retired he floundered without a rudder, in confusion. with the flood of morning sunshine the value of much she had said evaporated. her presence alone had supplied the key to the cipher. but while the indigestible portions he rejected, there remained a good deal he had already assimilated. the discomfort remained; and with it the grave, unholy reality of it all. it was something more than theory. results would follow--if he joined them. he would witness curious things. the force with which it drew him brought hesitation. it operated in him like a shock that numbs at first by its abrupt arrival, and needs time to realise in the right proportions to the rest of life. these right proportions, however, did not come readily, and his emotions ranged between sceptical laughter and complete acceptance. the one detail he felt certain of was this dreadful thing he had divined in vance. trying hard to disbelieve it, he found he could not. it was true. though without a shred of real evidence to support it, the horror of it remained. he knew it in his very bones. and this, perhaps, was what drove him to seek the comforting companionship of folk he understood and felt at home with. he told his host and hostess about the strangers, though omitting the actual conversation because they would merely smile in blank miscomprehension. but the moment he described the strong black eyes beneath the level eyelids, his hostess turned with a start, her interest deeply roused: "why, it's that awful statham woman," she exclaimed, "that must be lady statham, and the man she calls her nephew." "sounds like it, certainly," her husband added. "felix, you'd better clear out. they'll bewitch you too." and henriot bridled, yet wondering why he did so. he drew into his shell a little, giving the merest sketch of what had happened. but he listened closely while these two practical old friends supplied him with information in the gossiping way that human nature loves. no doubt there was much embroidery, and more perversion, exaggeration too, but the account evidently rested upon some basis of solid foundation for all that. smoke and fire go together always. "he _is_ her nephew right enough," mansfield corrected his wife, before proceeding to his own man's form of elaboration; "no question about that, i believe. he's her favourite nephew, and she's as rich as a pig. he follows her out here every year, waiting for her empty shoes. but they _are_ an unsavoury couple. i've met 'em in various parts, all over egypt, but they always come back to helouan in the end. and the stories about them are simply legion. you remember--" he turned hesitatingly to his wife--"some people, i heard," he changed his sentence, "were made quite ill by her." "i'm sure felix ought to know, yes," his wife boldly took him up, "my niece, fanny, had the most extraordinary experience." she turned to henriot. "her room was next to lady statham in some hotel or other at assouan or edfu, and one night she woke and heard a kind of mysterious chanting or intoning next her. hotel doors are so dreadfully thin. there was a funny smell too, like incense of something sickly, and a man's voice kept chiming in. it went on for hours, while she lay terrified in bed--" "frightened, you say?" asked henriot. "out of her skin, yes; she said it was so uncanny--made her feel icy. she wanted to ring the bell, but was afraid to leave her bed. the room was full of--of things, yet she could see nothing. she _felt_ them, you see. and after a bit the sound of this sing-song voice so got on her nerves, it half dazed her--a kind of enchantment--she felt choked and suffocated. and then--" it was her turn to hesitate. "tell it all," her husband said, quite gravely too. "well--something came in. at least, she describes it oddly, rather; she said it made the door bulge inwards from the next room, but not the door alone; the walls bulged or swayed as if a huge thing pressed against them from the other side. and at the same moment her windows--she had two big balconies, and the venetian shutters were fastened--both her windows _darkened_--though it was two in the morning and pitch dark outside. she said it was all _one_ thing--trying to get in; just as water, you see, would rush in through every hole and opening it could find, and all at once. and in spite of her terror--that's the odd part of it--she says she felt a kind of splendour in her--a sort of elation." "she saw nothing?" "she says she doesn't remember. her senses left her, i believe--though she won't admit it." "fainted for a minute, probably," said mansfield. "so there it is," his wife concluded, after a silence. "and that's true. it happened to my niece, didn't it, john?" stories and legendary accounts of strange things that the presence of these two brought poured out then. they were obviously somewhat mixed, one account borrowing picturesque details from another, and all in disproportion, as when people tell stories in a language they are little familiar with. but, listening with avidity, yet also with uneasiness, somehow, henriot put two and two together. truth stood behind them somewhere. these two held traffic with the powers that ancient egypt knew. "tell felix, dear, about the time you met the nephew--horrid creature--in the valley of the kings," he heard his wife say presently. and mansfield told it plainly enough, evidently glad to get it done, though. "it was some years ago now, and i didn't know who he was then, or anything about him. i don't know much more now--except that he's a dangerous sort of charlatan-devil, _i_ think. but i came across him one night up there by thebes in the valley of the kings--you know, where they buried all their johnnies with so much magnificence and processions and masses, and all the rest. it's the most astounding, the most haunted place you ever saw, gloomy, silent, full of gorgeous lights and shadows that seem alive--terribly impressive; it makes you creep and shudder. you feel old egypt watching you." "get on, dear," said his wife. "well, i was coming home late on a blasted lazy donkey, dog-tired into the bargain, when my donkey boy suddenly ran for his life and left me alone. it was after sunset. the sand was red and shining, and the big cliffs sort of fiery. and my donkey stuck its four feet in the ground and wouldn't budge. then, about fifty yards away, i saw a fellow--european apparently--doing something--heaven knows what, for i can't describe it--among the boulders that lie all over the ground there. ceremony, i suppose you'd call it. i was so interested that at first i watched. then i saw he wasn't alone. there were a lot of moving things round him, towering big things, that came and went like shadows. that twilight is fearfully bewildering; perspective changes, and distance gets all confused. it's fearfully hard to see properly. i only remember that i got off my donkey and went up closer, and when i was within a dozen yards of him--well, it sounds such rot, you know, but i swear the things suddenly rushed off and left him there alone. they went with a roaring noise like wind; shadowy but tremendously big, they were, and they vanished up against the fiery precipices as though they slipped bang into the stone itself. the only thing i can think of to describe 'em is--well, those sand-storms the khamasin raises--the hot winds, you know." "they probably _were_ sand," his wife suggested, burning to tell another story of her own. "possibly, only there wasn't a breath of wind, and it was hot as blazes--and--i had such extraordinary sensations--never felt anything like it before--wild and exhilarated--drunk, i tell you, drunk." "you saw them?" asked henriot. "you made out their shape at all, or outline?" "sphinx," he replied at once, "for all the world like sphinxes. you know the kind of face and head these limestone strata in the desert take--great visages with square egyptian head-dresses where the driven sand has eaten away the softer stuff beneath? you see it everywhere--enormous idols they seem, with faces and eyes and lips awfully like the sphinx--well, that's the nearest i can get to it." he puffed his pipe hard. but there was no sign of levity in him. he told the actual truth as far as in him lay, yet half ashamed of what he told. and a good deal he left out, too. "she's got a face of the same sort, that statham horror," his wife said with a shiver. "reduce the size, and paint in awful black eyes, and you've got her exactly--a living idol." and all three laughed, yet a laughter without merriment in it. "and you spoke to the man?" "i did," the englishman answered, "though i confess i'm a bit ashamed of the way i spoke. fact is, i was excited, thunderingly excited, and felt a kind of anger. i wanted to kick the beggar for practising such bally rubbish, and in such a place too. yet all the time--well, well, i believe it was sheer funk now," he laughed; "for i felt uncommonly queer out there in the dusk, alone with--with that kind of business; and i was angry with myself for feeling it. anyhow, i went up--i'd lost my donkey boy as well, remember--and slated him like a dog. i can't remember what i said exactly--only that he stood and stared at me in silence. that made it worse--seemed twice as real then. the beggar said no single word the whole time. he signed to me with one hand to clear out. and then, suddenly out of nothing--she--that woman--appeared and stood beside him. i never saw her come. she must have been behind some boulder or other, for she simply rose out of the ground. she stood there and stared at me too--bang in the face. she was turned towards the sunset--what was left of it in the west--and her black eyes shone like--ugh! i can't describe it--it was shocking." "she spoke?" "she said five words--and her voice--it'll make you laugh--it was metallic like a gong: 'you are in danger here.' that's all she said. i simply turned and cleared out as fast as ever i could. but i had to go on foot. my donkey had followed its boy long before. i tell you--smile as you may--my blood was all curdled for an hour afterwards." then he explained that he felt some kind of explanation or apology was due, since the couple lodged in his own hotel, and how he approached the man in the smoking-room after dinner. a conversation resulted--the man was quite intelligent after all--of which only one sentence had remained in his mind. "perhaps you can explain it, felix. i wrote it down, as well as i could remember. the rest confused me beyond words or memory; though i must confess it did not seem--well, not utter rot exactly. it was about astrology and rituals and the worship of the old egyptians, and i don't know what else besides. only, he made it intelligible and almost sensible, if only i could have got the hang of the thing enough to remember it. you know," he added, as though believing in spite of himself, "there _is_ a lot of that wonderful old egyptian religious business still hanging about in the atmosphere of this place, say what you like." "but this sentence?" henriot asked. and the other went off to get a note-book where he had written it down. "he was jawing, you see," he continued when he came back, henriot and his wife having kept silence meanwhile, "about direction being of importance in religious ceremonies, west and north symbolising certain powers, or something of the kind, why people turn to the east and all that sort of thing, and speaking of the whole universe as if it had living forces tucked away in it that expressed themselves somehow when roused up. that's how i remember it anyhow. and then he said this thing--in answer to some fool question probably that i put." and he read out of the note-book: "'you were in danger because you came through the gateway of the west, and the powers from the gateway of the east were at that moment rising, and therefore in direct opposition to you.'" then came the following, apparently a simile offered by way of explanation. mansfield read it in a shamefaced tone, evidently prepared for laughter: "'whether i strike you on the back or in the face determines what kind of answering force i rouse in you. direction is significant.' and he said it was the period called the night of power--time when the desert encroaches and spirits are close." and tossing the book aside, he lit his pipe again and waited a moment to hear what might be said. "can you explain such gibberish?" he asked at length, as neither of his listeners spoke. but henriot said he couldn't. and the wife then took up her own tale of stories that had grown about this singular couple. these were less detailed, and therefore less impressive, but all contributed something towards the atmosphere of reality that framed the entire picture. they belonged to the type one hears at every dinner party in egypt--stories of the vengeance mummies seem to take on those who robbed them, desecrating their peace of centuries; of a woman wearing a necklace of scarabs taken from a princess's tomb, who felt hands about her throat to strangle her; of little ka figures, pasht goddesses, amulets and the rest, that brought curious disaster to those who kept them. they are many and various, astonishingly circumstantial often, and vouched for by persons the reverse of credulous. the modern superstition that haunts the desert gullies with afreets has nothing in common with them. they rest upon a basis of indubitable experience; and they remain--inexplicable. and about the personalities of lady statham and her nephew they crowded like flies attracted by a dish of fruit. the arabs, too, were afraid of her. she had difficulty in getting guides and dragomen. "my dear chap," concluded mansfield, "take my advice and have nothing to do with 'em. there _is_ a lot of queer business knocking about in this old country, and people like that know ways of reviving it somehow. it's upset you already; you looked scared, i thought, the moment you came in." they laughed, but the englishman was in earnest. "i tell you what," he added, "we'll go off for a bit of shooting together. the fields along the delta are packed with birds now: they're home early this year on their way to the north. what d'ye say, eh?" but henriot did not care about the quail shooting. he felt more inclined to be alone and think things out by himself. he had come to his friends for comfort, and instead they had made him uneasy and excited. his interest had suddenly doubled. though half afraid, he longed to know what these two were up to--to follow the adventure to the bitter end. he disregarded the warning of his host as well as the premonition in his own heart. the sand had caught his feet. there were moments when he laughed in utter disbelief, but these were optimistic moods that did not last. he always returned to the feeling that truth lurked somewhere in the whole strange business, and that if he joined forces with them, as they seemed to wish, he would witness--well, he hardly knew what--but it enticed him as danger does the reckless man, or death the suicide. the sand had caught his mind. he decided to offer himself to all they wanted--his pencil too. he would see--a shiver ran through him at the thought--what they saw, and know some eddy of that vanished tide of power and splendour the ancient egyptian priesthood knew, and that perhaps was even common experience in the far-off days of dim atlantis. the sand had caught his imagination too. he was utterly sand-haunted. vii and so he took pains, though without making definite suggestion, to place himself in the way of this woman and her nephew--only to find that his hints were disregarded. they left him alone, if they did not actually avoid him. moreover, he rarely came across them now. only at night, or in the queer dusk hours, he caught glimpses of them moving hurriedly off from the hotel, and always desertwards. and their disregard, well calculated, enflamed his desire to the point when he almost decided to propose himself. quite suddenly, then, the idea flashed through him--how do they come, these odd revelations, when the mind lies receptive like a plate sensitised by anticipation?--that they were waiting for a certain date, and, with the notion, came mansfield's remark about "the night of power," believed in by the old egyptian calendar as a time when the supersensuous world moves close against the minds of men with all its troop of possibilities. and the thought, once lodged in its corner of imagination, grew strong. he looked it up. ten days from now, he found, leyel-el-sud would be upon him, with a moon, too, at the full. and this strange hint of guidance he accepted. in his present mood, as he admitted, smiling to himself, he could accept anything. it was part of it, it belonged to the adventure. but, even while he persuaded himself that it was play, the solemn reality, of what lay ahead increased amazingly, sketched darkly in his very soul. these intervening days he spent as best he could--impatiently, a prey to quite opposite emotions. in the blazing sunshine he thought of it and laughed; but at night he lay often sleepless, calculating chances of escape. he never did escape, however. the desert that watched little helouan with great, unwinking eyes watched also every turn and twist he made. like this oasis, he basked in the sun of older time, and dreamed beneath forgotten moons. the sand at last had crept into his inmost heart. it sifted over him. seeking a reaction from normal, everyday things, he made tourist trips; yet, while recognising the comedy in his attitude, he never could lose sight of the grandeur that banked it up so hauntingly. these two contrary emotions grafted themselves on all he did and saw. he crossed the nile at bedrashein, and went again to the tomb-world of sakkara; but through all the chatter of veiled and helmeted tourists, the _bandar-log_ of our modern jungle, ran this dark under-stream of awe their monkey methods could not turn aside. one world lay upon another, but this modern layer was a shallow crust that, like the phenomenon of the "desert-film," a mere angle of falling light could instantly obliterate. beneath the sand, deep down, he passed along the street of tombs, as he had often passed before, moved then merely by historical curiosity and admiration, but now by emotions for which he found no name. he saw the enormous sarcophagi of granite in their gloomy chambers where the sacred bulls once lay, swathed and embalmed like human beings, and, in the flickering candle light, the mood of ancient rites surged round him, menacing his doubts and laughter. the least human whisper in these subterraneans, dug out first four thousand years ago, revived ominous powers that stalked beside him, forbidding and premonitive. he gazed at the spots where mariette, unearthing them forty years ago, found fresh as of yesterday the marks of fingers and naked feet--of those who set the sixty-five ton slabs in position. and when he came up again into the sunshine he met the eternal questions of the pyramids, overtopping all his mental horizons. sand blocked all the avenues of younger emotion, leaving the channels of something in him incalculably older, open and clean swept. he slipped homewards, uncomfortable and followed, glad to be with a crowd--because he was otherwise alone with more than he could dare to think about. keeping just ahead of his companions, he crossed the desert edge where the ghost of memphis walks under rustling palm trees that screen no stone left upon another of all its mile-long populous splendours. for here was a vista his imagination could realise; here he could know the comfort of solid ground his feet could touch. gigantic ramases, lying on his back beneath their shade and staring at the sky, similarly helped to steady his swaying thoughts. imagination could deal with these. and daily thus he watched the busy world go to and fro to its scale of tips and bargaining, and gladly mingled with it, trying to laugh and study guidebooks, and listen to half-fledged explanations, but always seeing the comedy of his poor attempts. not all those little donkeys, bells tinkling, beads shining, trotting beneath their comical burdens to the tune of shouting and belabouring, could stem this tide of deeper things the woman had let loose in the subconscious part of him. everywhere he saw the mysterious camels go slouching through the sand, gurgling the water in their skinny, extended throats. centuries passed between the enormous knee-stroke of their stride. and, every night, the sunsets restored the forbidding, graver mood, with their crimson, golden splendour, their strange green shafts of light, then--sudden twilight that brought the past upon him with an awful leap. upon the stage then stepped the figures of this pair of human beings, chanting their ancient plainsong of incantation in the moonlit desert, and working their rites of unholy evocation as the priests had worked them centuries before in the sands that now buried sakkara fathoms deep. then one morning he woke with a question in his mind, as though it had been asked of him in sleep and he had waked just before the answer came. "why do i spend my time sight-seeing, instead of going alone into the desert as before? what has made me change?" this latest mood now asked for explanation. and the answer, coming up automatically, startled him. it was so clear and sure--had been lying in the background all along. one word contained it: vance. the sinister intentions of this man, forgotten in the rush of other emotions, asserted themselves again convincingly. the human horror, so easily comprehensible, had been smothered for the time by the hint of unearthly revelations. but it had operated all the time. now it took the lead. he dreaded to be alone in the desert with this dark picture in his mind of what vance meant to bring there to completion. this abomination of a selfish human will returned to fix its terror in him. to be alone in the desert meant to be alone with the imaginative picture of what vance--he knew it with such strange certainty--hoped to bring about there. there was absolutely no evidence to justify the grim suspicion. it seemed indeed far-fetched enough, this connection between the sand and the purpose of an evil-minded, violent man. but henriot saw it true. he could argue it away in a few minutes--easily. yet the instant thought ceased, it returned, led up by intuition. it possessed him, filled his mind with horrible possibilities. he feared the desert as he might have feared the scene of some atrocious crime. and, for the time, this dread of a merely human thing corrected the big seduction of the other--the suggested "super-natural." side by side with it, his desire to join himself to the purposes of the woman increased steadily. they kept out of his way apparently; the offer seemed withdrawn; he grew restless, unable to settle to anything for long, and once he asked the porter casually if they were leaving the hotel. lady statham had been invisible for days, and vance was somehow never within speaking distance. he heard with relief that they had not gone--but with dread as well. keen excitement worked in him underground. he slept badly. like a schoolboy, he waited for the summons to an important examination that involved portentous issues, and contradictory emotions disturbed his peace of mind abominably. viii but it was not until the end of the week, when vance approached him with purpose in his eyes and manner, that henriot knew his fears unfounded, and caught himself trembling with sudden anticipation--because the invitation, so desired yet so dreaded, was actually at hand. firmly determined to keep caution uppermost, yet he went unresistingly to a secluded corner by the palms where they could talk in privacy. for prudence is of the mind, but desire is of the soul, and while his brain of to-day whispered wariness, voices in his heart of long ago shouted commands that he knew he must obey with joy. it was evening and the stars were out. helouan, with her fairy twinkling lights, lay silent against the desert edge. the sand was at the flood. the period of the encroaching of the desert was at hand, and the deeps were all astir with movement. but in the windless air was a great peace. a calm of infinite stillness breathed everywhere. the flow of time, before it rushed away backwards, stopped somewhere between the dust of stars and desert. the mystery of sand touched every street with its unutterable softness. and vance began without the smallest circumlocution. his voice was low, in keeping with the scene, but the words dropped with a sharp distinctness into the other's heart like grains of sand that pricked the skin before they smothered him. caution they smothered instantly; resistance too. "i have a message for you from my aunt," he said, as though he brought an invitation to a picnic. henriot sat in shadow, but his companion's face was in a patch of light that followed them from the windows of the central hall. there was a shining in the light blue eyes that betrayed the excitement his quiet manner concealed. "we are going--the day after to-morrow--to spend the night in the desert; she wondered if, perhaps, you would care to join us?" "for your experiment?" asked henriot bluntly. vance smiled with his lips, holding his eyes steady, though unable to suppress the gleam that flashed in them and was gone so swiftly. there was a hint of shrugging his shoulders. "it is the night of power--in the old egyptian calendar, you know," he answered with assumed lightness almost, "the final moment of leyel-el-sud, the period of black nights when the desert was held to encroach with--with various possibilities of a supernatural order. she wishes to revive a certain practice of the old egyptians. there _may_ be curious results. at any rate, the occasion is a picturesque one--better than this cheap imitation of london life." and he indicated the lights, the signs of people in the hall dressed for gaieties and dances, the hotel orchestra that played after dinner. henriot at the moment answered nothing, so great was the rush of conflicting emotions that came he knew not whence. vance went calmly on. he spoke with a simple frankness that was meant to be disarming. henriot never took his eyes off him. the two men stared steadily at one another. "she wants to know if you will come and help too--in a certain way only: not in the experiment itself precisely, but by watching merely and--" he hesitated an instant, half lowering his eyes. "drawing the picture," henriot helped him deliberately. "drawing what you see, yes," vance replied, the voice turned graver in spite of himself. "she wants--she hopes to catch the outlines of anything that happens--" "comes." "exactly. determine the shape of anything that comes. you may remember your conversation of the other night with her. she is very certain of success." this was direct enough at any rate. it was as formal as an invitation to a dinner, and as guileless. the thing he thought he wanted lay within his reach. he had merely to say yes. he did say yes; but first he looked about him instinctively, as for guidance. he looked at the stars twinkling high above the distant libyan plateau; at the long arms of the desert, gleaming weirdly white in the moonlight, and reaching towards him down every opening between the houses; at the heavy mass of the mokattam hills, guarding the arabian wilderness with strange, peaked barriers, their sand-carved ridges dark and still above the wadi hof. these questionings attracted no response. the desert watched him, but it did not answer. there was only the shrill whistling cry of the lizards, and the sing-song of a white-robed arab gliding down the sandy street. and through these sounds he heard his own voice answer: "i will come--yes. but how can i help? tell me what you propose--your plan?" and the face of vance, seen plainly in the electric glare, betrayed his satisfaction. the opposing things in the fellow's mind of darkness fought visibly in his eyes and skin. the sordid motive, planning a dreadful act, leaped to his face, and with it a flash of this other yearning that sought unearthly knowledge, perhaps believed it too. no wonder there was conflict written on his features. then all expression vanished again; he leaned forward, lowering his voice. "you remember our conversation about there being types of life too vast to manifest in a single body, and my aunt's belief that these were known to certain of the older religious systems of the world?" "perfectly." "her experiment, then, is to bring one of these great powers back--we possess the sympathetic ritual that can rouse some among them to activity--and win it down into the sphere of our minds, our minds heightened, you see, by ceremonial to that stage of clairvoyant vision which can perceive them." "and then?" they might have been discussing the building of a house, so naturally followed answer upon question. but the whole body of meaning in the old egyptian symbolism rushed over him with a force that shook his heart. memory came so marvellously with it. "if the power floods down into our minds with sufficient strength for actual form, to note the outline of such form, and from your drawing model it later in permanent substance. then we should have means of evoking it at will, for we should have its natural body--the form it built itself, its signature, image, pattern. a starting-point, you see, for more--leading, she hopes, to a complete reconstruction." "it might take actual shape--assume a bodily form visible to the eye?" repeated henriot, amazed as before that doubt and laughter did not break through his mind. "we are on the earth," was the reply, spoken unnecessarily low since no living thing was within earshot, "we are in physical conditions, are we not? even a human soul we do not recognise unless we see it in a body--parents provide the outline, the signature, the sigil of the returning soul. this," and he tapped himself upon the breast, "is the physical signature of that type of life we call a soul. unless there is life of a certain strength behind it, no body forms. and, without a body, we are helpless to control or manage it--deal with it in any way. we could not know it, though being possibly _aware_ of it." "to be aware, you mean, is not sufficient?" for he noticed the italics vance made use of. "too vague, of no value for future use," was the reply. "but once obtain the form, and we have the natural symbol of that particular power. and a symbol is more than image, it is a direct and concentrated expression of the life it typifies--possibly terrific." "it may be a body, then, this symbol you speak of." "accurate vehicle of manifestation; but 'body' seems the simplest word." vance answered very slowly and deliberately, as though weighing how much he would tell. his language was admirably evasive. few perhaps would have detected the profound significance the curious words he next used unquestionably concealed. henriot's mind rejected them, but his heart accepted. for the ancient soul in him was listening and aware. "life, using matter to express itself in bodily shape, first traces a geometrical pattern. from the lowest form in crystals, upwards to more complicated patterns in the higher organisations--there is always first this geometrical pattern as skeleton. for geometry lies at the root of all possible phenomena; and is the mind's interpretation of a living movement towards shape that shall express it." he brought his eyes closer to the other, lowering his voice again. "hence," he said softly, "the signs in all the old magical systems--skeleton forms into which the powers evoked descended; outlines those powers automatically built up when using matter to express themselves. such signs are material symbols of their bodiless existence. they attract the life they represent and interpret. obtain the correct, true symbol, and the power corresponding to it can approach--once roused and made aware. it has, you see, a ready-made mould into which it can come down." "once roused and made aware?" repeated henriot questioningly, while this man went stammering the letters of a language that he himself had used too long ago to recapture fully. "because they have left the world. they sleep, unmanifested. their forms are no longer known to men. no forms exist on earth to-day that could contain them. but they may be awakened," he added darkly. "they are bound to answer to the summons, if such summons be accurately made." "evocation?" whispered henriot, more distressed than he cared to admit. vance nodded. leaning still closer, to his companion's face, he thrust his lips forward, speaking eagerly, earnestly, yet somehow at the same time, horribly: "and we want--my aunt would ask--your draughtsman's skill, or at any rate your memory afterwards, to establish the outline of anything that comes." he waited for the answer, still keeping his face uncomfortably close. henriot drew back a little. but his mind was fully made up now. he had known from the beginning that he would consent, for the desire in him was stronger than all the caution in the world. the past inexorably drew him into the circle of these other lives, and the little human dread vance woke in him seemed just then insignificant by comparison. it was merely of to-day. "you two," he said, trying to bring judgment into it, "engaged in evocation, will be in a state of clairvoyant vision. granted. but shall i, as an outsider, observing with unexcited mind, see anything, know anything, be aware of anything at all, let alone the drawing of it?" "unless," the reply came instantly with decision, "the descent of power is strong enough to take actual material shape, the experiment is a failure. anybody can induce subjective vision. such fantasies have no value though. they are born of an overwrought imagination." and then he added quickly, as though to clinch the matter before caution and hesitation could take effect: "you must watch from the heights above. we shall be in the valley--the wadi hof is the place. you must not be too close--" "why not too close?" asked henriot, springing forward like a flash before he could prevent the sudden impulse. with a quickness equal to his own, vance answered. there was no faintest sign that he was surprised. his self-control was perfect. only the glare passed darkly through his eyes and went back again into the sombre soul that bore it. "for your own safety," he answered low. "the power, the type of life, she would waken is stupendous. and if roused enough to be attracted by the patterned symbol into which she would decoy it down, it will take actual, physical expression. but how? where is the body of worshippers through whom it can manifest? there is none. it will, therefore, press inanimate matter into the service. the terrific impulse to form itself a means of expression will force all loose matter at hand towards it--sand, stones, all it can compel to yield--everything must rush into the sphere of action in which it operates. alone, we at the centre, and you, upon the outer fringe, will be safe. only--you must not come too close." but henriot was no longer listening. his soul had turned to ice. for here, in this unguarded moment, the cloven hoof had plainly shown itself. in that suggestion of a particular kind of danger vance had lifted a corner of the curtain behind which crouched his horrible intention. vance desired a witness of the extraordinary experiment, but he desired this witness, not merely for the purpose of sketching possible shapes that might present themselves to excited vision. he desired a witness for another reason too. why had vance put that idea into his mind, this idea of so peculiar danger? it might well have lost him the very assistance he seemed so anxious to obtain. henriot could not fathom it quite. only one thing was clear to him. he, henriot, was not the only one in danger. they talked for long after that--far into the night. the lights went out, and the armed patrol, pacing to and fro outside the iron railings that kept the desert back, eyed them curiously. but the only other thing he gathered of importance was the ledge upon the cliff-top where he was to stand and watch; that he was expected to reach there before sunset and wait till the moon concealed all glimmer in the western sky, and--that the woman, who had been engaged for days in secret preparation of soul and body for the awful rite, would not be visible again until he saw her in the depths of the black valley far below, busy with this man upon audacious, ancient purposes. ix an hour before sunset henriot put his rugs and food upon a donkey, and gave the boy directions where to meet him--a considerable distance from the appointed spot. he went himself on foot. he slipped in the heat along the sandy street, where strings of camels still go slouching, shuffling with their loads from the quarries that built the pyramids, and he felt that little friendly helouan tried to keep him back. but desire now was far too strong for caution. the desert tide was rising. it easily swept him down the long white street towards the enormous deeps beyond. he felt the pull of a thousand miles before him; and twice a thousand years drove at his back. everything still basked in the sunshine. he passed al hayat, the stately hotel that dominates the village like a palace built against the sky; and in its pillared colonnades and terraces he saw the throngs of people having late afternoon tea and listening to the music of a regimental band. men in flannels were playing tennis, parties were climbing off donkeys after long excursions; there was laughter, talking, a babel of many voices. the gaiety called to him; the everyday spirit whispered to stay and join the crowd of lively human beings. soon there would be merry dinner-parties, dancing, voices of pretty women, sweet white dresses, singing, and the rest. soft eyes would question and turn dark. he picked out several girls he knew among the palms. but it was all many, oh so many leagues away; centuries lay between him and this modern world. an indescriable loneliness was in his heart. he went searching through the sands of forgotten ages, and wandering among the ruins of a vanished time. he hurried. already the deeper water caught his breath. he climbed the steep rise towards the plateau where the observatory stands, and saw two of the officials whom he knew taking a siesta after their long day's work. he felt that his mind, too, had dived and searched among the heavenly bodies that live in silent, changeless peace remote from the world of men. they recognised him, these two whose eyes also knew tremendous distance close. they beckoned, waving the straws through which they sipped their drinks from tall glasses. their voices floated down to him as from the star-fields. he saw the sun gleam upon the glasses, and heard the clink of the ice against the sides. the stillness was amazing. he waved an answer, and passed quickly on. he could not stop this sliding current of the years. the tide moved faster, the draw of piled-up cycles urging it. he emerged upon the plateau, and met the cooler desert air. his feet went crunching on the "desert-film" that spread its curious dark shiny carpet as far as the eye could reach; it lay everywhere, unswept and smooth as when the feet of vanished civilizations trod its burning surface, then dipped behind the curtains time pins against the stars. and here the body of the tide set all one way. there was a greater strength of current, draught and suction. he felt the powerful undertow. deeper masses drew his feet sideways, and he felt the rushing of the central body of the sand. the sands were moving, from their foundation upwards. he went unresistingly with them. turning a moment, he looked back at shining little helouan in the blaze of evening light. the voices reached him very faintly, merged now in a general murmur. beyond lay the strip of delta vivid green, the palms, the roofs of bedrashein, the blue laughter of the nile with its flocks of curved felucca sails. further still, rising above the yellow libyan horizon, gloomed the vast triangles of a dozen pyramids, cutting their wedge-shaped clefts out of a sky fast crimsoning through a sea of gold. seen thus, their dignity imposed upon the entire landscape. they towered darkly, symbolic signatures of the ancient powers that now watched him taking these little steps across their damaged territory. he gazed a minute, then went on. he saw the big pale face of the moon in the east. above the ever-silent thing these giant symbols once interpreted, she rose, grand, effortless, half-terrible as themselves. and, with her, she lifted up this tide of the desert that drew his feet across the sand to wadi hof. a moment later he dipped below the ridge that buried helouan and nile and pyramids from sight. he entered the ancient waters. time then, in an instant, flowed back behind his footsteps, obliterating every trace. and with it his mind went too. he stepped across the gulf of centuries, moving into the past. the desert lay before him--an open tomb wherein his soul should read presently of things long vanished. the strange half-lights of sunset began to play their witchery then upon the landscape. a purple glow came down upon the mokattam hills. perspective danced its tricks of false, incredible deception. the soaring kites that were a mile away seemed suddenly close, passing in a moment from the size of gnats to birds with a fabulous stretch of wing. ridges and cliffs rushed close without a hint of warning, and level places sank into declivities and basins that made him trip and stumble. that indescribable quality of the desert, which makes timid souls avoid the hour of dusk, emerged; it spread everywhere, undisguised. and the bewilderment it brings is no vain, imagined thing, for it distorts vision utterly, and the effect upon the mind when familiar sight goes floundering is the simplest way in the world of dragging the anchor that grips reality. at the hour of sunset this bewilderment comes upon a man with a disconcerting swiftness. it rose now with all this weird rapidity. henriot found himself enveloped at a moment's notice. but, knowing well its effect, he tried to judge it and pass on. the other matters, the object of his journey chief of all, he refused to dwell upon with any imagination. wisely, his mind, while never losing sight of it, declined to admit the exaggeration that over-elaborate thinking brings. "i'm going to witness an incredible experiment in which two enthusiastic religious dreamers believe firmly," he repeated to himself. "i have agreed to draw--anything i see. there may be truth in it, or they may be merely self-suggested vision due to an artificial exaltation of their minds. i'm interested--perhaps against my better judgment. yet i'll see the adventure out--because i _must_." this was the attitude he told himself to take. whether it was the real one, or merely adopted to warm a cooling courage, he could not tell. the emotions were so complex and warring. his mind, automatically, kept repeating this comforting formula. deeper than that he could not see to judge. for a man who knew the full content of his thought at such a time would solve some of the oldest psychological problems in the world. sand had already buried judgment, and with it all attempt to explain the adventure by the standards acceptable to his brain of to-day. he steered subconsciously through a world of dim, huge, half-remembered wonders. the sun, with that abrupt egyptian suddenness, was below the horizon now. the pyramid field had swallowed it. ra, in his golden boat, sailed distant seas beyond the libyan wilderness. henriot walked on and on, aware of utter loneliness. he was walking fields of dream, too remote from modern life to recall companionship he once had surely known. how dim it was, how deep and distant, how lost in this sea of an incalculable past! he walked into the places that are soundless. the soundlessness of ocean, miles below the surface, was about him. he was with one only--this unfathomable, silent thing where nothing breathes or stirs--nothing but sunshine, shadow and the wind-borne sand. slowly, in front, the moon climbed up the eastern sky, hanging above the silence--silence that ran unbroken across the horizons to where suez gleamed upon the waters of a sister sea in motion. that moon was glinting now upon the arabian mountains by its desolate shores. southwards stretched the wastes of upper egypt a thousand miles to meet the nubian wilderness. but over all these separate deserts stirred the soft whisper of the moving sand--deep murmuring message that life was on the way to unwind death. the ka of egypt, swathed in centuries of sand, hovered beneath the moon towards her ancient tenement. for the transformation of the desert now began in earnest. it grew apace. before he had gone the first two miles of his hour's journey, the twilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those monstrous revelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble to conceal even in the daytime. and, while he well understood the eroding agencies that have produced them, there yet rose in his mind a deeper interpretation lurking just behind their literal meanings. here, through the motionless surfaces, that nameless thing the desert ill conceals urged outwards into embryonic form and shape, akin, he almost felt, to those immense deific symbols of other life the egyptians knew and worshipped. hence, from the desert, had first come, he felt, the unearthly life they typified in their monstrous figures of granite, evoked in their stately temples, and communed with in the ritual of their mystery ceremonials. this "watching" aspect of the libyan desert is really natural enough; but it is just the natural, henriot knew, that brings the deepest revelations. the surface limestones, resisting the erosion, block themselves ominously against the sky, while the softer sand beneath sets them on altared pedestals that define their isolation splendidly. blunt and unconquerable, these masses now watched him pass between them. the desert surface formed them, gave them birth. they rose, they saw, they sank down again--waves upon a sea that carried forgotten life up from the depths below. of forbidding, even menacing type, they somewhere mated with genuine grandeur. unformed, according to any standard of human or of animal faces, they achieved an air of giant physiognomy which made them terrible. the unwinking stare of eyes--lidless eyes that yet ever succeed in hiding--looked out under well-marked, level eyebrows, suggesting a vision that included the motives and purposes of his very heart. they looked up grandly, understood why he was there, and then--slowly withdrew their mysterious, penetrating gaze. the strata built them so marvellously up; the heavy, threatening brows; thick lips, curved by the ages into a semblance of cold smiles; jowls drooping into sandy heaps that climbed against the cheeks; protruding jaws, and the suggestion of shoulders just about to lift the entire bodies out of the sandy beds--this host of countenances conveyed a solemnity of expression that seemed everlasting, implacable as death. of human signature they bore no trace, nor was comparison possible between their kind and any animal life. they peopled the desert here. and their smiles, concealed yet just discernible, went broadening with the darkness into a desert laughter. the silence bore it underground. but henriot was aware of it. the troop of faces slipped into that single, enormous countenance which is the visage of the sand. and he saw it everywhere, yet nowhere. thus with the darkness grew his imaginative interpretation of the desert. yet there was construction in it, a construction, moreover, that was _not_ entirely his own. powers, he felt, were rising, stirring, wakening from sleep. behind the natural faces that he saw, these other things peered gravely at him as he passed. they used, as it were, materials that lay ready to their hand. imagination furnished these hints of outline, yet the powers themselves were real. there _was_ this amazing movement of the sand. by no other manner could his mind have conceived of such a thing, nor dreamed of this simple, yet dreadful method of approach. approach! that was the word that first stood out and startled him. there was approach; something was drawing nearer. the desert rose and walked beside him. for not alone these ribs of gleaming limestone contributed towards the elemental visages, but the entire hills, of which they were an outcrop, ran to assist in the formation, and were a necessary part of them. he was watched and stared at from behind, in front, on either side, and even from below. the sand that swept him on, kept even pace with him. it turned luminous too, with a patchwork of glimmering effect that was indescribably weird; lanterns glowed within its substance, and by their light he stumbled on, glad of the arab boy he would presently meet at the appointed place. the last torch of the sunset had flickered out, melting into the wilderness, when, suddenly opening at his feet, gaped the deep, wide gully known as wadi hof. its curve swept past him. this first impression came upon him with a certain violence: that the desolate valley rushed. he saw but a section of its curve and sweep, but through its entire length of several miles the wadi fled away. the moon whitened it like snow, piling black shadows very close against the cliffs. in the flood of moonlight it went rushing past. it was emptying itself. for a moment the stream of movement seemed to pause and look up into his face, then instantly went on again upon its swift career. it was like the procession of a river to the sea. the valley emptied itself to make way for what was coming. the approach, moreover, had already begun. conscious that he was trembling, he stood and gazed into the depths, seeking to steady his mind by the repetition of the little formula he had used before. he said it half aloud. but, while he did so, his heart whispered quite other things. thoughts the woman and the man had sown rose up in a flock and fell upon him like a storm of sand. their impetus drove off all support of ordinary ideas. they shook him where he stood, staring down into this river of strange invisible movement that was hundreds of feet in depth and a quarter of a mile across. he sought to realise himself as he actually was to-day--mere visitor to helouan, tempted into this wild adventure with two strangers. but in vain. that seemed a dream, unreal, a transient detail picked out from the enormous past that now engulfed him, heart and mind and soul. _this_ was the reality. the shapes and faces that the hills of sand built round him were the play of excited fancy only. by sheer force he pinned his thought against this fact: but further he could not get. there _were_ powers at work; they were being stirred, wakened somewhere into activity. evocation had already begun. that sense of their approach as he had walked along from helouan was not imaginary. a descent of some type of life, vanished from the world too long for recollection, was on the way,--so vast that it would manifest itself in a group of forms, a troop, a host, an army. these two were near him somewhere at this very moment, already long at work, their minds driving beyond this little world. the valley was emptying itself--for the descent of life their ritual invited. and the movement in the sand was likewise true. he recalled the sentences the woman had used. "my body," he reflected, "like the bodies life makes use of everywhere, is mere upright heap of earth and dust and--sand. here in the desert is the raw material, the greatest store of it in the world." and on the heels of it came sharply that other thing: that this descending life would press into its service all loose matter within its reach--to form that sphere of action which would be in a literal sense its body. in the first few seconds, as he stood there, he realised all this, and realised it with an overwhelming conviction it was futile to deny. the fast-emptying valley would later brim with an unaccustomed and terrific life. yet death hid there too--a little, ugly, insignificant death. with the name of vance it flashed upon his mind and vanished, too tiny to be thought about in this torrent of grander messages that shook the depths within his soul. he bowed his head a moment, hardly knowing what he did. he could have waited thus a thousand years it seemed. he was conscious of a wild desire to run away, to hide, to efface himself utterly, his terror, his curiosity, his little wonder, and not be seen of anything. but it was all vain and foolish. the desert saw him. the gigantic knew that he was there. no escape was possible any longer. caught by the sand, he stood amid eternal things. the river of movement swept him too. these hills, now motionless as statues, would presently glide forward into the cavalcade, sway like vessels, and go past with the procession. at present only the contents, not the frame, of the wadi moved. an immense soft brush of moonlight swept it empty for what was on the way.... but presently the entire desert would stand up and also go. then, making a sideways movement, his feet kicked against something soft and yielding that lay heaped upon the desert floor, and henriot discovered the rugs the arab boy had carefully set down before he made full speed for the friendly lights of helouan. the sound of his departing footsteps had long since died away. he was alone. the detail restored to him his consciousness of the immediate present, and, stooping, he gathered up the rugs and overcoat and began to make preparations for the night. but the appointed spot, whence he was to watch, lay upon the summit of the opposite cliffs. he must cross the wadi bed and climb. slowly and with labour he made his way down a steep cleft into the depth of the wadi hof, sliding and stumbling often, till at length he stood upon the floor of shining moonlight. it was very smooth; windless utterly; still as space; each particle of sand lay in its ancient place asleep. the movement, it seemed, had ceased. he clambered next up the eastern side, through pitch-black shadows, and within the hour reached the ledge upon the top whence he could see below him, like a silvered map, the sweep of the valley bed. the wind nipped keenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling sand. loose boulders of splintered rock, started by his climbing, crashed and boomed into the depths. he banked the rugs behind him, wrapped himself in his overcoat, and lay down to wait. behind him was a two-foot crumbling wall against which he leaned; in front a drop of several hundred feet through space. he lay upon a platform, therefore, invisible from the desert at his back. below, the curving wadi formed a natural amphitheatre in which each separate boulder fallen from the cliffs, and even the little _silla_ shrubs the camels eat, were plainly visible. he noted all the bigger ones among them. he counted them over half aloud. and the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the bed itself, now began again. the wadi went rushing past before the broom of moonlight. again, the enormous and the tiny combined in one single strange impression. for, through this conception of great movement, stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as bird-like. behind the solid mass of the desert's immobility flashed something swift and light and airy. bizarre pictures interpreted it to him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought of darting dragon-flies seen at helouan, of children's little dancing feet, of twinkling butterflies--of birds. chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds in flight, whose separate units formed a single entity. the idea of the group-soul possessed his mind once more. but it came with a sense of more than curiosity or wonder. veneration lay behind it, a veneration touched with awe. it rose in his deepest thought that here was the first hint of a symbolical representation. a symbol, sacred and inviolable, belonging to some ancient worship that he half remembered in his soul, stirred towards interpretation through all his being. he lay there waiting, wondering vaguely where his two companions were, yet fear all vanished because he felt attuned to a scale of things too big to mate with definite dread. there was high anticipation in him, but not anxiety. of himself, as felix henriot, indeed, he hardly seemed aware. he was some one else. or, rather, he was himself at a stage he had known once far, far away in a remote pre-existence. he watched himself from dim summits of a past, of which no further details were as yet recoverable. pencil and sketching-block lay ready to his hand. the moon rose higher, tucking the shadows ever more closely against the precipices. the silver passed into a sheet of snowy whiteness, that made every boulder clearly visible. solemnity deepened everywhere into awe. the wadi fled silently down the stream of hours. it was almost empty now. and then, abruptly, he was aware of change. the motion altered somewhere. it moved more quietly; pace slackened; the end of the procession that evacuated the depth and length of it went trailing past and turned the distant bend. "it's slowing up," he whispered, as sure of it as though he had watched a regiment of soldiers filing by. the wind took off his voice like a flying feather of sound. and there _was_ a change. it had begun. night and the moon stood still to watch and listen. the wind dropped utterly away. the sand ceased its shifting movement. the desert everywhere stopped still, and turned. some curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drew softly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul peered towards long-forgotten pictures. still buried by the sands too deep for full recovery, he yet perceived dim portions of them--things once honoured and loved passionately. for once they had surely been to him the whole of life, not merely a fragment for cheap wonder to inspect. and they were curiously familiar, even as the person of this woman who now evoked them was familiar. henriot made no pretence to more definite remembrance; but the haunting certainty rushed over him, deeper than doubt or denial, and with such force that he felt no effort to destroy it. some lost sweetness of spiritual ambitions, lived for with this passionate devotion, and passionately worshipped as men to-day worship fame and money, revived in him with a tempest of high glory. centres of memory stirred from an age-long sleep, so that he could have wept at their so complete obliteration hitherto. that such majesty had departed from the world as though it never had existed, was a thought for desolation and for tears. and though the little fragment he was about to witness might be crude in itself and incomplete, yet it was part of a vast system that once explored the richest realms of deity. the reverence in him contained a holiness of the night and of the stars; great, gentle awe lay in it too; for he stood, aflame with anticipation and humility, at the gateway of sacred things. and this was the mood, no thrill of cheap excitement or alarm to weaken in, in which he first became aware that two spots of darkness he had taken all along for boulders on the snowy valley bed, were actually something very different. they were living figures. they moved. it was not the shadows slowly following the moonlight, but the stir of human beings who all these hours had been motionless as stone. he must have passed them unnoticed within a dozen yards when he crossed the wadi bed, and a hundred times from this very ledge his eyes had surely rested on them without recognition. their minds, he knew full well, had not been inactive as their bodies. the important part of the ancient ritual lay, he remembered, in the powers of the evoking mind. here, indeed, was no effective nor theatrical approach of the principal figures. it had nothing in common with the cheap external ceremonial of modern days. in forgotten powers of the soul its grandeur lay, potent, splendid, true. long before he came, perhaps all through the day, these two had laboured with their arduous preparations. they were there, part of the desert, when hours ago he had crossed the plateau in the twilight. to them--to this woman's potent working of old ceremonial--had been due that singular rush of imagination he had felt. he had interpreted the desert as alive. here was the explanation. it _was_ alive. life was on the way. long latent, her intense desire summoned it back to physical expression; and the effect upon him had steadily increased as he drew nearer to the centre where she would focus its revival and return. those singular impressions of being watched and accompanied were explained. a priest of this old-world worship performed a genuine evocation; a great one of vision revived the cosmic powers. henriot watched the small figures far below him with a sense of dramatic splendour that only this association of far-off memory could account for. it was their rising now, and the lifting of their arms to form a slow revolving outline, that marked the abrupt cessation of the larger river of movement; for the sweeping of the wadi sank into sudden stillness, and these two, with motions not unlike some dance of deliberate solemnity, passed slowly through the moonlight to and fro. his attention fixed upon them both. all other movement ceased. they fastened the flow of time against the desert's body. what happened then? how could his mind interpret an experience so long denied that the power of expression, as of comprehension, has ceased to exist? how translate this symbolical representation, small detail though it was, of a transcendent worship entombed for most so utterly beyond recovery? its splendour could never lodge in minds that conceive deity perched upon a cloud within telephoning distance of fashionable churches. how should he phrase it even to himself, whose memory drew up pictures from so dim a past that the language fit to frame them lay unreachable and lost? henriot did not know. perhaps he never yet has known. certainly, at the time, he did not even try to think. his sensations remain his own--untranslatable; and even that instinctive description the mind gropes for automatically, floundered, halted, and stopped dead. yet there rose within him somewhere, from depths long drowned in slumber, a reviving power by which he saw, divined and recollected--remembered seemed too literal a word--these elements of a worship he once had personally known. he, too, had worshipped thus. his soul had moved amid similar evocations in some aeonian past, whence now the sand was being cleared away. symbols of stupendous meaning flashed and went their way across the lifting mists. he hardly caught their meaning, so long it was since, he had known them; yet they were familiar as the faces seen in dreams, and some hint of their spiritual significance left faint traces in his heart by means of which their grandeur reached towards interpretation. and all were symbols of a cosmic, deific nature; of powers that only symbols can express--prayer-books and sacraments used in the wisdom religion of an older time, but to-day known only in the decrepit, literal shell which is their degradation. grandly the figures moved across the valley bed. the powers of the heavenly bodies once more joined them. they moved to the measure of a cosmic dance, whose rhythm was creative. the universe partnered them. there was this transfiguration of all common, external things. he realised that appearances were visible letters of a soundless language, a language he once had known. the powers of night and moon and desert sand married with points in the fluid stream of his inmost spiritual being that knew and welcomed them. he understood. old egypt herself stooped down from her uncovered throne. the stars sent messengers. there was commotion in the secret, sandy places of the desert. for the desert had grown temple. columns reared against the sky. there rose, from leagues away, the chanting of the sand. the temples, where once this came to pass, were gone, their ruin questioned by alien hearts that knew not their spiritual meaning. but here the entire desert swept in to form a shrine, and the majesty that once was egypt stepped grandly back across ages of denial and neglect. the sand was altar, and the stars were altar lights. the moon lit up the vast recesses of the ceiling, and the wind from a thousand miles brought in the perfume of her incense. for with that faith which shifts mountains from their sandy bed, two passionate, believing souls invoked the ka of egypt. and the motions that they made, he saw, were definite harmonious patterns their dark figures traced upon the shining valley floor. like the points of compasses, with stems invisible, and directed from the sky, their movements marked the outlines of great signatures of power--the sigils of the type of life they would evoke. it would come as a procession. no individual outline could contain it. it needed for its visible expression--many. the descent of a group-soul, known to the worship of this mighty system, rose from its lair of centuries and moved hugely down upon them. the ka, answering to the summons, would mate with sand. the desert was its body. yet it was not this that he had come to fix with block and pencil. not yet was the moment when his skill might be of use. he waited, watched, and listened, while this river of half-remembered things went past him. the patterns grew beneath his eyes like music. too intricate and prolonged to remember with accuracy later, he understood that they were forms of that root-geometry which lies behind all manifested life. the mould was being traced in outline. life would presently inform it. and a singing rose from the maze of lines whose beauty was like the beauty of the constellations. this sound was very faint at first, but grew steadily in volume. although no echoes, properly speaking, were possible, these precipices caught stray notes that trooped in from the further sandy reaches. the figures certainly were chanting, but their chanting was not all he heard. other sounds came to his ears from far away, running past him through the air from every side, and from incredible distances, all flocking down into the wadi bed to join the parent note that summoned them. the desert was giving voice. and memory, lifting her hood yet higher, showed more of her grey, mysterious face that searched his soul with questions. had he so soon forgotten that strange union of form and sound which once was known to the evocative rituals of olden days? henriot tried patiently to disentangle this desert-music that their intoning voices woke, from the humming of the blood in his own veins. but he succeeded only in part. sand was already in the air. there was reverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking of the stream into great syllables. but was it due, this strange reverberation, to the countless particles of sand meeting in mid-air about him, or--to larger bodies, whose surfaces caught this friction of the sand and threw it back against his ears? the wind, now rising, brought particles that stung his face and hands, and filled his eyes with a minute fine dust that partially veiled the moonlight. but was not something larger, vaster these particles composed now also on the way? movement and sound and flying sand thus merged themselves more and more in a single, whirling torrent. but henriot sought no commonplace explanation of what he witnessed; and here was the proof that all happened in some vestibule of inner experience where the strain of question and answer had no business. one sitting beside him need not have seen anything at all. his host, for instance, from helouan, need not have been aware. night screened it; helouan, as the whole of modern experience, stood in front of the screen. this thing took place behind it. he crouched motionless, watching in some reconstructed ante-chamber of the soul's pre-existence, while the torrent grew into a veritable tempest. yet night remained unshaken; the veil of moonlight did not quiver; the stars dropped their slender golden pillars unobstructed. calmness reigned everywhere as before. the stupendous representation passed on behind it all. but the dignity of the little human movements that he watched had become now indescribable. the gestures of the arms and bodies invested themselves with consummate grandeur, as these two strode into the caverns behind manifested life and drew forth symbols that represented vanished powers. the sound of their chanting voices broke in cadenced fragments against the shores of language. the words henriot never actually caught, if words they were; yet he understood their purport--these names of power to which the type of returning life gave answer as they approached. he remembered fumbling for his drawing materials, with such violence, however, that the pencil snapped in two between his fingers as he touched it. for now, even here, upon the outer fringe of the ceremonial ground, there was a stir of forces that set the very muscles working in him before he had become aware of it.... then came the moment when his heart leaped against his ribs with a sudden violence that was almost pain, standing a second later still as death. the lines upon the valley floor ceased their maze-like dance. all movement stopped. sound died away. in the midst of this profound and dreadful silence the sigils lay empty there below him. they waited to be in-formed. for the moment of entrance had come at last. life was close. and he understood why this return of life had all along suggested a procession and could be no mere momentary flash of vision. from such appalling distance did it sweep down towards the present. upon this network, then, of splendid lines, at length held rigid, the entire desert reared itself with walls of curtained sand, that dwarfed the cliffs, the shouldering hills, the very sky. the desert stood on end. as once before he had dreamed it from his balcony windows, it rose upright, towering, and close against his face. it built sudden ramparts to the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls no centuries could ever bring down crumbling into dust. he himself, in some curious fashion, lay just outside, viewing it apart. as from a pinnacle, he peered within--peered down with straining eyes into the vast picture-gallery memory threw abruptly open. and the picture spaced its noble outline thus against the very stars. he gazed between columns, that supported the sky itself, like pillars of sand that swept across the field of vanished years. sand poured and streamed aside, laying bare the past. for down the enormous vista into which he gazed, as into an avenue running a million miles towards a tiny point, he saw this moving thing that came towards him, shaking loose the countless veils of sand the ages had swathed about it. the ka of buried egypt wakened out of sleep. she had heard the potent summons of her old, time-honoured ritual. she came. she stretched forth an arm towards the worshippers who evoked her. out of the desert, out of the leagues of sand, out of the immeasurable wilderness which was her mummied form and body, she rose and came. and this fragment of her he would actually see--this little portion that was obedient to the stammered and broken ceremonial. the partial revelation he would witness--yet so vast, even this little bit of it, that it came as a procession and a host. for a moment there was nothing. and then the voice of the woman rose in a resounding cry that filled the wadi to its furthest precipices, before it died away again to silence. that a human voice could produce such volume, accent, depth, seemed half incredible. the walls of towering sand swallowed it instantly. but the procession of life, needing a group, a host, an army for its physical expression, reached at that moment the nearer end of the huge avenue. it touched the present; it entered the world of men. x the entire range of henriot's experience, read, imagined, dreamed, then fainted into unreality before the sheer wonder of what he saw. in the brief interval it takes to snap the fingers the climax was thus so hurriedly upon him. and, through it all, he was clearly aware of the pair of little human figures, man and woman, standing erect and commanding at the centre--knew, too, that she directed and controlled, while he in some secondary fashion supported her--and ever watched. but both were dim, dropped somewhere into a lesser scale. it was the knowledge of their presence, however, that alone enabled him to keep his powers in hand at all. but for these two _human_ beings there within possible reach, he must have closed his eyes and swooned. for a tempest that seemed to toss loose stars about the sky swept round about him, pouring up the pillared avenue in front of the procession. a blast of giant energy, of liberty, came through. forwards and backwards, circling spirally about him like a whirlwind, came this revival of life that sought to dip itself once more in matter and in form. it came to the accurate out-line of its form they had traced for it. he held his mind steady enough to realise that it was akin to what men call a "descent" of some "spiritual movement" that wakens a body of believers into faith--a race, an entire nation; only that he experienced it in this brief, concentrated form before it has scattered down into ten thousand hearts. here he knew its source and essence, behind the veil. crudely, unmanageable as yet, he felt it, rushing loose behind appearances. there was this amazing impact of a twisting, swinging force that stormed down as though it would bend and coil the very ribs of the old stubborn hills. it sought to warm them with the stress of its own irresistible life-stream, to beat them into shape, and make pliable their obstinate resistance. through all things the impulse poured and spread, like fire at white heat. yet nothing visible came as yet, no alteration in the actual landscape, no sign of change in things familiar to his eyes, while impetus thus fought against inertia. he perceived nothing form-al. calm and untouched himself, he lay outside the circle of evocation, watching, waiting, scarcely daring to breathe, yet well aware that any minute the scene would transfer itself from memory that was subjective to matter that was objective. and then, in a flash, the bridge was built, and the transfer was accomplished. how or where he did not see, he could not tell. it was there before he knew it--there before his normal, earthly sight. he saw it, as he saw the hands he was holding stupidly up to shield his face. for this terrific release of force long held back, long stored up, latent for centuries, came pouring down the empty wadi bed prepared for its reception. through stones and sand and boulders it came in an impetuous hurricane of power. the liberation of its life appalled him. all that was free, untied, responded instantly like chaff; loose objects fled towards it; there was a yielding in the hills and precipices; and even in the mass of desert which provided their foundation. the hinges of the sand went creaking in the night. it shaped for itself a bodily outline. yet, most strangely, nothing definitely moved. how could he express the violent contradiction? for the immobility was apparent only--a sham, a counterfeit; while behind it the essential _being_ of these things did rush and shift and alter. he saw the two things side by side: the outer immobility the senses commonly agree upon, _and_ this amazing flying-out of their inner, invisible substance towards the vortex of attracting life that sucked them in. for stubborn matter turned docile before the stress of this returning life, taught somewhere to be plastic. it was being moulded into an approach to bodily outline. a mobile elasticity invaded rigid substance. the two officiating human beings, safe at the stationary centre, and himself, just outside the circle of operation, alone remained untouched and unaffected. but a few feet in any direction, for any one of them, meant--instantaneous death. they would be absorbed into the vortex, mere corpuscles pressed into the service of this sphere of action of a mighty body.... how these perceptions reached him with such conviction, henriot could never say. he knew it, because he _felt_ it. something fell about him from the sky that already paled towards the dawn. the stars themselves, it seemed, contributed some part of the terrific, flowing impulse that conquered matter and shaped itself this physical expression. then, before he was able to fashion any preconceived idea of what visible form this potent life might assume, he was aware of further change. it came at the briefest possible interval after the beginning--this certainty that, to and fro about him, as yet however indeterminate, passed magnitudes that were stupendous as the desert. there was beauty in them too, though a terrible beauty hardly of this earth at all. a fragment of old egypt had returned--a little portion of that vast body of belief that once was egypt. evoked by the worship of one human heart, passionately sincere, the ka of egypt stepped back to visit the material it once informed--the sand. yet only a portion came. henriot clearly realised that. it stretched forth an arm. finding no mass of worshippers through whom it might express itself completely, it pressed inanimate matter thus into its service. here was the beginning the woman had spoken of--little opening clue. entire reconstruction lay perhaps beyond. and henriot next realised that these magnitudes in which this group-energy sought to clothe itself as visible form, were curiously familiar. it was not a new thing that he would see. booming softly as they dropped downwards through the sky, with a motion the size of them rendered delusive, they trooped up the avenue towards the central point that summoned them. he realised the giant flock of them--descent of fearful beauty--outlining a type of life denied to the world for ages, countless as this sand that blew against his skin. careering over the waste of desert moved the army of dark splendours, that dwarfed any organic structure called a body men have ever known. he recognised them, cold in him of death, though the outlines reared higher than the pyramids, and towered up to hide whole groups of stars. yes, he recognised them in their partial revelation, though he never saw the monstrous host complete. but, one of them, he realised, posing its eternal riddle to the sands, had of old been glimpsed sufficiently to seize its form in stone,--yet poorly seized, as a doll may stand for the dignity of a human being or a child's toy represent an engine that draws trains.... and he knelt there on his narrow ledge, the world of men forgotten. the power that caught him was too great a thing for wonder or for fear; he even felt no awe. sensation of any kind that can be named or realised left him utterly. he forgot himself. he merely watched. the glory numbed him. block and pencil, as the reason of his presence there at all, no longer existed.... yet one small link remained that held him to some kind of consciousness of earthly things: he never lost sight of this--that, being just outside the circle of evocation, he was safe, and that the man and woman, being stationary in its untouched centre, were also safe. but--that a movement of six inches in any direction meant for any one of them instant death. what was it, then, that suddenly strengthened this solitary link so that the chain tautened and he felt the pull of it? henriot could not say. he came back with the rush of a descending drop to the realisation--dimly, vaguely, as from great distance--that he was with these two, now at this moment, in the wadi hof, and that the cold of dawn was in the air about him. the chill breath of the desert made him shiver. but at first, so deeply had his soul been dipped in this fragment of ancient worship, he could remember nothing more. somewhere lay a little spot of streets and houses; its name escaped him. he had once been there; there were many people, but insignificant people. who were they? and what had he to do with them? all recent memories had been drowned in the tide that flooded him from an immeasurable past. and who were they--these two beings, standing on the white floor of sand below him? for a long time he could not recover their names. yet he remembered them; and, thus robbed of association that names bring, he saw them for an instant naked, and knew that one of them was evil. one of them was vile. blackness touched the picture there. the man, his name still out of reach, was sinister, impure and dark at the heart. and for this reason the evocation had been partial only. the admixture of an evil motive was the flaw that marred complete success. the names then flashed upon him--lady statham--richard vance. vance! with a horrid drop from splendour into something mean and sordid, henriot felt the pain of it. the motive of the man was so insignificant, his purpose so atrocious. more and more, with the name, came back--his first repugnance, fear, suspicion. and human terror caught him. he shrieked. but, as in nightmare, no sound escaped his lips. he tried to move; a wild desire to interfere, to protect, to prevent, flung him forward--close to the dizzy edge of the gulf below. but his muscles refused obedience to the will. the paralysis of common fear rooted him to the rocks. but the sudden change of focus instantly destroyed the picture; and so vehement was the fall from glory into meanness, that it dislocated the machinery of clairvoyant vision. the inner perception clouded and grew dark. outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable confusion. the wrench seemed almost physical. it happened all at once, retreat and continuation for a moment somehow combined. and, if he did not definitely see the awful thing, at least he was aware that it had come to pass. he knew it as positively as though his eye were glued against a magnifying lens in the stillness of some laboratory. he witnessed it. the supreme moment of evocation was close. life, through that awful sandy vortex, whirled and raged. loose particles showered and pelted, caught by the draught of vehement life that moulded the substance of the desert into imperial outline--when, suddenly, shot the little evil thing across that marred and blasted it. into the whirlpool flew forward a particle of material that was a human being. and the group-soul caught and used it. the actual accomplishment henriot did not claim to see. he was a witness, but a witness who could give no evidence. whether the woman was pushed of set intention, or whether some detail of sound and pattern was falsely used to effect the terrible result, he was helpless to determine. he pretends no itemised account. she went. in one second, with appalling swiftness, she disappeared, swallowed out of space and time within that awful maw--one little corpuscle among a million through which the life, now stalking the desert wastes, moulded itself a troop-like body. sand took her. there followed emptiness--a hush of unutterable silence, stillness, peace. movement and sound instantly retired whence they came. the avenues of memory closed; the splendours all went down into their sandy tombs.... * * * * * the moon had sunk into the libyan wilderness; the eastern sky was red. the dawn drew out that wondrous sweetness of the desert, which is as sister to the sweetness that the moonlight brings. the desert settled back to sleep, huge, unfathomable, charged to the brim with life that watches, waits, and yet conceals itself behind the ruins of apparent desolation. and the wadi, empty at his feet, filled slowly with the gentle little winds that bring the sunrise. then, across the pale glimmering of sand, henriot saw a figure moving. it came quickly towards him, yet unsteadily, and with a hurry that was ugly. vance was on the way to fetch him. and the horror of the man's approach struck him like a hammer in the face. he closed his eyes, sinking back to hide. but, before he swooned, there reached him the clatter of the murderer's tread as he began to climb over the splintered rocks, and the faint echo of his voice, calling him by name--falsely and in pretence--for help. the end [transcriber's note: in chapter ix of the story sand, the word "indescriable" was corrected to "indescribable."] the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde , -chapter version contents chapter i: - chapter ii: - chapter iii: - chapter iv: - chapter v: - chapter vi: - chapter vii: - chapter viii: - chapter ix: - chapter x: - chapter xi: - chapter xii: - chapter xiii: - chapter i [ ] the studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. from the corner of the divan of persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, lord henry wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters who, in an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. the sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of the early june hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive, and the dim roar of london was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. in the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, basil hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures. as he looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. but he suddenly started up, and, closing [ ] his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. "it is your best work, basil, the best thing you have ever done," said lord henry, languidly. "you must certainly send it next year to the grosvenor. the academy is too large and too vulgar. the grosvenor is the only place." "i don't think i will send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at oxford. "no: i won't send it anywhere." lord henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette. "not send it anywhere? my dear fellow, why? have you any reason? what odd chaps you painters are! you do anything in the world to gain a reputation. as soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. it is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. a portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in england, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion." "i know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but i really can't exhibit it. i have put too much of myself into it." lord henry stretched his long legs out on the divan and shook with laughter. "yes, i knew you would laugh; but it is quite true, all the same." "too much of yourself in it! upon my word, basil, i didn't know you were so vain; and i really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young adonis, who looks as if he was made of ivory and rose-leaves. why, my dear basil, he is a narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. but beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. the moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. how perfectly hideous they are! except, of course, in the church. but then in the church they don't think. a bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and consequently he always looks absolutely delightful. your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. i feel quite sure of that. he is a brainless, beautiful thing, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. don't flatter yourself, basil: you are not in the least like him." "you don't understand me, harry. of course i am not like him. i know that perfectly well. indeed, i should be sorry to look like him. you shrug your shoulders? i am telling you the truth. there is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that [ ] seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. it is better not to be different from one's fellows. the ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. they can sit quietly and gape at the play. if they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. they live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. they neither bring ruin upon others nor ever receive it from alien hands. your rank and wealth, harry; my brains, such as they are,--my fame, whatever it may be worth; dorian gray's good looks,--we will all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly." "dorian gray? is that his name?" said lord henry, walking across the studio towards basil hallward. "yes; that is his name. i didn't intend to tell it to you." "but why not?" "oh, i can't explain. when i like people immensely i never tell their names to any one. it seems like surrendering a part of them. you know how i love secrecy. it is the only thing that can make modern life wonderful or mysterious to us. the commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. when i leave town i never tell my people where i am going. if i did, i would lose all my pleasure. it is a silly habit, i dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. i suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?" "not at all," answered lord henry, laying his hand upon his shoulder; "not at all, my dear basil. you seem to forget that i am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties. i never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what i am doing. when we meet,--we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the duke's,--we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. my wife is very good at it,--much better, in fact, than i am. she never gets confused over her dates, and i always do. but when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. i sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me." "i hate the way you talk about your married life, harry," said basil hallward, shaking his hand off, and strolling towards the door that led into the garden. "i believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. you are an extraordinary fellow. you never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. your cynicism is simply a pose." "being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose i know," cried lord henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the garden together, and for a time they did not speak. after a long pause lord henry pulled out his watch. "i am afraid i must be going, basil," he murmured, "and before i go i insist on your answering a question i put to you some time ago." "what is that?" asked basil hallward, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground. "you know quite well." "i do not, harry." [ ] "well, i will tell you what it is." "please don't." "i must. i want you to explain to me why you won't exhibit dorian gray's picture. i want the real reason." "i told you the real reason." "no, you did not. you said it was because there was too much of yourself in it. now, that is childish." "harry," said basil hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. it is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself. the reason i will not exhibit this picture is that i am afraid that i have shown with it the secret of my own soul." lord harry laughed. "and what is that?" he asked. "i will tell you," said hallward; and an expression of perplexity came over his face. "i am all expectation, basil," murmured his companion, looking at him. "oh, there is really very little to tell, harry," answered the young painter; "and i am afraid you will hardly understand it. perhaps you will hardly believe it." lord henry smiled, and, leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy from the grass, and examined it. "i am quite sure i shall understand it," he replied, gazing intently at the little golden white-feathered disk, "and i can believe anything, provided that it is incredible." the wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. a grasshopper began to chirrup in the grass, and a long thin dragon-fly floated by on its brown gauze wings. lord henry felt as if he could hear basil hallward's heart beating, and he wondered what was coming. "well, this is incredible," repeated hallward, rather bitterly,--"incredible to me at times. i don't know what it means. the story is simply this. two months ago i went to a crush at lady brandon's. you know we poor painters have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. with an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. well, after i had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious academicians, i suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me. i turned half-way round, and saw dorian gray for the first time. when our eyes met, i felt that i was growing pale. a curious instinct of terror came over me. i knew that i had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if i allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. i did not want any external influence in my life. you know yourself, harry, how independent i am by nature. my father destined me for the army. i insisted on [ ] going to oxford. then he made me enter my name at the middle temple. before i had eaten half a dozen dinners i gave up the bar, and announced my intention of becoming a painter. i have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till i met dorian gray. then--but i don't know how to explain it to you. something seemed to tell me that i was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life. i had a strange feeling that fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. i knew that if i spoke to dorian i would become absolutely devoted to him, and that i ought not to speak to him. i grew afraid, and turned to quit the room. it was not conscience that made me do so: it was cowardice. i take no credit to myself for trying to escape." "conscience and cowardice are really the same things, basil. conscience is the trade-name of the firm. that is all." "i don't believe that, harry. however, whatever was my motive,--and it may have been pride, for i used to be very proud,--i certainly struggled to the door. there, of course, i stumbled against lady brandon. 'you are not going to run away so soon, mr. hallward?' she screamed out. you know her shrill horrid voice?" "yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said lord henry, pulling the daisy to bits with his long, nervous fingers. "i could not get rid of her. she brought me up to royalties, and people with stars and garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and hooked noses. she spoke of me as her dearest friend. i had only met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me. i believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. suddenly i found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. we were quite close, almost touching. our eyes met again. it was mad of me, but i asked lady brandon to introduce me to him. perhaps it was not so mad, after all. it was simply inevitable. we would have spoken to each other without any introduction. i am sure of that. dorian told me so afterwards. he, too, felt that we were destined to know each other." "and how did lady brandon describe this wonderful young man? i know she goes in for giving a rapid précis of all her guests. i remember her bringing me up to a most truculent and red-faced old gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to everybody in the room, something like 'sir humpty dumpty--you know--afghan frontier--russian intrigues: very successful man--wife killed by an elephant--quite inconsolable--wants to marry a beautiful american widow--everybody does nowadays--hates mr. gladstone--but very much interested in beetles: ask him what he thinks of schouvaloff.' i simply fled. i like to find out people for myself. but poor lady brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. she either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one wants to know. but what did she say about mr. dorian gray?" [ ] "oh, she murmured, 'charming boy--poor dear mother and i quite inseparable--engaged to be married to the same man--i mean married on the same day--how very silly of me! quite forget what he does--afraid he--doesn't do anything--oh, yes, plays the piano--or is it the violin, dear mr. gray?' we could neither of us help laughing, and we became friends at once." "laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one," said lord henry, plucking another daisy. hallward buried his face in his hands. "you don't understand what friendship is, harry," he murmured,--"or what enmity is, for that matter. you like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one." "how horribly unjust of you!" cried lord henry, tilting his hat back, and looking up at the little clouds that were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the summer sky, like ravelled skeins of glossy white silk. "yes; horribly unjust of you. i make a great difference between people. i choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their characters, and my enemies for their brains. a man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies. i have not got one who is a fool. they are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. is that very vain of me? i think it is rather vain." "i should think it was, harry. but according to your category i must be merely an acquaintance." "my dear old basil, you are much more than an acquaintance." "and much less than a friend. a sort of brother, i suppose?" "oh, brothers! i don't care for brothers. my elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else." "harry!" "my dear fellow, i am not quite serious. but i can't help detesting my relations. i suppose it comes from the fact that we can't stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. i quite sympathize with the rage of the english democracy against what they call the vices of the upper classes. they feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself he is poaching on their preserves. when poor southwark got into the divorce court, their indignation was quite magnificent. and yet i don't suppose that ten per cent of the lower orders live correctly." "i don't agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is more, harry, i don't believe you do either." lord henry stroked his pointed brown beard, and tapped the toe of his patent-leather boot with a tasselled malacca cane. "how english you are, basil! if one puts forward an idea to a real englishman,--always a rash thing to do,--he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. the only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it one's self. now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it [ ] will not be colored by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. however, i don't propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. i like persons better than principles. tell me more about dorian gray. how often do you see him?" "every day. i couldn't be happy if i didn't see him every day. of course sometimes it is only for a few minutes. but a few minutes with somebody one worships mean a great deal." "but you don't really worship him?" "i do." "how extraordinary! i thought you would never care for anything but your painting,--your art, i should say. art sounds better, doesn't it?" "he is all my art to me now. i sometimes think, harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the history of the world. the first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. what the invention of oil-painting was to the venetians, the face of antinoüs was to late greek sculpture, and the face of dorian gray will some day be to me. it is not merely that i paint from him, draw from him, model from him. of course i have done all that. he has stood as paris in dainty armor, and as adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boar-spear. crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms, he has sat on the prow of adrian's barge, looking into the green, turbid nile. he has leaned over the still pool of some greek woodland, and seen in the water's silent silver the wonder of his own beauty. but he is much more to me than that. i won't tell you that i am dissatisfied with what i have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. there is nothing that art cannot express, and i know that the work i have done since i met dorian gray is good work, is the best work of my life. but in some curious way--i wonder will you understand me?--his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. i see things differently, i think of them differently. i can now re-create life in a way that was hidden from me before. 'a dream of form in days of thought,'--who is it who says that? i forget; but it is what dorian gray has been to me. the merely visible presence of this lad,--for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty,--his merely visible presence,--ah! i wonder can you realize all that that means? unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in itself all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is greek. the harmony of soul and body,--how much that is! we in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is bestial, an ideality that is void. harry! harry! if you only knew what dorian gray is to me! you remember that landscape of mine, for which agnew offered me such a huge price, but which i would not part with? it is one of the best things i have ever done. and why is it so? because, while i was painting it, dorian gray sat beside me." "basil, this is quite wonderful! i must see dorian gray." hallward got up from the seat, and walked up and down the [ ] garden. after some time he came back. "you don't understand, harry," he said. "dorian gray is merely to me a motive in art. he is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. he is simply a suggestion, as i have said, of a new manner. i see him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and the subtleties of certain colors. that is all." "then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" "because i have put into it all the extraordinary romance of which, of course, i have never dared to speak to him. he knows nothing about it. he will never know anything about it. but the world might guess it; and i will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. my heart shall never be put under their microscope. there is too much of myself in the thing, harry,--too much of myself!" "poets are not so scrupulous as you are. they know how useful passion is for publication. nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "i hate them for it. an artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. we live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. we have lost the abstract sense of beauty. if i live, i will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of dorian gray." "i think you are wrong, basil, but i won't argue with you. it is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. tell me, is dorian gray very fond of you?" hallward considered for a few moments. "he likes me," he answered, after a pause; "i know he likes me. of course i flatter him dreadfully. i find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that i know i shall be sorry for having said. i give myself away. as a rule, he is charming to me, and we walk home together from the club arm in arm, or sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. then i feel, harry, that i have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day." "days in summer, basil, are apt to linger. perhaps you will tire sooner than he will. it is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. that accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. in the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. the thoroughly well informed man,--that is the modern ideal. and the mind of the thoroughly well informed man is a dreadful thing. it is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, and everything priced above its proper value. i think you will tire first, all the same. some day you will look at gray, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of color, or something. you will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. the next time he calls, you will be [ ] perfectly cold and indifferent. it will be a great pity, for it will alter you. the worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic." "harry, don't talk like that. as long as i live, the personality of dorian gray will dominate me. you can't feel what i feel. you change too often." "ah, my dear basil, that is exactly why i can feel it. those who are faithful know only the pleasures of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies." and lord henry struck a light on a dainty silver case, and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and self-satisfied air, as if he had summed up life in a phrase. there was a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like swallows. how pleasant it was in the garden! and how delightful other people's emotions were!--much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. one's own soul, and the passions of one's friends,--those were the fascinating things in life. he thought with pleasure of the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with basil hallward. had he gone to his aunt's, he would have been sure to meet lord goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the housing of the poor, and the necessity for model lodging-houses. it was charming to have escaped all that! as he thought of his aunt, an idea seemed to strike him. he turned to hallward, and said, "my dear fellow, i have just remembered." "remembered what, harry?" "where i heard the name of dorian gray." "where was it?" asked hallward, with a slight frown. "don't look so angry, basil. it was at my aunt's, lady agatha's. she told me she had discovered a wonderful young man, who was going to help her in the east end, and that his name was dorian gray. i am bound to state that she never told me he was good-looking. women have no appreciation of good looks. at least, good women have not. she said that he was very earnest, and had a beautiful nature. i at once pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair, horridly freckled, and tramping about on huge feet. i wish i had known it was your friend." "i am very glad you didn't, harry." "why?" "i don't want you to meet him." "mr. dorian gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler, coming into the garden. "you must introduce me now," cried lord henry, laughing. basil hallward turned to the servant, who stood blinking in the sunlight. "ask mr. gray to wait, parker: i will be in in a few moments." the man bowed, and went up the walk. then he looked at lord henry. "dorian gray is my dearest friend," he said. "he has a simple and a beautiful nature. your aunt was quite right in what she said of him. don't spoil him for me. don't try to influence him. your influence would be bad. the world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. don't take [ ] away from me the one person that makes life absolutely lovely to me, and that gives to my art whatever wonder or charm it possesses. mind, harry, i trust you." he spoke very slowly, and the words seemed wrung out of him almost against his will. "what nonsense you talk!" said lord henry, smiling, and, taking hallward by the arm, he almost led him into the house. chapter ii [... ] as they entered they saw dorian gray. he was seated at the piano, with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of schumann's "forest scenes." "you must lend me these, basil," he cried. "i want to learn them. they are perfectly charming." "that entirely depends on how you sit to-day, dorian." "oh, i am tired of sitting, and i don't want a life-sized portrait of myself," answered the lad, swinging round on the music-stool, in a wilful, petulant manner. when he caught sight of lord henry, a faint blush colored his cheeks for a moment, and he started up. "i beg your pardon, basil, but i didn't know you had any one with you." "this is lord henry wotton, dorian, an old oxford friend of mine. i have just been telling him what a capital sitter you were, and now you have spoiled everything." "you have not spoiled my pleasure in meeting you, mr. gray," said lord henry, stepping forward and shaking him by the hand. "my aunt has often spoken to me about you. you are one of her favorites, and, i am afraid, one of her victims also." "i am in lady agatha's black books at present," answered dorian, with a funny look of penitence. "i promised to go to her club in whitechapel with her last tuesday, and i really forgot all about it. we were to have played a duet together,--three duets, i believe. i don't know what she will say to me. i am far too frightened to call." "oh, i will make your peace with my aunt. she is quite devoted to you. and i don't think it really matters about your not being there. the audience probably thought it was a duet. when aunt agatha sits down to the piano she makes quite enough noise for two people." "that is very horrid to her, and not very nice to me," answered dorian, laughing. lord henry looked at him. yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. there was something in his face that made one trust him at once. all the candor of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity. one felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. no wonder basil hallward worshipped him. he was made to be worshipped. "you are too charming to go in for philanthropy, mr. gray,--far too charming." and lord henry flung himself down on the divan, and opened his cigarette-case. hallward had been busy mixing his colors and getting his brushes ready. he was looking worried, and when he heard lord henry's last [ ] remark he glanced at him, hesitated for a moment, and then said, "harry, i want to finish this picture to-day. would you think it awfully rude of me if i asked you to go away?" lord henry smiled, and looked at dorian gray. "am i to go, mr. gray?" he asked. "oh, please don't, lord henry. i see that basil is in one of his sulky moods; and i can't bear him when he sulks. besides, i want you to tell me why i should not go in for philanthropy." "i don't know that i shall tell you that, mr. gray. but i certainly will not run away, now that you have asked me to stop. you don't really mind, basil, do you? you have often told me that you liked your sitters to have some one to chat to." hallward bit his lip. "if dorian wishes it, of course you must stay. dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself." lord henry took up his hat and gloves. "you are very pressing, basil, but i am afraid i must go. i have promised to meet a man at the orleans.--good-by, mr. gray. come and see me some afternoon in curzon street. i am nearly always at home at five o'clock. write to me when you are coming. i should be sorry to miss you." "basil," cried dorian gray, "if lord henry goes i shall go too. you never open your lips while you are painting, and it is horribly dull standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant. ask him to stay. i insist upon it." "stay, harry, to oblige dorian, and to oblige me," said hallward, gazing intently at his picture. "it is quite true, i never talk when i am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully tedious for my unfortunate sitters. i beg you to stay." "but what about my man at the orleans?" hallward laughed. "i don't think there will be any difficulty about that. sit down again, harry.--and now, dorian, get up on the platform, and don't move about too much, or pay any attention to what lord henry says. he has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the exception of myself." dorian stepped up on the dais, with the air of a young greek martyr, and made a little moue of discontent to lord henry, to whom he had rather taken a fancy. he was so unlike hallward. they made a delightful contrast. and he had such a beautiful voice. after a few moments he said to him, "have you really a very bad influence, lord henry? as bad as basil says?" "there is no such thing as a good influence, mr. gray. all influence is immoral,--immoral from the scientific point of view." "why?" "because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. he does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. his virtues are not real to him. his sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. he becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. the aim of life is self-development. to realize one's nature perfectly,--that is what each of us is here for. people are afraid of themselves, nowadays. they have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's [ ] self. of course they are charitable. they feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. but their own souls starve, and are naked. courage has gone out of our race. perhaps we never really had it. the terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of god, which is the secret of religion,--these are the two things that govern us. and yet--" "just turn your head a little more to the right, dorian, like a good boy," said hallward, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before. "and yet," continued lord henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his eton days, "i believe that if one man were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,--i believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the hellenic ideal,--to something finer, richer, than the hellenic ideal, it may be. but the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. the mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. we are punished for our refusals. every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. the body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. it has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. it is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. you, mr. gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame--" "stop!" murmured dorian gray, "stop! you bewilder me. i don't know what to say. there is some answer to you, but i cannot find it. don't speak. let me think, or, rather, let me try not to think." for nearly ten minutes he stood there motionless, with parted lips, and eyes strangely bright. he was dimly conscious that entirely fresh impulses were at work within him, and they seemed to him to have come really from himself. the few words that basil's friend had said to him--words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in them--had yet touched some secret chord, that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. music had stirred him like that. music had troubled him many times. but music was not articulate. it was not a new world, but rather a new chaos, that it created in us. words! mere words! how terrible they were! how clear, and vivid, and cruel! one could not escape from them. and yet what a subtle magic there was in them! [ ] they seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. mere words! was there anything so real as words? yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. he understood them now. life suddenly became fiery-colored to him. it seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. why had he not known it? lord henry watched him, with his sad smile. he knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing. he felt intensely interested. he was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen, which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he wondered whether dorian gray was passing through the same experience. he had merely shot an arrow into the air. had it hit the mark? how fascinating the lad was! hallward painted away with that marvellous bold touch of his, that had the true refinement and perfect delicacy that come only from strength. he was unconscious of the silence. "basil, i am tired of standing," cried dorian gray, suddenly. "i must go out and sit in the garden. the air is stifling here." "my dear fellow, i am so sorry. when i am painting, i can't think of anything else. but you never sat better. you were perfectly still. and i have caught the effect i wanted,--the half-parted lips, and the bright look in the eyes. i don't know what harry has been saying to you, but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression. i suppose he has been paying you compliments. you mustn't believe a word that he says." "he has certainly not been paying me compliments. perhaps that is the reason i don't think i believe anything he has told me." "you know you believe it all," said lord henry, looking at him with his dreamy, heavy-lidded eyes. "i will go out to the garden with you. it is horridly hot in the studio.--basil, let us have something iced to drink, something with strawberries in it." "certainly, harry. just touch the bell, and when parker comes i will tell him what you want. i have got to work up this background, so i will join you later on. don't keep dorian too long. i have never been in better form for painting than i am to-day. this is going to be my masterpiece. it is my masterpiece as it stands." lord henry went out to the garden, and found dorian gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. he came close to him, and put his hand upon his shoulder. "you are quite right to do that," he murmured. "nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." the lad started and drew back. he was bareheaded, and the leaves had tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded threads. there was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are suddenly awakened. his finely-chiselled nostrils quivered, and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling. [ ] "yes," continued lord henry, "that is one of the great secrets of life,--to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. you are a wonderful creature. you know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know." dorian gray frowned and turned his head away. he could not help liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. his romantic olive-colored face and worn expression interested him. there was something in his low, languid voice that was absolutely fascinating. his cool, white, flower-like hands, even, had a curious charm. they moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their own. but he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid. why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? he had known basil hallward for months, but the friendship between then had never altered him. suddenly there had come some one across his life who seemed to have disclosed to him life's mystery. and, yet, what was there to be afraid of? he was not a school-boy, or a girl. it was absurd to be frightened. "let us go and sit in the shade," said lord henry. "parker has brought out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare you will be quite spoiled, and basil will never paint you again. you really must not let yourself become sunburnt. it would be very unbecoming to you." "what does it matter?" cried dorian, laughing, as he sat down on the seat at the end of the garden. "it should matter everything to you, mr. gray." "why?" "because you have now the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having." "i don't feel that, lord henry." "no, you don't feel it now. some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. now, wherever you go, you charm the world. will it always be so? "you have a wonderfully beautiful face, mr. gray. don't frown. you have. and beauty is a form of genius,--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. it is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. it cannot be questioned. it has its divine right of sovereignty. it makes princes of those who have it. you smile? ah! when you have lost it you won't smile. "people say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. that may be so. but at least it is not so superficial as thought. to me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. "yes, mr. gray, the gods have been good to you. but what the gods give they quickly take away. you have only a few years in which really to live. when your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left [ ] for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. you will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. you will suffer horribly. "realize your youth while you have it. don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar, which are the aims, the false ideals, of our age. live! live the wonderful life that is in you! let nothing be lost upon you. be always searching for new sensations. be afraid of nothing. "a new hedonism,--that is what our century wants. you might be its visible symbol. with your personality there is nothing you could not do. the world belongs to you for a season. "the moment i met you i saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, what you really might be. there was so much about you that charmed me that i felt i must tell you something about yourself. i thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. for there is such a little time that your youth will last,--such a little time. "the common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. the laburnum will be as golden next june as it is now. in a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will have its purple stars. but we never get back our youth. the pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. our limbs fail, our senses rot. we degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we did not dare to yield to. youth! youth! there is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!" dorian gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. the spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. a furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. then it began to scramble all over the fretted purple of the tiny blossoms. he watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion, for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. after a time it flew away. he saw it creeping into the stained trumpet of a tyrian convolvulus. the flower seemed to quiver, and then swayed gently to and fro. suddenly hallward appeared at the door of the studio, and made frantic signs for them to come in. they turned to each other, and smiled. "i am waiting," cried hallward. "do come in. the light is quite perfect, and you can bring your drinks." they rose up, and sauntered down the walk together. two green-and-white butterflies fluttered past them, and in the pear-tree at the end of the garden a thrush began to sing. "you are glad you have met me, mr. gray," said lord henry, looking at him. "yes, i am glad now. i wonder shall i always be glad?" [ ] "always! that is a dreadful word. it makes me shudder when i hear it. women are so fond of using it. they spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. it is a meaningless word, too. the only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer." as they entered the studio, dorian gray put his hand upon lord henry's arm. "in that case, let our friendship be a caprice," he murmured, flushing at his own boldness, then stepped upon the platform and resumed his pose. lord henry flung himself into a large wicker arm-chair, and watched him. the sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas made the only sound that broke the stillness, except when hallward stepped back now and then to look at his work from a distance. in the slanting beams that streamed through the open door-way the dust danced and was golden. the heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything. after about a quarter of an hour, hallward stopped painting, looked for a long time at dorian gray, and then for a long time at the picture, biting the end of one of his huge brushes, and smiling. "it is quite finished," he cried, at last, and stooping down he wrote his name in thin vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of the canvas. lord henry came over and examined the picture. it was certainly a wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well. "my dear fellow, i congratulate you most warmly," he said.--"mr. gray, come and look at yourself." the lad started, as if awakened from some dream. "is it really finished?" he murmured, stepping down from the platform. "quite finished," said hallward. "and you have sat splendidly to-day. i am awfully obliged to you." "that is entirely due to me," broke in lord henry. "isn't it, mr. gray?" dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture and turned towards it. when he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. a look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. he stood there motionless, and in wonder, dimly conscious that hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. the sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. he had never felt it before. basil hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be merely the charming exaggerations of friendship. he had listened to them, laughed at them, forgotten them. they had not influenced his nature. then had come lord henry, with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity. that had stirred him at the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him. yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colorless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. the scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold steal from his hair. the life that was to make his soul would mar his body. he would become ignoble, hideous, and uncouth. [ ] as he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck like a knife across him, and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. his eyes deepened into amethyst, and a mist of tears came across them. he felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart. "don't you like it?" cried hallward at last, stung a little by the lad's silence, and not understanding what it meant. "of course he likes it," said lord henry. "who wouldn't like it? it is one of the greatest things in modern art. i will give you anything you like to ask for it. i must have it." "it is not my property, harry." "whose property is it?" "dorian's, of course." "he is a very lucky fellow." "how sad it is!" murmured dorian gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "how sad it is! i shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. but this picture will remain always young. it will never be older than this particular day of june. . . . if it was only the other way! if it was i who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! for this--for this--i would give everything! yes, there is nothing in the whole world i would not give!" "you would hardly care for that arrangement, basil," cried lord henry, laughing. "it would be rather hard lines on you." "i should object very strongly, harry." dorian gray turned and looked at him. "i believe you would, basil. you like your art better than your friends. i am no more to you than a green bronze figure. hardly as much, i dare say." hallward stared in amazement. it was so unlike dorian to speak like that. what had happened? he seemed almost angry. his face was flushed and his cheeks burning. "yes," he continued, "i am less to you than your ivory hermes or your silver faun. you will like them always. how long will you like me? till i have my first wrinkle, i suppose. i know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. your picture has taught me that. lord henry is perfectly right. youth is the only thing worth having. when i find that i am growing old, i will kill myself." hallward turned pale, and caught his hand. "dorian! dorian!" he cried, "don't talk like that. i have never had such a friend as you, and i shall never have such another. you are not jealous of material things, are you?" "i am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. i am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. why should it keep what i must lose? every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it. oh, if it was only the other way! if the picture could change, and i could be always what i am now! why did you paint it? it will mock me some day,--mock me horribly!" the hot tears welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as if he was praying. "this is your doing, harry," said hallward, bitterly. [ ] "my doing?" "yes, yours, and you know it." lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "it is the real dorian gray,--that is all," he answered. "it is not." "if it is not, what have i to do with it?" "you should have gone away when i asked you." "i stayed when you asked me." "harry, i can't quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work i have ever done, and i will destroy it. what is it but canvas and color? i will not let it come across our three lives and mar them." dorian gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and looked at him with pallid face and tear-stained eyes, as he walked over to the deal painting-table that was set beneath the large curtained window. what was he doing there? his fingers were straying about among the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something. yes, it was the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel. he had found it at last. he was going to rip up the canvas. with a stifled sob he leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end of the studio. "don't, basil, don't!" he cried. "it would be murder!" "i am glad you appreciate my work at last, dorian," said hallward, coldly, when he had recovered from his surprise. "i never thought you would." "appreciate it? i am in love with it, basil. it is part of myself, i feel that." "well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and sent home. then you can do what you like with yourself." and he walked across the room and rang the bell for tea. "you will have tea, of course, dorian? and so will you, harry? tea is the only simple pleasure left to us." "i don't like simple pleasures," said lord henry. "and i don't like scenes, except on the stage. what absurd fellows you are, both of you! i wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. it was the most premature definition ever given. man is many things, but he is not rational. i am glad he is not, after all: though i wish you chaps would not squabble over the picture. you had much better let me have it, basil. this silly boy doesn't really want it, and i do." "if you let any one have it but me, basil, i will never forgive you!" cried dorian gray. "and i don't allow people to call me a silly boy." "you know the picture is yours, dorian. i gave it to you before it existed." "and you know you have been a little silly, mr. gray, and that you don't really mind being called a boy." "i should have minded very much this morning, lord henry." "ah! this morning! you have lived since then." there came a knock to the door, and the butler entered with the tea-tray and set it down upon a small japanese table. there was a [ ] rattle of cups and saucers and the hissing of a fluted georgian urn. two globe-shaped china dishes were brought in by a page. dorian gray went over and poured the tea out. the two men sauntered languidly to the table, and examined what was under the covers. "let us go to the theatre to-night," said lord henry. "there is sure to be something on, somewhere. i have promised to dine at white's, but it is only with an old friend, so i can send him a wire and say that i am ill, or that i am prevented from coming in consequence of a subsequent engagement. i think that would be a rather nice excuse: it would have the surprise of candor." "it is such a bore putting on one's dress-clothes," muttered hallward. "and, when one has them on, they are so horrid." "yes," answered lord henry, dreamily, "the costume of our day is detestable. it is so sombre, so depressing. sin is the only color-element left in modern life." "you really must not say things like that before dorian, harry." "before which dorian? the one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?" "before either." "i should like to come to the theatre with you, lord henry," said the lad. "then you shall come; and you will come too, basil, won't you?" "i can't, really. i would sooner not. i have a lot of work to do." "well, then, you and i will go alone, mr. gray." "i should like that awfully." basil hallward bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. "i will stay with the real dorian," he said, sadly. "is it the real dorian?" cried the original of the portrait, running across to him. "am i really like that?" "yes; you are just like that." "how wonderful, basil!" "at least you are like it in appearance. but it will never alter," said hallward. "that is something." "what a fuss people make about fidelity!" murmured lord henry. "and, after all, it is purely a question for physiology. it has nothing to do with our own will. it is either an unfortunate accident, or an unpleasant result of temperament. young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say." "don't go to the theatre to-night, dorian," said hallward. "stop and dine with me." "i can't, really." "why?" "because i have promised lord henry to go with him." "he won't like you better for keeping your promises. he always breaks his own. i beg you not to go." dorian gray laughed and shook his head. "i entreat you." the lad hesitated, and looked over at lord henry, who was watching them from the tea-table with an amused smile. [ ] "i must go, basil," he answered. "very well," said hallward; and he walked over and laid his cup down on the tray. "it is rather late, and, as you have to dress, you had better lose no time. good-by, harry; good-by, dorian. come and see me soon. come to-morrow." "certainly." "you won't forget?" "no, of course not." "and . . . harry!" "yes, basil?" "remember what i asked you, when in the garden this morning." "i have forgotten it." "i trust you." "i wish i could trust myself," said lord henry, laughing.--"come, mr. gray, my hansom is outside, and i can drop you at your own place.--good-by, basil. it has been a most interesting afternoon." as the door closed behind them, hallward flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face. chapter iii [... ] one afternoon, a month later, dorian gray was reclining in a luxurious arm-chair, in the little library of lord henry's house in curzon street. it was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high panelled wainscoting of olive-stained oak, its cream-colored frieze and ceiling of raised plaster-work, and its brick-dust felt carpet strewn with long-fringed silk persian rugs. on a tiny satinwood table stood a statuette by clodion, and beside it lay a copy of "les cent nouvelles," bound for margaret of valois by clovis eve, and powdered with the gilt daisies that the queen had selected for her device. some large blue china jars, filled with parrot-tulips, were ranged on the mantel-shelf, and through the small leaded panes of the window streamed the apricot-colored light of a summer's day in london. lord henry had not come in yet. he was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. so the lad was looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers he turned over the pages of an elaborately-illustrated edition of "manon lescaut" that he had found in one of the bookcases. the formal monotonous ticking of the louis quatorze clock annoyed him. once or twice he thought of going away. at last he heard a light step outside, and the door opened. "how late you are, harry!" he murmured. "i am afraid it is not harry, mr. gray," said a woman's voice. he glanced quickly round, and rose to his feet. "i beg your pardon. i thought--" "you thought it was my husband. it is only his wife. you must let me introduce myself. i know you quite well by your photographs. i think my husband has got twenty-seven of them." [ ] "not twenty-seven, lady henry?" "well, twenty-six, then. and i saw you with him the other night at the opera." she laughed nervously, as she spoke, and watched him with her vague forget-me-not eyes. she was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. she was always in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. she tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. her name was victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church. "that was at 'lohengrin,' lady henry, i think?" "yes; it was at dear 'lohengrin.' i like wagner's music better than any other music. it is so loud that one can talk the whole time, without people hearing what one says. that is a great advantage: don't you think so, mr. gray?" the same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips, and her fingers began to play with a long paper-knife. dorian smiled, and shook his head: "i am afraid i don't think so, lady henry. i never talk during music,--at least during good music. if one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by conversation." "ah! that is one of harry's views, isn't it, mr. gray? but you must not think i don't like good music. i adore it, but i am afraid of it. it makes me too romantic. i have simply worshipped pianists,--two at a time, sometimes. i don't know what it is about them. perhaps it is that they are foreigners. they all are, aren't they? even those that are born in england become foreigners after a time, don't they? it is so clever of them, and such a compliment to art. makes it quite cosmopolitan, doesn't it? you have never been to any of my parties, have you, mr. gray? you must come. i can't afford orchids, but i spare no expense in foreigners. they make one's rooms look so picturesque. but here is harry!--harry, i came in to look for you, to ask you something,--i forget what it was,--and i found mr. gray here. we have had such a pleasant chat about music. we have quite the same views. no; i think our views are quite different. but he has been most pleasant. i am so glad i've seen him." "i am charmed, my love, quite charmed," said lord henry, elevating his dark crescent-shaped eyebrows and looking at them both with an amused smile.--"so sorry i am late, dorian. i went to look after a piece of old brocade in wardour street, and had to bargain for hours for it. nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing." "i am afraid i must be going," exclaimed lady henry, after an awkward silence, with her silly sudden laugh. "i have promised to drive with the duchess.--good-by, mr. gray.--good-by, harry. you are dining out, i suppose? so am i. perhaps i shall see you at lady thornbury's." "i dare say, my dear," said lord henry, shutting the door behind her, as she flitted out of the room, looking like a bird-of-paradise that had been out in the rain, and leaving a faint odor of patchouli behind her. then he shook hands with dorian gray, lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on the sofa. [ ] "never marry a woman with straw-colored hair, dorian," he said, after a few puffs. "why, harry?" "because they are so sentimental." "but i like sentimental people." "never marry at all, dorian. men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed." "i don't think i am likely to marry, harry. i am too much in love. that is one of your aphorisms. i am putting it into practice, as i do everything you say." "whom are you in love with?" said lord henry, looking at him with a curious smile. "with an actress," said dorian gray, blushing. lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "that is a rather common-place début," he murmured. "you would not say so if you saw her, harry." "who is she?" "her name is sibyl vane." "never heard of her." "no one has. people will some day, however. she is a genius." "my dear boy, no woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex. they never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. they represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as we men represent the triumph of mind over morals. there are only two kinds of women, the plain and the colored. the plain women are very useful. if you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. the other women are very charming. they commit one mistake, however. they paint in order to try to look young. our grandmothers painted in order to try to talk brilliantly. rouge and esprit used to go together. that has all gone out now. as long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. as for conversation, there are only five women in london worth talking to, and two of these can't be admitted into decent society. however, tell me about your genius. how long have you known her?" "about three weeks. not so much. about two weeks and two days." "how did you come across her?" "i will tell you, harry; but you mustn't be unsympathetic about it. after all, it never would have happened if i had not met you. you filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life. for days after i met you, something seemed to throb in my veins. as i lounged in the park, or strolled down piccadilly, i used to look at every one who passed me, and wonder with a mad curiosity what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. others filled me with terror. there was an exquisite poison in the air. i had a passion for sensations. "one evening about seven o'clock i determined to go out in search of some adventure. i felt that this gray, monstrous london of ours, with its myriads of people, its splendid sinners, and its sordid sins, as [ ] you once said, must have something in store for me. i fancied a thousand things. "the mere danger gave me a sense of delight. i remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful night when we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the poisonous secret of life. i don't know what i expected, but i went out, and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares. about half-past eight i passed by a little third-rate theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. a hideous jew, in the most amazing waistcoat i ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. he had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. ''ave a box, my lord?' he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an act of gorgeous servility. there was something about him, harry, that amused me. he was such a monster. you will laugh at me, i know, but i really went in and paid a whole guinea for the stage-box. to the present day i can't make out why i did so; and yet if i hadn't!--my dear harry, if i hadn't, i would have missed the greatest romance of my life. i see you are laughing. it is horrid of you!" "i am not laughing, dorian; at least i am not laughing at you. but you should not say the greatest romance of your life. you should say the first romance of your life. you will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. there are exquisite things in store for you. this is merely the beginning." "do you think my nature so shallow?" cried dorian gray, angrily. "no; i think your nature so deep." "how do you mean?" "my dear boy, people who only love once in their lives are really shallow people. what they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, i call either the lethargy of custom or the lack of imagination. faithlessness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the intellectual life,--simply a confession of failure. but i don't want to interrupt you. go on with your story." "well, i found myself seated in a horrid little private box, with a vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. i looked out behind the curtain, and surveyed the house. it was a tawdry affair, all cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding-cake. the gallery and pit were fairly full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and there was hardly a person in what i suppose they called the dress-circle. women went about with oranges and ginger-beer, and there was a terrible consumption of nuts going on." "it must have been just like the palmy days of the british drama." "just like, i should fancy, and very horrid. i began to wonder what on earth i should do, when i caught sight of the play-bill. what do you think the play was, harry?" "i should think 'the idiot boy, or dumb but innocent.' our fathers used to like that sort of piece, i believe. the longer i live, dorian, the more keenly i feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. in art, as in politics, les grand pères ont toujours tort." [ ] "this play was good enough for us, harry. it was 'romeo and juliet.' i must admit i was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place. still, i felt interested, in a sort of way. at any rate, i determined to wait for the first act. there was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young jew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the drop-scene was drawn up, and the play began. romeo was a stout elderly gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky tragedy voice, and a figure like a beer-barrel. mercutio was almost as bad. he was played by the low-comedian, who had introduced gags of his own and was on most familiar terms with the pit. they were as grotesque as the scenery, and that looked as if it had come out of a pantomime of fifty years ago. but juliet! harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose. she was the loveliest thing i had ever seen in my life. you said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears. i tell you, harry, i could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that came across me. and her voice,--i never heard such a voice. it was very low at first, with deep mellow notes, that seemed to fall singly upon one's ear. then it became a little louder, and sounded like a flute or a distant hautbois. in the garden-scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing. there were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of violins. you know how a voice can stir one. your voice and the voice of sibyl vane are two things that i shall never forget. when i close my eyes, i hear them, and each of them says something different. i don't know which to follow. why should i not love her? harry, i do love her. she is everything to me in life. night after night i go to see her play. one evening she is rosalind, and the next evening she is imogen. i have seen her die in the gloom of an italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover's lips. i have watched her wandering through the forest of arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap. she has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king, and given him rue to wear, and bitter herbs to taste of. she has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her reed-like throat. i have seen her in every age and in every costume. ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. they are limited to their century. no glamour ever transfigures them. one knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. one can always find them. there is no mystery in one of them. they ride in the park in the morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. they have their stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. they are quite obvious. but an actress! how different an actress is! why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?" "because i have loved so many of them, dorian." "oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces." "don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. there is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes." [ ] "i wish now i had not told you about sibyl vane." "you could not have helped telling me, dorian. all through your life you will tell me everything you do." "yes, harry, i believe that is true. i cannot help telling you things. you have a curious influence over me. if i ever did a crime, i would come and confide it to you. you would understand me." "people like you--the wilful sunbeams of life--don't commit crimes, dorian. but i am much obliged for the compliment, all the same. and now tell me,--reach me the matches, like a good boy: thanks,--tell me, what are your relations with sibyl vane?" dorian gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes. "harry, sibyl vane is sacred!" "it is only the sacred things that are worth touching, dorian," said lord henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice. "but why should you be annoyed? i suppose she will be yours some day. when one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. that is what the world calls romance. you know her, at any rate, i suppose?" "of course i know her. on the first night i was at the theatre, the horrid old jew came round to the box after the performance was over, and offered to bring me behind the scenes and introduce me to her. i was furious with him, and told him that juliet had been dead for hundreds of years, and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in verona. i think, from his blank look of amazement, that he thought i had taken too much champagne, or something." "i am not surprised." "i was not surprised either. then he asked me if i wrote for any of the newspapers. i told him i never even read them. he seemed terribly disappointed at that, and confided to me that all the dramatic critics were in a conspiracy against him, and that they were all to be bought." "i believe he was quite right there. but, on the other hand, most of them are not at all expensive." "well, he seemed to think they were beyond his means. by this time the lights were being put out in the theatre, and i had to go. he wanted me to try some cigars which he strongly recommended. i declined. the next night, of course, i arrived at the theatre again. when he saw me he made me a low bow, and assured me that i was a patron of art. he was a most offensive brute, though he had an extraordinary passion for shakespeare. he told me once, with an air of pride, that his three bankruptcies were entirely due to the poet, whom he insisted on calling 'the bard.' he seemed to think it a distinction." "it was a distinction, my dear dorian,--a great distinction. but when did you first speak to miss sibyl vane?" "the third night. she had been playing rosalind. i could not help going round. i had thrown her some flowers, and she had looked at me; at least i fancied that she had. the old jew was persistent. he seemed determined to bring me behind, so i consented. it was curious my not wanting to know her, wasn't it?" [ ] "no; i don't think so." "my dear harry, why?" "i will tell you some other time. now i want to know about the girl." "sibyl? oh, she was so shy, and so gentle. there is something of a child about her. her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when i told her what i thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious of her power. i think we were both rather nervous. the old jew stood grinning at the door-way of the dusty greenroom, making elaborate speeches about us both, while we stood looking at each other like children. he would insist on calling me 'my lord,' so i had to assure sibyl that i was not anything of the kind. she said quite simply to me, 'you look more like a prince.'" "upon my word, dorian, miss sibyl knows how to pay compliments." "you don't understand her, harry. she regarded me merely as a person in a play. she knows nothing of life. she lives with her mother, a faded tired woman who played lady capulet in a sort of magenta dressing-wrapper on the first night, and who looks as if she had seen better days." "i know that look. it always depresses me." "the jew wanted to tell me her history, but i said it did not interest me." "you were quite right. there is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies." "sibyl is the only thing i care about. what is it to me where she came from? from her little head to her little feet, she is absolutely and entirely divine. i go to see her act every night of my life, and every night she is more marvellous." "that is the reason, i suppose, that you will never dine with me now. i thought you must have some curious romance on hand. you have; but it is not quite what i expected." "my dear harry, we either lunch or sup together every day, and i have been to the opera with you several times." "you always come dreadfully late." "well, i can't help going to see sibyl play, even if it is only for an act. i get hungry for her presence; and when i think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, i am filled with awe." "you can dine with me to-night, dorian, can't you?" he shook his head. "to-night she is imogen," he answered, "and tomorrow night she will be juliet." "when is she sibyl vane?" "never." "i congratulate you." "how horrid you are! she is all the great heroines of the world in one. she is more than an individual. you laugh, but i tell you she has genius. i love her, and i must make her love me. you, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm sibyl vane to love me! i want to make romeo jealous. i want the dead lovers of the [ ] world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. i want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. my god, harry, how i worship her!" he was walking up and down the room as he spoke. hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. he was terribly excited. lord henry watched him with a subtle sense of pleasure. how different he was now from the shy, frightened boy he had met in basil hallward's studio! his nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. out of its secret hiding-place had crept his soul, and desire had come to meet it on the way. "and what do you propose to do?" said lord henry, at last. "i want you and basil to come with me some night and see her act. i have not the slightest fear of the result. you won't be able to refuse to recognize her genius. then we must get her out of the jew's hands. she is bound to him for three years--at least for two years and eight months--from the present time. i will have to pay him something, of course. when all that is settled, i will take a west-end theatre and bring her out properly. she will make the world as mad as she has made me." "impossible, my dear boy!" "yes, she will. she has not merely art, consummate art-instinct, in her, but she has personality also; and you have often told me that it is personalities, not principles, that move the age." "well, what night shall we go?" "let me see. to-day is tuesday. let us fix to-morrow. she plays juliet to-morrow." "all right. the bristol at eight o'clock; and i will get basil." "not eight, harry, please. half-past six. we must be there before the curtain rises. you must see her in the first act, where she meets romeo." "half-past six! what an hour! it will be like having a meat-tea. however, just as you wish. shall you see basil between this and then? or shall i write to him?" "dear basil! i have not laid eyes on him for a week. it is rather horrid of me, as he has sent me my portrait in the most wonderful frame, designed by himself, and, though i am a little jealous of it for being a whole month younger than i am, i must admit that i delight in it. perhaps you had better write to him. i don't want to see him alone. he says things that annoy me." lord henry smiled. "he gives you good advice, i suppose. people are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves." "you don't mean to say that basil has got any passion or any romance in him?" "i don't know whether he has any passion, but he certainly has romance," said lord henry, with an amused look in his eyes. "has he never let you know that?" "never. i must ask him about it. i am rather surprised to hear it. he is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit of a philistine. since i have known you, harry, i have discovered that." "basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into [ ] his work. the consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. the only artists i have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. a great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. but inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. the worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. the mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. he lives the poetry that he cannot write. the others write the poetry that they dare not realize." "i wonder is that really so, harry?" said dorian gray, putting some perfume on his handkerchief out of a large gold-topped bottle that stood on the table. "it must be, if you say so. and now i must be off. imogen is waiting for me. don't forget about to-morrow. good-by." as he left the room, lord henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began to think. certainly few people had ever interested him so much as dorian gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy. he was pleased by it. it made him a more interesting study. he had been always enthralled by the methods of science, but the ordinary subject-matter of science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. and so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. human life,--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. there was nothing else of any value, compared to it. it was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, or keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. there were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. there were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. and, yet, what a great reward one received! how wonderful the whole world became to one! to note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional colored life of the intellect,--to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they became one, and at what point they were at discord,--there was a delight in that! what matter what the cost was? one could never pay too high a price for any sensation. he was conscious--and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his brown agate eyes--that it was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that dorian gray's soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. to a large extent, the lad was his own creation. he had made him premature. that was something. ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. but now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its [ ] way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. yes, the lad was premature. he was gathering his harvest while it was yet spring. the pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was becoming self-conscious. it was delightful to watch him. with his beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at. it was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end. he was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses. soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! there was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. the senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began? how shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! and yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? or was the body really in the soul, as giordano bruno thought? the separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. he began to wonder whether we should ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. as it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. experience was of no ethical value. it was merely the name we gave to our mistakes. men had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain moral efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. but there was no motive power in experience. it was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. all that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy. it was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and certainly dorian gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results. his sudden mad love for sibyl vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. there was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion. what there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into something that seemed to the boy himself to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous. it was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. it often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. while lord henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the door, and his valet entered, and reminded him it was time to dress [ ] for dinner. he got up and looked out into the street. the sunset had smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite. the panes glowed like plates of heated metal. the sky above was like a faded rose. he thought of dorian gray's young fiery-colored life, and wondered how it was all going to end. when he arrived home, about half-past twelve o'clock, he saw a telegram lying on the hall-table. he opened it and found it was from dorian. it was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to sibyl vane. chapter iv [... ] "i suppose you have heard the news, basil?" said lord henry on the following evening, as hallward was shown into a little private room at the bristol where dinner had been laid for three. "no, harry," answered hallward, giving his hat and coat to the bowing waiter. "what is it? nothing about politics, i hope? they don't interest me. there is hardly a single person in the house of commons worth painting; though many of them would be the better for a little whitewashing." "dorian gray is engaged to be married," said lord henry, watching him as he spoke. hallward turned perfectly pale, and a curious look flashed for a moment into his eyes, and then passed away, leaving them dull. "dorian engaged to be married!" he cried. "impossible!" "it is perfectly true." "to whom?" "to some little actress or other." "i can't believe it. dorian is far too sensible." "dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear basil." "marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, harry," said hallward, smiling. "except in america. but i didn't say he was married. i said he was engaged to be married. there is a great difference. i have a distinct remembrance of being married, but i have no recollection at all of being engaged. i am inclined to think that i never was engaged." "but think of dorian's birth, and position, and wealth. it would be absurd for him to marry so much beneath him." "if you want him to marry this girl, tell him that, basil. he is sure to do it then. whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives." "i hope the girl is good, harry. i don't want to see dorian tied to some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his intellect." "oh, she is more than good--she is beautiful," murmured lord henry, sipping a glass of vermouth and orange-bitters. "dorian says she is beautiful; and he is not often wrong about things of that kind. [ ] your portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal appearance of other people. it has had that excellent effect, among others. we are to see her to-night, if that boy doesn't forget his appointment." "but do you approve of it, harry?" asked hallward, walking up and down the room, and biting his lip. "you can't approve of it, really. it is some silly infatuation." "i never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. it is an absurd attitude to take towards life. we are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. i never take any notice of what common people say, and i never interfere with what charming people do. if a personality fascinates me, whatever the personality chooses to do is absolutely delightful to me. dorian gray falls in love with a beautiful girl who acts shakespeare, and proposes to marry her. why not? if he wedded messalina he would be none the less interesting. you know i am not a champion of marriage. the real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. and unselfish people are colorless. they lack individuality. still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. they retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. they are forced to have more than one life. they become more highly organized. besides, every experience is of value, and, whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience. i hope that dorian gray will make this girl his wife, passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become fascinated by some one else. he would be a wonderful study." "you don't mean all that, harry; you know you don't. if dorian gray's life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier than yourself. you are much better than you pretend to be." lord henry laughed. "the reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. the basis of optimism is sheer terror. we think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with those virtues that are likely to benefit ourselves. we praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. i mean everything that i have said. i have the greatest contempt for optimism. and as for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. if you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. but here is dorian himself. he will tell you more than i can." "my dear harry, my dear basil, you must both congratulate me!" said the boy, throwing off his evening cape with its satin-lined wings, and shaking each of his friends by the hand in turn. "i have never been so happy. of course it is sudden: all really delightful things are. and yet it seems to me to be the one thing i have been looking for all my life." he was flushed with excitement and pleasure, and looked extraordinarily handsome. "i hope you will always be very happy, dorian," said hallward, "but i don't quite forgive you for not having let me know of your engagement. you let harry know." "and i don't forgive you for being late for dinner," broke in lord [ ] henry, putting his hand on the lad's shoulder, and smiling as he spoke. "come, let us sit down and try what the new chef here is like, and then you will tell us how it all came about." "there is really not much to tell," cried dorian, as they took their seats at the small round table. "what happened was simply this. after i left you yesterday evening, harry, i had some dinner at that curious little italian restaurant in rupert street, you introduced me to, and went down afterwards to the theatre. sibyl was playing rosalind. of course the scenery was dreadful, and the orlando absurd. but sibyl! you should have seen her! when she came on in her boy's dress she was perfectly wonderful. she wore a moss-colored velvet jerkin with cinnamon sleeves, slim brown cross-gartered hose, a dainty little green cap with a hawk's feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak lined with dull red. she had never seemed to me more exquisite. she had all the delicate grace of that tanagra figurine that you have in your studio, basil. her hair clustered round her face like dark leaves round a pale rose. as for her acting--well, you will see her to-night. she is simply a born artist. i sat in the dingy box absolutely enthralled. i forgot that i was in london and in the nineteenth century. i was away with my love in a forest that no man had ever seen. after the performance was over i went behind, and spoke to her. as we were sitting together, suddenly there came a look into her eyes that i had never seen there before. my lips moved towards hers. we kissed each other. i can't describe to you what i felt at that moment. it seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect point of rose-colored joy. she trembled all over, and shook like a white narcissus. then she flung herself on her knees and kissed my hands. i feel that i should not tell you all this, but i can't help it. of course our engagement is a dead secret. she has not even told her own mother. i don't know what my guardians will say. lord radley is sure to be furious. i don't care. i shall be of age in less than a year, and then i can do what i like. i have been right, basil, haven't i, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in shakespeare's plays? lips that shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. i have had the arms of rosalind around me, and kissed juliet on the mouth." "yes, dorian, i suppose you were right," said hallward, slowly. "have you seen her to-day?" asked lord henry. dorian gray shook his head. "i left her in the forest of arden, i shall find her in an orchard in verona." lord henry sipped his champagne in a meditative manner. "at what particular point did you mention the word marriage, dorian? and what did she say in answer? perhaps you forgot all about it." "my dear harry, i did not treat it as a business transaction, and i did not make any formal proposal. i told her that i loved her, and she said she was not worthy to be my wife. not worthy! why, the whole world is nothing to me compared to her." "women are wonderfully practical," murmured lord henry,--"much more practical than we are. in situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us." [ ] hallward laid his hand upon his arm. "don't, harry. you have annoyed dorian. he is not like other men. he would never bring misery upon any one. his nature is too fine for that." lord henry looked across the table. "dorian is never annoyed with me," he answered. "i asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question,--simple curiosity. i have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women, except, of course, in middle-class life. but then the middle classes are not modern." dorian gray laughed, and tossed his head. "you are quite incorrigible, harry; but i don't mind. it is impossible to be angry with you. when you see sibyl vane you will feel that the man who could wrong her would be a beast without a heart. i cannot understand how any one can wish to shame what he loves. i love sibyl vane. i wish to place her on a pedestal of gold, and to see the world worship the woman who is mine. what is marriage? an irrevocable vow. and it is an irrevocable vow that i want to take. her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good. when i am with her, i regret all that you have taught me. i become different from what you have known me to be. i am changed, and the mere touch of sibyl vane's hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories." "you will always like me, dorian," said lord henry. "will you have some coffee, you fellows?--waiter, bring coffee, and fine-champagne, and some cigarettes. no: don't mind the cigarettes; i have some.--basil, i can't allow you to smoke cigars. you must have a cigarette. a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. it is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. what more can you want?--yes, dorian, you will always be fond of me. i represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit." "what nonsense you talk, harry!" cried dorian gray, lighting his cigarette from a fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table. "let us go down to the theatre. when you see sibyl you will have a new ideal of life. she will represent something to you that you have never known." "i have known everything," said lord henry, with a sad look in his eyes, "but i am always ready for a new emotion. i am afraid that there is no such thing, for me at any rate. still, your wonderful girl may thrill me. i love acting. it is so much more real than life. let us go. dorian, you will come with me.--i am so sorry, basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham. you must follow us in a hansom." they got up and put on their coats, sipping their coffee standing. hallward was silent and preoccupied. there was a gloom over him. he could not bear this marriage, and yet it seemed to him to be better than many other things that might have happened. after a few moments, they all passed down-stairs. he drove off by himself, as had been arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little brougham in front of him. a strange sense of loss came over him. [ ] he felt that dorian gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. his eyes darkened, and the crowded flaring streets became blurred to him. when the cab drew up at the doors of the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older. chapter v [... ] for some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily, tremulous smile. he escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands, and talking at the top of his voice. dorian gray loathed him more than ever. he felt as if he had come to look for miranda and had been met by caliban. lord henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him. at least he declared he did, and insisted on shaking him by the hand, and assured him that he was proud to meet a man who had discovered a real genius and gone bankrupt over shakespeare. hallward amused himself with watching the faces in the pit. the heat was terribly oppressive, and the huge sunlight flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of fire. the youths in the gallery had taken off their coats and waistcoats and hung them over the side. they talked to each other across the theatre, and shared their oranges with the tawdry painted girls who sat by them. some women were laughing in the pit; their voices were horribly shrill and discordant. the sound of the popping of corks came from the bar. "what a place to find one's divinity in!" said lord henry. "yes!" answered dorian gray. "it was here i found her, and she is divine beyond all living things. when she acts you will forget everything. these common people here, with their coarse faces and brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage. they sit silently and watch her. they weep and laugh as she wills them to do. she makes them as responsive as a violin. she spiritualizes them, and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self." "oh, i hope not!" murmured lord henry, who was scanning the occupants of the gallery through his opera-glass. "don't pay any attention to him, dorian," said hallward. "i understand what you mean, and i believe in this girl. any one you love must be marvellous, and any girl that has the effect you describe must be fine and noble. to spiritualize one's age,--that is something worth doing. if this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. this marriage is quite right. i did not think so at first, but i admit it now. god made sibyl vane for you. without her you would have been incomplete." "thanks, basil," answered dorian gray, pressing his hand. "i [ ] knew that you would understand me. harry is so cynical, he terrifies me. but here is the orchestra. it is quite dreadful, but it only lasts for about five minutes. then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl to whom i am going to give all my life, to whom i have given everything that is good in me." a quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil of applause, sibyl vane stepped on to the stage. yes, she was certainly lovely to look at,--one of the loveliest creatures, lord henry thought, that he had ever seen. there was something of the fawn in her shy grace and startled eyes. a faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver, came to her cheeks as she glanced at the crowded, enthusiastic house. she stepped back a few paces, and her lips seemed to tremble. basil hallward leaped to his feet and began to applaud. dorian gray sat motionless, gazing on her, like a man in a dream. lord henry peered through his opera-glass, murmuring, "charming! charming!" the scene was the hall of capulet's house, and romeo in his pilgrim's dress had entered with mercutio and his friends. the band, such as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began. through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily-dressed actors, sibyl vane moved like a creature from a finer world. her body swayed, as she danced, as a plant sways in the water. the curves of her throat were like the curves of a white lily. her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory. yet she was curiously listless. she showed no sign of joy when her eyes rested on romeo. the few lines she had to speak,-- good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this; for saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss,-- with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly artificial manner. the voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. it was wrong in color. it took away all the life from the verse. it made the passion unreal. dorian gray grew pale as he watched her. neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. she seemed to them to be absolutely incompetent. they were horribly disappointed. yet they felt that the true test of any juliet is the balcony scene of the second act. they waited for that. if she failed there, there was nothing in her. she looked charming as she came out in the moonlight. that could not be denied. but the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew worse as she went on. her gestures became absurdly artificial. she over-emphasized everything that she had to say. the beautiful passage,-- thou knowest the mask of night is on my face, else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek for that which thou hast heard me speak to-night,-- [ ] was declaimed with the painful precision of a school-girl who has been taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. when she leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines,-- although i joy in thee, i have no joy of this contract to-night: it is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say, "it lightens." sweet, good-night! this bud of love by summer's ripening breath may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet,-- she spoke the words as if they conveyed no meaning to her. it was not nervousness. indeed, so far from being nervous, she seemed absolutely self-contained. it was simply bad art. she was a complete failure. even the common uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their interest in the play. they got restless, and began to talk loudly and to whistle. the jew manager, who was standing at the back of the dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage. the only person unmoved was the girl herself. when the second act was over there came a storm of hisses, and lord henry got up from his chair and put on his coat. "she is quite beautiful, dorian," he said, "but she can't act. let us go." "i am going to see the play through," answered the lad, in a hard, bitter voice. "i am awfully sorry that i have made you waste an evening, harry. i apologize to both of you." "my dear dorian, i should think miss vane was ill," interrupted hallward. "we will come some other night." "i wish she was ill," he rejoined. "but she seems to me to be simply callous and cold. she has entirely altered. last night she was a great artist. to-night she is merely a commonplace, mediocre actress." "don't talk like that about any one you love, dorian. love is a more wonderful thing than art." "they are both simply forms of imitation," murmured lord henry. "but do let us go. dorian, you must not stay here any longer. it is not good for one's morals to see bad acting. besides, i don't suppose you will want your wife to act. so what does it matter if she plays juliet like a wooden doll? she is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience. there are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating,--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic! the secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. come to the club with basil and myself. we will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of sibyl vane. she is beautiful. what more can you want?" "please go away, harry," cried the lad. "i really want to be alone.--basil, you don't mind my asking you to go? ah! can't you see that my heart is breaking?" the hot tears came to his eyes. his [ ] lips trembled, and, rushing to the back of the box, he leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands. "let us go, basil," said lord henry, with a strange tenderness in his voice; and the two young men passed out together. a few moments afterwards the footlights flared up, and the curtain rose on the third act. dorian gray went back to his seat. he looked pale, and proud, and indifferent. the play dragged on, and seemed interminable. half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots, and laughing. the whole thing was a fiasco. the last act was played to almost empty benches. as soon as it was over, dorian gray rushed behind the scenes into the greenroom. the girl was standing alone there, with a look of triumph on her face. her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. there was a radiance about her. her parted lips were smiling over some secret of their own. when he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy came over her. "how badly i acted to-night, dorian!" she cried. "horribly!" he answered, gazing at her in amazement,--"horribly! it was dreadful. are you ill? you have no idea what it was. you have no idea what i suffered." the girl smiled. "dorian," she answered, lingering over his name with long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to the red petals of her lips,--"dorian, you should have understood. but you understand now, don't you?" "understand what?" he asked, angrily. "why i was so bad to-night. why i shall always be bad. why i shall never act well again." he shrugged his shoulders. "you are ill, i suppose. when you are ill you shouldn't act. you make yourself ridiculous. my friends were bored. i was bored." she seemed not to listen to him. she was transfigured with joy. an ecstasy of happiness dominated her. "dorian, dorian," she cried, "before i knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. it was only in the theatre that i lived. i thought that it was all true. i was rosalind one night, and portia the other. the joy of beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of cordelia were mine also. i believed in everything. the common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. the painted scenes were my world. i knew nothing but shadows, and i thought them real. you came,--oh, my beautiful love!--and you freed my soul from prison. you taught me what reality really is. to-night, for the first time in my life, i saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness, of the empty pageant in which i had always played. to-night, for the first time, i became conscious that the romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words i had to speak were unreal, were not my words, not what i wanted to say. you had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. you have made me understand what love really is. my love! my love! i am sick [ ] of shadows. you are more to me than all art can ever be. what have i to do with the puppets of a play? when i came on to-night, i could not understand how it was that everything had gone from me. suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant. the knowledge was exquisite to me. i heard them hissing, and i smiled. what should they know of love? take me away, dorian--take me away with you, where we can be quite alone. i hate the stage. i might mimic a passion that i do not feel, but i cannot mimic one that burns me like fire. oh, dorian, dorian, you understand now what it all means? even if i could do it, it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. you have made me see that." he flung himself down on the sofa, and turned away his face. "you have killed my love," he muttered. she looked at him in wonder, and laughed. he made no answer. she came across to him, and stroked his hair with her little fingers. she knelt down and pressed his hands to her lips. he drew them away, and a shudder ran through him. then he leaped up, and went to the door. "yes," he cried, "you have killed my love. you used to stir my imagination. now you don't even stir my curiosity. you simply produce no effect. i loved you because you were wonderful, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. you have thrown it all away. you are shallow and stupid. my god! how mad i was to love you! what a fool i have been! you are nothing to me now. i will never see you again. i will never think of you. i will never mention your name. you don't know what you were to me, once. why, once . . . . oh, i can't bear to think of it! i wish i had never laid eyes upon you! you have spoiled the romance of my life. how little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! what are you without your art? nothing. i would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. the world would have worshipped you, and you would have belonged to me. what are you now? a third-rate actress with a pretty face." the girl grew white, and trembled. she clinched her hands together, and her voice seemed to catch in her throat. "you are not serious, dorian?" she murmured. "you are acting." "acting! i leave that to you. you do it so well," he answered, bitterly. she rose from her knees, and, with a piteous expression of pain in her face, came across the room to him. she put her hand upon his arm, and looked into his eyes. he thrust her back. "don't touch me!" he cried. a low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet, and lay there like a trampled flower. "dorian, dorian, don't leave me!" she whispered. "i am so sorry i didn't act well. i was thinking of you all the time. but i will try,--indeed, i will try. it came so suddenly across me, my love for you. i think i should never have known it if you had not kissed me,--if we had not kissed each other. kiss me again, my love. don't go away from me. i couldn't bear it. can't you forgive me for to-night? i will work so hard, and try to [ ] improve. don't be cruel to me because i love you better than anything in the world. after all, it is only once that i have not pleased you. but you are quite right, dorian. i should have shown myself more of an artist. it was foolish of me; and yet i couldn't help it. oh, don't leave me, don't leave me." a fit of passionate sobbing choked her. she crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and dorian gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain. there is always something ridiculous about the passions of people whom one has ceased to love. sibyl vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. her tears and sobs annoyed him. "i am going," he said at last, in his calm, clear voice. "i don't wish to be unkind, but i can't see you again. you have disappointed me." she wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer to him. her little hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him. he turned on his heel, and left the room. in a few moments he was out of the theatre. where he went to, he hardly knew. he remembered wandering through dimly-lit streets with gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses. women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. drunkards had reeled by cursing, and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. he had seen grotesque children huddled upon door-steps, and had heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts. when the dawn was just breaking he found himself at covent garden. huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. the air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain. he followed into the market, and watched the men unloading their wagons. a white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. he thanked him, wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly. they had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them. a long line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge jade-green piles of vegetables. under the portico, with its gray sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over. after some time he hailed a hansom and drove home. the sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it. as he was passing through the library towards the door of his bedroom, his eye fell upon the portrait basil hallward had painted of him. he started back in surprise, and then went over to it and examined it. in the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-colored silk blinds, the face seemed to him to be a little changed. the expression looked different. one would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. it was certainly curious. he turned round, and, walking to the window, drew the blinds up. the bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows [ ] into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. but the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. the quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. he winced, and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory cupids, that lord henry had given him, he glanced hurriedly into it. no line like that warped his red lips. what did it mean? he rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. there were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered. it was not a mere fancy of his own. the thing was horribly apparent. he threw himself into a chair, and began to think. suddenly there flashed across his mind what he had said in basil hallward's studio the day the picture had been finished. yes, he remembered it perfectly. he had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. surely his prayer had not been answered? such things were impossible. it seemed monstrous even to think of them. and, yet, there was the picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in the mouth. cruelty! had he been cruel? it was the girl's fault, not his. he had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he had thought her great. then she had disappointed him. she had been shallow and unworthy. and, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. he remembered with what callousness he had watched her. why had he been made like that? why had such a soul been given to him? but he had suffered also. during the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture. his life was well worth hers. she had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age. besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. they lived on their emotions. they only thought of their emotions. when they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes. lord henry had told him that, and lord henry knew what women were. why should he trouble about sibyl vane? she was nothing to him now. but the picture? what was he to say of that? it held the secret of his life, and told his story. it had taught him to love his own beauty. would it teach him to loathe his own soul? would he ever look at it again? no; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. the horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that [ ] makes men mad. the picture had not changed. it was folly to think so. yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile. its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. its blue eyes met his own. a sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him. it had altered already, and would alter more. its gold would wither into gray. its red and white roses would die. for every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness. but he would not sin. the picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. he would resist temptation. he would not see lord henry any more,--would not, at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in basil hallward's garden had first stirred within him the passion for impossible things. he would go back to sibyl vane, make her amends, marry her, try to love her again. yes, it was his duty to do so. she must have suffered more than he had. poor child! he had been selfish and cruel to her. the fascination that she had exercised over him would return. they would be happy together. his life with her would be beautiful and pure. he got up from his chair, and drew a large screen right in front of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. "how horrible!" he murmured to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it. when he stepped out on the grass, he drew a deep breath. the fresh morning air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions. he thought only of sibyl vane. a faint echo of his love came back to him. he repeated her name over and over again. the birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her. chapter vi [... ] it was long past noon when he awoke. his valet had crept several times into the room on tiptoe to see if he was stirring, and had wondered what made his young master sleep so late. finally his bell sounded, and victor came in softly with a cup of tea, and a pile of letters, on a small tray of old sèvres china, and drew back the olive-satin curtains, with their shimmering blue lining, that hung in front of the three tall windows. "monsieur has well slept this morning," he said, smiling. "what o'clock is it, victor?" asked dorian gray, sleepily. "one hour and a quarter, monsieur." how late it was! he sat up, and, having sipped some tea, turned over his letters. one of them was from lord henry, and had been brought by hand that morning. he hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside. the others he opened listlessly. they contained the usual collection of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes of charity concerts, and the like, that are showered on fashionable young men every morning during the season. there was a [ ] rather heavy bill, for a chased silver louis-quinze toilet-set, that he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when only unnecessary things are absolutely necessary to us; and there were several very courteously worded communications from jermyn street money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest. after about ten minutes he got up, and, throwing on an elaborate dressing-gown, passed into the onyx-paved bath-room. the cool water refreshed him after his long sleep. he seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through. a dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once or twice, but there was the unreality of a dream about it. as soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat down to a light french breakfast, that had been laid out for him on a small round table close to an open window. it was an exquisite day. the warm air seemed laden with spices. a bee flew in, and buzzed round the blue-dragon bowl, filled with sulphur-yellow roses, that stood in front of him. he felt perfectly happy. suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of the portrait, and he started. "too cold for monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the table. "i shut the window?" dorian shook his head. "i am not cold," he murmured. was it all true? had the portrait really changed? or had it been simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where there had been a look of joy? surely a painted canvas could not alter? the thing was absurd. it would serve as a tale to tell basil some day. it would make him smile. and, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing! first in the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn, he had seen the touch of cruelty in the warped lips. he almost dreaded his valet leaving the room. he knew that when he was alone he would have to examine the portrait. he was afraid of certainty. when the coffee and cigarettes had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a mad desire to tell him to remain. as the door closed behind him he called him back. the man stood waiting for his orders. dorian looked at him for a moment. "i am not at home to any one, victor," he said, with a sigh. the man bowed and retired. he rose from the table, lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on a luxuriously-cushioned couch that stood facing the screen. the screen was an old one of gilt spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a rather florid louis-quatorze pattern. he scanned it curiously, wondering if it had ever before concealed the secret of a man's life. should he move it aside, after all? why not let it stay there? what was the use of knowing? if the thing was true, it was terrible. if it was not true, why trouble about it? but what if, by some fate or deadlier chance, other eyes than his spied behind, and saw the horrible change? what should he do if basil hallward came and asked to look at his own picture? he would be sure to do that. no; the [ ] thing had to be examined, and at once. anything would be better than this dreadful state of doubt. he got up, and locked both doors. at least he would be alone when he looked upon the mask of his shame. then he drew the screen aside, and saw himself face to face. it was perfectly true. the portrait had altered. as he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest. that such a change should have taken place was incredible to him. and yet it was a fact. was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form and color on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? could it be that what that soul thought, they realized?--that what it dreamed, they made true? or was there some other, more terrible reason? he shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in sickened horror. one thing, however, he felt that it had done for him. it had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to sibyl vane. it was not too late to make reparation for that. she could still be his wife. his unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that basil hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness was to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of god to us all. there were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. but here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls. three o'clock struck, and four, and half-past four, but he did not stir. he was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life, and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering. he did not know what to do, or what to think. finally, he went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had loved, imploring her forgiveness, and accusing himself of madness. he covered page after page with wild words of sorrow, and wilder words of pain. there is a luxury in self-reproach. when we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. it is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. when dorian gray had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven. suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard lord henry's voice outside. "my dear dorian, i must see you. let me in at once. i can't bear your shutting yourself up like this." he made no answer at first, but remained quite still. the knocking still continued, and grew louder. yes, it was better to let lord henry in, and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead, to quarrel with him if it became necessary to quarrel, to part if parting was inevitable. he jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the picture, and unlocked the door. "i am so sorry for it all, my dear boy," said lord henry, coming in. "but you must not think about it too much." [ ] "do you mean about sibyl vane?" asked dorian. "yes, of course," answered lord henry, sinking into a chair, and slowly pulling his gloves off. "it is dreadful, from one point of view, but it was not your fault. tell me, did you go behind and see her after the play was over?" "yes." "i felt sure you had. did you make a scene with her?" "i was brutal, harry,--perfectly brutal. but it is all right now. i am not sorry for anything that has happened. it has taught me to know myself better." "ah, dorian, i am so glad you take it in that way! i was afraid i would find you plunged in remorse, and tearing your nice hair." "i have got through all that," said dorian, shaking his head, and smiling. "i am perfectly happy now. i know what conscience is, to begin with. it is not what you told me it was. it is the divinest thing in us. don't sneer at it, harry, any more,--at least not before me. i want to be good. i can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous." "a very charming artistic basis for ethics, dorian! i congratulate you on it. but how are you going to begin?" "by marrying sibyl vane." "marrying sibyl vane!" cried lord henry, standing up, and looking at him in perplexed amazement. "but, my dear dorian--" "yes, harry, i know what you are going to say. something dreadful about marriage. don't say it. don't ever say things of that kind to me again. two days ago i asked sibyl to marry me. i am not going to break my word to her. she is to be my wife." "your wife! dorian! . . . didn't you get my letter? i wrote to you this morning, and sent the note down, by my own man." "your letter? oh, yes, i remember. i have not read it yet, harry. i was afraid there might be something in it that i wouldn't like." lord henry walked across the room, and, sitting down by dorian gray, took both his hands in his, and held them tightly. "dorian," he said, "my letter--don't be frightened--was to tell you that sibyl vane is dead." a cry of pain rose from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his feet, tearing his hands away from lord henry's grasp. "dead! sibyl dead! it is not true! it is a horrible lie!" "it is quite true, dorian," said lord henry, gravely. "it is in all the morning papers. i wrote down to you to ask you not to see any one till i came. there will have to be an inquest, of course, and you must not be mixed up in it. things like that make a man fashionable in paris. but in london people are so prejudiced. here, one should never make one's début with a scandal. one should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age. i don't suppose they know your name at the theatre. if they don't, it is all right. did any one see you going round to her room? that is an important point." dorian did not answer for a few moments. he was dazed with horror. finally he murmured, in a stifled voice, "harry, did you say an inquest? what did you mean by that? did sibyl--? oh, [ ] harry, i can't bear it! but be quick. tell me everything at once." "i have no doubt it was not an accident, dorian, though it must be put in that way to the public. as she was leaving the theatre with her mother, about half-past twelve or so, she said she had forgotten something up-stairs. they waited some time for her, but she did not come down again. they ultimately found her lying dead on the floor of her dressing-room. she had swallowed something by mistake, some dreadful thing they use at theatres. i don't know what it was, but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it. i should fancy it was prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously. it is very tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself mixed up in it. i see by the standard that she was seventeen. i should have thought she was almost younger than that. she looked such a child, and seemed to know so little about acting. dorian, you mustn't let this thing get on your nerves. you must come and dine with me, and afterwards we will look in at the opera. it is a patti night, and everybody will be there. you can come to my sister's box. she has got some smart women with her." "so i have murdered sibyl vane," said dorian gray, half to himself,--"murdered her as certainly as if i had cut her little throat with a knife. and the roses are not less lovely for all that. the birds sing just as happily in my garden. and to-night i am to dine with you, and then go on to the opera, and sup somewhere, i suppose, afterwards. how extraordinarily dramatic life is! if i had read all this in a book, harry, i think i would have wept over it. somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears. here is the first passionate love-letter i have ever written in my life. strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. can they feel, i wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? sibyl! can she feel, or know, or listen? oh, harry, how i loved her once! it seems years ago to me now. she was everything to me. then came that dreadful night--was it really only last night?--when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke. she explained it all to me. it was terribly pathetic. but i was not moved a bit. i thought her shallow. then something happened that made me afraid. i can't tell you what it was, but it was awful. i said i would go back to her. i felt i had done wrong. and now she is dead. my god! my god! harry, what shall i do? you don't know the danger i am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. she would have done that for me. she had no right to kill herself. it was selfish of her." "my dear dorian, the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. if you had married this girl you would have been wretched. of course you would have treated her kindly. one can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. but she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. and when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to [ ] pay for. i say nothing about the social mistake, but i assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure." "i suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room, and looking horribly pale. "but i thought it was my duty. it is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right. i remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions,--that they are always made too late. mine certainly were." "good resolutions are simply a useless attempt to interfere with scientific laws. their origin is pure vanity. their result is absolutely nil. they give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for us. that is all that can be said for them." "harry," cried dorian gray, coming over and sitting down beside him, "why is it that i cannot feel this tragedy as much as i want to? i don't think i am heartless. do you?" "you have done too many foolish things in your life to be entitled to give yourself that name, dorian," answered lord henry, with his sweet, melancholy smile. the lad frowned. "i don't like that explanation, harry," he rejoined, "but i am glad you don't think i am heartless. i am nothing of the kind. i know i am not. and yet i must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. it seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. it has all the terrible beauty of a great tragedy, a tragedy in which i took part, but by which i have not been wounded." "it is an interesting question," said lord henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism,--"an extremely interesting question. i fancy that the explanation is this. it often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. they affect us just as vulgarity affects us. they give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. sometimes, however, a tragedy that has artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. if these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. or rather we are both. we watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. in the present case, what is it that has really happened? some one has killed herself for love of you. i wish i had ever had such an experience. it would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life. the people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there have been some--have always insisted on living on, long after i had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. they have become stout and tedious, and when i meet them they go in at once for reminiscences. that awful memory of woman! what a fearful thing it is! and what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! one should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details. details are always vulgar. [ ] "of course, now and then things linger. i once wore nothing but violets all through one season, as mourning for a romance that would not die. ultimately, however, it did die. i forget what killed it. i think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. that is always a dreadful moment. it fills one with the terror of eternity. well,--would you believe it?--a week ago, at lady hampshire's, i found myself seated at dinner next the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future. i had buried my romance in a bed of poppies. she dragged it out again, and assured me that i had spoiled her life. i am bound to state that she ate an enormous dinner, so i did not feel any anxiety. but what a lack of taste she showed! the one charm of the past is that it is the past. but women never know when the curtain has fallen. they always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue it. if they were allowed to have their way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. they are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. you are more fortunate than i am. i assure you, dorian, that not one of the women i have known would have done for me what sibyl vane did for you. ordinary women always console themselves. some of them do it by going in for sentimental colors. never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. it always means that they have a history. others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands. they flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it was the most fascinating of sins. religion consoles some. its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me; and i can quite understand it. besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. there is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life. indeed, i have not mentioned the most important one of all." "what is that, harry?" said dorian gray, listlessly. "oh, the obvious one. taking some one else's admirer when one loses one's own. in good society that always whitewashes a woman. but really, dorian, how different sibyl vane must have been from all the women one meets! there is something to me quite beautiful about her death. i am glad i am living in a century when such wonders happen. they make one believe in the reality of the things that shallow, fashionable people play with, such as romance, passion, and love." "i was terribly cruel to her. you forget that." "i believe that women appreciate cruelty more than anything else. they have wonderfully primitive instincts. we have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. they love being dominated. i am sure you were splendid. i have never seen you angry, but i can fancy how delightful you looked. and, after all, you said something to me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely fanciful, but that i see now was absolutely true, and it explains everything." [ ] "what was that, harry?" "you said to me that sibyl vane represented to you all the heroines of romance--that she was desdemona one night, and ophelia the other; that if she died as juliet, she came to life as imogen." "she will never come to life again now," murmured the lad, burying his face in his hands. "no, she will never come to life. she has played her last part. but you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from webster, or ford, or cyril tourneur. the girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. to you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy. the moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. mourn for ophelia, if you like. put ashes on your head because cordelia was strangled. cry out against heaven because the daughter of brabantio died. but don't waste your tears over sibyl vane. she was less real than they are." there was a silence. the evening darkened in the room. noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. the colors faded wearily out of things. after some time dorian gray looked up. "you have explained me to myself, harry," he murmured, with something of a sigh of relief. "i felt all that you have said, but somehow i was afraid of it, and i could not express it to myself. how well you know me! but we will not talk again of what has happened. it has been a marvellous experience. that is all. i wonder if life has still in store for me anything as marvellous." "life has everything in store for you, dorian. there is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do." "but suppose, harry, i became haggard, and gray, and wrinkled? what then?" "ah, then," said lord henry, rising to go,--"then, my dear dorian, you would have to fight for your victories. as it is, they are brought to you. no, you must keep your good looks. we live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. we cannot spare you. and now you had better dress, and drive down to the club. we are rather late, as it is." "i think i shall join you at the opera, harry. i feel too tired to eat anything. what is the number of your sister's box?" "twenty-seven, i believe. it is on the grand tier. you will see her name on the door. but i am sorry you won't come and dine." "i don't feel up to it," said dorian, wearily. "but i am awfully obliged to you for all that you have said to me. you are certainly my best friend. no one has ever understood me as you have." "we are only at the beginning of our friendship, dorian," answered lord henry, shaking him by the hand. "good-by. i shall see you before nine-thirty, i hope. remember, patti is singing." as he closed the door behind him, dorian gray touched the bell, [ ] and in a few minutes victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds down. he waited impatiently for him to go. the man seemed to take an interminable time about everything. as soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen, and drew it back. no; there was no further change in the picture. it had received the news of sibyl vane's death before he had known of it himself. it was conscious of the events of life as they occurred. the vicious cruelty that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was. or was it indifferent to results? did it merely take cognizance of what passed within the soul? he wondered, and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he hoped it. poor sibyl! what a romance it had all been! she had often mimicked death on the stage, and at last death himself had touched her, and brought her with him. how had she played that dreadful scene? had she cursed him, as she died? no; she had died for love of him, and love would always be a sacrament to him now. she had atoned for everything, by the sacrifice she had made of her life. he would not think any more of what she had made him go through, that horrible night at the theatre. when he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic figure to show love had been a great reality. a wonderful tragic figure? tears came to his eyes as he remembered her child-like look and winsome fanciful ways and shy tremulous grace. he wiped them away hastily, and looked again at the picture. he felt that the time had really come for making his choice. or had his choice already been made? yes, life had decided that for him,--life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins,--he was to have all these things. the portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all. a feeling of pain came over him as he thought of the desecration that was in store for the fair face on the canvas. once, in boyish mockery of narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. morning after morning he had sat before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times. was it to alter now with every mood to which he yielded? was it to become a hideous and loathsome thing, to be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of the hair? the pity of it! the pity of it! for a moment he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that existed between him and the picture might cease. it had changed in answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain unchanged. and, yet, who, that knew anything about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught? besides, was it really under his control? had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution? might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? if thought could exercise its [ ] influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom, in secret love or strange affinity? but the reason was of no importance. he would never again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. if the picture was to alter, it was to alter. that was all. why inquire too closely into it? for there would be a real pleasure in watching it. he would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. this portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. as it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. and when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer. when the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood. not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. not one pulse of his life would ever weaken. like the gods of the greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. what did it matter what happened to the colored image on the canvas? he would be safe. that was everything. he drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture, smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was already waiting for him. an hour later he was at the opera, and lord henry was leaning over his chair. chapter vii [... ] as he was sitting at breakfast next morning, basil hallward was shown into the room. "i am so glad i have found you, dorian," he said, gravely. "i called last night, and they told me you were at the opera. of course i knew that was impossible. but i wish you had left word where you had really gone to. i passed a dreadful evening, half afraid that one tragedy might be followed by another. i think you might have telegraphed for me when you heard of it first. i read of it quite by chance in a late edition of the globe, that i picked up at the club. i came here at once, and was miserable at not finding you. i can't tell you how heart-broken i am about the whole thing. i know what you must suffer. but where were you? did you go down and see the girl's mother? for a moment i thought of following you there. they gave the address in the paper. somewhere in the euston road, isn't it? but i was afraid of intruding upon a sorrow that i could not lighten. poor woman! what a state she must be in! and her only child, too! what did she say about it all?" "my dear basil, how do i know?" murmured dorian, sipping some pale-yellow wine from a delicate gold-beaded bubble of venetian glass, and looking dreadfully bored. "i was at the opera. you should have come on there. i met lady gwendolen, harry's sister, for the first time. we were in her box. she is perfectly charming; and patti sang divinely. don't talk about horrid subjects. if one doesn't [ ] talk about a thing, it has never happened. it is simply expression, as harry says, that gives reality to things. tell me about yourself and what you are painting." "you went to the opera?" said hallward, speaking very slowly, and with a strained touch of pain in his voice. "you went to the opera while sibyl vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging? you can talk to me of other women being charming, and of patti singing divinely, before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in? why, man, there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!" "stop, basil! i won't hear it!" cried dorian, leaping to his feet. "you must not tell me about things. what is done is done. what is past is past." "you call yesterday the past?" "what has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? it is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. a man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. i don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. i want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them." "dorian, this is horrible! something has changed you completely. you look exactly the same wonderful boy who used to come down to my studio, day after day, to sit for his picture. but you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. you were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. now, i don't know what has come over you. you talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. it is all harry's influence. i see that." the lad flushed up, and, going to the window, looked out on the green, flickering garden for a few moments. "i owe a great deal to harry, basil," he said, at last,--"more than i owe to you. you only taught me to be vain." "well, i am punished for that, dorian,--or shall be some day." "i don't know what you mean, basil," he exclaimed, turning round. "i don't know what you want. what do you want?" "i want the dorian gray i used to know." "basil," said the lad, going over to him, and putting his hand on his shoulder, "you have come too late. yesterday when i heard that sibyl vane had killed herself--" "killed herself! good heavens! is there no doubt about that?" cried hallward, looking up at him with an expression of horror. "my dear basil! surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident? of course she killed herself it is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. as a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. they are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. you know what i mean,--middle-class virtue, and all that kind of thing. how different sibyl was! she lived her finest tragedy. she was always a heroine. the last night she played--the night you saw her--she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. when she knew its unreality, she died, as juliet might have died. she passed again into the sphere of art. there is something of the martyr about her. her death has all the pathetic uselessness of [ ] martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. but, as i was saying, you must not think i have not suffered. if you had come in yesterday at a particular moment,--about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six,--you would have found me in tears. even harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what i was going through. i suffered immensely, then it passed away. i cannot repeat an emotion. no one can, except sentimentalists. and you are awfully unjust, basil. you come down here to console me. that is charming of you. you find me consoled, and you are furious. how like a sympathetic person! you remind me of a story harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered,--i forget exactly what it was. finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. he had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope. and besides, my dear old basil, if you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it from a proper artistic point of view. was it not gautier who used to write about la consolation des arts? i remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase. well, i am not like that young man you told me of when we were down at marlowe together, the young man who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. i love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp,--there is much to be got from all these. but the artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to me. to become the spectator of one's own life, as harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. i know you are surprised at my talking to you like this. you have not realized how i have developed. i was a school-boy when you knew me. i am a man now. i have new passions, new thoughts, new ideas. i am different, but you must not like me less. i am changed, but you must always be my friend. of course i am very fond of harry. but i know that you are better than he is. you are not stronger,--you are too much afraid of life,--but you are better. and how happy we used to be together! don't leave me, basil, and don't quarrel with me. i am what i am. there is nothing more to be said." hallward felt strangely moved. rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness. the lad was infinitely dear to him, and his personality had been the great turning-point in his art. he could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more. after all, his indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away. there was so much in him that was good, so much in him that was noble. "well, dorian," he said, at length, with a sad smile, "i won't speak to you again about this horrible thing, after to-day. i only trust your name won't be mentioned in connection with it. the inquest is to take place this afternoon. have they summoned you?" dorian shook his head, and a look of annoyance passed over his face at the mention of the word "inquest." there was something so [ ] crude and vulgar about everything of the kind. "they don't know my name," he answered. "but surely she did?" "only my christian name, and that i am quite sure she never mentioned to any one. she told me once that they were all rather curious to learn who i was, and that she invariably told them my name was prince charming. it was pretty of her. you must do me a drawing of her, basil. i should like to have something more of her than the memory of a few kisses and some broken pathetic words." "i will try and do something, dorian, if it would please you. but you must come and sit to me yourself again. i can't get on without you." "i will never sit to you again, basil. it is impossible!" he exclaimed, starting back. hallward stared at him, "my dear boy, what nonsense!" he cried. "do you mean to say you don't like what i did of you? where is it? why have you pulled the screen in front of it? let me look at it. it is the best thing i have ever painted. do take that screen away, dorian. it is simply horrid of your servant hiding my work like that. i felt the room looked different as i came in." "my servant has nothing to do with it, basil. you don't imagine i let him arrange my room for me? he settles my flowers for me sometimes,--that is all. no; i did it myself. the light was too strong on the portrait." "too strong! impossible, my dear fellow! it is an admirable place for it. let me see it." and hallward walked towards the corner of the room. a cry of terror broke from dorian gray's lips, and he rushed between hallward and the screen. "basil," he said, looking very pale, "you must not look at it. i don't wish you to." "not look at my own work! you are not serious. why shouldn't i look at it?" exclaimed hallward, laughing. "if you try to look at it, basil, on my word of honor i will never speak to you again as long as i live. i am quite serious. i don't offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any. but, remember, if you touch this screen, everything is over between us." hallward was thunderstruck. he looked at dorian gray in absolute amazement. he had never seen him like this before. the lad was absolutely pallid with rage. his hands were clinched, and the pupils of his eyes were like disks of blue fire. he was trembling all over. "dorian!" "don't speak!" "but what is the matter? of course i won't look at it if you don't want me to," he said, rather coldly, turning on his heel, and going over towards the window. "but, really, it seems rather absurd that i shouldn't see my own work, especially as i am going to exhibit it in paris in the autumn. i shall probably have to give it another coat of varnish before that, so i must see it some day, and why not to-day?" "to exhibit it! you want to exhibit it?" exclaimed dorian gray, a strange sense of terror creeping over him. was the world going [ ] to be shown his secret? were people to gape at the mystery of his life? that was impossible. something--he did not know what--had to be done at once. "yes: i don't suppose you will object to that. georges petit is going to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in the rue de sèze, which will open the first week in october. the portrait will only be away a month. i should think you could easily spare it for that time. in fact, you are sure to be out of town. and if you hide it always behind a screen, you can't care much about it." dorian gray passed his hand over his forehead. there were beads of perspiration there. he felt that he was on the brink of a horrible danger. "you told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it," he said. "why have you changed your mind? you people who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others. the only difference is that your moods are rather meaningless. you can't have forgotten that you assured me most solemnly that nothing in the world would induce you to send it to any exhibition. you told harry exactly the same thing." he stopped suddenly, and a gleam of light came into his eyes. he remembered that lord henry had said to him once, half seriously and half in jest, "if you want to have an interesting quarter of an hour, get basil to tell you why he won't exhibit your picture. he told me why he wouldn't, and it was a revelation to me." yes, perhaps basil, too, had his secret. he would ask him and try. "basil," he said, coming over quite close, and looking him straight in the face, "we have each of us a secret. let me know yours, and i will tell you mine. what was your reason for refusing to exhibit my picture?" hallward shuddered in spite of himself. "dorian, if i told you, you might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at me. i could not bear your doing either of those two things. if you wish me never to look at your picture again, i am content. i have always you to look at. if you wish the best work i have ever done to be hidden from the world, i am satisfied. your friendship is dearer to me than any fame or reputation." "no, basil, you must tell me," murmured dorian gray. "i think i have a right to know." his feeling of terror had passed away, and curiosity had taken its place. he was determined to find out basil hallward's mystery. "let us sit down, dorian," said hallward, looking pale and pained. "let us sit down. i will sit in the shadow, and you shall sit in the sunlight. our lives are like that. just answer me one question. have you noticed in the picture something that you did not like?--something that probably at first did not strike you, but that revealed itself to you suddenly?" "basil!" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with trembling hands, and gazing at him with wild, startled eyes. "i see you did. don't speak. wait till you hear what i have to say. it is quite true that i have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. somehow, i had never loved a woman. i suppose i never had time. perhaps, as [ ] harry says, a really 'grande passion' is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country. well, from the moment i met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. i quite admit that i adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. i was jealous of every one to whom you spoke. i wanted to have you all to myself. i was only happy when i was with you. when i was away from you, you were still present in my art. it was all wrong and foolish. it is all wrong and foolish still. of course i never let you know anything about this. it would have been impossible. you would not have understood it; i did not understand it myself. one day i determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. it was to have been my masterpiece. it is my masterpiece. but, as i worked at it, every flake and film of color seemed to me to reveal my secret. i grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry. i felt, dorian, that i had told too much. then it was that i resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. you were a little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to me. harry, to whom i talked about it, laughed at me. but i did not mind that. when the picture was finished, and i sat alone with it, i felt that i was right. well, after a few days the portrait left my studio, and as soon as i had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence it seemed to me that i had been foolish in imagining that i had said anything in it, more than that you were extremely good-looking and that i could paint. even now i cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. art is more abstract than we fancy. form and color tell us of form and color,--that is all. it often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. and so when i got this offer from paris i determined to make your portrait the principal thing in my exhibition. it never occurred to me that you would refuse. i see now that you were right. the picture must not be shown. you must not be angry with me, dorian, for what i have told you. as i said to harry, once, you are made to be worshipped." dorian gray drew a long breath. the color came back to his cheeks, and a smile played about his lips. the peril was over. he was safe for the time. yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for the young man who had just made this strange confession to him. he wondered if he would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend. lord harry had the charm of being very dangerous. but that was all. he was too clever and too cynical to be really fond of. would there ever be some one who would fill him with a strange idolatry? was that one of the things that life had in store? "it is extraordinary to me, dorian," said hallward, "that you should have seen this in the picture. did you really see it?" "of course i did." "well, you don't mind my looking at it now?" dorian shook his head. "you must not ask me that, basil. i could not possibly let you stand in front of that picture." "you will some day, surely?" [ ] "never." "well, perhaps you are right. and now good-by, dorian. you have been the one person in my life of whom i have been really fond. i don't suppose i shall often see you again. you don't know what it cost me to tell you all that i have told you." "my dear basil," cried dorian, "what have you told me? simply that you felt that you liked me too much. that is not even a compliment." "it was not intended as a compliment. it was a confession." "a very disappointing one." "why, what did you expect, dorian? you didn't see anything else in the picture, did you? there was nothing else to see?" "no: there was nothing else to see. why do you ask? but you mustn't talk about not meeting me again, or anything of that kind. you and i are friends, basil, and we must always remain so." "you have got harry," said hallward, sadly. "oh, harry!" cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter. "harry spends his days in saying what is incredible, and his evenings in doing what is improbable. just the sort of life i would like to lead. but still i don't think i would go to harry if i was in trouble. i would sooner go to you, basil." "but you won't sit to me again?" "impossible!" "you spoil my life as an artist by refusing, dorian. no man comes across two ideal things. few come across one." "i can't explain it to you, basil, but i must never sit to you again. i will come and have tea with you. that will be just as pleasant." "pleasanter for you, i am afraid," murmured hallward, regretfully. "and now good-by. i am sorry you won't let me look at the picture once again. but that can't be helped. i quite understand what you feel about it." as he left the room, dorian gray smiled to himself. poor basil! how little he knew of the true reason! and how strange it was that, instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend! how much that strange confession explained to him! basil's absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his curious reticences,--he understood them all now, and he felt sorry. there was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance. he sighed, and touched the bell. the portrait must be hidden away at all costs. he could not run such a risk of discovery again. it had been mad of him to have the thing remain, even for an hour, in a room to which any of his friends had access. chapter viii [... ] when his servant entered, he looked at him steadfastly, and wondered if he had thought of peering behind the screen. the man was quite impassive, and waited for his orders. dorian lit a cigarette, [ ] and walked over to the glass and glanced into it. he could see the reflection of victor's face perfectly. it was like a placid mask of servility. there was nothing to be afraid of, there. yet he thought it best to be on his guard. speaking very slowly, he told him to tell the housekeeper that he wanted to see her, and then to go to the frame-maker's and ask him to send two of his men round at once. it seemed to him that as the man left the room he peered in the direction of the screen. or was that only his fancy? after a few moments, mrs. leaf, a dear old lady in a black silk dress, with a photograph of the late mr. leaf framed in a large gold brooch at her neck, and old-fashioned thread mittens on her wrinkled hands, bustled into the room. "well, master dorian," she said, "what can i do for you? i beg your pardon, sir,"--here came a courtesy,--"i shouldn't call you master dorian any more. but, lord bless you, sir, i have known you since you were a baby, and many's the trick you've played on poor old leaf. not that you were not always a good boy, sir; but boys will be boys, master dorian, and jam is a temptation to the young, isn't it, sir?" he laughed. "you must always call me master dorian, leaf. i will be very angry with you if you don't. and i assure you i am quite as fond of jam now as i used to be. only when i am asked out to tea i am never offered any. i want you to give me the key of the room at the top of the house." "the old school-room, master dorian? why, it's full of dust. i must get it arranged and put straight before you go into it. it's not fit for you to see, master dorian. it is not, indeed." "i don't want it put straight, leaf. i only want the key." "well, master dorian, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you goes into it. why, it hasn't been opened for nearly five years,--not since his lordship died." he winced at the mention of his dead uncle's name. he had hateful memories of him. "that does not matter, leaf," he replied. "all i want is the key." "and here is the key, master dorian," said the old lady, after going over the contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands. "here is the key. i'll have it off the ring in a moment. but you don't think of living up there, master dorian, and you so comfortable here?" "no, leaf, i don't. i merely want to see the place, and perhaps store something in it,--that is all. thank you, leaf. i hope your rheumatism is better; and mind you send me up jam for breakfast." mrs. leaf shook her head. "them foreigners doesn't understand jam, master dorian. they calls it 'compot.' but i'll bring it to you myself some morning, if you lets me." "that will be very kind of you, leaf," he answered, looking at the key; and, having made him an elaborate courtesy, the old lady left the room, her face wreathed in smiles. she had a strong objection to the french valet. it was a poor thing, she felt, for any one to be born a foreigner. [ ] as the door closed, dorian put the key in his pocket, and looked round the room. his eye fell on a large purple satin coverlet heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century venetian work that his uncle had found in a convent near bologna. yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. it had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself,--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. what the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. they would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. and yet the thing would still live on. it would be always alive. he shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told basil the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away. basil would have helped him to resist lord henry's influence, and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. the love that he bore him--for it was really love--had something noble and intellectual in it. it was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. it was such love as michael angelo had known, and montaigne, and winckelmann, and shakespeare himself. yes, basil could have saved him. but it was too late now. the past could always be annihilated. regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. but the future was inevitable. there were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real. he took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen. was the face on the canvas viler than before? it seemed to him that it was unchanged; and yet his loathing of it was intensified. gold hair, blue eyes, and rose-red lips,--they all were there. it was simply the expression that had altered. that was horrible in its cruelty. compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow basil's reproaches about sibyl vane had been!--how shallow, and of what little account! his own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgment. a look of pain came across him, and he flung the rich pall over the picture. as he did so, a knock came to the door. he passed out as his servant entered. "the persons are here, monsieur." he felt that the man must be got rid of at once. he must not be allowed to know where the picture was being taken to. there was something sly about him, and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes. sitting down at the writing-table, he scribbled a note to lord henry, asking him to send him round something to read, and reminding him that they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening. "wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the men in here." in two or three minutes there was another knock, and mr. ashton himself, the celebrated frame-maker of south audley street, came in with a somewhat rough-looking young assistant. mr. ashton was a florid, red-whiskered little man, whose admiration for art was considerably [ ] tempered by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of the artists who dealt with him. as a rule, he never left his shop. he waited for people to come to him. but he always made an exception in favor of dorian gray. there was something about dorian that charmed everybody. it was a pleasure even to see him. "what can i do for you, mr. gray?" he said, rubbing his fat freckled hands. "i thought i would do myself the honor of coming round in person. i have just got a beauty of a frame, sir. picked it up at a sale. old florentine. came from fonthill, i believe. admirably suited for a religious picture, mr. gray." "i am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round, mr. ashton. i will certainly drop in and look at the frame,--though i don't go in much for religious art,--but to-day i only want a picture carried to the top of the house for me. it is rather heavy, so i thought i would ask you to lend me a couple of your men." "no trouble at all, mr. gray. i am delighted to be of any service to you. which is the work of art, sir?" "this," replied dorian, moving the screen back. "can you move it, covering and all, just as it is? i don't want it to get scratched going up-stairs." "there will be no difficulty, sir," said the genial frame-maker, beginning, with the aid of his assistant, to unhook the picture from the long brass chains by which it was suspended. "and, now, where shall we carry it to, mr. gray?" "i will show you the way, mr. ashton, if you will kindly follow me. or perhaps you had better go in front. i am afraid it is right at the top of the house. we will go up by the front staircase, as it is wider." he held the door open for them, and they passed out into the hall and began the ascent. the elaborate character of the frame had made the picture extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the obsequious protests of mr. ashton, who had a true tradesman's dislike of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful, dorian put his hand to it so as to help them. "something of a load to carry, sir," gasped the little man, when they reached the top landing. and he wiped his shiny forehead. "a terrible load to carry," murmured dorian, as he unlocked the door that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious secret of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men. he had not entered the place for more than four years,--not, indeed, since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child and then as a study when he grew somewhat older. it was a large, well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last lord sherard for the use of the little nephew whom, being himself childless, and perhaps for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance. it did not appear to dorian to have much changed. there was the huge italian cassone, with its fantastically-painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which he had so often hidden himself as a boy. there was the satinwood bookcase filled with his dog-eared school-books. on the wall behind it was hanging the same [ ] ragged flemish tapestry where a faded king and queen were playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists. how well he recalled it all! every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him, as he looked round. he remembered the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here that the fatal portrait was to be hidden away. how little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store for him! but there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as this. he had the key, and no one else could enter it. beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. what did it matter? no one could see it. he himself would not see it. why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? he kept his youth,--that was enough. and, besides, might not his nature grow finer, after all? there was no reason that the future should be so full of shame. some love might come across his life, and purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh,--those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm. perhaps, some day, the cruel look would have passed away from the scarlet sensitive mouth, and he might show to the world basil hallward's masterpiece. no; that was impossible. the thing upon the canvas was growing old, hour by hour, and week by week. even if it escaped the hideousness of sin, the hideousness of age was in store for it. the cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. yellow crow's-feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. the hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. there would be the wrinkled throat, the cold blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the uncle who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. the picture had to be concealed. there was no help for it. "bring it in, mr. ashton, please," he said, wearily, turning round. "i am sorry i kept you so long. i was thinking of something else." "always glad to have a rest, mr. gray," answered the frame-maker, who was still gasping for breath. "where shall we put it, sir?" "oh, anywhere, here, this will do. i don't want to have it hung up. just lean it against the wall. thanks." "might one look at the work of art, sir?" dorian started. "it would not interest you, mr. ashton," he said, keeping his eye on the man. he felt ready to leap upon him and fling him to the ground if he dared to lift the gorgeous hanging that concealed the secret of his life. "i won't trouble you any more now. i am much obliged for your kindness in coming round." "not at all, not at all, mr. gray. ever ready to do anything for you, sir." and mr. ashton tramped down-stairs, followed by the assistant, who glanced back at dorian with a look of shy wonder in his rough, uncomely face. he had never seen any one so marvellous. when the sound of their footsteps had died away, dorian locked [ ] the door, and put the key in his pocket. he felt safe now. no one would ever look on the horrible thing. no eye but his would ever see his shame. on reaching the library he found that it was just after five o'clock, and that the tea had been already brought up. on a little table of dark perfumed wood thickly incrusted with nacre, a present from his guardian's wife, lady radley, who had spent the preceding winter in cairo, was lying a note from lord henry, and beside it was a book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled. a copy of the third edition of the st. james's gazette had been placed on the tea-tray. it was evident that victor had returned. he wondered if he had met the men in the hall as they were leaving the house and had wormed out of them what they had been doing. he would be sure to miss the picture,--had no doubt missed it already, while he had been laying the tea-things. the screen had not been replaced, and the blank space on the wall was visible. perhaps some night he might find him creeping up-stairs and trying to force the door of the room. it was a horrible thing to have a spy in one's house. he had heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a letter, or overheard a conversation, or picked up a card with an address, or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a bit of crumpled lace. he sighed, and, having poured himself out some tea, opened lord henry's note. it was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper, and a book that might interest him, and that he would be at the club at eight-fifteen. he opened the st. james's languidly, and looked through it. a red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye. he read the following paragraph: "inquest on an actress.--an inquest was held this morning at the bell tavern, hoxton road, by mr. danby, the district coroner, on the body of sibyl vane, a young actress recently engaged at the royal theatre, holborn. a verdict of death by misadventure was returned. considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of dr. birrell, who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased." he frowned slightly, and, tearing the paper in two, went across the room and flung the pieces into a gilt basket. how ugly it all was! and how horribly real ugliness made things! he felt a little annoyed with lord henry for having sent him the account. and it was certainly stupid of him to have marked it with red pencil. victor might have read it. the man knew more than enough english for that. perhaps he had read it, and had begun to suspect something. and, yet, what did it matter? what had dorian gray to do with sibyl vane's death? there was nothing to fear. dorian gray had not killed her. his eye fell on the yellow book that lord henry had sent him. what was it, he wondered. he went towards the little pearl-colored octagonal stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some [ ] strange egyptian bees who wrought in silver, and took the volume up. he flung himself into an arm-chair, and began to turn over the leaves. after a few minutes, he became absorbed. it was the strangest book he had ever read. it seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed. it was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. the style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the french school of décadents. there were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as evil in color. the life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. one hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. it was a poisonous book. the heavy odor of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. the mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of revery, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and the creeping shadows. cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed through the windows. he read on by its wan light till he could read no more. then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the lateness of the hour, he got up, and, going into the next room, placed the book on the little florentine table that always stood at his bedside, and began to dress for dinner. it was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found lord henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very bored. "i am so sorry, harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your fault. that book you sent me so fascinated me that i forgot what the time was." "i thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his chair. "i didn't say i liked it, harry. i said it fascinated me. there is a great difference." "ah, if you have discovered that, you have discovered a great deal," murmured lord henry, with his curious smile. "come, let us go in to dinner. it is dreadfully late, and i am afraid the champagne will be too much iced." chapter ix [ ] for years, dorian gray could not free himself from the memory of this book. or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. he procured from paris no less than five large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colors, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control. the hero, the wonderful young parisian, in whom the romantic temperament and the scientific temperament were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. and, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. in one point he was more fortunate than the book's fantastic hero. he never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still water, which came upon the young parisian so early in his life, and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had once, apparently, been so remarkable. it was with an almost cruel joy--and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its really tragic, if somewhat over-emphasized, account of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and in the world, he had most valued. he, at any rate, had no cause to fear that. the boyish beauty that had so fascinated basil hallward, and many others besides him, seemed never to leave him. even those who had heard the most evil things against him (and from time to time strange rumors about his mode of life crept through london and became the chatter of the clubs) could not believe anything to his dishonor when they saw him. he had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. men who talked grossly became silent when dorian gray entered the room. there was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. his mere presence seemed to recall to them the innocence that they had tarnished. they wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensuous. he himself, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, would creep up-stairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that basil hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. the very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. he grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. he would examine with minute care, and often with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, [ ] wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. he would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. he mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs. there were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed tavern near the docks, which, under an assumed name, and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish. but moments such as these were rare. that curiosity about life that, many years before, lord henry had first stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase with gratification. the more he knew, the more he desired to know. he had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them. yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to society. once or twice every month during the winter, and on each wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. his little dinners, in the settling of which lord henry always assisted him, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver. indeed, there were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in dorian gray the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed in eton or oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. to them he seemed to belong to those whom dante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty." like gautier, he was one for whom "the visible world existed." and, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him. his mode of dressing, and the particular styles that he affected from time to time, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the mayfair balls and pall mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies. for, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the london of his own day what to imperial neronian rome the author of the "satyricon" had once been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or [ ] the conduct of a cane. he sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization. the worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than ourselves, and that we are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. but it appeared to dorian gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. as he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. so much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! there had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, nature in her wonderful irony driving the anchorite out to herd with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions. yes, there was to be, as lord henry had prophesied, a new hedonism that was to re-create life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. it was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. but it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment. there are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of revery. gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. black fantastic shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers. veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. the wan mirrors get back their mimic life. the flameless tapers stand where we have left them, and beside them [ ] lies the half-read book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. nothing seems to us changed. out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. we have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been re-fashioned anew for our pleasure in the darkness, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain. it was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to dorian gray to be the true object, or among the true objects, of life; and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their color and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament, and that indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it. it was rumored of him once that he was about to join the roman catholic communion; and certainly the roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. the daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. he loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement, and with the priest, in his stiff flowered cope, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, and raising aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the "panis caelestis," the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the passion of christ, breaking the host into the chalice, and smiting his breast for his sins. the fuming censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle fascination for him. as he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals, and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the tarnished grating the true story of their lives. but he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season; and for a [ ] season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the darwinismus movement in germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. he felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. he knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their mysteries to reveal. and so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the east. he saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, of aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul. at another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawled tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums, or turbaned indians, crouching upon scarlet mats, blew through long pipes of reed or brass, and charmed, or feigned to charm, great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. the harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when schubert's grace, and chopin's beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear. he collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them. he had the mysterious juruparis of the rio negro indians, that women are not allowed to look at, and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human bones such as alfonso de ovalle heard in chili, and the sonorous green stones that are found near cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness. he had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken; the long clarin of the mexicans, into which the performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the harsh turé of the amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in trees, and that can be heard, it is said, at a distance of three leagues; the teponaztli, that [ ] has two vibrating tongues of wood, and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the yotl-bells of the aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one that bernal diaz saw when he went with cortes into the mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description. the fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with lord henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "tannhäuser," and seeing in that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul. on another occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a costume ball as anne de joyeuse, admiral of france, in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls. he would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver, the pistachio-colored peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. he loved the red gold of the sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. he procured from amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness of color, and had a turquoise de la vieille roche that was the envy of all the connoisseurs. he discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. in alphonso's "clericalis disciplina" a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of alexander he was said to have found snakes in the vale of jordan "with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs." there was a gem in the brain of the dragon, philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep, and slain. according to the great alchemist pierre de boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of india made him eloquent. the cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. the garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color. the selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. leonardus camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly-killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. the bezoar, that was found in the heart of the arabian deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. in the nests of arabian birds was the aspilates, that, according to democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire. the king of ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand, as the ceremony of his coronation. the gates of the palace of john the priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned [ ] snake inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." over the gable were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the gold might shine by day, and the carbuncles by night. in lodge's strange romance "a margarite of america" it was stated that in the chamber of margarite were seen "all the chaste ladies of the world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrours of chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults." marco polo had watched the inhabitants of zipangu place a rose-colored pearl in the mouth of the dead. a sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to king perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over his loss. when the huns lured the king into the great pit, he flung it away,--procopius tells the story,--nor was it ever found again, though the emperor anastasius offered five hundred-weight of gold pieces for it. the king of malabar had shown a venetian a rosary of one hundred and four pearls, one for every god that he worshipped. when the duke de valentinois, son of alexander vi., visited louis xii. of france, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to brantôme, and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light. charles of england had ridden in stirrups hung with three hundred and twenty-one diamonds. richard ii. had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies. hall described henry viii., on his way to the tower previous to his coronation, as wearing "a jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses." the favorites of james i. wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane. edward ii. gave to piers gaveston a suit of red-gold armor studded with jacinths, and a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parsemé with pearls. henry ii. wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove set with twelve rubies and fifty-two great pearls. the ducal hat of charles the rash, the last duke of burgundy of his race, was studded with sapphires and hung with pear-shaped pearls. how exquisite life had once been! how gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful. then he turned his attention to embroideries, and to the tapestries that performed the office of frescos in the chill rooms of the northern nations of europe. as he investigated the subject,--and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up,--he was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things. he, at any rate, had escaped that. summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame, but he was unchanged. no winter marred his face or stained his flower-like bloom. how different it was with material things! where had they gone to? where was the great crocus-colored robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked for athena? where the huge velarium that nero had stretched across the colosseum at rome, on which were represented the starry sky, and apollo driving a chariot drawn by [ ] white gilt-reined steeds? he longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for elagabalus, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the mortuary cloth of king chilperic, with its three hundred golden bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the bishop of pontus, and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests, rocks, hunters,--all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature;" and the coat that charles of orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "madame, je suis tout joyeux," the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread, and each note, a square shape in those days, formed with four pearls. he read of the room that was prepared at the palace at rheims for the use of queen joan of burgundy, and was decorated with "thirteen hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked in gold." catherine de médicis had a mourning-bed made for her of black velvet powdered with crescents and suns. its curtains were of damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver. louis xiv. had gold-embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment. the state bed of sobieski, king of poland, was made of smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses from the koran. its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. it had been taken from the turkish camp before vienna, and the standard of mohammed had stood under it. and so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting the dainty delhi muslins, finely wrought, with gold-threat palmates, and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the east as "woven air," and "running water," and "evening dew;" strange figured cloths from java; elaborate yellow chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks and wrought with fleurs de lys, birds, and images; veils of lacis worked in hungary point; sicilian brocades, and stiff spanish velvets; georgian work with its gilt coins, and japanese foukousas with their green-toned golds and their marvellously-plumaged birds. he had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the church. in the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house he had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the bride of christ, who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for, and wounded by self-inflicted pain. he had a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask, figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side was the pine- [ ] apple device wrought in seed-pearls. the orphreys were divided into panels representing scenes from the life of the virgin, and the coronation of the virgin was figured in colored silks upon the hood. this was italian work of the fifteenth century. another cope was of green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves, from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of which were picked out with silver thread and colored crystals. the morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work. the orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was st. sebastian. he had chasubles, also, of amber-colored silk, and blue silk and gold brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with representations of the passion and crucifixion of christ, and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins and fleurs de lys; altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria. in the mystic offices to which these things were put there was something that quickened his imagination. for these things, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne. upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and had draped the purple-and-gold pall in front of it as a curtain. for weeks he would not go there, would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate pleasure in mere existence. then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to dreadful places near blue gate fields, and stay there, day after day, until he was driven away. on his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of rebellion that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own. after a few years he could not endure to be long out of england, and gave up the villa that he had shared at trouville with lord henry, as well as the little white walled-in house at algiers where he had more than once spent his winter. he hated to be separated from the picture that was such a part of his life, and he was also afraid that during his absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite of the elaborate bolts and bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door. he was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing. it was true that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and ugliness of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could they learn from that? he would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him. he had not painted it. what was it to him how vile and full of shame it looked? even if he told them, would they believe it? yet he was afraid. sometimes when he was down at his great [ ] house in nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendor of his mode of life, he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not been tampered with and that the picture was still there. what if it should be stolen? the mere thought made him cold with horror. surely the world would know his secret then. perhaps the world already suspected it. for, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him. he was blackballed at a west end club of which his birth and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the carlton, the duke of berwick and another gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out. curious stories became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. it was said that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade. his extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as if they were determined to discover his secret. of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice, and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer to the calumnies (for so they called them) that were circulated about him. it was remarked, however, that those who had been most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him. of all his friends, or so-called friends, lord henry wotton was the only one who remained loyal to him. women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if dorian gray entered the room. yet these whispered scandals only lent him, in the eyes of many, his strange and dangerous charm. his great wealth was a certain element of security. society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and charming. it feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and the highest respectability is of less value in its opinion than the possession of a good chef. and, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life. even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for cold entrées, as lord henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject; and there is possibly a good deal to be said for his view. for the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. form is absolutely essential to it. it should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays charming. is insincerity such a [ ] terrible thing? i think not. it is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. such, at any rate, was dorian gray's opinion. he used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. to him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. he loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country-house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins. here was philip herbert, described by francis osborne, in his "memoires on the reigns of queen elizabeth and king james," as one who was "caressed by the court for his handsome face, which kept him not long company." was it young herbert's life that he sometimes led? had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own? was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance, in basil hallward's studio, to that mad prayer that had so changed his life? here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wrist-bands, stood sir anthony sherard, with his silver-and-black armor piled at his feet. what had this man's legacy been? had the lover of giovanna of naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame? were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize? here, from the fading canvas, smiled lady elizabeth devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves. a flower was in her right hand, and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses. on a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple. there were large green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes. he knew her life, and the strange stories that were told about her lovers. had he something of her temperament in him? those oval heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him. what of george willoughby, with his powdered hair and fantastic patches? how evil he looked! the face was saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain. delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that were so overladen with rings. he had been a macaroni of the eighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of lord ferrars. what of the second lord sherard, the companion of the prince regent in his wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with mrs. fitzherbert? how proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and insolent pose! what passions had he bequeathed? the world had looked upon him as infamous. he had led the orgies at carlton house. the star of the garter glittered upon his breast. beside him hung the portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black. her blood, also, stirred within him. how curious it all seemed! yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. there [ ] were times when it seemed to dorian gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. he felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of wonder. it seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own. the hero of the dangerous novel that had so influenced his life had himself had this curious fancy. in a chapter of the book he tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as tiberius, in a garden at capri, reading the shameful books of elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables, and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as domitian, had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that taedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the circus, and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the street of pomegranates to a house of gold, and heard men cry on nero caesar as he passed by; and, as elagabalus, had painted his face with colors, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the moon from carthage, and given her in mystic marriage to the sun. over and over again dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the chapter immediately following, in which the hero describes the curious tapestries that he had had woven for him from gustave moreau's designs, and on which were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made monstrous or mad: filippo, duke of milan, who slew his wife, and painted her lips with a scarlet poison; pietro barbi, the venetian, known as paul the second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the price of a terrible sin; gian maria visconti, who used hounds to chase living men, and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the borgia on his white horse, with fratricide riding beside him, and his mantle stained with the blood of perotto; pietro riario, the young cardinal archbishop of florence, child and minion of sixtus iv., whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who received leonora of aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve her at the feast as ganymede or hylas; ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine,--the son of the fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; giambattista cibo, who in mockery took the name of innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a [ ] jewish doctor; sigismondo malatesta, the lover of isotta, and the lord of rimini, whose effigy was burned at rome as the enemy of god and man, who strangled polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to ginevra d'este in a cup of emerald, and in honor of a shameful passion built a pagan church for christian worship; charles vi., who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who could only be soothed by saracen cards painted with the images of love and death and madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthus-like curls, grifonetto baglioni, who slew astorre with his bride, and simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep, and atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him. there was a horrible fascination in them all. he saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day. the renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning,--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. dorian gray had been poisoned by a book. there were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. chapter x [... ] it was on the th of november, the eve of his own thirty-second birthday, as he often remembered afterwards. he was walking home about eleven o'clock from lord henry's, where he had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold and foggy. at the corner of grosvenor square and south audley street a man passed him in the mist, walking very fast, and with the collar of his gray ulster turned up. he had a bag in his hand. he recognized him. it was basil hallward. a strange sense of fear, for which he could not account, came over him. he made no sign of recognition, and went on slowly, in the direction of his own house. but hallward had seen him. dorian heard him first stopping, and then hurrying after him. in a few moments his hand was on his arm. "dorian! what an extraordinary piece of luck! i have been waiting for you ever since nine o'clock in your library. finally i took pity on your tired servant, and told him to go to bed, as he let me out. i am off to paris by the midnight train, and i wanted particularly to see you before i left. i thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as you passed me. but i wasn't quite sure. didn't you recognize me?" "in this fog, my dear basil? why, i can't even recognize grosvenor square. i believe my house is somewhere about here, but i don't feel at all certain about it. i am sorry you are going away, as i have not seen you for ages. but i suppose you will be back soon?" "no: i am going to be out of england for six months. i intend [ ] to take a studio in paris, and shut myself up till i have finished a great picture i have in my head. however, it wasn't about myself i wanted to talk. here we are at your door. let me come in for a moment. i have something to say to you." "i shall be charmed. but won't you miss your train?" said dorian gray, languidly, as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his latch-key. the lamp-light struggled out through the fog, and hallward looked at his watch. "i have heaps of time," he answered. "the train doesn't go till twelve-fifteen, and it is only just eleven. in fact, i was on my way to the club to look for you, when i met you. you see, i shan't have any delay about luggage, as i have sent on my heavy things. all i have with me is in this bag, and i can easily get to victoria in twenty minutes." dorian looked at him and smiled. "what a way for a fashionable painter to travel! a gladstone bag, and an ulster! come in, or the fog will get into the house. and mind you don't talk about anything serious. nothing is serious nowadays. at least nothing should be." hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed dorian into the library. there was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open hearth. the lamps were lit, and an open dutch silver spirit-case stood, with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers, on a little table. "you see your servant made me quite at home, dorian. he gave me everything i wanted, including your best cigarettes. he is a most hospitable creature. i like him much better than the frenchman you used to have. what has become of the frenchman, by the bye?" dorian shrugged his shoulders. "i believe he married lady ashton's maid, and has established her in paris as an english dressmaker. anglomanie is very fashionable over there now, i hear. it seems silly of the french, doesn't it? but--do you know?--he was not at all a bad servant. i never liked him, but i had nothing to complain about. one often imagines things that are quite absurd. he was really very devoted to me, and seemed quite sorry when he went away. have another brandy-and-soda? or would you like hock-and-seltzer? i always take hock-and-seltzer myself. there is sure to be some in the next room." "thanks, i won't have anything more," said hallward, taking his cap and coat off, and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in the corner. "and now, my dear fellow, i want to speak to you seriously. don't frown like that. you make it so much more difficult for me." "what is it all about?" cried dorian, in his petulant way, flinging himself down on the sofa. "i hope it is not about myself. i am tired of myself to-night. i should like to be somebody else." "it is about yourself," answered hallward, in his grave, deep voice, "and i must say it to you. i shall only keep you half an hour." dorian sighed, and lit a cigarette. "half an hour!" he murmured. [ ] "it is not much to ask of you, dorian, and it is entirely for your own sake that i am speaking. i think it right that you should know that the most dreadful things are being said about you in london,--things that i could hardly repeat to you." "i don't wish to know anything about them. i love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. they have not got the charm of novelty." "they must interest you, dorian. every gentleman is interested in his good name. you don't want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded. of course you have your position, and your wealth, and all that kind of thing. but position and wealth are not everything. mind you, i don't believe these rumors at all. at least, i can't believe them when i see you. sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. it cannot be concealed. people talk of secret vices. there are no such things as secret vices. if a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. somebody--i won't mention his name, but you know him--came to me last year to have his portrait done. i had never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the time, though i have heard a good deal since. he offered an extravagant price. i refused him. there was something in the shape of his fingers that i hated. i know now that i was quite right in what i fancied about him. his life is dreadful. but you, dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth,--i can't believe anything against you. and yet i see you very seldom, and you never come down to the studio now, and when i am away from you, and i hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, i don't know what to say. why is it, dorian, that a man like the duke of berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? why is it that so many gentlemen in london will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs? you used to be a friend of lord cawdor. i met him at dinner last week. your name happened to come up in conversation, in connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the dudley. cawdor curled his lip, and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. i reminded him that i was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant. he told me. he told me right out before everybody. it was horrible! why is your friendship so fateful to young men? there was that wretched boy in the guards who committed suicide. you were his great friend. there was sir henry ashton, who had to leave england, with a tarnished name. you and he were inseparable. what about adrian singleton, and his dreadful end? what about lord kent's only son, and his career? i met his father yesterday in st. james street. he seemed broken with shame and sorrow. what about the young duke of perth? what sort of life has he got now? what gentleman would associate with him? dorian, dorian, your reputation is infamous. i know you and harry are great friends. i say nothing about that now, but [ ] surely you need not have made his sister's name a by-word. when you met lady gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever touched her. is there a single decent woman in london now who would drive with her in the park? why, even her children are not allowed to live with her. then there are other stories,--stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in london. are they true? can they be true? when i first heard them, i laughed. i hear them now, and they make me shudder. what about your country-house, and the life that is led there? dorian, you don't know what is said about you. i won't tell you that i don't want to preach to you. i remember harry saying once that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always said that, and then broke his word. i do want to preach to you. i want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect you. i want you to have a clean name and a fair record. i want you to get rid of the dreadful people you associate with. don't shrug your shoulders like that. don't be so indifferent. you have a wonderful influence. let it be for good, not for evil. they say that you corrupt every one whom you become intimate with, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house, for shame of some kind to follow after you. i don't know whether it is so or not. how should i know? but it is said of you. i am told things that it seems impossible to doubt. lord gloucester was one of my greatest friends at oxford. he showed me a letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in her villa at mentone. your name was implicated in the most terrible confession i ever read. i told him that it was absurd,--that i knew you thoroughly, and that you were incapable of anything of the kind. know you? i wonder do i know you? before i could answer that, i should have to see your soul." "to see my soul!" muttered dorian gray, starting up from the sofa and turning almost white from fear. "yes," answered hallward, gravely, and with infinite sorrow in his voice,--"to see your soul. but only god can do that." a bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man. "you shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from the table. "come: it is your own handiwork. why shouldn't you look at it? you can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose. nobody would believe you. if they did believe you, they'd like me all the better for it. i know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously. come, i tell you. you have chattered enough about corruption. now you shall look on it face to face." there was the madness of pride in every word he uttered. he stamped his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner. he felt a terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret, and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the hideous memory of what he had done. "yes," he continued, coming closer to him, and looking steadfastly into his stern eyes, "i will show you my soul. you shall see the thing that you fancy only god can see." [ ] hallward started back. "this is blasphemy, dorian!" he cried. "you must not say things like that. they are horrible, and they don't mean anything." "you think so?" he laughed again. "i know so. as for what i said to you to-night, i said it for your good. you know i have been always devoted to you." "don't touch me. finish what you have to say." a twisted flash of pain shot across hallward's face. he paused for a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him. after all, what right had he to pry into the life of dorian gray? if he had done a tithe of what was rumored about him, how much he must have suffered! then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fireplace, and stood there, looking at the burning logs with their frost-like ashes and their throbbing cores of flame. "i am waiting, basil," said the young man, in a hard, clear voice. he turned round. "what i have to say is this," he cried. "you must give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against you. if you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to end, i will believe you. deny them, dorian, deny them! can't you see what i am going through? my god! don't tell me that you are infamous!" dorian gray smiled. there was a curl of contempt in his lips. "come up-stairs, basil," he said, quietly. "i keep a diary of my life from day to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written. i will show it to you if you come with me." "i will come with you, dorian, if you wish it. i see i have missed my train. that makes no matter. i can go to-morrow. but don't ask me to read anything to-night. all i want is a plain answer to my question." "that will be given to you up-stairs. i could not give it here. you won't have to read long. don't keep me waiting." chapter xi [... ] he passed out of the room, and began the ascent, basil hallward following close behind. they walked softly, as men instinctively do at night. the lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. a rising wind made some of the windows rattle. when they reached the top landing, dorian set the lamp down on the floor, and taking out the key turned it in the lock. "you insist on knowing, basil?" he asked, in a low voice. "yes." "i am delighted," he murmured, smiling. then he added, somewhat bitterly, "you are the one man in the world who is entitled to know everything about me. you have had more to do with my life than you think." and, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in. a cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in a flame of murky orange. he shuddered. "shut the door behind you," he said, as he placed the lamp on the table. [ ] hallward glanced round him, with a puzzled expression. the room looked as if it had not been lived in for years. a faded flemish tapestry, a curtained picture, an old italian cassone, and an almost empty bookcase,--that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and a table. as dorian gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was standing on the mantel-shelf, he saw that the whole place was covered with dust, and that the carpet was in holes. a mouse ran scuffling behind the wainscoting. there was a damp odor of mildew. "so you think that it is only god who sees the soul, basil? draw that curtain back, and you will see mine." the voice that spoke was cold and cruel. "you are mad, dorian, or playing a part," muttered hallward, frowning. "you won't? then i must do it myself," said the young man; and he tore the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground. an exclamation of horror broke from hallward's lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him. there was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. good heavens! it was dorian gray's own face that he was looking at! the horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely marred that marvellous beauty. there was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips. the sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet passed entirely away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat. yes, it was dorian himself. but who had done it? he seemed to recognize his own brush-work, and the frame was his own design. the idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. he seized the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. in the left-hand corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion. it was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. he had never done that. still, it was his own picture. he knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed from fire to sluggish ice in a moment. his own picture! what did it mean? why had it altered? he turned, and looked at dorian gray with the eyes of a sick man. his mouth twitched, and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate. he passed his hand across his forehead. it was dank with clammy sweat. the young man was leaning against the mantel-shelf, watching him with that strange expression that is on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when a great artist is acting. there was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. there was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in the eyes. he had taken the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so. "what does this mean?" cried hallward, at last. his own voice sounded shrill and curious in his ears. "years ago, when i was a boy," said dorian gray, "you met me, devoted yourself to me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. one day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. in a mad moment, that [ ] i don't know, even now, whether i regret or not, i made a wish. perhaps you would call it a prayer . . . ." "i remember it! oh, how well i remember it! no! the thing is impossible. the room is damp. the mildew has got into the canvas. the paints i used had some wretched mineral poison in them. i tell you the thing is impossible." "ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to the window, and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained glass. "you told me you had destroyed it." "i was wrong. it has destroyed me." "i don't believe it is my picture." "can't you see your romance in it?" said dorian, bitterly. "my romance, as you call it . . ." "as you called it." "there was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. this is the face of a satyr." "it is the face of my soul." "god! what a thing i must have worshipped! this has the eyes of a devil." "each of us has heaven and hell in him, basil," cried dorian, with a wild gesture of despair. hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. "my god! if it is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!" he held the light up again to the canvas, and examined it. the surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it. it was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. the rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful. his hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor, and lay there sputtering. he placed his foot on it and put it out. then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table and buried his face in his hands. "good god, dorian, what a lesson! what an awful lesson!" there was no answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window. "pray, dorian, pray," he murmured. "what is it that one was taught to say in one's boyhood? 'lead us not into temptation. forgive us our sins. wash away our iniquities.' let us say that together. the prayer of your pride has been answered. the prayer of your repentance will be answered also. i worshipped you too much. i am punished for it. you worshipped yourself too much. we are both punished." dorian gray turned slowly around, and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes. "it is too late, basil," he murmured. "it is never too late, dorian. let us kneel down and try if we can remember a prayer. isn't there a verse somewhere, 'though your sins be as scarlet, yet i will make them as white as snow'?" [ ] "those words mean nothing to me now." "hush! don't say that. you have done enough evil in your life. my god! don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?" dorian gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for basil hallward came over him. the mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than he had ever loathed anything in his whole life. he glanced wildly around. something glimmered on the top of the painted chest that faced him. his eye fell on it. he knew what it was. it was a knife that he had brought up, some days before, to cut a piece of cord, and had forgotten to take away with him. he moved slowly towards it, passing hallward as he did so. as soon as he got behind him, he seized it, and turned round. hallward moved in his chair as if he was going to rise. he rushed at him, and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man's head down on the table, and stabbing again and again. there was a stifled groan, and the horrible sound of some one choking with blood. the outstretched arms shot up convulsively three times, waving grotesque stiff-fingered hands in the air. he stabbed him once more, but the man did not move. something began to trickle on the floor. he waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. then he threw the knife on the table, and listened. he could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet. he opened the door, and went out on the landing. the house was quite quiet. no one was stirring. he took out the key, and returned to the room, locking himself in as he did so. the thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table with bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms. had it not been for the red jagged tear in the neck, and the clotted black pool that slowly widened on the table, one would have said that the man was simply asleep. how quickly it had all been done! he felt strangely calm, and, walking over to the window, opened it, and stepped out on the balcony. the wind had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. he looked down, and saw the policeman going his rounds and flashing a bull's-eye lantern on the doors of the silent houses. the crimson spot of a prowling hansom gleamed at the corner, and then vanished. a woman in a ragged shawl was creeping round by the railings, staggering as she went. now and then she stopped, and peered back. once, she began to sing in a hoarse voice. the policeman strolled over and said something to her. she stumbled away, laughing. a bitter blast swept across the square. the gas-lamps flickered, and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their black iron branches as if in pain. he shivered, and went back, closing the window behind him. he passed to the door, turned the key, and opened it. he did not even glance at the murdered man. he felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation. the friend who had painted [ ] the fatal portrait, the portrait to which all his misery had been due, had gone out of his life. that was enough. then he remembered the lamp. it was a rather curious one of moorish workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished steel. perhaps it might be missed by his servant, and questions would be asked. he turned back, and took it from the table. how still the man was! how horribly white the long hands looked! he was like a dreadful wax image. he locked the door behind him, and crept quietly down-stairs. the wood-work creaked, and seemed to cry out as if in pain. he stopped several times, and waited. no: everything was still. it was merely the sound of his own footsteps. when he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner. they must be hidden away somewhere. he unlocked a secret press that was in the wainscoting, and put them into it. he could easily burn them afterwards. then he pulled out his watch. it was twenty minutes to two. he sat down, and began to think. every year--every month, almost--men were strangled in england for what he had done. there had been a madness of murder in the air. some red star had come too close to the earth. evidence? what evidence was there against him? basil hallward had left the house at eleven. no one had seen him come in again. most of the servants were at selby royal. his valet had gone to bed. paris! yes. it was to paris that basil had gone, by the midnight train, as he had intended. with his curious reserved habits, it would be months before any suspicions would be aroused. months? everything could be destroyed long before then. a sudden thought struck him. he put on his fur coat and hat, and went out into the hall. there he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of the policeman outside on the pavement, and seeing the flash of the lantern reflected in the window. he waited, holding his breath. after a few moments he opened the front door, and slipped out, shutting it very gently behind him. then he began ringing the bell. in about ten minutes his valet appeared, half dressed, and looking very drowsy. "i am sorry to have had to wake you up, francis," he said, stepping in; "but i had forgotten my latch-key. what time is it?" "five minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock and yawning. "five minutes past two? how horribly late! you must wake me at nine to-morrow. i have some work to do." "all right, sir." "did any one call this evening?" "mr. hallward, sir. he stayed here till eleven, and then he went away to catch his train." "oh! i am sorry i didn't see him. did he leave any message?" "no, sir, except that he would write to you." [ ] "that will do, francis. don't forget to call me at nine tomorrow." "no, sir." the man shambled down the passage in his slippers. dorian gray threw his hat and coat upon the yellow marble table, and passed into the library. he walked up and down the room for a quarter of an hour, biting his lip, and thinking. then he took the blue book down from one of the shelves, and began to turn over the leaves. "alan campbell, , hertford street, mayfair." yes; that was the man he wanted. chapter xii [... ] at nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate on a tray, and opened the shutters. dorian was sleeping quite peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his cheek. he looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study. the man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he had been having some delightful dream. yet he had not dreamed at all. his night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain. but youth smiles without any reason. it is one of its chiefest charms. he turned round, and, leaning on his elbow, began to drink his chocolate. the mellow november sun was streaming into the room. the sky was bright blue, and there was a genial warmth in the air. it was almost like a morning in may. gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent blood-stained feet into his brain, and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. he winced at the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for basil hallward, that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair, came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. the dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. how horrible that was! such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. he felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken or grow mad. there were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. but this was not one of them. it was a thing to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself. he passed his hand across his forehead, and then got up hastily, and dressed himself with even more than his usual attention, giving a good deal of care to the selection of his necktie and scarf-pin, and changing his rings more than once. he spent a long time over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of [ ] getting made for the servants at selby, and going through his correspondence. over some of the letters he smiled. three of them bored him. one he read several times over, and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his face. "that awful thing, a woman's memory!" as lord henry had once said. when he had drunk his coffee, he sat down at the table, and wrote two letters. one he put in his pocket, the other he handed to the valet. "take this round to , hertford street, francis, and if mr. campbell is out of town, get his address." as soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette, and began sketching upon a piece of paper, drawing flowers, and bits of architecture, first, and then faces. suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have an extraordinary likeness to basil hallward. he frowned, and, getting up, went over to the bookcase and took out a volume at hazard. he was determined that he would not think about what had happened, till it became absolutely necessary to do so. when he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page of the book. it was gautier's "emaux et camées," charpentier's japanese-paper edition, with the jacquemart etching. the binding was of citron-green leather with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates. it had been given to him by adrian singleton. as he turned over the pages his eye fell on the poem about the hand of lacenaire, the cold yellow hand "du supplice encore mal lavée," with its downy red hairs and its "doigts de faune." he glanced at his own white taper fingers, and passed on, till he came to those lovely verses upon venice: sur une gamme chromatique, le sein de perles ruisselant, la vénus de l'adriatique sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc. les dômes, sur l'azur des ondes suivant la phrase au pur contour, s'enflent comme des gorges rondes que soulève un soupir d'amour. l'esquif aborde et me dépose, jetant son amarre au pilier, devant une façade rose, sur le marbre d'un escalier. how exquisite they were! as one read them, one seemed to be floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, lying in a black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. the mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the lido. the sudden flashes of color reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall honey-combed campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the dim arcades. leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself,-- devant une façade rose, sur le marbre d'un escalier. [ ] the whole of venice was in those two lines. he remembered the autumn that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to delightful fantastic follies. there was romance in every place. but venice, like oxford, had kept the background for romance, and background was everything, or almost everything. basil had been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over tintoret. poor basil! what a horrible way for a man to die! he sighed, and took up the book again, and tried to forget. he read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little café at smyrna where the hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; of the obelisk in the place de la concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile, and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered nile, where there are sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles, with small beryl eyes, that crawl over the green steaming mud; and of that curious statue that gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "monstre charmant" that couches in the porphyry-room of the louvre. but after a time the book fell from his hand. he grew nervous, and a horrible fit of terror came over him. what if alan campbell should be out of england? days would elapse before he could come back. perhaps he might refuse to come. what could he do then? every moment was of vital importance. they had been great friends once, five years before,--almost inseparable, indeed. then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end. when they met in society now, it was only dorian gray who smiled: alan campbell never did. he was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from dorian. his dominant intellectual passion was for science. at cambridge he had spent a great deal of his time working in the laboratory, and had taken a good class in the natural science tripos of his year. indeed, he was still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his own, in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions. he was an excellent musician, however, as well, and played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. in fact, it was music that had first brought him and dorian gray together,--music and that indefinable attraction that dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished, and indeed exercised often without being conscious of it. they had met at lady berkshire's the night that rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always seen together at the opera, and wherever good music was going on. for eighteen months their intimacy lasted. campbell was always either at selby royal or in grosvenor square. to him, as to many others, dorian gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life. whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one ever knew. but suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when [ ] they met, and that campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at which dorian gray was present. he had changed, too,--was strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing music of any passionate character, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time left in which to practise. and this was certainly true. every day he seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews, in connection with certain curious experiments. this was the man that dorian gray was waiting for, pacing up and down the room, glancing every moment at the clock, and becoming horribly agitated as the minutes went by. at last the door opened, and his servant entered. "mr. alan campbell, sir." a sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the color came back to his cheeks. "ask him to come in at once, francis." the man bowed, and retired. in a few moments alan campbell walked in, looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his coal-black hair and dark eyebrows. "alan! this is kind of you. i thank you for coming." "i had intended never to enter your house again, gray. but you said it was a matter of life and death." his voice was hard and cold. he spoke with slow deliberation. there was a look of contempt in the steady searching gaze that he turned on dorian. he kept his hands in the pockets of his astrakhan coat, and appeared not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted. "it is a matter of life and death, alan, and to more than one person. sit down." campbell took a chair by the table, and dorian sat opposite to him. the two men's eyes met. in dorian's there was infinite pity. he knew that what he was going to do was dreadful. after a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of the man he had sent for, "alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table. he has been dead ten hours now. don't stir, and don't look at me like that. who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do not concern you. what you have to do is this--" "stop, gray. i don't want to know anything further. whether what you have told me is true or not true, doesn't concern me. i entirely decline to be mixed up in your life. keep your horrible secrets to yourself. they don't interest me any more." "alan, they will have to interest you. this one will have to interest you. i am awfully sorry for you, alan. but i can't help myself. you are the one man who is able to save me. i am forced to bring you into the matter. i have no option. alan, you are a scientist. you know about chemistry, and things of that kind. you have made experiments. what you have got to do is to destroy the [ ] thing that is up-stairs,--to destroy it so that not a vestige will be left of it. nobody saw this person come into the house. indeed, at the present moment he is supposed to be in paris. he will not be missed for months. when he is missed, there must be no trace of him found here. you, alan, you must change him, and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes that i may scatter in the air." "you are mad, dorian." "ah! i was waiting for you to call me dorian." "you are mad, i tell you,--mad to imagine that i would raise a finger to help you, mad to make this monstrous confession. i will have nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is. do you think i am going to peril my reputation for you? what is it to me what devil's work you are up to?" "it was a suicide, alan." "i am glad of that. but who drove him to it? you, i should fancy." "do you still refuse to do this, for me?" "of course i refuse. i will have absolutely nothing to do with it. i don't care what shame comes on you. you deserve it all. i should not be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced. how dare you ask me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror? i should have thought you knew more about people's characters. your friend lord henry wotton can't have taught you much about psychology, whatever else he has taught you. nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you. you have come to the wrong man. go to some of your friends. don't come to me." "alan, it was murder. i killed him. you don't know what he had made me suffer. whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or the marring of it than poor harry has had. he may not have intended it, the result was the same." "murder! good god, dorian, is that what you have come to? i shall not inform upon you. it is not my business. besides, you are certain to be arrested, without my stirring in the matter. nobody ever commits a murder without doing something stupid. but i will have nothing to do with it." "all i ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment. you go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don't affect you. if in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. you would not turn a hair. you would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. on the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind. what i want you to do is simply what you have often done before. indeed, to destroy a body must be less horrible than what you are accustomed to work at. and, remember, it is the only piece of evidence against me. if it is discovered, i am lost; and it is sure to be discovered unless you help me." [ ] "i have no desire to help you. you forget that. i am simply indifferent to the whole thing. it has nothing to do with me." "alan, i entreat you. think of the position i am in. just before you came i almost fainted with terror. no! don't think of that. look at the matter purely from the scientific point of view. you don't inquire where the dead things on which you experiment come from. don't inquire now. i have told you too much as it is. but i beg of you to do this. we were friends once, alan." "don't speak about those days, dorian: they are dead." "the dead linger sometimes. the man up-stairs will not go away. he is sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms. alan! alan! if you don't come to my assistance i am ruined. why, they will hang me, alan! don't you understand? they will hang me for what i have done." "there is no good in prolonging this scene. i refuse absolutely to do anything in the matter. it is insane of you to ask me." "you refuse absolutely?" "yes." the same look of pity came into dorian's eyes, then he stretched out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it. he read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table. having done this, he got up, and went over to the window. campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and opened it. as he read it, his face became ghastly pale, and he fell back in his chair. a horrible sense of sickness came over him. he felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow. after two or three minutes of terrible silence, dorian turned round, and came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder. "i am so sorry, alan," he murmured, "but you leave me no alternative. i have a letter written already. here it is. you see the address. if you don't help me, i must send it. you know what the result will be. but you are going to help me. it is impossible for you to refuse now. i tried to spare you. you will do me the justice to admit that. you were stern, harsh, offensive. you treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me,--no living man, at any rate. i bore it all. now it is for me to dictate terms." campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him. "yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, alan. you know what they are. the thing is quite simple. come, don't work yourself into this fever. the thing has to be done. face it, and do it." a groan broke from campbell's lips, and he shivered all over. the ticking of the clock on the mantel-piece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne. he felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his forehead, and as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already come upon him. the hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead. it was intolerable. it seemed to crush him. "come, alan, you must decide at once." [ ] he hesitated a moment. "is there a fire in the room up-stairs?" he murmured. "yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos." "i will have to go home and get some things from the laboratory." "no, alan, you need not leave the house. write on a sheet of note-paper what you want, and my servant will take a cab and bring the things back to you." campbell wrote a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope to his assistant. dorian took the note up and read it carefully. then he rang the bell, and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as soon as possible, and to bring the things with him. when the hall door shut, campbell started, and, having got up from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. he was shivering with a sort of ague. for nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke. a fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was like the beat of a hammer. as the chime struck one, campbell turned around, and, looking at dorian gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. there was something in the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him. "you are infamous, absolutely infamous!" he muttered. "hush, alan: you have saved my life," said dorian. "your life? good heavens! what a life that is! you have gone from corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. in doing what i am going to do, what you force me to do, it is not of your life that i am thinking." "ah, alan," murmured dorian, with a sigh, "i wish you had a thousandth part of the pity for me that i have for you." he turned away, as he spoke, and stood looking out at the garden. campbell made no answer. after about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant entered, carrying a mahogany chest of chemicals, with a small electric battery set on top of it. he placed it on the table, and went out again, returning with a long coil of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously-shaped iron clamps. "shall i leave the things here, sir?" he asked campbell. "yes," said dorian. "and i am afraid, francis, that i have another errand for you. what is the name of the man at richmond who supplies selby with orchids?" "harden, sir." "yes,--harden. you must go down to richmond at once, see harden personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as i ordered, and to have as few white ones as possible. in fact, i don't want any white ones. it is a lovely day, francis, and richmond is a very pretty place, otherwise i wouldn't bother you about it." "no trouble, sir. at what time shall i be back?" dorian looked at campbell. "how long will your experiment take, alan?" he said, in a calm, indifferent voice. the presence of a third person in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage. campbell frowned, and bit his lip. "it will take about five hours," he answered. [ ] "it will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven, francis. or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. you can have the evening to yourself. i am not dining at home, so i shall not want you." "thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room. "now, alan, there is not a moment to be lost. how heavy this chest is! i'll take it for you. you bring the other things." he spoke rapidly, and in an authoritative manner. campbell felt dominated by him. they left the room together. when they reached the top landing, dorian took out the key and turned it in the lock. then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his eyes. he shuddered. "i don't think i can go in, alan," he murmured. "it is nothing to me. i don't require you," said campbell, coldly. dorian half opened the door. as he did so, he saw the face of the portrait grinning in the sunlight. on the floor in front of it the torn curtain was lying. he remembered that the night before, for the first time in his life, he had forgotten to hide it, when he crept out of the room. but what was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? how horrible it was!--more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it. he opened the door a little wider, and walked quickly in, with half-closed eyes and averted head, determined that he would not look even once upon the dead man. then, stooping down, and taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it over the picture. he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. he heard campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other things that he had required for his dreadful work. he began to wonder if he and basil hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had thought of each other. "leave me now," said campbell. he turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been thrust back into the chair and was sitting up in it, with campbell gazing into the glistening yellow face. as he was going downstairs he heard the key being turned in the lock. it was long after seven o'clock when campbell came back into the library. he was pale, but absolutely calm. "i have done what you asked me to do," he muttered. "and now, good-by. let us never see each other again." "you have saved me from ruin, alan. i cannot forget that," said dorian, simply. as soon as campbell had left, he went up-stairs. there was a horrible smell of chemicals in the room. but the thing that had been sitting at the table was gone. chapter xiii [ ] "there is no good telling me you are going to be good, dorian," cried lord henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled with rose-water. "you are quite perfect. pray don't change." dorian shook his head. "no, harry, i have done too many dreadful things in my life. i am not going to do any more. i began my good actions yesterday." "where were you yesterday?" "in the country, harry. i was staying at a little inn by myself." "my dear boy," said lord henry smiling, "anybody can be good in the country. there are no temptations there. that is the reason why people who live out of town are so uncivilized. there are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. one is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt. country-people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate." "culture and corruption," murmured dorian. "i have known something of both. it seems to me curious now that they should ever be found together. for i have a new ideal, harry. i am going to alter. i think i have altered." "you have not told me yet what your good action was. or did you say you had done more than one?" "i can tell you, harry. it is not a story i could tell to any one else. i spared somebody. it sounds vain, but you understand what i mean. she was quite beautiful, and wonderfully like sibyl vane. i think it was that which first attracted me to her. you remember sibyl, don't you? how long ago that seems! well, hetty was not one of our own class, of course. she was simply a girl in a village. but i really loved her. i am quite sure that i loved her. all during this wonderful may that we have been having, i used to run down and see her two or three times a week. yesterday she met me in a little orchard. the apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was laughing. we were to have gone away together this morning at dawn. suddenly i determined to leave her as flower-like as i had found her." "i should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real pleasure, dorian," interrupted lord henry. "but i can finish your idyl for you. you gave her good advice, and broke her heart. that was the beginning of your reformation." "harry, you are horrible! you mustn't say these dreadful things. hetty's heart is not broken. of course she cried, and all that. but there is no disgrace upon her. she can live, like perdita, in her garden." "and weep over a faithless florizel," said lord henry, laughing. "my dear dorian, you have the most curious boyish moods. do you think this girl will ever be really contented now with any one of her own rank? i suppose she will be married some day to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman. well, having met you, and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband, and she will be wretched. from a moral point of view i really don't think much of your great renunciation. [ ] even as a beginning, it is poor. besides, how do you know that hetty isn't floating at the present moment in some mill-pond, with water-lilies round her, like ophelia?" "i can't bear this, harry! you mock at everything, and then suggest the most serious tragedies. i am sorry i told you now. i don't care what you say to me, i know i was right in acting as i did. poor hetty! as i rode past the farm this morning, i saw her white face at the window, like a spray of jasmine. don't let me talk about it any more, and don't try to persuade me that the first good action i have done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice i have ever known, is really a sort of sin. i want to be better. i am going to be better. tell me something about yourself. what is going on in town? i have not been to the club for days." "the people are still discussing poor basil's disappearance." "i should have thought they had got tired of that by this time," said dorian, pouring himself out some wine, and frowning slightly. "my dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks, and the public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months. they have been very fortunate lately, however. they have had my own divorce-case, and alan campbell's suicide. now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist. scotland yard still insists that the man in the gray ulster who left victoria by the midnight train on the th of november was poor basil, and the french police declare that basil never arrived in paris at all. i suppose in about a fortnight we will be told that he has been seen in san francisco. it is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at san francisco. it must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world." "what do you think has happened to basil?" asked dorian, holding up his burgundy against the light, and wondering how it was that he could discuss the matter so calmly. "i have not the slightest idea. if basil chooses to hide himself, it is no business of mine. if he is dead, i don't want to think about him. death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. i hate it. one can survive everything nowadays except that. death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. let us have our coffee in the music-room, dorian. you must play chopin to me. the man with whom my wife ran away played chopin exquisitely. poor victoria! i was very fond of her. the house is rather lonely without her." dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and, passing into the next room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the keys. after the coffee had been brought in, he stopped, and, looking over at lord henry, said, "harry, did it ever occur to you that basil was murdered?" lord henry yawned. "basil had no enemies, and always wore a waterbury watch. why should he be murdered? he was not clever enough to have enemies. of course he had a wonderful genius for painting. but a man can paint like velasquez and yet be as dull as possible. basil was really rather dull. he only interested me once, [ ] and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration for you." "i was very fond of basil," said dorian, with a sad look in his eyes. "but don't people say that he was murdered?" "oh, some of the papers do. it does not seem to be probable. i know there are dreadful places in paris, but basil was not the sort of man to have gone to them. he had no curiosity. it was his chief defect. play me a nocturne, dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept your youth. you must have some secret. i am only ten years older than you are, and i am wrinkled, and bald, and yellow. you are really wonderful, dorian. you have never looked more charming than you do to-night. you remind me of the day i saw you first. you were rather cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary. you have changed, of course, but not in appearance. i wish you would tell me your secret. to get back my youth i would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. youth! there is nothing like it. it's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. the only people whose opinions i listen to now with any respect are people much younger than myself. they seem in front of me. life has revealed to them her last wonder. as for the aged, i always contradict the aged. i do it on principle. if you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in , when people wore high stocks and knew absolutely nothing. how lovely that thing you are playing is! i wonder did chopin write it at majorca, with the sea weeping round the villa, and the salt spray dashing against the panes? it is marvelously romantic. what a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative! don't stop. i want music to-night. it seems to me that you are the young apollo, and that i am marsyas listening to you. i have sorrows, dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of. the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. i am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity. ah, dorian, how happy you are! what an exquisite life you have had! you have drunk deeply of everything. you have crushed the grapes against your palate. nothing has been hidden from you. but it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. it has not marred you. you are still the same. "i wonder what the rest of your life will be. don't spoil it by renunciations. at present you are a perfect type. don't make yourself incomplete. you are quite flawless now. you need not shake your head: you know you are. besides, dorian, don't deceive yourself. life is not governed by will or intention. life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. you may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. but a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings strange memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play,--i tell you, dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. browning writes about that somewhere; but our [ ] own senses will imagine them for us. there are moments when the odor of heliotrope passes suddenly across me, and i have to live the strangest year of my life over again. "i wish i could change places with you, dorian. the world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. it always will worship you. you are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. i am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! life has been your art. you have set yourself to music. your days have been your sonnets." dorian rose up from the piano, and passed his hand through his hair. "yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but i am not going to have the same life, harry. and you must not say these extravagant things to me. you don't know everything about me. i think that if you did, even you would turn from me. you laugh. don't laugh." "why have you stopped playing, dorian? go back and play the nocturne over again. look at that great honey-colored moon that hangs in the dusky air. she is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth. you won't? let us go to the club, then. it has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly. there is some one at the club who wants immensely to know you,--young lord poole, bournmouth's eldest son. he has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. he is quite delightful, and rather reminds me of you." "i hope not," said dorian, with a touch of pathos in his voice. "but i am tired to-night, harry. i won't go to the club. it is nearly eleven, and i want to go to bed early." "do stay. you have never played so well as to-night. there was something in your touch that was wonderful. it had more expression than i had ever heard from it before." "it is because i am going to be good," he answered, smiling. "i am a little changed already." "don't change, dorian; at any rate, don't change to me. we must always be friends." "yet you poisoned me with a book once. i should not forgive that. harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. it does harm." "my dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. you will soon be going about warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired. you are much too delightful to do that. besides, it is no use. you and i are what we are, and will be what we will be. come round tomorrow. i am going to ride at eleven, and we might go together. the park is quite lovely now. i don't think there have been such lilacs since the year i met you." "very well. i will be here at eleven," said dorian. "good-night, harry." as he reached the door he hesitated for a moment, as if he had something more to say. then he sighed and went out. it was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm, and did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. as he strolled [ ] home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. he heard one of them whisper to the other, "that is dorian gray." he remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about. he was tired of hearing his own name now. half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was. he had told the girl whom he had made love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. he had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him, and told him that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. what a laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing. and how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! she knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost. when he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. he sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began to think over some of the things that lord henry had said to him. was it really true that one could never change? he felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood,--his rose-white boyhood, as lord henry had once called it. he knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption, and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. but was it all irretrievable? was there no hope for him? it was better not to think of the past. nothing could alter that. it was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think. alan campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know. the excitement, such as it was, over basil hallward's disappearance would soon pass away. it was already waning. he was perfectly safe there. nor, indeed, was it the death of basil hallward that weighed most upon his mind. it was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. he could not forgive him that. it was the portrait that had done everything. basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. the murder had been simply the madness of a moment. as for alan campbell, his suicide had been his own act. he had chosen to do it. it was nothing to him. a new life! that was what he wanted. that was what he was waiting for. surely he had begun it already. he had spared one innocent thing, at any rate. he would never again tempt innocence. he would be good. as he thought of hetty merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed. surely it was not still so horrible as it had been? perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face. perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away. he would go and look. he took the lamp from the table and crept up-stairs. as he unlocked the door, a smile of joy flitted across his young face and [ ] lingered for a moment about his lips. yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. he felt as if the load had been lifted from him already. he went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. a cry of pain and indignation broke from him. he could see no change, unless that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. the thing was still loathsome,--more loathsome, if possible, than before,--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilt. had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? or the desire of a new sensation, as lord henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? or, perhaps, all these? why was the red stain larger than it had been? it seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. there was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped,--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. confess? did it mean that he was to confess? to give himself up, and be put to death? he laughed. he felt that the idea was monstrous. besides, who would believe him, even if he did confess? there was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. everything belonging to him had been destroyed. he himself had burned what had been below-stairs. the world would simply say he was mad. they would shut him up if he persisted in his story. yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. there was a god who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. his sin? he shrugged his shoulders. the death of basil hallward seemed very little to him. he was thinking of hetty merton. it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. vanity? curiosity? hypocrisy? had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? there had been something more. at least he thought so. but who could tell? and this murder,--was it to dog him all his life? was he never to get rid of the past? was he really to confess? no. there was only one bit of evidence left against him. the picture itself,--that was evidence. he would destroy it. why had he kept it so long? it had given him pleasure once to watch it changing and growing old. of late he had felt no such pleasure. it had kept him awake at night. when he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. it had brought melancholy across his passions. its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. it had been like conscience to him. yes, it had been conscience. he would destroy it. he looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed basil hallward. he had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. it was bright, and glistened. as it had killed the painter, so it [ ] would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. it would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. he seized it, and stabbed the canvas with it, ripping the thing right up from top to bottom. there was a cry heard, and a crash. the cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke, and crept out of their rooms. two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped, and looked up at the great house. they walked on till they met a policeman, and brought him back. the man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. the house was all dark, except for a light in one of the top windows. after a time, he went away, and stood in the portico of the next house and watched. "whose house is that, constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen. "mr. dorian gray's, sir," answered the policeman. they looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered. one of them was sir henry ashton's uncle. inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. old mrs. leaf was crying, and wringing her hands. francis was as pale as death. after about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept up-stairs. they knocked, but there was no reply. they called out. everything was still. finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on to the balcony. the windows yielded easily: the bolts were old. when they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. he was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. it was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was. three john silence stories algernon blackwood to m.l.w. the original of john silence and my companion in many adventures contents case i: a psychical invasion case ii: ancient sorceries case iii: the nemesis of fire case i: a psychical invasion i "and what is it makes you think i could be of use in this particular case?" asked dr. john silence, looking across somewhat sceptically at the swedish lady in the chair facing him. "your sympathetic heart and your knowledge of occultism--" "oh, please--that dreadful word!" he interrupted, holding up a finger with a gesture of impatience. "well, then," she laughed, "your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may be disintegrated and destroyed--these strange studies you've been experimenting with all these years--" "if it's only a case of multiple personality i must really cry off," interrupted the doctor again hastily, a bored expression in his eyes. "it's not that; now, please, be serious, for i want your help," she said; "and if i choose my words poorly you must be patient with my ignorance. the case i know will interest you, and no one else could deal with it so well. in fact, no ordinary professional man could deal with it at all, for i know of no treatment nor medicine that can restore a lost sense of humour!" "you begin to interest me with your 'case,'" he replied, and made himself comfortable to listen. mrs. sivendson drew a sigh of contentment as she watched him go to the tube and heard him tell the servant he was not to be disturbed. "i believe you have read my thoughts already," she said; "your intuitive knowledge of what goes on in other people's minds is positively uncanny." her friend shook his head and smiled as he drew his chair up to a convenient position and prepared to listen attentively to what she had to say. he closed his eyes, as he always did when he wished to absorb the real meaning of a recital that might be inadequately expressed, for by this method he found it easier to set himself in tune with the living thoughts that lay behind the broken words. by his friends john silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was rich by accident, and by choice--a doctor. that a man of independent means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. the native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help themselves, puzzled them. after that, it irritated them, and, greatly to his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices. dr. silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner. he took no fees, being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted unremunerative cases, and cases that interested him for some very special reason. he argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a very large class of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the arts, could not afford the price of a week's comforts merely to be told to travel. and it was these he desired to help: cases often requiring special and patient study--things no doctor can give for a guinea, and that no one would dream of expecting him to give. but there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the "psychic doctor." in order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual. what precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to know,--for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,--but the fact that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the genuineness of his attainments. for the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the "man who knows." there was a trace of pity in his voice--contempt he never showed--when he spoke of their methods. "this classification of results is uninspired work at best," he said once to me, when i had been his confidential assistant for some years. "it leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. it is playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. far better, it would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily slip into place and explain themselves. for the sources are accessible, and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes practical investigation safe and possible." and towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than a keen power of visualising. "it connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more," he would say. "the true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. and you will find this always to be the real test." thus it was that john silence, this singularly developed doctor, was able to select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction that claimed his special powers. it was never necessary for him to resort to the cheap mysteries of divination; for, as i have heard him observe, after the solution of some peculiarly intricate problem-- "systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves, are merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the inner vision may become open. once the method is mastered, no system is necessary at all." and the words were significant of the methods of this remarkable man, the keynote of whose power lay, perhaps, more than anything else, in the knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly, that thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results. "learn how to _think_," he would have expressed it, "and you have learned to tap power at its source." to look at--he was now past forty--he was sparely built, with speaking brown eyes in which shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence, while at the same time they made one think of that wondrous gentleness seen most often in the eyes of animals. a close beard concealed the mouth without disguising the grim determination of lips and jaw, and the face somehow conveyed an impression of transparency, almost of light, so delicately were the features refined away. on the fine forehead was that indefinable touch of peace that comes from identifying the mind with what is permanent in the soul, and letting the impermanent slip by without power to wound or distress; while, from his manner,--so gentle, quiet, sympathetic,--few could have guessed the strength of purpose that burned within like a great flame. "i think i should describe it as a psychical case," continued the swedish lady, obviously trying to explain herself very intelligently, "and just the kind you like. i mean a case where the cause is hidden deep down in some spiritual distress, and--" "but the symptoms first, please, my dear svenska," he interrupted, with a strangely compelling seriousness of manner, "and your deductions afterwards." she turned round sharply on the edge of her chair and looked him in the face, lowering her voice to prevent her emotion betraying itself too obviously. "in my opinion there's only one symptom," she half whispered, as though telling something disagreeable--"fear--simply fear." "physical fear?" "i think not; though how can i say? i think it's a horror in the psychical region. it's no ordinary delusion; the man is quite sane; but he lives in mortal terror of something--" "i don't know what you mean by his 'psychical region,'" said the doctor, with a smile; "though i suppose you wish me to understand that his spiritual, and not his mental, processes are affected. anyhow, try and tell me briefly and pointedly what you know about the man, his symptoms, his need for help, my peculiar help, that is, and all that seems vital in the case. i promise to listen devotedly." "i am trying," she continued earnestly, "but must do so in my own words and trust to your intelligence to disentangle as i go along. he is a young author, and lives in a tiny house off putney heath somewhere. he writes humorous stories--quite a genre of his own: pender--you must have heard the name--felix pender? oh, the man had a great gift, and married on the strength of it; his future seemed assured. i say 'had,' for quite suddenly his talent utterly failed him. worse, it became transformed into its opposite. he can no longer write a line in the old way that was bringing him success--" dr. silence opened his eyes for a second and looked at her. "he still writes, then? the force has not gone?" he asked briefly, and then closed his eyes again to listen. "he works like a fury," she went on, "but produces nothing"--she hesitated a moment--"nothing that he can use or sell. his earnings have practically ceased, and he makes a precarious living by book-reviewing and odd jobs--very odd, some of them. yet, i am certain his talent has not really deserted him finally, but is merely--" again mrs. sivendson hesitated for the appropriate word. "in abeyance," he suggested, without opening his eyes. "obliterated," she went on, after a moment to weigh the word, "merely obliterated by something else--" "by some one else?" "i wish i knew. all i can say is that he is haunted, and temporarily his sense of humour is shrouded--gone--replaced by something dreadful that writes other things. unless something competent is done, he will simply starve to death. yet he is afraid to go to a doctor for fear of being pronounced insane; and, anyhow, a man can hardly ask a doctor to take a guinea to restore a vanished sense of humour, can he?" "has he tried any one at all--?" "not doctors yet. he tried some clergymen and religious people; but they know so little and have so little intelligent sympathy. and most of them are so busy balancing on their own little pedestals--" john silence stopped her tirade with a gesture. "and how is it that you know so much about him?" he asked gently. "i know mrs. pender well--i knew her before she married him--" "and is she a cause, perhaps?" "not in the least. she is devoted; a woman very well educated, though without being really intelligent, and with so little sense of humour herself that she always laughs at the wrong places. but she has nothing to do with the cause of his distress; and, indeed, has chiefly guessed it from observing him, rather than from what little he has told her. and he, you know, is a really lovable fellow, hard-working, patient--altogether worth saving." dr. silence opened his eyes and went over to ring for tea. he did not know very much more about the case of the humorist than when he first sat down to listen; but he realised that no amount of words from his swedish friend would help to reveal the real facts. a personal interview with the author himself could alone do that. "all humorists are worth saving," he said with a smile, as she poured out tea. "we can't afford to lose a single one in these strenuous days. i will go and see your friend at the first opportunity." she thanked him elaborately, effusively, with many words, and he, with much difficulty, kept the conversation thenceforward strictly to the teapot. and, as a result of this conversation, and a little more he had gathered by means best known to himself and his secretary, he was whizzing in his motor-car one afternoon a few days later up the putney hill to have his first interview with felix pender, the humorous writer who was the victim of some mysterious malady in his "psychical region" that had obliterated his sense of the comic and threatened to wreck his life and destroy his talent. and his desire to help was probably of equal strength with his desire to know and to investigate. the motor stopped with a deep purring sound, as though a great black panther lay concealed within its hood, and the doctor--the "psychic doctor," as he was sometimes called--stepped out through the gathering fog, and walked across the tiny garden that held a blackened fir tree and a stunted laurel shrubbery. the house was very small, and it was some time before any one answered the bell. then, suddenly, a light appeared in the hall, and he saw a pretty little woman standing on the top step begging him to come in. she was dressed in grey, and the gaslight fell on a mass of deliberately brushed light hair. stuffed, dusty birds, and a shabby array of african spears, hung on the wall behind her. a hat-rack, with a bronze plate full of very large cards, led his eye swiftly to a dark staircase beyond. mrs. pender had round eyes like a child's, and she greeted him with an effusiveness that barely concealed her emotion, yet strove to appear naturally cordial. evidently she had been looking out for his arrival, and had outrun the servant girl. she was a little breathless. "i hope you've not been kept waiting--i think it's _most_ good of you to come--" she began, and then stopped sharp when she saw his face in the gaslight. there was something in dr. silence's look that did not encourage mere talk. he was in earnest now, if ever man was. "good evening, mrs. pender," he said, with a quiet smile that won confidence, yet deprecated unnecessary words, "the fog delayed me a little. i am glad to see you." they went into a dingy sitting-room at the back of the house, neatly furnished but depressing. books stood in a row upon the mantelpiece. the fire had evidently just been lit. it smoked in great puffs into the room. "mrs. sivendson said she thought you might be able to come," ventured the little woman again, looking up engagingly into his face and betraying anxiety and eagerness in every gesture. "but i hardly dared to believe it. i think it is really too good of you. my husband's case is so peculiar that--well, you know, i am quite sure any _ordinary_ doctor would say at once the asylum--" "isn't he in, then?" asked dr. silence gently. "in the asylum?" she gasped. "oh dear, no--not yet!" "in the house, i meant," he laughed. she gave a great sigh. "he'll be back any minute now," she replied, obviously relieved to see him laugh; "but the fact is, we didn't expect you so early--i mean, my husband hardly thought you would come at all." "i am always delighted to come--when i am really wanted, and can be of help," he said quickly; "and, perhaps, it's all for the best that your husband is out, for now that we are alone you can tell me something about his difficulties. so far, you know, i have heard very little." her voice trembled as she thanked him, and when he came and took a chair close beside her she actually had difficulty in finding words with which to begin. "in the first place," she began timidly, and then continuing with a nervous incoherent rush of words, "he will be simply delighted that you've really come, because he said you were the only person he would consent to see at all--the only doctor, i mean. but, of course, he doesn't know how frightened i am, or how much i have noticed. he pretends with me that it's just a nervous breakdown, and i'm sure he doesn't realise all the odd things i've noticed him doing. but the main thing, i suppose--" "yes, the main thing, mrs. pender," he said, encouragingly, noticing her hesitation. "--is that he thinks we are not alone in the house. that's the chief thing." "tell me more facts--just facts." "it began last summer when i came back from ireland; he had been here alone for six weeks, and i thought him looking tired and queer--ragged and scattered about the face, if you know what i mean, and his manner worn out. he said he had been writing hard, but his inspiration had somehow failed him, and he was dissatisfied with his work. his sense of humour was leaving him, or changing into something else, he said. there was something in the house, he declared, that"--she emphasised the words--"prevented his feeling funny." "something in the house that prevented his feeling funny," repeated the doctor. "ah, now we're getting to the heart of it!" "yes," she resumed vaguely, "that's what he kept saying." "and what was it he _did_ that you thought strange?" he asked sympathetically. "be brief, or he may be here before you finish." "very small things, but significant it seemed to me. he changed his workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. he said all his characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they altered, so that he felt like writing tragedies--vile, debased tragedies, the tragedies of broken souls. but now he says the same of the sitting-room, and he's gone back to the library." "ah!" "you see, there's so little i can tell you," she went on, with increasing speed and countless gestures. "i mean it's only very small things he does and says that are queer. what frightens me is that he assumes there is some one else in the house all the time--some one i never see. he does not actually say so, but on the stairs i've seen him standing aside to let some one pass; i've seen him open a door to let some one in or out; and often in our bedrooms he puts chairs about as though for some one else to sit in. oh--oh yes, and once or twice," she cried--"once or twice--" she paused, and looked about her with a startled air. "yes?" "once or twice," she resumed hurriedly, as though she heard a sound that alarmed her, "i've heard him running--coming in and out of the rooms breathless as if something were after him--" the door opened while she was still speaking, cutting her words off in the middle, and a man came into the room. he was dark and clean-shaven, sallow rather, with the eyes of imagination, and dark hair growing scantily about the temples. he was dressed in a shabby tweed suit, and wore an untidy flannel collar at the neck. the dominant expression of his face was startled--hunted; an expression that might any moment leap into the dreadful stare of terror and announce a total loss of self-control. the moment he saw his visitor a smile spread over his worn features, and he advanced to shake hands. "i hoped you would come; mrs. sivendson said you might be able to find time," he said simply. his voice was thin and needy. "i am very glad to see you, dr. silence. it is 'doctor,' is it not?" "well, i am entitled to the description," laughed the other, "but i rarely get it. you know, i do not practise as a regular thing; that is, i only take cases that specially interest me, or--" he did not finish the sentence, for the men exchanged a glance of sympathy that rendered it unnecessary. "i have heard of your great kindness." "it's my hobby," said the other quickly, "and my privilege." "i trust you will still think so when you have heard what i have to tell you," continued the author, a little wearily. he led the way across the hall into the little smoking-room where they could talk freely and undisturbed. in the smoking-room, the door shut and privacy about them, fender's attitude changed somewhat, and his manner became very grave. the doctor sat opposite, where he could watch his face. already, he saw, it looked more haggard. evidently it cost him much to refer to his trouble at all. "what i have is, in my belief, a profound spiritual affliction," he began quite bluntly, looking straight into the other's eyes. "i saw that at once," dr. silence said. "yes, you saw that, of course; my atmosphere must convey that much to any one with psychic perceptions. besides which, i feel sure from all i've heard, that you are really a soul-doctor, are you not, more than a healer merely of the body?" "you think of me too highly," returned the other; "though i prefer cases, as you know, in which the spirit is disturbed first, the body afterwards." "i understand, yes. well, i have experienced a curious disturbance in--not in my physical region primarily. i mean my nerves are all right, and my body is all right. i have no delusions exactly, but my spirit is tortured by a calamitous fear which first came upon me in a strange manner." john silence leaned forward a moment and took the speaker's hand and held it in his own for a few brief seconds, closing his eyes as he did so. he was not feeling his pulse, or doing any of the things that doctors ordinarily do; he was merely absorbing into himself the main note of the man's mental condition, so as to get completely his own point of view, and thus be able to treat his case with true sympathy. a very close observer might perhaps have noticed that a slight tremor ran through his frame after he had held the hand for a few seconds. "tell me quite frankly, mr. pender," he said soothingly, releasing the hand, and with deep attention in his manner, "tell me all the steps that led to the beginning of this invasion. i mean tell me what the particular drug was, and why you took it, and how it affected you--" "then you know it began with a drug!" cried the author, with undisguised astonishment. "i only know from what i observe in you, and in its effect upon myself. you are in a surprising psychical condition. certain portions of your atmosphere are vibrating at a far greater rate than others. this is the effect of a drug, but of no ordinary drug. allow me to finish, please. if the higher rate of vibration spreads all over, you will become, of course, permanently cognisant of a much larger world than the one you know normally. if, on the other hand, the rapid portion sinks back to the usual rate, you will lose these occasional increased perceptions you now have." "you amaze me!" exclaimed the author; "for your words exactly describe what i have been feeling--" "i mention this only in passing, and to give you confidence before you approach the account of your real affliction," continued the doctor. "all perception, as you know, is the result of vibrations; and clairvoyance simply means becoming sensitive to an increased scale of vibrations. the awakening of the inner senses we hear so much about means no more than that. your partial clairvoyance is easily explained. the only thing that puzzles me is how you managed to procure the drug, for it is not easy to get in pure form, and no adulterated tincture could have given you the terrific impetus i see you have acquired. but, please proceed now and tell me your story in your own way." "this _cannabis indica_," the author went on, "came into my possession last autumn while my wife was away. i need not explain how i got it, for that has no importance; but it was the genuine fluid extract, and i could not resist the temptation to make an experiment. one of its effects, as you know, is to induce torrential laughter--" "yes: sometimes." "--i am a writer of humorous tales, and i wished to increase my own sense of laughter--to see the ludicrous from an abnormal point of view. i wished to study it a bit, if possible, and--" "tell me!" "i took an experimental dose. i starved for six hours to hasten the effect, locked myself into this room, and gave orders not to be disturbed. then i swallowed the stuff and waited." "and the effect?" "i waited one hour, two, three, four, five hours. nothing happened. no laughter came, but only a great weariness instead. nothing in the room or in my thoughts came within a hundred miles of a humorous aspect." "always a most uncertain drug," interrupted the doctor. "we make very small use of it on that account." "at two o'clock in the morning i felt so hungry and tired that i decided to give up the experiment and wait no longer. i drank some milk and went upstairs to bed. i felt flat and disappointed. i fell asleep at once and must have slept for about an hour, when i awoke suddenly with a great noise in my ears. it was the noise of my own laughter! i was simply shaking with merriment. at first i was bewildered and thought i had been laughing in dreams, but a moment later i remembered the drug, and was delighted to think that after all i had got an effect. it had been working all along, only i had miscalculated the time. the only unpleasant thing _then_ was an odd feeling that i had not waked naturally, but had been wakened by some one else--deliberately. this came to me as a certainty in the middle of my noisy laughter and distressed me." "any impression who it could have been?" asked the doctor, now listening with close attention to every word, very much on the alert. pender hesitated and tried to smile. he brushed his hair from his forehead with a nervous gesture. "you must tell me all your impressions, even your fancies; they are quite as important as your certainties." "i had a vague idea that it was some one connected with my forgotten dream, some one who had been at me in my sleep, some one of great strength and great ability--of great force--quite an unusual personality--and, i was certain, too--a woman." "a good woman?" asked john silence quietly. pender started a little at the question and his sallow face flushed; it seemed to surprise him. but he shook his head quickly with an indefinable look of horror. "evil," he answered briefly, "appallingly evil, and yet mingled with the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness--the perversity of the unbalanced mind." he hesitated a moment and looked up sharply at his interlocutor. a shade of suspicion showed itself in his eyes. "no," laughed the doctor, "you need not fear that i'm merely humouring you, or think you mad. far from it. your story interests me exceedingly and you furnish me unconsciously with a number of clues as you tell it. you see, i possess some knowledge of my own as to these psychic byways." "i was shaking with such violent laughter," continued the narrator, reassured in a moment, "though with no clear idea what was amusing me, that i had the greatest difficulty in getting up for the matches, and was afraid i should frighten the servants overhead with my explosions. when the gas was lit i found the room empty, of course, and the door locked as usual. then i half dressed and went out on to the landing, my hilarity better under control, and proceeded to go downstairs. i wished to record my sensations. i stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth so as not to scream aloud and communicate my hysterics to the entire household." "and the presence of this--this--?" "it was hanging about me all the time," said pender, "but for the moment it seemed to have withdrawn. probably, too, my laughter killed all other emotions." "and how long did you take getting downstairs?" "i was just coming to that. i see you know all my 'symptoms' in advance, as it were; for, of course, i thought i should never get to the bottom. each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the narrow hall at the foot of the stairs--well, i could have sworn it was half an hour's journey had not my watch certified that it was a few seconds. yet i walked fast and tried to push on. it was no good. i walked apparently without advancing, and at that rate it would have taken me a week to get down putney hill." "an experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space sometimes--" "but, when at last i got into my study and lit the gas, the change came horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. it was like a douche of icy water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter--" "yes; what?" asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his eyes. "--i was overwhelmed with terror," said pender, lowering his reedy voice at the mere recollection of it. he paused a moment and mopped his forehead. the scared, hunted look in his eyes now dominated the whole face. yet, all the time, the corners of his mouth hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of that merriment still amused him. the combination of fear and laughter in his face was very curious, and lent great conviction to his story; it also lent a bizarre expression of horror to his gestures. "terror, was it?" repeated the doctor soothingly. "yes, terror; for, though the thing that woke me seemed to have gone, the memory of it still frightened me, and i collapsed into a chair. then i locked the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug made my movements so prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach the door, and another five to get back to the chair again. the laughter, too, kept bubbling up inside me--great wholesome laughter that shook me like gusts of wind--so that even my terror almost made me laugh. oh, but i may tell you, dr. silence, it was altogether vile, that mixture of fear and laughter, altogether vile! "then, all at once, the things in the room again presented their funny side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. the bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the clock looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the arrangement of papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till i roared and shook and held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. and that footstool! oh, that absurd footstool!" he lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands at the thought of it, and at the sight of him dr. silence laughed, too. "go on, please," he said, "i quite understand. i know something myself of the hashish laughter." the author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing quickly grave again. "so, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror. the drug produced the laughter, i knew; but what brought in the terror i could not imagine. everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. it was terror masked by cap and bells; and i became the playground for two opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death. gradually, then, the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion--so you called it just now--of the 'person' who had wakened me: she was utterly evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished for good. there i stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything in the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my heart. and this creature was putting--putting her--" he hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely. "putting what?" "--putting ideas into my mind," he went on glancing nervously about the room. "actually tapping my thought-stream so as to switch off the usual current and inject her own. how mad that sounds! i know it, but it's true. it's the only way i can express it. moreover, while the operation terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me afresh with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. our ignorant, bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas, and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when i understood this superior and diabolical method. yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and ideas of evil and tragedy trod close upon the heels of the comic. oh, doctor, i tell you again, it was unnerving!" john silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of the story which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky sentences and lowered voice. "you saw nothing--no one--all this time?" he asked. "not with my eyes. there was no visual hallucination. but in my mind there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman--large, dark-skinned, with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye--the left--so drooping as to appear almost closed. oh, such a face--!" "a face you would recognise again?" pender laughed dreadfully. "i wish i could forget it," he whispered, "i only wish i could forget it!" then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the doctor's hand with an emotional gesture. "i _must_ tell you how grateful i am for your patience and sympathy," he cried, with a tremor in his voice, "and--that you do not think me mad. i have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere freedom of speech--the relief of sharing my affliction with another--has helped me already more than i can possibly say." dr. silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened eyes. his voice was very gentle when he replied. "your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to me," he said, "for it threatens, not your physical existence but the temple of your psychical existence--the inner life. your mind would not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be _spiritually insane_--a far more radical condition than merely being insane here." there came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men sitting there facing one another. "do you really mean--good lord!" stammered the author as soon as he could find his tongue. "what i mean in detail will keep till a little later, and i need only say now that i should not have spoken in this way unless i were quite positive of being able to help you. oh, there's no doubt as to that, believe me. in the first place, i am very familiar with the workings of this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, i have a firm belief in the reality of supersensuous occurrences as well as considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and painful experiment. the rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic treatment and practical application. the hashish has partially opened another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. ancient forces attached to this house have attacked you. for the moment i am only puzzled as to their precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, i should myself be psychic enough to feel them. yet i am conscious of feeling nothing as yet. but now, please continue, mr. pender, and tell me the rest of your wonderful story; and when you have finished, i will talk about the means of cure." pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and then went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative. "after making some notes of my impressions i finally got upstairs again to bed. it was four o'clock in the morning. i laughed all the way up--at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to alarm or disturb me, and i woke late in the morning after a dreamless sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache and a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation." "fear gone, too?" asked the doctor. "i seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere nervousness. its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that day i wrote and wrote and wrote. my sense of laughter seemed wonderfully quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the heart of true humour. i was exceedingly pleased with this result of my experiment. but when the stenographer had taken her departure and i came to read over the pages she had typed out, i recalled her sudden glances of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while i was dictating. i was amazed at what i read and could hardly believe i had uttered it." "and why?" "it was so distorted. the words, indeed, were mine so far as i could remember, but the meanings seemed strange. it frightened me. the sense was so altered. at the very places where my characters were intended to tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted. dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases. there was laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. the story, as it read then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these slight changes it had come somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as merriment. the framework of humour was there, if you understand me, but the characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil." "can you show me this writing?" the author shook his head. "i destroyed it," he whispered. "but, in the end, though of course much perturbed about it, i persuaded myself that it was due to some after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my mind and made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations that did not properly hold them." "and, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?" "no; that stayed more or less. when my mind was actively employed i forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular, there she was beside me, influencing my mind horribly--" "in what way, precisely?" interrupted the doctor. "evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been foreign, indeed impossible, to my normal nature--" "the pressure of the dark powers upon the personality," murmured the doctor, making a quick note. "eh? i didn't quite catch--" "pray, go on. i am merely making notes; you shall know their purport fully later." "even when my wife returned i was still aware of this presence in the house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate fashion; and outwardly i always felt oddly constrained to be polite and respectful towards it--to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself carefully deferential when it was about. it became very compelling at last, and, if i failed in any little particular, i seemed to know that it pursued me about the house, from one room to another, haunting my very soul in its inmost abode. it certainly came before my wife so far as my attentions were concerned. "but, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for i took it again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience, delayed like the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when it did come with a rush of this false demon-laughter. this time, however, there was a reversal of the changed scale of space and time; it shortened instead of lengthened, so that i dressed and got downstairs in about twenty seconds, and the couple of hours i stayed and worked in the study passed literally like a period of ten minutes." "that is often true of an overdose," interjected the doctor, "and you may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of an hour. it is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it, and is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of thought." "this time," pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his excitement, "another extraordinary effect came to me, and i experienced a curious changing of the senses, so that i perceived external things through one large main sense-channel instead of through the five divisions known as sight, smell, touch, and so forth. you will, i know, understand me when i tell you that i _heard_ sights and _saw_ sounds. no language can make this comprehensible, of course, and i can only say, for instance, that the striking of the clock i saw as a visible picture in the air before me. i saw the sounds of the tinkling bell. and in precisely the same way i heard the colours in the room, especially the colours of those books in the shelf behind you. those red bindings i heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the french bindings next to them made a shrill, piercing note not unlike the chattering of starlings. that brown bookcase muttered, and those green curtains opposite kept up a constant sort of rippling sound like the lower notes of a wood-horn. but i only was conscious of these sounds when i looked steadily at the different objects, and thought about them. the room, you understand, was not full of a chorus of notes; but when i concentrated my mind upon a colour, i heard, as well as saw, it." "that is a known, though rarely obtained, effect of _cannabis indica_," observed the doctor. "and it provoked laughter again, did it?" "only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. it was so like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of a performing bear--which is full of a kind of pathetic humour, you know. but this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. on the contrary, i was unusually clear-headed and experienced an intensification of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and keen-minded. "moreover, when i took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to sketch--a talent not normally mine--i found that i could draw nothing but heads, nothing, in fact, but one head--always the same--the head of a dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very drooping left eye; and so well drawn, too, that i was amazed, as you may imagine--" "and the expression of the face--?" pender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in the air and hunching his shoulders. a perceptible shudder ran over him. "what i can only describe as--_blackness_," he replied in a low tone; "the face of a dark and evil soul." "you destroyed that, too?" queried the doctor sharply. "no; i have kept the drawings," he said, with a laugh, and rose to get them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him. "here is all that remains of the pictures, you see," he added, pushing a number of loose sheets under the doctor's eyes; "nothing but a few scrawly lines. that's all i found the next morning. i had really drawn no heads at all--nothing but those lines and blots and wriggles. the pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind which constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. like the altered scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. these all passed, of course, with the passing of the drug's effects. but the other thing did not pass. i mean, the presence of that dark soul remained with me. it is here still. it is real. i don't know how i can escape from it." "it is attached to the house, not to you personally. you must leave the house." "yes. only i cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole means of support, and--well, you see, since this change i cannot even write. they are horrible, these mirthless tales i now write, with their mockery of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. horrible? i shall go mad if this continues." he screwed his face up and looked about the room as though he expected to see some haunting shape. "this influence in this house induced by my experiment, has killed in a flash, in a sudden stroke, the sources of my humour, and though i still go on writing funny tales--i have a certain name you know--my inspiration has dried up, and much of what i write i have to burn--yes, doctor, to burn, before any one sees it." "as utterly alien to your own mind and personality?" "utterly! as though some one else had written it--" "ah!" "and shocking!" he passed his hand over his eyes a moment and let the breath escape softly through his teeth. "yet most damnably clever in the consummate way the vile suggestions are insinuated under cover of a kind of high drollery. my stenographer left me of course--and i've been afraid to take another--" john silence got up and began to walk about the room leisurely without speaking; he appeared to be examining the pictures on the wall and reading the names of the books lying about. presently he paused on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and turned to look his patient quietly in the eyes. pender's face was grey and drawn; the hunted expression dominated it; the long recital had told upon him. "thank you, mr. pender," he said, a curious glow showing about his fine, quiet face; "thank you for the sincerity and frankness of your account. but i think now there is nothing further i need ask you." he indulged in a long scrutiny of the author's haggard features drawing purposely the man's eyes to his own and then meeting them with a look of power and confidence calculated to inspire even the feeblest soul with courage. "and, to begin with," he added, smiling pleasantly, "let me assure you without delay that you need have no alarm, for you are no more insane or deluded than i myself am--" pender heaved a deep sigh and tried to return the smile. "--and this is simply a case, so far as i can judge at present, of a very singular psychical invasion, and a very sinister one, too, if you perhaps understand what i mean--" "it's an odd expression; you used it before, you know," said the author wearily, yet eagerly listening to every word of the diagnosis, and deeply touched by the intelligent sympathy which did not at once indicate the lunatic asylum. "possibly," returned the other, "and an odd affliction, too, you'll allow, yet one not unknown to the nations of antiquity, nor to those moderns, perhaps, who recognise the freedom of action under certain pathogenic conditions between this world and another." "and you think," asked pender hastily, "that it is all primarily due to the _cannabis_? there is nothing radically amiss with myself--nothing incurable, or--?" "due entirely to the overdose," dr. silence replied emphatically, "to the drug's direct action upon your psychical being. it rendered you ultra-sensitive and made you respond to an increased rate of vibration. and, let me tell you, mr. pender, that your experiment might have had results far more dire. it has brought you into touch with a somewhat singular class of invisible, but of one, i think, chiefly human in character. you might, however, just as easily have been drawn out of human range altogether, and the results of such a contingency would have been exceedingly terrible. indeed, you would not now be here to tell the tale. i need not alarm you on that score, but mention it as a warning you will not misunderstand or underrate after what you have been through. "you look puzzled. you do not quite gather what i am driving at; and it is not to be expected that you should, for you, i suppose, are the nominal christian with the nominal christian's lofty standard of ethics, and his utter ignorance of spiritual possibilities. beyond a somewhat childish understanding of 'spiritual wickedness in high places,' you probably have no conception of what is possible once you break-down the slender gulf that is mercifully fixed between you and that outer world. but my studies and training have taken me far outside these orthodox trips, and i have made experiments that i could scarcely speak to you about in language that would be intelligible to you." he paused a moment to note the breathless interest of pender's face and manner. every word he uttered was calculated; he knew exactly the value and effect of the emotions he desired to waken in the heart of the afflicted being before him. "and from certain knowledge i have gained through various experiences," he continued calmly, "i can diagnose your case as i said before to be one of psychical invasion." "and the nature of this--er--invasion?" stammered the bewildered writer of humorous tales. "there is no reason why i should not say at once that i do not yet quite know," replied dr. silence. "i may first have to make one or two experiments--" "on me?" gasped pender, catching his breath. "not exactly," the doctor said, with a grave smile, "but with your assistance, perhaps. i shall want to test the conditions of the house--to ascertain, impossible, the character of the forces, of this strange personality that has been haunting you--" "at present you have no idea exactly who--what--why--" asked the other in a wild flurry of interest, dread and amazement. "i have a very good idea, but no proof rather," returned the doctor. "the effects of the drug in altering the scale of time and space, and merging the senses have nothing primarily to do with the invasion. they come to any one who is fool enough to take an experimental dose. it is the other features of your case that are unusual. you see, you are now in touch with certain violent emotions, desires, purposes, still active in this house, that were produced in the past by some powerful and evil personality that lived here. how long ago, or why they still persist so forcibly, i cannot positively say. but i should judge that they are merely forces acting automatically with the momentum of their terrific original impetus." "not directed by a living being, a conscious will, you mean?" "possibly not--but none the less dangerous on that account, and more difficult to deal with. i cannot explain to you in a few minutes the nature of such things, for you have not made the studies that would enable you to follow me; but i have reason to believe that on the dissolution at death of a human being, its forces may still persist and continue to act in a blind, unconscious fashion. as a rule they speedily dissipate themselves, but in the case of a very powerful personality they may last a long time. and, in some cases--of which i incline to think this is one--these forces may coalesce with certain non-human entities who thus continue their life indefinitely and increase their strength to an unbelievable degree. if the original personality was evil, the beings attracted to the left-over forces will also be evil. in this case, i think there has been an unusual and dreadful aggrandisement of the thoughts and purposes left behind long ago by a woman of consummate wickedness and great personal power of character and intellect. now, do you begin to see what i am driving at a little?" pender stared fixedly at his companion, plain horror showing in his eyes. but he found nothing to say, and the doctor continued-- "in your case, predisposed by the action of the drug, you have experienced the rush of these forces in undiluted strength. they wholly obliterate in you the sense of humour, fancy, imagination,--all that makes for cheerfulness and hope. they seek, though perhaps automatically only, to oust your own thoughts and establish themselves in their place. you are the victim of a psychical invasion. at the same time, you have become clairvoyant in the true sense. you are also a clairvoyant victim." pender mopped his face and sighed. he left his chair and went over to the fireplace to warm himself. "you must think me a quack to talk like this, or a madman," laughed dr. silence. "but never mind that. i have come to help you, and i can help you if you will do what i tell you. it is very simple: you must leave this house at once. oh, never mind the difficulties; we will deal with those together. i can place another house at your disposal, or i would take the lease here off your hands, and later have it pulled down. your case interests me greatly, and i mean to see you through, so that you have no anxiety, and can drop back into your old groove of work tomorrow! the drug has provided you, and therefore me, with a shortcut to a very interesting experience. i am grateful to you." the author poked the fire vigorously, emotion rising in him like a tide. he glanced towards the door nervously. "there is no need to alarm your wife or to tell her the details of our conversation," pursued the other quietly. "let her know that you will soon be in possession again of your sense of humour and your health, and explain that i am lending you another house for six months. meanwhile i may have the right to use this house for a night or two for my experiment. is that understood between us?" "i can only thank you from the bottom of my heart," stammered pender, unable to find words to express his gratitude. then he hesitated for a moment, searching the doctor's face anxiously. "and your experiment with the house?" he said at length. "of the simplest character, my dear mr. pender. although i am myself an artificially trained psychic, and consequently aware of the presence of discarnate entities as a rule, i have so far felt nothing here at all. this makes me sure that the forces acting here are of an unusual description. what i propose to do is to make an experiment with a view of drawing out this evil, coaxing it from its lair, so to speak, in order that it may _exhaust itself through me_ and become dissipated for ever. i have already been inoculated," he added; "i consider myself to be immune." "heavens above!" gasped the author, collapsing on to a chair. "hell beneath! might be a more appropriate exclamation," the doctor laughed. "but, seriously, mr. pender, this is what i propose to do--with your permission." "of course, of course," cried the other, "you have my permission and my best wishes for success. i can see no possible objection, but--" "but what?" "i pray to heaven you will not undertake this experiment alone, will you?" "oh, dear, no; not alone." "you will take a companion with good nerves, and reliable in case of disaster, won't you?" "i shall bring two companions," the doctor said. "ah, that's better. i feel easier. i am sure you must have among your acquaintances men who--" "i shall not think of bringing men, mr. pender." the other looked up sharply. "no, or women either; or children." "i don't understand. who will you bring, then?" "animals," explained the doctor, unable to prevent a smile at his companion's expression of surprise--"two animals, a cat and a dog." pender stared as if his eyes would drop out upon the floor, and then led the way without another word into the adjoining room where his wife was awaiting them for tea. ii a few days later the humorist and his wife, with minds greatly relieved, moved into a small furnished house placed at their free disposal in another part of london; and john silence, intent upon his approaching experiment, made ready to spend a night in the empty house on the top of putney hill. only two rooms were prepared for occupation: the study on the ground floor and the bedroom immediately above it; all other doors were to be locked, and no servant was to be left in the house. the motor had orders to call for him at nine o'clock the following morning. and, meanwhile, his secretary had instructions to look up the past history and associations of the place, and learn everything he could concerning the character of former occupants, recent or remote. the animals, by whose sensitiveness he intended to test any unusual conditions in the atmosphere of the building, dr. silence selected with care and judgment. he believed (and had already made curious experiments to prove it) that animals were more often, and more truly, clairvoyant than human beings. many of them, he felt convinced, possessed powers of perception far superior to that mere keenness of the senses common to all dwellers in the wilds where the senses grow specially alert; they had what he termed "animal clairvoyance," and from his experiments with horses, dogs, cats, and even birds, he had drawn certain deductions, which, however, need not be referred to in detail here. cats, in particular, he believed, were almost continuously conscious of a larger field of vision, too detailed even for a photographic camera, and quite beyond the reach of normal human organs. he had, further, observed that while dogs were usually terrified in the presence of such phenomena, cats on the other hand were soothed and satisfied. they welcomed manifestations as something belonging peculiarly to their own region. he selected his animals, therefore, with wisdom so that they might afford a differing test, each in its own way, and that one should not merely communicate its own excitement to the other. he took a dog and a cat. the cat he chose, now full grown, had lived with him since kittenhood, a kittenhood of perplexing sweetness and audacious mischief. wayward it was and fanciful, ever playing its own mysterious games in the corners of the room, jumping at invisible nothings, leaping sideways into the air and falling with tiny moccasined feet on to another part of the carpet, yet with an air of dignified earnestness which showed that the performance was necessary to its own well-being, and not done merely to impress a stupid human audience. in the middle of elaborate washing it would look up, startled, as though to stare at the approach of some invisible, cocking its little head sideways and putting out a velvet pad to inspect cautiously. then it would get absent-minded, and stare with equal intentness in another direction (just to confuse the onlookers), and suddenly go on furiously washing its body again, but in quite a new place. except for a white patch on its breast it was coal black. and its name was--smoke. "smoke" described its temperament as well as its appearance. its movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at two points only--the glowing eyes. all its forces ran to intelligence--secret intelligence, the wordless incalculable intuition of the cat. it was, indeed, _the_ cat for the business in hand. the selection of the dog was not so simple, for the doctor owned many; but after much deliberation he chose a collie, called flame from his yellow coat. true, it was a trifle old, and stiff in the joints, and even beginning to grow deaf, but, on the other hand, it was a very particular friend of smoke's, and had fathered it from kittenhood upwards so that a subtle understanding existed between them. it was this that turned the balance in its favour, this and its courage. moreover, though good-tempered, it was a terrible fighter, and its anger when provoked by a righteous cause was a fury of fire, and irresistible. it had come to him quite young, straight from the shepherd, with the air of the hills yet in its nostrils, and was then little more than skin and bones and teeth. for a collie it was sturdily built, its nose blunter than most, its yellow hair stiff rather than silky, and it had full eyes, unlike the slit eyes of its breed. only its master could touch it, for it ignored strangers, and despised their pattings--when any dared to pat it. there was something patriarchal about the old beast. he was in earnest, and went through life with tremendous energy and big things in view, as though he had the reputation of his whole race to uphold. and to watch him fighting against odds was to understand why he was terrible. in his relations with smoke he was always absurdly gentle; also he was fatherly; and at the same time betrayed a certain diffidence or shyness. he recognised that smoke called for strong yet respectful management. the cat's circuitous methods puzzled him, and his elaborate pretences perhaps shocked the dog's liking for direct, undisguised action. yet, while he failed to comprehend these tortuous feline mysteries, he was never contemptuous or condescending; and he presided over the safety of his furry black friend somewhat as a father, loving, but intuitive, might superintend the vagaries of a wayward and talented child. and, in return, smoke rewarded him with exhibitions of fascinating and audacious mischief. and these brief descriptions of their characters are necessary for the proper understanding of what subsequently took place. with smoke sleeping in the folds of his fur coat, and the collie lying watchful on the seat opposite, john silence went down in his motor after dinner on the night of november th. and the fog was so dense that they were obliged to travel at quarter speed the entire way. * * * * * it was after ten o'clock when he dismissed the motor and entered the dingy little house with the latchkey provided by pender. he found the hall gas turned low, and a fire in the study. books and food had also been placed ready by the servant according to instructions. coils of fog rushed in after him through the open door and filled the hall and passage with its cold discomfort. the first thing dr. silence did was to lock up smoke in the study with a saucer of milk before the fire, and then make a search of the house with flame. the dog ran cheerfully behind him all the way while he tried the doors of the other rooms to make sure they were locked. he nosed about into corners and made little excursions on his own account. his manner was expectant. he knew there must be something unusual about the proceeding, because it was contrary to the habits of his whole life not to be asleep at this hour on the mat in front of the fire. he kept looking up into his master's face, as door after door was tried, with an expression of intelligent sympathy, but at the same time a certain air of disapproval. yet everything his master did was good in his eyes, and he betrayed as little impatience as possible with all this unnecessary journeying to and fro. if the doctor was pleased to play this sort of game at such an hour of the night, it was surely not for him to object. so he played it, too; and was very busy and earnest about it into the bargain. after an uneventful search they came down again to the study, and here dr. silence discovered smoke washing his face calmly in front of the fire. the saucer of milk was licked dry and clean; the preliminary examination that cats always make in new surroundings had evidently been satisfactorily concluded. he drew an arm-chair up to the fire, stirred the coals into a blaze, arranged the table and lamp to his satisfaction for reading, and then prepared surreptitiously to watch the animals. he wished to observe them carefully without their being aware of it. now, in spite of their respective ages, it was the regular custom of these two to play together every night before sleep. smoke always made the advances, beginning with grave impudence to pat the dog's tail, and flame played cumbrously, with condescension. it was his duty, rather than pleasure; he was glad when it was over, and sometimes he was very determined and refused to play at all. and this night was one of the occasions on which he was firm. the doctor, looking cautiously over the top of his book, watched the cat begin the performance. it started by gazing with an innocent expression at the dog where he lay with nose on paws and eyes wide open in the middle of the floor. then it got up and made as though it meant to walk to the door, going deliberately and very softly. flame's eyes followed it until it was beyond the range of sight, and then the cat turned sharply and began patting his tail tentatively with one paw. the tail moved slightly in reply, and smoke changed paws and tapped it again. the dog, however, did not rise to play as was his wont, and the cat fell to parting it briskly with both paws. flame still lay motionless. this puzzled and bored the cat, and it went round and stared hard into its friend's face to see what was the matter. perhaps some inarticulate message flashed from the dog's eyes into its own little brain, making it understand that the programme for the night had better not begin with play. perhaps it only realised that its friend was immovable. but, whatever the reason, its usual persistence thenceforward deserted it, and it made no further attempts at persuasion. smoke yielded at once to the dog's mood; it sat down where it was and began to wash. but the washing, the doctor noted, was by no means its real purpose; it only used it to mask something else; it stopped at the most busy and furious moments and began to stare about the room. its thoughts wandered absurdly. it peered intently at the curtains; at the shadowy corners; at empty space above; leaving its body in curiously awkward positions for whole minutes together. then it turned sharply and stared with a sudden signal of intelligence at the dog, and flame at once rose somewhat stiffly to his feet and began to wander aimlessly and restlessly to and fro about the floor. smoke followed him, padding quietly at his heels. between them they made what seemed to be a deliberate search of the room. and, here, as he watched them, noting carefully every detail of the performance over the top of his book, yet making no effort to interfere, it seemed to the doctor that the first beginnings of a faint distress betrayed themselves in the collie, and in the cat the stirrings of a vague excitement. he observed them closely. the fog was thick in the air, and the tobacco smoke from his pipe added to its density; the furniture at the far end stood mistily, and where the shadows congregated in hanging clouds under the ceiling, it was difficult to see clearly at all; the lamplight only reached to a level of five feet from the floor, above which came layers of comparative darkness, so that the room appeared twice as lofty as it actually was. by means of the lamp and the fire, however, the carpet was everywhere clearly visible. the animals made their silent tour of the floor, sometimes the dog leading, sometimes the cat; occasionally they looked at one another as though exchanging signals; and once or twice, in spite of the limited space, he lost sight of one or other among the fog and the shadows. their curiosity, it appeared to him, was something more than the excitement lurking in the unknown territory of a strange room; yet, so far, it was impossible to test this, and he purposely kept his mind quietly receptive lest the smallest mental excitement on his part should communicate itself to the animals and thus destroy the value of their independent behaviour. they made a very thorough journey, leaving no piece of furniture unexamined, or unsmelt. flame led the way, walking slowly with lowered head, and smoke followed demurely at his heels, making a transparent pretence of not being interested, yet missing nothing. and, at length, they returned, the old collie first, and came to rest on the mat before the fire. flame rested his muzzle on his master's knee, smiling beatifically while he patted the yellow head and spoke his name; and smoke, coming a little later, pretending he came by chance, looked from the empty saucer to his face, lapped up the milk when it was given him to the last drop, and then sprang upon his knees and curled round for the sleep it had fully earned and intended to enjoy. silence descended upon the room. only the breathing of the dog upon the mat came through the deep stillness, like the pulse of time marking the minutes; and the steady drip, drip of the fog outside upon the window-ledges dismally testified to the inclemency of the night beyond. and the soft crashings of the coals as the fire settled down into the grate became less and less audible as the fire sank and the flames resigned their fierceness. it was now well after eleven o'clock, and dr. silence devoted himself again to his book. he read the words on the printed page and took in their meaning superficially, yet without starting into life the correlations of thought and suggestions that should accompany interesting reading. underneath, all the while, his mental energies were absorbed in watching, listening, waiting for what might come. he was not over-sanguine himself, yet he did not wish to be taken by surprise. moreover, the animals, his sensitive barometers, had incontinently gone to sleep. after reading a dozen pages, however, he realised that his mind was really occupied in reviewing the features of pender's extraordinary story, and that it was no longer necessary to steady his imagination by studying the dull paragraphs detailed in the pages before him. he laid down his book accordingly, and allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the features of the case. speculations as to the meaning, however, he rigorously suppressed, knowing that such thoughts would act upon his imagination like wind upon the glowing embers of a fire. as the night wore on the silence grew deeper and deeper, and only at rare intervals he heard the sound of wheels on the main road a hundred yards away, where the horses went at a walking pace owing to the density of the fog. the echo of pedestrian footsteps no longer reached him, the clamour of occasional voices no longer came down the side street. the night, muffled by fog, shrouded by veils of ultimate mystery, hung about the haunted villa like a doom. nothing in the house stirred. stillness, in a thick blanket, lay over the upper storeys. only the mist in the room grew more dense, he thought, and the damp cold more penetrating. certainly, from time to time, he shivered. the collie, now deep in slumber, moved occasionally,--grunted, sighed, or twitched his legs in dreams. smoke lay on his knees, a pool of warm, black fur, only the closest observation detecting the movement of his sleek sides. it was difficult to distinguish exactly where his head and body joined in that circle of glistening hair; only a black satin nose and a tiny tip of pink tongue betrayed the secret. dr. silence watched him, and felt comfortable. the collie's breathing was soothing. the fire was well built, and would burn for another two hours without attention. he was not conscious of the least nervousness. he particularly wished to remain in his ordinary and normal state of mind, and to force nothing. if sleep came naturally, he would let it come--and even welcome it. the coldness of the room, when the fire died down later, would be sure to wake him again; and it would then be time enough to carry these sleeping barometers up to bed. from various psychic premonitions he knew quite well that the night would not pass without adventure; but he did not wish to force its arrival; and he wished to remain normal, and let the animals remain normal, so that, when it came, it would be unattended by excitement or by any straining of the attention. many experiments had made him wise. and, for the rest, he had no fear. accordingly, after a time, he did fall asleep as he had expected, and the last thing he remembered, before oblivion slipped up over his eyes like soft wool, was the picture of flame stretching all four legs at once, and sighing noisily as he sought a more comfortable position for his paws and muzzle upon the mat. * * * * * it was a good deal later when he became aware that a weight lay upon his chest, and that something was pencilling over his face and mouth. a soft touch on the cheek woke him. something was patting him. he sat up with a jerk, and found himself staring straight into a pair of brilliant eyes, half green, half black. smoke's face lay level with his own; and the cat had climbed up with its front paws upon his chest. the lamp had burned low and the fire was nearly out, yet dr. silence saw in a moment that the cat was in an excited state. it kneaded with its front paws into his chest, shifting from one to the other. he felt them prodding against him. it lifted a leg very carefully and patted his cheek gingerly. its fur, he saw, was standing ridgewise upon its back; the ears were flattened back somewhat; the tail was switching sharply. the cat, of course, had wakened him with a purpose, and the instant he realised this, he set it upon the arm of the chair and sprang up with a quick turn to face the empty room behind him. by some curious instinct, his arms of their own accord assumed an attitude of defence in front of him, as though to ward off something that threatened his safety. yet nothing was visible. only shapes of fog hung about rather heavily in the air, moving slightly to and fro. his mind was now fully alert, and the last vestiges of sleep gone. he turned the lamp higher and peered about him. two things he became aware of at once: one, that smoke, while excited, was _pleasurably_ excited; the other, that the collie was no longer visible upon the mat at his feet. he had crept away to the corner of the wall farthest from the window, and lay watching the room with wide-open eyes, in which lurked plainly something of alarm. something in the dog's behaviour instantly struck dr. silence as unusual, and, calling him by name, he moved across to pat him. flame got up, wagged his tail, and came over slowly to the rug, uttering a low sound that was half growl, half whine. he was evidently perturbed about something, and his master was proceeding to administer comfort when his attention was suddenly drawn to the antics of his other four-footed companion, the cat. and what he saw filled him with something like amazement. smoke had jumped down from the back of the arm-chair and now occupied the middle of the carpet, where, with tail erect and legs stiff as ramrods, it was steadily pacing backwards and forwards in a narrow space, uttering, as it did so, those curious little guttural sounds of pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make expressive of supreme happiness. its stiffened legs and arched back made it appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of beatific joy. its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in an ecstasy. at the end of every few paces it turned sharply and stalked back again along the same line, padding softly, and purring like a roll of little muffled drums. it behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against the ankles of some one who remained invisible. a thrill ran down the doctor's spine as he stood and stared. his experiment was growing interesting at last. he called the collie's attention to his friend's performance to see whether he too was aware of anything standing there upon the carpet, and the dog's behaviour was significant and corroborative. he came as far as his master's knees and then stopped dead, refusing to investigate closely. in vain dr. silence urged him; he wagged his tail, whined a little, and stood in a half-crouching attitude, staring alternately at the cat and at his master's face. he was, apparently, both puzzled and alarmed, and the whine went deeper and deeper down into his throat till it changed into an ugly snarl of awakening anger. then the doctor called to him in a tone of command he had never known to be disregarded; but still the dog, though springing up in response, declined to move nearer. he made tentative motions, pranced a little like a dog about to take to water, pretended to bark, and ran to and fro on the carpet. so far there was no actual fear in his manner, but he was uneasy and anxious, and nothing would induce him to go within touching distance of the walking cat. once he made a complete circuit, but always carefully out of reach; and in the end he returned to his master's legs and rubbed vigorously against him. flame did not like the performance at all: that much was quite clear. for several minutes john silence watched the performance of the cat with profound attention and without interfering. then he called to the animal by name. "smoke, you mysterious beastie, what in the world are you about?" he said, in a coaxing tone. the cat looked up at him for a moment, smiling in its ecstasy, blinking its eyes, but too happy to pause. he spoke to it again. he called to it several times, and each time it turned upon him its blazing eyes, drunk with inner delight, opening and shutting its lips, its body large and rigid with excitement. yet it never for one instant paused in its short journeys to and fro. he noted exactly what it did: it walked, he saw, the same number of paces each time, some six or seven steps, and then it turned sharply and retraced them. by the pattern of the great roses in the carpet he measured it. it kept to the same direction and the same line. it behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against something solid. undoubtedly, there was something standing there on that strip of carpet, something invisible to the doctor, something that alarmed the dog, yet caused the cat unspeakable pleasure. "smokie!" he called again, "smokie, you black mystery, what is it excites you so?" again the cat looked up at him for a brief second, and then continued its sentry-walk, blissfully happy, intensely preoccupied. and, for an instant, as he watched it, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness stirred in the depths of his own being, focusing itself for the moment upon this curious behaviour of the uncanny creature before him. there rose in him quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it, the domestic cat--their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their incalculable subtlety. how utterly remote from anything that human beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. as he watched the indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers of darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome visitor, there stirred in his heart a feeling strangely akin to awe. its indifference to human kind, its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him forcibly with fresh meaning; so remote, so inaccessible seemed the secret purposes of its real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals. its absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater's words that "no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the mysterious"; and he became suddenly aware that the presence of the dog in this foggy, haunted room on the top of putney hill was uncommonly welcome to him. he was glad to feel that flame's dependable personality was with him. the savage growling at his heels was a pleasant sound. he was glad to hear it. that marching cat made him uneasy. finding that smoke paid no further attention to his words, the doctor decided upon action. would it rub against his leg, too? he would take it by surprise and see. he stepped quickly forward and placed himself upon the exact strip of carpet where it walked. but no cat is ever taken by surprise! the moment he occupied the space of the intruder, setting his feet on the woven roses midway in the line of travel, smoke suddenly stopped purring and sat down. if lifted up its face with the most innocent stare imaginable of its green eyes. he could have sworn it laughed. it was a perfect child again. in a single second it had resumed its simple, domestic manner; and it gazed at him in such a way that he almost felt smoke was the normal being, and _his_ was the eccentric behaviour that was being watched. it was consummate, the manner in which it brought about this change so easily and so quickly. "superb little actor!" he laughed in spite of himself, and stooped to stroke the shining black back. but, in a flash, as he touched its fur, the cat turned and spat at him viciously, striking at his hand with one paw. then, with a hurried scutter of feet, it shot like a shadow across the floor and a moment later was calmly sitting over by the window-curtains washing its face as though nothing interested it in the whole world but the cleanness of its cheeks and whiskers. john silence straightened himself up and drew a long breath. he realised that the performance was temporarily at an end. the collie, meanwhile, who had watched the whole proceeding with marked disapproval, had now lain down again upon the mat by the fire, no longer growling. it seemed to the doctor just as though something that had entered the room while he slept, alarming the dog, yet bringing happiness to the cat, had now gone out again, leaving all as it was before. whatever it was that excited its blissful attentions had retreated for the moment. he realised this intuitively. smoke evidently realised it, too, for presently he deigned to march back to the fireplace and jump upon his master's knees. dr. silence, patient and determined, settled down once more to his book. the animals soon slept; the fire blazed cheerfully; and the cold fog from outside poured into the room through every available chink and crannie. for a long time silence and peace reigned in the room and dr. silence availed himself of the quietness to make careful notes of what had happened. he entered for future use in other cases an exhaustive analysis of what he had observed, especially with regard to the effect upon the two animals. it is impossible here, nor would it be intelligible to the reader unversed in the knowledge of the region known to a scientifically trained psychic like dr. silence, to detail these observations. but to him it was clear, up to a certain point--for the rest he must still wait and watch. so far, at least, he realised that while he slept in the chair--that is, while his will was dormant--the room had suffered intrusion from what he recognised as an intensely active force, and might later be forced to acknowledge as something more than merely a blind force, namely, a distinct personality. so far it had affected himself scarcely at all, but had acted directly upon the simpler organisms of the animals. it stimulated keenly the centres of the cat's psychic being, inducing a state of instant happiness (intensifying its consciousness probably in the same way a drug or stimulant intensifies that of a human being); whereas it alarmed the less sensitive dog, causing it to feel a vague apprehension and distress. his own sudden action and exhibition of energy had served to disperse it temporarily, yet he felt convinced--the indications were not lacking even while he sat there making notes--that it still remained near to him, conditionally if not spatially, and was, as it were, gathering force for a second attack. and, further, he intuitively understood that the relations between the two animals had undergone a subtle change: that the cat had become immeasurably superior, confident, sure of itself in its own peculiar region, whereas flame had been weakened by an attack he could not comprehend and knew not how to reply to. though not yet afraid, he was defiant--ready to act against a fear that he felt to be approaching. he was no longer fatherly and protective towards the cat. smoke held the key to the situation; and both he and the cat knew it. thus, as the minutes passed, john silence sat and waited, keenly on the alert, wondering how soon the attack would be renewed, and at what point it would be diverted from the animals and directed upon himself. the book lay on the floor beside him, his notes were complete. with one hand on the cat's fur, and the dog's front paws resting against his feet, the three of them dozed comfortably before the hot fire while the night wore on and the silence deepened towards midnight. it was well after one o'clock in the morning when dr. silence turned the lamp out and lighted the candle preparatory to going up to bed. then smoke suddenly woke with a loud sharp purr and sat up. it neither stretched, washed nor turned: it listened. and the doctor, watching it, realised that a certain indefinable change had come about that very moment in the room. a swift readjustment of the forces within the four walls had taken place--a new disposition of their personal equations. the balance was destroyed, the former harmony gone. smoke, most sensitive of barometers, had been the first to feel it, but the dog was not slow to follow suit, for on looking down he noted that flame was no longer asleep. he was lying with eyes wide open, and that same instant he sat up on his great haunches and began to growl. dr. silence was in the act of taking the matches to re-light the lamp when an audible movement in the room behind him made him pause. smoke leaped down from his knee and moved forward a few paces across the carpet. then it stopped and stared fixedly; and the doctor stood up on the rug to watch. as he rose the sound was repeated, and he discovered that it was not in the room as he first thought, but outside, and that it came from more directions than one. there was a rushing, sweeping noise against the window-panes, and simultaneously a sound of something brushing against the door--out in the hall. smoke advanced sedately across the carpet, twitching his tail, and sat down within a foot of the door. the influence that had destroyed the harmonious conditions of the room had apparently moved in advance of its cause. clearly, something was about to happen. for the first time that night john silence hesitated; the thought of that dark narrow hall-way, choked with fog, and destitute of human comfort, was unpleasant. he became aware of a faint creeping of his flesh. he knew, of course, that the actual opening of the door was not necessary to the invasion of the room that was about to take place, since neither doors nor windows, nor any other solid barriers could interpose an obstacle to what was seeking entrance. yet the opening of the door would be significant and symbolic, and he distinctly shrank from it. but for a moment only. smoke, turning with a show of impatience, recalled him to his purpose, and he moved past the sitting, watching creature, and deliberately opened the door to its full width. what subsequently happened, happened in the feeble and flickering light of the solitary candle on the mantlepiece. through the opened door he saw the hall, dimly lit and thick with fog. nothing, of course, was visible--nothing but the hat-stand, the african spears in dark lines upon the wall and the high-backed wooden chair standing grotesquely underneath on the oilcloth floor. for one instant the fog seemed to move and thicken oddly; but he set that down to the score of the imagination. the door had opened upon nothing. yet smoke apparently thought otherwise, and the deep growling of the collie from the mat at the back of the room seemed to confirm his judgment. for, proud and self-possessed, the cat had again risen to his feet, and having advanced to the door, was now ushering some one slowly into the room. nothing could have been more evident. he paced from side to side, bowing his little head with great _empressement_ and holding his stiffened tail aloft like a flag-staff. he turned this way and that, mincing to and fro, and showing signs of supreme satisfaction. he was in his element. he welcomed the intrusion, and apparently reckoned that his companions, the doctor and the dog, would welcome it likewise. the intruder had returned for a second attack. dr. silence moved slowly backwards and took up his position on the hearthrug, keying himself up to a condition of concentrated attention. he noted that flame stood beside him, facing the room, with body motionless, and head moving swiftly from side to side with a curious swaying movement. his eyes were wide open, his back rigid, his neck and jaws thrust forward, his legs tense and ready to leap. savage, ready for attack or defence, yet dreadfully puzzled and perhaps already a little cowed, he stood and stared, the hair on his spine and sides positively bristling outwards as though a wind played through it. in the dim firelight he looked like a great yellow-haired wolf, silent, eyes shooting dark fire, exceedingly formidable. it was flame, the terrible. smoke, meanwhile, advanced from the door towards the middle of the room, adopting the very slow pace of an invisible companion. a few feet away it stopped and began to smile and blink its eyes. there was something deliberately coaxing in its attitude as it stood there undecided on the carpet, clearly wishing to effect some sort of introduction between the intruder and its canine friend and ally. it assumed its most winning manners, purring, smiling, looking persuasively from one to the other, and making quick tentative steps first in one direction and then in the other. there had always existed such perfect understanding between them in everything. surely flame would appreciate smoke's intention now, and acquiesce. but the old collie made no advances. he bared his teeth, lifting his lips till the gums showed, and stood stockstill with fixed eyes and heaving sides. the doctor moved a little farther back, watching intently the smallest movement, and it was just then he divined suddenly from the cat's behaviour and attitude that it was not only a single companion it had ushered into the room, but _several_. it kept crossing over from one to the other, looking up at each in turn. it sought to win over the dog to friendliness with them all. the original intruder had come back with reinforcements. and at the same time he further realised that the intruder was something more than a blindly acting force, impersonal though destructive. it was a personality, and moreover a great personality. and it was accompanied for the purposes of assistance by a host of other personalities, minor in degree, but similar in kind. he braced himself in the corner against the mantelpiece and waited, his whole being roused to defence, for he was now fully aware that the attack had spread to include himself as well as the animals, and he must be on the alert. he strained his eyes through the foggy atmosphere, trying in vain to see what the cat and dog saw; but the candlelight threw an uncertain and flickering light across the room and his eyes discerned nothing. on the floor smoke moved softly in front of him like a black shadow, his eyes gleaming as he turned his head, still trying with many insinuating gestures and much purring to bring about the introductions he desired. but it was all in vain. flame stood riveted to one spot, motionless as a figure carved in stone. some minutes passed, during which only the cat moved, and then there came a sharp change. flame began to back towards the wall. he moved his head from side to side as he went, sometimes turning to snap at something almost behind him. they were advancing upon him, trying to surround him. his distress became very marked from now onwards, and it seemed to the doctor that his anger merged into genuine terror and became overwhelmed by it. the savage growl sounded perilously like a whine, and more than once he tried to dive past his master's legs, as though hunting for a way of escape. he was trying to avoid something that everywhere blocked the way. this terror of the indomitable fighter impressed the doctor enormously; yet also painfully; stirring his impatience; for he had never before seen the dog show signs of giving in, and it distressed him to witness it. he knew, however, that he was not giving in easily, and understood that it was really impossible for him to gauge the animal's sensations properly at all. what flame felt, and saw, must be terrible indeed to turn him all at once into a coward. he faced something that made him afraid of more than his life merely. the doctor spoke a few quick words of encouragement to him, and stroked the bristling hair. but without much success. the collie seemed already beyond the reach of comfort such as that, and the collapse of the old dog followed indeed very speedily after this. and smoke, meanwhile, remained behind, watching the advance, but not joining in it; sitting, pleased and expectant, considering that all was going well and as it wished. it was kneading on the carpet with its front paws--slowly, laboriously, as though its feet were dipped in treacle. the sound its claws made as they caught in the threads was distinctly audible. it was still smiling, blinking, purring. suddenly the collie uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to one side. his bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom. the next instant he dashed past his master's legs, almost upsetting his balance, and shot out into the room, where he went blundering wildly against walls and furniture. but that bark was significant; the doctor had heard it before and knew what it meant: for it was the cry of the fighter against odds and it meant that the old beast had found his courage again. possibly it was only the courage of despair, but at any rate the fighting would be terrific. and dr. silence understood, too, that he dared not interfere. flame must fight his own enemies in his own way. but the cat, too, had heard that dreadful bark; and it, too, had understood. this was more than it had bargained for. across the dim shadows of that haunted room there must have passed some secret signal of distress between the animals. smoke stood up and looked swiftly about him. he uttered a piteous meow and trotted smartly away into the greater darkness by the windows. what his object was only those endowed with the spirit-like intelligence of cats might know. but, at any rate, he had at last ranged himself on the side of his friend. and the little beast meant business. at the same moment the collie managed to gain the door. the doctor saw him rush through into the hall like a flash of yellow light. he shot across the oilcloth, and tore up the stairs, but in another second he appeared again, flying down the steps and landing at the bottom in a tumbling heap, whining, cringing, terrified. the doctor saw him slink back into the room again and crawl round by the wall towards the cat. was, then, even the staircase occupied? did _they_ stand also in the hall? was the whole house crowded from floor to ceiling? the thought came to add to the keen distress he felt at the sight of the collie's discomfiture. and, indeed, his own personal distress had increased in a marked degree during the past minutes, and continued to increase steadily to the climax. he recognised that the drain on his own vitality grew steadily, and that the attack was now directed against himself even more than against the defeated dog, and the too much deceived cat. it all seemed so rapid and uncalculated after that--the events that took place in this little modern room at the top of putney hill between midnight and sunrise--that dr. silence was hardly able to follow and remember it all. it came about with such uncanny swiftness and terror; the light was so uncertain; the movements of the black cat so difficult to follow on the dark carpet, and the doctor himself so weary and taken by surprise--that he found it almost impossible to observe accurately, or to recall afterwards precisely what it was he had seen or in what order the incidents had taken place. he never could understand what defect of vision on his part made it seem as though the cat had duplicated itself at first, and then increased indefinitely, so that there were at least a dozen of them darting silently about the floor, leaping softly on to chairs and tables, passing like shadows from the open door to the end of the room, all black as sin, with brilliant green eyes flashing fire in all directions. it was like the reflections from a score of mirrors placed round the walls at different angles. nor could he make out at the time why the size of the room seemed to have altered, grown much larger, and why it extended away behind him where ordinarily the wall should have been. the snarling of the enraged and terrified collie sounded sometimes so far away; the ceiling seemed to have raised itself so much higher than before, and much of the furniture had changed in appearance and shifted marvellously. it was all so confused and confusing, as though the little room he knew had become merged and transformed into the dimensions of quite another chamber, that came to him, with its host of cats and its strange distances, in a sort of vision. but these changes came about a little later, and at a time when his attention was so concentrated upon the proceedings of smoke and the collie, that he only observed them, as it were, subconsciously. and the excitement, the flickering candlelight, the distress he felt for the collie, and the distorting atmosphere of fog were the poorest possible allies to careful observation. at first he was only aware that the dog was repeating his short dangerous bark from time to time, snapping viciously at the empty air, a foot or so from the ground. once, indeed, he sprang upwards and forwards, working furiously with teeth and paws, and with a noise like wolves fighting, but only to dash back the next minute against the wall behind him. then, after lying still for a bit, he rose to a crouching position as though to spring again, snarling horribly and making short half-circles with lowered head. and smoke all the while meowed piteously by the window as though trying to draw the attack upon himself. then it was that the rush of the whole dreadful business seemed to turn aside from the dog and direct itself upon his own person. the collie had made another spring and fallen back with a crash into the corner, where he made noise enough in his savage rage to waken the dead before he fell to whining and then finally lay still. and directly afterwards the doctor's own distress became intolerably acute. he had made a half movement forward to come to the rescue when a veil that was denser than mere fog seemed to drop down over the scene, draping room, walls, animals and fire in a mist of darkness and folding also about his own mind. other forms moved silently across the field of vision, forms that he recognised from previous experiments, and welcomed not. unholy thoughts began to crowd into his brain, sinister suggestions of evil presented themselves seductively. ice seemed to settle about his heart, and his mind trembled. he began to lose memory--memory of his identity, of where he was, of what he ought to do. the very foundations of his strength were shaken. his will seemed paralysed. and it was then that the room filled with this horde of cats, all dark as the night, all silent, all with lamping eyes of green fire. the dimensions of the place altered and shifted. he was in a much larger space. the whining of the dog sounded far away, and all about him the cats flew busily to and fro, silently playing their tearing, rushing game of evil, weaving the pattern of their dark purpose upon the floor. he strove hard to collect himself and remember the words of power he had made use of before in similar dread positions where his dangerous practice had sometimes led; but he could recall nothing consecutively; a mist lay over his mind and memory; he felt dazed and his forces scattered. the deeps within were too troubled for healing power to come out of them. it was glamour, of course, he realised afterwards, the strong glamour thrown upon his imagination by some powerful personality behind the veil; but at the time he was not sufficiently aware of this and, as with all true glamour, was unable to grasp where the true ended and the false began. he was caught momentarily in the same vortex that had sought to lure the cat to destruction through its delight, and threatened utterly to overwhelm the dog through its terror. there came a sound in the chimney behind him like wind booming and tearing its way down. the windows rattled. the candle flickered and went out. the glacial atmosphere closed round him with the cold of death, and a great rushing sound swept by overhead as though the ceiling had lifted to a great height. he heard the door shut. far away it sounded. he felt lost, shelterless in the depths of his soul. yet still he held out and resisted while the climax of the fight came nearer and nearer.... he had stepped into the stream of forces awakened by pender and he knew that he must withstand them to the end or come to a conclusion that it was not good for a man to come to. something from the region of utter cold was upon him. and then quite suddenly, through the confused mists about him, there slowly rose up the personality that had been all the time directing the battle. some force entered his being that shook him as the tempest shakes a leaf, and close against his eyes--clean level with his face--he found himself staring into the wreck of a vast dark countenance, a countenance that was terrible even in its ruin. for ruined it was, and terrible it was, and the mark of spiritual evil was branded everywhere upon its broken features. eyes, face and hair rose level with his own, and for a space of time he never could properly measure, or determine, these two, a man and a woman, looked straight into each other's visages and down into each other's hearts. and john silence, the soul with the good, unselfish motive, held his own against the dark discarnate woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose soul was on the side of the dark powers. it was the climax that touched the depth of power within him and began to restore him slowly to his own. he was conscious, of course, of effort, and yet it seemed no superhuman one, for he had recognised the character of his opponent's power, and he called upon the good within him to meet and overcome it. the inner forces stirred and trembled in response to his call. they did not at first come readily as was their habit, for under the spell of glamour they had already been diabolically lulled into inactivity, but come they eventually did, rising out of the inner spiritual nature he had learned with so much time and pain to awaken to life. and power and confidence came with them. he began to breathe deeply and regularly, and at the same time to absorb into himself the forces opposed to him, and to _turn them to his own account_. by ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour into him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus enormously increased his own. for this spiritual alchemy he had learned. he understood that force ultimately is everywhere one and the same; it is the motive behind that makes it good or evil; and his motive was entirely unselfish. he knew--provided he was not first robbed of self-control--how vicariously to absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good purposes. and, since his motive was pure and his soul fearless, they could not work him harm. thus he stood in the main stream of evil unwittingly attracted by pender, deflecting its course upon himself; and after passing through the purifying filter of his own unselfishness these energies could only add to his store of experience, of knowledge, and therefore of power. and, as his self-control returned to him, he gradually accomplished this purpose, even though trembling while he did so. yet the struggle was severe, and in spite of the freezing chill of the air, the perspiration poured down his face. then, by slow degrees, the dark and dreadful countenance faded, the glamour passed from his soul, the normal proportions returned to walls and ceiling, the forms melted back into the fog, and the whirl of rushing shadow-cats disappeared whence they came. and with the return of the consciousness of his own identity john silence was restored to the full control of his own will-power. in a deep, modulated voice he began to utter certain rhythmical sounds that slowly rolled through the air like a rising sea, filling the room with powerful vibratory activities that whelmed all irregularities of lesser vibrations in its own swelling tone. he made certain sigils, gestures and movements at the same time. for several minutes he continued to utter these words, until at length the growing volume dominated the whole room and mastered the manifestation of all that opposed it. for just as he understood the spiritual alchemy that can transmute evil forces by raising them into higher channels, so he knew from long study the occult use of sound, and its direct effect upon the plastic region wherein the powers of spiritual evil work their fell purposes. harmony was restored first of all to his own soul, and thence to the room and all its occupants. and, after himself, the first to recognise it was the old dog lying in his corner. flame began suddenly uttering sounds of pleasure, that "something" between a growl and a grunt that dogs make upon being restored to their master's confidence. dr. silence heard the thumping of the collie's tail against the floor. and the grunt and the thumping touched the depth of affection in the man's heart, and gave him some inkling of what agonies the dumb creature had suffered. next, from the shadows by the window, a somewhat shrill purring announced the restoration of the cat to its normal state. smoke was advancing across the carpet. he seemed very pleased with himself, and smiled with an expression of supreme innocence. he was no shadow-cat, but real and full of his usual and perfect self-possession. he marched along, picking his way delicately, but with a stately dignity that suggested his ancestry with the majesty of egypt. his eyes no longer glared; they shone steadily before him, they radiated, not excitement, but knowledge. clearly he was anxious to make amends for the mischief to which he had unwittingly lent himself owing to his subtle and electric constitution. still uttering his sharp high purrings he marched up to his master and rubbed vigorously against his legs. then he stood on his hind feet and pawed his knees and stared beseechingly up into his face. he turned his head towards the corner where the collie still lay, thumping his tail feebly and pathetically. john silence understood. he bent down and stroked the creature's living fur, noting the line of bright blue sparks that followed the motion of his hand down its back. and then they advanced together towards the corner where the dog was. smoke went first and put his nose gently against his friend's muzzle, purring while he rubbed, and uttering little soft sounds of affection in his throat. the doctor lit the candle and brought it over. he saw the collie lying on its side against the wall; it was utterly exhausted, and foam still hung about its jaws. its tail and eyes responded to the sound of its name, but it was evidently very weak and overcome. smoke continued to rub against its cheek and nose and eyes, sometimes even standing on its body and kneading into the thick yellow hair. flame replied from time to time by little licks of the tongue, most of them curiously misdirected. but dr. silence felt intuitively that something disastrous had happened, and his heart was wrung. he stroked the dear body, feeling it over for bruises or broken bones, but finding none. he fed it with what remained of the sandwiches and milk, but the creature clumsily upset the saucer and lost the sandwiches between its paws, so that the doctor had to feed it with his own hand. and all the while smoke meowed piteously. then john silence began to understand. he went across to the farther side of the room and called aloud to it. "flame, old man! come!" at any other time the dog would have been upon him in an instant, barking and leaping to the shoulder. and even now he got up, though heavily and awkwardly, to his feet. he started to run, wagging his tail more briskly. he collided first with a chair, and then ran straight into a table. smoke trotted close at his side, trying his very best to guide him. but it was useless. dr. silence had to lift him up into his own arms and carry him like a baby. for he was blind. iii it was a week later when john silence called to see the author in his new house, and found him well on the way to recovery and already busy again with his writing. the haunted look had left his eyes, and he seemed cheerful and confident. "humour restored?" laughed the doctor, as soon as they were comfortably settled in the room overlooking the park. "i've had no trouble since i left that dreadful place," returned pender gratefully; "and thanks to you--" the doctor stopped him with a gesture. "never mind that," he said, "we'll discuss your new plans afterwards, and my scheme for relieving you of the house and helping you settle elsewhere. of course it must be pulled down, for it's not fit for any sensitive person to live in, and any other tenant might be afflicted in the same way you were. although, personally, i think the evil has exhausted itself by now." he told the astonished author something of his experiences in it with the animals. "i don't pretend to understand," pender said, when the account was finished, "but i and my wife are intensely relieved to be free of it all. only i must say i should like to know something of the former history of the house. when we took it six months ago i heard no word against it." dr. silence drew a typewritten paper from his pocket. "i can satisfy your curiosity to some extent," he said, running his eye over the sheets, and then replacing them in his coat; "for by my secretary's investigations i have been able to check certain information obtained in the hypnotic trance by a 'sensitive' who helps me in such cases. the former occupant who haunted you appears to have been a woman of singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of england and only came to light by the merest chance. she came to her end in the year , for it was not this particular house she lived in, but a much larger one that then stood upon the site it now occupies, and was then, of course, not in london, but in the country. she was a person of intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will, and of consummate audacity, and i am convinced availed herself of the resources of the lower magic to attain her ends. this goes far to explain the virulence of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still able to carry on after death the evil practices that formed her main purpose during life." "you think that after death a soul can still consciously direct--" gasped the author. "i think, as i told you before, that the forces of a powerful personality may still persist after death in the line of their original momentum," replied the doctor; "and that strong thoughts and purposes can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their originators have passed away. "if you knew anything of magic," he pursued, "you would know that thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. for, not far removed from the region of our human life is another region where float the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower magic. that this woman understood its vile commerce, i am persuaded, and the forces she set going during her life have simply been accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so had they not been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged and satisfied through me. "anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain spiritual fevers, if i may so call them, which directly open the inner being to a cognisance of this astral region i have mentioned. in your case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it. "but now, tell me," he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed author a pencil drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had appeared to him during the night on putney hill--"tell me if you recognise this face?" pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. he shuddered a little as he looked. "undoubtedly," he said, "it is the face i kept trying to draw--dark, with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. that is the woman." dr. silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records of the newgate calendar. the woodcut and the pencil drawing were two different aspects of the same dreadful visage. the men compared them for some moments in silence. "it makes me thank god for the limitations of our senses," said pender quietly, with a sigh; "continuous clairvoyance must be a sore affliction." "it is indeed," returned john silence significantly, "and if all the people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they are. it is little wonder," he added, "that your sense of humour was clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your brain for their dissemination. you have had an interesting adventure, mr. felix pender, and, let me add, a fortunate escape." the author was about to renew his thanks when there came a sound of scratching at the door, and the doctor sprang up quickly. "it's time for me to go. i left my dog on the step, but i suppose--" before he had time to open the door, it had yielded to the pressure behind it and flew wide open to admit a great yellow-haired collie. the dog, wagging his tail and contorting his whole body with delight, tore across the floor and tried to leap up upon his owner's breast. and there was laughter and happiness in the old eyes; for they were clear again as the day. case ii: ancient sorceries i there are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange that the world catches its breath--and looks the other way! and it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the wide-spread net of john silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest. matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved to trace to their hidden sources. to unravel a tangle in the very soul of things--and to release a suffering human soul in the process--was with him a veritable passion. and the knots he untied were, indeed, after passing strange. the world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can attach credence--something it can, at least, pretend to explain. the adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the adventures. it expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. but dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them, not to say shocked. its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed. "such a thing happened to _that_ man!" it cries--"a commonplace person like that! it is too absurd! there must be something wrong!" yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to little arthur vezin, something of the curious nature he described to dr. silence. outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely that "such a thing might perhaps have come to iszard, that crack-brained iszard, or to that odd fish minski, but it could never have happened to commonplace little vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die according to scale." but, whatever his method of death was, vezin certainly did not "live according to scale" so far as this particular event in his otherwise uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. he lived the thing over again each time he told it. his whole personality became muffled in the recital. it subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. he appeared to excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so fantastic an episode. for little vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and almost constitutionally unable to say no, or to claim many things that should rightly have been his. his whole scheme of life seemed utterly remote from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an umbrella on an omnibus. and when this curious event came upon him he was already more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he cared to admit. john silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once, said that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet they were all obviously true. the whole scene was unforgettably cinematographed on to his mind. none of the details were imagined or invented. and when he told the story with them all complete, the effect was undeniable. his appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the charming personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and revealed itself. his modesty was always there, of course, but in the telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure. he was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern france from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. he had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday english. he disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. these english clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn't want and that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down, and so forth. so that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were over and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in surbiton. and when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little station in northern france, and he got out to stretch his legs on the platform, and saw to his dismay a further batch of the british isles debouching from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to continue the journey. even _his_ flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a night in the little town and going on next day by a slower, emptier train, flashed into his mind. the guard was already shouting "_en voiture_" and the corridor of his compartment was already packed when the thought came to him. and, for once, he acted with decision and rushed to snatch his bag. finding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped at the window (for he had a corner seat) and begged the frenchman who sat opposite to hand his luggage out to him, explaining in his wretched french that he intended to break the journey there. and this elderly frenchman, he declared, gave him a look, half of warning, half of reproach, that to his dying day he could never forget; handed the bag through the window of the moving train; and at the same time poured into his ears a long sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was able to comprehend only the last few words: "_à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats_." in reply to dr. silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once seized upon this frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, vezin admitted that the man had impressed him favourably from the beginning, though without being able to explain why. they had sat facing one another during the four hours of the journey, and though no conversation had passed between them--vezin was timid about his stuttering french--he confessed that his eyes were being continually drawn to his face, almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a dozen nameless little politenesses and attentions, had evinced the desire to be kind. the men liked each other and their personalities did not clash, or would not have clashed had they chanced to come to terms of acquaintance. the frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised a silent protective influence over the insignificant little englishman, and without words or gestures betrayed that he wished him well and would gladly have been of service to him. "and this sentence that he hurled at you after the bag?" asked john silence, smiling that peculiarly sympathetic smile that always melted the prejudices of his patient, "were you unable to follow it exactly?" "it was so quick and low and vehement," explained vezin, in his small voice, "that i missed practically the whole of it. i only caught the few words at the very end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his face was bent down out of the carriage window so near to mine." "'_Ã� cause du sommeil et à cause des chats'?_" repeated dr. silence, as though half speaking to himself. "that's it exactly," said vezin; "which, i take it, means something like 'because of sleep and because of the cats,' doesn't it?" "certainly, that's how i should translate it," the doctor observed shortly, evidently not wishing to interrupt more than necessary. "and the rest of the sentence--all the first part i couldn't understand, i mean--was a warning not to do something--not to stop in the town, or at some particular place in the town, perhaps. that was the impression it made on me." then, of course, the train rushed off, and left vezin standing on the platform alone and rather forlorn. the little town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. from the station itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was that the mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. and once he reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean out of modern life into a bygone century. the noise and bustle of the crowded train seemed days away. the spirit of this silent hill-town, remote from tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its own quiet life under the autumn sun, rose up and cast its spell upon him. long before he recognised this spell he acted under it. he walked softly, almost on tiptoe, down the winding narrow streets where the gables all but met over his head, and he entered the doorway of the solitary inn with a deprecating and modest demeanour that was in itself an apology for intruding upon the place and disturbing its dream. at first, however, vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. the attempt at analysis came much later. what struck him then was only the delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy rattle of the train. he felt soothed and stroked like a cat. "like a cat, you said?" interrupted john silence, quickly catching him up. "yes. at the very start i felt that." he laughed apologetically. "i felt as though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me purr. it seemed to be the general mood of the whole place--then." the inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coaching days still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. he felt he was only tolerated, he said. but it was cheap and comfortable, and the delicious cup of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel really very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold, original way. for to him it had seemed bold and original. he felt something of a dog. his room, too, soothed him with its dark panelling and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to it seemed the natural pathway to a real chamber of sleep--a little dim cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. it looked upon the courtyard at the back. it was all very charming, and made him think of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemed padded, the walls provided with cushions. the sounds of the streets could not penetrate there. it was an atmosphere of absolute rest that surrounded him. on engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person who seemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with dundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards him across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a little promenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietress herself. she was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed to swim towards him out of a sea of person. they emerged, so to speak. but she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and alert. when he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. a great mouser on the watch occurred to him. she took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite without being cordial. her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple in spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and the head it carried bowed so very flexibly. "but when she looked at me, you know," said vezin, with that little apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating gesture of the shoulders that was characteristic of him, "the odd notion came to me that really she had intended to make quite a different movement, and that with a single bound she could have leaped at me across the width of that stone yard and pounced upon me like some huge cat upon a mouse." he laughed a little soft laugh, and dr. silence made a note in his book without interrupting, while vezin proceeded in a tone as though he feared he had already told too much and more than we could believe. "very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and i felt she knew what i was doing even after i had passed and was behind her back. she spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. she asked if i had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then added that dinner was at seven o'clock, and that they were very early people in this little country town. clearly, she intended to convey that late hours were not encouraged." evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impression that here he would be "managed," that everything would be arranged and planned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the groove and obey. no decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked for from him. it was the very reverse of the train. he walked quietly out into the street feeling soothed and peaceful. he realised that he was in a _milieu_ that suited him and stroked him the right way. it was so much easier to be obedient. he began to purr again, and to feel that all the town purred with him. about the streets of that little town he meandered gently, falling deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. with no special aim he wandered up and down, and to and fro. the september sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. down winding alleyways, fringed with tumbling gables and open casements, he caught fairylike glimpses of the great plain below, and of the meadows and yellow copses lying like a dream-map in the haze. the spell of the past held very potently here, he felt. the streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busy enough, going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of him or turned to stare at his obviously english appearance. he was even able to forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in a charming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feeling delightfully insignificant and unimportant and unselfconscious. it was like becoming part of a softly coloured dream which he did not even realise to be a dream. on the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain below ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which the little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble fields like deep water. here he strolled along the old ramparts of ancient fortifications that once had been formidable, but now were only vision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls and wayward vine and ivy. from the broad coping on which he sat for a moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw the esplanade far below lying in shadow. here and there a yellow sunbeam crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height he looked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in the cool of the evening. he could just hear the sound of their slow footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through the gaps between the trees. the figures looked like shadows as he caught glimpses of their quiet movements far below. he sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs and half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of the plane trees. the whole town, and the little hill out of which it grew as naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying there half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed. and, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. and this music floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly charmed him. he recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they were simply improvising without a conductor. no definitely marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly after the fashion of wind through an aeolian harp. it was part of the place and scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind were part of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned plaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all half smothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his soul with a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be quite pleasant. there was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. the music seemed to him oddly unartificial. it made him think of trees swept by the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in the rigging of invisible ships; or--and the simile leaped up in his thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion--a chorus of animals, of wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and singing as animals will, to the moon. he could fancy he heard the wailing, half-human cries of cats upon the tiles at night, rising and falling with weird intervals of sound, and this music, muffled by distance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of these creatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn music to one another and the moon in chorus. it was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. the instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night, rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all in such strange confusion of discords and accords. but, at the same time a plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and the discords of these half-broken instruments were so singular that they did not distress his musical soul like fiddles out of tune. he listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his character was, and then strolled homewards in the dusk as the air grew chilly. "there was nothing to alarm?" put in dr. silence briefly. "absolutely nothing," said vezin; "but you know it was all so fantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly impressed. perhaps, too," he continued, gently explanatory, "it was this stirring of my imagination that caused other impressions; for, as i walked back, the spell of the place began to steal over me in a dozen ways, though all intelligible ways. but there were other things i could not account for in the least, even then." "incidents, you mean?" "hardly incidents, i think. a lot of vivid sensations crowded themselves upon my mind and i could trace them to no causes. it was just after sunset and the tumbled old buildings traced magical outlines against an opalescent sky of gold and red. the dusk was running down the twisted streets. all round the hill the plain pressed in like a dim sea, its level rising with the darkness. the spell of this kind of scene, you know, can be very moving, and it was so that night. yet i felt that what came to me had nothing directly to do with the mystery and wonder of the scene." "not merely the subtle transformations of the spirit that come with beauty," put in the doctor, noticing his hesitation. "exactly," vezin went on, duly encouraged and no longer so fearful of our smiles at his expense. "the impressions came from somewhere else. for instance, down the busy main street where men and women were bustling home from work, shopping at stalls and barrows, idly gossiping in groups, and all the rest of it, i saw that i aroused no interest and that no one turned to stare at me as a foreigner and stranger. i was utterly ignored, and my presence among them excited no special interest or attention. "and then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me with conviction that all the time this indifference and inattention were merely feigned. everybody as a matter of fact was watching me closely. every movement i made was known and observed. ignoring me was all a pretence--an elaborate pretence." he paused a moment and looked at us to see if we were smiling, and then continued, reassured-- "it is useless to ask me how i noticed this, because i simply cannot explain it. but the discovery gave me something of a shock. before i got back to the inn, however, another curious thing rose up strongly in my mind and forced my recognition of it as true. and this, too, i may as well say at once, was equally inexplicable to me. i mean i can only give you the fact, as fact it was to me." the little man left his chair and stood on the mat before the fire. his diffidence lessened from now onwards, as he lost himself again in the magic of the old adventure. his eyes shone a little already as he talked. "well," he went on, his soft voice rising somewhat with his excitement, "i was in a shop when it came to me first--though the idea must have been at work for a long time subconsciously to appear in so complete a form all at once. i was buying socks, i think," he laughed, "and struggling with my dreadful french, when it struck me that the woman in the shop did not care two pins whether i bought anything or not. she was indifferent whether she made a sale or did not make a sale. she was only pretending to sell. "this sounds a very small and fanciful incident to build upon what follows. but really it was not small. i mean it was the spark that lit the line of powder and ran along to the big blaze in my mind. "for the whole town, i suddenly realised, was something other than i so far saw it. the real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes. their busy-ness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual purposes. they bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places. in the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether i purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown. it was all a great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly for purposes of their own. but the main current of their energies ran elsewhere. i almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the whole body organises itself to eject it or to absorb it. the town was doing this very thing to me. "this bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as i walked home to the inn, and i began busily to wonder wherein the true life of this town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities of its hidden life. "and, now that my eyes were partly opened, i noticed other things too that puzzled me, first of which, i think, was the extraordinary silence of the whole place. positively, the town was muffled. although the streets were paved with cobbles the people moved about silently, softly, with padded feet, like cats. nothing made noise. all was hushed, subdued, muted. the very voices were quiet, low-pitched like purring. nothing clamorous, vehement or emphatic seemed able to live in the drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little hill-town into its sleep. it was like the woman at the inn--an outward repose screening intense inner activity and purpose. "yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about it. the people were active and alert. only a magical and uncanny softness lay over them all like a spell." vezin passed his hand across his eyes for a moment as though the memory had become very vivid. his voice had run off into a whisper so that we heard the last part with difficulty. he was telling a true thing obviously, yet something that he both liked and hated telling. "i went back to the inn," he continued presently in a louder voice, "and dined. i felt a new strange world about me. my old world of reality receded. here, whether i liked it or no, was something new and incomprehensible. i regretted having left the train so impulsively. an adventure was upon me, and i loathed adventures as foreign to my nature. moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere deep within me, in a region i could not check or measure, and a feeling of alarm mingled itself with my wonder--alarm for the stability of what i had for forty years recognised as my 'personality.' "i went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual to me, and of rather a haunting description. by way of relief i kept thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering passengers. i almost wished i were with them again. but my dreams took me elsewhere. i dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses." ii vezin stayed on from day to day, indefinitely, much longer than he had intended. he felt in a kind of dazed, somnolent condition. he did nothing in particular, but the place fascinated him and he could not decide to leave. decisions were always very difficult for him and he sometimes wondered how he had ever brought himself to the point of leaving the train. it seemed as though some one else must have arranged it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran to the swarthy frenchman who had sat opposite. if only he could have understood that long sentence ending so strangely with "_à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats_." he wondered what it all meant. meanwhile the hushed softness of the town held him prisoner and he sought in his muddling, gentle way to find out where the mystery lay, and what it was all about. but his limited french and his constitutional hatred of active investigation made it hard for him to buttonhole anybody and ask questions. he was content to observe, and watch, and remain negative. the weather held on calm and hazy, and this just suited him. he wandered about the town till he knew every street and alley. the people suffered him to come and go without let or hindrance, though it became clearer to him every day that he was never free himself from observation. the town watched him as a cat watches a mouse. and he got no nearer to finding out what they were all so busy with or where the main stream of their activities lay. this remained hidden. the people were as soft and mysterious as cats. but that he was continually under observation became more evident from day to day. for instance, when he strolled to the end of the town and entered a little green public garden beneath the ramparts and seated himself upon one of the empty benches in the sun, he was quite alone--at first. not another seat was occupied; the little park was empty, the paths deserted. yet, within ten minutes of his coming, there must have been fully twenty persons scattered about him, some strolling aimlessly along the gravel walks, staring at the flowers, and others seated on the wooden benches enjoying the sun like himself. none of them appeared to take any notice of him; yet he understood quite well they had all come there to watch. they kept him under close observation. in the street they had seemed busy enough, hurrying upon various errands; yet these were suddenly all forgotten and they had nothing to do but loll and laze in the sun, their duties unremembered. five minutes after he left, the garden was again deserted, the seats vacant. but in the crowded street it was the same thing again; he was never alone. he was ever in their thoughts. by degrees, too, he began to see how it was he was so cleverly watched, yet without the appearance of it. the people did nothing _directly_. they behaved _obliquely_. he laughed in his mind as the thought thus clothed itself in words, but the phrase exactly described it. they looked at him from angles which naturally should have led their sight in another direction altogether. their movements were oblique, too, so far as these concerned himself. the straight, direct thing was not their way evidently. they did nothing obviously. if he entered a shop to buy, the woman walked instantly away and busied herself with something at the farther end of the counter, though answering at once when he spoke, showing that she knew he was there and that this was only her way of attending to him. it was the fashion of the cat she followed. even in the dining-room of the inn, the be-whiskered and courteous waiter, lithe and silent in all his movements, never seemed able to come straight to his table for an order or a dish. he came by zigzags, indirectly, vaguely, so that he appeared to be going to another table altogether, and only turned suddenly at the last moment, and was there beside him. vezin smiled curiously to himself as he described how he began to realize these things. other tourists there were none in the hostel, but he recalled the figures of one or two old men, inhabitants, who took their _déjeuner_ and dinner there, and remembered how fantastically they entered the room in similar fashion. first, they paused in the doorway, peering about the room, and then, after a temporary inspection, they came in, as it were, sideways, keeping close to the walls so that he wondered which table they were making for, and at the last minute making almost a little quick run to their particular seats. and again he thought of the ways and methods of cats. other small incidents, too, impressed him as all part of this queer, soft town with its muffled, indirect life, for the way some of the people appeared and disappeared with extraordinary swiftness puzzled him exceedingly. it may have been all perfectly natural, he knew, yet he could not make it out how the alleys swallowed them up and shot them forth in a second of time when there were no visible doorways or openings near enough to explain the phenomenon. once he followed two elderly women who, he felt, had been particularly examining him from across the street--quite near the inn this was--and saw them turn the corner a few feet only in front of him. yet when he sharply followed on their heels he saw nothing but an utterly deserted alley stretching in front of him with no sign of a living thing. and the only opening through which they could have escaped was a porch some fifty yards away, which not the swiftest human runner could have reached in time. and in just such sudden fashion people appeared, when he never expected them. once when he heard a great noise of fighting going on behind a low wall, and hurried up to see what was going on, what should he see but a group of girls and women engaged in vociferous conversation which instantly hushed itself to the normal whispering note of the town when his head appeared over the wall. and even then none of them turned to look at him directly, but slunk off with the most unaccountable rapidity into doors and sheds across the yard. and their voices, he thought, had sounded so like, so strangely like, the angry snarling of fighting animals, almost of cats. the whole spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as something elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the same time intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated him; more--it began rather to frighten him. out of the mists that slowly gathered about his ordinary surface thoughts, there rose again the idea that the inhabitants were waiting for him to declare himself, to take an attitude, to do this, or to do that; and that when he had done so they in their turn would at length make some direct response, accepting or rejecting him. yet the vital matter concerning which his decision was awaited came no nearer to him. once or twice he purposely followed little processions or groups of the citizens in order to find out, if possible, on what purpose they were bent; but they always discovered him in time and dwindled away, each individual going his or her own way. it was always the same: he never could learn what their main interest was. the cathedral was ever empty, the old church of st. martin, at the other end of the town, deserted. they shopped because they had to, and not because they wished to. the booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the little _cafés_ desolate. yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk ever on the bustle. "can it be," he thought to himself, yet with a deprecating laugh that he should have dared to think anything so odd, "can it be that these people are people of the twilight, that they live only at night their real life, and come out honestly only with the dusk? that during the day they make a sham though brave pretence, and after the sun is down their true life begins? have they the souls of night-things, and is the whole blessed town in the hands of the cats?" the fancy somehow electrified him with little shocks of shrinking and dismay. yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being. something utterly remote from his ordinary life, something that had not waked for years, began faintly to stir in his soul, sending feelers abroad into his brain and heart, shaping queer thoughts and penetrating even into certain of his minor actions. something exceedingly vital to himself, to his soul, hung in the balance. and, always when he returned to the inn about the hour of sunset, he saw the figures of the townsfolk stealing through the dusk from their shop doors, moving sentry-wise to and fro at the corners of the streets, yet always vanishing silently like shadows at his near approach. and as the inn invariably closed its doors at ten o'clock he had never yet found the opportunity he rather half-heartedly sought to see for himself what account the town could give of itself at night. "--_à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats_"--the words now rang in his ears more and more often, though still as yet without any definite meaning. moreover, something made him sleep like the dead. iii it was, i think, on the fifth day--though in this detail his story sometimes varied--that he made a definite discovery which increased his alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax. before that he had already noticed that a change was going forward and certain subtle transformations being brought about in his character which modified several of his minor habits. and he had affected to ignore them. here, however, was something he could no longer ignore; and it startled him. at the best of times he was never very positive, always negative rather, compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose he was capable of reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish decision. the discovery he now made that brought him up with such a sharp turn was that this power had positively dwindled to nothing. he found it impossible to make up his mind. for, on this fifth day, he realised that he had stayed long enough in the town and that for reasons he could only vaguely define to himself it was wiser _and safer_ that he should leave. and he found that he could not leave! this is difficult to describe in words, and it was more by gesture and the expression of his face that he conveyed to dr. silence the state of impotence he had reached. all this spying and watching, he said, had as it were spun a net about his feet so that he was trapped and powerless to escape; he felt like a fly that had blundered into the intricacies of a great web; he was caught, imprisoned, and could not get away. it was a distressing sensation. a numbness had crept over his will till it had become almost incapable of decision. the mere thought of vigorous action--action towards escape--began to terrify him. all the currents of his life had turned inwards upon himself, striving to bring to the surface something that lay buried almost beyond reach, determined to force his recognition of something he had long forgotten--forgotten years upon years, centuries almost ago. it seemed as though a window deep within his being would presently open and reveal an entirely new world, yet somehow a world that was not unfamiliar. beyond that, again, he fancied a great curtain hung; and when that too rolled up he would see still farther into this region and at last understand something of the secret life of these extraordinary people. "is this why they wait and watch?" he asked himself with rather a shaking heart, "for the time when i shall join them--or refuse to join them? does the decision rest with me after all, and not with them?" and it was at this point that the sinister character of the adventure first really declared itself, and he became genuinely alarmed. the stability of his rather fluid little personality was at stake, he felt, and something in his heart turned coward. why otherwise should he have suddenly taken to walking stealthily, silently, making as little sound as possible, for ever looking behind him? why else should he have moved almost on tiptoe about the passages of the practically deserted inn, and when he was abroad have found himself deliberately taking advantage of what cover presented itself? and why, if he was not afraid, should the wisdom of staying indoors after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as eminently desirable? why, indeed? and, when john silence gently pressed him for an explanation of these things, he admitted apologetically that he had none to give. "it was simply that i feared something might happen to me unless i kept a sharp look-out. i felt afraid. it was instinctive," was all he could say. "i got the impression that the whole town was after me--wanted me for something; and that if it got me i should lose myself, or at least the self i knew, in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. but i am not a psychologist, you know," he added meekly, "and i cannot define it better than that." it was while lounging in the courtyard half an hour before the evening meal that vezin made this discovery, and he at once went upstairs to his quiet room at the end of the winding passage to think it over alone. in the yard it was empty enough, true, but there was always the possibility that the big woman whom he dreaded would come out of some door, with her pretence of knitting, to sit and watch him. this had happened several times, and he could not endure the sight of her. he still remembered his original fancy, bizarre though it was, that she would spring upon him the moment his back was turned and land with one single crushing leap upon his neck. of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. it has clothed itself in reality. he went upstairs accordingly. it was dusk, and the oil lamps had not yet been lit in the passages. he stumbled over the uneven surface of the ancient flooring, passing the dim outlines of doors along the corridor--doors that he had never once seen opened--rooms that seemed never occupied. he moved, as his habit now was, stealthily and on tiptoe. half-way down the last passage to his own chamber there was a sharp turn, and it was just here, while groping round the walls with outstretched hands, that his fingers touched something that was not wall--something that moved. it was soft and warm in texture, indescribably fragrant, and about the height of his shoulder; and he immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. the next minute he knew it was something quite different. instead of investigating, however,--his nerves must have been too overwrought for that, he said,--he shrank back as closely as possible against the wall on the other side. the thing, whatever it was, slipped past him with a sound of rustling and, retreating with light footsteps down the passage behind him, was gone. a breath of warm, scented air was wafted to his nostrils. vezin caught his breath for an instant and paused, stockstill, half leaning against the wall--and then almost ran down the remaining distance and entered his room with a rush, locking the door hurriedly behind him. yet it was not fear that made him run: it was excitement, pleasurable excitement. his nerves were tingling, and a delicious glow made itself felt all over his body. in a flash it came to him that this was just what he had felt twenty-five years ago as a boy when he was in love for the first time. warm currents of life ran all over him and mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft delight. his mood was suddenly become tender, melting, loving. the room was quite dark, and he collapsed upon the sofa by the window, wondering what had happened to him and what it all meant. but the only thing he understood clearly in that instant was that something in him had swiftly, magically changed: he no longer wished to leave, or to argue with himself about leaving. the encounter in the passage-way had changed all that. the strange perfume of it still hung about him, bemusing his heart and mind. for he knew that it was a girl who had passed him, a girl's face that his fingers had brushed in the darkness, and he felt in some extraordinary way as though he had been actually kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips. trembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and struggled to collect his thoughts. he was utterly unable to understand how the mere passing of a girl in the darkness of a narrow passage-way could communicate so electric a thrill to his whole being that he still shook with the sweetness of it. yet, there it was! and he found it as useless to deny as to attempt analysis. some ancient fire had entered his veins, and now ran coursing through his blood; and that he was forty-five instead of twenty did not matter one little jot. out of all the inner turmoil and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the mere atmosphere, the merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown in the darkness, had been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the centre of his heart, and rouse his whole being from a state of feeble sluggishness to one of tearing and tumultuous excitement. after a time, however, the number of vezin's years began to assert their cumulative power; he grew calmer, and when a knock came at length upon his door and he heard the waiter's voice suggesting that dinner was nearly over, he pulled himself together and slowly made his way downstairs into the dining-room. every one looked up as he entered, for he was very late, but he took his customary seat in the far corner and began to eat. the trepidation was still in his nerves, but the fact that he had passed through the courtyard and hall without catching sight of a petticoat served to calm him a little. he ate so fast that he had almost caught up with the current stage of the table d'hôte, when a slight commotion in the room drew his attention. his chair was so placed that the door and the greater portion of the long _salle à manger_ were behind him, yet it was not necessary to turn round to know that the same person he had passed in the dark passage had now come into the room. he felt the presence long before he heard or saw any one. then he became aware that the old men, the only other guests, were rising one by one in their places, and exchanging greetings with some one who passed among them from table to table. and when at length he turned with his heart beating furiously to ascertain for himself, he saw the form of a young girl, lithe and slim, moving down the centre of the room and making straight for his own table in the corner. she moved wonderfully, with sinuous grace, like a young panther, and her approach filled him with such delicious bewilderment that he was utterly unable to tell at first what her face was like, or discover what it was about the whole presentment of the creature that filled him anew with trepidation and delight. "ah, ma'mselle est de retour!" he heard the old waiter murmur at his side, and he was just able to take in that she was the daughter of the proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard her voice. she was addressing him. something of red lips he saw and laughing white teeth, and stray wisps of fine dark hair about the temples; but all the rest was a dream in which his own emotion rose like a thick cloud before his eyes and prevented his seeing accurately, or knowing exactly what he did. he was aware that she greeted him with a charming little bow; that her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly into his own; that the perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again assailed his nostrils, and that she was bending a little towards him and leaning with one hand on the table at this side. she was quite close to him--that was the chief thing he knew--explaining that she had been asking after the comfort of her mother's guests, and now was introducing herself to the latest arrival--himself. "m'sieur has already been here a few days," he heard the waiter say; and then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied-- "ah, but m'sieur is not going to leave us just yet, i hope. my mother is too old to look after the comfort of our guests properly, but now i am here i will remedy all that." she laughed deliciously. "m'sieur shall be well looked after." vezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply, but as he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting upon the table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of electricity, passed from her skin into his body. his soul wavered and shook deep within him. he caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a look of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he had sat down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was already half-way across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with a dessert-spoon and a knife. longing for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be alone with his thoughts. this time the passages were lighted, and he suffered no exciting contretemps; yet the winding corridor was dim with shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards, seemed longer than he had ever known it. it ran downhill like the pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the heart of a great forest. the world was singing with him. strange fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind. iv this part of the story he told to dr. silence, without special coaxing, it is true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. he could not in the least understand, he said, how the girl had managed to affect him so profoundly, and even before he had set eyes upon her. for her mere proximity in the darkness had been sufficient to set him on fire. he knew nothing of enchantments, and for years had been a stranger to anything approaching tender relations with any member of the opposite sex, for he was encased in shyness, and realised his overwhelming defects only too well. yet this bewitching young creature came to him deliberately. her manner was unmistakable, and she sought him out on every possible occasion. chaste and sweet she was undoubtedly, yet frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the first glance of her shining eyes, even if she had not already done so in the dark merely by the magic of her invisible presence. "you felt she was altogether wholesome and good!" queried the doctor. "you had no reaction of any sort--for instance, of alarm?" vezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable little apologetic smiles. it was some time before he replied. the mere memory of the adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes, and his brown eyes sought the floor again before he answered. "i don't think i can quite say that," he explained presently. "i acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room afterwards. a conviction grew upon me that there was something about her--how shall i express it?--well, something unholy. it is not impurity in any sense, physical or mental, that i mean, but something quite indefinable that gave me a vague sensation of the creeps. she drew me, and at the same time repelled me, more than--than--" he hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence. "nothing like it has ever come to me before or since," he concluded, with lame confusion. "i suppose it was, as you suggested just now, something of an enchantment. at any rate, it was strong enough to make me feel that i would stay in that awful little haunted town for years if only i could see her every day, hear her voice, watch her wonderful movements, and sometimes, perhaps, touch her hand." "can you explain to me what you felt was the source of her power?" john silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the narrator. "i am surprised that you should ask me such a question," answered vezin, with the nearest approach to dignity he could manage. "i think no man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman who ensnares him. i certainly cannot. i can only say this slip of a girl bewitched me, and the mere knowledge that she was living and sleeping in the same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of delight. "but there's one thing i can tell you," he went on earnestly, his eyes aglow, "namely, that she seemed to sum up and synthesise in herself all the strange hidden forces that operated so mysteriously in the town and its inhabitants. she had the silken movements of the panther, going smoothly, silently to and fro, and the same indirect, oblique methods as the townsfolk, screening, like them, secret purposes of her own--purposes that i was sure had _me_ for their objective. she kept me, to my terror and delight, ceaselessly under observation, yet so carelessly, so consummately, that another man less sensitive, if i may say so"--he made a deprecating gesture--"or less prepared by what had gone before, would never have noticed it at all. she was always still, always reposeful, yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that i never could escape from her. i was continually meeting the stare and laughter of her great eyes, in the corners of the rooms, in the passages, calmly looking at me through the windows, or in the busiest parts of the public streets." their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter which had so violently disturbed the little man's equilibrium. he was naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they therefore instinctively distrust originality. but vezin began to forget his primness after awhile. the girl was always modestly behaved, and as her mother's representative she naturally had to do with the guests in the hotel. it was not out of the way that a spirit of camaraderie should spring up. besides, she was young, she was charmingly pretty, she was french, and--she obviously liked him. at the same time, there was something indescribable--a certain indefinable atmosphere of other places, other times--that made him try hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath with a sudden start. it was all rather like a delirious dream, half delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to dr. silence; and more than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing or saying, as though he were driven forward by impulses he scarcely recognised as his own. and though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of this dreamy mediaeval town, losing more and more of his recognisable personality. soon, he felt, the curtain within would roll up with an awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into the secret purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. only, by that time, he would have become transformed into an entirely different being. and, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of the intention to make his stay attractive to him: flowers in his bedroom, a more comfortable arm-chair in the corner, and even special little extra dishes on his private table in the dining-room. conversations, too, with "mademoiselle ilsé" became more and more frequent and pleasant, and although they seldom travelled beyond the weather, or the details of the town, the girl, he noticed, was never in a hurry to bring them to an end, and often contrived to interject little odd sentences that he never properly understood, yet felt to be significant. and it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning that evaded him, that pointed to some hidden purpose of her own and made him feel uneasy. they all had to do, he felt sure, with reasons for his staying on in the town indefinitely. "and has m'sieur not even yet come to a decision?" she said softly in his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before _déjeuner_, the acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. "because, if it's so difficult, we must all try together to help him!" the question startled him, following upon his own thoughts. it was spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as she turned and peered at him half roguishly. possibly he did not quite understand the french of it, for her near presence always confused his small knowledge of the language distressingly. yet the words, and her manner, and something else that lay behind it all in her mind, frightened him. it gave such point to his feeling that the town was waiting for him to make his mind up on some important matter. at the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close beside him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly. "it is true i find it difficult to leave," he stammered, losing his way deliciously in the depths of her eyes, "and especially now that mademoiselle ilsé has come." he was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted with the little gallantry of it. but at the same time he could have bitten his tongue off for having said it. "then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased to stay on," she said, ignoring the compliment. "i am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you," he cried, feeling that his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain. and he was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the wildest description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair beside him, and made to go. "it is _soupe à l'onion_ to-day!" she cried, laughing back at him through the sunlight, "and i must go and see about it. otherwise, you know, m'sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then, perhaps, he will leave us!" he watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and lightness of the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her, he thought, exactly like the fur of the same supple species. she turned once to laugh at him from the porch with the glass door, and then stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who sat knitting as usual in her corner seat just inside the hall-way. but how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were? whence came that transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped them both as by magic? what was it about that massive woman that made her appear instantly regal, and set her on a throne in some dark and dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre over the red glare of some tempestuous orgy? and why did this slender stripling of a girl, graceful as a willow, lithe as a young leopard, assume suddenly an air of sinister majesty, and move with flame and smoke about her head, and the darkness of night beneath her feet? vezin caught his breath and sat there transfixed. then, almost simultaneously with its appearance, the queer notion vanished again, and the sunlight of day caught them both, and he heard her laughing to her mother about the _soupe à l'onion_, and saw her glancing back at him over her dear little shoulder with a smile that made him think of a dew-kissed rose bending lightly before summer airs. and, indeed, the onion soup was particularly excellent that day, because he saw another cover laid at his small table, and, with fluttering heart, heard the waiter murmur by way of explanation that "ma'mselle ilsé would honour m'sieur to-day at _déjeuner_, as her custom sometimes is with her mother's guests." so actually she sat by him all through that delirious meal, talking quietly to him in easy french, seeing that he was well looked after, mixing the salad-dressing, and even helping him with her own hand. and, later in the afternoon, while he was smoking in the courtyard, longing for a sight of her as soon as her duties were done, she came again to his side, and when he rose to meet her, she stood facing him a moment, full of a perplexing sweet shyness before she spoke-- "my mother thinks you ought to know more of the beauties of our little town, and _i_ think so too! would m'sieur like me to be his guide, perhaps? i can show him everything, for our family has lived here for many generations." she had him by the hand, indeed, before he could find a single word to express his pleasure, and led him, all unresisting, out into the street, yet in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural she should do so, and without the faintest suggestion of boldness or immodesty. her face glowed with the pleasure and interest of it, and with her short dress and tumbled hair she looked every bit the charming child of seventeen that she was, innocent and playful, proud of her native town, and alive beyond her years to the sense of its ancient beauty. so they went over the town together, and she showed him what she considered its chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her forebears had lived; the sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her mother's family dwelt for centuries, and the ancient market-place where several hundred years before the witches had been burnt by the score. she kept up a lively running stream of talk about it all, of which he understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood revive and jeer at him. and, as she talked, england and surbiton seemed very far away indeed, almost in another age of the world's history. her voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept deep. it lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep, allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. like the town, with its elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir in its sleep. that big curtain swayed a little to and fro. presently it might lift altogether.... he began to understand a little better at last. the mood of the town was reproducing itself in him. in proportion as his ordinary external self became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and vital, asserted itself. and this girl was surely the high-priestess of it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment. new thoughts, with new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly wonderful and seductive. and only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight in itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the child's face and a scream to her laughing lips. he had merely pointed to a column of blue smoke that rose from the burning autumn leaves and made a picture against the red roofs, and had then run to the wall and called her to his side to watch the flames shooting here and there through the heap of rubbish. yet, at the sight of it, as though taken by surprise, her face had altered dreadfully, and she had turned and run like the wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran, of which he had not understood a single word, except that the fire apparently frightened her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it, and to get him away too. yet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and they had both forgotten the incident. they were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his arrival. it moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and somehow he managed to find his tongue and his best french. the girl leaned across the stones close beside him. no one was about. driven by some remorseless engine within he began to stammer something--he hardly knew what--of his strange admiration for her. almost at the first word she sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him, just touching his knees as he sat there. she was hatless as usual, and the sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat. "oh, i'm so glad!" she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his face, "so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must also like what i do, and what i belong to." already he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. something in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. he knew the fear of embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea. "you will take part in our real life, i mean," she added softly, with an indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his shrinking. "you will come back to us." already this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august. he saw her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side. dimly this shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence. "you will, i know," she repeated, holding him with her eyes. they were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. the mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth. an irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what still remained to him of his own little personality in an effort to retain the right to his normal self. the girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall close beside him, gazing out across the darkening plain, her elbows on the coping, motionless as a figure carved in stone. he took his courage in both hands. "tell me, ilsé," he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, "what is the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? and why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? tell me what it all means? and, tell me," he added more quickly with passion in his voice, "what you really are--yourself?" she turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran like a shadow across her face. "it seems to me,"--he faltered oddly under her gaze--"that i have some right to know--" suddenly she opened her eyes to the full. "you love me, then?" she asked softly. "i swear," he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising tide, "i never felt before--i have never known any other girl who--" "then you _have_ the right to know," she calmly interrupted his confused confession, "for love shares all secrets." she paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. her words lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. he became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking again. "the real life i speak of," she whispered, "is the old, old life within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to which you still belong." a faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice sank into him. what she was saying he knew instinctively to be true, even though he could not as yet understand its full purport. his present life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his personality in one that was far older and greater. it was this loss of his present self that brought to him the thought of death. "you came here," she went on, "with the purpose of seeking it, and the people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide, whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether--" her eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change, growing larger and darker with an expression of age. "it is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you feel they watch you. they do not watch you with their eyes. the purposes of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you. you were all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want you back again among them." vezin's timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl's eyes held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. she fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self. "alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you," she resumed. "the motive force was not strong enough; it has faded through all these years. but i"--she paused a moment and looked at him with complete confidence in her splendid eyes--"i possess the spell to conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. i can win you back again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the ancient tie between us, if i choose to use it, is irresistible. and i do choose to use it. i still want you. and you, dear soul of my dim past"--she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his eyes, and her voice positively sang--"i mean to have you, for you love me and are utterly at my mercy." vezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand. he had passed into a condition of exaltation. the world was beneath his feet, made of music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above it through the sunshine of pure delight. he was breathless and giddy with the wonder of her words. they intoxicated him. and, still, the terror of it all, the dreadful thought of death, pressed ever behind her sentences. for flames shot through her voice out of black smoke and licked at his soul. and they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process of swift telepathy, for his french could never have compassed all he said to her. yet she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was like the recital of verses long since known. and the mingled pain and sweetness of it as he listened were almost more than his little soul could hold. "yet i came here wholly by chance--" he heard himself saying. "no," she cried with passion, "you came here because i called to you. i have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of the past behind you. you had to come, for i own you, and i claim you." she rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain insolence in the face--the insolence of power. the sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness rose up from the plain and enveloped them. the music of the band had ceased. the leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill of the autumn evening rose about them and made vezin shiver. there was no sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft rustle of the girl's dress. he could hear the blood rushing in his ears. he scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. some terrible magic of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs of his own being, telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words shadowed forth the truth. and this simple little french maid, speaking beside him with so strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite another being. as he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew and lived, dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree of reality he was compelled to acknowledge. as once before, he saw her tall and stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of shifting smoke about her feet. dark leaves encircled her hair, flying loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of clothing. others were about her, too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast delirious glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for one only, one whom she held by the hand. for she was leading the dance in some tempestuous orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led circled about a great and awful figure on a throne, brooding over the scene through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and forms crowded furiously about her in the dance. but the one she held by the hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne he knew to be her mother. the vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years of buried time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory reawakened.... and then the scene faded away and he saw the clear circle of the girl's eyes gazing steadfastly into his own, and she became once more the pretty little daughter of the innkeeper, and he found his voice again. "and you," he whispered tremblingly--"you child of visions and enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that i loved you even before i saw?" she drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity. "the call of the past," she said; "and besides," she added proudly, "in the real life i am a princess--" "a princess!" he cried. "--and my mother is a queen!" at this, little vezin utterly lost his head. delight tore at his heart and swept him into sheer ecstasy. to hear that sweet singing voice, and to see those adorable little lips utter such things, upset his balance beyond all hope of control. he took her in his arms and covered her unresisting face with kisses. but even while he did so, and while the hot passion swept him, he felt that she was soft and loathsome, and that her answering kisses stained his very soul.... and when, presently, she had freed herself and vanished into the darkness, he stood there, leaning against the wall in a state of collapse, creeping with horror from the touch of her yielding body, and inwardly raging at the weakness that he already dimly realised must prove his undoing. and from the shadows of the old buildings into which she disappeared there rose in the stillness of the night a singular, long-drawn cry, which at first he took for laughter, but which later he was sure he recognised as the almost human wailing of a cat. v for a long time vezin leant there against the wall, alone with his surging thoughts and emotions. he understood at length that he had done the one thing necessary to call down upon him the whole force of this ancient past. for in those passionate kisses he had acknowledged the tie of olden days, and had revived it. and the memory of that soft impalpable caress in the darkness of the inn corridor came back to him with a shudder. the girl had first mastered him, and then led him to the one act that was necessary for her purpose. he had been waylaid, after the lapse of centuries--caught, and conquered. dimly he realised this, and sought to make plans for his escape. but, for the moment at any rate, he was powerless to manage his thoughts or will, for the sweet, fantastic madness of the whole adventure mounted to his brain like a spell, and he gloried in the feeling that he was utterly enchanted and moving in a world so much larger and wilder than the one he had ever been accustomed to. the moon, pale and enormous, was just rising over the sea-like plain, when at last he rose to go. her slanting rays drew all the houses into new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew, seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables and quaint old towers lay far away in its purple reaches. the cathedral appeared unreal in a silver mist. he moved softly, keeping to the shadows; but the streets were all deserted and very silent; the doors were closed, the shutters fastened. not a soul was astir. the hush of night lay over everything; it was like a town of the dead, a churchyard with gigantic and grotesque tombstones. wondering where all the busy life of the day had so utterly disappeared to, he made his way to a back door that entered the inn by means of the stables, thinking thus to reach his room unobserved. he reached the courtyard safely and crossed it by keeping close to the shadow of the wall. he sidled down it, mincing along on tiptoe, just as the old men did when they entered the _salle à manger_. he was horrified to find himself doing this instinctively. a strange impulse came to him, catching him somehow in the centre of his body--an impulse to drop upon all fours and run swiftly and silently. he glanced upwards and the idea came to him to leap up upon his window-sill overhead instead of going round by the stairs. this occurred to him as the easiest, and most natural way. it was like the beginning of some horrible transformation of himself into something else. he was fearfully strung up. the moon was higher now, and the shadows very dark along the side of the street where he moved. he kept among the deepest of them, and reached the porch with the glass doors. but here there was light; the inmates, unfortunately, were still about. hoping to slip across the hall unobserved and reach the stairs, he opened the door carefully and stole in. then he saw that the hall was not empty. a large dark thing lay against the wall on his left. at first he thought it must be household articles. then it moved, and he thought it was an immense cat, distorted in some way by the play of light and shadow. then it rose straight up before him and he saw that it was the proprietress. what she had been doing in this position he could only venture a dreadful guess, but the moment she stood up and faced him he was aware of some terrible dignity clothing her about that instantly recalled the girl's strange saying that she was a queen. huge and sinister she stood there under the little oil lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. awe stirred in his heart, and the roots of some ancient fear. he felt that he must bow to her and make some kind of obeisance. the impulse was fierce and irresistible, as of long habit. he glanced quickly about him. there was no one there. then he deliberately inclined his head toward her. he bowed. "enfin! m'sieur s'est donc décidé. c'est bien alors. j'en suis contente." her words came to him sonorously as through a great open space. then the great figure came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and seized his trembling hands. some overpowering force moved with her and caught him. "on pourrait faire un p'tit tour ensemble, n'est-ce pas? nous y allons cette nuit et il faut s'exercer un peu d'avance pour cela. ilsé, ilsé, viens donc ici. viens vite!" and she whirled him round in the opening steps of some dance that seemed oddly and horribly familiar. they made no sound on the stones, this strangely assorted couple. it was all soft and stealthy. and presently, when the air seemed to thicken like smoke, and a red glare as of flame shot through it, he was aware that some one else had joined them and that his hand the mother had released was now tightly held by the daughter. ilsé had come in answer to the call, and he saw her with leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in tattered vestiges of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and horribly, odiously, loathsomely seductive. "to the sabbath! to the sabbath!" they cried. "on to the witches' sabbath!" up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly, dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out, and they were left in total darkness. and the devil woke in his heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid. suddenly they released his hands and he heard the voice of the mother cry that it was time, and they must go. which way they went he did not pause to see. he only realised that he was free, and he blundered through the darkness till he found the stairs and then tore up them to his room as though all hell was at his heels. he flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his hands, and groaned. swiftly reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape, all equally impossible, he finally decided that the only thing to do for the moment was to sit quiet and wait. he must see what was going to happen. at least in the privacy of his own bedroom he would be fairly safe. the door was locked. he crossed over and softly opened the window which gave upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of the hall through the glass doors. as he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity reached his ears from the streets beyond--the sound of footsteps and voices muffled by distance. he leaned out cautiously and listened. the moonlight was clear and strong now, but his own window was in shadow, the silver disc being still behind the house. it came to him irresistibly that the inhabitants of the town, who a little while before had all been invisible behind closed doors, were now issuing forth, busy upon some secret and unholy errand. he listened intently. at first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware of movements going on in the house itself. rustlings and cheepings came to him across that still, moonlit yard. a concourse of living beings sent the hum of their activity into the night. things were on the move everywhere. a biting, pungent odour rose through the air, coming he knew not whence. presently his eyes became glued to the windows of the opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a soft blaze. the roof overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the panes of glass, and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long footsteps over the tiles and along the coping. they passed swiftly and silently, shaped like immense cats, in an endless procession across the pictured glass, and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost sight of them. he just caught the soft thudding of their leaps. sometimes their shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then he could not make out whether they were the shadows of human beings or of cats. they seemed to change swiftly from one to the other. the transformation looked horribly real, for they leaped like human beings, yet changed swiftly in the air immediately afterwards, and dropped like animals. the yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the creeping movements of dark forms all stealthily drawing towards the porch with the glass doors. they kept so closely to the wall that he could not determine their actual shape, but when he saw that they passed on to the great congregation that was gathering in the hall, he understood that these were the creatures whose leaping shadows he had first seen reflected in the windowpanes opposite. they were coming from all parts of the town, reaching the appointed meeting-place across the roofs and tiles, and springing from level to level till they came to the yard. then a new sound caught his ear, and he saw that the windows all about him were being softly opened, and that to each window came a face. a moment later figures began dropping hurriedly down into the yard. and these figures, as they lowered themselves down from the windows, were human, he saw; but once safely in the yard they fell upon all fours and changed in the swiftest possible second into--cats--huge, silent cats. they ran in streams to join the main body in the hall beyond. so, after all, the rooms in the house had not been empty and unoccupied. moreover, what he saw no longer filled him with amazement. for he remembered it all. it was familiar. it had all happened before just so, hundreds of times, and he himself had taken part in it and known the wild madness of it all. the outline of the old building changed, the yard grew larger, and he seemed to be staring down upon it from a much greater height through smoky vapours. and, as he looked, half remembering, the old pains of long ago, fierce and sweet, furiously assailed him, and the blood stirred horribly as he heard the call of the dance again in his heart and tasted the ancient magic of ilsé whirling by his side. suddenly he started back. a great lithe cat had leaped softly up from the shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring fixedly at him with the eyes of a human. "come," it seemed to say, "come with us to the dance! change as of old! transform yourself swiftly and come!" only too well he understood the creature's soundless call. it was gone again in a flash with scarcely a sound of its padded feet on the stones, and then others dropped by the score down the side of the house, past his very eyes, all changing as they fell and darting away rapidly, softly, towards the gathering point. and again he felt the dreadful desire to do likewise; to murmur the old incantation, and then drop upon hands and knees and run swiftly for the great flying leap into the air. oh, how the passion of it rose within him like a flood, twisting his very entrails, sending his heart's desire flaming forth into the night for the old, old dance of the sorcerers at the witches' sabbath! the whirl of the stars was about him; once more he met the magic of the moon. the power of the wind, rushing from precipice and forest, leaping from cliff to cliff across the valleys, tore him away.... he heard the cries of the dancers and their wild laughter, and with this savage girl in his embrace he danced furiously about the dim throne where sat the figure with the sceptre of majesty.... then, suddenly, all became hushed and still, and the fever died down a little in his heart. the calm moonlight flooded a courtyard empty and deserted. they had started. the procession was off into the sky. and he was left behind--alone. vezin tiptoed softly across the room and unlocked the door. the murmur from the streets, growing momentarily as he advanced, met his ears. he made his way with the utmost caution down the corridor. at the head of the stairs he paused and listened. below him, the hall where they had gathered was dark and still, but through opened doors and windows on the far side of the building came the sound of a great throng moving farther and farther into the distance. he made his way down the creaking wooden stairs, dreading yet longing to meet some straggler who should point the way, but finding no one; across the dark hall, so lately thronged with living, moving things, and out through the opened front doors into the street. he could not believe that he was really left behind, really forgotten, that he had been purposely permitted to escape. it perplexed him. nervously he peered about him, and up and down the street; then, seeing nothing, advanced slowly down the pavement. the whole town, as he went, showed itself empty and deserted, as though a great wind had blown everything alive out of it. the doors and windows of the houses stood open to the night; nothing stirred; moonlight and silence lay over all. the night lay about him like a cloak. the air, soft and cool, caressed his cheek like the touch of a great furry paw. he gained confidence and began to walk quickly, though still keeping to the shadowed side. nowhere could he discover the faintest sign of the great unholy exodus he knew had just taken place. the moon sailed high over all in a sky cloudless and serene. hardly realising where he was going, he crossed the open market-place and so came to the ramparts, whence he knew a pathway descended to the high road and along which he could make good his escape to one of the other little towns that lay to the northward, and so to the railway. but first he paused and gazed out over the scene at his feet where the great plain lay like a silver map of some dream country. the still beauty of it entered his heart, increasing his sense of bewilderment and unreality. no air stirred, the leaves of the plane trees stood motionless, the near details were defined with the sharpness of day against dark shadows, and in the distance the fields and woods melted away into haze and shimmering mistiness. but the breath caught in his throat and he stood stockstill as though transfixed when his gaze passed from the horizon and fell upon the near prospect in the depth of the valley at his feet. the whole lower slopes of the hill, that lay hid from the brightness of the moon, were aglow, and through the glare he saw countless moving forms, shifting thick and fast between the openings of the trees; while overhead, like leaves driven by the wind, he discerned flying shapes that hovered darkly one moment against the sky and then settled down with cries and weird singing through the branches into the region that was aflame. spellbound, he stood and stared for a time that he could not measure. and then, moved by one of the terrible impulses that seemed to control the whole adventure, he climbed swiftly upon the top of the broad coping, and balanced a moment where the valley gaped at his feet. but in that very instant, as he stood hovering, a sudden movement among the shadows of the houses caught his eye, and he turned to see the outline of a large animal dart swiftly across the open space behind him, and land with a flying leap upon the top of the wall a little lower down. it ran like the wind to his feet and then rose up beside him upon the ramparts. a shiver seemed to run through the moonlight, and his sight trembled for a second. his heart pulsed fearfully. ilsé stood beside him, peering into his face. some dark substance, he saw, stained the girl's face and skin, shining in the moonlight as she stretched her hands towards him; she was dressed in wretched tattered garments that yet became her mightily; rue and vervain twined about her temples; her eyes glittered with unholy light. he only just controlled the wild impulse to take her in his arms and leap with her from their giddy perch into the valley below. "see!" she cried, pointing with an arm on which the rags fluttered in the rising wind towards the forest aglow in the distance. "see where they await us! the woods are alive! already the great ones are there, and the dance will soon begin! the salve is here! anoint yourself and come!" though a moment before the sky was clear and cloudless, yet even while she spoke the face of the moon grew dark and the wind began to toss in the crests of the plane trees at his feet. stray gusts brought the sounds of hoarse singing and crying from the lower slopes of the hill, and the pungent odour he had already noticed about the courtyard of the inn rose about him in the air. "transform, transform!" she cried again, her voice rising like a song. "rub well your skin before you fly. come! come with me to the sabbath, to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its evil worship! see! the great ones are there, and the terrible sacraments prepared. the throne is occupied. anoint and come! anoint and come!" she grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night. he too began to change swiftly. her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him with the burning salve that sent the old magic into his blood with the power before which fades all that is good. a wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her wicked joy. "satan is there!" she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw him with her to the edge of the wall. "satan has come. the sacraments call us! come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!" just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, vezin struggled to release himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and all but mastered him. he shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and then he shrieked again. it was the old impulses, the old awful habits instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had meaning in them, and were intelligible. it was the ancient call. and it was heard below. it was answered. the wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. the crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. strokes of wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling top of the stone wall; and ilsé clung to him with her long shining arms, smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck. but not ilsé alone, for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. the pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the old madness of the sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers doing honour to the personified evil of the world. "anoint and away! anoint and away!" they cried in wild chorus about him. "to the dance that never dies! to the sweet and fearful fantasy of evil!" another moment and he would have yielded and gone, for his will turned soft and the flood of passionate memory all but overwhelmed him, when--so can a small thing after the whole course of an adventure--he caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the wall, and then fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below. but he fell towards the houses, in the open space of dust and cobblestones, and fortunately not into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther side. and they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him, like flies upon a piece of food, but as they fell he was released for a moment from the power of their touch, and in that brief instant of freedom there flashed into his mind the sudden intuition that saved him. before he could regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly back upon the wall, as though bat-like they could only fly by dropping from a height, and had no hold upon him in the open. then, seeing them perched there in a row like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly shapeless, their eyes like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of ilsé's terror at the sight of fire. quick as a flash he found his matches and lit the dead leaves that lay under the wall. dry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the wind carried the flame in a long line down the length of the wall, licking upwards as it ran; and with shrieks and wailings, the crowded row of forms upon the top melted away into the air on the other side, and were gone with a great rush and whirring of their bodies down into the heart of the haunted valley, leaving vezin breathless and shaken in the middle of the deserted ground. "ilsé!" he called feebly; "ilsé!" for his heart ached to think that she was really gone to the great dance without him, and that he had lost the opportunity of its fearful joy. yet at the same time his relief was so great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind with the whole thing, that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only cried aloud in the fierce storm of his emotion.... the fire under the wall ran its course, and the moonlight came out again, soft and clear, from its temporary eclipse. with one last shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of horrid wonder for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still crowded and flew, he turned his face towards the town and slowly made his way in the direction of the hotel. and as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a sound of howling, followed him from the gleaming forest below, growing fainter and fainter with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between the houses. vi "it may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending," said arthur vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at dr. silence sitting there with his notebook, "but the fact is--er--from that moment my memory seems to have failed rather. i have no distinct recollection of how i got home or what precisely i did. "it appears i never went back to the inn at all. i only dimly recollect racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and villages, still and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and i saw the towers of a biggish town and so came to a station. "but, long before that, i remember pausing somewhere on the road and looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure stood up in the moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main streets, and the twin and broken towers of the cathedral marking its torn ears against the sky. that picture stays in my mind with the utmost vividness to this day. "another thing remains in my mind from that escape--namely, the sudden sharp reminder that i had not paid my bill, and the decision i made, standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage i had left behind would more than settle for my indebtedness. "for the rest, i can only tell you that i got coffee and bread at a café on the outskirts of this town i had come to, and soon after found my way to the station and caught a train later in the day. that same evening i reached london." "and how long altogether," asked john silence quietly, "do you think you stayed in the town of the adventure?" vezin looked up sheepishly. "i was coming to that," he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his body. "in london i found that i was a whole week out in my reckoning of time. i had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been september th,--instead of which it was only september th!" "so that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the inn?" queried the doctor. vezin hesitated before replying. he shuffled upon the mat. "i must have gained time somewhere," he said at length--"somewhere or somehow. i certainly had a week to my credit. i can't explain it. i can only give you the fact." "and this happened to you last year, since when you have never been back to the place?" "last autumn, yes," murmured vezin; "and i have never dared to go back. i think i never want to." "and, tell me," asked dr. silence at length, when he saw that the little man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing more to say, "had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft practices during the middle ages, or been at all interested in the subject?" "never!" declared vezin emphatically. "i had never given a thought to such matters so far as i know--" "or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?" "never--before my adventure; but i have since," he replied significantly. there was, however, something still on the man's mind that he wished to relieve himself of by confession, yet could only with difficulty bring himself to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness of the doctor had provided numerous openings that he at length availed himself of one of them, and stammered that he would like to show him the marks he still had on his neck where, he said, the girl had touched him with her anointed hands. he took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered his shirt a little for the doctor to see. and there, on the surface of the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending a little way down the back towards the spine. it certainly indicated exactly the position an arm might have taken in the act of embracing. and on the other side of the neck, slightly higher up, was a similar mark, though not quite so clearly defined. "that was where she held me that night on the ramparts," he whispered, a strange light coming and going in his eyes. * * * * * it was some weeks later when i again found occasion to consult john silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my notice, and we fell to discussing vezin's story. since hearing it, the doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his secretaries had discovered that vezin's ancestors had actually lived for generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. two of them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had been burned alive at the stake. moreover, it had not been difficult to prove that the very inn where vezin stayed was built about upon the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place. the town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches of the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there literally by scores. "it seems strange," continued the doctor, "that vezin should have remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the kind of history that successive generations would have been anxious to keep alive, or to repeat to their children. therefore i am inclined to think he still knows nothing about it. "the whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact with the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place, and, by a most singular chance, too, with the very souls who had taken part with him in the events of that particular life. for the mother and daughter who impressed him so strangely must have been leading actors, with himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which at that period dominated the imaginations of the whole country. "one has only to read the histories of the times to know that these witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to convey themselves swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies. lycanthropy, or the power to change themselves into wolves, was everywhere believed in, and the ability to transform themselves into cats by rubbing their bodies with a special salve or ointment provided by satan himself, found equal credence. the witchcraft trials abound in evidences of such universal beliefs." dr. silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject, and showed how every detail of vezin's adventure had a basis in the practices of those dark days. "but that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man's own consciousness, i have no doubt," he went on, in reply to my questions; "for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate, discovered his signature in the visitors' book, and proved by it that he had arrived on september th, and left suddenly without paying his bill. he left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty brown bag and some tourist clothes. i paid a few francs in settlement of his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. the daughter was absent from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he described her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange, absent-minded kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had feared for a long time that he had met with a violent end in the neighbouring forest where he used to roam about alone. "i should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took place with her as vezin told it. for her dread of fire and the sight of burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more than once that he saw her through smoke and flame." "and that mark on his skin, for instance?" i inquired. "merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding," he replied, "like the stigmata of the _religieuses_, and the bruises which appear on the bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them. this is very common and easily explained. only it seems curious that these marks should have remained so long in vezin's case. usually they disappear quickly." "obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it all over again," i ventured. "probably. and this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not yet. we shall hear of him again. it is a case, alas! i can do little to alleviate." dr. silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice. "and what do you make of the frenchman in the train?" i asked further--"the man who warned him against the place, _à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats?_ surely a very singular incident?" "a very singular incident indeed," he made answer slowly, "and one i can only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence--" "namely?" "that the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone there a similar experience. i should like to find this man and ask him. but the crystal is useless here, for i have no slightest clue to go upon, and i can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him thus to the personality of vezin, and enabled him to fear what might happen to him, and thus to warn him as he did. "yes," he presently continued, half talking to himself, "i suspect in this case that vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. for strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves, they may be said in a sense never to die. in this case they were not vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present and the past; yet he was sufficiently sensitive to recognise that it was true, and to fight against the degradation of returning, even in memory, to a former and lower state of development. "ah yes!" he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening sky, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, "subliminal up-rushes of memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes exceedingly dangerous. i only trust that this gentle soul may soon escape from this obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. but i doubt it, i doubt it." his voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back into the room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes greater than his power. case iii: the nemesis of fire i by some means which i never could fathom, john silence always contrived to keep the compartment to himself, and as the train had a clear run of two hours before the first stop, there was ample time to go over the preliminary facts of the case. he had telephoned to me that very morning, and even through the disguise of the miles of wire the thrill of incalculable adventure had sounded in his voice. "as if it were an ordinary country visit," he called, in reply to my question; "and don't forgot to bring your gun." "with blank cartridges, i suppose?" for i knew his rigid principles with regard to the taking of life, and guessed that the guns were merely for some obvious purpose of disguise. then he thanked me for coming, mentioned the train, snapped down the receiver, and left me, vibrating with the excitement of anticipation, to do my packing. for the honour of accompanying dr. john silence on one of his big cases was what many would have considered an empty honour--and risky. certainly the adventure held all manner of possibilities, and i arrived at waterloo with the feelings of a man who is about to embark on some dangerous and peculiar mission in which the dangers he expects to run will not be the ordinary dangers to life and limb, but of some secret character difficult to name and still more difficult to cope with. "the manor house has a high sound," he told me, as we sat with our feet up and talked, "but i believe it is little more than an overgrown farmhouse in the desolate heather country beyond d----, and its owner, colonel wragge, a retired soldier with a taste for books, lives there practically alone, i understand, with an elderly invalid sister. so you need not look forward to a lively visit, unless the case provides some excitement of its own." "which is likely?" by way of reply he handed me a letter marked "private." it was dated a week ago, and signed "yours faithfully, horace wragge." "he heard of me, you see, through captain anderson," the doctor explained modestly, as though his fame were not almost world-wide; "you remember that indian obsession case--" i read the letter. why it should have been marked private was difficult to understand. it was very brief, direct, and to the point. it referred by way of introduction to captain anderson, and then stated quite simply that the writer needed help of a peculiar kind and asked for a personal interview--a morning interview, since it was impossible for him to be absent from the house at night. the letter was dignified even to the point of abruptness, and it is difficult to explain how it managed to convey to me the impression of a strong man, shaken and perplexed. perhaps the restraint of the wording, and the mystery of the affair had something to do with it; and the reference to the anderson case, the horror of which lay still vivid in my memory, may have touched the sense of something rather ominous and alarming. but, whatever the cause, there was no doubt that an impression of serious peril rose somehow out of that white paper with the few lines of firm writing, and the spirit of a deep uneasiness ran between the words and reached the mind without any visible form of expression. "and when you saw him--?" i asked, returning the letter as the train rushed clattering noisily through clapham junction. "i have not seen him," was the reply. "the man's mind was charged to the brim when he wrote that; full of vivid mental pictures. notice the restraint of it. for the main character of his case psychometry could be depended upon, and the scrap of paper his hand has touched is sufficient to give to another mind--a sensitive and sympathetic mind--clear mental pictures of what is going on. i think i have a very sound general idea of his problem." "so there may be excitement, after all?" john silence waited a moment before he replied. "something very serious is amiss there," he said gravely, at length. "some one--not himself, i gather,--has been meddling with a rather dangerous kind of gunpowder. so--yes, there may be excitement, as you put it." "and my duties?" i asked, with a decidedly growing interest. "remember, i am your 'assistant.'" "behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. observe everything, without seeming to. say nothing--nothing that means anything. be present at all interviews. i may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions are correct this is--" he broke off suddenly. "but i won't tell you my impressions yet," he resumed after a moment's thought. "just watch and listen as the case proceeds. form your own impressions and cultivate your intuitions. we come as ordinary visitors, of course," he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his eye; "hence, the guns." though disappointed not to hear more, i recognised the wisdom of his words and knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful suggestion of having heard his own lay behind them. i likewise reflected that intuition joined to a sense of humour was of more use to a man than double the quantity of mere "brains," as such. before putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me to place it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any pictures that came spontaneously into my mind. "don't deliberately look for anything. just imagine you see the inside of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark screen." i followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as possible. but no visions came. i saw nothing but the lines of light that pass to and fro like the changes of a kaleidoscope across the blackness. a momentary sensation of warmth came and went curiously. "you see--what?" he asked presently. "nothing," i was obliged to admit disappointedly; "nothing but the usual flashes of light one always sees. only, perhaps, they are more vivid than usual." he said nothing by way of comment or reply. "and they group themselves now and then," i continued, with painful candour, for i longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, "group themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses--almost like geometrical figures. nothing more." i opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter. "it makes my head hot," i said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing anything of interest. but the look in his eyes arrested my attention at once. "that sensation of heat is important," he said significantly. "it was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable," i replied, hoping he would expand and explain. "there was a distinct feeling of warmth--internal warmth somewhere--oppressive in a sense." "that is interesting," he remarked, putting the letter back in his pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. he vouchsafed nothing more, and i knew the uselessness of trying to make him talk. following his example i settled likewise with magazines into my corner. but when i closed my eyes again to look for the flashing lights and the sensation of heat, i found nothing but the usual phantasmagoria of the day's events--faces, scenes, memories,--and in due course i fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind. when we left the train, after six hours' travelling, at a little wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather, the late october shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland hills. in a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about us. bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told us the sea lay. occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the manor house up to the moment of actual arrival. colonel wragge himself met us in the hall. he was the typical army officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the process. he was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning grey. i judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the years. the face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man to be depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore a veil of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. the whole appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with gravity and importance. a matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm, i felt, must be something real and of genuine moment. his speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple and sincere. he had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet. thus, he showed plainly his surprise that dr. silence had not come alone. "my confidential secretary, mr. hubbard," the doctor said, introducing me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand i then received were well calculated, i remember thinking, to drive home the impression that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and whose perplexity must spring from some very real and tangible cause. and, quite obviously, he was relieved that we had come. his welcome was unmistakably genuine. he led us at once into a room, half library, half smoking-room, that opened out of the low-ceilinged hall. the manor house gave the impression of a rambling and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient, comfortable, and wholly unpretentious. and so it was. only the heat of the place struck me as unnatural. this room with the blazing fire may have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive through the night air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole atmosphere of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled grates or the pipes of hot air and water. it was not the heat of the greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head and mind. it stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and i caught myself thinking of the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the letter in the train. i heard him thanking dr. silence for having come; there was no preamble, and the exchange of civilities was of the briefest description. evidently here was a man who, like my companion, loved action rather than talk. his manner was straightforward and direct. i saw him in a flash: puzzled, worried, harassed into a state of alarm by something he could not comprehend; forced to deal with things he would have preferred to despise, yet facing it all with dogged seriousness and making no attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of his incompetence. "so i cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own company, and the queer business that has been going on here, and is still going on," he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards me by way of including me in his confidence. "i think, colonel wragge," replied john silence impressively, "that we shall none of us find the time hangs heavy. i gather we shall have our hands full." the two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and there was an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first time made me admit a swift question into my mind; and i wondered a little at my rashness in coming with so little reflection into a big case of this incalculable doctor. but no answer suggested itself, and to withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. the gates had closed behind me now, and the spirit of the adventure was already besieging my mind with its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears. explaining that he would wait till after dinner to discuss anything serious, as no reference was ever made before his sister, he led the way upstairs and showed us personally to our rooms; and it was just as i was finishing dressing that a knock came at my door and dr. silence entered. he was always what is called a serious man, so that even in moments of comedy you felt he never lost sight of the profound gravity of life, but as he came across the room to me i caught the expression of his face and understood in a flash that he was now in his most grave and earnest mood. he looked almost troubled. i stopped fumbling with my black tie and stared. "it is serious," he said, speaking in a low voice, "more so even than i imagined. colonel wragge's control over his thoughts concealed a great deal in my psychometrising of the letter. i looked in to warn you to keep yourself well in hand--generally speaking." "haunted house?" i asked, conscious of a distinct shiver down my back. but he smiled gravely at the question. "haunted house of life more likely," he replied, and a look came into his eyes which i had only seen there when a human soul was in the toils and he was thick in the fight of rescue. he was stirred in the deeps. "colonel wragge--or the sister?" i asked hurriedly, for the gong was sounding. "neither directly," he said from the door. "something far older, something very, very remote indeed. this thing has to do with the ages, unless i am mistaken greatly, the ages on which the mists of memory have long lain undisturbed." he came across the floor very quickly with a finger on his lips, looking at me with a peculiar searchingness of gaze. "are you aware yet of anything--odd here?" he asked in a whisper. "anything you cannot quite define, for instance. tell me, hubbard, for i want to know all your impressions. they may help me." i shook my head, avoiding his gaze, for there was something in the eyes that scared me a little. but he was so in earnest that i set my mind keenly searching. "nothing yet," i replied truthfully, wishing i could confess to a real emotion; "nothing but the strange heat of the place." he gave a little jump forward in my direction. "the heat again, that's it!" he exclaimed, as though glad of my corroboration. "and how would you describe it, perhaps?" he asked quickly, with a hand on the door knob. "it doesn't seem like ordinary physical heat," i said, casting about in my thoughts for a definition. "more a mental heat," he interrupted, "a glowing of thought and desire, a sort of feverish warmth of the spirit. isn't that it?" i admitted that he had exactly described my sensations. "good!" he said, as he opened the door, and with an indescribable gesture that combined a warning to be ready with a sign of praise for my correct intuition, he was gone. i hurried after him, and found the two men waiting for me in front of the fire. "i ought to warn you," our host was saying as i came in, "that my sister, whom you will meet at dinner, is not aware of the real object of your visit. she is under the impression that we are interested in the same line of study--folklore--and that your researches have led to my seeking acquaintance. she comes to dinner in her chair, you know. it will be a great pleasure to her to meet you both. we have few visitors." so that on entering the dining-room we were prepared to find miss wragge already at her place, seated in a sort of bath-chair. she was a vivacious and charming old lady, with smiling expression and bright eyes, and she chatted all through dinner with unfailing spontaneity. she had that face, unlined and fresh, that some people carry through life from the cradle to the grave; her smooth plump cheeks were all pink and white, and her hair, still dark, was divided into two glossy and sleek halves on either side of a careful parting. she wore gold-rimmed glasses, and at her throat was a large scarab of green jasper that made a very handsome brooch. her brother and dr. silence talked little, so that most of the conversation was carried on between herself and me, and she told me a great deal about the history of the old house, most of which i fear i listened to with but half an ear. "and when cromwell stayed here," she babbled on, "he occupied the very rooms upstairs that used to be mine. but my brother thinks it safer for me to sleep on the ground floor now in case of fire." and this sentence has stayed in my memory only because of the sudden way her brother interrupted her and instantly led the conversation on to another topic. the passing reference to fire seemed to have disturbed him, and thenceforward he directed the talk himself. it was difficult to believe that this lively and animated old lady, sitting beside me and taking so eager an interest in the affairs of life, was practically, we understood, without the use of her lower limbs, and that her whole existence for years had been passed between the sofa, the bed, and the bath-chair in which she chatted so naturally at the dinner table. she made no allusion to her affliction until the dessert was reached, and then, touching a bell, she made us a witty little speech about leaving us "like time, on noiseless feet," and was wheeled out of the room by the butler and carried off to her apartments at the other end of the house. and the rest of us were not long in following suit, for dr. silence and myself were quite as eager to learn the nature of our errand as our host was to impart it to us. he led us down a long flagged passage to a room at the very end of the house, a room provided with double doors, and windows, i saw, heavily shuttered. books lined the walls on every side, and a large desk in the bow window was piled up with volumes, some open, some shut, some showing scraps of paper stuck between the leaves, and all smothered in a general cataract of untidy foolscap and loose-half sheets. "my study and workroom," explained colonel wragge, with a delightful touch of innocent pride, as though he were a very serious scholar. he placed arm-chairs for us round the fire. "here," he added significantly, "we shall be safe from interruption and can talk securely." during dinner the manner of the doctor had been all that was natural and spontaneous, though it was impossible for me, knowing him as i did, not to be aware that he was subconsciously very keenly alert and already receiving upon the ultra-sensitive surface of his mind various and vivid impressions; and there was now something in the gravity of his face, as well as in the significant tone of colonel wragge's speech, and something, too, in the fact that we three were shut away in this private chamber about to listen to things probably strange, and certainly mysterious--something in all this that touched my imagination sharply and sent an undeniable thrill along my nerves. taking the chair indicated by my host, i lit my cigar and waited for the opening of the attack, fully conscious that we were now too far gone in the adventure to admit of withdrawal, and wondering a little anxiously where it was going to lead. what i expected precisely, it is hard to say. nothing definite, perhaps. only the sudden change was dramatic. a few hours before the prosaic atmosphere of piccadilly was about me, and now i was sitting in a secret chamber of this remote old building waiting to hear an account of things that held possibly the genuine heart of terror. i thought of the dreary moors and hills outside, and the dark pine copses soughing in the wind of night; i remembered my companion's singular words up in my bedroom before dinner; and then i turned and noted carefully the stern countenance of the colonel as he faced us and lit his big black cigar before speaking. the threshold of an adventure, i reflected as i waited for the first words, is always the most thrilling moment--until the climax comes. but colonel wragge hesitated--mentally--a long time before he began. he talked briefly of our journey, the weather, the country, and other comparatively trivial topics, while he sought about in his mind for an appropriate entry into the subject that was uppermost in the thoughts of all of us. the fact was he found it a difficult matter to speak of at all, and it was dr. silence who finally showed him the way over the hedge. "mr. hubbard will take a few notes when you are ready--you won't object," he suggested; "i can give my undivided attention in this way." "by all means," turning to reach some of the loose sheets on the writing table, and glancing at me. he still hesitated a little, i thought. "the fact is," he said apologetically, "i wondered if it was quite fair to trouble you so soon. the daylight might suit you better to hear what i have to tell. your sleep, i mean, might be less disturbed, perhaps." "i appreciate your thoughtfulness," john silence replied with his gentle smile, taking command as it were from that moment, "but really we are both quite immune. there is nothing, i think, that could prevent either of us sleeping, except--an outbreak of fire, or some such very physical disturbance." colonel wragge raised his eyes and looked fixedly at him. this reference to an outbreak of fire i felt sure was made with a purpose. it certainly had the desired effect of removing from our host's manner the last signs of hesitancy. "forgive me," he said. "of course, i know nothing of your methods in matters of this kind--so, perhaps, you would like me to begin at once and give you an outline of the situation?" dr. silence bowed his agreement. "i can then take my precautions accordingly," he added calmly. the soldier looked up for a moment as though he did not quite gather the meaning of these words; but he made no further comment and turned at once to tackle a subject on which he evidently talked with diffidence and unwillingness. "it's all so utterly out of my line of things," he began, puffing out clouds of cigar smoke between his words, "and there's so little to tell with any real evidence behind it, that it's almost impossible to make a consecutive story for you. it's the total cumulative effect that is so--so disquieting." he chose his words with care, as though determined not to travel one hair's breadth beyond the truth. "i came into this place twenty years ago when my elder brother died," he continued, "but could not afford to live here then. my sister, whom you met at dinner, kept house for him till the end, and during all these years, while i was seeing service abroad, she had an eye to the place--for we never got a satisfactory tenant--and saw that it was not allowed to go to ruin. i myself took possession, however, only a year ago. "my brother," he went on, after a perceptible pause, "spent much of his time away, too. he was a great traveller, and filled the house with stuff he brought home from all over the world. the laundry--a small detached building beyond the servants' quarters--he turned into a regular little museum. the curios and things i have cleared away--they collected dust and were always getting broken--but the laundry-house you shall see tomorrow." colonel wragge spoke with such deliberation and with so many pauses that this beginning took him a long time. but at this point he came to a full stop altogether. evidently there was something he wished to say that cost him considerable effort. at length he looked up steadily into my companion's face. "may i ask you--that is, if you won't think it strange," he said, and a sort of hush came over his voice and manner, "whether you have noticed anything at all unusual--anything queer, since you came into the house?" dr. silence answered without a moment's hesitation. "i have," he said. "there is a curious sensation of heat in the place." "ah!" exclaimed the other, with a slight start. "you _have_ noticed it. this unaccountable heat--" "but its cause, i gather, is not in the house itself--but outside," i was astonished to hear the doctor add. colonel wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map that hung upon the wall. i got the impression that the movement was made with the deliberate purpose of concealing his face. "your diagnosis, i believe, is amazingly accurate," he said after a moment, turning round with the map in his hands. "though, of course, i can have no idea how you should guess--" john silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. "merely my impression," he said. "if you pay attention to impressions, and do not allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate." colonel wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. his face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story. "on coming into possession," he said, looking us alternately in the face, "i found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and impossible kind i had ever heard--stories which at first i treated with amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only to keep my servants. these stories i thought i traced to the fact of my brother's death--and, in a way, i think so still." he leant forward and handed the map to dr. silence. "it's an old plan of the estate," he explained, "but accurate enough for our purpose, and i wish you would note the position of the plantations marked upon it, especially those near the house. that one," indicating the spot with his finger, "is called the twelve acre plantation. it was just there, on the side nearest the house, that my brother and the head keeper met their deaths." he spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would have preferred to leave untouched--things he personally would rather have treated with ridicule if possible. it made his words peculiarly dignified and impressive, and i listened with an increasing uneasiness as to the sort of help the doctor would look to me for later. it seemed as though i were a spectator of some drama of mystery in which any moment i might be summoned to play a part. "it was twenty years ago," continued the colonel, "but there was much talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have heard of the affair. stride, the keeper, was a passionate, hot-tempered man but i regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them seem to have been frequent." "i do not recall the affair," said the doctor. "may i ask what was the cause of death?" something in his voice made me prick up my ears for the reply. "the keeper, it was said, from suffocation. and at the inquest the doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time when found." "and your brother?" asked john silence, noticing the omission, and listening intently. "equally mysterious," said our host, speaking in a low voice with effort. "but there was one distressing feature i think i ought to mention. for those who saw the face--i did not see it myself--and though stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged--" he stammered and hesitated with confusion. again that sense of terror moved between his words. he stuck. "yes," said the chief listener sympathetically. "my brother's face, they said, looked as though it had been scorched. it had been swept, as it were, by something that burned--blasted. it was, i am told, quite dreadful. the bodies were found lying side by side, faces downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as though they had been in the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards from its edge." dr. silence made no comment. he appeared to be studying the map attentively. "i did not see the face myself," repeated the other, his manner somehow expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice, "but my sister unfortunately did, and her present state i believe to be entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. she never can be brought to refer to it, naturally, and i am even inclined to think that the memory has mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. but she spoke of it at the time as a face swept by flame--blasted." john silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the air of one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently colonel wragge went on with his account. he stood on the mat, his broad shoulders hiding most of the mantelpiece. "they all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. that was to be expected, for the people here are as superstitious as irish peasantry, and though i made one or two examples among them to stop the foolish talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every week. you may imagine how little good dismissals did, when i tell you that the servants dismissed themselves. it was not the house servants, but the men who worked on the estate outside. the keepers gave notice one after another, none of them with any reason i could accept; the foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it. word flew all over the countryside that twelve acre plantation was a place to be avoided, day or night. "there came a point," the colonel went on, now well in his swing, "when i felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. i could not kill the thing by ignoring it; so i collected and analysed the stories at first hand. for this twelve acre wood, you will see by the map, comes rather near home. its lower end, if you will look, almost touches the end of the back lawn, as i will show you tomorrow, and its dense growth of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from the east winds that blow up from the sea. and in olden days, before my brother interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one of the best pheasant coverts on the whole estate." "and what form, if i may ask, did this interference take?" asked dr. silence. "in detail, i cannot tell you, for i do not know--except that i understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall around it. this wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins tomorrow in the daylight." "and the result of your investigations--these stories, i mean?" the doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues. "yes, i'm coming to that," he said slowly, "but the wood first, for this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way peculiar about it. it is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer part in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large boulders--old druid stones, i'm told. at another place there's a small pond. there's nothing distinctive about it that i could mention--just an ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood--only the trees are a bit twisted in the trunks, some of 'em, and very dense. nothing more. "and the stories? well, none of them had anything to do with my poor brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all odd--such odd things, i mean, to invent or imagine. i never could make out how these people got such notions into their heads." he paused a moment to relight his cigar. "there's no regular path through it," he resumed, puffing vigorously, "but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the gardeners whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights in it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of the trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound--most of 'em said that, in fact--and another man saw shapes flitting in and out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all faintly luminous. no one ever pretended to see human forms--always queer, huge things they could not properly describe. sometimes the whole wood was lit up, and one fellow--he's still here and you shall see him--has a most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars lying on the ground round the edge of the wood at regular intervals--" "what kind of stars?" put in john silence sharply, in a sudden way that made me start. "oh, i don't know quite; ordinary stars, i think he said, only very large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. he was too terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them since." he stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze--welcome for its blaze of light rather than for its heat. in the room there was already a strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its effect and far from comforting. "of course," he went on, straightening up again on the mat, "this was all commonplace enough--this seeing lights and figures at night. most of these fellows drink, and imagination and terror between them may account for almost anything. but others saw things in broad daylight. one of the woodmen, a sober, respectable man, took the shortcut home to his midday meal, and swore he was followed the whole length of the wood by something that never showed itself, but dodged from tree to tree, always keeping out of sight, yet solid enough to make the branches sway and the twigs snap on the ground. and it made a noise, he declared--but really"--the speaker stopped and gave a short laugh--"it's too absurd--" "_please!_" insisted the doctor; "for it is these small details that give me the best clues always." "--it made a crackling noise, he said, like a bonfire. those were his very words: like the crackling of a bonfire," finished the soldier, with a repetition of his short laugh. "most interesting," dr. silence observed gravely. "please omit nothing." "yes," he went on, "and it was soon after that the fires began--the fires in the wood. they started mysteriously burning in the patches of coarse white grass that cover the more open parts of the plantation. no one ever actually saw them start, but many, myself among the number, have seen them burning and smouldering. they are always small and circular in shape, and for all the world like a picnic fire. the head keeper has a dozen explanations, from sparks flying out of the house chimneys to the sunlight focusing through a dewdrop, but none of them, i must admit, convince me as being in the least likely or probable. they are most singular, i consider, most singular, these mysterious fires, and i am glad to say that they come only at rather long intervals and never seem to spread. "but the keeper had other queer stories as well, and about things that are verifiable. he declared that no life ever willingly entered the plantation; more, that no life existed in it at all. no birds nested in the trees, or flew into their shade. he set countless traps, but never caught so much as a rabbit or a weasel. animals avoided it, and more than once he had picked up dead creatures round the edges that bore no obvious signs of how they had met their death. "moreover, he told me one extraordinary tale about his retriever chasing some invisible creature across the field one day when he was out with his gun. the dog suddenly pointed at something in the field at his feet, and then gave chase, yelping like a mad thing. it followed its imaginary quarry to the borders of the wood, and then went in--a thing he had never known it to do before. the moment it crossed the edge--it is darkish in there even in daylight--it began fighting in the most frenzied and terrific fashion. it made him afraid to interfere, he said. and at last, when the dog came out, hanging its tail down and panting, he found something like white hair stuck to its jaws, and brought it to show me. i tell you these details because--" "they are important, believe me," the doctor stopped him. "and you have it still, this hair?" he asked. "it disappeared in the oddest way," the colonel explained. "it was curious looking stuff, something like asbestos, and i sent it to be analysed by the local chemist. but either the man got wind of its origin, or else he didn't like the look of it for some reason, because he returned it to me and said it was neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, so far as he could make out, and he didn't wish to have anything to do with it. i put it away in paper, but a week later, on opening the package--it was gone! oh, the stories are simply endless. i could tell you hundreds all on the same lines." "and personal experiences of your own, colonel wragge?" asked john silence earnestly, his manner showing the greatest possible interest and sympathy. the soldier gave an almost imperceptible start. he looked distinctly uncomfortable. "nothing, i think," he said slowly, "nothing--er--i should like to rely on. i mean nothing i have the right to speak of, perhaps--yet." his mouth closed with a snap. dr. silence, after waiting a little to see if he would add to his reply, did not seek to press him on the point. "well," he resumed presently, and as though he would speak contemptuously, yet dared not, "this sort of thing has gone on at intervals ever since. it spreads like wildfire, of course, mysterious chatter of this kind, and people began trespassing all over the estate, coming to see the wood, and making themselves a general nuisance. notices of man-traps and spring-guns only seemed to increase their persistence; and--think of it," he snorted, "some local research society actually wrote and asked permission for one of their members to spend a night in the wood! bolder fools, who didn't write for leave, came and took away bits of bark from the trees and gave them to clairvoyants, who invented in their turn a further batch of tales. there was simply no end to it all." "most distressing and annoying, i can well believe," interposed the doctor. "then suddenly, the phenomena ceased as mysteriously as they had begun, and the interest flagged. the tales stopped. people got interested in something else. it all seemed to die out. this was last july. i can tell you exactly, for i've kept a diary more or less of what happened." "ah!" "but now, quite recently, within the past three weeks, it has all revived again with a rush--with a kind of furious attack, so to speak. it has really become unbearable. you may imagine what it means, and the general state of affairs, when i say that the possibility of leaving has occurred to me." "incendiarism?" suggested dr. silence, half under his breath, but not so low that colonel wragge did not hear him. "by jove, sir, you take the very words out of my mouth!" exclaimed the astonished man, glancing from the doctor to me and from me to the doctor, and rattling the money in his pocket as though some explanation of my friend's divining powers were to be found that way. "it's only that you are thinking very vividly," the doctor said quietly, "and your thoughts form pictures in my mind before you utter them. it's merely a little elementary thought-reading." his intention, i saw, was not to perplex the good man, but to impress him with his powers so as to ensure obedience later. "good lord! i had no idea--" he did not finish the sentence, and dived again abruptly into his narrative. "i did not see anything myself, i must admit, but the stories of independent eye-witnesses were to the effect that lines of light, like streams of thin fire, moved through the wood and sometimes were seen to shoot out precisely as flames might shoot out--in the direction of this house. there," he explained, in a louder voice that made me jump, pointing with a thick finger to the map, "where the westerly fringe of the plantation comes up to the end of the lower lawn at the back of the house--where it links on to those dark patches, which are laurel shrubberies, running right up to the back premises--that's where these lights were seen. they passed from the wood to the shrubberies, and in this way reached the house itself. like silent rockets, one man described them, rapid as lightning and exceedingly bright." "and this evidence you spoke of?" "they actually reached the sides of the house. they've left a mark of scorching on the walls--the walls of the laundry building at the other end. you shall see 'em tomorrow." he pointed to the map to indicate the spot, and then straightened himself and glared about the room as though he had said something no one could believe and expected contradiction. "scorched--just as the faces were," the doctor murmured, looking significantly at me. "scorched--yes," repeated the colonel, failing to catch the rest of the sentence in his excitement. there was a prolonged silence in the room, in which i heard the gurgling of the oil in the lamp and the click of the coals and the heavy breathing of our host. the most unwelcome sensations were creeping about my spine, and i wondered whether my companion would scorn me utterly if i asked to sleep on the sofa in his room. it was eleven o'clock, i saw by the clock on the mantelpiece. we had crossed the dividing line and were now well in the movement of the adventure. the fight between my interest and my dread became acute. but, even if turning back had been possible, i think the interest would have easily gained the day. "i have enemies, of course," i heard the colonel's rough voice break into the pause presently, "and have discharged a number of servants---" "it's not that," put in john silence briefly. "you think not? in a sense i am glad, and yet--there are some things that can be met and dealt with--" he left the sentence unfinished, and looked down at the floor with an expression of grim severity that betrayed a momentary glimpse of character. this fighting man loathed and abhorred the thought of an enemy he could not see and come to grips with. presently he moved over and sat down in the chair between us. something like a sigh escaped him. dr. silence said nothing. "my sister, of course, is kept in ignorance, as far as possible, of all this," he said disconnectedly, and as if talking to himself. "but even if she knew she would find matter-of-fact explanations. i only wish i could. i'm sure they exist." there came then an interval in the conversation that was very significant. it did not seem a real pause, or the silence real silence, for both men continued to think so rapidly and strongly that one almost imagined their thoughts clothed themselves in words in the air of the room. i was more than a little keyed up with the strange excitement of all i had heard, but what stimulated my nerves more than anything else was the obvious fact that the doctor was clearly upon the trail of discovery. in his mind at that moment, i believe, he had already solved the nature of this perplexing psychical problem. his face was like a mask, and he employed the absolute minimum of gesture and words. all his energies were directed inwards, and by those incalculable methods and processes he had mastered with such infinite patience and study, i felt sure he was already in touch with the forces behind these singular phenomena and laying his deep plans for bringing them into the open, and then effectively dealing with them. colonel wragge meanwhile grew more and more fidgety. from time to time he turned towards my companion, as though about to speak, yet always changing his mind at the last moment. once he went over and opened the door suddenly, apparently to see if any one were listening at the keyhole, for he disappeared a moment between the two doors, and i then heard him open the outer one. he stood there for some seconds and made a noise as though he were sniffing the air like a dog. then he closed both doors cautiously and came back to the fireplace. a strange excitement seemed growing upon him. evidently he was trying to make up his mind to say something that he found it difficult to say. and john silence, as i rightly judged, was waiting patiently for him to choose his own opportunity and his own way of saying it. at last he turned and faced us, squaring his great shoulders, and stiffening perceptibly. dr. silence looked up sympathetically. "your own experiences help me most," he observed quietly. "the fact is," the colonel said, speaking very low, "this past week there have been outbreaks of fire in the house itself. three separate outbreaks--and all--in my sister's room." "yes," the doctor said, as if this was just what he had expected to hear. "utterly unaccountable--all of them," added the other, and then sat down. i began to understand something of the reason of his excitement. he was realising at last that the "natural" explanation he had held to all along was becoming impossible, and he hated it. it made him angry. "fortunately," he went on, "she was out each time and does not know. but i have made her sleep now in a room on the ground floor." "a wise precaution," the doctor said simply. he asked one or two questions. the fires had started in the curtains--once by the window and once by the bed. the third time smoke had been discovered by the maid coming from the cupboard, and it was found that miss wragge's clothes hanging on the hooks were smouldering. the doctor listened attentively, but made no comment. "and now can you tell me," he said presently, "what your own feeling about it is--your general impression?" "it sounds foolish to say so," replied the soldier, after a moment's hesitation, "but i feel exactly as i have often felt on active service in my indian campaigns: just as if the house and all in it were in a state of siege; as though a concealed enemy were encamped about us--in ambush somewhere." he uttered a soft nervous laugh. "as if the next sign of smoke would precipitate a panic--a dreadful panic." the picture came before me of the night shadowing the house, and the twisted pine trees he had described crowding about it, concealing some powerful enemy; and, glancing at the resolute face and figure of the old soldier, forced at length to his confession, i understood something of all he had been through before he sought the assistance of john silence. "and tomorrow, unless i am mistaken, is full moon," said the doctor suddenly, watching the other's face for the effect of his apparently careless words. colonel wragge gave an uncontrollable start, and his face for the first time showed unmistakable pallor. "what in the world---?" he began, his lip quivering. "only that i am beginning to see light in this extraordinary affair," returned the other calmly, "and, if my theory is correct, each month when the moon is at the full should witness an increase in the activity of the phenomena." "i don't see the connection," colonel wragge answered almost savagely, "but i am bound to say my diary bears you out." he wore the most puzzled expression i have ever seen upon an honest face, but he abhorred this additional corroboration of an explanation that perplexed him. "i confess," he repeated, "i cannot see the connection." "why should you?" said the doctor, with his first laugh that evening. he got up and hung the map upon the wall again. "but i do--because these things are my special study--and let me add that i have yet to come across a problem that is not natural, and has not a natural explanation. it's merely a question of how much one knows--and admits." colonel wragge eyed him with a new and curious respect in his face. but his feelings were soothed. moreover, the doctor's laugh and change of manner came as a relief to all, and broke the spell of grave suspense that had held us so long. we all rose and stretched our limbs, and took little walks about the room. "i am glad, dr. silence, if you will allow me to say so, that you are here," he said simply, "very glad indeed. and now i fear i have kept you both up very late," with a glance to include me, "for you must be tired, and ready for your beds. i have told you all there is to tell," he added, "and tomorrow you must feel perfectly free to take any steps you think necessary." the end was abrupt, yet natural, for there was nothing more to say, and neither of these men talked for mere talking's sake. out in the cold and chilly hall he lit our candles and took us upstairs. the house was at rest and still, every one asleep. we moved softly. through the windows on the stairs we saw the moonlight falling across the lawn, throwing deep shadows. the nearer pine trees were just visible in the distance, a wall of impenetrable blackness. our host came for a moment to our rooms to see that we had everything. he pointed to a coil of strong rope lying beside the window, fastened to the wall by means of an iron ring. evidently it had been recently put in. "i don't think we shall need it," dr. silence said, with a smile. "i trust not," replied our host gravely. "i sleep quite close to you across the landing," he whispered, pointing to his door, "and if you--if you want anything in the night you will know where to find me." he wished us pleasant dreams and disappeared down the passage into his room, shading the candle with his big muscular hand from the draughts. john silence stopped me a moment before i went. "you know what it is?" i asked, with an excitement that even overcame my weariness. "yes," he said, "i'm almost sure. and you?" "not the smallest notion." he looked disappointed, but not half as disappointed as i felt. "egypt," he whispered, "egypt!" ii nothing happened to disturb me in the night--nothing, that is, except a nightmare in which colonel wragge chased me amid thin streaks of fire, and his sister always prevented my escape by suddenly rising up out of the ground in her chair--dead. the deep baying of dogs woke me once, just before the dawn, it must have been, for i saw the window frame against the sky; there was a flash of lightning, too, i thought, as i turned over in bed. and it was warm, for october oppressively warm. it was after eleven o'clock when our host suggested going out with the guns, these, we understood, being a somewhat thin disguise for our true purpose. personally, i was glad to be in the open air, for the atmosphere of the house was heavy with presentiment. the sense of impending disaster hung over all. fear stalked the passages, and lurked in the corners of every room. it was a house haunted, but really haunted; not by some vague shadow of the dead, but by a definite though incalculable influence that was actively alive, and dangerous. at the least smell of smoke the entire household quivered. an odour of burning, i was convinced, would paralyse all the inmates. for the servants, though professedly ignorant by the master's unspoken orders, yet shared the common dread; and the hideous uncertainty, joined with this display of so spiteful and calculated a spirit of malignity, provided a kind of black doom that draped not only the walls, but also the minds of the people living within them. only the bright and cheerful vision of old miss wragge being pushed about the house in her noiseless chair, chatting and nodding briskly to every one she met, prevented us from giving way entirely to the depression which governed the majority. the sight of her was like a gleam of sunshine through the depths of some ill-omened wood, and just as we went out i saw her being wheeled along by her attendant into the sunshine of the back lawn, and caught her cheery smile as she turned her head and wished us good sport. the morning was october at its best. sunshine glistened on the dew-drenched grass and on leaves turned golden-red. the dainty messengers of coming hoar-frost were already in the air, a search for permanent winter quarters. from the wide moors that everywhere swept up against the sky, like a purple sea splashed by the occasional grey of rocky clefts, there stole down the cool and perfumed wind of the west. and the keen taste of the sea ran through all like a master-flavour, borne over the spaces perhaps by the seagulls that cried and circled high in the air. but our host took little interest in this sparkling beauty, and had no thought of showing off the scenery of his property. his mind was otherwise intent, and, for that matter, so were our own. "those bleak moors and hills stretch unbroken for hours," he said, with a sweep of the hand; "and over there, some four miles," pointing in another direction, "lies s---- bay, a long, swampy inlet of the sea, haunted by myriads of seabirds. on the other side of the house are the plantations and pine-woods. i thought we would get the dogs and go first to the twelve acre wood i told you about last night. it's quite near." we found the dogs in the stable, and i recalled the deep baying of the night when a fine bloodhound and two great danes leaped out to greet us. singular companions for guns, i thought to myself, as we struck out across the fields and the great creatures bounded and ran beside us, nose to ground. the conversation was scanty. john silence's grave face did not encourage talk. he wore the expression i knew well--that look of earnest solicitude which meant that his whole being was deeply absorbed and preoccupied. frightened, i had never seen him, but anxious often--it always moved me to witness it--and he was anxious now. "on the way back you shall see the laundry building," colonel wragge observed shortly, for he, too, found little to say. "we shall attract less attention then." yet not all the crisp beauty of the morning seemed able to dispel the feelings of uneasy dread that gathered increasingly about our minds as we went. in a very few minutes a clump of pine trees concealed the house from view, and we found ourselves on the outskirts of a densely grown plantation of conifers. colonel wragge stopped abruptly, and, producing a map from his pocket, explained once more very briefly its position with regard to the house. he showed how it ran up almost to the walls of the laundry building--though at the moment beyond our actual view--and pointed to the windows of his sister's bedroom where the fires had been. the room, now empty, looked straight on to the wood. then, glancing nervously about him, and calling the dogs to heel, he proposed that we should enter the plantation and make as thorough examination of it as we thought worth while. the dogs, he added, might perhaps be persuaded to accompany us a little way--and he pointed to where they cowered at his feet--but he doubted it. "neither voice nor whip will get them very far, i'm afraid," he said. "i know by experience." "if you have no objection," replied dr. silence, with decision, and speaking almost for the first time, "we will make our examination alone--mr. hubbard and myself. it will be best so." his tone was absolutely final, and the colonel acquiesced so politely that even a less intuitive man than myself must have seen that he was genuinely relieved. "you doubtless have good reasons," he said. "merely that i wish to obtain my impressions uncoloured. this delicate clue i am working on might be so easily blurred by the thought-currents of another mind with strongly preconceived ideas." "perfectly. i understand," rejoined the soldier, though with an expression of countenance that plainly contradicted his words. "then i will wait here with the dogs; and we'll have a look at the laundry on our way home." i turned once to look back as we clambered over the low stone wall built by the late owner, and saw his straight, soldierly figure standing in the sunlit field watching us with a curiously intent look on his face. there was something to me incongruous, yet distinctly pathetic, in the man's efforts to meet all far-fetched explanations of the mystery with contempt, and at the same time in his stolid, unswerving investigation of it all. he nodded at me and made a gesture of farewell with his hand. that picture of him, standing in the sunshine with his big dogs, steadily watching us, remains with me to this day. dr. silence led the way in among the twisted trunks, planted closely together in serried ranks, and i followed sharp at his heels. the moment we were out of sight he turned and put down his gun against the roots of a big tree, and i did likewise. "we shall hardly want these cumbersome weapons of murder," he observed, with a passing smile. "you are sure of your clue, then?" i asked at once, bursting with curiosity, yet fearing to betray it lest he should think me unworthy. his own methods were so absolutely simple and untheatrical. "i am sure of my clue," he answered gravely. "and i think we have come just in time. you shall know in due course. for the present--be content to follow and observe. and think, steadily. the support of your mind will help me." his voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death with a sort of happiness and pride. i would have followed him anywhere at that moment. at the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread seriousness. i caught the thrill of his confidence; but also, in this broad light of day, i felt the measure of alarm that lay behind. "you still have no strong impressions?" he asked. "nothing happened in the night, for instance? no vivid dreamings?" he looked closely for my answer, i was aware. "i slept almost an unbroken sleep. i was tremendously tired, you know, and, but for the oppressive heat--" "good! you still notice the heat, then," he said to himself, rather than expecting an answer. "and the lightning?" he added, "that lightning out of a clear sky--that flashing--did you notice _that_?" i answered truly that i thought i had seen a flash during a moment of wakefulness, and he then drew my attention to certain facts before moving on. "you remember the sensation of warmth when you put the letter to your forehead in the train; the heat generally in the house last evening, and, as you now mention, in the night. you heard, too, the colonel's stories about the appearances of fire in this wood and in the house itself, and the way his brother and the gamekeeper came to their deaths twenty years ago." i nodded, wondering what in the world it all meant. "and you get no clue from these facts?" he asked, a trifle surprised. i searched every corner of my mind and imagination for some inkling of his meaning, but was obliged to admit that i understood nothing so far. "never mind, you will later. and now," he added, "we will go over the wood and see what we can find." his words explained to me something of his method. we were to keep our minds alert and report to each other the least fancy that crossed the picture-gallery of our thoughts. then, just as we started, he turned again to me with a final warning. "and, for your safety," he said earnestly, "imagine _now_--and for that matter, imagine always until we leave this place--imagine with the utmost keenness, that you are surrounded by a shell that protects you. picture yourself inside a protective envelope, and build it up with the most intense imagination you can evoke. pour the whole force of your thought and will into it. believe vividly all through this adventure that such a shell, constructed of your thought, will and imagination, surrounds you completely, and that nothing can pierce it to attack." he spoke with dramatic conviction, gazing hard at me as though to enforce his meaning, and then moved forward and began to pick his way over the rough, tussocky ground into the wood. and meanwhile, knowing the efficacy of his prescription, i adopted it to the best of my ability. the trees at once closed about us like the night. their branches met overhead in a continuous tangle, their stems crept closer and closer, the brambly undergrowth thickened and multiplied. we tore our trousers, scratched our hands, and our eyes filled with fine dust that made it most difficult to avoid the clinging, prickly network of branches and creepers. coarse white grass that caught our feet like string grew here and there in patches. it crowned the lumps of peaty growth that stuck up like human heads, fantastically dressed, thrusting up at us out of the ground with crests of dead hair. we stumbled and floundered among them. it was hard going, and i could well conceive it impossible to find a way at all in the night-time. we jumped, when possible, from tussock to tussock, and it seemed as though we were springing among heads on a battlefield, and that this dead white grass concealed eyes that turned to stare as we passed. here and there the sunlight shot in with vivid spots of white light, dazzling the sight, but only making the surrounding gloom deeper by contrast. and on two occasions we passed dark circular places in the grass where fires had eaten their mark and left a ring of ashes. dr. silence pointed to them, but without comment and without pausing, and the sight of them woke in me a singular realisation of the dread that lay so far only just out of sight in this adventure. it was exhausting work, and heavy going. we kept close together. the warmth, too, was extraordinary. yet it did not seem the warmth of the body due to violent exertion, but rather an inner heat of the mind that laid glowing hands of fire upon the heart and set the brain in a kind of steady blaze. when my companion found himself too far in advance, he waited for me to come up. the place had evidently been untouched by hand of man, keeper, forester or sportsman, for many a year; and my thoughts, as we advanced painfully, were not unlike the state of the wood itself--dark, confused, full of a haunting wonder and the shadow of fear. by this time all signs of the open field behind us were hid. no single gleam penetrated. we might have been groping in the heart of some primeval forest. then, suddenly, the brambles and tussocks and stringlike grass came to an end; the trees opened out; and the ground began to slope upwards towards a large central mound. we had reached the middle of the plantation, and before us stood the broken druid stones our host had mentioned. we walked easily up the little hill, between the sparser stems, and, resting upon one of the ivy-covered boulders, looked round upon a comparatively open space, as large, perhaps, as a small london square. thinking of the ceremonies and sacrifices this rough circle of prehistoric monoliths might have witnessed, i looked up into my companion's face with an unspoken question. but he read my thought and shook his head. "our mystery has nothing to do with these dead symbols," he said, "but with something perhaps even more ancient, and of another country altogether." "egypt?" i said half under my breath, hopelessly puzzled, but recalling his words in my bedroom. he nodded. mentally i still floundered, but he seemed intensely preoccupied and it was no time for asking questions; so while his words circled unintelligibly in my mind i looked round at the scene before me, glad of the opportunity to recover breath and some measure of composure. but hardly had i time to notice the twisted and contorted shapes of many of the pine trees close at hand when dr. silence leaned over and touched me on the shoulder. he pointed down the slope. and the look i saw in his eyes keyed up every nerve in my body to its utmost pitch. a thin, almost imperceptible column of blue smoke was rising among the trees some twenty yards away at the foot of the mound. it curled up and up, and disappeared from sight among the tangled branches overhead. it was scarcely thicker than the smoke from a small brand of burning wood. "protect yourself! imagine your shell strongly," whispered the doctor sharply, "and follow me closely." he rose at once and moved swiftly down the slope towards the smoke, and i followed, afraid to remain alone. i heard the soft crunching of our steps on the pine needles. over his shoulder i watched the thin blue spiral, without once taking my eyes off it. i hardly know how to describe the peculiar sense of vague horror inspired in me by the sight of that streak of smoke pencilling its way upwards among the dark trees. and the sensation of increasing heat as we approached was phenomenal. it was like walking towards a glowing yet invisible fire. as we drew nearer his pace slackened. then he stopped and pointed, and i saw a small circle of burnt grass upon the ground. the tussocks were blackened and smouldering, and from the centre rose this line of smoke, pale, blue, steady. then i noticed a movement of the atmosphere beside us, as if the warm air were rising and the cooler air rushing in to take its place: a little centre of wind in the stillness. overhead the boughs stirred and trembled where the smoke disappeared. otherwise, not a tree sighed, not a sound made itself heard. the wood was still as a graveyard. a horrible idea came to me that the course of nature was about to change without warning, had changed a little already, that the sky would drop, or the surface of the earth crash inwards like a broken bubble. something, certainly, reached up to the citadel of my reason, causing its throne to shake. john silence moved forward again. i could not see his face, but his attitude was plainly one of resolution, of muscles and mind ready for vigorous action. we were within ten feet of the blackened circle when the smoke of a sudden ceased to rise, and vanished. the tail of the column disappeared in the air above, and at the same instant it seemed to me that the sensation of heat passed from my face, and the motion of the wind was gone. the calm spirit of the fresh october day resumed command. side by side we advanced and examined the place. the grass was smouldering, the ground still hot. the circle of burned earth was a foot to a foot and a half in diameter. it looked like an ordinary picnic fireplace. i bent down cautiously to look, but in a second i sprang back with an involuntary cry of alarm, for, as the doctor stamped on the ashes to prevent them spreading, a sound of hissing rose from the spot as though he had kicked a living creature. this hissing was faintly audible in the air. it moved past us, away towards the thicker portion of the wood in the direction of our field, and in a second dr. silence had left the fire and started in pursuit. and then began the most extraordinary hunt of invisibility i can ever conceive. he went fast even at the beginning, and, of course, it was perfectly obvious that he was following something. to judge by the poise of his head he kept his eyes steadily at a certain level--just above the height of a man--and the consequence was he stumbled a good deal over the roughness of the ground. the hissing sound had stopped. there was no sound of any kind, and what he saw to follow was utterly beyond me. i only know, that in mortal dread of being left behind, and with a biting curiosity to see whatever there was to be seen, i followed as quickly as i could, and even then barely succeeded in keeping up with him. and, as we went, the whole mad jumble of the colonel's stories ran through my brain, touching a sense of frightened laughter that was only held in check by the sight of this earnest, hurrying figure before me. for john silence at work inspired me with a kind of awe. he looked so diminutive among these giant twisted trees, while yet i knew that his purpose and his knowledge were so great, and even in hurry he was dignified. the fancy that we were playing some queer, exaggerated game together met the fact that we were two men dancing upon the brink of some possible tragedy, and the mingling of the two emotions in my mind was both grotesque and terrifying. he never turned in his mad chase, but pushed rapidly on, while i panted after him like a figure in some unreasoning nightmare. and, as i ran, it came upon me that he had been aware all the time, in his quiet, internal way, of many things that he had kept for his own secret consideration; he had been watching, waiting, planning from the very moment we entered the shade of the wood. by some inner, concentrated process of mind, dynamic if not actually magical, he had been in direct contact with the source of the whole adventure, the very essence of the real mystery. and now the forces were moving to a climax. something was about to happen, something important, something possibly dreadful. every nerve, every sense, every significant gesture of the plunging figure before me proclaimed the fact just as surely as the skies, the winds, and the face of the earth tell the birds the time to migrate and warn the animals that danger lurks and they must move. in a few moments we reached the foot of the mound and entered the tangled undergrowth that lay between us and the sunlight of the field. here the difficulties of fast travelling increased a hundredfold. there were brambles to dodge, low boughs to dive under, and countless tree trunks closing up to make a direct path impossible. yet dr. silence never seemed to falter or hesitate. he went, diving, jumping, dodging, ducking, but ever in the same main direction, following a clean trail. twice i tripped and fell, and both times, when i picked myself up again, i saw him ahead of me, still forcing a way like a dog after its quarry. and sometimes, like a dog, he stopped and pointed--human pointing it was, psychic pointing, and each time he stopped to point i heard that faint high hissing in the air beyond us. the instinct of an infallible dowser possessed him, and he made no mistakes. at length, abruptly, i caught up with him, and found that we stood at the edge of the shallow pond colonel wragge had mentioned in his account the night before. it was long and narrow, filled with dark brown water, in which the trees were dimly reflected. not a ripple stirred its surface. "watch!" he cried out, as i came up. "it's going to cross. it's bound to betray itself. the water is its natural enemy, and we shall see the direction." and, even as he spoke, a thin line like the track of a water-spider, shot swiftly across the shiny surface; there was a ghost of steam in the air above; and immediately i became aware of an odour of burning. dr. silence turned and shot a glance at me that made me think of lightning. i began to shake all over. "quick!" he cried with excitement, "to the trail again! we must run around. it's going to the house!" the alarm in his voice quite terrified me. without a false step i dashed round the slippery banks and dived again at his heels into the sea of bushes and tree trunks. we were now in the thick of the very dense belt that ran around the outer edge of the plantation, and the field was near; yet so dark was the tangle that it was some time before the first shafts of white sunlight became visible. the doctor now ran in zigzags. he was following something that dodged and doubled quite wonderfully, yet had begun, i fancied, to move more slowly than before. "quick!" he cried. "in the light we shall lose it!" i still saw nothing, heard nothing, caught no suggestion of a trail; yet this man, guided by some interior divining that seemed infallible, made no false turns, though how he failed to crash headlong into the trees has remained a mystery to me ever since. and then, with a sudden rush, we found ourselves on the skirts of the wood with the open field lying in bright sunshine before our eyes. "too late!" i heard him cry, a note of anguish in his voice. "it's out--and, by god, it's making for the house!" i saw the colonel standing in the field with his dogs where we had left him. he was bending double, peering into the wood where he heard us running, and he straightened up like a bent whip released. john silence dashed passed, calling him to follow. "we shall lose the trail in the light," i heard him cry as he ran. "but quick! we may yet get there in time!" that wild rush across the open field, with the dogs at our heels, leaping and barking, and the elderly colonel behind us running as though for his life, shall i ever forget it? though i had only vague ideas of the meaning of it all, i put my best foot forward, and, being the youngest of the three, i reached the house an easy first. i drew up, panting, and turned to wait for the others. but, as i turned, something moving a little distance away caught my eye, and in that moment i swear i experienced the most overwhelming and singular shock of surprise and terror i have ever known, or can conceive as possible. for the front door was open, and the waist of the house being narrow, i could see through the hall into the dining-room beyond, and so out on to the back lawn, and there i saw no less a sight than the figure of miss wragge--running. even at that distance it was plain that she had seen me, and was coming fast towards me, running with the frantic gait of a terror-stricken woman. she had recovered the use of her legs. her face was a livid grey, as of death itself, but the general expression was one of laughter, for her mouth was gaping, and her eyes, always bright, shone with the light of a wild merriment that seemed the merriment of a child, yet was singularly ghastly. and that very second, as she fled past me into her brother's arms behind, i smelt again most unmistakably the odour of burning, and to this day the smell of smoke and fire can come very near to turning me sick with the memory of what i had seen. fast on her heels, too, came the terrified attendant, more mistress of herself, and able to speak--which the old lady could not do--but with a face almost, if not quite, as fearful. "we were down by the bushes in the sun,"--she gasped and screamed in reply to colonel wragge's distracted questionings,--"i was wheeling the chair as usual when she shrieked and leaped--i don't know exactly--i was too frightened to see--oh, my god! she jumped clean out of the chair--_and ran_! there was a blast of hot air from the wood, and she hid her face and jumped. she didn't make a sound--she didn't cry out, or make a sound. she just ran." but the nightmare horror of it all reached the breaking point a few minutes later, and while i was still standing in the hall temporarily bereft of speech and movement; for while the doctor, the colonel and the attendant were half-way up the staircase, helping the fainting woman to the privacy of her room, and all in a confused group of dark figures, there sounded a voice behind me, and i turned to see the butler, his face dripping with perspiration, his eyes starting out of his head. "the laundry's on fire!" he cried; "the laundry building's a-caught!" i remember his odd expression "a-caught," and wanting to laugh, but finding my face rigid and inflexible. "the devil's about again, s'help me gawd!" he cried, in a voice thin with terror, running about in circles. and then the group on the stairs scattered as at the sound of a shot, and the colonel and dr. silence came down three steps at a time, leaving the afflicted miss wragge to the care of her single attendant. we were out across the front lawn in a moment and round the corner of the house, the colonel leading, silence and i at his heels, and the portly butler puffing some distance in the rear, getting more and more mixed in his addresses to god and the devil; and the moment we passed the stables and came into view of the laundry building, we saw a wicked-looking volume of smoke pouring out of the narrow windows, and the frightened women-servants and grooms running hither and thither, calling aloud as they ran. the arrival of the master restored order instantly, and this retired soldier, poor thinker perhaps, but capable man of action, had the matter in hand from the start. he issued orders like a martinet, and, almost before i could realise it, there were streaming buckets on the scene and a line of men and women formed between the building and the stable pump. "inside," i heard john silence cry, and the colonel followed him through the door, while i was just quick enough at their heels to hear him add, "the smoke's the worst part of it. there's no fire yet, i think." and, true enough, there was no fire. the interior was thick with smoke, but it speedily cleared and not a single bucket was used upon the floor or walls. the air was stifling, the heat fearful. "there's precious little to burn in here; it's all stone," the colonel exclaimed, coughing. but the doctor was pointing to the wooden covers of the great cauldron in which the clothes were washed, and we saw that these were smouldering and charred. and when we sprinkled half a bucket of water on them the surrounding bricks hissed and fizzed and sent up clouds of steam. through the open door and windows this passed out with the rest of the smoke, and we three stood there on the brick floor staring at the spot and wondering, each in our own fashion, how in the name of natural law the place could have caught fire or smoked at all. and each was silent--myself from sheer incapacity and befuddlement, the colonel from the quiet pluck that faces all things yet speaks little, and john silence from the intense mental grappling with this latest manifestation of a profound problem that called for concentration of thought rather than for any words. there was really nothing to say. the facts were indisputable. colonel wragge was the first to utter. "my sister," he said briefly, and moved off. in the yard i heard him sending the frightened servants about their business in an excellently matter-of-fact voice, scolding some one roundly for making such a big fire and letting the flues get over-heated, and paying no heed to the stammering reply that no fire had been lit there for several days. then he dispatched a groom on horseback for the local doctor. then dr. silence turned and looked at me. the absolute control he possessed, not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture, change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as i well knew, over its very birth in his heart, the masklike face of the dead he could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at any given moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. but now, when he turned and looked at me, there was no sphinx-expression there, but rather the keen triumphant face of a man who had solved a dangerous and complicated problem, and saw his way to a clean victory. "_now_ do you guess?" he asked quietly, as though it were the simplest matter in the world, and ignorance were impossible. i could only stare stupidly and remain silent. he glanced down at the charred cauldron-lids, and traced a figure in the air with his finger. but i was too excited, or too mortified, or still too dazed, perhaps, to see what it was he outlined, or what it was he meant to convey. i could only go on staring and shaking my puzzled head. "a fire-elemental," he cried, "a fire-elemental of the most powerful and malignant kind--" "a what?" thundered the voice of colonel wragge behind us, having returned suddenly and overheard. "it's a fire-elemental," repeated dr. silence more calmly, but with a note of triumph in his voice he could not keep out, "and a fire-elemental enraged." the light began to dawn in my mind at last. but the colonel--who had never heard the term before, and was besides feeling considerably worked up for a plain man with all this mystery he knew not how to grapple with--the colonel stood, with the most dumfoundered look ever seen on a human countenance, and continued to roar, and stammer, and stare. "and why," he began, savage with the desire to find something visible he could fight--"why, in the name of all the blazes--?" and then stopped as john silence moved up and took his arm. "there, my dear colonel wragge," he said gently, "you touch the heart of the whole thing. you ask 'why.' that is precisely our problem." he held the soldier's eyes firmly with his own. "and that, too, i think, we shall soon know. come and let us talk over a plan of action--that room with the double doors, perhaps." the word "action" calmed him a little, and he led the way, without further speech, back into the house, and down the long stone passage to the room where we had heard his stories on the night of our arrival. i understood from the doctor's glance that my presence would not make the interview easier for our host, and i went upstairs to my own room--shaking. but in the solitude of my room the vivid memories of the last hour revived so mercilessly that i began to feel i should never in my whole life lose the dreadful picture of miss wragge running--that dreadful human climax after all the non-human mystery in the wood--and i was not sorry when a servant knocked at my door and said that colonel wragge would be glad if i would join them in the little smoking-room. "i think it is better you should be present," was all colonel wragge said as i entered the room. i took the chair with my back to the window. there was still an hour before lunch, though i imagine that the usual divisions of the day hardly found a place in the thoughts of any one of us. the atmosphere of the room was what i might call electric. the colonel was positively bristling; he stood with his back to the fire, fingering an unlit black cigar, his face flushed, his being obviously roused and ready for action. he hated this mystery. it was poisonous to his nature, and he longed to meet something face to face--something he could gauge and fight. dr. silence, i noticed at once, was sitting before the map of the estate which was spread upon a table. i knew by his expression the state of his mind. he was in the thick of it all, knew it, delighted in it, and was working at high pressure. he recognised my presence with a lifted eyelid, and the flash of the eye, contrasted with his stillness and composure, told me volumes. "i was about to explain to our host briefly what seems to me afoot in all this business," he said without looking up, "when he asked that you should join us so that we can all work together." and, while signifying my assent, i caught myself wondering what quality it was in the calm speech of this undemonstrative man that was so full of power, so charged with the strange, virile personality behind it and that seemed to inspire us with his own confidence as by a process of radiation. "mr. hubbard," he went on gravely, turning to the soldier, "knows something of my methods, and in more than one--er--interesting situation has proved of assistance. what we want now"--and here he suddenly got up and took his place on the mat beside the colonel, and looked hard at him--"is men who have self-control, who are sure of themselves, whose minds at the critical moment will emit positive forces, instead of the wavering and uncertain currents due to negative feelings--due, for instance, to fear." he looked at us each in turn. colonel wragge moved his feet farther apart, and squared his shoulders; and i felt guilty but said nothing, conscious that my latent store of courage was being deliberately hauled to the front. he was winding me up like a clock. "so that, in what is yet to come," continued our leader, "each of us will contribute his share of power, and ensure success for my plan." "i'm not afraid of anything i can _see_," said the colonel bluntly. "i'm ready," i heard myself say, as it were automatically, "for anything," and then added, feeling the declaration was lamely insufficient, "and everything." dr. silence left the mat and began walking to and fro about the room, both hands plunged deep into the pockets of his shooting-jacket. tremendous vitality streamed from him. i never took my eyes off the small, moving figure; small yes,--and yet somehow making me think of a giant plotting the destruction of worlds. and his manner was gentle, as always, soothing almost, and his words uttered quietly without emphasis or emotion. most of what he said was addressed, though not too obviously, to the colonel. "the violence of this sudden attack," he said softly, pacing to and fro beneath the bookcase at the end of the room, "is due, of course, partly to the fact that tonight the moon is at the full"--here he glanced at me for a moment--"and partly to the fact that we have all been so deliberately concentrating upon the matter. our thinking, our investigation, has stirred it into unusual activity. i mean that the intelligent force behind these manifestations has realised that some one is busied about its destruction. and it is now on the defensive: more, it is aggressive." "but 'it'--what is 'it'?" began the soldier, fuming. "what, in the name of all that's dreadful, _is_ a fire-elemental?" "i cannot give you at this moment," replied dr. silence, turning to him, but undisturbed by the interruption, "a lecture on the nature and history of magic, but can only say that an elemental is the active force behind the elements,--whether earth, air, water, _or fire_,--it is impersonal in its essential nature, but can be focused, personified, ensouled, so to say, by those who know how--by magicians, if you will--for certain purposes of their own, much in the same way that steam and electricity can be harnessed by the practical man of this century. "alone, these blind elemental energies can accomplish little, but governed and directed by the trained will of a powerful manipulator they may become potent activities for good or evil. they are the basis of all magic, and it is the motive behind them that constitutes the magic 'black' or 'white'; they can be the vehicles of curses or of blessings, for a curse is nothing more than the thought of a violent will perpetuated. and in such cases--cases like this--the conscious, directing will of the mind that is using the elemental stands always behind the phenomena--" "you think that my brother--!" broke in the colonel, aghast. "has nothing whatever to do with it--directly. the fire-elemental that has here been tormenting you and your household was sent upon its mission long before you, or your family, or your ancestors, or even the nation you belong to--unless i am much mistaken--was even in existence. we will come to that a little later; after the experiment i propose to make we shall be more positive. at present i can only say we have to deal now, not only with the phenomenon of attacking fire merely, but with the vindictive and enraged intelligence that is directing it from behind the scenes--vindictive and enraged,"--he repeated the words. "that explains--" began colonel wragge, seeking furiously for words he could not find quickly enough. "much," said john silence, with a gesture to restrain him. he stopped a moment in the middle of his walk, and a deep silence came down over the little room. through the windows the sunlight seemed less bright, the long line of dark hills less friendly, making me think of a vast wave towering to heaven and about to break and overwhelm us. something formidable had crept into the world about us. for, undoubtedly, there was a disquieting thought, holding terror as well as awe, in the picture his words conjured up: the conception of a human will reaching its deathless hand, spiteful and destructive, down through the ages, to strike the living and afflict the innocent. "but what is its object?" burst out the soldier, unable to restrain himself longer in the silence. "why does it come from that plantation? and why should it attack us, or any one in particular?" questions began to pour from him in a stream. "all in good time," the doctor answered quietly, having let him run on for several minutes. "but i must first discover positively what, or who, it is that directs this particular fire-elemental. and, to do that, we must first"--he spoke with slow deliberation--"seek to capture--to confine by visibility--to limit its sphere in a concrete form." "good heavens almighty!" exclaimed the soldier, mixing his words in his unfeigned surprise. "quite so," pursued the other calmly; "for in so doing i think we can release it from the purpose that binds it, restore it to its normal condition of latent fire, and also"--he lowered his voice perceptibly --"also discover the face and form of the being that ensouls it." "the man behind the gun!" cried the colonel, beginning to understand something, and leaning forward so as not to miss a single syllable. "i mean that in the last resort, before it returns to the womb of potential fire, it will probably assume the face and figure of its director, of the man of magical knowledge who originally bound it with his incantations and sent it forth upon its mission of centuries." the soldier sat down and gasped openly in his face, breathing hard; but it was a very subdued voice that framed the question. "and how do you propose to make it visible? how capture and confine it? what d'ye mean, dr. john silence?" "by furnishing it with the materials for a form. by the process of materialisation simply. once limited by dimensions, it will become slow, heavy, visible. we can then dissipate it. invisible fire, you see, is dangerous and incalculable; locked up in a form we can perhaps manage it. we must betray it--to its death." "and this material?" we asked in the same breath, although i think i had already guessed. "not pleasant, but effective," came the quiet reply; "the exhalations of freshly spilled blood." "not human blood!" cried colonel wragge, starting up from his chair with a voice like an explosion. i thought his eyes would start from their sockets. the face of dr. silence relaxed in spite of himself, and his spontaneous little laugh brought a welcome though momentary relief. "the days of human sacrifice, i hope, will never come again," he explained. "animal blood will answer the purpose, and we can make the experiment as pleasant as possible. only, the blood must be freshly spilled and strong with the vital emanations that attract this peculiar class of elemental creature. perhaps--perhaps if some pig on the estate is ready for the market--" he turned to hide a smile; but the passing touch of comedy found no echo in the mind of our host, who did not understand how to change quickly from one emotion to another. clearly he was debating many things laboriously in his honest brain. but, in the end, the earnestness and scientific disinterestedness of the doctor, whose influence over him was already very great, won the day, and he presently looked up more calmly, and observed shortly that he thought perhaps the matter could be arranged. "there are other and pleasanter methods," dr. silence went on to explain, "but they require time and preparation, and things have gone much too far, in my opinion, to admit of delay. and the process need cause you no distress: we sit round the bowl and await results. nothing more. the emanations of blood--which, as levi says, is the first incarnation of the universal fluid--furnish the materials out of which the creatures of discarnate life, spirits if you prefer, can fashion themselves a temporary appearance. the process is old, and lies at the root of all blood sacrifice. it was known to the priests of baal, and it is known to the modern ecstasy dancers who cut themselves to produce objective phantoms who dance with them. and the least gifted clairvoyant could tell you that the forms to be seen in the vicinity of slaughter-houses, or hovering above the deserted battlefields, are--well, simply beyond all description. i do not mean," he added, noticing the uneasy fidgeting of his host, "that anything in our laundry-experiment need appear to terrify us, for this case seems a comparatively simple one, and it is only the vindictive character of the intelligence directing this fire-elemental that causes anxiety and makes for personal danger." "it is curious," said the colonel, with a sudden rush of words, drawing a deep breath, and as though speaking of things distasteful to him, "that during my years among the hill tribes of northern india i came across--personally came across--instances of the sacrifices of blood to certain deities being stopped suddenly, and all manner of disasters happening until they were resumed. fires broke out in the huts, and even on the clothes, of the natives--and--and i admit i have read, in the course of my studies,"--he made a gesture toward his books and heavily laden table,--"of the yezidis of syria evoking phantoms by means of cutting their bodies with knives during their whirling dances--enormous globes of fire which turned into monstrous and terrible forms--and i remember an account somewhere, too, how the emaciated forms and pallid countenances of the spectres, that appeared to the emperor julian, claimed to be the true immortals, and told him to renew the sacrifices of blood 'for the fumes of which, since the establishment of christianity, they had been pining'--that these were in reality the phantoms evoked by the rites of blood." both dr. silence and myself listened in amazement, for this sudden speech was so unexpected, and betrayed so much more knowledge than we had either of us suspected in the old soldier. "then perhaps you have read, too," said the doctor, "how the cosmic deities of savage races, elemental in their nature, have been kept alive through many ages by these blood rites?" "no," he answered; "that is new to me." "in any case," dr. silence added, "i am glad you are not wholly unfamiliar with the subject, for you will now bring more sympathy, and therefore more help, to our experiment. for, of course, in this case, we only want the blood to tempt the creature from its lair and enclose it in a form--" "i quite understand. and i only hesitated just now," he went on, his words coming much more slowly, as though he felt he had already said too much, "because i wished to be quite sure it was no mere curiosity, but an actual sense of necessity that dictated this horrible experiment." "it is your safety, and that of your household, and of your sister, that is at stake," replied the doctor. "once i have _seen_, i hope to discover whence this elemental comes, and what its real purpose is." colonel wragge signified his assent with a bow. "and the moon will help us," the other said, "for it will be full in the early hours of the morning, and this kind of elemental-being is always most active at the period of full moon. hence, you see, the clue furnished by your diary." so it was finally settled. colonel wragge would provide the materials for the experiment, and we were to meet at midnight. how he would contrive at that hour--but that was his business. i only know we both realised that he would keep his word, and whether a pig died at midnight, or at noon, was after all perhaps only a question of the sleep and personal comfort of the executioner. "tonight, then, in the laundry," said dr. silence finally, to clinch the plan; "we three alone--and at midnight, when the household is asleep and we shall be free from disturbance." he exchanged significant glances with our host, who, at that moment, was called away by the announcement that the family doctor had arrived, and was ready to see him in his sister's room. for the remainder of the afternoon john silence disappeared. i had my suspicions that he made a secret visit to the plantation and also to the laundry building; but, in any case, we saw nothing of him, and he kept strictly to himself. he was preparing for the night, i felt sure, but the nature of his preparations i could only guess. there was movement in his room, i heard, and an odour like incense hung about the door, and knowing that he regarded rites as the vehicles of energies, my guesses were probably not far wrong. colonel wragge, too, remained absent the greater part of the afternoon, and, deeply afflicted, had scarcely left his sister's bedside, but in response to my inquiry when we met for a moment at tea-time, he told me that although she had moments of attempted speech, her talk was quite incoherent and hysterical, and she was still quite unable to explain the nature of what she had seen. the doctor, he said, feared she had recovered the use of her limbs, only to lose that of her memory, and perhaps even of her mind. "then the recovery of her legs, i trust, may be permanent, at any rate," i ventured, finding it difficult to know what sympathy to offer. and he replied with a curious short laugh, "oh yes; about that there can be no doubt whatever." and it was due merely to the chance of my overhearing a fragment of conversation--unwillingly, of course--that a little further light was thrown upon the state in which the old lady actually lay. for, as i came out of my room, it happened that colonel wragge and the doctor were going downstairs together, and their words floated up to my ears before i could make my presence known by so much as a cough. "then you must find a way," the doctor was saying with decision; "for i cannot insist too strongly upon that--and at all costs she must be kept quiet. these attempts to go out must be prevented--if necessary, by force. this desire to visit some wood or other she keeps talking about is, of course, hysterical in nature. it cannot be permitted for a moment." "it shall not be permitted," i heard the soldier reply, as they reached the hall below. "it has impressed her mind for some reason--" the doctor went on, by way evidently of soothing explanation, and then the distance made it impossible for me to hear more. at dinner dr. silence was still absent, on the public plea of a headache, and though food was sent to his room, i am inclined to believe he did not touch it, but spent the entire time fasting. we retired early, desiring that the household should do likewise, and i must confess that at ten o'clock when i bid my host a temporary good-night, and sought my room to make what mental preparation i could, i realised in no very pleasant fashion that it was a singular and formidable assignation, this midnight meeting in the laundry building, and that there were moments in every adventure of life when a wise man, and one who knew his own limitations, owed it to his dignity to withdraw discreetly. and, but for the character of our leader, i probably should have then and there offered the best excuse i could think of, and have allowed myself quietly to fall asleep and wait for an exciting story in the morning of what had happened. but with a man like john silence, such a lapse was out of the question, and i sat before my fire counting the minutes and doing everything i could think of to fortify my resolution and fasten my will at the point where i could be reasonably sure that my self-control would hold against all attacks of men, devils, or elementals. iii at a quarter before midnight, clad in a heavy ulster, and with slippered feet, i crept cautiously from my room and stole down the passage to the top of the stairs. outside the doctor's door i waited a moment to listen. all was still; the house in utter darkness; no gleam of light beneath any door; only, down the length of the corridor, from the direction of the sick-room, came faint sounds of laughter and incoherent talk that were not things to reassure a mind already half a-tremble, and i made haste to reach the hall and let myself out through the front door into the night. the air was keen and frosty, perfumed with night smells, and exquisitely fresh; all the million candles of the sky were alight, and a faint breeze rose and fell with far-away sighings in the tops of the pine trees. my blood leaped for a moment in the spaciousness of the night, for the splendid stars brought courage; but the next instant, as i turned the corner of the house, moving stealthily down the gravel drive, my spirits sank again ominously. for, yonder, over the funereal plumes of the twelve acre plantation, i saw the broken, yellow disc of the half-moon just rising in the east, staring down like some vast being come to watch upon the progress of our doom. seen through the distorting vapours of the earth's atmosphere, her face looked weirdly unfamiliar, her usual expression of benignant vacancy somehow a-twist. i slipped along by the shadows of the wall, keeping my eyes upon the ground. the laundry-house, as already described, stood detached from the other offices, with laurel shrubberies crowding thickly behind it, and the kitchen-garden so close on the other side that the strong smells of soil and growing things came across almost heavily. the shadows of the haunted plantation, hugely lengthened by the rising moon behind them, reached to the very walls and covered the stone tiles of the roof with a dark pall. so keenly were my senses alert at this moment that i believe i could fill a chapter with the endless small details of the impression i received--shadows, odour, shapes, sounds--in the space of the few seconds i stood and waited before the closed wooden door. then i became aware of some one moving towards me through the moonlight, and the figure of john silence, without overcoat and bareheaded, came quickly and without noise to join me. his eyes, i saw at once, were wonderfully bright, and so marked was the shining pallor of his face that i could hardly tell when he passed from the moonlight into the shade. he passed without a word, beckoning me to follow, and then pushed the door open, and went in. the chill air of the place met us like that of an underground vault; and the brick floor and whitewashed walls, streaked with damp and smoke, threw back the cold in our faces. directly opposite gaped the black throat of the huge open fireplace, the ashes of wood fires still piled and scattered about the hearth, and on either side of the projecting chimney-column were the deep recesses holding the big twin cauldrons for boiling clothes. upon the lids of these cauldrons stood the two little oil lamps, shaded red, which gave all the light there was, and immediately in front of the fireplace there was a small circular table with three chairs set about it. overhead, the narrow slit windows, high up the walls, pointed to a dim network of wooden rafters half lost among the shadows, and then came the dark vault of the roof. cheerless and unalluring, for all the red light, it certainly was, reminding me of some unused conventicle, bare of pews or pulpit, ugly and severe, and i was forcibly struck by the contrast between the normal uses to which the place was ordinarily put, and the strange and medieval purpose which had brought us under its roof tonight. possibly an involuntary shudder ran over me, for my companion turned with a confident look to reassure me, and he was so completely master of himself that i at once absorbed from his abundance, and felt the chinks of my failing courage beginning to close up. to meet his eye in the presence of danger was like finding a mental railing that guided and supported thought along the giddy edges of alarm. "i am quite ready," i whispered, turning to listen for approaching footsteps. he nodded, still keeping his eyes on mine. our whispers sounded hollow as they echoed overhead among the rafters. "i'm glad you are here," he said. "not all would have the courage. keep your thoughts controlled, and imagine the protective shell round you--round your inner being." "i'm all right," i repeated, cursing my chattering teeth. he took my hand and shook it, and the contact seemed to shake into me something of his supreme confidence. the eyes and hands of a strong man can touch the soul. i think he guessed my thought, for a passing smile flashed about the corners of his mouth. "you will feel more comfortable," he said, in a low tone, "when the chain is complete. the colonel we can count on, of course. remember, though," he added warningly, "he may perhaps become controlled--possessed--when the thing comes, because he won't know how to resist. and to explain the business to such a man--!" he shrugged his shoulders expressively. "but it will only be temporary, and i will see that no harm comes to him." he glanced round at the arrangements with approval. "red light," he said, indicating the shaded lamps, "has the lowest rate of vibration. materialisations are dissipated by strong light--won't form, or hold together--in rapid vibrations." i was not sure that i approved altogether of this dim light, for in complete darkness there is something protective--the knowledge that one cannot be seen, probably--which a half-light destroys, but i remembered the warning to keep my thoughts steady, and forbore to give them expression. there was a step outside, and the figure of colonel wragge stood in the doorway. though entering on tiptoe, he made considerable noise and clatter, for his free movements were impeded by the burden he carried, and we saw a large yellowish bowl held out at arms' length from his body, the mouth covered with a white cloth. his face, i noted, was rigidly composed. he, too, was master of himself. and, as i thought of this old soldier moving through the long series of alarms, worn with watching and wearied with assault, unenlightened yet undismayed, even down to the dreadful shock of his sister's terror, and still showing the dogged pluck that persists in the face of defeat, i understood what dr. silence meant when he described him as a man "to be counted on." i think there was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features, and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door was shut and we had exchanged silent greetings, all the latent courage i possessed was well to the fore, and i felt as sure of myself as i knew i ever could feel. colonel wragge set the bowl carefully in the centre of the table. "midnight," he said shortly, glancing at his watch, and we all three moved to our chairs. there, in the middle of that cold and silent place, we sat, with the vile bowl before us, and a thin, hardly perceptible steam rising through the damp air from the surface of the white cloth and disappearing upwards the moment it passed beyond the zone of red light and entered the deep shadows thrown forward by the projecting wall of chimney. the doctor had indicated our respective places, and i found myself seated with my back to the door and opposite the black hearth. the colonel was on my left, and dr. silence on my right, both half facing me, the latter more in shadow than the former. we thus divided the little table into even sections, and sitting back in our chairs we awaited events in silence. for something like an hour i do not think there was even the faintest sound within those four walls and under the canopy of that vaulted roof. our slippers made no scratching on the gritty floor, and our breathing was suppressed almost to nothing; even the rustle of our clothes as we shifted from time to time upon our seats was inaudible. silence smothered us absolutely--the silence of night, of listening, the silence of a haunted expectancy. the very gurgling of the lamps was too soft to be heard, and if light itself had sound, i do not think we should have noticed the silvery tread of the moonlight as it entered the high narrow windows and threw upon the floor the slender traces of its pallid footsteps. colonel wragge and the doctor, and myself too for that matter, sat thus like figures of stone, without speech and without gesture. my eyes passed in ceaseless journeys from the bowl to their faces, and from their faces to the bowl. they might have been masks, however, for all the signs of life they gave; and the light steaming from the horrid contents beneath the white cloth had long ceased to be visible. then presently, as the moon rose higher, the wind rose with it. it sighed, like the lightest of passing wings, over the roof; it crept most softly round the walls; it made the brick floor like ice beneath our feet. with it i saw mentally the desolate moorland flowing like a sea about the old house, the treeless expanse of lonely hills, the nearer copses, sombre and mysterious in the night. the plantation, too, in particular i saw, and imagined i heard the mournful whisperings that must now be a-stirring among its tree-tops as the breeze played down between the twisted stems. in the depth of the room behind us the shafts of moonlight met and crossed in a growing network. it was after an hour of this wearing and unbroken attention, and i should judge about one o'clock in the morning, when the baying of the dogs in the stableyard first began, and i saw john silence move suddenly in his chair and sit up in an attitude of attention. every force in my being instantly leaped into the keenest vigilance. colonel wragge moved too, though slowly, and without raising his eyes from the table before him. the doctor stretched his arm out and took the white cloth from the bowl. it was perhaps imagination that persuaded me the red glare of the lamps grew fainter and the air over the table before us thickened. i had been expecting something for so long that the movement of my companions, and the lifting of the cloth, may easily have caused the momentary delusion that something hovered in the air before my face, touching the skin of my cheeks with a silken run. but it was certainly not a delusion that the colonel looked up at the same moment and glanced over his shoulder, as though his eyes followed the movements of something to and fro about the room, and that he then buttoned his overcoat more tightly about him and his eyes sought my own face first, and then the doctor's. and it was no delusion that his face seemed somehow to have turned dark, become spread as it were with a shadowy blackness. i saw his lips tighten and his expression grow hard and stern, and it came to me then with a rush that, of course, this man had told us but a part of the experiences he had been through in the house, and that there was much more he had never been able to bring himself to reveal at all. i felt sure of it. the way he turned and stared about him betrayed a familiarity with other things than those he had described to us. it was not merely a sight of fire he looked for; it was a sight of something alive, intelligent, something able to evade his searching; it was _a person_. it was the watch for the ancient being who sought to obsess him. and the way in which dr. silence answered his look--though it was only by a glance of subtlest sympathy--confirmed my impression. "we may be ready now," i heard him say in a whisper, and i understood that his words were intended as a steadying warning, and braced myself mentally to the utmost of my power. yet long before colonel wragge had turned to stare about the room, and long before the doctor had confirmed my impression that things were at last beginning to stir, i had become aware in most singular fashion that the place held more than our three selves. with the rising of the wind this increase to our numbers had first taken place. the baying of the hounds almost seemed to have signalled it. i cannot say how it may be possible to realise that an empty place has suddenly become--not empty, when the new arrival is nothing that appeals to any one of the senses; for this recognition of an "invisible," as of the change in the balance of personal forces in a human group, is indefinable and beyond proof. yet it is unmistakable. and i knew perfectly well at what given moment the atmosphere within these four walls became charged with the presence of other living beings besides ourselves. and, on reflection, i am convinced that both my companions knew it too. "watch the light," said the doctor under his breath, and then i knew too that it was no fancy of my own that had turned the air darker, and the way he turned to examine the face of our host sent an electric thrill of wonder and expectancy shivering along every nerve in my body. yet it was no kind of terror that i experienced, but rather a sort of mental dizziness, and a sensation as of being suspended in some remote and dreadful altitude where things might happen, indeed were about to happen, that had never before happened within the ken of man. horror may have formed an ingredient, but it was not chiefly horror, and in no sense ghostly horror. uncommon thoughts kept beating on my brain like tiny hammers, soft yet persistent, seeking admission; their unbidden tide began to wash along the far fringes of my mind, the currents of unwonted sensations to rise over the remote frontiers of my consciousness. i was aware of thoughts, and the fantasies of thoughts, that i never knew before existed. portions of my being stirred that had never stirred before, and things ancient and inexplicable rose to the surface and beckoned me to follow. i felt as though i were about to fly off, at some immense tangent, into an outer space hitherto unknown even in dreams. and so singular was the result produced upon me that i was uncommonly glad to anchor my mind, as well as my eyes, upon the masterful personality of the doctor at my side, for there, i realised, i could draw always upon the forces of sanity and safety. with a vigorous effort of will i returned to the scene before me, and tried to focus my attention, with steadier thoughts, upon the table, and upon the silent figures seated round it. and then i saw that certain changes had come about in the place where we sat. the patches of moonlight on the floor, i noted, had become curiously shaded; the faces of my companions opposite were not so clearly visible as before; and the forehead and cheeks of colonel wragge were glistening with perspiration. i realised further, that an extraordinary change had come about in the temperature of the atmosphere. the increased warmth had a painful effect, not alone on colonel wragge, but upon all of us. it was oppressive and unnatural. we gasped figuratively as well as actually. "you are the first to feel it," said dr. silence in low tones, looking across at him. "you are in more intimate touch, of course--" the colonel was trembling, and appeared to be in considerable distress. his knees shook, so that the shuffling of his slippered feet became audible. he inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no other reply. i think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself in hand. i knew what he was struggling against. as dr. silence had warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, though vainly, resisting. but, meanwhile, a curious and whirling sense of exhilaration began to come over me. the increasing heat was delightful, bringing a sensation of intense activity, of thoughts pouring through the mind at high speed, of vivid pictures in the brain, of fierce desires and lightning energies alive in every part of the body. i was conscious of no physical distress, such as the colonel felt, but only of a vague feeling that it might all grow suddenly too intense--that i might be consumed--that my personality as well as my body, might become resolved into the flame of pure spirit. i began to live at a speed too intense to last. it was as if a thousand ecstasies besieged me-- "steady!" whispered the voice of john silence in my ear, and i looked up with a start to see that the colonel had risen from his chair. the doctor rose too. i followed suit, and for the first time saw down into the bowl. to my amazement and horror i saw that the contents were troubled. the blood was astir with movement. the rest of the experiment was witnessed by us standing. it came, too, with a curious suddenness. there was no more dreaming, for me at any rate. i shall never forget the figure of colonel wragge standing there beside me, upright and unshaken, squarely planted on his feet, looking about him, puzzled beyond belief, yet full of a fighting anger. framed by the white walls, the red glow of the lamps upon his streaming cheeks, his eyes glowing against the deathly pallor of his skin, breathing hard and making convulsive efforts of hands and body to keep himself under control, his whole being roused to the point of savage fighting, yet with nothing visible to get at anywhere--he stood there, immovable against odds. and the strange contrast of the pale skin and the burning face i had never seen before, or wish to see again. but what has left an even sharper impression on my memory was the blackness that then began crawling over his face, obliterating the features, concealing their human outline, and hiding him inch by inch from view. this was my first realisation that the process of materialisation was at work. his visage became shrouded. i moved from one side to the other to keep him in view, and it was only then i understood that, properly speaking, the blackness was not upon the countenance of colonel wragge, but that something had inserted itself between me and him, thus screening his face with the effect of a dark veil. something that apparently rose through the floor was passing slowly into the air above the table and above the bowl. the blood in the bowl, moreover, was considerably less than before. and, with this change in the air before us, there came at the same time a further change, i thought, in the face of the soldier. one-half was turned towards the red lamps, while the other caught the pale illumination of the moonlight falling aslant from the high windows, so that it was difficult to estimate this change with accuracy of detail. but it seemed to me that, while the features--eyes, nose, mouth--remained the same, the life informing them had undergone some profound transformation. the signature of a new power had crept into the face and left its traces there--an expression dark, and in some unexplained way, terrible. then suddenly he opened his mouth and spoke, and the sound of this changed voice, deep and musical though it was, made me cold and set my heart beating with uncomfortable rapidity. the being, as he had dreaded, was already in control of his brain, using his mouth. "i see a blackness like the blackness of egypt before my face," said the tones of this unknown voice that seemed half his own and half another's. "and out of this darkness they come, they come." i gave a dreadful start. the doctor turned to look at me for an instant, and then turned to centre his attention upon the figure of our host, and i understood in some intuitive fashion that he was there to watch over the strangest contest man ever saw--to watch over and, if necessary, to protect. "he is being controlled--possessed," he whispered to me through the shadows. his face wore a wonderful expression, half triumph, half admiration. even as colonel wragge spoke, it seemed to me that this visible darkness began to increase, pouring up thickly out of the ground by the hearth, rising up in sheets and veils, shrouding our eyes and faces. it stole up from below--an awful blackness that seemed to drink in all the radiations of light in the building, leaving nothing but the ghost of a radiance in their place. then, out of this rising sea of shadows, issued a pale and spectral light that gradually spread itself about us, and from the heart of this light i saw the shapes of fire crowd and gather. and these were not human shapes, or the shapes of anything i recognised as alive in the world, but outlines of fire that traced globes, triangles, crosses, and the luminous bodies of various geometrical figures. they grew bright, faded, and then grew bright again with an effect almost of pulsation. they passed swiftly to and fro through the air, rising and falling, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood of the colonel, often gathering about his head and shoulders, and even appearing to settle upon him like giant insects of flame. they were accompanied, moreover, by a faint sound of hissing--the same sound we had heard that afternoon in the plantation. "the fire-elementals that precede their master," the doctor said in an undertone. "be ready." and while this weird display of the shapes of fire alternately flashed and faded, and the hissing echoed faintly among the dim rafters overhead, we heard the awful voice issue at intervals from the lips of the afflicted soldier. it was a voice of power, splendid in some way i cannot describe, and with a certain sense of majesty in its cadences, and, as i listened to it with quickly beating heart, i could fancy it was some ancient voice of time itself, echoing down immense corridors of stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of mountain tombs. "i have seen my divine father, osiris," thundered the great tones. "i have scattered the gloom of the night. i have burst through the earth, and am one with the starry deities!" something grand came into the soldier's face. he was staring fixedly before him, as though seeing nothing. "watch," whispered dr. silence in my ear, and his whisper seemed to come from very far away. again the mouth opened and the awesome voice issued forth. "thoth," it boomed, "has loosened the bandages of set which fettered my mouth. i have taken my place in the great winds of heaven." i heard the little wind of night, with its mournful voice of ages, sighing round the walls and over the roof. "listen!" came from the doctor at my side, and the thunder of the voice continued-- "i have hidden myself with you, o ye stars that never diminish. i remember my name--in--the--house--of--fire!" the voice ceased and the sound died away. something about the face and figure of colonel wragge relaxed, i thought. the terrible look passed from his face. the being that obsessed him was gone. "the great ritual," said dr. silence aside to me, very low, "the book of the dead. now it's leaving him. soon the blood will fashion it a body." colonel wragge, who had stood absolutely motionless all this time, suddenly swayed, so that i thought he was going to fall,--and, but for the quick support of the doctor's arm, he probably would have fallen, for he staggered as in the beginning of collapse. "i am drunk with the wine of osiris," he cried,--and it was half with his own voice this time--"but horus, the eternal watcher, is about my path--for--safety." the voice dwindled and failed, dying away into something almost like a cry of distress. "now, watch closely," said dr. silence, speaking loud, "for after the cry will come the fire!" i began to tremble involuntarily; an awful change had come without warning into the air; my legs grew weak as paper beneath my weight and i had to support myself by leaning on the table. colonel wragge, i saw, was also leaning forward with a kind of droop. the shapes of fire had vanished all, but his face was lit by the red lamps and the pale, shifting moonlight rose behind him like mist. we were both gazing at the bowl, now almost empty; the colonel stooped so low i feared every minute he would lose his balance and drop into it; and the shadow, that had so long been in process of forming, now at length began to assume material outline in the air before us. then john silence moved forward quickly. he took his place between us and the shadow. erect, formidable, absolute master of the situation, i saw him stand there, his face calm and almost smiling, and fire in his eyes. his protective influence was astounding and incalculable. even the abhorrent dread i felt at the sight of the creature growing into life and substance before us, lessened in some way so that i was able to keep my eyes fixed on the air above the bowl without too vivid a terror. but as it took shape, rising out of nothing as it were, and growing momentarily more defined in outline, a period of utter and wonderful silence settled down upon the building and all it contained. a hush of ages, like the sudden centre of peace at the heart of the travelling cyclone, descended through the night, and out of this hush, as out of the emanations of the steaming blood, issued the form of the ancient being who had first sent the elemental of fire upon its mission. it grew and darkened and solidified before our eyes. it rose from just beyond the table so that the lower portions remained invisible, but i saw the outline limn itself upon the air, as though slowly revealed by the rising of a curtain. it apparently had not then quite concentrated to the normal proportions, but was spread out on all sides into space, huge, though rapidly condensing, for i saw the colossal shoulders, the neck, the lower portion of the dark jaws, the terrible mouth, and then the teeth and lips--and, as the veil seemed to lift further upon the tremendous face--i saw the nose and cheek bones. in another moment i should have looked straight into the eyes-- but what dr. silence did at that moment was so unexpected, and took me so by surprise, that i have never yet properly understood its nature, and he has never yet seen fit to explain in detail to me. he uttered some sound that had a note of command in it--and, in so doing, stepped forward and intervened between me and the face. the figure, just nearing completeness, he therefore hid from my sight--and i have always thought purposely hid from my sight. "the fire!" he cried out. "the fire! beware!" there was a sudden roar as of flame from the very mouth of the pit, and for the space of a single second all grew light as day. a blinding flash passed across my face, and there was heat for an instant that seemed to shrivel skin, and flesh, and bone. then came steps, and i heard colonel wragge utter a great cry, wilder than any human cry i have ever known. the heat sucked all the breath out of my lungs with a rush, and the blaze of light, as it vanished, swept my vision with it into enveloping darkness. when i recovered the use of my senses a few moments later i saw that colonel wragge with a face of death, its whiteness strangely stained, had moved closer to me. dr. silence stood beside him, an expression of triumph and success in his eyes. the next minute the soldier tried to clutch me with his hand. then he reeled, staggered, and, unable to save himself, fell with a great crash upon the brick floor. after the sheet of flame, a wind raged round the building as though it would lift the roof off, but then passed as suddenly as it came. and in the intense calm that followed i saw that the form had vanished, and the doctor was stooping over colonel wragge upon the floor, trying to lift him to a sitting position. "light," he said quietly, "more light. take the shades off." colonel wragge sat up and the glare of the unshaded lamps fell upon his face. it was grey and drawn, still running heat, and there was a look in the eyes and about the corners of the mouth that seemed in this short space of time to have added years to its age. at the same time, the expression of effort and anxiety had left it. it showed relief. "gone!" he said, looking up at the doctor in a dazed fashion, and struggling to his feet. "thank god! it's gone at last." he stared round the laundry as though to find out where he was. "did it control me--take possession of me? did i talk nonsense?" he asked bluntly. "after the heat came, i remember nothing--" "you'll feel yourself again in a few minutes," the doctor said. to my infinite horror i saw that he was surreptitiously wiping sundry dark stains from the face. "our experiment has been a success and--" he gave me a swift glance to hide the bowl, standing between me and our host while i hurriedly stuffed it down under the lid of the nearest cauldron. "--and none of us the worse for it," he finished. "and fires?" he asked, still dazed, "there'll be no more fires?" "it is dissipated--partly, at any rate," replied dr. silence cautiously. "and the man behind the gun," he went on, only half realising what he was saying, i think; "have you discovered _that?_" "a form materialised," said the doctor briefly. "i know for certain now what the directing intelligence was behind it all." colonel wragge pulled himself together and got upon his feet. the words conveyed no clear meaning to him yet. but his memory was returning gradually, and he was trying to piece together the fragments into a connected whole. he shivered a little, for the place had grown suddenly chilly. the air was empty again, lifeless. "you feel all right again now," dr. silence said, in the tone of a man stating a fact rather than asking a question. "thanks to you--both, yes." he drew a deep breath, and mopped his face, and even attempted a smile. he made me think of a man coming from the battlefield with the stains of fighting still upon him, but scornful of his wounds. then he turned gravely towards the doctor with a question in his eyes. memory had returned and he was himself again. "precisely what i expected," the doctor said calmly; "a fire-elemental sent upon its mission in the days of thebes, centuries before christ, and tonight, for the first time all these thousands of years, released from the spell that originally bound it." we stared at him in amazement, colonel wragge opening his lips for words that refused to shape themselves. "and, if we dig," he continued significantly, pointing to the floor where the blackness had poured up, "we shall find some underground connection--a tunnel most likely--leading to the twelve acre wood. it was made by--your predecessor." "a tunnel made by my brother!" gasped the soldier. "then my sister should know--she lived here with him--" he stopped suddenly. john silence inclined his head slowly. "i think so," he said quietly. "your brother, no doubt, was as much tormented as you have been," he continued after a pause in which colonel wragge seemed deeply preoccupied with his thoughts, "and tried to find peace by burying it in the wood, and surrounding the wood then, like a large magic circle, with the enchantments of the old formulae. so the stars the man saw blazing--" "but burying what?" asked the soldier faintly, stepping backwards towards the support of the wall. dr. silence regarded us both intently for a moment before he replied. i think he weighed in his mind whether to tell us now, or when the investigation was absolutely complete. "the mummy," he said softly, after a moment; "the mummy that your brother took from its resting place of centuries, and brought home--here." colonel wragge dropped down upon the nearest chair, hanging breathlessly on every word. he was far too amazed for speech. "the mummy of some important person--a priest most likely--protected from disturbance and desecration by the ceremonial magic of the time. for they understood how to attach to the mummy, to lock up with it in the tomb, an elemental force that would direct itself even after ages upon any one who dared to molest it. in this case it was an elemental of fire." dr. silence crossed the floor and turned out the lamps one by one. he had nothing more to say for the moment. following his example, i folded the table together and took up the chairs, and our host, still dazed and silent, mechanically obeyed him and moved to the door. we removed all traces of the experiment, taking the empty bowl back to the house concealed beneath an ulster. the air was cool and fragrant as we walked to the house, the stars beginning to fade overhead and a fresh wind of early morning blowing up out of the east where the sky was already hinting of the coming day. it was after five o'clock. stealthily we entered the front hall and locked the door, and as we went on tiptoe upstairs to our rooms, the colonel, peering at us over his candle as he nodded good-night, whispered that if we were ready the digging should be begun that very day. then i saw him steal along to his sister's room and disappear. iv but not even the mysterious references to the mummy, or the prospect of a revelation by digging, were able to hinder the reaction that followed the intense excitement of the past twelve hours, and i slept the sleep of the dead, dreamless and undisturbed. a touch on the shoulder woke me, and i saw dr. silence standing beside the bed, dressed to go out. "come," he said, "it's tea-time. you've slept the best part of a dozen hours." i sprang up and made a hurried toilet, while my companion sat and talked. he looked fresh and rested, and his manner was even quieter than usual. "colonel wragge has provided spades and pickaxes. we're going out to unearth this mummy at once," he said; "and there's no reason we should not get away by the morning train." "i'm ready to go tonight, if you are," i said honestly. but dr. silence shook his head. "i must see this through to the end," he said gravely, and in a tone that made me think he still anticipated serious things, perhaps. he went on talking while i dressed. "this case is really typical of all stories of mummy-haunting, and none of them are cases to trifle with," he explained, "for the mummies of important people--kings, priests, magicians--were laid away with profoundly significant ceremonial, and were very effectively protected, as you have seen, against desecration, and especially against destruction. "the general belief," he went on, anticipating my questions, "held, of course, that the perpetuity of the mummy guaranteed that of its ka,--the owner's spirit,--but it is not improbable that the magical embalming was also used to retard reincarnation, the preservation of the body preventing the return of the spirit to the toil and discipline of earth-life; and, in any case, they knew how to attach powerful guardian-forces to keep off trespassers. and any one who dared to remove the mummy, or especially to unwind it--well," he added, with meaning, "you have seen--and you will see." i caught his face in the mirror while i struggled with my collar. it was deeply serious. there could be no question that he spoke of what he believed and knew. "the traveller-brother who brought it here must have been haunted too," he continued, "for he tried to banish it by burial in the wood, making a magic circle to enclose it. something of genuine ceremonial he must have known, for the stars the man saw were of course the remains of the still flaming pentagrams he traced at intervals in the circle. only he did not know enough, or possibly was ignorant that the mummy's guardian was a fire-force. fire cannot be enclosed by fire, though, as you saw, it can be released by it." "then that awful figure in the laundry?" i asked, thrilled to find him so communicative. "undoubtedly the actual ka of the mummy operating always behind its agent, the elemental, and most likely thousands of years old." "and miss wragge--?" i ventured once more. "ah, miss wragge," he repeated with increased gravity, "miss wragge--" a knock at the door brought a servant with word that tea was ready, and the colonel had sent to ask if we were coming down. the thread was broken. dr. silence moved to the door and signed to me to follow. but his manner told me that in any case no real answer would have been forthcoming to my question. "and the place to dig in," i asked, unable to restrain my curiosity, "will you find it by some process of divination or--?" he paused at the door and looked back at me, and with that he left me to finish my dressing. it was growing dark when the three of us silently made our way to the twelve acre plantation; the sky was overcast, and a black wind came out of the east. gloom hung about the old house and the air seemed full of sighings. we found the tools ready laid at the edge of the wood, and each shouldering his piece, we followed our leader at once in among the trees. he went straight forward for some twenty yards and then stopped. at his feet lay the blackened circle of one of the burned places. it was just discernible against the surrounding white grass. "there are three of these," he said, "and they all lie in a line with one another. any one of them will tap the tunnel that connects the laundry--the former museum--with the chamber where the mummy now lies buried." he at once cleared away the burnt grass and began to dig; we all began to dig. while i used the pick, the others shovelled vigorously. no one spoke. colonel wragge worked the hardest of the three. the soil was light and sandy, and there were only a few snake-like roots and occasional loose stones to delay us. the pick made short work of these. and meanwhile the darkness settled about us and the biting wind swept roaring through the trees overhead. then, quite suddenly, without a cry, colonel wragge disappeared up to his neck. "the tunnel!" cried the doctor, helping to drag him out, red, breathless, and covered with sand and perspiration. "now, let me lead the way." and he slipped down nimbly into the hole, so that a moment later we heard his voice, muffled by sand and distance, rising up to us. "hubbard, you come next, and then colonel wragge--if he wishes," we heard. "i'll follow you, of course," he said, looking at me as i scrambled in. the hole was bigger now, and i got down on all-fours in a channel not much bigger than a large sewer-pipe and found myself in total darkness. a minute later a heavy thud, followed by a cataract of loose sand, announced the arrival of the colonel. "catch hold of my heel," called dr. silence, "and colonel wragge can take yours." in this slow, laborious fashion we wormed our way along a tunnel that had been roughly dug out of the shifting sand, and was shored up clumsily by means of wooden pillars and posts. any moment, it seemed to me, we might be buried alive. we could not see an inch before our eyes, but had to grope our way feeling the pillars and the walls. it was difficult to breathe, and the colonel behind me made but slow progress, for the cramped position of our bodies was very severe. we had travelled in this way for ten minutes, and gone perhaps as much as ten yards, when i lost my grasp of the doctor's heel. "ah!" i heard his voice, sounding above me somewhere. he was standing up in a clear space, and the next moment i was standing beside him. colonel wragge came heavily after, and he too rose up and stood. then dr. silence produced his candles and we heard preparations for striking matches. yet even before there was light, an indefinable sensation of awe came over us all. in this hole in the sand, some three feet under ground, we stood side by side, cramped and huddled, struck suddenly with an over whelming apprehension of something ancient, something formidable, something incalculably wonderful, that touched in each one of us a sense of the sublime and the terrible even before we could see an inch before our faces. i know not how to express in language this singular emotion that caught us here in utter darkness, touching no sense directly, it seemed, yet with the recognition that before us in the blackness of this underground night there lay something that was mighty with the mightiness of long past ages. i felt colonel wragge press in closely to my side, and i understood the pressure and welcomed it. no human touch, to me at least, has ever been more eloquent. then the match flared, a thousand shadows fled on black wings, and i saw john silence fumbling with the candle, his face lit up grotesquely by the flickering light below it. i had dreaded this light, yet when it came there was apparently nothing to explain the profound sensations of dread that preceded it. we stood in a small vaulted chamber in the sand, the sides and roof shored with bars of wood, and the ground laid roughly with what seemed to be tiles. it was six feet high, so that we could all stand comfortably, and may have been ten feet long by eight feet wide. upon the wooden pillars at the side i saw that egyptian hieroglyphics had been rudely traced by burning. dr. silence lit three candles and handed one to each of us. he placed a fourth in the sand against the wall on his right, and another to mark the entrance to the tunnel. we stood and stared about us, instinctively holding our breath. "empty, by god!" exclaimed colonel wragge. his voice trembled with excitement. and then, as his eyes rested on the ground, he added, "and footsteps--look--footsteps in the sand!" dr. silence said nothing. he stooped down and began to make a search of the chamber, and as he moved, my eyes followed his crouching figure and noted the queer distorted shadows that poured over the walls and ceiling after him. here and there thin trickles of loose sand ran fizzing down the sides. the atmosphere, heavily charged with faint yet pungent odours, lay utterly still, and the flames of the candles might have been painted on the air for all the movement they betrayed. and, as i watched, it was almost necessary to persuade myself forcibly that i was only standing upright with difficulty in this little sand-hole of a modern garden in the south of england, for it seemed to me that i stood, as in vision, at the entrance of some vast rock-hewn temple far, far down the river of time. the illusion was powerful, and persisted. granite columns, that rose to heaven, piled themselves about me, majestically uprearing, and a roof like the sky itself spread above a line of colossal figures that moved in shadowy procession along endless and stupendous aisles. this huge and splendid fantasy, borne i knew not whence, possessed me so vividly that i was actually obliged to concentrate my attention upon the small stooping figure of the doctor, as he groped about the walls, in order to keep the eye of imagination on the scene before me. but the limited space rendered a long search out of the question, and his footsteps, instead of shuffling through loose sand, presently struck something of a different quality that gave forth a hollow and resounding echo. he stooped to examine more closely. he was standing exactly in the centre of the little chamber when this happened, and he at once began scraping away the sand with his feet. in less than a minute a smooth surface became visible--the surface of a wooden covering. the next thing i saw was that he had raised it and was peering down into a space below. instantly, a strong odour of nitre and bitumen, mingled with the strange perfume of unknown and powdered aromatics, rose up from the uncovered space and filled the vault, stinging the throat and making the eyes water and smart. "the mummy!" whispered dr. silence, looking up into our faces over his candle; and as he said the word i felt the soldier lurch against me, and heard his breathing in my very ear. "the mummy!" he repeated under his breath, as we pressed forward to look. it is difficult to say exactly why the sight should have stirred in me so prodigious an emotion of wonder and veneration, for i have had not a little to do with mummies, have unwound scores of them, and even experimented magically with not a few. but there was something in the sight of that grey and silent figure, lying in its modern box of lead and wood at the bottom of this sandy grave, swathed in the bandages of centuries and wrapped in the perfumed linen that the priests of egypt had prayed over with their mighty enchantments thousands of years before--something in the sight of it lying there and breathing its own spice-laden atmosphere even in the darkness of its exile in this remote land, something that pierced to the very core of my being and touched that root of awe which slumbers in every man near the birth of tears and the passion of true worship. i remember turning quickly from the colonel, lest he should see my emotion, yet fail to understand its cause, turn and clutch john silence by the arm, and then fall trembling to see that he, too, had lowered his head and was hiding his face in his hands. a kind of whirling storm came over me, rising out of i know not what utter deeps of memory, and in a whiteness of vision i heard the magical old chauntings from the book of the dead, and saw the gods pass by in dim procession, the mighty, immemorial beings who were yet themselves only the personified attributes of the true gods, the god with the eyes of fire, the god with the face of smoke. i saw again anubis, the dog-faced deity, and the children of horus, eternal watcher of the ages, as they swathed osiris, the first mummy of the world, in the scented and mystic bands, and i tasted again something of the ecstasy of the justified soul as it embarked in the golden boat of ra, and journeyed onwards to rest in the fields of the blessed. and then, as dr. silence, with infinite reverence, stooped and touched the still face, so dreadfully staring with its painted eyes, there rose again to our nostrils wave upon wave of this perfume of thousands of years, and time fled backwards like a thing of naught, showing me in haunted panorama the most wonderful dream of the whole world. a gentle hissing became audible in the air, and the doctor moved quickly backwards. it came close to our faces and then seemed to play about the walls and ceiling. "the last of the fire--still waiting for its full accomplishment," he muttered; but i heard both words and hissing as things far away, for i was still busy with the journey of the soul through the seven halls of death, listening for echoes of the grandest ritual ever known to men. the earthen plates covered with hieroglyphics still lay beside the mummy, and round it, carefully arranged at the points of the compass, stood the four jars with the heads of the hawk, the jackal, the cynocephalus, and man, the jars in which were placed the hair, the nail parings, the heart, and other special portions of the body. even the amulets, the mirror, the blue clay statues of the ka, and the lamp with seven wicks were there. only the sacred scarabaeus was missing. "not only has it been torn from its ancient resting-place," i heard dr. silence saying in a solemn voice as he looked at colonel wragge with fixed gaze, "but it has been partially unwound,"--he pointed to the wrappings of the breast,--"and--the scarabaeus has been removed from the throat." the hissing, that was like the hissing of an invisible flame, had ceased; only from time to time we heard it as though it passed backwards and forwards in the tunnel; and we stood looking into each other's faces without speaking. presently colonel wragge made a great effort and braced himself. i heard the sound catch in his throat before the words actually became audible. "my sister," he said, very low. and then there followed a long pause, broken at length by john silence. "it must be replaced," he said significantly. "i knew nothing," the soldier said, forcing himself to speak the words he hated saying. "absolutely nothing." "it must be returned," repeated the other, "if it is not now too late. for i fear--i fear--" colonel wragge made a movement of assent with his head. "it shall be," he said. the place was still as the grave. i do not know what it was then that made us all three turn round with so sudden a start, for there was no sound audible to my ears, at least. the doctor was on the point of replacing the lid over the mummy, when he straightened up as if he had been shot. "there's something coming," said colonel wragge under his breath, and the doctor's eyes, peering down the small opening of the tunnel, showed me the true direction. a distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point about half-way down the tunnel we had so laboriously penetrated. "it's the sand falling in," i said, though i knew it was foolish. "no," said the colonel calmly, in a voice that seemed to have the ring of iron, "i've heard it for some time past. it is something alive--and it is coming nearer." he stared about him with a look of resolution that made his face almost noble. the horror in his heart was overmastering, yet he stood there prepared for anything that might come. "there's no other way out," john silence said. he leaned the lid against the sand, and waited. i knew by the masklike expression of his face, the pallor, and the steadiness of the eyes, that he anticipated something that might be very terrible--appalling. the colonel and myself stood on either side of the opening. i still held my candle and was ashamed of the way it shook, dripping the grease all over me; but the soldier had set his into the sand just behind his feet. thoughts of being buried alive, of being smothered like rats in a trap, of being caught and done to death by some invisible and merciless force we could not grapple with, rushed into my mind. then i thought of fire--of suffocation--of being roasted alive. the perspiration began to pour from my face. "steady!" came the voice of dr. silence to me through the vault. for five minutes, that seemed fifty, we stood waiting, looking from each other's faces to the mummy, and from the mummy to the hole, and all the time the shuffling sound, soft and stealthy, came gradually nearer. the tension, for me at least, was very near the breaking point when at last the cause of the disturbance reached the edge. it was hidden for a moment just behind the broken rim of soil. a jet of sand, shaken by the close vibration, trickled down on to the ground; i have never in my life seen anything fall with such laborious leisure. the next second, uttering a cry of curious quality, it came into view. and it was far more distressingly horrible than anything i had anticipated. for the sight of some egyptian monster, some god of the tombs, or even of some demon of fire, i think i was already half prepared; but when, instead, i saw the white visage of miss wragge framed in that round opening of sand, followed by her body crawling on all fours, her eyes bulging and reflecting the yellow glare of the candles, my first instinct was to turn and run like a frantic animal seeking a way of escape. but dr. silence, who seemed no whit surprised, caught my arm and steadied me, and we both saw the colonel then drop upon his knees and come thus to a level with his sister. for more than a whole minute, as though struck in stone, the two faces gazed silently at each other: hers, for all the dreadful emotion in it, more like a gargoyle than anything human; and his, white and blank with an expression that was beyond either astonishment or alarm. she looked up; he looked down. it was a picture in a nightmare, and the candle, stuck in the sand close to the hole, threw upon it the glare of impromptu footlights. then john silence moved forward and spoke in a voice that was very low, yet perfectly calm and natural. "i am glad you have come," he said. "you are the one person whose presence at this moment is most required. and i hope that you may yet be in time to appease the anger of the fire, and to bring peace again to your household, and," he added lower still so that no one heard it but myself, "_safety to yourself_." and while her brother stumbled backwards, crushing a candle into the sand in his awkwardness, the old lady crawled farther into the vaulted chamber and slowly rose upon her feet. at the sight of the wrapped figure of the mummy i was fully prepared to see her scream and faint, but on the contrary, to my complete amazement, she merely bowed her head and dropped quietly upon her knees. then, after a pause of more than a minute, she raised her eyes to the roof and her lips began to mutter as in prayer. her right hand, meanwhile, which had been fumbling for some time at her throat suddenly came away, and before the gaze of all of us she held it out, palm upwards, over the grey and ancient figure outstretched below. and in it we beheld glistening the green jasper of the stolen scarabaeus. her brother, leaning heavily against the wall behind, uttered a sound that was half cry, half exclamation, but john silence, standing directly in front of her, merely fixed his eyes on her and pointed downwards to the staring face below. "replace it," he said sternly, "where it belongs." miss wragge was kneeling at the feet of the mummy when this happened. we three men all had our eyes riveted on what followed. only the reader who by some remote chance may have witnessed a line of mummies, freshly laid from their tombs upon the sand, slowly stir and bend as the heat of the egyptian sun warms their ancient bodies into the semblance of life, can form any conception of the ultimate horror we experienced when the silent figure before us moved in its grave of lead and sand. slowly, before our eyes, it writhed, and, with a faint rustling of the immemorial cerements, rose up, and, through sightless and bandaged eyes, stared across the yellow candlelight at the woman who had violated it. i tried to move--her brother tried to move--but the sand seemed to hold our feet. i tried to cry--her brother tried to cry--but the sand seemed to fill our lungs and throat. we could only stare--and, even so, the sand seemed to rise like a desert storm and cloud our vision ... and when i managed at length to open my eyes again, the mummy was lying once more upon its back, motionless, the shrunken and painted face upturned towards the ceiling, and the old lady had tumbled forward and was lying in the semblance of death with her head and arms upon its crumbling body. but upon the wrappings of the throat i saw the green jasper of the sacred scarabaeus shining again like a living eye. colonel wragge and the doctor recovered themselves long before i did, and i found myself helping them clumsily and unintelligently to raise the frail body of the old lady, while john silence carefully replaced the covering over the grave and scraped back the sand with his foot, while he issued brief directions. i heard his voice as in a dream; but the journey back along that cramped tunnel, weighted by a dead woman, blinded with sand, suffocated with heat, was in no sense a dream. it took us the best part of half an hour to reach the open air. and, even then, we had to wait a considerable time for the appearance of dr. silence. we carried her undiscovered into the house and up to her own room. "the mummy will cause no further disturbance," i heard dr. silence say to our host later that evening as we prepared to drive for the night train, "provided always," he added significantly, "that you, and yours, cause it no disturbance." it was in a dream, too, that we left. "you did not see her face, i know," he said to me as we wrapped our rugs about us in the empty compartment. and when i shook my head, quite unable to explain the instinct that had come to me not to look, he turned toward me, his face pale, and genuinely sad. "scorched and blasted," he whispered. transcriber's note: text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). the haunting of low fennel * * * * * _uniform with this volume._ adventures of captain kettle. by c. j. cutcliffe hyne. the lovers of yvonne. by rafael sabatini. the marriage of margaret. by e. m. albanesi. the secret way. by j. s. fletcher. captain kettle, k.c.b. by c. j. cutcliffe hyne. * * * * * the haunting of low fennel by sax rohmer author of "brood of the witch queen," "the quest of the sacred slipper," etc., etc. london: c. arthur pearson, ltd. henrietta street, w.c. first published reprinted printed in great britain by butler & tanner ltd., frome and london contents page the haunting of low fennel the valley of the just the blue monkey the riddle of ragstaff the master of hollow grange the curse of a thousand kisses the turquoise necklace the haunting of low fennel i "there's low fennel," said major dale. we pulled up short on the brow of the hill. before me lay a little valley carpeted with heather, purple slopes hemming it in. a group of four tall firs guarded the house, which was couched in the hollow of the dip--a low, rambling building, in parts showing evidence of great age and in other parts of the modern improver. "that's the new wing," continued the major, raising his stick; "projecting out this way. it's the only addition i've made to the house, which, as it stood, had insufficient accommodation for the servants." "it is a quaint old place." "it is, and i'm loath to part with it, especially as it means a big loss." "ah! have you formed any theories since wiring me?" "none whatever. i've always been a sceptic, addison, but if low fennel is not haunted, i'm a dutchman, by the lord harry!" i laughed reassuringly, and the two of us descended the slope to the white gate giving access to a trim gravel path flanked by standard roses. mrs. dale greeted us at the door. she was, as i had heard, much younger than the major, and a distinctly pretty woman. in so far dame rumour was confirmed; other things i had heard of her, but i was not yet in a position to pass judgment. she greeted me cordially enough, although women are usually natural actresses. i thought that she did not suspect the real object of my visit. tea was served in a delightful little drawing-room which bore evidence of having but recently left the hands of london decorators, but when presently i found myself alone with my host in the major's peculiar sanctum, the real business afoot monopolised our conversation. the room which major dale had appropriated as a study was on the ground floor of the new wing--the wing which he himself had had built on to low fennel. in regard to its outlook it was a charming apartment enough, with roses growing right up to the open window, so that their perfume filled the place, and beyond, a prospect of purple heather slopes and fir-clad hills. sporting prints decorated the walls, and the library was entirely, or almost entirely, made up of works on riding, hunting, shooting, racing, and golf, with a sprinkling of whyte-melville and nat gould novels and a murray handbook or two. it was a most cosy room, probably because it was so untidy, or, as mrs. dale phrased it, "so manny." on a side table was ranked enough liquid refreshment to have inebriated a regiment, and, in one corner, cigar-boxes and tobacco-tins were stacked from the floor some two feet up against the wall. we were soon comfortably ensconced, then, the major on a hard leather couch, and i in a deep saddle-bag chair. "it's an awkward sort of thing to explain," began dale, puffing away at a cigar and staring through the open window; "because, if you're to do anything, you will want full particulars." i nodded. "well," the major continued, "you've heard how that blackguard ellis let me down over those shares? the result?--i had to sell the hall--fennel hall, where a dale has been since the time of elizabeth! but still, never mind! that's not the story. this place, low fennel, is really part of the estate, and i have leased it from meyers, who has bought the hall. it was formerly the home farm, but since my father's time it has not been used for that purpose. the new farm is over the brow of the hill there, on the other side of the high road; my father built it." "why?" "well,"--dale shifted uneasily and a look of perplexity crossed his jolly, red face--"there were stories--uncomfortable stories. to cut a long story short, seager--a man named seager, who occupied it at the time i was at sandhurst--was found dead here, or something; i never was clear as to the particulars, but there was an inquiry and a lot of fuss, and, in short, no one would occupy the property. therefore the governor built the new farm." "low fennel has been empty for many years then?" "no, sir; only for one. ord, the head gardener at the hall, lived here up till last september. the old story about seager was dying out, you see; but ord must have got to hear about it--or i've always supposed so. at any rate, in september--a dam' hot september, too, almost if not quite as hot as this--ord declined to live here any longer." "on what grounds?" "he told me a cock-and-bull story about his wife having seen a horrible-looking man with a contorted face peering in at her bedroom window! i questioned the woman, of course, and she swore to it." he mopped his heated brow excitedly, and burnt several matches before he succeeded in relighting his cigar. "she tried to make me believe that she woke up and saw this apparition, but i bullied the truth out of her, and, as i expected, the man ord had come home the worse for drink. i made up my mind that the contorted face was the face of her drunken husband--whom she had declined to admit, and who therefore had climbed the ivy to get in at the open window." "she denied this?" "of course she denied it; they both did; but, from evidence obtained at the _three keys_ in the village, i proved that ord had returned home drunk that night. still"--he shrugged his shoulders ponderously--"the people declined to remain in the place, so what could i do? ord was a good gardener, and his drunken habits in no way interfered with his efficiency. he gained nothing out of the matter except that, instead of keeping low fennel, a fine house, i sent him to live in one of the valley cottages. he lives there now, for he's still head gardener at the hall." i made an entry in my notebook. "i must see ord," i said. "i should," agreed the major in his loud voice; "you'll get nothing out of him. he's the most pig-headed liar in the county! but to continue. the place proved unlettable. all the old stories were revived, and i'm told that people cheerfully went two miles out of their way in order to avoid passing low fennel at night! when i sold the hall and decided to lease the place from the new proprietor, believe me it was almost hidden in a wilderness of weeds and bushes which had grown up around it. by the lord harry, i don't think a living soul had approached within a hundred yards of the house since the day that the ords quitted it! but it suited my purpose, being inexpensive to keep up; and by adding this new wing i was enabled to accommodate such servants as we required. the horses and the car had to go, of course, and with them a lot of my old people, but we brought the housekeeper and three servants, and when a london firm had rebuilt, renovated, decorated, and so forth, it began to look habitable." "it's a charming place," i said with sincerity. "is it!" snapped the major, tossing his half-smoked cigar on to a side table and selecting a fresh one from a large box at his elbow. "help yourself, the bottle's near you. is it!... hullo! what have we here?" he broke off, cigar in hand, as the sound of footsteps upon the gravel path immediately outside the window became audible. through the cluster of roses peered a handsome face, that of a dark man, whose soft-grey hat and loose tie lent him a sort of artistic appearance. "oh, it's you, wales!" cried the major, but without cordiality. "see you in half an hour or so; little bit of business in hand at the moment, marjorie's somewhere about." "all right!" called the new arrival, and, waving his hand, passed on. "it's young aubrey wales," explained dale, almost savagely biting the end from his cigar, "son of sir frederick wales, and one of my neighbours. he often drops in." mentally considering the major's attitude, certain rumours which had reached me, and the youth and beauty of mrs. dale, i concluded that the visits of aubrey wales were not too welcome to my old friend. but he resumed in a louder voice than ever:-- "it was last night that the fun began. i can make neither head nor tail of it. if the blessed place is haunted, why have we seen nothing of the ghost during the two months or so we have lived at low fennel? the fact remains that nothing unusual happened until last night. it came about owing to the infernal heat. "mrs. alson, the housekeeper, came down about two o'clock, intending, so i understand, to get a glass of cider from the barrel in the cellar. she could not sleep owing to the heat, and felt extremely thirsty. there's a queer sort of bend in the stair--i'll show you in a minute; and as she came down and reached this bend she met a man, or a thing, who was going up! the moonlight was streaming in through the window right upon that corner of the stair, and the apparition stood fully revealed. "i gather that it was that of an almost naked man. mrs. alson naturally is rather reticent on the point, but i gather that the apparition was inadequately clothed. regarding the face of the thing she supplies more details. addison"--the major leant forward across the table--"it was the face of a demon, a contorted devilish face, the eyes crossed, and glaring like the eyes of a mad dog! "of course the poor woman fainted dead away on the spot. she might have died there if it hadn't been for the amazing heat of the night. this certainly was the cause of her trouble, but it also saved her. about three o'clock i woke up in a perfect bath of perspiration. i never remember such a night, not even in india, and, as mrs. alson had done an hour earlier, i also started to find a drink. addison! i nearly fell over her as she lay swooning on the stair!" he helped himself to a liberal tot of whisky, then squirted soda into the glass. "for once in a way i did the right thing, addison. not wishing to alarm marjorie, i knocked up one of the maids, and when mrs. alson had somewhat recovered, gave her into the girl's charge. i sat downstairs here in this room until she could see me, and then got the particulars which i've given you. i wired you as soon as the office was open; for i said to myself, 'dale, the devilry has begun again. if marjorie gets to hear of it there'll be hell to pay. she won't live in the place.'" he stood up abruptly, as a ripple of laughter reached us from the garden. "suppose we explore the scene of the trouble?" he suggested, moving toward the door. i thought in the circumstance our inspection might be a hurried one; therefore: "should you mind very much if i sought it out for myself?" i said. "it is my custom in cases of the kind to be alone if possible." "my dear fellow, certainly!" "my ramble concluded, i will rejoin mrs. dale and yourself--say on the lawn?" "good, good!" cried the major, throwing open the door. "an opening has been made on the floor above corresponding with this, and communicating with the old stair. go where you like; find out what you can; but remember--not a word to marjorie." ii filled with the liveliest curiosity, i set out to explore low fennel. first i directed my attention to the exterior, commencing my investigations from the front. that part of the building on either side of the door was evidently of tudor date, with a jacobean wing to the west containing apartments overlooking the lawn--the latter a georgian addition; whilst the new east wing, built by major dale, carried the building out almost level with the clump of fir-trees, and into the very heart of the ferns and bushes which here grew densely. there was no way around on this side, and not desiring to cross the lawn at present, i passed in through the house to the garden at the back. this led me through the northern part of the building and the servants' quarters, which appeared to be of even greater age than the front of the house. the fine old kitchen in particular was suggestive of the days when roasting was done upon a grand scale. beyond the flower garden lay the kitchen garden, and beyond that the orchard. the latter showed evidences of neglect, bearing out the major's story that the place had been unoccupied for twelve months; but it was evident, nevertheless, that the soil had been cultivated for many generations. thus far i had discovered nothing calculated to assist me in my peculiar investigation, and entering the house i began a room-to-room quest, which, beyond confirming most of my earlier impressions, afforded little data. the tortuous stairway, which had been the scene of the event described by my host, occupied me for some time, and i carefully examined the time-blackened panels, and tested each separate stair, for in houses like low fennel secret passages and "priest-holes" were to be looked for. however, i discovered nothing, but descending again to the hall i made a small discovery. there were rooms in low fennel which one entered by descending or ascending two or three steps, but this was entirely characteristic of the architectural methods of the period represented. i was surprised, however, to find that one mounted three steps in order to obtain access to the passage leading to the new wing. i had overlooked this peculiarity hitherto, but now it struck me as worthy of attention. why should a modern architect introduce such a device? it could only mean that the ground was higher on the east side of the building, and that, for some reason, it had proved more convenient to adopt the existing foundations than to level the site. i returned to the hall-way and stood there deep in thought, when the contact of a rough tongue with my hand drew my attention to a young airedale terrier who was anxious to make my acquaintance. i patted his head encouragingly, and, having reviewed the notes made during my tour of inspection, determined to repeat the tour in order to check them. the airedale accompanied me, behaving himself with admirable propriety as we passed around the house and then out through the kitchens into the garden. it was not until my journey led me back to the three steps, communicating with the new wing, that my companion seemed disposed to desert me. at first i ascribed his attitude to mere canine caprice. but when he persistently refused to be encouraged, i began to ascribe it to something else. suddenly grasping him by the collar, i dragged him up the steps, along the corridor, and into the major's study. the result was extraordinary. i think i have never seen a dog in quite the same condition; he whimpered and whined most piteously. at the door he struggled furiously, and even tried to snap at my hand. then, as i still kept a firm grip upon him, he set out upon a series of howls which must have been audible for miles around. finally i released him, having first closed the study door, and lowered the window. what followed was really amazing. the airedale hurled himself upon the closed door, scratching at it furiously, with intermittent howling; then, crouching down, he turned his eyes upon me with a look in them, not savage, but truly piteous. seeing that i did not move, the dog began to whimper again; when, suddenly making up his mind, as it seemed, he bounded across the room and went crashing through the glass of the closed window into the rose bushes, leaving me standing looking after him in blank wonderment. iii aubrey wales stayed to dinner, and since he had no opportunity of dressing, his presence afforded a welcome excuse for the other members of the party. the night was appallingly hot; the temperature being such as to preclude the slightest exertion. the major was an excellent host, but i could see that the presence of the younger man irritated him, and at times the conversation grew strained; there was an uncomfortable tension. so that altogether i was not sorry when mrs. dale left the table and the quartet was broken up. on closer acquaintance i perceived that wales was even younger than i had supposed, and therefore i was the more inclined to condone his infatuation for the society of mrs. dale, although i felt less sympathetically disposed toward her for offering him the encouragement which rather openly she did. ere long, wales left major dale and myself for the more congenial society of the hostess; so that shortly afterwards, when the major, who took at least as much wine as was good for him, began to doze in his chair, i found myself left to my own devices. i quitted the room quietly, without disturbing my host, and strolled around on to the lawn smoking a cigarette, and turning over in my mind the matters responsible for my presence at low fennel. with no definite object in view, i had wandered towards the orchard, when i became aware of a whispered conversation taking place somewhere near me, punctuated with little peals of laughter. i detected the words "aubrey" and "marjorie" (mrs. dale's name), and, impatiently tossing my cigarette away, i returned to the house, intent upon arousing the major and terminating this tête-à-tête. that it was more, on mrs. dale's part, than a harmless flirtation, i did not believe; but young wales was not a safe type of man for that sort of amusement. the major, sunk deep in his favourite chair in the study, was snoring loudly, and as i stood contemplating him in the dusk, i changed my mind, and retracing my steps, joined the two in the orchard, proclaiming my arrival by humming a popular melody. "has he fallen asleep?" asked mrs. dale, turning laughing eyes upon me. i studied the piquant face ere replying. her tone and her expression had reassured me, if further assurance were necessary, that my old friend's heart was in safe keeping; but she was young and gay; it was a case for diplomatic handling. "india leaves its mark on all men," i replied lightly; "but i have no doubt that the major is wide-awake enough now." my words were an invitation; to which, i was glad to note, she responded readily enough. "let's come and dig him out of that cavern of his!" she said, and linking her right arm in that of wales, and her left with mine, she turned us about toward the house. dusk was now fallen, and lights shone out from several windows of low fennel. suddenly, an upper window became illuminated, and mrs. dale pointed to this. "that is my room," she said to me; "isn't it delightfully situated? the view from the window is glorious." "i consider low fennel charming in every way," i replied. clearly she knew nothing of the place's sinister reputation, which seemed to indicate that she employed herself little with the domestic side of the household; otherwise she must undoubtedly have learnt of the episode of the man with the contorted face, if not from the housekeeper, from the maid. it was a tribute to the reticence of the servants that the story had spread no further; but the broken study window and the sadly damaged airedale already afforded matter for whispered debate among them, as i had noted with displeasure. the "digging out" of the major did not prove to be an entire success. he was in one of his peculiar moods, which i knew of old, and rather surly, being pointedly rude on more than one occasion to wales. he had some accounts to look into, or professed to have, and the three of us presently left him alone. it was now about ten o'clock, and aubrey wales made his departure, shaking me warmly by the hand and expressing the hope that we should see more of one another. he could not foresee that the wish was to be realised in a curious fashion. mrs. dale informed me that the major in all probability would remain immured in his study until a late hour, which i took to be an intimation that she wished to retire. i therefore pleaded weariness as a result of my journey, and went up to my room, although i had no intention of turning-in. i opened the two windows widely, and the heavy perfume of some kind of tobacco plant growing in the beds below grew almost oppressive. the heat of the night was truly phenomenal; i might have been, not in an english home county, but in the soudan. an absolute stillness reigned throughout low fennel, and, my hearing being peculiarly acute, i could detect the chirping of the bats which flitted restlessly past my windows. it was difficult to decide how to act. my experience of so-called supernatural appearances had strengthened my faith in the theory set forth in the paper "chemistry of psychic phenomena"--which had attracted unexpected attention a year before. therein i classified hauntings under several heads, basing my conclusions upon the fact that such apparitions are invariably localised; often being confined, not merely to a particular room, for instance, but to a certain wall, door, or window. i had been privileged to visit most of the famous haunted homes of great britain, and this paper was the result; but in the case of low fennel i found myself nonplussed, largely owing to lack of data. i hoped on the morrow to make certain inquiries along lines suggested by oddities in the structure of the house itself and by the nature of the little valley in which it stood. when meditating i never sit still, and whilst marshalling my ideas i paced the room from end to end, smoking the whole time. both windows and also the door, were widely opened. the amazing heat-wave which we were then experiencing promised to afford me a valuable clue, for i had proved to my own satisfaction that the apparitions variously known as "controls" and "elementals," not infrequently coincided with abrupt climatic changes, thunder-storms, or heat waves, or with natural phenomena, such as landslides and the like. this pacing led me from end to end of the room, then, between the open door and the large dressing-table facing it. it was as i returned from the door towards the dressing-table that i became aware of the presence of the _contorted face_. my peculiar studies had brought me into contact with many horrible apparitions, and if familiarity had failed to breed contempt, at least it had served to train my nerves for the reception of such sudden and ghastly appearances. i should be avoiding the truth, however, if i claimed to have been unmoved by the vision which now met me in the mirror. i drew up short, with one sibilant breath, and then stood transfixed. before me was a reflection of the open door, and of part of the landing and stairs beyond it. the landing lights were extinguished, and therefore the place beyond the door lay in comparative darkness. but, crawling in, serpent-fashion, inch by inch, silently, intently, so that the head, throat, and hands were actually across the threshold, came a creature which seemed to be entirely naked! it had the form of a man, but the face, the dreadful face which was being pushed forward slowly across the carpet with head held sideways so that one ear all but touched the floor, was the face, not of a man, but of a ghoul! i clenched my teeth hard, staring into the mirror and trying to force myself to turn and confront, not the reflection, but the reality. yet for many seconds i was unable to accomplish this. the baleful, protruding eyes glared straight into mine from the glass. the chin and lower lip of this awful face seemed to be drawn up so as almost to meet the nose, entirely covering the upper lip, and the nostrils were distended to an incredible degree, whilst the skin had a sort of purple tinge unlike anything i had seen before. the effect was grotesque in the true sense of the word; for the thing was clearly grimacing at me, yet god knows there was nothing humorous in that grimace! nearer it came and nearer. i could hear the heavy body being drawn across the floor; i could hear the beating of my own heart ... and i could hear a whispered conversation which seemed to be taking place somewhere immediately outside my room. at the moment that i detected the latter sound, it seemed that the apparition detected it also. the protruding eyes twisted in the head, rolling around ridiculously but horribly. despite the dread which held me, i identified the whisperers and located their situation. mrs. dale was at her open window and aubrey wales was in the garden below. the thought crossed my mind and was gone--but gone no quicker than the contorted face. by a sort of backward, serpentine movement, the thing which had been crawling into my room suddenly retired and was swallowed up in the shadows of the landing. i turned and sprang toward the open door, the fever of research hot upon me, and my nerves in hand again. at the door i paused and listened intently. no sound came to guide me from the darkened stair, and when, stepping quietly forward and leaning over the rail, i peered down into the hall below, nothing stirred, no shadow of the many there moved to tell of the passage of any living thing. i paused irresolute, unable to doubt that i was in the presence of an authentic apparition. but how to classify it? slowly i returned to my room, and stood there, thinking hard, and all the while listening for the slightest sound from within or without the house. the whispered conversation continued, and i stole quietly to one of the windows and leant out, looking to the left, in the direction of the new wing. a light burnt in the major's study, whereby i concluded that he was still engaged with his accounts, if he had not fallen asleep. between my window and the new wing, and on a level with my eyes, was the window of mrs. dale's room; and in the bright moonlight i could see her leaning out, her elbows on the ledge. her bare arms gleamed like marble in the cold light, and she looked statuesquely beautiful. wales i could not see, for a thick, square-clipped hedge obstructed my view ... but i saw something else. lizard fashion, a hideous unclad shape crawled past beneath me amongst the tangle of ivy and low plants about the foot of the fir trees. the moonlight touched it for a moment, and then it was gone into denser shadows.... a consciousness of impending disaster came to me, but, because of its very vagueness, found me unprepared. then suddenly i saw young wales. he sprang into view above the hedge, against which, i presume, he had been crouching; he leapt high in the air as though from some menace on the ground beneath him. i have never heard a more horrifying scream than that which he uttered. "my god!" he cried, "marjorie! marjorie!" and yet again: "marjorie! _save me!_" then he was down, still screaming horribly, and calling on the woman for aid--as though she could have aided him. the crawling thing made no sound, but the dreadful screams of wales sank slowly into a sort of sobbing, and then into a significant panting which told of his dire extremity. i raced out of the room, and down the dark stair into the hall. everywhere i was met by locked doors which baffled me. i had hoped to reach the garden by way of the kitchens, but now i changed my plan and turned my attention to the front-door. it was bolted, but i drew the bolts one after the other, and got the door open. outside, the landscape was bathed in glorious moonlight, and a sort of grey mist hovered over the valley like smoke. i ran around the angle of the house on to the lawn, and went plunging through flower-beds heedlessly to the scene of the incredible conflict. i almost fell over wales as he lay inert upon the gravel path. the shadows veiled him so that i could not see his face; but when, groping with my hands, i sought to learn if his heart still pulsed, i failed to discover any evidence that it did. with my hand thrust against his breast and my ear lowered anxiously, i listened, but he gave no sign of life, lying as still as all else around me. now this stillness was broken. excited voices became audible, and doors were being unlocked here and there. first of all the household, mrs. dale appeared, enveloped in a lace dressing-gown. "aubrey!" she cried tremulously, "what is it? where are you?" "he is here, mrs. dale," i answered, standing up, "and in a bad way, i fear." "for heaven's sake, what has happened to him? did you hear his awful cries?" "i did," i said shortly. standing with the moonlight fully upon her, mrs. dale sought him in the shadows of the hedge--and i knew that by the manner of his frightened outcry the man lying unconscious at my feet had forfeited whatever of her regard he had enjoyed. she was dreadfully alarmed, not so much on his behalf, as by the mystery of the attack upon him. but now she composed herself, though not without visible effort. "where is he, mr. addison?" she said firmly, "and what has happened to him?" a man, who proved to be a gardener, now appeared upon the scene. "help me to carry him in," i said to this new arrival; "perhaps he has only fainted." we gathered up the recumbent body and carried it through the kitchens into the breakfast-room, where there was a deep couch. all the servants were gathered at the foot of the stairs, frightened and useless, but the outcry did not seem to have aroused major dale. mrs. dale and i bent over wales. his face was frightfully congested, whilst his tongue protruded hideously; and it was evident, from the great discoloured weals which now were coming up upon his throat, that he had been strangled, or nearly so. i glanced at the white face of my hostess and then bent over the victim, examining him more carefully. i stood upright again. "do you know first aid, mrs. dale?" i asked abruptly. she nodded, her eyes fixed intently upon me. "then help to employ artificial respiration," i said, "and let one of the girls get ammonia, if you have any, and a bowl of hot water. we can patch him up, i think, without medical aid--which might be undesirable." mrs. dale seemed fully to appreciate the point, and in business-like fashion set to work to assist me. wales had just opened his eyes and begun to clutch at his agonized throat, when i heard a heavy step descending from the new wing--and major dale, in his dressing-gown, joined us. his red face was more red than usual, and his eyes were round with wonder. "what the devil's the matter?" he cried; "what's everybody up for?" "there has been an accident, major," i said, glancing around at the servants, who stood in a group by the door of the breakfast-room; "i can explain more fully later." major dale stepped forward and looked down at wales. "good god!" he said hoarsely, "it's young wales, by the lord harry!--what's he doing here?" mrs. dale, standing just behind me, laid her hand upon my arm; and, unseen by the major, i turned and pressed it reassuringly. iv the following day i lunched alone with the major, mrs. dale being absent on a visit. it had been impossible to keep the truth from her (or what we knew of it) and at present i could not quite foresee the issue of last night's affair. young wales, who had been driven home in a car sent from his place at a late hour, had not since put in an appearance; and it was sufficiently evident that mrs. dale would not welcome him should he do so, the hysterical panic which he had exhibited on the previous night having disgusted her. she had not said so in as many words, but i did not doubt it. "well, addison?" said the major as i entered, "have you got the facts you were looking for?" "some of them," i replied, and opening my notebook i turned to the pages containing notes made that morning. the major watched me with intense curiosity, and almost impatiently awaited my next words. the servant having left the room: "in the first place," i began, glancing at the notes, "i have been consulting certain local records in the town, and i find that in the year a certain dame pryce occupied a cabin which, according to one record, 'stood close beside unto ye lowe fennel.'" "that is, close beside this house?" interjected the major excitedly. "exactly," i said. "she attracted the attention of one of the many infamous wretches who disfigure the history of that period: matthew hopkins, the self-styled witch-finder general. this was a witch-ridden age, and the man hopkins was one of those who fattened on the credulity of his fellows, receiving a fee of twenty shillings for every unhappy woman discovered and convicted of witchcraft. poor pryce was 'swum' in a local pond (a test whereby the villain hopkins professed to discover if the woman were one of satan's band, or otherwise) and burnt alive in reigate market-place on september , ." "by god!" said the major, who had not attempted to commence his lunch, "that's a horrible story!" "it is one of the many to the credit of matthew hopkins," i replied; "but, without boring you with the details of this woman's examination and so forth, i may say that what interests me most in the case is the date--september ." "why? i don't follow you." "well," i said, "there's a hiatus in the history of the place after that, except that even in those early days it evidently suffered from the reputation of being haunted; but without troubling about the interval, consider the case of seager, which you yourself related to me. was it not in the month of august that he was done to death here?" "by gad!" cried the major, his face growing redder than ever, "you're right!--and hang it all, addison! it was in september--last september--that the ords cleared out!" "i remember your mentioning," i continued, smiling at his excitement, "that it was a very hot month?" "it was." "from a mere word dropped by one of the witnesses at the trial of poor pryce i have gathered that the month in which she was convicted of practising witchcraft in her cabin adjoining low fennel (as it stood in those days) was a tropically hot month also." major dale stared at me uncomprehendingly. "i'm out of my depth, addison--wading hopelessly. what the devil has the heat to do with the haunting?" "to my mind everything. i may be wrong, but i think that if the glass were to fall to-night, there would be no repetition of the trouble." "you mean that it's only in very hot weather--" "in phenomenally hot weather, major--the sort that we only get in england perhaps once in every ten years. for the glass to reach the altitude at which it stands at present, in two successive summers, is quite phenomenal, as you know." "it's phenomenal for it to reach that point at all," said the major, mopping his perspiring forehead; "it's simply indian, simply indian, sir, by the lord harry!" "another inquiry," i continued, turning over a leaf of my book, "i have been unable to complete, since, in order to interview the people who built your new wing, i should have to run up to london." "what the blazes have they to do with it?" "nothing at all, but i should have liked to learn their reasons for raising the wing three feet above the level of the hall-way." between the heat and his growing excitement, major dale found himself at a temporary loss for words. then: "they told me," he shouted at the top of his voice, "they told me at the time that it was something about--that it was due to the plan--that it was----" "i can imagine that they had some ready explanation," i said, "but it may not have been the true one." "then what the--what the--is the true one?" "the true one is that the new wing covers a former mound." "quite right; it does." "if my theory is correct, it was upon this mound that the cabin of dame pryce formerly stood." "it's quite possible; they used to allow dirty hovels to be erected alongside one's very walls in those days--quite possible." "moreover, from what i've learnt from ord--whom i interviewed at the hall--and from such accounts as are obtainable of the death of seager, this mound, and not the interior of low fennel as it then stood, was the scene of the apparitions." "you've got me out of my depth again, addison. what d'you mean?" "seager was strangled outside the house, not inside." "i believe that's true," agreed the major, still shouting at the top of his voice, but gradually growing hoarser; "i remember they found him lying on the step, or something." "then again, the apparition with the contorted face which peered in at mrs. ord----" "lies, all lies!" "i don't agree with you, major. she was trying to shield her husband, but i think she saw the contorted face right enough. at any rate it's interesting to note that the visitant came from outside the house again." "but," cried the major, banging his fist upon the table, "it wanders about inside the house, and--and--damn it all!--it goes outside as well!" "where it goes," i interrupted quietly, "is not the point. the point is, where it comes from." "then where do you believe it comes from?" "i believe the trouble arises, in the strictest sense of the word, from the same spot whence it arose in the days of matthew hopkins, and from which it had probably arisen ages before low fennel was built." "what the--" "i believe it to arise from the ancient barrow, or tumulus, above which you have had your new wing erected." major dale fell back in his chair, temporarily speechless, but breathing noisily; then: "tumulus!" he said hoarsely; "d'you mean to tell me the house is built on a dam' burial ground?" "not the whole house," i corrected him; "only the new wing." "then is the place haunted by the spirit of some uneasy ancient briton or something of that sort, addison? hang it all! you can't tell me a fairy tale like that! a ghost going back to pre-roman days is a bit too ancient for me, my boy--too hoary, by the lord harry!" "i have said nothing about an ancient british ghost--you're flying off at a tangent!" "hang it all, addison! i don't know what you're talking about at all, but nevertheless your hints are sufficiently unpleasant. a tumulus! no man likes to know he's sleeping in a graveyard, not even if it is two or three thousand years old. d'you think the chap who surveyed the ground for me knew of it?" "by the fact that he planned the new wing so as to avoid excavation, i think probably he did. he was wise enough to surmise that the order might be cancelled altogether and the job lost if you learnt the history of the mound adjoining your walls." "a barrow under the study floor!" groaned the major--"damn it all! i'll have the place pulled down--i won't live in it. gad! if marjorie knew, she would never close her eyes under the roof of low fennel again--i'm sure she wouldn't, i know she wouldn't. but what's more, addison, the thing, whatever it is, is dangerous--infernally dangerous. it nearly killed young wales!" he added, with a complacency which was significant. "it was the fright that nearly killed him," i said shortly. major dale stared across the table at me. "for god's sake, addison," he said, "what does it mean? what unholy thing haunts low fennel? you've studied these beastly subjects, and i rely upon you to make the place clean and good to live in again." "major," i replied, "i doubt if low fennel will ever be fit to live in. at any time an abnormal rise of temperature might produce the most dreadful results." "you don't mean to tell me----" "if you care to have the new wing pulled down and the wall bricked up again, if you care to keep all your doors and windows fastened securely whenever the thermometer begins to exhibit signs of rising, if you avoid going out on hot nights after dusk, as you would avoid the plague--yes, it may be possible to live in low fennel." again the major became speechless, but finally: "what d'you mean, addison?" he whispered; "for god's sake, tell me. what is it?--what is it?" "it is what some students have labelled an 'elemental' and some a 'control,'" i replied; "it is something older than the house, older, perhaps, than the very hills, something which may never be classified, something as old as the root of all evil, and it dwells in the ancient british tumulus." v as i had hoped, for my plans were dependent upon it, the mercury towered steadily throughout that day, and showed no signs of falling at night; the phenomenal heat-wave continued uninterruptedly. the household was late retiring, for the grey lord--fear--had imposed his will upon all within it. every shadow in the rambling old building became a cavern of horrors, every sound that disturbed the ancient timbers a portent and a warning. that the servants proposed to leave _en masse_ at the earliest possible moment was perfectly evident to me; in a word, all the dark old stories which had grown up around low fennel were revived and garnished, and new ones added to them. the horror of the night before had left its mark upon every one, and the coming of dusk brought with it such a dread as could almost be felt in the very atmosphere of the place. ghostly figures seemed to stir the hangings, ghostly sighs to sound from every nook of the old hall and stairway; baleful eyes looked in at the open windows, and the shrubberies were peopled with hosts of nameless things who whispered together in evil counsel. mrs. dale was as loath to retire as were the servants, more especially since the major and i were unable to disguise from her our intention of watching for the strange visitant that night. but finally we prevailed upon her to depart, and she ran upstairs as though the legions of the lost pursued her, slamming and locking her door so that the sound echoed all over the house. we had told her nothing, of course, of my discoveries and theories, but nevertheless the cat was out of the bag; the affair of the night before had spoilt our scheme of secrecy. in the major's study we made our preparations. the windows were widely opened, and the door was ajar. not a breath of wind disturbed the stillness of the night, and although major dale had agreed to act exactly as i might direct, he stared in almost comic surprise when he learnt the nature of these directions. placing two large silk handkerchiefs upon the table, i saturated them with the contents of a bottle which i had brought in my pocket, and handed one of the handkerchiefs to him. "tie that over your mouth and nostrils," i said, "and whatever happens don't remove it unless i tell you." "but, addison...." "you know the compact, major? if you aren't prepared to assist i must ask you to retire. to-night might be the last chance, perhaps, for years." growling beneath his breath, major dale obeyed, and, a humorous figure enough, stretched himself upon the couch, staring at me round-eyed. i also fastened a handkerchief about my head. "it would perhaps be better," i said, my voice dimmed by the wet silk, "if we avoided conversation as much as possible." standing up, i rolled back a corner of the carpet, exposing the floor-planks, and with a brace-and-bit, which i had in my pocket, i bored a round hole in one of these. into it i screwed the tube, attached to a little watch-like contrivance, twisting the face of the dial so that i could study it from where i proposed to sit. then i took up my post, smothering a laugh as i noted the expression upon that part of the major's red face which was visible to me. thus began the business of that strange night. half an hour passed in almost complete silence, save for the audible breathing of the major--by no means an ideal companion for such an investigation. but, having agreed to assist me, in justice to my old friend i must say that he did his best to stick to the bargain, and to play his part in what obviously he regarded as an insane comedy. at about the expiration of this thirty minutes, i thought i heard a door open somewhere in the house. listening intently, and glancing at my companion, i received no confirmation of the idea. evidently the major had heard nothing. again i thought i heard a sound--as of the rustling of silk upon the stair, or in an upper corridor; finally i was almost certain that the floor of the room above (viz. the major's bedroom) creaked very slightly. at that i saw my companion glance upward, then across at me, with a question in his eyes. but not desiring to disturb the silence, i merely shook my head. an hour passed. there had been no repetition of the slight sounds to which i have referred, and the stillness of low fennel was really extraordinary. a thermometer, which i had placed upon the table near to my elbow, recorded the fact that the temperature of the room had not abated a fraction of a point since sunset, and, sitting still though i was, i found myself bathed in perspiration. despite the open door and windows, not a breath of air stirred in the place, but the room was laden with the oppressive perfume of those night-scented flowers which i have mentioned elsewhere, for it was faintly perceptible to me, despite the wet silk. once, a bat flew half in at one of the windows, striking its wings upon the glass, but almost immediately it flew out again. a big moth fluttered around the room, persistently banging its wings against the lamp-shade. but nothing else within or without the house stirred, if i except the occasional restless movements of the major. then all at once--and not gradually as i had anticipated--the meter at my feet began to register. instantly, i looked to the thermometer. it had begun to fall. i glanced across at major dale. he was staring at something which seemed to have attracted his attention in a distant corner of the room. glancing away from the meter, the indicator of which was still moving upward, i looked in the same direction. there was much shadow there, but nevertheless i could not doubt that a very faint vapour was forming in that corner ... rising--rising--rising--slowly higher and higher. it proceeded from some part of the floor concealed by the big saddle-bag chair--the major's favourite dozing-place (probably from a faulty floor-board), and it was rising visibly, inch upon inch, as i watched, until it touched the ceiling above. then, like a column of smoke, it spread out, mushroom fashion; it crept in ghostly coils along the cornices, spreading, a dim grey haze, until it obscured a great part of the ceiling. again i looked across at the major. he was staring at the phenomenon with eyes which were glassy with amazement. i could see that momentarily he expected the vapour to take shape, to form into some ghoulish thing with a contorted face and clutching, outstretched fingers. but this did not happen. the vapour, which was growing more fine and imperceptible, began to disperse. i glanced from corner to corner of the room, then down to the meter on the floor. the indicator was falling again. still i made no move, although i could hear major dale fidgeting nervously, but i looked across at him ... and a dreadful change had come over his face. he was sitting upright upon the couch, the edge of which he clutched with one hand, whilst with the other he combed the air in a gesture evidently meant to attract my attention. he was trying to speak, but only a guttural sound issued from his throat. his staring eyes were set in a glare of stark horror upon the door of the study. swiftly i turned--to see the door slowly opening; to see, low down upon the bare floor--for i had removed the carpet from that corner of the room--a ghastly, contorted face, held sideways with one ear almost touching the ground, and with the lower lip and the chin drawn up as though they were of rubber, almost to the tip of the nose! the eyes glared up balefully into mine, the hair hung a dishevelled mass about the face, and i had a glimpse of one bare shoulder pressed upon the floor. wider and wider opened the door; and further into the room crept the horrible apparition.... the light gleamed equally upon the hideous, contorted face and upon the rounded shoulders and slim, white arms, on one of which a heavy gold oriental bangle was clasped. it was a woman! in a flash of inspiration--at sight of the bangle--my doubts were resolved; _i understood_. leaning across the table, i extinguished the lamp ... in the same instant that major dale, uttering an inarticulate, choking cry, sprang to his feet and toppled forward, senseless, upon the floor! the study became plunged in darkness, but into the long corridor, beyond the open door, poured the cold illumination of the moon. framed in the portal, uprose a slim figure, seeming like a black silhouette upon a silvern background, or a wondrous statue in ebony. elfin, dishevelled locks crowned the head; the pose of the form was as that of a startled dryad or a young bacchante poised for a joyous leap.... thus, for an instant, like some exquisite dream of phidias visualised, the figure stood ... then had fled away down the corridor and was gone! vi close upon a month had elapsed. major dale and i sat in my study in london. "young aubrey wales has gone abroad," i said. "he's ashamed to show up again, i suppose." "h'm!" growled the major--"i've got nothing to crow about, myself, by the lord harry! there's courage and courage, sir! i've led more than one bayonet attack, but i'd never qualify for the d.s.o. as a ghost-hunter!--never, by gad!--never!" he reached out for the decanter; then withdrew his hand. "doctor's orders," he muttered. "discipline must be maintained!" "it was the sudden excitement which precipitated the seizure," i said, glancing at the altered face of my old friend. "i was wrong to expose you to it; but of course i did not know that the doctor had warned you." "and now," said the major, sighing loudly as he filled his tumbler with plain soda-water--"what have you to tell me?" "in the first place--have you definitely decided to leave low fennel, for good?" "certainly--not a doubt on the point! we're leasing a flat in town here whilst we look around." "good! because i very much doubt if the place could ever be rendered tenable...." "then it's really haunted?" "undoubtedly." "by what, addison? tell me that!--by what?" "by a grey vapour." major dale's eyes began to protrude, and:-- "addison," he said hoarsely--"don't joke about it!--don't joke. it was not a grey vapour that strangled seager...." "certainly it was not. seager was strangled by some wholly inoffensive person--we shall probably never know his identity--who had fallen asleep amongst the bushes on the mound, close beside the house...." "but man alive! i've _seen_ the beastly thing, with my own eyes! you've seen it! wales saw it! mrs. ord saw it!..." "mrs. ord saw her husband." "ah! you're coming round to my belief about the ords!" "decidedly i am." "but what did wales see--eh? and what did _i_ see!" "you saw the vapour in operation." the major fell back in his chair with an expression upon his face which i cannot hope to describe. words failed him altogether. "i had come prepared for something of the sort," i continued rapidly; "for i have investigated several cases of haunting--notably in the peak district--which have proved to be due to an emanation from the soil--a vapour. but the effect of such vapour, in the other cases, was to induce delusions of sight, in nearly every instance (although, in two, the delusions were of hearing). "in other words, the person affected by this vapour was drugged, and, during the drugged state, perceived certain visions. i made the mistake, at first, of supposing that low fennel came within the same category. the classical analogy, of course, is that of the sibyls, who delivered the oracular responses from the tripod, under the afflatus of a vapour said to arise from the sacred subterranean stream called kassotis. the theory is, therefore, by no means a new one!" major dale stared dully, but made no attempt to interrupt me. "there are probably many spots, in england alone," i continued, "thus affected; but, fortunately, few of them have been chosen as building-sites. barrows and tumuli of the stone and bronze age, and also roman shrines, seem frequently to be productive of such emanations. the barrow beside low fennel (and now under the new wing) is a case in point. "sudden atmospheric changes seem to be favourable to the formation of the vapour. the barrow in peel castle, isle of man, is peculiarly susceptible to thunder-storms, for instance, whilst that at low fennel emits a vapour only after a spell of intense heat, and at the exact moment when the temperature begins to fall again. in the case of a sustained heat-wave, this would take place at some time during each night. "and now for the particular in which the vapour at low fennel differs from other, similar emanations. it is not productive of delusions of sight; it induces a definite and unvarying form of transient insanity!" major dale moved slightly, but still did not speak. "dame pryce was the first recorded victim of the vapour. she was accused of witchcraft by a neighbour who testified to having seen her transform herself into a hideous and unrecognizable hag--whereas, in her proper person, she seems to have been a comely old lady. lack of evidence compels us to dismiss the case of seager, but consider that of the ords. the man ord, on his own confession, had fallen asleep outside the house. he became a victim of the vapour--and his own wife failed to recognize him. "to what extent the mania so produced is homicidal remains to be proved; the gas is rare and difficult to procure, so that hitherto analysis has not been attempted. my own theory is that the subject remains harmless provided that, whilst under the mysterious influence, he does not encounter any person distasteful to him. thus, seager may have met his death at the hands of some tramp who had been turned away from the house. "as to the symptoms: they seem to be quite unvarying. the subject strips, contorts his face out of all semblance to humanity (and always in a particular fashion) and crawls, lizard-like upon the ground, with the head held low, in an attitude of listening. that it is possible so to contort the face as to render it unrecognizable is seen in some cases of angina pectoris, of course. "the subject apparently returns to the spot from whence he started and sinks into profound sleep, as is seen in some cases of somnambulism; and--like the somnambulist, again--he acquires incredible agility. how you yourself came, twice, under the influence of the vapour, is easily explained. the first time--when the housekeeper saw you--you had actually been in bed; and the second time, as you have told me, you had gone upstairs, undressed, and then slipped on your dressing-gown in order to complete some work in the study. instead of completing the work, you dozed in your chair--and we know what followed! in the case of--mrs. dale...." "god! addison," said the major huskily, and stood up, clutching the chair-arms--"addison! you are trying to tell me that--what i saw was ... _marjorie_!..." i nodded gravely. "without letting her suspect my reason for making the inquiries, i learnt that on that last night at low fennel, feeling dreadfully lonely and frightened, she determined to run along to the new wing--which seemed a safer place--and to wait in your room until you came up. she fell asleep, and...." "addison ... can a mere 'vapour' produce such...." "you mean, is the vapour directed or animated, by some discarnate, evil intelligence? my dear major, you are taking us back to the theory of elemental spirits, and i blankly refuse to follow you!" the valley of the just a story of the shan hills i the merciless sun beat down upon the little caravan, winding its way upward and ever upward to the hill-land. beneath stretched a panorama limned in feverish greens and unhealthy yellows; scarlike rocks striated the jungle, clothing the foothills, and through the dancing air, viewed from the arid heights, they had the appearance of running water. swamps to the south-east showed like unhealing wounds upon the face of the landscape; beyond them spread the muddy river waters, the bank of the stream proper being discernible only by reason of a greater greenness in the palm-tops: venomous green slopes beyond them again, a fringe of dwarfed forest, and the brazen skyline. on the right of the path rose volcanic rock, gnarled, twisted, and contorted as with the agonies of some mighty plague, which in a forgotten past had seized upon the very bowels of the world, and had contorted whole mountains, and laid waste vast forests and endless plains. above, the cruel sun; ahead, more plague-twisted rocks, with sandy scars dancing like running water; and, all around, the breathless stillness, the swooning stillness of tropical midday. north, south, east, and west, that haze of heat, that silence unbroken, lay like an accursed mantle upon burma. moreen fayne could scarcely support herself upright in the saddle; her head throbbed incessantly, and the veil which she wore could not protect her eyes from the maddening glare of the sun. but although at any moment during the past hour she could have slipped insensible from her saddle, she sat stiffly upright, her dauntless eyes looking straight ahead, her small mouth set with masculine sternness, and her hands clenched--the physical reflection of the mental effort whereby, alone, she was enabled to pursue the journey. just in front of her paced ramsa lal. his stride had not varied from the lowlands, through the foothills, nor on the rocky mountain paths. he had looked neither right nor left, but had walked, walked, walked. at times moreen had been hard put to it to choke down the hysterical screams which had risen in her throat; madness had threatened her, as she watched, in dumb misery, that silent striding man. yet she knew that it was only the presence of this tireless, immobile guide which had enabled her to go on; although he never directed one glance towards her, she knew that his steady march was meant for encouragement. behind, like the tail of a scorpion, trailed the native retinue, and on the end of the tail, where the sting would be, rode her husband. this simile had occurred to her at once, and she allowed her mind to dwell upon the idea as an invalid will consider imaginary designs upon the wall-paper of the sick-room. sometimes there was a sliding of hoofs and a sound of stumbling; sometimes her own pony lost his footing. on such occasion, there would be mechanical cries of encouragement from the natives, and perhaps a growling curse from the man who brought up the rear of the little company. the road wound through a frowning chasm, where lizards and other creeping things darted into holes to right and left of their progress. grateful shadow ruled a while, and a stifled sigh escaped from moreen's lips. ramsa lal paced straightly onward, the others came stumbling behind; fifty yards ahead the ravine opened out, and once more the deathly heat poured unchecked upon their heads. again moreen all but lost control of herself; her fortitude threatened to slip from her; so that she bit her lips until the pain filled her eyes with burning tears. the effort to control herself proved successful, but left her white and quivering. she felt impelled to speak to ramsa lal, and constrained herself only with a second effort of which her will was barely capable. then she saw that speech, which would be dangerous, was unnecessary; the man's wonderful intuition had enabled him to hear that crying of the soul, and he was answering her. his brown fingers were clutching and unclutching convulsively, and as he swung his arm, he would clench his right fist and beat the air. for a moment he acted thus, and then, as if he knew that she had seen, and understood, his fingers hung limply again, and his arm swung loosely as before. a sort of plateau was reached, and in a natural clearing, where giant bamboos ranged back to the tangled, creeper-laden boughs of the forest trees, the voice of major fayne cried a halt. ramsa lal was beside moreen's pony in a trice, and he so screened her exhausted descent from the saddle, setting her down upon an hospitable bank hard by, that she was enabled to maintain her inflexible attitude, when presently her husband came striding along to stand looking down on her, where she sat. his blackly pencilled brows were drawn together, and the pale blue eyes shone out, saturnine, from cavernous sockets. his handsome face was heavily lined, and in the appearance, in the whole attitude of the man, was something aggressive, a violence markedly repellent. moreen locked her hands behind her, the fingers twining and intertwining, but she raised a pale face to his, from which by a last supreme effort of will she had driven all traces of emotion. so they remained for a moment, whilst the servants busied themselves with the baggage; he, with feet wide apart, staring down at her, and slashing at the air with a fly-whisk, and she meeting his gaze with a stony calm pitiful to behold, had there been any soul capable of pity to see her. ramsa lal was directing operations. "here," said major fayne, "we camp." his voice would have told a skilled observer that which the facial lines and a certain odd puffiness of skin more than suggested, that major fayne was not a temperate man. moreen made no sign, but simply sat watching the speaker. "it's a delightful situation," continued he, "and your ambition, frequently expressed in mandalay, to see something of burma other than bridge parties and polo-matches, at last is realised." he spoke with a seeming sincerity that had carried conviction to any, save the most sceptical. but moreen made no sign. "here," continued major fayne, "you may feast your eyes upon the glories of a burma forest. those flowering creepers yonder, festooned from bough to bough, are peculiar to this district, and if you care to explore further, you will be rewarded by the discovery of some fine orchids. note, also, the perfume of the flowers." he twirled his slight moustache, and turned away to supervise the work of camping. ramsa lal already had one of the tents nearly erected, and moreen watched his deft fingers at work, with an anxiety none the less because it was masked. she knew that collapse was imminent. the cruel march under the pitiless sun had had due effect, but it had not broken her spirit. she knew that she had reached the end of her strength, but she showed no sign of weakness before her husband. it was done at last, and ramsa lal held the tent-cloth aside, and bowed. moreen stood up, clenched her teeth together grimly, and staggered forward. as the tent-flap was dropped, she sank down beside the camp bedstead, and her head fell upon the covering. ii dusk fell, a quick curtain, and the lamps of night shone out with glorious brilliancy, illuminating the little plateau. the tents gleamed whitely in the cold radiance; there was a dancing redness to show where the fire had been built, with figures grouped dimly around it. on a jagged rock, which started up from the very heart of a thicket, black against the newly risen moon, was silhouetted the figure of major fayne. night things swept the air about him, and rustled in the cane brake below him; the fire crackled in the neighbouring camp; sometimes a murmur came from the group of natives. but, heedless of these matters, moreen's husband stood on the rocky eminence looking back upon the way they had come, looking down to the distant river valley. for many minutes he remained so, but presently, clambering down, heavily forced his way through the undergrowth to the little camp. passing the tents, he walked back to the dip of the pathway, and paused again, watching and listening; then turned and strode to the fire, grasped ramsa lal by the shoulder, and drew him away from the others. "come here!" he directed tersely. at the head of the pathway he bade him halt. "listen!" he directed. ramsa lal stood in an attitude of keen attention, and the major watched him with feverish anxiety, which he was wholly unable to conceal. "do you hear it?" he demanded--"hoofs on the path!" ramsa lal shook his head. "i hear nothing, sahib." "put your ear to the ground, and listen. i tell you that i saw figures moving away below there, and i heard--hoofs, stumbling hoofs." the man knelt down upon the ground, and, bending forward, lowered his head. major fayne watched him, and with growing anxiety, so that, what with this and the pallid moonlight, his face appeared ghastly. but again ramsa lal stood up, shaking his head. "nothing, sahib," he repeated. major fayne suddenly grasped him by the shoulders, spinning him about, and dragging him forward, so that the dusky face was but inches removed from his own. he glared into the man's eyes. "are you lying to me?" he demanded, "are you lying?" "i swear it is the truth: why should i lie to you, sahib?" "you want them----" major fayne broke off abruptly and thrust the man away from him. a different expression had crept into his face, an expression in which there was something furtive. he spun around upon his heel and stepped to the tent where moreen was. raising the flap slightly: "good-night," he called, and turned away. ramsa lal had gone back to the fireside; and fayne, following a moment of hesitancy, strode with his swaggering military gait to the tent erected in the furthermost corner of the clearing. he had stooped to enter, when he hesitated, remaining there bent forward--and listening. from the opposite side of the distant fire, ramsa lal, though few would have suspected the fact, was watching. evidently enough, the leader of the little company was obsessed with his delusion that some one or something clambered up the steep path beneath. suddenly shrugging his shoulders, he stooped yet lower, and dived into the tent. one of the natives threw fresh fuel upon the fire, and a stream of sparks sped up through the clear air in a widening trail ever growing fainter. there was a crackling, a murmur of voices, and then a new silence. this in turn was broken by the distant howling of dogs, and in the near stillness one might have heard the faint shrieking of the bats, who now were embarked upon their nocturnal voyagings. a shrill, wild scream burst suddenly from the heart of the trees in the east, rose eerily upon the night, and died away. but the group about the fire moved not at all, for this dreadful screaming but marked an animal tragedy of the burma forests. so furred things howled and screamed and moaned in the woodlands, feathered things piped and hooted around and above, and the bats, uncanny creatures of the darkness, who seem to have kinship neither with fur nor feather, chirped faintly overhead. once there was a distant, hollow booming like the sound of artillery, which echoed down the mountain gorges, and seemed to roll away over the lowland swamps, and die, inaudible, by the remote river-bank. yet no one stirred; for this mysterious gunnery is a phenomenon met with in that district, inexplicable, weird, but no novelty to one who has camped in the shan hills. a second time later in the night the phantom guns boomed; and again their booming died away in the far valleys. the fire was getting low, now. iii moreen lay, sleepless, wide-eyed, staring up at the roof of the tent. she had eaten, could eat, nothing, but she was consumed by a parching thirst. the sounds of the night had no terrors for her; indeed, she scarcely noticed them, for she had other and more dreadful things to think of. ramsa lal had been her father's servant; him she could trust. but the others--the others were major fayne's. they were no more than spies upon her; guards. what did it mean, this sudden dash from the bungalow into the hills? it amused her husband to pretend that it was a pleasure-trip, but the equipment was not of the sort one takes upon such occasions, and one is not usually dragged from bed at midnight to embark upon such a journey. it was additionally improbable in view of the fact that up to the moment of departure major fayne had not spoken to her, except in public, for six months. the dreadful, forced marches were breaking her down, and she knew that her husband was drinking heavily. what, in god's name, would be the end of it? weakly, she raised herself into a sitting position, groping for and lighting a candle. from the bosom of her dress she took out a letter, the last she had received from home before this mad flight. there was something in it which had frightened her at the time, but which, viewed in the light of recent events, was unspeakably horrifying. during the long estrangement between her husband and herself she had learnt, and had paid for her knowledge with bitter tears, that there was a side to the character of major fayne which he had carefully concealed from her before marriage; the dark, saturnine part of her husband's character had dawned upon her suddenly. that had been the beginning of her disillusionment, the disillusionment which has come to more than one english girl during the first twelve months of married life in an indian bungalow. then, perforce, the gap had widened, and six months later had become a chasm quite impassable except in the interests of social propriety. anglo-indian society is notable for divorces, and poor moreen very early in her married life fully understood the reason. she held the letter to the dim light and read it again attentively. allowing a certain discount for her mother's changeless animosity towards major fayne, it yet remained a startling letter. much of it consisted in feckless condolences, characteristic but foolish; the passage, however, which she read and re-read by the dim, flickering light was as follows: "mr. harringay in his last letter begged of me to come out by the next boat to rangoon," her mother wrote. "he has quite opened my eyes to the truth, moreen, not in such a way as to shock me all at once, but gradually. i always distrusted ralph fayne and never disguised the fact from you. i knew that his previous life had been far from irreproachable, but his treatment of you surpasses even _my_ expectations. i know _all_, my poor darling! and i know something which you do not know. his father did not die in colombo at all; he died in a madhouse! and there are two other known dipsomaniacs in ralph fayne's family----" a hand reached over moreen's shoulder and tore the letter from her. she turned with a cry--and looked up into her husband's quivering face! for a moment he stood over her, his left fist clenching and unclenching and his pale blue eyes glassy with anger. then chokingly he spoke: "so you carry one of his letters about with you?" the veins were throbbing visibly upon his temples. moreen clutched at the blanket but did not speak, dared not move, for if ever she had looked into the face of a madman it was at this moment when she looked into the face of ralph fayne. he suddenly grabbed the candle and, holding it close to the letter, began to read. his hands were perfectly steady, showing the tremendous nerve tension under which he laboured. then his expression changed, but nothing of the maniac glare left his eyes. "from your mother," he said hoarsely, "and full of two things--your wrongs, _your_ wrongs! and jack harringay--jack harringay--always jack harringay! damn him!" he put down the candle and began to tear the letter into tiny fragments, pouring forth the while a stream of coarse, blasphemous language. moreen, who felt that consciousness was slipping from her, crouched there with a face deathly pale. fayne began to laugh softly as he threw the torn-up letter from him piece by piece. "damn him!" he said again. he turned the blazing eyes towards his wife. "you lying, baby-faced hypocrite! why don't you admit that he is----" he stopped; the sinister laughter died upon his lips and he stood there shaking all over and with a sort of stark horror in his eyes dreadful to see. "why don't you?" he muttered--and looked at her almost pathetically,--"why of course you can't--no one can----" he reeled and clutched at the tent-flap, then stumblingly made his way out. "no one can," came back in a shaky whisper--"no one can----" moreen heard him staggering away, until the sound of his uncertain footsteps grew inaudible. a distant howling rose upon the night, and, nearer to the clearing, sounded a sort of tapping, not unlike that of a woodpecker. some winged creature was fluttering over the tent. iv dawn saw the dreadful march resumed. major fayne now exhibited unmistakable traces of his course of heavy drinking. he brought up the rear as hitherto, and often tarried far behind where some peculiar formation of the path enabled him to study the country already traversed. he had altered the route of the march, and now they were leaving the shan hills upon the north-east and dipping down to a chasm-like valley through which ran a tributary of the selween river. since the dry season was commenced the entire country beneath them showed through a haze of heat and dust. they had partaken of a crude and hasty breakfast as strangers having nothing in common who by chance share a table. moreen no longer doubted that her husband was mad, for he muttered to himself and was ever glancing over his shoulder. this and his constant watching of the path behind spoke of some secret terror from which he fled. towards noon, they skirted a village whose inhabitants poured forth _en bloc_ to watch the passing of this unfamiliar company. a faint hope that some european might be there died in moreen's breast. her position was a dreadful one. led by a madman--of this she was persuaded--and surrounded by natives who, if not actively hostile, were certainly unfriendly, with but one man to whom she could look for the slightest aid, she was proceeding further and further from civilisation into unknown wildernesses. what her husband's purpose might be she could not conceive. she was unable to think calmly, unable to formulate any plan. in the dull misery of a sick dream she rode forward speculating upon the awakening. the midday heat in the valley was so great that a halt became imperative. they camped at the edge of a dense jungle where banks of rotten vegetation, sun-dried upon the top, lay heaped about the bamboo stems. none but a madman would have chosen to tarry in such a spot; and major fayne's servants went about their work with many a furtive glance at their master. ramsa lal's velvety eyes showed a great compassion, but moreen offered no protest. she was in an unreal frame of mind and her will was merely capable of a mute indifference: any attempt to assert herself would have meant a sudden breakdown. something in her brain was strained to utmost tension; any further effort must have snapped it. in the hour of the greatest heat major fayne went out alone, offering no explanation of his intentions and leaving no word as to the time of his return. moreen only learnt of his departure from ramsa lal. she received the news with indifference and asked no questions. inert she lay in the little tent looking out at the wall of jungle, where it uprose but twenty yards away. so the day wore on. mechanically she partook of food when ramsa lal placed it before her, but, although the man's attitude palpably was one of uneasiness, she did not question him, and he departed in silence. it was an incredible situation. throughout the afternoon nothing occurred to break this dread monotony save that once there arose a buzz of conversation, and she became dimly aware that some one from the native village which they had passed in the morning had come into the camp. after a time the sounds had died away again, and ramsa lal had stepped into view, looking towards her interrogatively; but although she recognized his wish to speak to her, the inertia which now claimed her mind and body prevailed, and she offered him no encouragement to intrude upon her misery. thus the weary hours passed, until even to the dulled perceptions of moreen the sounds of unrest and uneasiness pervading the camp began to penetrate. yet major fayne did not return. the insect and reptile life of a burmese jungle moved around her, but she was curiously indifferent to everything. without alarm she brushed a venomous spider, fully one inch in girth, from the camp-bedstead, and dully watched it darting away into the jungle undergrowth. darkness swept down and tropical night things raised their mingled voices; then came ramsa lal. "forgive me, mem sahib," he said, "but i must speak to you." she half reclined, looking at him as he stood, a dimly seen figure, before her. "the men from the village," continued he, "come to say that we may not camp. it is holy ground from this place away"--he waved his arm vaguely--"to the end of the jungle where the river is." "i can do nothing, ramsa lal." "i fear--for him." "major fayne?" "he goes into the jungle to look for something. what does he go to look for? why does he not return?" moreen made no reply. "all of them there"--he indicated the direction of the native servants--"know this place. they are already afraid, and, with those from the village coming to warn us, they get more afraid still. this is a haunted place, mem sahib." moreen sat up, shaking off something of the lassitude which possessed her. "what do you mean?" she asked. "in that jungle," replied ramsa lal, "there is buried a temple, a very old temple, and in the temple there is buried one who was a holy man. his spirit watches over this place, and none may rest here because of him----" "but the men of the village came here," said moreen. "before sunset, mem sahib. no man would come here after dark. look! you will see--they are frightened." languidly, but with some awakening to the necessities of the situation, moreen stepped out of the tent and looked across to where, about a great fire, the retinue huddled in a circle. ramsa lal stood beside her with something contemptuous in the bearing of his tall figure. "a spell lies upon all this valley, mem sahib," he said. "therefore it is called the valley of the just." "why?" "because only the just can stay within its bounds through the night." moreen stared affrightedly. "do you mean that they die in the night, ramsa lal?" "in the night, mem sahib, before the dawn." "by what means?" ramsa lal spread his palms eloquently. "who knows?" he replied. "it is a haunted place." "and are you afraid?" "i am not afraid, for i have passed a night in the valley of the just many years ago, and i live." "you were alone?" "with two others, mem sahib." "and the others?" "one was bitten by a snake an hour before dawn, and the other, who was an upright man, lives to-day." moreen shuddered. "do you know"--she still hesitated to broach this subject with the man--"do you know where--major fayne has gone?" "it is said, mem sahib, that a stream runs through the jungle close beside the old temple, a stream which bubbles up from a cavern and which is supposed to come underground from the ruby mine plateau. he goes early in the morning to look for rubies--so i think." moreen tapped the ground with her foot. "do you think"--again she hesitated--"that major fayne is afraid of something? of something--where we have come from?" ramsa lal bowed low. "i cannot tell," he replied, "but we shall know ere sunrise." for a moment moreen scarcely grasped the significance of his words; then their inner meaning became apparent to her. "make me some coffee, ramsa lal," she said; "i am cold--very cold." she re-entered the tent, lighting the lamp. the valley of the just! what irony, that her husband should have selected that spot to camp in! she sat deep in thought, when presently ramsa lal entered with coffee. he had just set down the tray when the sound of a distant cry brought him rigidly upright. he stood listening intently. the sound was repeated--nearer it seemed--a sort of hoarse scream, terrible to hear--impossible to describe. moreen rose to her feet and followed the man out of the tent. some one--some one who kept crying out--was plunging heavily through the jungle towards the camp. the men about the fire were on their feet now. obviously they would have fled, but the prospect of flight into the haunted darkness was one more terrible than that of remaining where they were. it ceased, that strange cry; but whoever was approaching could be heard alternately groaning and laughing madly. then out from the thicket on the west, into the red light of the fire, burst a fearful figure. it was that of major fayne, wild eyed, and with face which seemed to be of a dull grey. he staggered and almost fell, but kept on for a few more paces and then collapsed in a heap almost at moreen's feet, amid the clatter of the strange loot wherewith he was laden. this consisted in a number of golden vessels heavily encrusted with gems, a huge golden salver, and a dozen or more ropes of gigantic rubies! amid these treasures, the ransom of a sultan, the price of a throne, he lay writhing convulsively. ramsa lal was the first to recover himself. he leapt forward, seized the prostrate man by the shoulders and dragged him into the tent, past moreen. having effected this he raised his eyes in a mute question. she nodded, and whilst ramsa lal seized the major's shoulders, moreen grasped his ankles, and together they lifted him up on to the bed. he lay there, rolling from side to side. his eyes were wide open, glassy and unseeing; a slight froth was upon his lips, his fists rose and fell in regular, mechanical beats, corresponding with the convulsive movements of his knees. moreen dropped down beside him. "ramsa lal! ramsa lal! what shall i do? what has happened to him?" ramsa lal ripped the collar from major fayne's neck in order to aid his respiration. then, quietly signing to moreen to hold the lamp, he began to search the entire exposed surface of the major's skin. evidently he failed to find that for which he was looking. he glanced down at the ankles, but the major wore thick putties and ramsa lal shook his head in a puzzled way. "it is like the bite of a hamadryad," he said softly, "but there is no mark." "what shall i do!" moaned moreen--"what shall i do!" there was a frightened murmur from the entrance, where the native servants stood in a group, peering in. moreen stood up. "hot water, ramsa lal!" she said. "we must give him brandy." "but it is useless, mem sahib; he has not been bitten--there is no mark; it may be a fever from the jungle." moreen beat her hands together helplessly. "we must do _something_!" she said; "we must do _something_." a sudden change took place in major fayne. the convulsive movements ceased and he lay quiet, and breathing quite regularly. the glassy look began to fade from his eyes, and with every appearance of being in full possession of his senses, he stared at moreen and spoke: "you shall repent of your words, harringay," he said in a quiet voice. "you have deliberately accused me of faking the cards. i care nothing for any of you. why should i attempt such a thing? i could buy and sell you all!..." moreen dropped slowly back upon her knees again, white to the lips, watching her husband. with the same appearance of perfect sanity, but now addressing the empty air, he continued: "in my tent--my wife will tell you it is true--my wife, harringay, do you hear?--i have jewelled cups and strings of rubies, enough to buy up mandalay! i blundered on to them in that old ruined temple back in the jungle, not five hundred yards from your bungalow. harringay--think of it--a treasure-room like that within sight of your verandah! there are snakes there, snakes, you understand, in hundreds; but it is worth risking for a big fortune like mine." "he mixes time and place," murmured ramsa lal. "he talks to the commissioner sahib in mandalay of what is here in the valley of the just." moreen nodded, catching her breath hysterically. "you see," continued the delirious man, "i am as rich as midas. why should _i_ want to cheat you! don't talk to me of what you would do for my wife's sake! keep your favours, curse you!" with a contemptuous smile, major fayne threw his head back upon the pallet. then came another change; the look of stark horror which moreen had seen once before crept into the grey face; and her husband raised himself in bed, glaring wildly into the shadows beyond the lamp. "you are a spirit!" the words came in a thrilling, eerie whisper. "oh god! i understand. yes! i came away from harringay's bungalow. my wife was asleep and i sat drinking until i had emptied the whisky decanter." he bent forward as if listening. "yes, i went back. i went back to reason with him. no! as god is my witness i did not plan it! i went back to reason with him." again the uncanny attitude was resumed. then: "i stepped in through the verandah, and there he sat with moreen's photograph in his hand. listen to me--_listen!_" there was an agony of entreaty in his voice; it rose to a thin scream--"my wife's photograph! do you hear me? do you understand? _moreen's_ photograph--and as i stood behind him, he raised it to his lips--he----" major fayne stopped abruptly, as if checked by a spoken word; and with wildly beating heart moreen found herself listening for the phantom voice. she could hear the breathing of the natives clustered behind her; but no other sound save a distant howling in the jungle was audible, until her husband began again: "i struck him down--from behind, yes, from behind. his blood poured over the picture. you understand i was mad. if you are just--and is not this called the valley of the just?--you cannot condemn me. why did i fly? i was not in my right mind; i had--been drinking, as i told you; i was mad. if i was not mad i should never have fled, never have drawn suspicion--on myself." he fell back as if exhausted, then once more struggled upright and began to peer about him. when he spoke again, his voice, though weak, was more like his own. "moreen!" he said--"where the devil are you? why can't you give me a drink?" suddenly, he seemed to perceive her, and he drew his brows together in the old, ugly frown. "curse you!" he said. "i have found you out! i am a rich man now, and when i have gone to england, see what jack harringay will do for you. i will paint london red! i have looted the old temple, and they are after me, they----" the words merged into a frightful scream. major fayne threw up his hands and fell back insensible upon the bed. "mem sahib! mem sahib, you must be brave!" it was ramsa lal who spoke; he supported moreen with his arm. "there is a spell upon this place. no medicine, nothing, can save him. there is only one thing----" moreen controlled herself by one of those giant efforts of which she was capable. "tell me," she whispered--"what must we do?" ramsa lal removed his arm, saw that she could stand unsupported, and bent forward over the unconscious man. following a rapid examination, he signed to her to leave the tent. they came out into the white blaze of the moonlight--and there at their feet lay the glittering loot of the haunted temple, a dazzlement of rainbow sparks. "only for such a thing as this," said ramsa lal, "dare i go, but not one of us will see another dawn if we do not go." he pointed to the heap of treasure. "mem sahib must come also." "but--my husband----" "he must remain," he said. "it is of his own choosing." v the temple stood in a kind of clearing. grotesquely horrible figures guarded the time-worn entrance. moreen drew a deep breath of relief on emerging from the jungle path by which, amid the rustle of retreating snakes, they had come, but shrank back affrighted from the blackness of the ruined doorway. ramsa lal stood the lantern upon the stump of a broken pillar, where its faint yellow light was paled by the moon-rays. "it is _you_ who must restore," he said. one by one he handed her the jewel-encrusted vessels and hung the ropes of rubies upon her arm. she nodded, and as ramsa lal took up the lantern and began to descend the steps within followed him. "no foot save his," came back to her, "has trod these sacred steps for ages, for the secret of the jungle path is known only to the few...." "how do you--know the way?" ramsa lal did not reply. they traversed a short tunnel; a heavy door was thrust open; and moreen found herself standing in a small pillared hall. through a window high in one wall, overgrown with tangled vegetation, crept a broken moonbeam. directly before her was the carven figure of a grotesque deity. a long, heavily clamped chest stood before it like an altar step. she staggered forward, deposited her priceless burden upon the floor, and mechanically began to raise the lid of the chest. "not that one, mem sahib!" the voice of ramsa lal rose shrilly--"not that one!..." but he spoke too late. moreen realised that there were three divisions in the chest, each having a separate lid. as she raised the one in the centre, a breath of fetid air greeted her nostrils, and she had a vague impression that this was no chest but the entrance to a deep pit. then all these thoughts were swept away by the crowning horror which rose out of the subterranean darkness. a great winged creature, clammily white, rose towards her, passed beneath her upraised hands and sailed into the darkness on the right. she heard it flapping its great bat wings against the wall--heard them beating upon a pillar--then saw it coming back towards her into the moonlight--and knew no more. vi "mem sahib!" moreen opened her eyes. she lay, propped against a saddle, at the camp beside the jungle. she shuddered icily. "ramsa lal--how----" "i carried the mem sahib! the treasures of the temple i restored to their resting-place----" "and the--the other----" "the door that the mem sahib opened she opened by the decree of fate. it was not for ramsa lal to close it. that is a passage----" "yes?" "--to the tomb of the great one who is buried in the temple!" "oh! heavens! that white thing----" she raised her hands to her face. "but--the camp----" "the camp is deserted! they all fled from----" moreen sat up, rigidly. "from what?" "from something that came for what we forgot!" "my husband----" "there was a ring upon his finger. i saw it, and knew where it came from, but forgot to remove it." moreen stood up, and turned towards the nearer tent. ramsa lal gently detained her. "not that way, mem sahib." "but i must see him! i must, i _must_ tell him that he wrongs me, cruelly, wickedly! you heard his words-- oh, god! can he have----" "it would be useless to tell him, mem sahib,--he could not hear you! but that what you would tell him is true i know well; for see--it is the dawn!" "ramsa lal!..." "the unjust cannot stay in this valley through a night and live to see the dawn, mem sahib!" vii at about that same hour, deputy-commissioner jack harringay opened his eyes and looked wonderingly at a grey-haired, white-aproned nurse who sat watching him. "don't speak, mr. harringay," she said soothingly. "you have been very ill, but you are on the high road to recovery now." "nurse!..." "please don't speak; i know what you would ask. there has been no scandal. the attack upon you was ascribed to robbers. you have been delirious, mr. harringay, and have told me--many things. i am old enough, or nearly old enough, to be your mother, so you will not mind my telling you that a love like yours deserves reward. god has spared your life; be sure it was with a purpose----" the blue monkey i a tropically hot day had been followed by a stuffy and oppressive evening. in the tiny sitting-room of our tiny cottage, my friend--who, for the purposes of this story, i shall call mr. east--by the light of a vapour lamp was busily arranging a number of botanical specimens collected that morning. his briar fumed furiously between his teeth, and, his grim, tanned face lowered over his work, he brought to bear upon this self-imposed task all the intense nervous energy which was his. i sat by the open window alternately watching my tireless companion and the wonderful and almost eerie effects of the moonlight on the heather. then: "we came here for quiet--and rest, east," i said, smiling. "well!" snapped my friend. "isn't it quiet enough for you?" "undeniably. but i don't remember to have seen you rest from the moment that we left london! i exclude your brief hours of slumber--during which, by the way, you toss about and mutter in a manner far from reposeful." "no wonder. my nerves are anything but settled yet, i grant you." indeed, we had passed through a long and trying ordeal, the particulars whereof have no bearing upon the present matter, and in renting this tiny and remote cottage we had sought complete seclusion and forgetfulness of those evil activities of man which had so long engaged our attention. how ill we had chosen will now appear. i had turned again to the open window, when my meditations were interrupted by a sound that seemed to come from somewhere away behind the cottage. cigarette in hand, i leaned upon the sill, listening, then turned and glanced toward the littered table. east, his eyes steely bright in the lamplight, was watching me. "you heard it?" i said. "clearly. a woman's shriek!" "listen!" tense, expectant, we sat listening for some time, until i began to suspect that we had been deceived by the note of some unfamiliar denizen of the moors. then, faintly, chokingly, the sound was repeated, seemingly from much nearer. "come on!" snapped east. hatless, we both hurried around to the rear of the cottage. as we came out upon the slope, a figure appeared on the brow of a mound some two hundred yards away and stood for a moment silhouetted against the moonlit sky. it was that of a woman. she raised her arms at sight of us--and staggered forward. just in the nick of time we reached her, for her strength was almost spent. east caught her in his arms. "good god!" he said, "it is miss baird!" what could it mean? the girl, who was near to swooning and inarticulate with fatigue and emotion, was the daughter of sir jeffrey baird, our neighbour, whose house, the warrens, was visible from where we stood. east half led, half carried her down the slope to the cottage; and there i gave her professional attention, whilst, with horror-bright eyes and parted lips, she fought for mastery of herself. she was a rather pretty girl, but highly emotional, and her pathetically weak mouth was doubtless a maternal heritage, for her father, sir jeffrey, had the mouth and jaw of the old fighter that he was. at last she achieved speech. "my father!" she whispered brokenly; "oh, my poor father!" "what!" i began---- "at black gap!..." "black gap!" i said; for the place was close upon half a mile away. "have you come so far?" "he is lying there! my poor father--dead!" "what!" cried east, springing up--"sir jeffrey--dead? not drowned?" "no, no! he is lying on the path this side of the gap! i ... almost stumbled over ... him. he has been ... murdered! oh, god help me!..." east and i stared at one another, speechless with the sudden horror of it. sir jeffrey murdered! suddenly the distracted girl turned to my friend, clutching frenziedly at his arm. "oh, mr. east!" she cried, "what had my poor father done to merit such an end? what monster has struck him down? you will find him, will you not? i thank god that you are here--for although i know you as 'mr. east,' my father confided the truth to me, and i am aware that you are really a secret service agent, and i even know some of the wonderful things you have done in the past...." "very indiscreet!" muttered east, and his jaws snapped together viciously. but--"my dear miss baird," he added immediately, in the kindly way that was his own, "rely upon me. myself and my fellow-worker, the doctor here, had sought to escape from the darker things of life, but it was willed otherwise. i esteemed sir jeffrey very highly"--his voice shook--"very highly indeed. i, too, thank god that i am here." ii five minutes later, east and i set out across the moor, leaving miss baird at the cottage. by reason of the lonely situation, and the fact that the nearest house, the warrens, was fully a mile and a half away, no other arrangement was possible, since delay could not be entertained. east had managed to glean some few important facts. sir jeffrey, whose museum at the warrens was justly celebrated, had been to london that day to attend an auction at sotheby's. his greek secretary, mr. damopolon, and his daughter had accompanied him. returning by train to stanby, the nearest station, miss baird had called upon friends in the village (mr. damopolon had remained in london on business), and sir jeffrey had set out in the dusk to walk the two miles to the warrens; for the car was undergoing repairs. pursuing the same path later in the evening, the girl had come upon the body of her father in the dramatically dreadful manner already related. he had no enemies, she declared, or none known to her. she did not believe that her father was carrying a large sum of money, nor--although she had scarcely trusted herself to look at him--did she believe that robbery had been the motive of the crime. sir jeffrey had been carrying a large parcel containing one of his purchases, and i remembered, as we silently pursued our way to the scene of the murder, how east's keen eyes had seemed to dance with excitement when miss baird, in reply to a question, had told us what this parcel contained. it was a large figure, in blue porcelain, of a sacred ape, and was of burmese or chinese origin; she was uncertain which. her father had apparently attached great importance to this strange purchase, and had elected to bear it home in person rather than to trust it to railway transport. "did you notice if this parcel was there," east had inquired eagerly, "when you discovered him?" miss baird had shaken her head in reply. and now we were come to black gap, a weird feature in a weird landscape. this was a great hole in the moor, having high clay banks upon one side descending sheer to the tarn, and upon the other being flanked by low, marshy ground about a small coppice. the road from stanby to the warrens passed close by the coppice on the south-east. regarding this place opinions differed. by some it was supposed to be a natural formation, but it was locally believed to mark the site of an abandoned mine, possibly roman. its depth was unknown, and the legend of the coach which lay at the bottom, and which could be seen under certain favourable conditions, has found a place in all the guide-books to that picturesque and wild district. whatever its origin, black gap was a weird and gloomy spot as one approached and saw through the trees the gleam of the moonlight on its mystic waters. and here, passing a slight southerly bend in the track--for it was no more--we came upon sir jeffrey. he lay huddled in a grotesque and unnatural attitude. his right hand was tightly clenched, whilst with his left he clutched a tuft of rank grass. strangely enough, his soft hat was still upon his head. his tweed suit, soft collar and, tie all bore evidence of the fierce struggle which the old baronet had put up for his life. a quantity of torn brown paper lay scattered near the body. i dropped on my knees and made a rapid examination, east directing the ray of a pocket-lamp upon the poor victim. "well?" rapped my friend. "he was struck over the head by some heavy weapon," i said slowly, "and perhaps partly stunned. his hat protected him to a degree, and he tackled his assailant. death was actually due, i should say, to strangulation. his throat is very much bruised." east made no reply. glancing up from my gruesome task, i observed that he was looking at a faint track, which, commencing amid the confused marks surrounding the body, led in the direction of the coppice. east's steely eyes were widely opened. "in heaven's name, what have we here!" he said. a kindred amazement to that which held east claimed me, as i studied more closely the mysterious tracks. the spot where sir jeffrey had fallen was soft ground, whereon the lightest footstep must have left a clear impression. indeed, around the recumbent figure the ground showed a mass of indistinguishable marks. but proceeding thence, as i have said, in the direction of the neighbouring coppice, was this faint trail. "it looks," i said, in a voice hushed with something very like awe, "it looks like the track of ... _a child_!" "look again!" snapped east. i stooped over the first set of marks. clearly indented, i perceived the impressions of two small, bare feet, and, eighteen or twenty inches ahead, those of two small hands. i experienced a sudden chill; my blood seemed momentarily to run coldly in my veins, and i longed to depart from the shadow of the trees, from the neighbourhood of the black gap, and from the neighbourhood of the man who had died there. for it seemed to me that a barefooted infant had recently crawled from the side of the dead man into the coppice overhanging the tarn. looking up, i found east's steely eyes set upon me strangely. "well!" said he, "do you not miss something that you anticipated finding?" i hesitated, fearfully. then: "sir jeffrey carries no cane," i began---- "good! i had failed to note that. good! but what else?" closely i surveyed the body, noting the disarranged garments, the discoloured face. "what of this torn brown paper?" snapped my friend. "good heavens!" i cried; and like a flash my glance sought again those mysterious tracks--those tracks of _something_ that had crawled away from the murdered man. "where," inquired east deliberately, "is the burmese porcelain ape of which we have heard? and, since there are no tracks _approaching_ the body, where did the creature come from that made those retiring from it, and ... what manner of creature was it?" iii at east's request (for my friend was a man of very great influence) the police, beyond the unavoidable formalities, took no steps to apprehend the murderer of sir jeffrey. east had a long interview with the dead man's daughter, and, shortly afterwards, went off to london, leaving me to my own devices. the subject of the strange death of the baronet naturally engrossed my attention to the exclusion of all else. especially, my mind kept reverting to the tracks which we had discovered leading from the dead man's body into the coppice. i scarcely dared to follow my ideas to what seemed to be their logical conclusion. that the track was that, not of a child, but of an _ape_, i was now convinced. no such track approached where the victim had lain; no track of any kind, other than that of his own heavy footprints, led to the spot ... but the track of an ape receded from it; and the baronet had been carrying an ape (inanimate, certainly, according to all known natural laws), which was missing when his body was found! "these are the reflections of a madman!" i said aloud. "am i seriously considering the possibility of a blue porcelain monkey having come to life? if so, since no other footprints have been discovered, i shall be compelled, logically, to assume that the blue porcelain monkey strangled sir jeffrey!" my friend, east, attached very great importance to the missing curio; this he had not disguised from me. but, beyond spending half an hour or so among the trees of the coppice and around the margin of the black gap, he had not to my knowledge essayed any quest for it. finding my thoughts at once unpleasant and unprofitable company, i suddenly determined to make a call at the warrens, in order to inquire about the health of poor miss baird, and incidentally to learn if there were any new development. off i set, and failed to repress a shudder, despite the blazing sunlight, as i passed the gap and the spot where we had found the dead man. a tropical shower in the early morning had quite obliterated the mysterious tracks. coming to the warrens, i was shown into the fine old library. that air of hush, so awesome and so significant, prevailed throughout the house whose master lay dead above, and when presently mr. damopolon entered, attired in black, he seemed to complete a picture already sombre. as east and i had several times remarked, he was a singularly handsome man, and moreover, a very charming companion, widely travelled and deeply versed in those subjects to which the late baronet had devoted so many years of his life. i had always liked damopolon, though, as a rule, i am distrustful of his race; and now, seeing at a glance how hard the death of sir jeffrey had hit him, i offered no unnecessary word of condolence, but immediately turned the conversation upon miss baird. "she has but just hurried off to london, doctor," he said, to my surprise. "a telegram from the solicitors rendered her immediate departure unavoidable." "she has sustained this dreadful blow with exemplary fortitude," i replied. "are you sure she was strong enough for travel?" "i myself escorted her to the station; and mrs. grierson, the late baronet's sister, has accompanied her to london." "by the way," i said, "whilst i remember--was sir jeffrey carrying a cane at the time of his death?" "he had with him a heavy ash stick, as usual, when we parted at sotheby's, doctor; but, of course, he may have left it there, as he had a large parcel to take." "ah! that parcel! you can no doubt enlighten me, mr. damopolon? what, roughly, were the dimensions of this burmese idol?" "the monkey? i don't think it was actually an idol, doctor; it was, rather, a grotesque ornament. oh, it was about the size of a small moorish ape, hollow, and weighing perhaps six or seven pounds." "was it upon a pedestal?" "no. it was completely modelled, even to the soles of the feet and the nails." "extraordinary!" i muttered. "uncanny!" some little while longer i remained, and then set out, my doubts in no measure cleared up, for the cottage. to my surprise--for i had no idea that i had tarried so long--dusk was come. i will frankly confess it--i experienced a thrill of supernatural dread at the thought that my path led close beside black gap. however, it was a glorious evening, and i should have plenty of light for my return journey. i walked briskly across the moorpath toward the scene of the mysterious crime, hoping that i should find east returned when i gained the cottage. perhaps in a wandering life i have known more thrilling moments than some men; but never while memory serves shall i forget that, when, coming abreast of the coppice, and glancing hurriedly into the shadow of the trees ... i saw a crouching figure looking out at me! speech momentarily failed me; i stood rooted to the spot. then: "all right, old man!" i heard. "shall be with you in a moment!" it was east! fear changed to the wildest astonishment. carrying a strange-looking bundle, he came out and joined me on the path. "did i frighten you?" "is it necessary to ask!" i cried. "but--whatever were you doing there by the black gap?" "fishing! look what i have caught!" he held up for my inspection the object which he carried, by means of two loops of stout cord bound about it. it was a large china figure of an ape! "the blue monkey!" he snapped. "come! i am going to the warrens." iv again i sat in the fine old library of the warrens. at the further end of the long, book-laden table, facing me, sat east; mr. damopolon occupied a chair on the right, and midway between us, in the centre of the table, presiding over that strange meeting, was the fateful blue monkey. "you see, mr. damopolon," said east, "i knew that sir jeffrey was carrying this thing"--he indicated the image--"at the time of his death, and, since it had disappeared, i assumed at first that it had been the motive of the crime. sir jeffrey had money and other valuables upon him; therefore we were obviously dealing with no ordinary thief. "accordingly, i made inquiries respecting the history of the thing, and found that it possessed but little market value and next to no historical importance. it was of comparatively modern chinese workmanship, and sir jeffrey had bought it, apparently, because it amused him, though why he should have taken the trouble to carry it home, heaven only knows. my first idea--that the curio was a very rare and costly piece--was thus knocked on the head. "i sought another motive for a crime so horrible and, by a stroke of intuition, i found one. you may not have had an opportunity of studying the mysterious tracks which so puzzled us, mr. damopolon, before they were obliterated, but my friend, the doctor, will bear me out. they commenced, then, close beside the body of the murdered man, and they were, as i now perceive, made by the feet of this blue monstrosity upon the table here!" "impossible," murmured the secretary incredulously. "so it appeared to me at the time, when, although i had not then seen the image of the monkey, i perceived, by the absolutely regular character of the impressions, that they were made, not by a living creature, but by the model of one which had been firmly pressed into the soft ground at slightly varying intervals. since no footprints other than those of sir jeffrey were to be found in the vicinity, i was unable to account for the presence of the person who had made these impressions. i devoted myself to a close scrutiny of those footprints of sir jeffrey's which led up to the scene of the attack. it became apparent, immediately, that some one had _followed_ him ... some one who crept silently along behind the unsuspecting victim ... some one so clever that he placed his feet _almost exactly_ in the marks made by the baronet! "good! i had accounted for the presence of the murderer. he struck sir jeffrey with some heavy implement, but failed to stun him. then began the struggle, which so churned up the ground that all tracks were lost. the murderer prevailed. he was a man of wonderful nerve. never once did he place his foot upon virgin ground; not one imprint by which he might be identified did he leave behind him!" "then how," inquired damopolon, who was hanging upon every word, "did he leave the scene if----" "listen," snapped east. "i found by the body the torn paper in which the china image had been wrapped--but no string! i went all the way to london to learn if the parcel had been tied with string and if sir jeffrey had been carrying a stick!" "but surely," said damopolon, "i could have saved you the journey, since i was with the late baronet immediately before he set out for home." "quite so--but i had another reason for my visit." east shot a sudden glance from damopolon to myself, and there ensued a moment of electric silence. "beside the track made by the feet of the image," he resumed slowly, "i found a series of wedge-shaped holes, one on either side of each monkey-impression. do you follow me, mr. damopolon?" "perfectly," replied the greek, taking up and lighting a cigarette. "wedge-shaped holes, you say?" "they were the clue for which i sought! i saw it all! the china ape had been used as a _stepping-stone_! the cunning criminal had thus gained the firm ground in the coppice without leaving a footprint behind!..." "but, my dear east," i interrupted, "i cannot follow you. he stepped from beside the body on to the image, which he had placed at a convenient distance?" "yes. then, by means of loops of string--see, they are still attached!--he lifted it forward with his feet----" "but----" "supporting his weight upon two sticks--sir jeffrey's and his own! hence the wedge-shaped holes beside the track! he had actually reached firm ground when his own stick snapped off short, and he made the fatal error of leaving the fragment and the ferrule, imbedded in the hole! here is the fragment!" on the table east laid a fragment of an ebony cane, broken off short some three inches above the nickel ferrule. "ebony is so brittle, is it not, mr. damopolon?" he said. "it is indeed," agreed damopolon, standing up as though he believed east to have finished. "yet this stick was made of a particularly fine piece," added east. "carter!" he cried loudly. the library door opened ... and detective sergeant carter, of new scotland yard, entered, carrying a broken ebony stick. damopolon dropped his cigarette, and, whilst he stooped to recover it: "carter and i went fishing this afternoon," said east, "in the black gap. the criminal had sought to hide the broken cane--which bears his monogram--and also the image. he had tied them together, filled the image with clay, and dropped them into the water. fortunately, they stuck upon an outstanding mass of weeds, and we did not fish in vain. is there any point, mr. damopolon, which i have not made clear? i don't know what implement you used to strike sir jeffrey, nor do i know what you did with his ash-stick!..." clutching wildly at the table, i rose to my feet, my gaze set amazedly upon the man thus accused, upon the man i had called my friend, upon the man who owed so much to the dead baronet. and he?... he tossed his cigarette into the hearth and shrugged his shoulders. but, now, i saw that he was deathly pale. he began speaking, in a hoarse, mechanical voice: "i struck him with a broken elm branch," he said. "his hat saved him. i completed the matter with my bare hands. i was desperate. you need not tell me that olive--miss baird--has confessed to our secret marriage, nor shall i weary you with the many reasons i had to hate her father and the pressing need i had for the fortune which she inherits at his death. it is finished; i have lost, and----" "carter!" cried east. "quick! quick!" but though the detective, who had been edging nearer and nearer to the speaker, now sprang upon him with the leap of a panther, he was too late. the sound of a muffled shot echoed through the warrens, and the greek fell with an appalling crash fully over the library table, so that the blue monkey slid across its polished surface and was shattered to bits upon the oaken floor! the riddle of ragstaff i "well, harry, my boy, and what's the latest news from venice?" harry lorian stretched his long legs and lay back in his chair. "i had a letter from the governor this morning, colonel. he appears to be filling his portfolio with studies of windows and doorways and stair-rails and the other domestic necessities dear to his architectural soul!" colonel reynor laughed in his short, gruff way, as my friend, lorian, gazing sleepily about the quaint old hall in which we sat, but always bringing his gaze to one point--a certain door--blew rings of smoke straightly upward. "i suppose," said our host, the colonel, "most of the material will be used for the forthcoming book?" "i suppose so," drawled lorian, glancing for the twentieth time at the yet vacant doorway by the stair-foot. "the idea of architects and artists and other constitutionally languid people, having to write books, fills my soul with black horror." "he had a glorious time with our old panelling, harry," laughed the colonel, waving his cigar vaguely toward the panelled walls and nooks which gradually were receding into the twilight. "yes," said my friend. "he was here quite an unconscionable time--even for an old school chum of the proprietor. i hope you counted the spoons when he left!" lorian's disrespectful references to sir julius, his father, were characteristic; for he reverences that famous artist with the double love of a son and a pupil. "of course we did," chuckled reynor. "nothing missing, my boy!" "that's funny," drawled lorian. "because if he didn't steal it from here i can't imagine from where he stole it!" "stole what, harry?" "whatever some chap broke into his studio for last night!" "eh!" cried the colonel, sitting suddenly very upright. "into your father's studio? burglars?" "suppose so," was the reply. "they took nothing that i was aware to be in his possession, though the place was ransacked. i naturally concluded that they had taken something that i was _unaware_ to be in his----ah!" sybil reynor entered by the door which, for the past twenty minutes, had been the focus of lorian's gaze. the gathering dusk precluded the possibility of my seeing with certainty, but i think her face flushed as her dark eyes rested upon my friend. her beauty is not of the kind which needs deceptive half-lights to perfect it, but there in the dimness, as she came towards us, she looked very lovely and divinely graceful. i did not envy lorian his good fortune; but i suppressed a sigh when i saw how my existence had escaped the girl's notice and how the world in her eyes, contained only a henry lorian, r.i. her mother entered shortly afterwards and a general conversation arose, which continued until the arrival of ralph edie and his sister. they were accompanied by felix hulme; and their advent completed the small party expected at ragstaff park. "you late arrivals," said lorian, "have only just time to dress, unless you want to miss everything but the nuts!" "oh, harry!" said mrs. reynor, "you are as bad as your father!" "worse," said lorian promptly. "i am altogether more rude and have a bigger appetite!" with such seeming trivialities, then, opened the drama of ragstaff, the drama in which fate had cast four of us for leading rôles. ii following dinner, the men--or, as my friend has it, "the gunners"--drifted into the hall. the hall at ragstaff park is fitted as a smoking lounge. it dates back to tudor days and affords some magnificent examples of mediæval panelling. at every point the eye meets the device of a man with a ragged staff--from which the place derives its name, and which is the crest of the reynors. a conversation took place to which, at the time, i attached small importance, but which, later, assumed a certain significance. "extraordinary business," said felix hulme--"that attempted burglary at sir julius's studio last night." "yes," replied lorian. "who told you?" hulme appeared to be confused by the abrupt question. "oh," he replied, "i heard of it from baxter, who has the next studio, you know." "when did you see baxter?" asked lorian casually. "this morning." "i suppose," said colonel reynor to my friend, "a number of your father's drawings are there?" "yes," answered lorian slowly; "but the more valuable ones i have at my own studio, including those intended for use in his book." something in his tone caused me to glance hard at him. "you don't think they were the burglar's objective?" i suggested. "hardly," was the reply. "they would be worthless to a thief." "first i've heard of this attempt, lorian," said edie. "anything missing?" "no. the thing is an utter mystery. there were some odds and ends lying about which no ordinary burglar could very well have overlooked." "if any loss had been sustained," said the colonel, half jestingly, "i should have put it down to the riddle!" "don't quite follow you. colonel," remarked edie. "what riddle?" "the family riddle of the ragstaffs," explained lorian. "you've seen it--over there by the staircase." "oh!" exclaimed the other, "you mean that inscription on the panel--which means nothing in particular? yes, i have examined it several times. but why should it affect the fortunes of sir julius?" "you see," was the colonel's reply, "we have a tradition in the family, edie, that the riddle brings us luck, but brings misfortune to anyone else who has it in his possession. it's never been copied before; but i let lorian--sir julius--make a drawing of it for his forthcoming book on decorative wood-carving. i don't know," he added smilingly, "if the mysterious influence follows the copy or only appertains to the original." "let us have another look at it," said edie. "it has acquired a new interest!" the whole party of us passed idly across the hall to the foot of the great staircase. from the direction of the drawing-room proceeded the softly played strains of the _duetto_ from _cavalleria_. i knew sybil reynor was the player, and i saw lorian glance impatiently in the direction of the door. hulme detected the glance, too, and an expression rested momentarily upon his handsome face which i found myself at a loss to define. "you see," said the colonel, holding a candle close to the time-blackened panel, "it is a meaningless piece of mediæval doggerel roughly carved in the wood. the oak-leaf border is very fine, so your father tells me, harry"--to lorian--"but it is probably the work of another hand, as is the man and ragged staff which form the shield at the top." "has it ever occurred to you," asked hulme, "that the writing might be of a very much later date--late stuart, for instance?" "no," replied the colonel abruptly, and turned away. "i am sure it is earlier than that." i was not the only member of the party who noticed the curt tone of his reply; and when we had all retired for the night i lingered in lorian's room and reverted to the matter. "is the late stuart period a sore point with the colonel?" i asked. lorian, who was in an unusually thoughtful mood, lighted his pipe and nodded. "it is said," he explained, "that a reynor at about that time turned buccaneer and became the terror of the two atlantics! i don't know what possessed hulme to say such a thing. probably he doesn't know about the piratical page in the family records, however. he's a strange chap." "he is," i agreed. "everybody seems to know him, yet nobody knows anything _about_ him. i first met him at the travellers' club. i was unaware, until i came down here this time, that the colonel was one of his friends." "edie brought him down first," replied lorian. "but i think hulme had met sybil--miss reynor--in london, before. i may be a silly ass, but somehow i distrust the chap--always have. he seems to know altogether too much about other people's affairs." i mentally added that he also took too great an interest in a certain young lady to suit lorian's taste. we chatted upon various matters--principally upon the manners, customs, and manifold beauties of sybil reynor--until my friend's pipe went out. then i bade him good night and went to my own room. iii with that abruptness characteristic of the coast and season, a high wind had sprung up since the party had separated. now a continuous booming filled the night, telling how the wrath of the north atlantic spent itself upon the western rocks. to a town-dweller, more used to the vaguely soothing hum of the metropolis, this grander music of the elements was a poor sedative. sleep evaded me, tired though i was, and i presently found myself drifting into that uncomfortable frame of mind between dreaming and waking, wherein one's brain becomes a torturing parrot-house, filled with some meaningless reiteration. "the riddle of the ragged staff--the riddle of the ragged staff," was the phrase that danced maddeningly through my brain. it got to that pass with me, familiar enough to victims of insomnia, when the words began to go to a sort of monotonous melody. thereupon, i determined to light a candle and read for a while, in the hope of inducing slumber. the old clock down in the hall proclaimed the half-hour. i glanced at my watch. it was half-past one. the moaning of the wind and the wild song of the sea continued unceasingly. then i dropped my paper--and listened. amid the mighty sounds which raged about ragstaff park it was one slight enough which had attracted my attention. but in the elemental music there was a sameness which rendered it, after a time, negligible. indeed, i think sleep was not far off when this new sound detached itself from the old--like the solo from its accompaniment. something had fallen, crashingly, within the house. it might be some object insecurely fastened which had been detached in the breeze from an open window. and, realising this, i waited and listened. for some minutes the wind and the waves alone represented sound. then my ears, attuned to this stormy conflict, and sensitive to anything apart from it, detected a faint scratching and tapping. my room was the first along the corridor leading to the west wing, and therefore the nearest to the landing immediately above the hall. i determined that this mysterious disturbance proceeded from downstairs. at another time, perhaps, i might have neglected it, but to-night, and so recently following upon lorian's story of the attempt upon his father's studio, i found myself keenly alive to the burglarious possibilities of ragstaff. i got out of bed, put on my slippers, and, having extinguished the candle, was about to open the door when i observed a singular thing. a strong light--which could not be that of the moon, for ordinarily the corridor beyond was dark--shone under the door! even as i looked in amazement it was gone. very softly i turned the knob. careful as i was, it slipped from my grasp with a faint _click_. to this, i think, i owed my failure to see more than i did see. but what i saw was sufficiently remarkable. cloud-banks raced across the sky tempestuously, and, as i peered over the oaken balustrade down into the hall, one of these impinged upon the moon's disc and, within the space of two seconds or less, had wholly obscured it. upon where a long, rectangular patch of light, splashed with lozenge-shaped shadows spread from a mullioned window across the polished floor, crept a band of blackness--widened--claimed half--claimed the whole--and left the hall in darkness. yet, in the half-second before the coming of the cloud, and as i first looked down, i had seen something--something indefinable. all but immediately it was lost in the quick gliding shadow--yet i could be sure that i had seen--what? a gleaming, metallic streak--almost i had said a sword--which leapt from my view into the bank of gloom! passing the cloud, and the moon anew cutting a line of light through the darkness of the hall, nothing, no one, remained to be seen. i might have imagined the presence of the shining blade, rod, or whatever had seemed to glitter in the moon-rays; and i should have felt assured that such was the case but for the suspicion (and it was nearly a certainty) that a part of the shadow which had enwrapped the mysterious appearance had been of greater depth than the rest--more tangible; in short, had been no shadow, but a substance--the form of one who lurked there. doubtful how to act, and unwilling to disturb the house without good reason, i stood hesitating at the head of the stairs. a grating sound, like that of a rusty lock, and clearly distinguishable above the noise occasioned by the wind, came to my ears. i began slowly and silently to descend the stairs. at the foot i paused, looking warily about me. there was no one in the hall. a new cloud swept across the face of the moon, and utter darkness surrounded me again. i listened intently, but nothing stirred. briefly i searched all those odd nooks and corners in which the rambling place abounded, but without discovering anything to account for the phenomena which had brought me there at that hour of the night. the big doors were securely bolted, as were all the windows. extremely puzzled, i returned to my room and to bed. in the morning i said nothing to our host respecting the mysterious traffic of the night, since nothing appeared to be disturbed in any way. "did you hear it blowing?" asked colonel reynor during breakfast. "the booming of the waves sounded slap under the house. good job the wind has dropped this morning." it was, indeed, a warm and still morning, when on the moorland strip beyond the long cornfield, where the thick fir-tufts marked the warren honeycomb, partridges might be met with in many coveys, basking in the sandy patches. there were tunnels through the dense bushes to the west, too, which led one with alarming suddenness to the very brink of the cliff. and here went scurrying many a hare before the armed intruder. lorian and i worked around by lunch-time to the spinneys east of the cornfield, and, nothing loath to partake of the substantial hospitalities of ragstaff, made our way up to the house. there is a kind of rock-garden from which you must approach from that side. it affords an uninterrupted view of the lower part of the grounds from the lawn up to the terrace. only two figures were in sight; and they must have been invisible from any other point, as we, undoubtedly, were invisible to them. they were those of a man and a girl. they stood upon the steps leading down from the lawn to the rose-garden. it was impossible to misunderstand the nature of the words which the man was speaking. but i saw the girl turn aside and shake her head. the man sought to take her hand and received a further and more decided rebuff. we hurried on. lorian, though i avoided looking directly at him, was biting his lip. he was very pale, too. and i knew that he had recognized, as i had recognized, sybil reynor and felix hulme. iv during lunch, a mr. findon, who had driven over with one of the colonel's neighbours, asked sybil reynor whether the peculiar and far from beautiful ring which she invariably wore was oriental. from his conversation i gathered that he was something of an expert. "it is generally supposed to be phoenician, mr. findon," she answered; and slipping it from her finger she passed it to him. "it is my lot in life to wear it always, hideous though it is!" "indeed! an heirloom, i suppose?" "yes," replied the girl; "and an ugly one." in point of fact, the history of the ring was as curious as that of the riddle. for generations it had been worn by the heir of ragstaff from the day of his majority to that of his eldest son's. colonel reynor had no son. hence, following the tradition as closely as circumstances allowed, he had invested sybil with the ring upon the day that she came of age--some three months prior to the time of which i write. as mr. findon was about to return the ring, lorian said: "excuse me. may i examine it for a moment?" "of course," replied sybil. he took it in his hand and bent over it curiously. i cannot pretend to explain what impelled me to glance towards hulme at that moment; but i did do so. and the expression which rested upon his dark and usually handsome face positively alarmed me. i concluded that, beneath the cool surface, he was a man of hot passions, and i would have ascribed the fixed glare to the jealousy of a rejected suitor in presence of a more favoured rival, had it centred upon lorian. but it appeared to be focused, particularly, upon the ring. the incident impressed me very unfavourably. a sense of mystery was growing up around me--pervading the atmosphere of ragstaff park. after lunch lorian and i again set out in company, but my friend appeared to be in anything but sporting humour. we bore off at a sharp angle from the colonel and some others who were set upon the rough shooting on the western rim of the moors and made for the honeycombed ground which led one upward to the cliff edge. abruptly, we found ourselves upon the sheer brink, with the floor of the ocean at our feet and all the great atlantic before us. "let us relent of our murderous purpose," said lorian, dropping comfortably on to a patch of velvety turf and producing his pipe. "i have dragged you up here with the malicious intention of talking to you." i was not sorry to hear it. there was much that i wished to discuss with him. "i should have stayed to say something to some one," he added, carefully stuffing his briar, "but first i wanted to say something to you." he paused, fumbling for matches. "what," he continued, finding some and striking one, "is felix hulme's little game?" "he wants to marry miss reynor." "i know; but he needn't get so infernally savage because she won't accept him. he looked at me in a positively murderous way at lunch to-day." "so you noticed that?" "yes--and i saw that you noticed it, too." "listen," i said. "leaving hulme out of the question, there is an altogether more mysterious business afoot." and i told him of the episode of the previous night. he smoked stolidly whilst i spoke, frowning the while; then: "old chap," he said, "i begin to have a sort of glimmering of intelligence. i believe i am threatened with an idea! but it's such an utterly fantastic hybrid that i dare not name it--yet." he asked me several questions respecting what i had seen, and my replies appeared to confirm whatever suspicion was gathering in his mind. we saw little enough sport, but came in later than anyone. during dinner there was an odd incident. lorian said: "colonel, d'you mind my taking a picture of the riddle?" "eh!" said the colonel. "what for? your father made a drawing of it." "yes, i know," replied lorian. "i mean a photograph." "well," mused the colonel, "i don't know that there can be much objection, since it has been copied once. but have you got a camera here?" "ah--no," said my friend thoughtfully, "i haven't. can anybody lend me one?" apparently no one could. "if you care to drive over to dr. mason's after dinner," said our host, "he will lend you one. he has several." lorian said he would, and i volunteered to accompany him. accordingly the colonel's high dogcart was prepared; and beneath a perfect moon, swimming in a fleckless sky which gave no hint of the storm to come, we set off for the doctor's. my friend's manoeuvres were a constant source of surprise to me. however, i allowed him to know his own business best, and employed my mind with speculations respecting this mystery, what time the colonel's spirited grey whisked us along the dusty roads. we had just wheeled around dr. mason's drive, when the fact broke in upon my musings that a stygian darkness had descended upon the night, as though the moon had been snuffed, candle-wise. "devil of a storm brewing," said lorian. "funny how the weather changes at night." two minutes after entering the doctor's cosy study, down came the rain. "now we're in for it!" said mason. "i'll send wilkins to run the dogcart into the stable until it blows over." the storm proved to be a severe one; and long past midnight, despite the doctor's hospitable attempts to detain us, we set off for ragstaff park. "we can put up the grey ourselves," said lorian. "i love grooming horses! and by going around into the yard and throwing gravel up at his window, we can awaken peters without arousing the house. this plan almost startles me by its daring originality. i fear that i detect within myself the symptoms of genius." so, with one of dr. mason's cameras under the seat, we started back through the sweet-smelling lanes; and, at about twenty minutes past one, swung past the gate lodge and up the long avenue, the wheels grinding crisply upon the newly wetted gravel. there was but little moon, now, and the house stood up, an irregular black mass, before us. then, from three of the windows, there suddenly leapt out a dazzling white light! lorian pulled up the grey with a jerk. "good god!" he said. "what's that! an explosion!" but no sound reached us. only, for some seconds, the hard, white glare streamed out upon the steps and down on to the drive. suddenly as it had come--it was gone, and the whole of ragstaff was in darkness as before! the horse started nervously, but my friend held him with a firm hand, turning and looking at me queerly. "that's what shone under your door last night!" he said. "that light was in the hall!" v peters was awakened, the horse stabled and ourselves admitted without arousing another soul. as we came around from the back of the house (we had not entered by the main door), and, candles in hand, passed through the hall, nothing showed as having been disturbed. "don't breathe a word of our suspicions to anyone," counselled lorian. "what _are_ our suspicions?" said i. "at present," he replied, "indefinable." to-night the distant murmur of the sea proved very soothing, and i slept soundly. i was early afoot, however, but not so early as lorian. as i passed around the gallery above the hall, on my way to the bathroom, i saw him folding up the tripod of the camera which he had borrowed from dr. mason. the morning sun was streaming through the windows. "hullo!" lorian called to me. "i've got a splendid negative, i think. peters is rigging up a dark-room in the wine-cellar--delightful site for the purpose! will you join me in developing?" although i was unable to conjecture what my friend hoped to gain by his photographic experiments, i agreed, prompted as much by curiosity as anything else. so, after my tub, i descended to the cellar and splashed about in hypo., until lorian declared himself satisfied. "the second is the best," he pronounced critically, holding the negative up to the red lamp. "i made three exposures in all; but the reflection from the polished wood has rather spoiled the first and also the third." "whatever do you want with this photograph, anyway," i said, "when the original is available?" "my dear chap," he replied, "one cannot squat in the hall fixedly regarding a section of panel like some fakir staring at a palm leaf!" "then you intend to study it?" "closely!" as a matter of fact, he did not join us during the whole of the day; but since he spent the greater part of the time in his own room, i did not proffer my aid. from a remark dropped by the colonel, i gathered that sybil had volunteered to assist, during the afternoon, in preparing prints. i was one of the first in to tea, and lorian came racing out to meet me. "not a word yet," he said, "but if the colonel is agreeable, i shall tell them all at dinner!" "tell them what?" i began---- then i saw sybil reynor standing in the shadow of the porch, and, even from that distance, saw her rosy blushes. i understood. "lucky man!" i cried, and wrung his hand warmly. "the very best of good wishes, old chap. i am delighted!" "so am i!" replied lorian. "but come and see the print." we went into the house together; and sybil blushed more furiously than ever when i told her how i envied lorian--and added that he deserved the most beautiful girl in england, and had won her. lorian had a very clear print of the photograph pinned up to dry on the side of his window. "we shall be busy to-night!" he said mysteriously. he had planned to preserve his great secret until dinner-time; but, of course, it came out whilst we sat over tea on the balcony. the colonel was unfeignedly delighted, and there is nothing secretive about colonel reynor. consequently, five minutes after he had been informed how matters were between his daughter and lorian, all the house knew. i studied the face of hulme, to see how he would take the news. but he retained a perfect mastery of himself, though his large dark eyes gleamed at discord with the smile which he wore. our photographic experiments were forgotten; and throughout dinner, whereat sybil looked exquisitely lovely and very shy, and lorian preserved an unruffled countenance, other topics ruled. it was late before we found ourselves alone in lorian's room, with the print spread upon the table beneath the light of the shaded lamp. we bent over it. "now," said lorian, "i assume that this is some kind of cipher!" i stared at him surprisedly. "and," he continued, "you and i are going to solve it if we sit up all night!" "how do you propose to begin?" "well, as it appears to mean nothing in particular, as it stands, i thought of beginning by assuming that the letters have other values altogether. therefore, upon the basis that _e_ is the letter which most frequently occurs in english, with _a_, _o_, _i_, _d_, _h_, _n_, _r_, afterwards, i had thought of resolving it into its component letters." "but would that rule apply to mediæval english?" "ah," said lorian thoughtfully, "most sage counsellor! a wise and timely thought! i'm afraid it wouldn't." "what now?" lorian scratched his head in perplexity. "suppose," he suggested, "we write down the words plainly, and see if, treating each one separately, we can find other meanings to them." accordingly, upon a sheet of paper, i wrote: wherso eer thee doome bee looke untoe ye strypped tree offe ragged staffe. upon itte ley golde toe greene ande kay toe kay. our efforts in the proposed direction were rewarded with poor success. some gibberish even less intelligible than the original was the only result of our labour. lorian threw down his pencil and began to reload his pipe. "let us consider possible meanings to the original words," he said. "do you know of anything in the neighbourhood which might answer to the description of a 'strypped tree'?" i shook my head. "what has occasioned your sudden interest in the thing?" i asked wearily. "it is a long story," he replied; "and i have an idea that there's no time to be lost in solving the riddle!" however, even lorian's enthusiasm flagged at last. we were forced to admit ourselves hopelessly beaten by the riddle. i went to my own room feeling thoroughly tired. but i was not destined to sleep long. a few minutes after closing my eyes (or so it seemed), came a clamouring at the door. i stumbled sleepily out of bed, and, slipping on my dressing-gown, admitted lorian. colonel reynor stood immediately behind him. "most extraordinary business!" began the latter breathlessly. "sybil had--_you_ tell him, harry!" "well," said lorian, "it is not unexpected! listen: sybil woke up a while ago, with the idea that she had forgotten something or lost something--you know the frame of mind! she went to her dressing-table and found the family ring missing!" "_the_ ring!" burst in the colonel excitedly. "amazing!" "she remembered having taken it off, during the evening, to--er--to put another one on! but she was unable to recall having replaced it. she determined to run down and see if she had left it upon the seat in the corner of the library. well, she went downstairs in her dressing-gown, and, carrying a candle, very quietly, in order to wake no one, crossed to the library and searched unavailingly. she heard a faint noise outside in the hall." lorian paused. felix hulme had joined the party. "what's the disturbance?" he asked. "oh," said lorian, turning to him, "it's about sybil. she was down in the library a while ago to look for something, and heard a sort of grating sound out in the hall. she came out, and almost fell over an iron-bound chest, about a foot and a half long, which stood near the bottom of the staircase!" "good heavens, lorian!" i cried, "how had it come there?" "sybil says," he resumed, "that she could not believe her eyes. she stooped to examine the thing ... and with a thrill of horror saw it to be roughly marked _with a skull and cross-bones_!" "my dear lorian," said hulme, "are you certain that miss reynor was awake?" "she woke _us_ quickly enough!" interrupted the colonel. "poor girl, she was shaking dreadfully. thought it was a supernatural appearance. she's with her mother now." "but the box!" i cried. "where is the box?" "that's the mystery," answered colonel reynor. "i was downstairs two minutes later, and there was nothing of the kind to be seen! has our ragstaff ghost started walking again, i wonder? you ought to know, hulme; you're in the turret room--that is the authentic haunted chamber!" "i was aroused by the bell ringing," replied hulme. "i am a very light sleeper. but i heard or saw nothing supernatural." "by the way, hulme," said my friend, "the turret room is directly above the hall. i have a theory. might i come up with you for a moment?" "certainly," replied hulme. we all went up to the turret room. having climbed the stairs to this apartment, you enter it by descending three steps. it is octagonal and panelled all around. my friend tapped the panels and sounded all the oaken floor-boards. then, professing himself satisfied, he bade hulme good night, and accompanied me to my room. vi ragstaff park slumbered once more. but lorian sat upon the edge of my bed, smoking and thinking hard. he had been to his own room for the print of the riddle, and it lay upon a chair before him. "listen to this," he said suddenly: "(_a_) some one breaks into the governor's studio, and takes nothing. his drawings of the ragstaff riddle happen to be at my studio. (_b_) you hear a noise in the night, and see ( ) a bright light; ( ) a gleaming rod. (_c_) you and i see a bright light on the following night, and presumably proceeding from the same place; i.e., the hall. (_d_) something i have not mentioned before--hulme has a camera in his kit! and he doesn't want the fact known!" "what do you mean?" "i tested him the other night, by inquiring if anyone could lend me a camera. he did not volunteer! the morning following the mysterious business in the hall, observed by you, i saw a photographic printing frame in his window! he must have one of those portable developers with him." "and to what does all this point?" "to the fact that he has made at least three attempts to obtain a copy of the riddle, and has at last succeeded!" "three!" "i really think so. the evidence points to him as the person who broke into the studio. he made a bad slip. he referred to the matter, and cited horace baxter as his informant. baxter is away!" "but this is serious!" "i should say so! he couldn't attempt to photograph the panel in daylight, so he employed magnesium ribbon at night! first time his tripod slipped. it is evidently one of the light, telescopic kind. his negative proved useless. it was one of the metal legs of the tripod which you saw shining! the second time he was more successful. that was the light of his magnesium ribbon you and i saw from the drive!" "but, lorian, i went down and searched the hall!" "now we come on to the, at present, conjectural part," explained lorian. "my theory is that hulme, somewhere or other, has come across some old documents which give the clue to those secret passages said to exist in ragstaff, but which the colonel has never been able to locate. i feel assured that there is some means of secret communication between the turret room and the hall. i further believe that hulme has in some way got upon the track of another secret--that of the riddle." "but what _is_ the secret of the riddle?" "in my opinion the riddle is a clue to another hiding-place, evidently not connected with the maze of passages; possibly what is known as a priest's hole. as you know, hulme asked sybil to marry him. i believe the man to be in financial straits; so that we must further assume the riddle to conceal the whereabouts of a treasure, since the reynors are far from wealthy." "the _chest_! lorian! the chest!" i cried. "quite so. but what immediately preceded its appearance? the loss of the family ring! if i am not greatly in error, hulme found that ring! and the ring is the key to the riddle! do you recall the shape of the bezel? simply _a square peg of gold_! look at the photograph!" he was excited, for once. "what does it say?" he continued: "'ye strypped tree!' that means the device of leaves, twigs, and acorns--stripped _from_ a tree--see? here, at the bottom of the panel, is such a group, and (this is where we have been so blind!) intertwined with the design is the word _caeg_--ancient saxon for _key_! look! 'golde toe greene and kay toe kay'! amongst the _green_ leaves is a square hole. the _gold_ knob on the ring fits it!" for a moment i was too greatly surprised for speech. then: "you think hulme discovered this?" "i do. and i think sybil's mislaying her ring gave him his big chance. he had got the chest out whilst she was in the library. he must have been inside somewhere looking for it when she passed through the hall. then, hearing her approach from the library, he was forced to abandon his heavy 'find' and hide in the secret passage which communicates with his room. directly she ran upstairs he returned for the chest!" i looked him hard in the face. "we don't want a scene, lorian," i began. "besides, it's just possible you may be wrong." "i agree," said lorian. "come up to his room, now." passing quietly upstairs, we paused before the door of the turret room. a faint light showed under it. lorian glanced at me--then knocked. "who's there?" came sharply. "lorian," answered my friend. "i want a chat with you about the secret passage and the old treasure chest--_before speaking to the colonel_!" there was a long silence, then: "just a moment," came hoarsely. "don't come in until i call." we looked at one another doubtfully. a long minute passed. i could hear a faint sound within. at last came hulme's voice: "all right. come in." as lorian threw the door open, a faint _click_ sounded from somewhere. the turret room was empty! "by heaven! he's given us the slip!" cried my friend. we glanced around the room. a candle burnt upon the table. and upon the bed stood an iron-barred chest, with a sheet of notepaper lying on its lid! lorian pounced upon the note. we read it together. "mr. henry lorian" (it went), "i realize that you have found me out. i will confess that i had no time to open the chest. but as matters stand i only ask you not to pursue me. i have taken nothing not my own. the ring, and an interesting document which i picked up some years ago, are on the table. offer what explanation of my disappearance you please. i am in your hands." we turned again to the table. upon a piece of worn parchment lay the missing ring. lorian spread out the parchment and bent over it. "why," i cried, "it is a plan of ragstaff park!" "with a perfect network of secret passages!" added my friend, "and some instructions, apparently, as to how to enter them. it bears the initials 'r. r.' and, in brackets, 'capt. s.' i begin to understand." he raised the candle and stepped across to the ancient chest. it bore a roughly designed skull and cross-bones, and, in nearly defaced red characters, the words: "_captain satan_." "captain satan!" i said. "he was one of the most bloodthirsty pirates who ever harried the spanish main!" "he was," agreed lorian; "and his real name was roderick reynor. he evidently solved the riddle some generations earlier than hulme--and stored his bloodstained hoard in the ancient hiding-place. also, you see, he knew about the passages." "what shall we do?" "hulme has surrendered. you can see that the chest has not been opened. therefore there is only one thing that we _can_ do. we must keep what we know to ourselves, return the chest to its hiding-place, and proclaim that we have found the missing ring!" down to the hall we bore the heavy chest. the square knob on the ring fitted, as lorian had predicted, into the hole half hidden among the oak leaves of the design. without much difficulty we forced back the fastening (it proved to be of a very simple pattern), and slid the whole panel aside. a small, square chamber was revealed by the light of the candle--quite empty. "as i had surmised," said my friend; "a priest's hole." we carried the chest within, and reclosed the panel, which came to with a sharp _click_. * * * * * the story which we invented to account for hulme's sudden departure passed muster; for one topic usurped the interests of all--the ghostly box, with its piratical emblem. "my boy," colonel reynor said to lorian, "i cannot pretend to explain what sybil saw. but it bears curiously upon a certain black page in the family history. if the chest had been tangible, and had contained a fortune, i would not have opened it. let all pertaining to that part of our records remain buried, say i." "which determines our course," explained lorian to me. "the chest is not ours, and the colonel evidently would rather not know about it. i regret that i lack the morals of a burglar." the master of hollow grange i jack dillon came to hollow grange on a thunderous black evening when an ebony cloud crested the hill-top above, and, catching the upflung rays of sunset, glowed redly like the pall of avalon in the torchlight. through the dense ranks of firs cloaking the slopes a breeze, presaging the coming storm, whispered evilly, and here in the hollow the birds were still. the man who had driven him from the station glanced at him, with a curiosity thinly veiled. "what about your things, sir?" he inquired. dillon stared rather blankly at the ivy-covered lodge, which, if appearances were to be trusted, was unoccupied. "wait a moment; i will ring," he said curtly; for this furtive curiosity, so ill concealed, had manifested itself in the manner of the taxi-driver from the moment that dillon had directed him to drive to hollow grange. he pushed open the gate and tugged at the iron ring which was suspended from the wall of the lodge. a discordant clangour rewarded his efforts, the cracked note of a bell that spoke from somewhere high up in the building, that seemed to be buffeted to and fro from fir to fir, until it died away, mournfully, in some place of shadows far up the slope. in the voice of the bell there was something furtive, something akin to the half-veiled curiosity in the eyes of the man who stood watching him; something fearful, too, in both, as though man and bell would whisper: "return! beware of disturbing the dwellers in this place." but dillon angrily recalled himself to the realities. he felt that these ghostly imaginings were born of the boche-maltreated flesh, were products of lowered tone; that he would have perceived no query in the glance of the taxi-driver and heard no monkish whisper in the clang of the bell had he been fit, had he been fully recovered from the effects of his wound. monkish whisper? yes, that was it--his mind had supplied, automatically, an aptly descriptive term: the cracked bell spoke with the voice of ancient monasteries, had in it the hush of cloisters and the sigh of renunciation. "hang it all!" muttered dillon. "this won't do." a second time he awoke the ghostly bell-voice, but nothing responded to its call; man, bird, and beast had seemingly deserted hollow grange. he was conscious of a sudden nervous irritation, as he turned brusquely and met the inquiring glance of the taxi-man. "i have arrived before i was expected," he said. "if you will put my things in the porch here i will go up to the house and get a servant to fetch them. they will be safe enough in the meantime." his own words increased his irritability; for were they not in the nature of an apology on behalf of his silent and unseen host? were they not a concession to that nameless query in the man's stare? moreover, deep within his own consciousness, some vague thing was stirring; so that, the man dismissed and promptly departing, dillon stood glancing from the little stack of baggage in the lodge porch up the gloomy, narrow, and over-arched drive, indignantly aware that he also carried a question in his eyes. the throb of the motor mounting the steep, winding lane grew dim and more dim until it was borne away entirely upon the fitful breeze. faintly he detected the lowing of cattle in some distant pasture; the ranks of firs whispered secretly one to another, and the pall above the hills grew blacker and began to extend over the valley. amid that ominous stillness of nature he began to ascend the cone-strewn path. evidently enough, the extensive grounds had been neglected for years, and that few pedestrians, and fewer vehicles, ever sought hollow grange was demonstrated by the presence of luxuriant weeds in the carriage way. having proceeded for some distance, until the sheer hillside seemed to loom over him like the wall of a tower, dillon paused, peering about in the ever-growing darkness. he was aware of a physical chill; certainly no ray of sunlight ever penetrated to this tunnel through the firs. could he have mistaken the path and be proceeding, not toward the house, but away from it and into the midnight of the woods mantling the hills? there was something uncomfortable in that reflection; momentarily he knew a childish fear of the darkening woods, and walked forward rapidly, self-assertively. ten paces brought him to one of the many bends in the winding road--and there, far ahead, as though out of some cavern in the very hillside, a yellow light shone. he pressed on with greater assurance until the house became visible. now he perceived that he had indeed strayed from the carriage-sweep in some way, for the path that he was following terminated at the foot of a short flight of moss-covered brick steps. he mounted the steps and found himself at the bottom of a terrace. the main entrance was far to his left and separated from the terrace by a neglected lawn. that portion of the place was hanoverian and ugly, whilst the wing nearest to him was tudor and picturesque. excepting the yellow light shining out from a sunken window almost at his feet, no illuminations were visible about the house, although the brewing storm had already plunged the hollow into premature night. indeed, there was no sign of occupancy about the strange-looking mansion, which might have hidden forgotten for centuries in the horseshoe of the hills. he had sought for rest and quiet; here he should find them. the stillness of the place was of that sort which almost seems to be palpable; that can be seen and felt. a humid chill arose apparently from the terrace, with its stone pavings outlined in moss, crept up from the wilderness below and down from the fir-woods above. a thought struggled to assume form in his mind. there was something reminiscent about this house of the woods, this silent house which struck no chord of human companionship, in which was no warmth of life or love. suddenly, the thought leapt into complete being. this was the palace of the sleeping beauty to which he had penetrated. it was the fairy-tale dear to childhood which had been struggling for expression in his mind ever since he had emerged from the trees on to the desolate terrace. with the departure of the station cab had gone the last link with to-day, and now he was translated to the goblin realm of fable. he had crossed the terrace and the lawn, and stood looking through an open french window into a room that evidently adjoined the hall. a great still darkness had come, and on a little table in the room a reading-lamp was burning. it had a quaint, mosaic shade which shut in much of the light, but threw a luminous patch directly on a heap of cushions strewn upon the floor. face downward in this silken nest, her chin resting upon her hands and her elfin curly brown hair tousled bewitchingly, lay a girl so audaciously pretty that dillon hesitated to accept the evidence of his eyes. the crunching of a piece of gravel beneath his foot led to the awakening of the sleeping beauty. she raised her head quickly and then started upright, a lithe, divinely petite figure in a green velvet dress, having short fur-trimmed sleeves that displayed her pretty arms. for an instant it was a startled nymph that confronted him; then a distracting dimple appeared in one fair cheek, and: "oh! how you frightened me!" said the girl, speaking with a slight french accent which the visitor found wholly entrancing. "you must be jack dillon? i am phryné." dillon bowed. "how i envy hyperides!" he said. a blush quickly stained the lovely face of phryné, and the roguish eyes were lowered, whereby the penitent dillon, who had jested in the not uncommon belief that a pretty girl is necessarily brainless, knew that the story of the wonder-woman of thespiæ was familiar to her modern namesake. "i am afraid," declared phryné, with a return of her mischievous composure, "that you are very wicked." dillon, who counted himself a man of the world, was temporarily at a loss for a suitable rejoinder. the cause of his hesitancy was twofold. in the first place he had reached the age of disillusionment, whereat a man ceases to believe that a perfectly lovely woman exists in the flesh, and in the second place he had found such a fabulous being in a house of gloom and silence to which, a few moments ago, he had deeply regretted having come. his father, who had accepted the invitation from an old college friend on his son's behalf, had made no mention of a phryné, whereas phryné clearly took herself for granted and evidently knew all about jack dillon. the latter experienced a volcanic change of sentiment; hollow grange was metamorphosed, and assumed magically the guise of a golden house, an emperor's pleasure palace, a fair, old-world casket holding this lovely jewel. but who was she?--and in what spirit should he receive her bewildering coquetries? "i trust," he said, looking into the laughing eyes, "that you will learn to know me better." phryné curtsied mockingly. "you have either too much confidence in your own character or not enough in my wisdom," she said. dillon stepped into the room, and, stooping, took up a book which lay open upon the floor. it was a french edition of _the golden ass_ of apuleius. the hollow was illuminated by a blinding flash of lightning, and phryné's musical laughter was drowned in the thunder that boomed and crashed in deepening peals over the hills. in a sudden tropical torrent the rain descended, as dr. kassimere entered the room. ii jack dillon leant from his open window and looked out over the valley to where a dull red glow crowned the hill-top. there was a fire somewhere in the neighbourhood of the distant town; probably a building had been struck by lightning. the storm had passed, although thunder was still audible dimly, like the roll of muffled drums or a remote bombardment. stillness had reclaimed hollow grange. he was restless, uneasy; he sought to collate his impressions of the place and its master. twelve years had elapsed since his one previous meeting with dr. kassimere, and little or no memory of the man had remained. so much had intervened; the war--and phryné. now that he was alone and could collect his ideas he knew of what dr. kassimere's gaunt, wide-eyed face had reminded him: it was of thoth, the ibis-headed god whose figure he had seen on the walls of the temples during his service in egypt. "kassimere was always a queer fish, jack," his father had said; "but most of his eccentricities were due to his passion for study. the grange is the very place sir francis" (the specialist) "would have chosen for your convalescence, and you'll find nothing dangerously exciting in kassimere's atmosphere!" yet there was that about dr. kassimere which he did not and could not like; his quietly cordial welcome, his courteous regret that his guest's arrival by an earlier train (a circumstance due to reduced service) had led to his not being met at the station; the charming simplicity with which he confessed to the smallness of his household, and to the pleasure which it afforded him to have the son of an old chum beneath his roof--all these kindly overtures had left the bird-like eyes cold, hard, watchful, calculating. the voice was the voice of a friend and a gentleman, but the face was the face of thoth. the mystery of phryné was solved in a measure. she was dr. kassimere's adopted daughter and the orphaned child of louis devant, the famous paris cartoonist, who had died penniless in , at the height of his success. in his selection of a name for her, the brilliant and dissolute artist had exhibited a breadth of mind which phryné inherited in an almost embarrassing degree. her mental equipment was bewildering: the erudition of an oxford don spiced with more than a dash of boul' mich', which made for complexity. her curious learning was doubtless due to the setting of a receptive mind amid such environment, but how she had retained her piquant vivacity in hollow grange was less comprehensible. the servants formed a small and saturnine company, only two--the housekeeper, mrs. harman, a black and forbidding figure, and madame charny, a french companion--sleeping in the house. gawly, a surly creature who neglected the gardens and muttered savagely over other duties, together with his wife, who cooked, resided at the lodge. there were two maids, who lived in the village.... the glow from the distant fire seemed to be reflected upon the firs bordering the terrace below; then dillon, watching the dull, red light, remembered that dr. kassimere's laboratory adjoined the tiny chapel, and that, though midnight drew near, the doctor was still at work there. owls and other night birds hooted and shrieked among the trees and many bats were in flight. he found himself thinking of the pyramid bats of egypt, and of the ibis-headed thoth who was the scribe of the under-world. dr. kassimere had made himself medically responsible for his case, and had read attentively the letters which dillon had brought from his own physician. he was to prescribe on the following day, and to-night the visitor found morpheus a treacherous god. furtive activities disturbed the house, or so it seemed to the sleepless man tossing on his bed; alert intelligences within hollow grange responded to the night-life of the owls without, and he seemed to lie in the shadow of a watchfulness that never slumbered. iii "there's many a fine walk hereabouts," said the old man seated in the arm-chair in the corner of the _threshers' inn_ bar-parlour. dillon nodded encouragingly. "there's ganton-on-the-hill," continued the ancient. "you can see the sea from there in clear weather; and many's the time i've heard the guns in france from upper crobury of a still night. then, four mile away, there's the haunted grange, though nobody's allowed past the gate. not as nobody wants to be," he added, reflectively. "the haunted grange?" questioned dillon. "where is that?" "hollow grange?" said the old man. "why, it lies----" "oh, hollow grange--yes! i know where hollow grange is, but i was unaware that it was reputed to be haunted." "ah," replied the other, pityingly, "you're new to these parts; i see that the minute i set eyes on you. maybe you was wounded in france, and you're down here to get well, like?" "quite so. your deductive reasoning is admirable." "ah," said the sage, chuckling with self-appreciation, "i ain't lived in these here parts for nigh on seventy-five years without learning to use my eyes, i ain't. for seventy-four years and seven months," he added proudly, "i ain't been outside this here county where i was born, and i can use my eyes, i can; i know a thing i do, when i see it. maybe it was providence, as you might say, what brought you to the _threshers_ to-day." "quite possibly," dillon admitted. "he was just such another as you," continued the old man with apparent irrelevance. "you don't happen to be stopping at hainingham vicarage?" "no," replied dillon. "ah! he was stopping at hainingham vicarage and he'd been wounded in france. how he got to know dr. kassimere i can't tell you; not at parson's, anyway. parson won't never speak to him. only last sunday week he preached agin him; not in so many words, but i could see his drift. he spoke about them heathen women livin' on an island--sort of female robinson crusoes, i make 'em out, i do--as saves poor shipwrecked sailors from the sea and strangles of 'em ashore." dillon glanced hard at the voluble old man. "the sirens?" he suggested, conscious of a sudden hot surging about his heart. "ah, that's the women i mean." "but where is the connection?" "ah, you're new to these parts, you are. that dr. kassimere he keeps a siren down in hollow grange. they see her--these here strangers (same as the shipwrecked sailors parson told about)--and it's all up with 'em." dillon stifled a laugh, in which anger would have mingled with contempt. to think that in the twentieth century a man of science was like to meet with the fate of dr. dee in the days of elizabeth! truly there were dark spots in england. but could he credit the statement of this benighted elder that a modern clergyman had actually drawn an analogy between phryné devant and the sirens? it was unbelievable. "what was the unhappy fate," he asked, masking his intolerance, "of the young man staying at the vicarage?" "the same as them afore him," came the startling reply; "for he warn't the first, and maybe"--with a shrewd glance of the rheumy old eyes--"he won't be the last. them sirens has the powers of darkness. i know, 'cause i've seen one--her at the grange; and though i'm an old man, nigh on seventy-five, i'll never forget her face, i won't, and the way she smiled at me!" "but," persisted dillon, patiently, "what became of this particular young man, the one who was staying at the vicarage?" the ancient sage leant forward in his chair and tapped the speaker upon the knee with the stem of his clay pipe. "ask them as knows," he said, with impressive solemnity. "nobody else can tell you!" and, having permitted an indiscreet laugh to escape him, not another word on the subject could dillon induce the old man to utter, he strictly confining himself, in his ruffled dignity, to the climatic conditions and the crops. when dillon, finally, set out upon the four-mile walk back to the grange, he realised, with annoyance, that the senile imaginings of his bar-parlour acquaintance lingered in his mind. that dr. kassimere dwelt outside the social life of the county he had speedily learnt; but for this he had been prepared. that he might possibly be, not a recluse, but a pariah, was a new point of view. trivial things, to which hitherto he had paid scant attention, began to marshal themselves as evidence. the two village "helpers," he knew, received extravagant wages, because, as phryné had confessed, they had "found it almost impossible to get girls to stay." why? of the earlier guest, or guests, who had succumbed to the siren lure of phryné, he had heard no mention. why? save at meal-times he rarely saw his host, who frankly left him to the society of phryné. again--why? dr. kassimere, in his jealously locked laboratory, was at work day and night upon his experiments. what were these experiments? what was the nature of the doctor's studies? he had now been for nearly three weeks at hollow grange, and never had dr. kassimere spoken of his work. and phryné? the sudden, new thought of phryné was so strange, so wonderful and overwhelming, that it reacted physically; and he pulled up short in the middle of a field-path, as though some palpable obstacle blocked the way. why had he set out alone that day, when all other days had been spent in the girl's company? he had deliberately sought solitude--because of phryné; because he wanted to think calmly, judicially, to arraign himself before his own judgment, remote from the witchery of her presence. he had tried to render his mind a void, wherein should linger not one fragrant memory of her delicate beauty and charm, so that he might return unbiased to his judgment. he had returned; he was judged. he loved phryné madly, insanely. his future, his life, lay in the hollow of her hands. iv "yes," admitted phryné, "it is true. there were two of them." "and"--dillon hesitated--"were they in love with you?" "of course," said phryné, naïvely. "but you----" phryné shook her curly head. "i rather liked the french boy, but i do not believe anything that a frenchman says to a girl; and harry, the other, was handsome, but so silly...." "so you did not love either of them?" "of course not." "but," said dillon, and impulsively he swept her into his arms, "you are going to love me." one quick upward glance she gave, but instantly lowered her eyes and withheld her bewitching face from him. "am i?" she whispered. "you are so conceited." but as she spoke the words he kissed her, and she surrendered sweetly, nestling her head against his shoulder for a moment. then, leaping back, bright-eyed and blushing, she turned and ran like a startled fawn across the terrace and into the house. he saw no more of her until dinner-time, and spent the interval in a kind of suspended consciousness that was new and perturbing. within him life pulsed at delirious speed, but the universe seemed to have slowed upon its course so that each hour became as two. throughout dinner, phryné was deliciously shy to the point of embarrassment; and dillon, who several times surprised the bird-eyes of dr. kassimere studying the girl's face, detained his host, and being a young man of orderly mind, formally asked his consent to an engagement. the doctor's joy was seemingly so unfeigned that dillon almost liked him for a moment. he placed no obstacle in the path of the suitor for his adopted daughter's hand, graciously expressing every confidence in the future. his joy was genuine enough, dillon determined; but from what source did it actually spring? the thoth-like eyes were exultant, and all the old mistrust poured back in a wave upon the younger man. was this distrust becoming an obsession? why should he eternally be seeking an ulterior motive for every act in this man's life? he went to look for phryné, and found her in the spot where he had first seen her, prone in a nest of cushions. she sprang up as he entered the room, and glanced at him in that new way which set his heart leaping.... and because of the magic of her presence, it was not until later, when he stood alone in his own room, that he could order the facts gleaned from her. there was some grain of truth in the story of the ancient gossip at the _threshers_ after all. a young french lieutenant of artillery had received an invitation to spend a leave at hollow grange. his gallic soul had been fired by phryné's beauty, and although his advances had been met with rebuff, he had asked dr. kassimere's permission to pay his court to the girl. on the same evening he had departed hurriedly, and phryné had supposed, since the doctor never referred to him again, that he had been sent about his business. then came a strange letter, which phryné had shown to dillon. its tone throughout was of passionate anger, and one passage recurred again and again to dillon's mind. "i would give my life for you gladly," it read, "but my soul belongs to god...." phryné had counted him demented and dr. kassimere had agreed with her. but there was harry waynwright, the nephew of the vicar of st. peter's at hainingham. an accidental meeting with phryné had led to a courtesy call--and the inevitable. it had all the seeming of a case of love-sickness, and the unhappy youth grew seriously ill. from pestering her daily he changed his tactics to studiously avoiding her, until, meeting her in the village one morning, he greeted her with, "i can't do it, phryné! tell him i can't do it. he can rely upon my word; but i'm going away to try to forget!" dr. kassimere had professed entire ignorance of the meaning of the words. a faint shadow had crossed phryné's face as she spoke of these matters, but, as a result of her extraordinary beauty, she was somewhat callous where languishing admirers were concerned, and she had dismissed the gloomy twain with a shrug of her charming shoulders. "mad!" she had said. "it seems my fate always to meet mad-men!" the night silence had descended again upon hollow grange, disturbed only by the mournful cry of the owl and the almost imperceptible note of the bat. but to the nervous alertness of dillon, a deep unrest seemed to stir within the house; yet--an unrest not physical but spiritual; it was as the shadow of a sleepless watcher--a shadow creeping over his soul. what was the explanation lying at the back of it all? vainly he sought for a theory, however wild, however improbable, that should embrace all the facts known to him and serve either to banish his black doubts or to focus them. upon one thing he had determined: there was some thing or some one in hollow grange that he _feared_, some centre from whence fear radiated. phryné, for one fleeting moment, had revealed to him that she, too, had known this formless dread, but only latterly; probably from lack of a more definite date, she had spoken of this fear as first visiting her at about the time of the frenchman's advent. "slowly, he has changed towards me," she had whispered, referring to dr. kassimere. "he watches me, sometimes, in a strange way. oh, he has been so good, so very kind and good, but--i shall be glad when----" could some part of the mystery be explained away by the doctor's increasing absorption in his studies, which led him to regard the charge of a ward, and a wayward one at that, as unduly onerous and disturbing? might it not fairly be supposed that ignorant superstition and the ravings of unrequited passion accounted for the rest? at the nature of dr. kassimere's studies he could not even guess. the greater number of the works in the library related to mysticism in one form or another, although there was a sprinkling of exact science to leaven the whole. "he can rely upon my word," waynwright had said. regarding what, or regarding whom, had he given his word? the cry of a night-hawk came, as if in answer; the hoot of an owl, as if in mockery. out beyond the terrace a dull red light showed from dr. kassimere's laboratory. v enlightenment came about in this fashion--seeking to quench a feverish thirst, dillon discovered that no glass had been left in his room. he determined to fetch one from the buffet cupboard downstairs. softly, in slippered feet, he descended the stairs and was crossing the hallway when he kicked something--a small book, he thought--that lay there upon the floor. groping, he found it, slipped it into the pocket of his dressing-gown, and entered the dining-room. he found a tumbler without difficulty, in the dark, noted the presence of a heavy, oppressive odour, and returned upstairs. now he made another discovery. he had forgotten the nightly draught of medicine prescribed by dr. kassimere; a new unopened phial stood upon the dressing-table. he mixed himself a mild whisky and soda from the decanter and siphon which his host's hospitality caused nightly to be placed in his room, and then, seized by a sudden thought, took out the little book which he had found in the hall. it was a faded manuscript, in monkish latin; a copy of an unpublished work of paracelsus. many passages had been rendered into english, and the translations, in dr. kassimere's minute, cramped writing, were interposed between the bound pages. in these again were interpolated marginal notes, some in the shape of unintelligible symbols, others in that of chemical formulæ. several passages were marked in red ink. and, having perused the first of these which he chanced upon, a clammy moisture broke out upon his skin, accompanied by so marked a nervous trembling that he was forced to seat himself upon the bed. the secret of this man's ghastly life-work was in his hands; he knew, now, what bargain dr. kassimere had proposed to the frenchman and to the other; he knew why he had adopted the lovely daughter of louis devant--and he knew why he, jack dillon, had been invited to hollow grange. that such a ghoul in human shape could live and have his being amid ordinary mankind was a stupendous improbability which, ten minutes earlier, he would have laughed to scorn. "my god!" he whispered. "my god!" his glance fell upon the unopened phial on his dressing-table, and from his soul a silent thanksgiving rose to heaven that he had left that potion untasted. he realised that his own case differed from those of his predecessors in two particulars: he was actually in residence under dr. kassimere's roof and receiving treatment from the man's hands. no option was to be offered to _him_; the great experiment, the _magnum opus_, was to be performed without his consent! and phryné!--phryné, the other innocent victim of this fiend's lust for knowledge! the thought restored his courage. more than life itself depended upon his coolness and address; he must act, at once. the monstrous possibility hinted at by von hohenheim--in his earliest published work, _practica d. theophrasti paracelsi_, printed at augsburg in , was, in this hideous pamphlet, elaborated and brought within the bounds of practical experiment. he crept to the door, opened it, and stood listening intently. that silence which seemed like a palpable cloud--a cloud masking the presence of one who watched--lay over the house. slowly he descended to the hall and dropped the horror which the evil genius of von hohenheim had conceived, upon the spot where it had lain when his foot had discovered it. a creaking sound warned him of some one's approach, and he had barely time to slip behind some draperies ere a cowled figure bearing a lantern came out into the hall. it was dr. kassimere, wearing a loose gown having a monkish hood--and he was searching for something. nothing in his experience--not the blood-lust seen in the eyes of men in battle--had prepared him for that which transfigured the face of dr. kassimere. the strange semblance of thoth was there no more; it had given place to another, more active malevolence, to a sort of satanic _eagerness_ indescribably terrifying; it was the face of one possessed. like some bird of prey he pounced upon the book, thrust it into the pocket of his gown, and began furtively to retrace his steps. as he entered the big dining-room, dillon was close upon his heels. dr. kassimere passed into the small room beyond and turned from thence into the library. dillon, observing every precaution, followed. from the library the doctor entered the short, narrow passage leading to that quaint relic of bygone days and ways--the tiny chapel. at the entrance dillon paused, watchful. once, the man in the monkish robe turned, on the time-worn step of the altar, and looked back over his shoulder, revealing a face that might well have been that of asmodeus himself. on the left of the altar was the cupboard wherein, no doubt, in past ages, the priest had kept his vestments. the oppressive odour which dillon had first observed in the dining-room was very perceptible in the chapel; and as dr. kassimere opened the door of the cupboard and stepped within, an explanation of the presence of this deathly smell in the house occurred to dillon's mind. the laboratory adjoined the grange on this side; here was a private entrance known to, and used by, dr. kassimere alone. his surmise proved to be correct. occasioning scarcely a sound, the secret door opened, and a fiery glow leapt out across the altar steps, accompanied by a wave of heated air laden with the nauseous, unnameable smell. within the redly lighted doorway, dr. kassimere paused, and glanced at a watch which he wore upon his wrist. then for a moment he disappeared, to reappear carrying a small squat bottle and a contrivance of wire and gauze the sight of which created in dillon a sense of physical nausea. it was a chloroform-mask! both he placed upon a vaguely seen table and again approached the door. weakly, dillon fell back, pressing himself, closely against the chapel wall, as the doctor, this time leaving the secret entrance open--with a purpose in view which the watcher shudderingly recognized--recrossed the chapel and went off, softly treading, in the direction of the library. all his courage, moral and physical, was called upon now, and knowing, by some intuition of love, what and whom he should find there, he stepped unsteadily into dr. kassimere's laboratory.... that there were horrors--monstrosities that may not be described, whose names may not be written--in the place, he realised, in some subconscious fashion; but--prone upon a low, metal couch of most curious workmanship lay phryné, in her night-robe, still--white; perfect in her pale beauty as her namesake who posed for praxiteles. dillon reeled, steadied himself, and sank upon his knees by the couch. "phryné!" he whispered, locking his arms about her--"my phryné!..." then he remembered the gauze mask and even detected the sickly, sweet smell of the anaesthetic. anger gave him new strength; he raised the girl in his arms and turned towards the door communicating with the chapel. framed in the opening was the hooded figure of dr. kassimere, confronting him. his face was immobile again, with the immobility of ibis-headed thoth; his eyes were hard, his voice was cold. "what is the meaning of this outrage?" he demanded sternly. "phryné has been taken suddenly ill; an immediate operation may be necessary----" "out of my way!" said dillon, advancing past a huge glass jar filled with reddish liquid that stood upon a pedestal between the couch and the door. "be careful, you fool!" shrieked dr. kassimere, frenziedly, his calm dropping from him like a cloak and a new and dreadful light coming into the staring eyes. but he was too late. dillon's foot had caught the pedestal. with a resounding crash the thing overturned; as dr. kassimere sprang forward, he slipped in the slimy stream that was pouring over the laboratory floor--and fell.... laying phryné upon the altar, her head resting against the age-worn communion rails, dillon turned and closed the secret door dividing the house of god from the house of satan. one glimpse, in the red furnace glow, he had of dr. kassimere, writhing upon the slimy floor, shrieking, blaspheming--and fighting, fighting madly, as a man fights for life and more than life.... he had not yet carried the unconscious girl beyond the dining-room, when, above that other smell, he detected the odour of burning wood. a fire had broken out in the laboratory. * * * * * mrs. jack dillon mourns her guardian (no trace of whom was ever found in the charred remains of hollow grange) to this day; for she retains no memory of the night of the great fire, but believes that, overcome by the fumes, she was rescued and carried insensible from the house, by her lover. in the latter's bosom the grim secret is locked, with the memory of a demoniac figure, fighting, fighting.... the curse of a thousand kisses introductory saville grainger will long be remembered by the public as a brilliant journalist and by his friends as a confirmed misogynist. his distaste for the society of women amounted to a mania, and to grainger a pretty face was like a red rag to a bull. this was all the more extraordinary and, for grainger, more painful, because he was one of the most handsome men i ever knew--very dark, with wonderful flashing eyes and the features of an early roman--or, as i have since thought, of an aristocratic oriental; aquiline, clean-cut, and swarthy. at any mixed gathering at which he appeared, women gravitated in his direction as though he possessed some magnetic attraction for the sex; and grainger invariably bolted. his extraordinary end--never explained to this day--will be remembered by some of those who read of it; but so much that affected whole continents has occurred in the interval that to the majority of the public the circumstances will no longer be familiar. it created a considerable stir in cairo at the time, as was only natural, but when the missing man failed to return, the nine days' wonder of his disappearance was forgotten in the excitement of some new story or another. briefly, grainger, who was recuperating at mena house after a rather severe illness in london, went out one evening for a stroll, wearing a light dust-coat over his evening clothes and smoking a cigarette. he turned in the direction of the great pyramid--and never came back. that is the story in its bald entirety. no one has ever seen him since--or ever reported having seen him. if the following story is an elaborate hoax--perpetrated by grainger himself, for some obscure reason remaining in hiding, or by another well acquainted with his handwriting--i do not profess to say. as to how it came into my possession, that may be told very briefly. two years after grainger's disappearance i was in cairo, and although i was not staying at mena house i sometimes visited friends there. one night as i came out of the hotel to enter the car which was to drive me back to the continental, a tall native, dressed in white and so muffled up that little more of his face than two gleaming eyes was visible, handed me a packet--a roll of paper, apparently--saluted me with extraordinary formality, and departed. no one else seemed to have noticed the man, although the chauffeur, of course, was nearly as close to him as i was, and a servant from the hotel had followed me out and down the steps. i stood there in the dusk, staring at the packet in my hand and then after the tall figure--already swallowed up in the shadow of the road. naturally i assumed that the man had made some mistake, and holding the package near the lamp of the car i examined it closely. it was a roll of some kind of parchment, tied with a fragment of thin string, and upon the otherwise blank outside page my name was written very distinctly! i entered the car, rather dazed by the occurrence, which presented several extraordinary features, and, unfastening the string, began to read. then, in real earnest, i thought i must be dreaming. since i append the whole of the manuscript i will make no further reference to the contents here, but will content myself with mentioning that it was written--with dark-brown ink--in saville grainger's unmistakable hand upon some kind of parchment or papyrus which has defied three different experts to whom i have shown it, but which, in short, is of unknown manufacture. the twine with which it was tied proved to be of finely plaited reed. that part of grainger's narrative, if the following amazing statement is really the work of grainger, which deals with events up to the time that he left mena house--and the world--i have been able to check. the dragoman, hassan abd-el-kebîr, was still practising his profession at mena house at the time of my visit, and he confirmed the truth of grainger's story in regard to the heart of lapis-lazuli, which he had seen, and the meeting with the old woman in the mûski--of which grainger had spoken to him. for the rest, the manuscript shall tell grainger's story. the manuscript i two years have elapsed since i quitted the world, and the presence in egypt of a one-time colleague, of which i have been advised, prompts me to put on record these particulars of the strangest, most wonderful, and most beautiful experience which has ever befallen any man. i do not expect my story to be believed. the scepticism of the material world of fleet street will consume my statement with its devouring fires. but i do not care. the old itching to make a "story" is upon me. as a "story" let this paper be regarded. where the experience actually began i must leave to each reader to judge for himself. i, personally, do not profess to know, even now. but the curtain first arose upon that part of the story which it is my present purpose to chronicle one afternoon near the corner of the street of the silversmiths in cairo. i was wandering in those wonderful narrow, winding lanes, unaccompanied, for i am by habit a solitary being; and despite my ignorance of the language and customs of the natives i awakened to the fact that a link of sympathy--of silent understanding--seemed to bind me to these busy brown men. i had for many years cherished a secret ambition to pay a protracted visit to egypt, but the ties of an arduous profession hitherto had rendered its realisation impossible. now, a stranger in a strange land, i found myself _at home_. i cannot hope to make evident to my readers the completeness of this recognition. from shepheard's, with its throngs of cosmopolitan travellers and its hosts of pretty women, i had early fled in dismay to the comparative quiet of mena house. but the only real happiness i ever knew--indeed, as i soon began to realise, had ever known--i found among the discordant cries and mingled smells of perfume and decay in the native city. the desert called to me sweetly, but it was the people, the shops, the shuttered houses, the noise and the smells of the eastern streets which gripped my heart. delightedly i watched the passage of those commercial vehicles, narrow and set high upon monstrous wheels, which convey loads of indescribable variety along streets no wider than the "hall" of a small suburban residence. the parsees in the khân khalîl with their carpets and shining silk-ware, the arab dealers, fierce swarthy tradesmen from the desert, and the smooth-tongued cairenes upholding embroidered cloths and gauzy _yashmaks_ to allure the eye--all these i watched with a kind of gladness that was almost tender, that was unlike any sentiment i had ever experienced toward my fellow-creatures before. mendicants crying the eternal "_bakshîsh!_", _sakhas_ with their skins of nile water, and the other hundred and one familiar figures of the quarter filled me with a great and glad contentment. i purposely haunted the mûski during the heat of the day because at that hour it was comparatively free from the presence of europeans and americans. thus, on the occasion of which i write, coming to the end of the street in which the shops of the principal silversmiths are situated, i found myself to be the only white man (if i except the greeks) in the immediate neighbourhood. a group of men hurrying out of the street as i approached it first attracted my attention. they were glancing behind them apprehensively as though at a rabid dog. then came a white-bearded man riding a tiny donkey and also glancing back apprehensively over his shoulder. he all but collided with me in his blind haste; and, stepping quickly aside to avoid him, i knocked down an old woman who was coming out of the street. the man who had been the real cause of the accident rode off at headlong speed and i found myself left with the poor victim of my clumsiness in a spot which seemed miraculously to have become deserted. if the shopkeepers remained in their shops, they were invisible, and must have retreated into the darkest corners of the caves in the wall which constitute native emporiums. pedestrians there were none. i stooped to the old woman, who lay moaning at my feet ... and as i did so, i shrank. how can i describe the loathing, the repulsion which i experienced? never in the whole of my career had i seen such a hideous face. a ragged black veil which she wore had been torn from its brass fastenings as she fell, and her countenance was revealed in all its appalling ugliness. yellow, shrivelled, toothless, it was scarcely human; but, above all, it repelled because of its aspect of _extreme age_. i do not mean that it was like the face of a woman of eighty; it was like that of a woman who had miraculously survived decease for several centuries! it was a witch-face, a deathly face. and as i shrank, she opened her eyes, moaning feebly, and groping with claw-like hands as if darkness surrounded her. furthermore i saw a new pain, and a keener pain, light up those aged eyes. she had detected my involuntary movement of loathing. those who knew me will bear testimony to the fact that i was not an emotional man or one readily impressionable by any kind of human appeal. therefore they will wonder the more to learn that this pathetic light in the old woman's eyes changed my revulsion to a poignant sorrow. i had roughly knocked her from her feet and now hesitated to assist her to rise again! truly, she was scorned and rejected by all. a wave of tenderness, that cannot be described, that could not be resisted, swept over me. my eyes grew misty and a great remorse claimed me. "poor old soul!" i whispered. stooping, i gently raised the shrivelled, ape-like head, resting it against my knee; and, bending down, i kissed the old woman on the brow! i record the fact, but even now, looking back upon its happening, and seeking to recapture the cold, solitary saville grainger who has left the world, i realise the wonder of it. that _i_ should have given rein to such an impulse! that such an impulse should have stirred me! which phenomenon was the more remarkable? the result of my act--regretted as soon as performed--was singular. the aged, hideous creature sighed in a manner i can never forget, and an expression that almost lent comeliness to her features momentarily crept over her face. then she rose to her feet with difficulty, raised her hands as if blessing me, and muttering something in arabic went shuffling along the deserted street, stooping as she walked. apparently the episode had passed unnoticed. certainly if anyone witnessed it he was well concealed. but, conscious of a strange embarrassment, with which were mingled other tumultuous emotions, i turned out of the street of the silversmiths and found myself amid the normal activities of the quarter again. the memory of the kiss was repugnant, i wanted to wipe my lips--but something seemed to forbid the act; a lingering compassion that was almost a yearning. for once in my life i desired to find myself among normal, healthy, moderately brainless europeans. i longed for the smell of cigar-smoke, for the rattle of the cocktail-maker and the sight of a pretty face. i hurried to shepheard's. ii the same night, after dinner, i walked out of mena house to look for hassan abd-el-kebîr, the dragoman with whom i had contracted for a journey, by camel, to sakhâra on the following day. he had promised to attend at half-past eight in order to arrange the time of starting in the morning, together with some other details. i failed to find him, however, among the dragomans and other natives seated outside the hotel, and to kill time i strolled leisurely down the road toward the electric-tram terminus. i had taken no more than ten paces, i suppose, when a tall native, muffled to the tip of his nose in white and wearing a white turban, appeared out of the darkness beside me, thrust a small package into my hand, and, touching his brow, his lips and his breast with both hands, bowed and departed. i saw him no more! standing there in the road, i stared at the little package stupidly. it consisted of a piece of fine white silk fastened about some small, hard object. evidently, i thought, there had been a mistake. the package could not have been intended for me. returning to the hotel, i stood near a lamp and unfastened the silk, which was delicately perfumed. it contained a piece of lapis-lazuli carved in the form of a heart, beautifully mounted in gold and bearing three arabic letters, inlaid in some way, also in gold! at this singular ornament i stared harder than ever. certainly the muffled native had made a strange mistake. this was a love-token--and emphatically not for _me_! i was standing there lost in wonderment, the heart of lapis-lazuli in my palm, when the voice of hassan disturbed my stupor. "ah, my gentleman, i am sorry to be late but----" the voice ceased. i looked up. "well?" i said. then i, too, said no more. hassan abd-el-kebîr was glaring at the ornament in my hand as though i had held, not a very choice example of native jewellery, but an adder or a scorpion! "what's the matter?" i asked, recovering from my surprise. "do you know to whom this amulet belongs?" he muttered something in guttural arabic ere replying to my question. then: "it is the heart of lapis," he said, in a strange voice. "it is the heart of lapis!" "so much is evident," i cried, laughing. "but does it alarm you?" "please," he said softly, and held out a brown hand--"i will see." i placed the thing in his open palm and he gazed at it as one might imagine an orchid hunter would gaze at a new species of _odontoglossum_. "what do the figures mean?" i asked. "they form the word _alf_," he replied. "_alf?_ somebody's name!" i said, still laughing. "in arab it mean ten hundred," he whispered. "a thousand?" "yes--one thousand." "well?" hassan returned the ornament to me, and his expression was so strange that i began to grow really annoyed. he was looking at me with a mingling of envy and compassion which i found to be quite insufferable. "hassan," i said sternly, "you will tell me all you know about this matter. one would imagine that you suspected me of stealing the thing!" "ah, no, my gentleman!" he protested earnestly. "but i will tell you, yes, only you will not believe me." "never mind. tell me." thereupon hassan abd-el-kebîr told me the most improbable story to which i had ever listened. since to reproduce it in his imperfect english, with my own frequent interjections, would be tedious, i will give it in brief. some of the historical details, imperfectly related by hassan as i learned later, i have corrected. in the reign of the khalîf el-mamûn--a son of hárûn er-rashîd and brother of the prototype of beckford's _vathek_--one shâwar was governor of egypt, and the daughter of the governor, scheherazade, was famed throughout the domains of the khalîf as the most beautiful maiden in the land. wazîrs and princes sought her hand in vain. her heart was given to a handsome young merchant of cairo, ahmad er-mâdi, who was also the wealthiest man in the city. shâwar, although an indulgent father, would not hear of such a union, however, but he hesitated to destroy his daughter's happiness by forcing her into an unwelcome marriage. finally, passion conquered reason in the breasts of the lovers and they fled, scheherazade escaping from the palace of her father by means of a rope-ladder smuggled into the _harêm_ apartments by a slave whom ahmad's gold had tempted, and meeting ahmad outside the gardens where he waited with a fleet horse. even the guard at the city gate had been bought by the wealthy merchant, and the pair succeeded in escaping from cairo. the extensive possessions of ahmad were confiscated by the enraged father and a sentence of death was passed upon the absent man--to be instantly put into execution in the event of his arrest anywhere within the domain of the khalîf. exiled in a distant oasis, the sheikh of which was bound to ahmad by ties of ancient friendship, the prospect which had seemed so alluring to scheherazade became clouded. recognising this change in her attitude, ahmad er-mâdi racked his brains for some scheme whereby he might recover his lost wealth and surround his beautiful wife with the luxury to which she had been accustomed. in this extremity he had recourse to a certain recluse who resided in a solitary spot in the desert far from the haunts of men and who was widely credited with magical powers. it was a whole week's journey to the abode of the wizard, and, unknown to ahmad, during his absence a son of the khalîf, visiting egypt, chanced to lose his way on a hunting expedition, and came upon the secret oasis in which scheherazade was hiding. this prince had been one of her most persistent suitors. the ancient magician consented to receive ahmad, and the first boon which the enamoured young man craved of him was that he might grant him a sight of scheherazade. the student of dark arts consented. bidding ahmad to look into a mirror, he burned the secret perfumes and uttered the prescribed incantation. at first mistily, and then quite clearly, ahmad saw scheherazade, standing in the moonlight beneath a tall palm tree--her lips raised to those of her former suitor! at that the world grew black before the eyes of ahmad. and he, who had come a long and arduous journey at the behest of love, now experienced an equally passionate hatred. acquainting the magician with what he had seen, he demanded that he should exercise his art in visiting upon the false scheherazade the most terrible curse that it lay within his power to invoke! the learned man refused; whereupon ahmad, insane with sorrow and anger, drew his sword and gave the magician choice of compliance or instant death. the threat sufficed. the wizard performed a ghastly conjuration, calling down upon scheherazade the curse of an ugliness beyond that of humanity, and which should remain with her not for the ordinary span of a lifetime but for incalculable years, during which she should continue to live in the flesh, loathed, despised, and shunned of all! "until one thousand compassionate men, unasked and of their own free will, shall each have bestowed a kiss upon thee," was the exact text of the curse. "then thou shalt regain thy beauty, thy love--and death." ahmad er-mâdi staggered out from the cavern, blinded by a hundred emotions--already sick with remorse; and one night's stage on his return journey dropped dead from his saddle ... stricken by the malignant will of the awful being whose power he had invoked! i will conclude this wild romance in the words of hassan, the dragoman, as nearly as i can recall them. "and so," he said, his voice lowered in awe, "scheherazade, who was stricken with age and ugliness in the very hour that the curse was spoken, went out into the world, my gentleman. she begged her way from place to place, and as the years passed by accumulated much wealth in that manner. finally, it is said, she returned to cairo, her native city, and there remained. to each man who bestowed a kiss upon her--and such men were rare--she caused a heart of lapis to be sent, and upon the heart was engraved in gold the number of the kiss! it is said that these gifts ensured to those upon whom they were bestowed the certain possession of their beloved! once before, when i was a small child, i saw such an amulet, and the number upon it was nine hundred and ninety-nine." the thing was utterly incredible, of course; merely a picturesque example of eastern imagination; but just to see what effect it would have upon him, i told hassan about the old woman in the mûski. i had to do so. frankly, the coincidence was so extraordinary that it worried me. when i had finished: "it was she--scheherazade," he said fearfully. "and it was the _last_ kiss!" "what then?" i asked. "nothing, my gentleman. i do not know!" iii throughout the expedition to sakhâra on the following day i could not fail to note that hassan was covertly watching me--and his expression annoyed me intensely. it was that compound of compassion and resignation which one might bestow upon a condemned man. i charged him with it, but of course he denied any such sentiment. nevertheless, i knew that he entertained it, and, what was worse, i began, in an uncomfortable degree, to share it with him! i cannot make myself clearer. but i simply felt the normal world to be slipping from under my feet, and, no longer experiencing a desire to clutch at modernity as i had done after my meeting with the old woman, i found myself to be reconciled to my fate! to my fate? ... to what fate? i did not know; but i realised, beyond any shade of doubt, that something tremendous, inevitable, and ultimate was about to happen to me. i caught myself unconsciously raising the heart of lapis-lazuli to my lips! why i did so i had no idea; i seemed to have lost identity. i no longer knew myself. when hassan parted from me at mena house that evening he could not disguise the fact that he regarded the parting as final; yet my plans were made for several weeks ahead. nor did i quarrel with the man's curious attitude. _i_ regarded the parting as final, also! in a word i was becoming reconciled--to something. it is difficult, all but impossible, to render such a frame of mind comprehensible, and i shall not even attempt the task, but leave the events of the night to speak for themselves. after dinner i lighted a cigarette, and avoiding a particularly persistent and very pretty widow who was waiting to waylay me in the lounge, i came out of the hotel and strolled along in the direction of the pyramid. once i looked back--bidding a silent farewell to mena house! then i took out the heart of lapis-lazuli from my pocket and kissed it rapturously--kissed it as i had never kissed any object or any person in the whole course of my life! and why i did so i had no idea. all who read my story will be prepared to learn that in this placid and apparently feeble frame of mind i slipped from life, from the world. it was not so. the modern man, the saville grainger once known in fleet street, came to life again for one terrible, strenuous moment ... and then passed out of life for ever. just before i reached the pyramid, and at a lonely spot in the path--for this was not a "sphinx and pyramid night"--that is to say, the moon was not at the full--a tall, muffled native appeared at my elbow. he was the same man who had brought me the heart of lapis-lazuli, or his double. i started. he touched me lightly on the arm. "follow," he said--and pointed ahead into the darkness below the plateau. i moved off obediently. then--suddenly, swiftly, came revolt. the modern man within me flared into angry life. i stopped dead, and "who are you? where are you leading me?" i cried. i received no reply. a silk scarf was slipped over my head by some one who, silently, must have been following me, and drawn tight enough to prevent any loud outcry but not so as to endanger my breathing. i fought like a madman. i knew, and the knowledge appalled me, that i was fighting for life. arms like bands of steel grasped me; i was lifted, bound and carried--i knew not where.... placed in some kind of softly padded saddle, or, as i have since learned, into a _shibrîyeh_ or covered litter on a camel's back, i felt the animal rise to its ungainly height and move off swiftly. as suddenly as revolt had flamed up, resignation returned. i was contented. my bonds were unnecessary; my rebellion was ended. i yearned, wildly, for the end of the desert journey! some one was calling me and all my soul replied. for hours, as it seemed, the camel raced ceaselessly on. absolute silence reigned about me. then, in the distance i heard voices, and the gait of the camel changed. finally the animal stood still. came a word of guttural command, and the camel dropped to its knees. pillowed among a pile of scented cushions, i experienced no discomfort from this usually painful operation. i was lifted out of my perfumed couch and set upon my feet. having been allowed to stand for a while until the effects of remaining so long in a constrained position had worn off, i was led forward into some extensive building. marble pavements were beneath my feet, fountains played, and the air was heavy with burning ambergris. i was placed with my back to a pillar and bound there, but not harshly. the bandage about my head was removed. i stared around me. a magnificent eastern apartment met my gaze--a great hall open on one side to the desert. out upon the sands i could see a group of men who had evidently been my captors and my guards. the one who had unfastened the silk scarf i could not see, but i heard him moving away behind the pillar to which i was bound. stretched upon a luxurious couch before me was a woman. if i were to seek to describe her i should inevitably fail, for her loveliness surpassed everything which i had ever beheld--of which i had ever dreamed. i found myself looking into her eyes, and in their depths i found all that i had missed in life, and lost all that i had found. she smiled, rose, and taking a jewelled dagger from a little table beside her, approached me. my heart beat until i felt almost suffocated as she came near. and when she bent and cut the silken lashing which bound me, i knew such rapture as i had hitherto counted an invention of arabian poets. i was raised above the joys of common humanity and tasted the joy of the gods. she placed the dagger in my hand. "my life is thine," she said. "take it." and clutching at the silken raiment draping her beautiful bosom, she invited me to plunge the blade into her heart! the knife dropped, clattering upon the marble pavement. for one instant i hesitated, watching her, devouring her with my eyes; then i swept her to me and pressed upon her sweet lips the thousand and first kiss.... (note.--the manuscript of saville grainger finishes here.) the turquoise necklace i "he is the lord of the desert, effendi," declared mohammed the dragoman. "from the valley of zered to damascus he is known and loved, but feared. they say"--he lowered his voice--"that he is a great _welee_, and that he is often seen in the street of the attars, having the appearance of a simple old man; but in the desert he is like a bitter apple, a viper and a calamity! overlord is he of the bedouins, and all the sons of the desert bow to ben azreem, sheikh of the ibn-rawallah." "what is a _welee_, exactly?" asked graham. "a man of god, effendi, favoured beyond other men." "and this arab sheikh is a _welee_?" "so it is said. he goes about secretly aiding the poor and afflicted, when he may be known by his white beard----" "there are many white beards in egypt," said graham. but the other continued, ignoring the interruption: "and in the desert, ben azreem, a horseman unrivalled, may be known by the snow-white horse which he rides, or if he is not so mounted, by his white camel, swifter than the glance of envy, more surefooted than the eager lover who climbs to his enslaver's window." "indeed!" said graham dryly. "well, i hope i may have the pleasure of meeting this mysterious notability before i leave the country." "unless you journey across the sands for many days, it is unlikely. for when he comes into egypt he reveals himself to none but the supremely good,"--graham stared--"and the supremely wicked!" added mohammed. the poetic dragoman having departed, graham leaned over to his wife, who had sat spellbound, her big blue eyes turned to the face of mohammed throughout his romantic narrative. "these wild native legends appeal to you, don't they?" he said, smiling and patting her hand affectionately. "you superstitious little colleen!" eileen graham blushed, and the blush of a pretty irish bride is a very beautiful thing. "don't you believe it at all, then?" she asked softly. "i believe there may be such a person as ben azreem, and possibly he's a very imposing individual. he may even indulge in visits, incognito, to cairo, in the manner of the late lamented hárûn er-rashîd of _arabian nights_ memory, but i can't say that i believe in _welees_ as a class!" his wife shrugged her pretty shoulders. "there is something that _i_ have to tell you, which i suppose you will also refuse to believe," she said, with mock indignation. "you remember the arabs whom we saw at the exhibition in london?" graham started. "the gentlemen who were advertised as 'chiefs from the arabian desert'? i remember _one_ in particular." "that is the one i mean," said eileen. her husband looked at her curiously. "your explanation is delightfully lucid, dear!" he said jocularly. "my memories of the gentleman known as el-suleym, i believe, are not pleasant; his memories of me must be equally unfavourable. he illustrated the fact that savages should never be introduced into civilised society, however fascinating they may be personally. mrs. marstham was silly enough to take the man up, and because of the way he looked at you, i was wise enough to knock him down! what then?" "only this--i saw him, to-day!" "eileen!" there was alarm in graham's voice. "where? here, or in cairo?" "as we were driving away from the mosque of the whirling dervishes. he was one of a group who stood by the bridge." "you are certain?" "quite certain." "did he see you?" "i couldn't say. he gave no sign to show that he had seen me." john graham lighted a cigarette with much care. "it doesn't matter, anyway," he said, carelessly. "you are as safe here as at the _ritz_." but there was unrest in the glance which he cast out across the prospect touched by moon-magic into supernatural beauty. in the distance gleamed a fairy city of silvern minarets, born, it seemed, from the silvern stream. beyond lay the night mystery of the desert, into whose vastness marched the ghostly acacias. the discordant chattering and chanting from the river-bank merged into a humming song, not unmusical. the howling of the dogs, even, found a place in the orchestral scheme. behind him, in the hotel, was european and american life--modernity; before him was that other life, endless and unchanging. there was something cold, sombre, and bleak in the wonderful prospect, something shocking in the presence of those sight-seeing, careless folk, the luxurious hotel, _all_ that was western and new, upon that threshold of the ancient, changeless desert. a menace, too, substantial yet cloaked with the mystery of the motherland of mysteries, had arisen now. although he had assured eileen that gizeh was as safe as piccadilly, he had too much imagination to be unaware that from the egypt of cook's to the egypt of secrets is but a step. none but the very young or very sanguine traveller looks for adventure nowadays in the neighbourhood of mena house. when the intrepid george sandys visited and explored the great pyramid, it was at peril of his life, but graham reflected humorously that the most nervous old ladies now performed the feat almost daily. yet out here in the moonlight where the silence was, out beyond the radius of "sights," lay a land unknown to europe, as every desert is unknown. it was a thought that had often come to him, but it came to-night with a force and wearing a significance which changed the aspect of the sands, the aspect of all egypt. he glanced at the charming girl beside him. eileen, too, was looking into the distance with far-away gaze. the pose of her head was delightful, and he sat watching her in silence. within the hotel the orchestra had commenced softly to play; but graham did not notice the fact. he was thinking how easily one could be lost out upon that grey ocean, with its islands of priestly ruins. "it is growing rather chilly, dear," he said suddenly; "even for fur wraps. suppose we go in?" ii the crowd in the bazaar was excessive, and the bent old figure which laboured beneath a nondescript burden, wrapped up in a blue cloth, passed from the noisiness out into the narrow street which ran at right-angles with the lane of many shops. perhaps the old arab was deaf, perhaps wearied to the point of exhaustion; but, from whatever cause, he ignored, or was unaware of, the oncoming _arabeeyeh_, whose driver had lost control of his horse. even the shrill scream of the corpulent, white-veiled german lady, who was one of its passengers, failed to arouse him. out into the narrow roadway he staggered, bent almost double. graham, accompanied by mohammed, was some distance away, haggling with a greek thief who held the view that a return of three hundred and fifty per cent. spelled black ruination. eileen, finding the air stifling, had walked on in the direction of the less crowded street above. thus it happened that she, and the poor old porter, alone, were in the path of the onward-whirling carriage. many women so placed would have stood, frozen with horror, have been struck down by the frantic animal; some would have had sufficient presence of mind to gain the only shelter attainable in time--that of a deep-set doorway. few would have acted as eileen acted. it was under the stimulus of that celtic impetuosity--that generous madness which seems to proceed, not from the mind, but from the heart--that she leapt, not back, but forward. she never knew exactly what took place, nor how she escaped destruction; but there was a roaring in her ears, above it rising the teutonic screams of the lady in the _arabeeyeh_; there was a confused chorus of voices, a consciousness of effort; and she found herself, with wildly beating heart, crouching back into the recess which once had held a _mastabah_. from some place invisible, around a bend in the tortuous street, came sounds of shouting and that of lashing hoofs. the runaway was stopped. at her feet lay a shapeless bundle wrapped in a blue cloth, and beside her, leaning back against the whitewashed wall, and breathing with short, sobbing breaths, was the old porter. now, her husband had his arms about her, and mohammed, with frightened eyes, hovered in the background. without undue haste, all the bazaar gradually was coming upon the scene. "my darling, are you hurt?" john graham's voice shook. he was deathly pale. eileen smiled reassuringly. "not a bit, dear," she said breathlessly. "but i am afraid the poor old man is." "you are quite sure you are not hurt?" "i was not so much as touched, though honestly i don't know how either of us escaped. but do see if the old man is injured." graham turned to the rescued porter, who now had recovered his composure. "mohammed, ask him if he is hurt," he directed. mohammed put the question. a curious group surrounded the party. but the old man, ignoring all, knelt and bowed his bare head to the dust at eileen's feet. "oh, john," cried the girl, "ask him to stand up! i feel ashamed to see such a venerable old man kneeling before me!" "tell him it is--nothing," said graham hastily to mohammed, "and--er----"--he fumbled in his pocket--"give him this." but mohammed, looking ill at ease, thrust aside the proffered _bakshîsh_--a novel action which made graham stare widely. "he would not take it, effendi," he whispered. "see, his turban lies there; he is a _hadj_. he is praying for the eternal happiness of his preserver, and he is interceding with the prophet (_salla--'lláhu 'aleyhi wasellum_), that she may enjoy the delights of paradise equally with all true believers!" "very good of him," said graham, who, finding the danger passed and his wife safe, was beginning to feel embarrassed. "thank him, and tell him that she is greatly indebted!" he took eileen's arm, and turned to force a way through the strangely silent group about. but the aged porter seized the hem of the girl's white skirt, gently detaining her. as he rose upon his knees, mohammed, with marks of unusual deference, handed him his green turban. the old man, still clutching eileen's dress, signed that his dirty bundle should likewise be passed to him. this was done. graham was impatient to get away. but---- "humour him for a moment, dear," said eileen softly. "we don't want to hurt the poor old fellow's feelings." into the bundle the old man plunged his hand, and drew out a thin gold chain upon which hung a queerly cut turquoise. he stood upright, raised the piece of jewellery to his forehead and to his lips, and held it out, the chain stretched across his open palms, to eileen. "he must be some kind of pedlar," said graham. eileen shook her head, smiling. "mohammed, tell him that i cannot possibly take his chain," she directed. "but thank him all the same, of course." mohammed, his face averted from the statuesque old figure, bent to her ear. "take it!" he whispered. "take it! do not refuse!" there was a sort of frightened urgency in his tones, so that both graham and his wife looked at him curiously. "take it, then, eileen," said graham quickly. "and, mohammed, you must find out who he is, and we will make it up to him in some way." "yes, yes, effendi," agreed the man readily. eileen accordingly accepted the present, glancing aside at her husband to intimate that they must not fail to pay for it. as she took the chain in her hands, the donor said something in a low voice. "hang it round your neck," translated mohammed. eileen did so, whispering: "you must not lose sight of him, mohammed." mohammed nodded; and the old man, replacing his turban and making a low obeisance, spoke rapidly a few words, took up his bundle, and departed. the silent bystanders made way for him. "come on," said graham; "i am anxious to get out of this. find a carriage, mohammed. we'll lunch at shepheard's." a carriage was obtained, and they soon left far behind them the scene of this odd adventure. with mohammed perched up on the box, graham and his wife could discuss the episode without restraint. graham, however, did most of the talking, for eileen was strangely silent. "it is quite a fine stone," he said, examining the necklace so curiously acquired. "we must find some way of repaying the old chap which will not offend his susceptibilities." eileen nodded absently; and her husband, with his eyes upon the dainty white figure, found gratitude for her safety welling up like a hot spring in his heart. the action had been characteristic; and he longed to reprove her for risking her life, yet burned to take her in his arms for the noble impulse that had prompted her to do so. he wondered anxiously if her silence could be due to the after-effects of that moment of intense excitement. "you don't feel unwell, darling?" he whispered. she smiled at him radiantly, and gave his hand a quick little squeeze. "of course not," she said. but she remained silent to the end of the short drive. this was not due to that which her husband feared, however, but to the fact that she had caught a glimpse, amongst the throng at the corner of the bazaar, of the handsome, sinister face of el-suleym, the bedouin. iii the moon poured radiance on the desert. at the entrance to a camel-hair tent stood a tall, handsome man, arrayed in the picturesque costume of the bedouin. the tent behind him was upheld by six poles. the ends and one side were pegged to the ground, and the whole of that side before which he stood was quite open, with the exception of a portion before which hung a goat-hair curtain. this was the "house of hair" of the sheikh el-suleym, of the masr-bishareen--el-suleym, "the regicide" outcast of the great tribe of the bishareen. at some distance from the sheikh's tent were some half a dozen other and smaller tents, housing the rascally following of this desert outcast. little did those who had engaged the picturesque el-suleym, to display his marvellous horsemanship in london, know that he and those that came with him were a scorn among true sons of the desert, pariahs of that brotherhood which extends from zered to the nile, from tanta to the red sea; little did those who had opened their doors in hospitality to the dashing horseman dream that they entertained a petty brigand, sought for by the egyptian authorities, driven out into ostracism by his own people. and now before his tent he stood statuesque in the egyptian moonlight, and looked towards gizeh, less than thirty miles to the north-east. as el-suleym looked towards gizeh, graham and his wife were seated before mena house looking out across the desert. the adventure of the morning had left its impression upon both of them, and eileen wore the gold chain with its turquoise pendant. graham was smoking in silence, and thinking, not of the old porter and his odd eastern gratitude, but of another figure, and one which often came between his mental eye and the beauties of that old, beautiful land. eileen, too, was thinking of el-suleym; for the bedouin now was associated in her mind with the old pedlar, since she had last seen the handsome, sinister face amid the throng at the entrance to the bazaar. telepathy is a curious fact. were graham's reflections _en rapport_ with his wife's, or were they both influenced by the passionate thoughts of that other mind, that subtle, cunning mind of the man who at that moment was standing before his house of hair and seeking with his eagle glance to defy distance and the night? "have you seen--him, again?" asked graham abruptly. "since the other day at the bridge?" eileen started. although he had endeavoured to hide it from her, she was perfectly well aware of her husband's intense anxiety on her behalf. she knew, although he prided himself upon having masked his feelings, that the presence of the bedouin in egypt had cast a cloud upon his happiness. therefore she had not wished to tell him of her second encounter with el-suleym. but to this direct question there could be only one reply. "i saw him again--this morning," she said, toying nervously with the pendant at her neck. graham clasped her hand tensely. "where?" "outside the bazaar, in the crowd." "you did not--tell me." "i did not want to worry you." he laughed dryly. "it doesn't worry me, eileen," he said carelessly. "if i were in damascus or aleppo, it certainly might worry me to know that a man, no doubt actively malignant towards us, was near, perhaps watching; but cairo is really a prosaically safe and law-abiding spot. we are as secure here as we should be at--shepherd's bush, say!" he laughed shortly. voices floated out to them, nasal, guttural, strident; voices american, teutonic, gallic, and anglo-saxon. the orchestra played a viennese waltz. confused chattering, creaking, and bumping sounded from the river. out upon the mud walls dogs bayed the moon. but beyond the native village, beyond the howling dogs, beyond the acacia ranks out in the silver-grey mystery of the sands hard by, an outpost of the pharaohs, where a ruined shrine of horus bared its secret places to the peeping moon, the sheikh of the masr-bishareen smiled. graham felt strangely uneasy, and sought by light conversation to shake off the gloom which threatened to claim him. "that thief, mohammed," he said tersely, "has no more idea than adam, i believe, who your old porter friend really is." "why do you think so?" asked eileen. "because he's up in cairo to-night, searching for him!" "how do you know?" "i cornered him about it this afternoon, and although i couldn't force an admission from him--i don't think anybody short of an accomplished k.c. could--he was suspiciously evasive! i gave him four hours to procure the name and address of the old gentleman to whom we owe the price of a turquoise necklace. he has not turned up yet!" eileen made no reply. her celtic imagination had invested the morning's incident with a mystic significance which she could not hope to impart to her hard-headed husband. a dirty and ragged egyptian boy made his way on to the verandah, furtively glancing about him, as if anticipating the cuff of an unseen hand. he sidled up to graham, thrusting a scrap of paper on to the little table beside him. "for me?" said graham. the boy nodded; and whilst eileen watched him interestedly, graham, tilting the communication so as to catch the light from the hotel windows, read the following: "he is come to here but cannot any farther. i have him waiting the boy will bring you. "your obedient effendi, mohammed." graham laughed grimly, glancing at his watch. "only half an hour late," he said, standing up, "wait here, eileen; i shall not be many minutes." "but i should like to see him, too. he might accept the price from me where you would fail to induce him to take it." "never fear," said her husband; "he wouldn't have come if he meant to refuse. what shall i offer him?" "whatever you think," said eileen, smiling; "be generous with the poor old man." graham nodded and signed to the boy that he was ready to start. the night swallowed them up; and eileen sat waiting, whilst the band played softly and voices chatted incessantly around her. some five minutes elapsed; ten; fifteen. it grew to half an hour, and she became uneasy. she stood up and began to pace up and down the verandah. then the slinking figure of the egyptian youth reappeared. "graham effendi," he said, showing his gleaming teeth, "says you come too." eileen drew her wrap more closely about her and smiled to the boy to lead the way. they passed out from the hotel, turned sharply to the left, made in the direction of the river, then bore off to the right in the direction of the sand-dunes. the murmuring life of mena house died into remoteness; the discordance of the arab village momentarily took precedence; then this, in turn, was lost, and they were making out desert-ward to the hollow which harbours the sphinx. great events in our lives rarely leave a clear-cut impression; often the turning-point in one's career is a confused memory, a mere clash of conflicting ideas. trivial episodes are sharp silhouettes; unforgettable; great happenings but grey, vague things in life's panorama. thus, eileen never afterwards could quite recall what happened that night. the thing that was like to have wrecked her life had no sharp outlines to etch themselves upon the plate of memory. vaguely she wondered to what meeting-place the boy was leading her. faintly she was conscious of a fear of the growing silence, of a warning instinct whispering her to beware of the loneliness of the desert. then the boy was gone; the silence was gone; harsh voices were in her ears--a cloth was whipped about her face and strong arms lifted her. she was not of a stock that swoon or passively accept violence. she strove to cry out, but the band was too cunningly fastened to allow of it; she struck out with clenched fists and not unshrewdly, for twice her knuckles encountered a bearded face and a suppressed exclamation told that the blows were not those of a weakling. she kicked furiously and drew forth a howl of pain from her captor. her hands flew up to the bandage, but were roughly seized, thrust down and behind her, and tied securely. she was thrown across a saddle, and with a thrill of horror knew herself a captive. out into the desert she was borne, into that unknown land which borders so closely upon the sight-seeing track of cook's. and her helplessness, her inability to fight, broke her spirit, born fighter that she was; and the jarring of the saddle of the galloping horse, the dull thud of the hoofs on the sand, the iron grip which held her, fear, anger, all melted into a blank. iv mohammed the dragoman, with two hotel servants, came upon graham some time later, gagged and bound behind a sand hillock less than five hundred yards from mena house. they had him on his feet in an instant, unbound; and his face was ghastly--for he knew too well what the outrage portended. "quick!" he said hoarsely. "how long is she gone?" mohammed was trembling wildly. "nearly an hour, effendi--nearly an hour. allah preserve us, what shall we do? i heard it in cairo to-night--it is all over the bazaars--the sheikh el-suleym with the masr-bishareen is out. they travel like the wind, effendi. it is not four days since they stopped a caravan ten miles beyond bir-amber, now they are in lower egypt. allah preserve her!" he ran on volubly--"who can overtake the horsemen of the bishareen?" so he ran on, wildly, panting as they raced back to the hotel. the place was in an uproar. it was an event which furnished the guests with such a piece of local colour as none but the most inexperienced tourist could have anticipated. an arab raid in these days of electric tramways! a captive snatched from the very doors of mena house! one would as little expect an arab raid upon the _ritz_! the authorities at headquarters, advised of the occurrence, found themselves at a loss how to cope with this stupendous actuality. the desert had extended its lean arm and snatched a captive to its bosom. cairo had never before entirely realised the potentialities of that all-embracing desert. there are a thousand ways, ten thousand routes, across that ruin-dotted wilderness. justly did the ancient people worship in the moon the queenly isis; for when the silver emblem of the goddess claims the sands for her own, to all save the desert-born they become a place of secrets. here is a theatre for great dramas, wanting only the tragedian. the outlawed sheikh of the bishareen knew this full well, but, unlike others who know it, he had acted upon his convictions and revealed to wondering egypt what bedouin craft and a band of intrepid horsemen can do, aided by a belt of sand, and cloaked by night. graham was distracted. for he was helpless, and realised it. already the news was in cairo, and the machinery of the government at work. but what machinery, save that of the omniscient, could avail him now? a crowd of visitors flocked around him, offering frightened consolation. he broke away from them violently--swearing--a primitive man who wanted to be alone with his grief. the idea uppermost in his mind was that of leaping upon a horse and setting out in pursuit. but in which direction should he pursue? one declared that the arabs must have rode this way, another that, and yet another a third. some one shouted--the words came to him as if through a thick curtain--that the soldiers were coming. "what the hell's the good of it!" he said, and turned away, biting his lips. when a spruce young officer came racing up the steps to gather particulars, graham stared at him dully, said, "the arabs have got her--my wife," and walked away. the hoof-clatter and accompanying martial disturbance were faint in the distance when mohammed ran in to where graham was pacing up and down in an agony of indecision--veritably on the verge of insanity. the dragoman held a broken gold chain in his hand, from which depended a big turquoise that seemed to blink in the shaded light. "effendi," he whispered, and held it out upon trembling fingers, "it is her necklet! i found it yonder,"--pointing eastward. "_sallee 'a-nebee!_ it is her necklet!" graham turned, gave one wild glance at the thing, and grasped the man by the throat, glaring madly upon him. "you dog!" he shouted. "you were in the conspiracy! it was you who sent the false messages!" a moment he held him so, then dropped his hands. mohammed fell back, choking; but no malice was in the velvet eyes. the eastern understands and respects a great passion. "effendi," he gasped--"i am your faithful servant, and--i cannot write! _wa-llah!_ and by his mercy, this will save her if anything can!" he turned and ran fleetly out, graham staring after him. it may seem singular that john graham remained thus inert--inactive. but upon further consideration his attitude becomes explainable. he knew the futility of a blind search, and dreaded being absent if any definite clue should reach the hotel. meanwhile, he felt that madness was not far off. "they say that they have struck out across the arabian desert, mr. graham--probably in the direction of the old caravan route." graham did not turn; did not know nor care who spoke. "it's four hundred miles across to the caravan route," he said slowly; "four hundred miles of sand--of sand." v the most simple oriental character is full of complexity. mohammed the dragoman, by birth and education a thief, by nature a sluggard, spared no effort to reach cairo in the shortest space of time humanly possible. the source of his devotion is obscure. perhaps it was due to a humble admiration which john graham's attempt to strangle him could not alter, or perhaps to a motive wholly unconnected with mundane matters. certain it is that a sort of religious fervour latterly had possessed the man. from being something of a scoffer (for islam, like other creeds, daily loses adherents), he was become a most devout believer. to what this should be ascribed i shall leave you to judge. exhausted, tottering with his giant exertions, he made his way through the tortuous streets of old cairo--streets where ancient palaces and mansions of wealthy turks displayed their latticed windows, and, at that hour, barred doors to the solitary, panting wayfarer. upon one of these barred doors he beat. it was that of an old palace which seemed to be partially in ruins. after some delay, the door was opened and mohammed admitted. the door was reclosed. and, following upon the brief clamour, silence claimed the street again. much precious time had elapsed since eileen graham's disappearance from the hotel by the pyramids, when a belated and not too sober greek, walking in the direction of cairo, encountered what his muddled senses proclaimed to be an apparition--that of a white-robed figure upon a snow-white camel, which sped, silent, and with arrow-like swiftness, past him towards gizeh. about this vision of the racing camel (a more beautiful creature than any he had seen since the last to carry the mahmal), about the rider, spectral in the moonlight, white-bearded, there was that which suggested a vision of the moslem prophet. ere the frightened greek could gather courage to turn and look after the phantom rider, man and camel were lost across the sands. mena house was in an uproar. no one beneath its roof had thought of sleep that night. futile searches were being conducted in every direction, north, south, east, and west. graham, feeling that another hour of inactivity would spell madness, had succumbed to the fever to be up and doing, and had outdistanced all, had left the boy far behind and was mercilessly urging his poor little mount out into the desert, well knowing that in all probability he was riding further and further away from the one he sought, yet madly pressing on. he felt that to stop was to court certain insanity; he must press on and on; he must search--search. his mood had changed, and from cursing fate, heaven, everything and every one, he was come to prayer. he, then, was the next to see the man on the white camel, and, like the greek, he scarcely doubted that it was a wraith of his tortured imagination. indeed, he took it for an omen. the prophet had appeared to him to proclaim that the desert, the home of islam, had taken eileen from him. the white-robed figure gave no sign, looked neither to the right nor to the left, but straight ahead, with eagle eyes. graham pulled up his donkey, and sat like a shape of stone, until the silver-grey distance swallowed up the phantom. out towards the oasis called the well of seven palms, the straggling military company proceeded in growing weariness. the officer in charge had secured fairly reliable evidence to show that the arabs had struck out straight for the red sea. since he was not omniscient, he could not know that they had performed a wide detour which would lead them back an hour before dawn to the camp by the nile beside the temple of horus, where el-suleym waited for his captive. it was at the point in their march when, to have intercepted the raiders, they should have turned due south instead of proceeding toward the oasis, that one of them pulled up, rubbed his eyes, looked again and gave the alarm. in another moment they all saw it--a white camel; not such a camel as tourists are familiar with, the poor hacks of the species, but a swan-like creature, white as milk, bearing a white-robed rider who ignored utterly the presence of the soldiers, who answered by no word or sign to their challenge, but who passed them like a cloud borne along by a breeze and melted vaporously into the steely distances of the desert. the captain was hopelessly puzzled. "too late to bring him down," he muttered, "and no horse that was ever born could run down a racing camel. most mysterious." twenty miles south of their position, and exactly at right-angles to their route, rode the bishareen horsemen, the foremost with eileen graham across his saddle. and now, eighteen miles behind the bishareen, a white camel, of the pure breed which yearly furnishes the stately bearer of the mahmal, spurned the sand and like a creature of air gained upon the arabs, wild riders though they were, mile upon mile, league upon league. within rifle-shot of the camp, and with the desert dawn but an hour ahead, only a long sand-ridge concealed from the eyes of the bishareen troupe that fleet shape which had struck wonder to the hearts of all beholders. despite their start of close upon two hours, despite the fact that the soldiers were now miles, and hopeless miles, in their rear, the racer of the desert had passed them! eileen graham had returned to full and agonizing consciousness. for hours, it seemed, her captives had rode and rode in silence. now a certain coolness borne upon the breeze told her that they were nearing the river again. clamour sounded ahead. they were come to the arab camp. but ere they reached it they entered some lofty building which echoed hollowly to the horses' tread. she was lifted from her painful position, tied fast against a stone pillar, and the bandage was unfastened from about her head. she saw that she was lashed to one of the ruined pillars which once had upheld the great hall of a temple. about her were the crumbling evidences of the sacerdotal splendour that was ancient egypt. the moon painted massive shadows upon the debris, and carpeted the outer place with the black image of a towering propylæum. upon the mound which once had been the stone avenue of approach was the bedouin camp. it was filled with a vague disturbance. she was quite alone; for those who had brought her there were leading their spent horses out to the camp. eileen could not know what the hushed sounds portended; but actually they were due to the fact that the outlaw chief, wearied with that most exhausting passion--the passion of anticipation--had sought his tent, issuing orders that none should disturb him. many hours before he knew they could return, he had stood looking out across the sands, but at last had decided to fit himself, by repose, for the reception of his beautiful captive. a sheikh's tent has two apartments--one sacred to the lord and master, the other sheltering his harem. to the former el-suleym had withdrawn; and now his emissaries stood at the entrance, where the symbolic spear was stuck, blade upward, in the sand. those who had thrown in their lot with el-suleym, called the regicide, had learnt that a robber chief whose ambitions have been whetted by a sojourn in europe is a hard master, though one profitable to serve. they hesitated to arouse him, even though their delicate task was well accomplished. and whilst they debated before the tent, which stood alone, as is usual, at some little distance from the others, amid which moved busy figures engaged in striking camp, eileen, within the temple, heard a movement behind the pillar to which she was bound. she was in no doubt respecting the identity of her captor, and the author of the ruse by which she had been lured from the hotel, and now, unable to turn, it came to her that this was _he_, creeping to her through the moon-patched shadows. with eyes closed, and her teeth clenched convulsively, she pictured the sinister, approaching figure. then, from close beside her, came a voice: "only i can save you from him. do not hesitate, do not speak. do as i tell you." eileen opened her eyes. she could not see the speaker, but the voice was oddly familiar. her fevered brain told her that she had heard it before, but speaking arabic. it was the voice of an old man, but a strong, vibrant voice. "it is the will of allah, whose name be exalted, that i repay!" a lean hand held before her eyes a broken gold chain, upon which depended a turquoise. she knew the voice, now: it was that of the old pedlar! but his english, except for the hoarse eastern accent, was flawless, and this was the tone of no broken old man, but of one to be feared and respected. her reason, she thought, must be tricking her. how could the old pedlar, however strong in his queer gratitude, save her now? then the hand came again before her eyes, and it held a tiny green phial. "be brave. drink, quickly. they are coming to take you to him. it is the only escape!" "oh, god!" she whispered, and turned icily cold. this was the boon he brought her. this was the road of escape, escape from el-suleym--the road of death! it was cruel, unspeakably horrible, with a bright world just opening out to her, with youth, beauty, and---- she could not think of her husband. "god be merciful to him!" she murmured. "but he would prefer me dead to----" "quick! they are here!" she placed her lips to the phial, and drank. it seemed that fire ran through every vein in her body. then came chill. it grew, creeping from her hands and her feet inward and upward to her heart. "good-bye ... dear...." she whispered, and sobbed once, dryly. the ropes held her rigidly upright. vi "_wa-llah!_ she is dead, and we have slain her!" el-suleym's bedouins stood before the pillar in the temple, and fear was in their eyes. they unbound the girl, beautiful yet in her marble pallor, and lowered her rigid body to the ground. they looked one at another, and many a glance was turned toward the nile. then the leader of the party extended a brown hand, pointing to the tethered horses. they passed from the temple, muttering. no one among them dared to brave the wrath of the terrible sheikh. as they came out into the paling moonlight, the camp seemed to have melted magically; for ere dawn they began their long march to the lonely oasis in the arabian desert which was the secret base of the masr-bishareen's depredatory operations. stealthily circling the camp, which buzzed with subdued activity--even the dogs seemed to be silent when the sheikh slept--they came to the horses. solitary, a square silhouette against the paling blue, stood the sheikh's tent, on top of the mound, which alone was still untouched. the first horseman had actually leapt into the saddle, and the others, with furtive glances at the ominous hillock, were about to do likewise, when a low wail, weird, eerie, rose above the muffled stirring of the camp. "_allah el-'azeen!_" groaned one of the party--"what is that?" again the wail sounded--and again. other woman voices took it up. it electrified the whole camp. escape, undetected, was no longer possible. men, women, and children were abandoning their tasks and standing, petrified with the awe of it, and looking towards the sheikh's tent. as they looked, as the frightened fugitives hesitated, looking also, from the tent issued forth a melancholy procession. it was composed of the women of el-suleym's household. they beat their bared breasts and cast dust upon their heads. for within his own sacred apartment lay the sheikh in his blood--a headless corpse. and now those who had trembled before him were hot to avenge him. riders plunged out in directions as diverse as the spokes of a wheel. four of them rode madly through the temple where they had left the body of their captive, leaping the debris, and circling about the towering pillars, as only arab horsemen can. out into the sands they swept; and before them, from out of a hollow, rose an apparition that brought all four up short, their steeds upreared upon their haunches. it was the figure of a white-bearded man, white-robed and wearing the green turban, mounted upon a camel which, to the eyes of the four, looked in its spotless whiteness a creature of another world. before the eagle-eyed stranger lay the still form of eileen graham, and as the camel rose to its feet, its rider turned, swung something high above him, and hurled it back at the panic-stricken pursuers. right amongst their horses' feet it rolled, and up at them in the moonlight from out a mass of blood-clotted beard, stared the glassy eyes of el-suleym! the sun was high in the heavens when the grey-faced and haggard-eyed searchers came straggling back to mena house. two of them, who had come upon graham ten miles to the east, brought him in. he was quite passive, and offered no protest, spoke no word, but stared straight in front of him with a set smile that was dreadful to see. no news had come from the company of soldiers; no news had come from anywhere. it was ghastly, inconceivable; people looked at one another and asked if it could really be possible that one of their number had been snatched out from their midst in such fashion. officials, military and civil, literally in crowds, besieged the hotel. amid that scene of confusion no one missed mohammed; but when all the rest had given up in despair, he, a solitary, patient figure, stood out upon a distant mound watching the desert road to the east. he alone saw the return of the white camel with its double burden, from a distance of a hundred yards or more; for he dared approach no closer, but stood with bowed head pronouncing the _fáthah_ over and over again. he saw it kneel, saw its rider descend and lift a girl from its back. he saw him force something between her lips, saw him turn and make a deep obeisance toward mecca. at that he, too, knelt and did likewise. when he arose, camel and rider were gone. he raced across the sands as eileen graham opened her eyes, and supported her as she struggled to her feet, pale and trembling. * * * * * "i don't understand it at all," said graham. eileen smiled up at him from the long cane chair. she was not yet recovered from her dreadful experience. "perhaps," she said softly, "you will not laugh in future at my irish stories of the 'good people'!" graham shook his head and turned to mohammed. "what does it all mean, mohammed?" he said. "thank god it means that i have got her back, but how was it done? she returned wearing the turquoise necklace, which i last saw in your hand." mohammed looked aside. "i took it to him, effendi. it was the token by which he knew her need." "the pedlar?" "the pedlar, effendi." "you knew where to find him, then?" "i knew where to find him, but i feared to tell you; feared that you might ridicule him." he ceased. he was become oddly reticent. graham shrugged his shoulders, helplessly. "i only hope the authorities will succeed in capturing the bishareen brigands," he said grimly. "the authorities will never capture them," replied the dragoman with conviction. "for five years they have lived by plunder, and laughed at the government. but before another moon is risen"--he was warming to his usual eloquence now--"no masr-bishareen will remain in the land, they will be exterminated--purged from the desert!" "indeed," said graham; "by whom?" "by the rawallah, effendi." "are they a bedouin tribe?" "the greatest of them all." "then why should they undertake the duty?" "because it is the will of the one who saved her for you, effendi! i am blessed that i have set eyes upon him, spoken with him. paradise is assured to me because my hand returned to him his turban when it lay in the dust!" graham stared, looking from his wife, who lay back smiling dreamily, to mohammed, whose dark eyes burnt with a strange fervour--the fervour of one mysteriously converted to an almost fanatic faith. "are you speaking of our old friend, the pedlar?" "i am almost afraid to speak of him, effendi, for he is the chosen of heaven, a cleanser of uncleanliness; the scourge of god, who holds his flail in his hand--the broom of the desert!" graham, who had been pacing up and down the room, paused in front of mohammed. "who is he, then?" he asked quietly. "i owe him a debt i can never hope to repay, so i should at least like to know his real name." "i almost fear to speak it, effendi." mohammed's voice sank to a whisper, and he raised the turquoise hanging by the thin chain about eileen's throat, and reverently touched it with his lips. "he is the _welee_--ben azreem, sheikh of the ibn-rawallah!" _printed in great britain by_ butler & tanner ltd., _frome and london_ * * * * * transcriber's note: small capitals have been replaced by all capitals. the following corrections have been made, on page ...." added (but, addison....") "he" changed to "her" (looked up into her husband's quivering face!) ' changed to " (and rest, east," i said) . added (lighted his pipe and nodded.) "then" changed to "than" (blushed more furiously than ever when i told her) . added (i asked wearily.) " added ("nobody else can) "posesssion" changed to "possession" (how it came into my possession, that may) , removed (and avoiding a particularly persistent) "mahommed" changed to "mohammed" (when mohammed ran in to where graham was). otherwise the original has been preserved, including inconsistent hyphenation. all men are ghosts by l. p. jacks author of "mad shepherds," "among the idolmakers," "the alchemy of thought" london williams & norgate henrietta street, covent garden i dedicate this volume to stopford brooke to whom i owe more than could be told were many pages employed in the recital contents panhandle and the ghosts: i. panhandle lays down a principle ii. panhandle narrates his history and describes the haunted house iii. panhandle's remarkable adventure. the ghost appears the magic formula all men are ghosts: i. dr piecraft becomes confused ii. "the hole in the water-skin" iii. dr piecraft clears his mind the professor's mare farmer jeremy and his ways white roses of the stories in this volume, "farmer jeremy and his ways" has already appeared in the _cornhill_; "the magic formula," "the professor's mare," and "white roses" in the _atlantic monthly_. these are reprinted with the permission of the respective editors. some additions have been made which were precluded by the shorter form of the magazine story. "he that hath found some fledged bird's nest may know, at first sight, if the bird be flown; but what fair well or grove he sings in now, that is to him unknown. and yet, as angels in some brighter dreams call to the soul while man doth sleep; so some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, and into glory peep." henry vaughan, . all men are ghosts panhandle and the ghosts "'oh,' dissi lui, 'or se' tu ancor morto?' ed egli a me, 'come il mio corpo stea nel mondo su, nulla scienza porto.'" dante, _inferno_, canto xxxiii. i panhandle lays down a principle "the first principle to guide us in the study of the subject," said panhandle, "is that no genuine ghost ever recognised itself as what you suppose it to be. the conception which the ghost has of its own being is fundamentally different from yours. because it lacks solidity you deem it less real than yourself. the ghost thinks the opposite. you imagine that its language is a squeak. from the ghost's point of view the squeaker is yourself. in short, the attitude of mankind towards the realm of ghosts is regarded by them as a continual affront to the majesty of the spiritual world, perpetrated by beings who stand on a low level of intelligence; and for that reason they seldom appear or make any attempt at open communication, doing their work in secret and disclosing their identity only to selected souls. far from admitting that they are less real than you, they regard themselves as possessed of reality vastly more intense than yours. imagine what your own feelings would be if, at this moment, i were to treat you as a gibbering bogey, and you will then have some measure of the contempt which ghosts entertain for human beings." "you must confess, my dear panhandle," i answered, "that you are flying in the face of the greatest authorities, and have the whole literature of the subject against you. you tell me that no genuine ghost ever recognised itself as such." "i mean, of course," interrupted panhandle, "that it never recognised itself as a ghost in your inadequate sense of the term." "then," said i, "what do you make of the ghost's words in _hamlet_: 'i am thy father's spirit'? this one, at all events, recognised itself as such." "in attributing those words to the ghost," said panhandle, "shakespeare was using him as a stage property and as a means of playing to the gallery, which is incapable of right notions on this subject. but there is another passage in the same group of scenes which shows that shakespeare was not wholly ignorant of the inner mind of ghosts. listen to this:-- '_enter ghost._ _horatio._ what art thou, that usurp'st this time of night, together with that fair and warlike form in which the majesty of buried denmark did sometimes march? by heaven i charge thee, speak! _marcellus._ it is offended. _bernardo._ see, it stalks away'" "now, what does that mean?" he continued. "the words of horatio imply that the ghost has _usurped_ a reality which does not belong to him; that he is a wraith, a goblin, or some such absurdity--that, in short, he is going to be treated in the idiotic manner which is usual with men in the presence of such apparitions. doubtless the ghost saw that these men were afraid of him, that their hair was standing on end and their knees knocking together. disgusted at such an exhibition of what to him would appear as a mixture of stupidity and bad manners, he turned up his nose at the lot of them and stalked away in wrath. no self-respecting ghost would ever consent to be so treated; and that may help you to understand why communications from the world of spirits are comparatively rare. ghosts who believe in the existence of human beings often regard them as idiots. to communicate with such imbeciles is to court an insult, or at least to expose the communicating spirit to an exhibition of revolting antics and limited intelligence. from their point of view, men are a race of beings whose acquaintance is not worth cultivating." "your words imply," i said, "that some of the ghosts do not believe in our existence at all." "the majority are of that mind," he answered. "belief in the existence of beings like yourself is regarded among them as betokening a want of mental balance. a ghost who should venture to assert that you, for example, were real would certainly risk his reputation, and if he held a scientific professorship or an ecclesiastical appointment he would be sneered at by his juniors and made the victim of some persecution. i may tell you incidentally that the ghosts have among them a psychical research society which has been occupied for many years in investigating the reality of the inhabitants of this planet. by the vast majority of ghosts the proceedings of the society are viewed with indifference, and the claim, which is occasionally made, that communication has been established with the beings whom we know as men is treated with contempt. the critics point to the extreme triviality of the alleged communications from this world. they say that nothing of the least importance has ever come through from the human side, and are wont to make merry over the imbecility and disjointed nonsense of the messages reported by the mediums; for you must understand that there are mediums on that side as well as on this. i happen to know of two instances. some time ago two questions, purporting to come from this world, reached the ghosts. one was, 'what will be the price of midland preferred on january , ?' the other, 'will it be a boy or a girl?' for months a committee of ghostly experts has been investigating these communications, the meaning of which proved at first sight utterly unintelligible in that world. the matter is still undecided; but the conclusion most favoured at the moment is that the messages are garbled quotations from an eminent poet among the ghosts. meanwhile more than one great reputation has been sacrificed and the sceptics are jubilant." "as you speak, panhandle," i said, "it suddenly occurs to me, with a kind of shock, that at this moment these beings may be investigating the reality of my own existence. it would be interesting if i could find out what they suppose me to be." "i doubt if the knowledge would flatter you," he answered. "it is highly probable that you would hear yourself interpreted in lower terms than even the most malicious of your enemies could invent. a friend of mine, who is a doctor of science, and extremely scornful as to the existence of spirits, is actually undergoing that investigation by the ghosts the results of which, if applied to yourself, you would find so interesting. some assert that he is a low form of mental energy which has managed to get astray in the universe. others declare that he is a putrid emanation from some kind of matter which science has not yet identified, without consciousness, but by no means without odour. they allege that they have walked through him." at this point of the conversation i suddenly remembered a question which i had several times had on the tip of my tongue to ask. "panhandle," i said, "you seem to be on a familiar footing with the ghosts. how did you acquire it?" "ah, my friend," he replied, "the answer to that is a long story. come down to my house in the country, stay a fortnight, and i promise to give you abundant material for your next book." ii panhandle narrates his history and describes the haunted house panhandle's residence was situated in a remote part of the country, and at this moment i have no clear recollection of the complicated journey, with its many changes at little-known junctions, which i had to make in order to find my friend. the residence stood in the midst of elevated woodlands, and was well hidden by the trees. an immense sky-sign, standing out high above all other objects and plainly visible to the traveller from whatever side he made his approach, had been erected on the roof. the sky-sign carried the legend "no psychologists!" it turned with the wind, gyrating continually, and when darkness fell the letters were outlined in electric lamps. only a blind man could miss the warning. this legend was repeated over the main entrance to the grounds, with the addition of the word "beware!" i thought of mantraps and ferocious dogs, and for some minutes i stood before the gates, wondering if it would be safe for me to enter. at last, remembering how several friends had assured me that i was "no psychologist," i concluded that little harm awaited me, plucked up my courage, and boldly advanced. beyond the gates i found the warning again repeated with a more emphatic truculence and a finer particularity. at intervals along the drive i saw notice-boards projecting from the barberries and the laurels, each with some new version of the original theme. "_death to the psychology of religion_" were the words inscribed on one. the next was even more precise in its application, and ran as follows:-- "_inquisitive psychologists take notice! panhandle has a gun, and will not hesitate to shoot._" somewhat shaken i approached the front door and was startled to see a long, glittering thing suddenly thrust through an open window in the upper storey; and the man behind the weapon was unquestionably panhandle himself. "can it be," i said aloud, "that panhandle has taken me for an inquisitive psychologist?" "advance," cried my host, who had a keen ear for such undertones. "advance and fear nothing." a moment later he grasped me warmly by the hand, "welcome, dearest of friends," he was saying. "you have arrived at an opportune moment. the house is full of guests who are longing to meet you." "but, panhandle," i expostulated as we stood on the doorstep, "i understood we were to be alone. i have come for one purpose only, that you might explain your familiarity with--with _those people_." i used this expression, rather than one more explicit, because the footman was still present, knowing from long experience how dangerous it is to speak plainly about metaphysical realities in the hearing of the proletariat. "those very people are now awaiting you," said panhandle, as he drew me into the library. "i will be quite frank with you at once. _this house is haunted_; and if on consideration you find your nerves unequal to an encounter with ghosts, you had better go back at once, for there is no telling how soon the apparitions will begin." "i have been longing to see a ghost all my life," i answered; "and now that the chance has come at last, i am not going to run away from it. but i confess that with the encounter so near at hand my knees are not as steady as i could wish." "a turn in the open air will set that right," said he, "and we will take it at once; for i perceive an indication that the first ghost has already entered the room and is only waiting for your nerves to calm before presenting himself to your vision." i bolted into the garden, and panhandle, with an irritating smile at the corners of his mouth, followed. as we walked among the lawns and shrubberies we both fell silent: he, for a reason unknown to me; i, because something in his plan of gardening had absorbed my attention and filled me with wonder. presently i said, "panhandle, i cannot refrain from asking you a question. i observe that in your style of gardening you have embodied an idea which i have long cherished but never dared to carry out lest people should think me morbid. you have planted cypress at the back of your roses; and the plan is so unusual and yet so entirely in accord with my own mind on the subject that i suspect telepathy between you and me." he looked at me closely for a few seconds, and then said: "it may be. i too have often suspected that throughout the whole of my gardening operations i was under the control of an intelligence other than my own. but i would never have guessed that it was yours. anyhow, this particular idea, no matter what its origin may be, is admirable. no other background will compare with the cypress for bringing out the colour of the roses. see how gorgeous they look at this moment." "and the cypress too," i said, "are, thanks to the contrast, full of majesty. but, though you and i understand one another so completely at this point, there is another at which i confess you bewilder me." and i indicated the sky-sign, which at that moment had turned its legend--"no psychologists"--full towards us. "you will not be surprised to learn," he answered, "that this house, like other haunted houses, has been the scene of a tragedy. the tragedy is the explanation of the sign, and it is essential you should know the story, as the ghosts are certain to refer to it. you remember that i once had a religion?" "i trust you have one still," i said. "i prefer to be silent on that point," he answered. "whatever religion i may have at the present moment i am resolved to protect from the disasters which befell the religion i had long ago. a certain psychologist got wind of it, and i, in my innocence, granted his request to submit my religious consciousness to a scientific investigation. i was highly flattered by the result. the man, having completed his investigation, came to the conclusion that my religion was destined to be _the religion of the future_, and went up and down the country announcing his prophecy. but the strange thing was that as soon as we all knew that this was going to be the religion of the future it ceased to be the religion of the present. what followed? why, in a couple of years i and my followers had no religion at all. incidentally our minds had become a mass of self-complacency and conceit, and the public were coming to regard us as a set of intolerable wind-bags. such was the tragedy, and ever since its occurrence i have led a haunted life." "there may be compensations in that," i suggested. "there are, and i am resolved to maintain them. this house and these grounds are kept as a strict preserve for spirits of every denomination; and you will understand the severity of my measures for their protection when i tell you that the slightest taint of an earth-born psychology in the atmosphere, or the footprint of one of its exponents on the greensward, would instantly cause a general exodus of my ghostly visitors, and thus deprive me of the company which is at once the solace and the inspiration of my declining years. on all such intrusions i decree the penalty of death, being fully determined that no psychology shall pollute this neighbourhood until such time as the ghosts, having completed a psychology of their own, are able to protect themselves. i assure you that my intercourse with the spirits more than makes amends for all that i lost when my former religion was destroyed." "which never became the religion of the future after all?" i asked, more sarcastically perhaps than was quite decent. "of course not. and the same cause, if suffered to operate, will prevent anything else from becoming the religion of the future. it is one of the signs of decadence in the present age that livelihoods should be procurable by the scientific analysis of religion. had i the power, i would make it a penal offence to publish the results of such inquiries. as it is, we must protect ourselves. arm, therefore, my friend--arm yourself with the like of this; and whenever you see one of those marauders, do not hesitate to shoot! the only good psychologist is a dead one." as panhandle said this, he drew from his pocket quite the most formidable six-shooting pistol i have ever seen. i was about to protest against the atrocious obscurantism of this outburst, when my attention was caught by a strange sound of fluttering in the letters of the sky-sign above the house. looking up, i saw to my amazement that the former legend had disappeared and a new one was gradually forming. "_change the conversation_," were the words i read when the swaying letters had settled down into a position of rest. immediately afterwards the letters fluttered again and the original legend reappeared. "certainly," i said to myself, "this house is haunted." obedient to the mandate of the fluttering letters, i began at once to cast about for an opening that would change the conversation. i could find none, and i was embarrassed by the pause. there was nothing for it but to break out suddenly on a new line. but in the sequel i was astonished to observe with what ease panhandle, in spite of the violence of the transition, turned the conversation back to its original theme. "my dear panhandle," i said, "you are doubtless familiar with the remark of charles dickens to the effect that writers of fiction seldom _dream_ of the characters they have created, the reason being that they know those characters to be unreal." "i am perfectly familiar with the passage," he replied, "but i am astonished to hear it quoted by you. have you not often insisted, in pursuance, i suppose, of the principles of your philosophy, that characters created by imaginative genius, such as hamlet or faust, possess a deeper reality than beings of flesh and blood? did you not cite instances from dickens himself and say that sam weller and mr micawber were more real to you than louis xiv or george washington?" "i certainly said so, and adhere to the statement." "then you will not hesitate to admit that a character who is more real than george washington is at least as capable of being interested in the problem of his own creation as george washington could have been." "you are leading me into a trap," i replied. "i am only requiring you to be in earnest. like many persons who express the opinion you have just reiterated, you have never taken the trouble to realise what it implies. but i will now show you its implications. nor could a better means be found of introducing the revelations i am about to make as to what you may expect in this haunted house. it was your good genius who led you to this topic. you will learn presently that the phenomena peculiar to my house are entirely in harmony with your own philosophy on this point, that philosophy being, as i understand, some new brand of idealism." "i desire you to proceed with the revelations immediately," i said. "we live in an age which abhors introductions as fiercely as nature abhors a vacuum, and i beg you to leave it with me to adjust what you are about to deliver to the principles of my philosophy." "know, then," said panhandle, with a readiness that marked his approval of my attitude, "that your opinion as to the reality of these imaginary characters is entirely sound. many of them are in the habit of haunting this very house, and i think it extremely probable that some will put in an appearance to-night. you have quoted charles dickens to the effect that their creators know them to be unreal--a remarkable error for so gifted a man. but it may astonish you to learn that they return the compliment by having no belief in the reality of their reputed creators. it is more than possible, after what you have said, that mr micawber, who has now become a philosopher, will appear to you during your stay in the house. tell him by way of experiment that his creator was a certain charles dickens. you will find that he wholly fails to understand what you mean. he regards himself as a fortuitous concourse of ideas. only this morning i tried the same experiment on colonel newcome. i told him all about thackeray, who, said i, was the author of his being.[ ] he was utterly amazed, and just as incredulous as it is possible for so perfect a gentleman to be. he accused me of talking metaphysics." [footnote : "in the novel of _pendennis_, written ten years ago, there is an account of a certain costigan, whom i had invented.... i was smoking in a tavern-parlour one night, and this costigan came into the room alone--the very man: the most remarkable resemblance of the printed sketches of the man, and of the rude drawings in which i had depicted him. he had the same little coat, the same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle in that eye. 'sir,' said i, knowing him to be an old friend whom i had met in unknown regions, 'sir,' i said, 'may i offer you a glass of brandy and water?' ... how had i come to know him, to divine him? nothing shall convince me that i have not seen that man in the world of spirits." (thackeray, _de finibus_.) see the whole passage, from which it is evident that costigan did not recognise his creator.] my long acquaintance with panhandle had schooled me to betray no astonishment at anything he might say. so, assuming as cool an air as i could command, i merely asked: "would you mind telling me, panhandle, by what means you have managed to ascertain the views of these gentlemen concerning their creator?" "like yourself," he answered, "i was convinced long ago that the creations of genius, hamlet and the rest, are more real than the johns, toms, and marys who seem to walk the earth. but, unlike you, i have not been content that so important a truth should remain at the level of a mere elegant opinion. by a course of spiritual exercises carefully devised, into which i shall presently initiate you, i have placed myself in direct communication with these personalities; and so successful has the discipline proved, that intelligent intercourse has become possible between them and me. i frequently invite them to haunt the house, and the response is always favourable. i am on terms of intimacy with the principal characters of the classic drama, of shakespeare, goethe, and many eminent novelists of modern times." on hearing this all my efforts to keep cool broke down. "panhandle," i cried, "you must initiate me into those exercises without a moment's delay." "be patient," he replied, "until you have heard the further results to which they will lead. i have not yet told you the half, and it may be that when you have heard the rest you will prefer to have no part in these mysteries. the realm to which they will lead you has an immense population of ghosts; it is vastly more populous than our planet; and notwithstanding that my exercises have brought me abundant knowledge of them and their doings, i have not been able to classify more than a small portion of the inhabitants. the characters created by imaginative genius are only one among the orders of ghosts to whom you will presently be introduced. you will be haunted by _ideas_ in every variety, all of them living organisms of high complexity, and all more or less ignorant of whence they come or whose they are. possibly you will encounter your own ideas among them; and i must warn you against claiming to be the author of any of them, even the most original. there is nothing that offends them more deeply. they have their own notions as to their origin, which they conceive to lie in something infinitely superior to the brain of a being like yourself. by many of them their reputed authors are treated with contempt; some deny the existence of these 'authors' in any capacity whatsoever; others regard them as mere phrases, metaphors, or abstractions. a notable instance is that of your friend professor gunn, who wrote the famous treatise to prove the non-existence of god. the potent ideas projected in the course of that work had long enjoyed an independent being of their own in the spiritual world; and it may interest you--and professor gunn also, if you will be kind enough to tell him what i am now saying--to learn that these ideas of his have formed themselves into a congregation or society whose principal tenet is that there is no such being as professor gunn. they regard him alternatively as a sun-myth or an exploded fiction." "how absurd!" i cried. "in your present darkness," he answered, "the exclamation is to be excused. but i assure you that after passing one night in this house you will find that nothing in heaven or earth is less absurd than the statement you have just heard." "as to _your own_ ideas," he continued, "know that their relation to yourself is, in their eyes, widely different from what you conceive it to be. between yourself and them there is the utmost divergence of view on this matter. under no circumstances whatsoever will they consent to regard themselves as your _property_, and no claim of that kind, nor even the semblance of a claim, must ever be suffered to appear in your dealings with these ghosts. remember that your common-sense is their metaphysic, and their metaphysic your common-sense; what you dream of, they see; what you see, they dream of; and the consequence is that many truths, which appear to you as the least certain of your conclusions, are used by them as the familiar axioms of thought. on the other hand, what are axioms to you are often problems to them. your _cogito ergo sum_, for example, will not go down in the spiritual world. for just as you, on your side of the theory of knowledge, are busy in trying to account for your ideas, so they, on theirs, have much ado in their efforts to account for _you_; all of them find you the most illusive of beings, while some, as i have already hinted, deny your existence altogether, or treat you as a highly questionable hypothesis. with several of your leading ideas i hope to make you personally acquainted this very night. to convince them of your identity will be no easy matter, and the most vigilant circumspection will be necessary on your part. i counsel an attitude of uttermost modesty; anything else is certain to give them the impression that you are an impostor. betray, then, not the least surprise on finding yourself treated by your own ideas as a being of little importance to their concerns. above all, you must not expect them to take more than a passing interest in _your brain_. your best course is to avoid all reference to that topic. 'the brain' is seldom, if ever, mentioned in the best circles of the spiritual world--to which circles, i assume, your leading ideas belong. you must never forget that in the realm of ideas class distinctions are rigidly observed; there is an aristocracy and a proletariat, with all the intermediate grades; and many topics which may be safely mentioned among the commons are an offence when introduced to the nobility. 'the brain' is one of these. its use, among the ghosts, is confined exclusively to the working class; and you will commit a breach of good manners by flaunting its functions in the presence of august society. were you, for example, in the course of some conversation with a noble principle, to offer him the use of your own brain, or to suggest that he was in need of such an implement, or in the habit of using it, you would commit an indiscretion of the first magnitude; and it is certain the offended spirit would strike you off his visiting list and decline to haunt you any more. pardon my insistence on this point. knowing, as i do, how apt you are to talk about your brain, i am naturally apprehensive lest, in an unguarded moment, you should thrust that organ under the nose of some great idea. believe me, it would be a fatal mistake. remember, i implore you, what i have already said: that, in the spiritual world, the brain-habit is strictly confined to the working class."[ ] [footnote : "ni pour le jugement, ni pour le raisonnement, ni pour aucune autre faculté de la pensée proprement dite nous n'avons la moindre raison de supposer qu'elle soit attachée à tels ou tels processus cérébraux determinés.... les phénomènes cérébraux sont en effet à la vie mentale ce que les gestes du chef d'orchestre sont à la symphonie: ils en dessinent les articulations motrices, ils ne font pas autre chose. on ne trouverait done rien des opérations de l'esprit proprement dit à l'intérieur du cerveau." (professor henri bergson: presidential address to the society for psychical research, .)] "before you can persuade me of all this," i said, "you will have to turn my intelligence clean inside out." "that is precisely what i intend doing, and the first step shall be taken this very instant. begin the exercises by repeating the formula of initiation. it runs as follows: '_till another speaks to me i am nothing._'" "why, panhandle," i said laughing, "that is the very formula they taught me when i first entered a public school. and they enforced it with kicks." "the universe enforces it in the same manner. but let us keep to the matter in hand. repeat the formula at once." "wait," i said. "the situation is growing ominous, and i will not embark upon this enterprise till i know more of what it will lead to." "take your own time," said panhandle. "the rules of my system forbid me to hurry the neophyte. if what i have told you already is not enough, you shall hear more. among the ghosts who haunt this house are beings far mightier than any i have so far described. for a long time their identification baffled me, until one night i overheard them in high debate, and found they were occupied in an attempt to account for their own existence in the scheme of things. then i knew who they were." "these," i said, catching him up, "must assuredly be the ghosts of the great philosophies, or systems of thought, which in their earthly state accounted for the existence of everything else, but left the problem of their own existence untouched." "a most happy anticipation, and one that augurs well for your future success as an entertainer of ghosts. have we not heard on high authority that no philosophy is complete until it has explained its own presence in the universe? having neglected this at the first stage of their existence, the systems exercise their wits at the second in attempts to make good the oversight." "do many of them succeed?" i asked. "most of them fail; and for that reason their ghosts linger for ages in the neighbourhood of houses which, like my own, are hospitable to their presence. for it is a rule of the realm to which they now belong that so soon as any system succeeds in explaining its own origin it vanishes and passes on to a still higher state of existence." "panhandle," i said, "you have identified these ghosts beyond the possibility of cavil. a more conclusive proof could not be given." "beware, then, how you proceed!" said he. "it is possible that you will be haunted to-night not only by your ideas in their severalty, but by your whole system of thought organised as one synthetic ghost. it will certainly question you on the subject of its creator, that being, as i have said, the central and absorbing interest of all these spirits. but again let me implore you to be on your guard against claiming to be its author. to inform such a ghost that it originates in a human intelligence, and that intelligence your own, would be treated as an outbreak of impudence deserving the highest resentment, and it is more than likely that the indignant phantom would put a lasting blight on your intellect or punish your presumption in ways yet more fearful to contemplate." the flow of panhandle's speech had now become extremely rapid, and my intelligence was beginning to lag in the rear. "give me a breathing-space," i cried; "i need an interval for silent meditation." then, in a voice so low that he could not hear me, i repeated to myself the formula of initiation and, after musing for a few minutes, begged him to proceed. "a light is breaking," i said, "and your warnings are taking hold." "in this connection," he resumed, "i could relate many things that would surprise you. just as the personalities created by genius are apt to repudiate their creators, so the great philosophies when translated to the higher state are apt to disown all connection with the persons to whom their origin is humanly attributed. the philosophy of spencer, for example, believes its author to be absolutely inscrutable; that of von hartmann suspects a professor, but declares him to have been unconscious of what he was doing. pessimism, again, ascribes its beginning to a desire on the part of the primal power to give away the secret of its conspiracies against its own subjects; the doctrine that mind is mechanism believes itself the outcome of a non-mechanical principle, and has become in consequence the most superstitious of all the ghosts; and a group of materialistic systems have concluded, after long debate, that all philosophies originate from ink and a tendency in the ink to get itself transferred to paper." "it is evident," i interposed, "that even in their higher existence the systems are by no means free from illusions." "be cautious how you judge them," said panhandle, "for it may be that in accounting for their origin they are less astray than yourself. none the less, you are right in declaring them defective. _fallacies_ perpetrated in a system at the first stage of its existence become _diseases_ when translated to the second, and some of the ghosts in consequence live the life of invalids. the ghost of evolution, for example, will appear before you in a deplorable condition. this ghost has recently learnt that it is suffering from an undistributed middle, a disease unamenable to treatment, being proof even against the method of eloquence, which as you know is a potent specific for most logical defects. you may easily identify the spirit by remembering what i have told you. if you encounter an apparition walking about with hands pressed hard on its middle, and groaning heavily, know that the spectre of evolution is before you." "panhandle," i said, "your revelations have awakened my uttermost curiosity, and every nerve in my body is tense with eagerness to encounter an apparition. heaven grant that the ghost of my own philosophy may appear! and yet, in a sense, i am disappointed. you promised that you would furnish me with material for my next book. but the public has no interest in the phantoms you have described, and will not believe in their existence." "that remains to be seen," he answered. "meanwhile, i give you my solemn pledge that you shall see a ghost before the night is out." he said this in a tone so ominous that i could not refrain from starting. what could he mean? a sudden thought flashed upon me, and i cried aloud: "my dear friend, you fill me with alarm, and i am on the point of giving way! i begin to suspect that i shall never see the ghosts until i have passed to another world. i believe that i am doomed to die in this house to-night! it was indicated in the tone of your voice." with a quick motion panhandle swung round in his chair and looked me full in the face. "how do you know," he said, "that you are not dead now, and already passed to the existence of which you speak?" the effort to answer his question revived my courage. but in all my life i have never found a problem half so difficult. to prove that i was not dead already and become a ghost! forty or fifty times did i lay down a new set of premises, only to be reminded by panhandle that i begged the question in every one. my ingenuity was taxed to breaking point, my voice was exhausted, the sweat was pouring from my brows, when, once again, from the upper airs where the sky-sign was swinging, i heard the same fluttering and rustling which had arrested my attention at a former crisis. it was growing dark, and the arc-lamps which outlined the letters were all aglow. i watched the transformation, and suddenly saw, flashed out for a moment into the gathering darkness, these words: "_give it up._" iii panhandle's remarkable adventure. the ghost appears dinner was now served. we dined alone, and, in the intervals when the footman was out of the room, i seized the opportunity to probe further into the mystery of the haunted house. "the ghosts," i said, "have not appeared. neither in my own apartment, nor in the corridors, nor in the various empty rooms which i have visited, have i seen or heard anything to suggest that the house is haunted." "may i ask," said my companion, "for the grounds of your statement that so far the ghost has failed to appear?" "save for yourself," i answered, "the only person i have seen since entering is the footman." "and how do you know that the footman is not a ghost?" "why," said i, "he carried my bag upstairs, and pocketed the balance of half a crown i gave him to pay for a telegram." "i never heard a feebler argument," he replied. "it is obvious that you resemble the majority of mankind, who, if they were to see a thousand ghosts every day, would never recognise one of them for what it was. now, as to the footman----" but at that moment the individual in question entered the room bringing coffee and cigars. when he had gone panhandle resumed: "we were speaking of the footman. but perhaps it would be wiser to deal with the matter in general terms. i have already said enough to satisfy any reasonable judge of evidence that this is a genuinely haunted house. i have now to add that a doubt may be raised as to _who is the haunter and who the haunted_." i sat silent, staring at panhandle with wide eyes of astonishment, for i had no universe of discourse to which i could relate the strange things i was hearing. he went on: "from what i have told you already you have no doubt drawn the inference that the ghosts are haunting _me_. but the ghosts themselves are not of that mind. in their opinion it is i who am haunting _them_. my first discovery of this, which is destined to revolutionise the whole theory of ghosts, was made under circumstances which i will now relate. * * * * * "many years ago i was seated in the library late one night engaged in writing a report of certain mysterious phenomena which had been observed in this house. i had just completed a copy of the signed evidence of the cook, the gardener, and the housemaid, all of whom had left that day without notice in consequence of something they alleged they had seen. suddenly i thought i heard a whispered voice from the further side of the room, and looking up i saw seated at a table two beings of human semblance, who were gazing intently in my direction. "'do you not see something on yonder chair?' asked one. "'yes,' answered the other, 'i certainly see something. probably a gleam of light. observe, the curtains are not quite closed, and this is about the time when they turn on the searchlight at the barracks. draw the curtains close and it will instantly disappear.' "the speaker went to the window, leaving the other still staring fearfully in my direction. having closed the curtains, the man returned to his place. "'by heaven!' he cried, 'the thing is still there!' and i could see the pallor creeping over his face. "a moment later i heard one of them say, 'it has gone. well, whatever it was, i have had a shock. i am trembling all over.' and with that he rang the bell. "presently a footman appeared with a bottle of spirits and a siphon. having deposited the tray, he chanced to look towards the place where i was sitting. a piercing cry followed, and the man ran screaming out of the room. the two men also started to their feet and began shouting something i could not hear. i suppose they were calling to some person in the house, for the shouts were quickly followed by the entry of a young fellow of athletic build and truculent countenance. "'show me your damned ghost,' he said, 'and i'll soon settle him.' "'he's over there--in that seat,' cried one. 'for heaven's sake, go up to him, reginald, and see what he's made of.' "the truculent youth darted forward, but suddenly came to a dead stop, with a face as white as a sheet. then with a trembling hand he whipped a revolver out of his pocket, and at five paces fired all six barrels point-blank at my body. at each shot i was aware of a painful feeling in the penumbra of my consciousness, like the sudden awakening of a buried sorrow." at this point panhandle paused to relight his cigar, and i took the opportunity to make a remark. "count it no grievance," i said, "if one who shoots at psychologists is himself occasionally shot at. i surmise that the truculent youth was the ghost of a promising psychologist, foully murdered by your nefarious gun." "name it a righteous execution, and i shall agree," he answered. "or it may be," i added, "that many of the sudden and inexplicable pains that break out in our minds and in our bodies are caused by ghosts, or whatever you call them, shooting at us, or stabbing us, to test our reality." panhandle turned a keen glance at my face to see if i was serious, and, being satisfied that i was, continued: "i have heard more unlikely explanations of such pains, and your theory is precisely one of those which medical science will have to investigate when these discoveries of mine are made public. but let me resume the narrative. "at the sound of the firing the whole household seemed to be aroused. and what a household it was! in a few moments the room was crowded with beings of reverend countenance and stately carriage. looking round with slow, grave eyes, they conversed in whispers. 'science must investigate this,' one of them said. 'we will arrange that a committee of the society shall make a thorough examination of the house and test the phenomena. don't forget to engage two shorthand writers and an expert in spirit photography. and let the room be sealed up till the experts arrive.' "during the whole of these proceedings i remained absolutely still, my acquaintance with the other world having taught me the wisdom of reticence. at this point, however, i resolved to attempt communication with my visitors, and, looking round for a person to whom i might address myself, i observed a bright little fellow of twelve years old staring about him in an absent-minded way, quite inattentive to all that was going on. as i walked over to where he was standing he saw me plainly, and showed not the least surprise on being addressed. "'what is your name, my little man?' i asked. "'billy burst,' said he. "'and what are you thinking about while all those people are making such a fuss?' "'_i am wondering how people weigh the planets_,' he answered. "'come along with me,' said i, 'and i will show you just what you want to know.' "then taking him by the hand i led him across the room to the seat i had just left; but though the sages who were present saw him cross the room, not one of them saw me, who was leading him by the hand. "i took out a sheet of paper and began to draw figures and work formulæ, the boy meanwhile standing by the side of my chair and saying not a word. when i had finished i said: "'do you understand?' "'perfectly,' he answered; 'i see it at last. thank you ever so much.' "'now billy,' i said, 'there is something you can do for _me_. i want you to stand on that chair and tell the people that the person they are making the fuss about is named panhandle, that you know him, that he is real and quite harmless, and that he hopes they won't shoot at him any more, because it hurts. say you are _quite certain_ he is real, because he has just told you how the planets are weighed.' "'dear pan,' said billy, 'don't ask me to do that. i never tell people about _you_; they would only laugh at me if i did. let us keep just as we are, old fellow, and not tell our secret to anybody.' "unprepared for a style of address so familiar, 'why, billy,' i said, 'i have never seen you before.' "'are you quite sure you see me _now_?' he replied. "our positions had become reversed--billy sitting in my study chair that he might read over what i had written about the planets, i standing by his side. i looked down to answer his last question, and for the briefest fraction of a second a vision passed before me. the object beneath me was not my study chair, but a small iron bedstead on which there lay a boy, fast asleep. it passed in the twinkling of an eye, and i found myself seated as before at my desk; the half-finished report was before me, and, save myself, not a soul was in the room. 'it is certain,' thought i, 'that i am haunting somebody. in the name of all the secret powers that guide the fates of men--whom am i haunting?'" * * * * * "a marvellous story," i cried; "and more significant than even you, panhandle, are aware. i knew billy burst. he and i were schoolmates, and practised magic together under the guidance of a mysterious power whose name billy would never disclose." "you knew billy burst!" exclaimed panhandle. "my friend, you fill me with astonishment and delight. did i not say we were on the eve of great discoveries? tell me all you know about billy, for the matter is of the utmost importance." "you are making _me_ wait for the appearance of the ghost," said i, "and must not be aggrieved if i make _you_ wait for information about billy." "i again pledge my word to you," he answered, "that you shall see a ghost this very night." "and i pledge mine to you that you shall hear all about billy as soon as the ghost appears. but it is my turn first." "let us make it a covenant," he said. "agreed!" i answered. "then shake hands over the bargain." as he said this he stood up and extended his hand. with the utmost eagerness i sprang to my feet and made the reciprocating gesture. for an instant i thought that excitement had unsteadied me, for my hand, seeking his, seemed to move at random in the vacant air. then i made a second attempt, carefully noting the position of his extended palm, and this time the truth dawned upon me in a flash. my hand, indeed, grasped what seemed to be his. but there was no substance to resist my closing fingers, no hardness of interior bones, no softness of enveloping tissues, no pressure, no contact, no warmth. "panhandle," i cried, "you are a ghost!" "hush!" he answered; "we never use that term in addressing one another. whatever i _am_, you are also in process of _becoming_. you have been slow in making the discovery. i thought you had found me out when we stood among the cypress in the garden." i was trembling all over and had no control over the next words that came to my tongue. what they were i cannot remember, but panhandle's reply seems to indicate that i had been imploring him to tell me what kind of a ghost he was. "certainly not a character taken out of a novel," he was saying. "think of the other orders of spirits who i told you were haunting the house, and place me in the last and highest." "you are the ghost of a philosophy!" i said. "i am." "whose philosophy are you?" i shouted, for the figure of panhandle was rapidly sliding away into the distance. "your own!" was the answer. "come back, beloved panhandle!" i called after the retreating figure. "come back and let me fulfil my part of the compact before you go. i have yet to tell you the story of billy burst." "i shall read it in the next chapter of your book," was the reply, now almost inaudible, so great was the distance from which it came. i called yet louder, "i have a ghost-story to tell _you_, dear panhandle. very important. about the ghost of a novelist. far better than yours about the novelist's characters!" "i shall read about that in the next chapter but one." such, i am fain to believe, was the answer. but the voice had now become so faint that this rendering of the words is given with reserve. my first impression was that panhandle said simply, "pooh, pooh!" i was determined not to let him go. raising my voice to the uttermost, i continued to call him. "come back," i kept shouting, "and arm me with one more word of wisdom for the battle of life! without you, panhandle, i have no protector, and the psychologists will surely devour me." at the sound of the word "psychologists" panhandle's flight was suddenly arrested. in one swoop he retraversed the vast space that now lay between us, and returned to his original position. "hear, then, my last word," he said. "the chief errors of mankind issue from the notion that thinking is a solitary process and the thinker an isolated being. in writing their works or monologues the thinkers, with few exceptions, have mistaken the form which is proper to philosophy and thereby done violence to the true nature of thought. all thinking is the work of a community; its form is conversational and, in the highest stages, dramatic. for want of this knowledge many philosophers have gone astray. ignorant of the other minds with which their own are in communion, deaf to the voices which mingle with theirs in the eternal dialogue of thought, they have uttered their message as a weary monologue, and the vivid interplay of mind with mind, the quick debate of reacting spirits, which is the very life of thought, has fallen dead. in the course of your education, which has properly begun to-day, you will become acquainted with a multitude of interlocutors whose existence you have never suspected, though they have been addressing you from the first moment you began to think and contributing much of what you consider most original in your thought. these are the ghosts by whom you will henceforth be haunted, until, finally, they make you one of themselves and carry you to heaven in a whirlwind of fire. farewell." having said this, he instantly vanished, leaving behind him a faint odour of havana cigars. at the same moment a marvellous change, the stages of which have left no record on my memory, passed over me. i found myself in the place where i am at this moment, this identical sheet of paper was under my hand, this pen was writing, and the ink of the last paragraph was still wet. the magic formula i many years ago i had a schoolfellow and bosom friend whom i knew as billy, but whose name as it stood in the register was william xavier plosive. where his family came from, or where they got their outlandish name, i know not. from its rarity i infer that the plosive stock has not multiplied lavishly on the earth. only twice, since the days of my friendship with billy, have i encountered that name. there is, or was, a wayside public-house in devonshire, the landlord of which was a plosive; it bore the sign of the "dog and ladle," which the signboard interpreted by a picture of a large retriever in precipitate flight with a tin ladle tied to his tail. the other plosive of my acquaintance kept a shop in a canadian city; he was a french half-breed, and, as i have heard, a great rascal. billy's father was said to have been a roman catholic; and i infer from the name he bestowed on his son that he had a turn for waggishness of a sort. plosive senior must have foreseen what would happen. no sooner, of course, was the name william x. plosive seen on the outside of the poor boy's copy-books than a whisper passed through the whole school--"billy burst." and that name remained with him to the end. it was more appropriate than its bestowers knew. "_when_ did billy burst?" "_why_ did billy burst?" "will billy burst again?" and a hundred questions of the like order were asked all day long apropos of nothing. they were shouted in the playground. they were whispered in the class. they broke the silence of the dormitory in the dead of night. with them we relieved our pent-up feelings in hours of tedium or of gloom. introduced _pianissimo_, they profaned the daily half-hour devoted to the study of divinity. innumerable impositions followed in their train. one morning the rev. cyril puttock, m.a., who "took" us in divinity, saw written large on the blackboard in front of him these words: "what burst billy?" i spent my next half-holiday in writing out the beatitudes a hundred times. billy and i slept in the same dormitory and our beds were side by side. both of us were bad sleepers, and many a deep affinity did our souls discover in the silent watches of the night. as a place to observe the workings of telepathy i know of no spot on earth to compare with the dormitory of a boarding-school. the atmosphere of our dormitory was, if i may say so, in a state of chronic telepathic saturation, and the area where the currents ran strongest was in the space between billy's bed and mine. this is the sort of thing that would go on: "billy, are you awake?" "yes; i knew _you_ were." "shall we talk?" "i want to, ever so." "i say, we are going to have that beastly pudding for dinner to-morrow." "that's just what i want to talk about." "i've got an idea. billy, i found out yesterday where they cook those puddings. they boil them in the copper of the outhouse, and the cook leaves them there while she looks after the rest of the dinner." "ripping!" answered billy. "_i'll_ tell you what we'll do.--hush! is old ginger awake?--all right. well, we'll sneak into the outhouse to-morrow when the cook isn't looking, pinch the puddings out of the copper and chuck 'em in the pond." "why, billy, that's just what i was going to say to you. but won't we scald ourselves?" "i've thought of that. we'll get the garden fork and jab it into the puddings. they boil 'em in bags, you know." "there's a better way than that. we'll get in before the copper has begun to boil." "i hadn't thought of that, _but i was just going to_," said billy. "yes, that's the way." enterprises such as these, however, were episodic, and merely serve to show how great souls, born under the same star, and united in the grand trend of their life-directions, share also the minor details of their activity. the seat of our affinities lay deeper. both billy and i were persons with an "end" in life, and breathed in common the atmosphere of great designs. we were like two young trees planted side by side on a breezy hill-top. our roots were in the same soil; our branches swayed to the same rhythm; we heard the same secrets from the whispering winds. we were always on the heights. few were the days of our companionship when we were not infatuated about something or other; and i sometimes doubt whether even yet i have outgrown the habit, so deep was its spring in my own nature and so strong the reinforcement it received from the influence of billy. sometimes we were infatuated about the same thing; and sometimes each of us struck out an independent line of his own; but always we were the victims of one mania or another. at the time this history begins the particular mania that afflicted me was the collecting of tramcar tickets. my friends used to save them for me; i begged them from passengers as they alighted from the cars; i picked them up in the street; and i had over seven thousand collected in a box. i thought that when the sum had risen to ten thousand the goal of my existence would be reached; and it may be said that i lived for little else. billy's mania was astronomy. he would spend the hours of his playtime lying on his stomach with a map of the stars spread out before him on the floor. billy was a great astronomer--in secret. on the very day when he and i were being initiated into the mysteries of decimals, he whispered to me in class, "i say, i wonder how people found out the weight of the planets." he was an absent-minded boy, and many a clout on the head did he receive at this time for paying no attention to what was going on in class. little did the master know what billy was thinking of as he stared at the wall before him with his great, dreamy eyes--and not for ten thousand worlds would billy have told him. he was thinking about the weight of the planets, and the problem lay heavy on his soul; and billy grew ever more absent-minded, and spent more time on his stomach every day. at last he suddenly waked up and began to get top-marks not only in arithmetic but in every other subject as well. and later on, when we came to the quadratic equations and the higher geometry, the master was amazed to find that billy required no teaching at all. "what has happened to billy?" asked somebody; and the answer came, "why, of course, billy has _burst_." so he had. billy had found out "how they weighed the planets," and the mass of darkness that oppressed him had been blown away in the explosion. about the same time i burst also. on counting up my tickets i found there were ten thousand of them. then came a pause, during which billy and i wandered about in dry places seeking rest and finding none. life lost its spring and the world seemed very flat, stale, and unprofitable. conversation flagged, or became provocative of irritable rejoinders. "i say, what are you going to do with all those tramcar tickets?" asked billy one day. "oh, shut up!" i replied. shortly afterwards it was my turn. "billy, tell me what they mean by 'sidereal time.'" "oh, shut up!" said he. we were both waiting for the new birth, or the new explosion, utterly unconscious of our condition. but the powers-that-be were maturing their preparations, and, all being complete, they put the match to the train in the following manner. the usual exchange of measles and whooping-cough had been going on in our school, and billy and i being convalescent from the latter complaint, to which we had both succumbed at the same time, were sent out one day to take an airing in the park. on passing down a certain walk, shaded by planes, we noticed a very old gentleman seated in a bath-chair which had been wheeled under the shadow of one of the trees. he sat in the chair with his head bent forward on his chest, and his wasted hands were spread out on the cover. he seemed an image of decrepitude, a symbol of approaching death. he was absolutely still. a young woman on the bench beside him was reading aloud from a book. i think it was the immobility of the old man that first arrested our attention. the moment we saw him we stopped dead in our walk and stood, motionless as the figure before us, staring at what we saw. we just stared without thinking, but even at this long distance i can remember a vague emotion that stirred me, as though i had suddenly heard the wings of time beating over my innocent head, or as though a faint scent of death had arisen in the air around; such, i suppose, as horses or dogs may feel when they pass over the spot where a man has been slain. suddenly billy burst clutched my arm--he had a habit of doing that. "i say," he whispered, "let's go up to him and _ask him to tell us the time_." we crept up to the bath-chair like two timid animals, literally sniffing the air as we went. neither the old man nor his companion had noticed us, and it was not until we had both stopped in front of them that the reader looked up from her book. the old man was still unaware of our presence. "if you please," said billy, "would you mind telling us the time?" at the sound of billy's voice the old man seemed to wake from his dream. he lifted his head and listened, as though he heard himself summoned from a far point in space; and his eyes wandered vaguely from side to side unable to focus the speaker. then they fell on billy and his gaze was arrested. now billy was a beautiful person--_the very image of his mater_. the eyes of the houri were his, the lids slightly elevated at the outer angle; he had the mouth of them that are born to speak good things; and about his brow there played a light which made you dream of high olympus and of ancestors who had lived with the gods. yes, there was a star on billy's forehead; and this star it was that arrested the gaze of the old man. a look of indescribable pleasure overspread the withered face. it almost seemed as if, for a moment, youth returned to him, or as if a breath of spring had awakened in the midst of the winter's frost. "the time, laddie?" said he, "why, yes, of course i can give you the time; as much of it as you want. for, don't you see, i'm a very old fellow--ninety-one last birthday; which i should think is not more than eighty years older than you, my little man. so i've plenty of time to spare. but don't take too much of it, my laddie. it's not good for little chaps like you. now, _how much_ of the time would you like?" "the _correct_ time, if you please, sir," said billy, ignoring the quantitative form in which the question had been framed. so the old gentleman gave us the correct time. when we had passed on, i looked back and saw that he was talking eagerly to his companion and pointing at billy. "i'll tell you what," said billy as soon as we were out of hearing. "i've found out something. _it does old gentlemen good to ask them the time._ let's ask some more." so for an hour or more we wandered about looking out for old gentlemen--"to do them good." several whom we met were rejected by billy on the ground that they were not old enough, and allowed to pass unquestioned. some three or four came up to the standard, and at each experiment we found that our magic formula worked with wonderful success. it provoked smiles and kind words; it pleased the old gentlemen; it did them good. old hands were laid on young shoulders; old faces lit up; old watches were pulled out of old pockets. one was a marvel with a long inscription on the gold back of it. and the old gentleman showed us the inscription, which stated that the watch had been presented to him by his supporters for his services to political progress and for the gallant way in which he had fought the election at so-and-so in . yes, it did the old gentlemen good. but, be it observed, billy was the spokesman every time. from that time onward, billy and i were masters in magic, no less, infatuated with our calling and devoted to our formula. the star-books were bundled into billy's play-box; the ten thousand tramcar tickets were thrown into the fire. never since the world began, thought we, had a more glorious game been invented, never had so important an enterprise been conceived by the wit of man and entrusted to two apostles twelve years old. a world-wide mission to old gentlemen was ours. who would have believed there were so many of them? they seemed to spring into existence, to gather themselves from the four quarters of the earth, in order that they might receive the healing touch of our formula. we met them in the street, in the park, by the river, at the railway station, coming out of church--everywhere. and all were completely in our power. oh, it was magnificent! so it went on for three or four weeks. but a shock was in store for us. at first, as i have said, billy was the spokesman. but there came a day when it seemed good that some independence of action should be introduced into the partnership. billy went one way and i another. going on alone, i presently espied an old gentleman, of promising antiquity, walking briskly down one of the gravel paths. he was intermittently reading a newspaper. trotting up behind him, i observed that in the intervals of his reading he would be talking to himself. he would read for half a minute and then, whipping the newspaper behind his back, begin to declaim, as though he were making a speech, quickening his pace meanwhile, so that i was hard put to it to keep up with him. indeed i had to run, and was out of breath when, coming up alongside, i popped out my question, "if you please, sir, what o'clock is it?" "go to the devil!" growled the old ruffian. and without pausing even to look at me he strode on, continuing his declamation, of which i happen to remember very distinctly these words: "i cannot, my lords, i will not, join in congratulating the government on the disgrace into which they have brought the country." i recall these words because they resembled something in a speech of chatham's which i had to learn by heart at school, and i remember wondering whether the old gentleman was trying to learn the same speech and getting it wrong, or whether he was making up something of his own. be that as it may, i had received a blow and my fondest illusion was shattered. i was personally insulted. as a professional magician i was flouted, and my calling dishonoured. and, worst of all, the magic had broken down. for the first time the formula had failed to work--had done the old gentleman _no good_. it cut me to the heart. i ran about in great distress, seeking billy, whom finding presently i informed in general terms of what had happened. "what did you say to the old beast?" asked billy. "i said, 'if you please, sir, what o'clock is it?'" "oh, you ass!" cried billy. "_those are the wrong words._ if you'd said, 'would you mind telling me the time?' he'd have gone down like a ninepin. only cads say 'what o'clock.' he thought you were a cad! oh, you idiot! leave me to do it next time." thus it came to pass that the partnership was resumed on its old basis, with billy as the predominant member and spokesman of the firm. and now we entered on what i still regard as an enterprise of pith and moment. we determined, after long colloquy in the bedroom, to waylay this recalcitrant old gentleman once more, and repeat our question in its proper form, and with billy as spokesman. had i been alone, my courage would certainly have failed to carry me through. but with billy at my side i was never afraid of anything either then or afterwards. o billy, if only you had been with me--then--and then--if only i had felt your presence when the great waters went over me, if only i could have seen your tilted dreaming eyes when--i would have made a better thing of it, indeed i would! but one was taken and the other left; and i had to fight those battles alone--alone, but not forgetful of you. i did not fight them very well, billy; and yet not so ill as i should have done had i never known you. well, for several days the declaiming gentleman, whom we now knew as "the old beast," and never called by any other name, failed to appear. but at last we caught sight of him, striding along and violently whipping his newspaper behind his back, just as before. on the former occasion, when i was alone, i had operated from the rear, but with billy in support, i proposed that we should attack from the front. so we threw ourselves in his path and marched steadily to meet him. on he came, and as he drew near, down went the newspaper, and, as though he were spitting poison, he hissed out from between his teeth a fearful sentence, of which the last words were: "the most iniquitous government that has ever betrayed and abused the confidence of a sovereign people"--staring meanwhile straight over our heads. "if you please, sir," said billy in his singing voice, "would you mind telling us the time?" "go to----" but at that moment the gentleman lowered his fierce old eyes and encountered the gaze of billy, who was standing full in his path. have you ever seen a wild beast suddenly grow tame? i have not, but i saw something like it on the occasion of which i speak. never did a swifter or more astonishing change pass over the countenance of any human being. i really think the old fellow suffered a physical shock, for he stepped back two paces and looked for a moment like one who has been seriously hurt. then he recovered himself; lowered his spectacles to the tip of his nose; gazed over them, at me for a moment, at billy for a quarter of a minute, and finally broke out into a hearty laugh. "well," he exclaimed, in the merriest of voices, "you're a couple of young rascals. what are your names, and how old are you, and what school do you belong to, and who are your fathers?" we answered his questions in a fairly business-like manner until we came to that about the fathers. here there was an interlude. for billy had to explain, in succession, that he had no father, and no mother, and no brothers, and no sisters--indeed, no relations at all that he knew of. and there was some emotion at this point. "bless my soul," said the old gentleman, "that's very sad--very sad indeed. but who pays for your schooling?" "a friend of my mater's," said billy. "he's very good to me and has me to his house for the holidays." "and gives you plenty of pocket-money?" "lots," answered billy. the old gentleman ruminated, and there was more emotion. "then you are not an unhappy boy?" he said at length. "not a bit," answered billy. "thank god for that! thank god for that! i should be very sorry to learn you were unhappy. i hope you never will be. you don't _look_ unhappy." "i'm not," repeated billy. all this time the old gentleman seemed quite unconscious of my existence. but i was not hurt by that. i was well used to being overlooked when billy was with me, and never questioned for a moment the justice of the arrangement. but now the old gentleman seemed to recollect himself. "what was it you asked me just now?" said he. "we asked if you would mind telling us the time." "ha, just so. now are you quite sure that what you asked for is what you want? you said '_the_ time' not 'time.' for you must know, my dears, that there's a great difference between 'time' and '_the_ time.'" billy and i looked at each other, perplexed and disgusted--perplexed by the subtle distinction just drawn by the old gentleman; disgusted at being addressed as "my dears." ("he might as well have given us a kiss while he was about it," we thought.) "we want _the_ time, if you please," we said at length. "what, _the whole of it_?" said the old gentleman. "no," answered billy, "we only want the bit of it that's going on now." "which bit is that?" said our venerable friend. "that's just what we want to know," answered billy. this fairly floored the old gentleman. "you'll be a great parliamentary debater one day, my boy," he said, "but the bit of time that's going on now is not an easy thing to catch. my watch can't catch it." "give us the best your watch can do," answered billy. this made the old fellow laugh again. "better and better," said he. "well, the best my watch can do is a quarter past twelve. and that reminds me that you two young scamps have made me late for an appointment. now be good boys, both of you; and don't forget to write every week to your moth--to your friends. and put that in your pockets." whereupon he gave each of us half-a-sovereign. we walked on in silence, not pondering what had happened, for we pondered nothing in those days, but serenely conscious of triumph. a potent secret was in our hands and the world was at our feet. "it worked," said billy at length. "rather!" i answered. "it did him good." "rather!" "we beat him." "rather!" presently we were greeted by the park-keeper, who was a friend of ours. "well, young hopefuls," he said, "and who have you been asking the time of to-day?" we pointed to the old gentleman whose figure was still visible in the distance. "him!" cried the park-keeper. "well, bless your rascal impudence! do you know who _he_ is?" "no." "why, he's lord----." the name mentioned was that of a distinguished member of the cabinet which had recently gone out of office. did we quail and cower at the mention of that mighty name? did we cover ourselves with confusion? not we. "i'm awfully glad we asked him," said billy as we walked away. "so am i--i say, billy, i wish we could meet the pope. he's jolly old, and i'll bet he's jolly miserable, too." "you shut up about his being miserable," answered billy, who, as we know, was a roman catholic. "he ain't half as miserable as the archbishop of canterbury. i wish we could meet _him_!" "or the emperor of germany," i suggested. "yes, he'd do. i'd ask him, and you bet he'd tell us. but"--and here billy's manner became explosive--"i'll tell you what! _i wish we could meet god!_ he's a jolly sight older than the pope, or the archbishop of canterbury, or the emperor of germany. i believe he'd like to be asked more than any of them. and i'd ask him like a shot!" "but _he's_ not miserable," i interposed. "how do you know he isn't--_sometimes_? it would do him good anyhow." i was getting out of my depth. as a speculator i had none of the boldness which prompted the explosions of billy, and an instinct of decency suggested a change of conversation. "what shall we do with those half-sovereigns?" i asked. "hush!" said billy, "_they'll_ hear you." "who'll hear me?" "never mind who. they're listening, you bet. never say 'half-sovereigns' again." "but what are we to do with them?" "keep them. let's put a cross on each of them at once." so we took out the coins, and with our penknives we scratched a cross on the cheek of her gracious majesty, queen victoria. both coins are now in my possession. the cross on the cheek of queen victoria has worked wonders. it has brought me good luck. in return i have hedged the coins with safeguards both moral and material. when i am gone they will be----but i am anticipating. and now the fever was in full possession of our souls. i believe we were secretly determined to bring all the old gentlemen in the world under the sway of our formula. we were beneficent magicians. had we been older, a vast prospect of social regeneration would have opened before us. but all we knew at the time was that we possessed a power for rejuvenating the aged. an ardent missionary fervour burned in our bones; and we were swept along as by a whirlwind. never was infatuation more complete. as a preliminary step to the accomplishment of these great designs we resolved to ask ten thousand old gentlemen to tell us the time. making a calculation, we reckoned that, at the normal rate of progress, nine years would be required to complete the task. we were a little disconcerted, and, in order to expedite matters, we resolved to include old ladies, and any young persons of either sex with grey hair, or who, in our opinion, showed other signs of prematurely growing old. this led on to further extensions. we agreed, first, that anyone who looked "miserable" should have the benefit of our formula; next, that all limitations whatsoever, save one, should be withdrawn, and the formula allowed a universal application. the outstanding limitation was that nobody should be asked the question until he had been previously viewed by billy, who was a psychologist, and pronounced by him to be "the right sort." what constituted the "right sort" we never succeeded in defining; enough that billy knew the "right sort" when he saw it and never made a mistake. we believed that all mankind were divided into two classes, the sheep and the goats; in other words, those who were worthy to be asked the time and those who were not, and billy was the infallible judge for separating them the one from the other. to ask the question of any person was to seal that person's election and to put upon him the stamp of immortality. i believed, and still believe, that many whom we accosted were instantly conscious of a change for the better in their general conditions. years afterwards i met a man who remembered these things and bore testimony to the good we had done him. "it so happened," said he, "that just before i met you boys, that day, i had been speculating heavily on the stock exchange and had had a run of infernal bad luck. but the moment that little chap with the tilted eyes spoke to me i said to myself, 'the clouds are breaking.' and, by george, sir, my luck turned that very day. i walked straight to the telegraph office and sent my broker a wire which netted me a matter of £ ." as became a firm of business-like magicians, billy and i kept books, duly averaged and balanced, entering in them day by day the names of the persons to whom we had applied the formula. are the names worthy of being recorded? perhaps not. but a few specimens will do no harm and may incidentally serve to reveal the scope and catholicity of our operations. one of these books is before me now, and here are a few of the names, culled almost at random from its pages. it will be observed that in the last group our faculty of invention gave out and we were compelled to plagiarise. mr smoky, mr shinytopper, uncle jelly-bones, aunt ginger, lady peppermint, bishop butter, canon sweaty, dirty boots, holy toad, satan, old hurry, old bless-my-soul, old chronometer, miss no-watch, dr beard, lord splutters, aurora, mrs proud, polly sniggers, diamond pin, cigar, cuttyperoozle, jim, alfred dear! mr just-engaged, miss ditto, mr catch-his-train, mr hot, the reverend hum, the reverend ha-ha, so-there-you-be, mrs robin, mr high-mind, mr love-lust, mr heady. ii all of a sudden, and in the most unexpected manner, these vast designs of ours contracted their dimensions, or, as one might say, our outlook became focussed on a solitary point. from a world-wide mission to all mankind we narrowed down at a single stroke to a concentrated operation on a strictly limited class. but i can tell you that what our mission lost in scope it gained in intensity. you shall hear how all this happened and judge for yourself. one night billy and i were lying awake as usual, and the question "shall we talk?" had been asked and duly answered in the affirmative. we had raised ourselves in bed, leaning toward each other, and the telepathic current was running strong. "billy," i whispered, "i've got a ripping notion, a regular stunner. i'm bursting to tell you." "what is it?" "put your ear a little closer, billy, and listen like mad. suppose you were to meet a beautiful woman--_what would you do_?" quick as thought came the answer--"i should ask her to tell me the time." "why, that's _exactly_ what _i_ should do. we'll do it, the very next time we meet one. and, billy, i'm sure we shall meet one _soon_." "so am i." next day, the instant we were freed from school we bolted for the park, exalted in spirit and full of resolution. a lovely presence floated in the light above us and accompanied us as we ran. arrived in the park, we seemed to have reached the threshold of a new world. we stood on a peak in darien; and before us there shimmered an enchanted sea lit by the softest of lights and tinted with the fairest of colours. forces as old as the earth and as young as the dawn were stirring within us; the breath of spring was in our souls, and a vision of living beauty, seen only in the faintest of glimpses, lured us on. think not that we lacked discrimination. "let's wait, billy," i said, as he made a dart forward at a girl in a white frock, "till we find one beautiful _enough_. that one won't do. look at the size of her feet." "_whackers!_" said he, checking himself. and then he made a remark which i have often thought was the strangest thing billy ever uttered. "i wouldn't be surprised," came the solemn whisper, "_if her feet were made of clay_." so day by day we ranged the park, sometimes together, sometimes separate, possessed of one thought only--that of a woman beautiful enough _to be asked the time_. hundreds of faces--and forms--were examined, sometimes to the surprise of their owners; but the more we examined, the more inexorable, the more difficult to satisfy, became our ideal. at each fresh contact with reality it rose higher and outran the facts of life, until we were on the point of concluding that the world contained no woman beautiful enough to be asked the time. never were women stared at with greater innocence of heart, but never were they judged by a more fastidious taste. and yet we had no definable criterion. of each new specimen examined all we could say was, "that one won't do." but _why_ she wouldn't do we didn't know. we never disagreed. what wouldn't do for billy wouldn't do for me, and _vice versa_. once we met a charming little girl about our own age, walking all alone. "that's the one!" cried i. "come on, billy." i started forward, billy close behind. presently he clutched my jacket, "stop!" he said, "_what if she has no watch?_" the little girl was running away. "we've frightened her," said billy, who was a little gentleman. "we're two beasts." "she heard what you said about the watch," i answered, "and thought we wanted to steal it. she had one after all. billy, we've lost our chance." as we went home that day, something gnawed cruelly at our hearts. things had gone wrong. an ideal world had been on the point of realisation, and a freak of contingency had spoiled it. in another moment "time" would have been revealed to us by one worthy to make the revelation. but the sudden thought of a watch had ruined all. once more we had tasted the tragic quality of life. with ardour damped but not extinguished, we continued the quest day after day. but we were now half-hearted and we became aware of a strange falling-off in the beauty of the ladies who frequented the park. "we shall never find her here," said billy. "let's try the walk down by the river. they are better-looking down there, especially on sunday afternoon. and i'll bet you most of them have watches." the very day on which billy made this proposal another nasty thing happened to us. we were summoned into the headmaster's study and informed that complaints had reached him concerning two boys who were in the habit of walking about in the park and staring in the rudest manner at the young ladies, and making audible remarks about their personal appearance. were we the culprits? we confessed that we were. what did we mean by it? we were silent: not for a whole archipelago packed full of buried treasure would we have answered that question. did we consider it conduct worthy of gentlemen? we said we did not, though as a matter of fact we did. dark hints of flagitiousness were thrown out, which our innocence wholly failed to comprehend. the foolish man then gave himself away by telling us that whenever we met miss overbury's school on their daily promenade we were to walk on the other side of the road. billy and i exchanged meaning glances: we knew now who had complained (as though we would ever think of asking _them_ to tell us the time!). finally we were forbidden, under threat of corporal chastisement, to enter the park under any pretexts or circumstances whatsoever. "the old spouter doesn't know," said i to billy as we left the room, "that we've already made up our minds not to go there again. what a 'suck-in' for him!" necessity having thus combined with choice, the scene of our quest was now definitely shifted to the river-bank, where a broad winding path, with seats at intervals, ran under the willows. here a new order of beauty seemed to present itself, and our hopes ran high. several promising candidates presented themselves at once. one, i remember, wore a scarlet feather; another carried a gray muff. the scarlet feather was my fancy; the gray muff billy's. i think it was on the occasion of our third visit to the river that the crisis came. we sat down on the bank and held a long consultation. "well," said billy at last, "i'm willing to ask scarlet feather. she's ripping. her _nose_ takes the cake; but, mind you, gray muff has the prettier _boots_. and i know scarlet feather has a watch--i saw the chain when we passed her just now. but before deciding i'm going to have another look at gray muff. she's just round the bend. you wait here--i'll be back in half a second." i was left alone, and for some minutes i continued to gaze at the flowing stream in front of me. suddenly i saw, dancing about on the surface of the water--but doubtless the whole thing was hallucination! my nerves were in high tension at the moment, and in those days i could have dreams without going to sleep. the dream was interrupted by the sudden return of billy. he was white as the tablecloth and trembling all over. "come on!" he gasped. "i've found the very one! quick, quick, or she'll be gone!" "is it gray muff?" i asked. "no, no. it's another. the very one, i tell you. the one we've been looking for." "billy," i said, "i've just seen a good one too. she was dancing about on the water." "oh, rot!" cried billy. "mine's the one! come on, i say! i'm certain she won't wait. she looked as though she wouldn't sit still for a single minute." "what is she like, billy?" i asked as we hurried away. "she's--_oh, she's the exact image of my mater_!" he said. billy's mater had died about a year ago. at the age of twelve i had been deeply in love with her, and to this hour her image remains with me as the type of all that is most lovely and commendable in woman. o billy's mater, will these eyes ever see you again? how glad i am to remember you! i know where you lie buried, but i doubt if there lives another soul who could find your resting-place. harshly were you judged and conveniently were you forgotten! but i will scatter lilies on your grave this very night. well, we ran with all our might. scarlet feather, gray muff, and the dancing "good one" on the surface of the water were clean forgotten as if they had never existed--as perhaps one of them never did. "_just_ like my mater!" billy kept gasping. "hurry up! i tell you she won't wait! she's on the seat watching the water; no, not _that_ seat. it's round the next bend but one." we turned the bend and came in sight of the seat where billy had seen what he saw. the seat was empty. we looked round us: not a soul was in sight. we checked our pace and in utter silence, and very slowly, crept up to the empty seat, gazing round us as we walked. was there ever such a melancholy walk! oh, what a _via dolorosa_ we found it! arrived at the seat, billy felt it all over with his hands and, finding nothing, flung himself face downwards on the turf and uttered the most lamentable cry i have ever heard. "i knew she wouldn't wait," he moaned. "oh, why weren't we quicker! oh, why didn't i ask her the time the minute i saw her!" as, shattered and silent, we crawled back to school, continually loitering to gaze at a world that was all hateful, i realised with a feeling of awe that i had become privy to something deep in billy's soul. and i inwardly resolved that, so far as i could, i would set the matter right, and put friendship on a footing of true equality, by telling billy the deepest secret of _mine_. "billy," i said, as we lay wakeful in the small hours of the next morning, "come and stay with us next holidays, _and i will show you something_." "what is it?" "you wait and see." the great adventure was over. it had ended in disaster and tears. never again did billy and i ask any human being to tell us the time. iii in those days i was a great metaphysician. unassisted by any philosopher, ancient or modern, i had made a discovery in the metaphysical line. this discovery was _my_ secret. in the church-tower of the village where i was nurtured there was an ancient and curious clock, said to have been brought from spain by a former owner of the parish. this clock was worked by an enormous pendulum which hung down, through a slit in the ceiling, into the body of the church, swinging to and fro at the west end of the nave. its motion was even and beautiful; and the sight of it fascinated me continually through the hours of divine service. to those who were not attentive, the pendulum was inaudible; but if you listened you could detect a gentle tick, tock, between the pauses of the hymns or the parson's voice. "let us pray," said the parson. "tick," whispered the pendulum. "we beseech thee--" cried the clerk, (tick!);--"to hear us, good lord" (tock!). the clerk had unconsciously fallen into the habit of timing his cadence in the responses to correspond with these whispers of the pendulum. for my part, i used to think that this correspondence was the most beautiful arrangement in the universe. i loved the even motion of the pendulum; but i loved the faithful whispers more. to this day i have only to shut my eyes on entering a village church, and sit still for half a minute, and sure enough, stealing through the silence, comes the "tick, tock" of that ancient pendulum. of all the religious instruction i received during the eight or nine years we attended that church i confess i have not the faintest recollection. i cannot remember whether the sermons were good or bad, long or short, high, low, or broad. i know they never wearied me, for i never listened to a word that was said. the pendulum saw to that. there were two parsons in our time. the first, i have heard, was a very good man, but by no effort of memory can i recall what he was like. the second i do remember, and could draw his face on this sheet of paper, were i to try. i respected and admired him, not, i am sorry to say, for the purity of his life or his faithfulness in preaching the gospel, but because he had fought and licked our gardener, whom i detested, outside the village pub. with a little concentration of mind i can reconstruct the scene in church during this parson's tenure of office. i can see the rascal eminent in his pulpit, plodding through his task. i can hear the thud of the hymn-book which my father used to toss into the clerk's pew when he thought the sermon had lasted long enough: immediately the sermon stops and a great bull-voice roars out, "now to god the father," and so on. but all such incidents are as a fringe to the main theme of my memory--the restless curve of the swinging disc, and the whispered syllables of time. the question that haunted me was this: did the pendulum _stop_ on reaching the highest point of the ascending arc? did it pause before beginning the descent? and if it stopped, did _time_ stop with it? i answered both questions in the affirmative. well, then, what was a _second_? did the stoppage at the end of the swing make the second, or was the second made by the swing, the movement between the two points of rest? i concluded that it was the stoppage. for, mark you, it _takes_ a second for the pendulum to reach the stopping point on either side; therefore there can be no second till that point is reached; the second must _wait_ for the stoppage to do the business. i saw no other way of getting _any_ seconds. and if no seconds, no minutes; and if no minutes, no hours, no days, and therefore no time at all--which is absurd. i found great peace in this conclusion; but none the less i continued to support it by collateral reasonings, and by observation. in particular i determined, for reasons of my own, to make a careful survey of the hands of the clock. with this object i borrowed my father's field-glass, and, retiring to a convenient point of observation, focussed it on the clock-face. instantly a startling phenomenon sprang into view. i saw that the big hand of the clock, instead of moving evenly as it seemed to do when viewed by the naked eye, was visibly _jerking_ on its way, in time with the seconds that were being ticked off by the pendulum inside. by george, the hand was going jerk, jerk! the pendulum and the hand were moving together! jerk went the hand: then a pause. what's happening now? thought i. why the pendulum has just ticked and is going to tock. tock it goes and--there you are!--jerk goes the hand again. "why, of course," i said to myself, "that proves it. the hand _stops_, as well as the pendulum. the evidence of the hand corroborates the evidence of the pendulum. the seconds _must_ be the stoppages. they can't be anything else. there's nothing else for them to be. i'll tell billy burst this very day! but no, i won't. i'll wait till the holidays and _show_ it him." such was the secret which i resolved to impart to billy in return for what he had disclosed to me. some months after this amazing discovery billy came down for the holidays. he arrived late in the afternoon, and i could hardly restrain my impatience while he was having his tea. hardly had he swallowed the last mouthful when i had him by the jacket. "come on, billy," i cried. "i'm going to show you something"--and we ran together to the church. arrived there, i placed him in front of the pendulum, which seemed to be swinging that afternoon with an even friendlier motion than usual. "there!" i said, "look at him." billy stood spell-bound. oh, you should have seen his face! you should have seen his eyes slowly moving their lambent lights as they followed the rhythm of the pendulum from side to side. if billy was hypnotised by the pendulum, i was hypnotised by billy. suddenly he clutched my arm in his wonted way. "i say," he whispered, "_it knows us_. here, old chap" (addressing the pendulum), "you know us, don't you? you're glad to see us, aren't you?" "tick, tock," said the pendulum. "can't he talk--just!" said billy. "look at his eye! he winked at me that time, i'll swear." and, by the powers, the very next time the pendulum reached the top of the arc i saw the crumpled metal in the middle of the disc double itself up and wink at _me_ also, plain as plain. "billy," i said, "if we stare at him much longer we shall both go cracked. let's go into the churchyard. i've something else to show you." so to the churchyard we went, and there, among the mouldering tombstones, i expounded to billy my new theory as to the nature of time, reserving the crowning evidence until billy had grasped the main principle. "so you see," i concluded, "the seconds are the stoppages." "there aren't any stoppages," said he. "pendulums don't stop." "how can they go down after coming up unless they stop between?" i asked. "wait till you get to the higher mathematics." "then where do the seconds come in?" "they don't _come_ in: they _are_ in all along." "then," i said triumphantly, "look at that clock face. can't you see how the big hand goes jerk, jerk?" "well, what of that?" "what of that? why, if the seconds aren't the stoppages, what becomes of time between the jerks?" "why," answered billy, "_it's plugging ahead all the time_." "all _what_ time?" i countered, convinced now that i had him in a vicious circle. "blockhead!" cried billy. "don't you remember what that old johnny told us in the park? there's all the difference in the world between _the_ time and _time_." "i'll bet you can't tell me what the difference is." "yes, i can. it's the difference between the pendulum and the clock-hand. look at the jerking old idiot! _that_ thing can't talk; _that_ thing can't wink; _that_ thing doesn't know us. why, you silly, it only does what the pendulum tells it to do. the pendulum _knows_ what it's doing. but _that_ thing doesn't. here, let's go back into the church and have another talk with the jolly old chap!" * * * * * ten years later when billy, barely twenty-three, had half finished a book which would have made him famous, i handed him an essay by a distinguished philosopher, and requested him to read it. the title was "on translating time into eternity." when billy returned it, i asked him how he had fared. "oh," he answered, "i translated time into eternity without much difficulty. _but it was plugging ahead all the time._" shortly after that, billy rejoined his mater--a victim to the same disease. poor billy! you brought luck to others; god knows you had little yourself. he died in a hospital, without kith or kin to close his eyes. the sister who attended him brought me a small purse which she said billy had very urgently requested her to give me. on opening the purse i found in it a gold coin, marked with a cross. the nurse also told me that an hour before he died billy sat up suddenly in his bed and, opening his eyes very wide, said in a singing voice: "if you please, sir, would you mind telling me the time?" all men are ghosts i dr piecraft becomes confused "'to be or not to be--that is the _question_,' said hamlet: 'to be is not to be--that is the _answer_,' said hegel." dr phippeny piecraft invented this couplet one night for his own edification, as, inert in body and despondent in mind, he lay back in the arm-chair of his consulting-room. "there is more point," he went on, "in hamlet's 'question' than in hegel's 'answer.' but the gospel is not in either. both are futile as physic. at all events, neither of them brings any consolation to me." dr piecraft was reflecting on the hardness of his lot. ten years had elapsed since he first mounted his brass plate, and he was still virtually without a practice. he earned just enough from casual patients to pay his rent and keep body and soul together. to be sure, his father had left him a hundred a year; but piecraft had given the old man a promise "that he would look after jim." now jim was a half-brother, many years younger than himself; and he was also the one being in the world whom piecraft loved with an undivided heart. so the whole of his income from that source was ear-marked for the boy's education; not for worlds would the doctor have spent a penny of it on himself. he even denied himself cigars, of which he was exceedingly fond, restricting himself to the cheapest of tobacco, in order that jim might have plenty of pocket-money; and whenever the question arose as to who was to have a new suit of clothes, jim or the doctor, it was always jim who went smart and the doctor who went shabby. he was over forty years of age, and, in his own eyes, a failure. yet no man could have done more to deserve success. his medical qualifications were of the widest and highest; diplomas of all sorts covered the walls of his consulting-room; a gold medal for cerebral pathology lay in a glass case on his writing-table. he was actively abreast of advancing medical science; he had run into debt that he might keep himself supplied with the best literature of his profession, and he was prepared at a moment's notice to treat a difficult case in the light of the latest discoveries at paris, st petersburg, or new york. moreover, he had led a clean life, and was known among his friends as a man of irreproachable honour. but somehow the patients seemed to avoid him, and only once in two years had he been summoned to a consultation. to account for piecraft's failure as a medical man several theories were in circulation, and it is probable that each of them contained an element of truth. some persons would set it down to the shabbiness of his appearance, or to the brusqueness of his manners, or to the fact that his consulting-room often reeked with the fumes of cheap tobacco. others would say that piecraft was constitutionally unable to practise those "intelligent hesitations" so often needed in the application of medical principles. they would remind you of his fatal tendency to determine diagnosis on a sudden impulse, which piecraft called "psychological intuition," and in illustration of this they would tell you a story: how once, when the vicar's wife had brought her petted daughter to be treated for hysteria, the fit happening to come on in the consulting-room, piecraft had cured the young lady on the spot by soundly boxing her ears. concerning this incident he had been taken severely to task by an intimate friend of his, an old practitioner of standing. "it will be time enough to adopt those methods of treatment," the friend had said to him, "when you are earning five thousand a year. at the present stage of your career it is almost fatal. learn so to treat a patient that the story of the cure when subsequently related after dinner may have the characteristics of high tragedy, or at all events may reflect some credit on the sufferer. help him to create a drama, and see to it that he comes out ultimately as its hero. don't you see that in the present instance you have spoilt a moving story, than which nothing gives greater offence, turning the whole situation into low comedy and making the patient a laughing-stock? people will never stand that, piecraft. it is idle to insist that the cure was efficacious and permanent. so no doubt it was. a better remedy for that type of hysteria could not be devised. but reflect on the fact that you have deprived the vicar's family of a legitimate opportunity for dramatic expression and dethroned the vicar's daughter from her place as heroine. in short, you have committed an outrage on the artistic rights of medicine, and, mark my words, you will have to pay for it. always remember, piecraft, that in medicine, as in many other things, it is not the act alone which ensures success, but the gesture with which the act is accompanied." moreover, piecraft held a theory which he never took the least pains to conceal, though it was extremely provoking to his patients both rich and poor. his theory was that more than half the ailments of the human body are best treated by leaving them alone. for example, a certain old gentleman having consulted him about some senile malady, the doctor had dismissed him with the following remark: "my dear sir, the best remedy for the troubles of old age is to grow still older. the matter is in your own hands." many suchlike epigrams were reported of him, and often they constituted the sole return which the patients received for the two guineas deposited on the table of the consulting-room. obviously this kind of thing could not go on. as most of his patients consulted piecraft because they wished to be extensively interfered with, and objected to nothing so much as being left alone, with or without an epigram to console them, it followed of course that they seldom consulted him a second time. but beneath these peripheral causes of irritation there lay a deeper offence. the truth is that piecraft had made himself highly obnoxious to the members of his own profession, and had acquired--though i doubt if he fully deserved it--the reputation of a traitor. "futile as physic" was a phrase constantly on his lips; and the words, offensive as they were, were only the foam that broke forth from the deeper waters of his treachery. he had gone so far as to embark on a propaganda for what he called "the simplification of medical practice," publicly proposing that a society should be founded for that object; and in pursuance of this proposal he had published a series of articles in which he had argued that the healing art is still dominated by the spirit of magic and encumbered with a mass of dogmatic assumptions and superstitious observances. "the seat of authority in therapeutics," "medicine without priest and without ritual," "big words and little bottles," were the titles of some of these abominable essays. the last-named especially had aroused great indignation, not only by the excessively vehement language in which piecraft pleaded for "simple and rational" principles, but far more by a caustic parallel he had drawn between the doings of a successful london practitioner and the ritual of a medicine-man among the australian aborigines. the offence went deep, and the matter became the more serious for piecraft because the indignation extended from the doctors to the theologians, who suspected--though the suspicion was utterly unfounded--that under the cover of an attack on orthodox medicine he was really engaged in putting a knife, from the back, into official religion; a suspicion which deprived the unfortunate doctor of every one of his clerical patients, including their wives and daughters, at a single stroke. the combined effect of all these causes was, of course, disastrous. if, for example, you happened to be suffering from a severe pain in the head--_le mal des beaux esprits_--which your family doctor had failed to cure, and suggested to the latter that piecraft, as a distinguished cerebral pathologist, should be summoned to a consultation, you were pretty certain to be met with this rejoinder: "yes, piecraft has beyond all question an unrivalled knowledge of the human brain. but please understand that if you call him in i shall have to retire from the case." and if you pressed for further explanation you would at first be put off with airs of mystery which would gradually consolidate into some such statement as this: "well, in the profession we don't regard piecraft as a medical man in the strict sense of the term. he is really a literary man who has mistaken his vocation"; or, "nature intended piecraft for a popular agitator"; or, "piecraft's forte is journalism"; or, "piecraft's title of 'doctor' should always be written in inverted commas"; or, "piecraft is trying to live in two worlds, the world of imagination and the world of pure science; he will come to grief in both of them." and once the prophetic remark was made: "piecraft's proper rôle is that of a character in the arabian nights." i have been told, too, that one day the senior physician of the hospital where piecraft held a minor appointment overheard him muttering his favourite phrase by the bedside of a patient, "futile as physic! futile as physic!" whereupon the senior physician stepped up to him and, laying his hand on his shoulder in the kindest possible manner, whispered in his ear, "resign, piecraft; resign!" * * * * * dr phippeny piecraft had no belief in the immortality of the soul: his studies in cerebral pathology had disposed of that question long ago. "what a philosopher most requires," he used to reflect, "is not so much a big brain of his own as a little knowledge of the brains of other people. hamlet, for example, if he had studied yorick's brain instead of sentimentalising over his skull, might have framed his question differently. and as to hegel--well, that thing knocked all the hegelism out of me," and he glanced at the gold medal in the glass case. but, like many another man who disbelieves in the future life, dr piecraft was not a little curious as to what might happen to him after death. he was indulging that curiosity on the very evening we first encounter him. "there is a pill in that little bottle," he was thinking, "which would end the whole wretched business in something less than thirty seconds. i wonder i don't swallow it. i should do it if it were not for jim. but no, i shouldn't! hamlet, old boy, you were quite right. i'm as big a coward as the rest of them. there's just a chance that if i were to swallow that pill i should find myself in hell-fire in half a minute--and i'm not fool enough, or not hero enough, to run it. of course, there's just a chance of heaven too; for, after all, i've been a decent sort of chap, and, as stevenson says, there's an ultimate decency in the universe. _heaven!_--my stars, heaven doesn't attract me! i've never yet heard a description of heaven which doesn't make it almost as bad as the other place. extraordinary, that when people try to conceive a better world than this they almost invariably picture something infinitely worse! mahomet knew that: 'cute fellow, mahomet. and yet he was no more successful than the rest." piecraft's reflections, once started on that line, plunged further. "i wonder what sort of heaven _would_ attract me," he thought. "let me see. why, yes! if i could be sure of going to a place where i should be professionally busy all day long, plenty of interesting and difficult cases, and no need to worry about jim's education and his future--i'd swallow the pill this instant. _by heaven_, i would! i'd do harder things than that. i'd stick it out in this wretched hole for another ten years, i'd give up smoking shag, i'd give up everything, except jim--if only at the end of the time i could go to some heaven where the stream of patients would never cease! i really don't think i could accept salvation on any other terms. but wait! yes, there is just one other offer i would look at. if only they'd let me go back to the old home in gower street, if they'd make the old street _look_ as it did in those days, and _smell_ as it did, and give tobacco the same taste it had then, and show me dad standing at the window with jim in his arms, and let me be in love again with that nice girl at the slade school--yes, and if they'd let me go into the shilling seats at the lyceum to see mary anderson as perdita--by gad, i'd take the pill for that, indeed i would!" he was pursuing these reflections when his housekeeper entered the room with three or four letters. he looked them over, and his face brightened when he saw that one of them was from his half-brother jim. a pipe was instantly filled and piecraft re-settled himself in his arm-chair with the open letter in his hand. jim's letter was dated from harrow and ran as follows:-- "dear phip,--many thanks for your congratulations on my eighteenth birthday and for the enclosure of two pounds. don't be angry, old chap, when i tell you how i spent them. i got leave at once to go down town, and bought you a silk hat, a pair of gloves, some collars, and a couple of ties. you will get them all to-morrow, and i hope the hat and gloves are the right size. i am pretty sure they are. i was half inclined to buy you a box of cigars, but i thought you needed the other things more. "the fact of the case is, phip, i have definitely made up my mind to be a burden on you no longer. true, i might get a scholarship at the 'varsity, as i got one at harrow. but you would still have to pinch to maintain me; and when i remember how long you have done it already, i feel a perfect beast. i am old enough now to understand what it means, and i tell you, phip, that nothing will induce me to come back to harrow after the present term. so please give notice at once. i mean to go out to the colonies with a man from the modern side, and i shall earn my living somehow--as a labourer if need be, for i am big and strong enough. indeed, i would rather enlist than go on with this. "have you ever thought of trying to make a bit _by writing_, phip? i believe you could write a novel. don't you remember what bully stories you used to tell me when i was a kid? have a shot at it, old boy. there's a person here in the sixth who has a knack that way, and he made a hundred pounds by a thing he wrote. he got the tip for it out of a book on the art of novel-writing, the advertisement of which i have cut out of the _daily mail_ and send you enclosed. i would have sent you the book itself had there been enough left out of the two pounds. but there was only fourpence. "the head preached a capital sermon last night on the text, 'of such is the kingdom of heaven.' the instant he gave out the words i thought of you, old phip. and i went on thinking of you till he had done. that's how i know the sermon was a good one, though i didn't listen to another word. anything that makes me think of you _must_ be good. phip, _you are a dead cert. for heaven when you die_. but don't die yet, there's a good chap. for if you go, i shall go too.--ever yours, jim. "_p.s._--don't forget to give notice that i am leaving this term." when dr piecraft laid down the letter his eyes were full of tears. "the only bit of heaven that's left me," he said aloud, "is going to be taken away. there's one person in the world, anyhow, who doesn't think me a failure. if you go to the colonies, jim, i shall take the pill, come what may. you're a warm-hearted boy, jim, but cruel too. i'd rather spend a hundred a year on you and go threadbare in consequence, than earn ten thousand a year and not have you to spend it on. at the same time, my only chance of making you relent is to earn some money.--what the deuce is all this about novel-writing?" he took up the advertisement which had fallen in his lap, and read as follows: "how to write novels--a guide to fortune in literature. containing practical instructions for amateurs, whereby success is assured. by an old hand." * * * * * next morning piecraft bought the book. as no patients came that day he had ample leisure to read it. "easy as lying," he said to himself when he had finished. "i see the trick of it. and, by george, i'll make the first attempt this very night. i have half a dozen ideas already. cerebral pathology is no bad training for a novelist." so he sat down to work, and by two in the morning had written the first chapter of a very promising novel. in ten days more the novel was complete. reading over his manuscript, and severely criticising himself by the rules of his manual, he found that he had put in too much scenery, had undercoloured the beauty of the heroine, had forgotten to describe her dress, and had introduced no action to break the tedious sentiment of the love-dialogues. these errors he at once set himself to correct, pruning down the excesses and making good the defects. then, reviewing the whole, he satisfied himself that he had done well. the plot turned on a love affair, and was easily intelligible. the sexes were evenly balanced, and every character had its foil. there was plenty of incident and continuous action. and the whole was unified by a single purpose or controlling idea. this last gave piecraft peculiar satisfaction. he had feared when he began that unity of purpose would be of all the rules the most difficult to satisfy. in the purpose of his life he had failed; was it likely, he asked himself, that he would do any better in romance? judge, then, of his pleasure on discovering that a clear thread of intention ran through the novel from the first sentence to the last, and came to adequate fulfilment in the final catastrophe. "purpose," he reflected, "is going to be my strongest point. i shall score heavily on that." he sent his manuscript to a publisher, and was rejoiced to hear of its acceptance within a week. in the six months that followed, having little else to do, he produced two more novels. each of them had a purpose. the publisher bought the manuscripts outright for fifty pounds apiece. "it's the purpose that pays," thought piecraft. "it's the purpose that works the oracle. it's the purpose the public like. next time i'll introduce more purpose and stand out for better terms with the publisher." meanwhile he had been compelled, much against his will, to give notice of jim's withdrawal from school. in spite of the brightening of his prospects the half-brother had proved inexorable. "i will borrow from you," wrote jim, "enough to pay my third-class fare across the ocean and leave me with a pound or two on landing. after that, not another penny." "all right, jim; have it your own way," was phippeny's answer. "i shall work away until i have saved £ , and then, my boy, _i'll join you on the other side and life will begin again for both of us_. meanwhile, i'm growing uncommonly prolific in the way of pot-boilers. but i'm not exactly in love with it, and shall abandon my new profession without a sigh. i wish i could produce something really good. perhaps when i join you i shall get a new inspiration. i believe one can find a pen and ink in the colonies."--thus the matter was arranged. * * * * * dr phippeny piecraft was not in the habit of going to church, but one sunday evening, shortly after these events, he found himself there by accident and heard a sermon, some sentences of which caught his attention. it happened that just then he was gravelled for lack of matter; and he was busy during the service in vainly attempting to construct a plot in which a gamekeeper's daughter was to be betrayed by a young lord under circumstances of excruciating novelty. in spite of the novelty of the circumstances he could not help recognising that the main theme was a trifle stale; and as they were singing the hymn before the sermon he confessed to himself that the plot was not worth elaboration, and began to think about other things. piecraft's mind, indeed, was just then in a state of extreme confusion. now he would be listening to the words of the preacher, now giving way to anxieties about jim, now returning to the plot of his novel like a moth to a candle-light, and now reflecting, with the acute discomfort of a double consciousness, on his inability to concentrate his thoughts. "there is nothing," he mused, "which sooner demoralises a man's intelligence than the discovery that he can make money by following the demand of a degenerate public taste. it leads to mental incoherence and to the most extraordinary self-deception. i am afraid that that cursed manual has undone me. it seems to have resurrected another personality who belongs to a lower order of being than my true and proper self. having failed to earn my living by being the man i am, i am now in a way to make money by being the man i am not. what business have i to be constructing these ridiculous plots? and how is it that, once started on that line, i am unable to prevent myself going further? i had thought that a scientific training was the best safeguard against obsession. but i perceive it is no such thing. is it possible that i am so far like frate alberigo--my proper soul expelled to another world, and perhaps practising medicine there, while a demon holds possession of my body and writes third-rate novels in this?" a moment later he was thinking about jim. "i hope the boy won't forget to send me a cable when he reaches the port; somehow i feel unaccountably anxious about him." then he turned to wondering how much he would be able to screw out of the publishers for the next novel, and how everything would depend on the breadth of the purpose. suddenly a sentence of the sermon caught his ear: "_illusion is an integral part of reality_." "tip-top," thought piecraft. "so it is." and in a moment his imagination began to cast about for a reality of which three parts should be illusion. but he could think of nothing that answered the description, and again he said to himself, "i am not in a normal condition to-day. one should never force a reluctant brain. and i can't help being anxious about jim. i had better turn my attention to the sermon." "for example," the preacher was just then saying, "many a man who has determined to abandon the pursuit of happiness has subsequently realised that he was still pursuing happiness in another form. others have found that actions which they thought they were doing for the love of god were really done out of hatred of the devil.... nor can we ever be sure that we are the authors of our own acts. no doubt we usually think we are. but if the testimony of holy men--and of bad men too--counts for anything, we shall be forced to the conclusion that many acts which we think _we_ have performed have really been performed by some person who is not ourselves, or by some force or motivation whose source is not in our own souls. this, my friends, applies to our bad actions as well as to our good ones. thus we see how of all reality, even of moral reality, illusion is an integral part." dr phippeny piecraft did not trouble himself for one instant about the truth or error of these doctrines. an idea suddenly leaped into his mind as he heard them, and the preacher had hardly concluded the last period before the novelist saw himself secure of at least eighty pounds for his next manuscript. such are the strange reactions which the best-meant sermons often provoke in the minds of the hearers, especially when there is genius in the congregation. the title of his new novel was the first thing that came into piecraft's head. it was to be called _dual personality_, and cerebral pathology was to supply the atmosphere. the plot came next--at least the outline of it. the main actors were to be two young lords, or something of that sort, the one as good as they make them and the other as bad. each of these young lords was to play the part of motivating force to the actions of the other. "we'll call them a and b," reflected phippeny. "a, the good young lord, shall intend nothing but good and do nothing but evil. b, the bad one, shall intend nothing but evil and do nothing but good: that is, a's actions shall represent b's character, and _vice versa_. each, of course, must be exhibited as under the influence of the other; and this mutual influence must be so strong that a's virtues are converted by b's influence into vices, and b's vices by a's influence into virtues. thus each of them shall be the author, not of his own actions, but of the actions of his friend. a splendid idea, and one that has never yet occurred to any novelist living or dead! it is certain to lead to some tremendous situations." before the sermon concluded the pot was beginning to simmer. several situations had been rapidly sketched by way of experiment: a trial trip, so to say, had been taken. for example: scene, a labyrinthine wood. time, the dead of night. an intermittent moonlight, and a gale causing strange voices in the tree-tops. the bad young lord, on his way to the gamekeeper's daughter, is stealing among the trees. suddenly a figure steps into his path. it is the good young lord. conversation: upshot--the bad young lord resolves to take holy orders. takes them, but becomes a worse villain than before; psychology to be arranged later. second situation: good young lord now leader of labour movement: the bad young lord (in orders) persuades the other, by casuistry, to misapply trust funds to support coal-strike. and so on and so on. end: archbishopric for villain, penal servitude for hero. reader all the time kept in doubt as to which is villain and which hero; and sometimes led to think, by cerebral pathology, that the two men are one personality--the two halves of one brain. counter-plot for the women--each lord in love with the woman who is matched to the other. keynote of whole--tragic irony. piecraft had advanced thus far when his mind received another jostle. his attention was again caught by the words of the sermon. "i have heard," the preacher was saying, "of a distinguished author who, on reading one of his own books ten years after it was written, entirely failed to recognise it as his own work, and insisted that it had been written by somebody else. such is the force of illusion." "the fellow's an idiot," thought piecraft, "to believe such a story. the thing couldn't happen. at least, i'm pretty sure it will never happen to _me_. none the less, it might be worked in for a literary effect." and again he fell to musing. the preacher was now coming to the end of his sermon. he had been saying something about the relations of st paul to the older apostles, and about the various illusions current at the time; and then, after alluding to st paul's sojourn in the wilderness of arabia, was winding up a period with the following questions: "but meanwhile, my brethren, where is peter? where is john? where is james? and what are they doing?" "_where is james?_" these, and what followed them, were the only words that penetrated to piecraft's intelligence, and they struck so sharply into the current of his thoughts that he almost forgot himself. he sat bolt upright, opened his mouth, and was on the point of shouting an answer to the question, when he suddenly remembered where he was and checked himself in time. the answer he had on the tip of his tongue was this: "_james, so far as i can judge, is just getting into wireless touch with new york, but i would to god i knew what he was doing!_" a moment later he was thinking, "i'm getting light-headed, and shall be making an ass of myself if i'm not careful. i'm certainly not in my usual health. what the deuce is the matter with me? when, i wonder, shall i have news of jim's arrival?" when piecraft left the church he was in a state of acute depression and distress. his pulse was throbbing and his head aching, and it seemed to him as he paced the streets that the preacher was following close behind him, and constantly repeating the question, "where is james, where is james?" sometimes the voice would sound like a distant echo, sometimes like a mocking cry. on reaching home he said to his housekeeper: "mrs avory, i shall be glad if you will sit up till you hear me go to bed. for the first time in my life i am afraid of being left alone. i can't imagine what has come over me." he tried to read the paper, to write a letter, to play the piano; paced the floor; wandered into the housekeeper's sitting-room; went out for a walk and came back after going twenty yards. then he took up a volume of his favourite _arabian nights_ and found, after reading a page, that he had not understood a sentence of the print. towards midnight his agitation was so great that he could bear it no longer. he rang the bell. "mrs avory," he said, "something has gone wrong with me--or with somebody else. i can't help thinking about james--and fancying all sorts of things. i believe i am going mad. in heaven's name, what am i to do?" "well, sir," said the woman, "you are a doctor and should know better than i. but if i were you, sir, i'd take a sleeping draught and go to bed." in despair piecraft took the woman's advice. as a doctor he avoided the use of every kind of drug on principle, and was terrified when he realised how much morphia he had put into the draught. "now indeed i am mad," he thought, "for the smallest dose of morphia was always enough to give me the horrors." his fears were not ungrounded. there is no record of what he saw, fancied, or suffered during the night and the following day; but when he entered his dining-room late next evening, mrs avory started as though she had seen a ghost. "give me the newspaper," he cried, and before she could prevent him he snatched it out of her hand. "_'titanic' sinks after collision with iceberg. enormous loss of life_"--were the first words he read. "i knew it!" he exclaimed. * * * * * those who saw the tragic throng of men and women who for the next few days hung round the doors of the white star offices in london will not have forgotten that poor fellow who was beside himself--how he would walk among the crowd accosting this person and that, and how he would then take off his hat, or his gloves, or pull at his tie and say, "look at this hat, sir; look at those gloves; look at that tie! jim gave me those, sir. he bought them with two pounds i gave him to spend on himself. what do you think of that for a noble act? and i tell you that jim's lying at this moment fathoms deep in the ocean. he's among the lost, sir; by god, i know it. a mere boy in years, madam, only eighteen last birthday; but a man in character. loyal to the core! and take my word for one thing. jim played the man at the last, sir; you bet your stars he did! he didn't wear a lifebelt; not he--that is, if there was a woman around who hadn't got one! a man who would spend his money as he spent those two pounds wouldn't keep a lifebelt for himself. would he, now? look at this hat! look at these gloves! look at that tie!...." for two whole days piecraft maintained this requiem. on the evening of the second day some kind-hearted fellow-sufferer persuaded him to go home, and volunteered to bear him company. it was a long hour's journey to the other end of london. a telegraph boy arrived at the house at the same moment as the two men and handed piecraft a telegram. he broke it open and read. then he suddenly tore off his hat, and, handing it with a quick movement to his companion, staggered forward and collapsed on the doorstep. * * * * * when he came to himself he was lying on the sofa in his study. in the room were several people who, as soon as piecraft opened his eyes, gazed upon him attentively for a few moments and then, nodding to each other, as though to say "all right," quietly withdrew. the novelist looked round him. yes, he was assuredly in his own familiar room. but one thing struck him as strange. the room was usually in a state of extreme disorder--dust everywhere, books and papers lying about in confusion, hats, sticks, pipes, photographs and golf-balls mingling in the chaos. now everything was neat and orderly. the furniture had been polished, the carpet cleaned, the hearth swept up and the fire-irons in their place. on the table, too, was a vase of flowers. "there must have been a spring cleaning," he thought. he felt remarkably well. "i believe that i fell asleep during a sermon. well, the sleep has done me good and cleared my brain. but who on earth brought me here? strange: but i'll think it out when i have time. just now i want to write. that was a capital idea for my new novel. i must work it out at once while the inspiration is still active; for i never felt keener and fitter in my life. let me see.--yes, _dual personality_ was to be the title." these were his first reflections. then without more ado he sat down to the table; lit his pipe; ruminated for five minutes, and began to write. he wrote rapidly and continuously for many hours, and midnight had passed when piecraft flung down the last sheet on the floor and uttered a triumphant "done!" "i thought," he said aloud, "that it would run to at least , words. but i don't believe there's a fifth that number. the thing has come out a short story. never mind, i'm safe for a twenty-pound note anyhow. not so bad for one day's work. i'll read it over in the morning." then, feeling hungry, he rang the bell. to his great surprise there entered not the fussy old lady who usually waited on him, but a girl neatly dressed and with a remarkably intelligent face. "are you the new servant?" said he. the girl made no reply, but, having placed food on the table, withdrew. "as modest as she is pretty," thought piecraft as he ate his meal. "well, i'll give her no cause to complain of me. and i hope she'll continue to wait on me. for in all my life i never knew bread and wine to taste so delicious." on the following morning he had barely finished his breakfast, supplied him in the same silent manner, when a tap came at the door and a young man stepped into the room. "is there anything i can do for you, sir?" said he. "who are you?" said piecraft. "i have never seen you before." "oh," said the young man, "i'm a messenger. your friends have sent me to look after you." "it's the first time they have ever done such a thing," returned the other, "and i'm much obliged to them. anyhow, you came at the right time. there _is_ something you can do for me; at least i think so. can you read aloud?" "i like nothing better," said the young man. "well, then, you are the very man i want. it so happens that i wrote a story for the press last night, and i was just wishing that i had a kind friend who would do me the service of reading it aloud. there's nothing that gives an author a better idea of the effect of his work than to hear it read aloud." "i will read it with the greatest pleasure," said the youth. "then let us get to work at once," said piecraft--and he handed his manuscript across the table. the young man settled himself in a good light and began to read. the first sentence ran as follows: "_for the fourth time that day, abdulla, the water-seller of damascus, had come to the river's bank to fill his water-skin._" "stop!" cried piecraft. "i never wrote that! i must have given you the wrong manuscript. what is the title on the outside?" "_the hole in the water-skin_," answered the reader. "it's not the title of my story," said piecraft. "here, hand the papers over to me and let me look at them. extraordinary! where did this thing come from? i presume you're attempting some kind of practical joke. what have you done with the manuscript i gave you?" "the confusion will soon pass," said the other. "confusion, indeed!" answered piecraft, as his eye glanced over the sheets. "you've hit the right word this time, my boy. for the odd thing is that the whole piece is written in my hand and on my paper, and is, i could swear, the identical bundle of sheets i laid away last night. and yet there is not a word in it i can recognise as my own. but wait--what's this on page ? i see something about 'dual personality.' that was the title of my story. but no! the words are scratched out. yes, a whole page--two pages--more pages--are deleted at that point. what on earth does it all mean?" "perhaps," said the young man, "if you allow me to read the whole to you, your connection with the story will gradually become clear." "you had better do so," answered piecraft. "at all events, read on till i stop you. for, from what i see, i don't like the fellow's style, and may soon grow tired of it. and make a point of reading the portions that are scratched out." "i shall remember your wishes," said the other; "and as to not liking the fellow's style, i think you may find that it is to some extent founded on your own." "i don't believe it," said piecraft. "anyhow, if he hasn't been copying my style, he has been stealing my ideas. the passage about 'dual personality' proves it. but go ahead, and let us hear what it's all about." the young man again settled himself in a good light and read as follows. ii "the hole in the water-skin" for the fourth time that day abdulla, the water-seller of damascus, had come to the river's bank to fill his water-skin. the day was hot beyond endurance; the drinkers had been clamorous and trade had been brisk; and a bag of small money, the fruits of his merchandise, hung within the folds of his gaberdine. weary with going to and fro in the burning streets, abdulla seated himself under a palm tree, the last of a long line that ran down to the pool where the skins were filled. resting his back against the cool side of the tree, the setting sun being behind him, he drew forth his bag and counted his coins. "one more journey," he said to himself, "and the bag will be full. zobeida shall have sweetmeats to-morrow." the pleasing thought lingered in his mind; fled for a moment and then returned; abdulla saw the shop of the infidel greek, with boxes of chocolate in the window; he saw himself inside making his choice among innumerable boxes, and holding the bag of money in his hand. then his head fell forward on his chest and he was asleep. the plunge into sleep had been so sudden, and its duration was so brief, that no memory of it was left, and abdulla knew not that he had slept nor the moment when he awaked. fluctuating images rose and wavered and vanished; and then, as though in answer to a signal, the incoherence ceased, the forms became defined, and a steady stream of consciousness began to flow. he was conscious of the figure of a man in the foreground whose presence he had not previously noticed. the man was sitting motionless on a low rock less than a stone-cast distant, and close to the river's brim; and he seemed to be watching the still flow of the stream. a moment later he stood upright, turned round, and crossed the fifty paces of sand that lay between him and abdulla. as the man drew nearer, abdulla observed that he bore a bewildering resemblance to himself. not many minutes before he had been looking at his own reflection in a small pocket mirror which he had purchased that morning from a jew as a present for zobeida; and as he had looked at the image, still thinking of zobeida, he wished that god had bestowed upon him a countenance of nobler cast. the face he now saw before him was the face he had just seen in the mirror, with the nobler cast introduced; and abdulla, noticing the difference as well as the resemblance, was afraid. "depart from me, o my master," said he, "for i am a man of no account." and he bowed himself to the ground. "rise," said the other, "and make haste; for the sun is low, and scarce an hour remains for thy merchandise. dip thy water-skin into the stream; and, as thou dippest, think on the hour of thy death, when the all-merciful will dip into the river of thy life, and thou shalt sleep for the twinkling of an eye, and know not when thou awakest, and there shall be no mark left on thee, even as no mark is left on the river when thou hast filled thy water-skin from its abundance." "i know not what thou sayest," said abdulla, "for i am a poor man and ignorant." "thou art young," said the other, "and there is time for thee to learn. hear, then, and i will enlighten thee. everything hath its double, and the double is redoubled again. to this world there is a next before and a next after, and to each next a nearest, through a counting that none can complete. worlds without end lie enfolded one within another like the petals of a rose; and as the fragrance of one petal penetrates and intermingles with the fragrance of all the rest, so is the vision of the world thou seest now blended with the vision of that which was and of that which is to come. and i tell thee, o thou seller of water, that between this world and its next fellow the difference is so faint that none save the enlightened can discern it. a man may live a thousand lives, as thou hast already done, and dream but of one. again thou shalt sleep and again thou shalt awake, and the world of thy sleeping shall differ from the world of thy waking no more than thy full water-skin differs from itself when two drops of water have fallen from its mouth." "thou speakest like a devotee," answered abdulla. "the matter of thy discourse is utterly beyond me, save for that thou sayest concerning the dipping of the water-skin. there thy thought is as the echo of mine own. but know that i am ashamed in thy presence; and again i entreat thee to depart." and abdulla bowed himself as before. "do, then, as i bid thee," said the man; "dip thy skin in the water of the flowing river, think on the hour of thy death, and forget not as thou dippest to pronounce the name of god." then abdulla rose up and did what he was commanded to do. while he was dipping the skin he tried to think of the hour of his death; but he could think only of the words, and dying seemed to him a thing of naught; for he was young and zobeida was fair. nevertheless, when he had lifted the full skin from the river, and saw that his taking left no mark, an old thought came back to him, and for the thousandth time he began to wonder at the ways of flowing water. "only god can understand them," he murmured. "may the compassionate have mercy upon the ignorant!" then he adjusted the burden on his back and turned to the palm-belt. but the stranger was gone. as one who walks in sleep, abdulla retraced the path on which for more than half the year he came and went three or four times a day. now he pondered the words of his visitant; now the image of flowing water rose and glided before the inner eye. he passed under the gate of the city without noting where he was. but here a sudden jostle interrupted his reverie. a man driving a string of donkeys thrust him against the wall, cursing him as he passed. abdulla looked up and, when he heard the curses, repeated the name of god as a protection against evil. re-settling the water-skin in the position from which it had been displaced by the collision with the donkey, he took up the thread of his musing and went on. he thought of zobeida, of the cadi, of the contract of marriage, of the sweetmeats he would purchase on the morrow, of the shop of the greek. but again his reverie was broken; this time by the sound of his own voice. the cry of his trade had burst automatically from his lips: "water; sweet water! ho, everyone that thirsteth, come and buy!" a vision lay before him, and he seemed to be gazing at it from a point in mid-air. he saw a street in damascus; the crowd is coming and going, the merchants are in their shops, and some are crying their wares. close by the door of a house a boy is holding forth a wooden bowl, and in front of him a water-seller is in the act of opening his water-skin. abdulla watches the filling of the bowl, and sees the man put forth his hand to take the coin the boy is offering. the man touches the coin and instantly becomes abdulla himself! abdulla closes his water-skin and replaces it on his back, not without a momentary sense of bewilderment. he observes also that some of the water is spilt on the ground. but he has no memory of the spilling. abdulla would fain have questioned himself. but he found no question to ask and could not begin the interrogation. something seemed to have disturbed him, but so completely had it vanished that he could give the disturbance neither form nor name. otherwise the chain of his memory was unbroken. he had finished his last round for the day; scarce a cup of water remained in the skin, and as he flung the flaccid thing over his shoulder he began to recall, one by one, the names and faces of his customers, forty in all, reflecting with satisfaction that the last skinful had brought him the best gains of the day. then he remembered the driver of donkeys who had thrust him against the wall, and, examining the skin, found that it was frayed almost to bursting. and abdulla uttered a curse on the driver and turned homewards. his road lay through narrow streets, crowded with people, and as he passed down one of them a veiled woman cried to him from the door of a hovel. "o compassionate water-seller, i have two children within who are sore athirst, for the fever is burning them. give them, i pray thee, a mouthful of water, and allah shall recompense thee in paradise." "woman," said abdulla, "there is less water in the skin than would suffice to cool the tongue of a soul in hell. nevertheless, what i have i will give thee." and he lowered the mouth of his water-skin into the woman's bowl. not a drop came forth. in vain abdulla shook the skin and pressed the corners between the palms of his hands. then, discovering what had happened, he began to curse and to swear. "by the beard of the prophet," he cried, "the skin has burst! a driver of donkeys, begotten of satan, thrust me against the wall at the entering in of the city, and frayed the water-skin. and now, by the permission of god, the heat has dried up the remnant of the water and cracked the skin, thus completing the work of the deviser of mischief. alas, alas! for the skin was borrowed. and to-morrow restitution will be demanded, for the lender is likewise a son of the devil, and the bowels of mercy are not within him." "verily thou raisest a great cry for a small evil," said the woman. "bethink thee of them who are perishing with thirst, and hold thy peace." "nay, but i am mindful of them," said abdulla; "for had not the water-skin been burst, i would have had the wherewithal to give them to drink. but know, o mother of sorrows, that the motives of mankind are of a mixed nature, especially when grief oppresseth them. and my griefs are greater than thou deemest. woe is me! behold this bag of money, and raise thy voice with mine in lamentation over the miseries of the unfortunate. a damsel, more beautiful than the full moon seen beyond the summits of waving palms, is at this hour hungering for the sweetmeats of the infidel, even as the children of thy body are thirsting for water; and within this bag is the money which, by the favour of allah, would have purchased abundance of all that she desireth. but ere to-morrow's sun has risen from the edge of the desert, four coins out of every five will be claimed as damages by the lender of the skin (whom may the prophet utterly reject!), the rest being reserved for the daily food which the all-merciful provides for his creatures. and the damsel will sit in the corner of the house, rocking her goodly body, which was created for the angels to gaze upon; and she will bite her hands and beat them on the wall, and wail for the sweetmeats that come not, and curse the name of abdulla, the breaker of vows!" "most excellent of water-sellers," said the woman, "many are the damsels in this city addicted to the sweetmeats of the infidel, and of those that are beautiful as the full moon beyond the waving palms there are not a few. thy description, therefore, availeth not for the identification of thy beloved. describe her more narrowly, i beseech thee, that hereafter, when my children are dead, i may bring her the balm of consolation. for i am afflicted in her woes; and between women in sorrow there is ever a bond." "yea, verily," answered abdulla. "i will so describe my beloved that thou shall recognise her among ten thousand. know, then, that her form is like unto a minaret of ivory built by the waters of silence in a king's garden; her eyes are as lighted lamps in the house of the enchanter; the flowing of her hair is a troop of wild horses pursued by bedouîn in the wilderness of arabia; and the fragrance of her coming is like an odour of precious nards wafted on the evening breeze from the islands of wak-wak." "o abdulla," replied the other, "of a truth i know this damsel. and now i perceive that the devourer of bliss hath taken thee in his net and multiplied thy sorrows upon thy head. but forget not the grief of this thy handmaid, and the suffering of those she has nursed at the breast. hear even now the wailing that is within! lo, a worker of spells has sent destruction among us, and the sickness is sore in the habitations of the poor. press, then, thy skin once more, if peradventure allah may have left there one drop of water, that the mouth of the little ones may be moistened before they die. and add a curse, i pray thee, on the worker of spells; for the giver of gifts hath made thy tongue of great alacrity, and taught thee the putting-together of wise judgments and the rounding-off of memorable sayings." by this time a crowd, attracted by the cries and the cursing, had gathered round the speakers, and so thick was the press that abdulla had much ado to move his hands that he might press the water-skin as he was bidden. "o wise and much-enduring woman," he cried, "i greatly fear me that thy prayer is vain. but i will even do as thou biddest, if only these foolish ones will make room that i may pass my hands craftily over the skin. thereafter i will add a goodly curse on the worker of spells, and at the last thou and i and all this multitude will wail and lament together, that the heart of the all-merciful may be moved to pity and his will turned to work us good." so spake abdulla, and the crowd began to give way. but, behold, a marching squad of soldiery, going to the war, with drums beating and bayonets all aflash, suddenly swings down the street, filling its whole breadth from side to side. instantly the crowd backs, and abdulla and the woman, separated from one another, are swept along as driftwood by the torrent. arrived in the open space into which the street discharged, abdulla rushes hither and thither in search of the woman, examining every face in the crowd, and raising himself on tiptoe that he may look over their heads. but the woman is nowhere to be seen. perturbed by the sudden disappearance of the woman, abdulla turned once more into the homeward way. before he had taken many steps it occurred to him to examine the rent in his water-skin. standing quite still and holding the skin at arm's length before him, he gazed intently at the small hole, about the size of an olive-stone, which had resulted from the donkey-driver's assault. as he thus gazed, the incident which had so abruptly terminated a few minutes before seemed to retreat into the distant past. then it became a story, heard he knew not where, about a water-seller who lived long ago. next, it seemed a dream of the night before, the details of which he could not recall. finally, it vanished from his memory altogether. abdulla, realising that it was gone, turned quickly and found, with some surprise, that he was standing in front of a large shop with plate-glass windows, behind which were boxes of chocolate arranged in rows. a mirror--at least it seemed so to abdulla,--of equal length with the shop front, was set at the back and doubled the objects in the window. the sight of the sweetmeats instantly brought back the memory of his misfortunes, and, in so doing, gave an occasion to the tempter. "i will conceal what has happened from the lender of the skin," thought abdulla. "i will insert a cunning patch, which will assuredly burst so soon as the skin is filled with water, and i will then swear by god and the prophet that the skin was patched when i borrowed it. and now i will go in and bargain with the infidel for yonder box, the circumference whereof is wide as the belly of a well-fattened sheep." raising his eyes from the great box of chocolates, abdulla's attention was strangely arrested by the reflection of his own face and figure in the mirror at the back of the shop front. he noted, with a start, the unwonted dignity of the figure as thus presented, and immediately recalled the man who had accosted him but lately by the water-sellers' pool. abdulla gazed on what was before him, and thought thus within himself, "of a truth i knew not that allah had bestowed so dignified a countenance on the least worthy of his servants. the eyes are the eyes of eagles; the nose is a promontory looking seawards; the brow is a tower of brass built for defence at the gateway of a kingdom. verily, the mirror of zobeida must have been at fault. surely god hath now provided me, in my own countenance, with the means of endearment, and the sweetmeats of the infidel are needed not. moreover, it becometh not one thus favoured to deal crookedly with the followers of the prophet. is abdulla a man of violence, as the driver of the donkey; or a man of no bowels, as the lender of the skin? is he an accursed greek or a more accursed armenian that he should play the cheat with his neighbour, inserting a cunning patch, which will assuredly produce leakage and make the rent worse than before? god forbid! abdulla is a man of pure occupation, even as yonder image reveals him. nevertheless, it may be that the author of deception has fashioned a lying picture in the mirror, that he may cause me to forgo the purchase of the box, and undo me with the beloved, who will soil her cheeks with rivers of tears, and rock her body in the corner of the house. go to, now; i will see whether the evil one be not hidden behind the mirror; or if, perchance, there be not here some witchcraft contrivance of the franks." so thinking, abdulla stepped into the entry of the shop, that he might examine the back of the mirror. what was his astonishment on discovering that there was no mirror at all, the boxes of chocolate he had taken for reflections being just as real as all the rest! the greek proprietor, suspecting him to be a thief, rushed out to apprehend him. he was too late, for abdulla had fled into the darkness. * * * * * the sudden night had fallen; aloft, in a firmament of violet-black, the great stars were shining, and the city was still. pursuing his way, abdulla found himself in front of a lofty house with a solitary latticed window immediately beneath the roof. it was the appointed hour. presently a handkerchief was waved from between the lattice, and the soft voice of a woman began to speak. "o abdulla, my beloved," said the voice, "though it be dark in the street, yet there is a light round about thee so that i can see thy countenance as if it were noonday. wherefore hast thou anointed thyself with radiance, and made thyself to shine like the sons of the morning? where hast thou been? for thy fashion is passing strange, and my heart turns to water at the sight of thee." "i have been," said abdulla, "in the company of the wise, who have taught me the way of understanding, and shown me all knowledge, and opened the dark things that are hidden in the secret parts of the earth. all day have i conversed with enlightened and honourable men, and they have made me the chief of their company and the father of their sect." "begone, then," answered the woman, "for i know thee not, and thy comeliness makes me afraid. i had deemed that thou wert abdulla, the seller of water; and i am even now prepared to let down a basket that he may place therein the thing for which my soul is an hungered, even the sweetmeats of the infidel, which i would then draw up again with a cord of silk, and be refreshed after my manner. but as for the ways of understanding, thou mayest tread them alone, and the opening up of that which is hidden is a thing that my soul hateth." "o thou that speakest behind the lattice," said abdulla, "thy discourse is of matters that lack importance in the eyes of the sagacious. i perceive thou art possessed by a demon, and surmise that the whetter of appetite is leading thee in the path of destruction. retire, therefore, to thy inner chamber, and recite quickly the seven exorcisms and the two professions of faith." "o abdulla, if indeed thou art he," replied the voice, "i discern thou art contending for a purpose. peradventure, the eyes of the wanton have entangled thee in the way, and thou hast bestowed on another that which, when thy heart was upright, thou designedst for me. come now and prove thine integrity, for i will presently let down the basket that thou mayest fill it with the delicacies of the franks." "thou fallest deeper into the snares of the demon," said abdulla, "and thy voice soundeth afar off, even as the voice of one crying for water from the flames of the nethermost pit. know that he to whom thou speakest is of them that walk in the light; and what have these to do with the delicacies of the franks? verily, i understand not thy topic, having heard but a rumour thereof among the conversations of the ignorant." "o despiser of the knowledge that sweetens life," said the woman, "verily, i deem thee a man of limited information and degenerate wit. but hearken unto my words, and i will enlighten thee concerning the topic of our discourse, that ignorance may excuse thee no further. know, then, that the delicacies of the franks are of many kinds, arranged in boxes that are tied with silver cords. and the chief of them all is a thing of two natures, cunningly blended, whereof one nature appertaineth to the outer shell, and the other to the inner substance. the outer shell tasteth bitter, and the colour is of the second degree of blackness, like unto the skin of the ethiopian eunuch. the inner substance is sweeter than the honeycomb, and white as the wool of helbon, interspersed with all manner of nuts. this is the chief among the delicacies of the franks; and such is the marvel of the blending of the natures that the palate knoweth neither the bitterness of the shell, nor the sweetness of the kernel, but a third flavour of more eminent rank, to which allah hath appointed no name. hie thee, therefore, o man of no excuse, and buy from them that sell." "that for which thou askest," said abdulla, "is utterly beneath the dignity of the enlightened to give thee. ask for the wisdom of the ancients and thou shalt have it. ask for the revelation of things hidden, and it shall be accorded thee. but the delicacies of the franks, cunningly blended as to their two natures, and arranged in boxes that are tied with silver cords, shalt thou in no wise receive." "o raiser of false expectations," cried the lady, "and betrayer of her that has trusted thee, among all the sons of adam there is none more utterly contemptible than thou. in the dignity of thy carriage thou appearest unto me as a thing abhorred; i like not thy wisdom; i have no fellowship with thy knowledge, and i despise the insolent shining of thy inner light." "o woman of a light mind and a debased appetite," said abdulla, "thy wits have gone astray, and thou babblest like one asleep, confounding the things that are not with the things that are. abdulla, the water-seller, of whom thou speakest, is long numbered with the dead, and the waters of forgetfulness have flowed over his record. only this day i heard afar off the last rumour which the world hath concerning him. and this was the rumour: that, on a day, perceiving one athirst in the byways, abdulla gave him freely three drops of water from the dregs of his water-skin, thereby earning the favour of allah (whose name he exalted!) and the promise of paradise. but going forth in the way he met a man having the evil eye; and lo, it straightway entered into the heart of abdulla to fill his water-skin with the sweetmeats of the infidel, that he might find favour in the eyes of a frivolous woman--even one such as thou art. and god (than whom there is no other!), being angered at the folly of abdulla, made a hole in the skin, and sent forth the terminator of delights to end his days. so the water-seller died, and the weight of his water-skin, laden with sweetmeats, went forth with his soul. and this, being heavy, dragged him down to the place of darkness, where the sweetmeats fell out through the hole in the skin and were eaten of devils." at this the woman banged-to the lattice and disappeared. abdulla started at the sound of the closing lattice. he was in a standing posture on the roof of his house. the mat on which he slept was tossed into a heap, and the empty water-skin, which served him for a pillow, had been thrown some yards from its place. abdulla looked over the parapet eastwards; and he saw the desert rose-red in the dawn. for a long time abdulla walked to and fro on the roof of his house pondering the things that had happened to him both in the day and the night. to piece the story together was no easy matter, for there were gaps in his memory, and, though some of the incidents were clear, others were perplexingly dim. moreover, the incidents that were clear seemed to change places with those that were dim, so that the line between his dreams and his waking experiences was now in one place and now in another. he could not be sure, for example, that the fraying of his water-skin belonged to the one class rather than the other, and so rapid was the transition from conviction to doubt that he examined the skin no less than five times to satisfy himself the hole was there. the longer he meditated on these things the greater became his confusion of mind, and by the time the sun was fully risen from the desert he was well-nigh distracted and beginning to doubt of his own identity. in vain did he repeat the seven exorcisms, the four prayers, the tecbir, the adan, and the two professions of faith, calling on the name of allah between the exercises, and extolling his majesty every time. at last abdulla began to wring his hands and to cry aloud like one bereft of intelligence. while thus lamenting, it suddenly seemed to him that one from a far distance was calling him by name. checking his cries, he listened. the voice came nearer and nearer, and presently broke out in familiar tones at his very side. "what aileth thee, o abdulla?" said the voice. "hast thou partaken of the intoxicating drug? has the evil eye encountered thee? or sufferest thou from a visitation of god?" "o my mother," answered abdulla, "there is none else besides thee under heaven who can ease my pain and give me counsel in my perplexity. the sound of thy voice is to me like running waters to him that perisheth of thirst. know that a great bewilderment has overtaken me, so that i discern no more the things that are not from the things that are." "that which was foreordained has come to pass," said the woman. "thou wast marked on thy forehead in the hour of thy birth; and i saw it, and knew that things hidden from the foundation of the earth would be revealed unto thee. lo, the mark is on thy forehead still. o abdulla, my son, thou art no longer a seller of water, but a seer of the inner substance, and divulger of secrets." "o my mother," said abdulla, "i know not what thou sayest. the inner substance is a thing whereof i have never heard, and there is no secret that i can divulge. only a dream of the night season has troubled me, and even now it seemeth to mingle with the things that god makes visible, so that the desert floats like a yellow cloud, and thine own form undulates before me like the morning mist." "thy confusion," said the woman, "is caused by the intermingling of the worlds, which few among the sons of men are permitted to note; and the undulations that bewilder thee are made by the river of time. what thou seest is the passing of that which was into that which is, and of that which is into that which is to be. but rouse thy mind quickly, o my son, and betake thyself on the instant to a skilful interpreter of dreams, that the matter be resolved." "i hear and obey," said abdulla; and he ran down the steps of his house into the street. as he passed through the door, selim the courier called to him from the other side. "o thou that dwellest alone," cried selim, "hast thou taken to thyself a wife? has zobeida proved gracious?" "nay, verily," answered abdulla. "i have broken a vow and zobeida rejecteth me utterly. and know, o selim, that i am a man sore troubled with dreams in the night season, so that a spirit of amazement hath possessed me, and i discern not the light from the darkness, nor the shadow from the substance." "thou tellest a strange thing," said selim. "nevertheless, i heard thee speaking scarce a moment gone with one on the roof." "my mother was come from the lower parts of the house to comfort me," said abdulla, "and it was with her that i spake." "verily, thou art bewitched," answered the other. "more than twenty years have passed since thy mother entered into the mercy of god, and her body is dust within the tomb." abdulla's answer was a piteous cry. he leaned for support against the wall of his house, spreading out his hands like one who would save himself from falling. "o selim," he cried, "i am encompassed with forgetfulness, and my heart is eradicated within me. said i not unto thee that i discern no more between the darkness and the light, between the shadow and the substance? but i swear to thee, by the beard of the prophet, that she with whom i spake was the mother who bore me. she stretched out her arms towards me and touched the mark on my forehead, and bade me hasten to the interpreter of dreams that the matter might be resolved." "it is a sign from allah," said selim; "and i doubt not that thou wilt die the death at the hand of the infidel and be received into paradise. for know that thou hast been called two days ago, and the sergeant is even now seeking for thee." "that also i had forgotten," said abdulla. "i will hasten forthwith to the interpreter of dreams, and thereafter i will report me to the sergeant. and the rest shall be as allah willeth." and abdulla passed on his way to the interpreter of dreams. * * * * * suddenly he realised that his path was blocked by a crowd, and looking up he saw above him, on the other side of the street, the lattice of zobeida. "verily," he thought, "i have made a long circuit; for this house lieth not in the way." loud cries were coming from the house, mingled with curses and the sound of hands beaten against the wall. as soon as abdulla appeared, one of the crowd called out towards the lattice: "o woman that cursest in the darkness, come now to the light, that we may hear thy maledictions more plainly, and be refreshed by the beauty of thy countenance. lo, he who is thy enemy passeth even now beneath the window. come forth, then, and the sight of him shall be as a fire in thy bones, inspiring thy tongue to the invention of disastrous epithets and calamitous imprecations. and we, on our part, will hold him fast, even the accursed abdulla, that he run not away till his destiny is pronounced and his doom completed." at this the lattice was burst open, and zobeida, tearing aside her veil, displayed a countenance of wrath. her hair was dishevelled, her cheeks were soiled with ashes and tears, her eyes were like coals of fire, and her voice hissed and rang like the sword of a slayer in the day of battle. "o abdulla," she cried, "of a truth thou art the emperor of liars and the sultan of rogues. may the abaser of pride rub thy nose in the dust!" "o my mistress," answered abdulla, "impose upon thyself, i beseech thee, the obligation of good manners." "dog and son of a dog----" cried zobeida. but abdulla heard no more. a distant confusion of sounds had arisen. it drew nearer with amazing rapidity, and finally broke forth into the tramp of marching feet, the rumbling of wheels, and the booming of a drum. the houses melted away, the sound of zobeida's voice grew fainter and fainter, and the knot of bystanders was gone. abdulla sprang to attention and looked about him. he was in the main street of the city, and opposite was the house of the interpreter of dreams. coming down the street was a regiment of turkish infantry, with a battery of guns following behind. and a dim memory passed, like a swift shadow, over the mind of abdulla. for an instant he was bemused, and one who passed by heard him muttering broken words. "the long way round," he murmured; "the lattice of zobeida--a caravan of camels laden with sweetmeats--dog and the son of a dog." then a wind passed over his face, and it seemed to him that he had been thinking foolishly. "well for me," he replied, "that i went not round by the house of zobeida. for the time is short and i too am called." and with that he crossed over, making haste that he might reach the other side before the marching column blocked the street. the house of the interpreter was built after the european fashion, and on the door was a large brass knocker after the manner of the franks. abdulla stretched forth his hand, and was about to raise the knocker when one plucked him by the sleeve. turning round he saw a man in the uniform of an officer of artillery. "wherefore hast thou not reported thyself?" said the officer. "thy name was called two days ago, and verily thou runnest a risk of being shot." "o my master, a bewilderment hath overtaken me," said abdulla, "so that i forget all things and know not the day from the night. lo, even now, i seek the interpreter of dreams that the matter may be resolved." "thou art in a way to have thy dreams interpreted by a bullet through the brain," said the officer. "leave then thy dreaming and hold thy peace; or, by allah, i will proclaim thy cowardice forthwith and order thy arrest. fall in!" abdulla had no choice. a moment later he was marching in step with a squad of reservists who followed in the rear of the guns. as the column passed down the street a veiled woman stepped out from the edge of the crowd, and, taking three paces by the side of abdulla, whispered in his ear: "play the man." * * * * * they were now at the station, entraining for the seat of war. the carriages were crowded with shouting soldiery, and many, unable to find room within, had clambered on the roofs. among these was abdulla, crouching silent. suddenly a man in european costume forced his way along the platform and called him by name. "art thou abdulla, the water-seller of damascus?" said the man. "i am he." "come down, then, that i may speak with thee. and hasten, for the time is short." "stay thou behind and let these go," said the european, when abdulla had descended from the roof. "i will purchase thy release from the pasha. nay, the matter is already arranged, and none of these will hinder thee if thou stayest." "and wherefore should i do this?" asked abdulla. "for a weighty and good reason," said the european. "know that the fame of thee has reached to london, to paris, to new york. thou art spoken of as one who hath a power upon thee which may aid in opening up the things that have been hidden from the foundation of the earth. and the probers of secrets have sent me that i may search thee out, and engage thee at a great salary, and take thee with me to the seats of the learned and the cities of the west." "thou art in error," said abdulla, "for power such as thou speakest of belongeth not to me. of a truth, i am one who walketh in a great bewilderment, and the spirit of forgetfulness hath overpowered me. but withal i am a common man, of whom allah hath created millions, and it was but yesterday i was seeking the interpreter of dreams, that i might pay him the fee and have the matter resolved." "i am the interpreter of dreams whom thou soughtest," said the other, "and i dwell in the house built in the european fashion, with the great knocker of brass, after the manner of the franks." "thy name?" said abdulla. "my name is professor----"--but an escape of steam from the panting locomotive drowned the next word,--"and i am come from london to fetch thee." "i go not with thee," said abdulla, "for thou seemest to be one whom the deluder of intelligence is leading astray. i have but dreams to tell thee; and if thou wantest dreams, hast thou none of thine own? verily, a dream is but a little thing." "thou errest," shouted the other--for abdulla had now climbed back on to the roof,--"a dream is a thing more wonderful than aught else the creator hath appointed, and there is none among the sons of adam who understandeth the coming and the going thereof. but if thou wilt come with me----" the interpreter broke off in the middle of his sentence, for the train was moving out of the station, and he saw that abdulla could no longer hear the words. * * * * * the battery to which abdulla was attached lay in a hollow to the rear of the main battle, awaiting orders to take up a position in the front. it was the first time he had been under fire. dead bodies, horridly mangled, lay around, and a straggling throng of wounded men, some silent, some unmanned by agony, and all terrible to look upon, was passing by. as abdulla saw these things, the fear of death grew strong within him. his body trembled and his face was blanched. seeing his state his companions began to deride him. presently a gaily dressed officer, passing where he was, paused in front of him, and drawing a small mirror from his pocket held it in front of the trembling man, and said: "look in this, o abdulla, and thou wilt see the face of a coward." abdulla looked in the mirror and saw there the very face which had confronted him not long ago in the shop window of the greek. the soldiers around him burst into a roar of laughter as abdulla looked in the mirror; but he heard them not. he was busy in inward colloquy. "o thou that tremblest in thy body," he was saying to himself, "o abdulla the coward, hearken unto me. behold yon rider coming swiftly, and know, o thou craven carcase, that he bringeth the order to advance. thinkest thou to stay behind, and then run away stealthily, and get thee back to thy water-selling in damascus and to thy dallyings with a woman? yea, verily, thou thinkest it; and even now contrivest within thyself how thou mayest steal away and not be seen. but know thou that i who speak to thee will suffer not thy cowardice. i will force thee presently to carry thy trembling limbs to yonder line, whence come these whom thou seest in their pain. thither will i take thee, and i will hold thee fast in a place where death cometh to four of every five. not a step backward shalt thou go. nay, rather, i will blow a flame through thy nostrils into the marrow of thy bones, driving thee forward, until i have thee firm in the very hottest of the fire. see, the signal rises! hark, the trumpet sounds! up then, thou quaking carrion, for thy hour is come.--well done! those behind thee are taking note that thou tremblest no more! by allah, i have conquered thee and have thee utterly in my power!" every man was in his place. abdulla, firm and ready, the rebuking voice now silent within him, sat on the leading gun-horse; the traces that bound it to the gun were already taut, and the whip-hand of the driver was aloft in air. the word is given, the whips descend, and the whole thundering train of men and beasts, with abdulla at its head, sweeps forward to the place of sacrifice. * * * * * the battle was lost, and the long ridge on which abdulla's battery had been posted was carpeted with dead and dying men. a pall of yellow smoke, broken from moment to moment by the flashes of exploding shrapnel, hung over the ridge, and a blazing house immediately behind the position shed a copper-coloured glare over the appalling scene. a cold and cursed rain was falling, and stricken men, in extremities of thirst, were lapping pools of water defiled with their own blood. of the twelve guns that formed the battery, all were dismantled save one, and by this there stood a solitary man, the only upright figure from end to end of the ridge. it was abdulla. for five hours he had done his duty untouched by shot, shell, or bayonet. he had continued the service of his gun till the last round of ammunition was expended; and when a cry arose among the survivors that they should save themselves, he had watched the last stragglers depart and refused to stir from his post. and now he stood inactive and motionless, alone in a copper-coloured wilderness of agony and death. twice the enemy had attempted by desperate charges to storm the hill, and, save for the lull in the artillery fire which preceded these attacks, the work of death had hardly ceased for a moment. even now it still went on, slaying those who were half slain. unable to see clearly the state of things on the ridge, or behind it, and unaware that the defence was totally annihilated, the enemy had hardly slackened his fire. scores of shrapnel were bursting overhead, and the singing of the rifle bullets was like the hum of bees in swarming time. as the shells exploded and the pitiless missiles came thrashing down, abdulla noticed how, after each explosion, some portion of the human carpet would toss and undulate for a moment, as though the wind had got under it, and then subside again into its place. the numbness and exhaustion of other faculties had liberated his powers of observation, and at that moment they were abnormally acute. fear, even the memory of fear, had long departed, and of mental distress there was none, save a sense of immobility and powerlessness, such as a man may have in an ugly dream. abdulla leaned on the wheel of the gun-carriage, gazing on the scene around him as a spectacle to be studied; and he watched the shells bursting overhead with no more concern than he would have felt for a passing flight of birds. he was aware of his utter loneliness, and now and then a slight stir of self-compassion would ripple the lucid depths of his consciousness. with a certain repugnance, also, he noticed the copper-coloured light, which shed its glare in every direction as far as he could see. the tensest hours of his life, during which he had exerted his body with furious energy, and his senses had been incessantly assailed with every kind of shock, had ended in a feeling, amounting almost to conviction, that the events in which he had participated, the deeds he had done, and the spectacle now before him were the tissue of a dream. blustering facts that bludgeon and bombard the senses, often provoke us, by the very violence of their self-announcement, to suspect them as illusory. reality is a low-voiced, soft-footed thing; a mean between two extremes, clothed at all times in the garments of modesty and reserve, which neither strives nor cries nor lifts up its voice in the streets. but when the gods are drunk and the heavens in uproar, and the thing called "fact" is unrestrained, ranting and storming about the stage like an ill-mannered actor--then it is that the cup begins to pass away from us, and a still small voice whispers within that the whole performance is a masquerade. thus had it happened to abdulla. dreamer as he was, he had never yet been able to detect himself in the act of dreaming. but now the waking state was over-wakeful, and at the very moment when each nerve in his body was strung to utmost tension, and the sense organs in full commission, and fact in its most brutal form thundering on the gates of his mind, there came to him a calm that was more than vacancy, a conviction that he was in the land of dreams, and a peaceful foreshadowing that he would soon awake. "and yet," he thought, "it is weary work, this waiting for the spell to break. ha, that one would have done it, had i stood a span further to the left! why cannot they wake me? are not a hundred pieces of artillery sufficient to rouse one solitary man from his dreams? stay! what if i am wakened already? and what if this be hell? if so, is it so much worse than earth? but please allah that i stand not thus for all eternity, waiting for the dream to pass. ah! i was hit that time"--and he put his hand to the region of his heart. "a mere graze. perhaps the next will do better. allah send me a thing to do! ho, thou selim! hast thou life in thee to stand upright and do a thing? i saw thee raise thyself a moment ago. if thou hast strength, bestir thyself a little, and thou and i will find another round, and fire a last shot before we pass." selim the courier was lying behind the gun with a dozen others, dead or wounded to death. abdulla had hardly finished speaking when a shrapnel burst over the heap, and selim, who had been lying face downward on the top, flung himself round in the last agony. as the bullets struck, the whole heap seemed to disperse, the bodies spreading outward into a ring with a hollow space in the midst. then abdulla saw a thing that caused his heart to leap for joy. lying in the hollow made by the dispersion of the bodies was a round of ammunition which some man had been carrying at the moment he was stricken down, and which had hitherto been covered up by the dead. at the sight of it, a sudden inspiration fell like a thunderbolt upon abdulla's dream. the sense of immobility was gone. "by allah, thou art alive and awake!" he cried, addressing himself. "quick, thou slave of a body! thou hast yet strength in thee to open the breech-piece of the gun, and the cartridge is not so heavy but that these arms can lift it. up, then, and act!" he sprang forward. quick as thought he seized the cartridge and carried his burden back to the gun. then he stretched forth his hand to grasp the lever which controlled the mechanism of the breech. but before his fingers closed on the metal he paused for the briefest instant to look around him. in one glance he took in the whole scene in all its extent and detail--the long ridge under the copper-coloured light, the carpet of moaning or silent forms, the dead body of selim, the dismantled guns, the valley below, the enemy's position on the further side, and the red spurts of flame from his artillery. he noted also that the rain had ceased and the setting sun had broken through the cloud. then, on a sudden, the vast view seemed to fall away into an immeasurable distance, and, as a landscape contracts when seen from the wrong end of the telescope, drew inwards from its edges with incredible rapidity until it occupied no more space than is enclosed by the circumference of the smallest coin. and in the same flash of time it was gone altogether. as it went, abdulla felt his fingers close on the cold metal. they closed on the metal, and abdulla saw without the least surprise that the thing he held in his hand was the knocker of brass on the door of the interpreter of dreams. * * * * * he knew no shock, asked himself no questions, perceived no breach of continuity. he lifted the knocker, and its fall sounded in the street of damascus at the very instant that the boom of the bursting shell, which had blown the water-seller to fragments, was reverberating over tchatalja. abdulla knocked. as he waited for the door to open he looked up and down the street. he had arrived in damascus overnight, and his surroundings were yet strange to him. nevertheless, as he continued to look at the houses and the passers-by, a suspicion crossed his mind that he had been in this place before. "perhaps i have dreamed of such a place," he thought. "but surely the face of yonder man is familiar. where did i see one like him? in paris? in london? ho thou, with the courier's badge on thine arm! a word with thee." the man paused at the doorstep, and abdulla looked him full in the face. instantly his mind became confused, his tongue began to stammer, and he heard himself speaking of he knew not what. "hast thou life in thee?" he said. "if so, bestir thyself and thou and i----" but the words broke off, and abdulla stood mouthing. "thou babblest like one intoxicated," said the man. "may allah preserve thy wits!" and he passed on. the door opened, and abdulla's mind became clear. a moment later he stood in the presence of the interpreter of dreams. "who art thou?" said the interpreter, "and what is the occasion of thy coming?" "i am a cairene," said abdulla, "born of syrian parentage in this city, but taken hence when i was an infant of five years. i am come to damascus for a purpose which thou and i have in common. i, too, am a student of dreams." "of which kind?" asked the interpreter. "for know that dreams are of two kinds: dreams of the worlds that were, and dreams of the worlds that are to be. of which hast thou knowledge?" "of a world that was," said abdulla. "thou hast chosen a thankless study," answered the other. "few will trust thy discoveries. for a thousand who will believe thee if thou teachest of a world that is to be, there is scarce one who will listen if thou speakest of a world that was. but tell me thy history, and name thy qualifications." "i have been educated in the universities of the west," said abdulla, "and there i sat at the feet of one who taught me a doctrine which he had learnt from a master of the ancient time. and the doctrine was this: that worlds without end lie enfolded one within the other like the petals of a rose; and the next world after differs from the next world before no more than a full water-skin differs from itself when two drops of water have fallen from its mouth. 'the world,' taught the master, 'is a memory and a dream, and at every stage of its existence it beholds the image of its past and the fainter image of its future reflected as in a glass.'" "and why makest thou the world that was before of more account than the world that comes after?" "i said not that i made it of more account," answered abdulla, "but that my knowledge was of this rather than of that. but know that i am a dreamer of dreams, and it is the world before that my dreams have revealed to me." "tell me thy dreams." "it is of them that i came to speak with thee. there is one dream that ever recurreth both in the day and the night. seventy times seven have i seen a frayed water-skin, having a hole in a certain part, no larger than an olive-stone." "that is a small matter," said the interpreter, "and such things concern us not. but i suspect that thou art not at the end of thy story. for, verily, thou hast not travelled from the cities of the west to speak of a thing so slight. say, therefore, what has brought thee to damascus." "that also i would tell thee; for it is a matter to be pondered. thou art of the wise, and knowest, therefore, that there is a virtue in places and a power in localities. in one, the light of the soul is extinguished; in another, it is kindled; in one, the reason dies; in another, the half-thought becomes a whole, and the doctrine that is dimly apprehended becomes clear. now, being in the city of paris, i conversed with one of the french who had visited the holy places of his religion, where he had meditated in solitude and seen visions and dreamed dreams; and i told him that i had a doctrine newly born, half grown. 'o abdulla,' he said, 'there is a virtue in places and a power in localities. go thou, therefore, to the city of damascus, for that is a place where, in days that are gone, the half-thought became a whole, and the doctrine dimly apprehended became clear. put thyself on the way to damascus and await the issue.'" at these words the interpreter rose from his seat and paced the room in thought. "the man of whom thou speakest," he said at length, "is known to me; and many are they whom he has guided to this place. rightly sayest thou that there is a virtue in places and a power in localities. and here the power still lingers which the world lost when mankind took to babbling. thy reason for coming hither is mine also. seest thou not that i have made my dwelling in the street that is called straight?" "i see and understand," said abdulla. there was another pause, and again the interpreter paced the room. then he resumed: "between thee and me there is need of little speech to attain a comprehension, and the short sentence meaneth more than the long explanation. nevertheless, i would fain hear the rest of thy story. proceed then, and tell me of the dreams that came to thee on the way to damascus." "on the way itself," said abdulla, "there came no dreams. but this very day i sat by the bank of the river, full of thought, and methinks sleep overpowered me--though i know not. and there came a poor man carrying a water-skin, and i, looking upon him, saw that his face was like unto mine own, but marred by his toil and his poverty. and the man sat himself down, leaning against a palm-tree on the side away from the sun, and slept. then i arose and stood before him, and expounded to him my doctrine, and he seemed as one that saw and heard, though asleep. and when his eyes were opened he saw me no more, but took up his water-skin and filled it at the river, making mention of the name of god. "i followed him into the city, and saw one thrust him against the wall so that his water-skin was frayed. thereafter the water-skin burst, and a hole appeared in a certain part the size of an olive-stone, and the remnant of the water flowed forth. but, passing a certain street, a woman called to him to give her little ones to drink. and i, being hard by, and seeming to know the woman, whispered to the man that he should pass his hands craftily over the skin, if peradventure a drop remained to moisten the lips of them that cried out for the thirst. but none remained, and the man went on his way sorrowing. "then i lost him for a while; but as night fell i found him again, standing in front of a glass window and meditating a thing that was dishonest. and the man looking through the window saw me standing among the goods that were in the shop. whereupon he changed his design and ran away. "i wandered through the streets of the city, and passing by a certain house, a frivolous woman looked out from a lattice and reviled me. i understood not the things that she spake, and having answered the woman i departed. then i bethought me that she had taken me for another, and, remembering that the face of the water-seller was like unto mine own, i surmised that it was he. "suddenly, i know not how, i found myself in a place of battle, armed like the rest, and, turning aside, i saw, standing among the harnessed horses of a gun-team, the man whose water-selling i had watched in the city. and the spirit of fear was upon him; his countenance was blanched and his body all aquake; and i, ashamed that one who bore my own semblance should stand disgraced among his fellows, rebuked him for his cowardice; and methought i blew a fire through his nostrils into the marrow of his bones. then the man took courage and, mounting his horse with alacrity, went forward with the bravest to the place of death. "thereafter i saw him no more. but this very hour, even as i lifted thy knocker of brass, a great light shone round about me, a sound of thunder shook the air, and a voice said, 'lo! thy broken water-skin is mended and full of water. go forth, therefore, and give to them that are athirst.' whereupon it seemed to me that the half-thought became a whole, and the doctrine that was dimly apprehended grew clear. and now i am a man prepared to go forward, even as he was into whom i blew the breath of courage on the field of death. a thing that was holding me back is gone from me, and lo! i am free." "perchance one has ministered unto thee, even as thou didst minister to that other in the hour when he was afraid," said the interpreter. "that may be," said abdulla. "but did i not tell thee that as yet i have no knowledge of the world that will be?" "the knowledge awaits thee, and will begin from this hour," said the interpreter. "most assuredly that which thou tellest is an image of the world that was; and he that dreameth of the one world dreameth also in due season of the other. but hearken now while i put thee to the question; and if thou answerest according to thy doctrine, peradventure the interpretation of thy vision will appear in the issue." "say on," said abdulla. "this, then, is the question. thinkest thou, o dreamer, that when a man dies and enters paradise, he knows of his condition, as who should say, 'lo, i am now a disembodied spirit, having just passed through the article of death, and these before me are the gates of heaven, and yonder shining thing is the throne of god?'" "nay, verily," said abdulla, "in this and in every world the throne of god is revealed after one and the same manner, and never shall it be seen in any world save by such as follow there the loyal path whereby it is found in this. and he who beholdeth not the gates of paradise in the world where he is, will look for them in vain in the world where he is to be." "art thou willing to think, then, that thou and i are in paradise even at this hour?" "thou hintest at the doctrine that has been revealed to me," said the other. "it may be even as thou sayest. for certain am i that thou and i have died many deaths; and as there is another world in respect of this, so is this world another in respect of them that went before. great is the error which deemeth that the number of the worlds is but two, and that death, therefore, cometh once only to a man, when he passeth from the first to the second. of death, as of life, the kinds are innumerable; and of these, that which destroyeth the body at the end is only one, and perhaps not the chief. whatsoever changeth into its contrary must needs die in the act; so that except one die, grief cannot pass into joy, nor darkness into light, nor evil into good; neither can the lost be found, nor the sleeper awake. wherefore it may be that thou and i are in paradise even now." "thou speakest to the question," said the interpreter. "some there are, as thou sayest, who, being in paradise already, will still be asking whether paradise awaits them. and if the enlightened go thus astray, how much deeper is the ignorance of the darkened! for in no place, o abdulla, is hell more doubted of than in hell itself." "i have lived in the cities of the west and have observed that very thing," said abdulla. "many a damned soul have i heard making boast of his good estate, and many a doubt of judgment shouted forth from the very flames of the pit. for how shall a man know when he is now dead and come to judgment? doth he live in his dying, and, taking note of his last breath, say within himself, 'lo, now i am dead'? and if he know not the single occasion of his dying, how should he remember even though death worketh upon him daily and passeth over him a thousand times?" "death and forgetting are one," said the interpreter, "and the memory of dying perisheth like a dream. but some there are to whom allah hath appointed a station at the place of passage and set as watchmen at the intermingling of the worlds. these pass to and fro over the bridges, gathering tidings from forgotten realms; and much of majesty and worth that escapeth the common sort is apparent unto them. and of such, o abdulla, thy dreams declare thee to be one." "hast thou no further interpretation?" asked abdulla. "hark!" said the other. "the full interpretation cometh even now." and, as he spoke, the brass knocker sounded on the door. * * * * * _thus endeth "the hole in the water-skin."_ iii dr piecraft clears his mind throughout the whole of this long prelection dr phippeny piecraft had scarcely moved a muscle, listening with ever deeper attention as the story went on. once only had he interrupted the reader. "you are coming now," he had said, "to the deleted passage about dual personality. don't forget to read it." "pardon me," said the young man, "i passed that point some minutes since. the writer had pencilled against the passage, '_omit, spoils the unity_.' so, from respect to his wishes, i left it out." "it was well done," piecraft had answered. "unity is all-important. proceed." and now, the reading being over, the two men sat for several minutes facing one another in silence. presently the reader said: "well, have you identified the author?" "i have," said piecraft. "the tale is a reminiscence of some old speculations of mine. i wrote every word of it myself, and i finished it last night." "how came you to think that it was written by somebody else?" "that is what puzzles me. but i can give a partial explanation. last night, after finishing the tale, i had a dream, which was extremely vivid, though i find it impossible now to recall the details. i dreamt that i was writing a story under the title of _dual personality_--something about a gamekeeper and two young lords who interchanged their characters. it was a sort of nightmare, partly accounted for by the fact that my health, until to-day, has been indifferent. when you came in this morning the influence of the dream lingered in sufficient strength to make me think i had actually written the story dreamed about, and not the one you have just read out. it was an illusion." "illusion is an integral part of reality," said the young man. "is that an original remark?" asked piecraft. "somehow i seem to remember having heard it before." "it is a quotation," answered the other. "i am in the habit of using it for the enlightenment of new-comers." "new-comers!" exclaimed piecraft. "my dear fellow, do you know that my brass plate has been on this house for over ten years. it is you who are the new-comer, not i." the young man smiled. "it has been on this house much longer than that, but you are a new-comer all the same," said he. "i don't catch your drift," said piecraft. "what do you mean?" "it takes time to answer that," said the other. "be content to learn gradually." "there's something strange about all this," said piecraft, "which i should like to clear up at once. i don't seem to know exactly where i am. do you mind shaking me? for i'm half inclined to think that i'm fast asleep and dreaming--like abdulla, in the story." "you were never so wide-awake in your life. but if you wish for an immediate enlightenment, i can take you to a house in the next street, when the whole position will be cleared up at once." "come along," said piecraft. "i feel like a man who is in for a big adventure. there's something interesting in this." as they passed down the street, piecraft said: "would you mind telling me as we walk along what you think of the story you read just now? it's not in my usual style; in fact, it's quite a new departure, and i'm very anxious, before publishing, to know what impression it makes on good judges." "the story is not bad for a first attempt," said the young man. "you'll learn to express yourself better later on. it was a bold thing on your part to tackle that subject right away. to handle it properly requires much more experience than you have had. there are one or two points which you have presented in a false light, and you have mixed some things up which ought to have been kept separate. but, on the whole, you have no reason to be discouraged." "i'm surprised at what you say," returned piecraft. "as to my being a beginner, i had a notion that i was a novelist of standing, as well as a gold medallist in cerebral pathology. but just now i'm not going to dogmatise about that or anything else. it's just possible that i'm still under the illusion produced by the dream of last night. meanwhile, i'm really anxious to know what has happened. the things about me are familiar--and yet somehow not the same as i remember them. they look as though the old dirt had been washed out of them." "you are getting on remarkably well," said his companion. "the whole world has been spring-cleaned since you saw it last." "you have an original way of expressing yourself," said piecraft. "your style reminds me of a young half-brother of mine. he was lost in a steamer whose name i can't remember--when was it? his conversation was always picturesque. and, by the way, that suggests another thing. the young girl who waited on me, this morning--who is she?" "why do you ask?" "because she's so uncommonly like a girl i used to run after in the old days--a student at the slade school of art. and a wonderfully good, nice girl she was. her father, who was said to be a scoundrel, got ten years for alleged embezzlement; and the girl gave me up because i wouldn't take his side. how she stuck to him through thick and thin! i tell you, my boy, she was a loyal soul! i wonder if she is still alive." "such souls are hard to kill," said the other. * * * * * by this time the pair had arrived at the house indicated by the messenger. on the door of it was an enormous knocker of brass. "knock, and it shall be opened," said the young man. dr piecraft had lifted the knocker and was about to let it fall when he heard his name called loudly down the street and saw a man running towards him with a piece of paper in his hand. the man approached and piecraft, taking the paper, read as follows: "_dr phippeny piecraft is needed at once for a matter of life and death._" "i must be off immediately," he said to his companion; "i am called to an urgent case. it's a matter of life and death. duty first, my boy, and the clearing-up of mysteries afterwards! remember what the sergeant said to abdulla when he plucked him by the sleeve. besides--who knows?--this may mean that the practice is going to revive." "that is precisely what it does mean," said the young man. "matters of life and death are extremely common just now, and you are the very man to deal with them." "how do you know that?" said piecraft with some astonishment; and, as he spoke the words, without thinking he released the lifted knocker from his hand. the knocker fell, and the instant it struck the door dr phippeny piecraft knew where he was. "_it's wonderfully like the old home_," he said. a familiar laugh sounded behind him. he turned round; and the man who grasped his hand was jim. the professor's mare i the reverend john scattergood, d.d., professor of systematic theology, was of puritan descent. the founder of the family was caleb scatter-the-good-seed, a cornet of horse in cromwell's army, who had earned his master's favour by prowess at the battle of dunbar. the family tradition averred that when cromwell halted the pursuit of leslie's shattered forces for the purpose of singing the th psalm, it was caleb scatter-the-good-seed who gave out the tune and led the psalmody. this he did at the beginning of every verse by striking a tuning-fork on his bloody sword. he was mounted, said the tradition, on a coal-black horse. john scattergood, d.d., was a hard-headed theologian. his lectures on systematic theology ended, as all who attended them will remember, in a cogent demonstration of the friendliness of the universe, firmly established by the inflexible method. this was a masterpiece of ratiocination. the impartial observation of facts, the even-handed weighing of evidence, the right ordering of principles and their application, the separation and weaving together of lines of thought, the careful disentangling of necessary pre-suppositions, the just treatment of objectors--all the qualities demanded of one who handles the deepest problems of thought were combined in dr scattergood's demonstration of the friendliness of the universe according to the inflexible method. most of his hearers were convinced by his arguments, and went forth into the world to publish the good news that the universe was friendly. hard-headed as scattergood was, it would be unjust to his character to describe him as free from superstition. much of his life, indeed, had been spent in attacking the superstitions of the ignorant and the thoughtless; but this very practice had bred in him, as in so many others, a superstitious regard for the argumentative weapons used in the attack. like his ancestor at dunbar, he struck his tuning-fork on his sword. to be sure, he was a rational theist, and a cause of rational theism in others; but, unless i am much mistaken, the ultimate object of his faith, the power behind his deity, was the inflexible method. superstition never dies; it merely changes its form. it is not a confession we make to ourselves so much as a charge we bring against others, and its greatest power is always exercised in directions where we are least aware of its existence. and scattergood, of course, was unaware that his attitude towards the inflexible method was profoundly superstitious. it follows that he was unprepared for the part which superstition, changing its form, was destined to play in his life. theology, then, was his vocation, but i have now to add, the horse was his hobby. although he had taken to riding late in life, he was by no means an incapable rider or an ignorant horseman. next to the universe, the horse had been the subject of his profoundest study; and as he was a close reasoner in regard to the one, he was a tight rider in regard to the other. his seat, like his philosophy, was a trifle stiff; but what else could you expect in one who had passed his sixtieth year? he never rode to hounds, nor otherwise unduly jeopardised his neck; but for managing a high-spirited horse, when all the rest of us were in difficulties, i never knew his better. "let scattergood go first," we cried as the traction engine came snorting down the road and our elderly hacks were prancing on the pavement; and sure enough his young thoroughbred would walk by the monster without so much as changing its feet. "scattergood," i once asked him, "what do you _do_ to that young mare of yours when you meet a traction engine or a military band?" "nothing," he replied. "then what do you _say_ to her?" "nothing." "then how do you manage it?" "i haven't the faintest idea." needless to say, he was deeply respected in the stables. "a gen'l'man with a wonderful _'orse-sense_," said the old ostler one day, expatiating, as usual, on scattergood's virtues. "if i'd had a 'orse-sense like him, i'd be one o' the richest men in england. if ever there was a man as throwed himself away, there he goes! 'orse-sense isn't a thing as you see every day, sir. the only other man i've ever knowed as had it was his lordship, as i was his coachman in ireland more than twenty years ago. his lordship used to say to me, 'tom,' he says, 'tom, it all comes of my grandfather and his father before him bein' jockeys.' and between you and me, sir, that's what's the matter with his reverence. he's jockey-bred, sir, you take my word for it." "his father was a bishop," i interposed. "well, his father may have been a bishop, for all i care," said tom. "but what about his mother, and what about his mother's father, and his father before him, and all the rest on 'em? when it comes to a matter o' breedin', you don't stop at fathers; you take in the whole pedigree. wasn't his lordship's father a brewer? and what difference did that make? when 'orse-sense once gets started in a family it takes more than brewin' and more than bishopin' to wash it out o' the blood." "i've heard that gypsies have the same gift," i said. "i've 'eard it too, sir. but i never would have nothing to do with gypsies; though his lordship was as thick as thieves with 'em. and thieves are just what they are, sir, and if it weren't for that i'd say as the gen'l'man was as like to be gypsy-bred as jockey. don't you never let the gypsies sell _you_ a 'oss, sir; you'll be took in if you do. but they couldn't gypsy _him_! why, i don't believe as there's a 'oss-dealer for twenty miles round as wouldn't go out for a walk if he 'eard as dr scattergood was comin' to buy a 'oss." that the ostler's last remark was true in the spirit if not in the letter the following incident seems to prove. once i was myself entrapped into the folly of buying a horse, and i was on the point of concluding the bargain, which seemed to be all in my favour, when a friendly daimon whispered in my ear that i had better be cautious. so i said, "yes, the horse seems all right. but before coming to a final decision, i'll bring dr scattergood round to have a look at him." and the dealer presently abated his price by twenty pounds, on the understanding that "that there interferin' scattergood, as had already done him more bad turns than one, was not allowed to poke his nose into business which was none of his." "pretty good," said the professor when i showed him my purchase. "pretty good. but i think i could have saved you another ten pounds, had you taken the trouble to consult me." he kept but one horse, and it was observed, as a strange thing in a lover of horses, that he never kept that one for long. he was constantly changing his mount. by superficial observers this was set down to a certain fickleness of disposition; but the truth seems rather to have been that scattergood, consciously or unconsciously, was engaged in the quest for the perfect horse. no man knew better than he what equine perfection involved, and none was ever more painfully sensitive to the slightest deviation from the absolute ideal. whatever good qualities his horse might possess--and they were always numerous--the presence of a single fault, however slight, would haunt and oppress him in much the same way as a venial sin will trouble the consciousness of a saint. i remember one beautiful animal in which the severest judges could find no defect save that it had half a dozen miscoloured hairs hidden away on one of its hind-legs. every time the good doctor rode that horse he saw the miscoloured hairs through the back of his head; and away went the beast to tattersall's after a week's trial. another followed, and another after that; but we soon ceased to count them, and took it for granted that scattergood's horse, seen once, would not be seen again. so it went on until in the fullness of time there appeared a horse, or more strictly a mare, which did not depart as swiftly as it came. whatever perfection may be in other realms, perfection in horses seems after all to be a relative thing; for though dr scattergood himself regarded this one as perfect, i doubt if he could have found a single soul in the wide world to agree with him. to be sure, she was beautiful enough to cause a flutter of excitement as she passed down the street; but a beast of more dangerous mettle never pranced on two feet or kicked out with one. she was the terror of every stable she entered, and it was only by continual largesse on the part of scattergood that any groom could be induced to feed or tend her. what she cost him monthly for tips, for broken stable furniture, and for veterinary attendance on the horses she kicked in the ribs, i should be sorry to say. but scattergood paid it all without a murmur; no infatuated lover ever bore the extravagance of his mistress with a lighter heart. for the truth of the matter was, that he was deeply attached to this mare, and the mare was deeply attached to him. why the mare was fond of scattergood is a problem requiring for its solution more horse-sense than most of us possess; so we had better leave it alone. but scattergood's reason for being fond of the mare can be stated in a sentence. she reminded him, constantly and vividly, of ethelberta. her high spirits, her dash, her unexpectedness, her brilliant eyes, her gait, and especially the carriage of her head, were a far truer likeness of ethelberta than was the faded photograph, or even the miniature set in gold, which the reverend professor kept locked in his secret drawer. now ethelberta was the name of the lady whom scattergood wished he had married. for five-and-thirty years he had never ceased wishing he had married _her_--and not someone else. someone else! ay, there was the rub! the lawful mrs scattergood was not a person whose portrait i should care to draw in much detail. can you imagine a harder lot than that of a world-famous systematic theologian, publicly pledged to maintain the friendliness of the universe, but privately consumed with anxiety lest on returning home (_horresco referens!_) he should find a heavy-featured, blear-eyed, irredeemable woman, the woman who called herself his wife, narcotised on the drawing-room sofa, with an empty bottle of chloral at her side? that was the lot of john scattergood, d.d., and he bore it like a man, keeping up a pathetic show of devotion to his intolerable wife, and concealing his personal misery from the world with an ingenuity only equal to that with which he published abroad the friendliness of the universe. to be sure, he had long abandoned the quest for happiness as a thing unworthy of a systematic theologian--what else, indeed, could he do? still, it was hardly possible to avoid reflecting that he would have been happier if he had married ethelberta. each day something happened to convince him that he would. for example, his first duty every morning, before settling down to work, was to make a tour of the house, sometimes in the company of a trusted domestic, hunting for a concealed bottle of morphia; and when at last the servant, with her arm under a mattress, said, "i've got it, sir," he could not help reflecting that the burden of life would have been lighter had he married the high-souled ethelberta. and with the thought a cloud seemed to pass between john scattergood and the sun. he would often say to himself that he wished he could forget ethelberta. but in point of fact he wished nothing of the kind. he secretly cherished her memory, and the efforts he made to banish her from his thoughts only served to incorporate her more completely with the atmosphere of his life. all through life john scattergood had been a deeply conscientious man. but conscience--or rather something that called itself conscience, but was in reality nothing of the kind,--which had served him so well in other respects, had been his undoing in the matter of ethelberta. at the age of twenty-five he was not aware that a man's evil genius, bent on doing its victim the deadliest turn, will often disguise itself in the robes of his heavenly guide. later on in life he learned to penetrate these disguises, but at twenty-five he was at their mercy. he was, as we have seen, of puritan descent; his evangelical upbringing had taught him to regard as heaven-sent all inner voices which bade him sacrifice his happiness; and this it was of which the enemy took advantage. in his relationship with ethelberta the young man was radiantly happy; but that very circumstance aroused his suspicions. "you are not worthy of this happiness," said an inner voice; "and, what is far more to the point, you are not worthy of ethelberta. she is too good for such as you." "who are you?" said the young scattergood, addressing the inner voice. "who are you that haunt me night and day with this horrible fear?" "i am your conscience," answered the voice. "you are unworthy of ethelberta; and it is i, your conscience, that tell you so. i am a voice from heaven, and beware of disregarding me." had scattergood been thirty years older, this strange anxiety on the part of his conscience to establish its claims as a voice from heaven would have put him on his guard; he would have lifted those shining robes and seen the hoofs beneath them. but these precautions had not occurred to him in the days when he and ethelberta were walking hand in hand. so he listened to that inner voice with awe: he listened until its lying words became an obsession; until they darkened his mind; until they drowned the voices of love and began to find utterance in his manners, and even in his speech, with ethelberta. she, on her part, did not understand--what woman ever could or would?--and a cloud came between them. "the cloud is from heaven," said the inner voice. "i have sent it; let it grow; you are not good enough for ethelberta, and it will be a sin to link your life with hers." so the cloud grew, till one day a woman's wrath shot out of it; there was an explosion, a quarrel, a breach; and the two parted, never to meet again. "you have done your duty," said the false conscience. "you have dealt me a mortal hurt," said the soul. but scattergood was still convinced that he was not good enough for ethelberta. within a year or two the usual results had followed. scattergood married a woman who was not good enough for _him_; and that other man, who had been watching his opportunity, like a wolf around the sheepfold, married ethelberta. and he was not good enough for _her_. and now many years had passed, and ethelberta was long since dead. but that made no difference to the aching wound; for professor scattergood, who was intelligent about all things, and far too intelligent about ethelberta, used to reflect that probably she would still be alive had she married him. "they went to naples for their honeymoon," he would say aloud--for he was in the habit of talking to himself--"they went to naples for their honeymoon; there she caught typhoid fever, and died six weeks after her marriage. but things would have happened differently had she married _me_. _we_ were not going to naples for the honeymoon. we were going to switzerland: we settled it that night after the dance at lady brown's--the night i first told her i was not worthy of her. fool that i was!" such were the meditations of professor john scattergood, d.d., as he trotted under the hedgerow elms and heard the patter of his horse's hoofs falling softly on the withered leaves. thus we can understand how it came to pass that dr scattergood's imagination was abnormally sensitive to anything which could remind him of ethelberta. and i have no doubt that his peculiar horse-sense was also involved in the particular reminder with which we have now to deal. certain it is that he discerned the resemblance to ethelberta the moment he cast eyes upon his mare. he was standing in the dealer's yard, and the dealer was leading the animal out of the stable. suddenly catching sight of the strange black-coated figure, she stopped abruptly, lowered her head, curved her neck, and looked scattergood straight between the eyes. for a moment he was paralysed with astonishment and thought he was dreaming. the movement, the attitude, the look were all ethelberta's! exactly thus had she stopped abruptly, lowered her head, curved her neck, and looked him in the face when thirty-five years ago he had been introduced to her at an embassy ball in vienna. a vision swept over his inner eye: he saw bright uniforms, heard music, felt the presence of a crowd; and so completely was the actuality of things blotted out that he made a low reverence to the animal as though he were being introduced to some highborn dame. the dealer noticed the movement and wondered what "new hanky-panky old scattergood was trying on the mare." "now, that's a mare i raised myself," said the dealer. "i've watched her every day since she was foaled, and i'll undertake to say as there isn't another like her in----" "in the wide world: i know there isn't," said scattergood, cutting him short. then, suddenly, "what's her name?" "meg," replied the dealer, who was expecting a very different question. "meg--meg," said the doctor. "why, it ought to be----well, never mind, meg will do. so you bred her yourself? will you swear you didn't _steal_ her?" this was too much even for a horse-dealer. "we're not a firm of horse-thieves," he said, and he was preparing to lead her back into the stable. "i'm only joking," said scattergood in a tremulous voice which belied him. "she's the living likeness of one i remember years ago--one that _was_ stolen. come, bring her back. i'm ready to buy that mare at her full value." "and what may that be?" replied the dealer, glad that the enemy had made the first move. "a hundred and twenty." the dealer was astonished; for his customer had offered the exact sum at which he hoped to sell the mare. for a moment he thought of standing out for a hundred and fifty, but he knew it was useless to bargain with scattergood, so he said: "it's giving her away, sir, at a hundred and twenty. but for the sake of quick business, and you being a gentleman as knows a horse when you sees one, i'll take you at your own figure." "done," said scattergood. "i'll send you a cheque round in ten minutes." and without another word he walked out of the yard. he had found the perfect horse. the dealer stood dumbfoundered, halter in hand--he was unconscious that meg had already caught his shirt-sleeve between her teeth. could that retreating figure be the wary scattergood, scattergood of the thousand awkward questions, scattergood the terror of every horse-dealer in the countryside? never before had he found so prompt, so reckless a customer. were his eyes deceiving him? was it a dream? a violent jerk on his right arm, and the simultaneous sound of tearing linen, recalled him to himself. "you she-devil!" he said, "i'll take the skin off you for this. but i hope the old gentleman's well insured." meanwhile the professor was walking home in a state of profound mental perturbation. visions of the embassy ball in vienna, buddhist theories of reincarnation, problems of animal psychology, doubts as to the validity of the inflexible method, vague and nameless feelings that accompanied the disappearance of his "horse-sense," a yet vaguer joy as of one who has found something precious which he had lost, and beneath all the ever-present subconscious fear that he would find his wife narcotised on the drawing-room sofa, were buzzing and dancing through his mind. "it's the _likeness_ that puzzles me," he began to reflect. "a universal resemblance, borne by particulars not one of which is really like the original. quite unmistakable, and yet quite unthinkable. an indubitable fact, and yet a fact which no one who has not seen could ever be induced to believe." had anyone half an hour earlier propounded the statement that a woman could bear a closer resemblance to a horse than to her own portrait, he would have treated the proposition as one which no amount of evidence could make good. so far from the evidence proving the proposition true, he would have said, it is the proposition which proves the evidence false. otherwise, what is the use of the inflexible method? but now the thing was flashed on him with the brightness of authentic revelation, and there was no gainsaying its truth. not once during the five-and-thirty years of his mourning for ethelberta had anything happened to bring her so vividly to mind; not even among the dreams that haunt the borderland of sleep and waking; no, nor even when he listened to the great singer whose voice had pierced his heart with the sad and angry music of heine's bitterest song. professor scattergood was a firm believer in the efficacy of _a priori_ thought; but though by means of it he had excogitated a system in which the plan of an entire universe was sufficiently laid down, there was not one of his principles either primary or secondary which could have built a niche for the experience he had just undergone in the horse-dealer's yard. as he neared his doorstep the confusion of his mind suddenly ranged itself into form and gave birth to an articulate thought. "i'm sure," he said to himself, drawing his latch-key out of his pocket and inserting it in the keyhole--"i'm sure that ethelberta is not far off. yes, as sure as i am of anything in this world." ii the "horse-sense," which gave professor scattergood his reputation in the stables, was always accompanied by a well-marked physical sensation--to wit, a continuous tingling at the back of the head, seemingly located at an exact spot in the cortex of the brain. so long as the back of his head was tingling, every horse was completely at scattergood's mercy; he could do with it whatever he willed. but i have it on his own authority that at the moment he cast eyes on his new mare the sensation suddenly ceased and his horse-sense deserted him. accordingly, the first time he took her out he mounted with trepidation, and fear possessed his soul that she would run away with him. though nothing very serious followed, the fear was not entirely groundless. his daily ride, which usually occupied exactly two hours and five minutes, was accomplished on this occasion in one hour and twenty, and for a week afterwards the professor's man rubbed liniment into his back three times a day. on the second occasion he had the ill luck to encounter the local hunt in full career, a thing he would have minded not the least under ordinary circumstances, but extremely disconcerting at a moment when his horse-sense happened to be in abeyance. before he had time to take in the situation, meg joined the rushing tide, and for the next forty minutes the field was led by the first systematic theologian in europe, who had given himself up for lost and was preparing for death. and killed he probably would have been but for two things: the first was the fine qualities of his mount, and the second was a literary reminiscence which enabled him to retain his presence of mind. even in these desperate circumstances, the professor's habit of talking to himself remained in force. a friend of mine who was riding close behind him told me that he distinctly heard scattergood repeating the lines of the _odyssey_ which tell how ulysses, on the point of suffocation in the depths of the sea, kept his wits about him and made a spring for his raft the instant he rose to the surface. again and again, as the professor raced across the open, did he repeat those lines to himself; and whenever a dangerous fence or ditch came in sight he would break off in the middle of the greek and cry aloud in english, "now, john scattergood, prepare for death and sit well back"--resuming the greek the moment he was safely landed on the other side, and thus proving once more that the blood of the ironsides still ran in his veins. said a farmer to me one day: "who's that gentleman as has just gone up the lane on the chestnut mare?" "that," said i, "is professor scattergood--one of our greatest men." "h'm," said the farmer; "i reckon he's a clergyman--to judge by his clothes." "he is." "well, he's a queer 'un for a clergyman, danged if he isn't. he's allus talking aloud to himself. and what do you think i hear him say when he come through last thursday? 'john scattergood,' says he, 'you were a damned fool. yes, there's no other word for it, john; you were a _damned_ fool!'" "that," i said, "is language which no clergyman ought to use, not even when he is talking to himself. but perhaps the words were not his own. they may have been used about him by some other person--possibly by his wife, who, people say, is a bit of a tartar. in that case he would be just repeating them to himself, by way of refreshing his memory." the farmer laughed at this explanation. "i see you're a gentleman with a kind 'eart," said he. "but a man with a swearin' wife don't ride about the country lanes refreshin' his memory in that way. he knows his missus will do all the refreshin' he wants when he gets 'ome. no, you'll never persuade _me_ as them words weren't the gentleman's own. from the way he said 'em you could see as they tasted good. why, he said 'em just like this----" and the farmer repeated the objectionable language, with a voice and manner that entirely disposed of my charitable theory. he then added: "clergyman or no clergyman, i'll say one thing for him--he rides a good 'oss. i'll bet you five to one as that chestnut mare cost him a hundred and twenty guineas, if she cost him a penny." from the tone in which the farmer said this i gathered that a gentleman whose 'oss cost him a hundred and twenty guineas was entitled to use any language he liked; and that my explanation, therefore, even if true, was superfluous. what did the professor mean by apostrophising himself in the strong language overheard by the farmer? the exegesis of the passage, it must be confessed, is obscure, and, not unnaturally, there is a division of opinion among the higher critics. some, of whom i am one, argue that the words refer to a long-past error of judgment in the professor's life; more precisely, to the loss of ethelberta. others maintain that this theory is far-fetched and fanciful. the professor, they say, was plainly cursing himself for the purchase of meg. for, is there not reason to believe that at the very moment when the obnoxious words were uttered he was again in trouble with the mare, and therefore in a state of mind likely to issue in the employment of this very expression? now, although i have always held the first of these two theories, i must hasten to concede the last point in the argument of the other side. it is a fact that at the very moment when the professor cursed himself for a fool he was again in trouble with meg. on previous occasions her faults had been those of excess; but to-day she was erring by defect: instead of going too fast she was going too slow, and occasionally refusing to go at all. she would neither canter nor trot; it was with difficulty that she could be induced to walk, and then only at a snail's-pace; apparently she wanted to fly. in consequence of which the professor's daily ride promised to occupy at least three hours, thereby causing him to be twenty-five minutes late for his afternoon lecture. meg's behaviour that day had been irritating to the last degree. she began by insisting on the wrong side of the road, and before professor scattergood could emerge from the traffic of the town he had been threatened with legal proceedings by two policemen and cursed by several drivers of wheeled vehicles. arrived in the open country, meg spent her time in examining the fields on either side of the road, in the hope apparently of again discovering the hunt; she would dart down every lane and through every open gate, and now and then would stop dead and gaze at the scenery in the most provoking manner. coming to a blacksmith's shop with which she was acquainted, a desire for new shoes possessed her feminine soul, and, suddenly whisking round through the door of the shoeing shed, she knocked off the professor's hat and almost decapitated him against the lintel. the professor had not recovered from the shock of this incident when a black berkshire pig that was being driven to market came in sight round a turn of the road. meg, as became a highbred horse, positively refused to pass the unclean thing, or even to come within twenty yards of it. she snorted and pranced, reared and curveted, and was about to make a bolt for home when the pig-driver, who had considerately driven his charge into a field where it was out of sight, seized meg's bridle and led her beyond the dangerous pass. "meg, meg," said the professor, as soon as they were alone and order had been restored--"meg, meg, this will never do. you and i will have to part company. i don't mind your _looking_ like ethelberta, but i can't allow you to _act_ as she did. to be sure, ethelberta broke my heart thirty-five years ago. but that is no reason why i should suffer _you_ to break my neck to-day. we'll go home, meg, and i'll take an early opportunity of breaking off the engagement, just as i broke it off with ethelberta--though, between you and me, meg, i was a damned fool for doing it." professor scattergood spoke these words in a low, soft, musical voice; the voice he always used when talking to horses or to himself about ethelberta. even the obnoxious adjective was pronounced by the professor with that tenderness of intonation which only a horse or a woman can fully understand. and here i must explain that this particular tone came to him naturally in these two connections only. in all others his voice was high-pitched, hard, and a trifle forced. years of lecturing on systematic theology had considerably damaged his vocal apparatus. he had developed a throat-clutch; he had a distressing habit of ending all his sentences on the rising inflection; and whenever he was the least excited in argument he had a tendency to scream. it was in this voice that he addressed his class. but whenever he happened to be talking to horses, or to himself about ethelberta--and you might catch him doing so almost any time when he was alone,--you would hear something akin to music, and would reflect what a pity it was that professor scattergood had never learned to sing. it was, i say, in this low, soft, musical voice that he addressed his mare, perhaps with some exceptional sadness, on the day when, sorely tried by her bad behaviour, he had come to the conclusion that the engagement must be broken off. and now i must once more risk my reputation for veracity; and if the pinch comes and i have to defend myself from the charge of lying, i shall appeal for confirmation to my old friend the ostler, who knows a great deal about 'osses, and believes my story through and through. what happened was this. the moment professor scattergood began to address his mare in the tones aforesaid, she stood stock-still, with ears reversed in the direction from which the sounds were coming. when he had finished, a gentle quiver passed through her body. then, suddenly lowering her head, she turned it round with a quick movement towards the off stirrup, and slightly bit the toe of professor scattergood's boot. this done, she recovered her former attitude of attention, and again reversed her ears as though awaiting a response. taking in the meaning of her act with a swift instinct which he never allowed to mar his treatment of systematic theology, the professor said one word--"ethelberta"; and the word had hardly passed his lips when something began to tingle at the back of his head. instantly the mare broke into the gentlest and evenest canter that ever delighted a horseman of sixty years; carried him through the remainder of his ride without a single hitch, shy, or other misdemeanour, and brought him to his own doorstep in exactly two hours and five minutes from the time he had left it. thenceforward, until the last day of his life, he never had the slightest trouble with his mare. that is the story which the ostler believes through and through. next day the professor said to this man: "tom, i'm going to change the name of my mare." "you can't do that, sir. you'll never get her to answer to a new name." "i mean to try, anyhow. here"--and he slipped half a sovereign into the man's hand. "you make this mare answer to the name of _ethelberta_, and i'll give you as much more when it's done." "beg your pardon, sir," said the man, slipping the coin into his pocket--"beg your pardon, sir, but there never was a 'oss with a name like that. it's not a 'oss's name at all, sir." "never mind that. do as i tell you, and you won't regret it. ethelberta--don't forget." the groom touched his hat. professor scattergood left the stables, and presently the groom and his chief pal were rolling in laughter on a heap of straw. a fortnight later the groom said: "the mare answers wonderful well to that new name, sir. stopped her kicking and biting altogether, sir. why, the day before we give it her, she tore the shirt off my back and bit a hole in my breeches as big as a mangel-wurzel." "i'll pay for both of them," said professor scattergood. "thank 'ee, sir. but since we give her the new name she's not even made as though she _wanted_ to bite anybody. and as for kicking, why, you might take tea with your mother-in-law right under her heels and she wouldn't knock a saucer over. i nivver see such a thing in all my life, and don't expect nivver to see such another! _wonderful's_ what i calls it! though, since i've come to think of it, there _was_ once a 'oss named ethelberta as won the buddle stakes. our foreman says as he remembers the year it won. maybe as you had a bit yourself, sir, on that 'oss--though beg your pardon for saying so." "yes," said the professor, "i backed ethelberta for all i was worth, and won ten times as much. only, some fellow stole the winnings out of my--my inner pocket just before i got home. it was thirty-five years ago." "so it was a bit o' bad luck after all, sir?" "it was," said scattergood, "extremely bad luck." "did they ever catch the man, sir?" "they did. they caught him within a year after the theft." "i expect they give it 'im 'ot, sir?" "yes. he got a life-sentence, the same as mi--the same as that man got who was convicted the other day." at this lame conclusion the groom looked puzzled, and scattergood had to extricate himself. "you see, tom," he went on, "the value of what i lost was enormous." "it must have been a tidy haul to get the thief a sentence like that," said tom. "but maybe he give you a tap on the head into the bargain, sir." "he put a knife into me," said scattergood, "and the wound aches to this day." for some reason he felt an unwonted pleasure in pursuing this conversation with the sympathetic groom, and inwardly resolved that he would give him a handsome tip. "put a _knife_ into you, did he?" cried tom. "why, that's just like what happened to _me_ when i was coachman to his lordship. we was livin' in ireland, and it was the days of the land league. me and his lordship had been to ballymunny races, and his lordship had got his pockets stuffed full o' money as he'd won, and i don't say i hadn't won a bit myself, seein' as i allus backed the same 'osses as he did. well, we had about fifteen miles to drive in the dark, and before we starts his lordship says to me, 'tom, my lad,' he says, 'go round the town and buy me the most grievous big stick you can find in the place.' 'what's that for, my lord?' i says, for me and his lordship was a'most like brothers. 'tom,' he says, 'i've been losin' my 'orse-sense all day, and whenever that happens i knows there's trouble a-brewin'.' so i goes and buys him a stick, and a beauty it were, too, made o' bog oak, and that 'eavy that i couldn't 'elp feelin' sorry for the wife o' the man as was goin' to get it on the top of 'is 'ead. 'all right, tom,' says his lordship as he jumps on the car; 'and give the reins a turn round the palm o' your 'and.' so off we starts, and we 'adn't gone more than four miles when three men springs out on us just like shadows. 'look out, my lord,' i shouts; 'there's three on 'em!' his lordship, as was sitting just behind me, he hits out splendid, and i could 'ear his big stick going crack, crack on their 'eads. 'well done, my lord!' i shouts. '_hit_ 'em, my lord!' i says; 'give it 'em 'ome-brewed!' 'it's hittin' 'em that i'm after,' says he. 'i've made one on 'em comfortable. tom, you're a great boy for choosin' a stick; but what's become o' that big fellow?' 'he's on the near side, creepin' under the car,' i says; 'look out for that one, my lord; he's got a knife!' and i was just givin' the reins another turn round the palm o' my 'and when i feels summat sharp under my right shoulder-blade, and i begins catchin' my breath. the last as i remember was seein' his lordship bendin' over me, like as if he'd been my own mother. 'tom, my own darlin',' he says, 'if the black villains have killed you, it's a sorrowin' man i'll be for the rest of my days. but i've given that big one a sleepin'-draught as he won't wake up till the angel gabriel knocks at his bedroom door.'--i'd got it proper, i can tell you! touched the lung, too, that it did; and whenever i catches a bit o' cold and begins coughin', it's that painful that i can't----'" "ay, ay," said scattergood. "well, here's something that's good for an old wound--though," he muttered to himself, as he rode away, "it never made much difference to mine." he had given the man a sovereign. as the professor walked his horse down the yard, tom said to his pal, "'e must ha' bin a warm 'un in his young days. good-'earted, too. but why the old bloke should call his 'oss ethelberta, seeing he lost his money after all, licks me 'oller." "just look at the pair on 'em!" said the pal. "why, to see that mare walkin' down the yard, you might think as she was a little gel goin' to sunday-school. but you'll never persuade _me_ as she isn't foxin'. she'll do a down on him yet, you mark my word! she's as tricky as a woman. i can see it in her eye." "ha!" said tom, "that reminds me of something his lordship once said to me. it 'appened at the dublin 'orse show, as his lordship was one o' the judges, with me by to 'elp 'im. there was a roan mare just brought into the ring, and his lordship says to me, lookin' 'ard at the mare all the time, 'tom, my boy,' he says, 'did you ever 'ave a sweetheart?' 'yes, my lord,' i says, 'several.' 'are they livin' or dead?' says he. 'i never killed none on 'em, my lord,' i says; 'that's all _i_ knows about it.' 'treat 'em 'andsome, my boy, treat 'em 'andsome,' says he in the solemnest voice you ever 'eard; 'it's desperate bad luck on a man as has to do wi' 'osses when a' angry sweetheart dies on him. and look 'ere, tom,' he says in a whisper, 'from the way the back o' my 'ead's a-tinglin', _it's a' angry sweetheart as we're judgin' now_.--pass her down,' he says to the groom as were leadin' the mare, 'pass her down. divil a prize shall that one have! she's a dangerous bad 'oss." iii among professor scattergood's numerous admirers there have always been some to whom his arguments for the friendliness of the universe proved unconvincing. they would begin by pulling his logic to pieces, and conclude by saying, with the air of people who keep their strongest argument to the last: "it looks, at all events, as though the friendly universe had done our good professor a most unfriendly turn by depriving him of ethelberta and substituting the present mrs scattergood in her place." and there was no denying the force of the argument. for half a long lifetime john scattergood had lived his earnest days with little aid from those sources of spiritual vitality upon which most of us depend. love in all its finer essences had been denied him--denied him, as he knew better than anybody, by that very universe whose friendliness he had set himself to prove. among the many lonely souls who live in crowded places it would be hard to find one lonelier than he. even the demonstrated friendliness of the universe did not seem to thaw his heart, or to break down the barriers of his reserve. the surest means of discovering his inner mind was to put your ear to the keyhole on one of the many occasions when he was talking to himself. "_wie brennt mein alte wunde!_" is what you would often hear him say. mrs scattergood was said to have once been a very beautiful woman; and i can well believe it was even so. she was the daughter of a baronet, and had been brought up to think that the mission of women in this world is to have a good time. but her husband had thwarted this mission; at all events, he had not provided its fulfilment. and the lady made it a point of daily practice to remind him of the failure, driving the reminder home with the help of expletives learnt in her father's stables long ago. john scattergood would retire from these interviews talking to himself. "if i could keep her from the morphia," he would say, "i think i could bear the rest." he would then shut himself up in his study, would take out the miniature of ethelberta from his secret drawer--a foolish thing to do, but a thing which somehow he couldn't help; would shake his head and say for the thousandth time, "wie brennt mein alte wunde!" after which, having brushed aside a tear, he would take up his pen and continue his proof of the friendliness of the universe according to the inflexible method. if scattergood could have seen himself, as i see him in memory, seated in his quiet study, with the household skeleton, the philosophical thesis, and the gold-rimmed miniature of ethelberta, in their respective positions, forming as it were the three points of a mystic triangle, i think he might have discerned in the universe something of deeper import than ever appeared within the four corners of his philosophy. but alas! all q.e.d.'s are fatal to emotion, and it was q.e.d. that scattergood had placed at the end of his great thesis. in some respects he resembled that other great philosopher who became so absorbed in his proof of the existence of god that he forgot to say his prayers. the fact of the matter is, that after proving the ultimate nature of the universe to be friendly his heart was no warmer than before. indeed, his interest in that august object had stiffened into the chill rigidity of a professional pose. his thesis, by becoming demonstrably true, had ceased to be morally exciting. he actually looked forward to his afternoon ride as a means of getting the taste of the universe out of his mouth. by long and devious ways, john scattergood had thus arrived at the point from which he had set out; he had arrived, i mean, at that extremely common state of mind when one actual smile seen on the face of the world, or a moment of contact with any one of the innumerable friendly presences which the world harbours, was worth more to him, both as philosopher and man, than were all the achievements of the inflexible method, past, present, and to come. and i have now to record that such a smile was vouchsafed to him, and such a living contact provided, by the mediation of a four-footed beast. let no one suppose, however, that our professor was led astray by fatuous fancies concerning his mare. he did not jump to the conclusion that she was a reincarnation of the long-lost ethelberta. the inflexible method, thank god, saved him from that. but if you ask me how it all came about, i am bound to confess i don't know. all we can be sure of is that his mare did for professor scattergood something which a lifetime of reflection had been unable to accomplish. no doubt the lifetime of reflection had dried the fuel. but it was the influence of ethelberta that brought the flame. "it's quite true," he said one day, "that i prepare my lectures on horseback; and people tell me that i have fallen into a habit of preparing them aloud. but the fact is, i am going to deliver a new course; and i find that horse-exercise quickens the action of the brain--a necessary thing at my time of life, when one's powers of expression are on the wane, and new ideas increasingly difficult to put into form." "you ride a beautiful animal," said his interlocutor. "yes, and as good as she's beautiful." and then in his softest voice he repeated the line: "tra bell'e buona, non so qual fosse più." this favourable view of ethelberta's qualities was by no means convincing to professor scattergood's friends. we knew she was "bella"; but we doubted the "buona." the spectacle of an elderly doctor of divinity setting out for his daily ride on a magnificent racehorse in the pink of condition was indeed a vision to fill the bold with astonishment and the timid with alarm. "the man is mad," said some; "will no one warn him of his danger?" various attempts were made, but they came to nothing. knowing myself to be the least cogent of advisers, i kept silence to the last; but when all the others had failed i resolved to try my hand. "scattergood," i said, "that thoroughbred of yours is not a suitable mount for a man of your years. she ought to be ridden by a jockey. i wish to heaven you would sell her." "nothing in this world would induce me to part with ethelberta," he answered. "i'm sorry to hear it. there's no man living in england at this moment whose life is more precious than yours. we can't afford to lose you. then think of your----" i was going to say "your wife," but i checked myself in time: "think of your work. it's a very serious matter. sure as fate that brute"--("she's not a _brute_," he interrupted)--"sure as fate that beauty will run away with you one of these days and break your neck." "how do you know that?" he asked quietly. "because she's run away with you twice already, and you escaped only by a miracle. she'll do it again, and next time you may not be quite so fortunate." "she'll never do it again," he said in the same quiet voice. "how do you know that?" i said, thinking that i had turned the tables on him. "never mind how. i know it well enough." "by the inflexible method?" "of course not," he said with some annoyance. "there are different kinds of certainty, and this is one of the most certain of all." "more certain than the inflexible----?" "oh, damn the inflexible method!" he cried. "i'm sick to death of it. you'll do me a kindness by not mentioning it again." "all right; i'm as sick of it as you are. after all, it's not your philosophy i'm thinking of; what i am concerned about is your life. now, scattergood," i added--for i was an old friend,--"frankly, between you and me, don't you think you're a fool?" "my dear fellow, i am and always have been a ----" and here he used that objectionable word--"always have been a certain sort of fool. but not about ethelberta. we understand each other perfectly. she looks after me and takes care of me like a--like a mother. my life is absolutely safe in her hands--i mean, of course, on her back." "confound those mixed metaphors!" i cried. "that's the seventh i've heard to-day, and they're horribly confusing, even when they are corrected as you corrected yours. now, what on earth do you mean?" he looked at me curiously. "i mean," he said, "that ethelberta may be trusted to the uttermost." "scattergood," i said, "there's a sort of friendship in the universe which does not scruple on occasion to break every bone in a man's body, and i greatly fear that ethelberta may be one of its ministers. now, here's a plain question. would you be prepared to stand before your class to-morrow morning and bid them trust the universe for no better reasons than those on which you trust your life to the tender mercies of that bru----of ethelberta?" "i only wish i could find them reasons half as good." "half as good as what?" "as those for which i trust my life to ethelberta." "what are they?" "i can't tell you. if i did tell, the reasons would lose their force. but until they are uttered they are quite conclusive." "what!" i cried; "are the reasons _taboo_? have you found a magic formula?" "don't jest," he said. "the matter's far too serious. there is more at stake than the mere safety of my life." "then you admit your life _is_ at stake," said i; and i thought i had scored a point. "no, i don't. but other things are--things of far greater importance. my life, however, runs no risk from ethelberta." "then tell me this. who runs the bigger risk--you who trust your life to a beast for no reasons you can assign; or we, your disciples, who trust ourselves to the universe in the name of your philosophy?" "by far the bigger risk," he answered, "is yours." "then you mean to say that you have better reasons for trusting your beast than we have for trusting your system?" "i do." "you are quite serious?" "i am." "but follow this out," i said. "if we, your disciples, run the bigger risk in trusting ourselves to your system, you, its author, run the same risk yourself." "you're strangely mistaken," he answered. "surely," said i, "we are all in the same boat. what reasons can you have, other than those you have given us, for trusting your conclusion as to the friendliness of the universe?" "you forget," he said. "in addition to the reasons i have given you, i have all those which induce me to trust my life to ethelberta." "but how do they affect your philosophy?" "they affect it vitally." "in the way of confirmation or otherwise?" "confirmation." "you mean that your philosophy is already conclusively proved, and yet made more conclusive by ethelberta?" "put it that way, if you like." "is there no hope," i asked, "that you will be able one day to communicate the reasons to _us_?" "none," he answered. "but what i can do, and will do, if i live long enough, is to show that all of you are acting much as i am acting in regard to ethelberta." "but we are not all risking our lives on thoroughbred horses." "you are running far bigger risks than that," he said; "and you are fools not to see it. did i not tell you that i am revising my lectures?" "scattergood," i said, "it's plain to me that you will have to do one of two things. either you must radically change your system--or you must sell ethelberta. personally, i hope you'll do the last." "in any case," he replied, "i shall not sell ethelberta." "then," said i, "may the friendly universe preserve you from being killed." and with that i took my departure. iv that very afternoon, professor scattergood, arrayed in a pair of goodly riding-boots, went round to the stables to mount his mare. the groom met him as usual. "she's been wonderful restless all night, sir," said he. "she's broke her halter and a'most kicked the door out. and she's bitin' as though she'd just been married to the devil's son." "she wants exercise," said scattergood. "put the saddle on at once." "not me, sir!" answered the groom. "it's as much as a man's life's worth to go near her." "bring me the saddle, then, and i'll do it myself," said scattergood. he opened the door of the stable, and the moment the light was let in ethelberta announced her intentions by a smashing kick on the wooden partition. "have a care, sir," cried the terrified groom, as scattergood, with the saddle on his arm, passed through the door. "she'll give you no time to say yer prayers. look out, sir! she'll whip round on you like a bit o' sin and put her heel through you before you know where you are. good lord!" he added, addressing another man, "it's a _hexecution_! the gen'l'man'll be in heaven in less than half a minute." "ethelberta, ethelberta, what's the meaning of all this?" said scattergood in a quiet voice, as he faced the animal's blazing eyes. "come, come, sweetheart, let us behave for once like rational beings." and he put his arm round ethelberta's neck and rubbed his cheek against her nose. in five minutes the saddle was on, and scattergood, seated on as quiet a beast as ever submitted to bridle, was riding down the stable-yard. "that ole johnnie knows a trick or two about 'osses," said the groom as soon as the professor was out of hearing. "i'd give a month's wages to know how he quieted that mare. did ye 'ear 'im talkin' to 'er, bill? well, could you 'ear what 'e said? no? well, you listen the next time you 'ear 'im talkin' to her and see if you can get the very words 'e says. it's the _words_ as does it; and if we can find out what they are, it'll be worth 'undreds o' pounds to you and me. i tell yer, it's the _words_ as does it! i reckon as it's summat out o' the bible. why, when i was groom to lord charles i knowed a man as give scripture to 'osses regular. a psalm-smitin' ole teapot he were; and whenever we'd got a kicker, he used to put his 'ead in at the stable-door and say a hymn. then he'd go in and get 'old o' the oss's ear between his teeth and say texts o' scripture right into it's ear-'ole. i've knowed a gen'l'man give him five pounds for scripturin' a 'oss. only, don't you let on to the other blokes what i've told you now. keep it quiet, bill, and you be here wi' me when dr scattergood comes back at four o'clock." "all right," said bill; "we'll get the _words_--but they won't be no use to _us_ when we've got 'em. i've 'eard all about scripturin' 'osses, but you won't ketch me tryin' it on--i can tell yer _that_! you know that saller-faced man as works for bullivant--'im as limps on his left leg?" "do you mean 'im wi' the watery eyes?" asked the other. "that's 'im. well, he was takin' some polo-ponies to london, and one on 'em was a bit o' reg'lar hot ginger, and begins buckin' one day in the middle o' the road. there was a chap workin' in a field as sees what was goin' on, and 'e comes up and offers to scripture the pony for a pint o' ale. so he takes the pony's ear in his teeth and scriptures 'im same as that man did as was workin' wi' you at lord charles's. '_genesis and revelations_,' he says, whispering into the pony's ear; and the pony became as quiet as a lamb. the saller-faced chap 'eard 'im, and says 'e to 'imself, 'i'll remember them words.' so the next time as they had a kicker at bullivant's, the saller-faced chap thinks 'e'll try 'is 'and at scripturin' 'im. so out he goes for a drop o' whisky, to put a bit o' 'eart into 'im, for between you and me 'e didn't 'alf like his job. then he goes into the stables and makes a grab at the 'oss's ear. but the 'oss catches 'old of his breeches with his teeth and pitches 'im to the back o' the stable in no time. the saller-faced chap, seeing 'imself under the 'oss's 'eels, roars out '_genesis and revelations_' just as though 'is 'ouse was on fire. and no sooner had 'e spoken them words than the 'oss let 'im 'ave it red-'ot. broke 'is thigh in two places, that it did, and kep 'im in 'orspital three months. and that's 'ow 'e got 'is limp." "looks as though it were no use gettin' the right words unless you're the _right sort o' man_," said the other groom. "that's what does it," answered bill. "my old dad, as was in the balaklava charge, used to say as no man could scripture a 'oss unless he'd been _converted_." "i reckon that's what 'appened to old shiny-boots and his ethelberta. haven't i always said that he must 'a been a warm 'un in his young days? what about 'im puttin' his money on that 'oss as won the buddle stakes? and what about 'im bein' robbed of his winnings just as 'e was gettin' 'ome? he 'adn't got 'is white tie on then, bill, eh? what state must a man be in when 'e comes 'ome after a race and lets another feller pinch his money out of his inside pocket?" "drunk as a lord, no doubt," said bill; "though to see the old joker now you wouldn't think it." * * * * * meanwhile professor scattergood, after trotting three or four miles down the london road, had turned into the by-lane that led to the villages of medbury and charlton towers. up to this point the behaviour of ethelberta had been beyond reproach. but as they turned down the lane a tramp with a wooden leg, who was nursing a fire of sticks in the hedge, some fifty yards ahead, got up and stepped out into the road. for a few moments ethelberta did not see him, and maintained her swinging trot. professor scattergood tightened his grip. the mare went on until the tramp was not more than five paces distant, and then, suddenly noticing his deformity, she planted her fore-feet and stopped dead. scattergood, nearly unhorsed by the sudden stoppage, was thrown off his guard, and in momentary confusion of mind called out in his rasping voice, "steady, meg, steady!" "_meg_": the sound stung ethelberta like the lash of a whip, and in an instant she was off. professor scattergood did not lose his presence of mind. for a moment he tried to check the bolting mare, but feeling her mouth like iron he loosened his rein and let her race. he knew the road for the next five miles was fairly straight, except at one point; there was a long steep hill on this side of charlton towers, and he reflected that his mare was certain to be blown before she reached the top. he could keep his seat, and, barring a collision with some passing vehicle, the chances were that he would win through. he shouted, indeed, and tried such resources of language as his breathlessness allowed; but ethelberta was far beyond the reach of endearments, and the race had to be run. so scattergood sat tight and awaited the issue. his mind was perfectly clear. it seemed as if his desperate condition had given him a large quiet leisure for introspection. as objects on the road shot by him he noted each one; and, with a curious double consciousness, began watching the flow of his own thoughts. he even wondered at the calmness and lucidity of his mind, and asked himself the reason. "perhaps it is the imminence of death," he reflected; "but death, now that it has come so near, has no terrors. that is john hawksbury's cottage. i wonder if his son has returned from india. i must be careful on the bridge. god grant that we don't meet a cart!" they were nearing a village, and scattergood heard the pealing of bells mingled with the roar of the wind in his ear. as they shot past the church he saw a wedding-party standing aghast in the churchyard. he saw the bride, leaning on the bridegroom's arm. the party had just emerged from the porch, and the look of terror on the bride's face was clearly visible to scattergood. "poor girl," he reflected; "she'll take this for a bad omen." he saw men running and heard their shouts. at the end of the village street a brave lad stood with arms outstretched. "a hero," thought scattergood; "he will surely be rewarded in the resurrection of the just." they were out of the village in a flash. a furlong beyond it the road turned sharply at right angles. "she will jump the hedge at that point," thought scattergood; "i must be ready." ethelberta swung round the bend with hardly a check; but the rider, ready for that also, still kept his seat. a moment later she leapt over some obstacle in the road which scattergood, short-sighted as he was, could not see. his glasses were gone, and the cold wind beating in his eyes had half blinded him. he was losing the sense of his whereabouts, and there were moments when he saw himself as a mere inanimate object held in the grip of the brute force that was pulsing beneath him. "and yet," he reflected, "i am not utterly abandoned after all. i know what is happening; the leaf on the torrent knows nothing. a point for a lecture on necessity and freedom--all the difference between the two involved in that single fact! to have one's wits about him and be unafraid--what a power is that to break the ruling of fate! nothing save a shock can unhorse me. it is a match between pure reason in scattergood and madness in ethelberta. would that it had been so in the old days! but, please god, i shall beat her this time. ha! she's giving in!" they were breasting the two-mile hill on this side charlton towers, and with the rise in the gradient came a slackening of the pace. ethelberta, with head down, still held the bit between her teeth; but the first rush of her speed was exhausted. scattergood felt the difference instantly, and marked its gradual increase, promising himself that he would have her in hand before they reached the level ground on the top of the hill. some distance ahead of him he could dimly see the form of a tall tree. with admirable presence of mind he roughly measured the distance and said to himself: "on passing that tree, but not before, i will tighten the rein, and gradually tighten it until on reaching the summit i shall have completely pulled her up." they were almost abreast of the tree when a dark-plumaged bird, frightened from its roost, fluttered out of the upper branches and flew with a whir of wings right athwart the road. at the sight of the black object, flung as it were into her eyes, ethelberta made a rapid swerve, and, placing her near fore-foot on a rolling stone, plunged forward with her head between her knees. down she came, almost turning a somersault with the violence of her impetus, and professor scattergood, hurled far out of his saddle, fell prone with a terrific shock on the newly metalled road. * * * * * when consciousness at length returned it brought no pain of wounds; but cold pierced him like a knife and a shock of sounds was in his ears. a flood of memories was sweeping over him. beginning in the distant past, and streaming through the years with incredible rapidity, they terminated abruptly in a vision seen far below him, as though he were a watcher in the skies. he saw a deeply wounded man lying outstretched, as it seemed, on the circumpolar ice, and a horse stood by him like a ministering priest. the horse was warming the man with its breath, and the steam of its body rose high into the frozen air. the consciousness of scattergood, hovering in a present which had well-nigh become a past, was on the borderland which separates a running experience from a completed fact--vaguely suffering, yet aloof from the sufferer, whom he seemed to remember as one who long ago endured the bitterness of death. the vision was hardly more than a spectacle, the last link in a long chain of memories, and the past would have claimed it entirely had not the stunning sounds still fettered some fragment of conscious distress in the body of the freezing man. the din increased, and in great bewilderment of mind he began to seek for its cause. now it was one thing, now another. "this sound," he thought, "is the grind and roar of colliding ice-floes and the crackle of the northern lights." the sounds thus identified immediately became something else. they seemed to scatter and retreat, and then, concentrating again, returned as the tolling of an enormous bell. nearer and nearer it came till the quivering metal lay close against his ear and the iron tongue of the bell smote him like a bludgeon. a warmth passed over his face and a troubled thought began to disturb him. "i am sleeping through the summer; i must rouse myself before winter comes back." and with a great reluctant effort he opened his eyes. a scarlet veil hung before them. he tried to thrust it aside with his hands, which seemed to fail him and miss the mark. succeeding at last, he saw a vast creature standing motionless above him, its hot breath mingling with his, its great eyes, only a hand-breadth away, looking with infinite tenderness into his own. he tried to recollect himself, and something in his hand gave him a clue. "this thing," he mused, "is surely my handkerchief. it belongs to john scattergood. it is one of a dozen his poor drug-sodden wife gave him on christmas day. and here, close to me, is ethelberta. how red her feet are!" and he stared vacantly at a deep gash on ethelberta's chest, and watched the great gouts that were dripping from her knees and forming crimson pools around her hoofs. the crimson pools were full of mystery; they fascinated and troubled him; they were problems in philosophy he couldn't solve. "surely," he thought, "i _have_ solved them, but forgotten the solution. i have lost the notes of my lecture. dyed garments from bozrah--red, red! the colour of my doctor's gown--i have trodden the wine-press alone. the colour of poppies--drowsy syrups--deadly drugs! the ground-tint of the universe--a difficult problem! strange that a friendly universe should be so red. gentlemen, i am not well to-day--don't laugh at a sick man. the red is quite simple. it only means that someone is hurt. not i, certainly. who can it be? ah, now i see. poor old girl!" and he feebly reached out his handkerchief, already soaked with his own blood, as though he would staunch the streaming wounds of ethelberta. as he did this, the great bell broke out afresh. it fell away into the distance. a second joined it; a third, a fourth, a fifth, until a whole peal was ringing and the air seemed full of music and of summer warmth. then scattergood began to dream his last dream, ineffably content. he stood by the open door of a church: inside he could see the ringers pulling at the ropes. and ethelberta, young and happy as himself, was leaning on his arm. "sweetheart," she whispered, "let us behave ourselves like rational beings." he laughed and would have spoken. but a din of clattering hoofs, which drowned the pealing of the bells, struck him dumb. the swift image of a grey-headed man, riding a maddened horse, shot out of the darkness, passed by, and vanished; and the wedding-party stood aghast. "who is yonder rider?" he said, with a great effort, bending over ethelberta. "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," said a soft voice in his ear. a thousand echoes caught up the words and flung them far abroad. then thunders awoke behind, and rolled after the echoes like pursuing cavalry. "_a man of sorrows_," cried the echoes. "_he has come through great tribulations_," the thunders shouted in reply. on went the chase, the flying echoes in retreat, the deep-voiced thunder in pursuit. then scattergood saw himself swept into the torrent of riders, and it seemed as if the solid frame of things were dissolved into a flight of whispers and a pursuit of shouts. a fugitive secret, that fled with unapproachable speed, was the quarry, and the hunters were billows of sound, and the rhythm of beating hoofs gave the time to their undulations. a tide of joy awoke within the dreamer; he was horsed on the thunder; he was leading the field; he was close on the heels of the game; he was captain of the host to an innumerable company of loud-voiced and meaningless things. then would come expansions, accelerations, and sudden checks. fissures yawned in front; mountains barred the way; the time was broken, and voices from the rear were calling a halt. but the thunders have the bit between their teeth; they are clearing the chasms; they are leaping over the mountain tops; and clouds of witnesses are shouting "well done!" the wide heavens fill with the tumult; myriads of eager stars are watching, and great waters are clapping their hands. "who is this that leads the chase?" a voice was asking. "who is this that feels the thunder leap beneath him like a living thing?" "it is i--john scattergood--it is i!" and ever before him fled the secret; it mocked the chasing squadrons, and the wild winds aided its flight. and now the pursuer perceived himself pursued. a swarm of troubled thoughts, on winged horses, was overtaking him. they swept by on either side; they forged ahead; they pressed close and jostled him on his rocking seat. there was a shock; the thunder collapsed beneath him, and he fell and fell into bottomless gloom. suddenly his fall was stayed. a hand caught him; a presence encircled him, something touched him on the lips, and a voice said, "at last! at last!" * * * * * professor scattergood was sitting on the stones, his body bowed forward, his hands feebly clasped round the head of his motionless horse; the breath of life was leaving him, and his heart was almost still. then the dying flame flickered once more. he opened his eyes, gazing into the darkness like one who sees a long-awaited star. his fingers tightened; he seemed to draw the head of ethelberta a little nearer his own; and it was as if they two were holding some colloquy of love. in the twinkling of an eye it was done, and the pallor of death crept over the wounded face. the clasped hands, with the blood-stained handkerchief still between them, slowly relaxed; the glance withered; the arms fell; the head drooped. it rested for a moment on the soft muzzle of the beast; and then, with a quiet breath, the whole body rolled backwards and lay face upward to the stars. * * * * * clouds swept over the sky, the winds were hushed, and the dense darkness of a winter's night fell like a pall over the dead. not a soul came nigh the spot, and for hours the silence was unbroken by the footfall of any living creature or by the stirring of a withered leaf. and far away in the dead's man's home lay an oblivious woman, drenched in the sleep of opium. it was near midnight when a carrier's cart, drawn by an old horse and lit by a feeble lantern, began to climb the silent hill. weary with the labours of a long day, the carrier sat dozing among the village merchandise. suddenly he woke with a start: his cart had stopped. leaning forward, he peered ahead; and the gleam of his lantern fell on the stark figure of a man lying in the middle of the road. a larger mass, dimly outlined, lay immediately beyond. raising his light a little higher, the carrier saw that the further object was the dead body of a horse. farmer jeremy and his ways mr jeremy's system for the regulation of human life was summed up in the maxim, "put your back into it"; and a lifetime of practising what he preached has endowed that part, or aspect, of his person with an astonishing vitality and developed it to an enormous size. not without reason did our yeomanry sergeant exhibit his stock joke by informing jeremy on parade that if only his head had been set the other way he would have had the finest chest in the british army. but the full significance of jeremy's back was not to be perceived by one who looked upon it from the drill-sergeant's point of view. it was not only the broadest but the most expressive organ of the farmer's body, and a poet's eye was needed to interpret the meaning it conveyed. for myself, i should never have suspected that it meant anything more than great physical strength employed in a strenuous life, had not a poetical friend of mine taken the matter up and enlightened me. my friend and i were crossing a field by the footpath, and jeremy, walking rapidly in the same direction, was a few yards ahead. "there goes a man," i whispered, "who is worth your study. you could write a poem about him. he's one of the few remaining specimens of a type that is becoming extinct. he represents agriculture as it was before the advent of science and radical legislation. he is the most honest and prosperous farmer in the county: a man, moreover, who has endured many sorrows and conquered them. let us overtake him, for i should like you to see him face to face." "not so," said my friend. "the man's history, as you have told it, and much more beside, is written on his back. let us remain, therefore, as we are, and study him where such men can best be studied, from the rear. his back, i perceive, especially the upper portion of it, is the principal organ of his intelligence. observe, he is thinking with his back even now--he hitched his trousers up a moment ago. his thoughts are pleasant--you can see it in the rhythmical movement of the muscles under his coat. he has some great design on hand and is sure he can carry it through--see how his shoulders, as he swings along, seem to be tumbling forward over his chest. he has had great sorrows--the droop in the cervical vertebræ confirms it; he has conquered them--hence that forward plunge into his task. he understands his business; of course; for the back is the organ by which all business is understood. he is honest; he is temperate; he has never broken the seventh commandment. you can read his innocence in the back of his head--i wish mine were like his." and my poetical friend turned round and showed me his villainous cerebellum. thus enlightened, i began a closer study of the farmer's habits. i saw a new significance in an odd trick he had of suddenly swinging round on his heels at the interesting point of a conversation and delivering his remarks, and sometimes shaking his fist, with his back to the interlocutor. i say his back, but functionally considered it was not so; since at those moments the functions of the two sides of his body were interchanged, the organ of expression being the side now towards you, with every smile and frown accurately registered in the creases of the coat as they followed the movements of the muscles beneath. so, too, when jeremy laughed. no doubt his face, while laughing, was expressive enough, but you couldn't see it, because it was turned the other way. what you did see was the farmer's coat, _a tergo_, twitching up and down as though pulled by a cord and then suddenly released like a venetian blind; and this was quite enough to ensure your hearty participation in the merriment. i also managed to take several interesting photographs from the rear; and (may the saints forgive him!) a young gentleman of my acquaintance once attempted to snapshot the hinder parts of jeremy while in church. unfortunately the light was bad, and the negative proved a failure. otherwise my poetical friend, for whom i intended the photograph, would certainly have found in it material for a new poem. be it recorded that jeremy when engaged in devotion did not kneel, but stretched his body forward from the seat to the book-rest, presenting his back to the heavens and his face to the inner regions of the earth; and, as his body was very long and the pew very wide, the back formed a solid and substantial bridge over which you might have trundled a wheelbarrow laden with turnips. no photograph, indeed, save one of the cinematograph order, the apparatus for which was too large to lie concealed beneath the young gentleman's waistcoat, would have reproduced the creepings, ripplings, and dimplings of the farmer's coat. these gave animation to the picture; but even without them, the mere contour of the mass, thrust upwards like the back of a diving whale, was a spectacle of vigour and concentrated purpose of which my poetical friend would not have lost the significance. jeremy was the oldest of the duke's tenantry, and the land he farmed, which was of high quality throughout, had been held by his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and by ancestors of yet remoter date. if there is any calling in which heredity is of importance to success it is surely the farmer's, and jeremy was fully conscious that he "had it in the blood," and recognised the debt he owed to his fathers before him. people are wont to criticise the old-fashioned farmer as a stiff and unadaptable person; but what struck me about jeremy, who was old-fashioned enough, was the adaptiveness and flexibility of his mind in dealing with the ever-varying conditions the farmer has to face. he had an extraordinary instinct for doing the right thing at the right time, and handled his land as though it were a living thing, with a kind of unconscious tact which seemed to me the exact opposite to that blind and mechanical following of habit which so often, but so mistakenly, is said to be the standing fault of his class. obstinate and incredulous as he seemed to the new teachings of veterinary or agricultural science, i yet noticed that jeremy managed to absorb enough of these things to produce the results he desired; and though he never absorbed as much of them as the experts required, his crops were always larger and his stock healthier than those of his neighbours whose farming was strictly according to the modern card. i have read one or two books on the nature of soils, and it is not without significance to me that the little, the very little, useful knowledge i have of these things was derived not from the books but from mr jeremy. there was a bit of ground in my garden where i could make nothing grow, and i hunted in vain through all the gardening books i could find for a remedy, and even went the length of consulting some of the gifted authors, two of whom were ladies. i sent them specimens of the soil for examination; they teased them with formulæ and tormented them with acids; they boiled them in retorts and pickled them in glass tubes; they sent me the names of marauding bacteria whose lodgings they had discovered in that morsel of earth: and i, following their instructions, dosed the land with atrocious chemicals, until the earth-worms sickened and the very snails forsook the tainted spot. still nothing would grow. then came mr jeremy. he picked up a handful of the soil; gazed at it as a lapidary gazes at diamonds; smelt it; felt it tenderly with his forefinger; spat upon it; rubbed the mixture on his breeches; inspected the result, first on his breeches and then on his hand--and now my barren patch is blossoming like the garden of the lord. the others had advised me to try i know not what--nitrates of this and phosphates of that, sulphates of the other and carbonates of something else. mr jeremy said, "chuck a cart-load o' fine sand on her and then rip her up." mr jeremy, i have said, was aware that his roots struck deeply into the past, and this consciousness, i believe, helped to give him that confidence in himself without which no man can successfully till the earth or battle with destiny--the two things, i believe, being at bottom much the same. his farmhouse, so far as i could judge, was built--and built of almost imperishable stone--in the later years of the reign of charles ii., and had never been structurally modified since its erection. some of the out-buildings were of yet earlier date. scattered about in odd corners were not a few interesting relics of the past. for example, there was a case of coins, which had been arranged for jeremy by the late rector's wife, representing every reign from charles i. to george iv., every one of which coins had been dug up on the farm. in the big courtyard there was a block of hard stone scored with grooves and notches, where the troopers in some forgotten battle were said to have sharpened their swords; on the outside wall was a row of rings and stables where the same troopers had tethered their horses. in the cellar there was a collection of large shot, which there was reason to think had been stored there at the time of the forgotten battle; and with these were a lot of iron buckles, and broken tobacco-pipes of ancient form, which had been dug up in a mound on the hillside through which jeremy was cutting a drain. a good pint-measure of human teeth, in excellent preservation, had been discovered in the same place, and these were kept in an old tobacco-box. connected with all this, i suppose, were the names of several of the fields on the farm: one of which was called "the slaughters"; another, "horses' water"; another, "the guns." and besides these, which reminded one of "old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago," there were two other fields, the names of which were also interesting to me. one, a beautiful meadow with a southern slope, was "abbot's vineyard," and the big pond with the aspens beside it was "benedict's pool." of these names the explanation was utterly lost; nor could i invent a theory, for the nearest religious house of pre-reformation times was many miles away. the other field was called "quebec," and the coppice at its upper end was "monckton wood." these latter names i am able to explain. several of jeremy's ancestors had been to the wars, among them his great-great-grandfather silas jeremy, who had fought under wolfe at the capture of quebec, and probably under monckton in some earlier campaign. in the house there were several mementoes of this man: the identical george ii. shilling he had received on enlisting--proving, as jeremy would often say, that his great-great-grandfather was a "sober" man; a gold watch with a beautifully executed design of the death of wolfe engraved on the case, said to have been presented to silas on his return from the wars by the reigning duke; and, above all, a flint-lock musket, with bayonet attached, which jeremy asserted his ancestor had used in the battle, but which i judged on examination to have been of french manufacture, and therefore most probably a relic picked up from the battle-field--perhaps the identical musket along whose barrel some french grenadier had taken aim at the noble heart of wolfe--who knows? another memorial of this ancestor--a pretty obvious one--i can myself claim to have identified. it was an obstinate rule of the farm that the annual "harvest-home" should be held on september ; and even if the harvest was much belated and only a portion then gathered in, still september was the date, provided only that it did not fall on a sunday. september , i need hardly say, is the anniversary of the battle of the heights of abraham. the coincidence had been entirely forgotten by the jeremys, and was unrecorded in the traditions of our village; but not many days after i had pointed it out, the gossips having been at work in the meantime, an old man came in from a neighbouring parish and told me "as how" his father had talked with a man who knew another man who had been present at the jeremys' harvest-home in , when silas jeremy, who had just come back from foreign parts, and whose tomb was in the churchyard, sang a song about the taking of quebec, which the old man's father used to sing--though he himself couldn't remember it--and declared that for all time to come the feast should be held on quebec day, and on no other. this little circumstance, i may say in passing, was the beginning of my friendship with the jeremy who forms the subject of the present story. my discovery of the coincidence gave him a most exaggerated opinion of my abilities and worth. to quote his own words, it proved me to be "a gentleman as knows what's what"--a characteristic which, so far as i am aware, has never been revealed to anybody else. and jeremy's good opinion of me was yet further enhanced when he learnt that i had twice visited the plains of abraham; that i knew the place by heart; that i had climbed up the goat-path by which his ancestor had scaled the heights, and had laid my head on the spot where wolfe met his most enviable death. he would have me into his house that very night to tell him all about it; showed me the george ii. shilling and the gold watch; took down the old musket and let me handle it and put it to my shoulder and even pull the trigger; spent two hours in rapt attention while i read out parkman's account of the battle; and finally summed up the whole campaign and its significance in one sweeping comment, "by gum, sir, them fellers put their backs into it, and that's _just_ what they did!" the same held true, i should think, of jeremy's grandfather, to judge by another relic carefully treasured in the house. this was an enormous iron crowbar, the mere lifting of which was a challenge to "put your back into it." with this weapon the jeremy of that day had successfully defended himself against a crowd of rascals who came out to burn his ricks in ' . some memories of that fight were still extant in the village, and a bonny fight it must have been. my informant, an eyewitness of the scene, was too nearly imbecile to stand cross-examination; but what he remembered was to the point. aware of the impending danger, jeremy had built his ricks that year within the defences of his courtyard, the walls of which he had rendered unscalable by various devices. it only remained, therefore, to defend the gate; and here were posted timothy caine with a maul, job henderson with a flail, an unnamed woman with a cauldron of flour to fling in the face of the enemy, and the farmer with the crowbar. these won the day; and more i cannot tell you, because my informant's language, which i could never induce him to vary, became extremely metaphorical at this point: "master jeremy, he give 'em pen and ink: pen and ink is what he give 'em with the crowbar, sir, that he did; there was none on 'em wanted hitting twice, no, not one; and, my eye! to see the flour a-flying! what a steam it made! i can see it now." agricultural experts who visited our parish, though forced to admire the excellence of jeremy's farming, were wont to criticise him for being "too slow." now there, i think, they were distinctly wrong. i have nothing to say against agricultural science: i wish there was more of it; but if it has a weakness it lies in a certain tendency to be "quick" precisely at those points where jeremy was triumphantly "slow." his slowness was simply the instinctive timing of his action to the movements of nature, who is also "slow" in relation to yet higher powers. you would often think that he was dawdling; but if you looked into the matter you were sure to find that just then nature was dawdling too, and that jeremy was beating her at a waiting game. so, too, if you watched a python creeping from branch to branch or lying coiled in a glass case you would judge it to be the slowest of beasts; but not if you saw it springing on its prey. there was much of the wisdom of the serpent in mr jeremy, as there must be in every man who earns his living by battle with the natural order of the world. "i wakes regularly at five o'clock," he said. "but i never gets up till a quarter past. what do i think about in that quarter of an hour? why, i spends it in _cutting out_." by "cutting out" he meant the process of mentally arranging the day's work for himself and for every man on the farm. the python on the branch, i imagine, is often engaged in "cutting out." "in farming," he added, for he was giving a lesson, "you ought to cut out fresh every day, and not every week, as some farmers do--though i've knowed them as never cut out at all. and cutting out's a thing you can never learn in books and colleges. it comes by experience--and a light hand. sometimes you must cut out _rough_, and sometimes you must cut out _fine_--mostly according to the weather and the time o' year--and always _leave a bit somewhere as isn't cut out at all_. and when you've done the cutting out, take a look out o' the window and tap your glass. do it the minute you jumps out o' bed. and if there's been a change in the wind during the night, cut out _again_ while you're pulling your breeches on and tear up what you've cut out already. and don't give no orders to anybody till you've had your breakfast--leastways a cup o' tea; it clears a man's head and lets you see if you've been making any mistakes. i've often cut out six or seven times between waking and giving the day's orders--what with the tricks of the weather and my head not being as clear as it ought to have been." and i wondered how often napoleon had done the same thing. indeed, if i may venture on a quite innocent paradox, there is a kind of slowness which takes the form of rapidity in reducing one's pace. such slowness is nothing but inverted speed, and is highly effective in farming, in war, and in many other things. and of mr jeremy we may say that whereas, on the one hand, he was extremely slow in the acquisition of new knowledge, on the other he was equally quick to check himself in the application of such knowledge as he possessed already. this gave him, in the eyes of superficial observers, the appearance of being "slow." at the same time it enabled him to make a better thing out of farming than any of his neighbours, some of whom had been trained in agricultural colleges. i have to confess that my acquaintance with mr jeremy has not been without a certain demoralising effect. it has corrupted the brightness of many comfortable truths which excellent preceptors taught me in my youth. i will not say that my hold on these truths has altogether vanished; but, thanks to mr jeremy's influence, i have learned to see them in so many new lights, and with so many qualifications, that for purposes of platform oratory on all questions connected with the land and its uses i have entirely lost the very little effectiveness i once had. there was a time when if anyone mentioned the land i always wanted to make a speech. now i feel--what no doubt i ought to have felt then--that i must hold my tongue. to be quite frank, my views on the land have become confused, hesitating, and politically ineffective. that a farmer owning his own land was _cæteris paribus_ necessarily better off than a tenant once seemed to me a truth so plain as not to be worth discussion. but if i had to speak on that point now, i should hesitate and hedge about to a degree which would force any intelligent audience to regard me as a fool. instead of speaking out loud and strong for peasant proprietorship, i should be thinking all the time of the three peasant proprietors in our neighbourhood--george corey, charles narroway, and billy hoare, who are the meanest, the stingiest, the most underhand and generally despicable rascals i have ever met. were a resolution placed before the meeting in favour of bringing the townspeople back on to the land, i should say in support that while it is infinitely sad to see the real peasantry drifting into the towns, it is yet worse to see people like prendergast, the ex-draper, drifting out of the towns and setting up as country gentlemen. i should want to tell the audience all about prendergast and the hideous human packing-case he has built on the opposite hillside; how he swindled the village shopkeeper out of twenty pounds; how he sweats his labourers just as he sweated the poor girls who used to serve behind his counter; how he told me to go to the devil when i begged him not to build his abominable house where it would spoil the view: and then i should want to add a few details about his personal habits which i am afraid would cause the ladies to walk out of the room. and i should wind up by saying, amid the derisive laughter of the audience, that one reason, at all events, why the real peasants go _into_ the towns is to escape from slavery to these pinchbeck fellows who come _out_ of the towns. i should want to quote--but i am afraid my courage would have already broken down--what jeremy once said to me:--"the dook--when did you ever hear of any man going into the town as worked on _his_ estate? but as for this 'ere prendergast, i wonder the very pigs stop in his stye." undoubtedly it was due to jeremy's influence that i came to appreciate this side of the matter. he also taught me to regard the tenant farmer as superior to all other varieties of his class. i know it is wrong-headed, generalising from a particular case and all that--but i would rather be wrong-headed with jeremy, who took a back-view of everything, than right-headed with some forward spirits who treat the land as a _corpus vile_ for political experiments. and what logical mind could resist arguments like the following, back-views though they be? "it takes _two_, sir," said jeremy, "for to handle the land. a nobleman to own it, and a farmer to cultivate it. there's nothing that gives you _confidence_ like having a real gentleman behind you--and the dook's a real gentleman if ever there was one. and you want confidence in farming--and that's what these 'ere radicals don't see. i don't want none o' _their_ safeguards! give me the dook--he's safeguard enough for me! and what safeguard have you when fellers like prendergast begin buying up the land? look at _his_ tenants--not a real farmer among 'em, no, and not one as can make both ends meet. these little landlords are the men they ought to shoot at, not the big 'uns. now isn't it a wonderful thing that my family and the dook's has kept step with one another for a matter of two hundred years? eight dooks in that time and eight jeremys--one jeremy to each dook! but who'll ever keep step with prendergast? who'll ever _want_ to? why, i wouldn't be seen walking down the street with him, no, not if you was to give me a thousand pounds. and if he was to offer me his best farm rent-free to-morrow, i'd tell him to go and boil hisself. "no, sir," he continued, "it don't pay to own the land you farm; and don't you believe them as tells you it does. leastways, it pays a sight better to farm under a good landlord. them as can't make farming pay under a landlord, can't make it pay at all. now look at me and then look at charley shott. me and charley started the same year, him with acres of his own, and me with acres under the dook, rented all round at twenty-eight shillings an acre. and where are we both now after thirty years? why, if charley's land, and all he's made on it, and all he's put into it, were set at auction to-morrow, i could buy him up twice over! and me paying over five hundred pounds a year rent for thirty years, and him not paying a penny. how does that come about? well, you're not a farmer, and you wouldn't understand if i told you. but i'll tell you one thing as perhaps you can understand. it hurts the land to break it up. and it _hurts_ the land still more to _sell_ it. now i dare say you never heard of that before." i confessed that i had not. "well, it's a fact. when you break land up it won't _keep_. it goes like rotten apples: first a bit goes rotten here and then a bit there; and the rottenness spreads and runs together. and as to _selling_, i tell you there's something in the land _as knows when you're goin' to sell it, and loses heart_. i've seen the same thing in 'osses. it takes the land longer to get used to a new master than it does a 'oss; and there's some land as never will. "no, sir, i say again, if you want to make farming _pay_, take a farm on a big estate, one that's never been broke up and's never likely to be, one that's been in the same hands for hundreds o' years, one that's never been shaken up and messed with and slopped all over with lawyer's ink, and made sour with lawyer's lies. never mind if the rent's a bit stiffish. rent never bothered _me_." i ventured to dissent from these opinions, for i had given lectures on political economy, and i knew of at least four different theories of rent all at variance with jeremy's--and with one another. perhaps i should have succeeded better had i known of only one. but, knowing of four, i may have become a little confused in my attempts to confute farmer jeremy. not that this made very much difference. on all questions relating to the nature of land and its uses jeremy was a mystic, and orthodox political economy was as futile to his mind as it was to mr ruskin's. every position i took up was immediately stormed by the rejoinder, "ah, well, you're not a farmer, and you don't understand." i could not help remembering that i had often been overthrown in more abstruse arguments by the same sort of answer. i might, indeed, have countered by saying, "ah, well, mr jeremy, you're not an economist, and _you_ don't understand." but it occurred to me that the reply would be feeble. "i tell you," he went on, "that good land _likes_ to be high-rented. it sort o' keeps it in humour. land _likes_ to be owned by a gentleman, and keeps its heart up accordin'. whenever the rent o' land goes down, the quality goes down too. i've noticed it again and again." i tried to indicate that this last statement was an inversion of cause and effect, but the argument made not the faintest impression on mr jeremy, who merely brushed away a fly that had settled on his nose, and continued: "i never spoke to the dook but once. i met him one morning riding to hounds with lady sybil and lady agatha. as soon as he sees me he trots his horse up to where i was standing and holds out his hand. 'jeremy,' says he, 'i want to shake hands with you. you're a splendid specimen of the british farmer.' 'thank you, your grace,' i says; 'and you're a splendid specimen of the british dook,' for i was never afraid of speaking my mind to anyone. at that his grace bursts out laughin', and so did lady sybil and lady agatha too. 'let me introduce you to my two daughters,' says he. so he introduces me, and i can tell you i stood up to 'em like a man, though i did keep my hat in my hand all the time. 'well, jeremy,' says he, 'you've got your farm in tip-top condition'; and then he begins talking about putting up some new buildings, as me and the agent had been talking over before. 'we'll put 'em up next spring,' says his grace; 'and remember, jeremy, that in all that concerns the development of this farm you have me behind you.' 'i've never forgotten it, your grace,' i says, 'and i never shall. and i'm not the only one who remembers it. _the land_ remembers it too, your grace,' i says. 'i hope it does, jeremy,' says he, 'for i love it.' and i never see a young lady look prettier than lady agatha did when she heard her father say them words." i had heard this story so often from farmer jeremy, and always with the same reference to lady agatha at the end, that i was familiar with every word of it. he was growing old, and i believe that in the course of the year he managed to tell the story a hundred times over. "i was coming home from market last saturday," said he, "and a lot of other farmers was in the same compartment with me. we begins talkin' about the dook, and i happened to tell 'em about that time when i met his grace with lady sybil and lady agatha. there was a chap sitting in one corner as didn't belong to our lot, and as soon as he hears the dook's name mentioned he drops his paper and begins listening. well, i never see such a rage anywhere as that man got into when i told 'em how i kept my hat in my hand while talking to the ladies. regular insultin' is what he was; and i can tell you i never came nearer giving a man one in the eye than i did him. i believe i'd ha' done it if there'd been room in the carriage for him to put up his hands and make a square fight on it. i don't say as he weren't a plucky chap too; for there wasn't a man in the carriage as couldn't ha' knocked his head off with the flat of his hand, if he'd had a mind to. 'look here, you fellows,' he says, 'you're a lot of blasted idiots, that's what you are. it's because of the besotted ignorance of men like you that england has the worst land-system in the world. slaverin' and grovellin' before a lot o' rotten dooks--why, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves! i'll bet that dook o' yours and his two painted gals was mounted on fine horses and dressed up to the nines.' 'of course they was,' i says, 'and so they ought to be.' 'well,' says he, 'who paid for the horses and the clothes--and the paint?' 'here,' i says, jumping up from my seat, 'you drop the paint, or i'll pitch you out o' that winder.' 'well, then,' says he, 'who paid for the horses and the clothes?' 'i neither know nor care,' says i; 'so long as they was paid for, it's no business of mine or yourn who paid for 'em.' '_you paid for 'em_, you fool,' says he. 'oh, indeed,' says i. 'and now, young man, perhaps you'll allow me to give you a word of advice.' 'fire away,' says he. 'well,' i says, 'the next time your missus has a washin' day, you just wait till she's made the copper 'ot, and then jump into it and boil yourself!'" the "chap" in the railway carriage was by no means the only person to whom mr jeremy addressed this drastic advice. it was his usual mode of clinching an argument when his instincts supported a conclusion to which his intelligence could not find the way. this method of arriving at truth was especially useful in regard to politics and theology, in both of which mr jeremy took a lively, or even violent, interest. needless to say, his political aversions were of the strongest, and mr lloyd george was the statesman who had to bear the hottest flame of jeremy's wrath. more than once i have seen him fling his weekly paper on the floor with the words, "i wish this 'ere lloyd george would jump into the copper and boil hisself"; and on my remarking that i thought this a rather inhuman suggestion, he would wave his arm round the room, in a manner to indicate the entire liberal party, and say, "i wish the whole lot on 'em would jump into coppers and boil themselves." as to theology, i seldom dared to address a hint of my heresies to mr jeremy. but on my once saying to another person, in his presence, something to the effect that i did not believe in eternal damnation, he quickly crossed over to where i was sitting, and, giving me a rather ugly dig with his powerful forefinger, said, "look here! you just jump into the copper and boil yourself." a wise stupidity was the keynote of mr jeremy's life. another expression reserved for occasions when great emphasis was needed, was "a finished specimen." a thing, in mr jeremy's eyes, deserved this title when its general condition was so bad that nothing worse of its kind could be conceived, and the expression accordingly was only used after the ordinary resources of descriptive language had given out. it was applied to persons as well as to things. mr lloyd george was, naturally, "a finished specimen": so was the german emperor: so was dr crippen: so was a lady of uncertain reputation who "had taken a cottage" in the neighbourhood. a wet harvest, a badly built hayrick, a measly pig, a feeble sermon by the curate, were all "finished specimens." once when the curate, getting gravelled for lack of matter at the end of five minutes--for he was preaching _ex tempore_--abruptly concluded his sermon by promising to complete the subject next week, i heard jeremy whisper to his wife, "well, _he_'s a finished specimen, that he is." nothing irritated the good man so much as an unfinished job, and the fact that a thing was unfinished was precisely what he meant to express when he called it "a finished specimen." a great deal of human language, especially philosophical language, seems to be constructed on the same principle. mr jeremy was a regular church-goer. the church in his eyes was part of the established order of nature, on due observance of which the farmer's welfare depends, and merely extended into the next world those desirable results which sound instincts, punctuality, and "putting your back into it" produced in this. on week-days mr jeremy farmed the broad acres of the "dook"; on sundays he farmed palestine, and occasionally drove a straight furrow clean across the back of the universe. to both operations he applied the same methods, the same instincts, the same ideas. i confess that i have often smiled with the air of a superior person when listening to a highly trained cathedral choir proclaiming to the strains of great music that "moab was their washpot"; but when mr jeremy repeated the words in the village church i felt that he spoke the truth, and i went away with a clearer conception of moab than i have ever gained from the works of kuenen or cheyne. "moab," i reflected, "can be no other than the little field on the hillside, where jeremy washes his sheep in the pool behind the willows." again, i was morally certain that if jeremy had lived in the neighbourhood of edom he would have "cast out his shoe" upon that country, accurately aiming the missile at the head of any rascally edomite who happened to be prowling about with a rabbit-snare in his pocket. so too when he shouted "manasseh is mine"--he always shouted the psalms--i was sure that manasseh really was his, in a tenant-farmer way of speaking, and that next thursday he would begin to rip up manasseh with his great steam plough, and reap in due course a crop of forty bushels to the acre, paying the "dook" a high rent for the privilege. nor was jeremy making any idle boast when he thundered out his further intentions, which were "to divide sichem," "to mete out the valley of succoth," and "to triumph" over philistia. all this was pragmatism of the purest water; you were sure he would keep his promise to the letter; you were glad for sichem and succoth, which were to be "divided" and "meted out," though perhaps a little sorry for the philistines, who were to be "triumphed over," that a man like jeremy should have undertaken the business; but you recognised that no better man for the job could be found anywhere than he. to be sure, mr jeremy, although he would have gladly boiled the whole liberal party in coppers, was much too tender-hearted to wish that anybody's little ones should be dashed against the stones; but i believe that in his innermost thought he launched the words against "them tarnation sparrers" and "that plague o' rats." on the whole, no one who listened to mr jeremy's repetition of these psalms could doubt their entire appropriateness as a religious exercise for men such as he, or refrain from hoping that they would never be expunged from the book of common prayer until the last british farmer had gone to church for the last time. so too with the creeds. i believed every one of them as recited by mr jeremy, and i found the athanasian the most convincing of them all. the sundays set down for the use of that creed--and its use was never omitted in our parish--were the most serious sundays of the year to mr jeremy, and the vigour of his voice and his attitude, and the fervour of his participation, made a spectacle to be remembered. i wish william james might have seen it before he wrote his _varieties of religions experience_; it would have given him a new chapter. at the very first words jeremy joined in like a trained sprinter starting for a race; and though the clergyman rattled through the clauses as fast as he could pronounce, or mispronounce, the syllables, the farmer headed him by a word or two from the very first, gradually increasing his lead as the race proceeded until towards the end he was a full sentence to the good. it was evident that to jeremy's mind, and perhaps to the clergyman's also, a subtle relation existed between the truth of the creed and the speed with which it could be rendered. long before the end was in sight, and while jeremy was still battling with various "incomprehensibles," the rest of the competitors had retired from sheer exhaustion; the children were munching sweets; the lads and lasses were ogling one another at the back of the church; mrs jeremy was staring in front of her, wondering perhaps if the careless susan would remember that onion sauce _always_ went with a leg of mutton on sundays; while lady agatha and lady sybil--i grieve to record this, but my historical conscience compels me--sat down. as to those of us who remained attentive to what was going on, our confidence in catholic truth gradually took the form of a certainty that the farmer would come in first and the clergyman be nowhere. so it always proved. standing in the pew behind that of jeremy, i could see the muscles of his mighty back working up and down beneath the broadcloth of his sunday coat; and as i looked from him to the easily winded gentleman from pusey house who was running against him in the chancel, i could not help reflecting how ridiculous, nay, how unsportsmanlike, it was to allow two men so ill matched to compete for the same event. this, no doubt, was the first symptom that, in spite of the standing attitude, i was going to sleep. but before it could happen i was suddenly brought to my senses by the _fortissimo e prestissimo_ of jeremy's conclusion. "he _cannot_ be saved," he roared out, banging his prayer-book down on the book-rest, with a defiant look around him, as though the whole liberal party were in church. "he _cannot_ be saved,"--and visions of all sorts of people boiling in coppers filled the mental eye. jeremy, for a farmer, was the most outrageous optimist i have ever met. he never grumbled, save at politicians, and the worst weather could hardly disconcert him. "you can always turn a bit o' bad weather to good account--if you put your back into it. yes, it's been a _wet_ season, no doubt, but not what i should call a _bad_ season. it's true we've made but little hay, and that not good; but the meadows isn't dried up as they was last year, and there'll be feed for the stock in the open most of the winter. i bought fifty new head o' stock last wednesday--bought 'em cheap of a man as got frightened--and they'll be well fattened by christmas." serious setbacks, of course, often occurred; but jeremy, unlike most of his kind, was not the man to talk about them. "what i believe in," he said, "is not only keeping your own heart up, but helping your neighbours to keep up theirs. i've no patience with all this 'ere grumbling and growling. of course, a person has a lot to put up with in farming; but it doesn't do a person no good to be always thinking about that. pleasant thoughts goes a long way in making money. and i tell you there's money to be made in farming, let folks say what they will. what farmers want is not for parliament to help 'em, but for parliament to leave 'em alone. that's why i can't stand this 'ere liberal government. why can't they stop messing wi' things--messing wi' the land, messing wi' the landlords, messing wi' the tenants, messing wi' the farm-labourers? why can't they leave it all alone and stick to what they understand, if there's anything they _do_ understand, which i doubt? no, sir; i don't want their laws, good or bad. give me the custom of the county, and a good bench o' magistrates, and a cheerful disposition, and a farmyard full o' muck, and i've got all i want to make farming _pay_--always provided you put your back into it." but during the long-continued rain of last summer i could not help observing that jeremy, in spite of his fidelity to these principles, was making an effort to keep up his heart. not only was his hay ruined, but the finest crop of wheat he had ever raised was sprouting in the ear. there was sickness among the sheep and the pigs; and the standing crop in his great orchard was sold to a middleman for a quarter the usual price. but jeremy made no complaint. only, meeting the clergyman one day in the road, he said, "parson, it's high time you put up the prayer for fine weather." jeremy had a firm belief in the power of prayer--and especially of this one. on the first occasion when this prayer was used in the village church i was present in my usual place behind jeremy. as the prayer proceeded it was evident that the farmer was putting his back into it. i could see the movement of the deltoid muscles, and i watched a great crease form itself in the lower portion of his coat and gradually creep upwards until it formed a straight line from one shoulder-blade to the other. when the prayer concluded jeremy said "amen _and_ amen!" with the utmost fervour; and the crease in his coat slowly disappeared. i am afraid i was more occupied in watching this crease than in recalling the lesson that was taught to us sinners when it pleased jehovah to "drown all the world, except eight persons." during the next ten days the rain fell with increasing volume and fury: the ditches were in flood; the roads were watercourses, and much damage was done on jeremy's farm. meeting him at this time, i said in the course of conversation, perhaps foolishly, "mr jeremy, the prayer for fine weather seems to have done us very little good." for a moment he looked at me rather angrily, as though suspecting that some lukewarmness on my part had deprived the prayer of its due effect. then he checked himself and seemed to reflect. "no," he said at length, "it's done us no good at all. but what else can you expect, _with all them gigglin' wenches at the back of the church_?" for three miserable weeks the heavens were deaf to our entreaties, and matters began to look pretty black. a change for the better was confidently expected with the new moon; and though i have never been able to discover the origin of the superstition, nor a reason for it, i found myself as expectant as any of my neighbours--like that other great philosopher, who didn't believe in ghosts, but was desperately afraid of them. however, the new moon brought no relief to our sorry plight--and the superstition lives on in our parish, unimpaired. ominous rumours about the end of the world spread from cottage to cottage, and our wits were busy in discovering the culprit whose misdeeds had precipitated the coming catastrophe. most of us were persuaded that it was tom mellon the waggoner, a good workman but an irredeemable drunkard; and tom, who was aware of our suspicions, became thoroughly scared. for the first time in twenty years tom kept away from the public-house when his wages were paid, and went to bed sober but terribly depressed on saturday night. on monday morning, mrs mellon, whose face for once bore no trace of bruises, informed our cook that "her master had had a dreadful bad night. he would keep jumping out o' bed and going to the window, to look into the sky and _see if anything was up_." tom had communicated his fears, when in an early stage of development, to his boon companion, charley stamp the ex-roadman, whose old-age pension went the way of tom's wages and swelled the revenues of the public-house by the regular sum of five shillings per week. these two arcadians, as they sat over their cups, concerted a plan, composed mainly of bad language, for defeating the ends of justice on the day of doom; and on the saturday night previous to the one last mentioned came home together abominably intoxicated, waving their hats and roaring out as they went up the village that they were "ready" for judgment--"with a tooral-ri-looral, and a rooral-li-ray." subsequent events proved that neither of them was "ready." tom's courage, as we have seen, went to pieces on hearing it definitely whispered that the universe was about to be wiped out in consequence of his bad habits. charley's downfall was even more sudden. in the small hours of the very morning after his performance in the village street it happened that farmer jeremy's bull, scenting a cow in a neighbouring pasture, expressed his sentiments by emitting a loud bellow. the sound travelled to charley's cottage, and, descending the chimney, mingled with his drunken dreams. "get up, missis," he shouted, "get up; _the trumpet's sounding_!" and rushing into the garden he began to howl like a jackal. the howls woke the village, and a score of terrified souls, myself among them, convinced that "it was come at last," looked out of their windows--only to find that a lovely morning was breaking over the hills. fine weather returned soon after; and i am sorry to say that with its coming the moral reformation which had begun so hopefully in tom and charley, and spread to several less hardened sinners in our village, was terminated at a stroke. * * * * * it must have been some four or five days before the change came in the weather that i took advantage of a bright interval in the evening to walk across the summit of the hill which shades my house from the setting sun. i pushed on into the upland until the dusk had fallen, and found myself at last in a deserted quarry--a long familiar spot, where in old days i used to meet snarley bob. there i sat down on the very heap of stones on which he sat as he talked to me of the stars. in due time the stars came out, and i wondered in which of them the great spirit of my old friend had found its abode. i imagined it was capella; why i know not, unless it be that capella was the star to which snarley's finger often pointed when he lifted up his voice about the things on high. this has nothing to do with my story, and i mention it here only because i find myself wondering at this moment how spirits so diverse as those of snarley bob and tom mellon could have breathed the same atmosphere and drawn their sustenance from the same environment. i lingered in the quarry pondering my memories until the great rain-clouds, creeping up from different points of the horizon, had met in the zenith and every star had disappeared. a sullen rain began to fall, and black darkness was over the hill. i turned homewards, reflecting that it might not be easy to find my way by the sheep-tracks on so dark a night. i remembered that on the summit of the hill, some two miles from where i was, there stood an isolated barn surrounded by sheds for the shelter of cattle. from this point the way down into the village could hardly be missed, and thither accordingly i turned my steps. with some difficulty i found the barn; for the ways were wet and in some places impassable, and the night, as i have said, was very dark. on nearing the barn i was astonished to notice a gleam of light issuing from the half-closed door. i approached, and as i did so i was yet more astonished, and a little scared, to hear the loud and lamentable tones of a human voice. i listened, and at once recognised the voice as jeremy's, though i could not hear what he was saying nor explain to myself the preternatural solemnity of the tone. it was not a cry of pain, nor that of a man in need of human help. i drew yet nearer, and it became plain to me that jeremy was praying. curiosity tempting me on, i crept up to the barn and looked in through the partly opened door. this is what i saw. kneeling on the floor towards the further side of the barn, with a lighted stable-lantern suspended over his head, was jeremy. his back was towards me, but i could see that he had a book in his hand. a glance was sufficient to show me that i was looking at a man in wrestle with his god. i knew the signs of jeremy's earnestness; and they were there--intense, unmistakable. never have i witnessed a more solemn spectacle, and, had not something held me spell-bound to the spot, i should have retreated in very shame of my intrusion. at the moment when i first caught sight of his figure jeremy was silent. his head was bowed on his chest, his feet were drawn close together, and his right hand, holding the book--which i saw was the book of common prayer--drooped on the ground. i noted the head of a steel rat-trap protruding from the big side-pocket of his coat. i also remember how the bright nails of his boots, of which the soles were turned towards me, glittered in the light of the lantern. presently jeremy raised the book, turned over the leaves--for he had lost the place--slightly readjusted his position, and in a deep and solemn voice again began to pray. and this was his prayer: "o almighty lord god, who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world, except eight persons, and afterward of thy great mercy didst promise never to destroy it so again: we humbly beseech thee, that although we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our true repentance thou wilt send us such weather, as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season; and learn both by thy punishment to amend our lives, and for thy clemency to give thee praise and glory; through jesus christ our lord. _amen._" it was enough. quickly and silently as i could i slipped away into the darkness, filled with a sense of the sacrilege of my intrusion and the solemnity of the hour. i have listened in my time to many prayers of many men; i have heard the almighty flattered, complimented, instructed in the metaphysics of his own nature, and insulted by the grovelling and insincere self-depreciation of his own creatures; i have heard him talked at, and talked about, by cowardly men-pleasers who had no more religion than a rhinoceros; and i have wondered much at the patience of heaven with all this detestable eloquence. i have heard also the short and stumbling prayers of the honest, of the salvationist kneeling in the thoroughfare of a town full of sin, of the mother with her arms round the neck of a dying child; but none even of these have dealt so shrewd a thrust at my self-satisfaction as did the prayer of farmer jeremy. what strange secrets, i thought, are hidden in the human heart! verily, the ways of man, like the ways of god, are past finding out. now, it so happened that i had given jeremy a promise that i would, that very night, join him at supper and "have a chat." i would gladly have found an excuse if i could. but it was not easy to excuse oneself to jeremy; his discernments were keen. moreover, i half feared that he might have discovered my footsteps outside the barn; and i knew that if he had, the only wise course was to face the situation, tell the truth, and have it out. it was soon evident, however, that he had discovered nothing; and i, of course, kept my counsel. i entered the farm kitchen and found mrs jeremy awaiting her husband by the fire. "master's late in coming home," she said. "he's gone up the hill with a lantern, to set traps in the grey barn. he says it's full o' rats. but he ought to have come back half an hour ago." "he'll be back soon," i answered; and a moment later i heard the ring of his boots on the stone flags outside. entering the room, jeremy, without greeting me, walked across the floor and tapped the barometer on the wall. "it's rising," he said. "i thought it would by the look of the moon last night. well, given a bit o' fine weather now, we shall not do so badly after all. the wheat's less sprouted than i thought it was; just a little down in 'the guns,' but none at all in 'quebec.' please god, we shall get forty-five to the acre, up there; and all in tip-top condition." "how are the root-crops?" i asked. "looking splendid; couldn't be better. you see, they're all on the high ground." "did you set your traps?" said mrs jeremy. "i did. but there's too many rats for trappin' to do much good. we must try this 'ere new poison. that'll cook their gooses for 'em, according to what i hear." after supper the conversation turned once more on the weather. "it's bound to mend," said jeremy; "there's a rising glass, and the wind's gone round to the north-west since i went up the hill. just look out o' this winder at them clouds drifting across the sky. and they're a lot higher up than they were this afternoon. and i tell you these 'ere prayers as we've been puttin' up in church are bound to do _some_ good, though they mayn't do _all_ the good as we want. i've noticed it again and again, both wet seasons and droughty." "the prayer of a righteous man availeth much," said mrs jeremy, who, notwithstanding her mental wanderings during the athanasian creed, was a pious soul. i was sorry the conversation had taken this turn, being disinclined to discuss the subject just then. but jeremy was only too ready to take the cue. "yes," he said; "and the prayer of a sinner is sometimes _almost_ as good as the prayer of a righteous man; though, mind you, i don't say it's _quite_ as good. i'm a bit of a sinner myself; but i've had lots of answers to prayer in my life. _lots_, i tell you. you see, it's this way. my belief is, that you've no business to want a thing unless you're ready to pray for it. of course, you can't always tell what you ought to want and what you oughtn't--that's the difficulty. but my plan is to pray for everything as i wants and then leave the lord to sort out the bad from the good. there's a collect in church as puts it in that way. mind you, i wouldn't pray for anything as i _knowed_ were bad. there'd be no sense in that. and as for fine weather, all points to that being _good_, and your prayer stands a fair chance of being answered. of course, it may be bad for reasons we don't know about; though i don't think it is _myself_. so it's right to pray for it. pray for everything you want--that's what i says; and leave the rest to the lord." jeremy would no doubt have said much more, for he was a great talker when started on his favourite themes, and this was one of them. but we were interrupted by a cry from mrs jeremy at the other side of the table. it was simply, "oh dear!" looking up, i saw that she was leaning forward with her face buried in her hands, sobbing violently. "darn my gaiters!" said jeremy, "i'm nought but a fool. i oughtn't to ha' talked about them things before my missus. i never do; but something's made me forget myself to-night. you see, it's reminded her of our trouble." i did not understand this last remark. but i asked no question, being too much occupied in watching the infinite tenderness of the good man as he sought to comfort his wife. i draw a veil over that. "now go to bed, there's a good girl, and think no more about it," was the end of what he had to say. mrs jeremy retired, the tears standing in her eyes. she shook hands with me, but didn't speak. jeremy resumed his seat, lit his pipe, and began to explain. his voice trembled and almost broke down with the first sentence. "you see," he said, waving his hand towards the fire, "it's a childless hearth.... it hasn't always been. there was one, once--fifteen years ago. he was six years of age--as bright a little nipper as ever you see. oh yes, he said his prayers: said one too many, that he did.... o my god!... well, it was this way. it was one christmas eve, and a young lady as we had for his governess had been telling the little nipper all about father christmas--i don't blame _her_; she's never got over it any more than we have, and never will--... all about father christmas, as i was saying; and he drinks it all in with his wide little eyes, as though it was gospel truth. 'i'll tell father christmas to bring me something real nice,' he says. so just before they put him to bed that night he goes to that open fireplace, where you're sitting now, and pops his head up the chimney, and calls out, 'father christmas, please bring me to-night a magic lantern, a pair of roller skates, four wax candles, and a box o' them chocolates with the little nuts inside 'em, for jesus christ sake, amen.' then he goes away from the fire, and i says, 'all right, nipper, i'll bring 'em,' from behind that door, in a voice to make him believe as father christmas was answering. well, he starts to go to bed; but just as he reached them stairs in the passage he runs back, and pops his little head up the chimney again. 'father christmas,' he says, 'don't forget the little nuts in the chocolates. i don't want none o' them pink 'uns.' and, o my god! he'd hardly spoken the words when more than half a hundredweight of blazing soot comes slathering down the chimney and falls right on the top of him just where he stood. i tell you there never was a thing seen like it since this world began! the room was filled with black smoke in a second; we were all blinded; we could neither breathe nor see. we couldn't see him, we couldn't find him; and we all stumbled up against one another; and the missus fell insensible on the floor. and him screaming with pain all the time--and i tell you i couldn't find him, though i rushed like a madman all over the room and groped everywhere, and put my hands into the very fire! then i went too--dropped like a stone. it was all over in a minute. they pulled the rest of us out in the nick of time: but the poor little nipper was burned to death...." farmer jeremy rose from his seat and went to the window. he was shaking all over; but i averted my glance, for it is a terrible thing to see a strong man in the agony of his soul, and the eyes cannot bear it long. "the clouds are breaking," he said; "and, please god, i'll cut 'the slaughters' to-morrow. but there's one harvest as will never be reaped: and there's one cloud that will never break. not till the resurrection morn. ah me!" * * * * * on the lovely afternoon of an autumn sunday, about a fortnight after these things, i met jeremy in the fields, walking the round with his terrier dog. "grand weather for farmers," i cried. "grand it is, sir," he answered, "and let us be thankful for it." "yes," i said; "it has been long enough in coming, and is all the more welcome now it has come." i felt that the words struck the wrong note; or rather they struck none at all, where a note of music was needed. but i knew not what else to say. jeremy with all his reserve was less timid and more affluent than i. "have you never thought, sir," he said, drawing near to me, "what brought the fine weather?" i hesitated and was silent. "then i'll tell you," said he. "_the power o' prayer._" that very day i had been reading a book on primitive religion; and as i parted from jeremy a question flashed through my mind. "may it not be," i asked myself, "that primitive religion is the only religion that has ever existed, or will exist, in the world?" white roses of all the conversations of the learned, those in which history and philosophy maintain the dialogue are probably the most instructive. such a conversation i was fortunate enough to hear not long ago at the dinner-table of a friend; and the occasion was the more interesting inasmuch as the philosopher of the party was led by a turn of the argument to lay aside his mantle and assume the rôle of the story-teller; thereby providing us with a valuable comment on the very philosophy with which his own illustrious name has been long associated. we had been talking during dinner about a certain expedition to the south seas undertaken by the british government in the eighteenth century; and the historian had just finished a most surprising narration of the facts, based on his recent investigation of unpublished documents, when our hostess glanced at the clock, and rising from her chair gave the signal to the ladies to depart. when we had resumed our places the professor of philosophy said to the historian: "i wish you would tell us what in your opinion it was that caused the expedition to turn out such an utter failure." "the expedition failed," said the historian, "because the commander was not allowed to select his own crews. the government of the day was corrupt, and insisted on manning the ships with men of its own choosing. some were diseased; others were criminals; many had never handled a rope in their lives. before the fleet had doubled cape horn one-third of the crews had perished, and the rest were mutinous. the enterprise was doomed to failure from the start." "the whole planet is manned in the same manner," said the pessimist, as he helped himself to one of our host's superlative cigars. "i'm sorry for the commander, whoever he is." "what precisely do you mean?" said the professor of philosophy, holding a lighted match to the end of the pessimist's cigar. "i mean," said the pessimist, "that the prospects of the human expedition can't be very bright so long as society has to put up with anybody and everybody who happens to be born. i suppose there _is_ a human expedition," he went on. "at least, _you_ have written as though there were. but who selects the crew? nobody. they come aboard as they happen to be born, and the unfortunate commander has to put up with them as they come--broken men, jail-deliveries, invalids, sea-sick land-lubbers, and heaven knows what. who in his senses would put to sea with such a crowd? humanity is always in a state like that of your expedition when it doubled cape horn--incompetent, mutinous, or sick unto death. and what else can you expect in view of the conditions under which we all arrive on the planet?" the host now glanced uneasily at the professor of philosophy, whose treatise on _the world purpose_ was famous throughout three continents. the professor was visibly arming himself for the fray: he had just filled his claret-glass with port. "remember," said the host, "that we must join the ladies in twenty minutes at the utmost." "i'm not going to argue," replied the philosopher, after a resolute sip at his port; "i'm going to tell you a story." "tell it in the drawing-room," said the son of the house, who had taken his pretty cousin down to dinner, and was a little exhilarated by that and by the excellence of his father's wine; "that is to say,"--and he spoke eagerly, as if a bright idea had struck him,--"that is to say, of course, if it will bear telling in the presence of ladies." there was a roar of laughter, and the son of the house blushed to the roots of his hair. "i am inclined to think," said the professor, "that my story, so far from being unsuitable for the ladies, will be intelligible to no one else." "we'll join the ladies at once," said the host, "and hear the professor's story." the pessimist, who was fond of talking, now broke in. "that," he said, "is most attractive, but not quite fair to me. i should like to finish what i have begun. and i doubt if my views will be quite in place in the drawing-room. besides, the professor must finish his port. i was only going to say," he went on, "that the having to put up with all that comes in human shape is a very serious affair. it seems to me that we all arrive in the world like dumped goods. nobody has 'ordered' us, and perhaps nobody wants us. our parents wanted us, did you say? well, i suppose our parents wanted children; but it doesn't follow that they wanted _you_ or _me_. somebody else might have filled the book as well, or better. our birth is a matter of absolute chance. for example, my father has often told me how he met my mother. there was a picnic on a swiss lake. my father's watch was slow, and when he arrived at the quay the boat that carried his party was out of sight. it so happened that there was another party--people my father didn't know--going to another island, and seeing him disconsolate on the quay they took pity on him and made him go with them. it was in that boat that he first met my mother. the moral is obvious. if my father's watch had kept better time i should never have been in existence. ["a jolly good thing, too," whispered the son of the house.] neither would my six brothers, nor any of our descendants to the _n_th generation. well, that's how the whole planet gets itself _manned_. that's how the crew is 'chosen.' and that's why the expedition gets into trouble on rounding cape horn." "it's a capital introduction to my story," said the professor, in whom, after his second claret-glass of port, _the world purpose_ had assumed a new intensity. "i wish the ladies could have heard it." "i venture to think," said our host, "that the ladies will understand the story all the better for not having heard the introduction. you see, i am assuming that the story is a good one--which is as much as to say that no introduction is needed." "thank you," said the professor. "i say," broke in the son of the house, "i say, professor, it's a pity you didn't take that question up in _the world purpose_. that's an awfully good point of the pessimist's, and a jolly difficult one to answer, too. i should like to see you tackle it. why, i once heard the pater here say to the mater----" "we'll go upstairs," said our host. * * * * * "about ten years ago," the professor began, "i was travelling one night in a third-class carriage to a town on the north-east coast. my two companions in the compartment were evidently mother and daughter. the mother had a singularly beautiful and intelligent face; and the daughter, who was about twelve years old, resembled her. they were dressed in good taste, without rings or finery, and, so far as i am able to judge such things, without expense. "prior to the departure of the train from the london terminus, i had noticed the two walking up and down the platform and looking into the carriages, apparently endeavouring to find a compartment to themselves. they did not succeed, and finally entered the compartment where i was. whether i ought to have been flattered by this, or the reverse, i knew not. "i could see they wanted to be alone, and i felt a brief impulse to leave them to themselves and go elsewhere. it would have been a chivalrous act; but whether from indolence, or curiosity, or some other feeling, i let the impulse die, and remained where i was. "the girl began immediately to arrange cushions for her mother in the corner of the carriage; and from the solicitude she showed, i gathered that the mother, though to all appearance in health, was either ill or convalescent. by the time i had come to this conclusion the train was already in motion, or i verily believe i should have obeyed my first impulse and left the carriage. i am glad, however, that i did not. "when all had been arranged i noticed that the two had settled themselves in the attitude of lovers, their hands clasped, the girl resting her head on the mother's shoulder and gazing into her face from time to time with a look of infinite tenderness. and it was some relief to me to observe that, lover-like, they seemed indifferent to my presence. "i was reading a book, though i confess that my eyes and mind would constantly wander to the other side of the carriage. i am not a sentimental person, and scenes of sentiment are particularly objectionable to my temper of mind; but for once in my life i was overawed by the consciousness that i was in the presence of deep and genuine emotion. finally, i gave up the effort to read; a strange mental atmosphere seemed to surround me; i fell into a reverie, and i remember waking suddenly from a kind of dream, or incoherent meditation on the pathos and tragedy of human life. "i looked at my companions and i saw that both were weeping. the girl was in the same position as before. the mother had turned her face away, and was looking out into the blackness of the night. tear after tear rolled down her cheek. "they must have become conscious that i was observing them, though god knows i had little will to do so. i took up my book and pretended to read; and i knew that an effort was being made, that tears were being checked, that some climbing sorrow was being held down. presently the lady said, speaking in a steady voice-- "'do you know the name of the station we have just passed?' "i told her the name of the station; asked if i should raise the window; spoke to the girl; offered an illustrated paper, and so on through the usual preliminaries of a traveller's talk. the answers i received were such as one expects from people of charming manners. but nothing followed, for a time, and i again took up my book. "the book i was reading, or pretending to read, was a volume of the ingersoll lectures, bearing on the back the title _human immortality_. once or twice i noticed the eyes of the woman resting on this, but i was greatly surprised when, in one of the pauses when i laid down the book, she said-- "'would you mind my asking you a question?' "'certainly not.' "'do you believe in the immortality of the soul?' "as a teacher of philosophy i am accustomed to leading questions at all sorts of inopportune moments, but never in my life was i so completely taken aback. however, i collected my thoughts as best i could, and, though the subject is one on which i never like to speak without prolonged preparation, i briefly told her my opinions on that great problem, as you may find them expressed in my published works. possibly i spoke with some fervour; the more likely, because i spoke without preparation. she listened with great attention; and as for the young girl, her face was lit up with a look of intelligent eagerness which, had i seen it for one moment in my own class-room, would have rewarded me for the labour of a long course of lectures. "i had still much to say when the train drew up at the platform of st beeds. "'i'm sorry not to hear more,' said the lady, 'but this is our destination.' "'and there's dad!' cried the girl. "a man in working clothes stood at the carriage-door. "'good-bye,' said the woman, warmly shaking me by the hand; 'you have been most kind to me.' "'good-bye,' said the daughter; 'you're a dear old dear!' "and with that she threw her arms round my neck and kissed me fervently three or four times. i was greatly surprised, but not altogether displeased. "they were evidently a most affectionate family. as the train moved off the three stood arm in arm before the carriage-door. "'got two sweethearts to-night, sir,' said the man. "'and without jealousy,' said i. 'i congratulate you on each of them.' "'i hope you'll forgive my daughter,' he said; 'she's an impulsive little baggage.' "'she may repeat the offence the next time we meet,' i replied; and we all laughed. "it was a joyful ending to what had been, in some respects, a painful experience." * * * * * "i don't see the point of your story, professor; and i am at a loss to imagine what it has to do with my introduction." this from the pessimist. "the story has only begun," said the professor, who was sipping his tea. "those kisses at the end were jolly hard lines on a man who dislikes sentiment," said the son of the house. "i didn't find them so," answered the professor. "but remember, they were only the kisses of a child." "the best sort," growled the pessimist. "true," said our hostess. "the judgments of children are the judgments of god. but let the professor go on." * * * * * "it was seven or eight months later," the professor resumed, "when on opening the _times_ one morning my attention was caught by an item of news relating to the town at which my two companions had alighted from the train. the news itself was of no importance, but the name of the town printed at the head of the paragraph strangely arrested me, and served to recall with singular vividness the incident of my former journey. i found myself repeating, in order and minute detail, everything that had happened in the carriage, some of the particulars of which i had forgotten till that moment. the end of it was that i became possessed with a strong desire to visit st beeds, though i had no connections whatever with the place, and had never stayed there in my life. i knew, of course, that it was an interesting old town, with a famous cathedral, and i remember persuading myself at the time, and indeed telling my wife, that i ought to visit that cathedral without further delay. as the day wore on the impulse grew stronger, and eventually overpowered me. i travelled down to st beeds that night, and put up at one of the principal hotels. "the next morning was spent in the usual manner of sight-seers in an ancient town. reserving the cathedral for the afternoon, i visited the old wall and the dismantled quays, and wandered among the narrow streets, reading history, as my habit is, from the monuments with which the place abounded. about noon i found my way to the spacious market-place, and began inspecting the beautiful front of the old town hall. "i suddenly became aware of a man on the opposite pavement, who was watching me with some interest. what drew my attention to him was a large mass of white roses which he was carrying in a basket; for, as you know, i have been for many years an enthusiastic rose-grower, and there is nothing which attracts the mind so rapidly as any circumstance connected with one's hobby. the man was dressed in good clothes; and it was this that prevented me at first from recognising him as the person who had met my two companions at the station seven months before. "seeing that i had observed him, he crossed the street. "'you remember me?' he said. 'well, i have been looking for you all over the town. had i known your name i should have asked at the hotels.' "'but how did you know i had arrived?' i asked. "'my wife told me you were here.' "'she must have seen me, then,' i said. "'yes, she saw you. she saw you arrive last night at the station. and she saw you later, standing under an electric lamp, in front of the cathedral.' "this struck me as odd, for i had purposely waited till near midnight before going to the cathedral, that i might see the exterior in the light of the moon; and i had been confident that not a soul was about. "'how is she?' i asked, for i remembered my previous impression that she was an invalid. "'oh, much better,' he answered; 'in fact, quite restored. it's a great comfort.' "'it was very kind of her to send you to look for me,' i said. 'perhaps i shall have the pleasure of seeing her later on in the day--and your daughter as well. you remember i congratulated you on your two sweethearts?' "'yes,' he answered, 'and you were not far wrong in that. but wouldn't you like to take a turn round the old town first? it's a wonderful place and full of interest. and i know it through and through.' "i was greatly puzzled by his manner. his speech and address were certainly remarkable for a working man; and i confess that for a moment the thought crossed my mind that he was some sort of impostor, and that i should be well advised to have nothing to do with him. i suppose it was his basket of roses that reassured me. "'well,' i said, 'i've seen a good deal already. but i've no objection to seeing it all again. i'll put myself in your hands.' "'splendid!' he cried. 'it's an ideal day, and i'm hungering for sunlight and beauty, and thirsting for the peace of ancient memories. and it will please my wife to know that i've taken you round. what do you say to going up the river first? there's a glorious reach beyond the bridge. and the sun's in the right position to give you the best view of the cathedral.' "'nothing would please me better,' said i; and we set off at once toward the river. "on passing a certain building he bade me carefully examine the roof, the form of which was remarkable. while i was engaged in so doing, unconscious for a moment of his presence, i suddenly seemed to hear him groan behind me; and turning round i saw that he was holding tight to the iron railings on the other side of the foot-walk, and swaying his body backward and forward, as though he were in pain. "'are you ill?' i asked, in some alarm. "'not at all. this is just my way of resting when i'm tired. come along.' "'that's a splendid lot of roses in your basket,' i said, as we took our places in the boat, he sculling and i steering. 'frau carl druschki, unless i'm much mistaken.' "'yes. i grew them on my allotment. i'm taking them home to my wife.' "for some time we talked roses. he had a theory of pruning, which differed from mine, and led to a good deal of argument. finally, he dropped his sculls, and, taking a piece of paper from his pocket, drew on it the diagram of a rose-bush pruned according to his method. we had forgotten the cathedral. "i took his drawing and began to criticise. 'oh!' he said, 'let's drop it. we're missing one of the noblest sights in england. look at that!' and he pointed to the heights. "as we dropped down the river half an hour later, my companion, who had been silent for some time, again broke out on the subject of roses. 'rose-growing is a thing that takes time and patience and thought,' he said. 'more perhaps than it's worth. if it were not for my wife, i should give it up. she's desperately fond of roses.' "'that's the best of reasons for not giving it up,' i answered. 'i happen to be a great admirer of your wife.' "'that's another link between us,' said he. 'she's the best wife man ever had. she's worthy of all the admiration you can give her.' "she's worthy of all the roses you can grow for her,' i said. "'by god, she is!' he answered with an emphasis that startled me. "we grew confidential, and a story followed. he told me that he was the illegitimate son of a baronet; that his father had made him an allowance to study art in london; that he had married his model, in opposition to the wishes of his father; that the baronet had thereupon thrown him over for good and all; that he had failed to make a living by his original art; that he had got an engagement with a great furnishing-house as a skilled painter; that he was earning four pounds a week in doing artistic work in rich men's houses and elsewhere; that he was now engaged in restoring some fifteenth-century frescoes in a parish church. his wife earned money too, though he did not tell me how, and his daughter was being trained as a singer. 'we're all more or less in art,' he said, 'and we are a very happy family.' "by this time we were back at the landing-place, and as the man stepped ashore he said: 'it's about time i took these roses to my wife. we'll just walk along to where i live, and i'll show you the rest of the sights afterwards. i'll take you to the cathedral when the afternoon service is over.' "as we walked through the streets the man kept up an incessant stream of talk, pointing to this and that, and discoursing with great eagerness on the history and antiquities of the town. it struck me as strange that he never waited for any answer but passed from one thing to another without a pause. presently we stopped in front of a small house, one of a row of villas. "'this is where i live,' he said, and stopped on the doorstep. "'good!' i cried; 'and now you will take me in and reintroduce me to your charming wife.' "'i'm sorry,' he answered, 'but the thing's quite impossible.' "i was so startled by this unexpected answer that, without thinking, i blurted out the question, 'why?' "'_because_,' he said, '_she's in her coffin. she died at four o'clock this morning._' "at the words he sank down on his doorstep, put the basket of roses on his knees and bowed himself over them in a passion of tears. "the door opened, and the young girl, who had been with me in the train, ran down the steps. sitting down beside her father she put her arms round his neck and said, 'daddy, daddy, don't cry!'" * * * * * the professor ceased and there was a long pause. "did you discover," said the pessimist at length, "why the two were weeping in the train?" "no need to ask that," said our hostess. "the woman had received sentence of death." "did you ever follow it up?" said the historian. "what, for example, became of the young girl?" "_she was married to my eldest son last month_," said the professor. "i knew the pessimist's introduction would not be needed," said our host. "nevertheless, it was the introduction that reminded me of the story," said the professor. "and now," he continued, "can anyone here explain to me the strange conduct of the man with the white roses? for i confess that i can find no place for it in any system of psychology known to me." at this question the son of the house, who for some reason had become the gravest member of the party, looked up and seemed about to speak. but as he raised his eyes they met the bright glance of his pretty cousin, on whose cheek there was a tear. and when the son of the house saw that, the impulse to speech died within him. no one else ventured an explanation. but my impression was that there were two persons in the room to whom the strange conduct of the man with the white roses presented no enigma. _by the same author_ among the idolmakers "a man of kent" in _the british weekly_. "mr jacks has written a book which, for sheer ability, for rightmindedness, and for driving force, will compare favourably with any book of the season.... this is a book which strongly makes for cleanness, for sanity, for christianity." mad shepherds: and other human studies _with a frontispiece drawing by mr leslie brooke_ "a series of highly original studies of some human types portrayed with a wealth of irony and humour. the character snarley bob, the old shepherd, is destined to take its place among the unforgettable figures of literature."--_outlook._ the alchemy of thought professor j. h. muirhead in _the christian commonwealth_ says: "it is a significant book ... eloquent, imaginative, humorous. philosophy here forsakes its usual 'grey in grey.'" from _the westminster review_: "the book is one which no philosophical student of to-day can safely do without." the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent & co., ltd. paris on sale at ye old paris booke shoppe rue de chÂteaudun _registered at stationers' hall and protected under the copyright law act. first published in complete book form in by messrs. ward, lock & co. (london), first printed in this edition april , reprinted june , september , june , january october ._ _see the bibliographical note on certain pirated and mutilated editions of "dorian gray" at the end of this present volume._ the preface the artist is the creator of beautiful things. to reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. the critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. the highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. this is a fault. those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. for these there is hope. they are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. books are well written, or badly written. that is all. the nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of caliban seeing his own face in a glass. the nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. the moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. no artist desires to prove anything. even things that are true can be proved. no artist has ethical sympathies. an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. no artist is ever morbid. the artist can express everything. thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. from the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. from the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. all art is at once surface and symbol. those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. those who read the symbol do so at their peril. it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. when critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. we can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. the only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. all art is quite useless. oscar wilde. the picture of dorian gray chapter i the studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. from the corner of the divan of persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, lord henry wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. the sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. the dim roar of london was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. in the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, basil hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures. as the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. but he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. "it is your best work, basil, the best thing you have ever done," said lord henry, languidly. "you must certainly send it next year to the grosvenor. the academy is too large and too vulgar. whenever i have gone there, there have been either so many people that i have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that i have not been able to see the people, which was worse. the grosvenor is really the only place." "i don't think i shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at oxford. "no: i won't send it anywhere." lord henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette. "not send it anywhere? my dear fellow, why? have you any reason? what odd chaps you painters are! you do anything in the world to gain a reputation. as soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. it is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. a portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in england, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion." "i know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but i really can't exhibit it. i have put too much of myself into it." lord henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed. "yes, i knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same." "too much of yourself in it! upon my word, basil, i didn't know you were so vain; and i really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. why, my dear basil, he is a narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. but beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. the moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. how perfectly hideous they are! except, of course, in the church. but then in the church they don't think. a bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. i feel quite sure of that. he is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. don't flatter yourself, basil: you are not in the least like him." "you don't understand me, harry," answered the artist. "of course i am not like him. i know that perfectly well. indeed, i should be sorry to look like him. you shrug your shoulders? i am telling you the truth. there is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. it is better not to be different from one's fellows. the ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. they can sit at their ease and gape at the play. if they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. they live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. they neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. your rank and wealth, harry; my brains, such as they are--my art, whatever it may be worth; dorian gray's good looks--we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly." "dorian gray? is that his name?" asked lord henry, walking across the studio towards basil hallward. "yes, that is his name. i didn't intend to tell it to you." "but why not?" "oh, i can't explain. when i like people immensely i never tell their names to anyone. it is like surrendering a part of them. i have grown to love secrecy. it seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. the commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. when i leave town now i never tell my people where i am going. if i did, i would lose all my pleasure. it is a silly habit, i daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. i suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?" "not at all," answered lord henry, "not at all, my dear basil. you seem to forget that i am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. i never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what i am doing. when we meet--we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the duke's--we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. my wife is very good at it--much better, in fact, than i am. she never gets confused over her dates, and i always do. but when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. i sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me." "i hate the way you talk about your married life, harry," said basil hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. "i believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. you are an extraordinary fellow. you never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. your cynicism is simply a pose." "being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose i know," cried lord henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the garden together, and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that stood in the shade of a tall laurel bush. the sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. in the grass, white daisies were tremulous. after a pause, lord henry pulled out his watch. "i am afraid i must be going, basil," he murmured, "and before i go, i insist on your answering a question i put to you some time ago." "what is that?" said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground. "you know quite well." "i do not, harry." "well, i will tell you what it is. i want you to explain to me why you won't exhibit dorian gray's picture. i want the real reason." "i told you the real reason." "no, you did not. you said it was because there was too much of yourself in it. now, that is childish." "harry," said basil hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. it is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. the reason i will not exhibit this picture is that i am afraid that i have shown in it the secret of my own soul." lord henry laughed. "and what is that?" he asked. "i will tell you," said hallward; but an expression of perplexity came over his face. "i am all expectation, basil," continued his companion, glancing at him. "oh, there is really very little to tell, harry," answered the painter; "and i am afraid you will hardly understand it. perhaps you will hardly believe it." lord henry smiled, and, leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy from the grass, and examined it. "i am quite sure i shall understand it," he replied, gazing intently at the little golden white-feathered disk, "and as for believing things, i can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible." the wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. a grasshopper began to chirrup by the wall, and like a blue thread a long thin dragon-fly floated past on its brown gauze wings. lord henry felt as if he could hear basil hallward's heart beating, and wondered what was coming. "the story is simply this," said the painter after some time. "two months ago i went to a crush at lady brandon's. you know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. with an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilised. well, after i had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge over-dressed dowagers and tedious academicians, i suddenly became conscious that someone was looking at me. i turned halfway round, and saw dorian gray for the first time. when our eyes met, i felt that i was growing pale. a curious sensation of terror came over me. i knew that i had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if i allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. i did not want any external influence in my life. you know yourself, harry, how independent i am by nature. i have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till i met dorian gray. then---- but i don't know how to explain it to you. something seemed to tell me that i was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life. i had a strange feeling that fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. i grew afraid, and turned to quit the room. it was not conscience that made me do so; it was a sort of cowardice. i take no credit to myself for trying to escape." "conscience and cowardice are really the same things, basil. conscience is the trade-name of the firm. that is all." "i don't believe that, harry, and i don't believe you do either. however, whatever was my motive--and it may have been pride, for i used to be very proud--i certainly struggled to the door. there, of course, i stumbled against lady brandon. 'you are not going to run away so soon, mr. hallward?' she screamed out. you know her curiously shrill voice?" "yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said lord henry, pulling the daisy to bits with his long, nervous fingers. "i could not get rid of her. she brought me up to royalties, and people with stars and garters, and elderly ladles with gigantic tiaras and parrot noses. she spoke of me as her dearest friend. i had only met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionise me. i believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. suddenly i found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. we were quite close, almost touching. our eyes met again. it was reckless of me, but i asked lady brandon to introduce me to him. perhaps it was not so reckless, after all. it was simply inevitable. we would have spoken to each other without any introduction. i am sure of that. dorian told me so afterwards. he, too, felt that we were destined to know each other." "and how did lady brandon describe this wonderful young man?" asked his companion. "i know she goes in for giving a rapid _précis_ of all her guests. i remember her bringing me up to a truculent and red-faced old gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to everybody in the room, the most astounding details. i simply fled. i like to find out people for myself. but lady brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. she either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one wants to know." "poor lady brandon! you are hard on her, harry!" said hallward, listlessly. "my dear fellow, she tried to found a _salon_, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant. how could i admire her? but tell me, what did she say about mr. dorian gray?" "oh, something like, 'charming boy--poor dear mother and i absolutely inseparable. quite forget what he does--afraid he--doesn't do anything--oh, yes, plays the piano--or is it the violin, dear mr. gray?' neither of us could help laughing, and we became friends at once." "laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one," said the young lord, plucking another daisy. hallward shook his head. "you don't understand what friendship is, harry," he murmured--"or what enmity is, for that matter. you like everyone; that is to say, you are indifferent to everyone." "how horribly unjust of you!" cried lord henry, tilting his hat back, and looking up at the little clouds that, like ravelled skeins of glossy white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the summer sky. "yes; horribly unjust of you. i make a great difference between people. i choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. i have not got one who is a fool. they are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. is that very vain of me? i think it is rather vain." "i should think it was, harry. but according to your category i must be merely an acquaintance." "my dear old basil, you are much more than an acquaintance." "and much less than a friend. a sort of brother, i suppose?" "oh, brothers! i don't care for brothers. my elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else." "harry!" exclaimed hallward, frowning. "my dear fellow, i am not quite serious. but i can't help detesting my relations. i suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. i quite sympathise with the rage of the english democracy against what they call the vices of the upper orders. the masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if anyone of us makes an ass of himself he is poaching on their preserves. when poor southwark got into the divorce court, their indignation was quite magnificent. and yet i don't suppose that ten per cent. of the proletariat live correctly." "i don't agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is more, harry, i feel sure you don't either." lord henry stroked his pointed brown beard, and tapped the toe of his patent-leather boot with a tasselled ebony cane. "how english you are, basil! that is the second time you have made that observation. if one puts forward an idea to a true englishman--always a rash thing to do--he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. the only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself. now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. however, i don't propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. i like persons better than principles, and i like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. tell me more about mr. dorian gray. how often do you see him?" "every day. i couldn't be happy if i didn't see him every day. he is absolutely necessary to me." "how extraordinary! i thought you would never care for anything but your art." "he is all my art to me now," said the painter, gravely. "i sometimes think, harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world's history. the first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. what the invention of oil-painting was to the venetians, the face of antinoüs was to late greek sculpture, and the face of dorian gray will some day be to me. it is not merely that i paint from him, draw from him, sketch from him. of course i have done all that. but he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. i won't tell you that i am dissatisfied with what i have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. there is nothing that art cannot express, and i know that the work i have done, since i met dorian gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. but in some curious way--i wonder will you understand me?--his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. i see things differently, i think of them differently. i can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before. 'a dream of form in days of thought:'--who is it who says that? i forget; but it is what dorian gray has been to me. the merely visible presence of this lad--for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty--his merely visible presence--ah! i wonder can you realise all that that means? unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is greek. the harmony of soul and body--how much that is! we in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. harry! if you only knew what dorian gray is to me! you remember that landscape of mine, for which agnew offered me such a huge price, but which i would not part with? it is one of the best things i have ever done. and why is it so? because, while i was painting it, dorian gray sat beside me. some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life i saw in the plain woodland the wonder i had always looked for, and always missed." "basil, this is extraordinary! i must see dorian gray." hallward got up from the seat, and walked up and down the garden. after some time he came back. "harry," he said, "dorian gray is to me simply a motive in art. you might see nothing in him. i see everything in him. he is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. he is a suggestion, as i have said, of a new manner. i find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours. that is all." "then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" asked lord henry. "because, without intending it, i have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, i have never cared to speak to him. he knows nothing about it. he shall never know anything about it. but the world might guess it; and i will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. my heart shall never be put under their microscope. there is too much of myself in the thing, harry--too much of myself!" "poets are not so scrupulous as you are. they know how useful passion is for publication. nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "i hate them for it," cried hallward. "an artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. we live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. we have lost the abstract sense of beauty. some day i will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of dorian gray." "i think you are wrong, basil, but i won't argue with you. it is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. tell me, is dorian gray very fond of you?" the painter considered for a few moments. "he likes me," he answered, after a pause; "i know he likes me. of course i flatter him dreadfully. i find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that i know i shall be sorry for having said. as a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. then i feel, harry, that i have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day." "days in summer, basil, are apt to linger," murmured lord henry. "perhaps you will tire sooner than he will. it is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. that accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. in the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. the thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. and the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. it is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. i think you will tire first, all the same. some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something. you will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. the next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. it will be a great pity, for it will alter you. what you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic." "harry, don't talk like that. as long as i live, the personality of dorian gray will dominate me. you can't feel what i feel. you change too often." "ah, my dear basil, that is exactly why i can feel it. those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies." and lord henry struck a light on a dainty silver case, and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and satisfied air, as if he had summed up the world in a phrase. there was a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like swallows. how pleasant it was in the garden! and how delightful other people's emotions were!--much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. one's own soul, and the passions of one's friends--those were the fascinating things in life. he pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with basil hallward. had he gone to his aunt's he would have been sure to have met lord goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor, and the necessity for model lodging-houses. each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. the rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. it was charming to have escaped all that! as he thought of his aunt, an idea seemed to strike him. he turned to hallward, and said, "my dear fellow, i have just remembered." "remembered what, harry?" "where i heard the name of dorian gray." "where was it?" asked hallward, with a slight frown. "don't look so angry, basil. it was at my aunt, lady agatha's. she told me she had discovered a wonderful young man, who was going to help her in the east end, and that his name was dorian gray. i am bound to state that she never told me he was good-looking. women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not. she said that he was very earnest, and had a beautiful nature. i at once pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair, horribly freckled, and tramping about on huge feet. i wish i had known it was your friend." "i am very glad you didn't, harry." "why?" "i don't want you to meet him." "you don't want me to meet him?" "no." "mr. dorian gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler, coming into the garden. "you must introduce me now," cried lord henry, laughing. the painter turned to his servant, who stood blinking in the sunlight. "ask mr. gray to wait, parker: i shall be in in a few moments." the man bowed, and went up the walk. then he looked at lord henry. "dorian gray is my dearest friend," he said. "he has a simple and a beautiful nature. your aunt was quite right in what she said of him. don't spoil him. don't try to influence him. your influence would be bad. the world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses; my life as an artist depends on him. mind, harry, i trust you." he spoke very slowly, and the words seemed wrung out of him almost against his will. "what nonsense you talk!" said lord henry, smiling, and, taking hallward by the arm, he almost led him into the house. chapter ii as they entered they saw dorian gray. he was seated at the piano, with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of schumann's "forest scenes." "you must lend me these, basil," he cried. "i want to learn them. they are perfectly charming." "that entirely depends on how you sit to-day, dorian." "oh, i am tired of sitting, and i don't want a life-sized portrait of myself," answered the lad, swinging round on the music-stool, in a wilful, petulant manner. when he caught sight of lord henry, a faint blush coloured his cheeks for a moment, and he started up. "i beg your pardon, basil, but i didn't know you had anyone with you." "this is lord henry wotton, dorian, an old oxford friend of mine. i have just been telling him what a capital sitter you were, and now you have spoiled everything." "you have not spoiled my pleasure in meeting you, mr. gray," said lord henry, stepping forward and extending his hand. "my aunt has often spoken to me about you. you are one of her favourites, and, i am afraid, one of her victims also." "i am in lady agatha's black books at present," answered dorian, with a funny look of penitence. "i promised to go to a club in whitechapel with her last tuesday, and i really forgot all about it. we were to have played a duet together--three duets, i believe. i don't know what she will say to me. i am far too frightened to call." "oh, i will make your peace with my aunt. she is quite devoted to you. and i don't think it really matters about your not being there. the audience probably thought it was a duet. when aunt agatha sits down to the piano she makes quite enough noise for two people." "that is very horrid to her, and not very nice to me," answered dorian, laughing. lord henry looked at him. yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. there was something in his face that made one trust him at once. all the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity. one felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. no wonder basil hallward worshipped him. "you are too charming to go in for philanthropy, mr. gray--far too charming." and lord henry flung himself down on the divan, and opened his cigarette-case. the painter had been busy mixing his colours and getting his brushes ready. he was looking worried, and when he heard lord henry's last remark he glanced at him, hesitated for a moment, and then said, "harry, i want to finish this picture to-day. would you think it awfully rude of me if i asked you to go away?" lord henry smiled, and looked at dorian gray. "am i to go, mr. gray?" he asked. "oh, please don't, lord henry. i see that basil is in one of his sulky moods; and i can't bear him when he sulks. besides, i want you to tell me why i should not go in for philanthropy." "i don't know that i shall tell you that, mr. gray. it is so tedious a subject that one would have to talk seriously about it. but i certainly shall not run away, now that you have asked me to stop. you don't really mind, basil, do you? you have often told me that you liked your sitters to have someone to chat to." hallward bit his lip. "if dorian wishes it, of course you must stay. dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself." lord henry took up his hat and gloves. "you are very pressing, basil, but i am afraid i must go. i have promised to meet a man at the orleans. good-bye, mr. gray. come and see me some afternoon in curzon street. i am nearly always at home at five o'clock. write to me when you are coming. i should be sorry to miss you." "basil," cried dorian gray, "if lord henry wotton goes i shall go too. you never open your lips while you are painting, and it is horribly dull standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant. ask him to stay. i insist upon it." "stay, harry, to oblige dorian, and to oblige me," said hallward, gazing intently at his picture. "it is quite true, i never talk when i am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully tedious for my unfortunate sitters. i beg you to stay." "but what about my man at the orleans?" the painter laughed. "i don't think there will be any difficulty about that. sit down again, harry. and now, dorian, get up on the platform, and don't move about too much, or pay any attention to what lord henry says. he has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the single exception of myself." dorian gray stepped up on the dais, with the air of a young greek martyr, and made a little _moue_ of discontent to lord henry, to whom he had rather taken a fancy. he was so unlike basil. they made a delightful contrast. and he had such a beautiful voice. after a few moments he said to him, "have you really a very bad influence, lord henry? as bad as basil says?" "there is no such thing as a good influence, mr. gray. all influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view." "why?" "because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. he does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. his virtues are not real to him. his sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. he becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. the aim of life is self-development. to realise one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. people are afraid of themselves, nowadays. they have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. of course they are charitable. they feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. but their own souls starve, and are naked. courage has gone out of our race. perhaps we never really had it. the terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of god, which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us. and yet----" "just turn your head a little more to the right, dorian, like a good boy," said the painter, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before. "and yet," continued lord henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his eton days, "i believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--i believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the hellenic ideal--to something finer, richer, than the hellenic ideal, it may be. but the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. the mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. we are punished for our refusals. every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. the body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. it has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. it is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. you, mr. gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame----" "stop!" faltered dorian gray, "stop! you bewilder me. i don't know what to say. there is some answer to you, but i cannot find it. don't speak. let me think. or, rather, let me try not to think." for nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted lips, and eyes strangely bright. he was dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. the few words that basil's friend had said to him--words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in them--had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. music had stirred him like that. music had troubled him many times. but music was not articulate. it was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. words! mere words! how terrible they were! how clear, and vivid, and cruel! one could not escape from them. and yet what a subtle magic there was in them! they seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. mere words! was there anything so real as words? yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. he understood them now. life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him. it seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. why had he not known it? with his subtle smile, lord henry watched him. he knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing. he felt intensely interested. he was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen, a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he wondered whether dorian gray was passing through a similar experience. he had merely shot an arrow into the air. had it hit the mark? how fascinating the lad was! hallward painted away with that marvellous bold touch of his, that had the true refinement and perfect delicacy that in art, at any rate, comes only from strength. he was unconscious of the silence. "basil, i am tired of standing," cried dorian gray, suddenly. "i must go out and sit in the garden. the air is stifling here." "my dear fellow, i am so sorry. when i am painting, i can't think of anything else. but you never sat better. you were perfectly still. and i have caught the effect i wanted--the half-parted lips, and the bright look in the eyes. i don't know what harry has been saying to you, but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression. i suppose he has been paying you compliments. you mustn't believe a word that he says." "he has certainly not been paying me compliments. perhaps that is the reason that i don't believe anything he has told me." "you know you believe it all," said lord henry, looking at him with his dreamy, languorous eyes. "i will go out to the garden with you. it is horribly hot in the studio. basil, let us have something iced to drink, something with strawberries in it." "certainly, harry. just touch the bell, and when parker comes i will tell him what you want. i have got to work up this background, so i will join you later on. don't keep dorian too long. i have never been in better form for painting than i am to-day. this is going to be my masterpiece. it is my masterpiece as it stands." lord henry went out to the garden, and found dorian gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. he came close to him, and put his hand upon his shoulder. "you are quite right to do that," he murmured. "nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." the lad started and drew back. he was bareheaded, and the leaves had tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded threads. there was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are suddenly awakened. his finely-chiselled nostrils quivered, and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling. "yes," continued lord henry, "that is one of the great secrets of life--to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. you are a wonderful creation. you know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know." dorian gray frowned and turned his head away. he could not help liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. his romantic olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him. there was something in his low, languid voice that was absolutely fascinating. his cool, white, flower-like hands, even, had a curious charm. they moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their own. but he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid. why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? he had known basil hallward for months, but the friendship between them had never altered him. suddenly there had come someone across his life who seemed to have disclosed to him life's mystery. and, yet, what was there to be afraid of? he was not a schoolboy or a girl. it was absurd to be frightened. "let us go and sit in the shade," said lord henry. "parker has brought out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare you will be quite spoiled, and basil will never paint you again. you really must not allow yourself to become sunburnt. it would be unbecoming." "what can it matter?" cried dorian gray, laughing, as he sat down on the seat at the end of the garden. "it should matter everything to you, mr. gray." "why?" "because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having." "i don't feel that, lord henry." "no, you don't feel it now. some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. now, wherever you go, you charm the world. will it always be so?... you have a wonderfully beautiful face, mr. gray. don't frown. you have. and beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. it is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. it cannot be questioned. it has its divine right of sovereignty. it makes princes of those who have it. you smile? ah! when you have lost it you won't smile.... people say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. that may be so. but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. to me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.... yes, mr. gray, the gods have been good to you. but what the gods give they quickly take away. you have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. when your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. you will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. you will suffer horribly.... ah! realise your youth while you have it. don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. these are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. live! live the wonderful life that is in you! let nothing be lost upon you. be always searching for new sensations. be afraid of nothing.... a new hedonism--that is what our century wants. you might be its visible symbol. with your personality there is nothing you could not do. the world belongs to you for a season.... the moment i met you i saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. there was so much in you that charmed me that i felt i must tell you something about yourself. i thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. for there is such a little time that your youth will last--such a little time. the common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. the laburnum will be as yellow next june as it is now. in a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. but we never get back our youth. the pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. our limbs fail, our senses rot. we degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. youth! youth! there is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!" dorian gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. the spray of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. a furry bee came and buzzed round it for a moment. then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. he watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. after a time the bee flew away. he saw it creeping into the stained trumpet of a tyrian convolvulus. the flower seemed to quiver, and then swayed gently to and fro. suddenly the painter appeared at the door of the studio, and made staccato signs for them to come in. they turned to each other, and smiled. "i am waiting," he cried. "do come in. the light is quite perfect, and you can bring your drinks." they rose up, and sauntered down the walk together. two green-and-white butterflies fluttered past them, and in the pear-tree at the corner of the garden a thrush began to sing. "you are glad you have met me, mr. gray," said lord henry, looking at him. "yes, i am glad now. i wonder shall i always be glad?" "always! that is a dreadful word. it makes me shudder when i hear it. women are so fond of using it. they spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. it is a meaningless word, too. the only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer." as they entered the studio, dorian gray put his hand upon lord henry's arm. "in that case, let our friendship be a caprice," he murmured, flushing at his own boldness, then stepped up on the platform and resumed his pose. lord henry flung himself into a large wicker arm-chair and watched him. the sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas made the only sound that broke the stillness, except when, now and then, hallward stepped back to look at his work from a distance. in the slanting beams that streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden. the heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything. after about a quarter of an hour hallward stopped painting, looked for a long time at dorian gray, and then for a long time at the picture, biting the end of one of his huge brushes, and frowning. "it is quite finished," he cried at last, and stooping down he wrote his name in long vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of the canvas. lord henry came over and examined the picture. it was certainly a wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well. "my dear fellow, i congratulate you most warmly," he said. "it is the finest portrait of modern times. mr. gray, come over and look at yourself." the lad started, as if awakened from some dream. "is it really finished?" he murmured, stepping down from the platform. "quite finished," said the painter. "and you have sat splendidly to-day. i am awfully obliged to you." "that is entirely due to me," broke in lord henry. "isn't it, mr. gray?" dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture, and turned towards it. when he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. a look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognised himself for the first time. he stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. the sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. he had never felt it before. basil hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be merely the charming exaggerations of friendship. he had listened to them, laughed at them, forgotten them. they had not influenced his nature. then had come lord henry wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity. that had stirred him at the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him. yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. the scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold steal from his hair. the life that was to make his soul would mar his body. he would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth. as he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a knife, and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. his eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. he felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart. "don't you like it?" cried hallward at last, stung a little by the lad's silence, not understanding what it meant. "of course he likes it," said lord henry. "who wouldn't like it? it is one of the greatest things in modern art. i will give you anything you like to ask for it. i must have it." "it is not my property, harry." "whose property is it?" "dorian's, of course," answered the painter. "he is a very lucky fellow." "how sad it is!" murmured dorian gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "how sad it is! i shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. but this picture will remain always young. it will never be older than this particular day of june.... if it were only the other way! if it were i who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! for that--for that--i would give everything! yes, there is nothing in the whole world i would not give! i would give my soul for that!" "you would hardly care for such an arrangement, basil," cried lord henry, laughing. "it would be rather hard lines on your work." "i should object very strongly, harry," said hallward. dorian gray turned and looked at him. "i believe you would, basil. you like your art better than your friends. i am no more to you than a green bronze figure. hardly as much, i daresay." the painter stared in amazement. it was so unlike dorian to speak like that. what had happened? he seemed quite angry. his face was flushed and his cheeks burning. "yes," he continued, "i am less to you than your ivory hermes or your silver faun. you will like them always. how long will you like me? till i have my first wrinkle, i suppose. i know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. your picture has taught me that. lord henry wotton is perfectly right. youth is the only thing worth having. when i find that i am growing old, i shall kill myself." hallward turned pale, and caught his hand. "dorian! dorian!" he cried, "don't talk like that. i have never had such a friend as you, and i shall never have such another. you are not jealous of material things, are you?--you who are finer than any of them!" "i am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. i am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. why should it keep what i must lose? every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it. oh, if it were only the other way! if the picture could change, and i could be always what i am now! why did you paint it? it will mock me some day--mock me horribly!" the hot tears welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying. "this is your doing, harry," said the painter, bitterly. lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "it is the real dorian gray--that is all." "it is not." "if it is not, what have i to do with it?" "you should have gone away when i asked you," he muttered. "i stayed when you asked me," was lord henry's answer. "harry, i can't quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work i have ever done, and i will destroy it. what is it but canvas and colour? i will not let it come across our three lives and mar them." dorian gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with pallid face and tear-stained eyes looked at him, as he walked over to the deal painting-table that was set beneath the high curtained window. what was he doing there? his fingers were straying about among the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something. yes, it was for the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel. he had found it at last. he was going to rip up the canvas. with a stifled sob the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end of the studio. "don't, basil, don't!" he cried. "it would be murder!" "i am glad you appreciate my work at last, dorian," said the painter, coldly, when he had recovered from his surprise. "i never thought you would." "appreciate it? i am in love with it, basil. it is part of myself. i feel that." "well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and sent home. then you can do what you like with yourself." and he walked across the room and rang the bell for tea. "you will have tea, of course, dorian? and so will you, harry? or do you object to such simple pleasures?" "i adore simple pleasures," said lord henry. "they are the last refuge of the complex. but i don't like scenes, except on the stage. what absurd fellows you are, both of you! i wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. it was the most premature definition ever given. man is many things, but he is not rational. i am glad he is not, after all: though i wish you chaps would not squabble over the picture. you had much better let me have it, basil. this silly boy doesn't really want it, and i really do." "if you let anyone have it but me, basil, i shall never forgive you!" cried dorian gray; "and i don't allow people to call me a silly boy." "you know the picture is yours, dorian. i gave it to you before it existed." "and you know you have been a little silly, mr. gray, and that you don't really object to being reminded that you are extremely young." "i should have objected very strongly this morning, lord henry." "ah! this morning! you have lived since then." there came a knock at the door, and the butler entered with a laden tea-tray and set it down upon a small japanese table. there was a rattle of cups and saucers and the hissing of a fluted georgian urn. two globe-shaped china dishes were brought in by a page. dorian gray went over and poured out the tea. the two men sauntered languidly to the table, and examined what was under the covers. "let us go to the theatre to-night," said lord henry. "there is sure to be something on, somewhere. i have promised to dine at white's, but it is only with an old friend, so i can send him a wire to say that i am ill, or that i am prevented from coming in consequence of a subsequent engagement. i think that would be a rather nice excuse: it would have all the surprise of candour." "it is such a bore putting on one's dress-clothes," muttered hallward. "and, when one has them on, they are so horrid." "yes," answered lord henry, dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. it is so sombre, so depressing. sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life." "you really must not say things like that before dorian, harry." "before which dorian? the one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?" "before either." "i should like to come to the theatre with you, lord henry," said the lad. "then you shall come; and you will come too, basil, won't you?" "i can't really. i would sooner not. i have a lot of work to do." "well, then, you and i will go alone, mr. gray." "i should like that awfully." the painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. "i shall stay with the real dorian," he said, sadly. "is it the real dorian?" cried the original of the portrait, strolling across to him. "am i really like that?" "yes; you are just like that." "how wonderful, basil!" "at least you are like it in appearance. but it will never alter," sighed hallward. "that is something." "what a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed lord henry. "why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. it has nothing to do with our own will. young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say." "don't go to the theatre to-night, dorian," said hallward. "stop and dine with me." "i can't, basil." "why?" "because i have promised lord henry wotton to go with him." "he won't like you the better for keeping your promises. he always breaks his own. i beg you not to go." dorian gray laughed and shook his head. "i entreat you." the lad hesitated, and looked over at lord henry, who was watching them from the tea-table with an amused smile. "i must go, basil," he answered. "very well," said hallward; and he went over and laid down his cup on the tray. "it is rather late, and, as you have to dress, you had better lose no time. good-bye, harry. good-bye, dorian. come and see me soon. come to-morrow." "certainly." "you won't forget?" "no, of course not," cried dorian. "and... harry!" "yes, basil?" "remember what i asked you, when we were in the garden this morning." "i have forgotten it." "i trust you." "i wish i could trust myself," said lord henry, laughing. "come, mr. gray, my hansom is outside, and i can drop you at your own place. good-bye, basil. it has been a most interesting afternoon." as the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face. chapter iii at half-past twelve next day lord henry wotton strolled from curzon street over to the albany to call on his uncle, lord fermor, a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by society as he fed the people who amused him. his father had been our ambassador at madrid when isabella was young, and prim unthought of, but had retired from the diplomatic service in a capricious moment of annoyance at not being offered the embassy at paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good english of his despatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure. the son, who had been his father's secretary, had resigned along with his chief, somewhat foolishly as was thought at the time, and on succeeding some months later to the title, had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. he had two large town houses, but preferred to live in chambers, as it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at his club. he paid some attention to the management of his collieries in the midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth. in politics he was a tory, except when the tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of radicals. he was a hero to his valet, who bullied him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn. only england could have produced him, and he always said that the country was going to the dogs. his principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices. when lord henry entered the room, he found his uncle sitting in a rough shooting coat, smoking a cheroot, and grumbling over _the times_. "well, harry," said the old gentleman, "what brings you out so early? i thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible till five." "pure family affection, i assure you, uncle george. i want to get something out of you." "money, i suppose," said lord fermor, making a wry face. "well, sit down and tell me all about it. young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything." "yes," murmured lord henry, settling his buttonhole in his coat; "and when they grow older they know it. but i don't want money. it is only people who pay their bills who want that, uncle george, and i never pay mine. credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly upon it. besides, i always deal with dartmoor's tradesmen, and consequently they never bother me. what i want is information; not useful information, of course; useless information." "well, i can tell you anything that is in an english blue-book, harry, although those fellows nowadays write a lot of nonsense. when i was in the diplomatic, things were much better. but i hear they let them in now by examination. what can you expect? examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. if a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him." "mr. dorian gray does not belong to blue-books, uncle george," said lord henry, languidly. "mr. dorian gray? who is he?" asked lord fermor, knitting his bushy white eyebrows. "that is what i have come to learn, uncle george. or rather, i know who he is. he is the last lord kelso's grandson. his mother was a devereux; lady margaret devereux. i want you to tell me about his mother. what was she like? whom did she marry? you have known nearly everybody in your time, so you might have known her. i am very much interested in mr. gray at present. i have only just met him." "kelso's grandson!" echoed the old gentleman.--"kelso's grandson!... of course.... i knew his mother intimately. i believe i was at her christening. she was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, margaret devereux; and made all the men frantic by running away with a penniless young fellow; a mere nobody, sir, a subaltern in a foot regiment, or something of that kind. certainly. i remember the whole thing as if it happened yesterday. the poor chap was killed in a duel at spa, a few months after the marriage. there was an ugly story about it. they said kelso got some rascally adventurer, some belgian brute, to insult his son-in-law in public; paid him, sir, to do it, paid him; and that the fellow spitted his man as if he had been a pigeon. the thing was hushed up, but, egad, kelso ate his chop alone at the club for some time afterwards. he brought his daughter back with him, i was told, and she never spoke to him again. oh, yes; it was a bad business. the girl died too; died within a year. so she left a son, did she? i had forgotten that. what sort of boy is he? if he is like his mother he must be a good-looking chap." "he is very good-looking," assented lord henry. "i hope he will fall into proper hands," continued the old man. "he should have a pot of money waiting for him if kelso did the right thing by him. his mother had money too. all the selby property came to her, through her grandfather. her grandfather hated kelso, thought him a mean dog. he was, too. came to madrid once when i was there. egad, i was ashamed of him. the queen used to ask me about the english noble who was always quarrelling with the cabmen about their fares. they made quite a story of it. i didn't dare to show my face at court for a month. i hope he treated his grandson better than he did the jarvies." "i don't know," answered lord henry. "i fancy that the boy will be well off. he is not of age yet. he has selby, i know. he told me so. and... his mother was very beautiful?" "margaret devereux was one of the loveliest creatures i ever saw, harry. what on earth induced her to behave as she did, i never could understand. she could have married anybody she chose. carlington was mad after her. she was romantic, though. all the women of that family were. the men were a poor lot, but, egad! the women were wonderful. carlington went on his knees to her. told me so himself. she laughed at him, and there wasn't a girl in london at the time who wasn't after him. and by the way, harry, talking about silly marriages, what is this humbug your father tells me about dartmoor wanting to marry an american? ain't english girls good enough for him?" "it is rather fashionable to marry americans just now, uncle george." "i'll back english women against the world, harry," said lord fermor, striking the table with his fist. "the betting is on the americans." "they don't last, i am told," muttered his uncle. "a long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a steeplechase. they take things flying. i don't think dartmoor has a chance." "who are her people?" grumbled the old gentleman. "has she got any?" lord henry shook his head. "american girls are as clever at concealing their parents as english women are at concealing their past," he said, rising to go. "they are pork-packers, i suppose?" "i hope so, uncle george, for dartmoor's sake. i am told that pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in america, after politics." "is she pretty?" "she behaves as if she was beautiful. most american women do. it is the secret of their charm." "why can't these american women stay in their own country? they are always telling us that it is the paradise for women." "it is. that is the reason why, like eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it," said lord henry. "good-bye, uncle george. i shall be late for lunch, if i stop any longer. thanks for giving me the information i wanted. i always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones." "where are you lunching, harry?" "at aunt agatha's. i have asked myself and mr. gray. he is her latest _protégé_." "humph! tell your aunt agatha, harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals. i am sick of them. why, the good woman thinks that i have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads." "all right, uncle george, i'll tell her, but it won't have any effect. philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. it is their distinguishing characteristic." the old gentleman growled approvingly, and rang the bell for his servant. lord henry passed up the low arcade into burlington street, and turned his steps in the direction of berkeley square. so that was the story of dorian gray's parentage. crudely as it had been told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance. a beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. a few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. the mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. yes; it was an interesting background. it posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow.... and how charming he had been at dinner the night before, as, with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure, he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. he answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.... there was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. no other activity was like it. to project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.... he was a marvellous type, too, this lad, whom by so curious a chance he had met in basil's studio; or could be fashioned into a marvellous type, at any rate. grace was his, and the white purity of boyhood, and beauty such as old greek marbles kept for us. there was nothing that one could not do with him. he could be made a titan or a toy. what a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade!... and basil? from a psychological point of view, how interesting he was! the new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, dryad-like and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was! he remembered something like it in history. was it not plato, that artist in thought, who had first analysed it? was it not buonarotti who had carved it in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence? but in our own century it was strange.... yes; he would try to be to dorian gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. he would seek to dominate him--had already, indeed, half done so. he would make that wonderful spirit his own. there was something fascinating in this son of love and death. suddenly he stopped, and glanced up at the houses. he found that he had passed his aunt's some distance, and, smiling to himself, turned back. when he entered the somewhat sombre hall the butler told him that they had gone in to lunch. he gave one of the footmen his hat and stick, and passed into the dining-room. "late as usual, harry," cried his aunt, shaking her head at him. he invented a facile excuse, and having taken the vacant seat next to her, looked round to see who was there. dorian bowed to him shyly from the end of the table, a flush of pleasure stealing into his cheek. opposite was the duchess of harley; a lady of admirable good-nature and good temper, much liked by everyone who knew her, and of those ample architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses are described by contemporary historians as stoutness. next to her sat, on her right, sir thomas burdon, a radical member of parliament, who followed his leader in public life, and in private life followed the best cooks, dining with the tories, and thinking with the liberals, in accordance with a wise and well-known rule. the post on her left was occupied by mr. erskine of treadley, an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to lady agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty. his own neighbour was mrs. vandeleur, one of his aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book. fortunately for him she had on the other side lord faudel, a most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a ministerial statement in the house of commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of them ever quite escape. "we are talking about poor dartmoor, lord henry," cried the duchess, nodding pleasantly to him across the table. "do you think he will really marry this fascinating young person?" "i believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, duchess." "how dreadful!" exclaimed lady agatha. "really, someone should interfere." "i am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an american dry-goods store," said sir thomas burdon, looking supercilious. "my uncle has already suggested pork-packing, sir thomas." "dry-goods! what are american dry-goods?" asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder, and accentuating the verb. "american novels," answered lord henry, helping himself to some quail. the duchess looked puzzled. "don't mind him, my dear," whispered lady agatha. "he never means anything that he says." "when america was discovered," said the radical member, and he began to give some wearisome facts. like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners. the duchess sighed, and exercised her privilege of interruption. "i wish to goodness it never had been discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "really, our girls have no chance nowadays. it is most unfair." "perhaps, after all, america never has been discovered," said mr. erskine. "i myself would say that it had merely been detected." "oh! but i have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the duchess, vaguely. "i must confess that most of them are extremely pretty. and they dress well, too. they get all their dresses in paris. i wish i could afford to do the same." "they say that when good americans die they go to paris," chuckled sir thomas, who had a large wardrobe of humour's cast-off clothes. "really! and where do bad americans go to when they die?" inquired the duchess. "they go to america," murmured lord henry. sir thomas frowned. "i am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country," he said to lady agatha. "i have travelled all over it, in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters, are extremely civil. i assure you that it is an education to visit it." "but must we really see chicago in order to be educated?" asked mr. erskine, plaintively. "i don't feel up to the journey." sir thomas waved his hand. "mr. erskine of treadley has the world on his shelves. we practical men like to see things, not to read about them. the americans are an extremely interesting people. they are absolutely reasonable. i think that is their distinguishing characteristic. yes, mr. erskine, an absolutely reasonable people. i assure you there is no nonsense about the americans." "how dreadful!" cried lord henry. "i can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. there is something unfair about its use. it is hitting below the intellect." "i do not understand you," said sir thomas, growing rather red. "i do, lord henry," murmured mr. erskine, with a smile. "paradoxes are all very well in their way...." rejoined the baronet. "was that a paradox?" asked mr. erskine. "i did not think so. perhaps it was. well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. to test reality we must see it on the tight-rope. when the verities become acrobats we can judge them." "dear me!" said lady agatha, "how you men argue! i am sure i never can make out what you are talking about. oh! harry, i am quite vexed with you. why do you try to persuade our nice mr. dorian gray to give up the east end? i assure you he would be quite invaluable. they would love his playing." "i want him to play to me," cried lord henry, smiling, and he looked down the table and caught a bright answering glance. "but they are so unhappy in whitechapel," continued lady agatha. "i can sympathise with everything, except suffering," said lord henry, shrugging his shoulders. "i cannot sympathise with that. it is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. there is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. one should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. the less said about life's sores the better." "still, the east end is a very important problem," remarked sir thomas, with a grave shake of the head. "quite so," answered the young lord. "it is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves." the politician looked at him keenly. "what change do you propose, then?" he asked. lord henry laughed. "i don't desire to change anything in england except the weather," he answered. "i am quite content with philosophic contemplation. but, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure of sympathy, i would suggest that we should appeal to science to put us straight. the advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional." "but we have such grave responsibilities," ventured mrs. vandeleur, timidly. "terribly grave," echoed lady agatha. lord henry looked over at mr. erskine. "humanity takes itself too seriously. it is the world's original sin. if the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different." "you are really very comforting," warbled the duchess. "i have always felt rather guilty when i came to see your dear aunt, for i take no interest at all in the east end. for the future i shall be able to look her in the face without a blush." "a blush is very becoming, duchess," remarked lord henry. "only when one is young," she answered. "when an old woman like myself blushes, it is a very bad sign. ah! lord henry, i wish you would tell me how to become young again." he thought for a moment. "can you remember any great error that you committed in your early days, duchess?" he asked, looking at her across the table. "a great many, i fear," she cried. "then commit them over again," he said, gravely. "to get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies." "a delightful theory!" she exclaimed. "i must put it into practice." "a dangerous theory!" came from sir thomas's tight lips. lady agatha shook her head, but could not help being amused. mr. erskine listened. "yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." a laugh ran round the table. he played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. the praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow silenus for being sober. facts fled before her like frightened forest things. her white feet trod the huge press at which wise omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. it was an extraordinary improvisation. he felt that the eyes of dorian gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate, seemed to give his wit keenness, and to lend colour to his imagination. he was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. he charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe laughing. dorian gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips, and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes. at last, liveried in the costume of the age, reality entered the room in the shape of a servant to tell the duchess that her carriage was waiting. she wrung her hands in mock despair. "how annoying!" she cried. "i must go. i have to call for my husband at the club, to take him to some absurd meeting at willis's rooms, where he is going to be in the chair. if i am late, he is sure to be furious, and i couldn't have a scene in this bonnet. it is far too fragile. a harsh word would ruin it. no, i must go, dear agatha. good-bye, lord henry, you are quite delightful, and dreadfully demoralising. i am sure i don't know what to say about your views. you must come and dine with us some night. tuesday? are you disengaged tuesday?" "for you i would throw over anybody, duchess," said lord henry, with a bow. "ah! that is very nice, and very wrong of you," she cried; "so mind you come;" and she swept out of the room, followed by lady agatha and the other ladies. when lord henry had sat down again, mr. erskine moved round, and taking a chair close to him, placed his hand upon his arm. "you talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "i am too fond of reading books to care to write them, mr. erskine. i should like to write a novel certainly; a novel that would be as lovely as a persian carpet, and as unreal. but there is no literary public in england for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopædias. of all people in the world the english have the least sense of the beauty of literature." "i fear you are right," answered mr. erskine. "i myself used to have literary ambitions, but i gave them up long ago. and now, my dear young friend, if you will allow me to call you so, may i ask if you really meant all that you said to us at lunch?" "i quite forget what i said," smiled lord henry. "was it all very bad?" "very bad indeed. in fact i consider you extremely dangerous, and if anything happens to our good duchess we shall all look on you as being primarily responsible. but i should like to talk to you about life. the generation into which i was born was tedious. some day, when you are tired of london, come down to treadley, and expound to me your philosophy of pleasure over some admirable burgundy i am fortunate enough to possess." "i shall be charmed. a visit to treadley would be a great privilege. it has a perfect host, and a perfect library." "you will complete it," answered the old gentleman, with a courteous bow. "and now i must bid good-bye to your excellent aunt. i am due at the athenæum. it is the hour when we sleep there." "all of you, mr. erskine?" "forty of us, in forty arm-chairs. we are practising for an english academy of letters." lord henry laughed, and rose. "i am going to the park," he cried. as he was passing out of the door dorian gray touched him on the arm. "let me come with you," he murmured. "but i thought you had promised basil hallward to go and see him," answered lord henry. "i would sooner come with you; yes, i feel i must come with you. do let me. and you will promise to talk to me all the time? no one talks so wonderfully as you do." "ah! i have talked quite enough for to-day," said lord henry, smiling. "all i want now is to look at life. you may come and look at it with me, if you care to." chapter iv one afternoon, a month later, dorian gray was reclining in a luxurious arm-chair, in the little library of lord henry's house in mayfair. it was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high-panelled wainscoting of olive-stained oak, its cream-coloured frieze and ceiling of raised plaster-work, and its brickdust felt carpet strewn with silk long-fringed persian rugs. on a tiny satinwood table stood a statuette by clodion, and beside it lay a copy of "_les cent nouvelles_," bound for margaret of valois by clovis eve, and powdered with the gilt daisies that queen had selected for her device. some large blue china jars and parrot-tulips were ranged on the mantel-shelf, and through the small leaded panels of the window streamed the apricot-coloured light of a summer day in london. lord henry had not yet come in. he was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. so the lad was looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers he turned over the pages of an elaborately-illustrated edition of "_manon lescaut_" that he had found in one of the bookcases. the formal monotonous ticking of the louis quatorze clock annoyed him. once or twice he thought of going away. at last he heard a step outside, and the door opened. "how late you are, harry!" he murmured. "i am afraid it is not harry, mr. gray," answered a shrill voice. he glanced quickly round, and rose to his feet. "i beg your pardon. i thought----" "you thought it was my husband. it is only his wife. you must let me introduce myself. i know you quite well by your photographs. i think my husband has got seventeen of them." "not seventeen, lady henry?" "well, eighteen, then. and i saw you with him the other night at the opera." she laughed nervously as she spoke, and watched him with her vague forget-me-not eyes. she was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. she was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. she tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. her name was victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church. "that was at 'lohengrin,' lady henry, i think?" "yes; it was at dear 'lohengrin.' i like wagner's music better than anybody's. it is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says. that is a great advantage: don't you think so, mr. gray?" the same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips, and her fingers began to play with a long tortoise-shell paper-knife. dorian smiled, and shook his head: "i am afraid i don't think so, lady henry. i never talk during music, at least, during good music. if one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation." "ah! that is one of harry's views, isn't it, mr. gray? i always hear harry's views from his friends. it is the only way i get to know of them. but you must not think i don't like good music. i adore it, but i am afraid of it. it makes me too romantic. i have simply worshipped pianists--two at a time, sometimes, harry tells me. i don't know what it is about them. perhaps it is that they are foreigners. they all are, ain't they? even those that are born in england become foreigners after a time, don't they? it is so clever of them, and such a compliment to art. makes it quite cosmopolitan, doesn't it? you have never been to any of my parties, have you, mr. gray? you must come. i can't afford orchids, but i spare no expense in foreigners. they make one's rooms look so picturesque. but here is harry!--harry, i came in to look for you, to ask you something--i forget what it was--and i found mr. gray here. we have had such a pleasant chat about music. we have quite the same ideas. no; i think our ideas are quite different. but he has been most pleasant. i am so glad i've seen him." "i am charmed, my love, quite charmed," said lord henry, elevating his dark crescent-shaped eyebrows and looking at them both with an amused smile. "so sorry i am late, dorian. i went to look after a piece of old brocade in wardour street, and had to bargain for hours for it. nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing." "i am afraid i must be going," exclaimed lady henry, breaking an awkward silence with her silly sudden laugh. "i have promised to drive with the duchess. good-bye, mr. gray. good-bye, harry. you are dining out, i suppose? so am i. perhaps i shall see you at lady thornbury's." "i daresay, my dear," said lord henry, shutting the door behind her, as, looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the rain, she flitted out of the room, leaving a faint odour of frangipanni. then he lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on the sofa. "never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair, dorian," he said, after a few puffs. "why, harry?" "because they are so sentimental." "but i like sentimental people." "never marry at all, dorian. men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed." "i don't think i am likely to marry, henry. i am too much in love. that is one of your aphorisms. i am putting it into practice, as i do everything that you say." "who are you in love with?" asked lord henry, after a pause. "with an actress," said dorian gray, blushing. lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "that is a rather commonplace _début_." "you would not say so if you saw her, harry." "who is she?" "her name is sibyl vane." "never heard of her." "no one has. people will some day, however. she is a genius." "my dear boy, no woman is a genius. women are a decorative sex. they never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals." "harry, how can you?" "my dear dorian, it is quite true. i am analysing women at the present, so i ought to know. the subject is not so abstruse as i thought it was. i find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. the plain women are very useful. if you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. the other women are very charming. they commit one mistake, however. they paint in order to try and look young. our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly. _rouge_ and _esprit_ used to go together. that is all over now. as long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. as for conversation, there are only five women in london worth talking to, and two of these can't be admitted into decent society. however, tell me about your genius. how long have you known her?" "ah! harry, your views terrify me." "never mind that. how long have you known her?" "about three weeks." "and where did you come across her?" "i will tell you, harry; but you mustn't be unsympathetic about it. after all, it never would have happened if i had not met you. you filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life. for days after i met you, something seemed to throb in my veins. as i lounged in the park, or strolled down piccadilly, i used to look at every one who passed me, and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. some of them fascinated me. others filled me with terror. there was an exquisite poison in the air. i had a passion for sensations.... well, one evening about seven o'clock, i determined to go out in search of some adventure. i felt that this grey, monstrous london of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me. i fancied a thousand things. the mere danger gave me a sense of delight. i remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening when we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life. i don't know what i expected, but i went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares. about half-past eight i passed by an absurd little theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. a hideous jew, in the most amazing waistcoat i ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. he had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt. 'have a box, my lord?' he said, when he saw me, and he took off his hat with an air of gorgeous servility. there was something about him, harry, that amused me. he was such a monster. you will laugh at me, i know, but i really went in and paid a whole guinea for the stage-box. to the present day i can't make out why i did so; and yet if i hadn't--my dear harry, if i hadn't, i should have missed the greatest romance of my life. i see you are laughing. it is horrid of you!" "i am not laughing, dorian; at least i am not laughing at you. but you should not say the greatest romance of your life. you should say the first romance of your life. you will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. a _grande passion_ is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. that is the one use of the idle classes of a country. don't be afraid. there are exquisite things in store for you. this is merely the beginning." "do you think my nature so shallow?" cried dorian gray, angrily. "no; i think your nature so deep." "how do you mean?" "my dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. what they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, i call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failures. faithfulness! i must analyse it some day. the passion for property is in it. there are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. but i don't want to interrupt you. go on with your story." "well, i found myself seated in a horrid little private box, with a vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. i looked out from behind the curtain, and surveyed the house. it was a tawdry affair, all cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding cake. the gallery and pit were fairy full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and there was hardly a person in what i suppose they called the dress-circle. women went about with oranges and ginger-beer, and there was a terrible consumption of nuts going on." "it must have been just like the palmy days of the british drama." "just like, i should fancy, and very depressing. i began to wonder what on earth i should do, when i caught sight of the play-bill. what do you think the play was, harry?" "i should think 'the idiot boy, or dumb but innocent.' our fathers used to like that sort of piece, i believe. the longer i live, dorian, the more keenly i feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. in art, as in politics, _les grandpères ont toujours tort_." "this play was good enough for us, harry. it was 'romeo and juliet.' i must admit that i was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place. still, i felt interested, in a sort of way. at any rate, i determined to wait for the first act. there was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young hebrew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the drop-scene was drawn up, and the play began. romeo was a stout elderly gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky tragedy voice, and a figure like a beer-barrel. mercutio was almost as bad. he was played by the low-comedian, who had introduced gags of his own and was on most friendly terms with the pit. they were both as grotesque as the scenery, and that looked as if it had come out of a country-booth. but juliet! harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose. she was the loveliest thing i had ever seen in my life. you said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears. i tell you, harry, i could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that came across me. and her voice--i never heard such a voice. it was very low at first, with deep mellow notes, that seemed to fall singly upon one's ear. then it became a little louder, and sounded like a flute or a distant hautbois. in the garden-scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing. there were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of violins. you know how a voice can stir one. your voice and the voice of sibyl vane are two things that i shall never forget. when i close my eyes, i hear them, and each of them says something different. i don't know which to follow. why should i not love her? harry, i do love her. she is everything to me in life. night after night i go to see her play. one evening she is rosalind, and the next evening she is imogen. i have seen her die in the gloom of an italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover's lips. i have watched her wandering through the forest of arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap. she has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king, and given him rue to wear, and bitter herbs to taste of. she has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her reed-like throat. i have seen her in every age and in every costume. ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. they are limited to their century. no glamour ever transfigures them. one knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. one can always find them. there is no mystery in any of them. they ride in the park in the morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. they have their stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. they are quite obvious. but an actress! how different an actress is! harry! why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?" "because i have loved so many of them, dorian." "oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces." "don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. there is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes," said lord henry. "i wish now i had not told you about sibyl vane." "you could not have helped telling me, dorian. all through your life you will tell me everything you do." "yes, harry, i believe that is true. i cannot help telling you things. you have a curious influence over me. if i ever did a crime, i would come and confess it to you. you would understand me." "people like you--the wilful sunbeams of life--don't commit crimes, dorian. but i am much obliged for the compliment, all the same. and now tell me--reach me the matches, like a good boy: thanks:--what are your actual relations with sibyl vane?" dorian gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes. "harry! sibyl vane is sacred!" "it is only the sacred things that are worth touching, dorian," said lord henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice. "but why should you be annoyed? i suppose she will belong to you some day. when one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. that is what the world calls a romance. you know her, at any rate, i suppose?" "of course i know her. on the first night i was at the theatre, the horrid old jew came round to the box after the performance was over, and offered to take me behind the scenes and introduce me to her. i was furious with him, and told him that juliet had been dead for hundreds of years, and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in verona. i think, from his blank look of amazement, that he was under the impression that i had taken too much champagne, or something." "i am not surprised." "then he asked me if i wrote for any of the newspapers. i told him i never even read them. he seemed terribly disappointed at that, and confided to me that all the dramatic critics were in a conspiracy against him, and that they were every one of them to be bought." "i should not wonder if he was quite right there. but, on the other hand, judging from their appearance, most of them cannot be at all expensive." "well, he seemed to think they were beyond his means," laughed dorian. "by this time, however, the lights were being put out in the theatre, and i had to go. he wanted me to try some cigars that he strongly recommended. i declined. the next night, of course, i arrived at the place again. when he saw me he made me a low bow, and assured me that i was a munificent patron of art. he was a most offensive brute, though he had an extraordinary passion for shakespeare. he told me once, with an air of pride, that his five bankruptcies were entirely due to 'the bard,' as he insisted on calling him. he seemed to think it a distinction." "it was a distinction, my dear dorian--a great distinction. most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. to have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour. but when did you first speak to miss sibyl vane?" "the third night. she had been playing rosalind. i could not help going round. i had thrown her some flowers, and she had looked at me; at least i fancied that she had. the old jew was persistent. he seemed determined to take me behind, so i consented. it was curious my not wanting to know her, wasn't it?" "no; i don't think so." "my dear harry, why?" "i will tell you some other time. now i want to know about the girl." "sibyl? oh, she was so shy, and so gentle. there is something of a child about her. her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when i told her what i thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious of her power. i think we were both rather nervous. the old jew stood grinning at the doorway of the dusty greenroom, making elaborate speeches about us both, while we stood looking at each other like children. he would insist on calling me 'my lord,' so i had to assure sibyl that i was not anything of the kind. she said quite simply to me, 'you look more like a prince. i must call you prince charming.'" "upon my word, dorian, miss sibyl knows how to pay compliments." "you don't understand her, harry. she regarded me merely as a person in a play. she knows nothing of life. she lives with her mother, a faded tired woman who played lady capulet in a sort of magenta dressing-wrapper on the first night, and looks as if she had seen better days." "i know that look. it depresses me," murmured lord henry, examining his rings. "the jew wanted to tell me her history, but i said it did not interest me." "you were quite right. there is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies." "sibyl is the only thing i care about. what is it to me where she came from? from her little head to her little feet, she is absolutely and entirely divine. every night of my life i go to see her act, and every night she is more marvellous." "that is the reason, i suppose, that you never dine with me now. i thought you must have some curious romance on hand. you have; but it is not quite what i expected." "my dear harry, we either lunch or sup together every day, and i have been to the opera with you several times," said dorian, opening his blue eyes in wonder. "you always come dreadfully late." "well, i can't help going to see sibyl play," he cried, "even if it is only for a single act. i get hungry for her presence; and when i think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, i am filled with awe." "you can dine with me to-night, dorian, can't you?" he shook his head. "to-night she is imogen," he answered, "and to-morrow night she will be juliet." "when is she sibyl vane?" "never." "i congratulate you." "how horrid you are! she is all the great heroines of the world in one. she is more than an individual. you laugh, but i tell you she has genius. i love her, and i must make her love me. you, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm sibyl vane to love me! i want to make romeo jealous. i want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. i want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. my god, harry, how i worship her!" he was walking up and down the room as he spoke. hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. he was terribly excited. lord henry watched him with a subtle sense of pleasure. how different he was now from the shy, frightened boy he had met in basil hallward's studio! his nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. out of its secret hiding-place had crept his soul, and desire had come to meet it on the way. "and what do you propose to do?" said lord henry, at last. "i want you and basil to come with me some night and see her act. i have not the slightest fear of the result. you are certain to acknowledge her genius. then we must get her out of the jew's hands. she is bound to him for three years--at least for two years and eight months--from the present time. i shall have to pay him something, of course. when all that is settled, i shall take a west end theatre and bring her out properly. she will make the world as mad as she has made me." "that would be impossible, my dear boy?" "yes, she will. she has not merely art, consummate art-instinct, in her, but she has personality also; and you have often told me that it is personalities, not principles, that move the age." "well, what night shall we go?" "let me see. to-day is tuesday. let us fix to-morrow. she plays juliet to-morrow." "all right. the bristol at eight o'clock; and i will get basil." "not eight, harry, please. half-past six. we must be there before the curtain rises. you must see her in the first act, where she meets romeo." "half-past six! what an hour! it will be like having a meat-tea, or reading an english novel. it must be seven. no gentleman dines before seven. shall you see basil between this and then? or shall i write to him?" "dear basil! i have not laid eyes on him for a week. it is rather horrid of me, as he has sent me my portrait in the most wonderful frame, specially designed by himself, and, though i am a little jealous of the picture for being a whole month younger than i am, i must admit that i delight in it. perhaps you had better write to him. i don't want to see him alone. he says things that annoy me. he gives me good advice." lord henry smiled. "people are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. it is what i call the depth of generosity." "oh, basil is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit of a philistine. since i have known you, harry, i have discovered that." "basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. the consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common-sense. the only artists i have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. a great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. but inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. the worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. the mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. he lives the poetry that he cannot write. the others write the poetry that they dare not realise." "i wonder is that really so, harry?" said dorian gray, putting some perfume on his handkerchief out of a large gold-topped bottle that stood on the table. "it must be, if you say it. and now i am off. imogen is waiting for me. don't forget about to-morrow. good-bye." as he left the room, lord henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began to think. certainly few people had ever interested him so much as dorian gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy. he was pleased by it. it made him a more interesting study. he had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. and so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. compared to it there was nothing else of any value. it was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. there were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. there were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. and, yet, what a great reward one received! how wonderful the whole world became to one! to note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord--there was a delight in that! what matter what the cost was? one could never pay too high a price for any sensation. he was conscious--and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his brown agate eyes--that it was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that dorian gray's soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. to a large extent the lad was his own creation. he had made him premature. that was something. ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. but now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art; was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting. yes, the lad was premature. he was gathering his harvest while it was yet spring. the pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was becoming self-conscious. it was delightful to watch him. with his beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at. it was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end. he was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses. soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! there was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. the senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the physical impulse began? how shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! and yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? or was the body really in the soul, as giordano bruno thought? the separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. he began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. as it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. experience was of no ethical value. it was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. but there was no motive power in experience. it was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. all that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy. it was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and certainly dorian gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results. his sudden mad love for sibyl vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. there was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion. what there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous. it was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannised most strongly over us. our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. it often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. while lord henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the door, and his valet entered, and reminded him it was time to dress for dinner. he got up and looked out into the street. the sunset had smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite. the panes glowed like plates of heated metal. the sky above was like a faded rose. he thought of his friend's young fiery-coloured life, and wondered how it was all going to end. when he arrived home, about half-past twelve o'clock, he saw a telegram lying on the hall table. he opened it, and found it was from dorian gray. it was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to sibyl vane. chapter v "mother, mother, i am so happy!" whispered the girl, burying her face in the lap of the faded, tired-looking woman who, with back turned to the shrill intrusive light, was sitting in the one arm-chair that their dingy sitting-room contained. "i am so happy!" she repeated, "and you must be happy too!" mrs. vane winced, and put her thin bismuth-whitened hands on her daughter's head. "happy!" she echoed, "i am only happy, sibyl, when i see you act. you must not think of anything but your acting. mr. isaacs has been very good to us, and we owe him money." the girl looked up and pouted. "money, mother?" she cried, "what does money matter? love is more than money." "mr. isaacs has advanced us fifty pounds to pay off our debts, and to get a proper outfit for james. you must not forget that, sibyl. fifty pounds is a very large sum. mr. isaacs has been most considerate." "he is not a gentleman, mother, and i hate the way he talks to me," said the girl, rising to her feet, and going over to the window. "i don't know how we could manage without him," answered the elder woman, querulously. sibyl vane tossed her head and laughed. "we don't want him any more, mother. prince charming rules life for us now." then she paused. a rose shook in her blood, and shadowed her cheeks. quick breath parted the petals of her lips. they trembled. some southern wind of passion swept over her, and stirred the dainty folds of her dress. "i love him," she said, simply. "foolish child! foolish child!" was the parrot-phrase flung in answer. the waving of crooked, false-jewelled fingers gave grotesqueness to the words. the girl laughed again. the joy of a caged bird was in her voice. her eyes caught the melody, and echoed it in radiance; then closed for a moment, as though to hide their secret. when they opened, the mist of a dream had passed across them. thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense. she did not listen. she was free in her prison of passion. her prince, prince charming, was with her. she had called on memory to remake him. she had sent her soul to search for him, and it had brought him back. his kiss burned again upon her mouth. her eyelids were warm with his breath. then wisdom altered its method and spoke of espial and discovery. this young man might be rich. if so, marriage should be thought of. against the shell of her ear broke the waves of worldly cunning. the arrows of craft shot by her. she saw the thin lips moving, and smiled. suddenly she felt the need to speak. the wordy silence troubled her. "mother, mother," she cried, "why does he love me so much? i know why i love him. i love him because he is like what love himself should be. but what does he see in me? i am not worthy of him. and yet--why, i cannot tell--though i feel so much beneath him, i don't feel humble. i feel proud, terribly proud. mother, did you love my father as i love prince charming?" the elder woman grew pale beneath the coarse powder that daubed her cheeks, and her dry lips twitched with a spasm of pain. sibyl rushed to her, flung her arms round her neck, and kissed her. "forgive me, mother. i know it pains you to talk about our father. but it only pains you because you loved him so much. don't look so sad. i am as happy to-day as you were twenty years ago. ah! let me be happy for ever!" "my child, you are far too young to think of falling in love. besides, what do you know of this young man? you don't even know his name. the whole thing is most inconvenient, and really, when james is going away to australia, and i have so much to think of, i must say that you should have shown more consideration. however, as i said before, if he is rich...." "ah! mother, mother, let me be happy!" mrs. vane glanced at her, and with one of those false theatrical gestures that so often become a mode of second nature to a stage-player, clasped her in her arms. at this moment the door opened, and a young lad with rough brown hair came into the room. he was thick-set of figure, and his hands and feet were large, and somewhat clumsy in movement. he was not so finely bred as his sister. one would hardly have guessed the close relationship that existed between them. mrs. vane fixed her eyes on him, and intensified the smile. she mentally elevated her son to the dignity of an audience. she felt sure that the _tableau_ was interesting. "you might keep some of your kisses for me, sibyl, i think," said the lad, with a good-natured grumble. "ah! but you don't like being kissed, jim," she cried. "you are a dreadful old bear." and she ran across the room and hugged him. james vane looked into his sister's face with tenderness. "i want you to come out with me for a walk, sibyl. i don't suppose i shall ever see this horrid london again. i am sure i don't want to." "my son, don't say such dreadful things," murmured mrs. vane, taking up a tawdry theatrical dress, with a sigh, and beginning to patch it. she felt a little disappointed that he had not joined the group. it would have increased the theatrical picturesqueness of the situation. "why not, mother? i mean it." "you pain me, my son. i trust you will return from australia in a position of affluence. i believe there is no society of any kind in the colonies, nothing that i would call society; so when you have made your fortune you must come back and assert yourself in london." "society!" muttered the lad. "i don't want to know anything about that. i should like to make some money to take you and sibyl off the stage. i hate it." "oh, jim!" said sibyl, laughing, "how unkind of you! but are you really going for a walk with me? that will be nice! i was afraid you were going to say good-bye to some of your friends--to tom hardy, who gave you that hideous pipe, or ned langton, who makes fun of you for smoking it. it is very sweet of you to let me have your last afternoon. where shall we go? let us go to the park." "i am too shabby," he answered, frowning. "only swell people go to the park." "nonsense, jim," she whispered, stroking the sleeve of his coat. he hesitated for a moment. "very well," he said at last, "but don't be too long dressing." she danced out of the door. one could hear her singing as she ran upstairs. her little feet pattered overhead. he walked up and down the room two or three times. then he turned to the still figure in the chair. "mother, are my things ready?" he asked. "quite ready, james," she answered, keeping her eyes on her work. for some months past she had felt ill at ease when she was alone with this rough, stern son of hers. her shallow secret nature was troubled when their eyes met. she used to wonder if he suspected anything. the silence, for he made no other observation, became intolerable to her. she began to complain. women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders. "i hope you will be contented, james, with your sea-faring life," she said. "you must remember that it is your own choice. you might have entered a solicitor's office. solicitors are a very respectable class, and in the country often dine with the best families." "i hate offices, and i hate clerks," he replied. "but you are quite right. i have chosen my own life. all i say is, watch over sibyl. don't let her come to any harm. mother, you must watch over her." "james, you really talk very strangely. of course i watch over sibyl." "i hear a gentleman comes every night to the theatre, and goes behind to talk to her. is that right? what about that?" "you are speaking about things you don't understand, james. in the profession we are accustomed to receive a great deal of most gratifying attention. i myself used to receive many bouquets at one time. that was when acting was really understood. as for sibyl, i do not know at present whether her attachment is serious or not. but there is no doubt that the young man in question is a perfect gentleman. he is always most polite to me. besides, he has the appearance of being rich, and the flowers he sends are lovely." "you don't know his name, though," said the lad, harshly. "no," answered his mother, with a placid expression in her face. "he has not yet revealed his real name. i think it is quite romantic of him. he is probably a member of the aristocracy." james vane bit his lip. "watch over sibyl, mother," he cried, "watch over her." "my son, you distress me very much. sibyl is always under my special care. of course, if this gentleman is wealthy, there is no reason why she should not contract an alliance with him. i trust he is one of the aristocracy. he has all the appearance of it, i must say. it might be a most brilliant marriage for sibyl. they would make a charming couple. his good looks are really quite remarkable; everybody notices them." the lad muttered something to himself, and drummed on the window-pane with his coarse fingers. he had just turned round to say something, when the door opened, and sibyl ran in. "how serious you both are!" she cried. "what is the matter?" "nothing," he answered. "i suppose one must be serious sometimes. good-bye, mother; i will have my dinner at five o'clock. everything is packed, except my shirts, so you need not trouble." "good-bye, my son," she answered, with a bow of strained stateliness. she was extremely annoyed at the tone he had adopted with her, and there was something in his look that had made her feel afraid. "kiss me, mother," said the girl. her flower-like lips touched the withered cheek, and warmed its frost. "my child! my child!" cried mrs. vane, looking up to the ceiling in search of an imaginary gallery. "come, sibyl," said her brother, impatiently. he hated his mother's affectations. they went out into the flickering wind-blown sunlight, and strolled down the dreary euston road. the passers-by glanced in wonder at the sullen, heavy youth, who, in coarse, ill-fitting clothes, was in the company of such a graceful, refined-looking girl. he was like a common gardener walking with a rose. jim frowned from time to time when he caught the inquisitive glance of some stranger. he had that dislike of being stared at which comes on geniuses late in life, and never leaves the commonplace. sibyl, however, was quite unconscious of the effect she was producing. her love was trembling in laughter on her lips. she was thinking of prince charming, and, that she might think of him all the more, she did not talk of him but prattled on about the ship in which jim was going to sail, about the gold he was certain to find, about the wonderful heiress whose life he was to save from the wicked, red-shirted bushrangers. for he was not to remain a sailor, or a super-cargo, or whatever he was going to be. oh, no! a sailor's existence was dreadful. fancy being cooped up in a horrid ship, with the hoarse, hump-backed waves trying to get in, and a black wind blowing the masts down, and tearing the sails into long screaming ribands! he was to leave the vessel at melbourne, bid a polite good-bye to the captain, and go off at once to the gold-fields. before a week was over he was to come across a large nugget of pure gold, the largest nugget that had ever been discovered, and bring it down to the coast in a waggon guarded by six mounted policemen. the bushrangers were to attack them three times, and be defeated with immense slaughter. or, no. he was not to go to the gold-fields at all. they were horrid places, where men got intoxicated, and shot each other in bar-rooms, and used bad language. he was to be a nice sheep-farmer, and one evening, as he was riding home, he was to see the beautiful heiress being carried off by a robber on a black horse, and give chase, and rescue her. of course she would fall in love with him, and he with her, and they would get married, and come home, and live in an immense house in london. yes, there were delightful things in store for him. but he must be very good, and not lose his temper, or spend his money foolishly. she was only a year older than he was, but she knew so much more of life. he must be sure, also, to write to her by every mail, and to say his prayers each night before he went to sleep. god was very good, and would watch over him. she would pray for him, too, and in a few years he would come back quite rich and happy. the lad listened sulkily to her, and made no answer. he was heart-sick at leaving home. yet it was not this alone that made him gloomy and morose. inexperienced though he was, he had still a strong sense of the danger of sibyl's position. this young dandy who was making love to her could mean her no good. he was a gentleman, and he hated him for that, hated him through some curious race-instinct for which he could not account, and which for that reason was all the more dominant within him. he was conscious also of the shallowness and vanity of his mother's nature, and in that saw infinite peril for sibyl and sibyl's happiness. children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. his mother! he had something on his mind to ask of her, something that he had brooded on for many months of silence. a chance phrase that he had heard at the theatre, a whispered sneer that had reached his ears one night as he waited at the stage-door, had set loose a train of horrible thoughts. he remembered it as if it had been the lash of a hunting-crop across his face. his brows knit together into a wedge-like furrow, and with a twitch of pain he bit his under-lip. "you are not listening to a word i am saying, jim," cried sibyl, "and i am making the most delightful plans for your future. do say something." "what do you want me to say?" "oh! that you will be a good boy, and not forget us," she answered, smiling at him. he shrugged his shoulders. "you are more likely to forget me, than i am to forget you, sibyl." she flushed. "what do you mean, jim?" she asked. "you have a new friend, i hear. who is he? why have you not told me about him? he means you no good." "stop, jim!" she exclaimed. "you must not say anything against him. i love him." "why, you don't even know his name," answered the lad. "who is he? i have a right to know." "he is called prince charming. don't you like the name? oh! you silly boy! you should never forget it. if you only saw him, you would think him the most wonderful person in the world. some day you will meet him: when you come back from australia. you will like him so much. everybody likes him, and i... love him. i wish you could come to the theatre to-night. he is going to be there, and i am to play juliet. oh! how i shall play it! fancy, jim, to be in love and play juliet! to have him sitting there! to play for his delight! i am afraid i may frighten the company, frighten or enthrall them. to be in love is to surpass one's self. poor dreadful mr. isaacs will be shouting 'genius' to his loafers at the bar. he has preached me as a dogma; to-night he will announce me as a revelation. i feel it. and it is all his, his only, prince charming, my wonderful lover, my god of graces. but i am poor beside him. poor? what does that matter? when poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. our proverbs want re-writing. they were made in winter, and it is summer now; spring-time for me, i think, a very dance of blossoms in blue skies." "he is a gentleman," said the lad, sullenly. "a prince!" she cried, musically. "what more do you want?" "he wants to enslave you." "i shudder at the thought of being free." "i want you to beware of him." "to see him is to worship him, to know him is to trust him." "sibyl, you are mad about him." she laughed, and took his arm. "you dear old jim, you talk as if you were a hundred. some day you will be in love yourself. then you will know what it is. don't look so sulky. surely you should be glad to think that, though you are going away, you leave me happier than i have ever been before. life has been hard for us both, terribly hard and difficult. but it will be different now. you are going to a new world, and i have found one. here are two chairs; let us sit down and see the smart people go by." they took their seats amidst a crowd of watchers. the tulip-beds across the road flamed like throbbing rings of fire. a white dust, tremulous cloud of orris-root it seemed, hung in the panting air. the brightly-coloured parasols danced and dipped like monstrous butterflies. she made her brother talk of himself, his hopes, his prospects. he spoke slowly and with effort. they passed words to each other as players at a game pass counters. sibyl felt oppressed. she could not communicate her joy. a faint smile curving that sullen mouth was all the echo she could win. after some time she became silent. suddenly she caught a glimpse of golden hair and laughing lips, and in an open carriage with two ladies dorian gray drove past. she started to her feet. "there he is!" she cried. "who?" said jim vane. "prince charming," she answered, looking after the victoria. he jumped up, and seized her roughly by the arm. "show him to me. which is he? point him out. i must see him!" he exclaimed; but at that moment the duke of berwick's four-in-hand came between, and when it had left the space clear, the carriage had swept out of the park. "he is gone," murmured sibyl, sadly. "i wish you had seen him." "i wish i had, for as sure as there is a god in heaven, if he ever does you any wrong i shall kill him." she looked at him in horror. he repeated his words. they cut the air like a dagger. the people round began to gape. a lady standing close to her tittered. "come away, jim; come away," she whispered. he followed her doggedly, as she passed through the crowd. he felt glad at what he had said. when they reached the achilles statue she turned round. there was pity in her eyes that became laughter on her lips. she shook her head at him. "you are foolish, jim, utterly foolish; a bad-tempered boy, that is all. how can you say such horrible things? you don't know what you are talking about. you are simply jealous and unkind. ah! i wish you would fall in love. love makes people good, and what you said was wicked." "i am sixteen," he answered, "and i know what i am about. mother is no help to you. she doesn't understand how to look after you. i wish now that i was not going to australia at all. i have a great mind to chuck the whole thing up. i would, if my articles hadn't been signed." "oh, don't be so serious, jim. you are like one of the heroes of those silly melodramas mother used to be so fond of acting in. i am not going to quarrel with you. i have seen him, and oh! to see him is perfect happiness. we won't quarrel. i know you would never harm anyone i love, would you?" "not as long as you love him, i suppose," was the sullen answer. "i shall love him for ever!" she cried. "and he?" "for ever, too!" "he had better." she shrank from him. then she laughed and put her hand on his arm. he was merely a boy. at the marble arch they hailed an omnibus, which left them close to their shabby home in the euston road. it was after five o'clock, and sibyl had to lie down for a couple of hours before acting. jim insisted that she should do so. he said that he would sooner part with her when their mother was not present. she would be sure to make a scene, and he detested scenes of every kind. in sibyl's own room they parted. there was jealousy in the lad's heart, and a fierce, murderous hatred of the stranger who, as it seemed to him, had come between them. yet, when her arms were flung round his neck, and her fingers strayed through his hair, he softened, and kissed her with real affection. there were tears in his eyes as he went downstairs. his mother was waiting for him below. she grumbled at his unpunctuality, as he entered. he made no answer, but sat down to his meagre meal. the flies buzzed round the table, and crawled over the stained cloth. through the rumble of omnibuses, and the clatter of street-cabs, he could hear the droning voice devouring each minute that was left to him. after some time, he thrust away his plate, and put his head in his hands. he felt that he had a right to know. it should have been told to him before, if it was as he suspected. leaden with fear, his mother watched him. words dropped mechanically from her lips. a tattered lace handkerchief twitched in her fingers. when the clock struck six, he got up, and went to the door. then he turned back, and looked at her. their eyes met. in hers he saw a wild appeal for mercy. it enraged him. "mother, i have something to ask you," he said. her eyes wandered vaguely about the room. she made no answer. "tell me the truth. i have a right to know. were you married to my father?" she heaved a deep sigh. it was a sigh of relief. the terrible moment, the moment that night and day, for weeks and months, she had dreaded, had come at last, and yet she felt no terror. indeed in some measure it was a disappointment to her. the vulgar directness of the question called for a direct answer. the situation had not been gradually led up to. it was crude. it reminded her of a bad rehearsal. "no," she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life. "my father was a scoundrel then?" cried the lad, clenching his fists. she shook her head. "i knew he was not free. we loved each other very much. if he had lived, he would have made provision for us. don't speak against him, my son. he was your father, and a gentleman. indeed he was highly connected." an oath broke from his lips. "i don't care for myself," he exclaimed, "but don't let sibyl.... it is a gentleman, isn't it, who is in love with her, or says he is? highly connected, too, i suppose." for a moment a hideous sense of humiliation came over the woman. her head drooped. she wiped her eyes with shaking hands. "sibyl has a mother," she murmured; "i had none." the lad was touched. he went towards her, and stooping down he kissed her. "i am sorry if i have pained you by asking about my father," he said, "but i could not help it. i must go now. good-bye. don't forget that you will only have one child now to look after, and believe me that if this man wrongs my sister, i will find out who he is, track him down, and kill him like a dog. i swear it." the exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid to her. she was familiar with the atmosphere. she breathed more freely, and for the first time for many months she really admired her son. she would have liked to have continued the scene on the same emotional scale, but he cut her short. trunks had to be carried down, and mufflers looked for. the lodging-house drudge bustled in and out. there was the bargaining with the cabman. the moment was lost in vulgar details. it was with a renewed feeling of disappointment that she waved the tattered lace handkerchief from the window, as her son drove away. she was conscious that a great opportunity had been wasted. she consoled herself by telling sibyl how desolate she felt her life would be, now that she had only one child to look after. she remembered the phrase. it had pleased her. of the threat she said nothing. it was vividly and dramatically expressed. she felt that they would all laugh at it some day. chapter vi "i suppose you have heard the news, basil?" said lord henry that evening, as hallward was shown into a little private room at the bristol where dinner had been laid for three. "no, harry," answered the artist, giving his hat and coat to the bowing waiter. "what is it? nothing about politics, i hope? they don't interest me. there is hardly a single person in the house of commons worth painting; though many of them would be the better for a little white-washing." "dorian gray is engaged to be married," said lord henry, watching him as he spoke. hallward started, and then frowned. "dorian engaged to be married!" he cried. "impossible!" "it is perfectly true." "to whom?" "to some little actress or other." "i can't believe it. dorian is far too sensible." "dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear basil." "marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, harry." "except in america," rejoined lord henry, languidly. "but i didn't say he was married. i said he was engaged to be married. there is a great difference. i have a distinct remembrance of being married, but i have no recollection at all of being engaged. i am inclined to think that i never was engaged." "but think of dorian's birth, and position, and wealth. it would be absurd for him to marry so much beneath him." "if you want to make him marry this girl tell him that, basil. he is sure to do it, then. whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives." "i hope the girl is good, harry. i don't want to see dorian tied to some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his intellect." "oh, she is better than good--she is beautiful," murmured lord henry, sipping a glass of vermouth and orange-bitters. "dorian says she is beautiful; and he is not often wrong about things of that kind. your portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal appearance of other people. it has had that excellent effect, amongst others. we are to see her to-night, if that boy doesn't forget his appointment." "are you serious?" "quite serious, basil. i should be miserable if i thought i should ever be more serious than i am at the present moment." "but do you approve of it, harry?" asked the painter, walking up and down the room, and biting his lip. "you can't approve of it, possibly. it is some silly infatuation." "i never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. it is an absurd attitude to take towards life. we are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. i never take any notice of what common people say, and i never interfere with what charming people do. if a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. dorian gray falls in love with a beautiful girl who acts juliet, and proposes to marry her. why not? if he wedded messalina he would be none the less interesting. you know i am not a champion of marriage. the real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. and unselfish people are colourless. they lack individuality. still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. they retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. they are forced to have more than one life. they become more highly organised, and to be highly organised is, i should fancy, the object of man's existence. besides, every experience is of value, and, whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience. i hope that dorian gray will make this girl his wife, passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become fascinated by someone else. he would be a wonderful study." "you don't mean a single word of all that, harry; you know you don't. if dorian gray's life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier than yourself. you are much better than you pretend to be." lord henry laughed. "the reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. the basis of optimism is sheer terror. we think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. we praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. i mean everything that i have said. i have the greatest contempt for optimism. as for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. if you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. as for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. i will certainly encourage them. they have the charm of being fashionable. but here is dorian himself. he will tell you more than i can." "my dear harry, my dear basil, you must both congratulate me!" said the lad, throwing off his evening cape with its satin-lined wings and shaking each of his friends by the hand in turn. "i have never been so happy. of course it is sudden; all really delightful things are. and yet it seems to me to be the one thing i have been looking for all my life." he was flushed with excitement and pleasure, and looked extraordinarily handsome. "i hope you will always be very happy, dorian," said hallward, "but i don't quite forgive you for not having let me know of your engagement. you let harry know." "and i don't forgive you for being late for dinner," broke in lord henry, putting his hand on the lad's shoulder, and smiling as he spoke. "come, let us sit down and try what the new _chef_ here is like, and then you will tell us how it all came about." "there is really not much to tell," cried dorian, as they took their seats at the small round table. "what happened was simply this. after i left you yesterday evening, harry, i dressed, had some dinner at that little italian restaurant in rupert street you introduced me to, and went down at eight o'clock to the theatre. sibyl was playing rosalind. of course the scenery was dreadful, and the orlando absurd. but sibyl! you should have seen her! when she came on in her boy's clothes she was perfectly wonderful. she wore a moss-coloured velvet jerkin with cinnamon sleeves, slim brown cross-gartered hose, a dainty little green cap with a hawk's feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak lined with dull red. she had never seemed to me more exquisite. she had all the delicate grace of that tanagra figurine that you have in your studio, basil. her hair clustered round her face like dark leaves round a pale rose. as for her acting--well, you shall see her to-night. she is simply a born artist. i sat in the dingy box absolutely enthralled. i forgot that i was in london and in the nineteenth century. i was away with my love in a forest that no man had ever seen. after the performance was over i went behind, and spoke to her. as we were sitting together, suddenly there came into her eyes a look that i had never seen there before. my lips moved towards hers. we kissed each other. i can't describe to you what i felt at that moment. it seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect point of rose-coloured joy. she trembled all over, and shook like a white narcissus. then she flung herself on her knees and kissed my hands. i feel that i should not tell you all this, but i can't help it. of course our engagement is a dead secret. she has not even told her own mother. i don't know what my guardians will say. lord radley is sure to be furious. i don't care. i shall be of age in less than a year, and then i can do what i like. i have been right, basil, haven't i, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in shakespeare's plays? lips that shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. i have had the arms of rosalind around me, and kissed juliet on the mouth." "yes, dorian, i suppose you were right," said hallward, slowly. "have you seen her to-day?" asked lord henry. dorian gray shook his head. "i left her in the forest of arden, i shall find her in an orchard in verona." lord henry sipped his champagne in a meditative manner. "at what particular point did you mention the word marriage, dorian? and what did she say in answer? perhaps you forgot all about it." "my dear harry, i did not treat it as a business transaction, and i did not make any formal proposal. i told her that i loved her, and she said she was not worthy to be my wife. not worthy! why, the whole world is nothing to me compared with her." "women are wonderfully practical," murmured lord henry--"much more practical than we are. in situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us." hallward laid his hand upon his arm. "don't, harry. you have annoyed dorian. he is not like other men. he would never bring misery upon anyone. his nature is too fine for that." lord henry looked across the table. "dorian is never annoyed with me," he answered. "i asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question--simple curiosity. i have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. except, of course, in middle-class life. but then the middle classes are not modern." dorian gray laughed, and tossed his head. "you are quite incorrigible, harry; but i don't mind. it is impossible to be angry with you. when you see sibyl vane you will feel that the man who could wrong her would be a beast, a beast without a heart. i cannot understand how anyone can wish to shame the thing he loves. i love sibyl vane. i want to place her on a pedestal of gold, and to see the world worship the woman who is mine. what is marriage? an irrevocable vow. you mock at it for that. ah! don't mock. it is an irrevocable vow that i want to take. her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good. when i am with her, i regret all that you have taught me. i become different from what you have known me to be. i am changed, and the mere touch of sibyl vane's hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories." "and those are...?" asked lord henry, helping himself to some salad. "oh, your theories about life, your theories about love, your theories about pleasure. all your theories, in fact, harry." "pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about," he answered, in his slow, melodious voice. "but i am afraid i cannot claim my theory as my own. it belongs to nature, not to me. pleasure is nature's test, her sign of approval. when we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." "ah! but what do you mean by good?" cried basil hallward. "yes," echoed dorian, leaning back in his chair, and looking at lord henry over the heavy clusters of purple-lipped irises that stood in the centre of the table, "what do you mean by good, harry?" "to be good is to be in harmony with one's self," he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. "discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. one's own life--that is the important thing. as for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. besides, individualism has really the higher aim. modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. i consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality." "but, surely, if one lives merely for one's self, harry, one pays a terrible price for doing so?" suggested the painter. "yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. i should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich." "one has to pay in other ways but money." "what sort of ways, basil?" "oh! i should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in... well, in the consciousness of degradation." lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "my dear fellow, mediæval art is charming, but mediæval emotions are out of date. one can use them in fiction, of course. but then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. believe me, no civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever knows what a pleasure is." "i know what pleasure is," cried dorian gray. "it is to adore someone." "that is certainly better than being adored," he answered, toying with some fruits. "being adored is a nuisance. women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. they worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them." "i should have said that whatever they ask for they had first given to us," murmured the lad, gravely. "they create love in our natures. they have a right to demand it back." "that is quite true, dorian," cried hallward. "nothing is ever quite true," said lord henry. "this is," interrupted dorian. "you must admit, harry, that women give to men the very gold of their lives." "possibly," he sighed, "but they invariably want it back in such very small change. that is the worry. women, as some witty frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out." "harry, you are dreadful! i don't know why i like you so much." "you will always like me, dorian," he replied. "will you have some coffee, you fellows?--waiter, bring coffee, and _fine-champagne_, and some cigarettes. no: don't mind the cigarettes; i have some. basil, i can't allow you to smoke cigars. you must have a cigarette. a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. it is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. what more can one want? yes, dorian, you will always be fond of me. i represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit." "what nonsense you talk, harry!" cried the lad, taking a light from a fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table. "let us go down to the theatre. when sibyl comes on the stage you will have a new ideal of life. she will represent something to you that you have never known." "i have known everything," said lord henry, with a tired look in his eyes, "but i am always ready for a new emotion. i am afraid, however, that, for me at any rate, there is no such thing. still, your wonderful girl may thrill me. i love acting. it is so much more real than life. let us go. dorian, you will come with me. i am so sorry, basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham. you must follow us in a hansom." they got up and put on their coats, sipping their coffee standing. the painter was silent and preoccupied. there was a gloom over him. he could not bear this marriage, and yet it seemed to him to be better than many other things that might have happened. after a few minutes, they all passed downstairs. he drove off by himself, as had been arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little brougham in front of him. a strange sense of loss came over him. he felt that dorian gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. life had come between them.... his eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. when the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older. chapter vii for some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily, tremulous smile. he escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands, and talking at the top of his voice. dorian gray loathed him more than ever. he felt as if he had come to look for miranda and had been met by caliban. lord henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him. at least he declared he did, and insisted on shaking him by the hand, and assuring him that he was proud to meet a man who had discovered a real genius and gone bankrupt over a poet. hallward amused himself with watching the faces in the pit. the heat was terribly oppressive, and the huge sunlight flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of yellow fire. the youths in the gallery had taken off their coats and waistcoats and hung them over the side. they talked to each other across the theatre, and shared their oranges with the tawdry girls who sat beside them. some women were laughing in the pit. their voices were horribly shrill and discordant. the sound of the popping of corks came from the bar. "what a place to find one's divinity in!" said lord henry. "yes!" answered dorian gray. "it was here i found her, and she is divine beyond all living things. when she acts you will forget everything. these common, rough people, with their coarse faces and brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage. they sit silently and watch her. they weep and laugh as she wills them to do. she makes them as responsive as a violin. she spiritualises them, and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self." "the same flesh and blood as one's self! oh, i hope not!" exclaimed lord henry, who was scanning the occupants of the gallery through his opera-glass. "don't pay any attention to him, dorian," said the painter. "i understand what you mean, and i believe in this girl. anyone you love must be marvellous, and any girl that has the effect you describe must be fine and noble. to spiritualise one's age--that is something worth doing. if this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. this marriage is quite right. i did not think so at first, but i admit it now. the gods made sibyl vane for you. without her you would have been incomplete." "thanks, basil," answered dorian gray, pressing his hand. "i knew that you would understand me. harry is so cynical, he terrifies me. but here is the orchestra. it is quite dreadful, but it only lasts for about five minutes. then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl to whom i am going to give all my life, to whom i have given everything that is good in me." a quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil of applause, sibyl vane stepped on to the stage. yes, she was certainly lovely to look at--one of the loveliest creatures, lord henry thought, that he had ever seen. there was something of the fawn in her shy grace and startled eyes. a faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver, came to her cheeks as she glanced at the crowded, enthusiastic house. she stepped back a few paces, and her lips seemed to tremble. basil hallward leaped to his feet and began to applaud. motionless, and as one in a dream, sat dorian gray, gazing at her. lord henry peered through his glasses, murmuring, "charming! charming!" the scene was the hall of capulet's house, and romeo in his pilgrim's dress had entered with mercutio and his other friends. the band, such as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began. through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily-dressed actors, sibyl vane moved like a creature from a finer world. her body swayed, while she danced, as a plant sways in the water. the curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory. yet she was curiously listless. she showed no sign of joy when her eyes rested on romeo. the few words she had to speak-- good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this; for saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss-- with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly artificial manner. the voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. it was wrong in colour. it took away all the life from the verse. it made the passion unreal. dorian gray grew pale as he watched her. he was puzzled and anxious. neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. she seemed to them to be absolutely incompetent. they were horribly disappointed. yet they felt that the true test of any juliet is the balcony scene of the second act. they waited for that. if she failed there, there was nothing in her. she looked charming as she came out in the moonlight. that could not be denied. but the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew worse as she went on. her gestures became absurdly artificial. she over-emphasised everything that she had to say. the beautiful passage-- thou knowest the mask of night is on my face, else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek for that which thou hast heard me speak to-night-- was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. when she leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines-- although i joy in thee, i have no joy of this contract to-night: it is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say, "it lightens." sweet, good-night! this bud of love by summer's ripening breath may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet-- she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her. it was not nervousness. indeed, so far from being nervous, she was absolutely self-contained. it was simply bad art. she was a complete failure. even the common, uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their interest in the play. they got restless, and began to talk loudly and to whistle. the jew manager, who was standing at the back of the dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage. the only person unmoved was the girl herself. when the second act was over there came a storm of hisses, and lord henry got up from his chair and put on his coat. "she is quite beautiful, dorian," he said, "but she can't act. let us go." "i am going to see the play through," answered the lad, in a hard, bitter voice. "i am awfully sorry that i have made you waste an evening, harry. i apologise to you both." "my dear dorian, i should think miss vane was ill," interrupted hallward. "we will come some other night." "i wish she were ill," he rejoined. "but she seems to me to be simply callous and cold. she has entirely altered. last night she was a great artist. this evening she is merely a commonplace, mediocre actress." "don't talk like that about anyone you love, dorian. love is a more wonderful thing than art." "they are both simply forms of imitation," remarked lord henry. "but do let us go. dorian, you must not stay here any longer. it is not good for one's morals to see bad acting. besides, i don't suppose you will want your wife to act. so what does it matter if she plays juliet like a wooden doll? she is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience. there are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic! the secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. come to the club with basil and myself. we will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of sibyl vane. she is beautiful. what more can you want?" "go away, harry," cried the lad. "i want to be alone. basil, you must go. ah! can't you see that my heart is breaking?" the hot tears came to his eyes. his lips trembled, and, rushing to the back of the box, he leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands. "let us go, basil," said lord henry, with a strange tenderness in his voice; and the two young men passed out together. a few moments afterwards the footlights flared up, and the curtain rose on the third act. dorian gray went back to his seat. he looked pale, and proud, and indifferent. the play dragged on, and seemed interminable. half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots, and laughing. the whole thing was a _fiasco_. the last act was played to almost empty benches. the curtain went down on a titter, and some groans. as soon as it was over, dorian gray rushed behind the scenes into the greenroom. the girl was standing there alone, with a look of triumph on her face. her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. there was a radiance about her. her parted lips were smiling over some secret of their own. when he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy came over her. "how badly i acted to-night, dorian!" she cried. "horribly!" he answered, gazing at her in amazement--"horribly! it was dreadful. are you ill? you have no idea what it was. you have no idea what i suffered." the girl smiled. "dorian," she answered, lingering over his name with long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to the red petals of her mouth--"dorian, you should have understood. but you understand now, don't you?" "understand what?" he asked, angrily. "why i was so bad to-night. why i shall always be bad. why i shall never act well again." he shrugged his shoulders. "you are ill, i suppose. when you are ill you shouldn't act. you make yourself ridiculous. my friends were bored. i was bored." she seemed not to listen to him. she was transfigured with joy. an ecstasy of happiness dominated her. "dorian, dorian," she cried, "before i knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. it was only in the theatre that i lived. i thought that it was all true. i was rosalind one night, and portia the other. the joy of beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of cordelia were mine also. i believed in everything. the common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. the painted scenes were my world. i knew nothing but shadows, and i thought them real. you came--oh, my beautiful love!--and you freed my soul from prison. you taught me what reality really is. to-night, for the first time in my life, i saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which i had always played. to-night, for the first time, i became conscious that the romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words i had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what i wanted to say. you had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. you had made me understand what love really is. my love! my love! prince charming! prince of life! i have grown sick of shadows. you are more to me than all art can ever be. what have i to do with the puppets of a play? when i came on to-night, i could not understand how it was that everything had gone from me. i thought that i was going to be wonderful. i found that i could do nothing. suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant. the knowledge was exquisite to me. i heard them hissing, and i smiled. what could they know of love such as ours? take me away, dorian--take me away with you, where we can be quite alone. i hate the stage. i might mimic a passion that i do not feel, but i cannot mimic one that burns me like fire. oh, dorian, dorian, you understand now what it signifies? even if i could do it, it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. you have made me see that." he flung himself down on the sofa, and turned away his face. "you have killed my love," he muttered. she looked at him in wonder, and laughed. he made no answer. she came across to him, and with her little fingers stroked his hair. she knelt down and pressed his hands to her lips. he drew them away, and a shudder ran through him. then he leaped up, and went to the door. "yes," he cried, "you have killed my love. you used to stir my imagination. now you don't even stir my curiosity. you simply produce no effect. i loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realised the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. you have thrown it all away. you are shallow and stupid. my god! how mad i was to love you! what a fool i have been! you are nothing to me now. i will never see you again. i will never think of you. i will never mention your name. you don't know what you were to me, once. why, once.... oh, i can't bear to think of it! i wish i had never laid eyes upon you! you have spoiled the romance of my life. how little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! without your art you are nothing. i would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. the world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. what are you now? a third-rate actress with a pretty face." the girl grew white, and trembled. she clenched her hands together, and her voice seemed to catch in her throat. "you are not serious, dorian?" she murmured. "you are acting." "acting! i leave that to you. you do it so well," he answered bitterly. she rose from her knees, and, with a piteous expression of pain in her face, came across the room to him. she put her hand upon his arm, and looked into his eyes. he thrust her back. "don't touch me!" he cried. a low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet, and lay there like a trampled flower. "dorian, dorian, don't leave me!" she whispered. "i am so sorry i didn't act well. i was thinking of you all the time. but i will try--indeed, i will try. it came so suddenly across me, my love for you. i think i should never have known it if you had not kissed me--if we had not kissed each other. kiss me again, my love. don't go away from me. i couldn't bear it. oh! don't go away from me. my brother.... no; never mind. he didn't mean it. he was in jest.... but you, oh! can't you forgive me for to-night? i will work so hard, and try to improve. don't be cruel to me because i love you better than anything in the world. after all, it is only once that i have not pleased you. but you are quite right, dorian. i should have shown myself more of an artist. it was foolish of me; and yet i couldn't help it. oh, don't leave me, don't leave me." a fit of passionate sobbing choked her. she crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and dorian gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain. there is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. sibyl vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic. her tears and sobs annoyed him. "i am going," he said at last, in his calm, clear voice. "i don't wish to be unkind, but i can't see you again. you have disappointed me." she wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer. her little hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him. he turned on his heel, and left the room. in a few moments he was out of the theatre. where he went to he hardly knew. he remembered wandering through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed archways and evil-looking houses. women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. drunkards had reeled by cursing, and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. he had seen grotesque children huddled upon doorsteps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts. as the dawn was just breaking he found himself close to covent garden. the darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed itself into a perfect pearl. huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. the air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain. he followed into the market, and watched the men unloading their waggons. a white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. he thanked him, and wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly. they had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them. a long line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge jade-green piles of vegetables. under the portico, with its grey sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over. others crowded round the swinging doors of the coffee-house in the piazza. the heavy cart-horses slipped and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings. some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. iris-necked, and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds. after a little while, he hailed a hansom, and drove home. for a few moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent square with its blank, close-shuttered windows, and its staring blinds. the sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it. from some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke was rising. it curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air. in the huge gilt venetian lantern, spoil of some doge's barge, that hung from the ceiling of the great oak-panelled hall of entrance, lights were still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals of flame they seemed, rimmed with white fire. he turned them out, and, having thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library towards the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the ground floor that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had decorated for himself, and hung with some curious renaissance tapestries that had been discovered stored in a disused attic at selby royal. as he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait basil hallward had painted of him. he started back as if in surprise. then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. after he had taken the buttonhole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate. finally he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. in the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. the expression looked different. one would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. it was certainly strange. he turned round, and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. the bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. but the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. the quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. he winced, and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory cupids, one of lord henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. no line like that warped his red lips. what did it mean? he rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. there were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered. it was not a mere fancy of his own. the thing was horribly apparent. he threw himself into a chair, and began to think. suddenly there flashed across his mind what he had said in basil hallward's studio the day the picture had been finished. yes, he remembered it perfectly. he had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. surely his wish had not been fulfilled? such things were impossible. it seemed monstrous even to think of them. and, yet, there was the picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in the mouth. cruelty! had he been cruel? it was the girl's fault, not his. he had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he had thought her great. then she had disappointed him. she had been shallow and unworthy. and, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. he remembered with what callousness he had watched her. why had he been made like that? why had such a soul been given to him? but he had suffered also. during the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, æon upon æon of torture. his life was well worth hers. she had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age. besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. they lived on their emotions. they only thought of their emotions. when they took lovers, it was merely to have someone with whom they could have scenes. lord henry had told him that, and lord henry knew what women were. why should he trouble about sibyl vane? she was nothing to him now. but the picture? what was he to say of that? it held the secret of his life, and told his story. it had taught him to love his own beauty. would it teach him to loathe his own soul? would he ever look at it again? no; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. the horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that makes men mad. the picture had not changed. it was folly to think so. yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile. its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. its blue eyes met his own. a sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him. it had altered already, and would alter more. its gold would wither into grey. its red and white roses would die. for every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness. but he would not sin. the picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. he would resist temptation. he would not see lord henry any more--would not, at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in basil hallward's garden had first stirred within him the passion for impossible things. he would go back to sibyl vane, make her amends, marry her, try to love her again. yes, it was his duty to do so. she must have suffered more than he had. poor child! he had been selfish and cruel to her. the fascination that she had exercised over him would return. they would be happy together. his life with her would be beautiful and pure. he got up from his chair, and drew a large screen right in front of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. "how horrible!" he murmured to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it. when he stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath. the fresh morning air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions. he thought only of sibyl. a faint echo of his love came back to him. he repeated her name over and over again. the birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her. chapter viii it was long past noon when he awoke. his valet had crept several times on tiptoe into the room to see if he was stirring, and had wondered what made his young master sleep so late. finally his bell sounded, and victor came softly in with a cup of tea, and a pile of letters, on a small tray of old sèvres china, and drew back the olive-satin curtains, with their shimmering blue lining, that hung in front of the three tall windows. "monsieur has well slept this morning," he said, smiling. "what o'clock is it, victor?" asked dorian gray, drowsily. "one hour and a quarter, monsieur." how late it was! he sat up, and, having sipped some tea, turned over his letters. one of them was from lord henry, and had been brought by hand that morning. he hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside. the others he opened listlessly. they contained the usual collection of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes of charity concerts, and the like, that are showered on fashionable young men every morning during the season. there was a rather heavy bill, for a chased silver louis-quinze toilet-set, that he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realise that we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities; and there were several very courteously worded communiations from jermyn street money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest. after about ten minutes he got up, and, throwing on an elaborate dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool, passed into the onyx-paved bathroom. the cool water refreshed him after his long sleep. he seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through. a dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once or twice, but there was the unreality of a dream about it. as soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat down to a light french breakfast, that had been laid out for him on a small round table close to the open window. it was an exquisite day. the warm air seemed laden with spices. a bee flew in, and buzzed round the blue-dragon bowl that, filled with sulphur-yellow roses, stood before him. he felt perfectly happy. suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of the portrait, and he started. "too cold for monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the table. "i shut the window?" dorian shook his head. "i am not cold," he murmured. was it all true? had the portrait really changed? or had it been simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where there had been a look of joy? surely a painted canvas could not alter? the thing was absurd. it would serve as a tale to tell basil some day. it would make him smile. and, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing! first in the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn, he had seen the touch of cruelty round the warped lips. he almost dreaded his valet leaving the room. he knew that when he was alone he would have to examine the portrait. he was afraid of certainty. when the coffee and cigarettes had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a wild desire to tell him to remain. as the door was closing behind him he called him back. the man stood waiting for his orders. dorian looked at him for a moment. "i am not at home to anyone, victor," he said, with a sigh. the man bowed and retired. then he rose from the table, lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on a luxuriously-cushioned couch that stood facing the screen. the screen was an old one, of gilt spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a rather florid louis-quatorze pattern. he scanned it curiously, wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a man's life. should he move it aside, after all? why not let it stay there? what was the use of knowing? if the thing was true, it was terrible. if it was not true, why trouble about it? but what if, by some fate or deadlier chance, eyes other than his spied behind, and saw the horrible change? what should he do if basil hallward came and asked to look at his own picture? basil would be sure to do that. no; the thing had to be examined, and at once. anything would be better than this dreadful state of doubt. he got up, and locked both doors. at least he would be alone when he looked upon the mask of his shame. then he drew the screen aside, and saw himself face to face. it was perfectly true. the portrait had altered. as he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost scientific interest. that such a change should have taken place was incredible to him. and yet it was a fact. was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? could it be that what that soul thought, they realized?--that what it dreamed, they made true? or was there some other, more terrible reason? he shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in sickened horror. one thing, however, he felt that it had done for him. it had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to sibyl vane. it was not too late to make reparation for that. she could still be his wife. his unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that basil hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of god to us all. there were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. but here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls. three o'clock struck, and four, and the half-hour rang its double chime, but dorian gray did not stir. he was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life, and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering. he did not know what to do, or what to think. finally, he went over to the table, and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had loved, imploring her forgiveness, and accusing himself of madness. he covered page after page with wild words of sorrow, and wilder words of pain. there is a luxury in self-reproach. when we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. it is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. when dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven. suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard lord henry's voice outside. "my dear boy, i must see you. let me in at once. i can't bear your shutting yourself up like this." he made no answer at first, but remained quite still. the knocking still continued, and grew louder. yes, it was better to let lord henry in, and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead, to quarrel with him if it became necessary to quarrel, to part if parting was inevitable. he jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the picture, and unlocked the door. "i am so sorry for it all, dorian," said lord henry, as he entered. "but you must not think too much about it." "do you mean about sibyl vane?" asked the lad. "yes, of course," answered lord henry, sinking into a chair, and slowly pulling off his yellow gloves. "it is dreadful, from one point of view, but it was not your fault. tell me, did you go behind and see her, after the play was over?" "yes." "i felt sure you had. did you make a scene with her?" "i was brutal, harry--perfectly brutal. but it is all right now. i am not sorry for anything that has happened. it has taught me to know myself better." "ah, dorian, i am so glad you take it in that way! i was afraid i would find you plunged in remorse, and tearing that nice curly hair of yours." "i have got through all that," said dorian, shaking his head, and smiling. "i am perfectly happy now. i know what conscience is, to begin with. it is not what you told me it was. it is the divinest thing in us. don't sneer at it, harry, any more--at least not before me. i want to be good. i can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous." "a very charming artistic basis for ethics, dorian! i congratulate you on it. but how are you going to begin?" "by marrying sibyl vane." "marrying sibyl vane!" cried lord henry, standing up, and looking at him in perplexed amazement. "but, my dear dorian----" "yes, harry, i know what you are going to say. something dreadful about marriage. don't say it. don't ever say things of that kind to me again. two days ago i asked sibyl to marry me. i am not going to break my word to her. she is to be my wife!" "your wife! dorian!... didn't you get my letter? i wrote to you this morning, and sent the note down, by my own man." "your letter? oh, yes, i remember. i have not read it yet, harry. i was afraid there might be something in it that i wouldn't like. you cut life to pieces with your epigrams." "you know nothing then?" "what do you mean?" lord henry walked across the room, and, sitting down by dorian gray, took both his hands in his own, and held them tightly. "dorian," he said, "my letter--don't be frightened--was to tell you that sibyl vane is dead." a cry of pain broke from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his feet, tearing his hands away from lord henry's grasp. "dead! sibyl dead! it is not true! it is a horrible lie! how dare you say it?" "it is quite true, dorian," said lord henry, gravely. "it is in all the morning papers. i wrote down to you to ask you not to see anyone till i came. there will have to be an inquest, of course, and you must not be mixed up in it. things like that make a man fashionable in paris. but in london people are so prejudiced. here, one should never make one's _début_ with a scandal. one should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age. i suppose they don't know your name at the theatre? if they don't, it is all right. did anyone see you going round to her room? that is an important point." dorian did not answer for a few moments. he was dazed with horror. finally he stammered in a stifled voice, "harry, did you say an inquest? what did you mean by that? did sibyl----? oh, harry, i can't bear it! but be quick. tell me everything at once." "i have no doubt it was not an accident, dorian, though it must be put in that way to the public. it seems that as she was leaving the theatre with her mother, about half-past twelve or so, she said she had forgotten something upstairs. they waited some time for her, but she did not come down again. they ultimately found her lying dead on the floor of her dressing-room. she had swallowed something by mistake, some dreadful thing they use at theatres. i don't know what it was, but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it. i should fancy it was prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously." "harry, harry, it is terrible!" cried the lad. "yes; it is very tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself mixed up in it. i see by _the standard_ that she was seventeen. i should have thought she was almost younger than that. she looked such a child, and seemed to know so little about acting. dorian, you mustn't let this thing get on your nerves. you must come and dine with me, and afterwards we will look in at the opera. it is a patti night, and everybody will be there. you can come to my sister's box. she has got some smart women with her." "so i have murdered sibyl vane," said dorian gray, half to himself--"murdered her as surely as if i had cut her little throat with a knife. yet the roses are not less lovely for all that. the birds sing just as happily in my garden. and to-night i am to dine with you, and then go on to the opera, and sup somewhere, i suppose, afterwards. how extraordinarily dramatic life is! if i had read all this in a book, harry, i think i would have wept over it. somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears. here is the first passionate love-letter i have ever written in my life. strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. can they feel, i wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? sibyl! can she feel, or know, or listen? oh, harry, how i loved her once! it seems years ago to me now. she was everything to me. then came that dreadful night--was it really only last night?--when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke. she explained it all to me. it was terribly pathetic. but i was not moved a bit. i thought her shallow. suddenly something happened that made me afraid. i can't tell you what it was, but it was terrible. i said i would go back to her. i felt i had done wrong. and now she is dead. my god! my god! harry, what shall i do? you don't know the danger i am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. she would have done that for me. she had no right to kill herself. it was selfish of her." "my dear dorian," answered lord henry, taking a cigarette from his case, and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. if you had married this girl you would have been wretched. of course you would have treated her kindly. one can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. but she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. and when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. i say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject, which, of course, i would not have allowed, but i assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure." "i suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room, and looking horribly pale. "but i thought it was my duty. it is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right. i remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions--that they are always made too late. mine certainly were." "good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. their origin is pure vanity. their result is absolutely _nil_. they give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. that is all that can be said for them. they are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account." "harry," cried dorian gray, coming over and sitting down beside him, "why is it that i cannot feel this tragedy as much as i want to? i don't think i am heartless. do you?" "you have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be entitled to give yourself that name, dorian," answered lord henry, with his sweet, melancholy smile. the lad frowned. "i don't like that explanation, harry," he rejoined, "but i am glad you don't think i am heartless. i am nothing of the kind. i know i am not. and yet i must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should. it seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. it has all the terrible beauty of a greek tragedy, a tragedy in which i took a great part, but by which i have not been wounded." "it is an interesting question," said lord henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism--"an extremely interesting question. i fancy that the true explanation is this. it often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. they affect us just as vulgarity affects us. they give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. if these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. or rather we are both. we watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. in the present case, what is it that has really happened? someone has killed herself for love of you. i wish that i had ever had such an experience. it would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life. the people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there have been some--have always insisted on living on, long after i had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me. they have become stout and tedious, and when i meet them they go in at once for reminiscences. that awful memory of woman! what a fearful thing it is! and what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! one should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. details are always vulgar." "i must sow poppies in my garden," sighed dorian. "there is no necessity," rejoined his companion. "life has always poppies in her hands. of course, now and then things linger. i once wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic mourning for a romance that would not die. ultimately, however, it did die. i forget what killed it. i think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. that is always a dreadful moment. it fills one with the terror of eternity. well--would you believe it?--a week ago, at lady hampshire's, i found myself seated at dinner next the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future. i had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel. she dragged it out again, and assured me that i had spoiled her life. i am bound to state that she ate an enormous dinner, so i did not feel any anxiety. but what a lack of taste she showed! the one charm of the past is that it is the past. but women never know when the curtain has fallen. they always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue it. if they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. they are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. you are more fortunate than i am. i assure you, dorian, that not one of the women i have known would have done for me what sibyl vane did for you. ordinary women always console themselves. some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. it always means that they have a history. others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands. they flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. religion consoles some. its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me; and i can quite understand it. besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. conscience makes egotists of us all. yes; there is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life. indeed, i have not mentioned the most important one." "what is that, harry?" said the lad, listlessly. "oh, the obvious consolation. taking someone else's admirer when one loses one's own. in good society that always whitewashes a woman. but really, dorian, how different sibyl vane must have been from all the women one meets! there is something to me quite beautiful about her death. i am glad i am living in a century when such wonders happen. they make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with, such as romance, passion, and love." "i was terribly cruel to her. you forget that." "i am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. they have wonderfully primitive instincts. we have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. they love being dominated. i am sure you were splendid. i have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but i can fancy how delightful you looked. and, after all, you said something to me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely fanciful, but that i see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key to everything." "what was that, harry?" "you said to me that sibyl vane represented to you all the heroines of romance--that she was desdemona one night, and ophelia the other; that if she died as juliet, she came to life as imogen." "she will never come to life again now," muttered the lad, burying his face in his hands. "no, she will never come to life. she has played her last part. but you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from webster, or ford, or cyril tourneur. the girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. to you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy. the moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. mourn for ophelia, if you like. put ashes on your head because cordelia was strangled. cry out against heaven because the daughter of brabantio died. but don't waste your tears over sibyl vane. she was less real than they are." there was a silence. the evening darkened in the room. noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. the colours faded wearily out of things. after some time dorian gray looked up. "you have explained me to myself, harry," he murmured, with something of a sigh of relief. "i felt all that you have said, but somehow i was afraid of it, and i could not express it to myself. how well you know me! but we will not talk again of what has happened. it has been a marvellous experience. that is all. i wonder if life has still in store for me anything as marvellous." "life has everything in store for you, dorian. there is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do." "but suppose, harry, i became haggard, and old, and wrinkled? what then?" "ah, then," said lord henry, rising to go--"then, my dear dorian, you would have to fight for your victories. as it is, they are brought to you. no, you must keep your good looks. we live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. we cannot spare you. and now you had better dress, and drive down to the club. we are rather late, as it is." "i think i shall join you at the opera, harry. i feel too tired to eat anything. what is the number of your sister's box?" "twenty-seven, i believe. it is on the grand tier. you will see her name on the door. but i am sorry you won't come and dine." "i don't feel up to it," said dorian, listlessly. "but i am awfully obliged to you for all that you have said to me. you are certainly my best friend. no one has ever understood me as you have." "we are only at the beginning of our friendship, dorian," answered lord henry, shaking him by the hand. "good-bye. i shall see you before nine-thirty, i hope. remember, patti is singing." as he closed the door behind him, dorian gray touched the bell, and in a few minutes victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds down. he waited impatiently for him to go. the man seemed to take an interminable time over everything. as soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen, and drew it back. no; there was no further change in the picture. it had received the news of sibyl vane's death before he had known of it himself. it was conscious of the events of life as they occurred. the vicious cruelty that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was. or was it indifferent to results? did it merely take cognizance of what passed within the soul? he wondered, and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he hoped it. poor sibyl! what a romance it had all been! she had often mimicked death on the stage. then death himself had touched her, and taken her with him. how had she played that dreadful last scene? had she cursed him, as she died? no; she had died for love of him, and love would always be a sacrament to him now. she had atoned for everything, by the sacrifice she had made of her life. he would not think any more of what she had made him go through, on that horrible night at the theatre. when he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic figure sent on to the world's stage to show the supreme reality of love. a wonderful tragic figure? tears came to his eyes as he remembered her childlike look, and winsome fanciful ways, and shy tremulous grace. he brushed them away hastily, and looked again at the picture. he felt that the time had really come for making his choice. or had his choice already been made? yes, life had decided that for him--life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins--he was to have all these things. the portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all. a feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration that was in store for the fair face on the canvas. once, in boyish mockery of narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. morning after morning he had sat before the portrait, wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times. was it to alter now with every mood to which he yielded? was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair? the pity of it! the pity of it! for a moment he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that existed between him and the picture might cease. it had changed in answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain unchanged. and, yet, who, that knew anything about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught? besides, was it really under his control? had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution? might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? if thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love of strange affinity? but the reason was of no importance. he would never again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. if the picture was to alter, it was to alter. that was all. why inquire too closely into it? for there would be a real pleasure in watching it. he would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. this portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. as it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. and when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer. when the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood. not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. not one pulse of his life would ever weaken. like the gods of the greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. what did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? he would be safe. that was everything. he drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture, smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was already waiting for him. an hour later he was at the opera, and lord henry was leaning over his chair. chapter ix as he was sitting at breakfast next morning, basil hallward was shown into the room. "i am so glad i have found you, dorian," he said, gravely. "i called last night, and they told me you were at the opera. of course i knew that was impossible. but i wish you had left word where you had really gone to. i passed a dreadful evening, half afraid that one tragedy might be followed by another. i think you might have telegraphed for me when you heard of it first. i read of it quite by chance in a late edition of _the globe_, that i picked up at the club. i came here at once, and was miserable at not finding you. i can't tell you how heartbroken i am about the whole thing. i know what you must suffer. but where were you? did you go down and see the girl's mother? for a moment i thought of following you there. they gave the address in the paper. somewhere in the euston road, isn't it? but i was afraid of intruding upon a sorrow that i could not lighten. poor woman! what a state she must be in! and her only child, too! what did she say about it all?" "my dear basil, how do i know?" murmured dorian gray, sipping some pale-yellow wine from a delicate gold-beaded bubble of venetian glass, and looking dreadfully bored. "i was at the opera. you should have come on there. i met lady gwendolen, harry's sister, for the first time. we were in her box. she is perfectly charming; and patti sang divinely. don't talk about horrid subjects. if one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. it is simply expression, as harry says, that gives reality to things. i may mention that she was not the woman's only child. there is a son, a charming fellow, i believe. but he is not on the stage. he is a sailor, or something. and now, tell me about yourself and what you are painting." "you went to the opera?" said hallward, speaking very slowly, and with a strained touch of pain in his voice. "you went to the opera while sibyl vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging? you can talk to me of other women being charming, and of patti singing divinely, before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in? why, man, there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!" "stop, basil! i won't hear it!" cried dorian, leaping to his feet. "you must not tell me about things. what is done is done. what is past is past." "you call yesterday the past?" "what has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? it is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. a man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. i don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. i want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them." "dorian, this is horrible! something has changed you completely. you look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come down to my studio to sit for his picture. but you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. you were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. now, i don't know what has come over you. you talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. it is all harry's influence. i see that." the lad flushed up, and, going to the window, looked out for a few moments on the green, flickering, sun-lashed garden. "i owe a great deal to harry, basil," he said, at last--"more than i owe to you. you only taught me to be vain." "well, i am punished for that, dorian--or shall be some day." "i don't know what you mean, basil," he exclaimed, turning round. "i don't know what you want. what do you want?" "i want the dorian gray i used to paint," said the artist, sadly. "basil," said the lad, going over to him, and putting his hand on his shoulder, "you have come too late. yesterday when i heard that sibyl vane had killed herself----" "killed herself! good heavens! is there no doubt about that?" cried hallward, looking up at him with an expression of horror. "my dear basil! surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident? of course she killed herself." the elder man buried his face in his hands. "how fearful," he muttered, and a shudder ran through him. "no," said dorian gray, "there is nothing fearful about it. it is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age. as a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. they are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious. you know what i mean--middle-class virtue, and all that kind of thing. how different sibyl was! she lived her finest tragedy. she was always a heroine. the last night she played--the night you saw her--she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. when she knew its unreality, she died, as juliet might have died. she passed again into the sphere of art. there is something of the martyr about her. her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. but, as i was saying, you must not think i have not suffered. if you had come in yesterday at a particular moment--about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to six--you would have found me in tears. even harry, who was here, who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what i was going through. i suffered immensely. then it passed away. i cannot repeat an emotion. no one can, except sentimentalists. and you are awfully unjust, basil. you come down here to console me. that is charming of you. you find me consoled, and you are furious. how like a sympathetic person! you remind me of a story harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered--i forget exactly what it was. finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. he had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of _ennui_, and became a confirmed misanthrope. and besides, my dear old basil, if you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to see it from the proper artistic point of view. was it not gautier who used to write about _la consolation des arts_? i remember picking up a little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase. well, i am not like that young man you told me of when we were down at marlow together, the young man who used to say that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. i love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. old brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp, there is much to be got from all these. but the artistic temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to me. to become the spectator of one's own life, as harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. i know you are surprised at my talking to you like this. you have not realised how i have developed. i was a schoolboy when you knew me. i am a man now. i have new passions, new thoughts, new ideas. i am different, but you must not like me less. i am changed, but you must always be my friend. of course i am very fond of harry. but i know that you are better than he is. you are not stronger--you are too much afraid of life--but you are better. and how happy we used to be together! don't leave me, basil, and don't quarrel with me. i am what i am. there is nothing more to be said." the painter felt strangely moved. the lad was infinitely dear to him, and his personality had been the great turning-point in his art. he could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more. after all, his indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away. there was so much in him that was good, so much in him that was noble. "well, dorian," he said, at length, with a sad smile, "i won't speak to you again about this horrible thing, after to-day. i only trust your name won't be mentioned in connection with it. the inquest is to take place this afternoon. have they summoned you?" dorian shook his head and a look of annoyance passed over his face at the mention of the word "inquest." there was something so crude and vulgar about everything of the kind. "they don't know my name," he answered. "but surely she did?" "only my christian name, and that i am quite sure she never mentioned to anyone. she told me once that they were all rather curious to learn who i was, and that she invariably told them my name was prince charming. it was pretty of her. you must do me a drawing of sibyl, basil. i should like to have something more of her than the memory of a few kisses and some broken pathetic words." "i will try and do something, dorian, if it would please you. but you must come and sit to me yourself again. i can't get on without you." "i can never sit to you again, basil. it is impossible!" he exclaimed, starting back. the painter stared at him. "my dear boy, what nonsense!" he cried. "do you mean to say you don't like what i did of you? where is it? why have you pulled the screen in front of it? let me look at it. it is the best thing i have ever done. do take the screen away, dorian. it is simply disgraceful of your servant hiding my work like that. i felt the room looked different as i came in." "my servant has nothing to do with it, basil. you don't imagine i let him arrange my room for me? he settles my flowers for me sometimes--that is all. no; i did it myself. the light was too strong on the portrait." "too strong! surely not, my dear fellow? it is an admirable place for it. let me see it." and hallward walked towards the corner of the room. a cry of terror broke from dorian gray's lips, and he rushed between the painter and the screen. "basil," he said, looking very pale, "you must not look at it. i don't wish you to." "not look at my own work! you are not serious. why shouldn't i look at it?" exclaimed hallward, laughing. "if you try to look at it, basil, on my word of honour i will never speak to you again as long as i live. i am quite serious. i don't offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any. but, remember, if you touch this screen, everything is over between us." hallward was thunderstruck. he looked at dorian gray in absolute amazement. he had never seen him like this before. the lad was actually pallid with rage. his hands were clenched, and the pupils of his eyes were like disks of blue fire. he was trembling all over. "dorian!" "don't speak!" "but what is the matter? of course i won't look at it if you don't want me to," he said, rather coldly, turning on his heel, and going over towards the window. "but, really, it seems rather absurd that i shouldn't see my own work, especially as i am going to exhibit it in paris in the autumn. i shall probably have to give it another coat of varnish before that, so i must see it some day, and why not to-day?" "to exhibit it? you want to exhibit it?" exclaimed dorian gray, a strange sense of terror creeping over him. was the world going to be shown his secret? were people to gape at the mystery of his life? that was impossible. something--he did not know what--had to be done at once. "yes; i don't suppose you will object to that. george petit is going to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in the rue de sèze, which will open the first week in october. the portrait will only be away a month. i should think you could easily spare it for that time. in fact, you are sure to be out of town. and if you keep it always behind a screen, you can't care much about it." dorian gray passed his hand over his forehead. there were beads of perspiration there. he felt that he was on the brink of a horrible danger. "you told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it," he cried. "why have you changed your mind? you people who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. the only difference is that your moods are rather meaningless. you can't have forgotten that you assured me most solemnly that nothing in the world would induce you to send it to any exhibition. you told harry exactly the same thing." he stopped suddenly, and a gleam of light came into his eyes. he remembered that lord henry had said to him once, half seriously and half in jest, "if you want to have a strange quarter of an hour, get basil to tell you why he won't exhibit your picture. he told me why he wouldn't, and it was a revelation to me." yes, perhaps basil, too, had his secret. he would ask him and try. "basil," he said, coming over quite close, and looking him straight in the face, "we have each of us a secret. let me know yours and i shall tell you mine. what was your reason for refusing to exhibit my picture?" the painter shuddered in spite of himself. "dorian, if i told you, you might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at me. i could not bear your doing either of those two things. if you wish me never to look at your picture again, i am content. i have always you to look at. if you wish the best work i have ever done to be hidden from the world, i am satisfied. your friendship is dearer to me than any fame or reputation." "no, basil, you must tell me," insisted dorian gray. "i think i have a right to know." his feeling of terror had passed away, and curiosity had taken its place. he was determined to find out basil hallward's mystery. "let us sit down, dorian," said the painter, looking troubled. "let us sit down. and just answer me one question. have you noticed in the picture something curious?--something that probably at first did not strike you, but that revealed itself to you suddenly?" "basil!" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with trembling hands, and gazing at him with wild, startled eyes. "i see you did. don't speak. wait till you hear what i have to say. dorian, from the moment i met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. i was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. you became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. i worshipped you. i grew jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. i wanted to have you all to myself. i was only happy when i was with you. when you were away from me you were still present in my art.... of course i never let you know anything about this. it would have been impossible. you would not have understood it. i hardly understood it myself. i only knew that i had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes--too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them.... weeks and weeks went on, and i grew more and more absorbed in you. then came a new development. i had drawn you as paris in dainty armour, and as adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boar-spear. crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on the prow of adrian's barge, gazing across the green turbid nile. you had leant over the still pool of some greek woodland, and seen in the water's silent silver the marvel of your own face. and it had all been what art should be, unconscious, ideal, and remote. one day, a fatal day i sometimes think, i determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time. whether it was the realism of the method, or the mere wonder of your own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or veil, i cannot tell. but i know that as i worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. i grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry. i felt, dorian, that i had told too much, that i had put too much of myself into it. then it was that i resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. you were a little annoyed; but then you did not realise all that it meant to me. harry, to whom i talked about it, laughed at me. but i did not mind that. when the picture was finished, and i sat alone with it, i felt that i was right.... well, after a few days the thing left my studio, and as soon as i had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence it seemed to me that i had been foolish in imagining that i had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good-looking, and that i could paint. even now i cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. art is always more abstract than we fancy. form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. it often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him. and so when i got this offer from paris i determined to make your portrait the principal thing in my exhibition. it never occurred to me that you would refuse. i see now that you were right. the picture cannot be shown. you must not be angry with me, dorian, for what i have told you. as i said to harry, once, you are made to be worshipped." dorian gray drew a long breath. the colour came back to his cheeks, and a smile played about his lips. the peril was over. he was safe for the time. yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for the painter who had just made this strange confession to him, and wondered if he himself would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend. lord henry had the charm of being very dangerous. but that was all. he was too clever and too cynical to be really fond of. would there ever be someone who would fill him with a strange idolatry? was that one of the things that life had in store? "it is extraordinary to me, dorian," said hallward, "that you should have seen this in the portrait. did you really see it?" "i saw something in it," he answered, "something that seemed to me very curious." "well, you don't mind my looking at the thing now?" dorian shook his head. "you must not ask me that, basil. i could not possibly let you stand in front of that picture." "you will some day, surely?" "never." "well, perhaps you are right. and now good-bye, dorian. you have been the one person in my life who has really influenced my art. whatever i have done that is good, i owe to you. ah! you don't know what it cost me to tell you all that i have told you." "my dear basil," said dorian, "what have you told me? simply that you felt that you admired me too much. that is not even a compliment." "it was not intended as a compliment. it was a confession. now that i have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. perhaps one should never put one's worship into words." "it was a very disappointing confession." "why, what did you expect, dorian? you didn't see anything else in the picture, did you? there was nothing else to see?" "no; there was nothing else to see. why do you ask? but you mustn't talk about worship. it is foolish. you and i are friends, basil, and we must always remain so." "you have got harry," said the painter, sadly. "oh, harry!" cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter. "harry spends his days in saying what is incredible, and his evenings in doing what is improbable. just the sort of life i would like to lead. but still i don't think i would go to harry if i were in trouble. i would sooner go to you, basil." "you will sit to me again?" "impossible!" "you spoil my life as an artist by refusing, dorian. no man came across two ideal things. few come across one." "i can't explain it to you, basil, but i must never sit to you again. there is something fatal about a portrait. it has a life of its own. i will come and have tea with you. that will be just as pleasant." "pleasanter for you, i am afraid," murmured hallward, regretfully. "and now good-bye. i am sorry you won't let me look at the picture once again. but that can't be helped. i quite understand what you feel about it." as he left the room, dorian gray smiled to himself. poor basil! how little he knew of the true reason! and how strange it was that, instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend! how much that strange confession explained to him! the painter's absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his curious reticences--he understood them all now, and he felt sorry. there seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance. he sighed, and touched the bell. the portrait must be hidden away at all costs. he could not run such a risk of discovery again. it had been mad of him to have allowed the thing to remain, even for an hour, in a room to which any of his friends had access. chapter x when his servant entered, he looked at him steadfastly, and wondered if he had thought of peering behind the screen. the man was quite impassive, and waited for his orders. dorian lit a cigarette, and walked over to the glass and glanced into it. he could see the reflection of victor's face perfectly. it was like a placid mask of servility. there was nothing to be afraid of, there. yet he thought it best to be on his guard. speaking very slowly, he told him to tell the housekeeper that he wanted to see her, and then to go to the frame-maker and ask him to send two of his men round at once. it seemed to him that as the man left the room his eyes wandered in the direction of the screen. or was that merely his own fancy? after a few moments, in her black silk dress, with old-fashioned thread mittens on her wrinkled hands, mrs. leaf bustled into the library. he asked her for the key of the schoolroom. "the old schoolroom, mr. dorian?" she exclaimed. "why, it is full of dust. i must get it arranged, and put straight before you go into it. it is not fit for you to see, sir. it is not, indeed." "i don't want it put straight, leaf. i only want the key." "well, sir, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you go into it. why, it hasn't been opened for nearly five years, not since his lordship died." he winced at the mention of his grandfather. he had hateful memories of him. "that does not matter," he answered. "i simply want to see the place--that is all. give me the key." "and here is the key, sir," said the old lady, going over the contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands. "here is the key. i'll have it off the bunch in a moment. but you don't think of living up there, sir, and you so comfortable here?" "no, no," he cried, petulantly. "thank you, leaf. that will do." she lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail of the household. he sighed, and told her to manage things as she thought best. she left the room, wreathed in smiles. as the door closed, dorian put the key in his pocket, and looked round the room. his eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century venetian work that his grandfather had found in a convent near bologna. yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. it had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead. now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. what the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. they would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. and yet the thing would still live on. it would be always alive. he shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told basil the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away. basil would have helped him to resist lord henry's influence, and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. the love that he bore him--for it was really love--had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. it was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. it was such love as michael angelo had known, and montaigne, and winckelmann, and shakespeare himself. yes, basil could have saved him. but it was too late now. the past could always be annihilated. regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. but the future was inevitable. there were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real. he took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen. was the face on the canvas viler than before? it seemed to him that it was unchanged; and yet his loathing of it was intensified. gold hair, blue eyes, and rose-red lips--they all were there. it was simply the expression that had altered. that was horrible in its cruelty. compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow basil's reproaches about sibyl vane had been!--how shallow, and of what little account! his own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgment. a look of pain came across him, and he flung the rich pall over the picture. as he did so, a knock came to the door. he passed out as his servant entered. "the persons are here, monsieur." he felt that the man must be got rid of at once. he must not be allowed to know where the picture was being taken to. there was something sly about him, and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes. sitting down at the writing-table, he scribbled a note to lord henry, asking him to send him round something to read, and reminding him that they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening. "wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the men in here." in two or three minutes there was another knock, and mr. hubbard himself, the celebrated frame-maker of south audley street, came in with a somewhat rough-looking young assistant. mr. hubbard was a florid, red-whiskered little man, whose admiration for art was considerably tempered by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of the artists who dealt with him. as a rule, he never left his shop. he waited for people to come to him. but he always made an exception in favour of dorian gray. there was something about dorian that charmed everybody. it was a pleasure even to see him. "what can i do for you, mr. gray?" he said, rubbing his fat freckled hands. "i thought i would do myself the honour of coming round in person. i have just got a beauty of a frame, sir. picked it up at a sale. old florentine. came from fonthill, i believe. admirably suited for a religious subject, mr. gray." "i am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round, mr. hubbard. i shall certainly drop in and look at the frame--though i don't go in much at present for religious art--but to-day i only want a picture carried to the top of the house for me. it is rather heavy, so i thought i would ask you to lend me a couple of your men." "no trouble at all, mr. gray. i am delighted to be of any service to you. which is the work of art, sir?" "this," replied dorian, moving the screen back. "can you move it, covering and all, just as it is? i don't want it to get scratched going upstairs." "there will be no difficulty, sir," said the genial frame-maker, beginning, with the aid of his assistant, to unhook the picture from the long brass chains by which it was suspended. "and, now, where shall we carry it to, mr. gray?" "i will show you the way, mr. hubbard, if you will kindly follow me. or perhaps you had better go in front. i am afraid it is right at the top of the house. we will go up by the front staircase, as it is wider." he held the door open for them, and they passed out into the hall and began the ascent. the elaborate character of the frame had made the picture extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the obsequious protests of mr. hubbard, who had the true tradesman's spirited dislike of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful, dorian put his hand to it so as to help them. "something of a load to carry, sir," gasped the little man, when they reached the top landing. and he wiped his shiny forehead. "i am afraid it is rather heavy," murmured dorian, as he unlocked the door that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious secret of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men. he had not entered the place for more than four years--not, indeed, since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child, and then as a study when he grew somewhat older. it was a large, well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last lord kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and desired to keep at a distance. it appeared to dorian to have but little changed. there was the huge italian _cassone_, with its fantastically-painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which he had so often hidden himself as a boy. there the satinwood bookcase filled with his dog-eared schoolbooks. on the wall behind it was hanging the same ragged flemish tapestry, where a faded king and queen were playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists. how well he remembered it all! every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked round. he recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here the fatal portrait was to be hidden away. how little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store for him! but there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as this. he had the key, and no one else could enter it. beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. what did it matter? no one could see it. he himself would not see it. why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? he kept his youth--that was enough. and, besides, might not his nature grow finer, after all? there was no reason that the future should be so full of shame. some love might come across his life, and purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh--those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm. perhaps, some day, the cruel look would have passed away from the scarlet sensitive mouth, and he might show to the world basil hallward's masterpiece. no; that was impossible. hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. it might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. the cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. yellow crow's-feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. the hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. there would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. the picture had to be concealed. there was no help for it. "bring it in, mr. hubbard, please," he said, wearily, turning round. "i am sorry i kept you so long. i was thinking of something else." "always glad to have a rest, mr. gray," answered the frame-maker, who was still gasping for breath. "where shall we put it, sir?" "oh, anywhere. here: this will do. i don't want to have it hung up. just lean it against the wall. thanks." "might one look at the work of art, sir?" dorian started. "it would not interest you, mr. hubbard," he said, keeping his eye on the man. he felt ready to leap upon him and fling him to the ground if he dared to lift the gorgeous hanging that concealed the secret of his life. "i shan't trouble you any more now. i am much obliged for your kindness in coming round." "not at all, not at all, mr. gray. ever ready to do anything for you, sir." and mr. hubbard tramped downstairs, followed by the assistant, who glanced back at dorian with a look of shy wonder in his rough, uncomely face. he had never seen anyone so marvellous. when the sound of their footsteps had died away, dorian locked the door, and put the key in his pocket. he felt safe now. no one would ever look upon the horrible thing. no eye but his would ever see his shame. on reaching the library he found that it was just after five o'clock, and that the tea had been already brought up. on a little table of dark perfumed wood thickly encrusted with nacre, a present from lady radley, his guardian's wife, a pretty professional invalid, who had spent the preceding winter in cairo, was lying a note from lord henry, and beside it was a book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled. a copy of the third edition of _the st. james's gazette_ had been placed on the tea-tray. it was evident that victor had returned. he wondered if he had met the men in the hall as they were leaving the house, and had wormed out of them what they had been doing. he would be sure to miss the picture--had no doubt missed it already, while he had been laying the tea-things. the screen had not been set back, and a blank space was visible on the wall. perhaps some night he might find him creeping upstairs and trying to force the door of the room. it was a horrible thing to have a spy in one's house. he had heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a letter, or overheard a conversation, or picked up a card with an address, or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a shred of crumpled lace. he sighed, and, having poured himself out some tea, opened lord henry's note. it was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper, and a book that might interest him, and that he would be at the club at eight-fifteen. he opened _the st. james's_ languidly, and looked through it. a red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye. it drew attention to the following paragraph:-- "inquest on an actress.--an inquest was held this morning at the bell tavern, hoxton road, by mr. danby, the district coroner, on the body of sibyl vane, a young actress recently engaged at the royal theatre, holborn. a verdict of death by misadventure was returned. considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of dr. birrell, who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased." he frowned, and, tearing the paper in two, went across the room and flung the pieces away. how ugly it all was! and how horribly real ugliness made things! he felt a little annoyed with lord henry for having sent him the report. and it was certainly stupid of him to have marked it with red pencil. victor might have read it. the man knew more than enough english for that. perhaps he had read it, and had begun to suspect something. and, yet, what did it matter? what had dorian gray to do with sibyl vane's death? there was nothing to fear. dorian gray had not killed her. his eye fell on the yellow book that lord henry had sent him. what was it, he wondered. he went towards the little pearl-coloured octagonal stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some strange egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair, and began to turn over the leaves. after a few minutes he became absorbed. it was the strangest book that he had ever read. it seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed. it was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. the style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterises the work of some of the finest artists of the french school of _symbolistes_. there were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour. the life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. one hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. it was a poisonous book. the heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. the mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows. cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed through the windows. he read on by its wan light till he could read no more. then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the lateness of the hour, he got up, and, going into the next room, placed the book on the little florentine table that always stood at his bedside, and began to dress for dinner. it was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found lord henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very much bored. "i am so sorry, harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your fault. that book you sent me so fascinated me that i forgot how the time was going." "yes: i thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his chair. "i didn't say i liked it, harry. i said it fascinated me. there is a great difference." "ah, you have discovered that?" murmured lord henry. and they passed into the dining-room. chapter xi for years, dorian gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. he procured from paris no less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control. the hero, the wonderful young parisian, in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. and, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it. in one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic hero. he never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still water, which came upon the young parisian so early in his life, and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had once, apparently, been so remarkable. it was with an almost cruel joy--and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its really tragic, if somewhat over-emphasised, account of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and in the world, he had most dearly valued. for the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated basil hallward, and many others besides him, seemed never to leave him. even those who had heard the most evil things against him, and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through london and became the chatter of the clubs, could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. he had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. men who talked grossly became silent when dorian gray entered the room. there was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. his mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. they wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual. often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that basil hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and ageing face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. the very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. he grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. he would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead, or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. he would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. he mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs. there were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed tavern near the docks, which, under an assumed name, and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish. but moments such as these were rare. that curiosity about life which lord henry had first stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase with gratification. the more he knew, the more he desired to know. he had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them. yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to society. once or twice every month during the winter, and on each wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. his little dinners, in the settling of which lord henry always assisted him, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver. indeed, there were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in dorian gray the true realisation of a type of which they had often dreamed in eton or oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. to them he seemed to be of the company of those whom dante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty." like gautier, he was one for whom "the visible world existed." and, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him. his mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the mayfair balls and pall mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies. for, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the london of his own day what to imperial neronian rome the author of the "satyricon" once had been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere _arbiter elegantiarum_, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a cane. he sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualising of the senses its highest realisation. the worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organised forms of existence. but it appeared to dorian gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. as he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. so much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! there had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions. yes: there was to be, as lord henry had prophesied, a new hedonism that was to recreate life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. it was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet, it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. but it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment. there are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. in black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. the wan mirrors get back their mimic life. the flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. nothing seems to us changed. out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. we have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain. it was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to dorian gray to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it. it was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the roman catholic communion; and certainly the roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. the daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolise. he loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement, and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered vestment, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the "_panis cælestis_," the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the passion of christ, breaking the host into the chalice, and smiting his breast for his sins. the fuming censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle fascination for him. as he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals, and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives. but he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the _darwinismus_ movement in germany, and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. he felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. he knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal. and so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the east. he saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, or aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul. at another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts, in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawled tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums, and, crouching upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass, and charmed, or feigned to charm, great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. the harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when schubert's grace, and chopin's beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear. he collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with western civilisations, and loved to touch and try them. he had the mysterious _juruparis_ of the rio negro indians, that women are not allowed to look at, and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human bones such as alfonso de ovalle heard in chili, and the sonorous green jaspers that are found near cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness. he had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken; the long _clarin_ of the mexicans, into which the performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the harsh _ture_ of the amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a distance of three leagues; the _teponaztli_, that has two vibrating tongues of wood, and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the _yotl_-bells of the aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one that bernal diaz saw when he went with cortes into the mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description. the fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone or with lord henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "tannhäuser," and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul. on one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a costume ball as anne de joyeuse, admiral of france, in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls. this taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him. he would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamp-light, the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. he loved the red gold of the sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. he procured from amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness of colour, and had a turquoise _de la vieille roche_ that was the envy of all the connoisseurs. he discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. in alphonso's "clericalis disciplina" a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of alexander, the conqueror of emathia was said to have found in the vale of jordan snakes "with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs." there was a gem in the brain of the dragon, philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep, and slain. according to the great alchemist, pierre de boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of india made him eloquent. the cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. the garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her colour. the selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. leonardus camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly-killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. the bezoar, that was found in the heart of the arabian deer, was a charm that could cure the plague. in the nests of arabian birds was the aspilates, that, according to democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire. the king of ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand, at the ceremony of his coronation. the gates of the palace of john the priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." over the gable were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the gold might shine by day, and the carbuncles by night. in lodge's strange romance "a margarite of america" it was stated that in the chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste ladies of the world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrours of chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults." marco polo had seen the inhabitants of zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in the mouths of the dead. a sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to king perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss. when the huns lured the king into the great pit, he flung it away--procopius tells the story--nor was it ever found again, though the emperor anastasius offered five hundred-weight of gold pieces for it. the king of malabar had shown to a certain venetian a rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god that he worshipped. when the duke de valentinois, son of alexander vi., visited louis xii. of france, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to brantôme, and his cap had double rows of rubles that threw out a great light. charles of england had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and twenty-one diamonds. richard ii. had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies. hall described henry viii., on his way to the tower previous to his coronation, as wearing "a jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses." the favourites of james i. wore earrings of emeralds set in gold filigrane. edward ii. gave to piers gaveston a suit of red-gold armour studded with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap _parsemé_ with pearls. henry ii. wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-two great orients. the ducal hat of charles the rash, the last duke of burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls, and studded with sapphires. how exquisite life had once been! how gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful. then he turned his attention to embroideries, and to the tapestries that performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of the northern nations of europe. as he investigated the subject--and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up--he was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things. he, at any rate, had escaped that. summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame, but he was unchanged. no winter marred his face or stained his flower-like bloom. how different it was with material things! where had they passed to? where was the great crocus-coloured robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked by brown girls for the pleasure of athena? where, the huge velarium that nero had stretched across the colosseum at rome, that titan sail of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and apollo driving a chariot drawn by white gilt-reined steeds? he longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for the priest of the sun, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the mortuary cloth of king chilperic, with its three hundred golden bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the bishop of pontus, and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests, rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature;" and the coat that charles of orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "_madame, je suis tout joyeux_," the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread, and each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four pearls. he read of the room that was prepared at the palace at rheims for the use of queen joan of burgundy, and was decorated with "thirteen hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked in gold." catherine de médicis had a mourning-bed made for her of black velvet powdered with crescents and suns. its curtains were of damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver. louis xiv. had gold embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment. the state bed of sobieski, king of poland, was made of smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses from the koran. its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. it had been taken from the turkish camp before vienna, and the standard of mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its canopy. and so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting the dainty delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates, and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the east as "woven air," and "running water," and "evening dew"; strange figured cloths from java; elaborate yellow chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks, and wrought with _fleurs de lys_, birds, and images; veils of _lacis_ worked in hungary point; sicilian brocades, and stiff spanish velvets; georgian work with its gilt coins, and japanese _foukousas_ with their green-toned golds and their marvellously-plumaged birds. he had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the church. in the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house he had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the bride of christ, who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for, and wounded by self-inflicted pain. he possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask, figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side was the pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls. the orphreys were divided into panels representing scenes from the life of the virgin, and the coronation of the virgin was figured in coloured silks upon the hood. this was italian work of the fifteenth century. another cope was of green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves, from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of which were picked out with silver thread and coloured crystals. the morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work. the orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was st. sebastian. he had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with representations of the passion and crucifixion of christ, and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins and _fleurs de lys_; altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria. in the mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that quickened his imagination. for these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne. upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain. for weeks he would not go there, would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in mere existence. then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to dreadful places near blue gate fields, and stay there, day after day, until he was driven away. on his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own. after a few years he could not endure to be long out of england, and gave up the villa that he had shared at trouville with lord henry, as well as the little white walled-in house at algiers where they had more than once spent the winter. he hated to be separated from the picture that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid that during his absence someone might gain access to the room, in spite of the elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door. he was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing. it was true that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and ugliness of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could they learn from that? he would laugh at anyone who tried to taunt him. he had not painted it. what was it to him how vile and full of shame it looked? even if he told them, would they believe it? yet he was afraid. sometimes when he was down at his great house in nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not been tampered with, and that the picture was still there. what if it should be stolen? the mere thought made him cold with horror. surely the world would know his secret then. perhaps the world already suspected it. for, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him. he was very nearly blackballed at a west end club of which his birth and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and it was said that on one occasion when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the churchill, the duke of berwick and another gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out. curious stories became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. it was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade. his extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret. of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice, and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer to the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about him. it was remarked, however, that some of those who had been most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him. women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if dorian gray entered the room. yet these whispered scandals only increased, in the eyes of many, his strange and dangerous charm. his great wealth was a certain element of security. society, civilised society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. it feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good _chef_. and, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life. even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold _entrées_, as lord henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject; and there is possibly a good deal to be said for his view. for the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. form is absolutely essential to it. it should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. is insincerity such a terrible thing? i think not. it is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. such, at any rate, was dorian gray's opinion. he used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. to him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. he loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins. here was philip herbert, described by francis osborne, in his "memoires on the reigns of queen elizabeth and king james," as one who was "caressed by the court for his handsome face, which kept him not long company." was it young herbert's life that he sometimes led? had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own? was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance, in basil hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed his life? here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wrist-bands, stood sir anthony sherard, with his silver-and-black armour piled at his feet. what had this man's legacy been? had the lover of giovanna of naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame? were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realise? here, from the fading canvas, smiled lady elizabeth devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves. a flower was in her right hand, and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses. on a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple. there were large green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes. he knew her life, and the strange stories that were told about her lovers. had he something of her temperament in him? these oval heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him. what of george willoughby, with his powdered hair and fantastic patches? how evil he looked! the face was saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain. delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that were so over-laden with rings. he had been a macaroni of the eighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of lord ferrars. what of the second lord beckenham, the companion of the prince regent in his wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with mrs. fitzherbert? how proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and insolent pose! what passions had he bequeathed? the world had looked upon him as infamous. he had led the orgies at carlton house. the star of the garter glittered upon his breast. beside him hung the portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black. her blood, also, stirred within him. how curious it all seemed! and his mother with her lady hamilton face, and her moist wine-dashed lips--he knew what he had got from her. he had got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty of others. she laughed at him in her loose bacchante dress. there were vine leaves in her hair. the purple spilled from the cup she was holding. the carnations of the painting had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth and brilliancy of colour. they seemed to follow him wherever he went. yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. there were times when it appeared to dorian gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. he felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. it seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own. the hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had himself known this curious fancy. in the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as tiberius, in a garden at capri, reading the shameful books of elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him, and the flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as domitian, had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible _tædium vitæ_, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the circus, and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the street of pomegranates to a house of gold, and heard men cry on nero cæsar as he passed by; and, as elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the moon from carthage, and given her in mystic marriage to the sun. over and over again dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious tapestries or cunningly-wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made monstrous or mad: filippo, duke of milan, who slew his wife, and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled; pietro barbi, the venetian, known as paul the second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the price of a terrible sin; gian maria visconti, who used hounds to chase living men, and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the borgia on his white horse, with fratricide riding beside him, and his mantle stained with the blood of perotto; pietro riario, the young cardinal archbishop of florence, child and minion of sixtus iv., whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who received leonora of aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as ganymede or hylas; ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine--the son of the fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; giambattista cibo, who in mockery took the name of innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a jewish doctor; sigismondo malatesta, the lover of isotta, and the lord of rimini, whose effigy was burned at rome as the enemy of god and man, who strangled polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to ginevra d'este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a shameful passion built a pagan church for christian worship; charles vi., who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by saracen cards painted with the images of love and death and madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthus-like curls, grifonetto baglioni, who slew astorre with his bride, and simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep, and atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him. there was a horrible fascination in them all. he saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day. the renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. dorian gray had been poisoned by a book. there were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful. chapter xii it was on the ninth of november, the eve of his own thirty-eighth birthday, as he often remembered afterwards. he was walking home about eleven o'clock from lord henry's, where he had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold and foggy. at the corner of grosvenor square and south audley street a man passed him in the mist, walking very fast, and with the collar of his grey ulster turned up. he had a bag in his hand. dorian recognised him. it was basil hallward. a strange sense of fear, for which he could not account, came over him. he made no sign of recognition, and went on quickly in the direction of his own house. but hallward had seen him. dorian heard him first stopping on the pavement, and then hurrying after him. in a few moments his hand was on his arm. "dorian! what an extraordinary piece of luck! i have been waiting for you in your library ever since nine o'clock. finally i took pity on your tired servant, and told him to go to bed, as he let me out. i am off to paris by the midnight train, and i particularly wanted to see you before i left. i thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as you passed me. but i wasn't quite sure. didn't you recognise me?" "in this fog, my dear basil? why, i can't even recognise grosvenor square. i believe my house is somewhere about here, but i don't feel at all certain about it. i am sorry you are going away, as i have not seen you for ages. but i suppose you will be back soon?" "no: i am going to be out of england for six months. i intend to take a studio in paris, and shut myself up till i have finished a great picture i have in my head. however, it wasn't about myself i wanted to talk. here we are at your door. let me come in for a moment. i have something to say to you." "i shall be charmed. but won't you miss your train?" said dorian gray, languidly, as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his latch-key. the lamp-light struggled out through the fog, and hallward looked at his watch. "i have heaps of time," he answered. "the train doesn't go till twelve-fifteen, and it is only just eleven. in fact, i was on my way to the club to look for you, when i met you. you see, i shan't have any delay about luggage, as i have sent on my heavy things. all i have with me is in this bag, and i can easily get to victoria in twenty minutes." dorian looked at him and smiled. "what a way for a fashionable painter to travel! a gladstone bag, and an ulster! come in, or the fog will get into the house. and mind you don't talk about anything serious. nothing is serious nowadays. at least nothing should be." hallward shook his head as he entered, and followed dorian into the library. there was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open hearth. the lamps were lit, and an open dutch silver spirit-case stood, with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers, on a little marqueterie table. "you see your servant made me quite at home, dorian. he gave me everything i wanted, including your best gold-tipped cigarettes. he is a most hospitable creature. i like him much better than the frenchman you used to have. what has become of the frenchman, by the bye?" dorian shrugged his shoulders. "i believe he married lady radley's maid, and has established her in paris as an english dressmaker. _anglomanie_ is very fashionable over there now, i hear. it seems silly of the french, doesn't it? but--do you know?--he was not at all a bad servant. i never liked him, but i had nothing to complain about. one often imagines things that are quite absurd. he was really very devoted to me, and seemed quite sorry when he went away. have another brandy-and-soda? or would you like hock-and-seltzer? i always take hock-and-seltzer myself. there is sure to be some in the next room." "thanks, i won't have anything more," said the painter, taking his cap and coat off, and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in the corner. "and now, my dear fellow, i want to speak to you seriously. don't frown like that. you make it so much more difficult for me." "what is it all about?" cried dorian, in his petulant way, flinging himself down on the sofa. "i hope it is not about myself. i am tired of myself to-night. i should like to be somebody else." "it is about yourself," answered hallward, in his grave, deep voice, "and i must say it to you. i shall only keep you half an hour." dorian sighed, and lit a cigarette. "half an hour!" he murmured. "it is not much to ask of you, dorian, and it is entirely for your own sake that i am speaking. i think it right that you should know that the most dreadful things are being said against you in london." "i don't wish to know anything about them. i love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. they have not got the charm of novelty." "they must interest you, dorian. every gentleman is interested in his good name. you don't want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded. of course you have your position, and your wealth, and all that kind of thing. but position and wealth are not everything. mind you, i don't believe these rumours at all. at least, i can't believe them when i see you. sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. it cannot be concealed. people talk sometimes of secret vices. there are no such things. if a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even. somebody--i won't mention his name, but you know him--came to me last year to have his portrait done. i had never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the time, though i have heard a good deal since. he offered an extravagant price. i refused him. there was something in the shape of his fingers that i hated. i know now that i was quite right in what i fancied about him. his life is dreadful. but you, dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth--i can't believe anything against you. and yet i see you very seldom, and you never come down to the studio now, and when i am away from you, and i hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, i don't know what to say. why is it, dorian, that a man like the duke of berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? why is it that so many gentlemen in london will neither go to your house nor invite you to theirs? you used to be a friend of lord staveley. i met him at dinner last week. your name happened to come up in conversation, in connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the dudley. staveley curled his lip, and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. i reminded him that i was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant. he told me. he told me right out before everybody. it was horrible! why is your friendship so fatal to young men? there was that wretched boy in the guards who committed suicide. you were his great friend. there was sir henry ashton, who had to leave england, with a tarnished name. you and he were inseparable. what about adrian singleton, and his dreadful end? what about lord kent's only son, and his career? i met his father yesterday in st. james's street. he seemed broken with shame and sorrow. what about the young duke of perth? what sort of life has he got now? what gentleman would associate with him?" "stop, basil. you are talking about things of which you know nothing," said dorian gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt in his voice. "you ask me why berwick leaves a room when i enter it. it is because i know everything about his life, not because he knows anything about mine. with such blood as he has in his veins, how could his record be clean? you ask me about henry ashton and young perth. did i teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery? if kent's silly son takes his wife from the streets what is that to me? if adrian singleton writes his friend's name across a bill, am i his keeper? i know how people chatter in england. the middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society, and on intimate terms with the people they slander. in this country it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. and what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? my dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite." "dorian," cried hallward, "that is not the question. england is bad enough, i know, and english society is all wrong. that is the reason why i want you to be fine. you have not been fine. one has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. you have filled them with a madness for pleasure. they have gone down into the depths. you led them there. yes: you led them there, and yet you can smile, as you are smiling now. and there is worse behind. i know you and harry are inseparable. surely for that reason, if for none other, you should not have made his sister's name a by-word." "take care, basil. you go too far." "i must speak, and you must listen. you shall listen. when you met lady gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever touched her. is there a single decent woman in london now who would drive with her in the park? why, even her children are not allowed to live with her. then there are other stories--stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in london. are they true? can they be true? when i first heard them, i laughed. i hear them now, and they make me shudder. what about your country house, and the life that is led there? dorian, you don't know what is said about you. i won't tell you that i don't want to preach to you. i remember harry saying once that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always began by saying that, and then proceeded to break his word. i do want to preach to you. i want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect you. i want you to have a clean name and a fair record. i want you to get rid of the dreadful people you associate with. don't shrug your shoulders like that. don't be so indifferent. you have a wonderful influence. let it be for good, not for evil. they say that you corrupt everyone with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house, for shame of some kind to follow after. i don't know whether it is so or not. how should i know? but it is said of you. i am told things that it seems impossible to doubt. lord gloucester was one of my greatest friends at oxford. he showed me a letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in her villa at mentone. your name was implicated in the most terrible confession i ever read. i told him that it was absurd--that i knew you thoroughly, and that you were incapable of anything of the kind. know you? i wonder do i know you? before i could answer that, i should have to see your soul." "to see my soul!" muttered dorian gray, starting up from the sofa and turning almost white from fear. "yes," answered hallward, gravely, and with deep-toned sorrow in his voice--"to see your soul. but only god can do that." a bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man. "you shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from the table. "come: it is your own handiwork. why shouldn't you look at it? you can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose. nobody would believe you. if they did believe you, they would like me all the better for it. i know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously. come, i tell you. you have chattered enough about corruption. now you shall look on it face to face." there was the madness of pride in every word he uttered. he stamped his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner. he felt a terrible joy at the thought that someone else was to share his secret, and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the hideous memory of what he had done. "yes," he continued, coming closer to him, and looking steadfastly into his stern eyes, "i shall show you my soul. you shall see the thing that you fancy only god can see." hallward started back. "this is blasphemy, dorian!" he cried. "you must not say things like that. they are horrible, and they don't mean anything." "you think so?" he laughed again. "i know so. as for what i said to you to-night, i said it for your good. you know i have been always a staunch friend to you." "don't touch me. finish what you have to say." a twisted flash of pain shot across the painter's face. he paused for a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him. after all, what right had he to pry into the life of dorian gray? if he had done a tithe of what was rumoured about him, how much he must have suffered! then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fireplace, and stood there, looking at the burning logs with their frost-like ashes and their throbbing cores of flame. "i am waiting, basil," said the young man, in a hard, clear voice. he turned round. "what i have to say is this," he cried. "you must give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against you. if you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to end, i shall believe you. deny them, dorian, deny them! can't you see what i am going through? my god! don't tell me that you are bad, and corrupt, and shameful." dorian gray smiled. there was a curl of contempt in his lips. "come upstairs, basil," he said, quietly. "i keep a diary of my life from day to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written. i shall show it to you if you come with me." "i shall come with you, dorian, if you wish it. i see i have missed my train. that makes no matter. i can go to-morrow. but don't ask me to read anything to-night. all i want is a plain answer to my question." "that shall be given to you upstairs. i could not give it here. you will not have to read long." chapter xiii he passed out of the room, and began the ascent, basil hallward following close behind. they walked softly, as men do instinctively at night. the lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. a rising wind made some of the windows rattle. when they reached the top landing, dorian set the lamp down on the floor, and taking out the key turned it in the lock. "you insist on knowing, basil?" he asked, in a low voice. "yes." "i am delighted," he answered, smiling. then he added, somewhat harshly, "you are the one man in the world who is entitled to know everything about me. you have had more to do with my life than you think:" and, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in. a cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in a flame of murky orange. he shuddered. "shut the door behind you," he whispered, as he placed the lamp on the table. hallward glanced round him, with a puzzled expression. the room looked as if it had not been lived in for years. a faded flemish tapestry, a curtained picture, an old italian _cassone_, and an almost empty bookcase--that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and a table. as dorian gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was standing on the mantel-shelf, he saw that the whole place was covered with dust, and that the carpet was in holes. a mouse ran scuffling behind the wainscoting. there was a damp odour of mildew. "so you think that it is only god who sees the soul, basil? draw that curtain back, and you will see mine." the voice that spoke was cold and cruel. "you are mad, dorian, or playing a part," muttered hallward, frowning. "you won't? then i must do it myself," said the young man; and he tore the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground. an exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. there was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. good heavens! it was dorian gray's own face that he was looking at! the horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvellous beauty. there was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth. the sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat. yes, it was dorian himself. but who had done it? he seemed to recognise his own brush-work, and the frame was his own design. the idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. he seized the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. in the left-hand corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion. it was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. he had never done that. still, it was his own picture. he knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. his own picture! what did it mean? why had it altered? he turned, and looked at dorian gray with the eyes of a sick man. his mouth twitched, and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate. he passed his hand across his forehead. it was dank with clammy sweat. the young man was leaning against the mantel-shelf, watching him with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. there was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. there was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes. he had taken the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so. "what does this mean?" cried hallward, at last. his own voice sounded shrill and curious in his ears. "years ago, when i was a boy," said dorian gray, crushing the flower in his hand, "you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. one day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished the portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. in a mad moment, that, even now, i don't know whether i regret or not, i made a wish, perhaps you would call it a prayer...." "i remember it! oh, how well i remember it! no! the thing is impossible. the room is damp. mildew has got into the canvas. the paints i used had some wretched mineral poison in them. i tell you the thing is impossible." "ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to the window, and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained glass. "you told me you had destroyed it." "i was wrong. it has destroyed me." "i don't believe it is my picture." "can't you see your ideal in it?" said dorian, bitterly. "my ideal, as you call it...." "as you called it." "there was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. you were to me such an ideal as i shall never meet again. this is the face of a satyr." "it is the face of my soul." "christ! what a thing i must have worshipped! it has the eyes of a devil." "each of us has heaven and hell in him, basil," cried dorian, with a wild gesture of despair. hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. "my god! if it is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!" he held the light up again to the canvas, and examined it. the surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it. it was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. the rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful. his hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor, and lay there sputtering. he placed his foot on it and put it out. then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table and buried his face in his hands. "good god, dorian, what a lesson! what an awful lesson!" there was no answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window. "pray, dorian, pray," he murmured. "what is it that one was taught to say in one's boyhood? 'lead us not into temptation. forgive us our sins. wash away our iniquities.' let us say that together. the prayer of your pride has been answered. the prayer of your repentance will be answered also. i worshipped you too much. i am punished for it. you worshipped yourself too much. we are both punished." dorian gray turned slowly around, and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes. "it is too late, basil," he faltered. "it is never too late, dorian. let us kneel down and try if we cannot remember a prayer. isn't there a verse somewhere, 'though your sins be as scarlet; yet i will make them as white as snow'?" "those words mean nothing to me now." "hush! don't say that. you have done enough evil in your life. my god! don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?" dorian gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable feeling of hatred for basil hallward came over him, as though it had been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his ear by those grinning lips. the mad passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table, more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything. he glanced wildly around. something glimmered on the top of the painted chest that faced him. his eye fell on it. he knew what it was. it was a knife that he had brought up, some days before, to cut a piece of cord, and had forgotten to take away with him. he moved slowly towards it, passing hallward as he did so. as soon as he got behind him, he seized it, and turned round. hallward stirred in his chair as if he was going to rise. he rushed at him, and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind the ear, crushing the man's head down on the table, and stabbing again and again. there was a stifled groan, and the horrible sound of someone choking with blood. three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively, waving grotesque stiff-fingered hands in the air. he stabbed him twice more, but the man did not move. something began to trickle on the floor. he waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. then he threw the knife on the table, and listened. he could hear nothing but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet. he opened the door and went out on the landing. the house was absolutely quiet. no one was about. for a few seconds he stood bending over the balustrade, and peering down into the black seething well of darkness. then he took out the key and returned to the room, locking himself in as he did so. the thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table with bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms. had it not been for the red jagged tear in the neck, and the clotted black pool that was slowly widening on the table, one would have said that the man was simply asleep. how quickly it had all been done! he felt strangely calm, and, walking over to the window, opened it, and stepped out on the balcony. the wind had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. he looked down, and saw the policeman going his rounds and flashing the long beam of his lantern on the doors of the silent houses. the crimson spot of a prowling hansom gleamed at the corner, and then vanished. a woman in a fluttering shawl was creeping slowly by the railings, staggering as she went. now and then she stopped, and peered back. once, she began to sing in a hoarse voice. the policeman strolled over and said something to her. she stumbled away, laughing. a bitter blast swept across the square. the gas-lamps flickered, and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their black iron branches to and fro. he shivered, and went back, closing the window behind him. having reached the door, he turned the key, and opened it. he did not even glance at the murdered man. he felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realise the situation. the friend who had painted the fatal portrait to which all his misery had been due, had gone out of his life. that was enough. then he remembered the lamp. it was a rather curious one of moorish workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished steel, and studded with coarse turquoises. perhaps it might be missed by his servant, and questions would be asked. he hesitated for a moment, then he turned back and took it from the table. he could not help seeing the dead thing. how still it was! how horribly white the long hands looked! it was like a dreadful wax image. having locked the door behind him, he crept quietly downstairs. the woodwork creaked, and seemed to cry out as if in pain. he stopped several times, and waited. no: everything was still. it was merely the sound of his own footsteps. when he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner. they must be hidden away somewhere. he unlocked a secret press that was in the wainscoting, a press in which he kept his own curious disguises, and put them into it. he could easily burn them afterwards. then he pulled out his watch. it was twenty minutes to two. he sat down, and began to think. every year--every month, almost--men were strangled in england for what he had done. there had been a madness of murder in the air. some red star had come too close to the earth.... and yet what evidence was there against him? basil hallward had left the house at eleven. no one had seen him come in again. most of the servants were at selby royal. his valet had gone to bed.... paris! yes. it was to paris that basil had gone, and by the midnight train, as he had intended. with his curious reserved habits, it would be months before any suspicions would be aroused. months! everything could be destroyed long before then. a sudden thought struck him. he put on his fur coat and hat, and went out into the hall. there he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of the policeman on the pavement outside, and seeing the flash of the bull's-eye reflected in the window. he waited, and held his breath. after a few moments he drew back the latch, and slipped out, shutting the door very gently behind him. then he began ringing the bell. in about five minutes his valet appeared half dressed, and looking very drowsy. "i am sorry to have had to wake you up, francis," he said, stepping in; "but i had forgotten my latch-key. what time is it?" "ten minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock and blinking. "ten minutes past two? how horribly late! you must wake me at nine to-morrow. i have some work to do." "all right, sir." "did anyone call this evening?" "mr. hallward, sir. he stayed here till eleven, and then he went away to catch his train." "oh! i am sorry i didn't see him. did he leave any message?" "no, sir, except that he would write to you from paris, if he did not find you at the club." "that will do, francis. don't forget to call me at nine to-morrow." "no, sir." the man shambled down the passage in his slippers. dorian gray threw his hat and coat upon the table, and passed into the library. for a quarter of an hour he walked up and down the room biting his lip, and thinking. then he took down the blue book from one of the shelves, and began to turn over the leaves. "alan campbell, , hertford street, mayfair." yes; that was the man he wanted. chapter xiv at nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate on a tray, and opened the shutters. dorian was sleeping quite peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his cheek. he looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study. the man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he had been lost in some delightful dream. yet he had not dreamed at all. his night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain. but youth smiles without any reason. it is one of its chiefest charms. he turned round, and, leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his chocolate. the mellow november sun came streaming into the room. the sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air. it was almost like a morning in may. gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent blood-stained feet into his brain, and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness. he winced at the memory of all that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for basil hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair, came back to him, and he grew cold with passion. the dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. how horrible that was! such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. he felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken or grow mad. there were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them; strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. but this was not one of them. it was a thing to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself. when the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead, and then got up hastily, and dressed himself with even more than his usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and scarf-pin, and changing his rings more than once. he spent a long time also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made for the servants at selby, and going through his correspondence. at some of the letters he smiled. three of them bored him. one he read several times over, and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his face. "that awful thing, a woman's memory!" as lord henry had once said. after he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his lips slowly with a napkin, motioned to his servant to wait, and going over to the table sat down and wrote two letters. one he put in his pocket, the other he handed to the valet. "take this round to , hertford street, francis, and if mr. campbell is out of town, get his address." as soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette, and began sketching upon a piece of paper, drawing first flowers, and bits of architecture, and then human faces. suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to basil hallward. he frowned, and, getting up, went over to the bookcase and took out a volume at hazard. he was determined that he would not think about what had happened until it became absolutely necessary that he should do so. when he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page of the book. it was gautier's "Émaux et camées," charpentier's japanese-paper edition, with the jacquemart etching. the binding was of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted pomegranates. it had been given to him by adrian singleton. as he turned over the pages his eye fell on the poem about the hand of lacenaire, the cold yellow hand "_du supplice encore mal lavée_," with its downy red hairs and its "_doigts de faune_." he glanced at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon venice:-- "sur une gamme chromatique, le sein de perles ruisselant, la vénus de l'adriatique sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc. "les dômes, sur l'azur des ondes suivant la phrase au pur contour, s'enflent comme des gorges rondes que soulève un soupir d'amour. "l'esquif aborde et me dépose, jetant son amarre au pilier, devant une façade rose, sur le marbre d'un escalier." how exquisite they were! as one read them, one seemed to be floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. the mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the lido. the sudden flashes of colour reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall honey-combed campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the dim, dust-stained arcades. leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself:-- "devant une façade rose, sur le marbre d'un escalier." the whole of venice was in those two lines. he remembered the autumn that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to mad, delightful follies. there was romance in every place. but venice, like oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. basil had been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over tintoret. poor basil! what a horrible way for a man to die! he sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. he read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little café at smyrna where the hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the obelisk in the place de la concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile, and longs to be back by the hot lotus-covered nile, where there are sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles, with small beryl eyes, that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those verses which, drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious statue that gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "_monstre charmant_" that couches in the porphyry-room of the louvre. but after a time the book fell from his hand. he grew nervous, and a horrible fit of terror came over him. what if alan campbell should be out of england? days would elapse before he could come back. perhaps he might refuse to come. what could he do then? every moment was of vital importance. they had been great friends once, five years before--almost inseparable, indeed. then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end. when they met in society now, it was only dorian gray who smiled; alan campbell never did. he was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from dorian. his dominant intellectual passion was for science. at cambridge he had spent a great deal of his time working in the laboratory, and had taken a good class in the natural science tripos of his year. indeed, he was still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his own, in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for parliament, and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions. he was an excellent musician, however, as well, and played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. in fact, it was music that had first brought him and dorian gray together--music and that indefinable attraction that dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished, and indeed exercised often without being conscious of it. they had met at lady berkshire's the night that rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always seen together at the opera, and wherever good music was going on. for eighteen months their intimacy lasted. campbell was always either at selby royal or in grosvenor square. to him, as to many others, dorian gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life. whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one ever knew. but suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when they met, and that campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at which dorian gray was present. he had changed, too--was strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing music, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time left in which to practise. and this was certainly true. every day he seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews, in connection with certain curious experiments. this was the man dorian gray was waiting for. every second he kept glancing at the clock. as the minutes went by he became horribly agitated. at last he got up, and began to pace up and down the room, looking like a beautiful caged thing. he took long stealthy strides. his hands were curiously cold. the suspense became unbearable. time seemed to him to be crawling with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. he knew what was waiting for him there; saw it indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight, and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. it was useless. the brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand, and grinned through moving masks. then, suddenly, time stopped for him. yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. he stared at it. its very horror made him stone. at last the door opened, and his servant entered. he turned glazed eyes upon him. "mr. campbell, sir," said the man. a sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back to his cheeks. "ask him to come in at once, francis." he felt that he was himself again. his mood of cowardice had passed away. the man bowed, and retired. in a few moments alan campbell walked in, looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his coal-black hair and dark eyebrows. "alan! this is kind of you. i thank you for coming." "i had intended never to enter your house again, gray. but you said it was a matter of life and death." his voice was hard and cold. he spoke with slow deliberation. there was a look of contempt in the steady searching gaze that he turned on dorian. he kept his hands in the pockets of his astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted. "yes: it is a matter of life and death, alan, and to more than one person. sit down." campbell took a chair by the table, and dorian sat opposite to him. the two men's eyes met. in dorian's there was infinite pity. he knew that what he was going to do was dreadful. after a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of him he had sent for, "alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table. he has been dead ten hours now. don't stir, and don't look at me like that. who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do not concern you. what you have to do is this----" "stop, gray. i don't want to know anything further. whether what you have told me is true or not true, doesn't concern me. i entirely decline to be mixed up in your life. keep your horrible secrets to yourself. they don't interest me any more." "alan, they will have to interest you. this one will have to interest you. i am awfully sorry for you, alan. but i can't help myself. you are the one man who is able to save me. i am forced to bring you into the matter. i have no option. alan, you are scientific. you know about chemistry, and things of that kind. you have made experiments. what you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs--to destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left. nobody saw this person come into the house. indeed, at the present moment he is supposed to be in paris. he will not be missed for months. when he is missed, there must be no trace of him found here. you, alan, you must change him, and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes that i may scatter in the air." "you are mad, dorian." "ah! i was waiting for you to call me dorian." "you are mad, i tell you--mad to imagine that i would raise a finger to help you, mad to make this monstrous confession. i will have nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is. do you think i am going to peril my reputation for you? what is it to me what devil's work you are up to?" "it was suicide, alan." "i am glad of that. but who drove him to it? you, i should fancy." "do you still refuse to do this for me?" "of course i refuse. i will have absolutely nothing to do with it. i don't care what shame comes on you. you deserve it all. i should not be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced. how dare you ask me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror? i should have thought you knew more about people's characters. your friend lord henry wotton can't have taught you much about psychology, whatever else he has taught you. nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you. you have come to the wrong man. go to some of your friends. don't come to me." "alan, it was murder. i killed him. you don't know what he had made me suffer. whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or the marring of it than poor harry has had. he may not have intended it, the result was the same." "murder! good god, dorian, is that what you have come to? i shall not inform upon you. it is not my business. besides, without my stirring in the matter, you are certain to be arrested. nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid. but i will have nothing to do with it." "you must have something to do with it. wait, wait a moment; listen to me. only listen, alan. all i ask of you is to perform a certain scientific experiment. you go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the horrors that you do there don't affect you. if in some hideous dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. you would not turn a hair. you would not believe that you were doing anything wrong. on the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind. what i want you to do is merely what you have often done before. indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you are accustomed to work at. and, remember, it is the only piece of evidence against me. if it is discovered, i am lost; and it is sure to be discovered unless you help me." "i have no desire to help you. you forget that. i am simply indifferent to the whole thing. it has nothing to do with me." "alan, i entreat you. think of the position i am in. just before you came i almost fainted with terror. you may know terror yourself some day. no! don't think of that. look at the matter purely from the scientific point of view. you don't inquire where the dead things on which you experiment come from. don't inquire now. i have told you too much as it is. but i beg of you to do this. we were friends once, alan." "don't speak about those days, dorian: they are dead." "the dead linger sometimes. the man upstairs will not go away. he is sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms. alan! alan! if you don't come to my assistance i am ruined. why, they will hang me, alan! don't you understand? they will hang me for what i have done." "there is no good in prolonging this scene. i absolutely refuse to do anything in the matter. it is insane of you to ask me." "you refuse?" "yes." "i entreat you, alan." "it is useless." the same look of pity came into dorian gray's eyes. then he stretched out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it. he read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table. having done this, he got up, and went over to the window. campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and opened it. as he read it, his face became ghastly pale, and he fell back in his chair. a horrible sense of sickness came over him. he felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow. after two or three minutes of terrible silence, dorian turned round, and came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder. "i am so sorry for you, alan," he murmured, "but you leave me no alternative. i have a letter written already. here it is. you see the address. if you don't help me, i must send it. if you don't help me, i will send it. you know what the result will be. but you are going to help me. it is impossible for you to refuse now. i tried to spare you. you will do me the justice to admit that. you were stern, harsh, offensive. you treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me--no living man, at any rate. i bore it all. now it is for me to dictate terms." campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him. "yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, alan. you know what they are. the thing is quite simple. come, don't work yourself into this fever. the thing has to be done. face it, and do it." a groan broke from campbell's lips, and he shivered all over. the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne. he felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already come upon him. the hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead. it was intolerable. it seemed to crush him. "come, alan, you must decide at once." "i cannot do it," he said, mechanically, as though words could alter things. "you must. you have no choice. don't delay." he hesitated a moment. "is there a fire in the room upstairs?" "yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos." "i shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory." "no, alan, you must not leave the house. write out on a sheet of note-paper what you want, and my servant will take a cab and bring the things back to you." campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope to his assistant. dorian took the note up and read it carefully. then he rang the bell, and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as soon as possible, and to bring the things with him. as the hall door shut, campbell started nervously, and, having got up from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. he was shivering with a kind of ague. for nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke. a fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was like the beat of a hammer. as the chime struck one, campbell turned round, and, looking at dorian gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. there was something in the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him. "you are infamous, absolutely infamous!" he muttered. "hush, alan: you have saved my life," said dorian. "your life? good heavens! what a life that is! you have gone from corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. in doing what i am going to do, what you force me to do, it is not of your life that i am thinking." "ah, alan," murmured dorian, with a sigh, "i wish you had a thousandth part of the pity for me that i have for you." he turned away as he spoke, and stood looking out at the garden. campbell made no answer. after about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously-shaped iron clamps. "shall i leave the things here, sir?" he asked campbell. "yes," said dorian. "and i am afraid, francis, that i have another errand for you. what is the name of the man at richmond who supplies selby with orchids?" "harden, sir." "yes--harden. you must go down to richmond at once, see harden personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as i ordered, and to have as few white ones as possible. in fact, i don't want any white ones. it is a lovely day, francis, and richmond is a very pretty place, otherwise i wouldn't bother you about it." "no trouble, sir. at what time shall i be back?" dorian looked at campbell. "how long will your experiment take, alan?" he said, in a calm, indifferent voice. the presence of a third person in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage. campbell frowned, and bit his lip. "it will take about five hours," he answered. "it will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven, francis. or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. you can have the evening to yourself. i am not dining at home, so i shall not want you." "thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room. "now, alan, there is not a moment to be lost. how heavy this chest is! i'll take it for you. you bring the other things." he spoke rapidly, and in an authoritative manner. campbell felt dominated by him. they left the room together. when they reached the top landing, dorian took out the key and turned it in the lock. then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his eyes. he shuddered. "i don't think i can go in, alan," he murmured. "it is nothing to me. i don't require you," said campbell, coldly. dorian half opened the door. as he did so, he saw the face of his portrait leering in the sunlight. on the floor in front of it the torn curtain was lying. he remembered that, the night before he had forgotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas, and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder. what was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? how horrible it was!--more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it. he heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with half-closed eyes and averted head walked quickly in, determined that he would not look even once upon the dead man. then, stooping down, and taking up the gold and purple hanging, he flung it right over the picture. there he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. he heard campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other things that he had required for his dreadful work. he began to wonder if he and basil hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had thought of each other. "leave me now," said a stern voice behind him. he turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been thrust back into the chair, and that campbell was gazing into a glistening yellow face. as he was going downstairs he heard the key being turned in the lock. it was long after seven when campbell came back into the library. he was pale, but absolutely calm. "i have done what you asked me to do," he muttered. "and now, good-bye. let us never see each other again." "you have saved me from ruin, alan. i cannot forget that," said dorian, simply. as soon as campbell had left, he went upstairs. there was a horrible smell of nitric acid in the room. but the thing that had been sitting at the table was gone. chapter xv that evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large buttonhole of parma violets, dorian gray was ushered into lady narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants. his forehead was throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as ever. perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part. certainly no one looking at dorian gray that night could have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our age. those finely-shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on god and goodness. he himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life. it was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by lady narborough, who was a very clever woman, with what lord henry used to describe as the remains of really remarkable ugliness. she had proved an excellent wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed, and married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she devoted herself now to the pleasures of french fiction, french cookery, and french _esprit_ when she could get it. dorian was one of her special favourites, and she always told him that she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life. "i know, my dear, i should have fallen madly in love with you," she used to say, "and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake. it is most fortunate that you were not thought of at the time. as it was, our bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were so occupied in trying to raise the wind, that i never had even a flirtation with anybody. however, that was all narborough's fault. he was dreadfully short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who never sees anything." her guests this evening were rather tedious. the fact was, as she explained to dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her. "i think it is most unkind of her, my dear," she whispered. "of course i go and stay with them every summer after i come from homburg, but then an old woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, i really wake them up. you don't know what an existence they lead down there. it is pure unadulterated country life. they get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about. there has not been a scandal in the neighbourhood since the time of queen elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep after dinner. you shan't sit next either of them. you shall sit by me, and amuse me." dorian murmured a graceful compliment, and looked round the room. yes: it was certainly a tedious party. two of the people he had never seen before, and the others consisted of ernest harrowden, one of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in london clubs who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; lady ruxton, an over-dressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose, who was always trying to get herself compromised, but was so peculiarly plain that to her great disappointment no one would ever believe anything against her; mrs. erlynne, a pushing nobody, with a delightful lisp, and venetian-red hair; lady alice chapman, his hostess's daughter, a dowdy dull girl, with one of those characteristic british faces, that, once seen, are never remembered; and her husband, a red-cheeked, white-whiskered creature who, like so many of his class, was under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas. he was rather sorry he had come, till lady narborough, looking at the great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy curves on the mauve-draped mantel-shelf, exclaimed: "how horrid of henry wotton to be so late! i sent round to him this morning on chance, and he promised faithfully not to disappoint me." it was some consolation that harry was to be there, and when the door opened and he heard his slow musical voice lending charm to some insincere apology, he ceased to feel bored. but at dinner he could not eat anything. plate after plate went away untasted. lady narborough kept scolding him for what she called "an insult to poor adolphe, who invented the _menu_ specially for you," and now and then lord henry looked across at him, wondering at his silence and abstracted manner. from time to time the butler filled his glass with champagne. he drank eagerly, and his thirst seemed to increase. "dorian," said lord henry, at last, as the _chaud-froid_ was being handed round, "what is the matter with you to-night? you are quite out of sorts." "i believe he is in love," cried lady narborough, "and that he is afraid to tell me for fear i should be jealous. he is quite right. i certainly should." "dear lady narborough," murmured dorian, smiling, "i have not been in love for a whole week--not, in fact, since madame de ferrol left town." "how you men can fall in love with that woman!" exclaimed the old lady. "i really cannot understand it." "it is simply because she remembers you when you were a little girl, lady narborough," said lord henry. "she is the one link between us and your short frocks." "she does not remember my short frocks at all, lord henry. but i remember her very well at vienna thirty years ago, and how _décolletée_ she was then." "she is still _décolletée_," he answered, taking an olive in his long fingers; "and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an _édition de luxe_ of a bad french novel. she is really wonderful, and full of surprises. her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. when her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief." "how can you, harry!" cried dorian. "it is a most romantic explanation," laughed the hostess. "but her third husband, lord henry! you don't mean to say ferrol is the fourth." "certainly, lady narborough." "i don't believe a word of it." "well, ask mr. gray. he is one of her most intimate friends." "is it true, mr. gray?" "she assures me so, lady narborough," said dorian. "i asked her whether, like marguerite de navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and hung at her girdle. she told me she didn't, because none of them had had any hearts at all." "four husbands! upon my word that is _trop de zèle_." "_trop d'audace_, i tell her," said dorian. "oh! she is audacious enough for anything, my dear. and what is ferrol like? i don't know him." "the husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes," said lord henry, sipping his wine. lady narborough hit him with her fan. "lord henry, i am not at all surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked." "but what world says that?" asked lord henry, elevating his eyebrows. "it can only be the next world. this world and i are on excellent terms." "everybody i know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady, shaking her head. lord henry looked serious for some moments. "it is perfectly monstrous," he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true." "isn't he incorrigible?" cried dorian, leaning forward in his chair. "i hope so," said his hostess, laughing. "but really if you all worship madame de ferrol in this ridiculous way, i shall have to marry again so as to be in the fashion." "you will never marry again, lady narborough," broke in lord henry. "you were far too happy. when a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. when a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. women try their luck; men risk theirs." "narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady. "if he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady," was the rejoinder. "women love us for our defects. if we have enough of them they will forgive us everything, even our intellects. you will never ask me to dinner again, after saying this, i am afraid, lady narborough; but it is quite true." "of course it is true, lord henry. if we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? not one of you would ever be married. you would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. not, however, that that would alter you much. nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men." "_fin de siècle_," murmured lord henry. "_fin du globe_," answered his hostess. "i wish it were _fin du globe_," said dorian, with a sigh. "life is a great disappointment." "ah, my dear," cried lady narborough, putting on her gloves, "don't tell me that you have exhausted life. when a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him. lord henry is very wicked, and i sometimes wish that i had been; but you are made to be good--you look so good. i must find you a nice wife. lord henry, don't you think that mr. gray should get married?" "i am always telling him so, lady narborough," said lord henry, with a bow. "well, we must look out for a suitable match for him. i shall go through debrett carefully to-night, and draw out a list of all the eligible young ladies." "with their ages, lady narborough?" asked dorian. "of course, with their ages, slightly edited. but nothing must be done in a hurry. i want it to be what _the morning post_ calls a suitable alliance, and i want you both to be happy." "what nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed lord henry. "a man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her." "ah! what a cynic you are!" cried the old lady, pushing back her chair, and nodding to lady ruxton. "you must come and dine with me soon again. you are really an admirable tonic, much better than what sir andrew prescribes for me. you must tell me what people you would like to meet, though. i want it to be a delightful gathering." "i like men who have a future, and women who have a past," he answered. "or do you think that would make it a petticoat party?" "i fear so," she said, laughing, as she stood up. "a thousand pardons, my dear lady ruxton," she added. "i didn't see you hadn't finished your cigarette." "never mind, lady narborough. i smoke a great deal too much. i am going to limit myself, for the future." "pray don't, lady ruxton," said lord henry. "moderation is a fatal thing. enough is as bad as a meal. more than enough is as good as a feast." lady ruxton glanced at him curiously. "you must come and explain that to me some afternoon, lord henry. it sounds a fascinating theory," she murmured, as she swept out of the room. "now, mind you don't stay too long over your politics and scandal," cried lady narborough from the door. "if you do, we are sure to squabble upstairs." the men laughed, and mr. chapman got up solemnly from the foot of the table and came up to the top. dorian gray changed his seat, and went and sat by lord henry. mr. chapman began to talk in a loud voice about the situation in the house of commons. he guffawed at his adversaries. the word _doctrinaire_--word full of terror to the british mind--reappeared from time to time between his explosions. an alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. he hoisted the union jack on the pinnacles of thought. the inherited stupidity of the race--sound english common sense he jovially termed it--was shown to be the proper bulwark for society. a smile curved lord henry's lips, and he turned round and looked at dorian. "are you better, my dear fellow?" he asked. "you seemed rather out of sorts at dinner." "i am quite well, harry. i am tired. that is all." "you were charming last night. the little duchess is quite devoted to you. she tells me she is going down to selby." "she has promised to come on the twentieth." "is monmouth to be there too?" "oh, yes, harry." "he bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her. she is very clever, too clever for a woman. she lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. it is the feet of clay that makes the gold of the image precious. her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. white porcelain feet, if you like. they have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. she has had experiences." "how long has she been married?" asked dorian. "an eternity, she tells me. i believe, according to the peerage, it is ten years, but ten years with monmouth must have been like eternity, with time thrown in. who else is coming?" "oh, the willoughbys, lord rugby and his wife, our hostess, geoffrey clouston, the usual set. i have asked lord grotrian." "i like him," said lord henry. "a great many people don't, but i find him charming. he atones for being occasionally somewhat over-dressed, by being always absolutely over-educated. he is a very modern type." "i don't know if he will be able to come, harry. he may have to go to monte carlo with his father." "ah! what a nuisance people's people are! try and make him come. by the way, dorian, you ran off very early last night. you left before eleven. what did you do afterwards? did you go straight home?" dorian glanced at him hurriedly, and frowned. "no, harry," he said at last, "i did not get home till nearly three." "did you go to the club?" "yes," he answered. then he bit his lip. "no, i don't mean that. i didn't go to the club. i walked about. i forget what i did.... how inquisitive you are, harry! you always want to know what one has been doing. i always want to forget what i have been doing. i came in at half-past two, if you wish to know the exact time. i had left my latch-key at home, and my servant had to let me in. if you want any corroborative evidence on the subject you can ask him." lord henry shrugged his shoulders. "my dear fellow, as if i cared! let us go up to the drawing-room. no sherry, thank you, mr. chapman. something has happened to you, dorian. tell me what it is. you are not yourself to-night." "don't mind me, harry. i am irritable, and out of temper. i shall come round and see you to-morrow or next day. make my excuses to lady narborough. i shan't go upstairs. i shall go home. i must go home." "all right, dorian. i daresay i shall see you to-morrow at tea-time. the duchess is coming." "i will try to be there, harry," he said, leaving the room. as he drove back to his own house he was conscious that the sense of terror he thought he had strangled had come back to him. lord henry's casual questioning had made him lose his nerves for the moment, and he wanted his nerve still. things that were dangerous had to be destroyed. he winced. he hated the idea of even touching them. yet it had to be done. he realised that, and when he had locked the door of his library, he opened the secret press into which he had thrust basil hallward's coat and bag. a huge fire was blazing. he piled another log on it. the smell of the singeing clothes and burning leather was horrible. it took him three-quarters of an hour to consume everything. at the end he felt faint and sick, and having lit some algerian pastilles in a pierced copper brazier, he bathed his hands and forehead with a cool musk-scented vinegar. suddenly he started. his eyes grew strangely bright, and he gnawed nervously at his under-lip. between two of the windows stood a large florentine cabinet, made out of ebony, and inlaid with ivory and blue lapis. he watched it as though it were a thing that could fascinate and make afraid, as though it held something that he longed for and yet almost loathed. his breath quickened. a mad craving came over him. he lit a cigarette and then threw it away. his eyelids drooped till the long fringed lashes almost touched his cheek. but he still watched the cabinet. at last he got up from the sofa on which he had been lying, went over to it, and, having unlocked it, touched some hidden spring. a triangular drawer passed slowly out. his fingers moved instinctively towards it, dipped in, and closed on something. it was a small chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought, the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with round crystals and tasselled in plaited metal threads. he opened it. inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and persistent. he hesitated for some moments, with a strangely immobile smile upon his face. then shivering, though the atmosphere of the room was terribly hot, he drew himself up, and glanced at the clock. it was twenty minutes to twelve. he put the box back, shutting the cabinet doors as he did so, and went into his bedroom. as midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, dorian gray dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat, crept quietly out of the house. in bond street he found a hansom with a good horse. he hailed it, and in a low voice gave the driver an address. the man shook his head. "it is too far for me," he muttered. "here is a sovereign for you," said dorian. "you shall have another if you drive fast." "all right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an hour," and after his fare had got in he turned his horse round, and drove rapidly towards the river. chapter xvi a cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly in the dripping mist. the public-houses were just closing, and dim men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors. from some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. in others, drunkards brawled and screamed. lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead, dorian gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great city, and now and then he repeated to himself the words that lord henry had said to him on the first day they had met, "to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul." yes, that was the secret. he had often tried it, and would try it again now. there were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new. the moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. from time to time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it. the gas-lamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy. once the man lost his way, and had to drive back half a mile. a steam rose from the horse as it splashed up the puddles. the side-windows of the hansom were clogged with a grey-flannel mist. "to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul!" how the words rang in his ears! his soul, certainly, was sick to death. was it true that the senses could cure it? innocent blood had been spilt. what could atone for that? ah! for that there was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one. indeed, what right had basil to have spoken to him as he had done? who had made him a judge over others? he had said things that were dreadful, horrible, not to be endured. on and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him, at each step. he thrust up the trap, and called to the man to drive faster. the hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw at him. his throat burned, and his delicate hands twitched nervously together. he struck at the horse madly with his stick. the driver laughed, and whipped up. he laughed in answer, and the man was silent. the way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black web of some sprawling spider. the monotony became unbearable, and, as the mist thickened, he felt afraid. then they passed by lonely brickfields. the fog was lighter here, and he could see the strange bottle-shaped kilns with their orange fan-like tongues of fire. a dog barked as they went by, and far away in the darkness some wandering sea-gull screamed. the horse stumbled in a rut, then swerved aside, and broke into a gallop. after some time they left the clay road, and rattled again over rough-paven streets. most of the windows were dark, but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some lamp-lit blind. he watched them curiously. they moved like monstrous marionettes, and made gestures like live things. he hated them. a dull rage was in his heart. as they turned a corner a woman yelled something at them from an open door, and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred yards. the driver beat at them with his whip. it is said that passion makes one think in a circle. certainly with hideous iteration the bitten lips of dorian gray shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense, till he had found in them the full expression, as it were, of his mood, and justified, by intellectual approval, passions that without such justification would still have dominated his temper. from cell to cell of his brain crept the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible of all man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling nerve and fibre. ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. ugliness was the one reality. the coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song. they were what he needed for forgetfulness. in three days he would be free. suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane. over the low roofs and jagged chimney stacks of the houses rose the black masts of ships. wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly sails to the yards. "somewhere about here, sir, ain't it?" he asked huskily through the trap. dorian started, and peered round. "this will do," he answered, and, having got out hastily, and given the driver the extra fare he had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay. here and there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman. the light shook and splintered in the puddles. a red glare came from an outward-bound steamer that was coaling. the slimy pavement looked like a wet mackintosh. he hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see if he was being followed. in about seven or eight minutes he reached a small shabby house, that was wedged in between two gaunt factories. in one of the top-windows stood a lamp. he stopped, and gave a peculiar knock. after a little time he heard steps in the passage, and the chain being unhooked. the door opened quietly, and he went in without saying a word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened itself into the shadow as he passed. at the end of the hall hung a tattered green curtain that swayed and shook in the gusty wind which had followed him in from the street. he dragged it aside, and entered a long, low room which looked as if it had once been a third-rate dancing-saloon. shrill flaring gas-jets, dulled and distorted in the fly-blown mirrors that faced them, were ranged round the walls. greasy reflectors of ribbed tin backed them, making quivering discs of light. the floor was covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here and there into mud, and stained with dark rings of spilt liquor. some malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove playing with bone counters, and showing their white teeth as they chattered. in one corner, with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled over a table, and by the tawdrily-painted bar that ran across one complete side stood two haggard women mocking an old man who was brushing the sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust. "he thinks he's got red ants on him," laughed one of them, as dorian passed by. the man looked at her in terror and began to whimper. at the end of the room there was a little staircase, leading to a darkened chamber. as dorian hurried up its three rickety steps, the heavy odour of opium met him. he heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure. when he entered, a young man with smooth yellow hair, who was bending over a lamp, lighting a long thin pipe, looked up at him, and nodded in a hesitating manner. "you here, adrian?" muttered dorian. "where else should i be?" he answered, listlessly. "none of the chaps will speak to me now." "i thought you had left england." "darlington is not going to do anything. my brother paid the bill at last. george doesn't speak to me either.... i don't care," he added, with a sigh. "as long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends. i think i have had too many friends." dorian winced, and looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. the twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. he knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy. they were better off than he was. he was prisoned in thought. memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. from time to time he seemed to see the eyes of basil hallward looking at him. yet he felt he could not stay. the presence of adrian singleton troubled him. he wanted to be where no one would know who he was. he wanted to escape from himself. "i am going on to the other place," he said, after a pause. "on the wharf?" "yes." "that mad-cat is sure to be there. they won't have her in this place now." dorian shrugged his shoulders. "i am sick of women who love one. women who hate one are much more interesting. besides, the stuff is better." "much the same." "i like it better. come and have something to drink. i must have something." "i don't want anything," murmured the young man. "never mind." adrian singleton rose up wearily, and followed dorian to the bar. a half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a hideous greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers in front of them. the women sidled up, and began to chatter. dorian turned his back on them, and said something in a low voice to adrian singleton. a crooked smile, like a malay crease, writhed across the face of one of the women. "we are very proud to-night," she sneered. "for god's sake don't talk to me," cried dorian, stamping his foot on the ground. "what do you want? money? here it is. don't ever talk to me again." two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman's sodden eyes, then flickered out, and left them dull and glazed. she tossed her head, and raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers. her companion watched her enviously. "it's no use," sighed adrian singleton. "i don't care to go back. what does it matter? i am quite happy here." "you will write to me if you want anything, won't you?" said dorian, after a pause. "perhaps." "good-night, then." "good-night," answered the young man, passing up the steps, and wiping his parched mouth with a handkerchief. dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face. as he drew the curtain aside a hideous laugh broke from the painted lips of the woman who had taken his money. "there goes the devil's bargain!" she hiccoughed, in a hoarse voice. "curse you!" he answered, "don't call me that." she snapped her fingers. "prince charming is what you like to be called, ain't it?" she yelled after him. the drowsy sailor leapt to his feet as she spoke, and looked wildly round. the sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his ear. he rushed out as if in pursuit. dorian gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain. his meeting with adrian singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door, as basil hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult. he bit his lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad. yet, after all, what did it matter to him? one's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it. the only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. one had to pay over and over again, indeed. in her dealings with man destiny never closed her accounts. there are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. they move to their terrible end as automatons move, choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm. for all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. when that high spirit, that morning-star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell. callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind, and soul hungry for rebellion, dorian gray hastened on, quickening his step as he went, but as he darted aside into a dim archway, that had served him often as a short cut to the ill-famed place where he was going, he felt himself suddenly seized from behind, and before he had time to defend himself he was thrust back against the wall, with a brutal hand round his throat. he struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched the tightening fingers away. in a second he heard the click of a revolver, and saw the gleam of a polished barrel pointing straight at his head, and the dusky form of a short thick-set man facing him. "what do you want?" he gasped. "keep quiet," said the man. "if you stir, i shoot you." "you are mad. what have i done to you?" "you wrecked the life of sibyl vane," was the answer, "and sibyl vane was my sister. she killed herself. i know it. her death is at your door. i swore i would kill you in return. for years i have sought you. i had no clue, no trace. the two people who could have described you were dead. i knew nothing of you but the pet name she used to call you. i heard it to-night by chance. make your peace with god, for to-night you are going to die." dorian gray grew sick with fear. "i never knew her," he stammered. "i never heard of her. you are mad." "you had better confess your sin, for as sure as i am james vane, you are going to die." there was a horrible moment. dorian did not know what to say or do. "down on your knees!" growled the man. "i give you one minute to make your peace--no more. i go on board to-night for india, and i must do my job first. one minute. that's all." dorian's arms fell to his side. paralysed with terror, he did not know what to do. suddenly a wild hope flashed across his brain. "stop," he cried. "how long ago is it since your sister died? quick, tell me!" "eighteen years," said the man. "why do you ask me? what do years matter?" "eighteen years," laughed dorian gray, with a touch of triumph in his voice. "eighteen years! set me under the lamp and look at my face!" james vane hesitated for a moment, not understanding what was meant. then he seized dorian gray and dragged him from the archway. dim and wavering as was the wind-blown light, yet it served to show him the hideous error, as it seemed, into which he had fallen, for the face of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom of boyhood, all the unstained purity of youth. he seemed little more than a lad of twenty summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all, than his sister had been when they had parted so many years ago. it was obvious that this was not the man who had destroyed her life. he loosened his hold and reeled back. "my god! my god!" he cried, "and i would have murdered you!" dorian gray drew a long breath. "you have been on the brink of committing a terrible crime, my man," he said, looking at him sternly. "let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your own hands." "forgive me, sir," muttered james vane. "i was deceived. a chance word i heard in that damned den set me on the wrong track." "you had better go home, and put that pistol away, or you may get into trouble," said dorian, turning on his heel, and going slowly down the street. james vane stood on the pavement in horror. he was trembling from head to foot. after a little while a black shadow that had been creeping along the dripping wall, moved out into the light and came close to him with stealthy footsteps. he felt a hand laid on his arm and looked round with a start. it was one of the women who had been drinking at the bar. "why didn't you kill him?" she hissed out, putting her haggard face quite close to his. "i knew you were following him when you rushed out from daly's. you fool! you should have killed him. he has lots of money, and he's as bad as bad." "he is not the man i am looking for," he answered, "and i want no man's money. i want a man's life. the man whose life i want must be nearly forty now. this one is little more than a boy. thank god, i have not got his blood upon my hands." the woman gave a bitter laugh. "little more than a boy!" she sneered. "why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since prince charming made me what i am." "you lie!" cried james vane. she raised her hand up to heaven. "before god i am telling the truth," she cried. "before god?" "strike me dumb if it ain't so. he is the worst one that comes here. they say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. it's nigh on eighteen years since i met him. he hasn't changed much since then. i have though," she added, with a sickly leer. "you swear this?" "i swear it," came in hoarse echo from her flat mouth. "but don't give me away to him," she whined; "i am afraid of him. let me have some money for my night's lodging." he broke from her with an oath, and rushed to the corner of the street, but dorian gray had disappeared. when he looked back, the woman had vanished also. chapter xvii a week later dorian gray was sitting in the conservatory at selby royal talking to the pretty duchess of monmouth, who with her husband, a jaded-looking man of sixty, was amongst his guests. it was tea-time, and the mellow light of the huge lace-covered lamp that stood on the table lit up the delicate china and hammered silver of the service at which the duchess was presiding. her white hands were moving daintily among the cups, and her full red lips were smiling at something that dorian had whispered to her. lord henry was lying back in a silk-draped wicker chair looking at them. on a peach-coloured divan sat lady narborough pretending to listen to the duke's description of the last brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection. three young men in elaborate smoking-suits were handing tea-cakes to some of the women. the house-party consisted of twelve people, and there were more expected to arrive on the next day. "what are you two talking about?" said lord henry, strolling over to the table, and putting his cup down. "i hope dorian has told you about my plan for rechristening everything, gladys. it is a delightful idea." "but i don't want to be rechristened, harry," rejoined the duchess, looking up at him with her wonderful eyes. "i am quite satisfied with my own name, and i am sure mr. gray should be satisfied with his." "my dear gladys, i would not alter either name for the world. they are both perfect. i was thinking chiefly of flowers. yesterday i cut an orchid, for my buttonhole. it was a marvellous spotted thing, as effective as the seven deadly sins. in a thoughtless moment i asked one of the gardeners what it was called. he told me it was a fine specimen of _robinsoniana_, or something dreadful of that kind. it is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. names are everything. i never quarrel with actions. my one quarrel is with words. that is the reason i hate vulgar realism in literature. the man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. it is the only thing he is fit for." "then what should we call you, harry?" she asked. "his name is prince paradox," said dorian. "i recognise him in a flash," exclaimed the duchess. "i won't hear of it," laughed lord henry, sinking into a chair. "from a label there is no escape! i refuse the title." "royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips. "you wish me to defend my throne, then?" "yes." "i give the truths of to-morrow." "i prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered. "you disarm me, gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood. "of your shield, harry: not of your spear." "i never tilt against beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand. "that is your error, harry, believe me. you value beauty far too much." "how can you say that? i admit that i think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. but on the other hand no one is more ready than i am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly." "ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the duchess. "what becomes of your simile about the orchid?" "ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, gladys. you, as a good tory, must not underrate them. beer, the bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our england what she is." "you don't like your country, then?" she asked. "i live in it." "that you may censure it the better." "would you have me take the verdict of europe on it?" he inquired. "what do they say of us?" "that tartuffe has emigrated to england and opened a shop." "is that yours, harry?" "i give it to you." "i could not use it. it is too true." "you need not be afraid. our countrymen never recognise a description." "they are practical." "they are more cunning than practical. when they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy." "still, we have done great things." "great things have been thrust on us, gladys." "we have carried their burden." "only as far as the stock exchange." she shook her head. "i believe in the race," she cried. "it represents the survival of the pushing." "it has development." "decay fascinates me more." "what of art?" she asked. "it is a malady." "love?" "an illusion." "religion?" "the fashionable substitute for belief." "you are a sceptic." "never! scepticism is the beginning of faith." "what are you?" "to define is to limit." "give me a clue." "threads snap. you would lose your way in the labyrinth." "you bewilder me. let us talk of someone else." "our host is a delightful topic. years ago he was christened prince charming." "ah! don't remind me of that," cried dorian gray. "our host is rather horrid this evening," answered the duchess, colouring. "i believe he thinks that monmouth married me on purely scientific principles as the best specimen he could find of a modern butterfly." "well, i hope he won't stick pins into you, duchess," laughed dorian. "oh! my maid does that already, mr. gray, when she is annoyed with me." "and what does she get annoyed with you about, duchess?" "for the most trivial things, mr. gray, i assure you. usually because i come in at ten minutes to nine and tell her that i must be dressed by half-past eight." "how unreasonable of her! you should give her warning." "i daren't, mr. gray. why, she invents hats for me. you remember the one i wore at lady hilstone's garden-party? you don't, but it is nice of you to pretend that you do. well, she made it out of nothing. all good hats are made out of nothing." "like all good reputations, gladys," interrupted lord henry. "every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. to be popular one must be a mediocrity." "not with women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule the world. i assure you we can't bear mediocrities. we women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all." "it seems to me that we never do anything else," murmured dorian. "ah! then, you never really love, mr. gray," answered the duchess, with mock sadness. "my dear gladys!" cried lord henry. "how can you say that? romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. it merely intensifies it. we can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible." "even when one has been wounded by it, harry?" asked the duchess, after a pause. "especially when one has been wounded by it," answered lord henry. the duchess turned and looked at dorian gray with a curious expression in her eyes. "what do you say to that, mr. gray?" she inquired. dorian hesitated for a moment. then he threw his head back and laughed. "i always agree with harry, duchess." "even when he is wrong?" "harry is never wrong, duchess." "and does his philosophy make you happy?" "i have never searched for happiness. who wants happiness? i have searched for pleasure." "and found it, mr. gray?" "often. too often." the duchess sighed. "i am searching for peace," she said, "and if i don't go and dress, i shall have none this evening." "let me get you some orchids, duchess," cried dorian, starting to his feet, and walking down the conservatory. "you are flirting disgracefully with him," said lord henry to his cousin. "you had better take care. he is very fascinating." "if he were not, there would be no battle." "greek meets greek, then?" "i am on the side of the trojans. they fought for a woman." "they were defeated." "there are worse things than capture," she answered. "you gallop with a loose rein." "pace gives life," was the _riposte_. "i shall write it in my diary to-night." "what?" "that a burnt child loves the fire." "i am not even singed. my wings are untouched." "you use them for everything, except flight." "courage has passed from men to women. it is a new experience for us." "you have a rival." "who?" he laughed. "lady narborough," he whispered. "she perfectly adores him." "you fill me with apprehension. the appeal to antiquity is fatal to us who are romanticists." "romanticists! you have all the methods of science." "men have educated us." "but not explained you." "describe us as a sex," was her challenge. "sphynxes without secrets." she looked at him, smiling. "how long mr. gray is!" she said. "let us go and help him. i have not yet told him the colour of my frock." "ah! you must suit your frock to his flowers, gladys." "that would be a premature surrender." "romantic art begins with its climax." "i must keep an opportunity for retreat." "in the parthian manner?" "they found safety in the desert. i could not do that." "women are not always allowed a choice," he answered, but hardly had he finished the sentence before from the far end of the conservatory came a stifled groan, followed by the dull sound of a heavy fall. everybody started up. the duchess stood motionless in horror. and with fear in his eyes lord henry rushed through the flapping palms to find dorian gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a death-like swoon. he was carried at once into the blue drawing-room, and laid upon one of the sofas. after a short time he came to himself, and looked round with a dazed expression. "what has happened?" he asked. "oh! i remember. am i safe here, harry?" he began to tremble. "my dear dorian," answered lord henry, "you merely fainted. that was all. you must have overtired yourself. you had better not come down to dinner. i will take your place." "no, i will come down," he said, struggling to his feet. "i would rather come down. i must not be alone." he went to his room and dressed. there was a wild recklessness of gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of james vane watching him. chapter xviii the next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself. the consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him. if the tapestry did but tremble in the wind, he shook. the dead leaves that were blown against the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild regrets. when he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor's face peering through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once more to lay its hand upon his heart. but perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out of the night, and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him. actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. it was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. it was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. in the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. that was all. besides, had any stranger been prowling round the house he would have been seen by the servants or the keepers. had any footmarks been found on the flower-beds, the gardeners would have reported it. yes: it had been merely fancy. sibyl vane's brother had not come back to kill him. he had sailed away in his ship to founder in some winter sea. from him, at any rate, he was safe. why, the man did not know who he was, could not know who he was. the mask of youth had saved him. and yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them visible form, and make them move before one! what sort of life would his be, if day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep! as the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror, and the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder. oh! in what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! how ghastly the mere memory of the scene! he saw it all again. each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin. when lord henry came in at six o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will break. it was not till the third day that he ventured to go out. there was something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life. but it was not merely the physical conditions of environment that had caused the change. his own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm. with subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. their strong passions must either bruise or bend. they either slay the man, or themselves die. shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. the loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. besides, he had convinced himself that he had been the victim of a terror-stricken imagination, and looked back now on his fears with something of pity and not a little of contempt. after breakfast he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden, and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party. the crisp frost lay like salt upon the grass. the sky was an inverted cup of blue metal. a thin film of ice bordered the flat reed-grown lake. at the corner of the pine-wood he caught sight of sir geoffrey clouston, the duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of his gun. he jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken and rough undergrowth. "have you had good sport, geoffrey?" he asked. "not very good, dorian. i think most of the birds have gone to the open. i dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new ground." dorian strolled along by his side. the keen aromatic air, the brown and red lights that glimmered in the wood, the hoarse cries of the beaters ringing out from time to time, and the sharp snaps of the guns that followed, fascinated him, and filled him with a sense of delightful freedom. he was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high indifference of joy. suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass, some twenty yards in front of them, with black-tipped ears erect, and long hinder limbs throwing it forward, started a hare. it bolted for a thicket of alders. sir geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was something in the animal's grace of movement that strangely charmed dorian gray, and he cried out at once, "don't shoot it, geoffrey. let it live." "what nonsense, dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare bounded into the thicket he fired. there were two cries heard, the cry of a hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony, which is worse. "good heavens! i have hit a beater!" exclaimed sir geoffrey. "what an ass the man was to get in front of the guns! stop shooting there!" he called out at the top of his voice. "a man is hurt." the head-keeper came running up with a stick in his hand. "where, sir? where is he?" he shouted. at the same time the firing ceased along the line. "here," answered sir geoffrey, angrily, hurrying towards the thicket. "why on earth don't you keep your men back? spoiled my shooting for the day." dorian watched them as they plunged into the alder-clump, brushing the lithe, swinging branches aside. in a few moments they emerged, dragging a body after them into the sunlight. he turned away in horror. it seemed to him that misfortune followed wherever he went. he heard sir geoffrey ask if the man was really dead, and the affirmative answer of the keeper. the wood seemed to him to have become suddenly alive with faces. there was the trampling of myriad feet, and the low buzz of voices. a great copper-breasted pheasant came beating through the boughs overhead. after a few moments, that were to him, in his perturbed state, like endless hours of pain, he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. he started, and looked round. "dorian," said lord henry, "i had better tell them that the shooting is stopped for to-day. it would not look well to go on." "i wish it were stopped for ever, harry," he answered, bitterly. "the whole thing is hideous and cruel. is the man...?" he could not finish the sentence. "i am afraid so," rejoined lord henry. "he got the whole charge of shot in his chest. he must have died almost instantaneously. come; let us go home." they walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly fifty yards without speaking. then dorian looked at lord henry, and said, with a heavy sigh, "it is a bad omen, harry, a very bad omen." "what is?" asked lord henry. "oh! this accident, i suppose. my dear fellow, it can't be helped. it was the man's own fault. why did he get in front of the guns? besides, it's nothing to us. it is rather awkward for geoffrey, of course. it does not do to pepper beaters. it makes people think that one is a wild shot. and geoffrey is not; he shoots very straight. but there is no use talking about the matter." dorian shook his head. "it is a bad omen, harry. i feel as if something horrible were going to happen to some of us. to myself, perhaps," he added, passing his hand over his eyes, with a gesture of pain. the elder man laughed. "the only horrible thing in the world is _ennui_, dorian. that is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness. but we are not likely to suffer from it, unless these fellows keep chattering about this thing at dinner. i must tell them that the subject is to be tabooed. as for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. destiny does not send us heralds. she is too wise or too cruel for that. besides, what on earth could happen to you, dorian? you have everything in the world that a man can want. there is no one who would not be delighted to change places with you." "there is no one with whom i would not change places, harry. don't laugh like that. i am telling you the truth. the wretched peasant who has just died is better off than i am. i have no terror of death. it is the coming of death that terrifies me. its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me. good heavens! don't you see a man moving behind the trees there, watching me, waiting for me?" lord henry looked in the direction in which the trembling gloved hand was pointing. "yes," he said, smiling, "i see the gardener waiting for you. i suppose he wants to ask you what flowers you wish to have on the table to-night. how absurdly nervous you are, my dear fellow! you must come and see my doctor, when we get back to town." dorian heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the gardener approaching. the man touched his hat, glanced for a moment at lord henry in a hesitating manner, and then produced a letter, which he handed to his master. "her grace told me to wait for an answer," he murmured. dorian put the letter into his pocket. "tell her grace that i am coming in," he said, coldly. the man turned round, and went rapidly in the direction of the house. "how fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed lord henry. "it is one of the qualities in them that i admire most. a woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on." "how fond you are of saying dangerous things, harry! in the present instance you are quite astray. i like the duchess very much, but i don't love her." "and the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you are excellently matched." "you are talking scandal, harry, and there is never any basis for scandal." "the basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty," said lord henry, lighting a cigarette. "you would sacrifice anybody, harry, for the sake of an epigram." "the world goes to the altar of its own accord," was the answer. "i wish i could love," cried dorian gray, with a deep note of pathos in his voice. "but i seem to have lost the passion, and forgotten the desire. i am too much concentrated on myself. my own personality has become a burden to me. i want to escape, to go away, to forget. it was silly of me to come down here at all. i think i shall send a wire to harvey to have the yacht got ready. on a yacht one is safe." "safe from what, dorian? you are in some trouble. why not tell me what it is? you know i would help you." "i can't tell you, harry," he answered, sadly. "and i dare say it is only a fancy of mine. this unfortunate accident has upset me. i have a horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen to me." "what nonsense!" "i hope it is, but i can't help feeling it. ah! here is the duchess, looking like artemis in a tailor-made gown. you see we have come back, duchess." "i have heard all about it, mr. gray," she answered. "poor geoffrey is terribly upset. and it seems that you asked him not to shoot the hare. how curious!" "yes, it was very curious. i don't know what made me say it. some whim, i suppose. it looked the loveliest of little live things. but i am sorry they told you about the man. it is a hideous subject." "it is an annoying subject," broke in lord henry. "it has no psychological value at all. now if geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! i should like to know someone who had committed a real murder." "how horrid of you, harry!" cried the duchess. "isn't it, mr. gray? harry, mr. gray is ill again. he is going to faint." dorian drew himself up with an effort, and smiled. "it is nothing, duchess," he murmured; "my nerves are dreadfully out of order. that is all. i am afraid i walked too far this morning. i didn't hear what harry said. was it very bad? you must tell me some other time. i think i must go and lie down. you will excuse me, won't you?" they had reached the great flight of steps that led from the conservatory on to the terrace. as the glass door closed behind dorian, lord henry turned and looked at the duchess with his slumberous eyes. "are you very much in love with him?" he asked. she did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape. "i wish i knew," she said at last. he shook his head. "knowledge would be fatal. it is the uncertainty that charms one. a mist makes things wonderful." "one may lose one's way." "all ways end at the same point, my dear gladys." "what is that?" "disillusion." "it was my _début_ in life," she sighed. "it came to you crowned." "i am tired of strawberry leaves." "they become you." "only in public." "you would miss them," said lord henry. "i will not part with a petal." "monmouth has ears." "old age is dull of hearing." "has he never been jealous?" "i wish he had been." he glanced about as if in search of something. "what are you looking for?" she inquired. "the button from your foil," he answered. "you have dropped it." she laughed. "i have still the mask." "it makes your eyes lovelier," was his reply. she laughed again. her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet fruit. upstairs, in his own room, dorian gray was lying on a sofa, with terror in every tingling fibre of his body. life had suddenly become too hideous a burden for him to bear. the dreadful death of the unlucky beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal, had seemed to him to prefigure death for himself also. he had nearly swooned at what lord henry had said in a chance mood of cynical jesting. at five o'clock he rang his bell for his servant and gave him orders to pack his things for the night-express to town, and to have the brougham at the door by eight-thirty. he was determined not to sleep another night at selby royal. it was an ill-omened place. death walked there in the sunlight. the grass of the forest had been spotted with blood. then he wrote a note to lord henry, telling him that he was going up to town to consult his doctor, and asking him to entertain his guests in his absence. as he was putting it into the envelope, a knock came to the door, and his valet informed him that the head-keeper wished to see him. he frowned, and bit his lip. "send him in," he muttered, after some moments' hesitation. as soon as the man entered dorian pulled his chequebook out of a drawer, and spread it out before him. "i suppose you have come about the unfortunate accident of this morning, thornton?" he said, taking up a pen. "yes, sir," answered the gamekeeper. "was the poor fellow married? had he any people dependent on him?" asked dorian, looking bored. "if so, i should not like them to be left in want, and will send them any sum of money you may think necessary." "we don't know who he is, sir. that is what i took the liberty of coming to you about." "don't know who he is?" said dorian, listlessly. "what do you mean? wasn't he one of your men?" "no, sir. never saw him before. seems like a sailor, sir." the pen dropped from dorian gray's hand, and he felt as if his heart had suddenly stopped beating. "a sailor?" he cried out. "did you say a sailor?" "yes, sir. he looks as if he had been a sort of sailor; tattooed on both arms, and that kind of thing." "was there anything found on him?" said dorian, leaning forward and looking at the man with startled eyes. "anything that would tell his name?" "some money, sir--not much, and a six-shooter. there was no name of any kind. a decent-looking man, sir, but rough-like. a sort of sailor, we think." dorian started to his feet. a terrible hope fluttered past him. he clutched at it madly. "where is the body?" he exclaimed. "quick! i must see it at once." "it is in an empty stable in the home farm, sir. the folk don't like to have that sort of thing in their houses. they say a corpse brings bad luck." "the home farm! go there at once and meet me. tell one of the grooms to bring my horse round. no. never mind. i'll go to the stables myself. it will save time." in less than a quarter of an hour dorian gray was galloping down the long avenue as hard as he could go. the trees seemed to sweep past him in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his path. once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly threw him. he lashed her across the neck with his crop. she cleft the dusky air like an arrow. the stones flew from her hoofs. at last he reached the home farm. two men were loitering in the yard. he leapt from the saddle and threw the reins to one of them. in the farthest stable a light was glimmering. something seemed to tell him that the body was there, and he hurried to the door, and put his hand upon the latch. there he paused for a moment, feeling that he was on the brink of a discovery that would either make or mar his life. then he thrust the door open, and entered. on a heap of sacking in the far corner was lying the dead body of a man dressed in a coarse shirt and a pair of blue trousers. a spotted handkerchief had been placed over the face. a coarse candle, stuck in a bottle, sputtered beside it. dorian gray shuddered. he felt that his could not be the hand to take the handkerchief away, and called out to one of the farm-servants to come to him. "take that thing off the face. i wish to see it," he said, clutching at the doorpost for support. when the farm-servant had done so, he stepped forward. a cry of joy broke from his lips. the man who had been shot in the thicket was james vane. he stood there for some minutes looking at the dead body. as he rode home, his eyes were full of tears, for he knew he was safe. chapter xix "there is no use your telling me that you are going to be good," cried lord henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled with rose-water. "you're quite perfect. pray, don't change." dorian gray shook his head. "no, harry, i have done too many dreadful things in my life. i am not going to do any more. i began my good actions yesterday." "where were you yesterday?" "in the country, harry. i was staying at a little inn by myself." "my dear boy," said lord henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the country. there are no temptations there. that is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilised. civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. there are only two ways by which man can reach it. one is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate." "culture and corruption," echoed dorian. "i have known something of both. it seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found together. for i have a new ideal, harry. i am going to alter. i think i have altered." "you have not yet told me what your good action was. or did you say you had done more than one?" asked his companion, as he spilt into his plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded strawberries, and through a perforated shell-shaped spoon snowed white sugar upon them. "i can tell you, harry. it is not a story i could tell to anyone else. i spared somebody. it sounds vain, but you understand what i mean. she was quite beautiful, and wonderfully like sibyl vane. i think it was that which first attracted me to her. you remember sibyl, don't you? how long ago that seems! well, hetty was not one of our own class, of course. she was simply a girl in a village. but i really loved her. i am quite sure that i loved her. all during this wonderful may that we have been having, i used to run down and see her two or three times a week. yesterday she met me in a little orchard. the apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was laughing. we were to have gone away together this morning at dawn. suddenly i determined to leave her as flower-like as i had found her." "i should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill of real pleasure, dorian," interrupted lord henry. "but i can finish your idyll for you. you gave her good advice, and broke her heart. that was the beginning of your reformation." "harry, you are horrible! you mustn't say these dreadful things. hetty's heart is not broken. of course she cried, and all that. but there is no disgrace upon her. she can live, like perdita, in her garden of mint and marigold." "and weep over a faithless florizel," said lord henry, laughing, as he leant back in his chair. "my dear dorian, you have the most curiously boyish moods. do you think this girl will ever be really contented now with anyone of her own rank? i suppose she will be married some day to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman. well, the fact of having met you, and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband, and she will be wretched. from a moral point of view, i cannot say that i think much of your great renunciation. even as a beginning, it is poor. besides, how do you know that hetty isn't floating at the present moment in some star-lit mill-pond, with lovely water-lilies round her, like ophelia?" "i can't bear this, harry! you mock at everything, and then suggest the most serious tragedies. i am sorry i told you now. i don't care what you say to me. i know i was right in acting as i did. poor hetty! as i rode past the farm this morning, i saw her white face at the window, like a spray of jasmine. don't let us talk about it any more, and don't try to persuade me that the first good action i have done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice i have ever known, is really a sort of sin. i want to be better. i am going to be better. tell me something about yourself. what is going on in town? i have not been to the club for days." "the people are still discussing poor basil's disappearance." "i should have thought they had got tired of that by this time," said dorian, pouring himself out some wine, and frowning slightly. "my dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks, and the british public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months. they have been very fortunate lately, however. they have had my own divorce-case, and alan campbell's suicide. now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist. scotland yard still insists that the man in the grey ulster who left for paris by the midnight train on the ninth of november was poor basil, and the french police declare that basil never arrived in paris at all. i suppose in about a fortnight we shall be told that he has been seen in san francisco. it is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at san francisco. it must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world." "what do you think has happened to basil?" asked dorian, holding up his burgundy against the light, and wondering how it was that he could discuss the matter so calmly. "i have not the slightest idea. if basil chooses to hide himself, it is no business of mine. if he is dead, i don't want to think about him. death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. i hate it." "why?" said the younger man, wearily. "because," said lord henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt trellis of an open vinaigrette box, "one can survive everything nowadays except that. death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. let us have our coffee in the music-room, dorian. you must play chopin to me. the man with whom my wife ran away played chopin exquisitely. poor victoria! i was very fond of her. the house is rather lonely without her. of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. but then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. perhaps one regrets them the most. they are such an essential part of one's personality." dorian said nothing, but rose from the table and, passing into the next room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the white and black ivory of the keys. after the coffee had been brought in, he stopped, and, looking over at lord henry, said, "harry, did it ever occur to you that basil was murdered?" lord henry yawned. "basil was very popular, and always wore a waterbury watch. why should he have been murdered? he was not clever enough to have enemies. of course he had a wonderful genius for painting. but a man can paint like velasquez and yet be as dull as possible. basil was really rather dull. he only interested me once, and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration for you, and that you were the dominant motive of his art." "i was very fond of basil," said dorian, with a note of sadness in his voice. "but don't people say that he was murdered?" "oh, some of the papers do. it does not seem to me to be at all probable. i know there are dreadful places in paris, but basil was not the sort of man to have gone to them. he had no curiosity. it was his chief defect." "what would you say, harry, if i told you that i had murdered basil?" said the younger man. he watched him intently after he had spoken. "i would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that doesn't suit you. all crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. it is not in you, dorian, to commit a murder. i am sorry if i hurt your vanity by saying so, but i assure you it is true. crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. i don't blame them in the smallest degree. i should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations." "a method of procuring sensations? do you think, then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? don't tell me that." "oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," cried lord henry, laughing. "that is one of the most important secrets of life. i should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. one should never do any thing that one cannot talk about after dinner. but let us pass from poor basil. i wish i could believe that he had come to such a really romantic end as you suggest; but i can't. i dare say he fell into the seine off an omnibus, and that the conductor hushed up the scandal. yes: i should fancy that was his end. i see him lying now on his back under those dull-green waters with the heavy barges floating over him, and long weeds catching in his hair. do you know, i don't think he would have done much more good work. during the last ten years his painting had gone off very much." dorian heaved a sigh, and lord henry strolled across the room and began to stroke the head of a curious java parrot, a large grey-plumaged bird, with pink crest and tail, that was balancing itself upon a bamboo perch. as his pointed fingers touched it, it dropped the white scurf of crinkled lids over black glass-like eyes, and began to sway backwards and forwards. "yes," he continued, turning round, and taking his handkerchief out of his pocket; "his painting had quite gone off. it seemed to me to have lost something. it had lost an ideal. when you and he ceased to be great friends, he ceased to be a great artist. what was it separated you? i suppose he bored you. if so, he never forgave you. it's a habit bores have. by the way, what has become of that wonderful portrait he did of you? i don't think i have ever seen it since he finished it. oh! i remember your telling me years ago that you had sent it down to selby, and that it had got mislaid or stolen on the way. you never got it back? what a pity! it was really a masterpiece. i remember i wanted to buy it. i wish i had now. it belonged to basil's best period. since then, his work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative british artist. did you advertise for it? you should." "i forget," said dorian. "i suppose i did. but i never really liked it. i am sorry i sat for it. the memory of the thing is hateful to me. why do you talk of it? it used to remind me of those curious lines in some play--'hamlet,' i think--how do they run?-- "'like the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart.' yes: that is what it was like." lord henry laughed. "if a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart," he answered, sinking into an arm-chair. dorian gray shook his head, and struck some soft chords on the piano. "'like the painting of a sorrow,'" he repeated, "'a face without a heart.'" the elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes. "by the way, dorian," he said, after a pause, "'what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose'--how does the quotation run?--'his own soul'?" the music jarred and dorian gray started, and stared at his friend. "why do you ask me that, harry?" "my dear fellow," said lord henry, elevating his eyebrows in surprise, "i asked you because i thought you might be able to give me an answer. that is all. i was going through the park last sunday, and close by the marble arch there stood a little crowd of shabby-looking people listening to some vulgar street-preacher. as i passed by, i heard the man yelling out that question to his audience. it struck me as being rather dramatic. london is very rich in curious effects of that kind. a wet sunday, an uncouth christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly white faces under a broken roof of dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful phrase flung into the air by shrill, hysterical lips--it was really very good in its way, quite a suggestion. i thought of telling the prophet that art had a soul, but that man had not. i am afraid, however, he would not have understood me." "don't, harry. the soul is a terrible reality. it can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. it can be poisoned, or made perfect. there is a soul in each one of us. i know it." "do you feel quite sure of that, dorian?" "quite sure." "ah! then it must be an illusion. the things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. that is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance. how grave you are! don't be so serious. what have you or i to do with the superstitions of our age? no: we have given up our belief in the soul. play me something. play me a nocturne, dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept your youth. you must have some secret. i am only ten years older than you are, and i am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow. you are really wonderful, dorian. you have never looked more charming than you do to-night. you remind me of the day i saw you first. you were rather cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary. you have changed, of course, but not in appearance. i wish you would tell me your secret. to get back my youth i would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. youth! there is nothing like it. it's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. the only people to whose opinions i listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. they seem in front of me. life has revealed to them her latest wonder. as for the aged, i always contradict the aged. i do it on principle. if you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in , when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and knew absolutely nothing. how lovely that thing you are playing is! i wonder did chopin write it at majorca, with the sea weeping round the villa, and the salt spray dashing against the panes? it is marvellously romantic. what a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative! don't stop. i want music to-night. it seems to me that you are the young apollo, and that i am marsyas listening to you. i have sorrows, dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of. the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. i am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity. ah, dorian, how happy you are! what an exquisite life you have had! you have drunk deeply of everything. you have crushed the grapes against your palate. nothing has been hidden from you. and it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. it has not marred you. you are still the same." "i am not the same, harry." "yes: you are the same. i wonder what the rest of your life will be. don't spoil it by renunciations. at present you are a perfect type. don't make yourself incomplete. you are quite flawless now. you need not shake your head: you know you are. besides, dorian, don't deceive yourself. life is not governed by will or intention. life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. you may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. but a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play--i tell you, dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us. there are moments when the odour of _lilas blanc_ passes suddenly across me, and i have to live the strangest month of my life over again. i wish i could change places with you, dorian. the world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. it always will worship you. you are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. i am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! life has been your art. you have set yourself to music. your days are your sonnets." dorian rose up from the piano, and passed his hand through his hair. "yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but i am not going to have the same life, harry. and you must not say these extravagant things to me. you don't know everything about me. i think that if you did, even you would turn from me. you laugh. don't laugh." "why have you stopped playing, dorian? go back and give me the nocturne over again. look at that great honey-coloured moon that hangs in the dusky air. she is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth. you won't? let us go to the club, then. it has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly. there is some one at white's who wants immensely to know you--young lord poole, bournemouth's eldest son. he has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. he is quite delightful, and rather reminds me of you." "i hope not," said dorian, with a sad look in his eyes. "but i am tired to-night, harry. i shan't go to the club. it is nearly eleven, and i want to go to bed early." "do stay. you have never played so well as to-night. there was something in your touch that was wonderful. it had more expression than i had ever heard from it before." "it is because i am going to be good," he answered, smiling, "i am a little changed already." "you cannot change to me, dorian," said lord henry. "you and i will always be friends." "yet you poisoned me with a book once. i should not forgive that. harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. it does harm." "my dear boy, you are really beginning to moralise. you will soon be going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired. you are much too delightful to do that. besides, it is no use. you and i are what we are, and will be what we will be. as for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. art has no influence upon action. it annihilates the desire to act. it is superbly sterile. the books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. that is all. but we won't discuss literature. come round to-morrow. i am going to ride at eleven. we might go together, and i will take you to lunch afterwards with lady branksome. she is a charming woman, and wants to consult you about some tapestries she is thinking of buying. mind you come. or shall we lunch with our little duchess? she says she never sees you now. perhaps you are tired of gladys? i thought you would be. her clever tongue gets on one's nerves. well, in any case, be here at eleven." "must i really come, harry?" "certainly. the park is quite lovely now. i don't think there have been such lilacs since the year i met you." "very well. i shall be here at eleven," said dorian. "good-night, harry." as he reached the door he hesitated for a moment, as if he had something more to say. then he sighed and went out. chapter xx it was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm, and did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. as he strolled home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. he heard one of them whisper to the other, "that is dorian gray." he remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about. he was tired of hearing his own name now. half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was. he had often told the girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. he had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him, and answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. what a laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing. and how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! she knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost. when he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. he sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began to think over some of the things that lord henry had said to him. was it really true that one could never change? he felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood--his rose-white boyhood, as lord henry had once called it. he knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption, and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that, of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. but was it all irretrievable? was there no hope for him? ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! all his failure had been due to that. better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure, swift penalty along with it. there was purification in punishment. not "forgive us our sins," but "smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of a man to a most just god. the curiously carved mirror that lord henry had given to him, so many years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed cupids laughed round it as of old. he took it up, as he had done on that night of horror, when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished shield. once, some one who had terribly loved him had written to him a mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: "the world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. the curves of your lips rewrite history." the phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself. then he loathed his own beauty, and, flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. it was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. but for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. his beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. what was youth at best? a green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods and sickly thoughts. why had he worn its livery? youth had spoiled him. it was better not to think of the past. nothing could alter that. it was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think. james vane was hidden in a nameless grave in selby churchyard. alan campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know. the excitement, such as it was, over basil hallward's disappearance would soon pass away. it was already waning. he was perfectly safe there. nor, indeed, was it the death of basil hallward that weighed most upon his mind. it was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. he could not forgive him that. it was the portrait that had done everything. basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. the murder had been simply the madness of a moment. as for alan campbell, his suicide had been his own act. he had chosen to do it. it was nothing to him. a new life! that was what he wanted. that was what he was waiting for. surely he had begun it already. he had spared one innocent thing, at any rate. he would never again tempt innocence. he would be good. as he thought of hetty merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed. surely it was not still so horrible as it had been? perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face. perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away. he would go and look. he took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. as he unbarred the door a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face and lingered for a moment about his lips. yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. he felt as if the load had been lifted from him already. he went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. a cry of pain and indignation broke from him. he could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. the thing was still loathsome--more loathsome, if possible, than before--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilt. then he trembled. had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? or the desire for a new sensation, as lord henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? or, perhaps, all these? and why was the red stain larger than it had been? it seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. there was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. confess? did it mean that he was to confess? to give himself up, and be put to death? he laughed. he felt that the idea was monstrous. besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? there was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. everything belonging to him had been destroyed. he himself had burned what had been below-stairs. the world would simply say that he was mad. they would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. there was a god who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. his sin? he shrugged his shoulders. the death of basil hallward seemed very little to him. he was thinking of hetty merton. for it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. vanity? curiosity? hypocrisy? had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? there had been something more. at least he thought so. but who could tell?... no. there had been nothing more. through vanity he had spared her. in hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. for curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. he recognised that now. but this murder--was it to dog him all his life? was he always to be burdened by his past? was he really to confess? never. there was only one bit of evidence left against him. the picture itself--that was evidence. he would destroy it. why had he kept it so long? once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. of late he had felt no such pleasure. it had kept him awake at night. when he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. it had brought melancholy across his passions. its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. it had been like conscience to him. yes, it had been conscience. he would destroy it. he looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed basil hallward. he had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. it was bright, and glistened. as it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. it would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. it would kill this monstrous soul-life, and, without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. he seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it. there was a cry heard, and a crash. the cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke, and crept out of their rooms. two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped, and looked up at the great house. they walked on till they met a policeman, and brought him back. the man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was all dark. after a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico and watched. "whose house is that, constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen. "mr. dorian gray's, sir," answered the policeman. they looked at each other, as they walked away and sneered. one of them was sir henry ashton's uncle. inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. old mrs. leaf was crying and wringing her hands. francis was as pale as death. after about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept upstairs. they knocked, but there was no reply. they called out. everything was still. finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on to the balcony. the windows yielded easily; their bolts were old. when they entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. he was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. it was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was. the end * * * bibliographical note pirated editions owing to the number of unauthorised editions of "the picture of dorian gray" issued at various times both in america and on the continent of europe, it has become necessary to indicate which are the only authorised editions of oscar wilde's masterpiece. many of the pirated editions are incomplete in that they omit the preface and seven additional chapters which were first published in the london edition of . in other cases certain passages have been mutilated, and faulty spellings and misprints are numerous. authorised editions (i) first published in _lippincott's monthly magazine_, july, . london: ward, lock & co. _copyrighted in london_. published _simultaneously_ in america. philadelphia: j.-b. lippincott co. _copyrighted in the united states of america_. (ii) a preface to "dorian gray." _fortnightly review_, march , . london: chapman & hall. (_all rights reserved._) (iii) with the preface and seven additional chapters. london, new york, and melbourne: ward, lock & co. (n. d.). (of this edition copies were issued on l.p., _dated_ .) (iv) the same. london, new york, and melbourne: ward, lock & bowden. (n. d.). (published or .) see stuart mason's "art and morality" (page ). the following editions were issued by charles carrington, _publisher and literary agent_, late of faubourg montmartre, paris, and _rue de la tribune_, brussels (belgium), to whom the copyright belongs. (v) small vo, vii pages, printed on english antique wove paper, silk-cloth boards. copies, . (vi) the same, vii pages, silk-cloth boards. copies, . of this edition copies were issued on hand-made paper. (vii) to, vi pages, broad margins, claret-coloured paper wrappers, title on label on the outside. copies. price _s_. _d_. (february). (viii) cr. vo, uniform with methuen's (london) complete edition of wilde's _works_. xi pages, printed on hand-made paper, white cloth, gilt extra. copies. price _s._ _d._ (april ). of this edition further copies were printed on imperial japanese vellum, full vellum binding, gilt extra. price _s_. (ix) illustrated edition. containing seven fullpaged illustrations by paul thirlat, engraved on wood by eugène dété (both of paris), and artistically printed by brendon & son, ltd. (of plymouth), to, vi pages, half parchment bound, with corners, and _fleur-de-lys_ on side. - . price _s._ (x) small edition, uniform with messrs. methuen's issue of "oscar wilde's works" at same price. mo, xii and pages. copies. bound in green cloth. . price _s._ it follows from all this that, with the exception of the version in _lippincott's magazine_ only those editions are authorised to be sold in great britain and her colonies which bear the imprimatur of ward, lock & co., london, or charles carrington, paris and brussels; and that all other editions, whether american, continental (_save carrington's paris editions above specified_) or otherwise, may not be sold within british jurisdiction without infringing the _berne_ law of literary copyright and incurring the disagreements that may therefrom result. london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent & co., limited. * * * to possess a good edition of shakespeare is surely the desire of every one. simpkin's thin paper edition of shakespeare is a charming edition, suitable for the pocket or bookshelf. size - / × × / inch thick. printed in large type on a thin but thoroughly opaque paper, with photogravure frontispiece and title-page to each volume on japanese vellum. the volumes are comedies, histories, tragedies. cloth, /- each net. lambskin, / each net polished persian levant in case, /- net / vellum, gilt top, in case, /- net _to be had from all booksellers or the publishers_ london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent & co., ltd. * * * how interesting a study or hobby becomes when you have the assistance of an experienced guide. gordon's our country's series are reliable and safe guides for the professional or amateur student of nature study. _each volume contains full-page plates containing a coloured illustration of every species. cloth / each net_ flowers. shells. birds. fishes. butterflies & moths. animals (mammals, reptiles, and amphibians). eggs of british birds. (being a supplement to "our country's birds".) / net with full-page coloured plates. manual of british grasses. crown vo. /-net with an accurate coloured figure of every species, and outline drawings of the spikelets and florets of every genus. _ask your bookseller to show you gordon's our country's series_. london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent & co., ltd. * * * have you a friend who loves "my lady nicotine?" he would appreciate the smoker books they form a comprehensive collection of books for lovers of the "weed." in their unique and original binding they make an attractive novelty for a present. cigarettes in fact and fancy. collected and edited by john bain. tobacco in song and story. edited by john bain. a smoker's reveries, or tobacco in verse and rhyme. compiled by joseph knight. pipe and pouch, or the smoker's own book of poetry. compiled by joseph knight. bath robes and bachelors. compiled by arthur gray. each book is bound in velvet persian, tobacco shade, and enclosed in a case closely imitating a cigar box, with appropriate labels. price s. net. postage d. _to be had from all booksellers or the publishers_ london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent & co., ltd. * * * the caxton series illustrated reprints of famous classics. printed in large, clear type on antique wove paper, with photogravure frontispiece, and from ten to fourteen illustrations by the best artists in black and white. small foolscap vo, - / by - / , cloth limp, designed end-papers, /- net. undine, and aslauga's knight. by la motte fouquÉ. with illustrations by harold nelson. the pilgrim's progress from this world to that which is to come. by john bunyan. with illustrations by edmund j. sullivan. two volumes. in memoriam. by alfred, lord tennyson. with illustrations by a. garth jones. the serious poems of thomas hood. with illustrations by h. granville fell. a book of romantic ballads. compiled from various sources ranging from the thirteenth century to the present day. with illustrations by reginald savage. the sketch book. by washington irving. with illustrations by edmund j. sullivan. two volumes. rosalynde. by thomas lodge. with illustrations by edmund j. sullivan. herrick's hesperides and noble numbers. with illustrations by reginald savage. two volumes. london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent & co., ltd. supernatural religion: an inquiry the reality of divine revelation by walter richard cassels in three volumes: vol. i. complete edition. carefully revised. london: longmans, green, and co., . pg editor's note: this file has been provided with an image of the original scan for each page which is linked to the page number in the html file. nearly every page in the text has many greek passages which have been indicated where they occur by [���] as have many complex tables; these passages may be viewed in the page images. some of the pages have only a few lines of text and then the rest of the page is taken up with complex footnotes in english, greek and hebrew. the reader may click on the page numbers in the html file to see the entire page with the footnotes. �dw preface to the complete edition in preparing a complete edition of this work, i have revised it throughout. i have not hesitated to make any alterations, omissions or additions which seemed to me likely to improve it. i have endeavoured as much as possible to avoid presenting openings for side issues, and, with this object, i have softened statements which, however sustainable in themselves, might give rise to discussions apart from the direct purpose of the inquiry. wherever my argument has appeared to me either involved or insufficiently expressed i have as freely recast it as my limits permitted, and i have in several parts introduced new data discovered or elaborated since the work was first written, or which i may then have overlooked. in one instance only has any alteration been requisite which demands special mention here. since the sixth edition was published, i have been convinced that marcion's gospel was based upon our third synoptic, and i have accordingly so far modified my results. it may not be unnecessary, however, plainly to repeat that, with this exception, which is not of material consequence, my convictions not only remain fundamentally unchanged, but have been confirmed and strengthened both by thorough reconsideration of my own argument, and by careful attention to the replies made by able official apologists. as regards the philosophical and other objections to miracles, their cogency is so fully recognized that bampton lecturers and eminent churchmen practically abandon miracles as evidence, and press upon their brethren the necessity of reconstructing the christian argument the necessity of reconstruction is indeed apparent, but the materials have not yet been made manifest. meanwhile, such apologists have been forced virtually to repudiate the great christian representatives who have hitherto defended the faith. the case may fairly be considered desperate when the crew throw their officers overboard by way of lightening the ship. the historical argument is not in a better position. the learned professors and critics who have undertaken to deal with it do not even pretend, except perhaps in the case of papias, to do more than assert the anonymous use of the gospels by some of the fathers, and their consequent existence; but, if this were established, what support could that give to the record of miracles? as for papias, with his hebrew matthew and fragmentary indirect mark, even if secured as a solitary witness to the composition of two gospels, he would prove but a fatal friend to the apologetic cause. the "conclusions" have been almost entirely rewritten. this was essential to the finished work; but it was further necessary in order more adequately to convey my own views, and to withdraw expressions regarding the unknowable, hitherto used from consideration for prevalent ideas and feelings, which i now recognize to have been too definite and calculated to mislead. preface to the sixth edition. this work has scarcely yet been twelve months before the public, but both in this country, and in america and elsewhere, it has been subjected to such wide and searching criticism by writers of all shades of opinion, that i may perhaps be permitted to make a few remarks, and to review some of my reviewers. i must first, however, beg leave to express my gratitude to that large majority of my critics who have bestowed generous commendation upon the work, and liberally encouraged its completion. i have to thank others, who, differing totally from my conclusions, have nevertheless temperately argued against them, for the courtesy with which they have treated an opponent whose views must necessarily have offended them, and i can only say that, whilst such a course has commanded my unfeigned respect, it has certainly not diminished the attention with which i have followed their arguments. there are two serious misapprehensions of the purpose and line of argument of this work which i desire to correct. some critics have objected that, if i had succeeded in establishing the proposition advanced in the first part, the second and third parts need not have been written: in fact, that the historical argument against miracles is only necessary in consequence of the failure of the philosophical. now i contend that the historical is the necessary complement of the philosophical argument, and that both are equally requisite to completeness in dealing with the subject. the preliminary affirmation is not that miracles are impossible, but that they are antecedently incredible. the counter allegation is that, although miracles may be antecedently incredible, they nevertheless actually took place. it is, therefore, necessary, not only to establish the antecedent incredibility, but to examine the validity of the allegation that certain miracles occurred, and this involves the historical inquiry into the evidence for the gospels which occupies the second and third parts. indeed, many will not acknowledge the case to be complete until other witnesses are questioned in a succeeding volume. the view i have taken is clearly supported by mr. mill. in his recently published "essays on religion," he directly replies to the question whether any evidence can suffice to prove a divine revelation, and defines what the nature and amount of that evidence must be. he shows that internal evidences, that is to say, the indications which the revelation itself is thought to furnish of its divine origin, can only be negative. the bad moral character of the doctrines of an alleged revelation, he considers, may be good reason for rejecting it, "but the excellence of their morality can never entitle us to ascribe to them a supernatural origin: for we cannot have conclusive reason for believing that the human faculties were incompetent to find out moral doctrines of which the human faculties can perceive and recognise the excellence. a revelation, therefore," he decides, "cannot be proved divine unless by external evidence; that is, by the exhibition of supernatural facts."( ) he maintains that it is possible to prove the reality of a supernatural fact if it actually occurred; and after showing the great preponderance of evidence against miracles, or their antecedent incredibility, he proceeds: "against this weight of negative evidence we have to set such positive evidence as is produced in attestation of exceptions; in other words, the positive evidences of miracles"( ) this is precisely what i have done. in order to show that mr. mill's estimate of the nature of this positive evidence for miracles does not essentially differ from the results of this work, the following lines may be quoted:� "but the evidence of miracles, at least to protestant christians, is not, in our day, of this cogent description. it is not the evidence of our senses, but of witnesses, and even this not at first hand, but resting on the attestation of books and traditions. and even in the case of the original eye-witnesses, the supernatural facts asserted on their alleged testimony, are not of the transcendent character supposed in our example, about the nature of which, or the impossibility of their having had a natural origin, there could be little room for doubt. on the contrary, the recorded miracles are, in the first place, generally such as it would have been extremely difficult to verify as matters of fact, and in the next place, are hardly ever beyond the possibility of having been brought about by human means or by the spontaneous agencies of nature." the second point to which i desire to refer is a statement which has frequently been made that, in the second and third parts, i endeavour to prove that the four canonical gospels were not written until the end of the second century. this error is of course closely connected with that which has just been discussed, but it is difficult to understand how any one who had taken the slightest trouble to ascertain the nature of the argument, and to state it fairly, could have fallen into it. the fact is that no attempt is made to prove anything with regard to the gospels. the evidence for them is merely examined, and it is found that, so far from their affording {viii} sufficient testimony to warrant belief in the actual occurrence of miracles declared to be antecedently incredible, there is not a certain trace even of the existence of the gospels for a century and a half after those miracles are alleged to have occurred, and nothing whatever to attest their authenticity and truth. this is a very different thing from an endeavour to establish some special theory of my own, and it is because this line of argument has not been understood, that some critics have expressed surprise at the decisive rejection of mere conjectures and possibilities as evidence. in a case of such importance, no testimony which is not clear and indubitable could be of any value, but the evidence producible for the canonical gospels falls very far short even of ordinary requirements, and in relation to miracles it is scarcely deserving of serious consideration. it has been argued that, even if there be no evidence for our special gospels, i admit that gospels very similar must early have been in existence, and that these equally represent the same prevailing belief as the canonical gospels: consequently that i merely change, without shaking, the witnesses. those who advance this argument, however, totally overlook the fact that it is not the reality of the superstitious belief which is in question, but the reality of the miracles, and the sufficiency of the witnesses to establish them. what such objectors urge practically amounts to this: that we should believe in the actual occurrence of certain miracles contradictory to all experience, out of a mass of false miracles which are reported but never really took place, because some unknown persons in an ignorant and superstitious age, who give no evidence of personal knowledge, or of careful investigation, have written an account of them, and other {ix} persons, equally ignorant and superstitious, have believed them. i venture to say that no one who advances the argument to which i am referring can have realized the nature of the question at issue, and the relation of miracles to the order of nature. the last of these general objections to which i need now refer is the statement, that the difficulty with regard to the gospels commences precisely where my examination ends, and that i am bound to explain how, if no trace of their existence is previously discoverable, the four gospels are suddenly found in general circulation at the end of the second century, and quoted as authoritative documents by such writers as irenæus. my reply is that it is totally unnecessary for me to account for this. no one acquainted with the history of pseudonymic literature in the second century, and with the rapid circulation and ready acceptance of spurious works tending to edification, could for a moment regard the canonical position of any gospel at the end of that century either as evidence of its authenticity or early origin. that which concerns us chiefly is not evidence regarding the end of the second but the beginning of the first century. even if we took the statements of irenæus, and later fathers like the alexandrian clement, tertullian, and origen, about the gospels, they are absolutely without value except as personal opinion at a late date, for which no sufficient grounds are shown. of the earlier history of those gospels there is not a distinct trace, except of a nature which altogether discredits them as witnesses for miracles. after having carefully weighed the arguments which have been advanced against this work, i venture to express strengthened conviction of the truth of its conclusions. {x} the best and most powerful reasons which able divines and apologists have been able to bring forward against its main argument have, i submit, not only failed to shake it, but have, by inference, shown it to be unassailable. very many of those who have professedly advanced against the citadel itself have practically attacked nothing but some outlying fort, which was scarcely worth defence, whilst others, who have seriously attempted an assault, have shown that the church has no artillery capable of making a practicable breach in the rationalistic stronghold. i say this solely in reference to the argument which i have taken upon myself to represent, and in no sense of my own individual share in its maintenance. i must now address myself more particularly to two of my critics who, with great ability and learning, have subjected this work to the most elaborate and microscopic criticism of which personal earnestness and official zeal are capable. i am sincerely obliged to professor lightfoot and dr. westcott for the minute attention they have bestowed upon my book. i had myself directly attacked the views of dr. westcott, and of course could only expect him to do his best or his worst against me in reply; and i am not surprised at the vigour with which dr. lightfoot has assailed a work so opposed to principles which he himself holds sacred, although i may be permitted to express my regret that he has not done so in a spirit more worthy of the cause which he defends. in spite of hostile criticism of very unusual minuteness and ability, no flaw or error has been pointed out which in the slightest degree affects my main argument, and i consider that every point yet objected to by dr. lightfoot, or indicated by dr. {xi} westcott, might be withdrawn without at all weakening my position. these objections, i may say, refer solely to details, and only follow side issues, but the attack, if impotent against the main position, has in many cases been insidiously directed against notes and passing references, and a plentiful sprinkling of such words as "misstatements" and "misrepresentations" along the line may have given it a formidable appearance, and malicious effect, which render it worth while once for all to meet it in detail. the first point ( ) to which i shall refer is an elaborate argument by dr. lightfoot regarding the "silence of eusebius." ( ) i had called attention to the importance of considering the silence of the fathers, under certain conditions;( ) and i might, omitting his curious limitation, adopt dr. lightfoot's opening comment upon this as singularly descriptive of the state of the case: "in one province more especially, relating to the external evidences for the gospels, silence occupies a prominent place." dr. lightfoot proposes to interrogate this "mysterious oracle," and he considers that "the response elicited will not be at all ambiguous." i might again agree with him, but that unambiguous response can scarcely be pronounced very satisfactory for the gospels. such silence may be very eloquent, but after all it is only the eloquence of--silence. i have not yet met with the argument anywhere that, because none of the early fathers quote our canonical gospels, or say anything with regard to them, the fact is unambiguous {xii} evidence that they were well acquainted with them, and considered them apostolic and authoritative. dr. lightfoot's argument from silence is, for the present at least, limited to eusebius. the point on which the argument turns is this: after examining the whole of the extant writings of the early fathers, and finding them a complete blank as regards the canonical gospels, if, by their use of apocryphal works and other indications they are not evidence against them, i supplement this, in the case of hegesippus, papias, and dionysius of corinth, by the inference that, as eusebius does not state that their lost works contained any evidence for the gospels, they actually did not contain any. but before proceeding to discuss the point, it is necessary that a proper estimate should be formed of its importance to the main argument of my work. the evident labour which professor lightfoot has expended upon the preparation of his attack, the space devoted to it, and his own express words, would naturally lead most readers to suppose that it has almost a vital bearing upon my conclusions. dr. lightfoot says, after quoting the passages in which i appeal to the silence of eusebius: "this indeed is the fundamental assumption which lies at the basis of his reasoning; and the reader will not need to be reminded how much of the argument falls to pieces, if this basis should prove to be unsound. a wise master-builder would therefore have looked to his foundations first, and assured himself of their strength, before he piled up his fabric to this height. this our author has altogether neglected to do." ( ) towards the close of his article, after triumphantly expressing his belief that his "main conclusions are irrefragable," he further says: {xiii} "if they are, then the reader will not fail to see how large a part of the argument in 'supernatural religion' has crumbled to pieces." ( ) i do not doubt that dr. lightfoot sincerely believes this, but he must allow me to say that he is thoroughly mistaken in his estimate of the importance of the point, and that, as regards this work, the representations made in the above passages are a very strange exaggeration. i am unfortunately too familiar, in connection with criticism on this book, with instances of vast expenditure of time and strength in attacking points to which i attach no importance whatever, and which in themselves have scarcely any value. when writers, after an amount of demonstration which must have conveyed the impression that vital interests were at stake, have, at least in their own opinion, proved that i have omitted to dot an "i," cross a "t," or insert an inverted comma, they have really left the question precisely where it was. now, in the present instance, the whole extent of the argument which is based upon the silence of eusebius is an inference regarding some lost works of three writers only, which might altogether be withdrawn without affecting the case. the object of my investigation is to discover what evidence actually exists in the works of early writers regarding our gospels. in the fragments which remain of the works of three writers, hegesippus, papias, and dionysius of corinth, i do not find any evidence of acquaintance with these gospels,--the works mentioned by papias being, i contend, different from the existing gospels attributed to matthew and mark. whether i am right or not in this does not affect the present discussion. it is an unquestioned fact that eusebius does not mention that the lost works of these {xiv} writers contained any reference to, or information about, the gospels, nor have we any statement from any other author to that effect. the objection of dr. lightfoot is limited to a denial that the silence of eusebius warrants the inference that, because he does not state that these writers made quotations from or references to undisputed canonical books, the lost works did not contain any; it does not, however, extend to interesting information regarding those books, which he admits it was the purpose of eusebius to record. to give dr. lightfoot's statements, which i am examining, the fullest possible support, however, suppose that i abandon eusebius altogether, and do not draw any inference of any kind from him beyond his positive statements, how would my case stand? simply as complete as it well could be: hegesippus, papias, and dionysius do not furnish any evidence in favour of the gospels. the reader, therefore, will not fail to see how serious a misstatement dr. lightfoot has made, and how little the argument of "supernatural religion" would be affected even if he established much more than he has attempted to do. we may now proceed to consider dr. lightfoot's argument itself. he carefully and distinctly defines what he understands to be the declared intention of eusebius in composing his history, as regards the mention or use of the disputed and undisputed canonical books in the writings of the fathers, and in order to do him full justice i will quote his words, merely taking the liberty, for facility of reference, of dividing his statement into three paragraphs. he says: "eusebius therefore proposes to treat these two classes of writings in two different ways. this is the cardinal point of the passage. {xv} ( ) of the antilegomena he pledges himself to record when any ancient writer employs any book belonging to their class [--greek--]; ( ) but as regards the undisputed canonical books he only professes to mention them, when such a writer has something to tell about them [--greek--]. any anecdote of interest respecting them, as also respecting the others [--greek--], will be recorded. ( ) but in their case he nowhere leads us to expect that he will allude to mere quotations however numerous and however precise."( ) in order to dispose of the only one of these points upon which we can differ, i will first refer to the third. did eusebius intend to point out mere quotations of the books which he considered undisputed"? as a matter of fact, he actually did point such out in the case of the st epistle of peter and st epistle of john, which he repeatedly and in the most emphatic manner declared to be undisputed.( ) this is admitted by dr. lightfoot. that he omitted to mention a reference to the epistle to the corinthians in the epistle of clement of rome, or the reference by theophilus to the gospel of john, and other supposed quotations, might be set down as much to oversight as intention. on the other hand, that he did mention disputed books is evidence only that he not only pledged himself to do so, but actually fulfilled his promise. although much might be said upon this point, therefore, i consider it of so little importance that i do not intend to waste time in minutely discussing it. if my assertions with regard to the silence of eusebius likewise include the supposition that he proposed to mention mere quotations of the "undisputed" books, they are so far from limited to this very subsidiary testimony that i i regret very much that some ambiguity in my language (s. r., i. p. ) should have misled, and given dr. lightfoot much trouble. i used the word "quotation" in the sense of a use of the epistle of peter, and not in reference to any one sentence in polycarp. i trust that in this edition i have made my meaning clear. {xvi} should have no reluctance in waiving it altogether. even if the most distinct quotations of this kind had occurred in the lost works of the three writers in question, they could have proved nothing beyond the mere existence of the book quoted, at the time that work was written, but would have done nothing to establish its authenticity and trustworthiness. in the evidential destitution of the gospels, apologists would thankfully have received even such vague indications, indeed there is scarcely any other evidence, but something much more definite is required to establish the reality of miracles and divine revelation. if this point be, for the sake of argument, set aside, what is the position? we are not entitled to infer that there were no quotations from the gospels in the works of hegesippus, papias, and dionysius of corinth, because eusebius does not record them; but, on the other hand, we are still less entitled to infer that there were any. the only inference which i care to draw from the silence of eusebius is precisely that which dr. lightfoot admits that, both from his promise and practice, i am entitled to deduce: when any ancient writer "has something to _tell about_" the gospels, "any _anecdote_ of interest respecting them," eusebius will record it. this is the only information of the slightest value to this work which could be looked for in these writers. so far, therefore, from producing the destructive effect upon some of the arguments of "supernatural religion," upon which he somewhat prematurely congratulates himself, dr. lightfoot's elaborate and learned article on the silence of eusebius supports them in the most conclusive manner. {xvii} before proceeding to speak more directly of the three writers under discussion, it may be well to glance a little at the procedure of eusebius, and note, for those who care to go more closely into the matter, how he fulfils his promise to record what the fathers have to tell about the gospels. i may mention, in the first place, that eusebius states what he himself knows of the composition of the gospels and other canonical works.( ) upon two occasions he quotes the account which clement of alexandria gives of the composition of mark's gospel, and also cites his statements regarding the other gospels.( ) in like manner he records the information, such as it is, which irenæus has to impart about the four gospels and other works,( ) and what origen has to say concerning them.( ) interrogating extant works, we find in fact that eusebius does not neglect to quote anything useful or interesting regarding these books from early writers. dr. lightfoot says that eusebius "restricts himself to the narrowest limits which justice to his subject will allow," and he illustrates this by the case of irenæus. he says: "though he (eusebius) gives the principal passage in this author relating to the four gospels (irenæus, ady. iler. iii. , ) he omits to mention others which contain interesting statements directly or indirectly affecting the question, e.g. that st. john wrote his gospel to counteract the errors of cerinthus and the nicolaitans (irenæus, adv. hær. iii. , )." i must explain, however, that the "interesting statement" omitted, which is not in the context of the part quoted, is not advanced as information derived from any authority, but only in the course of argument, and there is nothing to distinguish it from mere personal opinion, so that on this ground eusebius may well have passed it over. dr. lightfoot farther says: "thus too when he quotes a few lines alluding to the unanimous tradition of the asiatic elders who were acquainted with st. john,( ) he omits the context, from which we find that this tradition had an important bearing on the authenticity of the fourth gospel, for it declared that christ's ministry extended much beyond a single year, thus confirming the obvious chronology of the fourth gospel against the apparent chronology of the synoptists."( ) nothing, however, could be further from the desire or intention of eusebius than to represent any discordance between the gospels, or to support the one at the expense of the others. on the contrary, he enters into an elaborate explanation in order to show that there is no discrepancy between them, affirming, and supporting his view by singular quotations, that it was evidently the intention of the three synoptists only to write the doings of the lord for one year after {xviii} the imprisonment of john the baptist, and that john, having the other gospels before him, wrote an account of the period not embraced by the other evangelists.( ) moreover, the extraordinary assertions of irenæus not only contradict the synoptics, but also the fourth gospel, and eusebius certainly could not have felt much inclination to quote such opinions, even although irenæus seemed to base them upon traditions handed down by the presbyters who were acquainted with john. it being then admitted that eusebius not only pledges himself to record when any ancient writer has something to "tell about" the undisputed canonical books, but that, judged by the test of extant writings which we can examine, he actually does so, let us sec the conclusions which we are entitled to draw in the case of the only three writers with regard to whom i have inferred anything from the "silence of eusebius." i need scarcely repeat that eusebius held hegesippus in very high estimation. he refers to him very frequently, and he clearly shows that he not only valued, but was intimately acquainted with, his writings. eusebius quotes from the work of hegesippus a very long account of the martyrdom of james;( ) he refers to hegesippus as his authority for the statement that simeon was a cousin [--greek--] of jesus, cleophas his father being, according to that author, the brother of joseph;( ) he confirms a passage in the epistle of clement by reference to hegesippus;( ) he quotes from hegesippus a story regarding some members of the family of jesus, of the race of david, who were brought before domitian;( ) he cites his narrative of the martyrdom of simeon, together with other matters concerning the early church;( ) in another place he gives a laudatory account of hegesippus and his writings;( ) shortly after, he refers to the {xix} statement of hegesippus that he was in rome until the episcopate of eleutherus,( ) and further speaks in praise of his work, mentions his observation on the epistle of clement, and quotes his remarks about the church in corinth, the succession of roman bishops, the general state of the church, the rise of heresies, and other matters.( ) i mention these numerous references to hegesippus as i have noticed them in turning over the pages of eusebius, but others may very probably have escaped me. eusebius fulfils his pledge, and states what disputed works were used by hegesippus and what he said about them, and one of these was the gospel according to the hebrews. he does not, however, record a single remark of any kind regarding our gospels, and the legitimate inference, and it is the only one i care to draw, is, that hegesippus did not say anything about them. i may simply add that, as eusebius quotes the account of matthew and mark from papias, a man of whom he expresses something like contempt, and again refers to him in confirmation of the statement of the alexandrian clement regarding the composition of mark's gospel,( ) it would be against all reason, as well as opposed to his pledge and general practice, to suppose that eusebius would have omitted to record any information given by hegesippus, a writer with whom he was so well acquainted, and of whom he speaks with so much respect. i have said that eusebius would more particularly have quoted anything with regard to the fourth gospel, and for those who care to go more closely into the point my reasons may be briefly given. no one can read eusebius attentively without noting the peculiar care with which he speaks of john and his writings, and the substantially apologetic tone which he adopts in regard to them. apart from any doubts expressed {xx} regarding the gospel itself, the controversy as to the authenticity of the apocalypse and second and third epistles called by his name, with which eusebius was so well acquainted, and the critical dilemma as to the impossibility of the same john having written both the gospel and apocalypse, regarding which he so fully quotes the argument of dionysius of alexandria,( ) evidently made him peculiarly interested in the subject, and his attention to the fourth gospel was certainly not diminished by his recognition of the essential difference between that work and the three synoptics. the first occasion on which he speaks of john, he records the tradition that he was banished to patmos during the persecution under domitian, and refers to the apocalypse. he quotes irenæus in support of this tradition, and the composition of the work at the close of domitian's reign.( ) he goes on to speak of the persecution under domitian, and quotes hegesippus as to a command given by that emperor to slay all the posterity of david,( ) as also tertullian's account,( ) winding up his extracts from the historians of the time by the statement that, after nerva succeeded domitian, and the senate had revoked the cruel decrees of the latter, the apostle john returned from exile in patmos and, according to ecclesiastical tradition, settled at ephesus.( ) he states that john, the beloved disciple, apostle and evangelist, governed the churches of asia after the death of domitian and his return from patmos, and that he was still living when trajan succeeded nerva, and for the truth of this he quotes passages from iremeus and clement of alexandria.( ) he then gives an account of the writings of john, and whilst asserting that the gospel must be universally acknowledged as genuine, he says that it is rightly put last in order amongst the four, of the composition of which he gives an elaborate description. it is not necessary to quote his account of the fourth gospel and of the occasion of its composition, which he states to have been john's receiving the other three gospels, and, whilst admitting their truth, perceiving that they did not contain a narrative of the earlier history of christ. for this reason, being entreated to do so, he wrote an account of the doings of jesus before the baptist was cast into prison. after some very extraordinary reasoning, eusebius says that no one who carefully considers the points he mentions can think that the gospels are at variance with each other, and he conjectures that john probably omitted the genealogies because matthew and luke had given them.( ) without further anticipating what i have to say when speaking of papias, it is clear, i think, that eusebius, being aware of, and interested in, the peculiar difficulties connected with the writings attributed to john, not to put a still stronger case, and quoting traditions from later and consequently less weighty authorities, would certainly have recorded with more special readiness any information on the subject given by hegesippus, whom he so frequently lays under contribution, had his writings contained any. {xxi} in regard to papias the case is still clearer. we find that eusebius quotes his account of the composition of gospels by matthew and mark,( ) although he had already given a closely similar narrative regarding mark from clement of alexandria, and appealed to papias in confirmation of it. is it either possible or permissible to suppose that, had papias known anything of the other two gospels, he would not have inquired about them from the presbyters and recorded their information? and is it either possible or permissible to suppose that if papias had recorded any similar information regarding the composition of the third and fourth gospels, eusebius would have omitted to quote it? certainly not; and dr. lightfoot's article proves it. eusebius had not only pledged himself to give such information, and does so in every case which we can test, but he fulfils it by actually quoting what papias had to say about the gospels. even if he had been careless, his very reference to the first two gospels must have reminded him of the claims of the rest. there are, however, special reasons which render it still more certain that had papias had anything to tell about the fourth gospel,--and if there was a fourth gospel in his knowledge he must have had something to tell about it,--eusebius would have recorded it. the first quotation which he makes from papias is the passage in which the bishop of hierapolis states the interest with which he had inquired about the words of the presbyters, "what john or matthew or what any other of the disciples of the lord said, and what aristion and the presbyter john, disciples of the lord, i am much obliged to dr. lightfoot for calling my attention to the accidental insertion of the words "and the apocalypse" (s. e. i. p. ). this was a mere slip of the pen, of which no use is made, and the error is effectually corrected by my own distinct statements. vol. i. {xxii} say."(l) eusebius observes, and particularly points out, that the name of john is twice mentioned in the passage, the former, mentioned with peter, james, and matthew, and other apostles, evidently being, he thinks, the evangelist, and the latter being clearly distinguished by the designation of presbyter. eusebius states that this proves the truth of the assertion that there were two men of the name of john in asia, and that two tombs were still shown at ephesus bearing the name of john. eusebius then proceeds to argue that probably the second of the two johns, if not the first, was the man who saw the revelation. what an occasion for quoting any information bearing at all on the subject from papias, who had questioned those who had been acquainted with both! his attention is so pointedly turned to john at the very moment when he makes his quotations regarding matthew and mark, that i am fully warranted, both by the conclusions of dr. lightfoot and the peculiar circumstances of the case, in affirming that the silence of eusebius proves that papias said nothing about either the third or fourth gospels. i need not go on to discuss dionysius of corinth, for the same reasoning equally applies to his case. i have, therefore, only a very few more words to say on the subject of eusebius. not content with what he intended to be destructive criticism, dr. lightfoot valiantly proceeds to the constructive and, "as a sober deduction from facts," makes the following statement, which he prints in italics: _"the silence of eusebius_ respecting early witnesses to the fourth gospel is an evidence in its favour."( ) now, interpreted even by the rules laid down (xxiii) by dr. lightfoot himself, what does this silence really mean? it means, not that the early writers about whom he is supposed to be silent are witnesses about anything connected with the fourth gospel, but simply that if eusebius noticed and did not record the mere use of that gospel by any one, he thereby indicates that he himself, in the fourth century, classed it amongst the undisputed books, the mere use of which he does not undertake to mention. the value of his opinion at so late a date is very small. professor lightfoot next makes a vehement attack upon me in connection with "the ignatian epistles,"( ) which is equally abortive and limited to details. i do not intend to complain of the spirit in which the article is written, nor of its unfairness. on the whole i think that readers may safely be left to judge of the tone in which a controversy is carried on. unfortunately, however, the perpetual accusation of mis-statement brought against me in this article, and based upon minute criticism into which few care to follow, is apt to leave the impression that it is well-founded, for there is the very natural feeling in most right minds that no one would recklessly scatter such insinuations. it is this which alone makes such an attack dangerous. now in a work like this, dealing with so many details, it must be obvious that it is not possible altogether to escape errors. a critic or opponent is of course entitled to point these out, although, if he be high-minded or even alive to his own interests, i scarcely think that he will do so in a spirit of unfair detraction. but in doing this a writer is bound to be accurate, for if he be liberal of such accusations {xxiv} and it can be shown that his charges are unfounded, they recoil with double force upon himself. i propose, therefore, as it is impossible for me to reply to all such attacks, to follow professor lightfoot and dr. westcott with some minuteness in their discussion of my treatment of the ignatian epistles, and once for all to show the grave mis-statements to which they commit themselves. dr. lightfoot does not ignore the character of the discussion upon which he enters, but it will be seen that his appreciation of its difficulty by no means inspires him with charitable emotions. he says: "the ignatian question is the most perplexing which confronts the student of earlier christian history. the literature is voluminous; the considerations involved are very wide, very varied, and very intricate. a writer, therefore, may well be pardoned if he betrays a want of familiarity with this subject but in this case the reader naturally expects that the opinions at which he has arrived will be stated with some diffidence."( ) my critic objects that i express my opinions with decision. i shall hereafter justify this decision, but i would here point out that the very reasons which render it difficult for dr. lightfoot to form a final and decisive judgment on the question make it easy for me. it requires but little logical perception to recognize that epistles, the authenticity of which it is so difficult to establish, cannot have much influence as testimony for the gospels. the statement just quoted, however, is made the base of the attack, and war is declared in the following terms:-- {xxv} "the reader is naturally led to think that a writer would not use such very decided language unless he had obtained a thorough mastery of his subject; and when he finds the notes thronged with references to the most recondite sources of information, he at once credits the author with an 'exhaustive' knowledge of the literature bearing upon it. it becomes important therefore to inquire whether the writer shows that accurate acquaintance with the subject, which justifies us in attaching weight to his dicta as distinguished from his arguments."(l) this sentence shows the scope of the discussion. my dicta, however, play a very subordinate part throughout, and even if no weight be attached to them, and i have never desired that any should be, my argument would not be in the least degree affected. the first point attacked, like most of those subsequently assailed, is one of mere critical history. i wrote: "the strongest internal, as well as other evidence, into which space forbids our going in detail, has led ( ) the majority of critics to recognize the syriac version as the most genuine form of the letters of ignatius extant, and ( ) this is admitted by most of those who nevertheless deny the authenticity of any of the epistles."( ) upon this dr. lightfoot remarks:-- "no statement could be more erroneous as a summary of the results of the ignatian controversy since the publication of the syriac epistles than this."( ) it will be admitted that this is pretty "decided language" for one who is preaching "diffidence." when we come to details, however, dr. lightfoot admits: "those who maintain the genuineness of the ignatian epistles in one or other of the two forms, may be said to be almost evenly divided on this question of priority." he seems to consider that he sufficiently shows this when he mentions five or six critics on either side; but even {xxvi} on this modified interpretation of my statement its correctness may be literally maintained. to the five names quoted as recognizing the priority of the syriac epistles may be added those of milman, böhringer, de pressensé, and dr. tregelles, which immediately occur to me. but i must ask upon what ground he limits my remark to those who absolutely admit the genuineness? i certainly do not so limit it, but affirm that a majority prefer the three curetonian epistles, and that this majority is made up partly of those who, denying the authenticity of any of the letters, still consider the syriac the purest and least adulterated form of the epistles. this will be evident to any one who reads the context. with regard to the latter ( ) part of the sentence, i will at once say that "most" is a slip of the pen for "many," which i correct in this edition. many of those who deny or do not admit the authenticity prefer the curetonian version. the tubingen school are not unanimous on the point, and there are critics who do not belong to it. bleek, for instance, who does not commit himself to belief, considers the priority of the curetonian "im höchsten grade wahrscheinlich.,, volkmar, lipsius, and rumpf prefer them. dr. light-foot says:-- "the case of lipsius is especially instructive, as illustrating this point. having at one time maintained the priority and genuineness of the curetonian letters, he has lately, if i rightly understand him, retracted his former opinion on both questions alike."( ) dr. lightfoot, however, has not rightly understood him. lipsius has only withdrawn his opinion that the syriac letters are authentic, but whilst now asserting that in all their forms the ignatian epistles are spurious, he still {xxvii} maintains the priority of the curetonian version. he first announced this change of view emphatically in , when he added: "an dem relativ grossern alter der syrischen textgestalt gegenuber der kürzeren griechischen halte ich ubrigens nach wie vor fest"( ) in the very paper to which dr. lightfoot refers lipsius also again says quite distinctly: "ich bin noch jetzt überzeugt, dass der syrer in zahlreichen fallen den relativ ursprünglichsten text bewahrt hat (vgl. meine nachweise in niedner's zeitschr. s. fl)."( ) with regard to the whole of this ( ) point, it must be remembered that the only matter in question is simply a shade of opinion amongst critics who deny the authenticity of the ignatian epistles in all forms. dr. lightfoot, however, goes on "to throw some light on this point" by analysing my "general statement of the course of opinion on this subject given in an earlier passage."( ) the "light" which he throws seems to pass through so peculiar a medium, that i should be much rather tempted to call it darkness. i beg the reader to favour me with his attention to this matter, for here commences a serious attack upon the accuracy of my notes and statements, which is singularly full of error and misrepresentation. the general statement referred to and quoted is as follows:-- "those three syriac epistles hive been subjected to the severest scrutiny, and many of the ablest critics have pronounced them to be the only authentic epistles of ignatius, whilst others, who do not admit that even these are genuine letters emanating from ignatius, still prefer them to the version of seven greek epistles, and consider them the most ancient form of the letters which we possess.( ) as early as the sixteenth century, however, the strongest doubts were expressed regarding the authenticity {xxviii} of any of the epistles ascribed to ignatius. the magdeburg centuriators first attacked them, and calvin declared (p. ) them to be spurious,( ) an opinion fully shared by chemnitz, dallseus, and others, and similar doubts, more or less definite, were expressed throughout the seventeenth century,( ) and onward to comparatively recent times,( ) although the means of forming a judgment were not then so complete as now. that the epistles were interpolated there was no doubt. fuller examination and more comprehensive knowledge of the subject have confirmed earlier doubts, and a large mass of critics recognize that the authenticity of none of these epistles can be established, and that they can only be considered later and spurious compositions.( )"( ) in the first note ( ) on p. i referred to bunsen, bleek, böhringer, cureton, ewald, lipsius, milman, ritschl, and weiss, and dr. lightfoot proceeds to analyze my statements as follows: and i at once put his explanation and my text in parallel columns, italicising parts of both to call more immediate attention to the point:-- the text. many of the ablest critics have pronounced them to be the only authentic epistles of ignatius, whilst others who do not admit that even these are genuine letters emanating from ignatius, still prefer them to the version of seven greek epistles, and consider them the most ancient form of the letters which we possess.( ) dr. lightfoot's statement. "these references, it will be observed, are given to illustrate more immediately, though perhaps not solely, the statement that writers 'who do not admit that even these (the curetonian epistles) are genuine letters emanating from ignatius, still prefer them to the version of seven greek epistles, and consider them the most ancient form of the letters which we possess.'"( ) it must be evident to any one who reads the context( ) that in this sentence i am stating opinions expressed in favour of the curetonian epistles, and that the note, which is naturally put at the end of that sentence, must be intended to represent this favourable opinion, whether of those who absolutely maintain the authenticity or {xxix} merely the relative priority. dr. lightfoot quietly suppresses, in his comments, the main statement of the text which the note illustrates, and then "throws light" upon the point by the following remarks:-- dr. lightfoot's statement: "the reader, therefore, will hardly be prepared to hear that not one of these nine writers condemns the ignatian letters as spurious. bleek alone leaves the matter in some uncertainty while inclining to bunsen's view; the other eight distinctly maintain the genuineness of the curetonian letters."' the truth: cureton, bunsen, böhringer, ewald, milman, ritschl, and weiss maintain both the priority and genuineness of the syriac epistles. bleek will not commit himself to a distinct recognition of the letters in any form. of the vossian epistles, he says: "aber auch die echtheit dieser recension ist keineswegs sicher." he considers the priority of the curetonian "in the highest degree probable." lipsius rejects all the epistles, as i have already said, but maintains the priority of the syriac. dr. lightfoot's statement, therefore, is a total misrepresentation of the facts, and of that mischievous kind which does most subtle injury. not one reader in twenty would take the trouble to investigate, but would receive from such positive assertions an impression that my note was totally wrong, when in fact it is literally correct. continuing his analysis, dr. lightfoot fights almost every inch of the ground in the very same style. he cannot contradict my statement that so early as the sixteenth century the strongest doubts were expressed regarding the authenticity of any of the epistles ascribed "contemporary beview," february, , p. . in a note dr. lightfoot states that my references to lipsius are to his earlier works, where he still maintains the priority and genuineness of the curetonian epistles. certainly they are so, but in the right place, two pages farther on, i refer to the writings in which he rejects the authenticity, whilst still maintaining his previous view of the priority of these letters {xxx} to ignatius, and that the magdeburg centuriators attacked them, and calvin declared them to be spurious,( ) but dr. lightfoot says: "the criticisms of calvin more especially refer to those passages which were found in the long recension alone."( ) of course only the long recension was at that time known. rivet replies to campianus that calvin's objections were not against ignatius but the jesuits who had corrupted him.( ) this is the usual retort theological, but as i have quoted the words of calvin the reader may judge for himself. dr. lightfoot then says: "the clause which follows contains a direct misstatement. chemnitz did not folly share the opinion that they were spurious; on the contrary, he quotes them several times as authoritative; but he says that they 'seem to have been altered in many places to strengthen the position of the papal power, do.' "( ) pearson's statement here quoted must be received with reserve, for chemnitz rather speaks sarcastically of those who quote these epistles as evidence. in treating them as ancient documents or speaking of parts of them with respect, chemnitz does nothing more than the magdeburg centuriators, but this is a very different thing from directly ascribing them to ignatius himself. the epistles in the "long recension" were before chemnitz both in the latin and greek forms. he says of them: ".... et multas habent non contemnendas sententias, presertim sicut graece leguntur. admixta vero sunt et alia non pauca, quae profecto non referunt gravitatem apostolicam. calvin's expressions are: nihil moniis illis, quro sub ignatii nomine editae sunt, putidius. quo minus tolerabilis est eorum impudentia, qui talibus larvis ad fallendum se instruunt. inst. chr. bel. i. , p . {xxxi} adulteratas enim jam esse illas epistolas, vel inde colligitur." he then shows that quotations in ancient writers purporting to be taken from the epistles of ignatius are not found in these extant epistles at all, and says: "de epistolis igitur illis ignatii, quae nunc ejus titulo feruntur, merito dubitamus: transformatse enim videntur in multis locis, ad stabiliendum statum regni pontificii."(l) even when he speaks in favour of them he "damns them with faint praise." the whole of the discussion turns upon the word "fully", and is an instance of the minute criticism of my critic, who evidently is not directly acquainted with chemnitz. a shade more or less of doubt or certainty in conveying the impression received from the words of a writer is scarcely worth much indignation. dr. lightfoot makes a very detailed attack upon my next two notes, and here again i must closely follow him. my note ( ) p. reads as follows:-- " by bochartus, aubertin, blondel, basnage, casaubon, cocus, humfrey, rivetus, salmasius, socinus (faustus), parker, petau, &c; &c.; cf. jacobson, patr. apost., i. p. jolt.; cureton vindiciæ ignatianæ, , appendix." upon this dr. lightfoot makes the following preliminary remarks: "but the most important point of all is the purpose for which they are quoted. 'similar doubts' could only, i think, be interpreted from the context as doubts 'regarding the authenticity of any of the epistles ascribed to ignatius.'"( ) as dr. lightfoot, in the first sentence just quoted, recognizes what is "the most important point of all," it is a pity that, throughout the whole of the subsequent analysis of the references in question, he persistently ignores my {xxxii} very careful definition of "the purpose for which they are quoted." it is difficult, without entering into minute classifications, accurately to represent in a few words the opinions of a great number of writers, and briefly convey a fair idea of the course of critical judgment. desirous, therefore, of embracing a large class,--for both this note and the next, with mere difference of epoch, illustrate the same statement in the text,--and not to overstate the case on my own side, i used what seemed to me a very moderate phrase, decreasing the force of the opinion of those who positively rejected the epistles, and not unfairly representing the hesitation of those who did not fully accept them. i said, then, in guarded terms,--and i italicise the part which dr. lightfoot chooses to suppress,--that "similar _doubts, more or less definite_," were expressed by the writers referred to. dr. lightfoot admits that bochart directly condemns one epistle, and would probably have condemned the rest also; that aubertin, blondel, basnage, r. parker, and saumaise actually rejected all; and that cook pronounces them "either supposititious or shamefully corrupted." so far, therefore, there can be no dispute. i will now take the rest in succession. dr. lightfoot says that humfrey "considers that they have been interpolated and mutilated, but he believes them genuine in the main." dr. google has so completely warped the statement in the text, that he seems to demand nothing short of a total condemnation of the epistles in the note, but had i intended to say that humfrey and all of these writers definitely rejected the whole of the epistles i should not have limited myself to merely saying that they expressed "doubts more or less definite," which humfrey does. dr. lightfoot says that socinus "denounces corruptions and {xxxiii} anachronisms, but so far as i can see does not question a nucleus of genuine matter." his very denunciations, however, are certainly the expression of "doubts, more or less definite." "casaubon, so far from rejecting them altogether," dr. lightfoot says, "promises to defend the antiquity of some of the epistles with new arguments." but i have never affirmed that he "rejected them altogether." casaubon died before he fulfilled the promise referred to, so that we cannot determine what arguments he might have used. i must point out, however, that the antiquity does not necessarily involve the authenticity of a document. with regard to rivet the case is different i had overlooked the fact that in a subsequent edition of the work referred to, after receiving archbishop ushers edition of the short recension, he had given his adhesion to "that form of the epistles."( ) this fact is also mentioned by pearson, and i ought to have observed it.( ) petau, the last of the writers referred to, says: "equidem haud abnuerim epistolas illius varie interpolatas et quibusdam additis mutatas, ac depravatas fuisse: turn aliquas esse supposititias: verum nullas omnino ab ignatio epistolas esse scriptas, id vero nimium temere affirmari sentio." he then goes on to mention the recent publication of the vossian epistles and the version of usher, and the learned jesuit father has no more decided opinion to express than: "ut haec prudens, ac justa suspicio sit, illas esse genuinas ignatii epistolas, quas antiquorum consensus illustribus testimoniis commendatas ac approbatas reliquit"( ) the next note ( ), p. , was only separated from the {xxxiv} preceding for convenience of reference, and dr. lightfoot quotes and comments upon it as follows: "the next note, p. , is as follows:--(see scanned page. ed.) the brackets are not the author's, but my own. this is doubtless one of those exhibitions of learning which have made such a deep impression on the reviewers. certainly, as it stands, this note suggests a thorough acquaintance with all the by-paths of the ignatian literature, and seems to represent the gleanings of many years' reading. it is important to observe, however, that every one of these references, except those which i have included in brackets, is given in the appendix to cureton's _vindicia ignatianæ_, where the passages are quoted in full. thus two-thirds of this elaborate note might have been compiled in ten minutes. our author has here and there transposed the order of the quotations, and confused it by so doing, for it is chronological in cureton. but what purpose was served by thus importing into his notes a mass of borrowed and unsorted references? and, if he thought fit to do so, why was the key-reference to cureton buried among the rest, so that it stands in immediate connection with some additional references on which it has no bearing?"( ) i do not see any special virtue in the amount of time which might suffice, under some circumstances, to compile a note, although it is here advanced as an important {xxxv} point to observe, but i call attention to the unfair spirit in which dr. lightfoot's criticisms are made. i ask every just-minded reader to consider what right any critic has to insinuate, if not directly to say, that, because some of the references in a note are also given by cureton, i simply took them from him, and thus "imported into my notes a mass of borrowed and unsorted references," and further to insinuate that i "here and there transposed the order" apparently to conceal the source? this is a kind of criticism which i very gladly relinquish entirely to my high-minded and reverend opponent. now, as full quotations are given in cureton's appendix, i should have been perfectly entitled to take references from it, had i pleased, and for the convenience of many readers i distinctly indicate cureton's work, in the note, as a source to be compared. the fact is, however, that i did not take the references from cureton, but in every case derived them from the works themselves, and if the note "seems to represent the gleanings of many years' reading," it certainly does not misrepresent the fact, for i took the trouble to make myself acquainted with the "by-paths of ignatian literature." now in analysing the references in this note it must be borne in mind that they illustrate the statement that "_doubts, more or less definite_" continued to be expressed regarding the ignatian epistles. i am much obliged to dr. lightfoot for drawing my attention to wotton. his name is the first in the note, and it unfortunately was the last in a list on another point in my note-book, immediately preceding this one, and was by mistake included in it. i also frankly give up weismann, whose doubts i find i had exaggerated, and proceed to examine dr. lightfoot's further statements. he says that thiersch {xxxvi} uses the curetonian as genuine, and that his only doubt is whether he ought not to accept the vossian. thiersch, however, admits that he cannot quote either the seven or the three epistles as genuine. he says distinctly: "these three syriac epistles lie under the suspicion that they are not an older text, but merely an epitome of the seven, for the other notes found in the same ms. seem to be excerpts. but on the other hand, the doubts regarding the genuineness of the seven epistles, in the form in which they are known since usher's time, are not yet entirely removed. for no ms. has yet been found which contains _only_ the seven epistles attested by eusebius, a ms. such as lay before eusebius."( ) thiersch, therefore, does express "doubts, more or less definite." dr. light-foot then continues: "of the rest a considerable number, as, for instance, lardner, beausobre, schroeckh, griesbach, kestner, neander, and baumgarten-crusius, _with different degrees of certainty or uncertainty_, pronounce themselves in favour of a genuine nucleus."( ) the words which i have italicised are a mere paraphrase of my words descriptive of the doubts entertained. i must point out that a leaning towards belief in a genuine "nucleus" on the part of some of these writers, by no means excludes the expression of "_doubts, more or less definite_," which is all i quote them for. i will take each name in order. _lardner_ says: "but whether the smaller (vossian epistles) themselves are the genuine writings of ignatius, bishop of antioch, is a question that has been much disputed, and has employed the pens of the ablest critics. and whatever positiveness some may have {xxxvii} shown on either side, i must own i have found it a very difficult question." the opinion which he expresses finally is merely: "it appears to me _probable_, that they are _for the main_ the genuine epistles of ignatius." _beausobre_ says: "je ne veux, ni defendre, ni combattre l'authenticite' des _lettres de st. ignace_. si elles ne sont pas veritables, elles ne laissent pas d'etre fort anciennes; et l'opinion, qui me paroit la plus raisonnable, est que les plus pures ont été inter-poises." _schroeckh_ says that along with the favourable considerations for the shorter (vossian) epistles "many doubts arise which make them suspicious." he proceeds to point out many grave difficulties, and anachronisms which cast doubt both on individual epistles and upon the whole, and he remarks that a very common way of evading these and other difficulties is to affirm that all the passages which cannot be reconciled with the mode of thought of ignatius are interpolations of a later time. he concludes with the pertinent observation: "however probable this is, it nevertheless remains as difficult to prove which are the interpolated passages." in fact it would be difficult to point out any writer who more thoroughly doubts, without definitely rejecting, all the epistles. _grtesbach_ and _kestner_ both express "doubts more or less definite," but to make sufficient extracts to illustrate this would occupy too much space. _neander_.--dr. lightfoot has been misled by the short extract from the english translation of the first {xxxviii} edition of neander's history given by cureton in his appendix, has not attended to the brief german quotation from the second edition, and has not examined the original at all, or he would have seen that, so far from pronouncing "in favour of a genuine nucleus," neander might well have been classed by me amongst those who distinctly reject the ignatian epistles, instead of being moderately quoted amongst those who merely express doubt. neander says: "as the account of the martyrdom of ignatius is very suspicious, so also the epistles which suppose the correctness of this suspicious legend, do not bear throughout the impress of a distinct individuality, and of a man of that time who is addressing his last words to the communities. a hierarchical purpose is not to be mistaken." in an earlier part of the work he still more emphatically says that, "in the so-called ignatian epistles," he recognizes a decided "design" (absichtlichkeit) and then he continues: "as the tradition regarding the journey of ignatius to rome, there to be cast to the wild beasts, seems to me for the above-mentioned reasons very suspicious, his epistles, which pre-suppose the truth of this tradition, can no longer inspire me with faith in their authenticity." he goes on to state additional grounds for disbelief. _baumgarten-crusius_ stated in one place, in regard to the seven epistles, that it is no longer possible to ascertain how much of the extant may have formed part of the original epistles, and in a note he excepts only the passages quoted by the fathers. {xxxix} he seems to agree with semler and others that the two recensions are probably the result of manipulations of the original, the shorter form being more in ecclesiastical, the longer in dogmatic interest. some years later he remarked that inquiries into the epistles, although not yet concluded, had rather tended towards the earlier view that the shorter recension was more original than the long, but that even the shorter may have suffered, if not from manipulations (ueberarbeitungen) from interpolations. this very cautious statement, it will be observed, is wholly relative, and does not in the least modify the previous conclusion that the original material of the letters cannot be ascertained. dr. lightfoot's objections regarding these seven writers are thoroughly unfounded, and in most cases glaringly erroneous. dr. lightfoot doubts, and a large mass of critics recognize _that the authenticity of none_ of these epistles _can be established_ and that they can only be considered later and spurious compositions." he proceeds to the next "note ( )" with the same unhesitating vigour, and characterizes it as "equally unfortunate." wherever it has been possible, dr. light-foot has succeeded in misrepresenting the "purpose" of my notes, although he has recognized how important it is to ascertain this correctly, and in this instance he has done so again. i will put my text and his explanation, upon the basis of which he analyses the note, in juxtaposition, italicising part of my own statement which he altogether disregards:-- "further examination and more references to twenty authorities comprehensive knowledge of the are then given, as belonging to the subject have confirmed earlier a large mass of critics who recognize {xl} that the ignatian epistles, 'can only be considered later and spurious compositions.'"( ) there are here, in order to embrace a number of references, two approximate states of opinion represented: the first, which leaves the epistles in permanent doubt, as sufficient evidence is not forthcoming to establish their authenticity; and the second, which positively pronounces them to be spurious. out of the twenty authorities referred to, dr. lightfoot objects to six as contradictory or not confirming what he states to be the purpose of the note. he seems to consider that a reservation for the possibility of a genuine substratum which cannot be defined invalidates my reference. i maintain, however, that it does not. it is quite possible to consider that the authenticity of the extant, letters cannot be established without denying that there may have been some original nucleus upon which these actual documents may have been based. i will analyse the six references. bleek.--dr. lightfoot says: "of these bleek (already cited in a previous note) expresses no definite opinion." dr. lightfoot omits to mention that i do not refer to bleek directly, but by "cf." merely request consideration of his opinions. i have already partly stated bleek's view. after pointing out some difficulties, he says generally: "it comes to this, that the origin of the ignatian epistles themselves is still very doubtful." he refuses {xli} to make use of a passage because it is only found in the long recension, and another which occurs in the shorter recension he does not consider evidence, because, first, he says, "the authenticity of this recension also is by no means certain," and, next, the cureton epistles discredit the others. "whether this recension (the curetonian) is more original than the shorter greek is certainly not altogether certain, but.... in the highest degree probable." in another place he refuses to make use of reminiscences in the "ignatian epistles," "because it is still very doubtful how the case stands as regards the authenticity and integrity of these ignatian epistles themselves, in the different recensions in which we possess them."( ) in fact he did not consider that their authenticity could be established. i do not, however, include him here at all. _gfrörer_.--dr. lightfoot, again, omits to state that i do not cite this writer like the others, but by a "cf." merely suggest a reference to his remarks. _harless_, according to dr. lightfoot, "avows that he must 'decidedly reject with the most considerable critics of older and more recent times' the opinion maintained by certain persons that the epistles are 'altogether spurious,' and proceeds to treat a passage as genuine because it stands in the vossian letters as well as in the long recension." this is a mistake. harless quotes a passage in connection with paul's epistle to the ephesians with the distinct remark: "in this case the disadvantage of the uncertainty regarding the recensions is in {xlii} part removed through the circumstance that both recensions have the passage." he recognizes that the completeness of the proof that ecclesiastical tradition goes back beyond the time of marcion is somewhat wanting from the uncertainty regarding the text of ignatius. he did not in fact venture to consider the ignatian epistles evidence even for the first half of the second century. _schliemann_, dr. lightfoot states, "says that 'the external testimonies oblige him to recognize a genuine substratum,' though he is not satisfied with either existing recension." now what schliemann says is this: "certainly neither the shorter and still less the longer recension in which we possess these epistles can lay claim to authenticity. only if we must, nevertheless, without doubt suppose a genuine substratum," &c. in a note he adds: "the external testimonies oblige me to recognize a genuine substratum--poly-carp already speaks of the same in ch. xiii. of his epistle. but that in their present form they do not proceed from ignatius the contents sufficiently show." _hase_, according to dr. lightfoot, "commits himself to no opinion." if he does not deliberately and directly do so, he indicates what that opinion is with sufficient clearness. the long recension, he says, bears the marks of later manipulation, and excites suspicion of an invention in favour of episcopacy, and the shorter text is not fully attested either. the curetonian epistles with the shortest and least hierarchical text give the impression of being an epitome. "but {xliii} even if no authentic kernel lay at the basis of these epistles, yet they would be a significant document at latest out of the middle of the second century." these last words are a clear admission of his opinion that the authenticity cannot be established. _lechler_ candidly confesses that he commenced with a prejudice in favour of the authenticity of the epistles in the shorter recension, but on reading them through, he says that an impression unfavourable to their authenticity was produced upon him which he had not been able to shake off. he proceeds to point out their internal improbability, and other difficulties connected with the supposed journey, which make it "still more improbable that ignatius himself can really have written these epistles in this situation." lechler does not consider that the curetonian epistles strengthen the case; and although he admits that he cannot congratulate himself on the possession of "certainty and cheerfulness of conviction" of the inauthenticity of the ignatian epistles, he at least very clearly justifies the affirmation that the authenticity cannot be established. now what has been the result of this minute and prejudiced attack upon my notes? out of nearly seventy critics and writers in connection with what is admitted to be one of the most intricate questions of christian literature, it appears that--much to my regret--i have inserted one name totally by accident, overlooked that the doubts of another had been removed by the subsequent publication of the short recension and consequently {xliv} erroneously classed him, and i withdraw a third whose doubts i consider that i have overrated. mistakes to this extent in dealing with such a mass of references, or a difference of a shade more or less in the representation of critical opinions, not always clearly expressed, may, i hope, be excusable, and i can only say that i am only too glad to correct such errors. on the other hand, a critic who attacks such references, in such a tone, and with such wholesale accusations of "misstatement" and "misrepresentation," was bound to be accurate, and i have shown that dr. lightfoot is not only inaccurate in matters of fact, but unfair in his statements of my purpose. i am happy, however, to be able to make use of his own words and say: "i may perhaps have fallen into some errors of detail, though i have endeavoured to avoid them, but the main conclusions are, i believe, irrefragable."(l) there are further misstatements made by dr. lightfoot to which i must briefly refer before turning to other matters. he says, with unhesitating boldness:-- one highly important omission is significant. there is no mention, from first to last, of the armenian version. now it happens that this version (so far as regards the documentary evidence) _has been felt to be the key to the position, and around it the battle has raged fiercely since its publication_. one who (like our author) maintains the priority of the curetonian letters, was especially bound to give it some consideration, for it furnishes the most formidable argument to his opponents. this version was given to the world by petermann in , the same year in which cureton's later work, the _corpus ignatianum_, appeared, and therefore was unknown to him. its _bearing occupies a more or less prominent place in all, or nearly all, the writers who have specially discussed the ignatian question during the last quarter of a century. this is true of lipsius and weiss and hilgenfeld and uhlhom, whom he cites, not less than of merx and denzinger and zahn, whom he neglects to cite_. now first as regards the facts. i do not maintain the "contemporary review," february, , p. . {xlv} priority of the curetonian epistles in this book myself, indeed i express no personal opinion whatever regarding them which is not contained in that general declaration of belief, the decision of which excites the wrath of my diffident critic, that the epistles in no form have "any value as evidence for an earlier period than the end of the second or beginning of the third century, even if they have any value at all." i merely represent the opinion of others regarding those epistles. dr. lightfoot very greatly exaggerates the importance attached to the armenian version, and i call special attention to the passages in the above quotation which i have taken the liberty of italicising. i venture to say emphatically that, so far from being considered the "key of the position," this version has, with some exceptions, played a most subordinate and insignificant part in the controversy, and as dr. lightfoot has expressly mentioned certain writers, i will state how the case stands with regard to them. weiss, lipsius, uhlhorn, merx, and zahn certainly "more or less prominently" deal with them. denzinger, however, only refers to petermann's publication, which appeared while his own _brochure_ was passing through the press, in a short note at the end, and in again writing on the ignatian question, two years after,( ) he does not even allude to the armenian version. beyond the barest historical reference to petermann's work, hilgenfeld does not discuss the armenian version at all so much for the writers actually mentioned by dr. lightfoot. as for "the writers who have specially discussed the ignatian question during the last quarter of a century": cureton apparently did not think it worth while to add anything regarding the armenian version of petermann {xlvi} after its appearance; bunsen refutes petermann's arguments in a few pages of his "hippolytus";( ) baur, who wrote against bunsen and the curetonian letters, and, according to dr. lightfoot's representation, should have found this "the most formidable argument" against them, does not anywhere, subsequent to their publication, even allude to the armenian epistles; ewald, in a note of a couple of lines,( ) refers to petermann's epistles as identical with a post-eusebian manipulated form of the epistles which he mentions in a sentence in his text; dressel devotes a few unfavourable lines to them;( ) hefele( ) supports them at somewhat greater length; but bleek, volkmar, tischendorf, bohringer, scholten, and others have not thought them worthy of special notice, at any rate none of these nor any other writers of any weight have, so far as i am aware, introduced them into the controversy at all. the argument itself did not seem to me of sufficient importance to introduce into a discussion already too long and complicated, and i refer the reader to bunsen's reply to it, from which, however, i may quote the following lines: "but it appears to me scarcely serious to say: there are the seven letters in armenian, and i maintain, they prove that coreton's text is an incomplete extract, because, i think, i have found some syriac idioms in the armenian text! well, if that is not a joke, it simply proves, according to ordinary logic, that the seven letters must have once been translated into syriac. but how can it prove that the greek original of {xlvii} this supposed syriac version is the genuine text, and not an interpolated and partially forged one?" (l) dr. lightfoot blames me for omitting to introduce this argument, on the ground that "a discussion which, while assuming the priority of the curetonian letters, ignores this version altogether, has omitted a vital problem of which it was bound to give an account" now all this is sheer misrepresentation. i do not assume the priority of the curetonian epistles, and i examine all the passages contained in the seven greek epistles which have any bearing upon our gospels. passing on to another point, i say: "seven epistles have been selected out of fifteen extant, all equally purporting to be by ignatius, simply because only that number were mentioned by eusebius."( ) another passage is also quoted by dr. lightfoot, which will be found a little further on, where it is taken for facility of reference. upon this he writes as follows: this attempt to confound the seven epistles mentioned by eusebius with the other confessedly spurious epistles, as if they presented themselves to us with the same credentials, ignores all the important facts bearing on the question. ( ). theodoret, a century after eusebius, betrays no knowledge of any other epistles, and there is no distinct trace of the use of the confessedly spurious epistles till late in the sixth century at the earliest. ( ). the confessedly spurious epistles differ widely in style from the seven epistles, and betray the same hand which interpolated the seven epistles. in other words, they clearly formed part of the long recension in the first instance. ( ). they abound in anachronisms which point to an age later than eusebius, as the date of their composition.( ) although i do not really say in the above that no other pleas are advanced in favour of the seven epistles, {xlviii} i contend that, reduced to its simplest form, the argument for that special number rests mainly, if not altogether, upon their mention by eusebius. the very first reason ( ) advanced by dr. lightfoot to refute me is a practical admission of the correctness of my statement, for the eight epistles are put out of court because even theodoret, a century after eusebius, does not betray any knowledge of them, but the "silence of eusebius," the earlier witness, is infinitely more important, and it merely receives some increase of significance from the silence of theodoret. suppose, however, that eusebius had referred to any of them, how changed their position would have been! the epistles referred to would have attained the exceptional distinction which his mention has conferred upon the rest the fact is, moreover, that, throughout the controversy, the two divisions of epistles are commonly designated the "prae-" and "post-eusebian," making him the turning-point of the controversy. indeed, further on, dr. lightfoot himself admits: "the testimony of eusebius first differentiates them."( ) the argument ( and ) that the eight rejected epistles betray anachronisms and interpolations, is no refutation of my statement, for the same accusation is brought by the majority of critics against the vossian epistles. the fourth and last argument seems more directly addressed to a second paragraph quoted by dr. lightfoot, to which i refer above, and which i have reserved till now as it requires more detailed notice. it is this: "it is a total mistake to suppose that the seven epistles mentioned by eusebius have been transmitted to us in any special way. these epistles are mixed up in the medicean and corresponding ancient latin mss. with the other eight epistles, universally pronounced to be spurious, without distinction of any kind, and all have equal honour."( ) {xlix} i will at once give dr. lightfoot's comment on this, in contrast with the statement of a writer equally distinguished for learning and orthodoxy--dr. tregelles: dr. lightfoot. ( ). "it is not strictly true that the seven epistles are mixed up with the confessedly spurious epistles. in the greek and latin mss., as also in the armenian version, the spurious epistles come after the others; and this circumstance, combined with the facts already mentioned, plainly shows that they were a later addition, borrowed from the long recension to complete the body of ignatian letters."( ) dr. tregelles. "it is a mistake to speak of seven ignatian epistles in greek having been transmitted to us, for no such seven exist, except through their having been selected by editors from the medicean ms. which contains so much that is confessedly spurious;--a fact which some who imagine a diplomatic transmission of seven have overlooked."( ) i will further quote the words of cureton, for as dr. lightfoot advances nothing but assertions, it is well to meet him with the testimony of others rather than the mere reiteration of my own statement cureton says: "again, there is another circumstance which will naturally lead us to look with some suspicion upon the recension of the epistles of st. ignatius, as exhibited in the medicean ms., and in the ancient latin version corresponding with it, which is, that the epistles presumed to be the genuine production of that holy martyr are mixed up with others, which are almost universally allowed to be spurious. both in the greek and latin mss. all these are placed upon the same footing, and no distinction is drawn between them; and the only ground which has hitherto been a note to "home's int. to the holy scriptures," th ed., , iv. p. , note . the italics are in the original. "contemporary beview," february, , p. . dr. lightfoot makes the following important admission in a note: "the roman epistle indeed has been separated from its companions, and is embedded in the martyrology which stands at the end of this collection in the latin version, where doubtless it stood also in the greek, before the ms. of this latter was mutilated. otherwise the vossian epistles come together, and are followed by the confessedly spurious epistles in the greek and latin mss. in the armenian all the vossian epistles are together, and the confessedly spurious epistles follow. see zahn, ignatius von antiochien, p. ." {l} assumed for their separation has been the specification of some of them by eusebius and his omission of any mention of the others."' "the external evidence from the testimony of manuscripts in favour of the rejected greek epistles, with the exception of that to the philip-pians, is certainly greater than that in favour of those which have been received.' they are found in all the manuscripts, both greek and latin, in the same form; while the others exhibit two distinct and very different recensions, if we except the epistle to polycarp, in which the variations are very few. of these two recensions the shorter has been most generally received: the circumstance of its being shorter seems much to have influenced its reception; and the text of the medicean codex and of the two copies of the corresponding latin version belonging to cains college, cambridge, and corpus christi college, oxford, has been adopted.... in all these there is no distinction whatever drawn between the former and latter epistles: all are placed upon the same basis; and there is no ground whatever to conclude either that the arranger of the greek recension or the translator of the latin version esteemed one to be better or more genuine than another. nor can any prejudice result to the epistles to the tarsians, to the antiochians, and to hero, from the circumstance of their being placed after the others in the collection; for they are evidently arranged in chronological order, and rank after the rest as having been written from philippi, at which place ignatius is said to have arrived after he had despatched the previous letters. so far, therefore, as the evidence of all the existing copies, latin as well as greek, of both the recensions is to be considered, it is certainly in favour of the rejected epistles, rather than of those which have been retained." ( ) proceeding from counter-statements to actual facts, i will very briefly show the order in which these epistles have been found in some of the principal mss. one of the earliest published was the ancient latin version of eleven epistles edited by j. faber stapulensis in , which was at least quoted in the ninth century, and which in the subjoined table i shall mark a,( ) and which also exhibits the order of cod. vat , assigned to the eleventh century.( ) the next (b) is a greek ms. edited by valentinus pacæus in ,( ) and the order at {li} the same time represents that of the cod. pal. .( ) the third (c) is the ancient latin translation, referred to above, published by archbishop usher.( ) the fourth (d) is the celebrated medicean ms. assigned to the eleventh century, and published by vossiusin .( ) this also represents the order of the cod. casanatensis g. v. .( ) i italicise the rejected epistles: (see scanned page in the html file, ed.) i have given the order in mss. containing the "long recension" as well as the vossian, because, however much some may desire to exclude them, the variety of arrangement is notable, and presents features which have an undeniable bearing upon this question. taking the vossian ms., it is obvious that, without any distinction whatever between the genuine and the spurious, it contains {lii} three of the false epistles, and _does not contain the so-called genuine epistle to the romans at all_. the epistle to the romans, in fact, is, to use dr. lightfoot's own expression, "embedded in the martyrology," which is as spurious as any of the epistles. this circumstance alone would justify the assertion which dr. lightfoot contradicts. i must now, in order finally to dispose of this matter of notes, turn for a short time to consider objections raised by dr. westcott. whilst i have to thank him for greater courtesy, i regret that i must point out serious errors into which he has fallen in his statements regarding my references which, as matters of fact, admit of practical test. before proceeding to them i may make one or two general observations. dr. westcott says: "i may perhaps express my surprise that a writer who is quite capable of thinking for himself should have considered it worth his while to burden his pages with lists of names and writings, arranged, for the most part, alphabetically, which have in very many cases no value whatever for a scholar, while they can only oppress the general reader with a vague feeling that all 'profound' critics are on one side. the questions to be discussed must be decided by evidence and by argument and not by authority."( ) now the fact is that hitherto, in england, argument and evidence have almost been ignored in connection with the great question discussed in this work, and it has practically been decided by the authority of the church, rendered doubly potent by force of habit and transmitted reverence. the orthodox works usually written on the subject have, to a very great extent, suppressed the objections raised by a mass of learned and independent critics, or treated them as insignificant, and worthy of little more than a passing word of pious indignation. at the same time, therefore, that i endeavour, to {liii} the best of my ability, to decide these questions by evidence and argument, in opposition to mere ecclesiastical authority, i refer readers desirous of further pursuing the subject to works where they may find them dis-. cussed. i must be permitted to add, that i do not consider i uselessly burden my pages by references to critics who confirm the views in the text or discuss them, for it is right that earnest thinkers should be told the state of opinion, and recognize that belief is not so easy and matter of course a thing as they have been led to suppose, or the unanimity quite so complete as english divines have often seemed to represent it dr. westcott, however, omits to state that i as persistently refer to writers who oppose, as to those who favour, my own conclusions. dr. westcott proceeds to make the accusation which i now desire to investigate. he says: "writers are quoted as holding on independent grounds an opinion which is involved in their characteristic assumptions. and more than this, the references are not unfrequently actually misleading. one example will show that i do not speak too strongly."(l) dr. westcott has scrutinized this work with great minuteness, and, as i shall presently explain, he has selected his example with evident care. the idea of illustrating the vast mass of references in these volumes by a single instance is somewhat startling, but to insinuate that a supposed contradiction pointed out in one note runs through the whole work, as he does, if i rightly understand his subsequent expressions, is scarcely worthy of dr. westcott, although i am sure he does not mean to be unfair. the example selected is as follows: "it has been demonstrated that ignatius was not sent to rome at all, but suffered martyrdom in antioch itself on the ()th december, a.d. {liv} when he was condemned to be cast to wild beasts in the amphitheatre, in consequence of the fanatical excitement produced by the earthquake which took place on the th of that month. "' the references in support of these statements are the following: baur, urspr. d. epiec.tub. zeitschr. f.theol. , h. , p. anm.; bretschneider, probabilia, &c, p. ; bleek, einl.n. t., p. ; guericke, h*bucht kt #., i p. ; hagenbach, k. g., i. p. f.; davidson, introd. n. t.,i. p. ; mayerhoff, eitll. petr. schr., p. ; scholten, die sit. zeugnisse, p. , p. f.; volkmar, der ursprung, p. ; r'buch einl. apocr., i. p. f., p. . volkmar, wuch einl. apocr., i. p. ff., f.; der ursprung, p. ff.; baur, ursp. d. episc. tub. zeitschr. f. th. , h. , p. f.; gesch. chr. kirehe, , i. p. , anm. .; davidson, introd. n. t., lp. ; scholten, die hit. zeugnisse, p. f.; cf. francke, zur gesch. trojans, u. s. w. , p. f.; hilgenfeld, die ap. vster, p. . upon this dr. westcott remarks: "such an array of authorities, drawn from different schools, cannot but appear overwhelming; and the fact that about half of them are quoted twice over emphasizes the implied precision of their testimony as to the two points affirmed." dr. westcott, however, has either overlooked or omitted to state the fact that, although some of the writers are quoted twice, the two notes differ in almost every particular, many of the names in note being absent from note , other names being inserted in the latter which do not appear in the former, an alteration being in most cases made in the place referred to, and the order in which the authorities are placed being significantly varied. for instance, in note the reference to volkmar is the last, but it is the first in note ; whilst a similar transposition of order takes place in his works, and alterations in the pages. the references in note , in fact, are given for the date occurring in the course of the sentence, whilst those in note , placed at the end, are intended to support the whole statement which is {lv} made. i must, however, explain an omission, which is pretty obvious, but which i regret may have misled dr. westcott in regard to note , although it does not affect note . headers are probably aware that there has been, amongst other points, a difference of opinion not only as to the place, but also the date of the martyrdom of ignatius. i have in every other case carefully stated the question of date, and my omission in this instance is, i think, the only exception in the book. the fact is, that i had originally in the text the words which i now add to the note: "the martyrdom has been variously dated about a.d. , or a.d. - , but whether assigning the event to home or to antioch a majority of critics of all shades of opinion have adopted the later date." thinking it unnecessary, under the circumstances, to burden the text with this, i removed it with the design of putting the statement at the head of note , with reference to "a.d. " in the text, but unfortunately an interruption at the time prevented the completion of this intention, as well.as the addition of some fuller references to the writers quoted, which had been omitted, and the point, to my infinite regret, was overlooked. the whole of the authorities in note , therefore, do not support the apparent statement of martyrdom in antioch, although they all confirm the date, for which i really referred to them. with this explanation, and marking the omitted references( ) by placing them within brackets, i proceed to analyze the two notes in contrast with dr. westcott's statements. these consist only of an additional page of baur's work first quoted, and a reference to another of his works quoted in the second note, but accidentally left out of the note . {lvi} see page scan, ed. {lvii} see page scan, ed. {lviii} see page scan, ed. {lix} it will thus be seen that the whole of these authorities confirm the later date assigned to the martyrdom, and that baur, in the note in which dr. westcott finds "nothing in any way bearing upon the history except a passing supposition," really advances a weighty argument for it and against the earlier date, and as dr. westcott considers, rightly, that argument should decide everything, i am surprised that he has not perceived the propriety of my referring to arguments as well as statements of evidence. to sum up the opinions expressed, i may state that whilst all the nine writers support the later date, for which purpose they were quoted, three of them (bleek, guericke, and mayerhoff) ascribe the martyrdom to rome, one (brctschneider) mentions no place, one (hagenbach) is doubtful, but leans to antioch, and the other four declare for the martyrdom in antioch. nothing, however, could show more conclusively the purpose of note , which i have explained, than this very contradiction, and the fact that i claim for the general statement in the text, regarding the martyrdom in antioch itself in opposition to the legend of the journey to and death in rome, only the authorities in note , which i shall now proceed to analyse in contrast with dr. westcott's statements, and here beg the favour of the readers attention. (see page scans, lix to lxii ed.) {lxiii} at the close of this analysis dr. westcott sums up the result as follows: "in this case, therefore, again, volkmar alone offers any arguments in support of the statement in the text; and the final result of the references is, that the alleged 'demonstration' is, at the most, what scholten calls 'a not groundless conjecture.'"( ) on the canon, preface th ed. p. xxiv. dr. westcott adds, in a note, "it may be worth while to add that in spite of the profuse display of learning in connexion with ignatius, i do not see even in the second edition any reference to the full and elaborate work of zahn." i might reply to this that my ms. had left my hands before zahn's work had reached england, but, moreover, the work contains nothing new to which reference was necessary. {lxiv} it is scarcely possible to imagine a more complete misrepresentation of the fact than the statement that "volkmar alone offers any arguments in support of the statement in the text," and it is incomprehensible upon any ordinary theory. my mere sketch cannot possibly convey an adequate idea of the elaborate arguments of volkmar, baur, and hilgenfeld, but i hope to state their main features, a few pages on. with regard to dr. westcott's remark on the "alleged 'demonstration,'" it must be evident that when a writer states anything to be "demonstrated" he expresses his own belief. it is impossible to secure absolute unanimity of opinion, and the only question in such a case is whether i refer to writers, in connection with the circumstances which i affirm to be demonstrated, who advance arguments and evidence bearing upon it. a critic is quite at liberty to say that the arguments are insufficient, but he is not at liberty to deny that there are any arguments at all when the elaborate reasoning of men like volkmar, baur and hilgenfeld is referred to. therefore, when he goes on to say: "it seems quite needless to multiply comments on these results. any one who will candidly consider this analysis will, i believe, agree with me in thinking that such a style of annotation, which runs through the whole work, is justly characterized as frivolous and misleading."( ) dr. westcott must excuse my retorting that, not my annotation, but his own criticism of it, endorsed by professor lightfoot, is "frivolous and misleading," and i venture to hope that this analysis, tedious as it has been, may once for all establish the propriety and substantial accuracy of my references. as dr. westcott does not advance any further arguments {lxv} of his own in regard to the ignatian controversy, i may now return to dr. lightfoot, and complete my reply to his objections; but i must do so with extreme brevity, as i have already devoted too much space to this subject, and must now come to a close. to the argument that it is impossible to suppose that soldiers such as the "ten leopards" described in the epistles would allow a prisoner, condemned to wild beasts for professing christianity, deliberately to write long epistles at every stage of his journey, promulgating the very doctrines for which he was condemned, as well as to hold the freest intercourse with deputations from the various churches, dr. lightfoot advances arguments, derived from zahn, regarding the roman procedure in cases that are said to be "known." these cases, however, are neither analogous, nor have they the force which is assumed. that christians imprisoned for their religious belief should receive their nourishment, while in prison, from friends, is anything but extraordinary, and that bribes should secure access to them in many cases, and some mitigation of suffering, is possible. the case of ignatius, however, is very different. if the meaning of [--greek--] be that, although receiving bribes, the "ten leopards" only became more cruel, the very reverse of the leniency and mild treatment ascribed to the roman procedure is described by the writer himself as actually taking place, and certainly nothing approaching a parallel to the correspondence of pseudo-ignatius can be pointed out in any known instance. the case of saturus and perpetua, even if true, is no confirmation, the circumstances being very different; (l) but in {lxvi} fact there is no evidence whatever that the extant history was written by either of them,( ) but on the contrary, i maintain, every reason to believe that it was not. dr. lightfoot advances the instance of paul as a case in point of a christian prisoner treated with great consideration, and who "writes letters freely, receives visits from his friends, communicates with churches and individuals as he desires."( ) it is scarcely possible to imagine two cases more dissimilar than those of pseudo-ignatius and paul, as narrated in the "acts of the apostles," although doubtless the story of the former has been framed upon some of the lines of the latter. whilst ignatius is condemned to be cast to the wild beasts as a christian, paul is not condemned at all, but stands in the position of a roman citizen, rescued from infuriated jews (xxiii. ), repeatedly declared by his judges to have done nothing worthy of death or of bonds (xxv. , xxvi. ), and who might have been set at liberty but that he had appealed to cæsar (xxv. f., xxvi. ). his position was one which secured the sympathy of the roman soldiers. ignatius 'fights with beasts from syria even unto rome,' and is cruelly treated by his "ten leopards," but paul is represented as receiving very different treatment. felix commands that his own people should be allowed to come and minister to him (xxiv. ), and when the voyage is commenced it is said that julius, who had charge of paul, treated him courteously, and gave him liberty to go to see his friends at sidon (xxvii. ). at rome he was allowed to live by himself with a single soldier to guard him (xxviii. ), and he continued for two years in his own hired house. {lxvii} these circumstances are totally different from those under which the epistles of ignatius are said to have been written. "but the most powerful testimony," dr. lightfoot goes on to say, "is derived from the representations of a heathen writer."( ) the case of peregrinus, to which he refers, seems to me even more unfortunate than that of paul. of peregrinus himself, historically, we really know little or nothing, for the account of lucian is scarcely received as serious by any one. lucian narrates that this peregrinus proteus, a cynic philosopher, having been guilty of parricide and other crimes, found it convenient to leave his own country. in the course of his travels he fell in with christians and learnt their doctrines, and, according to lucian, the christians soon were mere children in his hands, so that he became in his own person "prophet, high-priest, and ruler of a synagogue," and further "they spoke of him as a god, used him as a law-giver, and elected him their chief man."( ) after a time he was put in prison for his new faith, which lucian says was a real service to him afterwards in his impostures. during the time he was in prison, he is said to have received those services from christians which dr. lightfoot quotes. peregrinus was afterwards set at liberty by the governor of syria, who loved philosophy,( ) and travelled about living in great comfort at the expense of the christians, until at last they quarrelled in consequence, lucian thinks, of his eating some forbidden food. finally, peregrinus ended his career by throwing himself into the flames of a funeral pile during the olympian games. an earthquake is said to have taken {lxviii} place at the time; a vulture flew out from the pile crying out with a human voice; and shortly after peregrinus rose again and appeared clothed in white raiment unhurt by the fire. now this writing, of which i have given the barest sketch, is a direct satire upon christians, or even, as baur affirms, "a parody of the history of jesus."( ) there are no means of ascertaining that any of the events of the christian career of peregrinus were true, but it is obvious that, lucian's policy was to exaggerate the facility of access to prisoners, as well as the assiduity and attention of the christians to peregrinus, the ease with which they were duped being the chief point of the satire. there is another circumstance which must be mentioned. lucian's account of peregrinus is claimed by supporters of the ignatian epistles as evidence for them.( ) "the singular correspondence in this narrative with the account of ignatius, combined with some striking coincidences of expression," they argue, show "that lucian was acquainted with the ignatian history, if not with the ignatian letters." these are the words of dr. lightfoot, although he guards himself, in referring to this argument, by the words: "if it be true," and does not express his own opinion; but he goes on to say: "at all events it is conclusive for the matter in hand, as showing that christian prisoners were treated in the very way described in these epistles."( ) on the contrary, it is in no case conclusive of anything. if it were true that lucian employed, as the basis of his satire, the ignatian epistles and martyrology, {lxix} it is clear that his narrative cannot be used as independent testimony for the truth of the statements regarding the treatment of christian prisoners. on the other hand, as this cannot be shown, his story remains a mere satire with very little historical value. apart from all this, however, the case of peregrinus, a man confined in prison for a short time, under a favourable governor, and not pursued with any severity, is no parallel to that of ignatius condemned _ad bestias_ and, according to his own express statement, cruelly treated by the "ten leopards"; and further the liberty of pseudo-ignatius must greatly have exceeded all that is said of peregrinus, if he was able to write such epistles, and hold such free intercourse as they represent. i will now, in the briefest manner possible, indicate the arguments of the writers referred to in the note(l) attacked by dr. westcott, in which he cannot find any relevancy, but which, in my opinion, demonstrate that ignatius was not sent to rome at all, but suffered martyrdom in antioch itself. the reader who wishes to go minutely into the matter must be good enough to consult the writers there cited, and i will only sketch the case here, without specifically indicating the source of each argument. where i add any particulars i will, when necessary, give my authorities. the ignatian epistles and martyrologies set forth that, during a general persecution of christians, in syria at least, ignatius was condemned by trajan, when he wintered in antioch during the parthian war, to be taken to rome and cast to wild beasts in the amphitheatre. instead of being sent to rome by the short sea voyage, he is represented as taken thither by the long and incomparably more difficult land route. the ten soldiers who {lxx} guard him are described by himself as only rendered more cruel by the presents made to them to secure kind treatment for him, so that not in the amphitheatre only, but all the way from syria to rome, by night and day, by sea and land, he "fights with beasts." notwithstanding this severity, the martyr freely receives deputations from the various churches, who, far from being molested, are able to have constant intercourse with him, and even to accompany him in his journey. he not only converses with these freely, but he is represented as writing long epistles to the various churches which, instead of containing the last exhortations and farewell words which might be considered natural from the expectant martyr, are filled with advanced views of church government, and the dignity of the episcopate. these circumstances, at the outset, excite grave suspicions of the truth of the documents, and of the story which they set forth. when we inquire whether the alleged facts of the case are supported by historical data, the reply is emphatically adverse. all that is known of the treatment of christians during the reign of trajan, as well as of the character of the emperor, is opposed to the supposition that ignatius could have been condemned by trajan himself, or even by a provincial governor, to be taken to rome and there cast to the beasts. it is well known that under trajan there was no general persecution of christians, although there may have been instances in which prominent members of the body were either punished or fell victims to popular fury and superstition.( ) dean milman says: "trajan, indeed, is absolved, at least by the almost general voice of antiquity, from the crime of persecuting the christians." in a note, he adds: "excepting of ignatius, probably of simeon of jerusalem, there is no authentic martyrdom in the reign of trajan."--hist, of christianity, , ii. p. . {lxxi} an instance of this kind was the martyrdom of simeon, bishop of jerusalem, reported by hegesippus. he was not condemned _ad bestias_, however, and much less deported to rome for the purpose. why should ignatius have been so exceptionally treated? in fact, even during the persecutions under marcus aurelius, although christians in syria were frequently enough cast to the beasts, there is no instance recorded in which any one condemned to this fate was sent to rome. such a sentence is quite at variance with the clement character of trajan and his principles of government. neander, in a passage quoted by baur, says: "as he (trajan), like pliny, considered christianity mere fanaticism, he also probably thought that if severity were combined with clemency, if too much noise were not made about it, the open demonstration not left unpunished but also minds not stirred up by persecution, the fanatical enthusiasm would most easily cool down, and the matter by degrees come to an end."( ) this was certainly the policy which mainly characterized his reign. now not only would such a severe sentence have been contrary to such principles, but the agitation excited would have been enormously increased by sending the martyr a long journey by land through asia, and allowing him to pass through some of the principal cities, hold constant intercourse with the various christian communities, and address long epistles to them. with the fervid desire for martyrdom then prevalent, such a journey would have been a triumphal progress, spreading everywhere excitement and enthusiasm. it may not be out of place, as an indication of the results of impartial examination, to {lxxii} point out that neander's inability to accept the ignatian epistles largely rests on his disbelief of the whole tradition of this sentence and martyr-journey. "we do not recognize the emperor trajan in this narrative," (the martyrology) he says, "therefore cannot but doubt every thing which is related by this document, as well as that, during this reign, christians can have been cast to the wild beasts."( ) if, for a moment, we suppose that, instead of being condemned by trajan himself, ignatius received his sentence from a provincial governor, the story does not gain greater probability. it is not credible that such an official would have ventured to act so much in opposition to the spirit of the emperor's government besides, if such a governor did pronounce so severe a sentence, why did he not execute it in antioch? why send the prisoner to rome? by doing so he made all the more conspicuous a severity which was not likely to be pleasing to the clement trajan. the cruelty which dictated a condemnation _ad bestias_ would have been more gratified by execution on the spot, and there is besides no instance known, even during the following general persecution, of christians being sent for execution in rome. the transport to rome is in no case credible, and the utmost that can be admitted is, that ignatius, like simeon of jerusalem, may have been condemned to death during this reign, more especially if the event be associated with some sudden outbreak of superstitious fury against the christians, to which the martyr may at once have fallen a victim. we are not without indications of such a cause operating in the case of ignatius. {lxxiii} it is generally admitted that the date of trajan's visit to antioch is a.d. , when he wintered there during the parthian war. an earthquake occurred on the th december of that year, which was well calculated to excite popular superstition. it may not be out of place to quote here the account of the earthquake given by dean milmau, who, although he mentions a different date, and adheres to the martyrdom in rome, still associates the condemnation of ignatius with the earthquake. he says: "nevertheless, at that time there were circumstances which account with singular likelihood for that sudden outburst of persecution in antioch.... at this very time an earthquake, more than usually terrible and destructive, shook the cities of the east. antioch suffered its most appalling ravages--antioch, crowded with the legionaries prepared for the emperor's invasion of the east, with ambassadors and tributary kings from all parts of the east. the city shook through all its streets; houses, palaces, theatres, temples fell crashing down. many were killed: the consul pedo died of his hurts. the emperor himself hardly escaped through a window, and took refuge in the circus, where he passed some days in the open air. whence this terrible blow but from the wrath of the gods, who must be appeased by unusual sacrifices? this was towards the end of january; early in february the christian bishop, ignatius, was arrested. we know how, during this century, at every period of public calamity, whatever that calamity might be, the cry of the panic-stricken heathens was, 'the christians to the lions!' it may be that, in trajan's humanity, in order to prevent a general massacre by the infuriated populace, or to give greater solemnity to the sacrifice, the execution was ordered to {lxxiv} take place, not in antioch, but in rome."( ) i contend that these reasons, on the contrary, render execution in antioch infinitely more probable. to continue, however: the earthquake occurred on the th, and the martyrdom of ignatius took place on the th december, just a week after the earthquake. his remains, as we know from chrysostom and others, were, as an actual fact, interred at antioch. the natural inference is that the martyrdom, the only part of the ignatian story which is credible, occurred not in rome but in antioch itself, in consequence of the superstitious fury against the [--greek--] aroused by the earthquake. i will now go more into the details of the brief statements i have just made, and here we come for the first time to john malalas. in the first place he mentions the occurrence of the earthquake on the th december. i will quote dr. lightfoot's own rendering of his further important statement. he says: "the words of john malalas are: 'the same king trajan was residing in the same city (antioch) when the visitation of god (i.e. the earthquake) occurred. and at that time the holy ignatius, the bishop of the city of antioch, was martyred (or bore testimony), [--greek--] before him [--greek--]; for he was exasperated against him, because he reviled him.'"( ) dr. lightfoot endeavours in every way to discredit this statement. he argues that malalas tells foolish stories about other matters, and, therefore, is not to be believed here; but so simple a piece of information may well be correctly conveyed by a writer who elsewhere may record stupid traditions.( ) if the narrative of foolish stories and fabulous traditions is to exclude belief in everything else stated by those who relate them, the {lxxv} whole of the fathers are disposed of at one fell swoop, for they all do so. dr. lightfoot also asserts that the theory of the cause of the martyrdom advanced by volkmar "receives no countenance from the story of malalas, who gives a wholly different reason--the irritating language used to the emperor."(l) on the other hand, it in no way contradicts it, for ignatius can only have "reviled" trajan when brought before him, and his being taken before him may well have been caused by the fury excited by the earthquake, even if the language of the bishop influenced his condemnation; the whole statement of malalas is in perfect harmony with the theory in its details, and in the main, of course, directly supports it. then dr. lightfoot actually makes use of the following extraordinary argument: "but it may be worth while adding that the error of malalas is capable of easy explanation. he has probably misinterpreted some earlier authority, whose language lent itself to misinterpretation. the words [--greek--], which were afterwards used especially of martyrdom, had in the earlier ages a wider sense, including other modes of witnessing to the faith: the expression [--greek--] again is ambiguous and might denote either 'during the reign of trajan,' or 'in the presence of trajan.' a blundering writer like malalas might have stumbled over either expression."( ) this is a favourite device. in case his abuse of poor malalas should not sufficiently discredit him, dr. lightfoot attempts to explain away his language. it would be difficult indeed to show that the words [--greek--], already used in that sense in the new testament, were not, at the date at which any record of the martyrdom of ignatius which malalas could have had before him was written, employed to express martyrdom, when applied to such a case, as dr. lightfoot indeed has in the {lxxvi} first instance rendered the phrase. even zahn, whom dr. lightfoot so implicitly follows, emphatically decides against him on both points. "the [--greek--] together with [--greek--] can only signify 'coram trajano' ('in the presence of trajan'), and [--greek--] only the execution."( ) let any one simply read over dr. lightfoot's own rendering, which i have quoted above, and he will see that such quibbles are excluded, and that, on the contrary, malalas seems excellently well and directly to have interpreted his earlier authority. that the statement of malalas does not agree with the reports of the fathers is no real objection, for we have good reason to believe that none of them had information from any other source than the ignatian epistles themselves, or tradition. eusebius evidently had not. irenæus, origen, and some later fathers tell us nothing about him. jerome and chrysostom clearly take their accounts from these sources. malalas is the first who, by his variation, proves that he had another and different authority before him, and in abandoning the martyr-journey to rome, his account has infinitely greater apparent probability. malalas lived at antioch, which adds some weight to his statement. it is objected that so also did chrysostom, and at an earlier period, and yet he repeats the roman story. this, however, is no valid argument against malalas. chrysostom was too good a churchman to doubt the story of epistles so much tending to edification, which were in wide circulation, and had been quoted by earlier fathers. it is in no way surprising that, some two centuries and a half after the martyrdom, he should quietly have accepted the representations of the epistles purporting to have been {lxxvii} written by the martyr himself, and that their story should have shaped the prevailing tradition. the remains of ignatius, as we are informed by chrysostom and jerome, long remained interred in the cemetery of antioch, but finally,--in the time of theodosius, it is said,--were translated with great pomp and ceremony to a building which,--such is the irony of events,--had previously been a temple of fortune. the story told, of course, is that the relics of the martyr had been carefully collected in the coliseum and carried from rome to antioch. after reposing there for some centuries, the relics, which are said to have been transported from rome to antioch, were, about the seventh century, carried back from antioch to rome.( ) the natural and more simple conclusion is that, instead of this double translation, the bones of ignatius had always remained in antioch, where he had suffered martyrdom, and the tradition that they had been brought back from rome was merely the explanation which reconciled the fact of their actually being in antioch with the legend of the ignatian epistles. the th of december is the date assigned to the death of ignatius in the martyrology,( ) and zahn admits that this interpretation is undeniable.( ) moreover, the anniversary of his death was celebrated on that day in the greek churches and throughout the east. in the latin church it is kept on the st of february. there can be little doubt that this was the day of the translation of the relics to rome, and this was evidently the i need not refer to the statement of nicephorus that these relics were first brought from rome to constantinople and afterwards translated to antioch. {lxxviii} view of ruinart, who, although he could not positively contradict the views of his own church, says: "ignatii festum graeci vigesima die mensis decembris celebrant, quo ipsum passum fuisse acta testantur; latini vero die prima februarii, an ob aliquam sacrarum ejus reli-quiarum translationem? plures enim fuisse constat."( ) zahn( ) states that the feast of the translation in later calendars was celebrated on the th january, and he points out the evident ignorance which prevailed in the west regarding ignatius.( ) on the one hand, therefore, all the historical data which we possess regarding the reign and character of trajan discredit the story that ignatius was sent to rme to be exposed to beasts in the coliseum; and all the positive evidence which exists, independent of the epistles themselves, tends to establish the fact that he suffered martyrdom in antioch itself. on the other hand, all the evidence which is offered for the statement that ignatius was sent to rme is more or less directly based upon the representations of the letters, the authenticity of which is in discussion, and it is surrounded with improbabilities of every kind. and what is the value of any evidence emanating from the ignatian epistles and martyrologies? there are three martyrologies which, as ewald says, are "the one more fabulous than the other." there are fifteen epistles all equally purporting to be by {xxix} ignatius, and most of them handed down together in mss., without any distinction. three of these, in latin only, are universally rejected, as are also other five epistles, of which there are greek, latin, and other versions. of the remaining seven there are two forms, one called the long recension and another shorter, known as the vossian epistles. the former is almost unanimously rejected as shamefully interpolated and falsified; and a majority of critics assert that the text of the vossian epistles is likewise very impure. besides these there is a still shorter version of three epistles only, the cure-tonian, which many able critics declare to be the only genuine letters of ignatius, whilst a still greater number, both from internal and external reasons, deny the authenticity of the epistles in any form. the second and third centuries teem with pseudonymic literature, but i venture to say that pious fraud has never been more busy and conspicuous than in dealing with the martyr of antioch. the mere statement of the simple and acknowledged facts regarding the ignatian epistles is ample justification of the assertion, which so mightily offends dr. lightfoot, that "the whole of the ignatian literature is a mass of falsification and fraud." even my indignant critic himself has not ventured to use as genuine more than the three short syriac letters( ) out of this mass of forgery which he rebukes me for holding so cheap. documents which lie under such grave and permanent suspicion cannot prove anything. as i have shown, however, the vossian epistles, whatever the value of their testimony, so far from supporting the claims advanced in favour of our gospels, rather discredit them. {lxxx} i have now minutely followed professor lightfoot and dr. westcott in their attacks upon me in connection with eusebius and the ignatian epistles, and i trust that i have shown once for all that the charges of "misrepresentation" and "misstatement" so lightly and liberally advanced, far from being well-founded, recoil upon themselves. it is impossible in a work like this, dealing with such voluminous materials, to escape errors of detail, as both of these gentlemen bear witness, but i have at least conscientiously endeavoured to be fair, and i venture to think that few writers have ever more fully laid before readers the actual means of judging of the accuracy of every statement which has been made. before closing, i must say a few words regarding another of my critics, who is, however, of a very different order. my system of criticism is naturally uncongenial to mr. matthew arnold, but while he says so with characteristic vigour, he likewise speaks of this work with equally characteristic generosity, and i cordially thank him. i could only be classed by mistake amongst the "objectors" to "literature and dogma," and however different may be the procedure in "supernatural religion," there is fundamental agreement between the two works, and the one may be considered the complement of the other. some one must do the "pounding," if religion is to be a matter of belief and not of mere shifty opinion. we really address two distinct classes of readers. the reader who "has read _and accepted_" mr. matthew arnold's "half dozen lines about the composition of the gospels," and his "half dozen pages about miracles," may in one sense be "just in the same position as when he has read "the whole of this work,( ) but {lxxxi} i have written for those who do not accept them, and who,--as i think rightly,--distrust the conclusions merely forced upon them by ordinary "reflection and experience," and in such important matters demand evidence of a much more tangible kind. i would put it to mr. arnold whether, in seeming to depreciate any attempt to systematize and carry to logical conclusions the whole argument regarding the reality of miracles and divine revelation, he does not do himself injustice, and enunciate a dangerous doctrine. no doubt his own clear insight and wide culture have enabled him to discern truth more surely, and with less apparent effort, than most of those whom he addresses, but in encouraging, as he thus practically does, the adoption by others of religious views with very little trouble or thought, which have certainly cost himself years of training and study, he both cheapens his own intellectual labour, and advocates a superficiality which already has too many attractions. whether he address readers whose belief is already established, or those who are ready to accept it second hand from himself, it seems to me that no work should be unwelcome which supplies evidence of the results, which it has suited his own immediate purpose merely to assume. mr. matthew arnold objects that my book leaves the reader "with the feeling that the bible stands before him like a fair tree all stripped, torn and defaced, not at all like a tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations,"( ) but if this be the case, i submit that it is a necessary process through which the bible must go, before it can be successfully transplanted into that healthy soil, in which alone its leaves can truly be for the contemporary boviow," october, , p. . {lxxxii} healing of any one. under such circumstances, destructive must precede constructive criticism. it is only when we clearly recognize that the bible is not the "word of god" that we can worthily honour and "enjoy" it as the word of man. mr. matthew arnold finely says, with regard to what jesus said and did, that: "his reporters were incapable of rendering it, he was so much above them"; and he rightly considers that the governing idea of our criticism of the four evangelists should be "to make out what in their report of jesus, is jesus, and what is the reporters." i hold, however, that it is only after such an examination as i have endeavoured to carry out, and which for the time must seem hard and wanting in sympathetic appreciation, that most persons educated in christendom can rightly put any such governing idea into practice. it is only when we are entitled to reject the theory of miraculous divine revelation that the bible attains its full beauty, losing the blots and anomalies which it presented in its former character, and acquiring wondrous significance as the expression of the hopes and aspirations of humanity, from which every man may learn wisdom and derive inspiration. the value of such a book seems to me indestructible. i heartily sympathise with mr. arnold's desire to secure due appreciation for the venerable volume, of the beauty of which he has so fine and delicate a perception. a truer insight into its meaning may certainly be imparted by such eloquent and appreciating criticism, and no one is a better judge than mr. matthew arnold of the necessity to plead for the book, with those who are inclined thoughtlessly to reject it along with the errors which have grown with and been based upon it. but, in the end, every man who {lxxxiii} has a mind and a heart must love and honour the bible, and he who has neither is beyond the reach of persuasion. this work has been revised throughout.( ) it was, as i stated at the time, originally carried through the press under very great difficulties, and the revision of details, upon which i had counted, was not only prevented, but, beyond a careful revision of the first part for the second edition, circumstances have until now even prevented my seriously reading through the work since it has been in print. to those who have been good enough to call my attention to errors, or to suggest improvements, i return very sincere thanks. in making this revision i have endeavoured to modify unimportant points, in some of which i have been misunderstood, so as to avoid as far as possible raising difficulties, or inviting discussion without real bearing upon the main argument. as i know the alacrity with which some critics seize upon such points as serious concessions, i beg leave to say that i have not altered anything from change of opinion. i trust that greater clearness and accuracy may have been secured. march th, . it is right to mention that, whilst i have examined a great many of the references, i have not had time to verify them all. preface to the first edition. the present work is the result of many years of earnest and serious investigation, undertaken in the first instance for the regulation of personal belief, and now published as a contribution towards the establishment of truth in the minds of others who are seeking for it. the author's main object has been conscientiously and fully to state the facts of the case, to make no assertions the grounds for which are not clearly given, and as far as possible to place before the reader the materials from which a judgment may be intelligently formed regarding the important subject discussed. the great teacher is reported to have said: "be ye approved money-changers," wisely discerning the gold of truth, and no man need hesitate honestly to test its reality, and unflinchingly to reject base counterfeits. it is obvious that the most indispensable requisite in regard to religion is that it should be true. no specious hopes or flattering promises can have the slightest value unless they be genuine and based upon substantial realities. fear of the results of investigation, therefore, should deter no man, for the issue in any case is gain: emancipation from delusion, or increase of assurance. it is poor honour to sequester a creed from healthy handling, or to shrink from the serious examination of its doctrines. that which is true in religion cannot be shaken; that which is false no one can desire to preserve. {lxxxvi} preface to the second edition. the author has taken advantage of the issue of a second edition to revise this work. he has re-written portions of the first part, and otherwise re-arranged it. he hopes that the argument has thus been made more clear and consecutive. introduction. theoretically, the duty of adequate inquiry into the truth of any statement of serious importance before believing it is universally admitted. practically, no duty is more universally neglected. this is more especially the case in regard to religion, in which our concern is so great, yet the credentials of which so few personally examine. the difficulty of such an investigation and the inability of most men to pursue it, whether from want of opportunity or want of knowledge, are no doubt the chief reasons for this neglect; but another, and scarcely less potent, obstacle has probably been the odium which has been attached to any doubt regarding the dominant religion, as well as the serious, though covert, discouragement of the church to all critical examination of the title-deeds of christianity. the spirit of doubt, if not of intelligent inquiry, has, however, of late years become too strong for repression, and, at the present day, the pertinency of the question of a german writer: "are we still christians?" receives unconscious {xcii} illustration from many a popular pulpit, and many a social discussion. the prevalent characteristic of popular theology in england, at this time, may be said to be a tendency to eliminate from christianity, with thoughtless dexterity, every supernatural element which does not quite accord with current opinion, and yet to ignore the fact that, in so doing, ecclesiastical christianity has practically been altogether abandoned. this tendency is fostered with profoundly illogical zeal by many distinguished men within the church itself, who endeavour to arrest for a moment the pursuing wolves of doubt and unbelief which press upon it, by practically throwing to them, scrap by scrap, the very doctrines which constitute the claims of christianity to be regarded as a divine revelation at all. the moral christianity which they hope to preserve, noble though it be, has not one feature left to distinguish it as a miraculously communicated religion. christianity itself distinctly pretends to be a direct divine revelation of truths beyond the natural attainment of the human intellect. to submit the doctrines thus revealed, therefore, to criticism, and to clip and prune them down to the standard of human reason, whilst at the same time their supernatural character is maintained, is an obvious absurdity. christianity must either be recognized to be a divine revelation beyond man's criticism, and in that case its doctrines must be received even though reason cannot be satisfied, or the claims of christianity to be such a divine revelation must be disallowed, in which case it becomes the legitimate subject of criticism like every other human system. one or other of these alternatives must be adopted, but to {xciii} assert that christianity is divine, and yet to deal with it as human, is illogical and wrong. when we consider the vast importance of the interests involved, therefore, it must be apparent that there can be no more urgent problem for humanity to solve than the question: is christianity a supernatural divine revelation or not? to this we may demand a clear and decisive answer. the evidence must be of no uncertain character which can warrant our abandoning the guidance of reason, and blindly accepting doctrines which, if not supernatural truths, must be rejected by the human intellect as monstrous delusions. we propose in this work to seek a conclusive answer to this momentous question. it appears to us that at no time has such an investigation been more requisite. the results of scientific inquiry and of biblical criticism have created wide-spread doubt regarding the most material part of christianity considered as a divine revelation. the mass of intelligent men in england are halting between two opinions, and standing in what seems to us the most unsatisfactory position conceivable: they abandon, before a kind of vague and indefinite, if irresistible, conviction, some of the most central supernatural doctrines of christianity; they try to spiritualize or dilute the rest into a form which does not shock their reason; and yet they cling to the delusion, that they still retain the consolation and the hope of truths which, if not divinely revealed, are mere human speculation regarding matters beyond reason. they have, in fact, as little warrant to abandon the one part as they have to retain the other. they build their house upon the sand, and the waves which have already carried away so much may any day engulf the rest. at the same time, amid this general eclipse of faith, many {xciv} an earnest mind, eagerly seeking for truth, endures much bitter pain,--unable to believe--unable freely to reject--and yet without the means of securing any clear and intelligent reply to the inquiry: "what is truth?" any distinct assurance, whatever its nature, based upon solid grounds, would be preferable to such a state of doubt and hesitation. once persuaded that we have attained truth, there can be no permanent regret for vanished illusions. we must, however, by careful and impartial investigation, acquire the right to our belief, whatever it may be, and not float like a mere waif into the nearest haven. flippant unbelief is much worse than earnest credulity. the time is ripe for arriving at a definite conviction as to the character of christianity. there is no lack of materials for a final decision, although hitherto they have been beyond the reach of most english readers, and a careful and honest examination of the subject, even if it be not final, cannot fail to contribute towards a result more satisfactory than the generally vague and illogical religious opinion of the present day. even true conclusions which are arrived at either accidentally or by wrong methods are dangerous. the current which by good fortune led to-day to truth may to-morrow waft us to falsehood. that such an investigation cannot, even at the present time, be carried on in england without incurring much enmity and opposition need scarcely be remarked, however loudly the duty and liberty of inquiry be theoretically proclaimed, and the reason is obvious. if we look at the singular diversity of views entertained, not only with regard to the doctrines, but also to the evidences, of christianity, we cannot but be struck by the helpless position in which divine revelation is now placed. {xcv} orthodox christians at the present day may be divided into two broad classes, one of which professes to base the church upon the bible, and the other the bible upon the church. the one party assert that the bible is fully and absolutely inspired, that it contains god's revelation to man, and that it is the only and sufficient ground for all religious belief; and they maintain that its authenticity is proved by the most ample and irrefragable external as well as internal evidence. what then must be the feeling of any ordinary mind on hearing, on the other hand, that men of undoubted piety and learning, as well as unquestioned orthodoxy, within the church of england, admit that the bible is totally without literary or historical evidence, and cannot for a moment be upheld upon any such grounds as the revealed word of god; that none of the great doctrines of ecclesiastical christianity can be deduced from the bible alone;( ) and that, "if it be impossible to accept the literary method of dealing with holy scripture, the usual mode of arguing the truth of revelation, _ab extra_, merely from what are called 'evidences'--whether of miracles done or prophecies uttered thousands of years ago,--must also be insufficient."?( ) it cannot be much comfort to be assured by them that, notwithstanding this absence of external and internal evidence, this revelation stands upon the sure basis of the inspiration of a church, which has so little ground in history for any claim to infallibility. the unsupported testimony of a church which in every age has vehemently maintained errors and denounced truths which are now universally recognized is no {xcvi} sufficient guarantee of divine revelation. obviously, there is no ground for accepting from a fallible church and fallacious tradition doctrines which, avowedly, are beyond the criterion of reason, and therefore require miraculous evidence. with belief based upon such uncertain grounds, and with such vital difference of views regarding evidence, it is not surprising that ecclesiastical christianity has felt its own weakness, and entrenched itself against the assaults of investigation. it is not strange that intellectual vigour in any direction should, almost unconsciously, have been regarded as dangerous to the repose and authority of the church, and that, instead of being welcomed as a virtue, religious inquiry has almost been repelled as a crime. such inquiry, however, cannot be suppressed. mere scientific questions may be regarded with apathy by those who do not feel their personal bearing. it may possibly seem to some a matter of little practical importance to them to determine whether the earth revolves round the sun, or the sun round the earth; but no earnest mind can fail to perceive the immense personal importance of truth in regard to religion--the necessity of investigating, before accepting, dogmas, the right interpretation of which is represented as necessary to salvation,--and the clear duty, before abandoning reason for faith, to exercise reason, in order that faith may not be mere credulity. as bacon remarked, the injunction: "hold fast that which is good," must always be preceded by the maxim: "prove all things." even archbishop trench has said: "credulity is as real, if not so great, a sin as unbelief," applying the observation to the duty of demanding a "sign" from any one professing to be the utterer of a revelation: "else might he lightly {xcvii} be persuaded to receive that as from god, which, indeed, was only the word of man."( ) the acceptance of any revelation or dogma, however apparently true in itself, without "sign"--without evidence satisfying the reason, is absolute credulity. even the most thorough advocate of faith must recognise that reason must be its basis, and that faith can only legitimately commence where reason fails. the appeal is first to reason if afterwards to faith, and no man pretending to intellectual conscience can overlook the primary claim of reason. if it is to be more than a mere question of priority of presentation whether we are to accept buddhism, christianity, or mahometanism, we must strictly and fearlessly examine the evidence upon which they profess to stand. the neglect of examination can never advance truth, as the severest scrutiny can never retard it, but belief without discrimination can only foster ignorance and superstition. it was in this conviction that the following inquiry into the reality of divine revelation was originally undertaken, and that others should enter upon it. an able writer, who will not be suspected of exaggeration on this subject, has said: "the majority of mankind, perhaps, owe their belief rather to the outward influence of custom and education, than to any strong principle of faith within; and it is to be feared that many if they came to perceive how wonderful what they believed was, would not find their belief so easy, and so matter-of-course a thing as they appear to find it."( ) to no earnest mind can such inquiry be otherwise than a serious and often a {xcviii} painful task, but, dismissing preconceived ideas and preferences derived from habit and education, and seeking only the truth, holding it, whatever it may be, to be the only object worthy of desire, or capable of satisfying a rational mind, the quest cannot but end in peace and satisfaction. in such an investigation, however, to quote words of archbishop whately: "it makes all the difference in the world whether we place truth in the first place or in the second place."--for if truth acquired do not compensate for every pet illusion dispelled, the path is thorny indeed, although it must still be faithfully trodden. an inquiry into the reality of divine revelation. part i. chapter i. miracles in relation to christianity at the very outset of inquiry into the origin and true character of christianity we are brought face to face with the supernatural. christianity professes to be a divine revelation of truths which the human intellect could not otherwise have discovered. it is not a form of religion developed by the wisdom of man and appealing to his reason, but a system miraculously communicated to the human race, the central doctrines of which are either superhuman or untenable. if the truths said to be revealed were either of an ordinary character or naturally attainable they would at once discredit the claim to a divine origin. no one could maintain that a system discoverable by reason would be supernaturally communicated. the whole argument for christianity turns upon the necessity of such a revelation and the consequent probability that it would be made. { } there is nothing singular, it may be remarked, in the claim of christianity to be a direct revelation from god. with the exception of the religions of greece and rome, which, however, also had their subsidiary supposition of divine inspiration, there has scarcely been any system of religion which has not been proclaimed to the world as a direct divine communication. long before christianity claimed this character, the religions of india had anticipated the idea. to quote the words of an accomplished scholar:--"according to the orthodox views of indian theologians, not a single line of the veda was the work of human authors. the whole veda is in some way or other the work of the deity; and even those who received it were not supposed to be ordinary mortals, but beings raised above the level of common humanity, and less liable, therefore, to error in the reception of revealed truth."( ) the same origin is claimed for the religion of zoroaster, whose doctrines, beyond doubt, exercised great influence at least upon later jewish theology, and whose magian followers are appropriately introduced beside the cradle of jesus, as the first to do honour to the birth of christianity. in the same way mahomet announced his religion as directly communicated from heaven. christianity, however, as a religion professing to be divinely revealed, is not only supernatural in origin and doctrine, but its claim to acceptance is necessarily based upon supernatural evidence; for it is obvious that truths which require to be miraculously communicated do not come within the range of our intellect, and cannot, therefore, be intelligently received upon internal testimony. "and, certainly," says a recent able bampton lecturer, "if it was the will of god to give a revelation, there are { } plain and obvious reasons for asserting that miracles are necessary as the guarantee and voucher for that revelation. a revelation is, properly speaking, such only by virtue of telling us something which we could not know without it. but how do we know that that communication of what is undiscoverable by human reason is true? our reason cannot prove the truth of it, for it is by the very supposition beyond our reason. there must be, then, some note or sign to certify to it and distinguish it as a true communication from god, which note can be nothing else than a miracle."( ) in another place the same lecturer stigmatizes the belief of the mahometan "as in its very principle irrational," because he accepts the account which mahomet gave of himself, without supernatural evidence.( ) the belief of the christian is contrasted with it as rational, "because the christian believes in a supernatural dispensation upon the proper evidence of such a dispensation, viz., the miraculous."( ) mahomet is reproached with having "an utterly barbarous idea of evidence, and a total miscalculation of the claims of reason," because he did not consider miraculous evidence necessary to attest a supernatural dispensation;" whereas the gospel is adapted to perpetuity for this cause especially, with others, that it was founded upon a true calculation, and a foresight of the permanent need of evidence; our lord admitting the inadequacy of his own mere word, and the necessity of a rational guarantee to his revelation of his own nature and commission."( ) { } the spontaneous offer of miraculous evidence, indeed, has always been advanced as a special characteristic of christianity, logically entitling it to acceptance in contradistinction to all other religions. "it is an acknowledged historical fact," says bishop butler, "that christianity offered itself to the world, and demanded to be received, upon the allegation, i. e,, as unbelievers would speak, upon the pretence, of miracles, publicly wrought to attest the truth of it in such an age;... and christianity, including the dispensation of the old testament, seems distinguished by this from all other religions."( ) most of the great english divines have clearly recognized and asserted the necessity of supernatural evidence to establish the reality of a supernatural revelation. bishop butler affirms miracles and the completion of prophecy to be the "direct and fundamental proofs" of christianity.( ) elsewhere he says: "the notion of a miracle, considered as a proof of a divine mission, has been stated with great exactness by divines, and is, i think, sufficiently understood by every one. there are also invisible miracles, the incarnation of christ, for instance, which, being secret, cannot be alleged as a proof of such a mission; but require themselves to be proved by visible miracles. revelation itself, too, is miraculous; and miracles are the proof of it."( ) paley states the case with equal clearness: "in what way can a revelation be made but by miracles? in none which we are able to conceive."( ) his argument in fact is founded upon the principle that: "nothing but miracles { } could decide the authority" of christianity.( ) in another work he asserts that no man can prove a future retribution, but the teacher "who testifies by miracles that his doctrine comes from god."( ) bishop atterbury, again, referring to the principal doctrines of ecclesiastical christianity, says: "it is this kind of truth that god is properly said to reveal; truths, of which, unless revealed, we should have always continued ignorant; and 'tis in order only to prove these truths to have been really revealed, that we affirm miracles to be necessary."( ) dr. heurtley, the margaret professor of divinity in the university of oxford, after pointing out that the doctrines taught as the christian revelation are such as could not by any possibility have been attained by the unassisted human reason, and that, consequently, it is reasonable that they should be attested by miracles, continues: "indeed, it seems inconceivable how without miracles--including prophecy in the notion of a miracle--it could sufficiently have commended itself to men's belief? who would believe, or would be justified in believing, the great facts which constitute its substance on the _ipse dixit_ of an unaccredited teacher? and how, except by miracles, could the first teacher be accredited? paley, then, was fully warranted in the assertion.... that 'we cannot conceive a revelation'--such a revelation of course as christianity professes to be, a revelation of truths which transcend man's ability to discover,--' to be { } substantiated without miracles.' other credentials, it is true, might be exhibited _in addition_ to miracles,--and such it would be natural to look for,--but it seems impossible that miracles could be dispensed with."( ) dr. mansel, the late dean of st. paul's, bears similar testimony: "a teacher who proclaims himself to be specially sent by god, and whose teaching is to be received on the authority of that mission, must, from the nature of the case, establish his claim by proofs of another kind than those which merely evince his human wisdom or goodness. a superhuman authority needs to be substantiated by superhuman evidence; and what is superhuman is miraculous."( ) dr. j. h. newman, in discussing the idea and scope of miracles, says: "a revelation, that is, a direct message from god to man, itself bears in some degree a miraculous character;... and as a revelation itself, so again the evidences of a revelation may all more or less be considered miraculous.... it might even be said that, strictly speaking, no evidence of a revelation is conceivable which does not partake of the character of a miracle; since nothing but a display of power over the existing system of things can attest the immediate presence of him by whom it was originally established."( ) dr. mozley has stated in still stronger terms the necessity that christianity should be authenticated by the evidence of miracles. he supposes the case that a person of evident integrity and loftiness of character had appeared, eighteen centuries ago, announcing himself as pre-existent from all eternity, the son of god, maker { } of the world, who had come down from heaven and assumed the form and nature of man in order to be the lamb of god that taketh away the sins of the world, and so on, enumerating other doctrines of christianity. dr. mozley then asks: "what would be the inevitable conclusion of sober reason respecting that person? the necessary conclusion of sober reason respecting that person would be that he was disordered in his understanding... by no rational being could a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such astonishing announcements. miracles are the necessary complement, then, of the truth of such announcements, which, without them, are purposeless and abortive, the unfinished fragments of a design which is nothing unless it is the whole. they are necessary to the justification of such announcements, which indeed, unless they are supernatural truths, are the wildest delusions."( ) he, therefore, concludes that: "christianity cannot be maintained as a revelation undiscoverable by human reason, a revelation of a supernatural scheme for man's salvation, without the evidence of miracles."( ) in all points, christianity is emphatically a supernatural religion claiming to be divine in its origin, superhuman in its essence and miraculous in its evidence. it cannot be accepted without an absolute belief in miracles, and those who profess to hold the religion whilst they discredit its supernatural elements--and they are many at the present day--have widely seceded from ecclesiastical christianity. miracles, it is true, are external to christianity in so far as they are evidential, but inasmuch as it is admitted that miracles alone can attest the reality of divine revelation they are still inseparable { } from it; and as the contents of the revelation are so to say more miraculous than its attesting miracles, the supernatural enters into the very substance of christianity and cannot be eliminated. it is obvious, therefore, that the reality of miracles is the vital point in the investigation which we have undertaken. if the reality of miracles cannot be established, christianity loses the only evidence by which its truth can be sufficiently attested. if miracles be incredible the supernatural revelation and its miraculous evidence must together be rejected. this fact is thoroughly recognized by the ablest christian divines. dean mansel, speaking of the position of miracles in regard to christianity, says: "the question, however, assumes a very different character when it relates, not to the comparative importance of miracles as evidences, but to their reality as facts, and as facts of a supernatural kind. for if this is denied, the denial does not merely remove one of the supports of a faith which may yet rest securely on other grounds. on the contrary, the whole system of christian belief with its evidences... all christianity in short, so far as it has any title to that name, so far as it has any special relation to the person or the teaching of christ, is overthrown at the same time."( ) a little further on he says: "if there be one fact recorded in scripture which is entitled, in the fullest sense of the word, to the name of a miracle, the resurrection of christ is that fact. here, at least, is an instance in which the entire christian faith must stand or fall with our belief in the supernatural."( ) he, therefore, properly repudiates the view, "which represents the question of the possibility { } of miracles as one which merely affects the _external accessories_ of christianity, leaving the _essential doctrines_ untouched."( ) dr. mozley in a similar manner argues the inseparable union of miracles with the christian faith. "indeed not only are miracles _conjoined_ with doctrine in christianity, but miracles are inserted _in_ the doctrine and are part of its contents. a man cannot state his belief as a christian in the terms of the apostles' creed without asserting them. can the doctrine of our lord's incarnation be disjoined from one physical miracle? can the doctrine of his justification of us and intercession for us, be disjoined from another?... if a miracle is incorporated as an article in a creed, that article of the creed, the miracle, and the proof of it by a miracle, are all one thing. the great miracles, therefore, upon the evidence of which the christian scheme rested, being thus inserted in the christian creed, the belief in the creed was of itself the belief in the miraculous evidence of it.... thus miracles and the supernatural contents of christianity must stand or fall together."( ) dr. heurtley, referring to the discussion of the reality of miracles, exclaims: "it is not too much to say, therefore, that the question is vital as regards christianity."( ) canon westcott not less emphatically makes the same statement. "it is evident," he says, "that if the claim to be a miraculous religion is essentially incredible apostolic christianity is simply false.... the essence of christianity lies in a miracle; and if it can be shown that a miracle is either impossible or incredible, all further inquiry into the details of its history is superfluous { } in a religious point of view."( ) similarly, a recent hulsean lecturer, dr. farrar, has said: "however skilfully the modern ingenuity of semi-belief may have tampered with supernatural interpositions, it is clear to every honest and unsophisticated mind that, if miracles be incredible, christianity is false. if christ wrought no miracles, then the gospels are untrustworthy;... if the resurrection be merely a spiritual idea, or a mythicized hallucination, then our religion has been founded on an error...." ( ) it has been necessary clearly to point out this indissoluble connection between ecclesiastical christianity and the supernatural, in order that the paramount importance of the question as to the credibility of miracles should be duly appreciated. our inquiry into the reality of divine revelation, then, whether we consider its contents or its evidence, practically reduces itself to the very simple issue: are miracles antecedently credible? did they ever really take place? we do not intend to confine ourselves merely to a discussion of the abstract question, but shall also endeavour to form a correct estimate of the value of the specific allegations which are advanced. . having then ascertained that miracles are absolutely necessary to attest the reality of divine revelation we may proceed to examine them more closely, and for the present we shall confine ourselves to the representations of these phenomena which are given in the bible. throughout the old testament the doctrine is inculcated { } that supernatural communications must have supernatural attestation. god is described as arming his servants with power to perform wonders, in order that they may thus be accredited as his special messengers. the patriarchs and the people of israel generally are represented as demanding "a sign" of the reality of communications said to come from god, without which, we are led to suppose, they not only would not have believed, but would have been justified in disbelieving, that the message actually came from him. thus gideon( ) asks for a sign that the lord talked with him, and hezekiah( ) demands proof of the truth of isaiah's prophecy that he should be restored to health. it is, however, unnecessary to refer to instances, for it may be affirmed that upon all occasions miraculous evidence of an alleged divine mission is stated to have been required and accorded. the startling information is at the same time given, however, that miracles may be wrought to attest what is false as well as to accredit what is true. in one place,( ) it is declared that if a prophet actually gives a sign or wonder and it comes to pass, but teaches the people, on the strength of it, to follow other gods, they are not to hearken to him, and the prophet is to be put to death. the false miracle is, here,( ) attributed to god himself: "for the lord your god proveth you, to know whether ye love the lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul." in the book of the prophet ezekiel, the case is stated in a still stronger way, and god is represented as directly deceiving the prophet: "and if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, i the lord have deceived that prophet, and i will { } stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people israel."( ) god, in fact, is represented as exerting his almighty power to deceive a man and then as destroying him for being deceived. in the same spirit is the passage( ) in which micaiah describes the lord as putting a lying spirit into the mouths of the prophets who incited ahab to go to ramoth-gilead. elsewhere,( ) and notably in the new testament, we find an ascription of real signs and wonders to another power than god. jesus himself is represented as warning his disciples against false prophets, who work signs and wonders: "many will say to me in that day, lord, lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?" of whom he should say: "i never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity."( ) and again in another place: "for false prophets shall arise, and shall work signs and wonders [--greek--] to seduce, if it were possible, the elect."( ) also, when the pharisees accuse him of casting out devils by beelzebub the prince of the devils, jesus asks: "by whom do your children cast them out?"( ) a reply which would lose all its point if they were not admitted to be able to cast out devils. in another passage john is described as saying: "master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, who followeth not us, and we forbad him."( ) without multiplying instances, however, there can be no doubt of the fact { } that the reality of false miracles and lying wonders is admitted in the bible. the obvious deduction from this representation of miracles is that the source and purpose of such supernatural phenomena must always be exceedingly uncertain.( ) their evidential value is, therefore, profoundly affected, "it being," as dr. newman has said of ambiguous miracles, "antecedently improbable that the almighty should rest the credit of his revelation upon events which but obscurely implied his immediate presence."( ) as it is affirmed that other supernatural beings exist, as well as an assumed personal god, by whose agency miracles are performed, it is impossible to argue with reason that such phenomena are at any time specially due to the intervention of the deity. dr. newman recognizes this, but passes over the difficulty with masterly lightness of touch. after advancing the singular argument that our knowledge of spirits is only derived from scripture, and that their existence cannot be deduced from nature, whilst he asserts that the being of a god--a personal god be it remembered--can be so discovered, and that, therefore, miracles can only properly be attributed to him, he proceeds: "still it may be necessary to show that on our own principles we are not open to inconsistency. that is, it has been questioned whether, in admitting the existence and power of spirits on the authority of revelation, we are not in danger of { } invalidating the evidence upon which that authority rests. for the cogency of the argument for miracles depends on the assumption, that interruptions in the course of nature must ultimately proceed from god; which is not true, if they may be effected by other beings without his sanction. and it must be conceded, that, explicit as scripture is in considering miracles as signs of divine agency, it still does seem to give created spirits some power of working them; and even, in its most literal sense, intimates the possibility of their working them in opposition to the true doctrine. (deut. xiii. - ; matt. xxiv. ; thess. ii. -ll.)"( ) dr. newman repudiates the attempts of various writers to overcome this difficulty by making a distinction between great miracles and small, many miracles and few, or by referring to the nature of the doctrine attested in order to determine the author of the miracle, or by denying the power of spirits altogether, and explaining away scripture statements of demoniacal possession and the narrative of the lord's temptation. "without having recourse to any of these dangerous modes of answering the objection," he says, "it may be sufficient to reply, that, since, agreeably to the antecedent sentiment of reason, god has adopted miracles as the seal of a divine message, we believe he will never suffer them to be so counterfeited as to deceive the humble inquirer."( ) this is the only reply which even so powerful a reasoner as dr. newman can give to an objection based on distinct statements of scripture itself. he cannot deny the validity of the objection, he can only hope or believe in spite of it personal belief independent of evidence is the most common and the weakest of arguments; at the { } best it is prejudice masked in the garb of reason. it is perfectly clear that miracles being thus acknowledged to be common both to god and to other spirits they cannot be considered a distinctive attestation of divine intervention; and, as spinoza finely argued, not even the mere existence of god can be inferred from them; for as a miracle is a limited act, and never expresses more than a certain and limited power, it is certain that we cannot from such an effect, conclude even the existence of a cause whose power is infinite.( ) this dual character obviously leads to many difficulties in defining the evidential function and force of miracles, and we may best appreciate the dilemma which is involved by continuing to follow the statements and arguments of divines themselves. to the question whether miracles are absolutely to command the obedience of those in whose sight they are performed, and whether, upon their attestation, the doer and his doctrine are to be accepted as of god, archbishop trench unhesitatingly replies: "it cannot be so, for side by side with the miracles which serve for the furthering of the kingdom of god runs another line of wonders, the counter-workings of him who is ever the ape of the most high."( ) the deduction is absolutely logical and cannot be denied. "this fact," he says, "that the kingdom of lies has its wonders no less than the kingdom of truth, is itself sufficient evidence that miracles cannot be appealed { } to absolutely and finally, in proof of the doctrine which the worker of them proclaims." this being the case, it is important to discover how miracles perform their function as the indispensable evidence for a divine revelation, for with this disability they do not seem to possess much potentiality. archbishop trench, then, offers the following definition of the function of miracles: "a miracle does not prove the truth of a doctrine, or the divine mission of him that brings it to pass. that which alone it claims for him at the first is a right to be listened to: it puts him in the alternative of being from heaven or from hell. the doctrine must first commend itself to the conscience as being _good_, and only then can the miracle seal it as _divine_. but the first appeal is from the doctrine to the conscience, to the moral nature of man."( ) under certain circumstances, he maintains, their evidence is utterly to be rejected. "but the purpose of the miracle," he says, "being, as we have seen, to confirm that which is good, so, upon the other hand, where the mind and conscience witness against the doctrine, not all the miracles in the world have a right to demand submission to the word which they seal. on the contrary, the great act of faith { } is to believe, against, and in despite of them all, in what god has revealed to, and implanted in the soul of the holy and the true; not to believe another gospel, though an angel from heaven, or one transformed into such, should bring it (deut. xiii. ; gal. i. ); and instead of compelling assent, miracles are then rather warnings to us that we keep aloof, for they tell us that not merely lies are here, for to that the conscience bore witness already, but that he who utters them is more than a common deceiver, is eminently 'a liar and an anti-christ,' a false prophet, --standing in more immediate connection than other deceived and evil men to the kingdom of darkness, so that satan has given him his power (rev. xiii. ), is using him to be an especial organ of his, and to do a special work for him."( ) and he lays down the distinct principle that: "the miracle must witness for itself, and the doctrine must witness for itself, and then, and then only, the first is capable of witnessing for the second."( ) these opinions are not peculiar to the archbishop of dublin, but are generally held by divines, although dr. trench expresses them with unusual absence of reserve. dr. mozley emphatically affirms the same doctrine when he says: "a miracle cannot oblige us to accept any doctrine which is contrary to our moral nature, or to a fundamental principle of religion."( ) dr. mansel speaks to the same effect: "if a teacher claiming to work miracles proclaims doctrines contradictory to previously established truths, whether to the conclusions of natural religion or to the teaching of a former revelation, such a contradiction is allowed even by the most zealous defenders of the evidential value of miracles, to { } invalidate the authority of the teacher. but the right conclusion from this admission is not that true miracles are invalid as evidences, but that the supposed miracles in this case are not true miracles at all; i. e., are not the effects of divine power, but of human deception or of some other agency."( ) a passage from a letter written by dr. arnold which is quoted by dr. trench in support of his views, both illustrates the doctrine and the necessity which has led to its adoption: "you complain," says dr. arnold, writing to dr. hawkins, "of those persons who judge of a revelation not by its evidence, but by its substance. it has always seemed to me that its substance is a most essential part of its evidence; and that miracles wrought in favour of what was foolish or wicked would only prove manicheism. we are so perfectly ignorant of the unseen world, that the character of any supernatural power can only be judged by the moral character of the statements which it sanctions. thus only can we tell whether it be a revelation from god or from the devil."( ) in another place dr. arnold declares: "miracles must not be allowed to overrule the gospel; for it is only through our belief in the gospel that we accord our belief to them."( ) { } it is obvious that the mutual dependence which is thus established between miracles and the doctrines in connection with which they are wrought destroys the evidential force of miracles, and that the first and the final appeal is made to reason. the doctrine in fact proves the miracle instead of the miracle attesting the doctrine. divines of course attempt to deny this, but no other deduction from their own statements is logically possible. miracles, according to scripture itself, are producible by various supernatural beings and may be satanic as well as divine; man, on the other hand, is so ignorant of the unseen world that avowedly he cannot, from the miracle itself, determine the agent by whom it was performed;(l) the miracle, therefore, has no intrinsic evidential value. how, then, according to divines, does it attain any potentiality? only through a favourable decision on the part of reason or the "moral nature in man" regarding the { } character of the doctrine. the result of the appeal to reason respecting the morality and credibility of the doctrine determines the evidential status of the miracle. the doctrine, therefore, is the real criterion of the miracle which, without it, is necessarily an object of doubt and suspicion. we have already casually referred to dr. newman's view of such a relation between miracle and doctrine, but may here more fully quote his suggestive remarks. "others by referring to the nature of the doctrine attested," he says, "in order to determine the author of the miracle, have exposed themselves to the plausible charge of adducing, first the miracle to attest the divinity of the doctrine, and then the doctrine to prove the divinity of the miracle."( ) this argument he characterizes as one of the "dangerous modes" of removing a difficulty, although he does not himself point out a safer, and, in a note, he adds: "there is an appearance of doing honour to the christian doctrines in representing them as _intrinsically_ credible, which leads many into supporting opinions which, carried to their full extent, supersede the need of miracles altogether. it must be recollected, too, that they who are allowed to praise have the privilege of finding fault, and may reject, according to their _á priori_ notions, as well as receive. doubtless the divinity of a clearly immoral doctrine could not be evidenced by miracles; for our belief in the moral attributes of god is much stronger than our conviction of the negative proposition, that none but he can interfere with the system of nature.( ) but there is always { } the danger of extending this admission beyond its proper limits, of supposing ourselves adequate judges of the _tendency_ of doctrines; and, because unassisted reason informs us what is moral and immoral in our own case, of attempting to decide on the abstract morality of actions;... these remarks are in nowise inconsistent with using (as was done in a former section) our actual knowledge of god's attributes, obtained from a survey of nature and human affairs, in determining the probability of certain professed miracles having proceeded from him. it is one thing to infer from the experience of life, another to imagine the character of god from the gratuitous conceptions of our own minds."( ) although dr. newman apparently fails to perceive that he himself thus makes reason the criterion of miracles and therefore incurs the condemnation with which our quotation opens, the very indecision of his argument illustrates the dilemma in which divines are placed. dr. mozley, however, still more directly condemns the principle which we are discussing--that the doctrine must be the criterion of the miracle--although he also, as we have purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted. to rationalise in matters of revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry with them their own justification; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought, or are with difficulty harmonised with our existing stock of knowledge" (essays, crit. and hist., , vol. i. p. ); and a little further on: "a like desire of judging for one's self is discernible in the original fall of man. eve did not believe the tempter any more than god's word, till she perceived «the fruit was good for food '" ( ., p. ). dr. newman, of course, wishes to limit his principle precisely to suit his own convenience, but in permitting the rejection of a supposed revelation in spite of miracles, on the ground of our disapproval of its morality, it is obvious that the doctrine is substantially made the final criterion of the miracle. { } seen, elsewhere substantially affirms it. he says: "the position that the revelation proves the miracles, and not the miracles the revelation, admits of a good qualified meaning; but taken literally, it is a double offence against the rule, that things are properly proved by the proper proof of them; for a supernatural fact _is_ the proper proof of a supernatural doctrine; while a supernatural doctrine, on the other hand, is certainly _not_ the proper proof of a supernatural fact"( ) this statement is obviously true, but it is equally undeniable that, their origin being uncertain, miracles have no distinctive evidential force. how far, then, we may inquire in order thoroughly to understand the position, can doctrines prove the reality of miracles or determine the agency by which they are performed? in the case of moral truths within the limits of reason, it is evident that doctrines which are in accordance with our ideas of what is good and right do not require miraculous evidence at all. they can secure acceptance by their own merits alone. at the same time it is universally admitted that the truth or goodness of a doctrine is in itself no proof that it emanates directly from god, and consequently the most obvious wisdom and beauty in the doctrine could not attest the divine origin of a miracle. such truths, however, have no proper connection with revelation at all. "_these_ truths," to quote the words of bishop atterbury, "were of themselves sufficiently obvious and plain, and needed not a divine testimony to make them plainer. but the truths which are necessary in this manner to be attested, are those which are of positive institution; those, which if god had not pleased to reveal them, human reason could not { } have discovered; and those, which, even now they are revealed, human reason cannot fully account for, and perfectly comprehend."( ) how is it possible then that reason or "the moral nature in man" can approve as good, or appreciate the fitness of, doctrines which in their very nature are beyond the criterion of reason?( ) what reply, for instance, can reason give to any appeal to it regarding the doctrine of the trinity or of the incarnation? if doctrines the truth and goodness of which are apparent do not afford any evidence of divine revelation, how can doctrines which reason can neither discover nor comprehend attest the divine origin of miracles? dr. mozley clearly recognizes that they cannot do so. "the proof of a revelation," he says, and we may add, "the proof of a miracle--itself a species of revelation--which is contained in the substance of a revelation has this inherent check or limit in it: viz. that it cannot reach to what is undiscoverable by reason. internal evidence is itself an appeal to reason, because at every step the test is our own appreciation of such and such an idea or doctrine, our own perception of its fitness; but human reason cannot in the nature of the case prove that which, by the very hypothesis, lies beyond human reason."( ) it naturally follows that no doctrine which lies beyond reason, and therefore requires the attestation of miracles, can possibly afford that indication of the source and reality of miracles which is necessary to endow them with evidential value, and the supernatural doctrine must, therefore, be rejected in the absence of miraculous evidence of a decisive character. { } canon mozley labours earnestly, but unsuccessfully, to restore to miracles as evidence some part of that potentiality of which these unfortunate limitations have deprived them. whilst on the one hand he says: "we must admit, indeed, an inherent modification in the function of a miracle as an instrument of proof,"( ) he argues that this is only a limitation, and no disproof of it, and he contends that: "the evidence of miracles is not negatived because it has conditions."( ) his reasoning, however, is purely apologetic, and attempts by the unreal analogy of supposed limitations of natural principles and evidence to excuse the disqualifying limitation of the supernatural. he is quite conscious of the serious difficulty of the position: "the question," he says, "may at first sight create a dilemma--if a miracle is nugatory on the side of one doctrine, what cogency has it on the side of another? is it legitimate to accept its evidence when we please, and reject it when we please?" the only reply he seems able to give to these very pertinent questions is the remark which immediately follows them: "but in truth a miracle is never without an argumentative force, although that force may be counterbalanced."( ) in other words a miracle is always an argument although it is often a bad one. it is scarcely necessary to go to the supernatural for bad arguments. it might naturally be expected that the miraculous evidence selected to accredit a divine revelation should possess certain unique and marked characteristics. it must, at least, be clearly distinctive of divine power, and exclusively associated with divine truth. it is inconceivable that the deity, deigning thus to attest { } the reality of a communication from himself of truths beyond the criterion of reason, should not make the evidence simple and complete, because, the doctrines proper to such a revelation not being appreciable from internal evidence, it is obvious that the external testimony for them--if it is to be of any use--must be unmistakable and decisive. the evidence which is actually produced, however, so far from satisfying these legitimate anticipations, lacks every one of the qualifications which reason antecedently declares to be necessary. miracles are not distinctive of divine power but are common to satan, and they are admitted to be performed in support of falsehood as well as in the service of truth. they bear, indeed, so little upon them the impress of their origin and true character, that they arc dependent for their recognition upon our judgment of the very doctrines to attest which they are said to have been designed. even taking the representation of miracles, therefore, which divines themselves give, they are utterly incompetent to perform their contemplated functions. if they are superhuman they are not super-satanic, and there is no sense in which they can be considered miraculously evidential of anything. to argue, as theologians do, that the ambiguity of their testimony is deliberately intended as a trial of our faith is absurd, for reason being unable to judge of the nature either of supernatural fact or supernatural doctrine, it would be mere folly and injustice to subject to such a test beings avowedly incapable of sustaining it. whilst it is absolutely necessary, then, that a divine revelation should be attested by miraculous evidence to justify our believing it the testimony so called seems in all respects { } unworthy of the name, and presents anomalies much more suggestive of human invention than divine originality. we are, in fact, prepared even by the scriptural account of miracles to expect that further examination will supply an explanation of such phenomena which will wholly remove them from the region of the supernatural. { } chapter ii. miracles in relation to the order of nature without at present touching the question as to their reality, it may be well to ascertain what miracles are considered to be, and how far, and in what sense it is asserted that they are supernatural we have, hitherto, almost entirely confined our attention to the arguments of english divines, and we must for the present continue chiefly to deal with them, for it may broadly be said, that they alone, at the present day, maintain the reality and supernatural character of such phenomena. no thoughtful mind can fail to see that, considering the function of miracles, this is the only logical and consistent course.( ) the insuperable difficulties in the way of admitting the reality of miracles, however, have driven the great majority of continental, as well as very many english, theologians who still pretend to a certain orthodoxy, either to explain the miracles of the gospel naturally, or to suppress them altogether. since schleiermacher denounced the idea of divine interruptions of the order of nature, and explained away the supernatural character { } of miracles, by defining them as merely relative: miracles to us, but in reality mere anticipations of human knowledge and power, his example has been more or less followed throughout germany, and almost every expedient has been adopted, by would-be orthodox writers, to reduce or altogether eliminate the miraculous elements. the attempts which have been made to do this, and yet to maintain the semblance of unshaken belief in the main points of ecclesiastical christianity, have lamentably failed, from the hopeless nature of the task and the fundamental error of the conception. the endeavour of paulus and his school to get rid of the supernatural by a bold naturalistic interpretation of the language of the gospel narratives, whilst the credibility of the record was represented as intact, was too glaring an outrage upon common sense to be successful, but it was scarcely more illogical than subsequent efforts to suppress the miraculous, yet retain the creed. the great majority of modern german critics, however, reject the miraculous altogether, and consider the question as no longer worthy of discussion, and most of those who have not distinctly expressed this view either resort to every linguistic device to evade the difficulty, or betray, by their hesitation, the feebleness of their belief.( ) in dealing with the { } question of miracles, therefore, it is not to germany we must turn, but to england, where their reality is still maintained. archbishop trench rejects with disdain the attempts of schleiermacher and others to get rid of the miraculous elements of miracles, by making them relative, which he rightly considers to be merely "a decently veiled denial of the miracle altogether;"( ) and he will not accept any reconciliation which sacrifices the miracle, "which," he logically affirms, "is, in fact, no miracle, if it lay in nature already, if it was only the evoking of forces latent therein, not a new thing, not the bringing in of the novel powers of a higher world; if the mysterious processes and powers by which those works were brought about had been only undiscovered hitherto, and not undiscoverable, by the efforts of human inquiry."( ) when dr. trench tries to define what he considers the real character of miracles, however, he becomes, as might be expected, { } voluminous and obscure. he says: "an extraordinary divine casualty, and not that ordinary which we acknowledge everywhere, and in everything, belongs, then, to the essence of the miracle; powers of god other than those which have always been working; such, indeed, as most seldom or never have been working before. the unresting activity of god, which at other times hides and conceals itself behind the veil of what we term natural laws, does in the miracle unveil itself; it steps out from its concealment, and the hand which works is laid bare. beside and beyond the ordinary operation of nature, higher powers (higher, not as coming from a higher source, but as bearing upon higher ends) intrude and make themselves felt even at the very springs and sources of her power."( ) "not, as we shall see the greatest theologians have always earnestly contended, _contra_ naturam, but _præter_ naturam, and _supra_ naturam."( ) further on he adds: "_beyond_ nature, _beyond_ and _above_ the nature which we know, they are, but not _contrary_ to it."( ) dr. newman, in a similar strain, though with greater directness, says: "the miracles of scripture are undeniably beyond nature;" and he explains them as "wrought by persons consciously exercising, under divine guidance, a power committed to them for definite ends, professing to be immediate messengers from heaven, and to be evidencing their mission by their miracles."( ) miracles are here described as "beside," and "beyond," and "above" nature, but a moment's consideration must { } show that, in so far as these terms have any meaning at all, they are simply evasions, not solutions, of a difficulty. dr. trench is quite sensible of the danger in which the definition of miracles places them, and how fatal to his argument is would be to admit that they are contrary to the order of nature. "the miracle," he protests, "is not thus _unnatural_; nor could it be such, since the unnatural, the contrary to order, is of itself the ungodly, and can in no way, therefore, be affirmed of a divine work, such as that with which we have to do."( ) the archbishop in this; however, is clearly arguing from nature to miracles, and not from miracles to nature. he does not, of course, know what miracles really are, but as he recognizes that the order of nature must be maintained, he is forced to assert that miracles are not contrary to nature. he repudiates the idea of their being natural phenomena; and yet attempts to deny that they are unnatural. they must either be the one or the other. the archbishop, besides; forgets that he ascribes miracles to satan as well as to god. indeed, that his distinction is purely imaginary, and inconsistent with the alleged facts of scriptural miracles, is apparent from dr. trench's own illustrations; the whole argument is a mere quibble of words to evade a palpable dilemma. dr. newman does not fall into this error, and more boldly faces the difficulty. he admits that the scripture miracles "innovate upon the impressions which are made upon us by the order and the laws of the natural world;"( ) and that "walking on the sea, or the resurrection of the dead, is a plain reversal of its laws."( ) { } take, for instance, the multiplication of loaves and fishes. five thousand people are fed upon five barley loaves and two small fishes: "and they took up of the fragments which remained twelve baskets full."( ) dr. trench is forced to renounce all help in explaining this miracle from natural analogies, and he admits: "we must simply behold in the multiplying of the bread" (and fishes?)" an act of divine omnipotence on his part who was the word of god,--not, indeed, now as at the first, of absolute creation out of nothing, since there was a substratum to work on in the original loaves and fishes, but an act of creative accretion."( ) it will scarcely be argued by any one that such an "act of divine omnipotence" and "creative accretion" as this multiplication of five baked loaves and two small fishes is not contrary to the order of nature.( ) for dr. trench has himself pointed out that there must be interposition of man's art here, and that "a grain of wheat could never by itself, and according to the laws of natural development, issue in a loaf of bread.( ) undaunted by, or rather unconscious of, such contradictions, the archbishop proceeds with his argument, and with new definitions of the miraculous. so far from being disorder of nature, he continues with audacious precision: "the true miracle is a higher and a purer { } nature coming down out of the world of untroubled harmonies into this world of ours, which so many discords have jarred and disturbed, and bringing this back again, though it be but for one mysterious prophetic moment, into harmony with that higher."( ) in that "higher and purer nature" can a grain of wheat issue in a loaf of bread? we have only to apply this theory to the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes to perceive how completely it is the creation of dr. trench's poetical fancy. these passages fairly illustrate the purely imaginary and arbitrary nature of the definitions which those who maintain the reality and supernatural character of miracles give of them. that explanation is generally adopted which seems most convenient at the moment, and none ever passes, or, indeed, ever can pass, beyond the limits of assumption. the favourite hypothesis is that which ascribes miracles to the action of unknown law. archbishop trench naturally adopts it: "we should see in the miracle," he says, "not the infraction of a law, but the neutralizing of a lower law, the suspension of it for a time by a higher;" and he asks with indignation, whence we dare conclude that, because we know of no powers sufficient to produce miracles, none exist. "they exceed the laws of _our_ nature; but it does not therefore follow that they exceed the laws of _all_ nature."( ) it is not easy { } to follow the distinction here between "_our_ nature" and "_all nature_," since the order of nature, by which miracles are judged, is, so far as knowledge goes, universal, and we have no grounds for assuming that there is any other. the same hypothesis is elaborated by dr. mozley. assuming the facts of miracles, he proceeds to discuss the question of their "referribleness to unknown law," in which expression he includes both "_unknown law_, or unknown connexion with _known_ law."( ) taking first the supposition of (unknown) connection with known law, dr. mozley argues that, as a law of nature, in the scientific sense, cannot possibly produce single or isolated facts, it follows that no isolated or exceptional event can come under a law of nature _by direct observation_, but, if it comes under it at all, it can only do so by some _explanation_, which takes it out of its isolation and joins it to a class of facts, whose recurrence indeed constitutes the law. now dr. mozley admits that no explanation can be given by which miracles can have an unknown connexion with known law. taking the largest class of miracles, bodily cures, the correspondence between a simple command or prophetic notification and the cure is the chief characteristic of miracles, and distinguishes them from mere marvels. { } no violation of any law of nature takes place in either the cure or the prophetic announcement taken separately, but the two, taken together, are the proof of superhuman agency. dr. mozley concludes that no physical hypothesis can be framed accounting for the superhuman knowledge and power involved in this class of miracles, supposing the miracles to stand as they are recorded in scripture.( ) dr. mozley then shifts the inquiry to the other and different question, whether miracles may not be instances of laws which are as yet wholly unknown.( ) this is generally called a question of "higher law," --that is to say, a law which comprehends under itself two or more lower or less wide laws. and the principle would be applicable to miracles by supposing the existence of an unknown law, hereafter to be discovered, under which miracles would come, and then considering whether this new law of miracles, and the old law of common facts, might not both be reducible to a still more general law which comprehended them both. now a law of nature, in the scientific sense, cannot exist without a class of facts which comes under it, and in reality constitutes the law; but dr. mozley of course recognizes that the discovery of such a law of miracles would necessarily involve the discovery of fresh miracles, for to talk of a law of miracles without miracles would be an absurdity.( ) the supposition of the discovery of such a law of miracles, however, would be tantamount to the supposition of a future new order of nature, from which it immediately follows that the whole supposition is irrelevant and futile as regards the present question.( ) { } for no new order of things could make the present order different, and a miracle, could we suppose it becoming the ordinary fact of another different order of nature, would not be less a violation of the laws of nature in the present one.( ) dr. mozley also rejects this explanation. we pause here to remark that, throughout the whole inquiry into the question of miracles, we meet with nothing from theologians but mere assumptions, against which the invariability of the known order of nature steadily opposes itself. the facts of the narrative of the miracle are first assumed, and so are the theories by which it is explained. now, with regard to every theory which seeks to explain miracles by assumption, we may quote words applied by one of the ablest defenders of miracles to some conclusion of straw, which he placed in the mouth of an imaginary antagonist in order that he might refute it: "but the question is," said the late dean of st. paul's, "not whether such a conclusion has been asserted, as many other absurdities have been asserted, by the advocates of a theory, but whether it has been established on such scientific grounds as to be entitled to the assent of all duly cultivated minds, whatever their own consciences may say to the contrary."( ) divines are very strict in demanding absolute demonstrations from men of science and others, but we do not find them at all ready to furnish conclusions of similar accuracy regarding dogmatic theology. immediately after his indignant demand for scientific accuracy of demonstration, dr. mansel proceeds to argue as follows: in the will of man we have the solitary instance of an efficient cause, in the highest sense of the { } term, acting among the physical causes of the material world, and producing results which could not have been brought about by any mere sequence of physical causes. if a man of his own will throw a stone into the air, its motion, as soon as it has left his hand, is determined by a combination of purely material laws; but by what _law_ came it to be thrown at all? the law of gravitation, no doubt, remains constant and unbroken, whether the stone is lying on the ground, or moving through the air, but all the laws of matter could not have brought about the particular result without the interposition of the free will of the man who throws the stone. substitute the will of god for the will of man, and the argument becomes applicable to the whole extent of creation and to all the phenomena which it embraces.( ) it is evident that dr. mansel's argument merely tends to prove that every effect must have a cause, a proposition too obvious to require any argument at all. if a man had not thrown the stone, the stone would have remained lying on the ground. no one doubts this. we have here, however, this "solitary instance of an efficient cause acting among the physical causes of the material world," producing results which are wholly determined by material laws,( ) and incapable of producing any opposed to them. if, therefore, we substitute, as dr. mansel desires, "the will of god" for "the will of man," we arrive at no results which are not in harmony { } with the order of nature. we have no ground whatever for assuming any efficient cause acting in any other way than in accordance with the laws of nature. it is, how-fever, one of the gross fallacies of this argument, as applied to miracles, to pass from the efficient cause producing results which are strictly in accordance with natural laws, and determined by them, to an assumed efficient cause producing effects which are opposed to natural law. the restoration to life of a decomposed human body and the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes are opposed to natural laws, and no assumed efficient cause conceivable to which they may be referred can harmonize them. dr. mozley continues his argument in a similar way. he inquires: "is the suspension of physical and material laws by a spiritual being inconceivable? we reply that, however inconceivable this kind of suspension of physical law is, it is a fact. physical laws are suspended any time an animate being moves any part of its body; the laws of matter are suspended by the laws of life."(l) he goes on to maintain that, although it is true that his spirit is united with the matter in which it moves in a way in which the great spirit who acts on matter in the miracle is not, yet the action of god's spirit in the miracle of walking on the water is no more inconceivable than the action of his own spirit in holding up his own hand. "antecedently, one step on the ground and an ascent to heaven are alike incredible. but this appearance of incredibility is answered in one case literally _ambulando_. how can i place any reliance upon it in the other?"( ) from this illustration, { } dr. mozley, with a haste very unlike his previous careful procedure, jumps at the following conclusions: "the constitution of nature, then, disproved the incredibility of the divine suspension of physical law; but more than this, it creates a presumption for it."(l) the laws of life of which we have experience, he argues, are themselves in an ascending scale. first come the laws which regulate unorganized matter; next the laws of vegetation; then the laws of animal life, with its voluntary motion; and above these again, the laws of moral being. a supposed intelligent being whose experience was limited to one or more classes in this ascending scale of laws would be totally incapable of conceiving the action of the higher classes. the progressive succession of laws is perfectly conceivable backward, but an absolute mystery forward. "analogy," therefore, when in this ascending series we arrive at man, leads us to expect that there is a higher sphere of law as much above _him_ as he is above the lower natures in the scale, and "supplies a presumption in favour of such a belief."( ) and so we arrive at the question whether there is or is not a god, a personal head in nature, whose free will penetrates the universal frame invisibly to us, and is an omnipresent agent. if there be, dr. mozley concludes, then, every miracle in scripture is as natural an event in the universe as any chemical experiment in the physical world.( ) this is precisely the argument of dr. mansel, regarding the "efficient cause," somewhat elaborated, but, however ingeniously devised, it is equally based upon assumption and defective in analogy. the "classes of { } law" to which the bampton lecturer refers work harmoniously side by side, regulating the matter to which they apply. unorganized matter, vegetation, and animal life, may each have special conditions modifying phenomena, but they are all equally subject to the same general laws. man is as much under the influence of gravitation as a stone is. the special operation of physical laws is less a modification of law than that law acting under different conditions. the law of gravitation suffers no alteration, whether it cause the fall of an apple or shape the orbit of a planet. the reproduction of the plant and of the animal is regulated by the same fundamental principle acting through different organisms. the harmonious action of physical laws, and their adaptability to an infinite variety of forms, constitute the perfection of that code which produces the order of nature.( ) the mere superiority of man over lower forms of organic and inorganic matter does not lift him above physical laws, and the analogy of every grade in nature forbids the presumption that higher forms may exist which are exempt from their control. if in animated beings, as is affirmed, we had the solitary instance of an "efficient cause" acting among the forces of nature, and possessing the power of initiation, this "efficient cause" produces no disturbance of physical law. its existence is as much a recognized part of the infinite variety of form within the order of nature as the existence of a crystal or a plant; and although the character of the force exercised by it may not be clearly understood, its effects are regulated by the same laws as { } govern all other forces in nature. if "the laws of matter are suspended by the laws of life" each time an animated being moves any part of its body, one physical law is counteracted in precisely the same manner, and to an equivalent degree, each time another physical law is called into action. the law of gravitation, for instance, is equally neutralized by the law of magnetism each time a magnet suspends a weight in the air. in each case, a law is successfully resisted precisely to the extent of the force employed. the arm that is raised by the animated being falls again, in obedience to law, as soon as the force which raised it is exhausted, quite as certainly as the weight descends when the magnetic current fails. this, however, is not the suspension of law in the sense of a miracle, but, on the contrary, is simply the natural operation upon each other of co-existent laws. it is a recognized part of the order of nature,( ) and instead of { } rendering credible any supernatural suspension of laws, the analogy of animated beings distinctly excludes it. the introduction of life in no way changes the relation between cause and effect, which constitutes the order of nature, and is the essence of its law. life favours no presumption for the suspension of law, but, on the contrary, whilst acting in nature, universally exhibits the prevalence and invariability of law. the "laws of life" may be subtle, but they are an integral portion of the great order of nature, working harmoniously with the laws of matter, and not one whit more independent of them than any one natural law is of another. the supposed "efficient cause," is wholly circumscribed by law. it is brought into existence by the operation of immutable physical laws, and from the cradle to the grave it is subject to those laws. so inseparably is it connected with matter, and consequently with the laws which regulate matter, that it cannot even become conscious of its own existence without the intervention of matter. the whole process of life is dependent on obedience to natural laws, and so powerless is this efficient cause to resist their jurisdiction, that, in spite of its highest efforts, it pines or ceases to exist in consequence of the mere natural operation of law upon the matter with which it is united, and without { } which it is impotent. it cannot receive an impression from without that is not conveyed in accordance with law, and perceived by an exquisitely ordered organism, in every part of which law reigns supreme; nor can it communicate from within except through channels equally ordered by law. a slight injury may derange the delicate mechanical contrivances of eye, ear, and vocal chords, and may further destroy the reason and paralyze the body, reducing the animated being, by the derangement of those channels to which physical law limits its action, to a mere smouldering spark of life, without consciousness and without expression. the "laws of life" act amongst the laws of matter, but are not independent of them, and the action of both classes of law is regulated by precisely the same principles. dr. mozley's affirmation, that _antecedently_ one step on the ground and an ascent to heaven are alike incredible, does not help him. in that sense it follows that there is nothing that is not antecedently incredible, nothing credible until it has happened. this argument, however, while it limits us to actual experience, prohibits presumptions with regard to that which is beyond experience. to argue that, because a step on the ground and an ascent to heaven are antecedently alike incredible, yet as we subsequently make that step, therefore the ascent to heaven, which we cannot make, from incredible becomes credible, is a contradiction in terms. if the ascent be antecedently incredible, it cannot at the same time be antecedently credible. that which is incredible cannot become credible because something else quite different becomes credible. it is apparent that such an argument is vicious. experience comes { } with its sober wisdom to check such reasoning. we believe in our power to walk because we habitually exercise it: we disbelieve in bodily ascensions because all experience excludes them. the step is part of the recognised order of nature, and has none of the elements in it of the miraculous. but if we leap into the air on the brink of a precipice, belief in an ascent to heaven is shattered to pieces at the bottom to which the law of gravitation infallibly drags us. there is absolutely nothing in the constitution of nature, we may say, reversing dr. mozley's assertion, which does not prove the incredibility of a divine suspension of physical laws, and does not create a presumption against it. there is no instance producible, or even logically conceivable, of any power whose effects are opposed to the ultimate ruling of the laws of nature. the occurrence of anything opposed to those laws is incredible. dr. mozley has himself shown that miracles cannot be explained either by unknown connection with known law, or by reference to unknown law; and he renounces the explanation of "higher law." his distinction between the laws of nature and the "laws of the universe,"( ) by which he nevertheless endeavours to make a miracle credible, is one which is purely imaginary, and cannot affect us in our present position within the order of nature. we know of no laws of the universe differing from the laws of nature. so far as human observation can range, these laws alone prevail. for all practical purposes, therefore, such a distinction is futile, and belief is necessarily limited to the actual operation of natural laws. the occasional intervention of an unknown "efficient cause," producing the effects { } called "miracles"--effects which are not referrible to any known law--is totally opposed to experience, and such a hypothesis to explain alleged occurrences of a miraculous character cannot find a legitimate place within the order of nature. . the proposition with which dr. mozley commences these bampton lectures, and for which he contends to their close, is this: "that miracles, or visible suspensions of the order of nature for a providential purpose, are not in contradiction to reason."( ) he shows that, the purpose of miracles is to attest a supernatural revelation, which, without them, we could not be justified in believing. "christianity," he distinctly states, "cannot be maintained as a revelation undiscoverable by human reason--a revelation of a supernatural scheme for man's salvation without the evidence of miracles."( ) out of this very admission he attempts to construct an argument in support of miracles: "hence it follows," he continues, "that upon the supposition of the divine design of a revelation, a miracle is not an anomaly or irregularity, but part of the system of the universe; because, though an irregularity and an anomaly in relation to either part, it has a complete adaptation to the whole. there being two worlds, a visible and invisible, and a communication between the two being wanted, a miracle is the instrument of that communication."( ) here, again, the argument is based upon mere assumption. { } the supposition of the divine design of a revelation is the result of a foregone conclusion in its favour, and is not suggested by antecedent probability. it is, in fact, derived solely from the contents of the revelation itself. divines assume that a communication of this nature is in accordance with reason, and was necessary for the salvation of the human race, simply because they believe that it took place. no attempt is seriously made independently to prove the reality of the supposed "divine design of a revelation." a revelation having, it is supposed, been made, that revelation is consequently supposed to have been contemplated, and to have necessitated and justified suspensions of the order of nature to effect it. the proposition for which the evidence of miracles is demanded is viciously employed as evidence for miracles. the circumstances upon which the assumption of the necessity and reasonableness of a revelation is based, however, are incredible, and contrary to reason. we are asked to believe that god made man in his own image, pure and sinless, and intended him to continue so, but that scarcely had this, his noblest work, left the hands of the creator, than man was tempted into sin by satan, an all-powerful and persistent enemy of god, whose existence and antagonism to a being in whose eyes sin is abomination are not accounted for and are incredible.( ) adam's fall brought a curse upon the earth, and incurred the penalty of death for himself and for the whole of his posterity. the human race, although created perfect and without sin, { } thus disappointed the expectations of the creator, and became daily more wicked, the evil spirit having succeeded in frustrating the designs of the almighty, so that god repented that he had made man, and at length destroyed by a deluge all the inhabitants of the earth, with the exception of eight persons who feared him. this sweeping purification, however, was as futile as the original design, and the race of men soon became more wicked than ever. the final and only adequate remedy devised by god for the salvation of his creatures, become so desperately and hopelessly evil, was the incarnation of himself in the person of "the son," the second person in a mysterious trinity of which the godhead is said to be composed, (who was conceived by the holy ghost, and born of the virgin mary,) and his death upon the cross as a vicarious expiation of the sins of the world, without which supposed satisfaction of the justice of god his mercy could not possibly have been extended to the frail and sinful work of his own hands. the crucifixion of the incarnate god was the crowning guilt of a nation whom god himself had selected as his own peculiar people, and whom he had condescended to guide by constant direct revelations of his will, but who, from the first, had displayed the most persistent and remarkable proclivity to sin against him, and, in spite of the wonderful miracles wrought on their behalf, to forsake his service for the worship of other gods. we are asked to believe, therefore, in the frustration of the divine design of creation, and in the fall of man into a state of wickedness hateful to god, requiring and justifying the divine design of a revelation, and such a revelation as this, as a preliminary to the further proposition that, on the supposition of such a design, miracles would not be contrary to reason. { } antecedently, nothing could be more absolutely incredible or contrary to reason than these statements, or the supposition of such a design. dr. mozley himself admits that, as human announcements, the doctrines of christianity would be the "wildest delusions," which we could not be justified in believing, and that such a scheme could not be maintained without miraculous evidence. the supposition of the divine design of the revelation is solely derived from the doctrines supposed to have been revealed, and, indeed, that design forms part of them. until they are proved to be divine truths, these statements must obviously be considered human announcements, and consequently they are antecedently incredible, and the "wildest delusions." as dr. mozley does not pretend that there is anything antecedently credible upon which he can base an assertion that there was actually { } any "divine design of a revelation," or that any "communication between the two worlds" was requisite, it is therefore clear that his argument consists merely of assumptions admitted to be antecedently incredible. it advances a supposition of that which is contrary to reason to justify supposed visible suspensions of the order of nature, which are also contrary to reason. incredible assumptions cannot give probability to incredible evidence- tertullian's audacious paradox: "credo quia impossible," of which such reasoning is illustrative, is but the cry of enthusiastic credulity. the whole theory of this abortive design of creation, with such impotent efforts to amend it, is emphatically contradicted by the glorious perfection and invariability of the order of nature. it is difficult to say whether the details of the scheme, or the circumstances which are supposed to have led to its adoption, are more shocking to reason or to moral sense. the imperfection ascribed to the divine work is scarcely more derogatory to the power and wisdom of the creator, than the supposed satisfaction of his justice in the death of himself incarnate, the innocent for the guilty, is degrading to the idea of his moral perfection. the supposed necessity for repeated interference to correct the imperfection of the original creation, the nature of the means employed, and the triumphant opposition of satan, are anthropomorphic conceptions totally incompatible with the idea of an infinitely wise and almighty being. the constitution of nature, so far from favouring any hypothesis of original perfection and subsequent deterioration, bears everywhere the record of systematic upward progression. not only is the assumption, that any revelation of the nature of ecclesiastical christianity was necessary, excluded upon { } philosophical grounds, but it is contradicted by the whole operation of natural laws, which contain in themselves inexorable penalties against natural retrogression, or even unprogressiveness, and furnish the only requisite stimulus to improvement.( ) the survival only of the fittest is the we venture to add a passage from mr. herbert spencer's "social statics," which we have met with for the first time since this work was published, in illustration of this assertion. mr. spencer affirms "the evanescence of evil" and the perfectibility of man, upon the ground that: "all evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions." after an elaborate demonstration of this, he resumes as follows: "if there be any conclusiveness in the foregoing arguments, such a faith is well founded. as commonly supported by evidence drawn from history, it cannot be considered indisputable. the inference that as adyancement has been hitherto the rule, it will be the rule henceforth, may be called a plausible speculation. but when it is shown that this adyancement is due to the working of a universal law; and that in virtue of that law it must continue until the state we call perfection is reached, then the advent of such a state is removed out of the region of probability into that of certainty. if any one demurs to this let him point out the error. here are the several steps of the argument. all imperfection is unfitness to the conditions of existence. this unfitness must consist either in having a faculty or faculties in excess; or in having a faculty or faculties deficient; or in both. a faculty in excess is one which the conditions of existence do not afford full exercise to; and a faculty that is deficient is one from which the conditions of existence demand more than it can perform. but it is an essential principle of life that a faculty to which circumstances do not allow full exercise diminishes; and that a faculty on which circumstances make excessive demands increases. and so long as this excess and this deficiency continue, there must continue decrease on the one hand, and growth on the other. finally all excess and all deficiency must disappear, that is, all unfitness must disappear; that is, all imperfection must disappear. thus the ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain� as certain as any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance, that all men will die. for why do we infer that all men will die p simply because, in an immense number of past experiences, death has uniformly occurred. similarly then as the experiences of all people in all times�experiences that are embodied in maxims, proverbs, and moral precepts, and that are illustrated in biographies and histories, go to prove that organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. and if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it--that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-- unquestionable also. progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity. instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower. the modifications mankind have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from a law underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, those modifications must end in completeness. as surely as the tree becomes bulky when it stands alone, and slender if one of a group; as surely as the same creature assumes the different forms of cart-horse and racehorse, according as its habits demand strength or speed; as surely as a blacksmith's arm grows large, and the skin of a labourer's hand thick; as surely as the eye tends to become long-sighted in the sailor, and shortsighted in the student; as surely as the blind attain a more delicate sense of touch; as surely as a clerk acquires rapidity in writing and calculation; as surely as the musician learns to detect an error of a semitone amidst what seems to others a very babel of sounds; as surely as a passion grows by indulgence and diminishes when restrained; as surely as a disregarded conscience becomes inert, and one that is obeyed active; as surely as there is any efficacy in educational culture, or any meaning in such terms as habit, custom, practice; so surely must the human faculties be moulded into complete fitness for the social state; so surely must the things we call evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect." social statics, stereotyped ed. , p. f. { } stern decree of nature. the invariable action of law of itself eliminates the unfit progress is necessary to existence; extinction is the doom of retrogression. the highest effect contemplated by the supposed revelation is to bring man into perfect harmony with law, and this is ensured by law itself acting upon intelligence. only in obedience to law is there life and safety. knowledge of law is imperatively demanded by nature. ignorance of it is a capital offence. if we ignore the law of gravitation we are dashed to pieces at the foot of a precipice, or are crushed by a falling rock; if we neglect sanatory law, we are destroyed by a pestilence; if we disregard chemical laws, we are poisoned by a vapour. there is not, in reality, a gradation of breach of law that is not followed by an equivalent gradation of punishment. civilization is nothing but the knowledge and observance of natural laws. the savage must learn them or be extinguished; the cultivated must observe them or die. the balance of moral and physical development cannot be deranged with impunity. in the spiritual as well as the physical sense only the fittest eventually can survive in the struggle for existence. there is, in fact, an absolute upward impulse to the whole human race supplied by the invariable operation of the laws of nature acting upon the common instinct of self-preservation. as, on the one hand, the highest human conception of infinite wisdom and power is derived from the universality and invariability of law, so that universality and invariability, on the other hand, exclude the idea of interruption or occasional suspension of law for any purpose whatever, and more especially for the correction of supposed original errors of design which cannot have existed, or for the attainment of objects already provided for in the order of nature. { } upon the first groundless assumption of a divine design of such a revelation follows the hypothetical inference that, for the purpose of making the communication from the unseen world, a miracle or visible suspension of the order or nature is no irregularity, but part of the system of the universe. this, however, is a mere assertion, and no argument an avowed assumption which is contrary to reason is followed by another which is contrary to experience. it is simply absurd to speak of a visible suspension of the order of nature being part of the system of the universe. such a statement has no meaning whatever within the range of human conception. moreover, it must be remembered that miracles--or "visible suspensions of the order of nature"--are ascribed indifferently to divine and to satanic agency. if miracles are not an anomaly or irregularity on the supposition of the divine design of a revelation, upon what supposition do satanic miracles cease to be irregularities? is the order of nature, which it is asserted is under the personal control of god, at the same time at the mercy of the devil? archbishop trench has, as usual, a singular way of overcoming the difficulty. he says:--"so long as we abide in the region of nature, miraculous and improbable, miraculous and incredible may be admitted as convertible terms. but once lift up the whole discussion into a higher region, once acknowledge something higher than nature, a kingdom of god, and men the intended denizens of it, and the whole argument loses its strength and the force of its conclusions.... he who already counts it likely that god will interfere for the higher welfare of men, who believes that there is a { } nobler world-order than that in which we live and move, and that it would be the blessing of blessings for that nobler to intrude into and to make itself felt in the region of this lower, who has found that here in this world we are bound by heavy laws of nature, of sin, of death, which no powers that we now possess can break, yet which must be broken if we are truly to live,--he will not find it hard to believe the great miracle, the coming of the son of god in the flesh, &c... and as he believes that greatest miracle, so will he believe all other miracles, &c."( ) in other words, if we already believe the premises we shall not find it difficult to adopt the conclusions--if we already believe the greatest miracle we shall not hesitate to believe the less--if we already believe the dogmas we shall not find it hard to believe the evidence by which they are supposed to be authenticated. as we necessarily do abide in the { } region of nature, in which dr. trench admits that miraculous and incredible are convertible terms, it would seem rather difficult to lift the discussion into the higher region here described without having already abandoned it altogether. { } chapter iii. reason in relation to the order of nature the argument of those who assert the possibility and reality of miracles generally takes the shape of an attack, more or less direct, upon our knowledge of the order of nature. to establish an exception they contest the rule. dr. mozley, however, is not content with the ordinary objections advanced by apologists but, boldly entering into the mazes of a delicate philosophical problem, he adopts sceptical arguments and seeks to turn the flank of the enemy upon his own ground. he conducts his attack with unusual force and ability. "whatever difficulty there is in believing in miracles in general," he says, "arises from the circumstance that they are in contradiction to or unlike the order of nature. to estimate the force of this difficulty, then, we must first understand what kind of belief it is which we have in the order of nature; for the weight of the objection to the miraculous must depend on the nature of the belief to which the miraculous is opposed."( ) dr. mozley defines the meaning of the phrase, "order of nature" as the _connection_ of that part of the order of nature of which we are ignorant with that part of it which we know, the former being expected to be such and such, _because_ the latter is. but how do we justify this expectation of { } _likeness?_ we cannot do so, and all our arguments are mere statements of the belief itself, he affirms, and not reasons to account for it. it may be said, e.g., that when a fact of nature has gone on repeating itself a certain time, such repetition shows that there is a permanent cause at work, and that a permanent cause produces permanently recurring effects. but what is there to show the existence of a permanent cause? nothing. the effects which have taken place show a cause at work to the extent of these effects, but not further. that this cause is of a more permanent nature we have no evidence. why then do we expect the further continuance of these effects.( ) we can only say: because we believe the future will be like the past. after a physical phenomenon has even occurred every day for years we have nothing but the past repetition to justify our certain expectation of its future repetition.( ) do we think it giving a reason for our confidence in the future to say that, though no man has had experience of what is future, every man has had experience of what was future? it is true that what is future becomes at every step of our advance what was future, but that which is now still future is not the least altered by that circumstance; it is as invisible, as unknown, and as unexplored as if it were the very beginning and the very starting-point of nature. at this starting-point of nature what would a man know of its future course? nothing. at this moment he knows no more.( ) what ground of reason, then, can we assign for our expectation that any part of the course of nature will the next moment be like what it has been up to this moment, i.e., for our belief { } in the uniformity of nature? none. it is without a reason. it rests upon no rational ground, and can be traced to no rational principle.( ) the belief in the order of nature being thus an "unintelligent impulse" of which we cannot give any rational account, dr. mozley concludes, the ground is gone upon which it could be maintained that miracles, as opposed to the order of nature, were opposed to reason. a miracle in being opposed to our experience is not only not opposed to necessary reasoning, but to any reasoning.( ) we need not further follow the bampton lecturer, as with clearness and ability he applies this reasoning to the argument of "experience," until he pauses triumphantly to exclaim: "thus step by step has philosophy loosened the connection of the order of nature with the ground of reason, befriending, in exact proportion as it has done this, the principle of miracles."( ) we need not here enter upon any abstract argument regarding the permanence or otherwise of cause: it will be sufficient to deal with these objections in a simpler and more direct way. dr. mozley, of course, acknowledges that the principle of the argument from experience is that "which makes human life practicable; which utilizes all our knowledge; which makes the past anything more than an irrelevant picture to us; for of what use is the experience of the past to us unless we believe the future will be like it?'( ) our knowledge in all things is relative, and there are sharp and narrow limits to human thought. it is therefore evident that, in the absence of absolute knowledge, our belief must be accorded to that of which we have { } more full cognizance rather than to that which is contradicted by all that we do know. it may be "irrational" to feel entire confidence that the sun will "rise" tomorrow, or that the moon will continue to wax and wane as in the past, but we shall without doubt retain this belief, and reject any assertion, however positive, that the earth will stand still to-morrow, or that it did so some thousands of years ago. evidence must take its relative place in the finite scale of knowledge and thought, and if we do not absolutely know anything whatever, so long as one thing is more fully established than another, we must hold to that which rests upon the more certain basis. our belief in the invariability of the order of nature, therefore, being based upon more certain grounds than any other human opinion, we must of necessity refuse credence to a statement supported by infinitely less complete testimony, and contradicted by universal experience, that phenomena subversive of that order occurred many years ago, or we must cease to believe anything at all. if belief based upon unvarying experience be irrational, how much more irrational must belief be which is opposed to that experience. according to dr. mozley, it is quite irrational to believe that a stone dropped from the hand, for instance, will fall to the ground. it is true that all the stones we ourselves have ever dropped, or seen dropped, have so fallen, and equally true that all stones so dropped as far back as historic records, and those still more authentic and ancient records of earth's crust itself go, have done the same, but that does not justify our belief, upon any grounds of reason, that the next stone we drop will do so. if we be told, however, that upon one occasion a stone so dropped, instead of falling to the ground, rose { } up into the air and continued there, we have only two courses open to us: either to disbelieve the fact, and attribute the statement to error of observation, or to reduce the past to a mere irrelevant picture, and the mind to a blank page equally devoid of all belief and of all intelligent reasoning. dr. mozley's argument, however, is fatal to his own cause. it is admitted that miracles, "or visible suspensions of the order of nature,"( ) cannot have any evidential force unless they be supernatural, and out of the natural sequence of ordinary phenomena. now, unless there be an actual order of nature, how can there be any exception to it? if our belief in it be not based upon any ground of reason,--as dr. mozley maintains, in order to assert that miracles or visible suspensions of that order are not contrary to reason,--how can it be asserted that miracles are supernatural? if we have no rational ground for believing that the future will be like the past, what rational ground can we have for thinking that anything which happens is exceptional, and out of the common course of nature? because it has not happened before? that is no reason whatever; because the fact that a thing has happened ten millions of times is no rational justification of our expectation that it will happen again. if the reverse of that which had happened previously took place on the ten million and first time we should have no rational ground for surprise, and no reason for affirming that it did not occur in the most natural manner. because we cannot explain its cause? we cannot explain the cause of anything. our belief that there is any permanent cause is a mere unintelligent impulse. we can only say that there is a cause { } sufficient to produce an isolated effect, but we do not know the nature of that cause, and it is a mere irrational instinct to suppose that any cause produces continuous effects, or is more than momentary. a miracle, consequently, becomes a mere isolated effect from an unknown cause, in the midst of other merely isolated phenomena from unknown causes, and it is as irrational to wonder at the occurrence of what is new, as to expect the recurrence of what is old. in fact, an order of nature is at once necessary, and fatal, to miracles. if there be no order of nature, miracles cannot be considered supernatural occurrences, and have no evidential value; if there be an order of nature, the evidence for its immutability must consequently exceed the evidence for these isolated deviations from it. if we are unable rationally to form expectations of the future from unvarying experience in the past, it is still more irrational to call that supernatural which is merely different from our past experience. take, for instance, the case of supposed exemption from the action of the law of gravitation, which archbishop trench calls "a lost prerogative of our race:"( ) we cannot rationally affirm that next week we may not be able to walk on the sea, or ascend bodily into the air. to deny this because we have not hitherto been able to do so is unreasonable; for, as dr. mozley maintains, it is a mere irrational impulse which expects that which has hitherto happened, when we have made such attempts, to happen again next week. if we cannot rationally deny the possibility, however, that we may be able at some future time to walk on the sea or ascend into the air, the statement that these phenomena have already occurred loses all its force, and such occurrences { } cease to be in any way supernatural. if, on the other hand, it would be irrational to affirm that we may next week become exempt from the operation of the law of gravitation, it can only be so by the admission that unvarying experience forbids the entertainment of such a hypothesis, and in that case it equally forbids belief in the statement that such acts ever actually took place. if we deny the future possibility on any ground of reason, we admit that we have grounds of reason for expecting the future to be like the past, and therefore contradict dr. mozley's conclusion; and if we cannot deny it upon any ground of reason, we extinguish the claim of such occurrences in the past to any supernatural character. any argument which could destroy faith in the order of nature would be equally destructive to miracles. if we have no right to believe in a rule, there can be no right to speak of exceptions. the result in any case is this, that whether the principle of the order of nature be established or refuted, the supernatural pretensions of miracles are disallowed. more than this, however, must inevitably be deduced from dr. mozley's reasoning. in denying, as he does, the doctrine of a permanent cause, dr. mozley must equally renounce, as without foundation in reason, the assumption of a permanent agent working miracles. not only do the supposed miracles, in the complete isolation of all effects, cease to be supernatural or even exceptional, but as it cannot be affirmed that there is any cause of a nature more permanent than its existing or known effects, it is obvious that miracles cannot be traced to an eternal being of permanent omnipotence. if dr. mozley, therefore, be understood to adopt this reasoning as his own, he has involved himself, in the { } necessary abandonment both of miracles as supernatural occurrences, and of a permanent and unlimited cause of miracles. if, on the other hand, he has merely snatched the sword of an adversary to turn it against him, he has unfortunately impaled himself upon the borrowed weapon. . throughout the whole of his argument against the rationality of belief in the order of nature, the rigorous precision which dr. mozley unrelentingly demands from his antagonists is remarkable. they are not permitted to deviate by a hair's breadth from the line of strict logic, and the most absolute exactness of demonstration is required. anything like an assumption or argument from analogy is excluded; induction is allowed to add no reason to bare and isolated facts; and the belief that the sun will rise to-morrow morning is, with pitiless severity, written down as mere unintelligent impulse. belief in the return of day, based upon the unvarying experience of all past time, is declared to be without any ground of reason. we find anything but fault with strictness of argument; but it is fair that equal precision should be observed by those who assert miracles, and that assumption and inaccuracy should be excluded. hitherto, as we have frequently pointed out, we have met with very little or nothing but assumption in support of miracles; but, encouraged by the inflexible spirit of dr. mozley's attack upon the argument from experience, we may look for similar precision from himself. { } proceeding, however, from his argument against the rationality of belief in the order of nature to his more direct argument for miracles, we are astonished to find a total abandonment of the rigorous exactness imposed upon his antagonists, and a complete relapse into assumptions. dr. mozley does not conceal the fact. "the peculiarity of the argument of miracles," he frankly admits, "is, that it begins and ends with an assumption; i mean relatively to that argument."( ) such an argument is no argument at all; it is a mere _petitio principii_, incapable of proving anything. the nature of the assumptions obviously does not in the slightest degree affect this conclusion. it is true that the statement of the particular assumptions may constitute an appeal to belief otherwise derived, and evolve feelings which may render the calm exercise of judgment more difficult, but the fact remains absolute, that an argument which "begins and ends with an assumption" is totally impotent. it remains an assumption, and is not an argument at all. { } notwithstanding this unfortunate and disqualifying "peculiarity" we may examine the argument. it is as follows: "we assume the existence of a personal deity prior to the proof of miracles in the religious sense; but with this assumption the question of miracles is at an end; because such a being has necessarily the power to suspend those laws of nature which he has himself enacted."( ) the "question of miracles," which dr. mozley here asserts to be at an end on the assumption of a "personal deity," is of course merely that of the _possibility_ of miracles; but it is obvious that, even with the precise definition of deity which is assumed, instead of the real "question" being at an end, it only commences. the power to suspend the laws of nature being assumed, the will to suspend them has to be demonstrated, and the actual occurrence of any such suspension, which, it has already been shown, is contrary to reason. the subject is, moreover, complicated by the occurrence of satanic as well as divine suspensions of the order of nature, and by the necessity of assuming a personal devil as well as a personal deity, and his power to usurp that control over the laws of nature, which is assumed as the prerogative of the deity, and to suspend them in direct opposition to god. the express ascription of miracles to the special intervention of a personal god is also, as we have seen, excluded by the scriptural admission that there are other supernatural beings capable of performing them. even dr. newman has recognized this, and, in a passage already quoted, he says: "for the cogency of the argument from miracles depends on the assumption, that interruptions in the course of nature must ultimately proceed from god; which is not true, if they may be { } effected by other beings without his sanction."( ) the first assumption, in fact, leads to nothing but assumptions connected with the unseen, unknown and supernatural, which are beyond the limits of reason. dr. mozley is well aware that his assumption of a "personal" deity is not susceptible of proof;( ) indeed, this is admitted in the statement that the definition is an "assumption." he quotes the obvious reply which may be made regarding this assumption:--"everybody must collect from the harmony of the physical universe the existence of a god, but in acknowledging a god, we do not thereby acknowledge this peculiar doctrinal conception of a god. we see in the structure of nature a mind--a universal mind--but still a mind which only operates and expresses itself by law. nature only does and only can inform us of mind _in_ nature, the partner and correlative of organized matter. nature, therefore, can speak to the existence of a god in this sense, and can speak to the omnipotence of god in a sense coinciding with the actual facts of nature; but in no other sense does nature witness to the existence of an omnipotent supreme being. of a universal mind out of nature, nature says nothing, and of an omnipotence which does not possess an inherent limit in nature, she says nothing either. and, therefore, that conception of a supreme being which represents him as a spirit { } independent of the physical universe, and able from a standing-place external to nature to interrupt its order, is a conception of god for which we must go elsewhere. that conception is obtained from revelation which is asserted to be proved by miracles. but that being the case, this doctrine of theism rests itself upon miracles, and, therefore, miracles cannot rest upon this doctrine of theism."( ) with his usual fairness, dr. mozley, while questioning the correctness of the premiss of this argument, admits that, if established, the consequence stated would follow, "and more, for miracles being thrown back upon the same ground on which theism is, the whole evidence of revelation becomes a vicious circle, and the fabric is left suspended in space, revelation resting on miracles and miracles resting on revelation."( ) he not only recognizes, however, that the conception of a person al" deity cannot be proved, but he distinctly confesses that it was obtained from revelation,( ) and from nowhere else, and these necessary admissions obviously establish the correctness of the premiss, and involve the consequence pointed out, that the evidence of revelation is a mere vicious circle. dr. mozley attempts to argue that, although the idea was first obtained through this channel, "the truth once possessed is seen to rest upon grounds of natural reason."( ) why, then, does he call it an assumption? the argument by which he seeks to show that the conception is seen to rest upon grounds of natural reason is: "we naturally attribute to the design of a personal being a contrivance which is directed to the existence of a personal being.... from personality { } at one end i infer personality at the other." dr. mozley's own sense of the weakness of his argument, however, and his natural honesty of mind oblige him continually to confess the absence of evidence. a few paragraphs further on he admits:--"not, however, that the existence of a god is so clearly seen by reason as to dispense with faith;"( ) but he endeavours to convince us that faith is reason, only reason acting under peculiar circumstances: when reason draws conclusions which are not backed by experience, reason is then called faith.( ) the issue of the argument, he contends, is so amazing, that if we do not tremble for its safety it must be on account of a practical principle, which makes us confide and trust in reasons, and that principle is faith. we are not aware that conviction can be arrived at regarding any matter otherwise than by confidence in the correctness of the reasons, and what dr. mozley really means by faith, here, is confidence and trust in a conclusion for which there are no reasons. it is almost incredible that the same person who had just been denying grounds of reason to conclusions from unvarying experience, and excluding from them the results of inductive reasoning--who had denounced as unintelligent impulse and irrational instinct the faith that the sun, which has risen without fail every morning since time began, will rise again to-morrow, could thus argue. in fact, from the very commencement of the direct plea for miracles, calm logical reasoning is abandoned, and the argument becomes entirely _ad hominem_. mere feeling is substituted for thought, and in the inability to be precise and logical, the lecturer appeals { } to the generally prevailing inaccuracy of thought.( ) "faith, then," he concludes, "is _unverified_ reason; reason which has not yet received the verification of the final test, but is still expectant." in science this, at the best, would be called mere "hypothesis," but accuracy can scarcely be expected where the argument continues: "indeed, does not our heart bear witness to the fact that to believe in a god"--i. e., a personal god --"is an exercise of faith?" &c.( ) it does not help dr. mozley that butler, paley, and all other divines have equally been obliged to commence with the same assumption; and, indeed, as we have already remarked, dr. mozley honestly admits the difficulty of the case, and while naturally making the most of his own views, he does not disguise the insecurity of the position. he deprecates that school which maintains that any average man, taken out of a crowd, who has sufficient common sense to manage his own affairs, is a fit judge, and such a judge as was originally contemplated, of the christian evidences;( ) and he says: "it is not, indeed, consistent with truth, nor would it conduce to the real defence of christianity, to underrate the difficulties of the christian evidence; or to disguise this characteristic of it, that the very facts which constitute the evidence of revelation have to be accepted by an act of faith themselves, before they can operate as a proof of that further truth."( ) such evidence is manifestly worthless. after all his assumptions, dr. mozley is reduced to the necessity of pleading: "a probable fact is a probable evidence. i may, therefore, use a miracle as evidence of a revelation, though { } i have only probable evidence for the miracle."( ) the probability of the miracle, however, is precisely what is denied, as opposed to reason and experience, and incompatible with the order of nature. a cause is, indeed, weak when so able an advocate is reduced to such reasoning. the deduction which is drawn from the assumption of a "personal" deity is, as we have seen, merely the possibility of miracles. "paley's criticism," said the late dean of st. paul's, "is, after all, the true one--'once believe that there is a god, and miracles are not incredible.'"( ) the assumption, therefore, although of vital importance in the event of its rejection, does not very materially advance the cause of miracles if established. we have already seen that the assumption is avowedly incapable of proof, but it may be well to examine it a little more closely in connection with the inferences supposed to be derivable from it. we must, however, in doing so carefully avoid being led into a metaphysical argument, which would be foreign to the purpose of this inquiry. in his bampton lectures on "the limit of religious thought," delivered in , dr. mansel, the very able editor and disciple of sir william hamilton, discussed this subject with great minuteness, and although we cannot pretend here to follow him through the whole of his singular argument--a theological application of sir william hamilton's philosophy--we must sufficiently represent it. dr. mansel argues: we are absolutely incapable of conceiving or proving the existence of god as he is; and so far is human reason from being able to { } construct a theology independent of revelation that it cannot even read the alphabet out of which that theology must be formed.( ) we are compelled, by the constitution of our minds, to believe in the existence of an absolute and infinite being; but the instant we attempt to analyse, we are involved in inextricable confusion.( ) our moral consciousness demands that we should conceive him as a personality, but personality, as we conceive it, is essentially a limitation; to speak of an absolute and infinite person is simply to use language to which no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself.( ) this amounts simply to an admission that our knowledge of god does not satisfy the conditions of speculative philosophy, and is incapable of reduction to an ultimate and absolute truth.( ) it is, therefore, reasonable that we should expect to find that the revealed manifestation of the divine nature and attributes should likewise carry the marks of subordination to some higher truth, of which it indicates the existence, but does not make known the substance; and that our apprehension of the revealed deity should involve mysteries inscrutable, and { } doubts insoluble by our present faculties, while at the same time it inculcates the true spirit in which doubt should be dealt with by warning us that our knowledge of god, though revealed by himself, is revealed in relation to human faculties, and subject to the limitations and imperfections inseparable from the constitution of the human mind.( ) we need not, of course, point out that the reality of revelation is here assumed. elsewhere, dr. mansel maintains that philosophy, by its own incongruities, has no claim to be accepted as a competent witness; and, on the other hand, human personality cannot be assumed as an exact copy of the divine, but only as that which is most nearly analogous to it among finite things.( ) as we are, therefore, incapable on the one hand of a clear conception of the divine being, and have only analogy to guide us in conceiving his attributes, we have no criterion of religious truth or falsehood, enabling us to judge of the ways of god, represented by revelation,( ) and have no right to judge of his justice, or mercy, or goodness, by the standard of human morality. it is impossible to conceive an argument more vicious, or more obviously warped to favour already accepted { } conclusions of revelation:--as finite beings we are not only incapable of proving the existence of god, but even of conceiving him as he is; therefore we may conceive him as he is not. to attribute personality to him is a limitation totally incompatible with the idea of an absolute and infinite being, in which "we are compelled by the constitution of our minds to believe;" and to speak of him as a personality is "to use language to which no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself;" but, nevertheless, to satisfy supposed demands of our moral consciousness, we are to conceive him as a personality. although we must define the supreme being as a personality to satisfy our moral consciousness, we must not, we are told, make the same moral consciousness the criterion of the attributes of that personality. we must not suppose him to be endowed, for instance, with the perfection of morality according to our ideas of it; but, on the contrary, we must hold that his moral perfections are at best only analogous, and often contradictory, to our standard of morality. as soon as we conceive a personal deity to satisfy our moral consciousness, we have to abandon the personality which satisfies that consciousness, in order to accept the characteristics of a supposed revelation, to reconcile certain statements of which we must admit that we have no criterion of truth or falsehood enabling us to judge of the ways of god. now, in reference to the assumption of a personal deity as a preliminary to the proof of miracles, it must be clearly remembered that the contents of the revelation which miracles are to authenticate cannot { } have any weight. antecedently, then, it is admitted that personality is a limitation which is absolutely excluded by the ideas of the deity, which, it is asserted, the constitution of our minds compete us to form. it cannot, therefore, be rationally assumed. to admit that such a conception is false, and then to base conclusions upon it, as though it were true, is absurd. it is child's play to satisfy our feeling and imagination by the conscious sacrifice of our reason. moreover, dr. mansel admits that the conception of a personal deity is really derived from the revelation, which has to be rendered credible by miracles; therefore the consequence already pointed out ensues, that the assumption cannot be used to prove miracles. "it must be allowed that it is not through reasoning that men obtain the first intimation of their relation to the deity; and that, had they been left to the guidance of their intellectual faculties alone, it is possible that no such intimation might have taken place; or at best, that it would have been but as one guess, out of many equally plausible and equally natural."( ) the vicious circle of the argument is here again apparent, and the singular reasoning by which the late dean of st. paul's seeks to drive us into an acceptance of revelation is really the strongest argument against it. the impossibility of conceiving god as he is,( ) which is insisted upon, instead of being a { } reason for assuming his personality, or for accepting jewish conceptions of him, totally excludes such an assumption. this "great religious assumption"( ) is not suggested by any antecedent considerations, but is required to account for miracles, and is derived from the very revelation which miracles are to attest. "in nature and from nature," to quote words of professor baden powell, "by science and by reason, we neither have nor can possibly have any evidence of a _deity working_ miracles;--for that we must go out of nature and beyond science. if we could have any such evidence _from nature_, it could only prove extraordinary _natural_ effects, which would not be _miracles_ in the old theological sense, as isolated, unrelated, and uncaused; whereas no _physical_ fact can be conceived as unique, or without analogy and relation to others, and to the whole system of natural causes."( ) being, therefore, limited to reason for any feeble conception of a divine being of which we may be capable, and reason being totally opposed to the idea of an order of nature so imperfect as to require or permit repeated interference, and rejecting the supposition of arbitrary { } suspensions of law, such a conception of a deity as is proposed by theologians must be pronounced irrational and derogatory. it is impossible for us to conceive a supreme being acting otherwise than we actually see in nature, and if we recognize in the universe the operation of infinite wisdom and power, it is in the immutable order and regularity of all phenomena, and in the eternal prevalence of law, that we see their highest manifestation. this is no conception based merely upon observation of law and order in the material world, as dr. mansel insinuates,( ) but it is likewise the result of the highest exercise of mind. dr. mansel "does not hesitate to affirm with sir william hamilton "that the class of phenomena which requires that kind of cause we denominate a deity is exclusively given in the phenomena of mind; that the phenomena of matter, taken by themselves, do not warrant any inference to the existence of a god."( ) after declaring a supreme being, from every point of view, inconceivable by our finite minds, it is singular to find him thrusting upon us, in consequence, a conception of that being which almost makes us exclaim with bacon: "it were better to have no opinion of god at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him; for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely."( ) dr. mansel asks: "is matter or mind the truer image of god?"( ) but both matter and mind unite in repudiating so unworthy a conception of a god, and in rejecting the idea of suspensions of law. in the words of spinoza: "from miracles { } we can neither infer the nature, the existence, nor the providence of god, but, on the contrary, these may be much better comprehended from the fixed and immutable order of nature;"( ) indeed, as he adds, miracles, as contrary to the order of nature, would rather lead us to doubt the existence of god.( ) six centuries before our era, a noble thinker, xenophanes of colophon, whose pure mind soared far above the base anthropomorphic mythologies of homer and hesiod, and anticipated some of the highest results of the platonic philosophy, finely said:-- "there is one god supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals, whose form is not like unto man's, and as unlike his nature; but vain mortals imagine that gods like themselves are begotten, with human sensations, and voice, and corporeal members;' so if oxen or lions had hands and could work iu man's fashion, and trace out with chisel or brush their conception of godhead, then would horses depict gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, each kind the divine with its own form and nature endowing."( ) he illustrates this profound observation by pointing out that the ethiopians represent their deities as black with flat noses, while the thracians make them blue-eyed with ruddy complexions, and, similarly, the medes and the persians and egyptians portray their gods like { } themselves.( ) the jewish idea of god was equally anthropomorphic; but their highest conception was certainly that which the least resembled themselves, and which described the almighty as "without variableness or shadow of turning," and as giving a law to the universe which shall not be broken.( ) . none of the arguments with which we have yet met have succeeded in making miracles in the least degree antecedently credible. on the contrary they have been based upon mere assumptions incapable of proof and devoid of probability. on the other hand there are the strongest reasons for affirming that such phenomena are antecedently incredible. dr. mozley's attack which we discussed in the first part of this chapter, and which of course was chiefly based upon hume's celebrated argument, { } never seriously grappled the doctrine at all. the principle which opposes itself to belief in miracles is very simple. whatever is contradictory to universal and invariable experience is antecedently incredible, and as that sequence of phenomena which is called the order of nature is established by and in accordance with universal experience, miracles or alleged violations of that order, by whatever name they may be called, or whatever definition may be given of their characteristics or object, are antecedently incredible. the preponderance of evidence for the invariability of the order of nature, in fact, is so enormous that it is impossible to credit the reality of such variations from it, and reason and experience concur in attributing the ascription of a miraculous character to any actual occurrences which may have been witnessed to imperfect observation, mistaken inference or some other of the numerous sources of error. any allegation of the interference of a new and supernatural agent, upon such an occasion, to account for results, in contradiction of the known sequence of cause and effect, is excluded by the very same principle, for invariable experience being as opposed to the assertion that such interference ever takes place as it is to the occurrence of miraculous phenomena, the allegation is necessarily disbelieved. apologists find it much more convenient to evade the simple but effective arguments of hume than to answer them, and where it is possible they dismiss them with a sneer, and hasten on to less dangerous ground. for instance, a recent hulsean lecturer, arguing the antecedent credibility of the miraculous, makes the following remarks: "now, as regards the inadequacy of testimony to establish a miracle, modern scepticism has not advanced { } one single step beyond the blank assertion. and it is astonishing that this assertion should still be considered cogent, when its logical consistency has been shattered to pieces by a host of writers as well sceptical as christian (mill's _logic_, ii., -- ). for, as the greatest of our living logicians has remarked, the supposed recondite and dangerous formula of hume--that it is more probable that testimony should be mistaken than that miracles should be true--reduces itself to the very harmless proposition that anything is incredible which is contrary to a complete induction. it is in fact a _flagrant petitio principii_, used to support a wholly unphilosophical assertion."( ) it is much more astonishing that so able a man as dr. farrar could so misunderstand hume's argument and so misinterpret and mis-state mr. mill's remarks upon it. so far from shattering to pieces the logical consistency of hume's reasoning, mr. mill substantially confirms it, and pertinently remarks that "it speaks ill for the state of philosophical speculation on such subjects" that so simple and evident a doctrine should have been accounted a dangerous heresy. it is, in fact, the statement of a truth which should have been universally recognized, and would have been so, but for its unwelcome and destructive bearing upon popular theology. mr. mill states the evident principle, that--"if an alleged fact be in contradiction, not to any number of approximate generalizations, but to a completed generalization grounded on a rigorous induction, it is said to be impossible, and is to be disbelieved totally." mr. mill continues.: "this last principle, simple and evident as it { } appears, is the doctrine which, on the occasion of an attempt to apply it to the question of the credibility of miracles, excited so violent a controversy. hume's celebrated doctrine, that nothing is credible which is contradictory to experience or at variance with laws of nature, is merely this very plain and harmless proposition, that whatever is contradictory to a complete induction is incredible."( ) he then proceeds to meet possible objections: "but does not (it may be asked) the very statement of the proposition imply a contradiction? an alleged fact according to this theory is not to be believed if it contradict a complete induction. but it is essential to the completeness of an induction that it should not contradict any known fact. is it not, then, a _petitio principii_ to say, that the fact ought to be disbelieved because the induction to it is complete? how can we have a right to declare the induction complete, while facts, supported by credible evidence, present themselves in opposition to it? i answer, we have that right whenever the scientific canons of induction give it to us; that is, whenever the induction can be complete. we have it, for example, in a case of causation in which there has been an _experimentum cruris_." it will be remarked that dr. farrar adopts mr. mill's phraseology in one of the above questions to affirm the reverse of his opinion. mr. mill decides that the proposition is not a _petitio principii_; dr. farrar says, as in continuation of his reference to mr. mill, that it is a flagrant _petitio principii_. mr. mill proceeds to prove his statement, and he naturally argues that, if observations or experiments have been repeated so often, and by so many persons, as to exclude all supposition of { } error in the observer, a law of nature is established; and so long as this law is received as such, the assertion that on any particular occasion the cause a took place and yet the effect b did not follow, _without any counteracting cause_, must be disbelieved. in fact, as he winds up this part of the argument by saying: "we cannot admit a proposition as a law of nature, and yet believe a fact in real contradiction to it. we must disbelieve the alleged fact, or believe that we were mistaken in admitting the supposed law."( ) mr. mill points out, however, that, in order that any alleged fact should be contradictory to a law of causation, the allegation must be not simply that the cause existed without being followed by the effect, but that this happened in the absence of any adequate counteracting cause. "now, in the case of an alleged miracle, the assertion is the exact opposite of this. it is, that the effect was defeated, not in the absence, but in consequence of a counteracting cause, namely, a direct interposition of an act of the will of some being who has power over nature; and in particular of a being, whose will being assumed to have endowed all the causes with the powers by which they produce their effects, may well be supposed able to counteract them."( ) a miracle, then, is no contradiction to the law of cause and effect; it is merely a new effect supposed to be introduced by the introduction of a new cause; "of the adequacy of that cause _if present,_( ) there can be no doubt; and the only antecedent improbability which can be ascribed to the miracle is the improbability that any such cause existed." mr. mill then continues, resuming his criticism on hume's argument: { } "all, therefore, which hume has made out, and this he must be considered to have made out, is that (at least in the imperfect state of our knowledge of natural agencies, which leaves it always possible that some of the physical antecedents may have been hidden from us,) no evidence can prove a miracle to any one who did not previously believe the existence of a being or beings with supernatural power; or who believes himself to have full proof that the character of the being whom he recognizes is inconsistent with his having seen fit to interfere on the occasion in question." mr. mill proceeds to enlarge on this conclusion. "if we do not already believe in supernatural agencies, no miracle can prove to us their existence. the miracle itself, considered merely as an extraordinary fact, may be satisfactorily certified by our senses or by testimony; but nothing can ever prove that it is a miracle: there is still another possible hypothesis, that of its being the result of some unknown natural cause: and this possibility cannot be so completely shut out as to leave no alternative but that of admitting the existence and intervention of a being superior to nature. those, however, who already believe in such a being have two hypotheses to choose from, a supernatural, and an unknown natural agency; and they have to judge which of the two is the most probable in the particular case. in forming this judgment, an important element of the question will be the conformity of the result to the laws of the supposed agent; that is, to the character of the deity as they conceive it. but, with the knowledge which we now possess of the general uniformity of the course of nature, religion, following in the wake of science, has been compelled to acknowledge the government of the universe as { } being on the whole carried on by general laws, and not by special interpositions. to whoever holds this belief, there is a general presumption against any supposition of divine agency not operating through general laws, or, in other words, there is an antecedent improbability in every miracle, which, in order to outweigh it, requires an extraordinary strength of antecedent probability derived from the special circumstances of the case."( ) mr. mill rightly considers that it is not more difficult to estimate this than in the case of other probabilities. "we are seldom, therefore, without the means (when the circumstances of the case are at all known to us) of judging how far it is likely that such a cause should have existed at that time and place without manifesting its presence by some other marks, and (in the case of an unknown cause) without having hitherto manifested its existence in any other instance. according as this circumstance, or the falsity of the testimony, appears more improbable, that is, conflicts with an approximate generalization of a higher order, we believe the testimony, or disbelieve it; with a stronger or weaker degree of conviction, according to the preponderance: at least until we have sifted the matter further."( ) this is precisely hume's argument weakened by the introduction of reservations which have no cogency. "we have wished to avoid interrupting mr. mill's train of reasoning by any remarks of our own, and have, therefore, deferred till now the following observations regarding his criticism on hume's argument. in reducing hume's celebrated doctrine to the very plain proposition that whatever is contradictory to a complete induction is incredible, mr. mill in no way { } diminishes its potency against miracles; and he does not call that proposition "harmless" in reference to its bearing on miracles, as dr. farrar evidently supposes, but merely in opposition to the character of a recondite and "dangerous heresy" assigned by dismayed theologians to so obvious and simple a principle. the proposition, however, whilst it reduces hume's doctrine in the abstract to more technical terms, does not altogether represent his argument. without asserting that experience is an absolutely infallible guide, hume maintains that--" a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. in such conclusions as are founded on an infallible experience, he expects the event with the last degree of assurance, and regards his past experience as a full proof of the future existence of that event. in other cases he proceeds with more caution, he weighs the opposite experiments: he considers which side is supported by the greater number of experiments: to that side he inclines with doubt and hesitation; and when at last he fixes his judgment, the evidence exceeds not what we properly call _probability_. all probability, then, supposes an opposition of experiments and observations, where the one side is found to overbalance the other, and to produce a degree of evidence proportioned to the superiority. "(l) after elaborating this proposition, hume continues: "a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. why is it more than probable that all men must die; that lead { } cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water; unless it be that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and there is required a violation of these laws, or, in other words, a miracle, to prevent them? nothing is esteemed a miracle if it ever happen in the common course of nature. it is no miracle that a man seemingly in good health should die on a sudden; because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. but it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed in any age or country. there must, therefore, be an uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. and as an uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full _proof_, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof which is superior. the plain consequence is, (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish: and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force which remains after deducting the inferior.' when any one tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, i immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. i weigh the one miracle against the { } other; and according to the superiority which discover, i pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. if the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion."( ) the ground upon which mr. mill admits that a miracle may not be contradictory to complete induction is that it is not an assertion that a certain cause was not followed by a certain effect, but an allegation of the interference of an adequate counteracting cause. this does not, however, by his own showing, remove a miracle from the action of hume's principle, but simply modifies the nature of the antecedent improbability. mr. mill qualifies his admission regarding the effect of the alleged counteracting cause, by the all-important words "if present;" for, in order to be valid, the reality of the alleged counteracting cause must be established, which is impossible, therefore the allegations fall to the ground. no one knows better than mr. mill that the assertion of a personal deity working miracles, upon which a miracle is allowed for a moment to come into court, cannot be proved, and, therefore, that it cannot stand in opposition to complete induction which hume takes as his standard. in admitting that hume has made out, that no evidence can prove a miracle to any one who does not previously believe in a being of supernatural power willing to work miracles, mr. mill concedes everything to hume, for his only limitation is based upon a supposition of mere personal belief in something which is not capable of proof, and which belief, therefore, is not { } more valid than any other purely imaginary hypothesis. the belief may seem substantial to the individual entertaining it, but, not being capable of proof, it cannot have weight with others, or in any way affect the value of evidence in the abstract. that mere individual belief, apart from proof, should thus be advanced in limitation of a logical principle, seems to us most unwarranted, and at the most it can only be received as a statement of what practically takes place amongst illogical reason ers. the assumption of a personal deity working miracles is, in fact, excluded by hume's argument, and, although mr. mill apparently overlooks the fact, hume has not only anticipated but refuted the reasoning which is based upon it. in the succeeding chapter on a particular providence and a future state, he directly disposes of such an assumption, but he does so with equal effect also in the essay which we are discussing. taking an imaginary miracle as an illustration, he argues: "though the being to whom the miracle is ascribed be in this case almighty, it does not, upon that account, become a whit more probable; since it is impossible for us to know the attributes or actions of such a being, otherwise than from the experience which we have of his productions in the usual course of nature. this still reduces us to past observation, and obliges us to compare the instances of the violation of truth in the testimony of men, with those of the violation of the laws of nature by miracles, in order to judge which of them is most likely and probable. as the violations of truth are more common in the testimony concerning religious miracles than in that concerning any other matter of fact, this must diminish very much the authority of the former testimony, and { } make us form a general resolution never to lend any attention to it, with whatever specious pretence it may be covered."( ) a person who believes anything contradictory to a complete induction merely on the strength of an assumption which is incapable of proof is simply credulous, but such an assumption cannot affect the real evidence for that thing. the argument of paley against hume is an illustration of the reasoning suggested by mr. mill. paley alleges the interposition of a personal deity in explanation of miracles, but he protests that he does not assume the attributes of the deity or the existence of a future state in order to _prove_ their reality. "that reality," he admits, "always must be proved by evidence. we assert only that in miracles adduced in support of revelation there is not such antecedent improbability as no testimony can surmount." his argument culminates in the short statement: "in a word, once believe that there is a god" (i.e., a personal god working miracles), "and miracles are not incredible."( ) we have already quoted hume's refutation of this reasoning, and we may at once proceed to the final argument by which paley endeavours to overthrow hume's doctrine, and upon which he mainly rests his case. "but the short consideration," he says, "which, independently of every other, convinces me that there is no solid foundation in mr. hume's conclusion, is the following: when a theorem is proposed to a mathematician, the first thing he does with it is to try it upon a simple case, and if it produces a false result, he is sure that there { } must be some mistake in the demonstration. now, to proceed in this way with what may be called mr. hume's theorem. if twelve men, whose probity and good sense i had long known, should seriously and circumstantially relate to me an account of a miracle wrought before their eyes, and in which it was impossible that they should be deceived; if the governor of the country, hearing a rumour of this account, should call these men into his presence, and offer them a short proposal, either to confess the imposture or submit to be tied up to a gibbet; if they should refuse with one voice to acknowledge that there existed any falsehood or imposture in the case; if this threat was communicated to them separately, yet with no different effect; if it was at last executed; if i myself saw them, one after another, consenting to be racked, burned, or strangled, rather than give up the truth of their account,--still, if mr. hume's rule be my guide, i am not to believe them. now i undertake to say that there exists not a sceptic in the world who would not believe them, or who would defend such incredulity."( ) it is obvious that this reasoning, besides being purely hypothetical, is utterly without cogency against hume's doctrine. in the first place, it is clear that no assertion of any twelve men would be sufficient to overthrow a law of nature, which is the result of a complete induction, and in order to establish the reality of a miracle or the occurrence on one occasion of an unprecedented effect, from any cause, not in accordance with natural law, no smaller amount of evidence would suffice than would serve to refute the complete induction. the allegation of such an intervening cause as a personal { } deity working miracles is excluded as opposed to a complete induction. so long as we maintain the law, we are necessarily compelled to reject any evidence which contradicts it. we cannot at the same time believe the contradictory evidence, and yet assert the truth of the law. the specific allegation, moreover, is completely prohibited by the scriptural admission that miracles are also performed by other supernatural beings in opposition to the deity. the evidence of the twelve men, however, simply amounts to a statement that they saw, or fancied that they saw, a certain occurrence in contradiction to the law, but that which they actually saw was only an external phenomenon, the real nature of which is a mere inference, and an inference which, from the necessarily isolated position of the miraculous phenomenon, is neither supported by other instances capable of forming a complete counter induction, nor by analogies within the order of nature. the bare inference from an occurrence supposed to have been witnessed by twelve men is all that is opposed to the law of nature, which is based upon a complete induction, and it is, therefore, incredible. if we proceed to examine paley's "simple case" a little more closely, however, we find that not only is it utterly inadmissible as a hypothesis, but that as an illustration of the case of gospel miracles it is completely devoid of relevancy and argumentative force. the only point which gives a momentary value to the supposed instance is the condition attached to the account of the miracle related by the twelve men, that not only was it wrought before their eyes, but that it was one "in which it was impossible that they should be deceived." now { } this qualification of infallibility on the part of the twelve witnesses is as incredible as the miracle which they are supposed to attest. the existence of twelve men incapable of error or mistake is as opposed to experience as the hypothesis of a miracle in which it is impossible for the twelve men to be deceived is contradictory to reason. the exclusion of all error in the observation of the actual occurrence and its antecedents and consequences, whose united sum constitutes the miracle, is an assumption which deprives the argument of all potency. it cannot be entertained. on the other hand, the moment the possibility of error is admitted, the reasoning breaks down, for the probability of error on the part of the observers, either as regards the external phenomena, or the inferences drawn from them, being so infinitely greater than the probability of mistake in the complete induction, we must unquestionably hold by the law and reject the testimony of the twelve men. it need scarcely be said that the assertion of liability to error on the part of the observers by no means involves any insinuation of wilful "falsehood or imposture in the case." it is quite intelligible that twelve men might witness an occurrence which might seem to them and others miraculous,--but which was susceptible of a perfectly natural explanation,--and truthfully relate what they believed to have seen, and that they might, therefore, refuse "with one voice to acknowledge that there existed any falsehood or imposture in the case," even although the alternative might be death on a gibbet. this, however, would in no way affect the character of the actual occurrence. it would not convert a natural, though by them inexplicable, phenomenon into a miracle. their constancy in adhering to the account they had { } given would merely bear upon the truth of their own statements, and the fact of seeing them "one after another consenting to be racked, burned, or strangled, rather than give up the truth of their account," would not in the least justify our believing in a miracle. even martyrdom cannot transform imaginations into facts. the truth of a narrative is no guarantee for the correctness of an inference. it seems almost incredible that arguments like these should for so many years have been tolerated in the text-book of a university. as regards the applicability of paleys illustration to the gospel miracles, the failure of his analogy is complete. we shall presently see the condition of the people amongst whom these miracles are supposed to have occurred, and that, so far from the nature of the phenomena, and the character of the witnesses, supporting the inference that it was impossible that the observers could have been deceived, there is every reason for concluding with certainty that their ignorance of natural laws, their proneness to superstition, their love of the marvellous, and their extreme religious excitement, rendered them peculiarly liable to incorrectness in the observation of the phenomena, and to error in the inferences drawn from them. we shall likewise see that we have no serious and circumstantial accounts of those miracles from eye-witnesses of whose probity and good sense we have any knowledge, but that, on the contrary, the narratives of them which we possess were composed by unknown persons, who were not eyewitnesses at all, but wrote very long after the events related, and in that mythic period "in which reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed on the province of history." the proposition: "that { } there is satisfactory evidence that many, professing to be original witnesses of the christian miracles, passed their lives in labours, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of these accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives, to new rules of conduct," is made by paley the argument of the first nine chapters of his work, as the converse of the proposition, that similar attestation of other miracles cannot be produced, is of the following two. this shows the importance which he attaches to the point; but, notwithstanding, even if he could substantiate this statement, the cause of miracles would not be one whit advanced. we have freely quoted these arguments in order to illustrate the real position of miracles; and no one who has seriously considered the matter can doubt the necessity for very extraordinary evidence, even to render the report of such phenomena worthy of a moment's attention. the argument for miracles, however, has hitherto proceeded upon the merest assumption, and, as we shall further see, the utmost that they can do who support miracles, under the fatal disadvantage of being contradictory to uniform experience, is to refer to the alleged contemporaneous nature of the evidence for their occurrence, and to the character of the supposed witnesses. mr. mill has ably shown the serious misapprehension of so many writers against hume's "essay on miracles," which has led them to what he calls "the extraordinary conclusion, that nothing supported by credible testimony ought ever to be disbelieved."( ) in regard to historical facts, not contradictory to all { } experience, simple and impartial testimony may be sufficient to warrant belief, but even such qualities as these can go but a very small way towards establishing the reality of an occurrence which is opposed to complete induction.( ) it is admitted that the evidence requisite to establish the reality of a supernatural divine revelation of doctrines beyond human reason, and comprising in its very essence such stupendous miracles as the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension, must be miraculous. the evidence for the miraculous evidence, which is scarcely less astounding than the contents of the revelation itself, must, logically, be miraculous also, for it is not a whit more easy to prove the reality of an evidential miracle than of a dogmatic miracle. it is evident that the resurrection of lazarus, for instance, is as contradictory to complete induction as the resurrection of jesus. both the supernatural religion, therefore, and its supernatural evidence labour under the fatal disability of being antecedently incredible. { } chapter iv. the age of miracles let us now, however, proceed to examine the evidence for the reality of miracles, and to inquire whether they are supported by such an amount of testimony as can in any degree outweigh the reasons which, antecedently, seem to render them incredible. it is undeniable that belief in the miraculous has gradually been dispelled, and that, as a general rule, the only miracles which are now maintained are limited to brief and distant periods of time. faith in their reality, once so comprehensive, does not, except amongst a certain class, extend beyond the miracles of the new testament and a few of those of the old,( ) and the countless myriads of ecclesiastical { } and other miracles, for centuries devoutly and implicitly believed, are now commonly repudiated, and have sunk into discredit and contempt. the question is inevitably suggested how so much can be abandoned and the remnant still be upheld. as an essential part of our inquiry into the value of the evidence for miracles, we must endeavour to ascertain whether those who are said to have witnessed the supposed miraculous occurrences were either competent to appreciate them aright, or likely to report them without exaggeration. for this purpose, we must consider what was known of the order of nature in the age in which miracles are said to have taken place, and what was the intellectual character of the people amongst whom they are reported to have been performed. nothing is more rare, even amongst intelligent and cultivated men, than accuracy of observation and correctness of report, even in matters of sufficient importance to attract vivid attention, and in which there is no special interest unconsciously to bias the observer. it will scarcely be denied, however, that in persons of fervid imagination, and with a strong natural love of the marvellous, whose minds are not only unrestrained by specific knowledge, but predisposed by superstition towards false conclusions, the probability of inaccuracy and exaggeration is enormously { } increased. if we add to this such a disturbing element as religious excitement, inaccuracy, exaggeration, and extravagance are certain to occur. the effect of even one of these influences, religious feeling, in warping the judgment, is admitted by one of the most uncompromising supporters of miracles. "it is doubtless the tendency of religious minds," says dr. newman, "to imagine mysteries and wonders where there are none; and much more, where causes of awe really exist, will they unintentionally mis-state, exaggerate, and embellish, when they set themselves to relate what they have witnessed or have heard;" and he adds: "and further, the imagination, as is well known, is a fruitful cause of apparent miracles."( ) we need not offer any evidence that the miracles which we have to examine were witnessed and reported by persons exposed to the effects of the strongest possible religious feeling and excitement, and our attention may, therefore, be more freely directed to the inquiry how far this influence was modified by other circumstances. did the jews at the time of jesus possess such calmness of judgment and sobriety of imagination as to inspire us with any confidence in accounts of marvellous occurrences, unwitnessed except by them, and limited to their time, which contradict all knowledge and all experience? were their minds sufficiently enlightened and free from superstition to warrant our attaching weight to their report of events of such an astounding nature? and were they themselves sufficiently impressed with the exceptional character of { } any apparent supernatural and miraculous interference with the order of nature? let an english historian and divine, who will be acknowledged as no prejudiced witness, bear testimony upon some of these points. "nor is it less important," says the late dean milman, "throughout the early history of christianity, to seize the spirit of the times. events which appear to us so extraordinary, that we can scarcely conceive that they should either fail in exciting a powerful sensation, or ever be obliterated from the popular remembrance, in their own day might pass off as of little more than ordinary occurrence. during the whole life of christ, and the early propagation of the religion, it must be borne in mind that they took place in an age, and among a people, which superstition had made so familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events, that wonders awakened no emotion, or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the ever-ready belief. the jews of that period not only believed that the supreme being had the power of controlling the course of nature, but that the same influence was possessed by multitudes of subordinate spirits, both good and evil. where the pious christian of the present day would behold the direct agency of the almighty, the jews would invariably have interposed an angel as the author or ministerial agent in the wonderful transaction. where the christian moralist would condemn the fierce passion, the ungovernable lust, or the inhuman temper, the jew discerned the workings of diabolical possession. scarcely a malady was endured, or crime committed, but it was traced to the operation of one of these myriad daemons, who watched every opportunity { } of exercising their malice in the sufferings and the sins of men."( ) another english divine, of certainly not less orthodoxy, but of much greater knowledge of hebrew literature, bears similar testimony regarding the jewish nation at the same period. "not to be more tedious, therefore, in this matter," (regarding the bath kol, a jewish superstition,)" let two things only be observed: i. that the nation, under the second temple, was given to magical arts beyond measure; and, ii. that it was given to an easiness of believing all manner of delusions beyond measure."( ) and in another place: "it is a disputable case, whether the jewish nation were more mad with superstition in matters of religion, or with superstition in curious arts:--i. there was not a people upon earth that studied or attributed more to dreams than they. ii. there was hardly any people in the whole world that more used, or were more fond of, amulets, charms, mutterings, exorcisms, and all kinds of enchantments. we might here produce innumerable instances."( ) we shall presently see that these statements are far from being exaggerated. no reader of the old testament can fail to have been struck by the singularly credulous fickleness of the jewish mind. although claiming the title of the specially selected people of jehovah, the israelites exhibited a constant and inveterate tendency to forsake his service for the worship of other gods. the mighty "signs and wonders" which god is represented as incessantly working { } on their behalf, and in their sight, had apparently no effect upon them. the miraculous even then had, as it would seem, already lost all novelty, and ceased, according to the records, to excite more than mere passing astonishment. the leaders and prophets of israel had a perpetual struggle to restrain the people from "following after" heathen deities, and whilst the burden of the prophets is one grand denunciation of the idolatry into which the nation was incessantly falling, the verdict of the historical books upon the several kings and rulers of israel proves how common it was, and how rare even the nominal service of jehovah. at the best the mind of the jewish nation only after long and slow progression, attained the idea of a perfect monotheism, but added to the belief in jehovah the recognition of a host of other gods, over whom it merely gave him supremacy.( ) this is apparent even in the first commandment: "thou shalt have no other gods before me;" and the necessity for such a law received its illustration from a people who are represented as actually worshipping the golden calf, made for them by the complaisant aaron, during the very time that the great decalogue was being written on the mount by his colleague moses.( ) it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that, at a later period, and throughout patristic days, the gods of the greeks and other heathen nations were so far gently treated, that, although repudiated as deities, { } they were recognized as demons. in the septuagint version of the old testament, where "idols" are spoken of in the hebrew, the word is sometimes translated "demons;" as, for instance, psalm xcvi. is rendered: "for all the gods of the nations are demons."(l) the national superstition betrays itself in this and many other passages of this version, which so well represented the views of the first ages of the church that the fathers regarded it as miraculous. irenæus relates how ptolemy, the son of lagus, brought seventy of the elders of the jews together to alexandria in order to translate the hebrew scriptures into greek, but fearing that they might agree amongst themselves to conceal the real meaning of the hebrew, he separated them, and commanded each to make a translation. when the seventy translations of the bible were completed and compared, it was found that, by the inspiration of god, the very same words and the very same names from beginning to end had been used by them all.( ) the same superstition is quite as clearly expressed in the new testament. the apostle paul, for instance, speaking of things sacrificed to idols, says: "but (i say) that the things which the gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to god; and i would not that ye should be partakers with { } demons. ye cannot drink the cup of the lord, and the cup of demons; ye cannot partake of the lord's table, and of the table of demons."(l) the apocryphal book of tobit affords some illustration of the opinions of the more enlightened jews during the last century before the commencement of the christian era.( ) the angel raphael prescribes, as an infallible means of driving a demon out of man or woman so effectually that it should never more come back, fumigation with the heart and liver of a fish.( ) by this exorcism the demon asmodeus, who from love of sara, the daughter of raguel, has strangled seven husbands who attempted to marry her,( ) is overcome, and flies into "the uttermost parts of egypt," where the angel binds him.( ) the belief in demons, and in the necessity of exorcism, is so complete that the author sees no incongruity in describing the angel raphael, who has been sent, in answer to prayer, specially to help him, as instructing tobias to adopt such means of subjecting demons. raphael is described in this book as the angel of healing,( ) the office generally assigned to him by the fathers. he is also represented as saying of himself that he is one of the seven holy angels which present the prayers of the saints to god.( ) { } there are many curious particulars regarding angels and demons in the book of enoch.( ) this work, which is quoted by the author of the epistle of jude,( ) and by some of the fathers, as inspired scripture,( ) was supposed by tertullian to have survived the universal deluge, or to have been afterwards transmitted by means of noah, the great-grandson of the author enoch.( ) it may be assigned to about a century before christ, but additions were made to the text, and more especially to its angelology, extending probably to after the commencement of our era.( ) it undoubtedly represents views popularly prevailing about the epoch in which we are interested. the author not only relates the fall of the angels through love for the daughters of men, but gives the names of twenty-one of them and of their leaders; of whom jequn was he who seduced the holy angels, and ashbeêl it was who gave them evil counsel and corrupted them.( ) a third, gadreel,( ) was he who seduced eve. he also taught to the children of men the use and manufacture of all murderous weapons, of coats of mail, shields, { } swords, and of all the implements of death. another evil angel, named pênêmuê, taught them many mysteries of wisdom. he instructed men in the art of writing with paper [--greek--] and ink, by means of which, the author remarks, many fall into sin even to the present day. kaodejâ, another evil angel, taught the human race all the wicked practices of spirits and demons,( ) and also magic and exorcism.( ) the offspring of the fallen angels and of the daughters of men were giants, whose height was ells;( ) of these are the demons working evil upon earth.( ) azazel taught men various arts: the making of bracelets and ornaments; the use of cosmetics, the way to beautify the eyebrows; precious stones, and all dye-stuffs and metals; whilst other wicked angels instructed them in all kinds of pernicious knowledge.( ) the elements and all the phenomena of nature are controlled and produced by the agency of angels. uriel is the angel of thunder and earthquakes; raphael, of the spirits of men; raguel is the angel who executes vengeance on the world and the stars; michael is set over the best of mankind, i.e., over the people of israel;( ) saraqâel, over the souls of the children of men, who are misled by the spirits of sin; and gabriel is over serpents and over paradise, and over the cherubim.( ) enoch is shown the mystery of all the operations of nature, and the action of the elements, and he describes the spirits which guide them, and control the thunder and lightning and the winds; the spirit of the seas, who curbs them with his might, or tosses them forth and scatters them through the mountains of the earth; the { } spirit of hoar frost, and the spirit of hail, and the spirit of snow. there are, in fact, special spirits set over every phenomenon of nature--frost, thaw, mist, rain, light, and so on.( ) the heavens and the earth are filled with spirits. raphael is the angel set over all the diseases and wounds of mankind, gabriel over all powers, and fanuel over the penitence and the hope of those who inherit eternal life.( ) the decree for the destruction of the human race goes forth from the presence of the lord, because men know all the mysteries of the angels, all the evil works of satan, and all the secret might and power of those who practise the art of magic, and the power of conjuring, and such arts.( ) the stars are represented as animated beings.( ) enoch sees seven stars bound together in space like great mountains, and flaming as with fire; and he inquires of the angel who leads him, on account of what sin they are so bound? uriel informs him that they are stars which have transgressed the commands of the highest god, and they are thus bound until ten thousand worlds, the number of the days of their transgression, shall be accomplished.( ) the belief that sun, moon, and stars were living entities possessed of souls was generally held by the jews at the beginning of our era, along with greek philosophers, and we shall presently see it expressed by the fathers. philo judaeus considers the stars spiritual beings full of virtue and perfection,( ) and that to them is granted lordship over other heavenly bodies, not absolute, but as viceroys under the supreme { } being.( ) we find a similar view regarding the nature of the stars expressed in the apocalypse,( ) and it constantly appears in the talmud and targums.( ) an angel of the sun and moon is described in the ascensio isaiae.( ) we are able to obtain a full and minute conception of the belief regarding angels and demons and their influence over cosmical phenomena, as well as of other superstitions current amongst the jews at the time of jesus,( ) from the talmud, targums, and other rabbinical sources. we cannot, however, do more, here, than merely glance at these voluminous materials. the angels are perfectly pure spirits, without sin, and not visible to mortal eyes. when they come down to earth on any mission, they are clad in light and veiled in air. if, however, they remain longer than seven days on earth, they become so clogged with the earthly matter in which they have been immersed that they cannot again ascend to the upper heavens.( ) their multitude is innumerable,( ) and new angels are every day created, who in succession praise { } god and make way for others.( ) the expression, "host of heaven," is a common one in the old testament, and the idea was developed into a heavenly army. the first gospel represents jesus as speaking of "more than twelve legions of angels."( ) every angel has one particular duty to perform, and no more; thus of the three angels who appeared to abraham, one was sent to announce that sarah should have a son, the second to rescue lot, and the third to destroy sodom and gomorrah.( ) the angels serve god in the administration of the universe, and to special angels are assigned the different parts of nature. "there is not a thing in the world, not even a little herb, over which there is not an angel set, and everything happens according to the command of these appointed angels."( ) it will be remembered that the agency of angels is frequently introduced in the old testament, and still more so in the septuagint version, by alterations of the text. one notable case of such agency may be referred to, where the pestilence which is sent to punish david for numbering the people is said to be caused by an angel, whom david even sees. the lord is represented as repenting of the evil, when the angel was stretching forth his hand against jerusalem, and bidding him stay his hand after the angel had destroyed seventy thousand men by the pestilence.( ) this theory of disease has prevailed until comparatively recent times. the names of many of the superintending angels are given, as, for instance: jehuel { } is set over fire, michael over water, jechiel over wild beasts, and anpiel over birds. over cattle hariel is appointed, and samniel over created things moving in the waters, and over the face of the earth; messannahel over reptiles, deliel over fish. ruchiel is set over the winds, gabriel over thunder and also over fire, and over the ripening of fruit, xuriel over hail, makturiel over rocks, alpiel over fruit-bearing trees, saroel over those which do not bear fruit, and sandalfon over the human race; and under each of these there are subordinate angels.( ) it was believed that there were two angels of death, one for those who died out of the land of israel, who was an evil angel, called samaël (and at other times satan, asmodeus, &c), and the other, who presided over the dead of the land of israel, the holy angel gabriel; and under these there was a host of evil spirits and angels.( ) the jews were unanimous in asserting that angels superintend the various operations of nature, although there is some difference in the names assigned to these angels.( ) the sohar on numbers states that "michael, gabriel, nuriel, raphael are set over the four elements, water, fire, air, earth."( ) we shall presently sec how general this belief regarding angels was amongst the fathers, but it is also expressed in the new testament. in the apocalypse there appears an angel { } who has power over fire,( ) and in another place four angels have power to hurt the earth and the sea.( ) the angels were likewise the instructors of men, and communicated knowledge to the patriarchs. the angel gabriel taught joseph the seventy languages of the earth.( ) it appears, however, that there was one language--the syriac--which the angels do not understand, and for this reason men were not permitted to pray for things needful, in that tongue.( ) angels are appointed as princes over the seventy nations of the world; but the jews consider the angels set over gentile nations merely demons.( ) the septuagint translation of deuteronomy xxxii. introduces the statement into the old testament. instead of the most high, when he divided to the nations their inheritance, setting the bounds of the people "according to the number of the children of israel," the passage becomes, "according to the number of the angels of god" [--greek--]. the number of the nations was fixed at seventy, the number of the souls who went down into egypt.( ) the jerusalem targum on genesis xi. , , reads as follows: "god spake to the seventy angels which stand before him: come, let us go down and confound their language that they may not understand each other. and the word of the lord appeared there (at babel), with the seventy angels, according to the seventy nations, and { } each had the language of the people which was allotted to him, and the record of the writing in his hand, and scattered the nations from thence over the whole earth, in seventy languages, so that the one did not understand what the other said."(l) michael was the angel of the people of israel,( ) and he is always set in the highest place amongst the angels, and often called the high priest of heaven.( ) it was believed that the angels of the nations fought in heaven when their allotted peoples made war on earth. we see an allusion to this in the book of daniel,( ) and in the apocalypse there is "war in heaven; michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought, and his angels."( ) the jews of the time of jesus not only held that there were angels set over the nations, but also that each individual had a guardian angel.( ) this belief appears in several places in the new testament. for instance, jesus is represented as saying of the children: "for i say unto you that their angels do always behold the face of my father which is in heaven."( ) again, in the acts of the apostles, when peter is delivered from prison by an angel, and comes to the house of his friend, they will not believe the maid who had opened the gate and seen him, but say: "it is his angel" [--greek--]. the passage in the epistle to the hebrews will likewise be remembered, where it is said of the angels: "are they not all ministering spirits sent forth for ministry on { } account of them who shall be heirs of salvation."( ) there was at the same time a singular belief that when any person went into the private closet, the guardian angel remained at the door till he came out again, and in the talmud a prayer is given for strength and help under the circumstances, and that the guardian angel may wait while the person is there. the reason why the angel does not enter is that such places are haunted by demons.( ) the belief in demons at the time of jesus was equally emphatic and comprehensive, and we need scarcely mention that the new testament is full of references to them.( ) they are in the air, on earth, in the bodies of men and animals, and even at the bottom of the sea.( ) they are the offspring of the fallen angels who loved the daughters of men.( ) they have wings like the angels, and can fly from one end of heaven to another; they obtain a knowledge of the future, like the angels, by listening behind the veil of the temple of god in heaven.( ) their number is infinite. the earth is so full of them that if man had power to see he could not exist, on account of them; there are more demons than men, and they are about as close as the earth thrown up out of a newly-made grave.( ) it is stated that each man has , demons at his right hand, and , on his left, and the passage continues: "the crush on the sabbath in the synagogue arises from them, also the dresses of the rabbins become so soon old and torn through their rubbing; in like manner they cause the tottering of the feet. he who wishes to discover these spirits must take sifted ashes and strew them about his bed, and in the morning he will perceive their footprints upon them like a cock's tread. if any one wish to see them, he must take the afterbirth of a black cat, which has been littered by a first-born black cat, whose mother was also a first-birth, burn and reduce it to powder, and put some of it in his eyes, and he will see them."(l) sometimes demons assume the form of a goat. evil spirits fly chiefly during the darkness, for they are children of night.( ) for this reason the talmud states that men are forbidden to greet any one by night, lest it might be a devil,( ) or to go out alone even by day, but much more by night, into solitary places.( ) it was likewise forbidden for any man to sleep alone in a house, because any one so doing would be seized by the she-devil lilith, and die.( ) further, no man should drink water by night on account of the demon schafriri, the angel of blindness.( ) { } an evil spirit descended on any one going into a cemetery by night.( ) a necromancer is defined as one who fasts and lodges at night amongst tombs in order that the evil spirit may come upon him.( ) demons, however, take more especial delight in foul and offensive places, and an evil spirit inhabits every private closet in the world.( ) demons haunt deserted places, ruins, graves, and certain kinds of trees.( ) we find indications of these superstitions throughout the gospels. the possessed are represented as dwelling among the tombs, and being driven by the unclean spirits into the wilderness, and the demons can find no rest in clean places.( ) demons also frequented springs and fountains.( ) the episode of the angel who was said to descend at certain seasons and trouble the water of the pool of bethesda, so that he who first stepped in was cured of whatever disease he had, may be mentioned here in passing, although the passage is not found in some of the older mss. of the fourth gospel,( ) and it is argued by some that it is a later interpolation. there were demons who hurt those who did not wash their hands before meat. "shibta is an evil spirit which sits upon men's hands in the night; and if any touch his food with unwashen hands, that spirit sits upon that food, and there is danger from it."( ) { } the demon asmodeus is frequently called the king of the devils,( ) and it was believed that he tempted people to apostatize; he it was who enticed noah into his drunkenness, and led solomon into sin.( ) he is represented as alternately ascending to study in the school of the heavenly jerusalem, and descending to study in the school of the earth.( ) the injury of the human race in every possible way was believed to be the chief delight of evil spirits. the talmud and other rabbinical writings are full of references to demoniacal possession, but we need not enter into details upon this point, as the new testament itself presents sufficient evidence regarding it. not only one evil spirit could enter into a body, but many took possession of the same individual. there are many instances mentioned in the gospels, such as mary magdalene, "out of whom went seven demons" [--greek--], and the man whose name was legion, because "many demons" [--greek--] were entered into him.( ) demons likewise entered into the bodies of animals, and in the narrative to which we have just referred, the demons, on being expelled from the man, request that they may be allowed to enter into the herd of swine, which being permitted, "the demons went out of { } the man into the swine, and the herd ran violently down the cliff into the lake, and were drowned,"( ) the evil spirits, as usual, taking pleasure only in the destruction and injury of man and beast. besides "possession," all the diseases of men and animals were ascribed to the action of the devil and of demons.( ) in the gospels, for instance, the woman with a spirit of infirmity, who was bowed together and could not lift herself up, is described as "bound by satan," although the case was not one of demoniacal possession.( ) as might be expected from the universality of the belief in demons and their influence over the human race, the jews at the time of jesus occupied themselves much with the means of conjuring them. "there was hardly any people in the whole world," we have already heard from a great hebrew scholar, "that more used, or were more fond of, amulets, charms, mutterings, exorcisms, and all kinds of enchantments."( ) schoettgen bears similar testimony: "cæterum judoeos magicis artibus admodum deditos esse, notissimum est."( ) all competent scholars are agreed upon this point, and the talmud and rabbinical writings are full of it. the exceeding prevalence of such arts alone proves the existence of the grossest ignorance and superstition. { } there are elaborate rules in the talmud with regard to dreams, both as to how they are to be obtained and how interpreted.( ) fasts were enjoined in order to secure good dreams, and these fasts were not only observed by the ignorant, but also by the principal rabbins, and they were permitted even on the sabbath, which was unlawful in other cases.( ) indeed, the interpretation of dreams became a public profession.( ) it would be impossible within our limits to convey an adequate idea of the general superstition prevalent amongst the jews regarding things and actions lucky and unlucky, or the minute particulars in regard to every common act prescribed for safety against demons and evil influences of all kinds. nothing was considered indifferent or too trifling, and the danger from the most trivial movements or omissions to which men were supposed to be exposed from the malignity of evil spirits was believed to be great.( ) amulets, consisting of roots, or pieces of paper with charms written upon them, were hung round the neck of the sick, and considered efficacious for their cure. charms, mutterings, and spells were commonly said over wounds, against unlucky meetings, to make people sleep, to heal diseases, and to avert enchantments.( ) the talmud gives forms of enchantments against mad dogs, for instance, against the demon of blindness, and the like, as well as formulae for averting the evil eye, and { } mutterings over diseases.( ) so common was the practice of sorcery and magic that the talmud enjoins "that the senior who is chosen into the council ought to be skilled in the arts of astrologers, jugglers, diviners, sorcerers, &c, that he may be able to judge of those who are guilty of the same."( ) numerous cases are recorded of persons destroyed by means of sorcery.( ) the jewish women were particularly addicted to sorcery, and indeed the talmud declares that they had generally fallen into it.( ) the new testament bears abundant testimony to the prevalence of magic and exorcism at the time at which its books were written. in the gospels, jesus is represented as arguing with the pharisees, who accuse him of casting out devils by beelzebub, the prince of the devils. "if i by beelzebub cast out the demons [--greek--] by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore let them be your judges."( ) the thoroughness and universality of the jewish popular belief in demons and evil spirits and in the power of magic is exhibited in the ascription to solomon, the monarch in whom the greatness and glory of the nation attained its culminating point, of the character of a powerful magician. the most effectual forms of invocation and exorcism, and the most potent spells of magic, were said to have been composed by him, and thus the grossest superstition of the nation acquired the sanction of their wisest king. rabbinical writings are { } never weary of enlarging upon the magical power and knowledge of solomon. he was represented as not only king of the whole earth, but also as reigning over devils and evil spirits, and having the power of expelling them from the bodies of men and animals, and also of delivering people to them.( ) it was indeed believed that the two demons asa and asael taught solomon all wisdom and all arts.( ) the talmud relates many instances of his power over evil spirits, and amongst others how he made them assist in building the temple. solomon desired to have the help of the worm schamir in preparing the stones for the sacred building, and he conjured up a devil and a she-devil to inform him where schamir was to be found. they referred him to asmodeus, whom the king craftily captured, and by whom he was informed that schamir is under the jurisdiction of the prince of the seas, and asmodeus further told him how he might be secured. by his means the temple was built, but, from the moment it was destroyed, schamir for ever disappeared.( ) it was likewise believed that one of the chambers of the second temple was built by a magician called parvah, by means of magic.( ) the talmud narrates many stories of miracles performed by various rabbins.( ) the jewish historian, josephus, informs us that, amongst { } other gifts, god bestowed upon king solomon knowledge of the way to expel demons, an art which is useful and salutary for mankind. he composed incantations by which diseases are cured, and he left behind him forms of exorcism by which demons may be so effectually expelled that they never return, a method of cure, josephus adds, which is of great efficacy to his own day. he himself had seen a countryman of his own, named eliezer, release people possessed of devils in the presence of the emperor vespasian and his sons, and of his army. he put a ring containing one of the roots prescribed by solomon to the nose of the demoniac, and drew the demon out by his nostrils, and, in the name of solomon, and reciting one of his incantations, he adjured it to return no more. in order to demonstrate to the spectators that he had the power to cast out devils, eliezer was accustomed to set a vessel full of water a little way off, and he commanded the demon as he left the body of the man to overturn it, by which means, says josephus, the skill and wisdom of solomon were made very manifest.( ) jewish rabbins generally were known as powerful exorcisers, practising the art according to the formulae of their great monarch. justin martyr reproaches his jewish opponent, tryphon, with the fact that his countrymen use the same art as the gentiles, and exorcise with fumigations and charms [--greek--], and he shows the common belief in demoniacal influence "when he asserts that, while jewish exorcists cannot overcome demons by such means, or even by exorcising them in the name of their kings, prophets, or patriarchs, though he admits that they might do so if they adjured them in the name of the god of abraham, isaac, and { } jacob, yet christians at once subdued demons by exorcising them in the name of the son of god.( ) the jew and the christian were quite agreed that demons were to be exorcised, and merely differed as to the formula of exorcism. josephus gives an account of a root potent against evil spirits. it is called baaras, and is flame-coloured, and in the evening sends out flashes like lightning. it is certain death to touch it, except under peculiar conditions. one mode of securing it is to dig down till the smaller part of the root is exposed, and then to attach the root to a dog's tail. when the dog tries to follow its master from the place, and pulls violently, the root is plucked up, and may then be safely handled, but the dog instantly dies, as the man would have done had he plucked it up himself. when the root is brought to sick people, it at once expels demons.( ) according to josephus, demons are the spirits of the wicked dead; they enter into the bodies of the living, who die, unless succour be speedily obtained.( ) this theory, however, was not general, demons being commonly considered the offspring of the fallen angels and of the daughters of men. the jewish historian gives a serious account of the preternatural portents which warned the jews of the approaching fall of jerusalem, and he laments the infatuation of the people, who disregarded these divine denunciations. a star in the shape of a sword, and also a comet, stood over the doomed city for the space of a whole year. then, at the feast of unleavened bread, before the rebellion of the jews which preceded the war, at the ninth hour of the night a { } great light shone round the altar and the temple, so that for half an hour it seemed as though it were brilliant daylight. at the same festival other supernatural warnings were given. a heifer, as she was led by the high-priest to be sacrificed, brought forth a lamb in the temple; moreover, the eastern gate of the inner court of the temple, which was of brass, and so ponderous that twenty men had much difficulty in closing it, and which was fastened by heavy bolts descending deep into the solid stone floor, was seen to open of its own accord, about the sixth hour of the night. the ignorant considered some of these events good omens, but the priests interpreted them as portents of evil. another prodigious phenomenon occurred, which josephus supposes would be considered incredible were it not reported by those who saw it, and were the subsequent events not of sufficient importance to merit such portents: before sunset, chariots and troops of soldieis in armour were seen among the clouds, moving about, and surrounding cities. and further, at the feast of pentecost, as the priests were entering the inner court of the temple to perform their sacred duties, they felt an earthquake, and heard a great noise, and then the sound as of a great multitude saying: "let us remove hence."(l) there is not a shadow of doubt in the mind of josephus as to the reality of any of these wonders. if we turn to patristic literature, we find, everywhere, the same superstitions and the same theories of angelic agency and demoniacal interference in cosmical phenomena. according to justin martyr, after god had made the world and duly regulated the elements and the rotation of the seasons, he committed man and all { } things under heaven to the care of angels. some of these angels, however, proved unworthy of this charge, and, led away by love of the daughters of men, begat children, who are the demons who have corrupted the human race, partly by magical writings [--greek--] and partly by fears and punishments, and who have introduced wars, murders, and other evils amongst them, which are ignorantly ascribed by poets to god himself.( ) he considers that demoniacs are possessed and tortured by the souls of the wicked dead,( ) and he represents evil spirits as watching to seize the soul at death.( ) the food of the angels is manna.( ) the angels, says clement of alexandria, serve god in the administration of earthly affairs.( ) the host of angels and of gods [--greek--] is placed under subjection to the logos.( ) presiding angels are distributed over nations and cities, and perhaps are also deputed to individuals,( ) and it is by their agency, either visible or invisible, that god gives all good things.( ) he accuses the greeks of plagiarizing their miracles from the bible, and he argues that if certain powers do move the winds and distribute showers, they are agents subject to god.( ) clement affirms that the son gave philosophy to the greeks by means of the inferior angels,( ) and argues that it is absurd to attribute it to the devil.( ) theophilus of antioch, on the other hand, says that the greek poets were inspired by demons.( ) athenagoras states, as one of the principal { } points of belief among christians, that a multitude of angels and ministers are distributed and appointed by the logos to occupy themselves about the elements, and the heavens, and the universe and the things in it, and the regulating of the whole.( ) for it is the duty of the angels to exercise providence over all that god has created; so that god may have the universal care of the whole, but the several parts be ministered to by the angels appointed over them. there is freedom of will amongst the angels as among human beings, and some of the angels abused their trust, and fell through love of the daughters of men, of whom were begotten those who are called giants.( ) these angels who have fallen from heaven busy themselves about the air and the earth; and the souls of the giants,( ) which are the demons that roam about the world, work evil according to their respective natures.( ) there are powers which exercise dominion over matter, and by means of it, and more especially one, who is opposed to god. this prince of matter exerts authority and control in opposition to the good designed by god.( ) demons are greedy for sacrificial odours and the blood of the victims, which they lick; and they influence the multitude to idolatry by inspiring thoughts and visions which seem to come from idols and statues.( ) according to tatian, god made everything which is good, but the wickedness of demons perverts { } the productions of nature for bad purposes, and the evil in these is due to demons and not to god.( ) none of the demons have bodies; they are spiritual, like fire or air, and can only be seen by those in whom the spirit of god dwells. they attack men by means of lower forms of matter, and come to them whenever they are diseased, and sometimes they cause disorders of the body, but when they are struck by the power of the word of god, they flee in terror, and the sick person is healed.( ) various kinds of roots, and the relations of bones and sinews, are the material elements through which demons work.( ) some of those who are called gods by the greeks, but are in reality demons, possess the bodies of certain men, and then by publicly leaving them they destroy the disease they themselves had created, and the sick are restored to health.( ) demons, says cyprian of carthage, lurk under consecrated statues, and inspire false oracles, and control the lots and omens.( ) they enter into human bodies and feign various maladies in order to induce men to offer sacrifices for their recovery that they may gorge themselves with the fumes, and then they heal them. they are really the authors of the miracles attributed to heathen deities.( ) tertullian enters into minute details regarding angels and demons. demons are the offspring of the fallen angels, and their work is the destruction of the human race. they inflict diseases and other painful calamities upon our bodies, and lead astray our souls. from their { } wonderful subtleness and tenuity they find their way into both parts of our composition. their spirituality enables them to do much harm to men, for being invisible and impalpable they appear rather in their effects than in their action. they blight the apples and the grain while in the flower, as by some mysterious poison in the breeze, and kill them in the bud, or nip them before they are ripe, as though in some inexpressible way the tainted air poured forth its pestilential breath. in the same way demons and angels breathe into the soul and excite its corruptions, and especially mislead men by inducing them to sacrifice to false deities in order that they may thus obtain their peculiar food of fumes of flesh and blood. every spirit, whether angel or demon, has wings; therefore they are everywhere in a moment. the whole world is but one place to them, and all that takes place anywhere they can know and report with equal facility. their swiftness is believed to be divine because their substance is unknown, and thus they seek to be considered the authors of effects which they merely report, as, indeed, they sometimes are of the evil, but never of the good. they gather intimations of the future from hearing the prophets read aloud, and set themselves up as rivals of the true god by stealing his divinations. from inhabiting the air, and from their proximity to the stars and commerce with the clouds, they know the preparation of celestial phenomena, and promise beforehand the rains which they already feel coming. they are very kind in reference to the cure of diseases, tertullian ironically says, for they first make people ill, and then, by way of performing a miracle, they prescribe remedies either novel or contrary to common experience, and then, removing the cause, they are { } believed to have healed the sick.( ) if any one possessed by a demon be brought before a tribunal, tertullian affirms that the evil spirit, when ordered by a christian, will at once confess that he is a demon.( ) the fallen angels were the discoverers of astrology and magic.( ) unclean spirits hover over waters in imitation of the brooding (gestatio) of the holy spirit in the beginning, as, for instance, over dark fountains and solitary streams, and cisterns in baths and dwelling-houses, and similar places, which are said to carry one off (rapere), that is to say, by the force of the evil spirit.( ) the fallen angels disclosed to the world unknown material substances, and various arts, such as metallurgy, the properties of herbs, incantations, and interpretation of the stars; and to women specially they revealed all the secrets of personal adornment.( ) there is scarcely any man who is not attended by a demon; and it is well known that untimely and violent deaths, which are attributed to accidents, are really caused by demons.( ) those who go to theatres may become specially accessible to demons. there is the instance, the lord is witness (domino teste), of the woman who went to a theatre and came back possessed by a demon; and, on being cast out, the evil spirit replied that he had a right to act as he did, having found her within his limits. there was another case, also well known, of a woman who, at night, after having been to a theatre, had a vision of a { } winding sheet (linteum), and heard the name of the tragedian whom she had seen mentioned with reprobation and, five days after, the woman was dead.( ) origen attributes augury and divination through animals to demons. in his opinion certain demons, offspring of the titans or giants, who haunt the grosser parts of bodies and the unclean places of the earth, and who, from not having earthly bodies, have some power of divining the future, occupy themselves with this. they secretly enter the bodies of the more brutal and savage animals, and force them to make flights or indications of divination to lead men away from god. they have a special leaning to birds and serpents, and even to foxes and wolves, because the demons act better through these in consequence of an apparent analogy in wickedness between them.( ) it is for this reason that moses, who had either been taught by god what was similar in the nature of animals and their kindred demons, or had discovered it himself, prohibited as unclean the particular birds and animals most used for divination. therefore each kind of demon seems to have an affinity with a certain kind of animal. they are so wicked that demons even assume the bodies of weasels to foretell the future.( ) they feed on the blood and odour of the victims sacrificed in idol temples.( ) the spirits of the wicked dead wander about sepulchres and sometimes for ages haunt particular houses, and other places.( ) the prayers of christians drive demons out of men, and from places where they have { } taken up their abode, and even sometimes from the bodies of animals, which are frequently injured by them.( ) in reply to a statement of celsus that we cannot eat bread or fruit, or drink wine or even water without eating and drinking with demons, and that the very air we breathe is received from demons, and that, consequently, we cannot inhale without receiving air from the demons who are set over the air,( ) origen maintains, on the contrary, that the angels of god, and not demons, have the superintendence of such natural phenomena, and have been appointed to communicate all these blessings. not demons, but angels, have been set over the fruits of the earth, and over the birth of animals, and over all things necessary for our race.( ) scripture forbids the eating of things strangled because the blood is still in them, and blood, and more especially the fumes of it, is said to be the food of demons. if we ate strangled animals, we might have demons feeding with us,( ) but in origen's opinion a man only eats and drinks with demons when he eats the flesh of idol sacrifices, and drinks the wine poured out in honour of demons.( ) jerome states the common belief that the air is filled with demons.( ) chrysostom says that angels are everywhere in the atmosphere.( ) not content, however, with peopling earth and air with angels and demons, the fathers also shared the opinion common to jews( ) and heathen philosophers, that the heavenly bodies were animated beings. after fully discussing the question, with much reference to scripture, { } origen determines that sun, moon, and stars are living and rational beings, illuminated with the light of knowledge by the wisdom which is the reflection [--greek--] of eternal light. they have free will, and as it would appear from a passage in job (xxv. ) they are not only liable to sin, but actually not pure from the uncleanness of it. origen is careful to explain that this has not reference merely to their physical part, but to the spiritual; and he proceeds to discuss whether their souls came into existence at the same time with their bodies or existed previously, and whether, at the end of the world, they will be released from their bodies or will cease from giving light to the world. he argues that they are rational beings because their motions could not take place without a soul. "as the stars move with so much order and method," he says, "that under no circumstances whatever does their course seem to be disturbed, is it not the extreme of absurdity to suppose that so much order, so much observance of discipline and method could be demanded from or fulfilled by irrational beings?"( ) they possess life and reason, he decides, and he proves from scripture that their souls were given to them not at the creation of their bodily substance, but like those of men implanted strictly from without, after they were made.( ) they are "subject to vanity" with the rest of the creatures, and "wait for the manifestation of the sons of god."( ) origen is persuaded { } that sun, moon, and stars pray to the supreme being through his only begotten son.( ) to return to angels, however, origen states that the angels are not only of various orders of rank, but have apportioned to them specific offices and duties. to raphael, for instance, is assigned the task of curing and healing; to gabriel the management of wars; to michael the duty of receiving the prayers and the supplications of men. angels are set over the different churches, and have charge even of the least of their members. these offices were assigned to the angels by god agreeably to the qualities displayed by each.( ) elsewhere, origen explains that it is necessary for this world that there should be angels set over beasts and over terrestrial operations, and also angels presiding over the birth of animals, and over the propagation and growth of shrubs, and, again, angels over holy works, who eternally teach men the perception of the hidden ways of god, and knowledge of divine things; and he warns us not to bring upon ourselves those angels who are set over beasts, by leading an animal life, nor those which preside over terrestrial works, by taking delight in fleshly and mundane things, but rather to study how we may approximate to the companionship of the archangel michael, to whose duty of presenting the prayers of the saints to god he here adds the office of presiding over medicine.( ) it is through the ministry of angels that the water-springs in fountains and running streams refresh the earth, and that the air we breathe is { } kept pure.( ) in the "pastor" of hermas, a work quoted by the fathers as inspired scripture, which was publicly read in the churches, which almost secured a permanent place in the new testament canon, and which appears after the canonical books in the codex sinaiticus, the oldest extant ms. of the new testament, mention is made of an angel who has rule over beasts, and whose name is hegrin.( ) jerome also quotes an apocryphal work in which an angel of similar name is said to be set over reptiles, and in which fishes, trees, and beasts are assigned to the care of particular angels.( ) clement of alexandria mentions without dissent the prevailing belief that hail-storms, tempests, and similar phenomena do not occur merely from material disturbance, but also are caused by the anger of demons and evil angels.( ) origen states that while angels superintend all the phenomena of nature, and control what is appointed for our good, famine, the blighting of vines and fruit trees, and the destruction of beasts and of men, are, on the other hand, the personal works( ) of demons, they, as public executioners, receiving at certain times authority to carry into effect divine decrees.( ) "we have already quoted similar views expressed by tertullian,( ) and the universality and permanence of such opinions may be illustrated by the fact that, after the lapse of many centuries, we find st. thomas aquinas as solemnly affirming that disease and tempests are the direct work of the devil;( ) indeed, this belief prevailed { } throughout the middle ages until very recent times. the apostle peter, in the recognitions of clement, informs clement that when god made the world he appointed chiefs over the various creatures, even over the trees and the mountains and springs and rivers, and over everything in the universe. an angel was set over the angels, a spirit over spirits, a star over the stars, a demon over the demons, and so on.( ) he provided different offices for all his creatures, whether good or bad,( ) but certain angels having left the course of their proper order, led men into sin and taught them that demons could, by magical invocations, be made to obey man.( ) ham was the discoverer of the art of magic.( ) astrologers suppose that evils happen in consequence of the motions of the heavenly bodies, and represent certain climacteric periods as dangerous, not knowing that it is not the course of the stars, but the action of demons that regulates these things.( ) god has committed the superintendence of the seventy-two nations into which he has divided the earth to as many angels.( ) demons insinuate themselves into the bodies of men, and force them to fulfil their desires;( ) they sometimes appear visibly to men, and by threats or promises endeavour to lead them into error; they can transform themselves into whatever forms they please.( ) the distinction between what is spoken by the true god through the prophets or by visions, and that which is delivered by demons, is this: that what proceeds from the former is always true, whereas that which is foretold by demons is not always true.( ) lactantius says that when the { } number of men began to increase, fearing that the devil should corrupt or destroy them, god sent angels to protect and instruct the human race, but the angels themselves fell beneath his wiles, and from being angels they became the satellites and ministers of satan. the offspring of these fallen angels are unclean spirits, authors of all the evils which are done, and the devil is their chief. they are acquainted with the future, but nob completely. the art of the magi is altogether supported by these demons, and at their invocation they deceive men with lying tricks, making men think they see things which do not exist. these contaminated spirits wander over all the earth, and console themselves by the destruction of men. they fill every place with frauds and deceits, for they adhere to individuals, and occupy whole houses, and assume the name of genii, as demons are called in the latin language, and make men worship them. on account of their tenuity and impalpability they insinuate themselves into the bodies of men, and through their _viscera_ injure their health, excite diseases, terrify their souls with dreams, agitate their minds with phrensies, so that they may by these evils drive men to seek their aid.( ) being adjured in the name of god, however, they leave the bodies of the possessed, uttering the greatest howling, and crying out that they are beaten, or are on fire.( ) these demons are the inventors of astrology, divination, oracles, necromancy, and the art of magic.( ) the universe is governed by god through the medium of angels. the demons have a fore-knowledge of the purposes of god, from having been his { } ministers, and interposing in what is being done, they ascribe the credit to themselves.( ) the sign of the cross is a terror to demons, and at the sight of it they flee from the bodies of men. when sacrifices are being offered to the gods, if one be present who bears on his forehead the sign of the cross, the sacred rites are not propitious (_sacra nullo modo litant_), and the oracle gives no reply.( ) eusebius, like all the fathers, represents the gods of the greeks and other heathen nations as merely wicked demons. demons, he says, whether they circulate in the dark and heavy atmosphere which encircles our sphere, or inhabit the cavernous dwellings which exist within it, find charms only in tombs and in the sepulchres of the dead, and in impure and unclean places. they delight in the blood of animals, and in the putrid exhalations which rise from their bodies, as well as in earthly vapours. their leaders, whether as inhabitants of the upper regions of the atmosphere, or plunged in the abyss of hell, having discovered that the human race had deified and offered sacrifices to men who were dead, promoted the delusion in order to savour the blood which flowed.and the fumes of the burning flesh. they deceived men by the motions conveyed to idols and statues, by the oracles they delivered, and by healing diseases, with which, by the power inherent in their nature, they had before invisibly smitten bodies, and which they removed by ceasing to torture them. these demons first introduced magic amongst men.( ) we may here refer to the account of a miracle which eusebius seriously quotes, as exemplifying another occasional { } function of the angels. the heretical bishop natalius having in vain been admonished by god in dreams, was at last lashed through the whole of a night by holy angels, till he was brought to repentance, and, clad in sackcloth and covered with ashes, he at length threw himself at the feet of zephyrinus, then bishop of rome, pointing to the marks of the scourges which he had received from the angels, and implored to be again received into communion with the church.( ) augustine says that demons inhabit the atmosphere as in a prison, and deceive men, persuading them by their wonderful and false signs, or doings, or predictions, that they are gods.( ) he considers the origin of their name in the sacred scriptures worthy of notice: they are called [--greek--] in greek on account of their knowledge.( ) by their experience of certain signs which are hidden from us, they can read much more of the future, and sometimes even announce beforehand what they intend to do. speaking of his own time, and with strong expressions of assurance, augustine says that not only scripture testifies that angels have appeared to men with bodies which could not only be seen but felt, but what is more, it is a general report, and many have personal experience of it, or have learned it from those who have knowledge of the fact, and of whose truth there is no doubt, that satyrs and fauns, generally called "incubi," have frequently perpetrated their peculiar wickedness;( ) and also that certain demons called by the gauls _dusii_ every day attempt and effect the same uncleanness, as { } witnesses equally numerous and trustworthy assert, so that it would be impertinence to deny it.( ) lactantius, again, ridicules the idea that there can be antipodes, and he can scarcely credit that there can be any one so silly as to believe that there are men whose feet are higher than their heads, or that grain and trees grow downwards, and rain, snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth. after jesting at those who hold such ridiculous views, he points out that their blunders arise from supposing that the heaven is round, and the world, consequently, round like a ball, and enclosed within it. but if that were the case, it must present the same appearance to all parts of heaven, with mountains, plains, and seas, and consequently there would be no part of the earth uninhabited by men and animals. lactantius does not know what to say to those who, having fallen into such an error, persevere in their folly (_stultitia_), and defend one vain thing by another, but sometimes he supposes that they philosophize in jest, or knowingly defend falsehoods to display their ingenuity. space alone prevents his proving that it is impossible for heaven to be below the earth.( ) st. augustine, with equal boldness, declares that the stories told about the antipodes, that is to say, that there are men whose feet are against our footsteps, and upon whom the sun rises when it sets to us, are not to be believed. such an assertion is not supported by any historical evidence, { } but rests upon mere conjecture based on the rotundity of the earth. but those who maintain such a theory do not consider that even if the earth be round, it does not follow that the opposite side is not covered with water. besides, if it be not, why should it be inhabited, seeing that on the one hand it is in no way possible that the scriptures can lie, and on the other, it is too absurd (_nimisque absurdum est_) to affirm that any men can have traversed such an immensity of ocean to establish the human race there from that one first man adam.( ) clement of rome had no doubt of the truth of the story of the phoenix,( ) that wonderful bird of arabia and the adjoining countries, which lives years; at the end of which time, its dissolution being at hand, it builds a nest of spices, in which it dies. from the decaying flesh, however, a worm is generated, which being strengthened by the juices of the bird, produces feathers and is transformed into a phoenix. clement adds that it then flies away with the nest containing the bones of its defunct parent to the city of heliopolis in egypt, and in full daylight, and in the sight of all men, it lays them on the altar of the sun. on examining their registers, the priests find that the bird has returned precisely at the completion of the years. this bird, clement considers, is an emblem of the resurrection.( ) so does tertullian, who repeats the story with equal confidence.( ) it is likewise referred to in the apostolic constitutions.( ) celsus quotes the narrative in his work against christianity as an instance of the piety of irrational creatures, and although origen, in reply, while admitting that the story is indeed recorded, puts in a cautious "if it be true," he proceeds to account for the phenomenon on the ground that god may have made this isolated creature, in order that men might admire, not the bird, but its creator.( ) cyril of jerusalem, likewise, quotes the story from clement.( ) the author of the almost canonical epistle of barnabas, explaining the typical meaning of the code of moses regarding clean and unclean animals which were or were not to be eaten, states as a fact that the hare annually increases the number of its _foramina_, for it has as many as the years it lives.( ) he also mentions that the hyena changes its sex every year, being alternately male and female.( ) tertullian also points out as a recognized fact the annual change of sex of the hyena, and he adds: "i do not mention the stag, since itself is the witness of its own age; feeding on the serpent it languishes into youth from the working of the poison."( ) the geocentric { } theory of the church, which elevated man into the supreme place in the universe, and considered creation in general to be solely for his use, naturally led to the misinterpretation of all cosmical phenomena. such spectacles as eclipses and comets were universally regarded as awful portents of impending evil, signs of god's anger, and forerunners of national calamities.( ) we have already referred to the account given by josephus of the portents which were supposed to announce the coming destruction of the holy city, amongst which were a star shaped like a sword, a comet, and other celestial phenomena. volcanoes were considered openings into hell, and not only does ter-tullian hold them to be so, but he asks who will not deem these punishments sometimes inflicted upon mountains as examples of the judgments which menace the wicked.( ) chapter v. the permanent stream of miraculous pretension we have given a most imperfect sketch of some of the opinions and superstitions prevalent at the time of jesus, and when the books of the new testament were written. these, as we have seen, continued with little or no modification throughout the first centuries of our era. it must, however, be remembered that the few details we have given, omitting most of the grosser particulars, are the views deliberately expressed by the most educated and intelligent part of the community, and that it would have required infinitely darker colours adequately to have portrayed the dense ignorance and superstition of the mass of the jews. it is impossible to receive the report of supposed marvellous occurrences from an age and people like this without the gravest suspicion. even so thorough a defender of miracles as dr. newman admits that: "witnesses must be not only honest, but competent also; that is, such as have ascertained the facts which they attest, or who report after examination;"l and although the necessities of his case oblige him to assert that "the testimony of men of science and general knowledge" must not be required, he admits, under the head of "deficiency of examination," that--"enthusiasm, ignorance, and habitual credulity { } are defects which no number of witnesses removes."( ) we have shown how rank were these "defects" at the commencement of the christian era, and among the chief witnesses for christianity. miracles which spring from such a hot-bed of superstition are too natural in such a soil to be objects of surprise and, in losing their exceptional character, their claims upon attention are proportionately weakened if not altogether destroyed. preternatural interference with the affairs of life and the phenomena of nature was the rule in those days, not the exception, and miracles, in fact, had lost all novelty, and through familiarity had become degraded into mere commonplace. the gospel miracles were not original in their character, but were substantially mere repetitions of similar wonders well known amongst the jews, or commonly supposed to be of daily occurrence even at that time. in fact, the idea of such miracles, in such an age and performed amongst such a people, as the attestation of a supernatural revelation, may with singular propriety be ascribed to the mind of that period, but can scarcely be said to bear any traces of the divine. indeed, anticipating for a moment a part of our subject regarding which we shall have more to say hereafter, we may remark that, so far from being original either in its evidence or form, almost every religion which has been taught in the world has claimed the same divine character as christianity, and has surrounded the person and origin of its central figure with the same supernatural mystery. even the great heroes of history, long before our era, had their immaculate conception and miraculous birth. there can be no doubt that the writers of the new testament shared the popular superstitions of the jews. { } we have already given more than one instance of this, and now we have only to refer for a moment to one class of these superstitions, the belief in demoniacal possession and origin of disease, involving clearly both the existence of demons and their power over the human race. it would be an insult to the understanding of those who are considering this question to pause here to prove that the historical books of the new testament speak in the clearest and most unmistakable terms of actual demoniacal possession. now, what has become of this theory of disease? the archbishop of dublin is probably the only one who asserts the reality of demoniacal possession formerly and at the present day,( ) and in this we must say that he is consistent. dean milman, on the other hand, who spoke with the enlightenment of the th century, "has no scruple in avowing _his_ opinion on the subject of demoniacs to be that of joseph mede, lardner, dr. mead, paley, and all the learned modern writers. it was a kind of insanity.... and nothing was more probable than that lunacy should take the turn and speak the language of the prevailing superstition of the times."( ) the dean, as well as "all the learned modern writers" to whom he refers, felt the difficulty, but in seeking to evade it they sacrifice the gospels. they overlook the fact that the writers of these narratives not only themselves adopt "the prevailing superstition of the times," but represent jesus as doing so with equal completeness. there is no possibility, for instance, of evading such statements as those in the miracle of the country of the gadarenes, where the objectivity of the demons is so fully recognized that, { } on being cast out of the man, they are represented as requesting to be allowed to go into the herd of swine, and being permitted by jesus to do so, the entry of the demons into the swine is at once signalized by the herd running violently down the cliff into the lake, and being drowned.( ) archbishop trench adopts no such ineffectual evasion, but rightly objects: "our lord himself uses language which is not reconcilable with any such explanation. he everywhere speaks of demoniacs not as persons of disordered intellects, but as subjects and thralls of an alien spiritual might; he addresses the evil spirit as distinct from the man: 'hold thy peace and come out of him;'" and he concludes that "our idea of christ's absolute veracity, apart from the value of the truth which he communicated, forbids us to suppose that he could have spoken as he did, being perfectly aware all the while that there was no corresponding reality to justify the language which he used."( ) the dean, on the other hand, finds "a very strong reason," which he does not remember to have seen urged with sufficient force, "which may have contributed to induce our lord to adopt the current language on the point. the disbelief in these spiritual influences was one of the characteristics of the unpopular sect of the sadducees. a departure from the common language, or the endeavour to correct this inveterate error, would have raised an immediate outcry against him from his watchful and malignant adversaries as an unbelieving sadducec."( ) such ascription of politic { } deception for the sake of popularity might be intelligible in an ordinary case, but when referred to the central personage of a divine revelation, who is said to be god incarnate, it is perfectly astounding. the archbishop, however, rightly deems that if jesus knew that the jewish belief in demoniacal possession was baseless, and that satan did not exercise such power over the bodies or spirits of men, there would be in such language "that absence of agreement between thoughts and words in which the essence of a lie consists."( ) it is difficult to say whether the dilemma of the dean or of the archbishop is the greater,--the one obliged to sacrifice the moral character of jesus, in order to escape the admission for christianity of untenable superstition, the other obliged to adopt the superstition in order to support the veracity of the language. at least the course of the archbishop is consistent and worthy of respect. the attempt to eliminate the superstitious diagnosis of the disease, and yet to preserve intact the miraculous cure, is quite ineffectual. dr. trench anticipates the natural question, why there are no demoniacs now, if there were so many in those days,( ) and he is logically compelled to maintain that there may still be persons possessed. "it may well be a question, moreover," he says, "if an apostle or one with apostolic discernment of spirits were to enter into a mad-house now, how many of the sufferers there he might not recognize as possessed?"( ) there can scarcely be a question upon the point at all, for such a person issuing direct { } from that period, without subsequent scientific enlightenment, would most certainly pronounce them all, "possessed." it did not, however, require an apostle, nor even one with apostolic discernment of spirits, to recognize the possessed at that time. all those who are represented as being brought to jesus to be healed are described by their friends as having a devil or being possessed, and there was no form of disease more general or more commonly recognized by the jews. for what reason has the recognition of, and belief in, demoniacal possession passed away with the ignorance and superstition which were then prevalent? it is important to remember that the theory of demoniacal possession, and its supposed cure by means of exorcism and invocations, was most common among the jews long before the commencement of the christian era. as casting out devils was the most common type of christian miracles, so it was the commonest belief and practice of the jewish nation. christianity merely shared the national superstition, and changed nothing but the form of exorcism. christianity did not through a "clearer perception of spirits," therefore, originate the belief in demoniacal possession, nor first recognize its victims; nor did such superior enlightenment accompany the superior morality of christianity as to detect the ignorant fallacy. in the old testament we find the most serious evidence of the belief in demonology and witchcraft. the laws against them set the example of that unrelenting severity with which sorcery was treated for so many centuries. we read in exodus xxii. : "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." levit. xix. : "regard not them which have familiar spirits, neither { } seek after wizards, to be defiled by them." levit. xx. : "and the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards to go a-whoring after them, i will even set my face against that soul, and cut him off from among his people;" and verse : "a man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death; they shall stone them with stones; their blood shall be upon them." deut. xviii. : "there shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or an enchanter, or a witch; . or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer; . for all that do these things are an abomination unto the lord," &c. the passages which assert the reality of demonology and witchcraft, however, are much too numerous to permit their citation here. but not only did christianity thus inherit the long-prevalent superstition, but it transmitted it intact to succeeding ages; and there can be no doubt that this demonology, with its consequent and inevitable belief in witchcraft, sorcery, and magic, continued so long to prevail throughout christendom, as much through the authority of the sacred writings and the teaching of the church as through the superstitious ignorance of europe. it would be impossible to select for illustration any type of the gospel miracles, whose fundamental principle,--belief in the reality, malignant action, and power of demons, and in the power of man to control them,--has received fuller or more permanent living acceptance from posterity, down to very recent times, than the cure of disease ascribed to demoniacal influence. the writings of the fathers are full of the belief; the social { } history of europe teems with it. the more pious the people, the more firm was their conviction of its reality. from times antecedent to christianity, until medical science slowly came into existence and displaced miracle cures by the relics of saints, every form of disease was ascribed to demons. madness, idiotcy, epilepsy, and every shape of hysteria were the commonest forms of their malignity; and the blind, the dumb, and the deformed were regarded as unquestionable victims of their malice. every domestic calamity, from the convulsions of a child to the death of a cow, was unhesitatingly attributed to their agency. the more ignorant the community, the greater the number of its possessed. belief in the power of sorcery, witchcraft, and magic was inherent in the superstition, and the universal prevalence shows how catholic was the belief in demoniacal influence. the practice of these arts is solemnly denounced as sin in the new testament and throughout patristic literature, and the church has in all ages fulminated against it. no accusation was more common than that of practising sorcery, and no class escaped from the fatal suspicion. popes were charged with the crime, and bishops were found guilty of it. st. cyprian was said to have been a magician before he became a christian and a father of the church.( ) athanasius was accused of sorcery before the synod of tyre.( ) not only the illiterate but even the learned, in the estimation of their age, believed in it. no heresy was ever persecuted with more unrelenting hatred. popes have issued bulls vehemently anathematising witches and sorcerers, councils have proscribed them, ecclesiastical { } courts have consigned tens of thousands of persons suspected of being such to the stake, monarchs have written treatises against them and invented tortures for their conviction, and every nation in europe and almost every generation have passed the most stringent laws against them. upon no point has there ever been greater unanimity of belief. church and state have vied with each other for the suppression of the abominable crime. every phenomenon of nature, every unwelcome occurrence of social life, as well as every natural disease, has been ascribed to magic and demons. the historical records of europe are filled with the deliberate trial and conviction, upon what was deemed evidence, of thousands of sorcerers and witches. hundreds have been found guilty of exercising demoniacal influence over the elements, from sopater the philosopher, executed under constantino for preventing, by adverse winds, the arrival of corn ships at constantinople, to dr. fian and other witches horribly tortured and burnt for causing a stormy passage on the return of james i. from denmark.( ) thousands of men and tens of thousands of women have been done to death by every conceivable torment for causing sickness or calamity by sorcery, or for flying through the air to attend the witches' sabbath. when scepticism as to the reality of the demoniacal powers of sorcery tardily began to arise, it was fiercely reprobated by the church as infidelity. even so late as the th century, a man like sir thomas browne not only did not include the belief amongst the vulgar errors which he endeavoured to expose, but on the contrary wrote: "for my part, i have ever believed, and do now know that there are pitcairn's criminal trials of scotland, i. pp. , . { } witches. they that doubt of them, do not only deny them, but spirits; and are obliquely, and upon consequence, a sort not of infidels, but atheists."( ) in sir thomas hale, in passing sentence of death against two women convicted of being witches, declared that the reality of witchcraft was undeniable, because "first, the scriptures had affirmed so much; and secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime."( ) even the th century was stained with the blood of persons tortured and executed for sorcery. notwithstanding all this persistent and unanimous confirmation, we ask again: what has now become of the belief in demoniacal possession and sorcery? it has utterly disappeared. "joseph mede, lardner, dr. mead, paley, and all the learned modern writers" with dean milinan, as we have seen, explain it away, and such a theory of disease and elemental disturbance is universally recognized to have been a groundless superstition. the countless number of persons tormented and put to death for the supposed crime of witchcraft and sorcery were mere innocent victims to ignorance and credulity. mr. buckle has collected a mass of evidence to show that "there is in every part of the world an intimate relation between ignorance respecting the nature and proper treating of a disease, and { } the belief that such disease is caused by supernatural power, and is to be cured by it."( ) at the commencement of our era every disease was ascribed to the agency of demons simply because the nature of disease was not understood, and the writers of the gospels were not, in this respect, one whit more enlightened than the jews. the progress of science, however, has not only dispelled the superstitious theory as regards disease in our time; its effects are retrospective. science not only declares the ascription of disease to demoniacal possession or malignity to be an idle superstition now, but it equally repudiates the assumption of such a cause at any time. the diseases referred by the gospels, and by the jews of that time, to the action of devils, exist now, but they are known to proceed from purely physical causes. the same superstition and medical ignorance would enunciate the same diagnosis at the present day. the superstition and ignorance, however, have passed away, and with them the demoniacal theory. in that day the theory was as baseless as in this. this is the logical conclusion of every educated man. it is obvious that, with the necessary abandonment of the theory of "possession" and demoniacal origin of disease, the largest class of miracles recorded in the gospels is at once exploded. the asserted cause of the diseases of this class, said to have been miraculously healed, must be recognized to be a mere vulgar superstition, and the narratives of such miracles, ascribing as they do in perfect simplicity distinct objectivity to the supposed "possessing" demons, and reporting their very words and actions, at once assume the character of mere imaginative and fabulous writings based upon superstitious { } tradition, and cannot be accepted as the sober and intelligent report of eye-witnesses. we shall presently see how far this.inference is supported by the literary evidence regarding the date and composition of the gospels. the deduction, however, does not end here. it is clear that, this large class of gospel miracles being due to the superstition of an ignorant and credulous age, the insufficiency of the evidence for any of the other supposed miraculous occurrences narrated in the same documents becomes at once apparent. nothing but the most irrefragable testimony could possibly warrant belief in statements of supernatural events which contradict all experience, and are opposed to all science. when these statements, however, are not only rendered, _à priori_, suspicious by their proceeding from a period of the grossest superstition and credulity, but it becomes evident that a considerable part of them is due solely to that superstition and credulity, by which, moreover, the rest may likewise be most naturally explained, it is obvious that they cannot stand against the opposing conviction of invariable experience. the force of the testimony is gone. we are far from using this language in an offensive sense concerning the gospel narratives, which, by the simple faith of the writers, present the most noble aspect of the occurrences of which superstition is capable. indeed, viewed as compositions gradually rising out of pious tradition, and representing the best spirit of their times, the gospels, even in ascribing such miracles to jesus, are a touching illustration of the veneration excited by his elevated character. devout enthusiasm surrounded his memory with the tradition of the highest exhibitions of power within the range of jewish imagination, { } and that these conceptions represent merely an idealized form of prevalent superstition was not only natural but inevitable. we shall hereafter fully examine the character of the gospels, but it will be sufficient here to point out that none of these writings lays claim to any special inspiration, or in the slightest degree pretends to be more than a human composition,( ) and subject to the errors of human history. . we have seen how incompetent those who lived at the time when the gospel miracles are supposed to have taken place were to furnish reliable testimony regarding such phenomena; and the gross mistake committed in regard to the largest class of these miracles, connected with demoniacal possession, seems altogether to destroy the value of the evidence for the rest, and to connect the whole, as might have been expected, with the general superstition and ignorance of the period. it may be well to inquire further, whether there is any valid reason for excepting any of the miracles of scripture from the fate of the rest, and whether, in fact, there was any special "age of miracles" at all, round which a privileged line can be drawn on any reasonable ground. we have already pointed out that the kind of evidence which is supposed to attest the divine revelation of christianity, so far from being invented for the purpose, was so hackneyed, so to speak, as scarcely to attract the { } notice of the nation to which the revelation was, in the first instance, addressed. not only did the old testament contain accounts of miracles of every one of the types related in the new, but most of them were believed to be commonly performed both before and after the commencement of the christian era. that demons were successfully exorcised, and diseases cured, by means of spells and incantations, was never doubted by the jewish nation. satanic miracles, moreover, are not only recognized throughout the old and new testaments, but formed a leading feature of the patristic creed. the early christians were not more ready than the heathen to ascribe every inexplicable occurrence to supernatural agency, and the only difference between them was as to the nature of that agency. the jews and their heathen neighbours were too accustomed to supposed preternatural occurrences to feel much surprise or incredulity at the account of christian miracles; and it is characteristic of the universal superstition of the period that the fathers did not dream of denying the reality of pagan miracles, but merely attributed them to demons, whilst they asserted the divine origin of their own. the reality of the powers of sorcery was never questioned. every marvel and every narrative of supernatural interference with human affairs seemed matter of course to the superstitious credulity of the age. however much miracles are exceptions to the order of nature, they have always been the rule in the history of ignorance. in fact, the excess of belief in them throughout many centuries of darkness is fatal to their claims to credence now. the christian miracles are rendered almost as suspicious from their place in a long sequence of similar occurrences, as they are by being exceptions { } to the sequence of natural phenomena. it would indeed be extraordinary if whole cycles of miracles occurring before and since those of the gospels, and in connection with every religion, could be repudiated as fables, and those alone maintained as genuine. no attempt is made to deny the fact that miracles are common to all times and to all religious creeds. dr. newman states amongst the conclusions of his essay on the miracles of early ecclesiastical history: "that there was no age of miracles, after which miracles ceased; that there have been at all times true miracles and false miracles, true accounts and false accounts; that no authoritative guide is supplied to us for drawing the line between the two."( ) dr. mozley also admits that morbid love of the marvellous in the human race "has produced a constant stream of miraculous pretension in the world, which accompanies man wherever he is found, and is a part of his mental and physical history."( ) ignorance and its invariable attendant, superstition, have done more than mere love of the marvellous to produce and perpetuate belief in miracles, and there cannot be any doubt that the removal of ignorance always leads to the cessation of miracles.( ) the bampton lecturer proceeds: 'heathenism had its running stream of supernatural pretensions in the shape of prophecy, exorcism, and the miraculous cures of diseases, which the temples of esculapius recorded with pompous display."( ) so far from the gospel miracles being original, and a presentation, for the first time, of phenomena until then unknown { } and unlikely to suggest themselves to the mind, "jewish supernaturalism was indeed going on side by side with our lord's miracles."( ) dr. mozley, however, rebuts the inference which has been drawn from this: "that his miracles could not, in the very nature of the case, be evidences of his distinctive teaching and mission, inasmuch as miracles were common to himself and his opponents," by the assertion that a very marked distinction exists between the gospel miracles and all others.( ) he perfectly recognizes the consequence if such a distinction cannot be clearly demonstrated. "the criticism, therefore, which _evidential_ miracles, or miracles which serve as evidence of a revelation, must come up to, if they are to accomplish the object for which they are designed, involves at the outset this condition,--that the evidence of such miracles must be distinguishable from the evidences of this permanent stream of miraculous pretension in the world; that such miracles must be separated by an interval not only from the facts of the order of nature, but also from the common running miraculous, which is the simple offshoot of human nature. can evidential miracles be inserted in this promiscuous mass, so as not to be confounded with it, but to assert their own truth and distinctive source? if they cannot there is an end to the proof of a revelation by miracles: if they can, it remains to see whether the christian miracles are thus distinguishable, and whether their nature, their object, and their evidence vindicate their claim to this distinctive truth and divine source."( ) now, regarding this distinction between gospel and { } other miracles, it must be observed that the religious feeling which influenced the composition of the scripture narratives of miracles naturally led to the exclusion of all that was puerile or ignoble in the traditions preserved regarding the great master. the elevated character of jesus afforded no basis for what was petty, and the devotion with which he was regarded when the gospels were written insured the noblest treatment of his history within certain limits. we must, therefore, consider the bare facts composing the miracles rather than the narrative of the manner in which they are said to have been produced, in order rightly to judge of the comparative features of different miracles. if we take the case of a person raised from the dead, literary skill may invest the account with more or less of dramatic interest and dignity, but whether the main fact be surrounded with pathetic and picturesque details,.as in the account of the raising of lazarus in the fourth gospel, or the person be simply restored to life without them, it is the fact of the resurrection which constitutes the miracle, and it is in the facts alone that we must seek distinction, disregarding and distrusting the accessories. in the one case the effect may be much more impressive, but in the other the bare raising of the dead is not a whit less miraculous. "we have been accustomed to read the gospel narratives of miracles with so much special veneration, that it is now difficult to recognize how much of the distinction of these miracles is due to the composition, and to their place in the history of jesus. no other miracles, or account of miracles, ever had such collateral advantages. as works attributed to our sublimest teacher, described with simple eloquence and, especially in the case of those in { } the fourth gospel, with artistic perfection, and read generally with reverential wonder untempered by a thought of criticism, these miracles have seemed to be surrounded by a mystic halo certainly not emanating from themselves. it must not be forgotten, therefore, that the miracle lies in the bare act, and not in its dramatic arrangement. the restoration of life to a dead man is the very same miracle whether it be effected by the relics of a saint or by the word of an apostle. a miracle is not antecedently more credible because of the outstretched arm and word of command, than it is in the silence of the shrine. being supernatural, the real agency is not seen in either case, although the human mind is more satisfied by the presentation of an apparent cause in the one case, which seems to be absent in the other. in preferring the former type, we are not only influenced by a more dramatic narrative, but we select for belief the miracle from which we can unconsciously eliminate more of the miraculous elements, by tracing it to a visible natural cause which cannot be seen in the latter. the antecedent incredibility of miracles, however, is not affected by literary skill, and is independent of scenic effect. the archbishop of dublin says: "few points present greater difficulties than the attempt to fix accurately the moment when these miraculous powers were withdrawn from the church;" and he argues that they were withdrawn when it entered into what he calls its permanent state, and no longer required "these props and strengthenings of the infant plant."( ) that their retrocession was gradual, he considers natural, and he imagines the fulness of divine power as gradually waning as it was { } subdivided, first among the apostles, and then amongst the ever-multiplying members of the church, until by sub-division it became virtually extinct, leaving as a substitute "the standing wonder of a church."( ) this, of course, is not argument, but merely the archbishop's fanciful explanation of a serious difficulty. the fact is, however, that the gospel miracles were preceded and accompanied by others of the same type, and we may here merely mention exorcism of demons, and the miraculous cure of disease, as popular instances; they were also followed by a long succession of others, quite as well authenticated, whose occurrence only became less frequent in proportion as the diffusion of knowledge dispelled popular credulity. even at the present day a stray miracle is from time to time reported in outlying districts, where the ignorance and superstition which formerly produced so abundant a growth of them are not yet entirely dispelled. papias of hierapolis narrates a wonderful story, according to eusebius, which he had heard from the daughters of the apostle philip, who lived at the same time in hierapolis: "for he relates that a dead man was restored to life in his day."( ) justin martyr, speaking of his own time, frequently asserts that christians still receive the gift of healing, of foreknowledge, and of prophecy,( ) and he points out to the roman senate as a fact happening under their own observation, that many demoniacs throughout all the world [--greek--] and in their own city have { } been healed and are healed, many of the christian' men among is [--greek--] exorcising them in the name of jesus christ, subduing and expelling the possessing demons out of the man, although all the other exorcists with incantations and spells had failed to do so.( ) theophilus of antioch likewise states that to his day demons are exorcised.( ) irenæus in the clearest manner claims for the church of his time the continued possession of the divine [--greek--] he contrasts the miracles of the followers of simon and carpocrates, which he ascribes to magical illusions, with those of christians. "for they can neither give sight to the blind," he continues, "nor to the deaf hearing, nor cast out all demons, but only those introduced by themselves, if they can even do that; nor heal the sick, the lame, the paralytic, nor those afflicted in other parts of the body, as has been often done in regard to bodily infirmity.... but so far are they from raising the dead,--as the lord raised them and the apostles by prayer, and as frequently in the brotherhood, when the whole church in a place made supplication with much fasting and prayer, the spirit of the dead was constrained to return, and the man was freely restored in answer to the prayers of the saints--that they do not believe this can possibly be done."( ) canon { } mozley, who desires for the purpose of his argument to weaken the evidence of patristic belief in the continuance of miracles, says regarding this last passage on raising the dead:--"but the reference is so vague that it possesses but little weight as testimony."( ) we should be sorry to think that the vice, which seems at present to characterize the church to which dr. mozley belongs, of making simple language mean anything or nothing just as any one happens to wish, should be introduced into critical or historical studies. the language of irenæus is vague only in so far as specific detailed instances are not given of the miracles referred to; but no language could be more definite or explicit to express the meaning of irenæus, namely, the assertion that the prayers of christian communities had frequently restored the dead to life. eusebius, who quotes the passage, and who has preserved to us the original greek, clearly recognized this. he says, when making the quotations: "in the second book of the same work he (irenæus) testifies that up to his time tokens of divine and miraculous power remained in some churches,"( ) in the next chapter irenæus further says:--"on which account, also, his true disciples receiving grace from him, work (miracles) in his name for the benefit of the rest of mankind, according to the gift received from him by each of them. for some do certainly and truly [--greek--] cast out demons, so that frequently those very men who have thus been cleansed from the evil spirits both { } believe and are now in the church. and some have foreknowledge of future occurrences, and visions, and prophetic utterances. others heal the sick by the imposition of hands and make them whole. indeed, as we have already stated, even the dead have been raised up, and have remained with us for many years. and what more shall i say? it is not possible to state the number of the gifts which the church throughout the world has received from god in the name of jesus christ, crucified under pontius pilate, and which she each day employs for the benefit of the heathen," &c.( ) tertullian speaks with the most perfect assurance of miracles occurring in his day, and of the power of healing and of casting out devils still possessed by christians. in one place, for iustance, after asserting the power which they have generally over demons, so that if a person possessed by a devil be brought before one of the roman tribunals, a follower of christ can at once compel the wicked spirit within him to confess that he is a demon, even if he had before asserted himself to be a god, he proceeds to say: "so at our touch and breathing, violently affected by the contemplation and representation of those fires (of hell) they (demons) also depart at our command out of bodies, reluctant and complaining, and put to shame { } in your presence."( ) he declares that although dreams are chiefly inflicted upon us by demons, yet they are also sent by god, and indeed "almost the greater part of mankind derive their knowledge concerning god from visions."( ) he, elsewhere, states that he himself knows that a brother was severely castigated by a vision the same night on which his slaves had, without his knowledge, done something reprehensible.( ) he narrates as an instance of the continued possession of spiritual _charismata_ by christians: "there is at this day among us a sister who has the gift of revelations, which she receives in church amidst the solemnities of the lord's day by ecstasy in the spirit: she converses with angels, and sometimes also with the lord, and she both hears and sees mysteries (_sacramenta_), and she reads the hearts of some men, and prescribes medicines to those who are in need."( ) tertullian goes on to say that, after the people were dismissed from the church, this sister was in the regular habit of reporting what she had seen, and that most diligent inquiries were made in order to test the truth of her communications;( ) and after narrating a vision of a disembodied soul vouchsafed to her, he states: "this is the vision, god being witness, and { } the apostle( ) having foretold that such spiritual gifts should be in the church."( ) further on tertullian relates another story within his own knowledge: "i know the case of a woman, born within the fold of the church, who was in the prime of life and beauty. after being but once, and only a short time, married, having fallen asleep in peace, in the interval before interment (sp.) when the presbyter began to pray as she was being made ready for burial, at the first breath of prayer she removed her hands from her sides, folded them in the attitude of supplication, and again, when the last rites were over, restored them to their former position."( ) he then mentions another story known amongst them: that a dead body in a cemetery moved itself in order to make room beside it for another body;( ) and then he remarks: "if similar cases are also reported amongst the heathen, we conclude that god displays signs of his power for the consolation of his own people, and as a testimony to others."( ) again, he mentions cases where christians had cured persons of demoniacal possession, and adds: "and how many men of position (for we do not speak of the vulgar) have been delivered either from devils or from diseases."( ) tertullian { } in the same place refers to the miracle of the "thundering legion,"( ) and he exclaims: "when indeed have not droughts been removed by our prayers and fastings."( ) minucius felix speaks of the casting out of devils from sick persons by christians in his own day, as a matter of public notoriety even among pagans.( ) st. cyprian echoes the same assertions.( ) he likewise mentions cases of miraculous punishment inflicted upon persons who had lapsed from the christian faith. one of these, who ascended the capitol to make denial of christ, suddenly became dumb after he had spoken the words.( ) another, a woman, was seized by an unclean spirit even at the baths, and bit with her own teeth the impious tongue which had eaten the idolatrous food, or spoken the words, and she shortly expired in great agony.( ) he likewise maintains that christians are admonished by god in dreams and by visions, of which he mentions instances.( ) origen claims for christians the power still to expel demons, and to heal diseases in the name of jesus,( ) and he states that he had seen many persons so cured of madness and countless other evils, which could not be otherwise cured by men or devils.( ) lactantius repeatedly asserts the power of christians over demons; they make them flee from bodies when they adjure them in the name of god.( ) passing over the numerous apocryphal writings of the early centuries of our era, in which many miracles are { } recorded, we find in the pages of eusebius narratives of many miraculous occurrences. many miracles are ascribed to narcissus, bishop of jerusalem, of which eusebius relates several. whilst the vigils of the great watch of the passover were being kept, the oil failed, whereupon narcissus commanded that water from the neighbouring well should be poured into the lamps. having prayed over the water, it was changed into oil, of which a specimen had been preserved until that time.( ) on another occasion, three men having spread some vile slanders against narcissus, which they confirmed by an oath, and with imprecations upon themselves of death by a miserable disease, of death by fire, and of blindness, respectively, if their statements were not true, omnipotent justice in each case inflicted upon the wretches the curse which each had invoked.( ) the election of fabianus to the episcopal chair of rome was marked by the descent of a dove from on high, which rested upon his head, as the holy ghost had descended upon our saviour.( ) at cæsarea philippi there is a statue of jesus christ which eusebius states that he himself had seen, said to have been erected by the woman healed of the bloody issue, and on the pedestal grows a strange plant as high as the hem of the brazen garment, which is an antidote to all diseases.( ) great miracles are recorded as taking place during the persecutions in cæsarea.( ) gregory of nyssa gives an account of many wonderful works performed by his namesake gregory of neo-cæsarea, who was called _thaumaturgus_ from the miraculous power which he possessed and very freely { } exercised. the virgin mary and the apostle john appeared to him, on one occasion, when he was in doubt as to the doctrine which he ought to preach, and, at the request of mary, the apostle gave him all needful instructions.( ) if his faith did not move mountains, it moved a huge rock to convert a pagan priest.( ) he drove a demon out of a heathen temple in which he had taken refuge, and the evil spirit could not re-enter until he gave permission.( ) nyssen relates how st. gregory averted an armed contest of two brothers who quarrelled about the possession of a lake on their father's property. the saint passed the night in prayer beside the lake, and in the morning it was found dried up.( ) on another occasion he rescued the country from the devastation of a mountain stream, which periodically burst the dykes by which it was restrained and inundated the plain. he went on foot to the place, and invoking the name of christ, fixed his staff in the earth at the place where the torrent had broken through. the staff took root and became a tree, and the stream never again burst its bounds. the inhabitants of the district were converted to christianity by this miracle. the tree was still living in nyssen's time, and he had seen the bed of the lake covered with trees, pastures, and cottages.( ) two vagabond jews once attempted to deceive him. one of them lay down and pretended to be dead, while the other begged money from the saint wherewith to buy him a shroud. st. gregory quietly took off his cloak and laid it on the man, and { } walked away. his companion found that he was really dead.( ) st. gregory expelled demons from persons possessed, healed the sick and performed many other miracles;( ) and his signs and wonders are not only attested by gregory of nyssa, but by st. basil,( ) whose grandmother, st. macrina, was brought up at neo-cæsarea by the immediate followers of the saint. athanasius, in his memoir of st. anthony, who began to lead the life of a recluse about a.d. , gives particulars of many miracles performed by the saint. although he possessed great power over demons, and delivered many persons possessed by them, satan tormented him sadly, and he was constantly beset by legions of devils. one night satan with a troop of evil spirits so belaboured the saint that he lay on the ground speechless and almost dead from their blows.( ) we have already referred to the case of natalius, who was scourged by angels during a whole night, till he was brought to repentance.( ) upon one occasion when st. anthony had retired to his cell resolved to pass a time in perfect solitude, a certain soldier came to his door and remained long there knocking and supplicating the saint to come and deliver his daughter, who was tormented by a demon. at length st. anthony addressed the man and told him to go, and if he believed in jesus christ and prayed to god, his prayer should { } be fulfilled. the man believed, invoked jesus christ, and his daughter was delivered from the demon.( ) as anthony was once travelling across the desert to visit another monastery, the water of the caravan failed them, and his companions in despair threw themselves on the ground. st. anthony, however, retired a little apart, and in answer to his prayer a spring of water issued at the place where he was kneeling.( ) a man named fronto, who was afflicted with leprosy, begged his prayers, and was ordered by the saint to go into egypt, where he should be healed. fronto at first refused, but being told that he could not be healed if he remained, the sick man went believing, and as soon as he came in sight of egypt he was made whole.( ) another miracle was performed by anthony at alexandria in the presence of st. athanasius. as they were leaving the city a woman cried after him, "man of god, stay; my daughter is cruelly troubled by a demon;" and she entreated him to stop lest she herself should die in running after him. at the request of athanasius and the rest, the saint paused, and as the woman came up her daughter fell on the ground convulsed. st. anthony prayed in the name of jesus christ, and immediately the girl rose perfectly restored to health, and delivered from the evil spirit.( ) he astonished a number of pagan philosophers, who had come to dispute with him, by delivering several demoniacs, making the sign of the cross over them three times, and invoking the name of jesus christ.( ) it is unnecessary, however, to multiply instances of his miraculous power to drive out demons and heal diseases,( ) and to perform other { } wonderful works. st. athanasius, who was himself for a long time a personal follower of st. anthony, protests in his preface to the biography his general accuracy, he having everywhere been mindful of the truth.( ) hilarion, again, a disciple of st. anthony, performed many miracles, an account of some of which is given by st. jerome. he restored sight to a woman who had been blind for no less than ten years; he cast out devils, and miraculously cured many diseases. rain fell in answer to his prayers; and he further exhibited his power over the elements by calming a stormy sea. when he was buried, ten months after his death, not only was his body as perfect as though he had been alive, but it emitted a delightful perfume. he was so favoured of god that, long after, diseases were healed and demons expelled at his tomb.( ) st. macarius, the egyptian, is said to have restored a dead man to life in order to convince an unbeliever of the truth of the resurrection.( ) st. martin, of tours, restored to life a certain catechumen who had died of a fever, and sulpicius, his disciple, states that the man, who lived for many years after, was known to himself, although not until after the miracle. he also restored to life a servant who had hung himself.( ) he performed a multitude of other miracles, to which we need not here more minutely refer. the relics of the two martyrs protavius and gervasius, whose bones, with much fresh blood, the miraculous evidence of their martyrdom and identity, were discovered by st. ambrose, worked a { } number of miracles. a man suffering from demoniacal possession indicated the proximity of the relics by his convulsions. st. augustine states that he himself was in milan when a blind man, who merely touched the cloth which covered the two bodies as they were being moved to a neighbouring church, regained his sight.( ) paulinus relates many miracles performed by his master, st. ambrose, himself. he not only cast out many demons and healed the sick,( ) but he also raised the dead. whilst the saint was staying in the house of a distinguished christian friend, his child, who, a few days before, had been delivered from an unclean spirit, suddenly expired. the mother, an exceedingly religious woman, full of faith and the fear of god, carried the dead boy down and laid him on the saint's bed during his absence. when st. ambrose returned, filled with compassion for the mother and struck by her faith, he stretched himself, like elisha, on the body of the child, praying, and restored him living to his mother. paulinus relates this miracle with minute particulars of name and address.( ) st. augustine asserts that miracles are still performed in his day in the name of jesus christ, either by means of his sacraments or by the prayers or relics of his saints, although they are not so well-known as those of old, and he gives an account of many miracles which had recently taken place.( ) after referring to the miracle performed by the relics of the two martyrs upon the blind man in milan, which occurred when he was there, he goes on to narrate the miraculous cure of a friend of { } his own, named innocent, formerly advocate of the prefecture, in carthage, where augustine was, and beheld it with his own eyes (_ubi nos interfuimus et oculis aspeximus nostris_). a lady of rank in the same city was miraculously healed of an incurable cancer, and st. augustine is indignant at the apathy of her friends, which allowed so great a miracle to be so little known.( ) an inhabitant of the neighbouring town of curubis was cured of paralysis and other ills by being baptized. when augustine heard of this, although it was reported on very good authority, the man himself was brought to carthage by order of the holy bishop aurelius, in order that the truth might be ascertained. augustine states that, on one occasion during his absence, a tribunitian man amongst them named hesperius, who had a farm close by, called zubedi, in the fussalian district, begged one of the christian presbyters to go and drive away some evil spirits whose malice sorely afflicted his servants and cattle. one of the presbyters accordingly went, and offered the sacrifice of the body of christ with earnest prayer, and by the mercy of god, the evil was removed. now hesperius happened to have received from one of his friends a piece of the sacred earth of jerusalem, where jesus christ was buried and rose again the third day, and he had hung it up in his room to protect himself from the evil spirits. when his house had been freed from them, however, he begged st. augustine and his colleague maximinus, who happened to be in that neighbourhood, to come to him, and after telling them all that had happened, he prayed them to bury the piece of earth in some place where christians could assemble for the worship of god. they consented, and did as he desired. a young peasant of the neighbourhood, who was paralytic, hearing of this, begged that he might be carried without delay to the holy spot, where he offered up prayer, and rose up and went away on his feet perfectly cured. about thirty miles from hippo, at a farm called victoriana, there was a memorial to the two martyrs protavius and gervasius. to this, augustine relates, was brought a young man who, having gone one summer day at noon to water his horse in the river, was possessed by a demon. the lady to whom the place belonged came according to her custom in the evening, with her servants and some holy women to sing hymns and pray. on hearing them the demoniac started up and seized the altar with a terrible shudder, without daring to move, and as if bound to it, and the demon praying with a loud voice for mercy confessed where and when he had entered into the young man. at last the demon named all the members of his body, with threats to cut them off as he made his exit, and, saying these words, came out of him. in doing so, however, the eye of the youth fell from its socket on to his cheek, retained only by a small vein as by a root, whilst the pupil became altogether white. well pleased, however, that the young man had been freed from the evil spirit, they returned the eye to its place as well as they could, and bound it up with a handkerchief, praying fervently, and one of his relatives said: "god who drove out the demon at the prayer of his saints can also restore the sight." on removing the bandage seven days after, the eye was found perfectly whole. st. augustine knew a girl of { } hippo who was delivered from a demon by the application of oil with which had mingled the tears of the presbyter who was praying for her. he also knew a bishop who prayed for a youth possessed by a demon, although he had not even seen him, and the young man was at once cured. augustine further gives particulars of many miracles performed by the relics of the most glorious martyr stephen.( ) by their virtue the blind receive their sight, the sick are healed, the impenitent converted, and the dead are restored to life. "andurus is the name of an estate," augustine says, "where there is a church and in it a shrine dedicated to the martyr stephen. a certain little boy was playing in the court, when unruly bullocks drawing a waggon crushed him with the wheel, and immediately he lay in the agonies of death. then his mother raised him up, and placed him at the shrine, and he not only came to life again, but had manifestly received no injury.( ) a certain religious woman, who lived in a neighbouring property called caspalianus, being dangerously ill and her life despaired of, her tunic was carried to the same shrine, but before it was brought back she had expired. nevertheless, her relatives covered the body with this tunic, and she received back the spirit and was made whole.( ) at hippo, a certain man named { } bassus, a syrian, was praying at the shrine of the same martyr for his daughter who was sick and in great peril, and he had brought her dress with him; when lo! some of his household came running to announce to him that she was dead. but as he was engaged in prayer they were stopped by his friends, who prevented their telling him, lest he should give way to his grief in public. when he returned to his house, which already resounded with the wailing of his household, he cast over the body of his daughter her mantle which he had with him, and immediately she was restored to life.( ) again, in the same city, the son of a certain man among us named irenæus, a collector of taxes, became sick and died. as the dead body lay, and they were preparing with wailing and lamentation to bury it, one of his friends consoling him suggested that the body should be anointed with oil from the same martyr. this was done, and the child came to life again.( ) in the same way a man amongst us named eleusinus, formerly a tribune, laid the body of his child, who had died from sickness, on a memorial of the martyr which is in his villa in the suburbs, and after he had prayed, with many tears, he took up the child living."( ) { } we shall meet with more of these miracles in considering the arguments of dr. mozley. in a note he says: "augustine again, long after, alludes in his list of miracles (de civ. dei, xxii. ,) to some cases in which persons had been raised to life again by prayer and the intercession of martyrs, whose relics were applied. but though augustine relates with great particularity and length of detail some cases of recoveries from complaints in answer to prayer, his notices of the cases in which persons had been raised to life again, are so short, bare, and summary, that they evidently represent no more than mere report, and report of a very vague kind. indeed, with the preface which he prefixes to his list, he cannot be said even to profess to guarantee the truth or accuracy of the different instances contained in it. 'hæc autem, ubicunque fiunt, ibi sciuntur vix a tota ipsa civitate vel quocumque commanentium loco. nam plerumque etiam ibi paucissimi sciunt, ignorantibus eseteris, maxime si magna sit civitas; et quando alibi aliisque narrantur, non tantum ea commendat auctoritas, ut sine difficultate vel dubitatione credantur, quamvis christianis fidelibus a fidelibus indicentur.' he puts down the cases as he received them, then, without pledging himself to their authenticity. 'eucharius presbyter... mortuus sic jacebat ut ei jam pol-lices ligarentur: opitulatione memorati martyris, cum de memoria ejus reportata fuisset et supra jacentis corpus missa ipsius presbyteri tunica, suscitatus est... andurus nomen est &c.",( ) and then dr. mozley gives the passage already quoted by us. before continuing, { } we must remark with regard to the passages just quoted, that, in the miracle of eucharius, dr. mozley, without explanation, omits details. the whole passage is as follows: "eucharius, a presbyter from spain, resided at calama, who had for a long time suffered from stone. by the relics of the same martyr, which the bishop possidius brought to him, he was made whole. the same presbyter, afterwards succumbing to another disease, lay dead, so that they were already binding his hands. succour came from the relics of the martyr, for the tunic of the presbyter being brought back from the relics and placed upon his body he revived."( ) a writer who complains of the bareness of narratives, should certainly not curtail their statements. dr. mozley continues: "there are three other cases of the same kind, in which there is nothing to verify the death from which the return to life is said to take place, as being more than mere suspension of the vital powers; but the writer does not go into particulars of description or proof, but simply inserts them in his list as they have been reported to him."( ) dr. mozley is anxious to detract from the miracles described by augustine, and we regret to be obliged to maintain that in order to do so he misrepresents, no doubt unintentionally, augustine's statements, and, as we think, also unduly depreciates the comparative value of the evidence. we shall briefly refer to the two points in question. i. that "his notices of the cases in which persons had been raised to life again are so short, { } bare, and summary that they evidently represent no more than mere report, and report of a very vague kind." ii. "that with the preface which augustine prefixes to his list, he cannot be said even to profess to guarantee the truth or accuracy of the different instances contained in it." it is true that in several cases augustine gives the account of miraculous cures at greater length than those of restoration to life. it seems to us that this is almost inevitable at all times, and that the reason is obvious. where the miracle consists merely of the cure of disease, details are naturally given to show the nature and intensity of the sickness, and they are necessary not only for the comprehension of the cure but to show its importance. in the case of restoration to life, the mere statement of the death and assertion of the subsequent resurrection exclude all need of details. the pithy _reddita est vitæ_, or _factum est et revixit_ is more striking than any more prolix narrative. in fact, the greater the miracle the more natural is conciseness and simplicity; and practically, we find that augustine gives a more lengthy and verbose report of trifling cures, whilst he relates the more important with greater brevity and force. he narrates many of his cases of miraculous cure, however, as briefly as those in which the dead are raised. we have quoted the latter, and the reader must judge whether they are unduly curt. one thing may be affirmed, that nothing of importance is omitted, and in regard to essential details they are as explicit as the mass of other cases reported. in every instance names and addresses are stated, and it will have been observed that all these miracles occurred in, or close to, hippo, and in his own diocese. it is very certain that in { } every case the fact of the miracle is asserted in the most direct and positive terms. there can be no mistake either as to the meaning or intention of the narrative, and there is no symptom whatever of a thought on the part of augustine to avoid the responsibility of his statements, or to give them as mere vague report. if wo compare these accounts with those of the gospels, we do not find them deficient in any essential detail common to the latter. there is in the synoptic gospels only one case in which jesus is said to have raised the dead. the raising of jairus' daughter( ) has long been abandoned, as a case of restoration to life, by all critics and theologians, except the few who still persist in ignoring the distinct and positive declaration of jesus, "the damsel is not dead but sleepeth." the only case, therefore, in the synoptics is the account in the third gospel of the raising of the widow's son,( ) of which, strange to say, the other gospels know nothing. now, although, as might have been expected, this narrative is much more highly coloured and picturesque, the difference is chiefly literary, and, indeed, there are really fewer important details given than in the account by augustine, for instance, of the restoration to life of the daughter of bassus the syrian, which took place at hippo, of which he was bishop, and where he actually resided. augustine's object in giving his list of miracles did not require him to write picturesque narratives. he merely desired to state bare facts, whilst the authors of the gospels composed the life of their master, in which interesting details were everything. for many reasons we refrain here from alluding to the artistic narrative of the raising { } of lazarus, the greatest miracle ascribed to jesus, yet so singularly unknown to the other three evangelists, who, so readily repeating the accounts of trifling cures, would most certainly not have neglected this had they ever heard of it. dr. mozley complains of the absence of verification and proof of actual death in these cases, or that they were more than mere suspension of the vital powers. we cordially agree with him in the desire for such evidence, not only in these, but in all miracles. we would ask, however, what verification of the death have we in the case of the widow's son which we have not here? if we apply such a test to the miracles of the gospels, we must reject them as certainly as those of st. augustine. in neither case have we more than a mere statement that the subjects of these miracles were dead or diseased. so far are we from having any competent medical evidence of the reality of the death, or of the disease, or of the permanence of the supposed cures in the gospels, that we have little more than the barest reports of these miracles by writers who, even if their identity were established, were not, and do not pretend to have been, eye-witnesses of the occurrences which they relate. take, for instance, this very raising of the widow's son in the third gospel, which is unknown to the other evangelists, and the narrative of which is given only in a gospel which is not attributed to a personal follower of jesus. now we turn to the second statement of dr. mozley, "that with the preface which augustine prefixes to his list, he cannot be said even to profess to guarantee the truth or accuracy of the different instances contained in it." this extraordinary assertion is supported by a quotation { } given above, which dr. mozley has separated from what precedes and follows it, so that its real meaning is scarcely apparent. we shall as briefly as possible state what is actually the "preface" of st. augustine to his list of miracles, and his avowed object for giving it. in the preceding chapter, augustine has been arguing that the world believed in christ by virtue of divine influence and not by human persuasion. he contends that it is ridiculous to speak of the false divinity of romulus when christians speak of christ. if, in the time of romulus, some years before cicero, people were so enlightened that they refused to believe anything of which they had not experience, how much more, in the still more enlightened days of cicero himself, and notably in the reigns of augustus and tiberius, would they have rejected belief in the resurrection and ascension of christ, if divine truth and the testimony of miracles had not proved not only that such things could take place, but that they had actually done so. when the evidence of prophecy joined with that of miracles, and showed that the new doctrines were only contrary to experience and not contrary to reason, the world embraced the faith.( ) "why, then, say they, do these miracles which you declare to have taken place formerly, not occur now-a-days?" augustine, in replying, adopts a common rhetorical device: "i might, indeed, answer," he says, "that miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order that the world might believe. any one who now requires miracles in order that he may believe, is himself a great miracle in not believing what all the world believes. but, really, they say this in order that even those miracles should not be believed either." { } and he reduces what he considers to be the position of the world in regard to miracles and to the supernatural dogmas of christianity to the following dilemma: "either things incredible which nevertheless occurred, and were seen, led to belief in something else incredible, which was not seen; or that thing was in itself so credible that no miracles were required to establish it, and so much more is the unbelief of those who deny confuted. this might i say to these most frivolous objectors." he then proceeds to affirm that it cannot be denied that many miracles attest the great miracle of the ascension in the flesh of the risen christ, and he points out that the actual occurrence of all these things is not only recorded in the most truthful books, but the reasons also given why they took place. these things have become known that they might create belief; these things by the belief they have created have become much more clearly known. they are read to the people, indeed, that they may believe; yet, nevertheless, they would not be read to the people if they had not been believed. after thus stating the answer which he might give, augustine now returns to answer the question directly:--"but, furthermore," he continues, "miracles are performed now in his name, either by means of his sacraments, or by the prayers or relics of his saints, but they are not brought under the same strong light as caused the former to be noised abroad with so much glory; inasmuch as the canon of sacred scriptures, which must be definite, causes those miracles to be everywhere publicly read, and become firmly fixed in the memory of all peoples;"(l) and then follows dr. mozley's { } quotation: "but these are scarcely known to the whole of a city itself in which they are performed, or to its neighbourhood. indeed, for the most part, even there very few know of them, and the rest are ignorant, more especially if the city be large; and when they are related elsewhere and to others, the authority does not so commend them as to make them be believed without difficulty or doubt, albeit they are reported by faithful christians to the faithful." he illustrates this by pointing out in immediate continuation, that the miracle in milan by the bodies of the two martyrs, which took place when he himself was there, might reach the knowledge of many, because the city is large, and the emperor and an immense crowd of people witnessed it, but who knows of the miracle performed at carthage upon his friend innocent, when he was there also, and saw it with his own eyes? who knows of the miraculous cure of cancer, he continues, in a lady of rank in the same city? at the silence regarding which he is so indignant. who knows of the next case he mentions in his list? the cure of a medical man of the same town, to which he adds: "we, nevertheless, do know it, and a few brethren to whose knowledge it may have come."( ) who out of curubus, besides the very few who may have heard of it, knows of the miraculous cure of the paralytic man, whose case augustine personally investigated? and so on. observe that there is merely a question of the comparative notoriety of the gospel { } miracles and those of his own time, not a doubt as to the reality of the latter. again, towards the end of his long list, immediately after the narrative of the restoration to life of the child of eleusinus, which we have quoted, augustine says:--"what can i do? the promise of the completion of this work is pressing, so that i cannot here recount all (the miracles) that i know; and without doubt many of our brethren when they read this work will be grieved that i have omitted so very much, which they know as well as i do. this i even now beg that they will pardon, and consider how long would be the task of doing that which, for the completion of the work, it is thought necessary not to do. for if i desired to record merely the miracles of healing, without speaking of others, which have been performed by this martyr, that is to say, the most glorious stephen, in the district of calama, and in ours of hippo, many volumes must be composed, yet will it not be possible to make a complete collection of them, but only of such as have been published for public reading. for that was our object, since we saw repeated in our time signs of divine power similar to those of old, deeming that they ought not to be lost to the knowledge of the multitude. now this relic has not yet been two years at hippo-regius, and accounts of many of the miracles performed by it have not been written, as is most certainly known to us, yet the number of those which have been published, up to the time this is written, amounts ta about seventy. at calama, however, where these relics have been longer, and more of the miracles were recorded, they incomparably exceed this number."( ) augustine goes on to say that, to his knowledge, many very remarkable miracles were performed by the relics of the same martyr also at uzali, a district near to utica, and of one of these, which had recently taken place when he himself was there, he gives an account. then, before closing his list with the narrative of a miracle which took place at hippo, in his own church, in his own presence, and in the sight of the whole congregation, he resumes his reply to the opening question:--"many miracles, therefore," he says, "are also performed now, the same god who worked those of which we read, performing these by whom he wills and as he wills; but these miracles neither become similarly known, nor, that they may not slip out of mind, are they stamped, as it were like gravel, into memory, by frequent reading. for even in places where care is taken, as is now the case amongst us, that accounts of those who receive benefit should be publicly read, those who are present hear them only once, and many are not present at all, so that those who were present do not, after a few days, remember { } what they heard, and scarcely a single person is met with who repeats what he has heard to one whom he may have known to have been absent"( ) so far from casting doubt upon the miracles which he narrates, the "preface" of augustine is clearly intended to establish them. these "signs of divine power similar to those of old," are not less real and important, but merely less known, because the eyes of the world are not directed to them, and they have not the advantage of being everywhere published abroad by means of canonical scriptures constantly read to the people and acknowledged as authoritative. dr. mozleys statement is quite unwarranted, and it seems to us gratuitously injurious to st. augustine. this father of the church and bishop must have had as little good faith as good sense, if he did what such a statement implies. in order to demonstate the truth of his assertion that miracles were still performed in his day, dr. mozley represents augustine as deliberately producing a long list of instances of which "he cannot even be said to guarantee the truth," and the more important cases in which "evidently represent no more than mere report, and report of a very vague kind." we have furnished the reader with the materials for forming an opinion on these points. the judgment of dr. mozley may with equal justice be applied to { } the authors of the synoptic gospels. they certainly do not guarantee the truth of the miracles they relate in any more precise way than augustine. like him, they merely narrate them as facts, and he as evidently believes what he states as they do. indeed, as regards comparative fulness of testimony, the advantage is altogether on the side of the miracles reported by st. augustine. these miracles occurred within two years of the time at which he wrote, and were at once recorded with the names of the subjects and of the places at which they occurred; most of them were performed in his own diocese, and several of them in his own presence; some, of which he apparently did not feel sure, he personally investigated; he states his knowledge of others, and he narrates the whole of them with the most direct and simple affirmation of the facts, without a single word indicating hesitation, or directly or indirectly attributing the narrative to mere report. moreover, he not only advances these miracles deliberately and in writing, in support of his positive assertion that miracles were still performed, but these accounts of them had in the first instance been written that they might be publicly read in his own church for the edification of christians, almost on the very spot where they are stated to have occurred. we need scarcely say that we do not advance these reasons in order to argue the reality of the miracles themselves, but simply to maintain that, so far from his giving the account of them as mere report, or not even professing to vouch for their truth, st. augustine both believed them himself, and asked others to believe them as facts, and that they are as unhesitatingly affirmed as any related in the gospels. { } we shall not attempt any further detailed reference to the myriads of miracles with which the annals of the church teem up to very recent times. the fact is too well known to require evidence. the saints in the calendar are legion. it has been computed that the number of those whose lives are given in the bollandist collection( ) amounts to upwards of , , although, the saints being arranged according to the calendar, the unfinished work only reaches the twenty-fourth of october. when it is considered that all those upon whom the honour of canonization is conferred have worked miracles, many of them, indeed, almost daily performing such wonders, some idea may be formed of the number of miracles which have occurred in unbroken succession from apostolic days, and have been believed and recognized by the church. vast numbers of these miracles are in all respects similar to those narrated in the gospels, and they comprise hundreds of cases of restoration of the dead to life. if it be necessary to point out instances in comparatively recent times, we may mention the miracles of this kind liberally ascribed to st francis of assisi, in the th century, and to his namesake st. francis xavier, in the th, as pretty well known to all, although we might refer to much more recent miracles authenticated by the church. at the present day such phenomena have almost disappeared, and, indeed, with the exception of an occasional winking picture, periodical liquefaction of blood, or apparition of the virgin, confined to the still ignorant and benighted corners of the earth, miracles are extinct. { } chapter vi. miracles in relation to ignorance and superstition we have maintained that the miracles which are reported after apostolic days, instead of presenting the enormous distinction which dr. mozley asserts, are precisely of the same types in all material points as the earlier miracles. setting aside miracles of a trivial and unworthy character, there remains a countless number cast in the same mould as those of the gospels,--miraculous cure of diseases, expulsion of demons, transformation of elements, supernatural nourishment, resurrection of dead--of many of which we have quoted instances. dr. mozley anticipates an objection and says: "it will be urged, perhaps, that a large portion even of the gospel miracles are of the class here mentioned as ambiguous; cures, visions, expulsions of evil spirits; but this observation does not affect the character of the gospel miracles as a body, because we judge of the body or whole from its highest specimen, not from its lowest." he takes his stand upon, "e.g. our lord's resurrection and ascension."( ) now, without discussing the principle laid down here, it is evident that the great distinction between the gospel and other miracles is thus narrowed to a very small compass. it is admitted that the mass of the gospel miracles are of a class characterized as ambiguous, because "the current { } miracles of human history" are also chiefly of the same type, and the distinctive character is derived avowedly only from a few high specimens, such as the resurrection. we have already referred to the fact that in the synoptic gospels there is only one case, reported by the third gospel alone, in which jesus is said to have raised the dead. st. augustine alone, however, chronicles several cases in which life was restored to the dead. post-apostolic miracles, therefore, are far from lacking this ennobling type. observe that dr. mozley is here not so much discussing the reality of the subsequent miracles of the church, as contrasting them and other reputed miracles with those of the gospel, and from this point of view it is impossible to maintain that the gospels have a monopoly of the highest class of miracles. such miracles are met with long before the dawn of christianity, and continued to occur long after apostolic times. much stress is laid upon the form of the gospel miracles; but as we have already shown, it is the actual resurrection of the dead, for instance, which is the miracle, and this is not affected by the more or less dramatic manner in which it is said to have been effected, or in which the narrative of the event is composed. literary skill, and the judicious management of details, may make or mar the form of any miracle. the narrative of the restoration of the dead child to life by elisha might have been more impressive, had the writer omitted the circumstance that the child sneezed seven times before opening his eyes, and dr. mozley would probably have considered the miracle greater had the prophet merely said to the child, "arise!" instead of stretching himself on the body; but setting aside human cravings { } for the picturesque and artistic, the essence of the miracle would have remained the same. there is one point, however, regarding which it may be well to make a few remarks. whilst a vast number of miracles are ascribed to direct personal action of saints, many more are attributed to their relics. now this is no exclusive characteristic of later miracles, but christianity itself shares it with still earlier times. the case in which a dead body which touched the bones of elisha was restored to life will occur to every one. "and it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of moabites; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of elisha: and when the man was let down, and touched the bones of elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet."( ) the mantle of elijah smiting asunder the waters before elisha may be cited as another instance.( ) the woman who touches the hem of the garment of jesus in the crowd is made whole,( ) and all the sick and "possessed" of the country are represented as being healed by touching jesus, or even the mere hem of his garment.( ) it was supposed that the shadow of peter falling on the sick as he passed had a curative effect,( ) and it is very positively stated: "and god wrought miracles of no common kind by the hands of paul; so that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them." ( ) the argument which assumes an enormous distinction { } between gospel and other miracles betrays the prevalent scepticism, even in the church, of all miracles except those which it is considered an article of faith to maintain. if we inquire how those think who are more logical and thorough in their belief in the supernatural, we find the distinction denied. "the question," says dr. newman, "has hitherto been argued on the admission, that a distinct line can be drawn in point of character and circumstances, between the miracles of scripture and those of church history; but this is by no means the case. it is true, indeed, that the miracles of scripture, viewed as a whole, recommend themselves to our reason, and claim our veneration beyond all others, by a peculiar dignity and beauty; but still it is only as a whole that they make this impression upon us. some of them, on the contrary, fall short of the attributes which attach to them in general; nay, are inferior in these respects to certain ecclesiastical miracles, and are received only on the credit of the system of which they form part. again, specimens are not wanting in the history of the church, of miracles as awful in their character, and as momentous in their effects, as those which are recorded in scripture."( ) now here is one able and thorough supporter of miracles denying the enormous distinction between those of the gospel and those of human history, which another admits to be essential to the former as evidence of a revelation. dr. mozley, however, meets such a difficulty by asserting that there would be no disadvantage to the gospel miracles, and no doubt regarding them involved, if for some later miracles there was evidence as strong as for those of the gospel. "all the result would be," he says, { } "that we should admit these miracles over and above the gospel ones."( ) he denies the equality of the evidence, however, in any case. "between the evidence, then, upon which the gospel miracles stand, and that for later miracles we see a broad distinction arising, not to mention again the nature and type of the gospel miracles themselves--from the contemporaneous date of the testimony to them, the character of the witnesses, the probation of the testimony; especially when we contrast with these points the false doctrine and audacious fraud which rose up in later ages, and in connection with which so large a portion of the later miracles of christianity made their appearance."( ) we consider the point touching the type of the gospel miracles disposed of, and we may, therefore, confine ourselves to the rest of this argument. if we look for any external evidence of the miracles of jesus in any marked effect produced by them at the time they are said to have occurred, we find anything but confirmation of the statements of the gospels. it is a notorious fact that, in spite of these miracles, very few of the jews amongst whom they were performed believed in jesus, and that christianity made its chief converts not where the supposed miracles took place, but where an account of them was alone given by enthusiastic missionaries. such astounding exhibitions of power as raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, walking on the sea, changing water into wine, and indefinitely multiplying a few loaves and fishes, not only did not make any impression on the jews themselves, but were never heard of out of palestine until long after the events are said to have occurred, when the narrative of them was slowly disseminated by christian teachers and writers. { } dr. mozley refers to the contemporary testimony "for certain great and cardinal gospel miracles which, if granted, clear away all antecedent objection to the reception of the rest," and he says: "that the first promulgators of christianity asserted, as a fact which had come under the cognizance of their senses, the resurrection of our lord from the dead, is as certain as anything in history."( ) what they really did assert, so far from being so certain as dr. mozley states, must, as we shall hereafter see, be considered matter of the greatest doubt. but if the general statement be taken that the resurrection, for instance, was promulgated as a fact which the early preachers of christianity themselves believed to have taken place, the evidence does not in that case present the broad distinction he asserts. the miracles recounted by st athanasius and st. augustine, for example, were likewise proclaimed with equal clearness, and even greater promptitude and publicity at the very spot where many of them were said to have been performed, and the details were much more immediately reduced to writing. the mere assertion in neither case goes for much as evidence, but the fact is that we have absolutely no contemporaneous testimony at all as to what the first promulgators of christianity actually asserted, or as to the real grounds upon which they made such assertions. we shall presently enter upon a thorough examination of the testimony for the gospel narratives, their authorship and authenticity, but we may here be permitted, so far to anticipate, as to remark that, applied to documentary evidence, dr. mozley's reasoning from the contemporaneous date of the testimony, and the character of { } the witnesses, is contradicted by the whole history of new testament literature. whilst the most uncritically zealous assertors of the antiquity of the gospels never venture to date the earliest of them within a quarter of a century from the death of jesus, every tyro is aware that there is not a particle of evidence of the existence of our gospels until very long after that interval,--hereafter we shall show how long;--that two of our synoptic gospels at least were not, in any case, composed in their present form by the writers to whom they are attributed; that there is, indeed, nothing worthy of the name of evidence that any one of these gospels was written at all by the person whose name it bears; that the second gospel is attributed to one who was not an eye-witness, and of whose identity there is the greatest doubt even amongst those who assert the authorship of mark; that the third gospel is an avowed later compilation,( ) and likewise ascribed to one who was not a follower of jesus himself; and that the authorship of the fourth gospel and its historical character are amongst the most unsettled questions of criticism, not to use here any more definite terms. this being the state of the case it is absurd to lay such emphasis on the contemporaneous date of the testimony, and on the character of the witnesses, since it has not even been determined who those witnesses are, and two even of the supposed evangelists were not personal eye-witnesses at all.( ) surely the testimony of athanasius regarding the miracles of st. anthony, and that of augustine regarding luke i. -- . we need scarcely point out that paul, to whom so many of the writings of the new testament are ascribed, and who practically is the author of ecclesiastical christianity, not only was not an eye-witness of the gospel miracles but never even saw jesus. { } his list of miracles occurring in or close to his own diocese, within two years of the time at which he writes, or, to refer to more recent times, the evidence of pascal for the port-royal miracles, must be admitted, not only not to present the broad distinction of evidence of which dr. mozley speaks, but on the contrary to be even more unassailable than that of the gospel miracles. the church, which is the authority for those miracles, is also the authority for the long succession of such works wrought by the saints. the identity of the writers we have instanced has never been doubted; their trustworthiness, in so far as stating what they believe to be true is concerned, has never been impugned; the same could be affirmed of writers in every age who record such miracles. the broad distinction of evidence for which dr. mozley contends, does not exist; it does not lie within the scope of his lectures either to define or prove it, and he does not of course commit the error of assuming the inspiration of the records. the fact is that theologians demand evidence for later miracles, which they have not for those of the gospels, and which transmitted reverence forbids their requiring. they strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. dr. mozley points to the life of sacrifice and suffering of the apostles as a remarkable and peculiar testimony to the truth of the gospel miracles, and notably of the resurrection and ascension.( ) without examining, here, how much we really know of those lives and sufferings, one thing is perfectly evident: that sacrifice, suffering, and martyrdom itself are evidence of nothing except of the personal belief of the person enduring them; they do not prove the truth of the doctrines believed. no { } one doubts the high religious enthusiasm of the early christians, or the earnest and fanatical zeal with which they courted martyrdom, but this is no exclusive characteristic of christianity. every religion has had its martyrs, every error its devoted victims. does the marvellous endurance of the hindoo, whose limbs wither after years of painful persistence in vows to his deity, prove the truth of brahmanism? or do the fanatical believers who cast themselves under the wheels of the car of jagganath establish the soundness of their creed? do the jews, who for centuries bore the fiercest contumelies of the world, and were persecuted, hunted, and done to death by every conceivable torture for persisting in their denial of the truth of the incarnation, resurrection, and ascension, and in their rejection of jesus christ, do they thus furnish a convincing argument for the truth of their belief and the falsity of christianity? or have the thousands who have been consigned to the stake by the christian church herself for persisting in asserting what she has denounced as damnable heresy, proved the correctness of their views by their sufferings and death? history is full of the records of men who have honestly believed every kind of error and heresy, and have been stedfast to the death, through persecution and torture, in their mistaken belief. there is nothing so inflexible as superstitious fanaticism, and persecution, instead of extinguishing it, has invariably been the most certain means of its propagation. the sufferings of the apostles, therefore, cannot prove anything beyond their own belief, and the question what it was they really did believe and suffered for is by no means so simple as it appears. now the long succession of ecclesiastical and other { } miracles has an important bearing upon those of the new testament, whether we believe or deny their reality. if we regard the miracles of church history to be in the main real, the whole force of the gospel miracles, as exceptional supernatural evidence of a divine revelation, is annihilated. the "miraculous credentials of christianity" assume a very different aspect when they are considered from such a point of view. admitted to be scarcely recognizable from miracles wrought by satanic agency, they are seen to be a continuation of wonders recorded in the old testament, to be preceded and accompanied by pretension to similar power on the part of the jews and other nations, and to be succeeded by cycles of miracles, in all essential respects the same, performed subsequently for upwards of fifteen hundred years. supernatural evidence of so common and prodigal a nature certainly betrays a great want of force and divine speciality. how could that be considered as express evidence for a new divine revelation which was already so well known to the world, and which is scattered broad-cast over so many centuries, as well as successfully simulated by satan? if, on the other hand, we dismiss the miracles of later ages as false, and as merely the creations of superstition or pious imagination, how can the miracles of the gospel, which are precisely the same in type, and not better established as facts, remain unshaken? the apostles and evangelists were men of like passions, and also of like superstitions with others of their time, and must be measured by the same standard. dr. mozley will not admit that, even in such a case, the difficulty of distinguishing the true miracles amongst the mass of { } spurious justifies the rejection of all, and he demands a judicial process in each case, and settlement according to the evidence in that case.( ) we might reply that if the great mass of asserted miracles be determined to be spurious, there is no reason shown for entering upon a more minute consideration of pretensions, which knowledge and experience force us _à priori_ to regard as incredible, and which examination, in so many cases, has proved to be delusion. even if the plea, that "the evidence of the gospel miracles is a special case which must be decided on its own grounds," be admitted, it must be apparent that the rejection of the mass of other miracles is serious presumptive evidence also against them. . the argument for the reality of miracles receives very little strength from the character of either the early or the later ages of christianity. "it is but too plain," says dr. mozley, "in discussing ecclesiastical miracles, that in later ages, as the church advanced in worldly power and position, besides the mistakes of imagination and impression, a temper of deliberate and audacious fraud set itself in action for the spread of certain doctrines, as well as for the great object of the concentration of church power in one absolute monarchy."( ) we have already quoted words of dean milman regarding the frame of mind of the early church, and it may not be out of place to add a few lines from the same writer. speaking of the writings of the first ages of christianity, he says: "that some of the christian legends were deliberate forgeries can scarcely be questioned; the principle of pious fraud { } appeared to justify this mode of working on the popular mind; it was admitted and avowed. to deceive into christianity was so valuable a service as to hallow deceit itself. but the largest portion was probably the natural birth of that imaginative excitement which quickens its day-dreams and nightly visions into reality. the christian lived in a supernatural world; the notion of the divine power, the perpetual interference of the deity, the agency of the countless invisible beings which hovered over mankind, was so strongly impressed upon the belief, that every extraordinary, and almost every ordinary incident became a miracle, every inward emotion a suggestion either of a good or an evil spirit. a mythic period was thus gradually formed, in which reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed on the province of history."( ) whether we look upon this picture or on that, the result is equally unfavourable to miracles, and a ready explanation both of the earlier and later instances is suggested. we must, however, again recall the fact that, setting aside for the present the effect of pious fraud, this vivid and superstitious imagination, which so freely created for itself the miraculous, was not merely developed by christianity, but was equally rampant before it, and was a marked characteristic of the jews. the same writer, in a passage already quoted, says: "during the whole life of christ, and the early propagation of the religion, it must be borne in mind that they took place in an age, and among a people which superstition had made so familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events, that wonders awakened no emotion, or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the ever { } ready belief. the jews of that period not only believed that the supreme being had the power of controlling the course of nature, but that the same influence was possessed by multitudes of subordinate spirits, both good and evil."( ) between the "superstition," "imaginative excitement," and "pious fraud" of the early church, and the "deliberate and audacious fraud" of the later, we have abundant material for the natural explanation of all supposed miracles, without going to such an extreme hypothesis as exceptions to the order of nature, or supposing that a few miracles can be accepted as supernatural facts, whilst all the rest must be discarded as human fables. it is certain that throughout the whole period during which miracles are said to have been performed, gross ignorance and superstition prevailed, and nowhere more so than amongst the jews where those miracles occurred. almost every operation of nature was inexplicable, and everything which was inexplicable was considered supernatural. miracles seemed as credible to the mind of that age as deviations from the order of nature seem incredible in ours. it is a suggestive fact that miracles are limited to periods when almost every common incident was readily ascribed to supernatural agency. there is, however, one remarkable circumstance which casts some light upon the origin of narratives of miracles. throughout the new testament, patristic literature, and the records of ecclesiastical miracles, although we have narratives of countless wonderful works performed by others than the writers, and abundant assertion of the possession of miraculous power by the church, there is no instance whatever, that we can remember, in which { } a writer claims to have himself performed a miracle.( ) wherever there has existed even the comparatively accurate means of information which a person who himself performed a miracle might possess, the miraculous entirely fails, and it is found only where faith or credulity usurps the place of knowledge. pious men were perfectly ready to believe the supposed miracles of others, and to report them as facts, who were too veracious to imagine any of their own. even if apostles and saints had chronicled their own miraculous deeds, the argument for their reality would not have been much advanced; but the uniform absence of such personal pretension enables us more clearly to trace such narratives to pious credulity or superstition. if we consider the particular part which miracles have played in human history, we find precisely the phenomena which might have been expected if miracles, instead of being considered as real occurrences, were recognized as the mistakes or creations of ignorance and superstition during that period in which "reality melted into fable, and invention unconsciously trespassed on the province of history." their occurrence is limited to ages which were totally ignorant of physical laws, and they have been numerous or rare precisely in proportion to the degree of imagination and love of the marvellous characterizing the people amongst whom they are said to have occurred. instead of a few evidential miracles taking place at one epoch of history, and filling the world with surprise at such novel and exceptional phenomena, we find miracles represented as taking place in all ages and in all countries. the gospel miracles are set in the midst of a series of similar wonders, which commenced this is fully discussed in the third volume. { } many centuries before the dawn of christianity and continued, without interruption, for fifteen hundred years after it. they did not in the most remote degree originate the belief in miracles, or give the first suggestion of spurious imitation. it may, on the contrary, be much more truly said that the already existing belief created these miracles. no divine originality characterized the evidence selected to accredit the divine revelation. the miracles with which the history of the world is full occurred in ages of darkness and superstition, and they gradually ceased when enlightenment became more generally diffused. at the very time when knowledge of the laws of nature began to render men capable of judging of the reality of miracles, these wonders entirely failed. this extraordinary cessation of miracles, precisely at the time when their evidence might have acquired value by an appeal to persons capable of appreciating them, is perfectly unintelligible if they be viewed as the supernatural credentials of a divine revelation. if, on the other hand, they be regarded as the mistakes of imaginative excitement and ignorance, nothing is more natural than their extinction at the time when the superstition which created them gave place to knowledge. as a historical fact, there is nothing more certain than that miracles, and the belief in them, disappeared exactly when education and knowledge of the operation of natural laws became diffused throughout europe, and that the last traces of belief in supernatural interference with the order of nature are only to be found in localities where ignorance and superstition still prevail, and render delusion or pious fraud of that description possible. miracles are now denied to places more enlightened { } than naples or la salette. the inevitable inference from this fact is fatal to the mass of miracles, and it is not possible to protect them from it. miracle cures by the relics of saints, upheld for fifteen centuries by all the power of the church, utterly failed when medical science, increasing in spite of persecution, demonstrated the natural action of physiological laws. the theory of the demoniacal origin of disease has been entirely and for ever dispelled, and the host of miracles in connection with it retrospectively exploded by the progress of science. witchcraft and sorcery, the belief in which reigned supreme for so many centuries, are known to have been nothing but the delusions of ignorant superstition. "a l'époque où les faits merveilleux qui s'y (dans les légendes) trouvent consignés étaient rapportés," asks an able french writer, "possé dait-on les lumieres suffisantes pour exercer une critique véritable et sérieuse sur des témoignages que venaient affirmer des faits en contradiction avec nos connaissances? or, on peut assurer hardiment que non. au moyen-age, l'intime conviction que la nature voit tres fréquemment ses lois interverties par la volonté divine régnait dans les esprits, en sorte que pour peu qu'un fait se présentat avec des apparences extraordinaires, on se hatait de le regarder comme un miracle, comme loeuvre directe de la divinité. aujourd'hui on cherche au contraire à tout rapporter à la loi commune; on est tellement sobre de faits miraculeux, que ceux qui paraissent tels sont ^cartes comme des fables ou tonus pour des faits ordinaires mal expliques. la foi aux miracles a disparu. en outre, au moyen-age le cercle des connaissances qu'on possédait sur la nature était fort restreint, et tout ce qui n'y rentrait pas était regardé comme surnatural. { } actuellement ce cercle s'agrandit sans cesse; et loin d'en avoir arreté définitivement la limite, on le déclare infini." in a note the writer adds: "on voit par la que le nombre des miracles doit etre en raison inverse du nombre des lois connues de la nature, et, qu'a mesure que celles-ci nous sont révélées, les faits merveilleux ou miraculeux s'évanouissent."( ) these remarks are equally applicable to the commencement of the christian era. on the one hand, we have no other testimony for the reality of miracles than that of ages in which not only the grossest superstition and credulity prevailed, but in which there was such total ignorance of natural laws that men were incapable of judging of that reality, even if they desired impartially to investigate such occurrences, which they did not; on the other hand, we have the sober testimony of science declaring such phenomena violations of the invariable laws of nature, and experience teaching us a perfectly simple and natural interpretation of the legends regarding them. are we to believe ignorance and superstition or science and unvarying experience? science has already demonstrated the delusion involved in the largest class of miracles, and has so far established the superiority of her testimony. in an early part of his discussion dr. mozley argues: "christianity is the religion of the civilized world, and l. f. alfred maury. essai sur los legendes pieuses du moyen-age, , p. f., and p. , note ( ). the same arguments are employed by the late mr. buckle. "hence it is that, supposing other things equal, the superstition of a nation must always bear an exact proportion to the extent of its physical knowledge. this may be in some degree verified by the ordinary experience of mankind. for if we compare the different classes of society, we shall find that they are superstitious in proportion as the phenomena with which they are brought in contact have or have not been explained by natural laws." hist, of civilization, , i. p. . { } it is believed upon its miraculous evidence. now, for a set of miracles to be accepted in a rude age, and to retain their authority throughout a succession of such ages, and over the ignorant and superstitious part of mankind, may be no such great result for the miracle to accomplish, because it is easy to satisfy those who do not inquire. but this is not the state of the case which we have to meet on the subject of the christian miracles. the christian being the most intelligent, the civilized portion of the world, these miracles are accepted by the christian body as a whole, by the thinking and educated as well as the uneducated part of it, and the gospel is believed upon that evidence."( ) the picture of christendom here suggested is purely imaginary. we are asked to believe that succeeding generations of thinking and educated as well as uneducated men, since the commencement of the period in which the adequate inquiry into the reality of miracles became possible, have made that adequate inquiry, and have intelligently and individually accepted miracles and believed the gospel in consequence of their attestation. the fact, however, is that christianity became the religion of europe before men either possessed the knowledge requisite to appreciate the difficulties involved in the acceptance of miracles, or minds sufficiently freed from ignorant superstition to question the reality of the supposed supernatural interference with the order of nature, and belief had become so much a matter of habit that, in this nineteenth century, the great majority of men have professed belief for no better reason than that their fathers believed before them. belief is now little more than a transmitted quality or hereditary custom. few men, even { } now, have either the knowledge or the leisure requisite to enable them to enter upon such an examination of miracles as can entitle dr. mozley to affirm that they intelligently accept miracles for themselves. we have shown, moreover, that so loose are the ideas even of the clergy upon the subject, that dignitaries of the church fail to see either the evidential purpose of miracles or the need for evidence at all, and the first intelligent step towards inquiry--doubt--has generally been stigmatized almost as a crime. so far from dr. mozley's statement being correct, it is notorious that the great mass of those who are competent to examine, and who have done so, altogether reject miracles. instead of the "thinking and educated" men of science accepting miracles, they, as a body, distinctly deny them, and hence the antagonism between science and ecclesiastical christianity, and dr. mozley surely does not require to be told how many of the profoundest critics and scholars of germany, and of all other countries in europe, who have turned their attention to biblical subjects, have long ago rejected the miraculous elements of the christian religion. such being the case we necessarily revert to the first part of dr. mozley's representation, and find with him, that it is no great result for miracles to accomplish, merely to be accepted by, and retain authority over, a succession of ignorant and superstitious ages, "because it is easy to satisfy those who do not inquire." it is necessary that we should now refer to the circumstance that all the arguments which we have hitherto considered in support of miracles, whether to explain or account for them, have proceeded upon an assumption of the reality of the alleged phenomena. { } had it been first requisite to establish the truth of facts of such an astounding nature, the necessity of accounting for them might never have arisen. it is clear, therefore, that an assumption which permits the argument to attain any such position begs almost the whole question. facts, however astounding, which, it is admitted, did actually occur, claim a latitude of explanation, which a mere narrative of those alleged facts, written by an unknown person some eighteen centuries ago, could not obtain. if, for instance, it be once established as an absolute fact that a man actually dead, and some days buried, upon whose body decomposition had already made some progress,( ) had been restored to life, the fact of his death and of his subsequent resuscitation being so absolutely proved that the possibility of deception or of mistake on the part of the witnesses was totally excluded--if such conclusive evidence be supposed possible in such a case--it is clear that an argument, as to whether such an occurrence were to be ascribed to known or unknown laws, would assume a very different character indeed from that which it would have borne if the argument merely sought to account for so astounding a phenomenon of whose actual occurrence there was no sufficient evidence. it must not be forgotten, therefore, that, as the late professor baden powell pointed out: "at the present day it is not _a miracle_, but the _narrative of a miracle_, to which any argument can refer, or to which faith is accorded."( ) the discussion of miracles, then, is not one regarding miracles actually performed within our own knowledge, but merely regarding miracles said to have been performed eighteen hundred years ago, the reality of { } which was not verified at the time by any scientific examination, and whose occurrence is merely reported in the gospels. now, although dr. mozley rightly and logically maintains that christianity requires, and should be believed only upon, its miraculous evidence, the fact is that popular christianity is not believed because of miracles, but miracles are accepted because they are related in the gospels which are supposed to contain the doctrines of christianity. the gospels have for many generations been given to the child as inspired records, and doubt of miracles has, therefore, either never arisen or has been instantly suppressed, simply because miracles are recorded in the sacred volume. it could scarcely be otherwise, for in point of fact the gospel miracles stand upon no other testimony. we are therefore in this position: we are asked to believe astounding announcements beyond the limits of human reason, which, as br. mozley admits, we could only be justified in believing upon miraculous evidence, upon the testimony of miracles which are only reported by the records which also alone convey the announcements which those miracles were intended to accredit. there is no other contemporary evidence whatever. the importance of the gospels, therefore, as the almost solitary testimony to the occurrence of miracles can scarcely be exaggerated.( ) we have already dr. farrar, winding up the antecedent discussion, says: ".... we arrive at this point--that the credibility of miracles is in each instance simply and solely a question of evidence, and consequently that our belief or rejection of the christian miracles must mainly depend on the character of the gospels in which they are recorded." the witness of history to christ, , p. . it is somewhat singular that after such a declaration he considers it unnecessary to enter into the question of the genuineness and authenticity of the gospels, deeming it sufficient for his purpose, that strauss and renan admit that some portion of these documents existed at the beginning of the second century, or earlier, in the country where the events narrated took place. { } made an anticipatory remark regarding the nature of these documents, to which we may add that they are not the work of perfectly independent historians, but of men who were engaged in disseminating the new doctrines, and in saying this we have no intention of accusing the writers of conscious deception; it is, however, necessary to state the fact in order that the value of the testimony may be fairly estimated. the narratives of miracles were written by ardent partizans, with minds inflamed by religious zeal and enthusiasm, in an age of ignorance and superstition, a considerable time after the supposed miraculous occurrences had taken place. all history shows how rapidly pious memory exaggerates and idealizes the traditions of the past, and simple actions might readily be transformed into miracles, as the narratives circulated, in a period so prone to superstition and so characterized by love of the marvellous. religious excitement and reverence for the noblest of teachers could not, under such circumstances and in such an age, have escaped this exaggeration. how few men in more enlightened times have been able soberly to appreciate, and accurately to record exciting experiences, where feeling and religious emotion have been concerned. prosaic accuracy of observation and of language, at all times rare, are the last qualities we could expect to find in the early ages of christianity. in the certain fact that disputes arose among the apostles themselves so shortly after the death of their great master, we have one proof that even amongst them there was no accurate appreciation of the teaching of jesus,( ) and the frequent instances of their misunderstanding of very simple matters, and of their want of enlightenment, which occur throughout the { } gospels are certainly not calculated to inspire much confidence in their intelligence and accuracy of observation. now it is apparent that the evidence for miracles requires to embrace two distinct points: the reality of the alleged facts, and the accuracy of the inference that the phenomena were produced by supernatural agency. the task would even then remain of demonstrating the particular supernatural being by whom the miracles were performed, which is admitted to be impossible. we have hitherto chiefly confined ourselves to a consideration of the antecedent credibility of such events, and of the fitness of those who are supposed to have witnessed them to draw accurate inferences from the alleged phenomena. those who have formed any adequate conception of the amount of testimony which would be requisite in order to establish the reality of occurrences in violation of an order of nature, which is based upon universal and invariable experience, must recognize that, even if the earliest asserted origin of our four gospels could be established upon the most irrefragable grounds, the testimony of the writers--men of like ignorance with their contemporaries, men of like passions with ourselves--would be utterly incompetentto prove the reality of miracles. we have already sufficiently discussed this point, more especially in connection with hume's argument, and need not here resume it every consideration, historical and philosophical, has hitherto discredited the whole theory of miracles, and further inquiry might be abandoned as unnecessary. in order, however, to render our conclusion complete, it remains for us to see whether, as affirmed, there be any special evidence regarding the alleged facts entitling the gospel miracles to exceptional attention. if, instead of being { } clear, direct, the undoubted testimony of known eyewitnesses free from superstition, and capable, through adequate knowledge, rightly to estimate the alleged phenomena, we find that the actual accounts have none of these qualifications, the final decision with regard to miracles and the reality of divine revelation will be easy and conclusive. { } part ii. the synoptic gospels introduction. before commencing our examination of the evidence as to the date, authorship, and character of the gospels, it may be well to make a few preliminary remarks, and clearly state certain canons of criticism. we shall make no attempt to establish any theory as to the date at which any of the gospels was actually written, but simply examine all the testimony which is extant with the view of ascertaining what is known of these works and their authors, certainly and distinctly, as distinguished from what is merely conjectured or inferred. modern opinion, in an inquiry like ours, must not be mistaken for ancient evidence. we propose, therefore, as exhaustively as possible to search all the writings of the early church for information regarding the gospels, and to examine even the alleged indications of their use. it is very important, however, that the silence of early writers should receive as much attention as any supposed allusions to the gospels. when such writers, quoting largely from the old testament and other sources, deal { } with subjects which would naturally be assisted by reference to our gospels, and still more so by quoting such works as authoritative,--and yet we find that not only they do not show any knowledge of those gospels, but actually quote passages from unknown sources, or sayings of jesus derived from tradition,--the inference must be that our gospels were either unknown, or not recognized as works of authority at the time. it is still more important that we should constantly bear in mind, that a great number of gospels existed in the early church which are no longer extant, and of most of which even the names are lost. we need not here do more than refer, in corroboration of this fact, to the preliminary statement of the author of the third gospel: "forasmuch as many [--greek--] took in hand to set forth in order a declaration of the things which have been accomplished among us," &c.( ) it is therefore evident that before our third synoptic was written many similar works were already in circulation. looking at the close similarity of large portions of the three synoptics, it is almost certain that many of the writings here mentioned bore a close analogy to each other and to our gospels, and this is known to have been the case, for instance, amongst the various forms of the "gospel according to the hebrews." when, therefore, in early writings, we meet with quotations closely resembling, or we may add, even identical with passages which are found in our gospels, the source of which, however, is not mentioned, nor is any author's name indicated, the similarity or even identity cannot by any means be admitted as proof that the quotation is necessarily from our gospels, and not from some other similar work { } now no longer extant,( ) and more especially not when, in the same writings, there are other quotations from sources different from our gospels. whether regarded as historical records or as writings embodying the mere tradition of the early christians, our gospels cannot be recognized as the exclusive depositaries of the genuine sayings and doings of jesus. so far from the common possession by many works, in early times, of sayings of jesus in closely similar form being either strange or improbable, the really remarkable phenomenon is that such material variation in the report of the more important historical teaching should exist amongst them. but whilst similarity to our gospels in passages quoted by early writers from unnamed sources cannot prove the use of our gospels, variation from them would suggest or prove a different origin, and at least it is obvious that anonymous quotations which do not agree with our gospels cannot in any case necessarily indicate their existence. we shall in the course of the following pages more fully illustrate this, but such a statement is requisite at the very outset from the too general practice of referring every quotation of historical sayings of jesus exclusively to our gospels, as though they were the only sources of such matter which had ever existed. it is unnecessary to add that, in proportion as we remove from apostolic times without positive evidence of the existence and authenticity of our gospels, so does the value of their testimony dwindle away. indeed, requiring as we do clear, direct, and irrefragable evidence of the integrity, authenticity, and historical character of these gospels, doubt or obscurity on these points must inevitably be fatal to them as sufficient testimony,--if { } they could, under any circumstances be considered sufficient testimony,--for miracles and a direct divine revelation like ecclesiastical christianity. we propose to examine first, the evidence for the three synoptics and, then, separately, the testimony regarding the fourth gospel. { } chapter i. clement of rome--the epistle of barnabas--the pastor of hermas. the first work which presents itself for examination is the so-called first epistle of clement to the corinthians, which, together with a second epistle to the same community, likewise attributed to clement, is preserved to us in the codex alexandrinus,( ) a ms. assigned by the most competent judges to the second half of the fifth, or beginning of the sixth century, in which these epistles follow the books of the new testament. the second epistle, which is evidently not epistolary, but the fragment of a homily,( ) although it thus shares with the first the honour of a canonical position in one of the most ancient codices of the new testament, is not mentioned at all by the earlier fathers who refer to the first;( ) { } and eusebius,( ) who is the first writer who mentions it, expresses doubt regarding it, while jerome( ) and photius( ) state that it was rejected by the ancients. it is now universally regarded as spurious,( ) and dated about the end of the second century,( ) or later.( ) we shall hereafter see that many other pseudographs were circulated in the name of clement, to which, however, we need not further allude at present. there has been much controversy as to the identity of the clement to whom the first epistle is attributed. in early days he was supposed to be the clement { } mentioned in the epistle to the philippians (iv. )( ), but this is now generally doubted or abandoned,( ) and the authenticity of the epistle has, indeed, been called in question both by earlier and later critics.( ) it is unnecessary to detail the various traditions regarding the supposed writer, but we must point out that the epistle itself makes no mention of the author's name. it merely purports to be addressed by "the church of god which sojourns at rome to the church of god sojourning at corinth;" but in the codex alexandrinus, the title of "the first epistle of clement to the corinthians," is added at the end. clement of alexandria calls the supposed writer the "apostle clement:"( ) origen reports that many also ascribed to him the authorship of the epistle to the hebrews;( ) and photius mentions that he was likewise said to be the writer of the acts of the apostles.( ) we know that until a comparatively late date this epistle was quoted as holy scripture,( ) and was publicly read in the churches at the sunday meetings of christians.( ) it has, as we have seen, a place amongst { } the canonical books of the new testament in the codex alexandrinus, but it did not long retain that position in the canon, for although in the "apostolic canons"( ) of the sixth or seventh century both epistles appear, yet in the stichometry of nicephorus, a work of the ninth century, derived, however, as credner( ) has demonstrated, from a syrian catalogue of the fifth century, both epistles are classed among the apocrypha.( ) great uncertainty prevails as to the date at which the epistle was written. reference is supposed to be made to it by the so-called epistle of polycarp,( ) but, owing to the probable inauthenticity of that work itself, no weight can be attached to this circumstance. the first certain reference to it is by hegesippus, in the second half of the second century, mentioned by eusebius.( ) dionysius of corinth, in a letter ascribed to him addressed to soter, bishop of rome, is the first who distinctly mentions the name of clement as the author of the epistle.( ) there is some difference of opinion as to the order of his succession to the bishopric of rome. irenæus( ) and eusebius( ) say that he followed anacletus, and the latter adds the date of the twelfth year of the reign of domitian (a.d. - ), and that he died nine years after, in the third year of trajan's reign (a.d. ).( ) internal evidence( ) shows that the epistle was written after some persecution { } of the roman church, and the selection lies between the persecution under nero, which would suggest the date a.d. - , or that under domitian, which would assign the letter to the end of the first century, or to the beginning of the second. those who adhere to the view that the clement mentioned in the epistle to the philippians is the author, maintain that the epistle was written under nero.( ) one of their principal arguments for this conclusion is a remark occurring in chapter xli.: "not everywhere, brethren, are the daily sacrifices offered up, or the votive offerings, or the sin-offerings and the trespass-offerings, but only in jerusalem. but even there they are not offered in every place, but only at the altar before the sanctuary, examination of the sacrifice offered being first made by the high priest and the ministers already mentioned."( ) from this it is concluded that the epistle was written before the destruction of the temple. it has, however, been shown that josephus,( ) the author of the "epistle to diognetus" (c. ), and others, long after the jewish worship of the temple was at an end, continually speak in the present tense of the temple worship in jerusalem; and it is evident, as cotelier long ago remarked, that this may be done with propriety even in the present { } day. the argument is therefore recognized to be without value.(l) tischendorf, who systematically adopts the earliest possible or impossible dates for all the writings of the first two centuries, decides, without stating his reasons, that the grounds for the earlier date, about a.d. , as well as for the episcopate of clement from a.d. - ( ) are conclusive; but he betrays his more correct impression by classing clement, in his index, along with ignatius and polycarp, as representatives of the period: "first and second quarters of the second century:"( ) and in the prolegomena to his new testament he dates the episcopate of clement "ab anno usque ."( ) the earlier episcopate assigned to him by hefele upon most insufficient grounds is contradicted by the direct statements of irenæus, eusebius, jerome, and others who give the earliest lists of roman bishops,( ) as wrell as by the internal evidence of the epistle itself. in chapter xliv. the writer speaks of those appointed by the apostles to the oversight of the church, "or afterwards by other notable men, the whole church consenting.... who have for a long time been commended by all, &c.,"( ) which indicates successions of bishops since apostolic days. in another { } place (chap, xlvii.) he refers the corinthians to the epistle addressed to them by paul "in the beginning of the gospel" [--greek--], and speaks of "the most stedfast and ancient church of the corinthians" [--greek--], which would be absurd in an epistle written about a.d. . moreover, an advanced episcopal form of church government is indicated throughout the letter, which is quite inconsistent with such a date. the great mass of critics, therefore, have decided against the earlier date of the episcopate of clement, and assign the composition of the epistle to the end of the first century (a.d. - ).( ) others, however, date it still later. there is no doubt that the great number of epistles and { } other writings falsely circulated in the name of clement may well excite suspicion as to the authenticity of this epistle also, which is far from unsupported by internal proofs. of these, however, we shall only mention one. we have already incidentally remarked that the writer mentions the epistle of paul to the corinthians, the only instance in which any new testament writing is referred to by name; but along with the epistle of the "blessed paul" [--greek--] the author also speaks of the "blessed judith" [--greek--],( ) and this leads to the inquiry: when was the book of judith written? hitzig, volkmar, and others contend that it must be dated a.d. - ,( ) and if this be admitted, it follows of course that an epistle which already shows acquaintance with the book of judith cannot have been written before a.d. - at the earliest, which many, for this and other reasons, affirm to be the case with the epistle of pseudo-clement.( ) whatever date be assigned to it, however, it is probable that the epistle is interpolated, although it must be added that this is not the view of the majority of critics. it is important to ascertain whether or not this ancient christian epistle affords any evidence of the existence of { } our synoptic gospels at the time when it was written. tischendorf, who is ever ready to claim the slightest resemblance in language as a reference to new testament writings, states that although this epistle is rich in quotations from the old testament, and that clement here and there also makes use of passages from pauline epistles, he nowhere refers to the gospels.( ) this is perfectly true, but several passages occur in this epistle which are either quotations from evangelical works different from ours, or derived from tradition,( ) and in either case they have a very important bearing upon our inquiry. the first of these passages occurs in ch. xiii., and for greater facility of comparison, we shall at once place it both in the greek and in translation, in juxta-position with the nearest parallel readings in our synoptic gospels; and, as far as may be, we shall in the english version indicate differences existing in the original texts. the passage is introduced thus: "especially remembering the words of the lord jesus, which he spake teaching gentleness and long-suffering. for thus he said:"( )-- { } of course it is understood that, although for convenience { } of comparison we have broken up this quotation into these phrases, it is quite continuous in the epistle. it must be evident to any one who carefully examines the parallel passages, that "the words of the lord jesus" in the epistle cannot have been derived from our gospels. not only is there no similar consecutive discourse in them, but the scattered phrases which are pointed out as presenting superficial similarity with the quotation are markedly different both in thought and language. in it, as in the "beatitudes" of the "sermon on the mount" in the first gospel, the construction is peculiar and continuous: "do this.... in order that [--greek--]"; or, "as [--greek--]... so [--greek--]" the theor of a combination of passages from memory, which is usually advanced to explain such quotations, cannot serve here, for thoughts and expressions occur in the passage in the epistle which have no parallel at all in our gospels, and such dismembered phrases as can be collected from our first and third synoptics, for comparison with it, follow the course of the quotation in the ensuing order: matt. v. , vi. , part of vii. , phrase without parallel, first part of vii. , phrase without parallel, last part of vii. ; or, luke vi. , last phrase of vi. , vi. , first phrase of vi. , first phrase of vi. , phrase without parallel, last phrase of vi. . the only question with regard to this passage, therefore, is whether the writer quotes from an unknown written source or from tradition. he certainly merely professes to repeat "words of the lord jesus," and does not definitely indicate a written record, but it is much more probable, from the context, that he quotes from a gospel now no longer extant than that he derives this teaching from oral tradition. he introduces the quotation { } not only with a remark implying a well-known record: "remembering the words of the lord jesus which he spake, teaching, &c." but he reiterates: "for thus he said," in a way suggesting careful and precise quotation of the very words; and he adds at the end: "by this injunction and by these instructions let us establish ourselves, that we may walk in obedience to his holy words, thinking humbly of ourselves."( ) seems improbable that the writer would so markedly have indicated a precise quotation of words of jesus, and would so emphatically have commended them as the rule of life to the corinthians, had these precepts been mere floating tradition, until then unstamped with written permanence. the phrase: "as ye show kindness [--greek--] which is nowhere found in our gospels, recalls an expression quoted by justin martyr apparently from a gospel different from ours, and frequently repeated by him in the same form: "be ye kind and merciful [--greek--] father also is kind [--greek--] and merciful."( ) in the very next chapter of the epistle a similar reference again occurs: "let us be kind to each other [--greek--] according to the mercy and benignity of our creator."( ) without, however, going more minutely into this question, it is certain from its essential variations in language, thought and order, that the passage in the epistle cannot be claimed as a compilation from our gospels; and we shall presently see that some of the expressions in it which are foreign to our gospels are elsewhere quoted by other fathers, and there is reason to believe that these "words of the lord jesus" were not derived from tradition but { } from a written source different from our gospels.( ) when the great difference which exists between the parallel passages in the first and third synoptics, and still more between these and the second, is considered, it is easy to understand that other gospels may have contained a version differing as much from them as they do from each other. we likewise subjoin the next passage to which we must refer, with the nearest parallels in our synoptics. we may explain that the writer of the epistle is rebuking the corinthians for strifes and divisions amongst them, and for forgetting that they "are members one of another," and he continues: "remember the words of our lord jesus; for he said:"( ) { } this quotation is clearly not from our gospels, but must be assigned to a different written source. the writer would scarcely refer the corinthians to such words of jesus if they were merely traditional. it is neither a combination of texts, nor a quotation from memory. the language throughout is markedly different from any passage in the synoptics, and to present even a superficial parallel, it is necessary to take a fragment of the discourse of jesus at the last supper regarding the traitor who should deliver him up (matth. xxvi. ), and join it to a fragment of his remarks in connection with the little child whom he set in the midst (xviii. ). the parallel passage in luke has not { } the opening words of the passage in the epistle at all, and the portion which it contains (xvii. ), is separated from the context in which it stands in the first gospel, and which explains its meaning. if we contrast the parallel passages in the three synoptics, their differences of context are very suggestive, and without referring to their numerous and important variations in detail, the confusion amongst them is evidence of very varying tradition.( ) this alone would make the existence of another form like that quoted in the epistle before us more than probable. tischendorf, in a note to his statement that clement nowhere refers to the gospels, quotes the passage we are now considering, the only one to which he alludes, and says: "these words are expressly cited as 'words of jesus our lord;' but they denote much more oral apostolic tradition than a use of the parallel passages in matthew (xxvi. , xviii. ) and luke (xvii. )."( ) it is now, of course, impossible to determine finally whether the passage was actually derived from tradition or from a written source different from our gospels, but in either case the fact is, that the epistle not only does not afford the slightest evidence for the existence of any of our gospels, but from only making use of tradition or an apocryphal work as the source of information regarding words of jesus, it is decidedly opposed to the pretensions made on behalf of the synoptics. { } before passing on, we may, in the briefest way possible, refer to one or two other passages, with the view of further illustrating the character of the quotations in this epistle. there are many passages cited which are not found in the old testament, and others which have no parallels in the new. at the beginning of the very chapter in which the words which we have just been considering occur, there is the following quotation: "it-is written: cleave to the holy, for they who cleave to them shall be made holy,"( ) the source of which is unknown. in a previous chapter the writer says: "and our apostles knew, through our lord jesus christ, that there will be contention regarding the name, [--greek--], office, dignity?) of the episcopate."( ) what was the writers authority for this statement? we find justin martyr quoting, as an express prediction of jesus: "there shall be schisms and heresies,"( ) which is not contained in our gospels, but evidently derived from an uncanonical source,( ) a fact rendered more apparent by the occurrence of a similar passage in the clementine homilies, still more closely bearing upon our epistle: "for there shall be, as the lord said, false apostles, false prophets, heresies, desires for supremacy."( ) hegesippus also speaks in a similar way: "from these came the { } false christs, false prophets, false apostles who divided the unity of the church."(l) as hegesippus, and in all probability justin martyr, and the author of the clementines made use of the gospel according to the hebrews, or to peter, it is most probable that these gospels contained passages to which the words of the epistle may refer.( ) it may be well to point out that the author also cites a passage from the fourth book of ezra, ii. :( ) "and i shall remember the good day, and i shall raise you from your tombs."( ) ezra reads: "et resuscitabo mor-tuos de locis suis et de monumentis educam illos," &c. the first part of the quotation in the epistle, of which we have only given the latter clause above, is taken from isaiah xxvi. , but there can be no doubt that the above is from this apocryphal book,( ) which, as we shall see, was much used in the early church. . we now turn to the so-called "epistle of barnabas," another interesting relic of the early church, many points in whose history have considerable analogy with that of the epistle of pseudo-clement. the letter itself bears no author's name, is not dated from any place, and is not addressed to any special community. towards the { } end of the second century, however, tradition began to ascribe it to barnabas the companion of paul.( ) the first writer who mentions it is clement of alexandria, who calls its author several times the "apostle barnabas;"( ) and eusebius says that he gave an account of it in one of his works now no longer extant.( ) origen also refers to it, calling it a "catholic epistle," and quoting it as scripture.( ) we have already seen in the case of the epistles ascribed to clement of rome, and, as we proceed, we shall become only too familiar with the fact, the singular facility with which, in the total absence of critical discrimination, spurious writings were ascribed by the fathers to apostles and their followers. in many cases such writings were deliberately inscribed with names well known in the church, but both in the case of the two epistles to the corinthians, and the letter we are now considering, no such pious fraud was attempted, nor was it necessary. credulous piety, which attributed writings to every apostle, and even to jesus himself, soon found authors for each anonymous work of an edifying character. to barnabas, the friend of paul, not only this epistle was referred, but he was also reported by tertullian and others to be the author of the epistle to the hebrews;( ) and an apocryphal "gospel according to barnabas," said to have had close affinity with our { } first synoptic, is condemned along with many others in the decretal of gelasius.( ) eusebius, however, classes the so-called "epistle of barnabas" amongst the spurious books [--greek--],( ) and elsewhere also speaks of it as uncanonical.( ) jerome mentions it as read amongst apocryphal writings.( ) had the epistle been seriously regarded as a work of the "apostle" barnabas, it could scarcely have failed to attain canonical rank. that it was highly valued by the early church is shown by the fact that it stands, along with the pastor of hermas, after the canonical books of the new testament in the codex sinaiticus, which is probably the most ancient ms. of them now known. in the earlier days of criticism, some writers, without much question, adopted the traditional view as to the authorship of the epistle,( ) but the great mass of critics are now agreed in asserting that the composition, which itself is perfectly anonymous, cannot be attributed to barnabas the friend and fellow-worker of paul.( ) those who maintain the former opinion date { } the epistle about a.d. -- , or even earlier, but this is scarcely the view of any living critic. there are many indications in the epistle which render such a date impossible, but we do not propose to go into the argument minutely, for it is generally admitted that, whilst there is a clear limit further back than which the epistle cannot be set,( ) there is little or no certainty how far into the second century its composition may not reasonably be advanced. critics are divided upon the point; a few are disposed to date the epistle about the end of the first or beginning of the second century ( } while a still greater number assign it to the reign of hadrian (a.d. { } -- );( ) and others, not without reason, consider that it exhibits marks of a still later period.( ) it is probable that it is more or less interpolated.( ) until the discovery of the sinaitic ms., a portion of the "epistle of barnabas" was only known through an ancient latin version, the first four and a half chapters of the greek having been lost. the greek text, however, is now complete, although often very corrupt. the author quotes largely from the old testament, and also from apocryphal works.( ) he nowhere mentions any book or writer of the new testament, and with one asserted exception, which we shall presently examine, he quotes no passage agreeing with our gospels. we shall refer to these, commencing at once with the most important. in the ancient latin translation of the epistle, the only form, as we have just said, in which until the discovery { } of the codex sinaiticus the first four and a half chapters were extant, the following passage occurs: "adtendamus ergo, ne forte, sicut scriptum est, multi vocati pauci electi inveniamur."(l) "let us, therefore, beware lest we should be found, as it is written: many are called, few are chosen." these words are found in our first gospel (xxii. ), and as the formula by which they are here introduced--"it is written," is generally understood to indicate a quotation from holy scripture, it was and is argued by some that here we have a passage from one of our gospels quoted in a manner which shows that, at the time the epistle of barnabas was written, the "gospel according to matthew was already considered holy scripture."( ) whilst this portion of the text existed only in the latin version, it was argued that the "sicut scriptum est," at least, must be an interpolation, and in any case that it could not be deliberately applied, at that date, to a passage in any writings of the new testament. on the discovery of the sinaitic ms., however, the words were found in the greek text in that codex: [--greek--]. the question, therefore, is so far modified that, however much we may suspect the greek text of interpolation, it must be accepted as the basis of discussion that this passage, whatever its value, exists in the oldest, and indeed only (and this point must not be forgotten) complete ms. of the greek epistle. now with regard to the value of the expression "it is written," it may be remarked that in no case could its use in the epistle of barnabas indicate more than individual opinion, and it could not, for reasons to be presently given, be considered to represent the decision of the church. in the very same chapter in which the formula is used in connection with the passage we are considering, it is also employed to introduce a quotation from the book of enoch,( ) [--greek--], and elsewhere (c. xii.) he quotes from another apocryphal book( ) as one of the prophets.( )" again, he refers to the cross of christ in another prophet saying: 'and when shall these things come to pass? and the lord saith: when, &c. ... [--greek--], .......[--greek--]." he also quotes (ch. vi.) the apocryphal "book of wisdom" as holy scripture, and in like manner several other unknown works. when it is remembered that the epistle of clement to the corinthians, the pastor of hennas, the epistle of barnabas itself, and many other apocryphal works have been quoted by the fathers as holy scripture, the distinctive value of such an expression may be understood. with this passing remark, however, we proceed to say that this supposed quotation from matthew as holy scripture, by proving too much, destroys its own value as evidence. the generality of competent and { } impartial critics are agreed, that it is impossible to entertain the idea that one of our gospels could have held the rank of holy scripture at the date of this epistle, seeing that, for more than half a century after, the sharpest line was drawn between the writings of the old testament and of the new, and the former alone quoted as, or accorded the consideration of, holy scripture. if this were actually a quotation from our first gospel, already in the position of holy scripture, it would indeed be astonishing that the epistle, putting out of the question other christian writings for half a century after it, teeming as it does with extracts from the old testament, and from known, and unknown, apocryphal works, should thus limit its use of the gospel to a few words, totally neglecting the rich store which it contains, and quoting, on the other hand, sayings of jesus not recorded at all in any of our synoptics. it is most improbable that, if the author of the "epistle of barnabas" was acquainted with any one of our gospels, and considered it an inspired and canonical work, he could have neglected it in such a manner. the peculiarity of the quotation which he is supposed to make, which we shall presently point out, renders such limitation to it doubly singular upon any such hypothesis. the unreasonable nature of the assertion, however, will become more apparent as we proceed with our examination, and perceive that none of the early writers quote our gospels, { } if they knew them at all, but, on the other hand, make use of other works, and that the inference that matthew was considered holy scripture, therefore, rests solely upon this quotation of half a dozen words. the application of such a formula to a supposed quotation from one of our gospels, in so isolated an instance, led to the belief that, even if the passage were taken from our first synoptic, the author of the epistle in quoting it laboured under the impression that it was derived from some prophetical book.( ) we daily see how difficult it is to trace the source even of the most familiar quotations. instances of such confusion of memory are frequent in the writings of the fathers, and many can be pointed out in the new testament itself. for instance, in matt, xxvii. f. the passage from zechariah xi. - is attributed to jeremiah; in mark i. , a quotation from malachi iii. is ascribed to isaiah. in corinthians ii. , a passage is quoted as holy scripture which is not found in the old testament at all, but which is taken, as origen and jerome state, from an apocryphal work, "the revelation of elias,"( ) and the passage is similarly quoted by the so-called epistle of clement to the corinthians (xxxiv). then in what prophet did the author of the first gospel find the words (xiil ): "that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet,( ) saying: i will open my mouth in parables; i { } will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world "? orelli,( ) afterwards followed by many others,( ) suggested that the quotation was probably intended for one in iv ezra viii. : "nam multi creati sunt, pauci autem salvabuntur."( ) "for many are created, but few shall be saved." bretsclineider proposed as an emendation of the passage in ezra the substitution of "_vocati_" for "_creati_" but, however plausible, his argument did not meet with much favour.( ) along with this passage was also suggested a similar expression in iv ezra ix. : "plures sunt qui pereunt, quam qui salvabuntur." "there are more who perish than who shall be saved."( ) the greek of the three passages may read as follows:-- [--greek--] [--greek--] [--greek--] there can be no doubt that the sense of the reading in iv ezra is exactly that of the epistle, but the language is somewhat different. we must not forget, however, that the original greek of iv ezra( ) is lost, and that we are wholly dependent on the versions and mss. extant, regarding whose numerous variations and great { } corruption there are no differences of opinion. orelli's theory, moreover, is supported by the fact that the epistle, elsewhere, (c. xii) quotes from iv ezra (iv. , v. ). on examining the passage as it occurs in our first synoptic, we are at the very outset struck by the singular fact, that this short saying appears twice in that gospel with a different context, and in each case without any propriety of application to what precedes it, whilst it is not found at all in either of the other two synoptics. the first time we meet with it is at the close of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard.( ) the householder engages the labourers at different hours of the day, and pays those who had worked but one hour the same wages as those who had borne the burden and heat of the day, and the reflection at the close is, xx. : "thus the last shall be first and the first last; for many are called but few chosen." it is perfectly evident that neither of these sayings, but especially not that with which we are concerned, has any connection with the parable at all. there is no question of many or few, or of selection or rejection; all the labourers are engaged and paid alike. if there be a moral at all to the parable, it is the justification of the master: "is it not lawful for me to do what i will with mine own?" it is impossible to imagine a saying more irrelevant to its context than "many are called but few chosen," in such a place. the passage occurs again (xxii. ) in connection with the parable of the king who made a marriage for his son. the guests who are at first invited refuse to come, and are destroyed by the king's armies; but the wedding is nevertheless "furnished { } with guests" by gathering together as many as are found in the highways. a new episode commences when the king comes in to see the guests (v. ). he observes a man there who has not on a wedding garment, and he desires the servants to (v. ) "bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness without," where "there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth;"( ) and then comes our passage (v. ): "for many are called but few chosen." now, whether applied to the first or to the latter part of the parable, the saying is irrelevant. the guests first called were in fact chosen as much as the last, but themselves refused to come, and of all those who, being "called" from the highways and byways, ultimately furnished the wedding with guests in their stead, only one was rejected. it is clear that the facts here distinctly contradict the moral that "few are chosen." in both places the saying is, as it were, "dragged in by the hair." on examination, however, we find that the oldest mss. of the new testament omit the sentence from matthew xx. . it is neither found in the sinaitic nor vatican codices, and whilst it has not the support of the codex alexandrinus, which is defective at the part, nor of the dublin rescript (z), which omits it, many other mss. are also without it. the total irrelevancy of the saying to its context, its omission by the oldest authorities from matth. xx. , where it appears in later mss., and its total absence from both of the other gospels, must at once strike every one as peculiar, and as very unfortunate, to say this is not the place to criticize the expectation of finding a wedding garment on a guest hurried in from highways and byways, or the punishment inflicted for such an offence, as questions affecting the character of the parable. { } the least of it, for those who make extreme assertions with regard to its supposed quotation by the epistle of barnabas. weizsacker, with great probability, suggests that in this passage we have merely a well-known proverb,( ) which the author of the first gospel has introduced into his work from some uncanonical or other source, and placed in the mouth of jesus.( ) certainly under the circumstances it can scarcely be maintained in its present context as a historical saying of jesus. ewald, who naturally omits it from matthew xx. , ascribes the parable xx. -- as well as that xxii. -- , in which it stands, originally to the spruchsammlung( ) or collection of discourses, out of which, with intermediate works, he considers that our first gospel was composed.( ) however this may be, there is, it seems to us, good reason for believing that it was not originally a part of these parables, and that it is not in that sense historical; and there is, therefore, no ground for asserting that it may not have been derived by the author of the gospel from some older work, from which also it may have come into the "epistle of barnabas."( ) { } there is, however, another passage which deserves to be mentioned. the epistle has the following quotation: "again, i will show thee how, in regard to us, the lord saith, he made a new creation in the last times. the lord saith: behold i make the first as the last."(l) even tischendorf does not pretend that this is a quotation of matth. xx. ,( ) "thus the last shall be first and the first last," [--greek--] the sense of which is quite different. the application of the saying in this place in the first, and indeed in the other, synoptic gospels is evidently quite false, and depends merely on the ring of words and not of ideas. in xix. it is quoted a second time, quite irrelevantly, with some variation: "but many first shall be last and last first" [--greek--]. now it will be remembered that at xx. it occurs in several mss. in connection with "many are called but few are chosen," although the oldest codices omit the latter passage, and most critics consider it interpolated. the separate quotation of these two passages by the author of the epistle, with so marked a variation in the second, renders it most probable that he found both in the source from which he quotes. we have, however, more than sufficiently discussed this passage. the author of the epistle does not indicate any source from which he makes his quotation; and the mere existence in the first synoptic of a proverbial saying { } like this does not in the least involve the conclusion that it is necessarily the writing from which the quotation was derived, more especially as apocryphal works are repeatedly cited in the epistle. if it be maintained that the saying is really historical, it is obvious that the prescriptive right of our synoptic is at once excluded, and it may have been the common property of a score of evangelical works. there can be no doubt that many scriptural texts have crept into early christian writings which originally had no place there; and where attendant circumstances are suspicious, it is always well to remember the fact. an instance of the interpolation of which we speak is found in the "epistle of barnabas." in one place the phrase: "give to every one that asketh of thee" [--greek--]( ) occurs, not as a quotation, but merely woven into the greek text as it existed before the discovery of the sinaitic ms. this phrase is the same as the precept in luke vi. , although it was argued by some that, as no other trace of the third gospel existed in the epistle, it was more probably an alteration of the text of matth. v. . omitting the phrase from the passage in the epistle, the text read as follows: "thou shalt not hesitate to give, neither shalt thou murmur when thou givest... so shalt thou know who is the good recompenser of the reward." the supposed quotation, inserted where we have left a blank, really interrupted the sense and repeated the previous injunction. the oldest ms., the "codex sinaiticus," omits the quotation, and so ends the question, but it is afterwards inserted by another hand. some pious scribe, in fact, seeing the relation of the passage to the gospel, had added the { } words in the margin as a gloss, and they afterwards found their way into the text in this manner very many similar glosses have crept into texts which they were originally intended to illustrate. tischendorf, who does not allude to this, lays much stress upon the following passage: "but when he selected his own apostles, who should preach his gospel, who were sinners above all sin, in order that he might show that he came not to call the righteous but sinners, then he manifested himself to be the son of god."( ) we may remark that, in the common greek text, the words "to repentance" were inserted after "sinners," but they are not found in the sinaitic ms. in like manner many codices insert them in matth, ix. and mark ii. , but they are not found in some of the oldest mss., and are generally rejected. tischendorf considers them a later addition both to the text of the gospel and of the epistle.( ) but this very fact is suggestive. it is clear that a supposed quotation has been deliberately adjusted to what was considered to be the text of the gospel. why should the whole phrase not be equally an interpolation? we shall presently see that there is reason to think that it is so. alhough there is no quotation in the passage, who, asks tischendorf,( ) could mistake the words as they stand in matthew, ix. , "for i came not to call the righteous but sinners"? now this passage is referred to by origen in his work against celsus, in a way which indicates that the supposed quotation did not exist in his copy; origen says: "and as celsus has called { } the apostles of jesus infamous men, saying that they were tax-gatherers and worthless sailors, we have to remark on this, that, &c.... now in the catholic epistle of barnabas from which, perhaps, celsus derived the statement that the apostles were infamous and wicked men, it is written that 'jesus selected his own apostles who were sinners above all sin,"( )--and then he goes on to quote the expression of peter to jesus (luke v. ), and then i timothy, l , but he nowhere refers to the supposed quotation in the epistle. now, if we read the passage without the quotation, we have: "but when he selected his own apostles who should preach his gospel, who were sinners above all sin.... then he manifested himself to be the son of god." here a pious scribe very probably added in the margin the gloss: "in order that he might show that he came not to call the righteous but sinners," to explain the passage, and as in the case of the phrase: "give to every one that asketh of thee," the gloss became subsequently incorporated with the text. the epistle, however, goes on to give the only explanation which the author intended, and which clashes with that of the scribe. "for if he had not come in the flesh, how could men have been saved by beholding him? seeing that looking on the sun that shall cease to be, the work of his hands, they have not even power to endure his rays. accordingly, the son of man came in the flesh for this, that he might bring to a head the number of their sins who had persecuted to death his prophets."( ) the argument of origen bears out this view, for he does not at all take the explanation of { } the gloss as to why jesus chose his disciples from such a class, but he reasons: "what is there strange, therefore, that jesus being minded to manifest to the race of men his power to heal souls, should have selected infamous and wicked men, and should have elevated them so far, that they became a pattern of the purest virtue to those who were brought by their persuasion to the gospel of christ."( ) the argument, both of the author of the epistle and of origen, is different from that suggested by the phrase under examination, and we consider it a mere gloss introduced into the text; which, as the [--greek--] shows, has, in the estimation of tischendorf himself, been deliberately altered. even if it originally formed part of the text, however, it would be wrong to affirm that it affords proof of the use or existence of the first gospel. the words of jesus in matt. ix. -- , evidently belong to the oldest tradition of the gospel, and, in fact, ewald ascribes them, apart from the remainder of the chapter, originally to the spruchsammlung, from which, with two intermediate books, he considers that our present matthew was composed.( } nothing can be more certain than that such sayings, if they be admitted to be historical at all, must have existed in many other works, and the mere fact of their happening to be also in one of the gospels which has survived, cannot prove its use, or even { } its existence at the time the epistle of barnabas was written, more especially as the phrase does not occur as a quotation, and there is no indication of the source from which it was derived. teschendorf, however, finds a further analogy between the epistle and the gospel of matthew, in ch. xii. "since, therefore, in the future, they were to say that christ is the son of david, fearing and perceiving clearly the error of the wicked, david himself prophesies--"the lord said unto my lord, sit at my right hand until i make thine enemies thy footstool."( ) teschendorf upon this inquires: "could barnabas so write without the supposition, that his readers had matthew, xxii. . ff, before them, and does not such a supposition likewise infer the actual authority of matthew's gospel?"( ) such rapid argument and extreme conclusions are startling indeed, but, in his haste, our critic has forgotten to state the whole case. the author of the epistle has been elaborately showing that the cross of christ is repeatedly typified in the old testament, and at the commencement of the chapter, after quoting the passage from iv ezra, iv. , v. , he points to the case of moses, to whose heart "the spirit speaks that he should make a form of the cross," by stretching forth his arms in supplication, and so long as he did so israel prevailed over their enemies; and again he typified the cross, when he set up the brazen serpent upon which the people might look and be healed. then that which moses, as a prophet, said to joshua (jesus) the son of nave, when he gave him that { } name, was solely for the purpose that all the people might hear that the father would reveal all things regarding his son to the son of nave. this name being given to him when he was sent to spy out the land, moses said: "take a book in thy hands, and write what the lord saith, that the son of god will in the last days cut off by the roots all the house of amalek." this, of course, is a falsification of the passage, exodus, xvii. , for the purpose of making it declare jesus to be the "son of god." then proceeding in the same strain, he says: "behold again jesus is not the son of man, but the son of god, manifested in the type and in the flesh. since, therefore, in the future, they were to say that christ is the son of david," (and here follows the passage we are discussing) "fearing and perceiving clearly the error of the wicked, david himself prophesied: 'the lord said unto my lord, sit at my right hand until i make thine enemies thy footstool.' and again, thus speaks isaiah: 'the lord said to christ my lord, whose right hand i have held, that the nations may obey him, and i will break in pieces the strength of kings.' behold how david calleth him lord, and the son of god." and here ends the chapter and the subject. now it is quite clear that the passage occurs, not as a reference to any such dilemma as that in matthew, xxii. ff., but simply as one of many passages which, at the commencement of our era, were considered prophetic declarations of the divinity of christ, in opposition to the expectation of the jews that the messiah was to be the son of david,( ) and, as we have seen, in order to prove his point the author alters the text. to argue that such a passage of a psalm, quoted in such a manner in this { } epistle, proves the use of our first synoptic, is in the highest degree arbitrary. we have already pointed out that the author quotes apocryphal works as holy scripture; and we may now add that he likewise cites words of jesus which are nowhere found in our gospels. for instance, in ch. vii. we meet with the folio wing expressions directly attributed to jesus. "thus he say': 'those who desire to behold me, and to attain my kingdom, must through tribulation and suffering receive me.'"( ) hilgenfeld( ) compares this with another passage, similar in sense, in iv ezra, vii. ; but in any case it is not a quotation from our gospels; ( ) and with so many passages in them suitable to his purpose, it would be amazing, if he knew and held matthew in the consideration which tischendorf asserts, that he should neglect their stores, and go elsewhere for such quotations. there is nothing in this epistle worthy of the name of evidence even of the existence of our gospels. . the pastor of hennas is another work which very nearly secured permanent canonical rank with the writings of the new testament. it was quoted as holy scripture by the fathers and held to be divinely inspired, and it was publicly read in the churches.( ) it has a { } place, with the "epistle of barnabas," in the sinaitic codex, after the canonical books. in early times it was attributed to the hermas who is mentioned in the epistle to the romans, xiv. , in consequence of a mere conjecture to that effect by origen;(l) but the canon of muratori( ) confidently ascribes it to a brother of pius, bishop of rome, and at least there does not seem any ground for the statement of origen.( ) it may have been written about the middle of the second century or a little earlier.( ) { } tischendorf dismisses this important memorial of the early christian church with a note of two lines, for it has no quotations either from the old or new testament.( ) he does not even suggest that it contains any indications of acquaintance with our gospels. the only direct quotation in the "pastor" is from an apocryphal work which is cited as holy scripture: "the lord is nigh unto them who return to him, as it is written in eldad and modat, who prophesied to the people in the wilderness."( ) this work, which appears in the stichometry of nicephorus amongst the apocrypha of the old testament, is no longer extant.( ) chapter ii. the epistles of ignatius--the epistle of polycarp although, in reality, appertaining to a very much later period, we shall here refer to the so-called "epistles of ignatius," and examine any testimony which they afford regarding the date and authenticity of our gospels. there are in all fifteen epistles bearing the name of ignatius. three of these, addressed to the virgin mary and the apostle john , exist only in a latin version, and these, together with five others directed to mary of cassobolita, to the tarsians, to the antiochans, to hero of antioch, and to the philippians, of which there are versions both in greek and latin, are universally admitted to be spurious, and may, so far as their contents are concerned, be at once dismissed from all consideration.( ) they are not mentioned by eusebius, nor does any early writer refer to them. of the remaining seven epistles, addressed to the ephesians, magnesians, trallians, romans, philadelphians, smyrnæans, and to polycarp, there are two distinct versions extant, one long version, of which there are both greek and latin texts, and another much shorter, and presenting considerable variations, of which there are also both greek and latin texts. after a couple of centuries of discussion, critics { } almost without exception have finally agreed that the longer version is nothing more than an interpolated version of the shorter and more ancient form of the epistles. the question regarding the authenticity of the ignatian epistles, however, was re-opened and complicated by the publication, in , by dr. cureton, of a syriac version of three epistles only--to polycarp, to the ephesians, and to the romans--in a still shorter form, discovered amongst a large number of mss. purchased by dr. tattam from the monks of the desert of nitria. these three syriac epistles have been subjected to the severest scrutiny, and many of the ablest critics have pronounced them to be the only authentic epistles of ignatius, whilst others, who do not admit that even these are genuine letters emanating from ignatius, still prefer them to the version of seven greek epistles, and consider them the most ancient form of the letters which we possess.( ) as early as the sixteenth century, however, the strongest doubts were expressed regarding the authenticity of any of the epistles ascribed to ignatius. the magdeburg { } centuriators first attacked them, and calvin declared them to be spurious,( ) an opinion fully shared by dallaeus, and others; chemnitz regarded them with suspicion; and similar doubts, more or lass definite, were expressed throughout the seventeenth century,( ) and onward to comparatively recent times,( ) although the means of forming a judgment were not then so complete as now. that the epistles were interpolated there was no doubt. fuller examination and more comprehensive knowledge of the subject have confirmed earlier doubts, and a large mass of critics either recognize that the authenticity of none of these epistles can be established, or that they { } can only be considered later and spurious compositions.( ) omitting for the present the so-called epistle of polycarp to the philippians, the earliest reference to any of these epistles, or to ignatius himself, is made by irenæus, who quotes a passage which is found in the epistle to the romans (ch. iv.), without, however, any mention of name,' introduced by the following words: "as a certain man of ours said, being condemned to the wild beasts on account of his testimony to god: 'i am the wheat of god, and by the teeth of beasts i am ground, that i may be found pure { } bread."( ) origen likewise quotes two brief sentences which he refers to ignatius. the first is merely: "but my love is crucified,"( ) which is likewise found in the epistle to the romans (ch. vii.); and the other quoted as "out of one of the epistles" of the martyr ignatius: "from the prince of this world was concealed the virginity of mary,"( ) which is found in the epistle to the ephesians (ch. xix). eusebius mentions seven epistles,( ) and quotes one passage from the epistle to the romans (ch. v.), and a few words from an apocryphal gospel contained in the epistle to the smyrnæans (ch. iii.), the source of which he says that he does not know, and he cites from irenæus the brief quotation given above, and refers to the mention of the epistles in the letter of polycarp which we reserve. elsewhere,( ) he further quotes a short sentence found in the epistle to the ephesians (ch. xix.), part of which had previously been cited by origen. it will be observed that all these quotations, with the exception of that from irenæus, are taken from the three epistles which exist in the syriac translation, and they are found in that version; and the first occasion on which any passage attributed to ignatius is quoted which is not in the syriac version of the three epistles occurs in the second half of the fourth century, when athanasius, in his epistle regarding the synods of ariminum and selucia,( ) quotes a few words from the epistle to the ephesians (ch. vii.); but although foreign to the syriac text, it is to be noted that the words are { } at least from a form of one of the three epistles which exist in that version.( ) it is a fact, therefore, that up to the second half of the fourth century no quotation ascribed to ignatius, except one by eusebius, exists, which is not found in the three short syriac letters. as we have already remarked, the syriac version of the three epistles is very much shorter than the shorter greek version, the epistle to the ephesians, for instance, being only about one-third of the length of the greek text. those who still maintain the superior authenticity of the greek shorter version argue that the syriac is an epitome of the greek. this does not, however, seem tenable when the matter is carefully examined. although so much is absent from the syriac version, not only is there no interruption of the sense and no obscurity or undue curtness in the style, but the epistles read more consecutively, without faults of construction or grammar, and passages which in the greek text were confused and almost unintelligible have become quite clear in the syriac. the interpolations of the text, in fact, had been so clumsily made, that they had obscured the meaning, and their mere omission, without any other alteration of grammatical construction, has restored the epistles to clear and simple order.( ) it is, moreover, a remarkable fact that the passages which, long before the discovery of the syriac epistles, were pointed out as chiefly determining that the epistles were spurious, are not found in the syriac version at all. archbishop usher, who only admitted the authenticity of six epistles, showed that much interpolation of these letters took place in the { } sixth century,( ) but this very fact increases the probability of much earlier interpolation also, at which the various existing versions most clearly point. the interpolations can be explained upon the most palpable dogmatic grounds, but not so the omissions upon the hypothesis that the syriac version is an abridgment made upon any distinct dogmatic principle, for that which is allowed to remain renders the omissions ineffectual for dogmatic reasons. there is no ground of interest upon which the portions omitted and retained by the syriac version can be intelligently explained.( ) finally, here, we may mention that the mss. of the three syriac epistles are more ancient by some centuries than those of any of the greek versions of the seven epistles.( ) the strongest internal, as well as other evidence, into which space forbids our going in detail, has led the majority of critics to recognize the syriac version as the most ancient form of the letters of ignatius extant, and this is admitted by many of those who nevertheless deny the authenticity of any of the epistles.( ) seven epistles have been selected out of fifteen extant, all equally purporting to be by ignatius, simply because only that number was mentioned by eusebius, from whom for the first time, in the fourth century,--except the general reference in the so-called epistle of poly-carp, to which we shall presently refer,--we hear of them. now neither the silence of eusebius regarding the eight epistles, nor his mention of the seven, can have much weight in deciding the question of their authenticity. the only point which is settled by the reference { } of eusebius is that, at the date at which he wrote, seven epistles were known to him which were ascribed to ignatius. he evidently knew little or nothing regarding the man or the epistles, beyond what he had learnt from themselves,( ) and he mentions the martyr-journey to rome as a mere report: "it is said that he was conducted from syria to rome to be cast to wild beasts on account of his testimony to christ."( ) it would be unreasonable to argue that no other epistles existed simply because eusebius did not mention them; and on the other hand it would be still more unreasonable to affirm that the seven epistles are authentic merely because eusebius, in the fourth century,--that is to say, some two centuries after they are supposed to have been written,--had met with them. does any one believe the letter of jesus to abgarus prince of edessa to be genuine, because eusebius inserts it in his history( ) as an authentic document out of the public records of the city of edessa \ there is, in fact, no evidence that the brief quotations of irenæus and origen are taken from either of the extant greek versions of the epistles; for, as we have mentioned, they exist in the syriac epistles, and there is nothing to show the original state of the letters from which they were derived. nothing is more certain than the fact that, if any writer wished to circulate letters in the name of ignatius, he would insert such passages as were said to have been quoted from genuine epistles of ignatius, and supposing those quotations to be real, all that could be said on finding such passages would be that at least so much might be genuine.( ) it is a total { } mistake to suppose that the seven epistles mentioned by eusebius have been transmitted to us in any special way. these epistles are mixed up in the medicean and corresponding ancient latin mss. with the other eight epistles, universally pronounced to be spurious, without distinction of any kind, and all have equal honour.( ) the recognition of the number seven may, therefore, be ascribed simply to the reference to them by eusebius, and his silence regarding the rest. what, then, is the position of the so-called ignatian epistles? towards the end of the second century, irenæus makes a very short quotation from a source unnamed, which eusebius, in the fourth century, finds in an epistle attributed to ignatius. origen, in the third century, quotes a very few words which he ascribes to ignatius, although without definite reference to any particular epistle; and, in the fourth century eusebius mentions seven epistles ascribed to ignatius. there is no other evidence. there are, however, fifteen epistles extant, all of which are attributed to ignatius, of all of which, with the exception of three which are only known in a latin version, we possess both greek and latin versions. of seven of these epistles--and they are those mentioned by eusebius--we have two greek versions, one of which is very much shorter than the other; and finally we now possess a syriac version of three epistles only( ) in a form still shorter than the shorter greek version, in which are found all the quotations of the fathers, without exception, up to the fourth century. eight of the fifteen it is worthy of remark that at the end of the syriac version the subscription is: "here end the three epistles of ignatius, bishop and martyr;" cf. cureton, the ancient syriac version, &c, p. . { } epistles are universally rejected as spurious. the longer greek version of the remaining seven epistles is almost unanimously condemned as grossly interpolated; and the great majority of critics recognize that the shorter greek version is also much interpolated; whilst the syriac version, which so far as mss. are concerned is by far the most ancient text of any of the letters which we posses, reduces their number to three, and their contents to a very small compass indeed. it is not surprising that the vast majority of critics have expressed doubt more or less strong regarding the authenticity of all of these epistles, and that so large a number have repudiated them altogether. one thing is quite evident,--that amidst such a mass of falsification, interpolation, and fraud, the ignatian epistles cannot in any form be considered evidence on any important point.( ) we have not, however, finished. all of these epistles, including the three of the syriac recension, profess to have been written by ignatius during his journey from antioch to rome, in the custody of roman soldiers, in order to be exposed to wild beasts, the form of martyrdom to which he had been condemned. the writer describes the circumstances of his journey as follows: "from syria even unto rome i fight with wild beasts, by sea and by land, by night and day; being bound amongst ten leopards, which are the band of soldiers: who even receiving benefits become worse."( ) now if this account be in the least degree true, how is it possible to suppose that the martyr could have found means to write { } so many long epistles, entering minutely into dogmatic teaching, and expressing the most deliberate and advanced views regarding ecclesiastical government? indeed it may be asked why ignatius should have considered it necessary in such a journey, even if the possibility be for a moment conceded, to address such epistles to communities and individuals to whom, by the showing of the letters themselves, he had just had opportunities of addressing his counsels in person.( ) the epistles themselves bear none of the marks of composition under such circumstances, and it is impossible to suppose that soldiers such as the quotation above describes would allow a prisoner, condemned to wild beasts for professing christianity, deliberately to write long epistles at every stage of his journey, promulgating the very doctrines for which he was condemned. and not only this, but on his way to martyrdom, he has, according to the epistles,( ) perfect freedom to see his friends. he receives the bishops, deacons, and members of various christian communities, who come with greetings to him, and devoted followers accompany him on his journey. all this without hindrance from the "ten leopards," of whose cruelty he complains, and without persecution or harm to those who so openly declare themselves his friends and fellow believers. the whole story is absolutely incredible.( ) this conclusion, irresistible in itself, is, however, confirmed by facte arrived at from a totally different point of view. { } it has been demonstrated that, most probably, ignatius was not sent to rome at all, but suffered martyrdom in antioch itself(l) on the th december, a.d. ,( ) when he was condemned to be cast to wild beasts in the amphitheatre, in consequence of the fanatical excitement produced by the earthquake which took place on the th of that month.( ) there are no less than three martyrologies of ignatius,( ) giving an account of the martyr's journey from antioch to rome, but they are all recognised to be mere idle legends, of whose existence we do not hear till a very late period.( ) in fact the whole of the ignatian literature is a mass of falsification and fraud. we might well spare our readers the trouble of examining further the contents of the epistles of pseudo-ignatius, for it is manifest that they cannot afford testimony { } of any value on the subject of our inquiry. we shall, however, briefly point out all the passages contained in the seven greek epistles which have any bearing upon our synoptic gospels, in order that their exact position may be more fully appreciated. teschendorf( ) refers to a passage in the epistle to the romans, c. vi., as a verbal quotation of matthew xvi. , but he neither gives the context nor states the facts of the case. the passage reads as follows: "the pleasures of the world shall profit me nothing, nor the kingdoms of this time; it is better for me to die for jesus christ, than to reign over the ends of the earth. for what is a man profited if he gain the whole world, but lose his soul."( ) now this quotation not only is not found in the syriac version of the epistle, but it is also omitted from the ancient latin version, and is absent from the passage in the work of timotheus of alexandria against the council of chalcedon, and from other authorities. it is evidently a later addition, and is recognized as such by most critics.( ) it was probably a gloss, which subsequently was inserted in the text. of these facts, however, tischendorf does not say a word.( ) the next passage to which he refers is in the epistle to the smyrnæans, c. i., where the writer says of jesus: "he was baptized by john in order that all righteousness { } might be fulfilled by him,"( )--which teschendorf considers a reminiscence of matthew iii. , "for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness."( ) the phrase, besides being no quotation, has again all the appearance of being an addition; and when in ch. iii. of the same epistle we find a palpable quotation from an apocryphal gospel, which jerome states to be the "gospel according to the hebrews," to which we shall presently refer, a gospel which we know to have contained the baptism of jesus by john, it is not possible, even if the epistle were genuine, which it is not, to base any such conclusion upon these words. there is not only the alternative of tradition, but the use of the same apocryphal gospel, elsewhere quoted in the epistle, as the source of the reminiscence. tischendorf does not point out any more supposed references to our synoptic gospels, but we proceed to notice all the other passages which have been indicated by others. in the epistle to polycarp, c. ii., the following sentence occurs: "be thou wise as a serpent in everything, and harmless as the dove." this is, of course, compared with matth. x. , "be ye, therefore, wise as serpents and innocent as doves." the greek of both reads as follows: [--greek--] in the syriac version, the passage reads: "be thou wise as the serpent in everything, and harmless as to those things which are requisite as the dove."( ) it is unnecessary { } to add that no source is indicated for the reminiscence. ewald assigns this part of our first gospel originally to the spruchsammlung,( ) and even apart from the variations presented in the epistle there is nothing to warrant exclusive selection of our first gospel as the source of the saying. the remaining passages we subjoin in parallel columns. none of these passages are quotations, and they generally present such marked linguistic variations from the parallel { } passages in our first gospel, that there is not the slightest ground for specially referring them to it. the last words cited are introduced without any appropriate context. in no case are the expressions indicated as quotations from, or references to, any particular source. they may either be traditional, or reminiscences of some of the numerous gospels current in the early church, such as the gospel according to the hebrews. that the writer made use of one of these cannot be doubted. in the epistle to the smyrnaeans, c. iii., there occurs a quotation from an apocryphal gospel to which we have already, in passing, referred: "for i know that also after his resurrection he was in the flesh, and i believe he is so now. and when he came to those who were with peter, he said to them: lay hold, handle me, and see that i am not an incorporeal spirit, [--greek--]. and immediately they touched him and believed, being convinced by his flesh and spirit." eusebius, who quotes this passage, says that he does not know whence it is taken.( ) origen, however, quotes it from a work well known in the early church, called "the doctrine of peter," [--greek--];( ) and jerome found it in the "gospel according to the hebrews," in use among the nazarenes,( ) which he translated, as we shall hereafter sec. it was, no doubt, in both of those works. the narrative, luke xxiv. f., being neglected, and an apocryphal gospel used here, the inevitable inference is clear and very suggestive. as it is certain that this quotation was taken from a source { } different from our gospels, there is reason to suppose that the other passages which we have cited are reminiscences of the same work. the passage on the three mysteries in the epistle to the ephesians, c. xix., is evidently another quotation from an uncanonical source.( ) we must, however, again point out that, with the single exception of the short passage in the epistle to polycarp, c. ii., which is not a quotation, differs from the reading in matthew, and may well be from any other source, none of these supposed reminiscences of our synoptic gospels are found in the syriac version of the three epistles. the evidential value of the seven greek epistles is clearly stated by an english historian and divine: "my conclusion is, that i should be unwilling to claim historical authority for any passage not contained in dr. cureton's syriac reprint."( ) we must, however, go much further, and assert that none of the epistles have any value as evidence for an earlier period than the end of the second or beginning of the third century, if indeed they possess any value at all. the whole of the literature ascribed to ignatius is, in fact, such a tissue of fraud and imposture, and the successive versions exhibit such undeniable marks of the grossest interpolation, that even if any small original element exist referrible to ignatius, it is impossible to define it, or to distinguish with the slightest degree of accuracy between what is authentic and what is spurious. the epistles do not, however, in any case afford evidence even of the existence of our synoptic gospels. { } . we have hitherto deferred all consideration of the so-called epistle of polycarp to the philippians, from the fact that, instead of proving the existence of the epistles of ignatius, with which it is intimately associated, it is itself discredited in proportion as they are shown to be in authentic. we have just seen that the martyr-journey of ignatius to rome is, for cogent reasons, declared to be wholly fabulous, and the epistles purporting to be written during that journey must be held to be spurious. the epistle of polycarp, however, not only refers to the martyr-journey (c. ix.), but to the ignatian epistles which are inauthentic (c. xiii.), and the manifest inference is that it also is spurious. polycarp, who is said by irenæus( ) to have been in his youth a disciple of the apostle john, became bishop of smyrna, and suffered martyrdom at a very advanced age.( ) on the authority of eusebius and jerome, it has hitherto been generally believed that his death took place in a.d. - . in the account of his martyrdom, which we possess in the shape of a letter from the church of smyrna, purporting to have been written by eye-witnesses, which must be pronounced spurious, polycarp is said to have died under the proconsul statius quadratus.( ) if this statement be correct, the date hitherto received can no longer be maintained, for recent investigations have determined that statius quadratus was proconsul in a.d. - or - .( ) some critics, { } who affirm the authenticity of the epistle attributed to polycarp, date the epistle before a.d. ,( ) but the preponderance of opinion assigns it to a much later period.( ) doubts of its authenticity, and of the integrity of the text, were very early expressed,( ) and the close scrutiny to which later and more competent criticism has subjected it, has led very many to the conclusion that the epistle is either largely interpolated,( ) or altogether spurious.( ) the principal argument in favour { } of its authenticity is the fact that the epistle is mentioned by irenæus,( ) who in his extreme youth was acquainted with polycarp.( ) we have no very precise information regarding the age of irenæus, but jerome states that he flourished under commodus ( - ), and we may, as a favourable conjecture, suppose that he was then about - . in that case his birth must be dated about a.d. . there is reason to believe that he fell a victim to persecution under septimius severus, and it is only doubtful whether he suffered during the first outbreak in a.d. , or later. according to this calculation, the martyrdom of polycarp, in a.d. - , took place when he was ten or eleven years of age. even if a further concession be made in regard to his age, it is evident that the intercourse of irenæus with the bishop of smyrna must have been confined to his very earliest years,( ) a fact which is confirmed by the almost total absence of any record in his writings of the communications of polycarp. this certainly does not entitle irenæus to speak more authoritatively of an epistle ascribed to polycarp, than any one else of his day.( ) in the epistle itself, there are several anachronisms. in ch. ix. the blessed ignatius" is referred to as already dead, and he is held up with zosimus and rufus, and also with paul and the rest of the apostles, as examples of patience: men who have not run in vain, but are with the lord; but in ch. xiii. he is spoken of as living, and information is requested regarding him, { } "and those who are with him."( ) yet, although thus spoken of as alive, the writer already knows of his epistles, and refers, in the plural, to those written by him "to us, and all the rest which we have by us."( ) the reference here, it will be observed, is not only to the epistles to the smyrnæans, and to polycarp himself, but to other spurious epistles which are not included in the syriac version. dallseus( ) pointed out long ago, that ch. xiii. abruptly interrupts the conclusion of the epistle, and most critics, including those who assert the authenticity of the rest of the epistle, reject it at least, although many of these likewise repudiate ch. ix. as interpolated.( ) others, however, consider that the latter chapter is quite consistent with the later date, which, according to internal evidence, must be assigned to the epistle. the writer vehemently denounces,( ) as already widely spread, the gnostic heresy and other forms of false doctrine which did not exist until the time of marcion, to whom and to whose followers he refers in unmistakable terms. an expression is used in ch. vii. in speaking of these heretics, which polycarp is reported by irenseus to have actually applied to marcion in person, during his visit to home. he is said to have called marcion the "first-born of satan," [--greek--]( ) and the same term { } is employed in this epistle with regard to every one who holds such false doctrines. the development of these heresies, therefore, implies a date for the composition of the epistle, at earliest, after the middle of the second century, a date which is further confirmed by other circumstances.( ) the writer of such a letter must have held a position in the church, to which polycarp could only have attained in the latter part of his life, when he was deputed to rome for the paschal discussion, and the epistle depicts the developed ecclesiastical organization of a later time.( ) the earlier date which has now been adopted for the martyrdom of polycarp, by limiting the period during which it is possible that he himself could have written any portion of it, only renders the inauthenticity of the epistle more apparent. hilgenfeld has pointed out, as another indication of the same date, the injunction "pray for the kings" (orate pro regibus), which, in peter ii. , is "honour the king" [--greek--], which, he argues, accords with the period after antoninus pius had elevated marcus aurelius { } to joint sovereignty (a.d. ), or better still, with that in which marcus aurelius appointed lucius verus his colleague, a.d. , for to rulers outside of the roman empire there can be no reference. if authentic, however, the epistle must have been written, at latest, shortly after the martyrdom of ignatius in a.d. , but, as we have seen, there are strong internal characteristics excluding such a supposition. the reference to the martyr-journey of ignatius and to the epistles falsely ascribed to him, is alone sufficient to betray the spurious nature of the composition, and to class the epistle with the rest of the pseudo-ignatian literature. we shall now examine all the passages in this epistle which are pointed out as indicating any acquaintance with our synoptic gospels.( ) the first occurs in ch. ii., and we subjoin it in contrast with the nearest parallel passages of the gospels, but although we break it up into paragraphs, it will, of course, be understood that the quotation is continuous in the epistle. [---greek---] { } it will be remembered that an almost similar direct quotation of words of jesus occurs in the so-called epistle of clement to the corinthians, c. xiii., which we have already examined.( ) there, the passage is introduced by the same words, and in the midst of brief phrases which have parallels in our gospel there occurs in both epistles the same expression, "be pitiful that ye may be pitied," which is not found in any of our gospels. in order to find any parallels for the quotation, upon the hypothesis of a combination of texts, we have to add together portions of the following verses in the following order: matthew vii. , vi. (although, with complete linguistic variations, the sense of luke vi. is much closer), v. , vii. , v. , v. . such fragmentary compilation is in itself scarcely conceivable in an epistle of this kind, but when in the midst we find a passage foreign to our gospels, but which occurs in another work in connection with so similar a quotation, it is reasonable to conclude that the whole is derived from tradition or from a gospel different from ours.( ) in no case can such { } a passage be considered material evidence of the existence of any one of our gospels. another expression which is pointed out occurs in ch. vii., "beseeching in our prayers the all-searching god not to lead us into temptation, as the lord said: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."( ) this is compared with the phrase in "the lord's prayer" (matthew vi. ), or the passage (xxvi. ): "watch and pray that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak."( ) the second gospel, however, equally has the phrase (xiv. ), and shows how unreasonable it is to limit these historical sayings to a single gospel. the next passage is of a similar nature (c. vi.): "if, therefore, we pray the lord that he may forgive us, we ought also ourselves to forgive."( ) the thought but not the language of this passage corresponds with matthew vi. -- , but equally so with luke xi. . now we must repeat that all such sayings of jesus were the common property of the early christians--were no doubt orally current amongst them, and still more certainly were recorded by many of the numerous gospels then in circulation, as they are by several of our own. in no case is there any written source indicated from which these passages are derived; they are simply quoted as words of jesus, and being all connected either with the "sermon on the mount" or the "lord's prayer," the two portions of the teaching of jesus which were most { } popular, widely known, and characteristic, there can be no doubt that they were familiar throughout the whole of the early church, and must have formed a part of most or all of the many collections of the words of the master. to limit them to our actual gospels, which alone survive, would be quite unwarrantable, and no reference to them, without specification of the source, can be received as evidence even of the existence of our synoptics. we may here briefly illustrate the point from the synoptics themselves. assuming the parable of the sower to be a genuine example of the teaching of jesus, as there is every reason to believe, it may with certainty be asserted that it must have been included in many of the records circulating among early christians, to which reference is made in the prologue to the third gospel. it would not be permissible to affirm that no part of that parable could be referred to by an early writer without that reference being an indication of acquaintance with our synoptic gospels. the parable is reported in closely similar words in each of those three gospels,( ) and it may have been, and probably was, recorded similarly in a dozen more. confining ourselves, however, for a moment to the three synoptics: what could a general allusion to the parable of the sower prove regarding their existence and use, no mention of a particular source being made? would it prove that all the three were extant, and that the writer knew them all, for each of them containing the parable would possess an equal claim to the reference? could it with any reason be affirmed that he was acquainted with matthew and not with mark? or with mark and not with matthew and luke? or with the third gospel and { } not with either of the other two? the case is the very same if we extend the illustration, and along with the synoptics include the numerous other records of the early church. the anonymous quotation of historical expressions of jesus cannot prove the existence of one special document among many to which we may choose to trace it. this is more especially to be insisted on from the fact, that hitherto we have not met with any mention of any one of our gospels, and have no right even to assume their existence from any evidence which has been furnished. chapter iii. justin martyr we shall now consider the evidence furnished by the works of justin martyr, regarding the existence of our synoptic gospels at the middle of the second century, and we may remark, in anticipation, that whatever differences of opinion may finally exist regarding the solution of the problem which we have to examine, at least it is clear that the testimony of justin martyr is not of a nature to establish the date, authenticity, and character of gospels professing to communicate such momentous and astounding doctrines. the determination of the source from which justin derived his facts of christian history has for a century attracted more attention, and excited more controversy, than almost any other similar question in connection with patristic literature, and upon none have more divergent opinions been expressed. justin, who suffered martyrdom about a.d. -- ,( ) under marcus aurelius, probably at the instigation of the cynical philosopher, crescens, was born in the greek-roman colony, flavia neapolis,( ) established during the { } reign of vespasian, near the ancient sichem in samaria. by descent he was a greek, and during the earlier part of his life a heathen, but after long and disappointed study of greek philosophy, he became a convert to christianity(l) strongly tinged with judaism. it is not necessary to enter into any discussion as to the authenticity of the writings which have come down to us bearing justin's name, many of which are undoubtedly spurious, for the two apologies and the dialogue with trypho, with which we have almost exclusively to do, are generally admitted to be genuine. it is true that there has been a singular controversy regarding the precise relation to each other of the two apologies now extant, the following contradictory views having been maintained: that they are the two apologies mentioned by eusebius, and in their original order; that they are justin's two apologies, but that eusebius was wrong in affirming that the second was addressed to marcus aurelius; that our second apology was the preface or appendix to the first, and that the original second is lost. the shorter apology contains nothing of interest connected with our inquiry. there has been much controversy as to the date of the two apologies, and much difference of opinion still exists on the point. many critics assign the larger to about a.d. -- , and the shorter to a.d. -- .( ) a passage, however, occurs in the longer apology, which { } indicates that it must have been written about a century and a half after the commencement of the christian era, or, according to accurate reckoning, about a.d. . justin speaks, in one part of it, of perverted deductions being drawn from his teaching "that christ was born years ago under cyrenius."(l) those who contend for the earlier date have no stronger argument against this statement than the unsupported assertion, that in this passage justin merely speaks "in round numbers," but many important circumstances confirm the date which justin thus gives us. in the superscription of the apology, antoninus is called "pius," a title which was first bestowed upon him in the year . moreover, justin directly refers to marcion, as a man "now living and teaching his disciples.... and who has by the aid of demons caused many of all nations to utter blasphemies," &c.( ) now the fact has been established that marcion did not come to rome, where justin himself was, until a.d. -- ,( ) when his prominent public career commenced, and it is apparent that the words of justin indicate a period when his doctrines had already { } become widely diffused. for these and many other strong reasons, which need not here be detailed, the majority of competent critics agree in more correctly assigning the first apology to about a.d. .( ) the dialogue with trypho, as internal evidence shows,( ) was written after the longer apology, and it is therefore generally dated some time within the first decade of the second half of the second century.( ) in these writings justin quotes very copiously from the old testament, and he also very frequently refers to facts of christian history and to sayings of jesus. of these references, for instance, some fifty occur in the first apology, and upwards of seventy in the dialogue with trypho, a goodly number, it will be admitted, by means of which to identify the source from which he quotes. justin himself frequently and distinctly says that his information and quotations are derived from the "memoirs of the apostles" [--greek--], but except upon one occasion, which we shall hereafter consider, when he indicates peter, he never mentions an author's name. upon examination it is found that, with only one or two brief exceptions, the { } numerous quotations from these memoirs differ more or less widely from parallel passages in our synoptic gospels, and in many cases differ in the same respects as similar quotations found in other writings of the second century, the writers of which are known to have made use of uncanonical gospels, and further, that these passages are quoted several times, at intervals, by justin with the same variations. moreover, sayings of jesus are quoted from these memoirs which are not found in our gospels at all, and facts in the life of jesus and circumstances of christian history derived from the same source, not only are not found in our gospels, but are in contradiction with them. these peculiarities have, as might have been expected, created much diversity of opinion regarding the nature of the "memoirs of the apostles." in the earlier days of new testament criticism more especially, many of course at once identified the memoirs with our gospels exclusively, and the variations were explained by conveniently elastic theories of free quotation from memory, imperfect and varying mss., combination, condensation and transposition of passages, with slight additions from tradition, or even from some other written source, and so on.( ) others endeavoured to explain { } away difficulties by the supposition that they were a simple harmony of our gospels,( ) or a harmony of the gospels, with passages added from some apocryphal work.( ) a much greater number of critics, however, adopt the conclusion that, along with our gospels, justin made use of one or more apocryphal gospels, and more especially of the gospel according to the hebrews, or according to peter, and also perhaps of tradition.( ) others assert that he made use of a special unknown gospel, or of the gospel according to the hebrews or according to peter, with a subsidiary use of a version of one or two of our gospels to which, however, he did not attach much importance, preferring the apocryphal work;( ) whilst { } others have concluded that justin did not make use of our gospels at all, and that his quotations are either from the gospel according to the hebrews, or according to peter, or from some other special apocryphal gospel now no longer extant.( ) evidence permitting of such wide diversity of results to serious and laborious investigation of the identity of justin's memoirs of the apostles, cannot be of much value towards establishing the authenticity of our gospels, and in the absence of any specific mention of our synoptics any very elaborate examination of the memoirs might be considered unnecessary, more especially as it is admitted almost universally by competent critics, that justin did not himself consider the memoirs of the apostles inspired, or of any dogmatic authority, and had no idea of attributing canonical rank to them.( ) in pursuance of the system which we desire invariably to adopt of { } enabling every reader to form his own opinion, we shall as briefly as possible state the facts of the case, and furnish materials for a full comprehension of the subject. justin himself, as we have already stated, frequently and distinctly states that his information regarding christian history and his quotations are derived from the memoirs of the apostles [--greek--], to adopt the usual translation, although the word might more correctly be rendered "recollections," or "memorabilia." it has frequently been surmised that this name was suggested by the [--greek--] of xenophon, but, as credner has pointed out, the similarity is purely accidental, and to constitute a parallel the title should have been "memoirs of jesus."( ) the word [--greek--] is here evidently used merely in the sense of records written from memory, and it is so employed by papias in the passage preserved by eusebius regarding mark, who, although he had not himself followed the lord, yet recorded his words from what he heard from peter, and who, having done so without order, is still defended for "thus writing some things as he remembered them" [--greek--].( ) in the same way irenseus refers to the "memoirs of a certain presbyter of apostolic times" [--greek--]( ) whose name he does not mention; and origen still more closely approximates to justin's use of the word when, expressing his theory regarding, the epistle to the hebrews, he says that the thoughts are the apostle's, but the phraseology and the composition are of one recording from memory { } what the apostle said [--greek--], and as of one writing at leisure the dictation of his master.( ) justin himself speaks of the authors of the memoirs as [--greek--],( ) and the expression was then and afterwards constantly in use amongst ecclesiastical and other writers.( ) this title, "memoirs of the apostles," however, although most appropriate to mere recollections of the life and teaching of jesus, evidently could not be applied to works ranking as canonical gospels, but in fact excludes such an idea; and the whole of justin's views regarding holy scripture, prove that he saw in the memoirs merely records from memory to assist memory.( ) he does not call them [--greek--], but adheres always to the familiar name of [--greek--], and whilst his constant appeals to a written source show very clearly his abandonment of oral tradition, there is nothing in the name of his records which can identify them with our gospels. justin designates the source of his quotations ten times, the "memoirs of the apostles,"( ) and five times he calls it simply the "memoirs."( ) he says, upon one occasion, that these memoirs were composed "by his apostles and their followers,"( ) but except in one place, { } to which we have already referred, and which we shall hereafter fully examine, he never mentions the author's name, nor does he ever give any more precise information regarding their composition. it has been argued that, in saying that these memoirs were recorded by the apostles and their followers, justin intentionally and literally described the four canonical gospels, the first and fourth of which are ascribed to apostles, and the other two to mark and luke, the followers of apostles;( ) but such an inference is equally forced and unfounded. the language itself forbids this explanation, for justin does not speak indefinitely of memoirs of apostles and their followers, but of memoirs of the apostles, invariably using the article, which refers the memoirs to the collective body of the apostles.( ) moreover, the incorrectness of such an inference is manifest from the fact that circumstances are stated by justin as derived from these memoirs, which do not exist in our gospels at all, and which, indeed, are contradictory to them. vast numbers of spurious writings, moreover, bearing the names of apostles and their followers, and claiming more or less direct apostolic authority, were in circulation in the early church: gospels according to peter,( ) to thomas,( ) to james,( ) to judas,( ) according to the { } apostles, or according to the twelve,( ) to barnabas,( ) to matthias,( ) to nicodemus,( ) &c., and ecclesiastical writers bear abundant testimony to the early and rapid growth of apocryphal literature.( ) the very names of most of such apocryphal gospels are lost, whilst of others we possess considerable information; but nothing is more certain than the fact, that there existed many works bearing names which render the attempt to interpret the title of justin's gospel as a description of the four in our canon quite unwarrantable. the words of justin evidently imply simply that the source of his quotations is the collective recollections of the apostles, and those who followed them, regarding the life and teaching of jesus. the title: "memoirs of the apostles" by no means indicates a plurality of gospels.( ) a single passage has been pointed out, in which the memoirs are said to have been called [--greek--] in the plural: "for the apostles in the memoirs composed by them, which are called { } gospels,"( ) &c. the last expression, a [--greek--], as many scholars have declared, is probably an interpolation. it is, in all likelihood, a gloss on the margin of some old ms. which some copyist afterwards inserted in the text.( ) if justin really stated that the memoirs were called gospels, it seems incomprehensible that he should never call them so himself. in no other place in his writings does he apply the plural to them, but, on the contrary, we find trypho referring to the "so-called gospel," which he states that he has carefully read,( ) and which, of course, can only be justin's "memoirs;" and again, in another part of the same dialogue, justin quotes passages which are written "in the gospel"( ) [--greek--]. the term "gospel" is nowhere else used by justin in reference to a written record.( ) in no case, however, considering the numerous gospels then in circulation, and the fact that many of these, different from the canonical gospels, are known to have been exclusively used by distinguished contemporaries of justin, and by various communities of christians in that day, could such an expression be taken as a special indication of the canonical gospels.( ) { } describing the religious practices amongst christians, in another place, justin states that, at their assemblies on sundays, "the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits."( ( this, however, by no means identifies the memoirs with the canonical gospels, for it is well known that many writings which have been excluded from the canon were publicly read in the churches, until very long after justin's day.( ) we have already met with several instances of this. eusebius mentions that the epistle of the roman clement was publicly read in churches in his time,( ) and he quotes an epistle of dionysius of corinth to soter, the bishop of rome, which states that fact for the purpose of "showing that it was the custom to read it in the churches, even from the earliest times."( ) dionysius likewise mentions the public reading of the epistle of soter to the corinthians. epiphanius refers to the reading in the churches of the epistle of clement,( ) and it continued to be so read in jerome's day.( ) in like manner, the "pastor" of hermas,( ) the "apocalypse of peter,"( ) and other works excluded from the canon were publicly read in the church in early days.( ) it is certain that gospels which { } did not permanently secure a place in the canon, such as the gospel according to the hebrews, the gospel according to peter, the gospel of the ebionites, and many kindred gospels, which in early times were exclusively used by various communities,( ) must have been read at their public assemblies. the public reading of justin's memoirs, therefore, does not prove anything, for this practice was by no means limited to the works now in our canon. the idea of attributing inspiration to the memoirs, or to any other work of the apostles, with the single exception, as we shall presently see, of the apocalypse of john,( ) which, as prophecy, entered within his limits, was quite foreign to justin, who recognized the old testament alone as the inspired word of god.( ) indeed, as we { } have already said, the very name "memoirs" in itself excludes the thought of inspiration,( ) which justin attributed only to prophetic writings; and he could not in any way regard as inspired the written tradition of the apostles and their followers, or a mere record of the words of jesus. on the contrary, he held the accounts of the apostles to be credible solely from their being authenticated by the old testament, and he clearly states that he believes the facts recorded in the memoirs because the spirit of prophecy had already foretold them.( ) according to justin, the old testament contained all that was necessary for salvation, and its prophecies are the sole criterion of truth, the memoirs, and even christ himself, being merely its interpreters.( ) he says that christ commanded us not to put faith in human doctrines, but in those proclaimed by the holy prophets, and taught by himself.( ) prophecy and the words of christ himself are alone of dogmatic value, all else is human teaching.( ) indeed, from a passage quoted with approval by irenæus, justin, in his lost work against marcion, said: "i would not have believed the lord himself, if he had proclaimed any other god than the creator;" that is to say, the god of the old testament.( ) { } that justin does not mention the name of the author of the memoirs would in any case render any argument as to their identity with our canonical gospels inconclusive; but the total omission to do so is the more remarkable from the circumstance that the names of old testament writers constantly occur in his writings. semisch counts quotations of the old testament, in which justin refers to the author by name, or to the book, and only in which he omits to do so,( ) and the latter number might be reduced by considering the nature of the passages cited, and the inutility of repeating the reference.( ) when it is considered, therefore, that notwithstanding the extremely numerous quotations, and references to facts of christian history, all purporting to be derived from the "memoirs," he absolutely never, except in the one instance referred to, mentions an author's name, or specifies more clearly the nature of the source, the inference must not only be that he attached small importance to the memoirs, but also that he was actually ignorant of the author's name, and that his gospel had no more definite superscription. upon the theory that the memoirs of the apostles were simply our { } four canonical gospels, the singularity of the omission is increased by the diversity of contents and of authors, and the consequently greater necessity and probability that he should, upon certain occasions, distinguish between them. the fact is that the only writing of the new testament to which justin refers by name is, as we have already mentioned, the apocalypse, which he attributes to "a certain man whose name was john, one of the apostles of christ, who prophesied by a revelation made to him," &c.( ) the manner in which john is here mentioned, after the memoirs had been so constantly indefinitely referred to, clearly shows that justin did not possess any gospel also attributed to john. that he does name john, however, as author of the apocalypse and so frequently refers to old testament writers by name, yet never identifies the author of the memoirs, is quite irreconcilable with the idea that they were the canonical gospels.( ) it is perfectly clear, however, and this is a point of very great importance upon which critics of otherwise widely diverging views are agreed, that justin quotes from a _written_ source, and that oral tradition is excluded from his system.( ) he not only does not, like papias, attach value to tradition, but, on the contrary, he affirms that in the memoirs is recorded "everything that concerns our "saviour jesus christ.,,( ) he constantly refers to them { } directly, as the source of his information regarding the history of jesus, and distinctly states that he has derived his quotations from them. there is no reasonable ground whatever for affirming that justin supplemented or modified the contents of the memoirs by oral tradition. it must, therefore, be remembered, in considering the nature of these memoirs, that the facts of christian history and the sayings of jesus are derived from a determinate written source, and are quoted as justin found them there.( ) those who attempt to explain the divergences of justin's quotations from the canonical gospels, which they still maintain to have been his memoirs, on the plea of oral tradition, defend the identity at the expense of the authority of the gospels. for nothing could more forcibly show justin's disregard and disrespect for the gospels, than would the fact that, possessing them, he not only never names their authors, but considers himself at liberty continually to contradict, modify, and revise their statements. as we have already remarked, when we examine the contents of the memoirs of the apostles, through justin's numerous quotations, we find that many parts of the gospel narratives are apparently quite unknown, whilst, on the other hand, we meet with facts of evangelical history, which are foreign to the canonical gospels, and others which are contradictory of gospel statements. justin's quotations, almost without exception, vary more or less from the parallels in the canonical text, and often these variations are consistently repeated by himself, and are found in other works about his time. moreover, justin quotes expressions of jesus, which are not found in our gospels at all. the omissions, though often very { } singular, supposing the canonical gospels before him, and almost inexplicable when it is considered how important they would often have been to his argument, need not, as merely negative evidence, be dwelt on here, but we shall briefly illustrate the other peculiarities of justin's quotations. the only genealogy of jesus which is recognized by justin is traced through the virgin mary. she it is who is descended from abraham, isaac, and jacob, and from the house of david, and joseph is completely set aside.( ) jesus "was born of a virgin of the lineage of abraham and tribe of judah and of david, christ the son of god."( ) "jesus christ the son of god has been born without sin of a virgin sprung from the lineage of abraham."( ) "for of the virgin of the seed of jacob, who was the father of judah, who, as we have shown, was the father of the jews, by the power of god was he conceived; and jesse was his forefather according to the prophecy, and he (jesus) was the son of jacob and judah according to successive descent."( ) the genealogy of jesus in the canonical gospels, on the contrary, is traced solely through joseph, who alone is stated to be of the lineage of david.( ) the genealogies of matthew and luke, though differing in several important points, at least agree in excluding mary. that of the third gospel commences with joseph, { } and that of the first ends with him: "and jacob begat joseph, the husband of mary, of whom was born jesus, who is called christ."( ) the angel who warns joseph not to put away his wife, addresses him as "joseph, thou son of david,"( ) and the angel gabriel, who, according to the third gospel, announces to mary the supernatural conception, is sent "to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was joseph, of the house of david."( ) so persistent, however, is justin in ignoring this davidic descent through joseph, that not only does he at least eleven times trace it through mary, but his gospel materially differs from the canonical, where the descent of joseph from david is mentioned by the latter. in the third gospel, joseph goes to judaea "unto the city of david, which is called bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of david."( ) justin, however, simply states that he went "to bethlehem... for his descent was from the tribe of judah, which inhabited that region."( ) there can be no doubt that justin not only did not derive his genealogies from the canonical gospels, but that on the contrary the memoirs, from which he did learn the davidic descent through mary only, differed persistently and materially from them.( ) many traces still exist to show that the view of justin's memoirs of the apostles of the davidic descent of jesus through mary instead of through joseph, as the canonical gospels represent it, was anciently held in the church. apocryphal gospels of early date, based without doubt upon more ancient evangelical works, are still extant, in which the genealogy of jesus is traced, as in { } justin's memoirs, through mary. one of these is the gospel of james, commonly called the _protevangelium_, a work referred to by ecclesiastical writers of the third and fourth centuries,( ) and which tischendorf even ascribes to the first three decades of the second century,( ) in which mary is stated to be of the lineage of david.( ) she is also described as of the royal race and family of david in the gospel of the nativity of mary,( ) and in the gospel of pseudo-matthew her davidic descent is prominently mentioned.( ) there can be no doubt that all of these works are based upon earlier originals,( ) and there is no reason why they may not have been drawn from the same source from which justin derived his version of the genealogy in contradiction to the synoptics.( ) in the narrative of the events which preceded the { } birth of jesus, the first gospel describes the angel as appearing only to joseph and explaining the supernatural conception,( ) and the author seems to know nothing of any announcement to mary.( ) the third gospel, on the contrary, does not mention any such angelic appearance to joseph, but represents the angel as announcing the conception to mary herself alone.( ) justin's memoirs know of the appearances both to joseph and to mary, but the words spoken by the angel on each occasion differ materially from those of both gospels.( ) in this place, only one point, however, can be noticed. justin describes the angel as saying to mary: "'behold, thou shalt conceive of the holy ghost, and shalt bear a son, and he shall be called the son of the highest, and thou shalt call his name jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins,' as they taught who recorded everything that concerns our saviour jesus christ."( ) now this is a clear and direct quotation, but besides distinctly differing in form from our gospels, it presents the important peculiarity that the words, "for he shall save his people from { } their sins," are not, in luke, addressed to mary at all, but that they occur in the first gospel in the address of the angel to joseph.( ) these words, however, are not accidentally inserted in this place, for we find that they are joined in the same manner to the address of the angel to mary in the protevangelium of james: "for the power of the lord will overshadow thee; wherefore also that holy thing which is born of thee shall be called the son of the highest, and thou shalt call his name jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins."( ) tischendorf states his own opinion that this passage is a recollection of the protevangelium unconsciously added by justin to the account in luke,( ) but the arbitrary nature of the limitation "unconsciously" (ohne dass er sich dessen bewusst war) here is evident. there is a point in connection with this which merits a moment's attention. in the text of the protevangelium, edited by tischendorf, the angel commences his address to mary by saying: "fear not, mary, for thou hast found favour before the lord, and thou shalt conceive of his word" [--greek--].( ) now justin, after quoting the passage above, continues to argue that the spirit and the power of god must not be misunderstood to mean anything else than the word, who is also the first born of god as the prophet moses declared; and it was this which, when it came upon the virgin and overshadowed her, caused { } her to conceive.( ) the occurrence of the singular expression in the protovangelium and the similar explanation of justin immediately accompanying a variation from our gospels, which is equally shared by the apocryphal work, strengthens the suspicion of a similarity of origin. justin's divergences from the protevangelium prevent our supposing that, in its present state, it could have been the actual source of his quotations, but the wide differences which exist between the extant mss. of the protevangelium show that even the most ancient does not present it in its original form. it is much more probable that justin had before him a still older work, to which both the protevangelium and the third gospel were indebted.( ) justin's account of the removal of joseph to bethlehem is peculiar, and evidently is derived from a distinct un-canonical source. it may be well to present his account and that of luke side by side: { } attention has already been drawn to the systematic manner in which the davidic descent of jesus is traced by justin through mary, and to the suppression in this passage of all that might seem to indicate a claim of descent through joseph. as the continuation of a peculiar representation of the history of the infancy of jesus, differing materially from that of the synoptics, it is impossible to regard this, with its remarkable variations, as an arbitrary correction by justin of the canonical text, and we must hold it to be derived from a different source, perhaps, indeed, one of those from which luke's gospel itself first drew the elements of the narrative, and this persuasion increases as further variations in the earlier history, presently to be considered, are taken into account. it is not necessary to enter into the question of the correctness of the date of this census, but it is evident that justin's memoirs clearly and deliberately modify the canonical narrative. the limitation of the census to judæa, instead of extending it to the whole roman empire; the designation of cyrenius as [--greek--] of judaea instead of [--greek--] of syria; and the careful suppression of the davidic element in connection with joseph indicate a peculiar written source different from the synoptics.( ) had justin departed from the account in luke with the view of correcting inaccurate statements, the matter might have seemed more consistent with the use of the third gospel, although at the same time it might have evinced but little reverence for it as a canonical { } work. on the contrary, however, the statements of justin are still more inconsistent with history than those in luke, inasmuch as, so far from being the first procurator of judsea, as justin's narrative states in opposition to the third gospel, cyrenius never held that office, but was really, later, the imperial proconsul over syria, and as such, when judaea became a roman province after the banishment of archelaus, had the power to enrol the inhabitants, and instituted coponius as first procurator of judaea. justin's statement involves the position that at one and the same time herod was the king, and cyrenius the roman procurator of judsea.( ) in the same spirit, and departing from the usual narrative of the synoptics, which couples the birth of jesus with "the days of herod the king," justin in another place states that christ was born "under cyrenius."( ) justin evidently adopts without criticism a narrative which he found in his memoirs, and does not merely correct and remodel a passage of the third gospel, but, on the contrary, seems altogether ignorant of it.( ) the genealogies of jesus in the first and third gospels differ irreconcileably from each other. justin differs from both. in this passage another discrepancy arises. while luke seems to represent nazareth as the dwelling-place of joseph and mary, and bethlehem as the city to which they went solely on account of the census,( ) { } matthew, who seems to know nothing of the census, makes bethlehem, on the contrary, the place of residence of joseph,( ) and on coming back from egypt, with the evident intention of returning to bethlehem, joseph is warned by a dream to turn aside into galilee, and he goes and dwells, apparently for the first time, "in a city called nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets: he shall be called a nazarene."( ) justin, however, goes still further than the third gospel in his departure from the data of matthew, and where luke merely infers, justin distinctly asserts nazareth to have been the dwelling-place of joseph [--greek--], and bethlehem, in contradistinction, the place from which he derived his origin [--greek--]. the same view is to be found in several apocryphal gospels still extant. in the protevangelium of james again, we find joseph journeying to bethlehem with mary before the birth of jesus.( ) the census here is ordered by augustus, who commands: "that all who were in bethlehem _of judeæ_, should be enrolled."( ) a limitation worthy of notice in comparison with that of justin. in like manner the gospel of the nativity. this gospel represents the parents of mary as living in nazareth, in { } which place she was born,( ) and it is here that the angel gabriel announces to her the supernatural conception.( ) joseph goes to bethlehem to set his house in order and prepare what is necessary for the marriage, but then returns to nazareth, where he remains with mary until her time was nearly accomplished,( ) "when joseph having taken his wife with whatever else was necessary went to the city of bethlehem, whence he was."( ) the phrase "_unde ipse erat_" recalls the [--greek--] of justin.( ) as we continue the narrative of the birth and infancy of jesus, we meet with further variations from the account in the canonical gospels for which the preceding have prepared us, and which indicate that justin's memorials certainly differed from them: { } at least it is clear that these particulars of the birth of jesus,--not taking place in bethlehem itself but in a cave [--greek--] near the village, because joseph could not find a lodging there,--are not derived from our gospels, and here even scmisch( ) is forced to abandon his theory that justin's variations arise merely from imperfectly quoting from memory, and to conjecture that he must have adopted tradition. it has, however, been shown that justin himself distinctly excludes tradition, and in this case, moreover, there are many special reasons for believing that he quotes from a written source. ewald rightly points out that here, and in other passages where, in common with ancient ecclesiastical writers, justin departs from our gospels, the variation can in no way be referred to oral tradition;( ) and, moreover, that when justin proves( ) from isaiah xxxiii. , that christ _must_ be born in a cave, he thereby shows how certainly he found the fact of the cave in his written gospel.( ) the whole argument of justin excludes the idea that he could avail himself of mere tradition. he maintains that everything which the prophets had foretold of christ had actually been fulfilled, and he perpetually refers to the memoirs and other written documents for the verification of his assertions. he either refers to the prophets for the confirmation of the memoirs, or shows in the { } memoirs the narrative of facts which are the accomplishment of prophecies, but in both cases it is manifest that there must have been a record of the facts which he mentions. there can be no doubt that the circumstances we have just quoted, and which are not found in the canonical gospels, must have been narrated in justin's memoirs. we find, again, the same variations as in justin in several extant apocryphal gospels. the protevangelium of james represents the birth of jesus as taking place in a cave;( ) so also the arabic gospel of the infancy,( ) and several others.( ) this uncanonical detail is also mentioned by several of the fathers, origen and eusebius both stating that the cave and the manger were still shown in their day.( ) teschendorf does not hesitate to affirm that justin derived this circumstance from the protevangelium.( ) justin, however, does not distinguish such a source; and the mere fact that we have a form of that gospel, in which it occurs, still extant, by no means justifies such a specific conclusion, when so many other works, now lost, may equally have contained { } it. if the fact be derived from the protevangelium, that work, or whatever other apocryphal gospel may have supplied it, must be admitted to have at least formed part of the memoirs of the apostles, and with that necessary admission ends all special identification of the memoirs with our canonical gospels. much more probably, however, justin quotes from the more ancient source from which the protevangelium and, perhaps, luke drew their narrative.( ) there can be very little doubt that the gospel according to the hebrews contained an account of the birth in bethlehem, and as it is, at least, certain that justin quotes other particulars known to have been in it, there is fair reason to suppose that he likewise found this fact in that work.( ) in any case it is indisputable that he derived it from a source different from our canonical gospels.( ) justin does not apparently know anything of the episode of the shepherds of the plain, and the angelic appearance to them, narrated in the third gospel.( ) to the cave in which the infant jesus is born came the magi, but instead of employing the phrase used by the first gospel, "magi from the east,"( ) [--greek--] justin always describes them as "magi from arabia," [--greek--]. justin is so punctilious that he { } never speaks of these magi without adding "from arabia," except twice, where, however, he immediately mentions arabia as the point of the argument for which they are introduced; and in the same chapter in which this occurs he four times calls them directly magi from arabia.( ) he uses this expression not less than nine times.( ) that he had no objection to the term "the east," and that with a different context it was common to his vocabulary, is proved by his use of it elsewhere.( ) it is impossible to resist the conviction that justin's memoirs contained the phrase "magi from arabia," which is foreign to our gospels.( ) again, according to justin, the magi see the star "in heaven" [--greek--],( ) and not "in the east" [--greek--] as the first gospel has it:( ) "when a star rose in heaven [--greek--] at the time of his birth as is recorded in the memoirs of the apostle."( ) he apparently knows nothing of the star guiding them to the place where the young child was.( ) herod, moreover, questions the elders [--greek--]( ) as to the place where the christ should be born, and not the "chief priests and scribes of the people" [--greek--].( ) these divergences, taken in connection with those which are interwoven with the whole narrative of the birth, can only proceed from the fact that justin quotes from a source different from ours.( ) justin relates that when jesus came to jordan he was { } believed to be the son of joseph the carpenter, and he appeared without comeliness, as the scriptures announced; "and being considered a carpenter,--for, when he was amongst men, he made carpenter's works, ploughs and yokes [--greek--]; by these both teaching the symbols of righteousness and an active life."( ) these details are foreign to the canonical gospels. mark has the expression: "is not this the carpenter, the son of mary? "( ) but luke omits it altogether.( ) the idea that the son of god should do carpenter's work on earth was very displeasing to many christians, and attempts to get rid of the obnoxious phrase are evident in mark. apparently the copy which origen used had omitted even the modified phrase, for he declares that jesus himself is nowhere called a carpenter in the gospels current in the church.( ) a few mss. still extant are without it, although it is found in all the more ancient codices. traces of these details are found in several apocryphal works, especially in the gospel of thomas, where it is said: "now his father was a carpenter and made at that time ploughs and yokes" [--greek--]( ), an account which, from the similarity of language, was in all { } probability derived from the same source as that of justin. the explanation which justin adds: "by which he taught the symbols of righteousness and an active life," seems to indicate that he refers to a written narrative containing the detail, already, perhaps, falling into sufficient disfavour to require the aid of symbolical interpretation. in the narrative of the baptism there are many peculiarities which prove that justin did not derive it from our gospels. thrice he speaks of john sitting by the river jordan: "he cried as he sat by the river jordan;"( ( "while he still sat by the river jordan;"( ) and "for when john sat by the jordan."( ) this peculiar expression so frequently repeated must have been derived from a written gospel.( ) then justin, in proving that jesus predicted his second coming and the re-appearance of elijah, states: "and therefore our lord in his teaching announced that this should take place, saying elias also should come" [--greek--]. a little lower down he again expressly quotes the words of jesus: "for which reason our christ declared on earth to those who asserted that elias must come before christ: elias, indeed, shall come," &c. [--greek--].( ) matthew, however, reads: "elias indeed cometh," [--greek--].( ) now there is no version in which [--greek--] is substituted for [--greek--] as justin does, but, as credner has pointed out,( ) the whole weight of justin's argument lies in the use of the future tense. as there are so many other variations { } in justin's context, this likewise appears to be derived from a source different from our gospels.( ) when jesus goes to be baptized by john many-striking peculiarities occur in justin's narrative: "as jesus went down to the water, a fire also was kindled in the jordan; and when he came up from the water, the holy spirit like a dove fell upon him, as the apostles of this very christ of ours wrote... and at the same time a voice came from the heavens... thou art my son, this day have i begotten thee."( ) the incident of the fire in jordan is of course quite foreign to our gospels, and further the words spoken by the heavenly voice differ from those reported by them, for instead of the passage from psalm ii. , the gospels have: "thou art my beloved son; in thee i am well pleased."( ) justin repeats his version a second time in the same chapter, and again elsewhere he says regarding the temptation: "for this devil also at the time when he (jesus) went up from the river jordan, when the voice declared to him: 'thou art my son; this day have i begotten thee,' it is written in the memoirs of the apostles, came to him and tempted him," &c.( ) in both of these passages, it will be perceived that justin directly refers to the memoirs of the apostles as the source of his statements. some have argued that { } justin only appeals to them for the fact of the descent of the holy ghost, and not for the rest of the narrative.( ) it has of course been felt that, if it can be shown that justin quotes from the memoirs words and circumstances which are not to be found in our canonical gospels, the identity of the two can no longer be maintained. it is, however, in the highest degree arbitrary to affirm that justin intends to limit his appeal to the testimony of the apostles to one-half of his sentence. to quote authority for one assertion and to leave another in the same sentence, closely connected with it and part indeed of the very same narrative, not only unsupported, but indeed weakened by direct exclusion, would indeed be singular, for justin affirms with equal directness and confidence the fact of the fire in jordan, the descent of the holy ghost, and the words spoken by the heavenly voice. if in the strictest grammatical accuracy there may be no absolute necessity to include in that which the apostles wrote more than the phrase immediately preceding, there is not, on the other hand, anything which requires or warrants the exclusion of the former part of the sentence. the matter must therefore be decided according to fair inference and reasonable probability, and not to suit any foregone conclusion, and these as well as all the evidence concerning justin's use of the memoirs irresistibly point to the conclusion that the whole passage is derived from one source. in the second extract given above, it is perfectly clear that the words spoken by the heavenly voice, which justin again quotes, and which are not in our gospels, were recorded in the memoirs, for justin could { } not have referred to them for an account of the temptation at the time when jesus went up from jordan and the voice said to him: "thou art my son; this day have i begotten thee," if these facts and words were not recorded in them at all.( ) it is impossible to doubt, after impartial consideration, that the incident of the fire in jordan, the words spoken by the voice from heaven, and the temptation were taken from the same source: they must collectively be referred to the memoirs.( ) of one thing we may be sure: had justin known the form of words used by the voice from heaven according to our gospels, he would certainly have made use of it in preference to that which he actually found in his memoirs. he is arguing that christ is preexisting god, become incarnate by god's will through the virgin mary, and trypho demands how he can be demonstrated to have been pre-existent, who is said to be filled with the power of the holy ghost, as though he had required this, justin replies that these powers of the spirit have come upon him not because he had need of them, but because they would accomplish scripture, which declared that after him there should be no prophet.( ) the proof of this, he continues, is that, as soon as the child was born, the magi from arabia came to worship him, because even at his birth he was in possession of his power,( ) and after he had grown up like other men by the use of suitable means, he came to { } the river jordan where john was baptizing, and as he went into the water a fire was kindled in the jordan, and the holy ghost descended like a dove. he did not go to the river because he had any need of baptism or of the descent of the spirit, but because of the human race which had fallen under the power of death. now if, instead of the passage actually cited, justin could have quoted the words addressed to jesus by the voice from heaven according to the gospels: "thou art my beloved son; in thee i am well pleased," his argument would have been greatly strengthened by such direct recognition of an already existing, and, as he affirmed, pre-existent divinity in jesus. not having these words in his memoirs of the apostles, however, he was obliged to be content with those which he found there: "thou art my son; this day have i begotten thee;"--words which, in fact, in themselves destroyed the argument for pre-existence, and dated the divine begetting of jesus as the son of god that very day. the passage, indeed, supported those who actually asserted that the holy ghost first entered into jesus at his baptism. these considerations, and the repeated quotation of the same words in the same form, make it clear that justin quotes from a source different from our gospel.( ) in the scanty fragments of the "gospel according to the hebrews" which have been preserved, we find both the incident of the fire kindled in jordan and the words { } of the heavenly voice as quoted by justin. "and as he went up from the water, the heavens were opened, and he saw the holy spirit of god in the form of a dove which came down and entered into him. and a voice came from heaven saying: 'thou art my beloved son; in thee i am well pleased;' and again: 'this day have i begotten thee.' and immediately a great light shone round about the place."( ) epiphanius extracts this passage from the version in use amongst the ebionites, but it is well known that there were many other varying forms of the same gospel; and hilgenfeld,( ) with all probability, conjectures that the version known to epiphanius was no longer in the same purity as that used by justin, but represents the transition stage to the canonical gospels,--adopting the words of the voice which they give without yet discarding the older form. jerome gives another form of the words from the version in use amongst the nazarenes: "factum est autem cum ascendisset dominus de aqua, descendit fons omnis spiritus sancti et requievit super eum, et dixit illi: fili mi, in omnibus prophetis expectabam te ut venires et requiescerem in te, tu es enim requies mea, tu es filius meus primo-genitus qui regnas in sempiternum."( ) this supports justin's reading. regarding the gospel according to the hebrews more must be said hereafter, but when it is remembered that justin, a native of samaria, probably first knew christianity through believers in syria to whose jewish view of christianity he all his { } life adhered, and that these christians almost exclusively used this gospel( ) under various forms and names, it is reasonable to suppose that he also like them knew and made use of it, a supposition increased almost to certainty when it is found that justin quotes words and facts foreign to the canonical gospels which are known to have been contained in it. the argument of justin that jesus did not need baptism may also be compared to another passage of the gospel according to the hebrews preserved by jerome, and which preceded the circumstances narrated above, in which the mother and brethren of jesus say to him that john the baptist is baptizing for the remission of sins, and propose that they should go to be baptized by him. jesus replies, "in what way have i sinned that i should go and be baptized by him?"( ) the most competent critics agree that justin derived the incidents of the fire in jordan and the words spoken by the heavenly voice from the gospel according to the hebrews or some kindred work,( ) and there is every probability that the numerous other quotations in his works differing from our gospels are taken from the same source. the incident of the fire in jordan likewise occurs in the ancient work "prædicatio pauli,"( ) coupled with a { } context which forcibly recalls the passage of the gospel according to the hebrews, which has just been quoted, and apparent allusions to it are found in the sibylline books and early christian literature.( ) credner has pointed out that the marked use which was made of fire or lights at baptism by the church, during early times, probably rose out of this tradition regarding the fire which appeared in jordan at the baptism of jesus.( ) the peculiar form of words used by the heavenly voice according to justin and to the gospel according to the hebrews was also known to several of the fathers.( ) augustine mentions that some mss. in his time contained that reading in luke iii. , although without the confirmation of more ancient greek codices.( ) it is still extant in the codex bezæ (d). the itala version adds to matthew iii. : "and when he was baptized a great light shone round from the water, so that all who had come were afraid" (et cum baptizaretur, lumen ingens circumfulsit de aqua, ita ut timerent omnes qui advenerant); and again at luke iii. it gives the words of the voice in a form agreeing at least in sense with those which justin found in his memoirs of the apostles. { } these circumstances point with certainty to an earlier original corresponding with justin, in all probability the gospel according to the hebrews, and to the subsequent gradual elimination of the passage from the gospels finally adopted by the church for dogmatic reasons, as various sects based on the words doctrines which were at variance with the ever-enlarging belief of the majority.( ) then justin states that the men of his time asserted that the miracles of jesus were performed by magical art [--greek--], "for they ventured to call him a magician and deceiver of the people."( ) this cannot be accepted as a mere version of the charge that jesus cast out demons by beelzebub, but must have been found by justin in his memoirs.( ) in the gospel of nicodemus or acta pilati, the jews accuse jesus before pilate of being a magician,( ) coupled with the assertion that he casts out demons through beelzebub the prince of the demons; and again they simply say: "did we not tell thee that he is a magician?"( ) we shall presently see that justin actually refers to certain acts of pontius pilate in justification of other assertions regarding the trial of jesus.( ) in the clementine recognitions, moreover, the same charge is made by one of the scribes, who says that jesus did not perform his miracles as a prophet, but as a magician.( ) { } oelsus makes a similar charge,( ) and lactantius refers to such an opinion as prevalent among the jews at the time of jesus,( ) which we find confirmed by many passages in talmudic literature.( ) there was indeed a book called "magia jesu christi," of which jesus himself, it was pretended, was the author.( ) in speaking of the trial of jesus, justin says: "for also as the prophet saith, they reviled him and set him on the judgment seat and said: judge for us,"( ) a peculiarity which is not found in the canonical gospels. justin had just quoted the words of isaiah (lxv. , lviii. )... "they now ask of me judgment and dare to draw nigh to god," and then he cites psalm xxii. , : "they pierced my hands and my feet, and upon my vesture they cast lots." he says that this did not happen to david, but was fulfilled in christ, and the expression regarding the piercing the hands and feet referred to the nails of the cross which were driven through his hands and feet. and after he was crucified they cast lots upon his vesture. "and that these things occurred," he continues, "you may learn from the acts drawn up under pontius pilate."( ) he likewise upon another occasion refers to the same acta for confirmation of statements.( ) the gospel of nicodemus or gesta { } pilati, now extant, does not contain the circumstance to which we are now referring, but in contradiction to the statement in the fourth gospel (xviii. , ) the jews in this apocryphal work freely go into the very judgment seat of pilate.( ) teschendorf maintains that the first part of the gospel of nicodemus, or acta pilati, still extant, is the work, with more or less of interpolation, which, existing in the second century, is referred to by justin.( ) a few reasons may here be given against such a conclusion. the fact of jesus being set upon the judgment seat is not contained in the extant acta pilati at all, and therefore this work does not correspond with justin's statement. it seems most unreasonable to suppose that justin should seriously refer roman emperors to a work of this description, so manifestly composed by a christian, and the acta to which he directs them must have been a presumed official document, to which they had access, as of course no other evidence could be of any weight with them.( ) the extant work neither pretends to be, nor has in the slightest degree the form of, an official report. moreover, the prologue attached to it distinctly states that ananias, a provincial warden in the reign of flavius theodosius (towards the middle of the fifth century), found these acts written in hebrew by nicodemus, and that he translated them into greek.( ) the work itself, therefore, only pretends to be a private composition in hebrew, and does not claim any relation to pontius pilate. the greek is very corrupt and { } degraded, and considerations of style alone would assign it to the fifth century, as would still more imperatively the anachronisms with which it abounds. tischendorf considers that tertullian refers to the same work as justin, but it is evident that he infers an official report, for he says distinctly, after narrating the circumstances of the crucifixion and resurrection: "all these facts regarding christ, pilate.... reported to the reigning emperor tiberius."( ) it is extremely probable that in saying this tertullian merely extended the statement of justin. he nowhere states that he himself had seen this report, nor does justin, and as is the case with the latter, some of the facts which tertullian supposes to be reported by pilate are not contained in the apocryphal work.( ) there are still extant some apocryphal writings in the form of official reports made by pilate of the trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of jesus,( ) but none are of very ancient date. it is certain that, on the supposition that pilate may have made an official report of events so important in their estimation, christian writers; with greater zeal than conscience, composed fictitious reports in his name, in the supposed interest of their religion, and there was in that day little or no critical sense to detect and discredit such forgeries. there is absolutely no evidence to show that justin was acquainted with any official report of pilate to the roman emperor, nor indeed is it easy to understand how he could possibly have been, even if such a document existed, and it is most probable, as { } scholten conjectures, that justin merely referred to documents which tradition supposed to have been written, but of which he himself had no personal knowledge.( ) be this as it may, as he considered the incident of the judgment seat a fulfilment of prophecy, there can be little or no doubt that it was narrated in the memoirs which contained "everything relating to jesus christ," and finding it there he all the more naturally assumed that it must have been mentioned in any official report. in narrating the agony in the garden, there are further variations. justin says: "and the passage: 'all my bones are poured out and dispersed like water; my heart has become like wax melting in the midst of my belly,' was a prediction of that which occurred to him that night when they came out against him to the mount of olives to seize him. for in the memoirs composed, i say, by his apostles and their followers, it is recorded that his sweat fell down like drops while he prayed, saying: 'if possible, let this cup pass.'"( ) it will be observed that this is a direct quotation from the memoirs, but there is a material difference from our gospels. luke is the only gospel which mentions the bloody sweat, and there the account reads (xxii. ), "as it were drops of blood falling down to the ground." [--greek--] [--greek--] in addition to the other linguistic differences justin omits the emphatic [--greek--] which gives the whole point to luke's account, and which evidently could not have been in the text of the memoirs. semisch argues that [--greek--] alone, especially in medical phraseology, meant { } "drops of blood," without the addition of [--greek--];(l) but the author of the third gospel did not think so, and undeniably makes use of both, and justin does not. moreover, luke introduces the expression [--greek--] to show the intensity of the agony, whereas justin evidently did not mean to express "drops of blood" at all, his intention in referring to the sweat being to show that the prophecy: "all my bones are poured out, &c, like water," had been fulfilled, with which the reading in his memoirs more closely corresponded. the prayer also so directly quoted decidedly varies from luke xxii. , which reads: "father, if thou be willing to remove this cup from me ": [--greek--] [--greek--] in matthew xxvi. this part of the prayer is more like the reading of justin: "father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me "--[--greek--] but that gospel has nothing of the sweat of agony, which excludes it from consideration. in another place justin also quotes the prayer in the garden as follows: "he prayed, saying: 'father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me;' and besides this, praying, he said: 'not as i wish, but as thou willest.'"( ) the first phrase in this place, apart from some transposition of words, agrees with matthew; but even if this reading be preferred of the two, the absence of the incident of the sweat of agony from the first gospel renders it impossible to regard it as the source; and, further, the second part of the prayer which is here { } given differs materially both from the first and third gospels. [--greek--] the two parts of this prayer, moreover, seem to have been separate in the memoirs, for not only does justin not quote the latter portion at all in dial. , but here he markedly divides it from the former. justin knows nothing of the episode of the angel who strengthens jesus, which is related in luke xxii. . there is, however, a still more important point to mention: that although verses , with the incidents of the angel and the bloody sweat are certainly in a great number of mss., they are omitted by some of the oldest codices, as for instance by the alexandrian and vatican mss.( ) it is evident that in this part justin's memoirs differed from our first and third gospels much in the same way that they do from each other. in the same chapter justin states that when the jews went out to the mount of olives to take jesus, "there was not even a single man to run to his help as a guiltless person."( ) this is in direct contradiction to all the gospels,( ) and justin not only completely ignores the episode of the ear of malchus, but in this passage in the sinaitic codex they are marked for omission by a later hand. lachmann brackets, and drs. westcott and hort double-bracket them. the ms. evidence may bo found in detail in scrivener's int. to crit. n. t. nd ed. p. , stated in the way which is most favourable for the authenticity. { } excludes it, and his gospel could not have contained it.( ) luke is specially marked in generalizing the resistance of those about jesus to his capture: "when they which were about him saw what would follow, they said unto him: lord, shall we smite with the sword? and a certain one of them smote the servant of the high priest and cut off his right ear."( ) as this episode follows immediately after the incident of the bloody sweat and prayer in the garden, and the statement of justin occurs in the very same chapter in which he refers to them, this contradiction further tends to confirm the conclusion that justin employed a different gospel. it is quite in harmony with the same peculiar account that justin states that, "after he (jesus) was crucified, all his friends (the apostles) stood aloof from him, having denied him( ).... (who, after he rose from the dead, and after they were convinced by himself that before his passion he had told them that he must suffer these things, and that they were foretold by the prophets, repented of their flight from him when he was crucified), and while remaining among them he sang praises to god, as is made evident in the memoirs of the apostles."( ) justin, therefore, repeatedly asserts that _after_ the crucifixion all the apostles forsook him, and he extends the denial of peter { } to the whole of the twelve. it is impossible to consider this distinct and reiterated affirmation a mere extension of the passage: "they all forsook him and fled "[--greek--],( ) when jesus was arrested, which proceeded mainly from momentary fear.( ) justin seems to indicate that the disciples withdrew from and denied jesus when they saw him crucified, from doubts which consequently arose as to his messianic character. now, on the contrary, the canonical gospels represent the disciples as being together after the crucifixion.( ) justin does not exhibit any knowledge of the explanation given by the angels at the sepulchre as to christ's having foretold all that had happened,( ) but makes this proceed from jesus himself. indeed, he makes no mention of these angels at all. there are some traces elsewhere of the view that the disciples were offended after the crucifixion.( ) hilgenfeld points out the appearance of special petrine tendency in this passage, in the fact that it is not peter alone, but all the apostles, who are said to deny their master; and he suggests that an indication of the source from which justin quoted may be obtained from the kindred quotation in the epistle to the smyrnæans (iii.) by pseudo-ignatius: "for i know that also after his resurrection he was in the flesh, and i believe that he is so now. and when he came to those that were with peter, he said to them: lay hold, handle me, and see that i am { } not an incorporeal spirit. and immediately they touched him and believed, being convinced by his flesh and spirit." jerome, it will be remembered, found this in the gospel according to the hebrews used by the nazarenes, which he translated,( ) from which we have seen that justin in all probability derived other particulars differing from the canonical gospels, and with which we shall constantly meet, in a similar way, in examining justin's quotations. origen also found it in a work called the "doctrine of peter" [--greek--],( ) which must have been akin to the "preaching of peter" [--greek--].( ) hilgenfeld suggests that, in the absence of more certain information, there is no more probable source from which justin may have derived his statement than the gospel according to peter, or the gospel according to the hebrews, which is known to have contained so much in the same spirit.( ) it may well be expected that, at least in touching such serious matters as the crucifixion and last words of jesus, justin must adhere with care to authentic records, and not fall into the faults of loose quotation from memory, free handling of texts, and careless omissions and additions, by which those who maintain the identity of the memoirs with the canonical gospels seek to explain the systematic variations of justin's quotations from the text of the latter. it will, however, be found that here also marked discrepancies occur. justin says, after referring to numerous prophecies regarding the treatment of christ: "and again, when he says: 'they spake with their lips, they wagged the head, saying: let him { } deliver himself.' that all these things happened to the christ from the jews, you can ascertain. for when he was being crucified they shot out the lips, and wagged their heads, saying: 'let him who raised the dead deliver himself.'"( ) and in another place, referring to the same psalm (xxii.) as a prediction of what was to happen to jesus, justin says: "for they who saw him crucified also wagged their heads, each one of them, and distorted [--greek--] their lips, and sneeringly and in scornful irony repeated among themselves those words which are also written in the memoirs of his apostles: he declared himself the son of god; (let him) come down, let him walk about; let god save him."( ) in both of these passages justin directly appeals to written authority. the [--greek--] may leave the source of the first uncertain,( ) but the second is distinctly stated to contain the actual words "written in the memoirs of his apostles," and it seems reasonable to suppose that the former passage is also derived from them. it is scarcely necessary to add that both differ very materially from the canonical gospels.( ) the taunt canon westcott admits that in the latter passage justin does profess to give the exact words which were recorded in the memoirs, and that they are not to be found in our gospels; "but," he apologetically adds, "we do find these others so closely connected with them that few readers would feel the difference"! this is a specimen of apologetic criticism. dr. westcott goes on to say that as no ms. or father known to him has preserved any reading more closely resembling justin's, "if it appear not to be deducible from our gospels, due allowance being made for the object which he had in view, its source) must remain concealed." on the canon, p. f. cf. matt, xxvii. -- ; mark xv. -- ; luke xxiii. -- . { } contained in the first of these passages is altogether peculiar to justin: "let him who raised the dead deliver himself" [--greek--];( ) and even if justin did not himself indicate a written source, it would not be reasonable to suppose that he should himself for the first time record words to which he refers as the fulfilment of prophecy.( ) it would be still more ineffectual to endeavour to remove the difficulty presented by such a variation by attributing the words to tradition, at the same time that it is asserted that justin's memoirs were actually identical with the gospels. no aberration of memory could account for such a variation, and it is impossible that justin should prefer tradition regarding a form of words, so liable to error and alteration, with written gospels within his reach. besides, to argue that justin affirmed that the truth of his statement could be ascertained [--greek--], whilst the words which he states to have been spoken were not actually recorded, would be against all reason. the second of the mocking speeches ( ) of the lookers-on is referred distinctly to the memoirs of the apostles, but is also, with the accompanying description, foreign the nearest parallel in our gospels is in luke xxiii. . "he saved others, let him save himself if this man be the christ of god, his chosen." [--greek--] semisch argues that both forms are quotations of the same sentence, and that there is consequently a contradiction in the very quotations themselves; but there can be no doubt whatever that the two phrases are distinct parts of the mockery, and the very same separation and variation occur in each of the canonical gospels. die ap. denkw. mart. just., p. ; cf. hilgenfeld, die ew. justin's, p. . { } to our gospels. the nearest approach to it occurs in our first gospel, and we subjoin both passages for comparison: [--greek--] it is evident that justin's version is quite distinct from this, and cannot have been taken from our gospels,( ) although professedly derived from the memoirs of the apostles. justin likewise mentions the cry of jesus on the cross, "o god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?" [--greek--];( ) as a fulfilment of the words of the psalm, which he quotes here, and elsewhere,( ) with the peculiar addition of the septuagint version, "attend to me" [--greek--], which, however, he omits when giving the cry of jesus, thereby showing that he follows a written source which did not contain it, for the quotation of the psalm, and of { } the cry which is cited to show that it refers to christ, immediately follow each other. he apparently knows nothing whatever of the chaldaic cry, "eli, eli, lama sabacthani" of the gospels.( ) the first and second gospels give the words of the cry from the chaldaic differently from justin, from the version of the lxx., and from each other. matthew xxvii. , [--greek--] the third gospel makes no mention at all of this cry, but instead has one altogether foreign to the other gospels: "and jesus cried with a loud voice, and said: father, into thy hands i commend my spirit: and having said this, he expired."( ) justin has this cry also, and in the same form as the third gospel. he says: "for when he (jesus) was giving up his spirit on the cross, he said: 'father, into thy hands i commend my spirit,' as i have also learned from the memoirs."( ) justin's gospel, therefore, contained both cries, and as even the first two synoptics mention a second cry of jesus( ) without, however, giving the words, it is not surprising that other gospels should have existed which included both. even if we had no trace of this cry in any other ancient work, there would be no ground for asserting that justin must have derived it from the third gospel, for if there be any historical truth in the statement that these words were actually spoken by jesus, it follows of course that they may have been, and probably were, reported in a dozen christian writings now { } no longer extent, and in all probability they existed in some of the many works referred to in the prologue to the third gospel. both cries, however, are given in the gospel of nieodemus, or gesta pilati, to which reference has already so frequently been made. in the greek versions edited by teschendorf we find only the form contained in luke. in the codex a, the passage reads: "and crying with a loud voice, jesus said: father, baddach ephkid rouchi, that is, interpreted: 'into thy hands i commend my spirit;' and having said this he gave up the ghost."(l) in the codex b, the text is: "then jesus having called out with a loud voice: 'father, into thy hands will i commend my spirit,' expired."( ) in the ancient latin version, however, both cries are given: "and about the ninth hour jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, hely, hely, lama zabacthani, which interpreted is: 'my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me.' and after this, jesus said: 'father, into thy hands i commend my spirit': and saying this, he gave up the ghost."( ) one of the codices of the same apocryphal work likewise gives the taunting speeches of the jews in a form more nearly approaching that of justin's memoirs { } than any found in our gospels. "and the jews that stood and looked ridiculed him, and said: if thou saidst truly that thou art the son of god, come down from the cross, and at once, that we may believe in thee. others ridiculing, said: he saved others, he healed others, and restored the sick, the paralytic, lepers, demoniacs, the blind, the lame, the dead, and himself he cannot heal."( ) the fact that justin actually refers to certain acta pilati in connection with the crucifixion renders this coincidence all the more important. other texts of this gospel read: "and the chief priests, and the rulers with them, derided him, saying: he saved others, let him save himself; if he is the son of god, let him come down from the cross."( ) it is clear from the whole of justin's treatment of the narrative, that he followed a gospel adhering more closely than the canonical to the psalm xxii., but yet with peculiar variations from it. our gospels differ very much from each other; justin's memoirs of the apostles in like manner differed from them. it had its characteristic features clearly and sharply defined. in this way his systematic variations are natural and perfectly intelligible, but they become totally inexplicable if it be supposed that, having our gospels for his source, he thus ev. niood., pars. i. a. x.; tischendorf ev. apocr., p. ; cf. thilo. cod. apocr. n. t., p. ; fabricius, cod. apocr. n. t., i. p. ; tiachendorf ib., p. . there are differences between all these texts--indeed there are scarcely two mss. which agree--clearly indicating that wo have now nothing but corrupt versions of a more ancient text. { } persistently and in so arbitrary a way ignored, modified, or contradicted their statements. upon two occasions justin distinctly states that the jews sent persons throughout the world to spread calumnies against christians. "when you knew that he had risen from the dead, and ascended into heaven, as the prophets had foretold, not only did you (the jews) not repent of the wickedness which you had committed, but at that time you selected and sent forth from jerusalem throughout the land chosen men, saying that the atheistic heresy of the christians had arisen/' &c.( ).... "from a certain jesus, a galilrean impostor, whom we crucified, but his disciples stole him by night from the tomb where he had been laid when he was unloosed from the cross, and they now deceive men, saying that he has risen from the dead and ascended into heaven."( ) this circumstance is not mentioned by our gospels, but, reiterated twice by justin in almost the same words, it was in all probability contained in the memoirs. eusebius quotes the passage from justin, without comment, evidently on account of the information which it conveyed. these instances, which, although far from complete, have already occupied too much of our space, show that justin quotes from the memoirs of the apostles many statements and facts of gospel history which are not only foreign to our gospels, but in some cases contradictory to them, whilst the narrative of the most solemn events in the life of jesus presents distinct and systematic variations from parallel passages in the synoptic records. { } it will now be necessary to compare his general quotations from the same memoirs with the canonical gospels, and here a very wide field opens before us. as we have already stated, justin's works teem with these quotations, and to take them all in detail would be impossible within the limits of this work. such a course, moreover, is unnecessary. it may be broadly stated that even those who maintain the use of the canonical gospels can only point out two or three passages out of this vast array which verbally agree with them.( ) this extraordinary anomaly--on the supposition that justin's memoirs were in fact our gospels--is, as we have mentioned, explained by the convenient hypothesis that justin quotes imperfectly from memory, interweaves and modifies texts, and in short freely manipulates these gospels according to his argument. even strained to the uttermost, however, could this be accepted as a reasonable explanation of such systematic variation, that only twice or thrice out of the vast number of his quotations does he literally agree with passages in them? in order to illustrate the case with absolute impartiality we shall first take the instances brought forward as showing agreement with our synoptic gospels. teschendorf only cites two passages in support of his affirmation that justin makes use of our first gospel.( ) it might be supposed that, in selecting these, at least two might have been produced literally agreeing, but this is { } not the case, and this may be taken as an illustration of the almost universal variation of justin's quotations. the first of teschendorf s examples is the supposed use of matthew viii. , : "many shall come from the east and from the west, and shall sit down," &c. [--greek--]. now this passage is repeated by justin no less than three times in three very distinct parts of his dialogue with trypho,( ) with a uniform variation from the text of matthew--_they_ shall come from the _west_ and from the east," &c. &c. [--greek--]( ) that a historical saying of jesus should be reproduced in many gospels, and that no particular work can have any prescriptive right to it, must be admitted, so that even if the passage in justin agreed literally with our first synoptic, it would not afford any proof of the actual use of that gospel; but when on the contrary justin upon three several occasions, and at distinct intervals of time, repeats the passage with the same persistent variation from the reading in matthew, not only can it not be ascribed to that gospel, but there is reason to conclude that justin derived it from another source. it may be added that [--greek--] is anything but a word uncommon in the vocabulary of justin, and that elsewhere, for instance, he twice quotes a passage similar to one in matthew, in which, amongst other variations, he reads "_many_ shall come [--greek--]," instead of the phrase found in that gospel.( ) the second example adduced by tischendorf is the supposed quotation of matthew xii. ; but in order fully { } to comprehend the nature of the affirmation, we quote the context of the gospel and of justin in parallel columns:-- [--greek--] now it is clear that justin here directly professes to quote from the memoirs, and consequently that accuracy may be expected; but passing over the preliminary substitution of "some of your nation," for "certain of the scribes and pharisees," although it recalls the "some of them," and "others," by which the parallel passage, otherwise so different, is introduced in luke xi. , , ff.,( ) the question of the jews, which should be literal, is quite different from that of the first gospel, whilst there are variations in the reply of jesus, which, if not so important, are still undeniable. we cannot compare with the first gospel the parallel passages in the second and third gospels without recognizing that other works may have narrated the { } same episode with similar variations, and whilst the distinct differences which exist totally exclude the affirmation that justin quotes from matthew, everything points to the conclusion that he makes use of another source. this is confirmed by another important circumstance. after enlarging during the remainder of the chapter upon the example of the people of nineveh, justin commences the next by returning to the answer of jesus, and making the following statement: "and though all of your nation were acquainted with these things which occurred to jonah, and christ proclaimed among you, that he would give you the sign of jonah, exhorting you at least after his resurrection from the dead to repent of your evil deeds, and like the ninevites to supplicate god, that your nation and city might not be captured and destroyed as it has been destroyed; yet not only have you not repented on learning his resurrection from the dead, but as i have already said,( ) you sent chosen( ) and select men throughout all the world, proclaiming that an atheistic and impious heresy had arisen from a certain jesus, a galilaean impostor," &c. &c.( ) now not only do our gospels not mention this mission, as we have already pointed out, but they do not contain the exhortation to repent at least after the resurrection of jesus here referred to, and which evidently must have formed part of the episode in the memoirs. tischendorf does not produce any other instances of supposed quotations of justin from matthew, but rests his case upon these. as these are the best examples apparently which he can point out, we may judge of the { } weakness of his argument. do wette divides the quotations of justin which may be compared with our first and third gospels into several categories. regarding the first class, he says: "some agree quite literally, which, however, is seldom: "( ) and under this head he can only collect three passages of matthew and refer to one of luke. of the three from matthew the first is that, viii. , ,( ) also brought forward by teschendorf, of which we have already disposed. the second is matt. v. : "for i say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed that of the scribes and pharisees, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." a parallel passage to this exists in dial. , a chapter in which there are several quotations not found in our gospels at all, with the exception that the first words, "for i say unto you that," are not in justin. we shall speak of this passage presently. de wette's third passage is matt. vii. : "every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire," which, with the exception of one word, "but," at the commencement of the sentence in justin, also agrees with his quotation.( ) in these two short passages there are no peculiarities specially pointing to the first gospel as their source, and it cannot be too often repeated that the mere coincidence of short historical sayings in two works by no means warrants the conclusion that the one is dependent on the other. in order, however, to enable the reader to form a correct estimate of the value of the similarity of the two passages above noted, and also at the same time to examine a considerable body of evidence, selected with { } evident impartiality, we propose to take all justin's readings of the sermon on the mount, from which the above passages are taken, and compare them with our gospels. this should furnish a fair test of the composition of the memoirs of the apostles. taking first, for the sake of continuity, the first apology, we find that chapters xv., xvi., xvii., are composed almost entirely of examples of what jesus himself taught, introduced by the remark with which chapter xiv. closes, that: "brief and concise sentences were uttered by him, for he was not a sophist, but his word was the power of god."( ) it may broadly be affirmed that, with the exception of the few words quoted above by de wette, not a single quotation of the words of jesus in these three chapters agrees with the canonical gospels. we shall however confine ourselves at present to the sermon on the mount. we must mention that justin's text is quite continuous, except where we have inserted asterisks. we subjoin justin's quotations, together with' the parallel passages in our gospels, side by side, for greater facility of comparison.( ) [--greek--] how completely this description contradicts the representation of the fourth gospel of the discourses of jesus. it seems clearly to indicate that justin had no knowledge of that gospel. it need not be said that the variations between the quotations of justin and the text of our gospels must be looked for only in the greek. for the sake of the reader unacquainted with greok, however, we shall endeavour as far as possible to indicate in translation where differences exist, although this cannot of course be fully done, nor often, without being more literal than is desirable. whore it is not necessary to amend the authorized version of the new testament for the sake of more closely following the text, and marking differences from justin, wo shall adopt it. we divide the quotations where desirable by initial letters, in order to assist reference at the end of our quotations from the sermon on the mount. { } [---greek---] matt. v. , , it will be remembered, are repeated with some variation and also reversed in order, and with a totally different context, matt, xviii. , . the latter verse, the greek of the concluding part of which we give above, approximates more nearly in form to justin's, but is still widely different. "and if thine eye ('right' omitted) offend thee pluck it out and cast it from theo; it is good for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire." the sequence of matt. v. , , points specially to it. the double occurrence of this passage, however, with a different context, and with the order reversed in matthew, renders it almost certain that the two passages a. and b. were separate in the memoirs. the reading of mark ix. , is equally distinct from justin's: and if thine eye offend thee cast it out [--greek--]; it is good for thee [--greek--] to enter into the kingdom of god [--greek--] with one eye rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell, [--greek--] { } [---greek---] { } [---greek---] in the first gospel the subject breaks off at the end of v. . v. may be compared with justin's continuation, but it is fundamentally different. the parallel passages in luke vi. , , present still greater variations. we have given vi. above, as nearer justin than matt. v. . it will be remarked that to find a parallel for justin's continuation, without break, of the subject, we must jump from matt. v. , , to vi. , . { } [---greek---] this phrase, it will bo observed, is also introduced higher up in the passage, and its repetition in such a manner, with the same variations, emphatically demonstrates the unity of the whole quotation. there is no parallel to this in the first gospel. matt. v. , is too remote in sense as well as language. the first part of v. is quite different from the context in justin: "that ye may be sons of your father which is in heaven: for he maketh," &c, &c. { } [---greek---] { } [---greek---] { } [---greek---] { } [---greek---] { } [---greek---] { } [---greek---] { } [---greek---] { } [---greek---] we have taken the whole of justin's quotations from the sermon on the mount not only because, adopting so large a test, there can be no suspicion that we select passages for any special purpose, but also because, on the contrary, amongst these quotations are more of the passages claimed as showing the use of our gospels than any series which could have been selected. it will have been observed that most of the passages follow each other in unbroken sequence in justin, for with the exception of a short break between y and the whole extract down to the end of is continuous, as indeed, after another brief interruption at the end of i, it is again to the close of the very long and remarkable passage k. with two exceptions, therefore, the whole of these quotations from the sermon on the mount occur consecutively in two succeeding chapters of justin's first apology, and one passage follows in the next chapter. only a single passage comes from a distant part of the dialogue with trypho. these passages are bound together by clear unity of idea and context, and as, where there is a separation of sentences in his gospel, justin clearly marks it by [--greek--], there is every reason to decide that those quotations which are continuous in form and in argument were likewise consecutive in the memoirs. now the hypothesis that these quotations are from the { } canonical gospels requires the assumption of the fact that justin, with singular care, collected from distant and scattered portions of those gospels a series of passages in close sequence to each other, forming a whole unknown to them but complete in itself, and yet, although this is carefully performed, he at the same time with the most systematic carelessness misquoted and materially altered almost every precept he professes to cite. the order of the canonical gospels is as entirely set at naught as their language is disregarded. as hilgenfeld has pointed out, throughout the whole of this portion of his quotations the undeniable endeavour after accuracy, on the one hand, is in the most glaring contradiction with the monstrous carelessness on the other, if it be supposed that our gospels are the source from which justin quotes. nothing is more improbable than the conjecture that he made use of the canonical gospels, and we must accept the conclusion that justin quotes with substantial correctness the expressions in the order in which he found them in his peculiar gospel.( ) it is a most arbitrary proceeding to dissect a passage, quoted by justin as a consecutive and harmonious whole, and finding parallels more or less approximate to its various phrases scattered up and down distant parts of our gospels, scarcely one of which is not materially different from the reading of justin, to assert that he is quoting these gospels freely from memory, altering, excising, combining, and interweaving texts, and introverting their order, but nevertheless making use of them and not of others. it is perfectly obvious that such an assertion is nothing but the merest assumption. our synoptic gospels themselves condemn { } it utterly, for precisely similar differences of order and language exist in them and distinguish between them. not only the language but the order of a quotation must have its due weight, and we have no right to dismember a passage and, discovering fragmentary parallels in various parts of the gospels, to assert that it is compiled from them and not derived, as it stands, from another source.( ) as an illustration from our gospels, let us for a moment suppose the "gospel according to luke" to have been lost, like the "gospel according to the hebrews" and so many others. in the works of one of the fathers, we discover the following quotation from an unnamed evangelical work: "and he said unto them [--greek--]: the harvest truly is great but the labourers are few: pray ye therefore the lord of the harvest that he would send forth labourers into his harvest. go your ways: [--greek--] behold i send you forth as lambs [--greek--] in the midst of wolves." following the system adopted in regard to justin, apologetic critics would of course maintain that this was a compilation from memory of passages quoted freely from our first gospel, that is to say matt. ix. . "then saith he unto his disciples [--greek--] the harvest," &c, and matt. x. , "behold i [--greek--] send you forth as sheep [--greek--] in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore," &c, which, with the differences which we have indicated, agree. it would probably be in vain for the arguments of apologetic criticism, the reader may be referred to canon westcott's work on the canon, p. -- . dr. westcott does not, of course, deny the fact that justin's quotations are different from the text of our gospels, but he accounts for his variations ou grounds which seem to us purely imaginary. it is evident that, so long as there are such variations to be explained away, at least no proof of identity is possible. { } to argue that the quotation indicated a continuous order, and the variations combined to confirm the probability of a different source, and still more so to point out that, although parts of the quotation separated from their context might to a certain extent correspond with scattered verses in the first gospel, such a circumstance was no proof that the quotation was taken from that and from no other gospel. the passage, however, is a literal quotation from luke x. , , which, as we have assumed, had been lost. again, still supposing the third gospel no longer extant, we might find the following quotation in a work of the fathers: "take heed to yourselves [--greek--] of the leaven of the pharisees, which is hypocrisy [--greek--]. for there is nothing covered up [--greek--] which shall not be revealed, and hid which shall not be known." it would of course be affirmed that this was evidently a combination of two verses of our first gospel quoted almost literally, with merely a few very immaterial slips of memory in the parts we note, and the explanatory words "which is hypocrisy" introduced by the father, and not a part of the quotation at all. the two verses are matt. xvi. : "beware and [--greek--] take heed of the leaven of the pharisees and sadducees" [--greek--] and matt. x. .... "for [--greek--] there is nothing covered [--greek--] that shall not be revealed, and hid that shall not be known." the sentence would in fact be divided as in the case of justin, and each part would have its parallel pointed out in separate portions of the gospel. how wrong such a system is--and it is precisely that which is adopted with regard to justin--is clearly established by the fact that the quotation, { } instead of being such a combination, is simply taken from the gospel according to luke xii. , , as it stands. to give one more example, and such might easily be multiplied, if our second gospel had been lost, and the following passage were met with in one of the fathers without its source being indicated, what would be the argument of those who insist that justin's quotations, though differing from our gospels, were yet taken from them? "if any one have [--greek--] ears to hear let him hear. and he said unto them: take heed what [--greek--] ye hear: with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you: and more shall be given unto you. for he [--greek--] that hath to him shall be given, and he [--greek--] that hath not from him shall be taken even that which he hath." upon the principle on which justin's quotations are treated, it would certainly be affirmed positively that this passage was a quotation from our first and third gospels combined and made from memory. the exigencies of the occasion might probably cause the assertion to be made that the words: "and he said to them," really indicated a separation of the latter part of the quotation from the preceding, and that the father thus showed that the passage was not consecutive; and as to the phrase: "and more shall be given unto you," that it was evidently an addition of the father. the passage would be dissected, and its different members compared with scattered sentences, and declared almost literal quotations from the canonical gospels: matt. xiii. . he that hath [--greek--] ears to hear let him hear."(l) luke viii. , "take heed therefore how [--greek--] ye hear." matt. vii. ... "with what measure ye { } mete it shall be measured to you."( ) matt. xiii. : "for whosoever [--greek--] hath, to him shall be given (and he shall have abundance); but whosoever [--greek--] hath not from him shall be taken even that which he hath." a in spite of these ingenious assertions, however, the quotation in reality is literally and consecutively taken from mark iv. -- . these examples may suffice to show that any argument which commences by the assumption that the order of a passage quoted may be entirely disregarded, and that it is sufficient to find parallels scattered irregularly up and down the gospels to warrant the conclusion that the passage is compiled from them, and is not a consecutive quotation from some other source, is utterly unfounded and untenable. the supposition of a lost gospel which has just been made to illustrate this argument is, however, not a mere supposition as applied to justin but a fact, for we no longer have the gospel according to peter nor that according to the hebrews, not to mention the numerous other works in use in the early church. the instances we have given show the importance of the order as well as the language of justin's quotations, and while they prove the impossibility of demonstrating that a consecutive passage which differs not only in language but in order from the parallels in our gospels must be derived from them, they likewise prove the probability that such passages are actually quoted from a different source. if we examine further, however, in the same way, quotations which differ merely in language, we arrive at the very same conclusion. supposing the third gospel to be lost, what would be the source assigned to the { } following quotation from an unnamed gospel in the work of one of the fathers? "no servant [--greek--] can serve two lords, for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. ye cannot serve god and mammon." of course the passage would be claimed as a quotation from memory of matt. vi. , with which it perfectly corresponds with the exception of the addition of the second word [--greek--], which, it would no doubt be argued, is an evident and very natural amplification of the simple [--greek--] of the first gospel. yet this passage, only differing by the single word from matthew, is a literal quotation from the gospel according to luke xvi. . or, to take another instance, supposing the third gospel to be lost, and the following passage quoted, from an unnamed source, by one of the fathers: "beware [--greek--] of the scribes which desire to walk in long robes, and love [--greek--] greetings in the markets, and chief seats in the synagogues and uppermost places at feasts; which devour widows( ) houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: these shall receive greater damnation." this would without hesitation be declared a quotation from memory of mark xii.. - ".... beware [--greek--] of the scribes which desire to walk in long robes and greetings in the markets, and chief seats in the synagogues and uppermost places at feasts: which devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: these shall receive," &c. it is however a literal quotation of luke xx. , ; yet probably it would be in vain to submit to apologetic critics that possibly, not to say probably, the passage was not derived from mark but from a lost gospel. to quote one more instance, let us { } suppose the "gospel according to mark" no longer extant, and that in some early work there existed the following quotation: "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye [--greek--] of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of god." this would of course be claimed as a quotation from memory of matt. xix. ,( ) with which it agrees with the exception of the substitution of [--greek--] for the [--greek--]. it would not the less have been an exact quotation from mark x. .( ) we have repeatedly pointed out that the actual agreement of any saying of jesus, quoted by one of the early fathers from an unnamed source, with a passage in our gospels is by no means conclusive evidence that the quotation was actually derived from that gospel. it must be apparent that literal agreement in reporting short and important sayings is not in itself so surprising as to constitute proof that, occurring in two histories, the one must have copied from the other. the only thing which is surprising is that such frequent inaccuracy should occur. when we add, however, the fact that most of the larger early evangelical works, including our synoptic gospels, must have been compiled out of the same original sources, and have been largely indebted to each other, the common possession of such sayings becomes { } a matter of natural occurrence. moreover, it must be admitted even by apologetic critics that, in a case of such vast importance as the report of sayings of jesus, upon the verbal accuracy of which the most essential doctrines of christianity depend, it cannot be considered strange if various gospels report the same saying in the same words. practically, the synoptic gospels differ in their reports a great deal more than is right or desirable; but we may take them as an illustration of the fact, that identity of passages, where the source is unnamed, by no means proves that such passages in a work of the early fathers were derived from one gospel, and not from any other. let us suppose our first gospel to have been lost, and the following quotation from an unnamed source to be found in an early work: "every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire." this being in literal agreement with luke iii. , would certainly be declared by modern apologists conclusive proof that the father was acquainted with that gospel, and although the context in the work of the father might for instance be: "ye shall know them from their works, and every tree," &c, &c, and yet in the third gospel, the context is: "and now also, the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: and every tree," &c, that would by no means give them pause. the explanation of combination of texts, and quotation from memory, is sufficiently elastic for every emergency. now the words in question might in reality be a quotation from the lost gospel according to matthew, in which they twice occur, so that here is a passage which is literally repeated three times, matthew iii. , vii. , and luke iii . in matthew iii. , and in the third gospel, the words are part of a saying of john the { } baptist; whilst in matthew vii. , they are given as part of the sermon on the mount, with a different context, this passage is actually quoted by justin (k ), with the context: "ye shall know them from their works," which is different from that in any of the three places in which the words occur in our synoptics and, on the grounds we have clearly established, it cannot be considered in any case as necessarily a quotation from our gospels, but, on the contrary, there are good reasons for the very opposite conclusion. another illustration of this may be given, by supposing the gospel of luke to be no longer extant, and the following sentence in one of the fathers: "and ye shall be hated by all men, for my name's sake." these very words occur both in matthew x. , and mark xiii. , in both of which places there follow the words: "but he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved." there might here have been a doubt, as to whether the father derived the words from the first or second gospel, but they would have been ascribed either to the one or to the other, whilst in reality they were taken from a different work altogether, luke xxi. . here again, we have the same words in three gospels. in how many more may not the same passage have been found? one more instance to conclude. the following passage might be quoted from an unnamed source by one of the fathers: "heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." if the gospel according to mark were no longer extant, this would be claimed as a quotation either from matthew xxiv. , or luke xxi. , in both of which it occurs, but, notwithstanding, the father might not have been acquainted with either of them, and simply have quoted from mark { } xiii. . and here again, the three gospels contain the same passage without variation. now in all these cases, not only is the selection of the gospel from which the quotation was actually taken completely an open question, since they all have it, but still more is the point uncertain, when it is considered that many other works may also have contained it, historical sayings being naturally common property. does the agreement of the quotation with a passage which is equally found in the three gospels prove the existence of all of them? and if not, how is the gospel from which it was actually taken to be distinguished? if it be difficult to do so, how much more when the possibility and probability, demonstrated by the agreement of the three extant, that it might have formed part of a dozen other works is taken into account in the case of justin, it is simply absurd and unreasonable, in the face of his persistent variation from our gospels, to assert positively that his quotations are derived from them. it must have been apparent to all that, throughout his quotation from the "sermon on the mount," justin follows an order which is quite different from that in our synoptic gospels, and as might have been expected, the inference of a different source, which is naturally suggested by this variation in order, is more than confirmed by persistent and continuous variation in language. if it be true, that examples of confusion of quotation are to be found in the works of clement of alexandria, origen, and other fathers, it must at the same time be remembered, that these are quite exceptional, and we are { } scarcely in a position to judge how far confusion of memory may not have arisen from reminiscences of other forms of evangelical expressions occurring in apocryphal works, with which we know the fathers to have been well acquainted. the most vehement asserter of the identity of the memoirs with our gospels, however, must absolutely admit as a fact, explain it as he may, that variation from our gospel readings is the general rule in justin's quotations, and agreement with them the very rare exception. now, such a phenomenon is elsewhere unparalleled in those times, when memory was more cultivated than with us in these days of cheap printed books, and it is unreasonable to charge justin with such universal want of memory and carelessness about matters which he held so sacred, merely to support a foregone conclusion, when the recognition of a difference of source, indicated in every direction, is so much more simple, natural, and justifiable. it is argued that justin's quotations from the old testament likewise present constant variation from the text. this is true to a considerable extent, but they are not so persistently inaccurate as the quotations we are examining, supposing them to be derived from our gospels. this pica, however, is of no avail, for it is obvious that the employment of the old testament is not established merely by inaccurate citations; and it is quite undeniable that the use of certain historical documents out of many of closely similar, and in many parts probably identical, character cannot be proved by anonymous quotations differing from anything actually in these documents. there are very many of the quotations of justin which bear unmistakable marks of exactness and verbal { } accuracy, but which yet differ materially from our gospels, and most of his quotations from the sermon on the mount are of this kind. for instance, justin introduces the passages which we have marked a, b, c, with the words: "he (jesus) spoke thus of chastity,"(l) and after giving the quotations, a, b, and c, the first two of which, although finding a parallel in two consecutive verses, matthew v. , , are divided by the separating [--greek--], and therefore do not appear to have been united in his gospel, justin continues: "just as even those who with the sanction of human law contract a second marriage are sinners in the eye of our master, so also are those who look upon a woman to lust after her. for not only he who actually commits adultery is rejected by him, but also he who desires to commit adultery, since not our acts alone are open before god, but also our thoughts."( ) now it is perfectly clear that justin here professes to give the actual words of jesus, and then moralizes upon them; and both the quotation and his own subsequent paraphrase of it lose all their significance, if we suppose that justin did not correctly quote in the first instance, but actually commences by altering the text.( ) these passages a, b, and c, however, have all marked and characteristic variations from the gospel text, but as we have already shown, there is no reason for asserting that they are not accurate verbal quotations from another gospel. { } the passage is likewise a professed quotation,( ) but not only does it differ in language, but it presents deliberate transpositions in order which clearly indicate that justin's source was not our gospels. the nearest parallels in our gospels are found in matthew v. , followed by . the same remarks apply to the next passage �, which is introduced as a distinct quotation,( ) but which, like the rest, differs materially, linguistically and in order, from the canonical gospels. the whole of the passage is consecutive, and excludes the explanation of a mere patchwork of passages loosely put together, and very imperfectly quoted from memory. justin states that jesus taught that we should communicate to those who need, and do nothing for vain glory, and he then gives the very words of jesus in an unbroken and clearly continuous discourse. christians are to give to all who ask, and not merely to those from whom they hope to receive again, which would be no new thing--even the publicans do that; but christians must do more. they are not to lay up riches on earth, but in heaven, for it would not profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his soul; therefore, the teacher a second time repeats the injunction that christians should lay up treasures in heaven. if the unity of thought which binds this passage so closely together were not sufficient to prove that it stood in justin's gospel in the form and order in which he quotes it, the requisite evidence would be supplied by the repetition at its close of the injunction: "lay up, therefore, in the heavens," &c. it is impossible that justin should, through defect of memory, quote a second time in so short a passage the same injunction, if the passage were not thus appropriately terminated in { } his gospel. the common sense of the reader must at once perceive that it is impossible that justin, professedly quoting words of jesus, should thus deliberately fabricate a discourse rounded off by the repetition of one of its opening admonitions, with the addition of an argumentative "therefore." he must have found it so in the gospel from which he quotes. nothing indeed but the difficulty of explaining the marked variations presented by this passage, on the supposition that justin must quote from our gospels, could lead apologists to insinuate such a process of compilation, or question the consecutive character of this passage. the nearest parallels to the dismembered parts of this quotation, presenting everywhere serious variations, however, can only be found in the following passages in the order in which we cite them, matthew v. , luke vi. , matthew vi. , , xvi. , and a repetition of part of vi. , with variations. moreover, the expression: "what new thing do ye?" is quite peculiar to justin. we have already met with it in the preceding section . "if ye love them which love you, what _new_ thing do ye? for even," &c. here, in the same verse, we have: "if ye lend to them from whom ye hope to receive, what _new_ thing do ye? for even," &c. it is evident, both from its repetition and its distinct dogmatic view of christianity as a new teaching in contrast to the old, that this variation cannot have been the result of defective memory, but must have been the reading of the memoirs, and, in all probability, it was the original form of the teaching. such antithetical treatment is clearly indicated in many parts of the sermon on the mount: for instance, matthew v. , "ye have heard that it hath been said _by them of old_.... but _i_ say unto you,' &c, cf. v. , , . it is certain that { } the whole of the quotation e differs very materially from our gospels, and there is every reason to believe that not only was the passage not derived from them, but that it was contained in the memoirs of the apostles substantially in the form and order in which justin quotes it.( ) the next passage (f)( ) is separated from the preceding merely by the usual [--greek--] and it moves on to its close with the same continuity of thought and the same peculiarities of construction which characterize that which we have just considered. christians are to be kind and merciful [--greek--] to all as their father is, who makes his sun to shine alike on the good and evil, and they need not be anxious about their own temporal necessities: what they shall eat and what put on; are they not better than the birds and beasts whom god feedeth? therefore, they are not to be careful about what they are to eat and what put on, for their heavenly father knows they have need of these things; but they are to seek the kingdom of heaven, and all these things shall be added: for where the treasure is--the thing he seeks and is careful about--there will also be the mind of the man. in fact, the passage is a suitable continuation of c, inculcating, like it, abstraction from worldly cares and thoughts in reliance on the heavenly father, and the mere fact that a separation is made where it is between the two passages c and £ shows further that each of those passages was complete in itself. there is absolutely no reason for the separating /cat, if these passages were a mere combination of scattered verses. this quotation, however, which is so consecutive in justin, can only find distant parallels in passages widely divided throughout the synoptic { } gospels, which have to be arranged in the following order: luke vi. , matt. v. , vi. , , , , , vi. , the whole of which present striking differences from justin's quotation. the repetition of the injunction "be not careful" again with the illative "therefore" is quite in the spirit of e. this admonition: "therefore, be not careful," &c, is reiterated no less than three times in the first gospel (vi , , ), and confirms the characteristic repetition of justin's gospel, which seems to have held a middle course between matthew and luke, the latter of which does not repeat the phrase, although the injunction is made a second time in more direct terms. the repetition of the passage: "be ye kind and merciful," &c, in dial. , with the same context and peculiarities, is a remarkable confirmation of the natural conclusion that justin quotes the passage from a gospel different from ours. the expression [--greek--] thrice repeated by justin himself, and supported by a similar duplication in the clementine homilies (iii. )( ) cannot possibly be an accidental departure from our gospels.( ) for the rest it is undeniable that the whole passage £ differs materially both in order and language from our gospels, from which it cannot without unwarrantable assumption be maintained to have been taken either collectively or in detail, and strong internal reasons lead us to conclude that it is quoted substantially as it stands from justin's { } gospel, which must have been different from our synoptics.( ) in again, we have an express quotation introduced by the words: "and regarding our being patient under injuries and ready to help all, and free from anger, this is what he said;" and then he proceeds to give the actual words.( ) at the close of the quotation he continues: "for we ought not to strive, neither would he have us be imitators of the wicked, but he has exhorted us by patience and gentleness to lead men from shame and the love of evil," &c., &c.( ) it is evident that these observations, which are a mere paraphrase of the text, indicate that the quotation itself is deliberate and precise. justin professes first to quote the actual teaching of jesus, and then makes his own comments; but if it be assumed that he began by concocting out of stray texts, altered to suit his purpose, a continuous discourse, the subsequent observations seem singularly useless and out of place. although the passage forms a consecutive and harmonious discourse, the nearest parallels in our gospels can only be found by uniting parts of the following scattered verses: matthew v. , , , , . the christian who is struck on one cheek is to turn the other, and not to resist those who would take away his cloak or coat; but if, on the contrary, he be angry, he is in danger of fire; if, then, he be compelled to go one mile, let him show his gentleness by going two, and thus let his good works shine before men that, seeing them, they may adore his father which is in heaven. it is evident that the last two sentences, which find their parallels in matt by putting v. after , the former verse having { } quite a different context in the gospel, must have so followed each other in justin's text. his purpose is to quote the teaching of jesus, "regarding our being patient under injuries, and ready to help all and free from anger," but his quotation of "let your good works shine before men," &c, has no direct reference to his subject, and it cannot reasonably be supposed that justin would have selected it from a separate part of the gospel. coming as it no doubt did in his memoirs in the order in which he quotes it, it is quite appropriate to his purpose. it is difficult, for instance, to imagine why justin further omitted the injunction in the parallel passage, matthew v. , "that ye resist not evil," when supposed to quote the rest of the verse, since his express object is to show that "we ought not to strive," &c. the whole quotation presents the same characteristics as those which we have already examined, and in its continuity of thought and wide variation from the parallels in our gospels, both in order and language, we must recognize a different and peculiar source.( ) the passage i, again, is professedly a literal quotation, for justin prefaces it with the words: "and regarding our not swearing at all, but ever speaking the truth, he taught thus;" and having in these words actually stated what jesus did teach, he proceeds to quote his very words.( ) in the quotation there is a clear departure from our gospel, arising, not from accidental failure-of memory, but from difference of source. the parallel passages in our gospels, so far as they exist at all, can only be found by taking part of matthew v. and joining it to v. , omitting the intermediate verses. the quotation in the { } epistle of james v. , which is evidently derived from a source different from matthew, supports the reading of justin. this, with the passage twice repeated in the clementine homilies in agreement with justin, and, it may be added, the peculiar version found in early ecclesiastical writings,( ) all tend to confirm the belief that there existed a more ancient form of the injunction which justin no doubt found in his memoirs.( ) the precept, terse, simple, and direct, as it is here, is much more in accordance with justin's own description of the teaching of jesus, as he evidently found it in his gospel, than the diffused version contained in the first gospel, v. -- . another remarkable and characteristic illustration of the peculiarity of justin's memoirs is presented by the long passage k, which is also throughout consecutive and bound together by clear unity of thought.( ) it is presented with the context: "for not those who merely make professions but those who do the works, as he (jesus) said, shall be saved. for he spake thus." it does not, therefore, seem possible to indicate more clearly the deliberate intention to quote the exact expressions of jesus, and yet not only do we find material difference from the language in the parallel passages in our gospels, but those parallels, such as they are, can only be made by patching together the following verses in the order in { } which we give them: matt. vii. , luke x. , matt. vii. , , xiii. , , vii. , part of , . it will be remarked that the passage (k ) luke x. , is thrust in between two consecutive verses in matthew, and taken from a totally different context as the nearest parallel to k of justin, although it is widely different from it, omitting altogether the most important words: "and doeth what i say." the repetition of the same phrase: "he that heareth me heareth him that sent me," in apol. i, ,( ) makes it certain that justin accurately quotes his gospel, whilst the omission of the words in that place: "and doeth what i say," evidently proceeds from the fact that they are an interruption of the phrase for which justin makes the quotation, namely, to prove that jesus is sent forth to reveal the father.( ) it may be well to compare justin's passage, k -- , with one occurring in the so-called second epistle of clement to the corinthians, iv. "let us not, therefore, only call him lord, for that will not save us. for he saith: 'not every one that saith to me, lord, lord, shall be saved, but he that worketh righteousness.'... the lord said: 'if ye be with me gathered together in my bosom, and do not my commandments, i will cast you off and say to you: depart from me; i know you not, whence you are, workers of iniquity.'"( ) the expression [--greek--] here strongly recalls the reading of justin.( ) this passage, which is foreign to { } our gospels, at least shows the existence of others containing parallel discourses with distinct variations. some of the quotations in this spurious epistle are stated to be taken from the "gospel according to the egyptians,"( ) which was in all probability a version of the gospel according to the hebrews.( ) the variations which occur in justin's repetition, in dial , of his quotation k are not important, because the more weighty departure from the gospel in the words "did we not eat and drink in thy name," [--greek--] is deliberately repeated,( ) and if, therefore, there be freedom of quotation it is free quotation not from the canonical, but from a different gospel.( ) origen's quotation( ) does not affect this conclusion, for the repetition of the phrase [--greek--] has the form of the gospel, and besides, which is much more important, we know that origen was well acquainted with the gospel according to the hebrews and other apocryphal works from which this may have been a reminiscence.( ) we must add, moreover, that the passage in dial appears in connection with others widely differing from our gospels. the passage k not only materially varies from the parallel in matt. xiii. , in language but in connection of ideas.( ) here also, upon examination, we must conclude that justin quotes from a source different from our { } gospels, and moreover, that his gospel gives with greater correctness the original form of the passage.( ) the weeping and gnashing of teeth are distinctly represented as the consequence when the wicked see the bliss of the righteous while they are sent into everlasting fire, and not as the mere characteristics of hell. it will be observed that the preceding passages k and , find parallels to a certain extent in matt. vii. , , although luke xiii. , , is in some respects closer to the reading of justin k , however, finds no continuation of parallel in matt, vii., from which the context comes, but we have to seek it in xiii. , . k , however, does find its continuing parallel in the next verse in luke xiii. , where we have "there shall be (the) weeping and (the) gnashing of teeth when ye shall see abraham," &c there is here, it is evident, the connection of ideas which is totally lacking in matt. xiii. , , where the verses in question occur as the conclusion to the exposition of the parable of the tares. now, although it is manifest that luke xiii. , cannot possibly have been the source from which justin quotes, still the opening words and the sequence of ideas demonstrate the great probability that other gospels must have given, after k , a continuation which is wanting after matt. vii. , but which is indicated in the parallel luke xiii. ( , ) , and is somewhat closely followed in matt. xiii. , . when such a sequence is found in an avowed quotation from justin's gospel, it is certain that he must have found it there substantially as he quotes it. the passage k ,( ) "for many shall arrive," &c, is a very important one, and it departs { } emphatically from the parallel in our first gospel. instead of being, like the latter, a warning against false prophets, it is merely the announcement that many deceivers shall come. this passage is rendered more weighty by the fact that justin repeats it with little variation in dial. , and immediately after quotes a saying of jesus of only five words which is not found in our gospels, and then he repeats a quotation to the same effect in the shape of a warning: "beware of false prophets," &c, like that in matt. vii. , but still distinctly differing from it.( ) it is perfectly clear that justin quotes two separate passages.( ) it is impossible that he could intend to repeat the same quotation at an interval of only five words; it is equally impossible that, having quoted it in the one form, he could so immediately quote it in the other through error of memory.( ) the simple and very natural conclusion is that he found both passages in his gospel. the object for which he quotes would more than justify the quotation of both passages, the one referring to the many false christians and the other to the false prophets of whom he is speaking. that two passages so closely related should be found in the same gospel is not in the least singular. there are numerous instances of the same in our synoptics.( ) the actual facts of the case then are these: justin quotes in the dialogue, with the same marked deviations from the { } parallel in the gospel, a passage quoted by him m the apology, and after an interval of only five words he quotes a second passage to the same effect, though with very palpable difference in its character, which likewise differs from the gospel, in company with other texts which still less find any parallels in the canonical gospels. the two passages, by their differences, distinguish each other as separate, whilst, by their agreement in common variations from the parallel in matthew, they declare their common origin from a special gospel, a result still further made manifest by the agreement between the first passage in the dialogue and the quotations in the apology. in k ,( ) justin's gospel substitutes [--greek--] for [--greek--], and is quite in the spirit of the passage o, "ye shall know them from their _works_" is the natural reading. the gospel version clearly introduces "fruit" prematurely, and weakens the force of the contrast which follows. it will be observed, moreover, that in order to find a parallel to justin's passage k , , only the first part of matt. vii. , is taken, and the thread is only caught again at vii. , k being one of the two passages indicated by de wette which we are considering, and it agrees with matt. vii. , with the exception of the single word [--greek--]. we must again point out, however, that this passage in matt. vii. , is repeated no less than three times in our gospels, a second time in matt iii. , and once in luke iii. . upon two occasions it is placed in the mouth of john the baptist, and forms the second portion of a sentence the whole of which is found in literal agreement both in matt. iii. , and luke iii. , "but now the axe is laid unto the root of the trees, therefore every tree," &c, &c. { } the passage pointed out by de wette as the parallel to justin's anonymous quotation, matt. vii. --a selection which is of course obligatory from the context--is itself a mere quotation by jesus of part of the saying of the baptist, presenting, therefore, double probability of being well known; and as we have three instances of its literal reproduction in the synoptics, it would indeed be arbitrary to affirm that it was not likewise given literally in other gospels. the passage x( ) is very emphatically given as a literal quotation of the words of jesus, for justin cites it directly to authenticate his own statements of christian belief he says: "but if you disregard us both when we entreat, and when we set all things openly before you, we shall not suffer loss, believing, or rather being fully persuaded, that every one will be punished by eternal fire according to the desert of his deeds, and in proportion to the faculties which he received from god will his account be required, as christ declared when he said: to whom god gave more, of him shall more also be demanded again." this quotation has no parallel in the first gospel, but we add it here as part of the sermon on the mount. the passage in luke xii. , it will be perceived, presents distinct variation from it, and that gospel cannot for a moment be maintained as the source of justin's quotation. the last passage, ft, is one of those advanced by de wette which led to this examination.( ) it is likewise clearly a quotation, but as we have already shown, its agreement with matt v. , is no evidence that it was actually derived from that gospel. occurring as it does as one of numerous quotations from the sermon on the mount, whose general variation both in order and { } language from the parallels in our gospel points to the inevitable conclusion that justin derived them from a different source, there is no reason for supposing that this sentence also did not come from the same gospel. no one who has attentively considered the whole of these passages from the sermon on the mount, and still less those who are aware of the general rule of variation in his mass of quotations as compared with parallels in our gospels, can fail to be struck by the systematic departure from the order and language of the synoptics. the hypothesis that they are quotations from our gospels involves the accusation against justin of an amount of carelessness and negligence which is quite unparalleled in literature. justin's character and training, however, by. no means warrant any such aspersion,( ) and there are no grounds for it. indeed, but for the attempt arbitrarily to establish the identity of the "memoirs of the apostles" with our gospels, such a charge would never have been thought of. it is unreasonable to suppose that avowed and deliberate quotations of sayings of jesus, made for the express purpose of furnishing authentic written proof of justin's statements regarding christianity, can as an almost invariable rule be so singularly incorrect, more especially when it is considered that these quotations occur in an elaborate apology for christianity addressed to the roman emperors, and in a careful and studied controversy with a jew in defence of the new faith. the simple and natural conclusion, supported by many strong reasons, is that justin derived his quotations from a gospel which was different from ours, although naturally by subject and design it must have been related to them. his { } gospel, in fact, differs from our synoptics as they differ from each other. we now return to tischendorf's statements with regard to justin's acquaintance with our gospels. having examined the supposed references to the first gospel, we find that tischendorf speaks much less positively with regard to his knowledge of the other two synoptics. he says: "there is the greatest probability that in several passages he also follows mark and luke."( ) first taking mark, we find that the only example which tischendorf gives is the following. he says: "twice (dial. and ) he quotes as an expression of the lord: 'the son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the scribes and pharisees (ch. by the 'pharisees and scribes'), and be crucified and the third day rise again.'( ) this agrees better with mark viii. and luke ix. than with matt. xvi. , only in justin the 'pharisees' are put instead of the 'elders and chief priests' (so matthew, mark, and luke), likewise 'be crucified' instead of 'be killed."'( ) this is the only instance of similarity with mark that tischendorf can produce, and we have given his own remarks to show how thoroughly weak his case is. the passage in mark viii. , reads: "and he began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests [--greek--], and the scribes and be killed [--greek--], and after three days [--greek--] { } rise again." and the following is the reading of luke ix. : "saying that the son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests [--greek--] and scribes and be killed [--greek--], and the third day rise again." it will be perceived that, different as it also is, the passage in luke is nearer than that of mark, which cannot in any case have been the source of justin's quotation. tischendorf, however, does not point out that justin, elsewhere, a third time refers to this very passage in the very same terms. he says: "and christ.... having come.... and himself also preached, saying.... that he must suffer many things from the scribes and pharisees and be crucified, and the third day rise again."(l) although this omits the words "and be rejected," it gives the whole of the passage literally as before. and thus there is the very remarkable testimony of a quotation three times repeated, with the same marked variations from our gospels, to show that justin found those very words in his memoirs.( ) the persistent variation clearly indicates a different source from our synoptics. we may, in reference to this reading, compare luke xxiv. : "he is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in galilee (v. ), saying that the son of man must be delivered up into the hands of sinful men, _and be crucified_, and the third day rise again." this reference to words of jesus, in which the words [--greek--]. occurred, as in justin, indicates that although our gospels do not contain it some others may well have { } done so. in one place justin introduces the saying with the following words: "for he exclaimed before the crucifixion, the son of man," &c.,( ) both indicating a time for the discourse, and also quoting a distinct and definite saying in contradistinction to this report of the matter of his teaching, which is the form in which the parallel passage occurs in the gospels. in justin's memoirs it no doubt existed as an actual discourse of jesus, which he verbally and accurately quoted. with regard to the third gospel, tischendorf says: "it is in reference to luke (xxii. ) that justin recalls in the dialogue ( ) the falling drops of the sweat of agony on the mount of olives, and certainly with an express appeal to the 'memoirs composed by his apostles and their followers,'"( ) now we have already seen( ) that justin, in the passage referred to, does not make use of the peculiar expression which gives the whole of its character to the account in luke, and that there is no ground for affirming that justin derived his information from that gospel. the only other reference to passages proving the "probability" of justin's use of luke or mark is that which we have just discussed--"the son of man must," &c. from this the character of tischendorf's assumptions may be inferred. de wette does not advance any instances of verbal agreement either with mark or luke.( ) he says, moreover: "the historical references are much freer still (than quotations), and combine in part { } the accounts of matthew and luke; some of the kind, however, are not found at all in our canonical gospels."( ) this we have already sufficiently demonstrated. we might now well terminate the examination of justin's quotations, which has already taken up too much of our space, but before doing so it may be well very briefly to refer to another point. in his work "on the canon," dr. westcott adopts a somewhat singular course. he evidently feels the very great difficulty in which anyone who asserts the identity of the source of justin's quotations with our gospels is placed by the fact that, as a rule, these quotations differ from parallel passages in our gospels; and whilst on the one hand maintaining that the quotations generally are from the canonical gospels, he on the other endeavours to reduce the number of those which profess to be quotations at all. he says: "to examine in detail the whole of justin's quotations would be tedious and unnecessary. it will be enough to examine ( ) those which are alleged by him as quotations, and ( ) those also which, though anonymous, are yet found repeated with the same variations either in justin's own writings, or ( ) in heretical works. it is evidently on these quotations that the decision hangs."( ) now under the first category dr. westcott finds very few. he says: "in seven passages only, as far as i can discover, does justin profess to give the exact words recorded in the memoirs; and in these, if there be no reason to the contrary, it is natural to expect that he will preserve the exact language of the gospels which he used, just as in anonymous quotations we may conclude that he is trusting to memory."( ) { } before proceeding further, we may point out the straits to which an apologist is reduced who starts with a foregone conclusion. we have already seen a number of justin's professed quotations; but here, after reducing the number to seven only, our critic prepares a way of escape even out of these. it is difficult to understand what "reason to the contrary" can possibly justify a man "who professes to give the exact words recorded in the memoirs" for not doing what he professes; and further, it passes our comprehension to understand why, in anonymous quotations, "we may conclude that he is trusting to memory." the cautious exception is as untenable as the gratuitous assumption. dr. westcott continues as follows the passage which we have just interrupted:--"the result of a first view of the passages is striking. of the seven, five agree verbally with the text of st. matthew or st. luke, _exhibiting indeed three slight various readings not elsewhere found, but such as are easily explicable_; the sixth is a _compound summary_ of words related by st. matthew; the seventh alone _presents an important variation in the text of a verse_, which is, however, otherwise very uncertain."( ) the italics of course are ours. the "first view" of the passages and of the above statement is indeed striking. it is remarkable how easily difficulties are overcome under such an apologetic system. the striking result, to summarize canon westcott's own words, is this: out of seven professed quotations from the memoirs, in which he admits we may expect to find the exact language preserved, five present three variations; one is a compressed summary, and does not agree verbally at all; and the seventh presents an important variation. dr. { } westcott, on the same easy system, continues: "our inquiry is thus confined to the two last instances; and it must be seen whether their disagreement from the synoptic gospel is such as to outweigh the agreement of the remaining five."(l) before proceeding to consider these seven passages admitted by dr. westcott, we must point out that, in a note to the statement of the number, he mentions that he excludes other two passages as "not merely quotations of words, but concise narratives."( ) but surely this is a most extraordinary reason for omitting them, and one the validity of which cannot be admitted. as justin introduces them deliberately as quotations, why should they be excluded simply because they are combined with a historical statement? we shall produce them. the first is in apol. i. : "for the apostles, in the memoirs composed by them, which are called gospels,( ) handed down that it was thus enjoined on them, that jesus, having taken bread and given thanks, said: 'this do in remembrance of me. this is my body.' and similarly, having taken the cup and given thanks, he said: 'this is my blood,' and delivered it to them alone."( ) this passage, it will be remembered, occurs in an elaborate apology for christianity addressed to the roman emperors, and justin is giving an account of the most solemn sacrament of his religion. here, if ever, we might reasonably expect accuracy and care, and justin, in fact, carefully { } indicates the source of the quotation he is going to make. it is difficult to understand any ground upon which so direct a quotation from the "memoirs of the apostles" could be set aside by canon westcott. justin distinctly states that the apostles in these memoirs have "thus" [--greek--] transmitted what was enjoined on us by jesus, and then gives the precise quotation. had the quotation agreed with our gospels, would it not have been claimed as a professedly accurate quotation from them? surely no one can reasonably pretend, for instance, that when justin, after this preamble, states that having taken bread, &c., _jesus said_: "this do in remembrance of me: this is my body;" or having taken the cup, &c, _he said_: "this is my blood"--justin does not deliberately mean to quote what jesus actually did say? now the account of the episode in luke is as follows (xxii. ): "and he took a cup, gave thanks, and said: take this, and divide it among yourselves. . for i say unto you, i will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of god shall come. . and he took bread, gave thanks, brake it, and gave it unto them, saying: this is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. . and in like manner the cup after supper, saying: this is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you."(l) dr. westcott of course only compares this passage of justin with luke, to which { } and the parallel in cor. xi. , wide as the difference is, it is closer than to the accounts in the other two gospels. that justin professedly quoted literally from the memoirs is evident, and is rendered still more clear by the serious context by which the quotation is introduced, the quotation in fact being made to authenticate by actual written testimony the explanations of justin. his dogmatic views, moreover, are distinctly drawn from a gospel, which, in a more direct way than our synoptics do, gave the expressions: "this is my body," and "this is my blood," and it must have been observed that luke, with which justin's reading alone is compared, not only has not: [--greek--], at all, but instead makes use of a totally different expression: "this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you." the second quotation from the memoirs which dr. westcott passes over is that in dial. , compared with luke xxii. , , on the agony in the garden, which we have already examined,( ) and found at variance with our gospel, and without the peculiar and distinctive expressions of the latter. we now come to the seven passages which canon westcott admits to be professed quotations from the memoirs, and in which "it is natural to expect that he will preserve the exact words of the gospels which he used." the first of these is a passage in the dialogue, part of which has already been discussed in connection with the fire in jordan and the voice at the baptism, and found to be from a source different from our synoptics.( ) justin says: "for even he, the devil, at the time when he also (jesus) went up from the river jordan when the voice { } said to him: 'thou art my son, this day have i begotten thee,' is recorded in the memoirs of the apostles to have come to him and tempted him even so far as saying to him: 'worship me;' and christ answered him [---greek---], 'get thee behind me, satan' [---greek---], 'thou shalt worship the lord thy god, and him only shalt thou serve.'"( ) this passage is compared with the account of the temptation in matt iv. , : "and he said unto him, all these things will i give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. . then saith jesus unto him [---greek---], get thee hence, satan [--greek--]: it is written, thou shalt worship," &c all the oldest codices, it should be stated, omit the [--greek--], as we have done, but cod. d. (bezæ) and a few others of infirm authority, insert these two words. canon westcott, however, justly admits them to be "probably only a very early interpolation."( ) we have no reason whatever for supposing that they existed in matthew during justin's time. the oldest codices omit the whole phrase from the parallel passage, luke iv. , but cod. a. is an exception, and reads: [--greek--]. the best modern editions, however, reject this as a mere recent addition to luke. a comparison of the first and third gospels with justin clearly shows that the gospel which he used followed the former more closely than luke. matthew makes the climax of the temptation { } the view of all the kingdoms of the world, and the offer to give them to jesus if he will fall down and worship satan. luke, on the contrary, makes the final temptation the suggestion to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. justin's gospel, as the words, "so far as saying to him" [--greek--], &c., clearly indicate, had the same climax as matthew. now the following points must be observed. justin makes the words of satan, "worship me" [--greek--], a distinct quotation; the gospel makes satan offer all that he has shown "if thou wilt fall down and worship me" [--greek--]. then justin's quotation proceeds: "and christ answered him" [--greek--]; whilst matthew has, "then jesus saith to him" [---greek---], which is a marked variation.( ) the[--greek--] of justin, as we have already said, is not found in any of the older codices of matthew. then the words: "it is written," which form part of the reply of jesus in our gospels, are omitted in justin's; but we must add that, in dial , in again referring to the temptation, he adds, "it is written." still, in that passage he also omits the whole phrase, "get thee behind me, satan," and commences: "for he answered him: it is written, thou shalt worship," &c. we must, however, again point out the most important fact, that this account of the temptation is directly connected with another which is foreign to our gospels. the devil is said to come at the time jesus went up out of the jordan and the voice said to him: "thou art my son, this day have i begotten thee"--words which do not occur at all in our gospels, and which are again bound up with the incident of the fire in jordan. it is altogether { } unreasonable to assert that justin could have referred the fact which he proceeds to quote from the memoirs, to the time those words were uttered, if they were not to be found in the same memoirs. the one incident was most certainly not derived from our gospels, inasmuch as they do not contain it, and there are the very strongest reasons for asserting that justin derived the account of the temptation from a source which contained the other. under these circumstances, every variation is an indication, and those which we have pointed out are not accidental, but clearly exclude the assertion that the quotation is from our gospels. the second of the seven passages of canon westcott is one of those from the sermon on the mount, dial. , compared with matt v. , adduced by de wette, which we have already considered.( ) with the exception of the opening words, [--greek--], the two sentences agree, but this is no proof that justin derived the passage from matthew; while on the contrary, the persistent variation of the rest of his quotations from the sermon on the mount, both in order and language, forces upon us the conviction that he derived the whole from a source different from our gospels. the third passage of dr. westcott is that regarding the sign of jonas the prophet, matt, xii. , compared with dial. , which was the second instance adduced by tischendorf we have already examined it,( ) and found that it presents distinct variations from our first synoptic, both linguistically and otherwise, and that many reasons lead to the conclusion that it was quoted from a gospel different from ours. the fourth of canon westcott's quotations is the { } following, to part of which we have already had occasion to refer:(l) "for which reason our christ declared on earth to those who asserted that elias must come before christ: elias indeed shall come [--greek--] and shall restore all things: but i say unto you that elias is come already, and they knew him not, but did unto him [--greek--] whatsoever they listed. and it is written that then the disciples understood that he spoke to them of john the baptist."( ) the express quotation" in this passage, which is compared with matt. xvii. -- , is limited by canon "westcott to the last short sentence( ) corresponding with matt xvii. , and he points out that credner admits that it must have been taken from matthew. it is quite true that credner considers that if any passage of justin's quotations proves a necessary connection between justin's gospels and the gospel according to matthew, it is this sentence: "and it is written that then the disciples, &c." he explains his reason for this opinion as follows: "these words can only be derived from our matthew, with which they literally agree; for it is thoroughly improbable that a remark of so special a description could have been made by two different and independent individuals so completely alike."( ) we totally differ from this argument, { } which is singularly opposed to credner's usual clear and thoughtful mode of reasoning.( ) no doubt if such gospels could be considered to be absolutely distinct and independent works, deriving all their matter from individual and separate observation of the occurrences narrated by their authors and personal report of the discourses given, there might be greater force in the argument, although even in that case it would have been far from conclusive here, inasmuch as the observation we are considering is the mere simple statement of a fact necessary to complete the episode, and it might well have been made in the same terms by separate reporters. the fact is, however, that the numerous gospels current in the early church cannot have been, and our synoptic gospels most certainly are not, independent works, but are based upon earlier evangelical writings no longer extant, and have borrowed from each other. the gospels did not originate full fledged as we now have them, but are the result of many revisions of previously existing materials. critics may differ as to the relative ages and order of the synoptics, but almost all are agreed that in one order or another they are dependent on each other, and on older forms of the gospel. now such an expression as matt. xvii. in some early record of the discourse might have been transferred to a dozen of other christian writings. ewald assigns the passage to the oldest gospel, matthew in its present form being fifth in descent.( ) our three canonical gospels are filled with instances in which expressions still more individual are repeated, and these show that such phrases cannot be limited to { } one gospel, but, if confined in the first instance to one original source, may have been transferred to many subsequent evangelical works. take, for instance, a passage in matt. vii. , : ".... the multitudes were astonished at his teaching: for he taught them as having authority, and not as their scribes."( ) mark i. has the very same passage,( ) with the mere omission of "the multitudes" [--greek--], which does not in the least affect the argument; and luke iv. : "and they were astonished at his teaching: for his word was power."( ) although the author of the third gospel somewhat alters the language, it is clear that he follows the same original, and retains it in the same context as the second gospel. now the occurrence of such a passage as this in one of the fathers, if either the first or second gospels were lost, would, on credner's grounds, be attributed undoubtedly to the survivor, although in reality derived from the gospel no longer extant, which likewise contained it. another example may be pointed out in matt. xiii. : "all these things spake jesus unto the multitudes in parables; and _without a parable spake he not unto them_," compared with mark iv. , , "and with many such parables spake he the word unto them.... and without a parable spake he not unto them." the part of this very individual remark which we have italicised is literally the same in both gospels, as a personal comment at the end of the parable of the grain of mustard seed. then, for instance, in the account { } of the sleep of the three disciples during the agony in the garden (matt. xxvi. , mark xiv. ), the expression "and he found them asleep, _for their eyes were heavy_," which is equally individual, is literally the same in the first two gospels. another special remark of a similar kind regarding the rich young man: "he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions," is found both in matt. xix. and mark x. . such examples( ) might be multiplied, and they show that the occurrence of passages of the most individual character cannot, in justin's time, be limited to any single gospel. now the verse we are discussing, matt xvii. , in all probability, as ewald supposes, occurred in one or more of the older forms of the gospel from which our synoptics and many other similar works derived their matter, and nothing is more likely than that the gospel according to the hebrews, which in many respects was nearly related to matthew, may have contained it. at any rate we have shown that such sayings cannot, however apparently individual, be considered evidence of the use of a particular gospel simply because it happens to be the only one now extant which contains it. credner, however, whilst expressing the opinion which we have quoted likewise adds his belief that by the expression [--greek--], justin seems expressly to indicate that this sentence is taken from a different work from what precedes it, and he has proved that the preceding part of the quotation was not derived from our gospels.( ) we cannot, however, coincide with this opinion either. it seems to us that the expression "and { } it is written" simply was made use of by justin to show that the identification of elias with john the baptist is not his, but was the impression conveyed at the time by jesus to his disciples. now the whole narrative of the baptism of john in justin bears characteristic marks of being from a gospel different from ours,( ) and in the first part of this very quotation we find distinct variation. justin first affirms that jesus in his teaching had proclaimed that elias should also come [--greek--], and then further on he gives the actual words of jesus: [--greek--], which we have before us, whilst in matthew the words are: [--greek--] and there is no ms. which reads [--greek--] for [--greek--], and yet, as credner remarks, the whole force of the quotation rests upon the word, and justin is persistent in his variation from the text of our first synoptic. it is unreasonable to say that justin quotes loosely the important part of his passage, and then about a few words at the close pretends to be so particularly careful. considering all the facts of the case, we must conclude that this quotation also is from a source different from our gospels.( ) another point, however, must be noted. dr. westcott claims this passage as an express quotation from the memoirs, apparently for no other reason than that the few words happen to agree with matt. xvii. , and that he wishes to identify the memoirs with our gospels. justin, however, does not once mention the memoirs in this chapter; it follows, therefore, that canon westcott who is so exceedingly strict in his limitation of express quotations, assumes that all quotations of christian history and words of jesus in justin are to be considered { } as derived from the memoirs whether they be mentioned by name or not. we have already seen that amongst these there are not only quotations differing from the gospels, and contradicting them, but others which have no parallels at all in them. the fifth of dr. westcott's express quotations occurs in dial. , where justin says: "for when he (jesus) was giving up his spirit on the cross he said: 'father, into thy hands i commend my spirit,' as i have also learned from the memoirs." this short sentence agrees with luke xxiii. , it is true, but as we have already shown, justin's whole account of the crucifixion differs so materially from that in our gospels that it cannot have been derived from them. we see this forcibly in examining the sixth of canon westcott's quotations, which is likewise connected with the crucifixion. "for they who saw him crucified also wagged their heads each one of them, and distorted their lips, and sneeringly and in scornful irony repeated among themselves those words which are also written in the memoirs of his apostles: he declared himself the son of god: (let him) come down, let him walk about: let god save him."( ) we have ourselves already quoted and discussed this passage,( ) and need not further examine it here. canon westcott has nothing better to say regarding this quotation, in an examination of the accuracy of parallel passages, than this: "these exact words do not occur in our gospels, but we do find there others so closely connected with them that few readers would feel the difference "!( ) when criticism descends to language like this, the case is indeed desperate. it is clear that, as canon westcott admits, the words are expressly declared to be a { } quotation from the memoirs of the apostles, but they do not exist in our gospels, and consequently our gospels are not identical with the memoirs. canon westcott refers to the taunts in matthew, and then with commendable candour he concludes his examination of the quotation with the following words: "no manuscript or father (so far as we know) has preserved any reading of the passage more closely resembling justin's quotation; and if it appear not to be deducible from our gospels, due allowance being made for the object which he had in view, its source must remain concealed."( ) we need only add that it is futile to talk of making "due allowance" for the object which justin had in view. his immediate object was accurate quotation, and no allowance can account for such variation in language and thought as is presented in this passage. that this passage, though a professed quotation from the memoirs, is not taken from our gospels is certain both from its own variations and the differences in other parts of justin's account of the crucifixion, an event whose solemnity and importance might well be expected to secure reverential accuracy. it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that justin's memoirs of the apostles were not identical with our gospels, and the systematic variation of his quotations thus receives its natural and reasonable explanation. the seventh and last of dr. westcott's express quotations is, as he states, "more remarkable." we subjoin the passage in contrast with the parallel texts of the first and third gospels. { } [--greek--] it is apparent that justin's quotation differs very materially from our gospels in language, in construction, and in meaning. these variations, however, acquire very remarkable confirmation and significance from the fact that justin in two other places( ) quotes the latter and larger part of the passage from [--greek--] in precisely the same way, with the sole exception that, in both of these quotations, he uses the aorist [--greek--] instead of [--greek--]. this threefold repetition in the same peculiar form clearly stamps the passage as being a literal { } quotation from his gospel, and the one exception to the verbal agreement of the three passages, in the substitution of the present for the aorist in the dialogue, does not in the least remove or lessen the fundamental variation of the passage from our gospel. as the [--greek--] is twice repeated it was probably the reading of his text. now it is well known that the peculiar form of the quotation in justin occurred in what came to be considered heretical gospels, and constituted the basis of important gnostic doctrines.( ) canon westcott speaks of the use of this passage by the fathers in agreement with justin in a manner which, unintentionally we have no doubt, absolutely misrepresents important facts. he says: "the transposition of the words still remains; and how little weight can be attached to that will appear upon an examination of the various forms in which the text is quoted by fathers like origen, irenæus and epiphanius, who admitted our gospels exclusively. it occurs in them as will be seen from the table of readings[--greek--] with almost every possible variation. irenæus in the course of one chapter quotes the verse first as it stands in the canonical text; then in the same order, but with the last clause like justin's; and once again altogether as he has given it. epiphanius likewise quotes the text seven times in the same order as justin, and four times as it stands in the gospels."[--greek--] now in the chapter to which reference is made in this sentence irenæus commences by stating that the lord had declared: "nemo cognoscit filium nisi pater; neque { } patrem quis cognoscit nisi films, et cui voluerit filius revelare,"( ) as he says, "thus matthew has set it down and luke similarly, and mark the very same."( ) he goes on to state, however, that those who would be wiser than the apostles write this verse as follows: "nemo cognovit patrem nisi filius; nee filium nisi pater, et cui voluerit filius revelare." and he explains: "they interpret it as though the true god was known to no man before the coming of our lord; and that god who was announced by the prophets they affirm not to be the father of christ."( ) now in this passage we have the [--greek--] of justin in the 'cognovit,' in contradistinction to the 'cognoscit' of the gospel, and his transposition of order as not by any possibility an accidental thing, but as the distinct basis of doctrines. irenæus goes on to argue that no one can know the father unless through the word of god, that is through the son, and this is why he said: "'nemo cognoscit patrem nisi filius; neque filium nisi pater, et quibuscunque filius reve-laverit.' thus teaching that he himself also is the father, as indeed he is, in order that we may not receive any other father except him who is revealed by the son."( ) in this third quotation irenseus alters the [--greek--] into [--greek--], but retains the form, for the rest, of the gnostics and of justin, and his aim apparently is to show that adopting his present tense instead of the aorist the transposition { } of words is of no importance. a fourth time, however, in the same chapter, which in fact is wholly dedicated to this passage and to the doctrines based upon it, irenæus quotes the saying: "nemo cognoscit filium nisi pater; neque patrem nisi filius, et quibuscunque filius reve-laverit."( ) here the language and order of the gospel are followed with the exception that 'cui voluerit revelare' is altered to the 'quibuscunque revelaverit' of justin; and that this is intentional is made clear by the continuation: "for _revelaverit_ was said not with reference to the future alone,"( ( &c. now in this chapter we learn very clearly that, although the canonical gospels by the express declaration of irenæus had their present reading of the passage before us, other gospels of considerable authority even in his time had the form of justin, for again in a fifth passage he quotes the opening words: "he who was known, therefore, was not different from him who declared: 'no one knoweth the father,' but one and the same."( ) with the usual alteration of the verb to the present tense, irenæus in this and in one of the other quotations of this passage just cited gives some authority to the transposition of the words "father" and "son," although the reading was opposed to the gospels, but he invariably adheres to [--greek--] and condemns [--greek--], the reading maintained by those who in the estimation of irenæus "would be wiser than the apostles." elsewhere, descanting on { } the passages of scripture by which heretics attempt to prove that the father was unknown before the advent of christ, irenseus, after accusing them of garbling passages of scripture,( ) goes on to say of the marcosians and others: "besides these, they adduce a countless number of apocryphal and spurious works which they themselves have forged to the bewilderment of the foolish, and of those who are not versed in the scriptures of truth."( ) he also points out passages occurring in our gospels to which they give a peculiar interpretation and, amongst these, that quoted by justin. he says: "but they adduce as the highest testimony, and as it were the crown of their system, the following passage.... 'all things were delivered to me by my father, and no one knew [--greek--] the father but the son, and the son but the father, and he to whomsoever [--greek--] the son shall reveal [--greek--].'( ) in these words they assert that he clearly demonstrated that the father of truth whom they have invented was known to no one before his coming; and they desire to interpret the words as though the maker and creator had been known to all, and the lord spoke these words regarding the father unknown to all, whom they proclaim."( ) here we have the exact quotation twice made by justin, with the [--greek--] and the same order, set { } forth as the reading of the gospels of the marcosians and other sects, and the highest testimony to their system. it is almost impossible that justin could have altered the passage by an error of memory to this precise form, and it must be regarded as the reading of his memoirs.( ) the evidence of irenæus is clear: the gospels had the reading which we now find in them, but apocryphal gospels on the other hand had that which we find twice quoted by justin, and the passage was as it were the text upon which a large sect of the early church based its most fundamental doctrine. the [--greek--] is invariably repudiated, but the transposition of the words "father" and "son" was apparently admitted to a certain extent, although the authority for this was not derived from the gospels recognized by the church which contained the contrary order. we must briefly refer to the use of this passage by clement of alexandria. he quotes portions of the text eight times, and although with some variation of terms he invariably follows the order of the gospels. six times he makes use of the aorist [--greek--],( ) once of [--greek--],( ) and once of [--greek--].( ) he only once quotes the whole passage,( ) but on this occasion, as well as six others in which he only quotes the latter part of the sentence,( ) he omits [--greek--], and reads "and he to whom the son shall reveal," thus supporting the [--greek--] { } of justin. twice he has "god" instead of "father,"( ) and once he substitutes [--greek--] for [--greek--].( ) it is evident from the loose and fragmentary way in which clement interweaves the passage with his text, that he is more concerned with the sense than the verbal accuracy of the quotation, but the result of his evidence is that he never departs from the gospel order of "father" and "son," although he frequently makes use of [--greek--] and also employs [--greek--] in agreement with justin and, therefore, he shows the prevalence of forms approximating to, though always presenting material difference from, the reading of justin. epiphanius refers to this passage no less than ten times,( ) but he only quotes it fully five times, and upon each of these occasions with variations. of the five times to which we refer, he thrice follows the order of the gospels,( ) as he does likewise in another place where he does not complete the sentence.( ) on the remaining two occasions he adopts the same order as justin, with variations from his reading, however, to which we shall presently refer;( ) and where he only partially quotes he follows the same order on other three occasions,( ) and in one other place the quotation is too fragmentary to allow us to distinguish the order.( ) now in all of these ten quotations, with one exception, epiphanius substitutes [--greek--] for [--greek--] at the commencement of the { } passage in matthew, and only thrice does he repeat the verb in the second clause as in that gospel, and on these occasions he twice makes use of [--greek--]( ) and once of [--greek--].( ) he once uses [--greek--] with the same order as justin, but does not complete the sentence.( ) each time he completes the quotation, he uses [--greek--] with the gospel, and [--greek--] with justin,( ) but only once out of the five complete quotations does he insert [--greek--] in the concluding phrase. it is evident from this examination, which we must not carry further, that epiphanius never verbally agrees with the gospel in his quotation of this passage and never verbally with justin, but mainly follows a version different from both. it must be remembered, however, that he is writing against various heresies, and it does not seem to us improbable that he reproduces forms of the passage current amongst those sects. in his work against marcion, tertullian says: "with regard to the father, however, that he was never seen, the gospel which is common to us will testify, as it was said by christ: nemo cognovit patrem nisi filius,"( ) but elsewhere he translates "nemo scit,"( ) evidently not fully appreciating the difference of [--greek--].( ) the passage in mar-cion's gospel reads like justin's: [--greek--].( ) the use of [--greek--] as applied to the father and [--greek--] as regards the son in this passage is suggestive. origen { } almost invariably uses [--greek--], sometimes adopting the order of the gospels and sometimes that of justin, and always employing [--greek--].( ) the clementine homilies always read [--greek--], and always follow the same order as justin, presenting other and persistent variations from the form in the gospels. [--greek--] this reading occurs four times. the clementine recognitions have the aorist with the order of the gospels.( ) there only remain a few more lines to add to those already quoted to complete the whole of dr. westcott's argument regarding this passage. he continues and concludes thus: "if, indeed, justin's quotations were made from memory, no transposition could be more natural; and if we suppose that he copied the passage directly from a manuscript, there is no difficulty in believing that he found it so written in a manuscript of the canonical st. matthew, since the variation is excluded by no internal improbability, while it is found elsewhere, and its origin is easily explicable."( ) it will be observed that canon westcott does not attempt any argument, but simply confines himself to suppositions. if such explanations were only valid, there could be no difficulty in believing anything, and every embarrassing circumstance would indeed be easily explicable. the facts of the case may be briefly summed up as follows: justin deliberately and expressly quotes from his gospel, himself calling it "gospel," be it observed, a { } passage whose nearest parallel in our gospels is matt. xi. . this quotation presents material variations from our canonical gospel both in form and language. the larger part of the passage he quotes twice in a different work, written years before, in precisely the same words as the third quotation, with the sole exception that he uses the aorist instead of the present tense of the verb. no ms. of our gospel extant approximates to the reading in justin, and we are expressly told by irenæus that the present reading of our matthew was that existing in his day. on the other hand, irenæus states with equal distinctness that gospels used by gnostic sects had the reading of justin, and that the passage was "the crown of their system," and one upon whose testimony they based their leading doctrines. here, then, is the clear statement that justin's quotation disagrees with the form in the gospels, and agrees with that of other gospels. the variations occurring in the numerous quotations of the same passage by the fathers, which we have analysed, show that they handled it very loosely, but also indicate that there must have been various readings of considerable authority then current. it has been conjectured with much probability that the form in which justin quotes the passage twice in his apology may have been the reading of older gospels, and that it was gradually altered by the church to the form in which we now have it, for dogmatic reasons, when gnostic sects began to base doctrines upon it inconsistent with the prevailing interpretation.( ) be this as it may, justin's gospel clearly had a reading different from ours, but in unison with { } that known to exist in other gospels, and this express quotation only adds additional proof to the mass of evidence already adduced that the memoirs of the apostles were not our canonical gospels.( ) we have already occupied so much space even with this cursory examination of justin's quotations, that we must pass over in silence passages which he quotes from the memoirs with variations from the parallels in our gospels which are also found in the clementine homilies and other works emanating from circles in which other gospels than ours were used. we shall now only briefly refer to a few sayings of jesus expressly quoted by justin, which are altogether unknown to our gospels. justin says: "for the things which he foretold would take place in his name, these we see actually coming to pass in our sight. for he said: 'many shall come,' &c., &c.,( ) and 'there shall be schisms and heresies,'( ) and 'beware of false prophets,'( ) &c, and 'many false christs and false apostles shall arise and shall deceive many of the faithful.'"( ) neither of the two prophecies here quoted are to be found anywhere in our gospels, and to the second of them justin repeatedly refers. he says in one place that jesus "foretold that in the interval of his coming, as i previously said,( ) heresies and false prophets would arise in his name."( ) it is admitted that these { } prophecies are foreign to our gospels.( ) it is very probable that the apostle paul refers to the prophecy, "there shall be schisms and heresies" in cor. xi. - , where it is said, ".... i hear that schisms exist amongst you; and i partly believe it. for there must also be heresies amongst you," &c. [--greek--].( ) we find also, elsewhere, traces both of this saying and that which accompanies it. in the clementine homilies, peter is represented as stating, "for there shall be, as the lord said, _false apostles_, false prophets, _heresies_, desires for supremacy," &c. [--greek--]. we are likewise reminded of the passage in the epistle attributed to the roman clement, xliv.: "our apostles knew through our lord jesus christ that there would be contention regarding the dignity of the episcopate."( ) in our gospel there is no reference anywhere to schisms and heresies, nor are false apostles once mentioned, the reference being solely to "false christs" and "false prophets." the recurrence here and elsewhere of the peculiar expression "false apostles" is very striking,( ) and the evidence for the passage as a saying of jesus is important. hegesippus, after enumerating a vast number of heretical sects and teachers, continues: "from these sprang the false christs, false prophets, _false apostles_, who divided the { } union of the church by corrupting doctrines concerning god and concerning his christ."( ) it will be remembered that hegesippus made use of the gospel according to the hebrews, and the clementine literature points to the same source. in the apostolic constitutions we read: "for these are false christs and false prophets, _and false apostles_, deceivers, and corrupters," &c.,( ) and in the clementine recognitions the apostle peter is represented as saying that the devil, after the temptation, terrified by the final answer of jesus, "hastened immediately to send forth into this world false prophets, and _false apostles_, and false teachers, who should speak in the name of christ indeed, but should perform the will of the demon."( ) justin's whole system forbids our recognizing in these two passages mere tradition, and we must hold that we have here quotations from a gospel different from ours. elsewhere, justin says: "out of which (affliction and fiery trial of the devil) again jesus, the son of god, promised to deliver us, and to put on us prepared garments, if we do his commandments, and he is proclaimed as having provided an eternal kingdom for us."( ) this promise is nowhere found in our gospel.( ) immediately following the passage (k and ) which we have discussed( ) as repeated in the dialogue: "many { } shall say to me, &c, &c, and i will say to them, depart from me," justin continues: "and in other words by which he will condemn those who are unworthy to be saved, he said that he will say: begone into the darkness without, which the father hath prepared for satan and his angels."( ) the nearest parallel to this is in matt. xxv. : "then shall he say also unto them on the left hand: depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels." [--greek--] it is apparent that justin's quotation differs very widely from the reading of our gospel. the same reading, with the exception of a single word, is found in the clementine homilies (xix. ), that is to say, that "devil" is substituted for "satan," and this variation is not important. the agreement of the rest, on the other hand, seems to establish the conclusion that the quotation is from a written gospel different from ours,( ) and here we have further strong indications of justin's use of the ebionite gospel. another of the sayings of jesus which are foreign to our gospels is one in reference to the man who falls away from righteousness into sin, of whom justin says: "wherefore also our lord jesus christ said: in whatsoever things i may find you, in these i shall also judge you."( ) [--greek--] { } "[--greek--]") a similar expression is used by some of the fathers, and in some cases is ascribed to the prophets.( ) clement of alexandria has quoted a phrase closely resembling this without indicating the source. [--greek--].( ) grabe was of opinion that justin derived the passage from the gospel according to the hebrews,( ) an opinion shared by the greater number of modern critics, and which we are prepared to accept from many previous instances of agreement. even the warmest asserters of the theory that the memoirs are identical with our gospels are obliged to admit that this saying of jesus is not contained in them, and that it must have been derived from an extra-canonical source.( ) other passages of a similar kind might have been pointed out, but we have already devoted too much space to justin's quotations, and must hasten to a conclusion. there is one point, however, to which we must refer. we have more than once alluded to the fact that, unless in one place, justin never mentions an author's name in connection with the memoirs of the apostles. the exception to which we referred is the following. justin says: "the statement also that he (jesus) changed the name of peter, one of the apostles, and that this is also written in _his_ memoirs as having been done, { } together with the fact that he also changed the name of other two brothers, who were sons of zebedee, to boanerges, that is, sons of thunder," &c.( ) according to the usual language of justin, and upon strictly critical grounds, the [--greek--] in this passage must be referred to peter; and justin, therefore, seems to ascribe the memoirs to that apostle, and to speak of a gospel of peter. some critics maintain that the [--greek--] does not refer to peter, but to jesus, or, more probably still, that it should be amended to [--greek--], and apply to the apostles.( ) the great majority, however, are forced to admit the reference of the memoirs to peter, although they explain it, as we shall see, in different ways. it is argued by some that this expression is used when justin is alluding to the change of name not only of peter but of the sons of zebedee, the narrative of which is only found in the gospel according to mark. now mark was held by many of the fathers to have been the mere mouthpiece of peter, and to have written at his dictation;( ) so that, in fact, in calling the second gospel by the name of the apostle peter, they argue, justin merely adopted the tradition current in the early church, and referred to the { } gospel now known as the gospel according to mark.( ) it must be evident, however, that after admitting that justin speaks of the memoirs of peter," it is indeed hasty in the extreme to conclude from the fact that the mention of the sons of zebedee being surnamed boanerges is only recorded in mark iii. , and not in the other canonical gospels, that therefore the "memoirs of peter" and our gospel according to mark are one and the same. we shall, hereafter, in examining the testimony of papias, see that the gospel according to mark, of which the bishop of hierapolis speaks, was not our canonical mark at all. it would be very singular indeed on this hypothesis that justin should not have quoted a single passage from the only gospel whose author he names, and the number of times he seems to quote from a petrine gospel, which was quite different from mark, confirms the inference that he cannot possibly here refer to our second gospel. it is maintained, therefore, by numerous other critics that justin refers to a gospel according to peter, or according to the hebrews, and not to mark.( ) we learn from eusebius that serapion, who became bishop of antioch about a.d. , composed a book on { } the "gospel according to peter" [--greek--], which he found in circulation in his diocese. at first serapion had permitted the use of this gospel, as it evidently was much prized, but he subsequently condemned it as a work favouring docetic views, and containing many things superadded to the doctrine of the saviour.( ) origen likewise makes mention of the gospel according to peter [--greek--] as agreeing with the tradition of the hebrews.( ) but its relationship to the gospel according to the hebrews becomes more clear when theodoret states that the nazarenes made use of the gospel according to peter,( ) for we know by the testimony of the fathers generally that the nazarene gospel was that commonly called the gospel according to the hebrews [--greek--]. the same gospel was in use amongst the ebionites, and in fact, as almost all critics are agreed, the gospel according to the hebrews, under various names, such as the gospel according to peter, according to the apostles, the nazarenes, ebionites, egyptians, &c, with modifications certainly, but substantially the same work, was circulated very widely throughout the early church.( ) a quotation occurs in the { } so-called epistle of ignatius to the smyrnaeans, to which we have already referred, which is said by origen to be in the work called the doctrine of peter(l) [--greek--], but jerome states that it is taken from the hebrew gospel of the nazarenes.( ) delitzsch finds traces of the gospel according to the hebrews before a.d. in the talmud.( ) eusebius( ) informs us that papias narrated a story regarding a woman accused before the lord of many sins which was contained in the gospel according to the hebrews.( ) the same writer likewise states that hegesippus, who came to rome and commenced his public career under anicetus, quoted from the same gospel.( ) the evidence of this "ancient and apostolic man is very important, for although he evidently attaches great value to tradition, does not seem to know of any canonical scriptures of the new testament { } and, like justin, apparently rejected the apostle paul,( ) he still regarded the gospel according to the hebrews with respect, and probably made exclusive use of it. the best critics consider that this gospel was the evangelical work used by the author of the clementine homilies.( ) cerinthus and carpocrates made use of a form of it,( ) and there is good reason to suppose that tatian, like his master justin, used the same gospel: indeed his "diatessaron," we are told, was by some called the gospel according to the hebrews.( ) clement of alexandria quotes it as an authority, with quite the same respect as the other gospels. he says: "so also in the gospel according to the hebrews: 'he who wonders shall reign,' it is written, 'and he who reigns shall rest.'"( ) a form of this gospel, "according to the egyptians," is quoted in the second epistle of pseudo-clement of rome, as we are informed by the alexandrian { } clement, who likewise quotes the same passage.( ) origen frequently made use of the gospel according to the hebrews,( ) and that it long enjoyed great consideration in the church is proved by the fact that theodoret found it in circulation not only among heretics, but also amongst orthodox christian communities;( ) and even in the fourth century eusebius records doubts as to the rank of this gospel amongst christian books, speaking of it under the second class in which some reckoned the apocalypse of john.( ) later still jerome translated it;( ) whilst nicephorus inserts it, in his stichometry, not amongst the apocrypha, but amongst the antilegomena, or merely doubtful books of the new testament, along with the apocalypse of john.( ) eusebius bears testimony to the value attached to it by the jewish christians,( ) and indeed he says of the ebionites that, "making use only of the gospel according to the hebrews, they took little account of the rest."( ) in such repute was this gospel amongst the earliest christian communities, that it was generally believed to be the original of the greek gospel of matthew. irenæus states that the ebionites used solely the gospel according to matthew and reject the apostle paul, asserting that he was an apostate from the law.( ) we know from statements { } regarding the ebionites( ) that this gospel could not have been our gospel according to matthew, and besides, both clement( ) of alexandria and origen( ) call it the gospel according to the hebrews. eusebius, however, still more clearly identifies it, as we have seen above. repeating the statements of irenæus, he says: "these indeed (the ebionites) thought that all the epistles of the apostle (paul) should be rejected, calling him an apostate from the law; making use only of the gospel according to the hebrews, they took little account of the rest."( ) epiphanius calls both the single gospel of the ebionites and of the nazarenes the "gospel according to the hebrews," and also the gospel according to matthew,( ) as does also theodoret( ) jerome translated the gospel according to the hebrews both into greek and latin,( ) and it is clear that his belief was that this gospel, a copy of which he found in the library collected at cæsarea by the martyr pamphilus (f ), was the hebrew original of matthew; and in support of this view he points out that it did not follow the version of the lxx. in its quotations from the old testament, but quoted directly from the hebrew.( ) an attempt has been made to argue { } that, later, jerome became doubtful of this view, but it seems to us that this is not the case, and certainly jerome in his subsequent writings states that it was generally held to be the original of matthew.( ) that this gospel was not identical with the greek matthew is evident both from the quotations of jerome and others, and also from the fact that jerome considered it worth while to translate it twice. if the greek gospel had been an accurate translation of it, of course there could not have been inducement to make another.( ) as we shall hereafter see, the belief was universal in the early church that matthew wrote his gospel in hebrew. attempts have been made to argue that the gospel according to the hebrews was first written in greek and then translated into hebrew,( ) but the reasons advanced seem quite insufficient and arbitrary,( ) and it is contradicted by the whole tradition of the fathers. { } it is not necessary for our purpose to enter fully here into the question of the exact relation of our canonical gospel according to matthew to the gospel according to the hebrews. it is sufficient for us to point out that we meet with the latter before matthew's gospel, and that the general opinion of the early church was that it was the original of the canonical gospel this opinion, as schwegler( ) remarks, is supported by the fact that tradition assigns the origin of both gospels to palestine, and that both were intended for jewish christians and exclusively used by them. that the two works, however originally related, had by subsequent manipulation become distinct, although still amidst much variation preserving some substantial affinity, cannot be doubted, and in addition to evidence already cited we may point out that in the stichometry of nicephorus, the gospel according to matthew is said to have [--greek--], whilst that according to the hebrews has only .( ) whether this gospel formed one of the writings of the [--greek--] of luke it is not our purpose to inquire, but enough has been said to prove that it was one of the most ancient( ) { } and most valued evangelical works, and to show the probability that justin martyr, a jewish christian living amongst those who are known to have made exclusive use of this gospel, may well, like his contemporary hegesippus, have used the gospel according to the hebrews; and this probability is, as we have seen, greatly strengthened by the fact that many of his quotations agree with passages which we know to have been contained in it; whilst, on the other hand, almost all differ from our gospels, presenting generally, however, a greater affinity to the gospel according to matthew, as we might expect, than to the other two. it is clear that the title "gospel according to the hebrews" cannot have been its actual superscription, but merely was a name descriptive of the readers for whom it was prepared or amongst whom it chiefly circulated, and it is most probable that it originally bore no other title than "the gospel" [--greek--], to which were added the different designations under which we find it known amongst different communities.( ) we have already seen that justin speaks of "the gospel" and seems to refer to the "memoirs of peter," both distinguishing appellations of this gospel, but there is another of the names borne by the "gospel according to the hebrews," which singularly recalls the "memoirs of the apostles," by which justin prefers to call his evangelical work. it was called the "gospel according to the apostles"( ) { } [--greek--], and, in short, comparing justin's memoirs with this gospel, we find at once similarity of contents and even of name.( ) it is not necessary, however, for) the purposes of this examination to dwell more fully upon the question as to what specific gospel now no longer extant justin employed. we have shown that there is no evidence that he made use of any of our gospels, and he cannot, therefore, be cited even to prove their existence, and much less to attest the authenticity and character of records whose authors he does not once name. on the other hand it has been made evident that there were other gospels, now lost but which then enjoyed the highest consideration, from which his quotations might have been, and probably were, taken. we have seen that justin's memoirs of the apostles contained facts of gospel history unknown to our gospels, which were contained in apocryphal works and notably in the gospel according to the hebrews; that they further contained matter contradictory to our gospels, and sayings of jesus not contained in them; and that his quotations, although so numerous, systematically vary from similar passages in our gospels. no theory of quotation from memory can satisfactorily account for these phenomena, and the reasonable conclusion is that justin did not make use of our gospels, but quoted from another source. in no case can the testimony of justin afford the requisite support to the gospels as records of miracles and of a divine revelation. { } chapter iv. hegesippus--papias of hierapolis. we now turn to hegesippus, one of the contemporaries of justin, and, like him, a palestinian jewish christian. most of our information regarding him is derived from eusebius, who fortunately gives rather copious extracts from his writings. hegesippus was born in palestine, of jewish parents,(l) and in all probability belonged to the primitive community of jerusalem.( ) in order to make himself thoroughly acquainted with the state of the church, he travelled widely and came to rome when anicetus was bishop. subsequently he wrote a work of historical memoirs, [--greek--], in five books, and thus became the first ecclesiastical historian of christianity. this work is lost, but portions have been preserved to us by eusebius, and one other fragment is also extant. it must have been, in part at least, written after the succession of eleutherus to the roman bishopric (a.d. - ), as that event is mentioned in the book itself, and his testimony is allowed by all critics to date from an advanced period of the second half of the second century.( ) { } the testimony of hegesippus is of great value, not only as that of a man born near the primitive christian tradition, but also as that of an intelligent traveller amongst many christian communities. eusebius evidently held him in high estimation as recording the unerring tradition of the apostolic preaching in the most simple style of composition,( ) and as a writer of authority who was "contemporary with the first successors of the apostles"( ) [--greek--]. any indications, therefore, which we may derive from information regarding him, and from the fragments of his writings which survive, must be of peculiar importance for our inquiry. as might have been expected from a convert from judaism( ) [--greek--], we find in hegesippus manifest evidences of general tendency to the jewish side of christianity. for him, "james, the brother of the lord," was the chief of the apostles, and he states that he had received the government of the church after the death of jesus.( ) the account which he gives of him is remarkable. "he was holy from his mothers womb. he drank neither wine nor strong drink, nor ate he any living thing. a razor never went upon his head, he anointed not himself with { } oil, and did not use a bath. he alone was allowed to enter into the holies. for he did not wear woollen garments, but linen. and he alone entered into the sanctuary and was wont to be found upon his knees seeking forgiveness on behalf of the people; so that his knees became hard like a camel's, through his constant kneeling in supplication to god, and asking for forgiveness for the people. in consequence of his exceeding great righteousness he was called righteous and 'oblias,' that is, protector of the people and righteousness, as the prophets declare concerning him,"( ) and so on. throughout the whole of his account of james, hegesippus describes him as a mere jew, and as frequenting the temple, and even entering the holy of holies as a jewish high priest. whether the account be apocryphal or not is of little consequence here; it is clear that hegesippus sees no incongruity in it, and that the difference between the jew and the christian was extremely small. the head of the christian community could assume all the duties of the jewish high-priest,( ) and his christian doctrines did not offend more than a small party amongst the jews.( ) we are not, therefore, surprised to find that his rule [--greek--] of orthodoxy in the christian communities { } which he visited, was "the law, the prophets, and the lord." speaking of the result of his observations during his travels, and of the succession of bishops in rome, he says: "the corinthian church has continued in the true faith until primus, now bishop of corinth. i conversed with him on my voyage to rome, and stayed many days with the corinthians, during which time we were refreshed together with true doctrine. arrived in rome i composed the succession until anicetus, whose deacon was eleutherus. after anicetus succeeded soter, and afterwards eleutherus. but with every succession, and in every city, that prevails which the law, and the prophets, and the lord enjoin."( ) the test of true doctrine [--greek--] with hegesippus as with justin, therefore, is no new testament canon, which does not yet exist for him, but the old testament, the only holy scriptures which he acknowledges, and the words of the lord himself,( ) which, as in the case of jewish christians like justin, were held to be established by, and in direct conformity with, the old testament. he carefully transmits the unerring tradition of apostolic preaching [--greek--], but he apparently knows nothing of any canonical series even of apostolic epistles. the care with which eusebius searches for information regarding the books of the new testament in early writers, and his anxiety to produce any evidence concerning their composition and authenticity, render his silence upon the subject almost as important as his distinct { } utterance when speaking of such a man as hegesippus.( ) now, while eusebius does not mention that hegesippus refers to any of our canonical gospels or epistles, he very distinctly states that he made use in his writings of the "gospel according to the hebrews" [--greek--]. it may be well, however, to give his remarks in a consecutive form. "he sets forth some matters from the gospel according to the hebrews and the syriac, and particularly from the hebrew language, showing that he was a convert from among the hebrews, and other things he records as from unwritten jewish tradition. and not only he, but also irenæus, and the whole body of the ancients, called the proverbs of solomon: all-virtuous wisdom. and regarding the so-called apocrypha, he states that some of them had been forged in his own time by certain heretics."( ) it is certain that eusebius, who quotes with so much care the testimony of papias, a man of whom he speaks disparagingly, regarding the composition of the first two gospels, would not have neglected to have availed himself of the evidence of hegesippus, for whom he has so much respect, had that writer furnished him with any opportunity, and there can be no doubt that he found no facts concerning the origin and authorship of our gospels in his writings. it is, on the other hand, reasonable to infer that hegesippus exclusively made use of the { } gospel according to the hebrews, together with unwritten tradition.( ) in the passage regarding the gospel according to the hebrews, as even lardner( ) conjectures, the text of eusebius is in all probability confused, and he doubtless said what jerome later found to be the fact, that "the gospel according to the hebrews is written in the chaldaic and syriac (or syro-chaldaic) language, but with hebrew characters."( ) it is in this sense that rufinus translates it. it may not be inappropriate to point out that fragments of the gospel according to the hebrews, which have been preserved, show the same tendency to give some pre-eminence to james amongst the apostles which we observe in hegesippus.( ) it has been argued by a few that the words, "and regarding the so-called apocrypha, he states that some of them had been forged in his own times by certain heretics," are contradictory to his attributing authority to the gospel according to the hebrews, or at least that they indicate some distinction amongst christians between recognized and apocryphal works. the apocryphal works referred to, however, are clearly old testament apocrypha.( ) the words are introduced by the statement that hegesippus records matters "as from unwritten jewish tradition," and then proceeds, "and { } not only he, but also irenæus and the whole body of the ancients, called the proverbs of solomon: all-virtuous wisdom." then follow the words, "and with regard to the _so-called_ apocrypha," &c, &c, evidently passing from the work just mentioned to the old testament apocrypha, several of which stand also in the name of solomon, and it is not improbable that amongst these were included the _ascensio esaiæ_ and the _apocalypsis eliæ_, to which is referred a passage which hegesippus, in a fragment preserved by photius,( ) strongly repudiates. as hegesippus does not, so far as we know, mention any canonical work of the new testament, but takes as his rule of faith the law, the prophets, and the words of the lord, probably as he finds them in the gospel according to the hebrews, quotes also jewish tradition and discusses the proverbs of solomon, the only possible conclusion at which we can reasonably arrive is that he spoke of old testament apocrypha. there cannot be a doubt that eusebius would have recorded his repudiation of new testament "apocrypha," regarding which he so carefully collects information, and his consequent recognition of new testament canonical works implied in such a distinction. we must now see how far in the fragments of the works of hegesippus which have been preserved to us there are references to assist our inquiry. in his account of certain surviving members of the family of jesus, who were brought before domitian, hegesippus says: "for domitian feared the appearing of the christ as much as herod."( ) it has been argued that this { } may be an allusion to the massacre of the children by herod related in matt ii., more especially as it is doubtful that the parallel account to that contained in the first two chapters of the first gospel existed in the oldest forms of the gospel according to the hebrews.( ) but the tradition which has been preserved in our first synoptic may have formed part of many other evangelical works, in one shape or another, and certainly cannot be claimed with reason exclusively for that gospel. this argument, therefore, has no weight whatever, and it obviously rests upon the vaguest conjecture. the principal passages which apologists( ) adduce as references to our gospels occur in the account which hegesippus gives of the martyrdom of james the just. the first of these is the reply which james is said to have given to the scribes and pharisees: "why do ye ask me concerning jesus the son of man? he sits in heaven on the right hand of great power, and is about to come on the clouds of heaven."( ) this is compared with matt. xxvi. : "from this time ye shall see the son of man sitting on the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven."( ) it is not necessary to point out the variations between these two passages, which are obvious. if we had not the direct intimation that hegesippus made use of the gospel according to the hebrews, which no doubt contained this passage, it would be apparent that a man who valued tradition { } so highly might well have derived this and other passages from that source. this is precisely one of those sayings which were most current in the early church, whose hope and courage were sustained amid persecution and suffering by such chiliastic expectations, with which according to the apostolic injunction they comforted each other.( ) in any case the words do not agree with the passage in the first gospel, and as we have already established, even perfect agreement would not under the circumstances be sufficient evidence that the quotation is from that gospel, and not from another; but with such discrepancy, without any evidence whatever that hegesippus knew anything of our gospels, but, on the contrary, with the knowledge that he made use of the gospel according to the hebrews, we must decide that any such passages must rather be derived from it than from our gospels. it is scarcely necessary to say anything regarding the phrase: "for we and all the people testify to thee that thou art just and that thou respectest not persons."( ) canon westcott points out that [--greek--] only occurs in luke xx. , and galatians ii. ;( ) but the similarity of this single phrase, which is not given as a quotation, but in a historical form put into the mouth of those who are addressing james, cannot for a moment be accepted as evidence of a knowledge of luke. the episode of the tribute money is generally ascribed to the oldest form of the gospel history, and although the other two synoptics( ) read [--greek--] for [--greek--], there is { } no ground for asserting that some of the [--greek--] who preceded luke did not use the latter form, and as little for asserting that it did not so stand, for instance, in the gospel according to the hebrews. the employment of the same expression in the epistle, moreover, at once deprives the gospel of any individuality in its use. hegesippus represents the dying james as kneeling down and praying for those who were stoning him: "i beseech (thee), lord god father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" [--greek--].( ) this is compared with the prayer which luke( ) puts into the mouth of jesus on the cross: "father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" [--greek--], and it is assumed from this partial coincidence that hegesippus was acquainted with the third of our canonical gospels. we are surprised to see an able and accomplished critic like hilgenfeld adopting such a conclusion without either examination or argument of any kind.( ) such a deduction is totally unwarranted by the facts of the case, and if the partial agreement of a passage in such a father with a historical expression in a gospel which, alone out of many previously existent, has come down to us can be considered evidence of the acquaintance of the father with that particular gospel, the function of criticism is at an end. it may here be observed that the above passage of luke xxiii. is omitted altogether from the vatican ms. and codex d (bezse), and in the codex sinaiticus { } its position is of a very doubtful character.( ) the codex alexandrinus which contains it omits the word [--greek--].( ) luke's gospel was avowedly composed after many other similar works were already in existence, and we know from our synoptics how closely such writings often followed each other, and drew from the same sources.( ) if any historical character is conceded to this prayer of jesus it is natural to suppose that it must have been given in at least some of these numerous gospels which have unfortunately perished. no one could reasonably assert that our third gospel is the only one which ever contained the passage. it would be preposterous to affirm, for instance, that it did not exist in the gospel according to the hebrews, which hegesippus employed. on the supposition that the passage is historical, which apologists at least will not dispute, what could be more natural or probable than that such a prayer, "emanating from the innermost soul of jesus,"( ) should have been adopted under similar circumstances by james his brother and successor, who certainly could not have derived it from luke. the tradition of such words, expressing so much of the original spirit of christianity, setting aside for the moment written { } gospels, could scarcely fail to have remained fresh in the mind of the early church, and more especially in the primitive community amongst whom they were uttered, and of which hegesippus was himself a later member; and they would certainly have been treasured by one who was so careful a collector and transmitter of "the unerring tradition of the apostolic preaching." no saying is more likely to have been preserved by tradition, both from its own character, brevity, and origin, and from the circumstances under which it was uttered, and there can be no reason for limiting it amongst written records to luke's gospel. the omission of the prayer from very important codices of luke further weakens the claim of that gospel to the passage. beyond these general considerations, however, there is the important and undoubted fact that the prayer which hegesippus represents james as uttering does not actually agree with the prayer of jesus in the third gospel. so far from proving the use of luke, therefore, this merely fragmentary and partial agreement, on the contrary, rather proves that he did not know that gospel, for on the supposition of his making use of the third synoptic at all for such a purpose, and not simply giving the prayer which james may in reality have uttered, why did he not quote the prayer as he actually found it in luke? we have still to consider a fragment of hegesippus preserved to us by stephanus gobarus, a learned monophysite of the sixth century, which reads as follows: "that the good things prepared for the righteous neither eye saw, nor ear heard, nor entered they into the heart of man. hegesippus, however, an ancient and apostolic man, how moved i know not, says in the fifth book of his memoirs that these words are vainly { } spoken, and that those who say these things give the lie to the divine writings and to the lord saying: 'blessed are your eyes that see, and your cars that hear,'" &c. [--greek--].( ) we believe that we have here an expression of the strong prejudice against the apostle paul and his teaching which continued for so long to prevail amongst jewish christians, and which is apparent in many writings of that period.( ) the quotation of paul, corinthians ii. , differs materially from the septuagint version of the passage in isaiah lxiv. , and, as we have seen, the same passage quoted by "clement of rome,"( ) differs both from the version of the lxx'. and from the epistle, although closer to the former. jerome however found the passage in the apocryphal work called "ascensio isaiæ,"( ) and origen, jerome, and others likewise ascribe it to the "apocalypsis eliæ."( ) this, however, does not concern us here, and we have merely to examine the "saying of the lord," which hegesippus opposes to the passage: "blessed are your eyes that see and your ears that hear." this is compared with matt. xiii. , "but blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear" [--greek--], and also with luke x. , "blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see," &c. we need not point out that the saying referred to by hegesippus, whilst conveying the { } same sense as that in the two gospels, differs as materially from them both as they do from each other, and as we might expect a quotation taken from a different though kindred source, like the gospel according to the hebrews, to do. the whole of the passages which we have examined, indeed, exhibit the same natural variation. we have already referred to the expressions of hegesippus regarding the heresies in the early church: "from these sprang the false christs, and false prophets, and _false apostles_ who divided the unity of the church by corrupting doctrines concerning god and his christ."( ) we have shown how this recalls quotations in justin of sayings of jesus foreign to our gospels, in common with similar expressions in the clementine homilies,( ) apostolic constitutions,( ) and clementine recognitions,( ) and we need not discuss the matter further. this community of reference, in a circle known to have made use of the gospel according to the hebrews, to matters foreign to our synoptics, furnishes collateral illustration of the influence of that gospel. tischendorf, who so eagerly searches for every trace, real or imaginary, of the use of our gospels and of the existence of a new testament canon, passes over in silence, with the exception of a short note( ) devoted to the denial that hegesippus was opposed to paul, this first writer of christian church history, whose evidence, could it have been adduced, would have been so valuable. he does not pretend that hegesippus made use of the canonical gospels, or knew of any other holy scriptures { } than those of the old testament, but, on the other hand, he does not mention that he possessed, and quoted from, the gospel according to the hebrews. there is no reason for supposing that hegesippus found a new testament canon in any of the christian communities which he visited, and such a rule of faith certainly did not yet exist in rome in a.d. - .( ) there is no evidence whatever to show that hegesippus recognized any other evangelical work than the gospel according to the hebrews, as the written source of his knowledge of the words of the lord.( ) . the testimony of papias is of great interest and importance in connection with our inquiry, inasmuch as he is the first ecclesiastical writer who mentions the tradition that matthew and mark composed written records of the life and teaching of jesus; but no question has been more continuously contested than that of the identity of the works to which he refers with our actual canonical gospels. papias was bishop of hierapolis, in phrygia,( ) in the first half of the second century, and is said to have suffered martyrdom under marcus aurelius about a.d. - .( ) about the middle of the second century( ) he wrote a work in five books, entitled { } "exposition of the lord's oracles "(l) [--greek--], which, with the exception of a few fragments preserved to us chiefly by eusebius and irenæus, is unfortunately, no longer extant. in the preface to his book he stated: "but i shall not hesitate also to set beside my interpretations all that i rightly learnt from the presbyters, and rightly remembered, earnestly testifying to their truth. for i was not, like the multitude, taking pleasure in those who speak much, but in those who teach the truth, nor in those who relate alien commandments, but in those who record those delivered by the lord to the faith, and which come from the truth itself. if it happened that any one came who had followed the presbyters, i inquired minutely after the words of the presbyters, what andrew or what peter said, or what philip or what thomas or james, or what john or matthew, or what any other of the disciples of the lord, and what aristion and the presbyter john, the disciples of the lord, say, for i held that what was to be derived from books did not so profit me as that from the living and abiding voice"( ). [--greek--] it is clear from this that papias preferred tradition to any written works with which he was acquainted, that he attached little or { } no value to any gospels with which he had met,( ) and that he knew absolutely nothing of canonical scriptures of the new testament.( ) his work was evidently intended to furnish a collection of the discourses of jesus completed from oral tradition, with his own expositions, and this is plainly indicated both by his own words, and by the statements of eusebius who, amongst other things, mentions that papias sets forth strange parables of the saviour and teachings of his from unwritten tradition [--greek--].( ) it is not, however, necessary to discuss more closely the nature of the work, for there is no doubt that written collections of discourses of jesus existed before it was composed of which it is probable he made use. the most interesting part of the work of papias which is preserved to us is that relating to matthew and with reference to the last sentence of papias, teschendorf asks: "what books does he refer to here, perhaps our gospels ? according to the expression this is not impossible, but from the whole character of the book in the highest degree improbable." (wann wurden, u. s. w.t p. .) we know little or nothing of the "whole character" of the book, and what we do know is contradictory to our gospels. the natural and only reasonable course is to believe the express declaration of papias, more especially as it is made, in this instance, as a prefatory statement of his belief. { } mark. after stating that papias had inserted in his book accounts of jesus given by aristion, of whom nothing is known, and by the presbyter john, eusebius proceeds to extract a tradition regarding mark communicated by the latter. there has been much controversy as to the identity of the presbyter john, some affirming him to have been the apostle,( ) but the great majority of critics deciding that he was a totally different person.( ) irenseus, who, sharing the chiliastic opinions of papias, held him in high respect, boldly calls him "the hearer of john" (meaning the apostle) "and a companion of polycarp" [--greek--]( ) but this is expressly contradicted by eusebius, who points out that, in the preface to his book, papias by no means asserts that he was himself a hearer of the apostles, but merely that he received their doctrines from those who had personally known them;( ) and after making the quotation from papias which we have given { } above, he goes on to point out that the name of john is twice mentioned, once together with peter, james, and matthew, and the other apostles, "evidently the evangelist," and the other john he mentions separately, ranking him amongst those who are not apostles, and placing aristion before him, distinguishing him clearly by the name of presbyter.( ) he further refers to the statement of the great bishop of alexandria, dionysius,( ) that at ephesus there were two tombs, each bearing the name of john, thereby leading to the inference that there were two men of the name.( ) there can be no doubt that papias himself in the passage quoted mentions two persons of the name of john, distinguishing the one from the other, and classing the one amongst the apostles and the other after aristion, an unknown "disciple of the lord," and, but for the phrase of irenæus, so characteristically uncritical and assumptive, there probably never would have been any doubt raised as to the meaning of the passage. the question is not of importance to us, and we may leave it, with the remark that a writer who suffered martyrdom under marcus aurelius, c. a.d. , can scarcely have been a hearer of the apostles.( ) the account which the presbyter john is said to have { } given of mark's gospel is as follows: "'this also the presbyter said: mark having become the interpreter of peter, wrote accurately whatever he remembered, though he did not arrange in order the things which were either said or done by christ. for he neither heard the lord, nor followed him; but afterwards, as i said,( ) accompanied peter, who adapted his teaching to the occasion, and not as making a consecutive record of the lord's oracles. mark, therefore, committed no error in thus writing down some things as he remembered them. for of one point he was careful, to omit none of the things which he heard, and not to narrate any of them falsely.' these facts papias relates concerning mark."( ) the question to decide is, whether the work here described is our canonical gospel or not. the first point in this account is the statement that mark was the interpreter of peter [--greek--]. was he merely the secretary of the apostle writing in a manner from his dictation, or does the passage mean that he translated the aramaic narrative of peter into dr. lightfoot (contemp. bev., , p. ), in the course of a highly fanciful argument says, in reference to this "as i said": "it is quite clear that papias had already said something of the relations existing between st. peter and st mark previously to the extract which gives an account of the second gospel, for he there refers back to a preceding notice." it is quite clear that he refers back, but only to the preceding sentence in which he "had already said something of the relations" in stating the fact that: "mark, having become the interpreter of peter, wrote, &c." { } greek?( ) the former is the more probable supposition and that which is most generally adopted, but the question is not material here. the connection of peter with the gospel according to mark was generally affirmed in the early church, as was also that of paul with the third gospel,{ } with the evident purpose of claiming apostolic origin for all the canonical gospels.( ) irenæus says: "after their decease (peter and paul), mark the disciple and interpreter of peter delivered to, us in writing that which had been preached by peter."( ) eusebius quotes a similar tradition from clement of alexandria, embellished however with further particulars. he says: "... the cause for which the gospel according to mark was written was this: when peter had publicly preached the word at rome, and proclaimed the gospel by the spirit, those who were present being many, requested mark, as he had followed him from afar and remembered what he had said, to write down what he had spoken; and when he had composed the gospel, he gave it to those who had asked it of him; which when peter knew he neither absolutely hindered nor encouraged it*"( ) tertullian repeats the same tradition. he says: { } "and the gospel which mark published may be affirmed to be peter's, whose interpreter mark was.... for it may rightly appear that works which disciples publish are of their masters."(l) we have it again from origen: "the second (gospel) is according to mark, written as peter directed him."( ) eusebius gives a more detailed and advanced version of the same tradition. "so much, however, did the effulgence of piety illuminate the minds of those (romans) who heard peter, that it did not content them to hear but once, nor to receive only the unwritten doctrine of the divine teaching, but with reiterated entreaties they besought mark, to whom the gospel is ascribed, as the companion of peter, that he should leave them a written record of the doctrine thus orally conveyed. nor did they cease their entreaties until they had persuaded the man, and thus became the cause of the writing of the gospel called according to mark. they say, moreover, that the apostle (peter) having become aware, through revelation to him of the spirit, of what had been done, was delighted with the ardour of the men, and ratified the work in order that it might be read in the churches. this narrative is given by clement in the sixth book of his institutions, whose testimony is supported by that of papias, the bishop of hierapolis."( ) { } the account given by clement, however, by no means contained these details, as we have seen. in his "demonstration of the gospel" eusebius, referring to the same tradition, affirms that it was the modesty of peter which prevented his writing a gospel himself.( ) jerome almost repeats the preceding account of eusebius: "mark, the disciple and interpreter of peter, being entreated by the brethren of rome, wrote a short gospel according to what he had received from peter, which when peter heard, he approved, and gave his authority for its being read in the churches, as clement writes in the sixth book of his institutions,"( ) &c. jerome moreover says that peter had mark for an interpreter, "whose gospel was composed: peter narrating and he writing" (cujus evangelium petro narrante et illo scribente compositum est).( ) it is evident that all these writers merely repeat with variations the tradition regarding the first two gospels which papias originated. irenæus dates the writing of mark after the death of peter and paul in rome. clement describes mark as writing during peter's life, the apostle preserving absolute neutrality. by the time of eusebius, however, the tradition has acquired new and miraculous elements and a more decided character--peter is made aware of the undertaking of mark through a revelation of the spirit, and instead of being neutral is delighted and lends the work the weight of his authority. eusebius refers to clement and papias as giving the same account, which they do { } not, however, and jerome merely repeats the story of eusebius without naming him, and the tradition which he had embellished thus becomes endorsed and perpetuated. such is the growth of tradition;(l) it is impossible to overlook the mythical character of the information we possess as to the origin of the second canonical gospel.( ) in a gospel so completely inspired by peter as the tradition of papias and of the early church indicates, we may reasonably expect to find unmistakable traces of petrine influence, but on examination it will be seen that these are totally wanting.( ) some of the early church did not fail to remark this singular discrepancy between the gospel and the tradition of its dependence on peter, and in reply eusebius adopts an apologetic tone.( ) for instance, in the brief account of the calling of simon in a similar discrepancy of tradition is to be observed as to the place in which the gospel was written, irenæus and others dating it from rome, and others (as chrysostom, in matth. homil., i.), assigning it to egypt. indeed some mss. of the second gospel have the words [--greek--] in accordance with this tradition as to its origin. cf. scholz, einl. n. t., i. p. . various critics have argued for its composition at rome, alexandria, and antioch. we do not go into the discussion as to whether peter ever was in rome. { } mark, the distinguishing addition: "called peter," of the first gospel is omitted,( ) and still more notably the whole narrative of the miraculous draught of fishes, which gives the event such prominence in the third gospel.( ) in matthew, jesus goes into the house of "peter" to cure his wife's mother of a fever, whilst in mark it is "into the house of simon and andrew," the less honourable name being still continued.( ) matthew commences the catalogue of the twelve by the pointed indication: "the first, simon, who is called peter,"( ) thus giving him precedence, whilst mark merely says: "and simon he surnamed peter."( ) the important episode of peter's walking on the sea, of the first gospel,( ) is altogether ignored by mark. the enthusiastic declaration of peter: "thou art the christ,"( ) is only followed by the chilling injunction to tell no one, in the second gospel,( ) whilst matthew not only gives greater prominence to the declaration of peter, but gives the reply of jesus: "blessed art thou, simon bar-jona," &c,--of which mark apparently knows nothing,--and then proceeds to the most important episode in the history of the apostle, the celebrated words by which the surname of peter was conferred upon him: "and i say unto thee, that thou art peter, and upon this rock will i build my church," &c.( ) the gospel supposed to be inspired by peter, however, totally omits this most important passage; as it also does the miracle of the finding the tribute money in the fish's mouth, narrated by the first gospel.( ) luke states that "peter { } and john "are sent to prepare the passover, whilst mark has only "two disciples;"( ) and in the account of the last supper, luke gives the address of jesus to peter: "simon, simon, behold satan hath desired to have you (all) that he may sift you as wheat; but i have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not; and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren."( ) of this mark does not say a word. again, after the denial, luke reads: "and the lord turned and looked upon peter, and peter remembered the word of the lord, &c, and peter went out and wept bitterly;"( ) whereas mark omits the reproachful look of jesus, and makes the penitence of peter depend merely on the second crowing of the cock, and further modifies the penitence by the omission of "bitterl"--" and when he thought thereon he wept."( ) there are other instances to which we need not refer. not only are some of the most important episodes in which peter is represented by the other gospels as a principal actor altogether omitted, but throughout the gospel there is the total absence of anything which is specially characteristic of petrine influence and teaching. the argument that these omissions are due to the modesty of peter is quite untenable, for not only does irenæus, the most ancient authority on the point, state that this gospel was only written after the death of peter,( ) but also there is no modesty in omitting passages of importance in the history of jesus, simply because peter himself was in some way concerned in them, or, for instance, in decreasing his penitence for such a denial { } of his master, which could not but have filled a sad place in the apostle's memory. on the other hand, there is no adequate record of special matter, which the intimate knowledge of the doings and sayings of jesus possessed by peter might have supplied, to counterbalance the singular omissions. there is infinitely more of the spirit of peter in the first gospel than there is in the second. the whole internal evidence, therefore, shows that this part of the tradition of the presbyter john transmitted by papias does not apply to our gospel. the discrepancy, however, is still more marked when we compare with our actual second gospel the account of the work of mark which papias received from the presbyter. mark wrote down from memory some parts [--greek--] of the teaching of peter regarding the life of jesus, but as peter adapted his instructions to the actual circumstances [--greek--], and did not give a consecutive report [--greek--] of the sayings or doings of jesus, mark was only careful to be accurate, and did not trouble himself to arrange in historical order [--greek--] his narrative of the things which were said and done by jesus, but merely wrote down facts as he remembered them. this description would lead us to expect a work composed of fragmentary reminiscences of the teaching of peter, without regular sequence or connection. the absence of orderly arrangement is the most prominent feature in the description, and forms the burden of the whole. mark writes "what he remembered;" "he did not arrange in order the things that were either said or done by christ;" and then follow the apologetic expressions of explanation--he was not himself a hearer or follower of the lord, but derived his { } information from the occasional preaching of peter, who did not attempt to give a consecutive narrative. now it is impossible in the work of mark here described to recognize our present second gospel, which does not depart in any important degree from the order of the other two synoptics, and which, throughout, has the most evident character of orderly arrangement each of the synoptics compared with the other two would present a similar degree of variation, but none of them could justly be described as not arranged in order or as not being consecutive. the second gospel opens formally, and after presenting john the baptist as the messenger sent to prepare the way of the lord, proceeds to the baptism of jesus, his temptation, his entry upon public life, and his calling of the disciples. then, after a consecutive narrative of his teaching and works, the history ends with a full and consecutive account of the last events in the life of jesus, his trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, there is in the gospel every characteristic of artistic and orderly arrangement, from the striking introduction by the prophetic voice crying in the wilderness to the solemn close of the marvellous history.( ) the great majority of critics, therefore, are agreed in concluding that the account of the presbyter john recorded by papias does not apply to our second canonical gospel at all.( ) many { } of those who affirm that the description of papias may apply to our second gospel( ) do so with hesitation, and few maintain that we now possess the original work without considerable subsequent alteration. some of these critics, however, feeling the difficulty of identifying our second gospel with the work here described, endeavour { } to reconcile the discrepancy by a fanciful interpretation of the account of papias. they suggest that the first part, in which the want of chronological order is pointed out, refers to the rough notes which mark made during the actual preaching and lifetime of peter, and that the latter part applies to our present gospel, which he later remodelled into its present shape.( ) this most unreasonable and arbitrary application of the words of papias is denounced even by apologists.( ) it has been well argued that the work here described as produced by mark in the character of [--greek--] is much more one of the same family as the clementine homilies than of our gospels.( ) the work was no systematic narrative of the history of jesus, nor report of his teaching, but the dogmatic preaching of the apostle, illustrated and interspersed with passages from the discourses of jesus or facts from his life.( ) of this character seems actually to have been that ancient work "the preaching of peter" [--greek--], which was used by heracleon,( ) and by clement( ) of alexandria as an authentic canonical work,( ) denounced by origen( ) { } on account of the consideration in which it was held by-many, but still quoted with respect by gregory of nazianzum.( ) there can be no doubt that the [--greek--] although it failed to obtain a permanent place in the canon, was one of the most ancient works of the christian church, dating probably from the first century, from which indeed the clementine homilies themselves were in all likelihood produced,( ) and, like the work described by papias, it also was held to have been composed in rome in connection with the preaching there of peter and paul. it must be noted, moreover, that papias does not call the work ascribed to mark a gospel, but merely a record of the preaching of peter. it is not necessary for us to account for the manner in which the work referred to by the presbyter john disappeared, and the present gospel according to mark became substituted for it. the merely negative evidence that our actual gospel is not the work described by papias is sufficient for our purpose. any one acquainted with the thoroughly uncritical character of the fathers, and with the literary history of the early christian church, will readily conceive the facility with which this can have been accomplished. the great mass of intelligent critics are agreed that our synoptic gospels have assumed their present form only after repeated modifications by various editors of earlier evangelical works. these changes have not been effected without traces { } being left by which the various materials may be separated and distinguished, but the more primitive gospels have entirely disappeared, naturally supplanted by the later and amplified versions. the critic, however, who distinguishes between the earlier and later matter is not bound to perform the now impossible feat of producing the originals, or accounting in any but a general way for the disappearance of the primitive gospel. teschendorf asks: "how then has neither eusebius nor any other theologian of christian antiquity thought that the expressions of papias were in contradiction with the two gospels (mt. and mk.)?"( ) the absolute credulity with which those theologians accepted any fiction, however childish, which had a pious tendency, and the frivolous character of the only criticism in which they indulged, render their unquestioning application of the tradition of papias to our gospels anything but singular, and it is only surprising to find their silent acquiescence elevated into an argument. we have already in the course of these pages seen something of the singularly credulous and uncritical character of the fathers, and we cannot afford space to give instances of the absurdities with which their writings abound. no fable could be too gross, no invention too transparent, for their unsuspicious acceptance, if it assumed a pious form or tended to edification. no period in the history of the world ever produced so many spurious works as the first two or three centuries of our era. the name of every apostle, or christian teacher, not excepting that of the great master himself, was freely attached to every description of religious forgery. false gospels, epistles, acts, martyrologies, were unscrupulously { } circulated, and such pious falsification was not even intended or regarded as a crime, but perpetrated for the sake of edification. it was only slowly and after some centuries that many of these works, once, as we have seen, regarded with pious veneration, were excluded from the canon; and that genuine works shared this fate, whilst spurious ones usurped their places, is one of the surest results of criticism. the fathers omitted to inquire critically when such investigation might have been of value, and mere tradition credulously accepted and transmitted is of no critical value.( ) in an age-when the multiplication of copies of any work was a slow process, and their dissemination a matter of difficulty and even danger, it is easy to understand with what facility the more complete and artistic gospel could take the place of the original notes as the work of mark. the account given by papias of the work ascribed to matthew is as follows: "matthew composed the oracles in the hebrew dialect, and every one interpreted them as he was able."( ) critics are divided in opinion as to whether this tradition was, like that regarding mark, derived from the presbyter john,( ) or is given merely on canon westcott himself admits that "the proof of the canon is rendered more difficult by the uncritical character of the first two centuries." he says: "the spirit of the ancient world was essentially uncritical." on the canon, p. f. { } the authority of papias himself.( ) eusebius joins the account of mark to that given by matthew merely by the following words: "these facts papias relates concerning mark; but regarding matthew he has said as follows:"( ) eusebius distinctly states that the account regarding mark is derived from the presbyter, and the only reason for ascribing to him also that concerning matthew is that it is not excluded by the phraseology of eusebius, and the two passages being given by him consecutively--however they may have stood in the work of papias--it is reasonable enough to suppose that the information was derived from the same source. the point is not of much importance, but it is clear that there is no absolute right to trace this statement to the presbyter john, as there is in the case of the tradition about mark. this passage has excited even more controversy than that regarding mark, and its interpretation and application are still keenly debated. the intricacy and difficulty of the questions which it raises are freely admitted by some of the most earnest defenders of the canonical gospels, but the problem, so far as our examination is concerned, can be solved without much trouble. the dilemma in which apologists find themselves when they attempt closely to apply the description of this work given by papias to our canonical gospel is the great difficulty which complicates the matter and prevents a { } clear and distinct solution of the question. we shall avoid minute discussion of details, contenting ourselves with the broader features of the argument, and seeking only to arrive at a just conclusion as to the bearing of the evidence of papias upon the claim to authenticity of our canonical gospel. the first point which we have to consider is the nature of the work which is here described. matthew is said to have composed the [--greek--] or oracles, and there can be little doubt from the title of his own book: "exposition of the lord's oracles" [--greek--], that these oracles referred to by papias were the discourses of jesus. does the word xoyta, however, mean strictly oracles or discourses alone, or does it include within its fair signification also historical narrative? "were the "xoyta" here referred to a simple collection of the discourses of jesus, or a complete gospel like that in our canon bearing the name of matthew? that the natural interpretation of the word is merely "oracles" is indirectly admitted, even by the most thorough apologists, when they confess the obscurity of the expression--obscurity, however, which simply appears to exist from the difficulty of straining the word to make it apply to the gospel. "in these sentences," says tischendorf, referring to the passage about matthew, "there is much obscurity; for instance, it is doubtful whether we have rightly translated 'discourses of the lord,'" and he can only extend the meaning to include historical narrative by leaving the real meaning of the word and interpreting it by supposed analogy. there can be no doubt that the direct meaning of the word xoyta anciently and at the time of papias was { } simply: words or oracles of a sacred character, and however much the signification became afterwards extended, that it was not then at all applied to doings as well as sayings. there are many instances of this original and limited signification in the new testament;( ) and there is no linguistic precedent for straining the expression, used at that period, to mean anything beyond a collection of sayings of jesus which were estimated as oracular or divine, nor is there any reason for thinking that [--greek--] was here used in any other sense.( ) it is argued { } on the other hand, that in the preceding passage upon mark, a more extended meaning of the word is indicated. the presbyter john says that mark, as the interpreter of peter, wrote without order "the things which were either said or done by christ" ([--greek--]), and then, apologizing for him, he goes on to say that peter, whom he followed, adapted his teaching to the occasion, "and not as making a consecutive record of the oracles [--greek--] of the lord." here, it is said, the word [--greek--] is used in reference both to sayings and doings, and therefore in the passage on matthew [--greek--] must not be understood to mean only [--greek--], but also includes, as in the former case, the [--greek--]. for these and similar reasons,--in very many cases largely influenced by the desire to see in these xoyta our actual gospel according to matthew--many critics have maintained that [--greek--] in this place may be understood to include historical narrative as well as discourses.( ) the arguments by which they arrive at this { } conclusion, however, seem to us to be based upon thorough misconception of the direct meaning of the passage. few or none of these critics would deny that the simple interpretation of [--greek--], at that period, was oracular sayings.( ) papias shows his preference for discourses in the very title of his lost book, "exposition of the [--greek--] of the lord," and in the account which he gives of the works attributed to mark and matthew, the discourses evidently attracted his chief interest. now, in the passage regarding mark, instead of [--greek--] being made the equivalent of [--greek--] and [--greek--], the very reverse is the fact. the presbyter says mark wrote what he remembered of the things which were said or done by christ, although not in order, and he apologizes for his doing this on the ground that he had not himself been a _hearer_ of the lord, but merely reported what he had heard from peter, who adapted his teaching to the occasion, and did _not_ attempt to give a consecutive record of the oracles [--greek--] of the lord. mark, therefore, could not do so either. matthew, on the contrary, he states, did compose the oracles [--greek--]. there is an evident contrast made: mark { } wrote [--greek--] because he had not the means of writing the oracles, but matthew composed the [--greek--].( ) papias clearly distinguishes the work of mark, who had written reminiscences of what jesus had said and done, from that of matthew, who had made a collection of his discourses.( ) it is impossible upon any but arbitrary grounds, and from a foregone conclusion, to maintain that a work commencing with a detailed history of the birth and infancy of jesus, his genealogy, and the preaching of john the baptist, and concluding with an equally minute history of his betrayal, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection, and which relates all the miracles and has for its evident aim throughout the demonstration that messianic prophecy was fulfilled in jesus, could be entitled [--greek--]: the oracles or discourses of the lord.( ) partly for these, but also for other important reasons, some of which shall presently be referred to, the great majority of critics deny that the work described by papias can be the same as the gospel in our canon bearing the name of matthew.( ) whilst of those who { } suppose that the (aramaic) original of which papias speaks may have been substantially similar to it in construction, very few affirm that the work did not receive much subsequent manipulation, addition, and alteration, necessarily including translation, before it assumed the form in which the gospel now lies before us, and many of them altogether deny its actual apostolic origin.( ) the next most important and obvious point is that the work described in this passage was written by matthew { } in the hebrew or aramaic dialect, and each one who did not understand that dialect was obliged to translate as best he could. our gospel according to matthew, however, is in greek. tischendorf, who is obliged to acknowledge the greek originality of our actual gospel, and that it is not a translation from another language, recognizes the inevitable dilemma in which this fact places apologists, and has, with a few other critics, no better argument with which to meet it than the simple suggestion that papias must have been mistaken in saying that matthew wrote in hebrew.( ) just as much of the testimony as is convenient or favourable is eagerly claimed by such apologists, and the rest, which destroys its applicability to our gospel, is set aside as a mistake. tischendorf perceives the difficulty, but not having arguments to meet it, he takes refuge in feeling. "in this," he says, "there lies before us one of the most complicated questions, whose detailed treatment would here not be in place. for our part, we are fully at rest concerning it, in the conviction that the assumption by papias of a hebrew original text of matthew, which already in his time cannot have been limited to himself and was soon repeated by other men, arises only from a misunderstanding."( ) it is difficult to comprehend why it should be considered out of place in a work specially written to establish the authenticity of the gospels to discuss fully so vital a point, and its deliberate evasion in such a manner alone can be deemed out of place on such an occasion.( ) { } we may here briefly remark that teschendorf and others( ) repeat with approval the disparaging expressions against papias which eusebius, for dogmatic reasons, did not scruple to use, and in this way they seek somewhat to depreciate his testimony, or at least indirectly to warrant their free handling of it. it is true that eusebius says that papias was a man of very limited comprehension( ) [--greek--], but this is acknowledged to be on account of his millenarian opinions,( ) to which eusebius was vehemently opposed. it must be borne in mind, however, that the chiliastic passage from papias quoted by irenæus, and in which he certainly saw nothing foolish, is given on the authority of the presbyter john, to whom, and not to papias, any criticism upon it must be referred. if the passage be not of a very elevated character, it is quite in the spirit of that age. the main point, however, is that in regard to the testimony of papias we have little to { } do with his general ability, for all that was requisite was the power to see, hear, and accurately state very simple facts. he repeats what is told him by the presbyter, and in such matters we presume that the bishop of hierapolis must be admitted to have been competent.( ) there is no point, however, on which the testimony of the fathers is more invariable and complete than that the work of matthew was written in hebrew or aramaic. the first mention of any work ascribed to matthew occurs in the account communicated by papias, in which, as we have seen, it is distinctly said that matthew wrote "in the hebrew dialect." irenæus, the next writer who refers to the point, says: "matthew also produced a written gospel amongst the hebrews in their own dialect," and that he did not derive his information solely from papias may be inferred from his going on to state the epoch of matthew's writings: "when peter and paul were preaching and founding the church in rome."( ) the evidence furnished by pantænus is certainly independent of papias. eusebius states with regard to him: "of these pantænus is said to have been one, and to have penetrated as far as india (southern arabia), where it is reported that he found the gospel according to matthew, which had been delivered before his arrival to some who had the knowledge of christ, to whom bartholomew, one of the apostles, as it is said, had preached, and left them that writing of matthew in hebrew letters" [--greek--] { } [--greek--].( ) jerome gives a still more circumstantial account of this. "pantaenus found that bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles, had there (in india) preached the advent of our lord jesus christ according to the gospel of matthew, which was written in hebrew letters (quod hebraicis uteris scriptum), and which on returning to alexandria he brought with him."( ) it is quite clear that this was no version specially made by bartholomew, for had he translated the gospel according to matthew from the greek, for the use of persons in arabia, he certainly would not have done so into hebrew.( ) origen, according to eusebius, "following the ecclesiastical canon," states what he has understood from tradition [--greek--] of the gospels, and says: "the first written was that according to matthew, once a publican, but afterwards an apostle of jesus christ, who delivered it to the jewish believers, composed in the hebrew language."( ) eusebius in another place makes a similar statement in his own name: "matthew having first preached to the hebrews when he was about to go also to others, delivered to them his gospel written in their native language, and thus compensated those from whom he was departing for the want of his presence by the writing."( ) cyril of jerusalem says: "matthew, who wrote the gospel, wrote it in the hebrew language."( ) epiphanius, referring to the fact that the nazarenes called the only gospel which they { } recognized the "gospel according to the hebrews," continues: "as in very truth we can affirm that matthew alone in the new testament set forth and proclaimed the gospel in the hebrew language and in hebrew characters;"( ) and elsewhere he states that "matthew wrote the gospel in hebrew."( ) the same tradition is repeated by chrysostom,( ) augustine,( ) and others. whilst the testimony of the fathers was thus unanimous as to the fact that the gospel ascribed to matthew was originally written in hebrew, no question ever seems to have arisen in their minds as to the character of the greek version; much less was any examination made with the view of testing the accuracy of the translation. "such inquiries were not in the spirit of christian learned men generally of that time,"( ) as tischendorf remarks in connection with the belief current in the early church, and afterwards shared by jerome, that the gospel according to the hebrews was the original of the greek gospel according to matthew. the first who directly refers to the point, frankly confessing the total ignorance which generally prevailed, was jerome. he states: "matthew, who was also called levi, who from a publican became an apostle, was the first who wrote a gospel of christ in judæa in hebrew language and letters, on account of those from amongst the circumcision who had believed; but who afterwards translated it into greek is not { } sufficiently certain."( ) it was only at a much later period, when doubt began to arise, that the translation was wildly ascribed to the apostles john, james, and others.( ) the expression in papias that "everyone interpreted them (the [--greek--]) as he was able" [--greek--] has been variously interpreted by different critics, like the rest of the account. schleier-macher explained the [--greek--] as translation by enlargement: matthew merely collected the xoyta ([--greek--]), and everyone added the explanatory circumstances of time and occasion as best he could.( ) this view, however, has not been largely adopted. others consider that the expression refers to the interpretation which was given on reading it at the public meetings of christians for worship,( ) but there can be no doubt that, coming after the statement that the work was written in the hebrew dialect, [--greek--] can only mean simple translation.( ) some maintain that the passage infers the existence of many written translations, amongst which very probably was ours;( ) whilst others affirm that the phrase merely signifies that as there was no recognized { } translation, each one who had but an imperfect knowledge of the language, yet wished to read the work, translated the hebrew for himself orally as best he could.( ) some consider that papias or the presbyter use the verb in the past tense, [--greek--], as contrasting the time when it was necessary for each to interpret as best he could with the period when, from the existence of a recognized translation, it was no longer necessary for them to do so;( ) whilst others deny that any written translation of an authentic character was known to papias at all.( ) now the words in papias are merely: "matthew composed the xoyta in the hebrew dialect,( ) and everyone interpreted them as he was able." the statement is perfectly simple and direct, and it is at least quite clear that it conveys the fact that when the work was composed, translation was requisite, and as each one translated "as he was able," that no recognized translation existed to which all might have recourse. there is no contrast either necessarily or, we think, probably implied in the use of the past tense. the composition of the xoyta being of course referred to in the in connection with this it may be of interest to remember that, in the account of his conversion and the vision which he saw on his way to damascus which paul gives to king agrippa in the acts of the apostles, he states that jesus spoke to him "in the hebrew dialect" [--greek--], acts xxvi. . { } past tense, the same tense is simply continued in completing the sentence. the purpose is obviously to convey the fact that the work was composed in the hebrew language. but even if it be taken that papias intentionally uses the past tense in reference to the time when translations did not exist, nothing is gained, papias may have known of many translations, but there is absolutely not a syllable which warrants the conclusion that papias was acquainted with an authentic greek version, although it is possible that he may have known of the existence of some greek translations of no authority. the words used, however, imply that, if he did, he had no respect for any of them. thus the account of papias, supported by the perfectly unanimous testimony of the fathers, declares that the work composed by matthew was written in the hebrew or aramaic dialect. the only evidence which asserts that matthew wrote any work at all, distinctly asserts that he wrote it in hebrew. it is quite impossible to separate the statement of the authorship from the language. the two points are so indissolubly united that they stand or fall together. if it be denied that matthew wrote in hebrew, it cannot be asserted that he wrote at all. it is therefore perfectly certain from this testimony that matthew cannot be declared the direct author of the greek canonical gospel bearing his name.( ) at the very best it can only be a translation, by an unknown hand, of a work the original of which was early lost. none of the earlier fathers ever ventured a conjecture as to how, when, or by whom the translation was effected. jerome explicitly states that the translator of the work was unknown. the { } deduction is clear: our greek gospel, in so far as it is associated with matthew at all, cannot at the utmost be more than a translation, but as the work of an unknown translator, there cannot, in the absence of the original, or of satisfactory testimony of its accuracy, bo any assurance that the translation faithfully renders the work of matthew, or accurately conveys the sense of the original. all its apostolical authority is gone. even michaelis long ago recognized this: "if the original text of matthew be lost, and we have nothing but a greek translation: then, frankly, we cannot ascribe any divine inspiration to the words: yea, it is possible that in various places the true meaning of the apostle has been missed by the translator."( ) this was felt and argued by the manicheans in the fourth century,( ) and by the anabaptists at the time of the reformation.( ) a wide argument might be opened out as to the dependence of the other two gospels on this unauthenticated work. the dilemma, however, is not yet complete. it was early remarked that our first canonical gospel bore no real marks of being a translation at all, but is evidently an original independent greek work. even men like erasmus, calvin, cajctan, and oecolampadius, began to deny the statement that our gospels showed any traces of hebrew origin, and the researches of later scholars have so fully confirmed their doubts that few now maintain the primitive belief in a translation. we do not propose here to enter fully into this argument. it is sufficient to say that the great majority of competent critics declare that our first canonical gospel is no translation, but an { } original greek text;( ) whilst of those who consider that they find traces of translation and of hebrew origin, { } some barely deny the independent originality of the greek gospel, and few assert more than substantial agreement with the original, with more or less variation and addition often of a very decided character.( ) the case, therefore, stands thus: the whole of the evidence which warrants our believing that matthew wrote any { } work at all, distinctly, invariably, and emphatically asserts that he wrote that work in hebrew or aramaic; a greek gospel, therefore, as connected with matthew, can only be a translation by an unknown hand, whose accuracy we have not, and never have had, the means of verifying. our greek gospel, however, being an independent original greek text, there is no ground whatever for ascribing it even indirectly to matthew at all, the whole evidence of antiquity being emphatically opposed, and the gospel itself laying no claim, to such authorship. one or other of these alternatives must be adopted for our first gospel, and either is absolutely fatal to its direct apostolic origin. neither as a translation from the hebrew nor as an original greek text can it claim apostolic authority. this has been so well recognized, if not admitted, that some writers, with greater zeal than discretion, have devised fanciful theories to obviate the difficulty. these maintain that matthew himself wrote both in hebrew and in greek,( ) or at least that the translation was made during his own lifetime and under his own eye,( ) and so on. there is not, however, a particle of evidence for any of these assertions, which { } are merely the arbitrary and groundless conjectures of embarrassed apologists. it is manifest that upon this evidence both those who assert the hebrew original of matthew's work and those who maintain that our gospel is not a translation but an original greek composition, should logically deny its apostolicity. we need not say that this is not done, and that for dogmatic and other foregone conclusions many profess belief in the apostolic authorship of the gospel, although in doing so they wilfully ignore the facts, and in many cases merely claim a substantial but not absolute apostolic origin for the work.( ) a much greater number of the most able and learned critics, however, both from external and internal evidence deny the apostolic origin of our first canonical gospel.( ) { } there is another fact to which we may briefly refer, which from another side shows that the work of matthew { } with which papias was acquainted was different from our gospel. in a fragment from the fourth book of his lost work which is preserved to us by oecumenius and theophylact, papias relates the circumstances of the death of judas iscariot in a manner which is in contradiction to the account in the first gospel. in matthew xxvii. , the death of the traitor is thus related: "and he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed and went and hanged himself."( ) the narrative in papias is as follows: "judas walked about in this world a great example of impiety; for his body having swollen so that, on an occasion, when a waggon was moving on its way, he could not pass it, he was crushed by the waggon and his bowels gushed out."( ) theophylact, in connection with this passage, adds other details also apparently taken from the work of papias, as for instance that, from his excessive corpulency, the eyes of judas were so swollen that they could not see, and so sunk in his head that they could not be perceived even by the aid of the optical instruments of physicians; and that the rest of his body was covered with running sores and maggots, and so on in the manner of the early christian ages, whose imagination conjured up the wildest "special { } providences" to punish the enemies of the faith.( ) as papias expressly states that he eagerly inquired what the apostles, and amongst them what matthew, said, we may conclude that he would not have deliberately contradicted the account given by that apostle had he been acquainted with any work attributed to him which contained it.( ) it has been argued, from some very remote and imaginary resemblance between the passage from the preface to the work of papias quoted by eusebius with the prologue to luke, that papias was acquainted with that gospel;( ) but nothing could be more groundless than such a conclusion based upon such evidence, and there is not a word in our fragments of papias which warrants such an assertion.( ) eusebius, who never fails to state what the fathers say about the works of the new testament, does not mention that papias knew either the third or fourth gospels. is it possible to suppose that if papias had been acquainted with those gospels he would not have asked for information about them from the presbyters, or that eusebius would not have recorded it as he did that regarding the works ascribed to matthew and mark? eusebius states, however, that papias "made use of testimonies from the first epistle of john and, likewise, from that of peter."( ) as eusebius, { } however, does not quote the passages from papias, we must remain in doubt whether he did not, as elsewhere, assume from some similarity of wording that the passages were quotations from these epistles, whilst in reality they might not be. andrew, a cappadocian bishop of the fifth century, mentions that papias, amongst others of the fathers, considered the apocalypse inspired.( ) no reference is made to this by eusebius, but although from his millenarian tendencies it is very probable that papias regarded the apocalypse with peculiar veneration as a prophetic book, this evidence is too vague and isolated to be of much value. we find, however, that papias, like hegesippus and others of the fathers, was acquainted with the gospel according to the hebrews.( ) eusebius says: "he (papias) has likewise related another history of a woman accused of many sins before the lord, which is contained in the gospel according to the hebrews."( ) this is generally believed to be the episode inserted in the later mss. of the fourth gospel, viii. -- . whatever books papias knew, however, it is certain, from his own express declaration, that he ascribed little importance to them, and preferred tradition as a more beneficial source of information regarding evangelical history. "for i held that what was to be derived from { } books," he says, "did not so profit me as that from the living and abiding voice."( ) if, therefore, it could even have been shown that papias was acquainted with any of our canonical gospels, it must at the same time have been admitted that he did not recognize them as authoritative documents. it is manifest from the evidence adduced, however, that papias did not know our gospels. it is not possible that he could have found it better to inquire "what john or matthew, or what any other of the disciples of the lord... say" if he had known of gospels such as ours, and believed them to have been actually written by those apostles, deliberately telling him what they had to say. the work of matthew which he mentions being, however, a mere collection of discourses of jesus, he might naturally inquire what the apostle( ) himself said of the history and teaching of the master. the evidence of papias is in every respect most important. he is the first writer who mentions that matthew and mark were believed to have written any works at all; but whilst he shows that he does not accord any canonical authority even to the works attributed to them, his description of those works and his general testimony comes with crushing force against the pretensions made on behalf of our gospels to apostolic origin and authenticity. we may merely remark that papias does not call the matthew who wrote the[--greek--] an apostle. in this passage he speaks of the apostle, but he does not distinctly identify him with the matthew of the other passage. end of vol. i. the centaur algernon blackwood i "we may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all." --william james, _a pluralistic universe_ "... a man's vision is the great fact about him. who cares for carlyle's reasons, or schopenhauer's, or spencer's? a philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it." --ibid "there are certain persons who, independently of sex or comeliness, arouse an instant curiosity concerning themselves. the tribe is small, but its members unmistakable. they may possess neither fortune, good looks, nor that adroitness of advance-vision which the stupid name good luck; yet there is about them this inciting quality which proclaims that they have overtaken fate, set a harness about its neck of violence, and hold bit and bridle in steady hands. "most of us, arrested a moment by their presence to snatch the definition their peculiarity exacts, are aware that on the heels of curiosity follows--envy. they know the very things that we forever seek in vain. and this diagnosis, achieved as it were _en passant_, comes near to the truth, for the hallmark of such persons is that they have found, and come into, their own. there is a sign upon the face and in the eyes. having somehow discovered the 'piece' that makes them free of the whole amazing puzzle, they know where they belong and, therefore, whither they are bound: more, they are definitely _en route_. the littlenesses of existence that plague the majority pass them by. "for this reason, if for no other," continued o'malley, "i count my experience with that man as memorable beyond ordinary. 'if for no other,' because from the very beginning there was another. indeed, it was probably his air of unusual bigness, massiveness rather,--head, face, eyes, shoulders, especially back and shoulders,--that struck me first when i caught sight of him lounging there hugely upon my steamer deck at marseilles, winning my instant attention before he turned and the expression on his great face woke more--woke curiosity, interest, envy. he wore this very look of certainty that knows, yet with a tinge of mild surprise as though he had only recently known. it was less than perplexity. a faint astonishment as of a happy child--almost of an animal--shone in the large brown eyes--" "you mean that the physical quality caught you first, then the psychical?" i asked, keeping him to the point, for his irish imagination was ever apt to race away at a tangent. he laughed good-naturedly, acknowledging the check. "i believe that to be the truth," he replied, his face instantly grave again. "it was the impression of uncommon bulk that heated my intuition--blessed if i know how--leading me to the other. the size of his body did not smother, as so often is the case with big people: rather, it revealed. at the moment i could conceive no possible connection, of course. only this overwhelming attraction of the man's personality caught me and i longed to make friends. that's the way with me, as you know," he added, tossing the hair back from his forehead impatiently,"--pretty often. first impressions. old man, i tell you, it was like a possession." "i believe you," i said. for terence o'malley all his life had never understood half measures. ii "the friendly and flowing savage, who is he? is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it, and mastering it?" --whitman "we find ourselves today in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of society, which we call civilization, but which even to the most optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable. some of us, indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which the various races of man have to pass through.... "while history tells us of many nations that have been attacked by it, of many that have succumbed to it, and of some that are still in the throes of it, we know of no single case in which a nation has fairly recovered from and passed through it to a more normal and healthy condition. in other words, the development of human society has never yet (that we know of) passed beyond a certain definite and apparently final stage in the process we call civilization; at that stage it has always succumbed or been arrested." --edward carpenter, _civilization: its cause and cure_ o'malley himself is an individuality that invites consideration from the ruck of commonplace men. of mingled irish, scotch, and english blood, the first predominated, and the celtic element in him was strong. a man of vigorous health, careless of gain, a wanderer, and by his own choice something of an outcast, he led to the end the existence of a rolling stone. he lived from hand to mouth, never quite growing up. it seemed, indeed, that he never could grow up in the accepted sense of the term, for his motto was the reverse of _nil admirari_, and he found himself in a state of perpetual astonishment at the mystery of things. he was forever deciphering the huge horoscope of life, yet getting no further than the house of wonder, on whose cusp surely he had been born. civilization, he loved to say, had blinded the eyes of men, filling them with dust instead of vision. an ardent lover of wild outdoor life, he knew at times a high, passionate searching for things of the spirit, when the outer world fell away like dross and he seemed to pass into a state resembling ecstasy. never in cities or among his fellow men, struggling and herded, did these times come to him, but when he was abroad with the winds and stars in desolate places. then, sometimes, he would be rapt away, caught up to see the tail-end of the great procession of the gods that had come near. he surprised eternity in a running moment. for the moods of nature flamed through him--_in_ him--like presences, potently evocative as the presences of persons, and with meanings equally various: the woods with love and tenderness; the sea with reverence and magic; plains and wide horizons with the melancholy peace and silence as of wise and old companions; and mountains with a splendid terror due to some want of comprehension in himself, caused probably by a spiritual remoteness from their mood. the cosmos, in a word, for him was psychical, and nature's moods were transcendental cosmic activities that induced in him these singular states of exaltation and expansion. she pushed wide the gateways of his deeper life. she entered, took possession, dipped his smaller self into her own enormous and enveloping personality. he possessed a full experience, and at times a keen judgment, of modern life; while underneath, all the time, lay the moving sea of curiously wild primitive instincts. an insatiable longing for the wilderness was in his blood, a craving vehement, unappeasable. yet for something far greater than the wilderness alone--the wilderness was merely a symbol, a first step, indication of a way of escape. the hurry and invention of modern life were to him a fever and a torment. he loathed the million tricks of civilization. at the same time, being a man of some discrimination at least, he rarely let himself go completely. of these wilder, simpler instincts he was afraid. they might flood all else. if he yielded entirely, something he dreaded, without being able to define, would happen; the structure of his being would suffer a nameless violence, so that he would have to break with the world. these cravings stood for that loot of the soul which he must deny himself. complete surrender would involve somehow a disintegration, a dissociation of his personality that carried with it the loss of personal identity. when the feeling of revolt became sometimes so urgent in him that it threatened to become unmanageable, he would go out into solitude, calling it to heel; but this attempt to restore order, while easing his nature, was never radical; the accumulation merely increased on the rebound; the yearnings grew and multiplied, and the point of saturation was often dangerously near. "some day," his friends would say, "there'll be a bursting of the dam." and, though their meaning might be variously interpreted, they spoke the truth. o'malley knew it, too. a man he was, in a word, of deep and ever-shifting moods, and with more difficulty than most in recognizing the underlying self of which these outer aspects were projections masquerading as complete personalities. the underlying ego that unified these projections was of the type touched with so sure a hand in the opening pages of an inspired little book: _the plea of pan_. o'malley was useless as a citizen and knew it. sometimes--he was ashamed of it as well. occasionally, and at the time of this particular "memorable adventure," aged thirty, he acted as foreign correspondent; but even as such he was the kind of newspaper man that not merely collects news, but discovers, reveals, creates it. wise in their generation, the editors who commissioned him remembered when his copy came in that they were editors. a roving commission among the tribes of the caucasus was his assignment at the moment, and a better man for the purpose would have been hard to find, since he knew beauty, had a keen eye for human nature, divined what was vital and picturesque, and had, further, the power to set it down in brief terms born directly of his vivid emotions. when first i knew him he lived--nowhere, being always on the move. he kept, however, a dingy little room near paddington where his books and papers accumulated, undusted but safe, and where the manuscripts of his adventures were found when his death made me the executor of his few belongings. the key was in his pocket, carefully ticketed with a bone label. and this, the only evidence of practical forethought i ever discovered in him, was proof that something in that room was deemed by him of value--to others. it certainly was not the heterogeneous collection of second-hand books, nor the hundreds of unlabeled photographs and sketches. can it have been the mss. of stories, notes, and episodes i found, almost carefully piled and tabulated with titles, in a dirty kitbag of green willesden canvas? some of these he had told me (with a greater vividness than he could command by pen); others were new; many unfinished. all were unusual, to say the least. all, too, had obviously happened to himself at some period of his roving career, though here and there he had disguised his own part in them by hoffmann's device of throwing the action into the third person. those told to me by word of mouth i could only feel were true, true for himself at least. in no sense were they mere inventions, but arose in moments of vision upon a structure of solid events. ten men will describe in as many different ways a snake crossing their path; but, besides these, there exists an eleventh man who sees more than the snake, the path, the movement. o'malley was some such eleventh man. he saw the thing whole, from some kind of inner bird's-eye view, while the ten saw only limited aspects of it from various angles. he was accused of adding details, therefore, because he had divined their presence while still below the horizon. before they emerged the others had already left. by which i mean that he saw in commonplace events the movement of greater tides than others saw. at one remove of time or distance--a minute or a mile--he perceived _all_. while the ten chattered volubly about the name of the snake, he was caught beyond by the beauty of the path, the glory of the running glide, the nature of the forces that drove, hindered, modified. the others reasoned where the snake was going, its length in inches and its speed per second, while he, ignoring such superficial details, plunged as it were into the very nature of the creature's being. and in this idiosyncrasy, which he shared with all persons of mystical temperament, is exemplified a certain curious contempt for reason that he had. for him mere intellectuality, by which the modern world sets such store, was a valley of dry bones. its worship was a worship of the form. it missed the essential inner truth because such inner truth could be known only by being it, feeling it. the intellectual attitude of mind, in a word, was critical, not creative, and to be unimaginative seemed to him, therefore, the worst form of unintelligence. "the arid, sterile minds!" he would cry in a burst of his celtic enthusiasm. "where, i ask ye, did the philosophies and sciences of the world assist the progress of any single soul a blessed inch?" any little dreamer in his top-floor back, spinning by rushlight his web of beauty, was greater than the finest critical intelligence that ever lived. the one, for all his poor technique, was stammering over something god had whispered to him, the other merely destroying thoughts invented by the brain of man. and this attitude of mind, because of its interpretative effect upon what follows, justifies mention. for to o'malley, in some way difficult to explain, reason and intellect, as such, had come to be worshipped by men today out of all proportion to their real value. consciousness, focused too exclusively upon them, had exalted them out of due proportion in the spiritual economy. to make a god of them was to make an empty and inadequate god. reason should be the guardian of the soul's advance, but not the object. its function was that of a great sandpaper which should clear the way of excrescences, but its worship was to allow a detail to assume a disproportionate importance. not that he was fool enough to despise reason in what he called its proper place, but that he was "wise" enough--not that he was "intellectual" enough!--to recognize its futility in measuring the things of the soul. for him there existed a more fundamental understanding than reason, and it was, apparently, an inner and natural understanding. "the greatest teacher we ever had," i once heard him say, "ignored the intellect, and who, will ye tell me, can by searching find out god? and yet what else is worth finding out...? isn't it only by becoming as a little child--a child that feels and never reasons things--that any one shall enter the kingdom...? where will the giant intellects be before the great white throne when a simple man with the heart of a child will top the lot of 'em?" "nature, i'm convinced," he said another time, though he said it with puzzled eyes and a mind obviously groping, "is our next step. reason has done its best for centuries, and gets no further. it _can_ get no further, for it can do nothing for the inner life which is the sole reality. we must return to nature and a purified intuition, to a greater reliance upon what is now subconscious, back to that sweet, grave guidance of the universe which we've discarded with the primitive state--a spiritual intelligence, really, divorced from mere intellectuality." and by nature he did not mean a return to savagery. there was no idea of going backwards in his wild words. rather he looked forwards, in some way hard to understand, to a state when man, with the best results of reason in his pocket, might return to the instinctive life--to feeling _with_--to the sinking down of the modern, exaggerated intellectual personality into its rightful place as guide instead of leader. he called it a return to nature, but what he meant, i always felt, was back to a sense of kinship with the universe which men, through worshipping the intellect alone, had lost. men today prided themselves upon their superiority to nature as beings separate and apart. o'malley sought, on the contrary, a development, if not a revival, of some faultless instinct, due to kinship with her, which--to take extremes--shall direct alike the animal and the inspired man, guiding the wild bee and the homing pigeon, and--the soul toward its god. this clue, as he called it, crystallized so neatly and so conclusively his own mental struggles, that he had called a halt, as it were, to his own intellectual development.... the name and family of the snake, hence, meant to him the least important things about it. he caught, wildly yet consistently, at the psychic links that bound the snake and nature and himself together with all creation. troops of adventurous thoughts had all his life "gone west" to colonize this land of speculative dream. true to his idea, he "thought" with his emotions as much as with his brain, and in the broken record of the adventure that this book relates, this strange passion of his temperament remains the vital clue. for it happened _in_, as well as to, himself. his being could include the earth by feeling with her, whereas his intellect could merely criticize, and so belittle, the details of such inclusion. many a time, while he stretched credulity to a point, i have heard him apologize in some such way for his method. it was the splendor of his belief that made the thing so convincing in the telling, for later when i found the same tale written down it seemed somehow to have failed of an equal achievement. the truth was that no one language would convey the extraordinary freight that was carried so easily by his instinctive choice of gestures, tone, and glance. with him these were consummately interpretative. * * * * * before the age of thirty he had written and published a volume or two of curious tales, all dealing with extensions of the personality, a subject that interested him deeply, and one he understood because he drew the material largely from himself. psychology he simply devoured, even in its most fantastic and speculative forms; and though perhaps his vision was incalculably greater than his power of technique, these strange books had a certain value and formed a genuine contribution to the thought on that particular subject. in england naturally they fell dead, but their translation into german brought him a wider and more intelligent circle. the common public unfamiliar with sally beauchamp no. , with hélène smith, or with dr. hanna, found in these studies of divided personality, and these singular extensions of the human consciousness, only extravagance and imagination run to wildness. yet, none the less, the substratum of truth upon which o'malley had built them, lay actually within his own personal experience. the books had brought him here and there acquaintances of value; and among these latter was a german doctor, heinrich stahl. with dr. stahl the irishman crossed swords through months of somewhat irregular correspondence, until at length the two had met on board a steamer where the german held the position of ship's doctor. the acquaintanceship had grown into something approaching friendship, although the two men stood apparently at the opposite poles of thought. from time to time they still met. in appearance there was nothing unusual about o'malley, unless it was the contrast of the light blue eyes with the dark hair. never, i think, did i see him in anything but that old grey flannel suit, with the low collar and shabby glistening tie. he was of medium height, delicately built, his hands more like a girl's than a man's. in towns he shaved and looked fairly presentable, but once upon his travels he grew beard and moustache and would forget for weeks to have his hair cut, so that it fell in a tangle over forehead and eyes. his manner changed with the abruptness of his moods. sometimes active and alert, at others for days together he would become absent, dreamy, absorbed, half oblivious of the outer world, his movements and actions dictated by subconscious instinct rather than regulated by volition. and one cause of that loneliness of spirit which was undoubtedly a chief pain in life to him, was the fact that ordinary folk were puzzled how to take him, or to know which of these many extreme moods was the man himself. uncomfortable, unsatisfactory, elusive, not to be counted upon, they deemed him: and from their point of view they were undoubtedly right. the sympathy and above all the companionship he needed, genuinely craved too, were thus denied to him by the faults of his own temperament. with women his intercourse was of the slightest; in a sense he did not know the need of them much. for one thing, the feminine element in his own nature was too strong, and he was not conscious, as most men are, of the great gap of incompleteness women may so exquisitely fill; and, for another, its obvious corollary perhaps, when they did come into his life, they gave him more than he could comfortably deal with. they offered him more than he needed. in this way, while he perhaps had never fallen in love, as the saying has it, he had certainly known that high splendor of devotion which means the losing of oneself in others, that exalted love which seeks not any reward of possession because it is itself so utterly possessed. he was pure, too; in the sense that it never occurred to him to be otherwise. chief cause of his loneliness--so far as i could judge his complex personality at all--seemed that he never found a sympathetic, truly understanding ear for those deeply primitive longings that fairly ravaged his heart. and this very isolation made him often afraid; it proved that the rest of the world, the sane majority at any rate, said no to them. i, who loved him and listened, yet never quite apprehended his full meaning. far more than the common call of the wild, it was. he yearned, not so much for a world savage, uncivilized, as for a perfectly natural one that had never known, perhaps never needed civilization--a state of freedom in a life unstained. he never wholly understood, i think, the reason why he found himself in such stern protest against the modern state of things, why people produced in him a state of death so that he turned from men to nature--to find life. the things the nations exclusively troubled themselves about all seemed to him so obviously vain and worthless, and, though he never even in his highest moments felt the claims of sainthood, it puzzled and perplexed him deeply that the conquest over nature in all its multifarious forms today should seem to them so infinitely more important than the conquest over self. what the world with common consent called reality, seemed ever to him the most crude and obvious, the most transient, the most blatant un-reality. his love of nature was more than the mere joy of tumultuous pagan instincts. it was, in the kind of simple life he craved, the first step toward the recovery of noble, dignified, enfranchised living. in the denial of all this external flummery he hated, it would leave the soul disengaged and free, able to turn her activities within for spiritual development. civilization now suffocated, smothered, killed the soul. being in the hopeless minority, he felt he must be somewhere wrong, at fault, deceived. for all men, from a statesman to an engine-driver, agreed that the accumulation of external possessions had value, and that the importance of material gain was real.... yet, for himself, he always turned for comfort to the earth. the wise and wonderful earth opened her mind and her deep heart to him in a way few other men seemed to know. through nature he could move blind-folded along, yet find his way to strength and sympathy. a noble, gracious life stirred in him then which the pettier human world denied. he often would compare the thin help or fellowship he gained from ordinary social intercourse, or from what had seemed at the time quite a successful gathering of his kind, with the power he gained from a visit to the woods or mountains. the former, as a rule, evaporated in a single day; the other stayed, with ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and months. and hence it was, whether owing to the truth or ignorance of his attitude, that a sense of bleak loneliness spread through all his life, and more and more he turned from men to nature. moreover, foolish as it must sound, i was sometimes aware that deep down in him hid some nameless, indefinable quality that proclaimed him fitted to live in conditions that had never known the restraints of modern conventions--a very different thing to doing without them once known. a kind of childlike, transcendental innocence he certainly possessed, _naïf_, most engaging, and--utterly impossible. it showed itself indirectly, i think, in this distress under modern conditions. the multifarious apparatus of the spirit of today oppressed him; its rush and luxury and artificiality harassed him beyond belief. the terror of cities ran in his very blood. when i describe him as something of an outcast, therefore, it will be seen that he was such both voluntarily and involuntarily. "what the world has gained by brains is simply nothing to what it has lost by them--" "a dream, my dear fellow, a mere dream," i stopped him, yet with sympathy because i knew he found relief this way. "your constructive imagination is too active." "by gad," he replied warmly, "but there is a place somewhere, or a state of mind--the same thing--where it's more than a dream. and, what's more, bless your stodgy old heart, some day i'll get there." "not in england, at any rate," i suggested. he stared at me a moment, his eyes suddenly charged with dreams. then, characteristically, he snorted. he flung his hand out with a gesture that should push the present further from him. "i've always liked the eastern theory--old theory anyhow if not eastern--that intense yearnings end by creating a place where they are fulfilled--" "subjectively--" "of course; objectively means incompletely. i mean a heaven built up by desire and intense longing all your life. your own thought makes it. living idea, that!" "another dream, terence o'malley," i laughed, "but beautiful and seductive." to argue bored him. he loved to state his matter, fill it with detail, blow the heated breath of life into it, and then leave it. argument belittled without clarifying; criticism destroyed, sealing up the sources of life. any fool could argue; the small, denying minds were always critics. "a dream, but a damned foine one, let me tell you," he exclaimed, recovering his brogue in his enthusiasm. he glared at me a second, then burst out laughing. "tis better to have dhreamed and waked," he added, "than never to have dhreamed at all." and then he poured out o'shaughnessy's passionate ode to the dreamers of the world: we are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams, wandering by lone sea-breakers, and sitting by desolate streams; world-losers and world-forsakers, on whom the pale moon gleams; yet we are the movers and shakers of the world forever, it seems. with wonderful deathless ditties we build up the world's great cities, and out of a fabulous story we fashion an empire's glory; one man with a dream, at pleasure, shall go forth and conquer a crown; and three with a new song's measure can trample an empire down. we, in the ages lying in the buried past of the earth, built nineveh with our sighing, and babel itself with our mirth; and o'erthrew them with prophesying to the old of the new world's worth; for each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth. for this passion for some simple old-world innocence and beauty lay in his soul like a lust--self-feeding and voracious. iii "lonely! why should i feel lonely? is not our planet in the milky way?" --thoreau march had passed shouting away, and april was whispering deliciously among her scented showers when o'malley went on board the coasting steamer at marseilles for the levant and the black sea. the _mistral_ made the land unbearable, but herds of white horses ran galloping over the bay beneath a sky of childhood's blue. the ship started punctually--he came on board as usual with a bare minute's margin--and from his rapid survey of the thronged upper deck, it seems, he singled out on the instant this man and boy, wondering first vaguely at their uncommon air of bulk, secondly at the absence of detail which should confirm it. they appeared so much bigger than they actually were. the laughter, rising in his heart, however, did not get as far as his lips. for this appearance of massive bulk, and of shoulders comely yet almost humped, was not borne out by a direct inspection. it was a mental impression. the man, though broad and well-proportioned, with heavy back and neck and uncommonly sturdy torso, was in no sense monstrous. it was upon the corner of the eye that the bulk and hugeness dawned, a false report that melted under direct vision. o'malley took him in with attention merging in respect, searching in vain for the detail of back and limbs and neck that suggested so curiously the sense of the gigantic. the boy beside him, obviously son, possessed the same elusive attributes--felt yet never positively seen. passing down to his cabin, wondering vaguely to what nationality they might belong, he was immediately behind them, elbowing french and german tourists, when the father abruptly turned and faced him. their gaze met. o'malley started. "whew...!" ran some silent expression like fire through his brain. out of a massive visage, placid for all its ruggedness, shone eyes large and timid as those of an animal or child bewildered among so many people. there was an expression in them not so much cowed or dismayed as "un-refuged"--the eyes of the hunted creature. that, at least, was the first thing they betrayed; for the same second the quick-blooded celt caught another look: the look of a hunted creature that at last knows shelter and has found it. the first expression had emerged, then withdrawn again swiftly like an animal into its hole where safety lay. before disappearing, it had flashed a wireless message of warning, of welcome, of explanation--he knew not what term to use--to another of its own kind, to _himself_. o'malley, utterly arrested, stood and stared. he would have spoken, for the invitation seemed obvious enough, but there came an odd catch in his breath, and words failed altogether. the boy, peering at him sideways, clung to his great parent's side. for perhaps ten seconds there was this interchange of staring, intimate staring, between the three of them ... and then the irishman, confused, more than a little agitated, ended the silent introduction with an imperceptible bow and passed on slowly, knocking absent-mindedly through the crowd, down to his cabin on the lower deck. in his heart, deep down, stirred an indescribable sympathy with something he divined in these two that was akin to himself, but that as yet he could not name. on the surface he felt an emotion he knew not whether to call uneasiness or surprise, but crowding past it, half smothering it, rose this other more profound emotion. something enormously winning in the atmosphere of father and son called to him in the silence: it was significant, oddly buried; not yet had it emerged enough to be confessed and labeled. but each had recognized it in the other. each knew. each waited. and it was extraordinarily disturbing. before unpacking, he sat for a long time on his berth, thinking....trying in vain to catch through a thunder of surprising emotions the word that might bring explanation. that strange impression of giant bulk, unsupported by actual measurements; that look of startled security seeking shelter; that other look of being sure, of knowing where to go and being actually _en route_,--all these, he felt, grew from the same hidden cause whereof they were symptoms. it was this hidden thing in the man that had reached out invisibly and fired his own consciousness as their gaze met in that brief instant. and it had disturbed him so profoundly because the very same lost thing lay buried in himself. the man knew, whereas he anticipated merely--as yet. what was it? why came there with it both happiness and fear? the word that kept chasing itself in a circle like a kitten after its own tail, yet bringing no explanation, was loneliness--a loneliness that must be whispered. for it was loneliness on the verge of finding relief. and if proclaimed too loud, there might come those who would interfere and prevent relief. the man, and the boy too for that matter, were escaping. they had found the way back, were ready and eager, moreover, to show it to other prisoners. and this was as near as o'malley could come to explanation. he began to understand dimly--and with an extraordinary excitement of happiness. "well--and the bigness?" i asked, seizing on a practical point after listening to his dreaming, "what do you make of that? it must have had some definite cause surely?" he turned and fixed his light blue eyes on mine as we paced beside the serpentine that summer afternoon when i first heard the story told. he was half grave, half laughing. "the size, the bulk, the bigness," he replied, "must have been in reality the expression of some mental quality that reached me psychically, producing its effect directly on my mind and not upon the eyes at all." in telling the story he used a simile omitted in the writing of it, because his sense of humor perceived that no possible turn of phrase could save it from grotesqueness when actually it was far from grotesque--extraordinarily pathetic rather: "as though," he said, "the great back and shoulders carried beneath the loose black cape--humps, projections at least; but projections not ugly in themselves, comely even in some perfectly natural way, that lent to his person this idea of giant size. his body, though large, was normal so far as its proportions were concerned. in his spirit, though, there hid another shape. an aspect of that other shape somehow reached my mind." then, seeing that i found nothing at the moment to reply, he added: "as an angry man you may picture to yourself as red, or a jealous man as green!" he laughed aloud. "d'ye see, now? it was not really a physical business at all!" iv "we think with only a small part of the past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will, and act." --henri bergson the balance of his fellow-passengers were not distinguished. there was a company of french tourists gong to naples, and another lot of germans bound for athens, some business folk for smyrna and constantinople, and a sprinkling of russians going home via odessa, batoum, or novorossisk. in his own stateroom, occupying the upper berth, was a little round-bodied, red-faced canadian drummer, "traveling" in harvest-machines. the name of the machine, its price, and the terms of purchase were his universe; he knew them in several languages; beyond them, nothing. he was good-natured, conceding anything to save trouble. "d'ye mind the light for a bit while i read in bed?" asked o'malley. "don't mind anything much," was the cheery reply. "i'm not particular; i'm easy-going and you needn't bother." he turned over to sleep. "old traveler," he added, his voice muffled by sheets and blankets, "and take things as they come." and the only objection o'malley found in him was that he took things as they came to the point of not taking baths at all, and not even taking all his garments off when he went to bed. the captain, whom he knew from previous voyages, a genial, rough-voiced sailor from sassnitz, chided him for so nearly missing the boat--"as usual." "you're too late for a seat at my taple," he said with his laughing growl; "it's a pidy. you should have led me know py telegram, and i then kepd your place. now you find room at the doctor's taple howefer berhaps...!" "steamer's very crowded this time," o'malley replied, shrugging his shoulders; "but you'll let me come up sometimes for a smoke with you on the bridge?" "of course, of course." "anybody interesting on board?" he asked after a moment's pause. the jolly captain laughed. "'pout the zame as usual, you know. nothing to stop ze ship! ask ze doctor; he knows zooner than me. but, anyway, the nice ones, they get zeazick always and dizappear. going trebizond this time?" he added. "no; batoum." "ach! oil?" "caucasus generally--up in the mountains a bit." "god blenty veapons then, i hope. they shoot you for two pfennig up there!" and he was off with his hearty deep laugh and rather ponderous briskness toward the bridge. thus o'malley found himself placed for meals at the right hand of dr. stahl; opposite him, on the doctor's left, a talkative moscow fur-merchant who, having come to definite conclusions of his own about things n general, was persuaded the rest of the world must share them, and who delivered verbose commonplaces with a kind of pontifical utterance sometimes amusing, but usually boring; on his right a gentle-eyed, brown-bearded armenian priest from the venice monastery that had sheltered byron, a man who ate everything except soup with his knife, yet with a daintiness that made one marvel, and with hands so graceful they might almost have replaced the knife without off offence. beyond the priest sat the rotund canadian drummer. he kept silence, watched the dishes carefully lest anything should escape him, and--ate. lower down on the opposite side, one or two nondescripts between, sat the big, blond, bearded stranger with his son. diagonally across from himself and the doctor, they were in full view. o'malley talked to all and sundry whom his voice could reach, being easily forthcoming to people whom he was not likely to see again. but he was particularly pleased to find himself next to the ship's doctor, dr. heinrich stahl, for the man both attracted and antagonized him, and they had crossed swords pleasantly on more voyages than one. there was a fundamental contradiction in his character due--o'malley divined--to the fact that his experiences did not tally as he wished them to do with his beliefs, or vice versa. affecting to believe in nothing, he occasionally dropped remarks that betrayed a belief in all kinds of things, unorthodox things. then, having led the irishman into confessions of his own fairy faith, he would abruptly rule the whole subject out of order with some cynical phrase that closed discussion. in this sarcastic attitude o'malley detected a pose assumed for his own protection. "no man of sense can possibly accept such a thing; it is incredible and foolish." yet, the biting way he said the words betrayed him; the very thing his reason rejected, his soul believed.... these vivid impressions the irishman had of people, one wonders how accurate they were! in this case, perhaps, he was not far from the truth. that a man with dr. stahl's knowledge and ability could be content to hide his light under the bushel of a mere _schiffsarzt_ required explanation. his own explanation was that he wanted leisure for thinking and writing. bald-headed, slovenly, prematurely old, his beard stained with tobacco and snuff, under-sized, scientific in the imaginative sense that made him speculative beyond mere formulae, his was an individuality that inspired a respect one could never quite account for. he had keen dark eyes that twinkled, sometimes mockingly, sometimes, if the word may be allowed, bitterly, yet often too with a good-humored amusement which sympathy with human weaknesses could alone have caused. a warm heart he certainly had, as more than one forlorn passenger could testify. conversation at their table was slow at first. it began at the lower end where the french tourists chattered briskly over the soup, then crept upwards like a slow fire o'erleaping various individuals who would not catch. for instance, it passed the harvest-machine man; it passed the nondescripts; it also passed the big light-haired stranger and his son. at the table behind, there was a steady roar and buzz of voices; the captain was easy and genial, prophesying to the ladies on either side of him a calm voyage. in the shelter of his big voice even the shy found it easy to make remarks to their neighbors. listening to fragments of the talk o'malley found that his own eyes kept wandering down the table--diagonally across--to the two strangers. once or twice he intercepted the doctor's glance traveling in the same direction, and on these occasions it was on the tip of his tongue to make a remark about them, or to ask a question. yet the words did not come. dr. stahl, he felt, knew a similar hesitation. each, wanting to speak, yet kept silence, waiting for the other to break the ice. "this _mistral_ is tiresome," observed the doctor, as the tide of talk flowed up to his end and made a remark necessary. "it tries the nerves of some." he glanced at o'malley, but it was the fur-merchant who replied, spreading a be-ringed hand over his plate to feel the warmth. "i know it well," he said pompously in a tone of finality; "it lasts three, six, or nine days. but once across the golfe de lyons we shall be free of it." "you think so? ah, i am glad," ventured the priest with a timid smile while he adroitly balanced meat and bullet-like green peas upon his knife-blade. tone, smile, and gesture were so gentle that the use of steel in any form seemed incongruous. the voice of the fur-merchant came in domineeringly. "of course. i have made this trip so often, i _know_. st. petersburg to paris, a few weeks on the riviera, then back by constantinople and the crimea. it is nothing. i remember last year--" he pushed a large pearl pin more deeply into his speckled tie and began a story that proved chiefly how luxuriously he traveled. his eyes tried to draw the whole end of the table into his circle, but while the armenian listened politely, with smiles and bows, dr. stahl turned to the irishman again. it vas the year of halley's comet and he began talking interestingly about it. "... three o'clock in the morning--any morning, yes--is the best time," the doctor concluded, "and i'll have you called. you must see it through my telescope. end of this week, say, after we leave catania and turn eastwards..." and at this instant, following a roar of laughter from the captain's table, came one of those abrupt pauses that sometimes catch an entire room at once. all voices hushed. even the merchant, setting down his champagne glass, fell silent. one heard only the beating of the steamer's screw, the rush of water below the port-holes, the soft scuffle of the stewards' feet. the conclusion of the doctor's inconsiderable sentence was sharply audible all over the room-- "... crossing the ionian sea toward the isles of greece." it rang across the pause, and at the same moment o'malley caught the eyes of the big stranger lifted suddenly and fixed upon the speaker's face as though the words had summoned him. they shifted the same instant to his own, then dropped again to his plate. again the clatter of conversation drowned the room as before; the merchant resumed his self-description in terms of gold; the doctor discussed the gases of the comet's tail. but the swift-blooded irishman felt himself caught away strangely and suddenly into another world. out of the abyss of the subconscious there rose a gesture prophetic and immense. the trivial phrase and that intercepted look opened a great door of wonder in his heart. in a second he grew "absent-minded." or, rather, something touched a button and the whole machinery of his personality shifted round noiselessly and instantaneously, presenting an immediate new facet to the world. his normal, puny self-consciousness slipped a moment into the majestic calm of some far larger state that the stranger also knew. the universe lies in every human heart, and he plunged into that archetypal world that stands so close behind all sensible appearances. he could neither explain nor attempt to explain, but he sailed away into some giant swimming mood of beauty wherein steamer, passengers, talk, faded utterly, the stranger and his son remaining alone real and vital. he had seen; he could never forget. chance prepared the setting, but immense powers had rushed in and availed themselves of it. something deeply buried had flamed from the stranger's eyes and beckoned to him. the fire ran from the big man to himself and was gone. "the isles of greece--" the words were simple enough, yet it seemed to o'malley that the look they summoned to the stranger's eyes ensouled them, transfiguring them with the significance of vital clues. they touched the fringe of a mystery, magnificent and remote--some transcendent psychical drama in the 'life of this man whose "bigness" and whose "loneliness that must be whispered" were also in their way other vital clues. moreover, remembering his first sight of these two upon the upper deck a few hours before, he understood that his own spirit, by virtue of its peculiar and primitive yearnings, was involved in the same mystery and included in the same hidden passion. the little incident illustrates admirably o'malley's idiosyncrasy of "seeing whole." in a lightning flash his inner sense had associated the words and the glance, divining that the one had caused the other. that pause provided the opportunity.... if imagination, then it was creative imagination; if true, it was assuredly spiritual insight of a rare quality. he became aware that the twinkling eyes of his neighbor were observing him keenly. for some moments evidently he had been absent-mindedly staring down the table. he turned quickly and looked at the doctor with frankness. this time it was impossible to avoid speech of some kind. "following those lights that do mislead the morn?" asked dr. stahl slyly. "your thoughts have been traveling. you've heard none of my last remarks!" under the clamor of the merchant's voice o'malley replied in a lowered tone: "i was watching those two half-way down the table opposite. they interest you as well, i see." it was not a challenge exactly; if the tone was aggressive, it was merely that he felt the subject was one on which they would differ, and he scented an approaching discussion. the doctor's reply, indicating agreement, surprised him a good deal. "they do; they interest me greatly." there was no trace of fight in the voice. "that should cause _you_ no surprise." "me--they simply fascinate," said o'malley, always easily drawn. "what is it? what do you see about them that is unusual? do you, too, see them 'big'?" the doctor did not answer at once, and o'malley added, "the father's a tremendous fellow, but it's not that--" "partly, though," said the other, "partly, i think." "what else, then?" the fur-merchant, still talking, prevented their being overheard. "what is it marks them off so from the rest?" "of all people _you_ should see," smiled the doctor quietly. "if a man of your imagination sees nothing, what shall a poor exact mind like myself see?" he eyed him keenly a moment. "you really mean that you detect nothing?" "a certain distinction, yes; a certain aloofness from others. isolated, they seem in a way; rather a splendid isolation i should call it--" and then he stopped abruptly. it was most curious, but he was aware that unwittingly in this way he had stumbled upon the truth, aware at the same time that he resented discussing it with his companion--because it meant at the same time discussing himself or something in himself he wished to hide. his entire mood shifted again with completeness and rapidity. he could not help it. it seemed suddenly as though he had been telling the doctor secrets about himself, secrets moreover he would not treat sympathetically. the doctor had been "at him," so to speak, searching the depths of him with a probing acuteness the casual language had disguised. "what are they, do you suppose: finns, russians, norwegians, or what?" the doctor asked. and the other replied briefly that he guessed they might be russians perhaps, south russians. his tone was different. he wished to avoid further discussion. at the first opportunity he neatly changed the conversation. it was curious, the way proof came to him. something in himself, wild as the desert, something to do with that love of primitive life he discussed only with the few who were intimately sympathetic toward it, this something in his soul was so akin to a similar passion in these strangers that to talk of it was to betray himself as well as them. further, he resented dr. stahl's interest in them, because he felt it was critical and scientific. not far behind hid the analysis that would lay them bare, leading to their destruction. a profound instinctive sense of self-preservation had been stirred within him. already, mysteriously guided by secret affinities, he had ranged himself on the side of the strangers. v "mythology contains the history of the archetypal world. it comprehends past, present, and future." --novalis, _flower pollen, translated by u.c.b. in this way there came between these two the slight barrier of a forbidden subject that grew because neither destroyed it. o'malley had erected it; dr. stahl respected it. neither referred again for a time to the big russian and his son. in his written account o'malley, who was certainly no constructive literary craftsman, left out apparently countless little confirmatory details. by word of mouth he made me feel at once that this mystery existed, however; and to weld the two together is a difficult task. there nevertheless was this something about the russian and his boy that excited deep curiosity, accompanied by an aversion on the part of the other passengers that isolated them; also, there was this competition on the part of the two friends to solve it, from opposing motives. had either of the strangers fallen seasick, the advantage would have been easily with dr. stahl--professionally, but since they remained well, and the doctor was in constant demand by the other passengers, it was the irishman who won the first move and came to close quarters by making a personal acquaintance. his strong desire helped matters of course; for he noticed with indignation that these two, quiet and inoffensive as they were and with no salient cause of offence, were yet rejected by the main body of passengers. they seemed to possess a quality that somehow insulated them from approach, sending them effectually "to coventry," and in a small steamer where the travelers settle down into a kind of big family life, this isolation was unpleasantly noticeable. it stood out in numerous little details that only a keen observer closely watching could have taken into account. small advances, travelers' courtesies, and the like that ordinarily should have led to conversation, in their case led to nothing. the other passengers invariably moved away after a few moments, politely excusing themselves, as it were, from further intercourse. and although at first the sight of this stirred in him an instinct of revolt that was almost anger, he soon felt that the couple not merely failed to invite, but even emanated some definite atmosphere that repelled. and each time he witnessed these little scenes, there grew more strongly in him the original picture he had formed of them as beings rejected and alone, hunted by humanity as a whole, seeking escape from loneliness into a place of refuge that they knew of, definitely at last _en route_. only an imaginative mind, thus concentrated upon them, could have divined all this; yet to o'malley it seemed plain as the day. with the certitude, moreover, came the feeling, ever stronger, that the refuge they sought would prove to be also the refuge he himself sought, the difference being that whereas they knew, he still hesitated. yet, in spite of this secret sympathy, imagined or discovered, he found it no easy matter to approach the big man for speech. for a day and a half he merely watched; attraction so strong excited caution; he paused, waiting. his attention, however, was so keen that he seemed always to know where they were and what they were doing. by instinct he was aware in what part of the ship they would be found--for the most part leaning over the rail alone in the bows, staring down at the churned water together by the screws, pacing the after-deck in the dusk or early morning when no one was about, or hidden away in some corner of the upper deck, side by side, gazing at sea and sky. their method of walking, too, made it easy to single them out from the rest--a free, swaying movement of the limbs, a swing of the shoulders, a gait that was lumbering, almost clumsy, half defiant, yet at the same time graceful, and curiously rapid. the body moved along swiftly for all its air of blundering--a motion which was a counterpart of that elusive appearance of great bulk, and equally difficult of exact determination. an air went with them of being ridiculously confined by the narrow little decks. thus it was that genoa had been made and the ship was already half way on to naples before the opportunity for closer acquaintance presented itself. rather, o'malley, unable longer to resist, forced it. it seemed, too, inevitable as sunrise. rain had followed the _mistral_ and the sea was rough. a rich land-taste came about the ship like the smell of wet oaks when wind sweeps their leaves after a sousing shower. in the hour before dinner, the decks slippery with moisture, only one or two wrapped-up passengers in deck-chairs below the awning, o'malley, following a sure inner lead, came out of the stuffy smoking-room into the air. it was already dark and the drive of mist-like rain somewhat obscured his vision after the glare. only for a moment though--for almost the first thing he saw was the russian and his boy moving in front of him toward the aft compasses. like a single figure, huge and shadowy, they passed into the darkness beyond with a speed that seemed as usual out of proportion to their actual stride. they lumbered rapidly away. o'malley caught that final swing of the man's great shoulders as they disappeared, and, leaving the covered deck, he made straight after them. and though neither gave any sign that they had seen him, he felt that they were aware of his coming--and even invited him. as he drew close a roll of the vessel brought them almost into each other's arms, and the boy, half hidden beneath his parent's flowing cloak, looked up at once and smiled. the saloon light fell dimly upon his face. the irishman saw that friendly smile of welcome, and lurched forward with the roll of the deck. they brought up against the bulwarks, and the big man put out an arm to steady him. they all three laughed together. at close quarters, as usual again, the impression of bulk had disappeared. and then, at first, utterly unlike real life, they said--nothing. the boy moved round and stood close to his side so that he found himself placed between them, all three leaning forward over the rails watching the phosphorescence of the foam-streaked mediterranean. dusk lay over the sea; the shores of italy not near enough to be visible; the mist, the hour, the loneliness of the deserted decks, and something else that was nameless, shut them in, these three, in a little world of their own. a sentence or two rose in o'malley's mind, but without finding utterance, for he felt that no spoken words were necessary. he was accepted without more ado. a deep natural sympathy existed between them, recognized intuitively from that moment of first mutual inspection at marseilles. it was instinctive, almost as with animals. the action of the boy in coming round to his side, unhindered by the father, was the symbol of utter confidence and welcome. there came, then, one of those splendid and significant moments that occasionally, for some, burst into life, flooding all barriers, breaking down as with a flaming light the thousand erections of shadow that close one in. something imprisoned in himself swept outwards, rising like a wave, bringing an expansion of life that "explained." it vanished, of course, instantly again, but not before he had caught a flying remnant that lit the broken puzzles of his heart and left things clearer. before thought, and therefore words, could overtake, it was gone; but there remained at least this glimpse. the fire had flashed a light down subterranean passages of his being and made visible for a passing second some clue to his buried primitive yearnings. he partly understood. standing there between these two this thing came over him with a degree of intelligibility scarcely captured by his words. the man's qualities--his quietness, peace, slowness, silence--betrayed somehow that his inner life dwelt in a region vast and simple, shaping even his exterior presentment with its own huge characteristics, a region wherein the distress of the modern world's vulgar, futile strife could not exist--more, could never _have_ existed. the irishman, who had never realized exactly why the life of today to him was dreadful, now understood it in the presence of this simple being with his atmosphere of stately power. he was like a child, but a child of some pre-existence utterly primitive and utterly forgotten; of no particular age, but of some state that antedates all ages; simple in some noble, concentrated sense that was prodigious, almost terrific. to stand thus beside him was to stand beside a mighty silent fire, steadily glowing, a fire that fed all lesser flames, because itself close to the central source of fire. he felt warmed, lighted, vivified--made whole. the presence of this stranger took him at a single gulp, as it were, straight into nature--a nature that was alive. the man was part of her. never before had he stood so close and intimate. cities and civilization fled away like transient dreams, ashamed. the sun and moon and stars moved up and touched him. this word of lightning explanation, at least, came to him as he breathed the other's atmosphere and presence. the region where this man's spirit fed was at the center, whereas today men were active with a scattered, superficial cleverness, at the periphery. he even understood that his giant gait and movements were small outer evidences of this inner fact, wholly in keeping. that blundering stupidity, half glorious, half pathetic, with which he moved among his fellows was a physical expression of this psychic fact that his spirit had never learned the skilful tricks taught by civilization to lesser men. it was, in a way, awe-inspiring, for he was now at last driving back full speed for his own region and--escape. o'malley knew himself caught, swept off his feet, momentarily driving with him.... the singular deep satisfaction of it, standing there with these two in the first moment, he describes as an entirely new sensation in his life--an awareness that he was "complete." the boy touched his side and he let an arm steal round to shelter him. the huge, bearded parent rose in his massiveness against his other shoulder, hemming him in. for a second he knew a swift and curious alarm, passing however almost at once into the thrill of a rare happiness. in that moment, it was not the passengers or the temper of today who rejected them; it was they who rejected the world: because they knew another and superior one--more, they were in it. then, without turning, the big man spoke, the words in heavy accented english coming out laboriously and with slow, exceeding difficulty as though utterance was a supreme effort. "you ... come ... with ... us?" it was like stammering almost. still more was it like essential inarticulateness struggling into an utterance foreign to it--unsuited. the voice was a deep and windy bass, merging with the noise of the sea below. "i'm going to the caucasus," o'malley replied; "up into the old, old mountains, to--see things--to look about--to search--" he really wanted to say much more, but the words lay dead or beyond reach. the big man nodded slowly. the boy listened. "and yourself--?" asked the irishman, hardly knowing why he faltered and trembled. the other smiled; a beauty that was beyond all language passed with that smile across the great face in the dusk. "some of us ... of ours ..." he spoke very slowly, very brokenly, quarrying out the words with real labor, "... still survive... out there.... we ... now go back. so very ... few ... remain.... and you--come with us ..." vi "in the spiritual nature-kingdom, man must everywhere seek his peculiar territory and climate, his best occupation, his particular neighborhood, in order to cultivate a paradise in idea; this is the right system.... paradise is scattered over the whole earth, and that is why it has become so unrecognizable." --novalis, translated by u.c.b. "man began in instinct and will end in instinct. instinct is genius in paradise, before the period of self-abstraction (self-knowledge)." --ibid "look here, old man," he said to me, "i'll just tell you what it was, because i know you won't laugh." we were lying under the big trees behind the round pond when he reached this point, and his direct speech was so much more graphic than the written account that i use it. he was in one of his rare moments of confidence, excited, hat off, his shabby tie escaping from the shabbier grey waistcoat. one sock lay untidily over his boot, showing bare leg. children's voices floated to us from the waterside as though from very far away, the nursemaids and perambulators seemed tinged with unreality, the london towers were clouds, its roar the roar of waves. i saw only the ship's deck, the grey and misty sea, the uncouth figures of the two who leaned with him over the bulwarks. "go on," i said encouragingly; "out with it!" "it must seem incredible to most men, but, by gad, i swear to you, it lifted me off my feet, and i've never known anything like it. the mind of that great fellow got hold of me, included me. he made the inanimate world--sea, stars, wind, woods, and mountains--seem all alive. the entire blessed universe was conscious--and he came straight out of it to get me. i understood things about myself i've never understood before--and always funked rather;--especially that feeling of being out of touch with my kind, of finding no one in the world today who speaks my language quite--that, and the utter, god-forsaken loneliness it makes me suffer--" "you always have been a lonely beggar really," i said, noting the hesitation that thus on the very threshold checked his enthusiasm, quenching the fire in those light-blue eyes. "tell me. i shall understand right enough--or try to." "god bless you," he answered, leaping to the sympathy, "i believe you will. there's always been this primitive, savage thing in me that keeps others away--puts them off, and so on. i've tried to smother it a bit sometimes--" "have you?" i laughed. "'tried to,' i said, because i've always been afraid of its getting out too much and bustin' my life all to pieces:--something lonely and untamed and sort of outcast from cities and money and all the thick suffocating civilization of today; and i've only saved myself by getting off into wildernesses and free places where i could give it a breathin' chance without running the risk of being locked up as a crazy man." he laughed as he said it, but his heart was in the words. "you know all that; haven't i told you often enough? it's not a morbid egoism, or what their precious academic books so stupidly call 'degenerate,' for in me it's damned vital and terrific, and moves always to action. it's made me an alien and--and--" "something far stronger than the call of the wild, isn't it?" he fairly snorted. "sure as we're both alive here sittin' on this sooty london grass," he cried. "this call of the wild they prate about is just the call a fellow hears to go on 'the bust' when he's had too much town and's got bored--a call to a little bit of license and excess to safety-valve him down. what i feel," his voice turned grave and quiet again, "is quite a different affair. it's the call of real hunger--the call of food. they want to let off steam, but i want to take in stuff to prevent--starvation." he whispered the word, putting his lips close to my face. a pause fell between us, which i was the first to break. "this is not your century! that's what you really mean," i suggested patiently. "not my century!" he caught me up, flinging handfuls of faded grass in the air between us and watching it fall; "why, it's not even my world! and i loathe, loathe the spirit of today with its cheap-jack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity, without enough real sense of beauty left to see that a daisy is nearer heaven than an airship--" "especially when the airship falls," i laughed. "steady, steady, old boy; don't spoil your righteous case by overstatement." "well, well, you know what i mean," he laughed with me, though his face at once turned earnest again, "and all that, and all that, and all that.... and so this savagery that has burned in me all these years unexplained, these russian strangers made clear. i can't tell you how because i don't know myself. the father did it--his proximity, his silence stuffed with sympathy, his great vital personality unclipped by contact with these little folk who left him alone. his presence alone made me long for the earth and nature. he seemed a living part of it all. he was magnificent and enormous, but the devil take me if i know how." "he said nothing--that referred to it directly?" "nothing but what i've told you,--blundering awkwardly with those few modern words. but he had it in him a thousand to my one. he made me feel i was right and natural, untrue to myself to suppress it and a coward to fear it. the speech-center in the brain, you know, is anyhow a comparatively recent thing in evolution. they say that--" "it wasn't his century either," i checked him again. "no, and he didn't pretend it was, as i've tried to," he cried, sitting bolt upright beside me. "the fellow was genuine, never dreamed of compromise. d'ye see what i mean? only somehow he'd found out where his world and century were, and was off to take possession. and that's what caught me. i felt it by some instinct in me stronger than all else; only we couldn't talk about it definitely because--because--i hardly know how to put it--for the same reason," he added suddenly, "that i can't talk about it to you _now!_ there are no words.... what we both sought was a state that passed away before words came into use, and is therefore beyond intelligible description. no one spoke to them on the ship for the same reason, i felt sure, that no one spoke to them in the whole world--because no one could manage even the alphabet of their language. "and this was so strange and beautiful," he went on, "that standing there beside him, in his splendid atmosphere, the currents of wind and sea reached _me through him first_, filtered by his spirit so that i assimilated them and they fed me, because he somehow stood in such close and direct relation to nature. i slipped into my own region, made happy and alive, knowing at last what i wanted, though still unable to phrase it. this modern world i've so long tried to adjust myself to became a thing of pale remembrance and a dream...." "all in your mind and imagination, of course, this," i ventured, seeing that his poetry was luring him beyond where i could follow. "of course," he answered without impatience, grown suddenly thoughtful, less excited again, "and that's why it was true. no chance of clumsy senses deceiving one. it was direct vision. what is reality, in the last resort," he asked, "but the thing a man's vision brings to him--to believe? there's no other criterion. the criticism of opposite types of mind is merely a confession of their own limitations." being myself of the "opposite type of mind," i naturally did not argue, but suffered myself to accept his half-truth for the whole--temporarily. i checked him from time to time merely lest he should go too fast for me to follow what seemed a very wonderful tale of faerie. "so this wild thing in me the world today has beggared and denied," he went on, swept by his celtic enthusiasm, "woke in its full strength. calling to me like some flying spirit in a storm, it claimed me. the man's being summoned me back to the earth and nature, as it were, automatically. i understood that look on his face, that sign in his eyes. the 'isles of greece' furnished some faint clue, but as yet i knew no more--only that he and i were in the same region and that i meant to go with him and that he accepted me with delight that was joy. it drew me as empty space draws a giddy man to the precipice's edge. thoughts from another's mind," he added by way of explanation, turning round, "come far more completely to me when i stand in a man's atmosphere, silent and receptive, than when by speech he tries to place them there. ah! and that helps me to get at what i mean, perhaps. the man, you see, hardly thought; he _felt_." "as an animal, you mean? instinctively--?" "in a sense, yes," he replied after a momentary hesitation. "like some very early, very primitive form of life." "with the best will in the world, terence, i don't quite follow you--" "i don't quite follow myself," he cried, "because i'm trying to lead and follow at the same time. you know that idea--i came across it somewhere--that in ancient peoples the senses were much less specialized than they are now; that perception came to them in general, massive sensations rather than divided up neatly into five channels:--that they felt all over so to speak, and that all the senses, as in an overdose of hashish, become one single sense? the centralizing of perception in the brain is a recent thing, and it might equally well have occurred in any other nervous headquarters of the body, say, the solar plexus; or, perhaps, never have been localized at all! in hysteria patients have been known to read with the finger-tips and smell with the heel. touch is still all over; it's only the other four that have got fixed in definite organs. there are systems of thought today that still would make the solar plexus the main center, and not the brain. the word 'brain,' you know, never once occurs in the ancient scriptures of the world. you will not find it in the bible--the reins, the heart, and so forth were what men felt with then. they felt all over--well," he concluded abruptly, "i think this fellow was like that. d'ye see now?" i stared at him, greatly wondering. a nursemaid passed close, balancing a child in a spring-perambulator, saying in a foolish voice, "wupsey up, wupsey down! wupsey there!" o'malley, in the full stream of his mood, waited impatiently till she had gone by. then, rolling over on his side, he came closer, talking in a lowered tone. i think i never saw him so deeply stirred, nor understood, perhaps, so little of the extreme passion working in him. yet it was incredible that he could have caught so much from mere interviews with a semi-articulate stranger, unless what he said was strictly true, and this russian had positively touched latent fires in his soul by a kind of sympathetic magic. "you know," he went on almost under his breath, "every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book or in a person, the priest who shall make it clear to him. well--i'd found mine, that's all. i can't prove it to you with a pair of scales or a butcher's meat-axe, but it's true." "and you mean his mere presence conveyed all this without speech almost?" "because there _was_ no speech possible," he replied, dropping his voice to a whisper and thrusting his face yet closer into mine. "we were solitary survivors of a world whose language was either uncreated or"--he italicized the word--"_forgotten_...." "an elaborate and detailed thought-transference, then?" "why not?" he murmured. "it's one of the commonest facts of daily life." "and you had never fully realized it before, this loneliness and its possible explanation--that there might exist, i mean, a way of satisfying it--till you met this stranger?" he answered with deep earnestness. "always, old man, always, but suffered under it atrociously because i'd never understood it. i had been afraid to face it. this man, a far bigger and less diluted example of it than myself, made it all clear and right and natural. we belonged to the same forgotten place and time. under his lead and guidance i could find my own--return...." i whistled a long soft whistle, looking up into the sky. then, sitting upright like himself, we stared hard at one another, straight in the eye. he was too grave, too serious to trifle with. it would have been unfair too. besides, i loved to hear him. the way he reared such fabulous superstructures upon slight incidents, interpreting thus his complex being to himself, was uncommonly interesting. it was observing the creative imagination actually at work, and the process in a sense seemed sacred. only the truth and actuality with which he clothed it all made me a little uncomfortable sometimes. "i'll put it to you quite simply," he cried suddenly. "yes, and 'quite simply' it was--?" "that he knew the awful spiritual loneliness of living in a world whose tastes and interests were not his own, a world to which he was essentially foreign, and at whose hands he suffered continual rebuff and rejection. advances from either side were mutually and necessarily repelled because oil and water cannot mix. rejected, moreover, not merely by a family, tribe, or nation, but by a race and time--by the whole world of today; an outcast and an alien, a desolate survival." "an appalling picture!" "i understood it," he went on, holding up both hands by way of emphasis, "because in miniature i had suffered the same: he was a supreme case of what lay so deeply in myself. he was a survival of other life the modern mind has long since agreed to exile and deny. humanity stared at him over a barrier, never dreaming of asking him in. even had it done so he could not by the law of his being have accepted. outcast myself in some small way, i understood his terrible loneliness, a soul without a country, visible and external country that is. a passion of tenderness and sympathy for him, and so also for myself, awoke. i saw him as chieftain of all the lonely, exiled souls of life." breathless a moment, he lay on his back staring at the summer clouds--those thoughts of wind that change and pass before their meanings can be quite seized. similarly protean was the thought his phrases tried to clothe. the terror, pathos, sadness of this big idea he strove to express touched me deeply, yet never quite with the clarity of his own conviction. "there _are_ such souls, _dépaysées_ and in exile," he said suddenly again, turning over on the grass. "they _do_ exist. they walk the earth today here and there in the bodies of ordinary men ... and their loneliness is a loneliness that must be whispered." "you formed any idea what kind of--of survival?" i asked gently, for the notion grew in me that after all these two would prove to be mere revolutionaries in escape, political refugees, or something quite ordinary. o'malley buried his face in his hands for a moment without replying. presently he looked up. i remember that a streak of london black ran from the corner of his mouth across the cheek. he pushed the hair back from his forehead, answering in a manner grown abruptly calm and dispassionate. "don't ye see what a foolish question that is," he said quietly, "and how impossible to satisfy, inviting that leap of invention which can be only an imaginative lie...? i can only tell you," and the breeze brought to us the voices of children from the round pond where they sailed their ships of equally wonderful adventure, "that my own longing became this: to go with him, to know what he knew, to live where he lived--forever." "and the alarm you said you felt?" he hesitated. "that," he added, "was a kind of mistake. to go involved, i felt, an inner catastrophe that might be death--that it would be out of the body, i mean, or a going backwards. in reality, it was a going forwards and a way to life." vii and it was just before the steamer made naples that the jolly captain unwittingly helped matters forward a good deal. for it was his ambition to include in the safe-conduct of his vessel the happy-conduct also of his passengers. he liked to see them contented and of one accord, a big family, and he noted--or had word brought to him perhaps--that there were one or two whom the attitude of the majority left out in the cold. it may have been--o'malley wondered without actually asking--that the man who shared the cabin with the strangers made some appeal for re-arrangement, but in any case captain burgenfelder approached the irishman that afternoon on the bridge and asked if he would object to having them in his stateroom for the balance of the voyage. "your present gompanion geds off at naples," he said. "berhaps you would not object. i think--they seem lonely. you are friendly with them. they go alzo to batoum?" this proposal for close quarters gave him pause. he knew a moment or two of grave hesitation, yet without time to analyze it. then, driven by a sudden decision of the heart that knew no revision of reason, he agreed. "i had better, perhaps, suggest it to see if they are willing," he said the next minute, hedging. "i already ask him dat." "oh, you have! and he would like it--not object, i mean?" he added, aware of a subtle sense of half-frightened pleasure. "pleased and flattered on the contrary," was the reply, as he handed him the glasses to look at ischia rising blue from the sea. o'malley felt as though his decision was somehow an act of self-committal, almost grave. it meant that impulsively he accepted a friendship which concealed in its immense attraction--danger. he had taken the plunge. the rush of it broke over him like a wave, setting free a tumult of very deep emotion. he raised the glasses automatically to his eyes, but looking through them he saw not ischia nor the opening the captain explained the ship would make, heading that evening for sicily. he saw quite another picture that drew itself up out of himself--was thrown up, rather, somewhat with violence, as upon a landscape of dream-scenery. the lens of passionate yearning in himself, ever unsatisfied, focused it against a background far, far away, in some faint distance that was neither of space nor time, and might equally have been past as future. large figures he saw, shadowy yet splendid, that ran free-moving as clouds over mighty hills, vital with the abundant strong life of a younger world.... yet never quite saw them, never quite overtook them, for their speed and the manner of their motion bewildered the sight.... moreover, though they evaded him in terms of physical definition he knew a sense of curious, half-remembered familiarity. some portion of his hidden self, uncaught, unharnessed by anything in modern life, rose with a passionate rush of joy and made after them--something in him untamed as wind. his mind stood up, as it were, and shouted "i am coming." for he saw himself not far behind, as a man, racing with great leaps to join them ... yet never overtaking, never drawing close enough to see quite clearly. the roar of their tramping shook the very blood in his ears.... his decision to accept the strangers had set free in his being something that thus for the first time in his life--escaped.... symbolically in his mind this escape had taken picture form.... the captain's voice was asking for the glasses; with a wrench that caused almost actual physical pain he tore himself away, letting this herd of flying thoughts sink back into the shadows and disappear. with sharp regret he saw them go--a regret for long, long, far-off things.... turning, he placed the field-glasses carefully in that fat open hand stretched out to receive them, and noted as he did so the thick, pink fingers that closed about the strap, the heavy ring of gold, the band of gilt about the sleeve. that wrought gold, those fleshy fingers, the genial gutteral voice saying "t'anks" were symbols of an existence tamed and artificial that caged him in again.... then he went below and found that the lazy "drummer" who talked harvest-machines to puzzled peasants had landed, and in his place an assortment of indiscriminate clothing belonging to the big russian and his son lay scattered over the upper berth and upon the sofa-bed beneath the port-hole. viii "for my own part i find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior consciousness being possible. i doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without using the very letter of fechner's conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us." --william james, _a pluralistic universe_ and it was some hours later, while the ship made for the open sea, that he told dr. stahl casually of the new arrangement and saw the change come so suddenly across his face. stahl stood back from the compass-box whereon they leaned, and putting a hand upon his companion's shoulder, looked a moment into his eyes. with surprise o'malley noted that the pose of cynical disbelief was gone; in its place was sympathy, interest, kindness. the words he spoke came from his heart. "is that true?" he asked, as though the news disturbed him. "of course. why not? is there anything wrong?" he felt uneasy. the doctor's manner confirmed the sense that he had done a rash thing. instantly the barrier between the two crumbled and he lost the first feeling of resentment that his friends should be analyzed. the men thus came together in unhindered sincerity. "only," said the doctor thoughtfully, half gravely, "that--i may have done you a wrong, placed you, that is, in a position of--" he hesitated an instant,--"of difficulty. it was i who suggested the change." o'malley stared at him. "i don't understand you quite." "it is this," continued the other, still holding him with his eyes. he said it deliberately. "i have known you for some time, formed-er--an opinion of your type of mind and being--a very rare and curious one, interesting me deeply--" "i wasn't aware you'd had me under the microscope," o'malley laughed, but restlessly. "though you felt it and resented it--justly, i may say--to the point of sometimes avoiding me--" "as doctor, scientist," put in o'malley, while the other, ignoring the interruption, continued in german:-- "i always had the secret hope, as 'doctor and scientist,' let us put it then, that i might one day see you in circumstances that should bring out certain latent characteristics i thought i divined in you. i wished to observe you--your psychical being--under the stress of certain temptations, favorable to these characteristics. our brief voyages together, though they have so kindly ripened our acquaintance into friendship"--he put his hand again on the other's shoulder smiling, while o'malley replied with a little nod of agreement--"have, of course, never provided the opportunity i refer to--" "ah--!" "until now!" the doctor added. "until now." puzzled and interested the irishman waited for him to go on, but the man of science, who was now a ship's doctor, hesitated. he found it difficult, apparently, to say what was in his thoughts. "you refer, of course, though i hardly follow you quite--to our big friends?" o'malley helped him. the adjective slipped out before he was aware of it. his companion's expression admitted the accuracy of the remark. "you also see them--big, then?" he said, quickly taking him up. he was not cross-questioning; out of keen sympathetic interest he asked it. "sometimes, yes," the irishman answered, more astonished. "sometimes only--" "exactly. bigger than they really are; as though at times they gave out--emanated--something that extended their appearance. is that it?" o'malley, his confidence wholly won, more surprised, too, than he quite understood, seized stahl by the arm and drew him toward the rails. they leaned over, watching the sea. a passenger, pacing the decks before dinner, passed close behind them. "but, doctor," he said in a hushed tone as soon as the steps had died away, "you are saying things that i thought were half in my imagination only, not true in the ordinary sense quite--your sense, i mean?" for some moments the doctor made no reply. in his eyes a curious steady gaze replaced the usual twinkle. when at length he spoke it was evidently following a train of thought of his own, playing round a subject he seemed half ashamed of and yet desired to state with direct language. "a being akin to yourself," he said in low tones, "only developed, enormously developed; a master in your own peculiar region, and a man whose influence acting upon you at close quarters could not fail to arouse the latent mind-storms"--he chose the word hesitatingly, as though seeking for a better he could not find on the moment,--"always brewing in you just below the horizon." he turned and watched his companion's face keenly. o'malley was too impressed to feel annoyance. "well--?" he asked, feeling the adventure closing round him with quite a new sense of reality. "well?" he repeated louder. "please go on. i'm not offended, only uncommonly interested. you leave me in a fog, so far. i think you owe me more than hints." "i do," said the other simply. "about that man is a singular quality too rare for language to have yet coined its precise description: something that is essentially"--they had lapsed into german now, and he used the german word--"_unheimlich_." the irishman started. he recognized this for truth. at the same time the old resentment stirred a little in him, creeping into his reply. "you have studied him closely then--had him, too, under the microscope? in this short time?" this time the answer did not surprise him, however. "my friend," he heard, while the other turned from him and gazed out over the misty sea, "i have not been a ship's doctor--always. i am one now only because the leisure and quiet give me the opportunity to finish certain work, recording work. for years i was in the h----"--he mentioned the german equivalent for the salpêtrière--"years of research and investigation into the astonishing vagaries of the human mind and spirit--with certain results, followed later privately, that it is now my work to record. and among many cases that might well seem--er--beyond either credence or explanation,"--he hesitated again slightly--"i came across one, one in a million, let us admit, that an entire section of my work deals with under the generic term of _urmenschen_." "primitive men," o'malley snapped him up, translating. through his growing bewilderment ran also a growing uneasiness shot strangely with delight. intuitively he divined what was coming. "beings," the doctor corrected him, "not men. the prefix _ur-_, moreover, i use in a deeper sense than is usually attached to it as in _urwald_, _urwelt_, and the like. an _urmensch_ in the world today must suggest a survival of an almost incredible kind--a kind, too, utterly inadmissible and inexplicable to the materialist perhaps--" "paganistic?" interrupted the other sharply, joy and fright rising over him. "older, older by far," was the rejoinder, given with a curious hush and a lowering of the voice. the suggestion rushed into full possession of o'malley's mind. there rose in him something that claimed for his companions the sea, the wind, the stars--tumultuous and terrific. but he said nothing. the conception, blown into him thus for the first time at full strength, took all his life into its keeping. no energy was left over for mere words. the doctor, he was aware, was looking at him, the passion of discovery and belief in his eyes. his manner kindled. it was the hidden stahl emerging. "... a type, let me put it," he went on in a voice whose very steadiness thrilled his listener afresh, "that in its strongest development would experience in the world today the loneliness of a complete and absolute exile. a return to humanity, you see, of some unexpended power of mythological values...." "doctor...!" the shudder passed through him and away almost as soon as it came. again the sea grew splendid, the thunder of the waves held voices calling, and the foam framed shapes and faces, wildly seductive, though fugitive as dreams. the words he had heard moved him profoundly. he remembered how the presence of the stranger had turned the world alive. he knew what was coming, too, and gave the lead direct, while yet half afraid to ask the question. "so my friend--this big 'russian'--?" "i have known before, yes, and carefully studied." ix "is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion?" --herbert spencer, _first principles_ the two men left the rail and walked arm in arm along the deserted deck, speaking in lowered voices. "he came first to us, brought by the keeper of an obscure hotel where he was staying, as a case of lapse of memory--loss of memory, i should say, for it was complete. he was unable to say who he was, whence he came, or to whom he belonged. of his land or people we could learn nothing. his antecedents were an utter blank. speech he had practically none of his own--nothing but the merest smattering of many tongues, a word here, a word there. utterance, indeed, of any kind was exceedingly difficult to him. for years, evidently, he had wandered over the world, companionless among men, seeking his own, finding no place where to lay his head. people, it seemed, both men and women, kept him at arm's-length, feeling afraid; the keeper of the little hotel was clearly terrified. this quality he had that i mentioned just now, repelled human beings--even in the hospital it was noticeable--and placed him in the midst of humanity thus absolutely alone. it is a quality more rare than"--hesitating, searching for a word--"purity, one almost extinct today, one that i have never before or since come across in any other being--hardly ever, that is to say," he qualified the sentence, glancing significantly at his companion. "and the boy?" o'malley asked quickly, anxious to avoid any discussion of himself. "there was no boy then. he has found him since. he may find others too--possibly!" the irishman drew his arm out, edging away imperceptibly. that shiver of joy reached him from the air and sea, perhaps. "and two years ago," continued dr. stahl, as if nothing had happened, "he was discharged, harmless"--he lingered a moment on the word, "if not cured. he was to report to us every six months. he has never done so." "you think he remembers you?" "no. it is quite clear that he has lapsed back completely again into the--er--state whence he came to us, that unknown world where he passed his youth with others of his kind, but of which he has been able to reveal no single detail to us, nor we to trace the slightest clue." they stopped beneath the covered portion of the deck, for the mist had now turned to rain. they leaned against the smoking-room outer wall. in o'malley's mind the thoughts and feelings plunged and reared. only with difficulty did he control himself. "and this man, you think," he asked with outward calmness, "is of--of my kind?" "'akin,' i said. i suggest--" but o'malley cut him short. "so that you engineered our sharing a cabin with a view to putting him again--putting us both--under the microscope?" "my scientific interest was very strong," dr. stahl replied carefully. "but it is not too late to change. i offer you a bed in my own roomy cabin on the promenade deck. also, i ask your forgiveness." the irishman, large though his imaginative creed was, felt oddly checked, baffled, stupefied by what he had heard. he knew perfectly well what stahl was driving at, and that revelations of another kind were yet to follow. what bereft him of very definite speech was this new fact slowly awakening in his consciousness which hypnotized him, as it were, with its grandeur. it seemed to portend that his own primitive yearnings, so-called, grew out of far deeper foundations than he had yet dreamed of even. stahl, should he choose to listen, meant to give him explanation, quasi-scientific explanation. this talk about a survival of "unexpended mythological values" carried him off his feet. he knew it was true. veiled behind that carefully chosen phrase was something more--a truth brilliantly discovered. he knew, too, that it bit at the platform-boards upon which his personality, his sanity, his very life, perhaps, rested--his modern life. "i forgive you, dr. stahl," he heard himself saying with a deceptive calmness of voice as they stood shoulder to shoulder in that dark corner, "for there is really nothing to forgive. the characteristics of these _urmenschen_ you describe attract me very greatly. your words merely give my imagination a letter of introduction to my reason. they burrow among the foundations of my life and being. at least--you have done me no wrong...." he knew the words were wild, impulsive, yet he could find no better. above all things he wished to conceal his rising, grand delight. "i thank you," stahl said simply, yet with a certain confusion. "i--felt i owed you this explanation--er--this confession." "you wished to warn me?" "i wished to say 'be careful' rather. i say it now--be careful! i give you this invitation to share my cabin for the remainder of the voyage, and i urge you to accept it." the offer was from the heart, while the scientific interest in the man obviously half hoped for a refusal. "you think harm might come to me?" "not physically. the man is gentle and safe in every way." "but there _is_ danger--in your opinion?" insisted the other. "there _is_ danger--" "that his influence may make me as himself--an _urmensch_?" "that he may--get you," was the curious answer, given steadily after a moment's pause. again the words thrilled o'malley to the core of his delighted, half-frightened soul. "you really mean that?" he asked again; "as 'doctor and scientist,' you mean it?" stahl replied with a solemn anxiety in eyes and voice. "i mean that you have in yourself that 'quality' which makes the proximity of this 'being' dangerous: in a word that he may take you--er--with him." "conversion?" "appropriation." they moved further up the deck together for some minutes in silence, but the irishman's feelings, irritated by the man's prolonged evasion, reached a degree of impatience that was almost anger. "let us be more definite," he exclaimed at length a trifle hotly. "you mean that i might go insane?" "not in the ordinary sense," came the answer without a sign of annoyance or hesitation; "but that something might happen to you--something that science could not recognize and medical science could not treat--" then o'malley interrupted him with the vital question that rushed out before he could consider its wisdom or legitimacy. "then what really is he--this man, this 'being' whom you call a 'survival,' and who makes you fear for my safety. tell me _exactly_ what he is?" they found themselves just then by the doctor's cabin, and stahl, pushing the door open, led him in. taking the sofa for himself, he pointed to an armchair opposite. x "superstition is outside reason; so is revelation." --old saying and o'malley understood that he had pressed the doctor to the verge of confessing some belief that he was ashamed to utter or to hold, something forced upon him by his out-of-the-way experience of life to which his scientific training said peremptorily "no." further, that he watched him keenly all the time, noting the effect his words produced. "he is not a human being at all," he continued with a queer thin whisper that conveyed a gravity of conviction singularly impressive, "in the sense in which you and i are accustomed to use the term. his inner being is not shaped, as his outer body, upon quite--human lines. he is a cosmic being--a direct expression of cosmic life. a little bit, a fragment, of the soul of the world, and in that sense a survival--a survival of her youth." the irishman, as he listened to these utterly unexpected words, felt something rise within him that threatened to tear him asunder. whether it was joy or terror, or compounded strangely of the two, he could not tell. it seemed as if he stood upon the edge of hearing something--spoken by a man who was no mere dreamer like himself--that would explain the world, himself, and all his wildest cravings. he both longed and feared to hear it. in his hidden and most secret thoughts, those thoughts he never uttered to another, this deep belief in the earth as a conscious, sentient, living being had persisted in spite of all the forces education and modern life had turned against it. it seemed in him an undying instinct, an unmovable conviction, though he hardly dared acknowledge it even to himself. he had always "dreamed" the earth alive, a mothering organism to humanity; and himself, _via_ his love of nature, in some sweet close relation to her that other men had forgotten or ignored. now, therefore, to hear stahl talk of cosmic beings, fragments of the soul of the world, and "survivals of her early life" was like hearing a great shout of command to his soul to come forth and share it in complete acknowledgment. he bit his lips, pinched himself, stared. then he took the black cigar he was aware was being handed to him, lit it with fingers that trembled absurdly, and smoked as hard as though his sanity depended on his finishing it in a prescribed time. great clouds rose before his face. but his soul within him came up with a flaming rush of speed, shouting, singing.... there was enough ash to knock off into the bronze tray beside him before either said a word. he watched the little operation as closely as though he were aiming a rifle. the ash, he saw, broke firmly. "this must be a really good cigar," he thought to himself, for as yet he had not been conscious of tasting it. the ash-tray, he also saw, was a kind of nymph, her spread drapery forming the receptacle. "i must get one of those," he thought. "i wonder what they cost." then he puffed violently again. the doctor had risen and was pacing the cabin floor slowly over by the red curtain that concealed the bunk. o'malley absent-mindedly watched him, and as he did so the words he had heard kept on roaring at the back of his mind. and then, while silence still held the room,--swift, too, as a second although it takes time to write--flashed through him a memory of fechner, the german philosopher who held that the universe was everywhere consciously alive, and that the earth was the body of a living entity, and that the world-soul or cosmic consciousness is something more than a picturesque dream of the ancients.... the doctor came to anchor again on the sofa opposite. to his great relief he was the first to break the silence, for o'malley simply did not know how or where to begin. "we know today--_you_ certainly know for i've read it accurately described in your books--that the human personality can extend itself under certain conditions called abnormal. it can project portions of itself, show itself even at a distance, operate away from the central covering body. in exactly similar fashion may the being of the earth have projected portions of herself in the past. of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when her consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity ... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...." and then, suddenly, as though he had been deliberately giving his imagination rein yet now regretted it, his voice altered, his manner assumed a shade of something colder. he shifted the key, as though to another aspect of his belief. the man was talking swiftly of his experiences in the big and private hospitals. he was describing _the_ very belief to which he had first found himself driven--the belief that had opened the door to so much more. so far as o'malley could follow it in his curiously excited condition of mind, it was little more or less than a belief he himself had often played lovingly with--the theory that a man has a fluid or etheric counterpart of himself which is obedient to strong desire and can, under certain conditions, be detached--projected in a shape dictated by that desire. he only realized this fully later perhaps, for the doctor used a phraseology of his own. stahl was telling calmly how he had been driven to some such belief by the facts that had come under his notice both in the asylums and in his private practice. "...that in the amazingly complex personality of a human being," he went on, "there does exist some vital constituent, a part of consciousness, that can leave the body for a short time without involving death; that it is something occasionally visible to others; something malleable by thought and desire--especially by intense and prolonged yearning; and that it can even bring relief to its owner by satisfying in some subjective fashion the very yearnings that drew it forth." "doctor! you mean the 'astral'?" "there is no name i know of. i can give it none. i mean in other words that it can create the conditions for such satisfaction--dream-like, perhaps, yet intense and seemingly very real at the time. great emotion, for instance, drives it forth, explaining thus appearances at a distance, and a hundred other phenomena that my investigations of abnormal personality have forced me to recognize as true. and nostalgia often is the means of egress, the channel along which all the inner forces and desires of the heart stream elsewhere toward their fulfillment in some person, place, or _dream_." stahl was giving himself his head, talking freely of beliefs that rarely found utterance. clearly it was a relief to him to do so--to let himself be carried away. there was, after all, the poet in him side by side with the observer and analyst, and the fundamental contradiction in his character stood most interestingly revealed. o'malley listened, half in a dream, wondering what this had to do with the cosmic life just mentioned. "moreover, the appearance, the aspect of this etheric double, molded thus by thought, longing, and desire, corresponds to such thought, longing, and desire. its shape, when visible shape is assumed, may be various--very various. the form might conceivably be _felt_, discerned clairvoyantly as an emanation rather than actually seen," he continued. then he added, looking closely at his companion, "and in your own case this double--it has always seemed to me--may be peculiarly easy of detachment from the rest of you." "i certainly create my own world and slip into it--to some extent," murmured the irishman, absorbingly interested; "--reverie and so forth; partially, at any rate." "'partially,' yes, in your reveries of waking consciousness," stahl took him up, "but in sleep--in the trance consciousness--completely! and therein lies your danger," he added gravely; "for to pass out completely in _waking_ consciousness, is the next step--an easy one; and it constitutes, not so much a disorder of your being, as a readjustment, but a readjustment difficult of sane control." he paused again. "you pass out while fully awake--a waking delusion. it is usually labeled--though in my opinion wrongly so--insanity." "i'm not afraid of that," o'malley laughed, almost nettled. "i can manage myself all right--have done so far, at any rate." it was curious how the rôles had shifted. o'malley it was now who checked and criticized. "i suggest caution," was the reply, made earnestly. "i suggest caution." "i should keep your warnings for mediums, clairvoyants, and the like," said the other tartly. he was half amazed, half alarmed even while he said it. it was the personal application that annoyed him. "they are rather apt to go off their heads, i believe." dr. stahl rose and stood before him as though the words had given him a cue he wanted. "from that very medium-class," he said, "my most suggestive 'cases' have come, though not for one moment do i think of including you with them. yet these very 'cases' have been due one and all to the same cause--the singular disorder i have just mentioned." they stared at one another a moment in silence. stahl, whether o'malley liked it or no, was impressive. he gazed at the little figure in front of him, the ragged untidy beard, the light shining on the bald skull, wondering what was coming next and what all this bewildering confession of unorthodox belief was leading up to. he longed to hear more about that hinted cosmic life ... and how yearning might lead to its realization. "for any phenomena of the séance-room that may be genuine," he heard him saying, "are produced by this fluid, detachable portion of the personality, the very thing we have been speaking about. they are projections of the personality--automatic projections of the consciousness." and then, like a clap of thunder upon his bewildered mind, came this man's amazing ultimatum, linking together all the points touched upon and bringing them to a head. he repeated it emphatically. "and in similar fashion," concluded the calm, dispassionate voice beside him, "there have been projections of the earth's great consciousness--direct expressions of her cosmic life--cosmic beings. and of these distant and primitive manifestations, it is conceivable that one or two may still--here and there in places humanity has never stained--actually survive. this man is one of them." he turned on the two electric lights behind him with an admirable air of finality. the extraordinary talk was at an end. he moved about the cabin, putting chairs straight and toying with the papers on his desk. occasionally he threw a swift and searching glance at his companion, like a man who wished to note the effect of an attack. for, indeed, this was the impression that his listener retained above all else. this flood of wild, unorthodox, speculative ideas had been poured upon him helter-skelter with a purpose. and the abruptness of the climax was cleverly planned to induce impulsive, hot confession. but o'malley found no words. he sat there in his armchair, passing his fingers through his tumbled hair. his inner turmoil was too much for speech or questions ... and presently, when the gong for dinner rang noisily outside the cabin door, he rose abruptly and went out without a single word. stahl turned to see him go. he merely nodded with a little smile. but he did not go to his stateroom. he walked the deck alone for a time, and when he reached the dining room, stahl, he saw, had already come and gone. halfway down the table, diagonally across, the face of the big russian looked up occasionally at him and smiled, and every time he did so the irishman felt a sense of mingled alarm and wonder greater than anything he had ever known in his life before. one of the great doors of life again had opened. the barriers of his heart broke away. he was no longer caged and manacled within the prison of a puny individuality. the world that so distressed him faded. the people in it were dolls. the fur-merchant, the armenian priest, the tourists and the rest were mere automatic puppets, all made to scale--petty scale, amazingly dull, all exactly alike--tiny, unreal, half alive. the ship, meanwhile, he reflected with a joy that was passion, was being borne over the blue sea, and this sea lay spread upon the curved breast of the round and spinning earth. he, too, and the big russian lay upon her breast, held close by gravity so-called, caught closer still, though, by something else besides. and his longings increased with his understanding. stahl, wittingly or unwittingly, had given them an immense push forwards. xi "in scientific terms one can say: consciousness is everywhere; it is awake when and wherever the bodily energy underlying the spiritual exceeds that degree of strength which we call the threshold. according to this, consciousness can be localized in time and space." --fechner, _buchlein vom leben nach dem tode_ the offer of the cabin, meanwhile, remained open. in the solitude that o'malley found necessary that evening he toyed with it, though knowing that he would never really accept. like a true celt his imagination took the main body of stahl's words and ensouled them with his own vivid temperament. there stirred in him this nameless and disquieting joy that wrought for itself a body from material just beyond his thoughts--that region of enormous experience that ever fringes the consciousness of imaginative men. he took the picture at its face value, took it inside with his own thoughts, delighted in it, raised it, of course, very soon to a still higher scale. if he criticized at all it was with phrases like "the man's a poet after all! why, he's got creative imagination!" to find his own intuitions endorsed, even half explained, by a mind of opposite type was a new experience. it emphasized amazingly the reality of that inner world he lived in. this explanation of the big russian's effect upon himself was terrific, and that a "doctor" should have conceived it, glorious. that some portion of a man's spirit might assume the shape of his thoughts and project itself visibly seemed likely enough. indeed, to him, it seemed already a "fact," and his temperament did not linger over it. but that other suggestion fairly savaged him with its strange grandeur. he played lovingly with it. that the earth was a living being was a conception divine in size as in simplicity, and that the gods and mythological figures had been projections of her consciousness--this thought ran with a magnificent new thunder about his mind. it was overwhelming, beautiful as heaven and as gracious. he saw the ancient shapes of myth and legend still alive in some gorgeous garden of the primal world, a corner too remote for humanity to have yet stained it with their trail of uglier life. he understood in quite a new way, at last, those deep primitive longings that hitherto had vainly craved their full acknowledgment. it meant that he lay so close to the earth that he felt her pulses as his own. the idea stormed his belief. it was the soul of the earth herself that all these years had been calling to him. and while he let his imagination play with the soaring beauty of the idea, he remembered certain odd little facts. he marshaled them before him in a row and questioned them: the picture he had seen with the captain's glasses--those speeding shapes of beauty; the new aspect of a living nature that the russian's presence stirred in him; the man's broken words as they had leaned above the sea in the dusk; the curious passion that leaped to his eyes when certain chance words had touched him at the dinner-table. and, lastly, the singular impression of giant bulk he produced sometimes upon the mind, almost as though a portion of him--this detachable portion molded by the quality of his spirit as he felt himself to be--emerged visibly to cause it. vaguely, in this way, o'malley divined how inevitable was the apparent isolation of these two, and why others instinctively avoided them. they seemed by themselves in an enclosure where the parent lumberingly, and the boy defiantly, disported themselves with a kind of lonely majesty that forbade approach. and it was later that same night, as the steamer approached the lipari islands, that the drive forward he had received from the doctor's words was increased by a succession of singular occurrences. at the same time, stahl's deliberate and as he deemed it unjustifiable interference, helped him to make up his mind decisively on certain other points. the first "occurrence" was of the same order as the "bigness"-- extraordinarily difficult, that is, to confirm by actual measurement. it was ten o'clock, stahl still apparently in his cabin by himself, and most of the passengers below at an impromptu concert, when the irishman, coming down from his long solitude, caught sight of the russian and his boy moving about the dark after-deck with a speed and vigor that instantly arrested his attention. the suggestion of size, and of rapidity of movement, had never been more marked. it was as though a cloud of the summer darkness moved beside them. then, going cautiously nearer, he saw that they were neither walking quickly, nor running, as he had first supposed, but--to his amazement--were standing side by side upon the deck--stock still. the appearance of motion, however, was not entirely a delusion, for he next saw that, while standing there steady as the mast and life-boats behind them, something emanated shadow-like from both their persons and seemed to hover and play about them--something that was only approximately of their own outer shapes, and very considerably larger. now it veiled them, now left them clear. he thought of smoke-clouds moving to and fro about dark statues. so far as he could focus his sight upon them, these "shadows," without any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a motion that was somehow rhythmical--a great movement as of dance or gambol. as with the appearance of "bigness," he perceived it first out of the corner of his eye. when he looked again he saw only two dark figures, motionless. he experienced the sensation a man sometimes knows on entering a deserted chamber in the nighttime, and is aware that the things in it have just that instant--stopped. his arrival puts abrupt end to some busy activity they were engaged in, which begins again the moment he goes. chairs, tables, cupboards, the very spots and patterns of the wall have just flown back to their usual places whence they watch impatiently for his departure--with the candle. this time, on a deck instead of in a room, o'malley with his candle had surprised them in the act: people, moreover, not furniture. and this shadowy gambol, this silent dance of the emanations, immense yet graceful, made him think of winds flying, visible and uncloaked, somewhere across long hills, or of clouds passing to a stately, elemental measure over the blue dancing-halls of an open sky. his imagery was confused and gigantic, yet very splendid. again he recalled the pictured shapes seen with his mind's eye through the captain's glasses. and as he watched, he felt in himself what he called "the wild, tearing instinct to run and join them," more even--that by rights he ought to have been there from the beginning--dancing with them--indulging a natural and instinctive and rhythmical movement that he had somehow forgotten. the passion in him was very strong, very urgent, it seems, for he took a step forward, a call of some kind rose in his throat, and in another second he would have been similarly cavorting upon the deck, when he felt his arm clutched suddenly with vigor from behind. some one seized him and held him back. a german voice spoke with a guttural whisper in his ear. dr. stahl, crouching and visibly excited, drew him forward a little. "hold up!" he heard whispered--for their india rubber soles slithered on the wet decks. "we shall see from here, eh? see something at last?" he still whispered. o'malley's sudden anger died down. he could not give vent to it without making noise, for one thing, and above all else he wished to--see. he merely felt a vague wonder how long stahl had been watching. they crouched behind the lee of a boat. the outline of the ship rose, distinctly visible against the starry sky, masts, spars, and cordage. a faint gleam came through the glass below the compass-box. the wheel and the heaps of coiled rope beyond rose and fell with the motion of the vessel, now against the stars, now black against the phosphorescent foam that trailed along the sea like shining lace. but the human figures, he next saw, were now doing nothing, not even pacing the deck; they were no longer of unusual size either. quietly leaning over the rail, father and son side by side, they were guiltless of anything more uncommon than gazing into the sea. like the furniture, they had just--stopped! dr. stahl and his companion waited motionless for several minutes in silence. there was no sound but the dull thunder of the screws, and a faint windy whistle the ship's speed made in the rigging. the passengers were all below. then, suddenly, a burst of music came up as some one opened a saloon port-hole and as quickly closed it again--a tenor voice singing to the piano some trivial modern song with a trashy sentimental lilt. it was--in this setting of sea and sky--painful; o'malley caught himself thinking of a barrel-organ in a greek temple. the same instant father and son, as though startled, moved slowly away down the deck into the further darkness, and dr. stahl tightened his grip of the irishman's arm with a force that almost made him cry out. a gleam of light from the opened port-hole had fallen about them before they moved. quite clearly it revealed them bending busily over, heads close together, necks and shoulders thrust forward and down a little. "look, by god!" whispered stahl hoarsely as they moved off. "there's a third!" he pointed. where the two had been standing something, indeed, still remained. concealed hitherto by their bulk, this other figure had been left. they saw its large, dim outline. it moved. apparently it began to climb over the rails, or to move in some way just outside them, hanging half above the sea. there was a free, swaying movement about it, not ungainly so much as big--very big. "now, quick!" whispered the doctor excited, in english; "this time i find out, sure!" he made a violent movement forward, a pocket electric lamp in his hand, then turned angrily, furiously, to find that o'malley held him fast. there was a most unseemly struggle--for a minute, and it was caused by the younger man's sudden passionate instinct to protect his own from discovery, if not from actual capture and destruction. stahl fought in vain, being easily overmatched; he swore vehement german oaths under his breath; and the pocket-lamp, of course unlighted, fell and rattled over the deck, sliding with the gentle roll of the steamer to leeward. but o'malley's eyes, even while he struggled, never for one instant left the spot where the figure and the "movement" had been; and it seemed to him that when the bulwarks dipped against the dark of the sea, the moving thing completed its efforts and passed into the waves with a swift leap. when the vessel righted herself again the outline of the rail was clear. dr. stahl, he then saw, had picked up the lamp and was bending over some mark upon the deck, examining a wide splash of wet upon which he directed the electric flash. the sense of revived antagonism between the men for the moment was strong, too strong for speech. o'malley feeling half ashamed, yet realized that his action had been instinctive, and that another time he would do just the same. he would fight to the death any too close inspection, since such inspection included also now--himself. the doctor presently looked up. his eyes shone keenly in the gleam of the lamp, but he was no longer agitated. "there is too much water," he said calmly, as though diagnosing a case; "too much to permit of definite traces." he glanced round, flashing the beam about the decks. the other two had disappeared. they were alone. "it was outside the rail all the time, you see," he added, "and never quite reached the decks." he stooped down and examined the splash once more. it looked as though a wave had topped the scuppers and left a running line of foam and water. "nothing to indicate its exact nature," he said in a whisper that conveyed something between uneasiness and awe, again turning the light sharply in every direction and peering about him. "it came to them--er--from the sea, though; it came from the sea right enough. that, at least, is positive." and in his manner was perhaps just a touch to indicate relief. "and it returned into the sea," exclaimed o'malley triumphantly. it was as though he related his own escape. the two men were now standing upright, facing one another. dr. stahl, betraying no sign of resentment, looked him steadily in the eye. he put the lamp back into his pocket. when he spoke at length in the darkness, the words were not precisely what the irishman had expected. under them his own vexation and excitement faded instantly. he felt almost sheepish when he remembered his violence. "i forgive your behavior, of course," stahl said, "for it is consistent--splendidly consistent--with my theory of you; and of value, therefore. i only now urge you again"--he moved closer, speaking almost solemnly--"to accept the offer of a berth in my cabin. take it, my friend, take it--tonight." "because you wish to watch me at close quarters." "no," was the reply, and there was sympathy in the voice, "but because you are in danger--especially in sleep." there was a moment's pause before o'malley said anything. "it is kind of you, dr. stahl, very kind," he answered slowly, and this time with grave politeness; "but i am not afraid, and i see no reason to make the change. and as it's now late," he added somewhat abruptly, almost as though he feared he might be persuaded to alter his mind, "i will say good-night and turn in--if you will forgive me--at once." dr. stahl said no further word. he watched him, the other was aware, as he moved down the deck toward the saloon staircase, and then turned once more with his lamp to stoop over the splashed portion of the boards. he examined the place apparently for a long time. but o'malley, as he went slowly down the hot and stuffy stairs, realized with a wild and rushing tumult of joy that the "third" he had seen was of a splendor surpassing the little figures of men, and that something deep within his own soul was most gloriously akin with it. a link with the universe had been subconsciously established, tightened up, adjusted. from all this living nature breathing about him in the night, a message had reached the strangers and himself--a message shaped in beauty and in power. nature had become at last aware of his presence close against her ancient face. henceforth would every sight of beauty take him direct to the place where beauty comes from. no middleman, no art was necessary. the gates were opening. already he had caught a glimpse. xii in the stateroom he found, without surprise somehow, that his new companions had already retired for the night. the curtain of the upper berth was drawn, and on the sofa-bed below the opened port-hole the boy already slept. standing a moment in the little room with these two close, he felt that he had come into a new existence almost. deep within him this sense of new life thrilled and glowed. he was shaking a little all over, not with the mere tremor of excitement, however, but with the tide of a vast and rising exultation he could scarce contain. for his normal self was too small to hold it. it demanded expansion, and the expansion it claimed had already begun. the boundaries of his personality were enormously extending. in words this change escaped him wholly. he only knew that something in him of an old unrest lay down at length and slept. less acute grew those pangs of starvation his life had ever felt--the ache of that inappeasable hunger for the beauty and innocence of some primal state before thick human crowds had stained the world with all their strife and clamor. the glory of it burned white within him. and the way he described it to himself was significant of its true nature. for it vans the analogy of childhood. the passion of a boy's longing swept over him. he knew again the feelings of those early days when-- a boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, --when all the world smells sweet and golden as a summer's day, and a village street is endless as the sky.... this it was, raised to its highest power, that dropped a hint of explanation into that queer heart of his wherein had ever burned the strange desire for primitive existence. it was the call, though, not of his own youth alone, but of the youth of the world. a mood of the earth's consciousness--some giant expression of her cosmic emotion--caught him. and it was the big russian who acted as channel and interpreter. before getting into bed, he drew aside the little red curtain that screened his companion, and peered cautiously through the narrow slit. the big occupant of the bunk also slept, his mane-like hair spread about him over the pillow, and on his great, placid face a look of peace that seemed to deepen with every day the steamer neared her destination. o'malley gazed for a full minute and more. then the sleeper felt the gaze, for suddenly the eyelids quivered, moved, and lifted. the large brown eyes peered straight into his own. the irishman, unable to turn away in time, stood fixed and staring in return. the gentleness and power of the look passed straight down into his heart, filled him to the brim with things their owner knew, and confirmed that appeasement of his own hunger, already begun. "i tried--to prevent the--interference," he stammered in a low voice. "i held him back. you saw me?" a huge hand stretched forth from the bunk to stop him. impulsively he seized it with both his own. at the first contact he started--a little frightened. it felt so wonderful, so mighty. thus might a gust of wind or a billow of the sea have thrust against him. "a messenger--came," said the man with that laborious slow utterance, and deep as thunder, "from--the--sea." "from--the--sea, yes," repeated o'malley beneath his breath, yet conscious rather that he wanted to shout and sing it. he saw the big man smile. his own small hands were crushed in the grasp of power. "i--understand," he added in a whisper. he found himself speaking with a similar clogged utterance. somehow, it seemed, the language they ought to have used was either forgotten or unborn. yet whereas his friend was inarticulate perhaps, he himself was--dumb. these little modern words were all wrong and inadequate. modern speech could only deal with modern smaller things. the giant half rose in his bed, as though at first to leap forward and away from it. he tightened an instant the grasp upon his companion's hands, then suddenly released them and pointed across the cabin. that smile of happiness spread upon his face. o'malley turned. there the boy lay, deeply slumbering, the clothes flung back so that the air from the port-hole played over the bare neck and chest; upon his face, too, shone the look of peace and rest his father wore, the hunted expression all gone, as though the spirit had escaped in sleep. the parent pointed, first to the boy, then to himself, then to this new friend standing beside his bed. the gesture including the three of them was of singular authority--invitation, welcome, and command lay in it. more--in some incomprehensible way it was majestic. o'malley's thought flashed upon him the limb of some great oak tree, swaying in the wind. next, placing a finger on his lips, his eyes once more swept o'malley and the boy, and he turned again into the little bunk that so difficultly held him, and lay back. the hair flowed down and mingled with the beard, over pillow and neck, almost to the shoulders. and something that was enormous and magnificent lay back with him, carrying with it again that sudden atmosphere of greater bulk. with a deep sound in his throat that was certainly no actual word and yet more expressive than any speech, he turned hugely over among the little, scanty sheets, drew the curtain again before his face, and returned into the world of--sleep. xiii "it may happen that the earthly body falls asleep in one direction deeply enough to allow it in others to awaken far beyond its usual limits, and yet not so deeply and completely as to awaken no more. or, to the subjective vision there comes a flash so unusually vivid as to bring to the earthly sense an impression rising above the threshold from an otherwise inaccessible distance. here begin the wonders of clairvoyance, of presentiments, and premonitions in dreams;--pure fables, if the future body and the future life are fables; otherwise signs of the one and predictions of the other; but what has signs exists, and what has prophecies will come." --fechner, _buchlein vom leben nach dem tode_ but o'malley rolled into his own berth below without undressing, sleep far from his eyes. he had heard the gates of ivory and horn swing softly upon their opening hinges, and the glimpse he caught of the garden beyond made any question of slumber impossible. again he saw those shapes of cloud and wind flying over the long hills, while the name that should describe them ran, hauntingly splendid, along the mysterious passages of his being, though never coming quite to the surface for capture. perhaps, too, he was glad that the revelation was only partial. the size of the vision thus invoked awed him a little, so that he lay there half wondering at the complete surrender he had made to this guidance of another soul. stahl's warnings ran far away and laughed. the idea even came to him that stahl was playing with him: that his portentous words had been carefully chosen for their heightening effect upon his own imagination so that the doctor might study an uncommon and extreme "case." the notion passed through him merely, without lingering. in any event it was idle to put the brakes on now. he was internally committed and must go wherever it might lead. and the thought rejoiced him. he had climbed upon a pendulum that swung into an immense past; but its return swing would bring him safely back. it was rushing now into that nameless place of freedom that the primitive portion of his being had hitherto sought in vain, and a fundamental, starved craving of his life would know satisfaction at last. already life had grown all glorious without. it was not steel engines but a speeding sense of beauty that drove the ship over the sea with feet of winged blue darkness. the stars fled with them across the sky, dropping golden leashes to draw him faster and faster forwards--yet within--to the dim days when this old world yet was young. he took his fire of youth and spread it, as it were, all over life till it covered the entire world, far, far away. then he stepped back into it, and the world herself, he found, stepped with him. he lay listening to the noises of the ship, the thump and bumble of the engines, the distant droning of the screws under water. from time to time stewards moved down the corridor outside, and the footsteps of some late passenger still paced the decks overhead. he heard voices, too, and occasionally the clattering of doors. once or twice he fancied some one moved stealthily to the cabin door and lingered there, but the matter never drew him to investigate, for the sound each time resolved itself naturally into the music of the ship's noises. and everything, meanwhile, heard or thought, fed the central concern upon which his mind was busy. these superficial sounds, for instance, had nothing to do with the real business of the ship; _that_ lay below with the buried engines and the invisible screws that worked like demons to bring her into port. and with himself and his slumbering companions the case was similar. their respective power-stations, working in the subconscious, had urged them toward one another inevitably. how long, he wondered, had the spirit of that lonely, alien "being" flashed messages into the void that reached no receiving-station tuned to their acceptance? their accumulated power was great, the currents they generated immense. he knew. for had they not charged full into himself the instant he came on board, bringing an intimacy that was immediate and full-fledged? the untamed longings that always tore him when he felt the great winds, moved through forests, or found himself in desolate places, were at last on the high road to satisfaction--to some "state" where all that they represented would be explained and fulfilled. and whether such "state" should prove to be upon the solid surface of the earth, objective; or in the fluid regions of his inner being, subjective--was of no account whatever. it would be true. the great figure that filled the berth above him, now deeply slumbering, had in him subterraneans that gave access not only to greece, but far beyond that haunted land, to a state of existence symbolized in the legends of the early world by eden and the golden age.... "you are in danger," that wise old speculative doctor had whispered, "and especially in sleep!" but he did not sleep. he lay there thinking, thinking, thinking, a rising exaltation of desire paving busily the path along which eventually he might escape. as the night advanced and the lesser noises retired, leaving only the deep sound of the steamer talking to the sea, he became aware, too, that a change, at first imperceptibly, then swiftly, was stealing over the cabin. it came with a riot of silent beauty. at a loss to describe it with precision, he nevertheless divined that it proceeded from the sleeping figure overhead and in a lesser pleasure, too, from the boy upon the sofa opposite. it emanated from these two, he felt, in proportion as their bodies passed into deeper and deeper slumber, as though what occurred sometimes upon the decks by an act of direct volition, took place now automatically and with a fuller measure of release. their spirits, free of that other world in sleep, were alert and potently discharging. unconsciously, their vital, underlying essence escaped into activity. growing about his own person, next, it softly folded him in, casing his inner being with glory and this crowding sense of beauty. this increased manifestation of psychic activity reached down into the very core of himself, like invisible fingers playing upon an instrument. notes--powers--in his soul, hitherto silent because none had known how to sound them, rose singing to the surface. for it seemed at length that forms of some intenser life, busily operating, moved to and fro within the painted white walls of that little cabin, working subtly to bring about a transformation of himself. a singular change was fast and cleverly at work in his own being. it was, he puts it, a silent and irresistible evocation. no one of his senses was directly affected; certainly he neither saw, felt, nor heard anything in the usual acceptance of the terms; but any instant surely, it seemed that all his senses must awake and report to the mind things that were splendid beyond the common order. in the crudest aspect of it, he felt as though he extended and grew large--that he dreaded to see himself in the mirror lest he might witness an external appearance of bigness which corresponded to this interior expansion. for a long time he lay unresisting, letting the currents of this subjective tempest play through and round him. entrancing sensations of beauty and rapture came with it. the outer world seemed remote and trivial, the passengers unreal--the priest, the voluble merchant, the jovial captain, all spun like dead things at the periphery of life; whereas he was moving toward the center. stahl--! the thought of dr. stahl, alone intruded with a certain unwelcome air of hindrance, almost as though he sought to end it, or call a halt. but stahl, too, himself presently spun off like a leaf before the rising wind... and then it was that an external sense was tapped, and he did hear something. from the berth overhead came a faint sound that made his heart stand still, though not with common fear. he listened intently. the blood tearing through his ears at first concealed its actual nature. it was far, far away; then came closer, as a waft of wind brings near and carries off again a sound of bells in mountains. it fled over vales and hills, to return a moment after with suddenness--a little louder, a little nearer. and with it came an increase of this sense of beauty that stretched his heart, as it were, to some deep ancient scale of joy once known, but long forgotten... across the cabin, the boy moved uneasily in his sleep. "oh, that i could be with him where he now is!" he cried, "in that place of eternal youth and eternal companionship!" the cry was instinctive utterly; his whole being, condensed in the single yearning, pressed through it--drove behind it. the place, the companionship, the youth--all, he knew, would prove in some strange way enormous, vast, ultimately satisfying forever and ever, far out of this little modern world that imprisoned him... again, most unwelcome and unexplained, the face of stahl flashed suddenly before him to hinder and interrupt. he banished it with an effort, for it brought a smaller comprehension that somehow involved--fear. "curse the man!" flamed in anger across his world of beauty, and the violence of the contrast broke something in his mind like a globe of colored glass that had focused the exquisiteness of the vision.... the sound continued as before, but its power of evocation lessened. the thought of stahl--stahl in his denying aspect--dimmed it. glancing up at the frosted electric light, o'malley felt vaguely that if he turned it out he would somehow yet see better, hear better, understand more; and it was this practical consideration, introduced indirectly by the thought of stahl, that made him realize now for the first time that he actually and definitely was--afraid. for, to leave his bunk with its comparative, protective dark, and step into the middle of a cabin he knew to be alive with a seethe of invisible charging forces, made him realize that distinct effort was necessary--effort of will. if he yielded he would be caught up and away, swept from his known moorings, borne through high space out of himself. and stahl with his cowardly warnings and belittlements set fear, thus, in the place of free acceptance. otherwise he might even have come to these long blue hills where danced and raced the giant shapes of cloud, singing while.... "singing!" ah! there was the clue! the sound he heard was singing--faint, low singing; close beside him too. it was the big man, singing softly in his sleep. this ordinary explanation of the "wonder-sound" brought him down to earth, and so to a more normal feeling of security again. he stepped cautiously from the bed, careful not to let the rings rattle on the rod of brass, and slowly raised himself upright. and then, through a slit of the curtain, he--saw. the lips of the big sleeper moved gently, the beard rising and falling very slightly with them, and this murmur that he had thought so far away, came out and sang deliriously and faint before his very face. it most curiously--flowed. easily, naturally, almost automatically, it poured softly forth, and the irishman at once understood why he had first mistaken it for an echo of wind from distant hills. the imagery was entirely accurate. for it was precisely the singing cry that wind makes in a keyhole, in a chimney, or passing idly over the sweep of grassy hills. exactly thus had he often listened to it swishing through the crannies of high rocks, tuneless yet searching. in it, too, there lay some accent of a secret, dim sublimity, deeper far than any other human sound could touch. the terror of a great freedom caught him, a freedom most awfully remote from the smaller personal existence he knew today ... for it suggested, with awe and wonder, the kind of primitive utterance that was before speech or the development of language; when emotions were still too vague and mighty to be caught by little words, but when beings, close to the heart of their great mother, expressed the feelings, enormous and uncomplex, of the greater life they shared as portions of her--projections of the earth herself. with a crash in his brain, o'malley stopped. these thoughts, he suddenly realized, were not his own. an attack of unwonted sensations stung and scattered his mind with a rush of giant splendor that threatened to overwhelm him. he was in the very act of being carried away; his sense of personal identity menaced; surrender well-nigh already complete. another moment, especially if those eyes opened and caught him, and he would be beyond recall in the region of these other two. the narrow space of that little cabin was charged already to the brim, filled with some overpowering loveliness of wild and simple things, the beauty of stars and winds and flowers, the terror of seas and mountains; strange radiant forms of gods and heroes, nymphs, fauns and satyrs; the fierce sunshine of some golden age unspoiled, of a stainless region now long forgotten and denied--that world of splendor his heart had ever craved in vain, and beside which the life of today faded to a wretched dream. it was the _urwelt_ calling.... with a violent internal effort, he tore his gaze from those eyelids that fortunately opened not. at the same moment, though he did not hear them, steps came close in the corridor, and there was a rattling of the knob. behind him, a movement from the berth below the port-hole warned him that he was but just in time. the vision he was afraid as yet to acknowledge drew with such awful speed toward the climax. quickly he turned away, lifted the hook of the cabin door, and passed into the passage, strangely faint. a great commotion followed him out: father and son both, it seemed, suddenly upon their feet. and at the same time the sound of "singing" rolled into the body of a great hushed chorus, as it were of galloping winds that filled big valleys far away with a gust of splendor, faintly roaring in some incredible distance where no cities were, nor habitations of men; with a freedom, too, that was majestic and sublime. oh! the terrific gait of that life in an open world!--golden to the winds!--uncrowded!--the cosmic life--! o'malley shivered as he heard. for an instant, the true grain of his inner life, picked out in flame and silver, flashed clear. almost--he knew himself caught back. and there, in the dimly-lighted corridor, against the paneling of the cabin wall, crouched dr. stahl--listening. the pain of the contrast was vivid beyond words. it seemed as if he had passed from the thunder of organs to hear the rattling of tin cans. instantly he understood the force that all along had held him back: the positive, denying aspect of this man's mind--afraid. "_you!_" he exclaimed in a high whisper. "what are _you_ doing here?" he hardly remembers what he said. the doctor straightened up and came on tiptoe to his side. he moved hurriedly. "come away," he said vehemently under his breath. "come with me to my cabin--to the decks--anywhere away from this--before it's too late." and the irishman then realized that his face was white and that his voice shook. the hand that gripped him by the arm shook too. they went quickly along the deserted corridor and up the stairs, o'malley making no resistance, moving in a kind of dream. he has a fleeting recollection of an odor, sweet and slightly pungent as of horses, in his nostrils. the wind of the open decks revived him, and he saw to his amazement that the east was brightening. in that cabin, then, hours had been compressed into minutes. the steamer had already slipped by the straits of messina. to the right he saw the cones of etna, shadowy in the sky, calling across the dawn to stromboli their smoking brother of the lipari. to the left over the blue ionian sea the lights of a cloudless sunrise rose softly above the world. and the hour of enchantment seized and shook him anew. somewhere, across those faint blue waves, lay the things that he so passionately sought. it was the very essence of their loveliness and wonder that had charged down between the walls of that stuffy cabin below. for every morning still, at dawn, the tired world knows again the splendors of her youth; and the irishman, shuddering a little in his sacred joy, felt that he must burst his bonds and fly to join the sunrise and the sea. the yearning, he was aware, had now increased a thousandfold: its fulfillment was merely delayed. he passed along the decks all slippery with dew into dr. stahl's cabin, and flung himself on the broad sofa to sleep. sleep, too, came at once; he was profoundly exhausted; and, while he slept, stahl watched over him, covering his body with a thick blanket. xiv "it is a lovely imagination responding to the deepest desires, instincts, cravings of spiritual man, that spiritual rapture should find an echo in the material world; that in mental communion with god we should find sensible communion with nature; and that, when the faithful rejoice together, bird and beast, hill and forest, should be not felt only, but seen to rejoice along with them. it is not the truth; between us and our environment, whatever links there are, this link is wanting. but the yearning for it, the passion which made wordsworth cry out for something, even were it the imagination of a pagan which would make him 'less forlorn,' is natural to man; and simplicity leaps at the lovely fiction of a response. just here is the opportunity for such alliances between spiritualism and superstition as are the daily despair of seekers after truth." --dr. verrall and though he slept for hours the doctor never once left his side, but sat there with pencil and notebook, striving to catch, yet in vain, some accurate record of the strange fragmentary words that fell from his lips at intervals. his own face was aflame with an interest that amounted to excitement. the very hand that held the pencil trembled. one would have said that thus somewhat a man might behave who found himself faced with confirmation of some vast, speculative theory his mind had played with hitherto from a distance only. toward noon the irishman awoke. the steamer, still loading oranges and sacks of sulfur in the catania harbor, was dusty and noisy. most of the passengers were ashore, hurrying with guidebooks and field-glasses to see the statue of the dead bellini or watch the lava flow. a blazing, suffocating heat lay over the oily sea, and the summit of the volcano, with its tiny, ever-changing puff of smoke, soared through blue haze. to stahl's remark, "you've slept eight hours," he replied, "but i feel as though i'd slept eight centuries away." he took the coffee and rolls provided, and then smoked. the doctor lit a cigar. the red curtains over the port-holes shut out the fierce sun, leaving the cabin cool and dim. the shouting of the lightermen and officers mingled with the roar and scuttle of the donkey-engine. and o'malley knew perfectly well that while the other moved about carelessly, playing with books and papers on his desk, he was all the time keeping him under close observation. "yes," he continued, half to himself, "i feel as if i'd fallen asleep in one world and awakened into another where life is trivial and insignificant, where men work like devils for things of no value in order to accumulate them in great ugly houses; always collecting and collecting, like mad children, possessions that they never really possess--things external to themselves, valueless and unreal--" dr. stahl came up quietly and sat down beside him. he spoke gently, his manner kind and grave rather. he put a hand upon his shoulder. "but, my dear boy," he said, the critical mood all melted away, "do not let yourself go too completely. that is vicious thinking, believe me. all details are important--here and now--spiritually important, if you prefer the term. the symbols change with the ages, that is all." then, as the other did not reply, he added: "keep yourself well in hand. your experience is of extraordinary interest--may even be of value, to yourself as well as to--er--others. and what happened to you last night is worthy of record--if you can use it without surrendering your soul to it altogether. perhaps, later, you will feel able to speak of it--to tell me in detail a little--?" his keen desire to know more evidently fought with his desire to protect, to heal, possibly even to prevent. "if i felt sure that your control were sufficient, i could tell you in return some results of my own study of--certain cases in the hospitals, you see, that might throw light upon--upon your own curious experience." o'malley turned with such abruptness that the cigar ash fell down over his clothes. the bait was strong, but the man's sympathy was not sufficiently of a piece, he felt, to win his entire confidence. "i cannot discuss beliefs," he said shortly, "in the speculative way you do. they are too real. a man doesn't argue about his love, does he?" he spoke passionately. "today everybody argues, discusses, speculates: no one believes. if you had your way, you'd take away my beliefs and put in their place some wretched little formula of science that the next generation will prove all wrong again. it's like the n rays one of you discovered: they never really existed at all." he laughed. then his flushed face turned grave again. "beliefs are deeper than discoveries. they are eternal." stahl looked at him a moment with admiration. he moved across the cabin toward his desk. "i am more with you than perhaps you understand," he said quietly, yet without too obviously humoring him. "i am more--divided, that's all." "modern!" exclaimed the other, noticing the ashes on his coat for the first time and brushing them off impatiently. "everything in you expresses itself in terms of matter, forgetting that matter being in continual state of flux is the least real of all things--" "our training has been different," observed stahl simply, interrupting him. "i use another phraseology. fundamentally, we are not so far apart as you think. our conversation of yesterday proves it, if you have not forgotten. it is people like yourself who supply the material that teaches people like me--helps me to advance--to speculate, though you dislike the term." the irishman was mollified, though for some time he continued in the same strain. and the doctor let him talk, realizing that his emotion needed the relief of this safety-valve. he used words loosely, but stahl did not check him; it was merely that the effort to express himself--this self that could believe so much--found difficulty in doing so coherently in modern language. he went very far. for the fact that while stahl criticized and denied, he yet understood, was a strong incentive to talk. o'malley plunged repeatedly over his depth, and each time the doctor helped him in to shore. "perhaps," said stahl at length in a pause, "the greatest difference between us is merely that whereas you jump headlong, ignoring details by the way, i climb slowly, counting the steps and making them secure. i deny at first because if the steps survive such denial, i know that they are permanent. i build scaffolding. you fly." "flight is quicker," put in the irishman. "it is for the few," was the reply; "scaffolding is for all." "you spoke a few days ago of strange things," o'malley said presently with abruptness, "and spoke seriously too. tell me more about that, if you will." he sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did not intend to be fully drawn. "you said something about the theory that the earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of life may have been emanations--projections of herself--detached portions of her consciousness--or something of the sort. tell me about that theory. can there be really men who are thus children of the earth, fruit of pure passion--cosmic beings as you hinted? it interests me deeply." dr. stahl appeared to hesitate. "it is not new to me, of course," pursued the other, "but i should like to know more." stahl still seemed irresolute. "it is true," he replied at length slowly, "that in an unguarded moment i let drop certain observations. it is better you should consider them unsaid perhaps: forget them." "and why, pray?" the answer was well calculated to whet his appetite. "because," answered the doctor, bending over to him as he crossed over to his side, "they are dangerous thoughts to play with, dangerous to the interests of humanity in its present state today, unsettling to the soul, shaking the foundations of sane consciousness." he looked hard at him. "your own mind," he added softly, "appears to me to be already on their track. whether you are aware of it or not, you have in you that kind of very passionate desire--of yearning--which might reconstruct them and make them come true--for yourself--if you get out." o'malley, his eyes shining, looked up into his face. "'reconstruct--make them come true--if i get out'!" he repeated stammeringly, fearful that if he appeared too eager the other would stop. "you mean, of course, that this double in me would escape and build its own heaven?" stahl nodded darkly. "driven forth by your intense desire." after a pause he added, "the process already begun in you would complete itself." ah! so obviously what the doctor wanted was a description of his sensations in that haunted cabin. "temporarily?" asked the irishman under his breath. the other did not answer for a moment. o'malley repeated the question. "temporarily," said stahl, turning away again toward his desk, "unless--the yearning were too strong." "in which case--?" "permanently. for it would draw the entire personality with it...." "the soul?" stahl was bending over his books and papers. the answer was barely audible. "death," was the whispered word that floated across the heavy air of that little sun-baked cabin. the word if spoken at all was so softly spoken that the irishman scarcely knew whether he actually heard it, or whether it was uttered by his own thought. he only realized--catching some vivid current from the other man's mind--that this separation of a vital portion of himself that stahl hinted at might involve a kind of nameless inner catastrophe which should mean the loss of his personality as it existed today--an idea, however, that held no terror for him if it meant at the same time the recovery of what he so passionately sought. and another intuition flashed upon its heels--namely, that this extraordinary doctor spoke of something he knew as a certainty; that his amazing belief, though paraded as theory, was to him more than theory. had he himself undergone some experience that he dared not speak of, and were his words based upon a personal experience instead of, as he pretended, merely upon the observation of others? was this a result of his study of the big man two years ago? was this the true explanation of his being no longer an assistant at the h--hospital, but only a ship's doctor? had this "modern" man, after all, a flaming volcano of ancient and splendid belief in him, akin to what was in himself, yet ever fighting it? thoughts raced and thundered through his mind as he watched him across the cigar smoke. the rattling of that donkey-engine, the shouts of the lightermen, the thuds of the sulfur-sacks--how ridiculous they all sounded, the clatter of a futile, meaningless existence where men gathered--rubbish, for mere bodies that lived amid dust a few years, then returned to dust forever. he sprang from his sofa and crossed over to the doctor's side. stahl was still bending over a littered desk. "you, too," he cried, and though trying to say it loud, his voice could only whisper, "you, too, must have the _urmensch_ in your heart and blood, for how else, by my soul, could you _know_ it all? tell me, doctor, tell me!" and he was on the very verge of adding, "join us! come and join us!" when the little german turned his bald head slowly round and fixed upon the excited irishman such a cool and quenching stare that instantly he felt himself convicted of foolishness, almost of impertinence. he dropped backwards into an armchair, and the doctor at the same moment let himself down upon the revolving stool that was nailed to the floor in front of the desk. his hands smoothed out papers. then he leaned forward, still holding his companion's eyes with that steady stare which forbade familiarity. "my friend," he said quietly in german, "you asked me just now to tell you of the theory--fechner's theory--that the earth is a living, conscious being. if you care to listen, i will do so. we have time." he glanced round at the shady cabin, took down a book from the shelf before him, puffed his black cigar and began to read. "it is from one of your own people--william james; what you call a 'hibbert lecture' at manchester college. it gives you an idea, at least, of what fechner saw. it is better than my own words." so stahl, in his turn, refused to be "drawn." o'malley, as soon as he recovered from the abruptness of the change from that other conversation, gave all his attention. the uneasy feeling that he was being played with, coaxed as a specimen to the best possible point for the microscope, passed away as the splendor of the vast and beautiful conception dawned upon him, and shaped those nameless yearnings of his life in glowing language. xv the shadows of the september afternoon were lengthening toward us from the round pond by the time o'malley reached this stage of his curious and fascinating story. it was chilly under the trees, and the "wupsey-up, wupsey-down" babies, as he termed them, had long since gone in to their teas, or whatever it is that london babies take at six o'clock. we strolled home together, and he welcomed the idea of sharing a dinner we should cook ourselves in the tiny knightsbridge flat. "stewpot evenings," he called these occasions. they reminded us of camping trips together, although it must be confessed that in the cage-like room the "stew" never tasted quite as it did beside running water on the skirts of the forest when the dews were gathering on the little gleaming tent, and the wood-smoke mingled with the scents of earth and leaves. passing that grotesque erection opposite the albert hall, gaudy in the last touch of sunset, i saw him shudder. the spell of the ship and sea and the blazing sicilian sunshine lay still upon us, etna's cones towering beyond those gilded spikes of the tawdry memorial. i stole a glance at my companion. his light blue eyes shone, but with the reflection of another sunset--the sunset of forgotten, ancient, far-off scenes when the world was young. his personality held something of magic in that silent stroll homewards, for no word fell from either one of us to break its charm. the untidy hair escaped from beneath the broad-brimmed old hat, and his faded coat of grey flannel seemed touched with the shadows that the dusk brings beneath wild-olive trees. i noticed the set of his ears, and how the upper points of them ran so sharply into the hair. his walk was springy, light, very quiet, suggesting that he moved on open turf where a sudden running jump would land him, not into a motor-bus, but into a mossy covert where ferns grew. there was a certain fling of the shoulders that had an air of rejecting streets and houses. some fancy, wild and sweet, caught me of a faun passing down through underbrush of woodland glades to drink at a forest pool; and, chance giving back to me a little verse of alice corbin's, i turned and murmured it while watching him: what dim arcadian pastures have i known, that suddenly, out of nothing, a wind is blown, lifting a veil and a darkness, showing a purple sea-- and under your hair, the faun's eyes look out on me? it was, of course, that whereas his body marched along hill street and through montpelier square, his thoughts and spirit flitted through the haunted, old-time garden he forever craved. i thought of the morrow--of my desk in the life insurance office, of the clerks with oiled hair brushed back from the forehead, all exactly alike, trousers neatly turned up to show fancy colored socks from bargain sales, their pockets full of cheap cigarettes, their minds busy with painted actresses and the names of horses! a life insurance office! all london paying yearly sums to protect themselves against--against the most interesting moment of life. premiums upon escape and freedom! again, it was the spell of my companion's personality that turned all this paraphernalia of the busy, modern existence into the counters in some grotesque and rather sordid game. tomorrow, of course, it would all turn real and earnest again, o'malley's story a mere poetic fancy. but for the moment i lived it with him, and found it magnificent. and the talk we had that evening when the stew-pot was empty and we were smoking on the narrow-ledged roof of the prison-house--for he always begged for open air, and with cushions we often sat beneath the stars and against the grimy chimney-pots--that talk i shall never forget. life became constructed all anew. the power of the greatest fairy tale this world can ever know lay about me, raised to its highest expression. i caught at least some touch of reality--of awful reality--in the idea that this splendid globe whereon we perched like insects peeping timidly from tiny cells, might be the body of a glorious being--the mighty frame to which some immense collective consciousness, vaster than that of men, and wholly different in kind, might be attached. in the story, as i found it later in the dusty little paddington room, o'malley reported, somewhat heavily, it seemed to me, the excerpts chosen by dr. stahl. as an imaginative essay, they were interesting, of course, and vitally suggestive, but in a tale of adventure such as this they overweight the barque of fancy. yet, in order to appreciate what followed, it seems necessary for the mind to steep itself in something of his ideas. the reader who dreads to think, and likes his imagination to soar unsupported, may perhaps dispense with the balance of this section; but to be faithful to the scaffolding whereon this irishman built his amazing dream, i must attempt as best i can some précis of that conversation. xvi "every fragment of visible nature might, as far as is known, serve as part in some organism unlike our bodies.... as to that which can, and that which cannot, play the part of an organism, we know very little. a sameness greater or less with our own bodies is the basis from which we conclude to other bodies and souls.... a certain likeness of outward form, and again some amount of similarity in action, are what we stand on when we argue to psychical life. but our failure, on the other side, to discover these symptoms is no sufficient warrant for positive denial. it is natural in this connection to refer to fechner's vigorous advocacy." --f.h. bradley, _appearance and reality_ it was with an innate resistance--at least a stubborn prejudice--that i heard him begin. the earth, of course, was but a bubble of dried fire, a huge round clod, dead as mutton. how could it be, in any permissible sense of the word--alive? then, gradually, as he talked there among the chimney-pots of old smoky london, there stole over me this new and disquieting sense of reality--a strange, vast splendor, too mighty to lie in the mind with comfort. laughter fled away, ashamed. a new beauty, as of some amazing dawn, flashed and broke upon the world. the autumn sky overhead, thick-sown with its myriad stars, came down close, sifting gold and fire about my life's dull ways. that desk in the insurance office of cornhill gleamed beyond as an altar or a possible throne. the glory of fechner's immense speculation flamed about us both, majestic yet divinely simple. only a dim suggestion of it, of course, lay caught in the words the irishman used--words, as i found later, that were a mixture of professor james and dr. stahl, flavored strongly with terence o'malley--but a suggestion potent enough to have haunted me ever since and to have instilled meanings of stupendous divinity into all the commonest things of daily existence. mountains, seas, wide landscapes, forests,--all i see now with emotions of wonder, delight, and awe unknown to me before. flowers, rain, wind, even a london fog, have come to hold new meanings. i never realized before that the mere _size_ of our old planet could have hindered the perception of so fair a vision, or her mere quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea of her being in some sense living. a microbe, endowed with our powers of consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on which it rode; or some wee arguing atom, endowed with mind and senses, persuade itself that the monster upon whose flesh it dwelt were similarly a "heavenly body" of dead, inert matter; the bulk of the "world" that carried them obstructing their perception of its life. and fechner, as it seems, was no mere dreamer, playing with a huge poetical conception. professor of physics in leipsic university, he found time amid voluminous labors in chemistry to study electrical science with the result that his measurements in galvanism are classic to this day. his philosophical work was more than considerable. "a book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics (many persons consider fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these books); a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental æsthetics, in which again fechner is thought by some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science," are among his other performances.... "all leipsic mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and learning.... his mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized crossroads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective. patientest observation, exactest mathematics, shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the largest scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. he was in fact a philosopher in the 'great' sense." "yes," said o'malley softly in my ear as we leaned against the chimneys and watched the tobacco curl up to the stars, "and it was this man's imagination that had evidently caught old stahl and bowled him over. i never fathomed the doctor quite. his critical and imaginative apparatus got a bit mixed up, i suspect, for one moment he cursed me for asking 'suspicious questions,' and the next sneered sarcastically at me for boiling over with a sudden inspirational fancy of my own. he never gave himself away completely, and left me to guess that he made that hospital place too hot to hold him. he was a wonderful bird. but every time i aimed at him i shot wide and hit a cloud. meantime he peppered me all over--one minute urging me into closer intimacy with my russian--his cosmic being, his _urmensch_ type--so that he might study my destruction, and half an hour later doing his utmost apparently to protect me from him and keep me sane and balanced." his laugh rang out over the roofs. "the net result," he added, his face tilted toward the stars as though he said it to the open sky rather than to me, "was that he pushed me forwards into the greatest adventure life has ever brought to me. i believe, i verily believe that sometimes, there were moments of unconsciousness--semi-consciousness perhaps--when i really did leave my body--caught away as moses, or was it job or paul?--into a third heaven, where i touched a bit of reality that fairly made me reel with happiness and wonder." "well, but fechner--and his great idea?" i brought him back. he tossed his cigarette down into the back-garden that fringed the park, leaning over to watch its zigzag flight of flame. "is simply this," he replied, "--'that not alone the earth but the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, is everywhere alive and conscious.' he regards the spiritual as the rule in nature, not the exception. the professorial philosophers have no vision. fechner towers above them as a man of vision. he dared to imagine. he made discoveries--whew!!" he whistled, "and such discoveries!" "to which the scholars and professors of today," i suggested, "would think reply not even called for?" "ah," he laughed, "the solemn-faced intellectuals with their narrow outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! perhaps! but in fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being between man and god. the vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. he believes passionately in the earth soul, he treats her as our special guardian angel; we can pray to the earth as men pray to their saints. the earth has a collective consciousness. we rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. we grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a tree. sometimes we find our bigger life and realize that we are parts of her bigger collective consciousness, but as a rule we are aware only of our separateness, as individuals. these moments of cosmic consciousness are rare. they come with love, sometimes with pain, music may bring them too, but above all--landscape and the beauty of nature! men are too petty, conceited, egoistic to welcome them, clinging for dear life to their precious individualities." he drew breath and then went on: "'fechner likens our individual persons on the earth to so many sense-organs of her soul, adding to her perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. she absorbs our perceptions, just as they occur, into her larger sphere of knowledge. when one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease.'" "go on," i exclaimed, realizing that he was obviously quoting verbatim fragments from james that he had since pondered over till they had become his own, "tell me more. it is delightful and very splendid." "yes," he said, "i'll go on quick enough, provided you promise me one thing: and that is--to understand that fechner does not regard the earth as a sort of big human being. if a being at all, she is a being utterly different from us in kind, as of course we know she is in structure. planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from any other beings that we know. he merely protests at the presumption of our insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and consciousness to a form so beautifully and marvelously organized as that of the earth! the heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to men in the scale of life--a vaster order of intelligence altogether. a little two-legged man with his cocksure reason strutting on its tiny brain as the apex of attainment he ridicules. d'ye see, now?" i gasped, i lit a big pipe--and listened. he went on. this time it was clearly a page from that hibbert lecture stahl had mentioned--the one in which professor james tries to give some idea of fechner's aim and scope, while admitting that he "inevitably does him miserable injustice by summarizing and abridging him." "ages ago the earth was called an animal," i ventured. "we all know that." "but fechner," he replied, "insists that a planet is a higher class of being than either man or animal--'a being whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life.'" "an inhabitant of the ether--?" "you've hit it," he replied eagerly. "every element has its own living denizens. ether, then, also has hers--the globes. 'the ocean of ether, whose waves are light, has also her denizens--higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,' sensitive to the slightest pull of one another's attraction: beings in every way superior to us. any imagination, you know," he added, "can play with the idea. it is old as the hills. but this chap showed how and why it could be actually true." "this superiority, though?" i queried. "i should have guessed their stage of development lower than ours, rather than higher." "different," he answered, "different. that's the point." "ah!" i watched a shooting star dive across our thick, wet atmosphere, and caught myself wondering whether the flash and heat of that hurrying little visitor produced any reaction in this collective consciousness of the huge body whereon we perched and chattered, and upon which later it would fall in finest dust. "it is by insisting on the differences as well as on the resemblances," rushed on the excited o'malley, "that he makes the picture of the earth's life so concrete. think a moment. for instance, our animal organization comes from our inferiority. our need of moving to and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only our defect." "defect!" i cried. "but we're so proud of it!" '"what are our legs,'" he laughed, "'but crutches, by means of which, with restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside ourselves? the earth is no such cripple; why should she who already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs analogous to ours? what need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? of a neck with no head to carry? of eyes or nose, when she finds her way through space without either, and has the millions of eyes of all her animals to guide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell the flowers she grows?'" "we are literally a part of her, then--projections of her immense life, as it were--one of the projections, at least?" "exactly. and just as we are ourselves a part of the earth," he continued, taking up my thought at once, "so are our organs her organs. 'she is, as it were, eye and ear over her whole extent--all that we see and hear in separation she sees and hears at once.'" he stood up beside me and spread his hands out to the stars and over the trees and paths of the park at our feet, where the throngs of men and women walked and talked together in the cool of the evening. his enthusiasm grew as the idea of this german's towering imagination possessed him. "'she brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon her surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with each other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life.'" he leaned over the parapet and drew me to his side. i stared with him at the reflection of london town in the sky, thinking of the glow and heat and restless stir of the great city and of the frantic strivings of its millions for success--money, power, fame, a few, here and there, for spiritual success. the roar of its huge trafficking beat across the night in ugly thunder to our ears. i thought of the other cities of the world; of its villages; of shepherds among the lonely hills; of its myriad wild creatures in forest, plain, and mountain... "all this she takes up into her great heart as part of herself!" i murmured. "all this," he replied softly, as the sound of the band beyond the serpentine floated over to us on our roof; "--the separate little consciousnesses of all the cities, all the tribes, all the nations of men, animals, flowers, insects--everything." he again opened his arms to the sky. he drew in deep breaths of the night air. the dew glistened on the slates behind us. far across the towers of westminster a yellow moon rose slowly, dimming the stars. big ben, deeply booming, trembled on the air nine of her stupendous vibrations. automatically, i counted them--subconsciously. "and all our subconscious sensations are also hers," he added, catching my thought again; "our dreams but half divined, our aspirations half confessed, our tears, our yearnings, and our--prayers." at the moment it almost seemed to me as if our two minds joined, each knowing the currents of the other's thought, and both caught up, gathered ill, folded comfortably away into the stream of a consciousness far bigger than either. it was like a momentary, specific proof of what he urged--a faint pulse-beat we heard of the soul of the earth; and it was amazingly uplifting. "every form of life, then, is of importance," i heard myself thinking, or saying, for i hardly knew which. "the tiniest efforts of value--even the unrecognized ones, and those that seem futile." "even the failures," he whispered, "--the moments when we do not trust her." we stood for some moments in silence. presently, with a hand upon my shoulder, he drew me down again among our rugs against the chimney-stack. "and there are some of us," he said gently, yet with a voice that held the trembling of an immense joy, "who know a more intimate relationship with their great mother than the rest, perhaps. by the so-called love of nature, or by some artless simplicity of soul, wholly unmodern of course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they lie caught close to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of her mighty soul, divinely mothered, strangers to all the strife for material gain--to that 'unrest which men miscall delight,'--primitive children of her potent youth ... offspring of pure passion ... each individual conscious of her weight and drive behind him--" his words faded away into a whisper that became unintelligible, then inaudible; but his thought somehow continued itself in my own mind. "the simple life," i said in a low tone; "the call of the wild, raised to its highest power?" but he changed my sentence a little. "the call," he answered, without turning to look at me, speaking it into the night about us, "the call to childhood, the true, pure, vital childhood of the earth--the golden age--before men tasted of the tree and knew themselves separate; when the lion and the lamb lay down together and a little child could lead them. a time and state, that is, of which such phrases can be symbolical." "and of which there may be here and there some fearful exquisite survival?" i suggested, remembering stahl's words. his eyes shone with the fire of his passion. "of which on that little tourist steamer i found one!" the wind that fanned our faces came perhaps across the arid wastes of bayswater and the north-west. it also came from the mountains and gardens of this lost arcadia, vanished for most beyond recovery.... "the hebrew poets called it before the fall," he went on, "and later poets the golden age; today it shines through phrases like the land of heart's desire, the promised land, paradise, and what not; while the minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their deity. for it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form is the reality and riot the inner thought...." the hoarse shouting of a couple of drunken men floated to us from the pavements, and crossing over, we peered down toward the opening of sloane street, watching a moment the stream of broughams, motors, and pedestrians. the two men with the rage of an artificial stimulant in their brains reeled out of sight. a big policeman followed slowly. the night-life of the great glaring city poured on unceasingly--the stream of souls all hurrying by divers routes and means toward a state where they sought to lose themselves--to forget the pressure of the bars that held them--to escape the fret and worry of their harassing personalities, and touch some fringe of happiness! all so sure they knew the way--yet hurrying really in the wrong direction--outwards instead of inwards; afraid to be--simple.... we moved back to our rugs. for a long time neither of us found anything to say. soon i led the way down the creaking ladder indoors again, and we entered the stuffy little sitting-room of the tiny flat he temporarily occupied. i turned up an electric light, but o'malley begged me to lower it. i only had time to see that his eyes were still aglow. we sat by the open window. he drew a worn notebook from his still more worn coat; but it was too dark for him to read. he knew it all by heart. xvii some of fechner's reasons for thinking the earth a being superior in the scale to ourselves, he gave, but it was another passage that lingered chiefly in my heart, the description of the daring german's joy in dwelling upon her perfections--later, too, of his first simple vision. though myself wholly of the earth, earthy in the ordinary sense, the beauty of the thoughts live in my spirit to this day, transfiguring even that dingy insurance office, streaming through all my dullest, hardest daily tasks with the inspiration of a simple delight that helps me over many a difficult weary time of work and duty. "'to carry her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be more excellent than hers--being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all in one. think of her beauty--a shining ball, sky-blue and sunlit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her mountains and windings of her valleys she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain tops. every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her all at once--all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. _that landscape is her face_--a peopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the dew-drops. green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil--a veil the vapory, transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew.' "she needs, as a sentient organism," he continued, pointing into the curtain of blue night beyond the window, "no heart or brain or lungs as we do, for she is--different. 'their functions she performs _through us_! she has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other stars. to these her whole mass reacts by the most exquisite alterations in its total gait and by the still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snowfields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors.... men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and god. here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between god and us, obeying his commands. so, if the heavens really are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures there are none. yes! the earth is our great common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.' "and then," whispered the irishman, seeing that i still eagerly listened, "give your ear to one of his moments of direct vision. note its simplicity, and the authority of its conviction: "'on a certain spring morning i went out to walk. the fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. it was only a little bit of the earth; it was only a moment of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to heaven, and carrying me along with her into that heaven, that i asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,--only to find them nowhere.'" fire-engines, clanging as with a hurrying anger through the night, broke in upon his impassioned sentences; the shouts of the men drowned his last words.... life became very wonderful inside those tight, confining walls, for the spell and grandeur of the whole conception lifted the heart. even if belief failed, in the sense of believing--a shilling, it succeeded in the sense of believing--a symphony. the invading beauty swept about us both. here was a glory that was also a driving power upon which any but a man half dead could draw for practical use. for the big conceptions fan the will. the little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill true joy, nor deaden effort. "come," said o'malley softly, interrupting my dream of hope and splendor, "let us walk together through the park to your place. it is late, and you, i know, have to be up early in the morning ... earlier than i." and presently we passed the statue of achilles and got our feet upon the turf beyond--a little bit of living planet in the middle of the heavy smothering london town. about us, over us, within us, stirred the awe of that immense idea. upon that bit of living, growing turf we passed toward the marble arch, treading, as it were, the skin of a huge body--the physical expression of a grand angelic being, alive, sentient, conscious. conscious, moreover, of our little separate individual selves who walked ... a being who cared; who felt us; who knew, understood, and--loved us as a mother her own offspring.... "to whom men could pray as they pray to their saints." the conception, even thus dimly and confusedly adumbrated, brought a new sense of life--terrific and eternal. all living things upon the earth's surface were emanations of her mighty central soul; all--from the gods and fairies of olden time who knew it, to the men and women of today who have forgotten it. the gods--! were these then projections of her personality--aspects and facets of her divided self--emanations now withdrawn? latent in her did they still exist as moods or powers--true, alive, everlasting, but unmanifest? still knowable to simple men and to children of nature? was this the giant truth that stahl had built on fechner? everything about us seemed to draw together into an immense and towering configuration that included trees and air and the sweep of open park--the looming and overwhelming beauty of one of these very gods survived--pan, the eternal and the splendid ... a mood of the earth-life, a projection clothed with the light of stars, the cloudy air, the passion of the night, the thrill of an august, extended mood. and the others were not so very far behind--those other little parcels of earth's consciousness the greeks and early races, the simple, primitive, childlike peoples of the dawn, divined the existence of, and labeled "gods" ... and worshipped ... so as to draw their powers into themselves by ecstasy and vision ... could, then, worship now still recall them? was the attitude of even one true worshipper's heart the force necessary to touch that particular aspect of the mighty total consciousness of earth, and call forth those ancient forms of beauty? could it be that this idea--the idea of "the gods"--was thus forever true and vital...? and might they be known and felt in the heart if not actually in some suggested form? i only know that as we walked home past the doors of that dingy paddington house where terence o'malley kept his dusty books and papers and so to my own quarters, these things he talked about dropped into my mind with a bewildering splendor to stay forever. his words i have forgotten, or how he made such speculations worth listening to at all. yet, i hear them singing in my blood as though of yesterday; and often when that conflict comes 'twixt duty and desire that makes life sometimes so vain and bitter, the memory comes to lift with strength far greater than my own. the earth can heal and bless. xviii slowly, taking life easily, the little steamer puffed its way across the ionian sea. the pyramid of etna, bluer even than the sky, dominated the western horizon long after the heel of italy had faded, then melted in its turn into the haze of cloud and distance. no other sails were visible. with the passing of calabria spring had leaped into the softness of full summer, and the breezes were gentle as those that long ago fanned the cheeks and hair of io, beloved of zeus, as she flew southwards toward the nile. the passengers, less lovely than that fair daughter of argos, and with the unrest of thinner adventure in their blood, basked lazily in the sun; but the sea was not less haunted for those among them whose hearts could travel. the irishman at any rate slipped beyond the confines of the body, viewing that ancient scene as she had done, from above. his widening consciousness expanded to include it. cachalots spouted; dolphins danced, as though still to those wild flutes of dionysus; porpoises rolled beneath the surface of the transparent waves, diving below the vessel's sides but just in time to save their shiny noses; and all day long, ignoring the chart upon the stairway walls, the tourists turned their glasses eastwards, searching for a first sight of greece. o'malley, meanwhile, trod the decks of a new ship. for him now sea and sky were doubly peopled. the wind brought messages of some divine deliverance approaching slowly, the heat of that pearly, shining sun warmed centers of his being that hitherto the world kept chill. the land toward which the busy steamer moved he knew, of course, was but the shell from which the inner spirit of beauty once vivifying it had long since passed away. yet it remained a clue. that ancient loveliness, as a mood of the earth's early consciousness, was buried, not destroyed. eternally it still flamed somewhere. and, long before the days of greece, he knew, it had existed in yet fuller and more complete manifestation: that earliest, vastly splendid mood of the earth's soul, too mighty for any existence that the history of humanity can recall, and too remote for any but the most daringly imaginative minds even to conceive. the _urwelt_ mood, as stahl himself admitted, even while it called to him, was a reconstruction that to men today could only seem--dangerous. and his own little self, guided by the inarticulate stranger, was being led at last toward its complete recapture. yet, while he crawled slowly with the steamer over a tiny portion of the spinning globe, feeling that at the same time he crawled toward a spot upon it where access would be somehow possible to this huge expression of her first life--what was it, phrased timidly as men phrase big thoughts today, that he really believed? even in our london talks, intimate as they were, interpreted too by gesture, facial expression, and--silence, his full meaning evaded precise definition. "there are no words, there are no words," he kept saying, shrugging his shoulders and stroking his untidy hair. "in me, deep down, it all lies clear and plain and strong; but language cannot seize a mode of life that throve before language existed. if you cannot catch the picture from my thoughts, i give up the whole dream in despair." and in his written account, owing to its strange formlessness, the result was not a little bewildering. briefly stated, however--that remnant, at least, which i discover in my own mind when attempting to tell the story to others--what he felt, believed, _lived_, at any rate while the adventure lasted, was this:-- that the earth, as a living, conscious being, had known visible projections of her consciousness similar to those projections of our own personality which the advanced psychologists of today now envisage as possible; that the simple savagery of his own nature, and the poignant yearnings derived from it, were in reality due to his intimate closeness to the life of the earth; that, whereas in the body the fulfillment of these longings was impossible, in the spirit he might yet know contact with the soul of the planet, and thus experience their complete satisfaction. further, that the portion of his personality which could thus enter this heaven of its own subjective construction, was that detachable portion stahl had spoken of as being "malleable by desire and longing," leaving the body partially and temporarily sometimes in sleep, and, at death, completely. more,--that the state thus entered would mean a quasi-merging back into the life of the earth herself, of which he was a partial expression. this closeness to nature was today so rare as to be almost unrecognized as possible. its possession constituted its owner what the doctor called a "cosmic being"--a being scarcely differentiated from the life of the earth spirit herself--a direct expression of her life, a survival of a time before such expressions had separated away from her and become individualized as human creatures. moreover, certain of these earliest manifestations or projections of her consciousness, knowing in their huge shapes of fearful yet simple beauty a glory of her own being, still also survived. the generic term of "gods" might describe their status as interpreted to the little human power called imagination. this call to the simple life of primal innocence and wonder that had ever brimmed the heart of the irishman, acknowledged while not understood, might have slumbered itself away with the years among modern conditions into atrophy and denial, had he not chanced to encounter a more direct and vital instance of it even than himself. the powerfully-charged being of this russian stranger had summoned it forth. the mere presence of this man quickened and evoked this faintly-stirring center in his psychic being that opened the channel of return. speech, as any other explanation, was unnecessary. to resist was still within his power. to accept and go was also open to him. the "inner catastrophe" he feared need not perhaps be insuperable or permanent. "remember," the doctor had said to him at the end of that last significant conversation, "this berth in my stateroom is freely at your disposal till batoum." and o'malley, thanking him, had shaken off that restraining hand upon his arm, knowing that he would never make use of it again. for the russian stranger and his son had somehow made him free. between that cabin and the decks he spent his day. occasionally he would go below to report progress, as it were, by little sentences which he divined would be acceptable, and at the same time gave expression to his own growing delight. the boy, meanwhile, was everywhere, playing alone like a wild thing; one minute in the bows, hat off, gazing across the sea beneath a shading hand, and the next leaning over the stern-rails to watch the churning foam that drove them forwards. at regular intervals he, too, rushed to the cabin and brought communications to his parent. "tomorrow at dawn," observed the irishman, "we shall see cape mattapan rising from the sea. after that, athens for a few hours; then coasting through the cyclades, close to the mainland often." and glancing over to the berth, while pretending to be busy with his steamer-trunk, he saw the great smile of happiness break over the other's face like a sunrise.... for it was clear to him that with the approach to greece, a change began to come over his companions. it was noticeable chiefly in the father. the joy that filled the man, too fine and large to be named excitement, passed from him in radiations that positively seemed to carry with them a physical extension. this, of course, was purely a clairvoyant effect upon the mind--o'malley's divining faculty visualized the spiritual traits of the man's dilating self. but, nevertheless, the truth remained that--somehow he increased. he grew; became interiorly more active, alive, potent; and of this singular waxing of the inner spirit something passed outwards and stood with rare dignity about his very figure. and this manifestation of themselves was due to that expansion of the inner life caused by happiness. the little point of their personalities they showed normally to the world was but a single facet, a tip as it were of their whole selves. more lay within, beyond. as with the rest of the world, a great emotion stimulated and summoned it forth into activity nearer the surface. clearly, for these two greece symbolized a point of departure of a great hidden passion. something they expected lay waiting for them there. guidance would come thence. and, by reflection perhaps as much as by direct stimulation, the same change made itself felt in himself. joy caught him--the joy of a home-coming, long deferred.... at the same time, the warning of dr. stahl worked in him, if subconsciously only. he showed this by mixing more with the other passengers. he chatted with the captain, who was as pleased with his big family as though he had personally provided the weather that made them happy; with the armenian priest, who was eager to show that he had read "a much of t'ackeray and keeplin"; and especially with the boasting moscow merchant, who by this time "owned" the smoking-room and imposed his verbose commonplaces upon one and all with authoritative self-confidence in six languages--a provincial mind in full display. the latter in particular held him to a normal humanity; his atmosphere breathed the wholesome thickness of the majority of humankind--ordinary, egoistic, with the simplicity of the uninspiring sort. the merchant acted upon him as a sedative, and that day the irishman took him in large doses, allopathically, for his talk formed an admirable antidote to the stress of that other burning excitement that, according to stahl, threatened to disintegrate his personality. though hardly in the sense he intended, the fur-merchant was entirely delightful--engaging as a child; for, among other marked qualities, he possessed the unerring instinct of the snob which made him select for his friends those whose names or position might glorify his banal insignificance--and his stories were vivid pictorial illustrations of this useful worldly faculty. o'malley listened with secret delight, keeping a grave face and dropping in occasional innocent questions to heighten the color or increase the output. others in the circle responded in kind, feeling the same chord vibrating in themselves. even the priest, like a repeating-gun, continually discharged his little secret pride that byron had occupied a room in that venetian monastery where he lived; and at last o'malley himself was conscious of an inclination to report his own immense and recently discovered kinship with a greater soul and consciousness than his own. after all, he reflected with a deep thrill while he listened, the desire of the snob was but a crude and simple form of the desire of the mystic:--to lose one's little self in a self which is greater! then, weary of them all and their minute personal interests, he left the smoking-room and joined the boy again, running absurd races with him from stern to bow, playing hide-and-seek among the decks, even playing shuffle-board together. they sweated in the blazing sun and watched the dance of the sea; caught the wind in their faces with a shout of joy, or with pointing fingers followed the changing outlines of the rare, soft clouds that sailed the world of blue above them. there was no speech between them, and both felt that other things, invisible, swift, and spirit-footed, whose home is just beyond the edge of life as the senses report life, played wildly with them. the smoking-room then, with its occupants so greedy for the things that money connotes--the furs, champagne, cigars, and heavy possessions that were symbols of the personal aggrandizement they sought and valued--seemed to the irishman like a charnel-house where those about to die sat making inventories in blind pride of the things they must leave behind. it was, indeed, a contrast of death and life. for beside him, with that playing, silent boy, coursed the power of transforming loveliness which had breathed over the world before her surface knew this swarming race of men. the life of the earth knew no need of outward acquisition, possessing all things so completely in herself. and he--he was her child--o glory! joy passing belief! "oh!" he cried once with passion, turning to the fair-haired figure of youth who stood with him in the bows, meeting the soft wind,--"oh, to have heard the trees whispering together in the youth of the world, and felt one of the earliest winds that ever blew across the cooling seas!" and the boy, not understanding the words, but responding with a perfect naturalness to the emotion that drove them forth, seized his hand and with an extraordinarily free motion as of flying, raced with him down the decks, happy, laughing, hair loose over his face, and with a singular action of the shoulders as though he somehow--cantered. o'malley remembered his vision of the flying shapes.... toward the evening, however, the boy disappeared, keeping close to his father's side, and after dinner both retired early to their cabin. and the ship, meanwhile, drew ever nearer to the haunted land. xix "privacy is ignorance." --josiah royce somewhat after the manner of things suffered in vivid dreams, where surprise is numbed and wonder becomes the perfect password, the irishman remembers the sequence of little events that filled the following day. yet his excitement held nothing of the vicious fling of fever; it was spread over the entire being rather than located hotly in the brain and blood alone; and it "derived," as it were, from tracts of his personality usually unstirred, atrophied indeed in most men, that connected him as by a delicate network of feelers with nature and the earth. he came gradually to feel them, as a man in certain abnormal conditions becomes conscious of the bodily processes that customarily go on in himself without definite recognition. stahl could have told him, had he cared to seek the information, that this fringe of wider consciousness, stretching to the stars and winds and earth, was the very part that had caused his long unrest and yearning--the part that knew the earth as mother and sought the sweet and savage freedom of what he called with the poverty of modern terms--primitive. the channels leading toward a state of cosmic consciousness, one with the earth life, were being now flushed and sluiced by the forces emanating from the persons of his new companions. and as this new state slowly usurped command, the readjustment of his spiritual economy thus involved, caused other portions of himself to sink into temporary abeyance. while it alarmed him, it was too delicious to resist. he made no real attempt to resist. yet he knew full well that the portion sinking thus out of sight was what folk with such high pride call reason, judgment, common sense! in common with animal, bird, and insect life, all intimately close to nature, he began to feel as realities those subtle currents of the earth's personality by which the seals know direction in the depths of a thousand-mile sea, by which the homing pigeons blaze trails through space, birds fly south, the wild bees know their pathways, and all simple life, from the red indian to the red ant, acknowledges the viewless guidance of the mother's enveloping heart. the cosmic life ran through his being, lighting signals, offering service, more--claiming leadership. with it, however, came no loss of individuality, but rather a powerful increase of life by means of which for the first time he dreamed of a fuller existence which should eventually harmonize and combine the ancient simplicity of soul that claimed the earth, with the modern complexity which, indulged alone, rendered the world so ugly and insignificant...! he experienced an immense, driving push upon what bergson has called the _élan vital_ of his being. the opening charge of his new discovery, however, was more than disconcerting, and it is not surprising that he lost his balance. its attack and rush were overwhelming. thus, it was a kind of exalted speculative wonder lying behind his inner joy that caused his mistakes. he had imagined, for instance, that the first sight of greece would bring some climax of revelation, making clear to what particular type of early life the spirits of his companions conformed; more, that they would then betray themselves to one and all for what they were in some effort to escape, in some act of unrestraint, something, in a word, that would explain themselves to the world of passengers, and focus them upon the doctor's microscope forever. yet when greece showed her first fair rim of outline, his companions still slept peacefully in their bunks. the anticipated _dénouement_ did not appear. nothing happened. it was not the mere sight of so much land lying upon the sea's cool cheek that could prove vital in an adventure of such a kind. for the adventure remained spiritual. o'malley had merely confused two planes of consciousness. as usual, he saw the thing "whole" in that extraordinary way to which his imagination alone held the key; and hence his error. yet the moment has ever remained for him one of vital, stirring splendor, significant as life or death. he remembers that he was early on deck and saw the dawn blow up softly from behind the islands with a fresh, salt wind that blew at the same time like music into his very heart. golden clear it rose; and just below, like the petals of some vast, archetypal flower that gave it birth, the low blue hills of coast and island opened magically into blossom. the rocky cliffs of mattapan slipped past; the smooth, bare slopes of the ancient shore-line followed; treeless peaks and shoulders, abrupt precipices, summits and ridges all exquisitely rosy and alive. he had seen greece before, yet never thus, and the emotion that invaded every corner of his larger consciousness lay infinitely deeper than any mere pseudo-classical thrill he had known in previous years. he saw it, felt it, knew it from within, instead of as a spectator from without. this dawn-mood of the earth was also his own; and upon his spirit, as upon her blue-crowned hills, lay the tide of high light with its delicate swift blush. he saw it with her--through one of her opened eyes. the hot hours the steamer lay in the piraeus harbor were wearisome, the noise of loading and unloading cargo worse even than at catania. while the tourist passengers hurried fussily ashore, carrying guidebooks and cameras, to chatter among the ruined temples, he walked the decks alone, dreaming his great dream, conscious that he spun through leagues of space with the great being who more and more possessed him. beyond the shipping and the masts collected there from all the ports of the mediterranean and the levant, he watched the train puffing slowly to the station that lay in the shadow of theseus' temple, but his eyes at the same tune strained across the haze toward eleusis bay, and while his ears caught the tramping feet of the long torchlight procession, some power of his remoter consciousness divined the forms of hovering gods, expressions of his vast mother's personality with which, in worship, this ancient people had believed it possible to merge themselves. the significant truths that lay behind the higher mysteries, degraded since because forgotten and misinterpreted, trooped powerfully down into his mind. for the supreme act of this profound cult, denied by a grosser age that seeks to telephone to heaven, deeming itself thereby "advanced," lay in the union of the disciple with his god, the god he worshipped all his life, and into whose person he slipped finally at death by a kind of marriage rite. "the gods!" ran again through his mind with passion and delight, as the letter of his early studies returned upon him, accompanied now for the first time by the in-living spirit that interpreted them. "the gods!--moods of her giant life, manifestations of her spreading consciousness pushed outwards, powers of life and truth and beauty...!" * * * * * and, meanwhile, dr. stahl, sometimes from a distance, sometimes coming close, kept over him a kind of half-paternal, half-professional attendance, the irishman accepting his ministrations without resentment, almost with indifference. "i shall be on deck between two and three in the morning to see the comet," the german observed to him casually toward evening as they met on the bridge. "we may meet perhaps--" "all right, doctor; it's more than possible," replied o'malley, realizing how closely he was being watched. in his mind at the moment another sentence ran, the thought growing stronger and stronger within him as the day declined: "it will come tonight--come as an inner catastrophe not unlike that of death! i shall hear the call--to escape...." for he knew, as well as if it had been told to him in so many words, that the sleep of his two companions all day was in the nature of a preparation. the fluid projections of themselves were all the time active elsewhere. their bodies heavily slumbered; their spirits were out and alert. summoned forth by those strange and radiant evocative forces that even in the dullest minds "greece" stirs into life, they had temporarily escaped. again he saw those shapes of cloud and wind moving with swift freedom over the long, bare hills. again and again the image returned. with the night a similar separation of the personality might come to himself too. stahl's warning passed in letters of fire across his inner sight. with a relief that yet contained uneasiness he watched his shambling figure disappear down the stairway. he was alone. xx "to everything that a man does he must give his undivided attention or his ego. when he has done this, thoughts soon arise in him, or else a new method of apprehension miraculously appears.... "very remarkable it is that through this play of his personality man first becomes aware of his specific freedom, and that it seems to him as though he awaked out of a deep sleep as though he were only now at home in the world, and as if the light of day were breaking now over his interior life for the first time.... the substance of these impressions which affect us we call nature, and thus nature stands in an immediate relationship to those functions of our bodies which we call senses. unknown and mysterious relations of our body allow us to surmise unknown and mysterious correlations with nature, and therefore nature is that wondrous fellowship into which our bodies introduce us, and which we learn to know through the mode of its constitutions and abilities." --novalis, _disciples at saïs_. translated by u.c.b. and so, at last, the darkness came, a starry darkness of soft blue shadows and phosphorescent sea out of which the hills of the cyclades rose faint as pictures of floating smoke a wind might waft away like flowers to the sky. the plains of marathon lay far astern, blushing faintly with their scarlet tamarisk blossoms. the strange purple glow of sunset upon hymettus had long since faded. a hush grew over the sea, now a marvelous cobalt blue. the earth, gently sleeping, manifested dreamily. into the subconscious state passed one half of her huge, gentle life. the irishman, responding to the eternal spell of her dream-state, experienced in quite a new way the magic of her night-mood. he found it more difficult than ever to realize as separate entities the little things that moved about through the upper surface of her darkness. wings of silver, powerfully whirring, swept his soul onwards to another place--toward home. and the two worlds intermingled oddly. these little separate "outer things" going to and fro so busily became as symbols more or less vital, more or less transparent. they varied according to their simplicity. some of them were channels that led directly where he was going; others, again, had lost all connection with their vital source and center of existence. to the former belonged the sailors, children, the tired birds that rested on the ship as they journeyed northwards, swallows, doves, and little travelers with breasts of spotted yellow that nested in the rigging; even, in a measure, the gentle, brown-eyed priest; but to the latter, the noisy, vulgar, beer-drinking tourists, and, especially, the fur-merchant.... stahl, interpreter and intermediary, hovered between--incarnate compromise. escaping from everybody, at length, he made his way into the bows; there, covered by the stars, he waited. and the thing he waited for--he felt it coming over him with a kind of massive sensation as little local as heat or cold--was that disentanglement of a part of his personality from the rest against which stahl had warned him. that portion of his complex personality in which resided desire and longing, matured during these many years of poignant nostalgia, was now slowly and deliberately loosening out from the parent center. it was the vehicle of his _urwelt_ yearnings; and the _urwelt_ was about to draw it forth. the call was on its way. hereabouts, then, near the isles of greece, lay a channel to the earth's far youth, a channel for some reason still unclosed. his companions knew it; he, too, had half divined it. the increased psychic activity of all three as they approached greece seemed explained. the sign--would it be through hearing, sight, or touch?--would shortly come that should convince. that very afternoon stahl had said--"greece will betray them," and he had asked: "their true form and type?" and for answer the old man did an expressive thing, far more convincing than words: he bent forwards and downwards. he made as though to move a moment on all fours. o'malley remembered the brief and vital scene now. the word, however, persistently refused to come into his mind. because the word was really inadequate, describing but partially a form and outline symbolical of far more,--a measure of nature and deity alike. and so, as a man dreading the entrance to a great adventure that he yet desires, the irishman waited there alone beneath the cloud of night.... soft threads of star-gold, trailing the sea, wove with the darkness a veil that hid from his eyes the world of crude effects. all memory of the casual realities of modern life that so distressed his soul, fled far away. the archetypal world, soul of the earth, swam close about him, enormous and utterly simple. he seemed alone in some hollow of the night which time had overlooked, and where the powers of sea and air held him in the stretch of their gigantic, changeless hands. in this hollow lay the entrance to the channel down which he presently might flash back to that primal garden of the earth's first beauty--her golden age... down which, at any rate, the authoritative call he awaited was to come.... "oh! what a power has white simplicity!" wings from the past, serene and tranquil, bore him toward this ancient peace where echoes of life's brazen clash today could never enter. ages before greece, of course, it had flourished, yet greece had caught some flying remnant ere it left the world of men, and for a period had striven to renew its life, though by poetry but half believed. over the vales and hills of hellas this mood had lingered bravely for a while, then passed away forever ... and those who dreamed of its remembrance remain homeless and lonely, seeking it ever again in vain, lost citizens, rejected by the cycles of vainer life and action that succeeded. the spirit of the earth, yes, whispered in his ears as he waited covered by the night and stars. she called him, as though across all the forests on her breast the long sweet winds went whispering his name. lying there upon the coils of thick and tarry rope, the _urwelt_ caught him back with her splendid passion. currents of earth life, quasi-deific, gentle as the hands of little children, tugged softly at this loosening portion of his self, urging his very lips, as it were, once more to the mighty mother's breasts. again he saw those cloud-like shapes careering over long, bare hills ... and almost knew himself among them as they raced with streaming winds ... free, ancient comrades among whom he was no longer alien and outcast, including his two companions of the steamer. the early memory of the earth became his own; as a part of her, he shared it too. the _urwelt_ closed magnificently about him. vast shapes of power and beauty, other than human, once his comrades thus, but since withdrawn because denied by a pettier age, moved up, huge and dim, across the sham barriers of time and space, singing the great earth-song of welcome in his ears. the whisper grew awfully.... the spirit of the earth flew close and called upon him with a shout...! then, out of this amazing reverie, he woke abruptly to the consciousness that some one was approaching him stealthily, yet with speed, through the darkness. with a start he sat up, peering about him. there was dew on his clothes and hair. the stars, he saw, had shifted their positions. he heard the surge of the water from the vessel's bows below. the line of the shore lay close on either side. overhead he saw the black threads of rigging, quivering with the movement of the ship; the swaying mast-head light; the dim, round funnels; the confused shadows where the boats swung--and nearer, moving between the ropes and windlasses, this hurrying figure whose approach had disturbed him in his gorgeous dream. and o'malley divined at once that, though in one sense a portion of his dream, it belonged outwardly to the same world as this long dark steamer that trailed after him across the sea. a piece of his vision, as it were, had broken off and remained in the cruder world wherein his body lay upon these tarry ropes. the boy came up and stood a moment by his side in silence, then, stooping to the level of his head, he spoke:-- "come," he said in low tones of joy; "come! we wait long for you already!" the words, like music, floated over the sea, as o'malley took the outstretched hand and suffered himself to be led quickly toward the lower deck. he walked at first as in a dream continued after waking; more than once it seemed as though they stepped together from the boards and moved through space toward the line of peaked hills that fringed the steamer's course so close. for through the salt night air ran a perfume that suggested flowers, earth, and woods, and there seemed no break in the platforms of darkness that knit sea and shore to the very substance of the vessel. xxi the lights in the saloon were out, the smoking-room empty, the passengers in bed. the ship seemed entirely deserted. only, on the bridge, the shadow of the first officer paced quietly to and fro. then, suddenly, as they approached the stern, o'malley discerned anther figure, huge and motionless, against the background of phosphorescent foam; and at the first glance it was exactly as though he had detached from the background of his mind one of those flying outlines upon the hills--and caught it there, arrested visibly at last. he moved along, fairly sure of himself, yet with a tumult of confused sensations, as if consciousness were transferring itself now more rapidly to that portion of him which sought to escape. leaning forward, in a stooping posture over the bulwarks, wrapped in the flowing cape he sometimes wore, the man's back and shoulders married so intimately with the night that it was hard to determine the dividing line between the two. so much more of the deck behind him, and of the sky immediately beyond his neck, was obliterated than by any possible human outline. whether owing to obliquity of disturbed vision, tricks of shadow, or movement of the vessel between the stars and foam, the irishman saw these singular emanations spread about him into space. he saw them this time directly. and more than ever before they seemed in some way right and comely--true. they were in no sense monstrous; they reported beauty, though a beauty cloaked in power. and, watching him, o'malley felt that this loosening portion of himself, as once before in the little cabin, likewise began to grow and spread. within some ancient fold of the earth's dream-consciousness they both lay caught. in some mighty dream of her planetary spirit, dim, immense, slow-moving, they played their parts of wonder. already they lay close enough to share the currents of her subconscious activities. and the dream, as she turned in her vast, spatial sleep, was a dream of a time long gone. here, amid the loneliness of deserted deck and night, this illusion of bulk was more than ever before outwardly impressive, and as he yielded to the persuasion of the boy's hand, he was conscious of a sudden wild inclination to use his own arms and legs in a way he had never before known or dreamed of, yet that seemed curiously familiar. the balance and adjustment of his physical frame sought to shift and alter; neck and shoulders, as it were, urged forward; there came a singular pricking in the loins, a rising of the back, a thrusting up and outwards of the chest. he felt that something grew behind him with a power that sought to impel or drive him in advance and out across the world at a terrific gait; and the hearing of his ears became of a sudden intensely acute. while his body moved ordinarily, he knew that a part of him that was not body moved--otherwise, that he neither walked, ran, nor stepped upon two feet, but--galloped. the motion proclaimed him kin with the flying shapes upon the hills. at the heart of this portion which sought to detach itself from his central personality--which, indeed, seemed already half escaped--he cantered. the experience lasted but a second--this swift, free motion of the escaping double--then passed away like those flashes of memory that rise and vanish again before they can be seized for examination. he shook himself free of the unaccountable obsession, and with the effort of returning to the actual present, the passing-outwards was temporarily checked. and it was then, just as he held himself in hand again, that glancing sideways, he became aware that the boy beside him had, like his parent, also changed--grown large and shadowy with a similar suggestion of another splendid outline. the extension already half accomplished in himself and fully accomplished in the father, was in process of accomplishment in the smaller figure of the son. clothed in the emerged true shape of their inner being they slowly revealed themselves. it was as bewildering as watching death, and as stern and beautiful. for the boy, still holding his hand, loped along beside him as though the projection that emanated from him, grown almost physical, were somehow difficult to manage. in the moment of nearer, smaller consciousness that yet remained to him, o'malley recalled the significant pantomime of dr. stahl two days before in the cabin. it came with a rush of fire. the warning operated; his caution instantly worked. he dropped the hand, let the clinging fingers slip from his own, overcome by something that appalled. for this, surely, was the inner catastrophe that he dreaded, the radical internal dislocation of his personality that involved--death. the thing that had happened, or was happening to these other two, was on the edge of fulfillment in himself--before he was either ready or had decided to accept it. at any rate he hesitated; and the hesitation, shifting his center of consciousness back into his brain, checked and saved him. a confused sense of forces settling back within himself followed; a kind of rush and scuttle of moods and powers: and he remained temporarily master of his being, recovering balance and command. twice already--in that cabin-scene, as also on the deck when stahl had seized him--the moment had come close. now, again, had he kept hold of the boy's grasp, that inner transformation, which should later become externalized, must have completed itself. "no, no!" he tried to cry aloud, "for i'm not yet ready!" but his voice rose scarcely above a whisper. the decision of his will, however, had produced the desired result. the "illusion," so strangely born, had passed, at any rate for the time. he knew once more the glory of the steadfast stars, realized that he walked normally upon a steamer's deck, heard with welcome the surge of the sea below, and felt the peace of this calm southern night as they coasted with two hundred sleeping tourists between the islands and the grecian mainland.... he remembered the fur-merchant, the armenian priest, the canadian drummer.... it seemed his feet half tripped, or at least that he put out a hand to steady himself against the ship's long roll, for the pair of them moved up to the big man's side with a curious, rushing motion that brought them all together with a mild collision. and the boy laughed merrily, his laughter like singing half completed. o'malley remembers the little detail, because it serves to show that he was yet still in a state of intensified consciousness, far above the normal level. it was still "like walking in my sleep or acting out some splendid dream," as he put it in his written version. "half out of my body, if you like, though in no sense of the words at all half out of my mind!" xxii what followed he relates with passion, half confused. without speaking the big russian turned his head by way of welcome, and o'malley saw that the proportions of it were magnificent like a fragment of the night and sky. though too dark to read the actual expression in the eyes, he detected their gleam of joy and splendor. the whole presentment of the man was impressive beyond any words that he could find. massive, yet charged with swift and alert vitality, he reared there through the night, his inner self now toweringly manifested. at any other time, and without the preparation already undergone, the sight might almost have terrified; now it only uplifted. for in similar fashion, though lesser in degree, because the mold was smaller, and hesitation checked it, this very transformation had been going forward within himself. the three of them leaned there upon the rails, rails oddly dwindled now to the size of a toy steamer, while thus the spirit of the dreaming earth swam round and through them, awful in power, yet at the same time gentle, winning, seductive as wild flowers in the spring. and it was this delicate, hair-like touch of delight, magical with a supreme and utterly simple innocence, that made the grandeur of the whole experience still easily manageable, and terror in it all unknown. the irishman stood on the outside, toward the vessel's stern, next him the father, beyond, the boy. they touched. a current like a river in flood swept through all three. he, too, was caught within those visible extensions of their personalities; all again, caught within the consciousness of the earth. across the sea they gazed together in silence--waiting. it was the oro passage, where the mainland hills on the west and the isle of tenos on the east draw close together, and the steamer passes for several miles so near to greece that the boom of surf upon the shore is audible. that night, however, the sea lay too still for surf; it whispered softly in its sleep; and in its sleep, too, listened. they heard its multitudinous rush of voices as the surge below raced by--a giant frieze in which the phosphorescence painted dancing forms and palely luminous faces. unsubstantial shapes of foam held hands in continuous array below the waves, lit by soft-sea-lanterns strung together along the steamer's sides. yet it was not these glimmering shapes the three of them watched, thus intently silent. the lens of yearning focused not in sight. down the great channel at whose opening they stood, leading straight to the earth's old central heart, the message of communion would not be a visual one. the sensitive fringe of their stretched personalities, contacting thus actually the consciousness of the planet-soul, would quiver to a reaction of another kind. this point of union, already affected, would presently report itself, unmistakably, yet not to the eyes. the increased acuteness of the irishman's hearing--a kind of interior hearing--quickly supplied the key. it was that all three--listened. some primitive sound of earth would presently vibrate through their extended beings with an authoritative sweet thunder not to be denied. by a voice, a call, the earth would tell them that she heard; that lovingly she was aware of their presence in her heart. she would call them, with the voice of _one of their own kind_. how strange it all was! enormous in conception, enormous in distance, scope, stretch! yet so tiny, intimate, sweet! and this vast splendor was to report itself by one of the insignificant little channels by which men, locked in cramped physical bodies, interpret the giant universe--a trivial sense-impression! that so terrible a communication could reach the soul via the quivering of a wee material nerve was on a par with that other grave splendor--that god can exist in the heart of a child. thus, dimly, yet with an authority that shakes the soul, may little human hearts divine the immensities that travel with a thunder of great glory close about their daily life. through regions of their subliminal consciousness, which transcends the restricted physical expression of it called personality as the moisture of the world transcends a drop of water, deific presences pass grandly to and fro. for here, to this wild-hearted irishman with the forbidden strain of the _urmensch_ in his blood, came the sharp and instant revelation that the consciousness is not contained skin-tight around the body. it spread enormously about him, remote, extended; and in some distant tract of it this strange occurrence took place. the idea of distance and extension, of course, were merely intellectual concepts, like that of time. for what happened, happened near and close, beside, _within_ his actual physical person. that physical person, with its brain, however, he realized, was but a fragment of his total self. a broken piece of the occurrence filtered through from beyond and fell upon the deck at his feet. the rest he divined, seeing it whole. only the little bit, however, has he found the language to describe. and that for which all three listened was already on the way. forever it had been "happening," yet only reached them now because they were ready and open to it. events upon the physical plane, he grasped, represented the last feeble expression of things that had happened interiorly with a vaster power long ago--and are ever happening still. this sound they listened for, coming from the spirit of the earth, lay ever close to men's ears, divinely sweet and splendid. it seemed born somewhere in the heart of the blue gloom that draped the hills of greece. thence, across the peaked mountains, stretched the immense pipe of starry darkness that carried it toward them as along a channel. made possible of approach by the ancient passion of beauty that greece once knew, it ran down upon the world into their hearts, direct from the being of the earth. with a sudden rush, it grew nearer, swelling with a draught of sound that sucked whole spaces of sky and sea and stars with it. it emerged. they heard, all three. above the pulse and tremble of the steamer's engines, above the surge and gurgle of the sea, a cry swept toward them from the shore. long-drawn, sweetly-penetrating, yet with some strident accent of power and command, this voice of earth rushed upon them over the quiet water--then died away again among the mountains and the night. its passage through the sky was torrential. the whole pouring flood of it dipped back with abrupt swiftness into silence. the irishman understood that but an echo of its main volume had come through. a deep, convulsive movement ran over the great body at his side, and at once communicated itself to the boy beyond. father and son straightened up abruptly as though the same force lifted both; then stretched down and forwards over the bulwarks. they seemed to shake themselves free of something. neither spoke. something utterly overwhelming lay in that moment. for the cry was at once of enchanting sweetness, yet with a deep and dreadful authority that overpowered. it invited the very soul. a moment of silence followed, and the cry was then repeated, thinner, fainter, already further away. it seemed withdrawn, sunk more deeply into the night, higher up, too, floating away northwards into remoter vales and glens that lay beyond the shore-line. though still a single cry, there were distinct breaks of utterance in it this time, as of words. it was, of a kind--speech: a message, a summons, a command that somehow held entreaty at its heart. and this time the appeal in it was irresistible. father and son started forwards as though deliberately pulled; while from himself shot outwards that loosening portion of his being that all the evening had sought release. the vehicle of his yearnings, passionately summoned, leaped to the ancient call of the earth's eternally young life. this vital essence of his personality, volatile as air and fierce as lightning, flashed outwards from its hidden prison where it lay choked and smothered by the weights and measures of modern life. for the beauty and splendor of that far voice wrung his very heart and set it free. he knew a quasi-physical wrench of detachment. a wild and tameless glory fused the fastenings of ages. only the motionless solidity of the great figure beside him prevented somehow the complete escape, and made him understand that the call just then was not for all three of them, especially not for himself. the parent rose beside him, massive and stable, secure as the hills which were his true home, and the boy broke suddenly into happy speech which was wild and singing. he looked up swiftly into his parent's steady visage. "father!" he cried in tones that merged half with the wind, half with the sea, "it is his voice! chiron calls--!" his eyes shone like stars, his young face was alight with joy and passion.--"go, father, _you_, or--" he stopped an instant, catching the irishman's eyes upon his own across the form between them. "--or you!" he added with a laughter of delight; "_you_ go!" the big figure straightened up, standing back a pace from the rails. a low sound rolled from him that was like an echo of thunder among hills. with slow, laborious distinctness it broke off into fragments that were words, with great difficulty uttered, but with a final authority that rendered them command. "no," o'malley heard, "you--first. and--carry word--that we--are--on the way." staring out across the sea and sky he boomed it deeply. "you--first. we--follow--!" and the speech seemed to flow from the entire surface of his body rather than from the lips alone. the sea and air mothered the syllables. thus might the night herself have spoken. _chiron_! the word, with its clue of explanation, flamed about him with a roar. was this, then, the type of cosmic life to which his companions, and himself with them, inwardly approximated...? the same instant, before o'malley could move a muscle to prevent it, the boy climbed the rails with an easy, vaulting motion that was swift yet oddly spread, and dropped straight down into the sea. he fell; and as he fell it was as if the passage through the air drew out a part of him again like smoke. whether it was due to the flying cloak, or to some dim wizardry of the shadows, there grew over him an instantaneous transformation of outline that was far more marked than anything before. for as the steamer drew onwards, and the body thus passed in its downward flight close beneath o'malley's eyes, he saw that the boy was making the first preparatory motions of swimming,--movements, however, that were not the horizontal sweep of a pair of human arms, but rather the vertical strokes of a swimming animal. he pawed the air. the surprise of the whole unexpected thing came upon him with a crash that brought him back effectually again into himself. that part of him, already half emerged in similar escape, now flashed back sheath-like within him. the inner catastrophe he dreaded while desiring it, had not yet completed itself. he heard no splash, for the ship was high out of the water, and the place where the body met the sea already lay far astern; but when the momentary arrest of his faculties had passed and he found his voice to cry for help, the father turned upon him like a lion and clapped a great, encompassing hand upon his mouth. "quiet!" his deep voice boomed. "it is well--and he--is--safe." and across the huge and simple visage ran an expression of such supreme happiness, while in his act and gesture lay such convincing power, that the irishman felt himself overborne and forced to acknowledge another standard of authority that somehow made the whole thing right. to cry "man overboard," to stop the ship, throw life-buoys and the rest, was not only unnecessary, but foolish. the boy was safe; it was well with him; he was not "lost"... "see," said the parent's deep voice, breaking in upon his thoughts as he drew him to one side with a certain vehemence, "see!" he pointed downwards. and there, between them, half in the scuppers, against their very feet, lay the huddled body upon the deck, the arms outstretched, the face turned upwards to the stars. * * * * * the bewilderment that followed was like the confusion which exists between two states of consciousness when the mind passes from sleep to waking, or _vice versa_. o'malley lost that power of attention which enables a man to concentrate on details sufficiently to recall their exact sequence afterwards with certainty. two things, however, stood out and he tells them briefly enough: first, that the joy upon the father's face rendered an offer of sympathy ludicrous; secondly, that dr. stahl was again upon the scene with a promptness which proved him to have been close at hand all the time. it was between two and three in the morning, the rest of the passengers asleep still, but captain burgenfelder and the first officer appeared soon after and an orderly record of the affair was drawn up formally. the depositions of the father and of himself were duly taken down in writing, witnessed, and all the rest. the scene in the doctor's cabin remains vividly in his mind: the huge russian standing by the door--for he refused a seat--incongruously smiling in contrast to the general gravity, his mind obviously brought by an effort of concentration to each question; the others seated round the desk some distance away, leaving him in a space by himself; the scratching of the doctor's pointed pen; the still, young outline underneath the canvas all through the long pantomime, lying upon a couch at the back where the shadows gathered thickly. and then the gust of fresh wind that came in with a little song as they opened the door at the end, and saw the crimson dawn reflected in the dewy, shining boards of the deck. the father, throwing the irishman a significant and curious glance, was out to join it on the instant. syncope, produced by excitement, cause unknown, was the scientific verdict, and an immediate burial at sea the parent's wish. as the sun rose over the highlands of asia minor it was carried into effect. but the father's eyes followed not the drop. they gazed with rapt, intent expression in another direction where the shafts of sunrise sped across the sea toward the glens and dales of distant pelion. at the sound of the plunge he did not even turn his eyes. he pointed, gathering o'malley somehow into the gesture, across the Ã�gean sea to where the shores of north-western arcadia lay below the horizon, raised his arms with a huge sweep of welcome to the brightening sky, then turned and went below without a single word. for a few minutes, puzzled and perhaps a little awed, the group of sailors and ship's officers remained standing with bared heads, then disappeared silently in their turn, leaving the decks to the sunrise and the wind. xxiii but o'malley did not immediately return to his own cabin; he yielded to dr. stahl's persuasion and dropped into the armchair he had already occupied more than once, watching his companion's preparations with the lamp and coffeepot. with his eyes, that is, he watched, staring, as men say, absent-mindedly; for the fact was, only a little bit of him hovered there about his weary physical frame. the rest of him was off somewhere else across the threshold--subliminal: below, with the russian, beyond with the traveling spirit of the boy; but the major portion, out deep in space, reclaimed by the earth. so, at least, it felt; for the circulation of blood in his brain ran low and physical sensation there was almost none. the driving impulse upon the outlying tracts of consciousness usually submerged had been tremendous. "that time," he heard stahl saying in an oddly distant voice from across the cabin, "you were nearly--out--" "you heard? you saw it all?" he murmured as in half-sleep. for it was an effort to focus his mind even upon simple words. the reply he hardly caught, though he felt the significant stare of the man's eye upon him and divined the shaking of his head. his life still pulsed and throbbed far away outside his normal self. complete return was difficult. he felt all over: with the wind and hills and sea, all his little personal sensations tucked away and absorbed into nature. in the earth he lay, pervading her whole surface, still sharing her vaster life. with her he moved, as with a greater, higher, and more harmonious creation than himself. in large measure the cosmic instincts still swept these quickened fringes of his deep subconscious personality. "you know them now for what they are," he heard the doctor saying at the end of much else he had entirely missed. "the father will be the next to go, and then--yourself. i warn you before it is too late. beware! and--resist!" his thoughts, and with them those subtle energies of the soul that are the vehicles of thought, followed where the boy had gone. deep streams of longing swept him. the journey of that spirit, so singularly released, drew half his forces after it. thither the bereaved parent and himself were also bound; and the lonely incompleteness of his life lay wholly now explained. that cry within the dawn, though actually it had been calling always, had at last reached him; hitherto he had caught only misinterpreted echoes of it. from the narrow body it had called him forth. another moment and he would have known complete emancipation; and never could he forget that glorious sensation as the vital essence tasted half release. next time the process should complete itself, and he would--go! "drink this," he heard abruptly in stahl's grating voice, and saw him cross the cabin with a cup of steaming coffee. "concentrate your mind now upon the things about you here. return to the present. and tell me, too, if you can bring yourself to do so," he added, stooping over him with the cup, "a little of what you experienced. the return, i know, is pain. but try--try--" "like a little bit of death, yes," murmured the irishman. "i feel caught again and caged--small." he could have wept. this ugly little life! "because you've tasted a moment of genuine cosmic consciousness and now you feel the limitations of normal personality," stahl added, more soothingly. he sat down beside him and sipped his own coffee. "dispersed about the whole earth i felt, deliciously extended and alive," o'malley whispered with a faint shiver as he glanced about the little cabin, noticing the small windows and shut door. "upholstery" oppressed him. "now i'm back in prison again." there was silence for a moment. then presently the doctor spoke, as though he thought aloud, expecting no reply. "all great emotions," he said in lowered tones, "tap the extensions of the personality we now call subconscious, and a man in anger, in love, in ecstasy of any kind is greater than he knows. but to you has come, perhaps, the greatest form of all--a definite and instant merging with the being of the earth herself. you reached the point where you _felt_ the spirit of the planet's life. you almost crossed the threshold--your extension edged into her own. she bruised you, and you knew--" "'bruised'?" he asked, startled at the singular expression into closer hearing. "we are not 'aware' of our interior," he answered, smiling a little, "until something goes wrong and the attention is focused. a keen sensation--pain--and you become aware. subconscious processes then become consciously recognized. i bruise your lung for instance; you become conscious of that lung for the first time, and feel it. you gather it up from the general subconscious background into acute personal consciousness. similarly, a word or mood may sting and stimulate some phase of your consciousness usually too remote to be recognized. last night--regions of your extended self, too distant for most men to realize their existence at all, contacted the consciousness of the earth herself. she bruised you, and _via_ that bruise caught you up into her greater self. you experienced a genuine cosmic reaction." o'malley listened, though hardly to the actual words. behind the speech, which was in difficult german for one thing, his mind heard the rushing past of this man's ideas. they moved together along the same stream of thought, and the irishman knew that what he thus heard was true, at any rate, for himself. and at the same time he recognized with admiration the skill with which this scientific mystic of a _schiffsarzt_ sought to lead him back into the safer regions of his normal state. stahl did not now oppose or deny. catching the wave of the celt's experience, he let his thought run sympathetically with it, alongside, as it were, guiding gently and insinuatingly down to earth again. and the result justified this cunning wisdom; o'malley returned to the common world by degrees. for it was enchanting to find his amazing adventure explained even in this partial, speculative way. who else among his acquaintances would have listened at all, much less admitted its possibility? "but, why in particular _me_?" he asked. "can't everybody know these cosmic reactions you speak of?" it was his intellect that asked the foolish question. his whole self knew the answer beforehand. "because," replied the doctor, tapping his saucer to emphasize each word, "in some way you have retained an almost unbelievable simplicity of heart--an innocence singularly undefiled--a sort of primal, spontaneous innocence that has kept you clean and open. i venture even to suggest that shame, as most men know it, has never come to you at all." the words sank down into him. passing the intellect that would have criticized, they nested deep within where the intuition knew them true. behind the clumsy language that is, he caught the thought. "as if i were a saint!" he laughed faintly. stahl shook his head. "rather, because you live detached," he replied, "and have never identified your self with the rubbish of life. the channels in you are still open to these tides of larger existence. i wish i had your courage." "while others--?" the german hesitated a moment. "most men," he said, choosing his words with evident care, "are too grossly organized to be aware that these reactions of a wider consciousness can be possible at all. their minute normal self they mistake for the whole, hence denying even the experiences of others. 'our actual personality may be something considerably unlike that conception of it which is based on our present terrestrial consciousness--a form of consciousness suited to, and developed by, our temporary existence here, _but not necessarily more than a fraction of our total self_. it is quite credible that our entire personality is never terrestrially manifest.'" obviously he quoted. the irishman had read the words somewhere. he came back more and more into the world--correlated, that is, the subconscious with the conscious. "yet consciousness apart from the brain is inconceivable," he interposed, more to hear the reply than to express a conviction. whether stahl divined his intention or not, he gave no sign. "'we cannot say with any security that the stuff called brain is the only conceivable machinery which mind and consciousness are able to utilize: though it is true that we know no other.'" the last phrase he repeated: "'though it is true that we know no other.'" o'malley sank deeper into his chair, making no reply. his mind clutched at the words "too grossly organized," and his thoughts ran back for a moment to his daily life in london. he pictured his friends and acquaintances there; the men at his club, at dinner parties, in the parks, at theatres; he heard their talk--shooting--destruction of exquisite life; horses, politics, women, and the rest; yet good, honest, lovable fellows all. but how did they breathe in so small a world at all? practical-minded specimens of the greatest civilization ever known! he recalled the heavy, dazed expression on the faces of one or two to whom he had sometimes dared to speak of those wider realms that were so familiar to himself.... "'though it is true that we know no other,'" he heard stahl repeating slowly as he looked down into his cup and stirred the dregs. then, suddenly, the doctor rose and came over to his side. his eyes twinkled, and he rubbed his hands vigorously together as he spoke. he laughed. "for instance, i have no longer now the consciousness of that coffee i have just swallowed," he exclaimed, "yet, if it disagreed with me, my consciousness of it would return." "the abnormal states you mean are a symptom of disorder then?" the irishman asked, following the analogy. "at present, yes," was the reply, "and will remain so until their correlation with the smaller conscious self is better understood. these belligerent powers of the larger consciousness are apt to overwhelm as yet. that time, perhaps, is coming. already a few here and there have guessed that the states we call hysteria and insanity, conditions of trance, hypnotism, and the like, are not too satisfactorily explained." he peered down at his companion. "if i could study your self at close quarters for a few years," he added significantly, "and under various conditions, i might teach the world!" "thank you!" cried the irishman, now wholly returned into his ordinary self. he could think of nothing else to say, yet he meant the words and gave them vital meaning. he moved across to another chair. lighting a cigarette, he puffed out clouds of smoke. he did not desire to be caught again beneath this man's microscope. and in his mind he had a sudden picture of the speculative and experimenting doctor being "requested to sever his connection" with the great hospital for the sake of the latter's reputation. but stahl, in no way offended, was following his own thoughts aloud, half speaking to himself. "... for a being organized as you are, more active in the outlying tracts of consciousness than in the centers lying nearer home,--a being like yourself, i say, might become aware of other life and other personalities even more advanced and highly organized than that of the earth." a strange excitement came upon him, making his eyes shine. he walked to and fro, o'malley watching him, a touch of alarm mingled with his interest. "and to think of the great majority that denies because they are--dead!" he cried. "smothered! undivining! living in that uninspired fragment which they deem the whole! ah, my friend,"--and he came abruptly nearer--"the pathos, the comedy, the pert self-sufficiency of their dull pride, the crass stupidity and littleness of their denials, in the eyes of those like ourselves who have actually known the passion of the larger experience--! for all this modern talk about a subliminal self is woven round a profoundly significant truth, a truth newly discovered and only just beginning to be understood. we are much greater than we know, and there is a vast subconscious part of us. but, what is more important still, there is a super-consciousness as well. the former represents what the race has discarded; it is past; but the latter stands for what it reaches out to in the future. the perfect man you dream of perhaps is he who shall eventually combine the two, for there is, i think, a vast amount the race has discarded unwisely and prematurely. it is of value and will have to be recovered. in the subconsciousness it lies secure and waiting. but it is the super-consciousness that you should aim for, not the other, for there lie those greater powers which so mysteriously wait upon the call of genius, inspiration, hypnotism, and the rest." "one leads, though, to the other," interrupted o'malley quickly. "it is merely a question of the swing of the pendulum?" "possibly," was the laconic reply. "they join hands, i mean, behind my back, as it were." "possibly." "this stranger, then, may really lead me forward and not back?" "possibly," again was all the answer that he got. for stahl had stopped short, as though suddenly aware that he had said too much, betraying himself in the sudden rush of interest and excitement. the face for a moment had seemed quite young, but now the flush faded, and the light died out from his eyes. o'malley never understood how the change came about so quickly, for in a moment, it seemed, the doctor was calm again, quietly lighting one of his black cigars over by the desk, peering at him half quizzingly, half mockingly through the smoke. "so i urge you again," he was saying, as though the rest had been some interlude that the irishman had half imagined, "to proceed with the caution of this sane majority, the caution that makes for safety. your friend, as i have already suggested to you, is a direct expression of the cosmic life of the earth. perhaps, you have guessed by now, the particular type and form. do not submit your inner life too completely to his guidance. contain your self--and resist--while it is yet possible." and while he sat on there, sipping hot coffee, half listening to the words that warned of danger while at the same time they cunningly urged him forwards, it seemed that the dreams of childhood revived in him with a power that obliterated this present day--the childhood, however, not of his mere body, but of his spirit, when the world herself was young.... he, too, had dwelt in arcady, known the free life of splendor and simplicity in some saturnian reign; for now this dream, but half remembered, half believed, though eternally yearned for--dream of a golden age untouched by time, still there, still accessible, still inhabited, was actually coming true. it surely was that old garden of innocence and joy where the soul, while all unvexed by a sham and superficial civilization of the mind, might yet know growth--a realm half divined by saints and poets, but to the gross majority forgotten or denied. the simple life! this new interpretation of it at first overwhelmed. the eyes of his soul turned wild with glory; the passion that o'er-runs the world in desolate places was his; his, too, the strength of rushing rivers that coursed their parent's being. he shared the terror of the mountains and the singing of the sweet spring rains. the spread wonder of the woods of the world lay imprisoned and explained in the daily hurry of his very blood. he understood, because he felt, the power of the ocean tides; and, flitting to and fro through the tenderer regions of his extended self, danced the fragrance of all the wild flowers that ever blew. that strange allegory of man, the microcosm, and earth, the macrocosm, became a sudden blazing reality. the feverish distress, unrest, and vanity of modern life was due to the distance men had traveled from the soul of the world, away from large simplicity into the pettier state they deemed so proudly progress. out of the transliminal depths of this newly awakened consciousness rose the pelt and thunder of these magical and enormous cosmic sensations--the pulse and throb of the planetary life where his little self had fringed her own. those untamed profundities in himself that walked alone, companionless among modern men, suffering an eternal nostalgia, at last knew the approach to satisfaction. for when the "inner catastrophe" completed itself and escape should come--that transfer of the conscious center across the threshold into this vaster region stimulated by the earth--all his longings would be housed at last like homing birds, nested in the gentle places his yearnings all these years had lovingly built for them--in a living nature! the fever of modern life, the torture and unrest of a false, external civilization that trained the brain while it still left wars and baseness in the heart, would drop from him like the symptoms of some fierce disease. the god of speed and mechanism that ruled the world today, urging men at ninety miles an hour to enter a heaven where material gain was only a little sublimated and not utterly denied, would pass for the nightmare that it really was. in its place the cosmic life of undifferentiated simplicity, clean and sweet and big, would hold his soul in the truly everlasting arms. and that little german doctor, sitting yonder, enlightened yet afraid, seeking an impossible compromise--stahl could no more stop his going than a fly could stop the rising of the atlantic tides. out of all this tumult of confused thought and feeling there rose then the silver face of some forgotten and passionate loveliness. apparently it reached his lips, for he heard his own voice murmuring outside him somewhere across the cabin:-- "the gods of greece--and of the world--" yet the instant words clothed it, the flashing glory went. the idea plunged back out of sight--untranslatable in language. thrilled and sad, he lay back in his chair, watching the doctor and trying to focus his mind upon what he was saying. but the lost idea still dived and reared within him like a shining form, yet never showing more than this radiant point above the surface. the passion and beauty of it...! he tried no more to tie a label of modern words about its neck. he let it swim and dive and leap within him uncaught. only he understood better why, close to greece, his friends had betrayed their inner selves, and why for the lesser of the two, whose bodily cage was not yet fully clamped and barred by physical maturity, escape, or return rather, had been possible, nay, had been inevitable. xxiv stahl, he remembers, had been talking for a long time. the general sense of what he said reached him, perhaps, but certainly not many of the words. the doctor, it was clear, wished to coax from him the most intimate description possible of his experience. he put things crudely in order to challenge criticism, and thus to make his companion's reason sit in judgment on his heart. if this visionary celt would let his intellect pass soberly and dissectingly upon these flaming states of wider consciousness he had touched, the doctor would have data of real value for his own purposes. but this discriminating analysis was precisely what the irishman found impossible. his soul was too "dispersed" to concentrate upon modern terms and phrases. these in any case dealt only with the fragments of self that manifested through brain and body. the rest could be felt only, never truly described. since the beginning of the world such transcendental experiences had never been translatable in the language of "common" sense; and today, even, when a few daring minds sought a laborious classification, straining the resources of psychology, the results were little better than a rather enticing and suggestive confusion. in his written account, indeed, he gives no proper report of what stahl tried to say. a gaping hiatus appears in the manuscript, with only asterisks and numbers that referred to pages of his tumbled notebooks. following these indications i came across the skeletons of ideas which perhaps were the raw material, so to say, of these crude and speculative statements that the german poured out at him across that cabin--blocks of exaggeration he flung at him, in the hope of winning some critical and intelligible response. like the structure of some giant fairy-tale they read--some toppling scaffolding that needed reduction in scale before it could be focused for normal human sight. "nature" was really alive for those who believed--and worshipped; for worship was that state of consciousness which opens the sense and provides the channel for this singular interior realization. in very desolate and lonely places, unsmothered and unstained by men as they exist today, such expressions of the earth's stupendous, central vitality were still possible.... the "russian" himself was some such fragment, some such cosmic being, strayed down among men in a form outwardly human, and the irishman had in his own wild, untamed heart those same very tender and primitive possibilities which enabled him to know and feel it. in the body, however, he was fenced off--without. only by the disentanglement of his primitive self from the modern development which caged it, could he recover this strange lost eden and taste in its fullness the mother-life of the planetary consciousness which called him back. this dissociation might be experienced temporarily as a subliminal adventure; or permanently--in death. here, it seemed, was a version of the profound mystical idea that a man must lose his life to find it, and that the personal self must be merged in a larger one to know peace--the incessant, burning nostalgia that dwells in the heart of every religion known to men: escape from the endless pain of futile personal ambitions and desires for external things that are unquenchable because never possible of satisfaction. it had never occurred to him before in so literal and simple a form. it explained his sense of kinship with the earth and nature rather than with men.... there followed, then, another note which the irishman had also omitted from his complete story as i found it--in this ms. that lay among the dust and dinginess of the paddington back-room like some flaming gem in a refuse heap. it was brief but pregnant--the block of another idea, fechner's apparently, hurled at him by the little doctor. that, just as the body takes up the fact of the bruised lung into its own general consciousness, lifting it thereby from the submerged, unrealized state; and just as our human consciousness can be caught up again as a part of the earth's; so, in turn, the planet's own vast personality is included in the collective consciousness of the entire universe--all steps and stages of advance to that final and august consciousnss of which they are fragments, projections, manifestations in time--god. and the immense conception, at any rate, gave him a curious, flashing clue to that passionate inclusion which a higher form of consciousness may feel for the countless lesser manifestations below it; and so to that love for humanity as a whole that saviors feel.... yet, out of all this deep flood of ideas and suggestions that somehow poured about him from the mind of this self-contradictory german, alternately scientist and mystic, o'malley emerged with his own smaller and vivid personal delight that he would presently himself--escape: escape under the guidance of the big russian into some remote corner of his own extended being, where he would enjoy a quasi-merging with the earth-life, and know subjectively at least the fruition of all his yearnings. the doctor had phrased it once that a part of him fluid, etheric or astral, malleable by desire, would escape and attain to this result. but, after all, the separation of one portion of himself from the main personality could only mean being conscious it: another part of it--in a division usually submerged. as stahl so crudely put it, the earth had bruised him. he would know in some little measure the tides of her own huge life, his longings, loneliness, and nostalgia explained and satisfied. he would find that fair old garden. he might even know the lesser gods. * * * * * that afternoon at smyrna the matter was officially reported, and so officially done with. it caused little enough comment on the steamer. the majority of the passengers had hardly noticed the boy at all, much less his disappearance; and while many of them landed there for ephesus, still more left the ship next day at constantinople. the big russian, though he kept mostly to his own cabin, was closely watched by the ship's officers, and o'malley, too, realized that he was under observation. but nothing happened; the emptied steamer pursued her quiet way, and the earth, unrealized by her teeming freight so busy with their tiny personal aims, rushed forwards upon her glorious journey through space. o'malley alone realized her presence, aware that he rushed with her amid a living universe. but he kept his new sensations to himself. the remainder of the voyage, indeed, across the black sea _via_ samsoun and trebizond, is hazy in his mind so far as practical details are concerned, for he found himself in a dreamy state of deep peace and would sometimes sit for hours in reverie, only reminded of the present by certain pricks of annoyance from the outer world. he had returned, of course, to his own stateroom, yet felt in such close sympathy with his companion that no outward expression by way of confidence or explanation was necessary. in their subconsciousness they were together and at one. the pricks of annoyance came, as may be expected, chiefly from dr. stahl, and took the form of variations of "i told you so." the man was in a state of almost anger, caused half by disappointment, half by unsatisfied curiosity. his cargo of oil and water would not mix, yet he knew not which to throw overboard; here was another instance where facts refused to tally with the beliefs dictated by sane reason; where the dazzling speculations he played with threatened to win the day and destroy the compromise his soul loved. the irishman, however, did not resent his curiosity, though he made no attempt to satisfy it. he allowed him to become authoritative and professional, to treat him somewhat as a patient. what could it matter to him, who in a few hours would land at batoum and go off with his guide and comrade to some place where--? the thought he could never see completed in words, for he only knew that the fulfillment of the adventure would take place--somewhere, somehow, somewhen--in that space within the soul of which external space is but an image and a figure. what takes place in the mind and heart are alone the true events; their outward expression in the shifting and impermanent shapes of matter is the least real thing in all the world. for him the experience would be true, real, authoritative--fact in the deepest sense of the word. already he saw it "whole." faith asks no travelers' questions--exact height of mountains, length of rivers, distance from the sea, precise spelling of names, and so forth. he felt--the quaint and striking simile is in the written account--like a man hunting for a pillar-box in a strange city--absurdly difficult to find, as though purposely concealed by the authorities amid details of street and houses to which the eye is unaccustomed, yet really close at hand all the time.... but at trebizond, a few hours before batoum, dr. stahl in his zealous attentions went too far; for that evening he gave his "patient" a sleeping-draught in his coffee that caused him to lie for twelve hours on the cabin sofa, and when at length he woke toward noon, the customs officers had been aboard since nine o'clock, and most of the passengers had already landed. among them, leaving no message, the big russian had also gone ashore. and, though stahl may have been actuated by the wisest and kindest motives, he was not quite prepared for the novel experience with which it provided him--namely, of hearing an angry irishman saying rapidly what he thought of him in a stream of eloquent language that lasted nearly a quarter of an hour without a break! xxv although batoum is a small place, and the trains that leave it during the day are few enough, o'malley knew that to search for his friend by the methods of the ordinary detective was useless. it would have been also wrong. the man had gone deliberately, without attempting to say good-bye--because, having come together in the real and inner sense, real separation was not possible. the vital portion of their beings, thought, feeling, and desire, were close and always would be. their bodies, busy at different points of the map among the casual realities of external life, could make no change in that. and at the right moment they would assuredly meet again to begin the promised journey. thus, at least, in some fashion peculiarly his own, was the way the irishman felt; and this was why, after the first anger with his german friend, he resigned himself patiently to the practical business he had in hand. the little incident was characteristically revealing, and shows how firmly rooted in his imaginative temperament was the belief, the unalterable conviction rather, that his life operated upon an outer and an inner plane simultaneously, the one ever reacting upon the other. it was as if he were aware of two separate sets of faculties, subtly linked, one carrying on the affairs of the physical man in the "practical" world, the other dealing with the spiritual economy in the subconscious. to attend to the latter alone was to be a useless dreamer among men, unpractical, unbalanced; to neglect it wholly for the former was to be crassly limited, but half alive; to combine the two in effective co-operation was to achieve that high level of a successful personality, which some perhaps term genius, some prophet, and others, saint. it meant, at any rate, to have sources of inspiration within oneself. thus he spent the day completing what was necessary for his simple outfit, and put up for the night at one of the little hotels that spread their tables invitingly upon the pavement, so that dinner may be enjoyed in full view of one of the most picturesque streams of traffic it is possible to see. the sultry, enervating heat of the day had passed and a cool breeze came shorewards over the black sea. with a box of thin russian cigarettes before him he lingered over the golden kakhetian wine and watched the crowded street. knowing enough of the language to bargain smartly for his room, his pillows, sheets, and samovar, he yet could scarcely compass conversation with the strangers about him. of russian proper, besides, he heard little; there was a babel of many tongues, armenian, turkish, georgian, explosive phrases of swanetian, soft gliding persian words, and the sharp or guttural exclamations of the big-voiced, giant fellows, all heavily armed, who belonged to the bewildering tribes that dwelt among the mountains beyond. occasionally came a broken bit of french or german; but they strayed in, lost and bizarre, as fragments from some distant or forgotten world. down the pavement, jostling his elbows, strode the constant, gorgeous procession of curious, wild, barbaric faces, bearded, with hooked noses, flashing eyes, burkas flowing; cartridge-belts of silver and ivory gleaming across chests in the glare of the electric light; bashliks of white, black, and yellow wool upon the head, increasing the stature; evil-looking black sea knives stuck in most belts, rifles swung across great supple shoulders, long swords trailing; turkish gypsies, dark and furtive-eyed, walking softly in leather slippers--of endless and fascinating variety, many colored and splendid, it all was. from time to time a droschky with two horses, or a private carriage with three, rattled noisily over the cobbles at a reckless pace, stopping with the abruptness of a practiced skater; and officers with narrow belted waists like those of women, their full-skirted cloaks reaching half-way down high boots of shining leather, sprang out to pay the driver and take a vacant table at his side; and once or twice a body of soldiers, several hundred strong, singing the national songs with a full-throated vigor, hoarse, wild, somehow half terrible, passed at a swinging gait away into the darkness at the end of the street, the roar of their barbaric singing dying away in the distance by the sea where the boom of waves just caught it. and o'malley loved it all, and "thrilled" as he watched and listened. from his hidden self within something passed out and joined it. he felt the wild pulse of energetic life that drove along with the tumult of it. the savage, untamed soul in him leaped as he saw; the blood ran faster. sitting thus upon the bank of the hurrying stream, he knew himself akin to the main body of the invisible current further out; it drew him with it, and he experienced a quickening of all his impulses toward some wild freedom that was mighty--clean--simple. civilian dress was rare, and noticeable when it came. the shipping agents wore black alpaca coats, white trousers, and modern hats of straw. a few ship's officers in blue, with official caps gold-braided, passed in and out like men without a wedding garment, as distressingly out of the picture as tourists in check knickerbockers and nailed boots moving through some dim cathedral aisle. o'malley recognized one or two from his own steamer, and turned his head the other way. it hurt. he caught himself thinking, as he saw them, of stock exchanges, two-penny-tubes, belgravia dinner parties, private views, "small and earlies," musical comedy, and all the rest of the dismal and meager program. these harmless little modern uniforms were worse than ludicrous, for they formed links with the glare and noise of the civilization he had left behind, the smeared vulgarity of the big cities where men and women live in their possessions, wasting life in that worship of external detail they call "progress"... a well-known german voice crashed through his dream. "already at the wine! these caucasian vintages are good; they really taste of grapes and earth and flowers. yes, thanks, i'll join you for a moment if i may. we only lie three days in port and are glad to get ashore." o'malley called for a second glass, and passed the cigarettes. "i prefer my black cigars, thank you," was the reply, lighting one. "you push on tomorrow, i suppose? kars, tiflis, erzerum, or somewhere a little wilder in the mountains, eh?" "toward the mountains, yes," the irishman said. dr. stahl was the only person he could possibly have allowed to sit next him at such a time. he had quite forgiven him now, and though at first he felt no positive welcome, the strange link between the two men quickly asserted itself and welded them together in that odd harmony they knew in spite of all differences. they could be silent together, too, without distress or awkwardness, sure test that at least some portion of their personalities fused. and for a long time they remained silent, watching the surge and movement of the old, old types about them. they sipped the yellow wine and smoked. the stars came out; the carriages grew less; from far away floated a deep sonorous echo now and then of the soldiers singing by their barracks. sometimes a steamer hooted. cossacks swung by. often some wild cry rang out from a side street. there were heavy, unfamiliar perfumes in the air. presently stahl began talking about the revolution of a few years before and the scenes of violence he had witnessed in these little streets, the shooting, barricades, bombs thrown into passing carriages, cossacks charging down the pavements with swords drawn, shouting and howling. o'malley listened with a part of his mind at any rate. the rest of him was much further away.... he was up among the mountain fastnesses. already, it seemed, he knew the secret places of the mist, the lair of every running wind.... two tall mountain tribesmen swaggered past close to their table; the thick grey burkas almost swept their glasses. they walked magnificently with easy, flowing stride, straight from the hips. "the earth here," said o'malley, taking advantage of a pause in the other's chatter, "produces some splendid types. look at those two; they make one think of trees walking--blown along bodily before a wind." he watched them with admiration as they swung off and disappeared among the crowd. dr. stahl, glancing keenly at him, laughed a little. "yes," he said; "brave, generous fellows too as a rule, who will shoot you for a pistol that excites their envy, yet give their life to save one of their savage dogs. they're still--natural," he added after a moment's hesitation; "still unspoiled. they live close to nature with a vengeance. up among the ossetians on the high saddles you'll find true pagans who worship trees, sacrifice blood, and offer bread and salt to the nature-deities." "still?" asked o'malley, sipping his wine. "still," replied stahl, following his example. over the glasses' rims their eyes met. both smiled, though neither quite knew why. the irishman, perhaps, was thinking of the little city clerks he knew at home, pigeon-breasted, pale-faced, under-sized. one of these big men, so full of rushing, vigorous life, would eat a dozen at a sitting. "there's something here the rest of the world has lost," he murmured to himself. but the doctor heard him. "you feel it?" he asked quickly, his eyes brightening. "the awful, primitive beauty--?" "i feel--something, certainly," was the cautious answer. he could not possibly have said more just then; yet it seemed as though he heard far echoes of that voice that had been first borne to his ears across the blue Ã�gean. in the gorges of these terrible mountains it surely sounded still. these men must know it too. "the spell of this strange land will never leave you once you've felt it," pursued the other quietly, his voice deepening. "even in the towns here--tiflis, kutais--i have felt it. hereabouts is the cradle of the human race, they say, and the people have not changed for thousands of years. some of them you'll find"--he hunted for a word, then said with a curious, shrugging gesture, "terrific." "ah--" said the irishman, lighting a fresh cigarette from the dying stump so clumsily that the trembling of the hand was noticeable. "and akin most likely," said stahl, thrusting his face across the table with a whispering tone, "to that--man--who--tempted you." o'malley did not answer. he drank the liquid golden sunshine in his glass; his eyes lifted to the stars that watched above the sea; between the surge of human figures came a little wind from the grim, mysterious caucasus beyond. he turned all tender as a child, receiving as with a shock of sudden strength and sweetness a thousand intimate messages from the splendid mood of old mother-earth who here expressed herself in such a potent breed of men and mountains. he heard the doctor's voice still speaking, as from a distance though:-- "for here they all grow with her. they do not fight her and resist. she pours freely through them; there is no opposition. the channels still lie open; ... and they share her life and power." "that beauty which the modern world has lost," repeated the other to himself, lingering over the words, and wondering why they expressed so little of what he really meant. "but which will never--_can_ never come again," stahl completed the sentence. there was a wistful, genuine sadness in his voice and eyes, and the sympathy touched the inflammable celt with fire. it was ever thus with him. the little man opposite, with the ragged beard, and the bald, domed head gleaming in the electric light, had laid a card upon the table, showing a bit of his burning heart. the generous irishman responded like a child, laying himself bare. so hungry was he for comprehension. "men have everywhere else clothed her fair body with their smothering, ugly clothing and their herded cities," he burst out, so loud that the armenian waiter sidled up, thinking he called for wine. "but here she lies naked and unashamed, sweet in divinity made simple. by jove! i tell you, doctor, it burns and sweeps me with a kind of splendid passion that drowns my little shame-faced personality of the twentieth century. i could run out and worship--fall down and kiss the grass and soil and sea--!" he drew back suddenly like a wounded animal; his face turned scarlet, as though he knew himself convicted of an hysterical outburst. stahl's eyes had changed even as he spoke the flaming words that struggled so awkwardly to seize his mood of rapture--a thought the earth poured through him for a moment. the bitter, half-mocking smile lay in them, and on the lips the cold and critical expression of the other stahl, skeptic and science-man. a revulsion of feeling caught them both. but to o'malley came the thought that once again he had been drawn--was being coaxed for examination beneath the microscope. "the material here," stahl said presently, with the calm tones of a dispassionate diagnosis, "is magnificent as you say, uncivilized without being merely savage, untamed, yet far from crude barbarism. when the progress of the age gets into this land the transformation will be grand. when russia lets in culture, when modern improvements have developed her resources and trained the wild human forces into useful channels...." he went on calmly by the yard, till it was all the irishman could do not to dash the wine-glass in his face. "remember my words when you are up in the lonely mountains," he concluded at length, smiling his queer sardonic smile, "and keep yourself in hand. put on the brakes when possible. your experience will thus have far more value." "and you," replied o'malley bluntly, so bluntly it was almost rudeness, "go back to fechner, and try to save your compromising soul before it is too late--" "still following those lights that do mislead the morn," stahl added gently, breaking into english for a phrase he apparently loved. they laughed and raised their glasses. a long pause came which neither cared to break. the streets were growing empty, the personality of the mysterious little black sea port folding away into the darkness. the wilder element had withdrawn behind the shuttered windows. there came a murmur of the waves, but the soldiers no longer sang. the droschkys ceased to rattle past. the night flowed down more thickly from the mountains, and the air, moist with that malarial miasma which makes the climate of this reclaimed marsh whereon batoum is built so unhealthy, closed unpleasantly about them. the stars died in it. "another glass?" suggested stahl. "a drink to the gods of the future, and till we meet again, on your return journey, eh?" "i'll walk with you to the steamer," was the reply. "i never care for much wine. and the gods of the future will prefer my usual offering, i think--imaginative faith." the doctor did not ask him to explain. they walked down the middle of the narrow streets. no one was about, nor were there lights in many windows. once or twice from an upper story came the faint twanging of a balalaika against the drone of voices, and occasionally they passed a little garden where figures outlined themselves among the trees, with the clink of glasses, laughter of men and girls, and the glowing tips of cigarettes. they turned down toward the harbor where the spars and funnels of the big steamers were just visible against the sky, and opposite the unshuttered window of a shop--one of those modern shops that oddly mar the town with assorted german tinware, paris hats, and oleographs indiscriminately mingled--stahl stopped a moment and pointed. they moved up idly and looked in. from the shadows of the other side, well hidden, an armed patrol eyed them suspiciously, though they were not aware of it. "it was before a window like this," remarked stahl, apparently casually, "that i once in tiflis overheard two mountain georgians talking together as they examined a reproduction of a modern picture--böcklin's 'centaur.' they spoke in half whispers, but i caught the trend of what they said. you know the picture, perhaps?" "i've seen it somewhere, yes," was the short reply. "but what were they saying?" he strove to keep his voice commonplace and casual like his companion's. "oh, just discussing it together, but with a curious stretched interest," stahl went on. "one asked, 'what does it say?' and pointed to the inscription underneath. they could not read. for a long time they stared in silence, their faces grave and half afraid. 'what is it?' repeated the first one, and the other, a much older man, heavily bearded and of giant build, replied low, 'it's what i told you about'; there was awe in his tone and manner; 'they still live in the big valley of the rhododendrons beyond--' mentioning some lonely uninhabited region toward daghestan; 'they come in the spring, and are very swift and roaring....you must always hide. to see them is to die. but they cannot die; they are of the mountains. they are older, older than the stones. and the dogs will warn you, or the horses, or sometimes a great sudden wind, though you must never shoot.' they stood gazing in solemn wonder for minutes...till at last, realizing that their silence was final, i moved away. there were manifestations of life in the mountains, you see, that they had seen and knew about--old forms akin to that picture apparently." the patrol came out of his shadows, and stahl quickly drew his companion along the pavement. "you have your passport with you?" he asked, noticing the man behind them. "it went to the police this afternoon. i haven't got it back yet." o'malley spoke thickly, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. how much he welcomed that casual interruption of the practical world he could never explain or tell. for the moment he had felt like wax in the other's hands. he had dreaded searching questions, and felt unspeakably relieved. a minute more and he would have burst into confession. "you should never be without it," the doctor added. "the police here are perfect fiends, and can cause you endless inconvenience." o'malley knew it all, but gladly seized the talk and spun it out, asking innocent questions while scarcely listening to the answers. they distanced the patrol and neared the quays and shipping. in the darkness of the sky a great line showed where the spurs of the lesser caucasus gloomed huge and solemn to the east and west. at the gangway of the steamer they said good-bye. stahl held the irishman's hand a moment in his own. "remember, when you know temptation strong," he said gravely, though a smile was in the eyes, "the passwords that i now give you: humanity and civilization." "i'll try." they shook hands warmly enough. "come home by this steamer if you can," he called down from the deck. "and keep to the middle of the road on your way back to the hotel. it's safer in a town like this." o'malley divined the twinkle in his eyes as he said it. "forgive my many sins," he heard finally, "and when we meet again, tell me your own...." the darkness took the sentence. but the word the irishman took home with him to the little hotel was the single one--civilization: and this, owing to the peculiar significance of intonation and accent with which this bewildering and self-contradictory being had uttered it. xxvi he walked along the middle of the street as stahl had advised. he would have done so in any case, unconsciously, for he knew these towns quite as well as the german did. yet he did not walk alone. the entire earth walked with him, and personal danger was an impossibility. a dozen ruffians might attack him, but none could "take" his life. how simple it all seemed, yet how utterly beyond the reach of intelligible description to those who have never felt it--this sudden surge upwards, downwards, all around and about of the vaster consciousness amid which the sense of normal individuality seemed but a tiny focused point. that loss of personality he first dreaded as an "inner catastrophe" appeared to him now for what it actually was--merely an extinction of some phantasmal illusion of self into the only true life. here, upon the fringe of this wonder-region of the caucasus, the spirit of the earth still manifested as of old, reached out lovingly to those of her children who were simple enough to respond, ready to fold them in and heal them of the modern, racking fevers which must otherwise destroy them.... the entire sky of soft darkness became a hand that covered him, and stroked him into peace; the perfume that wafted down that narrow street beside him was the single, enveloping fragrance of the whole wide earth herself; he caught the very murmur of her splendid journey through the stars. the certitude of some state of boundless being flamed, roaring and immense, about his soul.... and when he reached his room, a little cell that shut out light and air, he met that sinister denial of the simple life which, for him at least, was the true dweller on the threshold. crashing in to it he choked, as it were, and could have cried aloud. it gripped and caught him by the throat--the word that stahl--stahl who understood even while he warned and mocked and hesitated himself--had flung so tauntingly upon him from the decks--civilization. upon his table lay by chance--the armenian hotel-keeper had evidently unearthed it for his benefit--a copy of a london halfpenny paper, a paper that feeds the public with the ugliest details of all the least important facts of life by the yard, inventing others when the supply is poor. he read it over vaguely, with a sense of cold distress that was half pain, half nausea. somehow it stirred his sense of humor; he returned slowly to his normal, littler state. but it was not the contrast which made him smile; rather was it the chance juxtaposition of certain of the contents; for on the page facing the accounts of railway accidents, of people burned alive, explosions, giant strikes, crumpled air-men and other countless horrors which modern inventions offered upon the altar of feverish progress, he read a complacently boastful leader that extolled the conquest of nature men had learned _by speed_. the ability to pass from one point to another across the skin of the globe in the least possible time was sign of the development of the human soul. the pompous flatulence of the language touched bathos. he thought of the thousands who had read both columns and preened themselves upon that leader. he thought how they would pride themselves upon the latest contrivance for speeding their inert bodies from one point to another "annihilating distance"; upon being able to get from suburbia to the huge shops that created artificial wants, then filled them; from the pokey villas with their wee sham gardens to the dingy offices; from dark airless east end rooms to countless factories that pour out semifraudulent, unnecessary wares upon the world, explosives and weapons to destroy another nation, or cheapjack goods to poison their own--all in a few minutes less than they could do it the week before. and then he thought of the leisure of the country folk and of those who knew how to be content without external possessions, to watch the sunset and the dawn with hearts that sought realities; sharing the noble slowness of the seasons, the gradual growth of flowers, trees, and crops, the unhurried dignity of nature's grand procession, the repose-in-progress of the mother-earth. the calmness of the unhastening earth once more possessed his soul in peace. he hid the paper, watching the quiet way the night beyond his window buried it from sight... and through that open window came the perfume and the mighty hand of darkness slowly. it seemed to this imaginative irishman that he caught a sound of awful laughter from the mountains and the sea, a laughter that brought, too, a wave of sighing--of deep and old-world sighing. and before he went to sleep he took an antidote in the form of a page from that book that accompanied all his travels, a book which was written wholly in the open air because its message refused to come to the heart of the inspired writer within doors, try as he would, the "sky especially containing for me the key, the inspiration--" and the fragment that he read expressed a little bit of his own thought and feeling. the seer who wrote it looked ahead, naming it "after civilization," whereas he looked back. but they saw the same vision; the confusion of time was nothing:-- in the first soft winds of spring, while snow yet lay on the ground-- forth from the city into the great woods wandering, into the great silent white woods where they waited in their beauty and majesty for man their companion to come: there, in vision, out of the wreck of cities and civilizations, slowly out of the ruins of the past out of the litter and muck of a decaying world, lo! even so i saw a new life arise. o sound of waters, jubilant, pouring, pouring--o hidden song in the hollows! secret of the earth, swelling, sobbing to divulge itself! slowly, building, lifting itself up atom by atom, gathering itself round a new center--or rather round the worldÂ�old center once more revealed-- i saw a new life, a new society, arise. man i saw arising once more to dwell with nature; (the old old story--the prodigal son returning, so loved, the long estrangement, the long entanglement in vain things)-- the child returning to its home--companion of the winter woods once more-- companion of the stars and waters--hearing their words at first-hand (more than all science ever taught)-- the near contact, the dear dear mother so close--the twilight sky and the young tree-tops against it; the few needs, the exhilarated radiant life--the food and population question giving no more trouble; no hurry more, no striving one to over-ride the other: ... man the companion of nature. civilization behind him now--the wonderful stretch of the past; continents, empires, religions, wars, migrations--all gathered up in him; the immense knowledge, the vast winged powers--to use or not to use--... and as he fell asleep at length it seemed there came a sound of hushed huge trampling underneath his window, and that when he rose to listen, his big friend from the steamer led him forth into the darkness, that those shapes of cloud and wind he now so often saw, companioned them across the heights of the night toward some place in the distant mountains where light and flowers were, and all his dream of years most exquisitely fulfilled.... he slept. and through his sleep there dropped the words of that old tribesman from the wilderness: "they come in the spring... and are very swift and roaring. they are older, older than the stones. they cannot die... they are of the mountains, and you must hide." but the dream-consciousness knows no hiding; and though memory failed to report with detail in the morning, o'malley woke refreshed and blessed, knowing that companionship awaited him, and that once he found the courage to escape completely, the simple life of earth would claim him in full consciousness. stahl with his little modern "intellect" was no longer there to hinder and prevent. xxvii "far, very far, steer by my star, leaving the loud world's hurry and clamor, in the mid-sea waits you, maybe, the isles of glamour, where beauty reigns. from coasts of commerce and myriad-marted towns of traffic by wide seas parted, past shoals unmapped and by reefs uncharted, the single-hearted my isle attains. "each soul may find faith to her mind, seek you the peace of the groves elysian, or the ivy twine and the wands of vine, the dionysian, orphic rite? to share the joy of the maenad's leaping in frenzied train thro' the dusk glen sweeping, the dew-drench'd dance and the star-watch'd sleeping, or temple keeping in vestal white? "ye who regret suns that have set, lo, each god of the ages golden, here is enshrined, ageless and kind, unbeholden the dark years through. their faithful oracles yet bestowing, by laurels whisper and clear streams flowing, or the leafy stir of the gods' own going, in oak trees blowing, may answer you!" --from peregrina's song for the next month terence o'malley possessed his soul in patience; he worked, and the work saved him. that is to say it enabled him to keep what men call "balanced." stahl had--whether intentionally or not he was never quite certain--raised a tempest in him. more accurately, perhaps, he had called it to the top, for it had been raging deep down ever since he could remember, or had begun to think. that the earth might be a living, sentient organism, though too vast to be envisaged as such by normal human consciousness, had always been a tenet of his imagination's creed. now he knew it true, as a dinner-gong is true. that deep yearnings, impossible of satisfaction in the external conditions of ordinary life, could know subjective fulfillment in the mind, had always been for him poetically true, as for any other poet: now he realized that it was literally true for some outlying tract of consciousness usually inactive, termed by some transliminal. spiritual nostalgia provided the channel, and the transfer of consciousness to this outlying tract, involving, of course, a trance condition of the usual self, indicated the way--that was all. again, his mystical temperament had always seen objects as forces which from some invisible center push outwards into visible shape--as bodies: bodies of trees, stones, flowers, men, women, animals; and others but partially pushed outwards, still invisible to limited physical sight at least, either too huge, too small, or too attenuated for vision. whereas now, as a result of stahl and fechner combined, it flamed into him that this was positively true; more--that there was a point in his transliminal consciousness where he might "contact" these forces before they reached their cruder external expression as bodies. nature, in this sense, had always been for him alive, though he had allowed himself the term by a long stretch of poetic sympathy; but now he knew that it was actually true, because objects, landscapes, humans, and the rest, were verily aspects of the collective consciousness of the earth, moods of her spirit, phases of her being, expressions of her deep, pure, passionate "heart"--projections of herself. he pondered lingeringly over this. common words revealed their open faces to him. he saw the ideas behind language, saw them naked. repetition had robbed them of so much that now became vital, like bible phrases that too great familiarity in childhood kills for all subsequent life as meaningless. his eyes were opened perhaps. he took a flower into his mind and thought about it; really thought; meditated lovingly. a flower was literally projected by the earth so far as its form was concerned. its roots gathered soil and earth-matter, changing them into leaves and blossoms; its leaves again, took of the atmosphere, also a part of the earth. it was projected by the earth, born of her, fed by her, and at "death" returned into her. but this was its outward and visible form only. the flower, for his imaginative mind, was a force made visible as literally as a house was a force the mind of the architect made visible. in the mind, or consciousness of the earth this flower first lay latent as a dream. perhaps, in her consciousness, it nested as that which in us corresponds to a little thought.... and from this he leaped, as the way ever was with him, to bigger "projections"--trees, atmosphere, clouds, winds, some visible, some invisible, and so to a deeper yet simpler comprehension of fechner's thundering conception of human beings as projections. was he, then, literally, a child of the earth, mothered by the whole magnificent planet...? all the world akin--that seeking for an eternal home in every human heart explained...? and were there--had there been rather--these other, vaster projections stahl had adumbrated with his sudden borrowed stretch of vision--forces, thoughts, moods of her hidden life invisible to sight, yet able to be felt and known interiorly? that "the gods" were definitely knowable powers, accessible to any genuine worshipper, had ever haunted his mind, thinly separated only from definite belief: now he understood that this also had been true, though only partially divined before. for now he saw them as the rare expressions of the earth's in the morning of her life. that he might ever come to know them close made him tremble with a fearful joy, the idea flaming across his being with a dazzling brilliance that brought him close to that state of consciousness termed ecstasy. and that in certain unique beings, outwardly human like his friend, there might still survive some primitive expression of the earth-soul, lesser than the gods, and intermediate as it were, became for him now a fact--wondrous, awe-inspiring, even holy, but still a fact that he could grasp. he had found one such; and stahl, by warnings that fought with urging invitation at the same time, had confirmed it. it was singular, he reflected, how worship had ever turned for him a landscape or a scene enchantingly alive. worship, he now understood, of course invited "the gods," and was the channel through which their manifestation became possible to the soul. all the gods, then, were accessible in this interior way, but pan especially--in desolate places and secret corners of a wood.... he remembered dimly the greek idea of worship in the mysteries: that the worshipper knew actual temporary union with his deity in ecstasy, and at death went permanently into his sphere of being. he understood that worship was au fond a desire for loss of personal life--hence its subtle joy; and a fear lest it be actually accomplished--whence its awe and wonder. some glorious, winged thing moved now beside him; it held him by the hand. the earth possessed him; and the whole adventure, so far as he can make it plain, was an authoritative summons to the natural, simple life. for the next month, therefore, o'malley, unhurrying, blessed with a deeper sense of happiness than he had ever known before, dismissed the "tempest" from his surface consciousness, and set to work to gather the picturesque impressions of strange places and strange peoples that the public liked to read about in occasional letters of travel. and by the time may had passed into june he had moved up and down the caucasus, observing, learning, expanding, and gathering in the process through every sense--through the very pores of his skin almost--draughts of a new and abundant life that is to be had there merely for the asking. that modification of the personality which comes even in cities to all but the utterly hidebound--so that a man in rome finds himself not quite the same as he was in london or in paris a few days before--went forward in him on a profounder scale than anything he had known hitherto. nature fed, stimulated and called him with a passionate intimacy that destroyed all sense of loneliness, and with a vehement directness of attack that simply charged him to the brim with a new joy of living. his vitality, powers, even his physical health, stood at their best and highest. the country laid its spell upon him, in a word; and if he expresses it thus with some intensity it was because life came to him so. his record is the measure of his vision. those who find exaggeration in it merely confess thereby their own smaller capacity of living. here, as he wandered to and fro among these proud, immense, secluded valleys, through remote and untamed forests, and by the banks of wild rivers that shook their flying foam across untrodden banks, he wandered at the same time deeper and ever deeper into himself, toward a point where he lost touch with all that constituted him "modern," or held him captive in the spirit of today. nearer and ever nearer he moved into some tremendous freedom, some state of innocence and simplicity that, while gloriously unrestrained, yet knew no touch of license. dreams had whispered of it; childhood had fringed its frontiers; longings had even mapped it faintly to his mind. but now he breathed its very air and knew it face to face. the earth surged wonderfully about him. with his sleeping-bag upon a small caucasian horse, a sack to hold his cooking things, a pistol in his belt, he wandered thus for days, sleeping beneath the stars, seeing the sunset and the dawn, drenched in new strength and wonder all the time. here he touched deeper reaches of the earth that spoke of old, old things, that yet were still young because they knew not change. he walked in the morning of the world, through her primal fire and dew, when all was a first and giant garden. the advertised splendors of other lands, even of india, egypt, and the east, seemed almost vulgar beside this country that had somehow held itself aloof, unstained and clean. the civilization of its little towns seemed but a coated varnish that an hour's sun would melt away; the railway, crawling along the flanks of the great range, but a ribbon of old iron pinned on that, with the first shiver of those giant sides, would split and vanish. here, where the argonauts once landed, the golden fleece still shone o' nights in the depths of the rustling beech woods; along the shores of that old phasis their figures might still be seen, tall jason in the lead, erect and silvery, passing o'er the shining, flowered fields upon their quest of ancient beauty. further north from this sunny colchian strand rose the peak of kasbek, gaunt and desolate pyramid of iron, "sloping through five great zones of climate," whence the ghost of prometheus still gazed down from his "vast frozen precipice" upon a world his courage would redeem. for somewhere here was the cradle of the human race, fair garden of some edened life before the "fall," when the earth sang for joy in her first, golden youth, and her soul expressed itself in mighty forms that remain for lesser days but a faded hierarchy of visioned gods. a living earth went with him everywhere, with love that never breathed alarm. it seemed he felt her very thoughts within himself--thoughts, however, that now no longer married with a visible expression as shapes. among these old-world tribes and peoples with their babble of difficult tongues, wonder and beauty, terror and worship, still lay too deeply buried to have as yet externalized themselves in mental forms as legend, myth, and story. in the blood ran all their richness undiluted. life was simple, full charged with an immense delight. at home little cocksure writers in little cocksure journals, pertly modern and enlightened, might dictate how far imaginative vision and belief could go before they overstepped the limits of an artificial schedule; but here "everything possible to be believed was still an image of truth," and the stream of life flowed deeper than all mere intellectual denials. a little out of sight, but thinly veiled, the powers that in this haunted corner of the earth, too strangely neglected, pushed outwards into men and trees, into mountains, flowers, and the rest, were unenslaved and intensely vital. in his blood o'malley knew the primal pulses of the world. it was irresistibly seductive. whether he slept with the aryan ossetians upon the high ridges of the central range, or shared the stone huts of the mountain jews, unchanged since bible days, beyond the suram heights, there came to all his senses the message of that golden age his longings ever sought--the rush and murmur of the _urwelt_ calling. and so it was, about the first week in june that lean, bronzed, and in perfect physical condition, this wandering irishman found himself in a little swanetian hamlet beyond alighir, preparing with a georgian peasant-guide to penetrate yet deeper into the mountain recesses and feed his heart with what he found of loneliness and beauty. this region of imerethia, bordering on mingrelia, is smothered beneath an exuberance of vegetation almost tropical, blue and golden with enormous flowers, tangled with wild vines, rich with towering soft beech woods, and finally, in the upper sections, ablaze with leagues of huge rhododendron trees in blossom that give whole mountain-sides the aspect of a giant garden, flowering amid peaks that even dwarf the alps. for here the original garden of the world survives, run wild with pristine loveliness. the prodigality of nature is bewildering, almost troubling. there are valleys, rarely entered by the foot of man, where monstrous lilies, topping a man on foot and even reaching to his shoulder on horseback, have suggested to botanists in their lavish luxuriance a survival of the original flora of the world. a thousand flowers he found whose names he had never heard of, their hues and forms as strangely lovely as those of another planet. the grasses alone in scale and mass were magnificent. while, in and out of all this splendor, less dense and voluminous only than the rhododendron forests, ran scattered lines of blazing yellow--the crowding clusters of azalea bushes that scented the winds beyond belief. beyond this region of extravagance in size and color, there ran immense bare open slopes of smooth turf that led to the foot of the eternal snowfields, with, far below, valleys of prodigious scale and steepness that touched somehow with disdain all memory of other mountain ranges he had ever known. and here it was this warm june evening--june th it was--while packing his sack with cheese and maize-flour in the dirty yard of a so-called "post-house," more hindered than helped by his georgian guide, that he realized the approach of a familiar, bearded figure. the figure emerged. there was a sudden clutch and lift of the heart ... then a rush of wild delight. there stood his russian steamer-friend, part of the scale and splendor, as though grown out of the very soil. he occupied in a flash the middle of the picture. he gave it meaning. he was part of it, exactly as a tree or big grey boulder were part of it. xxviii "seasons and times; life and fate--all are remarkably rhythmic, metric, regular throughout. in all crafts and arts, in all machines, in organic bodies, in our daily occupations everywhere there is rhythm, meter, accent, melody. all that we do with a certain skill unnoticed, we do rhythmically. there is rhythm everywhere; it insinuates itself everywhere. all mechanism is metric, rhythmic. there must be more in it than this. is it merely the influence of inertia?" --novalis, translated by u.c.b. notwithstanding the extent and loneliness of this wild country, coincidence seemed in no way stretched by the abrupt appearance; for in a sense it was not wholly unexpected. there had been certain indications that the meeting again of these two was imminent. the irishman had never doubted they would meet. but something more than mere hints or warnings, it seemed, had prepared him. the nature of these warnings, however, o'malley never fully disclosed. two of them he told to me by word of mouth, but there were others he could not bring himself to speak about at all. even the two he mentioned do not appear in his written account. his hesitation is not easy to explain, unless it be that language collapsed in the attempt to describe occurrences so remote from common experience. this may be so, although he grappled not unsuccessfully with the rest of the amazing adventure. at any rate i could never coax from him more than the confession that there _were_ other things that had brought him hints. then came a laugh, a shrug of the shoulders, an expression of confused bewilderment in eyes and manner and--silence. the two he spoke of i report as best i can. on the roof of that london apartment-house where so many of our talks took place beneath the stars and to the tune of bustling modern traffic, he told them to me. both were consistent with his theory that he was becoming daily more active in some outlying portion of his personality--knowing experiences in a region of extended consciousness stimulated so powerfully by his strange new friend. both, moreover, brought him one and the same conviction that he was no longer--alone. for some days past he had realized this. more than his peasant guide accompanied him. he was both companioned and--observed. "a dozen times," he said, "i thought i saw him, and a dozen times i was mistaken. but my mind looked for him. i knew that he was somewhere close." he compared the feeling to that common experience of the streets when a friend, not known to be near, or even expected, comes abruptly into the thoughts, so that numberless individuals may trick the sight with his appearance before he himself comes suddenly down the pavement. his approach has reached the mind before his mere body turns the corner. "something in me was aware of his approach," he added, "as though his being were sending out feelers in advance to find me. they reached me first, i think"--he hesitated briefly, hunting for a more accurate term he could not find--"in dream." "you dreamed that he was coming, then?" "it came first in dream," he answered; "only when i woke the dream did not fade; it passed over into waking consciousness, so that i could hardly tell where the threshold lay between the two. and, meanwhile, i was always expecting to see him at every turn of the trail almost; a little higher up the mountain, behind a rock, or standing beside a tree, just as in the end i actually did see him. long before he emerged in this way, he had been close about me, guiding, waiting, watching." he told it as a true thing he did not quite expect me to believe. yet, in a sense, _his_ sense, i could and did believe it. it was so wholly consistent with the tenor of his adventure and the condition of abnormal receptivity of mind. for his stretched consciousness was in a state of white sensitiveness whereon the tenderest mental force of another's thought might well record its signature. acutely impressionable he was all over. physical distance was of as little, or even of less, account to such forces as it is to electricity. "but it was more than the russian who was close," he added quietly with one of those sentences that startled me into keen attention. "he was there--with others--of his kind." and then, hardly pausing to take breath, he plunged, as his manner was, full tilt into the details of this first experience that thrilled my hedging soul with an astonishing power of conviction. as always when his heart was in the words, the scenery about us faded and i lived the adventure with him. the cowled and hooded chimneys turned to trees, the stretch of dim star-lit london park became a deep caucasian vale, the thunder of the traffic was the roaring of the snow-fed torrents. the very perfume of strange flowers floated in the air. they had been in their blankets, he and his peasant guide, for hours, and a moon approaching the full still concealed all signs of dawn, when he woke out of deep sleep with the odd sensation that it was only a part of him that woke. one portion of him was in the body, while another portion was elsewhere, manifesting with ease and freedom in some state or region whither he had traveled in his sleep--where, moreover, he had not been alone. and close about him in the trees was--movement. yes! through and between the scattered trunks he saw it still. with eyes a little dazed, the active portion of his brain perceived this processing movement passing to and fro across the glades of moonlight beneath the steady trees. for there was no wind. the shadows of the branches did not stir. he saw swift running shapes, vigorous yet silent, hurrying across the network of splashed silver and pools of black in some kind of organized movement that was circular and seemed not due to chance. arranged it seemed and ordered; like the regulated revolutions of a set and whirling measure. perhaps twenty feet from where he lay was the outer fringe of what he discerned to be this fragment of some grand gamboling dance or frolic; yet discerned but dimly, for the darkness combined with his uncertain vision to obscure it. and the shapes, as they sped across the silvery patchwork of the moon, seemed curiously familiar. beyond question he recognized and knew them. for they were akin to those shadowy emanations seen weeks ago upon the steamer's after-deck, to that "messenger" who climbed from out the sea and sky, and to that form the spirit of the boy assumed, set free in death. they were the flying outlines of wind and cloud he had so often glimpsed in vision, racing over the long, bare, open hills--at last come near. in the moment of first waking, when he saw them clearest, he declares with emphasis that he _knew_ the father and the boy were among them. not so much that he saw them actually for recognition, but rather that he felt their rushing presences; for the first sensation on opening his eyes was the conviction that both had passed him close, had almost touched and called him. afterwards he searched in vain among the flying forms that swept in the swift succession of their leaping dance across the silvery pathways. while varying in size all were so similar. his description of them is confused a little, for he admits that he could never properly focus them in steady sight. they slipped with a melting swiftness under the eye; the moment one seemed caught in vision it passed on further and the next was in its place. it was like following a running wave-form on the sea. he says, moreover, that while erect and splendid, their backs and shoulders seemed prolonged in hugeness as though they often crouched to spring; they seemed to paw the air; and that a faint delicious sound to which they kept obedient time and rhythm, held that same sweetness which had issued from the hills of greece, blown down now among the trees from very far away. and when he says "blown down among the trees," he qualifies this phrase as well, because at the same time it came to him that the sound also rose up from underneath the earth, as if the very surface of the ground ran shaking with a soft vibration of its own. some marvelous dream it might have been in which the forms, the movement, and the sound were all thrown up and outwards from the quivering surface of the earth itself. yet, almost simultaneously with the first instant of waking, the body issued its call of warning. for, while he gazed, and before time for the least reflection came, the irishman experienced this dislocating conviction that he himself was taking part in the whirling gambol even while he lay and watched it, and that in this way the sense of division in his personality was explained. the fragment of himself within the brain watched some other more vital fragment--some projection of his consciousness detached and separate--playing yonder with its kind beneath the moon. this sense of a divided self was not new to him, but never before had he known it so distinct and overwhelming. the definiteness of the division, as well as the importance and vitality of the separated portion, were arrestingly novel. it felt as though he were completely out, or to such a degree, at least, that the fraction left behind with the brain was at first only just sufficient for him to recognize his body at all. yonder with these others he felt the wind of movement pass along his back, he saw the trees slip by, and knew the very contact of the ground between the leaps. his movements were natural and easy, light as air and fast as wind; they seemed automatic, impelled by something mighty that directed and contained them. he knew, too, the sensation that others pressed behind him and passed before, slipped in and out, and that through the whole wild urgency of it he yet could never make an error. more--he knew that these shifting forms had been close and dancing about him for a time not measurable merely by the hours of a single night, that in a sense they were always there though he had but just discovered them. his earlier glimpses had been a very partial divination of a truth, immense and beautiful, that now dawned quite gorgeously upon him all complete. the whole world danced. the universe was rhythmical as well as metrical. for this amazing splendor showed itself in a flash-like revelation to the freed portion of his consciousness, and he knew it irresistibly because he himself shared it. here was an infinite joy, naked and unashamed, born of the mighty mother's heart and life, a joy which, in its feebler, lesser manifestations, trickles down into human conditions, though still spontaneously even then, so pure its primal urgency, as--dancing. the entire experience, the entire revelation, he thinks, can have occupied but a fraction of a second, but it seemed to smite the whole of his being at once with the conviction of a supreme authority. and close behind it came, too, that other sister expression of a spontaneous and natural expression, equally rhythmical--the impulse to sing. he could have sung aloud. for this puissant and mysterious rhythm to which all moved was greater than any little measure of their own. surging through them, it came from outside and beyond, infinitely greater than themselves, springing from something of which they were, nevertheless, a living portion. from the body of the earth it came direct--it was in fact a manifestation of her own vibrating life. the currents of the earth pulsed through them. "and then," he says, "i caught this flaming thought of wonder, though so much of it faded instantly upon my full awakening that i can only give you the merest suggestion of what it was." he stood up beside me as he said it, spreading his arms, as so often when he was excited, to the sky. i caught the glow of his eyes, and in his voice was passion. he spoke unquestionably of something he had intimately known, not as men speak of even the vividest dreams, but of realities that have burned the heart and left their trails of glory. "science has guessed some inkling of the truth," he cried, "when it declares that the ultimate molecules of matter are in constant vibratory movement one about another, even upon the point of a needle. but i saw--_knew_, rather, as if i had always known it, sweet as summer rain, and close in me as love--that the whole earth with all her myriad expressions of life moved to this primal rhythm as of some divine dancing." "dancing?" i asked, puzzled. "rhythmical movement call it then," he replied. "to share the life of the earth is to dance and sing in a huge abundant joy! and the nearer to her great heart, the more natural and spontaneous the impulse--the instinctive dancing of primitive races, of savages and children, still artless and untamed; the gamboling of animals, of rabbits in the meadows and of deer unwatched in forest clearings--you know naturalists have sometimes seen it; of birds in the air--rooks, gulls, and swallows; of the life within the sea; even of gnats in the haze of summer afternoons. all life simple enough to touch and share the enormous happiness of her deep, streaming, personal being, dances instinctively for very joy--obedient to a greater measure than they know.... the natural movement of the great earth-soul is rhythmical. the very winds, the swaying of trees and flowers and grasses, the movement of the sea, of water running through the fields with silver feet, of the clouds and edges of the mist, even the trembling of the earthquakes,--all, all respond in sympathetic motions to this huge vibratory movement of her great central pulse. ay, and the mountains too, though so vastly scaled their measure that perhaps we only know the pauses in between, and think them motionless.... the mountains rise and fall and change; our very breathing, first sign of stirring life, even the circulation of our blood, bring testimony; our speech as well--inspired words are ever rhythmical, language that pours into the poet's mind from something greater than himself. and not unwisely, but in obedience to a deep instinctive knowledge was dancing once--in earlier, simpler days--a form of worship. you know, at least, how rhythm in music and ceremonial uplifts and cleans and simplifies the heart toward the greater life.... you know, perhaps, the dance of jesus...." the words poured from him with passion, yet always uttered gently with a smile of joy upon the face. i saw his figure standing over me, outlined against the starry sky; and, deeply stirred, i listened with delight and wonder. rhythm surely lies behind all expression of life. he was on the heels of some simple, dazzling verity though he phrased it wildly. but not a tenth part of all he said could i recapture afterwards for writing down. the steady, gentle swaying of his body i remember clearly, and that somewhere or other in the stream of language, he made apt reference to the rhythmical swaying of those who speak in trance, or know some strange, possessing gust of inspiration. the first and natural expression of the earth's vitality lies in a dancing movement of purest joy and happiness--that for me is the gist of what remains. those near enough to nature feel it. i myself remembered days in spring ... my thoughts, borne upon some sweet emotion, traveled far.... "and not of the earth alone," he interrupted my dreaming in a voice like singing, "but of the entire universe. the spheres and constellations weave across the fields of ether the immense old rhythm of their divine, eternal dance...!" then, with a disconcerting abruptness, and a strange little wayward laugh as of apology for having let himself so freely go, he sat down beside me with his back against the chimney-stack. he resumed more quietly the account of this particular adventure that lay 'twixt dream and waking: all that he described had happened in a few seconds. it flashed, complete, authoritative and vivid, then passed away. he knew again the call and warning of his body--to return. for this consciousness of being in two places at once, divided as it were against himself, brought with it the necessity for decision. with which portion should he identify himself? by an act of will, it seemed, a choice was possible. and with it, then, came the knowledge that to remain "out" was easier than to return. this time, to come back into himself would be difficult. the very possibility seemed to provide the shock of energy necessary for overcoming it; the experience alarmed him; it was like holding an option upon living--like a foretaste of death. automatically, as it were, these loosened forces in him answered to the body's summons. the result was immediate and singular; one of these dancing outlines separated itself from the main herd, approached with a sudden silent rush, enveloped him for a second of darkness and confusion, losing its shape completely on the way, and then merged into his being as smoke slips in and merges with the structure of a tree. the projected portion of his personality had returned. the sense of division was gone. there remained behind only the little terror of the weak flesh whose summons had thus brought it back. the same instant he was fully awake--the night about him empty of all but the silver dreaming of the moon among the shadows. beside him lay the sleeping figure of his companion, the bashlik of lamb's wool drawn closely down about the ears and neck, and the voluminous black burka shrouding him from feet to shoulders. a little distance away the horse stood, munching grass. again he noted that there was no wind, and the shadows of the trees lay motionless upon the ground. the air smelt sweet of forest, soil, and dew. the experience--it seemed now--belonged to dreaming rather than to waking consciousness, for there was nothing about him to confirm it outwardly. only the memory remained--that, and a vast, deep-coursing, subtle happiness. the smaller terror that he felt was of the flesh alone, for the flesh ever instinctively fought against such separation. the happiness, though, contained and overwhelmed the fear. yes, only the memory remained, and even that fast fading. but the substance of what had been, passed into his inmost being: the splendor of that would remain forever, incorporated with his life. he had shared in this brief moment of extended consciousness some measure of the mother's cosmic being, simple as sunshine, unrestrained as wind, complete and satisfying. its natural expression was rhythmical, a deep, pure joy that drove outwards even into little human conditions as dancing and singing. he had known it, too, with companions of his kind... moreover, though no longer visible or audible, it still continued somewhere close. he was blessedly companioned all the time--and watched. _they_ knew him one of themselves--these brother expressions of her cosmic life--these _urwelt_ beings that today had no external, bodily forms. they waited, knowing well that he would come. fulfillment beckoned surely just beyond... xxix "... and then suddenly,-- while perhaps twice my heart was dutiful to send my blood upon its little race-- i was exalted above surety, and out of time did fall." --lascelles abercrombie, _poems and interludes_ this, then, was one of the "hints" by which o'malley knew that he was not alone and that the mind of his companion was stretched out to find him. he became aware after it of a distinct guidance, even of direction as to his route of travel. the "impulse came," as one says, to turn northwards, and he obeyed it without more ado. for this "dream" had come to him when camped upon the slopes of ararat, further south toward the turkish frontier, and though all prepared to climb the sixteen-thousand foot summit, he changed his plans, dismissed the local guide, and turned back for tiflis and the central range. in the wilder, lonelier mountains, he felt strongly, was where he ought to be. another man, of course, would have dismissed the dream or forgotten it while cooking his morning coffee; but, rightly or wrongly, this divining celt accepted it as real. he held an instinctive belief, that in dreams of a certain order the forces that drive behind the soul at a given moment, may reveal themselves to the subconscious self, becoming authoritative in proportion as they are sanely encouraged and interpreted. they dramatize themselves in scenes that are open to intuitive interpretation. and o'malley, it seems, possessed, like the hebrew prophets of old, just that measure of judgment and divination which go to the making of a true clear-vision. packing up kit and dunnage, he crossed the georgian military route on foot to vladikavkaz, and thence with another horse and a mohammedan georgian as guide, rostom by name, journeyed _via_ alighir and oni up a side valley of unforgettable splendor toward an imerethian hamlet where they meant to lay-in supplies for a prolonged expedition into the uninhabited wilderness. and here, the second occurrence he told me of took place. it was more direct than the first, yet equally strange; also it brought a similar authority--coming first along the deep mysterious underpaths of sleep--sleep, that short cut into the subconscious. they were camped among low boxwood trees, a hot dry night, wind soft and stars very brilliant, when the irishman turned in his sleeping-bag and abruptly woke. this time there was no dream--only the certainty that something had wakened him deliberately. he sat up, almost with a cry. it was exactly as though he heard himself called by name and recognized the voice that spoke it. he looked quickly round. nothing but the crowding army of the box-trees was visible, some bushy and round, others straggling in their outline, all whispering gently together in the night. beyond ran the immense slopes, and far overhead he saw the gleaming snow on peaks that brushed the stars. no one was visible. this time no flying figures danced beneath the moon. there was, indeed, no moon. something, however, he knew had come up close and touched him, calling him from the depths of a profound and tired slumber. it had withdrawn again, vanished into the night. the strong certainty remained, though, that it lingered near about him still, trying to press forwards and outwards into some kind of objective visible expression that _included himself_. he had responded with an effort in his sleep, but the effort had been unsuccessful. he had merely waked ... and lost it. the horse, tethered a few feet away, was astir and troubled, straining at the rope, whinnying faintly, and rostom, the georgian peasant, he saw, was already up to quiet it. a curious perfume passed him through the air--once, then vanished; unforgettable, however, for he had known it already weeks ago upon the steamer. and before the gardened woods about him smothered it with their richer smells of a million flowers and weeds, he recognized in it that peculiar pungent whiff of horse that had reached him from the haunted cabin. this time it was less fleeting--a fine, clean odor that he liked even while it strangely troubled him. kicking out of his blankets, he joined the man and helped to straighten out the tangled rope. rostom spoke little russian, and o'malley's knowledge of georgian lay in a single phrase, "look sharp!" but with the aid of french the man had learned from shooting-parties, he gathered that some one had approached during the night and camped, it seemed, not far away above them. though unusual enough in so unfrequented a region, this was not necessarily alarming, and the first proof o'malley had that the man experienced no ordinary physical fear was the fact that he had left both knife and rifle in his blankets. hitherto, at the least sign of danger, he changed into a perfect arsenal; he invariably slept "in his weapons"; but now, even in the darkness, the other noted that he was unarmed, and therefore it was no attempt at horse-stealing or of assault upon themselves he feared. "who is it? what is it?" he asked, stumbling over the tangle of string-like roots that netted the ground. "natives, travelers like ourselves, or--something else?" he spoke very low, as though aware that what had waked him still hovered close enough to overhear. "why do you fear?" and rostom looked up a moment from stooping over the rope. he stepped a little nearer, avoiding the animal's hoofs. in a confused whisper of french and russian, making at the same time the protective signs of his religion, he muttered a sentence of which the other caught little more than the unassuring word that something was about them close--something "_méchant_." this curious, significant word he used. the whispered utterance, the manner that went with it, surely the dark and lonely setting of the little scene as well, served to convey the full suggestion of the adjective with a force the man himself could scarcely have intended. something had passed by, not so much evil, wicked, or malign as strange and alien--uncanny. rostom, a man utterly careless of physical danger, rising to it, rather, with delight, was frightened--in his soul. "what do you mean?" o'malley asked louder, with an air of impatience assumed. the man was on his knees, but whether praying, or merely struggling with the rope, was hard to see. "what is it you're talking about so foolishly?" he spoke with a confidence he hardly felt himself. and the involved reply, spoken with lips against the earth, the head but slightly turned as he knelt, again smothered the words. only the curious phrase came to him--"_de l'ancien monde_--_quelque-chose_--" the irishman took him by the shoulders. not meaning actually to shake him, he yet must have used some violence, for the fact was that he did not like the answers and sought to deny some strong emotion in himself. the man stood up abruptly with a kind of sudden spring. the expression of his face was not easily divined in the darkness, but a gleam of the eyes was clearly visible. it may have been anger, it may have been terror; vivid excitement it certainly was. "something--old as the stones, old as the stones," he whispered, thrusting his dark bearded face unpleasantly close. "such things are in these mountains.... _mais oui! c'est moi qui vous le dis!_ old as the stones, i tell you. and sometimes they come out close--with sudden wind. _we_ know!" he stepped back again sharply and dropped upon his knees, bowing to the ground with flattened palms. he made a repelling gesture as though it was o'malley's presence that brought the experience. "and to see them is--to die!" he heard, muttered against the ground thickly. "to see them is to die!" the irishman went back to his sleeping-bag. some strange passion of the man was deeply stirred; he did not wish to offend his violent beliefs and turn it against himself in a stupid, scrambling fight. he lay and waited. he heard the muttering of the deep voice behind him in the darkness. presently it ceased. rostom came softly back to bed. "_he_ knows; _he_ warned me!" he whispered, jerking one hand toward the horse significantly, as they at length lay again side by side in their blankets and the stars shone down upon them from a deep black sky. "but, for the moment, they have passed, not finding us. no wind has come." "another--horse?" asked o'malley suggestively, with a sympathy meant to quiet him. but the peasant shook his head; and this time it was not difficult to divine the expression on his face even in the darkness. at the same moment the tethered animal again uttered a long whinnying cry, plaintive, yet of pleasure rather than alarm it seemed, which instantly brought the man again with a leap from the blankets to his knees. o'malley did not go to help him; he stuffed the clothes against his ears and waited; he did not wish to hear the peasant's sentences. and this pantomime went on at intervals for an hour or more, when at length the horse grew quiet and o'malley snatched moments of unrefreshing sleep. the night lay thick about them with a silence like the silence of the sky. the boxwood bushes ran together into a single sheet of black, the far peaks faded out of sight, the air grew keen and sharp toward the dawn on the wave of wind the sunrise drives before it round the world. but to and fro across the irishman's mind as he lay between sleep and dozing ran the feeling that his friends were close, and that those dancing forms of cosmic life to which all three approximated had come near once more to summon him. he also knew that what the horse had felt was something far from terror. the animal instinctively had divined the presence of something to which it, too, was remotely kin. rostom, however, remained keenly on the alert, much of the time apparently praying. not once did he touch the weapons that lay ready to hand upon the folded burka ... and when at last the dawn came, pale and yellow, through the trees, showing the outlines of the individual box and azalea bushes, he got up earlier than usual and began to make the fire for coffee. in the fuller light which soon poured swiftly over the eastern summits and dropped gold and silver into the tremendous valley at their feet, the men made a systematic search of the immediate surroundings, and then of the clearings and more open stretches beyond. in silence they made it. they found, however, no traces of another camping-party. and it was clear from the way they went about the search that neither expected to find anything. the ground was unbroken, the bushes undisturbed. yet still, both knew. that "something" which the night had brought and kept concealed, still hovered close about them. and it was at this scattered hamlet, consisting of little more than a farm of sorts and a few shepherds' huts of stone, where they stopped two hours later for provisions, that o'malley looked up thus suddenly and recognized the figure of his friend. he stood among the trees a hundred yards away. at first the other thought he was a tree--his stalwart form the stem, his hair and beard the branches--so big and motionless he stood between the other trunks. o'malley saw him for a full minute before he understood. the man seemed so absolutely a part of the landscape, a giant detail in keeping with the rest--a detail that had suddenly emerged. the same moment a great draught of wind, rising from depths of the valley below, swept overhead with a roaring sound, shaking the beech and box trees and setting all the golden azalea heads in a sudden agitation. it passed as swiftly as it came. the peace of the june morning again descended on the mountains. it was broken by a wild, half-smothered cry,--a cry of genuine terror. for o'malley had turned to rostom with some word that here, in this figure, lay the explanation of the animal's excitement in the night, when he saw that the peasant, white as chalk beneath the tangle of black hair that covered his face, had stopped dead in his tracks. his mouth was open, his arms upraised to shield; he was staring fixedly in the same direction as himself. the next instant he was on his knees, bowing and scraping toward mecca, groaning, hiding his eyes with both hands. the sack he held had toppled over; the cheese and flour rolled upon the ground; and from the horse came that long-drawn whinnying of the night. there was a momentary impression--entirely in the irishman's mind, of course,--that the whole landscape veiled a giant, rushing movement that passed across it like a wave. the surface of the earth, it seemed, ran softly quivering, as though that wind had stirred response together with the trembling of the million leaves ... before it settled back again to stillness. it passed in the flash of an eyelid. the earth lay tranquil in repose. but, though the suddenness of the stranger's arrival might conceivably have startled the ignorant peasant, with nerves already overwrought from the occurrence of the night, o'malley was not prepared for the violence of the man's terror as shown by the immediate sequel. for after several moments' prayer and prostration, with groans half smothered against the very ground, he sprang impetuously to his feet again, turned to his employer with eyes that gleamed wildly in that face of chalk, cried out--the voice thick with the confusion of his fear--"it is the wind! _they_ come; from the mountains _they_ come! older than the stones they are. save yourself.... hide your eyes ... fly...!"--and was gone. like a deer he went. he waited neither for food nor payment, but flung the great black burka round his face--and ran. and to o'malley, bereft of all power of movement as he watched in complete bewilderment, one thing seemed clear: the man went in this extraordinary fashion because he was afraid of something he had _felt_, not seen. for as he ran with wild and leaping strides, he did not run away from the figure. he took the direction straight toward the spot where the stranger still stood motionless as a tree. so close he passed him that he must almost have brushed his very shoulder. he did not see him. the last thing the irishman noted was that in his violence the man had dropped the yellow bashlik from his head. o'malley saw him stoop with a flying rush to pick it up. he seemed to catch it as it fell. and then the big figure moved. he came slowly forward from among the trees, his hands outstretched in greeting, on his great visage a shining smile of welcome that seemed to share the sunrise. in that moment for the irishman all was forgotten as though unknown, unseen, save the feelings of extraordinary happiness that filled him to the brim. xxx "the poets are thus liberating gods. the ancient british bards had for the title of their order, 'those who are free throughout the world.' they are free, and they make free. an imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. i think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. if a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism." --emerson to criticize, deny, perhaps to sneer, is no very difficult or uncommon function of the mind, and the story as i first heard him tell it, lying there in the grass beyond the serpentine that summer evening, roused in me, i must confess, all of these very ordinary faculties. yet, as i listened to his voice that mingled with the rustle of the poplars overhead, and watched his eager face and gestures, it came to me dimly that a man's mistakes may be due to his attempting bigger things than his little critic ever dreamed perhaps. and gradually i shared the vision that this unrhyming poet by my side had somehow lived out in action. inner experience for him was ever the reality--not the mere forms or deeds that clothe it in partial physical expression. there was no question, of course, that he had actually met this big, inarticulate russian on the steamer; that stahl's part in the account was unvarnished; that the boy had fallen on the deck from heart disease; and that, after an interval, chance had brought o'malley and the father together again in this valley of the central caucasus. all that was as literal as the superstitious terror of the georgian peasant. further, that the russian possessed precisely those qualities of powerful sympathy with the other's hidden longings which the subtle-minded celt had been so quick to appropriate--this, too, was literal enough. here, doubtless, was the springboard whence he leaped into the stream of this quasi-spiritual adventure with an eagerness of fine, whole-hearted belief which must make this dull world a very wonderful place indeed to those who know it; for it is the visioned faculty of correlating the commonest event with the procession of august powers that pass ever to and fro behind life's swaying curtain, and of divining in the most ordinary of yellow buttercups the golden fires of a dropped star. again, for terence o'malley there seemed no definite line that marked off one state of consciousness from another, just as there seems no given instant when a man passes actually from sleep to waking, from pleasure to pain, from joy to grief. there is, indeed, no fixed threshold between the states of normal and abnormal consciousness. in this stranger he imagined a sense of companionship that by some magic of alchemy transformed his deep loneliness into joy, and satisfied his passionate yearnings by bringing their subjective fulfillment within range. to have found acceptance in his sight was thus a revolutionary fact in his existence. while a part of my mind may have labeled it all as creative imagination, another part recognized it as plainly true--because his being lived it out without the least denial. he, at any rate, was not inventing; nor ever knew an instant's doubt. he simply told me what had happened. the discrepancies--the omissions in his written account especially--were simply due, i feel, to the fact that his skill in words was not equal to the depth and brilliance of the emotions that he experienced. but the fact remains: he did experience them. his fairy tale convinced. his faith had made him whole--one with the earth. the sense of disunion between his outer and his inner self was gone. and now, as these two began their journey together into the wilder region of these stupendous mountains, o'malley says he realized clearly that the change he had dreaded as an "inner catastrophe" simply would mean the complete and final transfer of his consciousness from the "without" to the "within." it would involve the loss only of what constituted him a person among the external activities of the world today. he would lose his life to find it. the deeper self thus quickened by the stranger must finally assert its authority over the rest. to join these urwelt beings and share their eternal life of beauty close to the earth herself, he must shift the center. only thus could he enter the state before the "fall"--that ancient garden of the world-soul, walled-in so close behind his daily life--and know deliverance from the discontent of modern conditions that so distressed him. to do this temporarily, perhaps, had long been possible to him--in dream, in reverie, in those imaginative trances when he almost seemed to leave his body altogether; but to achieve it permanently was something more than any such passing disablement of the normal self. it involved, he now saw clearly, that which he had already witnessed in the boy: the final release of his double in so-called death. thus, as they made their way northwards, nominally toward the mighty elbruz and the borders of swanetia, the irishman knew in his heart that they in reality came nearer to the garden long desired, and to those lofty gates of horn and ivory that hitherto he had never found--because he feared to let himself go. often he had camped beneath the walls, had smelt the flowers, heard the songs, and even caught glimpses of the life that moved so gorgeously within. but the gates themselves had never shone for him, even against the sky of dream, because his vision had been clouded by alarm. they swung, it had seemed to him before, in only one direction--for those who enter: he had always hesitated, lost his way, returned.... and many, like him, make the same mistake. once in, there need be no return, for in reality the walls spread outwards and--enclose the entire world. civilization and humanity, the man of smaller vision had called out to him as passwords to safety. simplicity and love, he now discovered, were the truer clues. his big friend in silence taught him. now he knew. for in that little hamlet their meeting had taken place--in silence. no actual speech had passed. "you go--so?" the russian conveyed by a look and by a movement of his whole figure, indicating the direction; and to the irishman's assenting inclination of the head he made an answering gesture that merely signified compliance with a plan already known to both. "we go, together then." and, there and then, they started, side by side. the suddenness of this concerted departure only seemed strange afterwards when o'malley looked back upon it, for at the time it seemed as inevitable as being obliged to swim once the dive is taken. he stood upon a pinnacle whence lesser details were invisible; he knew a kind of exaltation--of loftier vision. small facts that ordinarily might fill the day with trouble sank below the horizon then. he did not even notice that they went without food, horse, or blankets. it was reckless, unrestrained, and utterly unhindered, this free setting-forth together. thus might he have gone upon a journey with the wind, the sunshine, or the rain. departure with a thought, a dream, a fancy could not have been less unhampered. the only detail of his outer world that lingered--and that, already sinking out of sight like a stone into deep water--was the image of the running peasant. for a moment he recalled the picture. he saw the man in the act of stooping after the fallen bashlik. he saw him seize it, lift it to his head again. but the picture was small--already very far away. before the bashlik actually reached the head, the detail dipped into mist and vanished.... xxxi it was spring--and the flutes of pan played everywhere. the radiance of the world's first morning shone undimmed. life flowed and sang and danced, abundant and untamed. it bathed the mountains and that sky of stainless blue. it bathed him too. dipped, washed, and shining in it, he walked the earth as she lay radiant in her early youth. the crystal presence of her everlasting spring flew laughing through a world of light and flowers--flowers that none could ever pluck to die, light that could never fade to darkness within walls and roofs. all day they wound easily, as though on winged feet, through the steep belt of box and beech woods, and in sparkling brilliant heat across open spaces where the azaleas shone; a cooling wind, fresh as the dawn, seemed ever to urge them forwards. the country, for all its huge scale and wildness, was park-like; the giant, bushy trees wore an air of being tended by the big winds that ran with rustling music among their waving foliage. between the rhododendrons were avenues of turf, broad-gladed pathways, yet older than the moon, from which a thousand gardeners of wind and dew had gone but a moment before to care for others further on. over all brimmed up some primal, old-world beauty of a simple life--some immemorial soft glory of the dawn. closer and closer, deeper and deeper, ever swifter, ever more direct, o'malley passed down toward the heart of his mother's being. along the tenderest pathways of his inner being, so wee, so soft, so simple that for most men they lie ignored or overgrown, he slipped with joy a little nearer--one stage perhaps--toward reality. pan "blew in power" across these caucasian heights and valleys. sweet, sweet, sweet, o pan! piercing sweet by the river! blinding sweet, o great god pan! the sun on the hill forgot to die, and the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly came back to dream on the river in front his big leader, no longer blundering clumsily as on that toy steamer with the awkward and lesser motion known to men, pressed forward with a kind of giant sure supremacy along paths he knew, or rather over a trackless, pathless world which the great planet had charted lovingly for his splendid feet. that wind, blowing from the depths of valleys left long since behind, accompanied them wisely. they heard, not the faint horns of elfland faintly blowing, but the blasts of the _urwelt_ trumpets growing out of the still distance, nearer, ever nearer. for leagues below the beech woods poured over the enormous slopes in a sea of soft green foam, and through the meadow spaces they saw the sweet nakedness of running water, and listened to its song. at noon they rested in the greater heat, sleeping beneath the shadow of big rocks; and sometimes traveled late into the night, when the stars guided them and they knew the pointing of the winds. the very moonlight then, that washed this lonely world with silver, sheeting the heights of snow beyond, was friendly, half divine ... and it seemed to o'malley that while they slept they were watched and cared for--as though others who awaited had already come halfway out to meet them. and ever, more and more, the passion of his happiness increased; he knew himself complete, fulfilled, made whole. it was as though his self were passing outwards into hundreds of thousands, and becoming countless as the sand. he was everywhere; in everything; shining, singing, dancing.... with the ancient woods he breathed; slipped with the streams down the still darkened valleys; called from each towering summit to the sun; and flew with all the winds across the immense, untrodden slopes. about him lay this whole spread being of the flowered caucasus, huge and quiet, drinking in the sunshine at its leisure. but it lay also _within_ himself, for his expanding consciousness included and contained it. through it--this early potent mood of nature--he passed toward the soul of the earth within, even as a child, caught by a mood of winning tenderness in its mother, passes closer to the heart that gave it birth. some central love enwrapped him. he knew the surrounding power of everlasting arms. xxxii "inward, ay, deeper far than love or scorn, deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin, rend thou the veil and pass alone within, stand naked there and know thyself forlorn. nay! in what world, then, spirit, vast thou born? or to what world-soul art thou entered in? feel the self fade, feel the great life begin. with love re-rising in the cosmic morn. the inward ardor yearns to the inmost goal; the endless goal is one with the endless way; from every gulf the tides of being roll, from every zenith burns the indwelling day, and life in life has drowned thee and soul in soul; and these are god and thou thyself art they." --f.w.h. myers. from "a cosmic outlook" the account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart that does not dream itself shut off from the universe in some wee compartment all alone. if o'malley's written account, and especially his tumbled notebooks, left me bewildered and confused, the fragments that he told me brought this sense of an immense, sweet picture that actually existed. i caught small scenes of it, set in some wild high light. their very incoherence conveyed the gorgeous splendor of the whole better than any neat ordered sequence could possibly have done. climax, in the story-book meaning, there was none. the thing flowed round and round forever. a sense of something eternal wrapped me as i listened; for his imagination set the whole adventure out of time and space, and i caught myself dreaming too. "a thousand years in his sight"--i understood the old words as refreshingly new--might be a day. thus felt that monk, perhaps, for whose heart a hundred years had passed while he listened to the singing of a little bird. my practical questions--it was only at the beginning that i was dull enough to ask them--he did not satisfy, because he could not. there was never the least suggestion of the artist's mere invention. "you really felt the earth about and in you," i had asked, "much as one feels the presence of a friend and living person?" "drowned in her, yes, as in the thoughts and atmosphere of some one awfully loved." his voice a little trembled as he said it. "so speech unnecessary?" "impossible--fatal," was the laconic, comprehensive reply, "limiting: destructive even." that, at least, i grasped: the pitifulness of words before that love by which self goes wholly lost in the being of another, adrift yet cared for, gathered all wonderfully in. "and your russian friend--your leader?" i ventured, haltingly. his reply was curiously illuminating:-- "like some great guiding thought within her mind--some flaming _motif_--interpreting her love and splendor--leading me straight." "as you felt at marseilles, a clue--a vital clue?" for i remembered the singular phrase he had used in the notebook. "not a bad word," he laughed; "certainly, as far as it goes, not a wrong one. for he--_it_--was at the same time within myself. we merged, as our life grew and spread. we swept things along with us from the banks. we were in flood together," he cried. "we drew the landscape with us!" the last words baffled me; i found no immediate response. he pushed away the plates on the table before us, where we had been lunching in the back room of a dingy soho restaurant. we now had the place to ourselves. he drew his chair a little nearer. "don't ye see--our journey also was _within_," he added abruptly. the pale london sunlight came through the window across chimneys, dreary roofs, courtyards. yet where it touched his face it seemed at once to shine. his voice was warm and eager. i caught from him, as it were, both heat and light. "you moved actually, though, over country--?" "while at the same time we moved within, advanced, sank deeper," he returned; "call it what you will. our condition moved. there was this correspondence between the two. over her face we walked, yet into her as well. we 'traveled' with one greater than ourselves, both caught and merged in her, in utter sympathy with one another as with herself..." this stopped me dead. i could not pretend more than a vague sympathetic understanding with such descriptions of a mystical experience. nor, it was clear, did he expect it of me. even his own heart was troubled, and he knew he spoke of things that only few may deal with sanely, still fewer hear with patience. but, oh, that little room in greek street smelt of forests, dew, and dawn as he told it,--that dear wayward child of earth! for "his voice fell, like music that makes giddy the dim brain, faint with intoxication of keen joy." i watched those delicate hands he spread about him through the air; the tender, sensitive lips, the light blue eyes that glowed. i noted the real strength in the face,--a sort of nobility it was--his shabby suit of grey, his tie never caught properly in the collar, the frayed cuffs, and the enormous boots he wore even in london--"policeman boots" as we used to call them with a laugh. so vivid was the picture that he painted! almost, it seemed, i knew myself the pulse of that eternal spring beneath our feet, beating in vain against the suffocating weight of london's bricks and pavements laid by civilization--the earth's delight striving to push outwards into visible form as flowers. she flashed some scrap of meaning thus into me, though blunted on the way, i fear, and crudely paraphrased. yes, as he talked across the airless gloom of that little back room, in some small way i caught the splendor of his vision. behind the words, i caught it here and there. my own wee world extended. my being stretched to understand him and to net in fugitive fragments the scenes of wonder that he knew complete. perhaps his larger consciousness fringed my own to "bruise" it, as he claimed the earth had done to him, so that i glimpsed in tinier measure an experience that in himself blazed whole and thundering. it was, i must admit, exalting and invigorating, if a little breathless; and the return to streets and omnibuses painful--a descent to ugliness and disappointment. for things i can hardly understand now, even in my own descriptions of them, seemed at the time quite clear--or clear-ish at any rate. whereas normally i could never have compassed them at all. it taught me: that, at least, i know. in some spiritual way i quickened to the view that all great teaching really comes in some such curious fashion--via a temporary stretching or extension of the "heart" to receive it. the little normal self is pushed aside to make room, even to the point of loss, in order to contain it. later, the consciousness contracts again. but it has expanded--and there has been growth. was this, i wondered, perhaps what mystics speak of when they say the personal life must slip aside, be trampled on, submerged, before there can be room for the divine presences...? at any rate, as he talked there over coffee that grew cold and cigarette smoke that made the air yet thicker than it naturally was, his words conveyed with almost grandeur of conviction this reality of a profound inner experience. i shared in some faint way its truth and beauty, so that when i saw it in his written form i marveled to find the thing so thin and cold and dwindled. the key his personal presence supplied, of guidance and interpretation, of course was gone. xxxiii "why, what is this patient entrance into nature's deep resources but the child's most gradual learning to walk upright without bane? when we drive out, from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses, are we greater than the first men who led black ones by the mane?" --e.b. browning the "russian" led. o'malley styled him thus to the end for want of a larger word, perhaps--a word to phrase the inner and the outer. although the mountains were devoid of trails, he seemed always certain of his way. an absolute sense of orientation possessed him; or, rather, the whole earth became a single pathway. her being, in and about their hearts, concealed no secrets; he knew the fresh, cool water-springs as surely as the corners where the wild honey gathered. it seemed as natural that the bees should leave them unmolested, giving them freely of their store, as that the savage dogs in the aouls, or villages, they passed so rarely now, should refrain from attack. even the peasants shared with them some common, splendid life. occasionally they passed an ossetian on horseback, a rifle swung across his saddle, a covering burka draping his shoulders and the animal's haunches in a single form that seemed a very outgrowth of the mountains. but not even a greeting was exchanged. they passed in silence; often very close, as though they did not see these two on foot. and once or twice the horses reared and whinnied, while their riders made the signs of their religion.... sentries they seemed. but for the password known to both they would have stopped the travelers. in these forsaken fastnesses mere unprotected wandering means death. yet to the happy irishman there never came a thought of danger or alarm. all was a portion of himself, and no man can be afraid of his own hands or feet. their convoy was immense, invisible, a guaranteed security of the vast earth herself. no little personal injury could pass so huge defense. others, armed with a lesser security of knives and guns and guides, would assuredly have been turned back, or had they shown resistance, would never have been heard to tell the tale. dr. stahl and the fur-merchant, for instance-- but such bothering little thoughts with their hard edges no longer touched reality; they spun away and found no lodgment; they were--untrue; false items of some lesser world unrealized. for, in proportion as he fixed his thoughts successfully on outward and physical things, the world wherein he now walked grew dim: he missed the path, stumbled, saw trees and flowers indistinctly, failed to hear properly the call of birds and wind, to feel the touch of sun; and, most unwelcome of all,--was aware that his leader left him, dwindling in size, dropping away somehow among shadows far behind or far ahead. the inversion was strangely complete: what men called solid, real, and permanent he now knew as the veriest shadows of existence, fleeting, unsatisfactory, false. their dreary make-believe had all his life oppressed him. he now knew why. men, driving their forces outwards for external possessions had lost the way so utterly. it truly was amazing. he no longer quite understood how such feverish strife was possible to intelligent beings: the fur-merchant, the tourists, his london friends, the great majority of men and women he had known, pain in their hearts and weariness in their eyes, the sad strained faces, the furious rush to catch a little pleasure they deemed joy. it seemed like some wild senseless game that madness plays. he found it difficult to endow them, one and all, with any sense of life. he saw them groping in thick darkness, snatching with hands of shadow at things of even thinner shadow, all moving in a wild and frantic circle of artificial desires, while just beyond, absurdly close to many, blazed this great living sunshine of reality and peace and beauty. if only they would turn--and look _within_--! in fleeting moments these sordid glimpses of that dark and shadow-world still afflicted his outer sight--the nightmare he had left behind. it played like some gloomy memory through a corner of consciousness not yet wholly disentangled from it. already he burned to share his story with the world...! a few he saw who here and there half turned, touched by a flashing ray--then rushed away into the old blackness as though frightened, not daring to escape. false images thrown outward by the intellect prevented. stahl he saw ... groping; a soft light of yearning in his eyes ... a hand outstretched to push the shadows from him, yet ever gathering them instead.... men he saw by the million, youth still in their hearts, yet slaving in darkened trap-like cages not merely to earn a competency but to pile more gold for things not really wanted; faces of greed round gambling-tables; the pandemonium of exchanges; even fair women, playing bridge through all a summer afternoon--the strife and lust and passion for possessions degrading every heart, choking the channels of simplicity.... over the cities of the world he heard the demon civilization sing its song of terror and desolation. its music of destruction shook the nations. he saw the millions dance. and mid the bewildering ugly thunder of that sound few could catch the small sweet voice played by the earth upon the little pipes of pan... the fluting call of nature to the simple life--which is the inner. for now, as he moved closer to the earth, deeper ever deeper into the enfolding moods of her vast collective consciousness, he drew nearer to the reality that satisfies. he approached that center where outward activity is less, yet energy and vitality far greater--because it is at rest. here he met things halfway, as it were, _en route_ for the outer physical world where they would appear later as "events," but not yet emerged, still alive and breaking with their undischarged and natural potencies. modern life, he discerned, dealt only with these forces when they had emerged, masquerading at the outer rim of life as complete embodiments, whereas actually they are but partial and symbolical expressions of their eternal prototypes behind. and men today were busy at this periphery only, touch with the center lost, madly consumed with the unimportant details that concealed the inner glory. it was the spirit of the age to mistake the outer shell for the inner reality. he at last understood the reason of his starved loneliness amid the stupid uproar of latter-day life, why he distrusted "civilization," and stood apart. his yearnings were explained. his heart dwelt ever in the golden age of the earth's first youth, and at last--he was coming home. like mud settling in dirty water, the casual realities of that outer life all sank away. he grew clear within, one with the primitive splendor, beauty, grace of a fresh world. over his inner self, flooding slowly the passages and cellars, those subterranean ways that honeycomb the dim-lit foundations of personality, this tide of power rose. filling chamber after chamber, melting down walls and ceiling, eating away divisions softly and irresistibly, it climbed in silence, merging all moods and disunion of his separate selves into the single thing that made him comprehensible to himself and able to know the earth as mother. he saw himself whole; he knew himself divine. a strange tumult as of some ecstasy of old remembrance invaded him. he dropped back into a more spacious scale of time, long long ago when a month might be a moment, or a thousand years pass round him as a single day.... the qualities of all the earth lay too, so easily contained, within himself. he understood that old legend by which man the microcosm represents and sums up earth, the macrocosm in himself, so that nature becomes the symbol and interpreter of his inner being. the strength and dignity of the trees he drew into himself; the power of the wind was his; with his unwearied feet ran all the sweet and facile swiftness of the rivulets, and in his thoughts the graciousness of flowers, the wavy softness of the grass, the peace of open spaces and the calm of that vast sky. the murmur of the _urwelt_ was in his blood, and in his heart the exaltation of her golden mood of spring. how, then, could speech be possible, since both shared this common life? the communion with his friend and leader was too profound and perfect for any stammering utterance in the broken, partial symbols known as language. this was done for them: the singing of the birds, the wind-voices, the rippling of water, the very humming of the myriad insects even, and rustling of the grass and leaves, shaped all they felt in some articulate expression that was right, complete, and adequate. the passion of the larks set all the sky to music, and songs far sweeter than the nightingales' made every dusk divine. he understood now that laborious utterance of his friend upon the steamer, and why his difficulty with words was more than he could overcome. like a current in the sea he still preserved identity, yet knew the freedom of a boundless being. and meanwhile the tide was ever rising. with this singular companion he neared that inner realization which should reveal them as they were--thoughts in the earth's old consciousness too primitive, too far away, too vital and terrific to be confined in any outward physical expression of the "civilized" world today.... the earth shone, glittered, sang, holding them close to the rhythm of her gigantic heart. her glory was their own. in the blazing summer of the inner life they floated, happy, caught away, at peace ... emanations of her living self. * * * * * the valleys far below were filled with mist, cutting them off literally from the world of men, but the beauty of the upper mountains grew more and more bewilderingly enticing. the scale was so immense, while the brilliant clearness of the air brought distance close before the eyes, altered perspective, and robbed "remote" and "near" of any definite meaning. space fled away. it shifted here and there at pleasure, according as they felt. it was within them, not without. they passed, dispersed and swift about the entire landscape, a very part of it, diffused in terms of light and air and color, scattered in radiance, distributed through flowers, spread through the sky and grass and forests. space is a form of thought. but they no longer "thought": they felt.... o, that prodigious, clean, and simple feeling of the earth! love that redeems and satisfies! power that fills and blesses! electric strength that kills the germ of separateness, making whole! the medicine of the world! for days and nights it was thus--or was it years and minutes?--while they skirted the slopes and towers of the huge dykh-taou, and elbrous, supreme and lonely in the heavens, beckoned solemnly. the snowy kochtan-taou rolled past, yet through, them; kasbek superbly thundered; hosts of lesser summits sang in the dawn and whispered to the stars. and longing sank away--impossible. "my boy, my boy, could you only have been with me...!" broke his voice across the splendid dream, bringing me back to the choking, dingy room i had forgotten. it was like a cry--a cry of passionate yearning. "i'm with you now," i murmured, some similar rising joy half breaking in my breast. "that's something--" he sighed in answer. "something, perhaps. but i have got it always; it's all still part of me. oh, oh! that i could give it to the world and lift the ache of all humanity...!" his voice trembled. i saw the moisture of immense compassion in his eyes. i felt myself swim out into universal being. "perhaps," i stammered half beneath my breath, "perhaps some day you may...!" he shook his head. his face turned very sad. "how should they listen, much less understand? their energies drive outwards, and separation is their god. there is no 'money in it'...!" xxxiv "oh! whose heart is not stirred with tumultuous joy when the intimate life of nature enters into his soul with all its plenitude, ... when that mighty sentiment for which language has no other name than love is diffused in him, like some powerful all-dissolving vapor; when he, shivering with sweet terror, sinks into the dusky, enticing bosom of nature; when the meager personality loses itself in the overpowering waves of passion, and nothing remains but the focal point of the incommensurable generative force, an engulfing vortex in the ocean?" --novalis, _disciples at saïs._ translated by u.c.b. early in the afternoon they left the bigger trees behind, and passed into that more open country where the shoulders of the mountains were strewn with rhododendrons. these formed no continuous forest, but stood about in groups some twenty-five feet high, their rounded masses lighted on the surface with fires of mauve and pink and purple. when the wind stirred them, and the rattling of their stiff leaves was heard, it seemed as if the skin of the mountains trembled to shake out colored flames. the air turned radiant through a mist of running tints. still climbing, they passed along broad glades of turfy grass between the groups. more rapidly now, o'malley says, went forward that inner change of being which accompanied the progress of their outer selves. so intimate henceforth was this subtle correspondence that the very landscape took the semblance of their feelings. they moved as "emanations" of the landscape. each melted in the other, dividing lines all vanished. their union with the earth approached this strange and sweet fulfillment. and so it was that, though at this height the vestiges of bird and animal life were wholly gone, there grew more and more strongly the sense that, in their further depths and shadows, these ancient bushes screened activities even more ancient than themselves. life, only concealed because they had not reached its plane of being, pulsed everywhere about their pathway, immense in power, moving swiftly, very grand and very simple, and sometimes surging close, seeking to draw them in. more than once, as they moved through glade and clearing, the irishman knew thrills of an intoxicating happiness, as this abundant, driving life brushed past him. it came so close, it glided before his eyes, yet still was viewless. it strode behind him and before, peered down through space upon him, lapped him about with the stir of mighty currents. the deep suction of its invitation caught his soul, urging the change within himself more quickly forward. huge and delightful, he describes it, awful, yet bringing no alarm. he was always on the point of seeing. surely the next turning would reveal; beyond the next dense, tangled group would come--disclosure; behind that clustered mass of purple blossoms, shaking there mysteriously in the wind, some half-veiled countenance of splendor watched and welcomed! before his face passed swift, deific figures, tall, erect, compelling, charged with this ancient, golden life that could never wholly pass away. and only just beyond the fringe of vision. vision already strained upon the edge. his consciousness stretched more and more to reach them, while they came crowding near to let him know inclusion. these projections of the earth's old consciousness moved thick and soft about them, eternal in their giant beauty. soon he would know, perhaps, the very forms in which she had projected them--dear portions of her streaming life the earliest races half divined and worshipped, and never quite withdrawn. worship could still entice them out. a single worshipper sufficed. for worship meant retreat into the heart where still they dwelt. and he had loved and worshipped all his life. and always with him, now at his side or now a little in advance, his leader moved in power, with vigorous, springing gestures like to dancing, singing that old tuneless song of the wind, happier even than himself. the splendor of the _urwelt_ closed about them. they drew nearer to the gates of that old garden, the first time ever knew, whose frontiers were not less than the horizons of the entire world. for this lost eden of a golden age when "first god dawned on chaos" still shone within the soul as in those days of innocence before the "fall," when men first separated themselves from their great mother. a little before sunset they halted. a hundred yards above the rhododendron forest, in a clear wide space of turf that ran for leagues among grey boulders to the lips of the eternal snowfields, they waited. through a gap of sky, with others but slightly lower than himself, the pyramid of kasbek, grim and towering, stared down upon them, dreadfully close though really miles away. at their feet yawned the profound valley they had climbed. halfway into it, unable to reach the depths, the sun's last rays dropped shafts like rivers slanting. already in soft troops the shadows crept downwards from the eastern-facing summits overhead. out of these very shadows night drew swiftly down about the world, building with her masses of silvery architecture a barrier that rose to heaven. these two lay down beside it. beyond it spread that shining garden...only the shadow-barrier between. with the rising of the moon this barrier softened marvelously, letting the starbeams in. it trembled like a line of wavering music in the wind of night. it settled downwards, shaking a little, toward the ground, while just above them came a curving inwards like a bay of darkness, with overhead two stately towers, their outline fringed with stars. "the gateway...!" whispered something through the mountains. it may have been the leader's voice; it may have been the irishman's own leaping thought; it may have been merely a murmur from the rhododendron leaves below. it came sifting gently through the shadows. o'malley knew. he followed his leader higher. just beneath this semblance of an old-world portal which time could neither fashion nor destroy, they lay upon the earth--and waited. beside them shone the world, dressed by the moon in silver. the wind stood still to watch. the peak of kasbek from his cloudy distance listened too. for, floating upwards across the spaces came a sound of simple, old-time piping--the fluting music of a little reed. it drew near, stopped for a moment as though the player watched them; then, with a plunging swiftness, passed off through starry distance up among the darker mountains. the lost, forsaken asian valley covered them. nowhere were they extraneous to it. they slept. and while they slept, they moved across the frontiers of fulfillment. the moon-blanched gate of horn and ivory swung open. the consciousness of the earth possessed them. they passed within. xxxv "for of old the sun, our sire, came wooing the mother of men, earth, that was virginal then, vestal fire to his fire. silent her bosom and coy, but the strong god sued and press'd; and born of their starry nuptial joy are all that drink of her breast. "and the triumph of him that begot, and the travail of her that bore, behold they are evermore as warp and weft in our lot. we are children of splendor and flame, of shuddering, also, and tears. magnificent out of the dust we came, and abject from the spheres. "o bright irresistible lord! we are fruit of earth's womb, each one, and fruit of thy loins, o sun, whence first was the seed outpour'd. to thee as our father we bow, forbidden thy father to see, who is older and greater than thou, as thou art greater and older than we." --william watson, "ode in may" very slowly the dawn came. the sky blushed rose, trembled, flamed. a breath of wind stirred the vapors that far below sheeted the surface of the black sea. but it was still in that gentle twilight before the actual color comes that o'malley found he was lying with his eyes wide open, watching the rhododendrons. he may have slept meanwhile, though "sleep," he says, involving loss of consciousness, seemed no right description. a sense of interval there was at any rate, a "transition-blank,"--whatever that may mean--he phrased it in the writing. and, watching the rhododendron forest a hundred yards below, he saw it move. through the dim light this movement passed and ran, here, there, and everywhere. a curious soft sound accompanied it that made him remember the bible phrase of wind "going in the tops of the mulberry trees." hushed, swift, elusive murmur, it passed about him through the dusk. he caught it next behind him and, turning, noticed groups upon the slopes,--groups that he had not seen the night before. these groups seemed also now to move; the isolated scattered clusters came together, merged, ran to the parent forest below, or melted just beyond the line of vision above. the wind sprang up and rattled all the million leaves. that rattling filled the air, and with it came another, deeper sound like to a sound of tramping that seemed to shake the earth. confusion caught him then completely, for it was as if the mountain-side awoke, rose up, and shook itself into a wild and multitudinous wave of life. at first he thought the wind had somehow torn the rhododendrons loose from their roots and was strewing them with that tramping sound about the slopes. but the groups passed too swiftly over the turf for that, swept completely from their fastenings, while the tramping grew to a roaring as of cries and voices. that roaring had the quality of the voice that reached him weeks ago across the Ã�gean sea. a strange, keen odor, too, that was not wholly unfamiliar, moved upon the wind. and then he knew that what he had been watching all along were not rhododendrons at all, but living, splendid creatures. a host of others, moreover, large ones and small together, stood shadowy in the background, stamping their feet upon the turf, manes tossing in the early wind, in their entire mass awful as in their individual outline somehow noble. the light spread upwards from the east. with a fire of terrible joy and wonder in his heart, o'malley held his breath and stared. the luster of their glorious bodies, golden bronze in the sunlight, dazed the sight. he saw the splendor of ten hundred velvet flanks in movement, with here and there the uprising whiteness of a female outline that flashed and broke above the general mass like foam upon a great wave's crest--figures of incomparable grace and power; the sovereign, upright carriage; the rippling muscles upon massive limbs, and shoulders that held defiant strength and softness in exquisite combination. and then he heard huge murmurs of their voices that filled the dawn, aged by lost thousand years, and sonorous as the booming of the sea. a cry that was like singing escaped him. he saw them rise and sweep away. there was a rush of magnificence. they cantered--wonderfully. they were gone. the roar of their curious commotion traveled over the mountains, dying into distance very swiftly. the rhododendron forest that had concealed their approach resumed its normal aspect, but burning now with colors innumerable as the sunrise caught its thousand blossoms. and o'malley understood that during "sleep" he had passed with his companion through the gates of ivory and horn, and stood now within the first garden of the early world. all frontiers crossed, all barriers behind, he stood within the paradise of his heart's desire. the consciousness of the earth included him. these were early forms of life she had projected--some of the living prototypes of legend, myth, and fable--embodiments of her first manifestations of consciousness, and eternal, accessible to every heart that holds a true and passionate worship. all his life this love of nature, which was worship, had been his. it now fulfilled itself. merged by love into the consciousness of the being loved, he _felt_ her thoughts, her powers, and manifestations of life as his own. in a flash, of course, this all passed clearly before him; but there was no time to dwell upon it. for the activity of his companion had likewise become suddenly tremendous. he had risen into complete revelation at last. his own had called him. he was off to join his kind. the transformation came upon both of them, it seems, at once, but in that moment of bewilderment, the irishman only realized it first in his leader. for on the edge of the advancing sunlight first this cosmic being crouched, then rose with alert and springing movement, leaping to his feet in a single bound that propelled him with a stride of more than a man's two limbs. his great sides quivered as he shook himself. a roar, similar to that sound the distance already swallowed, rolled forth into the air. with head thrown back, chest forward, too, for all the backward slant of the mighty shoulders, he stood there, grandly outlined, pushing the wind before him. the great brown eyes shone with the joy of freedom and escape--a superb and regal transformation. urged by the audacity of his strange excitement, the irishman obeyed an impulse that came he knew not whence. the single word sprang to his lips before he could guess its meaning, much less hold it back. "lapithae...!" he cried aloud; "lapithae...!" the stalwart figure turned with an awful spring as though it would trample him to the ground. a moment the brown eyes flamed with a light of battle. then, with another roar, and a gesture that was somehow both huge and simple, he seemed to rise and paw the air. the next second this figure of the _urwelt_, come once more into its own, bent down and forward, leaped wonderfully--then, cantering, raced away across the slopes to join his kind. he went like a shape of wind and cloud. the heritage of racial memory was his, and certain words remained still vividly evocative. that old battle with the lapithae was but one item of the scenes of ancient splendor lying pigeon-holed in his mighty mother's consciousness. the instant he had called, the irishman himself lay caught in lost memory's tumultuous whirl. the lonely world about him seemed of a sudden magnificently peopled--sky, woods, and torrents. he watched a moment the fierce rapidity with which he sped toward the mountains, the sound of his feet already merged in that other, vaster tramping, and then he turned--to watch himself. for a similar transformation was going forward in himself, and with the happiness of wild amazement he saw it. already, indeed, it was accomplished. all white and shining lay the sunlight over his own extended form. power was in his limbs; he rose above the ground in some new way; the usual little stream of breath became a river of rushing air he drew into stronger, more capacious lungs; likewise his bust grew strangely deepened, pushed the wind before it; and the sunshine glowed on shaggy flanks agleam with dew that powerfully drove the ground behind him while he ran. he ran, yet only partly as a man runs; he found himself shot forwards through the air, upright, yet at the same time upon all fours brandishing his arms he flew with a free, unfettered motion, traversing the surface of the mother's mind and body. free of the entire earth he was. and as he raced to join the others, there passed again across his memory faintly--it was like the little memory of some physical pain almost--the picture of the boy who swam so strangely in the sea, the picture of the parent's curious emanations on the deck, and, lastly, of those flying shapes of cloud and wind his inner vision brought so often speeding over long, bare hills. this was the final fragment of the outer world that reached him.... he tore along the mountains in the dawn, the awful speed at last explained. his going made a sound upon the wind, and like the wind he raced. far beyond him in the distance, he saw the shadow of that disappearing host spreading upon the valleys like a mist. faintly still he caught their sound of roaring; but it was his own feet now that made that trampling as of hoofs upon the turf. the landscape moved and opened, gathering him in.... and, hardly had he gone, when there stole upon the place where he had stood, a sweet and simple sound of music--the little piping of a reed. it dropped down through the air, perhaps, or came from the forest edge, or possibly the sunrise brought it--this ancient little sound of fluting on those pipes men call the pipes of pan.... xxxvi "here we but peak and dwindle the clank of chain and crane, the whirr of crank and spindle bewilder heart and brain; the ends of our endeavor are wealth and fame, yet in the still forever we're one and all the same; "yet beautiful and spacious the wise, old world appears. yet frank and fair and gracious outlaugh the jocund years. our arguments disputing, the universal pan still wanders fluting--fluting-- fluting to maid and man. our weary well-a-waying his music cannot still: come! let us go a-maying, and pipe with him our fill." --w.e. henley in a detailed description, radiant with a wild loveliness of some forgotten beauty, and of necessity often incoherent, the irishman conveyed to me, sitting in that dreary soho restaurant, the passion of his vision. with an astonishing vitality and a wealth of deep conviction it all poured from his lips. there was no halting and no hesitation. like a man in trance he talked, and like a man in trance he lived it over again while imparting it to me. none came to disturb us in our dingy corner. indeed there is no quieter place in all london town than the back room of these eating-houses of the french quarter between the hours of lunch and dinner. the waiters vanish, the "patron" disappears; no customers come in. but i know surely that its burning splendor came not from the actual words he used, but was due to definite complete transference of the vision itself into my own heart. i caught the fire from his very thought. his heat inflamed my mind. words, both in the uttered and the written version, dimmed it all distressingly. and the completeness of the transference is proved for me by the fact that i never once had need to ask a question. i saw and understood it all as he did. and hours must have passed during the strange recital, for toward the close people came in and took the vacant tables, the lights were up, and grimy waiters clattered noisily about with plates and knives and forks, thrusting an inky carte du jour beneath our very faces. yet how to set it down i swear i know not. nor he, indeed. the notebooks that i found in that old sack of willesden canvas were a disgrace to any man who bid for sanity,--a disgrace to paper and pencil too! all memory of his former life, it seems, at first, had fallen utterly away; nothing survived to remind him of it; and thus he lost all standard of comparison. the state he moved in was too complete to admit of standards or of critical judgment. for these confine, imprison, and belittle, whereas he was free. his escape was unconditioned. from the thirty years of his previous living, no single fragment broke through. the absorption was absolute. "i really do believe and know myself," he said to me across that spotted table-cloth, "that for the time i was merged into the being of another, a being immensely greater than myself. perhaps old stahl was right, perhaps old crazy fechner; and it actually was the consciousness of the earth. i can only tell you that the whole experience left no room in me for other memories; all i had previously known was gone, wiped clean away. yet much of what came in its place is beyond me to describe; and for a curious reason. it's not the size or splendor that prevent the telling, but rather the sublime simplicity of it all. i know no language today simple enough to utter it. far behind words it lies, as difficult of full recovery as the dreams of deep sleep, as the ecstasy of the religious, elusive as the mystery of kubla khan or the patmos visions of st. john. full recapture, i am convinced, is not possible at all in words. "and at the time it did not seem like vision; it was so natural; unstudied, unprepared, and ever there; spontaneous too and artless as a drop of water or a baby's toy. the natural is ever the unchanging. my god! i tell you, man, it was divine!" he made about him a vehement sweeping gesture with his arm which emphasized more poignantly than speech the contrast he felt here where we sat--tight, confining walls, small stifling windows, chairs to rest the body, smothering roof and curtains, doors of narrow entrance and exit, floors to lift above the sweet surface of the soil,--all of them artificial barriers to shut out light and separate away from the earth. "see what we've come to!" it said plainly. and it included even his clothes and boots and collar, the ridiculous hat upon the peg, the unsightly "brolly" in the dingy corner. had there been room in me for laughter, i could well have laughed aloud. * * * * * for as he raced across that stretch of splendid mountainous earth, watching the sunrise kiss the valleys and the woods, shaking the dew from his feet and swallowing the very wind for breath, he realized that other forms of life similar to his own were everywhere about him--also moving. "they were a part of the earth even as i was. here she was crammed to the brim with them--projections of her actual self and being, crowded with this incomparable ancient beauty that was strong as her hills, swift as her running streams, radiant as her wild flowers. whether to call them forms or thoughts or feelings, or powers perhaps, i swear, old man, i know not. her consciousness through which i sped, drowned, lost, and happy, wrapped us all in together as a mood contains its own thoughts and feelings. for she _was_ a being--of sorts. and i _was_ in her mind, mood, consciousness, call it what you best can. these other thoughts and presences i felt were the raw material of forms, perhaps--forces that when they reach the minds of men must clothe themselves in form in order to be known, whether they be dreams, or gods, or any other kind of inspiration. closer than that i cannot get.... i knew myself within her being like a child, and i felt the deep, eternal pull--to simple things." * * * * * and thus the beauty of the early world companioned him, and all the forgotten gods moved forward into life. they hovered everywhere, immense and stately. the rocks and trees and peaks that half concealed them, betrayed at the same time great hints of their mighty gestures. near him, they were; he moved toward their region. if definite sight refused to focus on them the fault was not their own but his. he never doubted that they could be seen. yet, even thus partially, they manifested--terrifically. he was aware of their overshadowing presences. sight, after all, was an incomplete form of knowing--a thing he had left behind--elsewhere. it belonged, with the other limited sense-channels, to some attenuated dream now all forgotten. now he knew _all over._ he himself was of them. "i am home!" it seems he cried as he ran cantering across the sunny slopes. "at last i have found you! home...!" and the stones shot wildly from his thundering tread. a roar of windy power filled the sky, and far away that echoing tramping paused to listen. "we have called you! come...!" and the forms moved down slowly from their mountainous pedestals; the woods breathed out a sigh; the running water sang; the slopes all murmured through their grass and flowers. for a worshipper, strayed from the outer world of the dead, stood within the precincts of their ancient temple. he had passed the angel with the flaming sword those very dead had set there long ago. the garden now enclosed him. he had found the heart of the earth, his mother. self-realization in the perfect union with nature was fulfilled. he knew the great at-onement. * * * * * the quiet of the dawn still lay upon the world; dew sparkled; the air was keen and fresh. yet, in spite of all this vast sense of energy, this vigor and delight, o'malley no longer felt the least goading of excitement. there was this animation and this fine delight; but craving for sensation of any kind, was gone. excitement, as it tortured men in that outer world he had left, could not exist in this larger state of being; for excitement is the appetite for something not possessed, magnified artificially till it has become a condition of disease. all that he needed was now contained within himself; he was at-ease; and, literally, that unrest which men miscall delight could touch him not nor torture him again. if this were death--how exquisite! and time was not a passing thing, for it lay, he says, somehow in an ocean everywhere, heaped up in gulfs and spaces. it was as though he could help himself and take it. that morning, had he so wished, could last forever; he could go backwards and taste the shadows of the night again, or forward and bask in the glory of hot noon. there were no parts of things, and so no restlessness, no sense of incompleteness, no divisions. this quiet of the dawn lay in himself, and, since he loved it, lay there, cool and sweet and sparkling for--years; almost--forever. * * * * * moreover, while this giant form of _urwelt_-life his inner self had assumed was new, it yet seemed somehow familiar. the speed and weight and power caused him no distress, there was no detail that he could not manage easily. to race thus o'er the world, keeping pace with an eternal dawn, was as simple as for the earth herself to spin through space. his union with her was as complete as that. in every item of her being lay the wonder of her perfect form--a sphere. it was complete. nothing could add to it. yet, while all recollection of his former, pettier self was gone, he began presently to remember--men. though never in relation to himself, he retained dimly a picture of that outer world of strife and terror. as a memory of illness he recalled it--dreadfully, a nightmare fever from which he had recovered, its horror already fading out. cities and crowds, poverty, illness, pain and all the various terror of civilization, robbed of the power to afflict, yet still hung hovering about the surface of his consciousness, though powerless to break his peace. for the power to understand it vanished; no part of him knew sympathy with it; so clearly he now saw himself sharing the earth, that a vague wonder filled him when he recalled the mad desires of men to possess external forms of things. it was amazing and perplexing. how could they ever have devised such wild and childish efforts--all in the wrong direction? if that outer life were the real one how could any intelligent being think it worth while to live? how could any thinking man hold up his head and walk along the street with dignity if that was what he believed? was a man satisfied with it worth keeping alive at all? what bigger scheme could ever use him? the direction of modern life today was diametrically away from happiness and truth. peace was the word he knew, peace and a singing joy. * * * * * he played with the earth's great dawn and raced along these mountains through her mind. _of course>_ the hills could dance and sing and clap their hands. he saw it clear. how could it be otherwise? they were expressions of her giant moods--what in himself were thoughts--phases of her ample, surging consciousness.... he passed with the sunlight down the laughing valleys, spread with the morning wind above the woods, shone on the snowy peaks, and leaped with rushing laughter among the crystal streams. these were his swift and darting signs of joy, words of his singing as it were. his main and central being swung with the pulse of the earth, too great for any telling. he read the book of nature all about him, yes, but read it singing. he understood how this patient mother hungered for her myriad lost children, how in the passion of her summers she longed to bless them, to wake their high yearnings with the sweetness of her springs, and to whisper through her autumns how she prayed for their return...! instinctively he read the giant page before him. for "every form in nature is a symbol of an idea and represents a sign or letter. a succession of such symbols forms a language; and he who is a true child of nature may understand this language and know the character of everything. his mind, becomes a mirror wherein the attributes of natural things are reflected and enter the field of his consciousness.... for man himself is but a thought pervading the ocean of mind." whether or not lie remembered these stammering yet pregnant words from the outer world now left behind, the truth they shadowed forth rose up and took him ... and so he flowed across the mountains like a thing of wind and cloud, and so at length came up with the stragglers of that mighty herd of _urwelt_ life. he joined them in a river-bed of those ancient valleys. they welcomed him and took him to themselves. * * * * * for the particular stratum, as it were, of the earth's enormous collective consciousness to which he belonged, or rather that part and corner in which he was first at home, lay with these lesser ancient forms. although aware of far mightier expressions of her life, he could not yet readily perceive or join them. and this was easily comprehensible by the analogy of his own smaller consciousness. did not his own mind hold thoughts of various kinds that could not readily mingle? his thoughts of play and frolic, for instance, could not combine with the august and graver sentiments of awe and worship, though both could dwell together in the same heart. and here apparently, as yet, he only touched that frolicsome fringe of consciousness that knew these wild and playful lesser forms. thus, while he was aware of other more powerful figures of wonder all about him, he never quite achieved their full recognition. the ordered, deeper strata of her consciousness to which they belonged still lay beyond him. yet everywhere he fringed them. they haunted the entire world. they brooded hugely with a kind of deep magnificence that was like the slow brooding of the seasons; they rose, looming and splendid, through the air and sky, proud, strong, and tragic. for, standing aloof from all the rest, in isolation, like dreams in a poet's mind, too potent for expression, they thus knew tragedy--the tragedy of long neglect and loneliness. seated on peak and ridge, rising beyond the summits in the clouds, filling the valleys, spread over watercourse and forest, they passed their life of lonely majesty--apart, their splendor too remote for him as yet to share. long since had earth withdrawn them from the hearts of men. her lesser children knew them no more. but still through the deep recesses of her further consciousness they thundered and were glad... though few might hear that thunder, share that awful joy.... even the irishman--who in ordinary life had felt instinctively that worship which is close to love, and so to the union that love brings--even he, in this new-found freedom, only partially discerned their presences. he felt them now, these stately powers men once called the gods, but felt them from a distance; and from a distance, too, they saw and watched him come. he knew their gorgeous forms half dimmed by a remote and veiled enchantment; knew that they reared aloft like ancient towers, ruined by neglect and ignorance, starved and lonely, but still hauntingly splendid and engaging, still terrifically alive. and it seemed to him that sometimes their awful eyes flashed with the sunshine over slope and valley, and that wherever they rested flowers sprang to life. their nearness sometimes swept him like a storm, and then the entire herd with which he mingled would stand abruptly still, caught by a wave of awe and wonder. the host of them stood still upon the grass, their frolic held a moment, their voices hushed, only deep panting audible and the soft shuffling of their hoofs among the flowers. they bowed their splendid heads and waited--while a god went past them.... and through himself, as witness of the passage, a soft, majestic power also swept. with the lift of a hurricane, yet with the gentleness of dew, he felt the noblest in himself irresistibly evoked. it was gone again as soon as come. it passed. but it left him charged with a regal confidence and joy. as in the mountains a shower of snow picks out the highest peaks in white, tracing its course and pattern over the entire range, so in himself he knew the highest powers--aspirations, yearnings, hopes--raised into shining, white activity, and by these quickened splendors of his soul could recognize the nature of the god who came so close. * * * * * and, keeping mostly to the river-beds, they splashed in the torrents, played and leaped and cantered. from the openings of many a moist cave others came to join them. below a certain level, though, they never went; the forests knew them not; they loved the open, windy heights. they turned and circulated as by a common consent, wheeling suddenly together as if a single desire actuated the entire mass. one instinct spread, as it were, among the lot, shared instantly, conveying to each at once the general impulse. their movements in this were like those of birds whose flight in coveys obeys the order of a collective consciousness of which each single one is an item--expressions of one single bird-idea behind, distributed through all. and o'malley without questioning or hesitation obeyed, while yet he was free to do as he wished alone. to do as they did was the greatest pleasure, that was all. for sometimes with two of them, one fully-formed, the other of lesser mold--he flew on little journeys of his own. these two seemed nearer to him than the rest. he felt he knew them and had been with them before. their big brown eyes continually sought his own with pleasure. it almost seemed as if they had all three been separated long away from one another, and had at last returned. no definite memory of the interval came back, however; the sea, the steamer, and the journey's incidents all had faded--part of that world of lesser insignificant dream where they had happened. but these two kept close to him; they ran and danced together.... the time that passed included many dawns and nights and also many noons of splendor. it all seemed endless, perfect, and serene. that anything could finish here did not once occur to him. complete things cannot finish. he passed through seas and gulfs of glorious existence. for the strange thing was that while he only remembered afterwards the motion, play, and laughter, he yet had these other glimpses here and there of some ordered and progressive life existing just beyond. it lay hidden deeper within. he skimmed its surface; but something prevented his knowing it fully. and the limitation that held him back belonged, it seemed, to that thin world of trivial dreaming he had left behind. he had not shaken it off entirely. it still obscured his sight. the scale and manner of this greater life faintly reached him, nothing more. it may be that he only failed to bring back recollection, or it may be that he did not penetrate deeply enough to know. at any rate, he recognized that this sudden occasional passing by of vast deific figures had to do with it, and that all this ocean of earth's deeper consciousness was peopled with forms of life that obeyed some splendid system of progressive ordered existence. to be gathered up in this one greater consciousness was not the end.... rather was it merely the beginning.... meantime he learned that here, among these lesser thoughts of the great mother, all the pantheons of the world had first their origin--the greek, the eastern, and the northern too. here all the gods that men have ever half divined, still ranged the moods of her timeless consciousness. their train of beauty, too, accompanied them. * * * * * i cannot half recall the streams of passionate description with which his words clothed these glowing memories of his vision. great pictures of it haunt the background of my mind, pictures that lie in early mists, framed by the stars and glimmering through some golden, flowered dawn. besides the huge outlines that stood breathing in the background like dark mountains, there flitted here and there strange dreamy forms of almost impossible beauty, slender as lilies, eyes soft and starry shining through the dusk, hair flying past them like a rain of summer flowers. nymph-like they moved down all the pathways of the earth's young mind, singing and radiant, spring blossoms in the garden of her consciousness.... and other forms, more vehement and rude, urged to and fro across the pictures; crowding the movement; some playful and protean; some clothed as with trees, or air, or water; and others dark, remote, and silent, ranging her deeper layers of thought and dream, known rarely to the outer world at all. the rush and glory of it all is more than my mind can deal with. i gather, though, o'malley saw no definite forms, but rather knew "forces," powers, aspects of this soul of earth, facets she showed in long-forgotten days to men. certainly the very infusoria of his imagination were kindled and aflame when he spoke of them. through the tangled thicket of his ordinary mind there shone this passion of an uncommon loveliness and splendour. xxxvii "the hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things, so much the more is snatched from inevitable time." --richard jefferies in the relationship that his everyday mind bore to his present state there lay, moreover, a wealth of pregnant suggestion. the bridge connecting his former "civilized" condition with this cosmic experience was a curious one. that outer, lesser state, it seemed, had known a foretaste sometimes of the greater. and it was hence had come those dreams of a golden age that used to haunt him. for he began now to recall the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by means of certain indefinite channels only. and the things he remembered were not what the world calls important. they were moments when he had known--beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that most men overlook it altogether. he understood now why the thrill had been so wonderful. he saw clearly why those moments of ecstasy he had often felt in nature used to torture him with an inexpressible yearning that was rather pain than joy. for they were precisely what he now experienced when the viewless figure of a god passed by him. down there, out there, below--in that cabined lesser state--they had been partial, but were now complete. those moments of worship he had known in woods, among mountains, by the shores of desolate seas, even in a london street, perhaps at the sight of a tree in spring or of a pathway of blue sky between the summer clouds,--these had been, one and all, tentative, partial revelations of the consciousness of the soul of earth he now knew face to face. these were his only memories of that outer world. of people, cities, or of civilization apart from these, he had no single remembrance. * * * * * certain of these little partial foretastes now came back to him, like fragments of dream that trouble the waking day. he remembered, for instance, one definite picture: a hot autumn sun upon a field of stubble where the folded corn-sheaves stood; thistles waving by the hedges; a yellow field of mustard rising up the slope against the sky-line, and beyond a row of peering elms that rustled in the wind. the beauty of the little scene was somehow poignant. he recalled it vividly. it had flamed about him, transfiguring the world; he had trembled, yearning to see more, for just behind it he divined with an exulting passionate worship this gorgeous, splendid earth-being with whom at last he now actually moved. in that instant of a simple loveliness her consciousness had fringed his own--had bruised it. he had known it only by the partial channels of sight and smell and hearing, but had felt the greater thing beyond, without being able to explain it. and a portion of what he felt had burst in speech from his lips. he was there, he remembered, with two persons, a man and woman whose name and face, however, he could not summon, and he recalled that the woman smiled incredulously when he spoke of the exquisite perfume of those folded corn-sheaves in the air. she told him he imagined it. he saw again the pretty woman's smile of incomprehension; he saw the puzzled expression in the eyes of the man; he heard him murmur something prosaic about the soul, about birds, too, and the prospects of killing hundreds later--sport! he even saw the woman picking her way with caution as though the touch of earth could stain or injure her. he especially recalled the silence that had followed on his words that sought to show them--beauty.... he remembered, too, above all, the sense of loneliness among men that it induced in himself. but the memory brought him a curious, sharp pain; and turning to that couple who were now his playmates in this garden of the earth, he called them with a singing cry and cantered over leagues of flowers, wind, and sunshine before he stopped again. they leaped and danced together, exulting in their spacious _urwelt_ freedom ... want of comprehension no longer possible. * * * * * the memory fled away. he shook himself free of it. then others came in its place, another and another, not all with people, blind, deaf, and unreceptive, yet all of "common," simple scenes of beauty when something vast had surged upon him and broken through the barriers that stand between the heart and nature. such curious little scenes they were. in most of them he had evidently been alone. but one and all had touched his soul with a foretaste of this same nameless ecstasy that now he knew complete. in every one the consciousness of the earth had "bruised" his own. utterly simple they had been, one and all, these partial moments of blinding beauty in that lesser, outer world:--a big, brown, clumsy bee he saw, blundering into the petals of a wild flower on which the dew lay sparkling.... a wisp of colored cloud driving loosely across the hills, dropping a purple shadow.... deep, waving grass, plunging and shaking in the wind that drew out its underworld of blue and silver over the whole spread surface of a field.... a daisy closed for the night upon the lawn, eyes tightly shut, hands folded.... a south wind whispering through larches.... the pattering of summer rain upon young oak leaves in the dawn.... fingers of long blue distance upon dreamy woods.... anemones shaking their pale and starry little faces in the wind.... the columned stillness of a pine-wood in the dusk.... young birch trees mid the velvet gloom of firs.... the new moon setting in a cloud of stars.... the hush of stars in many a summer night.... sheep grazing idly down a sun-baked hill.... a path of moonlight on a lake.... a little wind through bare and wintry woods.... oh! he recalled the wonder, loveliness, and passion of a thousand more! they thronged and passed, and thronged again, crowding one another:--all golden moments of revelation when he had caught glimpses of the earth, and her greater moods had swept him up into herself. moments in which a god had passed.... these were his only memories of that outer world he had left behind: flashes of simple beauty. was thus the thrill of beauty then explained? was loveliness, as men know it, a revelation of the earth-soul behind? and were the blinding flash, the dazzling wonder, and the dream men seek to render permanent in music, color, line and language, a vision of her nakedness? down there, the poets and those simple enough of heart to stand close to nature, could catch these whispered fragments of the enormous message, told as in secret; but now, against her very heart he heard the thunder of the thing complete. now, in the glory of all naked bodily forms,--of women, men and children, of swift animals, of flowers, trees, and running water, of mountains and of seas,--he understood these partial revelations of the great earth-soul that bore them, gave them life. for one and all were channels for her loveliness. he saw the beauty of the "natural" instincts, the passion of motherhood and fatherhood--earth's seeking to project herself in endless forms and variety. he understood why love increased the heart and made it feel at one with all the world. * * * * * moreover in some amazing fashion he was aware that others from that outer world beside himself had access here, and that from this garden of the earth's deep central personality came all the inspiration known to men. he divined that others were even now drawing upon it like himself. the thoughts of the poets went past him like thin flames; the dreams of millions--mute, inexpressible yearnings like those he had himself once known--streamed by in pale white light, to shoot forward with a little nesting rush into some great figure ... and then return in double volume to the dreaming heart whence first they issued. shadows, too, he saw, by myriads--faint, feeble gropings of men and women seeking it eagerly, yet hardly knowing what they sought; but, above all, long, singing, beautiful tongues of colored flame that were the instincts of divining children and of the pure in heart. these came in rippling floods unerringly to their goal, lingered for long periods before returning. and all, he knew, were currents of the great earth life, moods, thoughts, dreams--expressions of her various consciousness with which she mothered, fed, and blessed all whom it was possible to reach. their passionate yearning, their worship, made access possible. along the tenderest portions of her personality these latter came, as by a spread network of infinitely delicate filaments that extended from herself, deliciously inviting.... * * * * * the thing, however, that remained with him long after his return to the normal state of lesser consciousness was the memory of those blinding moments when a god went past him, or, as he phrased it in another way, when he caught glimpses of the earth--naked. for these were instantaneous flashes of a gleaming whiteness, a dazzling and supreme loveliness that staggered thought and arrested feeling, while yet of a radiant simplicity that brought--for a second at least--a measure of comprehension. he then knew not mere partial projections. he saw beyond--deep down into the flaming center that gave them birth. the blending of his being with the cosmic consciousness was complete enough for this. he describes it as a spectacle of sheer glory, stupendous, even terrifying. the refulgent majesty of it utterly possessed him. the shock of its magnificence came, moreover, upon his entire being, and was not really of course a "sight" at all. the message came not through any small division of a single sense. with a massed yet soaring power it shook him free of all known categories. he then fringed a region of yet greater being wherein he tasted for a moment some secret comprehension of a true "divinity." the deliverance into ecstasy was complete. in these flashing moments, when a second seemed a thousand years, he further _understood_ the splendor of the stage beyond. earth in her turn was but a mood in the consciousness of the universe, that universe again was mothered by another vaster one ... and the total that included them all was not the gods--but god. xxxviii the litter of disordered notebooks filled to the covers with fragments of such beauty that they almost seem to burn with a light of their own, lies at this moment before me on my desk. i still hear the rushing torrent of his language across the spotted table-cloth in that dark restaurant corner. but the incoherence seems only to increase with my best efforts to combine the two. "go home and dream it," as he said at last when i ventured a question here and there toward the end of the recital. "you'll see it best that way--in sleep. get clear away from _me_, and my surface physical consciousness. perhaps it will come to you then." there remains, however, to record the manner of his exit from that great garden of the earth's fair youth. and he tells it more simply. or, perhaps, it is that i understand it better. for suddenly, in the midst of all the joy and splendor that he tasted, there came unbidden a strengthening of the tie that held him to his "outer," lesser state. a wave of pity and compassion surged in upon him from the depths. he saw the struggling millions in the prisons and cages civilization builds. he felt _with_ them. no happiness, he understood, could be complete that did not also include them all; and--he longed to tell them. the thought and the desire tore across him burningly. "if only i can get this back to them!" passed through him, like a flame. "i'll save the world by bringing it again to simple things! i've only got to tell it and all will understand at once--and follow!" and with the birth of the desire there ran a deep convulsive sound like music through the greater consciousness that held him close. those moods that were the gods, thronged gloriously about him, almost pressing forwards into actual sight.... he might have lingered where he was for centuries, or forever; but this thought pulled him back--the desire to share his knowledge with the world, the passion to heal and save and rescue. and instantly, in the twinkling of an eyelid, the urwelt closed its gates of horn and ivory behind him. an immense dark shutter dropped noiselessly with a speed of lightning across his mind. he stood without.... he found himself near the tumbled-down stone huts of a hamlet that he recognized. he staggered, rubbed his eyes, and stared. a forest of beech trees shook below him in a violent wind. he saw the branches tossing. a caucasian saddle-horse beside him nosed a sack that spilt its flour on the ground at his feet, he heard the animal's noisy breathing; he noted the sliding movement of the spilt flour before it finally settled; and some fifty yards beyond him, down the slopes, he saw a human figure--running. it was his georgian guide. the man, half stooping, caught the woolen bashlik that had fallen from his head. o'malley watched the man complete the gesture. still running, he replaced the cap upon his head. and coming up to his ears upon the wind were the words of a broken french sentence that he also recognized. disjointed by terror, it completed an interrupted phrase:-- "... one of them is close upon us. hide your eyes! save yourself!. they come from the mountains. they are old as the stones ... run...!" no other living being was in sight. xxxix the extraordinary abruptness of the transition produced no bewilderment, it seems. realizing that without rostom he would be in a position of helplessness that might be serious, the irishman put his hands to his lips and called out with authority to the running figure of his frightened guide. he shouted to him to stop. "there is nothing to fear. come back! are you afraid of a gust of wind?" and in his face and voice, perhaps too in his manner, was something he had brought back from the vision, for the man stopped at once in his headlong course, paused a moment to stare and question, and then, though still looking over his shoulder and making occasional signs of his religion, came slowly back to his employer's side again. "it has passed," said o'malley in a voice that seemed to crumble in his mouth. "it is gone again into the mountains whence it came. we are safe. with me," he added, not without a secret sense of humor stirring in him, "you will always be safe. i can protect us both." he felt as normal as a british officer giving orders to his soldiers. and the georgian slowly recovered his composure, yet for a long time keeping close to the other's side. the transition, thus, had been as sudden and complete as anything well could be. o'malley described it as the instantaneous dropping of a shutter across his mind. the entire vision had lasted but a fraction of a second, and in a fraction of a second, too, he had returned to his state of everyday lesser consciousness. that blending with the earth's great consciousness was but a flashing glimpse after all. the extension of personality had been momentary. so absolute, moreover, was the return that at first, remembering nothing, he took up life again exactly where he had left it. the guide completed the gesture and the sentence which the vision had interrupted, and o'malley, similarly, resumed his own thread of thought and action. only a hint remained. that, and a curious sense of interval, alone were left to witness this flash of an immense vision,--of cosmic consciousness--that apparently had filled so many days and nights. "it was like waking suddenly in the night out of deep sleep," he said; "not of one's own accord, or gradually, but as when someone shakes you out of slumber and you are wide awake at once. you have been dreaming vigorously--thick, lively, crowded dreams, and they all vanish on the instant. you catch the tail-end of the procession just as it's diving out of sight. in less than a second all is gone." for this was the hint that remained. he caught the flying tail-end of the vision. he knew he _had_ seen something. but, for the moment, that was all. then, by degrees and afterwards, the details re-emerged. in the days that followed, while with rostom he completed the journey already planned, the deeper consciousness gave back its memory piece by piece; and piece by piece he set it down in notebooks as best he could. the memory was on deposit deep within him, and at intervals he tapped it. hence, of course, is due the confused and fragmentary character of those bewildering entries; hence, at the same time, too, their truth and value. for here was no imaginative dream concocted in a mood of high invention. the parts were disjointed, incomplete, just as they came. the lesser consciousness, it seems, could not contain the thing complete; nor to the last, i judge, did he ever know complete recapture. * * * * * they wandered for two weeks and more about the mountains, meeting various adventure by the way, reported duly in his letters of travel. but these concerned the outer man and have no proper place in this strange record ... and by the middle of july he found himself once more in--civilization. at michaelevo he said good-bye to rostom and took the train. and it was with the return to the conditions of modern life that the reaction set in and stirred the deeper layers of consciousness to reproduce their store of magic. for this return to what seemed the paltry activities of an age of machinery, physical luxury, and superficial contrivances brought him a sense of pain that was acute and trenchant, more--a deep and poignant sense of loss. the yearnings, no longer satisfied, began again to reassert themselves. it was not the actual things the world seemed so busy about that pained him, but rather the point of view from which the world approached them--those that it deemed with one consent "important," and those, with rare exceptions, it obviously deemed worth no consideration at all, and ignored. for himself these values stood exactly reversed. the vision then came back to him, rose from the depths, blinded his eyes with maddening beauty, sang in his ears, possessed his heart and mind. he burned to tell it. the world of tired, restless men, he felt, must equally burn to hear it. some vision of a simple life lived close to nature came before his inner eye as the remedy for the vast disease of restless self-seeking of the age, the medicine that should cure the entire world. a return to nature was the first step toward the great deliverance men sought. and, most of all, he yearned to tell it first to heinrich stahl. to hear him talk about it, as he talked perhaps to me alone, was genuinely pathetic, for here, in terence o'malley, i thought to see the essential futility of all dreamers nakedly revealed. his vision was so fine, sincere, and noble; his difficulty in imparting it so painful; and its marriage with practical action so ludicrously impracticable. at any rate that combination of vision and action, called sometimes genius, which can shake the world, assuredly was not his. for his was no constructive mind; he was not "intellectual"; he _saw_, but with the heart; he could not build. to plan a new utopia was as impossible to him as to shape even in words the splendor he had known and lived. bricks and straw could only smother him before he laid what most would deem foundations. at first, too, in those days while waiting for the steamer in batoum, he kept strangely silent. even in his own thoughts was silence. he could not speak of what he knew. even paper refused it. but all the time this glorious winged thing, that yet was simple as the sunlight or the rain, went by his side, while his soul knew the relief of some divine, proud utterance that, he felt, could never know complete confession in speech or writing. later he stammered over it--to his notebooks and to me, and partially also to dr. stahl. but at first it dwelt alone and hidden, contained in this deep silence. the days of waiting he filled with walks about the streets, watching the world with new eyes. he took the russian steamer to poti, and tramped with a knapsack up the tchourokh gorge beyond bourtchka, regardless of the turkish gypsies and encampments of wild peoples on the banks. the sense of personal danger was impossible; he felt the whole world kin. that sense protected him. pistol and cartridges lay in his bag, forgotten at the hotel. delight and pain lay oddly mingled in him. the pain he recognized of old, but this great radiant happiness was new. the nightmare of modern cheap-jack life was all explained; unjustified, of course, as he had always dimly felt, symptom of deep disorder; all due, this feverish, external business, to an odd misunderstanding with the earth. humanity had somehow quarreled with her, claiming an independence that could not really last. for her the centuries of this estrangement were but a little thing perhaps--a moment or two in that huge life which counted a million years to lay a narrow bed of chalk. they would come back in time. meanwhile she ever called. a few, perhaps, already dreamed of return. movements, he had heard, were afoot--a tentative endeavor here and there. they heard, these few, the splendid whisper that, sweetly calling, ever passed about the world. for her voice in the last resort was more potent than all others--an enchantment that never wholly faded; men had but temporarily left her mighty sides and gone astray, eating of trees of knowledge that brought them deceptive illusions of a mad self-intoxication; fallen away into the pains of separateness and death. loss of direction and central control was the result; the babel of many tongues so clumsily invented, by which all turned one against another. insubordinate, artificial centers had assumed disastrous command. each struggled for himself against his neighbors. even religions fought to the blood. a single sect could damn the rest of humanity, yet in the same breath sing complaisantly of its own heaven. meanwhile she smiled in love and patience, letting them learn their lesson; meanwhile she watched and waited while, like foolish children, they toiled and sweated after futile transient things that brought no single letter of content. she let them coin their millions from her fairest thoughts, the gold and silver in her veins; and let them turn it into engines of destruction, knowing that each "life lost," returned into her arms and heart, crying with the pain of its wayward foolishness, the lesson learned; she watched their tears and struggling just outside the open nursery door, knowing they must at length return for food; and while thus waiting, watching, she heard all prayers that reached her; she answered them with love and forgiveness ever ready; and to the few who realized their folly--naughtiness, perhaps, at worst it was--this side of "death," she brought full measure of peace and joy and beauty. not permanently could they hurt themselves, for evil was but distance from her side, the ignorance of those who had wandered furthest into the little dark labyrinth of a separated self. the "intellect" they were so proud of had misled them. and sometimes, here and there across the ages, with a glory that refused utterly to be denied, she thundered forth her old sweet message of deliverance. through poet, priest, or child she called her children home. the summons rang like magic across the wastes of this dreary separated existence. some heard and listened, some turned back, some wondered and were strangely thrilled; some, thinking it too simple to be true, were puzzled by the yearning and the tears and went back to seek for a more difficult way; while most, denying the secret glory in their hearts, sought to persuade themselves they loved the strife and hurrying fever best. at other times, again, she chose quite different ways, and sent the amazing message in a flower, a breath of evening air, a shell upon the shore; though oftenest, perhaps, it hid in a strain of music, a patch of color on the sea or hills, a rustle of branches in a little twilight wind, a whisper in the dusk or in the dawn. he remembered his own first visions of it.... only never could the summons come to her children through the intellect, for this it was that led them first away. her message enters ever by the heart. the simple life! he smiled as he thought of the bald utopias here and there devised by men, for he had seen a truth whose brilliance smote his eyes too dazzlingly to permit of the smallest corner of darkness. remote, no doubt, in time that day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and men shall live together in peace and gentleness; when the inner life shall be admitted as the reality, strife, gain, and loss unknown because possessions undesired, and petty selfhood merged in the larger life--remote, of course, yet surely not impossible. he had seen the face of nature, heard her call, tasted her joy and peace; and the rest of the tired world might do the same. it only waited to be shown the way. the truth he now saw so dazzling was that all who heard the call might know it for themselves at once, cuirassed with shining love that makes the whole world kin, the earth a mother literally divine. each soul might thus provide a channel along which the summons home should pass across the world. to live with nature and share her greater consciousness, _en route_ for states yet greater, nearer to the eternal home--this was the beginning of the truth, the life, the way. he saw "religion" all explained: and those hard sayings that make men turn away:--the imagined dread of losing life to find it; the counsel of perfection that the neighbor shall be loved as self; the fancied injury and outrage that made it hard for rich men to enter the kingdom. of these, as of a hundred other sayings, he saw the necessary truth. it all seemed easy now. the world would see it with him; it must; it could not help itself. simplicity as of a little child, and selflessness as of the mystic--these were the splendid clues. death and the grave, indeed, had lost their victory. for in the stages of wider consciousness beyond this transient physical phase he saw all loved ones joined and safe, as separate words upgathered each to each in the parent sentence that explains them, the sentence in the paragraph, the paragraph in the whole grand story all achieved--and so at length into the eternal library of god that consummates the whole. he saw the glorious series, timeless and serene, advancing to the climax, and somehow understood that individuality at each stage was never lost but rather extended and magnified. love of the earth, life close to nature, and denial of so-called civilization was the first step upwards. in the simple life, in this return to nature, lay the opening of the little path that climbed to the stars and heaven. xl at the end of the week the little steamer dropped her anchor in the harbor and the irishman booked his passage home. he was standing on the wharf to watch the unloading when a hand tapped him on the shoulder and he heard a well-known voice. his heart leaped with pleasure. there were no preliminaries between these two. "i am glad to see you safe. you did not find your friend, then?" o'malley looked at the bronzed face beside him, noted the ragged tobacco-stained beard, and saw the look of genuine welcome in the twinkling brown eyes. he watched him lift his cap and mop that familiar dome of bald head. "i'm safe," was all he answered, "because i found him." for a moment dr. stahl looked puzzled. he dropped the hand he held so tightly and led him down the wharf. "we'll get out of this devilish sun," he said, leading the way among the tangle of merchandise and bales, "it's enough to boil our brains." they passed through the crowd of swarthy, dripping turks, georgians, persians, and armenians who labored half naked in the heat, and moved toward the town. a russian gunboat lay in the bay, side by side with freight and passenger vessels. an oil-tank steamer took on cargo. the scene was drenched in sunshine. the black sea gleamed like molten metal. beyond, the wooded spurs of the caucasus climbed through haze into cloudless blue. "it's beautiful," remarked the german, pointing to the distant coastline, "but hardly with the beauty of those grecian isles we passed together. eh?" he watched him closely. "you're coming back on our steamer?" he asked in the same breath. "it's beautiful," o'malley answered ignoring the question, "because it lives. but there is dust upon its outer loveliness, dust that has gathered through long ages of neglect, dust that i would sweep away--i've learnt how to do it. he taught me." stahl did not even look at him, though the words were wild enough. he walked at his side in silence. perhaps he partly understood. for this first link with the outer world of appearances was difficult for him to pick up. the person of stahl, thick-coated with the civilization whence he came, had brought it, and out of the ocean of glorious vision in his soul, o'malley took at random the first phrases he could find. "yes, i've booked a passage on your steamer," he added presently, remembering the question. it did not seem strange to him that his companion ignored both clues he offered. he knew the man too well for that. it was only that he waited for more before he spoke. they went to the little table outside the hotel pavement where several weeks ago they had drunk kakhetian wine together and talked of deeper things. the german called for a bottle, mineral water, ice, and cigarettes. and while they sipped the cooling golden liquid, hats off and coats on the backs of their chairs, stahl gave him the news of the world of men and events that had transpired meanwhile. o'malley listened vaguely as he smoked. it seemed remote, unreal, almost fantastic, this long string of ugly, frantic happenings, all symptoms of some disordered state that was like illness. the scream of politics, the roar and rattle of flying-machines, financial crashes, furious labor upheavals, rumors of war, the death of kings and magnates, awful accidents and strange turmoil in enormous cities. details of some sad prison life, it almost seemed, pain and distress and strife the note that bound them all together. men were mastered by these things instead of mastering them. these unimportant things they thought would make them free only imprisoned them. they lunched there at the little table in the shade, and in turn the irishman gave an outline of his travels. stahl had asked for it and listened attentively. the pictures interested him. "you've done your letters for the papers," he questioned him, "and now, perhaps, you'll write a book as well?" "something may force its way out--come blundering, thundering out in fragments, yes." "you mean you'd rather not--?" "i mean it's all too big and overwhelming. he showed me such blinding splendors. i might tell it, but as to writing--!" he shrugged his shoulders. and this time dr. stahl ignored no longer. he took him up. but not with any expected words or questions. he merely said, "my friend, there's something that i have to tell you--or, rather, i should say, to show you." he looked most keenly at him, and in the old familiar way he placed a hand upon his shoulder. his voice grew soft. "it may upset you; it may unsettle--prove a shock perhaps. but if you are prepared, we'll go--" "what kind of shock?" o'malley asked, startled a moment by the gravity of manner. "the shock of death," was the answer, gently spoken. the irishman only knew a swift rush of joy and wonder as he heard it. "but there is no such thing!" he cried, almost with laughter. "he taught me that above all else. there is no death!" "there is 'going away,' though," came the rejoinder, spoken low; "there is earth to earth and dust to dust--" "that's of the body--!" "that's of the body, yes," the older man repeated darkly. "there is only 'going home,' escape and freedom. i tell you there's only that. it's nothing but joy and splendor when you really understand." but dr. stahl made no immediate answer, nor any comment. he paid the bill and led him down the street. they took the shady side. passing beyond the skirts of the town they walked in silence. the barracks where the soldiers sang, the railway line to tiflis and baku, the dome and minarets of the church, were left behind in turn, and presently they reached the hot, straight dusty road that fringed the sea. they heard the crashing of the little waves and saw the foam creamily white against the dark grey pebbles of the beach. and when they reached a small enclosure where thin trees were planted among sparse grass all brown and withered by the sun, they paused, and stahl pointed to a mound, marked at either end by rough stone boulder. a date was on it, but no name. o'malley calculated the difference between the russian calendar and the one he was accustomed to. stahl checked him. "the fifteenth of june," the german said. "the fifteenth of june, yes," said o'malley very slowly, but with wonder and excitement in his heart. "that was the day that rostom tried to run away--the day i saw him come to me from the trees--the day we started off together ... to the garden...." he turned to his companion questioningly. for a moment the rush of memory was quite bewildering. "he never left batoum at all, you see," stahl continued, without looking up. "he went straight to the hospital the day we came into port. i was summoned to him in the night--that last night while you slept so deeply. his old strange fever was upon him then, and i took him ashore before the other passengers were astir. i brought him to the hospital myself. and he never left his bed." he pointed down to the little nameless grave at their feet where a wandering wind from the sea just stirred the grasses. "that was the date on which he died." "he went away in the early morning," he added in a low voice that held both sadness and sympathy. "he went home," said the irishman, a tide of joy rising tumultuously through his heart as he remembered. the secret of that complete and absolute leadership was out. he understood it all. it had been a spiritual adventure to the last. then followed a pause. in silence they stood there for some minutes. there grew no flowers on that grave, but o'malley stooped down and picked a strand of the withered grass. he put it carefully between the pages of his notebook; and then, lying flat against the ground where the sunshine fell in a patch of white and burning glory, he pressed his lips to the crumbling soil. he kissed the earth. oblivious of stahl's presence, or at least ignoring it, he worshipped. and while he did so he heard that little sound he loved so well--which more than any words or music brought peace and joy, because it told his passion all complete. with his ears close to the earth he heard it, yet at the same time heard it everywhere. for it came with the falling of the waves upon the shore, through the murmur of the rustling branches overhead, and even across the whispering of the withered grass about him. deep down in the center of the mothering earth he heard it too in faintly rising pulse. it was the exquisite little piping on a reed--the ancient fluting of the everlasting pan.... and when he rose he found that stahl had turned away and was gazing at the sea, as though he had not noticed. "doctor," he cried, yet so softly it was a whisper rather than a call, "i heard it then again; it's everywhere! oh, tell me that you hear it too!" stahl turned and looked at him in silence. there was a moisture in his eyes, and on his face a look of softness that a woman might have worn. "i've brought it back, you see, i've brought it back. for that's the message--that's the sound and music i must give to all the world. no words, no book can tell it." his hat was off, his eyes were shining, his voice broke with the passion of joy he yearned to share yet knew so little how to impart. "if i can pipe upon the flutes of pan the millions all will listen, will understand, and--follow. tell me, oh, tell me, that _you_ heard it too!" "my friend, my dear young friend," the german murmured in a voice of real tenderness, "you heard it truly--but you heard it in your heart. few hear the pipes of pan as you do. few care to listen. today the world is full of other sounds that drown it. and even of those who hear," he shrugged his shoulders as he led him away toward the sea,--"how few will care to follow--how fewer still will _dare._" and while they lay upon the beach and watched the line of foam against their feet and saw the seagulls curving idly in the blue and shining air, he added underneath his breath--o'malley hardly caught the murmur of his words so low he murmured them:-- "the simple life is lost forever. it lies asleep in the golden age, and only those who sleep and dream can ever find it. if you would keep your joy, dream on, my friend! dream on, but dream alone!" xli summer blazed everywhere and the sea lay like a blue pool of melted sky and sunshine. the summits of the caucasus soon faded to the east and north, and to the south the wooded hills of the black sea coast accompanied the ship in a line of wavy blue that joined the water and the sky indistinguishably. the first-class passengers were few; o'malley hardly noticed their existence even. an american engineer, building a railway in turkey, came on board at trebizond; there were one or two light women on their way home from baku, and the attaché of a foreign embassy from teheran. but the irishman felt more in touch with the hundred peasant-folk who joined the ship at ineboli from the interior of asia minor and were bound as third-class emigrants for marseilles and far america. dark-skinned, wild-eyed, ragged, very dirty, they had never seen the sea before, and the sight of a porpoise held them spellbound. they lived on the after-deck, mostly cooking their own food, the women and children sleeping beneath a large tarpaulin that the sailors stretched for them across the width of deck. at night they played their pipes and danced, singing, shouting, and waving their arms--always the same tune over and over again. o'malley watched them for hours together. he also watched the engineer, the over-dressed women, the attaché. he understood the difference between them as he had never understood it before. he understood the difficulty of his task as well. how in the world could he ever explain a single syllable of his message to these latter, or waken in them the faintest echo of desire to know and listen. the peasants, though all unconscious of the blinding glory at their elbows, stood far nearer to the truth. "been further east, i suppose?" the engineer observed, one afternoon as the steamer lay off broussa, taking on a little extra cargo of walnut logs. he looked admiringly at the irishman's bronzed skin. "take a better sun than this to put that on!" he laughed in his breezy, vigorous way, and the other laughed with him. previous conversations had already paved the way to a traveler's friendship, and the american had taken to him. "up in the mountains," he replied, "camping out and sleeping in the sun did it." "the caucasus! ah, i'd like to get up there myself a bit. i'm told they're a wonderful thing in the mountain line." scenery for him was evidently a commercial commodity, or it was nothing. it was the most up-to-date nation in the world that spoke--in the van of civilization--representing the last word in progress due to triumph over nature. o'malley said he had never seen anything like them. he described the trees, the flowers, the tribes, the scenery in general; he dwelt upon the vast uncultivated spaces, the amazing fruitfulness of the soil, the gorgeous beauty above all. "i'd like to get the overcrowded cities of england and europe spread all over it," he said with enthusiasm. "there is room for thousands there to lead a simple life close to nature, in health and peace and happiness. even your tired millionaires could escape their restless, feverish worries, lay down their weary burden of possessions, and enjoy the earth at last. the poor would cease to be with us; life become true and beautiful again--" he let it pour out of him, building the scaffolding of his dream before him in the air and filling it in with beauty. the american listened in patience, watching the walnut logs being towed through the water to the side of the ship. from time to time he spat on them, or into the sea. he let the beauty go completely past him. "great idea, that!" he interrupted at length. "you're interested, i see, in socialism and communistic schemes. there's money in them somewhere right enough, if a man only could hit the right note at the first go off. take a bit of doing, though!" one of the women from baku came up and leaned upon the rails a little beyond them. the sickly odor of artificial scent wafted down. the attaché strolled along the deck and ogled her. "get a few of that sort to draw the millionaires in, eh?" he added vulgarly. "even those would come, yes," said the irishman softly, realizing for the first time within his memory that his gorge did not rise, "for they too would change, grow clean and sweet and beautiful." the engineer looked sharply into his face, uncertain whether he had not missed a clever witticism of his own kind. but o'malley did not meet his glance. his eyes were far away upon the snowy summit of olympus where a flock of fleecy clouds hung hovering like the hair of the eternal gods. "they say there's timber going to waste that you could get to the coast merely for the cost of drawing it--caucasian walnut, too, to burn," the other continued, getting on to safer ground, "and labor's dirt cheap. there's every sort of mineral too god ever made. you could build light railways and run the show by electricity. and water-power for the asking. you'd have to get a concession from russia first though," he added, spitting down upon a huge floating log in the clear sea underneath, "and russia's got palms that want a lot of greasing. i guess the natives, too, would take a bit of managing." the woman beyond had shifted several feet nearer, and after a pause the irishman found no words to fill, his companion turned to address a remark to her. o'malley took the opening and moved away. "here's my card, anyway," the american added, handing him an over-printed bit of large pasteboard from a fat pocket-book that bore his name and address in silver on the outside. "if you develop the scheme and want a bit of money, count me in." he went to the other side of the vessel and watched the peasants on the lower deck. their dirt seemed nothing by comparison. it was only on their clothes and bodies. the odor of this unwashed humanity was almost sweet and wholesome. it cleansed the sickly taint of that other scent from his palate; it washed his mind of thoughts as well. he stood there long in dreaming silence, while the sunlight on olympus turned from gold to rose, and the sea took on the colors of the fading sky. he watched a dark kurd baby sliding down the tarpaulin. a kitten was playing with a loose end of rope too heavy for it to move. further off a huge fellow with bared chest and the hands of a colossus sat on a pile of canvas playing softly on his wooden pipes. the dark hair fell across his eyes, and a group of women listened idly while they busied themselves with the cooking of the evening meal. immediately beneath him a splendid-eyed young woman crammed a baby to her naked breast. the kitten left the rope and played with the tassel of her scarlet shawl. and as he heard those pipes and watched the grave, untamed, strong faces of those wild peasant men and women, he understood that, low though they might be in scale of evolution, there was yet absent from them the touch of that deteriorating _something_ which civilization painted into those other countenances. but whether the word he sought was degradation or whether it was shame, he could not tell. in all they did, the way they moved, their dignity and independence, there was this something, he felt, that bordered on being impressive. their wants were few, their worldly possessions in a bundle, yet they had this thing that set them in a place apart, if not above, these others:--beyond that simpering attaché for all his worldly diplomacy, that engineer with brains and skill, those painted women with their clever playing upon the feelings and desires of their kind. there _was_ this difference that set the ragged dirty crew in a proud and quiet atmosphere that made them seem almost distinguished by comparison, and certainly more desirable. rough and untutored though they doubtless were, they still possessed unspoiled that deeper and more elemental nature that bound them closer to the earth. it needed training, guidance, purifying; yes; but, in the last resort, was it not of greater spiritual significance and value than the mode of comparatively recently-developed reason by which civilization had produced these other types? he watched them long. the sun sank out of sight, the sea turned dark, ten thousand stars shone softly in the sky, and while the steamer swung about and made for peaked andros and the coast of greece, he still stood on in reverie and wonder. the wings of his great dream stirred mightily ... and he saw pale millions of men and women trooping through the gates of horn and ivory into that garden where they should find peace and happiness in clean simplicity close to the earth.... xlii there followed four days then of sea, greece left behind, messina and the lipari islands past; and the blue outline of sardinia and corsica began to keep pace with them as they neared the narrow straits of bonifacio between them. the passengers came up to watch the rocky desolate shores slip by so close, and captain burgenfelder was on the bridge. grey-headed rocks rose everywhere close about the ship; overhead the seagulls cried and circled; no vegetation was visible on either shore, no houses, no abode of man--nothing but the lighthouses, then miles of deserted rock dressed in those splendors of the sun's good-night. the dinner-gong had sounded but the sight was too magnificent to leave, for the setting sun floated on an emblazoned sea and stared straight against them in level glory down the narrow passage. unimaginable colors painted sky and wave. the ruddy cliffs of bleak loneliness rose from a bed of flame. soft airs fanned the cheeks with welcome coolness after the fierce heat of the day. there was a scent of wild honey in the air borne from the purple uplands far, far away. "i wonder, oh, i wonder, if they realized that a god is passing close...!" the irishman murmured with a rising of the heart, "and that here is a great mood of the earth-consciousness inviting them to peace! or do they merely see a yellow sun that dips beneath a violet sea...?" the washing of the water past the steamer's sides caught away the rest of the half-whispered words. he remembered that host of many thousand heads that bowed in silence while a god swept by.... it was almost a shock to hear a voice replying close beside him:-- "come to my cabin when you're ready. my windows open to the west. we can be alone together. we can have there what food we need. you would prefer it perhaps?" he felt the touch of that sympathetic hand upon his shoulder, and bent his head to signify agreement. for a moment, face to face with that superb sunset, he had known a deep and utter peace in the vast bosom of this greater soul about him. her consciousness again had bruised and fringed his own. across that delicately divided threshold the beauty and the power of the gods had poured in a flood into his being. and only there was peace, only there was joy, only there was the death of those ancient yearnings that tortured his little personal and separate existence. the return to the world was aching pain again. the old loneliness that seemed more than he could bear swept icily through him, contracting life and freezing every spring of joy. for in that single instant of return he felt pass into him a loneliness of the whole travailing world, the loneliness of countless centuries, the loneliness of all the races of the earth who were exiled and had lost the way. too deep it lay for words or tears or sighs. the doctor's invitation came most opportunely. and presently in silence he turned his back upon that opal sky of dream from which the sun had gone, and walked slowly down the deck toward stahl's cabin. "if only i can share it with them," he thought as he went; "if only men will listen, if only they will come. to keep it all to myself, to dream alone, will kill me." and as he stood before the door it seemed he heard wild rushing through the sky, the tramping of a thousand hoofs, a roaring of the wind, the joy of that free, torrential passage with the earth. he turned the handle and entered the cozy room where weeks before they held the inquest on the little empty tenement of flesh, remembering how that other figure had once stood where he now stood--part of the sunrise, part of the sea, part of the morning winds. * * * * * they had their meal almost in silence, while the glow of sunset filled the cabin through the western row of port-holes, and when it was over stahl made the coffee as of old and lit the familiar black cigar. slowly o'malley's pain and restlessness gave way before the other's soothing quiet. he had never known him before so calm and gentle, so sympathetic, almost tender. the usual sarcasm seemed veiled in sadness; there was no irony in the voice, nor mockery in the eyes. then to the irishman it came suddenly that all these days while he had been lost in dreaming the doctor had kept him as of old under close observation. the completeness of his reverie had concealed from him this steady scrutiny. he had been oblivious to the fact that stahl had all the time been watching, investigating, keenly examining. abruptly he now realized it. and then stahl spoke. his tone was winning, his manner frank and inviting. but it was the sadness about him that won o'malley's confidence so wholly. "i can guess," he said, "something of the dream you've brought with you from those mountains. i can understand--more, perhaps, than you imagine, and i can sympathize--more than you think possible. tell me about it fully--if you can. i see your heart is very full, and in the telling you will find relief. i am not hostile, as you sometimes feel. tell me, my dear, young clear-eyed friend. tell me your vision and your hope. perhaps i might even help ... for there may be things that i could also tell to you in return." something in the choice of words, none of which offended; in the atmosphere and setting, no detail of which jarred; and in the degree of balance between utterance and silence his world of inner forces just then knew, combined to make the invitation irresistible. moreover, he had wanted to tell it all these days. stahl was already half convinced. stahl would surely understand and help him. it was the psychological moment for confession. the two men rose in the same moment, stahl to lock the cabin doors against interruption, o'malley to set their chairs more closely side by side so that talking should be easiest. and then without demur or hesitation he opened his heart to this other and let the floodgates of his soul swing wide. he told the vision and he told the dream; he told his hope as well. and the story of his passion, filled in with pages from those notebooks he ever carried in his pocket, still lasted when the western glow had faded from the sky and the thick-sown stars shone down upon the gliding steamer. the hush of night lay soft upon the world before he finished. he told the thing complete, much, i imagine, as he told it all to me upon the roof of that apartment building and in the dingy soho restaurant. he told it without reservations--his life-long yearnings: the explanation brought by the presence of the silent stranger upon the outward voyage: the journey to the garden: the vision that all life--from gods to flowers, from men to mountains--lay contained in the conscious being of the earth, that beauty was but glimpses of her essential nakedness; and that salvation of the world's disease of modern life was to be found in a general return to the simplicity of nature close against her mothering heart. he told it all--in words that his passionate joy chose faultlessly. and heinrich stahl in silence listened. he asked no single question. he made no movement in his chair. his black cigar went out before the half of it was smoked. the darkness hid his face impenetrably. and no one came to interrupt. the murmur of the speeding steamer, and occasional footsteps on the deck as passengers passed to and fro in the cool of the night, were the only sounds that broke the music of that incurable idealist's impassioned story. xliii and then at length there came a change of voice across the cabin. the irishman had finished. he sank back in the deep leather chair, exhausted physically, but with the exultation of his mighty hope still pouring at full strength through his heart. for he had ventured further than ever before and had spoken of a possible crusade--a crusade that should preach peace and happiness to every living creature. and dr. stahl, in a voice that showed how deeply he was moved, asked quietly:-- "by leading the nations back to nature you think they shall advance to truth at last?" "with time," was the reply. "the first step lies there:--in changing the direction of the world's activities, changing it from the transient outer to the eternal inner. in the simple life, external possessions unnecessary and recognized as vain, the soul would turn within and seek reality. only a tiny section of humanity has time to do it now. there is no leisure. civilization means acquirement for the body: it ought to mean development for the soul. once sweep aside the trash and rubbish men seek outside themselves today, and the wings of their smothered souls would stir again. consciousness would expand. nature would draw them first. they would come to feel the earth as i did. self would disappear, and with it this false sense of separateness. the greater consciousness would waken in them. the peace and joy and blessedness of inner growth would fill their lives. but, first, this childish battling to the death for external things must cease, and civilization stand revealed for the bleak and empty desolate thing it really is. it leads away from god and from the things that are eternal." the german made no answer; o'malley ceased to speak; a long silence fell between them. then, presently, stahl relighted his cigar, and lapsing into his native tongue--always a sign with him of deepest seriousness--he began to talk. "you've honored me," he said, "with a great confidence; and i am deeply, deeply grateful. you have told your inmost dream--the thing men find it hardest of all to speak about." he felt in the darkness for his companion's hand and held it tightly for a moment. he made no other comment upon what he had heard. "and in return--in some small way of return," he continued, "i may ask you to listen to something of my own, something of possible interest. no one has ever known it from my lips. only, in our earlier conversations on the outward voyage, i hinted at it once or twice. i sometimes warned you--" "i remember. you said he'd 'get' me, 'win' me over--'appropriation' was the word you used." "i suggested caution, yes; urged you not to let yourself go too completely; told you he represented danger to yourself, and to humanity as it is organized today--" "and all the rest," put in o'malley a shade impatiently. "i remember perfectly." "because i knew what i was talking about." the doctor's voice came across the darkness somewhat ominously. and then he added in a louder tone, evidently sitting forward as he said it: "for the thing that has happened to yourself as i foresaw it would, had already _almost_ happened to me too!" "to you, doctor, too?" exclaimed the irishman in the moment's pause that followed. "i saved myself just in time--by getting rid of the cause." "you discharged him from the hospital, because you were afraid!" he said it sharply as though are instant of the old resentment had flashed up. by way of answer stahl rose from his chair and abruptly turned up the electric lamp upon the desk that faced them across the cabin. evidently he preferred the light. o'malley saw that his face was white and very grave. he grasped for the first time that the man was speaking professionally. the truth came driving next behind it--that stahl regarded him as a patient. * * * * * "please go on, doctor," he said, keenly on the watch. "i'm deeply interested." the wings of his great dream still bore him too far aloft for him to feel more than the merest passing annoyance at his discovery. resentment had gone too. sadness and disappointment for an instant touched him perhaps, but momentarily. in the end he felt sure that stahl would stand at his side, completely won over and convinced. "you had a similar experience to my own, you say," he urged him. "i am all eagerness and sympathy to hear." "we'll talk in the open air," the doctor answered, and ringing the bell for the steward to clear away, he drew his companion out to the deserted decks. they moved toward the bows, past the sleeping peasants. the stars were mirrored in a glassy sea and toward the north the hills of corsica stood faintly outlined in the sky. it was already long after midnight. "yes, a similar thing nearly happened to me," he resumed as they settled themselves against a coil of rope where only the murmur of the washing sea could reach them, "and might have happened to others too. inmates of that big _krankenhaus_ were variously affected. my action, tardy i must admit, saved myself and them." and the german then told his story as a man might tell of his escape from some grave disaster. in the emphatic sentences of his native language he told it, congratulating himself all through. the russian had almost won him over, gained possession of his heart and mind, persuaded him, but in the end had failed--because the other ran away. it was like hearing a man describe an attempt to draw him into heaven, then boast of his escape. his caution and his judgment, as he put it, saved him, but to the listening celt it rather seemed that his compromise it was that damned him. the kingdom of heaven is hard to enter, for stahl had possessions not of the wood and metal order, but possessions of the brain and reason he was too proud to forego completely. they kept him out. with increasing sadness, too, he heard it; for here he realized was the mental attitude of an educated, highly civilized man today--a representative type regarded by the world as highest. it was this he had to face. moreover stahl was more than merely educated, he was understandingly sympathetic, meeting the great dream halfway; seeing in it possibilities; admitting its high beauty, and even sometimes speaking of it with hope and a touch of enthusiasm. its originator none the less he regarded as a reactionary dreamer, an unsettling and disordered influence, a patient, if not even something worse! stahl's voice and manner were singular while he told it all, revealing one moment the critical mind that analyzed and judged, and the next an enthusiasm almost of the mystic. alternately, like the man and woman of those quaint old weather-glasses, each peered out and showed a face, the reins of compromise yet ever seeking to hold them well in leash and drive them together. hardly, it seems, had the strange russian been under his care a week before he passed beneath the sway of his curious personality and experienced the attack of singular emotions upon his heart and mind. he described at first the man's arrival, telling it with the calm and balanced phrases a doctor uses when speaking merely of a patient who had stirred his interest. he first detailed the method of suggestion he had used to revive the lapsed memory--and its utter failure. then he passed on to speak of him more generally: but briefly and condensed. "the man," he said, "was so engaging, so docile, his personality altogether so attractive and mysterious, that i took the case myself instead of delegating it to my assistants. all efforts to trace his past collapsed. it was as if he had drifted into that little hotel out of the night of time. of madness there was no evidence whatever. the association of ideas in his mind, though limited, was logical and rigid. his health was perfect, barring strange, sudden fever; his vitality tremendous; yet he ate most sparingly and the only food he touched was fruit and milk and vegetables. meat made him sick, the huge frame shuddered when he saw it. and from all the human beings in the place with whom he came in contact he shrank with a kind of puzzled dismay. with animals, most oddly it seemed, he sought companionship; he would run to the window if a dog barked, or to hear a horse's hoofs; a persian cat belonging to one of the nurses never left his side, and i have seen the trees in the yard outside his window thick with birds, and even found them in the room and on the sill, flitting about his very person, unafraid and singing. "with me, as with the attendants, his speech was almost nil--laconic words in various languages, clipped phrases that sometimes combined russian, french, or german, other tongues as well. "but, strangest of all, with animal life he seemed to hold this kind of communication that was intelligible both to himself and them. animals certainly were 'aware' of him. it was not speech. it ran in a deep, continuous murmur like a droning, humming sound of wind. i took the hint thus faintly offered. i gave him his freedom in the yards and gardens. the open air and intercourse with natural life was what he craved. the sadness and the air of puzzled fretting then left his face, his eyes grew bright, his whole presentment happier; he ran and laughed and even sang. the fever that had troubled him all vanished. often myself i took the place of nurse or orderly to watch him, for the man's presence more than interested me: it gave me a renewed sense of life that was exhilarating, invigorating, delightful. and in his appearance, meanwhile, something that was not size or physical measurement, turned--tremendous. "a part of me that was not mind--a sort of forgotten instinct blindly groping--came of its own accord to regard him as some loose fragment of a natural, cosmic life that had somehow blundered down into a human organism it sought to use.... "and then it was for the first time i recognized the spell he had cast upon me; for, when the committee decided there was no reason to keep him longer, i urged that he should stay. making a special plea, i took him as a private patient of my own. i kept him under closer personal observation than ever before. i needed him. something deep within me, something undivined hitherto, called out into life by his presence, could not do without him. this new craving, breakingly wild and sweet, awoke in my blood and cried for him. his presence nourished it in me. most insidiously it attacked me. it stirred deep down among the roots of my being. it 'threatened my personality' seems the best way i can put it; for, turning a critical analysis upon it, i discovered that it was an undermining and revolutionary change going steadily forward in my character. its growth had hitherto been secret. when i first recognized its presence, the thing was already strong. for a long time, it had been building. "and the change in a word--you will grasp my meaning from the shortest description of essentials--was this: that ambition left me, ordinary desire crumbled, the outer world men value so began to fade." "and in their place?" cried o'malley breathlessly, interrupting for the first time. "came a rushing, passionate desire to escape from cities and live for beauty and simplicity 'in the wilderness'; to taste the life _he_ seemed to know; to go out blindly with him into woods and desolate places, and be mixed and blended with the loveliness of earth and nature. this was the first thing i knew. it was like an expansion of my normal world--almost an extension of consciousness. it somehow threatened my sense of personal identity. and--it made me hesitate." o'malley caught the tremor in his voice. even in the telling of it the passion plucked at him, for here, as ever, he stood on the border-line of compromise, his heart tempting him toward salvation, his brain and reason tugging at the brakes. "the sham and emptiness or modern life, its drab vulgarity, the unworthiness of its very ideals stood appallingly revealed before some inner eye just opening. i felt shaken to the core of what had seemed hitherto my very solid and estimable self. how the man thus so powerfully affected me lies beyond all intelligible explanation. to use the obvious catchword 'hypnotism' is to use a toy and stop a leak with paper. for his influence was _unconsciously_ exerted. he cast no net of clever, persuasive words about my thought. out of that deep, strange silence of the man it somehow came. his actions and his simple happiness of face and manner--both in some sense the raw material of speech perhaps--may have operated as potently suggestive agents; but no adequate causes to justify the result, apart from the fantastic theories i have mentioned, have ever yet come within the range of my understanding. i can only give you the undeniable effects." "your sense of extended consciousness," asked his listener, "was this continuous, once it had begun?" "it came in patches," stahl continued. "my normal, everyday self was thus able to check it. while it derided, commiserated this everyday self, the latter stood in dread of it and even awe. my training, you see, regarded it as symptom of disorder, a beginning of unbalance that might end in insanity, the thin wedge of a dissociation of the personality morton prince and others have described." his speech grew more and more jerky, even incoherent; evidently the material had not even now been fully reduced to order in his mind. "among other curious symptoms i soon established that this subtle spreading of my consciousness grew upon me especially during sleep. the business of the day distracted, scattered it. on waking in the morning, as with the physical fatigue that comes toward the closing of the day, it was strongest. "and so, in order to examine it closely when in fullest manifestation, i came to spend the nights with him. i would creep in while he slept and stay till morning, alternately sleeping and waking myself. i watched the two of us together. i also watched the 'two' in me. and thus it was i made the further strange discovery that the influence _he_ exerted on me was strongest while he slept. it is best described by saying that in his sleep i was conscious that he sought to draw me with him--away somewhere into his own wonderful world--the state or region, that is, where he manifested completely instead of partially as i knew him here. his personality was a channel somewhere out into a living, conscious nature...." "only," interrupted o'malley, "you felt that to yield and go involved some nameless inner catastrophe, and so resisted?" he chose his phrase with purpose. "because i discovered," was the pregnant answer, given steadily while he watched his listener closely through the darkness, "that this desire for escape the man had wakened in me was nothing more or less than the desire to leave the world, to leave the conditions that prevented--in fact to leave the body. my discontent with modern life had gone as far as that. it was the birth of the suicidal mania." * * * * * the pause that followed the words, on the part of dr. stahl at any rate, was intentional. o'malley held his peace. the men shifted their places oil the coil of rope, for both were cramped and stiff with the lengthy session. for a minute or two they leaned over the bulwarks and watched the phosphorescent foam in silence. the blue mountainous shores slipped past in shadowy line against the stars. but when they sat down again their relative positions were not what they had been before. dr. stahl had placed himself between his listener and the sea. and o'malley did not let the manoeuvre escape him. smiling to himself he noticed it. just as surely he noticed, too, that the whole recital was being told him with a purpose. "you really need not be afraid," he could not resist saying. "the idea of escape _that_ way has never even come to me at all. and, anyhow, i've far too much on hand first in telling the world my message." he laughed in the silence that took his words, for stahl said nothing and made as though he had not heard. but the irishman understood that it was in the spirit of feeble compromise that danger lay--if danger there was at all, and he himself was far beyond such weakness. his eye was single and his body full of light, and the faith that plays with mountains had made him whole. return to nature for him involved no denial of human life, nor depreciation of human interests, but only a revolutionary shifting of values. "and it was one night while he slept and i watched him in the little room," resumed the german as though there had been no interruption, "i noticed first so decisively this growing of a singular size about him i have already mentioned, and grasped its meaning. for the bulk of the man while growing--emerging, rather, i should say--assumed another shape than his own. it was not my eyes that saw it. i saw him as _he felt himself to be_. the creature's personality, his essential inner being, was acting directly upon my own. his influence was at me from another point or angle. first the emotions, then the senses you see. it was a finely organized attack. "i definitely understood at last that my mind was affected--and proved it too, for the instant effort i made at recovery resulted in my seeing him normal again. the size and shape retreated the moment i denied them." o'malley noticed how the speaker's voice lingered over the phrase. again he knew the intention of the pause that followed. he held his peace, however, and waited. "nor was sight the only sense affected," stahl continued, "for smell and hearing also brought their testimony. through all but touch, indeed, the hallucination attacked me. for sometimes at night while i sat up watching in the little room, there rose outside the open window in the yards and gardens a sound of tramping, a distant roaring as of voices in a rising wind, a rushing, hollow murmur, confused and deep like that of forests, or the swift passage of a host of big birds across the sky. i heard it, both in the air and on the ground--this tramping on the lawns, this curious shaking of the atmosphere. and with it at the same time a sharp and mingled perfume that made me think of earth and leaves, of flowers after rain, of plains and open spaces, most singular of all--of animals and horses. "before the firm denial of my mind, they vanished, just as the change of form had vanished. but both left me weaker than they found me, more tender to attack. moreover, i understood most plainly, that they emanated all from him. these 'emanations' came, too, chiefly, as i mentioned, whilst he slept. in sleep, it seemed, he set them free. the slumber of the body disengaged them. and then the instinct came to warn me--presenting itself with the authority of an unanswerable intuition--the realization, namely, that if, for a single moment in his presence, i slept, the changes would leap forward in my own being, and i should join him." "escape! know freedom in a larger consciousness!" cried the other. "and for a man of my point of view and training to have permitted such a conviction at all," he went on, the interruption utterly ignored again, "proves how far along the road i had already traveled without knowing it. only at the time i was not aware of this. it was the shock of full discovery later that brought me to my senses, when, seeking to withdraw,--i found i could not." "and so you ran away." it came out bluntly enough, with a touch of scorn but ill concealed. "we discharged him. but before that came there was more i have to tell you--if you still care to hear it." "i'm not tired, if that's what you mean. i could listen all night, as far as that goes." he rose to stretch his legs a moment, and stahl rose too--instantly. together they leaned over the bulwarks. the german's hat was off and the air made by the steamer's passage drew his beard out. the warm soft wind brought odors of sea and shore. it caressed their faces, then passed on across those sleeping peasants on the lower deck. the masts and rigging swung steadily against the host of stars. "before i thus knew myself half caught," continued the doctor, standing now close enough beside him for actual contact, "and found it difficult to get away, other things had happened, things that confirmed the change so singularly begun in me. they happened everywhere; confirmation came from many quarters; though slight enough, they filled in all the gaps and crevices, strengthened the joints, and built the huge illusion round me all complete until it held me like a prison. "and they are difficult to tell. only, indeed, to yourself who underwent a similar experience up there in the mountains, could they bring much meaning. you had the same temptation and you--weathered the same storm." he caught o'malley's arm a moment and held it. "you escaped this madness just as i did, and you will realize what i mean when i say that the sensation of losing my sense of personal identity became so dangerously, so seductively strong. the feeling of extended consciousness became delicious--too delicious to resist. a kind of pagan joy and exultation known to some in early youth, but put away with the things of youth, possessed me. in the presence of this other's soul, so strangely powerful in its silence and simplicity, i felt as though i touched new sources of life. i tapped them. they poured down and flooded me--with dreams--dreams that could really haunt--with unsettling thoughts of glory and delight _beyond the body_. i got clean away into nature. i felt as though some portion of me just awakening reached out across him into rain and sunshine, far up into the sweet and starry sky--as a tree growing out of a thicket that chokes its lower part finds light and freedom at the top." "it caught you badly, doctor," o'malley murmured. "the gods came close!" "so badly that i loathed the prisoned darkness that held me so thickly in the body. i longed to know my being all dispersed through nature, scattered with dew and wind, shining with the star-light and the sun. and the manner of escape i hinted to you a little while ago came to seem right and necessary. lawful it seemed, and obvious. the mania literally obsessed me, though still i tried to hide it even from myself ... and struggled in resistance." "you spoke just now of other things that came to confirm it," the irishman said while the other paused to take breath. all this he knew. he grew weary of stahl's clever laboring the point that it was madness. a little knowledge is ever dangerous, and he saw so clearly why the hesitation of the merely intellectual man had led him into error. "did you mean that others acknowledged this influence as well as yourself?" "you shall read that for yourself tomorrow," came the answer, "in the detailed report i drew up afterwards; it is far too long to tell you now. but, i may mention something of it. that breaking out of patients was a curious thing, their trying to escape, their dreams and singing, their efforts sometimes to approach his room, their longing for the open and the gardens; the deep, prolonged entrancing of a few; the sounds of rushing, tramping that they, too, heard, the violence of some, the silent ecstasy of others. the thing may find its parallel, perhaps, in the collective mania that sometimes afflicts religious communities, in monasteries or convents. only here there was no preacher and eloquent leader to induce hysteria--nothing but that silent dynamo of power, gentle and winning as a little child, a being who could not put a phrase together, exerting his potent spell unconsciously, and chiefly while he slept. "for the phenomena almost without exception came in the night, and often at their fullest strength, as afterwards reported to me, while i dozed in his room and watched beside his motionless and slumbering form. oh, and there was more as well, much more, as you shall read. the stories my assistants brought me, the tales of frightened nurse and warder, the amazing yarns the porter stammered out, of strangers who had rung the bell at dawn, trying to push past him through the door, saying they were messengers and had been summoned, sent for, had to come,--large, curious, windy figures, or, as he sometimes called them with unconscious humor, 'like creatures out of fairy books or circuses' that always vanished as suddenly as they came. making every allowance for excitement and exaggeration, the tales were strange enough, i can assure you, and the way many of the patients knew their visions intensified, their illusions doubly strengthened, their efforts even to destroy themselves in many cases almost more than the staff could deal with--all this brought the matter to a climax and made my duty very plain at last." "and the effect upon yourself--at its worst?" asked his listener quietly. stahl sighed wearily a little as he answered with a new-found sadness in his tone. "i've told you briefly that," he said; "repetition cannot strengthen it. the worthlessness of the majority of human aims today expresses it best--what you have called yourself the 'horror of civilization.' the vanity of all life's modern, so-called up-to-date tendencies for outer, mechanical developments. a wild, mad beauty streaming from that man's personality overran the whole place and caught the lot of us, myself especially, with a lust for simple, natural things, and with a passion for spiritual beauty to accompany them. fame, wealth, position seemed the shadows then, and something else it's hard to name announced itself as the substance.... i wanted to clear out and live with nature, to know simplicity, unselfish purposes, a golden state of childlike existence close to dawns and dew and running water, cared for by woods and blessed by all the winds...." he paused again for breath, then added:-- "and that's just where the mania caught at me so cunningly--till i saw it and called a halt." "ah!" "for the thing i sought, the thing _he_ knew, and perhaps remembered, was not possible _in the body_. it was a spiritual state--" "or to be known subjectively!" o'malley checked him. "i am no lotus-eater by nature," he went on with energy, "and so i fought and conquered it. but first, i tell you, it came upon me like a tempest--a hurricane of wonder and delight. i've always held, like yourself perhaps, that civilization brings its own army of diseases, and that the few illnesses known to ruder savage races can be cured by simple means the earth herself supplies. and along this line of thought the thing swept into me--the line of my own head-learning. this was natural enough; natural enough, too, that it thus at first deceived me. "for the quack cures of history come to this--herb simples and the rest; only we know them now as sun-cure, water-cure, open-air cure, old kneipp, sea-water, and a hundred others. doctors have never swarmed before as they do now, and these artificial diseases civilization brings in such quantity seemed all at once to mean the abeyance of some central life or power men ought to share with--nature.... you shall read it all in my written report. i merely wish to show you now how the insidious thing got at me along the line of my special knowledge. i saw the truth that priests and doctors are the only possible and necessary 'professions' in the world, and--that they should be really but a single profession...." xliv he drew suddenly back with a kind of jerk. it was as though he realized abruptly that he had said too much--had overdone it. he took his companion by the arm and led him down the decks. as they passed the bridge the captain called out a word of welcome to them; and his jolly, boisterous laugh ran down the wind. the american engineer came from behind a dark corner, almost running into them; his face was flushed. "it's like a furnace below," he said in his nasal familiar manner; "too hot to sleep. i've run up for a gulp of air." he made as though he would join them. "the wind's behind us, yes," replied the doctor in a different tone, "and there's no draught." with a gesture, half bow, half dismissal, he made even this thick-skinned member of "the greatest civilization on earth" understand he was not wanted. and they turned at the cabin door, o'malley a moment wondering at the admirable dignity with which the "little" man had managed the polite dismissal. himself, perhaps, he would not have minded the diversion. he was a little weary of the german's long recital. the confession had not been complete, he felt. much had been held back. it was not altogether straightforward. the dishonesty which hides in compromise peeped through it everywhere. and the incoherence of the latter part had almost bored him. for it was, he easily divined, a studied incoherence. it was meant to touch a similar weakness in himself--if there. but it was _not_ there. he saw through the whole manoeuvre. stahl wished to warn and save him by showing that the experience they had partly shared was nothing but a strange mental disorder. he wished to force in this subtle way his own interpretation of it upon his friend. yet at the same time the intuitive irishman discerned that other tendency in the man which would so gladly perhaps have welcomed a different explanation, and even in some fashion did actually accept it. o'malley smiled inwardly as he watched him prepare the coffee as of old. and patiently he waited for the rest that was to come. in a certain sense it all was useful. it would be helpful later. this was an attitude he would often have to face when he returned to civilized life and tried to tell his message to the thinking, educated men of today--the men he must win over somehow to his dream--the men, without whose backing, no movement could hope to meet with even a measure of success. "so, like myself," said stahl, as he carefully tended the flame of the spirit-lamp between them, "you have escaped by the skin of your teeth, as it were. and i congratulate you--heartily." "i thank you," said the other dryly. "you write your version now, and i'll write mine--indeed it is already almost finished--then we'll compare notes. perhaps we might even publish them together." he poured out the fragrant coffee. they faced each other across the little table. but o'malley did not take the bait. he wished to hear the balance his companion still might tell. and presently he asked for it. "with the discharge of your patient the trouble ceased at once, then?" "comparatively soon. it gradually subsided, yes." "and as regards yourself?" "i came back to my senses. i recovered my control. the insubordinate impulses i had known retired." he smiled as he sipped his coffee. "you see me now," he added, looking his companion steadily in the eyes, "a sane and commonplace ship's doctor." "i congratulate you--" "_vielen dank._" he bowed. "on what you missed, yet almost accomplished," the other finished. "you might have known, like me, the cosmic consciousness! you might have met the gods!" "in a strait-waistcoat," the doctor added with a snap. they laughed at one another across their coffee cups as once before they had laughed across their glasses of kakhetian wine--two eternally antagonistic types that will exist as long as life itself. but, contrary to his expectations, the german had little more to tell. he mentioned how the experience had led his mind into strange and novel reading in his desire to know what other minds might have to offer by way of explanation, even the most fanciful and far-fetched. he told, though very briefly, how he had picked up fechner among others, and carefully studied his "poetic theories," and read besides the best accounts of "spiritistic" phenomena, as also of the rarer states of hysteria, double-consciousness, multiple personality, and even those looser theories which suggest that a portion of the human constitution called "astral" or "etheric" may escape from the parent center and, carrying with it the subtler forces of desire and yearning, construct a vivid subjective state of mind which is practically its heaven of hope and longing all fulfilled. he did not, however, betray the results upon himself of all this curious reading and study, nor mention what he found of truth or probability in it all. he merely quoted books and authors, in at least three languages, that stretched in a singular and catholic array from plato and the neo-platonists across the ages to myers, du prel, flournoy, lodge, and morton prince. out of the lot, perhaps,--o'malley gathered it by inference rather than from actual statement, from fragments of their talks upon the outward voyage more than from anything let fall just then--fechner had proved the most persuasive to this man's contradictory and original mind. it certainly seemed, at least, as if he knew some secret sympathetic leaning toward the idea that consciousness and matter were inseparable, and that a cosmic consciousness "of sorts" might pertain to the earth as, equally, to all the other stars and planets. the _urwelt_ idea he so often referred to had seized a part of his imagination--that, at least, was clear. the irishman drank it all in, but he was too exhausted now to argue, and too full besides to ask questions. his natural volubility forsook him. he let the doctor have his say without interruptions. he took the warnings with the rest of it. nothing the other said had changed him. it was not the first sunrise they had watched together, and as they took the morning air on deck once more, corsica rising like a dream the night had left behind her on the sea, he listened with fainter interest to the german's concluding sentences. "at any rate you now understand why on that other voyage i was so eager to watch you with your friend, so keen to separate you, to prevent your sleeping with him, and at the same time so desirous to see his influence upon you at close quarters; and also--why i always understood so well what was going on both outwardly and within." o'malley quietly reiterated the belief he still held in the power of his own dream. "i shall go home and give my message to the world," was what he said quietly. "i think it's true." "it's better to keep silent," was the answer, "for, even if true, the world is not ready yet to listen. it will evaporate, you'll find, in the telling. you'll find there's nothing to tell. besides, a dream like yours must dawn on all at once, and not on merely one. no one will understand you." "i can but try." "you will reach no men of action; and few of intellect. you will merely stuff the dreamers who are already stuffed enough. what is the use, i ask you? what is the use?" "it will set the world on fire for simplicity," the other murmured, knowing the great sweet passion flame within him as he watched the sun come slowly out of the rosy sea. "all the use in the world." "none," was the laconic answer. "they might know the gods!" cried o'malley, using the phrase that symbolized for him the entire vision. stahl looked at him for some time before he spoke. again that expression of wistful, almost longing admiration shone in the brown eyes. "my friend," he answered gravely, "men do not want to know the gods. they prefer their delights less subtle. they crave the cruder physical sensations that bang them toward excitement--" "of disease, of pain, of separateness," put in the other. the german shrugged his shoulders. "it's the stage they're at," he said. "you, if you have success, will merely make a few uncomfortable. the majority will hardly turn their heads. to one in a million you may bring peace and happiness." "it's worth it," cried the irishman, "even for that one!" stahl answered very gently, smiling with his new expression of tenderness and sympathy. "dream your great dream if you will, but dream it, my friend, alone--in peace and silence. that 'one' i speak of is yourself." the doctor pressed his hand and turned toward his cabin. o'malley stood a little longer to share the sunrise. neither spoke another word. he heard the door shut softly behind him. the unspoken answer in his mind was in two words--two common little adjectives: "coward and selfish!" but stahl, once in the privacy of his cabin, judging by the glance visible on his face ere he closed the door, may probably have known a very different thought. and possibly he uttered it below his breath. a sigh most certainly escaped his lips, a sigh half sadness, half relief. for o'malley remembered it afterwards. "beautiful, foolish dreamer among men! but, thank god, harmless--to others and--himself." and soon afterwards o'malley also went to his cabin. before sleep took him he lay deep in a mood of sadness--almost as though he had heard his friend's unspoken thought. he realized the insuperable difficulties that lay before him. the world would think him "mad but harmless." then, with full sleep, he slipped across that sunrise and found the old-world garden. he held the eternal password. "i can but try...!" xlv and here the crowded, muddled notebooks come to an end. the rest was action--and inevitable disaster. the brief history of o'malley's mad campaign may be imagined. to a writer who found interest in the study of forlorn hopes and their leaders, a detailed record of this particular one might seem worth while. for me personally it is too sad and too pathetic. i cannot bring myself to tell, much less to analyze the story of a broken heart, when that heart and story are those of a close and deeply admired intimate, a man who gave me genuine love and held my own. besides, although a curious chapter in uncommon human nature, it is not by any means a new one. it is the true story of many a poet and dreamer since the world began, though perhaps not often told nor even guessed. and only the poets themselves, especially the little poets who cannot utter half the fire that consumes them, may know the searing pain and passion and the true inwardness of it all. most of those months it chanced i was away, and only fragments of the foolish enterprise could reach me. but nothing, i think, could have stopped him, nor any worldly selfish wisdom made him even pause. the thing possessed him utterly; it had to flame its way out as best it could. to high and low, he preached by every means in his power the simple life; he preached the mystical life as well--that the true knowledge and the true progress are within, that they both pertain to the inner being and have no chief concern with external things. he preached it wildly, lopsidedly, in or out of season, knowing no half measures. his enthusiasm obscured his sense of proportion and the extravagance hid the germ of truth that undeniably lay in his message. to put the movement on its feet at first he realized every possession that he had. it left him penniless, if he was not almost so already, and in the end it left him smothered beneath the glory of his blinding and unutterable dream. he never understood that suggestion is more effective than a sledge-hammer. his faith was no mere little seed of mustard, but a full-fledged forest singing its message in a wind of thunder. he shouted it aloud to the world. i think the acid disappointment that lies beneath that trite old phrase "a broken heart" was never really his; for indeed it seemed that his cruel, ludicrous failure merely served to strengthen hope and purpose by making him seek for a better method of imparting what he had to say. in the end he learned the bitter lesson to the full. but faith never trailed a single feather. those jeering audiences in the park; those empty benches in many a public hall, those brief, ignoring paragraphs in the few newspapers that filled a vacant corner by labeling him crank and long-haired prophet; even the silence that greeted his pamphlets, his letters to the press, and all the rest, hurt him for others rather than for himself. his pain was altruistic, never personal. his dream and motive, his huge, unwieldy compassion, his genuine love for humanity, all were big enough for that. and so, i think, he missed the personal mortification that disappointment so deep might bring to dreamers with an aim less unadulteratedly pure. his eye was single to the end. he attributed only the highest motives to all who offered help. the very quacks and fools who flocked to his banner, eager to exploit their smaller fads by joining them to his own, he welcomed, only regretting that, as stahl had warned him, he could not attract a better class of mind. he did not even see through the manoeuvres of the occasional women of wealth and title who sought to conceal their own mediocrity by advertising in their drawing-rooms the eccentricities of men like himself. and to the end he had the courage of his glorious convictions. the change of method that he learned at last, moreover, was characteristic of this faith and courage. "i've begun at the wrong end," he said; "i shall never reach men through their intellects. their brains today are occupied by the machine-made gods of civilization. i cannot change the direction of their thoughts and lusts from outside; the momentum is too great to stop that way. i must get at them from within. to reach their hearts, the new ideas must rise up _from within_. i see the truer way. i must do it _from the other side_. it must come to them--in beauty." for he was to the last convinced that death would merge him in the being of the earth's collective consciousness, and that, lost in her deep eternal beauty, he thus might reach the hearts of men in some stray glimpse of nature's loveliness, and register his flaming message. he loved to quote from adonais: "he is made one with nature: there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird; he is a presence to be felt and known in darkness and in light, from herb and stone, spreading itself where'er that power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own. he is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely: he doth bear his part, while the one spirit's plastic stress sweeps through the dull dense world..." and this thought, phrased in a dozen different ways, was always on his lips. to dream was right and useful, even to dream alone, because the beauty of the dream must add to the beauty of the whole of which it is a part and an interpretation. it was not really lost or vain. all must come back in time to feed the world. he had known gracious thoughts of earth too big to utter, almost too big to hold. such thoughts could not ever be really told; they were incommunicable. for the mystical revelation is incommunicable. it has authority only for him who feels it. a corporate revelation is impossible. only those among men could know, in whose hearts it rose intuitively and made its presence felt as innate ideas. inspiration brings it, and beauty is the vehicle. their hearts must change before their minds could be reached. "i can work it better from the other side--from that old, old garden which is the mother's heart. in this way i can help at any rate...!" xlvi it was at the close of a wet and foggy autumn that we met again, winter in the air, all london desolate; and his wasted, forlorn appearance told me the truth at once. only the passionate eagerness of voice and manner were there to prove that the spirit had not weakened. there glowed within a fire that showed itself in the translucent shining of the eyes and face. "i've made one great discovery, old man," he exclaimed with old, familiar, high enthusiasm, "one great discovery at least." "you've made so many," i answered cheerfully, while my real thoughts were busy with his bodily state of health. for his appearance shocked me. he stood among a litter of papers, books, neckties, nailed boots, knapsacks, maps and what-not, that rolled upon the floor from the mouth of the willesden canvas sack. his old grey flannel suit hung literally upon a bag of bones; all the life there was seemed concentrated in his face and eyes--those far-seeing, light blue eyes. they were darker than usual now, eyes like the sea, i thought. his hair, long and disordered, tumbled over his forehead. he was pale, and at the same time flushed. it was almost a disembodied spirit that i saw. "you've made so many. i love to hear them. is this one finer than the others?" he looked a moment at me through and through, almost uncannily. he looked in reality beyond me. it was something else he saw, and in the dusk i turned involuntarily. "simpler," he said quickly, "much simpler." he moved up close beside me, whispering. was it all imagination that a breath of flowers came with him? there was certainly a curious fragrance in the air, wild and sweet like orchards in the spring. "and it is--?" "that the garden's _everywhere!_ you needn't go to the distant caucasus to find it. it's all about this old london town, and in these foggy streets and dingy pavements. it's even in this cramped, undusted room. now at this moment, while that lamp flickers and the thousands go to sleep. the gates of horn and ivory are here," he tapped his breast. "and here the flowers, the long, clean open hills, the giant herd, the nymphs, the sunshine and the gods!" so attached was he now to that little room in paddington where his books and papers lay, that when the curious illness that had caught him grew so much worse, and the attacks of the nameless fever that afflicted him turned serious, i hired a bedroom for him in the same house. and it was in that poky, cage-like den he breathed his last. his illness i called curious, his fever nameless, because they really were so and puzzled every one. he simply faded out of life, it seemed; there was no pain, no sleeplessness, no suffering of any physical kind. he uttered no complaint, nor were there symptoms of any known disorder. "your friend is sound organically," the doctor told me when i pressed him for the truth there on the stairs, "sound as a bell. he wants the open air and plenty of wholesome food, that's all. his body is ill-nourished. his trouble is mental--some deep and heavy disappointment doubtless. if you can change the current of his thoughts, awaken interest in common things, and give him change of scene, perhaps--" he shrugged his shoulders and looked very grave. "you think he's dying?" "i think, yes, he is dying." "from--?" "from lack of living pure and simple," was the answer. "he has lost all hold on life." "he has abundant vitality still." "full of it. but it all goes--elsewhere. the physical organism gets none of it." "yet mentally," i asked, "there's nothing actually wrong?" "not in the ordinary sense. the mind is clear and active. so far as i can test it, the process of thought is healthy and undamaged. it seems to me--" he hesitated a moment on the doorstep while the driver wound the motor handle. i waited with a sinking heart for the rest of the sentence. "...like certain cases of nostalgia i have known--very rare and very difficult to deal with. acute and vehement nostalgia, yes, sometimes called a broken heart," he added, pausing another instant at the carriage door, "in which the entire stream of a man's inner life flows to some distant place, or person, or--or to some imagined yearning that he craves to satisfy." "to a dream?" "it _might_ be even that," he answered slowly, stepping in. "it might be spiritual. the religious and poetic temperament are most open to it, _and_ the most difficult to deal with when afflicted." he emphasized the little word as though the doubt he felt was far less strong than the conviction he only half concealed. "if you would save him, try to change the direction of his thoughts. there is nothing--in all honesty i must say it--nothing that i can do to help." and then, pulling at the grey tuft on his chin and looking keenly at me a moment over his glasses,--"those flowers," he said hesitatingly, "you might move those flowers from the room, perhaps. their perfume is a trifle strong ... it might be better." again he looked sharply at me. there was an odd expression in his eyes. and in my heart there was an odd sensation too, so odd that i found myself bereft a moment of any speech at all, and when my tongue became untied, the carriage was already disappearing down the street. for in that dingy sick-room there were no flowers at all, yet the perfume of woods and fields and open spaces had reached the doctor too, and obviously perplexed him. "change the direction of his thoughts!" i went indoors, wondering how any honest and even half-unselfish friend, knowing what i knew, could follow such advice. with what but the lowest motive, of keeping him alive for my own happiness, could i seek to change his thoughts of some imagined joy and peace to the pain and sordid facts of an earthly existence that he loathed? but when i turned i saw the tousled yellow-headed landlady standing in the breach. mrs. heath stopped me in the hall to inquire whether i could say "anythink abart the rent per'aps?" her manner was defiant. i found three months were owing. "it's no good arsking 'im," she said, though not unkindly on the whole. "i'm sick an' tired of always being put off. he talks about the gawds and a mr. pan, or some such gentleman who he says will look after it all. but i never sees 'im--not this mr. pan. and his stuff up there," jerking her head toward the little room, "ain't worth a sankey-moody 'ymn-book, take the lot of it at cost!" i reassured her. it was impossible to help smiling. for some minds, i reflected, a sankey hymn-book might hold dreams that were every bit as potent as his own, and far less troublesome. but that "mr. pan, or some such gentleman" should serve as a "reference" between lodger and landlady was an unwitting comment on the modern point of view that made me want to cry rather than to laugh. o'malley and mrs. heath between them had made a profounder criticism than they knew. * * * * * and so by slow degrees he went, leaving the outer fury for the inner peace. the center of consciousness gradually shifted from the transient form which is the true ghost, to the deeper, permanent state which is the eternal reality. for this was how he phrased it to me in one of our last, strange talks. he watched his own withdrawal. in bed he would lie for hours with fixed and happy eyes, staring apparently at nothing, the expression on his face quite radiant. the pulse sank often dangerously low; he scarcely seemed to breathe; yet it was never complete unconsciousness or trance. my voice, when i found the heart to try and coax his own for speech, would win him back. the eyes would then grow dimmer, losing their happier light, as he turned to the outer world to look at me. "the pull is so tremendous now," he whispered; "i was far, so far away, in the deep life of earth. why do you bring me back to all these little pains? i can do nothing here; _there_ i am of use..." he spoke so low i had to bend my head to catch the words. it was very late at night and for hours i had been watching by his side. outside an ugly yellow fog oppressed the town, but about him like an atmosphere i caught again that fragrance as of trees and flowers. it was too faint for any name--that fugitive, mild perfume one meets upon bare hills and round the skirts of forests. it was somehow, i fancied, in the very breath. "each time the effort to return is greater. in there i am complete and full of power. i can work and send my message back so splendidly. here," he glanced down at his wasted body with a curious smile, "i am only on the fringe--it's pain and failure. all so ineffective." that other look came back into the eyes, more swiftly than before. "i thought you might like to speak, to tell me--something," i said, keeping the tears with difficulty from my voice. "is there no one you would like to see?" he shook his head slowly, and gave the peculiar answer: "they're all in there." "but stahl, perhaps--if i could get him here?" an expression of gentle disapproval crossed his face, then melted softly into a wistful tenderness as of a child. "he's not there--yet," he whispered, "but he will come too in the end. in sleep, i think, he goes there even now." "where are you _really_ then?" i ventured, "and where is it you go to?" the answer came unhesitatingly; there was no doubt or searching. "into myself, my real and deeper self, and so beyond it into her--the earth. where all the others are--all, all, all." and then he frightened me by sitting up in bed abruptly. his eyes stared past me--out beyond the close confining walls. the movement was so startling with its suddenness and vigor that i shrank back a moment. the head was sideways. he was intently listening. "hark!" he whispered. "they are calling me! do you hear...?" the look of joy that broke over the face like sunshine made me hold my breath. something in his low voice thrilled me beyond all i have ever known. i listened too. only the rumble of the traffic down the distant main street broke the silence, the rattle of a nearer cart, and the footsteps of a few pedestrians. no other noises came across the night. there was no wind. thick yellow fog muffled everything. "i hear nothing," i answered softly. "what is it that _you_ hear?" and, making no reply, he presently lay down again among the pillows, that look of joy and glory still upon his face. it lay there to the end like sunrise. the fog came in so thickly through the window that i rose to close it. he never closed that window, and i hoped he would not notice. for a sound of wretched street-music was coming nearer--some beggar playing dismally upon a penny whistle--and i feared it would disturb him. but in a flash he was up again. "no, no!" he cried, raising his voice for the first time that night. "do not shut it. i shan't be able to hear then. let all the air come in. open it wider... wider! i love that sound!" "the fog--" "there is no fog. it's only sun and flowers and music. let them in. don't you hear it now?" he added. and, more to bring him peace than anything else, i bowed my head to signify agreement. for the last confusion of the mind, i saw, was upon him, and he made the outer world confirm some imagined detail of his inner dream. i drew the sash down lower, covering his body closely with the blankets. he flung them off impatiently at once. the damp and freezing night rushed in upon us like a presence. it made me shudder, but o'malley only raised himself upon one elbow to taste it better, and--to listen. then, waiting patiently for the return of the quiet, trance-like state when i might cover him again, i moved toward the window and looked out. the street was empty, save for that beggar playing vilely on his penny whistle. the wretch came to a standstill immediately before the house. the lamplight fell from the room upon his tattered, broken figure. i could not see his face. he groped and felt his way. outside that homeless wanderer played his penny pipe in the night of cold and darkness. inside the dreamer listened, dreaming of his gods and garden, his great earth mother, his visioned life of peace and simple things with a living nature... and i felt somehow that player watched us. i made an angry sign to him to go. but it was the sudden touch upon my arm that made me turn round with such a sudden start that i almost cried aloud. o'malley in his night-clothes stood close against me on the floor, slight as a spirit, eyes a-shine, lips moving faintly into speech through the most wonderful smile a human face has ever shown me. "do not send him away," he whispered, joy breaking from him like a light, "but tell him that i love it. go out and thank him. tell him i hear and understand, and say that i am coming. will you...?" something within me whirled. it seemed that i was lifted from my feet a moment. some tide of power rushed from his person to my own. the room was filled with blinding light. but in my heart there rose a great emotion that combined tears and joy and laughter all at once. "the moment you are back in bed," i heard my voice like one speaking from a distance, "i'll go--" the momentary, wild confusion passed as suddenly as it came. i remember he obeyed at once. as i bent down to tuck the clothes about him, that fragrance as of flowers and open spaces rose about my bending face like incense--bewilderingly sweet. and the next second i was standing in the street. the man who played upon the pipe, i saw, was blind. his hand and fingers were curiously large. i was already close, ready to press all that my pockets held into his hand--ay, and far more than merely pockets held because o'malley said he loved the music--when something made me turn my head away. i cannot say precisely what it was, for first it seemed a tapping at the window of his room behind me, and then a little noise within the room itself, and next--more curious than either,--a feeling that something came out rushing past me through the air. it whirled and shouted as it went... i only remember clearly that in the very act of turning, and while my look still held that beggar's face within the field of vision, i saw the sightless eyes turn bright a moment as though he opened them and saw. he did most certainly smile; to that i swear. but when i turned again the street immediately about me was empty. the beggar-man was gone. and down the pavement, moving swiftly through the curtain of fog, i saw his vanishing figure. it was large and spreading. in the fringe of light the lamp-post gave, its upper edges seemed far above the ground. someone else was with him. there were two figures. i heard that sound of piping far away. it sounded faint and almost flute-like in the air. and in the mud at my feet the money lay--spurned utterly. i heard the last coins ring upon the pavement as they settled. but in the room, when i got back, the body of terence o'malley had ceased to breathe. the novels of ivan turgenev knock, knock, knock and other stories translated from the russian by constance garnett * * * * * contents: knock, knock, knock the inn lieutenant yergunov's story the dog the watch * * * * * knock, knock, knock a study i we all settled down in a circle and our good friend alexandr vassilyevitch ridel (his surname was german but he was russian to the marrow of his bones) began as follows: i am going to tell you a story, friends, of something that happened to me in the 'thirties ... forty years ago as you see. i will be brief--and don't you interrupt me. i was living at the time in petersburg and had only just left the university. my brother was a lieutenant in the horse-guard artillery. his battery was stationed at krasnoe selo--it was summer time. my brother lodged not at krasnoe selo itself but in one of the neighbouring villages; i stayed with him more than once and made the acquaintance of all his comrades. he was living in a fairly decent cottage, together with another officer of his battery, whose name was ilya stepanitch tyeglev. i became particularly friendly with him. marlinsky is out of date now--no one reads him--and even his name is jeered at; but in the 'thirties his fame was above everyone's--and in the opinion of the young people of the day pushkin could not hold candle to him. he not only enjoyed the reputation of being the foremost russian writer; but--something much more difficult and more rarely met with--he did to some extent leave his mark on his generation. one came across heroes _à la_ marlinsky everywhere, especially in the provinces and especially among infantry and artillery men; they talked and corresponded in his language; behaved with gloomy reserve in society--"with tempest in the soul and flame in the blood" like lieutenant byelosov in the "_frigate hope_." women's hearts were "devoured" by them. the adjective applied to them in those days was "fatal." the type, as we all know, survived for many years, to the days of petchorin. [footnote: the leading character in lermontov's _a hero of our time_.--_translator's note_.] all sorts of elements were mingled in that type. byronism, romanticism, reminiscences of the french revolution, of the dekabrists--and the worship of napoleon; faith in destiny, in one's star, in strength of will; pose and fine phrases--and a miserable sense of the emptiness of life; uneasy pangs of petty vanity--and genuine strength and daring; generous impulses--and defective education, ignorance; aristocratic airs--and delight in trivial foppery.... but enough of these general reflections. i promised to tell you the story. ii lieutenant tyeglev belonged precisely to the class of those "fatal" individuals, though he did not possess the exterior commonly associated with them; he was not, for instance, in the least like lermontov's "fatalist." he was a man of medium height, fairly solid and round-shouldered, with fair, almost white eyebrows and eyelashes; he had a round, fresh, rosy-cheeked face, a turn-up nose, a low forehead with the hair growing thick over the temples, and full, well-shaped, always immobile lips: he never laughed, never even smiled. only when he was tired and out of heart he showed his square teeth, white as sugar. the same artificial immobility was imprinted on all his features: had it not been for that, they would have had a good-natured expression. his small green eyes with yellow lashes were the only thing not quite ordinary in his face: his right eye was very slightly higher than his left and the left eyelid drooped a little, which made his eyes look different, strange and drowsy. tyeglev's countenance, which was not, however, without a certain attractiveness, almost always wore an expression of discontent mingled with perplexity, as though he were chasing within himself a gloomy thought which he was never able to catch. at the same time he did not give one the impression of being stuck up: he might rather have been taken for an aggrieved than a haughty man. he spoke very little, hesitatingly, in a husky voice, with unnecessary repetitions. unlike most "fatalists," he did not use particularly elaborate expressions in speaking and only had recourse to them in writing; his handwriting was quite like a child's. his superiors regarded him as an officer of no great merit--not particularly capable and not over-zealous. the brigadier-general, a man of german extraction, used to say of him: "he has punctuality but not precision." with the soldiers, too, tyeglev had the character of being neither one thing nor the other. he lived modestly, in accordance with his means. he had been left an orphan at nine years old: his father and mother were drowned when they were being ferried across the oka in the spring floods. he had been educated at a private school, where he had the reputation of being one of the slowest and quietest of the boys, and at his own earnest desire and through the good offices of a cousin who was a man of influence, he obtained a commission in the horse-guards artillery; and, though with some difficulty, passed his examination first as an ensign and then as a second lieutenant. his relations with other officers were somewhat strained. he was not liked, was rarely visited--and he hardly went to see anyone. he felt the presence of strangers a constraint; he instantly became awkward and unnatural ... he had no instinct for comradeship and was not on really intimate terms with anyone. but he was respected, and respected not for his character nor for his intelligence and education--but because the stamp which distinguishes "fatal" people was discerned in him. no one of his fellow officers expected that tyeglev would make a career or distinguish himself in any way; but that tyeglev might do something extraordinary or that tyeglev might become a napoleon was not considered impossible. for that is a matter of a man's "star"--and he was regarded as a "man of destiny," just as there are "men of sighs" and "of tears." iii two incidents that marked the first steps in his career did a great deal to strengthen his "fatal" reputation. on the very first day after receiving his commission--about the middle of march--he was walking with other newly promoted officers in full dress uniform along the embankment. the spring had come early that year, the neva was melting; the bigger blocks of ice had gone but the whole river was choked up with a dense mass of thawing icicles. the young men were talking and laughing ... suddenly one of them stopped: he saw a little dog some twenty paces from the bank on the slowly moving surface of the river. perched on a projecting piece of ice it was whining and trembling all over. "it will be drowned," said the officer through his teeth. the dog was slowly being carried past one of the sloping gangways that led down to the river. all at once tyeglev without saying a word ran down this gangway and over the thin ice, sinking in and leaping out again, reached the dog, seized it by the scruff of the neck and getting safely back to the bank, put it down on the pavement. the danger to which tyeglev had exposed himself was so great, his action was so unexpected, that his companions were dumbfoundered--and only spoke all at once, when he had called a cab to drive home: his uniform was wet all over. in response to their exclamations, tyeglev replied coolly that there was no escaping one's destiny--and told the cabman to drive on. "you might at least take the dog with you as a souvenir," cried one of the officers. but tyeglev merely waved his hand, and his comrades looked at each other in silent amazement. the second incident occurred a few days later, at a card party at the battery commander's. tyeglev sat in the corner and took no part in the play. "oh, if only i had a grandmother to tell me beforehand what cards will win, as in pushkin's _queen of spades_," cried a lieutenant whose losses had nearly reached three thousand. tyeglev approached the table in silence, took up a pack, cut it, and saying "the six of diamonds," turned the pack up: the six of diamonds was the bottom card. "the ace of clubs!" he said and cut again: the bottom card turned out to be the ace of clubs. "the king of diamonds!" he said for the third time in an angry whisper through his clenched teeth--and he was right the third time, too ... and he suddenly turned crimson. he probably had not expected it himself. "a capital trick! do it again," observed the commanding officer of the battery. "i don't go in for tricks," tyeglev answered drily and walked into the other room. how it happened that he guessed the card right, i can't pretend to explain: but i saw it with my own eyes. many of the players present tried to do the same--and not one of them succeeded: one or two did guess _one_ card but never two in succession. and tyeglev had guessed three! this incident strengthened still further his reputation as a mysterious, fatal character. it has often occurred to me since that if he had not succeeded in the trick with the cards, there is no knowing what turn it would have taken and how he would have looked at himself; but this unexpected success clinched the matter. iv it may well be understood that tyeglev clutched at this reputation. it gave him a special significance, a special colour ... "_cela le posait_," as the french express it--and with his limited intelligence, scanty education and immense vanity, such a reputation just suited him. it was difficult to acquire it but to keep it up cost nothing: he had only to remain silent and hold himself aloof. but it was not owing to this reputation that i made friends with tyeglev and, i may say, grew fond of him. i liked him in the first place because i was rather an unsociable creature myself--and saw in him one of my own sort, and secondly, because he was a very good-natured fellow and in reality, very simple-hearted. he aroused in me a feeling of something like compassion; it seemed to me that apart from his affected "fatality," he really was weighed down by a tragic fate which he did not himself suspect. i need hardly say i did not express this feeling to him: could anything be more insulting to a "fatal" hero than to be an object of pity? and tyeglev, on his side, was well-disposed to me; with me he felt at ease, with me he used to talk--in my presence he ventured to leave the strange pedestal on which he had been placed either by his own efforts or by chance. agonisingly, morbidly vain as he was, yet he was probably aware in the depths of his soul that there was nothing to justify his vanity, and that others might perhaps look down on him ... but i, a boy of nineteen, put no constraint on him; the dread of saying something stupid, inappropriate, did not oppress his ever-apprehensive heart in my presence. he sometimes even chattered freely; and well it was for him that no one heard his chatter except me! his reputation would not have lasted long. he not only knew very little, but read hardly anything and confined himself to picking up stories and anecdotes of a certain kind. he believed in presentiments, predictions, omens, meetings, lucky and unlucky days, in the persecution and benevolence of destiny, in the mysterious significance of life, in fact. he even believed in certain "climacteric" years which someone had mentioned in his presence and the meaning of which he did not himself very well understand. "fatal" men of the true stamp ought not to betray such beliefs: they ought to inspire them in others.... but i was the only one who knew tyeglev on that side. v one day--i remember it was st. elijah's day, july th--i came to stay with my brother and did not find him at home: he had been ordered off for a whole week somewhere. i did not want to go back to petersburg; i sauntered about the neighbouring marshes, killed a brace of snipe and spent the evening with tyeglev under the shelter of an empty barn where he had, as he expressed it, set up his summer residence. we had a little conversation but for the most part drank tea, smoked pipes and talked sometimes to our host, a russianised finn or to the pedlar who used to hang about the battery selling "fi-ine oranges and lemons," a charming and lively person who in addition to other talents could play the guitar and used to tell us of the unhappy love which he cherished in his young days for the daughter of a policeman. now that he was older, this don juan in a gay cotton shirt had no experience of unsuccessful love affairs. before the doors of our barn stretched a wide plain gradually sloping away in the distance; a little river gleamed here and there in the winding hollows; low growing woods could be seen further on the horizon. night was coming on and we were left alone. as night fell a fine damp mist descended upon the earth, and, growing thicker and thicker, passed into a dense fog. the moon rose up into the sky; the fog was soaked through and through and, as it were, shimmering with golden light. everything was strangely shifting, veiled and confused; the faraway looked near, the near looked far away, what was big looked small and what was small looked big ... everything became dim and full of light. we seemed to be in fairyland, in a world of whitish-golden mist, deep stillness, delicate sleep.... and how mysteriously, like sparks of silver, the stars filtered through the mist! we were both silent. the fantastic beauty of the night worked upon us: it put us into the mood for the fantastic. vi tyeglev was the first to speak and talked with his usual hesitating incompleted sentences and repetitions about presentiments ... about ghosts. on exactly such a night, according to him, one of his friends, a student who had just taken the place of tutor to two orphans and was sleeping with them in a lodge in the garden, saw a woman's figure bending over their beds and next day recognised the figure in a portrait of the mother of the orphans which he had not previously noticed. then tyeglev told me that his parents had heard for several days before their death the sound of rushing water; that his grandfather had been saved from death in the battle of borodino through suddenly stooping down to pick up a simple grey pebble at the very instant when a volley of grape-shot flew over his head and broke his long black plume. tyeglev even promised to show me the very pebble which had saved his grandfather and which he had mounted into a medallion. then he talked of the lofty destination of every man and of his own in particular and added that he still believed in it and that if he ever had any doubts on that subject he would know how to be rid of them and of his life, as life would then lose all significance for him. "you imagine perhaps," he brought out, glancing askance at me, "that i shouldn't have the spirit to do it? you don't know me ... i have a will of iron." "well said," i thought to myself. tyeglev pondered, heaved a deep sigh and dropping his chibouk out of his hand, informed me that that day was a very important one for him. "this is the prophet elijah's day--my name day.... it is ... it is always for me a difficult time." i made no answer and only looked at him as he sat facing me, bent, round-shouldered, and clumsy, with his drowsy, lustreless eyes fixed on the ground. "an old beggar woman" (tyeglev never let a single beggar pass without giving alms) "told me to-day," he went on, "that she would pray for my soul.... isn't that strange?" "why does the man want to be always bothering about himself!" i thought again. i must add, however, that of late i had begun noticing an unusual expression of anxiety and uneasiness on tyeglev's face, and it was not a "fatal" melancholy: something really was fretting and worrying him. on this occasion, too, i was struck by the dejected expression of his face. were not those very doubts of which he had spoken to me beginning to assail him? tyeglev's comrades had told me that not long before he had sent to the authorities a project for some reforms in the artillery department and that the project had been returned to him "with a comment," that is, a reprimand. knowing his character, i had no doubt that such contemptuous treatment by his superior officers had deeply mortified him. but the change that i fancied i saw in tyeglev was more like sadness and there was a more personal note about it. "it's getting damp, though," he brought out at last and he shrugged his shoulders. "let us go into the hut--and it's bed-time, too." he had the habit of shrugging his shoulders and turning his head from side to side, putting his right hand to his throat as he did so, as though his cravat were constricting it. tyeglev's character was expressed, so at least it seemed to me, in this uneasy and nervous movement. he, too, felt constricted in the world. we went back into the hut, and both lay down on benches, he in the corner facing the door and i on the opposite side. vii tyeglev was for a long time turning from side to side on his bench and i could not get to sleep, either. whether his stories had excited my nerves or the strange night had fevered my blood--anyway, i could not go to sleep. all inclination for sleep disappeared at last and i lay with my eyes open and thought, thought intensely, goodness knows of what; of most senseless trifles--as always happens when one is sleepless. turning from side to side i stretched out my hands.... my finger hit one of the beams of the wall. it emitted a faint but resounding, and as it were, prolonged note.... i must have struck a hollow place. i tapped again ... this time on purpose. the same sound was repeated. i knocked again.... all at once tyeglev raised his head. "ridel!" he said, "do you hear? someone is knocking under the window." i pretended to be asleep. the fancy suddenly took me to play a trick at the expense of my "fatal" friend. i could not sleep, anyway. he let his head sink on the pillow. i waited for a little and again knocked three times in succession. tyeglev sat up again and listened. i tapped again. i was lying facing him but he could not see my hand.... i put it behind me under the bedclothes. "ridel!" cried tyeglev. i did not answer. "ridel!" he repeated loudly. "ridel!" "eh? what is it?" i said as though just waking up. "don't you hear, someone keeps knocking under the window, wants to come in, i suppose." "some passer-by," i muttered. "then we must let him in or find out who it is." but i made no answer, pretending to be asleep. several minutes passed.... i tapped again. tyeglev sat up at once and listened. "knock ... knock ... knock! knock ... knock ... knock!" through my half-closed eyelids in the whitish light of the night i could distinctly see every movement he made. he turned his face first to the window then to the door. it certainly was difficult to make out where the sound came from: it seemed to float round the room, to glide along the walls. i had accidentally hit upon a kind of sounding board. "ridel!" cried tyeglev at last, "ridel! ridel!" "why, what is it?" i asked, yawning. "do you mean to say you don't hear anything? there is someone knocking." "well, what if there is?" i answered and again pretended to be asleep and even snored. tyeglev subsided. "knock ... knock ... knock!" "who is there?" tyeglev shouted. "come in!" no one answered, of course. "knock ... knock ... knock!" tyeglev jumped out of bed, opened the window and thrusting out his head, cried wildly, "who is there? who is knocking?" then he opened the door and repeated his question. a horse neighed in the distance--that was all. he went back towards his bed. "knock ... knock ... knock!" tyeglev instantly turned round and sat down. "knock ... knock ... knock!" he rapidly put on his boots, threw his overcoat over his shoulders and unhooking his sword from the wall, went out of the hut. i heard him walk round it twice, asking all the time, "who is there? who goes there? who is knocking?" then he was suddenly silent, stood still outside near the corner where i was lying and without uttering another word, came back into the hut and lay down without taking off his boots and overcoat. "knock ... knock ... knock!" i began again. "knock ... knock ... knock!" but tyeglev did not stir, did not ask who was knocking, and merely propped his head on his hand. seeing that this no longer acted, after an interval i pretended to wake up and, looking at tyeglev, assumed an air of astonishment. "have you been out?" i asked. "yes," he answered unconcernedly. "did you still hear the knocking?" "yes." "and you met no one?" "no." "and did the knocking stop?" "i don't know. i don't care now." "now? why now?" tyeglev did not answer. i felt a little ashamed and a little vexed with him. i could not bring myself to acknowledge my prank, however. "do you know what?" i began, "i am convinced that it was all your imagination." tyeglev frowned. "ah, you think so!" "you say you heard a knocking?" "it was not only knocking i heard." "why, what else?" tyeglev bent forward and bit his lips. he was evidently hesitating. "i was called!" he brought out at last in a low voice and turned away his face. "you were called? who called you?" "someone...." tyeglev still looked away. "a woman whom i had hitherto only believed to be dead ... but now i know it for certain." "i swear, ilya stepanitch," i cried, "this is all your imagination!" "imagination?" he repeated. "would you like to hear it for yourself?" "yes." "then come outside." viii i hurriedly dressed and went out of the hut with tyeglev. on the side opposite to it there were no houses, nothing but a low hurdle fence broken down in places, beyond which there was a rather sharp slope down to the plain. everything was still shrouded in mist and one could scarcely see anything twenty paces away. tyeglev and i went up to the hurdle and stood still. "here," he said and bowed his head. "stand still, keep quiet and listen!" like him i strained my ears, and i heard nothing except the ordinary, extremely faint but universal murmur, the breathing of the night. looking at each other in silence from time to time we stood motionless for several minutes and were just on the point of going on. "ilyusha ..." i fancied i heard a whisper from behind the hurdle. i glanced at tyeglev but he seemed to have heard nothing--and still held his head bowed. "ilyusha ... ah, ilyusha," sounded more distinctly than before--so distinctly that one could tell that the words were uttered by a woman. we both started and stared at each other. "well?" tyeglev asked me in a whisper. "you won't doubt it now, will you?" "wait a minute," i answered as quietly. "it proves nothing. we must look whether there isn't anyone. some practical joker...." i jumped over the fence--and went in the direction from which, as far as i could judge, the voice came. i felt the earth soft and crumbling under my feet; long ridges stretched before me vanishing into the mist. i was in the kitchen garden. but nothing was stirring around me or before me. everything seemed spellbound in the numbness of sleep. i went a few steps further. "who is there?" i cried as wildly as tyeglev had. "prrr-r-r!" a startled corn-crake flew up almost under my feet and flew away as straight as a bullet. involuntarily i started.... what foolishness! i looked back. tyeglev was in sight at the spot where i left him. i went towards him. "you will call in vain," he said. "that voice has come to us--to me--from far away." he passed his hand over his face and with slow steps crossed the road towards the hut. but i did not want to give in so quickly and went back into the kitchen garden. that someone really had three times called "ilyusha" i could not doubt; that there was something plaintive and mysterious in the call, i was forced to own to myself.... but who knows, perhaps all this only appeared to be unaccountable and in reality could be explained as simply as the knocking which had agitated tyeglev so much. i walked along beside the fence, stopping from time to time and looking about me. close to the fence, at no great distance from our hut, there stood an old leafy willow tree; it stood out, a big dark patch, against the whiteness of the mist all round, that dim whiteness which perplexes and deadens the sight more than darkness itself. all at once it seemed to me that something alive, fairly big, stirred on the ground near the willow. exclaiming "stop! who is there?" i rushed forward. i heard scurrying footsteps, like a hare's; a crouching figure whisked by me, whether man or woman i could not tell.... i tried to clutch at it but did not succeed; i stumbled, fell down and stung my face against a nettle. as i was getting up, leaning on the ground, i felt something rough under my hand: it was a chased brass comb on a cord, such as peasants wear on their belt. further search led to nothing--and i went back to the hut with the comb in my hand, and my cheeks tingling. ix i found tyeglev sitting on the bench. a candle was burning on the table before him and he was writing something in a little album which he always had with him. seeing me, he quickly put the album in his pocket and began filling his pipe. "look here, my friend," i began, "what a trophy i have brought back from my expedition!" i showed him the comb and told him what had happened to me near the willow. "i must have startled a thief," i added. "you heard a horse was stolen from our neighbour yesterday?" tyeglev smiled frigidly and lighted his pipe. i sat down beside him. "and do you still believe, ilya stepanitch," i said, "that the voice we heard came from those unknown realms...." he stopped me with a peremptory gesture. "ridel," he began, "i am in no mood for jesting, and so i beg you not to jest." he certainly was in no mood for jesting. his face was changed. it looked paler, longer and more expressive. his strange, "different" eyes kept shifting from one object to another. "i never thought," he began again, "that i should reveal to another ... another man what you are about to hear and what ought to have died ... yes, died, hidden in my breast; but it seems it is to be--and indeed i have no choice. it is destiny! listen." and he told me a long story. i have mentioned already that he was a poor hand at telling stories, but it was not only his lack of skill in describing events that had happened to him that impressed me that night; the very sound of his voice, his glances, the movements which he made with his fingers and his hands--everything about him, indeed, seemed unnatural, unnecessary, false, in fact. i was very young and inexperienced in those days and did not know that the habit of high-flown language and falsity of intonation and manner may become so ingrained in a man that he is incapable of shaking it off: it is a sort of curse. later in life i came across a lady who described to me the effect on her of her son's death, of her "boundless" grief, of her fears for her reason, in such exaggerated language, with such theatrical gestures, such melodramatic movements of her head and rolling of her eyes, that i thought to myself, "how false and affected that lady is! she did not love her son at all!" and a week afterwards i heard that the poor woman had really gone out of her mind. since then i have become much more careful in my judgments and have had far less confidence in my own impressions. x the story which tyeglev told me was, briefly, as follows. he had living in petersburg, besides his influential uncle, an aunt, not influential but wealthy. as she had no children of her own she had adopted a little girl, an orphan, of the working class, given her a liberal education and treated her like a daughter. she was called masha. tyeglev saw her almost every day. it ended in their falling in love with one another and masha's giving herself to him. this was discovered. tyeglev's aunt was fearfully incensed, she turned the luckless girl out of her house in disgrace, and moved to moscow where she adopted a young lady of noble birth and made her her heiress. on her return to her own relations, poor and drunken people, masha's lot was a bitter one. tyeglev had promised to marry her and did not keep his promise. at his last interview with her, he was forced to speak out: she wanted to know the truth and wrung it out of him. "well," she said, "if i am not to be your wife, i know what there is left for me to do." more than a fortnight had passed since that last interview. "i never for a moment deceived myself as to the meaning of her last words," added tyeglev. "i am certain that she has put an end to her life and ... and that it was _her_ voice, that it was _she_ calling me ... to follow her there ... i _recognised_ her voice.... well, there is but one end to it." "but why didn't you marry her, ilya stepanitch?" i asked. "you ceased to love her?" "no; i still love her passionately." at this point i stared at tyeglev. i remembered another friend of mine, a very intelligent man, who had a very plain wife, neither intelligent nor rich and was very unhappy in his marriage. when someone in my presence asked him why he had married and suggested that it was probably for love, he answered, "not for love at all. it simply happened." and in this case tyeglev loved a girl passionately and did not marry her. was it for the same reason, then? "why don't you marry her, then?" i asked again. tyeglev's strange, drowsy eyes strayed over the table. "there is ... no answering that ... in a few words," he began, hesitating. "there were reasons.... and besides, she was ... a working-class girl. and then there is my uncle.... i was obliged to consider him, too." "your uncle?" i cried. "but what the devil do you want with your uncle whom you never see except at the new year when you go to congratulate him? are you reckoning on his money? but he has got a dozen children of his own!" i spoke with heat.... tyeglev winced and flushed ... flushed unevenly, in patches. "don't lecture me, if you please," he said dully. "i don't justify myself, however. i have ruined her life and now i must pay the penalty...." his head sank and he was silent. i found nothing to say, either. xi so we sat for a quarter of an hour. he looked away--i looked at him--and i noticed that the hair stood up and curled above his forehead in a peculiar way, which, so i have heard from an army doctor who had had a great many wounded pass through his hands, is always a symptom of intense overheating of the brain.... the thought struck me again that fate really had laid a heavy hand on this man and that his comrades were right in seeing something "fatal" in him. and yet inwardly i blamed him. "a working-class girl!" i thought, "a fine sort of aristocrat you are yourself!" "perhaps you blame me, ridel," tyeglev began suddenly, as though guessing what i was thinking. "i am very ... unhappy myself. but what to do? what to do?" he leaned his chin on his hand and began biting the broad flat nails of his short, red fingers, hard as iron. "what i think, ilya stepanitch, is that you ought first to make certain whether your suppositions are correct.... perhaps your lady love is alive and well." ("shall i tell him the real explanation of the taps?" flashed through my mind. "no--later.") "she has not written to me since we have been in camp," observed tyeglev. "that proves nothing, ilya stepanitch." tyeglev waved me off. "no! she is certainly not in this world. she called me." he suddenly turned to the window. "someone is knocking again!" i could not help laughing. "no, excuse me, ilya stepanitch! this time it is your nerves. you see, it is getting light. in ten minutes the sun will be up--it is past three o'clock--and ghosts have no power in the day." tyeglev cast a gloomy glance at me and muttering through his teeth "good-bye," lay down on the bench and turned his back on me. i lay down, too, and before i fell asleep i remember i wondered why tyeglev was always hinting at ... suicide. what nonsense! what humbug! of his own free will he had refused to marry her, had cast her off ... and now he wanted to kill himself! there was no sense in it! he could not resist posing! with these thoughts i fell into a sound sleep and when i opened my eyes the sun was already high in the sky--and tyeglev was not in the hut. he had, so his servant said, gone to the town. xii i spent a very dull and wearisome day. tyeglev did not return to dinner nor to supper; i did not expect my brother. towards evening a thick fog came on again, thicker even than the day before. i went to bed rather early. i was awakened by a knocking under the window. it was _my_ turn to be startled! the knock was repeated and so insistently distinct that one could have no doubt of its reality. i got up, opened the window and saw tyeglev. wrapped in his great-coat, with his cap pulled over his eyes, he stood motionless. "ilya stepanitch!" i cried, "is that you? i gave up expecting you. come in. is the door locked?" tyeglev shook his head. "i do not intend to come in," he pronounced in a hollow tone. "i only want to ask you to give this letter to the commanding officer to-morrow." he gave me a big envelope sealed with five seals. i was astonished--however, i took the envelope mechanically. tyeglev at once walked away into the middle of the road. "stop! stop!" i began. "where are you going? have you only just come? and what is the letter?" "do you promise to deliver it?" said tyeglev, and moved away a few steps further. the fog blurred the outlines of his figure. "do you promise?" "i promise ... but first--" tyeglev moved still further away and became a long dark blur. "good-bye," i heard his voice. "farewell, ridel, don't remember evil against me.... and don't forget semyon...." and the blur itself vanished. this was too much. "oh, the damned _poseur_," i thought. "you must always be straining after effect!" i felt uneasy, however; an involuntary fear clutched at my heart. i flung on my great-coat and ran out into the road. xiii yes; but where was i to go? the fog enveloped me on all sides. for five or six steps all round it was a little transparent--but further away it stood up like a wall, thick and white like cotton wool. i turned to the right along the village street; our house was the last but one in the village and beyond it came waste land overgrown here and there with bushes; beyond the waste land, a quarter of a mile from the village, there was a birch copse through which flowed the same little stream that lower down encircled our village. the moon stood, a pale blur in the sky--but its light was not, as on the evening before, strong enough to penetrate the smoky density of the fog and hung, a broad opaque canopy, overhead. i made my way out on to the open ground and listened.... not a sound from any direction, except the calling of the marsh birds. "tyeglev!" i cried. "ilya stepanitch!! tyeglev!!" my voice died away near me without an answer; it seemed as though the fog would not let it go further. "tyeglev!" i repeated. no one answered. i went forward at random. twice i struck against a fence, once i nearly fell into a ditch, and almost stumbled against a peasant's horse lying on the ground. "tyeglev! tyeglev!" i cried. all at once, almost behind me, i heard a low voice, "well, here i am. what do you want of me?" i turned round quickly. before me stood tyeglev with his hands hanging at his sides and with no cap on his head. his face was pale; but his eyes looked animated and bigger than usual. his breathing came in deep, prolonged gasps through his parted lips. "thank god!" i cried in an outburst of joy, and i gripped him by both hands. "thank god! i was beginning to despair of finding you. aren't you ashamed of frightening me like this? upon my word, ilya stepanitch!" "what do you want of me?" repeated tyeglev. "i want ... i want you, in the first place, to come back home with me. and secondly, i want, i insist, i insist as a friend, that you explain to me at once the meaning of your actions--and of this letter to the colonel. can something unexpected have happened to you in petersburg?" "i found in petersburg exactly what i expected," answered tyeglev, without moving from the spot. "that is ... you mean to say ... your friend ... this masha...." "she has taken her life," tyeglev answered hurriedly and as it were angrily. "she was buried the day before yesterday. she did not even leave a note for me. she poisoned herself." tyeglev hurriedly uttered these terrible words and still stood motionless as a stone. i clasped my hands. "is it possible? how dreadful! your presentiment has come true.... that is awful!" i stopped in confusion. slowly and with a sort of triumph tyeglev folded his arms. "but why are we standing here?" i began. "let us go home." "let us," said tyeglev. "but how can we find the way in this fog?" "there is a light in our windows, and we will make for it. come along." "you go ahead," answered tyeglev. "i will follow you." we set off. we walked for five minutes and our beacon light still did not appear; at last it gleamed before us in two red points. tyeglev stepped evenly behind me. i was desperately anxious to get home as quickly as possible and to learn from him all the details of his unhappy expedition to petersburg. before we reached the hut, impressed by what he had said, i confessed to him in an access of remorse and a sort of superstitious fear, that the mysterious knocking of the previous evening had been my doing ... and what a tragic turn my jest had taken! tyeglev confined himself to observing that i had nothing to do with it--that something else had guided my hand--and this only showed how little i knew him. his voice, strangely calm and even, sounded close to my ear. "but you do not know me," he added. "i saw you smile yesterday when i spoke of the strength of my will. you will come to know me--and you will remember my words." the first hut of the village sprang out of the fog before us like some dark monster ... then the second, our hut, emerged--and my setter dog began barking, probably scenting me. i knocked at the window. "semyon!" i shouted to tyeglev's servant, "hey, semyon! make haste and open the gate for us." the gate creaked and opened; semyon crossed the threshold. "ilya stepanitch, come in," i said, and i looked round. but no ilya stepanitch was with me. tyeglev had vanished as though he had sunk into the earth. i went into the hut feeling dazed. xiv vexation with tyeglev and with myself succeeded the amazement with which i was overcome at first. "your master is mad!" i blurted out to semyon, "raving mad! he galloped off to petersburg, then came back and is running about all over the place! i did get hold of him and brought him right up to the gate--and here he has given me the slip again! to go out of doors on a night like this! he has chosen a nice time for a walk!" "and why did i let go of his hand?" i reproached myself. semyon looked at me in silence, as though intending to say something--but after the fashion of servants in those days he simply shifted from one foot to the other and said nothing. "what time did he set off for town?" i asked sternly. "at six o'clock in the morning." "and how was he--did he seem anxious, depressed?" semyon looked down. "our master is a deep one," he began. "who can make him out? he told me to get out his new uniform when he was going out to town--and then he curled himself." "curled himself?" "curled his hair. i got the curling tongs ready for him." that, i confess, i had not expected. "do you know a young lady," i asked semyon, "a friend of ilya stepanitch's. her name is masha." "to be sure i know marya anempodistovna! a nice young lady." "is your master in love with this marya ... et cetera?" semyon heaved a sigh. "that young lady is ilya stepanitch's undoing. for he is desperately in love with her--and can't bring himself to marry her--and sorry to give her up, too. it's all his honour's faintheartedness. he is very fond of her." "what is she like then, pretty?" i inquired. semyon assumed a grave air. "she is the sort that the gentry like." "and you?" "she is not the right sort for us at all." "how so?" "very thin in the body." "if she died," i began, "do you think ilya stepanitch would not survive her?" semyon heaved a sigh again. "i can't venture to say that--there's no knowing with gentlemen ... but our master is a deep one." i took up from the table the big, rather thick letter that tyeglev had given me and turned it over in my hands.... the address to "his honour the commanding officer of the battery, colonel so and so" (the name, patronymic, and surname) was clearly and distinctly written. the word _urgent_, twice underlined, was written in the top left-hand corner of the envelope. "listen, semyon," i began. "i feel uneasy about your master. i fancy he has some mischief in his mind. we must find him." "yes, sir," answered semyon. "it is true there is such a fog that one cannot see a couple of yards ahead; but all the same we must do our best. we will each take a lantern and light a candle in each window--in case of need." "yes, sir," repeated semyon. he lighted the lanterns and the candles and we set off. xv i can't describe how we wandered and lost our way! the lanterns were of no help to us; they did not in the least dissipate the white, almost luminous mist which surrounded us. several times semyon and i lost each other, in spite of the fact that we kept calling to each other and hallooing and at frequent intervals shouted--i: "tyeglev! ilya stepanitch!" and semyon: "mr. tyeglev! your honour!" the fog so bewildered us that we wandered about as though in a dream; soon we were both hoarse; the fog penetrated right into one's chest. we succeeded somehow by help of the candles in the windows in reaching the hut again. our combined action had been of no use--we merely handicapped each other--and so we made up our minds not to trouble ourselves about getting separated but to go each our own way. he went to the left, i to the right and i soon ceased to hear his voice. the fog seemed to have found its way into my brain and i wandered like one dazed, simply shouting from time to time, "tyeglev! tyeglev!" "here!" i heard suddenly in answer. holy saints, how relieved i was! how i rushed in the direction from which the voice came.... a human figure loomed dark before me.... i made for it. at last! but instead of tyeglev i saw another officer of the same battery, whose name was tyelepnev. "was it you answered me?" i asked him. "was it you calling me?" he asked in his turn. "no; i was calling tyeglev." "tyeglev? why, i met him a minute ago. what a fool of a night! one can't find the way home." "you saw tyeglev? which way did he go?" "that way, i fancy," said the officer, waving his hand in the air. "but one can't be sure of anything now. do you know, for instance, where the village is? the only hope is the dogs barking. it is a fool of a night! let me light a cigarette ... it will seem like a light on the way." the officer was, so i fancied, a little exhilarated. "did tyeglev say anything to you?" i asked. "to be sure he did! i said to him, 'good evening, brother,' and he said, 'good-bye.' 'how good-bye? why good-bye.' 'i mean to shoot myself directly with a pistol.' he is a queer fish!" my heart stood still. "you say he told you ..." "he is a queer fish!" repeated the officer, and sauntered off. i hardly had time to recover from what the officer had told me, when my own name, shouted several times as it seemed with effort, caught my ear. i recognised semyon's voice. i called back ... he came to me. xvi "well?" i asked him. "have you found ilya stepanitch?" "yes, sir." "where?" "here, not far away." "how ... have you found him? is he alive?" "to be sure. i have been talking to him." (a load was lifted from my heart.) "his honour was sitting in his great-coat under a birch tree ... and he was all right. i put it to him, 'won't you come home, ilya stepanitch; alexandr vassilitch is very much worried about you.' and he said to me, 'what does he want to worry for! i want to be in the fresh air. my head aches. go home,' he said, 'and i will come later.'" "and you left him?" i cried, clasping my hands. "what else could i do? he told me to go ... how could i stay?" all my fears came back to me at once. "take me to him this minute--do you hear? this minute! o semyon, semyon, i did not expect this of you! you say he is not far off?" "he is quite close, here, where the copse begins--he is sitting there. it is not more than five yards from the river bank. i found him as i came alongside the river." "well, take me to him, take me to him." semyon set off ahead of me. "this way, sir.... we have only to get down to the river and it is close there." but instead of getting down to the river we got into a hollow and found ourselves before an empty shed. "hey, stop!" semyon cried suddenly. "i must have come too far to the right.... we must go that way, more to the left...." we turned to the left--and found ourselves among such high, rank weeds that we could scarcely get out.... i could not remember such a tangled growth of weeds anywhere near our village. and then all at once a marsh was squelching under our feet, and we saw little round moss-covered hillocks which i had never noticed before either.... we turned back--a small hill was sharply before us and on the top of it stood a shanty--and in it someone was snoring. semyon and i shouted several times into the shanty; something stirred at the further end of it, the straw rustled--and a hoarse voice shouted, "i am on guard." we turned back again ... fields and fields, endless fields.... i felt ready to cry.... i remembered the words of the fool in _king lear_: "this night will turn us all to fools or madmen." "where are we to go?" i said in despair to semyon. "the devil must have led us astray, sir," answered the distracted servant. "it's not natural ... there's mischief at the bottom of it!" i would have checked him but at that instant my ear caught a sound, distinct but not loud, that engrossed my whole attention. there was a faint "pop" as though someone had drawn a stiff cork from a narrow bottle-neck. the sound came from somewhere not far off. why the sound seemed to me strange and peculiar i could not say, but at once i went towards it. semyon followed me. within a few minutes something tall and broad loomed in the fog. "the copse! here is the copse!" semyon cried, delighted. "yes, here ... and there is the master sitting under the birch-tree.... there he is, sitting where i left him. that's he, surely enough!" i looked intently. a man really was sitting with his back towards us, awkwardly huddled up under the birch-tree. i hurriedly approached and recognised tyeglev's great-coat, recognised his figure, his head bowed on his breast. "tyeglev!" i cried ... but he did not answer. "tyeglev!" i repeated, and laid my hand on his shoulder. then he suddenly lurched forward, quickly and obediently, as though he were waiting for my touch, and fell onto the grass. semyon and i raised him at once and turned him face upwards. it was not pale, but was lifeless and motionless; his clenched teeth gleamed white--and his eyes, motionless, too, and wide open, kept their habitual, drowsy and "different" look. "good god!" semyon said suddenly and showed me his hand stained crimson with blood.... the blood was coming from under tyeglev's great-coat, from the left side of his chest. he had shot himself from a small, single-barreled pistol which was lying beside him. the faint pop i had heard was the sound made by the fatal shot. xvii tyeglev's suicide did not surprise his comrades very much. i have told you already that, according to their ideas, as a "fatal" man he was bound to do something extraordinary, though perhaps they had not expected that from him. in the letter to the colonel he asked him, in the first place, to have the name of ilya tyeglev removed from the list of officers, as he had died by his own act, adding that in his cash-box there would be found more than sufficient money to pay his debts,--and, secondly, to forward to the important personage at that time commanding the whole corps of guards, an unsealed letter which was in the same envelope. this second letter, of course, we all read; some of us took a copy of it. tyeglev had evidently taken pains over the composition of this letter. "you know, your excellency" (so i remember the letter began), "you are so stern and severe over the slightest negligence in uniform when a pale, trembling officer presents himself before you; and here am i now going to meet our universal, righteous, incorruptible judge, the supreme being, the being of infinitely greater consequence even than your excellency, and i am going to meet him in undress, in my great-coat, and even without a cravat round my neck." oh, what a painful and unpleasant impression that phrase made upon me, with every word, every letter of it, carefully written in the dead man's childish handwriting! was it worth while, i asked myself, to invent such rubbish at such a moment? but tyeglev had evidently been pleased with the phrase: he had made use in it of the accumulation of epithets and amplifications _à la_ marlinsky, at that time in fashion. further on he had alluded to destiny, to persecution, to his vocation which had remained unfulfilled, to a mystery which he would bear with him to the grave, to people who had not cared to understand him; he had even quoted lines from some poet who had said of the crowd that it wore life "like a dog-collar" and clung to vice "like a burdock"--and it was not free from mistakes in spelling. to tell the truth, this last letter of poor tyeglev was somewhat vulgar; and i can fancy the contemptuous surprise of the great personage to whom it was addressed--i can imagine the tone in which he would pronounce "a worthless officer! ill weeds are cleared out of the field!" only at the very end of the letter there was a sincere note from tyeglev's heart. "ah, your excellency," he concluded his epistle, "i am an orphan, i had no one to love me as a child--and all held aloof from me ... and i myself destroyed the only heart that gave itself to me!" semyon found in the pocket of tyeglev's great-coat a little album from which his master was never separated. but almost all the pages had been torn out; only one was left on which there was the following calculation: napoleon was born ilya tyeglev was born on august th, . on january th, . * + ----- ----- total total * august--the th month + january--the st month of the year. of the year. --- --- total ! total ! napoleon died on may ilya tyeglev died on th, . april st, . * + ----- ----- total total * may--the th month + july--the th month of the year. of the year. -- -- total ! total ! poor fellow! was not this perhaps why he became an artillery officer? as a suicide he was buried outside the cemetery--and he was immediately forgotten. xviii the day after tyeglev's burial (i was still in the village waiting for my brother) semyon came into the hut and announced that ilya wanted to see me. "what ilya?" i asked. "our pedlar." i told semyon to call him. he made his appearance. he expressed some regret at the death of the lieutenant; wondered what could have possessed him.... "was he in debt to you?" i asked. "no, sir. he always paid punctually for everything he had. but i tell you what," here the pedlar grinned, "you have got something of mine." "what is it?" "why, that," he pointed to the brass comb lying on the little toilet table. "a thing of little value," the fellow went on, "but as it was a present ..." all at once i raised my head. something dawned upon me. "your name is ilya?" "yes, sir." "was it you, then, i saw under the willow tree the other night?" the pedlar winked, and grinned more broadly than ever. "yes, sir." "and it was _your_ name that was called?" "yes, sir," the pedlar repeated with playful modesty. "there is a young girl here," he went on in a high falsetto, "who, owing to the great strictness of her parents----" "very good, very good," i interrupted him, handed him the comb and dismissed him. "so that was the 'ilyusha,'" i thought, and i sank into philosophic reflections which i will not, however, intrude upon you as i don't want to prevent anyone from believing in fate, predestination and such like. when i was back in petersburg i made inquiries about masha. i even discovered the doctor who had treated her. to my amazement i heard from him that she had died not through poisoning but of cholera! i told him what i had heard from tyeglev. "eh! eh!" cried the doctor all at once. "is that tyeglev an artillery officer, a man of middle height and with a stoop, speaks with a lisp?" "yes." "well, i thought so. that gentleman came to me--i had never seen him before--and began insisting that the girl had poisoned herself. 'it was cholera,' i told him. 'poison,' he said. 'it was cholera, i tell you,' i said. 'no, it was poison,' he declared. i saw that the fellow was a sort of lunatic, with a broad base to his head--a sign of obstinacy, he would not give over easily.... well, it doesn't matter, i thought, the patient is dead.... 'very well,' i said, 'she poisoned herself if you prefer it.' he thanked me, even shook hands with me--and departed." i told the doctor how the officer had shot himself the same day. the doctor did not turn a hair--and only observed that there were all sorts of queer fellows in the world. "there are indeed," i assented. yes, someone has said truly of suicides: until they carry out their design, no one believes them; and when they do, no one regrets them. baden, . * * * * * the inn on the high road to b., at an equal distance from the two towns through which it runs, there stood not long ago a roomy inn, very well known to the drivers of troikas, peasants with trains of waggons, merchants, clerks, pedlars and the numerous travellers of all sorts who journey upon our roads at all times of the year. everyone used to call at the inn; only perhaps a landowner's coach, drawn by six home-bred horses, would roll majestically by, which did not prevent either the coachman or the groom on the footboard from looking with peculiar feeling and attention at the little porch so familiar to them; or some poor devil in a wretched little cart and with three five-kopeck pieces in the bag in his bosom would urge on his weary nag when he reached the prosperous inn, and would hasten on to some night's lodging in the hamlets that lie by the high road in a peasant's hut, where he would find nothing but bread and hay, but, on the other hand, would not have to pay an extra kopeck. apart from its favourable situation, the inn with which our story deals had many attractions: excellent water in two deep wells with creaking wheels and iron buckets on a chain; a spacious yard with a tiled roof on posts; abundant stores of oats in the cellar; a warm outer room with a very huge russian stove with long horizontal flues attached that looked like titanic shoulders, and lastly two fairly clean rooms with the walls covered with reddish lilac paper somewhat frayed at the lower edge with a painted wooden sofa, chairs to match and two pots of geraniums in the windows, which were, however, never cleaned--and were dingy with the dust of years. the inn had other advantages: the blacksmith's was close by, the mill was just at hand; and, lastly, one could get a good meal in it, thanks to the cook, a fat and red-faced peasant woman, who prepared rich and appetizing dishes and dealt out provisions without stint; the nearest tavern was reckoned not half a mile away; the host kept snuff which though mixed with wood-ash, was extremely pungent and pleasantly irritated the nose; in fact there were many reasons why visitors of all sorts were never lacking in that inn. it was liked by those who used it--and that is the chief thing; without which nothing, of course, would succeed and it was liked principally as it was said in the district, because the host himself was very fortunate and successful in all his undertakings, though he did not much deserve his good fortune; but it seems if a man is lucky, he is lucky. the innkeeper was a man of the working class called naum ivanov. he was a man of middle height with broad, stooping shoulders; he had a big round head and curly hair already grey, though he did not look more than forty; a full and fresh face, a low but white and smooth forehead and little bright blue eyes, out of which he looked in a very queer way from under his brows and yet with an insolent expression, a combination not often met with. he always held his head down and seemed to turn it with difficulty, perhaps because his neck was very short. he walked at a trot and did not swing his arms, but slowly moved them with his fists clenched as he walked. when he smiled, and he smiled often without laughing, as it were smiling to himself, his thick lips parted unpleasantly and displayed a row of close-set, brilliant teeth. he spoke jerkily and with a surly note in his voice. he shaved his beard, but dressed in russian style. his costume consisted of a long, always threadbare, full coat, full breeches and shoes on his bare feet. he was often away from home on business and he had a great deal of business--he was a horse-dealer, he rented land, had a market garden, bought up orchards and traded in various ways--but his absences never lasted long; like a kite, to which he had considerable resemblance, especially in the expression of his eyes, he used to return to his nest. he knew how to keep that nest in order. he was everywhere, he listened to everything and gave orders, served out stores, sent things out and made up his accounts himself, and never knocked off a farthing from anyone's account, but never asked more than his due. the visitors did not talk to him, and, indeed, he did not care to waste words. "i want your money and you want my victuals," he used to say, as it were, jerking out each word: "we have not met for a christening; the traveller has eaten, has fed his beasts, no need to sit on. if he is tired, let him sleep without chattering." the labourers he kept were healthy grown-up men, but docile and well broken in; they were very much afraid of him. he never touched intoxicating liquor and he used to give his men ten kopecks for vodka on the great holidays; they did not dare to drink on other days. people like naum quickly get rich ... but to the magnificent position in which he found himself--and he was believed to be worth forty or fifty thousand roubles--naum ivanov had not arrived by the strait path.... the inn had existed on the same spot on the high road twenty years before the time from which we date the beginning of our story. it is true that it had not then the dark red shingle roof which made naum ivanov's inn look like a gentleman's house; it was inferior in construction and had thatched roofs in the courtyard, and a humble fence instead of a wall of logs; nor had it been distinguished by the triangular greek pediment on carved posts; but all the same it had been a capital inn--roomy, solid and warm--and travellers were glad to frequent it. the innkeeper at that time was not naum ivanov, but a certain akim semyonitch, a serf belonging to a neighbouring lady, lizaveta prohorovna kuntse, the widow of a staff officer. this akim was a shrewd trading peasant who, having left home in his youth with two wretched nags to work as a carrier, had returned a year later with three decent horses and had spent almost all the rest of his life on the high roads; he used to go to kazan and odessa, to orenburg and to warsaw and abroad to leipsic and used in the end to travel with two teams, each of three stout, sturdy stallions, harnessed to two huge carts. whether it was that he was sick of his life of homeless wandering, whether it was that he wanted to rear a family (his wife had died in one of his absences and what children she had borne him were dead also), anyway, he made up his mind at last to abandon his old calling and to open an inn. with the permission of his mistress, he settled on the high road, bought in her name about an acre and a half of land and built an inn upon it. the undertaking prospered. he had more than enough money to furnish and stock it. the experience he had gained in the course of his years of travelling from one end of russia to another was of great advantage to him; he knew how to please his visitors, especially his former mates, the drivers of troikas, many of whom he knew personally and whose good-will is particularly valued by innkeepers, as they need so much food for themselves and their powerful beasts. akim's inn became celebrated for hundreds of miles round. people were even readier to stay with him than with his successor, naum, though akim could not be compared with naum as a manager. under akim everything was in the old-fashioned style, snug, but not over clean; and his oats were apt to be light, or musty; the cooking, too, was somewhat indifferent: dishes were sometimes put on the table which would better have been left in the oven and it was not that he was stingy with the provisions, but just that the cook had not looked after them. on the other hand, he was ready to knock off something from the price and did not refuse to trust a man's word for payment--he was a good man and a genial host. in talking, in entertaining, he was lavish, too; he would sometimes chatter away over the samovar till his listeners pricked up their ears, especially when he began telling them about petersburg, about the circassian steppes, or even about foreign parts; and he liked getting a little drunk with a good companion, but not disgracefully so, more for the sake of company, as his guests used to say of him. he was a great favourite with merchants and with all people of what is called the old school, who do not set off for a journey without tightening up their belts and never go into a room without making the sign of the cross, and never enter into conversation with a man without first wishing him good health. even akim's appearance disposed people in his favour: he was tall, rather thin, but graceful even at his advanced years; he had a long face, with fine-looking regular features, a high and open brow, a straight and delicate nose and a small mouth. his brown and prominent eyes positively shone with friendly gentleness, his soft, scanty hair curled in little rings about his neck; he had very little left on the top of his head. akim's voice was very pleasant, though weak; in his youth he had been a good singer, but continual travelling in the open air in the winter had affected his chest. but he talked very smoothly and sweetly. when he laughed wrinkles like rays that were very charming came round his eyes:--such wrinkles are only to be seen in kind-hearted people. akim's movements were for the most part deliberate and not without a certain confidence and dignified courtesy befitting a man of experience who had seen a great deal in his day. in fact, akim--or akim semyonitch as he was called even in his mistress's house, to which he often went and invariably on sundays after mass--would have been excellent in all respects--if he had not had one weakness which has been the ruin of many men on earth, and was in the end the ruin of him, too--a weakness for the fair sex. akim's susceptibility was extreme, his heart could never resist a woman's glance: he melted before it like the first snow of autumn in the sun ... and dearly he had to pay for his excessive sensibility. for the first year after he had set up on the high road akim was so busy with building his yard, stocking the place, and all the business inseparable from moving into a new house that he had absolutely no time to think of women and if any sinful thought came into his mind he immediately drove it away by reading various devotional works for which he cherished a profound respect (he had learned to read when first he left home), singing the psalms in a low voice or some other pious occupation. besides, he was then in his forty-sixth year and at that time of life every passion grows perceptibly calmer and cooler and the time for marrying was past. akim himself began to think that, as he expressed it, this foolishness was over and done with ... but evidently there is no escaping one's fate. akim's former mistress, lizaveta prohorovna kuntse, the widow of an officer of german extraction, was herself a native of mittau, where she had spent the first years of her childhood and where she had numerous poor relations, about whom she concerned herself very little, especially after a casual visit from one of her brothers, an infantry officer of the line. on the day after his arrival he had made a great disturbance and almost beaten the lady of the house, calling her "du lumpenmamselle," though only the evening before he had called her in broken russian: "sister and benefactor." lizaveta prohorovna lived almost permanently on her pretty estate which had been won by the labours of her husband who had been an architect. she managed it herself and managed it very well. lizaveta prohorovna never let slip the slightest advantage; she turned everything into profit for herself; and this, as well as her extraordinary capacity for making a farthing do the work of a halfpenny, betrayed her german origin; in everything else she had become very russian. she kept a considerable number of house serfs, especially many maids, who earned their salt, however: from morning to night their backs were bent over their work. she liked driving out in her carriage with grooms in livery on the footboard. she liked listening to gossip and scandal and was a clever scandal-monger herself; she liked to lavish favours upon someone, then suddenly crush him with her displeasure, in fact, lizaveta prohorovna behaved exactly like a lady. akim was in her good graces; he paid her punctually every year a very considerable sum in lieu of service; she talked graciously to him and even, in jest, invited him as a guest ... but it was precisely in his mistress's house that trouble was in store for akim. among lizaveta prohorovna's maidservants was an orphan girl of twenty called dunyasha. she was good-looking, graceful and neat-handed; though her features were irregular, they were pleasing; her fresh complexion, her thick flaxen hair, her lively grey eyes, her little round nose, her rosy lips and above all her half-mocking, half-provocative expression--were all rather charming in their way. at the same time, in spite of her forlorn position, she was strict, almost haughty in her deportment. she came of a long line of house serfs. her father, arefy, had been a butler for thirty years, while her grandfather, stepan had been valet to a prince and officer of the guards long since dead. she dressed neatly and was vain over her hands, which were certainly very beautiful. dunyasha made a show of great disdain for all her admirers; she listened to their compliments with a self-complacent little smile and if she answered them at all it was usually some exclamation such as: "yes! likely! as though i should! what next!" these exclamations were always on her lips. dunyasha had spent about three years being trained in moscow where she had picked up the peculiar airs and graces which distinguish maidservants who have been in moscow or petersburg. she was spoken of as a girl of self-respect (high praise on the lips of house serfs) who, though she had seen something of life, had not let herself down. she was rather clever with her needle, too, yet with all this lizaveta prohorovna was not very warmly disposed toward her, thanks to the headmaid, kirillovna, a sly and intriguing woman, no longer young. kirillovna exercised great influence over her mistress and very skilfully succeeded in getting rid of all rivals. with this dunyasha akim must needs fall in love! and he fell in love as he had never fallen in love before. he saw her first at church: she had only just come back from moscow.... afterwards, he met her several times in his mistress's house; finally he spent a whole evening with her at the steward's, where he had been invited to tea in company with other highly respected persons. the house serfs did not disdain him, though he was not of their class and wore a beard; he was a man of education, could read and write and, what was more, had money; and he did not dress like a peasant but wore a long full coat of black cloth, high boots of calf leather and a kerchief on his neck. it is true that some of the house serfs did say among themselves that: "one can see that he is not one of us," but to his face they almost flattered him. on that evening at the steward's dunyasha made a complete conquest of akim's susceptible heart, though she said not a single word in answer to his ingratiating speeches and only looked sideways at him from time to time as though wondering why that peasant was there. all that only added fuel to the flames. he went home, pondered and pondered and made up his mind to win her hand.... she had somehow "bewitched" him. but how can i describe the wrath and indignation of dunyasha when five days later kirillovna with a friendly air invited her into her room and told her that akim (and evidently he knew how to set to work) that bearded peasant akim, to sit by whose side she considered almost an indignity, was courting her. dunyasha first flushed crimson, then she gave a forced laugh, then she burst into tears; but kirillovna made her attack so artfully, made the girl feel her own position in the house so clearly, so tactfully hinted at the presentable appearance, the wealth and blind devotion of akim and finally mentioned so significantly the wishes of their mistress that dunyasha went out of the room with a look of hesitation on her face and meeting akim only gazed intently into his face and did not turn away. the indescribably lavish presents of the love-sick man dissipated her last doubts. lizaveta prohorovna, to whom akim in his joy took a hundred peaches on a large silver dish, gave her consent to the marriage, and the marriage took place. akim spared no expense--and the bride, who on the eve of her wedding at her farewell party to her girl friends sat looking a figure of misery, and who cried all the next morning while kirillovna was dressing her for the wedding, was soon comforted.... her mistress gave her her own shawl to wear in the church and akim presented her the same day with one like it, almost superior. and so akim was married, and took his young bride home.... they began their life together.... dunyasha turned out to be a poor housewife, a poor helpmate to her husband. she took no interest in anything, was melancholy and depressed unless some officer sitting by the big samovar noticed her and paid her compliments; she was often absent, sometimes in the town shopping, sometimes at the mistress's house, which was only three miles from the inn. there she felt at home, there she was surrounded by her own people; the girls envied her finery. kirillovna regaled her with tea; lizaveta prohorovna herself talked to her. but even these visits did not pass without some bitter experiences for dunyasha.... as an innkeeper's wife, for instance, she could not wear a hat and was obliged to tie up her head in a kerchief, "like a merchant's lady," said sly kirillovna, "like a working woman," thought dunyasha to herself. more than once akim recalled the words of his only relation, an uncle who had lived in solitude without a family for years: "well, akimushka, my lad," he had said, meeting him in the street, "i hear you are getting married." "why, yes, what of it?" "ech, akim, akim. you are above us peasants now, there's no denying that; but you are not on her level either." "in what way not on her level?" "why, in that way, for instance," his uncle had answered, pointing to akim's beard, which he had begun to clip in order to please his betrothed, though he had refused to shave it completely.... akim looked down; while the old man turned away, wrapped his tattered sheepskin about him and walked away, shaking his head. yes, more than once akim sank into thought, cleared his throat and sighed.... but his love for his pretty wife was no less; he was proud of her, especially when he compared her not merely with peasant women, or with his first wife, to whom he had been married at sixteen, but with other serf girls; "look what a fine bird we have caught," he thought to himself.... her slightest caress gave him immense pleasure. "maybe," he thought, "she will get used to it; maybe she will get into the way of it." meanwhile her behaviour was irreproachable and no one could say anything against her. several years passed like this. dunyasha really did end by growing used to her way of life. akim's love for her and confidence in her only increased as he grew older; her girl friends, who had been married not to peasants, were suffering cruel hardships, either from poverty or from having fallen into bad hands.... akim went on getting richer and richer. everything succeeded with him--he was always lucky; only one thing was a grief: god had not given him children. dunyasha was by now over five and twenty; everyone addressed her as avdotya arefyevna. she never became a real housewife, however--but she grew fond of her house, looked after the stores and superintended the woman who worked in the house. it is true that she did all this only after a fashion; she did not keep up a high standard of cleanliness and order; on the other hand, her portrait painted in oils and ordered by herself from a local artist, the son of the parish deacon, hung on the wall of the chief room beside that of akim. she was depicted in a white dress with a yellow shawl with six strings of big pearls round her neck, long earrings, and a ring on every finger. the portrait was recognisable though the artist had painted her excessively stout and rosy--and had made her eyes not grey but black and even slightly squinting.... akim's was a complete failure, the portrait had come out dark--_à la_ rembrandt--so that sometimes a visitor would go up to it, look at it and merely give an inarticulate murmur. avdotya had taken to being rather careless in her dress; she would fling a big shawl over her shoulders, while the dress under it was put on anyhow: she was overcome by laziness, that sighing apathetic drowsy laziness to which the russian is only too liable, especially when his livelihood is secure.... with all that, the fortunes of akim and his wife prospered exceedingly; they lived in harmony and had the reputation of an exemplary pair. but just as a squirrel will wash its face at the very instant when the sportsman is aiming at it, man has no presentiment of his troubles, till all of a sudden the ground gives way under him like ice. one autumn evening a merchant in the drapery line put up at akim's inn. he was journeying by various cross-country roads from moscow to harkov with two loaded tilt carts; he was one of those travelling traders whose arrival is sometimes awaited with such impatience by country gentlemen and still more by their wives and daughters. this travelling merchant, an elderly man, had with him two companions, or, speaking more correctly, two workmen, one thin, pale and hunchbacked, the other a fine, handsome young fellow of twenty. they asked for supper, then sat down to tea; the merchant invited the innkeeper and his wife to take a cup with him, they did not refuse. a conversation quickly sprang up between the two old men (akim was fifty-six); the merchant inquired about the gentry of the neighbourhood and no one could give him more useful information about them than akim; the hunchbacked workman spent his time looking after the carts and finally went off to bed; it fell to avdotya to talk to the other one.... she sat by him and said little, rather listening to what he told her, but it was evident that his talk pleased her; her face grew more animated, the colour came into her cheeks and she laughed readily and often. the young workman sat almost motionless with his curly head bent over the table; he spoke quietly, without haste and without raising his voice; but his eyes, not large but saucily bright and blue, were rivetted on avdotya; at first she turned away from them, then she, too, began looking him in the face. the young fellow's face was fresh and smooth as a crimean apple; he often smiled and tapped with his white fingers on his chin covered with soft dark down. he spoke like a merchant, but very freely and with a sort of careless self-confidence and went on looking at her with the same intent, impudent stare.... all at once he moved a little closer to her and without the slightest change of countenance said to her: "avdotya arefyevna, there's no one like you in the world; i am ready to die for you." avdotya laughed aloud. "what is it?" asked akim. "why, he keeps saying such funny things," she said, without any particular embarrassment. the old merchant grinned. "ha, ha, yes, my naum is such a funny fellow, don't listen to him." "oh! really! as though i should," she answered, and shook her head. "ha, ha, of course not," observed the old man. "but, however," he went on in a singsong voice, "we will take our leave; we are thoroughly satisfied, it is time for bed, ..." and he got up. "we are well satisfied, too," akim brought out and he got up, "for your entertainment, that is, but we wish you a good night. avdotyushka, come along." avdotya got up as it were unwillingly. naum, too, got up after her ... the party broke up. the innkeeper and his wife went off to the little lobby partitioned off, which served them as a bedroom. akim was snoring immediately. it was a long time before avdotya could get to sleep.... at first she lay still, turning her face to the wall, then she began tossing from side to side on the hot feather bed, throwing off and pulling up the quilt alternately ... then she sank into a light doze. suddenly she heard from the yard a loud masculine voice: it was singing a song of which it was impossible to distinguish the words, prolonging each note, though not with a melancholy effect. avdotya opened her eyes, propped herself on her elbows and listened.... the song went on.... it rang out musically in the autumn air. akim raised his head. "who's that singing?" he asked. "i don't know," she answered. "he sings well," he added, after a brief pause. "very well. what a strong voice. i used to sing in my day," he went on. "and i sang well, too, but my voice has gone. that's a fine voice. it must be that young fellow singing, naum is his name, isn't it?" and he turned over on the other side, gave a sigh and fell asleep again. it was a long time before the voice was still ... avdotya listened and listened; all at once it seemed to break off, rang out boldly once more and slowly died away.... avdotya crossed herself and laid her head on the pillow.... half an hour passed.... she sat up and softly got out of bed. "where are you going, wife?" akim asked in his sleep. she stopped. "to see to the little lamp," she said, "i can't get to sleep." "you should say a prayer," akim mumbled, falling asleep. avdotya went up to the lamp before the ikon, began trimming it and accidentally put it out; she went back and lay down. everything was still. early next morning the merchant set off again on his journey with his companions. avdotya was asleep. akim went half a mile with them: he had to call at the mill. when he got home he found his wife dressed and not alone. naum, the young man who had been there the night before, was with her. they were standing by the table in the window talking. when avdotya saw akim, she went out of the room without a word, and naum said that he had come for his master's gloves which the latter, he said, had left behind on the bench; and he, too, went away. we will now tell the reader what he has probably guessed already: avdotya had fallen passionately in love with naum. it is hard to say how it could have happened so quickly, especially as she had hitherto been irreproachable in her behaviour in spite of many opportunities and temptations to deceive her husband. later on, when her intrigue with naum became known, many people in the neighbourhood declared that he had on the very first evening put a magic potion that was a love spell in her tea (the efficacy of such spells is still firmly believed in among us), and that this could be clearly seen from the appearance of avdotya who, so they said, soon after began to pine away and look depressed. however that may have been, naum began to be frequently seen in akim's yard. at first he came again with the same merchant and three months later arrived alone, with wares of his own; then the report spread that he had settled in one of the neighbouring district towns, and from that time forward not a week passed without his appearing on the high road with his strong, painted cart drawn by two sleek horses which he drove himself. there was no particular friendship between akim and him, nor was there any hostility noticed between them; akim did not take much notice of him and only thought of him as a sharp young fellow who was rapidly making his way in the world. he did not suspect avdotya's real feelings and went on believing in her as before. two years passed like this. one summer day it happened that lizaveta prohorovna--who had somehow suddenly grown yellow and wrinkled during those two years in spite of all sorts of unguents, rouge and powder--about two o'clock in the afternoon went out with her lap dog and her folding parasol for a stroll before dinner in her neat little german garden. with a faint rustle of her starched petticoats, she walked with tiny steps along the sandy path between two rows of erect, stiffly tied-up dahlias, when she was suddenly overtaken by our old acquaintance kirillovna, who announced respectfully that a merchant desired to speak to her on important business. kirillovna was still high in her mistress's favour (in reality it was she who managed madame kuntse's estate) and she had some time before obtained permission to wear a white cap, which gave still more acerbity to the sharp features of her swarthy face. "a merchant?" said her mistress; "what does he want?" "i don't know what he wants," answered kirillovna in an insinuating voice, "only i think he wants to buy something from you." lizaveta prohorovna went back into the drawing-room, sat down in her usual seat--an armchair with a canopy over it, upon which a climbing plant twined gracefully--and gave orders that the merchant should be summoned. naum appeared, bowed, and stood still by the door. "i hear that you want to buy something of me," said lizaveta prohorovna, and thought to herself, "what a handsome man this merchant is." "just so, madam." "what is it?" "would you be willing to sell your inn?" "what inn?" "why, the one on the high road not far from here." "but that inn is not mine, it is akim's." "not yours? why, it stands on your land." "yes, the land is mine ... bought in my name; but the inn is his." "to be sure. but wouldn't you be willing to sell it to me?" "how could i sell it to you?" "well, i would give you a good price for it." lizaveta prohorovna was silent for a space. "it is really very queer what you are saying," she said. "and what would you give?" she added. "i don't ask that for myself but for akim." "for all the buildings and the appurtenances, together with the land that goes with it, of course, i would give two thousand roubles." "two thousand roubles! that is not enough," replied lizaveta prohorovna. "it's a good price." "but have you spoken to akim?" "what should i speak to him for? the inn is yours, so here i am talking to you about it." "but i have told you.... it really is astonishing that you don't understand me." "not understand, madam? but i do understand." lizaveta prohorovna looked at naum and naum looked at lizaveta prohorovna. "well, then," he began, "what do you propose?" "i propose ..." lizaveta prohorovna moved in her chair. "in the first place i tell you that two thousand is too little and in the second ..." "i'll add another hundred, then." lizaveta prohorovna got up. "i see that you are talking quite off the point. i have told you already that i cannot sell that inn--am not going to sell it. i cannot ... that is, i will not." naum smiled and said nothing for a space. "well, as you please, madam," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "i beg to take leave." he bowed and took hold of the door handle. lizaveta prohorovna turned round to him. "you need not go away yet, however," she said, with hardly perceptible agitation. she rang the bell and kirillovna came in from the study. "kirillovna, tell them to give this gentleman some tea. i will see you again," she added, with a slight inclination of her head. naum bowed again and went out with kirillovna. lizaveta prohorovna walked up and down the room once or twice and rang the bell again. this time a page appeared. she told him to fetch kirillovna. a few moments later kirillovna came in with a faint creak of her new goatskin shoes. "have you heard," lizaveta prohorovna began with a forced laugh, "what this merchant has been proposing to me? he is a queer fellow, really!" "no, i haven't heard. what is it, madam?" and kirillovna faintly screwed up her black kalmuck eyes. "he wants to buy akim's inn." "well, why not?" "but how could he? what about akim? i gave it to akim." "upon my word, madam, what are you saying? isn't the inn yours? don't we all belong to you? and isn't all our property yours, our mistress's?" "good gracious, kirillovna, what are you saying?" lizaveta prohorovna pulled out a batiste handkerchief and nervously blew her nose. "akim bought the inn with his own money." "his own money? but where did he get the money? wasn't it through your kindness? he has had the use of the land all this time as it is. it was all through your gracious permission. and do you suppose, madam, that he would have no money left? why, he is richer than you are, upon my word, he is!" "that's all true, of course, but still i can't do it.... how could i sell the inn?" "and why not sell it," kirillovna went on, "since a purchaser has luckily turned up? may i ask, madam, how much he offers you?" "more than two thousand roubles," said lizaveta prohorovna softly. "he will give more, madam, if he offers two thousand straight off. and you will arrange things with akim afterwards; take a little off his yearly duty or something. he will be thankful, too." "of course, i must remit part of his duty. but no, kirillovna, how can i sell it?" and lizaveta prohorovna walked up and down the room. "no, that's out of the question, that won't do ... no, please don't speak of it again ... or i shall be angry." but in spite of her agitated mistress's warning, kirillovna did continue speaking of it and half an hour later she went back to naum, whom she had left in the butler's pantry at the samovar. "what have you to tell me, good madam?" said naum, jauntily turning his tea-cup wrong side upwards in the saucer. "what i have to tell you is that you are to go in to the mistress; she wants you." "certainly," said naum, and he got up and followed kirillovna into the drawing-room. the door closed behind them.... when the door opened again and naum walked out backwards, bowing, the matter was settled: akim's inn belonged to him. he had bought it for paper roubles. it was arranged that the legal formalities should take place as quickly as possible and that till then the matter should not be made public. lizaveta prohorovna received a deposit of a hundred roubles and two hundred went to kirillovna for her assistance. "it has not cost me much," thought naum as he got into his coat, "it was a lucky chance." while the transaction we have described was going forward in the mistress's house, akim was sitting at home alone on the bench by the window, stroking his beard with a discontented expression. we have said already that he did not suspect his wife's feeling for naum, although kind friends had more than once hinted to him that it was time he opened his eyes; it is true that he had noticed himself that of late his wife had become rather difficult, but we all know that the female sex is capricious and changeable. even when it really did strike him that things were not going well in his house, he merely dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand; he did not like the idea of a squabble; his good nature had not lessened with years and indolence was asserting itself, too. but on that day he was very much out of humour; the day before he had overheard quite by chance in the street a conversation between their servant and a neighbouring peasant woman. the peasant woman asked the servant why she had not come to see her on the holiday the day before. "i was expecting you," she said. "i did set off," replied the servant, "but as ill-luck would have it, i ran into the mistress ... botheration take her." "ran into her?" repeated the peasant woman in a sing-song voice and she leaned her cheek on her hand. "and where did you run into her, my good girl?" "beyond the priest's hemp-patch. she must have gone to the hemp-patch to meet her naum, but i could not see them in the dusk, owing to the moon, maybe, i don't know; i simply dashed into them." "dashed into them?" the other woman repeated. "well, and was she standing with him, my good girl?" "yes, she was. he was standing there and so was she. she saw me and said, 'where are you running to? go home.' so i went home." "you went home?" the peasant woman was silent. "well, good-bye, fetinyushka," she brought out at last, and trudged off. this conversation had an unpleasant effect on akim. his love for avdotya had cooled, but still he did not like what the servant had said. and she had told the truth: avdotya really had gone out that evening to meet naum, who had been waiting for her in the patch of dense shade thrown on the road by the high motionless hemp. the dew bathed every stalk of it from top to bottom; the strong, almost overpowering fragrance hung all about it. a huge crimson moon had just risen in the dingy, blackish mist. naum heard the hurried footsteps of avdotya a long way off and went to meet her. she came up to him, pale with running; the moon lighted up her face. "well, have you brought it?" he asked. "brought it--yes, i have," she answered in an uncertain voice. "but, naum ivanitch----" "give it me, since you have brought it," he interrupted her, and held out his hand. she took a parcel from under her shawl. naum took it at once and thrust it in his bosom. "naum ivanitch," avdotya said slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on him, "oh, naum ivanitch, you will bring my soul to ruin." it was at that instant that the servant came up to them. and so akim was sitting on the bench discontentedly stroking his beard. avdotya kept coming into the room and going out again. he simply followed her with his eyes. at last she came into the room and after taking a jerkin from the lobby was just crossing the threshold, when he could not restrain himself and said, as though speaking to himself: "i wonder," he began, "why it is women are always in a fuss? it's no good expecting them to sit still. that's not in their line. but running out morning or evening, that's what they like. yes." avdotya listened to her husband's words without changing her position; only at the word "evening," she moved her head slightly and seemed to ponder. "once you begin talking, semyonitch," she commented at last with vexation, "there is no stopping you." and with a wave of her hand she went away and slammed the door. avdotya certainly did not appreciate akim's eloquence and often in the evenings when he indulged in conversation with travellers or fell to telling stories she stealthily yawned or went out of the room. akim looked at the closed door. "once you begin talking," he repeated in an undertone.... "the fact is, i have not talked enough to you. and who is it? a peasant like any one of us, and what's more...." and he got up, thought a little and tapped the back of his head with his fist. several days passed in a rather strange way. akim kept looking at his wife as though he were preparing to say something to her, and she, for her part, looked at him suspiciously; meanwhile, they both preserved a strained silence. this silence, however, was broken from time to time by some peevish remark from akim in regard to some oversight in the housekeeping or in regard to women in general. for the most part avdotya did not answer one word. but in spite of akim's good-natured weakness, it certainly would have come to a decisive explanation between him and avdotya, if it had not been for an event which rendered any explanation useless. one morning akim and wife were just beginning lunch (owing to the summer work in the fields there were no travellers at the inn) when suddenly a cart rattled briskly along the road and pulled up sharply at the front door. akim peeped out of window, frowned and looked down: naum got deliberately out of the cart. avdotya had not seen him, but when she heard his voice in the entry the spoon trembled in her hand. he told the labourers to put up the horse in the yard. at last the door opened and he walked into the room. "good-day," he said, and took off his cap. "good-day," akim repeated through his teeth. "where has god brought you from?" "i was in the neighbourhood," replied naum, and he sat down on the bench. "i have come from your lady." "from the lady," said akim, not getting up from his seat. "on business, eh?" "yes, on business. my respects to you, avdotya arefyevona." "good morning, naum ivanitch," she answered. all were silent. "what have you got, broth, is it?" began naum. "yes, broth," replied akim and all at once he turned pale, "but not for you." naum glanced at akim with surprise. "not for me?" "not for you, and that's all about it." akim's eyes glittered and he brought his fist on the table. "there is nothing in my house for you, do you hear?" "what's this, semyonitch, what is the matter with you?" "there's nothing the matter with me, but i am sick of you, naum ivanitch, that's what it is." the old man got up, trembling all over. "you poke yourself in here too often, i tell you." naum, too, got up. "you've gone clean off your head, old man," he said with a jeer. "avdotya arefyevna, what's wrong with him?" "i tell you," shouted akim in a cracked voice, "go away, do you hear? ... you have nothing to do with avdotya arefyevna ... i tell you, do you hear, get out!" "what's that you are saying to me?" naum asked significantly. "go out of the house, that's what i am telling to you. here's god and here's the door ... do you understand? or there will be trouble." naum took a step forward. "good gracious, don't fight, my dears," faltered avdotya, who till then had sat motionless at the table. naum glanced at her. "don't be uneasy, avdotya arefyevna, why should we fight? fie, brother, what a hullabaloo you are making!" he went on, addressing akim. "yes, really. you are a hasty one! has anyone ever heard of turning anyone out of his house, especially the owner of it?" naum added with slow deliberateness. "out of his house?" muttered akim. "what owner?" "me, if you like." and naum screwed up his eyes and showed his white teeth in a grin. "you? why, it's my house, isn't it?" "what a slow-witted fellow you are! i tell you it's mine." akim gazed at him open-eyed. "what crazy stuff is it you are talking? one would think you had gone silly," he said at last. "how the devil can it be yours?" "what's the good of talking to you?" cried naum impatiently. "do you see this bit of paper?" he went on, pulling out of his pocket a sheet of stamped paper, folded in four, "do you see? this is the deed of sale, do you understand, the deed of sale of your land and your house; i have bought them from the lady, from lizaveta prohorovna; the deed was drawn up at the town yesterday; so i am master here, not you. pack your belongings today," he added, putting the document back in his pocket, "and don't let me see a sign of you here to-morrow, do you hear?" akim stood as though struck by a thunderbolt. "robber," he moaned at last, "robber.... heigh, fedka, mitka, wife, wife, seize him, seize him--hold him." he lost his head completely. "mind now, old man," said naum menacingly, "mind what you are about, don't play the fool...." "beat him, wife, beat him!" akim kept repeating in a tearful voice, trying helplessly and in vain to get up. "murderer, robber.... she is not enough for you, you want to take my house, too, and everything.... but no, stop a bit ... that can't be.... i'll go myself, i'll speak myself ... how ... why should she sell it? wait a bit, wait a bit." and he dashed out bareheaded. "where are you off to, akim ivanitch?" said the servant fetinya, running into him in the doorway. "to our mistress! let me pass! to our mistress!" wailed akim, and seeing naum's cart which had not yet been taken into the yard, he jumped into it, snatched the reins and lashing the horse with all his might set off at full speed to his mistress's house. "my lady, lizaveta prohorovna," he kept repeating to himself all the way, "how have i lost your favour? i should have thought i had done my best!" and meantime he kept lashing and lashing the horse. those who met him moved out of his way and gazed after him. in a quarter of an hour akim had reached lizaveta prohorovna's house, had galloped up to the front door, jumped out of the cart and dashed straight into the entry. "what do you want?" muttered the frightened footman who was sleeping sweetly on the hall bench. "the mistress, i want to see the mistress," said akim loudly. the footman was amazed. "has anything happened?" he began. "nothing has happened, but i want to see the mistress." "what, what," said the footman, more and more astonished, and he slowly drew himself up. akim pulled himself up.... he felt as though cold water had been poured on him. "announce to the mistress, please, pyotr yevgrafitch," he said with a low bow, "that akim asks leave to see her." "very good ... i'll go ... i'll tell her ... but you must be drunk, wait a bit," grumbled the footman, and he went off. akim looked down and seemed confused.... his determination had evaporated as soon as he went into the hall. lizaveta prohorovna was confused, too, when she was informed that akim had come. she immediately summoned kirillovna to her boudoir. "i can't see him," she began hurriedly, as soon as the latter appeared. "i absolutely cannot. what am i to say to him? i told you he would be sure to come and complain," she added in annoyance and agitation. "i told you." "but why should you see him?" kirillovna answered calmly, "there is no need to. why should you be worried! no, indeed!" "what is to be done then?" "if you will permit me, i will speak to him." lizaveta prohorovna raised her head. "please do, kirillovna. talk to him. you tell him ... that i found it necessary ... but that i will compensate him ... say what you think best. please, kirillovna." "don't you worry yourself, madam," answered kirillovna, and she went out, her shoes creaking. a quarter of an hour had not elapsed when their creaking was heard again and kirillovna walked into the boudoir with the same unruffled expression on her face and the same sly shrewdness in her eyes. "well?" asked her mistress, "how is akim?" "he is all right, madam. he says that it must all be as you graciously please; that if only you have good health and prosperity he can get along very well." "and he did not complain?" "no, madam. why should he complain?" "what did he come for, then?" lizaveta prohorovna asked in some surprise. "he came to ask whether you would excuse his yearly payment for next year, that is, until he has been compensated." "of course, of course," lizaveta prohorovna caught her up eagerly. "of course, with pleasure. and tell him, in fact, that i will make it up to him. thank you, kirillovna. i see he is a good-hearted man. stay," she added, "give him this from me," and she took a three-rouble note out of her work-table drawer, "here, take this, give it to him." "certainly, madam," answered kirillovna, and going calmly back to her room she locked the note in an iron-cased box which stood at the head of her bed; she kept in it all her spare cash, and there was a considerable amount of it. kirillovna had reassured her mistress by her report but the conversation between herself and akim had not been quite what she represented. she had sent for him to the maid's room. at first he had not come, declaring that he did not want to see kirillovna but lizaveta prohorovna herself; he had, however, at last obeyed and gone by the back door to see kirillovna. he found her alone. he stopped at once on getting into the room and leaned against the wall by the door; he would have spoken but he could not. kirillovna looked at him intently. "you want to see the mistress, akim semyonitch?" she began. he simply nodded. "it's impossible, akim semyonitch. and what's the use? what's done can't be undone, and you will only worry the mistress. she can't see you now, akim semyonitch." "she cannot," he repeated and paused. "well, then," he brought out at last, "so then my house is lost?" "listen, akim semyonitch. i know you have always been a sensible man. such is the mistress's will and there is no changing it. you can't alter that. whatever you and i might say about it would make no difference, would it?" akim put his arm behind his back. "you'd better think," kirillovna went on, "shouldn't you ask the mistress to let you off your yearly payment or something?" "so my house is lost?" repeated akim in the same voice. "akim semyonitch, i tell you, it's no use. you know that better than i do." "yes. anyway, you might tell me what the house went for?" "i don't know, akim semyonitch, i can't tell you.... but why are you standing?" she added. "sit down." "i'd rather stand, i am a peasant. i thank you humbly." "you a peasant, akim semyonitch? you are as good as a merchant, let alone a house-serf! what do you mean? don't distress yourself for nothing. won't you have some tea?" "no, thank you, i don't want it. so you have got hold of my house between you," he added, moving away from the wall. "thank you for that. i wish you good-bye, my lady." and he turned and went out. kirillovna straightened her apron and went to her mistress. "so i am a merchant, it seems," akim said to himself, standing before the gate in hesitation. "a nice merchant!" he waved his hand and laughed bitterly. "well, i suppose i had better go home." and entirely forgetting naum's horse with which he had come, he trudged along the road to the inn. before he had gone the first mile he suddenly heard the rattle of a cart beside him. "akim, akim semyonitch," someone called to him. he raised his eyes and saw a friend of his, the parish clerk, yefrem, nicknamed the mole, a little, bent man with a sharp nose and dim-sighted eyes. he was sitting on a bundle of straw in a wretched little cart, and leaning forward against the box. "are you going home?" he asked akim. akim stopped "yes." "shall i give you a lift?" "please do." yefrem moved to one side and akim climbed into the cart. yefrem, who seemed to be somewhat exhilarated, began lashing at his wretched little horse with the ends of his cord reins; it set off at a weary trot continually tossing its unbridled head. they drove for nearly a mile without saying one word to each other. akim sat with his head bent while yefrem muttered to himself, alternately urging on and holding back his horse. "where have you been without your cap, semyonitch?" he asked akim suddenly and, without waiting for an answer, went on, "you've left it at some tavern, that's what you've done. you are a drinking man; i know you and i like you for it, that you are a drinker; you are not a murderer, not a rowdy, not one to make trouble; you are a good manager, but you are a drinker and such a drinker, you ought to have been pulled up for it long ago, yes, indeed; for it's, a nasty habit.... hurrah!" he shouted suddenly at the top of his voice, "hurrah! hurrah!" "stop! stop!" a woman's voice sounded close by, "stop!" akim looked round. a woman so pale and dishevelled that at first he did not recognise her, was running across the field towards the cart. "stop! stop!" she moaned again, gasping for breath and waving her arms. akim started: it was his wife. he snatched up the reins. "what's the good of stopping?" muttered yefrem. "stopping for a woman? gee-up!" but akim pulled the horse up sharply. at that instant avdotya ran up to the road and flung herself down with her face straight in the dust. "akim semyonitch," she wailed, "he has turned me out, too!" akim looked at her and did not stir; he only gripped the reins tighter. "hurrah!" yefrem shouted again. "so he has turned you out?" said akim. "he has turned me out, akim semyonitch, dear," avdotya answered, sobbing. "he has turned me out. the house is mine, he said, so you can go." "capital! that's a fine thing ... capital," observed yefrem. "so i suppose you thought to stay on?" akim brought out bitterly, still sitting in the cart. "how could i! but, akim semyonitch," went on avdotya, who had raised her head but let it sink to the earth again, "you don't know, i ... kill me, akim semyonitch, kill me here on the spot." "why should i kill you, arefyevna?" said akim dejectedly, "you've been your own ruin. what's the use?" "but do you know what, akim semyonitch, the money ... your money ... your money's gone.... wretched sinner as i am, i took it from under the floor, i gave it all to him, to that villain naum.... why did you tell me where you hid your money, wretched sinner as i am? ... it's with your money he has bought the house, the villain." sobs choked her voice. akim clutched his head with both hands. "what!" he cried at last, "all the money, too ... the money and the house, and you did it.... ah! you took it from under the floor, you took it.... i'll kill you, you snake in the grass!" and he leapt out of the cart. "semyonitch, semyonitch, don't beat her, don't fight," faltered yefrem, on whom this unexpected adventure began to have a sobering effect. "no, akim semyonitch, kill me, wretched sinner as i am; beat me, don't heed him," cried avdotya, writhing convulsively at akim's feet. he stood a moment, looked at her, moved a few steps away and sat down on the grass beside the road. a brief silence followed. avdotya turned her head in his direction. "semyonitch! hey, semyonitch," began yefrem, sitting up in the cart, "give over ... you know ... you won't make things any better. tfoo, what a business," he went on as though to himself. "what a damnable woman.... go to him," he added, bending down over the side of the cart to avdotya, "you see, he's half crazy." avdotya got up, went nearer to akim and again fell at his feet. "akim semyonitch!" she began, in a faint voice. akim got up and went back to the cart. she caught at the skirt of his coat. "get away!" he shouted savagely, and pushed her off. "where are you going?" yefrem asked, seeing that he was getting in beside him again. "you were going to take me to my home," said akim, "but take me to yours ... you see, i have no home now. they have bought mine." "very well, come to me. and what about her?" akim made no answer. "and me? me?" avdotya repeated with tears, "are you leaving me all alone? where am i to go?" "you can go to him," answered akim, without turning round, "the man you have given my money to.... drive on, yefrem!" yefrem lashed the horse, the cart rolled off, avdotya set up a wail.... yefrem lived three-quarters of a mile from akim's inn in a little house close to the priest's, near the solitary church with five cupolas which had been recently built by the heirs of a rich merchant in accordance with the latter's will. yefrem said nothing to akim all the way; he merely shook his head from time to time and uttered such ejaculations as "dear, dear!" and "upon my soul!" akim sat without moving, turned a little away from yefrem. at last they arrived. yefrem was the first to get out of the cart. a little girl of six in a smock tied low round the waist ran out to meet him and shouted, "daddy! daddy!" "and where is your mother?" asked yefrem. "she is asleep in the shed." "well, let her sleep. akim semyonitch, won't you get out, sir, and come indoors?" (it must be noted that yefrem addressed him familiarly only when he was drunk. more important persons than yefrem spoke to akim with formal politeness.) akim went into the sacristan's hut. "here, sit on the bench," said yefrem. "run away, you little rascals," he cried to three other children who suddenly came out of different corners of the room together with two lean cats covered with wood ashes. "get along! sh-sh! come this way, akim semyonitch, this way!" he went on, making his guest sit down, "and won't you take something?" "i tell you what, yefrem," akim articulated at last, "could i have some vodka?" yefrem pricked up his ears. "vodka? you can. i've none in the house, but i will run this minute to father fyodor's. he always has it.... i'll be back in no time." and he snatched up his cap with earflaps. "bring plenty, i'll pay for it," akim shouted after him. "i've still money enough for that." "i'll be back in no time," yefrem repeated again as he went out of the door. he certainly did return very quickly with two bottles under his arm, of which one was already uncorked, put them on the table, brought two little green glasses, part of a loaf and some salt. "now this is what i like," he kept repeating, as he sat down opposite akim. "why grieve?" he poured out a glass for akim and another for himself and began talking freely. avdotya's conduct had perplexed him. "it's a strange business, really," he said, "how did it happen? he must have bewitched her, i suppose? it shows how strictly one must look after a wife! you want to keep a firm hand over her. all the same it wouldn't be amiss for you to go home; i expect you have got a lot of belongings there still." yefrem added much more to the same effect; he did not like to be silent when he was drinking. this is what was happening an hour later in yefrem's house. akim, who had not answered a word to the questions and observations of his talkative host but had merely gone on drinking glass after glass, was sleeping on the stove, crimson in the face, a heavy, oppressive sleep; the children were looking at him in wonder, and yefrem ... yefrem, alas, was asleep, too, but in a cold little lumber room in which he had been locked by his wife, a woman of very masculine and powerful physique. he had gone to her in the shed and begun threatening her or telling her some tale, but had expressed himself so unintelligibly and incoherently that she instantly saw what was the matter, took him by the collar and deposited him in a suitable place. he slept in the lumber room, however, very soundly and even serenely. such is the effect of habit. * * * * * kirillovna had not quite accurately repeated to lizaveta prohorovna her conversation with akim ... the same may be said of avdotya. naum had not turned her out, though she had told akim that he had; he had no right to turn her out. he was bound to give the former owners time to pack up. an explanation of quite a different character took place between him and avdotya. when akim had rushed out crying that he would go to the mistress, avdotya had turned to naum, stared at him open-eyed and clasped her hands. "good heavens!" she cried, "naum ivanitch, what does this mean? you've bought our inn?" "well, what of it?" he replied. "i have." avdotya was silent for a while; then she suddenly started. "so that is what you wanted the money for?" "you are quite right there. hullo, i believe your husband has gone off with my horse," he added, hearing the rumble of the wheels. "he is a smart fellow!" "but it's robbery!" wailed avdotya. "why, it's our money, my husband's money and the inn is ours...." "no, avdotya arefyevna," naum interrupted her, "the inn was not yours. what's the use of saying that? the inn was on your mistress's land, so it was hers. the money was yours, certainly; but you were, so to say, so kind as to present it to me; and i am grateful to you and will even give it back to you on occasion--if occasion arises; but you wouldn't expect me to remain a beggar, would you?" naum said all this very calmly and even with a slight smile. "holy saints!" cried avdotya, "it's beyond everything! beyond everything! how can i look my husband in the face after this? you villain," she added, looking with hatred at naum's fresh young face. "i've ruined my soul for you, i've become a thief for your sake, why, you've turned us into the street, you villain! there's nothing left for me but to hang myself, villain, deceiver! you've ruined me, you monster!" and she broke into violent sobbing. "don't excite yourself, avdotya arefyevna," said naum. "i'll tell you one thing: charity begins at home, and that's what the pike is in the sea for, to keep the carp from going to sleep." "where are we to go now. what's to become of us?" avdotya faltered, weeping. "that i can't say." "but i'll cut your throat, you villain, i'll cut your throat." "no, you won't do that, avdotya arefyevna; what's the use of talking like that? but i see i had better leave you for a time, for you are very much upset.... i'll say good-bye, but i shall be back to-morrow for certain. but you must allow me to send my workmen here today," he added, while avdotya went on repeating through her tears that she would cut his throat and her own. "oh, and here they are," he observed, looking out of the window. "or, god forbid, some mischief might happen.... it will be safer so. will you be so kind as to put your belongings together to-day and they'll keep guard here and help you, if you like. i'll say goodbye." he bowed, went out and beckoned the workmen to him. avdotya sank on the bench, then bent over the table, wringing her hands, then suddenly leapt up and ran after her husband.... we have described their meeting. when akim drove away from her with yefrem, leaving her alone in the field, for a long time she remained where she was, weeping. when she had wept away all her tears she went in the direction of her mistress's house. it was very bitter for her to go into the house, still more bitter to go into the maids' room. all the maids flew to meet her with sympathy and consideration. seeing them, avdotya could not restrain her tears; they simply spurted from her red and swollen eyes. she sank, helpless, on the first chair that offered itself. someone ran to fetch kirillovna. kirillovna came, was very friendly to her, but kept her from seeing the mistress just as she had akim. avdotya herself did not insist on seeing lizaveta prohorovna; she had come to her old home simply because she had nowhere else to go. kirillovna ordered the samovar to be brought in. for a long while avdotya refused to take tea, but yielded at last to the entreaties and persuasion of all the maids and after the first cup drank another four. when kirillovna saw that her guest was a little calmer and only shuddered and gave a faint sob from time to time, she asked her where they meant to move to and what they thought of doing with their things. avdotya began crying again at this question, and protesting that she wanted nothing but to die; but kirillovna as a woman with a head on her shoulders, checked her at once and advised her without wasting time to set to work that very day to move their things to the hut in the village which had been akim's and in which his uncle (the old man who had tried to dissuade him from his marriage) was now living; she told her that with their mistress's permission men and horses should be sent to help them in packing and moving. "and as for you, my love," added kirillovna, twisting her cat-like lips into a wry smile, "there will always be a place for you with us and we shall be delighted if you stay with us till you are settled in a house of your own again. the great thing is not to lose heart. the lord has given, the lord has taken away and will give again. lizaveta prohorovna, of course, had to sell your inn for reasons of her own but she will not forget you and will make up to you for it; she told me to tell akim semyonitch so. where is he now?" avdotya answered that when he met her he had been very unkind to her and had driven off to yefrem's. "oh, to that fellow's!" kirillovna replied significantly. "of course, i understand that it's hard for him now. i daresay you won't find him to-day; what's to be done? i must make arrangements. malashka," she added, turning to one of the maids, "ask nikanop ilyitch to come here: we will talk it over with him." nikanop ilyitch, a feeble-looking man who was bailiff or something of the sort, made his appearance at once, listened with servility to all that kirillovna said to him, said, "it shall be done," went out and gave orders. avdotya was given three waggons and three peasants; a fourth who said that he was "more competent than they were," volunteered to join them and she went with them to the inn where she found her own labourers and the servant fetinya in a state of great confusion and alarm. naum's newly hired labourers, three very stalwart young men, had come in the morning and had not left the place since. they were keeping very zealous guard, as naum had said they would--so zealous that the iron tyres of a new cart were suddenly found to be missing. it was a bitter, bitter task for poor avdotya to pack. in spite of the help of the "competent" man, who turned out, however, only capable of walking about with a stick in his hand, looking at the others and spitting on the ground, she was not able to get it finished that day and stayed the night at the inn, begging fetinya to spend the night in her room. but she only fell into a feverish doze towards morning and the tears trickled down her cheeks even in her sleep. meanwhile yefrem woke up earlier than usual in his lumber room and began knocking and asking to be let out. at first his wife was unwilling to release him and told him through the door that he had not yet slept long enough; but he aroused her curiosity by promising to tell her of the extraordinary thing that had happened to akim; she unbolted the door. yefrem told her what he knew and ended by asking "is he awake yet, or not?" "the lord only knows," answered his wife. "go and look yourself; he hasn't got down from the stove yet. how drunk you both were yesterday! you should look at your face--you don't look like yourself. you are as black as a sweep and your hair is full of hay!" "that doesn't matter," answered yefrem, and, passing his hand over his head, he went into the room. akim was no longer asleep; he was sitting on the stove with his legs hanging down; he, too, looked strange and unkempt. his face showed the effects the more as he was not used to drinking much. "well, how have you slept, akim semyonitch?" yefrem began. akim looked at him with lustreless eyes. "well, brother yefrem," he said huskily, "could we have some again?" yefrem took a swift glance at akim.... he felt a slight tremor at that moment; it was a tremor such as is felt by a sportsman when he hears the yap of his dog at the edge of the wood from which he had fancied all the game had been driven. "what, more?" he asked at last. "yes, more." "my wife will see," thought yefrem, "she won't let me out, most likely. "all right," he pronounced aloud, "have a little patience." he went out and, thanks to skilfully taken precautions, succeeded in bringing in unseen a big bottle under his coat. akim took the bottle. but yefrem did not sit down with him as he had the day before--he was afraid of his wife--and informing akim that he would go and have a look at what was going on at the inn and would see that his belongings were being packed and not stolen--at once set off, riding his little horse which he had neglected to feed--but judging from the bulging front of his coat he had not forgotten his own needs. soon after he had gone, akim was on the stove again, sleeping like the dead.... he did not wake up, or at least gave no sign of waking when yefrem returned four hours later and began shaking him and trying to rouse him and muttering over him some very muddled phrases such as that "everything was moved and gone, and the ikons have been taken out and driven away and that everything was over, and that everyone was looking for him but that he, yefrem, had given orders and not allowed them, ..." and so on. but his mutterings did not last long. his wife carried him off to the lumber room again and, very indignant both with her husband and with the visitor, owing to whom her husband had been drinking, lay down herself in the room on the shelf under the ceiling.... but when she woke up early, as her habit was, and glanced at the stove, akim was not there. the second cock had not crowed and the night was still so dark that the sky hardly showed grey overhead and at the horizon melted into the darkness when akim walked out of the gate of the sacristan's house. his face was pale but he looked keenly around him and his step was not that of a drunken man.... he walked in the direction of his former dwelling, the inn, which had now completely passed into the possession of its new owner--naum. naum, too, was awake when akim stole out of yefrem's house. he was not asleep; he was lying on a bench with his sheepskin coat under him. it was not that his conscience was troubling him--no! he had with amazing coolness been present all day at the packing and moving of all akim's possessions and had more than once addressed avdotya, who was so downcast that she did not even reproach him ... his conscience was at rest but he was disturbed by various conjectures and calculations. he did not know whether he would be lucky in his new career; he had never before kept an inn, nor had a home of his own at all; he could not sleep. "the thing has begun well," he thought, "how will it go on?" ... towards evening, after seeing off the last cart with akim's belongings (avdotya walked behind it, weeping), he looked all over the yard, the cellars, sheds, and barns, clambered up into the loft, more than once instructed his labourers to keep a very, very sharp look-out and when he was left alone after supper could not go to sleep. it so happened that day that no visitor stayed at the inn for the night; this was a great relief to him. "i must certainly buy a dog from the miller to-morrow, as fierce a one as i can get; they've taken theirs away," he said to himself, as he tossed from side to side, and all at once he raised his head quickly ... he fancied that someone had passed by the window ... he listened ... there was nothing. only a cricket from time to time gave a cautious churr, and a mouse was scratching somewhere; he could hear his own breathing. everything was still in the empty room dimly lighted by the little glass lamp which he had managed to hang up and light before the ikon in the corner.... he let his head sink; again he thought he heard the gate creak ... then a faint snapping sound from the fence.... he could not refrain from jumping up; he opened the door of the room and in a low voice called, "fyodor! fyodor!" no one answered.... he went out into the passage and almost fell over fyodor, who was lying on the floor. the man stirred in his sleep with a faint grunt; naum roused him. "what's there? what do you want?" fyodor began. "what are you bawling for, hold your tongue!" naum articulated in a whisper. "how you sleep, you damned fellows! have you heard nothing?" "nothing," answered the man.... "what is it?" "where are the others sleeping?" "where they were told to sleep.... why, is there anything ..." "hold your tongue--come with me." naum stealthily opened the door and went out into the yard. it was very dark outside.... the roofed-in parts and the posts could only be distinguished because they were a still deeper black in the midst of the black darkness. "shouldn't we light a lantern?" said fyodor in a low voice. but naum waved his hand and held his breath.... at first he could hear nothing but those nocturnal sounds which can almost always be heard in an inhabited place: a horse was munching oats, a pig grunted faintly in its sleep, a man was snoring somewhere; but all at once his ear detected a suspicious sound coming from the very end of the yard, near the fence. someone seemed to be stirring there, and breathing or blowing. naum looked over his shoulder towards fyodor and cautiously descending the steps went towards the sound.... once or twice he stopped, listened and stole on further.... suddenly he started.... ten paces from him, in the thick darkness there came the flash of a bright light: it was a glowing ember and close to it there was visible for an instant the front part of a face with lips thrust out.... quickly and silently, like a cat at a mouse, naum darted to the fire.... hurriedly rising up from the ground a long body rushed to meet him and, nearly knocking him off his feet, almost eluded his grasp; but naum hung on to it with all his strength. "fyodor! andrey! petrushka!" he shouted at the top of his voice. "make haste! here! here! i've caught a thief trying to set fire to the place...." the man whom he had caught fought and struggled violently ... but naum did not let him go. fyodor at once ran to his assistance. "a lantern! make haste, a lantern! run for a lantern, wake the others!" naum shouted to him. "i can manage him alone for a time--i am sitting on him.... make haste! and bring a belt to tie his hands." fyodor ran into the house.... the man whom naum was holding suddenly left off struggling. "so it seems wife and money and home are not enough for you, you want to ruin me, too," he said in a choking voice. naum recognised akim's voice. "so that's you, my friend," he brought out; "very good, you wait a bit." "let me go," said akim, "aren't you satisfied?" "i'll show you before the judge to-morrow whether i am satisfied," and naum tightened his grip of akim. the labourers ran up with two lanterns and cords. "tie his arms," naum ordered sharply. the men caught hold of akim, stood him up and twisted his arms behind his back.... one of them began abusing him, but recognising the former owner of the inn lapsed into silence and only exchanged glances with the others. "do you see, do you see!" naum kept repeating, meanwhile throwing the light of the lantern on the ground, "there are hot embers in the pot; look, there's a regular log alight here! we must find out where he got this pot ... here, he has broken up twigs, too," and naum carefully stamped out the fire with his foot. "search him, fyodor," he added, "see if he hasn't got something else on him." fyodor rummaged akim's pockets and felt him all over while the old man stood motionless, with his head drooping on his breast as though he were dead. "here's a knife," said fyodor, taking an old kitchen knife out of the front of akim's coat. "aha, my fine gentleman, so that's what you were after," cried naum. "lads, you are witnesses ... here he wanted to murder me and set fire to the house.... lock him up for the night in the cellar, he can't get out of that.... i'll keep watch all night myself and to-morrow as soon as it is light we will take him to the police captain ... and you are witnesses, do you hear!" akim was thrust into the cellar and the door was slammed.... naum set two men to watch it and did not go to bed himself. meanwhile, yefrem's wife having convinced herself that her uninvited guest had gone, set about her cooking though it was hardly daylight.... it was a holiday. she squatted down before the stove to get a hot ember and saw that someone had scraped out the hot ashes before her; then she wanted her knife and searched for it in vain; then of her four cooking pots one was missing. yefrem's wife had the reputation of being a woman with brains, and justly so. she stood and pondered, then went to the lumber room, to her husband. it was not easy to wake him--and still more difficult to explain to him why he was being awakened.... to all that she said to him yefrem made the same answer. "he's gone away--well, god bless him.... what business is it of mine? he's taken our knife and our pot--well, god bless him, what has it to do with me?" at last, however, he got up and after listening attentively to his wife came to the conclusion that it was a bad business, that something must be done. "yes," his wife repeated, "it is a bad business; maybe he will be doing mischief in his despair.... i saw last night that he was not asleep but was just lying on the stove; it would be as well for you to go and see, yefrem alexandritch." "i tell you what, ulyana fyodorovna," yefrem began, "i'll go myself to the inn now, and you be so kind, mother, as to give me just a drop to sober me." ulyana hesitated. "well," she decided at last, "i'll give you the vodka, yefrem alexandritch; but mind now, none of your pranks." "don't you worry, ulyana fyodorovna." and fortifying himself with a glass, yefrem made his way to the inn. it was only just getting light when he rode up to the inn but, already a cart and a horse were standing at the gate and one of naum's labourers was sitting on the box holding the reins. "where are you off to?" asked yefrem. "to the town," the man answered reluctantly. "what for?" the man simply shrugged his shoulders and did not answer. yefrem jumped off his horse and went into the house. in the entry he came upon naum, fully dressed and with his cap on. "i congratulate the new owner on his new abode," said yefrem, who knew him. "where are you off to so early?" "yes, you have something to congratulate me on," naum answered grimly. "on the very first day the house has almost been burnt down." yefrem started. "how so?" "oh, a kind soul turned up who tried to set fire to it. luckily i caught him in the act; now i am taking him to the town." "was it akim, i wonder?" yefrem asked slowly. "how did you know? akim. he came at night with a burning log in a pot and got into the yard and was setting fire to it ... all my men are witnesses. would you like to see him? it's time for us to take him, by the way." "my good naum ivanitch," yefrem began, "let him go, don't ruin the old man altogether. don't take that sin upon your soul, naum ivanitch. only think--the man was in despair--he didn't know what he was doing." "give over that nonsense," naum cut him short. "what! am i likely to let him go! why, he'd set fire to the house to-morrow if i did." "he wouldn't, naum ivanitch, believe me. believe me you will be easier yourself for it--you know there will be questions asked, a trial--you can see that for yourself." "well, what if there is a trial? i have no reason to be afraid of it." "my good naum ivanitch, one must be afraid of a trial." "oh, that's enough. i see you are drunk already, and to-day a saint's day, too!" yefrem all at once, quite unexpectedly, burst into tears. "i am drunk but i am speaking the truth," he muttered. "and for the sake of the holiday you ought to forgive him." "well, come along, you sniveller." and naum went out on to the steps. "forgive him, for avdotya arefyevna's sake," said yefrem following him on to the steps. naum went to the cellar and flung the door wide open. with timid curiosity yefrem craned his neck from behind naum and with difficulty made out the figure of akim in the corner of the cellar. the once well-to-do innkeeper, respected all over the neighbourhood, was sitting on straw with his hands tied behind him like a criminal. hearing a noise he raised his head.... it seemed as though he had grown fearfully thin in those last few days, especially during the previous night--his sunken eyes could hardly be seen under his high, waxen-yellow forehead, his parched lips looked dark ... his whole face was changed and wore a strange expression--savage and frightened. "get up and come along," said naum. akim got up and stepped over the threshold. "akim semyonitch!" yefrem wailed, "you've brought ruin on yourself, my dear!" akim glanced at him without speaking. "if i had known why you asked for vodka i would not have given it to you, i really would not. i believe i would have drunk it all myself! eh, naum ivanitch," he added clutching at naum's arm, "have mercy upon him, let him go!" "what next!" naum replied with a grin. "well, come along," he added addressing akim again. "what are you waiting for?" "naum ivanitch," akim began. "what is it?" "naum ivanitch," akim repeated, "listen: i am to blame; i wanted to settle my accounts with you myself; but god must be the judge between us. you have taken everything from me, you know yourself, everything i had. now you can ruin me, only i tell you this: if you let me go now, then--so be it--take possession of everything! i agree and wish you all success. i promise you as before god, if you let me go you will not regret it. god be with you." akim shut his eyes and ceased speaking. "a likely story!" retorted naum, "as though one could believe you!" "but, by god, you can," said yefrem, "you really can. i'd stake my life on akim semyonitch's good faith--i really would." "nonsense," cried naum. "come along." akim looked at him. "as you think best, naum ivanitch. it's for you to decide. but you are laying a great burden on your soul. well, if you are in such a hurry, let us start." naum in his turn looked keenly at akim. "after all," he thought to himself, "hadn't i better let him go? or people will never have done pestering me about him. avdotya will give me no peace." while naum was reflecting, no one uttered a word. the labourer in the cart who could see it all through the gate did nothing but toss his head and flick the horse's sides with the reins. the two other labourers stood on the steps and they too were silent. "well, listen, old man," naum began, "when i let you go and tell these fellows" (he motioned with his head towards the labourers) "not to talk, shall we be quits--do you understand me--quits ... eh?" "i tell you, you can have it all." "you won't consider me in your debt?" "you won't be in my debt, i shall not be in yours." naum was silent again. "and will you swear it?" "yes, as god is holy," answered akim. "well, i know i shall regret it," said naum, "but there, come what may! give me your hands." akim turned his back to him; naum began untying him. "now, mind, old man," he added as he pulled the cord off his wrists, "remember, i have spared you, mind that!" "naum ivanitch, my dear," faltered yefrem, "the lord will have mercy upon you!" akim freed his chilled and swollen hands and was moving towards the gate. naum suddenly "showed the jew" as the saying is--he must have regretted that he had let akim off. "you've sworn now, mind!" he shouted after him. akim turned, and looking round the yard, said mournfully, "possess it all, so be it forever! ... good-bye." and he went slowly out into the road accompanied by yefrem. naum ordered the horse to be unharnessed and with a wave of his hand went back into the house. "where are you off to, akim semyonitch? aren't you coming back to me?" cried yefrem, seeing that akim was hurrying to the right out of the high road. "no, yefremushka, thank you," answered akim. "i am going to see what my wife is doing." "you can see afterwards.... but now we ought to celebrate the occasion." "no, thank you, yefrem.... i've had enough. good-bye." and akim walked off without looking round. "well! 'i've had enough'!" the puzzled sacristan pronounced. "and i pledged my word for him! well, i never expected this," he added, with vexation, "after i had pledged my word for him, too!" he remembered that he had not thought to take his knife and his pot and went back to the inn.... naum ordered his things to be given to him but never even thought of offering him a drink. he returned home thoroughly annoyed and thoroughly sober. "well?" his wife inquired, "found?" "found what?" answered yefrem, "to be sure i've found it: here is your pot." "akim?" asked his wife with especial emphasis. yefrem nodded his head. "yes. but he is a nice one! i pledged my word for him; if it had not been for me he'd be lying in prison, and he never offered me a drop! ulyana fyodorovna, you at least might show me consideration and give me a glass!" but ulyana fyodorovna did not show him consideration and drove him out of her sight. meanwhile, akim was walking with slow steps along the road to lizaveta prohorovna's house. he could not yet fully grasp his position; he was trembling all over like a man who had just escaped from a certain death. he seemed unable to believe in his freedom. in dull bewilderment he gazed at the fields, at the sky, at the larks quivering in the warm air. from the time he had woken up on the previous morning at yefrem's he had not slept, though he had lain on the stove without moving; at first he had wanted to drown in vodka the insufferable pain of humiliation, the misery of frenzied and impotent anger ... but the vodka had not been able to stupefy him completely; his anger became overpowering and he began to think how to punish the man who had wronged him.... he thought of no one but naum; the idea of lizaveta prohorovna never entered his head and on avdotya he mentally turned his back. by the evening his thirst for revenge had grown to a frenzy, and the good-natured and weak man waited with feverish impatience for the approach of night and ran, like a wolf to its prey, to destroy his old home.... but then he had been caught ... locked up.... the night had followed. what had he not thought over during that cruel night! it is difficult to put into words all that a man passes through at such moments, all the tortures that he endures; more difficult because those tortures are dumb and inarticulate in the man himself.... towards morning, before naum and yefrem had come to the door, akim had begun to feel as it were more at ease. everything is lost, he thought, everything is scattered and gone ... and he dismissed it all. if he had been naturally bad-hearted he might at that moment have become a criminal; but evil was not natural to akim. under the shock of undeserved and unexpected misfortune, in the delirium of despair he had brought himself to crime; it had shaken him to the depths of his being and, failing, had left in him nothing but intense weariness.... feeling his guilt in his mind he mentally tore himself from all things earthly and began praying, bitterly but fervently. at first he prayed in a whisper, then perhaps by accident he uttered a loud "oh, god!" and tears gushed from his eyes.... for a long time he wept and at last grew quieter.... his thoughts would probably have changed if he had had to pay the penalty of his attempted crime ... but now he had suddenly been set free ... and he was walking to see his wife, feeling only half alive, utterly crushed but calm. lizaveta prohorovna's house stood about a mile from her village to the left of the cross road along which akim was walking. he was about to stop at the turning that led to his mistress's house ... but he walked on instead. he decided first to go to what had been his hut, where his uncle lived. akim's small and somewhat dilapidated hut was almost at the end of the village; akin walked through the whole street without meeting a soul. all the people were at church. only one sick old woman raised a little window to look after him and a little girl who had run out with an empty pail to the well gaped at him, and she too looked after him. the first person he met was the uncle he was looking for. the old man had been sitting all the morning on the ledge under his window taking pinches of snuff and warming himself in the sun; he was not very well, so he had not gone to church; he was just setting off to visit another old man, a neighbour who was also ailing, when he suddenly saw akim.... he stopped, let him come up to him and glancing into his face, said: "good-day, akimushka!" "good-day," answered akim, and passing the old man went in at the gate. in the yard were standing his horses, his cow, his cart; his poultry, too, were there.... he went into the hut without a word. the old man followed him. akim sat down on the bench and leaned his fists on it. the old man standing at the door looked at him compassionately. "and where is my wife?" asked akim. "at the mistress's house," the old man answered quickly. "she is there. they put your cattle here and what boxes there were, and she has gone there. shall i go for her?" akim was silent for a time. "yes, do," he said at last. "oh, uncle, uncle," he brought out with a sigh while the old man was taking his hat from a nail, "do you remember what you said to me the day before my wedding?" "it's all god's will, akimushka." "do you remember you said to me that i was above you peasants, and now you see what times have come.... i'm stripped bare myself." "there's no guarding oneself from evil folk," answered the old man, "if only someone such as a master, for instance, or someone in authority, could give him a good lesson, the shameless fellow--but as it is, he has nothing to be afraid of. he is a wolf and he behaves like one." and the old man put on his cap and went off. avdotya had just come back from church when she was told that her husband's uncle was asking for her. till then she had rarely seen him; he did not come to see them at the inn and had the reputation of being queer altogether: he was passionately fond of snuff and was usually silent. she went out to him. "what do you want, petrovitch? has anything happened?" "nothing has happened, avdotya arefyevna; your husband is asking for you." "has he come back?" "yes." "where is he, then?" "he is in the village, sitting in his hut." avdotya was frightened. "well, petrovitch," she inquired, looking straight into his face, "is he angry?" "he does not seem so." avdotya looked down. "well, let us go," she said. she put on a shawl and they set off together. they walked in silence to the village. when they began to get close to the hut, avdotya was so overcome with terror that her knees began to tremble. "good petrovitch," she said, "go in first.... tell him that i have come." the old man went into the hut and found akim lost in thought, sitting just as he had left him. "well?" said akim raising his head, "hasn't she come?" "yes," answered the old man, "she is at the gate...." "well, send her in here." the old man went out, beckoned to avdotya, said to her, "go in," and sat down again on the ledge. avdotya in trepidation opened the door, crossed the threshold and stood still. akim looked at her. "well, arefyevna," he began, "what are we going to do now?" "i am guilty," she faltered. "ech arefyevna, we are all sinners. what's the good of talking about it!" "it's he, the villain, has ruined us both," said avdotya in a cringing voice, and tears flowed down her face. "you must not leave it like that, akim semyonitch, you must get the money back. don't think of me. i am ready to take my oath that i only lent him the money. lizaveta prohorovna could sell our inn if she liked, but why should he rob us.... get your money back." "there's no claiming the money back from him," akim replied grimly, "we have settled our accounts." avdotya was amazed. "how is that?" "why, like this. do you know," akim went on and his eyes gleamed, "do you know where i spent the night? you don't know? in naum's cellar, with my arms and legs tied like a sheep--that's where i spent the night. i tried to set fire to the place, but he caught me--naum did; he is too sharp! and to-day he meant to take me to the town but he let me off; so i can't claim the money from him.... 'when did i borrow money from you?' he would say. am i to say to him, 'my wife took it from under the floor and brought it to you'? 'your wife is telling lies,' he will say. hasn't there been scandal enough for you, arefyevna? you'd better say nothing, i tell you, say nothing." "i am guilty, semyonitch, i am guilty," avdotya, terrified, whispered again. "that's not what matters," said akim, after a pause. "what are we going to do? we have no home or no money." "we shall manage somehow, akim semyonitch. we'll ask lizaveta prohorovna, she will help us, kiriliovna has promised me." "no, arefyenva, you and your kirillovna had better ask her together; you are berries off the same bush. i tell you what: you stay here and good luck to you; i shall not stay here. it's a good thing we have no children, and i shall be all right, i dare say, alone. there's always enough for one." "what will you do, semyonitch? take up driving again?" akim laughed bitterly. "i should be a fine driver, no mistake! you have pitched on the right man for it! no, arefyenva, that's a job not like getting married, for instance; an old man is no good for the job. i don't want to stay here, just because i don't want them to point the finger at me--do you understand? i am going to pray for my sins, arefyevna, that's what i am going to do." "what sins have you, semyonitch?" avdotya pronounced timidly. "of them i know best myself, wife." "but are you leaving me all alone, semyonitch? how can i live without a husband?" "leaving you alone? oh, arefyevna, how you do talk, really! much you need a husband like me, and old, too, and ruined as well! why, you got on without me in the past, you can get on in the future. what property is left us, you can take; i don't want it." "as you like, semyonitch," avdotya replied mournfully. "you know best." "that's better. only don't you suppose that i am angry with you, arefyevna. no, what's the good of being angry when ... i ought to have been wiser before. i've been to blame. i am punished." (akim sighed.) "as you make your bed so you must lie on it. i am old, it's time to think of my soul. the lord himself has brought me to understanding. like an old fool i wanted to live for my own pleasure with a young wife.... no, the old man had better pray and beat his head against the earth and endure in patience and fast.... and now go along, my dear. i am very weary, i'll sleep a little." and akim with a groan stretched himself on the bench. avdotya wanted to say something, stood a moment, looked at him, turned away and went out. "well, he didn't beat you then?" asked petrovitch sitting bent up on the ledge when she was level with him. avdotya passed by him without speaking. "so he didn't beat her," the old man said to himself; he smiled, ruffled up his beard and took a pinch of snuff. * * * * * akim carried out his intention. he hurriedly arranged his affairs and a few days after the conversation we have described went, dressed ready for his journey, to say goodbye to his wife who had settled for a time in a little lodge in the mistress's garden. his farewell did not take long. kirillovna, who happened to be present, advised akim to see his mistress; he did so, lizaveta prohorovna received him with some confusion but graciously let him kiss her hand and asked him where he meant to go. he answered he was going first to kiev and after that where it would please the lord. she commended his decision and dismissed him. from that time he rarely appeared at home, though he never forgot to bring his mistress some holy bread.... but wherever russian pilgrims gather his thin and aged but always dignified and handsome face could be seen: at the relics of st. sergey; on the shores of the white sea, at the optin hermitage, and at the far-away valaam; he went everywhere. this year he has passed by you in the ranks of the innumerable people who go in procession behind the ikon of the mother of god to the korennaya; last year you found him sitting with a wallet on his shoulders with other pilgrims on the steps of nikolay, the wonder-worker, at mtsensk ... he comes to moscow almost every spring. from land to land he has wandered with his quiet, unhurried, but never-resting step--they say he has been even to jerusalem. he seems perfectly calm and happy and those who have chanced to converse with him have said much of his piety and humility. meanwhile, naum's fortunes prospered exceedingly. he set to work with energy and good sense and got on, as the saying is, by leaps and bounds. everyone in the neighbourhood knew by what means he had acquired the inn, they knew too that avdotya had given him her husband's money; nobody liked naum because of his cold, harsh disposition.... with censure they told the story of him that once when akim himself had asked alms under his window he answered that god would give, and had given him nothing; but everyone agreed that there never had been a luckier man; his corn came better than other people's, his bees swarmed more frequently; even his hens laid more eggs; his cattle were never ill, his horses did not go lame.... it was a long time before avdotya could bear to hear his name (she had accepted lizaveta prohorovna's invitation and had reentered her service as head sewing-maid), but in the end her aversion was somewhat softened; it was said that she had been driven by poverty to appeal to him and he had given her a hundred roubles.... she must not be too severely judged: poverty breaks any will and the sudden and violent change in her life had greatly aged and humbled her: it was hard to believe how quickly she lost her looks, how completely she let herself go and lost heart.... how did it all end? the reader will ask. why, like this: naum, after having kept the inn successfully for about fifteen years, sold it advantageously to another townsman. he would never have parted from the inn if it had not been for the following, apparently insignificant, circumstance: for two mornings in succession his dog, sitting before the windows, had kept up a prolonged and doleful howl. he went out into the road the second time, looked attentively at the howling dog, shook his head, went up to town and the same day agreed on the price with a man who had been for a long time anxious to purchase it. a week later he had moved to a distance--out of the province; the new owner settled in and that very evening the inn was burnt to ashes; not a single outbuilding was left and naum's successor was left a beggar. the reader can easily imagine the rumours that this fire gave rise to in the neighbourhood.... evidently he carried his "luck" away with him, everyone repeated. of naum it is said that he has gone into the corn trade and has made a great fortune. but will it last long? stronger pillars have fallen and evil deeds end badly sooner or later. there is not much to say about lizaveta prohorovna. she is still living and, as is often the case with people of her sort, is not much changed, she has not even grown much older--she only seems to have dried up a little; on the other hand, her stinginess has greatly increased though it is difficult to say for whose benefit she is saving as she has no children and no attachments. in conversation she often speaks of akim and declares that since she has understood his good qualities she has begun to feel great respect for the russian peasant. kirillovna bought her freedom for a considerable sum and married for love a fair-haired young waiter who leads her a dreadful life; avdotya lives as before among the maids in lizaveta prohorovna's house, but has sunk to a rather lower position; she is very poorly, almost dirtily dressed, and there is no trace left in her of the townbred airs and graces of a fashionable maid or of the habits of a prosperous innkeeper's wife.... no one takes any notice of her and she herself is glad to be unnoticed; old petrovitch is dead and akim is still wandering, a pilgrim, and god only knows how much longer his pilgrimage will last! . * * * * * lieutenant yergunov's story i that evening kuzma vassilyevitch yergunov told us his story again. he used to repeat it punctually once a month and we heard it every time with fresh satisfaction though we knew it almost by heart, in all its details. those details overgrew, if one may so express it, the original trunk of the story itself as fungi grow over the stump of a tree. knowing only too well the character of our companion, we did not trouble to fill in his gaps and incomplete statements. but now kuzma vassilyevitch is dead and there will be no one to tell his story and so we venture to bring it before the notice of the public. ii it happened forty years ago when kuzma vassilyevitch was young. he said of himself that he was at that time a handsome fellow and a dandy with a complexion of milk and roses, red lips, curly hair, and eyes like a falcon's. we took his word for it, though we saw nothing of that sort in him; in our eyes kuzma vassilyevitch was a man of very ordinary exterior, with a simple and sleepy-looking face and a heavy, clumsy figure. but what of that? there is no beauty the years will not mar! the traces of dandyism were more clearly preserved in kuzma vassilyevitch. he still in his old age wore narrow trousers with straps, laced in his corpulent figure, cropped the back of his head, curled his hair over his forehead and dyed his moustache with persian dye, which had, however, a tint rather of purple, and even of green, than of black. with all that kuzma vassilyevitch was a very worthy gentleman, though at preference he did like to "steal a peep," that is, look over his neighbour's cards; but this he did not so much from greed as carefulness, for he did not like wasting his money. enough of these parentheses, however; let us come to the story itself. iii it happened in the spring at nikolaev, at that time a new town, to which kuzma vassilyevitch had been sent on a government commission. (he was a lieutenant in the navy.) he had, as a trustworthy and prudent officer, been charged by the authorities with the task of looking after the construction of ship-yards and from time to time received considerable sums of money, which for security he invariably carried in a leather belt on his person. kuzma vassilyevitch certainly was distinguished by his prudence and, in spite of his youth, his behaviour was exemplary; he studiously avoided every impropriety of conduct, did not touch cards, did not drink and, even fought shy of society so that of his comrades, the quiet ones called him "a regular girl" and the rowdy ones called him a muff and a noodle. kuzma vassilyevitch had only one failing, he had a tender heart for the fair sex; but even in that direction he succeeded in restraining his impulses and did not allow himself to indulge in any "foolishness." he got up and went to bed early, was conscientious in performing his duties and his only recreation consisted in rather long evening walks about the outskirts of nikolaev. he did not read as he thought it would send the blood to his head; every spring he used to drink a special decoction because he was afraid of being too full-blooded. putting on his uniform and carefully brushing himself kuzma vassilyevitch strolled with a sedate step alongside the fences of orchards, often stopped, admired the beauties of nature, gathered flowers as souvenirs and found a certain pleasure in doing so; but he felt acute pleasure only when he happened to meet "a charmer," that is, some pretty little workgirl with a shawl flung over her shoulders, with a parcel in her ungloved hand and a gay kerchief on her head. being as he himself expressed it of a susceptible but modest temperament kuzma vassilyevitch did not address the "charmer," but smiled ingratiatingly at her and looked long and attentively after her.... then he would heave a deep sigh, go home with the same sedate step, sit down at the window and dream for half an hour, carefully smoking strong tobacco out of a meerschaum pipe with an amber mouthpiece given him by his godfather, a police superintendent of german origin. so the days passed neither gaily nor drearily. iv well, one day, as he was returning home along an empty side-street at dusk kuzma vassilyevitch heard behind him hurried footsteps and incoherent words mingled with sobs. he looked round and saw a girl about twenty with an extremely pleasing but distressed and tear-stained face. she seemed to have been overtaken by some great and unexpected grief. she was running and stumbling as she ran, talking to herself, exclaiming, gesticulating; her fair hair was in disorder and her shawl (the burnous and the mantle were unknown in those days) had slipped off her shoulders and was kept on by one pin. the girl was dressed like a young lady, not like a workgirl. kuzma vassilyevitch stepped aside; his feeling of compassion overpowered his fear of doing something foolish and, when she caught him up, he politely touched the peak of his shako, and asked her the cause of her tears. "for," he added, and he laid his hand on his cutlass, "i, as an officer, may be able to help you." the girl stopped and apparently for the first moment did not clearly understand what he wanted of her; but at once, as though glad of the opportunity of expressing herself, began speaking in slightly imperfect russian. "oh, dear, mr. officer," she began and tears rained down her charming cheeks, "it is beyond everything! it's awful, it is beyond words! we have been robbed, the cook has carried off everything, everything, everything, the dinner service, the lock-up box and our clothes.... yes, even our clothes, and stockings and linen, yes ... and aunt's reticule. there was a twenty-five-rouble note and two appliqué spoons in it ... and her pelisse, too, and everything.... and i told all that to the police officer and the police officer said, 'go away, i don't believe you, i don't believe you. i won't listen to you. you are the same sort yourselves.' i said, 'why, but the pelisse ...' and he, 'i won't listen to you, i won't listen to you.' it was so insulting, mr. officer! 'go away,' he said, 'get along,' but where am i to go?" the girl sobbed convulsively, almost wailing, and utterly distracted leaned against kuzma vassilyevitch's sleeve.... he was overcome with confusion in his turn and stood rooted to the spot, only repeating from time to time, "there, there!" while he gazed at the delicate nape of the dishevelled damsel's neck, as it shook from her sobs. "will you let me see you home?" he said at last, lightly touching her shoulder with his forefinger, "here in the street, you understand, it is quite impossible. you can explain your trouble to me and of course i will make every effort ... as an officer." the girl raised her head and seemed for the first time to see the young man who might be said to be holding her in his arms. she was disconcerted, turned away, and still sobbing moved a little aside. kuzma vassilyevitch repeated his suggestion. the girl looked at him askance through her hair which had fallen over her face and was wet with tears. (at this point kuzma vassilyevitch always assured us that this glance pierced through him "like an awl," and even attempted once to reproduce this marvellous glance for our benefit) and laying her hand within the crooked arm of the obliging lieutenant, set off with him for her lodging. v kuzma vassilyevitch had had very little to do with ladies and so was at a loss how to begin the conversation, but his companion chattered away very fluently, continually drying her eyes and shedding fresh tears. within a few minutes kuzma vassilyevitch had learnt that her name was emilie karlovna, that she came from riga and that she had come to nikolaev to stay with her aunt who was from riga, too, that her papa too had been in the army but had died from "his chest," that her aunt had a russian cook, a very good and inexpensive cook but she had not a passport and that this cook had that very day robbed them and run away. she had had to go to the police--_in die polizei_.... but here the memories of the police superintendent, of the insult she had received from him, surged up again ... and sobs broke out afresh. kuzma vassilyevitch was once more at a loss what to say to comfort her. but the girl, whose impressions seemed to come and go very rapidly, stopped suddenly and holding out her hand, said calmly: "and this is where we live!" vi it was a wretched little house that looked as though it had sunk into the ground, with four little windows looking into the street. the dark green of geraniums blocked them up within; a candle was burning in one of them; night was already coming on. a wooden fence with a hardly visible gate stretched from the house and was almost of the same height. the girl went up to the gate and finding it locked knocked on it impatiently with the iron ring of the padlock. heavy footsteps were audible behind the fence as though someone in slippers trodden down at heel were carelessly shuffling towards the gate, and a husky female voice asked some question in german which kuzma vassilyevitch did not understand: like a regular sailor he knew no language but russian. the girl answered in german, too; the gate opened a very little, admitted the girl and then was slammed almost in the face of kuzma vassilyevitch who had time, however, to make out in the summer twilight the outline of a stout, elderly woman in a red dress with a dimly burning lantern in her hand. struck with amazement kuzma vassilyevitch remained for some time motionless in the street; but at the thought that he, a naval officer (kuzma vassilyevitch had a very high opinion of his rank) had been so discourteously treated, he was moved to indignation and turning on his heel he went homewards. he had not gone ten paces when the gate opened again and the girl, who had had time to whisper to the old woman, appeared in the gateway and called out aloud: "where are you going, mr. officer! please come in." kuzma vassilyevitch hesitated a little; he turned back, however. vii this new acquaintance, whom we will call emilie, led him through a dark, damp little lobby into a fairly large but low-pitched and untidy room with a huge cupboard against the further wall and a sofa covered with american leather; above the doors and between the windows hung three portraits in oils with the paint peeling off, two representing bishops in clerical caps and one a turk in a turban; cardboard boxes were lying about in the corners; there were chairs of different sorts and a crooked legged card table on which a man's cap was lying beside an unfinished glass of kvass. kuzma vassilyevitch was followed into the room by the old woman in the red dress, whom he had noticed at the gate, and who turned out to be a very unprepossessing jewess with sullen pig-like eyes and a grey moustache over her puffy upper lip. emilie indicated her to kuzma vassilyevitch and said: "this is my aunt, madame fritsche." kuzma vassilyevitch was a little surprised but thought it his duty to introduce himself. madame fritsche looked at him from under her brows, made no response, but asked her niece in russian whether she would like some tea. "ah, yes, tea!" answered emilie. "you will have some tea, won't you, mr. officer? yes, auntie, give us some tea! but why are you standing, mr. officer? sit down! oh, how ceremonious you are! let me take off my fichu." when emilie talked she continually turned her head from one side to another and jerked her shoulders; birds make similar movements when they sit on a bare branch with sunshine all round them. kuzma vassilyevitch sank into a chair and assuming a becoming air of dignity, that is, leaning on his cutlass and fixing his eyes on the floor, he began to speak about the theft. but emilie at once interrupted him. "don't trouble yourself, it's all right. auntie has just told me that the principal things have been found." (madame fritsche mumbled something to herself and went out of the room.) "and there was no need to go to the police at all; but i can't control myself because i am so ... you don't understand german? ... so quick, _immer so rasch!_ but i think no more about it ... _aber auch gar nicht!_" kuzma vassilyevitch looked at emilie. her face indeed showed no trace of care now. everything was smiling in that pretty little face: the eyes, fringed with almost white lashes, and the lips and the cheeks and the chin and the dimples in the chin, and even the tip of her turned-up nose. she went up to the little looking glass beside the cupboard and, screwing up her eyes and humming through her teeth, began tidying her hair. kuzma vassilyevitch followed her movements intently.... he found her very charming. viii "you must excuse me," she began again, turning from side to side before the looking glass, "for having so ... brought you home with me. perhaps you dislike it?" "oh, not at all!" "as i have told you already, i am so quick. i act first and think afterwards, though sometimes i don't think at all.... what is your name, mr. officer? may i ask you?" she added going up to him and folding her arms. "my name is kuzma vassilyevitch yergunov." "yergu.... oh, it's not a nice name! i mean it's difficult for me. i shall call you mr. florestan. at riga we had a mr. florestan. he sold capital _gros-de-naples_ in his shop and was a handsome man, as good-looking as you. but how broad-shouldered you are! a regular sturdy russian! i like the russians.... i am a russian myself ... my papa was an officer. but my hands are whiter than yours!" she raised them above her head, waved them several times in the air, so as to drive the blood from them, and at once dropped them. "do you see? i wash them with greek scented soap.... sniff! oh, but don't kiss them.... i did not do it for that.... where are you serving?" "in the fleet, in the nineteenth black sea company." "oh, you are a sailor! well, do you get a good salary?" "no ... not very." "you must be very brave. one can see it at once from your eyes. what thick eyebrows you've got! they say you ought to grease them with lard overnight to make them grow. but why have you no moustache?" "it's against the regulations." "oh, that's not right! what's that you've got, a dagger?" "it's a cutlass; a cutlass, so to say, is the sailor's weapon." "ah, a cutlass! is it sharp? may i look?" with an effort, biting her lip and screwing up her eyes, she drew the blade out of the scabbard and put it to her nose. "oh, how blunt! i can kill you with it in a minute!" she waved it at kuzma vassilyevitch. he pretended to be frightened and laughed. she laughed too. "_ihr habt pardon_, you are pardoned," she pronounced, throwing herself into a majestic attitude. "there, take your weapon! and how old are you?" she asked suddenly. "twenty-five." "and i am nineteen! how funny that is! ach!" and emilie went off into such a ringing laugh that she threw herself back in her chair. kuzma vassilyevitch did not get up from his chair and looked still more intently at her rosy face which was quivering with laughter and he felt more and more attracted by her. all at once emilie was silent and humming through her teeth, as her habit was, went back to the looking glass. "can you sing, mr. florestan?" "no, i have never been taught." "do you play on the guitar? not that either? i can. i have a guitar set with _perlenmutter_ but the strings are broken. i must buy some new ones. you will give me the money, won't you, mr. officer? i'll sing you a lovely german song." she heaved a sigh and shut her eyes. "ah, such a lovely one! but you can dance? not that, either? _unmöglich_! i'll teach you. the _schottische_ and the _valse-cosaque_. tra-la-la, tra-la-la," emilie pirouetted once or twice. "look at my shoes! from warsaw. oh, we will have some dancing, mr. florestan! but what are you going to call me?" kuzma vassilyevitch grinned and blushed to his ears. "i shall call you: lovely emilie!" "no, no! you must call me: _mein schätzchen, mein zuckerpüppchen_! repeat it after me." "with the greatest pleasure, but i am afraid i shall find it difficult...." "never mind, never mind. say: _mein_." "me-in." "_zucker_." "tsook-ker." "_püppchen! püppchen! püppchen!_" "poop ... poop.... that i can't manage. it doesn't sound nice." "no! you must ... you must! do you know what it means? that's the very nicest word for a young lady in german. i'll explain it to you afterwards. but here is auntie bringing us the samovar. bravo! bravo! auntie, i will have cream with my tea.... is there any cream?" "_so schweige doch_," answered the aunt. ix kuzma vassilyevitch stayed at madame fritsche's till midnight. he had not spent such a pleasant evening since his arrival at nikolaev. it is true that it occurred to him that it was not seemly for an officer and a gentleman to be associating with such persons as this native of riga and her auntie, but emilie was so pretty, babbled so amusingly and bestowed such friendly looks upon him, that he dismissed his rank and family and made up his mind for once to enjoy himself. only one circumstance disturbed him and left an impression that was not quite agreeable. when his conversation with emilie and madame fritsche was in full swing, the door from the lobby opened a crack and a man's hand in a dark cuff with three tiny silver buttons on it was stealthily thrust in and stealthily laid a big bundle on the chair near the door. both ladies instantly darted to the chair and began examining the bundle. "but these are the wrong spoons!" cried emilie, but her aunt nudged her with her elbow and carried away the bundle without tying up the ends. it seemed to kuzma vassilyevitch that one end was spattered with something red, like blood. "what is it?" he asked emilie. "is it some more stolen things returned to you?" "yes," answered emilie, as it were, reluctantly. "some more." "was it your servant found them?" emilie frowned. "what servant? we haven't any servant." "some other man, then?" "no men come to see us." "but excuse me, excuse me.... i saw the cuff of a man's coat or jacket. and, besides, this cap...." "men never, never come to see us," emilie repeated emphatically. "what did you see? you saw nothing! and that cap is mine." "how is that?" "why, just that. i wear it for dressing up.... yes, it is mine, _und punctum_." "who brought you the bundle, then?" emilie made no answer and, pouting, followed madame fritsche out of the room. ten minutes later she came back alone, without her aunt and when kuzma vassilyevitch tried to question her again, she gazed at his forehead, said that it was disgraceful for a gentleman to be so inquisitive (as she said this, her face changed a little, as it were, darkened), and taking a pack of old cards from the card table drawer, asked him to tell fortunes for her and the king of hearts. kuzma vassilyevitch laughed, took the cards, and all evil thoughts immediately slipped out of his mind. but they came back to him that very day. when he had got out of the gate into the street, had said good-bye to emilie, shouted to her for the last time, _"adieu, zuckerpüppchen!"_ a short man darted by him and turning for a minute in his direction (it was past midnight but the moon was shining rather brightly), displayed a lean gipsy face with thick black eyebrows and moustache, black eyes and a hooked nose. the man at once rushed round the corner and it struck kuzma vassilyevitch that he recognised--not his face, for he had never seen it before--but the cuff of his sleeve. three silver buttons gleamed distinctly in the moonlight. there was a stir of uneasy perplexity in the soul of the prudent lieutenant; when he got home he did not light as usual his meerschaum pipe. though, indeed, his sudden acquaintance with charming emilie and the agreeable hours spent in her company would alone have induced his agitation. x whatever kuzma vassilyevitch's apprehensions may have been, they were quickly dissipated and left no trace. he took to visiting the two ladies from riga frequently. the susceptible lieutenant was soon on friendly terms with emilie. at first he was ashamed of the acquaintance and concealed his visits; later on he got over being ashamed and no longer concealed his visits; it ended by his being more eager to spend his time with his new friends than with anyone and greatly preferring their society to the cheerless solitude of his own four walls. madame fritsche herself no longer made the same unpleasant impression upon him, though she still treated him morosely and ungraciously. persons in straitened circumstances like madame fritsche particularly appreciate a liberal expenditure in their visitors, and kuzma vassilyevitch was a little stingy and his presents for the most part took the shape of raisins, walnuts, cakes.... only once he let himself go and presented emilie with a light pink fichu of real french material, and that very day she had burnt a hole in his gift with a candle. he began to upbraid her; she fixed the fichu to the cat's tail; he was angry; she laughed in his face. kuzma vassilyevitch was forced at last to admit to himself that he had not only failed to win the respect of the ladies from riga, but had even failed to gain their confidence: he was never admitted at once, without preliminary scrutinising; he was often kept waiting; sometimes he was sent away without the slightest ceremony and when they wanted to conceal something from him they would converse in german in his presence. emilie gave him no account of her doings and replied to his questions in an offhand way as though she had not heard them; and, worst of all, some of the rooms in madame fritsche's house, which was a fairly large one, though it looked like a hovel from the street, were never opened to him. for all that, kuzma vassilyevitch did not give up his visits; on the contrary, he paid them more and more frequently: he was seeing living people, anyway. his vanity was gratified by emilie's continuing to call him florestan, considering him exceptionally handsome and declaring that he had eyes like a bird of paradise, "_wie die augen eines paradiesvogels!_" xi one day in the very height of summer, kuzma vassilyevitch, who had spent the whole morning in the sun with contractors and workmen, dragged himself tired and exhausted to the little gate that had become so familiar to him. he knocked and was admitted. he shambled into the so-called drawing-room and immediately lay down on the sofa. emilie went up to him and mopped his wet brow with a handkerchief. "how tired he is, poor pet! how hot he is!" she said commiseratingly. "good gracious! you might at least unbutton your collar. my goodness, how your throat is pulsing!" "i am done up, my dear," groaned kuzma vassilyevitch. "i've been on my feet all the morning, in the baking sun. it's awful! i meant to go home. but there those vipers, the contractors, would find me! while here with you it is cool.... i believe i could have a nap." "well, why not? go to sleep, my little chick; no one will disturb you here." ... "but i am really ashamed." "what next! why ashamed? go to sleep. and i'll sing you ... what do you call it? ... i'll sing you to bye-bye, _'schlaf, mein kindchen, schlafe!'_" she began singing. "i should like a drink of water first." "here is a glass of water for you. fresh as crystal! wait, i'll put a pillow under your head.... and here is this to keep the flies off." she covered his face with a handkerchief. "thank you, my little cupid.... i'll just have a tiny doze ... that's all." kuzma vassilyevitch closed his eyes and fell asleep immediately. "_schlaf, mein kindchen, schlafe_," sang emilie, swaying from side to side and softly laughing at her song and her movements. "what a big baby i have got!" she thought. "a boy!" xii an hour and a half later the lieutenant awoke. he fancied in his sleep that someone touched him, bent over him, breathed over him. he fumbled, and pulled off the kerchief. emilie was on her knees close beside him; the expression of her face struck him as queer. she jumped up at once, walked away to the window and put something away in her pocket. kuzma vassilyevitch stretched. "i've had a good long snooze, it seems!" he observed, yawning. "come here, _meine züsse fräulein_!" emilie went up to him. he sat up quickly, thrust his hand into her pocket and took out a small pair of scissors. "_ach, herr je_!" emilie could not help exclaiming. "it's ... it's a pair of scissors?" muttered kuzma vassilyevitch. "why, of course. what did you think it was ... a pistol? oh, how funny you look! you're as rumpled as a pillow and your hair is all standing up at the back.... and he doesn't laugh.... oh, oh! and his eyes are puffy.... oh!" emilie went off into a giggle. "come, that's enough," muttered kuzma vassilyevitch, and he got up from the sofa. "that's enough giggling about nothing. if you can't think of anything more sensible, i'll go home.... i'll go home," he repeated, seeing that she was still laughing. emilie subsided. "come, stay; i won't.... only you must brush your hair." "no, never mind.... don't trouble. i'd better go," said kuzma vassilyevitch, and he took up his cap. emilie pouted. "fie, how cross he is! a regular russian! all russians are cross. now he is going. fie! yesterday he promised me five roubles and today he gives me nothing and goes away." "i haven't any money on me," kuzma vassilyevitch muttered grumpily in the doorway. "good-bye." emilie looked after him and shook her finger. "no money! do you hear, do you hear what he says? oh, what deceivers these russians are! but wait a bit, you pug.... auntie, come here, i have something to tell you." that evening as kuzma vassilyevitch was undressing to go to bed, he noticed that the upper edge of his leather belt had come unsewn for about three inches. like a careful man he at once procured a needle and thread, waxed the thread and stitched up the hole himself. he paid, however, no attention to this apparently trivial circumstance. xiii the whole of the next day kuzma vassilyevitch devoted to his official duties; he did not leave the house even after dinner and right into the night was scribbling and copying out his report to his superior officer, mercilessly disregarding the rules of spelling, always putting an exclamation mark after the word _but_ and a semi-colon after _however_. next morning a barefoot jewish boy in a tattered gown brought him a letter from emilie--the first letter that kuzma vassilyevitch had received from her. "mein allerliebstep florestan," she wrote to him, "can you really so cross with your zuckerpüppchen be that you came not yesterday? please be not cross if you wish not your merry emilie to weep very bitterly and come, be sure, at o'clock to-day." (the figure was surrounded with two wreaths.) "i will be very, very glad. your amiable emilie." kuzma vassilyevitch was inwardly surprised at the accomplishments of his charmer, gave the jew boy a copper coin and told him to say, "very well, i will come." xiv kuzma vassilyevitch kept his word: five o'clock had not struck when he was standing before madame fritsche's gate. but to his surprise he did not find emilie at home; he was met by the lady of the house herself who--wonder of wonders!--dropping a preliminary curtsey, informed him that emilie had been obliged by unforeseen circumstances to go out but she would soon be back and begged him to wait. madame fritsche had on a neat white cap; she smiled, spoke in an ingratiating voice and evidently tried to give an affable expression to her morose countenance, which was, however, none the more prepossessing for that, but on the contrary acquired a positively sinister aspect. "sit down, sit down, sir," she said, putting an easy chair for him, "and we will offer you some refreshment if you will permit it." madame fritsche made another curtsey, went out of the room and returned shortly afterwards with a cup of chocolate on a small iron tray. the chocolate turned out to be of dubious quality; kuzma vassilyevitch drank the whole cup with relish, however, though he was at a loss to explain why madame fritsche was suddenly so affable and what it all meant. for all that emilie did not come back and he was beginning to lose patience and feel bored when all at once he heard through the wall the sounds of a guitar. first there was the sound of one chord, then a second and a third and a fourth--the sound continually growing louder and fuller. kuzma vassilyevitch was surprised: emilie certainly had a guitar but it only had three strings: he had not yet bought her any new ones; besides, emilie was not at home. who could it be? again a chord was struck and so loudly that it seemed as though it were in the room.... kuzma vassilyevitch turned round and almost cried out in a fright. before him, in a low doorway which he had not till then noticed--a big cupboard screened it--stood a strange figure ... neither a child nor a grown-up girl. she was wearing a white dress with a bright-coloured pattern on it and red shoes with high heels; her thick black hair, held together by a gold fillet, fell like a cloak from her little head over her slender body. her big eyes shone with sombre brilliance under the soft mass of hair; her bare, dark-skinned arms were loaded with bracelets and her hands covered with rings, held a guitar. her face was scarcely visible, it looked so small and dark; all that was seen was the crimson of her lips and the outline of a straight and narrow nose. kuzma vassilyevitch stood for some time petrified and stared at the strange creature without blinking; and she, too, gazed at him without stirring an eyelid. at last he recovered himself and moved with small steps towards her. the dark face began gradually smiling. there was a sudden gleam of white teeth, the little head was raised, and lightly flinging back the curls, displayed itself in all its startling and delicate beauty. "what little imp is this?" thought kuzma vassilyevitch, and, advancing still closer, he brought out in a low voice: "hey, little image! who are you?" "come here, come here," the "little image" responded in a rather husky voice, with a halting un-russian intonation and incorrect accent, and she stepped back two paces. kuzma vassilyevitch followed her through the doorway and found himself in a tiny room without windows, the walls and floor of which were covered with thick camel's-hair rugs. he was overwhelmed by a strong smell of musk. two yellow wax candles were burning on a round table in front of a low sofa. in the corner stood a bedstead under a muslin canopy with silk stripes and a long amber rosary with a red tassle at the end hung by the pillow. "but excuse me, who are you?" repeated kuzma vassilyevitch. "sister ... sister of emilie." "you are her sister? and you live here?" "yes ... yes." kuzma vassilyevitch wanted to touch "the image." she drew back. "how is it she has never spoken of you?" "could not ... could not." "you are in concealment then ... in hiding?" "yes." "are there reasons?" "reasons ... reasons." "hm!" again kuzma vassilyevitch would have touched the figure, again she stepped back. "so that's why i never saw you. i must own i never suspected your existence. and the old lady, madame fritsche, is your aunt, too?" "yes ... aunt." "hm! you don't seem to understand russian very well. what's your name, allow me to ask?" "colibri." "what?" "colibri." "colibri! that's an out-of-the-way name! there are insects like that in africa, if i remember right?" xv colibri gave a short, queer laugh ... like a clink of glass in her throat. she shook her head, looked round, laid her guitar on the table and going quickly to the door, abruptly shut it. she moved briskly and nimbly with a rapid, hardly audible sound like a lizard; at the back her hair fell below her knees. "why have you shut the door?" asked kuzma vassilyevitch. colibri put her fingers to her lips. "emilie ... not want ... not want her." kuzma vassilyevitch grinned. "i say, you are not jealous, are you?" colibri raised her eyebrows. "what?" "jealous ... angry," kuzma vassilyevitch explained. "oh, yes!" "really! much obliged.... i say, how old are you?" "seventen." "seventeen, you mean?" "yes." kuzma vassilyevitch scrutinised his fantastic companion closely. "what a beautiful creature you are!" he said, emphatically. "marvellous! really marvellous! what hair! what eyes! and your eyebrows ... ough!" colibri laughed again and again looked round with her magnificent eyes. "yes, i am a beauty! sit down, and i'll sit down ... beside." "by all means! but say what you like, you are a strange sister for emilie! you are not in the least like her." "yes, i am sister ... cousin. here ... take ... a flower. a nice flower. it smells." she took out of her girdle a sprig of white lilac, sniffed it, bit off a petal and gave him the whole sprig. "will you have jam? nice jam ... from constantinople ... sorbet?" colibri took from the small chest of drawers a gilt jar wrapped in a piece of crimson silk with steel spangles on it, a silver spoon, a cut glass decanter and a tumbler like it. "eat some sorbet, sir; it is fine. i will sing to you.... will you?" she took up the guitar. "you sing, then?" asked kuzma vassilyevitch, putting a spoonful of really excellent sorbet into his mouth. "oh, yes!" she flung back her mane of hair, put her head on one side and struck several chords, looking carefully at the tips of her fingers and at the top of the guitar ... then suddenly began singing in a voice unexpectedly strong and agreeable, but guttural and to the ears of kuzma vassilyevitch rather savage. "oh, you pretty kitten," he thought. she sang a mournful song, utterly un-russian and in a language quite unknown to kuzma vassilyevitch. he used to declare that the sounds "kha, gha" kept recurring in it and at the end she repeated a long drawn-out "sintamar" or "sintsimar," or something of the sort, leaned her head on her hand, heaved a sigh and let the guitar drop on her knee. "good?" she asked, "want more?" "i should be delighted," answered kuzma vassilyevitch. "but why do you look like that, as though you were grieving? you'd better have some sorbet." "no ... you. and i will again.... it will be more merry." she sang another song, that sounded like a dance, in the same unknown language. again kuzma vassilyevitch distinguished the same guttural sounds. her swarthy fingers fairly raced over the strings, "like little spiders," and she ended up this time with a jaunty shout of "ganda" or "gassa," and with flashing eyes banged on the table with her little fist. xvi kuzma vassilyevitch sat as though he were in a dream. his head was going round. it was all so unexpected.... and the scent, the singing ... the candles in the daytime ... the sorbet flavoured with vanilla. and colibri kept coming closer to him, too; her hair shone and rustled, and there was a glow of warmth from her--and that melancholy face.... "a russalka!" thought kuzma vassilyevitch. he felt somewhat awkward. "tell me, my pretty, what put it into your head to invite me to-day?" "you are young, pretty ... such i like." "so that's it! but what will emilie say? she wrote me a letter: she is sure to be back directly." "you not tell her ... nothing! trouble! she will kill!" kuzma vassilyevitch laughed. "as though she were so fierce!" colibri gravely shook her head several times. "and to madame fritsche, too, nothing. no, no, no!" she tapped herself lightly on the forehead. "do you understand, officer?" kuzma vassilyevitch frowned. "it's a secret, then?" "yes ... yes." "very well.... i won't say a word. only you ought to give me a kiss for that." "no, afterwards ... when you are gone." "that's a fine idea!" kuzma vassilyevitch was bending down to her but she slowly drew herself back and stood stiffly erect like a snake startled in the grass. kuzma vassilyevitch stared at her. "well!" he said at last, "you are a spiteful thing! all right, then." colibri pondered and turned to the lieutenant.... all at once there was the muffled sound of tapping repeated three times at even intervals somewhere in the house. colibri laughed, almost snorted. "to-day--no, to-morrow--yes. come to-morrow." "at what time?" "seven ... in the evening." "and what about emilie?" "emilie ... no; will not be here." "you think so? very well. only, to-morrow you will tell me?" "what?" (colibri's face assumed a childish expression every time she asked a question.) "why you have been hiding away from me all this time?" "yes ... yes; everything shall be to-morrow; the end shall be." "mind now! and i'll bring you a present." "no ... no need." "why not? i see you like fine clothes." "no need. this ... this ... this ..." she pointed to her dress, her rings, her bracelets, and everything about her, "it is all my own. not a present. i do not take." "as you like. and now must i go?" "oh, yes." kuzma vassilyevitch got up. colibri got up, too. "good-bye, pretty little doll! and when will you give me a kiss?" colibri suddenly gave a little jump and swiftly flinging both arms round his neck, gave him not precisely a kiss but a peck at his lips. he tried in his turn to kiss her but she instantly darted back and stood behind the sofa. "to-morrow at seven o'clock, then?" he said with some confusion. she nodded and taking a tress of her long hair with her two fingers, bit it with her sharp teeth. kuzma vassilyevitch kissed his hand to her, went out and shut the door after him. he heard colibri run up to it at once.... the key clicked in the lock. xvii there was no one in madame fritsche's drawing-room. kuzma vassilyevitch made his way to the passage at once. he did not want to meet emilie. madame fritsche met him on the steps. "ah, you are going, mr. lieutenant?" she said, with the same affected and sinister smile. "you won't wait for emilie?" kuzma vassilyevitch put on his cap. "i haven't time to wait any longer, madam. i may not come to-morrow, either. please tell her so." "very good, i'll tell her. but i hope you haven't been dull, mr. lieutenant?" "no, i have not been dull." "i thought not. good-bye." "good-bye." kuzma vassilyevitch returned home and stretching himself on his bed sank into meditation. he was unutterably perplexed. "what marvel is this?" he cried more than once. and why did emilie write to him? she had made an appointment and not come! he took out her letter, turned it over in his hands, sniffed it: it smelt of tobacco and in one place he noticed a correction. but what could he deduce from that? and was it possible that madame fritsche knew nothing about it? and _she_.... who was she? yes, who was she? the fascinating colibri, that "pretty doll," that "little image," was always before him and he looked forward with impatience to the following evening, though secretly he was almost afraid of this "pretty doll" and "little image." xviii next day kuzma vassilyevitch went shopping before dinner, and, after persistent haggling, bought a tiny gold cross on a little velvet ribbon. "though she declares," he thought, "that she never takes presents, we all know what such sayings mean; and if she really is so disinterested, emilie won't be so squeamish." so argued this don juan of nikolaev, who had probably never heard of the original don juan and knew nothing about him. at six o'clock in the evening kuzma vassilyevitch shaved carefully and sending for a hairdresser he knew, told him to pomade and curl his topknot, which the latter did with peculiar zeal, not sparing the government note paper for curlpapers; then kuzma vassilyevitch put on a smart new uniform, took into his right hand a pair of new wash-leather gloves, and, sprinkling himself with lavender water, set off. kuzma vassilyevitch took a great deal more trouble over his personal appearance on this occasion than when he went to see his "zuckerpüppchen", not because he liked colibri better than emilie but in the "pretty little doll" there was something enigmatic, something which stirred even the sluggish imagination of the young lieutenant. xix madame fritsche greeted him as she had done the day before and as though she had conspired with him in a plan of deception, informed him again that emilie had gone out for a short time and asked him to wait. kuzma vassilyevitch nodded in token of assent and sat down on a chair. madame fritsche smiled again, that is, showed her yellow tusks and withdrew without offering him any chocolate. kuzma vassilyevitch instantly fixed his eyes on the mysterious door. it remained closed. he coughed loudly once or twice so as to make known his presence.... the door did not stir. he held his breath, strained his ears.... he heard not the faintest sound or rustle; everything was still as death. kuzma vassilyevitch got up, approached the door on tiptoe and, fumbling in vain with his fingers, pressed his knee against it. it was no use. then he bent down and once or twice articulated in a loud whisper, "colibri! colibri! little doll!" no one responded. kuzma vassilyevitch drew himself up, straightened his uniform--and, after standing still a little while, walked with more resolute steps to the window and began drumming on the pane. he began to feel vexed, indignant; his dignity as an officer began to assert itself. "what nonsense is this?" he thought at last; "whom do they take me for? if they go on like this, i'll knock with my fists. she will be forced to answer! the old woman will hear.... what of it? that's not my fault." he turned swiftly on his heel ... the door stood half open. xx kuzma vassilyevitch immediately hastened into the secret room again on tiptoe. colibri was lying on the sofa in a white dress with a broad red sash. covering the lower part of her face with a handkerchief, she was laughing, a noiseless but genuine laugh. she had done up her hair, this time plaiting it into two long, thick plaits intertwined with red ribbon; the same slippers adorned her tiny, crossed feet but the feet themselves were bare and looking at them one might fancy that she had on dark, silky stockings. the sofa stood in a different position, nearer the wall; and on the table he saw on a chinese tray a bright-coloured, round-bellied coffee pot beside a cut glass sugar bowl and two blue china cups. the guitar was lying there, too, and blue-grey smoke rose in a thin coil from a big, aromatic candle. kuzma vassilyevitch went up to the sofa and bent over colibri, but before he had time to utter a word she held out her hand and, still laughing in her handkerchief, put her little, rough fingers into his hair and instantly ruffled the well-arranged curls on the top of his head. "what next?" exclaimed kuzma vassilyevitch, not altogether pleased by such unceremoniousness. "oh, you naughty girl!" colibri took the handkerchief from her face. "not nice so; better now." she moved away to the further end of the sofa and drew her feet up under her. "sit down ... there." kuzma vassilyevitch sat down on the spot indicated. "why do you move away?" he said, after a brief silence. "surely you are not afraid of me?" colibri curled herself up and looked at him sideways. "i am not afraid ... no." "you must not be shy with me," kuzma vassilyevitch said in an admonishing tone. "do you remember your promise yesterday to give me a kiss?" colibri put her arms round her knees, laid her head on them and looked at him again. "i remember." "i should hope so. and you must keep your word." "yes ... i must." "in that case," kuzma vassilyevitch was beginning, and he moved nearer. colibri freed her plaits which she was holding tight with her knees and with one of them gave him a flick on his hand. "not so fast, sir!" kuzma vassilyevitch was embarrassed. "what eyes she has, the rogue!" he muttered, as though to himself. "but," he went on, raising his voice, "why did you call me ... if that is how it is?" colibri craned her neck like a bird ... she listened. kuzma vassilyevitch was alarmed. "emilie?" he asked. "no." "someone else?" colibri shrugged her shoulder. "do you hear something?" "nothing." with a birdlike movement, again colibri drew back her little oval-shaped head with its pretty parting and the short growth of tiny curls on the nape of her neck where her plaits began, and again curled herself up into a ball. "nothing." "nothing! then now i'll ..." kuzma vassilyevitch craned forward towards colibri but at once pulled back his hand. there was a drop of blood on his finger. "what foolishness is this!" he cried, shaking his finger. "your everlasting pins! and the devil of a pin it is!" he added, looking at the long, golden pin which colibri slowly thrust into her sash. "it's a regular dagger, it's a sting.... yes, yes, it's your sting, and you are a wasp, that's what you are, a wasp, do you hear?" apparently colibri was much pleased at kuzma vasselyevitch's comparison; she went off into a thin laugh and repeated several times over: "yes, i will sting ... i will sting." kuzma vassilyevitch looked at her and thought: "she is laughing but her face is melancholy. "look what i am going to show you," he said aloud. "_tso?_" "why do you say _tso?_ are you a pole?" "_nee_." "now you say _nee!_ but there, it's no matter." kuzma vassilyevitch got out his present and waved it in the air. "look at it.... isn't it nice?" colibri raised her eyes indifferently. "ah! a cross! we don't wear." "what? you don't wear a cross? are you a jewess then, or what?" "we don't wear," repeated colibri, and, suddenly starting, looked back over her shoulder. "would you like me to sing?" she asked hurriedly. kuzma vassilyevitch put the cross in the pocket of his uniform and he, too, looked round. "what is it?" he muttered. "a mouse ... a mouse," colibri said hurriedly, and suddenly to kuzma vassilyevitch's complete surprise, flung her smooth, supple arms round his neck and a rapid kiss burned his cheek ... as though a red-hot ember had been pressed against it. he pressed colibri in his arms but she slipped away like a snake--her waist was hardly thicker than the body of a snake--and leapt to her feet. "wait," she whispered, "you must have some coffee first." "nonsense! coffee, indeed! afterwards." "no, now. now hot, after cold." she took hold of the coffee pot by the handle and, lifting it high, began pouring out two cups. the coffee fell in a thin, as it were, twirling stream; colibri leaned her head on her shoulder and watched it fall. "there, put in the sugar ... drink ... and i'll drink." kuzma vassilyevitch put a lump of sugar in the cup and drank it off at one draught. the coffee struck him as very strong and bitter. colibri looked at him, smiling, and faintly dilated her nostrils over the edge of her cup. she slowly put it down on the table. "why don't you drink it?" asked kuzma vassilyevitch. "not all, now." kuzma vassilyevitch got excited. "do sit down beside me, at least." "in a minute." she bent her head and, still keeping her eyes fixed on kuzma vassilyevitch, picked up the guitar. "only i will sing first." "yes, yes, only sit down." "and i will dance. shall i?" "you dance? well, i should like to see that. but can't that be afterwards?" "no, now.... but i love you very much." "you love? mind now ... dance away, then, you queer creature." xxi colibri stood on the further side of the table and running her fingers several times over the strings of the guitar and to the surprise of kuzma vassilyevitch, who was expecting a lively, merry song, began singing a slow, monotonous air, accompanying each separate sound, which seemed as though it were wrung out of her by force, with a rhythmical swaying of her body to right and left. she did not smile, and indeed knitted her brows, her delicate, high, rounded eyebrows, between which a dark blue mark, probably burnt in with gunpowder, stood out sharply, looking like some letter of an oriental alphabet. she almost closed her eyes but their pupils glimmered dimly under the drooping lids, fastened as before on kuzma vassilyevitch. and he, too, could not look away from those marvellous, menacing eyes, from that dark-skinned face that gradually began to glow, from the half-closed and motionless lips, from the two black snakes rhythmically moving on both sides of her graceful head. colibri went on swaying without moving from the spot and only her feet were working; she kept lightly shifting them, lifting first the toe and then the heel. once she rotated rapidly and uttered a piercing shriek, waving the guitar high in the air.... then the same monotonous movement accompanied by the same monotonous singing, began again. kuzma vassilyevitch sat meanwhile very quietly on the sofa and went on looking at colibri; he felt something strange and unusual in himself: he was conscious of great lightness and freedom, too great lightness, in fact; he seemed, as it were, unconscious of his body, as though he were floating and at the same time shudders ran down him, a sort of agreeable weakness crept over his legs, and his lips and eyelids tingled with drowsiness. he had no desire now, no thought of anything ... only he was wonderfully at ease, as though someone were lulling him, "singing him to bye-bye," as emilie had expressed it, and he whispered to himself, "little doll!" at times the face of the "little doll" grew misty. "why is that?" kuzma vassilyevitch wondered. "from the smoke," he reassured himself. "there is such a blue smoke here." and again someone was lulling him and even whispering in his ear something so sweet ... only for some reason it was always unfinished. but then all of a sudden in the little doll's face the eyes opened till they were immense, incredibly big, like the arches of a bridge.... the guitar dropped, and striking against the floor, clanged somewhere at the other end of the earth.... some very near and dear friend of kuzma vassilyevitch's embraced him firmly and tenderly from behind and set his cravat straight. kuzma vassilyevitch saw just before his own face the hooked nose, the thick moustache and the piercing eyes of the stranger with the three buttons on his cuff ... and although the eyes were in the place of the moustache and the nose itself seemed upside down, kuzma vassilyevitch was not in the least surprised, but, on the contrary, thought that this was how it ought to be; he was even on the point of saying to the nose, "hullo, brother grigory," but he changed his mind and preferred ... preferred to set off with colibri to constantinople at once for their forthcoming wedding, as she was a turk and the tsar promoted him to be an actual turk. xxii and opportunely a little boat appeared: he lifted his foot to get into it and though through clumsiness he stumbled and hurt himself rather badly, so that for some time he did not know where anything was, yet he managed it and getting into the boat, floated on the big river, which, as the river of time, flows to constantinople in the map on the walls of the nikolaevsky high school. with great satisfaction he floated down the river and watched a number of red ducks which continually met him; they would not let him come near them, however, and, diving, changed into round, pink spots. and colibri was going with him, too, but to escape the sultry heat she hid, under the boat and from time to time knocked on the bottom of it.... and here at last was constantinople. the houses, as houses should, looked like tyrolese hats; and the turks had all big, sedate faces; only it did not do to look at them too long: they began wriggling, making faces and at last melted away altogether like thawing snow. and here was the palace in which he would live with colibri.... and how well everything was arranged in it! walls with generals' gold lace on it, everywhere epaulettes, people blowing trumpets in the corners and one could float into the drawing-room in the boat. of course, there was a portrait of mahomet.... only colibri kept running ahead through the rooms and her plaits trailed after her on the floor and she would not turn round, and she kept growing smaller and smaller.... and now it was not colibri but a boy in a jacket and he was the boy's tutor and he had to climb after the boy into a telescope, and the telescope got narrower and narrower, till at last he could not move ... neither backwards nor forwards, and something fell on his back ... there was earth in his mouth. xxiii kuzma vassilyevitch opened his eyes. it was daylight and everything was still ... there was a smell of vinegar and mint. above him and at his sides there was something white; he looked more intently: it was the canopy of a bed. he wanted to raise his head ... he could not; his hand ... he could not do that, either. what was the meaning of it? he dropped his eyes.... a long body lay stretched before him and over it a yellow blanket with a brown edge. the body proved to be his, kuzma vassilyevitch's. he tried to cry out ... no sound came. he tried again, did his very utmost ... there was the sound of a feeble moan quavering under his nose. he heard heavy footsteps and a sinewy hand parted the bed curtains. a grey-headed pensioner in a patched military overcoat stood gazing at him.... and he gazed at the pensioner. a big tin mug was put to kuzma vassilyevitch's lips. he greedily drank some cold water. his tongue was loosened. "where am i?" the pensioner glanced at him once more, went away and came back with another man in a dark uniform. "where am i?" repeated kuzma vassilyevitch. "well, he will live now," said the man in the dark uniform. "you are in the hospital," he added aloud, "but you must go to sleep. it is bad for you to talk." kuzma vassilyevitch began to feel surprised, but sank into forgetfulness again.... next morning the doctor appeared. kuzma vassilyevitch came to himself. the doctor congratulated him on his recovery and ordered the bandages round his head to be changed. "what? my head? why, am i ..." "you mustn't talk, you mustn't excite yourself," the doctor interrupted. "lie still and thank the almighty. where are the compresses, poplyovkin?" "but where is the money ... the government money ..." "there! he is lightheaded again. some more ice, poplyovkin." xxiv another week passed. kuzma vassilyevitch was so much better that the doctors found it possible to tell him what had happened to him. this is what he learned. at seven o'clock in the evening on the th of june he had visited the house of madame fritsche for the last time and on the th of june at dinner time, that is, nearly twenty-four hours later, a shepherd had found him in a ravine near the herson high road, a mile and a half from nikolaev, with a broken head and crimson bruises on his neck. his uniform and waistcoat had been unbuttoned, all his pockets turned inside out, his cap and cutlass were not to be found, nor his leather money belt. from the trampled grass, from the broad track upon the grass and the clay, it could be inferred that the luckless lieutenant had been dragged to the bottom of the ravine and only there had been gashed on his head, not with an axe but with a sabre--probably his own cutlass: there were no traces of blood on his track from the high road while there was a perfect pool of blood round his head. there could be no doubt that his assailants had first drugged him, then tried to strangle him and, taking him out of the town by night, had dragged him to the ravine and there given him the final blow. it was only thanks to his truly iron constitution that kuzma vassilyevitch had not died. he had returned to consciousness on july nd, that is, five weeks later. xxv kuzma vassilyevitch immediately informed the authorities of the misfortune that had happened to him; he stated all the circumstances of the case verbally and in writing and gave the address of madame fritsche. the police raided the house but they found no one there; the birds had flown. they got hold of the owner of the house. but they could not get much sense out of the latter, a very old and deaf workman. he lived in a different part of the town and all he knew was that four months before he had let his house to a jewess with a passport, whose name was schmul or schmulke, which he had immediately registered at the police station. she had been joined by another woman, so he stated, who also had a passport, but what was their calling did not know; and whether they had other people living with them had not heard and did not know; the lad whom he used to keep as porter or watchman in the house had gone away to odessa or petersburg, and the new porter had only lately come, on the st of july. inquiries were made at the police station and in the neighbourhood; it appeared that madame schmulke, together with her companion, whose real name was frederika bengel, had left nikolaev about the th of june, but where they had gone was unknown. the mysterious man with a gipsy face and three buttons on his cuff and the dark-skinned foreign girl with an immense mass of hair, no one had seen. as soon as kuzma vassilyevitch was discharged from the hospital, he visited the house that had been so fateful for him. in the little room where he had talked to colibri and where there was still a smell of musk, there was a second secret door; the sofa had been moved in front of it on his second visit and through it no doubt the murderer had come and seized him from behind. kuzma vassilyevitch lodged a formal complaint; proceedings were taken. several numbered reports and instructions were dispatched in various directions; the appropriate acknowledgments and replies followed in due course.... there the incident closed. the suspicious characters had disappeared completely and with them the stolen government money had vanished, too, one thousand, nine hundred and seventeen roubles and some kopecks, in paper and gold. not an inconsiderable sum in those days! kuzma vassilyevitch was paying back instalments for ten years, when, fortunately for him, an act of clemency from the throne cancelled the debt. xxvi he was himself at first firmly convinced that emilie, his treacherous zuckerpüppchen, was to blame for all his trouble and had originated the plot. he remembered how on the last day he had seen her he had incautiously dropped asleep on the sofa and how when he woke he had found her on her knees beside him and how confused she had been, and how he had found a hole in his belt that evening--a hole evidently made by her scissors. "she saw the money," thought kuzma vassilyevitch, "she told the old hag and those other two devils, she entrapped me by writing me that letter ... and so they cleaned me out. but who could have expected it of her!" he pictured the pretty, good-natured face of emilie, her clear eyes.... "women! women!" he repeated, gnashing his teeth, "brood of crocodiles!" but when he had finally left the hospital and gone home, he learned one circumstance which perplexed and nonplussed him. on the very day when he was brought half dead to the town, a girl whose description corresponded exactly to that of emilie had rushed to his lodging with tear-stained face and dishevelled hair and inquiring about him from his orderly, had dashed off like mad to the hospital. at the hospital she had been told that kuzma vassilyevitch would certainly die and she had at once disappeared, wringing her hands with a look of despair on her face. it was evident that she had not foreseen, had not expected the murder. or perhaps she had herself been deceived and had not received her promised share? had she been overwhelmed by sudden remorse? and yet she had left nikolaev afterwards with that loathsome old woman who had certainly known all about it. kuzma vassilyevitch was lost in conjecture and bored his orderly a good deal by making him continually describe over and over again the appearance of the girl and repeat her words. xxvii a year and a half later kuzma vassilyevitch received a letter in german from emilie, _alias_ frederika bengel, which he promptly had translated for him and showed us more than once in later days. it was full of mistakes in spelling and exclamation marks; the postmark on the envelope was breslau. here is the translation, as correct as may be, of the letter: "my precious, unforgettable and incomparable florestan! mr. lieutenant yergenhof! "how often i felt impelled to write to you! and i have always unfortunately put it off, though the thought that you may regard me as having had a hand in that awful crime has always been the most appalling thought to me! oh, dear mr. lieutenant! believe me, the day when i learnt that you were alive and well, was the happiest day of my life! but i do not mean to justify myself altogether! i will not tell a lie! i was the first to discover your habit of carrying your money round your waist! (though indeed in our part of the world all the butchers and meat salesmen do the same!) and i was so incautious as to let drop a word about it! i even said in joke that it wouldn't be bad to take a little of your money! but the old wretch (mr. florestan! she was _not_ my aunt) plotted with that godless monster luigi and his accomplice! i swear by my mother's tomb, i don't know to this day who those people were! i only know that his name was luigi and that they both came from bucharest and were certainly great criminals and were hiding from the police and had money and precious things! luigi was a dreadful individual (_ein schröckliches subject_), to kill a fellow-man (_einen mitmenschen_) meant nothing at all to him! he spoke every language--and it was _he_ who that time got our things back from the cook! don't ask how! he was capable of anything, he was an awful man! he assured the old woman that he would only drug you a little and then take you out of town and put you down somewhere and would say that he knew nothing about it but that it was your fault--that you had taken too much wine somewhere! but even then the wretch had it in his mind that it would be better to kill you so that there would be no one to tell the tale! he wrote you that letter, signed with my name and the old woman got me away by craft! i suspected nothing and i was awfully afraid of luigi! he used to say to me, 'i'll cut your throat, i'll cut your throat like a chicken's!' and he used to twitch his moustache so horribly as he said it! and they dragged me into a bad company, too.... i am very much ashamed, mr. lieutenant! and even now i shed bitter tears at these memories! ... it seems to me ... ah! i was not born for such doings.... but there is no help for it; and this is how it all happened! afterwards i was horribly frightened and could not help going away, for if the police had found us, what would have happened to us then? that accursed luigi fled at once as soon as he heard that you were alive. but i soon parted from them all and though now i am often without a crust of bread, my heart is at peace! you will ask me perhaps why i came to nikolaev? but i can give you no answer! i have sworn! i will finish by asking of you a favour, a very, very important one: whenever you remember your little friend emilie, do not think of her as a black-hearted criminal! the eternal god sees my heart. i have a bad morality (_ich habe eine schlechte moralität_) and i am feather-headed, but i am not a criminal. and i shall always love and remember you, my incomparable florestan, and shall always wish you everything good on this earthly globe (_auf diesem erdenrund!_). i don't know whether my letter will reach you, but if it does, write me a few lines that i may see you have received it. thereby you will make very happy your ever-devoted emilie. "p. s. write to f. e. poste restante, breslau, silesia. "p. s. s. i have written to you in german; i could not express my feelings otherwise; but you write to me in russian." xxviii "well, did you answer her?" we asked kuzma vassilyevitch. "i meant to, i meant to many times. but how was i to write? i don't know german ... and in russian, who would have translated it? and so i did not write." and always as he finished his story, kuzma vassilyevitch sighed, shook his head and said, "that's what it is to be young!" and if among his audience was some new person who was hearing the famous story for the first time, he would take his hand, lay it on his skull and make him feel the scar of the wound.... it really was a fearful wound and the scar reached from one ear to the other. . * * * * * the dog "but if one admits the possibility of the supernatural, the possibility of its participation in real life, then allow me to ask what becomes of common sense?" anton stepanitch pronounced and he folded his arms over his stomach. anton stepanitch had the grade of a civil councillor, served in some incomprehensible department and, speaking emphatically and stiffly in a bass voice, enjoyed universal respect. he had not long before, in the words of those who envied him, "had the stanislav stuck on to him." "that's perfectly true," observed skvorevitch. "no one will dispute that," added kinarevitch. "i am of the same opinion," the master of the house, finoplentov, chimed in from the corner in falsetto. "well, i must confess, i cannot agree, for something supernatural has happened to me myself," said a bald, corpulent middle-aged gentleman of medium height, who had till then sat silent behind the stove. the eyes of all in the room turned to him with curiosity and surprise, and there was a silence. the man was a kaluga landowner of small means who had lately come to petersburg. he had once served in the hussars, had lost money at cards, had resigned his commission and had settled in the country. the recent economic reforms had reduced his income and he had come to the capital to look out for a suitable berth. he had no qualifications and no connections, but he confidently relied on the friendship of an old comrade who had suddenly, for no visible reason, become a person of importance, and whom he had once helped in thrashing a card sharper. moreover, he reckoned on his luck--and it did not fail him: a few days after his arrival in town he received the post of superintendent of government warehouses, a profitable and even honourable position, which did not call for conspicuous abilities: the warehouses themselves had only a hypothetical existence and indeed it was not very precisely known with what they were to be filled--but they had been invented with a view to government economy. anton stepanitch was the first to break the silence. "what, my dear sir," he began, "do you seriously maintain that something supernatural has happened to you? i mean to say, something inconsistent with the laws of nature?" "i do maintain it," replied the gentleman addressed as "my dear sir," whose name was porfiry kapitonitch. "inconsistent with the laws of nature!" anton stepanitch repeated angrily; apparently he liked the phrase. "just so ... yes; it was precisely what you say." "that's amazing! what do you think of it, gentlemen?" anton stepanitch tried to give his features an ironical expression, but without effect--or to speak more accurately, merely with the effect of suggesting that the dignified civil councillor had detected an unpleasant smell. "might we trouble you, dear sir," he went on, addressing the kaluga landowner, "to give us the details of so interesting an incident?" "certainly, why not?" answered the landowner and, moving in a free-and-easy way to the middle of the room, he spoke as follows: "i have, gentlemen, as you are probably aware, or perhaps are not aware, a small estate in the kozelsky district. in old days i used to get something out of it, though now, of course, i have nothing to look forward to but unpleasantness. but enough of politics. well, in that district i have a little place: the usual kitchen garden, a little pond with carp in it, farm buildings of a sort and a little lodge for my own sinful person ... i am a bachelor. well, one day--some six years ago--i came home rather late; i had had a game of cards at a neighbour's and i was--i beg you to note--the least little bit elevated, as they say; i undressed, got into bed and put out the candle. and only fancy, gentlemen: as soon as i put out the candle there was something moving under my bed! i wondered whether it was a rat; no, it was not a rat: it moved about, scratched on the floor and scratched itself.... at last it flapped its ears! "there was no mistake about it; it was a dog. but where could a dog have come from? i did not keep one; could some stray dog have run in, i wondered. i called my servant; filka was his name. he came in with a candle. "'how's this,' i said, 'filka, my lad? is that how you look after things? a dog has got under my bed?' 'what dog?' said he. 'how do i know,' said i, 'that's your business--to save your master from disturbance.' my filka bent down, and began moving the candle under the bed. 'but there's no dog here,' said he. i bent down, too; there certainly was no dog there. what a queer thing!--i glanced at filka and he was smiling. 'you stupid,' i said to him, 'why are you grinning. when you opened the door the dog must have whisked out into the passage. and you, gaping idiot, saw nothing because you are always asleep. you don't suppose i am drunk, do you?' he would have answered, but i sent him out, curled up and that night heard nothing more. "but the next night--only fancy--the thing was repeated. as soon as i blew out the candle, he scratched himself and flapped his ears again. again i called filka; again he looked under the bed--again there was nothing! i sent him away, blew out the candle--and, damn it all, the dog was there again and it was a dog right enough: one could hear it breathing, biting its coat, looking for fleas.... it was so distinct--'filka,' i said, 'come here without the candle!' he came in. 'well, now,' i said, 'do you hear?' 'yes,' he said. i could not see him, but i felt that the fellow was scared. 'what do you make of it?' said i. 'what do you bid me make of it, porfiry kapitonitch? it's sorcery!' 'you are a foolish fellow,' i said, 'hold your tongue with your sorcery....' and our voices quavered like a bird's and we were trembling in the dark as though we were in a fever. i lighted a candle, no dog, no sound, only us two, as white as chalk. so i kept a candle burning till morning and i assure you, gentlemen, you may believe me or you may not, but from that night for six weeks the same thing was repeated. in the end i actually got used to it and began putting out the candle, because i couldn't get to sleep in the light. 'let him fidget,' i thought, 'he doesn't do me any harm.'" "well, i see you are not one of the chicken-hearted brigade," anton stepanitch interrupted in a half-contemptuous, half-condescending tone! "one can see the hussar at once!" "i shouldn't be afraid of you in any case," porfiry kapitonitch observed, and for an instant he really did look like a hussar. "but listen to the rest. a neighbour came to see me, the very one with whom i used to play cards. he dined with me on what luck provided and dropped some fifty roubles for his visit; night came on, it was time for him to be off. but i had my own idea. 'stay the night with me,' i said, 'vassily vassilitch; tomorrow, please god, you will win it back.' vassily vassilitch considered and stayed. i had a bed put up for him in my room.... well, we went to bed, smoked, chatted--about the fair sex for the most part, as is only suitable in bachelor company--we laughed, of course; i saw vassily vassilitch put out his candle and turn his back towards me: as much as to say: 'good night.' i waited a little, then i, too, put out my candle. and, only fancy, i had hardly time to wonder what sort of trick would be played this time, when the sweet creature was moving again. and moving was not all; it came out from under the bed, walked across the room, tapped on the floor with its paws, shook its ears and all of a sudden pushed against the very chair that was close by vassily vassilitch's bed. 'porfiry kapitonitch,' said the latter, and in such an unconcerned voice, you know, 'i did not know you had a dog. what sort is it, a setter?' 'i haven't a dog,' i said, 'and never have had one!' 'you haven't? why, what's this?' 'what's _this_?' said i, 'why, light the candle and then you will see for yourself.' 'isn't it a dog?' 'no.' vassily vassilitch turned over in bed. 'but you are joking, dash it all.' 'no, i am not joking.' i heard him go strike, strike, with a match, while the creature persisted in scratching its ribs. the light flared up ... and, hey presto! not a trace remained! vassily vassilitch looked at me and i looked at him. 'what trick is this?' he said. 'it's a trick,' i said, 'that, if you were to set socrates himself on one side and frederick the great on the other, even they could not make it out.' and then i told him all about it. didn't my vassily vassilitch jump out of bed! as though he had been scalded! he couldn't get into his boots. 'horses,' he cried, 'horses!' i began trying to persuade him, but it was no use! he positively gasped! 'i won't stay,' he said, 'not a minute! you must be a man under a curse! horses.' however, i prevailed upon him. only his bed was dragged into another room and nightlights were lighted everywhere. at our tea in the morning he had regained his equanimity; he began to give me advice. 'you should try being away from home for a few days, porfiry kapitonitch,' he said, 'perhaps this abomination would leave you.' and i must tell you: my neighbour was a man of immense intellect. he managed his mother-in-law wonderfully: he fastened an i. o. u. upon her; he must have chosen a sentimental moment! she became as soft as silk, she gave him an authorisation for the management of all her estate--what more would you have? you know it is something to get the better of one's mother-in-law. eh! you can judge for yourselves. however, he took leave of me in some displeasure; i'd stripped him of a hundred roubles again. he actually abused me. 'you are ungrateful.' he said, 'you have no feeling'; but how was i to blame? well, be that as it may, i considered his advice. that very day i drove off to the town and put up at an inn, kept by an old man i knew, a dissenter. he was a worthy old fellow, though a little morose from living in solitude, all his family were dead. but he disliked tobacco and had the greatest loathing for dogs; i believe he would have been torn to pieces rather than consent to let a dog into his room. 'for how can one?' he would say, 'the queen of heaven herself is graciously pleased to be on my wall there, and is an unclean dog to put his infidel nose there?' of course, it was lack of education! however, to my thinking, whatever wisdom a man has he had better stick to that." "i see you are a great philosopher," anton stepanitch interrupted a second time with the same sarcastic smile. this time porfiry kapitonitch actually frowned. "how much i know of philosophy i cannot tell," he observed, tugging grimly at his moustache, "but i would be glad to give you a lesson in it." we all simply stared at anton stepanitch. every one of us expected a haughty reply, or at least a glance like a flash of lightning.... but the civil councillor turned his contemptuous smile into one of indifference, then yawned, swung his foot and--that was all! "well, i stayed at that old fellow's," porfiry kapitonitch went on. "he gave me a little room, not one of the best, as we were old friends; his own was close by, the other side of the partition--and that was just what i wanted. the tortures i faced that night! a little room, a regular oven, stuffiness, flies, and such sticky ones; in the corner an extraordinarily big shrine with ancient ikons, with dingy setting in relief on them. it fairly reeked of oil and some other stuff, too; there were two featherbeds on the beds. if you moved the pillow a black beetle would run from under it.... i had drunk an incredible quantity of tea, feeling so dreary--it was simply dreadful! i got into bed; there was no possibility of sleeping--and, the other side of the partition, my host was sighing, clearing his throat, repeating his prayers. however, he subsided at last. i heard him begin to snore, but only faintly, in the old-fashioned polite way. i had put my candle out long ago, but the little lamp was burning before the ikons.... that prevented it, i suppose. so i got up softly with bare feet, climbed up to the lamp, and blew it out.... nothing happened. 'oho!' i thought, 'so it doesn't come off in other people's houses.' "but i had no sooner got into bed than there was a commotion again. he was scraping on the floor and scratching himself and shaking his ears ... the usual thing, in fact. very good! i lay still and waited to see what would happen. i heard the old man wake up. 'sir,' he said, 'hey, sir.' 'what is it?' 'did you put out the lamp?' but without waiting for my answer, he burst out all at once. 'what's that? what's that, a dog? a dog! ah, you vile heretic!' 'wait a bit, old man, before you scold,' i said. 'you had better come here yourself. things are happening,' i said, 'that may well make you wonder.' the old man stirred behind the partition and came in to me, with a candle, a very, very thin one, made of yellow wax; i was surprised when i looked at him! he looked bristling all over, with hairy ears and eyes as fierce as a weasel's; he had on a white woollen night cap, a beard to his waist, white; too, and a waistcoat with copper buttons on it over his shirt and fur boots on his feet and he smelt of juniper. in this attire he approached the ikons, crossed himself three times with his two fingers crossed, lighted the lamp, crossed himself again and, turning to me, just grunted: 'explain!' and thereupon, without delay, i told him all that had happened. the old man listened to my account and did not drop one word, simply shook his head. then he sat down on my bed and still said nothing. he scratched his chest, the back of his head and so on and said nothing. 'well,' i said, 'fedul ivanitch, what do you think? is it some devil's sorcery or what?' the old man looked at me. 'what an idea! devil's sorcery! a tobacco-smoker like you might well have that at home, but not here. only think what holiness there is here! sorcery, indeed!' 'and if it is not sorcery, what is it, then?' the old man was silent again; again he scratched himself and said at last, but in a muffled voice, for his moustache was all over his mouth: 'you go to the town of belyov. there is no one who can help you but one man. and that man lives in belyov. he is one of our people. if he is willing to help you, you are lucky; if he is not, nothing can be done.' 'and how am i to find this man?' i said. 'i can direct you about that,' he answered; 'but how can it be sorcery? it is an apparition, or rather an indication; but you cannot comprehend it, it is beyond your understanding. lie down to sleep now with the blessing of our lord christ; i will burn incense and in the morning we will converse. morning, you know, brings wisdom.' "well, we did converse in the morning, only i was almost stifled by that incense. and this was the counsel the old man gave me: that when i reached belyov i should go into the market place and ask in the second shop on the right for one prohoritch, and when i had found prohoritch, put into his hand a writing and the writing consisted of a scrap of paper, on which stood the following words: 'in the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost. amen. to sergey prohorovitch pervushin. trust this man. feduly ivanitch.' and below, 'send the cabbages, for god's sake.' "i thanked the old man and without further discussion ordered my carriage and drove to belyov. for i reflected, that though i suffered no harm from my nocturnal visitor, yet it was uncanny and in fact not quite the thing for a nobleman and an officer--what do you think?" "and did you really go to belyov?" murmured finoplentov. "straight to belyov. i went into the market place and asked at the second shop on the right for prohoritch. 'is there such a person?' i asked. 'yes,' they told me. 'and where does he live?' 'by the oka, beyond the market gardens.' 'in whose house?' 'in his own.' i went to the oka, found his house, though it was really not a house but simply a hovel. i saw a man wearing a blue patched coat and a ragged cap, well ... he looked like a working-man, he was standing with his back to me, digging among his cabbages. i went up to him. 'are you so and so?' i said. he turned round and, i tell you the truth, i have never seen such piercing eyes in my life. yet the whole face was shrunk up like a little fist with a little wedge-shaped beard and sunken lips. he was an old man. 'i am so and so,' he said. 'what are you _needing_?' 'why, this is what i am _needing_,' i said, and put the writing in his hand. he looked at me intently and said: 'come indoors, i can't read without spectacles.' "well, i went with him into his hut--and a hut it certainly was: poor, bare, crooked; only just holding together. on the wall there was an ikon of old workmanship as black as a coal; only the whites of the eyes gleamed in the faces. he took some round spectacles in iron frames out of a little table, put them on his nose, read the writing and looked at me again through the spectacles. 'you have need of me?' 'i certainly have,' i answered. 'well,' said he, 'if you have, tell it and we will listen.' and, only fancy, he sat down and took a checked handkerchief out of his pocket, and spread it out on his knee, and the handkerchief was full of holes, and he looked at me with as much dignity as though he were a senator or a minister, and he did not ask me to sit down. and what was still stranger, i felt all at once awe-stricken, so awe-stricken ... my soul sank into my heels. he pierced me through with his eyes and that's the fact! i pulled myself together, however, and told him all my story. he was silent for a space, shrank into himself, chewed his lips and then questioned me just like a senator again, majestically, without haste. 'what is your name?' he asked. 'your age? what were your parents? are you single or married?' then again he munched his lips, frowned, held up his finger and spoke: 'bow down to the holy ikon, to the honourable saints zossima and savvaty of solovki.' i bowed down to the earth and did not get up in a hurry; i felt such awe for the man and such submission that i believe that whatever he had told me to do i should have done it on the spot! ... i see you are grinning, gentlemen, but i was in no laughing mood then, i assure you. 'get up, sir,' said he at last. 'i can help you. this is not sent you as a chastisement, but as a warning; it is for your protection; someone is praying for your welfare. go to the market now and buy a young dog and keep it by you day and night. your visions will leave you and, moreover, that dog will be of use to you.' "i felt as though light dawned upon me, all at once; how those words delighted me. i bowed down to prohoritch and would have gone away, when i bethought me that i could not go away without rewarding him. i got a three rouble note out of my pocket. but he thrust my hand away and said, 'give it to our chapel, or to the poor; the service i have done you is not to be paid for.' i bowed down to him again almost to the ground, and set off straight for the market! and only fancy: as soon as i drew near the shops, lo and behold, a man in a frieze overcoat comes sauntering towards me carrying under his arm a two months' old setter puppy with a reddish brown coat, white lips and white forepaws. 'stay,' i said to the man in the overcoat, 'what will you sell it for?' 'for two roubles.' take three!' the man looked at me in amazement, thought the gentleman had gone out of his wits, but i flung the notes in his face, took the pup under my arm and made for my carriage! the coachman quickly had the horses harnessed and that evening i reached home. the puppy sat inside my coat all the way and did not stir; and i kept calling him, 'little trésor! little trésor!' i gave him food and drink at once. i had some straw brought in, settled him and whisked into bed! i blew out the candle: it was dark. 'well, now begin,' said i. there was silence. 'begin,' said i, 'you so and so!'... not a sound, as though to mock me. well, i began to feel so set up that i fell to calling it all sorts of names. but still there was not a sound! i could only hear the puppy panting! filka,' i cried, 'filka! come here, you stupid!' he came in. 'do you hear the dog?' 'no, sir,' said he, 'i hear nothing,' and he laughed. 'and you won't hear it ever again,' said i. 'here's half a rouble for vodka!' 'let me kiss your hand,' said the foolish fellow, and he stooped down to me in the darkness.... it was a great relief, i must tell you." "and was that how it all ended?" asked anton stepanitch, this time without irony. "the apparitions ended certainly and i was not disturbed in any way, but wait a bit, the whole business was not over yet. my trésor grew, he turned into a fine fellow. he was heavy, with flopping ears and overhanging lip and a thick tail; a regular sporting dog. and he was extremely attached to me, too. the shooting in our district is poor, however, as i had set up a dog, i got a gun, too. i took to sauntering round the neighbourhood with my trésor: sometimes one would hit a hare (and didn't he go after that hare, upon my soul), sometimes a quail, or a duck. but the great thing was that trésor was never a step away from me. where i went, he went; i even took him to the bath with me, i did really! one lady actually tried to get me turned out of her drawing-room on account of trésor, but i made such an uproar! the windows i broke! well, one day ... it was in summer ... and i must tell you there was a drought at the time such as nobody remembered. the air was full of smoke or haze. there was a smell of burning, the sun was like a molten bullet, and as for the dust there was no getting it out of one's nose and throat. people walked with their mouths wide open like crows. i got weary of sitting at home in complete deshabille, with shutters closed; and luckily the heat was beginning to abate a little.... so i went off, gentlemen, to see a lady, a neighbour of mine. she lived about three-quarters of a mile away--and she certainly was a benevolent lady. she was still young and blooming and of most prepossessing appearance; but she was of rather uncertain temper. though that is no harm in the fair sex; it even gives me pleasure.... well, i reached her door, and i did feel that i had had a hot time of it getting there! well, i thought, nimfodora semyonovna will regale me now with bilberry water and other cooling drinks--and i had already taken hold of the doorhandle when all at once there was the tramping of feet and shrieking, and shouting of boys from round the corner of a hut in the courtyard.... i looked round. good heavens! a huge reddish beast was rushing straight towards me; at the first glance i did not recognise it as a dog: its jaws were open, its eyes were bloodshot, its coat was bristling.... i had not time to take breath before the monster bounded up the steps, stood upon its hind legs and made straight for my chest--it was a position! i was numb with terror and could not lift my arms. i was completely stupefied.... i could see nothing but the terrible white tusks just before my nose, the red tongue all covered with white foam. but at the same instant, another dark body was whisking before me like a ball--it was my darling trésor defending me; and he hung like a leech on the brute's throat! the creature wheezed, grated its teeth and staggered back. i instantly flung open the door and got into the hall.... i stood hardly knowing what i was doing with my whole weight on the door, and heard a desperate battle going on outside. i began shouting and calling for help; everyone in the house was terribly upset. nimfodora semyonovna ran out with her hair down, the voices in the yard grew louder--and all at once i heard: 'hold the gate, hold it, fasten it!' i opened the door--just a crack, and looked out: the monster was no longer on the steps, the servants were rushing about the yard in confusion waving their hands and picking up bits of wood from the ground; they were quite crazy. 'to the village, it has run off to the village,' shrieked a peasant woman in a cap of extraordinary size poking her head out of a dormer window. i went out of the house. "'where is my trésor?' i asked and at once i saw my saviour. he was coming from the gate limping, covered with wounds and with blood.... 'what's the meaning of it?' i asked the servants who were dashing about the yard as though possessed. 'a mad dog!' they answered, 'the count's; it's been hanging about here since yesterday.' "we had a neighbour, a count, who bred very fierce foreign dogs. my knees shook; i rushed to a looking-glass and looked to see whether i had been bitten. no, thank god, there was nothing to be seen; only my countenance naturally looked green; while nimfodora semyonovna was lying on the sofa and cackling like a hen. well, that one could quite understand, in the first place nerves, in the second sensibility. she came to herself at last, though, and asked me whether i were alive. i answered that i was and that trésor had saved me. 'ah,' she said, 'what a noble creature! and so the mad dog has strangled him?' 'no,' i said, 'it has not strangled him, but has wounded him seriously.' 'oh,' she said, 'in that case he must be shot this minute!' 'oh, no,' i said, 'i won't agree to that. i shall try to cure him....' at that moment trésor began scratching at the door. i was about to go and open it for him. 'oh,' she said, 'what are you doing, why, it will bite us all.' 'upon my word,' i said, 'the poison does not act so quickly.' 'oh, how can you?' she said. 'why, you have taken leave of your senses!' 'nimfotchka,' i said, 'calm yourself, be reasonable....' but she suddenly cried, 'go away at once with your horrid dog.' 'i will go away,' said i. 'at once,' she said, 'this second! get along with you,' she said, 'you villain, and never dare to let me set eyes on you again. you may go mad yourself!' 'very good,' said i, 'only let me have a carriage for i am afraid to go home on foot now.' 'give him the carriage, the coach, the chaise, what he likes, only let him be gone quickly. oh, what eyes! oh, what eyes he has!' and with those words she whisked out of the room and gave a maid who met her a slap in the face--and i heard her in hysterics again. "and you may not believe me, gentlemen, but that very day i broke off all acquaintance with nimfodora semyonovna; on mature consideration of everything, i am bound to add that for that circumstance, too, i shall owe a debt of gratitude to my friend trésor to the hour of my death. "well, i had the carriage brought round, put my trésor in and drove home. when i got home i looked him over and washed his wounds, and thought i would take him next day as soon as it was light to the wise man in the yefremovsky district. and this wise man was an old peasant, a wonderful man: he would whisper over some water--and some people made out that he dropped some snake spittle into it--would give it as a draught, and the trouble would be gone completely. i thought, by the way, i would be bled myself at yefremovo: it's a good thing as a precaution against fright, only not from the arm, of course, but from the falcon." "what place is that, the falcon?" mr. finoplentov asked with demure curiosity. "why, don't you know? it is here on the fist near the thumb, the spot on which one shakes the snuff from one's horn, just here. it's the best place for letting blood. for only consider, the blood from the arm comes from the vein, but here it is of no consequence. the doctors don't know that and don't understand it, how should they, the idle drones, the wretched germans? it's the blacksmiths who go in for it. and aren't they skilful! they get a chisel, give it a tap with a hammer and it's done! ... well, while i was thinking it over, it got quite dark, it was time for bed. i went to bed and trésor, of course, was close by me. but whether it was from the fight, from the stuffiness, from the fleas or from my thoughts, i could not get to sleep, do what i would! i can't describe the depression that came over me; i sipped water, opened the window and played the 'kamarinsky' with italian variations on the guitar.... no good! i felt i must get out of the room--and that was all about it! i made up my mind at last: i took my pillow, my quilt and my sheet and made my way across the garden to the hayloft; and settled myself there. and how pleasant i felt in there, gentlemen: it was a still, still night, only from time to time a breath of air like a woman's hand caressed one's cheek; it was so fresh; the hay smelt as sweet as tea; among the apple trees' the grasshoppers were chirping; then all at once came the cry of the quail--and one felt that he, too, the rogue, was happy, sitting in the dew with his little lady.... and the sky was magnificent.... the stars were glowing, or a cloud would float by, white as cotton wool, scarcely moving...." at this point in the story skvorevitch sneezed; kinarevitch sneezed, too--he never failed in anything to follow his colleague's example. anton stepanitch looked approvingly at both of them. "well," porfiry kapitonitch went on, "well, so i lay there and again could not go to sleep. i fell to musing, and what i thought of most was the strangeness of it all: how correctly prohoritch had explained it as a warning and i wondered why it was to me such marvels had happened.... i marvelled--particularly because i could make nothing of it--and trésor kept whining, as he twisted round in the hay; his wounds hurt him. and i will tell you what else prevented me from sleeping--you won't believe it--the moon. it was just facing me, so big and round and yellow and flat, and it seemed to me that it was staring at me, it really did. and so insolently, so persistently.... i put out my tongue at it at last, i really did. what are you so inquisitive about? i thought. i turned away from it and it seemed to be creeping into my ear and shining on the back of my head, so that i felt caught in it as in rain; i opened my eyes and every blade of grass, every paltry being in the hay, the most flimsy spider's web--all were standing out as though they were chiselled! as though asking to be looked at! there was no help for it: i leaned my head on my hand and began gazing. and i couldn't help it: would you believe it: my eyes bulged out like a hare's; they opened so wide--as though they did not know what sleep was! it seemed as though i would devour it all with my eyes. the doors of the barn were wide open; i could see for four miles into the open country, distinctly and yet not, as it always is on a moonlight night. i gazed and gazed without blinking.... and all at once it seemed as though something were moving, far, far away ... like a faint glimmer in the distance. a little time passed: again the shadow stirred--now a little nearer; then again nearer still. 'what can it be?' i wondered, 'a hare, no,' i thought, 'it is bigger than a hare and its action is not the same.' i looked, and again the shadow came in sight, and was moving across the grazing meadow (the meadow looked whitish in the moonlight) like a big blur; it was clear that it was a wild animal, a fox or a wolf. my heart seemed to stand still ... though one might wonder why i was frightened. all sorts of wild creatures run about the fields at night. but curiosity was even stronger than fear. i sat up, i opened my eyes wide and i turned cold all over. i felt frozen, as though i had been thrust into the ice, up to my ears, and why? the lord only knows! and i saw the shadow growing and growing, so it was running straight towards the barn. and i began to realise that it certainly was a wild beast, big, with a huge head.... he flew like a whirlwind, like a bullet.... holy saints! what was it? he stopped all at once, as though he scented something.... why it was ... the same mad dog! it was ... it was! heavens! and i could not stir, i could not cry out.... it darted to the doors, with glittering eyes, howled and dashed through the hay straight at me! "out of the hay like a lion leapt my trésor, here he was. they hung on to each other's jaws and rolled on the ground. what happened then i don't remember; all i remember is that i flew headlong between them into the garden, and home and into my bedroom and almost crept under the bed--why not make a clean breast of it? and what leaps, what bounds i took in the garden! the _prémiere danseuse_ dancing before the emperor napoleon on his nameday couldn't have kept pace with me. however, when i had recovered myself a little, i roused the whole household; i ordered them all to arm themselves, i myself took a sword and a revolver (i bought that revolver, i must own, soon after the emancipation, you know, in case anything should happen, but it turned out the man who sold it was such a rogue--it would be sure to miss fire twice out of every three shots). well, i took all this and so we went, a regular horde of us with stakes and lanterns, to the barn. we approached and called--there was not a sound; at last we went into the barn.... and what did we see? my poor trésor lay dead with his throat torn open, and of the other, the damned brute, not a trace to be seen! "and then, gentlemen, i howled like a calf and i am not ashamed to say so; i stooped down to the friend who had saved my life twice over and kissed his head, again and again. and i stayed in that position until my old housekeeper, praskovya (she, too, had run in at the uproar), brought me to my senses. 'how can you, porfiry kapitonitch,' she said, 'distress yourself so about a dog? and you will catch cold, too, god forbid.' (i was very lightly clad.) 'and if this dog has lost his life in saving you, it may be taken as a great blessing vouchsafed him!' "though i did not agree with praskovya, i went home. and next day a soldier of the garrison shot the mad dog. and it must have been its destined end: it was the first time in his life that the soldier had fired a gun, though he had a medal for service in . so this was the supernatural incident that happened to me." the speaker ceased and began filling his pipe. we all looked at each other in amazement. "well, perhaps, you have led a very virtuous life," mr. finoplentov began, "so in recompense ..." but he broke off at that word, for he saw porfiry kapitonitch's cheeks grow round and flushed while his eyes screwed up--he was on the point of breaking into a guffaw. "but if one admits the possibility of the supernatural, the possibility of its participation in everyday life, so to say," anton stepanitch began again, "then allow me to ask, what becomes of common sense?" none of us found anything to say in reply and we remained in perplexity as before. . * * * * * the watch an old man's story i i will tell you my adventures with a watch. it is a curious story. it happened at the very beginning of this century, in . i had just reached my sixteenth year. i was living at ryazan in a little wooden house not far from the bank of the river oka with my father, my aunt and my cousin; my mother i do not remember; she died three years after her marriage; my father had no other children. his name was porfiry petrovitch. he was a quiet man, sickly and unattractive in appearance; he was employed in some sort of legal and--other--business. in old days such were called attorneys, sharpers, nettle-seeds; he called himself a lawyer. our domestic life was presided over by his sister, my aunt, an old maiden lady of fifty; my father, too, had passed his fourth decade. my aunt was very pious, or, to speak bluntly, she was a canting hypocrite and a chattering magpie, who poked her nose into everything; and, indeed, she had not a kind heart like my father. we were not badly off, but had nothing to spare. my father had a brother called yegor; but he had been sent to siberia in the year for some "seditious acts and jacobin tendencies" (those were the words of the accusation). yegor's son david, my cousin, was left on my father's hands and lived with us. he was only one year older than i; but i respected him and obeyed him as though he were quite grown up. he was a sensible fellow with character; in appearance, thick-set and broad-shouldered with a square face covered with freckles, with red hair, small grey eyes, thick lips, a short nose, and short fingers--a sturdy lad, in fact--and strong for his age! my aunt could not endure him; my father was positively afraid of him ... or perhaps he felt himself to blame towards him. there was a rumour that, if my father had not given his brother away, david's father would not have been sent to siberia. we were both at the high school and in the same class and both fairly high up in it; i was, indeed, a little better at my lessons than david. i had a good memory but boys--as we all know!--do not think much of such superiority, and david remained my leader. ii my name--you know--is alexey. i was born on the seventh of march and my name-day is the seventeenth. in accordance with the old-fashioned custom, i was given the name of the saint whose festival fell on the tenth day after my birth. my godfather was a certain anastasy anastasyevitch putchkov, or more exactly nastasey nastasyeitch, for that was what everyone called him. he was a terribly shifty, pettifogging knave and bribe-taker--a thoroughly bad man; he had been turned out of the provincial treasury and had had to stand his trial on more than one occasion; he was often of use to my father.... they used to "do business" together. in appearance he was a round, podgy figure; and his face was like a fox's with a nose like an owl's. his eyes were brown, bright, also like a fox's, and he was always moving them, those eyes, to right and to left, and he twitched his nose, too, as though he were sniffing the air. he wore shoes without heels, and wore powder every day, which was looked upon as very exceptional in the provinces. he used to declare that he could not go without powder as he had to associate with generals and their ladies. well, my name-day had come. nastasey nastasyeitch came to the house and said: "i have never made you a present up to now, godson, but to make up for that, look what a fine thing i have brought you to-day." and he took out of his pocket a silver watch, a regular turnip, with a rose tree engraved on the face and a brass chain. i was overwhelmed with delight, while my aunt, pelageya petrovna, shouted at the top of her voice: "kiss his hand, kiss his hand, dirty brat!" i proceeded to kiss my godfather's hand, while my aunt went piping on: "oh, nastasey nastasyeitch! why do you spoil him like this? how can he take care of a watch? he will be sure to drop it, break it, or spoil it." my father walked in, looked at the watch, thanked nastasey nastasyeitch--somewhat carelessly, and invited him to his study. and i heard my father say, as though to himself: "if you think to get off _with that_, my man...." but i could not stay still. i put on the watch and rushed headlong to show my present to david. iii david took the watch, opened it and examined it attentively. he had great mechanical ability; he liked having to do with iron, copper, and metals of all sorts; he had provided himself with various instruments, and it was nothing for him to mend or even to make a screw, a key or anything of that kind. david turned the watch about in his hands and muttering through his teeth (he was not talkative as a rule): "oh ... poor ..." added, "where did you get it?" i told him that my godfather had given it me. david turned his little grey eyes upon me: "nastasey?" "yes, nastasey nastasyeitch." david laid the watch on the table and walked away without a word. "do you like it?" i asked. "well, it isn't that.... but if i were you, i would not take any sort of present from nastasey." "why?" "because he is a contemptible person; and you ought not to be under an obligation to a contemptible person. and to say thank you to him, too. i suppose you kissed his hand?" "yes, aunt made me." david grinned--a peculiar grin--to himself. that was his way. he never laughed aloud; he considered laughter a sign of feebleness. david's words, his silent grin, wounded me deeply. "so he inwardly despises me," i thought. "so i, too, am contemptible in his eyes. he would never have stooped to this himself! he would not have accepted presents from nastasey. but what am i to do now?" give back the watch? impossible! i did try to talk to david, to ask his advice. he told me that he never gave advice to anyone and that i had better do as i thought best. as i thought best!! i remember i did not sleep all night afterwards: i was in agonies of indecision. i was sorry to lose the watch--i had laid it on the little table beside my bed; its ticking was so pleasant and amusing ... but to feel that david despised me (yes, it was useless to deceive myself, he did despise me) ... that seemed to me unbearable. towards morning a determination had taken shape in me ... i wept, it is true--but i fell asleep upon it, and as soon as i woke up, i dressed in haste and ran out into the street. i had made up my mind to give my watch to the first poor person i met. iv i had not run far from home when i hit upon what i was looking for. i came across a barelegged boy of ten, a ragged urchin, who was often hanging about near our house. i dashed up to him at once and, without giving him or myself time to recover, offered him my watch. the boy stared at me round-eyed, put one hand before his mouth, as though he were afraid of being scalded--and held out the other. "take it, take it," i muttered, "it's mine, i give it you, you can sell it, and buy yourself ... something you want.... good-bye." i thrust the watch into his hand--and went home at a gallop. stopping for a moment at the door of our common bedroom to recover my breath, i went up to david who had just finished dressing and was combing his hair. "do you know what, david?" i said in as unconcerned a tone as i could, "i have given away nastasey's watch." david looked at me and passed the brush over his temples. "yes," i added in the same businesslike voice, "i have given it away. there is a very poor boy, a beggar, you know, so i have given it to him." david put down the brush on the washing-stand. "he can buy something useful," i went on, "with the money he can get for it. anyway, he will get something for it." i paused. "well," david said at last, "that's a good thing," and he went off to the schoolroom. i followed him. "and if they ask you what you have done with it?" he said, turning to me. "i shall tell them i've lost it," i answered carelessly. no more was said about the watch between us that day; but i had the feeling that david not only approved of what i had done but ... was to some extent surprised by it. he really was! v two days more passed. it happened that no one in the house thought of the watch. my father was taken up with a very serious unpleasantness with one of his clients; he had no attention to spare for me or my watch. i, on the other hand, thought of it without ceasing! even the approval ... the presumed approval of david did not quite comfort me. he did not show it in any special way: the only thing he said, and that casually, was that he hadn't expected such recklessness of me. certainly i was a loser by my sacrifice: it was not counter-balanced by the gratification afforded me by my vanity. and what is more, as ill-luck would have it, another schoolfellow of ours, the son of the town doctor, must needs turn up and begin boasting of a new watch, a present from his grandmother, and not even a silver, but a pinch-back one.... i could not bear it, at last, and, without a word to anyone, slipped out of the house and proceeded to hunt for the beggar boy to whom i had given my watch. i soon found him; he was playing knucklebones in the churchyard with some other boys. i called him aside--and, breathless and stammering, told him that my family were angry with me for having given away the watch--and that if he would consent to give it back to me i would gladly pay him for it.... to be ready for any emergency, i had brought with me an old-fashioned rouble of the reign of elizabeth, which represented the whole of my fortune. "but i haven't got it, your watch," answered the boy in an angry and tearful voice; "my father saw it and took it away from me; and he was for thrashing me, too. 'you must have stolen it from somewhere,' he said. 'what fool is going to make you a present of a watch?'" "and who is your father?" "my father? trofimitch." "but what is he? what's his trade?" "he is an old soldier, a sergeant. and he has no trade at all. he mends old shoes, he re-soles them. that's all his trade. that's what he lives by." "where do you live? take me to him." "to be sure i will. you tell my father that you gave me the watch. for he keeps pitching into me, and calling me a thief! and my mother, too. 'who is it you are taking after,' she says, 'to be a thief?'" i set off with the boy to his home. they lived in a smoky hut in the back-yard of a factory, which had long ago been burnt down and not rebuilt. we found both trofimitch and his wife at home. the discharged sergeant was a tall old man, erect and sinewy, with yellowish grey whiskers, an unshaven chin and a perfect network of wrinkles on his cheeks and forehead. his wife looked older than he. her red eyes, which looked buried in her unhealthily puffy face, kept blinking dejectedly. some sort of dark rags hung about them by way of clothes. i explained to trofimitch what i wanted and why i had come. he listened to me in silence without once winking or moving from me his stupid and strained--typically soldierly--eyes. "whims and fancies!" he brought out at last in a husky, toothless bass. "is that the way gentlemen behave? and if petka really did not steal the watch--then i'll give him one for that! to teach him not to play the fool with little gentlemen! and if he did steal it, then i would give it to him in a very different style, whack, whack, whack! with the flat of a sword; in horseguard's fashion! no need to think twice about it! what's the meaning of it? eh? go for them with sabres! here's a nice business! tfoo!" this last interjection trofimitch pronounced in a falsetto. he was obviously perplexed. "if you are willing to restore the watch to me," i explained to him--i did not dare to address him familiarly in spite of his being a soldier--"i will with pleasure pay you this rouble here. the watch is not worth more, i imagine." "well!" growled trofimitch, still amazed and, from old habit, devouring me with his eyes as though i were his superior officer. "it's a queer business, eh? well, there it is, no understanding it. ulyana, hold your tongue!" he snapped out at his wife who was opening her mouth. "here's the watch," he added, opening the table drawer; "if it really is yours, take it by all means; but what's the rouble for? eh?" "take the rouble, trofimitch, you senseless man," wailed his wife. "you have gone crazy in your old age! we have not a half-rouble between us, and then you stand on your dignity! it was no good their cutting off your pigtail, you are a regular old woman just the same! how can you go on like that--when you know nothing about it? ... take the money, if you have a fancy to give back the watch!" "ulyana, hold your tongue, you dirty slut!" trofimitch repeated. "whoever heard of such a thing, talking away? eh? the husband is the head; and yet she talks! petka, don't budge, i'll kill you.... here's the watch!" trofimitch held out the watch to me, but did not let go of it. he pondered, looked down, then fixed the same intent, stupid stare upon me. then all at once bawled at the top of his voice: "where is it? where's your rouble?" "here it is, here it is," i responded hurriedly and i snatched the coin out of my pocket. but he did not take it, he still stared at me. i laid the rouble on the table. he suddenly brushed it into the drawer, thrust the watch into my hand and wheeling to the left with a loud stamp, he hissed at his wife and his son: "get along, you low wretches!" ulyana muttered something, but i had already dashed out into the yard and into the street. thrusting the watch to the very bottom of my pocket and clutching it tightly in my hand, i hurried home. vi i had regained the possession of my watch but it afforded me no satisfaction whatever. i did not venture to wear it, it was above all necessary to conceal from david what i had done. what would he think of me, of my lack of will? i could not even lock up the luckless watch in a drawer: we had all our drawers in common. i had to hide it, sometimes on the top of the cupboard, sometimes under my mattress, sometimes behind the stove.... and yet i did not succeed in hoodwinking david. one day i took the watch from under a plank in the floor of our room and proceeded to rub the silver case with an old chamois leather glove. david had gone off somewhere in the town; i did not at all expect him to be back quickly.... suddenly he was in the doorway. i was so overcome that i almost dropped the watch, and, utterly disconcerted, my face painfully flushing crimson, i fell to fumbling about my waistcoat with it, unable to find my pocket. david looked at me and, as usual, smiled without speaking. "what's the matter?" he brought out at last. "you imagined i didn't know you had your watch again? i saw it the very day you brought it back." "i assure you," i began, almost on the point of tears.... david shrugged his shoulders. "the watch is yours, you are free to do what you like with it." saying these cruel words, he went out. i was overwhelmed with despair. this time there could be no doubt! david certainly despised me. i could not leave it so. "i will show him," i thought, clenching my teeth, and at once with a firm step i went into the passage, found our page-boy, yushka, and presented him with the watch! yushka would have refused it, but i declared that if he did not take the watch from me i would smash it that very minute, trample it under foot, break it to bits and throw it in the cesspool! he thought a moment, giggled, and took the watch. i went back to our room and seeing david reading there, i told him what i had done. david did not take his eyes off the page and, again shrugging his shoulder and smiling to himself, repeated that the watch was mine and that i was free to do what i liked with it. but it seemed to me that he already despised me a little less. i was fully persuaded that i should never again expose myself to the reproach of weakness of character, for the watch, the disgusting present from my disgusting godfather, had suddenly grown so distasteful to me that i was quite incapable of understanding how i could have regretted it, how i could have begged for it back from the wretched trofimitch, who had, moreover, the right to think that he had treated me with generosity. several days passed.... i remember that on one of them the great news reached our town that the emperor paul was dead and his son alexandr, of whose graciousness and humanity there were such favourable rumours, had ascended the throne. this news excited david intensely: the possibility of seeing--of shortly seeing--his father occurred to him at once. my father was delighted, too. "they will bring back all the exiles from siberia now and i expect brother yegor will not be forgotten," he kept repeating, rubbing his hands, coughing and, at the same time, seeming rather nervous. david and i at once gave up working and going to the high school; we did not even go for walks but sat in a corner counting and reckoning in how many months, in how many weeks, in how many days "brother yegor" ought to come back and where to write to him and how to go to meet him and in what way we should begin to live afterwards. "brother yegor" was an architect: david and i decided that he ought to settle in moscow and there build big schools for poor people and we would go to be his assistants. the watch, of course, we had completely forgotten; besides, david had new cares.... of them i will speak later, but the watch was destined to remind us of its existence again. vii one morning we had only just finished lunch--i was sitting alone by the window thinking of my uncle's release--outside there was the steam and glitter of an april thaw--when all at once my aunt, pelageya petrovna, walked into the room. she was at all times restless and fidgetty, she spoke in a shrill voice and was always waving her arms about; on this occasion she simply pounced on me. "go along, go to your father at once, sir!" she snapped out. "what pranks have you been up to, you shameless boy! you will catch it, both of you. nastasey nastasyeitch has shown up all your tricks! go along, your father wants you.... go along this very minute." understanding nothing, i followed my aunt, and, as i crossed the threshold of the drawing-room, i saw my father, striding up and down and ruffling up his hair, yushka in tears by the door and, sitting on a chair in the corner, my godfather, nastasey nastasyeitch, with an expression of peculiar malignancy in his distended nostrils and in his fiery, slanting eyes. my father swooped down upon me as soon as i walked in. "did you give your watch to yushka? tell me!" i glanced at yushka. "tell me," repeated my father, stamping. "yes," i answered, and immediately received a stinging slap in the face, which afforded my aunt great satisfaction. i heard her gulp, as though she had swallowed some hot tea. from me my father ran to yushka. "and you, you rascal, ought not to have dared to accept such a present," he said, pulling him by the hair: "and you sold it, too, you good-for-nothing boy!" yushka, as i learned later had, in the simplicity of his heart, taken my watch to a neighbouring watchmaker's. the watchmaker had displayed it in his shop-window; nastasey nastasyeitch had seen it, as he passed by, bought it and brought it along with him. however, my ordeal and yushka's did not last long: my father gasped for breath, and coughed till he choked; indeed, it was not in his character to be angry long. "brother, porfiry petrovitch," observed my aunt, as soon as she noticed not without regret that my father's anger had, so to speak, flickered out, "don't you worry yourself further: it's not worth dirtying your hands over. i tell you what i suggest: with the consent of our honoured friend, nastasey nastasyeitch, in consideration of the base ingratitude of your son--i will take charge of the watch; and since he has shown by his conduct that he is not worthy to wear it and does not even understand its value, i will present it in your name to a person who will be very sensible of your kindness." "whom do you mean?" asked my father. "to hrisanf lukitch," my aunt articulated, with slight hesitation. "to hrisashka?" asked my father, and with a wave of his hand, he added: "it's all one to me. you can throw it in the stove, if you like." he buttoned up his open vest and went out, writhing from his coughing. "and you, my good friend, do you agree?" said my aunt, addressing nastasey nastasyeitch. "i am quite agreeable," responded the latter. during the whole proceedings he had not stirred and only snorting stealthily and stealthily rubbing the ends of his fingers, had fixed his foxy eyes by turns on me, on my father, and on yushka. we afforded him real gratification! my aunt's suggestion revolted me to the depths of my soul. it was not that i regretted the watch; but the person to whom she proposed to present it was absolutely hateful to me. this hrisanf lukitch (his surname was trankvillitatin), a stalwart, robust, lanky divinity student, was in the habit of coming to our house--goodness knows what for!--to help the _children_ with their lessons, my aunt asserted; but he could not help us with our lessons because he had never learnt anything himself and was as stupid as a horse. he was rather like a horse altogether: he thudded with his feet as though they had been hoofs, did not laugh but neighed, opening his jaws till you could see right down his throat--and he had a long face, a hooked nose and big, flat jaw-bones; he wore a shaggy frieze, full-skirted coat, and smelt of raw meat. my aunt idolised him and called him a good-looking man, a cavalier and even a grenadier. he had a habit of tapping children on the forehead with the nails of his long fingers, hard as stones (he used to do it to me when i was younger), and as he tapped he would chuckle and say with surprise: "how your head resounds, it must be empty." and this lout was to possess my watch!--no, indeed, i determined in my own mind as i ran out of the drawing-room and flung myself on my bed, while my cheek glowed crimson from the slap i had received and my heart, too, was aglow with the bitterness of the insult and the thirst for revenge--no, indeed! i would not allow that cursed hrisashka to jeer at me.... he would put on the watch, let the chain hang over his stomach, would neigh with delight; no, indeed! "quite so, but how was it to be done, how to prevent it?" i determined to steal the watch from my aunt. viii luckily trankvillitatin was away from the town at the time: he could not come to us before the next day; i must take advantage of the night! my aunt did not lock her bedroom door and, indeed, none of the keys in the house would turn in the locks; but where would she put the watch, where would she hide it? she kept it in her pocket till the evening and even took it out and looked at it more than once; but at night--where would it be at night?--well, that was just my work to find out, i thought, shaking my fists. i was burning with boldness and terror and joy at the thought of the approaching crime. i was continually nodding to myself; i knitted my brows. i whispered: "wait a bit!" i threatened someone, i was wicked, i was dangerous ... and i avoided david!--no one, not even he, must have the slightest suspicion of what i meant to do.... i would act alone and alone i would answer for it! slowly the day lagged by, then the evening, at last the night came. i did nothing; i even tried not to move: one thought was stuck in my head like a nail. at dinner my father, who was, as i have said, naturally gentle, and who was a little ashamed of his harshness--boys of sixteen are not slapped in the face--tried to be affectionate to me; but i rejected his overtures, not from slowness to forgive, as he imagined at the time, but simply that i was afraid of my feelings getting the better of me; i wanted to preserve untouched all the heat of my vengeance, all the hardness of unalterable determination. i went to bed very early; but of course i did not sleep and did not even shut my eyes, but on the contrary opened them wide, though i did pull the quilt over my head. i did not consider beforehand how to act. i had no plan of any kind; i only waited till everything should be quiet in the house. i only took one step: i did not remove my stockings. my aunt's room was on the second floor. one had to pass through the dining-room and the hall, go up the stairs, pass along a little passage and there ... on the right was the door! i must not on any account take with me a candle or a lantern; in the corner of my aunt's room a little lamp was always burning before the ikon shrine; i knew that. so i should be able to see. i still lay with staring eyes and my mouth open and parched; the blood was throbbing in my temples, in my ears, in my throat, in my back, all over me! i waited ... but it seemed as though some demon were mocking me; time passed and passed but still silence did not reign. ix never, i thought, had david been so late getting to sleep.... david, the silent david, even began talking to me! never had they gone on so long banging, talking, walking about the house! and what could they be talking about? i wondered; as though they had not had the whole day to talk in! sounds outside persisted, too; first a dog barked on a shrill, obstinate note; then a drunken peasant was making an uproar somewhere and would not be pacified; then gates kept creaking; then a wretched cart on racketty wheels kept passing and passing and seeming as though it would never pass! however, these sounds did not worry me: on the contrary, i was glad of them; they seemed to distract my attention. but now at last it seemed as though all were tranquil. only the pendulum of our old clock ticked gravely and drowsily in the dining-room and there was an even drawn-out sound like the hard breathing of people asleep. i was on the point of getting up, then again something rustled ... then suddenly sighed, something soft fell down ... and a whisper glided along the walls. or was there nothing of the sort--and was it only imagination mocking me? at last all was still. it was the very heart, the very dead of night. the time had come! chill with anticipation, i threw off the bedclothes, let my feet down to the floor, stood up ... one step; a second.... i stole along, my feet, heavy as though they did not belong to me, trod feebly and uncertainly. stay! what was that sound? someone sawing, somewhere, or scraping ... or sighing? i listened ... i felt my cheeks twitching and cold watery tears came into my eyes. nothing! ... i stole on again. it was dark but i knew the way. all at once i stumbled against a chair.... what a bang and how it hurt! it hit me just on my leg.... i stood stock still. well, did that wake them? ah! here goes! suddenly i felt bold and even spiteful. on! on! now the dining-room was crossed, then the door was groped for and opened at one swing. the cursed hinge squeaked, bother it! then i went up the stairs, one! two! one! two! a step creaked under my foot; i looked at it spitefully, just as though i could see it. then i stretched for the handle of another door. this one made not the slightest sound! it flew open so easily, as though to say, "pray walk in." ... and now i was in the corridor! in the corridor there was a little window high up under the ceiling, a faint light filtered in through the dark panes. and in that glimmer of light i could see our little errand girl lying on the floor on a mat, both arms behind her tousled head; she was sound asleep, breathing rapidly and the fatal door was just behind her head. i stepped across the mat, across the girl ... who opened that door? ... i don't know, but there i was in my aunt's room. there was the little lamp in one corner and the bed in the other and my aunt in her cap and night jacket on the bed with her face towards me. she was asleep, she did not stir, i could not even hear her breathing. the flame of the little lamp softly flickered, stirred by the draught of fresh air, and shadows stirred all over the room, even over the motionless wax-like yellow face of my aunt.... and there was the watch! it was hanging on a little embroidered cushion on the wall behind the bed. what luck, only think of it! nothing to delay me! but whose steps were those, soft and rapid behind my back? oh! no! it was my heart beating! ... i moved my legs forward.... good god! something round and rather large pushed against me below my knee, once and again! i was ready to scream, i was ready to drop with horror.... a striped cat, our own cat, was standing before me arching his back and wagging his tail. then he leapt on the bed--softly and heavily--turned round and sat without purring, exactly like a judge; he sat and looked at me with his golden pupils. "puss, puss," i whispered, hardly audibly. i bent across my aunt, i had already snatched the watch. she suddenly sat up and opened her eyelids wide.... heavenly father, what next? ... but her eyelids quivered and closed and with a faint murmur her head sank on the pillow. a minute later i was back again in my own room, in my own bed and the watch was in my hands.... more lightly than a feather i flew back! i was a fine fellow, i was a thief, i was a hero, i was gasping with delight, i was hot, i was gleeful--i wanted to wake david at once to tell him all about it--and, incredible as it sounds, i fell asleep and slept like the dead! at last i opened my eyes.... it was light in the room, the sun had risen. luckily no one was awake yet. i jumped up as though i had been scalded, woke david and told him all about it. he listened, smiled. "do you know what?" he said to me at last, "let's bury the silly watch in the earth, so that it may never be seen again." i thought his idea best of all. in a few minutes we were both dressed; we ran out into the orchard behind our house and under an old apple tree in a deep hole, hurriedly scooped out in the soft, springy earth with david's big knife, my godfather's hated present was hidden forever, so that it never got into the hands of the disgusting trankvillitatin after all! we stamped down the hole, strewed rubbish over it and, proud and happy, unnoticed by anyone, went home again, got into our beds and slept another hour or two--and such a light and blissful sleep! x you can imagine the uproar there was that morning, as soon as my aunt woke up and missed the watch! her piercing shriek is ringing in my ears to this day. "help! robbed! robbed!" she squealed, and alarmed the whole household. she was furious, while david and i only smiled to ourselves and sweet was our smile to us. "everyone, everyone must be well thrashed!" bawled my aunt. "the watch has been stolen from under my head, from under my pillow!" we were prepared for anything, we expected trouble.... but contrary to our expectations we did not get into trouble at all. my father certainly did fume dreadfully at first, he even talked of the police; but i suppose he was bored with the enquiry of the day before and suddenly, to my aunt's indescribable amazement, he flew out not against us but against her. "you sicken me worse than a bitter radish, pelageya petrovna," he shouted, "with your watch. i don't want to hear any more about it! it can't be lost by magic, you say, but what's it to do with me? it may be magic for all i care! stolen from you? well, good luck to it then! what will nastasey nastasyeitch say? damnation take him, your nastasyeitch! i get nothing but annoyances and unpleasantness from him! don't dare to worry me again! do you hear?" my father slammed the door and went off to his own room. david and i did not at first understand the allusion in his last words; but afterwards we found out that my father was just then violently indignant with my godfather, who had done him out of a profitable job. so my aunt was left looking a fool. she almost burst with vexation, but there was no help for it. she had to confine herself to repeating in a sharp whisper, twisting her mouth in my direction whenever she passed me, "thief, thief, robber, scoundrel." my aunt's reproaches were a source of real enjoyment to me. it was very agreeable, too, as i crossed the flower-garden, to let my eye with assumed indifference glide over the very spot where the watch lay at rest under the apple-tree; and if david were close at hand to exchange a meaning grimace with him.... my aunt tried setting trankvillitatin upon me; but i appealed to david. he told the stalwart divinity student bluntly that he would rip up his belly with a knife if he did not leave me alone.... trankvillitatin was frightened; though, according to my aunt, he was a grenadier and a cavalier he was not remarkable for valour. so passed five weeks.... but do you imagine that the story of the watch ended there? no, it did not; only to continue my story i must introduce a new character; and to introduce that new character i must go back a little. xi my father had for many years been on very friendly, even intimate terms with a retired government clerk called latkin, a lame little man in poor circumstances with queer, timid manners, one of those creatures of whom it is commonly said that they are crushed by god himself. like my father and nastasey, he was engaged in the humbler class of legal work and acted as legal adviser and agent. but possessing neither a presentable appearance nor the gift of words and having little confidence in himself, he did not venture to act independently but attached himself to my father. his handwriting was "regular beadwork," he knew the law thoroughly and had mastered all the intricacies of the jargon of petitions and legal documents. he had managed various cases with my father and had shared with him gains and losses and it seemed as though nothing could shake their friendship, and yet it broke down in one day and forever. my father quarrelled with his colleague for good. if latkin had snatched a profitable job from my father, after the fashion of nastasey, who replaced him later on, my father would have been no more indignant with him than with nastasey, probably less. but latkin, under the influence of an unexplained, incomprehensible feeling, envy, greed--or perhaps even a momentary fit of honesty--"gave away" my father, betrayed him to their common client, a wealthy young merchant, opening this careless young man's eyes to a certain--well, piece of sharp practice, destined to bring my father considerable profit. it was not the money loss, however great--no--but the betrayal that wounded and infuriated my father; he could not forgive treachery. "so he sets himself up for a saint!" he repeated, trembling all over with anger, his teeth chattering as though he were in a fever. i happened to be in the room and was a witness of this ugly scene. "good. amen, from today. it's all over between us. there's the ikon and there's the door! neither you in my house nor i in yours. you are too honest for us. how can we keep company with you? but may you have no house nor home!" it was in vain that latkin entreated my father and bowed down before him; it was in vain that he tried to explain to him what filled his own soul with painful perplexity. "you know it was with no sort of profit to myself, porfiry petrovitch," he faltered: "why, i cut my own throat!" my father remained implacable. latkin never set foot in our house again. fate itself seemed determined to carry out my father's last cruel words. soon after the rupture (which took place two years before the beginning of my story), latkin's wife, who had, it is true, been ill for a long time, died; his second daughter, a child three years old, became deaf and dumb in one day from terror; a swarm of bees had settled on her head; latkin himself had an apoplectic stroke and sank into extreme and hopeless poverty. how he struggled on, what he lived upon--it is hard to imagine. he lived in a dilapidated hovel at no great distance from our house. his elder daughter raissa lived with him and kept house, so far as that was possible. this raissa is the character whom i must now introduce into our story. xii when her father was on friendly terms with mine, we used to see her continually. she would sit with us for hours at a time, either sewing, or spinning with her delicate, rapid, clever fingers. she was a well-made, rather thin girl, with intelligent brown eyes and a long, white, oval face. she talked little but sensibly in a soft, musical voice, barely opening her mouth and not showing her teeth. when she laughed--which happened rarely and never lasted long--they were all suddenly displayed, big and white as almonds. i remember her gait, too, light, elastic, with a little skip at each step. it always seemed to me that she was going down a flight of steps, even when she was walking on level ground. she held herself erect with her arms folded tightly over her bosom. and whatever she was doing, whatever she undertook, if she were only threading a needle or ironing a petticoat--the effect was always beautiful and somehow--you may not believe it--touching. her christian name was raissa, but we used to call her black-lip: she had on her upper lip a birthmark; a little dark-bluish spot, as though she had been eating blackberries; but that did not spoil her: on the contrary. she was just a year older than david. i cherished for her a feeling akin to respect, but we were not great friends. but between her and david a friendship had sprung up, a strange, unchildlike but good friendship. they somehow suited each other. sometimes they did not exchange a word for hours together, but both felt that they were happy and happy because they were together. i had never met a girl like her, really. there was something attentive and resolute about her, something honest and mournful and charming. i never heard her say anything very intelligent, but i never heard her say anything commonplace, and i have never seen more intelligent eyes. after the rupture between her family and mine i saw her less frequently: my father sternly forbade my visiting the latkins, and she did not appear in our house again. but i met her in the street, in church and black-lip always aroused in me the same feeling--respect and even some wonder, rather than pity. she bore her misfortunes very well indeed. "the girl is flint," even coarse-witted, trankvillitatin said about her once, but really she ought to have been pitied: her face acquired a careworn, exhausted expression, her eyes were hollow and sunken, a burden beyond her strength lay on her young shoulders. david saw her much oftener than i did; he used to go to their house. my father gave him up in despair: he knew that david would not obey him, anyway. and from time to time raissa would appear at the hurdle fence of our garden which looked into a lane and there have an interview with david; she did not come for the sake of conversation, but told him of some new difficulty or trouble and asked his advice. the paralysis that had attacked latkin was of a rather peculiar kind. his arms and legs had grown feeble, but he had not lost the use of them, and his brain indeed worked perfectly; but his speech was muddled and instead of one word he would pronounce another: one had to guess what it was he wanted to say.... "tchoo--tchoo--tchoo," he would stammer with an effort--he began every sentence with "tchoo--tchoo--tchoo, some scissors, some scissors," ... and the word scissors meant bread.... my father, he hated with all the strength left him--he attributed all his misfortunes to my father's curse and called him alternately the butcher and the diamond-merchant. "tchoo, tchoo, don't you dare to go to the butcher's, vassilyevna." this was what he called his daughter though his own name was martinyan. every day he became more exacting; his needs increased.... and how were those needs to be satisfied? where could the money be found? sorrow soon makes one old: but it was horrible to hear some words on the lips of a girl of seventeen. xiii i remember i happened to be present at a conversation with david over the fence, on the very day of her mother's death. "mother died this morning at daybreak," she said, first looking round with her dark expressive eyes and then fixing them on the ground. "cook undertook to get a coffin cheap but she's not to be trusted; she may spend the money on drink, even. you might come and look after her, davidushka, she's afraid of you." "i will come," answered david. "i will see to it. and how's your father?" "he cries; he says: 'you must spoil me, too.' spoil must mean bury. now he has gone to sleep." raissa suddenly gave a deep sigh. "oh, davidushka, davidushka!" she passed her half-clenched fist over her forehead and her eyebrows, and the action was so bitter ... and as sincere and beautiful as all her actions. "you must take care of yourself, though," david observed; "you haven't slept at all, i expect.... and what's the use of crying? it doesn't help trouble." "i have no time for crying," answered raissa. "that's a luxury for the rich, crying," observed david. raissa was going, but she turned back. "the yellow shawl's being sold, you know; part of mother's dowry. they are giving us twelve roubles; i think that is not much." "it certainly is not much." "we shouldn't sell it," raissa said after a brief pause, "but you see we must have money for the funeral." "of course you must. only you mustn't spend money at random. those priests are awful! but i say, wait a minute. i'll come. are you going? i'll be with you soon. goodbye, darling." "good-bye, davidushka, darling." "mind now, don't cry!" "as though i should cry! it's either cooking the dinner or crying. one or the other." "what! does she cook the dinner?" i said to david, as soon as raissa was out of hearing, "does she do the cooking herself?" "why, you heard that the cook has gone to buy a coffin." "she cooks the dinner," i thought, "and her hands are always so clean and her clothes so neat.... i should like to see her there at work in the kitchen.... she is an extraordinary girl!" i remember another conversation at the fence. that time raissa brought with her her little deaf and dumb sister. she was a pretty child with immense, astonished-looking eyes and a perfect mass of dull, black hair on her little, head (raissa's hair, too, was black and hers, too, was without lustre). latkin had by then been struck down by paralysis. "i really don't know what to do," raissa began. "the doctor has written a prescription. we must go to the chemist's; and our peasant (latkin had still one serf) has brought us wood from the village and a goose. and the porter has taken it away, 'you are in debt to me,' he said." "taken the goose?" asked david. "no, not the goose. he says it is an old one; it is no good for anything; he says that is why our peasant brought it us, but he is taking the wood." "but he has no right to," exclaimed david. "he has no right to, but he has taken it. i went up to the garret, there we have got a very, very old trunk. i began rummaging in it and what do you think i found? look!" she took from under her kerchief a rather large field glass in a copper setting, covered with morocco, yellow with age. david, as a connoisseur of all sorts of instruments, seized upon it at once. "it's english," he pronounced, putting it first to one eye and then to the other. "a marine glass." "and the glasses are perfect," raissa went on. "i showed it to father; he said, 'take it and pawn it to the diamond-merchant'! what do you think, would they give us anything for it? what do we want a telescope for? to look at ourselves in the looking-glass and see what beauties we are? but we haven't a looking-glass, unluckily." and raissa suddenly laughed aloud. her sister, of course, could not hear her. but most likely she felt the shaking of her body: she clung to raissa's hand and her little face worked with a look of terror as she raised her big eyes to her sister and burst into tears. "that's how she always is," said raissa, "she doesn't like one to laugh. "come, i won't, lyubotchka, i won't," she added, nimbly squatting on her heels beside the child and passing her fingers through her hair. the laughter vanished from raissa's face and her lips, the corners of which twisted upwards in a particularly charming way, became motionless again. the child was pacified. raissa got up. "so you will do what you can, about the glass i mean, davidushka. but i do regret the wood, and the goose, too, however old it may be." "they would certainly give you ten roubles," said david, turning the telescope in all directions. "i will buy it of you, what could be better? and here, meanwhile, are fifteen kopecks for the chemist's.... is that enough?" "i'll borrow that from you," whispered raissa, taking the fifteen kopecks from him. "what next? perhaps you would like to pay interest? but you see i have a pledge here, a very fine thing.... first-rate people, the english." "they say we are going to war with them." "no," answered david, "we are fighting the french now." "well, you know best. take care of it, then. good-bye, friends." xiv here is another conversation that took place beside the same fence. raissa seemed more worried than usual. "five kopecks for a cabbage, and a tiny little one, too," she said, propping her chin on her hand. "isn't it dear? and i haven't had the money for my sewing yet." "who owes it you?" asked david. "why, the merchant's wife who lives beyond the rampart." "the fat woman who goes about in a green blouse?" "yes, yes." "i say, she is fat! she can hardly breathe for fat. she positively steams in church, and doesn't pay her debts!" "she will pay, only when? and do you know, davidushka, i have fresh troubles. father has taken it into his head to tell me his dreams--you know he cannot say what he means: if he wants to say one word, it comes out another. about food or any everyday thing we have got used to it and understand; but it is not easy to understand the dreams even of healthy people, and with him, it's awful! 'i am very happy,' he says; 'i was walking about all among white birds to-day; and the lord god gave me a nosegay and in the nosegay was andryusha with a little knife,' he calls our lyubotchka, andryusha; 'now we shall both be quite well,' he says. 'we need only one stroke with the little knife, like this!' and he points to his throat. i don't understand him, but i say, 'all right, dear, all right,' but he gets angry and tries to explain what he means. he even bursts into tears." "but you should have said something to him," i put in; "you should have made up some lie." "i can't tell lies," answered raissa, and even flung up her hands. and indeed she could not tell lies. "there is no need to tell lies," observed david, "but there is no need to kill yourself, either. no one will say thank you for it, you know." raissa looked at him intently. "i wanted to ask you something, davidushka; how ought i to spell 'while'?" "what sort of 'while'?" "why, for instance: i hope you will live a long _while_." "spell: w-i-l-e." "no," i put in, "w-h-i-l-e." "well, it does not matter. spell it with an h, then! what does matter is, that you should live a long while." "i should like to write correctly," observed raissa, and she flushed a little. when she flushed she was amazingly pretty at once. "it may be of use.... how father wrote in his day ... wonderfully! he taught me. well, now he can hardly make out the letters." "you only live, that's all i want," david repeated, dropping his voice and not taking his eyes off her. raissa glanced quickly at him and flushed still more. "you live and as for spelling, spell as you like.... oh, the devil, the witch is coming!" (david called my aunt the witch.) "what ill-luck has brought her this way? you must go, darling." raissa glanced at david once more and ran away. david talked to me of raissa and her family very rarely and unwillingly, especially from the time when he began to expect his father's return. he thought of nothing but him and how we should live together afterwards. he had a vivid memory of him and used to describe him to me with particular pleasure. "he is big and strong; he can lift three hundred-weight with one hand.... when he shouted: 'where's the lad?' he could be heard all over the house. he's so jolly and kind ... and a brave man! nobody can intimidate him. we lived so happily together before we were ruined. they say he has gone quite grey, and in old days his hair was as red as mine. he was a strong man." david would never admit that we might remain in ryazan. "you will go away," i observed, "but i shall stay." "nonsense, we shall take you with us." "and how about my father?" "you will cast off your father. you will be ruined if you don't." "how so?" david made me no answer but merely knitted his white brows. "so when we go away with father," he began again, "he will get a good situation and i shall marry." "well, that won't be just directly," i said. "no, why not? i shall marry soon." "you?" "yes, i; why not?" "you haven't fixed on your wife, i suppose." "of course, i have." "who is she?" david laughed. "what a senseless fellow you are, really? raissa, of course." "raissa!" i repeated in amazement; "you are joking!" "i am not given to joking, and don't like it." "why, she is a year older than you are." "what of it? but let's drop the subject." "let me ask one question," i said. "does she know that you mean to marry her?" "most likely." "but haven't you declared your feelings?" "what is there to declare? when the time comes i shall tell her. come, that's enough." david got up and went out of the room. when i was alone, i pondered ... and pondered ... and came to the conclusion that david would act like a sensible and practical man; and indeed i felt flattered at the thought of being the friend of such a practical man! and raissa in her everlasting black woollen dress suddenly seemed to me charming and worthy of the most devoted love. xv david's father still did not come and did not even send a letter. it had long been summer and june was drawing to its end. we were wearing ourselves out in suspense. meanwhile there began to be rumours that latkin had suddenly become much worse, and that his family were likely to die of hunger or else the house would fall in and crush them all under the roof. david's face even looked changed and he became so ill-tempered and surly that there was no going near him. he began to be more often absent from home, too. i did not meet raissa at all. from time to time, i caught a glimpse of her in the distance, rapidly crossing the street with her beautiful, light step, straight as an arrow, with her arms crossed, with her dark, clever eyes under her long brows, with an anxious expression on her pale, sweet face--that was all. my aunt with the help of her trankvillitatin pitched into me as before, and as before reproachfully whispered in my ear: "you are a thief, sir, a thief!" but i took no notice of her; and my father was very busy, and occupied with his writing and driving all over the place and did not want to hear anything. one day, passing by the familiar apple-tree, more from habit than anything i cast a furtive glance in the direction of the little spot i knew so well, and it suddenly struck me that there was a change in the surface of the soil that concealed our treasure ... as though there were a little protuberance where there had been a hollow, and the bits of rubbish were disarranged. "what does that mean?" i wondered. "can someone have guessed our secret and dug up the watch?" i had to make certain with my own eyes. i felt, of course, the most complete indifference in regard to the watch that lay rusting in the bosom of the earth; but was not prepared to let anyone else make use of it! and so next day i got up before dawn again and arming myself with a knife went into the orchard, sought out the marked spot under the apple-tree, began digging--and after digging a hole a yard deep was forced to the conviction that the watch was gone, that someone had got hold of it, taken it away, stolen it! but who could have dug it up except david? who else knew where it was? i filled in the hole and went back to the house. i felt deeply injured. "supposing," i thought, "that david needs the watch to save his future wife or her father from dying of starvation.... say what you like, the watch was worth something.... why did he not come to me and say: 'brother' (in david's place i should have certainly begun by saying brother), 'brother, i need money; you have none, i know, but let me make use of that watch which we buried together under the old apple-tree? it is of no use to anyone and i shall be so grateful to you, brother!' with what joy i should have consented. but to act secretly, treacherously, not to trust his friend.... no! no passion, no necessity would justify that!" i repeat, i felt horribly injured. i began by a display of coldness and sulking.... but david was not one of the sort to notice this and be upset by it. i began dropping hints. but david appeared not to understand my hints in the least! i said before him how base in my eyes was the man who having a friend and understanding all that was meant by that sacred sentiment "friendship," was yet so devoid of generosity as to have recourse to deception; as though it were possible to conceal anything. as i uttered these last words i laughed scornfully. but david did not turn a hair. at last i asked him straight out: "what did he think, had our watch gone for some time after being buried in the earth or had it stopped at once?" he answered me: "the devil only knows! what a thing to wonder about!" i did not know what to think! david evidently had something on his mind ... but not the abduction of the watch. an unexpected incident showed me his innocence. xvi one day i came home by a side lane which i usually avoided as the house in which my enemy trankvillitatin lodged was in it; but on this occasion fate itself led me that way. passing the open window of an eating-house, i suddenly heard the voice of our servant, vassily, a young man of free and easy manners, "a lazy fellow and a scamp," as my father called him, but also a great conqueror of female hearts which he charmed by his wit, his dancing and his playing on the tambourine. "and what do you suppose they've been up to?" said vassily, whom i could not see but heard distinctly; he was, most likely, sitting close by, near the window with a companion over the steaming tea--and as often happens with people in a closed room, spoke in a loud voice without suspecting that anyone passing in the street could hear every word: "they buried it in the ground!" "nonsense!" muttered another voice. "i tell you they did, our young gentlemen are extraordinary! especially that davidka, he's a regular aesop! i got up at daybreak and went to the window.... i looked out and, what do you think! our two little dears were coming along the orchard bringing that same watch and they dug a hole under the apple-tree and there they buried it, as though it had been a baby! and they smoothed the earth over afterwards, upon my soul they did, the young rakes!" "ah! plague take them," vassily's companion commented. "too well off, i suppose. well, did you dig up the watch?" "to be sure i did. i have got it now. only it won't do to show it for a time. there's been no end of a fuss over it. davidka stole it that very night from under our old lady's back." "oh--oh!" "i tell you, he did. he's a desperate fellow. so it won't do to show it. but when the officers come down i shall sell it or stake it at cards." i didn't stay to hear more: i rushed headlong home and straight to david. "brother!" i began, "brother, forgive me! i have wronged you! i suspected you! i blamed you! you see how agitated i am! forgive me!" "what's the matter with you?" asked david. "explain!" "i suspected that you had dug up our watch under the apple-tree." "the watch again! why, isn't it there?" "it's not there; i thought you had taken it, to help your friends. and it was all vassily." i repeated to david all that i had overheard under the window of the eating-house. but how to describe my amazement! i had, of course, expected david to be indignant, but i had not for a moment anticipated the effect it produced on him! i had hardly finished my story when he flew into an indescribable fury! david, who had always taken up a scornful attitude to the whole "vulgar," as he called it, business of the watch; david, who had more than once declared that it wasn't worth a rotten egg, jumped up from his seat, got hot all over, ground his teeth and clenched his fists. "we can't let this pass!" he said at last; "how dare he take someone else's property? wait a bit, i'll show him. i won't let thieves off so easily!" i confess i don't understand to this day what can have so infuriated david. whether he had been irritated before and vassily's action had simply poured oil on the flames, or whether my suspicions had wounded him, i cannot say, but i had never seen him in such excitement. i stood before him with my mouth open merely wondering how it was that his breathing was so hard and laboured. "what do you intend to do?" i asked at last. "you shall see after dinner, when your father lies down. i'll find this scoffer, i'll talk to him." "well," thought i, "i should not care to be in that scoffer's shoes! what will happen? merciful heavens?" xvii. this is what did happen: as soon as that drowsy, stifling stillness prevailed, which to this day lies like a feather bed on the russian household and the russian people in the middle of the day after dinner is eaten, david went to the servants' rooms (i followed on his heels with a sinking heart) and called vassily out. the latter was at first unwilling to come, but ended by obeying and following us into the garden. david stood close in front of him. vassily was a whole head taller. "vassily terentyev," my comrade began in a firm voice, "six weeks ago you took from under this very apple-tree the watch we hid there. you had no right to do so; it does not belong to you. give it back at once!" vassily was taken aback, but at once recovered himself. "what watch? what are you talking about? god bless you! i have no watch!" "i know what i am saying and don't tell lies. you've got the watch, give it back." "i've not got your watch." "then how was it that in the eating-house, you ..." i began, but david stopped me. "vassily terentyev!" he pronounced in a hollow, threatening voice, "we know for a fact that you have the watch. you are told honourably to give it back and if you don't ..." vassily sniggered insolently. "then what will you do with me then? eh?" "what will we do? we will both fight with you till you beat us or we beat you." vassily laughed. "fight? that's not for a gentleman! to fight with a servant!" david suddenly caught hold of vassily's waistcoat. "but we are not going to fight you with our fists," he articulated, grinding his teeth. "understand that! i'll give you a knife and take one myself.... and then we shall see who does for which? alexey!" he began commanding me, "run for my big knife, you know the one with the bone handle--it's lying on the table and the other's in my pocket." vassily positively collapsed. david stood holding him by the waistcoat. "mercy on us! ... mercy on us, david yegoritch!" he muttered; tears actually came into his eyes. "what do you mean, what are you saying? let me go." "i won't let you go. and we shall have no mercy on you! if you get away from us today, we shall begin again to-morrow. alyoshka, where's the knife?" "david yegoritch," wailed vassily, "don't commit murder.... what are you doing! the watch ... i certainly ... i was joking. i'll give it to you this minute. what a thing, to be sure! first you are going to slit hrisanf lukitch's belly, then mine. let me go, david yegoritch.... kindly take the watch. only don't tell your papa." david let go his hold of vassily's waistcoat. i looked into his face: certainly not only vassily might have been frightened by it. it looked so weary ... and cold ... and angry.... vassily dashed into the house and promptly returned with the watch in his hand. he gave it to david without a word and only on going back into the house exclaimed aloud in the doorway: "tfoo! here's a go." he still looked panic-stricken. david tossed his head and walked into our room. again i followed on his heels. "a suvorov! he's a regular suvorov!" i thought to myself. in those days, in , suvorov was our great national hero. xviii david shut the door after him, put the watch on the table, folded his arms and--oh, wonder!--laughed. looking at him i laughed, too. "what a wonderful performance!" he began. "we can't get rid of this watch anyway. it's bewitched, really. and why was i so furious about it?" "yes, why?" i repeated. "you ought to have let vassily keep it...." "well, no," interposed david. "that's nonsense. but what are we to do with it?" "yes! what?" we both stared at the watch and pondered. adorned with a chain of pale blue beads (the luckless vassily in his haste had not removed this chain which belonged to him) it was calmly doing its work: ticking somewhat irregularly, it is true, and slowly moving its copper minute hand. "shall we bury it again? or put it in the stove," i suggested at last. "or, i tell you what: shouldn't we take it to latkin?" "no," answered david. "that's not the thing. i know what: they have set up a committee at the governor's office and are collecting subscriptions for the benefit of the people of kasimov. the town has been burnt to ashes with all its churches. and i am told they take anything, not only bread and money, but all sorts of things. shall we send the watch there?" "yes! yes!" i answered. "a splendid idea. but i thought that since your friends are in want...." "no, no; to the committee; the latkins will manage without it. to the committee." "well, if it is to be the committee, let it be. only, i imagine, we must write something to the governor." david glanced at me. "do you think so?" "yes, of course; there is no need to write much. but just a few words." "for instance?" "for instance ... begin like this: 'being' ... or better: 'moved by' ..." "'moved by' ... very good." "then we must say: 'herewith our mite' ..." "'mite' ... that's good, too. well, take your pen, sit down and write, fire away!" "first i must make a rough copy," i observed. "all right, a rough copy, only write, write.... and meanwhile i will clean it with some whitening." i took a sheet of paper, mended a pen, but before i had time to write at the top of the sheet "to his excellency, the illustrious prince" (our governer was at that time prince x), i stopped, struck by the extraordinary uproar ... which had suddenly arisen in the house. david noticed the hubbub, too, and he, too, stopped, holding the watch in his left hand and a rag with whitening in his right. we looked at each other. what was that shrill cry. it was my aunt shrieking ... and that? it was my father's voice, hoarse with anger. "the watch! the watch!" bawled someone, surely trankvillitatin. we heard the thud of feet, the creak of the floor, a regular rabble running ... moving straight upon us. i was numb with terror and david was as white as chalk, but he looked proud as an eagle. "vassily, the scoundrel, has betrayed us," he whispered through his teeth. the door was flung wide open, and my father in his dressing gown and without his cravat, my aunt in her dressing jacket, trankvillitatin, vassily, yushka, another boy, and the cook, agapit--all burst into the room. "scoundrels!" shouted my father, gasping for breath.... "at last we have found you out!" and seeing the watch in david's hands: "give it here!" yelled my father, "give me the watch!" but david, without uttering a word, dashed to the open window and leapt out of it into the yard and then off into the street. accustomed to imitate my paragon in everything, i jumped out, too, and ran after david.... "catch them! hold them!" we heard a medley of frantic shouts behind us. but we were already racing along the street bareheaded, david in advance and i a few paces behind him, and behind us the clatter and uproar of pursuit. xix many years have passed since the date of these events; i have reflected over them more than once--and to this day i can no more understand the cause of the fury that took possession of my father (who had so lately been so sick of the watch that he had forbidden it to be mentioned in his hearing) than i can david's rage at its having been stolen by vassily! one is tempted to imagine that there was some mysterious power connected with it. vassily had not betrayed us as david assumed--he was not capable of it: he had been too much scared--it was simply that one of our maids had seen the watch in his hands and had promptly informed our aunt. the fat was in the fire! and so we darted down the street, keeping to the very middle of it. the passers-by who met us stopped or stepped aside in amazement. i remember a retired major craned out of the window of his flat--and, crimson in the face, his bulky person almost overbalancing, hallooed furiously. shouts of "stop! hold them" still resounded behind us. david ran flourishing the watch over his head and from time to time leaping into the air; i jumped, too, whenever he did. "where?" i shouted to david, seeing that he was turning into a side street--and i turned after him. "to the oka!" he shouted. "to throw it into the water, into the river. to the devil!" "stop! stop!" they shouted behind. but we were already flying along the side street, already a whiff of cool air was meeting us--and the river lay before us, and the steep muddy descent to it, and the wooden bridge with a train of waggons stretching across it, and a garrison soldier with a pike beside the flagstaff; soldiers used to carry pikes in those days. david reached the bridge and darted by the soldier who tried to give him a blow on the legs with his pike and hit a passing calf. david instantly leaped on to the parapet; he uttered a joyful exclamation.... something white, something blue gleamed in the air and shot into the water--it was the silver watch with vassily's blue bead chain flying into the water.... but then something incredible happened. after the watch david's feet flew upwards--and head foremost, with his hands thrust out before him and the lapels of his jacket fluttering, he described an arc in the air (as frightened frogs jump on hot days from a high bank into a pond) and instantly vanished behind the parapet of the bridge ... and then flop! and a tremendous splash below. what happened to me i am utterly unable to describe. i was some steps from david when he leapt off the parapet ... but i don't even remember whether i cried out; i don't think that i was even frightened: i was stunned, stupefied. i could not stir hand or foot. people were running and hustling round me; some of them seemed to be people i knew. i had a sudden glimpse of trofimitch, the soldier with the pike dashed off somewhere, the horses and the waggons passed by quickly, tossing up their noses covered with string. then everything was green before my eyes and someone gave me a violent shove on my head and all down my back ... i fell fainting. i remember that i came to myself afterwards and seeing that no one was paying any attention to me went up to the parapet but not on the side that david had jumped. it seemed terrible to me to approach it, and as i began gazing into the dark blue muddy swollen river, i remember that i noticed a boat moored to the bridge not far from the bank, and several people in the boat, and one of these, who was drenched all over and sparkling in the sun, bending over the edge of the boat was pulling something out of the water, something not very big, oblong, a dark thing which at first i took to be a portmanteau or a basket; but when i looked more intently i saw that the thing was--david. then in violent excitement i shouted at the top of my voice and ran towards the boat, pushing my way through the people, but when i had run down to it i was overcome with timidity and began looking about me. among the people who were crowding about it i recognised trankvillitatin, the cook agapit with a boot in his hand, yushka, vassily ... the wet and shining man held david's body under the arms, drew him out of the boat and laid him on his back on the mud of the bank. both david's hands were raised to the level of his face as though he were trying to hide himself from strange eyes; he did not stir but lay as though standing at attention, with his heels together and his stomach out. his face was greenish--his eyes were staring and water was dripping from his hair. the wet man who had pulled him out, a factory hand, judging by his clothes, began describing how he had done it, shivering with cold and continually throwing back his hair from his forehead as he talked. he told his story in a very proper and painstaking way. "what do i see, friends? this young lad go flying from the bridge.... well! ... i ran down at once the way of the current for i knew he had fallen into mid-stream and it would carry him under the bridge and there ... talk of the devil! ... i looked: something like a fur cap was floating and it was his head. well, quick as thought, i was in the water and caught hold of him.... it didn't need much cleverness for that!" two or three words of approval were audible in the crowd. "you ought to have something to warm you now. come along and we will have a drink," said someone. but at this point all at once somebody pushed forward abruptly: it was vassily. "what are you doing, good christians?" he cried, tearfully. "we must bring him to by rolling him; it's our young gentleman!" "roll him, roll him," shouted the crowd, which was continually growing. "hang him up by the feet! it's the best way!" "lay him with his stomach on the barrel and roll him backwards and forwards.... take him, lads." "don't dare to touch him," put in the soldier with the pike. "he must be taken to the police station." "low brute," trofimitch's bass voice rang out. "but he is alive," i shouted at the top of my voice and almost with horror. i had put my face near to his. "so that is what the drowned look like," i thought, with a sinking heart.... and all at once i saw david's lips stir and a little water oozed from them.... at once i was pushed back and dragged away; everyone rushed up to him. "roll him, roll him," voices clamoured. "no, no, stay," shouted vassily. "take him home.... take him home!" "take him home," trankvillitatin himself chimed in. "we will bring him to. we can see better there," vassily went on.... (i have liked him from that day.) "lads, haven't you a sack? if not we must take him by his head and his feet...." "stay! here's a sack! lay him on it! catch hold! start! that's fine. as though he were driving in a chaise." a few minutes later david, borne in triumph on the sack, crossed the threshold of our house again. xx he was undressed and put to bed. he began to give signs of life while in the street, moaned, moved his hands.... indoors he came to himself completely. but as soon as all anxiety for his life was over and there was no reason to worry about him, indignation got the upper hand again: everyone shunned him, as though he were a leper. "may god chastise him! may god chastise him!" my aunt shrieked, to be heard all over the house. "get rid of him, somehow, porfiry petrovitch, or he will do some mischief beyond all bearing." "upon my word, he is a viper; he is possessed with a devil," trankvillitatin chimed in. "the wickedness, the wickedness!" cackled my aunt, going close to the door of our room so that david might be sure to hear her. "first of all he stole the watch and then flung it into the water ... as though to say, no one should get it...." everyone, everyone was indignant. "david," i asked him as soon as we were left alone, "what did you do it for?" "so you are after that, too," he answered in a voice that was still weak; his lips were blue and he looked as though he were swollen all over. "what did i do?" "but what did you jump into the water for?" "jump! i lost my balance on the parapet, that was all. if i had known how to swim i should have jumped on purpose. i shall certainly learn. but the watch now--ah...." but at that moment my father walked with a majestic step into our room. "you, my fine fellow," he said, addressing me, "i shall certainly whip, you need have no doubt about that, though you are too big to lie on the bench now." then he went up to the bed on which david was lying. "in siberia," he began in an impressive and dignified tone, "in siberia, sir, in penal servitude, in the mines, there are people living and dying who are less guilty, less criminal than you. are you a suicide or simply a thief or altogether a fool? be so kind as to tell me just that!" "i am not a suicide and i am not a thief," answered david, "but the truth's the truth: there are good men in siberia, better than you or i ... who should know that, if not you?" my father gave a subdued gasp, drew back a step, looked intently at david, spat on the floor and, slowly crossing himself, walked away. "don't you like that?" david called after him and put his tongue out. then he tried to get up but could not. "i must have hurt myself somehow," he said, gasping and frowning. "i remember the water dashed me against a post." "did you see raissa?" he added suddenly. "no. i did not.... stay, stay, stay! now i remember, wasn't it she standing on the bank by the bridge? ... yes ... yes ... a dark dress ... a yellow kerchief on her head, yes it must have been raissa." "well, and afterwards.... did you see her?" "afterwards ... i don't know, i had no thought to spare for her.... you jumped in ..." david was suddenly roused. "alyosha, darling, go to her at once, tell her i am all right, that there's nothing the matter with me. tomorrow i shall be with them. go as quickly as you can, brother, for my sake!" david held out both hands to me.... his red hair, by now dry, stuck up in amusing tufts.... but the softened expression of his face seemed the more genuine for that. i took my cap and went out of the house, trying to avoid meeting my father and reminding him of his promise. xxi "yes, indeed," i reflected as i walked towards the latkins', "how was it that i did not notice raissa? what became of her? she must have seen...." and all at once i remembered that the very moment of david's fall, a terrible piercing shriek had rung in my ears. "was not that raissa? but how was it i did not see her afterwards?" before the little house in which latkin lodged there stretched a waste-ground overgrown with nettles and surrounded by a broken hurdle. i had scarcely clambered over the hurdle (there was no gate anywhere) when the following sight met my eyes: raissa, with her elbows on her knees and her chin propped on her clasped hands, was sitting on the lowest step in front of the house; she was looking fixedly straight before her; near her stood her little dumb sister with the utmost composure brandishing a little whip, while, facing the steps with his back to me, old latkin, in torn and shabby drawers and high felt boots, was trotting and prancing up and down, capering and jerking his elbows. hearing my footsteps he suddenly turned round and squatted on his heels--then at once, skipping up to me, began speaking very rapidly in a trembling voice, incessantly repeating, "tchoo--tchoo--tchoo!" i was dumbfoundered. i had not seen him for a long time and should not, of course, have known him if i had met him anywhere else. that red, wrinkled, toothless face, those lustreless round eyes and touzled grey hair, those jerks and capers, that senseless halting speech! what did it mean? what inhuman despair was torturing this unhappy creature? what dance of death was this? "tchoo--tchoo," he muttered, wriggling incessantly. "see vassilyevna here came in tchoo--tchoo, just now.... do you hear? with a trough on the roof" (he slapped himself on the head with his hand), "and there she sits like a spade, and she is cross-eyed, cross-eyed, like andryushka; vassilyevna is cross-eyed" (he probably meant to say dumb), "tchoo! my vassilyevna is cross-eyed! they are both on the same cork now. you may wonder, good christians! i have only these two little boats! eh?" latkin was evidently conscious that he was not saying the right thing and made terrible efforts to explain to me what was the matter. raissa did not seem to hear what her father was saying and the little sister went on lashing the whip. "good-bye, diamond-merchant, good-bye, good-bye," latkin drawled several times in succession, making a low bow, seeming delighted at having at last got hold of an intelligible word. my head began to go round. "what does it all mean?" i asked of an old woman who was looking out of the window of the little house. "well, my good gentleman," she answered in a sing-song voice, "they say some man--the lord only knows who--went and drowned himself and she saw it. well, it gave her a fright or something; when she came home she seemed all right though; but when she sat down on the step--here, she has been sitting ever since like an image, it's no good talking to her. i suppose she has lost her speech, too. oh, dear! oh, dear!" "good-bye, good-bye," latkin kept repeating, still with the same bow. i went up to raissa and stood directly facing her. "raissa, dear, what's the matter with you?" she made no answer, she seemed not to notice me. her face had not grown pale, had not changed--but had turned somehow stony and there was a look in it as though she were just falling asleep. "she is cross-eyed, cross-eyed," latkin muttered in my ear. i took raissa by the hand. "david is alive," i cried, more loudly than before. "alive and well; david's alive, do you understand? he was pulled out of the water; he is at home now and told me to say that he will come to you to-morrow; he is alive!" as it were with effort raissa turned her eyes on me; she blinked several times, opening them wider and wider, then leaned her head on one side and flushed slightly all over while her lips parted ... she slowly drew in a deep breath, winced as though in pain and with fearful effort articulated: "da ... dav ... a ... alive," got up impulsively and rushed away. "where are you going?" i exclaimed. but with a faint laugh she ran staggering across the waste-ground.... i, of course, followed her, while behind me a wail rose up in unison from the old man and the child.... raissa darted straight to our house. "here's a day!" i thought, trying not to lose sight of the black dress that was fluttering before me. "well!" xxii passing vassily, my aunt, and even trankvillitatin, raissa ran into the room where david was lying and threw herself on his neck. "oh ... oh ... da ... vidushka," her voice rang out from under her loose curls, "oh!" flinging wide his arms david embraced her and nestled his head against her. "forgive me, my heart," i heard his voice saying. and both seemed swooning with joy. "but why did you go home, raissa, why didn't you stay?" i said to her.... she still kept her head bowed. "you would have seen that he was saved...." "ah, i don't know! ah, i don't know. don't ask. i don't know, i don't remember how i got home. i only remember: i saw you in the air ... something seemed to strike me ... and what happened afterwards ..." "seemed to strike you," repeated david, and we all three suddenly burst out laughing together. we were very happy. "what may be the meaning of this, may i ask," we heard behind us a threatening voice, the voice of my father. he was standing in the doorway. "will there ever be an end to these fooleries? where are we living? are we in the russian empire or the french republic?" he came into the room. "anyone who wants to be rebellious and immoral had better go to france! and how dare _you_ come here?" he said, turning to raissa, who, quietly sitting up and turning to face him, was evidently taken aback but still smiled as before, a friendly and blissful smile. "the daughter of my sworn enemy! how dare you? and hugging him, too! away with you at once, or ..." "uncle," david brought out, and he sat up in bed. "don't insult raissa. she is going away, only don't insult her." "and who are you to teach me? i am not insulting her, i am not in ... sul ... ting her! i am simply turning her out of the house. i have an account to settle with you, too, presently. you have made away with other people's property, have attempted to take your own life, have put me to expense." "to what expense?" david interrupted. "what expense? you have ruined your clothes. do you count that as nothing? and i had to tip the men who brought you. you have given the whole family a fright and are you going to be unruly now? and if this young woman, regardless of shame and honour itself ..." david made a dash as though to get out of bed. "don't insult her, i tell you." "hold your tongue." "don't dare ..." "hold your tongue!" "don't dare to insult my betrothed," cried david at the top of his voice, "my future wife!" "betrothed!" repeated my father, with round eyes. "betrothed! wife! ho, ho, ho! ..." ("ha, ha, ha," my aunt echoed behind the door.) "why, how old are you? he's been no time in the world, the milk is hardly dry on his lips, he is a mere babe and he is going to be married! but i ... but you ..." "let me go, let me go," whispered raissa, and she made for the door. she looked more dead than alive. "i am not going to ask permission of you," david went on shouting, propping himself up with his fists on the edge of the bed, "but of my own father who is bound to be here one day soon; he is a law to me, but you are not; but as for my age, if raissa and i are not old enough ... we will bide our time whatever you may say...." "aië, aië, davidka, don't forget yourself," my father interrupted. "just look at yourself. you are not fit to be seen. you have lost all sense of decency." david put his hand to the front of his shirt. "whatever you may say ..." he repeated. "oh, shut his mouth, porfiry petrovitch," piped my aunt from behind the door, "shut his mouth, and as for this hussy, this baggage ... this ..." but something extraordinary must have cut short my aunt's eloquence at that moment: her voice suddenly broke off and in its place we heard another, feeble and husky with old age.... "brother," this weak voice articulated, "christian soul." xxiii we all turned round.... in the same costume in which i had just seen him, thin, pitiful and wild looking, latkin stood before us like an apparition. "god!" he pronounced in a sort of childish way, pointing upwards with a bent and trembling finger and gazing impotently at my father, "god has chastised me, but i have come for va ... for ra ... yes, yes, for raissotchka.... what ... tchoo! what is there for me? soon underground--and what do you call it? one little stick, another ... cross-beam--that's what i ... want, but you, brother, diamond-merchant ... mind ... i'm a man, too!" raissa crossed the room without a word and taking his arm buttoned his vest. "let us go, vassilyevna," he said; "they are all saints here, don't come to them and he lying there in his case"--he pointed to david--"is a saint, too, but you and i are sinners, brother. come. tchoo.... forgive an old man with a pepper pot, gentleman! we have stolen together!" he shouted suddenly; "stolen together, stolen together!" he repeated, with evident satisfaction that his tongue had obeyed him at last. everyone in the room was silent. "and where is ... the ikon here," he asked, throwing back his head and turning up his eyes; "we must cleanse ourselves a bit." he fell to praying to one of the corners, crossing himself fervently several times in succession, tapping first one shoulder and then the other with his fingers and hurriedly repeating: "have mercy me, oh, lor ... me, oh, lor ... me, oh, lor ..." my father, who had not taken his eyes off latkin, and had not uttered a word, suddenly started, stood beside him and began crossing himself, too. then he turned to him, bowed very low so that he touched the floor with one hand, saying, "you forgive me, too, martinyan gavrilitch," kissed him on the shoulder. latkin in response smacked his lips in the air and blinked: i doubt whether he quite knew what he was doing. then my father turned to everyone in the room, to david, to raissa and to me: "do as you like, act as you think best," he brought out in a soft and mournful voice, and he withdrew. my aunt was running up to him, but he cried out sharply and gruffly to her. he was overwhelmed. "me, oh, lor ... me, oh, lor ... mercy!" latkin repeated. "i am a man." "good-bye, davidushka," said raissa, and she, too, went out of the room with the old man. "i will be with you tomorrow," david called after her, and, turning his face to the wall, he whispered: "i am very tired; it will be as well to have some sleep now," and was quiet. it was a long while before i went out of the room. i kept in hiding. i could not forget my father's threats. but my apprehensions turned out to be unnecessary. he met me and did not utter a word. he seemed to feel awkward himself. but night soon came on and everything was quiet in the house. xxiv next morning david got up as though nothing were the matter and not long after, on the same day, two important events occurred: in the morning old latkin died, and towards evening my uncle, yegor, david's father, arrived in ryazan. without sending any letter in advance, without warning anyone, he descended on us like snow on our heads. my father was completely taken aback and did not know what to offer to his dear guest and where to make him sit. he rushed about as though delirious, was flustered as though he were guilty; but my uncle did not seem to be much touched by his brother's fussy solicitude; he kept repeating: "what's this for?" or "i don't want anything." his manner with my aunt was even colder; she had no great liking for him, indeed. in her eyes he was an infidel, a heretic, a voltairian ... (he had in fact learnt french to read voltaire in the original). i found my uncle yegor just as david had described him. he was a big heavy man with a broad pock-marked face, grave and serious. he always wore a hat with feathers in it, cuffs, a frilled shirt front and a snuff-coloured vest and a sword at his side. david was unspeakably delighted to see him--he actually looked brighter in the face and better looking, and his eyes looked different: merrier, keener, more shining; but he did his utmost to moderate his joy and not to show it in words: he was afraid of being too soft. the first night after uncle yegor's arrival, father and son shut themselves up in the room that had been assigned to my uncle and spent a long time talking together in a low voice; next morning i saw that my uncle looked particularly affectionately and trustfully at his son: he seemed very much pleased with him. david took him to the requiem service for latkin; i went to it, too, my father did not hinder my going but remained at home himself. raissa impressed me by her calm: she looked pale and much thinner but did not shed tears and spoke and behaved with perfect simplicity; and with all that, strange to say, i saw a certain grandeur in her; the unconscious grandeur of sorrow forgetful of itself! uncle yegor made her acquaintance on the spot, in the church porch; from his manner to her, it was evident that david had already spoken of her. he was as pleased with her as with his son: i could read that in david's eyes when he looked at them both. i remember how his eyes sparkled when his father said, speaking of her: "she's a clever girl; she'll make a capable woman." at the latkins' i was told that the old man had quietly expired like a candle that has burnt out, and that until he had lost power and consciousness, he kept stroking his daughter's head and saying something unintelligible but not gloomy, and he was smiling to the end. my father went to the funeral and to the service in the church and prayed very devoutly; trankvillitatin actually sang in the choir. beside the grave raissa suddenly broke into sobs and sank forward on the ground; but she soon recovered herself. her little deaf and dumb sister stared at everyone and everything with big, bright, rather wild-looking eyes; from time to time she huddled up to raissa, but there was no sign of terror about her. the day after the funeral uncle yegor, who, judging from appearances, had not come back from siberia with empty hands (he paid for the funeral and liberally rewarded david's rescuer) but who told us nothing of his doings there or of his plans for the future, uncle yegor suddenly informed my father that he did not intend to remain in ryazan, but was going to moscow with his son. my father, from a feeling of propriety, expressed regret and even tried--very faintly it is true--to induce my uncle to alter his decision, but at the bottom of his heart, i think he was really much relieved. the presence of his brother with whom he had very little in common, who did not even condescend to reproach him, whose feeling for him was more one of simple disgust than disdain--oppressed him ... and parting with david could not have caused him much regret. i, of course, was utterly crushed by the separation; i was utterly desolate at first and lost all support in life and all interest in it. and so my uncle went away and took with him not only david but, to the great astonishment and even indignation of our whole street, raissa and her little sister, too.... when she heard of this, my aunt promptly called him a turk, and called him a turk to the end of her days. and i was left alone, alone ... but this story is not about me. xxv so this is the end of my tale of the watch. what more have i to tell you? five years after david was married to his black-lip, and in , as a lieutenant of artillery, he died a glorious death on the battlefield of borodino in defence of the shevardinsky redoubt. much water has flowed by since then and i have had many watches; i have even attained the dignity of a real repeater with a second hand and the days of the week on it. but in a secret drawer of my writing table there is preserved an old-fashioned silver watch with a rose on the face; i bought it from a jewish pedlar, struck by its likeness to the watch which was once presented to me by my godfather. from time to time, when i am alone and expect no one, i take it out of the drawer and looking at it remember my young days and the companion of those days that have fled never to return. paris.-- . distributed proofreaders canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (this file was produced from images generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) the wizard's son a novel by mrs. oliphant author of "the curate in charge," "young musgrave," etc. in three volumes vol. iii. london macmillan and co. [_the right of translation and reproduction is reserved_] london: r. clay, sons, and taylor, printers, bread street hill. the wizard's son. chapter i. was this then the conclusion of all things--that there was nothing so perfect that it was worth a man's while to struggle for it; that any officious interference with the recognised and existing was a mistake; that nothing was either the best or the worst, but all things mere degrees in a round of the comparative, in which a little more or a little less was of no importance, and the most strenuous efforts tended to failure as much as indifference? walter, returning to the old house which was his field of battle, questioned himself thus, with a sense of despair not lessened by the deeper self-ridicule within him, which asked, was he then so anxious for the best, so ready to sacrifice his comfort for an ideal excellence? that he, of all men, should have this to do, and yet that, being done, it should be altogether ineffectual, was a sort of climax of clumsy mortal failure and hopelessness. the only good thing he had done was the restoration of those half-evicted cotters, and that was but a mingled and uncertain good, it appeared. what was the use of any struggle? if it was his own personal freedom alone that he really wanted, why here it was within his power to purchase it--or at least a moderate amount of it--a comparative freedom, as everything was comparative. his mind by this time had ceased to be able to think, or even to perceive with any distinctness the phrase or _motif_ inscribed upon one of those confused and idly-turning wheels of mental machinery which had stood in the place of thought to him. it was the afternoon when he got back, and everything within him had fallen into an afternoon dreariness. he lingered when he landed on the waste bit of grass that lay between the little landing-place and the door of the old castle. he had no heart to go in and sit down unoccupied in that room which had witnessed so many strange meetings. he was no longer indeed afraid of his visitor there, but rather looked forward with a kind of relief to the tangible presence which delivered him from meetings of the mind more subtle and painful. but he had no expectation of any visitor; nor was there anything for him to do except to sit down and perhaps attempt to read, which meant solely a delivering over of himself to his spiritual antagonists--for how was it possible to give his mind to any fable of literature in the midst of a parable so urgent and all-occupying, of his own? he stood therefore idly upon the neglected turf, watching the ripple of the water as it lapped against the rough stones on the edge. the breadth of the loch was entirely hidden from him by the projection of the old tower, which descended into the water at the right, and almost shut off this highest corner of loch houran into a little lakelet of its own. walter heard the sound of oars and voices from the loch without seeing any one: but that was usual enough, and few people invaded his privacy: so that he was taken by surprise when, suddenly raising his eyes, he was aware of the polished and gilded galley from birkenbraes, in which already mr. williamson, seated in the stern, had perceived and was hailing him. "hallo, my lord erradeen! here we've all come to see ye this fine afternoon. i told them we should find ye under your own vine and your own fig-tree." this speech was accompanied by a general laugh. the arrival of such a party, heralded by such laughter in a desolate house, with few servants and no readiness for any such emergency, to a young man in walter's confused and distracted condition would not, it may be supposed, have been very welcome in any case, and at present in his exhaustion and dismay he stood and gazed at them with a sort of horror. there was not even a ready servitor like hamish to assist in the disembarkation. duncan had rowed cheerfully off upon some other errand after landing his master, and old symington and old macalister were singularly ill-adapted for the service. lord erradeen did his best, with a somewhat bad grace, to receive the boat at the landing-place. the gravity of his countenance was a little chill upon the merry party, but the williamsons were not of a kind that is easily discouraged. "oh, yes, here we all are," said the millionnaire. "i would not let our english visitor, mr. braithwaite here, leave without showing him the finest thing on the loch. so i just told him i knew i might take the liberty. hoot! we know ye have not your household here, and that it is just an old family ruin, and not bound to produce tea and scones like the forresters' isle. bless me! i hope we have a soul above tea and scones," mr. williamson cried with his hearty laugh. by this time the young, hardy, half-clad rowers had scrambled out, and grouped themselves in various attitudes, such as would suit a new and light-hearted michael angelo--one kneeling on the stones holding the bow of the boat, another with one foot on sea and one on shore helping the ladies out. walter in his dark dress, and still darker preoccupied countenance, among all those bronzed and cheerful youths looked like a being from another sphere: but the contrast was not much to his advantage either in bodily or mental atmosphere. he looked so grave and so unlike the joyous hospitality of a young housekeeper surprised by a sudden arrival, that katie, always more on her guard than her father, looked at him with a countenance as grave as his own. "i am not the leader of this expedition, lord erradeen," she said; "you must not blame me for the invasion. my father took it into his head, and when that happens there is nothing to be done. i don't mean i was not glad to be brought here against my will," she added, as his face, by a strain of politeness which was far from easy to him, began to brighten a little. katie was not apt to follow the leading of another face and adopt the woman's _rôle_ of submission, but she felt herself so completely in the wrong, an intruder where she was very sure she and her party, exuberant in spirits and gaiety, were not wanted, that she was compelled to watch his expression and make her apologies with a deference quite unusual to her. "i hope it will not be a very great--interruption to you," she said after a momentary pause. "that could never matter," walter said, with some stateliness. "i could have wished to have notice and to have received my friends at auchnasheen rather than here. but being here--you must excuse the primitive conditions of the place." "hoot! there is nothing to excuse--a fine old castle, older than the flood--just the very thing that is wanted for the picturesque, ye see, braithwaite; for as ye were remarking, we are in general too modern for a highland loch. but you'll not call this modern," said mr. williamson. "will that old body not open the door to ye when he sees ye have friends? lord! that just beats all! that is a step beyond caleb balderstone." "papa!" cried katie in keen reproof, "we have been quite importunate enough already. i vote we all go over to auchnasheen--the view there is much finer, and we could send over for oona----" "is it common in this country," said the member of parliament, "to have two residences so very near? it must be like going next door for change of air when you leave one for the other, lord erradeen." at this there was that slight stir among the party which takes place when an awkward suggestion is made; the young men and the girls began to talk hurriedly, raising up a sort of atmosphere of voices around the central group. this however was curiously and suddenly penetrated by the reply which--who?--was it walter? made, almost as it seemed without a pause. "not common--but yet not unknown in a country which has known a great deal of fighting in its day. the old castle is our family resource in danger. we do our family business here, our quarrels: and afterwards retire to auchnasheen, the house of peace (perhaps you don't know that names have meanings hereabouts?) to rest." there was a pause as slight, as imperceptible to the ignorant, as evident to the instructed as had been the stir at the first sound of those clear tones. walter himself to more than one observer had seemed as much startled as any of them. he turned quickly round towards the speaker with a sudden blanching of his face which had been pale enough before; but this was only momentary; afterwards all that was remarkable in him was a strange look of resolution and determined self-control. perhaps the only one completely unmoved was the englishman, who at once accepted the challenge, and stepped forward to the individual who it was evident to him was the only duly qualified cicerone in the party, with eager satisfaction. "that is highly interesting. of course the place must be full of traditions," he said. "with your permission, walter, i will take the part of cicerone," said the new voice. to some of the party it seemed only a voice. the ladies and the young men stumbled against each other in their eager curiosity about the stranger. "i will swear there was nobody near erradeen when we landed," said young tom campbell in the nearest ear that presented itself; but of course it was the number of people about which caused this, and it could be no shadow with whom the m.p. went forth delighted, asking a hundred questions. "you are a member of the family?" mr. braithwaite said. he was not tall, and his companion was of a splendid presence. the englishman had to look up as he spoke and to quicken his somewhat short steps as he walked to keep up with the other's large and dignified pace. katie followed with walter. there was a look of agitation and alarm in her face; her heart beat she could not tell why. she was breathless as if she had been running a race. she looked up into lord erradeen's face tremulously, not like herself. "is this gentleman--staying with you?" she said in a scarcely audible voice. walter was not agitated for his part, but he had little inclination to speak. he said "yes" and no more. "and we have been--sorry for you because you were alone? is it a--relation? is it--? you have never," said katie, forcing the words out with a difficulty which astonished her, and for which she could not account, "brought him to birkenbraes." walter could not but smile. a sort of feeble amusement flew over his mind touching the surface into a kind of ripple. "shall i ask him to come?" he said. katie was following in the very footsteps of this altogether new and unexpected figure. there was nothing like him, it seemed to her, in all the country-side. his voice dominated every other sound, not loud, but clear. it subdued her little being altogether. she would not lose a word, yet her breath was taken away by an inexplicable terror. "he is--like somebody," she said, panting, "out of a book," and could say no more. old macalister came towards them from the now open door, at which stood symington in attendance. the servants had been disturbed by the unusual sounds of the arrival. macalister's old face was drawn and haggard. "where will ye be taking all thae folk?" he said, no doubt forgetting his manners in his bewilderment. "come back, ye'll get into mischief that road," he cried, putting out his hand to catch the arm of braithwaite, who, guided by the stranger, was passing the ordinary entrance. he became quite nervous and angry when no heed was paid to him. "my lord, you're no so well acquaint yourself. will you let that lad just wander and break his neck?" he cried, with a kind of passion. "never mind," said walter, with a strange calm which was as unaccountable as all the rest. "will you tell your wife to prepare for these ladies--when we come back." here symington too came forth to explain somewhat loudly, addressing his master and braithwaite alternately, that the roads were not safe about the old castle, that the walls were crumbling, that a person not acquaint might get a deadly fall, with unspeakable anxiety in his eyes. the party all followed, notwithstanding, led by the stranger, whom even the least of them now thought she could distinguish over katie's head, but of whom the servants took no notice, addressing the others in front as if he had not been there. "my lord, ye'll repent if ye'll no listen to us," symington said, laying his hand in sudden desperation on walter's arm. "you fool!" cried the young man, "can't you see we have got a safe guide?" symington gave a look round him wildly of the utmost terror. his scared eyes seemed to retreat into deep caverns of anguish and fear. he stood back out of the way of the somewhat excited party, who laughed, and yet scarcely could laugh with comfort, at him. the youngsters had begun to chatter: they were not afraid of anything--still--: though it was certainly amusing to see that old man's face. turning round to exchange a look with macalister, symington came in contact with mr. williamson's solid and cheerful bulk, who brought up the rear. "i'm saying," said the millionnaire confidentially, "who's this fine fellow your master's got with him? a grand figure of a man! it's not often you see it, but i always admire it. a relation, too; what relation? i would say it must be on the mother's side, for i've never seen or heard tell of him. eh? who's staying with your master, i'm asking ye? are ye deaf or doited that ye cannot answer a simple question?" "na, there is nothing the matter with me; but i think the rest of the world has just taken leave of their senses," symington said. chapter ii. julia herbert had failed altogether in her object during that end of the season which her relations had afforded her. walter had not even come to call. he had sent a hurried note excusing himself, and explaining that he was "obliged to leave town," an excuse by which nobody was deceived. it is not by any easy process that a girl, who begins with all a girl's natural pride and pretensions, is brought down to recognise the fact that a man is avoiding and fleeing from her, and yet to follow and seek him. hard poverty, and the memories of a life spent in the tiny cottage with her mother, without any enlargement or wider atmosphere, and with but one way of escape in which there was hope or even possibility, had brought julia to this pass. she had nothing in her life that was worth doing except to scheme how she could dress and present the best appearance, and how she could get hold of and secure that only stepping-stone by which she could mount out of it--a man who would marry her and open to her the doors of something better. in every other way it is worth the best exertions of either man or woman to get these doors opened, and to come to the possibility of better things; and a poor girl who has been trained to nothing more exalted, who sees no other way, notwithstanding that this poor way of hers revolts every finer spirit, is there not something pitiful and tragic in her struggles, her sad and degrading attempt after a new beginning? how much human force is wasted upon it, what heart-sickness, what self-contempt is undergone, what a debasement of all that is best and finest in her? she has no pity, no sympathy in her pursuit, but ridicule, contempt, the derision of one half of humanity, the indignation of the other. and yet her object after all may not be entirely despicable. she may feel with despair that there is no other way. she may intend to be all that is good and noble were but this one step made, this barrier crossed, the means of a larger life attained. it would be better for her no doubt to be a governess, or even a seamstress, or to put up with the chill meannesses of a poverty-stricken existence, and starve, modestly keeping up appearances with her last breath. but all women are not born self-denying. when they are young, the blood runs as warmly in their veins as in that of men; they too want life, movement, sunshine and happiness. the mere daylight, the air, a new frock, however hardly obtained, a dance, a little admiration, suffice for them when they are very young; but when the next chapter comes, and the girl learns to calculate that, saving some great matrimonial chance, there is no prospect for her but the narrowest and most meagre and monotonous existence under heaven, the life of a poor, very poor single woman who cannot dig and to beg is ashamed--is it to be wondered at if she makes a desperate struggle anyhow (and alas! there is but one _how_) to escape. perhaps she likes too, poor creature, the little excitement of flirtation, the only thing which replaces to her the manifold excitement which men of her kind indulge in--the tumultuous joys of the turf, the charms of play, the delights of the club, the moors, and sport in general, not to speak of all those developments of pleasure, so-called, which are impossible to a woman. she cannot dabble a little in vice as a man can do, and yet return again, and be no worse thought of than before. both for amusement and profit she has this one way, which, to be sure, answers the purpose of all the others in being destructive of the best part in her, spoiling her character, and injuring her reputation--but for how much less a cause, and with how little recompense in the way of enjoyment! the husband-hunting girl is fair game to whosoever has a stone to throw, and very few are so charitable as to say, poor soul! julia herbert had been as bright a creature at eighteen as one could wish to see. at twenty-four she was bright still, full of animation, full of good humour, clever in her way, very pretty, high-spirited, amusing--and still so young! but how profoundly had it been impressed upon her that she must not lose her time! and how well she knew all the opprobrious epithets that are directed against a young woman as she draws towards thirty--the very flower and prime of her life. was she to blame if she was influenced by all that was said to this effect, and determined to fight with a sort of mad persistence, for the hope which seemed so well within her reach? were she but once established as lady erradeen, there was not one of her youthful sins that would be remembered against her. a veil of light would fall over her and all her peccadilloes as soon as she had put on her bridal veil. her friends, instead of feeling her a burden and perplexity, would be proud of julia; they would put forth their cousinhood eagerly, and claim her--even those who were most anxious now to demonstrate the extreme distance of the connection--as near and dear. and she liked walter, and thought she would have no difficulty in loving him, had she ever a right to do so. he was not too good for her; she would have something to forgive in him, if he too in her might have something to forgive. she would make him a good wife, a wife of whom he should have no occasion to be ashamed. all these considerations made it excusable--more than excusable, almost laudable--to strain a point for so great an end. and in her cousin's wife she had, so far as this went, a real friend. lady herbert not only felt that to get julia settled was most desirable, and that, as lady erradeen, she would become a most creditable cousin, and one who might return the favours showed to her, but also, which is less general, felt within herself a strong inclination to help and further julia's object. she thought favourably of lord erradeen. she thought he would not be difficult to manage (which was a mistake as the reader knows). she thought he was not so strong as julia, but once fully within the power of her fascinations, would fall an easy prey. she did not think less of him for running away. it was a sign of weakness, if also of wisdom; and if he could be met in a place from which he could not run away, it seemed to her that the victory would be easy. and sir thomas must have a moor somewhere to refresh him after the vast labours of a session in which he had recorded so many silent votes. by dint of having followed him to many a moor, lady herbert had a tolerable geographical knowledge of the highlands, and it was not very difficult for her to find out that mr. campbell of ellermore, with his large family, would be obliged this year to let his shootings. every thing was settled and prepared accordingly to further julia's views, without any warning on the point having reached walter. she had arrived indeed at the lodge, which was some miles down the loch, beyond birkenbraes, a few days after walter's arrival, and thus once more, though he was so far from thinking of it, his old sins, or rather his old follies, were about to find him out. lady herbert had already become known to various people on the loch-side. she had been at the lodge since early in september, and had been called upon by friendly folk on all sides. there had been a thousand chances that walter might have found her at luncheon with all the others on his first appearance at birkenbraes, and julia had already been introduced to that hospitable house. katie did not recognise lady herbert either by name or countenance. but she recognised julia as soon as she saw her. "i think you know lord erradeen?" was almost her first greeting, for katie was a young person of very straight-forward methods. "oh yes," julia had answered with animation, "i have known him all my life." "i suppose you know that he lives here?" upon this julia turned to her chaperon, her relation in whose hands all these external questions were. "did you know, dear lady herbert, that lord erradeen lived here?" "oh yes, he has a place close by. didn't i tell you? a pretty house, with that old castle near it, which i pointed out to you on the lock," lady herbert said. "how small the world is!" cried julia; "wherever you go you are always knocking up against somebody. fancy walter methven living here!" katie was not taken in by this little play. she was not even irritated as she had been at burlington house. if it might so happen that some youthful bond existed between lord erradeen and this girl, katie was not the woman to use any unfair means against it. "you will be sure to meet him," she said calmly. "we hope he is not going to shut himself up as he did last year." "oh tell me!" julia cried, with overflowing interest, "is there not some wonderful ghost story? something about his house being haunted; and he has to go and present himself and have an interview with the ghost? captain underwood, i remember, told us----" "did you know captain underwood?" said katie, in that tone which says so much. and then she turned to her other guests: for naturally the house was full of people, and as was habitual in birkenbraes a large party from outside had come to lunch. the williamsons were discussed with much freedom among the visitors from the lodge when they went away. sir thomas declared that the old man was a monstrous fine old fellow, and his claret worth coming from devonshire to drink. "no expense spared in that establishment," he cried; "and there's a little girl, i should say, that would be worth a young fellow's while." he despised julia to the bottom of his heart, but he thought of his young friends on the other side without any such elevated sentiment, and decided it might not be a bad thing to have algy newton down, to whom it was indispensable that he should marry money. sir thomas, however, had not the energy to carry his intention out. next day it so happened that lady herbert had to return the visit of mrs. forrester, who--though she always explained her regret at not being able to entertain her friends--was punctilious in making the proper calls. the english ladies were "charmed" with the isle. they said there had never been anything so original, so delightful, so unconventional; ignoring altogether, with a politeness which mrs. forrester thought was "pretty," any idea that necessity might be the motive of the mother and daughter in settling there. "i am sure it is very kind of you to say so; but it is not just a matter of choice, you know. it is just an old house that came to me from the macnabs--my mother's side. and it proved very convenient when all the boys were away and nothing left but oona and me. women want but little in comparison with gentlemen; and though it is a little out of the way and inconvenient in the winter season, it is wonderful how few days there are that we can't get out. i am very well content with the walk when there is a glint of sunshine; but oona, she just never minds the weather. oh, you will not be going just yet! tell mysie, oona, to bring ben the tea. if it is a little early what matter? it always helps to keep you warm on the loch, and my old cook is rather noted for her scones. she just begins as soon as she hears there's a boat, and she will be much disappointed if ye don't taste them. our friends are all very kind; we have somebody or other every day." "it is you who are kind, i think," lady herbert said. "no, no; two ladies--it is nothing we have it in our power to do: but a cup of tea, it is just a charity to accept it; and as you go down to your boat i will let you see the view." julia, for her part, felt, or professed, a great interest in the girl living the life of a recluse on this little island. "it must be delightful," she said with enthusiasm; "but don't you sometimes feel a little dull? it is the sweetest place i ever saw. but shouldn't you like to walk on to the land without always requiring a boat?" "i don't think i have considered the subject," oona said; "it is our home, and we do not think whether or not we should like it to be different." "oh what a delightful state of mind! i don't think i could be so contented anywhere--so happy in myself. i think," said julia with an ingratiating look, "that you must be very happy in yourself." oona laughed. "as much and as little as other people," she said. "oh not as little! i should picture to myself a hundred things i wanted as soon as i found myself shut up here. i should want to be in town. i should want to go shopping. i should wish for--everything i had not got. don't you immediately think of dozens of things you want as soon as you know you can't get them? but you are so good?" "if that is being good! no, i think i rather refrain from wishing for what i should like when i see i am not likely to get it." "i call that goodness itself--but perhaps it is scotch. i have the greatest respect for the scotch," said julia. "they are so sensible." then she laughed, as at some private joke of her own, and said under her breath, "not all, however," and looked towards kinloch houran. they were seated on the bench, upon the little platform, at the top of the ascent which looked down upon the castle. the sound of mrs. forrester's voice was quite audible behind in the house, pouring forth a gentle stream. the sun was setting in a sky full of gorgeous purple and golden clouds; the keen air of the hills blowing about them. but julia was warmly dressed, and only shivered a little out of a sense of what was becoming: and oona was wrapped in the famous fur cloak. "it is so strange to come upon a place one has heard so much of," julia resumed. "no doubt you know lord erradeen?" the name startled oona in spite of herself. she was not prepared for any allusion to him. she coloured involuntarily, and gave her companion a look of surprise. "do you know him?" she asked. "oh, so well! i have known him almost all my life. people said indeed----" said julia, breaking off suddenly with a laugh. "but that was nonsense. you know how people talk. oh, yes, we have been like brother and sister--or if not quite that--at least--oh yes, i know walter, and his mother, and everything about him. he has been a little strange since he came here; though indeed i have no reason to say so, for he is always very nice to me. when he came home last year i saw a great deal of him; but i don't think he was very communicative about--what do you call it?--kinloch----" "he was not here long," oona said. "no? he did not give himself time to find out how many nice people there are. he did not seem very happy about it when he came back. you see all his habits were formed--it was something so new for him. and though the people are extremely nice, and so hospitable and kind, they were different--from those he had been used to." oona smiled a little. she did not see her new acquaintance from the best side, and there came into her mind a slightly bitter and astonished reflection that walter, perhaps, preferred people like _this_ to other--people. it was an altogether incoherent thought. "does he know that you are here?" she said. "oh, i don't think he does--but he will soon find me out," said julia, with an answering smile. "he always tells me everything. we are such old friends, and perhaps something--more. to be sure that is not a thing to talk of; but there is something in your face which is so sweet, which invites confidence. with a little encouragement i believe i should tell you everything i ever did." she leant over oona as if she would have kissed her: but compliments so broad and easy disconcerted the highland girl. she withdrew a little from this close contact. "the wind is getting cold," she said. "perhaps we ought to go in. my mother always blames me for keeping strangers, who are not used to it, in this chilly air." "ah, you do not encourage me," julia said. and then after a pause added, with the look of one preoccupied by her subject--"is he there now?" "i think lord erradeen is still at kinloch houran, if that is what you mean. that is another house of his among the trees." "how curious! two houses so close together. if you see him," said julia, rising to join her cousin who had come out to the door of the cottage with mrs. forrester, "if you see him, don't, please don't, tell him you have met me. i prefer that he should find it out. he is quite sure, oh, sooner than i want him, to find me out." and then the ladies were attended to the boat in the usual hospitable way. "you will get back before it is dark," said mrs. forrester. "i am always glad of that, for the wind is cold from the hills, especially to strangers that are not used to our highland climate. i take your visit very kind, lady herbert. in these days i can do so little for my friends: unless sir thomas would take his lunch with me some day--and that is no compliment to a gentleman that is out on the hills all his time--i have just no opportunity of showing attention. but if you are going further north, my son, the present mr. forrester of eaglescairn, would be delighted to be of any service. he knows how little his mother can do for her friends, perched up here in the middle of the water and without a gentleman in the house. hamish, have ye got the cushions in, and are ye all ready? you'll be sure to take her ladyship to where the carriage is waiting, and see that she has not a long way to walk." thus talking, the kind lady saw her visitors off, and stood on the beach waving her hand to them. the fur cloak had been transferred to her shoulders. it was the one wrap in which everybody believed. oona, who moved so much more quickly, and had no need to pause to take breath, did not now require such careful wrapping. she too stood and waved her hand as the boat turned the corner of the isle. but her farewells were not so cordial as her mother's. julia's talk had been very strange to oona; it filled her with a vague fear. something very different from the sensation with which she had heard katie's confessions on the subject of lord erradeen moved her now. an impression of unworthiness had stolen into her mind, she could not tell how. it was the first time she had been sensible of any thought of the kind. walter had not been revealed to her in any of the circumstances of his past life. she had known him only during his visit at kinloch houran, and when he was in profound difficulty and agitation, in which her presence and succour had helped him she could not tell how, and when his appeal to her, his dependence on her, had seized hold of her mind and imagination with a force which it had taken her all this time to throw off, and which, alas! his first appearance and renewed appeal to her to stand by him had brought back again in spite of her resistance and against her will. she had been angry with herself and indignant at this involuntary subjugation--which he had not desired so far as she knew, nor she dreamt of, until she had fallen under it--and had recognised, with a sort of despair and angry sense of impotence, the renewal of the influence, which she seemed incapable of resisting. but julia's words roused in her a different sentiment. julia's laugh, the light insinuations of her tone, her claim of intimacy and previous knowledge, brought a revulsion of feeling so strong and powerful that she felt for the moment as if she had been delivered from her bonds. delivered--but not with any pleasure in being free: for the deliverance meant the lowering of the image of him in whom she had suddenly found that union of something above her with something below, which is the man's chief charm to the woman, as probably it is the woman's chief charm to the man. he had been below her, he had needed her help, she had brought to him some principle of completeness, some moral support which was indispensable, without which he could not have stood fast. but now another kind of inferiority was suggested to her, which was not that in which a visionary and absolute youthful mind could find any charm, which it was difficult even to tolerate, which was an offence to her and to the pure and overmastering sentiment which had drawn her to him. if he was so near to miss herbert, so entirely on her level, making her his confidant, he could be nothing to oona. she seemed to herself to burst her bonds and stand free--but not happily. her heart was not the lighter for it. she would have liked to escape, yet to be able to bear him the same stainless regard, the same sympathy as ever; to help him still, to honour him in his resistance to all that was evil. all this happened on the afternoon of the day which walter had begun with a despairing conviction that oona's help must fail him _when she knew_. she had begun to know without any agency of his: and if it moved her so to become aware of a frivolous and foolish connection in which there was levity and vanity, and a fictitious counterfeit of higher sentiments but no harm, what would her feelings be when all the truth was unfolded to her? but neither did she know of the darker depths that lay below, nor was he aware of the revelation which had begun. oona returned to the house with her mother's soft-voiced monologue in her ears, hearing vaguely a great many particulars of lady herbert's family and connections and of her being "really an acquisition, and sir thomas just an honest english sort of man, and miss herbert very pretty, and a nice companion for you, oona," without reply, or with much consciousness of what it was. "it is time you were indoors, mamma, for the wind is very cold," she said. "oh yes, oona, it is very well for you to speak about me: but you must take your own advice and come in too. for you have nothing about your shoulders, and i have got the fur cloak." "i am coming, mother," oona said, and with these words turned from the door and going to the rocky parapet that bordered the little platform, cast an indignant glance towards the ruined walls so far beneath her on the water's edge, dark and cold, out of the reach of all those autumn glories that were fading in the sky. there was no light or sign of life about kinloch houran. she had looked out angrily, as one defrauded of much honest feeling had, she felt, a right to do; but something softened her as she looked and gazed--the darkness of it, the pathos of the ruin, the incompleteness, and voiceless yet appealing need. was it possible that there was no need at all or vacancy there but what miss herbert, with her smiles and dimples, her laughing insinuations, her claim upon him from the past, and the first preference of youth, could supply? oona felt a great sadness take the place of her indignation as she turned away. if that was so, how poor and small it all was--how different from what she had thought! chapter iii. this was not the only danger that once more overshadowed the path of lord erradeen. underwood had been left alone in one of those foreign centres of "pleasure," so called, whither he had led his so often impatient and unruly pupil. he had been left, without notice, by a sudden impulse, such as he was now sufficiently acquainted with in walter--who had always the air of obeying angrily and against his will the temptations with which he was surrounded: a sort of moral indignation against himself and all that aided in his degradation curiously mingling with the follies and vices into which he was led. you never knew when you had him, was captain underwood's own description. he would dart aside at a tangent, go off at the most unlikely moment, dash down the cup when it was at the sweetest, and abandon with disgust the things that had seemed to please him most. and underwood knew that the moment was coming when his patron and _protégé_ must return home: but notwithstanding he was left, without warning, as by a sudden caprice; the young man, who scorned while he yielded to his influence, having neither respect nor regard enough for his companion to leave a word of explanation. underwood was astonished and angry as a matter of course, but his anger soon subsided, and the sense of lord erradeen's importance to him was too strong to leave room for lasting resentment, or at least for anything in the shape of relinquishment. he was not at all disposed to give the young victim up. already he had tasted many of what to him were the sweets of life by walter's means, and there were endless capabilities in lord erradeen's fortune and in his unsettled mind, which made a companion like underwood too wise ever to take offence, necessary to him--which that worthy would not let slip. after the shock of finding himself deserted, he took two or three days to consider the matter, and then he made his plan. it was bold, yet he thought not too bold. he followed in the very track of his young patron, passing through edinburgh and reaching auchnasheen on the same momentous day which had witnessed julia herbert's visit to the isle. captain underwood was very well known at auchnasheen. he had filled in many ways the position of manager and steward to the last lord. he had not been loved, but yet he had not been actively disliked. if there was some surprise and a little resistance on the part of the household there was at least no open revolt. they received him coldly, and required considerable explanation of the many things which he required to be done. they were all aware, as well as he was, that lord erradeen was to be expected from day to day, and they had made such preparations for his arrival as suggested themselves: but these were not many, and did not at all please the zealous captain. his affairs, he felt, were at a critical point. it was very necessary that the young man should feel the pleasure of being expected, the surprise of finding everything arranged according to his tastes. "you know very well that he will come here exhausted, that he will want to have everything comfortable," he said to the housekeeper and the servants. "no one would like after a fatiguing journey to come into a bare sort of a miserable place like this." "my lord is no so hard to please," said the housekeeper, standing her ground. "last year he just took no notice. whatever was done he was not heeding." "because he was unused to everything: now it is different; and i mean to have things comfortable for him." "well, captain! i am sure it's none of my wish to keep the poor young gentleman from his bits of little comforts. ye'll have _his_ authority?" "oh, yes, i have his authority. it will be for your advantage to mind what i tell you; even more than with the late lord. i've been abroad with him. he left me but a short time ago; i was to follow him, and look after everything." at this the housekeeper looked at the under-factor mr. shaw's subordinate, who had come to intimate to her her master's return. "will that be all right, mr. adamson?" adamson put his shaggy head on one side like an intelligent dog and looked at the stranger. but they all knew captain underwood well enough, and no one was courageous enough to contradict him. "it will, maybe, be as ye say," said the under-factor cautiously. "anyway it will do us no harm to take his orders," he added, in an undertone to the woman. "he was always very far ben with the old lord." "the worse for him," said that important functionary under her breath. but she agreed with adamson afterwards that as long as it was my lord's comfort he was looking after and not his own, his orders should be obeyed. as with every such person, the household distrusted this confident and unpaid major domo. but underwood had not been tyrannical in his previous reign, and young lord erradeen during his last residence at auchnasheen had frightened them all. he had been like a man beside himself. if the captain could manage him better, they would be grateful to the captain; and thus underwood, though by no means confident of a good reception, had no serious hindrances to encounter. he strolled forth when he had arranged everything to "look about him." he saw the birkenbraes boat pass in the evening light, returning from the castle, with a surprise which took away his breath. the boat was near enough to the shore as it passed to be recognised and its occupants; but not even katie, whose eyesight was so keen, recognised the observer on the beach. he remarked that the party were in earnest conversation, consulting with each other over something, which seemed to secure everybody's attention, so that the ordinary quick notice of a stranger, which is common to country people, was not called forth by his own appearance. it surprised him mightily to see that such visitors had ventured to kinloch houran. they never would have done so in the time of the last lord. had walter all at once become more friendly, more open-hearted, perhaps feeling in the company of his neighbours a certain safety? underwood was confounded by this new suggestion. it did not please him. nothing could be worse for himself than that lord erradeen should find amusement in the society of the neighbourhood. there would be no more riot if this was the case, no "pleasure," no play; but perhaps a wife--most terrible of all anticipations. underwood had been deeply alarmed before by katie williamson's ascendancy; but when lord erradeen returned to his own influence, he had believed that risk to be over. if, however, it recurred again, and, in this moment while undefended by his, underwood's, protection, if the young fellow had rushed into the snare once more, the captain felt that the incident would acquire new significance. there were women whom he might have tolerated if better could not be. julia herbert was one whom he could perhaps--it was possible--have "got on with," though possibly she would have changed after her marriage; but with katie, underwood knew that he never would get on. if this were so he would have at once to disappear. all his hopes would be over--his prospect of gain or pleasure by means of lord erradeen. and he had "put up with" so much! nobody knew how much he had put up with. he had humoured the young fellow, and endured his fits of temper, his changes of purpose, his fantastic inconsistencies of every kind. what friendship it was on his part, after erradeen had deserted him, left him planted there--as if he cared for the d---- place where he had gone only to please the young'un! thus to put all his grievances in his pocket and hurry over land and sea to make sure that all was comfortable for the ungrateful young man! that was true friendship, by jove; what a man would do for a man! not like a woman that always had to be waited upon. captain underwood felt that his vested rights were being assailed, and that if it came to this it would be a thing to be resisted with might and main. a wife! what did erradeen want with a wife? surely it would be possible to put before him the charms of liberty once more and prevent the sacrifice. he walked along the side of the loch almost keeping up with the boat, hot with righteous indignation, in spite of the cold wind which had driven mrs. forrester into the house. presently he heard the sound of salutations on the water, of oars clanking upon rowlocks from a different quarter, and saw the boat from the isle--hamish rowing in his red shirt--meet with the large four-oared boat from birkenbraes and pause while the women's voices exchanged a few sentences, chorused by mr. williamson's bass. then the smaller boat came on towards the shore, towards the point near which a carriage was waiting. captain underwood quickened his steps a little, and he it was who presented himself to julia herbert's eyes as she approached the bit of rocky beach, and hurrying down, offered his hand to help her. "what a strange meeting," cried julia; "what a small world, as everybody says! who could have thought, captain underwood, of seeing you here?" "i might reply, if the surprise were not so delightful, who could have thought, miss herbert, of seeing you here? for myself it is a second home to me, and has been for years." "my reason for being here is simple. let me introduce you to my cousin, lady herbert. sir thomas has got the shootings lower down. i suppose you are with lord erradeen." lady herbert had given the captain a very distant bow. she did not like the looks of him, as indeed it has been stated no ladies did, whether in sloebury or elsewhere; but at the name of erradeen she paid a more polite attention, though the thought of her horses waiting so long in the cold was already grievous to her. "i hope," she said, "that lord erradeen does not lodge his friends in that old ruin, as he does himself, people say." "we are at auchnasheen, a house you may see among the trees," said the captain. "feudal remains are captivating, but not to live in. does our friend walter know, miss herbert, what happiness awaits him in your presence here?" "what a pretty speech," julia cried; "far prettier than anything walter could muster courage to say. no, captain underwood, he does not. it was all settled quite suddenly. i did not even know that he was here." "julia, the horses have been waiting a long time," said lady herbert. "i have no doubt lord erradeen is a very interesting subject--but i don't know what barber (who was the coachman) will say. i shall be glad to see your friends any day at luncheon. tell lord erradeen, please. we are two women alone, sir thomas is on the hills all day; all the more we shall be glad to see him--i mean you both--if you will take pity on our loneliness. now, julia, we really must not wait any longer." "tell walter i shall look for him," said julia, kissing her hand as they drove away. underwood stood and looked after the carriage with varied emotions. as against katie williamson, he was overjoyed to have such an auxiliary--a girl who would not stand upon any punctilio--who would pursue her object with any assistance she could pick up, and would not be above an alliance defensive or offensive, a girl who knew the advantage of an influential friend. so far as that went he was glad: but, heavens! what a neighbourhood, bristling with women; a girl at every corner ready to decoy his prey out of his hands. he was rueful, even though he was in a measure satisfied. if he could play his cards sufficiently well to detach walter from both one and the other, to show the bondage which was veiled under julia's smiles and complacency, as well as under katie's uncompromising code, and to carry him off under their very eyes, that would indeed be a triumph; but failing that, it was better for him to make an ally of julia, and push her cause, than to suffer himself to be ousted by the other, the little parvenue, with her cool impertinence, who had been the first, he thought, to set walter against him. he walked back to auchnasheen, full of these thoughts, and of plans to recover his old ascendancy. he had expedients for doing this which would not bear recording, and a hundred hopes of awakening the passions, the jealousies, the vanity of the young man whom already he had been able to sway beyond his expectations. he believed that he had led walter by the nose, as he said, and had a mastery over him which would be easily recovered if he but got him for a day or two to himself. it was a matter of fact that he had done him much, if not fatal harm; and if the captain had been clever enough to know that he had no mastery whatever over his victim, and that walter was the slave of his own shifting and uneasy moods, of his indolences and sudden impulses, and immediate abandonment of himself to the moment, but not of captain underwood, that tempter might have done him still more harm. but he did not possess this finer perception, and thus lost a portion of his power. he went back to auchnasheen to find a comfortable dinner, a good fire, a cheerful room, full of light and comfort, which reminded him of "old days," which he gave a regretful yet comfortable thought to in passing--the time when he had waited, not knowing what moment the old lord, his former patron, should return from kinloch houran. and now he was waiting for the other--who was so unlike the old lord--and yet had already been of more use to underwood, and served him better in his own way, than the old lord had ever done. he was much softened, and even perhaps a little maudlin in his thoughts of walter as he sat over that comfortable fire. what was he about, poor boy? not so comfortable as this friend and retainer, who was drinking his wine and thinking of him. but he should find some one to welcome him when he returned. he should find a comfortable meal and good company, which was more than the foolish fellow would expect. it was foolish of him, in his temper, to dart away from those who really cared for him, who really could be of use to him; but by this time the young lord would be too glad, after his loneliness, to come back and find a faithful friend ready to make allowances for him, and so well acquainted with his circumstances here. so well acquainted with his circumstances! underwood, in his time, had no doubt wondered over these as much as any one; but that was long ago, and he had in the mean time become quite familiar with them, and did not any longer speculate on the subject. he had no supernatural curiosity for his part. he could understand that one would not like to see a ghost: and he believed in ghosts--in a fine, healthy, vulgar, natural apparition, with dragging chains and hollow groans. but as for anything else, he had never entered into the question, nor had he any thought of doing so now. however, as he sat by the fire with all these comfortable accessories round him, and listened now and then to hear if any one was coming, and sometimes was deceived by the wind in the chimneys, or the sound of the trees in the fresh breeze which had become keener and sharper since he came indoors, it happened, how he could not tell, that questions arose in the captain's mind such as he had never known before. the house was very still, the servants' apartments were at a considerable distance from the sitting-rooms, and all was very quiet. two or three times in the course of the evening, old symington, who had also come to see that everything was in order for his master, walked all the way from these retired regions through a long passage running from one end of the house to the other, to the great door, which he opened cautiously, then shut again, finding nobody in sight, and retired the same way as he came, his shoes creaking all the way. this interruption occurring at intervals had a remarkable effect upon underwood. he began to wait for its recurrence, to count the steps, to feel a thrill of alarm as they passed the door of the room in which he was sitting. oh, yes, no doubt it was symington, who always wore creaking shoes, confound him! but what if it were not symington? what if it might be some one else, some mysterious being who might suddenly open the door, and freeze into stone the warm, palpitating, somewhat unsteady person of a man who had eaten a very good dinner and drunk a considerable quantity of wine? this thought so penetrated his mind, that gradually all his thoughts were concentrated on the old servant's perambulation, watching for it before it came, thinking of it after it had passed. the steady and solemn march at intervals, which seemed calculated and regular, was enough to have impressed the imagination of any solitary person. and the captain was of a primitive simplicity of mind in some respects. his fears paralysed him; he was afraid to get up, to open the door, to make sure what it was. how could he tell that he might not be seized by the hair of the head by some ghastly apparition, and dragged into a chamber of horrors! he tried to fortify himself with more wine, but that only made his tremor worse. finally the panic came to a crisis, when symington, pausing, knocked at the library door. underwood remembered to have heard that no spirit could enter without invitation, and he shut his mouth firmly that no habitual "come in" might lay him open to the assault of the enemy. he sat breathless through the ensuing moment of suspense, while symington waited outside. the captain's hair stood up on his head; his face was covered with a profuse dew; he held by the table in an agony of apprehension when he saw the door begin to turn slowly upon its hinges. "my lord will not be home the night," said symington, slowly. the sight of the old servant scarcely quieted the perturbation of underwood. it had been a terrible day for symington. he was ashy pale or grey, as old men become when the blood is driven from their faces. he had not been able to get rid of the scared and terror-stricken sensation with which he had watched the birkenbraes party climbing the old stairs, and wandering as he thought at the peril of their lives upon the unsafe battlements. he had been almost violent in his calls to them to come down: but nobody had taken any notice, and they had talked about their guide and about the gentleman who was living with lord erradeen, till it seemed to symington that he must go distracted. "where there ever such fools--such idiots! since there is nobody staying with lord erradeen but me, his body servant," the old man had said tremulously to himself. at symington's voice the captain gave a start and a cry. even in the relief of discovering who it was, he could not quiet the excitement of his nerves. "it's you, old truepenny," he cried, yet looked at him across the table with a tremor, and a very forced and uncomfortable smile. "that's not my name," said symington, with, on his side, the irritation of a disturbed mind. "i'm saying that it's getting late, and my lord will not be home to-night." "by jove!" cried captain underwood, "when i heard you passing from one end of the house to the other, i thought it might be--the old fellow over there, coming himself----" "i cannot tell, sir, what you are meaning by the old fellow over there. there's no old fellow i know of but old macalister; and it was not for him you took me." "if you could have heard how your steps sounded through the house! by jove! i could fancy i hear them now." "where?" symington cried, coming in and shutting the door, which he held with his hand behind him, as if to bar all possible comers. and then the two men looked at each other, both breathless and pale. "sit down," said underwood. "the house feels chilly and dreary, nobody living in it for so long. have a glass of wine. one wants company in a damp, dreary old hole like this." "you are very kind, captain," said the old man; "but auchnasheen, though only my lord's shooting-box, is a modern mansion, and full of every convenience. it would ill become me to raise an ill name on it." "i wonder what erradeen's about?" said the captain. "i bet he's worse off than we are. how he must wish he was off with me on the other side of the channel." "captain! you will, maybe, think little of me, being nothing but a servant; but it is little good you do my young lord on the ither side of the channel." underwood laughed, but not with his usual vigour. "what can i do with your young lord," he said. "he takes the bit in his teeth, and goes--to the devil his own way." "captain, there are some that think the like of you sore to blame." underwood said nothing for a moment. when he spoke there was a quiver in his voice. "let me see the way to my room, symington. oh yes, i suppose it is the old room; but i've forgotten. i was there before? well, so i suppose; but i have forgotten. take the candle as i tell you, and show me the way." he had not the least idea what he feared, and he did not remember ever having feared anything before; but to-night he hung close to symington, following at his very heels. the old man was anxious and alarmed, but not in this ignoble way. he deposited the captain in his room with composure, who would but for very shame have implored him to stay. and then his footsteps sounded through the vacant house, going further and further off till they died away in the distance. captain underwood locked his door, though he felt it was a vain precaution, and hastened to hide his head under the bed-clothes: but he was well aware that this was a vain precaution too. chapter iv. it was on the evening of the day after captain underwood's arrival that lord erradeen left kinloch houran for auchnasheen. after labour, rest. he could not but compare as he walked along in the early falling autumnal twilight the difference between himself now, and the same self a year ago, when he had fled from the place of torture to the house of peace, a man nearly frantic with the consciousness of all the new bonds upon him, the uncomprehended powers against which he had to struggle, the sense of panic and impotence, yet of mad excitement and resistance, with which his brain was on flame. the recollection of the ensuing time spent at auchnasheen, when he saw no one, heard no voice but his own, yet lived through day after day of bewildering mental conflict, without knowing who it was against whom he contended, was burned in upon his recollection. all through that time he had been conscious of such a desire to flee as hurried the pace of his thoughts, and made the intolerable still more intolerable. his heart had sickened of the unbearable fight into which he was compelled like an unwilling soldier with death behind him. to resist had always been walter's natural impulse; but the impulse of flight had so mingled with it that his soul had been in a fever, counting no passage of days, but feeling the whole period long or short, he did not know which, as one monstrous uninterrupted day or night, in which the processes of thought were never intermitted. his mind was in a very different condition now. he had got over the early panic of nature. the blinding mists of terror had melted away from his eyes, and the novelty and horror of his position, contending with unseen dominations and powers, had almost ceased for the moment to affect his mind, so profoundly exhausted was he by the renewed struggle in which he had been engaged. the loch was veiled in mist, through which it glimmered faintly with broken reflections, the wooded banks presenting on every side a sort of ghostly outline, with the colour no more than indicated against the dreary confusion of air and vapour. at some points there was the glimpse of a blurred light, looking larger and more distant than it really was, the ruddy spot made by the open door of the little inn, the whiter and smaller twinkle of the manse window, the far-off point, looking no more than a taper light in the distance, that shone from the isle. there was in walter's mind a darkness and confusion not unlike the landscape. he was worn out: there was in him none of that vivid feeling which had separated between his human soul in its despair and the keen sweetness of the morning. now all was night within him and around. his arms had fallen from his hands. he moved along, scarcely aware that he was moving, feeling everything blurred, confused, indistinct in the earth about him and in the secret places of his soul. desire for flight he had none: he had come to see that it was impossible: and he had not energy enough to wish it. and fear had died out of him. he was not afraid. had he been joined on the darkling way by the personage of whom he had of late seen so much, it would scarcely have quickened his pulses. all such superficial emotion had died out of him: the real question was so much superior, so infinitely important in comparison with any such transitory tremors as these. but at the present moment he was not thinking at all, scarcely living, any more than the world around him was living, hushed into a cessation of all energy and almost of consciousness, looking forward to night and darkness and repose. it was somewhat surprising to him to see the lighted windows at auchnasheen, and the air of inhabitation about the house with which he had no agreeable associations, but only those which are apt to hang about a place in which one has gone through a fever, full of miserable visions, and the burning restlessness of disease. but when he stepped into the hall, the door being opened to him by symington as soon as his foot was heard on the gravel, and turning round to go into the library found himself suddenly in the presence of captain underwood, his astonishment and dismay were beyond expression. the dismay came even before the flush of anger, which was the first emotion that showed itself. underwood stood holding open the library door, with a smile that was meant to be ingratiating and conciliatory. he held out his hand, as walter, with a start and exclamation, recognised him. "yes," he said, "i'm here, you see. not so easy to get rid of when once i form a friendship. welcome to your own house, erradeen." walter did not say anything till he had entered the room and shut the door. he walked to the fire, which was blazing brightly, and placed himself with his back to it, in that attitude in which the master of a house defies all comers. "i did not expect to find you here," he said. "you take me entirely by surprise." "i had hoped it would be an agreeable surprise," said the captain, still with his most amiable smile. "i thought to have a friend's face waiting for you when you came back from that confounded place would be a relief." "what do you call a confounded place?" said walter, testily. "you know nothing about it, as far as i am aware. no, underwood, it is as well to speak plainly. it is not an agreeable surprise. i am sorry you have taken the trouble to come so far for me." "it was no trouble. if you are a little out of sorts, never mind. i am not a man to be discouraged for a hasty word. you want a little cheerful society----" "is that what you call yourself?" walter said with a harsh laugh. he was aware that there was a certain brutality in what he said; but the sudden sight of the man who had disgusted him even while he had most influenced him, and of whom he had never thought but with a movement of resentment and secret rage, affected him to a sort of delirium. he could have seized him with the force of passion and flung him into the loch at the door. it would have been no crime, he thought, to destroy such vermin off the face of the earth--to make an end of such a source of evil would be no crime. this was the thought in his mind while he stood upon his own hearth, looking at the man who was his guest and therefore sacred. as for captain underwood, he took no offence; it was not in his _rôle_ to do so, whatever happened. what he had to do was to regain, if possible, his position with the young man upon whom he had lived and enriched himself for the greater part of the year, to render himself indispensable to him as he had done to his predecessor. for this object he was prepared to bear everything, and laugh at all that was too strong to be ignored. he laughed now, and did his best, not very gracefully, to carry out the joke. he exerted himself to talk and please throughout the dinner, which walter went through in silence, drinking largely, though scarcely eating at all--for kinloch houran was not a place which encouraged an appetite. after dinner, in the midst of one of underwood's stories, walter lighted a candle abruptly, and saying he was going to bed, left his companion without apology or reason given. it was impossible to be more rude. the captain felt the check, for he had a considerable development of vanity, and was in the habit of amusing the people to whom he chose to make himself agreeable. but this affront, too, he swallowed. "he will have come to himself by morning," he said. in the morning, however, walter was only more gloomy and unwilling to listen, and determined not to respond. it was only when in the middle of the breakfast he received a note brought by a mounted messenger who waited for an answer, that he spoke. he flung it open across the table to underwood with a harsh laugh. "is this your doing, too?" he cried. "my doing, erradeen!" underwood knew very well what it was before he looked at it. it was from lady herbert, explaining that she had only just heard that lord erradeen was so near a neighbour, and begging him, if he was not, like all the other gentlemen, on the hills, that he would come ("and your friend captain underwood") to luncheon that day to cheer two forlorn ladies left all by themselves in this wilderness. "and you will meet an old friend," it concluded playfully. the composition was julia's, and had not been produced without careful study. "my doing!" said captain underwood. "can you suppose that _i_ want you to marry, erradeen?" it was a case, he thought, in which truth was best. walter started up from his seat. "marry!" he cried, with a half-shout of rage and dismay. "well, my dear fellow, i don't suppose you are such a fool; but, of course, that is what _she_ means. the fair julia----" "oblige me," cried lord erradeen, taking up once more his position on the hearth, "by speaking civilly when you speak of ladies in my house." "why, bless me, erradeen, you gave me the note----" "i was a fool--that is nothing new. i have been a fool since the first day when i met you and took you for something more than mortal. oh, and before that!" cried walter bitterly. "do not flatter yourself that you did it. it is of older date than you." "the fair julia----" underwood began; but he stopped when his companion advanced upon him threatening, with so gloomy a look and so tightly strained an arm that the captain judged it wise to change his tone. "i should have said, since we are on punctilio, that miss herbert and you are older acquaintances than you and i, erradeen." "fortunately you have nothing to do with that," walter said, perceiving the absurdity of his rage. then he walked to the window and looked out so long and silently that the anxious watcher began to think the incident over. but it was not till walter, after this period of reflection, had written a note and sent it to the messenger, that he ventured to speak. "you have accepted, of course. in the circumstances it would be uncivil----" walter looked at him for a moment, breaking off his sentence as if he had spoken. "i have something to tell you," he said. "my mother is coming to auchnasheen." "your mother!" underwood's voice ran into a quaver of dismay. "you will see that in the circumstances, as you say, i am forced to be uncivil. when my mother is here she will, of course, be the mistress of the house; and she, as you know----" "will not ask me to prolong my visit," said the captain, with an attempt at rueful humour. "i think we may say as much as that, erradeen." "i fear it is not likely," walter said. captain underwood gave vent to his feelings in a prolonged whistle. "you will be bored to death. mark my words, i know you well enough. you will never be able to put up with it. you will be ready to hang yourself in a week. you will come off to me. it is the best thing that could happen so far as i am concerned--wishing to preserve your friendship as i do----" "is it friendship, then, that has bound us together?" said lord erradeen. "what else? disinterested friendship on my part. i take your laugh rather ill, erradeen. what have i gained by it, i should like to know? i've liked you, and i liked the last man before you. i have put up with a great deal from you--tempers like a silly woman, vagaries of all sorts, discontent and abuse. why have i put up with all that?" "why indeed? i wish you had not," said the young man scornfully. "yes, you have put up with it, and made your pupil think the worse of you with every fresh exercise of patience. i should like to pay you for all that dirty work." "pay me!" the captain said, faltering a little. he was not a very brave man, though he could hold his own; and there was a force of passion and youth in his "pupil"--with what bitterness that word was said!--that alarmed him a little. besides, walter had a household of servants behind him--grooms, keepers, all sorts of people--who held captain underwood in no favour. "pay me! i don't know how you could pay me," he said. "i should like to do it--in one way; and i shall do it--in another," said walter still somewhat fiercely. then once more he laughed. he took out a pocket-book from his coat, and out of that a cheque. "you have been at some expense on my account," he said; "your journey has been long and rapid. i consider myself your debtor for that, and for the--good intention. will this be enough?" in the bitter force of his ridicule and dislike, walter held out the piece of paper as one holds a sweetmeat to a child. the other gave a succession of rapid glances at it to make out what it was. when he succeeded in doing so a flush of excitement and eagerness covered his face. he put out his hand nervously to clutch it with the excited look of the child before whom a prize is held out, and who catches at it before it is snatched away. but he would not acknowledge this feeling. "my lord," he said, with an appearance of dignity offended, "you are generous; but to pay me, as you say, and offer money in place of your friendship----" "it is an excellent exchange, underwood. this is worth something, if not very much--the other," said walter with a laugh, "nothing at all." perhaps this was something like what captain underwood himself thought, as he found himself, a few hours later, driving along the country roads towards the railway station, retracing the path which he had travelled two days before with many hopes and yet a tremor. his hopes were now over, and the tremor too; but there was something in his breast pocket better, for the moment at least, than any hopes, which kept him warm, even though the wind was cold. he had failed in his attempt to fix himself once more permanently on lord erradeen's shoulders--an attempt in which he had not been very sanguine. it was a desperate venture, he knew, and it had failed; but, at the same time, circumstances might arise which would justify another attempt, and that one might not fail: and, in the mean time, his heart rose with a certain elation when he thought of that signature in his breast pocket. _that_ was worth an effort, and nothing could diminish its value. friendship might fail, but a cheque is substantial. he had something of the dizzy feeling of one who has fallen from a great height, and has not yet got the giddiness of the movement out of his head. and yet he was not altogether discouraged. who could tell what turn the wheel of fortune might take? and, in the mean time, there was that bit of paper. the horse was fresh, and flew along the road, up and down, at a pace very different from that of big john's steeds, which had brought captain underwood to auchnasheen. about half-way along he came up to the waggonette from birkenbraes, in which was mr. braithwaite and his luggage, along with two other guests, ladies, bound for the station, and escorted by mr. williamson and katie, as was their way. "dear me, is that underwood?" cried mr. williamson with the lively and simple curiosity of rural use and wont. "so you're there, captain," he said, as the dog-cart came up behind the heavier carriage. "no, i'm not here--i'm going," said underwood, quickly, "hurrying to catch the train." "oh, there is plenty of time; we are going too (bless me," he said aside, "how many visitors think you they can have had in yon old place?) i am thinking ye have been with our young neighbour, lord erradeen." "that is an easy guess. i am leaving him, you mean. erradeen is a reformed character. he is turning over a new leaf--and full time too," captain underwood cried, raising his voice that he might be heard over the rattle of the two carriages. notwithstanding the cheque which kept him so warm, he had various grudges against walter, and did not choose to lose the opportunity for a little mischief. "it is always a good thing," said mr. williamson, "to turn over a new leaf. we have all great occasion to do that." "especially when there are so many of them," the captain cried, as his light cart passed the other. he met the party again at the station, where they had to wait for the train. katie stood by herself in a thoughtful mood while the departing guests consulted over their several boxes, and captain underwood seized the moment: "i am sorry to lose the fun," he said, in a confidential tone, "but i must tell you, miss williamson, what is going to happen. erradeen has been pursued up here into his stronghold by one of the many ladies----i expect to hear she has clutched hold of him before long, and then you'll have a wedding." "is that why you are going away, captain underwood?" "he has gone a little too far, you know, that is the truth," said the captain. "i am glad he is not going to take in any nice girl. i couldn't have stood by and seen that. i should have had to warn her people. even miss julia, by jove! i'm sorry for miss julia, if she gets him. but she is an old campaigner; she will know how to take care of herself." "is it because lord erradeen is so bad that you are leaving him, or because he is going to be good?" katie asked. captain underwood on ordinary occasions was a little afraid of her; but his virtuous object fortified him now. "oh, by jove! he goes too far," said underwood. "i am not squeamish, heaven knows, but he goes too far. i can speak now that it's all over between him and me. i never could bear to see him with nice girls; but he's got his match in miss julia. the fair julia--that is another pair of shoes." "who was he meaning with his fair julias?" said mr. williamson as they drove away. "yon's a scoundrel, if there ever was one, and young erradeen is well rid of him. but when thieves cast out, honest folk get their ain. would yon be true?" katie was in what her father called "a brown study," and did not care to talk. she only shook her head--a gesture which could be interpreted as any one pleased. "i am not sure," said mr. williamson, in reply. "he knows more about lord erradeen than any person on the loch. but who is the fair julia, and is he really to be married to her? i would like fine to hear all about it. i will call at auchnasheen in the afternoon and see what he has to say." but katie remained in her brown study, letting her father talk. she knew very well who the fair julia was. she remembered distinctly the scene at burlington house. she saw with the clearest perception what the tactics were of the ladies at the lodge. katie had been somewhat excited by the prospect of being oona's rival, which was like something in a book. it was like the universal story of the young man's choice, not between venus and minerva, or between good and evil, but perhaps, katie thought, between poetry and prose, between the ideal and the practical. she was interested in that conflict and not unwilling in all kindness and honour to play her part in it. oona would be the ideal bride for him, but she herself, katie felt, would be better in a great many ways, and she did not feel that she would have any objection to marry lord erradeen. but here was another rival with whom she did not choose to enter the lists. it is to be feared that katie in her heart classified miss herbert as vice, as the sinner against whom every man is to be warned, and turned with some scorn from any comparison with her meretricious attractions. but she was fair and just, and her heart had nothing particular to do with the matter; so that she was able calmly to wait for information, which was not oona's case. it had been entirely at random that lord erradeen had announced his mother's approaching arrival to underwood. the idea had come into his mind the moment before he made use of it, and he had felt a certain amusement in the complete success of this hastily-assumed weapon. it had been so effectual that he began to think it might be available in other conflicts as well as this: and in any case he felt himself pledged to make it a matter of fact. he walked to the village when underwood had gone, to carry at once his intention into effect. though it was only a cluster of some half-dozen houses, it had a telegraph-office--as is so general in the highlands--and walter sent a brief, emphatic message, which he felt would carry wild excitement into sloebury. "you will do me a great favour if you will come at once, alone," was walter's message. he was himself slightly excited by it. he began to think over all those primitive relationships of his youth as he walked along the quiet road. there was sweetness in them, but how much conflict, trouble, embarrassment!--claims on one side to which the other could not respond--a sort of authority, which was no authority--a duty which did nothing but establish grievances and mutual reproach. his mind was still in the state of exhaustion which captain underwood had only temporarily disturbed; and a certain softening was in the weakened faculties, which were worn out with too much conflict. poor mother, after all! he could remember, looking back, when it was his greatest pleasure to go home to her, to talk to her, pouring every sort of revelation into her never-wearied ears; all his school successes and tribulations, all about the other fellows, the injustices that were done, the triumphs that were gained. could women interest themselves in all that as she had seemed to interest herself? or had she sometimes found it a bore to have all these schoolboy experiences poured forth upon her? miss merivale had very plainly thought it a bore; his voice had given her a headache. but mrs. methven never had any headaches, or anything that could cloud her attention. he remembered now that his mother was not a mere nursery woman--that she read a great deal more than he himself did, knew many things he did not know, was not silly, or a fool, or narrow-minded, as so many women are. was it not a little hard, after all, that she should have nothing of her son but the schoolboy prattle? she had been everything to him when he was a boy, and now she was nothing to him; perhaps all the time she might have been looking forward to the period when he should be a man, and have something more interesting to talk over with her than a cricket-match--for, to be sure, when one came to think of it, she could have no personal interest in a cricket-match. a momentary _serrement_ of compunction came to walter's heart. poor mother! he said to himself; perhaps it was a little hard upon her. and she must have the feeling, to make it worse, that she had a right to something better. he could not even now get his mind clear about that right. as he returned from the telegraph-office he too met the waggonette from birkenbraes, which was stopped at sight of him with much energy on the part of mr. williamson. "we've just met your friend captain underwood. if you'll not take it amiss, lord erradeen, i will say that i'm very glad you're not keeping a man like that about you. but what is this about--a lady? i hear there's a lady--the fair----what did he call her, katie? i am not good at remembering names." "it is of no consequence," said katie, with a little rising colour, "what such a man said." "that's true, that's true," said her father; "but still, erradeen, you must mind we are old friends now, and let us know what's coming. the fair----toots, i thought of it a minute ago? it's ridiculous to forget names." "you may be sure i shall let you know what's coming. my mother is coming," walter said. and this piece of news was so unexpected and startling that the williamsons drove off with energy to spread it far and near. mr. williamson himself was as much excited as if it had been of personal importance to him. "now that will settle the young man," he said; "that will put many things right. there has not been a lady at auchnasheen since ever i have been here. a mother is the next best thing to a wife, and very likely the one is in preparation for the other, and ye will all have to put on your prettiest frocks for her approval." he followed this with one of his big laughs, looking round upon a circle in which there were various young persons who were very marriageable. "but i put no faith in underwood's fair--what was it he called her?" mr. williamson said. chapter v. two days after, mrs. methven arrived at kinloch houran by the afternoon coach, alone. she had interpreted very literally the telegram which had brought such a tremor yet such a movement of joy to her heart. her son wanted her. perhaps he might be ill, certainly it must be for something serious and painful that she was called; yet he wanted her! she had been very quiet and patient, waiting if perhaps his heart might be touched and he might recall the tie of nature and his own promises, feeling with a sad pride that she wanted nothing of him but his love, and that without that the fine houses and the new wealth were nothing to her. she was pleased even to stand aloof, to be conscious of having in no way profited by walter's advancement. she had gained nothing by it, she wished to gain nothing by it. if walter were well, then there was no need for more. she had enough for herself without troubling him. so long as all was well! but this is at the best a forlorn line of argument, and it cannot be doubted that mrs. methven's bosom throbbed with a great pang of disappointment when she sat and smiled to conceal it, and answered questions about walter, yet could not say that she had seen him or any of his "places in scotland," or knew much more than her questioners did. when his message arrived her heart leapt in her breast. there were no explanations, no reason given, but that imperative call, such as mothers love to have addressed to them: "come;" all considerations of her own comfort set aside in the necessity for her which had arisen at last. another might have resented so complete an indifference to what might happen to suit herself. but there are connections and relationships in which this is the highest compliment. he knew that it did not matter to her what her own convenience was, as long as he wanted her. she got up from her chair at once, and proceeded to put her things together to get ready for the journey. with a smiling countenance she prepared herself for the night train. she would not even take a maid. "he says, alone. he must have some reason for it, i suppose," she said to miss merivale. "i am the reason," said cousin sophy: "he doesn't want me. you can tell him, with my love, that to travel all night is not at all in my way, and he need have had no fear on that subject." but mrs. methven would not agree to this, and departed hurriedly without any maid. she was surprised a little, yet would not allow herself to be displeased, that no one came to meet her: but it was somewhat forlorn to be set down on the side of the loch in the wintry afternoon, with the cold, gleaming water before her, and no apparent way of getting to the end of her journey. "oh yes, mem, you might drive round the head of the loch: but it's a long way," the landlady of the little inn said, smoothing down her apron at the door, "and far simpler just crossing the water, as everybody does in these parts." mrs. methven was a little nervous about crossing the water. she was tired and disappointed, and a chill had crept to her heart. while she stood hesitating a young lady came up, whose boat waited for her on the beach, a man in a red shirt standing at the bow. "it is a lady for auchnasheen, miss oona," said the landlady, "and no boat. duncan is away, and for the moment i have not a person to send: and his lordship will maybe be out on the hill, or he will have forgotten, or maybe he wasna sure when to expect you, mem?" "no, he did not know when to expect me. i hope there is no illness," said mrs. methven, with a thrill of apprehension. at this the young lady came forward with a shy yet frank grace. "if you will let me take you across," she said, "my boat is ready. i am oona forrester. lord erradeen is quite well i think, and i heard that he expected--his mother." "yes," said mrs. methven. she gave the young stranger a penetrating look. her own aspect was perhaps a little severe, for her heart had been starved and repressed, and she wore it very warm and low down in her bosom, never upon her sleeve. there rose over oona's countenance a soft and delicate flush under the eyes of walter's mother. she had nothing in the world to blush for, and probably that was why the colour rose. they were of infinite interest to each other, two souls meeting, as it were, in the dark, quite unknown to each other and yet--who could tell?--to be very near perhaps in times to come. the look they interchanged was a mutual question. then mrs. methven felt herself bound to take up her invariable defence of her son. "he did not, most likely, think that i could arrive so soon. i was wrong not to let him know. if i accept your kindness will it be an inconvenience to you?" this question was drowned in oona's immediate response and in the louder protest of mrs. macfarlane. "bless me, mem, you canna know the loch! for there is nobody but would put themselves about to help a traveller: and above all miss oona, that just has no other thought. colin, put in the lady's box intill the boat, and hamish, he will give ye a hand." thus it was settled without farther delay. it seemed to the elder lady like a dream when she found herself afloat upon this unknown water, the mountains standing round, with their heads all clear and pale in the wonderful atmosphere from which the last rays of the sunset had but lately faded, while down below in this twilight scene the colour had begun to go out of the autumn trees and red walls of the ruined castle, at which she looked with a curiosity full of excitement. "that is----?" she said pointing with a strange sensation of eagerness. "that is kinloch houran," said oona, to whose sympathetic mind, she could not tell how, there came a tender, pitying comprehension of the feelings of the mother, thus thrust alone and without any guide into the other life of her son. "it is very strange to me--to see the place where walter----you know perhaps that neither my son nor i were ever here until he----" "oh yes," oona said hastily, interrupting the embarrassed speech; and she added, "my mother and i have been here always, and everybody on the loch knows everybody else. we were aware----" and then she paused too; but her companion took no notice, her mind being fully occupied. "i feel," she said, "like a woman in a dream." it was very still on the loch, scarcely a breath stirring (which was very fortunate, for mrs. methven, unaccustomed, had a little tremor for the dark water even though so smooth). the autumnal trees alone, not quite put out by the falling darkness, seemed to lend a little light as they hung, reflected, over the loch--a redder cluster here and there looking like a fairy lamp below the water. a thousand suggestions were in the air, and previsions of she knew not what, a hidden life surrounding her on every side. her brain was giddy, her heart full. by-and-by she turned to her young companion, who was so sympathetically silent, and whose soft voice when she spoke, with the little cadence of an accent unfamiliar yet sweet, had a half-caressing sound which touched the solitary woman. "you say your mother and you," she said. "are you too an only child?" "oh no! there are eight of us: but i am the youngest, the only one left. all the boys are away. we live on the isle. i hope you will come and see us. my mother will be glad----" "and she is not afraid to trust you--by yourself? it must be a happy thing for a woman to have a daughter," mrs. methven said, with a sigh. "the boys, as you say, go away." "nobody here is afraid of the loch," said oona. "accidents happen--oh, very rarely. mamma is a little nervous about yachting, for the winds come down from the hills in gusts; but hamish is the steadiest oar, and there is no fear. do you see now the lights at auchnasheen? there is some one waiting, at the landing-place. it will be lord erradeen, or some one from the house. hamish, mind the current. you know how it sweeps the boat up the loch?" "it will just be the wash of that confounded steam-boat," hamish said. the voices bounded in the air without conveying any sense to her mind. was that walter, the vague line of darker shadow upon the shade? was it his house she was going to, his life that she was entering once more? all doubts were put to an end speedily by walter's voice. "is it hamish?" he cried out. "oh, lord erradeen, it is me," cried oona, in her soft scotch. "and i am bringing you your mother." the boat grated on the bank as she spoke, and this disguised the tremor in her voice, which mrs. methven, quite incapable of distinguishing anything else, was yet fully sensible of. she stepped out tremulously into her son's arms. "mother," he cried, "what must you think of me for not coming to meet you? i never thought you could be here so soon." "i should have come by telegraph if i could," she said, with an agitated laugh: so tired, so tremulous, so happy, the strangest combination of feelings overwhelming her. but still she was aware of a something, a tremor, a tingle in oona's voice. the boat receded over the water almost without a pause, hamish under impulsion of a whispered word, having pushed off again as soon as the traveller and her box were landed. walter paused to call out his thanks over the water, and then he drew his mother's arm within his, and led her up the bank. "where is jane?" he said. "have you no one with you? have you travelled all night, and alone, mother, for me?" "for whom should i do it, but for you? and did you think i would lose a minute after your message, walter? but you are well, there is nothing wrong with your health?" "nothing wrong with my health," he said, with a half-laugh. "no, that is safe enough. i have not deserved that you should come to me, mother----" "there is no such word as deserving between mother and son," she said tremulously, "so long as you want me, walter." "take care of those steps," was all he said. "we are close now to the house. i hope you will find your rooms comfortable. i fear they have not been occupied for some time. but what shall you do without a maid? perhaps the housekeeper----" "you said to come alone, walter." "oh yes. i was afraid of cousin sophy; but you could not think i wanted to impair your comfort, mother? here we are at the door, and here is symington, very glad to receive his lady." "but you must not let him call me so." "why not? you are our lady to all of us. you are the lady of the house, and i bid you welcome to it, mother," he said, pausing to kiss her. she had a thousand things to forgive, but in that moment they were as though they had not been. and there was not much more said until she had settled down into possession of the library, which answered instead of a drawing-room: had dined, and been brought back to the glowing peat fire which gave an aromatic breath of warmth and character to a highland house. when all the business of the arrival had thus been gone through, there came a moment when it was apparent that subjects of more importance must be entered upon. there was a pause, and an interval of complete silence which seemed much longer than it really was. walter stood before the fire for some time, while she sat close by, her hands clasped in her lap, ready to attend. then he began to move about uneasily, feeling the compulsion of the moment, yet unprepared with anything to say. at length it was she who began. "you sent for me, walter?" she said. "yes, mother." was there nothing more to tell her? he threw into disorder the books on the table, and then he came back again, and once more faced her, standing with his back to the fire. "my dear," she said hesitating, "it is with no reproach i speak, but only----there was some reason for sending for me?" he gave once more a nervous laugh. "you have good reason to be angry if you will; but i'll tell you the truth, mother. i made use of you to get rid of underwood. he followed me here, and i told him you were coming, and that he could not stay against the will of the mistress of the house. then i was bound to ask you----" the poor lady drew back a little, and instinctively put her hand to her heart, in which there was a hot thrill of sensation, as if an arrow had gone in. and then, in the pang of it, she laughed too, and cried-- "you were bound, to be sure, to fulfil your threat. and this is why--this is why, walter----" she could not say more without being hysterical, and departing from every rule she had made for herself. meanwhile, walter stood before her, feeling in his own heart the twang of that arrow which had gone through hers, and the pity of it and wonder of it, with a poignant realisation of all; and yet found nothing to say. after a while mrs. methven regained her composure, and spoke with a smile that was almost more pathetic than tears. "after all, it was a very good reason. i am glad you used me to get rid of that man." "i always told you, mother," he said, "that you had a most absurd prejudice against that man. there is no particular harm in the man. i had got tired of him. he is well enough in his own way, but he was out of place here." "well, walter, we need not discuss captain underwood. but don't you see it is natural that i should exaggerate his importance by way of giving myself the better reason for having come?" the touch of bitterness and sarcasm that was in her words made walter start from his place again, and once more turn over the books on the table. she was not a perfect woman to dismiss all feeling from what she said, and her heart was wrung. after a while he returned to her again. "mother, i acknowledge you have a good right to be displeased. but that is not all. i am glad, anyhow--heartily glad to have you here." she looked up at him with her eyes full, and quivering lips. everything went by impulse in the young man's mind, and this look--in which for once in his life he read the truth, the eagerness to forgive, the willingness to forget, the possibility, even in the moment of her deepest pain, of giving her happiness--went to his heart. after all it is a wonderful thing to have a human creature thus altogether dependent upon your words, your smile, ready to encounter all things for you, without hesitation, without a grudge. and why should she? what had he ever done for her? and she was no fool. these thoughts had already passed through his mind with a realisation of the wonder of it all, which seldom strikes the young at sight of the devotion of the old. all these things flashed back upon him at the sight of the dumb anguish yet forgiveness in her eyes. "mother," he cried, "there's enough of this between you and me. i want you not for underwood, but for everything. why should you care for a cad like me? but you do----" "care for you? oh, my boy!" "i know; there you sit that have travelled night and day because i held up my finger: and would give me your life if you could, and bear everything, and never change and never tire. why, in the name of god, why?" he cried with an outburst. "what have i ever done that you should do this for me? you are worth a score of such as i am, and yet you make yourself a slave--" "oh, walter, my dear! how vain are all these words. i am your mother," she said. presently he drew a chair close to her and sat down beside her. "all these things have been put before me," he said, "to drive me to despair. i have tried to say that it was this vile lordship, and the burden of the family, that has made me bad, mother. but you know better than that," he said, looking up at her with a stormy gleam in his face that could not be called a smile, "and so do i." "walter, god forbid that i should ever have thought you bad. you have been led astray." "to do--what i wanted to do," he said with another smile, "that is what is called leading astray between a man and those who stand between him and the devil; but i have talked with one who thinks of no such punctilios. mother, vice deserves damnation; isn't that your creed?" "walter!" "oh, i know; but listen to me. if that were so, would a woman like you stand by the wretch still?" "my dearest boy! you are talking wildly. there are no circumstances, none! in which i should not stand by you." "that is what i thought," he said, "you and--but they say that you don't know, you women, how bad a man can be: and that if you knew--and then as for god----" "god knows everything, walter." "ay: and knows that never in my life did i care for or appeal to him, till in despair. if you think of it, these are not things a man can do, mother: take refuge with women who would loathe him if they knew; or with god, who does know that only in desperation, only when nothing else is left to him, he calls out that name like a spell. yes, that is all; like an incantation, to get rid of the fiend." the veins were swollen on walter's forehead; great drops of moisture hung upon it; on the other hand his lips were parched and dry, his eyes gleaming with a hot treacherous lustre. mrs. methven, as she looked at him, grew sick with terror. she began to think that his brain was giving way. "what am i to say to you?" she cried; "who has been speaking so? it cannot be a friend, walter. that is not the way to bring back a soul." he laughed, and the sound alarmed her still more. "there was no friendship intended," he said, "nor reformation either. it was intended--to make me a slave." "to whom, oh! to whom?" he had relieved his mind by talking thus; but it was by putting his burden upon her. she was agitated beyond measure by these partial confidences. she took his hands in hers, and pleaded with him-- "oh, walter, my darling, what has happened to you? tell me what you mean." "i am not mad, mother, if that is what you think." "i don't think so, walter. i don't know what to think. tell me. oh, my boy, have pity upon me; tell me." "you will do me more good, mother, if you will tell me--how i am to get this burden off, and be a free man." "the burden of--what? sin? oh, my son!" she cried, rising to her feet, with tears of joy streaming from her eyes. she put her hands upon his head and bade god bless him. god bless him! "there is no doubt about that; no difficulty about that," she said; "for everything else in the world there may be uncertainty, but for this none. god is more ready to forgive than we are to ask. if you wish it sincerely with all your heart, it is done. he is never far from any of us. he is here, walter--here, ready to pardon!" he took her hands which she had put upon him, and looked at her, shaking his head. "mother, you are going too fast," he said. "i want deliverance, it is true; but i don't know if it is _that_ i mean." "that is at the bottom of all, walter." he put her softly into her chair, and calmed her agitation; then he began to walk up and down the room. "that is religion," he said. "i suppose it is at the bottom of all. what was it you used to teach me, mother, about a new heart? can a man enter a second time--and be born? that seems all so visionary when one is living one's life. you think of hundreds of expedients first. to thrust it away from you, and forget all about it; but that does not answer; to defy it and go the other way out of misery and spite. then to try compromises; marriage, for instance, with a wife perhaps, one thinks----" "my dear," said mrs. methven, with a sad sinking of disappointment in her heart after her previous exultation, yet determined that her sympathy should not fail, "if you had a good wife no one would be so happy as i--a good girl who would help you to live a good life." here he came up to her again, and, leaning against the table, burst into a laugh. but there was no mirth in it. a sense of the ludicrous is not always mirthful. "a girl," he said, "mother, who would bring another fortune to the family: who would deluge us with money, and fill out the lines of the estates, and make peace--peace between me and--and not a bad girl either," he added with a softening tone, "far too good for me. an honest, upright little soul, only not--the best; only not the one who--would hate me if she knew----" "walter," said mrs. methven, trembling, "i don't understand you. your words seem very wild to me. i am all confused with them, and my brain seems to be going. what is it you mean? oh, if you would tell me all you mean and not only a part which i cannot understand!" there never happens in any house a conversation of a vital kind, which is not interrupted at a critical moment by the entrance of the servants, those legitimate intruders who can never be staved off. it was symington now who came in with tea, which, with a woman's natural desire to prevent any suspicion of agitation in the family, she accepted. when he had gone the whole atmosphere was changed. walter had seated himself by the fire with the newspapers which had just come in, and all the emotion and _attendrissement_ were over. he said to her, looking up from his reading-- "by-the-bye, mother, julia herbert is here with some cousins; they will be sure to call on you. but i don't want to have any more to do with them than we can help. you will manage that?" "julia herbert," she said. the countenance which had melted into so much softness, froze again and grew severe. "here! why should she be here? indeed, i hope i shall be able to manage that, as you say." but oh, what ignoble offices for a woman who would have given her life for him as he knew! to frighten away underwood, to "manage" julia. patience! so long as it was for her boy. chapter vi. on the next morning after his mother's arrival, lord erradeen set out early for birkenbraes. everything pushed him towards a decision; even her prompt arrival, which he had not anticipated, and the clearing away from his path of the simpler and more easy difficulties that beset him, by her means. but what was far more than this was the tug at his heart, the necessity that lay before him to satisfy, one way or the other, the demands of his tyrant. he could not send away that spiritual enemy, who held him in his grip, as he did the vulgar influence of underwood. _that_ had disgusted him almost from the first; he had never tolerated it, even when he yielded to it; and the effort he had made in throwing it over had been exhilarating to him, and gave a certain satisfaction to his mind. but now that was over, and he had returned again to the original question, and found himself once more confronted by that opponent who could not be shaken off--who, one way or other, must be satisfied or vanquished, if life were to be possible. vanquished? how was he to be vanquished?--by a pure man and a strong--by a pure woman and her love--by the help of god against a spiritual tyranny. he smiled to himself as he hurried along the road, thinking of the hopelessness of all this--himself neither pure nor strong; and oona, who, if she knew--and god, whom, as his tempter had said, he had never sought nor thought of till now. he hurried along to try if the second best was within his reach; perhaps even that might fail him for anything he knew. the thought of meeting the usual party in the house of the williamsons was so abhorrent to him, and such a disgust had risen in his mind of all the cheerful circumstances of the big, shining house, that he set out early with the intention of formally seeking an interview with katie, and thus committing himself from the beginning. the morning was bright and fair, with a little shrill wind about, which brought the yellow leaves fluttering to his feet, and carried them across him as he walked--now detached and solitary, now in little drifts and heaps. he hurried along, absorbed in his own thoughts, shutting his eyes to the vision of the isle, as it lay all golden, russet, and brown upon the surface of the water which gave its colours back; walter would not look nor see the boat pushing round the corner, with the back of hamish's red shirt alone showing, as the prow came beyond the shade of the trees. he did not see the boat, and yet he knew it was there, and hurried, hurried on to escape all reminders. the great door at birkenbraes stood open, as was its wont--the great stone steps lying vacant in the sunshine, and everything still about. it was the only hour at which the place was quiet. the men were out on the hill, the ladies following such rational occupations as they might have to resort to, and the house had an air of relief and repose. walter felt that he pronounced his own fate when he asked to see miss williamson. "mr. williamson is out, my lord," the solemn functionary said, who was far more important and dignified than the master of the house. "i asked to see miss williamson," lord erradeen repeated, with a little impatience; and he saw the man's eyebrows raised. so far as the servants were concerned, and through them the whole district, walter's "intentions" stood revealed. katie williamson was alone. she was in her favourite room--the room especially given over to her amusements and occupations. it was not a small room, for such a thing scarcely existed in birkenbraes. it was full of windows, great expanses of plate glass, through which the mountains and the loch appeared uninterrupted, save by a line of framework here and there, with a curious open-air effect. it was in one of the corners of the house, and the windows formed two sides of the brilliant place; on the others were mirrors reflecting the mountains back again. she sat between them, her little fair head the only solid thing which the light encountered. when she rose, with a somewhat astonished air, to receive her visitor, her trim figure, neat and alert, stood out against the background of the trees and rocks on the lower slopes of the hills. a curious transparency, distinctness, and absence of privacy and mystery were in the scene. the two seemed to stand together there in the sight of all the world. "lord erradeen!" katie said, with surprise, almost consternation. "but if i had been told, i should have come down-stairs to you. nobody but my great friends, nobody but women, ever come here." "i should have thought that any one might come. there are no concealments here," he said, expressing the sentiment of the place unconsciously. then, seeing that katie's colour rose: "your boudoir is not all curtained and shadowy, but open and candid--as you are." "that last has saved you," said katie, with a laugh. "i know what you mean--and that is that my room (for it is not a boudoir--i never _boude_) is far too light, too clear for the fashion. but this is my fashion, and people who come to me must put up with it." she added, after a moment: "what did you say to sanderson, lord erradeen, to induce him to bring you here?" "i said i wanted to see miss williamson." "that was understood," said katie, once more with an increase of colour, and looking at him with a suppressed question in her eyes. her heart gave a distinct knock against her breast, but did not jump up and flutter, as hearts less well regulated will do in such circumstances; for she too perceived what sanderson had perceived, that the interview was not one to take place amid all the interruptions of the drawing-room. sanderson was a very clever person, and his young mistress agreed with him; but, nevertheless, made a private memorandum that he should have notice, and that she would speak to papa. "yes, i think it must be easily understood. i have come to you with a great deal that is very serious to say." "you look very serious," said katie; and then she added, hurriedly, "and i want very much to speak to you, lord erradeen. i want you to tell me--who was that gentleman at kinloch houran? i have never been able to get him out of my mind. is he paying you a visit? what is his name? has he been in this country before? but oh, to be sure, he must have been, for he knew everything about the castle. i want to know, lord erradeen----" "after you have heard what i have got to say----" "no, not after--before. i tremble when i think of him. it is ridiculous, i know; but i never had any such sensation before. i should think he must be a mesmerist, or something of that sort," katie said, with a pale and nervous smile; "though i don't believe in mesmerism," she added, quickly. "you believe in nothing of the kind--is it not so? you put no faith in the stories about my family, in the influence of the past on the present, in the despotism--but why say anything on that subject. you laugh." "i believe in superstition," said katie somewhat tremulously, "and that it impresses the imagination, and puts you in a condition to believe--things. and then there is a pride in having anything of the sort connected with one's own family," she said recovering herself. "if it was our ghost i should believe in it too." "ghost--is not a word that means much?" walter said. and then there was a pause. it seemed to him that his lips were sealed, and that he had no longer command of the ordinary words. he had known what he had meant to say when he came, but the power seemed to have gone from him. he stood and looked out upon the wide atmosphere, and the freedom of the hills, with a blank in his mind, and that sense that nothing is any longer of importance or meaning which comes to those who are baffled in their purpose at the outset. it was katie who with a certain sarcasm in her tone recalled him to himself. "you came--because you had something serious to say to me, lord erradeen." she was aware of what he intended to say; but his sudden pause at the very beginning had raised the mocking spirit in katie. she was ready to defy and provoke, and silence with ridicule, the man whom she had no objection to accept as her husband--provided he found his voice. "it is true--i had something very serious to say. i came to ask you whether you could--" all this time he was not so much as looking at her; his eyes were fixed dreamily and rather sadly upon the landscape, which somehow seemed so much more important than the speck of small humanity which he ought to have been addressing. but at this point walter recollected himself, and came in as it were from the big, silent, observing world, to katie, sitting expectant, divided between mockery and excitement, with a flush on her cheeks, but a contraction of her brows, and an angry yet smiling mischief in her eyes. "to ask you," he said, "whether you would--pass your life with me. i am not much worth the taking. there is a poor title, there is a family which we might restore and--emancipate perhaps. you are rich, it would be of no advantage to you. but at all events it would not be like asking you to banish yourself, to leave all you cared for. i have little to say for myself," he went on after a pause with a little more energy, "you know me well enough. whether i should ever be good for anything would--most likely--rest with you. i am at present under great depression--in trouble and fear--" here he came to another pause, and looked out upon the silent mountains and great breadths of vacant air in which there was nothing to help: then with a sigh turned again and held out his hand. "will you have me--katie?" he said. katie sat gazing at him with a wonder which had by degrees extinguished the sarcasm, the excitement, the expectation, that were in her face. she was almost awestricken by this strangest of all suits that could be addressed to a girl--a demand for herself which made no account of herself, and missed out love and every usual preliminary. it was serious indeed--as serious as death: more like that than the beginning of the most living of all links. she could not answer him with the indignation which in other circumstances she might have felt. it was too solemn for any ebullition of feeling. she felt overawed, little as this mood was congenial to her. "lord erradeen," she said, "you seem to be in great trouble." he made an affirmative movement of his head, but said no more. "--or you would not put such a strange question to me," she went on. "why should i have you? when a man offers himself to a girl he says it is because he loves her. you don't love me--" she made a momentary breathless pause with a half-hope of being interrupted; but save by a motion of his hand, walter made no sign. "you don't love me," she went on with some vehemence, "nor do you ask me to love you. such a proposal might be an insult. but i don't think you mean it as an insult." "not that. you know better. anything but that!" "no--i don't think it is that. but what is it then, lord erradeen?" her tone had a certain peremptory sound which touched the capricious spring by which the young man's movements were regulated. he came to himself. "miss williamson," he said, "when you ran away from me in london it was imminent that i should ask you this question. it was expected on all sides. you went away, i have always believed, to avoid it." "why should it have been imminent? i went away," cried katie, forgetting the contradiction, "because some one came in who seemed to have a prior right. she is here now with the same meaning." "she has no prior right. she has no right at all, nor does she claim any," he said hurriedly. "it is accident. katie! had you stayed, all would have been determined then, and one leaf of bitter folly left out of my life." "supposing it to be so," she said calmly, "i am not responsible for your life, lord erradeen. why should i be asked to step in and save you from--bitter folly or anything else? and this life that you offer me, are you sure it is fit for an honest girl to take? the old idea that a woman should be sacrificed to reform a man has gone out of fashion. is that the _rôle_ you want me to take up?" katie cried, rising to her feet in her excitement. "captain underwood (whose word i would never take) said you were bad, unworthy a good woman. is that true?" "yes," he said in a low tone, "it is true." katie gazed at him for a moment, and then in her excitement sat down and cried, covering her face with her hands. she it was, though she was not emotional, who was overcome with feeling. walter stood gazing at her with a sort of stupefaction, seeing the scene pass with a sense that he was a spectator rather than an actor in it, his dark figure swaying slightly against the clearness of the landscape which took so strange a part in all that was happening. it had passed now altogether out of his hands. as for katie, it would be impossible to tell what sudden softening, what pity, mingled with keen vexation and annoyance, forced these tears from her eyes. her heart revolted against him and melted towards him all at once. her pride would not let her accept such a proposal; and yet she would have liked to accept him, to take him in hand, to be his providence, and the moulder of his fate. a host of hurrying thoughts and sentiments rushed headlong through her mind. she had it in her to do it, better than any silly woman of the world, better than a creature of visionary soul like oona. she was practical, she was strong, she could do it. but then all her pride rose up in arms. she wept a few hot impatient tears which were irrestrainable: then raised her head again. "i am very sorry for you," she said. "if you were my brother, lord erradeen, i would help you with all my might, or if i--cared for you more than you care for me. but i don't," she added after a pause. he made an appealing, deprecating movement with his hands, but did not speak. "i almost wish i did," said katie regretfully; "if i had been fond of you i should have said yes: for you are right in thinking i could do it. i should not have minded what went before. i should have taken you up and helped you on. i know that i could have done it; but then i am not--fond of you," she said slowly. she did not look at him as she spoke; but had he renewed his claim upon her, even with his eyes, katie would have seen it, and might have allowed herself to be persuaded still. but walter said nothing. he stood vaguely in the light, without a movement, accepting whatever she might choose to say. she remained silent for a time, waiting. and then katie sprang to her feet again, all the more indignant and impatient that she had been so near yielding, had he but known. "well!" she said, "is it i that am to maintain the conversation? have you anything more to say, lord erradeen?" "i suppose not," he answered slowly. "i came to you hoping perhaps for deliverance, at least partial--for deliverance--now that you will not, there is nothing for it but a struggle to the death." she looked at him with a sort of vertigo of amazement. not a word about her, no regret for losing her, not a touch of sentiment, of gratitude, not even any notice of what she had said! the sensation of awe came back to her as she stood before this insensibility which was half sublime. was he mad? or a wretch, an egotist, wanting a woman to do something for him, but without a thought for the woman? "i am glad," she said, with irrepressible displeasure, "that it affects you so little. and now i suppose the incident is over and we may return to our occupations. i was busy--with my housekeeping," she said with a laugh. "one might sometimes call a struggle with one's bills a struggle to the death." he gave her a look which was half-anger, half-remonstrance; and then to katie's amazement resumed in a moment the tone of easy intercourse which had always existed between them. "you will find your bills refreshing after this highflown talk," he said. "forgive me. you know i am not given to romantic sentiment any more than yourself." "i don't know," said katie, offended, "that i am less open to the romantic than other people when the right touch is given." "but it is not my hand that can give the right touch?" he said. "i accept my answer as there is nothing else for me to do. but i cannot abandon the country," he added after a moment, "and i hope we may still meet as good friends." "nothing has happened," said katie with dignity, "to lessen my friendship for you, lord erradeen." she could not help putting a faint emphasis on the pronouns. the man rejected may dislike to meet the woman who has rejected him, but the woman can have no feeling in the matter. she held out her hand with a certain stateliness of dismissal. "papa need not know," she said, "and so there will be nothing more about it. good-bye." walter took her hand in his, with a momentary perception that perhaps there had been more than lay on the surface in this interview, on her side as well as his. he stooped down and kissed it respectfully, and even with something like tenderness. "you do not refuse it to me, in friendship, even after all you have heard?" "it shall always be yours in friendship," katie said, the colour rising high in her face. she was glad he went away without looking at her again. she sat down and listened to his footsteps along the long corridor and down the stairs with a curious sensation as if he carried something with him that would not return to her again. and for long after she sat in the broad daylight without moving, leaving the books upon the table--which were not housekeeping books--untouched--going over this strange interview, turning over all the past that had any connection with lord erradeen. it seemed all to roll out before her like a story that had been full of interest: and now here was the end of it. such a fit of wistful sadness had seldom come over the active and practical intelligence of katie. it gave her for the moment a new opening in nature. but by degrees her proper moods came back. she closed this poetical chapter with a sigh, and her sound mind took up with a more natural regret the opportunity for congenial effort which she had been compelled to give up. she said to herself that she would not have minded that vague badness which he had owned, and underwood had accused him of. she could have brought him back. she had it in her to take the charge even of a man's life. so she thought in inexperience, yet with the powerful confidence which so often is the best means of fulfilling triumphantly what it aims at. she would not have shrunk from the endeavour. she would have put her vigorous young will into his feeble one, she thought, and made him, with her force poured into him, a man indeed, contemptuous of all miserable temptations, able to sail over and despise them. as she mused her eyes took an eager look, her very fingers twitched with the wish to be doing. had he come back then it is very possible that katie would have announced to him her change of mind, her determination "to pull him through." for she could have done it! she repeated to herself. whatever his burdens had been, when she had once set her shoulder to the wheel she would have done it. gambling, wine, even the spells of such women as katie blushed to think of--she would have shrunk before none of these. his deliverance would not have been partial, as he had said, but complete. she would have fought the very devils for him and brought him off. what a work it was that she had missed! not a mere commonplace marriage with nothing to do. but with a sigh katie had to acknowledge that it was over. she could not have accepted him, she said, excusing herself to herself. it would have been impossible. a man who asks you like _that_, not even pretending to care for you--you could not do it! but, alas! what an opportunity lost! saying this she gave herself a shake, and smoothed her hair for luncheon, and put the thought away from her resolutely. katie thought of dante's nameless sinner who made "the great refusal." she had lost perhaps the one great opportunity of her life. chapter vii. lord erradeen retired very quietly, as became a man defeated. though katie heard his retiring steps, he hardly did so himself, as he came down the broad softly-carpeted stair-case. there was a sound of voices and of movement in the great dining-room, where a liveried army were preparing the table for one of the great luncheons, under the orders of the too discreet and understanding sanderson--but nobody about to see the exit of the rejected suitor, who came out into the sunshine with a sort of dim recognition of the scenery of katie's boudoir; but the hills did not seem so near as they were in that large-windowed and shining place. failure has always a subduing effect upon the mind even when success was scarcely desired; and walter came out of the great house with the sense of being cut off from possibilities that seemed very near, almost certain, that morning. this subduing influence was the first that occupied his mind as he came out, feeling as if he were stealing away from the scene of what had been far from a triumph. perhaps he was a little ashamed of his own certainty; but at all events he was subdued and silent, refraining almost from thought. he had got securely out of the immediate neighbourhood, and was safe from the risk of meeting any one belonging to it, and being questioned where he had been, before he began to feel the softening of relief, and a grateful sense of freedom. then his heart recurred with a bound to the former situation. expedients or compromises of any kind were no more to be thought of; the battle must be fought out on its natural ground. he must yield to the ignominious yoke, or he must conquer. last year he had fled, and forced himself to forget, and lived in a fever of impulses which he could not understand, and influences which drew him like--he could not tell like what--mesmerism, katie had said, and perhaps she was right. it might be mesmerism; or it might be only the action of that uncontrolled and capricious mind which made him do that to-day which he loathed to-morrow. but however it was, the question had again become a primary one, without any compromise possible. he must yield, or he must win the battle. he put the losing first, it seemed so much the most likely, with a dreary sense of all the impossibilities that surrounded him. he had no standing ground upon which to meet his spiritual foe. refusal, what was that? it filled his life with distraction and confusion, but made no foundation for anything better, and afforded no hope of peace. peace! the very word seemed a mockery to walter. he must never know what it was. his soul (if he had one) would not be his own; his impulses, hitherto followed so foolishly, would be impotent for everything but to follow the will of another. to abdicate his own judgment altogether, to give up that power of deciding for himself which is the inheritance of the poorest, never to be able to help a poor neighbour, to aid a friend: to be a mere puppet in the hands of another--was it possible that he, a man, was to give himself up, thus bound hand and foot, to a slavery harder than that of any negro ever born? it was this that was impossible he cried within himself. and then there suddenly came before walter, like a vision set before him by the angels, a gleam of the one way of escape. when a poor wretch has fallen into a pit, a disused quarry, perhaps, or an old coal-pit, or a still more eerie dungeon, there shines over him, far off, yet so authentic, a pure, clear intensity of light above, a concentrated glory of the day, a sort of opening of heaven in his sight. this is the spot of light, more beautiful than any star, which is all that the walls of his prison permit him to see of the common day, which above-ground is lavished around us in such a prodigal way that we make no account of it. there are times when the common virtues of life, the common calm and peacefulness, take an aspect like this to the fallen soul:--the simple goodness which, perhaps, he has scoffed at and found tame and unprofitable, appearing to the spirit in prison like heaven itself, so serene and so secure. to think he himself has fallen from that, might have possessed and dwelt in it, safe from all censure and dishonour, if he had not been a fool! to think that all the penalties to which he has exposed himself might never have existed at all--if he had not been a fool! to think that now if some miracle would but raise him up to it--and then there are moments in which even the most vicious, the most utterly fallen, can feel as if no great miracle would be required, as if a little help, only a little, would do it--when strength is subdued and low, when the sense of dissatisfaction is strong, and all the impulses of the flesh in abeyance, as happens at times. walter's mind came suddenly to this conviction as he walked and mused. a good life, a pure heart, these were the things which would overcome--better, far better than any gain, than any sop given to fate; and he felt that all his desires went up towards these, and that there was nothing in him but protested against the degradation of the past. he had, he said to himself, never been satisfied, never been but disgusted with the riot and so-called pleasure. while he indulged in them he had loathed them, sinning contemptuously with a bitter scorn of himself and of the indulgences which he professed to find sweet. strange paradox of a soul! which perceived the foulness of the ruin into which it had sunk, and hated it, yet sank deeper and deeper all the while. and now how willing he was to turn his back upon it all, and how easy it seemed to rise with a leap to the higher level and be done with everything that was past! the common goodness of the simple people about seemed suddenly to him like a paradise in which was all that was lovely. to live among your own, to do them good, to be loved and honoured, to have a history pure and of good report, nothing in it to give you a blush; to love a pure and good woman, and have her for your companion all your life--how easy, how simple, how safe it was! and what tyrant out of the unseen could rule a man like this, or disturb his quiet mastery of himself and all that belonged to him? once upon that standing ground and who could assail you? and it seemed at that moment so easy and so near. everything round was wholesome, invigorating, clear with the keen purity of nature, fresh winds blowing in his face, air the purest and clearest, inspiring body and soul, not a lurking shade of temptation anywhere, everything tending to goodness, nothing to evil. "and you think these pettifogging little virtues will deliver _you_," said some one quietly by his side. there were two figures walking along in the wintry sunshine instead of one--that was all. the stone-cutter on the road who had seen lord erradeen pass and given him a good morning, rubbed his eyes when next he paused to rest and looked along the road. he saw two gentlemen where but one had been, though it was still so early and "no a drap" had crossed his lips. "and a pretty man!" he said to himself with mingled amazement and admiration. as for walter, it was with an instinctive recoil that he heard the voice so near to him, but that not because of any supernatural sensation, though with an annoyance and impatience inexpressible that any one should be able to intrude on his privacy and thus fathom his thoughts. "this is scarcely an honourable advantage you take of your powers." the other took no notice of this reproach. "a good man," he said, "a good husband, a good member of society, surrounded by comfort on all sides and the approbation of the world. i admire the character as much as you do. shall i tell you what this good man is? he is the best rewarded of all the sons of men. everything smiles upon him: he has the best of life. everything he does counts in his favour. and you think that such a man can stand against a purpose like mine? but for that he would want a stronger purpose than mine. goodness," he continued reflectively, "is the best policy in the world. it never fails. craft may fail, and skill and even wisdom, and the finest calculations; but the good always get their reward. a prize falls occasionally to the other qualities, but theirs is the harvest of life. to be successful you have only to be good. it is far the safest form of self-seeking, and the best." he had fallen into a reflective tone, and walked along with a slight smile upon his lips, delivering with a sort of abstract authority his monologue, while walter, with an indescribable rage and mortification and confusion of all his thoughts, accompanied him like a schoolboy overpowered by an authority against which his very soul was rebel. then the speaker turned upon his companion with a sort of benevolent cordiality. "be good!" he said. "i advise it--it is the easiest course you can pursue: you will free yourself from by far the worst part of the evils common to humanity. nothing is so bad as the self-contempt under which i have seen you labouring, the shame of vice for which you have no true instinct, only a sham appetite invented by the contradictoriness of your own mind. be good! it pays better than anything else in life." here walter interrupted him with an exclamation of anger irrestrainable. "stop!" he cried, "you have tortured me by my sins, and because i had nothing better to fall back upon. will you make this more odious still?" "by no means," said the other, calmly. "you think i want you to be miserable? you are mistaken--i don't. seeking the advantage of my race as i do, there is nothing i more desire than that you should have the credit of a spotless life. i love reputation. be good! it is the most profitable of all courses. i repeat that whatever may fail that never does. your error is to think that it will free you from me. so far as concerns me it would probably do you more injury than good; for it may well be that i shall have to enforce measures which will revolt you and make you unhappy. but then you will have compensations. the world will believe that only bad advisers or mistaken views could move so good a man to appear on occasions a hard landlord, a tyrannical master. and then your virtue will come in with expedients to modify the secondary effect of my plans and soften suffering. i do not desire suffering. it will be in every way to our advantage that you should smooth down and soften and pour balm into the wounds which in the pursuit of a higher purpose it is necessary to make. do not interrupt: it is the _rôle_ i should have recommended to you, if, instead of flying out like a fool, you had left yourself from the first in my hands." "i think you must be the devil," walter said. "no; nor even of his kind: that is another mistake. i have no pleasure in evil any more than in suffering, unless my object makes it necessary. i should like you to do well. it was i, was it not, that set before you the miserableness of the life you have been leading? which you had never faced before. can you suppose that i should wish greatness to the race and misfortune to its individual members? certainly not. i wish you to do well. you could have done so, and lived very creditably with the girl whom you have just left, whom you have driven into refusing you. take my advice--return to her, and all will be well." "you have a right to despise me," said walter, quivering with passion and self-restraint. "i did take your advice, and outraged her and myself. but that is over, and i shall take your advice no more." "you are a fool for your pains," he said. "go back now and you will find her mind changed. she has thought it over. what! you will not? i said it in your interest, it was your best chance. you could have taken up that good life which i recommend to you with all the more success had there been a boundless purse to begin upon. poor it is not so easy: but still you can try. your predecessor was of that kind. there was nothing in him that was bad, poor fellow. he was an agglomeration of small virtues. underwood was his one vice, a fellow who played cards with him and amused him. no one, you will find, has anything to say against him; he was thought weak, and so he was--against me. but that did not hinder him from being good." "in the name of heaven what do you call yourself, that can speak of good and evil as if they were red and blue!" the young man cried. passion cannot keep always at a climax. walter's mind ranged from high indignation, rage, dismay, to a wonder that was almost impersonal, which sometimes reached the intolerable point, and burst out into impatient words. it seemed impossible to endure the calm of him, the reason of him, as he walked along the hilly road like any other man. "it is not amiss for a comparison," he answered with a smile. his composure was not to be disturbed. he made no further explanations. while he played upon the young man beside him as on an instrument, he himself remained absolutely calm. "but these are abstractions," he resumed, "very important to you in your individual life, not so important to me who have larger affairs in hand. there is something however which will have to be decided almost immediately about the island property. i told you that small business about the cotters in the glen was a bagatelle. on the whole, though i thought it folly at the time, your action in the matter was serviceable. a burst of generosity has a fine effect. it is an example of what i have been saying. it throws dust in the eyes of the world. now we can proceed with vigour on a larger scale." "if you mean to injure the poor tenants, never! and whatever you mean, no," cried walter, "i will not obey you. claim your rights, if you have any rights, publicly." "i will not take that trouble. i will enforce them through my descendant." "no! you can torture me, i am aware, but something i have learned since last year." "you have learned," said his companion calmly, "that your theatrical benevolence was not an unmixed good, that your _protégés_ whom you kept to that barren glen would have been better off had they been dislodged cruelly from their holes. the question in its larger forms is not to be settled from that primitive point of view. i allow," he said with a smile, "that on the whole that was well done. it leaves us much more free for operations now. it gives a good impression--a man who in spite of his kind heart feels compelled to carry out--" "you are a demon," cried the young man, stung beyond endurance. "you make even justice a matter of calculation, even the natural horror of one's mind. a kind heart! is that like a spade, an instrument in your hands?" "the comparison is good again," said his companion with a laugh; "your faculty that way is improving. but we must have no trifling about the matter in hand. the factor from the isles is not a fool like this fellow here, whom i tolerate because he has his uses too. the other will come to you presently, he will lay before you--" "i will not hear him--once for all i refuse--" "what, to receive your own servant?" said the other. "come, this is carrying things too far. you must hear, and see, and consent. there is no alternative, except--" "except--if it comes to that, what can you do to me?" asked walter, ghastly with that rending of the spirit which had once more begun within him, and with the host of fierce suggestions that surged into his mind. he felt as men feel when they are going mad, when the wild intolerance of all conditions which is the root of insanity mounts higher and higher in the brain--when there is nothing that can be endured, nothing supportable, and the impulse to destroy and ravage, to uproot trees and beat down mountains, to lay violent hands upon something, sweeps like a fiery blast across the soul. even in madness there is always a certain self-restraint. he knew that it would be vain to seize the strong and tranquil man who stood before him, distorting everything in heaven and earth with his calm consistency: therefore in all the maddening rush of impulse _that_ did not suggest itself. "what can you do to me?" how unnecessary was the question! what he could do was sensible in every point, in the torrent of excitement that almost blinded, almost deafened the miserable young man. he saw his enemy's countenance as through a mist, a serene and almost beautiful face--looking at him with a sort of benevolent philosophical pity which quickened the flood of passion. his own voice was stifled in his throat, he could say no more. nor could he hear for the ringing in his ears, what more his adversary was saying to him--something wildly incoherent he thought, about prospero, prospero! "do you think i am prospero to send you aches and stitches?" the words seemed to circle about him in the air, half mockery, half folly. what had that to do with it? he walked along mechanically, rapt in an atmosphere of his own, beating the air like a drowning man. how long this horror lasted he could never tell. while still those incomprehensible syllables were wavering about him, another voice suddenly made itself heard, a touch came upon his arm. he gave a violent start, recoiling from the touch, not knowing what it was. by degrees, however, as the giddiness went off, he began to see again, to perceive slowly coming into sight those mountains that had formed the background in katie's room, and to hear the soft wash of the waters upon the beach. he found himself standing close to the loch, far below the road upon which he had been walking. had he rushed down to throw himself into the water, and thus end the terrible conflict? he could never tell. or whether it was some angel that had arrested the terrible impulse. when the mist dispersed from his eyes he saw this angel in a red shirt standing close to him, looking at him with eyes that peered out beneath the contraction of a pair of shaggy sandy eyebrows, from an honest freckled face. "my lord! you'll maybe no have seen miss oona?" hamish said. and walter heard himself burst into a wild laugh that seemed to fill the whole silent world with echoes. he caught hold of the boatman's arm with a grasp that made even hamish shrink. "who sent you here?" he cried; "who sent you here? do you come from god?" he did not know what he said. "my lord! you mustna take that name in vain. i'm thinking the almighty has a hand in maist things, and maybe it was just straight from him i've come, though i had no suspicion o' that," hamish said. he thought for the first moment it was a madman with whom he had to do. walter had appeared with a rush down the steep bank, falling like some one out of the skies, scattering the pebbles on the beach, and hamish had employed oona's name in the stress of the moment as something to conjure with. he was deeply alarmed still as he felt the quiver in the young man's frame, which communicated itself to hamish's sturdy arm. madness frightens the most stout-hearted. hamish was brave enough, as brave as a highlander need be, but he was half alarmed for himself, and much more for oona, who might appear at any moment. "i'll just be waiting about and nothing particular to do," he said in a soothing tone; "if ye'll get into the boat, my lord, i'll just put your lordship hame. na, it's nae trouble, nae trouble." hamish did not like the situation; but he would rather have rowed twenty maniacs than put oona within reach of any risk. he took lord erradeen by the elbow and directed him towards the boat, repeating the kindly invitation of his country--"come away, just come away; i've naething particular to do, and it will just be a pleasure." "hamish," said walter, "you think i am out of my mind: but you are mistaken, my good fellow. _i_ think you have saved my life, and i will not forget it. what was that you said about miss oona?" hamish looked earnestly into the young man's face. "my lord," he began with hesitation, "you see--if a young gentleman is a thocht out of the way, and just maybe excited about something and no altogether his ain man--what's that to the like of me? never a hair o' hairm would that do to hamish. but when it's a leddy, and young and real tender-hearted! we maun aye think o' them, my lord, and spare them--the weemen. no, it's what we dinna do--they have the warst in a general way to bear. but atween you and me, my lord, that though you're far my shuperior, are just man and man----" "it is you that are my superior, hamish," said lord erradeen; "but look at me now and say if you think i am mad. you have saved me. i am fit to speak to her now. do you think i would harm her? not for anything in the world." "no if you were--yoursel'--lord erradeen." "but i am--myself. and the moment has come when i must know. take my hand, hamish; look at me. do you think i am not to be trusted with oona?" "my lord, to make hamish your judge, what's that but daft too? and what right have ye to call my young leddy by her name? you're no a drap's blood to them, nor even a great friend." oona's faithful guardian stood lowering his brows upon the young lord with a mingled sense of the superiority of his office, and of disapproval, almost contemptuous, of the madman who had given it to him. that he should make hamish the judge was mad indeed. and yet hamish was the judge, standing on his right to defend his mistress. they stood looking at each other, the boatman holding his shaggy head high, reading the other's face with the keenest scrutiny. but just then there came a soft sound into the air, a call from the bank, clear, with that tone, not loud but penetrating, which mountaineers use everywhere. "are you there, hamish?" oona cried. chapter viii. oona's mind had been much disturbed, yet in no painful way, by the meeting with mrs. methven. the service which she had done to walter's mother, the contact with her, although almost in the dark, the sense of approach to another woman whose mind was full of anxiety and thought for him, agitated her, yet seemed to heal and soften away the pain which other encounters had given her. it gave her pleasure to think of the half-seen face, made softer by the twilight, and of the tremor of expectation and anxiety that had been in it. there was somehow in this a kind of excuse to herself for her involuntary preoccupation with all that concerned him. she had felt that there was an unspoken sympathy between her and the stranger, and that it was something more than chance which brought them together. as the boat pushed off into the loch, and she felt she had left the mother to a certain happiness in her son, her heart beat with a subdued excitement. she felt with them both, divining the soul of the mother who came to him with trembling, not approving perhaps, not fully trusting, but loving; and of the son who was at fault, who had not shown her the tenderness which her love merited in return. the sense of that union so incomplete in fact, and so close in nature, filled oona with emotion. as the boat glided along the glittering pathway of the lake between the reflected banks, her mind was full of the two who had gone away together arm and arm into the soft darkness. how mysterious was that twilight world, the eye incapable in the dimness of perceiving which was the substance and which the shadow of those floating woods and islands! sometimes the boat would glide into the tangled reflections of the trees, sometimes strike through what seemed a headland, a wall of rock, a long projecting promontory in this little world of water, where nothing was as it seemed. but it was not half so mysterious as life. it was but lately that this aspect of existence had struck the healthful soul of the highland girl. till the last year all had been open and sweet as the day about her ways and thoughts. if she had any secrets at all they had been those which even the angels guard between themselves and god, those sacred enthusiasms for the one love that is above all: those aspirations towards the infinite which are the higher breath of gentle souls; or perhaps a visionary opening into the romance of life in its present form, which was scarcely less visionary and pure. but nothing else, nothing more worldly, nothing that her namesake, "heavenly una with her milkwhite lamb," need have hesitated to avow. but since then oona had gone far and wandered wide in a shadowy world which she shared with no one, and in which there were mystic forces beyond her fathoming, influences which caught the wanderer all unwitting, and drew her hither or thither unawares, against her will. she was no longer the princess and sovereign of life as she had been in the earlier portion of it, but rather its subject or possible victim, moved by powers which she could not understand nor resist, and which overcame her before she was aware of their existence. she thought of all this as her boat made its way, propelled by the long, strong strokes of hamish, amid the shadows; but not angrily, not miserably as she had sometimes done, with a sadness which (if it was sadness at all) was sweet, and a secret exhilaration for which she could not account. the mother seemed somehow to step into the visionary conflict which was going on, a half-seen, unknown, but powerful champion on the side of----was it on the side of oona? she shrank a little from that identification, and said to herself, on the side of good. for that there was a struggle going on between good and evil, which in some mysterious way centred in lord erradeen, she was mysteriously aware, she could not tell how. "yon young lord will be the better of his mother," hamish was saying, his voice coming to her vaguely, running on without any thought of reply, mingled with the larger sound of the oars upon the rowlocks, the long sweep of them through the loch, the gurgle and tinkle of the water as the boat cut through. hamish was faintly visible and even retained till it grew quite dark some trace of colour in his favourite garment. "he'll be the better of his mother," he said; "there will aye be a want when there's no a leddy in the house. weeman servants are no to lippen to. a young man when he has not a wife, he will be muckle the better for his mother." oona heard the words vaguely like a chant amid all those sounds of the loch which were the music and accompaniment of her own being. she ran up the slope when they landed, and burst into the little drawing-room which was so bright after the darkness of the evening world, with a pleasure in her little adventure, and in having something to tell which is only known in the deep recesses, the unbroken quiet of rural life. mrs. forrester was just beginning, as she herself said, to "weary" for oona's return. she had put down her knitting and taken a book. again she had put aside her book and taken the knitting. oona was late. oona meant the world and life to the solitary lady on the crest of the isle. the house, the little retired nest amid the trees, was full and cheerful when she was there, and though mysie and the cook, "ben the house," gave now and then a sign of life, yet nothing was complete until the sound of the boat drawn up on the shingle, the unshipping oars, the light firm foot on the path, followed by the heavier tread, scattering the gravel, of hamish, gave token that all the little population were gathered within the circle of their rocks and waters. then mrs. forrester brightened and turned her face towards the door with cheerful expectation: for it became a little too cold now to go down to the beach to meet the boat, even with the fur cloak upon her shoulders, which had been her wont on summer nights, and even on wintry days. "his mother, poor young man! dear me, that is very interesting, oona. i was not sure he had a mother. that's good news: for i always took an interest in lord erradeen, like one of our own boys. indeed, you know, oona, i always thought him like rob, though their complexions are different. dear me! i am very glad you were on the spot, and able to show her a little civility. but he should have been there, oh! he should have been there, to meet her. if any of the boys were to do that to me, i would not know what to think--to leave me to the civility of any person that might be passing. oh, fie! no, i would not know what to think." "i know what you would think," said oona, "that there must have been some mistake, that they did not know the hour of the train, or did not know which train, or that they had been too late of starting, or--something. you would be sure to find a good reason, mamma." "well, that's true, oona; no doubt it would be something of that kind, for it is impossible that a nice lad (and lord erradeen was always that) would show himself neglectful of his mother. poor lady! and she would be tired after her journey. i am very glad you were there to show her a little attention. she will perhaps think, as so many of those english do, that we're cold and distant in the north. my dear, you can just ring for the tea: and we'll go and call upon her to-morrow, oona. well, perhaps not to-morrow; but wait till she is well rested. we'll go on thursday, and you can just mention it about, wherever you are to-morrow, that everybody may know. it is such a fine thing: for a young man to have his mother with him (when he has not a wife), that we must give her a warm welcome, poor lady," mrs. forrester said. she had no reason to call mrs. methven poor, but did it as a child does, with a meaning of kindness. she was in fact much pleased and excited by the news. it seemed to throw a gleam of possible comfort over the head of the loch. "the late lord had no woman about him," she said to herself after oona had left the room. she had quite forgotten that she was beginning to "weary." "did you hear, mysie," she went on when "the tea" appeared with all its wealth of scones, "that lord erradeen was expecting his mother? i am almost as glad to hear it as if one of our own boys had come home." "it is a real good thing for the young lord, mem," said mysie; "and no doubt you'll be going to see her, being such near neighbours, and my lord such great friends with the isle." "i would not say very great friends, oh no," said mrs. forrester, deprecatory, but with a smile of pleasure on her face. "there is little to tempt a young gentleman here. but no doubt we will call as soon as she is rested--miss oona and me." this formed the staple of their conversation all the evening, and made the little room cheerful with a sentiment of expectation. "and what kind of a person did you find her, oona? and do you think she will be a pleasant neighbour? and he was at the water-side to meet her, when he saw the boat? and was he kind? and did he show a right feeling?" these questions mrs. forrester asked over and over again. she put herself in the place of the mother who had arrived so unexpectedly without any one to meet her. "and you will be sure to mention it, whoever you see to-morrow," she repeated several times, "that she may see we have all a regard for him. i know by myself that is the first thing you think of," mrs. forrester added with a pleasant smile. "the boys" were everything they ought to be. there were no eccentricities, nothing out of the way, about them to make public opinion doubtful. wherever they went, their mother, pleased, but not surprised, heard everything that was pleasant of them. she "knew by herself" that this was what walter's mother would want to hear. and oona "mentioned it" to the ellermore campbells, with whom she had some engagement next morning, and where she met miss herbert from the lodge. julia was already popular with her nearest neighbours, and had an attendant at her side in the shape of a friend invited by sir thomas as an ardent sportsman, but of whom julia had taken the command from his first appearance. she was in high spirits, finding everything go well with her, and slightly off her balance with the opening up of new prosperity. she threw herself into the discussion with all the certainty of an old acquaintance. "i don't understand why you should be so pleased," said julia. "are you pleased? or is it only a make-believe? oh, no, dear oona; i do not suppose you are so naughty as that. you never were naughty in your life--was she? never tore her pinafore, or dirtied her frock? it is pretty of you, all you girls, to take an interest in walter's mother; but for my part i like young men best without their mothers," miss herbert said, with a laugh, and a glance towards the attendant squire, who said to himself that here was a girl above all pretences, who knew better than to attempt to throw dust in the eyes of wise men like himself. some of the ellermore girls laughed, for there is nothing that girls and boys are more afraid of than this reputation of never having dirtied their pinafores; while their mother, with the easy conviction of a woman so full of sons and daughters that she is glad, whenever she can, to shirk her responsibilities, said: "well, that is true enough: a young man should not be encumbered with an old woman; and if i were mrs. methven----" "but thank heaven, you are not at all like mrs. methven," said julia. "she is always after that unfortunate boy. it did not matter where he went, he was never free of her. sitting up for him, fancy! making him give her an account of everything. he had to count up how many times he came to see me." "which perhaps would be difficult," some one said. julia laughed--that laugh of triumph which disturbs feminine nerves. "he did come pretty often," she said, "poor fellow. oh, most innocently! to get me to play his accompaniments. don't you know he sings? oh, yes, very tolerably: if he would but open his mouth, i used to tell him; but some people like to be scolded, i think." "by you," said the attendant in an undertone. julia gave him a look which repaid him. "i always had to take his part. poor walter!" she said with a sigh. "and then when i had him by myself i scolded him. isn't that the right way? i used to get into great trouble about that boy," she added. "when one has known a person all one's life one can't help taking an interest----and he was so mismanaged in his youth." "here is a daniel come to judgment," said jeanie campbell: "so much wiser than the rest of us. lord erradeen must be years older than you are. let us call, mother, all the same, and see what sort of a dragon she is." "i shall call, of course," the mother said; "and i don't want to hear anything about dragons. i am one too, i suppose. thank you, oona, for telling me. i should not like to be wanting in politeness. your mother will be going to-morrow, i shouldn't wonder? well, we shall go the next day, girls. erradeen marches with ellermore, and i know your father wishes to pay every respect." "i suppose when you're a lord," said tom, who was very far down in the family, and of no account, "you can go upon a rule of your own; but it would be far greater fun for erradeen if he would mix himself up more with other people. did anybody ever find out who that fellow was that was staying with him? braithwaite thought he must be something very fine indeed--a foreign prince, or that sort. he said such a fellow couldn't be english without being well known. it seems he knew everybody, and everything you could think of. a tremendous swell, according to braithwaite. oona, who was he? you ought to know." at this all eyes turned to oona, who grew red in spite of herself. "i have no way of knowing," she said. "i saw such a person once--but i never heard who he was." "i am not superstitious," said mrs. campbell, "but there are people seen about that old castle that--make your blood run cold. no, i never saw anything myself; but your father says----" "my father never met this fellow," cried tom. "he wasn't a fellow to make any mistake about. neither old nor young--oh, yes, oldish: between forty and fifty; as straight as a rod, with eyes that go through and through you; and a voice--i think erradeen himself funks him. yes, i do. he turned quite white when he heard his voice." "there are all kinds of strange stories about that old castle," said one of the campbell sisters in an explanatory tone, addressing julia. "you must not be astonished if you hear of unearthly lights, and some dreadful ordeal the heir has to go through, and ghosts of every description." "i wish, jeanie," said tom, "when a fellow asks a question, that you would not break in with your nonsense. who is talking of ghosts? i am asking who a fellow was--a very fine gentleman, i can tell you; something you don't see the like of often----" the young man was much offended by his sister's profanity. he went to the door with oona, fuming. "these girls never understand," he said; "they make a joke of everything. this was one of the grandest fellows i ever saw--and then they come in with their rubbish about ghosts!" "never mind," oona said, giving him her hand. the conversation somehow had been more than she herself could bear, and she had come away with a sense of perplexity and indignation. tom, who was hot and indignant too, was more in sympathy with her than the others who talked about ghosts, which made her angry she could scarcely tell why. "let me walk with you," said julia herbert, following. "i have sent major antrobus to look after the carriage. he is a friend of my cousin sir thomas, and supposed to be a great sportsman, but not so devoted to slaughter as was hoped. instead of slaughtering, he is slaughtered, lady herbert says. i am sure i don't know by whom. do let me walk with you a little way. it is so nice to be with you." julia looked into oona's face with something of the ingratiating air which she assumed to her victims of the other sex. "dear miss forrester----" and then she stopped with a laugh. "i don't dare to call you by your christian name." "it must be i then that am the dragon, though i did not know it," oona said; but she did not ask to be called by her christian name. "i see--you are angry with me for what i said of mrs. methven. it is quite true, however; that is the kind of woman she is. but i don't excuse walter, for all that. he was very wicked to her. ever since he was a boy at school he has been nasty to his mother. everybody says it is her own fault, but still it was not nice of him, do you think? oh, _i_ think him very nice, in many ways. i have known him so long. he has always been most agreeable to me--sometimes _too_ agreeable," said julia with a smile, pausing, dwelling upon the recollection. "but his mother and he never got on. sometimes those that are the very nicest out of doors are rather disagreeable at home. haven't you seen that? oh, i have, a hundred times. of course the mother is sure to be to blame. she ought to have made a cheerful home for him, you know, and asked young people, and cheerful people, instead of a set of fogies. but she never would do that. she expected him to put up with her old-fashioned ways." oona made no reply. she was disturbed in the ideal that had been rising within her--an ideal not all made up of sunshine and virtue, but where at least the darker shades were of a more elevated description than petty disobediences on one hand and exactions on the other. life becomes mean and small when dragged down to this prosaic level, which was the natural level in julia's mind, not pitiful and debasing, as it appeared to oona. as there was no response to what she had said, julia resumed, putting her hand with a great show of affection within oona's arm. "i want you to let me be your friend," she said, "and i don't want you to be deceived. i fear you think too well of people; and when you hear anything against them, then you feel displeased. oh, yes, i know. you are not pleased with me for telling the truth about the methvens." "i wonder rather," said oona, somewhat coldly, "that being so much a friend of lord erradeen you should--betray him; for we should never have known this without you." "oh, betray him; what hard words!" cried julia, making believe to shrink and hide her face. "i would not betray him for worlds, poor dear walter, if i had a secret of his. but this is no secret at all," she added, with a laugh; "everybody knows they never got on. and between ourselves, walter has been a sad bad boy. oh, yes, there is no doubt about it. i know more of the world than a gentle creature like you, and i know that no man is very good. oh, don't say a word, for you don't understand. there are none of them very good. what goes on when they are knocking about the world--we don't know what it is: but it is no good. everybody that knows human nature knows that. but walter has gone further, you know, than the ordinary. oh, he has been a bad boy. he took up with captain underwood before he knew anything about kinloch houran, while he was not much more than a boy: and everybody knows what captain underwood is. he has gambled and betted, and done a great many still more dreadful things. and poor mrs. methven scolded and cried and nagged: and that has made everything worse." oona's countenance changed very much during this conversation. it flushed and paled, and grew stern with indignation, and quivered with pity. it seemed to her that all that was said must be true: it had not the air of an invention. she asked, with a trembling voice, "if this is so, how is it that you still care for him? still----" she would have said--pursue him; but oona's womanly instincts were too strong for this, and she faltered and paused, and said, feebly, "still--keep him in your thoughts?" "oh, we must not be too hard, you know," said julia, smiling; "a man must sow his wild oats. oh, i should myself had i been a man. i should not have been content with your humdrum life. i should have stormed all over the place and had a taste of everything. don't you think it is better for them when they have been downright bad? i do; it makes them more humble. they know, if you came to inquire into them, there would not be a word to say for them. i think it is a good thing, for my part; i don't mind. i am not afraid of it. but still it must be confessed that walter has been, oh! very bad! and unkind to his mother; not what people call a good son. and what is the use of her coming here? she is coming only to spoil sport, to poke her nose into everything. i have no patience with that kind of woman. now i can see in your face you are quite shocked with me. you think it is i who am bad. but you know i have taken a great fancy to you, and i want you to know." "i have no wish to know," said oona. she had grown very pale--with the feeling of having been out in a storm and exposed to the beating of remorseless rain, the fierce hail that sometimes sweeps the hills. she heard julia's laugh ringing through like something fiendish in the midst of her suffering. she was glad to escape, though beaten down and penetrated by the bitter storm. the silence was grateful to her, and to feel herself alone. she scarcely doubted that it was all true. there was something in miss herbert's tone which brought conviction with it: the levity and indulgence were abhorrent to oona, but they sounded true. julia pressed her hand as she turned back, saying something about major antrobus and the carriage, with a laugh at oona's startled looks, "don't look so pale; you are too sensitive. it is nothing more than all of them do. good-bye, dear," julia said. she bent forward with a half-offer of a kiss, from which oona shrank: and then went away laughing, calling out, "people will think you have seen one of those ghosts." a ghost! oona went upon her way, silent, aching in heart and spirit. what was a ghost, as they said, in comparison? no ghost but must know secrets that would at the least make levity and irreverence impossible. nothing but a human voice could mock and jibe at that horror and mystery of evil before which oona's spirit trembled. she had walked some way alone upon the daylight road, with the wholesome wind blowing in her face, and the calm of nature restoring her to composure, but not relieving the ache in her heart, before she came to the edge of the bank, and called in her clear voice to hamish in the boat. chapter ix. "lord erradeen!" his appearance was so unexpected, so curiously appropriate and inappropriate, that oona felt as if she must be under some hallucination, and was beholding an incarnation of her own thoughts instead of an actual man. and walter was himself at so high a strain of excitement that the agitation of her surprise seemed natural to him. it scarcely seemed possible that everybody around, and specially that she, did not know the crisis at which he stood. he took the hand which she instinctively put forward, into both his, and held fast by it as if it had been an anchor of salvation. "i am a fugitive," he said. "will you receive me, will you take me with you? have pity upon me, for you are my last hope." "lord erradeen--has anything--happened? what--have you done?" she trembled, standing by him, gazing in his face, not withdrawing her hand, yet not giving it, lost in wonder; yet having come to feel that something he had done, some guilt of his, must be the cause. "i have done--i will tell you everything. i wish to tell you everything: let me come with you, oona." all this time hamish, standing behind walter, was making signs to his young mistress, which seemed to no purpose but to increase her perplexity. hamish shook his shaggy head, and his eyebrows worked up and down. he gesticulated with his arm pointing along the loch. finally he stepped forward with a sort of desperation. "i'm saying, miss oona, that we're in no hurry. there will always be somebody about that would be glad, real glad, of a visit from you. and as his lordship is a wee disturbed in his mind, and keen to get home, i could just put him up to auchnasheen--it would take me very little time--and syne come back for you." oona stood startled, undecided between the two--alarmed a little by walter's looks, and much by the significance of the gestures of hamish, and his eagerness and anxiety. "i will no be keeping you waiting long at all--oh, not at all. and my lord will be best at home, being a wee disturbed in his mind--and we're in no hurry--no hurry," hamish insisted, doing his best to place himself between the two. "hamish thinks i am mad," said walter. "i do not wonder. but i am not mad. i want neither home nor anything else--but you. it is come to that--that nobody can help me but you. first one tries expedients," he cried, "anything to tide over; but at last one comes--one comes to the only true--" "you are speaking very wildly," said oona. "i don't know what you mean, lord erradeen; and hamish is afraid of you. what is it? we are only simple people--we do not understand." he dropped her hand which he had held all the time, half, yet only half against her will, for there was something in the way he held it which forbade all idea of levity. she looked at him very wistfully, anxious, not with any offence, endeavouring to put away all prepossession out of her mind--the prejudice in his favour which moved her heart in spite of herself--the prejudice against him, and indignant wonder whether all was true that she had heard, which had arisen from julia's words. her eyelids had formed into anxious curves of uncertainty, out of which her soul looked wistfully, unable to refuse help, perplexed, not knowing what to do. "if you refuse to hear me," he said, "i have no other help to turn to. i know i have no right to use such an argument, and yet if you knew--i will urge no more. it is death or life--but it is in your hands." oona's eyes searched into his very soul. "what can i do?" she said, wondering. "what power have i? how can i tell if it is--true--" she faltered, and begged his pardon hastily when she had said that word. "i mean--i do not mean--" she said confusedly. "but oh, what can i do? it is not possible that i----" it is cruel to have the burden put upon you of another's fate. sometimes that is done to a woman lightly in the moment of disappointment by a mortified lover. was this the sort of threat he meant, or was it perhaps--true? oona, who had no guile, was shaken to the very soul by that doubt. better to risk an affront in her own person than perhaps to fail of an occasion in which sincere help was wanted and could be given. she had not taken her eyes from him, but searched his face with a profound uncertainty and eagerness. at last, with the sigh of relief which accompanies a decision, she said to hamish, "push off the boat. lord erradeen will help me in," with something peremptory in her tone against which her faithful servant could make no further protest. hamish proceeded accordingly to push off the boat into the water, and presently they were afloat, steering out for the centre of the loch. they were at some distance from the isle on the other side of the low, green island with its little fringe of trees, so different from the rocky and crested isles about, which is known on loch houran as the isle of rest. the low wall round about the scattered tombs, the scanty ruins of its little chapel, were all that broke the soft greenness of those low slopes. there was nothing like it all around in its solemn vacancy and stillness, and nothing could be more unlike that chill and pathetic calm than the freight of life which approached it in oona's boat: she herself full of tremulous visionary excitement--the young man in his passion and desperation; even the watchful attendant, who never took his eyes from lord erradeen, and rowed on with all his senses on the alert, ready to throw himself upon the supposed maniac at a moment's notice, or without it did the occasion require. there was a pause till they found themselves separated by a widening interval of water from the shore, where at any moment a chance passenger might have disturbed their interview. here no one could disturb them. walter placed himself in front of hamish facing oona: but perhaps the very attitude, the freedom and isolation in which he found himself with her, closed his lips. for a minute he sat gazing at her, and did not speak. "you wished--to say something to me, lord erradeen?" it was she again, as katie had done before, who recalled to him his purpose--with a delicate flush colouring the paleness of her face, half in shame that after all she had to interfere to bring the confession forth. "so much," he said, "so much that i scarcely know where to begin." and then he added, "i feel safe with you near me. do you know what it means to feel safe? but you never were in deadly danger. how could you be?" "lord erradeen, do not mystify me with these strange sayings," she cried. "do they mean anything? what has happened to you? or is it only--is it nothing but----" "a pretence, do you think, to get myself a hearing--to beguile you into a little interest? that might have been. but it is more serious, far more serious. i told you it was life or death." he paused for a moment and then resumed. "do you remember last year when you saved me?" "i remember--last year," she said with an unsteady voice, feeling the flush grow hotter and hotter on her cheek, for she did not desire to be reminded of that self-surrender, that strange merging of her being in another's which was her secret, of which she had been aware, but no one else. "i never understood it," she added, with one meaning for herself and one for him. the hidden sense was to her more important than the other. "it has always been--a mystery----" "it was the beginning of the struggle," he said. "i came here, you know--don't you know?--out of poverty to take possession of my kingdom--that was what i thought. i found myself instead at the beginning of a dreary battle. i was not fit for it, to begin with. do you remember the old knights had to prepare themselves for their chivalry with fasting, and watching of arms, and all that--folly----" a gleam of self-derision went over his face, and yet it was deadly serious underneath. "it was no folly," she said. "oh, do you think i don't know that? the devil laughs in me, now and then, but i don't mean it. oona--let me call you oona, now, if never again--i had neither watched nor prayed----" he made a pause, looking at her pitifully; and she, drawn, she knew not how, answered, with tears in her eyes, "i have heard that you--had strayed----" "that means accidentally, innocently," he said. "it was not so. i had thought only of myself: when i was caught in the grip of a will stronger than mine, unprepared. there was set before me--no, not good and evil as in the books, but subjection to one--who cared neither for good nor evil. i was bidden to give up my own will, i who had cared for nothing else: to give up even such good as was in me. i was not cruel. i cared nothing about worldly advantages; but these were henceforward to be the rule of my life--pleasant, was it not?" he said with a laugh, "to a man who expected to be the master--of everything round." at the sound of his laugh, which was harsh and wild, hamish, raising himself so as to catch the eye of his mistress, gave her a questioning, anxious look. oona was very pale, but she made an impatient gesture with her hand to her humble guardian. she was not herself at ease; an agonizing doubt lest walter's mind should have given way had taken possession of her. she answered him as calmly as she could, but with a tremor in her voice, "who could ask that, lord erradeen? oh no, no--you have been deceived." "you ask me who! you who gave me your hand--your hand that was like snow--that had never done but kindness all your life--and saved me--so that i defied him. and you ask me who?" he put out his hand as he spoke and touched hers as it lay in her lap. his face was full of emotion, working and quivering. "give it to me, oona!--will you give it to me? i am not worthy that you should touch me. it has been said to me that you would turn from me--ah, with disgust!--_if you knew_. and i want you to know everything. for you gave it then without pausing to think. oona! i am going to tell you everything. give it to me," he said, holding out his hands one over the other to receive and clasp hers, his eyes moist, his lips appealing with a quivering smile of entreaty. and how may it be told what was in oona's heart? her whole being was moved through and through with tenderness, wonder, pity. her hand seemed to move of itself towards him. the impulse was upon her almost too strong to be resisted, to throw her arms around him, like a mother with a child--to identify herself with him whatever might follow. the womanly instinct that held her back--that kept all these impulses in check and restrained the heart that seemed leaping out of her bosom towards this man whom she loved in spite of herself, and who had need of her, most sacred of all claims--was like a frame of iron round her, against which she struggled, but from which she could not get free. tears filled her eyes--she clasped her hands together in an involuntary appeal. "what can i do? what can i do?" she cried. "you shall hear all," said he. "i have tried everything before coming back to that which i always knew was my only hope. i fled away after that night. do you remember?" (she almost smiled at this, for she remembered far better than he, and the wonder and despair of it, and his boat going away over the silent loch, and his face eager to be gone, and she indignant, astonished, feeling that her life went with him; but of all this he knew nothing.) "i fled--thinking i could escape and forget. there seemed no better way. there was no one to help me, only to mar and waste--what was all wasted and spoilt already. i want to tell you everything," he said faltering, drooping his head, withdrawing his eyes from her, "but i have not the courage--you would not understand me. nothing that you could imagine could reach to a hundredth part of the evil i have known." he covered his face with his hands. the bitterness of the confession he dared not make seemed to stifle his voice and every hope. and oona's heart quivered and beat against the strong bondage that held it in, and her hands fluttered with longing to clasp him and console him. what woman can bear to hear out such a confession, not to interrupt it with pardon, with absolution, with cries to bring forth the fairest robe? she touched his head with her hands for a moment, a trembling touch upon his hair, and said, "god forgive you. god will forgive you," with a voice almost choked with tears. he raised his head and looked at her with an eager cry. "i want--not forgiveness. i want life," he cried, "life, new life. i want to be born again. is not that in the bible? to be born again, to begin again from the beginning, everything new. help me, oona! i am not thinking of the past. it is _now_ i am thinking of. i am not thinking of forgiveness--punishment if you please, anything!--but a new life. he knew man who said that," walter cried, raising his head. "what use is it to me to forgive me? i want to be born again." when he thus delivered himself of his exceeding bitter cry, this woman too, like his mother, answered him with a shining face, with eyes swimming in tears, and brilliant with celestial certainty. she put out her hands to him without a moment's hesitation, and grasped his and smiled. "oh, that is all provided for!" she said. "yes, he knew! it is all ready for you--waiting--waiting. don't you know our lord stands at the door and knocks, till you are ready to let him in? and now you are ready. there is nothing more." he received the soft hands within his with feelings indescribable, at such a height of emotion that all the lesser shades and degrees were lost. he twined her fingers among his own, clasping them with an entire appropriation. "oona," he said, "the house is yours, and all in it. open the door to your lord, whom i am not worthy to come near--and to everything that is good. it is yours to do it. open the door!" they had forgotten hamish who sat behind, pulling his long, even strokes, with his anxious shaggy countenance fixed like that of a faithful dog upon his mistress, whom he had to guard. he saw the two heads draw very close together, and the murmur of the voices. "what will she be saying to him? she will be winning him out of yon transport. she will be puttin' peace in his hairt. she has a voice that would wile the bird from the tree," said hamish to himself. "but oh hon!--my bonnie miss oona," hamish cried aloud. this disturbed them and made them conscious of the spectator, who was there with them, separate from all the world. oona, with a woman's readiness to throw her veil over and hide from the eye of day all that is too sacred for the vulgar gaze, raised her face, still quivering with tender and holy passion. "why do you say 'oh hon?' there is nothing to say 'oh hon' for, hamish. no, no; but the other way." hamish looked across the young lord, whose head was bowed down still over oona's hands, which he held. the boatman gave him a glance in which there was doubt and trouble, and then raised his shaggy eyebrows, and addressed a look of entreaty and warning to the fair inspired face that hovered over walter like a protecting angel. "ye will not be doing the like of that," he said, "without thought?" and all the time the boat swept on over the reflections in the water, by the low shore of the isle of rest where death had easy landing, away among the feathery islets, all tufted brown and crimson to the water's edge, where nothing but the wild life of the woods could find footing:--nothing near them but the one anxious, humble retainer, watching over oona, for whom no one in heaven or earth, save himself, entertained any fear. he quickened those long strokes in the excitement of his soul, but neither did walter take any account of where he was going, nor oona awake out of the excitement of the moment to think of the descent into common life which was so near. hamish only, having the entire conduct of them, hastened their progress back to ordinary existence--if perhaps there might be some aid of reason and common judgment (as he said to himself) there, to see that the man was in his right senses before oona should be bound for life. there was no excitement about the isle. it lay as calm in the sunshine as if nothing but peace had ever passed by that piece of solid earth, with its rocks and trees, that little human world amid the waters; every jagged edge of rock, every red-tinted tree against the background of tall firs, and the firs themselves in their dark motionless green, all shining inverted in the liquid clearness around. the two were still afloat, though their feet were on solid ground; and still apart from all the world, though the winding way led direct to the little centre of common life in which oona was all in all. but they did not immediately ascend to that gentle height. they paused first on the little platform, from which kinloch houran was the chief object. one of those flying shadows that make the poetry of the hills was over it for a moment, arrested as by some consciousness of nature, while they stood and gazed. there walter stood and told to oona the story of miss milnathort, and how she had said that two, set upon all good things, would hold the secret in their hands. two--and here were the two. it seemed to him that every cloud had fled from his soul from the moment when he felt her hands in his, and had bidden her "open the door." oh, fling wide the door to the christ who waits outside, the anointed, the deliverer of men: to peace and truth, that wait upon him, and mercy and kindness, and love supreme that saves the world! fling wide the doors! not a bolt or bar but that soft hand shall unloose them, throw them wide, that the lord may come in. not a crevice, or corner, or dark hiding-place of evil but shall open to the light. he said so standing there, holding her hand still, not only as a lover caressing, protecting, holds the soft hand he loves, but as a man drowning will hold by the hand held out to save him. it was both to walter. he told her, and it was true, that from the day when she had put it into his a year ago, he had never lost the consciousness that in this hand was his hope. oona was penetrated by all these words to the depths of her heart. what girl could be told that in her hands was the saving of one she loved, without such a movement of the soul to the highest heroism and devotion as raises human nature above itself? her soul seemed to soar, drawing his with it, into heights above. she felt capable of everything--of the highest effort and the humblest service. that union of the spiritual being above his, and the human longing beneath, came back to her in all the joy of a permitted and befitting mood. she was his to raise him above all those soils of life of which he was sick and weary; and his to sweep away the thorns and briars out of his path; to lead him and to serve him, to mingle her being in his life so that no one henceforward should think of oona save as his second and helpmeet: yet so to guide his uncertain way as that it should henceforward follow the track of light by which the best of all ages has gone. even to understand that office of glory and humility demands an enlightenment, such as those who do not love can never attain. to oona it seemed that life itself became glorious in this service. it raised her above all earthly things. she looked at him with the pity of an angel, with something of the tenderness of a mother, with an identification and willingness to submit which was pure woman. all was justified to her--the love that she had given unsought, the service which she was willing and ready to give. he stopped before they had reached the height upon which stood home and the sweet and simple existence which embraced these mysteries without comprehending them. a darker shadow, a premonition of evil, came over him. "and yet," he said, "i have not told you all. i have something more still to say." chapter x. what did there remain to say? he had made his confession, which, after all, was no confession, and she had stopped his mouth with pardon. his cry for new life had overcome every reluctance in her. her delicate reserve, the instinct that restrained her, had no more power after that. she had stood no longer behind any barrier--at that touch she had thrown her heart wide open and taken him within. "what more?" she said. "there can be no more." "much more: and you were to hear all: not only the wretched folly into which i fled, to try if i could forget, but something meaner, nearer----something for which you will despise me. oh, do not smile; it is past smiling for you and me--for you as well as me now, oona. god forgive me that have tangled your life in mine!" "what is it?" she said, giving him an open look of trust and confidence. "i am not afraid." he was. far worse than the general avowal of sins which she did not understand was the avowal he had to make of something which she could understand. he perceived that it would wound her to the heart--he had no fear now that oona would throw him off. she had put her hand into his, and was ready to pour the fresh and spotless stream of her life into his. it was no more possible for her to separate herself, to withdraw from him, whatever might happen. he perceived this with a keen pang of remorse, for the first time entering with all his heart into the soul of another, and understanding what it meant. she could not now turn her back upon him, go away from him; and he was about to give her a sharp, profound, intolerable wound. "oona," he said, with great humility, "it occurred to-day. i cannot tell whether you will be able to see why i did it, or how i did it. this morning----" he paused here, feeling that the words hung in his throat and stifled him. "this morning--i went--and insulted katie williamson, and asked her--to marry me." she had been listening with her sweet look of pity and tenderness--sorry, sorry to the depths of her heart, for the evil he had done--sorry beyond tears; but yet ready with her pardon, and not afraid. at the name of katie williamson there came up over her clear face the shadow of a cloud--not more than the shadow. when such words as these are said they are not to be understood all at once. but they woke in her a startled curiosity--a strange surprise. "this morning--it is still morning," she said, bewildered; "and katie----" "oona! you do not understand." "no. i do not quite--understand. what is it? this morning? and katie----" "i asked her this morning to join her land to my land and her money to my money: to be--my wife." she drew her hand slowly out of his, looking at him with eyes that grew larger as they gazed. for some time she could not say a word, but only got paler and paler, and looked at him. "then what place--have i?--what am--i?" she said, slowly. afterwards a sudden flush lighted up her face. "she would not: and then you came--to me?" she said. a faint smile of pain came to her mouth. walter had seen that look very recently before--when he told his mother why it was that he had sent for her. was he capable of giving nothing but pain to those he loved? if he had tried to explain or apologise, it is doubtful whether oona's faculties, so suddenly and strangely strained, could have borne it. but he said nothing. what was there to say?--the fact which he had thus avowed was beyond explanation. he met her eyes for a moment, then drooped his head. there was nothing--nothing to be said. it was true. he had gone to another woman first, and then, when that failed, as a last resource had come to her. the anguish was so sharp that it brought that smile. it was incredible in the midst of her happiness. her heart seemed wrung and crushed in some gigantic grasp. she looked at him with wondering, incredulous misery. "you thought then, i suppose," she said, "that one--was as good as another?" "i did not do that, oona; it is, perhaps, impossible that you should understand. i told you--i had tried--every expedient: not daring to come to the one and only--the one, the only----" she waved her hand as if putting this aside, and stood for a moment looking out vaguely upon the loch--upon the sheen of the water, the castle lying darkly in shadow, the banks stretching upward and downward in reflection. they had been glorified a moment since in the new union; now they were blurred over, and conveyed no meaning. then she said drearily-- "my mother--will wonder why we do not come in--" "may i speak to her--at once? let me speak." "oh no!" she cried. "say nothing--nothing! i could not bear it." and then he seized upon her hand, the hand she had taken from him, and cried out-- "you are not going to forsake me, oona! you will not cast me away?" "i cannot," she said very low, with her eyes upon the landscape, "i cannot!" then, turning to him, "you have my word, and i have but one word: only everything is changed. let us say no more of it just now. a little time--i must have a little time." and she turned and walked before him to the house. they went in silence, not a word passing between them. mysie, startled, came out to the door to ascertain who it could be who were preceded by the sound of footsteps only, not of voices. it was "no canny," she said. and to think this was miss oona, whose cheerful voice always came home before her to warn the house that its pride and joy was approaching! mysie, confounded, went to open the door of the drawing-room that her mistress might be made to share her uneasiness. "it will just be miss oona, mem, and my lord," mysie said, "but very down, as if something had happened and not saying a word." "bless me!" cried mrs. forrester. her heart naturally leapt to the only source of danger that could affect her deeply. "it is not a mail day, mysie," she said; "there can be no ill news." "the lord be thanked for that!" mysie said: and then stood aside to give admittance to those footsteps which came one after the other without any talking or cheerful note of sound. mrs. forrester rose to meet them with a certain anxiety, although her mind was at rest on the subject of the mails. it might be something wrong at eaglescairn: it might be---- "dear me! what is the matter, oona? you are white, as if you had seen a ghost," she said, with a more tangible reason for her alarm. "i am quite well, mamma. perhaps i may have seen a ghost--but nothing more," she said with a half-laugh. "and here is lord erradeen whom we picked up, hamish and i." "and lord erradeen, you are just very whitefaced too," cried mrs. forrester. "bless me, i hope you have not both taken a chill. that will sometimes happen when the winter is wearing on, and ye are tempted out on a fine morning with not enough of clothes. i have some cherry brandy in my private press, and i will just give you a little to bring back the blood to your cheeks: and come in to the fire. dear me, oona, do not shiver like that! and you not one that feels the cold. you have just taken a chill upon the water, though it is such a beautiful morning. and so you have got your mother with you, lord erradeen?" "she came yesterday. she was so fortunate as to meet--miss forrester." it seemed to him a wrong against which he was ready to cry out to earth and heaven that he should have to call her by that formal name. he paused before he said it, and looked at her with passionate reproach in his eyes. and oona saw the look, though her eyes were averted, and trembled, with what her mother took for cold. "you may be sure oona was very content to be of use: and i hope now you have got her you will keep her, lord erradeen. it will be fine for your house and the servants, and all, to have a lady at auchnasheen. there has not been a lady since the last lord but one, who married the last of the glen oriel family, a person that brought a great deal of property with her. i remember her very well. they said she was not his first love, but she was a most creditable person, and well thought upon, and kind to the poor. we were saying to ourselves, oona and me, that we would go up the loch to-morrow and call, if you are sure mrs. methven is rested from her journey, and will like to see such near neighbours." "but, mother--" oona said. "but what? there is no but, that i know of. you know that it was all settled between us. we thought to-day she would be tired, and want repose rather than company. but by to-morrow she would be rested, and willing to see what like persons we are in this place. that would be very natural. and i am proud oona was in the way, to take her across the loch. people that come from flat countries where there is little water, they are sometimes a little timid of the loch, and in the dark too. but she will have got over all that by to-morrow, and to call will be a real pleasure. did you mention, oona, at ellermore and other places that mrs. methven had arrived?--for everybody will be keen to see your mother, lord erradeen." "it is very kind. she will rather see you than any one." "hoots," said mrs. forrester with a smile and a shake of her head, "that is just flattery; for we have very little in our power except good-will and kindness: but it will give me great pleasure to make your mother's acquaintance, and if she likes mine, that will be a double advantage. but you are not going away, lord erradeen? you have this moment come! and mysie will be reckoning upon you for lunch, and i have no doubt a bird has been put to the fire. well, i will not say a word, for mrs. methven's sake, for no doubt she will be a little strange the first day or two. oona, will you see that hamish is ready? and we will have the pleasure of calling to-morrow," mrs. forrester said, following to the door. her easy smiles, the little movements of her hands, the fluttering of the pretty ribbons in her cap, added to the calm and tranquil stream of her talk so many additional details of the softest quietude of common life. she stood and looked after the young pair as they went down together to the beach, waving her hand to them when they turned towards her, as unconscious of any disturbing influence as were the trees that waved their branches too. passion had never been in her little composed and cheerful world. by-and-by she felt the chill of the wind, and turned and went back to her fireside. "no doubt that winter is coming now," she said to herself, "and no wonder if oona, poor thing, was just frozen with the cold on the water. i wish she may not have taken a chill." this was the greatest danger mrs. forrester anticipated, and she did not doubt that a hot drink when oona went to bed would make all right. it was very strange to both of the young wayfarers to find themselves alone again in the fresh air and stillness. since the moment when they had landed in an ecstasy of union, until this moment when they went down again to the same spot, years might have passed for anything they knew. they did not seem to have a word to say to each other. oona was a step or two in advance leading the way, while behind her came walter, his head drooping, his courage gone, not even the despair in him which had given him a wild and fiery energy. despair itself seemed hopeful in comparison with this. he had risen into another life, come to fresh hopes, received beyond all expectation the help which he had sought for elsewhere in vain, but which here alone he could ever find; but now the soul had gone out of it all, and he stood bewildered, deprived of any power to say or do. all through his other miseries there had been the thought of this, like a distant stronghold in which if he ever reached it there would be deliverance. if he ever reached it! and now he had reached it, but too late. was it too late? he followed her helplessly, not able to think of anything he could say to her, though he had pleaded so eagerly, so earnestly, a little while ago. there comes a time after we have poured out our whole soul in entreaties, whether to god or man, when exhaustion overpowers the mind, and utterance is taken from us, and even desire seems to fail--not that what we long for is less to be desired, but that every effort is exhausted and a dreary discouragement has paralysed the soul. walter felt not less, but more than ever, that in oona was his every hope. but he was dumb and could say no more, following her with a weight upon his heart that allowed him no further possibility, no power to raise either voice or hand. they walked thus as in a mournful procession following the funeral of their brief joy, half way down the bank. then oona who was foremost paused for a moment, looking out wistfully upon that familiar prospect, upon which she had looked all her life. the scene had changed, the sky had clouded over, as if in harmony with their minds; only over kinloch houran a watery ray of sunshine, penetrating through the quickly gathering clouds, threw a weird light. the ruinous walls stood out red under this gleam askance of the retreating sun. it was like an indication--a pointing out, to the executioner of some deadly harm or punishment, of the victim. oona paused, and he behind her, vaguely turning as she turned, gazing at this strange significant light, which seemed to point out, "this is the spot"--was that what was meant?--"the place to be destroyed." "it was in shadow a moment since," oona said, and her voice seemed to thrill the air that had been brooding over them in a heavy chill, as if under the same influence that made them voiceless. what did she mean? and why should she care---- "the shadow was better," he said, but he did not know what he himself meant more than what she could mean. "it has come here," said oona, "between you and me. you said you insulted katie. i cannot think that it was your meaning to--insult me." "insult--_you_!" his mind was so clear of that, and his own meaning in respect to the other so evident to him, that the dead quietude of his discouragement yielded to a momentary impatience. but how was he to make that clear? "no, i cannot think it. whatever you meant, whether it was in levity, whether it was----i do not believe _that_." "oona," he cried, waking to the desperation of the position, "will you give me up, after all we have said?" she shook her head sadly. "i will never now deny you what help i can give you, lord erradeen." he turned from her with a cry of bitterness. "help without love is no help. alms and pity will do nothing for me. it must be two--who are one." she answered him with a faint laugh which was more bitter still; but restrained the jest of pain which rose to her lips, something about three who could not be one. it was the impulse of keen anguish, but it would not have become a discussion that was as serious as life and death. "it is all a confusion," she said; "what to say or do i know not. it is such a thing--as could not have been foreseen. some would think it made me free, but i do not feel that i can ever be free." she spoke without looking at him, gazing blankly out upon the landscape. "you said it was no smiling matter to you or me--to you and me. perhaps," she interrupted herself as if a new light had come upon her, "that is the true meaning of what you say--two that are one; but it is not the usual creed. two for misery----" "oh not for misery, oona! there is no misery for me where you are." "or--any other," she said with a smile of unimaginable suffering, and ridicule, and indignation. he answered nothing. what could he say to defend himself? "if you could see into my heart," he said after a time, "you would understand. one who is in despair will clutch at anything. can you imagine a man trying like a coward to escape the conflict, rather than facing it, and bringing the woman he loved into it?" "yes," she said, "i can imagine that; but not in the man who is me." then she moved away towards the beach, saying, "hamish is waiting," with a sigh of weariness. "oona," said walter, "you will give me your hand again before we part?" "what does it matter if i give it or hold it back? it is yours whether i will or not. you should have told me before. i should have understood. oh, i am ashamed, ashamed! to think of all i have said to you. how could you betray me first before you told me? in the same morning! it is more than a woman can bear!" she cried. perhaps this outburst of passion relieved her, for she turned and held out her hand to him with a smile of pain which was heartrending. "it did not seem like this when we landed," she said. "and it would not seem like this, oh, oona! if you could see my heart." she shook her head, looking at him all the while with that strange smile, and then drew away her hand and repeated, "hamish is waiting." hamish in the background, standing up against the shining of the water, with his oar in his hand, waited with his anxious eyes upon his young lady, not knowing how it was. he would have pitched lord erradeen into the loch, or laid him at his feet with highland passion, had she given him a sign. he held the boat for him instead to step in, with an anxious countenance. love or hate, or madness or good meaning, hamish could not make out what it was. "to-morrow!" walter said, "if i can live till to-morrow in this suspense----" she waved her hand to him, and hamish pushed off. and oona stood as in a dream, seeing over again the scene which had been in her mind for so long--but changed. she had watched him go away before, eager to be gone, carrying her life with him without knowing it, without desiring it: he unaware of what he was doing, she watching surprised, bereaved of herself, innocently and unaware. how poignant had that parting been! but now it was different. he gazed back at her now, as she stood on the beach, leaving his life with her, all that was in him straining towards her, gazing till they were each to the other but a speck in the distance. two that were one! oh, not perhaps for mutual joy, not for the happiness that love on the surface seems to mean--rather for the burden, the disappointment, the shame. she waved her hand once more over the cold water, and then turned away. till to-morrow--"if i can live till to-morrow"--as he had said. chapter xi. the rest of this day passed over walter like a dream in a fever. through a kind of hot mist full of strange reflections, all painful, terrible, lurid, with confusion and suffering he saw the people and things about him--his mother questioning him with anxious words, with still more anxious eyes; his servants looking at him wondering, compassionate; and heard now and then a phrase which came to his consciousness and thereafter continued to rise before him from time to time, like a straw cast into a whirlpool and boiling up as the bubbles went and came--something about seeing a doctor, something about sending for mr. cameron, with now and then an imploring entreaty, "oh, my boy! what ails you? what is wrong?" from mrs. methven. these were the words that came back to his ears in a kind of refrain. he answered, too, somehow, he was aware, that there was nothing the matter with him, that he wanted no doctor, no counsellor, in a voice which seemed to come from any point of the compass rather than from his own lips. it was not because of the breach which had so rapidly followed the transport of his complete union with oona. that, too, had become secondary, a detail scarcely important in the presence of the vague tempest which was raging within him, and which he felt must come to some outburst more terrible than anything he had yet known when he was left to himself. he had come back to auchnasheen under the guidance of hamish, distracted, yet scarcely unhappy, feeling that at the end, whatever misunderstanding there might be, he was assured of oona, her companionship, her help, and, what was greatest of all, her love. she had not hesitated to let him see that he had that; and with that must not all obstacles, however miserable, disappear at the last? but when he landed, the misery that fell upon him was different from the pain of the temporary misunderstanding. he became conscious at once that it was the beginning of the last struggle, a conflict which might end in--he knew not what: death, downfall, flight, even shame, for aught he knew. the impulse was strong upon him to speed away to the hillside and deliver himself over to the chances of this battle, which had a fierce attraction for him on one hand, while on the other it filled him with a mad terror which reason could not subdue. so strong was this impulse that he hurried past the gate of auchnasheen and took the path that led up to the moors, with a sense of flying from, yet flying to, his spiritual enemies. he was met there by the gamekeeper, who began to talk to him about the game, and the expediency of inviting "twa-three" gentlemen to shoot the coverts down by corrieden, an interruption which seemed to his preoccupied soul too trivial, too miserable, to be borne with. he turned from the astonished speaker in the midst of his explanations, and rushed back with the impatience which was part of his character, exaggerated into a sort of mad intolerance of any interruption. not there, not there--he began to remember the wild and mad contest which last year had gone on upon those hills, and with an instantaneous change of plan retraced his steps to the house, and burst into his mother's presence, so pale, so wild, with eyes almost mad in their fire, looking out from the curves of his eyelids like those of a maniac. her terror was great. she came up to him and laid her hands upon him, and cried out, what was it? what was it? after this the active frenzy that had possessed him seemed to sink into a maze of feverish confusion which was less violent, less terrible, more like the operations of nature. he was not aware that he looked at her piteously, and said, "i want to stay with you, mother"--childlike words, which penetrated with a misery that was almost sweet to mrs. methven's very heart. she put her arms round him, drawing down his head upon her bosom, kissing his forehead with trembling lips, holding him fast, as when he was a child and came to her for consolation. he was scarcely aware of all this, and yet it soothed him. the excitement of his brain was calmed. that uneasy haze of fever which confuses everything, the half-delirium of the senses through which the mind looks as through a mist, uneasy, yet with visions that are not all miserable, was a sort of paradise in comparison with the frenzy of a conflict in which every expedient of torture was exercised upon him. he was grateful for the relief. that he did not know what he said or what she said, but heard the answering voices far off, like something musical, was nothing. there was a kind of safety in that society: the enemy could not show himself there. he had to stand off baffled and wait--ah, wait! that was certain. he had not gone away--not oona, not the mother, could save the victim altogether. they protected him for the moment, they held the foe at arm's length: but that could not be always. sooner or later the last struggle must come. walter remained within-doors all day. it was contrary to all his habits, and this of itself added to the alarm of all about him; but it was not inconsistent with the capricious impatient constitution of his mind, always ready to turn upon itself at a moment's notice, and do that which no one expected. during every moment of this long day he had to resist the strong impulse which was upon him--more than an impulse, a tearing and rending of his spirit, sometimes rising into sudden energy almost inconceivable--to go out and meet his enemy. but he held his ground so far with a dumb obstinacy which also was part of his character, and which was strengthened by the sensation of comparative exemption so long as he had the protection of others around him, and specially of his mother's presence. it was with reluctance that he saw her go out of the room even for a moment; and his eager look of inquiry when she left him, his attempts to retain her, his strained gaze towards the door till she returned, gave mrs. methven a sort of anguish of pleasure, if those contradictory words can be put together. to feel that she was something, much to him, could not but warm her heart; but with that was the misery of knowing that something must indeed be very far wrong with walter to make him thus, after so many years of independence, cling to his mother. "it is like a fever coming on," she said to symington, with whom alone she could take any counsel. "he is ill, very ill, i am sure of it. the doctor must be sent for. have you ever seen him like this before?" "my lady," said old symington, "them that have the methvens to deal with have need of much gumption. have i seen him like that before? oh, yes, i have seen him like that before. it is just their hour and the power o' darkness. let him be for two-three days----" "but in two or three days the fever may have taken sure hold of him. it may be losing precious time: it may get--fatal force----" "there is no fears of his life," said old symington; "there is enough fear of other things." "of what? oh, for god's sake! tell me; don't leave me in ignorance!" the mother cried. "but that's just what i cannot do," symington said. "by the same taken that i ken nothing mysel'." while this conversation was going on, walter, through his fever, saw them conspiring, plotting, talking about him as he would have divined and resented in other moods, but knew vaguely now in his mist of being that they meant him no harm, but good. and thus the day went on. he prolonged it as long as he could, keeping his mother with him till long after the hour when the household was usually at rest. but, however late, the moment came at last when he could detain her no longer. she, terrified, ignorant, fearing a dangerous illness, was still more reluctant to leave him, if possible, than he was to let her go, and would have sat up all night watching him had she ventured to make such a proposal. but at last walter summoned up all his courage with a desperate effort, an effort of despair which restored him to himself and made a clear spot amid all the mist and confusion of the day. "mother," he said, as he lighted her candle, "you have been very good to me to-day! oh i know you have always been good--and i always ungrateful; but i am not ungrateful now." "oh, walter! what does that word mean between you and me? if i could but do anything. it breaks my heart to see you like this." "yes, mother," he said, "and it may break my heart. i don't know what may come of it--if i can stand, or if i must fall. go and pray for me, mother." "yes, my dearest--yes, my own boy! as i have done every day, almost every hour, since ever you were born." "and so will oona," he said. he made no response of affection to this brief record of a life devoted to him, which mrs. methven uttered with eyes full of tears and every line of her countenance quivering with emotion. he was abstracted into a world beyond all such expressions and responses, on the verge of an ordeal too terrible for him, more terrible than any he had yet sustained--like a man about to face fearful odds, and counting up what aids he could depend upon. "and so will oona," he repeated to himself, aloud but unawares: and looked up at his mother with a sad glimmer of a smile and kissed her, and said, "that should help me." then, without waiting for her to go first, he walked out of the room, like a blind man, feeling with his hand before him, and not seeing where he went. for already there had begun within him that clanging of the pulses, that mounting of every faculty of the nerves and blood to his head, the seat of thought, which throbbed as though it would burst, and to his heart, which thundered and laboured and filled his ears with billows of sound. all his fears, half quiescent in the feverish pause of the day, were suddenly roused to action, ranging themselves to meet the last, the decisive, the most terrible assault of all. he went into his room and closed the door upon all mortal succour. the room was large and heavily furnished in the clumsy fashion of the last generation--heavy curtains, huge articles of furniture looming dark in the partial light, a gloomy expanse of space, dim mirrors glimmering here and there, the windows closely shut up and shrouded, every communication of the fresh air without, or such succour of light as might linger in the heavens, excluded. the old castle, with its ruined battlements, seemed a more fit scene for spiritual conflict than the dull comfort of this gloomy chamber, shut in from all human communication. but walter made no attempt to throw open the closed windows. no help from without could avail him, and he had no thought or time to spare for any exertion. he put his candle on the table and sat down to await what should befall. the night passed like other nights to most men, even to the greater number of the inhabitants in this house. mrs. methven after a while, worn out, and capable of nothing that could help him, dozed and slept, half dressed, murmuring familiar prayers in her sleep, ready to start up at the faintest call. but there came no call. two or three times in the night there was a faint stir, and once old symington, who was also on the alert, and whose room was near that of his master, saw lord erradeen come out of his chamber with a candle in his hand, the light of which showed his countenance all ghastly and furrowed as with the action of years, and go down-stairs. the old man, watching from the gallery above, saw his master go to the door, which he opened, admitting a blast of night wind which seemed to bring in the darkness as well as cold. symington waited trembling to hear it clang behind the unfortunate young man. where was he going to in the middle of the night? but after a few minutes, the door, instead of clanging, closed softly, and walter came back. it might be that this happened more than once while the slow hours crept on, for the watcher, hearing more than there was to hear, thought that there were steps about the house, and vague sounds of voices. but this was all vanity and superstition. no one came in--with none, save with his own thoughts, did walter speak. had his enemy entered bodily, and even with maddening words maintained a personal conflict, the sufferer would have been less harshly treated. once, as symington had seen, he was so broken down by the conflict that he was on the eve of a shameful flight which would have been ruin. when he came down-stairs with his candle in the dead of the night and opened the great hall door, he had all but thrown down his arms and consented that nothing remained for him but to escape while he could, as long as he could, to break all ties and abandon all succour, and only flee, flee from the intolerable moment. he had said to himself that he could bear it no longer, that he must escape anyhow, at any cost, leaving love and honour, and duty and every higher thought--for what could help him--nothing--nothing--in earth or heaven. that which touched him to the quick was not any new menace, it was not the horror of the struggles through which he had already passed, it was the maddening derision with which his impulses were represented to him as the last expedients of the most refined selfishness. when his tormentor in the morning had bidden him, with a smile, "be good!" as the height of policy, it had seemed to walter that the point of the intolerable was reached, and that life itself under such an interpretation became insupportable, a miserable jest, a mockery hateful to god and man; but there was yet a lower depth, a more hateful derision still. love! what was his love? a way of securing help, a means of obtaining, under pretences of the finest sentiment, some one who would supremely help him, stand by him always, protect him with the presence of a nature purer than his own. nothing was said to the unhappy young man. it was in the course of his own thoughts that this suggestion arose like a light of hell illuminating all the dark corners of his being. had he ever said to oona that he loved her? did he love her? was it for any motive but his own safety that he sought her? katie he had sought for her wealth, for the increase of importance she could bring, for the relief from torture she could secure to him. and oona, oona whom he loved! was it for love he fled to her? oh, no, but for safety! all was miserable, all was self, all was for his own interest, to save _him_, to emancipate him, to make life possible for him. he had started to his feet when this intolerable consciousness (for was it not true?) took possession of him. it was true. she was sweet and fair, and good and lovely, a creature like the angels; but he, miserable, had thought only that in her company was safety--that she could deliver him. he sent forth a cry which at the same time sounded like the laughter of despair, and seemed to shake the house; and took up his candle, and opened his door and hurried forth to escape, where he did not know, how he did not know nor care, to escape from the ridicule of this life, the horror of this travestie and parody of everything good and fair. heaven and earth! to seek goodness because it was the most profitable of all things; to seek love because it was safety; to profane everything dear and sacred to his own advantage! can a man know this, and recognise it with all the masks and pretences torn off, and yet consent to live, and better himself by that last desecration of all! he went down with hurried steps through the silence of his house, that silence through which was rising the prayers of the mother in whose love too he had taken refuge when in despair, whom he had bidden to go and pray, for his advantage, solely for him, that he might steal from god a help he did not deserve, by means of her cries and tears. "and so would oona," he had said. oh, mockery of everything sacred!--all for him, for his self-interest, who deserved nothing, who made use of all. he opened the door, and stood bare-headed, solitary, on the edge of the black and lonely night; behind him life and hope, and torture and misery--before the void, the blank into which the wretched may escape and lose--if not themselves, that inalienable heritage of woe, yet their power to harm those who love them. he loved nobody, it seemed, but for himself--prized nothing but for himself; held love, honour, goodness, purity, only as safeguards for his miserable life. let it go then, that wretched contemner of all good--disappear into the blackness of darkness, where god nor man should be disturbed by its exactions more! the night was wild with a raving wind that dashed the tree-tops against the sky, and swept the clouds before it in flying masses; no moon, no light, gloom impenetrable below, a pale glimpse of heaven above, swept by black billows of tumultuous clouds; somewhere in the great gloom, the loch, all invisible, waited for the steps that might stumble upon its margin; the profound world of darkness closed over every secret that might be cast into it. he stood on the threshold in a momentary pause, forlorn, alone, loosing his hold of all that he had clung to, to save him. why should he be saved who was unworthy? why trouble earth or heaven? the passion and the struggle died out of walter's soul: a profound sadness took possession of him; he felt his heart turn trembling within him, now that he had given up the instinct of self-preservation which had driven him to her feet--to oona whom he loved. god bless her! not for him would be that sweet companionship, and yet of all things the world contained, was not that the best? two that should be one. all that was external died away from him in his despair. he forgot for the first time since it had been revealed to him, that he had an enemy, a tyrant waiting for his submission. his heart turned to the love which he had thought he dishonoured, without even recollecting that cursed suggestion. it seemed to him now that he was giving it up for oona's sake, and that only now all the beauty of it, the sweetness of it, was clear to him. oh, the pity! to see all this so lovely, so fair, and yet have to resign it! what was everything else in comparison with that? but for her sake, for her dear sake! how dark it was, impenetrable, closing like a door upon the mortal eyes which had in themselves no power to penetrate that gloom! he stepped across the threshold of life, and stood outside, in the dark. he turned his eyes--for once more, for the last time, in the great calm of renunciation, his heart in a hush of supreme anguish, without conflict or struggle--to where she was, separated from him only by silent space and atmosphere, soon to be separated by more perfect barriers; only to turn his head that way, not even to see where she was hidden in the night--so small a satisfaction, so little consolation, yet something before the reign of nothingness began. all dark; but no, half way between heaven and earth, what was that, shining steady through the gloom? not a star; it was too warm, too large, too near; the light in oona's window shining in the middle of the night when all was asleep around. then she was not asleep, though everything else was, but watching--and if watching, then for him. the little light, which was but a candle in a window, suddenly, brilliantly lighted up the whole heavens and earth to walter. watching, and for him; praying for him, not because of any appeal of his, but out of her own heart, and because she so willed it--out of the prodigality, the generous, unmeasured love which it was her choice to give him--not forced but freely, because she so pleased. he stood for a moment with awe in his heart, arrested, not able to make another step, pale with the revolution, the revelation, the change of all things. his own dark thoughts died away; he stood astonished, perceiving for the first time what it was. to have become part of him had brought no joy to oona, but it was done, and never could be undone; and to be part of her, what was that to walter? he had said it without knowing what it meant, without any real sense of the great thing he said. now it fell upon him in a great wonder, full of awe. he was hers, he was _her_, not himself henceforward, but a portion of another, and that other portion of him standing for him at the gates of heaven. his whole being fell into silence, overawed. he stepped back out of the night and closed softly the great door, and returned to his room, in which everything was stilled by a spell before which all evil things fly--the apprehension of that love which is unmerited, unextorted, unalterable. when he reached his room, and had closed the door, walter, with trembling hands undid the window, and flung it open to the night, which was no more night or darkness, but part of the everlasting day, so tempered that feeble eyes might perceive those lights which hide themselves in the sunshine. what was it he saw? up in the heavens, where the clouds swept over them, stars shining, undisturbed, though hidden by moments as the masses of earthly vapour rolled across the sky; near him stealing out of his mother's window a slender ray of light that never wavered; further off, held up as in the very hand of love, the little lamp of oona. the young man was silent in a great awe; his heart stirring softly in him, hushed, like the heart of a child. for him! unworthy! for him who had never sought the love of god, who had disregarded the love of his mother, who had profaned the love of woman: down, down on his knees--down to the dust, hiding his face in gratitude unutterable. he ceased to think of what it was he had been struggling and contending for; he forgot his enemy, his danger, himself altogether, and, overawed, sank at the feet of love, which alone can save. chapter xii. lord erradeen was found next morning lying on his bed full dressed sleeping like a child. a man in his evening dress in the clear air of morning is at all times a curious spectacle, and suggestive of many uncomfortable thoughts, but there was about walter as he lay there fast asleep an extreme youthfulness not characteristic of his appearance on ordinary occasions, which made the curious and anxious spectator who bent over him, think instinctively of a child who had cried itself to sleep, and a convalescent recovering from a long illness. symington did not know which his young master resembled the most. the old man stood and looked at him, with great and almost tender compassion. one of the windows stood wide open admitting the air and sunshine. but it had evidently been open all night, and must have chilled the sleeper through and through. symington had come at his usual hour to wake lord erradeen. but as he looked at him the water came into his eyes. instead of calling him he covered him carefully with a warm covering, softly closed the window, and left all his usual morning preparations untouched. this done, he went down-stairs to the breakfast-room where mrs. methven, too anxious to rest, was already waiting for her son. symington closed the door behind him and came up to the table which was spread for breakfast. "my lady," he said, "my lord will no be veesible for some time. i found him sleeping like a bairn, and i had not the heart to disturb him. no doubt he's had a bad night, but if i'm any judge of the human countenance he will wake another man." "oh, my poor boy! you did well to let him rest, symington. i will go up and sit by him." "if ye will take my advice, my lady, ye will just take a little breakfast; a good cup of tea, and one of our fine fresh eggs, or a bit of trout from the loch; or i would find ye a bonnie bit of the breast of a bird." "i can eat nothing," she said, "when my son is in trouble." "oh, canny, canny, my lady. i am but a servant, but i am one that takes a great interest. he's in no trouble at this present moment; he's just sleeping like a baby, maybe a wee bit worn out, but not a line o' care in his face; just sleepin'--sleepin' like a little bairn. it will do you mair harm than him if i may mak' so bold as to speak. a cup of tea, my lady, just a cup of this fine tea, if nothing else--it will do ye good. and i'll answer for him," said symington. "i'm well acquaint with all the ways of them," the old servant added, "if i might venture, madam, to offer a word of advice, it would be this, just to let him bee." a year ago mrs. methven would have considered this an extraordinary liberty for a servant to take, and perhaps would have resented the advice; but at that time she did not know symington, nor was she involved in the mysterious circumstances of this strange life. she received it with a meekness which was not characteristic, and took the cup of tea, which he poured out for her, with a lump of sugar too much, by way of consolation, and a liberal supply of cream, almost with humility. "if he is not better when he comes down-stairs, i think i must send for the doctor, symington." "i would not, my lady, if i were you. i would just watch over him, but let him bee. i would wait for two or three days and just put up with everything. the methvens are no just a race like other folk. ye require great judgment to deal with the methvens. ye have not been brought up to it, my lady, like me." all this mrs. methven received very meekly, and only gratified herself with a cup of tea which was palatable to her, after symington, having done everything he could for her comfort, had withdrawn. she was very much subdued by the new circumstances in which she found herself, and felt very lonely and cast away, as in a strange land where everything was unknown. she sat for a long time by herself, trying to calm her thoughts by what symington had said. she consented that he knew a great deal more than she did, even of her son in his new position, and had come to put a sort of infinite faith in him as in an oracle. but how hard it was to sit still, or to content herself with looking out upon that unfamiliar prospect, when her heart was longing to be by her son's bedside! better to let him bee!--alas, she knew very well and had known for long that it was better to let him bee. but what was there so hard to do as that was? the shrubberies that surrounded the window allowed a glimpse at one side of the loch, cold, but gleaming in the morning sunshine. it made her shiver, yet it was beautiful: and as with the landscape, so it was with her position here. to be with walter, ready to be of use to him, whatever happened, that was well; but all was cold, and solitary, and unknown. poor mother! she had loved, and cherished, and cared for him all the days of his life, and a year since he had scarcely seen oona; yet it was oona's love, and not his mother's, which had made him understand what love was. strange injustice, yet the injustice of nature, against which it is vain to rebel. while mrs. methven, sad and anxious and perplexed, sat in the unfamiliar room, and looked on the strange landscape in which she found no point of sympathy, oona in the solitude of the isle, was full of similar thoughts. the day which had passed so miserably to walter had gone over her in that self-repression which is one of the chief endowments of women, in her mother's cheerful society, and amid all the little occupations of her ordinary life. she had not ventured to indulge herself even in thought, unless she had been prepared, as she was not, to open everything to mrs. forrester--and thus went through the hours in that active putting aside of herself and her own concerns, which is sometimes called hypocrisy and sometimes self-renunciation. she smiled, and talked, and even ate against her will, that her mother might not take fright and search into the cause, so that it was not till she had retired into the refuge of her own room that she was at liberty to throw herself down in all the abandonment of solitude and weep out the tears which made her brow heavy, and think out the thoughts with which her mind was charged almost to bursting. her candle burned almost all the night long, until long after the moment in which the sight of it held walter back from the wild flight from her and everything to which his maddening thoughts had almost driven him. the conflict in oona's mind was longer, if not so violent. with an effort she was able to dismiss herself from the consideration, and with that entire sympathy which may mistake the facts but never the intention, to enter into the mind of her lover. there was much that she could not understand, and did not attempt to fathom, and the process was not one of those that bring happiness, as when a woman, half-adoring, follows in her own exalted imagination the high career of the hero whom she loves. walter was no hero, and oona no simple worshipper to be beguiled into that deification. she had to account to herself for the wanderings, the contradictions, the downfalls of a man of whom she could not think, as had been the first impulse of pain, that any woman would satisfy him, that katie or oona, it did not matter which--but who it was yet true had offered himself to katie first, had given himself to vice (as she remembered with a shudder) first of all, and had been roaming wildly through life without purpose or hope. in all the absolutism of youth to know this, and yet to recognise that the soul within may not be corrupt, and that there may be still an agony of longing for the true even in the midst of the false, is difficult indeed. she achieved it, but it was not a happy effort. bit by bit it became clearer to her. had she known the character of the interview with katie, which gave her grievous pain even when she reasoned it out and said to herself that she understood it, the task would have been a little less hard: but it was hard and very bitter, by moments almost more than she could bear. as she sat by the dying fire, with her light shining so steadily, like a little pharos of love and steadfastness, her mind went through many faintings and moments of darkness. to have to perceive and acknowledge that you have given your heart and joined your life to that of a man who is no hero, one in whom you cannot always trust that his impulses will be right, is a discovery which is often made in after life, but by degrees, and so gently, so imperceptibly, that love suffers but little shock. but to make this discovery at the very outset is far more terrible than any other obstacle that can stand in the way. oona was compelled to face it from the first moment almost of a union which she felt in herself no possibility of breaking. she had given herself, and she could not withdraw the gift any more than she could separate from him the love which long before she had been betrayed, she knew not how, into bestowing upon him unasked, undesired, to her own pain and shame. as she sat all through the night and felt the cold steal upon her, into her very heart, and the desolation of the darkness cover her while she pondered, she was aware that this love had never failed, and knew that to abandon him was no more possible to her than if she had been his wife for years. the girl had come suddenly, without warning, without any fault of hers, out of her innocence and lightheartedness, into the midst of the most terrible problem of life. to love yet not approve, to know that the being who is part of you is not like you, has tendencies which are hateful to you, and a hundred imperfections which the subtlest casuistry of love cannot justify--what terrible fate is this, that a woman should fall into it unawares and be unable to free herself? oona did not think of freeing herself at all. it did not occur to her as a possibility. how she was to bear his burden which was hers, how she was to reconcile herself to his being as it was, or help the good in him to development, and struggle with him against the evil, that was her problem. love is often tested in song and story by the ordeal of a horrible accusation brought against the innocent, whom those who love him, knowing his nature, stand by through all disgrace, knowing that he cannot be guilty, and maintaining his cause in the face of all seeming proof. how light, how easy, what an elementary lesson of affection! but to have no such confidence, to take up the defence of the sinner who offends no one so much as yourself, to know that the accusations are true--that is the ordeal by fire, which the foolish believe to be abolished in our mild and easy days. oona saw it before her, realised it, and made up her mind to it solemnly during that night of awe and pain. this was her portion in the world: not simple life and happiness, chequered only with shadows from terrible death and misfortune, such as may befall the righteous, but miseries far other, far different, to which misfortune and death are but easy experiments in the way of suffering. this was to be her lot. and yet love is so sweet! she slept towards morning, as walter did, and when she woke, woke to a sense of happiness so exquisite and tender that her soul was astonished and asked why in an outburst of gratitude and praise to god. and it was not till afterwards that the burden and all the darkness came back to her. but that moment perhaps was worth the pain of the other--one of those compensations, invisible to men, with which god still comforts his martyrs. she rose from her bed and came back to life with a face full of new gravity and thoughtfulness, yet lit up with smiles. even mrs. forrester, who had seen nothing and suspected nothing on the previous night except that oona had perhaps taken a chill, felt, though she scarcely understood, a something in her face which was beyond the ordinary level of life. she remarked to mysie, after breakfast, that she was much relieved to see that miss oona's cold was to have no bad result. "for i think she is looking just bonnier than usual this morning--if it is not my partiality--like a spring morning," mrs. forrester said. "ah mem, and mair than that," said mysie. "god bless her! she is looking as i have seen her look the sabbath of the sacrament; for she's no like the like of us, just hardened baith to good and evil, but a' in a tremble for sorrow and joy, when the occasion comes round." "i hope we are not hardened," said mrs. forrester; "but i know what you mean, mysie, though you cannot perhaps express it like an educated person; and i was afraid that she was taking one of her bad colds, and that we should be obliged to put off our visit to mrs. methven--which would have been a great pity, for i had promised to lord erradeen." "do ye not think, mem," said mysie, "that yon young lord he is very much taken up with--the isle and those that are on it?" "hoots," said mrs. forrester, with a smile, "with you and me, mysie, do you think? but that might well be after all, for i would not wonder but he felt more at home with the like of us, that have had so much to do with boys and young men, and all the ways of them. and you know i have always said he was like mr. rob, which has warmed my heart to him from the very first day." perhaps the mother was, no more than mysie, inclined to think that she and her old maid won the young lord's attention to the isle: but a woman who is a girl's mother, however simple she may be, has certain innocent wiles in this particular. lord erradeen would be a great match for any other young lady on the loch, no doubt: but for oona what prince was good enough? they both thought so, yet not without a little flutter of their hearts at the new idea which began to dawn. it was once more a perfectly serene and beautiful day, a day that was like oona's face, adapted to that "sabbath of the sacrament" which is so great a festival in rural scotland, and brings all the distant dwellers out of the glens and villages. about noon, when the sun was at its height, and the last leaves on the trees seemed to reflect in their red and yellow, and return, a dazzling response to his shining, hamish, busy about his fishing tackle on the beach, perceived a boat with a solitary rower, slowly rounding the leafy corners, making a circuit of the isle. hamish was in no doubt as to the rower; he knew everything as well as the two who were most closely concerned. his brow, which for the last twenty-four hours had been full of furrows, gradually began to melt out of those deep-drawn lines, his shaggy eyebrows smoothed out, his mouth began to soften at the corners. there was much that was mysterious in the whole matter, and hamish had not been able to account to himself for the change in the young pair who had stepped out of his boat on to the isle in an ecstasy of happiness, and had returned sombre, under the shadow of some sudden estrangement which he could not understand. neither could he understand why it was that the young lord hovered about without attempting to land at the isle. this was so unlike the usual custom of lovers, that not even the easy explanation, half-contemptuous, half-respectful, which the habits of the masters furnish to their servants, of every eccentricity, answered the occasion--and hamish could not but feel that there was something "out of the ordinary" in the proceeding. but his perplexity on this subject did not diminish his satisfaction in perceiving that the young lord was perfectly capable of managing his boat, and that no trace of the excitement of the previous day was visible in its regular motion, impelled now and then by a single stroke, floating on the sunny surface of the water within sight of the red roofs and shining windows of the house, and kept in its course out of the way of all rocks and projecting corners by a skill which could not, hamish felt sure, be possessed by a disordered brain. this solaced him beyond telling, for though he had not said a word to any one, not even to mysie, it had lain heavily upon his heart that miss oona might be about to link her life to that of a daft man. she that was good enough for any king! and what were the erradeens to make so muckle work about, but just a mad race that nobody could understand? and the late lord had been one that could not hold an oar to save his life, nor yet yon underwood-man that was his chosen crony. but this lad was different! oh! there was no doubt that there was a great difference; just one easy touch and he was clear of the stanes yonder, that made so little show under the water--and there was that shallow bit where he would get aground if he didna mind; but again a touch and that difficulty too was cleared. it was so well done that the heart of hamish melted altogether into softness. and then he began to take pity upon this modest lover. he put his hands to his mouth and gave forth a mild roar which was not more than a whisper in kind intention. "the leddies are at home, and will ye no land, my lord?" hamish cried. lord erradeen shook his head, and sent his boat soft gliding into a little bay under the overhanging trees. "hamish," he said, "you can tell me. are they coming to-day to auchnasheen?" "at half-past two, my lord," breathed hamish through his curved hands, "they'll be taking the water: and it's just miss oona herself that has given me my orders: and as i was saying, they could not have a bonnier day." it seemed to hamish that the young lord said "thank god!" which was perhaps too much for the occasion, and just a thocht profane in the circumstances; but a lord that is in love, no doubt there will be much forgiven to him so long as he has a true heart. the sunshine caught hamish as he stood watching the boat which floated along the shining surface of the water like something beatified, an emblem of divine ease, and pleasure, and calm, and made his face shine too like the loch, and his red shirt glow. his good heart glowed too with humble and generous joy; they were going to be happy then, these two; no that he was good enough for miss oona; but who was good enough for miss oona? the faithful fellow drew his rough hand across his eyes. he who had rowed her about the loch since she was a child, and attended every coming and going--he knew it would be "a sair loss," a loss never to be made up. but then so long as she was pleased! at half-past two they started, punctual as mrs. forrester always was. every event of this day was so important that it was remembered after how exact they were to the minute, and in what a glory of sunshine loch houran lay as they pushed out, mysie standing on the beach to watch them, and lending a hand herself to launch the boat. mrs. forrester was well wrapped in her fur cloak with a white "cloud" about her head and shoulders, which she declared was not at all necessary in the sunshine which was like summer. "it is just a june day come astray," she said, nodding and smiling to mysie on the beach, who thought once more of the sacrament-day with its subdued glory and awe, and all the pacifying influence that dwelt in it. and oona turned back to make a little friendly sign with hand and head to mysie, as the first stroke of the oars carried the boat away. how sweet her face was; how tender her smile and bright! more sorrowful than mirthful, like one who has been thinking of life and death, but full of celestial and tender cheer, and a subdued happiness. mysie stood long looking after them, and listening to their voices which came soft and musical over the water. she could not have told why the tears came to her eyes. something was about to happen, which would be joyful yet would be sad. "none of us will stand in her way," said mysie to herself, unconscious of any possibility that she, the faithful servant of the house, might be supposed to have no say in the matter; "oh, not one of us! but what will the isle be with miss oona away!" chapter xiii. mrs. methven had time to recover from the agitation and trouble of the morning before her visitors' arrival. walter's aspect had so much changed when he appeared that her fears were calmed, though not dispelled. he was very pale, and had an air of exhaustion, to which his softened manners and evident endeavour to please her gave an almost pathetic aspect. her heart was touched, as it is easy to touch the heart of a mother. she had watched him go out in his boat with a faint awakening of that pleasure with which in ordinary circumstances a woman in the retirement of age sees her children go out to their pleasure. it gave her a satisfaction full of relief, and a sense of escape from evils which she had feared, without knowing what she feared, to watch the lessening speck of the boat, and to feel that her son was finding consolation in natural and uncontaminated pleasures, in the pure air and sky and sunshine of the morning. when he came back he was a little less pale, though still strangely subdued and softened. he told her that she was about to receive a visit from his nearest neighbours--"the young lady," he added, after a pause, "who brought you across the loch." "miss forrester--and her mother, no doubt? i shall be glad to see them, walter." "i hope so, mother--for there is no way in which you can do me so much good." "you mean--this is the lady of whom you spoke to me--" her countenance fell a little, for what he had said to her was not reassuring; he had spoken of one who would bring money with her, but who was not the best. "no, mother; i have never told you what i did yesterday. i asked that--lady of whom i spoke--to give me her money and her lands to add to mine, and she would not. she was very right. i approved of her with all my heart." "walter! my dear, you have been so--well--and so--like yourself this morning. do not fall into that wild way of speaking again." "no," he said, "if all goes well--never again if all goes well;" and with this strange speech he left her not knowing what to think. she endeavoured to recall to her memory the half-seen face which had been by her side crossing the dark water: but all the circumstances had been so strange, and the loch itself had given such a sensation of alarm and trouble to the traveller, that everything was dim like the twilight in her recollection. a soft voice, with the unfamiliar accent of the north, a courteous and pleasant frankness of accost, a strange sense of thus encountering, half-unseen, some one who was no stranger, nor unimportant in her life--these were the impressions she had brought out of the meeting. in all things this poor lady was like a stranger suddenly introduced into a world unknown to her, where great matters, concerning her happiness and very existence, were hanging upon mysterious decisions of others, unknown, and but to be guessed at faintly through a strange language and amidst allusions which conveyed no meaning to her mind. thus she sat wondering, waiting for the coming of--she could scarcely tell whom--of some one with whom she could do more good for walter than by anything else, yet who was not the lady to whom he had offered himself only yesterday. could there be any combination more confusing? and when, amid all this mystery, as she sat with her heart full of tremulous questions and fears, there came suddenly into this darkling, uncomprehended world of hers the soft and smiling certainty of mrs. forrester, kind and simple, and full of innocent affectations, with her little airs of an old beauty, and her amiable confidence in everybody's knowledge and interest, mrs. methven had nearly laughed aloud with that keen sense of mingled disappointment and relief which throws a certain ridicule upon such a scene. the sweet gravity of oona behind was but a second impression. the first was of this simple, easy flood of kind and courteous commonplace, which changed at once the atmosphere and meaning of the scene. "we are all very glad upon the loch to hear that lord erradeen has got his mother with him," said the guileless visitor, "for everything is the better of a lady in the house. oh, yes, you will say, that is a woman's opinion, making the most of her own side: but you just know very well it is true. we have not seen half so much of lord erradeen as we would have liked--for in my circumstances we have very little in our power. no gentleman in the house; and what can two ladies do to entertain a young man, unless he will be content with his tea in the afternoon? and that is little to ask a gentleman to. however, i must say all the neighbours are very good-natured, and just accept what we have got to give." "your daughter was most kind to me when i arrived," said mrs. methven. "i should have felt very lonely without her help." "that was nothing. it was just a great pleasure to oona, who is on the loch from morning to night," said mrs. forrester. "it was a great chance for her to be of use. we have little happening here, and the news was a little bit of excitement for us all. you see, though i have boys of my own, they are all of them away--what would they do here?--one in canada, and one in australia, and three, as i need not say, in india--that is where all our boys go--and doing very well, which is just all that heart can desire. it has been a pleasure from the beginning that lord erradeen reminds me so much of my rob, who is now up with his regiment in the north-west provinces, and a very promising young officer, though perhaps it is not me that should say so. the complexion is different, but i have always seen a great likeness. and now, lord erradeen, i hope you will bring mrs. methven soon, as long as the fine weather lasts, to the isle?" mrs. methven made a little civil speech about taking the first opportunity, but added, "i have seen nothing yet--not even this old castle of which i have heard so much." "it is looking beautiful this afternoon, and i have not been there myself, i may say, for years," said mrs. forrester. "what would you say, as it is so fine, to trust yourself to hamish, who is just the most careful man with a boat on all the loch, and take a turn as far as kinloch houran with oona and me?" the suggestion was thrown out very lightly, with that desire to do something for the pleasure of the stranger, which was always so strong in mrs. forrester's breast. she would have liked to supplement it with a proposal to "come home by the isle" and take a cup of tea, but refrained for the moment with great self-denial. it was caught at eagerly by walter, who had not known how to introduce his mother to the sight of the mystic place which had so much to do with his recent history: and in a very short time they were all afloat--mrs. methven, half-pleased, half-disappointed with the sudden changing of all graver thoughts and alarms into the simplicity of a party of pleasure, so natural, so easy. the loch was radiant with that glory of the afternoon which is not like the glory of the morning, a dazzling world of light, the sunbeams falling lower every moment, melting into the water, which showed all its ripples like molten gold. the old tower lay red in the light, the few green leaves that still fluttered on the ends of the branches, standing out against the darker background, and the glory of the western illumination besetting every dark corner of the broken walls as if to take them by joyful assault and triumph over every idea of gloom. nothing could have been more peaceful than the appearance of this group. the two elder ladies sat in the stern of the boat, carrying on their tranquil conversation--mrs. forrester entering well pleased into details about "the boys," which mrs. methven, surprised, amused, arrested somehow, she could not tell how, in the midst of the darker, more bewildering current, responded to now and then with some half-question, enough to carry on the innocent fulness of the narrative. oona, who had scarcely spoken at all, and who was glad to be left to her own thoughts, sat by her mother's side, with the eyes of the other mother often upon her, yet taking no part in the talk; while walter, placed behind hamish at the other end of the boat, felt this strange pause of all sensation to be something providential, something beyond all his power of arranging, the preface to he knew not what, but surely at least not to any cutting off or separation from oona. she had not indeed met his anxious and questioning looks: but she had not refused to come, and that of itself was much; nor did there seem to be any anger, though some sadness, in the face which seemed to him, as to mysie, full of sacred light. "no, i have not been here for long," said mrs. forrester; "not since the late lord's time: but i see very little change. if you will come this way, mrs. methven, it is here you will get the best view. yon is the tower upon which the light is seen, the light, ye will have heard, that calls every new lord: oh and that comes many a time when there is no new lord: you need not bid me whisht, oona! no doubt there will be some explanation of it: but it is a thing that all the world knows." mrs. methven laughed, more at her ease than she had yet been, and said-- "walter, what a terrible omission: you have never told me of this." walter did not laugh. his face, on the contrary, assumed the look of gloom and displeasure which she knew so well. "if you will come with me," he said to mrs. forrester, "i will show you my rooms. old macalister is more gracious than usual. you see he has opened the door." "oh i will go with great pleasure, lord erradeen: for it is long since i have been inside, and i would like to see your rooms. oh how do you do, macalister? i hope your wife and you are quite well, and not suffering with rheumatism. we've come to show mrs. methven, that is your master's mother, round the place. yes, i am sure ye will all be very glad to see her. this is macalister, a very faithful old servant that has been with the lords erradeen as long as i can remember. how long is it--near five and forty years? dear me, it is just wonderful how time runs on. i was then but lately married, and never thought i would ever live like a pelican in the wilderness in my mother's little bit isle. but your mind just is made to your fortune, and i have had many a happy day there. dear me, it will be very interesting to see the rooms, we that never thought there were any rooms. where is oona? oh, never take the trouble, lord erradeen, your mother is waiting: and oona, that knows every step of the castle, she will soon find her way." this was how it was that oona found herself alone. walter cast behind him an anxious look, but he could not desert the elder ladies, and oona was glad to be left behind. her mind had recovered its calm; but she had much to think of, and his presence disturbed her, with that influence of personal contact which interferes with thought. she knew the old castle, if not every step of it, as her mother said, yet enough to make it perfectly safe for her. old macalister had gone first to lead the way, to open doors and windows, that the ladies might see everything, and, save for hamish in his boat on the beach, there was nobody within sight or call. the shadow of the old house shut out the sunshine from the little platform in front of the door; but at the further side, where the trees grew among the broken masses of the ruin, the sun from the west entered freely. she stood for a moment undecided, then turned towards that wild conjunction of the living and the dead, the relics of the past, and the fresh growth of nature, which give so much charm to every ruin. oona went slowly, full of thought, up to the battlements, and looked out upon the familiar landscape, full of light and freshness, and all the natural sounds of the golden afternoon--the lapping of the water upon the rocks, the rustle of the wind in the trees, the far-off murmurs of life, voices cheerful, yet inarticulate, from the village, distant sounds of horses and wheels on the unseen roads, the bark of a dog, all the easy, honest utterance, unthought of, like simple breathing, of common life. for a moment the voice of her own thoughts was hushed within her, replaced by this soft combination of friendly noises. it pleased her better to stand here with the soft air about her, than amid all the agitation of human influences to accompany the others. but human influence is more strong than the hold of nature; and by-and-by she turned unconsciously from the landscape to the house, the one dark solid mass of habitable walls, repelling the sunshine, while the tower, with its blunted outline above, and all the fantastic breaches and openings in the ruin, gave full play to every level ray. the loch, all golden with the sunset, the shadows of the trees, the breath and utterance of distant life, gave nothing but refreshment and soothing. but the walls that were the work of men, and that for hundreds of years had gathered sombre memories about them, had an attraction more absorbing. a little beyond where she was standing, was the spot from which miss milnathort had fallen. she had heard the story vaguely all her life, and she had heard from walter the meaning of it, only the other day. perhaps it was the sound of a little crumbling and precipitation of dust and fragments from the further wall that brought it so suddenly to her memory; but the circumstances in which she herself was, were enough to bring those of the other woman, who had been as herself, before her with all the vividness of reality. as young as herself, and more happy, the promised bride of another walter, everything before her as before oona, love and life, the best that providence can give, more happy than she, nothing to disturb the gladness of her betrothal; and in a moment all over, all ended, and pain and helplessness, and the shadow of death, substituted for her happiness and hope. oona paused, and thought of that tragedy with a great awe stealing over her, and pity which was so intense in her realisation of a story, in every point save the catastrophe, so like her own, penetrating her very soul. she asked herself which of the two it was who had suffered most--the faithful woman who lived to tell her own story, and to smile with celestial patience through her death in life, or the man who had struggled in vain, who had fallen under the hand of fate, and obeyed the power of outward circumstances, and been vanquished, and departed from the higher meaning of his youth? oona thought with a swelling and generous throbbing of her heart, of the one--but with a deeper pang of the other; he who had not failed at all so far as any one knew, who had lived and been happy as people say. she leant against the wall, and asked herself if anything should befall her, such as befell miss milnathort, whether her walter would do the same. would he accept his defeat as the other had done, and throw down his arms and yield? she said no in her heart, but faltered, and remembered katie. yet no! that had been before, not after their hearts had met, and he had known what was in hers. no, he might be beaten down to the dust; he might rush out into the world, and plunge into the madness of life, or he might plunge more deeply, more darkly, into the madness of despairing, and die. but he would not yield; he would not throw down his arms and accept the will of the other. faulty as he was, and stained and prone to evil, this was what he would never do. and then her thoughts turned to the immediate matter before her--the deliverance of the man whose fate she had pledged herself to share notwithstanding all his imperfections; he who had found means already, since she had bound herself to him, to make her heart bleed; he whom she had loved against her will, against her judgment, before she was aware. he was to be made free from a bondage, a spiritual persecution, a tyrant who threatened him in every action of his life. oona had known all her life that there was some mysterious oppression under which the house of erradeen was bound, and there was no scepticism in her mind in respect to a wonder about which every inhabitant of the district had something to say; but from the moment when it became apparent that she too was to belong to this fated house, it had become insupportable and impossible. she felt, but with less agitation and a calmer certainty than that of walter, that by whatsoever means it must be brought to an end. had he been able to bear it, she could not have borne it. and he said that she alone could save him--that with her by his side he was safe; strange words, containing a flattery which was not intended, a claim which could not be resisted. he had said it when as yet he scarcely knew her, he had repeated it when he came to her hot from the presence of the other to whom he had appealed in vain. strange mixture of the sweet and the bitter! she remembered, however, that he had asked her in the simplicity of desperation to give him her hand to help him, a year ago, and this thought banished all the other circumstances from her mind. she had helped him then, knowing nothing--how was she to help him now? could she but do it by standing forth in his place and meeting his enemy for him! could she but take his burden on her shoulders and carry it for him! he who had suffered so much feared with a deadly terror his oppressor; but oona did not fear him. on her he had no power. in walter's mind there was the weakness of previous defeat, the tradition of family subjection; but in her there was no such weakness, either personal or traditionary; and what was the use of her innocence, of her courage, if not to be used in his cause? could she but stand for him, speak for him, take his place! "up and spoke she, alice brand, and made the holy sign; and if there's blood on richard's hand, a stainless hand is mine." oona's heart was full of this high thought. it drove away from her mind all shadows, all recollections of a less exalting kind. she moved on quietly, not caring nor thinking where she went, forming within herself visions of this substitution, which is in so many cases a woman's warmest desire. but then she paused, and there became visible to her a still higher eminence of generous love--a higher giddy eminence, more precarious, more dangerous, by which deliverance was less secure; not substitution--that was impossible. in her inward thoughts she blushed to feel that she had thought of a way of escape which for walter would have been ignoble. it was for him to bear his own part, not to stand by while another did it for him. a noble shame took possession of her that she could for a moment have conceived another way. but with this came back all the anxious thoughts, the questions, the uncertainty. how was she to help him? how pour all the force of her life into him? how transfer to him every needed quality, and give him the strength of two in one? in the full current of her thoughts oona was suddenly brought to a pause. it was by the instinct of self-preservation which made her start back on the very edge of the ruin. the sickening sensation with which she felt the crumbling masonry move beneath her foot, drove everything out of her mind for the moment. with a sudden recoil upon herself, oona set her back against the edge of the parapet that remained, and endeavoured to command and combat the sudden terror that seized hold upon her. she cast a keen wild look round her to find out if there was any way of safety, and called out for help, and upon walter! walter! though she felt it was vain. the wind was against her, and caught her voice, carrying it as if in mockery down the loch, from whence it returned only in a vague and distant echo; and she perceived that the hope of any one hearing and reaching her was futile indeed. above her, on a range of ruin always considered inaccessible, there seemed to oona a line of masonry solid enough to give her footing. necessity cannot wait for precedents. she was young and active, and used to exercise, and her nerves were steadied by the strain of actual danger. she made a spring from her insecure standing, feeling the ruin give way under her foot with the impulse, and with the giddiness of a venture which was almost desperate, flung herself upon the higher level. when she had got there it seemed to her incredible that she could have done it: and what was to be her next step she knew not, for the ledge on which she stood was very narrow, and there was nothing to hold by in case her head or courage should fail. everything below and around was shapeless ruin, not to be trusted, all honeycombed, with hollow places thinly covered over by remains of fallen roofs and drifted earth and treacherous vegetation. only in one direction was there any appearance of solidity, and that was above her towards the tower which still stood firmly, the crown of the building, though no one had climbed up to its mysterious heights within the memory of man. round it was a stone balcony or terrace, which was the spot upon which the mysterious light, so familiar to her, was periodically visible. oona's heart beat as she saw herself within reach of this spot. she had watched it so often from the safe and peaceful isle, with that thrill of awe, and wonder, and half-terror, which gave an additional pleasure to her own complete and perfect safety. she made a few steps forward, and, putting out her hand with a quiver of all her nerves, took hold upon the cold roughness of the lower ledge. the touch steadied her, yet woke an agitation in her frame, the stir of strong excitement; for death lay below her, and her only refuge was in the very home of mystery, a spot untrodden of men. for the next few minutes she made her way instinctively without thought, holding by every projection which presented itself; but when oona found herself standing safe within the balustrade, close upon the wall of the tower, and had drawn breath and recovered a little from the exhaustion and strain--when her mind got again the upper hand and disentangled itself from the agitation of the body, the hurry and whirl of all her thoughts were beyond description. she paused as upon the threshold of a new world. what might be about to happen to her? not to perish like the other, which seemed so likely a few minutes ago, yet perhaps as tragic a fate; perhaps the doom of all connected with the methvens was here awaiting her. but there is something in every extreme which disposes the capricious human soul to revolt and recoil. oona still spoke to herself, but spoke aloud, as it was some comfort to do in her utter isolation. she laughed to herself, nature forcing its way through awe and alarm. "doom!" she said to herself, "there is no doom. that would mean that god was no longer over all. what he wills let that be done." this calmed her nerves and imagination. she did not stop to say any prayer for her own safety. there arose even in her mind upon the very foundation of her momentary panic, a sudden new force and hope. she who had so desired to stand in walter's place, to be his substitute, might not this, without any plan or intention of hers, be now placed within her power? in the mean time everything was solid and safe beneath her feet. the tower stood strong, the pavement of the narrow platform which surrounded it was worn by time and weather, but perfectly secure. here and there a breach in the balustrade showed like fantastic flamboyant work, but a regiment might have marched round it without disturbing a stone. oona's excitement was extreme. her heart beat in her ears like the roaring of a torrent. she went on, raised beyond herself, with a strange conviction that there was some object in her coming, and that this which seemed so accidental was no accident at all, but perhaps--how could she tell?--an ordeal, the first step in that career which she had accepted. she put her hand upon the wall, and guided herself by it, feeling a support in the rough and time-worn surface, the stones which had borne the assault of ages. daylight was still bright around her, the last rays of the sun dazzling the loch below, which in its turn lent a glory of reflection to the sky above, and sent up a golden sheen through the air from the blaze upon the water. round the corner of the tower the wind blew freshly in her face from the hills, reviving and encouraging her. nature was on her side in all its frankness and reality whatever mystery might be elsewhere. when she had turned the corner of the tower, and saw beneath her the roofs of auchnasheen visible among the trees, oona suddenly stood still, her heart making, she thought, a pause as well as her feet; then with a bound beginning again in louder and louder pulsation. she had come to a doorway deep set in the wall, like the entrance of a cavern, with one broad, much-worn step, and a heavy old door bound and studded with iron. she stood for a moment uncertain, trembling, with a sense of the unforeseen and extraordinary which flew to her brain--a bewildering pang of sensation. for a moment she hesitated what to do: yet scarcely for a moment, since by this time she began to feel the force of an impulse which did not seem her own, and which she had no strength to resist. the door was slightly ajar, and pushing it open, oona found herself, with another suffocating pause, then bound, of her heart, upon the threshold of a richly furnished room. she was aware of keeping her hold upon the door with a terrifying anticipation of hearing it close upon her, but otherwise seemed to herself to have passed beyond her own control and consciousness, and to be aware only of the wonderful scene before her. the room was lighted from an opening in the roof, which showed in the upper part the rough stone of the walls in great blocks, rudely hewn, contrasting strangely with the heavy curtains with which they were hung round below. the curtains seemed of velvet, with panels of tapestry in dim designs here and there: the floor was covered with thick and soft carpets. a great telescope occupied a place in the centre of the room, and various fine instruments, some looking like astronomical models, stood on tables about. the curtained walls were hung with portraits, one of which she recognised as that of the last lord erradeen. and in the centre of all supported on a table with a lamp burning in front of it, the light of which (she supposed), blown about by the sudden entrance of the air, so flickered upon the face that the features seemed to change and move, was the portrait of walter. the cry which she would have uttered at this sight died in oona's throat. she stood speechless, without power to think, gazing, conscious that this discovery was not for nothing, that here was something she must do, but unable to form a thought. the light fell upon the subdued colours of the hangings and furniture with a mystic paleness, without warmth; but the atmosphere was luxurious and soft, with a faint fragrance in it. oona held open the door, which seemed in the movement of the air which she had admitted, to struggle with her, but to which she held with a desperate grasp, and gazed spellbound. was it the flickering of the lamp, or was it possible that the face of the portrait changed, that anguish came into the features, and that the eyes turned and looked at her appealing, full of misery, as walter's eyes had looked? it seemed to oona that her senses began to fail her. there was a movement in the tapestry, and from the other side of the room, some one put it aside, and after looking at her for a moment came slowly out. she had seen him only in the night and darkness, but there was not another such that she should mistake who it was. a thrill ran through her of terror, desperation, and daring. whatever might now be done or said, oona had come to the crisis of her fate. he came towards her with the air of courtesy and grace, which seemed his most characteristic aspect. "come in," he said; "to reach this place requires a stout heart; but you are safe here." oona made him no reply. she felt her voice and almost her breathing arrested in her throat, and felt capable of nothing but to hold fast to the heavy door, which seemed to struggle with her like a living thing. "you are afraid," he said; "but there is no reason to fear. why should you think i would injure you? you might have fallen, like others, from the ruin; but you are safe here." he advanced another step and held out his hand. it seemed to oona that the door crushed her as she stood against it, but she would not let go her hold; and with all her power she struggled to regain possession of her voice, but could not, paralysed by some force which she did not understand. he smiled with a slight ridicule in his lofty politeness. "i tell you not to fear," he said. "yours is not a spirit to fear; you who would have put yourself in his place and defied the demon. you find me no demon, and i offer no hostility, yet you are afraid." oona was astonished by the sound of her own voice, which burst forth suddenly, by no apparent will of her own, and which was strange to her, an unfamiliar tone, "i am not afraid--i am in--the protection of god--" he laughed softly. "you mean to exorcise me," he said; "but that is not so easily done; and i warn you that resistance is not the best way. you have trusted yourself to me--" "no--no--" "yes. you fled from the danger to which another in your place succumbed, and you have taken refuge with me. to those who do so i am bound. come in; there is no danger here." it seemed to oona that there were two beings in her--one which ridiculed her distrust, which would have accepted the hand held out; another--not her, surely, not her frank and unsuspicious self--who held back and clung in terror to the door. she stammered, hearing even in her voice the same conflict, some tones that were her own, some shrill that were not hers--"i want no protection--but god's." "why then," he said with a smile, "did you not remain among the ruins? what brought you here?" there was an answer--a good answer if she could have found it--but she could not find it, and made no reply. "you refuse my friendship, then," he said, "which is a pity, for it might have saved you much suffering. all the same, i congratulate you upon your prize." these last words stopped the current towards him of that natural sentiment of confidence and faith in her fellow-creatures, which was oona's very atmosphere. her prize! what did he mean by her prize? "there could not be anything more satisfactory to your friends," he said. "a title--large estates--a position which leaves nothing to be desired. your mother must be fully satisfied, and your brothers at the ends of the world will all feel the advantage. other conquests might have been better for the erradeens, but for you nothing could be more brilliant. it was a chance too, unlikely, almost past hoping for, thus to catch a heart in the rebound." she stood aghast, gazing with eyes that were pained by the strain, but which would not detach themselves from his face. brilliant! advantages! was she in a dream? or what was the meaning of the words? "it is against my own policy," he continued, "as perhaps you know; still i cannot help admiring your skill, unaided, against every drawback. you have a strong mind, young lady of the isle, and the antecedents which would have daunted most women have been allies and auxiliaries to you." his laugh was quite soft and pleasant, sounding like gentle amusement, not ridicule. "i know your family," he continued, "of old. they were all men of strong stomachs, able to swallow much so long as their own interest was concerned. with highland caterans, that is comprehensible; but one so young as you--named like you--after--" he laughed again that low soft laugh of amusement as if at something which tickled him in spite of himself, "the emblem of purity and innocence--'heavenly una with her milk-white lamb.'" "you want," said oona, whose voice sounded hoarse in her throat, and sharp to her own ears, "to make me mad with your taunts; to make me give up--" "pardon me, i am only congratulating you," he said, and smiled, looking at her with a penetrating look of amusement and that veiled ridicule which does not infringe the outward forms of politeness. she gazed back at him with eyes wide open, with such a pang of wondering anguish and shame in her heart as left her speechless; for what he said was true. she had thought of her union with walter in many ways before, but never in this. now it all flashed upon her as by a sudden light. what he said was true. she who had never given a thought to worldly advantage, had nevertheless secured it as much as if that had been her only thought. her senses seemed to fail her in the whirl and heart-sickness of the revelation. it was true. she who had believed herself to be giving all, she was taking to herself rank, wealth, and honour, in marrying walter. and giving to him what?--a woman's empty hand; no more. oona was very proud though she did not know it, and the blow fell upon her with crushing effect. every word had truth in it; her mother would be satisfied; the family would profit by it wherever they were scattered; and she would be the first to reap the advantage. oona felt everything swim around her as in the whirl and giddiness of a great fall. her fall was greater than that of miss milnathort, for it was the spirit not the body that was crushed and broken. she could not lift up her head. a horrible doubt even of herself came into her mind in her sudden and deep humiliation. had this been in her thoughts though she did not know it? no stroke could have been aimed at her so intolerable as this. he kept his eyes upon her, as if with a secret enjoyment of her overthrow. "you do not thank me for my congratulations," he cried. "oh!" she cried in the wondering self-abandonment of pain, "can you be a man, only a man, and strike so deep?" then the very anguish of her soul gave her a sudden inspiration. she looked round her with her eyes dilating. "when you can do this," she said, putting with unconscious eloquence her hand to her heart, "what do you want with things like those?" the sight of the lamp which burned before walter's portrait had given her a painful sense of harm and danger when she saw it first. it filled her now with a keen disdain. to be able to pierce the very soul, and yet to use the aid of _that_! she did not know what its meaning was, yet suffering in every nerve, she scorned it, and turned to him with a questioning look which was full of indignation and contempt. and he who was so strong, so much above her in power and knowledge, shrank--almost imperceptibly, but yet he shrank--startled, from her look and question. "_that?_" he said, "you who know so little of your own mind, how can you tell how human nature is affected?--by what poor methods, as well as by great. you understand nothing--not yourself--far less the devices of the wise." "oh, you are wise," cried oona, "and cruel. you can make what is best look the worst. you can confuse our souls so that we cannot tell what is good in us, and what evil. i know, i know, you are a great person. yet you hide and lurk in this place which no man knows; and work by spells and charms like--like--" "like what?" a gleam of anger and shame--or of something that might have betrayed these sentiments on any other face--crossed his usually calm and lofty countenance. oona, opposite to him, returned his look with a passionate face of indignation and disdain. she had forgotten herself altogether, and everything but the thrill and throbbing of the anguish which seemed to have taken the place of her heart in her. she feared nothing now. the blow which she had received had given her the nobleness of desperation. "like a poor--witch," she said; "like the wizard they call you; like one who plays upon the ignorant, not like the powerful spirit you are. you that can beat us down to the dust, both him and me. you that can turn sweet into bitter, and good into evil. oh, how can you for shame take that way too, like a--juggler," she cried in her passion; "like a sorcerer; like----" "you speak like a fool, though you are no fool," he said, "not knowing the stuff that we are made of." he made a step towards her as he spoke, and though his tone was rather sad than fierce, there came upon oona in a moment such a convulsion of terror as proved what the weakness was of which he spoke. she clung with all her failing force to the door which seemed her only support, and broke out into a shrill cry, "walter, walter, save me!" afraid of she knew not what, panic seizing her, and the light flickering in her fainting eyes. chapter xiv. while oona was standing on the verge of these mysteries a trial of a very different kind had fallen to walter. they had exchanged parts in this beginning of their union. it was his to lead the two elder ladies into those rooms which were to him connected with the most painful moments of his life, but to them conveyed no idea beyond the matter of fact that they were more comfortably furnished and inhabitable than was to be expected in such a ruin. even to mrs. methven, who was interrogating his looks all the time, in an anxious endeavour to know what his feelings were, there seemed nothing extraordinary in the place save this. she seated herself calmly in the chair, which he had seen occupied by so different a tenant, and looking smiling towards him, though always with a question in her eyes, began to express her wonder why, with auchnasheen so near, it had been thought necessary to retain a dwelling-place among these ruins; but since walter did from time to time inhabit them, his mother found it pleasant that they were so habitable, so almost comfortable, and answered old macalister's apologies for the want of a fire or any preparations for their coming with smiling assurances that all was very well, that she could not have hoped to find rooms in such careful repair. mrs. forrester was a great deal more effusive, and examined everything with a flow of cheerful remark, divided between lord erradeen and his old servant, with whom, as with everybody on the loch, she had the acquaintance of a lifetime. "i must see your wife, macalister," she said, "and make her my compliment on the way she has kept everything. it is really just a triumph, and i would like to know how she has done it. to keep down the damp even in my little house, where there are always fires going, and every room full, is a constant thought--and how she does it here, where it is so seldom occupied----. the rooms are just wonderfully nice rooms, lord erradeen, but i would not say they were a cheerful dwelling--above all, for a young man like you." "no, they are not a very cheerful dwelling," said walter with a smile, which to his mother, watching him so closely, told a tale of pain which she did not understand indeed, yet entered into with instinctive sympathy. the place began to breathe out suffering and mystery to her, she could not tell why. it was cold, both in reality and sentiment, the light coming into it from the cold north-east, from the mountains which stood up dark and chill above the low shining of the setting sun. and the cold affected her from his eyes, and made her shiver. "i think," she said, "we must not stay too long. the sun is getting low, and the cold----" "but where is oona?" said mrs. forrester. "i would not like to go away till she has had the pleasure too. oh, yes, it is a pleasure, lord erradeen--for you see we cannot look out at our own door, without the sight of your old castle before our eyes, and it is a satisfaction to know what there is within. she must have stayed outside among the rains that she was always partial to. perhaps macalister will go and look for her--or, oh! lord erradeen, but i could not ask you to take that trouble." "my lord," said old macalister aside, "if it had been any other young lady i wad have been after her before now. miss oona is just wonderful for sense and judgment; but when i think upon yon wall----" "i will go," said walter. amid all the associations of this place, the thought of oona had threaded through every movement of his mind. he thought now that she had stayed behind out of sympathy, now that it was indifference, now--he could not tell what to think. but no alarm for her safety had crossed his thoughts. he made a rapid step towards the door, then paused, with a bewildering sense that he was leaving two innocent women without protection in a place full of dangers which they knew nothing of. was it possible that his enemy could assail him through these unsuspecting simple visitors? he turned back to them with a strange pang of pity and regret, which he himself did not understand. "mother," he said, "you will forgive me--it is only for a moment?" "walter!" she cried, full of surprise; then waved her hand to him with a smile, bidding him, "go, go--and bring miss forrester." her attitude, her smile of perfect security and pleasure, went with him like a little picture, as he went down the spiral stairs. mrs. forrester was in the scene too, in all her pretty faded colour and animation, begging him--"dear me, not to take the trouble; for no doubt oona was just at the door, or among the ruins, or saying a word to hamish about the boat." a peaceful little picture--no shadow upon it; the light a little cold, but the atmosphere so serene and still. strange contrast to all that he had seen there--the conflict, the anguish, which seemed to have left their traces upon the very walls. he hurried down-stairs with this in his mind, and a lingering of all his thoughts upon the wistful smiling of his mother's face--though why at this moment he should dwell upon that was a wonder to himself. oona was not on the grassy slope before the door, nor talking to hamish at the landing-place, as her mother suggested. there was no trace of her among the ruins. then, but not till then, walter began to feel a tremor of alarm. there came suddenly into his mind the recollection of that catastrophe of which he had been told in edinburgh by its victim; it sent a shiver through him, but even yet he did not seriously fear; for oona was no stranger to lose herself upon the dangerous places of the ruin. he went hurriedly up the steps to the battlements, where he himself had passed through so many internal struggles, thinking nothing less than to find her in one of the embrasures, where he had sat and looked out upon the loch. he had been startled as he came out of the shadow of the house, by a faint cry, which seemed to issue from the distance, from the other extremity of the water, and which was indeed the cry for help to which oona had given utterance when she felt the wall crumbling under her feet, which the wind had carried far down the loch, and which came back in a distant echo. walter began to remember this cry as he searched in vain for any trace of her. and when he reached the spot where the danger began and saw the traces that some other steps had been there before him, and that a shower of crumbling mortar and fragments of stone had fallen, his heart leaped to his throat with sudden horror. this was calmed by the instant reassurance that had she fallen he must at once have discovered the catastrophe. he looked round him bewildered, unable to conceive what had become of her. where had she gone? the boat lay at the landing-place, with hamish in waiting; the whole scene full of rest and calm, and everything silent about and around. "oona!" he cried, but the wind caught his voice too, and carried it away to the village on the other bank, to her own isle away upon the glistening water, where oona was not. where was she? his throat began to grow parched, his breath to labour with the hurry of his heart. he stood on the verge of the precipice of broken masonry, straining his eyes over the stony pinnacles above, and the sharp irregularities of the ruin. there he saw something suddenly which made his heart stand still: her glove lying where she had dropped it in her hurried progress along the ledge. he did not pause to think how she got there, which would have seemed at another moment impossible, but with a desperate spring and a sensation as of death in his heart, followed, where she had passed, wherever that might be. walter neither knew where he was going nor how he made his way along those jagged heights. he did not go cautiously as oona had done, but flew on, taking no notice of the dangers of the way. the sound of voices, and of his own name, and oona's cry for help, reached his ear as with a leap he gained the stone balcony of the tower. his feet scarcely touched the stones as he flew to her who called him, nor did he think where he was, or feel any wonder at the call, or at the voices on such a height, or at anything that was happening. his mind had no room for any observation or thought save that oona called him. he flung himself into the dark doorway as if it had been a place he had known all his life, and caught her as her strength failed her. she who had thought she could put herself in his place, and who had been ready to brave everything for him, turned round with her eyes glazing and her limbs giving way, with strength enough only to throw herself upon his breast. thus walter found himself once more face to face with his enemy. the last time they had met, lord erradeen had been goaded almost to madness. he stood now supporting oona on his arm, stern, threatening in his turn. "if you have killed her," he cried; "if you have hurt her as you did before; if you have made her your victim, as you did before!" there was no shrinking in his look now: he spoke out loudly with his head high, his eyes blazing upon the enemy who was no longer his, but _hers_, which had a very different meaning; and though he stood against the door where he had found oona holding it wide open, this was done unconsciously, with no idea of precaution. the time for that was over now. and with the sensation of his support, the throb of his heart so near hers, oona came back to herself. she turned slowly round towards the inhabitant of the tower. "walter, tell him--that though he can make us miserable he cannot make us consent. tell him--that now we are two, not one, and that our life is ours, not his. oh!" she cried, lifting her eyes, addressing herself directly to him, "listen to me!--over me you have no power--and walter is mine, and i am his. go--leave us in peace." "she says true; leave us in peace. in all my life now, i shall do no act that is not half hers, and over her you have no power." "you expect me then," he said, "to give way to this bargain of self-interest--a partnership of protection to you and gain to her. and you think that before this i am to give way." "it is not so," cried walter, "not so. oona, answer him. i turned to her for help because i loved her, and she to me for--i know not why--because she loved me. answer him, oona! if it should be at this moment for death not for life--" she turned to him with a look and a smile, and put her arm through his, clasping his hand: then turned again to the other who stood looking on. "if it should be for death," she said. there was a moment of intense stillness. he before whom these two stood knew human nature well. he knew every way in which to work upon a solitary being, a soul alone, in his power; but he knew that before two, awake, alive, on the watch one for the other, these methods were without power, and though his experiences were so great the situation was new. they were in the first absolute devotion of their union, invulnerable, no germ of distrust, no crevice of possible separation. he might kill, but he could not move them. this mysterious agent was not above the artifices of defeat. to separate them was the only device that remained to him. "you are aware," he said, "that here if nowhere else you are absolutely in my power. you have come to me. i have not gone to you. if you wish to sacrifice her life you can do so, but what right have you to do it? how dare you take her from those who love her, and make her your victim? she will be your victim, not mine. there is time yet for her to escape. it is for her to go--die? why should she die? are you worth such a sacrifice? let her go----" "hold me fast--do not loose me, walter," cried oona wildly in his ear. and here his last temptation took him, in the guise of love, and rent him in two. to let _her_ perish, was that possible? could he hold her though she was his life, and sacrifice hers? walter could not pause to think; he tore his hand out of hers, which would not be loosed, and thrust her from him. "oona," he cried, his voice sinking to a whisper, "go! oona, go! not to sacrifice you--no, no, i will not. anything but that. while there is time, go!" she stood for a moment between the two, deserted, cast off by him who loved her. it was the supreme crisis of all this story of her heart. for a moment she said nothing, but looked at them, meeting the keen gaze of the tempter, whose eyes seemed to burn her, gazing at walter who had half-closed his not to see her go. then with the sudden, swift, passionate action, unpremeditated and impulsive, which is natural to women, she flung herself before him, and seized with her hands the table upon which the light was burning. "you said," she cried, breathless, "that you used small methods as well as great--and this is one, whatever it is." she thrust it from her violently as she spoke. the lamp fell with a great crash and broke, and the liquid which had supplied it burst out and ran blazing in great globules of flames over the floor. the crash, the blaze, the sudden uproar, was like a wall between the antagonists. the curtains swaying with the wind, the old dry tapestries, caught in the fire like tinder. oona, as wild with fear as she had been with daring, caught at walter's hand with the strength of despair, and fled dragging him after her. the door clanged behind them as he let it go, then burst open again with the force of the breeze and let out a great blaze, the red mad gleam of fire in the sunshine and daylight--unnatural, devouring. with a sense that death was in their way before and behind, they went forth clinging to each other, half-stupefied, half-desperate. then sense and hearing and consciousness itself were lost in a roar as of all the elements let loose--a great dizzy upheaving as of an earthquake. the whole world darkened round them; there was a sudden rush of air and whirl of giddy sensation--and nothing more. * * * * * the two mothers meanwhile talked calmly in the room below, where macalister had lighted the fire, and where, in the cheerful blaze and glow, everything became more easy and tranquil and calm. perhaps even the absence of the young pair, whose high strain of existence at the moment could not but disturb the elder souls with sympathy, made the quiet waiting, the pleasant talk, more natural. mrs. methven had been deeply touched by her son's all unneeded apology for leaving her. she could have laughed over it, and cried, it was so kind, so tender of walter, yet unlike him, the late awakening of thought and tenderness to which she had never been accustomed, which penetrated her with a sweet and delightful amusement as well as happiness. she had no reason to apprehend any evil, neither was mrs. forrester afraid for oona. "oh no, she is well used to going about by herself. there is nobody near but knows my oona. her family and all her belongings have been on the loch, i might say, since ever it was a loch; and if any stranger took it upon him to say an uncivil word, there is neither man nor woman for ten miles round but would stand up for her--if such a thing could be," mrs. forrester added with dignity, "which is just impossible and not to be thought of. and as for ruins, she knows them well. but i would like her to see the books, and what a nice room lord erradeen has here, for often we have been sorry for him, and wondered what kind of accommodation there was, and what good it could do to drag the poor young man out of his comfortable house, if it was only once in the year----" "and why should he come here once in the year?" mrs. methven asked with a smile. "that is just the strange story: but i could not take upon myself to say, for i know nothing except the common talk, which is nonsense, no doubt. you will never have been in the north before?" said mrs. forrester, thinking it judicious to change the subject. "never before," mrs. methven replied, perceiving equally on her side that the secrets of the family were not to be gleaned from a stranger; and she added, "my son himself has not yet seen his other houses, though this is the second time he has come here." "it is to be hoped," said the other, "that now he will think less of that weary london, which i hear is just an endless traffic of parties and pleasure--and settle down to be a scots lord. we must make excuses for a young man that naturally likes to be among his own kind, and finds more pleasure in an endless on-going than ladies always understand. though i will not say but i like society very well myself, and would be proud to see my friends about me, if it were not for the quiet way that oona and i are living, upon a little bit isle, which makes it always needful to consider the weather, and if there is a moon, and all that; and besides that, i have no gentleman in the house." "i never had a daughter," said mrs. methven; "there can be no companion so sweet." "you mean oona? her and me," said mrs. forrester, with scotch grammar and a smile, "we are but one; and you do not expect me to praise myself? when i say we have no gentleman in the house, it is because we cannot be of the use we would wish to our friends. to offer a cup of tea is just all i have in my power, and that is nothing to ask a gentleman to; but for all that it is wonderful how constantly we are seeing our neighbours, especially in the summer time, when the days are long. but bless me, what is that?" mrs. forrester cried. the end of her words was lost in a tumult and horror of sound such as loch houran had never heard before. chapter xv. the explosion startled the whole country for miles around. the old castle was at all times the centre of the landscape, standing sombre in its ruin amid all the smiling existence of to-day. it flashed in a moment into an importance more wonderful, blazing up to the sky in fire and flame and clouds of smoke like a great battle. the whole neighbourhood, as far as sight could carry, saw this new wonder, and sprang into sudden excitement, alarm, and terror. every soul rushed out of the village on the bank; servants appeared half frantic in front of auchnasheen, pushing out in skiffs and fishing-cobbles upon the water which seemed to share the sudden passion of alarm, and became but one great reflection, red and terrible, of the flames which seemed to burst in a moment from every point. some yachtsmen, whose little vessel had been lying at anchor, and who had been watching with great curiosity the moving figures on the height of the gallery round the tower, with much laughing discussion among themselves as to the possibility of having seen the ghost--were suddenly brought to seriousness in a moment as the yacht bounded under their feet with the concussion of the air, and the idle sail flapping from the mast grew blood-red in the sudden glare. it was the work of another moment to leap into their boat and speed as fast as the oars could plough through the water, to the rescue, if rescue were needed. who could be there? they asked each other. only old macalister with his wife, who, safe in the lower story, would have full time to escape. but then, what were those figures on the tower? the young men almost laughed again as they said to each other, "the warlock lord!" "let's hope he's blown himself up and made an end of all that nonsense," said the sceptic of the party. but just then the stalwart boat-load came across a wild skiff dashing through the water, old symington like a ghost in the stern, and red-haired duncan, with bare arms and throat, rowing as for life and death. "my lord is there!" cried the old man with quivering lips, "the leddies are there!" "and hamish and miss oona!" fell stammering from duncan, half dumb with horror. the young yachtsmen never said a word, but looked at each other and flew along over the blood-red water. oona! it was natural they should think of her first in her sweetness and youth. the two mothers in their tranquil talk sat still for a moment and looked at each other with pale awe on their faces, when that wild tumult enveloped them, paralysing every other sense. they thought they were lost, and instinctively put out their hands to each other. they were alone--even the old servant had left them--and there they sat breathless, expecting death. for a moment the floor and walls so quivered about them that this alone seemed possible; but nothing followed, and their faculties returned. they rose with one impulse and made their way together to the door--then, the awe of death passing, life rising in them, flew down the stair-case with the lightness of youth, and out to the air, which already was full of the red flashes of the rising flames. but once there, a worse thing befell these two poor women. they had been still in the face of death, but now, with life saved, came a sense of something more terrible than death. they cried out in one voice the names of their children. "my boy!" "oona!" old macalister, speechless, dragging his old wife after him, came out and joined them, the two old people looking like owls suddenly scared by the outburst of lurid light. "oh, what will be happening?" said the old woman, her dazed astonishment contrasting strangely with the excitement and terror of the others. mrs. forrester answered her with wild and feverish volubility. "nothing will have happened," she said. "oona, my darling! what would happen? she knows her way: she would not go a step too far. oh, oona, where are you? why will you not answer me? they will just be bewildered like ourselves, and she will be in a sore fright; but that will be for me. oona! oona! she will be frightened--but only for me. oona! oh hamish, man, can ye not find your young lady? the fire--i am not afraid of the fire. she will just be wild with terror--for me. oona! oona! oona!" cried the poor lady, her voice ending in a shriek. mrs. methven stood by her side, but did not speak. her pale face was raised to the flaming tower, which threw an illumination of red light over everything. she did not know that it was supposed to be inaccessible. for anything she knew, her boy might be there perishing within her sight; and she could do nothing. the anguish of the helpless and hopeless gave her a sort of terrible calm. she looked at the flames as she might have looked at executioners who were putting her son to death. she had no hope. into the midst of this distracted group came a sudden rush of men from the boats, which were arriving every minute, the young yachtsmen at their head. mrs. forrester flung herself upon these young men, catching hold of them as they came up. "my oona's among the ruins," she said breathlessly. "oh, no fear but you'll find her. oh, find her! find her! for i'm going out of my senses, i think. i know that she's safe, oh, quite safe! but i'm silly, silly, and my nerves are all wrong. oh, harry, for the love of god, and patrick, patrick, my fine lad! and not a brother to look after my bairn!" "we are all her brothers," cried the youths, struggling past the poor lady, who clung to them and hindered their progress, her voice coming shrill through the roar of the flames and the bustle and commotion below. amid this tumult her piercing "oona! oona!" came in from time to time, sharp with the derision of tragedy for anything so ineffectual and vain. before many minutes had passed the open space in front of the house which stood intact and as yet unthreatened, was crowded with men, none of them, however, knowing what to do, nor, indeed, what had happened. the information that lord erradeen and oona were missing was handed about among them, repeated with shakings of the head to every new-comer. mrs. methven standing in the midst, whom nobody knew, received all the comments like so many stabs into her heart. "was it them that were seen on the walls just before? then nothing could have saved them." "the wall's all breached to the loch: no cannon could have done it cleaner. it's there you'll find them." "find them! oh, hon, oh, hon! the bodies of them. let's hope their souls are in a better place." the unfortunate mother heard what everybody said. she stood among strangers, with nobody who had any compassion upon her, receiving over and over again the assurance of his fate. the first difficulty here, as in every other case of the kind, was that no one knew what to do; there were hurried consultations, advices called out on every hand, suggestions--many of them impossible--but no authoritative guide to say what was to be done. mrs. methven, turning her miserable looks from one to another, saw standing by her side a man of commanding appearance, who seemed to take no share in either advice or action, but stood calmly looking on. he was so different from the rest, that she appealed to him instinctively. "oh, sir!" she cried, "you must know what is best to be done--tell them." he started a little when she spoke; his face, when he turned it towards her, was full of strange expression. there was sadness in it, and mortification, and wounded pride. she said after that he was like a man disappointed, defeated, full of dejection and indignation. he gave her a look of keen wonder, and then said with a sort of smile-- "ah, that is true!" then in a moment his voice was heard over the crowd. "the thing to be done," he said, in a voice which was not loud, but which immediately silenced all the discussions and agitations round, "is to clear away the ruins. the fire will not burn downward--it has no food that way--it will exhaust itself. the young lady fell with the wall. if she is to be found, she will be found there." the men around all crowded about the spot from which the voice came. "wha's that that's speaking?" "i see nobody." "what were you saying, sir?" "whoever it is, it is the right thing," cried young patrick from the yacht. "harry, keep you the hose going on the house. i'll take the other work; and thank you for the advice, whoever you are." mrs. forrester too had heard this voice, and the command and calm in it gave to her troubled soul a new hope. she pushed her way through the crowd to the spot from whence it came. "oh," she cried, "did you see my oona fall? did you see my oona? no, no, it would not be her that fell. you are just deceived. where is my oona? oh, sir, tell them where she is that they may find her, and we'll pray for you on our bended knees, night and morning, every day!" she threw herself on her knees, as she spoke, on the grass, putting up her quivering, feverish hands. the other mother, with a horror which she felt even in the midst of her misery, saw the man to whom this heartrending prayer was addressed, without casting even a glance at the suppliant at his feet, or with any appearance of interest in the proceedings he had advised, turn quietly on his heel and walk away. he walked slowly across the open space and disappeared upon the edge of the water with one glance upward to the blazing tower, taking no more notice of the anxious crowd collected there than if they had not existed. nor did any one notice the strange spectator going away at the height of the catastrophe, when everybody far and near was roused to help. the men running hurriedly to work did not seem to observe him. the two old servants of the house, symington and macalister, stood crowding together out of the reach of the stream of water which was being directed upon the house. but mrs. methven took no note of them: only it gave her a strange surprise in the midst of her anguish to see that while her walter's fate still hung in the balance, there was one who could calmly go away. by this time the sun had set; the evening, so strangely different from any other that ever had fallen on the loch, was beginning to darken on the hills, bringing out with wilder brilliancy the flaming of the great fire, which turned the tower of kinloch houran into a lantern, and blazed upwards in a great pennon of crimson and orange against the blue of the skies. for miles down the loch the whole population was out upon the roads gazing at this wonderful sight; the hillsides were crimsoned by the reflection, as if the heather had bloomed again; the water glowed red under the cool calm of the evening sky. round about birkenbraes was a little crowd, the visitors and servants occupying every spot from which this wonder could be seen, and mr. williamson himself, with his daughter, standing at the gate to glean what information might be attainable from the passers-by. katie, full of agitation, unable to bear the common babble inside, had walked on, scarcely knowing what she did, in her indoor dress, shivering with cold and excitement. they had all said to each other that there could be no danger to life in that uninhabited place. "toots, no danger at all!" mr. williamson had said, with great satisfaction in the spectacle. "old macalister and his wife are just like rats in their hole, the fire will never come near them; and the ruin will be none the worse--it will just be more a ruin than ever." there was something in katie's mind which revolted against this easy treatment of so extraordinary a catastrophe. it seemed to her connected, she could not tell how, with the scene which had passed in her own room so short a time before. but for shame she would have walked on to auchnasheen to make sure that walter was in no danger. but what would he think of her--what would everybody think? katie went on, however, abstracted from herself, her eyes upon the blaze in the distance, her heart full of disturbed thoughts. all at once she heard the firm quick step of some one advancing to meet her. she looked up eagerly; it might be walter himself--it might be----when she saw who it was, she came to a sudden pause. her limbs refused to carry her, her very breath seemed to stop. she looked up at him and trembled. the question that formed on her lips could not get utterance. he was perfectly calm and courteous, with a smile that bewildered her and filled her with terror. "is there any one in danger?" he said, answering as if she had spoken. "i think not. there is no one in danger _now_. it is a fine spectacle. we are at liberty to enjoy it without any drawback--now." "oh, sir," said katie, her very lips quivering, "you speak strangely. are you sure that there was no one there?" "i am sure of nothing," he said with a strange smile. and then mr. williamson, delighted to see a stranger, drew near. "you need not be so keen with your explanations, katie. of course it is the gentleman we met at kinloch houran. alas! poor kinloch houran, we will never meet there again. you will just stay to dinner now that we have got you. come, katie, where are your manners? you say nothing. indeed we will consider it a great honour--just ourselves and a few people that are staying in the house; and as for dress, what does that matter? it is a thing that happens every day. neighbours in the country will look in without preparation; and for my part, i say always, the more the merrier," said the open-hearted millionnaire. the stranger's face lighted up with a gleam of scornful amusement. "the kindness is great," he said, "but i am on my way to the other end of the loch." "you are never walking?" cried mr. williamson. "lord bless us? that was a thing that used to be done in my young days, but nobody thinks of now. your servant will have gone with your baggage? and you would have a delicacy--i can easily understand--in asking for a carriage in the excitement of the moment; but ye shall not walk past my house where there are conveyances of all kinds that it is just a charity to use. now, i'll take no denial; there's the boat. in ten minutes they'll get up steam. i had ordered it, ready to send up to auchnasheen for news. but as a friend would never be leaving if the family was in trouble, it is little use to do that now. i will just make a sign to the boat, and they'll have ye down in no time; it will be the greatest pleasure--if you are sure you will not stay to your dinner in the mean time, which is what i would like best?" he stood looking down upon them both from his great height; his look had been sad and grave when he had met katie, a look full of expression which she could not fathom. there came now a gleam of amusement over his countenance. he laughed out. "that would be admirable," he said, offering no thanks, "i will take your boat," like a prince according, rather than receiving, a favour. mr. williamson looked at his daughter with a confused air of astonishment and perplexity, but he sent a messenger off in a boat to warn the steamer, which lay with its lights glimmering white in the midst of the red reflections on the loch. the father and daughter stood there silenced, and with a strange sensation of alarm, beside this stranger. they exchanged another frightened look. "you'll be going--a long journey?" mr. williamson said, faltering, scarcely knowing what he said. "i am going--for a long time, at least," the stranger said. he seemed to put aside their curiosity as something trifling, unworthy to be answered, and with a wave of his hand to them, took the path towards the beach. they turned and looked after him, drawing close to each other for mutual comfort. it was twilight, when everything is confusing and uncertain. they lost sight of him, then saw him again, like a tall pillar on the edge of the water. there was a confusion of boats coming and going, in which they could not trace whither he went, or how. katie and her father stood watching, taking no account of the progress of time, or of the cold wind of the night which came in gusts from the hills. they both drew a long sigh of relief when the steamer was put in motion, and went off down the loch with its lights like glow-worms on the yards and the masts. nor did they say a word to each other as they turned and went home. when inquiries were made afterwards, nothing but the most confused account could be had of the embarkation. the boatman had seen the stranger, but none among them would say that he had conveyed him to the steamer; and on the steamer the men were equally confused, answering at random, with strange glances at each other. had they carried that passenger down to the foot of the loch? not even katie's keen questioning could elicit a clear reply. but when the boat had steamed away, carrying into the silence the rustle of its machinery and the twinkling of its lights, there was another great explosion from the tower of kinloch houran, a loud report which seemed to roar away into the hollow of the mountains, and came back in a thousand rolling echoes. a great column of flame shot up into the sky, the stones fell like a cannonade, and then all was darkness and silence. the loch fell into sudden gloom; the men who were labouring at the ruins stopped short, and groped about to find each other through the dust and smoke which hung over them like a cloud. the bravest stood still, as if paralysed, and for a moment, through all this strange scene of desolation and terror, there was but one sound audible, the sound of a voice which cried "oona! oona!" now shrill, now hoarse with exhaustion and misery, "oona! oona!" to earth and heaven. chapter xvi. when the curious and the inefficient dropped away, as they did by degrees as night fell, there were left the three youths from the yacht, hamish, duncan, and two or three men from the village, enough to do a greater work than that which lay before them; but the darkness and the consternation, and even their very eagerness and anxiety, confused their proceedings. such lamps as they could get from macalister were fastened up among the heaps of ruin, and made a series of wild rembrandt-like pictures in the gloom, but afforded little guidance to their work. the masses of masonry which they laboured to clear away seemed to increase rather than diminish under their picks and spades--new angles of the wall giving way when they seemed to have come nearly to the foundation. and now and then from above a mass of stones penetrated through and through by the fire, and kept in their place only by mere balance, would topple down without warning, dangerously near their heads, risking the very lives of the workers; upon whom discouragement gained as the night wore on, and no result was obtained. after a while, with a mournful unanimity they stopped work and consulted in whispers what was to be done. not a sound had replied to their cries. they had stopped a hundred times to listen, one more imaginative than the rest, thinking he heard an answering cry; but no such response had ever come, how was it possible, from under the choking, suffocating mass, which rolled down upon them as they worked, almost stopping their breath? they gave up altogether in the middle of the night in dejection and hopelessness. the moon had risen and shone all round them, appearing through the great chasms in the wall, making a glory upon the loch, but lending no help here, the shadow of the lower part of the house lying black over the new-made ruin. what was the use? they stood disconsolately consulting over the possibilities. if walter and oona were under those heaps of ruin, it was impossible that they could be alive, and the men asked each other, shaking their heads, what chance there was of any of those fortunate accidents which sometimes save the victims of such a calamity. the wall had been already worn by time, there were no beams, no archways which could have sheltered them--everything had come down in one mass of ruin. after many and troubled discussions they prepared reluctantly to abandon the hopeless work. "perhaps, in the morning"--it was all that any one could say. the young yachtsmen made a last effort, calling out walter's name. "if you can speak, for god's sake speak? any sign and we'll have you out. erradeen! erradeen!" they cried. but the silence was as that of the grave. a fall of powdery fragments now and then from the heap, sometimes a great stone solemnly bounding downwards from point to point, the light blown about by the night air lighting up the dark group, and the solitary figure of hamish, apart from them, who was working with a sort of rage, never pausing, pulling away the stones with his hands. this was all; not a moan, not a cry, not a sound of existence under those shapeless piles of ruin. the only thing that broke the silence, and which came now with a heartrending monotony, almost mechanical, was the cry of "oona! oona!" which oona's mother, scarcely conscious, sent out into the night. the men stole softly round the corner of the house which remained untouched, to get to their boats, stealing away like culprits, though there was no want of goodwill in them. but they were not prepared for the scene that met them there. the little platform before the door, and the landing-place, were bright almost as day with the shining of the moon, the water one sheet of silver, upon which the boats lay black, the grassy space below all white and clear. in the midst of this space, seated on a stone, was mrs. methven. she had scarcely stirred all night. her companion in sorrow had been taken into the shelter of the house, but she, unknown and half-forgotten, and strong with all the vigour of misery, had remained there, avoiding speech of any one. with all her senses absorbed in listening, not a stroke had escaped her, scarcely a word--for a long time she had stood and walked about, not asking a question, observing, seeing, hearing all that was done. but as the awful hours went on, she had dropped down upon this rough seat, little elevated above the ground, where her figure now struck the troubled gaze of the young men, as if it had been that of a sentinel watching to see that they did not abandon their work. no such thought was in her mind. she was conscious of every movement they had made. for a moment she had thought that their call upon her son meant that they had found some trace of him--but that was a mere instantaneous thrill, which her understanding was too clear to continue to entertain. she had said to herself from the beginning that there was no hope; she had said from the first what the men had said to each other reluctantly after hours of exertion. what was the good? since nothing could be done. yet all the while as she said this, she was nursing within her bosom, concealing it even from her own consciousness, covering up the smouldering dying fire in her heart, a hope that would not altogether die. she would not even go towards the workers when they called out her son's name to know what it was; but only waited, waited with a desperate, secret, half-heathen thought, that perhaps if she did not cry and importune, but was silent, letting god do what he would, he might yet relent and bring her back her boy. oh be patient! put on at least the guise of patience! and perhaps he would be touched by the silence of her misery--he who had not heard her prayers. she sat going over a hundred things in her heart. that walter should have come back to her, called her to him, opened his heart to her, as a preparation for being thus snatched from her for ever! she said to herself that by-and-by she would thank god for this great mercy, and that she had thus found her son again if only for two days: but in the mean time her heart bled all the more for the thought, and bereavement became more impossible, more intolerable, even from that, which afterwards would make it almost sweet. as she kept that terrible vigil and heard the sound of the implements with which--oh, what was it?--not him, his body, the mangled remains of him, were being sought, she seemed to see him, standing before her, leaning upon her, the strong on the weak, pouring his troubles into her bosom--as he had not done since he was a child; and now he was lying crushed beneath those stones. oh no, no, oh no, no--it was not possible. god was not like that, holding the cup of blessing to a woman's lips and then snatching it away. and then with an effort she would say to herself what she had said from the first, what she had never wavered in saying, that there was no hope. how could there be any hope? crushed beneath tons of falling stones--oh, crushed out of recognition, out of humanity! her imagination spared her nothing. when they found him they would tell her it was better, better, she the mother that bore him, that she should not see him again. and all the while the moon shining and god looking on. she was callous to the cry that came continually, mechanically, now stronger, now fainter, from the rooms above. "oona, oona!" sometimes it made her impatient. why should the woman cry, as if her voice could reach her child under those masses of ruin? and _she_ could not cry who had lost her all! her only one! why should the other have that relief and she none--nor any hope? but all the sounds about her caught her ear with a feverish distinctness. when she heard the steps approaching after the pause of which she had divined the meaning, they seemed to go over her heart, treading it down into the dust. she raised her head and looked at them as they came up, most of the band stealing behind to escape her eye. "i heard you," she said, "call--my son." "it was only to try; it was to make an effort; it was a last chance." "a last----" though she was so composed there was a catch in her breath as she repeated this word; but she added, with the quiet of despair, "you are going away?" the young man who was the spokesman stood before her like a culprit with his cap in his hand. "my brothers and i," he said, "would gladly stay if it was any use; but there is no light to work by, and i fear--i fear--that by this time----" "there is no more hope?" she said. "i have no hope. i never had any hope." the young man turned away with a despairing gesture, and then returned to her humbly, as if she had been a queen. "we are all grieved--more grieved than words can say: and gladly would we stay if we could be of any use. but what can we do? for we are all convinced--" "no me," cried hamish, coming forward in the moonlight. "no me!" his bleeding hands left marks on his forehead as he wiped the heavy moisture from it; his eyes shone wildly beneath his shaggy brows. "i was against it," he cried, "from the first! i said what would they be doing here? but convinced, that i never will be, no till i find--mem, if ye tell them they'll bide. tell them to bide. as sure as god is in heaven that was all her thought--we will find her yet." the other men had slunk away, and were softly getting into their boats. the three young yachtsmen alone waited, a group of dark figures about her. she looked up at them standing together in the moonlight, her face hollowed out as if by the work of years. "he is my only one," she said, "my only one. and you--you--you are all the sons of one mother." her voice had a shrill anguish in it, insupportable to hear: and when she paused there came still more shrilly into the air, with a renewed passion, "oona! oona!" the cry that had not ceased for hours. the young man who was called patrick flung his clenched hand into the air; he gave a cry of pity and pain unendurable. "go and lie down for an hour or two," he said to the others, "and come back with the dawn. don't say a word. i'll stay; it's more than a man can bear." when the others were gone, this young fellow implored the poor lady to go in, to lie down a little, to try and take some rest. what good could she do? he faltered; and she might want all her strength for to-morrow--using all those familiar pleas with which the miserable are mocked. something like a smile came over her wan face. "you are very kind," she said, "oh very kind!" but no more. but when he returned and pressed the same arguments upon her she turned away almost with impatience. "i will watch with my son to-night," she said, putting him away with her hand. and thus the night passed. mrs. forrester had been taken only half-conscious into walter's room early in the evening. her cry had become almost mechanical, not to be stopped; but she, it was hoped, was but half aware of what was passing, the unwonted and incredible anguish having exhausted her simple being, unfamiliar with suffering. mr. cameron, the minister from the village, had come over on the first news, and mysie from the isle to take care of her mistress. together they kept watch over the poor mother, who lay sometimes with her eyes half closed in a sort of stupor, sometimes springing up wildly, to go to oona who was ill, and wanting her, she cried, distraught. "oona! oona!" she continued to cry through all. mysie had removed her bonnet, and her light faded hair was all dishevelled, without the decent covering of the habitual cap, her pretty colour gone. sorrow seems to lie harder on such a gentle soul. it is cruel. there is nothing in it that is akin to the mild level of a being so easy and common. it was torture that prostrated the soul--not the passion of love and anguish which gave to the other mother the power of absolute self-control, and strength which could endure all things. mr. cameron himself, struck to the heart, for oona was as dear to him as a child of his own, restrained his longing to be out among the workers in order to soothe and subdue her; and though she scarcely understood what he was saying, his presence did soothe her. it was natural that the minister should be there, holding her up in this fiery passage, though she could not tell why. and thus the night went on. the moonlight faded outside; the candles paled and took a sickly hue within as the blue dawn came stealing over the world. at that chillest, most awful moment of all the circle of time, mrs. forrester had sunk into half-unconsciousness. she was not asleep, but exhaustion had almost done the part of sleep, and she lay on the sofa in a stupor, not moving, and for the first time intermitting her terrible cry. the minister stole down-stairs in that moment of repose. he was himself an old man and shaken beyond measure by the incidents of the night. his heart was bleeding for the child of his spirit, the young creature to whom he had been tutor, counsellor, almost father from her childhood. he went out with his heart full, feeling the vigil insupportable in the miserable room above, yet almost less supportable when he came out to the company of the grey hills growing visible, a stern circle of spectators round about, and realised with a still deeper pang the terrible unmitigated fact of the catastrophe. it was with horror that he saw the other mother sitting patient upon the stone outside. he did not know her, and had forgotten that such a person existed as lord erradeen's mother. had she been there all night? "god help us," he said to himself; "how selfish we are, even to the sharers of our calamity." she looked up at him as he passed, but said nothing. and what could he say to her? for the first time he behaved himself like a coward, and fled from duty and kindness; for what could he say to comfort her? and why insult her misery with vain attempts? young patrick had pressed shelter and rest upon her, being young and knowing no better. but the minister could not tell walter's mother to lie down and rest, to think of her own life. what was her life to her? he passed her by with the acute and aching sympathy which bears a share of the suffering it cannot relieve. and his own suffering was sore. oona, oona, he cried to himself silently in his heart as her mother had done aloud--his child, his nursling, the flower of his flock. mysie had told him in the intervals, when her mistress was quiet, in whispers and with tears, of all that had happened lately, and of oona's face that was like the sabbath of the sacrament, so grave yet so smiling as she left the isle. this went to the old minister's heart. he passed the ruin where hamish was still plucking uselessly, half-stupefied, at the stones, and patrick, with his back against the unbroken wall, had fallen asleep in utter weariness. mr. cameron did not linger there, but sought a place out of sight of man, where he could weep: for he was old, and his heart was too full to do without some natural relief. he went through the ruined doorway to a place where all was still green and intact, as it had been before the explosion; the walls standing, but trees grown in the deep soil which covered the old stone floor. he leaned his white head against the roughness of the wall, and shed the tears that made his old eyes heavy, and relieved his old heart with prayer. he had prayed much all the night through, but with distracted thoughts, and eyes bent upon the broken-hearted creature by whose side he watched. but now he was alone with the great and closest friend, he to whom all things can be said, and who understands all. "give us strength to resign her to thee," he said, pressing his old cheek against the damp and cold freshness of the stones, which were wet with other dews than those of nature, with the few concentrated tears of age, that mortal dew of suffering. the prayer and the tears relieved his soul. he lifted his head from the wall, and turned to go back again--if, perhaps, now fresh from his master's presence he might find a word to say to the other woman who all night long, like rizpah, had sat silent and watched her son. but as he turned to go away it seemed to the minister that he heard a faint sound. he supposed nothing but that one of the men who had been working had gone to sleep in a corner, and was waking and stirring to the daylight. he looked round, but saw no one. perhaps, even, there came across the old man's mind some recollection of the tales of mystery connected with this house; but in the presence of death and sorrow, he put these lesser wonders aside. nevertheless, there was a sound, faint, but yet of something human. the old stone floor was deep under layers of soil upon which every kind of herbage and even trees grew; but in the corner of the wall against which he had been leaning, the gathered soil had been hollowed away by the droppings from above, and a few inches of the original floor was exposed. the old man's heart began to beat with a bewildering possibility: but he dared not allow himself to think of it: he said to himself, but it must be a bird, a beast, something imprisoned in some crevice. he listened. god! was that a moan? he turned and rushed, with the step of a boy, to where patrick sat dozing, and hamish, stupefied, worked on mechanically. he clutched the one out of his sleep, the other from his trance of exhaustion--"come here! come here! and listen. what is this?" the old minister said. chapter xvii. the two fugitives, holding each other's hands, had fled from the fire without a word to each other. all that needed to be spoken seemed to them both to be over. they hurried on instinctively, but without any hope, expecting every moment when destruction should overtake them. walter was the last to give up consciousness: but the sickening sense of a great fall, the whirl and resistance of the air rushing madly against him through the void, the sensation mounting up to his brain, the last stronghold of consciousness, and thrill of feeling, as if life were to end there, in a painful rush of blood, were all that were known to him. what happened really was that, holding oona insensible in his arms, he was carried downwards with the slide and impetus of the part of the ruin on which he was standing, detached by his own weight, rather than thrown violently down by the action of the explosion. the force of the fall, however, was so great, and the mass falling with them so heavy, that some of the stones, already very unsteady, of the pavement below gave way, and carried them underground to one of the subterranean cellars, half filled up with soil, which ran under the whole area of the old castle. how long they lay there unable to move, and for some part of the time at least entirely without consciousness, walter could never tell. when he recovered his senses he was in absolute darkness and in considerable pain. oona had fallen across him and the shock had thus been broken. it was a moan from her which woke him to life again. but she made no reply to his first distracted question, and only gave evidence of life by a faint little cry from time to time--too faint to be called a cry--a breath of suffering, no more. the suffocating terrible sensation of the darkness, a roar of something over them like thunder, the oppression of breathing, which was caused by the want of atmosphere, all combined to bewilder his faculties and take away both strength and will to do anything more than lie there quietly and gasp out the last breath. walter was roused by feeling in oona an unconscious struggle for breath. she raised first one hand, then another, as if to take away something which was stifling her, and he began to perceive in the vagueness of his awakening consciousness that her life depended upon his exertions. then, his eyes becoming more accustomed to the darkness, he caught a faint ray of light, so attenuated as to be no more than a thread in the solid gloom. to drag himself towards this, and with himself the still more precious burden, thus in utter helplessness confided to him, was a more terrible work than walter in all his life had ever attempted before. there was not room to stand upright, and his limbs were so shaken and aching that he could scarcely raise himself upon them; and one of his arms was useless, and, when he tried to raise it, gave him the most exquisite pain. it seemed hours before he could succeed in dragging her to the little opening, a mere crevice between the stones, through which the thread of light had come. when he had cleared the vegetation from it, a piercing cold breath came in and revived him. he raised oona in his arms to the air, but the weight of her unconsciousness was terrible to him in his weakened condition, and though she began to breathe more easily, she was not sufficiently recovered to give him any help. thus she lay, and he crouched beside her, trying to think, for he could not tell how long. he heard sounds above him indeed, but the roar of the falling stones drowned the human noises, and his brain was too much clouded to think of the search which must be going on overhead for his companion and himself. the worst of all was this dazed condition of his brain, so that it was a long time before he could put one thing to another and get any command of his thoughts. in all likelihood consciousness did not fully return until the time when the men above in despair relinquished their work, for some feeble sense of cries and human voices penetrated the darkness, but so muffled and far off that in the dimness of his faculties he did not in any way connect them with himself, nor think of attempting any reply. perhaps it was, though he was not aware that he heard it, the echo of his own name that finally brought him to the full possession of himself--and then all his dull faculties centred, not in the idea of any help at hand, but in that of fighting a way somehow to a possible outlet. how was he to do it? the pain of his arm was so great that at times he had nearly fainted with mere bodily suffering, and his mind fluctuated from moment to moment--or was it not rather from hour to hour?--with perplexity and vain endeavour. he was conscious, however, though he had not given any meaning to the sounds he heard, of the strange silence which followed upon the stopping of the work. something now and then like the movements of a bird (was it hamish working wildly above, half-mad, half-stupefied, unable to be still?) kept a little courage in him, but the silence and darkness were terrible, binding his very soul. it was then that he had the consolation of knowing that his companion had come to herself. suddenly a hand groping found his, and caught it; it was his wounded arm, and the pain went like a knife to his heart, a pang which was terrible, but sweet. "where are we?" oona said, trying to raise herself--oh, anguish!--by that broken arm. he could not answer her for the moment, he was so overcome by the pain--and he was holding her up with the other arm. "do not hold my hand," he said at last; "take hold of my coat. thank god that you can speak!" "your arm is hurt, walter?" "broken, i think; but never mind, that is nothing. nothing matters so long as you have your senses. oona, if we die together, it will be all right?" "yes," she said, raising her face in the darkness to be nearer his. he kissed her solemnly, and for the moment felt no more pain. "as well this way as another. nothing can reach us here--only silence and sleep." she began to raise herself slowly, until her head struck against the low roof. she gave a faint cry--then finding herself on her knees, put her arm round him, and they leant against each other. "god is as near in the dark as in the day," she said. "lord, deliver us--lord, deliver us!" then, after a pause, "what happened? you saved my life." "is it saved?" he asked. "i don't know what has happened, except that we are together." oona gave a sudden shudder and clung to him. "i remember now, the flames and the fire: and it was i that broke the lamp. what did it mean, the lamp? i thought it was something devilish--something to harm you." she shivered more and more, clinging to him. "do you think it is he--that has shut us up in this dungeon, to die?" walter made no reply; it was no wonder to him that she should speak wildly. he too was tempted to believe that accident had no part in what had befallen them, that they had now encountered the deadly vengeance of their enemy. he tried to soothe her, holding her close to his breast. "i think we are in some of the vaults below--perhaps for our salvation." as her courage failed there was double reason that he should maintain a good heart. "there must be some outlet. will you stay here and wait till i try if i can find a way?" "oh no, no," cried oona, clinging to him, "let us stay together. i will creep after you. i will not hinder you." she broke off with a cry, echoing, but far more keenly, the little moan that came from him unawares as he struck his arm against the wall. she felt it far more sharply than he did, and in the darkness he felt her soft hands binding round his neck something warm and soft like their own touch in which she had wound the wounded arm to support it. it was the long white "cloud" which had been about her throat, and it warmed him body and soul; but he said nothing by way of gratitude. they were beyond all expressions of feeling, partly because they had reached the limit at which reality is too overpowering for sentiment, and partly because there was no longer any separation of mine and thine between them, and they were but one soul. but to tell the miseries of their search after a way of escape would demand more space than their historian can afford. they groped along the wall, thinking now that they saw a glimmer in one direction, now in another, and constantly brought up with a new shock against the opaque resistance round them, a new corner, or perhaps only that from which they started; under their feet unequal heaps of damp soil upon which they stumbled, and broken stones over which oona, with childlike sobs of which she was unconscious, caught her dress, falling more than once as they laboured along. in this way they moved round and round their prison, a long pilgrimage. at length, when they were almost in despair, saying nothing to each other, only keeping close that the touch of each to each might be a moral support, they found themselves in what seemed a narrow passage, walls on each side, and something like an arrowslit over their heads, the light from which showed them where they were, and was as an angel of consolation to the two wounded and suffering creatures, stumbling along with new hope. but when they had reached the end of this narrow passage, walter, going first, fell for a distance of two or three feet into the lower level of another underground chamber like that which he had left, jarring his already strained and racked frame, and only by an immense effort hindered oona from falling after him. the force of the shock, and instant recovery by which he kept her back and helped her to descend with precaution, brought heavy drops of exhaustion and pain to his forehead. and when they discovered that they were nothing the better for their struggles, and that the place which they had reached at such a cost, though lighter, was without any outlet whatever except that by which they had come, their discouragement was so great that walter had hard ado not to join in the tears which oona, altogether prostrated by the disappointment, shed on his shoulder. "we must not give in," he tried to say. "here there is a little light at least. oona, my darling, do not break down, or i shall break down too." "no, no," she said submissively through her sobs, leaning all her weight upon him. he led her as well as he was able to a heap of earth in the corner, over which in the roof was a little opening to the light, barred with an iron stanchion, and quite out of reach. here he placed her tenderly, sitting down by her, glad of the rest, though it was so uninviting. the light came in pale and showed the strait inclosure of their little prison. they were neither of them able to resume their search, but sat close together leaning against each other, throbbing with pain, and sick with weariness and disappointment. it gave walter a kind of forlorn pride in his misery to feel that while oona had failed altogether, he was able to sustain and uphold her. they did not speak in their weakness, but after a while dozed and slept, in that supreme necessity of flesh and blood which overcomes even despair, and makes no account of danger. they slept as men will sleep at death's door, in the midst of enemies: and in the depths of their suffering and misery found refreshment. but in that light sleep little moans unawares came with their breathing, for both were bruised and shaken, and walter's broken arm was on fire with fever and pain. it was those breathings of unconscious suffering that caught the ear of the minister as he made his prayer. his step had not disturbed them, but when he came back accompanied by the others, the light was suddenly darkened and the stillness broken by some one who flung himself upon his knees with a heavy shock of sound and a voice pealing in through the opening--"miss oona, if ye are there, speak! or, oh for the love of the almighty, whoever is there, speak and tell me where's my leddy?" it was hamish, half mad with hope and suspense and distracted affection, who thus plunged between them and the light. they both woke with the sound, but faintly divining what it was, alarmed at first rather than comforted by the darkness into which they were plunged. there was a pause before either felt capable of reply, that additional deprivation being of more immediate terror to them, than there was consolation in the half-heard voice. in this pause, hamish, maddened by the disappointment of his hopes, scrambled to his feet reckless and miserable, and shook his clenched fist in the face of the minister who was behind him. "how dare ye," he cried, "play upon a man, that is half wild, with your imaginations! there's naebody there!" and with something between a growl and an oath, he flung away, with a heavy step that sounded like thunder to the prisoners. but next moment the rage of poor hamish all melted away into the exceeding and intense sweetness of that relief which is higher ecstasy than any actual enjoyment given to men, the very sweetness of heaven itself--for as he turned away the sound of a voice, low and weak, but yet a voice, came out of the bowels of the earth; a murmur of two voices that seemed to consult with each other, and then a cry of "oona is safe. oona is here. come and help us, for the love of god." "the lord bless you!" cried the old minister, falling on his knees. "oona, speak to me, if you are there. oona, speak to me! i want to hear your own voice." there was again a pause of terrible suspense. hamish threw himself down, too, behind the minister, tears running over his rough cheeks, while the young man, who was overawed by the sight, and affected too, in a lesser degree, stood with his face half hidden against the wall. "i am here," oona said feebly, "all safe--not hurt even. we are both safe; but oh, make haste, make haste, and take us out of this place." "god bless you, my bairn. god bless you, my dearest bairn!" cried mr. cameron: but his words were drowned in a roar of laughter and weeping from the faithful soul behind him--"ay, that will we, miss oona--that will we, miss oona!" hamish shouted and laughed and sobbed till the walls rang, then clamorous with his heavy feet rushed out of sight without another word, they knew not where. "i'll follow him," said young patrick; "he will know some way." the minister was left alone at the opening through which hope had come. he was crying like a child, and ready to laugh too like hamish. "my bonny dear," he said; "my bonny dear----" and could not command his voice. "mr. cameron--my mother. she must be breaking her heart." "and mine," walter said with a groan. he thought even then of the bitterness of her woe, and of all the miserable recollections that must have risen in her mind: please god not to come again. "i am an old fool," said mr. cameron, outside: "i cannot stand out against the joy; but i am going. i'm going, my dear. say again you are not hurt, oona. say it's you, my darling, my best bairn!" "and me that had not the courage to say a word to yon poor woman," he said to himself as he hurried away. the light was still grey in the skies, no sign of the sun as yet, but not only the hills distinct around, but the dark woods, and the islands on the water, and even the sleeping roofs so still among their trees on the shores of the loch, had come into sight. the remaining portion of the house which had stood so many assaults, and the shapeless mass of the destroyed tower, stood up darkly against the growing light: and almost like a part of it, like a statue that had come down from its pedestal was the figure of mrs. methven, which he saw standing between him and the shore, her face turned towards him. she had heard the hurrying steps and the shout of hamish, and knew that something had happened. she had risen against her will, against the resolution she had formed, unable to control herself, and stood with one hand under her cloak, holding her heart, to repress, if possible, the terrible throbbing in it. the face she turned towards the minister overawed him in the simplicity of his joy. it was grey, like the morning, or rather ashen white, the colour of death. even now she would not, perhaps could not, ask anything; but only stood and questioned him with her eyes, grown to twice their usual size, in the great hollows which this night had opened out. the minister knew that he should speak carefully, and make easy to her the revolution from despair to joy; but he could not. they were both beyond all secondary impulses. he put the fact into the plainest words. "thank god! your son is safe," he cried. "what did you say?" "oh, my poor lady, god be with you. i dared not speak to you before. your son is safe. do you know what i mean? he is as safe as you or me." she kept looking at him, unable to take it into her mind; that is to say, her mind had flashed upon it, seized it at the first word, yet--with a dumb horror holding hope away from her, lest deeper despair might follow--would not allow her to believe. "what--did you say? you are trying to make me think----" and then she broke off, and cried out "walter!" as if she saw him--as a mother might cry who saw her son suddenly, unlooked for, come into the house when all believed him dead--and fell on her knees,--then from that attitude sank down upon herself, and dropped prostrate on the ground. mr. cameron was alarmed beyond measure. he knew nothing of faints, and he thought the shock had killed her. but what could he do? it was against his nature to leave a stranger helpless. he took off his coat and covered her, and then hurried to the door and called up macalister's wife, who was dozing in a chair. "i think i have killed her," he said, "with my news." "then ye have found him?" the three old people said together, the woman clasping her hands with a wild "oh hon--oh hon!" while symington came forward, trembling, and pale as death. "i had hoped," he said, with quivering lips, "like the apostles with one that was greater, that it was he that was to have delivered----oh, but we are vain creatures! and now it's a' to begin again." "is that all ye think of your poor young master? he is living, and will do well. go and take up the poor lady. she is dead, or fainted, but it is with joy." and then he went up-stairs. many an intimation of sorrow and trouble the minister had carried. but good news had not been a weight upon him hitherto. he went to the other poor mother with trouble in his heart. if the one who had been so brave was killed by it, how encounter her whose soft nature had fallen prostrate at once? he met mysie at the door, who told him her mistress had slept, but showed signs of waking. "oh, sir, if ye could give her something that would make her sleep again! i could find it in my heart to give her, what would save my poor lady from ever waking more," cried the faithful servant; "for oh, what will she do--oh, what will we all do without miss oona?" "mysie," cried the minister, "how am i to break it to her? i have just killed the poor lady down-stairs with joy; and what am i to say to your mistress? miss oona is safe and well--she's safe and well." "oh, mr. cameron," cried mysie, with a sob, "i ken what you are meaning. she's well, the lord bless her, because she has won to heaven." mrs. forrester had woke during this brief talk, and raised herself upon the sofa. she broke in upon them in a tone so like her ordinary voice, so cheerful and calm, that they both turned round upon her with a kind of consternation. "what is that you are saying--safe and well--oh, safe and well. thank god for it; but i never had a moment's doubt. and where has she been all this weary night; and why did she leave me in this trouble? what are ye crying for, mysie, like a daft woman? you may be sure, my darling has been doing good, and not harm." "that is true, my dear lady--that is true, my dear friend," cried the minister. "god bless her! she has done us all good, all the days of her sweet life." "and you are crying too," said oona's mother, almost with indignation. "what were you feared for? do you think i could not trust god, that has always been merciful to me and mine? or was it oona ye could not trust?" she said with smiling scorn. "and is she coming soon? for it seems to me we have been here a weary time." "as soon--as she can get out of the--place where she is. the openings are blocked up by the ruin." "i had no doubt," said mrs. forrester, "it was something of that kind." then she rose up from the sofa, very weak and tottering, but smiling still, her pale and faded face looking ten years older, her hair all ruffled, falling out of its usual neat arrangement. she put up her hands to her head with a little cry. "bless me," she said, "she will think i have gone out of my senses, and you too, mysie, to take my bonnet off and expose me, with no cap. i must put all this right again before my oona comes." mr. cameron left her engaged in these operations, with the deepest astonishment. was it a faith above the reach of souls less simple? or was it the easy rebound of a shallow nature? he watched her for a moment as she put up her thin braids of light hair, and tied her ribbons, talking all the time of oona. "she never was a night out of her bed in all her life before; and my only fear is she may have gotten a chill, and no means here of making her comfortable. mysie, you will go down-stairs, and try at least to get the kettle to boil, and a cup of tea for her. did the minister say when she would be here?" "no, mem," said mysie's faltering voice; "naething but that she was safe and well; and the lord forgive me--i thought--i thought----" "never mind what you thought," said mrs. forrester briskly, "but run down-stairs and see if you can make my darling a good cup of tea." by the time she had tied her bonnet strings and made herself presentable, the full light of the morning was shining upon the roused world. the air blew chill in her face as she came down the staircase (strangely weak and tottering, which was "just extraordinary" she said to herself), and emerged upon the little platform outside. several boats already lay on the beach, and there was the sound of the voices and footsteps of men breaking the stillness. mrs. forrester came out with those little graces which were part of herself, giving a smile to old symington, and nodding kindly to the young men from the yacht who were just coming ashore. "this is early hours," she said to them with her smile, and went forward to the little group before the door, surrounding mrs. methven, who still lay where mr. cameron had left her, incapable of movement. "dear me," said mrs. forrester, "here have i been taking up a comfortable room, and them that have a better right left out of doors. they have given us a terrible night, my child and yours, but let us hope there has been a good reason for it, and that they will be none the worse. they are just coming, the minister tells me. if ye will take the help of my arm, we might step that way and meet them. they will be glad to see we are not just killed with anxiety, which is what my oona will fear." chapter xviii. the news that lord erradeen, and it was supposed several others--some went so far as to say a party of visitors, others his mother, newly arrived as all the world was aware, and to whom he was showing the old castle, with a young lady who was her companion--had perished in the fire, streamed down the loch nobody knew how, and was known and believed to the end of the country before the evening was over. it came to the party at birkenbraes as they were sitting down to dinner, some time after everybody had come in from gazing at the extraordinary spectacle of the fire, got up, mr. williamson assured his guests, entirely for their amusement. the good man, however, had been much sobered out of that jocose mood by his encounter with the strange visitor whom he had first seen at kinloch houran, but had begun to draw a little advantage from that too, and was telling the lady next to him with some pride of lord erradeen's relation, a very distinguished person indeed. "i'm thinking in the diplomatic service, or one of the high offices that keep a man abroad all his life. (i would rather for my part live in a cottage at home, but that is neither here nor there.) so as he was leaving and naturally could not trouble the family about carriages just at such a moment, i offered him the boat: and you could see them getting up steam. i find it very useful to have a steam-boat always ready, just waiting at the service of my friends." the lady had replied as in duty bound, and as was expected of her, that it was a magnificent way of serving your friends, which the millionnaire on his side received with a laugh and a wave of his hand, declaring that it was nothing, just nothing, a bagatelle in the way of cost, but a convenience, he would not deny it was a convenience; when that discreet butler who had ushered lord erradeen into katie's private sitting-room, leaned over his master's shoulder with a solemn face, and a "beg your pardon, sir. they say, sir, that lord erradeen has perished in the fire." "lord bless us!" said mr. williamson, "what is that you say?" "it is only a rumour, sir, but i hear kinloch houran is all in a commotion, and it is believed everywhere. the young lord was seen with some ladies going there in a boat this afternoon, and they say that he has perished in the flames." sanderson was fond of fine language, and his countenance was composed to the occasion. "lord bless us!" cried mr. williamson again. "send off a man and horse without a moment's delay to find out the truth. quick, man, and put down the sherry, i'll help myself! poor lad, poor lad, young erradeen! he was about this house like one of our own, and no later than yesterday--katie, do you hear?" he cried, half rising and leaning over the forest of flowers and ferns that covered the table, "katie! do you hear this terrible news? but it cannot be true!" katie had been told at the same moment, and the shock was so great that everything swam in her eyes, as she looked up blanched and terror-stricken in mechanical obedience to her father's cry. "that man will have killed him," she said to herself: and then there came over her mind a horror which was flattering too, which filled her with dismay and pain, yet with a strange sensation of importance. was it she who was to blame for this catastrophe, was she the cause---- "it seems to be certain," said some one at the table, "that erradeen was there. he was seen on the battlements with a lady, just before the explosion." "his mother!" said katie, scarcely knowing why it was that she put forth this explanation. "a young lady. there is some extraordinary story among the people that she--had something to do with the fire." "that will be nonsense," said mr. williamson. "what would a lady have to do with the fire? old stone walls like yon are not like rotten wood. i cannot understand for my part----" "and there could be no young lady," said katie. "mrs. methven was alone." "well, well!" said her father. "i am sorry--sorry for lord erradeen; he was just as fine a young fellow----but we will do him no good, poor lad, by letting our dinner get cold. and perhaps the man will bring us better news--there is always exaggeration in the first report. i am afraid you will find that soup not eatable, lady mary. just send it away; there is some fine trout coming." he was sincerely sorry; but, after all, to lose the dinner would have spared nothing to poor young erradeen. katie said little during the long meal. her end of the table, usually so gay, was dull. now and then she would break in with a little spasmodic excitement, and set her companions talking: then relapse with a strange mingling of grief and horror, and that melancholy elation which fills the brain of one who suddenly feels himself involved in great affairs and lifted to heroic heights. if it was for her--if it was she who was the cause of this calamity----she had dreamed often of finding herself with a high heroic part to fulfil in the world, though it seemed little likely that she would ever realise her dream; but now, katie said to herself, if this was so, never more should another take the place which she had refused to him. if he had died for her, she would live--for him. she would find out every plan he had ever formed for good and fulfil it. she would be the providence of the poor tenants whom he had meant to befriend. she imagined herself in this poetical position always under a veil of sadness, yet not enough to make her unhappy--known in the county as the benefactor of everybody, described with whispers aside as "the lady that was to have married poor young lord erradeen." katie was profoundly sorry for poor walter--for the first few minutes her grief was keen; but very soon this crowd of imaginations rushed in, transporting her into a new world. if this were so! already everybody at table had begun to remark her changed looks, and to whisper that they had been sure there was "something between" katie and the poor young lord. when the ladies went to the drawing-room they surrounded her with tender cares. "if you would like to go to your room, my dear, never mind us." "oh, never mind us," cried the gentle guests, "we can all understand----" but katie was prudent even at this crisis of fate. she reflected that the report might not be true, and that it was premature at least to accept the position. she smiled upon the ladies who surrounded her, and put her handkerchief to her eyes. "of course," she said, "i can't help feeling it--every one will feel it on the loch--and we had seen so much of him! but perhaps, as papa says, when the messenger comes back, we may have better news." the messenger did not come back till late, when the party were about to separate. he had found the greatest difficulty in getting information, for all that was known at auchnasheen was that the young lord and his mother had gone in the boat from the isle with the ladies, to see the old castle. with the ladies! katie could not restrain a little cry. she knew what was coming. and he had been seen, the man went on, with miss oona on the walls--and that was all that was known. this stroke went to katie's heart. "oona!" she cried, with something of sharpness and bitterness in the cry; though in the wail that rose from all around who knew the isle, this tone that broke the harmony of grief was lost. but her little fabric of imaginary heroism fell into the dust: and for the moment the shock of a genuine, if alloyed, sentiment thrown back upon herself, and the secret mortification with which she became conscious of the absurdity of her own self-complacence, kept katie from feeling the natural pity called forth by such a catastrophe, and the deeper pang which by-and-by awakened her heart to the thought of oona--oona no rival, but the friend of her youth, oona the only companion of her mother, the young and hopeful creature whom everybody loved. to think that she should have indulged a little miserable rivalry--on account of a man for whom she did not care the hundredth part so much as she cared for oona, before realising this real grief and calamity! katie's honest little soul was bowed down with shame. she, too, watched that night with many a prayer and tear, gazing from her many-windowed chamber towards the feathery crest of the isle which lay between her and kinloch houran. oh, the desolation that would be there and oona gone! oh, the blank upon the loch, and in all the meetings of the cheerful neighbours! another man on horseback was sent off by break of day for news, and not only from birkenbraes, but from every house for miles round the messengers hurried. there had been no such excitement in the district for generations. the news reached the lodge--sir thomas herbert's shooting-box--early in the morning when the family met at breakfast. the previous night had been occupied with an excitement of their own. major antrobus, sir thomas's friend, brother in sport and arms, had been from the moment of his arrival a disappointment to sir thomas. the first evening julia had caught him in her toils. she had sung and laughed and talked his heart, so much as remained to him, away. he was the man of all others who, his friends were convinced, was not a marrying man. he had a good estate, a house full of every bachelor comfort, and was useful to those in whom he was interested as only a bachelor can be. nor was it only to men that he was invaluable as a friend. he had a box at ascot; he had ways of making the derby delightful to a party of ladies; he was of infinite use at goodwood; he knew everybody whom it was well to know. lady herbert was almost as inconsolable as her husband at the idea of losing him. and that such a man should be brought by sir thomas himself into harm's way, and delivered over to the enemy by the very hands of his friends, was more than flesh and blood could bear. the herberts saw their mistake before he had been at the lodge two days. but what could they do? they could not send him away--nor could they send julia away. had they done so, that young lady had already made herself friends enough to have secured two or three invitations in a foolishly hospitable country, where everybody's first idea was to ask you to stay with them! sir thomas acted with the noble generosity characteristic of middle-aged men of the world in such circumstances. he told his friend, as they smoked their cigars in the evening, a great many stories about julia, and all she had been "up to" in her chequered career. he described how lady herbert had brought her down here, because of some supposed possibility about lord erradeen. "but young fellows like that are not to be so easily taken in," sir thomas said, and vaunted his own insight in perceiving from the first that there was nothing in it. the major listened, and sucked his cigar, and said nothing; but next day on the way home, when the fire at kinloch houran was reddening the skies, took his host aside, and said-- "i say, all that may be true, you know. i don't know anything about that. girls, you know, poor things! they've devilish hard lines, when they've got no tin. if she's tried it on, you know, once or twice before, that's nothing to me. that's all their mother's fault, don't you know. she's the jolliest girl i ever met, and no end of fun. with her in the house, you know, a fellow would never be dull, and i can tell you it's precious dull at antrobus on off days, when all you fellows are away. i say! i've asked her--to be mine, you know, and all that; and she's--going to have me, tom!" "going to have you! oh, i'll be bound she is! and everything you've got belonging to you!" in the keenness of his annoyance, cried sir thomas. the major, who was somewhat red in the face, and whose figure was not elegant (but what trifles were these, julia truly said, in comparison with a true heart!), hemmed a little, and coughed, and set his chin into his shirt collar. he stood like a man to his choice, and would have no more said. "of course she is--if she's going to have me, you know. fixtures go with the property," said major antrobus, with a hasty laugh. "and, i say, by-gones are by-gones, you know--but no more of them in the future if we're going to be friends." the men had a quarrel, however, before sir thomas gave in--which was stopped fortunately before it went too far by his wife, who met them all smiles with both hands extended. "what are you talking loud about, you two?" she said. "major, i'm delighted. of course i've seen it all along. she'll make you an excellent wife, and i wish you all the happiness in the world." "thank you: he don't think so," the major said with a growl. but after this sir thomas perceived that to quarrel with a man for marrying your cousin whom he has met in your house is one of the foolishest of proceedings. he relieved his feelings afterwards by falling upon the partner of his life. "what humbugs you women are! what lies you tell! you said she would make him an excellent wife." "and so she will," said lady herbert, "a capital wife! he will be twice as happy, but alas! no good at all henceforward," she ended with a sigh. the excitement of this incident was not over, when to the breakfast-table next morning, where julia appeared triumphant, having overcome all opposition, the news arrived, not softened by any doubt as if the result was still uncertain, but with that pleasure in enhancing the importance of dolorous intelligence which is common to all who have the first telling of a catastrophe. there was a momentary hush of horror when the tale was told, and then julia, her expression changed in a moment, her eyes swimming in tears, rose up in great excitement from her lover's side. "oh, walter!" she cried, greatly moved. "oh that i should be so happy, and he----" and then she paused, and her tears burst forth. "and his mother--his mother!" she sat down again and wept, while the rest of the party looked on, her major somewhat gloomy, her cousin (after a momentary tribute of silence to death) with a dawning of triumph in his eye. "you always thought a great deal of young erradeen, ju--at least since he has been lord erradeen." "i always was fond of him," she cried. "poor walter! poor walter! oh, you can weigh my words if you like at such a time, but i won't weigh them. if henry likes to be offended i can't help it. he has no reason. oh, walter, walter! i was always fond of him. i have known him since i was _that_ high--and his mother, i have always hated her. i have known her since i was _that_ high. if you think such things go for nothing it is because you have no hearts. harry, if you love me as you say, get your dog-cart ready this moment and take me to that poor woman--that poor, poor woman! his mother--and she has only him in all the world. harry, take me or not but i will go----" "you said you hated her, julia," cried lady herbert. "and so i did: and what does that matter? shall i keep away from her for that--when i am the only one that has known him all his life--that knew him from a child? harry----" "i have ordered the dog-cart, my dear; and you are a good woman, julia. i thought so, but with all your dear friends and people hang me if i knew." julia gave him her hand: she was crying without any disguise. "perhaps i haven't been very good," she said, "but i never was hard-hearted, and when i think upon that poor woman among strangers----" "by jove, but this is something new," cried sir thomas; "the girl that liked young men best without their mothers, antrobus, hey?" "oh hush, tom," cried his wife; "and dear julia, be consistent a little--that you're sorry for your old--friend (don't laugh, tom; say her old flame if you like, but remember that he's dead, poor fellow), that we can understand. major antrobus knows all that story. but this fuss about the mother whom you never could bear. oh that is a little too much! you can't expect us to take in that!" julia turned upon her relations with what at bottom was a generous indignation. "if you don't know," she said, "how it feels to hear of another person's misfortune, when you yourself are happier than you deserve--and if you don't understand that i would go on my knees to poor mrs. methven to take one scrap of her burden off her! oh all the more because i never liked her----but what is the use of talking, for if you don't understand, nothing i could say would make you understand. and it does not matter to me now," cried julia, less noble feelings breaking in, "now i have got one who is going to stand by me, who knows what i mean, and will put no bad motive--" the real agitation and regret in her face gave force to the triumph with which she turned to her major, and taking his arm swept out of the room. he, too, had all the sense of dignity which comes from fine feeling misunderstood, and felt himself elevated in the scale of humanity by his superior powers of understanding. lady herbert, who remained behind, was saved by the humour of the situation from exploding, as sir thomas did. to think that the delicacy of the major's perceptions should be the special foundation of his bride's satisfaction was, as she declared with tears of angry laughter, "too good!" but the second and better news arrived before julia could set out on her charitable mission. perhaps it was better that it should end so: for though the first outburst of feeling had been perfectly genuine and sincere, the impulse might have been alloyed by less perfect wishes before she had reached kinloch houran. and it is doubtful in any case whether her ministrations, however kind, would have been acceptable to walter's mother. as it was, when she led her major back, julia was too clever not to find a medium of reconciliation with her cousins, who by that time had come to perceive how ludicrous any quarrel open to the world would be. and so peace was established, and julia herbert's difficulties came in the happiest way to an end. chapter xix. the miseries of the night's imprisonment were soon forgotten. oona, elastic in youthful health, recovered in a few days, she said in a few hours, from its effects, and the keen reality of the after events dimmed in her mind the mystery of that extraordinary moment which appeared now like a dream, too wonderful to be true, too inexplicable and beyond experience to come into natural life at all. they spoke of it to each other with bated breath, but not till some time after their rescue, when the still higher excitement of their near approach to death--a thing which reveals the value and charm of life as nothing else does--had somewhat subsided in their minds. but their recollections were confused, they could not tell how; and as walter had never been sure after they were over, whether the terrible conflicts which he had gone through were not conflicts between the better and worse parts of his own nature, without any external influence, so they asked each other now whether the mysterious chamber, the burning lamp, the strange accessories of a concealed and mysterious life, were dreams of disordered fancy, or something real and actual. they could not explain these things to each other, neither could they understand what it was that made the throwing down of the light of such vital importance. was it common fire, acting after the ordinary laws of nature and finding ready fuel in the dry wood and antique furniture? or was it something more mystic, more momentous? they gave little explanation to questioners, not so much because they were unwilling, as because they were unable; and when they discussed it between themselves became more and more confused as the days went on. it became like a phantasmagoria, sometimes suddenly appearing in all the vivid lines of reality, sometimes fading into a pale apparition which memory could scarcely retain. to the world in general the fact of a great fire, a thing unfortunately not very rare in the records of ancient houses, became after a while a very simple piece of history; and the wonderful escape of lord erradeen and miss forrester, and their subsequent betrothal and marriage, a pretty piece of natural romance. the tower, now preserving nothing more than a certain squareness in its mass of ruins, showed traces of two rooms that might have been, but everything was destroyed except the stones, and any remains that might have withstood the action of the fire were buried deep under the fallen walls; nor could any trace be found of concealed passages or any way of descent into the house from that unsuspected hiding-place. one thing was certain, however, that the being who had exercised so strange an influence on a year of his life never appeared to walter more. there were moments in which he felt, with a pang of alarm, that concentration of his thoughts upon himself, that subtle direction and intensification of his mind, as if it had suddenly been driven into a dialogue with some one invisible, which had been the worst of all the sufferings he had to bear; but these, after the first terror, proved to be within the power of his own efforts to resist and shake off, and never came to any agonising crisis like that which he had formerly passed through. his marriage, which took place as soon as circumstances would permit, ended even these last contentions of the spirit. and if in the midst of his happiness he was sometimes tortured by the thought that the change of his life from the evil way to the good one had all the results of the most refined selfishness, as his adversary had suggested, and that he was amply proving the ways of righteousness to be those of pleasantness, and godliness to be great gain, that thought was too ethereal for common use, and did not stand the contact of reality. mr. cameron, to whom he submitted it in some moment of confidence, smiled with the patience of old age upon this overstrained self-torment. "it is true enough," the minister said, "that the right way is a way of pleasantness, and that all the paths of wisdom are peace. but life has not said out its last word, and ye will have to tread them one time or other with bleeding feet, or all is done--if the lord has not given you a lot apart from that of other men. and human nature," the old man said, not without a little recollection of some sermon, at which he smiled as he spoke, "is so perverse, that when trouble comes, you that are afraid of your happiness will be the first to cry out and upbraid the good lord that does not make it everlasting. wait, my young man, wait--till perhaps you have a boy at your side that will vex your heart as children only can vex those that love them--wait till death steps into your house, as step he must----" "stop!" cried walter, with a wild sudden pang of that terror of which the italian poet speaks, which makes all the earth a desert-- "senza quella nova, sola, infinita, felicitá che il suo pensier figura." he never complained again of being too happy, or forgot that one time or other the path of life must be trod with bleeding feet. "but i'll not deny," said the minister, "that to the like of you, my young lord, with so much in your power, there is no happier way of amusing yourself than just in being of use and service to your poor fellow-creatures that want so much and have so little. man!" cried mr. cameron, "i would have given my head to be able to do at your age the half or quarter of what you can do with a scratch of your pen!--and you must mind that you are bound to do it," he added with a smile. but before this serene course of life began which walter found too happy, there was an interval of anxiety and pain. mrs. methven did not escape, like the rest, from the consequences of the night's vigil. she got up indeed from her faint, and received with speechless thanksgiving her son back from the dead, as she thought, but had herself to be carried to his room in the old castle, and there struggled for weeks in the grips of fever, brought on, it was said, by the night's exposure. but this she would not herself allow. she had felt it, she said, before she left her home, but concealed it, not to be hindered from obeying her son's summons. if this was true, or invented upon the spur of the moment to prove that in no possible way was walter to blame, it is impossible to say. but the fever ran very high, and so affected her heart, worn and tired by many assaults, that there was a time when everything was hushed and silenced in the old castle in expectation of death. by-and-by, however, that terror gave place to all the innocent joys of convalescence--soft flitting of women up and down, presents of precious flowers and fruits lighting up the gloom, afternoon meetings when everything that could please her was brought to the recovering mother, and all the loch came with inquiries, with good wishes, and kind offerings. mrs. forrester, who was an excellent nurse, and never lost heart, but smiled, and was sure, in the deepest depth, that all would "come right," as she said, took the control of the sick-room, and recovered there the bloom which she had partially lost when oona was in danger. and oona stole into the heart of walter's mother, who had not for long years possessed him sufficiently to make it bitter to her that he should now put a wife before her. some women never learn this philosophy; and perhaps mrs. methven might have resisted it, had not oona, her first acquaintance on the loch, her tenderest nurse, won her heart. to have the grim old house in which the secret of the methvens' fate had been laid up, and in which, even to indifferent lookers-on, there had always been an atmosphere of mystery and terror, thus occupied with the most innocent and cheerful commonplaces, the little cares and simple pleasures of a long but hopeful recovery, was confusing and soothing beyond measure to all around. the old servants, who had borne for many years the presence of a secret which was not theirs, felt in this general commotion a relief which words could not express. "no," old symington said, "it's not ghosts nor any such rubbitch. i never, for my part, here or elsewhere, saw onything worse than myself; but, miss oona, whatever it was that you did on the tap of that tower--and how you got there the lord above knows, for there never was footing for a bird that ever i saw--it has just been blessed. 'ding down the nests and the craws will flee away.' what am i meaning? well, that is just what i canna tell. it's a' confusion. i know nothing. many a fricht and many an anxious hour have i had here: but i am bound to say i never saw anything worse than mysel'." "all yon is just clavers," said old macalister, waving his hand. "if ye come to that there is naething in this life that will bide explaining. but i will not deny that there is a kind of a different feel in the air which is maybe owing to this fine weather, just wonderful for the season; or maybe to the fact of so many leddies about, which is a new thing here--no that i hold so much with women," he added, lest oona should be proud, "they are a great fyke and trouble, and will meddle with everything; but they're fine for a change, and a kind of soothing for a little whilie at a time, after all we've gone through." before the gentle _régime_ of the sick-room was quite over, an unusual and unexpected visitor arrived one morning at loch houran. it was the day after that on which mrs. methven had been transferred to auchnasheen, and a great festival among her attendants. she had been brought down to the drawing-room very pale and shadowy, but with a relaxation of all the sterner lines which had once been in her face, in invalid dress arranged after mrs. forrester's taste rather than her own, and lending a still further softness to her appearance, not to be associated with her usual rigid garb of black and white. and her looks and tones were the most soft of all, as, the centre of everybody's thoughts, she was led to the sofa near the fire and surrounded by that half-worship which is the right of a convalescent where love is. to this pleasant home-scene there entered suddenly, ushered in with great solemnity by symington, the serious and somewhat stern "man of business" who had come to sloebury not much more than a year before with the news of that wonderful inheritance so unexpected and unthought of, which had seemed to mrs. methven, as well as to her son, the beginning of a new life. mr. milnathort made kind but formal inquiries after mrs. methven's health, and offered his congratulations no less formally upon her recovery. "i need not say to you that all that has happened has been an interest to us that are connected with the family beyond anything that i can express. i have taken the liberty," he added, turning to walter, "to bring one to see you, lord erradeen, who has perhaps the best right of any one living to give ye joy. i told her that you would no doubt come to her, for she has not left her chamber, as you know, for many a year; but nothing would serve her but to come herself, frail as she is----" "your sister!" walter cried. "just my sister. i have taken the liberty," mr. milnathort repeated, "to have her carried into the library, where you will find her. she has borne the journey better than i could have hoped, but it is an experiment that makes me very anxious. you will spare her any--emotion, any shock, that you can help?" the serious face of the lawyer was more serious than ever: his long upper lip trembled a little. he turned round to the others with anxious self-restraint. "she is very frail," he said, "a delicate bit creature all her life--and since her accident--" he spoke of this, as his manner was, as if it had happened a week ago. walter hurried away to the library, in which he found miss milnathort carefully arranged upon a sofa, wrapped up in white furs instead of her usual garments, a close white hood surrounding the delicate brightness of her face. she held out her hands to him at first without a word; and when she could speak, said, with a tremble in her voice: "i have come to see the end of it. i have come to see--her and you." "i should have come to you," cried walter, "i did not forget--but for my mother's illness----" "yes?" she said with a grateful look. "you thought upon me? oh, but my heart has been with her and you! oh, the terrible time it was! the first news in the papers, the fear that you were buried there under the ruins, you--and she; and then to wait a night and a day." "i should have sent you word at once--i might have known; but i did not think of the papers." "no, how should you? you were too busy with your own life. oh, the thoughts of that night. i just lay and watched for you from the darkening to the dawning. no, scarcely what you could call praying--just waiting upon the lord. i bade him mind upon walter and me--that had lost the battle. and i thought i saw you, you and your oona. was not i wise when i said it was a well-omened name?" she paused a little, weeping and smiling. "i could not tell you all the thoughts that went through my mind. i thought if it was even so, there might have been a worse fate. to break the spell and defeat the enemy even at the cost of your two bonnie lives--i thought it would not be an ill fate, the two of you together. did i not say it? two that made up one, the perfect man. that is god's ordinance, my dear? that is his ordinance. two--not just for pleasure, or for each other, but for him and everything that is good. you believed me when i said that. oh, you believed me! and so it was not in vain that i was--killed yon time long ago----" her voice was broken with sobs. she leant upon walter's shoulder who had knelt down beside her, and wept there like a child--taking comfort like a child. "generally," she began after a moment, "there is little account made, little, little account, of them that have gone before, that have been beaten, walter. i can call you nothing but walter to-day. and oona, though she has won the battle, she is just me, but better. we lost. we had the same heart; but the time had not come for the victory. and now you, my young lord, you, young erradeen, like him, you have won, oona and you. we were beaten; but yet i have a share in it. how can you tell, a young man like you, how those that have been defeated, lift their hearts and give god thanks?" she made a pause and said, after a moment, "i must see oona, too." but when he was about to rise and leave her in order to bring oona, she stopped him once more. "you must tell me first," she said, speaking very low, "what is become of _him_? did he let himself be borne away to the clouds in yon flames? i know, i know, it's all done; but did you see him? did he speak a word at the end?" "miss milnathort," said walter, holding her hands, "there is nothing but confusion in my mind. was it all a dream and a delusion from beginning to end?" she laughed a strange little laugh of emotion. "look at me then," she said, "for what have i suffered these thirty years? and you--was it all for nothing that you were so soon beaten and ready to fall? have you not seen him? did he go without a word?" walter looked back upon all the anguish through which he had passed, and it seemed to him but a dream. one great event, and then weeks of calm had intervened since the day when driven to the side of the loch in madness and misery, he had found oona and taken refuge in her boat, and thrown himself on her mercy; and since the night when once more driven distracted by diabolical suggestions, he had stepped out into the darkness, meaning to lose himself somehow in the gloom and be no more heard of--yet was saved again by the little light in her window, the watch-light that love kept burning. these recollections and many more swept through his mind, and the pain and misery more remote upon which this old woman's childlike countenance had shone. he could not take hold of them as they rose before him in the darkness, cast far away into a shadowy background by the brightness and reality of the present. a strange giddiness came over his brain. he could not tell which was real, the anguish that was over, or the peace that had come, or whether life itself--flying in clouds behind him, before him hid under the wide-spreading sunshine--was anything but a dream. he recovered himself with an effort, grasping hold of the latest recollection to satisfy his questioner. "this i know," he cried, "that when we were flying from the tower, with flames and destruction behind us, the only words i heard from her were a prayer for pardon--'forgive him,' that was all i heard. and then the rush of the air in our faces, and roar that was like the end of all things. we neither heard nor saw more." "pardon!" said miss milnathort, drying her eyes with a trembling hand, "that is what i have said too, many a weary hour in the watches of the night. what pleasure can a spirit like yon find in the torture of his own flesh and blood? the lord forgive him if there is yet a place of repentance! but well i know what you mean that it is just like a vision when one awaketh. that is what all our troubles will be when the end comes: just a dream! and good brought out of evil and pardon given to many, many a one that men are just willing to give over and curse instead of blessing. now go and bring your oona, my bonnie lad! i am thinking she is just me, and you are walter, and we have all won the day together," said the invalid clasping her thin hands, and with eyes that shone through their tears, "all won together! though we were beaten twenty years ago." the end. london: r. clay, sons, and taylor, bread street hill. * * * * * [transcriber's note: hyphen variations left as printed.] [the end of _the wizard's son, volume _ by margaret oliphant] the scarecrow and other stories by g. ranger wormser new york e. p. dutton & company fifth avenue copyright, , by e. p. dutton & company _all rights reserved_ printed in the united states of america contents page the scarecrow mutter schwegel haunted flowers the shadow the effigy the faith yellow china-ching the wood of living trees before the dawn the stillness the scarecrow and other stories the scarecrow "ben--" the woman stood in the doorway of the ramshackle, tumble-down shanty. her hands were cupped at her mouth. the wind blew loose, whitish blond wisps of hair around her face and slashed the faded blue dress into the uncorseted bulk of her body. "benny--oh, benny--" her call echoed through the still evening. her eyes staring straight before her down the slope in front of the house caught sight of something blue and antiquatedly military standing waist deep and rigid in the corn field. "that ole scarecrow," she muttered to herself, "that there old scarecrow with that there ole uniform onto him, too!" the sun was going slowly just beyond the farthest hill. the unreal light of the skies' reflected colors held over the yellow, waving tips of the corn field. "benny--," she called again. "oh--benny!" and then she saw him coming toward her trudging up the hill. she waited until he stood in front of her. "supper, ben," she said. "was you down in the south meadow where you couldn't hear me call?" "naw." he was young and slight. he had thick hair and a thin face. his features were small. there was nothing unusual about them. his eyes were deep-set and long, with the lids that were heavily fringed. "you heard me calling you?" "yes, maw." he stood there straight and still. his eyelids were lowered. "why ain't you come along then? what ails you, benny, letting me shout and shout that way?" "nothing--maw." "where was you?" he hesitated a second before answering her. "i was to the bottom of the hill." "and what was you doing down there to the bottom of the hill? what was you doing down there, benny?" her voice had a hushed tenseness to it. "i was watching, maw." "watching, benny?" "that's what i was doing." his tone held a guarded sullenness. "'tain't no such a pretty sunset, benny." "warn't watching no sunset." "benny--!" "well." he spoke quickly. "what d'you want to put it there for? what d'you want to do that for in the first place?" "there was birds, benny. you know there was birds." "that ain't what i mean. what for d'you put on that there uniform?" "i ain't had nothing else. there warn't nothing but your grand-dad's ole uniform. it's fair in rags, benny. it's all i had to put on to it." "well, you done it yourself." "naw, benny, naw! 'tain't nothing but an ole uniform with a stick into it. just to frighten off them birds. 'tain't nothing else. honest, 'tain't, benny." he looked up at her out of the corners of his eyes. "it was waving its arms." "that's the wind." "naw, maw. waving its arms before the wind it come up." "sush, benny! 'tain't likely. 'tain't." "i was watching, maw. i seen it wave and wave. s'pose it should beckon--; s'pose it should beckon to me. i'd be going, then, maw." "sush, benny." "i'd fair have to go, maw." "leave your mammy? naw, ben; naw. you couldn't never go off and leave your mammy. even if you ain't able to bear this here farm you couldn't go off from your mammy. you couldn't! not--your--maw--benny!" she could see his mouth twitch. she saw him catch his lower lip in under his teeth. "aw--" "say you couldn't leave, benny; say it!" "i--i fair hate this here farm!" he mumbled. "morning and night;--and morning and night. nothing but chores and earth. and then some more of them chores. and always that there way. so it is! always! and the stillness! nothing alive, nothing! sometimes i ain't able to stand it nohow. sometimes--!" "you'll get to like it--; later, mebbe--" "naw! naw, maw!" "you will, benny. sure you will." "i won't never. i ain't able to help fretting. it's all closed up tight inside of me. eating and eating. it makes me feel sick." she put out a hand and laid it heavily on his shoulder. "likely it's a touch of fever in the blood, benny." "aw--! i ain't got no fever!" "you'll be feeling better in the morning, ben." "i'll be feeling the same, maw. that's just it. always the same. nothing but the stillness. nothing alive. and down there in the corn field--" "that ain't alive, benny!" "ain't it, maw?" "don't say that, benny. don't!" he shook her hand off of him. "i was watching," he said doggedly. "i seen it wave and wave." she turned into the house. "that ole scarecrow!" she muttered to herself. "that there ole scarecrow!" she led the way into the kitchen. the boy followed at her heels. a lamp was lighted on the center table. the one window was uncurtained. through the naked spot of it the evening glow poured shimmeringly into the room. inside the doorway they both paused. "you set down, benny." he pulled a chair up to the table. she took a steaming pot from the stove and emptying it into a plate, placed the dish before him. he fell to eating silently. she came and sat opposite him. she watched him cautiously. she did not want him to know that she was watching him. whenever he glanced up she hurried her eyes away from his face. in the stillness the only live things were those two pair of eyes darting away from each other. "benny--!" she could not stand it any longer. "benny--just--you--just--you--" he gulped down a mouthful of food. "aw, maw--don't you start nothing. not no more to-night, maw." she half rose from her chair. for a second she leaned stiffly against the table. then she slipped back into her seat, her whole body limp and relaxed. "i ain't going to start nothing, benny. i ain't even going to talk about this here farm. honest--i ain't." "aw--this--here--farm--!" "i've gave the best years of my life to it." she spoke the words defiantly. "you said that all afore, maw." "it's true," she murmured. "terrible true. and i done it for you, benny. i wanted to be giving you something. it's all i'd got to give you, benny. there's many a man, ben, that's glad of his farm. and grateful, too. there's many that makes it pay." "and what'll i do if it does pay, maw? what'll i do then?" "i--i--don't know, benny. it's only just beginning, now." "but if it does pay, maw? what'll i do? go away from here?" "naw, benny--. not--away--. what'd you go away for, when it pays? after all them years i gave to it?" his spoon clattered noisily to his plate. he pushed his chair back from the table. the legs of it rasped loudly along the uncarpeted floor. he got to his feet. "let's go on outside," he said. "there ain't no sense to this here talking--and talking." she glanced up at him. her eyes were narrow and hard. "all right, benny. i'll clear up. i'll be along in a minute. all right, benny." he slouched heavily out of the room. she sat where she was, the set look pressed on her face. automatically her hands reached out among the dishes, pulling them toward her. outside the boy sank down on the step. it was getting dark. there were shadows along the ground. blue shadows. in the graying skies one star shone brilliantly. beyond the mist-slurred summit of a hill the full moon grew yellow. in front of him was the slope of wind-moved corn field, and in the center of it the dim, military figure standing waist deep in the corn. his eyes fixed themselves to it. "ole--uniform--with--a--stick--into--it." he whispered the words very low. still--standing there--still. the same wooden attitude of it. his same, cunning watching of it. there was a wind. he knew it was going over his face. he could feel the cool of the wind across his moistened lips. he took a deep breath. down there in the shivering corn field, standing in the dark, blue shadows, the dim figure had quivered. an arm moved--swaying to and fro. the other arm began--swaying--swaying. a tremor ran through it. once it pivoted. the head shook slowly from side to side. the arms rose and fell--and rose again. the head came up and down and rocked a bit to either side. "i'm here--" he muttered involuntarily. "here." the arms were tossing and stretching. he thought the head faced in his direction. the wind had died out. the arms went down and came up and reached. "benny--" the woman seated herself on the step at his side. "look!" he mumbled. "look!" he pointed his hand at the dim figure shifting restlessly in the quiet, shadow-saturated corn field. her eyes followed after his. "oh--benny--" "well--" his voice was hoarse. "it's moving, ain't it? you can see it moving for yourself, can't you? you ain't able to say you don't see it, are you?" "the--wind--" she stammered. "where's the wind?" "down--there." "d'you feel a wind? say, d'you feel a wind?" "mebbe--down--there." "there ain't no wind. not now--there ain't! and it's moving, ain't it? say, it's moving, ain't it?" "it looks like it was dancing. so it does. like as if it was--making--itself--dance--" his eyes were still riveted on those arms that came up and down--; up and down--; and reached. "it'll stop soon--now." he stuttered it more to himself than to her. "then--it'll be still. i've watched it mighty often. mebbe it knows i watch it. mebbe that's why--it--moves--" "aw--benny--" "well, you see it, don't you? you thought there was something the matter with me when i come and told you how it waves--and waves. but you seen it waving, ain't you?" "it's nothing, ben. look, benny. it's stopped!" the two of them stared down the slope at the dim, military figure standing rigid and waist deep in the corn field. the woman gave a quick sigh of relief. for several moments they were silent. from somewhere in the distance came the harsh, discordant sound of bull frogs croaking. out in the night a dog bayed at the golden, full moon climbing up over the hills. a bird circled between sky and earth hovering above the corn field. they saw its slow descent, and then for a second they caught the startled whir of its wings, as it flew blindly into the night. "that ole scarecrow!" she muttered. "s'pose--" he whispered. "s'pose when it starts its moving like that;--s'pose some day it walks out of that there corn field! just naturally walks out here to me. what then, if it walks out?" "benny--!" "that's what i'm thinking of all the time. if it takes it into its head to just naturally walk out here. what's going to stop it, if it wants to walk out after me; once it starts moving that way? what?" "benny--! it couldn't do that! it couldn't!" "mebbe it won't. mebbe it'll just beckon first. mebbe it won't come after me. not if i go when it beckons. i kind of figure it'll beckon when it wants me. i couldn't stand the other. i couldn't wait for it to come out here after me. i kind of feel it'll beckon. when it beckons, i'll be going." "benny, there's sickness coming on you." "'tain't no sickness." the woman's hands were clinched together in her lap. "i wish to gawd--" she said--"i wish i ain't never seen the day when i put that there thing up in that there corn field. but i ain't thought nothing like this could never happen. i wish to gawd i ain't never seen the day--" "'tain't got nothing to do with you." his voice was very low. "it's got everything to do with me. so it has! you said that afore yourself; and you was right. ain't i put it up? ain't i looked high and low the house through? ain't that ole uniform of your grand-dad's been the only rag i could lay my hands on? was there anything else i could use? was there?" "aw--maw--!" "ain't we needed a scarecrow down there? with them birds so awful bad? pecking away at the corn; and pecking." "'tain't your fault, maw." "there warn't nothing else but that there ole uniform. i wouldn't have took it, otherwise. poor ole pa so desperate proud of it as he was. him fighting for his country in it. always saying that he was. he couldn't be doing enough for his country. and that there ole uniform meaning so much to him. like a part of him i used to think it,--and--. you wanting to say something, ben?" "naw--naw--!" "he wouldn't even let us be burying him in it. 'put my country's flag next my skin'; he told us. 'when i die keep the ole uniform.' just like a part of him, he thought it. wouldn't i have kept it, falling to pieces as it is, if there'd have been anything else to put up there in that there corn field?" she felt the boy stiffen suddenly. "and with him a soldier--" he broke off abruptly. she sensed what he was about to say. "aw, benny--. that was different. honest, it was. he warn't the only one in his family. there was two brothers." the boy got to his feet. "why won't you let me go?" he asked it passionately. "why d'you keep me here? you know i ain't happy! you know all the men've gone from these here parts. you know i ain't happy! ain't you going to see how much i want to go? ain't you able to know that i want to fight for my country? the way he did his fighting?" the boy jerked his head in the direction of the figure standing waist deep in the corn field; standing rigidly and faintly outlined beneath the haunting flood of moonlight. "naw, benny. you can't go. naw--!" "why, maw? why d'you keep saying that and saying it?" "i'm all alone, benny. i've gave all my best years to make the farm pay for you. you got to stay, benny. you got to stay on here with me. you just plain got--to! you'll be glad some day, benny. later--on. you'll be right glad." she saw him thrust his hands hastily into his trouser pockets. "glad?" his voice sounded tired. "i'll be shamed. that's what i'll be. nothing, d'you hear, nothing--but shamed!" she started to her feet. "benny--" a note of fear shook through the words. "you wouldn't--wouldn't--go?" he waited a moment before he answered her. "if you ain't wanting me to go--; i'll stay. gawd! i guess i plain got to--stay." "that's a good boy, benny. you won't never be sorry--nohow--i promise you!--i'll be making it up to you. honest, i will!--there's lots of ways--i'll--!" he interrupted her. "only, maw--; i won't let it come after me. if it beckons i--got--to--go--!" she gave a sudden laugh that trailed off uncertainly. "'tain't going to beckon, benny." "it if beckons, maw--" "'tain't going to, benny. 'tain't nothing but the wind that moves it. it's just the wind, sure. mebbe you got a touch of fever. mebbe you better go on to bed. you'll be all right in the morning. just you wait and see. you're a good boy, benny. you'll never go off and leave your maw and the farm. you're a fine lad, benny." "if--it--beckons--" he repeated in weary monotone. "'tain't, benny!" "i'll be going to bed," he said. "that's it, benny. good night." "good night, maw." she stood there listening to his feet thudding up the stairs. she heard him knocking about in the room overhead. a door banged. she stood quite still. there were footsteps moving slowly. a window was thrown open. she looked up to see him leaning far out over the sill. her eyes went down the slope of the moonlight-bathed corn field. her right hand curled itself into a fist. "ole--scarecrow--!" she half laughed. she waited there until she saw the boy draw away from the window. she went into the house and bolted the door behind her. then she went up the narrow steps. that night she lay awake for a long time. the heat had grown intense. she found herself tossing from side to side of the small bed. the window shade had stuck at the top of the window. the moonlight trickled into the room. she could see the window-framed, star-specked patch of the skies. when she sat up she saw the round, reddish-yellow ball of the moon. she must have dozed, because she woke with a start. she felt that she had had a fearful, evil dream. the horror of it clung to her. the room was like an oven. she thought the walls were coming together and the ceiling pressing down. her body was covered with sweat. she forced herself wide awake. she made herself get out of the bed. she stood for a second uncertain. then she went to the window. not a breath of air stirring. the moon was high in the sky. she looked out across the hills. down there to the left the acres of potatoes. potatoes were paying. she counted on a big harvest. to the right the wheat. only the second year for those five fields. she knew that she had done well with them. she thought, with a smile running over her lips, back to the time when less than half of the place had been under cultivation. she remembered her dream of getting the whole of her farm in work. she and the boy had made good. she thought of that with savage complacency. it had been a struggle; a bitter, hard fight from the beginning. but she had made good with her farm. and there down the slope, just in front of the house, the corn field. and in the center of it, standing waist deep in the corn, the antiquated, military figure. the smile slid from her mouth. the suffocating heat was terrific. not a breath of air. suddenly she began to shake from head to foot. her eyes wide and staring, were fixed on the moonlight-whitened corn field; her eyes were held to the moonlight-streaked figure standing in the ghostly corn. moving-- an arm swayed--swayed to and fro. backwards and forwards--backwards--the other arm--swaying--a tremor ran through it. once it pivoted. the head shook slowly from side to side. the arms rose and fell--; and rose again. the head came up and down, and rocked a bit to either side. "dancing--" she whispered stupidly. "dancing--" she thought she could not breathe. she had never felt such oppressive heat. the arms were tossing and stretching. she could not take her eyes from it. and then she saw both arms reach out, and slowly, very slowly, she saw the hands of them, beckoning. in the stillness of the room next to her she thought she heard a crash. she listened intently, her eyes stuck to those reaching arms, and the hands of them that beckoned and beckoned. "benny--" she murmured--"benny--!" silence. she could not think. it was his talk that had done this--benny's talk--he had said something about it--walking out--if it should come--out--! moving all over like that--if its feet should start--! if they should of a sudden begin to shuffle--; shuffle out of the cornfield--! but benny wasn't awake. he--couldn't--see--it. thank gawd! if only something--would--hold--it! if--only--it--would--stop--; gawd! nothing stirring out there in the haunting moon-lighted night. nothing moving. nothing but the figure standing waist deep in the corn field. and even as she looked, the rigid, military figure grew still. still, now, but for those slow, beckoning hands. a tremendous dizziness came over her. she closed her eyes for a second and then she stumbled back to the bed. she lay there panting. she pulled the sheets up across her face; her shaking fingers working the tops of them into a hard ball. she stuffed it between her chattering teeth. whatever happened, benny mustn't hear her. she mustn't waken, benny. thank heaven, benny was asleep. benny must never know how, out there in the whitened night, the hands of the figure slowly and unceasingly beckoned and beckoned. the sight of those reaching arms stayed before her. when, hours later, she fell asleep, she still saw the slow-moving, motioning hands. it was morning when she wakened. the sun streamed into the room. she went to the door and opened it. "benny--" she called. "oh, benny." there was no answer. "benny--" she called again. "get on up. it's late, benny!" the house was quiet. she half dressed herself and went into his room. the bed had been slept in. she saw that at a glance. his clothes were not there. down--in--the--field--because--she'd--forgotten--to--wake--him--. in a sudden stunning flash she remembered the crash she had heard. it took her a long while to get to the little closet behind the bed. before she opened it she knew it would be empty. the door creaked open. his one hat and coat were gone. she had known that. he had seen those two reaching arms! he had seen those two hands that had slowly, very slowly, beckoned! she went to the window. her eyes staring straight before her, down the slope in front of the house, caught sight of something blue and antiquatedly military standing waist deep and rigid in the corn field. "you ole scarecrow--!" she whimpered. "why're you standing there?" she sobbed. "what're you standing still for--_now_?" mutter schwegel he was tremendously disappointed. the house was empty. he had thought it looked uninhabited from the outside. it made him a bit dreary to have his people away like this. that uncertain feeling came over him again. the uncertain feeling never quite left him of late. he was conscious of it most of the time. it formed an intangible background to all his other thought. he decided he would go down to the lodge presently. he was certain to find bennet at the lodge. and bennet's wife; and bennet's three children. he grinned as he thought of bennet chasing his children out of his gardens. he could imagine the old gardener's gladness at his homecoming. going quickly up the last flight of stairs, he could see that the door of his room stood ajar. he wondered at the yellow glow of light trickling in a long narrow stream out into the dark of the hall. he went rushing along the corridor. he pushed the door open. the same old room. the familiar, faded wall paper. the high, mahogany bed. the hunting print he had so cherished on the wall facing him. the table just as he had left it; the books piled in neat stacks on its polished surface. the lamp standing lighted among the books. the two big arm chairs. he took a deep breath of surprise. some one was seated in the chair facing from him. he saw the top of a man's head. he had a dim recognition of feet sprawling from under the chair. on either arm of the chair rested a man's hand. there was something he knew about those hands; the prominent knuckles; the long, well made fingers. the heavy, silver signet ring on the smallest finger of the left hand was a ring he had often seen. he crossed the room. "otto--!" standing there in front of kurz, he wondered at the change in him. he looked so much older. there was no trace left of the boyishness which he had always associated with otto kurz. there were gray streaks in kurz's heavy hair; gray at the temples of the wide forehead; gray behind the ears. the mustache and beard were threaded with grayed hairs. he was astonished to find otto kurz in his room. "otto--! i had no idea that you would be here--!" he could not understand the rigid attitude of the man's great body; the set mobility of the man's large hewn features. he moved a bit so as to stand directly in the line of those fixed staring eyes. he wanted to interrupt the wooden expression of those eyes. "otto--it was good of you to come." kurz's eyes raised themselves to meet his eyes. he quivered at the look in kurz's eyes. "my god!--what is it--?" the glazed, deadened eyes with the live, dumbed suffering behind them widened. "ach--charlie--!" "what's happened, otto?" "i--do--not--know. i was waiting, charlie--for--you--to--come." "good old otto!" he saw kurz's hand with the heavy, silver signet ring on the smallest finger go up trembling to his beard. it was the old familiar gesture. "good?--did you say good of me, charlie?" "yes, yes!" he insisted eagerly. "of course it was good of you to come and meet me." "i--had--to--come." for he a second he wondered. "but how did you know?--who told you?--i only just got here. no one--knew. how could you have known i was coming?" he heard kurz sigh; a long sigh that quavered at the end. "i--? ach!--how--i--hoped--!" "that i would come?" "that you would come, charlie." he could not fathom the look in kurz's eyes. he had never seen a look like that in those eyes. he thought that it was not a human look. "see here, otto--what is it?" kurz made a little, appealing gesture with his long, trembling hands. "later--i--will--try--to--tell--you--" "later?" kurz nodded his great, shaggy head up and down. "how did you come in here, charlie?" he was surprised at the question. "how? why, with my latch key, of course!" he glanced over at the windows. the blinds were up. he could see the dark pressing against the glass; pressing tightly so that it spread. he started for the window. kurz's voice stopped him. "and your family? you have then seen your family, charlie?" he smiled. "no. not yet. they weren't here when you came in, were they?" "no--no!--i--have--seen--no--one. i could not bring myself to go before any one. there was an old man. he was going down the hall. i waited till he passed. he must have come to light your lamp." "well, old otto--they're not here. i've hunted all through the house for them. i rather think they must have gone down to surrey. they've taken the servants with them. after a bit we'll walk over to the lodge and ask bennet where my people are. that must have been bennet you saw up here." "then you do not know?" "know what?" "about your family?" "but i just told you, otto; they must've run down to our place in surrey. i only came up here to get a look at the old room. i'll go down and ask bennet presently." a quick moan escaped through kurz's set lips. a sudden thought flashed to him. "you, otto--how did you get in here?--with them all away?--with the servants gone?" he saw the muscles of kurz's face twitch horribly. "ach--! you must not ask, charlie. a little time, charlie. there are things i do not myself know. later--i--will--try--to--tell--you." "things you do not know, otto?" kurz's mouth twisted itself into a distorted grin. "i do not blame you for ridiculing me, charlie. i always thought i knew everything. later--; you will see." "why not tell me now?" "no--no--!" kurz's voice whined frantically. "i do not know if you yourself understand." "i was only trying to help you, old chap." "help--! it is that i want. it is that which brought me here. it is because i must have you help me." "you've only to say what you want." "your help--" "you know i'll do whatever i can for you." "yes--; i hoped that. i counted--on--your--help." he waited for kurz to go on. kurz sat there silent. the long, shaking fingers fumbled at each other. "well?" "later." "all right--i don't know what you're driving at." "are--you--sure--you--do--not--know--?" "but--if you don't want to tell me now; why, tell me in your own good time, old fellow." "yes. you are not angry? you do not care if i say it later?" "of course i don't care." "not--care--if--you--knew--; if--it--is--true--; you will care!" he could not make out what kurz meant. "it's mighty nice seeing you," he said after a second's silence. "it's been a long time. years since i've seen you." "i came though, charlie;--i had to come, charlie." "i'm jolly well glad you did!" "you knew i would come." he drew his brows together in a perplexed frown. "i knew we would meet sometime." "yes. sometime." "and the sometime's now. eh, otto?" "now?" kurz's big body strained forward. "what--is--it, charlie--; this--now--?" the frown stayed over his eyes. "we were bound to come together again, old otto. you and i were pretty good pals back there at your university. what a time we two had together! and old mutter schwegel! how old mutter schwegel fussed over us! how she took care of us! it all seems like yesterday--!" kurz got out of his chair. "old mutter schwegel--;" he muttered. "dear old mutter schwegel!" kurz's eyes stole away from his face. "later--i shall tell you of mutter schwegel too." "and the talks we used to have--! the nightlong talks. we settled the affairs of the world nicely in those days. didn't we, old otto?" "the--affairs--of--the--world--" "and old mutter schwegel coming in to put out the light. and then standing there to hear what we had to say of life and of death." "of--life--and--of--death." "and not being able to tear herself away to go to bed. she thought we were wise, otto. she used to drink in every word we said. and then she'd scold us for staying up all night. old mutter schwegel. i've thought of her often--" kurz made a movement toward him. "and of me, charlie?--you had thought of me?" "i say, rather--! many a time--when they called me back from the university--even after i went out to france--i thought of you." his mind was muddled a bit. he put it down to the excitement of his coming home. that uncertain feeling came over him again quite strongly. but he had thought of otto. he remembered he had thought of otto a lot. "and what was it you thought of me, charlie?" it came back to him that there had been one time when he had thought of otto particularly. that one time when something tremendous had happened to him. he could not quite think what. he knew he had been glad when he thought of otto because he had been spared inflicting the thing on him. he could not get it clear. he avoided looking at kurz. "why--; why, i wondered what you were doing. all that sort of thing. you know what i mean." "yes. i know. i did go into the army, charlie. it was that sort of thing you meant, charlie?" he felt himself start. "i was afraid you would do that;" he said involuntarily. "yes. i, too, was afraid." kurz's voice was low. "you? afraid?" "ach, charlie!--you know it. the fear it was not for myself!" he walked over to the window. he stood there looking down at the huge boxwood hedges looming in thick gray bulks up from the smudging reach of the heavily matted shadows. he turned. "you funked meeting me--in--war?" "ach!--god forbid!--that--i--should--meet--you--in--war--!" "i too;" he said it quickly. "i too was afraid that i should come upon you. it haunted me--; that fear i might harm you. it stayed with me--; day and night. i shouldn't want to hurt you, otto. i--i prayed." it came back to him how often he had prayed it. "i always prayed that it might never be you!" "yes--; i know." he went and stood close beside kurz. he found himself staring at kurz intently. "but you're here;--in england. i say, did they make you a prisoner? could my people get parole for you?" "no. i do not think they do that here in your country. i do--not--need--parole, charlie." "i thought perhaps--" "no--!" "but how did you get here, then?" "charlie--; charlie!--ach!--will--you--not--then--wait?" "come, come, old otto. you've got something to tell me. if you don't want to say how you got here, why, all right. only, you'd best get it off your mind. whatever it is you'd better come out and say what you came to say." kurz slid back into the chair again. the room was still. heavy with silence. "yes. i'll tell you--if i can. charlie, it is hard to say." he tried to help kurz. "it's about this war of ours; that's it, isn't it?" "about the war? yes--!" "then tell me." he saw kurz's massive shoulders jerking. "how--can--i--tell--you--? i do not think you understand. i do not even know if it is what i think it is. i cannot reason it out to myself. the power of reasoning has left me. i had no other knowledge than my reasoning. i do not know. now, i do not know where i am--or--what--i--am--" the maddened urge of kurz's words struck him. "you're here, old otto;" he said it reassuringly. "here with me. in my room. in england. you're with me, otto!" "yes--with--you." and then beneath his breath he whispered: "where--are--you--?" he caught the smothered insistence of that last sentence. he smiled, forcing his lips to smile. "standing right in front of you, old man. waiting for you to say what you came to--" kurz interrupted him. "i--had--to come. i felt that i must come. i--came, charlie. i got myself here, charlie." "quite right, otto." "i want you to know first that i thought of you. that i was, as you say you were, afraid i might in some way injure you. i want to tell you that first." "good old sentimental otto!" "sentimental?--ach!--i am not sentimental. but i do not think you can understand how much you were to me back there at the university. i do not think you yourself knew how much you joyed in things. how happy your kind of thought made you." he laughed. "i always managed to have a rather corking time of it," he admitted. "you loved everything so," kurz went on. "at night when we talked it was you who believed in what you said. it was you who saw so clearly how well all things of life were meant. it was always i who questioned." "but, i say, old otto, your mind was so quick; so brilliant. you could pick flaws where i never knew they existed." "it was you who had so much of faith, charlie." "how we did talk;" he said it to himself. "talk and talk until old mutter schwegel, who was so keen for us, grew tired of listening and came and turned out the lamp." "and how you spoke ever of your beliefs," kurz's voice was hoarse. "it was so easy for you to know. you never questioned. you believed. it ended there, with your belief. you were so near to what you thought. it was a part of you. i--i stood away from all things and from myself. i would tell you that the mind should reason. i stayed outside with my criticism, while you--ach, charlie!--how you did know!" "and how you laughed at me for that!" "but now, i do not laugh!" kurz protested with wearied eagerness. "now i come to you. i ask you if you know those things--now?" "what things, otto?" "the things of life. the things of death." "i know what i always knew," he said slowly. "i know that life is meant to live fully and understandingly and that death is meant to live on; fully and understandingly." "and--you--do--understand--_now_?" "i understand that always." "you would not be afraid?" "of what?" "of--death?" "no." he stared out of the window. the dense, opaque shadows pressing down on the garden. the shadows hanging loose and thick on the high, boxwood hedges. the dark, smooth, night sky. and suddenly a faint tremor ran through him from head to foot. he pressed his face close to the glass. his hands went up screening a small space for his eyes. in the still block of shadows, in the black mass of them, he had seen something; something had moved against the quiet clumping shadows. "i say," he whispered. "there's some one coming up through the garden." "yes--yes." they were silent for a long time. once he looked at kurz huddled in the armchair; his face white and drawn; his eyes staring before him. he thought he heard footsteps coming softly up the stairs; footsteps that came lightly and hesitated and then came on again. "charlie--!" kurz stammered. "charlie--!" he felt that some one was standing in the open doorway. he turned. his eyes took in the well known figure. the sweet face with its red cheeks and its framing white hair. the short body. the blue eyes that were fixed on him. "mutter schwegel!" he shouted. kurz leaped to his feet. "what!" he started for the door. "mutter schwegel, who would have thought of your coming here. it has been a long time. i say!--but i am glad." "stop--!" kurz's voice thundered behind him. he wheeled to look at kurz. kurz's eyes were riveted on the woman standing in the doorway. "aren't you glad to see mutter schwegel?" he asked. "when we've been talking of her all night?" kurz was muttering to himself. "mutter--schwegel--;" kurz mumbled. "mutter schwegel--! it--is--that--i--wanted--to--tell--you--about--mutter schwegel. it--is--as--i--thought. it--is--ach!--it--is--then--that--way--with--us--!" he felt that the woman was coming into the room. he turned and looked at her. "mutter--schwegel--is--dead;" kurz stammered. he saw that the old woman smiled. "she--is--dead. dead--!" kurz mumbled. he smiled back at her. "dead--;" kurz's voice droned shaking. he saw the old woman go to the table. he and kurz watched her take the lamp up in her hands. he and kurz saw her fingers fumbling at the wick. kurz's quivering face stood out in the lamplight. the old woman was smiling quietly. they saw her try to put out the light. the lamp still burned. "mutter-schwegel--is--dead--!" kurz's voice quavered; and then it screamed. "dead--," he shrieked; "we--are--all--of--us--dead--!" that uncertain feeling came over him. and suddenly it went quite from him. haunted he lived quite alone in the stone built shanty perched on the highest pinnacle of the great sun bleached chalk cliffs. all about him, as far as the eye could reach, lay the flat, salt marshes with their dank, yellowed grasses. against the inland horizon three, gaunt, thin-foliaged trees reared themselves from the monotonously even soil. overhead the cloud splotched blue gray sky, and below him the changing, motion pulled, current swirling depths of the blue green sea. and at all times of the day and the night, the wild whirring of the sea gulls' wings and the uncanny inhuman piercing sound of their shrieking. he had lived there since that day when the fisherman had pulled him half drowned out of the sea. he could never remember where he had come from, or what had happened. all that he ever knew was that far out by the nets in the early morning they had come upon him and had brought him in to shore. naturally, the fishermen had questioned him; but his vagueness, his absolute lack of belief that he had ever been anything before they had snatched him from the waters, had frightened them so that since that day they had left him severely alone. fishing folk have strange, superstitious ideas about certain things. he had borne the full weight of their credulous awe. perhaps because he, himself, thought as they thought. that he was something come from the sea, and of the sea, and always belonging to the sea. he had built himself the stone shanty upon the highest pinnacle of those waste grown chalk cliffs; and he had stayed on and on, year in and year out, close there to the sea. in winter for a livelihood he made baskets from the reeds he had picked in the swamps about him. in the summer he sold the vegetables he grew in the tiny truck garden behind his house. somehow he managed to eke out a living. the fishing folk in the small village at the foot of the cliffs saw him come and go along their narrow streets, morose and taciturn. he never spoke to any of them unless he had to. they in their turn avoided him with their habitual superstitious uneasiness. he went to and fro between his shanty and the village store when the need arose. the rest of the time he sat in front of his iron bolted door staring and staring down at the sea. daybreak and noon. evening and night he sat there. when the sky above was tinged with the first streaking colors of the dawn he watched the ghostly gray expanse of the ocean. when the sun was high in the heavens he looked steadily at the light-flecked spotted swells of the waves. when the shadows began to creep up from the earth he stared at the greater blackness that swam in glistening undulating darkness to him from across the water. and at night his eyes strained through the fitful gloom at the pitchy, turbulent sea. it was like that in all kinds of weather. the spring tides, with their quick changes from calm to storm, and the slender silver crescent of the new moon hanging just above the horizon. the long summer laziness of the green ocean with its later gigantic flame-red moons and the wide yellow streak of phosphorescent light that streamed in moving ripples to him; the chill, lashing spray in autumn. the foam-covered seething breadth of it in winter when the blackness of the low night skies and the darkness of the high tides were as one menacing roaring turmoil churning itself into white spumed frenzy. it always held him. he was a man of one idea: the sea. he was a man who drew his life from one source: the sea. it had taken his body and had tried to drown it; the sea had for that short time caught and gripped his soul. the slimy, wet touch of it was seared into him. it fascinated him; it kept him near it so that he could not have gotten away from it, had he had the courage to want to get away. it kept him there as though he belonged to it; as though it knew he belonged to it; and knew that he knew it. and always and ever the sea haunted him. the fishing men coming home late at night across the water had grown used to steering their course by the unreal light that trickled out to them from the shanty on the top of the cliffs. and in the dawn when they pushed their smacks off from the long, hard beach to sail out to the nets, they knew that from the high precipices above them the man was watching. and outwardly they laughed at him; even when in their hearts they feared the thing they thought he was. they could not understand him. they, who made their living from the sea, could not understand how he could be content to live the way he was living. they could not have known that he would infinitely rather have died than to have taken one thing from out the sea from which he had already filched his soul. his enslavement by it had made him understand it a lot better than they understood it. and so he lived the stupid, hypnotized life of one who is held so enchained and cowed that he could not think for himself, or of himself. until that day when he first met sally. it was a sunny day late in the autumn that he stood in front of the weather beaten wooden hut of the village store, his arms filled with baskets. and as he stood there, sally walsh came from the store and out into the street. she had seen the man a hundred times but she had never seen him so close. she stopped short and stared quite frankly at the bigness of him; at the heavily matted hair clinging so damply to his forehead; and at the white face so strange to her beside the sun-burned faces she had always seen. it was when, quite suddenly, he looked at her and she saw the odd blue green sea colored eyes of him, that she started to hurry on. she had gotten half way down the street when he overtook her. "d'you want--anything of--me?" he asked it, his blue green eyes going quickly over her slight form, her small face, and resting for a second curiously upon her masses of coiled golden hair. "i--? why--no." "you sure?" "sure." she went on her way again and he stood there watching her go; then he turned abruptly and walked slowly back to the store. it was not so long after that when he met her for the second time. she was on her knees in the yard in front of her father's house mending the tar-covered fishing nets with quick deft fingers. he stopped at the gate. feeling the intensity of his blue green eyes upon her, she looked up and saw him. she got to her feet. "it's a nice morning." she spoke to him first. "yes"; he said. "you live up there?" she pointed a bare browned arm up toward the sun bleached chalk cliffs. "by yourself?" "yes." "you ain't got a boat?" "no." "they say you don't ever fish. why don't you, mister?" "i--i ain't the one to fish." "want to help me with these here nets?" "i--i can't do--that." "it ain't hard, mister." "i--can't--do--it." "come on in; i'll show you how." he opened the gate and went into the yard and then he stood there just looking down at her. "i wouldn't touch--no--net--" her brows drew together in a puzzled frown. "you mean you don't like fishing?" somehow he did not want her to know. "i--ain't--the--one--to--take--no--sea-thing--away--from--the--sea." "oh;" she said, not understanding. they were silent a moment. "you sell baskets?" she asked him. "d'you want one?" "mebbe. got a medium-sized one?" "got a lot." "mebbe--i--could--use--one." "i'd like mighty well to--to give you one, little girl." "why, i ain't a little girl, mister. i--i thought--i'd mebbe--buy--" he interrupted her. "you'll not buy one off of me. i'll bring you one--; if you like." "a medium-sized one." "i'll bring it to you--; to-morrow." "thanks." "good-by, little girl." "good-by, mister." at the end of the street he turned to look back. she was on her knees working at her mending of the nets again. she looked very small kneeling there on the hard brown earth with the straggling lines of squat weather darkened shanties trailing behind her out onto the edge of the yellow sanded beach, and the clear unbroken blue of the autumn skies above. she glanced up and then she waved her hand at him. he went slowly along the narrow pathway that wound through the sharp crevices of the chalk cliffs to the back of his own stone built shanty. that night he stood staring out at the sea. the moon was on the wane. it hung very low in the sky so that the red-gold streak of it seemed to dip into the water. a cold northeast wind lashed over the waves. dark swollen purplish clouds raced together in an angry mass. the sea itself was black but for the tossing gigantic waves with their dead white crests of spraying foam. the pounding of them on the beach below him vibrated in his ears. the sea-gulls were flying heavily close to the earth; their inhuman, piercing shrieking filling the air. the little girl had spoken to him. he turned from the sea then. he went into his shanty. he bolted the great iron bolts of the door and braced himself against it as if he were shutting something out; something that he feared; something that was certain to come after him. he crouched there shivering and shuddering. the pounding of the sea was in his ears. the wind that came from the ocean whistled and wailed shrilly around and around the house. he leaned there; his back to the door; his hands pressing stiff fingered against it; his lips moving, mumbling dumbly. his eyes, the color of the sea, stared blindly before him. the rumbling roar of the rising tide; the thundering boom of it. and in the sudden lull of the wind the hiss of the seething spray. the sea was angry. he thought with a kind of paralyzing terror that it was angry with him. it was calling to him. the lashing of the big waves demanded him. the sonorous drumming of it. he had never before denied its call. the persistent thudding of it there at the base of the chalk cliffs. it was insisting that he belonged to it. the inhuman piercing shrieks of the circling sea-gulls mocked him. they knew that he belonged to the sea. how could he even think of that golden haired little girl who had spoken to him-- the sea was angry. he tore at the iron bolts and flinging the door wide open he rushed out to the edge of the chalk cliffs. and as he stood there the clouds dwindled in a vaporous haze away from the skies. the thin red-gold line of the waning moon grew brighter. the sea lay foam flecked and calm beneath the dark heavens. and at the base of the chalk cliffs the water lapped and lapped with a strange insidious sound. and the next day he sat there in front of his shanty, his reeds in his hands, his fingers busy with his basket weaving; making big baskets and small baskets; and his eyes, blue green and strained, were fixed on the tranquil blue green of the water below him. for two days he sat there in front of his iron bolted door that now swung wide open on its rusty hinges. the third day he stood upon the edge of the precipice. it was a gray fog drenched day. the mist dripped all about him. the opaque veil of it shut out everything in wet obliteration. he stood quite still knowing that beneath its dank dribbling thickness, the sea churned wildly in its rising tide. and standing there motionless he heard a voice calling through the quiet denseness of the fog. a voice coming from a distance and muffled by the mist. he started. it was her voice calling to him from the narrow pathway that wound up the chalk cliffs to the back of his shanty. "mister--oh, mister." he reached his hand out in front of him trying to break the saturating cover of the fog. he went stumbling unseeingly toward the rear of the house. "mister--oh, mister." the rear of the shanty. his feet sank down into the turned soil of the truck garden. he stood still. "here." "mister;" the voice of her was nearer. "where are--you--?" he could not see in front of him. he felt that she was close. "here;--little girl." he saw the faint outline of her shadow then through the obliterating denseness of the mist. "some fog; ain't it, mister?" "stay where--you are. there's the precipice." "i ain't afraid of no precipice." "stay--where--you--are!" he could hear the dripping of the mist over the window ledges. and then he thought he heard, smothered by the weight of the fog, the pounding of the sea. "you surprised to see me? but you ain't able to see me. are you?" "no." "you ain't surprised?" down there at the base of the chalk cliffs the sea was still; waiting. "you--shouldn't--have--come." "why--you don't mean;--you ain't trying to tell me;--you--don't--want--me--here?" great beads of moisture trickled down across his eyes. "little girl--; i just said you shouldn't have come. not up here in this kind of weather." "oh, the weather!" she laughed. "i ain't the one to mind the weather, mister." again he reached his hand out in front of him in an effort to rend the suffocating thickness of the fog. his fingers touched her arm and closed over it. from below him came the repeated warning roar of the waves. "can you find your way home--by yourself--little girl?" "i ain't going home, mister;--not yet. i came up here to get that basket you said you had for me; you know, the medium sized one." "i'll give it to you--now." her hand caught at his hand that lay on her arm. her fingers fastened themselves around his and held tightly. he had never felt anything like that. the touch of them was cool and fresh, like sea weed that had just drifted in from the sea. and then from far off across the water came the shrill, piercing shriek of a gull. he felt her start. "that's only a sea-gull, little girl." "i know, mister. but don't it sound strange; almost as if it were the sea itself; calling for something." for a second he could not speak. "why--;" his voice was hoarse, "why d'you say that?" "i don't know. sometimes i get to feeling mighty queer about that water out there." "you mean--; why--you ain't afraid of it, little girl, are you?" "afraid? there ain't nothing that i'm afraid of, mister. why, i'd go anywhere and not be afraid--" he repeated her words very slowly to himself. "you'd--go--anywhere--and--not--be--afraid--" he thought then that the fog was lifting. a sickly, yellowish glow filtered through the heavy grayness. he could see her more distinctly. "there's only one thing about the sea, mister, that'd scare me, and that's--" she broke off abruptly. "what, little girl?" "why, mister; why, i can't hardly say it. but there's pa and there's my brother, will. if anything ever happened--; if the sea ever did anything to pa or will, why--i guess, mister, i'd just die." "don't!" he said quickly. "don't you talk like that." for a second they were silent. the sun was breaking through the dwindling thickness of the mist. he could see it lifting in a faint gray line, uncovering the reach of the flat salt marshes with their dank yellowed grasses; a thin silver net of it hung for a second between the sky and the earth, and was gone. from the base of the chalk cliffs came the sound of the sea lapping and lapping with insistent cunning. she dropped his hand and she stood there looking up to him, scanning his white face with those childlike eyes of hers. "you live up here because of the sea, mister?" "yes." "you ever feel the sea's something--alive, like you and me?" "you--feel--that--too?" "yes," she said slowly, "and i knew you felt it, because the first time i saw you--why--you're somehow--something like the sea." his hands clinched at his sides. his breath came in quick rasping gasps. "i'll get your basket," he muttered. he rushed into his one room shanty and caught up the basket nearest to him and went out again to her. she took the basket from him in silence. she slipped the handle of it on to her arm. her hands rubbed against each other; the fingers of them twining and intertwining. "i'll be going now, mister." "yes." "i've got to be getting home before pa and will go out to the nets." "good-by, little girl." "good-by, mister; and--thanks." he stood there and watched her go from the back of his stone built shanty down the narrow winding path that lay along the sun bleached chalk cliffs. she went quickly and lightly down the steep incline, her small slender figure in its blue print dress, with the sun bringing out the burnished glints in her golden hair. his eyes strained after her. in a short while he lost her from sight. he went back to his basket making then. and as he sat there, his fingers weaving and bending the supple reeds, mechanically working them into shape, he tried to shut out all thought of her; to feel as though she had never come to him; to rivet his attention upon the insistent pounding of the sea that hurled itself again and again at the base of the chalk cliffs; calling and calling to him. after a while the early deep blue dusk of the twilight came. he got stiffly to his feet. the long moving shadows were quivering in fantastic purpled patterns on the ground about him. great daubs of them clung in the crevices of the chalk cliffs. a mat of shadows crept over the flat salt marshes and through the dank yellowed grasses. there was a sudden chill in the wind that came to him from off the water. a flock of screeching sea-gulls wildly beating their wings, rose from the cliffs and whirred out toward the open sea, the uncanny piercing sound of their shrieking coming deafeningly back to him. he stood there staring at the ocean, his head well back; his nostrils dilated; his blue green eyes strangely wide. far in the distance against the graying horizon he could see the choppy white capped waves racing over the smooth dark water. even as he looked the sea began to rise in great swollen billows. the wind too was rising. he could hear the distant cry of it. his heart began to thump wildly. he knew what was going to happen; just as he always knew. he could feel what the sea was going to do. he stood there undecided. a quick picture came to him of the storm. he had seen it all before. he had stood there on the chalk cliffs and watched it all: watched the shattered broken logs; the swirling sucking water. the sea had held him under its spell; had compelled him to witness its maddened, infuriated stalking of its prey. her people were out there. her pa and her will. why had she told him that? why had she said if anything ever happened to them she would die? why? he could just make out the stiff sticks of the nets reaching thin and dark from the surface of the gray water against the lighter gray skies; and the boats rowing toward them. the boats with the fishermen. he could see the slender patches of them rising and falling with the waves, going slowly to the nets. he could distinguish the small, dark shadows of the men, rowing. they had pulled him out of the sea in that early morning; he who was something come from the sea, and of the sea; and always belonging to the sea. to--betray--the--sea-- the waves were racing in to the shore. the thumping, deafening boom of them there at the base of the chalk cliffs below him. he tried to tear his eyes away from it. it held him as it ever held him. it kept him there as though he belonged to it. as though it knew he belonged to it; and knew that he knew it. a strange uneasiness arose within him. even before he was conscious of it, he felt that the sea had sensed it. its insistent angry pounding threatened him. she had said that she would die. below him the swirling, churning sea. he turned then and went very slowly down the narrow, winding path that led along the sun bleached chalk cliffs. through the deep blue dusk of the evening he went, and the gray blotched reach of the flat salt marshes with their dank yellowed grasses lay all about him; and overhead the cloud spotted, moving gray of the sky, and beneath him the raging sea that called to him; and called. he never stopped until he came to the weather darkened shanty where she lived. he paused then at the gate. a lighted lamp was in one of the windows on the ground floor. the soft glow of it streamed in a long ladder of light out to him in the darkness. he opened the gate and went haltingly across the yard, and after a moment's hesitation he knocked at the door. at the far end of the street the sea thudded over the yellow sanded beach; the pale stretch of it coming out of the grayness in a long white line. she answered his knock. the light from the lamp swept through the open doorway. something in his face terrified her; something that she had never before seen in those blue green eyes, the color of the sea. "what is it? what's happened?" he stood there just looking down at her. "oh, mister, tell me; please--what is it?" her two hands went up to her throat and caught tightly at her neck. "there's--a--storm--" she looked out into the quiet, darkening evening. "a storm?" "there's a bad storm--; coming." he could hardly say the words. she stared up at him; her childlike eyes were very wide. "will it--be--soon--?" he never took his blue green eyes from off her face. "it's coming--quick." "they're out--pa--and--will." he said it very quietly then. "that's why i'm here." "how can we--get them--back?" "oh, little girl;" he muttered. "little girl--" "how, mister; how?" "i'll get a boat." "there's sam wilkins' smack--down there at the wharf. we could take that." "then--i'll go--after them." they went from the door together down the street and out onto the back patch of the wharf. through the grayness they could see the boat rocking on the water at the farther end. the wail of the rising wind; the pounding of the sea; and close to them the muffled, bumping sound of the smack thrown again and again at the long wooden piles of the wharf. for a second they stood quite still. "i'm going," he said. her arms went suddenly up around his neck. her lips brushed across his. he felt her body shivering. he caught and held her to him; and then he let her go and went quickly to the end of the wharf and pulled the boat alongside and stepped into it. he looked up at her standing there against the gray sky. he could see the white patches of her face and her hands and the pale mass of her hair that the wind had loosened. and down through the draggling grayness he distinctly saw her childlike eyes searching for his. before he could stop her she was in the boat. "get--back." "i'm going." "quick--get--back." "i'm going--with--you." "you can't--; you don't know." "i'm not afraid. honest--i'm--not." "you don't know what it means!" "i'm--not--afraid." "little girl--i ain't going--if you go." "you've got--to--go." he repeated her words. "i've--got--to--go." "if you don't take me with you;" he had never heard her voice like that--"i'll come out myself. you can't leave me--you can't!" the rain began then. great drops of it fell into his face. the whining of the wind was terrific. "you--don't know what it--means." "i do know;--oh, god,--i do." he caught up his oars then. he rowed with all his strength. the whole thing was so strange to him. her going. their being out on the water. the rowing. the waves rose in tremendous black swells all about them. the rain and the spray drenched them. the wind rocked the small boat. the whistling wail of it; the lowering cloud sprawled pitchy sky. he pulled in silence until they came to the nets. she stood up in the boat and called; again and again her voice rose into the wind. "sit down!" he told her. a distant shout answered her. he bent to his oars then till he came to the cluster of smacks on the other side of the nets. "pa--;" she cried. "sally--! what you doing here?" "pa--; there's a storm." "i can see that." "pa--come on back--to shore." "you get on back, sally. it'll blow over." she turned to him then. "you tell him;" she said it desperately. "you--tell--him." he waited until he got just alongside of the fishing smack. "it's going to be--a--bad--one." he said it slowly. he thought then that the angry swirling of the sea became more infuriated; that the swell of the waves was greater. far in the distance he heard the inhuman, piercing shriek of the sea-gulls. "who's that there, sally?" "it's--me." he saw that both of the men in the smack leaned toward him. "what?" "it's--it's--me." "you!" "go on back, pa;--will, make him--go on back. get the others to go;--please--pa;--please." for answer he heard the man's shout to the other boats about the nets. "storm--lads;--make--for--shore." he saw a moment's hesitation in that cluster of fishing smacks and then one by one he watched them pull away from the nets and row toward the beach. he reached out his hand and caught hold of the other boat's gunwale. "make--the little girl--go--back with--you." "come on, sally. hop across there. pa'll help you." "we'll follow you, pa." "all right." "tell--the--little girl--to go with you!" "with--me?" "tell--her!" "you go on, pa. we'll come right after you." he felt the boat at his side give a quick lurch. his hand slipped into the water. he could feel the sea pulling at it. his own smack rocked perilously for a second. and then he saw the girl's father and brother rowing toward the beach. "what--what'd--you--do--that--for?" she did not answer him. a wave broke over the bow of his boat. in the darkness he could see her crawling on her hands and knees along the bottom of the smack to him. he reached down and caught her up in his arms. "will they get back--safe?" she whispered it. "yes." "sure?" "they're there--now." and then the storm broke. the lightning flashed in zigzagging, blindly flares across the dark of the sky. the thunder rumbled in clattering crescendo. the sea tore and swirled and sucked. wave after wave broke over the small boat. she rocked and pitched and swivelled. the oars were washed away. the rain and the wind stung them with their fury. the spray cut into their faces. from far off came the uncanny, inhuman, piercing sound of the sea-gulls' shrieking. he knew then that the time had come. he held her very close to him. he had filched his soul from the sea. he who was something come from the sea, and of the sea; and always belonging to the sea. he had betrayed the sea. "little girl." "i'm not--afraid." "little girl." "i couldn't stay on--without you. i always knew--always--that some time you'd--go--back." "you're not--scared?" "just--hold--me--tight." the foam covered seething breadth of the water churning itself into white spumed frenzy. the dark, lowering skies. the black deep pull of the sea. "tighter--" flowers the night wind brought him the smell of flowers. for a moment he fought against the smothering oppression of the thing he hated; for a second the same struggle against its stifling weight. his eyes closed with the brows above them drawn and tight. his teeth caught savagely at his lower lip, gnawing at it until the blood came. his hands, the fingers wide spread, the veins purple and standing out, moved slowly and tensely to his throat. how he dreaded it! how he abominated the thing! how he loathed the subtle, insidious fragrance! how he abhorred flowers--flowers! with a tremendous, forcing effort he opened his eyes. the same garden. the same sweeping reach of flowers. flowers as far as he could see. gigantic blossoming clumps of rhododendron. slender, fragile lilies of the valley showing white and faint on the deep green leaves. violets somewhere. he got the sickeningly sweet scent of them. early roses growing riotously. he detested the perfume of roses. overhead the darkening sky that held in the west the thin gray crescent of the coming moon. and all through the garden the first dull blue shadows of evening. shadows that blurred around the shapes of flowers; shadows that spread over the flowers, smearing out the spotting color of them until they were a gloom-splotched, ghostly mass. shadows that brought out in all its pungent power the assailing, suffocating smell of the flowers. he stood there waiting. he could feel his heartbeats throbbing in his temples. his breath came in long racking gasps. his one thought was to breathe regularly. one--two--he tried to think of something other than his breathing. the intangible odor of the flowers choked him with their stealthy cunning. it was always like this at first. he had always to contend silently and with all his strength against this illusive, abominated thing poured out to him by the flowers. his strangling intaking of breath. one--two-- never in all his life had he been without his horror of flowers; never until now had he known why he hated them. lately he had begun to wonder if they hated him. it would be better when she came. they were her flowers. her flowers that took all her time; all her thoughts; all her caring and affection. her flowers that grew all about her. her flowers that held her away from him. he hated her flowers. one. two. it would be quite all right when she was there. her flowers would not harm her. and then he heard the soft, uneven rustling of her skirts. he looked up to see her walking toward him down the long lane of her flowers. through the drenching grayness he could see that she wore the same light dress that made her tall and clung to her in folds so that her figure seemed to bend. he could distinguish the heavy shadowy mass of her uncovered hair. her eyes, set far apart and dark, fixed themselves on him. a quick light flooded into them. in the dusk he saw that her hands were clasped together and that they were filled with lilies. "throw them away," he said when she stood beside him. "they're so pretty," she told him, staring down at the lilies. "you'll let me keep these; just this once?" "throw them away," he repeated. "i can't stand the sight of them. you know that. why must you go on picking the things and picking them?" she shrugged her shoulders. her eyes left his face. "i love them," she said simply. "love?" he laughed. "how can you love flowers?" "oh, but i can." "well, i can't!" he had been wanting her to know that for a long while. "why not?" she asked him. he could not bring himself to tell her why not. "throw them away!" she let the lilies sift through her fingers one by one. and then the last fell to the ground. "are you satisfied?" "no," he said. "what good does it do, anyway? the next time it'll be the same again. it always is." she reached out a hand and touched his arm. "but i never know when you're coming. if i knew i wouldn't be picking flowers. i can't help having them in my hands when you come, if i don't know, can i?" "it isn't that." he covered her hand lying on his arm with his hand. "what is it, then?" she pulled her fingers from under his and drew away a bit. he made up his mind to try and tell her. "it's the flowers. i should have told you long ago. even at the beginning when we first--when i first came here, i--" she interrupted him. "when was that? how long ago?" "how can i tell? ages ago." "it does seem;" she said it slowly. "it does seem as if you had always come here. i can't remember the time when you didn't come. it's strange, isn't it? because, you know, there was a time when you weren't here. that was when i began with the flowers." "i wish you'd never begun," he muttered. "that's what i've got to say to you. i hate flowers. i've always hated them! i never quite knew why till i came here and found you loving them so much. you never think of anything, or talk of anything but your flowers. if you must know, that's why i hate them!" "how silly of you!" he thought she smiled. "it's not," he said. "there's nothing silly about it. i'd like to have you think of other things. there're plenty of other things. i want you to think of them. i--want--" he broke off abruptly. "what do you want?" "i--i--want--you--i can't say it!" for a little while they were silent. it grew darker. the shadows that lay along the ground moved upward through the bushes of rhododendron. he watched the fantastic mesh of them shifting there. the gray of the crescent moon grew faintly yellow. his eyes roved over the shadow splashed reach of flowers. the heavy odor of them sickened him. "if only you'd try to like them!" she said it wistfully. "it's no use. i couldn't." "if you worked among them the way i work, perhaps you could." "i tell you i couldn't!" "but they're so lovely." her hand went out and touched a rose. "it's taken me years to perfect this one. you can't see in this light. but during the day--; why don't you ever come here during the day?" "i don't know," he told her quite truthfully. "during the day," she went on, "you ought to see it. it's yellow; almost gold. and its center--that's quite, quite pink with the very middle bit almost scarlet. i love this rose." he thought then that he could smell the particular fragrance of the one rose permeating subtly through the odor of all those other flowers. she loved that yellow and gold and scarlet rose. "good heavens," he said, "do stop telling me how much you love your flowers!" "if you were with them all the time--" he did not let her finish. "that's all you do, isn't it? just care for your flowers all day long?" "why, yes." she was surprised. "of course it's all i do. it's all i care about doing. it takes every minute of my time. you know that, don't you?" "yes, i know it." his tone was gruff. "then why do you always talk about it like this?" she asked him. "i've done it for years. ever since i can remember. it's hard work, but i like doing it. i don't think you know how alone i've always been. i'm afraid you don't realize that. not really, anyway. i've just never had anything to care about until i started in with the flowers. i don't know if i ought to tell you--" she stopped speaking quite suddenly. "what?" "i don't think you'd like to know what i was going to say." "tell me," he insisted. "well." she spoke slowly. "sometimes i feel as though--it's so hard to say. but sometimes i feel as if the flowers know how much i care and--and as if they care too." "why d'you say that?" "i don't quite know. only they're living things; they are, aren't they?" "i suppose they are; but that's no reason for you to encourage yourself in all those queer ideas about them." "queer ideas?" "you know the sort of thing i mean." "i don't. what sort?" he thought then that her voice had a hurt sound drifting through it. "loving them. for one thing." "but what can i do? what else have i to love? i've just told you how much alone i am. all the time, really. the flowers are the only things i have. i've just told you that." he waited a second. "you have me," he said. "you? but you hardly ever come. i'm so lonesome. you can't know what that means. i am lonely. and you--why, sometimes i think you're not real. not--even--real--" "don't! for god's sake don't say that!" "i can't help it! i tell you, i can't. it's all right now. it's always all right when you're here. but after you go--nothing is real to me; nothing but the flowers. and you don't want me to care for them. you keep saying you hate them. they're all i've got. won't you--can't you see that?" "but--if--i--come--here--to--stay?" "to--stay?" "would you want me here?" he saw her hands move upward until they lay in two white spots on her breast. "want you?--if--only--you--knew--" he waited a moment before he said it. "and you--could--love--me?" "i've always loved you." she spoke in a whisper. "i'll find a way." he told her. "there must be a way." "but how? how?" "i don't know. i never thought about it before. i never knew you cared. i thought it was just the flowers. nothing but the flowers. i hate the flowers. the feel of them--the sight of them--the smell of them. i couldn't ever come here without being suffocated. i was jealous of them; fearfully jealous." "and--i--thought." her voice was low. "i--thought--that--because--i--feel--they--love--me;--because--i love--them;--somehow--they--brought--you--here." "and when i come--" "when?" her voice itself trailed to a whisper. "i will come to you! i--will!" "how--can--you--find--me?" "somehow--i will!" "if--only--you--could. i am lonely. terribly--lonely. if--it--would--be--soon." "it--must--be--soon." "i'll--wait--for you--always. but--if you are--real--you'll--come--soon. it's lonely--waiting. and--i--don't--even--know--if--you--are. i--don't--even--know." the reverend william cruthers started from his chair. some one had banged the window closed. some one had lit the lamp on the center table. its yellow light trickled through the room and over the scant old fashioned furniture and crept upwards across the booklined walls. the room was stuffy and close. the smell of flowers had gone. "billy!" he turned to see his sister rushing across the room to him. he stooped a bit and caught her in his arms. "why, gina. i didn't know. why didn't you write and tell me? who brought you up from the station?" the girl kissed him hastily and enthusiastically on either cheek. "a nice welcome home!" she laughed breathlessly. "i was just about to make a graceful and silent exit." "but, gina, i didn't know." "of course you didn't know. you couldn't. i wouldn't write. i wanted to surprise you. aren't you surprised, billy?" "awfully," he conceded. "awfully?" her brows puckered. "very much so, i mean." "you never do know just what you do mean. do you, william?" "naturally, i do." "it wouldn't be natural for you if you did." the girl slid away from him and went and perched herself comfortably on the arm of the chair in which he had been sitting. her hands were busy with her hatpins and her eyes that peered up at him were filled with laughter. "how did you get up from the station, gina?" "oh, such a lovely way, billy! and so very energetic for me. i walked. now, what do you know about that?" he frowned a bit. "very good for you, i don't doubt." he said it stiffly. "after all the motoring you must have done with those friends of yours!" she had gotten her hat off. she sat dangling it by the brim. the lamplight streaked over her hair. "now, don't be nasty, william. and whatever you do, don't speak to me as if i were a congregation. the trents are perfectly lovely people, even if they are terribly rich and not very christian. and--and georgie trent is a sweet boy; and," she added it hastily. "wood mills is a duck of a place!" he thrust his hands into his coat pockets. "i never said it wasn't, gina." she paid no attention to him. her legs were crossed. her one foot was swinging to and fro. her eyes were fixed speculatively on the foot. "and you ought to be very glad to have me here again. suppose i'd listened to georgie and married him right off, instead of coming back here. a nice fix you'd have been in. you know perfectly well no one in all the world does for you as nicely as i do. you know that, don't you?" he smiled down at her. "to be sure i do." "as a matter of fact," she went on. "when i came in here you were half, if not altogether, asleep in this chair." "i wasn't asleep, gina." "oh, that's what you always say. but i banged in and you didn't hear me. i lighted the lamp and you didn't seem particularly conscious of it. and the window. the window was wide open. i closed that for you. the wind was bringing in just yards of those flower smells you hate so." "was it, gina?" "huh--huh." "you smelled them, then?" his tone was strangely quiet. "of course i did. come and sit here, billy." she wiggled herself into a more comfortable position on the arm of the chair. "and tell your onliest sister how much you love her." he went and sat beside her in the chair. he put his arm about her waist. "you're a dear child, gina." "i know it!" she snuggled close to him. "and i've had the most divine time, billy. wood mills is a glorious place. there wasn't an awful lot to do; but whatever we did was great fun." "you'd have a good time anywhere, little sister." "would i?" her eyes wavered about the room a bit hungrily. something in her voice pulled his eyes up to her face. "gina, what is it?" "nothing, billy." she felt his fingers tighten at her side. "aren't you happy here, gina?" "of course i am, billy!" her head was thrown back so that the long line of her throat showed in its firm molded whiteness. "only, billy, i want--i don't think i even know what i want. only just sometimes i feel it. a want--that--perhaps--isn't--even--mine. it's for something;--well, for something that doesn't feel here." he stroked her hand. "it's lonesome for you, gina." "no, it isn't that. it's just; oh, i guess it's just that i worry about you." "me, gina?" "yes, billy. sometimes you look so--so starved. that's what makes me think it's your want i feel--; yours that you want very much--and--and--billy, that you can't get hold of." "no, gina! no!" she pressed her cheek against his. "oh, billy." she spoke quickly. "there was one place out there at wood mills. you wouldn't have liked it. but it was too wonderful!" he drew a deep breath of relief at the sudden change in her voice. "what was it, gina? why wouldn't i have liked it?" she fidgeted a bit. "why? oh--because." "because what, gina?" "it was just one big estate, billy. a girl owns it. she's an orphan. she's very beautiful. she lives there all by herself except for a couple of old servants. claire trent and i saw her once or twice when we rode through the place. claire says she's sort of queer. she doesn't bother about people. she doesn't like them, claire says. she spends all her time around the place." "that sounds very strenuous, gina." "oh, it isn't, billy. it's lovely. the estate is." "i've heard the places there are pretty." "pretty! but this one, billy;" in her enthusiasm she leaned eagerly forward. "you couldn't imagine it! there are miles and miles. and the whole thing; claire says the whole year round; it's just one big mass of flowers." in spite of himself he pulled his arm away from the girl's waist. "oh, is it?" "billy, i know you don't like flowers. but this! you've never seen anything like this!" "there're probably lots and lots of places like it, little sister." "oh, no!" her tone was vehement. "there couldn't be. not such a garden! all rhododendrons and lilies of the valley--; is anything wrong, billy?" "nothing. those flowers grow in all gardens at this time of the year." she stared into his blanched face and her brows drew together in a puzzled frown. "not like this, billy. really. i've never seen such rhododendrons or such lilies. and the violets and roses!" he got to his feet suddenly. "what?" he asked hoarsely. "what flowers did you say?" "why, rhododendrons--and lilies,--and--lilies. what is it, billy?" "go on, gina. go on!" "billy!" "lilies of the valley and violets, gina--" "and roses;" she finished mechanically. "what kind of roses, gina?" the puzzled frown left her face. "glorious roses, billy." she was enthusiastic again. "there've never been roses like these. why, there's one kind of a rose. it's known all over now. it took her years and years to grow it." "what sort of a rose, gina? what sort did you say?" "i didn't say, billy. i don't even know the name of it. but it's a yellow rose; almost gold. and its center is pink and--and scarlet." for a moment they were silent. "did you see this--this woman, gina--often?" "oh, once or twice, billy." "when, gina?" "in the evenings; each time." "where was she, gina?" "why, how strange you are, billy." "where, gina? tell me, d'you hear--tell me--where?" "in her garden, billy. what's there to get so excited about?" he fought for his control then. "i'd like to know, gina--where you saw her and--and--" the girl interrupted him. "i saw her in the evenings--in her garden. she used to walk down--well--it looked like a long lane of flowers. to be exact, billy, it was always in the evening and kind of gray. so i couldn't see very much except that she wore a light clingy sort of dress." she stopped for a second. "yes, gina?" his voice was more quiet now. "i told you she was a bit queer, didn't i?" "queer? god! she--was--lonesome--gina!" "yes," the girl caught at his last words. "i'll bet she was lonesome. any one would be, living like that. that's what makes her queer i guess. i saw her both times with my own eyes come down the garden with her hands full of flowers. both times i saw her stand quite still. and then claire and i would see her drop her flowers to the ground. that was the funny part. she didn't throw them away. it wasn't that, you know." "no, gina." "she'd, well, she'd drop them. one by one. as if--" "as if what, gina?" "oh, as if she were being made to do it." he went to his knees then. he buried his head in the girl's lap. she leaned anxiously forward, her hand smoothing his hair. "billy--billy, dear--aren't you well? billy, tell me." he could not bring himself to speak. "billy, is this what you do when i come home to you? shame on you, billy! why--why, billy, aren't you glad to have me here? say, aren't you?" "thank god!" he whispered. "thank god!" he got to his feet then. the girl rose from her chair and clung to him. "i've never seen you like this, billy." "listen, gina;" his voice was low. "when you go upstairs to take off your things, pack my grip, little sister. i'm going away." "away, billy?" "yes, gina." "but where, billy?" "to a place where i've wanted to go for a very long--long time, little sister." "but, billy--" "will you do that for me? now, gina? i--i--want to--leave." "when, billy?" "as--soon--as--i can, gina. it--must--be--soon." the girl went out of the room very quietly. he crossed over to the window and threw it open. darkness as far as he could see. darkness in which were smudged lighter things without shape. somewhere in the distance the feathery ends of branches brushed their leaves to and fro against the sky. he knew that the wind was stirring. he looked up at the heavens. gray and dark save where the thin crescent moon held its haunting yellow light that was slurred over by drifting clouds and then held again. he could see the wind driving the clouds. the swish of the wind out there going through those smudged lighter things without shape. he leaned far over the sill. and suddenly the night wind brought him the smell of flowers. gradually the odor of the flowers blending subtly and faint at first, grew more distinct; heavier. he stood there smiling. flowers-- her--flowers-- "i'm coming;" he whispered. "i'm--coming--to--you--now--dear--" the shadow he was colossally vain. he lived with his wife ellen, in the small house on peach tree road. there was nothing pretentious about the house; there were any number of similar houses along the line of peach tree road. for that matter the house was the kind planted innumerable times in the numerous suburbs of the large city. still, it was his house. his own. that meant a lot to him whenever he thought of it; and he thought of it often enough. he liked to feel the thing actually belonged to him. it emphasized his being to himself. the house was a two-storied affair built of wood and white washed. a green mansard roof came down over the small green shuttered upper windows. on the lower floor the windows were somewhat larger with the same solid wooden green shutters. a gravel path led up to the front door. two drooping willow trees stood on either side of the wicker gate. before the time when his aunt had died and had left him the house he had not been particularly successful. at the age of forty-one he had found himself a hard-working journalist and nothing more. he had had no ambition to ever be anything else. he was at all times so utterly confident that the work he was doing was quite right; chiefly because it was the work that he was doing. no man had a more unbounded faith in himself. at that time he had not been conscious of his lack of success. now, of course, he looked back on it all as a period of development; something which had prepared him for this that was even then destined to come. he told himself that in this small house, away from the surrounding clatter and nuisances of the city, he had found time to write; to be himself; to really express what he knew himself to be. he had become tremendously well known in that space of six years. no one ever doubted the genius of jasper wald. he wrote as a man writes who is actually inspired. his books were read with interest and surprisingly favorable comment. there was something different; something singularly appealing in all of jasper wald's works. at that time his conceit was inordinate. it extended to a sort of personal, physical vanity. in itself that was grotesque. there was absolutely nothing attractive in the loosely jointed, stoop-shouldered body of him; or for that matter in the narrow head covered with sparse blond gray hair. the eyes of him were of rather a washed blue and bulged a bit from out their sockets; the nose was a singularly squat affair, at the same time too long. the mouth was unpleasantly small with lips so colorless and thin that the line of it was like some weird mark. yet he was vain of his appearance. but then his egoism was the keynote of his entire being. some people could not forgive it in him; even when they acknowledged him as a writer and praised his work. the man in literature was spoken of as a mystic, a poet, a possessor of subtlety that was close to genius. in actual life, jasper wald was an out and out materialist. as for his wife, ellen: she was rather a tall woman; thin but not ungraceful. her features were good, very regular, still somewhat nondescript. all but her eyes. her eyes were strange; green in color, and so heavily lidded that one could rarely see the expression of them. then, too, she had an odd manner of moving. there never seemed to be any effort or any abruptness in whatever she did. even her walk was sinuous. he had married her when they both were young. through his persistent habit of ignoring her she had been dwarfed into a nonentity. to have looked at the woman one would have said that hers was a distinctive personality unbelievably suppressed. it would not have been possible for any one living with jasper wald to have asserted himself. perhaps she had learned that years before. certainly his was the character which predominated; domineered through the encouragement of his own egoism. her attitude toward him was perpetually one of self-effacement. she stood for his conceit in a peculiarly passive way. if it ever irritated her she gave no sign. and he kept right on with his semi-indulgent manner of patronizing her stupidity. that is, when he noticed her at all. she was essential to him in so far as she supplied all of his physical wants. those in themselves were of great importance to jasper wald. there was no companionship between them. jasper wald could never have indulged in companionship of any kind. he had put himself far beyond that. to his way of thinking he was a super being who had no need whatever for the rest of man. he was all self-sufficient. if there had ever been love between them in those days when they had first come together they had both of them completely lost sight of it. he in his complacent conceit; she in her monotonous negation. and as time went on, and as his work became greater jasper wald grew even further away from the sort of thing he wrote; so that it was more than ever difficult for those who knew him to disassociate him from his writings. there was always the temptation to try to find some of his literary idealism in himself; to find some of his prosaic realism in his works. on one occasion delafield, his publisher, came to him; to the house on peach tree road. it was a peculiarity of jasper wald's to persistently refuse any request to leave his home. it was the one thing about which he was superstitious. he had never by word or thought attributed his success to anyone or anything outside of himself. he had made his name in this house and he would not leave it. delafield's visit came at a time just after jasper wald's last book had been published. sitting in the square, simply furnished living room, delafield for all his enthusiasm for the author had felt a certain inexplicable disgust. "it's great, wald; there's genius to it. we'll have it run through its second edition a week after we put it on the market." "i don't doubt that;" jasper wald's tone was matter-of-fact in his confidence. "not for a moment." delafield bit off the end of his cigar. "when will your next one be ready?" he asked it abruptly. "oh, i don't know," jasper wald had pulled leisurely at his pipe. "whenever i make up my mind to it, i suppose. it's going to be the biggest thing i've tackled yet, delafield." "well--" delafield got up to go. "it can't be too soon. you'll have a barrel of money before you get done. genius doesn't usually pay that way, either. but--;" he could not help himself. "you've got the knack of the thing. heaven knows where you get it; but it's the knowledge we all need that comes from--" he broke off quite suddenly as ellen wald came into the room. "i didn't know;" she said uncertainly. "i thought you were alone." "my wife, delafield." jasper wald made the introduction impatiently. "ellen, this is mr. delafield, who publishes my books." she came toward them and held out her hand to delafield. he could not help but noticing her odd manner of moving. "good evening," she said. delafield had not known that jasper wald was married. it was almost impossible for him to imagine anyone living with this man. he looked at the woman curiously. he had the feeling that her individuality had been stultified. it did not surprise him. jasper wald could have accomplished that. it would have been difficult to have matched him with as flagrantly material a person as he himself was. only that sort of person would have stood a chance with him. any other would have had to fall flat. she had fallen flat. delafield knew that the moment he looked at her. "why, i didn't know;" delafield took her hand in his. "you never told me, wald, that you were married." "didn't i? no, of course not.--but, about the new book, delafield." delafield dropped her hand. he had never felt anything quite as inert as that hand. it impressed the nondescript quality of her upon him even more strongly than had her appearance. "your husband has promised me another book, mrs. wald." he spoke slowly. he felt he had to speak that way or she would not understand him. "your husband is a great author, mrs. wald." "yes." "why don't you say, genius, delafield, and be done with it? why don't you make a clean breast of it with--genius?" "i've got to be going." delafield felt a strange irritation. the man was a fool. for what reason under the sun could this woman with those half closed eyes let herself be dominated by him? the two of them got on his nerves. "won't you stay to dinner?" jasper wald was obviously anxious for a chance to speak of himself. "sorry, wald. i've got to be getting on." delafield still watched the woman. she stood there quite silent. "i thought you might have something to say about that book of mine." "no--there's nothing more." delafield started for the door. "i've just told you that it's full of the sort of knowledge all of us are in need of. i can't say more, you know. i suppose that knowledge is what constitutes genius; but--" he was staring now full into those bulging blue eyes--"lord, man, where, where d'you get it from?" glancing at the woman, delafield saw that she was looking straight at him. her eyes met his in a way which he was completely at a loss to explain. there was something eerie about it. "where does he get it?" she repeated his question stupidly and once again the heavy lids came down over those strange green eyes, hiding all expression. jasper wald drew in his breath. "i write it," he said. after that delafield left them both severely alone. the woman puzzled him. he could not tolerate the man, jasper wald, and he could not for worlds have the genius of jasper wald hurt or slighted in any way. he knew how big it was. it often left him breathless. but the man; he would have liked to have hit him that day in the living room in the house on peach tree road; to have kicked him into some sort of a realization as to what an utter little rat he was. and so, because of his physical make-up, people stayed away from jasper wald. not that he avoided people; not that he wanted to live the life of a recluse. he never made any attempt to conceal his living from the general public. he was too much of the egoist to attempt concealment of any kind. so his life was known to any man, woman or child who cared for the knowledge. his life of narrow selfishness, of tranquil complacency; of colossal conceit. and of genius. he always wrote in the evenings, did jasper wald. and often he would keep at his writing well on into the morning. he liked to sit there in the square, old-fashioned living room with its wide window that gave out upon peach tree road. when he had first moved into the house as an obscure, hard-working journalist he had placed the desk against the window ledge so that he could look directly out of the window without moving. and he had kept the desk there. he was just a bit insistent about it. then, too, he liked the blind up so that he could stare out into the evening and at the house opposite. for all his impossible vanity there must have been imbedded deep down in the small, hard soul of the man some excessive, frantic hunger of self-recognition by others. a potential desire to accomplish an assertion of self that could in no way be denied; a fundamental energy which had in some way made possible the work, but which he could never admit for fear that it might evade the importance of himself. the house opposite interested him tremendously. sitting there in an abstract fit of musing, he watched it as one subconsciously watches a place that has one's attention. to all outward appearances the house across the way was heavily boarded up and closed. it had always been closed since the time that jasper wald had come to live in peach tree road. yet every evening in the window directly facing his he had seen the shadow of a man moving to and fro; to and fro, beyond the drawn blind. he would sit there watching the dark, undefined shadow until he felt that he had to work, and then the whole thing would slip from his mind until the following evening when he would again be at his desk. strangely enough he had never mentioned the presence of the shadow to anyone. there was about it a certain mysterious unreality. that much he, jasper wald, was capable of knowing. it was the one thing outside of himself that gripped at his intelligence. during all those six years he had waited at his desk each night for the coming of the shadow. and when it came he had started to work. he never explained the thing to himself. he never thought he had to explain anything to his own understanding. had he tried, he would have been utterly at a loss for an explanation. so jasper wald had come to look upon the shadow as a sign of luck; a superstition-fostered thing that epitomized his genius to himself. naturally it had not always been that way. the first time that jasper wald had felt the shadow he had experienced an uncanny sense of terror. that had been before he had really seen it. he had been standing there beside the window just after he and ellen had moved into their home, looking out at the closed house opposite. he had felt a queer oppression which he readily interpreted as the vibration of his new environment. when the thing had persisted he had become a bit uneasy. the sense of oppression so utterly unknown to him had changed to one which grew upon him; as if he were being forced out of himself in some uncanny manner. there was about it all a curious sensation of remoteness of self and at the same time a weird consciousness of the haunting permeation of something invisible and dynamic. he never thought back to that evening without a positive horror. the whole thing was so completely alien to him. it had been with a great sense of relief that he had, finally, been able to see and to rivet his attention upon the shadow there against the blind of the house opposite. he had clinched his thought onto it. and the other thing had left him; had lessened in its maddening oppression. that evening he had started to write. he had felt that writing was a thing he had to do. it was entirely because of his first fear that he kept the knowledge of the shadow to himself. cock sure as he was of himself, thoroughly certain of his genius, and inordinately vain of his success, there was one thing about it all that jasper wald could not quite make out. not for worlds would he have admitted it. still there was the one thing. and the one thing was that jasper wald could not understand the kind of thought behind what he himself wrote. it was late one summer evening that jasper wald sat at his desk in the square living room; his pen was in his hand; a pile of blank paper made a white patch on the dark wood before him. his blue eyes that bulged a bit looked out into the graying half light. the green of the lawn was matted with dark shadows. a mist of shadows were pressed into the faint lined leaves of the two drooping willow trees on either side of the wicker gate. an unreal light held in the sky. his eyes were fixed on the one window of the house opposite. with his pen in his hand, jasper wald waited. from somewhere in the house came the chimes of a clock striking the half hour. starting from his chair, jasper wald went to the side of the desk and leaned far out of the window. a wave of heat came up to him from the earth. his eyes stared intently at the window opposite. the door behind him was thrown open. he turned to see ellen's tall, not ungraceful, figure standing in the doorway. her two hands grasped the bowl of a lighted lamp. "i don't need that." jasper wald told it to her impatiently. she came a step into the room. "it's dark in here, jasper." "but i don't need any more light, ellen. i don't need it, i tell you!" "it's dark in here, jasper." "all right, then; put the thing down. i can't take up my time arguing with you. how can a man write in a place like this, anyway? have you no consideration? must i always be disturbed? have you no respect for genius?" she came a step further toward the center of the room. "genius,--jasper?" "my genius, ellen. mine." he watched her cross the room with that odd, sinuous moving of hers and place the lamp in the center of his desk. and then he saw her go to a chair within its light and, sitting down, pick up some sewing which she had left there. he went back and sat at his desk. he had made up his mind that this new book of his would be something big; something bigger than he had ever done before. he wanted to write a stupendous thing. he caught up his pen and dipped it in the ink. she startled him with a quick cough. "can't you be still?" he turned toward her. "you know i can't write if i'm bothered. you don't have to sit in here if you're going to cough your head off. there're plenty of other rooms in the house." she half rose from her chair. "d'you want me to go?" "oh, sit there," he muttered irritably. "only, for heaven's sake be still!" "yes, jasper." all of his books had brought him fame; but this one; this one would bring him fame with something else. this book would be the great work that would show to people the staggering power of one man's mind; his mind. his eyes that stared at the window of the house opposite came back to be pile of blank paper which made a white patch on the dark wood before him. without any definite idea he began to write. a word. a sentence. a paragraph. he tore the thing up without stopping to read it. ellen's dull-toned voice came to him through the stillness of the room. "anything wrong, jasper?" "wrong? what should be wrong?" "i don't know." he began to write again. he looked out of his window at the window of the house opposite. he went on with his writing till he had covered the whole page. again he tore the paper up and threw it from him. "i'm going, jasper." he turned to see her standing in the center of the room, her heavily lidded eyes fixed on the floor. "i told you you could stay here!" "i'd best be going, jasper." "sit down, over there; and do be still." "i seem to bother you. you haven't started to write. is it because i'm here, jasper?" "you!" he snorted contemptuously. "what've you got to do with it?" "i don't know," she said quietly, and she went back to her chair. again his eyes were fixed on that one window. he leaned forward quickly. his hands gripped the chair's arms on either side of him. his brows drew down together above the bulging blue eyes. thrown on the clear blank of the window blind, moving to and fro across it, went the shadow. with a sharp sigh of relief jasper wald began to write. it was not until he had gotten far down the page that he became suddenly conscious of ellen standing directly behind him. he looked over at the window. the shadow was still there. "what is it? what d'you want?" the lamplight brought out her features, good and very regular and still somewhat nondescript. the lamplight showed her strange green eyes and beneath the heavy lids the lamplight brought out in a glinting streak the expression of the eyes themselves. "what made you do that, jasper?" "i'm trying to write. you keep interrupting me. what are you talking about? made me do what?" "made you write, jasper." "don't i always write?" "yes, jasper. always. all of a sudden--; like that." "well, what of it?" "what makes you do it, jasper?" "oh, lord, can't you leave me alone?" "d'you know what makes you do it, jasper?" "of course i know." "well, what?" "my--it's my inspiration!" "that comes"; she spoke slowly. "every night when you look out of the window. that's how it comes, jasper." "look out of the window? why shouldn't i look out of the window?" "what is it you see? over there; in that house; in that one window?" he looked across the way at the shadow moving to and fro against the window blind. he started to his feet so suddenly that his chair crashed to the floor behind him. he faced her angrily. "what under the sun's the matter with you?" "nothing." "then why can't you leave me alone?" "i want to know, jasper." "you don't know what you want." "yes, jasper; i--want--to--know--" "leave the room," he said furiously. "leave the room! i've got to write!" she started for the door. "you've got to write?" her words came back to him across the length of the room with a curious insistence. "_you've_--got--to--write, jasper?" he waited until the door closed behind her and then he went back to his desk. what had she meant by that last question of hers? didn't she know that he had to write? didn't she realize that he had to write? and this book of his; this book that was to be the biggest thing that he had yet done. "ellen," he called. "ellen!" he heard her feet coming toward him along the passageway. she came back into the room as though nothing had happened. "yes, jasper?" "what--what did you mean by that, ellen? by what you just said?" she faced him in the center of the room. "i've been wanting to tell you, jasper." "well?" her hands hung quite quietly at her sides. "i've put up with you for a long time, jasper. i haven't said very much, you know." "what?" he stuttered. "oh, yes," she went on evenly. "if it weren't for your vanity you'd have realized long ago what a contemptible little man you really are." he interrupted her. "ellen!" his tone was astonished. "you're so full of yourself that you can't see anything else. you're so full of that genius--; of--yours--" "you don't have to speak of that--; you can leave that out of it--; you've nothing to do with it--; with my genius." "your genius." she laughed then. "it's your genius, jasper, that has nothing to do with you!" "nothing--to--do--with--me?" "no, jasper. i haven't been blind." "blind?" "i've seen, jasper; sitting here night after night in this room with you; i've seen." "what?" "over there--; in the house opposite." "you mean--" "and you can't write without it, jasper! you couldn't write before and you can't write now without it. it isn't you. it isn't you who writes. it's something--something working through you. and you call it your own. jasper, you're a fool!" "ellen, how dare you!" "dare!" she spoke the word disdainfully. he had never in his whole life seen her this way; he had never thought to see her like this; but then, he had never given ellen much thought of any kind. "it's you who're the fool." he was furious. "it's i who've always been the brains; if you could you'd have hampered me with your stupidity. but you couldn't. i shut you quite outside. i nurtured my own genius. if i'd have left things to you, i'd have been down and out by now; and that's all there is to it." "no!" her voice rang through the room. "i won't let you say that, jasper. i'll tell you the truth now. and take it or leave it as you will. you won't be able to get away from it. not if i tell you the truth, jasper. there'll be no getting away from it!" "truth--; about what?" "you and your genius. i wouldn't have told you but it's no good going on like this. i thought there was some hope for you; i couldn't think any human being would be as self-satisfied, as disgustingly material as you are. why, if you have a soul, but you haven't, and i thought--god, how i hoped!" he started to speak. he could not find his voice. she went on presently in that quiet, monotonous voice which had been hers for so many years. "you left me alone; i wouldn't have complained; i wouldn't complain now if you had some excuse for it. it all made me different. there's no use in telling you how; you couldn't understand. but i got to feeling things i'd never felt before; and then i saw things. and after a while i found i could bring those things to me. and that night, the first night we moved in here--" he interrupted her in spite of himself. "what of that night? what?" "that night when you were standing there at the window i got down on my knees and prayed. i brought something to you that night. and you called the genius yours." she broke off and was silent for a second. "i brought it to you because i wanted you to be great. i thought with all that energy of yours for writing that if it could work through you, you'd be big. but you were too small for it! you tried to make it a thing of your own. and i've held on to it. for six years i've kept it here with you; and now it's going. i'm letting it go back again. you're too small; you can't ever be anything but just--you!" he walked over to his desk, and sank down into the arm chair. "i don't--know--what--you're--talking--about." "you do! and if you don't, why do you look out of the window there every night? why d'you wait for it to come, before you start to write?" his exclamation was involuntary. "the shadow!" "yes. its shadow--; from this room where i kept it--casting--over--there--its--shadow." so that was what she meant. the superstition-fostered thing that epitomized his genius to himself. the shadow that he had come to look upon as a sign of luck. but it was nonsense. it wasn't possible; not such rot as that. it was his mind; the big creative mind of him that wrote. "have you said all you're going to say?" for a second her gaze met his and then the heavy lids came down again over those strange green eyes, hiding all expression. "yes, jasper." he looked out of the window. his eyes stared through the night beyond the two shadowy, drooping willow trees on either side of the wicker gate and over at the house opposite. he caught his breath. the yellow light from the lamp on his desk played across the clear blank of the window blind across the way. the shadow had gone. "ellen--" his voice was hoarse. "ellen!" "what is it?" "it's not there, ellen--; six years; now--; why, ellen--" she went and sat down in the chair beside the desk. "yes." "it isn't there! i tell you--" "i thought it could make no difference to you!" "it was--lucky--ellen." "oh, lucky, jasper?" he made an effort to pull himself together. "it won't make any difference to me--not to my writing; not to my genius." after the silence of a moment her voice came to him in its low even measure. "then--; write!" "of course." his tone was high pitched, hysterical. "naturally i'll write." "write, jasper." he caught up his pen and dipped it in the ink. he drew the white pile of paper nearer to him. "jasper--" "how can i work if you don't stop talking? how can i do anything? how can i write?" "are--you--writing--jasper? are--you--?" he did not answer her. "because;" she went on very quietly. "it's gone back, jasper. it's--gone--now--" his pen went to and fro; to and fro across the page. his figure was bent well over the desk. every now and again, without moving, his bulging blue eyes would lift themselves to the clear blank blind of the window opposite and then they would come back and fix themselves intently upon the white page of paper which he was so busily covering with stupid, meaningless little drawings. the effigy "mr. evans is upstairs in the library, ma'am." genevieve evans hurried through the hall and up the steps. she pulled off her gloves as she went. she rolled them into a hard, small ball and tucked them automatically in her muff. she had hoped that she would get there before him. she had been thinking of that all during the quick rush home. she would have liked to have had a moment to pull herself together. after what she had been through she wondered if she could keep from going all to pieces. it could not be helped. she did not even know if she cared a lot about it. she was quite numbed. he was there ahead of her; there in the library. of all the rooms in the house that he should have chosen the one so rarely used. the room she hated. at the door of the library she paused breathless. for a second she thought the long dark room empty. then she saw ernest. he was standing in one of the deep windows. a short squat figure black against the dim yellow of the velvet curtains. one hand held his cigarette; the fingers of the other hand tapped unevenly on the window glass. she knew then that he must have seen her come into the house. "ernest." he turned. "i've been waiting for you," he told her with studied indifference. "where've you been, jenny?" she took a step into the room. "i'm sorry, ernest. i didn't know you'd be home so early." "it's late. where've you been?" she wondered why she should bother avoiding answering his question. "oh--out." her tone was vague. "no," he scoffed. "i wouldn't have guessed it. really, i wouldn't!" she loosened the fur from her neck and tossed it onto the center table. "don't, ernest." "don't what, jenny?" she sank down into the depths of the nearest chair. "oh--nothing." her hands clinched themselves. "nothing." he came and stood quite close to her. he glanced quickly at her, puffing the while at his cigarette. she thought he looked wicked and pagan; hideous and yellow behind the rising smoke. his narrow eyes peered at her. "well, jenny--out with it, my girl. where've you been?" she looked away from him. her face was pale. in the twilight shadowed room he had seen how wide and strange her eyes were. she made up her mind then that it was not worth bothering about. she would tell him the truth. she did not care how he took it. "i've been to see--; to--see--father--" she whispered the words. her eyes wavered back to his face. "good heavens!" he laughed harshly. "after all you said?" "yes." "rather a joke, that." "no. there wasn't anything funny about it." "well. was the old man surprised?" "no. he told me he knew i'd come--some time." "wise old beggar, daniel drare!" her breath came quickly; unevenly. "he's a devil, ernest! that's what he is--; he's--" he interrupted her. "not so fast, jenny. you went there to see him, you know." "but, ernest, i couldn't stand it any longer. i--simply--couldn't--" he walked deliberately over to the screened fireplace and tossed his cigarette into it. "why d'you go to him?" "you know why i went." "why!" she had felt right along that he must be made to understand it. she could not see why he had not known before. "oh, don't pretend any more. i'm sick of it. you know i'm sick of it." his brows drew together in an angry frown. "sick of what? eh, jenny?" her eyes crept away from his and went miserably about the room. they took no note of the rare old furniture; of the dark paneled walls; of the color mellowed tapestries. she sat looking at it all blindly. then her eyes raised themselves a bit. she found herself staring at the picture hung just above the wood carved mantel. the famous picture. the work of the great artist. the picture before which she had stood and hated; and hated. the picture which was the pride and portrait of her father, daniel drare. she got to her feet. "i'm sick of you--;" she said it quite calmly. "and--i'm sick--of--him." she nodded her head in the direction of the portrait. "i'd do anything to get away from both of you--anything!" he smiled. "you'll not get away from me," he told her. "you--!" the one word was contemptuous. "you don't really count." "what d'you mean?" he still smiled. "i mean what i say." her voice was tired. "you're nothing--; nothing but--oh, a kind of a henchman to him. that's all you are. not that he needs you. he doesn't need any one. he's too unscrupulously powerful for that. he's never needed any one. not you. nor--me. he didn't even need my mother. he broke her heart and let her die because he didn't need her. i think you know he's like that. you're no different where he's concerned than the others." "after all--i'm your husband!" "that's the ghastly part of it. you--my--husband. you're only my husband because of him. you knew that when i married you, didn't you? you knew the lies he told me when he wanted me to marry you. you never contradicted them. and i was too silly, too young to know. i wanted to get away from it all; and from him. i couldn't guess that you--d'you think, ernest, if it hadn't been for those lies i'd have married you? do you?" "oh, i don't know. i usually get what i want, jenny." "and why do you get it? why?" "perhaps because i want it." she laughed harshly. "because daniel drare gets it for you. because he's had everything all his life. because he's behind you for the time being. that's why!" "and what if it is?" "my god!" she muttered. "i can't make you understand. i can't even talk to either of you." "you went to see him!" "i went to him to tell him i couldn't stand it any longer. i begged him to help me; just--this--once--i told him i couldn't go on this way. i told him i couldn't bear any more. i told him the truth; that i'd--i'd go mad." "what did he say? eh, jenny?" for a second her eyes closed. "he laughed. laughed--" "of course!" "there's no 'of course' about it. i'm serious. deadly serious." "don't be a fool, jenny. if you ask me i'd say you were mighty well off. your father gives you everything you want. your husband gives you everything you want. there isn't a man in the whole city who has more power than daniel drare. or more money for that matter. you ought to be jolly well satisfied." she waited a full moment before speaking. "maybe i'm a fool, ernest. maybe i am. a weak, helpless kind of a fool. but i'm not happy, ernest. i can't go this kind of a life any more. it's gotten unreal and horrible. and the kind of things you do to make money; the kind of things you're proud of. they prey on me, ernest. there's nothing about all this that's clean. it's making me ill; the rottenness of this sort of living. i'm not happy. doesn't that mean anything to you?" "nonsense. you've no reason for not being happy. the trouble with you, jenny, is that you've too lively an imagination." "oh, no, ernest. i've got to get away. somewhere--anywhere. just by myself. i don't love you, ernest. you don't really love me. it's only because i'm daniel drare's daughter that you married me. it was just his wealth and his power and--and is unscrupulous self that fascinated you." "you don't know what you're saying." "i do, i do, ernest! you'd like to be like him. but you can't. you are like him in a lot of ways. the little ways. but you're not big enough to be really like him. let me go, ernest. before it's too late;--let me go!" he came and put a hand on her shoulder. "i'll never let you go," he said. "you must!" she whispered. "you've got to let me. just to get away from all this. i've never been away in all my life. he'd never let me go--either." unconsciously her eyes went up to the picture. the full, red face with the hard lines in it. the thick, sensual lips. the small, cunning eyes that laughed. the ponderous, heavy set of the figure. the big, powerful hands. his gaze followed after hers. and very suddenly he left her side. he walked over to the mantel. "funny," he muttered to himself. "jolly strange--that!" her fingers clutched at her breast. "ernest--! what're you doing?" "can you see anything wrong here, jenny?" he was looking up at the portrait. "wrong?" she said it beneath her breath. "wrong--" he reached up a hand. he drew his fingers across the canvas. "by jove!" his voice was excited. "so it is. thought i wasn't crazy. when could it have happened, eh? ever notice this, jenny?" she could not take her eyes from his hand that was going over and over the canvas along the arm of the painted figure. "can't you see it, jenny?" "i--i can't see anything." she whispered it. "come over here--; where i am." she hesitated. "ernest, what's the sense? how can you see in this light anyway, how--" he did not let her finish. "come here!" slowly she went toward him. "what is it, ernest? what?" "a crack?" his hand still worked across it. "in the paint--here along the arm. or a cut, or something. how under the sun could it have happened? we've got to have it fixed somehow. never heard of such a thing before. old daniel drare'll be as sore as a crab if ever he gets wind of this. it'd be like hurting him to touch this portrait. he certainly does think the world of it! how could it have happened;--that's what i'd like to know." "i--i don't know what you're talking about--i--!" "here! can't you see it? it's as plain as the nose on your face. along the arm. it's a cut. right into the canvas. you can run your finger in it. give me your hand." she shrank back from him. "no--no, ernest." he stared at her intently. "you do look seedy. you'd better go up and lie down. i've got to dress for dinner, anyway. we'll have to have this fixed." he started for the door. she blocked his way. "will--you--let--me--go, ernest?" "don't start that again." "all right. i won't!" "that's a sensible girl, jenny. even your father had to laugh at you when you told him the way you feel. it isn't natural. it's just nerves, i guess. you could stick it out with daniel drare. you can stick it out with me. look here, daniel drare's a great old fellow, but i'm not as crude in some things as he is; am i, jenny?" "you would be if you could." her voice was singsong. "you haven't his strength; that's all." "i'm not as crude as he is." "you haven't his strength," she droned. "i've enough strength to keep you here; if that's what you mean." "no, it's not what i mean." a puzzled look crept across her face. her eyes were suddenly furtive. "maybe i don't know what i mean. but i don't think it's you. i don't think you count. it's him. it's daniel drare! he's behind it all. i don't think i quite know what i'll do about it. i must do something! i mustn't be angry!" he stared at her. "you'd best come along if you're going to dress." "i'll be up in a moment," she said. when he was gone she went over to the window. she stood there gazing out into the darkened quiet side-street. she was trembling in every limb. now and again she would half turn. her eyes would go slowly, warily toward the portrait hanging there over the mantel and then they would hurry away again. she started nervously when the butler knocked at the door. "what is it, williams?" "mr. drare's housekeeper, ma'am. she'd like to see you, ma'am. i said i'd ask." "show her in here, williams." the man left the room. she walked over to the farther corner of the room and switched on the lights. she heard footsteps in the hall. she stood quite still; waiting. footsteps--nearer-- a middle-aged woman very plainly dressed was in the doorway. "miss genevieve--" "nannie!" "miss genevieve. i wouldn't have come; only i've got to tell you." "what, nannie? come and sit down, nannie." the woman came into the room. for a second she paused, and then hurriedly she closed the door behind her. "no, miss genevieve. i'll not sit down. thank you. i can't be staying long. he might want me. i wouldn't like him to know i was here." the muscles on either side of genevieve evans' mouth pulled and twitched. "so? you're frightened too, nannie!" she said the words to herself. the woman heard her. "that i am, miss. and that i've got good reason to be; the same as you, my poor miss genevieve." "yes, yes, nannie. what was it you wanted?" the woman stood quite rigid. "you was there, miss--this afternoon?" "yes--" "did you notice anything, miss?" she drew a deep breath. "what d'you mean, nannie? nannie, what?" "it's him, miss. it was last night--" the woman broke off. "yes, nannie;" genevieve evans urged. "i don't rightly know how to tell it to you, miss. it's hard to find the words to say it in. he'd kill me if he knew i come here and told you. but you got to know. i can't keep it to myself. he's been fierce of late. what with making so much more money. and the drinking, miss. and the women. the women, they're there all hours, now." "my mother's house!" genevieve evans said it uncertainly. "yes, miss," the woman went on. "and it was almost as bad when she lived." "i know, nannie. i've always known!" "but last night, miss; after they'd gone. i was asleep, miss genevieve. it woke me. it was awful. plain horrid, miss." "what--nannie?" "the scream, miss--a shriek of pain." "no,--no, nannie!" genevieve evans interrupted wildly. "don't say it! don't!" the woman looked at her wonderingly. "why, miss genevieve--poor, little lamb." "nannie, nannie." she made a tremendous effort to control herself. "what was it you were going to say?" "the scream, miss. in the night. i rushed down. i knocked at his door. he wouldn't let me in. he was moaning, miss. and cursing. and moaning. he was swearing about a knife. i listened, miss--at the keyhole. i was scared. he kept cursing and moaning about a knife; about his arm--" "nannie--" she whispered the word beneath her breath. "yes, miss. cut in the arm. he would have it that way. and he wouldn't let me in. i waited for hours. and this morning i went into his room myself. he was in his shirt-sleeves. i pretended i wanted the linen for the wash. i was looking for blood, miss. not a drop did i find. not a pin prick stain. but i seen him bandaging his arm; right in front of me he did it. and then i seen him rip the bandage off." "nannie--" "it's his reason i fear for, miss. he turns to me and asks me if i can see the cut." "yes? yes, nannie?" "he shows me his arm. and, miss--" the woman stopped abruptly. "nannie--what? what?" genevieve evans' hands had gone up to her throat. "there wasn't a scratch;--not--a--scratch!" "oh--" she breathed. "and that's why i came here, miss. to ask if he'd said anything of it to you. or if--if you'd noticed anything, miss." genevieve evans waited a full second before she answered: "no, nannie. he wouldn't have told me. i didn't notice anything. i wasn't there very long. you see i only went to ask him to let me get away. out in the country--by myself. i wanted the money to go. he and--and mr. evans never give me money, nannie. just things--all the things, i want. only i'm tired of things. i don't quite know what to do. when--i think about it i get very angry. i was very angry. last night i was very angry! i've such funny ideas when i'm angry, nannie. i mustn't get angry again. but i've got--to--get--away." "i don't blame you, miss genevieve, for being angry. you've been an angel all your life; all your life pent up like--like a saint--with--with--devils." "you--don't--blame--me--nannie?" "no, lamb. not your nannie. your nannie knows what it's been like for you. i know him, miss genevieve. i know he didn't give you the money." "no, nannie. he laughed at me. laughed--" "he's a beast! that's what he is, miss. he should have give it to you. and him going away himself. he was telling me only to-day. into the country." "what?" "oh, miss. i hate to say such things to you. he's going with that black-haired woman;--the latest one, she is. he thinks she works too hard. he's taking her off for a rest. is anything the matter? aren't you well, darling?" genevieve evans swayed dizzily for a second her one hand reaching out blindly before her. the woman came quickly and took the hand between both of her hands and stroked it. "nannie, i'm sick--sick!" "nannie's darling--; nannie's pet." from somewhere in the house came the silvery, tinkling sound of a clock striking seven times. "i've got to go, miss genevieve, dear." "all right, nannie." the woman drew a chair up and pushed her gently into it. "you'll not be telling him, miss?" "no, nannie--; no--" the woman started for the door. "thank you, miss genevieve." "nannie--; you said he was taking her--; the black-haired one--; away for a--a rest? away into the country?" with her hand on the door-knob the woman turned. "yes. why--lamb!" "into the country." genevieve evans' voice was lifeless. "into the country where everything is quiet and big--; and clean. you said that, nannie?" "i said the country, miss genevieve, dearie." "nannie--nannie--;" her eyes were staring straight before her. "i--want--to--go!" "lamb--darling." the woman stood undecided. "but he wouldn't let me. he laughed at me. nannie, he laughed." the woman made up her mind. "will nannie stop with you a bit, miss genevieve, dearie?" "you said;" genevieve evans' lifeless, monotonous voice went on; "you said you wouldn't blame me for being angry. i get very angry, nannie. very angry. it brings all kinds of things to me when i get angry. his kind of things. rotten things. and he's going to take her into the country; where everything's clean; and he won't let me--go. god!" "will i stay, miss genevieve?" "no, nannie--go! go quickly! go--now!" "yes, miss genevieve. he'll be wanting to know where i am." "go, nannie!" she half rose from her chair. the door closed quietly behind the woman. "go!" genevieve evans whispered. "he's going--into the country--; he's taking that woman. he wouldn't let me. he wants to keep me here. just to feel his power--; his filthy power. he's not the only one." she was muttering now. "he's not the only one who can do things. rotten--dirty things! his kind of things!" she swayed to her feet. her steps were short and uncertain. her whole body reeled. her face was blanched; drained of all color. her fingers trembled wide spread at her sides. she was quivering from head to foot. only her eyes were steady; her eyes wide and dilated that were riveted on the portrait hanging there above the wood carved mantel. she backed toward the door, her eyes glued to the picture. her shaking fingers, fumbling behind her, found the key and turned it. feeling her way with her hands, her distended eyes still fixed on that one thing, she got to the center table. it took her a while to pull open the drawer. her breath came raspingly; as if she had been running. the old venetian dagger with the cracked jeweled handle was between her fingers. very slowly now she went toward the fireplace. the electric light flared over the colored gems that studded the handle of the dagger, giving out small quick rays of blue and red and green. "i'm angry;" she whispered hoarsely. "i--i'm very angry--with--you. you've no right--; no right--to--ruin--my--life--and laugh! you did--laugh--at--me!" her eyes stared up at the full, red face with the hard lines in it. up at the thick, sensual lips. up at the cunning eyes. at the ponderous, heavy-set figure. the powerful hands. "why--don't--you--laugh--now? you aren't afraid--are--you? you--aren't--afraid of--anything? not of--me--are--you--daniel drare--? you've--done--your--best--to--keep--me--under--your--power--; you--stood--behind--ernest--to keep--me under--your--power. you're--not--afraid--of--me? why--don't--you--laugh--daniel--drare?" her right hand that held the dagger raised itself. "laugh, daniel drare! laugh!" she stood there under the portrait. her left hand went stiffly out feeling over the long cut in the painted arm. "angry--last--night." she whispered. "and--it--hurt--you. daniel drare--i--could-hurt--you!" for a second her eyes went up to the dagger held there above her head; the dagger with the thousand colored gleams pointing from it. she gave a quick choking laugh. "i laugh--at--you--daniel--drare." with all her strength she drove the dagger into the heart of the canvas. she staggered back to the center of the room. there was a gaping rent in the portrait. she laughed again; stupidly. her laughter trailed off and stopped. she stood there waiting. once she thought some one paused outside the door. her hands were up across her eyes. motionless she waited. suddenly she gave a quick start. out there in the hall a telephone had rung. she heard her husband answer it. her one distinct thought was that he must have been on his way out for dinner. his unbelieving cry came to her. "my god! it can't--" her fingers were pressed into her ears. she did not want to hear the rest. she knew it. the faith the great lady fingered the pearls that circled her throat. "quite true," she murmured, and a smile crept up about the corners of her lips and lingered there. "really, surprisingly true." the woman with the white hair and the heavily lidded eyes bent a bit lower over her charts of stars and constellations. "this year"--she went on in that low, undecided voice of hers--"this year madame has had a big sorrow. it was the loss to madame of a young man. he was tall and fair like madame, but he had not madame's eyes. he had courage, madame, and a soft voice; always a soft voice. he went on, this young one, with his courage. the son of madame died in the early spring." the great lady's hands dropped into her lap and clinched there: the knuckles showing white and round as her fingers strained against each other. her eyes stared hard at the cracked walls; up over the low ceiling, toward the back of the small room that was divided off from the kitchen by a loose-hung plush curtain; out through the one window which gave on to the street. she could just see the heads of people who were passing and the faint, gray shadows of the late evening that were reaching in dark spots up along the rough, white walls of the house opposite. her eyes came dazedly back to the room and the chairs and the table before which she sat. two giant tears trickled down her cheeks. the smile was wiped from off her mouth. the woman with the white hair had waited. "there is another here. he is perhaps a little older than the one who died. he has not that one's courage. he is very careful of all the small things; like his clothes and his cigarettes and his affections. the big things he has never known. his eyes are like the eyes of madame. madame has this son in the war now." "no--no!" the great lady leaned across the table. "don't tell me--not that he--i couldn't bear it! not--both--of--them!" the woman with the white hair looked up quite suddenly from her charts of stars and constellations. a pitying quiver shook over her face. "you need have no fear, madame. he is not ready. it is a wound. it is not a wound that gives death." the great lady fingered her pearls again. "you--you quite carried me away. for a moment you startled me." "i regret it, madame. perhaps i should not have said anything." "of course you should have. i told you that when i came in, didn't i? i said i wanted to hear everything. everything you could tell me." "ah--yes, madame." "is that all, now? you're certain that you've not forgotten anything?" and she pulled at her gold mesh bag, which was studded with sapphires. "it is everything, madame. unless, perhaps, madame has some question she would like to ask of me?" the great lady drew her money out and tossed it on the table. the woman with the white hair and those heavily lidded eyes did not touch it. the great lady got to her feet and started to the door. quite suddenly she stopped. "when--" she made an effort to steady her voice. "when will this thing--; this wound--come--?" the woman with the white hair bent over the charts again. and then she caught up a pencil and made little signs on the yellow paper and drew a triangle through them and across them at the points. "the fourth day of the second month from now, madame." the great lady came back to the table and stood there looking down. "how do you do it?" the woman with the white hair stared up in astonishment. "madame?" the great lady's ringed fingers spread out, pale and taut at her sides. the jewels of the rings showed in dark, glistening stains against the white of her skin. "what you've just told me--all of it. i don't see how you know--how you can know. it's true. i can't understand how it can be true. but it is. every word of it." the woman with the white hair fingered her pencil a bit wearily. "but--of course, madame." "i came here;" the great lady spoke hurriedly. "i don't know why i came. only i didn't think: i wouldn't have believed it possible. i couldn't tell you now why i came." "there are many who come--these days." "these days?" "people would know more than they know of things they never thought of before, madame--these days. they would follow a bit further after the lives that have been broken off so suddenly. they are impatient because they cannot see where they have never before looked and so they come to me because i have sat, staring into those places. they will see--all of them--soon. they are going on, further, because they must know. these days they must--know!" the great lady stood quite still. "you have a wonderful gift--wonderful." "it is not mine, madame." the great lady's eyes went about the room. "i'll be going," she said. "it's quite late." her eyes took in the cheap poverty of the mended carpet and the paint-scratched walls and the dingy-threaded, plush-covered chairs. the woman with the white hair got to her feet. "i know what you are thinking." her voice was low. "if i can do this for others, you think, why should i not be able to do everything for myself? if i can tell to others, what may i not tell to myself? if i can give help to others, why can i not give help to myself?" the silk of the great lady's dress gave out a faint rustle as she took a step back. "no--" she murmured uncertainly. "it is not 'no.'" the woman's voice trembled. "it is 'yes.' it is what was going through your head--going around and around and fearing to be asked. but i will answer you. i will say that the power is not mine. it is the power that is given to me. it is not for myself. i do not want it for myself. i shall never touch it for myself, because it is meant for others. to help others and that is all." "d'you mean you can't see things for yourself?" the great lady was curious. "but of course i can see. it is that which, sometimes--" the woman with the white hair broke off abruptly. "do you know what it is to see and then to be able to do nothing--nothing? not--one--thing--!" "how can you?" "i can, madame, because that is what i am here for. it is by being nothing myself that this thing comes through me so that i can feel what other people are; what they are going to be. if i thought only of me, i would be so full of myself i could not think of anything else. it is from thinking a little bit beyond that the power first came. and now that i keep on thinking away from the nearest layer of thought, it works through me. and i can help. it is the wish of my life to help. it is what i am here for. placed in the field. they told it to me--the voices. put in the field,--by them." the great lady shrugged her shoulders. the woman with the white hair pulled herself up very suddenly. there was a quick, convulsive movement of her hands and for a short second her eyes closed. she went to the table and caught the money between her fingers and dragged it across the red cover to her. "i thank madame." the great lady walked slowly to the door. "good-by. perhaps some day i'll be back." "perhaps--madame. good-by." the great lady went out of the room and closed the door behind her. the sound of her high-heeled footsteps tapped in sharp staccato down the uncarpeted stairs, and died away into the stillness. the long-drawn creak of rusty hinges and then the muffled thud of the front door swinging to. in the street the soft diminishing whirr of a motor grew fainter and was gone. silence. the woman sank into a chair and buried her face between her two shaking hands. shadows crept up against the uncurtained window and pressed, quivering, against the pane. shadows came into the room and stretched themselves along the floor. shadows reached up across the wall and over the chairs and the table. shadows spread in a gray, moving mass over the still figure of the woman. a young girl came quickly and silently through the curtain that partitioned the room off from the kitchen. "maman--" the woman did not move. "i had not thought, maman, that you were alone." the woman slowly drew her face from out between her hands. she looked up uncertainly, her eyes only half open. "leave me, angele." "but, maman, supper is ready." "let it wait, angele." the girl came over to the table and put her hand on the woman's shoulder. "was she then horrid, maman?" the woman sighed softly. "it is not that, angele. she was like the others. they come because they are curious. something, perhaps, brings them here, but they do not know that. they are only curious. they do not believe. i tell them the truth. they are shocked for a little moment. they do not believe, angele." "pauvre petite maman, you are tired." "non, non, angele." "will you have jean see you tired, maman?" the woman stared up into the girl's small, white face that was dimmed with shifting shadows. the woman's heavily lidded eyes met the girl's wide, dark eyes. "jean--" "he will be home to eat, maman. soon, now, he will be home." the woman passed her hands again and again over her forehead and then she held them with the tips of her fingers pressed tight to her temples. "he is such a child, angele." "shall we have supper now?" "angele--" "i will bring a light in here, maman, and then when jean is back we will go in to supper." "he--is--such--a--child,--angele." "and never on time, maman!" the woman caught the girl's fingers between her own. "answer me, angele. answer me!" the girl looked down in surprise. "but what, maman?" the woman's breath came quickly. "he is a child. say that he is a baby. he is all that i have. you and he are all--everything! say, angele, that he is a child! only yesterday, you remember--the long curls? the velvet suit? surely it was yesterday. say, angele, that he--is--still--a--little--one." the girl threw back her head and laughed. the shadows lay like long, dark fingers on the white of her throat. "of course. he is young--too young even now when they take the young. you have no need to worry, maman. maman--what is it?" she had seen the sudden, far-away look in the woman's eyes. she had seen her head stretch forward, the chin pointing, the mouth a little open. "maman--" the woman's hand reached out in a gesture commanding silence. "the voices," the woman whispered. "they have been after me the whole day. the voices. they--keep--coming--and--coming--to--me--i have not been able to think--for the voices--" "maman--" "you say 'yes.' you are coming--nearer--nearer. no--i cannot see. but hear--mais, it is good now! you speak distinctly. of course i thank you for speaking so beautifully. you--say--you--want--want--" "petite maman, you will make yourself ill with those old horoscopes and these voices. petite maman, have you not done enough for one day?" the woman paid no attention to her. she did not seem to hear the girl. her face was pale; there were faint, bluish smudges about her mouth and nostrils. "you want--i cannot--cannot understand what you want. i'm trying to understand. i'm trying hard! if you will tell it to me again. and--slowly. with patience. it is better now. so that is it? more slowly,--if you can. of course. is it that you wish to know? of--course--i--shall--give--you--what--you--want. i always give you what--you want. i do my best for that. you--want--" the woman's eyes were closed. she was breathing deeply. her whole figure was tense. the girl stood beside her, a puzzled, half incredulous look coming into her face. "i--should--look. it does no--good--to--look. i can never see--beyond the wood--i should look beyond.--what wood? now? is it perhaps that--you--mean--gate? swings to and fro? now--you--want--; this--moment--" the door was flung wide open. at the noise the woman slowly opened her eyes, staring blindly before her. "you--want--" she murmured. a boy stood in the doorway. he was slight and young. his face was small and rather like the girl's face, and his dark eyes were set far apart like her eyes. through the gray of the massing shadows gleamed the brass buttons of his uniform. the girl sprang forward. "jean--!" "maman." the boy came a step into the room. "see, maman!" "hush, jean." the girl turned to gaze at the woman sitting there with that stony, frozen stare, staying in her eyes. "maman, they have taken me at last!" "oh," for a second the girl forgot the woman. "but i am proud of you!" "maman, i wear the uniform. they will let me go now. i knew they would take me. sooner or later; i knew they would have to! aren't you glad?" the girl remembered and interrupted him. "be still, jean!" the boy stood looking from one to the other, his eyes straining through the gloom. "maman," he whispered. the woman's voice came trailing softly to them. "they--want--" "maman;" the girl threw her arm protectingly over the woman's shoulders. "jean is here. see, petite maman; it is jean. your jean." the woman repeated the words in that gentle, plaintive singsong. "they want--" and then she got to her feet. "jean!--" her voice rose shrilly crescendo. "it was that! my--jean--" "maman;" the boy came and stood beside her. "you would not have me stay behind when they need me? you will be glad to have me go. come, maman, you must say that you are glad!" "my little one--" "say, maman, that you are glad." "so young, jean." "but old enough to fight when they need me. old enough to fight for france!" "my baby--" "you will not grieve, maman." she reached up and caught his face between her two hands and drew it down and kissed him on the mouth. "ah, jean!" "and say, how do i look?" he turned around and around in front of them. "but, angele, fetch the lamp quickly. you cannot see in this dark. you cannot see me." the girl laughed a bit uncertainly, and then she went quickly, rushing into the next room. the woman gripped hold of the boy's hand. his fingers grasped hers. "petite maman." "mon jean--just--a--moment--still--so." they stood there silent and very close to each other, in the room crowded with moving, splotching shadows. the girl came back through the curtain, a lighted lamp between her two hands. the flicker of it spread broadly into her eager, anxious face. the glow of it trickled before her and widened through the room. the shadows stuck to the walls in the corners and rocked up against the ceiling, black among the uneven streaks of yellow light. "now, angele. now, maman. put it there on the table, angele. no, hold it higher. like that. keep your hands steady, angele, or how can maman see? such a miserable lamp! does not my uniform look magnificent? i am the real poilu, hein? something to be proud of, maman?" "the real poilu?" the girl questioned softly. "the grandchild of the real poilu, maybe." "she mocks me, maman." "be quiet, angele." "i do not mock, maman; but i will not have his head turned. the poor little cabbage!" "see, maman. she will not stop. tell her that i fight for france." for a moment the woman hesitated. they could hear the deep breath she took. "for france. and for something else, my little son." with great care the girl placed the lamp on the table. "something else, maman?" "the thing for which france stands--; and conquers." he seized at her last word. "conquers? of course she conquers. and i will help! i will kill the boches. right and left. i shall fight until france will win!" a strange light had filtered into the woman's heavily lidded eyes. "bravo!" the girl clapped her hands together. "and shall we have our supper now, petite maman, and my little rabbit?" "maman--when i have this uniform--" "go, children. in a moment i will be with you." "come, my cauliflower. maman would be alone." "maman--" "jean--i do not mean to tease. let us go in to supper. if i do not try to be pleasant i shall weep. you would not have me weep, brother jean? i would wet the pretty shoulder of your uniform with my tears. that would be a tragedy. so come along to supper, my rascal." hand in hand the boy and the girl went through the loose-hung, plush curtain into the kitchen. the woman stood rigid beside the table. "help me," she whispered beneath her breath. "you--" she stumbled to her knees. her head was pressed against the edge of the table. her hands fumbled over the top of it, the fingers widespread and catching; clutching at whatever they touched. from the kitchen came the sound of low voices. a knife rattled clatteringly against a plate. once the girl laughed and her laughter snapped off in a half-smothered sob. the woman moaned a little. "just to watch over him. that's all i ask.--you--across there, just--to--protect--him--" her hands went to her throat, the fingers tightening. "a sign," she implored. "dieu--that--you--hear--me!" her eyes stared about the room, peering frantically from under their heavy lids. "will you not help me?" she pleaded. "dieu! mon dieu,--will you not--help--me--?" her kneeling figure swayed a bit. "you will not hear," she whimpered. "you will--not--hear--" for a moment longer she waited in the tense silence. and then she rose stiffly to her feet. her eyes riveted themselves upon a little pool of yellow light that lay in the center of the table under the lamp. the palms of her hands struck noiselessly together. very slowly, she went through the curtain and into the kitchen. it was a scrupulously clean room. a stove stood in one corner. against the wall hung a row of pots and pans that caught the light from the swinging lamp in brilliant, burnished patches. angele and jean sat near to each other at the center table. their heads were close. their cautious whispering stopped abruptly as she came toward them. the woman sat down with the girl on one side of her and the boy on the other. she was very silent. there was only one thing she could have said. she did not want to say it. mechanically she tried to eat. she watched her hands moving upward from her plate with a sort of dazed interest. it was only when she tried to swallow that she realized how each mouthful of food choked her. the one question came to her lips again and again. at last she asked it. "when do you go--mon jean?" the boy gave a quick glance at his sister and his eyes fixed themselves upon the table before him and stayed there. she knew then what they had been speaking of when she came into the room. "what difference does it make, petite maman, when i go?" "but when, my son?" "see, angele, she is anxious to be rid of me! she cannot wait until i go. she insists upon knowing even before we have finished this supper of ours." "maman;"--the girl spoke hurriedly. "let us talk of that later." "when?" she insisted. "but, maman, you have not touched your food. was it not good? and i thought you would so like the p'tit marmite." "it is excellent, angele." "then eat, maman." "it is that i am not hungry, angele." "so, the p'tit marmite is not good, petite maman. if it were excellent, even though you have no hunger, you would eat and eat until there was not one little bit left." the woman took another spoonful. "when?" she repeated. the boy's dark eyes lifted and looked into hers. "to-night,--maman." her figure straightened itself with a quick jerk. "to-night?" "and what does it matter, petite maman, when i go? surely to-night is as nice a time as any." "as nice a time as any;" she echoed his words. the three of them sat there silently. the girl was the first to move. "ah, but it is hot in here." she pushed her chair back from the table. "it is uncomfortable!" the boy and the woman got to their feet. "i'll pack, maman. not much, you know. just my shaving things and soap, and some underwear. angele will help me. i won't be long." he went out of the kitchen door and down the narrow passage way to his room. the girl hesitated for a moment. without a word she hurried after him. the woman crossed slowly into the next room. for a second she stood beside the table, and then she walked over to the window. outside the street was dark. no light trickled through the blinds of the house opposite. no light reached its brilliant electric flare into the sky. no light from the tall lamp-post specked through the gloom. in the dim shadow of the silent street she could see the vague forms of people going to and fro. blurred figures moving in the darkness with the echo of their footsteps trailing sharply behind them. she stood quite still. once her hands crept up to her mouth, the backs of them pressing against her teeth. "maman." she wheeled about at the sound of jean's voice. he was standing just within the doorway, the girl at his side. the woman stood there staring. the girl crossed the room quickly and put her arm about the woman's waist, drawing her close. "petite maman--" "you--go--now--jean?" she said the words carefully and precisely with a tremendous effort for control. "but, yes, maman!" she leaned a little against the girl. "mon jean, you will have courage--; great--courage--my little one, you will be protected. you--will--be--protected!" she had said that in spite of herself. he came to her then and flung his arms about her and kissed her on either cheek, and held her tightly to him. "good-by, petite maman." "good--" she could not say it. "good-by, angele." "my little rabbit--i wish you luck. my cabbage--au revoir--;" and her lips brushed across his mouth. for a second he did not move. then he went across the room and out through the door. he was gone. the woman's eyes went to the window. the silent, darkened street. the people there below her. the somber, black lack of light. "maman;" the girl whispered. "they will watch over him," the woman muttered. "they must watch--out--there. they do come back into the world again to protect. they cannot--cannot leave them in all that horror--alone." "see, maman." the girl's quivering face was against the window-pane. "maman, jean waves to you!" her eyes followed the pointing of the girl's finger. "they--must--be--here--," she murmured. "maman,--wave to jean!" her gaze rested on the dim, undefined figure of the boy standing in the street with his hat in the hand that was reached toward them above his head. mechanically she waved back. the woman and the girl stood close. "oh--petite maman;" she whispered piteously. the woman's eyes dilated. there, following after jean; going through the shadow-saturated street; moving unheeded among the vague figures of the people going to and fro. something was there. some scant movement like a current too quiet to see. a shadow in the shadows that her sight could not hold to. in the dark, gloom-soaked street, staying close to her jean, she could feel something. some one was there. her eyes strained with desperate intentness. her hands went up slowly across her heart. the words that came to her lips were whispered: "dieu! give me faith;--faith--not--to--disbelieve--" yellow he walked along the pavement with the long, swinging stride he had so successfully aped from the men about him. it had been one of the first things upon which he had dwelt with the greatest patience; one of the first upon which he had centered his stolid concentration. he had carried his persistency to such a degree that he had even been known to follow other men about measuring their step to a nicety with those long, narrow eyes of his, that seemed to see nothing, and yet penetrated into the very soul of everything. his classmates at the big college had at the beginning laughed at him; scoffing readily because of the dogged manner in which he had persevered at his desire to become thoroughly american. now after all his laborious painstaking, now that he had carefully studied all their ways of talking, all their distinctive mannerisms; now that he had gone even beyond that with true oriental perception, reaching out with the cunning tentacles of his brain into the minds of those about him, he knew they had begun to treat him with the comradeship, the unthinking fellow-feeling which they accorded each other. he thoroughly realized that had they paused to consider, had they in any way been made to feel that he, a chinaman, had consciously made up his mind to become one of them, consistently mimicking them day after day, that they would have resented him. he knew that they could not have helped but think it all hypocrisy. and yet he actually felt that it was the one big thing of his life; that desire of his to cast aside the benightment of dying china, for what he considered the enlightment and virility of america. to be sure he recognized there was still a great number of the men who distrusted him because of his yellow face. he had made up his mind with the slow deliberation that always characterized his unswerving determination to win every one of them before the end of his last year. he would show them one and all that he was as good as they were; that the traditions of the chinaman which they so looked down upon, upon which he himself looked down upon, were not his traditions. as he walked along he thought of these things; thought of them carefully and concisely in english. his narrow eyes became a trifle more narrow, and a smile that held something of triumph in it came and played about his flat, mobile mouth. it had been raining hard. the wet streets stretched in dark, reflecting coils under the corner lamps. overhead a black sky lowered threateningly; pressing down upon the crouching, gray masses of the close-built houses in sullen menace. now and again a swift moving train flung itself in thundering derision across the elevated tracks; a long brightly lit line streaking through the encircling gloom. he could feel the mysterious throb of life all about him. the unfathomed lure of the night, of the few people that at so late an hour crept past him, looming for a second in sudden distinctness at his side, then fading phantom-like into the deep engulfing shadows of the dim street. he was at a complete loss how to express to himself the feeling of dread; a subtle feeling that somehow refused to be translated into the carefully acquired english of which he was so proud. for a moment he doubted himself. doubted that, were he so thoroughly american, he could feel the oriental's subconscious recognition of the purposeful, sinister intent in the huddled mass of darkened shop windows with their rain-dripping signs; in the shining reptile scales of the asphalt underfoot; in the pulsing intensity of the hot, torpid july atmosphere. a street lamp flickered its uncertain light sluggishly over the carefully groomed figure and across the placid breath of the yellow face. he paused a second as he saw a form come lurching unsteadily out of the gloom ahead of him. it came nearer and he could see that what had at first appeared to be a dark, undefinable mass, pushed here and there by unseen hands, was in reality a man swaying drunkenly out of the shadows. he watched the man curiously, with a little of that contemptuous feeling an oriental always holds for any expression of excess. as the man stood before him in the darkness, as he stumbled and seemed about to fall, he put out his hand and caught him by the elbow. "thank 'e;" the drunken eyes blinked blearily up into his stolid impassive face. "it's fine to be saved on a stormy night like this. it is--" "don't mention it." "it's a powerful dark night;--it is." "les. that is so." "and it's a damn long way home. ain't it?" "i do not know." "by the saints! and no more do i. ain't you got a dime on you, mister? you could be giving it to me for car fare--; couldn't you now, mister?" "velee glad to let you have it." he fished in his pocket. he drew out the coin and placed it in the man's outstretched hand. he watched the dirty fingers close eagerly over it. suddenly the bloodshot eyes wavered suspiciously across his face. he saw the red flushed features twitch convulsively. "holy mother!" the drunkard muttered thickly. "it's a heathen." the dime slipped from between the inert fingers. it tinkled down onto the pavement, rolling with a little splash into a pool of water that lay a deep stain in the crevice of the broken asphalt. for a moment he wondered placidly at the injustice of it; wondered that he should be made to feel the disgust of so revolting a thing as this drunkard. he saw that the man had crossed himself with sudden fervor; he saw him shuffle uncertainly this way and that, as though the feet refused to carry the huge, bloated body. he stood watching the reeling figure until its dark outline was absorbed into the intenser darkness of a side street. the expression on his face never changing, he walked on. he knew he had no right to be out at that time of the night; he knew he ought to be sitting at his desk in his comfortable little room, working out the studies which he had set himself. and yet he could not make up his mind to turn back. something drew him on into the blackness of the night; pulling him into it like a fated thing. now and then he found that the stride he had acquired from such grinding observation tired him. not for worlds would he have shortened his step to that padding, sinuous motion so distinctly chinese. he had grown to hate all things chinese. in the short time in which he had been in new york he had discarded with the utmost patience the traits which are so persistently associated with the chinaman. to be thought american; to have the freedom, the quick appreciation of life that belongs to the occident, that had been the goal toward which he had striven; the goal he prided himself he had almost reached. suddenly he became aware of a hand on his arm. in the dark he felt the pressure of bony fingers against his flesh. looking down he saw that a woman had crept up from behind him; that she had put out her hand in an effort to detain him. it was in the center of a block. the thick blackness that hung loosely, an opaque veil all about him, was almost impenetrable. yet as he looked at her with his small, piercing eyes, he thought he saw her lips moving in crimsoned stains splashed against the whiteness of her face. "what is it?" he asked. he saw her raise her eyelids at his question. he found himself gazing into her eyes; eyes that were twin balls of fire left to burn in a place that had been devastated by flames. "it's hot;--ain't it?" he stood silent for a moment trying to realize that the woman had every right to be there; trying to understand with an even greater endeavor that she was in reality a flesh and blood woman, and not some mysteriously incarnate soul crawling to his side out of the sinister night. "les,--it's velee hot." something in his tone caused her to start; caused her to look around her as though she were afraid. "i wouldn't have spoke," she stammered. "i wouldn't have spoke only it's such a fierce night." then as he did not answer her immediately, her voice rose querulously. "it's a fierce night; ain't it, now?" that was the word for which he had so vainly searched throughout the vocabulary of his carefully acquired english. the word the woman had given him, that expressed the sullen menace of the night about him. "it is--fie--" he made an effort to accomplish the refractory "r." "it is fierce." the hand she had withdrawn from his arm was reached out again. he could feel her fingers scrape like the talons of a frightened bird around his wrist. "you get it too, mister?" "get what?" "the kind of feeling that makes you think something is going to happen?" she drew the back of her free hand across her mouth. "ain't it making you afraid?" somehow the woman's words aroused within him a dread that was a prophecy. he made one attempt at holding to his acquired americanism. the americanism which was slowly receding before the stifled waves of oriental foreboding, like a weak, protesting thing that fears a hidden strength. for he knew the foreboding was fate; and he knew too that when fulfilled, it would be met with all the stoicism of a chinaman. "you feel aflaid?" the fingers about his wrist clattered bonily together; then clinched themselves anew. "yes," she whispered. "i guess that's it. i guess i'm afraid." for a moment he thought of the lateness of the hour. "i'm velee solee," he said. "i'm solee, but i must be going." "you can't leave me;" she stuttered behind her shut teeth. "you ain't got the heart to leave me all alone on a night like this." "you can go to your home;" and he thought of the drunkard who had gone to his home. surely the night sheltered strange creatures. "les, you better go on to your home." she laughed. he had never thought of one of his little chinese gods with their crooked faces laughing; but as he heard her he knew that their mirth would sound like that. sound as though all the gladness had been killed; choked out of it, leaving only the harsh echoes that mocked and mocked. "gee, mister--; i ain't got no place to go." "i'm velee solee." he said it again, not knowing what else to say. something in his evident sincerity aroused her to protest. "oh, i know you thinks it queer for me to be talking this way," she said. "i know you thinks it funny for me to say i'm afraid. and i ain't, excepting--" she added hastily, "on a night like this. it kinder makes everything alive; everything that's rotten bad. i ain't ashamed of the things i've done. i ain't scared of the dead things. it's the live ones i'm afraid of--; the dirty live things. they kinder come at you in the dark." for an instant her body trembled against his. "then they goes past you all creepy-like. creeping on their bellies--; sliding,--like--like--slime." "you don't know what you are saying," he interrupted. "i know," she insisted. "i know! some night like this i'll be doing something awful;--and they'll be there." she pointed a shaking hand towards the shadows. "they'll be there, wriggling to me--quiet--!" "imagination," he said, and he smiled. in the dark she could not have seen the smile, nor could she have known that the lightness of his tone covered a deep, malignant dread. "it is all imagination!" "it ain't!" she spoke sullenly. "i tell you, it's real. it's horrible real!" her voice was frantic. "maybe it is," he conceded, and then, as she made no answer, he asked: "you like to walk with me a little?" "yes." her head drooped as though she were utterly discouraged. "it wouldn't be so bad as sticking it out here--alone." he could not help but notice that she hesitated a bit before the word alone. undoubtedly she could not get the thought of those things--those live things she so feared, out of her head. the things that waited for her in the shadows. they walked along the wet pavements together. an engine shrieked weirdly above them, like something neither bird nor beast; like something inhuman. under a street lamp she glanced up at him curiously. he heard her gasp. he looked down at her. he saw her eyes widen in terror; he saw her pale, bare hands creep uncertain, stumbling to her neck, as if she were choking. he heard her voice rattling in her throat. "what is it?" he asked. "you are ill?" he put his hand on her shoulder. he could feel her shudder, as she writhed and twisted under his touch. "let go of me." her voice was hoarse. "let go of me, i say!" for some unaccountable reason his fingers closed all the more tightly on her shrinking flesh. "let me go;--you--damned--chink!" she muttered the words under her breath. he heard her. he thought of the drunkard and he thought of her. suddenly he felt quite furious; stilly, sinisterly furious. "i'm 'melican." he said it stolidly. his narrow, black eyes were unwavering on her. she began to cry. "let me go," she whimpered. "i ain't done nothing to you. i couldn't have got on to your being--a--chink." "what diffelence does that make?" he asked. and then he reiterated with careful precision: "i tell you i'm a 'melican." her words came to him in a gurgle of terror. "i hate you. i hate all of your yellow faces--and them eyes! i hate them horrid, nasty--eyes!" he bent his head until his face almost touched hers. his strong, angry fingers held her firmly by either arm. "it is not pletty, this face?" she struggled, inane with fear. she fought, trying to free herself, to tear away from the vise-like grip of those awful hands; swaying like a tortured, trapped creature against his strength. she could feel the intensity, the calm scrutiny of his long, narrow eyes upon her. suddenly something in his brain snapped. he pushed her roughly from him. he saw her fall to the pavement; he saw her head strike the curb. he stood there watching her as she lay, outlined by the light colored material of her dress against the wet blackness of the asphalt. "what diffelence does it make if i am a chinaman?" he asked it as he bent over her. but she did not answer. the question went out into the heavy stillness, hanging there to be echoed deafeningly by a thousand silent tongues. something in the sudden quiet of the way she lay filled him with a tranquil joy. he knelt beside her, he reached his hand over her heart. he got up slowly, deliberately. he moved silently away, going with that padded, sinuous motion, so distinctly chinese. with cunning stealth he went back the way he had come, treading lightly; cautiously seeking the darkest shadows. he had gone some little distance when he heard the regular beat of hurrying footsteps following him. he stood stolidly, still, awaiting whatever might happen. overhead he saw a cluster of heavy, black clouds sweeping across the sky, like eager, reaching hands against a somber background. it had begun to rain again. he could feel the raindrops trickling gently down his upturned face. he wondered, as the footsteps halted beside him, if he should have run. his mind, working rapidly, decided that any other man would have gotten away; any other man but not a chinaman. a heavy hand fell across his shoulder. "i've got you, my boy!" a voice shouted in his ear. "i seen you kneeling there beside her. you'll be coming along with me!" he turned to face the voice. the wind that heralded the coming storm rustled through the street, carrying with it a litter of filthy castaway newspapers. flurries of stinging sand-sharp dust swirled above the pavement. a low rumble of thunder bellowed overhead. then the rain came down in sudden lashing fury. he had to raise his voice to make himself heard. "i'm velee glad," he said. the bull's eye was flashed into his placid, narrow eyes. he could see the policeman's face behind the light; see the surprise quivering on the red features. in the darkness above the racket of the storm, he heard the man's gasping mutter: "yellow--by god!--yellow!" china-ching[ ] [footnote : published originally in _the all story magazine_.] the racket was terrific. the yelping, the shrill prolonged whines, the quick incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the throaty, infuriated snarling. the woman stood at the window gazing out into the gathering twilight. before her eyes stretched the drab, flat fields; here and there a shadowy mass of trees reached their feathery tips that were etched in darkly against the graying skies. directly before her, beyond the unkept waste that might at one time have been a garden, reared the high, wire walls of the kennels. she could just make out the dim, undefined forms of the dogs running to and fro within the narrow, confining space. the swift, persistent movement of them fascinated her. the ghostly shapes of them pattering sinuously and silently along the ground; the dull scratching thud of the claws and bodies that hurled themselves again and again into the strong wire netting. the impossibility of their escape throttled her. their futile attempts at freedom caused a powerful nausea to creep over her. and there in the center of the run she could distinguish, chained to the dog-house,--a pale blur in the fading light,--the motionless yellow mass of the chow, china-ching. the shrill, prolonged whines, the quick, incessant barking:-- "oh, my gawd;" she muttered involuntarily. "oh, my gawd!" the man sitting in the middle of the room pulled his pipe out of his mouth. "what's that you say?" she stood at the window, her eyes fixed steadfastly on that one dumb dog among all those yelping, snarling other dogs. the man got up from his chair and came and stood beside her. unconsciously she shrank away from his nearness. "ain't you used to that by now;--ain't you?" she turned toward him;--all but her eyes. her eyes were still riveted out there upon the motionless chow chained in the center of the run. "it ain't the noise; that,--that don't mean so much, james. it ain't the noise." "then what's the matter,--huh?" she pointed a trembling forefinger at that yellow mass tied to the dog-house. "him," she whispered. "he don't make no racket, james." the man peered over her shoulder. "the chow?" "yes;" her voice was still. "china-ching. he don't make no racket, james." "i'd like to hear him," the man blustered. "i'd just like to hear one peep out of him;--that's all." she saw his coarse, hairy hand go to his hip pocket. she smiled bitterly. she knew the confidence he felt when he touched the mother-of-pearl handle of his pistol. "you don't need that on him," she said. "he just sits there and don't never move. he don't hardly eat when you feeds him. he don't seem to have no heart left for nothing. he ain't like the terrier what had the distemper;--he ain't like the greyhound what had the hydrophobia,--so awful bad." "what d'you mean?" the man muttered angrily. "ain't they had the hydrophobia;--ain't they had the distemper;--ain't they?" "you says they did, james." "ain't i the one to know? if i ain't been born with dog-sense, would folks be giving me their muts to care for?" "you shot them pups, james." "and what if i did?" he stormed. "they was dangerous--they was a menace to the community,--so they was. and see, here,--you take it from me, there ain't nothing more dangerous as a dog when he gets took that there way. why, i've heard tell of dogs what have torn men limb from limb." and then he added in afterthought: "men that've been kind to 'em, too." her laughter rang out shrilly, piercingly. "aw, james," she giggled hysterically. "aw, now, james-- "what's that?" his hand was on her hand. "see here, you, ain't i kind to 'em?" his touch sobered her quite suddenly. "kind to 'em--?" she repeated his words vaguely as though not fully conscious of their actual meaning. the grip of his fingers tightened cruelly about her arm. "ain't i--kind--to--'em?" "oh, my gawd," she whimpered. "oh, my gawd,--yes." he went back to the center of the room and lighted the lamp on the bare-boarded, pine-wood table. its light flickered in a sickly, yellow glow over the straight-backed chairs, across the unpapered walls, and dribbled feebly upwards to where the heavy rafters of the ceiling were obliterated in a smothering thickness of shadows. "what're you standing there for? pull down that blind! come here, i say!" the faint, motionless form there beside the dog-house. the wooden, stiffened attitude of it. the great mass of the chow's rigid body that was gradually becoming absorbed into the gray shadow; that was slowly losing its faint outline in the saturating, blurring darkness. she did as she was told; hastily, nervously. and then she came and stood beside the table. try as she would to prevent it her eyes kept on staring through the curtained window. again she became conscious of the yelping, the prolonged whines, the quick, incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the throaty, infuriated snarling. "i can't stand it no more!" she shrieked. "it's too much,--so it is! i just--can't--stand--it--no--more!" he looked up at her, startled. "what under the canopy's eating you?" she sank into a chair. the palms of her hands pounded against each other. in the lamplight her face showed itself pale and drawn with the eyes pulling out of its deadened setness in live despair. "you got to do something for me, james." her voice shook. "you simply got to do it. i ain't never asked nothing from you before this. i've been a good wife to you. i've stood for a lot,--gawd knows i have. i ain't never made no complaint. you got to do this for me, james." "got to,--huh? them's high words, my lady. there ain't nothing what i got to do. you ain't gone plum crazy, have you?" "crazy?" she muttered. "no, i ain't gone crazy;--not yet, i ain't. only you got to do this for me, james." "what're you driving at,--huh?" she rose to her feet then. when she spoke her tone was quite controlled. "you got to let that chow-dog go." the man sprang erect. "what d'you mean?" "you--got--to--let--china-ching--go! you got to let him get away. you got to make that china-ching--free." he laughed. the laugh had no sound of mirth in it. the laugh was long and loud; but its loudness could not cover the insidious evil of it. "that's a good one," he shouted. "let a dog go of his own sweet will when some day i'll be getting my price for him. that's the funniest thing i've heard in many a long day. land's sakes! you're just full of wit,--ain't you?" "i ain't," she retorted sullenly. but he paid no attention to her. "i never would have thought it--that's a cinch! say,--it do seem i'm learning all the time." her teeth came together with a sharp snap. "better be careful you don't learn too much,--about me." she whispered it beneath her breath. "muttering,--huh?" he leaned toward her over the table. "i don't like no muttering. i ain't the one to allow no muttering around me. speak out--if you got something to say;--and if you ain't,--why, then,--shut up!" the lamp threw its full light up into his face. not one muscle, not one wrinkle, but stood out harshly above its crude flame. she drew back a step. "all right." she had been goaded into it. "i'll speak up--all right. that's what you wants, ain't it? i've stood for enough. i reckon i've stood for too much. you knows that. but you ain't thought that maybe i knows it,--have you? that makes a difference,--don't it? you knows the way you treats me,--only you ain't thought that i ever gives it no thought;--and i ain't,--no,--i ain't; not till you brought that there china-ching here. not--till--you--brought--china-ching." "what's that mut got to do between you and me?" his eyes refused to meet her eyes that were ablaze with a strange, inspired light. "everything. from the day i seen you bring him here--; from the day i seen you beating him because he snapped at you--; from the day you chained him up to that dog-house to break his spirit--; from that day it come over me what you done to me." "you're crazy;--plum crazy!" "oh, no, i ain't;" she went on in suppressed fury. "i've slaved for you when you was sober, and when you was drunk. i've stood your kicks and i've stood your dirty talk, and i've stood for the way you treats them there dogs. and d'you know why i've stood for it,--say, do you?" his hands clenched at his sides. their knuckles showed white against the soiled dark skin. "no--and what's more--" she interrupted him. "i've stood for it all because i knowed that any time--any time, mind you,--i could clear out. whenever i likes i can get up and,--go!" "you wouldn't dare;--you ain't got the nerve!" "i have--; i have,--too." "where'd you go,--huh?" "i'd get away from you,--all right." "what'd you do?" "that ain't of no account to you!" he watched her for a second between half-closed lids. a cunning smile spread itself over his thick lips. he walked to the door and threw it wide open. "you can go--if you likes;--you can go--now!" her hand went to her heart. the scant color in her face left it. she took one hesitating step forward and then she stood quite still. "if you lets the dog go--i stays." her words sounded muffled. he shrugged his shoulders. "the dog's my dog. i ain't able to see where he comes in on all this." "you can't see nothing;--you don't want to see! it's knowing too well what that pup's up against that makes me want you to let him go. it's that i don't want to have the heart took out of him;--the way you took the heart out of me,--that makes me want to have him set free." he gave a noiseless chuckle. "so i took the heart out of you,--did i?" she glared at him savagely. "you knows you did!" for a moment they were silent. "well?" he asked. she saw him wave a hand toward the door. "aw, james, you can't be so cruel bad--you can't. the other dogs don't mind it--; they makes a noise and they tears around. and then they eats and drinks and late at nights they lies down and sleeps;--if there ain't no moon. but that china-ching he ain't like them. maybe--he is savage;--maybe you're right to be afraid of him." his whole figure was suddenly taut. his head shrank into his shoulders. "there ain't nothing i'm afraid of;--get that into your head--i ain't afraid of nothing--and if you wants to go,--why, all i got to say is, you can--git!" a stillness came between them, broken only by the sounds from the kennels. the yelping, the shrill prolonged whines, the quick, incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the throaty, infuriated snarling. he went to the table and took the lamp up in one hand. he went over to the door and closed it with a loud bang. then he started toward the stairs. "if you ain't able to bring yourself to leave me," the words came to her over his shoulder, "you can come on up to bed." mechanically she followed him up the steps. mechanically she went through the process of undressing and washing. long after he had fallen asleep she lay there wide awake watching the moonlight trickle in quivering, golden spots across the floor; lay wide awake listening to the eerie baying of the dogs. she had had her chance of freedom and at the last moment her courage had failed her. what she had told him had been the absolute truth. she had never realized what had happened to her, what a stifled, smothered thing she had become, until that day when he had brought the chow-dog home to the kennels. she had married james when she was very young. their fathers' farms adjoined. it had been the expected thing and she had gone through with it quite as a matter of course. in those days he had been somewhat ambitious. the country-folk around admitted grudgingly that james conover was a born farmer. then the old people, both their fathers and his mother, had grown a bit older, and one by one they had died. there had been nothing violent in their deaths. silent, narrow-minded, like most country persons they had grown a trifle more silent, a trifle more bigoted, and then they were dead. it had seemed to her that way at any rate. she had become conscious all of a sudden that she was alone with james. strange that the consciousness should have come to her after she had been alone with him for three years; and then that she should only realize she was alone in the world with him the first time he came home drunk. after that he took to drinking more and more, and finally he gave up farming. it had been quite by accident that he took to boarding dogs; now and then buying one for a quick turn. he liked the job. as far as she could see it gave him more time to spend in the village saloon. one thing she had never been able to understand. in her heart she was certain that james was terrified of the animals. she had seen him shoot a dog at the slightest provocation. but until she had seen the chow she had never bothered with the beasts. she had cooked their meals but she had not been allowed to feed them. she had watched them from the outside of the kennels but she had never gone in to them. she had tolerated their racket because she had never fully understood what lay in back of it all. and then the chow came. james had brought china-ching home in the old runabout; brought him to the kennels tied down in a great basket. she had not paid much attention to either man or dog. the first sight that she had of the chow had been because of james. she had heard his cursing and the crack of his huge whip. she had gone out on the porch then and had seen the man beating the dog with all his strength; the man swearing loudly and furiously and the chow silent. she had never gotten over that spectacle. it was the first time she had ever seen a dog maintain silence. and then day after day she had watched china-ching, chained there and so strangely silent. among all those yapping, yipping dogs he alone had remained quiet. and the other animals had paid scant attention to him after the first short while. even in their wild racing about the enclosure they had given him a wide berth. there was something magnificent, something almost majestic in the chow's aloofness. if it had not been for the dog's eyes she would have thought him dumb;--a fool. but the eyes haunted her. great liquid brown eyes, that met hers with unutterable sadness; eyes that clutched and held on to her with the depths of their sorrow. she made up her mind after the first month that she must free the dog; that she must get him out of the kennels somehow or other. she had never thought of a direct appeal to james. if it had not been for the way he had goaded her this evening she would never have spoken as she did. only she had always known that it would not be in her power to let the dog escape from the kennels without his finding who had done it; without bearing the brunt of his inevitable rage. and after the first month she began almost unconsciously to associate herself with the chow, to put herself in his place. as she commenced to understand what his desires for freedom must be so she first realized that those same desires were hers. only, as she phrased it to herself, she could stand it a lot better than the chow. dogs could not reason. she could go on existing this way till the end of her days; but she felt that if china-ching could not be freed that he would die. she could not bear the thought of that. whatever happened to the dog would happen to that part of her which had come into being when the dog had come. the moonlight trickled further and further into the room. the stream of it spilled itself wider and wider along the shadow-specked floor. she could hear the man's deep breathing, now and then punctuated by a guttural snore. the eerie baying of the dogs; and out there the one silent dog chained to the dog-house. not one moment longer could she endure it. very stealthily she got up and slipped on her skirt. shoeless and stockingless she crept out into the hall and down the stairs. unbolting the front door, she paused an instant to hear if she had been detected. with strained ears she listened for those harsh, long-drawn snores. but the house was very still. she could not hear his breathing from where she was. if only he would snore. she waited. the sound came to her at last. she hurried out on to the porch. the dampness of the summer night was all about her. overhead the pale flecks of innumerable stars, and the far, cold light of the waning moon. from somewheres in the distance came the monotonous droning of locusts. against the dark clump of bushes darted the quick, illusive glimmer of a will-o'-the-wisp. she shivered as her feet struck the chill, wet grass. and then very slowly she went toward the kennels. her eyes took no note of the dogs that lay on the ground; of the little fox-terrier sniffing here and there along the wall for rats; of the big police-dog, and the massive english bull, reared on their haunches, their muzzles lifted to the moon. she only saw, chained to the dog-house,--a pale blur in the haunting, whitened light,--the silent, yellow mass of the chow,--china-ching. she knew that the great, liquid brown eyes were fixed upon her; she could feel them drawing her on. she went toward him. very silently she went. and as she went she mumbled. "if they start a rumpus,--the same racket,--maybe,--if he wakes he won't think nothing of it;--that is, if he ain't enough awake to know i ain't there besides him. maybe though, he won't wake;--maybe they won't make no noise;--maybe he won't--please, gawd--! only to get china-ching,--so that he can feel free--please, gawd!--so's china-ching don't have to stay--so that i--please gawd!--so's i can set something--free." she suddenly became afraid to approach too silently. afraid of the deafening uproar of a dog's warning. already the police-dog had stopped his regular baying; already the little fox-terrier sniffed the air through the wire netting, sensing some one coming. if only she had thought to get them some bones; if only she had a piece of meat; a dog-biscuit,--anything to throw to them to keep them quiet. but she had not had time to think of that. she began to whistle softly, and then a bit louder as she realized that she had whistled the call of the whip-poor-will. the police-dog got to his feet. she could hear the sinister rumbling of his throaty snarling. she saw the bull-dog waddling clumsily after him. they stood there, their coats bristling, their ears erect, their muzzles poked into the wire netting. and then a quick bark from quite the other side of the kennels. she felt that numberless small eyes were peering out at her with betraying cunning. it seemed to her that innumerable dogs were rising from the ground; were rushing to the walls; were tearing out of their separate kennels. she called then; called very low, in the hope that they might know her voice. "china-ching;--oh, china-ching." she was face to face with it now. all through the day she managed somehow to bear with it. hideous as it was, deafening so that she could not hear, hated so that it made her physically ill. and now in the dead of night it was let loose; with the unlimited stillness of the night vibrating in grotesque, yapping echo, with the cold light of the moon spotting uncanny over the kennels, she had it. the yelping, the shrill, prolonged whines, the quick incessant barking; and running in growling under-current, the throaty, infuriated snarling. she knew then that it was quite beyond hope that james should not hear them. she had to hurry. she began to run; and all the while she called in the same low voice: "china-ching;--i'm coming to you. oh china-ching--" she pulled back the stiff, iron bolts. it took all her strength to do that. she opened the gate a bit, and slipped in, pushing it to, behind her. and then she was among them. their noise increased in volume,--pitched in a shriller note. the sudden rush of them threw her off her feet. some of them leaped on her. she felt a sharp, stinging nip in her wrist. in a second she was up again. "down!" she commanded. "down!" she went toward the chow, pushing the other dogs out of her way with both hands; stumbling, stepping over them as they crowded about her feet. "down!" she murmured breathless. it was not until she got well within a couple of strides of the chow that the other dogs dropped away from her. it was the same thing that she had witnessed a hundred times from her window. the animals had always given china-ching a wide berth; had always respected his magnificent, majestic aloofness. and as she reached him she fell to her knees. "china-ching;" she whispered brokenly. "china-ching!" her arms went around the dog's neck. her hands stroked the thick ruff at his throat. she felt a cold nose on her cheek. a slow, deep sniffing; a second later two heavy paws were on her shoulder, and a warm, moist tongue curled again and again about her ear. in the moonlight she looked into his eyes. the great, liquid brown eyes met hers with all their unutterable sadness. "d'you want to go, china-ching?" she murmured; "d'you want to go and be free?" her fingers were working swiftly at his collar. as it clanked to the ground she felt him stiffen rigidly beneath her touch. she saw his ears go back flat against his head; she saw his upper lip pulled so that the long, sharp teeth showed glisteningly in the huckle-berry, blue gums. she followed the set stare of his eyes, and what she saw sent a shiver down her spine. coming across the waste that had once been a garden, running stumblingly in the full path of the moonlight, came james. and the other dogs had seen him. she realized that when she heard the growling, the snarling, the low, infuriated snorts. she rushed back to the gate. james saw her then. "get away," he shouted. "get away from there!" she threw the gate open and stood leaning against it to keep it wide. "china-ching," she called; "come on,--china-ching!" but it was the other dogs that tore past her. first one, then another, then two together, and then the whole wild, panting pack of them. "for gawd's sake;" the man shrieked. "get--get--" the words were lost in his breathless choking. the chow-dog was the last to go. for a second he stood beside her. she bent over him. she was afraid to touch him; afraid that at that moment her hands might involuntarily hold him. "go on, china-ching;" she urged frantically; "go on!" "hey, you--!" the man stormed at the dogs. "here--, here--!" he whistled; "here, boy,--here, old fellow,--come on;--" he suddenly stood still. he tried to make his whistling persuasive. he was out of breath. when he saw that they would not come to him he ran after them. they scattered pellmell before him. she saw them disappearing in every direction. some of them slinking away with their tails between their legs; some of them crawling into the bushes on their bellies; some of them rushing head-long, racing madly into the night. only the yellow mass of the chow-dog went in even padded patter out toward the road. she waited there for james. she could not think. she only waited. and at last he came back. "you--" his voice was low; "you--!" the words were smothered in his anger. she smiled then. she thought that she still could hear the even, padded patter of the dog jogging to his freedom. "so you turned on me;--you--! d'you know what's going to happen to you;--d'you dare to think?" her voice was filled with a strange calm. "i don't care, james;--i don't care--none. i set china-ching loose." his face leered at her evilly in the moonlight. "you ain't got no excuses;--you don't even make no excuses to me;--huh?" "no, james;--no!" her tone was exultant. the even, padded patter was still in her ears. it seemed so near. she saw the man's raised fist. the coarse, bulging hammer of it. she felt that something was behind her. she turned. the chow stood there--his ears back; his coat bristling, the hairs standing on end in tremendous bushiness; his fangs laid bare. there he crouched, drawn together, ready to spring. the man took a step toward her. out of the corner of her eyes she could see the huge taut fist. "i wouldn't do that, james;" she said quietly. "i just--wouldn't!" "you'll live to rue the day." the words came hoarsely, gutturally. "i'm going to beat you, woman. i'm going to beat you,--damn good!" "you ain't;" she said. "look, james!" she pointed to the chow. "call him off;" the man shrieked. "d'you want him to kill me?" she saw him trembling with fear, paralyzed with terror so that his clenched hand still reached above his head,--shaking. she thought then of the pistol he always carried with him. for the second time she smiled. she saw him try to take a step backwards. his knees almost gave way under him. the chow wormed a bit nearer. "call him off;--take him away. damn you, speak to him--! for gawd's sake,--do something;--" he whined. she looked at the man, cowed; abjectly afraid. she had nothing more to fear from him. he was beaten. her hand went out until it rested on the dog's head. "it's all right, china-ching. it's all right,--now." she felt the chow's great eyes fixed on her face; she felt that he was waiting. "you can go on, james;--go on into the house!" "what--what d'you mean?" he stuttered. "i'm going," she said. "me, and china-ching. i told you i'd go when i was ready;--but i wasn't going alone. that's what you ain't understood, james. now we're both going. and you better be meandering up to your house, or maybe china-ching he'll be getting tired of waiting." slowly the man turned; ponderously, his figure huddled together, he started back stumbling along in the full path of the moonlight. she thought she saw his fingers fumbling to his hip-pocket. "stop!" she called. "none of that, james. this here's one time when that there gun don't work." "i ain't got no gun." the mumbled words came back to her indistinctly. "d'you think if i'd have had--" "stand where you are. and don't you make no move from there. we'll be on our way,--now." he stood still. "come on, china-ching." she started toward the road, the dog at her heels. once as she went she turned to look at the emptied, quiet kennels, at the moonlight drenched waste that had once been a garden; at the huddled figure of the man standing there so silently. "good-by, james," she called. out in the road she paused to look up and down the long, white stretch of it. the chow stopped at her side. his great, liquid brown eyes were raised to hers. she could feel his impatience to be off. suddenly he started. her feet followed those padded, pattering feet. "aw, china-ching," she whispered, "aw, china-ching--" the wood of living trees _and i do hereby swear and take unto myself right solemnly and in most sacred oath before the lord god to prove myself innocent of this most awful and hideous crime, for the which, in the morning, i do swing by the neck. i, cedric of hampden, do swear to show with the righteous help of most high god, that it is not i who beareth the blood guilt of the murther of the lady beatrix._ _there is in this world a certain devilish influence that worketh most evilly against the high heavens and the good in man, and the which doeth foully with the flesh of man and bringeth the soul of him unto the stinking depths of hell. i, cedric of hampden, having scant knowledge of the meanings of witchcraft, or of magic, either black or white, have many times and oft felt the spell which lyeth so infernally o'er the wood of living trees. i, who loveth the lady beatrix, who did meet her death the while she wandered within the confines of the wood of living trees, searching therein for the crucifix which she did lose from off her neck, do accuse no one of the killing of her whom i loved. yet unto myself i do confess the knowledge of this evil thing, the which i have assured myself hath the power at all times to become incarnate._ _this will i prove. at some unknown time will i show that in this world a certain devilish influence worketh most evilly against the high heavens and the good in man. i do confess the knowing of this to be true, and many times and oft have i convinced myself that this satanic thing hath the power to become incarnate._ _in the morning i hang. god, the father, christ, the son, come unto me in purgatory that i may fulfill my sacred oath and that the soul of her i love may find peace within the seven golden gates of heaven._ at first there was not one of them who noticed it. strange that people who are forever entertaining are so very apt to disregard the congeniality of their guests. perhaps they become calloused; probably they grow tired of a ceaseless picking and choosing. after a while they caught on to it. it was one of those things that could not be avoided. gregory manners never was the sort of chap to conceal his feelings, and very evidently he had most decided ones in regard to the russian, stephanof andreyvitch. he was much in vogue, was andreyvitch. it was considered rather a stunt to get him to come to one of your dinners. he was tremendously in demand. not that andreyvitch had ever done anything to make himself famous. it was just the personality of the man. women would tell you that he was fascinating, different. of course there were some of them, the stupid, fastidious ones, who took offense at his looks. no one could ever say they were in any way prepossessing. he was fairly well built, extremely sinewy. his arms were noticeably long and he had an odd fashion of always walking on the balls of his feet. add to that a rather narrow face, a heavy nose, deep-set eyes, a bit too close together, and a shock of reddish-brown hair, which grew over his head and face in great abundance. most men would not pretend to understand him. he was at all times courteous. perhaps even too suavely polite for the anglo-saxon temperament. he aired his views with a wonderful assurance; views that had to do chiefly with æstheticism and a violent disregard of all conventional thought. when andreyvitch spoke, one had the feeling that he feared to express himself too well; that after all his wicked disbelief in the things in which most men placed their entire faith was something actually a part of him; something which might even cause the amazing heathenism of his talk to be somewhat subdued. and when stephanof andreyvitch spoke, one could not help but notice his teeth. yellow, horridly decayed things they were, with the two eye-teeth on either side surprisingly pointed, like fangs. of course, in his way gregory manners was a bit of a lion. it was that which undoubtedly made them attribute his dislike of the russian to jealousy. at least at first. afterwards they found plenty of other reasons. naturally one of them was kathleen. but that came much later on. he had traveled all over the world, had manners, and he wrote charmingly vague bits that one read and then forgot. he took himself very seriously. he was one of those men who believe firmly and basically that they are sent into this world with a mission to perform. one could not actually tell whether manners really thought his writing to be his life work. his best friends maintained that he had not as yet found himself. but no one bothered to ask him the question. his work was good; he was a distinctly decent sort of chap, utterly british, and he was above all else exceedingly interesting. for the most part, people were really fond of manners, and he fond of them. the first time andreyvitch and manners were introduced, manners had the feeling that they had met at some time before. he even asked the russian if it had not been in moscow. when andreyvitch told him that he had never in his whole life seen him, and that he positively regretted not having done so, manners' attitude underwent a sudden and unexpected change. he became silent, almost morose. he kept away from andreyvitch all evening, and yet he stayed near enough to him to watch his every move. after that night manners decided he hated andreyvitch; that he knew the man was a liar, an impostor. not at the time that he was in any way jealous of the russian; still there was a strange familiar feeling there that he had felt at some other time, and in connection with the same man. he could have sworn he had known him before. it was the only way then in which he could explain the thing to himself with any degree of coherence. it was never difficult to get gregory manners to speak of the first evening he met andreyvitch. it was almost as if he were tremendously puzzled, as if he thought speaking of it, even to a casual acquaintance, might clear things up to himself. he never varied the thing. at first, at any rate. later on he became strangely, uncannily secretive about it all. that must have been when he began to suspect there was a great deal more to it than had appeared upon the surface. "d'you know?" his words always came slowly. "deuce take it! i thought i was going to like the fellow. i'd heard so much about him, too. why, old chap, i was anxious; positively keen, to know him. and then--why, when i stood face to face with him, i couldn't think of anything but that i had known him, or did know him, or something. first glance and i saw he was one of those poseurs. one of those rummy fellows who affect poses because they're always consciously trying to imitate the people about them. that's it, you know. they can't be themselves because of some queer kink they funk expressing. so they fake other people and quite naturally they overdo it." he would usually get worked up about this time; and then he would go on a lot more quickly: "i've seen them the world over. there was one chap--but--well--i thought this--this fellow who calls himself andreyvitch, was just going to be one of them--poseurs, you know. he looked harmless enough to be sure. of course there were his eyes--and the way he walks--but then--i couldn't help feeling he wasn't quite--quite cricket. that came over me confoundedly strongly at the very first minute. and when he smiled--i say, man, d'you ever see such damnably wicked teeth?" and the man to whom he spoke always had to admit that he had never seen such teeth. later on manners never worked himself up as much. "that fellow who calls himself andreyvitch--i've met him before. don't know where; and at that i've a pretty fair head for names and places. but i know him. he may have looked differently, and it probably was in some of those out-of-the-way holes; but i know him. i don't say he was the russian andreyvitch when i knew him--but--well, old chap, we'll see." they stopped asking andreyvitch and manners around together after a while. but that never kept manners from speaking of the russian. "was andreyvitch there?" "they don't ask us together, eh?" "no fear, old chap, of my insulting him; i couldn't, you know!" "rather a filthy sort of beggar, that russian; makes the gooseflesh come over me. happened before. deuce take the thing!--if i could only think when!" and then after manners had dropped out of sight for a fortnight or more, he suddenly made his appearance at the club. they were all of them unspeakably shocked by his looks. he never carried much weight, but in those two weeks he had gotten down to little else than skin and bones. his color was ghastly. his cheekbones were appallingly prominent and his eyes looked as if they were sunken back into his skull. to all their questions he gave the same answer: "no, he wasn't ill. no, he hadn't been ill. there was nothing the matter with him. he'd felt a bit seedy and he'd run down to his place for a fortnight. it was good of them to bother. he was quite, quite all right." they saw he wanted to be left alone and they let him go over to the window and sit there, his great, loose frame huddled together in the leather arm chair. there could not have been more than three or four of them sitting near him. it was only those three or four who saw him stagger to his feet, swaying there dizzily for a second. only those three or four who could distinguish the words spoken in that low, half strangled whisper. "that's it--i've got it now--something rotten; always living--always waiting the chance to do its filthy harm! the power to incarnate--in any form. the greater its loathsomeness, the greater that incarnating stuff! probably at most times more beast than human--but it could take on human guise--that's it--that's--" and those three or four men saw him rush out of the reading-room, his head thrown well back, his eyes ablaze with a great light. and then mrs. broughton-hollins gave the famous house-party. the house-party of which every member, although not fully understanding, tried to forget. the house-party which drove gregory manners and kathleen bennet out of england. mrs. broughton-hollins was a charming little american widow, with untold wealth and a desire to do everything, everywhere, with every one. of course she always managed to get a lot of nice people together, and of course she picked the very nicest ones for her house-party. then because she had set her heart on having the russian, stephanof andreyvitch, she naturally got him to come, and because she had kathleen bennet, she had to ask gregory. kathleen and gregory were engaged to be married. she was a dear, was kathleen. as pretty as a picture and delightfully simple-minded. her father belonged to the clergy, and her family consisted of innumerable brothers and sisters. gregory manners, who had traveled the world over, fell quite completely in love with her. and she--she worshiped the ground he walked on. no one ever quite knew whether or not manners heard that andreyvitch was to be of the house-party. perhaps he had; probably he had not. if kathleen were to be there, that would have been all-sufficient, as far as manners was concerned. by that time manners had worked himself out of his frenzy of hatred against the russian. they had been able to explain it to themselves by saying that he had talked himself into it. as a matter of fact, the whole thing was totally subconscious. whenever he had become conscious the man was anywhere near him, he had begun to realize his hatred of him. but now it had gone infinitely further than just that. manners had become uncannily quiet and uncannily knowing. they were all together in the hall when manners, as usual, came in late. mrs. broughton-hollins and an anæmic looking youth, who always lounged about in her wake; a man named galvin, an oldish chap, who had seen service in india, and his pretty, young wife. the dowager of endon and her middle-aged son, the duke, and stephanof andreyvitch, holding the center of the floor with little kathleen bennet sitting close to where he stood, her eyes fixed in awed surprise upon his face; her white fingers toying nervously with a small silver crucifix which hung about her neck. whether or not andreyvitch heard the man announce gregory manners, whether or not he saw him standing there in the doorway, whether or not he purposely went on with what he was then saying was a subject for debate the rest of the evening. "faith?" andreyvitch's low, insidious voice carried well. "but there's no such thing. can't you realize that all this sickly sentimentality is nothing but dogmatic idiocy on your parts? must you all drivel your catechism at every turn of the road? must you close your eyes to filth, to vice, to everything you think outside of your smug english minds? don't you know you're a part of it? that each one of you is part of the lowest, rottenest--" it was then that, unable to stand it a second longer, gregory manners came into the room. "i--i most sincerely hope i'm not interrupting, andreyvitch--but--are you speaking of those things--again?" the quiet, polite tone was full of subtle significance. and although they could not have known what manners actually meant, they all of them recognized an emphatic significance. and not one of those people present could overlook the peculiar stress which he had laid upon that slow-drawled "again." andreyvitch turned sharply; his face for a second drawn into a hideous, ghastly grimace. "it is no interruption, mr. manners." he was trying hard to resume his habitual insouciance. "but what do you mean, eh? what is this?" he stood where he was, did manners. his face was almost expressionless. "i think you know what i mean. but see here. i'll repeat it for you, if you like. listen this time. are--you--speaking--of--those--things--_again_?" the russian was livid. and for an infinitesimal fraction of time it seemed to those watching him that he was cowed; terrifyingly cowed. "your humor," he shrugged his shoulders, endeavoring to pass the thing off as flippantly as possible; "your humor is bizarre, mr. manners. i spoke but of that which we all know exists. surely there is no harm in speaking of what we all recognize!" manners' voice rang out clearly, in surprising sternness. "we all know what exists in this world. we know that greater than all else is faith. as long as you speak before those who know what real goodness is, who believe in it, there is no harm done! i hardly think this is the first time you've tried to impress evil on people--the reason for that's easily understood. but, thank god." his tone vibrated with earnestness. "thank god, you can do nothing here!" the russian turned on him. his usual suave manner had left him. his words were little else than an angry snarl. "you know me well--very well, indeed, my english friend. you who have met me--is it not once--perhaps, eh, twice?" manners laughed. a laugh that had no sound of mirth in it. "i've met you again and again. and you know it! and there's something else we have to settle for--and you know that, too--mr.--mr. andreyvitch!" and then gregory manners turned to mrs. broughton-hollins. "good afternoon," he said, quietly. a bit flustered, the hostess got hastily to her feet. "so good of you to come--you know every one, don't you, gregory? you'll have your tea here with us?" and below her breath, she added: "you mustn't be too hard on andreyvitch, gregory. these russians--well, they're all a bit primitive." he went from one to the other of the men. he kissed kathleen's hand and told her how pretty she looked. he let mrs. broughton-hollins pour his tea, and he ignored the russian completely, the while he watched kathleen with a strange foreboding, as her eyes flickered again and again over andreyvitch's face. things did not go very smoothly during the next two days. naturally they all did the usual. golf and riding, bridge and dancing in the evenings, and shooting. andreyvitch was passionately fond of shooting. manners had never so much as killed a sparrow in all his life. there was an undercurrent of uneasiness which permeated the entire household. it was not particularly because of andreyvitch and manners. it was something that not one of them could have explained if they had been put to it. the first day mrs. galvin told her husband that she would be glad when it was all over. and although unexpressed that was the general sentiment. not that andreyvitch or manners made the others uncomfortable. after gregory's first outburst, and now that they were under the same roof, it rather seemed that the russian avoided manners. and manners--he watched carefully every movement, every little turn or twist of andreyvitch's. at that time it was as if he were trying to substantiate some memory of his; to substantiate it deliberately and positively. and then because of andreyvitch's unceasing attentions to kathleen bennet, word went round among the various members of the house-party that gregory and kathleen had quarreled. it was sunday afternoon when manners came upon kathleen walking alone in the rose-garden. "i'll be jolly well glad," he told her, "when we get back to town again." "aren't you having a good time, greg?" "how can i?" "but you really needed the rest--you haven't been looking any too fit, you know. i thought this would be quite nice for you, greg." he let loose at that. "if you must have it, kathleen. i can't stand you and that bounder in the same house. that's the truth of it, old girl!" she avoided answering him directly. "it's such a ripping place here, gregory. all--that is, all but those forests over there. the gardener told me his grandfather used to call them the wood of living trees. he couldn't tell me why--only--isn't it a strange name, greg?" she wound up lamely. evidently she had not said what she started out to say. "not so awfully," he answered absent-mindedly. "it's probably an old, old name. they stick to places, you know." "but the woods," she went on slowly, "they're so dark and mysterious and all that sort of thing. i've wanted to explore them ever since i've been here--that is--that's not altogether true, gregory. they frighten me a good bit--especially at night. i get into quite a funk about it--at night. i say, you wouldn't call me a coward, would you, gregory?" "of course not, kathleen. what utter nonsense!" "but if i weren't afraid," she continued half to herself. "if i weren't really terrified, i'd go into the woods and show myself there's nothing to be frightened of, wouldn't i?" "you most certainly would not!" he said. "if you did, you'd be sure to lose your way, old girl." for a second they walked in silence. "d'you ever feel"--she turned to face him--"d'you ever feel you'd been in a place before--and yet you knew you'd never been there at all?" "no," he told her a bit too abruptly. "you needn't be so stuffy, gregory," she murmured. "oh, my dear!" he caught her and held her in his arms. "can't you see that it's all like a horrible nightmare? can't you see that i'm not able to know positively until it's actually happened--and then--oh, my god!--if it should be too late!" her hands clenched rigidly on his shoulders. "gregory," she whispered, "tell me, dear--you've been so strange of late--so terribly unlike yourself. tell me, dear, what is it?" "nothing, dearest girl--nothing." "oh, but there is something!" she exclaimed passionately. "i've known it right along. i haven't asked because i thought you'd tell me. why--one must be blind not to see how you've changed! you're--you're just a skeleton of yourself, gregory." she paused for breath. "can't you bring yourself to tell me--can't you, dear?" "if i only knew," he muttered, "if i only knew--for certain." her eyes were lifted to his. the brows met in a puckering frown above them. "gregory--that time you were away--for a whole fortnight--did anything happen, then--gregory?" "did anything happen?" she had surprised him into it. "good god, did anything happen? why, you don't know what it was like--you couldn't know! if they'd told me such a thing were possible--i shouldn't have believed it! i wanted to think--i wanted to work the thing out for myself--so i went down there for a rest. rest--" he broke off then, but she stood very silently beside him and presently he went on again. "have you ever felt you were going mad, kathleen? raving, tearing--mad? that's how i felt for two weeks. i thought it would never end. and all the time--why, i couldn't think! i couldn't do anything but feel that something was driving me to do something--something tremendous, as if the very force of my own life were making me do this thing that i had been sent into life to do. and, kathleen," his voice sank to a hoarse whisper, "i couldn't understand--what--it--was!" she put her arm about his neck and drew his head down until her cheek rested on his. "i couldn't think a thought," he muttered. "i'd laid myself open to the thing. it just swept over me and through me. it saturated me with the impulse to do the thing i had come into the world to do! the one thing that stood out--was--the feeling that it would have to be done--soon." he paused for a moment. "and then one afternoon at the club--when i'd been back a day or two--something came to me-a sudden knowledge of--well, of rottenness--that--that might have to be done away with--as if that had something to do with it. only i don't know, kathleen--not--as yet." he looked at her then and he saw her eyes were filled with tears. he thought he had frightened her. he waited until he had himself well in hand before he spoke again. "kathleen, always believe in the good of things, dearest girl. and, kathleen," the words that came to him were almost as great a surprise to him as they were to her. "never leave that crucifix off your neck. promise me, dear?" "i promise." a little later they went in to tea. he got to bed that night with a great feeling of relief that in the morning they would all be back in town. he had thought something would happen. he had not known what, but the feeling had been there. he did not mind admitting it to himself now, and he did not mind acknowledging that he could not understand how the thing, whatever it was, had been avoided. unformed, undefinable, it had been powerfully imminent. he fell asleep wondering what it was that he had expected. the full moon was streaming into the room when he awoke. he was on his feet in the middle of the floor in a flash. he could have sworn a cry had awakened him. a woman's voice calling for help--a woman's voice that had been strangely like kathleen's. he went to the window and looked out. a cloud had drifted across the surface of the full moon. the whole garden lay blotched with shadows. and there beyond the garden was the forest. black, sinister, mysterious. the dark depth of it sickened him. kathleen had spoken only that afternoon of the forest. the wood of living trees. she had told him it was called the wood of living trees. in heaven's name, where did the horrible, appalling significance of the wood of living trees come from? what was this ghastly knowledge that sought for recognition in his own mind? what did the wood of living trees mean to him? and then he heard the faint, far cry-- his shoes--his trousers--hatless and coatless he was out in the garden. the cloud had passed from off the face of the moon. the garden lay in the bright moonlight; even the separate flowers were visible. beyond was the sinister depth of that black forest. he felt it then. sensed the insidious evil of something that emanated from the wood. something which lurked there beneath the trees--something which clung to the tall trunks of them--something which rose and expanded among the leaves and reached out to him in evil menace. and at some time he had felt it all before. he ran quickly through the garden; over the rosebeds; crashing through the high boxwood hedge at the farther end; and then into the forest. his feet sank into the moss-covered slime. the trees were gigantic. he felt as if they were closing in on him. their branches stretched out like living arms, hindering his progress. thorns caught at his clothing, at his hands, his face. he had a vague, half-formed thought that the forest was advancing to achieve his destruction. his only clear determination was to protect his eyes. he knew then, he had always known, that the wood was some live, evil thing--the wood of living trees; and that it hid the presence of something infinitely more foul. a queer odor assailed his nostrils. an odor that was not only of the damp, dank underbrush; an odor that, in its putridness, almost suffocated him. breathless and half crazed with an unexplainable dread, he fought the forest, beating his way with his naked hands through the dense bushes. and then he heard a sound. the first sound he had heard since entering the forest. it was quite distinct. vibrating loudly through the deadly stillness of the wood, came the steady patter of a four-footed thing. the next instant something leaped out of the darkness--something huge and strong that tried to catch at his neck. he fought for his life then. fought this horrible thing that had been concealed by the forest. fought with the darkness shutting down on him and that putrid odor smothering his breathing. panting and blinded, he and the thing swayed to and fro, crashing against the tree-trunks, springing again and again at each other from the tangled underbrush. he never knew how long he struggled there in the blackness of the wood. it might have been hours; it might have been minutes. and then he had the beast by its great, hairy throat. the infuriated snarling grew weaker-- he felt the body become rigid. silence. he threw the thing from him. he staggered farther into the wood. he had not gone far when he came upon kathleen. she was walking uncertainly toward him. the moonlight trickled clear and yellow through the branches now. he could see her lips moving--moving--he knew that she was praying. her eyes looked out at him dazed and unseeing; and in her right hand that was reached before her he saw the little, silver crucifix. he did not dare speak to her. he was afraid. he sank back against the bushes and let her pass. the moonlight flooded the place with its haunting golden light. a strange feeling of relief came over him and with it a vast calm. and very quietly he followed her. she went a bit further. and she came to that spot where he had killed the thing. he heard her shriek. the wild cry that had awakened him. "the wolf--gregory--the wolf!" he caught her in his arms as she fainted. then he looked down. there at his feet lay the body of the russian, stephanof andreyvitch. _this will i prove. at some unknown time will i show that in this world a certain devilish influence worketh most evilly against the high heavens and the good in man. i do confess the knowing of this to be true, and many times and oft have i convinced myself that this satanic thing hath the power to become incarnate._ _in the morning i hang. god, the father, christ, the son, come unto me in purgatory that i may fulfill my sacred oath and that the soul of her i love may find peace within the seven golden gates of heaven._ before the dawn he had gotten as far as the cross-roads. he could not go on. his feet ached; his eyes hurt with the incessant effort of trying to penetrate the obliterating dark. where the three roads met he stopped. above him the black, unlighted skies. before him mile upon mile of deep, shadow-stained plain. somewhere beyond the plain, at the foot of the hills, lay charvel. jans was waiting for him at charvel. his orders to meet jans were urgent; but now he could not go further. jans would have to wait until morning, when, by the light of day, he could again find the way which he had so completely lost in the night. he sank down at the base of the crucifix. it loomed in a ghostly, gray mass against the muddy white of the wind-driven clouds. he pulled his coat collar up about his ears. his eyes were raised to where he thought to see the dimly defined christ figure; but the pitch black gloom drenched opaquely over everything. there was something mysterious; something remote, about the cross. he imagined peasants kneeling before it in awed reverence, gabbling their prayers. the ignorance of such idolatry! their prayers had not been proof against the enemies' bullets; and still they prayed. tired as he was, he laughed aloud. "why do you laugh?" he started to his feet. the voice, quiet and deep, came from directly behind him. he had not conceived the possibility of any human thing lurking so dangerously near. he peered blindly through the obscuring dark. "who's there?" he questioned, his fingers involuntarily closing tautly about the butt of the revolver at his belt. "you, too, ask questions, eh?" the voice went on. "i can almost make out the shape of you. do you see me?" it seemed to him then that by carefully tracing the sound of the voice he could dimly define the outline of a man's form lying close within the murked, smudging shadow of the crucifix. "yes, i think now i almost see you." his tone was anything but assured. "what are you doing here?" "what is there to do but sleep?" the muttered words were half defiant. "name of a dog! it was your laughter that woke me. why did you laugh?" "if i weren't so tired, i might explain it to you." he hesitated a second, playing for time. "i was thinking--drawing up a mental picture of the ignorant peasant praying here before your back-rest." "my back-rest?" the man's voice was sleepily puzzled. "it's this cross you mean, eh? well, never mind, my fine fellow. it has comfort--and that's something to be grateful for." "not the sort of splintery comfort i'd choose." he wondered what sort of a man this was. he was used to judging men at sight. he cursed inwardly the unlighted night. "i'm not spending my time out here from choice--i can tell you that! this does for me well enough. i told you, didn't i, that i was asleep until your stupid laughing woke me? sacré, why did you have to laugh? what's the joke, eh?" "perhaps it's my natural humor; even when i'm dead tired." he grinned to himself. he had reached his decision. this sleepy fool sounded safe enough; besides the question itself was non-committal. he asked it: "say, do you know the way to charvel?" "you're miles from charvel, my friend. you've surely lost all sense of direction." "right. i don't know where i'm at. it's this damned blackness. never saw such an infernal night. started to walk from chalet corneille this afternoon. didn't count on its getting dark so early. then i lost my way. been wandering about for hours. probably in a circle. and now i'm half dead. god! i'm all in!" "it's almost morning. if you wait for the light, you'll not miss your road again; but i shouldn't counsel you to try to find it till dawn." he wondered if he dared to go to sleep with this man beside him. there were the papers carefully concealed in his right boot-leg; the papers jans was waiting for. the man sounded plain-spoken and courteous enough, considering he had been aroused from supposedly sound slumber. he felt he wasn't a soldier. that is, he couldn't be one of their men. he knew what their men were like. despite their world reputation he had heard they were anything but courteous. but then one never knew. and anyway hadn't this man spoken to him in irreproachable french? still, french was the language of the country and his own gift of languages was rather pronounced. of course it tended to make him a bit suspicious; but logically he couldn't lay much stress on it. if only he had gotten beyond their lines before night, everything would have been all right. as it was he must have been wandering round and round, covering the self-same ground and getting no nearer to charvel, where jans was waiting for him and the papers. taking all in all into consideration, he decided it best not to let himself sleep; even if the staying awake was not an easy plan for a man utterly tired. he would have to do it somehow or other. "you're a native of these parts?" he asked, trying to keep any trace of speculation as to what the man really was out of his voice. "sacré, but i thought you were about to sleep." the tone sounded as if it might be angry. "i assure you it will soon be morning." "don't feel like sleeping. if you don't want to talk i can easily be quiet." "no--no! it makes no difference to me. i've had my forty winks. we'll talk, if you want. not that i was ever one for doing much talking. i'm too little of a fool for that--still--why don't you lean back here beside me against this beam?" he wriggled backwards and propped his drooping head stiffly against the wood of the cross. "i can't see you at all." he closed his eyes; it wasn't worth the throbbing strain of it to try to penetrate the obliterating, dripping darkness. he couldn't do it. "i'd like to see you." "i'd like to see you, my friend. but what good are wishes, eh? do you say you live at chalet corneille?" on the instant he was alert. "why do you ask?" "curiosity, my friend. i know of some good people there by name of fornier. perhaps they might be friends of yours." "don't think i know them." he paused to collect his wits. he had been startled by the man's suave question. he wondered if he was going to try to trap him. he thought he couldn't have done it more neatly himself. this job of stalling when he was almost too tired to think wasn't an easy thing to do. he called upon his imagination. "i'm an artist," he lied smoothly. "sent over here to paint war scenes. i couldn't miss the chance of a ransacked village. its picturesque value is tremendous. i've just finished my painting of chalet corneille." he waited tentatively. surely if the man were just some simple, sleepy fool he'd say something now to give an inkling of what he was. "one week ago it was splashed in blood--soldiers too, in their way, are artists," was all he said. "then you're not a soldier?" "what made you think i was?" "i don't know what you are," he answered truthfully; and then quite frankly he came back with the man's own question. "did you say _you_ lived in chalet corneille?" "no--i asked if you knew people there by name of fornier?" "mighty few folk left there now." the picture of the razed town came before him. "some old men waiting for the lost ones to come back to them; some young children and three or four sisters of charity. and then this morning i saw a woman--she wasn't much more than a girl--she had a face you couldn't forget. they told me about her at the inn, where i breakfasted." "tell me," the man suggested grudgingly; "we're comfortable enough. dawn's a long way off, and i suppose you want to talk." "there isn't much to tell. she left the town; was driven out of it with the others. unlike them, she came back. god knows what she wanted to do that for! they told me of her goodness; and her beauty and her kindness. they dwelt on it at great length. don't know as i blame them for harping on all that. and now it seems the spirit of the war has lit upon even her. she's changed--they say she's absolutely no good these days. steals--lies--has done everything, as near as i can make out, excepting commit murder. but you ought to have seen her face. i'll wager that once seen, it would rise to haunt any one. i don't care who it'd be. it was beautiful--but--" he felt the man look up at the sky and the ghostly, gray mass of the crucifix stretching across it. "strange creatures, these peasant people." the man's words were speculative. "dumb kind of beasts--these soil-tillers--the best of them. got nothing in their lives but work and religion. don't know as i blame you for laughing when you looked up there. sacré, but there is nothing real about religion to me!" "you're right." he stifled a yawn. "all that sort of thing went out of the world years ago. thinking people aren't religious nowadays. it doesn't give them enough food for logical thought. it's all too palpably obvious and absurd for an intelligent person to bother with." "rather a strange view for an artist, my friend, is it not?" "what do you mean?" "thought you fellows traded on the beauty of faith, the talk of priests, and all that sort of thing." "good lord, no." his voice was energetic enough now. he was becoming interested. "all this belief in god and man and the innate good, and the rest of it, is tommyrot--that's what it is! and the soul within you--and the teachings of christ"--he paused to regain his breath. "we'd know those things all right enough, if they were real. we'd see them, wouldn't we, if they were real? they'd happen--they couldn't help but happen--every day. but they don't, and so they're just talked about. i tell you if there were such things, we'd know it!" "yes--yes--surely we would see it--some time." "i haven't had more than the average university education," he went on. "but i've seen men and women, and i know that some of them are bad, and some of them are good, and that's all there is to it. if a man wants to be a liar--he'll lie. what's going to make him tell the truth, i'd like to know?" "it doesn't sound like artistic idealism, this talk of yours." "what do i care for any kind of idealism? there's too much of the poppycock--too many of those long-haired, long-winded donkeys playing the miniature creator for my taste. lord, but i'd like to see an army of them in the field!" "you speak like a soldier, my friend." "i'm proud, sir, of being a soldier!" in a flash he realized what he had said. beneath his breath he cursed furiously. never before had he been guilty of such blatant stupidity. a sudden anger welled within him against this man who had caught him in his lie. yet the man seemed harmless and indifferent enough. perhaps he could still get out of it. what in the name of heaven had drawn the truth from him? he glanced up at the crucifix and his cursing abruptly stopped. he fell to wondering if he had better strike out again in the dark. he couldn't tell who the man was, and he had the papers to guard. dawn wasn't a long way off. he wondered if he ought to chance it. "see here"--the man's voice caught in on his train of thought. "i know what's going through your head. you didn't want me to know that you were a soldier. i wasn't going to tell you, either. but i'm one, too. only i'm not one of them; not one of that blood-thirsty, blood-drunk canaille. you're not either. i knew the minute i heard you speak. and see here, i pretended at first that i didn't want to talk. but it wasn't true. i was starving for a word with one of my own kind. i told you i was comfortable, didn't i? i told you i was asleep? well--i lied. i've been writhing here for hours. i'm in agony. my leg's shot off--that's what they did to me. i've been lying in this place for a day and a half. a peasant stopped to pray here to-night. he gave me some water; but he was afraid to touch me." a sob vibrated hoarsely in the man's throat. "my brother, i want your hand." without hesitation he put out his hand, his fingers fumbling over the hard earth, until at last they found and grasped the man's hand. "is there anything i can do?" he asked. "no, it's too dark. we must wait for the dawn. then if you'll help me along the road a bit"--his voice trailed off into silence. so they sat there. "there's some one coming," he said. he felt the man try to struggle to a sitting position. "no use," he moaned. "i couldn't see through the dark, anyway. sacré, didn't i try it before, when you came along?" breathlessly they waited. there was nothing pleasant about this meeting people one couldn't see. it was just luck that the man beside him hadn't been one of them. he wondered if the approaching person would stop before the crucifix or would go on. the footsteps came nearer and nearer. louder and louder they grew until the sound of them echoed clatteringly through the silence of the night. then sudden deafening stillness. as yet he could make out no form. he wondered what was happening. slowly he realized that the gloom-merged mass of the crucifix had been seen and that the feet were coming toward it. a long half minute and then something soft and cold brushed his cheek. a quick, half-smothered cry. a woman had reached him with her outstretched hands. her fingers had touched his face. "mon dieu!" she whispered. "then i am not alone? mon dieu! who are you?" he answered her. "i've lost my way. i'm waiting for the dawn." "you will not hurt me?" her whimpered words betrayed her fear. "you will let me stay to wait the daylight with you?" "that makes three of us," he said, "waiting for morning." "non--non; how is it then three?" "my brother here--you--and--i." "mon dieu! such a darkness. tell me, it is a sign of luck, is it not, to meet with two brothers?" "well," his tone was apologetic. "we're not blood-brothers--just--" he hesitated. "ah!" she breathed softly. "is it, as the curé says, 'a brotherhood of man'?" he could not explain to himself why he should so resent her comparing him to her priest. "it is a brotherhood of understanding," he said. "it is because we are friends." "friends?" she questioned. "of course," he stated emphatically. and at the same time he wondered at his own vehemence. why should he call this man, whom he could not even see, his friend? "surely you do not think that i could sit here in the dark, holding my enemy by the hand?" "but no," she muttered as though to herself. "no hands are given in this time of war. no hands but the hands of hate." for the first time the man spoke. "hate has made men of us. sacré, but is there anything greater than hate?" "mon dieu! it is all so cruel--this hate that has crippled our men. look you, you two brothers--i would avenge them as you avenge them, but voilà--there is so little--so pitifully little that i can do!" "will you sit beside me?" the man asked gently. "i'd move, if i could, but they've shot off my leg, and moving isn't easy." "the barbarians have caught you too?" she sank to her knees beside them. "how i loathe them! ah, how i detest them! they burned my home--they drove me out of chalet corneille--my father and my mother and i. we fled by the light of our flaming farm-houses. i thought that bad, but it wasn't the worst. that came when they took me away with them. what i have been through! it is as if i had suffered and suffered; and now there is nothing left me to feel but hatred. and i've been back there, thinking my people might come for me. mais, they never came, and so i must go on. i've an aunt in charvel. there's just a chance--but even if i do find a home, i'll still hate those soldiers. i'd kill them if i could. i pray to christ that some day i may kill to avenge." "is that what you're here for?" "i'm here to await the dawn." "madame is religious?" "the sisters and the curé were my only teachers." "and now before the crucifix, madame prays christ for the power to kill?" "non--non," her voice rose shrilly. "there is no christ here on this cross. the canaille pulled him down and dragged him away in the dirt when they passed. there were peasants who begged them to leave the figure, but they left only the cross--and once--three days after they had defiled it--i saw a spy crucified there. i helped cut him down. now it's empty!" "sacré, it is like them," the man said. "i'd wondered why the cross was bare. i'm not one of your believers, but i can see how it would hurt a good woman like you." "a good woman?" she questioned vaguely, as if in her innocence all were good. "mon dieu, i only know that it hurt." he looked up at the crucifix. the sky was slowly, very slowly, lightening. "it will soon be day," he said. they were silent. and in the stillness they could feel the expectancy of dawn; the terse waiting for the light. the eager, anticipating stare of each was fixed upon the other's face. the black of the sky merged very gradually into a pale, sickly gray. far to the east quivered a thin streak of yellow light. the three drab shadows of them cowered beneath the cross. mauve and pink and golden light spread slowly over the firmament. "no, it can't be!" he muttered, his eyes upon the man's face--this man whom he had sat with those long hours before the dawn, whose hand he still held in his. he thought he caught the man's whispered "sacré!" the woman was the first to speak. "voilà!" she taunted. "but it is--oh, so pretty! a french soldier with a leg shot off and a german officer to nurse him. you two--you who spoke of hate, do you still sit hand in hand?" "the girl from chalet corneille!" he had known he would not forget her face. "the dark has made cowards of you," she mocked. "before the morning you clung together. but now it is dawn!" her voice rang out bitterly, brutally clear. "did not one of you ask, 'is there anything greater than hate'?" "sacré! what you say is just." the wounded man's eyes were raised to glance at the light-quivering firmament. slowly the eyes caught the sight of something else. very gradually they took in that unexpected thing. mechanically the words were jerked out: "it--was--i--who--asked--" a sudden pause--a quick gasp--"god forgive me--it--was--i!" the uncanniness of the words shocked him. in spite of himself, his own eyes followed the man's wide stare; followed it from the eastern horizon, over the shimmering sky; followed it until he reached the crucifix. the hand, which, at the girl's words, had half-heartedly sought his pistol, shook now as he crossed himself. was it the smudging shadows, the still unlighted mass of them up there on the arms of the crucifix? would shadows take on so the semblance of the human body? "if there were such things--we'd know it--" fragments of their talk in the night came vividly back to him. "if these things were real--sometimes--we'd see it!" the girl dropped to her knees. her hands were clinched over her heaving breast; her gaze riveted itself upon that mass of shadows, high up on the cross; that mass of shadows so mysteriously like the dimly defined christ figure. with a hoarse, racking sob that shook his whole frame, the wounded soldier fell upon his face. quickly the officer bent over him, his hand on the shaking shoulder, his breath coming and going in short, rasping gasps. motionless he stood there, moving only to catch hold of the girl's fingers, that reached up and clung to his. the faint, cold light of early morning tinged across the gray-white of the sky. daybreak lighted the three grouped figures huddled so close together beneath the crucifix. dawn showed clearly the brown wooden cross and the great half-ripped out nails that had once held the christ. the stillness he cringed in shuddering awe beneath the stillness. he could not stand the heavy, deep silence of it; the muffled, sucking thickness absorbing so completely all sound into its deadening mat. he had gotten so that he had to be perpetually stopping himself from screaming. he had to keep watch on himself always. he was terrified that he might go mad. he feared the oppression of the awful quiet would craftily draw his reason away from him. he did not want to scream. he did not want to attempt to defy the harrowing, rending silence. he was afraid of the blanketing, saturating weight of the stillness. sometimes when he could bring himself to think he thought that he might after all like to go about shouting at the top of his lungs. his mind kept on surreptitiously toying with the thought of the relief from the thing. he thought of it a lot. he knew that shouting about his own farm would not do him any good. he was too far away from everything and everyone in the strip of valley hemmed in between the rolling hills. of course there was old man efferts. old man efferts did not live so very far away. he knew he could not count on efferts. efferts had lived there too long in the stillness that rolled down to him from the hills and came together to lie flat and sluggish, thudding down on the valley land. if he could bring himself to walk into the ten-mile-off town shouting so that other people would follow after him shouting; so that there would be some kind of continuous, human noise for a while. it was that he wanted more than anything else; human noise. at night he would wake suddenly from his heavy, quiet slumber; from the dreamless, ponderous pit of it and listen to the stillness. when he first went to bed it would take him hours before he could get himself off to sleep. he dreaded the muted, frantic struggle of those dragging, pulling hours in which he would try to shut his ears to the soundless, deafening silence that throbbed noiselessly from a great distance and was noiseless in the room all about him; and pressed noiselessly against his blood filled ear-drums. he had the feeling at night that the stillness became more real sweeping in a greater rush down the hills; that it had an heightened, insidious power to get inside of him. he would toss about on his narrow wooden bed for hours; moving cautiously and carefully so as not to do anything that would offend the drugged burden of the silence. he would move a leg or an arm slyly and then he would lie quite quiet for a time holding his breath until the cracking pain came plunging again and again into his chest. he could feel the stillness filling in all the spaces and crevices around him, so that he thought it rose and swelled hideously. he was afraid of those hours before he went to sleep; before he could drop off with that overwhelming sense that in losing consciousness he was consciously letting himself drown in a tremendous, swollen wave of silence. and then toward morning that sudden, inevitable awakening. his rousing himself to listen. his whole body becoming rigid; tautly holding itself with straining, shaking muscles to the position in which he lay. the sweat breaking out all over him and trickling coldly down from his armpits along his sides. his cunning shifting of his head so that he could clear his ears to hear better. his futile harkening for the sound that never came. his intensive shivering waiting for it. and nothing but the stillness. he could never make himself move. the thing was so actual; suffocatingly potent; malignant. he had grown terrified of attempting to disrupt it in any of those little ways at his command. he had begun to think that the noise he would make would not be a noise. he could not have stood the shock of making a noise that would be quite vacantly without sound. all day long, working in his fields, he used to wonder at it. in the sunlight it was with him still and bated. it rose up to him from the ground at his feet, from the soil it had wormed itself into. it crushed down on him from the clear, blue sweep of the sky. it spread unseen toward him down the long, uncertain slopes of the hills coming on always from all sides and staying. it had become so that nothing was real to him; nothing but the stillness that drenched everything; stifling and choking. the old mare working her way in front of the plow along the narrowed, deepening furrows, was a ghost creature to him. the grayness of her blurred ahead of him in the brightest stream of sunlight. her foolish, stilly gliding played horridly on his raw nerves. at all times she was a phantom animal, stirring with the intangible motion of the silence. he felt that she did not belong to him; that she was a thing of the stillness. he would trail after her, his quivering, thin hands on the plow handles, his eyes riveted on her bony withers. he would try to concentrate his thoughts on the way she moved and then overcome quite suddenly with the quiet, insidious stealth of her ambling, he would pull her up and stop to mop his forehead, his eyes going slowly around him as if he almost expected to see the thing that had lain that smothering, strangling hold on to him. his one and only companion was a yellow mongrel that had come slinking in at the farm gate, its tail drooping between its legs. he had been glad at first of having the dog with him. and then gradually he had come to feel the oddness of the animal. if he could have done so he would have turned the dog out again into the stillness from which it had come to him. he was sure that the mongrel must be old; unnaturally old. he could not understand the dog's awful quiet. in his heart he was scared of the dog. the mongrel followed incessantly at his heels, always with dragging tail. whenever his eyes turned behind him they met the mongrel's eyes that were fixed on him; the eyes that were filled with that uncanny, beaten look as if it had been horridly cowed. there was an age of agony in the dog's eyes. as the days went on he became more and more afraid of the mongrel's eyes. he had come out to the farm to start with because of the silence. he had felt that he would have to get away from the noise and the tumultuous uproar of the city. after what he had done he could not stand it. he had gotten away. he thought now that his mind would snap; that it would break from under the lull which had come into it--the lull which devastated him with its hushed brutality. he had never been fond of people. even in those days back there in the city before he had done the thing that was wrong he had mistrusted them. and after it he had run from them. run wildly and unthinkingly to cover with the fear of them coming on behind him. the deathly, lonely farm was to him at that time a haven of rest. he had made up his mind to live on the farm until the end of his life. he used to think bitterly of his waiting so patiently for his death. when he could think of anything other than the silence he thought of his dying; of life being squeezed out of him by the shrouded quiet. sometimes he would wonder if it were death that ominously waited for him in that appalling, threatening stillness. there had been days when he had tried to recall the sound of voices he had known. he had spent long hours in awakening in his memory those voices. he had wanted particularly to think of people laughing. he used to want to get the pitch of their laughing; to surround himself with the vibration of reiterated laughter. and then when he had gotten it so that he almost heard it, so that he felt that with concentrated attention he might hear the laughing, he would find himself listening to the frightful, numbing stillness. he had not the courage to go on trying that. following the plow and the old gray mare through the fields with the dog skulking abjectly at his heels, he would think of that thing which he had done that had ostracized him from the rest of humanity. he never thought of the possibility of making his life over again. he could not have thought of it if he had wanted to. it was all too hopeless; too impossible to think about. the deadening quiet in which he had been steeped had drained him; sapped from him all initiative. when evening came he would go into his shack and close the door. he would light the oil lamp on the old table that stood in the center of the room and he would go about getting supper for himself and the mongrel. he took great care always to move his pots and pans gently. if he picked up a plate he did it slowly, softly. when he put his bowl of food on the table he slid it consciously onto the surface without noise. and going to and fro not oftener than he had to, his feet in their padded moccasins lifted him to his toes. he ate quietly and quickly, swallowing his food without chewing, feeding himself and the dog with his fingers. and all the while feeling that the stillness was rushing down from the hills and gathering to greater force about him. and when he was quite finished with the clearing away of his dishes he would sit beside the table, the mongrel in front of him, and he would think frantically of the relief of talking. his lips would begin to quiver hideously; to move. that hoarse, inhuman muttering that had no sound of voice in it would start. and then he would see the dog's eyes, filled with that horrid, beaten look, fixed on his mouth and he would stop, gasping. once every little while old man efferts would come down to the shack in the valley. he knew nothing of old man efferts other than that ever since he had come to live at the farm efferts had stopped in for an evening now and again. at first he had resented old man efferts' coming. later when he had seen that efferts would not interfere with him he had not minded so much. he had become quite used to seeing the bent, huddled figure of the man trailing down the hillside and shambling into the room to sit there opposite to him quite silent. of late he had gone about fetching the old man a glass of cider and a piece of bread. and they had sat facing each other, never talking; just sitting rigidly with the dog on the floor between them and the silence spilling itself in gigantic floods all around them. and then old efferts would light his pipe and when he had finished it he would get up and go out of the door. and after he had watched old man efferts go, with the feeling that he might not be real, he would stumble up to his room to lie in the narrow wooden bed trying to shut his ears to the deafening silence about him; cringing between his blankets as the swell of it heightened insidiously. he knew that the stillness had swamped itself into old man efferts. he could see the stamp of it in the uncertain, stupefied face; in the bewildered eyes that had behind them something of the look that stayed on in the dog's eyes; in the thin-lipped mouth that drooled at the corners; in the old man's still, quiet way of moving, the unreal, phantom way in which the gray mare moved. he did not know why the old man should come to him to sit so dumbly opposite him for a whole evening. he did not care. he was long past caring. there were times when he thought he might tell old man efferts of that thing which he had done years ago and which had isolated him from his fellows. not that he thought so much of it. he had almost forgotten it. the stillness had made him forget everything but itself; had pushed everything out of his mind before its own spreading weight. but he kept the thought of speaking to efferts of what he had done in the back of his head. he knew how his telling it to efferts could not fail to act. he knew that something would infallibly happen; that the surprise of it could not help but penetrate the thickness of efferts' silence. he always felt, soothing himself with the thought of relief, that when the power of the stillness became unbearable he would shock old efferts into talk. there were moments when he hungered savagely to force old efferts out of his walling quiet. moments when he was starving for the comfort of human sound. his voice and efferts' voice. voices that would rise above the stillness; voices that would penetrate cunningly through the quiet; voices that would speak and answer each other. he was sitting in the center of his lamp lit room. he had had his supper and had cleared away the dishes with his usual crafty carefulness. he had lighted his pipe. he sat in the chair beside the table; his body quite rigid; his arms and legs stiffened to a torturing quiet. the mongrel crouched at his feet. there was something strange in the way the animal lay; in its tightened muscles that pulled and twitched as it breathed. whenever he looked down his eyes met the dog's eyes. outside the heavy shadows of the night crept along the ground, pushed on by the rushing, rising silence behind them. he knew that the stillness was rolling down the slope of those long hills. he knew that its awful quiet was gathering in the valley. he knew that it was trickling horridly still into the low ceilinged room. he had the feeling for the thousandth time that the most minute noise was swallowed up in the stillness before it came into being. he looked up then to see the door shoved warily ajar. a wrinkled, ugly hand showed against the dark wood in a lighter patch of brown. a coarse booted foot came behind the swing of the door. standing against the black of the night he saw old man efferts. he watched the old man come into the room. he saw him pull up a chair, lifting it from off the floor and setting it down opposite to him within the pooling space of the yellow lamplight. he stared at efferts as he sank into the chair. old man efferts took out his pipe and lit it. he kept his eyes on efferts as he had so often done; on the uncertain, stupefied face that was turned to him; on the bewildered eyes that had something behind them of the look that stayed on in the dog's eyes; on the thin-lipped mouth that drooled at the corners. he got up then and went on his toes to the door and closed it softly. he felt that efferts' eyes were on him; and the mongrel's eyes. he came back and sat down in his chair. they both smoked quietly. he remembered the glass of cider and the piece of bread. he could not bring himself to move to-night. he felt the suffocating weight of the stillness crowding past him. it was expanding menacingly throughout the small room. it filled in all about him. presently old man efferts would finish his pipe and would get up and shamble out of the door. he would sit there and watch him go as he always watched, wondering if perhaps old man efferts was not real. and then he would stumble up to bed and lie awake and listen to the stillness that grew greater and greater. he wanted the relief from that silence; wanted it desperately; passionately. he remembered that if he told efferts of that thing that he had come so near forgetting in the smothering quiet that he would have what he so frantically wanted. some human speech. human talk that would break the silence even for a little while; the sound of human voices that would rise and answer each other. he glanced at the old man surreptitiously. he tried to think what expression would come into that stupid face with the bewildered eyes; he tried to see the thin-lipped drooling mouth as it would look with the lips of it startled into moving. he sat very still. words formed themselves; lagging into his mind. "i--am--going--to--tell--" he would start to say it to old man efferts that way. he could not stand the stillness any longer. anything was better than the appalling agony of the quiet. he made a little tentative movement with his thin, shaking hands. he felt that efferts was staring at him. the mongrel crouching at his feet moved stealthily. he heard no sound from the animal's moving. he knew it had gotten to its feet. he saw it standing there between where he sat and where efferts sat. he felt his lips begin to quiver. "i--am--going--to--" he got the words into his head again through the menacing, waiting stillness. he muttered something. old man efferts leaned forward, his hand behind his ear. in a sudden blinding flash of knowledge he realized that old man efferts was deaf. he felt his mouth twisting around his face. he tried then to shout. his eyes avoided the mongrel's eyes that he knew were filled with that uncanny, beaten look and were fixed on his jerking, grimacing mouth. all about him the ominous, malignant silence. he tried again and again to speak. he could not talk. sweat stood out in great, glistening beads on his forehead and dribbled blindingly into his wide, distended eyes. his body shook with the stupendous effort he was making. his tongue was swollen. he could feel his throat tightening so that it hurt. he could not get his words into that hoarse, inhuman muttering that had no sound of voice in it. he kept on trying and trying to speak---- he saw that old man efferts had finished his pipe. he watched him get out of his chair and go shambling across the room and through the door. he sat there. his hands went up to his working mouth. he wanted to hide the hideous jerking of it. his eyes met the mongrel's eyes. the stillness grew appalling. book was produced from images made available by the hathitrust digital library.) transcriber's notes: words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_. words in bold in the original are surrounded by =equal signs=. ellipses match the original. poetry of the supernatural compiled by earle f. walbridge [illustration] the new york public library reprinted june from the branch library news of may printed at the new york public library form p- [vi- - m] poetry of the supernatural[ : ] lafcadio hearn, in his _interpretations of literature_ (one of the most valuable and delightful books on literature which has been written in our time), says: "let me tell you that it would be a mistake to suppose that the stories of the supernatural have had their day in fine literature. on the contrary, wherever fine literature is being produced, either in poetry or in prose, you will find the supernatural element very much alive. . . but without citing other living writers, let me observe that there is scarcely any really great author in european literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in the treatment of the supernatural. in english literature, i believe, there is no exception,--even from the time of the anglo-saxon poets to shakespeare, and from shakespeare to our own day. and this introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact,--a fact that i do not remember to have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance; there is something ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture." feeling this, mr. walbridge has compiled the following list. it is not a bibliography, nor even a "contribution toward" a bibliography, nor a "reading list," in the usual sense, but the intelligent selection of a number of instances in which poets, major and minor, have turned to ghostly themes. if it causes you, reading one of its quotations, to hunt for and read the whole poem, it will have served its purpose. if it tells you of a poem you have never read--and so gives you a new pleasure--or if it reminds you of one you had forgotten, it will have been sufficiently useful. but for those who are fond of poetry, and fond of recollecting poems which they have enjoyed, it is believed that the list is not without interest in itself. its quotations are taken from the whole great range of english poetry, both before and after the time of him "who made prospero the magician, and gave him caliban and ariel as his servants, who heard the tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs of the enchanted isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood near athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty scottish heath, and hid hecate in a cave with the weird sisters." footnotes: [ : ] the picture on the front cover is from an illustration by mr. gerald metcalfe, for coleridge's "christabel," in _the poems of coleridge_, published by john lane. poetry of the supernatural compiled by earle f. walbridge _like one that on a lonesome road doth walk in fear and dread, and having once turned round, walks on, and turns no more his head; because he knows a frightful fiend doth close behind him tread._ --_rime of the ancient mariner._ the older poets =allingham=, william. a dream. (in charles welsh's the golden treasury of irish songs and lyrics.) i heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night. i went to the window to see the sight: all the dead that ever i knew going one by one and two by two. =arnold=, matthew. the forsaken merman. in its delicate loveliness "the forsaken merman" ranks high among mr. arnold's poems. it is the story of a sea-king, married to a mortal maiden, who forsook him and her children under the impulse of a christian conviction that she must return and pray for her soul.--_h. w. paul._ she sate by the pillar: we saw her clear; "margaret, hist! come quick, we are here! dear heart," i said, "we are long alone; the sea grows stormy, the little ones moan." but, ah, she gave me never a look, for her eyes were seal'd to the holy book. ---- st. brandan. . . . a picturesque embodiment of a strange mediaeval legend touching judas iscariot, who is supposed to be released from hell for a few hours every christmas because he had done in his life a single deed of charity.--_h. w. paul._ =barlow=, jane. three throws and one. (in walter jerrold's the book of living poets.) at each throw of my net there's a life must go down into death on the sea. at each throw of my net it comes laden, o rare, with my wish back to me. with my choice of all treasures most peerless that lapt in the oceans be. =boyd=, thomas. the king's son. (in padric gregory's modern anglo-irish verse.) who rideth through the driving rain at such a headlong speed? naked and pale he rides amain, upon a naked steed. =browning=, elizabeth barrett. the lay of the brown rosary. who meet there, my mother, at dawn and at even? who meet by that wall, never looking at heaven? o sweetest my sister, what doeth with thee the ghost of a nun with a brown rosary and a face turned from heaven? =browning=, robert. mesmerism. and the socket floats and flares, and the house-beams groan and a foot unknown is surmised on the garret stairs and the locks slip unawares. . . =buchanan=, robert. the ballad of judas iscariot. (in stedman's victorian anthology.) the beauty is chiefly in the central idea of forgiveness, but the workmanship of this composition has also a very remarkable beauty, a celtic beauty of weirdness, such as we seldom find in a modern composition touching religious tradition.--_lafcadio hearn._ the body of judas iscariot lay stretched along the snow. 'twas the soul of judas iscariot ran swiftly to and fro. =carleton=, william. sir turlough, or the churchyard bride. (in stopford brooke's a treasury of irish poetry.) the churchyard bride is accustomed to appear to the last mourner in the churchyard after a burial, and, changing its sex to suit the occasion, exacts a promise and a fatal kiss from the unfortunate lingerer. he pressed her lips as the words were spoken, killeevy, o killeevy! and his banshee's wail--now far and broken-- murmured "death" as he gave the token by the bonny green woods of killeevy. =chatterton=, thomas. the parliament of sprites. "the parliament of sprites" is an interlude played by carmelite friars at william canynge's house on the occasion of the dedication of st. mary redcliffe's. one after another the "antichi spiriti dolenti" rise up and salute the new edifice: nimrod and the assyrians, anglo-saxon ealdormen and norman knights templars, and citizens of ancient bristol.--_h. a. beers._ =coleridge=, samuel taylor. christabel. the thing attempted in "christabel" is the most difficult of execution in the whole field of romance--witchery by daylight--and the success is complete.--_john gibson lockhart._ ---- the rime of the ancient mariner. about, about, in reel and rout the death-fires danced at night; the water, like a witch's oils, burnt green, and blue, and white. =cortissoz=, ellen mackay hutchinson. on kingston bridge. (in stedman's american anthology.) 'twas all souls' night, and to and fro the quick and dead together walked, the quick and dead together talked, on kingston bridge. =crawford=, isabella valancy. the mother's soul. (in john garvin's canadian poets and poetry.) another elaborate variation on the theme of the return of a mother from her grave to rescue her children. miss crawford's mother does not go as far as the ghost in robert buchanan's "dead mother," who not only makes three trips to assemble her neglected family, but manages to appear to their delinquent father, to his great discomfort and the permanent loss of his sleep. =dobell=, sydney. the ballad of keith of ravelston. (in the oxford book of english verse.) a ballad unsurpassed in our literature for its weird suggestiveness.--_richard garnett._ she makes her immemorial moan, she keeps her shadowy kine; o, keith of ravelston, the sorrows of thy line! =drummond=, william henry. the last portage. (in wilfred campbell's the oxford book of canadian verse.) an' oh! mon dieu! w'en he turn hees head i'm seein' de face of my boy is dead. =eaton=, arthur wentworth hamilton. the phantom light of the baie des chaleurs. (in t. h. rand's a treasury of canadian verse.) this was the last of the pirate crew; but many a night the black flag flew from the mast of a spectre vessel sailed by a spectre band that wept and wailed for the wreck they had wrought on the sea, on the land, for the innocent blood they had spilt on the sand of the baie des chaleurs. =field=, eugene. the peter-bird. (in his songs and other verse.) these are the voices of those left by the boy in the farmhouse, when, with his laughter and scorn, hatless and bootless and sockless, clothed in his jeans and his pride, peter sailed out in the weather, broke from the warmth of his home into that fog of the devil, into the smoke of that witch brewing her damnable porridge! =freneau=, philip. the indian burying-ground. (in stedman's american anthology.) by midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, in habit for the chase arrayed, the hunter still the deer pursues, the hunter and the deer--a shade. =graves=, alfred perceval. the song of the ghost. (in padric gregory's modern anglo-irish verse.) o hush your crowing, both grey and red, or he'll be going to join the dead; o cease from calling his ghost to the mould and i'll come crowning your combs with gold. =guiney=, louise imogen. peter rugg, the bostonian. (in warner's library of the world's best literature, v. .) upon those wheels on any path the rain will follow loud, and he who meets that ghostly man will meet a thunder-cloud. and whosoever speaks with him may next bespeak his shroud. =harte=, francis bret. a greyport legend. still another phantom ship, a treacherous hulk that broke from its moorings and drifted with a crew of children into the fog. =hawker=, robert stephen. mawgan of melhuach. (in stedman's victorian anthology.) hard was the struggle, but at the last with a stormy pang old mawgan past, and away, away, beneath their sight, gleam'd the red sail at pitch of night. =hawthorne=, julian. were-wolf. (in stedman's american anthology.) dabbled with blood are its awful lips grinning in horrible glee. the wolves that follow with scurrying feet sniffing that goblin scent, at once scatter in terror, while it slips away, to the shore of the frozen sea. =herrick=, robert. the hag. the hag is astride, this night for to ride, the devil and she together. through thick, and through thin, now out, and then in, though ne'er so foul be the weather. =hood=, thomas. the haunted house. o'er all there hung a shadow and a fear a sense of mystery the spirit daunted and said, as plain as whisper in the ear, "the place is haunted!" =houghton=, george. the handsel ring. (in stedman's american anthology.) a man and maid are plighting their troth in the tomb of an old knight, the girl's father, when the man lucklessly drops the ring through a crack in the floor of the tomb. "let not thy heart be harried and sore for a little thing!" "nay! but behold what broodeth there! see the cold sheen of his silvery hair! look how his eyeballs roll and stare, seeking thy handsel ring!" =hugo=, victor. the djinns. (in charles a. dana's the household book of poetry.) ha! they are on us, close without! shut tight the shelter where we lie! with hideous din the monster rout, dragon and vampire, fill the sky! =joyce=, patrick weston. the old hermit's story. (in padric gregory's modern anglo-irish verse.) my curragh sailed on the western main, and i saw, as i viewed the sea, a withered old man upon a wave, and he fixed his eyes on me. =keats=, john. la belle dame sans merci. i saw pale kings, and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all; who cry'd---"la belle dame sans merci hath thee in thrall." ---- lamia. "a serpent!" echoed he; no sooner said, than with a frightful scream she vanished: and lycius' arms were empty of delight, as were his limbs of life, from that same night. =kingsley=, charles. the weird lady. the swevens came up round harold the earl like motes in the sunnès beam; and over him stood the weird lady in her charmèd castle over the sea, sang "lie thou still and dream." =leconte de lisle=, charles. les elfes. (in the oxford book of french verse.) --ne m'arrête pas, fantôme odieux! je vais épouser ma belle aux doux yeux. --o mon cher époux, la tombe éternelle sera notre lit de noce, dit-elle. je suis morte!--et lui, la voyant ainsi, d'angoisse et d'amour tombe mort aussi. =lockhart=, arthur john. the waters of carr. (in t. h. rand's a treasury of canadian verse.) 'tis the indian's babe, they say, fairy stolen; changed a fay; and still i hear her calling, calling, calling, in the mossy woods of carr! =longfellow=, henry wadsworth. the ballad of carmilhan. for right ahead lay the ship of the dead the ghostly carmilhan! her masts were stripped, her yards were bare, and on her bowsprit, poised in air, sat the klaboterman. =macdonald=, george. janet. (in linton and stoddard's ballads and romances.) the night was lown and the stars sat still a glintin' down the sky; and the souls crept out of their mouldy graves a' dank wi' lying by. =mckay=, charles. the kelpie of corrievreckan. (in dugald mitchell's the book of highland verse.) and every year at beltan e'en the kelpie gallops across the green on a steed as fleet as the wintry wind, with jessie's mournful ghost behind. =mackenzie=, donald a. the banshee. (in the book of highland verse.) the linen that would wrap the dead she beetled on a stone, she stood with dripping hands, blood-red, low singing all alone-- "his linen robes are pure and white, for fergus more must die tonight." =mallet=, david. william and margaret. (in w. m. dixon's the edinburgh book of scottish verse.) the hungry worm my sister is, the winding sheet i wear. and cold and weary lasts our night, till that last morn appear. =moore=, thomas. the lake of the dismal swamp. they made her a grave too cold and damp for a soul so warm and true; and she's gone to the lake of the dismal swamp where all night long, by a firefly lamp, she paddles her birch canoe. =morris=, william. the tune of seven towers. no one walks there now; except in the white moonlight the white ghosts walk in a row, if one could see it, an awful sight. "listen!" said fair yolande of the flowers, "this is the tune of seven towers." =Österling=, anders. meeting of phantoms. (in charles wharton stork's anthology of swedish lyrics from to .) i in a vision saw my lost sweetheart, fearlessly toward me i saw her stray. so pale! i thought then; she smiled her answer: "my heart, my spirit, i've kissed away." =o'sullivan=, vincent. he came on holy saturday. (in padric gregory's modern anglo-irish verse.) to-night on holy saturday the weary ghost came back, and laid his hand upon my brow, and whispered me, "alack! there sits no angel by the tomb, the sepulchre is black." =poe=, edgar allan. the conqueror worm. through a circle that ever returneth in to the self-same spot, and much of madness, and more of sin, and horror the soul of the plot. ---- ulalume. and we passed to the end of a vista, but were stopped by the door of a tomb-- by the door of a legended tomb; and i said--"what is written, sweet sister, on the door of that legended tomb?" she replied--"ulalume--ulalume-- 'tis the vault of thy lost ulalume." =rossetti=, christina. she never doubts but she always wonders. again and again in imagination she crosses the bridge of death and explores the farther shore. her ghosts come back with familiar forms, familiar sensations, and familiar words.--_elisabeth luther cary._ ---- a chilly night. i looked and saw the ghosts dotting plain and mound. they stood in the blank moonlight but no shadow lay on the ground. they spoke without a voice and they leaped without a sound. ---- goblin market. "lie close," laura said, pricking up her golden head: "we must not look at goblin men. we must not buy their fruits; who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry thirsty roots?" =rossetti=, dante gabriel. eden bower. it was lilith the wife of adam. (eden bower's in flower) not a drop of her blood was human, but she was made like a soft sweet woman. ---- sister helen. its forty-two short verses unfold the whole story of the wronged woman's ruthless vengeance on her false lover as she watches the melting of the "waxen man" which, according to the old superstitions, is to carry with it the destruction, body and soul, of him in whose likeness it was fashioned.--_h. r. fox-bourne._ "ah! what white thing at the door has cross'd, sister helen? ah! what is this that sighs in the frost?" "a soul that's lost as mine is lost, little brother!" (o mother, mary mother, lost, lost, all lost, between hell and heaven!) =scott=, sir walter. child dyring. 'twas lang i' the night, and the bairnies grat. their mither she under the mools heard that. ---- the dance of death. a vision appearing to a scottish sentinel on the eve of waterloo. . . . down the destined plain 'twixt britain and the bands of france wild as marsh-borne meteor's glance, strange phantoms wheeled a revel dance and doom'd the future slain. =scott=, william bell. the witch's ballad. (in the oxford book of english verse.) drawn up i was right off my feet, into the mist and off my feet, and, dancing on each chimney top i saw a thousand darling imps keeping time with skip and hop. =shairp=, john campbell. cailleach bein-y-vreich. (in stedman's victorian anthology.) then i mount the blast, and we ride full fast, and laugh as we stride the storm, i, and the witch of the cruachan ben and the scowling-eyed seul-gorm. =shanly=, c. d. the walker of the snow. (in stedman's victorian anthology.) . . . i saw by the sickly moonlight as i followed, bending low, that the walking of the stranger left no footmarks on the snow. =sharp=, william. ("fiona mcleod.") cap'n goldsack. down in the yellow bay where the scows are sleeping, where among the dead men the sharks flit to and fro-- there cap'n goldsack goes creeping, creeping, creeping, looking for his treasure down below. =southey=, robert. the old woman of berkeley. i have 'nointed myself with infant's fat, the fiends have been my slaves. from sleeping babes i have sucked the breath, and breaking by charms the sleep of death, i have call'd the dead from their graves. and the devil will fetch me now in fire my witchcrafts to atone; and i who have troubled the dead man's grave will never have rest in my own. =stephens=, riccardo. the phantom piper. (in the book of highland verse.) but when the year is at its close right down the road to hell he goes. there the gaunt porters all agrin fling back the gates to let him in, then damned and devil, one and all, make mirth and hold high carnival. =swinburne=, algernon charles. after death. (in poems and ballads, first series.) the four boards of the coffin lid heard all the dead man did. the first curse was in his mouth, made of grave's mould and deadly drouth. =taylor=, william. lenore. the most successful rendering of bürger's much-translated "lenore," and the direct inspiration of scott's "william and helen." tramp, tramp across the land they speede, splash, splash across the sea: "hurrah! the dead can ride apace. dost fear to ride with me?" =watson=, rosamund marriott-. the farm on the links. (in the oxford book of victorian verse.) what is it cries with the crying of the curlews? what comes apace on those fearful, stealthy feet? back from the chill sea-deeps, gliding o'er the sand dunes, home to the old home, once again to meet? =whittier=, john greenleaf. the dead ship of harpswell. no foot is on thy silent deck, upon thy helm no hand, no ripple hath the soundless wind that smites thee from the land. ---- the old wife and the new. ring and bracelet all are gone, and that ice-cold hand withdrawn; but she hears a murmur low, full of sweetness, full of woe, half a sigh and half a moan: "fear not! give the dead her own." the younger poets _the darkness behind me is burning with eyes, it needs not my turning, i know otherwise: the air is a-quiver with rustle of wings and i feel the cold shiver of spiritual things!_ --_"instinct and reason" from "the book of winifred maynard."_ =benét=, william rose. devil's blood. (second film in "films," in "the burglar of the zodiac.") . . . down the path-- _is it but shadow?_--steals a thread of wrath, a red bright thread. it reaches him. he reels. _wet! warm!_ wily athwart his step it steals and stains his white court footgear, toes to heels. =brooke=, rupert. dead men's love. (in his collected poems. .) there was a damned successful poet. there was a woman like the sun. and they were dead. they did not know it. they did not know their time was done. ---- hauntings. so a poor ghost, beside his misty streams, is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams. =burnet=, dana. ballad of the late john flint. (in his poems. .) the bridegroom smiled a twisted smile, "the wine is strong," he said. the bride she twirled her wedding ring nor lifted up her head; and there were three at john flint's board, and one of them was dead. =campbell=, william wilfred. the mother. (in john w. garvin's canadian poets and poetry.) i dreamed that a rose-leaf hand did cling; oh, you cannot bury a mother in spring! . . . . . . . . i nestled him soft to my throbbing breast, and stole me back to my long, long rest. ---- the were-wolves. (in stedman's victorian anthology.) each panter in the darkness is a demon-haunted soul, the shadowy, phantom were-wolves that circle round the pole. =carman=, bliss. the nancy's pride. (in his ballads of lost haven.) her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds with the judgment in their face; and to their mates' "god save you!" have never a word of grace. ---- the yule guest. (in ballads of lost haven.) but in the yule, o yanna, up from the round dim sea and reeling dungeons of the fog, i am come back to thee! =chalmers=, patrick r. the little ghost. (in his green days and blue days.) down the long path, beset with heaven-scented, haunting mignonette, the gardeners say a little grey ghost-lady walks! =colum=, padraic. the ballad of downal baun. (in wild earth and other poems.) "o dream-taught man," said the woman-- she stood where the willows grew, a woman from the country where the cocks never crew. =couch=, arthur quiller-. dolor oogo. (in john masefield's a sailor's garland.) thirteen men by ruan shore, dolor oogo, dolor oogo, drownèd men since 'eighty-four down in dolor oogo: on the cliff against the sky, ailsa, wife of malachi that cold woman-- sits and knits eternally. =de la mare=, walter. the keys of morning. (in his the listeners.) she slanted her small bead-brown eyes across the empty street and saw death softly watching her in the sunshine pale and sweet. ---- the listeners. but only a host of phantom listeners that dwelt in the lone house then stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight to that voice from the world of men: stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair that goes down to the empty hall, hearkening in an air stirred and shaken by the lonely traveller's call. ---- the witch. all of these dead were stirring each unto each did call, "a witch, a witch is sleeping under the churchyard wall." =dollard=, father. ballad of the banshee. (in j. w. garvin's canadian poets and poetry.) mother of mercy! there she sat, a woman clad in a snow-white shroud, streamed her hair to the damp moss-mat, white the face on her bosom bowed! =fletcher=, john gould. the ghosts of an old house. (in his goblins and pagodas.) yet i often wonder if these things are really dead. if the old trunks never open letting out grey flapping things at twilight. if it is all as safe and dull as it seems? =furlong=, alice. the warnings. (in padric gregory's modern anglo-irish verse.) i was weaving by the door-post, when i heard the death-watch beating; and i signed the cross upon me, and i spoke the name of three. high and fair, through cloud and air, a silver moon was fleeting, but the night began to darken as the death-watch beat for me. =gibson=, wilfrid wilson. the blind rower. (in his collected poems. .) some say they saw the dead man steer-- the dead man steer the blind man home-- though, when they found him dead, his hand was cold as lead. ---- comrades. as i was marching in flanders a ghost kept step with me-- kept step with me and chuckled, and muttered ceaselessly. ---- the lodging house. and when at last i stand outside my garret door i hardly dare to open it, lest when i fling it wide with candle lit and reading in my only chair i find myself already there. =hagedorn=, hermann. the last faring. (in poems and ballads.) the father into the storm he drives! full is the sail; but the wind blows wilder and shriller! the son 'tis the ghost of a sea-king, my father, rigid and pale, that holds so firm the tiller! ---- the cobbler of glamorgan. he coughed, he turned; and crystal-eyed he stared, for the bolted door stood wide, and on the threshold, faint and grand, he saw the awful gray man stand. his flesh was a thousand snails that crept, but his face was calm though his pulses leapt. =herford=, oliver. ye knyghte-mare. (in the bashful earthquake.) ye log burns dimme, and eke more dimme, loud groans each knyghtlie gueste, as ye ghost of his grandmother, gaunt and grimme, sits on each knyghte hys cheste. =kilmer=, joyce. the white ships and the red. (in w. s. braithwaite's anthology of magazine verse for .) the red ship is the lusitania. "she goes to the bottom all in red to join all the other dead ships, which are in white." =le gallienne=, richard. ballad of the dead lover. (in his new poems. .) she took his head upon her knee and called him love and very fair. and with a golden comb she combed the grave-dust from his hair. =lowell=, amy. the crossroads. (in her men, women, and ghosts.) in polyphonic prose. the body buried at the crossroads struggles for twenty years to free itself of the stake driven through its heart and wreak vengeance on its enemy. it is finally successful as the funeral cortège of this enemy comes down the road. "he wavers like smoke in the buffeting wind. his fingers blow out like smoke, his head ripples in the gale. under the sign post, in the pouring rain, he stands, and watches another quavering figure drifting down the wayfleet road. then swiftly he streams after it. . ." =marquis=, don. haunted. (in his dreams and dust.) drink and forget, make merry and boast, but the boast rings false and the jest is thin. in the hour that i meet ye ghost to ghost, stripped of the flesh that ye skulk within, stripped to the coward soul 'ware of its sin, ye shall learn, ye shall learn, whether dead men hate! =masefield=, john. cape horn gospel. (in his collected poems. .) "i'm a-weary of them there mermaids," says old bill's ghost to me, "it ain't no place for christians, below there, under sea. for it's all blown sands and shipwrecks and old bones eaten bare, and them cold fishy females with long green weeds for hair." ---- mother carey. she lives upon an iceberg to the norred 'n' her man is davy jones, 'n' she combs the weeds upon her forred with poor drowned sailors' bones. =maynard=, winifred. saint catherine. (in the book of winifred maynard.) . . . "saint catherine," in which the spotless virginity of the saint is made ashamed by the pitiful ghosts, who whisper their humanity to her in a dream.--_william stanley braithwaite._ =middleton=, jesse edgar. off heligoland. (in his seadogs and men-at-arms.) ghostly ships in a ghostly sea. . . =millay=, edna st. vincent. the little ghost. (in her renascence.) i knew her for a little ghost that in my garden walked; the wall is high--higher than most-- and the green gate was locked. =monroe=, harriet. the legend of pass christian. (in her you and i.) now we, who wait one night a year under these branches long, may see a flaming ship, and hear the echo of a song. =noyes=, alfred. the admiral's ghost. (in his collected poems. .) ---- a song of sherwood. the dead are coming back again, the years are rolled away, in sherwood, in sherwood, about the break of day. =scollard=, clinton. a ballad of hallowmass. (in his ballads patriotic and romantic.) it happed at the time of hallowmass, when the dead may walk abroad, that the wraith of ralph of the peaceful heart went forth from the courts of god. =seeger=, alan. broceliande. (in his poems. .) untroubled, untouched by the woes of this world are the moon-marshalled hosts that invade broceliande. =shorter=, dora sigerson. all souls' night. (in stedman's victorian anthology.) . . . deelish! deelish! my woe forever that i could not sever coward flesh from fear. i called his name and the pale ghost came; but i was afraid to meet my dear. =sterling=, george. a wine of wizardry. (in a wine of wizardry and other poems. .) and, ere the tomb-thrown mutterings have ceased, the blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast, smiles bloodily against the leprous moon. =widdemer=, margaret. the forgotten soul. (in her the factories.) 'twas i that stood to greet you on the churchyard pave-- (o fire o' my heart's grief, how could you never see?) you smiled in pleasant dreaming as you crossed my grave and crooned a little love-song where they buried me! ---- the house of ghosts. out from the house of ghosts i fled lest i should turn and see the child i had been lift her head and stare aghast at me. =yeats=, william butler. the ballad of father gilligan. (in burton stevenson's the home book of verse.) how an angel obligingly took upon itself the form and performed the duties of father gilligan while the father was asleep at his post. ---- the host of the air. based upon a scrap of folklore in "the celtic twilight" and apparently among the simplest of his poems, nothing he has ever done shows a greater mastery of atmosphere, or a greater metrical mastery.--_forrest reid._ he heard, while he sang and dreamed, a piper piping away, and never was piping so sad, and never was piping so gay. the old ballads "_from ghaisties, ghoulies, and long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night-- good lord, deliver us._" the ballads that follow have all been selected from the oxford book of ballads, edited by sir arthur quiller-couch. clarendon press, oxford, . alison gross. she's turned me into an ugly worm and gar'd me toddle about the tree. clerk saunders. the most notable of the ballads of the supernatural, from the dramatic quality of its story and a certain wild pathos in its expression. "is there ony room at your head, saunders, is there ony room at your feet? or ony room at your side, saunders, where fain, fain i wad sleep?" the daemon lover. and aye as she turned her round about, aye taller he seemed to be; until that the tops o' that gallant ship nae taller were than he. king henry. o he has doen him to his ha' to make him bierly cheer, an' in it came a griesly ghost steed stappin' i' the fleer. the laily worm. for she has made me the laily worm, that lies at the fit o' the tree, and my sister masery she's made the machrel of the sea. a lyke-wake dirge. this ae nighte, this ae nighte, --every nighte and alle, fire and sleet and candle-lighte, and christ receive thy saule. tam lin. and pleasant is the fairy land for those that in it dwell, but ay at end of seven years they pay a teind to hell; i am sae fair and fu' of flesh i'm fear'd 'twill be mysell. +---------------------------------------------------------+ |transcribers note: in this text the macron is represented| |by [=o] | +---------------------------------------------------------+ supernatural & occult fiction this is a volume in the arno press collection supernatural & occult fiction advisory editors r. reginald douglas menville see last pages of this volume for a complete list of titles. the mummy and miss nitocris _a phantasy of the fourth dimension_ george griffith arno press a new york times company editorial supervision: marie stareck reprint edition by arno press inc. reprinted from a copy in the library of the university of california, riverside supernatural and occult fiction isbn for complete set: o- - - see last pages of this volume for titles. manufactured in the united states of america ~library of congress cataloging in publication data~ griffith, george chetwynd. the mummy and miss nitocris. (supernatural and occult fiction) reprint of the ? ed. published by t. w. laurie, london. i. title. ii. series. pz .g mu [pr . ] '. - isbn - - - the mummy and miss nitocris [illustration] _a phantasy of the fourth dimension_ by george griffith author of "the angel of the revolution," "a honeymoon in space," "an island love story," "a mayfair magician," etc., etc. t. werner laurie clifford's inn, fleet street london foreword certain it should be that, beyond and about this world of length, and breadth, and thickness, there is another world, or state of existence, consisting of these and another dimension of which only those beings who are privileged to enter or dwell in it can have any conception. now, if this postulate be granted, it follows that a dweller in this state would be freed from those conditions of time and space which bind those beings who are confined within the limits of tri-dimensional space, or existence. for example, he would be able to make himself visible or invisible to us at will by entering into or withdrawing himself from this state, and returning into that of four dimensions, whither our eyes could not follow him--even though he might be close to us in our sense of nearness. moreover, he could be in two or more places at once, and cause two bodies to occupy the same space--which to us is inconceivable. stranger still, he might be both alive and dead at the same time--since past, present, and future would be all one to him; the world without beginning or end ...--from the "geometrical possibilities," of abd'el kasir, of cordoba, circa. a.d. contents chap. page i. introduces the mummy ii. back to the past iii. the death-bridal of nitocris iv. thieves in the night v. across the threshold vi. the law of selection vii. mostly possibilities viii. miss brenda arrives, and phadrig the egyptian prophesies ix. "the wilderness," wimbledon common x. the stage fills xi. the marvels of phadrig xii. controversy and confidences xiii. over the tea and the toast xiv. "supposed impossibilities" xv. the advancement of nitocris--the resolve of oscarovitch xvi. the mystery of prince zastrow xvii. m. nicol hendry xviii. murder by suggestion xix. the horus stone xx. through the centuries xxi. what happened at trelitz xxii. a trip on the sound xxiii. the disappearance of the professor xxiv. the lust that was--and is xxv. the passing of phadrig xxvi. captain merill's commission xxvii. the bridal of oscarovitch epilogue the mummy and miss nitocris chapter i introduces the mummy "oh, what a perfectly lovely mummy! just fancy!--the poor thing--dead how many years? something like five thousand, isn't it? and doesn't she look just like me! i mean, wouldn't she, if we had both been dead as long?" as she said this, miss nitocris marmion, the golden-haired, black-eyed daughter of one of the most celebrated mathematicians and physicists in europe, stood herself up beside the mummy-case which her father had received that morning from memphis. "look!" she continued. "i am almost the same height. just a little taller, perhaps, but you see her hair is nearly as fair as mine. of course, you don't know what colour her eyes are--just fancy, dad! they have been shut for nearly five thousand years, perhaps a little more--because i think they counted by dynasties then--and yet look at the features! just imagine me dead!" "just imagine yourself shutting the door on the other side, my dear niti," said the professor, who had risen from the chair, and was facing his daughter and the mummy. "i don't want to banish you too unceremoniously, but i really have a lot of work to do to-night, and, as you might know, bachelor of science of london as you are, i have got to worry out as best i can, if i can do it at all, this problem that hartley sent me about the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of euclid." "oh yes," she said, going to his side and putting her hand on to his shoulder as he stood facing the mummy; "i have reason enough to remember that. and what does professor hartley say about it?" "he says, my dear niti," said the professor, in a voice which had something like a note of awe in it, "that when pythagoras thought out that problem--which, of course, is not euclid's at all--he almost saw across the horizon of the world that we live in." "but that," she interrupted, "would be something like looking across the edge of time into eternity, and that--well, of course, that is quite impossible, even to you, dad, or mr hartley. what does he mean?" "he doesn't quite mean that, dear," replied the professor, still staring straight at the motionless mummy as though he half expected the lips which had not spoken for fifty centuries to answer the question that was shaping itself in his mind. "what hartley means, dear, is this--that when pythagoras thought out that proposition he had almost reached the border which divides the world of three dimensions from the world of four." "which, as our dear old friend euclid would say, is impossible; because you know, dad, if that were possible, everything else would be. come, now, annie is bringing up your whisky and soda. put away your problems and take your night-cap, and do get to bed in something like respectable time. don't worry your dear old head about forty-seventh propositions and fourth dimensions and mummies and that sort of thing, even if this mummy does happen to look a bit like me. now, good night, and remember that the night-cap _is_ to be a night-cap, and when you've put it on you really must go to bed. you've been thinking a great deal too much this week. good-night, dad." "good-night, niti, dear. don't trouble your head about my thinking. sufficient unto the brain are the thoughts thereof. sometimes they are more than sufficient. good-night. sleep well and don't dream, if you can help it." "and don't _you_ dream, dad, especially about that wretched proposition. just have another pipe, and drink your whisky and go to bed. there's something in your eyes that says you want a long night's rest. good-night now, and sleep well." she pulled his head down and kissed him twice on his grey, thin cheek, and then, with a wave of her hand and a laughing nod towards the mummy, vanished through the closing study door to go and dream her dreams, which were not very likely to be of mummies and fourth dimensional problems, and left her father to dream his. then a couple of lines from one of "b.v.'s" poems, which had been running in his head all the evening, came back to him, and he murmured half-unconsciously: "'was it hundreds of years ago, my love, was it thousands of miles away...?'" "and why should it not be? why should you, who were once ma-rim[=o]n, priest of amen-ra, in the city of memphis--you who almost stood upon the threshold of the inmost sanctuary of knowledge: you who, if your footsteps had not turned aside into the way of temptation and trodden the black path of sin, might even now be dwelling on the shores of everlasting peace in the land of amenti--dost _thou_ dare to ask such a question?" the sudden change of the pronoun seemed to him to put the clock of time back indefinitely. he was standing by his desk still facing the mummy just as his daughter had left him after saying "good-night." he was not a man to be easily astonished. not only was he one of the best-read amateur egyptologists in europe, but he was also an ex-president of the royal society, a member of the psychical research society, and, moreover, chairman of a recently appointed commission on comparative insanity, the object of whose labours was to determine, if possible, what proportion of people outside asylums were mad or sane according to a standard which, somehow, no one had thought of inventing before--the standard of common-sense. the voice, strangely like his daughter's and his dead wife's also, appeared to come from nowhere and yet from everywhere, and it had a faint and far-away echo in it which harmonised most marvellously with other echoes which seemed to come up out of the depths of his own soul. where had he heard it before? somewhere, certainly. there was no possibility of mistaking tones which were so irresistibly familiar, and, moreover, why did they bring back to him such distinct memories of tragedies long forgotten, even by him? why did they instantly draw before the windows of his soul a long panorama of vast cities, splendid palaces, sombre temples, and towering tombs, in which he saw all these and more with an infinitely greater vividness of form and light and colour than he had ever been able to do in his most inspired hours of dream or study? had the voice really come from those long-silenced lips of the mummy of nitocris, that daughter of the pharaohs who had so terribly avenged her outraged love, and after whom he had named the only child of his marriage? "it is certainly very strange," he said, going to his writing-table and taking up his pipe. "i know that voice, or at least i seem to know it, and it is very like niti's and her mother's; but where can it have come from? hardly from your lips, my long-dead royal egypt," he went on, going up to the mummy-case and peering through his spectacles into the rigid features. he put up his hand and tapped the tightly-drawn lips very gently, then turned away with a smile, saying aloud to himself: "no, no, i must have been allowing what they call my scientific imagination to play tricks with me. perhaps i have been worrying a little too much about this confounded fourth dimension problem,--and yet the thing is exceedingly fascinating. if the hand of science could only reach across the frontier line! if we could only see out of the world of length and breadth and thickness into that other world of these and something else, how many puzzles would be solved, how many impossibilities would become possible, and how many of the miracles which those old egyptian adepts so seriously claimed to work would look like the merest commonplaces! ah well, now for the realities. i suppose that's annie with the whisky." as he turned round the door opened, and he beheld a very strange sight, one which, to a man who had had a less stern mental training than he had had, would have been nothing less than terrifying. his daughter came in with a little silver tray on which there was a small decanter of whisky, a glass, and a syphon of soda-water. "annie has gone to the post, and i thought i might as well bring this myself," said miss nitocris, walking to the table and putting the tray down on the corner of it. beside her stood another figure as familiar now to his eyes as her's was, dressed and tired and jewelled in a fashion equally familiar. save for the difference in dress, nitocris, the daughter of rameses, was the exact counterpart in feature, stature, and colouring of nitocris, the daughter of professor marmion. in her hands she carried a slender, long-necked jar of brilliantly enamelled earthenware and a golden flagon richly chased, and glittering with jewels, and these she put down on the table in exactly the same place as the other nitocris had put her tray on, and as she did so he heard the voice again, saying: "time was, is now, and ever shall be to those for whom time has ceased to be--which is a riddle that ma-rim[=o]n may even now learn, since his soul has been purified and his spirit strengthened by earnest devotion through many lives to the search for the true knowledge." both voices had spoken together, the one in english and the other in the ancient tongue of khem, yet he had heard each syllable separately and comprehended both utterances perfectly. he felt a cold grip of fear at his heart as he looked towards the mummy-case, and, as his fear had warned him, it was empty. then he looked at his daughter, and as their eyes met, she said in the most commonplace tones: "my dear dad, what _is_ the matter with you? if advanced people like ourselves believed in any such nonsense, i should be inclined to say that you had seen a ghost; but i suppose it's only that silly fourth dimension puzzle that's worrying you. now, look here, you must really take your whisky and go to bed. if you go on bothering any longer about 'n to the fourth,' you will have one of your bad headaches to-morrow and won't be able to finish your address for the institute." she put her hand out and took up the decanter. it passed without any apparent resistance through the jar. she lifted it from the same place, and poured out the usual modicum of whisky into the glass, which was standing just where the flagon was. then she pressed the trigger of the syphon, and the familiar hiss of the soda-water brought the professor, as he thought, back to his senses. but no! there could be no doubt about it. there in material form on the corner of his table was a point-blank, tangible contradiction of the universally accepted axiom that two bodies cannot occupy the same space, and that, come from somewhere or nowhere, there were two plainly material objects through which his daughter's hand, without her even knowing it, had passed as easily as it would have done through a little cloud of steam. happily she had no idea of what he had seen and heard, and so for her sake he made a strong effort to control himself, and said as steadily as he could: "thank you, niti, it is very good of you. yes, i think i am a little tired to-night. good-night now, and i promise you that i will be off very soon; i will just have one more pipe, and drink my whisky, and then i really will go. good-night, little woman. we'll have a talk about the mummy in the morning." as soon as his daughter had closed the door, professor marmion returned to his writing-table. the decanter of whisky, the tumbler, and the syphon of soda-water were still standing on the corner of the table, occupying the same space as the enamelled flagon of wine and the drinking goblet which the long-dead other-self of miss nitocris had placed on the little silver salver. he looked about the room anxiously, with a feeling nearer akin to physical dread than he had ever experienced before; but his worst fears were not fulfilled. nitocris the queen had vanished and the mummy was back in its case, blind, rigid, and silent, as it had been for fifty centuries. for several moments he looked at the hard, grey, fixed features of the woman who had once been nitocris, queen of middle egypt, half expecting, after what he had seen, or thought he had seen, that the soul would return, that the long-closed eyes would open again, and that the long-silent lips would speak to him. but no! for all the answer that he got he might as well have been looking upon the granite features of the sphinx itself. he turned away again towards the table, and murmured: "ah well! i suppose it was only an hallucination, after all. one of these strange pranks that the over-strained intellect sometimes plays with us. perhaps i have been thinking too much lately. and now i really think i had better follow niti's advice, and take my night-cap and go to bed." but as he put out his hand to take the whisky decanter he stopped and pulled it back. "what on earth is the matter with me?" he said, putting his hand to his head. "that decanter is mine--it is the same, and yet it is standing in just the same place as that other thing--and i remember that, too. look here, franklin marmion, my friend, if you were not a rather over-worked man i should think you had had a good deal too much to drink. two bodies _cannot_ occupy the same space. it is ridiculous, impossible!" as he said the last word, his voice rose a little, and, as it seemed, an echo came back from one of the corners of the room: "impossible, impossible?" there seemed to be a sarcastic note of interrogation after the last word. "eh? what was that?" and he looked round at the mummy-case. her long-dead majesty was still reclining in it, silent and impassive. "oh, this won't do at all! hartley and the fourth dimension be hanged! it strikes me that this way madness lies if you only go far enough. i'll have that night-cap at once and go to bed." he put out his hand, took hold of the whisky decanter, and as he drew back his arm he saw that instead he held the enamelled flagon in his grasp. "well, well," he said, looking at it half-angrily, "if it is to be, it must be." he put out his left hand and took hold of the goblet, tilted the flagon, and out of the curved lip there fell a thin stream of wine, which glittered with a pale ruby radiance in the light of the electric cluster that hung above his writing-desk. he set the flagon down, and as he raised the goblet to his lips, he heard his own voice saying in the ancient language of khem: "as was, and is, and ever shall be; ever, yet never--never, yet ever. nitocris the queen, in the name of nebzec i greet thee! from thy hands i take the gift of the perfect knowledge!" as he drained the goblet he turned towards the mummy-case. it might have been fancy, it might have been the effect of that miraculous old wine of cos which, if he had really drunk it, must now be more than thirty centuries old: it might have been the result of the hard thinking that he had been doing now for several days and half-nights; but he certainly thought that the queen's head suddenly became endowed with life, that the eyes opened, and the grey of the parchment skin softened into a delicate olive tinge with a faint rosy blush showing through it. the brown, shrivelled lips seemed to fill out, grow red, and smile. the eyelids lifted, and the eyes of the nitocris of old looked down on him for a moment. he shook his head and looked, and there was the mummy just as it had been when he opened the case. "really, this is strange, almost to the point of bewilderment," he went on. "i wonder if there is any more of that wine left?" he took up the flagon and poured out another goblet, filled and drank it. "yes," he continued, speaking as though under some strange exultation of the mind rather than of the senses, "yes, that is the wine of cos. i drank it. i, ma-rim[=o]n, the priest-student of the higher mysteries; i, whose feet faltered on the threshold of the place of the elect, and whose heart failed him at the portal of the sanctuary, even though amen-ra was beckoning me to cross it." "good heavens, what nonsense i am talking! whatever there was in that wine or wherever it came from, i think it is quite time i was off, not to old egypt, but the land of nod. it seems to--no, it has not got into my head; in fact i am beginning to see that, after all, hartley might very possibly be right about that forty-seventh proposition. well, i will do as the russians say, take my thoughts to bed with me, since the morning is wiser than the evening. it is all very mysterious. i certainly hope that annie won't find these things here in the morning when she comes to clear up. i wonder what the museum would give me for them if they were not, as i think they are, the unsubstantial fabric of a vision?" when he got into his room and turned the electric light on, he stood under the cluster and held up his closed hand so that the light fell upon a curiously engraved scarab set in a heavy gold ring which had been given to him on his last birthday by lord lester leighton, a wealthy and accomplished young nobleman who had devoted his learned leisure to egyptian exploration and research. it was he who had sent the mummy of queen nitocris to the house on wimbledon common instead of adding it to his own collection--not altogether unselfishly, it must be confessed, for he was very much in love with the other nitocris who was still in the flesh. "now," he said, fingering the scarab, "if i was not dreaming, and if by some mysterious means her highness's promise is to be actually fulfilled, i ought to be able to take this ring off without opening my hand. certainly, any fourth dimensional being could do it." as he spoke he pulled at the setting of the scarab--and, to his amazement, the ring came off whole. there was no scar on his finger--no break in the ring. "good heavens!" he exclaimed, staring with something like fear in his eyes, first at his hand, and then at the ring. "then it _is_ true!" he was silent for a full minute; then he put the ring down on the dressing-table and whispered: "what a terrible power--and what an awful responsibility! well, thank god, i am a fairly honest man!" as he undressed he was conscious of a curious sense of reminiscence which he had never experienced before. his brain was not only perfectly clear, but almost abnormally active, and yet the current of his thoughts appeared to be turned backward instead of forward. the things of his own life, the life that he was then living, seemed to drift behind him. the facts which he had learned in his long and minute study of egyptian history came up in his mind, no longer as facts learned from books and monuments, wall-paintings, and hieroglyphics, but as living entities. he seemed to know, not by memory, but of immediate knowledge. it was the difference between the reading of the story, say, of a battle, and actually taking part in it. he got into bed, and turned over on his right side, saying: "well, this is all very extraordinary. i wonder what it all means? thank goodness, i am sleepy enough, and sleep is the best of all medicines. i should not wonder if i were to dream of memphis again to-night. a wonderfully beautiful mummy that, quite unique--and nitocris, too. good-night, nitocris, my royal mistress that might have been! good-night!" chapter ii back to the past the city of a hundred kings, vast and sombre, stretched away into the dim, soft distance of the moonlit night to right and left and far behind him. in front lay the broad, smooth, silver-gleaming nile, then approaching its full flood-time, and looking like a wide, shining road out of the shadows through the light and into the shadows again--symbol of the visible present coming invisibly out of the domains of the past, and fading away into the still more hazy domain of the unknown future. symbol, too, in its countless ripples under the fresh north wind, of the generations of man drifting endlessly down the stream of time. he was standing in the dark shadows of a huge pylon at one end of the broad white terrace of the palace of pepi in memphis--he, ma-rim[=o]n, priest of amen-ra and initiate of the higher mysteries. nitocris was standing beside him with her hands clasped behind her and her head slightly thrown back, and as she gazed out over the river the moonlight fell full on the white loveliness of her face and into the dark depths of her eyes, where it seemed to lose itself in the dusk that lay deep down in them, a dusk like the shadow of a soul in sorrow. he looked upon her face, and saw in it a beauty and a mystery deeper even than the beauty and the mystery of the egyptian night as it was in those old days--the face of a fair woman, a riddle of the gods which men might go mad in seeking to read aright, and yet never learn the true meaning of it. the silence between them had been long and yet so solemn in its wordless meaning that he had not dared to break it. then at length she spoke, moving only her lips, her body still motionless and her eyes still gazing at the stars, or into the depths beyond them. "can it be true, ma-rim[=o]n? can the gods indeed have permitted such a thing to be? can the all-father have given his chief minister to be the instrument of such a foul crime and monstrous impiety as this?" and he replied, slowly and sadly: "yes, it is true, nitocris, true that thou art now queen in the land by the will of the great rameses; and true also it is that the shade of nefer is now waiting in the halls of amenti till his murderers shall be sent by the hand of a just vengeance into the presence of the divine assessors." "ah yes, vengeance," she replied, turning towards him with a gasp in her voice, "that must come; but whose hand shall cast the spear or draw the bow? we claim kinship with the gods, but we are not the gods, and what mortal hand could avenge a crime like this?" "a woman's hand is soft and a woman's lips are sweet, yet what so cruel or so merciless in all the world as a woman? as there is nothing liker heaven than a woman's love, so there is nothing liker hell than a woman's hate. so saith the ancient wisdom, o nitocris; and therefore, as thou hast loved nefer the prince, so shalt thou also hate menkau-ra and anemen-ha, his murderers and the destroyers of his promised happiness." she shivered as he spoke, not with cold, for the breath of that perfect night was well nigh as soft as her touch and as warm as her own breath. she turned swiftly and laid her hand on his shoulder. her touch was as light as the falling of the rose-leaves in the gardens of sais, yet he trembled under it, and his face, which had been as pale as her own before, flushed darkly red as she looked into his eyes. "you--yes, you, ma-rim[=o]n, you too love me, do you not--truly? the stars are the eyes of the gods: they are looking on you. tell me, do you love me? does your blood throb in your veins when i touch you? does your heart beat quicker when you come near me? are your ears keener for my voice than for that of any other woman--tell me?" his hands went up and clasped hers as they lay on his shoulders. he took her right hand and pressed it to his heart, and laid her left hand on his cheek. then he let them fall. he stepped back, bowed his head, and said: "the queen is answered!" "not the queen, but the woman, ma-rim[=o]n, and as a woman loves to be answered. and now the woman shall speak. nefer is dead, yet is not nefer re-incarnated in another form, another man of another build, but yet nefer that was--and is beside me now?" she whispered these words very softly and very distinctly, and as the words came rippling out from between her half-smiling lips, she took half a pace forward and looked up into his face. "not dead--nefer--i!" he exclaimed, starting back. "have not the paraschites done their work on his body? is not his mummy even now resting in the city of the dead? how can it be? surely, nitocris, thou art dreaming." "and hast thou, a priest and sage, standing on the threshold of the holy mysteries, hast thou not learned the law which tells thee how, with the permission of the divine assessors, the souls of the dead may come back from the halls of amenti to do their bidding in other mortal shapes? and what if they should have ordained that his soul should have thus returned? "thou, who art so like him that while he was yet alive mortal eyes could scarce distinguish the one from the other. may it not be that the gods, who foresee all things, made thee in the same image, perchance to this very end?" "no, the riddle is too deep for me, even as that other riddle which i read in thy eyes, o queen!" "let thy love help thee to read it, then!" she replied, coming to him and putting her hands on his shoulders again. "tell me now, ma-rim[=o]n, what wouldst thou do if thy soul were now waiting in the land of aalu and the soul of nefer was listening to me with thine ears, and looking at me with thine eyes?" "and if thou----" "yes, and if i too believed that this were so?" he saw the sweet, red, smiling lips coming nearer to him, and felt the soft breath on his bare throat. he saw the deep eyes melting into tenderness as the moonlight shone upon them, and in the pale olive cheeks a faint flush swiftly deepened. "nefer or ma-rim[=o]n, i am mortal," he said, swiftly catching her wrists and drawing her towards him. "i am flesh and blood. i am man, and thou art woman--and i love thee! i love thee! ah, how sweet thy kisses are! now let the gods bless or curse, for never could they take away what thou hast given--and for it i will give thee all. all that has been, and is, and might have been! priest and sage, initiate of the mysteries, what are they to me now! o nitocris, my queen and my love! sooner would i live through one year of bliss with thee than an eternity in the peace of the gods itself!" the words of blasphemy came hot and fast between his kisses, and she heard them unresisting in his arms, giving him back kiss for kiss, and looking into his eyes under the dark lashes which half-hid hers; and so ma-rim[=o]n, the youthful initiate of the holy mysteries, became in that moment a man, and so he began to learn the long lesson which teaches to what heights and depths a woman who has loved and hated can rise and fall for the sake of her love and her hate. "and now, my nefer," she went on, throwing her clinging arms round his neck again, "now, good-night! go and dream of me as i will dream of thee, and remember that, though mortals may plan, the gods decide. we may try to paint the picture, but the outline is drawn by their hands and may not be changed by ours. but, so far as this matter is concerned, i swear by the veil of isis, by these sacred kisses of ours, and by the uraeus crown of the three kingdoms, that, rather than be sold as a priceless chattel to grace the triumph of menkau-ra, i will give myself, as others did in the old days, to be the bride of father nile. remember that, and remember, too, that, whatever the outward seeming of things may be, i am thine and thou art mine, as it was, and is, and shall be, until the peace of all things shall come." * * * * * then the dream-vision changed from moonlight to sunlight, from night to morning; for it was the dawn of the day that was to see, as all men believed, the gorgeous ceremony of the nuptials of the daughter of rameses with menkau-ra, the mohar, chief of the house of war and mightiest of all the warriors of the land of khem, now that rameses had passed from the black banks of the nile to the shores of amenti, and his mummy was waiting the summons of the high gods which should recall it to life in the fulness of time and the dawn of the everlasting peace. never had even the land of khem seen a fairer dawn. the east shone in silver, blushed into amethyst, and flamed in gold as the restorer of all things rose bright and glorious in sudden splendour over the city of the white wall. standing on the flat roof of the temple of ptah, he looked about him in the first flush of this morning which had just dawned, big with fate, not only for him and his beloved, but also for the land of khem, and perchance for the world. the great river was spreading its annual blessings over the land. the waters were broadening out into wide shining sheets, and the slow, soft music of their rippling was stealing along the great water-walls of the temples and palaces which formed the river-front of memphis. only a week ago the victorious armies of khem had brought their spoils and their prisoners across the eastern frontier. there had been fruit, bread, and flesh, and wine for the poor, and banquets of royal lavishness for those who could claim right of entry into the sacred circle which enclosed the throne, the temple, and the camp of the victorious warrior. for days he had heard the name of menkau-ra the conqueror shouted up to the heavens by the crowds that had thronged the streets and the market-places, and, mingled with it, he had also heard the name of the girl-queen whose arms had been about his neck, and whose lips he had kissed the night before, and he knew that even now the people were asking why the conqueror should not wed the daughter of rameses, and become the father of a line of even greater and yet mightier pharaohs. he had heard their cries calmly and without anger, for he knew that that one stolen hour of sweet intercourse with her meant much more than the conqueror himself could win--something that could not be taken by force, or even through the will of the dead king. her soul was his, and he knew well that the man to whom she had not given her soul would never be permitted to lay a loving hand on her body. "ah yes, there he comes, i suppose," he went on, still talking aloud to himself, as a shrill musical peal of silver trumpets broke out from the direction of the barracks to the north of the palace. "alas! were i but truly nefer! that golden-crowned murderer--for sure i am that he killed him--he would not now be making ready for his triumph at the head of his victorious troops through the streets and squares of memphis. if that were so, how glad a day this would be for egypt and for us!" but, as the divine assessors willed it, there was no triumph that day in memphis. the sun had hardly risen to a level with the topmost wall of the rameseum before messengers were sent out from the palace bearing the tidings that nitocris the queen had been stricken with a sudden malady, and that all festivities were to be deferred till the next day at the earliest. that night, when the moon was sinking low down in the west towards the dark hills of the libyan desert, and the isis star was glowing palely like an expiring lamp hung high above the brightening eastern earth-line, he saw her muffled form gliding ghost-like towards him as he stood waiting for her on the terrace. she was clad like the meanest of her serving-maids, just as a common slave-wench who had stolen out to meet a lover of her own sort might have been. when she came within a pace of him, he held his arms out. she put hers out too, and for a moment they looked in silence into each other's eyes, and then she, seeing that the kiss which she expected did not come, parted her lips and said smilingly: "you need not fear to kiss them, dearest, they have not yet been polluted by the lips of menkau-ra, although all the city has been hailing him as the betrothed of nitocris." then he smiled too, and their lips met in such a long, silent kiss as only lovers give and take. "thy words are almost as sweet as thy kisses are, o nitocris!" he said, "for i would sooner see thee--yes, i would sooner see thee in the hands of the paraschites--this lovely body of thine dead--knowing that thy soul was waiting for mine on the shores of amenti, than i would know that those sweet lips had been defiled by the touch of such as he; and yet surely thou hast spoken with him. did he not claim the fulfilment of the promise of the great king?" "ah yes," she replied softly, as she slipped out of his arms, "but it is one thing to claim and another to get. yes, i have spoken with him. i have promised all, and given nothing. i have not even yielded my hand to his lips, for i told him in answer to all the entreaties of his love--and of a truth i tell thee that he loves me very dearly, for that great, strong frame of his shook like a bulrush in the wind under the breath of my lightest words--that, until the last vows had made us man and wife, i would be his queen and he should be my subject and my slave, even as he was of the great rameses; and with this he was fain to be content, thinking, no doubt, how soon he would be my lord and master, and i his--his queen and plaything, bound by the law that may not be broken, to submit to every varying whim and humour of his passion." "thy master, nitocris! thine! such shame could never be. rather would the high gods permit death to be the master of life, or night to be lord of day. is there no other way?" "yes, there is another way, and only one to save me, nefer--if truly the soul of my beloved is looking out of thine eyes into mine," she whispered, coming close to him and laying her hands lightly upon his shoulders, "there is another way, but it is the way that leads through the mystery of the things that are into the deeper mystery of the things that are to be--the way of death and vengeance. tell me, my beloved, hast thou the courage to tread it with me?" the lovely face, the pleading lips, the searching eyes were close to his. he could feel the soft contact of her body, even her fluttering heartbeats answering his. it was the moment of the supreme test, the parting of the ways--to the heights whose pinnacles reach to the heaven of perfect knowledge, or to the abysses whose lowest depths are the roof of hell; for there is but one heaven and one hell, and their names are knowledge and ignorance. there lay the fulfilment of his vows, the renunciation of the lower life with all its potent witcheries of the senses, with all its exquisite delights and glittering prizes, fame and honours, power and wealth, and, dearest of all, the love of woman. here, clasped in his arms, stood nitocris, her hands still resting lightly on his shoulders, her head lying on his breast, her eyes upturned, the star-beams swimming in their luminous depths. "nefer, beloved, answer me!" the stars grew dim, and the solid floor of the terrace shook under his feet. he bent his head and laid his lips upon hers. "thou art answered, o nitocris--even unto death and the life beyond!" her lips returned his kisses--kisses that were curses--and then for many minutes they conversed in hurried whispers. at last she slipped out of his arms and left him, his lips burning from the clinging touch of hers, and his heart cold with a fear that was greater than the fear of death. he clasped his hands to his temples and looked up at the coldly shining isis star, and through the silence there came to his soul in the speech that is never heard by the ears of flesh the fateful words: "once only is it given to mortals to look into the eyes of isis. he who looks and turns his gaze aside has found and lost." chapter iii the death-bridal of nitocris the day of the bridal of nitocris the queen with menkau-ra the conqueror had come and gone in a blaze of golden splendour. in all the upper and lower lands no head was held so proudly as the head of menkau-ra, no heart beat so high as his that day, nor did any cheek bloom so sweetly, or any eyes shine so brightly as the cheeks and the eyes of nitocris--so strange are the workings of a woman's heart, and so far are its mysteries past finding out. and now the bridal feast was spread in the great banqueting hall which pepi the wise had made deep down in the foundations of his palace below the waters of the nile at flood-time, and at midnight the waters would be at the full. it was here that nitocris had sat at the betrothal feast with nefer but a few hours before his death, for here he had drunk from the poisoned cup which anemen-ha the high priest had prepared, and here only would nitocris meet her guests. the great hall shone with the light of a thousand golden lamps, which shed their radiance and the perfume from the scented oils in which were dissolved the most precious gums of the distant east. the long tables, spread with snowy linen and loaded with vessels of gold and silver and glass of many hues and curious forms, flashed and glittered in the glow of the thousand flames. the vineyards of cos and sais had yielded their oldest and sweetest wines, red and purple and golden. the choicest meats and the rarest fruits that ripened under the glowing suns of khem--all was there that could make glad the heart of man and fill his soul with contentment. at the centre of the table, which stood on a raised platform in front of the great black pedestal of the colossus of pepi, nitocris the queen sat in her chair of ivory and gold, clad in almost transparent robes of the finest silk of cos, shining with gems, and crowned with the uraeus snake, and the double diadem of the two lands. on her right sat menkau-ra, crowned and robed in royal vesture, and on her left anemen-ha in his priestly garments of snowy linen. at the other tables sat their friends and kindred, the families of the mohar and the high priest, the chief officers of the victorious army and all the proud hierarchy of the temple of ptah, for was not this the triumph of anemen-ha no less than of menkau-ra? only ma-rim[=o]n was absent. he had disappeared from the temple early in the morning, and no one had given a thought to his going, for one base-born, even though of royal blood, had no place at the bridal feast of the queen and her chosen consort. the libations had been poured out to the lords and ladies of heaven--to ptah the beginner, and ra the lord of day, to sechet the lady of love and war, and necheb the bringer of victory; and when the slaves had carried round the viands till all were satisfied, the guests were crowned with garlands, and the jars of the oldest and choicest wines were broached. the feast was ended, and the revel was about to begin. the last half of the last hour of the night was well-nigh spent, and while the guests were waiting for the signal from the royal table, the queen rose in her place, and, in the silence that greeted her, her voice sounded sweetly as she spoke and said: "o my guests--ye who are the holiest and the bravest in the land of khem, though our hearts are joyful, and our souls refreshed with wine and good cheer, let us not forget the pious customs and wise ways of our ancestors, for it is fitting that in such hours as this our hearts should be turned from pride by the remembrance that we live ever in the presence of death, and that this world is but the threshold of the next. ill, too, would it become me to forget, in the midst of my present happiness, to pay the honour due to him who might have shared this crown with me; wherefore let the noble dead be brought into our midst, so that the soul of nefer, looking down from the flowery fields of aalu, may see that in the hour of our joy we do not forget the sorrow of his untimely death." then she clapped her hands, and menkau-ra and anemen-ha shifted in their seats, and looked at each other with eyes of evil meaning as six slaves appeared at the lower end of the hall, bearing upon their shoulders the mummy-case of nefer, the dead prince, beloved of nitocris. now low, sad music sounded from a hidden source, and to the cadence of this the slaves marched slowly round the tables, followed by the eyes of the silenced and sobered guests. then they stopped in front of the queen's seat, and she said: "let the case be set up against the central pillar yonder, and let the face of the prince be uncovered, that i may look upon him who was to have been my lord." "but if i may speak, royal egypt," said anemen-ha, the chief of the house of ptah, leaning towards her, "that would be beyond the law of the gods and the customs of the land. to look on the face of the dead were defilement for thee and us." "yet this once it shall be done, o priest of the father of the gods," answered nitocris, turning and looking into his eyes, "for last night i had a vision, and i saw the soul of nefer come back to his mummy, here in this hall, at my bridal feast, and his eyes opened, and his lips spoke, and made plain to me many things that i greatly longed to know. but why shouldst thou turn pale and tremble, thou the holiest man in the land? what hast thou to fear, even if my vision came true? and thou, too, menkau-ra the mighty, hast thou slain thy thousands, and yet fearest to look upon the face of one dead man? see, see!" and she pointed her finger at the face of the mummy. "by the power of the just and merciful gods, my vision shall be made very truth indeed! look, anemen-ha, priest of the god who is king of gods! look, menkau-ra, thou who wouldst reign in the place of nefer. behold, he has come back from the bosom of osiris to greet thee!" with eyes fixed and ears sharpened by such terror as only the sin-steeped soul can know, they saw the waxen eyelids of the mummy slowly rise, the dim, glazed eyes look out from underneath them, the dry, black lips move, and heard a thin, harsh voice say through the awful silence: "greeting, nitocris, my queen--greeting from the gloom of amenthes, where i have waited too long for those who ere now should have stood with me in the halls of doom and the presence of the assessors! say now, thou who sittest feasting between my murderers, how much longer must i wait for thee and them?" not long, o nefer, my beloved, not long! tarry yet a little while, o outraged soul, in the shape that once was thine, and thou shalt see thyself avenged. lo, i hear the wings of kefa, goddess of the flood-time, rustling in the silence of the midnight skies. she herself shall pour out a libation to thine injured shade! "nay, nay, my lords, and you good friends of those who did my own true lord to death, sit still, and drain a farewell cup with me, your queen. it is too late to fly, for every way is closed. the high gods have spoken, and i will do their bidding!" then, extending her white, jewelled arms toward the mummy, she cried in a deeper, harsher tone: "o nefer, my prince and my love! there lives no man in khem who shall take thy place beside me, or usurp the throne that should have been thine. i have sinned, but i repent me of the wrong. lo, now i come and bring thee a goodly sacrifice to cheer thine angry heart--my lord, my love, i come!" held by the triple spell of guilt and fear and wonder, they listened to these terrible words in silence, white horror sitting on their blanching cheeks and brows. as she ceased she raised her arms above her head, a golden cup full-crowned between her glittering hands. a moment she held it aloft, then dashed it to the floor, and cried in a voice that rang like the laughter of devils through the awful silence: "come, kefa, come, and bear me to my lord!" the goddess answered in a mighty rush and roar of waters, long pent and swiftly loosed. then above the tumult rose the hoarse shouts of men and the shrill screams of women, and the crash and clash of tables overturned; then came the swirl and bubbling hiss of a flood that gleamed darkly under the golden lamps and swiftly rose towards them, bearing upon its surface white arms with outstretched hands gripping at the empty air, and gauzy robes which half hid gleaming limbs, white faces with wildly-staring eyes, and teeth that grinned between tight-drawn lips so lately smiling; strong swimmers fighting for another moment's breath, and one by one dragged down by many hidden hands: then the sharp hiss of swift-quenched flames, then darkness, and the stifling of sobbing groans into silence, and after that only the sibilant undertone of waters rushing swiftly past smooth walls through utter night. * * * * * "dear me!" the professor heard himself say as he sat up and rubbed his eyes, "what on earth can be the matter with me? egypt--the queen--palace of pepi--bridal feast of nitocris and menkau-ra--yes, yes, of course i remember it all now. she made me impersonate nefer in the mummy-case, and then, when she had frightened her guests half out of their wits, she avenged her lover by opening the sluice-gates and drowning the lot, herself included. a rare device, that of old pepi's, for getting rid of hospitably entertained enemies. not quite in accordance with our modern ideas of sport, i'm afraid, but in those days we thought a good deal more of effectiveness than sport. good heavens! what sort of nonsense am i talking? dreaming, i suppose." he stopped as the reflection of a brilliant flash of lightning lit up his window, and bursts of rain dashed upon the panes. "ah yes, of course, that's it! quite in accordance with the theory of dreams. it's only the difference between a thunder-shower and the nile flood. the genius of dreams could easily account for the rest. certainly this apparatus that we call our brain plays some very curious tricks with us sometimes. i suppose this is one of them. and yet if ever there was a dream that seemed like reality that one did. the mummy and the long-dead nitocris back to life! by the way, i wonder whether that flagon was really there, and whether there _was_ any wine in it? if there was, perhaps i took too much of it. ah, there's the rain again! "by the way now, suppose that this fourth dimension that has puzzled so many of us is, after all, duration? if so, it would solve a great many problems, because it would be possible to be and not to be at the same time, and, therefore, for two bodies to occupy the same space. that would be perfectly easy of supposition to the being to whom time and eternity were one. yes, i believe that when the great problem is solved, it will be found that the fourth dimension _is_ duration, extending in all directions like the circumference of a circle, the edges of a cube, and the curves of the conic sections. "yes, i really do think i have got it at last, and that confounded mummy has taught it me. still, i don't think i ought to speak as disrespectfully as that of a young lady who has been dead for the last fifty centuries or so and has come back. yes, that is it. it _is_ duration." perfectly satisfied for the time being with this solution, he turned over on to his right side--for, to his disgust, he found that he had been lying on his back, a most pernicious position where dreaming is concerned--and went to sleep. half an hour later he was awakened by another heaven-shaking crash of thunder. chapter iv thieves in the night this time he was very much awake. in fact, his sense of wakefulness seemed almost superhuman. his faculties were preternaturally alert, and he had a feeling of what might properly be called mental extension--it was not exaltation--- which seemed to widen his mental vision enormously. problems which had puzzled him to desperation suddenly became as obvious as the first axioms of geometry. in short, he felt as though he had become a new man, re-born, or re-incarnated, into another world which contained the one he had so far lived in, but which was infinitely vaster in some undefined way which was not yet plain to him. he lay for some time thinking over the extraordinary happenings of the evening and his dream, which he remembered with astonishing exactness of detail. then a sudden turn of thought carried his mind to the subject of miracles, apparitions, ghosts, and mathematical impossibilities such as squaring the circle and doubling the cube--and to his amazement he found that the impossible of yesterday had become the possible--nay, the almost absurdly obvious of to-night. he went on thinking and wondering until he began to half-believe that he was dreaming again, so he got up and switched on the electric light. then he turned involuntarily towards the wardrobe, which, as usual, had a long mirror running down the middle of it. to his amazement he did not see himself reflected in it. the mirror seemed to have vanished, and in its place was a window looking into his study. he saw the mummy-case leaning up against the wall, but it was empty. in front of it stood a man and a woman. both were plainly, almost meanly, dressed; the man in a tightly-buttoned black frock-coat and baggy grey trousers; the woman in a plain gown of dark stuff, and a shawl which was draped round her head and shoulders in somewhat eastern fashion. he could see their faces distinctly in profile. they were of the classic coptic type which so persistently reproduces the features of the old egyptians as we see them outlined in the wall-paintings of the temples and the half-mutilated carvings and statues. the window of the study was open, but the door was shut; so was the door of his own room, but for all that he distinctly heard the man say to the woman in coptic, which, curiously enough, sounded as familiar to his ears as the faces seemed to his eyes: "neb-anat, it is gone! these heathen ravishers have not been content with stealing the body of our queen from its sacred resting-place and bringing it here, whither we have traced it with so much labour. see, it has been stolen again; hidden, no doubt, so that the servants of the king could not find it. it may be that even we have been suspected and watched, in spite of all our care. yet it must be found, or the doom that may not be revoked will be ours." "even so, pent-ah," replied the woman in a soft, musical voice which well suited the comeliness of her face; "but though the priceless treasure has been taken from its casket, it cannot have been carried out of the house, for you know that every approach has been watched closely since it was brought here. come, in this house it must be, and to find it is our task. every one is asleep; take off thy shoes and let us search." she took off her own shoes as she spoke, and he saw the man do the same. then, as the man opened the door and they passed out of the study, the picture vanished from the mirror. amazement at what he had seen and heard--the disappearance of the mummy, the presence of the man and woman, evidently charged with what they believed to be the sacred mission of stealing it back again, and their evident purpose of searching the house for it--instantly gave place to a quick thrill of fear. his daughter's bedroom was on the same floor as the study, only a couple of doors away round the corner of the landing. these people would search every room. what if she had not locked her door securely, or if they had some means of opening it? she was the living image of the dead nitocris. he did not dare to think of what might happen to her. would these new-found, strangely-given powers of his suffice to protect her? if not, he would have but little use for them, since she was his nearest and dearest on earth. he pulled his stockings over the pants of his pyjamas and put on his velvet working jacket, forgetting for the moment that, if these things were true, it would be perfectly easy for him to make himself invisible to beings in the ordinary world of three dimensions. then he turned out the light, opened the door very softly, and crept downstairs. yes, what he had seen was true. he heard the soft, shuffling patter of stockinged feet along the landing, though he could see nothing in the dark. a door opened gently. his sense of location told him that it was the door of the spare bedroom next but one to the study. he felt his way silently and softly along the wall, and as he did so his hand touched the electric switch. should he turn the light on and alarm the house? whoever was there had "broken and entered" after midnight, and was therefore outside the law. no, he would not do that. if what he had seen was true, the intruders believed that their mission was a sacred one. no doubt the man was armed, and perhaps the woman also, and what would a knife-stab mean to them on such a desperate quest? as these thoughts ran at lightning speed through his mind, he saw a faint glow inside the room. he crept forward and looked round the side of the doorway. the man had a little electric lamp in his hand and was flashing the slender rays all over the room. he drew his head back quickly as he heard him say: "there is nothing here, anat. come, let us try the next room. neither lock nor bolt nor even human life must stand in the way of our search now that we have begun it!" he heard them coming towards the door. instinctively he shrank back, and his heart stood still as he thought of what would happen if the man chanced to turn the little ray of his lamp on him. almost involuntarily his thoughts went back to the promise of queen nitocris, and something like a prayer that it might be kept rose to his lips. they came out, and the man flashed the thin electric ray up and down the passage. it wavered hither and thither, and at last fell directly on his face. he was anything but a coward, but he was thinking of niti--and what if a knife-stab left her undefended? but to his amazement, although they were both looking straight at him, the expression of neither face changed in the slightest. they had not seen him. the queen had answered his prayer. he was no longer in the world of three dimensions, and so he was invisible to all dwellers in it. for him, then, there was evidently no danger--but niti----? they moved along to the next door. that was hers. the woman put her hand on the knob and turned it. to his horror, the door opened. she had forgotten to lock it. they both crept in, and he followed them boldly enough now, knowing what he did. the ray leapt rapidly about the room till it fell on the bed with its pale blue silken coverlet, and then on the pillow, on which rested the head of the sleeping, breathing image of the long-dead queen. with a half-stifled gasp the man shrank back and dropped the lamp, and the professor heard him say to the woman in a shuddering whisper: "by the high gods, neb-anat, it is a miracle! do you not see her? it is she--the queen--alive again, as the ancient prophecy said she should be. what magic have these heathens used?" "yes," replied the woman, whispering lower, "truly it is the queen, and she is alive and sleeping--no doubt passing from the sleep of death through the sleep of life to life again. now, o pent-ah, is our task much harder, yet will its accomplishment be all the more glorious for you and me, and greatly will our lord reward us if we can restore to his keeping, not the ravished mummy of nitocris, but the queen herself, warm and breathing and beautiful, as she was in the ancient days of the great rameses." "i'll be hanged if you do!" said the professor to himself, "not, at least, if her majesty's legacy to me is worth anything. abduct my daughter at the dead of night, would you, you scoundrels? we'll see about that. if you don't leave this house as thoroughly frightened as ever you were in your lives, i know nothing about the fourth dimension." meanwhile he heard them both groping about the floor after the lamp. the woman found it, and pressed the button. the ray fell on the man's face, and he saw that the olive of his skin had turned to a ghastly grey. his eyes were wide open, and his mouth and nostrils were working with intense excitement. then the woman turned the ray on niti's face again. "they will wake her if this goes on much longer," said the professor to himself again. "i had better stop this little comedy before it becomes a tragedy. poor niti would go half mad if she found these two scoundrels by her bedside--and yet if i do anything out of the way they will yell. ah, i think i have it!" he walked softly out of the room, and when he got into the passage he whispered in the tongue that had become so strangely familiar to him: "pent-ah, neb-anat, come hither instantly! who are you that you should disturb the slumbers of your lady the queen!" he saw them stare at each other with eyes wide with fear and wonder. "it is the command of the mighty one," whispered the woman, taking hold of the man's hand and drawing him towards the door. "and he must be obeyed," said he in reply, bowing his head and following her. they closed the door very softly behind them. the professor could not repress a sigh of thankfulness for niti's escape from what, at best, would have been a very terrible fright. "and now, my friends," he went on to himself, "i think i can teach you not to come into an english gentleman's house again with an idea of stealing his property, to say nothing of abducting his daughter." the man and woman were still staring at each other by the light of the lamp, each holding each other's trembling hand, when the lamp was suddenly snatched away from the woman and went out. then, to their horror, the ray shot out again in front of them as though the lamp were floating by itself in the air. it flashed from face to face, both ghastly with fear. then an invisible hand gripped the man's, and drew him with irresistible force along the passage. the woman grasped his coat, and followed with shuffling feet and shaking limbs, dumb with wonder and fear. the hand led them down the passage, round the corner, and into the study. then it released them. they heard the door shut and the key turn in the lock. then there was a click, and the electric cluster above the writing-table shone out, apparently of its own volition. the woman uttered a low scream, and cowered down in a corner of a big sofa that stood by the bay-window. the man, after one terrified glance round the room, began to creep towards the open sash; but the invisible hand gripped him by the collar and pulled him back. his trembling knees gave way under him, and he rolled in a heap on the floor. then, to his wondering horror, he saw a stout blackthorn stick which was standing in a corner of the room, jump up into the air and leap towards him. he put his head down on to the carpet, covered his eyes with his hands, and began to moan with terror. the stick came down with what seemed to him superhuman force again and again on his back and shoulders. he whimpered and moaned, and at last howled with pain. he rolled over and looked up, and there was the stick hanging in the air above him. he put up his hands clasped as though in prayer, and down it came on his knuckles. he did not howl this time. his hands unclasped and dropped beside him; his head went back, and he fainted in sheer terror. "there, my friend," said the professor aloud, forgetting the presence of the woman for the moment; "mummy or no mummy, i don't think you will come into this house again. and as for you, madam," he went on, "of course, i can't give you a hiding, so the sight of his punishment will have to be enough for you. still, i think you have had enough of attempted mummy-stealing to last you some time." the woman stared up into the vacancy out of which the voice came, her eyes dilated, and her lips trembling with the movement of her lower jaw. she saw a jug of water get up off the table and empty itself over her companion's face. then she fainted, too. when pent-ah came to himself and sat up, he saw an elderly gentleman, tall and erect as a man in the prime of life, standing over him with the blackthorn in one hand and the water-jug in the other. "i am not going to ask what you two are doing here," he said sternly, "because i know already. if i called the police i could send you both to prison for house-breaking and attempted robbery; but i don't want any fuss, and perhaps you have been punished enough for the present. ah, i see your accomplice is coming round. you came in by the window, i suppose. now get out by it as quick as you can, and mind you keep your mouths shut as to what has happened to-night. if you don't," he went on, suddenly changing into coptic, "beware of the anger of your lord--of him who never forgives!" the man scrambled to his feet, whimpering: "i go, lord, i go, and my lips shall be silent as the lips of----" he cast a frightened glance towards the mummy-case, and then, grasping the woman roughly by the arm, he dragged her towards the open window, saying: "come, neb-anat, come ere the wrath of our lord consumes us!" * * * * * "why, where's the mummy, dad?" said miss nitocris, as she came into her father's study just before breakfast the next morning, and looked in amazement at the empty case. "stolen, my dear, i am sorry to say," replied the professor gravely. "did you hear any noises in the house last night, or were you sleeping too soundly?" "i seem to have an idea that i did," she said, "but only a dim one; i thought i only dreamt it. but did you, dad? do tell me all about it. what a horrible shame to steal that lovely mummy! and it was so like me, too. i believe i should have got quite fond of it." "yes, dear," continued the professor, speaking, as she thought, a little nervously. "there was a noise, and i heard it. i came down here and turned the light on. i found the window open and the mummy gone--and that is all i can tell you about it." chapter v across the threshold after breakfast professor marmion, according to his practice on fine days, lit his pipe, and went out for a stroll on the common to put in a little hard thinking, while miss nitocris, after seeing to certain household matters, sat down in his study and read the papers, in order that she might be able to give him a synopsis of the world's news at lunch. he did not read the newspapers himself, except, perhaps, in the train, when he had nothing better to do. he took no interest in politics, for one thing, and he had still less interest in professional cricket and football, racing, and what is generally called sport. he had a fixed opinion that all the events happening in the world which really mattered, not even excepting the proceedings of learned societies and the criminal and civil law courts, could be adequately recorded on a couple of sheets of notepaper. in other words, he had an absolute contempt for everything that makes a newspaper sell, and therefore his daughter had very soon learnt to omit these fascinating items entirely. curiously enough, his mind seemed to be running on this subject of all things that morning. he had been reading an article in the _fortnightly_ on the growing sensationalism, and therefore the general decadence of the english press a day or two before, and this had got connected up in his thoughts with the amazing happenings of the last twelve hours, and he asked himself what would happen if he were to give the narrative of his experiences in a letter to the _times_, supported by the authority of his own distinguished and irreproachable name. certainly it would be the most sensational communication that had ever appeared in a newspaper. in a day or two, granted always that the _times_ had no doubts as to his sanity and printed the letter, the whole press would be ablaze with it; wimbledon would be besieged by reporters eager to see miracles; and then they would go away and write lurid articles, some about the miracles, if they saw them, and some about an absolutely new form of conjuring that he had invented. then the scientific press would take it up, and a very merry battle of wits would begin. he smiled gravely as he thought of the inkshed that would come to pass in a _combat à l'outrance_ between the three dimensionists and the four dimensionists, and how the distinguished scientists on each side would hurl their ponderous thunderbolts of wisdom against each other. then there would be the religious folk to deal with, for naturally no theologian of any enterprise or self-respect could see a fight like that going on without taking a hand in it. the churches, of course, had a monopoly of miracles, or at least the traditions of them. the christian scientists, blatantly, claimed to work them now, but their subjects died with disgusting regularity. so he quickly came to the conclusion that, if he were once to state in plain english that he could accomplish the seemingly impossible; that he, a mere mortal, could make himself independent of the ordinary conditions of time and space and break with impunity all the laws which govern the physical universe, he would simply make himself the centre of a vortex of frenzied disputation which would shake the social, religious, and scientific worlds to their foundations, and that would certainly not be a pleasant position for an eminent and respected scientist, who was already a certain number of years past middle age--to say nothing of the very real harm that might be done. of course, he could settle all the disputes instantly, and dazzle the whole world into the bargain by simply delivering a lecture, say, before the royal society, on the existence of a world of four dimensions, and then proving by ocular demonstration that it does exist; but what would happen then? simply intellectual anarchy. every belief that man had held for ages would be negatived. for instance, if there is one dogma to which humanity has clung with unanimous consistency, it is to the dogma that two and two make four. what if he were to prove--as, of course, he could do now that this mysterious hand, outstretched through the mists of the far past, had led him across the horizon which divides the two states of existence--that, under certain circumstances, they would also make three or five? what if he demonstrated that even the axioms of euclid could, under different conditions, be both true and false at the same time? no, the thought of overthrowing such a venerable authority and plunging the scientific world into a hopeless state of intellectual chaos sent a shudder through his nerves. he could not do it. and yet it was only the bare, solid truth that he did possess these powers. the dream of the death-bridal of nitocris might possibly have been nothing more than just a dream, or possibly the revival of an episode in a past existence; but the other experiences certainly were not. he had taken off his ring without unbending his finger. yes, he could do it again now; it was just as easy as taking it off in the ordinary way. he certainly had not been dreaming when the mummy had become queen nitocris and given him the wine. he could not have been mad or dreaming, because his daughter was there. the episode of the strange stealers who had come into his house--that too was real, for they had left their lamp and the man's shoes behind them, and the mummy was gone! he took a piece of string out of his pocket, tied the two ends, and then with the greatest ease tied another knot in the string without undoing the first. a motor-car came humming along the road towards him, and he began to think what this place was like a thousand years before motors were heard of. that instant the motor vanished, and he found himself standing in a little glade surrounded by huge forest trees with not so much as a foot-track in sight. he made his way through the trees in what he remembered to be the direction of the road, and presently, through an opening avenue, he saw the sun glittering upon something moving, and heard voices; and then past the end of the avenue half a dozen armoured knights, followed by their squires and a string of men-at-arms guarding a covered waggon, and after these came a motley little crowd of travellers, some on horseback and some on foot, evidently taking advantage of the escort to protect them from robbers. "dear me!" said the professor to himself, not without a little shiver of apprehension, "this is very interesting. i seem to have put myself back into the tenth century. yes, that is certainly tenth-century armour that they're wearing. i mustn't let them see me, or there's no telling what they'd think of an elderly gentleman in a soft hat and a twentieth-century morning suit. but perhaps," he went on with his reasoning, "they can't see me at all. my condition is n to the fourth now. there's a thousand years between us; i forgot that. at any rate, i'll try it." he walked quickly down the avenue, and stood by the side of the rugged path looking at the strange spectacle. no one took the slightest notice of him. and then a chill of awful loneliness struck him. although he could see and move and hear, and, no doubt, eat and drink in this world, he was unexistent as regards the inhabitants of it, and yet he knew perfectly well he was standing by the side of the road where the motor-car ought to be, and over there, a few hundred yards away, niti would be sitting in her room or walking in the garden--and she wouldn't be born for nearly a thousand years yet. it was certainly somewhat disquieting, this power of living in two existences and different ages, but it was a matter that would take some little time to get accustomed to. the next instant the cavalcade and the forest had vanished, and there was the motor-car, just spinning past him. he was on the wimbledon common of the twentieth century once more. he stroked his clean-shaven chin with his finger and thumb, and walked slowly along the path by the side of the road, and then across the grass towards the flagstaff. "i think i begin to see it now," he murmured. "of course, life, that is to say real, intellectual, or, as some would say, spiritual life, is, after all, the coefficient of that totally unexplainable thing called thought which enables us to explain most things except itself. time and space and location are only realities to us in so far that we can see them. a human being born blind, dumb, deaf, and without feeling would still, i suppose, be a human being, because it would be conscious of existence; it would breathe and know that its heart was beating, but without sight or sensation there could be no idea of space--time, to it, would be a meaningless series of breaths or heartbeats. without touch or sight it could have no idea of form or size, which are merely conditions of space, and both the past and the future would be absolutely non-existent for it." he paused, and walked on a little way in silence, arguing silently with himself as to the correctness of these premises. then he began aloud again: "yes, i think that's about right. and now, suppose that such a being became endowed with the natural senses, one by one. it would go through all the processes of the physical and mental evolution of humanity until it reached the highest of human attributes--the ability to think, and therefore to reason. in other words, from a merely living organism it would, in the old scriptural language, have become a living soul. that is, obviously, what the words in genesis were really intended to mean. it would then become capable of development, of proceeding from the partly-known to the more fully known, until, granted perfect physical and mental health, it reached what are generally called the limits of human knowledge." the professor's thumb and finger went up to his chin again. he walked another two or three hundred yards in silence; then he recommenced his spoken argument with himself: "limits of human knowledge? yes, that sounds all very well in ordinary language, but are there any? who was it said that a man trying to reach those limits was like the child who saw a rainbow for the first time, and started out to find the place where it rested? the simile is not bad, not by any means. just in the same way, we try to imagine the limits of time and space, and we can't do it. only infinity of space and duration are possible, and yet we can't grasp them; still, they are the only possible states in which we can exist. and now, as i have had a glimpse of the past, i wonder what this place would be like in ten thousand years? "good heavens, how cold it is!" he shivered, and buttoned up his coat, and continued, looking about him on the vast snow-field dotted with hummocks of ice which lay bleak and lifeless about him: "ah, i suppose either the gulf stream has got diverted, or the earth's axis has shifted and we are in another glacial epoch. "we!" again the shock of utter isolation struck him, but it seemed to hit him harder this time. the world that he had been born in lay ten thousand years behind him. for all he knew, he might be standing upon what was now the earth's north pole. civilisation, as he had known it, might have been wiped off the face of the earth, and the remnants of humanity flung back into savagery. he looked up at the sun, and saw that it was almost exactly where it had been, and that it had not perceptibly diminished in power. the idea was not at all pleasant to him, and very naturally his thoughts turned back once more to his cosy home that had been on the edge of wimbledon common ten thousand years ago. he remembered, with a curious sort of thrill, some notes which he had to complete that morning for his lecture--and in the same instant he was walking back across the turf towards his house through the warm may sunshine. "yes," he said to himself, as he drew a deep breath of the sweet spring air. "i was right; that's it. the fourth dimension is a form of duration in some way correlated with space. i shall have to work that out in the light of the greater knowledge, which her vanished majesty has given me, and which i almost attained to in egypt. wherefore, existence in a state of four dimensions, or the world of n , as i have always called it, is, roughly speaking, one. time and space are, as it were, two sides of the same shield, and a person living in that world can see both of them at once. wherefore, past, present, future, length, breadth, thickness, here and there are all the same thing to him. it's a great pity there isn't a fourth dimensional language as well, so that one could state these things a little more precisely. but that, of course, is out of the question. "really, i can hardly make myself understand it as far as words and phrases are concerned; still, there it is; and now the question arises: having got this power, as i certainly have, of transferring myself from one existence to another by a mere effort of thought, because it is very evident that this power is really only an extension or an exaltation--confound the language of the third dimension--i can't say it! although i understand what it is, it won't go into words. what am i to do with it? its possibilities are, of course, a little appalling--that is to say, from the point of view of n . i have not the slightest desire to shake the fabric of society to pieces, as i could do, and still less have i taste for spending the rest of my scientific career in what the world would very easily believe to be conjuring tricks. i hope i am not going to be another of the unnumbered proofs of solomon's wisdom when he said, 'whoso getteth knowledge, getteth sorrow.' i wonder what sort of advice her late majesty of egypt---- "dear me, what nonsense i am talking! her late majesty? that won't do at all--she has reached the higher plane too, so, of course, she can't be dead----" and then with the force of a powerful electric shock, the terrible fact struck him that, for those who had reached that plane, there was no death! here was a new light on the weird problem which he had somehow been called upon to deal with. "i wonder what her majesty would really think of it?" he murmured, after a few moments of mental bewilderment. "dear me, who's that?" he looked up, and, to his utter amazement, he saw queen nitocris, arrayed exactly as she had been on that terrible night of her bridal with menkau-ra, walking towards him; a perfect incarnation of beauty, but---- "oh dear me!" said the professor, "this will never do. good heavens! everybody in wimbledon knows me, and--well, of course, her majesty is very lovely and all that; but what on earth would people think if any one saw me strolling across the common in company with an egyptian queen--to say nothing of the costume--and the image of my own daughter, too!" the figure approached, and the queen, dazzlingly and bewilderingly beautiful, held out her hands to him, and their eyes met and they looked at each other across the gulf of fifty centuries. impelled by an irresistible impulse coming from whence he knew not, he clasped them in his, and said, apparently by no volition of his own, in the ancient tongue: "ma-rim[=o]n greets nitocris, the queen! what hath he done that he should be once more so highly honoured?" at that moment a carriage came by along the road quite close to them. two of its occupants were looking straight towards them. they passed without taking the slightest notice, as they must have done had they seen such a marvellous figure as that of the queen. and then he remembered that, unless she willed it, no one in the world of n could see her, since it was for her, as it was for him now, to make herself visible or invisible as she chose to pass on to or beyond the lower plane of existence. these things were quickly becoming more plain to his comprehension, although, as will be readily understood, it was not a lesson to be learnt very easily. "welcome, ma-rim[=o]n," replied the queen, in a voice which filled him with many distant and strange memories, "but let there be no talk between us of honour, for in this state there is neither honour nor dishonour, neither ruler nor subject, neither good nor evil, since all these are absorbed in the perfect knowledge. yet it is the will of the high gods that i should help thee and guide thee in that new world whose threshold thou hast so lately crossed. it was my hand led thee from the path of light to the path of darkness, and for that i have paid the penalty as well as thou. "for many ages, as time is counted in that other world, we have toiled, sometimes together, sometimes apart, sometimes in honour, sometimes in dishonour, yet ever struggling on to regain the heights which then we had so nearly won. the high gods permitted me to reach them first, and therefore it was my hand which was stretched out to lead thee across the border. "now, my message to thee is this: thou hast powers which no other man living in that lower state possesses; see to it that they be used rightly. forget not that in that other world sin and shame, oppression and misery, are as rife as, within the limits of time, they have ever been. make it thy concern that the forces of evil shall be weaker and not stronger for the use of these powers to which thou hast attained. "we shall meet often in that other world, and that living other-self of mine, thy daughter in the flesh and bearer of my name, through every moment of her time-life, i shall watch and guard her, for she, too--although she knows it not--is approaching the light never seen by the eye of flesh, and, though strange things should befall her, it will be for thee in that other state, knowing what thou dost in the higher life, to help me in this task as in others. now, farewell, ma-rim[=o]n," she said, holding out her hands again. as he took them, they melted in his grasp, two lustrous eyes looked at him for a moment and grew dim, and he was once more alone on wimbledon common. "i think i'll be getting home," he said, looking at his watch, and he turned and walked slowly with bent head and hands clasped behind his back to the house. chapter vi the law of selection in actual mundane time, to use a somewhat halting expression, professor marmion's walk had occupied about a couple of hours. his strange experiences had, of course, occupied none, since they had taken place beyond the bounds of time. meanwhile, miss nitocris had finished her digest of the morning papers, given the cook a few directions, and then gone out on the lawn at the back of the house to have a quiet read and enjoy the soft air and sunshine of that lovely may morning. she lay down in a hammock chair in the shade of a fine old cedar at the bottom of the lawn, and began to read, and soon she began to dream. the news in the papers, even the most responsible of them, had been very serious. the shadow of war was once more rising in the east--war which, if it came, england could scarcely escape, and if it did someone would have to go and fight in that most perilous of all forms of battle, torpedo attack. the book she had taken with her was one of exceedingly clever verse written years before by just such another as herself; a girl, beautiful, learned, and yet absolutely womanly, and endowed, moreover, with that gift so rare among learned women, the gift of humour. long ago, this girl had taken the fever in egypt, and died of it; but before she died she wrote a book of poems and verses, which, though long forgotten--if ever known--by the multitude, is still treasured and re-read by some, and of these miss nitocris was one. just now the book was open at the hundred and forty-third page, on which there is a portion of a poem entitled _natural selection_. miss nitocris' eyes alternately rested on the page for a few moments and then lifted and looked over the lawn towards the open french windows. the verses ran thus: _"but there comes an idealless lad, with a strut, and a stare, and a smirk; and i watch, scientific though sad, the law of selection at work._ _"of science he hasn't a trace, he seeks not the how and the why, but he sings with an amateur's grace and he dances much better than i._ _"and we know the more dandified males by dance and by song win their wives-- 'tis a law that with_ aves _prevails, and even in_ homo _survives."_ "just my precious papa's ideas!" she murmured, with a toss of her head, and something like a little sniff. "what a nuisance it all is! aristocracy of intellect, indeed! just as if any of us, even my dear dad, if he _is_ considered one of the cleverest and most learned men in europe, were anything more than what newton called himself--a little child picking up pebbles and grains of sand on the shore of a boundless and fathomless ocean, and calling them knowledge. i'm not quite sure that that's correct, but it's something like it. still, that's not the question. how on earth am i to tell poor mark? oh dear! he'll have to be 'mr merrill' now, i suppose. what a shame! i've half a mind to rebel, and vindicate the law of selection at any price. ah, there he is. well, i suppose i've got to get through it somehow." as she spoke, one of the french windows under the verandah opened, and a man in a panama hat, norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, came out and raised his hat as he stepped off the verandah. with a sigh and a frown she closed the book sharply, got up and tossed it into the chair. no daintier or more desirable incarnation of the eternal feminine could have been imagined than she presented as she walked slowly across the lawn to meet the man whom the law of selection had designated as her natural mate, and whom her father, for reasons presently to be made plain, had forbidden her to marry on pain of exile from his affections for ever. the face he turned towards her as she approached was not exactly handsome as an artist or some women would have defined the word, but it was strong, honest, and open--just the sort of face, in short, to match the broad shoulders, the long, cleanly-shaped, athletic limbs, and the five feet eleven of young, healthy manhood with which nature had associated it. a glance at his face and another one at him generally would, in spite of the costume, have convinced any one who knows the genus that mark merrill was a naval officer. he had that quiet air of restrained strength, of the instinctive habit of command which somehow or other does not distinguish any other fighting man in the world in quite the same degree. his name and title were lieutenant-commander mark gwynne merrill, of his majesty's destroyer _blazer_, one of the coolest-headed and yet most judiciously reckless officers in the service. there was a light in his wide-set, blue-grey eyes, and a smile on his strong, well-cut lips which were absolutely boyish in their anticipation of sheer delight as she approached; and then, after one glance at her face, his own changed with a suddenness, which, to a disinterested observer, would have been almost comic. "i'm awfully sorry, mark," she began, in a tone which literally sent a shiver--a real physical shiver--through him, for he was very, very much in love with her. "what on earth is the matter, niti?" he said, looking at the fair face and downcast eyes which, for the first time since he had asked the eternal question and she had answered it according to his heart's desire, had refused to meet his. "let's have it out at once. it's a lot better to be shot through the heart than starved to death, you know. i suppose it's something pretty bad, or you wouldn't be looking down at the grass like that," he continued. "oh, it's--it's--it's a _beastly_ shame, that's what it is, so there!" and as she said this miss nitocris marmion, b.sc., stamped her foot on the turf and felt inclined to burst out crying, just as a milkmaid might have done. "which means," said mark, pulling himself up, as a man about to face a mortal enemy would do, "that the professor has said 'no.' in other words, he has decided that his learned and lovely daughter shall not, as i suppose he would put it, mate with an animal of a lower order--a mere fighting-man. well, miss marmion----" "oh, don't; _please_ don't!" she exclaimed, almost piteously, dropping into a big wicker armchair by the verandah and putting her hands over her eyes. he had an awful fear that she was going to cry, and, as the easterns say, he felt his heart turning to water within him. but her highly trained intellect came to her aid. she swallowed the sob, and looked up at him with clear, dry eyes. "it isn't quite that, mark," she continued. "you know i wouldn't stand anything like that even from the dear old dad. much as i love him, and even, as you know, in some senses almost worship him, it isn't that. it's this theory of heredity of his--this scientific faith--bigotry, i call it, for it is just the same to him as catholicism was to the spaniards in the sixteenth century. in fact, i told him the other night that he reminded me of the spanish grandee whose daughters were convicted of heresy by the inquisition, and who showed his devotion to the church by lighting the faggots which burned them with his own hands." "and what did he say to that?" said the sailor, not because he wanted to know, but because there was an awkward pause that needed filling. "i would rather not tell you, mark, if you don't mind," she said slowly and looking very straightly and steadily at him. "you know--well, i needn't tell you again what i've told you already. you know i care for you, and i always shall, but i cannot--i dare not--disobey my father. i owe all that i ever had to him. he has been father, mother, teacher, friend, companion--everything to me. we are absolutely alone in the world. if i could leave him for anybody, i'd leave him for you, but i won't disobey him and break his heart, as i believe i should, even for you." "you're perfectly right, niti, perfectly," said commander merrill, in a tone of steady conviction which inspired her with an almost irresistible impulse to get up and kiss him. "you couldn't honestly do anything else, and i know the shortest way to make you hate me would be to ask you to do that something else. but still," he went on, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his norfolk jacket, "i do think i have a sort of right to have some sort of explanation, and with your permission i shall just ask him for one." "for goodness' sake, don't do that, mark--don't!" she pleaded. "you might as well go and ask a jewish rabbi why he wouldn't let his daughter marry a christian. wise and clever as he is in other things, poor dad is simply a fanatic in this, and--well, if he did condescend to explain, i'm afraid you might mistake what he would think the correct scientific way of putting it, for an insult, and i couldn't bear to think of you quarrelling. you know you're the only two people in the world i--i--oh dear, what _shall_ i do!" it was at this point that the law of natural selection stepped in. natural laws of any sort have very little respect for the refinements of what mortals are pleased to call their philosophy. professor marmion was a very great man--some men said he was the greatest scientist of his age--but at this moment he was but as a grain of sand among the wheels of the mighty machine which grinds out human and other destinies. commander merrill took a couple of long, swift strides towards the chair in which nitocris was leaning back with her hands pressed to her eyes. he picked her up bodily, as he might have picked a child of seven up, put her protesting hands aside, and slowly and deliberately kissed her three times squarely on the lips as if he meant it; and the third time her lips moved too. then he whispered: "good-bye, dear, for the present, at any rate!" after which he deposited her tenderly in the chair again, and, with just one last look, turned and walked with quick, angry strides across the lawn and round the semi-circular carriage-drive, saying some things to himself between his clenched teeth, and thinking many more. a few yards outside the gate he came face to face with the professor. "good-morning, sir," said merrill, with a motion of his hand towards his hat. "oh, good-morning, mr merrill," replied the professor a little stiffly, for relations between them had been strained for some considerable time now. "i presume you have been to the house. i am sorry that you did not find me at home, but if it is anything urgent and you have half an hour to spare----" he stopped in his speech, silenced by a shock of something like shame. he was prevaricating. he knew perfectly well that "it" was the most urgent errand a man could have, next to his duty to his country, that had brought the young sailor to his house. twenty-four hours ago he would not have noticed such a trifle: but it was no trifle now; for to his clearer vision it was a sin, an evasion of the immutable laws of truth, utterly unworthy of the companion of nitocris the queen in that other existence which he had just left. "you have seen niti, i suppose?" he continued, with singular directness. "yes," replied merrill. "you will remember that the week was up this morning, and so i called to learn my fate, and your daughter has told me. i presume that your decision is final, and that, therefore, there is nothing more to be said on the subject." "my decisions are usually final, mr merrill, because i do not arrive at them without due consideration. i am deeply grieved, as i have told you before, but my decision is a deduction from what i consider to be an unbreakable chain of argument which i need not trouble you with. personally and socially, of course, it would be impossible for me to have the slightest objection to you. in fact, apart from your execrable fighting profession, i like you; but otherwise, as you know, i cannot help looking at you as the survival of an age of barbarism, a hark-back of humanity, for all the honour in which that trade is held by an ignorant and deluded world; and so for the last time it is my painful task to tell you that there can be no union between your blood and mine. outside that, of course, there is no reason why we should not remain friends." "very well, sir," replied merrill, "i have heard your decision, and miss marmion has told me she is resolved to abide by it; i should be something less than a man if i attempted to alter her resolve. we are ordered on foreign service this week, and so for the present, good-bye." he lifted his hat, turned away and walked down the road with teeth clenched and eyes fixed straight in front of him, and a shade of grey under the tan of his skin. the professor looked after him for a few moments and turned in at the gate, saying: "it's a great pity in some ways--many ways, in fact. he's a fine young fellow and a thorough gentleman, and i'm afraid they're very fond of each other, but of course to let niti marry him would be the negation of the belief and teaching of more than half a lifetime. i hope the poor girl won't take it too keenly to heart. i'm afraid he seems rather hard hit, poor chap, but of course there's no help for it. just fancy me the father-in-law of a fighting man, and the grandfather of what might be a brood of fighters! no, no; that is quite out of the question." chapter vii mostly possibilities the professor went into the garden feeling just a trifle uncomfortable. he not only loved his daughter dearly, but he also had a very deep and well-justified respect for her intellect and scholarly attainments. her unfortunate love for a man whom he honestly believed to be a totally unfit mate for her was the only shadow that had ever drifted between them since she had become, not only his daughter, but his friend and companion, and the enthusiastic sharer of his intellectual pursuits. of course, anything like a scene was utterly out of the question; but there is a silence more eloquent than words, and it was that that he was mostly afraid of. he found her walking up and down the lawn with her hands behind her back. she was a little paler than usual, and there was a shadow in her eyes. she came towards him, and said quite quietly: "mr merrill has been here, dad, to say good-bye. i told him, and so we have said it." the simple words were spoken with a quiet and yet tender dignity which made him feel prouder than ever of his daughter and all the more sorry for her. "i met him just outside the gate, niti," he replied, looking at her through a little mist in his eyes, "he spoke most honourably, and like the gentleman that he is. i hope you will believe me----" "i believe you in everything, dad," she said quickly; "and since the matter is ended, it will only hurt us both to say any more about it. now, i have some news," she continued, in a tone whose alteration was well assumed. "ah! and what is that, niti?" he asked, looking up at her with a smile of relief. "it's something that i hope you will be able to get some of your solemn fun out of. one of the items in the 'social intelligence' to-day states that your old friend, professor hoskins van huysman, and his wife and daughter have come to london, and will stay ten days before 'proceeding' to paris and the south of france, and so, of course, they will be here for your lecture, and naturally he will not resist the temptation of making one of your audience." "van huysman!" exclaimed the professor. "that yankee charlatan, confound him! i shouldn't wonder if he had the impudence to take part in the discussion afterwards." "then," laughed nitocris, "you must take care to have all your heavy guns ready for action. but, of course, dad, you won't let your--well, your scientific feelings get mixed up with social matters, will you? because, you know, i like brenda very much; she's the prettiest and brightest girl i know. you know, she can do almost anything, and yet she's as unaffected----" "as some one else we know," interrupted the professor with another smile. "and then, you know, mrs van huysman," continued nitocris with a little flush, "is such a dear, innocent, good-natured thing, so good-hearted and so deliciously american. of course, you can fight with the professor as much as you like in print, and in lecture halls--i know you both love it--but you'll still be friends socially, won't you?" "which, of course, means garden-parties and river trips, and similar frivolities that learned young ladies love so much. you needn't trouble about that, niti. i shall not allow my zeal for scientific truth to interfere with your social pleasures, you may be quite sure. science, as you know, has nothing to do with what we call society, except as one of the most curious phenomena of sociology. drive into town whenever you like and see them. present my respectful compliments, and ask them to dinner, or whatever you like. and now i must get to my work--i've only three more days, and my notes are not anything like complete." "very well, dad; i think i'll telephone them--they're stopping at the savoy--extravagant people!--to say that i'll run in this afternoon and have tea. oh! and, by the way," she added, as he turned towards the house, "there's another item. lord leighton has been called home suddenly on some business, and will be here the day after to-morrow." "oh! indeed," said the professor, pausing. "well, i shall be delighted to see him--but i don't know what i shall have to say to him about that mummy." nitocris turned away towards her chair with a faint smile on her lips. with a woman's rapid intuition, she had seen a glimmer of hope in the conjunction of these two announcements. although professor van huysman's personal fortune was not as great as his attainments or his fame, brenda would be very rich, for her mother was the only sister of a widower whose sole interest and occupation in life was piling up dollars. he had dollars in everything, from pork and lumber to canned goods, and her own father's scientific inventions, and brenda was the bright particular star of his affections. on the other hand, lord leighton, son and heir of the invalid earl of kyneston, was a fairly well-to-do young nobleman, good-looking, a scholar, and a good sportsman, who had done brilliantly at cambridge, and then devoted himself to egyptian exploration with a whole-souled ardour which had quickly won professor marmion's heart, and a ready consent to his "trying his luck" with his daughter to boot. this had not a little to do with the present unfortunate condition of her own love affairs. she had already refused lord leighton, letting him down, of course, as gently as possible, but withal firmly and uncompromisingly. who could better console him than this beautiful and brilliant american girl, and what would better suit that lovely head of hers than an english coronet which was bright with the untarnished traditions of five hundred years? wherefore, then and there, miss nitocris marmion, bachelor of science, licentiate of literature and art, and gold-medallist in higher mathematics at the university of london, decided upon her first experiment in match-making. when the professor got into his study and shut the door, there was a curious smiling expression upon his refined, intellectual features. instead of sitting down to his desk, he lit a pipe and began walking up and down the room, communing with his own soul in isolated sentences, as was his wont when he was trying to arrive at any difficult decision. in order to appreciate his deliberations and their result, it will be necessary to say that professor hoskins van huysman was one of the most distinguished physicists in america, and he had also gained distinction in applied mathematics. in addition to this, he was the inventor of many marvellous contrivances for the demonstration and measurement of the more obscure physical forces. his official position was that of lecturer and demonstrator in physical science in harvard university. he and professor marmion had been deadly opponents in the field of controversy for years. the latter had once detected an error in a very learned monograph which he had published in the _scientific american_ on the "co-relation of the etheric forces in the phenomena of light and heat," and of course he had never forgiven him. from that day forth a relentless duel of wits between them had continued. every essay, monograph, or book that the one published, the other criticised with cold but ruthless severity, to the great delectation of the scientific world, if not to the clarification of its atmosphere. socially, they were cordial acquaintances, if not friends. what they really thought of each other was known only to themselves and to their immediate domestic circles. naturally professor marmion was well aware that his elevation to the higher plane of n gave him an enormous advantage over his adversary, for now he could, if he chose, smite him hip and thigh, in a strictly scientific sense, and reduce him to utter confusion and public ridicule, and the question which he had come to discuss with himself was: in how far, if at all, was he justified in so using the extra-human powers with which he had been endowed? the moment that he began to do this he became conscious of another curious complication of his recent development. on the higher plane he had argued the matter out with no more emotion than a calculating machine would have betrayed, and he had come to a conclusion that was absolutely luminous and just: but now that he came to argue the same question on the lower plane he found that he was doing it under human limitations, and therefore with human feelings. "no," he said in the peculiar low, musing tone which was habitual to him during these monologues, "no; after all, i do not see that there would be any harm in that. wrong, nay, sinful it would undoubtedly be to prove to demonstration that religious, social, and physical laws, may, under certain changing circumstances, be both true and false at the same time. i am, or was--or whatever it is--perfectly right in considering that to deliberately produce such a chaos as that would do would be the most colossal crime that a man could commit against humanity, as far as this plane is concerned, but there can be no harm in making a few mathematical experiments." he took a few more turns up and down the room, pulling slowly at his pipe, and with his mind not wholly unoccupied with speculations as to what professor van huysman's feelings might be if he were watching the said experiments. then he began again: "at the worst i shall only be carrying certain investigations a few steps farther, and developing theories which have been seriously discussed by the hardest-headed scholars in the world. both the greek and the alexandrian philosophers speculated on the possibility of a state of four dimensions; and didn't cayley, before this very society, deliberately say that at the present rate of progress in the higher mathematics, the eye of intellect might ere long see across the border of tri-dimensional space? "surely i cannot do any very great harm by carrying his arguments to their logical conclusions--if i can. of course, physical demonstrations would never do: i should frighten my brilliant and learned audience out of its seven senses; but, as for mere mathematics--well, i may make them stare, and set a good many highly-respected brains--my gifted friend huysman's, among them--working pretty hard. of course, he will be especially furious, but there's no harm in that either. yes, i shall certainly do it. if he can't understand my demonstrations, that's not my concern." he went and sat down at his desk, still smiling, and went very carefully through the notes he had already made, and then through professor hartley's letter, and his speculations on the forty-seventh proposition. this done, he plunged into a fresh vortex of figures, and symbols, and diagrams, in which he remained for the next two hours, his mind hovering, as it were, over the borderland which at once divides and unites the higher and the lower planes. when he returned to earth, the dreamy, abstracted look faded away from his face; his eyes lit up, and the pleasant smile came back. he opened the middle drawer in his desk, and took out the first page of the fair copy of his notes, which nitocris had made for him--thinking the while how easy it would have been for him in the state of n to take it out without opening the drawer at all--and looked at it. it was headed: "recent progress in the higher mathematics." he crossed the title out carefully, and wrote above it: "an examination of some supposed mathematical impossibilities." "there," he murmured, as he put the sheet back; "i think that such a theme, adequately treated, will considerably astonish my learned friends in general, and my esteemed critic, van huysman, in particular." from which remark it will be gathered that franklin marmion had certainly recrossed the dividing line between the two planes of existence. chapter viii miss brenda arrives, and phadrig the egyptian prophesies "now, this is just too sweet of you, niti, to come so soon after we got here. in five minutes more i should have written you a note, asking you and the professor to come and take lunch with us to-morrow, and here you've anticipated me, so we have the pleasure of seeing you all the sooner." these were the words with which miss brenda van huysman greeted nitocris as she entered the drawing-room of the suite of apartments which formed her home for the time being in london. i say her home advisedly, because, although her father and mother also occupied it, she was virtually, if not nominally, mistress undisputed of the splendid camping-place. she was an almost perfect type of the highly developed, highly educated american girl of to-day, a marvellous compound of intense energy and languorous grace. she had done as brilliantly at vassar as nitocris had done at girton and london, and she had also rowed stroke in the ladies' eight, and was champion fencer of the college. yet as far as her physical presence was concerned, she was just a "gibson girl" of the daintiest type--fair-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired--her hair had a darker gleam of bronze in it in certain lights--exquisitely moulded features which seemed capable of every sort of expression within a few changing moments, and a poise of head and carriage of body which only perfect health and the most scientific physical training can produce. in a word, she was one of those miraculous developments of femininity which nature seems to have made a speciality for the particular benefit of the younger branch of the anglo-saxon race. as for her dress--well, the shortest and best way to describe that is to say that it exactly suited her. as she spoke, and their hands met, mrs van huysman got up and came towards them, saying: "good afternoon, miss marmion. we were real glad to get your 'phone, and it's good to see you again. how's the professor? too busy to come with you, i suppose, as usual. we see he's going to lecture before the royal society on the tenth, and i reckon we shall all be there to listen to him. i shouldn't wonder but there'll be trouble as usual between him and my husband. it seems a pity that two such clever men should waste so much time in scrapping over these scientific things, which don't seem to matter half a cent, anyhow." "oh, i don't know," laughed nitocris, as they shook hands. "you see, mrs van huysman, _they_ do think it matters a great deal, and, besides, i'm quite sure that they both enjoy it very thoroughly. it's their way of taking recreation, you see, just as a couple of pitmen will try and pound one another to pieces, just for the fun of the thing. it's only a case of intellectual fisticuffs, after all." "why, certainly," said brenda, as she rang for tea; "i'm just sure that poppa never has such a good time as when he thinks he's tearing one of professor marmion's theories into little pieces and dancing on them, and i shouldn't wonder if professor marmion didn't feel about the same." "i dare say he does," said nitocris, remembering what had happened in the morning; "it's only one of the thousand unexplained puzzles of human nature. as you know, my father hates fighting in the physical sense with a hatred which is almost fanatical, and yet, when it comes to a battle of wits, he's like a schoolboy in a football match." "it's just another development of the same thing," said brenda. "man was born a fighting animal, and i guess he'll remain one till the end of time; and with all our progress in civilisation and science, and all that, the man who doesn't enjoy a fight of some sort isn't of very much account. now, here's tea, which is just now a more interesting subject. sit down, and we'll talk about vanities. i'm just perishing to see what regent street and bond street are like. i don't think i've spent ten dollars in london yet. i'm twenty-two to-morrow, niti, and my grandfather, who is just about the best grandfather a girl ever had, cabled across to the napier people, and they've sent round the dandiest six-cylinder, thirty-horse landaulette that you ever saw, even in central park, and a driver to match--only i shan't have much use for him, except to look after the automobile. i'll run you round in her after tea, and you can reintroduce me to the stores--i mean shops; i forgot we were in london." mrs van huysman, as usual, took a back seat while her daughter dispensed tea, and did most of the talking. she was a lady of moderate proportions, and, unlike a good many american women, she had kept her good looks until very close on fifty. she was full of shrewd common sense, but she had been born in a different generation and in a different grade of life, and therefore her attire inclined rather to magnificence than to elegance, in spite of her daughter's restraining hand and frankly expressed counsel. she had a profound respect for her husband's attainments without in the least understanding them, and she very naturally held an unshakable belief that no quite ordinary woman, as she called herself, had ever been miraculously blessed with such a daughter as she had. nitocris was just beginning her second cup of tea when the door opened and her father's foeman in the arena of science came in. he was the very antithesis of professor marmion; a trifle below middle height, square-shouldered and strongly built, with thick, iron-grey hair, and somewhat heavy features which would have been almost commonplace but for the broad, square forehead above them, and the brilliant steel-grey eyes which glittered restlessly under the thick brows, and also a certain sensitiveness about the nostrils and lips which seemed curiously out of keeping with the strength of the lower jaw. his whole being suggested a combination of restless energy and inflexible determination. if he had not been one of america's greatest scientists, he would probably have been one of her most ruthless and despotic dollar lords. "ah, miss marmion, good afternoon! pleased to see you," he said heartily, as nitocris got up and held out her hand. "very kind of you to look us up so soon. how's the professor? well, i hope. i see he's scheduled for a lecture before the royal society. he's got something startling to tell us about, i hope. it's some time since we had anything of a scientific scrap between us." "and therefore," said nitocris, as she took his hand, "i suppose you are just dying for another one." "well, not quite dying," laughed the professor. "don't look half dead, do i? just curious, that's all. you can't give me any idea of the subject, i suppose?" "i could, professor," she replied, with a malicious twinkle in her eye, because she had already had a talk with her father on the altered title of the lecture, "but if i did, you know, i should only, as we say in england, be spoiling sport. however, i don't think i shall be playing traitor if i tell you to prepare for a little surprise." professor van huysman's manner changed instantly, and the warrior soul of the scientist was in arms. "oh yes! a surprise, eh?" he said, with something between a snort and a snarl in his voice. "then i guess----" "poppa, sit down and have some tea," said his daughter, quietly but firmly. he sat down without a word, took his cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter; listened in silence as long as he could bear the entirely feminine conversation on a subject in which he hadn't the remotest interest, and then he put his cup down with a little jerk, got up with a bigger one, and said, holding out his hand to miss nitocris: "well, miss marmion, i shall have to say good afternoon. you see we've only just reached this side, and i've got quite a lot of things to attend to. bring your father along to dinner to-morrow night, if you can; i shall be glad to meet him again. you needn't be afraid: we shan't shoot." when he had gone, brenda rang and ordered the motor-car to be ready in half an hour. then they finished their tea and talk, and brenda and nitocris went and put on their wraps--not the imitation of the mediæval armour which is used for serious motor-driving, but just dust-cloaks and mushrooms, both of which brenda lent to her friend. as they came back through the drawing-room, she said to her mother: "well, mamma, the car's ready, i believe. won't you join us in a little run round town?" "when i want to take a run into the other world in one of those infernal machines of yours, brenda," said her mother, with a mild touch of sarcasm in her tone, "i'll ask you to let me come. this afternoon i feel just a little bit too comfortable for a journey like that." "it's a curious thing," said brenda, as they were going down in the lift, "mamma's as healthy a woman as ever lived, and she's american too, and yet i believe she'd as soon get on top of a broncho as into an automobile." the car was waiting for them in the courtyard under the glass awning. a smart-looking young _chauffeur_ in orthodox costume touched his cap and set the engine going. the gold-laced porters handed them into the two front seats, and the _chauffeur_ effaced himself in the _tonneau_. miss brenda put one hand on the steering-wheel and the other on the first speed lever, and the car slid away, as though it had been running on ice, towards the great arched entrance. as they turned to the left on their way westward, a shabbily dressed man and woman stepped back from the roadway on to the pavement. for a moment they stared at the car in mute astonishment; then the man gripped the woman tightly by the arm and led her away out of the ever-passing throng, whispering to her in coptic: "did'st thou see her, neb-anat--the queen--the queen in the living flesh sitting there in the self-mover, the devil-machine? to what unholy things has she come--she, the daughter of the great rameses! but it may be that she is held in bondage under the spell of the evil powers that created these devil-chariots which pant like souls in agony and breathe with the breath of hell. she must be rescued, neb-anat." "rescued?" echoed the woman, in a tone that was half scorn and half fear. "is it so long ago that thou hast forgotten how we tried to rescue her mummy from the hands of these infidels? now, behold, she is alive again, living in the midst of this vast, foul city of the infidels, clothed after the fashion of their women, and yet still beautiful and smiling. pent-ah, didst thou not even see her laugh as she rode past us? alas! i tell thee that our queen is laid under some awful spell, doubtless because she has in some way incurred the displeasure of the high gods, and if that is so, not even the master himself could rescue her. what, then, shall we do?" "thy saying is near akin to blasphemy, neb-anat," he murmured in reply, "and yet there may be a deep meaning in it. nevertheless, to-night, nay, this hour, the master must know of what we have seen." they walked along, conversing in murmurs, as far as waterloo bridge, then they turned and crossed it and walked down waterloo road into the borough road, and then turned off into a narrow, grimy street which ended in a small court whose three sides were formed of wretched houses, upon which many years of misery, poverty, and crime had set their unmistakable stamp. they crossed the court diagonally and entered a house in the right-hand corner. they went up the worn, carpetless stairs with a rickety handrail on one side and the torn, peeling paper on the other, and stopped before a door which opened on to a narrow landing on the first floor. pent-ah knocked with his knuckles on the panel, first three times quickly, and then twice slowly. then came the sound of the drawing of a bolt, and the door opened. they went in with shuffling feet and crouching forms, and the woman closed the door behind her. a tall, gaunt, yellow-skinned man, his head perfectly bald and the lower part of his face covered with a heavy white beard and moustache, faced them. his clothing was half western, half oriental. a pair of thin, creased, grey tweed trousers met, or almost met, a pair of turkish slippers, showing an inch of bare, lean ankle in between. his body was covered with a dirty yellow robe of fine woollen stuff, whose ragged fringe reached to his knees, and a faded red scarf was folded twice round his neck, one end hanging down his breast and the other down his back. as pent-ah closed the door and bolted it, he said to him in coptic: "so ye have returned! what news of the queen? for without that surely ye would not have dared to come before me." he spoke the words as a pharaoh might have spoken them to a slave, and as though the bare, low-ceiled, shabby room, with its tawdry oriental curtains and ornaments, had been an audience-chamber in the palace of pepi in old memphis, for this was he who had once been anemen-ha, high priest of ptah, in the days when nitocris was queen of the two kingdoms. "we have seen her once more, lord," said pent-ah, "scarce an hour ago, dressed after the fashion of these heathen english, and seated in a devil-chariot beside another woman, as fair almost as she. it is true, lord, even as we said, that our lady the queen is in the flesh again, and yet she knows us not. it may be that the high gods have laid some spell upon her." "spell or no spell, the mission which is ours is the same," was the reply. "it is plain that a miracle has been worked. the mummy which we--i as well as you--were charged to recover and restore to its resting-place, has vanished. the queen has returned to live yet another life in the flesh, but the command remains the same. mummy or woman, she shall be taken back to her ancient home to await the day when the divine assessors shall determine the penalty of her guilt. the task will be hard, yet nothing is impossible to those who serve the high gods faithfully. ye have done well to bring me this news promptly. here is money to pay for your living and your work. watch well and closely. know every movement that the queen makes, and every day inform me by word or in writing of all her actions. on the fourth day from now come here an hour before midnight. now go." he counted out five sovereigns to pent-ah. their glitter contrasted strangely with the shabby squalor of the room and the poverty of his own dress, but he gave them as though they had been coppers. pent-ah took them with a low obeisance, and dropped them one by one into a pocket in a canvas belt which he wore under his ragged waistcoat. neb-anat looked at them greedily as they disappeared. "the master's commands shall be obeyed, and the high gods shall be faithfully served," said pent-ah, as he straightened himself up again. "from door to door the queen shall be watched, and, if it be permitted, neb-anat shall become her slave, and so the watch shall be made closer. is not that so, neb-anat?" "the will of the master is the law of his slave," she replied, sinking almost to her knees. "it is enough," replied the master, who was known to the few who knew him as phadrig amena, a coptic dealer in ancient egyptian relics and curios in a humble way of business. "serve faithfully, both of you, and your reward shall not be wanting. farewell, and the peace of the high gods be on you." when they had gone he sat down to the old bureau, took out a sheaf of papers, some white and new, others yellow-grey with age, and yet others which were sheets of the ancient papyrus. the writing on these was in the old hermetic character; of the rest some were in cursive greek and some in coptic. a few only were in english, and about half a dozen in russian. he read them all with equal ease, and although he knew their contents almost by heart, he pored over them for a good half-hour with scarcely so much as a movement of his lips. then he put them away and locked the drawer with one of a small bunch of curiously shaped keys which were fastened round his waist by a chain. when he had concealed them in his girdle, he got up and began to pace the floor of the miserable room with long, stately, silent steps as though the dirty, cracked, uneven boards had been the gleaming squares of alternate black and white marble of the floor of the sanctuary in the now ruined temple of ptah in old memphis. then, after a while, with head thrown proudly back and hands clasped behind him, he began to speak in the ancient tongue, as though he were addressing some invisible presence. "yes, truly the powers of evil and darkness have conquered through many generations of men, but the days of the high gods are unending, and the climax of fate is not yet. not yet, o nitocris, is the murderous crime of thy death-bridal forgotten. the souls of those who died by thy hand in the banqueting chamber of pepi still call for vengeance out of the glooms of amenti. the thirst of hate and the hunger of love are still unslaked and unsatisfied. i, phadrig, the poor trader, who was once anemen-ha, hate thee still, and the russian warrior-prince, who was once menkau-ra, shall love thee yet again with a love as fierce as that of old, and so, if the high gods permit, between love and hate shalt thou pass to the doom that thou hast earned." he paused in his walk and stood staring blankly out of the grimy little window with eyes which seemed to see through and beyond the smoke-blackened walls of the wretched houses opposite, and away through the mists of time to where a vast city of temples and palaces lay under a cloudless sky beside a mighty slow-flowing river, and his lips began to move again as those of a man speaking in a dream: "o memphis, gem of the ancient land and home of a hundred kings, how is thy grandeur humbled and thy glory departed! thy streets and broad places which once rang with the tramp of mighty hosts and echoed with the songs of jubilant multitudes welcoming them home from victory are buried under the drifting desert sands; in the ruins of thy holy temples the statues of the gods lie prone in the dust, and the owl rears her brood on thy crumbling altars, and hoots to the moon where once rose the solemn chant of priests and the sweet hymns of the sacred virgins; the jackal barks where once the mightiest monarchs of earth gave judgment and received tribute; thy tombs are desecrated, and the mummies of kings and queens and holy men have been ravished from them to adorn the unconsecrated halls of the museums of ignorant infidels; the heel of the heathen oppressor has stamped the fair flower of thy beauty into the deep dust of defilement. alas, what great evil have the sons and daughters of khem wrought that the high gods should have visited them with so sore a judgment! how long shall thy bright wings lie folded and idle, o necheb, bringer of victory?" a deep sigh came from his heaving breast as he turned away and began his walk again. soon he spoke again, but now in a changed voice from which the note of exaltation had passed away: "but it is of little use to brood over the lost glories of the past. our concern is with that which is and that which may--nay, shall be. who is this franklin marmion, this wise man of the infidels? who is he, and who was he--since, by the changeless law of life and death, each man and woman is a deathless soul which passes into the shadows only to return re-garbed in the flesh to live and work through the interlocked cycles of eternal destiny? was he--ah gods! was _he_ once ma-rim[=o]n, whose footsteps in the days that are dead approached so nearly to the threshold of the perfect knowledge, while mine, doubtless for the sin of my longing for mere earthly power and greatness, were caught and held back in a web of my own weaving? and, if so, has he attained while i have lost? "what if that strange tale which pent-ah and neb-anat told me of their visit to his house--told, as i thought, to hide their failure under a veil of lies--was true? if so, then he has passed the threshold and taken a place only a little lower than the seats of the gods, a place that i may not approach, barred by the penalty of my accursed folly and pride! ah well, be it so or be it not, are not the fates of all men in the hands of the high gods who see all things? we see but a little, and that little, with their help, we must do according to the faith and the hope that is in us." at this moment there came a knock at the door. it opened at his bidding, and a dirty-faced, ragged-frocked little girl shuffled into the room holding out a letter in her hard, grimy, claw-like hand. "'ere's somethin' as has just come for you, mister phadrig. muvver told me ter bring it up, and wot'll yer want for supper, and will yer give me the money?" she said in a piping monotone, still holding out her hand after he had taken the letter. he gave her sixpence, saying: "two eggs and some bread. i will make my coffee myself." she took the coin and shuffled out quickly, for she went not a little in awe of this dark-faced foreign man from mysterious regions beyond her ken, who was doubtless a magician of some sort, and could kill her or change her into a rat by just breathing on her, if he wanted to. meantime nitocris and brenda were having what the latter called "a perfectly lovely time" in regent street and bond street and other purlieus of that london paradise which the genius of commerce has created for the delight of his richest and most lavish-handed votaries. brenda spent her ten dollars and a few thousands more, and then, as it was getting on to dinner-time and nitocris absolutely refused to let her father eat his meal alone, she ran her out to wimbledon at a speed for which a mere man would have inevitably been fined, asked herself to dinner, and made herself entirely delightful to the professor. but in spite of all her cunning wiles and winning ways she left in absolute ignorance of the subject of the forthcoming lecture. chapter ix "the wilderness," wimbledon common the little estate on wimbledon common, which had been in professor marmion's family for three generations, was called "the wilderness." the house was of distinctly composite structure. tradition said that it had been a royal hunting lodge in the days when barnes and putney and wimbledon were tiny hamlets and the thames flowed silver-clear through a vast, wild region of forest and gorse and heather, and the ancestors of the deer in richmond park browsed in the shade of ancient oaks and elms and beeches, and antler-crowned monarchs sent their hoarse challenges bellowing across the open spaces which separated their jealously guarded domains. generation by generation it had grown with the wealth and importance of its owners, as befits a house that is really a home and not merely a place to live in, until it had become a quaint medley of various styles of architecture from the elizabethan to the later georgian. thus it had come to possess a charm that was all its own, a charm that can never belong to a house that has only been built, and has not grown. its interior was an embodiment in stone and oak and plaster of cosy comfort and dignified repose, and, though it contained every "modern improvement," all was in such perfect taste and harmony that even the electric light might have been installed in the days of the first james. the professor inhabited the northern wing, reputed to have been the original lodge in which kings and queens and great soldiers and statesmen had held revel after the chase, and tradition had endowed it with a quite authentic ghost: which was that of a fair maiden who had been decoyed thither to become the victim of royal passion, and who, strangely enough, poisoned herself in her despair, instead of getting herself made a duchess and founding the honours of a noble family on her own dishonour. although, as i have said, quite authentic, for the professor had seen her so often that he had come to regard her with respectful friendship, the lady alicia was not quite an orthodox ghost. she did not come at midnight and wail in distressing fashion over the scene of her sad and shameful death. she seemed to come when and where she listed, whether in the glimpses of the moon or the full sunlight of mid-day. she never passed beyond the limits of the old lodge, and never broke the silence of her coming and goings. none of the present inhabitants of "the wilderness" had seen her save the professor, but nitocris had often shivered with a sudden chill when she chanced to be in her invisible presence, and at such times she would often say to her father: "there is something cold in the room, dad. i suppose your friend the lady alicia is paying you a visit. i _do_ wish she would allow me to make her acquaintance." and to this he would sometimes reply with perfect gravity: "yes, she has just come in: she is standing by the window yonder." and this had happened so often that nitocris, like her father, had come to regard the wraith, or astral body, as the professor deemed it, of the unhappy lady almost as a member of the family. of course, after he had passed the border into the realm of n , franklin marmion speedily came to look upon her visits as the merest commonplaces. but as the unhappy lady alicia will have no part to play in the action of this narrative, her little story must be accepted as a perhaps excusable digression. there were about four acres of comfortably wooded land about the house, of which nearly an acre had formed the pleasaunce of the old lodge. this was now a beautifully-kept modern garden, with a broad, gently-sloping lawn, whose turf had been growing more and more velvety year by year for over three centuries, and divided from it by a low box-hedge was another, levelled up and devoted to tennis and new-style croquet. the old lawn, as it was called, sloped away from a broad verandah which ran the whole length of the central wing and formed the approach to the big drawing-room and dining-room, and a cosy breakfast-room of early georgian style, and these, with her study and "snuggery" and bedroom on the next floor, formed the peculiar domain of miss nitocris. she and the professor were just sitting down to an early breakfast on the morning of the garden-party, which had been arranged for the day but one after the arrival of the huysmans, when the post came in. there were a good many letters for both, for each had many interests in life. the professor only ran his eye over the envelopes and then put the bundle aside for consideration in the solitude of his own den. nitocris did the same, picked one out and left the others for similar treatment after she had interviewed the cook about lunch and refreshments for the afternoon, and the butler on the subject of cooling drinks, for it promised to be a perfect english day in june--which is, of course, the most delicious day that you may find under any skies between the poles. she opened the one she had selected and skimmed its contents. then her eyelids lifted, and she said: "oh!" "what is the matter, niti?" asked her father, looking up from his cutlet. "nothing gone wrong with your arrangements, i hope." "oh dear, no," she replied, with something like exultation in her voice, "quite the reverse, dad. this is from brenda, and brenda is an angel disguised in petticoats and picture hats. listen." then she began to read: "my dearest niti,--i am going to take what i'm afraid english people would think a great liberty. the trouble is this: when the professor (mine, i mean) was making his tour of the russian universities two years ago, he received a great deal of courtesy and help from no less a person than the celebrated prince oscar oscarovitch--the modern skobeleff, you know--who was very interested in poppa's work, and took a lot of trouble to smooth things out for him. well, the prince, as of course you know, is in london now. he called yesterday, and when i mentioned your party, he said he was very sorry he had not the honour of your father's acquaintance as well as mine. the grammar's a bit wrong there, but you know what i mean. that, of course, meant that he wants to come; and, to be candid, i should like to bring him, for even an american girl here doesn't always get a prince, and a famous man as well, to take around, so, as the time is so short, may we include him in our party? if you have forgiven me and are going to say 'yes,' i must tell you that the prince would like to compensate for his intrusion--that's the way he puts it--by helping entertain your guests. it seems that he has met with a man who can work miracles, an egyptian----" at this point professor marmion looked up again suddenly with an almost imperceptible start, and, for the first time, took an interest in miss huysman's letter. "----named phadrig. the prince assures me that he is not a conjurer in the professional sense, and would be deeply insulted to be called one; also that no amount of money would induce him to give a display of his powers just _for_ money. he will come to-day, if you like, and do wonderful things, which, from what the prince says, will astonish and perhaps frighten us a bit, but only because the prince once saved his life and got him out of a very bad place he had got into with a turkish pascha. now, that is my little story. please 'phone me as soon as you can so that i can let the prince know. it will be just too sweet of you and the professor to say 'yes.' --your devoted chum, brenda." "well, dad," she asked, as she put the letter down, "what do you say?" "just what you want to say, my dear niti," he replied, carefully spreading some marmalade on a triangle of toast "personally, i must confess that i should rather like to see some of this so-called magician's alleged magic. i know that some of these fellows are extraordinarily clever, and i have no doubt that he will show us something interesting, if you care to see it." "then that settles it," said nitocris, rising; "i will go and ring up the savoy at once. perhaps the egyptian gentleman might be able to help you with that forty-seventh proposition problem of professor hartley's." "perhaps," answered franklin marmion drily, and went on with his breakfast. chapter x the stage fills the party which gradually assembled on the lawn about four was somewhat small, but very select. nitocris had too much common sense and too much real consideration for her friends and acquaintances to get together a mere mob of well-dressed people of probably incompatible tastes and temperament, and call it a party. she disliked an elbowing crowd and a clatter of fashionably shrill tongues with all the aversion of a delicately developed sensibility. no consideration of rank or social power or wealth had the slightest weight with her when she was distributing cards of invitation, wherefore the said cards were all the more eagerly awaited by those who did, and did not, get them. the result of this in the present case was that, although every one accepted and came, rather less than fifty people had the run of the broad lawns and the leafy wilderness about them on that momentous afternoon. the first of the arrivals was professor hartley, reputed to be the greatest mathematician in england. he was a large man with rather heavy features, lit up by alert grey eyes, a big, dome-like cranium, and a manner that was modest almost to diffidence. he brought his wife, a slim and somewhat stern-featured lady, who, in the domestic sense, kept him in his place with inflexible decision, and worshipped him in his professional capacity, and two pretty, well-dressed, and obviously well-bred daughters. their carriage drew up, turned into the drive precisely at four. punctuality was the professor's one and only social vice. next came commander merrill in a hansom. this would be one of the very few meetings that he could hope for with his lost beloved--as he now sadly thought of her--before he put h.m.s. _blazer_ into commission, and so punctuality on his part was both natural and excusable. then came a few more carriages containing very nice people with whom we have here but little concern; and then miss brenda, deeply regretting her beautiful napier, with her father and mother in a very smart savoy turn-out followed by a coronetted brougham drawn by a splendid pair of black orloffs. this was followed by an equally smart dog-cart driven by a rather slightly-built but well set-up young man with a light moustache, bronzed skin, and brilliant blue eyes. he was good-looking, but if his features had been absolutely plain he could never have looked commonplace, for this was lord lester leighton, son of the earl of kyneston, and twenty generations of unblemished descent had made him the aristocrat that he was. nitocris did not like pompous announcements by servants, and so she received her guests, who were all acquaintances or friends, in the great porch through which many a brilliant presence had passed, and had two maids waiting inside to see to the wants of the ladies, and their own coachman and a couple of grooms to attend to matters outside. merrill was made as happy as possible by a bright smile, a real hand-clasp instead of the usual society paw-waggle, and instructions to go and make himself agreeable and useful. brenda also received a hearty "shake"--nitocris did not believe in kissing in public--and when the professor and mrs huysman had gone in, she whispered: "i suppose that's the prince's brougham. you must wait here, dear, and do the introductions. you're responsible, you know." brenda assented with a nod and a smile, as the brougham drew up and the smart tiger jumped down and opened the door. the prince got out, and was followed by phadrig the adept. as she looked at the two men, nitocris felt as though a wave of cold air had suddenly enveloped her whole being--body and soul. "niti, this is our friend, prince oscar oscarovitch, whom you have been kind enough to let me invite by proxy. prince, this is miss nitocris marmion." of course all the world knew of oscar oscarovitch, the modern skobeleff, the lineal descendant of ivan the terrible, the crystal-brained, steel-willed man who was to be the saviour and regenerator of half-ruined, revolution-rent russia, but this was the first time that nitocris had met him in her present life. when she had returned his stately bow, she looked up and saw with a strange intuition, which somehow seemed half-reminiscent an almost perfect type of the primitive warrior through the disguise of his faultless twentieth-century attire. he was nearly two inches over six feet, but he was so exquisitely proportioned that he looked less than his height. his skin was fair and smooth, but tanned to an olive-brown. his forehead was of medium height, straight and square, with jet-black brows drawn almost straight across it above a pair of rather soft, dreamy eyes that were blue or black according to the mood of their possessor. his nose was strong and slightly curved, with delicately sensitive nostrils. a dark glossy moustache and beard trimmed _à la_ tsar, partly hid full, almost sensual lips and a powerful somewhat projecting chin. as their eyes met the shiver of revulsion passed through her again. she hardly heard his murmured compliments, but her attention awoke when he turned to the man who was standing behind him, and said with a very graceful gesture of his left hand: "miss marmion, this is the gentleman whom you have so graciously permitted me to bring to your house. this is phadrig the adept, as he is known in his own ancient land of egypt, a worker of wonders which really are wonders, and not mere sleight-of-hand conjuring tricks. he has been good enough to accompany me in order to convince the learned of the west that the immemorial east could still teach it something if it chose." nitocris bowed, and as she looked at the figure which now stood beside the prince, she shivered again. she had a swift sense of standing in the presence of implacable enemies, and yet she had never seen these men before, and, for all she knew, she had not an enemy in the world. she was intensely relieved when lord lester leighton came up and held out his hand, and she was able to ask the prince and his companion to go through to the lawn. no one would have recognised the shabby denizen of the grimy room in candler's court, borough high street, in the tall, dignified eastern gentleman who walked with slow and stately step through the spacious old hall of "the wilderness." he was clad in a light frock-coat suit of irreproachable cut and fit. the correctly-creased trousers met brightly-burnished, narrow-toed tan boots; a black-tasselled scarlet tarbush was set square on his high forehead, and the dark red tie under his two-ply collar just added the necessary touch of oriental colour to his costume, and went excellently with the lighter red of the tarbush. it is hardly necessary to say that when he and the prince went out on to the lawn, they were, as a society paper report of the function would have put it, "the observed of all observers." "i'm so glad you were able to be here in time for my little party, lord leighton," said nitocris, when she had ended the welcoming of the other guests. "dad will be delighted, too----" she stopped rather suddenly, remembering that dad would have to tell his young friend the sad story of the mysterious loss of the mummy; but another subject was uppermost in her mind just then, and, taking refuge in it, she went on quickly: "come along to the lawn. i want to introduce you to a very distinguished gentleman--and his wife and daughter. no less a person, my lord, than the great professor hoskins van huysman!" "what!" exclaimed leighton, with a laugh that was almost boyish for such a serious and learned young man. "_the_ huysman: the professor's most doughty antagonist in the arena of symbols and theorems? oh, now that _is_ good!" "yes; i think you will find him very interesting," replied nitocris, hoping in her soul that he would find brenda a great deal more interesting. "come along, or dad will be beginning to think that i am neglecting my duties, and i must be on quite my best behaviour to-day. we are favoured by the presence of another very celebrated celebrity to-day. that tall man who came in just before you was prince oscar oscarovitch." "oh yes," he said lightly; "i recognised the brute." "the brute? dear me, that is rather severe. then you know his highness?" she asked in a low, almost eager, voice. "there are not many men in the near or far east who have not some cause to know his highness," he replied in a serious tone, tinged by the suspicion of a sneer. "he is about the finest specimen of the well-veneered savage that even russia has produced for the last century. he is a brilliant scholar, statesman, and soldier; delightful among his equals--or those he chooses to consider so--charming to men, and, they say, almost irresistible to women; but to his opponents and his inferiors, a pitiless brute-beast without heart, or soul, or honour. a curious mixture: but that's the man." "how awful!" murmured nitocris. "fancy a man like that being in such a position!" but, although she did not understand why, she had heard his harshly-spoken words with a positive sense of relief. they exactly translated and crystallised her first inexplicable feelings of desperate aversion--almost of terror. she led leighton to a little group on the left side of the lawn, composed of the three professors and the wives and daughters of two of them. as they approached them, nitocris became sensible of a curious kind of nervousness. she did not know that by this commonplace action she was reuniting two links in a long-severed chain of destiny, but she had a dim consciousness that she was going to do something much more important than merely introducing two strangers to each other. she looked quite anxiously at brenda, who had turned towards them as they came near, and saw that, just for the fraction of a second, her eyes brightened, and a passing flush deepened the delicate colour in her cheeks. it was almost like a glance of recognition, and yet she had only heard his name two or three times, and certainly had never seen him before. then she looked swiftly at leighton. yes, there was a flush under his tan and a new light in his eyes. when she had completed the introductions she looked away for a moment, and said in her soul: "thank goodness! if that is not a case of love at first sight, i shan't believe that there is any such thing, whatever the poets and romancers may say." yes, her womanly intuition was right as far as it reached; but she could not yet grasp the full meaning of the marvel which she had helped to bring about. with her father, she believed in the doctrine of re-incarnation as the only one which affords a logical and entirely just solution of the bewildering puzzles and ghastly problems of human life as seen by the eyes of ignorance. she had grasped in its highest meaning the truth--that man is really a living soul, living from eternity to eternity. an immortality with one end to it was to her an unthinkable proposition which could not possibly be true. for her, as for her father, eternal life and eternal justice were one. where a man ended one life, from that point he began the next: for good or for evil, for ignorance or for knowledge. a life lived and ended in righteousness (not, of course, in the narrow theological sense of the term) began again in righteousness, and in evil meant inexorably a re-beginning in evil. that was fate, because it was also immutable justice. man possessed the divine gift of free will to use or abuse as he would, so far as his own life-conduct was concerned; but there was no evasion of the adamantine law of the survival and progress of the fittest, which, in the course of ages, infallibly proved to be the best. this, in a word, was why "some are born to honour and some to dishonour." yet she had still to fathom an even subtler mystery than this: the mystery of sexual love. why should one man and one woman, out of all the teeming millions of humanity, be irresistibly attracted to each other by a force which none can analyse or define? why should a woman, confronted with the choice between two men, one of whom possesses every apparent advantage over the other, yet feel her heart go out to that other, and impel her to follow him, even to the leaving of father and mother and home, and all else that has been dear to her? why in the soul of every true man and woman is love, when it comes, made lord of all, and all in all? it is because love is co-eternal with life, and these two have loved, perchance wedded, many times before in other lives which they have lived together, and, with the succession of these lives, their love has grown stronger and purer, until "falling in love" is merely a recognition of lovers; unconscious, no doubt, to those who have not progressed far enough in wisdom, but none the less necessary and inevitable for that.[ ] is it not from ignorance of this truth, or wilful denial of this law, that all the miseries of mismarriage come forth? again the woman has the choice. she obeys the bidding of her own lust of wealth and comfort and social power, or she submits to the pressure of family influence, or the stress of poverty, and crushes--or thinks she does--the ages-old love out of her heart and marries the man she does not love, never has loved, and never can. she has defied the eternal law of selection. she has desecrated the sanctity of an immortal soul, and she has defiled the temple of her body. she has sold herself for a price in the market-place, and has become a prostitute endowed by law with a conventional respectability, and for this crime she pays the penalty of unsated heart-hunger. instead of the fruits of eden distilling their sweet juices into her blood, the apples of gomorrah turn perpetually to ashes in her mouth. often weariness and despair drive her to the brief intoxication of the anodyne of adultery, a further crime which is only the natural consequence of the first. but it must not be thought that women are the only sexual criminals. there are male as well as female prostitutes made respectable by convention, and the debt-burdened man of title who marries to get gold to re-gild his tarnished coronet is the worst of these; for too often he drags an innocent but ignorant maiden down to his own vile level. yet the chief criminal of all is not the individual, but the society which not only encourages, but too often compels the crime. for this it also pays the penalty. the collective crime brings the collective curse, for, if human history proves anything, it proves that the society which persistently denies the law of selection, and continually defiles the altar of love, in the end goes down through a foul welter of lust and greed and gluttony into the nethermost pit of destruction. nitocris had not learned this yet. it was not within the plan of eternal justice that her virgin soul, purified by the strenuous labour of many lives towards the light, should yet be darkened by the shadow of such grim knowledge as this. it was enough for her now that she should be the ministering angel of love and light. but at the same moment, standing on that smooth, shady lawn, there were also two incarnations of the destroying angels of hate and darkness, for even here, amidst this pleasant scene of seemingly innocent pleasure and laughter, the eternal conflict was being continued, as it is and must be, wherever man comes in contact with his kith and kind. soon after nitocris and brenda had joined the group, phadrig approached the prince, who happened for the moment to be standing alone at the bottom of the lawn, and said softly in russian: "highness, my dream, as you are pleased to call it, has proved true. that is the queen--she who was once the daughter of the great rameses, lady of the upper and lower kingdoms." "what?" laughed the prince. "miss marmion, that lovely english girl, your old egyptian mummy re-vivified! well, have it as you like. you are welcome to your dreams as long as you use your arts to help me to lay hands on the beautiful reality. i have seen many a fair woman, and thought myself in love with some of them, but by the beard of ivan, i have never seen one like this. i tell you, phadrig, that the moment my eyes looked for the first time into hers, only a few minutes ago, i knew that i had found my fate, and, having found it, i shall take very good care that i don't lose it. and you shall help me to keep it; i shall try every fair means first to make her my princess, for, whether she was once queen of egypt or not, she is worthy now to sit beside a sovereign on his throne--and it might be that i could some day give her such a place--but have her i will, if not as fairly-won wife and consort, then as stolen slave and plaything, to keep as long as my fancy lasts. and listen, phadrig," he went on in a low tone, but with savage intensity. "your life is mine, for i gave it back to you when the lifting of a finger would have sent you into what you would call another incarnation; and from this day forth you must devote it to this end until it is attained, one way or the other. i know you don't care for money as wealth, but in this world it is the right hand of power, and that you love. all that you need shall be yours for the asking in exchange for your faithful service. are you content with the bargain?" "no, highness, that will not content me," replied phadrig, in a voice that had no expression save unalterable resolve. "what! is not that enough for you, a penniless seller of curios?" said the prince, with a sneer in his tone. "then i will add to it the ready aid and unquestioning obedience of our secret police, here and in europe. will that satisfy you?" "i do not need the help of your police, highness," answered the egyptian, in the same passionless accents. "they are skilful and brave, but they have not the greater knowledge. i could turn the wisest of them into a fool, and frighten the bravest out of his senses in a few minutes. use them yourself, highness, should it become necessary. they would be less than useless to me." "then what will satisfy you?" asked the prince impatiently, but with no show of anger, for he knew the strange power of the man whose help he needed. "i do not ask you to believe in the reality of what you call my dreams, highness," replied phadrig slowly, "but i do ask--nay, i require, as the price of my faithful service, your solemn promise in writing, signed and attested, that, if and when my dreams become realities, and your own hopes are fulfilled, the independence and sovereignty of the ancient land shall be restored; her temples and tombs and palaces shall be rebuilt; her ancient worship revived in my person, and the sceptre of rameses replaced in the hand of nitocris the queen." the prince was silent for a few moments. to grant the seemingly extravagant demand meant to reduce the splendid dream and scheme of his life to cold, tangible writing, and to put into this man's hand the power to betray him. on the other hand, their aims were one, and only through him could phadrig hope to realise his dreams. of course they were only dreams; but he was faithful to them, and so he would be faithful to him. at the worst it would be easy to arrange a burglary, or, for the matter of that, a murder in candler's court, and that would make an end of the matter. "very well, phadrig," he said at length. "it is settled. i will trust you, for it is necessary that we should trust each other. you shall have what you ask for within a week. now i must go. i shall tell them that i have been arranging the exhibition of your powers which you are going to give them. it will be well to startle them sufficiently to shake their british beef-sense up into something like fear. make them wonder, but, for the sake of our hostess, don't frighten them too much." phadrig only acknowledged his promise with a bow, and he turned away and joined the growing group in which nitocris and brenda were still the central objects of attraction. +------------------------------------------------------------+ |footnote: | | | |[ ] the doctrine, of course, affords the same explanation of| |friendships between man and man, and woman and woman. | | | +------------------------------------------------------------+ chapter xi the marvels of phadrig the time, about an hour or so before tea, was occupied by the guests according to their varying tastes--in tennis, croquet, more or less good-natured gossip, and flirtations which may or may not have been serious. nitocris saw with growing cause for self-gratulation that lord leighton and brenda were decidedly attracted towards each other. he, in spite of having received his gracious, but, as he well knew, final _congé_ from nitocris, still felt that he was not quite playing the game with himself; but for all that it was impossible for him not to see that the emotion, which was even now stirring in his heart, awakened by the first touch of brenda's hand, and the first meeting of their eyes, was something very different from the tenderly respectful admiration, the real friendship, inevitably exalted by the magic of sex, which, as he saw now, he had innocently mistaken for love. he managed quite adroitly to separate brenda from the circle, and to lure her into a stroll about the outside grounds, during which he told her the history and traditions of "the wilderness" not, of course, omitting the sad little tragedy of the lady alicia, all of which miss brenda listened to with an interest which was not, perhaps, wholly derived from the story itself. she had never yet met any one who was quite like this learned, much-travelled, quiet-spoken young aristocrat. on her father's side she was descended from one of the oldest knickerbocker families in the state of new york and her aristocracy responded instinctively to his, and formed a first bond between them. it need hardly be said that her beauty and her prospective wealth, to say nothing of the bright, mental, and intellectual atmosphere in which she seemed to live and move, had attracted to her many men whom she had inspired with a very genuine desire to link their lives with hers. she was only twenty-two, but she had already refused more than one coronet of respectable dignity, and so far her heart had remained as virgin as it was when she had admired herself in her first long skirt. but now, for the first time in her life, she began to feel a strange disquietude in the presence of a man, and a man, too, whom she had not known for an hour. nitocris had, happily, told her nothing of what had passed between lord leighton and herself, and so the pleasant element in her disquietude was entirely unalloyed. her father was already too deeply engrossed in learned converse with his brother professors to take any notice of the great fact which was beginning to get itself accomplished; but her mother's instinct instantly noticed the subtle change that had come over her daughter, and she saw it with anything but displeasure. all sensible mothers of beautiful daughters are discreetly sanguine. she was far too wise in her generation not to have agreed with brenda's decision in certain former cases. the idea of her daughter's beauty and her father's millions being bartered for mere rank and social power, however splendid, was utterly repugnant to her. she had married for love, and she wanted brenda to do the same, whoever the chosen man might be, provided always that he was a man--and in this regard there could be no doubt about lord lester leighton; so as they walked away she said to nitocris with a confidence which was almost girlish: "his lordship is just delightful--now, isn't he, miss marmion? just the sort that you seem to raise over here, and nowhere else. tells you that you have to take him for a gentleman and nothing else in the first three words he says to you--and brenda seems to like him. i never saw her go off with a man like that on such short notice, for brenda's pretty proud and cold with men, for all her nice ways and high spirits." "you would have to search a long time, mrs van huysman," replied nitocris very demurely, "before you found a better type of the real english gentleman than lord leighton. his family is one of the oldest in the country, and, unlike too many of our noble families, the kynestons have no bar-sinister on their escutcheon." "i guess you're getting a little beyond me there, miss marmion. i don't think i ever heard of a--what is it?--a bar-sinister, before. what might it be?" nitocris flushed very faintly as she replied: "i think i can explain it best, mrs van huysman, by saying that it means that lord leighton's ancestors have preserved their honour unstained through many generations. of course, you know that some of our so-called noble families in england spring from anything but a noble origin. there are not a few english dukes and earls who would find it rather awkward to introduce their great-great-grandmothers to their present circle of friends." "i should think they would, from what i have read of them, the shameless creatures!" said mrs van huysman, with a sniff of real republican virtue. then the prince joined them, and the conversation was promptly switched off on to another line of interest. tea was served on the old lawn under the shade of the great cedars, which made its greatest adornment; and when everybody had had what he or she wanted, and the men had lit their cigarettes--and the professors, by special permission, their pipes--nitocris looked across a couple of tables at oscarovitch, whom she had so far managed most adroitly to keep at an endurable distance, and said: "now, prince, if your friend the adept is in the mood to astonish us with his wonders, perhaps you will be good enough to tell him that we are all ready and willing to be startled--only i hope that he will be merciful to our ignorance and not frighten us too much." "i can assure you, miss marmion, that my good friend from egypt will be discretion itself," replied the prince, with a look and a courtly gesture that inspired commander merrill with an almost passionate longing to take him down one of the quiet paths under the beeches for a ten minutes' interlude. "i can promise that he will show you some marvels which even your learned and distinguished father and his _confrères_ may find difficult of explanation: but it shall all be white magic. i understand that your real adept considers the black variety as what you call bad form." as the company rose and went in little groups towards the tennis-lawn, where phadrig had elected to display his powers, the three professors instinctively joined each other in a small phalanx of scepticism. if there was any trick or deception to be discovered all looked to them to do it, and they were almost gleefully aware of their responsibility. figuratively speaking, they each wore the scalps of many spiritualistic mediums, and both professor van huysman and professor hartley sensed a possible addition to their belts of scientific wampum which would not be the least of their trophies. it had been agreed to by phadrig, with a quiet scorn, that they were to take any measures they liked to detect him in any practice that would convict him of being merely a conjurer; and they had accepted the permission with that whole-souled devotion to truth which excludes all idea of pity from the really scientific mind. franklin marmion was naturally in a very different frame of mind, although, from reasons of high policy, he assumed a similar mask of almost scornful scepticism; but for all that he was by far the most anxious man in the company. at the request of their hostess the guests arranged themselves sitting and standing in a spacious circle on the tennis-lawn; and when this was, formed, phadrig, whose isolation so far from the rest of the company had been satisfactorily explained by the prince, walked slowly into the middle of it, and, after a quick, keen glance round him--a glance which rested for just a moment or so on professor marmion and his _confrères_, and then on nitocris, who was sitting beside brenda attended by lord leighton and merrill--he said in a low but clear and far-reaching voice, and in perfect english: "ladies and gentlemen, i have come to the house of the learned professor marmion at the request of my very good friend and patron, his highness prince oscar oscarovitch, to give you a little display of what i may call white magic. but before i begin i must ask you to accept my word of honour as a humble student of the mysteries of what, for want of a better word, we call nature, that i am not in any sense a conjurer, by which i mean one who performs apparent marvels by merely deceiving your senses. "what i am going to show you, you really will see. my marvels, if you please to think them such, will be realities, not illusions; and i shall be pleased if you will take every means to satisfy yourselves that they are so. i say this with all the more pleasure because i know that there are present three gentlemen of great eminence in the world of science, and if they are not able to detect me in anything approaching trickery, i think you will take their word for it that i am not deceiving you. "in order that there may not be the smallest possible chance of error, i will ask professors marmion, hartley, and van huysman to come and stand near to me, so that they may be satisfied that i make use of none of the mere conjurer's apparatus. i shall use nothing but the knowledge, and therefore the power, to which it has been my privilege to attain." phadrig spoke with all the calm confidence of perfect self-reliance, and therefore his words were not wanting in effect on his audience, critical and sceptical as it was. "i reckon that's a challenge we can't very well afford to let go," said professor van huysman, with a keen look at his two brother scientists. "of course he's just a trick-merchant, but they're so mighty clever nowadays, especially these fellows from the gorgeous east, that you've got to keep your eyes wide open all the time they've got the platform." "certainly," said professor hartley, as they moved out from the circle; "it must be trickery of some sort, and we shall be doing a public service by exposing it. what do you think, marmion? i hope you won't mind the exposure taking place in your own garden and among your own guests?" "not a bit, my dear hartley," replied franklin marmion with a smile, which was quite lost upon his absolutely materialistic friends. "we have, as van huysman says, received a direct challenge. we should be most unworthy servants of our great mistress if we did not take it up. personally, i mean to find out everything that i can." "and, gentlemen," laughed the prince, who had been standing with them and now moved away towards nitocris, "i sincerely hope that what you find out will be worth the learning." "he's a big man, that," said professor van huysman, when he was out of earshot, "but he's not the sort i'd have much use for. i wonder why those people who are on the war-path in his country ever let him out of it alive?" in accordance with phadrig's request, they made a triangle of which he was the central point. without any formula of introduction, he said rather abruptly: "professor van huysman, will you oblige me by taking a croquet ball and holding it in your hand as tightly as you can?" brenda ran out of the circle and gave him one. he took it and gripped it in a fist that looked made to hold things. phadrig glanced at the ball, and said quietly: "follow me!" then he turned away, and, in spite of all the professor's efforts to hold it, the ball somehow slipped through his fingers and fell on to the lawn. then, to the utter amazement of every one, except franklin marmion, it rolled towards the adept and followed him at a distance of about three yards as he walked round the circle of spectators. he did not even look at it. when he had made the round, he took his place in the triangle of science, and the ball stopped at his feet. "it is now released, professor," he said to van huysman. "you may take it away, if you wish." there was something in the saying of the last sentence that nettled him. he had seen all, or nearly all, the physical laws, which were to him as the credo is to a catholic or the profession of faith to a moslem, openly and shamelessly outraged, defied, and set at nought. to say he was angry would be to give a very inadequate idea of his feelings, because he, the greatest exposer of spiritualism, dowieism, and christian scientism in the united states, was not only angry, but--for the time being only, as he hoped--utterly bewildered. it was too much, as he would have put it, to take lying down, and so, greatly daring, he took a couple of strides towards phadrig, and said with a snarl in his voice: "i guess you mean really if _you_ wish, mr miracle-worker. it was mighty clever, however you did it, but you haven't got me to believe that physical laws are frauds yet. you want me to pick that ball up?" "certainly, professor--if you can--now," replied phadrig, with a little twitch of his lips which might have been a smile, or something else. hoskins van huysman was a strong man, and he knew it. not very many years before, he had been able to shoulder a sack of flour and take it away at a run, and now he could bend a poker across his shoulders without much trouble. he stooped down and gripped the ball, expecting, of course, to lift it quite easily. it didn't move. he put more force into his arms and tried again. for "all the move he got on it," as he said afterwards, it might have weighed a ton. it was ridiculous, but it was a fact. in spite of all his pulling and straining, the ball remained where it was as though it had been rooted in the foundations of the world. he was wise enough to know when he was beaten, so he let go, and when he pulled himself up, somewhat flushed after his exertions, he said: "well, mister phadrig, i don't know how you do it, but i've got to confess that it lets me out. i'm beaten. if you can make the law of gravitation do what you want, you're a lot bigger man in physics than i am." he turned and went back to his place, looking, as his daughter whispered to nitocris, "pretty well shaken up." the prince caught phadrig's eye for an instant, and said: "miss marmion, will you confound the wisdom of the wise and bring the ball here?" it was not the words but the challenge in them that impelled her to rise from her chair, aided by merrill's hand, and not the one that the prince held out, and walk across the lawn towards phadrig. she took no notice of him. she just stooped and picked up the ball and carried it back to her chair. she tossed it down on the grass, and sat down again without a word, quaking with many inward emotions, but outwardly as calm as ever. what professor van huysman said to himself when he saw this will be better left to himself. it might have been expected that the miracle, or at least the extraordinary defiance of physical law which had been accomplished by phadrig, would have produced something like consternation among the bulk of the spectators. it did nothing of the sort. they were, perhaps, above the ordinary level of society intellect in london; but they only saw something wonderful in what had been done. nothing would have persuaded them that it was not the result of such skill as produced the marvels of the egyptian hall, simply because they were not capable of grasping its inner significance. could they have done that, the panic which professor marmion was beginning to fear would probably have broken the party up in somewhat unpleasant fashion. as it was they contented themselves with saying: "how exceedingly clever!" "he must be quite a remarkable man!" "i wonder we've never heard of him before!" "he must make a great deal of money!" "i wonder if i could persuade the dear prince--what a charming man he is!--to bring him to my next at home day?" and so on, perfectly ignorant, as it was well they should be, that they had witnessed a real conquest of knowledge over force. phadrig, who seemed to be the least interested person on the lawn, looked about him, and said as quietly as before: "i should be very much obliged if the best tennis player in the company will do me the honour to have a game with me." now, it so happened that brenda, in addition to her other athletic honours, had recently won the ladies' tennis tournament at washington, which carried with it the championship of the state for the year, and so this challenge appealed both to her pride in the game and her spirit of adventure. she looked round at nitocris, and said: "i've half a mind to try, niti. i suppose he won't strike me with lightning or send me down through the earth if i happen to beat him. shall i?" "yes, do," replied her hostess, with a suspicion of mischief in her voice; "those dear professors of ours are puzzling so delightfully over the first miracle, or whatever it was, that i _do_ want to see them worried a little more. it will be a wholesome chastening for the overweening pride of knowledge." "very well," laughed brenda, rising and dropping a light cloak from her shoulders. "it's the first time i've had the honour of playing against a magician, mind, so you mustn't be too hard on me if i lose." lord leighton fetched her racquet and one for phadrig, and they went together towards the tennis-court in which he was standing. the three professors left their places and stood at one end of the net, messrs hartley and van huysman indulging in audible growls of baffled scepticism, and franklin marmion silently observant, divided between interest and amusement. he could not help imagining what would happen if he were to stand in the middle of the circle and remove himself to the higher plane, and then go round shaking hands and saying, "good afternoon." brenda acknowledged phadrig's bow with a gracious nod as she took her place. then lord leighton handed the other racquet to the adept. to his astonishment he declined it with another bow, saying: "i thank you, my lord, but i do not need it." "what!" exclaimed the other, with a frank stare of astonishment. "excuse me, but tennis without a racquet, you know--are you going to play with your hands?" "to some extent, yes, my lord," replied phadrig, as he took his place. "will you ask miss van huysman if she will be kind enough to serve?" brenda would. phadrig stood on the middle line between the two courts with his hands folded in front of him. she certainly felt a little nervous, but she knew her skill, and she sent a scorcher of an undercut skimming across the net. the ball stopped dead. phadrig gave a flick with his right forefinger, and it hopped back over the net and ran swiftly along the ground to brenda's feet. she flushed as she picked it up and changed courts. then she raised her racquet and sent a really vicious slasher into the opposite court. phadrig, without moving, raised his hand at the same moment. the ball, hard as it had been driven, stopped in mid-air over the net, hung there for a moment, then dropped on brenda's side and rolled to her feet again. she picked it up, walked to the net with it in her hand, and said quite good-humouredly: "i think you're a bit too smart for me, mr phadrig. i can't pretend to play against a gentleman who can suspend the law of gravitation just to win a game of tennis." "i did not do it to win the game, miss van huysman," he replied with a gentle smile; "i only desired to amuse you and the other guests of professor marmion. now, it may be that some excellent but ignorant people here may think that that ball is bewitched, as they would call it, so if you will give it to me, i will send it out of reach." she handed him the ball, wondering what was going to happen next. he took it and put it on the thumb of his right hand as one does with a coin when tossing. he flicked it into the air, and, to the amazement of every one, saving always franklin marmion, it rose slowly up to the cloudless sky, followed by the gaze of a hundred eyes, and vanished. then he bowed again to brenda, and said in the most commonplace tone: "it is out of harm's way now. thank you once more for your condescension." "but how did it go up like that?" asked brenda, looking him frankly and somewhat defiantly in the eyes. "that, miss huysman," he replied with perfect gravity, "was only a demonstration of what spiritualists and theosophists are accustomed to call levitation. it is only a matter of reversing the force of gravity." "is that all?" laughed brenda, as she turned away. "you talk of it as though it were a matter of turning a paper bag inside out." "the one is as easy as the other," he smiled. "it is only a question of knowing how to do it." she walked back to her chair very much mystified, and, for the first time in her so far triumphal journey through the interlude between the eternities which we call life, a trifle humiliated: but that fact, of course, she kept to herself. as she dropped back in her chair, she said to lord leighton: "that was pretty wonderful, wasn't it? i'm quite certain that there's no trickery about it. what he did, he really did do." "i don't pretend to be able to explain it," he replied, "but for all that i've seen very much the same sort of thing done by the fakirs in india, and i think it's generally admitted that that is either a matter of trickery or hypnotism. they make you believe you see what you really don't see at all." "that's about it," said merrill, with a short laugh, "of course no one who knows anything about the east will deny that hypnotism is a fact, although i must say that these same fakirs have tried it with me more than once and found me a quite hopeless subject." even as though he had heard him, phadrig came towards them at the moment, and said in his polite, impersonal tone: "commander merrill, i am going to try one or two experiments now which i should like to have very closely watched. i know that there is no keener observer in the world than the skilled british naval officer. may i ask for your assistance?" there was something in his tone which made it quite impossible to refuse, so he replied: "you have shown us a good many wonders already, mr phadrig, and unless you've hypnotised the whole of us, i haven't a notion how you have done it; but if i can find you out i will." "that is exactly what i wish, sir," said phadrig, as he bowed to the ladies and went back to the centre of the circle. merrill followed him, and, with the three professors, formed a square about him. phadrig, turning slowly round so that his voice might reach all his audience, said: "ladies and gentlemen, you have all heard of or seen the strange performances of the indian fakirs: the growing of the mango plant, the so-called basket trick, and the throwing into the air of a rope up which the performer climbs from view of the spectators. i am not going to say whether those are tricks or not. their knowledge may be different from mine, therefore i do not question it. i only propose to show you the same kind of performance without the use of any coverings or concealment, and leave you and these four gentlemen to discover any deception on my part if you can. i will begin by giving you a new version of the mango trick, if trick it is, with variations. professor marmion, would you have the goodness to ask one of the young ladies to bring me one of those beautiful white roses of yours?" franklin marmion was on the point of saying: "i'll bring you one myself, and see what you can do with it," but he was a sportsman in his way, and, seeing that his guests were so far not all inclined to be frightened at what they had seen, he refrained from spoiling the "entertainment," as they evidently took it to be, and so he asked his daughter to go and get one of her nicest marèchal niels. she rose from her chair and went to her favourite tree; merrill followed her with a ready penknife. they came back with a fine half-blown rose on a leafy twig about nine inches long. as she held it out to phadrig he declined it with a bow and a wave of his hand, saying: "i thank you, miss marmion, but it will be better for me not to touch it. some one might think that i had bewitched it in some way; will you be kind enough to give it to commander merrill and ask him to put the stem into the turf: about two inches down, please." she handed the rose to merrill, and as he took it their eyes met for an instant, and she flushed ever so slightly. he, with many unspoken thoughts, knelt down, made a little hole in the turf with his knife, and planted the rose. when he stood up again phadrig went on in the same quiet impersonal voice: "now, ladies and gentlemen, you know that this rose is of a pale cream colour slightly tinted with red. it shall now grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses. it will not be necessary for me to touch it." this somehow appealed more closely to such imagination as the majority of the spectators possessed. they had regarded the other marvels they had seen merely as bewilderingly clever examples of legerdemain: but for a man to make a single sprig of rose grow into a tree bearing both red and white roses without even touching it meant something quite unbelievable--until they had seen it. instinctively the circle narrowed, and phadrig noting this, said: "pray, come as close as you like, ladies and gentlemen, as long as you do not pass my guardians, for they have undertaken that you shall not be deceived." the result was that a smaller circle was formed round the square, at the angles of which stood merrill and the three men of science. phadrig stood at one side facing the east. then he spread his hands out above the rose, and said slowly: "earth feeds, sun warms, and air refreshes: wherefore grow, rose, that the power of the greater knowledge may be manifested, and that those who believed not before may now see and believe." he raised his hands with a spreading movement and, to the utter amazement of every one except franklin marmion, who now saw that this man certainly had approached to within measurable distance of the borderland which he had himself so lately crossed--wherefore in his eyes there was nothing at all marvellous in anything he had done--the leaves on the sprig grew rapidly out into branches as the main stem increased in height and thickness, red and white buds appeared under the leaves and swelled out into full blooms with a rapidity that would have been quite incredible if a hundred keen eyes had not been watching the marvel so closely; and within ten minutes a fine rose-bush, some three feet high, loaded with red and white and creamy blossoms, stood where merrill had planted the sprig. after the first gasps of astonishment there arose quite a chorus of requests from the younger members of phadrig's audience for a rose to keep in memory of the marvel they had seen; but he shook his head, and said with a smile of deprecation: "i regret that it is not possible for me to grant what you ask. for your own sakes i cannot do it. if i gave you those roses they would never fade, and it might be that those who possessed them would never die. far be it from me to curse you with such a terrible gift as immortality on earth." the gravely, almost sadly spoken words fell upon his hearer's ears like so many snowflakes. instinctively they shrank back from the beautiful bush as though it had been the fabled upas. they had begun to fear now for the first time. but there was one among them, a young fellow of twenty-two, named martin caine, who was already known as one of the most daring and far-sighted of the rising generation of chemical investigators, to whom the prospect of an endless life devoted to his darling science was anything but a curse. intoxicated for the moment by what he had seen, he sprang forward, exclaiming: "i'll risk the curse if i can have the life!" as his hand touched one of the roses, phadrig's darted out and caught his wrist. he was a powerful youth, but the instant phadrig's hand gripped him he stopped, as though he had been suddenly stricken by paralysis. he turned a white, scared face with fear-dilated eyes upward, and said in a half-choked voice: "what's the matter? if what you say's true, give me eternal life, and i'll give it to science." "my young friend," said phadrig, with a slow shake of his head, "you are grievously mistaken. you have eternal life already. you may kill your body, or it may die of age or disease, but the life of your soul is not yours to take or keep. only the high gods can dispose of that. who am i that i should abet you in defying their decrees? here is my refusal of your mad request." he plucked the rose which caine had touched, held it to his lips and breathed on it. the next instant the withered leaves fell to the ground, and lay there dry and shrivelled. the stalk was brown and dry. as he released caine's wrist he dropped the stalk in the middle of the bush, and said in a loud tone: "as thou hast lived, die--as all things must which shall live again." as quickly as the rose-bush had grown and flowered so quickly, it withered and died. in a few moments there was nothing left of it but a few dry sticks lying in a little heap of dust. the circle suddenly widened out as the people shrank back, every face showing, not only wonder now, but actual fear; and now franklin marmion felt that phadrig had been allowed to go as far as a due consideration for the sanity of his guests would permit. the other two professors were disputing in low, anxious tones, as if even their scepticism was shaken at last: martin caine had drifted away through the opening press to hide his terror and chagrin. the adept stood impassively triumphant beside the poor relics of the rose-bush, but obviously enjoying the consternation that he had produced--for now the lust of power which ever attends upon imperfect knowledge had taken hold of him, and he was devising yet another marvel for their bewilderment. but before he had arrived at his decision, something else happened which was quite outside his programme. the prince broke the chilly silence by saying to nitocris in a tone loud enough for every one to hear: "i hope, miss marmion, that i have justified my intrusion by the skill which my friend phadrig has displayed for the entertainment of your guests?" she turned and looked at him, and, as their glances met, he saw a change come over her. her eyes grew darker: her features acquired an almost stony rigidity utterly strange to her. his eyelids lifted quickly, and he shrank back from her as a man might do who had seen the wraith of one long dead, but once well known. "nitocris!" he murmured in russian. "phadrig was right: it is the queen!" she swept past him--oscar oscarovitch, the man who aspired to the throne of the eastern empire of europe--as though he had been one of his own slaves in the old days, and faced phadrig. "it is enough, anemen-ha that was. hast thou not learned wisdom yet, after so many lives? is the inmost chamber of thy soul still closed in rebellion against the precepts of the high gods? no more of thy poor little mummeries for the deception of the ignorant! go, and without further display of the weakness which thou hast presumptuously mistaken for strength. the queen commands--go!" only phadrig and franklin marmion saw that it was not nitocris, the daughter of the english man of science, but the daughter of the great rameses who stood there crowned and robed as queen of the two kingdoms. phadrig raised the palms of his hands to his forehead, bowed before her, and murmured: "the queen has but to speak to be obeyed! it is even as i feared. but the prince----" "i who was and am, know what thou wouldst say. go, or----" "royal egypt, i go! but as thou art mighty, have mercy, and make the manner of my going easy." nitocris turned away with a gesture of utter contempt, walked slowly towards her father, and said in english: "dad, i think our friend the adept is a little tired after his wonder-working. i dare say most of us would be if we could do what he has been doing. he seems quite exhausted. i think you had better ask the prince to let his coachman take him home." oscar oscarovitch's soul was in a tumult of bewilderment, but his almost perfect training made it possible for him to say as quietly as though he had been taking leave of his hostess at a reception in london: "miss marmion, we must thank you for your great consideration. as you say, our friend is undoubtedly fatigued, and, as i have an appointment at the embassy this evening, i will ask you to allow me to take my leave as well." with a comprehensive bow of farewell to the company, and a somewhat limp handshake with professor marmion and his daughter, he put his arm through that of his defeated and humiliated accomplice, and led him away through an opening which the still dazed spectators instinctively made for them. chapter xii controversy and confidences after this incident, the guests melted away, singly and by pairs and families, thanking nitocris and her father with much _empressement_ for "the delightful afternoon," and "the extraordinary entertainment which they had so much enjoyed," and many regrets that "the poor adept, who really was so very clever and had mystified them all so delightfully," had overdone himself and got ill, and so on, and so on, through the endless repetitions and variations usual on such occasions. a small party, including the hartleys, the van huysmans, merrill, and lord leighton, had been asked to stay to dinner, but it happened that they had a conversazione already included in the day's programme, and so they took their departure soon after the others, the professor, it must be confessed, in a somewhat morose frame of mind. like all men of similar mental constitution, he hated to be mystified, and now, for the first time in his long career of investigation into apparently abstruse phenomena, he had been absolutely stumped by this perfect-mannered, quiet-spoken gentleman from the east who performed wonders in broad daylight, on a plot of grass amidst a crowd of people, and did not deign to even touch the things he worked his miracles with. if he had only used some sort of apparatus, or condescended to some concealment, after the manner of others of this kind, there might have been a chance of finding a means of exposure; but the whole performance had been so transparently open and aboveboard that professor marcus hartley, d.sc., m.a., f.r.s., etc., etc., felt that, as a consistent materialist, he had not been given a fair chance. still, he did not despair; and by the time he got back into his own den he had resolved that when it did come, as of course it must do sooner or later, the exposure of phadrig the adept and the vindication of natural law should be complete and final. a discussion of the same marvels naturally bulked largely in the conversation during dinner at "the wilderness." mrs van huysman did not contribute much wisdom to it beyond the assertion of her conviction that such things were wicked and should be stopped by law, at which her daughter was sufficiently unfilial to draw a diverting picture of a stalwart policeman trying to arrest an elusive adept who could probably make himself invisible at will, or call to his aid fire-breathing dragons, just as easily as he could make a tennis ball evaporate into thin air, or grow lovely witch-roses and wither them to ashes with a breath. "i do think it was a bit mean of him not to let that poor young man have one of them, if he was willing to take the risk. especially as he just wanted to go on working for science for ever. fancy what a single man might do if he could just keep right on with his life-work for, say, a thousand years without having to stop it to die and be born again, according to niti's pet theory. what couldn't a man like that do for human knowledge!" "would you have had one of those roses, brenda, if the prince's miracle-worker had offered you one?" asked nitocris, smiling, but still with a decided note of seriousness in her tone. "i?" laughed brenda, leaning back in her chair. "sakes, no, child! i've had a pretty good time so far, and i hope it won't be over just yet; but, after all, there must be a limit even to the combinations of human life, and a time would have to come when you'd just be doing the same old things over and over again. and, besides that, think of the horror of living on and on and seeing every one you loved--husband and wife, and children and grandchildren--grow old and die, and leave you alone in a world of strangers. no; life's a good thing if you only have fair play in the world; but so is death when you've lived your life. it's only like going to bed, after all. eternal life would be like a day with no night to it, and that, i guess, would get a bit monotonous after a century or two. what do you think, professor?" "my dear miss van huysman," replied her host with one of his rare but eloquent smiles, "since i began to study the question with anything like enlightenment, i have not been able to look upon what we call life, by which i mean existence in this or some other world, as anything but eternal. in its manifestations to our senses it is, i admit, merely transitory, a brief span of time between two other states which, for want of a better word, we may call two eternities; but i must confess that, to me, a human existence beginning with the cradle and ending with the grave is merely a more or less tragic riddle without an answer: in other words, a meaningless absurdity. i find it quite impossible to conceive any deity or presiding genius of the universe who could be guilty of such a colossally useless tragedy as human life would be under those circumstances." "i can't see it, my dear marmion," said brenda's father a trifle gruffly, for he had not yet quite recovered from the disquieting experiences of the afternoon. "what does it matter whether we live again or not as long as we live cleanly and do our work honestly while we are alive? surely if we leave this world a little bit better, a little bit richer in knowledge, than we find it, these poor little lives of ours, such as they are, and that's not much--will not have been lived in vain. of course, as you know, i'm just a common, low-down materialist who can't rise to the poetry of things as you can with this gorgeous theory of re-incarnation of yours. "i should very much like to believe it if i could, as i once said to an eminent revivalist on the war-path in the states; but the trouble with a man who is honest with himself is that he can no more make himself believe what doesn't seem true to him than he can make himself hungry when he isn't. all the horrible history of religious persecution is just the story of a lot of bigots in power trying to force helpless people to do what they couldn't do honestly. the awful part of the business is that they were most likely all wrong, and didn't know it." "but, at least, professor, i hope you are able to give them credit for honest intentions, however mistaken they might have been?" interposed merrill, who was the son of a country parson and had so far preserved his simple faith intact. it may be remarked here, that nitocris was well aware of this, and loved her strong-souled sailor all the better for it. franklin marmion did not, but then he thought any creed good enough for "a mere fighting man." "there were schemers and scoundrels among them on both sides, sir," replied the american quietly. "the temptation was too big; but i am quite willing to allow that the majority of them, even the inquisitors, were honest zealots who really did think it right to produce any amount of suffering and misery here on earth in order to get matters straightened out, as they thought, hereafter. charles v. was the most enlightened monarch of his age and the worst persecutor, and torquemada, away from his religion, was as kind-hearted a man as ever lived. calvin was a good man, but he watched servetus burn, and our own pilgrim fathers on the other side were just about as hard men as any when it came to arguing out a religious question with whips and pillories and thumbscrews, and the like. i don't want to offend any one's sentiment or question any one's faith. to each man the belief that satisfies him, but personally i have no use for a religion that can't get itself believed without persecution." "i quite agree with you there, professor," replied merrill, who felt a little chilled by the perfect aloofness with which the other spoke, and was wondering what his dear old father, living his quiet, saintly life among the derbyshire dales, would have thought of such cold-blooded heresy. "i have always looked upon that sort of brutal intolerance as a form of religious mania--sincere, but still mania, and the story of it is the most awful chapter in human history----" "except, perhaps, the story of war," interrupted professor marmion, with a snap in his voice. monomania, more or less harmless, is a not infrequent affliction of very high intelligences, and a quite unreasoning hatred of war was his, although within the last few days he had come to suspect disquieting misgivings on the subject, possibly in consequence of the higher knowledge to which he was attaining. "my dear sir," replied merrill quite good-humouredly, and not at all sorry for the diversion, "i am glad to say that i agree with you also. no man who has not actually fought can have any just idea of the appalling abominations of war, and i am sure that no men hate it more devotedly than those who have to fight. but we have to take the world as it is, and not as we would like it to be; and as long as we have people in it who want to set it on fire for their own brutally selfish purposes, we shall have to keep the fire-extinguishers in good order." in obedience to an appealing glance from his daughter, the professor did not reply. his opponent in the bloodless arena of science saved him by interrupting: "yes, sir. i differ from my friend marmion on a good many points, and that's one of them. you have the honour to serve in the biggest fire-extinguishing institution on earth. it was the british navy that put out napoleon's bonfire that he was making of the world: you kept the ring round us and spain, and round russia and japan, and you've saved more conflagrations than half a dozen noah's floods would put out. that's why the kaiser and his tin-hatted firebrands have such a healthy dislike for you. they'd have had the world on fire years ago if they hadn't had to worry about you." "i think you must admit, professor marmion," said lord leighton, who had so far been busy with his own new thoughts and the contemplation of the inspirer of them, "that it is people like these on whom the real guilt of the crime of war rests. now that the pressure of the bear's paw is removed, germany is the danger-spot of the world. the maroocan business proved that pretty clearly; and nothing but our friendship with america and france and japan, and the ability to strike hard and instantly at sea, saved europe, and perhaps the world, from something like a repetition of the napoleonic wars." "with mister william hohenzollern a napoleon," added professor van huysman, with a half-suppressed snort. "it seems to me as though that gentleman had been spreading himself round europe as german war-lord so long that he's getting tired of playing at it, and 's just spoiling for a real fight." "that is very possible," said merrill; "but happily he has responsibilities, and even the german war party would not follow him as far as he would like to go, to say nothing of the liberals and the socialists. personally, i must say that i think we have had a much more dangerous person, as far as the peace of the world is concerned, on the lawn of 'the wilderness' this afternoon." "of course you mean that hateful russian prince who brought that equally hateful adept, as he calls himself, with him," said nitocris, with an unwonted harshness that made every one look up. "oh, niti," exclaimed brenda, "and i asked you to let me bring him!" "i'm very sorry, dear," she replied quietly, but with a smile of reassurance. "it was not your fault, of course. he may have been very nice to you, but i am obliged to say that the first moment i looked at him i was possessed by some inexplicable feeling of dislike, and even fear, although i certainly never hated or feared any one before. if i had met him before i got your note, i really think i should have asked you to spare us the honour. it seemed to me as though there was something uncanny about the man. it was very curious." her father looked up at her for a moment, wondering what would happen if he were to explain the mysterious antipathy there and then. the little theological discussion would look very small after such a revelation as that. but he, too, had had a revelation which the somewhat desultory conversation had done something to press home upon him. he had seen the advent of the queen, and heard what she had said to phadrig with other eyes and ears than his guests had done, for to them it had only been nitocris who had gone to him and said a few inaudible words, which they had taken as a request for the conclusion of his "performance." he had seen back through the mists of many centuries and recognised them as they had been, and he had learned that oscarovitch the russian had now entered the circle of the queen's, and therefore his own, influence. a sudden anxiety for the safety of his darling niti had awakened in his heart. he had seen the lust for possession flame in the man's eyes, and now that he knew who he was--and had been--he determined that whatever other adventurer might set the world aflame, the modern skobeleff should not do it if he and his royal ally on the higher plane could prevent it. his coming had been a curious coincidence, possibly a consequence of obscure causes; but, for some reason or other, he felt himself beginning to look with a more favourable eye on commander mark merrill--perhaps because he was the impersonation of uncompromising hostility to everything that oscarovitch represented. dinner had come to an end now, and so nitocris took advantage of ending a conversation which bade fair to become somewhat awkward. she glanced round the table and rose, saying: "don't you think we've had polemics enough for one little dinner, dad? there's a lovely moon, so we'll have our coffee on the verandah, and you and mr van huysman can settle the affairs of the universe comfortably over your pipes. give lord leighton and mr merrill something to smoke, and we will join you when we have got some wraps." when they got back from nitocris's rooms mrs van huysman elected to take her coffee in a big, deep-seated armchair by the drawing-room window. she said that she had felt the sun a little, and might possibly indulge in forty winks--which she did within a few minutes of getting comfortably arranged in it. then nitocris took brenda by the arm and walked her half-way down the lawn. "i want to take possession of lord leighton for about half an hour, dear, if you don't mind. i've got something very serious to say to him. dad, with the characteristic cowardice of his sex, has left it to me to say. it's--well, it's about a mummy: a female mummy, or, at least, i suppose i ought to say a mummy that was once a female--about five thousand years ago." "my dear niti----" "no, no, don't interrupt me, for goodness' sake. it's too serious. it is really. we've had something like a tragedy here in the last few days, and things seem to have been, as you would say, a good deal mixed up ever since. i don't understand it a bit; but they have been." "but, my dear niti, what on earth can you have to say to lord leighton about a--a female mummy? what possible interest can a five-thousand-year-old corpse have for him?" "don't, brenda, don't--at least not just now! wait till i've told you, and then you'll see," said nitocris, pressing her arm closer to her side. "lord leighton is, as i think you know, an enthusiastic student of egyptian antiquities. he was also, or thought he was, in love with my unworthy self. he found this mummy in a royal tomb at memphis. he--well, i suppose, stole it--of course under the usual licence from the khedive--and sent it home to dad. now comes the mystery. that was the mummy of nitocris, the daughter of the great rameses, and it was the dead image of my living self." "oh, but, niti--what do you mean?" "i don't know, brenda. i wish i did. all i do know is that it was stolen that very night out of dad's study in the old wing, and that i've got to tell lord leighton all about it. i'm sure dad could have told him much better, only somehow he seems afraid." "oh, is that all--just the stealing of what was perhaps a very valuable relic? they try to steal much fresher corpses than that in the states if there are dollars in the business." "don't be brutal, brenda! i know you don't mean it, and it isn't like you. now, listen. before he went to egypt this time lord leighton asked me to marry him. i said 'no,' and for two reasons. i knew that he liked me very much--he always has done--and poor dad took his liking for love and encouraged him: but i'm a woman and, i know, that liking isn't love--and then i love some one else. and now he, i mean lord leighton--loves some one else. turn your face to the moon. yes, you know who the some one else is. i'm so glad, for i do think you----" "niti, you're talking arrant nonsense for an educated young woman. i've only known his lordship for a day, and how can you----" "because female bachelors of science and graduates of vassar, whatever stupid people may say, have hearts _as_ well as intellects, dear, and so they know. i seem to have had a kind of sixth sense given to me to-day, and, when you met lord leighton, i saw it, and i believe you _felt_ it. i saw your eyes brighten and your face flush--only a little, but it did, and so did his. you know my belief in the doctrine. you may have been lovers--perhaps wedded lovers--once upon a time, as they say in the fairy tales." "how awful--no, i mean how wonderful--if it could only be true! and now, as you've told me all this, you might as well tell me who your some one else is." "really, brenda, i thought you had more perception. he's there on the verandah smoking with your lord leighton." "oh! then, of course, you're going to marry him?" "i'm sorry to say dad doesn't want me to. with all his genius and learning he is a perfect child in that sort of thing. he has no idea of natural selection. now listen again, brenda.. when i had to tell mark that dad wouldn't let me marry him, he picked me up out of a chair in the verandah there, where your father and mine are sitting, and kissed me three times." "and i'll gamble ten cents that you kissed him back. that's natural selection, if i know anything about it. niti, if that man--and he is a man--doesn't get killed in a fight, he'll marry you in spite of all the misguided scientific dads on earth. don't you worry. you've made me just happy. i'm not emotional that way, but i'd like to kiss you if the moon wasn't so bright. suppose we go back and try to assist the kindly fates a little bit?" the fates which, in some dimly-perceived fashion, seem to shape our little successive phases of existence, were certainly in a kindly mood that "lovely night in june." the two professors had retired to franklin marmion's sanctum for the discussion of whisky and soda and the possibilities of physical manifestations of the occult. mrs van huysman was frankly and comfortably sleeping in the deep, amply-cushioned armchair, and the two young men were almost as frankly pining for sweeter companionship than their own. but the pairing off, which was so deftly managed by nitocris, did not at first appear entirely satisfactory to them, yet a very few minutes' conversation sufficed to convince them of the wisdom of the arrangement. brenda, with all the delicate tact which makes every highly-trained woman a skilled diplomatist, managed, not only to completely charm merrill as a man who is in love with another woman likes to be charmed, but also to make him understand even more clearly than he had done how greatly the fates had blessed him by giving him the love of such a girl as nitocris; and then, by a few very deftly conveyed suggestions, she further gave him to understand that, so far as lord leighton had ever been an unconscious obstacle in his path, he was even now engaged in removing himself. wherefore commander merrill enjoyed his smoke and stroll under the beeches a good deal more than he had anticipated. more difficultly ambiguous, certainly, was the position in which lord leighton found himself with nitocris, but here also her tact and perfect candour helped his own innate chivalry to accomplish all that was desirable with the slightest possible friction. she began by telling him, as she had told brenda, of the mysterious stealing of the mummy, and made a sort of apology for her father having deputed the telling of it to her--of course, in perfect innocence of the real reason for his doing so. he deplored with her the loss of what they both believed to be a priceless relic of the golden age of egypt, but he passed it over lightly, chiefly for the reason that there was something in his mind just now that was much more serious than even the loss of the mummy of her long-dead namesake. there had been a little silence between them after he had made his condolences, and then he said, with a hesitation which told quite plainly what was coming: "miss marmion, i have a rather awkward confession to make to you--i have got to tell you, in fact, i think it is my duty to--well, honestly i really don't quite know how to put it properly, but--but--er, something has happened to me to-day that is a good deal more important to me, at least, than the disappearance of half a dozen royal mummies." "indeed?" said nitocris, with a demurely perfect assumption of ignorance. "a good many things seem somehow to have happened to-day. it is something connected with that wonderful adept's marvels, perhaps? they have certainly astonished most of us, i think." "no," he replied, still a trifle hesitatingly, "it is nothing connected with him or his miracles, as far as i know, except that there was certainly something decidedly queer about the man and the impression he made upon one. of course i have seen something like the same thing in egypt and the farther east; but he seemed quite what i might call uncanny. still, that's not the point, although possibly it may have had something to do with it." he hesitated again. she looked at him with a sideway glance, and said, almost in a whisper: "yes?" the moonlight was bright enough for him to see the notes of interrogation in her eyes, and he took the plunge. "miss marmion, i once told you that i loved you and wanted you for my wife, and--and the real fact is that it--i mean i know now that it wasn't true--and so i thought i ought to tell you. you know, of course, that the professor----" "my dear lord leighton," she answered, with an air of quite superior wisdom, "my learned father is a very clever man in his own subjects: but i think i know a great deal more about this particular one than he does. you are quite right. you did not love me. you liked me very much, i have no doubt----" "yes, and so i do still, and always shall do, but----" "but your liking was great enough to make you mistake it for love. women's instincts are quicker and keener in these relations than men's are, and i saw that you did not love me as a real woman has to be loved, and, to be quite frank with you, some one else did. i like you very much, lord leighton, and i am going to go on liking you; but, you see, i could not give you what i had already given away. now, you have told me so much that you ought to tell me a little more. how did your sudden enlightenment on that interesting subject come about?" he was infinitely relieved by the absolutely frank and friendly way in which she had treated the whole subject, and so he had courage to reply with a laugh: "in short, miss marmion, you ask me who the other girl is. well, you certainly have a right to know, because, curiously enough, i might never have got to know her but for you----" "is it brenda?" the question was whispered, and he replied in a whisper: "yes; do you think i have any chance?" a cohort of wild cats would not have torn brenda's secret out of her friend's soul, and so she replied in a tone that was almost judicious in its evenness: "that, my friend, is a question that you can only get answered by asking another--and you must ask her, not me." "oh yes, of course i must," he said rather limply. "but she's so splendid--so beautiful, so exquisite--and--i do wish she wasn't so very rich. you see, even if i had the great good fortune to--to get her to marry me, i have lots for both; and, you know, the moment an englishman with a title gets engaged to an american millionairess everybody says that he is simply dollar-hunting." "that, unfortunately, is usually too well justified by the facts," she replied seriously. "but only the most idiotic and ignorant of gossips could possibly say that of you. every one who is any one knows that the kyneston coronet does not want re-gilding." and then she went on, glancing sideways at him again: "still, as you know perfectly well, in matters of this kind, these very delicate diplomatic considerations, i do not care whether it is a question of fifty shillings a week or fifty thousand a year. you once paid me the very great compliment of offering me rank, position, and almost everything that a girl, from the merely material point of view could ask for. i refused, because i felt certain that you and i did not love each other--however much we may have liked and respected each other--as a man and woman ought to do, unless they become guilty of a great sin against each other. to put it in a very hackneyed way, we were not each other's affinities. i had already found mine--and i think, and hope, that you have found yours--and i wish you all the good fortune that you may, and, perhaps, can win." "if is very, very good of you, miss marmion; but do you think you could--well, help me a little? i know i don't deserve it." "no, sir, you do not," she laughed softly, because the other two were coming back on to the lawn. "i wonder that you have--i have half a mind to say the impudence--to ask such a thing. you have confessed your fickleness in an almost shameless way; and now you ask me to help you with the other girl! no, my lord: if i know anything of brenda van huysman's nature, there is no one who can help you except yourself. of course she might----" "do you really think she might--i mean in that way?" "who am i that i should know the secrets of another woman's soul?" she replied, with unhesitating prevarication. "there she is. go and ask her, and take my best wishes with you. now i am going to talk to _my_ affinity for a few minutes." "so it was merrill, after all!" he said to himself, as they joined the others. "well, i'm glad. he's a splendid fellow; and she--of course, she's worth the love of the best man on earth--and i'm afraid that's not--anyhow, i'll have miss brenda's opinion on the subject before i go home to-night." it now need hardly be added that the said opinion was not only entirely satisfactory, but also very sweetly expressed. chapter xiii over the tea and the toast the next morning there were, at least, three eventful breakfasts "partaken of," as it was once the fashion to say; one at "the wilderness," one at the savoy, and one at the kyneston town house in prince's gate. when professor marmion came down he was a little late, for he had done a long night's work, finishing his lecture-notes to his own satisfaction, or, at least, as nearly as he could get there. like all good workers, he was never quite satisfied with what he did. when the maid had closed the door of the breakfast-room, he looked across the table at his daughter with a twinkle in his eyes, and said: "niti, before lord leighton left last night he had a talk with me, and you were partly the subject of it." "and who might have been the other part of the subject, dad?" she asked, with excellently simulated composure. "that, niti," he replied slowly, "i expect you know quite as well as i do. i am inclined to consider myself the victim of something very like a conspiracy." "i think you are quite right, dad," she replied, with perfect calmness. "but the chief conspirators were the fates themselves. we others only did as we had to do. when you have solved that problem of n to the fourth, i think you will see that we could really have done nothing else, because, if you once crossed the border-line--the horizon which professor cayley spoke of, i mean--you ought to be on speaking terms with them." before he replied to this somewhat searching remark, the man who _had_ crossed the horizon emptied his coffee cup, and set it down in the saucer with a perceptible rattle. then he said more slowly than before: "my dear niti, there are other mysteries than n to the fourth. i only wish now to confess frankly to you that i have tried to solve one of them, perhaps the greatest of all, and ignominiously failed. i learnt a great deal last night from a young man to whom i thought i could have taught anything, and i got up this morning in a distinctly chastened frame of mind; and so, to make a long story short, if you like to drive into town and bring commander merrill back to lunch, i shall be very pleased to have a chat with him afterwards." the next moment nitocris was on the other side of the table, with her arm round her father's shoulders. she kissed him, and whispered: "you dearest of dears! if i could have loved you any more, i would now, but i can't. i won't drive into town, because brenda's coming out with lord leighton in her new motor to fetch me; at least, she will, if other papas have been as delightful as you have been." he put his hand up and stroked her cheek with a gesture that was older than she was, and said with a smile which meant more than she could comprehend: "ah! so it _was_ a conspiracy, after all! well, dear, i hope that, for all your sakes, it will turn out a successful one." about the same time brenda was saying to her parents: "poppa and mammy, i've got some news to tell you, and i've slept on it, so as to make quite sure about the telling." "and what might that be, brenda?" asked her mother, looking up a trifle anxiously. "nothing very serious, i hope." "anything connected with the marmions?" asked her father, in a voice that sounded as though it had come from somewhere far away. he had the _times_ propped up against the sugar basin on his left hand, and he had just read the announcement of franklin marmion's lecture for the following evening, and this was quite a serious matter for him. "it's connected with them in this way," said brenda, leaning her elbows on the table. "you and uncle have wanted a coronet in the family, and you know that i've refused three, because the men who wore them weren't fit to respect, to say nothing about loving. well, i've just discovered that i do love a man who has one coronet now, and will have another some day, unless something unexpected happens to him; but mind, it's the man i love and want to marry, and i'd want to do it just the same if he was still the same man he is, and hadn't either a coronet or a dollar to his name." "that's like you, brenda, and it sounds good," said her father, tearing his attention away from the alluring title of franklin marmion's lecture. "now, who is it?" "if it was only that nice young man, lord leighton!" said mrs van huysman, in a voice that sounded like an appeal against the final judgment of human fate, "but, of course, he's----" "no, mammy, that's just what he's _not_ going to do," exclaimed brenda, sitting up and clasping her hands behind her neck. "nitocris marmion is in love with some one else, and lord leighton is in love with me--at least he said so last night at 'the wilderness,' and i don't suppose he'd have said it if he hadn't meant it--and i told him to go and ask his papa: and now i'm going to ask my poppa and mammy if i may be lady leighton soon, and, perhaps, some day countess of kyneston. you see, lord leighton is just a viscount now----" "what, just a viscount!" exclaimed mrs van huysman, getting up from her chair and putting a plump arm round her neck. "just a viscount--and heir to one of the oldest peerages in england! oh, brenda, is it really true?" "i guess brenda wouldn't say it if it wasn't, and that's about all there is to it," said her father, putting his long arm out over the table. "i congratulate you, my girl. mammy and i may have been a bit troubled over some of those other refusals of yours, but you seem to have known best, after all: and i reckon your uncle ephraim'll think the same. lord leighton's a man right through. he wouldn't have done what he has done if he hadn't been. shake, child, and----" brenda "shook," and then, without another word, she got up and hurried out of the room. "the girl's right!" said professor van huysman, as the door closed behind her; "and if i'm not a fool entirely, she's found the right man." "hoskins, you can leave that to a well-brought-up girl like brenda all the time. she _is_ right, and all we've got to hope for now is that the earl will be right too," said his wife somewhat anxiously. "he's just got to see our girl and then he will be, unless he's a natural born idiot, which, of course, he couldn't be," replied brenda's father in a tone of absolute conviction. "now, i wonder what that man marmion's going to let loose on us to-morrow night?" "good morning, sir," said lord leighton, as his father came into the breakfast-room at about the same time that brenda left the other room in the savoy. "good morning, lester," replied the earl of kyneston, as father and son shook hands in the old courtly fashion which, within the last half century, has gone out of vogue save among those who have ancestors whose record is a credit to their descendants. "you are looking very well and fit--and there is something else. what is it? had you a very pleasant evening yesterday at 'the wilderness'? has miss marmion revoked her decision after all?" "no, sir," said his son, looking at him with brightening eyes; "but she convinced me that i had thought myself in love with the wrong girl--and the other girl was on the lawn at the same time, talking with the man that miss marmion was, and is in love with, and will be always, i think." "and the other young lady, lester--because, of course, she is a lady, i mean in our sense of the word, much misunderstood as it is in these days?" "she is brenda van huysman, sir." "oh, the professor's daughter.--i mean the other professor's daughter. a very good family. her father is a distinguished man, and, if i remember rightly, a van huysman was one of the first colonisers of new england about four hundred years ago. it is the same family, i suppose?" "yes, sir; i can vouch for that." nitocris had given him the whole history of the family, and so he was sure of his facts. "lester, i congratulate you," replied his father, taking his arm, as they were accustomed to. "while you have been away digging among those egyptian tombs and temples, this girl has refused at least three coronets, and one had strawberry leaves on it; so she loves you for yourself. that is good, other things being equal, as i think they will be in this case. now, we will go to breakfast, and you shall tell me the whole story. i have not heard a real love story for a good many years." chapter xiv "supposed impossibilities" it was only to be expected that the announcement of a lecture with such an alluring title by such a distinguished scholar and scientist as professor franklin marmion should fill the theatre of the royal society, as the reporters said tritely but truly, "to its utmost capacity." the mere words, "an examination of some supposed mathematical impossibilities," were just so many bomb-shells tossed into the middle of the scientific arena. the circle-squarers, the triangle-trisectors, the cube-doublers, the flat-worlders, and all the other would-be workers of miracles plainly impossible in a world of three dimensions jumped--not incorrectly--to the conclusion that their favourite impossibility would be selected for examination, and, perhaps--blissful thought!--demonstration by one of the foremost thinkers of the day, to the lasting confusion of the scoffers. learned pundits of the old school, who were firmly convinced that mathematics had long ago said their last word, and that to talk about "supposed impossibilities" was blasphemy of the rankest sort, came with note-books and a grim determination to explode franklin marmion's heresies for good and all. dreamers of fourth dimensional dreams came hoping against hope, for the professor was known to be something of a dreamer himself; and added to all these there assembled a distinguished company of ladies and gentlemen who looked upon the lecture as a "function" which their social positions made it necessary for them to patronise. the reader's personal friends and acquaintances, including prince oscarovitch and phadrig, were naturally among the most anxiously interested of the professor's audience. it is almost needless to say that hoskins van huysman had donned all his panoply of scientific war, and had armed himself with what he believed his keenest weapons; and that professor hartley looked with amused confidence to a veritable battle royal of wits when the lecture was over and the discussion began. the prince and phadrig were keenly anticipative, and the latter not a little nervous. a verbatim report of that famous lecture would, of course, be out of place in these pages. if professor marmion's words of wonder are not already written in the archives of the royal society, no doubt they will be in the fullness of time when the minds of men shall have become prepared to receive them. here we are mainly concerned with the results which they produced upon his audience. certain portions may, however, be properly reproduced here. when the decorous murmur of applause which greeted the president's closing sentences had died away, and franklin marmion went to the reading-desk and unfolded his notes, there was a tense silence of anticipation, and hundreds of pairs of eyes, which had some of the keenest brains in europe behind them, were converged upon his spare, erect figure and his refined, clear-cut, somewhat sternly-moulded face. "mr president, my lords, ladies, and gentlemen," he began, in his quiet, but far-reaching tones. "the somewhat peculiar title which i have chosen for my lecture was not, i hope i need scarcely say, selected with a view of arousing any but that intelligent curiosity which is always characteristic of such a distinguished audience as that which i have the honour of addressing to-night. i chose it after somewhat anxious consideration, because i am aware that the bulk of opinion in the world of science strongly insists upon the finality of the axioms of mathematics, and therefore it was with no little hesitancy that i approached such a subject as this. i am well aware that, in the estimation of most of my learned _confrères_ and fellow-seekers after scientific truth, to suggest those axioms may not embody final and universal truth is, if i may put it so, to lay sacrilegious hands on the ark of the scientific covenant." a low murmur, prelude of the coming storm, ran through the theatre, and professor van huysman permitted himself to snort distinctively, for which he was very promptly, though quietly, called to order by his daughter, who was sitting in front of the platform between him and lord leighton. franklin marmion paused for a moment and smiled ever so faintly. nitocris looked round at the now eager audience a trifle anxiously, for she had a fairly clear idea of the trouble that might possibly be ahead. her father went on as quietly as before: "of course, every one here is aware that the great napoleon once said that the word 'impossible' was not french. i need not remind such an audience as this that more than one distinguished student and investigator has suggested that it also may not be scientific." the murmur broke out again, and hoskins van huysman blew his nose somewhat aggressively. his scientific bile was beginning to rise. he disapproved very strongly of the tone which his rival had begun. its quiet confidence was somewhat ominous. the lecturer continued without this time noticing the interruption, and proceeded to give a lengthy and learned but singularly lucid _resumé_ of the more recent progress in the higher mathematics and the deeply interesting speculations to which it had given rise. this, with certain demonstrations which he made on the great black-board beside him, occupied nearly an hour. when he had finished there was another murmur, which this time was wholly of applause, for this part of the lecture had not only been masterly but entirely orthodox. then silence fell again, the silence of expectant waiting, for every one felt that the "examination" was coming now. he began again in a slightly altered voice. "what i have just been saying was necessary to my subject as far as it went, but for all that it was chiefly introductory to what i am now going to bring to your notice. but this is a matter rather for illustration and discussion than for mere disquisition. therefore, to save your time as much as possible, i will proceed at once to the illustration, and then we will have the discussion." professor van huysman snorted again, even as a war-horse that snuffs the fray. this time franklin marmion seemed to recognise the implied challenge, for he looked round the crowded theatre with a curious smile, which seemed to say: "yes, gentlemen, i see that some of you are getting ready for a tussle. i am in hopes of being able to oblige you." "now," he continued, "it is generally conceded that an ounce of practice is worth a good many pounds of precept, so i will get to the practice. i need hardly remind you that ever since mathematics became an exact science, three problems have been recognised as impossible of solution--trisecting the triangle, squaring the circle, and doubling the cube. i have now the pleasure of announcing that i have had the great good fortune to discover certain formulæ which, so far, at least, as i can see, make the solution of those problems not only possible, but comparatively easy--to those who know how to use them." as he said this, franklin marmion looked directly at hoskins van huysman. he was the challenger now, and there was a glint in his eyes and a smile on his lips which showed that he meant business. the american writhed, and had it not been for brenda's gently but firmly restraining hand, he might have jumped to his feet and precipitated matters in a somewhat embarrassing fashion. the chairman looked up at the lecturer with elevated eyelids which had a note of interrogation under each of them, and then there came that sound of shifting in seats and breathing in many low keys which denotes that an audience has been wound up to a very tense pitch of expectation. if a smaller man had said such words to such hearers some one would have laughed, and then would have burst forth a storm of derision. but the keenest critic had never found franklin marmion wrong yet, and he had far too great a reputation to permit himself to say in such a place that which he did not seriously mean. so the hum died down as he went to the black-board, and nitocris looked at merrill with something like fear in her eyes. "if he does that," whispered phadrig to the prince in russian, "the story that pent-ah and neb-anat told will be true--which the high gods forbid!" "as the trisection of the triangle is, perhaps, the simplest of the three problems," said the lecturer, with almost judicial calmness, "we will, if you please, begin with that. i hope that gentlemen who have brought note-books with them will be kind enough to follow my calculations and check any error that i may make." but a good threescore note-books, pencils, and stylographic pens were out already, and hundreds of eyes were eagerly fastening their gaze on the black-board, their owners desperately anxious to detect the first slip in the demonstration. the demonstrator drew an isosceles triangle rapidly, and without speaking filled the remainder of the board with formulæ. the almost breathless silence was broken only by the click of the chalk on the board and the scratching of pencils and pens on paper. when he had finished he ran through the calculations aloud, and said in the most commonplace voice: "now, gentlemen, if, as i hope, you have found my working correct, i may draw the two lines which will trisect the triangle." he drew them, and then, as calmly as though he had done nothing more than cross the much-trodden _pons asinorum_, he told two attendants to take the board down and put it in front of the platform; then, while they were lifting another on to the easel, he said: "as those who have followed me would no doubt like a little time to revise the figures, i will go on with the next problem, which will be our old friend, or enemy, the squaring of the circle." the second board was filled with diagrams and formulæ as rapidly as the first. "there is the demonstration, gentlemen," he said, as the attendants placed it beside the other in full view of everybody. "now, as time is shortening, i will get on with the third problem." the chalk began to click again, and the pens and pencils scratched on to the accompaniment of murmurs and whispers and occasional grunts and snorts of incredulity. by a master-stroke of strategy franklin marmion had, in placing the three demonstrations of the long-supposed impossible before them in quick succession, kept the learned, but now utterly bewildered mathematicians so busy that they literally had not time to begin "the trouble" which brenda was now actually dreading. her father's face, bent down over his note-book, was getting more terrible to look upon every moment. the mere fact that he had not uttered a sound since the demonstrations had begun was sufficiently ominous, for it meant that he was puzzled--perhaps even beaten--and if that was so, she dreaded to even imagine what might happen. on the other hand, nitocris felt her spirits rising as she looked round and saw the many learned heads bending and shaking over the note-books, each owner of them working at high pressure to win the honour of first finding the error which all firmly believed must exist, and which none of them could detect. when he had finished his third demonstration, franklin marmion, without interrupting the hard thinking that was going on, took a chair by the side of the president, poured out a glass of water, and waited for results. "marmion, what is this white magic that you have been springing upon us?" whispered the presiding genius of the learned assembly, looking up from several sheets of paper which he had been rapidly covering with formulæ. "these things are impossible, you know--unless, of course, you have got a good deal farther than any of us. and yet the calculations are correct as far as i can follow them, and no one else seems to have hit on any error yet. i must confess, though, that these progressives of yours are too deep for me. i can follow them, and yet i can't. at a certain point they seem to elude me, and yet the calculations are rigidly right. it's almost enough to make one think you had done what cayley once told us in this room some one might do some day." "my lord," replied franklin marmion, almost inaudibly, "i began my address by remarking, as you will remember, that perhaps, after all, the word 'impossible' might not be scientific." their eyes met, and the president, than whose there was no greater name in the higher realm of learning, saw something in marmion's which sent a little chill through him, and that something told him that he was in the presence of a superior being. "dear me!" he murmured, looking down at his papers again, "the age of miracles is not past, after all--in fact, it is only just beginning." "it is re-beginning, my lord--for us," came the reply, in a voice which seemed to come from very far away. the president did not reply. as a matter of fact, he had no reply ready, and he had something else to do. he rose, and said in a somewhat constrained voice: "ladies and gentlemen, professor marmion has shown us some very strange demonstrations which have certainly amply justified the title which he selected. a good many gentlemen, and some ladies as well, i am glad to see, have followed his calculations very carefully. i have done the same myself, but i am bound to confess that i have not been able to find any error. i think i shall be right in saying that no one will be more pleased than the learned and--er--gifted lecturer to hear that some one else has been able to do so." franklin marmion bowed his assent, and a faint smile flickered across his clean-shaven lips. the next instant professor van huysman was on his legs, note-book in one hand and stylo in the other. all the fresh colour had gone out of his face; his eyes were burning, and his lips were twitching with uncontrollable excitement. "my lord," he began, in a voice that even brenda hardly recognised, "like yourself, i have been unable to find any actual error in the lecturer's demonstrations of which i will take permission to call the possibility of the impossible; in other words, that a contradiction in terms can be true and false at one and the same time. that, my lord, and ladies, and gentlemen," he went on, raising his voice almost to a shout, "is still, and, i hope, in the interests of true science, and not adroit jugglery with figures and formulæ, will ever remain, another impossibility. professor marmion has apparently trisected the triangle, squared the circle, and doubled the cube. it may be that he has persuaded some present that he really has done so; but, again, in the interests of science, i desire to protest against the way in which these demonstrations have been sprung upon us. calculations which he has doubtless taken months to elaborate, he has asked us to test in a few minutes. for myself, i decline to accept them as true, and i hope that others will do the same until we have had time to satisfy ourselves that the hitherto impossible has been made possible." he sat down, breathing hard and white with anger and excitement, and then the trouble began. the trisectors, the circle-squarers, and the cube-doublers, had seen their long-flouted theories proved to demonstration by one of the most learned and responsible men of science in the world, and one of their most sarcastic and hitherto successful flouters had been compelled to confess that he could find no flaw in the calculations of this mathematical daniel so unexpectedly come to judgment. they did not understand his proofs, but that was no reason why they should reject them, and so they rose as one man in support of their champion to demand that professor van huysman should withdraw his imputations of jugglery. he sat still, and shook his head. he was too disgusted and bewildered to do or say anything more until he had made a searching analysis of these diabolical formulæ. but there were others who wanted to have their say in defence of scientific orthodoxy, and they had it--and the rest was a chaos of intellectual conflict until, at the end of nearly an hour, the president, who now saw with clearer eyes than any of the disputants, rose and put an end to the discussion by remarking that they had not the whole night before them, and that all that professor marmion had said and done would be published in the scientific papers; further, that such a controversy would perhaps be more profitably conducted in print than by word of mouth. such a course would give every one ample leisure to work out the problems in the light of the new demonstrations, and also give a much better prospect of reaching a logical, and therefore just, conclusion than a discussion in which haste, and possibly pre-conceived opinions, from the influence of which no human being was really free, could possibly promise. this, of course, put an end to the matter for the time being, and, after the usual votes of thanks and acknowledgments, the distinguished company dispersed--amused, mystified, gratified, bewildered, and exasperated: but, saving only four of its members, with no idea of the effect which that evening's proceedings were destined to have upon the fate of europe, perhaps of the whole human race. chapter xv the advancement of nitocris--the resolve of oscarovitch franklin marmion and hoskins van huysman parted that evening in what may be described as a state of armed neutrality, but with more cordiality than brenda, at any rate, had hoped for. still, they were both gentlemen, and, moreover, the american scientist was honestly looking forward to the discovery of some fatal flaw in the reasoning of his english rival which should leave the final triumph with him--and such a triumph would be not only final but crushing. brenda whirled her father and lord leighton--who, of course, sat beside her in front as she drove--off to supper; merrill went to his club to ruminate happily for an hour; and the hero of the evening and his daughter drove home almost in silence, and it was a silence for which there was a very sufficient reason. such people do not talk about trivialities when they are thinking about much more serious concerns. after supper nitocris followed her father into the study, as he quite expected her to do, and when she had shut the door, she faced him and said in a voice that was not quite her own: "dad, there seems to me to be only one explanation of what you did to-night. i know enough mathematics to see that it is the only one. if you tell me that i am wrong, of course i shall believe you--and then i shall ask you how else you did it." as she spoke he felt that his soul was asking itself a momentous question. she had guessed--or did she already know?--the great secret. and, if either, was she herself near enough to the dividing line between the two worlds for him to tell her the truth? he sat down in the chair before his writing-table and stared hard at his plotting-pad for a few moments. then he looked up at her and saw the answer. "niti," he said slowly, and with a little halt between the words, "you have asked me a question which i think some one else must answer, if it can be answered at all. look behind you!" she turned swiftly, and there, almost beside her, stood--not the mummy, but the queen, her living other-self, royal-robed and crowned as she had been in the dim past, which was now again the present. would she flinch or faint, or cry out with fear? if her unconscious feet had not advanced very near to the border she would certainly do one or the other. indeed, it was with an inward quaking of fear for her that her father had told her to turn. it might well have meant the difference between sanity and insanity, knowing what she already did of the mummy and its mysterious disappearance. but no: there before his eyes was worked again the miracle which had already been worked in his own case, though now it was, if possible, even more marvellous than it had been before. as nitocris turned she uttered a low cry of wonder and recognition, and held out both hands to her other twin-self. the queen took them, and said in the ancient tongue, which now she understood again after many centuries: "welcome, thou who wast once myself, into this larger life to which the perfect knowledge hath led thee: where time is not, and that which was, and is, and shall be are the same! thou hast yet many days, as men call them, to live in that limited life known as mortal, and so the mortal lot, with its perils and sorrows and joys, shall yet be thine: yet, although, if the high gods will it so, that life shall end and begin and end again many times, thou hast already won through the shadows which bound that little life into the light of the day which knows not dawn nor noon nor night. i who was, and thou who art, are one again!" then came silence. franklin marmion saw the two kindred shapes merge into each other. he closed his eyes for a moment, as he thought, and when he opened them again he was alone. he looked at the clock, and saw that it was after four. "dear me!" he said, getting up with a shake of his shoulders, "i must have fallen asleep. where's niti? why, of course, she has been in bed for hours, and it's about time that i got there, too." when they met before breakfast nitocris said to him: "i had a very strange experience last night, dad. i either saw, or dreamt i saw, the mummy alive again, robed and crowned like a queen of ancient egypt; and then we seemed to become the same person, and i remembered that i had been queen nitocris of egypt once. then i found myself alone--so very much alone--in a new world which was still like this one, only there wasn't any time. i had another sense which made me able to see past, present, and future all at once, and here and there, and up and down, and something else were all the same, and yet it did not seem in the slightest strange to me, so i suppose it was a dream." "it was no dream, niti," said her father, looking at her with grave eyes. "last night, as we have to say in the state of three dimensions, you had your first glimpse of the state of four. i saw what you did." "ah!" she replied, without any sign of astonishment. "then that is why i was able to understand your demonstrations last night when all the rest were puzzled. i didn't think i quite did then, however, but i see now that i did. and so i and her majesty are really one and the same! it ought to seem very wonderful, but somehow it doesn't in the slightest." "i don't think that anything will seem wonderful to you now, niti," was the quiet response. "but as we are at present on the lower plane of existence, it will be necessary for us to go to breakfast." * * * * * oscarovitch and phadrig went back after the lecture to the prince's flat in royal court mansions, which, as a bachelor and a bird of passage, he found much more convenient in many ways than a house. he ordered his russian servant to make coffee for his guest, and mixed a stiff brandy-and-soda for himself. he wanted it, for the experiences of the evening had shaken even his nerves not a little. he was essentially a man of power, both physically and mentally, of boundless ambitions and iron will, vast knowledge of the world, as he knew it, and of very high intellectual attainments; but the cast of his mind was absolutely material, and therefore he both hated and feared anything which appeared to transcend the material plane to which his mental vision was at present entirely confined. when the servant had left the room after bringing the coffee, he gave phadrig a cigar, lit one himself, and said through the first puffs of smoke: "phadrig, you know, or pretend to know, more about these things than i do, or want to do: but, still, just now i want you to tell me honestly if you believe that professor marmion did really solve those problems to-night. i ask you because i admit that the solutions went beyond the range of my mathematics." "highness," replied the egyptian, speaking slowly and almost reverently, "he did. there is not, i think, another man on earth now who could have done so; but for those who had eyes to see there could be no doubt, and you will find that, though he has many rivals and will have countless critics, not one will be able either to explain his solutions or find a flaw in them." "you did a few things that i should not have thought possible the other day, which you claimed to be really miracles. now, if they were, i suppose you can explain professor marmion's?" "there are no miracles, highness: only the results of higher knowledge than that which they who see them possess. that is why what i did seemed like miracles to those who watched. but this franklin marmion, as he is called in this life, has attained to a higher knowledge than mine, wherefore i am able only to understand imperfectly, but not myself to do, that which he does. yet, as the high gods live, he did this thing; and to do it he must have passed to the higher life through the gate of the perfect knowledge." "in other words," said the prince, after a big gulp of his brandy-and-soda, "that he has solved that infernal problem of the fourth dimension you have had so much to say about. now, granted that he has done so, what does it amount to as regards our world--the world of practical thought and real action, i mean?" "all thought is practical, highness," replied phadrig, "since there can be no action which is intelligent without thought. wherefore, the higher the thought the more potent the action, and so he who has the perfect knowledge has also the perfect power." "then, do you mean to tell me seriously--and i can hardly think that you would trifle with me--that this man is now practically omnipotent, as far as we lower beings, as you seem to call us, are concerned?" "only the high gods are omnipotent, your excellency; but, if i have seen rightly, he is as a god to us of the lower life, and therefore i would pray you again to utterly relinquish your lately and, as i have dared for your sake to say, rashly-formed designs to make the queen who was, and his daughter that is, the sharer of your future throne. is not the princess hermia noble and fair enough?" "no, by all your gods, no!" exclaimed the prince passionately. "since i have seen the woman who, as you say, was once queen of egypt, there is, and shall be, no other consort for me. and who are you to advise me thus? are you still the same man who made the condition that, if you used your arts, whatever they may be, to place her in my power, she should be, not only my empress, but also queen of egypt? what has changed you? what has made you faithless to the promise that you gave me in exchange for mine? if you have forgotten that, do not also forget that we russians have a short way with traitors." "what has changed me, highness," replied phadrig, ignoring the threat, "is the knowledge that i have gained to-night. though you believe me or not, the debt which i owe you makes it my duty to warn you. the matter stands thus: nitocris, the daughter of franklin marmion, was the queen. for all i know, she also may have attained to the higher life, and is therefore the queen still, though that is a mystery beyond my comprehension; but i do know now that her father has attained to it, and that for this reason, unless you put this new-found love out of your heart, you will bring yourself within the sphere of this man's power--a power mighty enough to wreck every scheme you have ever shaped, and to doom you to a fate more horrible than mortal brain could conceive. you would be as a man who strove against a god." "you may believe what you are saying, phadrig, and i dare say you do," exclaimed the prince again. "i don't, because i can't; but even if i did, i would claim your promise. i love this nitocris, queen or woman, and neither man nor god shall keep her from me, willing or unwilling. as for the princess hermia--well, her husband is not dead yet." "better he dead and his widow your wife, as was planned, highness, than that you should dare the power of one who has attained to the perfect knowledge," said the egyptian, with all the earnestness of absolute conviction. "but my duty is done. i have warned you of that which you cannot see for yourself. i have done it to my own sorrow and the destroying of my own dream; but my promise is given, and i will keep it, even to a fate that may be worse than death." the prince drained his glass and laughed. "well said, my ages-old adept, as you think you are! you shall follow me, for i will go on now even to death, or what there may be worse behind it, if i can only take my beautiful queen with me. yes, i swear i will, by god--if there is one!" so by his ignorant blasphemy oscar oscarovitch, who once was lord of war in egypt, for the love of the same woman, fixed his fate for this life, and for many that were to come after it. chapter xvi the mystery of prince zastrow events now began to move with an almost bewildering rapidity, at least, so far as they affected the immediate temporal concerns of nitocris and her father. for days and weeks a furious storm raged round the famous lecture, and the atmosphere of the scientific world was thick with figures and formulæ, diagrams and disquisitions; but since none of the learned disputators proved himself capable of detecting the slightest flaw in the lecturer's mathematics, it had very little interest for him, and therefore has none for us. in fact, so little did he seem concerned with the tempest he had raised, that a few days later, to the astonishment and chagrin of his baffled critics, he and nitocris bade adieu to their more intimate friends and disappeared on a wandering trip of undetermined destination for change of air and scene and a much-needed holiday for the over-worked professor. at least, that is the reason which nitocris gave to lord leighton and the van huysmans, and the few others to whom she thought it necessary to give any explanation at all. the day before they left, merrill lunched at "the wilderness," took a fitting leave of his lady-love and his prospective father-in-law, and departed to join his ship, slightly mystified, perhaps, by recent happenings, but still believing himself with sufficient reason to be the happiest and most fortunate lieutenant-commander in the british navy. the true reasons for the sudden departure of the now more than ever famous professor and his beautiful daughter from the scene of his latest and most marvellous triumph may be set forth as follows: on the evening of the third day after the lecture franklin marmion was going back by train to wimbledon after a long day at the british museum among the relics of egyptian antiquity--which, as may well be understood, he studied now with an interest of which no other man living could have been capable; and as soon as he was seated in a comfortable corner, and had his pipe going, he opened his _pall mall gazette_, and, as was his wont on such occasions, began with the leading article and read straight along through the special article and the occ. notes, until he came to the news of the day, skipping only the financial news and quotations, which, under his present changed conditions of existence, he dare not trust himself to read lest he might be tempted by the unrighteousness of mammon, a form of idolatry which he had always heartily despised. the first item on the news page was headed in bold type: ~"mysterious disappearance of a ruling german prince. "suspicion of foul play. "important state papers vanish with him.--special.~ "in spite of the most rigorous censorship of the press bureau, it has now become a matter of practical certainty that prince emil rudolf von zastrow, the youthful and very capable ruler of boravia, who, during the last two or three years, has become one of the most brilliant figures in european society, has disappeared under circumstances so strangely mysterious as to suggest some analogy with the tragedy of which the unhappy prince alexander of bulgaria was the central figure. "the facts, so far as they have been ascertained, are briefly as follows:--up to about a fortnight ago, the prince was living in semi-retirement with his consort, the princess hermia, in his picturesque castle of trelitz, which, as every one knows, looks down over the waters of the baltic from a solitary eminence of rock which rises out of the vast forests that cover the rolling plains for leagues on the landward sides. it will be remembered that every year since his accession, the prince has been wont to retire to this famous hunting-ground of his to enjoy at once the pleasures of the chase and the society of his beautiful young consort in peace and solitude after the whirl of the european winter season. as far as is known, the only guests at the castle were the count ulik von kessner, high chamberlain of boravia, who is believed to have been present on business of state, and captain alexis vollmar, of the th caucasus regiment, at present attached to the imperial headquarter staff at st petersburg. captain vollmar, in addition to being a brilliant young officer, is also a scion of two of the wealthiest and most aristocratic families in russia. "it is now fully established that on the evening of the th of this month--that is to say, nearly three weeks ago--the prince and his two guests returned after a long day in the forest, and that the prince retired to rest very shortly before supper. from that day to this he has never been seen, either at home or in society. what makes the disappearance more strangely striking is the fact that the prince, who is colonel of the th pommeranian regiment, did not put in an appearance at the recent review in the kaiserhof when the german emperor held his usual inspection. although it was obvious that his majesty was both puzzled and annoyed by his absence, no official explanation of it has been given, and all information on the subject is rigidly withheld. our own comes from a personal friend, and, as far as it goes, may be absolutely relied upon." for some reason or other, which, after his recent experiences, he thought it would be as well not to try and fathom for the present, these few paragraphs made a strangely persistent impression on him. when he got home he gave his evening papers as usual to his daughter, and at dinner the zastrow mystery was the chief, in fact almost the only, topic of conversation. "yes, it certainly is very extraordinary," said nitocris. "the papers make mysteries enough out of the disappearance, of the most everyday, insignificant persons, who were probably only running away from their debts or their domestic troubles, but for a real prince to utterly vanish like this--that certainly looks like a little more than an ordinary mystery. and i suppose," she went on, after a little interval of silence, "if there really has been foul play--i mean, granted that prince charming, as all the society papers got to call him, has been spirited away for some hidden reason of state or politics and is never intended to see the light of day again, who knows how many secrets may be connected with this affair which might be like matches in a powder magazine? and--oh yes--why, dad, it was this same prince zastrow who has been mentioned by most of the best european papers as the only possible elective tsar of russia if the romanoffs are driven out by the revolution, and the people go back to the old constitution. in fact, some of them went so far as to say that nothing but his selection could prevent a scramble for the fragments of russia which could only end in general conflagration." "yes, of course i do," replied her father. "but what an atrocious shame, if it is so! one of the most popular of the minor princes of europe spirited away, and perhaps either murdered or thrown into some prison or fortress, where he will drag out his days and nights in solitude until he goes mad: a young, bright, promising life ruined, just because he happens to stand in the way of some unscrupulous ambition, or vile political intrigue! "it would be a crime of the very first magnitude, that is to say, of the most villainous description, and all the more horrible because it would be committed by people in the highest of places. really, niti, it is enough to make one think that there ought to be some higher power in the world capable of making these political crimes impossible. the inner history of european politics--i mean, the history that doesn't get into books or newspapers--would, i am certain, prove that quite half the wars of the world, at least during the period of what we are pleased to call civilisation, would have been avoided if some means could have been found of putting an end to the miserable personal ambitions and jealousies which have never anything to do with the welfare of nations, but quite the reverse. i shouldn't wonder if poor prince zastrow has been the victim of something of the sort. it is quite possible that expiring tsardom had a finger in the pie. at any rate, there was a russian officer in the castle the day he disappeared. i should very much like to see the sort of explanation _he_ could give of the affair, if he chose." "but is there not such a power in the world now, dad?" asked nitocris, looking across the table at him with a peculiar smile. he looked back in silence for a moment or two. then he replied slowly: "i see what you mean, niti. of course, i suppose we shall be able to read each other's thoughts now, or even converse without speaking, or when we are out of earshot of each other. the same idea came to me while i was reading the account of this affair in the train; but should i, or, rather we, be doing right in interfering actively in the transactions, political and otherwise, of the world--by which i mean, of course, the state of three dimensions? it would be a terrific responsibility. remember what tremendous powers we are capable of wielding by simply--it is so very simple now--simply transferring our personalities to the higher plane. what if we were to do wrong? we might involve the whole world in some unspeakable catastrophe." "and which do _you_ consider to be the greatest catastrophe, or, perhaps i ought rather to say the greatest evil, that has ever afflicted the world, dad?" she asked, with just a suspicion of a smile in her eyes, though her lips were perfectly serious. "oh, war, of course!" he replied, with his usual emphasis when he got on to that topic. "what was i saying only just now about personal intrigues and ambitions that make war? what have i always thought about war? it is the most appalling curse----" "then, dad," she interrupted in her sweetest tones, "do you think that, supposing we possess these wonderful powers, they could be better used than in preventing any war which may possibly arise out of this disappearance of prince zastrow, and so convincing those who are wicked enough to plunge the human race into blood and misery that henceforth all wars of aggression and ambition will be impossible?" "yes, you are right as usual, niti," he exclaimed, getting up. "now you go and think about it all, and give me your advice in the morning. i want to get away now and work out an intelligible solution of those three problems--if i can make it so--for the benefit of van huysman and the rest of my respected critics. when i've done that, we'll be off to the continent or somewhere----" "and see what we can make of the zastrow mystery, perhaps!" said nitocris. "good-night, dad. i want to do some thinking, too." he went to his study and set to work upon a development of the demonstrations with which he had astounded not only london, but the whole civilised world. but it was no good to-night. the ideas would not come. over and over again he picked up the threads of his arguments, only to drop them again. at last, in something like wondering despair, he muttered: "confound the thing! i almost had it last night, and now i seem as far away from it as ever. what on earth can be the matter with me?" he put his elbows on the table, took his head between his hands, and stared down at the pages covered with angles and circles, chords and curves, and wildernesses of symbols, which were scattered about his desk. as he stared at them they seemed somehow to come together, and the lines and curves arranged themselves in symmetrical shapes, until they developed from diagrams into pictures; and as they did so he found himself forgetting all about the problems, and thinking only of the strange vision which seemed to be unfolding itself among the scattered papers before him. the straight lines became the walls and turrets of one of those two-or three-hundred-year-old german country houses, half castle, half mansion, which every explorer of the bye-paths of the fatherland has seen and admired so often. the curves became long, sweeping stretches of sandy bays, fringed with other curves of breaking rollers; and as the picture grew more distinct, one great circle embraced a whole perfect picture of land and seascape--land dusky and forest-covered in the southward half; and the misty sea, island-dotted, wind-whipped, and foam-flecked, to the northward. the castle stood on the top of a somewhat steeply sloping hill about five hundred feet above the sandy shore, on which the breakers were curling a couple of miles away. the hill was covered with thick-growing firs from the plain to the castle wall, but two broad avenues ran in straight lines, one to seaward, and the other down into the depths of the vast forest, until it opened on to the post road, which afforded the only practicable carriage route to the station of trelitz on the main berlin-königsberg railway. the longer he looked, the more surprisingly distinct the picture became, and, curiously enough, the less his wonder grew. he saw three men on horseback riding at a canter up the avenue from the forest. their costumes showed plainly enough that they had just come back from the chase. as they rode on they seemed to come quite close to him, until he could see their features with perfect distinctness. by the changing expression of their faces he could tell they were laughing and chatting; but, singularly enough, he could not hear a word that they were saying, which, considering the minuteness with which he saw everything, struck him as being distinctly curious. he watched them ride up to the old gothic gateway in the wall which ran round the castle, suiting itself to the irregularities of the hill. they crossed the courtyard and dismounted. the grooms led their horses away, and, as the big double doors opened, they went in, one of them, standing aside for the younger of his companions but entering before the other. in the great hall whose walls were adorned with horns and heads and tusks, and whose floor was almost completely carpeted with skins, they gave their weapons to a couple of footmen; and as they did so he saw the slim and yet stately figure of a woman coming down the winding stair which led into the hall from a broad gallery running round it. as she reached the bottom of the stairway she threw her head back a little, and held out both her hands towards the man who had come in second. as the light of a great swinging lamp above the stairway fell upon her upturned face, he recognised the countess hermia von zastrow, the reigning european beauty whose portrait in the illustrated papers, and in the great photographer's windows, was almost as familiar as that of queen alexandra. the count--for the handsome young hunter who now took her hands could now be no other than the prince of boravia-trelitz--raised her right hand in courtly fashion to his lips. the other two bowed low before her, and then she led the way up the stairs. he saw all this as distinctly as though he had been actually present, and yet none of the party seemed to take the slightest notice of him. but he was getting quite accustomed to miracle-working now, and so he accepted the extraordinary conditions of his visions, or whatever it was, with more interest than astonishment. he followed them up the stairs and along the right hand side of the gallery. the count opened a door of heavy black oak and stood aside for his countess to enter. again the younger of his companions went first, and again he followed; then, as the elder man entered and closed the door, the scene was blotted out as though a sudden darkness had fallen upon his eyes. "dear me!" he said, getting up and rubbing his temples with both hands. "if i hadn't had so many extraordinary experiences since my promotion to the plane of n , i should probably be a little scared as well. but it is really astonishing how soon the trained intellect gets accustomed to anything--even the eccentricities of the fourth dimensional world. well, well! i hope that's not the end of the adventure, i was getting quite interested. i suppose this must be in some obscure way the reason why those paragraphs in the _pall mall_ interested me so strangely." he walked towards the window, pulled the blind aside and looked out. but instead of his own tree-shaded lawn and the wide expanse of moonlit common beyond which he expected to see, he found himself looking, as it were, through a window from the outside into a great, oak-panelled sleeping chamber, lighted by a huge silver lamp hanging from the middle of the painted and corniced ceiling. against the middle of the left hand side wall, as he was looking into the room, stood one of the huge, heavily-draped, four-post bedsteads in which the great ones of the earth were wont to take their rest a couple of hundred years ago. the curtains were drawn back on both sides. in the middle of the bed lay count zastrow, deathly white, with fast-closed eyes and lips, breathing heavily as the rise and fall of the embroidered sheet and silken coverlet which lay across his chest showed. on the right hand side stood the countess and the two men whom he had seen before; on the other side stood a tall, strikingly handsome woman, whose dark imperious features seemed strangely at variance with the severely fashioned grey dress and the plainly arranged hair which proclaimed her either a nurse or an upper servant. he saw the elder of the two men lean over the bed and raise one of the sleeper's eyelids with his thumb. the nurse took up a lighted taper by the table beside her and passed it in front of the opened eye. the man closed the eyelid, and turned and said something to the countess and the other man. the countess nodded and smiled, not quite as a man likes to see a woman smile, and, with a swift glance at the motionless figure on the bed, turned away and left the room. the nurse said something to the two men, and as the door closed behind her the scene changed again. this time he was not looking into a window, but out of one. he was gazing over a vast expanse of forest pierced by a broad, straight road which led for several miles, as it seemed to him, between two dark walls of thickly-growing pines until it ended abruptly with the forest and opened out on a tiny sand-fringed inlet whose narrow mouth was guarded by two little outcrops of rock half a mile to seaward. a carriage drawn by four black horses rolled rapidly along the road, swung out on to the beach, and stopped. almost at the same moment a grey-painted, six-oared boat grounded on the sandy beach. a couple of men landed from her, and as the carriage door opened, they saluted. the count's two guests got out and the others entered the carriage, then one of them got out again followed by the other, and between them they carried a limp, motionless human form completely covered by a great rug of dark fur. it was taken to the boat. all embarked, and the pinnace shot away out through the little headlands. a mile out to seaward lay the long black shape of a torpedo destroyer. the pinnace ran alongside and they all went on board, two of the sailors carrying the body as before. professor marmion found himself accompanying them. the body was taken into a little cabin and laid in a berth. the rug was turned down from the face, and he recognised prince zastrow. a few minutes later he found himself in the main cabin of the destroyer. the two men who had come in the carriage were sitting at a little table with a man in mufti. this man raised his head and said something. he did not hear the words--but, to his amazement, he recognised the handsome face as that of prince oscarovitch, whom he had never seen before he came as his guest to the garden-party at "the wilderness." on the bulkhead of the cabin at the prince's head there hung a little block-calendar, and the exposed leaf showed the date, monday, th june. as he read it an impulse caused him to look round at the calendar standing upon his own mantel-shelf. it showed the date, friday, th june. he turned back to the window and saw nothing but his own lawn and the moonlit common beyond. chapter xvii m. nicol hendry franklin marmion sat down and began to think the situation over. it was not an easy one, for, as it appeared to him, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for nitocris and himself to help in the elucidation of the zastrow mystery, and the prevention of any european complications that might arise out of it, on both the higher and the lower planes of existence. of course, it would have been perfectly easy to do so in one sense, for now, practically nothing in human affairs was impossible of achievement to them; but, on the other hand, it would never do to allow people on the lower plane to become aware of their extra-human powers. this was out of the question for many reasons, not the least of which was that they had their lives to live under the ordinary conditions of time and space and among their fellow-mortals, every one of whom would shun them in fear, perhaps even horror, if they knew their secret. what, for instance, would happen to nitocris in her temporal state if even only merrill came to know it? no, the idea was certainly beyond the possibility of consideration. at the same time, it was to some extent necessary that they should work on both planes if they were to reap the full advantage of their recently acquired powers, and out of this dilemma there appeared to be only one way open to the professor: he must have the assistance of others to do on the lower plane the work that he would, as it were, direct from the higher. the question was, who? obviously it must be some one upon whose discretion absolute reliance could be placed. he must be highly skilled in police work, and have a reputation to enhance or lose as the result might decide. suddenly a name occurred to him. a short time ago his friend the president had been telling him the inner story of a very intricate case which had involved a scandal of two courts. only the most meagre details had obviously been permitted to appear in the papers, but his lordship had told him that it had been solved and settled almost entirely by the skill and diplomacy of a m. nicol hendry, who held the little advertised but highly responsible position of head of the english department of the international police bureau. "that's the very man," he said, "the very man, and i shouldn't wonder if he's engaged on this particular case. it's too late to wire, and, besides, that would look suspicious. i could telephone to scotland yard, but i don't want even the police to know i want him until i've seen him. no, i'll write a note: it will go by the early post, and no one will know where it comes from." just as lunch was over the next day the front door bell tingled, and presently the parlour-maid knocked, and came in with a card on a silver salver: "i have shown the gentleman into the drawing-room, sir. he says that he has an appointment with you for half-past two." "very well: i will be up in a moment, annie." then, as she closed the door, he gave nitocris the card, and continued: "our ally on the lower plane that may be. you say you wouldn't care to be present and help me with your opinion?" "oh no, dad. i don't want any one to know that i am taking any part in this little adventure. but if you will introduce him afterwards, i'll tell you what i think. you know, women generally judge other people that way." "very well," laughed her father, as he turned to the door, "that will be best. if everything goes right and i think i can work with him, i shall bring him upstairs and you can give him a cup of tea. if i don't, you will know that he won't do." "good-bye, then, for the present," she smiled, "and don't frighten the poor man, if you can help it. i dare say he's only an exaggerated policeman, after all." but it was a very different sort of person whom franklin marmion greeted in the drawing-room. m. nicol hendry was a slimly but strongly-built man of about forty. his high, somewhat narrow forehead was framed with close-cut, crinkly, reddish-brown hair. under well-defined brown eyebrows shone a pair of alert steel-grey eyes of almost startling brilliancy. his nose was a trifle long and slightly aquiline. a carefully-trained golden-brown moustache half-concealed firm, thinly-cut lips, and a closely-trimmed, pointed beard just revealed the strength of the chin beneath. he was dressed in a dark grey frock-coat suit, and wore a pinky-red wild rose, which he had plucked on the common, in his button-hole. as he shook hands with him the professor made a mental note of him as an embodiment of strength, keenness, and quiet inflexibility: a summing-up which was pretty near the truth. "good afternoon, m. hendry," he said, as the hands and eyes met. "good afternoon, professor," returned the other in a gentle voice, and almost perfect english. "may i ask to what happy circumstance--at least, i hope it is a happy one--i owe the honour of making the acquaintance of the gentleman who has succeeded in mystifying all the mathematicians of europe?" "well," said franklin marmion with a smile, "i don't know whether there is so very much honour about that, but i do know that your time is very valuable and that i have already taken up a good deal of it by bringing you all the way out here, so i will come to the point at once. but wait a moment. come down into my study. we can talk more comfortably there." when the professor had given his guest a cigar and lit his pipe, he said quite abruptly: "it is about the zastrow affair." if he had said it was about the last grand ducal plot in the peterhof, m. hendry could not have been inwardly more astonished. outwardly the professor might have mentioned the last commonplace murder. only his eyelids lifted a little as he replied: "ah, indeed? well, really, professor, you must forgive me for saying that that is about the very last matter i should have expected you to have brought up. all the world knows you as one of its most distinguished men of science, now, of course, more distinguished than ever; but i hardly think any one would have expected you to interest yourself in political mysteries. i have a recollection of hearing or reading somewhere that politics were your pet aversion." "so they are," replied franklin marmion, with a short laugh. "i consider ordinary politics--juggling with phrases to delude the ignorance and flatter the prejudices of the mob, and bartering principles for place and power--to be about the most contemptible vocation a man can descend to, but those are low politics in more senses than one. now high politics, as a psychological study, to an outsider are a very different matter. but i am digressing. i did not invite you here to discuss trivialities like these. i want to ask you--of course, you will not answer me unless you like--whether you are connected, professionally or otherwise, with the zastrow affair?" m. hendry looked down at the toes of his perfectly-shaped boots for a moment or two. then he raised his head and said good-humouredly: "professor, i know that there is no more honourable man in the world than you, but even from you i must ask frankly your reasons for asking that question?" "you have a perfect right to do that, my dear sir," was the quiet reply. "if you say 'yes,' i am anxious to help you: if you say 'no,' i should like you to help me: if you don't care to answer, there is an end of the matter. those are my reasons." it took a good deal to astonish nicol hendry, but he was considerably astonished now. yet it was impossible to have the remotest doubt of franklin marmion's absolute earnestness. but why should he of all men on earth want to unravel the zastrow mystery? what interest save the merest curiosity could he have in the matter? and yet he was by no means the sort of man to be merely curious. the very strangeness of his proposition half-convinced him that there must be some other very strong reason underlying those which he had given. again, he was to be perfectly trusted, so no harm could be done trying to discover if this was so, since if he could help he would do so loyally. so he told him. "yes, professor," he said, looking keenly into his eyes, "i am interested in the _affaire_, professionally interested, and, i may add, very deeply interested, to boot." "i am glad to hear that," said franklin marmion with unexpected earnestness. "now, the next question is: will you accept my assistance, whatever it may be, under my own conditions, which are these: no one but yourself shall know that i am helping you, and you yourself will not ask me how i help you." once more a puzzle. nicol hendry thought for a few seconds before he replied slowly: "yes, professor. as long as you do help us i don't care either why or how, for, as i may now be quite frank with you, we certainly want help of some sort very badly. the papers are quite right for once. neither here nor on the continent have we found a single clue worth picking up. it is humiliating, but it is true." "then before you go i hope i shall be able to give you some that will be worth picking up, and keeping too," said the scientist with a faint smile; "at any rate, i think i can put you upon certain lines of enquiry which you will find it profitable to trace out." nicol hendry was an ambitious man, and he would have given a good deal to have known what was passing in the other's mind just then, but his expression betrayed nothing more than interested anticipation. "we shall be entirely grateful to you if you will, professor," he murmured. "i have no doubt of that, my dear sir. now, to begin with: i presume that there are photographs of the persons mentioned in the newspapers as being in the castle of trelitz with the prince on the last day that he was known to be there?" "certainly; we should scarcely leave a simple preliminary like that neglected," smiled nicol hendry. "with the exception of the fraülein hulda von tyssen, the princess' lady of the bedchamber, all have been photographed for publication, and hers we have got through a private source. the chief of each of our departments has a copy of them, and i happen to have mine in my pocket now, if you would like to see them. the princess, of course, you must have seen. she is in every photographer's window in the west end." "oh yes, i have seen her. who has not? she is a singularly beautiful woman. but i should very much like to see the others, if i may." the chef de bureau looked at him sharply as he took a small square morocco case out of his inner pocket and opened it. going to a little table he spread out five small unmounted photographs upon it. he put two of them on one side, saying: "those, of course, you know; they are the prince and princess. this one is count ulik von kessner, high chamberlain of boravia; this, captain alexis vollmar; and this is fraülein von tyssen." franklin marmion looked at them with much more than ordinary interest, for he recognised all five as clearly as though he had just left them in his own dining-room. "there are no suspicions attaching to any of these people, i suppose?" he said carelessly. "my dear professor," replied nicol hendry a little coldly, "those who write stories about our profession always say that it is our invariable rule to suspect everybody, but we have a little common-sense, and we know the records of these ladies and gentlemen in the minutest detail from the prince himself to fraülein hulda. we have not the slightest reason to suspect any of them." "ah, just so," said the other musingly; "no, of course you wouldn't have, and, unfortunately, i cannot tell you why you should. but i'll tell you this: if you ever do find cause to suspect any of these persons, you will find that this group is not complete. it ought to contain the photograph of prince oscar oscarovitch." "prince oscar oscarovitch!" exclaimed nicol hendry, staring at him this time with wide-open eyes. "why on earth should you----" "pardon me, my dear sir," interrupted franklin marmion gently, "remember that you are not supposed to care anything about the why or the how. i have already explained that i cannot explain." "a thousand pardons, professor. i don't often forget myself, but i did then. you took me so utterly by surprise." "i fancy that you will be a good deal more surprised before you have come to the end of this affair," was the smiling but almost exasperating reply; "but, as i implied, i can only give you clues. i cannot even tell you how i get them, and it is for you to follow them or not as your judgment dictates. now, here are one or two to go on with. try and find out whether or not there was a four-funnelled russian destroyer anywhere in the neighbourhood of trelitz on the night of the th. trace as closely as you can the movements of prince oscarovitch on that and the two preceding days. try and find out whether or not a large closed chariot something like a barouche, drawn by four black horses, went from anywhere in the direction of the castle on that day. and lastly, keep a very close eye upon the egyptian adept, as he calls himself--his name is phadrig amena--who worked those alleged miracles at my daughter's garden-party the other day. the prince practically invited himself, and brought this fellow with him. if you can find out the true relationship between them i think you will have found out enough to keep you rather busy for the present. if you do think anything of these little points and examine them, let me know how you get on. we are going abroad for a bit of a holiday, but i will send you my address every now and then. now, let us go back into the drawing-room, and my daughter will give us some tea." when nicol hendry left "the wilderness" that afternoon he was about the most mystified man in london. after he had gone, franklin marmion said to nitocris: "well, niti, what do you think of our gimlet-eyed friend? will he do?" "yes, dad; i like his manner, and he seems very clever in his own way. quite a gentleman, too," she replied. "i'm glad you think that," he added; "but what a pity it is that we could not get the world to accept fourth dimensional evidence without turning the said world inside out. we could clear up the whole _affaire_ zastrow in a week then." "but we shouldn't enjoy our holiday as much, i'm afraid, it would be too exciting," concluded nitocris. chapter xviii murder by suggestion two days later the marmions left london for copenhagen, whence they intended to take a trip among the baltic islands, now looking their brightest and prettiest, then up along the norwegian fiords, just before the tourist rush began, and finally across from trondjem to iceland. they were both excellent sailors, and both disliked crowds, especially when the said crowds were pleasure-hunting. moreover, they had now a particular reason for being alone that they might enjoy together--they, the only two mortals who could do so--the countless marvels of that new existence which had now become possible for them. where, too, could they do this to more advantage than in the ancient northland, whose marvellous past would now be to them even as the present of their own temporal lives? the van huysmans, and, of course, lord lester leighton, were to remain in london until the end of the season. uncle ephraim had cabled warm congratulations and large credits, and so brenda, very naturally as a newly-engaged girl and a prospective countess, wanted all that london and ranelagh and henley, ascot and goodwood and cowes, could give her before her devoted lover's yacht carried them off to the mediterranean. later in the autumn they were all to go over to the states to spend the winter in washington and new york, whence they were to return to london for the wedding in may: surely as pleasant a programme--i fear that miss brenda spelt it "program"--as could be desired even by a fair maiden upon whom the kindly fates had already showered their choicest gifts. the only bitter drop in the family cup of content was the fact that professor van huysman was as far away as ever from the exposure of the fallacy which, as he was immovably convinced, those abominable demonstrations _must_ contain. after due consultation between nicol hendry and his colleagues of france, germany, and russia, it was decided to follow up the clues which he had so mysteriously received. the others would, of course, have been very glad to know where and how he got them, but at the outset he had put them on their honour not to ask, and so professional etiquette made it impossible for them to do anything but accept his assurance that he had received them from a source which was quite beyond reproach. once they accepted the situation, they got to work with a quiet thoroughness which resulted in the spreading of an invisible but unbreakable net round the footsteps of every one of the suspects from the great oscarovitch himself to the humble seller of curios in candler's court, and his still humbler friends pent-ah and neb-anat, who were known to the few who knew them as mr and mrs pentana, renovators, and, possibly manufacturers, of ancient gems and relics. but to one pair of eyes, at least, the police-net was as plainly visible as a spider's web hanging in the sunlight. within three days phadrig received a visit from a shabbily-dressed but well-to-do jew trader with whom he had done business before, who wanted to know if he could put him in the way of getting some really good old egyptian gems and jewellery to show on approval to a wealthy patron who wanted to give his daughter a set of rare and uncommon ornaments on her wedding day. it was by this means, by acting as an intermediary between those who had something to sell and those who wished to buy, that phadrig was supposed to make his modest living. his knowledge of eastern antiquities was admittedly great, though, of course, no one knew how great, and he had often been asked why, instead of living in such a wretched way, he did not start a little business for himself; to which he always replied that he had no capital, and that he preferred independence, however poor, to the cares and ties of regular trading. when the jew had stated his business, phadrig looked at him with sleepy eyes with a strange expression in them which, for some reason or other, held his visitor's usually shifty gaze fixed, and said in a slow, gentle voice: "it is very kind of you, mr josephus, to bring me all these nice little commissions. they are of much benefit to a poor student of antiquities like myself, although i do not like trading in things that i love. still, one must live if one would study. now, i had a gem sent to me the other day which i would dearly love to possess, but, alas! as well might i long for the koh-i-noor itself. moreover, it is already promised--nay, as good as sold. but what have the poor to do with such splendours save to help the rich to buy them!" the jew's prominent eyes shone with an inward light at the mention of the gem, and he said in a coaxing voice: "my dear phadrig, we have always been friends for ever so long, and you say i've been a good customer to you. might i have a look at that gem? you know how fond i am of the pretty things. have you got it here?" "yes, and you shall see it with pleasure, my good josephus," replied phadrig, well knowing the thought that was in his mind when he asked if he had the gem there in that shabby, unprotected room. he went to the old oak secretaire, unlocked a cupboard at the side, and then a drawer within it, followed in every motion by the gleaming eyes of the jew, and took from it a leather parcel. he undid this and produced a box, about four inches long and three wide, of plain black polished wood. it looked solid, but phadrig made a swift motion with his fingers, and one half of it slid off the other. he held it towards his visitor, and said: "what do you think of that as a specimen of ancient art, mr josephus?" the jew looked. the inside of the box seemed filled with green light tinted with yellow. out of the midst of it began to shine a deeper green light which crystallised into the most glorious emerald that he had ever even dreamt of. it was fully an inch square, flawless, and of perfect colour. the yellow sheen came from a framework of heavy, exquisitely-wrought gold. phadrig took it out and held it before him, and the green light seemed to radiate through the dull atmosphere of the room. the jew stared at it with bulging eyes and trembling under-lip, and his hands went out towards it with a gesture which seemed like worship. "god of israel," he gasped, "was anything so splendid ever seen before! mr phadrig, is it--is it real?" "real?" echoed the egyptian scornfully. "did you ever see light like that come out of a sham stone? you should know more about gems than that, mr josephus." "ah yes, yes, of course. it is glorious; it is worthy to shine on the breastplate of the high priest--and what a price it must be! is it allowed to ask the name of the great millionaire for whom it is destined?" "yes. it will in a few hours be the property of prince oscar oscarovitch." as phadrig spoke he hid the gem in his hand. his voice was so changed that the jew looked up at him. his eyes were wide open now, and glowing with a fire that made them look almost dull red. they seemed to see right through his eyeballs and look into his brain. josephus started as though he had been struck. he tried to turn his head away, but the terrible eyes held him. his fat, greasy, olive face grew grey and dry, and his head shook from side to side. "what is the matter, my dear mr josephus?" asked phadrig, in slow, stern tones. "the mention of the prince seems to have affected your nerves. are you acquainted with his highness?" "me? i? why, how should i know a great man like the noble prince? no, no; of course i know him as a very grand and great gentleman, but that is all, really all, my dear phadrig." "yes, yes, of course," said the egyptian, once more in his gentle voice; "would not be likely, would it? now, if you would like to look at the gem more closely, go and sit down there by the light and take it in your hand. you will see that it is engraved with hieroglyphics. they say that this jewel was once the property of rameses the great of egypt, and was given by him to his daughter nitocris." this information did not interest the jew in the slightest, since he had never heard the names in his life; but the delight and honour of holding such a glorious gem in his hand even for a few minutes was ecstasy to him. he sat down, and held out his fat, trembling hand greedily. with a smile of contempt phadrig placed the jewel in it, and said: "examine it closely, my friend. it is well worth it, and it may be long before you see another like it." "like--like _it_, like _this_! by the beard of father moses, i should think not--i should think--i should--oh, beautiful--glor--glorious--splendid--did--splen--oh, what a light--li--light--li--oh----!" as each of the disjointed syllables came from his shaking lips he mumbled more and more, and his head sank lower towards the priceless thing in his palm. as he gazed, the stone grew round and bigger and brighter, till it seemed like a great green-blazing eye glaring into the utmost depths of his being. then the light suddenly went out, his head fell on his breast, and as his hand sank, phadrig caught it and took away the jewel. then he put the jew back in the chair, and standing in front of him began in a slow, penetrating voice: "isaac josephus, thou hast gazed upon the horus stone, and he who doeth that may not answer the questions of an adept with lies save at the price of his life. now answer me truly, or to-morrow morning those of thine household shall find thee dead in thy bed." wide open the eyes of the hypnotised man stared at him, and the loose lips quivered, but these were the only signs of life. "thou art not only a dealer in gems and curious things: thou art also a spy of the police; is not that so?" "yes." "believing that i am a very poor man, yet knowing that i dealt with objects of value, they thought me to be one who receives such things from thieves to sell them again, since they could not. is that so?" "yes." "and, believing this, and knowing thee to have dealings with me, they bribed thee to come here as my friend and fellow-dealer and spy upon my actions, so that they might have evidence against me and cast me into prison. is that so?" "yes." "late on the last night but one thou didst go to the house of nicol hendry, who is no common catcher of thieves, but a spy of nations whose business is with the great ones of the earth. tell me: whom did thy business with him concern?" "prince oscarovitch and yourself." "what were his orders?" "to watch you both, especially you, and find out when you went to him, and why you were sometimes a poor devil in a miserable hole like this, and sometimes a swell going to swagger places with him." "how were you going to do this?" "i know your servant or chum, mr pentana. i've lent him money: and peter petroff, the prince's particular servant, gambles like a lord, and he owes me and a friend of mine a lot of money. we were going to work through them." "it is enough; and well for you that you have answered truthfully. now tell me: do you know how to use a revolver?" "never fired a shot in my life." phadrig went to the secretaire and took a common, cheap revolver, identical with thousands of others which our criminally careless government allows to be bought every day without the production of a licence--just a hooligan's weapon, in fact--went back and put it into the jew's hand. he raised the hand several times, and pointed the muzzle to the temple, keeping the forefinger on the trigger. at length he let go the wrist, and said in a gentle, persuading tone: "that is the way to handle a revolver when you are going to shoot, my dear josephus. now, let me see if you can do it by yourself." with mechanical precision the jew's arm went up until the muzzle touched his temple. again and again he did the same thing at phadrig's bidding, till at length he said rather more peremptorily: "now pull the trigger!" the finger tightened and the hammer clicked. five times more was the operation repeated, and then phadrig gently took the revolver and laid the hand down. he went to the secretaire and loaded the six chambers, cocked the weapon and put it into the right hand side-pocket of the lounge jacket which josephus was wearing, and said deliberately: "now remember, my dear josephus: you will go straight back to your office in waterloo road and let yourself in with your key. in your private room you will see a man who wants to rob you of some valuable papers. you will be ruined if he gets them, so you must take your pistol out of your pocket and shoot him. do you quite understand me?" "yes; i am to shoot him." "that is right. now, if you do not go he will have them before you get there. get up and we will say good-night. you must not put your hand in your pocket until you see the man who wants to rob you. good-night. there is your hat." "good-night!" mr isaac josephus put on his hat and walked away to his death with the motions of a mechanical doll. chapter xix the horus stone an hour later phadrig, the poor curio dealer, had disappeared, and mr phadrig amena, the wonder-working adept, clad in evening clothes and a light overcoat, alighted from a hansom at the great entrance to the royal court mansions. the huge, gorgeously uniformed guardian of the gilded gates was saluting at his elbow in an instant, for a friend of princes is a very great man in the eyes of even such dignitaries as he. "the prince expects you, sir," he said, loud enough to make the title heard by those who were standing by. "will you be good enough to walk in? i will discharge the cab." he stood aside with a bow and another salute, and phadrig walked lightly up the broad steps. peter petroff opened the door of the flat, bowing low, and conducted him to his master's sanctum. evidently he was expected, for the coffee apparatus stood ready on the moorish table beside the cosy chair which he was wont to occupy. the prince, who was standing on a white bear's skin by the mantel, motioned him to it, saying: "ah, phadrig, my friend, punctual, of course; and equally, of course, you have something important to impart. your wire just caught me in time to put off an engagement which, happily, is of no great consequence. there's the coffee, and you'll find the cigars you like in the second drawer. now, what is the news?" his guest filled a cup of coffee and took a cigar and lit it before he replied. then, turning to the prince, he said in his usual slow, even tone: "highness, i regret to say that my news is both urgent and bad." "it would naturally be urgent," said the prince, turning quickly towards him, "but bad i hardly expected. well, all news cannot be good. what is it?" "i fear that my warning was even more urgent than i thought it myself--i mean, in point of time. your highness is already being watched." "what! a prince of the empire, the man whom they call the modern skobeleff, an intimate of nicholas! what should i be watched for?" exclaimed the prince, half angry and half astonished. "the thing is ridiculous; another of your dreams!" "ridiculous it may be, highness," replied phadrig, quite unruffled, "but it is no dream; and, moreover, the eyes which are watching you are keen ones--and they are everywhere. you are under the surveillance of the international police." these were not words which even a prince of the holy russian empire cared to hear. oscarovitch was silent for a few moments, for the earnestness, and yet the calmness, with which they were spoken made it impossible for him to doubt them. as he had asked, what could such a man as he be watched for by this thousand-eyed organisation of which he himself was one of the supreme directors? it was impossible that these people could suspect his great scheme of treachery and self-aggrandisement. that was known to only three persons in the world--himself, phadrig, and the princess hermia; and the princess, the woman who had willingly sacrificed her brilliant young husband to her guilty love and her boundless ambition--no, she could be no traitress. it must be something else: and yet what? he took two or three rapid turns up and down the room, chewing and puffing at his cigar, until he stopped before phadrig, and said quietly, but with angry eyes: "very well, we will grant that i am watched by the international. tell me how you came to know it." the egyptian took a few sips of his coffee, and then related almost word for word his interview with josephus. he ended by saying: "your highness may believe or not now as you please, but i presume you will when you read in your paper to-morrow morning of the suicide of a respectable hebrew merchant named isaac josephus at the address which i have mentioned." oscarovitch had pretty strong nerves, and he was well accustomed to regard any kind of crime as a quite proper means of furthering political ends: but there was something in this man's utter soullessness and the weird horror of the crime which he had just accomplished--for by this time his victim would be already lying self-slain on the floor of his own spider's lair--that chilled him, cold-blooded as he was. he looked at him lounging in his chair and calmly puffing the smoke from his half-smiling lips as though he hadn't a thought beyond the little blue rings that he was making. "that was a devilish thing to do, phadrig!" he said, a little above a whisper. "devilish, possibly, highness, but necessary, of a certainty," was the quiet reply. "you will agree with me that nicol hendry is a dangerous antagonist even for you, and as for me--no doubt he thinks that he can crush me under his foot whenever he chooses to put it down. i should like to know his feelings as he reads of his spy's suicide when he had only just got to work." "it will certainly be somewhat of a shock to him and his colleagues, and for that reason i am inclined, on second thoughts, to agree that it was necessary, and ghastly, as i confess; it seems to me, i think, that you took the best means to give them a salutary warning. after all, the life of an individual, and that individual a jew, does not count for much when the fate of empires is at stake. what puzzles me is how these fellows came to suspect me, and what do they suspect me of. i suppose you have no idea on the subject, have you?" he looked at him keenly as he spoke, but he might as well have looked at the face of a graven image. then, like a flash of inspiration, the zastrow affair leapt into his mind. had his connection with that, by any extraordinary chance, come to the knowledge of the international? the thought was distinctly disquieting. phadrig had helped in this with his strange arts. he would discuss this phase of the matter with him afterwards. phadrig replied, returning his glance: "highness, i have only one explanation to offer, and that you have already refused. were i to speak of any other it would only be vain invention." "you mean about professor marmion and his mathematical miracles?" said the prince somewhat uneasily. "i do," replied the egyptian firmly. "i say now what i thought when i saw him work them. i did not believe that any man could have done what he did unless he had attained to what we styled in the ancient days the perfect knowledge, or, as they term it to-day, passed the border between the states of three and four dimensions. if professor marmion has achieved that triumph of virtue and intelligence--and in the days that i can remember there were more than one of the adepts who had done so--then your highness's imperial designs must be as well known to him as to yourself: nay, better, for, while you can see only a part, the beginning and a little way beyond, he can see the whole, even to the end; for in that state, as we were taught, past, present, and future are one. now, only three persons know of the project, and treason among them is not within the limits of reason, wherefore i would again ask your highness to believe that such information as the international may have has been given them directly or indirectly by professor marmion." "but," said the prince, who was now evidently wavering in his scepticism, since phadrig's explanation of the mystery really seemed to be the only feasible one, impossible as it looked to him, "granted all you say, what possible interest could professor marmion, whether he's living in this world or the one of four dimensions, have in interfering in such a project, even if he did know all about it, especially as every educated englishman admits that the state of affairs in russia could hardly be worse than it is? i cannot see what conceivable interest he can have in the matter." "but, highness, his interest may be a private and not a public one." "what do you mean by that, phadrig?" asked the prince sharply. "as i have said," replied the egyptian slowly, "it may be that his daughter, who was once the queen, has also attained to the knowledge. in that case the love which your highness so suddenly conceived for her would instantly bring you within the sphere of his and her influence and power. now, she, as nitocris marmion, the mortal, is betrothed to the english officer, merrill. she loves him, and therefore, since you are great and powerful in the earth-life, your ruin, or even your death, might seem necessary to remove you from her path." oscarovitch shivered in spite of all his courage and self-control. the idea of fearing anything human had never occurred to him after his first battle; but this, if true, was a very different matter. to be threatened with ruin or death by a power which he could not even see, to contend against enemies who could read his very thoughts, and even be present in a room with him without his knowing it--as phadrig had assured him more than once that they could be--was totally beyond the power of the bravest or strongest of men. no, it was impossible: he could not, would not, believe that, such a thing could be. his invincible materialism came suddenly to his aid, and saved him from the reproach of fear in his own eyes. "no, phadrig," he said, with a gesture of impatience, "that is not to be credited. to you it may seem a reality: to me it can never be anything more than a phantasy of intellect run mad on a single point--which, i need hardly remind you, is a by no means uncommon failing of the greatest of minds. another reason has just occurred to me which would need no such fantastic explanation." "and that, highness?" queried phadrig, looking up with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders. "the zastrow affair. unlikely as it seems, it is not impossible that there has been treason there. i have many enemies in both russia and germany, and it is well known that zastrow and i were rivals once. yes, that is it: it must be so, and therefore we must prepare to fight the international; and with such weapons as you are able to use there is not much reason why we should fear them." he dismissed the subject with an imperious wave of his hand, and continued in an altered tone: "and now, _àpropos_ of your weapons. tell me something about this wonderful gem with which you hypnotised the jew." "i will not only tell you about it, highness, i will show it to you, if you desire to see it," replied phadrig, who now fully recognised the hopelessness of overcoming the blind materialism which was, of course, inevitable to the life-condition in which the prince had his present being. "what! you have brought it with you! excellent! now i think we shall be able to talk on pleasanter subjects than conspiracies and such phantasms as the fourth dimension!" exclaimed oscarovitch, who, like all russians, was almost passionately fond of gems. "fancy asking a russian if he desires to see such a thing as that!" "your excellency must be careful not to look at it too long or closely," said phadrig, putting his hand down inside his waistcoat and drawing out a wash-leather bag. "as i have told you, it possesses certain qualities which are not to be trifled with. you are, of course, aware that many eastern gems are credited with hypnotic powers. this one undoubtedly has them." as he spoke he drew out the emerald, and held it by the clasp under a cluster of electric lights. "what a glorious gem!" exclaimed the prince, starting forward to look at it more closely. "there is nothing to compare with it even among the imperial jewels of russia." "have a care, highness," said the egyptian, raising his left hand, "unless you wish to fall under its influence. once it seized your gaze you could not withdraw it without the permission of its possessor, and meanwhile he would have complete mastery of you. i am your faithful servant, and therefore i warn you." was there just the faintest suspicion of a sneer in his voice as he said this? if there was, oscarovitch did not notice it. he was already too much under the charm of the horus stone. phadrig suddenly put his hand over the gem and went on. "the story of this jewel, highness, is that many ages ago, before the beginning of the first dynasty, a little raft of a strange wood, as white as ivory and shaped like a river-lily, came floating down the nile at full flood-time and drifted to the shore in front of the house of a wise and holy man who was reputed to hold perpetual communion with the gods. on the raft was a cradle of white wicker-work lined with down, upon which lay a man-child of such exquisite beauty that he could scarce have been born of mortal parents. his body was bare, but round his neck was a glistening chain of marvellously wrought gold, fastened to which was this gem lying on his breast. this was doubtless the origin of the hebrew fable of the finding of moses, who, as all scholars know, was not a hebrew, but an egyptian priest in the house of ra. "the holy man took him into his home, burying the chain and gem, lest it might bring temptation to those who saw them; and as the boy grew to manhood he taught him all his lore, until he, too, was wise enough to be admitted into the communion of the gods, which afterwards was called by the adepts the perfect knowledge. on the gem are engraved the three symbols by which the trinity--osiris, isis, and horus; father: mother, and child, the antetype of humanity--became known and worshipped. the holy man divined that the boy was the incarnation of horus sent thus to earth to teach men the way of knowledge, which is the only righteousness, since those who know all cannot sin. where his house stood was built the first temple of the divine trinity, and of this horus became high priest. he crowned the king in the land, and hung this gem round his neck as the symbol of his kingship and the approval of the gods. "from the first king it was handed down from monarch to monarch through all the changes of dynasties, until it hung from the royal chain of the great rameses; and by him it was given to his daughter nitocris, thereby making her queen of egypt after him; and she wore it on that fatal night of the death-bridal when, rather than wed with you, who were then menkau-ra, lord of war, she flooded the banqueting hall of pepi and drowned herself and all her guests--which, highness, is an omen that it were well for you not to forget should you persist in your pursuit of the daughter of professor marmion." oscarovitch was a man of vivid imagination, as all great soldiers and statesmen must be, and so the story of the horus stone appealed strongly to him; but what interested him perhaps even more was the spectacle of this man, who had just been guilty of a peculiarly ghastly form of murder, sitting there and telling with simple eloquence and evident reverence the sacred myth out of which what was perhaps the most ancient religion in the world had evolved. he heard him with a silence of both interest and respect until his last sentence. then he got up and stretched his arms out and said with a laugh: "omen, phadrig! your tale of the stone has interested me deeply, but i believe no more in the omen than i do in the story. ay, and even if i did, i would dare all the omens that wizards ever invented for their own profit in trying to make nitocris marmion what i want her to be, and what she shall be unless she is the cause of my first failure to achieve what i had set my heart upon. but you have not finished your story. tell me now how the stone came into your possession, seeing that it was swept out into the nile hanging on the breast of the royal nitocris." "the next season of flood, so the records ran, highness, the skeleton of a woman was washed up to the foot of the river stairs of the house of ptah, and the stone and chain were found among the weeds which filled the cavity of the chest. they were taken with all reverence to the high priest, who bore them to the pharaoh, and, amidst great rejoicing, hung them round his neck. then from pharaoh to pharaoh it came down through the centuries until it fell into the possession of her who wrought the ruin of the ancient land. she gave the stone to her lover, and from his body it was taken by a priest of the ancient faith who once was anemen-ha, and is now phadrig amena, the degenerate worker of mean marvels which the ignorant of these days would call miracles did they not take them for conjuring tricks. "since then it remained hidden, seen only by the successors of him who rescued it from the plunderers of the body of antony, until, seemingly in the way of trade, yet doubtless for some deep reason which is not revealed to me, it came back into my hands again. such so far, highness, is the end of the story of the stone of horus." "and doubtless more yet remains to be written or told," said the prince seriously, for he was really impressed in spite of his scepticism. then, after a little pause, he continued: "phadrig, you have said that the stone is dangerous to any but its possessor. i wish to possess it. name your price, and, to half my fortune, you shall have it." "the stone, highness," replied the egyptian, with the shadow of a smile flickering across his lips, "never has been, and never can be, sold for money, so i could not sell it, even if money had value for me, which it has not. there is only one price for it." "and what is that?" "a human life--perchance many lives--but all to be paid in succession by him or her who buys it, unless he or she shall attain to the perfect knowledge." "give it to me, then!" exclaimed oscarovitch, holding out his hand. "the life i have i will gladly pay for it in the hope of laying it on the breast of the living nitocris. as i do not believe in any others, i will throw them in. give it to me!" "it is a perilous possession, highness, for one who has not even attained to the greater knowledge, as i have. let me warn you to think again, for once you take it from me the price must be paid to the uttermost pang of the doom that it may bring with it." "i care nothing about your knowledges, phadrig," laughed the prince, still holding out his hand. "it is enough for me to know that it is the most glorious gem on earth, and that it shall help me to win the divinest woman on earth. so, once more, give it to me!" "take it, then, highness," said the egyptian, with a ring of solemnity in his voice. "take, and with it all that the high gods may have in store for you!" he dropped the more than priceless gem into his hand with as little reluctance as he would have given him a brass trinket. then he turned away to take another cigar, leaving oscarovitch gazing in silent ecstasy at, as he thought, his easily-come-by treasure. then the prince went to a large panel picture fixed to the wall on the left-hand side of the fireplace, touched it with his finger, and it swung aside, disclosing the door of a small safe built into the wall. he unlocked this, placed the stone in an inner drawer, closed the safe, and put the picture back in its place. when he sat down again, he said: "my good friend, i know that it is useless for me to thank you, for even if you wanted thanks i could not do justice to the occasion, as they say in speeches: but i want to ask you just one more question, and then i won't keep you any longer from that delightful oriental club of yours which i suppose you are bound to. now that i have got the stone i am, as you may well believe, more than anxious to find the lady to whom it shall belong--again, as i suppose you would say. to my great disgust, the professor and his daughter have disappeared from the sphere of london society for a holiday _à deux_, and have, apparently with intent, left all their friends in ignorance of their destination. have you any idea of it? i know that that coptic woman whom you employ has been ordered to keep a sharp watch on the movements of miss nitocris." "yes, highness," replied phadrig, "and she has obeyed her orders. the day before they left she waylaid that pretty maid of miss marmion's on the common, and told her fortune. of course, she talked the usual jargon about lovers and letters and going on a journey, and the maid quite innocently let out that she was going with her master and mistress by steamer to denmark and up the coast of norway, and then over to iceland by the passenger steamers, and that she did not like the idea at all, because she knew that she would be very seasick." "excellent! the very thing!" exclaimed the prince. "it couldn't be better if i had arranged it myself. my yacht is down in the solent waiting for cowes week. i'll be afloat to-morrow. give that woman a ten-pound note from me with my blessing. now, i shall leave everything else to you. do what you think fit with regard to our friends of the international. kill as many of their spies as you can with safety, and make the chiefs believe that they are fighting the devil himself. and now, good-night." when peter petroff brought him the papers the next morning, the prince took up the _telegraph_, and turned to the page devoted to the minor events of the previous day. his eye was almost immediately caught by a paragraph headed: "suicide in the waterloo road "shortly after seven last evening the passers-by on the eastern side of this thoroughfare were startled by hearing the report of a firearm, apparently coming from the office of mr isaac josephus at a. constable q., who was on point-duty near the spot, had seen mr josephus enter the office with his key only a few minutes before, walking in a rather curious way, and staring straight before him. as the door was locked, the officer thought it his duty to force it. the door of the inner office was also locked, and when this was opened, the unfortunate man was found lying across the desk with a bullet wound in his temple. his right hand still clutched a cheap revolver which was loaded in five chambers. there appears at present to have been no reason for the rash act. mr josephus was a broker dealing chiefly in curios and antique jewellery. although not in a large way of business, his affairs are understood to have been in a prosperous condition. what makes the tragedy all the more strange is the fact that suicide is almost unknown among persons of the jewish faith." oscarovitch felt a little shiver run down his back as he read the commonplace lines. the man who had done this had been in this room with him a few hours before, and one of the means of murder was now in his safe. it would have been just as easy for phadrig to have caused him to look upon the fatal gem, left a bottle of poison with him, and told him to take it as medicine on going to bed. the only difference would have been that there would have been a very much greater sensation in the papers. nicol hendry was reading the paragraph about the same time. his eyes contracted, and he stroked his beard with slow motions of his hand. the hand was steady, but even his nerves quivered a little. he divined instantly how the suicide-murder had been brought about, and this very fact, coupled with the absolute impossibility of proving anything, made the affair all the more disquieting. "so that is the sort of thing we've got to fight, is it? i don't like it. still, it goes far to prove that the professor was perfectly right when he told me to keep a sharp eye on mr phadrig amena." chapter xx through the centuries as they discovered that the sea journey to copenhagen would be somewhat tedious and uninteresting, and that the steamers were not exactly palatial, nitocris and her father decided at the last minute to cross to ostend, spend a day there and go on to cologne, put in a couple of days more among its venerable and odorous purlieus, and two more at hamburg, so that, while the present-day inhabitants were asleep, they might, as nitocris somewhat flippantly put it, take a trip back through the centuries, and watch the great city grow from the little wooden village of the ubii and the roman colony of agrippina into the hanse town of the thirteenth century: watch the laying of the first stone of the mighty dom, the up-rising of the glorious fabric, and the crowning of the last tower in . during the journey from hamburg to copenhagen, nitocris, reclining comfortably in a corner of their compartment in the long, easily-moving car, entertained herself with a review of these extraordinary experiences from the point of view of her temporal life, and found them not only extraordinary, but also very curious. she had already learnt that the connecting link between the two existences, when once the border had been passed, was will: but will of a far more intense and exalted character than that which was necessary as an incentive to action on the lower plane. there was naturally something that seemed extra-human in the mysterious force which was capable of bidding the present-day world vanish like a shadow into either the future or the past, its solid-seeming substance melt away like "the airy fabric of a vision," and summon in an instant, too brief to be measured, the past from the grave where it lay buried beneath the dust of uncounted ages, or the future from the womb of unborn things. but to her, at least at first, the strangest part of the new revelation was this: when her will had carried her across the confines of the tri-dimensional world, and she saw the centuries marshalled and motionless before her, she felt not the slightest sense of wonder or awe. she was simply a being apart, moving along their ranks and passing them in review, herself unseen and unknown save by that other being who, in this state, was no longer her father or even her friend, but merely a companion endowed with power and intelligence equal to her own. her human hopes and fears and loves and passions had, as it were, been left behind. the men and things she saw were absolutely real to her, as they had been to the men of other days, or would be in days to come; but she herself was a pure intelligence which saw and acted and thought with perfect clearness, but with absolutely no feeling save that of intellectual interest. she saw armies meet in the shock of battle without a thrill of fear or horror; towns and cities roared up to the unheeding heavens in flame and smoke, and left her standing unmoved amidst their ruins; she heard the screams of agony that rang through the torture chambers without a quiver, and watched the long, pale lines of the martyrs to what in the earth-life was called religion pass to the stake without a quiver of pity or a thrill of disgust. she stood face to face with the great ones of the earth who have graven their names deep upon the tablets of time without reverence or admiration; and she witnessed the most heroic deeds and the most atrocious crimes with neither respect for the one nor hatred for the other. human history was in her eyes merely a logical sequence of necessary events, neither good nor bad in themselves, but only as they were viewed from this standpoint or that, by the oppressor or the oppressed, the slayer or the slain, the robber or the robbed, the governor or the governed. she learned that human emotion is merely a matter of time and space. one century does not feel the loves and hates of another, and the sorrows of here have no real sympathy with the sufferings of there. beyond the border all these were merely matters of intense intellectual interest. but when she returned to the temporal life the memory of them was marvellous and terrible. her heart throbbed with pity and burned with righteous anger. horror seemed to take hold of her soul and shake it with earthquake shudders when she thought that what she had seen but a few time-moments ago had really come to pass; and she longed for the power to show all this to the men and women of her own passing day, and bid them have done with the poor, shadowy images of themselves, which, had they really been gods, would have made of human life something better and happier and nobler than the ghastly tragedy which, as she had seen with her own eyes, it had been. but she knew that such a power was not hers. she, like her father, had, through the toil and strife and stress of many lives of mingled good and evil, knowledge and ignorance, won her way to the perfect knowledge; and so she knew that all these poor kings and slaves, conquerors and conquered, torturers and tortured, were all doing the same thing, were all groping their way through the shadows and the night towards the dawn and the light, through the hell of ignorance to the heaven of knowledge. and now, too, since the wisdom of the ages was hers, she saw that over all the vast, weltering swarm of struggling immortals, hung the inevitable decree of silent, impersonal destiny. "as ye live, so shall ye die; as ye end, so shall ye begin again--in knowledge or ignorance, in good or evil, life after life, death after death, world without end." it was clear to her now why "some are born to honour and some to dishonour": some to happiness and some to misery, each in his or her degree; why the liver of a good life was happy, no matter what his place in the earth-life might be: and why the evil liver, no matter how high he might stand in his own or others' sight, carried the canker of past misdeeds in his heart. standing, as she now did, in the midway of the present, looking with single gaze on past and future, she saw at once the honest striver after good in his yesterday-life rise to his reward in the life of to-day, and the dishonest rich and powerful sitting in the high places of to-day cast down into the gutterways of to-morrow. life had ceased to be a riddle to her now. what with their halts at ostend, cologne, and hamburg, the thirty-three-hour journey lengthened itself out very pleasantly into a week; and so, when the famous city on the sound was reached, they were as fresh and unfatigued as they were on the morning that they left "the wilderness." of course, they put up at the hôtel d'angleterre, and here they enjoyed themselves quietly for four days, for of all european capitals, copenhagen is one of the pleasantest in which to idle a few fine summer days away. on the evening of the fourth day they were just sitting down to their table by one of the windows overlooking the oestergade when nitocris happened to look up towards the door through which the diners were trickling in an irregular stream of well-dressed men and women. for a moment her eyes became fixed. then she bent her head over the table, and said: "dad, there is prince oscarovitch. i wonder what he is doing here? he is alone: please go and ask him to join us. i will tell you why afterwards." they exchanged glances, and the professor got up and went towards the door, while his daughter got through a considerable amount of hard thinking in a very short time. she was, of course, perfectly conversant with his share in the zastrow affair, so far as her father had yet gone with it; but she determined that when copenhagen had gone to sleep that night they would cross the border and pay a visit to the castle of trelitz at the time of the tragedy, and follow it out as far as it had gone. it has already been shown that on her first meeting with the prince she conceived an aversion from him which was then inexplicable save by the ordinary theory of natural antipathy: but now she knew that she had been nitocris, queen of egypt, when he was menkau-ra, the lord of war, who would have forced her to wed him by the might and terror of the sword, and the will of a blind and blood-intoxicated populace. she had hated him then even to death, and now she hated him still in life; wherefore she desired to make his closer acquaintance on the earth-plane on which they had met once more after many lives. as he had been in those far-off days, so he was now, a splendid specimen of aristocratic humanity. many eyes had followed her as she had walked to her table, but there were more people in the room now, and as the prince walked towards her beside the famous professor who had puzzled all the mathematicians of europe, the whole crowd of guests was looking at nothing but these three. "this is indeed good fortune, miss marmion, and as good as it is unexpected--which, perhaps makes it all the better! who would have thought of finding you in copenhagen?" he said, as he bowed low over her hand. "if there is any reason at all for it, prince, it is that my father and i always like to take our holidays at irregular times and in unexpected places: by which, i mean places where we do not expect to meet all our acquaintances," she replied, as she sat down. "i think we manage to bore each other quite enough in london, and we like each other all the better when we meet again." "is not that rather an ungracious speech, niti, seeing that one of the said acquaintances has only just chanced to join us?" said the professor mildly. "you mean as regards the prince?" she laughed. "certainly not. his highness is hardly an acquaintance--yet. you know we have only had the pleasure of meeting him once: and then, of course, i said _all_ our acquaintances. there might be exceptions." these words, spoken with a quite indescribable charm, were, as he thought, quite the sweetest that oscarovitch had heard for many a day. it had been perfectly easy for a man with his official influence to trace by telegraph every movement that the marmions had made after he had guessed that they would travel by either calais or ostend. he had wired for his yacht, the _grashna_, to meet him at dover, run across to ostend, found that they had left there for cologne with through tickets for copenhagen, again guessed rightly that they would spend a few days there and in hamburg, and then steam away for the sound. the farther north he travelled, the farther he left phadrig and his phantasies behind, and the nearer he came to the belief that, if he had only a fair chance and the field to himself, as he intended to have, he would not find very much difficulty in convincing nitocris that there was no comparison at all between the humble naval officer she had left behind to do his work on his dirty little destroyer, and the millionaire prince who could give her one of the noblest names in europe and everything that the heart of woman could desire. and now these sweetly-spoken words and the glance which accompanied them, her undisguised pleasure at the chance meeting, and her father's very evident approval of his presence, quickly but finally convinced him that he had come to a perfectly just conclusion. of course, there was the memory of another woman, only a little less fair than nitocris, who had shut herself up yonder in the gloomy castle of trelitz, acting the farce of her official sorrow for love of him, and pining for the time when the finding of her betrayed husband's corpse should leave her free, after a decent interval of mock-mourning, to join her lot with his: but what did that matter? was it not as easy to get rid of a woman as a man? was not the fatal beauty of the horus stone at his command now that he was its possessor for good or evil? a well-arranged suicide might easily be taken by the world as the excusable, if deplorable, result of her mysterious bereavement. the conversation during dinner naturally turned on ways and means of travelling, and, when the professor had sketched out their plans, oscarovitch said with an admirably simulated deference: "my dear sir, i most sincerely hope that you and miss marmion will not think that i am presuming on an acquaintance which, if only a new one now, may perhaps one day be older, if i venture to suggest another way of making your tour. i am an old voyager in these waters, and i can assure you that the steamers, though vastly improved, have not quite reached the standard of the atlantic liner." "oh, but you know, prince, we didn't expect it," interrupted nitocris. "neither my father nor i have the slightest objection to roughing it a little. in fact, that is half the fun of wandering." "and slow travelling between stated points, not always of the greatest or any interest, together with the enforced company of a promiscuous crowd of tourists and commercial travellers, who, by the way, are mostly german, and therefore of nature and necessity disagreeable, would about make up the other half," said oscarovitch, leaning back in his chair with a low laugh. "no, no, my dear miss marmion, i am afraid you would not find that the reality quite squared with the anticipation. now, may i risk the suspicion of presumption and offer an alternative proposition?" "why not?" said nitocris with a smile, and a glance which dazzled him. "i'm sure it is very kind of you to take so much interest in our poor little attempt to get away for a while from the madding crowd who are doing the round of the same stale, weary pleasures that they try so hard to enjoy year after year, and then come back _so_ tired, after all." "then," he replied, looking at them alternately, "as i have your permission, i would suggest that, instead of rushing from fixed point to fixed point in crowded steamers and the shackles of company or government regulations, you should take possession of a fairly comfortable steam yacht of a little over a thousand tons which will be entirely at your disposal, and will run you from anywhere to anywhere you choose at any speed you like, from five to thirty-five knots an hour, with properly trained servants to attend to you, and, as the advertisements say, 'every possible comfort and convenience.'" "which, of course, means that you have got your yacht here, and are so very kind as to ask us to become your guests for a time," said the professor, with a suspicion of stiffness. "it is more than generous of you, prince, but really----" "but really, my dear sir," oscarovitch interrupted, with a gesture of deprecation, "i can assure you that, so far as i am concerned, there is no kindness, to say nothing of generosity. it is pure selfishness. this is my position. i have managed to escape for a time from the toils of official work and worry, and the almost equally irksome bonds of that form of penal servitude which is called society. like you, i have fled overseas, but, unlike you, i have no company but my own, and i have had a great deal too much of that already, though i have only been three days and nights at sea. i have no plans, i have got nothing to do and nowhere to go; and so, if you and miss marmion would take pity on my loneliness all the generosity would be on your side. of course, i cannot presume to ask you to change your plans all at once, but if you will sleep on my proposition and come and lunch with me to-morrow on board the _grashna_ and take a run up the sound, say, to elsinore, you may be able to come to a decision." it was a lovely night, and so they took their coffee and liqueurs, and the two men their smokes on the balcony overlooking the oestergade, which might be called the rue de la paix of copenhagen, and watched the well-dressed crowds sauntering to and fro past the brilliantly lighted shops; and nitocris, who seemed to her father to be in singularly high spirits, sent the conversation rippling over all manner of subjects with the exception of politics and the fourth dimension. oscarovitch was becoming more and more fascinated as the light-winged minutes sped by, and he took but little pains to conceal the fact. nitocris, of course, saw this, and simulated a delightful unconsciousness. the professor was, for the time being, completely mystified. he knew that his daughter hated the prince with a thorough cordiality, and yet he had never seen her make herself so entirely charming to any man, not even excepting merrill himself, as she was to this man, her enemy of the ages. he could have solved the problem instantly by crossing the border, but then the sudden vanishing of a famous scientist from the midst of the brilliant company on the balcony would have set all the newspapers in europe chattering, with consequences which would have been the reverse of pleasant both to his daughter and himself. however, he had not long to wait, for nitocris soon rose, saying that she must go to jenny, her maid, to see about packing arrangements for to-morrow; and the prince, after another cigarette and liqueur, took his leave and went on board the yacht to give orders for her to be put into her best trim, and then to have a luxurious half-hour with the horus stone, and indulge in fond imaginings as to how it would look hanging from a chain of diamonds on the white breast of miss nitocris. when the professor went to his own sitting-room he found his daughter waiting to say good-night. "niti," he said, as he closed the door, "i don't want to seem inquisitive, but, frankly, i was astounded at the gracious way in which you treated that scoundrel oscarovitch." "dad," she replied, with apparent irrelevance, "do you believe in the forgiveness of sins?" "of course not! how could any one who holds the doctrine do that? we know that every moral debit must be worked off and turned into a credit by the sinner, however many lives of suffering it takes to do it. why do you ask?" "so that you might answer as you have done!" she said, with a little laugh. "now this oscarovitch has sinned grievously, not only in this life but in many others, and i am going to see that he works off at least some of his debit as you put it somewhat commercially. he loved me in the old days in memphis, and he loves me still in the same brutal, animal way. i know that if he cannot get me by fair means he will try to take me by force--and i am going to let him do it." "niti!" "yes, he shall take me; he shall think he had got me safe away from you and mark--and when he has got me he shall taste what the hot-and-strong sort of christian preachers call the torments of the damned. no, i shall not kill him. he shall live till he prays to all his gods, if he has any, that he may die. he shall hunger without eating, thirst without drinking, lie down without sleeping, have wealth that he cannot spend, and palaces so hideously haunted that he dare not live in them, until, when men wish to illustrate the uttermost extreme of human misery, they shall point to prince oscarovitch. i, the queen, have said it!" then, with a swift change of voice and manner, she laid her hands on her father's shoulders, kissed him, and murmured: "good-night, dad--at least as far as this world is concerned." chapter xxi what happened at trelitz it was the th of june again. once more prince zastrow rode with ulik von kessner and alexis vollmar and the attendant huntsmen up the avenue of pines leading to the gate of the castle of trelitz, but now accompanied by two unseen presences which belonged at once to their own world and also to another and wider one. once more the great doors opened and they passed into the trophy-decked, skin-carpeted hall: and once more they were welcomed by the stately, silken-clad woman who came down the broad staircase to greet her lord and his guests. emil von zastrow, last and worthiest scion of his ancient line, the very _beau ideal_ of youthful strength and manly dignity, ran half-way up the stairs to meet his lady and his love, and then the men went away to their rooms, while the princess hermia, true housewife as well as princess, betook herself to the pleasant task of making sure that all the preparations for dinner were complete. the dinner was served in one of the smaller rooms, in the modern wing of the castle, on an oval table. the prince sat at one end faced by his beautiful consort. to his right sat his guest, alexis vollmar, and a tall, handsome, but somewhat hard-featured woman of about thirty, with the clear blue eyes and thick, yellow-gold hair which proclaimed her a daughter of the northern german lowlands. this was hulda von tyssen, the princess's companion and lady-in-waiting. they were faced by a stout, powerfully-built man with a full beard and moustache _à la_ friedrich, ulik von kessner, high chamberlain of boravia. captain alexis vollmar was a typical russian officer of the younger school, tall, well-set-up, and good-looking after the muscovite fashion. he had distinguished himself in the far east, but just now he preferred the serene atmosphere of boravia to the thunder-laden air of holy russia. the talk was of hunting and war and politics and the chances of the russian revolution, and on this latter subject it was perfectly unrestrained, for all knew that the powers had made a secret compact by which they bound themselves, in the event of the fall of the romanoff dynasty and the arch-ducal oligarchy--which all europe would be very glad to see the last of--to support prince zastrow as elective candidate for the vacant throne. the revolutionary leaders had been sounded on the subject, and were found strongly in favour of the scheme. it meant a return to the ancient principle of elected monarchy, and prince zastrow, though now a german ruling prince, represented the union of two of the oldest and noblest families in russia and poland. moreover, he had pledged himself to a constitution which, without going to radical or socialistic extremes, embodied all that the moderate and responsible adherents of the revolutionary cause desired or considered suitable for the people in their present stage of political development--which, of course, meant everything that oscar oscarovitch did not want. after dinner they went out through the long french windows on to a verandah which overlooked a vast sea of forest, lying dark and seemingly limitless under the fading daylight and the radiance of the brightening moon. since their marriage day the prince had made it a bargain that whenever they dined _en famille_, his wife should prepare his coffee with her own hands. she even roasted the berries and ground them herself, and, as many a time before, she did it to-night in the seclusion of the little room set apart for that and similar purposes. she was alone in the physical sense, for the two watching presences were invisible to her, and so, for all she knew, no one saw her measure twenty drops of a colourless fluid from a little blue bottle into the coronetted cup of almost transparent porcelain which had been one of her wedding presents to her husband. after a couple of cups of coffee and half a dozen half-smoked cigarettes, the prince stretched his long legs out, struggled with a yawn, and said in a sleepy voice: "my princess, you must ask our guests to excuse me. i am tired after the long day in the sun; and so, if i may, i will go to bed." he rose, and the rest rose at the same moment. he bowed his good-night, and the two saluted. the princess followed him into the dining-room. the unseen watchers stood by the end of the great heavily-hung bed, in the midst of which lay prince zastrow, seemingly sinking into the slumber of death. von kessner leaned over and raised an eyelid, and said to the princess, who was standing on the other side, the single word: "unconscious." she bent forward for a moment as though she were bidding a silent farewell to the man to whom she had pledged her maiden troth, then straightened up and walked like some beautiful simulacrum of a woman towards the door which vollmar held open for her.... the earth-hours passed, and the two men kept their watch by the bed, conversing now and then in whispers between long intervals of anxious silence, until three strokes sounded from the bell of the castle clock. the whole household, save one fair woman, who, in softly-slippered feet, was pacing the floor of her bedroom, was fast asleep, and the days of sentries were far past. von kessner gently lifted one of the arms lying on the coverlet of the bed and let it fall. it dropped as the arm of a man who had just died might have done. again he raised an eyelid, this time with some difficulty. the eyeball beneath was fixed and glassy as that of a corpse. he nodded across the bed to the russian, and together they turned the bedclothes down to the foot. then from under the bed he pulled out a bundle of grey skins which he spread on the floor beside the bed. it was a sleeping bag such as hunters use in winter on the snow-swept plains and forests of northern europe. vollmar turned the head-flap back. then they lifted the body of the prince from the bed, slid it into the sack, and buttoned the flap down over the face. "that egyptian's drug has worked well," whispered von kessner. vollmar nodded, and whispered back: "i wish i had a handful of it. but it is time. he will be ready for us now." even as he spoke the locked door opened, as it were of its own accord, and phadrig stood in the room dressed in the livery of the prince's coachman. von kessner and vollmar turned grey as he bowed, and whispered: "the doors are open, excellencies, and all is ready!" then the three lifted the shapeless bag and carried it with noiseless tread down to the hall and out through the half-open doors to where a carriage drawn by four black horses stood waiting. though there was no one in charge of them, they stood as still as though carved out of blocks of black marble until the body of the prince had been laid in the carriage and von kessner and vollmar had taken their places beside it. then phadrig mounted the box, shook the reins, and the rubber-shod horses moved silently away at a trot, which, as soon as the main road was reached, became a gallop only a little less silent than the trot. the carriage turned aside from the road, and ran down a broad forest lane till it stopped by the shore of a little sandy inlet. the bow of a long black boat was resting on the sand, and six closely-blindfolded men were sitting on the thwarts with oars out. another stood on the beach with the painter in his hands. the body of the prince was carried from the carriage to the boat, and laid in the stern sheets. von kessner and vollmar remained on board, and phadrig went back to the carriage. at a short word of command the oarsman backed hard, and the boat slid off the sand into the smooth water of the little cove. then she shot away and melted into the light haze which hung over the outside sea. the boat stopped under the shadow of the long, low-lying black hull of a four-funnelled destroyer. a rope dropped from the deck and was made fast by vollmar in the bow. the blindfolded crew were helped up the ladder which hung over the side and taken below forward. then came a sharp order: "all hands below"; and when the deck was deserted, von kessner and vollmar went up the ladder and were met on deck by oscar oscarovitch in civilian dress. there was another man beside him in the uniform of a lieutenant. he slacked off the tackle falls of the davits under which the boat had brought up, dropped down the ladder and hooked them on. when he got back to the deck the four men hauled first on one tackle and then on the other, till the boat was up flush with the deck. the falls were belayed, and oscarovitch got into the boat and opened the flap of the sleeping-sack. he touched the spring of an electric pocket-lamp and looked upon the calm, cold features of his rival. then he buttoned down the flap again and returned to the deck. the four went down into the cabin: glasses were filled with champagne, and as oscarovitch raised his to his lips, he said: "count and captain vollmar, i am satisfied. let us drink to the new empire of the russias and the sceptre of ivan the terrible!" "and his illustrious successor!" added von kessner. within half an hour a small boat was lowered; the chamberlain and vollmar got into it and rowed away toward the cove. the russian officer went on to the little bridge, signalled "full speed ahead" to the engine-room, and then took the wheel. the screws ground the water astern into foam, the black shape leapt forward and sped away eastward into the glimmering dawn with its silent passenger lying in the swinging boat, and the unseen watchers standing by the helmsman.... more earth-hours passed. the sun rose upon a lonely sea. the destroyer stopped, and a white speck on the eastward horizon rapidly grew into the white shape of a large yacht flying through the water at a tremendous speed. in a few minutes she was almost alongside. she swung round in a sharp curve, slowed down and dropped a boat. oscarovitch and the lieutenant lowered the destroyer's boat till it touched the water. the other came alongside, and the body of prince zastrow was transferred to it, and oscarovitch followed it. four men from the yacht's boat jumped on board the destroyer and hauled hers up. the other was backed to the ladder and they came on board. a silent salute passed between oscarovitch and the lieutenant, and a few minutes later the yacht's boat was hoisted to the davits, and the white shape was growing smaller and dimmer amidst the light haze that lay on the water shimmering under the slanting rays of the rising sun. morning grew into noon, noon faded into evening, and evening darkened into night. the yacht ran into a wide-opening gulf between two forest-clad points, on the southern of which twinkled the lights of a large town. these were soon left behind by the flying yacht, and as a vast sea of fleecy cloud drifted up from the north-east and spread its veil across the path of the half moon, a little cluster of lights gleamed out on the port bow. her bowsprit swerved to the left till it pointed directly to them. presently she slowed down and ran into a little land-locked bay surrounded with dense pine woods which came down almost to the water's edge, swung round and slowed up alongside a wooden jetty. from this a broad road, cut straight through the forest, sloped steeply up to a plateau on which stood a gaunt, grey, turreted castle, the very picture of the sea-robbers' home that it had been in the days of oscarovitch's not very remote ancestors. up this road and into the outer gate across the lowered drawbridge the sleeping-sack and the insensible man within were borne. through the keep-yard it was taken into the castle and up to a large room in the eastern turret, comfortably furnished, and containing a bed almost as luxurious as that in which prince zastrow had lain down to sleep the evening before. oscarovitch preceded the men who carried him, and was met at the door by a grey-haired, keen-eyed man, who bowed before him, and said in a low tone: "may i presume to ask if this is my charge, highness?" "it is, doctor hugo; and i give him into your hands with every confidence that you will restore your patient to health as quickly as any man in europe could do. i must leave immediately, and so i trust everything to you. all care must be taken of him. he must want for nothing that you can give him--except liberty." oscarovitch returned the doctor's assenting bow and left the room. in half an hour the yacht was flying at full speed over the smooth waters of the baltic, heading a little to the south of west. chapter xxii a trip on the sound "good morning, dad," said nitocris, as she entered the sitting-room about half an hour before breakfast the next morning. "what is your opinion of the european situation now?" "good morning, niti; what is yours?" asked her father, looking at her with grave eyes and smiling lips. "as it was yesterday, only rather more so. in his present incarnation, prince oscar oscarovitch is, i should think, about as black-hearted a scoundrel as ever polluted the air that honest people breathe." "i entirely agree with you. and now, believing that, do you still propose to trust yourself to his tender mercies on board his own yacht, surrounded, as you will be, by men who, no doubt, are his absolute slaves?" "_i_ trust myself to his tender mercies, dad?" she replied, drawing herself up and throwing her head back a little; "you seem to have got hold of the thing by the wrong end, as brenda would say. that is only what it will look like. the reality will be that he will blindly trust himself to _my_ mercies--and i can assure you that he will find them anything but tender. no, dear, we shall accept his highness's invitation to lunch, and then his offer of the hospitality of the yacht for the trip, which, by the way, i fancy will be more to the eastward than to the northward----" "you mean, i suppose, trelitz and viborg?" "not trelitz, i think, but viborg almost certainly. that will be the end of the abduction as far as i can see from our present plane of existence." "really, niti--well, well. of course, i know that you will be perfectly safe: but what would our good friends on this plane, as you put it, the van huysmans, for instance, think if they could hear you talking so calmly to your own father about getting yourself abducted by a man whom you justly think to be one of the most unscrupulous scoundrels on earth! and, by the way, what is to become of me in the carrying out of this little scheme of yours? i hope you don't expect me to connive at the abduction of my own daughter. i have a certain amount of reputation to lose, you know." "oh, if his highness is the clever villain that we know him to be, i think we may safely trust him to arrange for your temporary disappearance from the scene. and whatever he does it will be easy for you to play the part of the passive victim for the time being. he can't injure or kill you, for if it came to extremities you have the means of giving his people such a fright as would probably drive them out of their senses, just as i could if their master got troublesome. really, from a certain point of view, the adventure will have a decidedly humorous aspect." "with a very considerable leaven of tragedy." "yes, the tragedy will be a logical sequence of the comedy--and, as i said last night, it will be tragedy. and now suppose we go to breakfast. i have been up nearly two hours helping jenny with the packing, and this lovely air has given me a raging appetite. there's a little more to do yet, and we shall have his highness here before long to ask for our decision and take us off to the yacht." here she was quite right, for she had hardly left her father to his after-breakfast pipe and gone upstairs to help her maid, than oscarovitch came into the smoking-room. "good morning, professor marmion! i need not ask you if you have had a good night. you look the very picture of a man who has slept the sleep of the just. and miss marmion?" "thanks, your highness, i think we have both managed to spend the night to good purpose. the air here is glorious just now. i always think that sound, dreamless sleep is the best sign that a place is doing you good." "oh, undoubtedly, though for some reason or other i did not sleep very well last night. something had disagreed with me, i suppose. i seemed to have a sense of being pursued to the uttermost ends of the earth and back again by some relentless foe who simply would not allow me to take a moment's rest. but i didn't come to talk about the stuff that dreams are made of. i came to ask whether my cruise is to be a lonely one, or whether i am to have the very great pleasure of your company." franklin marmion, for perhaps the first time in his life, felt distinctly murderous towards a fellow-creature as he looked at this splendid specimen of physical humanity, knowing so well the real man who was hiding behind that fascinating exterior; but he managed to answer pleasantly enough: "we have talked the matter over, prince, and we have come to the conclusion that your very kind invitation is really too good to be refused. we know that we are incurring a debt that we shall not be able to pay, but we are trusting to your generosity to let us off." "on the contrary, my dear professor," said oscarovitch, without the slightest attempt to conceal the pleasure that the acceptation gave him, "it is yourself and miss marmion who have made me your debtor. in fact, if you had not found yourselves able to come, i should have run the _grashna_ back to cowes, gone up to london, plunged into a maelström of dissipation, and probably ended by losing a great deal of money at ascot and goodwood. ah, miss marmion, good morning! how well the air of copenhagen seems to agree with you! the professor has just gladdened my soul by telling me that you have decided to take pity on my loneliness." "good morning, prince!" she replied, putting her hand for a moment in the one he held out. "yes, we are coming, if you will have us. in fact, i have just finished packing." "ah, excellent! well now, since that is happily arranged, it would be a pity to waste any of this lovely morning. the sound is like a streak of blue sky fallen from heaven. my gig is down at the jetty, and i have a couple of my men here who will convoy your baggage down. if it is packed, as you say, you need not trouble about it. you will find everything safe on board." "thank you, prince," said the professor. "then i will go and settle up at the office while niti puts her hat on. i will have the things sent down, and we may as well walk to the jetty. it will do me good after that big breakfast. jenny had better get into a cab and go down with the luggage." when they reached the promenade along the sound shore oscarovitch pointed to a beautifully-shaped, three-masted, two-funnelled white yacht lying about five hundred yards out, and said: "that is the _grashna_, miss marmion. i hope you like the look of her." "she is beautiful!" exclaimed nitocris, recognising at once the vessel which had met the russian destroyer on the early morning of the th. "she almost looks as if she could fly." "so she can in a sense," laughed the prince. "come now, here is the gig. we will get on board, and you shall see her go through her paces." neither she nor her father were strangers to yachts, but when they mounted the bridge of the _grashna_ and looked over her from stem to stern, they had to admit that they had never seen anything quite so daintily splendid. they had chosen their rooms, and jenny was below unpacking. although, of course, he had a captain on board, the prince often sailed the yacht himself when he had guests on board. he had a genuine love for the beautiful craft, and he took an almost boyish delight in showing what she could do. she was a twelve-hundred-ton, triple-screw, turbine-driven boat, and, thanks to the space-economy of the new system, her builders had been able to stow away fifteen thousand horse-power in her engine-room, and this when fully developed gave a speed in smooth water of thirty-five knots or a little over forty statute miles an hour. the anchor was up almost as soon as they got on to the bridge, and oscarovitch moved the pointer of the telegraph to "ahead slow." the quartermaster in the oval wheel-house behind him moved the little wheel a few spokes to starboard, her mellow whistle tooted, and she glided in an outward curve through the other yachts and shipping, and gained the open water. "now," he said, turning to nitocris, "we can begin to move. it is roughly thirty english miles to elsinore. if you have never done any fast travelling at sea and would like to do some now, i can get you there in about three-quarters of an hour." "what!" exclaimed the professor, "thirty miles in forty-five minutes by sea! that is over forty miles an hour. a wonderful speed." "yes," he replied, almost tenderly; "but my beautiful _grashna_ is a wonderful craft--at least, i think you will say so when you see what she can do. now, if you will take advice, you and miss marmion will go into shelter, for it will begin to blow soon." behind the wheel-house was an observation room, as it would be called in the states, running nearly the whole length of the bridge, and fronted with thick plate glass. they went in, and oscarovitch turned the pointer to half-speed. there was no increase in vibration, but the shore began to slip away behind them faster and faster, and the northern suburbs of copenhagen rose ahead and fell astern as though they were part of a swiftly moving panorama. then the pointer went down to full speed, and the prince, after a word to the quartermaster, joined them in the bridge-house and closed the door. "you will need all your eyes to see much of the shore now," he said; "i have given her her wings." nitocris felt a shudder in the carpeted floor. looking ahead she saw the bow lift slightly. then a smooth, green swathe of water curled up on either side. she looked aft, and saw a broad torrent of froth, foaming like a furious, rapid stream away from the stern. the houses and trees on the shore seemed to run into each other, and slide out of sight almost before the eye could rest upon them. the water alongside was merely a blue-green blur. nitocris involuntarily held her breath as though she had been out on deck. "it is wonderful, prince!" she said, almost in a whisper. "that alleged express from hamburg was nothing to this: and yet how steadily she moves in spite of the speed. i should have thought that it would have nearly shaken us to jelly." "that is the turbines, dear," said her father, who was already wondering whether oscarovitch was doing this just to show how hopeless any pursuit of such a vessel would be. "they are a marvellous means of applying steam power. lieutenant parsons is robbing the sea of one, at least, of its worst terrors." "yes," added the prince, "we are travelling a little over forty miles an hour; and if you got that speed out of reciprocating engines you would scarcely be able to lie on the deck without holding on to something, yet here we are as comfortable as though we were standing in a drawing-room." "you have given us a new experience to begin with," said nitocris, thinking how nice it would be to take her wedding trip with merrill in such a craft as this. "why, look at the two shores coming together, dad!" "no, excuse me," said oscarovitch, "we are only about half-way to the gate of the baltic yet. that land on the right is the island of hvreen. when we have passed that you will soon see the heights of elsinore and helsingborg rising ahead. there are only about two and a half miles between denmark and sweden there." "oh yes, of course. i am forgetting my geography," laughed nitocris, as the low, wooded patch of land came rushing towards them as though it were adrift on a fast-flowing stream. "goodness, what a speed!" "a very wonderful craft, prince," added the professor, as the island drifted past; "she quite inclines me towards a breach of the tenth commandment. now that you have given us this taste of the delights of speed, i think that if i were a millionaire, i should try to build one to beat her." "exactly," laughed oscarovitch. "it is marvellous this fascination of speed. your poet, henley, touched the pulse of the times when he wrote those splendid lines of his. but surely, professor, _you_ would not have very much difficulty in leaving all far behind. a man to whom mathematical impossibilities are as easy as an addition sum ought to be able to realise the dream of the ages and solve the problem of aerial navigation." he looked him straight in the eyes as he said this. he fully believed in the possibility of human flight, given the transcendent genius who could work out the equation of weight and power. perhaps that genius might be with him now in the bridge-house. his vivid imagination was already picturing the lovely girl at his side crowned empress of the russias and the east, and himself in command of an aerial navy, beneath whose assault the armies and navies and fortresses of the rest of the world would be as so many toys to play with and destroy. "if i could do that, and i do not think it would be so very difficult after all," said franklin marmion, returning his glance, "i would not do it. it would put too much power in the hands of a few men, and we have enough of that already. the owner of a fleet of aerial warships would be above all human law. he could terrorise the earth, and make mankind his slaves. life would become unendurable under such conditions. commercialism, which only means slavery plus the liberty to starve, is bad enough, but it is at least possible. the other would be impossible. there is no man quite honest enough to be trusted with such a power as that. i have worked the thing out, and it is perfectly feasible, but i burnt my designs and calculations." "what!" exclaimed oscarovitch, flushing in spite of his effort to keep the blood back from his face. "you have solved the problem, and won't make use of the greatest invention of all the ages! surely, professor, that is a little quixotic, is it not?" "who am i that i should bring a curse upon humanity, prince?" he answered gravely. "do you not kill each other fast enough now? no, the world is not fit for such a development yet. my results will remain my own until tom hood's ideal of good government has been realised." "and what was that, dad?" asked nitocris, who had a double reason for being interested in the conversation. "if i ever knew it, i have forgotten it." "despotism, niti--and an angel from heaven for the despot," he replied, with another look into the prince's eyes which brought him to the conclusion that the sooner his presence on board the _grashna_ was dispensed with the better for his plans. there was a sense of quiet mastery in franklin marmion's manner which made him uneasy. "ah! there is the famous fortress, is it not? the home of hamlet and ophelia and the ghost!" she exclaimed, pointing ahead to where a grey-blue mass was rising out of the water. "do you believe in ghosts, prince?" she added suddenly, flashing a glance at him which seemed to pierce his brain like a ray of unearthly light. "ghosts? no, miss marmion. i'm afraid i am too hopelessly materialistic for that. i never saw or heard of an authentic ghost, and i do not propose to believe until i see." "we have a ghost at 'the wilderness,'--the wraith of a poor young lady who killed herself after some royal blackguard had abused his own hospitality. she often comes to visit me in my study," said the professor, as though he were relating the most ordinary occurrence. "ah," smiled the prince, "that is very interesting: but, of course, it would be in the power of a man like yourself to have experiences which are denied to ordinary mortals. still, granted all that, i confess that i have often wondered whether or not i should be frightened if i really did see a ghost." "yes, i wonder?" murmured nitocris, with a great deal more meaning than he had any idea of just then. all three felt that the conversation was getting a little difficult, and they were not sorry when the rapid rising of the rock of elsinore made it necessary for oscarovitch to go out to the engine telegraph. "his highness doesn't believe in ghosts now," whispered nitocris to her father, when the door shut behind him, "but i think he will before very long. i wonder what he is really going to do? i've half a mind to----" "no, no, niti," he said quickly; "keep this side of the border till you really have to cross it. what on earth, literally, would happen if he came back and found me standing here alone?" "oh, of course i didn't mean it," she smiled. "it would be very poor sport to spoil both the comedy and the tragedy before the curtain goes up. i wonder if the drama will begin to-night? i shouldn't be surprised." "nor i," said the professor, a trifle grimly. "i didn't at all like his looks when i was talking about the flying machine. the brute looked as if he were quite capable of locking me up and starving or torturing me until i gave him the secret. my word, i should like to see him try! i'd have him grovelling at my feet in five minutes." the door opened and oscarovitch came in. he took off the cap which had been pulled tight over his eyes, and said: "well, we have arrived! almost exactly forty-five minutes. there is elsinore, there is kronborg, king frederick's sixteenth-century castle, and there is marienlyst, which is to copenhagen what brighton is to london, only, i must say, in a much more refined sense. now what is your pleasure, miss marmion? we have still nearly two hours before lunch, so, if you would like an hour's stroll ashore, the gig will be ready in a couple of minutes." "thank you, prince," she said with a rewarding smile. "dad, what do you think? it all looks very beautiful under this sun and sky." "which, of course, means that you want to go ashore, niti," said her father. "for my own part, i certainly should like a little walk on new ground. i have never been here before." "then, of course we will go," said oscarovitch, opening the door and going to the telegraph. the yacht came to a standstill in a few minutes, and the gig was waiting at the foot of the gangway ladder. they spent a very pleasant hour ashore, and what they saw, you may read of in your murray and baedeker, wherefore there is no need to set it down here. when they came aboard again, lunch was almost ready, and the steward presented his master and the professor with quite exceptional cocktails in the smoking-room. then they went and had a wash, and the mellow gong sounded. i am not very fond of those descriptions in stories which read like extracts from an upholsterer's price-list, nor yet those accounts of meals that, after all, are only menus writ large, so it may suffice to say that the saloon of the _grashna_ was an arrangement of sandal-wood panels, framed in thin silver filigree, and hung with exquisite little masterpieces in water-colour, and black and white, and crayon, mostly sea-scapes, with here and there a beautiful head with living eyes which followed you everywhere; that the rich yellow of the panels was enhanced by _portières_ and curtains of deep golden-bronze silk, and that the domed ceiling was of pale, sky-blue enamel spangled with the constellations of the northern heavens, which at night lit up the whole saloon with a soft electric radiance. as for the lunch, it was as nearly perfect as the best-paid chef afloat could make it, after his master had asked him as a personal favour to do so. they ran back quietly to copenhagen at twenty knots, and oscarovitch and the professor went ashore to send off a few telegrams, leaving nitocris, for her own reasons, to make herself at home on the yacht. they returned in time to dress for dinner and enjoy a stroll on the broad upper deck, and watch the sunset over the town and the quickly-increasing sparkle of the myriad lights on shore and sea. when they came up after dinner, these lights were only represented by a luminous haze glimmering under the stars to the northward. the _grashna_ was heading nearly due south at an easy speed towards the baltic islands. something told both nitocris and her father that the decisive hour would come soon, and they were both prepared for its advent. chapter xxiii the disappearance of the professor the prince and the professor sat up in the smoking-room for a considerable time after nitocris had retired. oscarovitch was doing his utmost to persuade his guest to revoke his decision as to the creation of the aerial warships. franklin marmion's simple announcement, which he never thought for a moment of disbelieving, had filled his mind with new ideas, which were rapidly taking the shape of gorgeous dreams of an empire such as mortal man had never ruled over before. all his present designs faded away into mere trivialities in comparison with this splendid conception. he pictured nitocris, as his consort, empress of the air, and himself lord of earth and sea and sky. but all his subtle arguments, all his delicately-put suggestions, and his skilfully framed promises failed to produce the slightest effect upon the genially inflexible man, who quietly turned them all aside, as a grown man might deal with the arguments of a boy. the thought that this man who was lying back in his deep-seated armchair, holding a cigar in a white, delicately-shaped hand which was strong enough to shake the world to its foundations, should possess such a tremendous power and yet refuse to use it, as quietly as he might have declined an invitation to dinner, exasperated him almost beyond the bounds of patience. if he would only join forces with him what glories might they not achieve, what splendours of power and possession might not be theirs! here was universal empire, in one sense, only a couple of yards away from him! in another it was more distant than the suns which flame in space beyond the milky way. it was maddening, but it was true, and he knew the man well enough now to feel absolutely assured that no extremity of mental or physical torment would wring the priceless secret from him. well, if it had to be, it must be. if he could not learn the secret, at least no one else should. before morning it would be buried for ever under the waters of the baltic, and he would revenge himself on the daughter for that which the father refused to do. if franklin marmion would not give him the sceptre of the world-empire, then nitocris should be his wife and empress if she would, and if not, his slave and plaything, as he had sworn to phadrig the egyptian. the fortress-castle of oscarburg, on the lonely wooded shore of viborg bay, had kept many a secret safely before now, and it would keep this one. every retainer in the castle, every man, woman, and child on the estates for leagues around, was his, body and soul, as their fathers before them had been the blind, unquestioning serfs of his fathers. there his word was law, and his will was fate. there was no "liberty" within his domains, since no man wanted it, or would have understood it had it been given to him. when their argument was over they parted, apparently the best of friends. franklin marmion went to bed calmly curious as to what was going to happen, and oscarovitch paid a visit to his captain. a little after three that morning he opened the door of the professor's state-room very gently and looked in. the room was dark, and he listened. a soft, just audible sound of breathing came from the bed. it was the breathing of a man fast asleep. he pressed the spring of his electric lamp, and turned the thin ray on to the water-bottle in the rack over the wash-stand. it was half-empty, and a glass stood on the table in the middle of the room. then the ray fell on the face of the sleeping man. it was as prince zastrow's face had been the last night he went to sleep in the castle of trelitz--rather the face of a corpse than that of a living man. his captain stood behind him, and he turned and whispered: "he is ready. are the men below?" "all, highness, save grovno at the wheel and hartog on the look-out. they will see nothing, as they did before," came the whispered reply. "very well, then. you and i can manage this between us. you have the line?" the captain nodded, and they went into the room, softly closing the door. in a few minutes they came out again, carrying between them a long bundle of blankets lashed from end to end with thin line. they took it aft along the alloway and out on to the lower deck by the stern. two iron doors of a port used for coaling stood open on the starboard side. on the deck lay a couple of pigs of iron lashed together. these the captain made fast to one end of the bundle and lifted them towards the port. oscarovitch took hold of the other end. they lifted it. the weights dropped outside the port, and the bundle followed them. the captain started up, clasped his hands to his forehead, and said in a gasping whisper: "holy god, highness, what have we done?" "what do you mean, derevskin? you have obeyed my orders; that is all. is it not enough for you?" "yes, highness--but who or what was that man? was he really a man?" "are you mad, derevskin?" "no, highness, i hope not: but did you hear--or, rather, did you not hear?" "what, you fool?" "he--it--the body--it made no splash when it touched the water!" the stammered words struck oscarovitch like so many puffs of frozen air. no, the body of franklin marmion _had_ made no splash. it had vanished through the port into silence. that was all. he beat back his own terror with the exertion of all his will-power, and said in a sneering whisper: "derevskin, you are either mad or drunk; but i will forgive you this time because you have obeyed. go to bed, and don't forget to be either sober or sane when i come on deck." the captain bowed his head, and went forward with shambling steps and shaking limbs. oscarovitch closed the port with hands which all his force could not keep steady, and betook himself to bed, to lie awake for the rest of the short summer night wondering vainly what really had happened. he had had his bath and dressed soon after six, and went on deck. the captain was on the bridge, and he joined him. "good morning, derevskin!" "i have the honour to wish your highness good morning!" "nothing happened during the night worth reporting, i suppose?" "no, highness, nothing." "very good: but i have slept badly, and you look as if you had been on the bridge all night. perhaps it is necessary among all these islands, and i am pleased that you are so watchful, especially as i have guests on board. come down to your room now and send your steward for a bottle. it will do neither of us any harm." there was a somewhat lengthy conversation over this early breakfast of champagne and biscuits after the door had been closed and locked, and when it was finished, oscarovitch and his captain understood each other as completely as was necessary. an hour later he saw nitocris walking about the upper deck looking pale and anxious. he went to her and said in a tone which intentionally betrayed his own nervousness: "good morning, miss marmion! have you seen anything of the professor?" "no, prince, i have not. i went to his room just now and knocked. there was no reply and i opened the door. the room was empty, but he had evidently been to bed. is he not on deck?" "no, miss marmion, he is not. he said last night that he would like his bath about six, and the steward i sent to valet him went to his room and found it as you say. i have had the ship searched high and low, and from stem to stern, and there is no sign of him. i have had every one questioned, and no one has seen anything of him since last night." "oh, my poor, poor dad, i have lost him! yes, i suppose it must have been that. he has walked overboard." "walked overboard, miss marmion?" "yes, yes, it must be that. prince oscarovitch, my father, like most very clever men, had one dangerous failing. he walked in his sleep and did things unconsciously. that was why he told you about the ghost at 'the wilderness' just as though he really had seen it. yes, he must have got up in the night and come on deck, and walked overboard, and so i have lost the best friend i ever had, or shall have. you must excuse me, prince. i must go to my room. the very sunlight seems horrible now. jenny will look after me. good morning!" her face was white and her eyes were staring at nothing. she spoke with a horrible, stony calm which, crime-hardened as he was, sent a thrilling shiver through his nerves. a spasm of remorse shook him; then his self-control came back, and he offered her his arm in silence. he led her down to the saloon, and gave her into jenny's charge. then he went on deck again, lit a cigar, and proceeded to congratulate himself on the great good fortune which had, from his point of view at least, so happily explained away the disappearance of franklin marmion. chapter xxiv the lust that was--and is nitocris kept her room until nearly seven the following evening. oscarovitch made frequent enquiries of jenny as to her condition, and always received the same reply. her mistress was in a semi-unconscious state, and she could only rouse her every now and then to take a little nourishment. unfortunately there was no doctor on board. he had had news in copenhagen that his mother was lying very ill at hamburg, and, as the cruise was then intended to be only a very short one, he had been given leave to go to her. the prince wished to go back to copenhagen, but this nitocris absolutely refused. she had determined to fight her sorrow alone, and when she had conquered it, she would go back to england and her friends--which was exactly what oscarovitch had determined she should not do. she was absolutely at his mercy now. he would be something worse than a fool to let such a golden opportunity go by--and so the _grashna's_ bowsprit was kept pointing eastward, and the leagues between her and oscarburg were being flung behind her as fast as the whirling screws could devour them. the only question that he had to ask himself was: how? and to that an easy answer at once suggested itself: the horus stone. when he went down to what he expected would be a lonely dinner, he was more than agreeably surprised to find nitocris dressed in a black evening costume, which was the nearest approach to mourning that her available wardrobe made possible, already in the saloon. he bowed to her with a gesture of reverence, which meant far more than mere formal politeness, and said in a low tone: "miss marmion, i need not say how pleased i am to find that you are able to leave your room. may i hope that you will be able to dine?" "yes, prince," she replied, in the same cold, mechanical voice in which she had answered the tidings of her father's death. "the worst is over now, i hope. some time and some way we must all leave the world and, at least, there is the consolation that my father has left it perhaps a little better and a little wiser than he found it. that, i think is as much as the ordinary mortal may be permitted to hope for. we who hold the doctrine do not sorrow for the dead: we only sorrow for ourselves who are left to wait until we may, perhaps, meet again." "the doctrine, miss marmion?" he asked, as he placed a chair for her at his right hand. "may i ask what the doctrine is?" "of re-incarnation," she replied, sitting down and looking at him across the corner of the table. "really? i most sincerely wish that i could believe in it. mr amena, whom i took the great liberty of bringing to your garden-party, a man of very remarkable powers, as you saw, holds the doctrine, as you call it, and he has been trying for months to convert me to it; but, as i said going to elsinore, i'm afraid i am too hopelessly materialistic for any conversion to be possible in my case, at least as far as my present experiences have gone." "as the belief so must be the faith," she said with a grave smile. "it is no more possible to have true faith when you do not really believe than it is to be hungry when you have not got an appetite. that is quite a material simile; but i think it is true." "absolutely true!" he replied, looking at her again with a note of interrogation in each eye. "but, really, these things are too deep for me, a mere human animal. and now, talking about appetite, here comes the soup." the dinner _à deux_ was just what he had intended it to be, simple and yet perfect in every detail. the subject of franklin marmion's departure from the world was, as if by mutual consent, dropped. oscarovitch comforted such conscience as he had by trying to believe that what nitocris had said about her belief in the doctrine was to her really true. he also honestly believed that she had faced her great sorrow in solitude, and overcome it in the strength of that belief. their conversation turned easily away to other topics, and by the time that coffee was brought in and he had obtained her permission to light a cigarette, his beautiful guest appeared to have left the recent past behind her, for the time being at least, and was almost as she had been during the run up to elsinore. her manner was that of complete composure, and it is hardly necessary to say that this mastery of her emotion forced him to a degree of admiration, almost of worship, which the physical charm that appealed only to his animal senses could never have inspired. here, truly, was the ideal empress of the russias and the east sitting almost beside him. and now the psychological moment had come! "will you excuse me for a couple of minutes, miss marmion?" he asked, as he finished his coffee and rose from his chair. "going back to what you were saying about re-incarnation: i have something in my room which i hope may interest you. i got it from my friend, the miracle-worker. he told me a long story about it that i don't want to trouble you with: but the thing in itself is quite worth seeing. at least, i never saw anything like it before." "then please let me see it," she replied, assenting with an inclination of her head. "if that is so it must be, as you say, well worth seeing." he went to his room and came back with a large square morocco case in his hand. he gave it to her, and said: "do me the favour to open it, and tell me what you think of it." she touched the spring and the cover flew up. she half-expected what she saw. there, lying in a nest of soft black velvet, encircled by a triple halo of whitely gleaming diamonds, was the horus stone. in an instant she travelled back through fifty centuries to the scene of the death-bridal of her other self, nitocris the queen, in the banqueting-hall of the palace of pepi. then it had lain gleaming on her breast, and now she saw it again with the eyes of flesh, after nearly five thousand years. now, too, she grasped in all the fullness of its evil meaning the reason why oscarovitch had brought it to her in such an hour as this. with utter contempt in her soul and a smile on her lips, she leaned back in her chair and said in a voice which had a note of ecstasy in it: "oh, prince, how lovely! what a glorious gem! the diamonds are, of course, splendid, but they are only a setting for the emerald. what a magnificent stone! rich as you are, you are very fortunate to be the possessor of such a treasure--for treasure it surely must be." "it is, as you say, a magnificent stone," he replied, looking steadily into her questioning eyes. "but if what amena told me was true, it is something more than a unique gem. there is an inscription on it, some characters carved in the stone which are, as he said, the history of it, but to me they are as unintelligible as the assyrian cuneiform would be. possibly you may know something of them. if you do, here is a lens that will help your sight." she took the glass from him and bent down over the gem. she read the sacred symbol of the trinity as she had read it and known it ages before. but while she was gazing at it, she also read the intent of the man who had given it into her hands. she put the lens aside, and, laying her palms on her temples, she looked deep down into the luminous depths of the great emerald in a silence which oscarovitch interpreted into such meaning as he was able to make for himself. minute after minute passed in silence, and still her eyes were fixed upon the stone. her face became like that of a beautiful masterpiece of phidias: pure, cold, and true. a feeling of something like awe crept over him as he watched her, and he found himself asking whether, after all, phadrig's story might have been true. but, true or not, there was the fascination which, as phadrig had told him, had lured isaac josephus to his self-inflicted doom. her eyes were chained to the gem: her face was no longer that of a living woman dominated by her own will. after all his disbelief, there _was_ an enchantment in the stone, for here, even she, nitocris, had succumbed to it. he sat and waited for a few minutes longer. if there is magic in the stone, let it work, he thought; and so he sat and watched her until he saw that the fixed stare of her eyes and the rigidity of her now perfectly statuesque face convinced him that the magic of the stone had, as phadrig had told him, made him the possessor of it, absolute master of the man or woman who had gazed upon its fatal beauty. then he got up and, reaching over her shoulders, took up the diamond chain, glistening under the soft light of the starry dome of the saloon, shook it out into a flood of white radiance, lifted it above her head, and let it fall very gently round her neck. the horus stone, as though endowed with sentience, fell and rested where it had rested five thousand years before. as it touched her flesh nitocris felt a tremor of indescribable emotion, not only of the body but of the soul, pass through her. she leaned back in her chair again, and whispered: "is it really mine now, prince? but no! how could i take it from you--i who can give nothing in exchange for such a treasure? no, no, you must take it back. i am not worthy to wear it." he laid his hands gently on her arms, and said in a soft, murmuring tone which sounded like the purring of a tiger-cat: "nitocris, if all the choicest gems in all the world could be put into a crucible and fused into one, all its splendour would still be unworthy to lie on that white breast of yours. give me your love, nitocris. i am hungering and thirsting for it. come with me to oscarburg, and you shall be crowned princess--and after that empress--empress of the russias and the east. i will give you a dominion such as the great catherine never dared to dream of. say yes, and in a month you shall be seated on her throne. it is only a little word, dearest, only a little word--will you not say it, and be my princess, my queen, my empress?" "i am tired now, oscar," she said wearily, "so much has happened in so short a time. yes, i will, if it is possible: but let me go now. no, you must not kiss me yet. remember that russian saying, 'take thy thoughts to bed with thee, for the morning is wiser than the evening.' good-night, oscar, i am very tired. you shall have your answer in the morning. may i take this with me?" "yes," he replied, giving her his hand as she rose from her chair, and bowing over hers until his lips touched it. "take it, unworthy as it is, as an earnest of the realisation of the happy dreams that will come to me to-night. au revoir, pas adieu!" "auf viedersehn, mein oscar!" she replied as she passed him, leaving the sensation of a gentle flutter of her hand in his. "we shall understand each other better still before long--i hope." "it is my dearest wish. good-night, nitocris, and when the dawn comes may it find nothing but sunshine in that sweet soul of yours!" nitocris went to her room and found her maid waiting, white-faced and anxious. she was frightened and nearly worn out with caring for her mistress. she would have been very glad to have been back that very night at "the wilderness," even if it had lost its master. "go to bed at once, jenny; you look like a ghost, as you may well do after all the trouble i've given you. no, i don't really want you, and you want sleep rather badly. go to bed, like a good girl. it will not be the first time that i have undressed myself." and when jenny had gone and she had locked the door, nitocris stripped herself, save for the collar of diamonds and the pendant horus stone. she took a long veil of indian muslin out of her dress-box and wound it round her after the fashion of old egypt, leaving her left breast bare. only the ureaus crown was wanting to make her, in the flesh, nitocris the queen: but here on her bosom flashed and flamed the horus stone--hers once again, as it had been in the far-off past, symbol of her sovereignty, and proof of her faith in the one true doctrine. she looked at the lovely reflection in the long mirror behind her dressing-table, and said to herself in a low, whispering laugh: "this for you, oscar oscarovitch that is, menkau-ra who was! yes, you may dream your pleasant dreams to-night; you may take me to your lonely castle in viborg bay; you may make me marry you, as you think i shall--and here is my wedding gift--mine again after all these ages--blessed be for ever the holy trinity, osiris, isis, and horus. may the most high gods help and protect me!" she raised the sacred stone to her lips as she spoke, turned off the light, and lay down in her bed to dream dreams of forgotten ages. chapter xxv the passing of phadrig in all london, or, indeed, in any capital of europe, there were no more angrily puzzled men than nicol hendry and his colleague and subordinates. he was perfectly certain now that phadrig amena held the key to the conspiracy which had resulted in the disappearance of prince zastrow. oscarovitch had vanished. he had been traced to copenhagen, and then absolutely lost sight of. three agents, all picked experts, had been put on to watch phadrig and the pentanas, as they were known to him, and within a fortnight they had all died. one had fallen down crossing the north side of trafalgar square: the verdict had been heart failure. another threw himself into the river from the tower bridge; and the third, a woman who was one of the most skilful spies in the service of the international, had made his acquaintance and had dinner with him at the "monico," and was found dead the next morning with an empty morphia syringe in her hand and a swollen puncture in her left arm. thus four more or less valuable lives had been lost, and not a shred of tangible evidence obtained against the egyptian. convinced as he was that this man was as responsible for their deaths as he had been for that of josephus, neither he nor his colleagues could find the slightest grounds for applying for a warrant for his arrest, and meanwhile things were going from bad to worse in russia. the romanoff dynasty was tottering to its fall. the responsible leaders of the revolution, angry and bewildered by the loss of the man whom they had practically chosen to rule over them, were distributing thousands of copies of an unsigned manifesto which could not have come from any one but "the new skobeleff." what was left of the army and the navy was rallying to the nameless standard of the still unknown saviour of russia. von kessner and captain vollmar had apparently ceased to exist, and the princess hermia was living with her lady-in-waiting in the strictest retirement in dresden. "it seems to me that things are at an utter deadlock," said nicol hendry to the chief of the german section, who had come over to london to confer with him. "four of our best agents have died in a fortnight, and the others are getting shy. really, we can't blame them. this is not like fighting the ordinary sort of anarchist or regicide, who, after all, does content himself with physical means. this infernal scoundrel, as i must confess i was warned to begin with, is quite independent of the rules of the game. he kills people by their own hands, not his, and, literally, there seems no way of catching him." "there must be a way, my dear hendry," replied the german, who was the very incarnation of mechanical officialism. "you look at these things as consequences, i regard them only as rather extraordinary coincidences. if this is anything like what you seem to think it, it is supernatural, and i don't believe in that." "there is a very easy way to convince yourself, my dear von hamner," replied hendry, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. "suppose you go and interview this modern mephistopheles yourself?" "will you come with me if i do?" asked the german, with a straight stare through his spectacles. "certainly. in our profession it is necessary to take risks. the thing has gone far enough. here we are in my room at new scotland yard, the centre and stronghold of the british police system, and there is this man or super-man, if you like, making no sign, doing nothing that will give us a hold upon him, and yet killing our agents as fast as we send them to find out what he is working at, and we know just as much to-day as we did three weeks ago. now, what is your idea?" "just this: if the english law won't touch him, do as we do in germany, take the law into your own hands. we know where the fellow is to be found down in that slum near the borough road. send a few of your plain-clothes men there this afternoon, and we will follow in a cab. bring your bracelets with you, and i shall take my revolver. we don't want any nonsense this time. if it goes on much longer we shall be the laughing-stock of the whole force from end to end of europe, and that will not do us any good. shall it be for this afternoon?" "it will be better done now. he has worked mischief enough, and if we are going to do it we may as well bring the thing to a head at once, as they say in the states. now i will give the instructions, and we will go to lunch. it may be the last that either of us will eat, you know." "poof!" exclaimed von hamner, who was feeling not a little nettled at this quiet challenge to test his personal courage. "you are the last man on earth that i should have suspected of superstition, my dear hendry. but, there, give your orders, and we will go to lunch, and then about four o'clock we may make our call in candler's court." while the two chiefs of the international were talking, phadrig was reading a cypher telegram, of which the meaning was this: "reval.--professor fell overboard three days ago. body not recovered. horus stone did its work. n. consents. i marry her at oscarburg. russia ready. fool international for a few days and come to viborg when you have done with them. o." "that is good news," said phadrig, in a confidential whisper to himself; "for a man on the lower plane of existence the prince is wonderfully clever. this is a master-stroke. if he really has the queen in his power all the rest will be easy." "there's two gentlemen to see you, mr amena." the door opened, and his landlady's dirty little daughter put her towsled head through the little space behind the doorpost. "they're down below; shall i send 'em up?" "certainly, jane. tell the gentlemen that i shall be pleased to see them." the dirty face vanished as the door closed. phadrig shut down the top of the big escritoire and locked it. heavy treads sounded on the rickety stairs. there was a shuffle of feet on the little landing, a sharp knock at the door, and he said in a low tone: "come in, gentlemen. i have been expecting you." the door opened and nicol hendry entered, followed by his german colleague. practised as they were in all the arts of their profession, they looked about the mean, miserably appointed room with curious eyes. phadrig, dressed in the same shabby semi-oriental costume in which he had received isaac josephus, salaamed, and said: "gentlemen, although this is but a poor room to receive you in, i am pleased that you have come. you are officers of the international, if i am not mistaken." then his speech changed to german, and he went on: "you, sir, are m. nicol hendry, and your friend is the herr von hamner, chief of the berlin section. what can i do to serve you?" it was anything but the greeting that they expected. they thought that they had tracked the real criminal to his last hiding-place. they had established the identity between phadrig, the poor seller of curios, and phadrig amena, the worker of miracles, whom all the smart set in london was talking about; and here he was in this miserable, shabby room, dressed in clothes that no pawnbroker would advance a couple of shillings on, smiling and bowing before them as though they were lords of the earth, and he--the man who had sent three men and a woman to their deaths by, as it were, a mere word of command--a worm beneath their feet. nicol hendry managed to keep his self-possession, but von hamner was already sorry that he had come, and his face showed it. "we have come to ask you, mr amena," said hendry, thinking it best to come to the point at once, "why you found it necessary to kill those people. i needn't mention names. you know them as well as we do." "i did not kill them, gentlemen. they killed themselves, according to the newspaper reports. and now, may i ask you why you found it necessary to set these spies of yours to watch my every movement night and day? what have i done to bring myself within the four corners of your english law?" "nothing, unfortunately, that we can get a warrant for," replied hendry, trying not to look into his eyes, "and so we have taken the law into our own hands. come, mr amena, the game is up. we know all about your share in the conspiracy to remove prince zastrow in order to make room for your patron prince oscarovitch. we have copies of his manifesto at scotland yard, and we know that you received a telegram in cypher from him to-day." "ah!" said phadrig, in a tone whose smoothness was intensely aggravating, "that is very interesting. may i ask if you have translated the cypher?" "no, damn you and your prince!" burst in von hamner. "if we had done that we should know even more about you than we do now--and that ought to be enough to hang you." he had spluttered the words out before hendry had time to stop him. he expected a tragedy there and then, but it did not happen. phadrig took the telegram out of his coat pocket, handed it to von hamner with a graceful bow, and said: "your information is quite correct, gentlemen. that is the telegram, and this is the meaning of it." then as they read the unintelligible jumble of words, he repeated the meaning of them as though they formed the most ordinary message, instead of a dispatch that might, as they well knew, shake europe to its social and political foundations within the next week or so. "then this is another of your devilries, i suppose," snarled von hamner. "so you have killed the great professor marmion, the most gifted genius in the whole world, as you killed the others, to promote your infernal schemes; and you have helped that scoundrel oscarovitch to abduct his daughter. well, law or no law, this shall be the end of your doings. you will come with us as our prisoner, or you will not leave this room alive." "those are hard words, mein herr," said phadrig, still speaking in german. "i your prisoner! why? what have i done to make this outrage on english law possible?" "you will do better to come, mr amena," said hendry, in his quiet official tone; "it will save a good deal of trouble both to you and us. it must be the same in the end, you know. we have got you, and we don't mean to let you do any more mischief. you have done quite enough already. now, will you come quietly, or shall we take you? we shall charge you at lambeth as a receiver of stolen goods: you will be remanded for a week in custody, and by that time we shall have your prince in safe keeping in st petersburg." "will you, really?" asked phadrig, lifting his eyelids for the first time during the interview. "i should have thought that a man of your european experience would have called the russian capital by its proper name. surely you know that only newspaper people make that mistake. it is the city of peter the great, not saint peter the apostle. the fortress of petro-paulovsky is not named after saints--only after tsars." there was a sneer in his voice as he made this trivial correction which roused both hendry and von hamner to anger. the german pulled his revolver out of his hip pocket, and hendry produced a beautiful pair of polished handcuffs from his left trouser pocket. "ah, i see that you have come prepared, gentlemen!" said phadrig, with a laughing sneer in his low-voiced whisper. "those are what you call the bracelets in england, are they not? well, since you are determined to take the law into your hands--here are mine. put them on m. hendry, and then your friend may not think it necessary to try and shoot me." he held his hands out. the way in which he said "try and shoot me" did not sound well in their ears, but nicol hendry thought that the work had to be put through now or not at all. he took a couple of steps towards phadrig, and a couple of sharp snaps told von hamner that their prisoner was safe. but the prisoner did not seem to think so. he raised his hands and looked at the handcuffs. he seemed to examine them as though they were curiosities. "are these really what you take criminals to prison with? they don't seem very strong. i could break them as though they were thread." "that will do, mr amena. you've got them on now, and we don't want any more of your conjuring tricks. come along, and take it quietly like a sensible man." hendry was fast losing patience, and von hamner was doing all he could to keep his finger off the trigger of the revolver. "ah yes, conjuring tricks you call them, you ignorants! now look. you have put the handcuffs on to my wrists. is this a conjuring trick? see!" he held his arms out towards them, his two hands chained together. "mr hendry, be good enough to take my right hand, and you, herr von hamner, my left. so; now shake my hands. you see, there are the handcuffs on the floor." it was only a shake of the hands, but the clink of the steel followed as the bracelets dropped from his wrists. he stooped down, and inside ten seconds they were clipped round von hamner's. in the same instant he had twitched the revolver out of his hand and pointed it at hendry's face. "now, gentlemen, you were talking about taking the law into your own hands. i, you see, have taken it into mine. what do you propose to do? i am quite at your service. your idea of arresting me on a charge of receiving stolen goods is, if you will allow me to say so, absurd. you could no more make me guilty of that than you could hang me for the deaths of those foolish spies of yours. now, what is it to be? pardon me, herr von hamner: the bracelets inconvenience you. allow me." he took the handcuffs between his finger and thumb, shook the chain, and they dropped into his hand. "you will feel more comfortable now." "yes, and i'll make you less comfortable in hell, where you should have been long ago," shouted von hamner, jumping at him the moment his hands were free, and snatching the revolver out of his hand. the pistol went up before hendry could get hold of his arm, and he fired. phadrig put his hand up, and when the smoke had drifted away, he held it out to von hamner, and said: "i think that is your bullet, mein herr." the bullet was lying in the palm of his hand, a little out of shape through passing the rifling, but still the same bullet. the german's face turned a reddish-grey, and nicol hendry, with all his courage, was not feeling particularly well. as a matter of fact, he was, for the first time in his life, absolutely frightened. a man who could deal with handcuffs as though they were made of cotton, and catch a bullet in his hands, was not the sort of criminal he had been trained to hunt. as for von hamner, he was in a state of utter collapse. he dropped upon a chair, a pitiable spectacle of craven fear, looking about half his real size so physically shrunken did he seem. "let the devil go, hendry," he mumbled. "he is more than man. what is the use? if you cannot shoot him, you cannot hang him, and if handcuffs won't hold him, prison doors won't. let us go and leave the devil to himself. i've had enough of it." "but perhaps the devil has not," said phadrig, with a politeness which was infuriating in its mildness. "you gentlemen will understand that i do not wish to have this espionage going on any longer. if you cannot promise that it shall stop at once i shall, for my own protection, have to suggest to you that you shall remove yourselves, as the others have done." "no, no, not that, man, not that!" shouted von hamner, springing from his seat and making for the door. "i have done with the whole business, curse it! let me go, let me go! hendry, do as you like, but do it alone. i have finished." before hendry could reply, or before von hamner could reach it, the door was flung open, and franklin marmion strode into the room. von hamner crawled back to his chair. he did not like the look of a dead man who had come to life again. nicol hendry held out his hand, and said: "and is it really you, professor? mr amena here has just had news that you were dead--'fallen overboard in the baltic from prince oscarovitch's yacht. body not recovered,' is what the telegram says." "the body is here right enough, m. hendry. i did not fall overboard. i was bound hand and foot, had a mass of iron tied to my feet, and was thrown out of a port-hole by the prince and his captain. of course, i got rid of the rope and the iron even more easily than this man got rid of your handcuffs a short time ago, and after keeping myself afloat for half an hour or so, i was picked up by a fishing-boat which took me to stralsund. i got a change of clothes there, and came home _viâ_ hamburg and ostend. my daughter has gone on in the yacht to oscarburg, where the prince expects to make her his wife, and where she will make a very considerable fool of him. that is all, and now i suppose i had better deal with this man." "mercy, mercy, thou who knowest! pity, pity!" phadrig raised his hands above his head, turned round thrice slowly, and sank in a heap on the floor. "thou who wast once high priest in the house of ptah: thou who hast held the doctrine: thou darest to ask for mercy, knowing well that there is no forgiveness of sins: thou hast taken innocent lives, believing thyself above human law. a wasted life is behind thee: see that thou doest better for thy soul's sake in the next. die now! the high gods have spoken, and the penalty of sin is death--and the life beyond. die!" and phadrig died. his eyes glazed and his flesh withered; his lips and his gums dried up and shrivelled away from his jaws. his clothes fell away from his body in rotting shreds, and before nicol hendry and von hamner had quite grasped the full meaning of the horror that was happening before their eyes, all that was left of him was a little heap of yellow bones with a few fragments of cloth clinging to them. "gentlemen," said franklin marmion, "there are some things which cannot be told. i think you will agree with me that this is one of them. mr amena has left the world for the present. those bones will be dust in a few minutes. it will only be another mysterious disappearance, and i don't think that any one except the pentanas and prince oscarovitch will trouble much about him. the pentanas are now deprived of all power for harm, and the prince will probably be a harmless lunatic when he comes back into the world. i should sweep that dust up and put it into the fireplace, if i were you. in that desk you will find documents giving the whole history of the affaire zastrow. they will be useful to you. you will have to excuse me now. europe is on the brink of war, and i must go and remove the cause. i rely upon your discretion as to the events of this afternoon. au revoir. i shall have the pleasure of seeing you again shortly." the door closed, and they were left to their somewhat gruesome task. chapter xxvi captain merrill's commission franklin marmion found a hansom in the borough road and drove to waterloo. he had just time to wire to merrill to meet him at the "keppel's head" for dinner and catch the new . express for portsmouth. merrill was waiting for him in the smoking-room. as they shook hands, he said in the quiet tone which is characteristic of his profession: "your wire was rather sudden news, professor. i thought you were somewhere in the baltic. your coming back like this seemed to mean something, and so i took the liberty of having a private room for our dinner." "perfectly right, my dear merrill," he replied. "let us go upstairs at once. i have a good deal to say to you, and what i am going to say will have to be done quickly." "we have our sailing orders for the baltic, and the special squadron leaves spithead at midnight. come upstairs, professor, and we can talk." dinner was served a few minutes after they got into the room that merrill had reserved on the first floor. the waiter was dismissed and the door locked, and then franklin marmion told mark merrill the most wonderful story he had ever heard. if it had come from any one else he would have put it down as a lie, but he remembered what had happened in the lecture theatre of the royal society, and so he held his peace. it was quite impossible for him to disbelieve anything the father of his best beloved told him. when the professor had finished the story of nitocris and the prince, he leaned his elbows on the table, and said: "now, my dear merrill, i am going to put it into your power to save europe from the horrors of a universal war: but to that you must be prepared to take risks which may result in your being dismissed the service. on the other hand, if you succeed, as you are almost certain to do if you act strictly on the instructions that i am going to give you, you will be a captain in a month, and a vice-admiral in a year." "but i'm a captain now, professor. i was keeping that little bit of news for you. i hoisted my pennant this morning on his majesty's ship _nitocris_: new second-class cruiser, eight thousand tons, and twenty-four knots: as pretty a ship as elswick ever turned out. and the name: it came to me like a revelation." "possibly it was, in a sense that you may not quite understand now, but you will understand it when you and niti are married. she will be better able to explain it then than i could now." "and what are the orders--i mean, of course, the private ones? ours are: sail at midnight, make kronstadt in forty-eight hours: command the approaches to riga and st petersburg, and wait for the developments of this manifesto which seems to be setting what is left of russia on fire. germany is in with us for the time being: france and italy and our mediterranean squadron will see to things in the near east, and altogether there seem to be the prospects of a very handsome sort of row." "which you, my dear merrill, will be the means of preventing," said franklin marmion, taking a piece of folded tracing paper out of the inside pocket of his coat. "i yield to circumstance. the name of your new ship convinces me that i was wrong in certain other circumstances. you will give me a passage to viborg on the _nitocris_. you will take french leave of the fleet as soon as you sight kronstadt, get into viborg bay at your best speed, land your men, take the castle, which is quite undefended, bring away prince zastrow and oscarovitch, and, of course, niti; put your two princes on board the flagship, bring them back to england, and dictate terms from london. it seems a good deal to do, but i will make it possible, if you are prepared to do as i advise you. there is the chart showing the approaches to oscarburg." "i'll do it, sir," said merrill, taking the tracing from his hand. "i'll break every regulation of the service into little pieces to get that done. now, i ought to be getting on board. are you ready?" "quite," said franklin marmion, rising from his chair. "i see now where the man of action comes in. i did not see that before, i must confess." chapter xxvii the bridal of oscarovitch the special service squadron steamed out of spithead as the clock of portsmouth town hall chimed twelve that night. thirty-six hours later a marriage ceremony took place in the chapel of the castle of oscarburg. it was performed according to the rites of the orthodox church, and the witnesses were prince zastrow and his medical attendant, doctor hugo. the retainers of the castle, headed by the major-domo and the housekeeper, formed the congregation. jenny was up in her mistress' room packing as though for an immediate departure. she was very frightened at the happenings of the past three or four days, but she contented herself with the thought that her mistress was going to be a princess, and that, therefore, her own lot in life would be brightened with reflected glory. when the ceremony was over, the wedding feast was held in the great dining-hall of the castle after the ancient finnish style. when the loving-cup had been drunk, nitocris took leave of her lord and went to her room. the bridal chamber was blazing with light, and the great silken-hung bed was a couch fit for a queen. she turned the draperies down, laid herself dressed on the thick, downy bed, and then got up and went back to her own. "i shall sleep here to-night, jenny, and i shall not undress. you mustn't do, either. lock the door, and put the sofa across it. you will find that something is going to happen to-night. is everything ready for us to go away?" "yes, your highness," replied jenny, wondering what was going to happen next. "you must not call me highness, jenny," said her mistress, with a laugh. "i did not marry the prince to-day. it was some one else he knew a long time ago. i have put her to bed in that splendid bridal chamber of his. she is waiting for him now." "but i don't understand, miss--i----" "there is no need for you to understand, jenny. just be a good girl, and do as you're told. when we get back to england i will explain matters as far as i can." miss jenny wisely decided to keep her thoughts to herself, and went on with her packing. nitocris changed her bridal dress for her yachting costume, and lay down on the couch to await the progress of events. oscarovitch left the company in the dining-hall to their revel in about an hour's time, and went up to his fate in the bridal chamber. he knocked and opened the door softly: locked it, and went toward the bed. he leaned over it for a moment, and then a hoarse shriek of mingled rage and terror rang through the room. he flung the clothes off the bed. where was the lovely bride he had wedded only a few hours before? what was this horrible thing lying where _she_ should have been? not nitocris--and yet, it _was_ nitocris. like a flash of lightning rending the darkness of the midnight heavens, the gap of oblivion between his lives was rent, and the light flamed into his soul. phadrig had lied to him. the daughter of rameses had not died that night in the banqueting chamber of the palace of pepi. she had lived and reigned virgin queen of the sacred land. her body had been submitted to the hands of the paraschites and buried in the city of the dead over against memphis, on the eastward side of the river. and here was her mummy lying in his bridal bed, mocking him with its hideous, stony rigidity. for a few terrible moments he stood staring at it, his clenched fists raised above his head. then with another scream he cast himself upon it. when they broke the door open, they found the man who in a few days would have been emperor of the russias and the east lying across the bed mowing and gibbering like a mad monkey, and scraping up handfuls of brown dust from the stained sheets. * * * * * twenty-four hours later the admiral in command of the british special squadron off kronstadt saw the private signal flashed from the north-east. he was a very angry admiral, for he had lost a brand-new cruiser and one of the smartest captains in the service. but the signal spelt "_nitocris_. all well. coming alongside." "all well, and be damned to you, captain merrill!" muttered the admiral under his breath, when the signal was read to him. "this is a nice way to begin a new command. i've half a mind to put him under arrest: but he's a good man. i'd better hear what he has to say for himself first. i wonder what the deuce he's been doing with that cruiser since he took her away without leave? well, here she is, i suppose." but it was not h.m.s. _nitocris_ that came out of the night glittering with electric lights and flying through the water at a speed that the fastest destroyer in the squadron could not have equalled. a whistle tooted softly, a white shape swung up out of the darkness and slowed down alongside the flagship. a boat dropped into the water, and three minutes later captain mark merrill ran up the gangway ladder, saluted the quarter-deck, and handed his sword to the admiral. "i have done wrong, sir, but i hope that i have also, in another sense, done right. i have brought both princes with me." "both princes--good lord, sir, what do you mean?" "may i come below with you, sir, and explain? it has been rather delicate work, but we've got it through all right, i think." "then keep your sword for the present, and come and tell me what you have to say." captain merrill followed the admiral to his room, and told the story of the taking of the oscarburg--a very easy matter with a hundred bluejackets at his back--the capture of oscarovitch, who was now in a straight waistcoat on board his own yacht, the rescue of prince zastrow and nitocris, and---- "the other nitocris is following, sir," he concluded. "i thought i had better take the yacht. she can make a good thirty-five knots, and that's useful when you're in a hurry. and now, sir, i am at your disposal." "rubbish!" said the admiral, holding out his hand. "captain merrill, i don't quite know how you've done it, but you've saved europe, and perhaps the world, from war. if you hadn't brought those two princes of yours to-night, we should have been fighting germany for the possession of kronstadt before mid-day to-morrow. those were the orders. now, of course, they can do nothing, as you have brought prince zastrow back from the dead. he's their choice, and you had better get him and the other away to london as soon as i have seen them, and you can take my report with you on that thirty-five knotter after breakfast to-morrow morning. now, it's getting late. i'll say good-night." epilogue the double wedding which took place at st george's, hanover square, the following june was one of the most brilliant functions of the year. their majesties of russia and great britain graced the ceremony with their presence, and, as a special act of grace to the man who, with franklin marmion's help, had saved the world from what might have been one of the bloodiest wars in history, h.m.s. _nitocris_ was put into commission for a cruise, the object of which was anything rather than warlike. two of the happiest couples on land or sea made the round of the world in her. before they returned princess hermia had taken the last of phadrig's drug and lain down to sleep never to wake again, and in the fullness of her happiness nitocris pardoned oscar oscarovitch, and allowed him to die. the end supernatural & occult fiction an arno press collection ainsworth, w[illiam] harrison. ~auriol~: or, the elixir of life. [c. ] arlen, michael. ~ghost stories~. [ ] balzac, honoré de. horace de saint-aubin, pseud. ~the centenarian~; or, the two beringhelds. translated from the original french edition by george edgar slusser. beck, l[ily moresby] adams. ~the ninth vibration, and other stories~. benson, e[dward] f[rederick]. ~spook stories~. [ ] blackwood, algernon. ~the centaur~. blackwood, algernon. ~strange stories~. boothby, guy. ~pharos, the egyptian~. ~the boyhood days of guy fawkes~; or, the conspirators of old london, [c. ] [burrage, alfred mclelland]. ex-private x, pseud. ~someone in the room~. [ ] [carnegie, james], [ninth] earl of southesk. ~suomiria~: a fantasy. coppard, a [lfred] e[dgar]. ~the collected tales of a. e. coppard~. crawford, f[rancis] marion. ~with the immortals~. [dalton]. ~the gentleman in black~. de la mare, walter. ~the return~. doughty, francis worcester. ~mirrikh; or, a woman from mars~: a tale of occult adventure. erckmann, [emile and alexandre] chatrian. ~the man-wolf, and other tales~. [c. ] ewers, hanns heinz. ~alraune~. translated by s. guy endore. fielding, henry. ~a journey from this world to the next~. gautier, théophile. ~spirite~. translated by arthur d. hall. griffith, george. ~the mummy and miss nitocris~: a phantasy of the fourth dimension. [ ] [hadley, george]. ~argal; or, the silver devil~, being the adventures of an evil spirit, related by himself. two vols. in one. [ ] haggard, h[enry] rider. ~allan and the ice-gods~: a tale of beginnings. harvey, william fryer. ~midnight house and other tales.~ hearn, lafcadio. ~fantastics and other fancies.~ edited by charles woodward hutson. hecht, ben. ~fantazius mallare:~ a mysterious oath. hecht, ben. ~the kingdom of evil:~ a continuation of the journal of fantazius mallare. [heron-allen, edward]. christopher blayre, pseud. ~the strange papers of dr. blayre.~ holmes, oliver wendell, [sr.]. ~elsie venner:~ a romance of destiny. housman, clemence. ~the were-wolf.~ ingram, eleanor m. ~the thing from the lake.~ james, m[ontague] r[hodes]. ~the five jars.~ [johnstone, charles]. an adept, pseud. ~chrysal:~ or, the adventures of a guinea. two vols. in one. keller, david h. ~the devil and the doctor.~ knowles, vernon. ~the street of queer houses and other tales.~ le fanu, j[oseph] sheridan, charles young and others. ~a stable for nightmares or weird tales.~ [an anonymous anthology]. [le sage, alain rené]. ~the devil on two sticks.~ [a translation of _le diable boiteux_]. machen, arthur. ~the children of the pool and other stories.~ [mackay, mary]. marie corelli, pseud. ~the strange visitation of josiah mcnason:~ a christmas ghost story. marryat, florence. ~the dead man's message:~ an occult romance. marsh, richard. ~the beetle.~ menville, douglas and r. reginald, editors. ~ancient hauntings.~ menville, douglas and r. reginald, editors. ~phantasmagoria.~ merritt, a [braham] and hannes bok. ~the fox woman and the blue pagoda~ _and_ ~the black wheel.~ two vols. in one. / molesworth, mrs. [mary louisa stewart]. ~uncanny tales.~ o'donnell, elliott. ~the sorcery club.~ [oliver, george]. oliver onions, pseud. ~widdershins.~ [paget, violet]. vernon lee, pseud. ~for maurice:~ five unlikely stories. pain, barry [eric odell]. ~robinson crusoe's return.~ [ ] paine, albert bigelow. ~the mystery of evelin delorme:~ a hypnotic story. phillpotts, eden. ~a deal with the devil.~ powys, john cowper. ~morwyn:~ or, the vengeance of god. praed, mrs. [rosa caroline murray-prior] campbell. ~the brother of the shadow:~ a mystery of to-day. reginald, r. and douglas menville, editors. ~r. i. p.~: five stories of the supernatural. reginald, r. and douglas menville, editors. ~the spectre bridegroom, and other horrors.~ reynolds, george w. m. ~the necromancer:~ a romance. russell, w[illiam] clark. ~the death ship:~ a strange story. three vols. in one. sicard, clara. ~the ghost:~ a legend. [ ] viereck, george sylvester. ~the house of the vampire.~ [vivian, evelyn charles]. jack mann, pseud. ~maker of shadows.~ [ ] wakefield, h[erbert] russell. ~ghost stories.~ [wall, john w.]. "sarban", pseud. ~ringstones and other curious tales.~ [ward, arthur sarsfield]. sax rohmer, pseud. ~grey face.~ whiting, sydney. ~heliondé~; or, adventures in the sun. printed at the edinburgh press, and young street generously made available by the internet archive.) glimpses of the supernatural. the other world; or, glimpses of the supernatural. being facts, records, and traditions relating to dreams, omens, miraculous occurrences, apparitions, wraiths, warnings, second-sight, witchcraft, necromancy, etc. edited by the rev. frederick george lee, d.c.l. _vicar of all saints', lambeth._ in two volumes. vol. ii. henry s. king and co., london. . (_all rights reserved._) contents of vol. ii. page chapter vi. spectral appearances of persons at the point of death and perturbed spirits chapter vii. haunted houses and localities chapter viii. modern spiritualism chapter ix. modern spiritualism (_continued_) chapter x. summary and conclusion general index spectral appearances. "now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a little thereof. in thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: it stood still, but i could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes."--_job iv. - ._ chapter vi. spectral appearances. examples of spectral appearances are so numerous, and the editor has collected so many, both ancient and modern, that considerable difficulty has been occasioned in determining which shall here be set forth. the following, chosen from examples, some well known and well authenticated, and others now first published, but equally interesting and important, and coming to the editor upon very high authority, deserve the best consideration of the reader. the following record describes what is known as the "chester-le-street" apparition:-- "about the year of our lord (as near as i can remember, having lost my notes and the copy of the letter to serjeant hutton, but i am sure that i do most perfectly remember the substance of the story), near unto chester-in-the-street, there lived one walker, a yeoman of good estate, and a widower, who had a young woman to his kinswoman, that kept his house, who was by the neighbours suspected to be with child, and was, towards the dark of the evening one night, sent away with one mark sharp, who was a collier, one who digged coals under ground, and one that had been born at blackburn hundred in lancashire; and so she was not heard of a long time, and no noise, or little, was made about it. in the winter time after, one james graham, or grime, for so in that country they call them, being a miller, and living about two miles from the place where walker lived, was one night alone very late in the mill grinding corn; and about twelve or one of the clock at night, he came down the stairs from having been putting corn in the hopper; the mill doors being shut, there stood a woman upon the midst of the floor, with her hair about her head, hanging down and all bloody, with five large wounds on her head. he being much affrighted and amazed began to bless himself;[ ] and at last asked her who she was, and what she wanted. to which she said, 'i am the spirit of such a woman who lived with walker, and being got with child by him, he promised to send me to a private place, where i should be well-looked to, till i was brought to bed, and well again; and then i should come again and keep his house. and, accordingly,' said the apparition, 'i was one night sent away with one mark sharp, who, upon a moor (naming a place that the miller knew) slew me with a pick, such as men dig coals withal and gave me these five wounds, and after threw my body into a coal-pit hard by, and hid the pick under a bank; and his shoes and stockings being bloody, he endeavoured to wash them; but seeing the blood would not forth, he hid them there.' and the apparition further told the miller that he must be the man to reveal it, or else that she must still appear and haunt him. the miller returned home very sad and heavy, but spoke not one word of what he had seen, but eschewed as much as he could to stay in the mill within night without company, thinking thereby to escape the seeing again of that frightful apparition. but notwithstanding, one night when it began to be dark, the apparition met him again and seemed very fierce and cruel, and threatened him that if he did not reveal the murder she would continually pursue and haunt him; yet, for all this, he still concealed it until s. thomas' eve before christmas; when being soon after sunset walking in his garden, she appeared again, and then so threatened him, and affrighted him, that he promised faithfully to reveal it next morning. in the morning he went to a magistrate, and made the whole matter known with all the circumstances; and diligent search being made, the body was found in a coal-pit, with five wounds in the head, and the pick and shoes and stockings yet bloody; in every circumstance as the apparition had related unto the miller; whereupon walker and mark sharp were both apprehended, but would confess nothing. at the assizes following, i think it was at durham, they were arraigned, found guilty, condemned and executed; but i could never hear they confessed the fact. there were some that reported the apparition did appear unto the judge, or the foreman of the jury, who was alive in chester-in-the-street about ten years ago, as i have been credibly informed, but of that i know no certainty. there are many persons yet alive that can remember this strange murder, and the discovery of it; for it was, and sometimes yet is, as much discoursed of in the north country, as anything that almost hath ever been heard of, and the relation printed, though now not to be gotten. i relate this with the greater confidence (though i may fail in some of the circumstances) because i saw and read the letter that was sent to serjeant hutton, who then lived at goldsburgh in yorkshire, from the judge before whom walker and mark sharp were tried, and by whom they were condemned, and had a copy of it until about the year , when i had it and many other books and papers taken from me; and this i confess to be one of the most convincing stories, being of undoubted verity, that ever i read, heard, or knew of, and carrieth with it the most evident force to make the most incredulous spirit to be satisfied that there are really, sometimes, such things as apparitions.--william lumley."[ ] the above account, in which the object of the spectral appearance is obvious enough, is taken from the well-known "history of durham," by that celebrated antiquarian the late mr. robert surtees. it needs no comment, telling as it does so well, in quaint but plain language, its own remarkable story. the next example to be recorded, the apparition of the rev. mr. naylor, may be found in mr. john nichols' "literary illustrations,"[ ] and, though less startling than that already given, is certainly not without its own inherent interest:-- "part of a letter from mr. edward walter, fellow of s. john's college, cambridge, to his friend in the country, dated 'dec. , .' "'i should scarce have mentioned anything of the matter you write about of my own accord; but, since you have given yourself the trouble of an inquiry, i am, i think, obliged in friendship to relate all that i know of the matter; and that i do the more willingly, because i can so soon produce my authority. "'mr. shaw, to whom the apparition appeared, was rector of soldern, or souldern, in oxfordshire, late of s. john's college aforesaid; on whom mr. grove, his old fellow collegiate, called july last in his journey to the west, where he stayed a day or two, and promised to see him again on his return, which he did, and stayed three days with him; in that time one night after supper, mr. shaw told him that there happened a passage which he could not conceal from him, as being an intimate friend, and one to whom this transaction might have something more relation than another man. he proceeded therefore, and told him that about a week before that time, viz. july the th, , as he was smoking and reading in his study about eleven or twelve at night, there came to him the apparition of mr. naylor, formerly fellow of the said college, and dead some years ago, a friend of mr. shaw's, in the same garb he used to be in, with his hands clasped before him. mr. shaw, not being much surprised, asked him how he did and desired him to sit down, which mr. naylor did. they both sat there a considerable time and entertained one another with various discourses. mr. shaw then asked him after what manner they lived in the separate state; he answered, far different from what they do here, but that he was very well. he inquired further, whether there was any of their old acquaintance in that place where he was? he answered, 'no, not one;' and then proceeded and told him that one of their old friends, naming mr. orchard, should die quickly, and he himself should not be long after. there was mention of several people's names; but who they were, or upon what occasion, mr. grove cannot or will not tell. mr. shaw then asked him whether he would not visit him again before that time; he answered, no, he could not; he had but three days allowed him, and farther he could not go. mr. shaw said, "_fiat voluntas domini_;" and the apparition left him. this is word for word as mr. shaw told mr. grove, and mr. grove told me. "'_note._--what surprised mr. grove was, that as he had in his journey homewards occasion to ride through clopton, or claxton, he called upon one mr. clark, fellow of our college aforesaid and curate there, when inquiring after college news, mr. clark told him arthur orchard[ ] died that week, aug. , , which very much shocked mr. grove, and brought to his mind the story of mr. shaw afresh. about three weeks ago mr. shaw died of apoplexy in the desk, [_i. e._ when ministering in church,] of the same distemper poor arthur orchard died of. "'_note._--since this strange completion of matters, mr. grove has told this relation, and stands to the truth of it; and that which confirms the narrative is, that he told the same to dr. baldiston, the present vice-chancellor and master of emanuel college, above a week before mr. shaw's death; and when he came to the college he was no way surprised as others were. "'what farthers my belief of its being a true vision and not a dream, is mr. grove's incredulity of stories of this nature. considering them both as men of learning and integrity, the one would not first have declared, nor the other have spread the same, were not the matter serious and real. "'edward walter.'" the following example of an apparition in scotland, unlike those already recorded, carries with it evidences of truth:-- "a gentleman of rank and property in scotland served in his youth in the army of the duke of york in flanders. he occupied the same tent with two other officers, one of whom was sent on some service. one night during his absence, this gentleman while in bed saw the figure of his absent friend sitting on the vacant bed. he called to his companion, who also saw the figure, which spoke to them, and said he had just been killed at a certain place, pointing to his wound. he then requested them on returning to england, to call at a certain agent's house in a certain street, and to procure from him a document of great importance for the family of the deceased. if the agent, as was probable, should deny the possession of it, it would be found in a certain drawer of a cabinet in his room. next day it appeared that the officer had been shot as he had told them, in the manner and at the time and place indicated. after the return of the troops to england, the two friends walking together one day, found themselves in the street where the agent lived, and the request of their friend recurred to both, they having hitherto forgotten it. they called on the agent, who denied having the paper in question; when they compelled him in their presence to open the drawer of the cabinet, where it was found and restored to the widow."[ ] an authentic record of the "tyrone," or "beresford apparition," will now be given. it created a very great sensation at the time of its occurrence; and the narrative which follows has been pronounced traditionally "true and accurate" by a member of the family:-- "lord tyrone and miss ---- were born in ireland, and were left orphans in their infancy to the care of the same person, by whom they were both educated in the principles of deism. their guardian dying when they were each of them about fourteen years of age, they fell into very different hands. "the persons on whom the care of them now devolved, used every means to eradicate the erroneous principles they had imbibed, and to persuade them to embrace revealed religion, but in vain. their arguments were strong enough to stagger their former faith. though separated from each other, their friendship was unalterable, and they continued to regard each other with a sincere and fraternal affection. "after some years were elapsed, and both were grown up, they made a solemn promise to each other that whichever should die first, would, if permitted, appear to the other, to declare what religion was most approved by the supreme being. "miss ---- was shortly after addressed by sir martin beresford, to whom she was after a few years married, but a change of condition had no power to alter their friendship. the families visited each other, and often spent some weeks together. a short time after one of these visits, sir martin remarked, that when his lady came down to breakfast, her countenance was disturbed, and inquired after her health. she assured him she was quite well. he then asked her if she had hurt her wrist: 'have you sprained it?' said he, observing a black ribbon round it. she answered in the negative, and added, 'let me conjure you, sir martin, never to inquire the cause of my wearing this ribbon; you will never see me without it. if it concerned you as a husband to know, i would not for a moment conceal it: i never in my life denied you a request, but of this i entreat you to forgive me the refusal, and never to urge me further on the subject.' 'very well,' said he, smiling; 'since you beg me so earnestly, i will inquire no more.' "the conversation here ended; but breakfast was scarcely over when lady beresford eagerly inquired if the post was come in; she was told it was not. in a few minutes she rang again and repeated the inquiry. she was again answered as at first. 'do you expect letters?' said sir martin, 'that you are so anxious for the arrival of the post?' 'i do,' she answered, 'i expect to hear that lord tyrone is dead; he died last tuesday at four o'clock.' 'i never in my life,' said sir martin, 'believed you superstitious; some idle dream has surely thus alarmed you.' at that instant the servant entered and delivered to them a letter sealed with black. 'it is as i expected,' exclaimed lady beresford, 'lord tyrone is dead.' sir martin opened the letter; it came from lord tyrone's steward, and contained the melancholy intelligence of his master's death, and on the very day and hour lady beresford had before specified. sir martin begged lady beresford to compose herself, and she assured him she felt much easier than she had done for a long time; and added, 'i can communicate intelligence to you which i know will prove welcome; i can assure you, beyond the possibility of a doubt, that i shall in some months present you with a son.' sir martin received this news with the greatest joy. "after some months lady beresford was delivered of a son (she had before been the mother of only two daughters). sir martin survived the birth of his son little more than four years. "after his decease his widow seldom left home; she visited no family but that of a clergyman who resided in the same village; with them she frequently passed a few hours; the rest of her time was spent in solitude, and she appeared determined for ever to banish all other society. the clergyman's family consisted of himself, his wife, and one son, who at the time of sir martin's death was quite a youth; to this son, however, she was after a few years married, notwithstanding the disparity of years and the manifest imprudence of a connexion so unequal in every point of view. "lady beresford was treated by her young husband with contempt and cruelty, while at the same time his conduct evinced him the most abandoned libertine, utterly destitute of every principle of virtue and humanity. by this, her second husband, she had two daughters; after which such was the baseness of his conduct that she insisted on a separation. they parted for a few years, when so great was the contrition he expressed for his former conduct, that, won over by his supplications, promises, and entreaties, she was induced to pardon, and once more to reside with him, and was in time the mother of a son. "the day on which she had lain-in a month being the anniversary of her birthday, she sent for lady betty cobb (of whose friendship she had long been possessed), and a few other friends, to request them to spend the day with her. about seven, the clergyman by whom she had been christened, and with whom she had all her life been intimate, came into the room to inquire after her health. she told him she was perfectly well, and requested him to spend the day with them; for, said she, 'this is my birthday. i am forty-eight to-day.' 'no, madam,' answered the clergyman, 'you are mistaken; your mother and myself have had many disputes concerning your age, and i have at last discovered that i was right. i happened to go last week into the parish where you were born; i was resolved to put an end to the dispute; i searched the register, and find that you are forty-seven this day.' 'you have signed my death warrant,' she exclaimed; 'i have then but a few hours to live. i must therefore entreat you to leave me immediately, as i have something of importance to settle before i die.' "when the clergyman had left her, lady beresford sent to forbid the company coming, and at the same time to request lady betty cobb and her son (of whom sir martin was the father, and who was then about twenty-two years of age), to come to her apartment immediately. upon their arrival, having ordered the attendants to quit the room, 'i have something,' she said, 'of the greatest importance to communicate to you both before i die, a period which is not far distant. you, lady betty, are no stranger to the friendship which subsisted between lord tyrone and myself: we were educated under the same roof and in the same principles of deism. when the friends, into whose hands we afterwards fell, endeavoured to persuade us to embrace revealed religion, their arguments, though insufficient to convince, were powerful to stagger our former feelings, and to leave us wavering between the two opinions: in this perplexing state of doubt and uncertainty, we made a solemn promise to each other that whichever died first should (if permitted) appear to the other, and declare what religion was most acceptable to god; accordingly, one night, while sir martin and myself were in bed, i suddenly awoke and discovered lord tyrone sitting by my bedside. i screamed out and endeavoured to awake sir martin. "for heaven's sake," i exclaimed, "lord tyrone, by what means or for what reason came you hither at this time of night?" "have you then forgotten our promise?" said he; "i died last tuesday at four o'clock, and have been permitted by the supreme being to appear to you to assure you that the revealed religion is true, and the only religion by which we can be saved. i am further suffered to inform you that you will soon produce a son, who it is decreed will marry my daughter; not many years after his birth sir martin will die, and you will marry again, and to a man by whose ill-treatment you will be rendered miserable: you will have two daughters and afterwards a son, in childbirth of whom you will die in the forty-seventh year of your age." "just heavens!" i exclaimed, "and cannot i prevent this?" "undoubtedly," returned the spectre; "you are a free agent, and may prevent it all by resisting every temptation to a second marriage; but your passions are strong, you know not their power; hitherto you have had no trials. more i am not permitted to reveal, but if after this warning you persist in your infidelity, your lot in another world will be miserable indeed." "may i not ask," said i, "if you are happy?" "had i been otherwise," he replied, "i should not have been permitted to appear to you." "i may, then, infer that you are happy?" he smiled. "but how," said i, "when morning comes, shall i know that your appearance to me has been real, and not the mere representation of my own imagination?" "will not the news of my death be sufficient to convince you?" "no," i returned, "i might have had such a dream, and that dream accidentally come to pass. i will have some stronger proofs of its reality." "you shall," said he, and waving his hand, the bed curtains, which were crimson velvet, were instantly drawn through a large iron hoop by which the tester of the bed was suspended. "in that," said he, "you cannot be mistaken; no mortal arm could have performed this." "true," said i, "but sleeping we are often possessed of far more strength than when awake; though waking i could not have done it, asleep i might; and i shall still doubt." "here is a pocket-book; in this," said he, "i will write my name; you know my handwriting." i replied, "yes." he wrote with a pencil on one side of the leaves. "still," said i, "in the morning i may doubt; though waking i could not imitate your hand, asleep i might." "you are hard of belief," said he. "touch would injure you irreparably; it is not for spirits to touch mortal flesh." "i do not," said i, "regard a slight blemish." "you are a woman of courage," said he, "hold out your hand." _i did; he struck my wrist: his hand was cold as marble; in a moment the sinews shrunk up, every nerve withered._ "now," said he, "while you live let no mortal eye behold that wrist: to see it is sacrilege." he stopped; i turned to him again; he was gone. "'during the time i had conversed with him my thoughts were perfectly calm and collected; but the moment he was gone i felt chilled with horror, the very bed moved under me. i endeavoured, but in vain, to awake sir martin; all my attempts were ineffectual, and in this state of agitation and terror i lay for some time, when a shower of tears came to my relief and i fell asleep. "'in the morning sir martin arose and dressed himself as usual, without perceiving the state the curtains remained in. when i awoke i found sir martin gone down; i arose, and having put on my clothes, went to the gallery adjoining the apartment and took from thence a long broom (such as cornices are swept with); by the help of this i took down with some difficulty the curtains, as i imagined their extraordinary position might excite suspicion in the family. i then went to the bureau, took up my pocket-book, and bound a piece of black ribbon round my wrist. when i came down, the agitation of my mind had left an impression on my countenance too visible to pass unobserved by my husband. he instantly remarked it, and asked the cause; i informed him lord tyrone was no more, that he died at the hour of four on the preceding tuesday, and desired him never to question me more respecting the black ribbon, which he kindly desisted from after. you, my son, as had been foretold, i afterwards brought into the world, and in little more than four years after your birth your lamented father expired in my arms. after this melancholy event i determined, as the only probable chance to avoid the sequel of the prediction, for ever to abandon all society, to give up every pleasure resulting from it, and to pass the rest of my days in solitude and retirement. but few can long endure to exist in a state of perfect sequestration: i began an intimacy with a family, and one alone; nor could i foresee the fatal consequences which afterwards resulted from it. little did i think their son, their only son, then a mere youth, would form the person destined by fate to prove my destruction. in a very few years i ceased to regard him with indifference; i endeavoured by every possible way to conquer a passion, the fatal effects of which i too well knew. i had fondly imagined i had overcome its influence, when the evening of one fatal day terminated my fortitude and plunged me in a moment down that abyss i had so long been meditating how to shun. he had often solicited his parents for leave to go into the army, and at last obtained permission, and came to bid me adieu before his departure. the instant he entered the room he fell upon his knees at my feet, told me he was miserable, and that i alone was the cause. at that moment my fortitude forsook me, i gave myself up as lost, and regarding my fate as inevitable, without further hesitation consented to a union, the immediate result of which i knew to be misery, and its end death. the conduct of my husband after a few years amply justified a separation, and i hoped by these means to avoid the fatal sequel of the prophecy: but won over by his reiterated entreaties, i was prevailed upon to pardon and once more reside with him, though not till after i had, as i thought, passed my forty-seventh year. "'but alas! i have this day heard from indisputable authority that i have hitherto lain under a mistake with regard to my age, and that i am but forty-seven to-day. of the near approach of my death then i entertain not the slightest doubt; but i do not dread its arrival; armed with the sacred precepts of christianity i can meet the king of terrors without dismay, and without fear bid adieu to mortality for ever. "'when i am dead, as the necessity for concealment closes with my life, i could wish that you, lady betty, would unbind my wrist, take from thence the black ribbon, and let my son with yourself behold it.' lady beresford here paused for some time, but resuming the conversation she entreated her son would behave himself so as to merit the high honour he would in future receive from a union with the daughter of lord tyrone. "lady b. then expressed a wish to lay down on the bed and endeavour to compose herself to sleep. lady betty cobb and her son immediately called her domestics and quitted the room, having first desired them to watch their mistress attentively, and if they observed the smallest change in her, to call instantly. "an hour passed and all was quiet in the room. they listened at the door and everything remained still, but in half an hour more a bell rang violently; they flew to her apartment, but before they reached the door, they heard the servants exclaim, 'oh, she is dead!' lady betty then bade the servants for a few minutes to quit the room, and herself with lady beresford's son approached the bed of his mother; they knelt down by the side of it; lady betty lifted up her hand and untied the ribbon,--_the wrist was found exactly as lady beresford had described it, every sinew shrunk, every nerve withered_. "lady beresford's son, as had been predicted, is since married to lord tyrone's daughter. the black ribbon and pocket-book were formerly in the possession of lady betty cobb, marlborough buildings, bath, who, during her long life, was ever ready to attest the truth of this narration, as are, to the present hour, the whole of the tyrone and beresford families."[ ] three remarkable examples of spectral appearances must now be given, because of their inherent interest and corresponding likeness. the first is recorded by glanville, a learned and pious author already referred to; the second is the case of dr. ferrar, and the third that of the "wynyard ghost story." (i.) glanville tells a story regarding the appearance of a spirit in fulfilment of a promise made during lifetime, which is full of point and purpose. it runs thus. the substance, not the exact words, of the narrative are here given:--in the seventeenth century there lived two friends, major george sydenham of dulverton in the county of somerset, and captain william dyke of the same county. they were both reputed to be unbelievers in the christian religion, if not avowed atheists. during the civil wars they had each served under the parliamentary generals, and took an active part on the side of the rebels. having held many discussions both on the subject of religion and irreligion, they eventually argued out the fact of the immortality of the soul, which each felt disposed to deny: and finally they agreed between themselves that whichever of them died first, should (if such a possibility existed,) appear on the third day after death to the survivor in major sydenham's summer-house at dulverton, and enlighten him as to the existence of a future state of rewards and punishments. in due course major sydenham died; and captain dyke, in company with a cousin of his own, a celebrated physician, who was attending a sick child at major sydenham's house, but who knew nothing of the matter in hand, arrived there. captain dyke and his relative dr. dyke, the physician, occupied the same bedroom. the latter was surprised to hear the captain ask of the servant for two of the largest candles that could be obtained, and sought an explanation. the captain then informed him of his promise to major sydenham, and of his own determined resolution to fulfil it. dr. dyke urged with considerable force that as there was no warrant for making such engagements, they were to be regarded as unquestionably wrong; and pointed out, firstly, that evil spirits might take advantage of the situation, and secondly, that such a tempting of the almighty was altogether wrong. "this may be all very true," responded captain dyke, "but as i faithfully promised to go, go i will. if you will come and sit up with me, well and good: and i shall be grateful. but if not, i shall certainly go alone." then, placing his watch on the table, he waited until half-past eleven; when taking up the candles, he walked up and down in close proximity to the entrance of the summer-house, until two o'clock, without either seeing or hearing anything extraordinary. upon this he formed two conclusions; either that the soul perished with the body, or that the laws of the spiritual world forbade his friend major sydenham abiding by his pledge. six weeks afterwards, however, captain dyke and his relation the physician had occasion to go to eton, where one of the sons of the former was to be placed at the college. they lodged at the s. christopher's inn, occupying different sleeping-rooms. on the last morning of their stay, captain dyke was unusually late, and when he entered the doctor's room was like a man struck with madness, his eyes staring, his knees refusing to support him, and his whole appearance altered. "what is the matter?" asked dr. dyke. "i have seen the major," replied the captain; "for if ever i saw him in my life, i certainly saw him just now." upon the doctor pressing for details, captain dyke gave the following account:--"after it was first light this morning, someone pulled back the curtains of my bed suddenly, and i saw the major exactly as i had seen him in life. 'i could not,' he said, 'come at the time appointed, but i am here now to tell you that there is a god, a very just and terrible god, and that if you do not turn over a new leaf you will find it so.' he then disappeared." it is said, finally, that captain dyke's truthfulness was so notorious, as to preclude the possibility of doubting his relation of the occurrence. furthermore, the apparition and warnings of his departed friend exercised a visible effect on his character and life, which latter was prolonged for two years; during which period he is said to have had the words then spoken to him always sounding in his ears. (ii.) the celebrated nicholas ferrar, of little gidding, (who, in the seventeenth century, lived a most retired, religious, and pious life,) had a brother, a physician in london. this physician made a compact with his eldest and favourite daughter that whichever of them died first should, if happy, appear to the other. this compact is said to have proved the subject of many conversations and religious discussions between father and child. the latter is reported to have been very averse to making any such agreement; but being overcome by arguments as to the reasonableness of such a course (if permitted by a gracious and merciful god) at last consented. after this she married and settled with her husband at gillingham lodge, in the county of wiltshire. here she was prematurely confined; and during her illness, one night by mistake took poison, and died quite suddenly. that very night her spirit appeared to her father in london, the curtains of whose bed she drew back, and with a sweet but mournful expression looked upon him, and then gradually faded away. in fact, and as a test of the objective reality of his daughter's apparition, dr. ferrar, deeply impressed by the occurrence, announced the death of his daughter to his family two days before he received intelligence of it by the then tardy post. (iii.) john cope sherbroke and george wynyard appear in the "army list" of , the one as a captain and the other lieutenant in the rd regiment,--a corps which some years after had the honour to be commanded by the hon. arthur wellesley, subsequently duke of wellington. the regiment was then on service in canada, and sherbroke and wynyard, being of congenial tastes, had become great friends. it was their custom to spend in study much of the time which their brother officers devoted to idle pleasures. according to a narration[ ] resting on the best authority now attainable, they were one afternoon sitting in wynyard's apartment. it was perfectly light, the hour was about four o'clock: they had dined, but neither of them had drunk wine, and they had retired from their mess to continue together the occupations of the morning. it ought to have been said that the apartment in which they were had two doors in it, the one opening into a passage and the other leading into wynyard's bedroom. there was no other means of entering the sitting-room, so that any person passing into the bedroom must have remained there unless he returned by the way he entered. this point is of consequence to the story. "as these two young officers were pursuing their studies, sherbroke, whose eyes happened accidentally to glance from the book before him towards the door which opened to the passage, all at once observed a tall youth of about twenty years of age whose appearance was that of extreme emaciation. struck with the presence of a perfect stranger, he immediately turned to his friend, who was sitting near him, and directed his attention to the guest who had thus strangely broken in upon their studies. as soon as wynyard's eyes were turned towards the mysterious visitor his countenance became suddenly agitated. 'i have heard,' says sir john sherbroke, 'of a man's being as pale as death, but i never saw a living face assume the appearance of a corpse except wynyard's at that moment.' as they looked silently at the form before them--for wynyard, who seemed to apprehend the import of the appearance, was deprived of the faculty of speech, and sherbroke, perceiving the agitation of his friend, felt no inclination to address it--as they looked silently upon the figure it proceeded slowly into the adjoining apartment, and in the act of passing them cast its eyes with an expression of somewhat melancholy affection on young wynyard. the oppression of this extraordinary presence was no sooner removed than wynyard, seizing his friend by the arm, and drawing a deep breath as if recovering from the suffocation of intense astonishment and emotion, muttered in a low and almost inaudible tone of voice, 'great god, my brother!' 'your brother!' repeated sherbroke, 'what can you mean? wynyard, there must be some deception; follow me;' and immediately taking his friend by the arm, he preceded him into the bedroom, which, as before stated, was connected with the sitting-room, and into which the strange visitor had evidently entered. it has already been said that from this chamber there was no possibility of withdrawing but by the way of the apartment, through which the figure had certainly never returned. imagine then the astonishment of the young officers when, on finding themselves in the chamber, they perceived that the room was perfectly untenanted. wynyard's mind had received an impression at the first moment of his observing him, that the figure whom he had seen was the spirit of his brother. sherbroke still persevered in strenuously believing that some delusion had been practised. they took note of the day and hour in which the event had happened, but they resolved not to mention the occurrence in the regiment, and gradually they persuaded each other that they had been imposed upon by some artifice of their fellow-officers, though they could neither account for the means of its execution. they were content to imagine anything possible rather than admit the possibility of a supernatural appearance. but though they had attempted these stratagems of self-delusion, wynyard could not help expressing his solicitude with respect to the safety of the brother whose apparition he had either seen or imagined himself to have seen; and the anxiety which he exhibited for letters from england, and his frequent mention of his brother's health, at length awakened the curiosity of his comrades, and eventually betrayed him into a declaration of the circumstances which he had in vain determined to conceal. the story of the silent and unbidden visitor was no sooner bruited abroad than the arrival of wynyard's letters from england were welcomed with more than usual eagerness, for they promised to afford the clue to the mystery which had happened among themselves. "by the first ships no intelligence relating to the story could have been received, for they had all departed from england previously to the appearance of the spirit. at length, the long wished-for vessel arrived; all the officers had letters except wynyard. they examined the several newspapers, but they contained no mention of any death or of any other circumstance connected with his family that could account for the preternatural event. there was a solitary letter for sherbroke still unopened. the officers had received their letters in the mess-room at the hour of supper. after sherbroke had broken the seal of his last packet, and cast a glance on its contents, he beckoned his friend away from the company, and departed from the room. all were silent. the suspense of the interest was now at its climax; the impatience for the return of sherbroke was inexpressible. they doubted not but that letter had contained the long-expected intelligence. "after the interval of an hour, sherbroke joined them. no one dared inquire the nature of his correspondence; but they waited in mute attention, expecting that he would himself touch upon the subject. his mind was manifestly full of thoughts that pained, bewildered, and oppressed him. he drew near to the fire-place, and leaning his head on the mantlepiece, after a pause of some moments, said in a low voice to the person who was nearest him, wynyard's brother was dead. 'dear john, break to your friend wynyard the death of his favourite brother.' _he had died on the day and at the very hour on which the friends had seen his spirit pass so mysteriously through the apartment._ "it might have been imagined that these events would have been sufficient to have impressed the mind of sherbroke with the conviction of their truth, but so strong was his prepossession against the existence or even the possibility of any preternatural intercourse with the spirits of the departed, that he still entertained a doubt of the report of his senses, supported as their testimony was by the coincidence of sight and event. some years after, on his return to england, he was with two gentlemen in piccadilly, when on the opposite side of the street he saw a person bearing the most striking resemblance to the figure which had been disclosed to wynyard and himself. his companions were acquainted with the story, and he instantly directed their attention to the gentleman opposite, as the individual who had contrived to enter and depart from wynyard's apartment without their being conscious of the means. "full of this impression, he immediately went over and addressed the gentleman. he now fully expected to elucidate the mystery. he apologized for the interruption, but excused it by relating the occurrence which had induced him to the commission of this solecism in manners. the gentleman received him as a friend. he had never been out of the country, but he was the twin brother of the youth whose spirit had been seen. "from the interesting character of this narration--the facts of the vision occurring in daylight, and to two persons; and of the subsequent verification of likeness by the party not previously acquainted with the subject of the vision, it is much to be regretted that no direct report of particulars had come to us. there is all other desirable authentication for the story, and sufficient evidence to prove that the two gentlemen believed and often told nearly what is here reported. "dr. mayo makes the following statement on the subject: 'i have had opportunities of inquiring of two near relations of this general wynyard, upon what evidence the above story rests. they told me that they had each heard it from his own mouth. more recently a gentleman, whose accuracy of recollection exceeds that of most people, had told me that he had heard the late sir john sherbroke, the other party in the ghost story, tell it in much the same way at the dinner-table. a writer in 'notes and queries' for july , , states that the brother, not twin-brother, whose spirit appeared to wynyard and his friend, was john otway wynyard, lieutenant in the rd regiment of foot-guards, who died on the th of october, . as this gentleman writes with a minute knowledge of the family history, this date may be considered as that of the alleged spiritual incident. "in 'notes and queries' for july nd, , appeared a correspondence, giving the strongest testimony then attainable to the truth of the wynyard ghost story. a series of queries on the subject being drawn up at quebec, by sir john harvey, adjutant-general of the forces in canada, was sent to colonel gore of the same garrison, who was understood to be a survivor of the officers who were with sherbroke and wynyard at the time of the occurrence, and colonel gore explicitly replied to the following effect: he was present at sydney, in the island of cape breton, in the autumn of or , when the incident happened. it was in the then new barrack, and the place was blocked up by ice so as to have no communication with any part of the world. he was one of the first persons who entered the room after the apparition was seen. the ghost passed them as they were sitting at coffee, between eight and nine in the evening, and went into g. wynyard's bed closet, the window of which was putt[i]ed down. he next day suggested to sherbroke the propriety of making a memorandum of the incident, which was done. 'i remember the date, and on the th of june our first letters from england brought the news of john wynyard's death, [which had happened] on the very night they saw his apparition.' colonel gore was under the impression that the person afterwards seen in one of the streets of london, by sherbroke and william wynyard, was not a brother of the latter family, but a gentleman named (he thought) hayman, noted for being like the deceased john wynyard, and who affected to dress like him." so much for these records and testimonies. the following, now to be narrated, not altogether unlike them, and producing a good result on the person who witnessed the apparition, is of almost equal interest:-- "lord chedworth[ ] had living with him the orphan daughter of a sister of his, a miss wright, who often related this circumstance: lord chedworth was a good man, and seemed anxious to do his duty, but, unfortunately, he had considerable intellectual doubts as to the existence of the soul in another world. he had a great friendship for a gentleman, whom he had known from his boyhood, and who was, like himself, one of those unbelieving mortals that must have ocular demonstration for everything. they often met, and often, too, renewed the subject so interesting to both; but neither could help the other to that happy conviction which was honestly wished for by each. "one morning miss wright observed on her uncle joining her at breakfast, a considerable gloom of thought and trouble displayed on his countenance. he ate little, and was unusually silent. at last, he said, 'molly' (for thus he familiarly called her), 'i had a strange visitor last night. my old friend b---- came to me.' "'how?' said miss wright, 'did he come after i went to bed?' "'his spirit did,' said lord chedworth, solemnly. "'oh! my dear uncle, how could the spirit of a living man appear?' said she, smiling. "'he is dead, beyond doubt,' replied his lordship; 'listen, and then laugh as much as you please. i had not entered my bedroom many minutes when he stood before me. like you, i could not but think that i was looking on the living man, and so accosted him; but he answered, "chedworth, i died this night at eight o'clock; i come to tell you, that there is another world beyond the grave; and that there is a righteous god who judgeth all."' "'depend upon it, uncle, it was only a dream!' but while miss wright was thus speaking a groom on horseback rode up the avenue, and immediately after delivered a letter to lord chedworth, announcing the sudden death of his friend. whatever construction the reader may be disposed to put upon this narrative, it is not unimportant to add that the effect upon the mind of lord chedworth was as happy as it was permanent. all his doubts were at once removed, and for ever." the well-known lyttelton ghost story may now be fitly recorded. it created a great and widespread interest at the time of its occurrence, and was criticised and commented upon by many. several versions of it have already appeared in print, and they seem to vary in certain unimportant details. the editor, instead of writing out what has already appeared, prefers to set forth at length various documents containing independent evidence of the truth of the several apparitions, which by the courtesy and kindness of the present accomplished bearer of the title, he is enabled to embody _verbatim_ in this volume, having been permitted to transcribe them from the originals in lord lyttelton's possession. the subject of this narrative was the son of george, lord lyttelton, who was alike distinguished for the raciness of his wit and the profligacy of his manners. the latter trait of his character has induced many persons to suppose the apparition which he asserted he had seen, to have been the effect of a conscience quickened with remorse and misgivings, on account of many vices. the probability of the narrative[ ] has, consequently, been much questioned; but two gentlemen, one of whom was at pitt place, the seat of lord lyttelton, and the other in the immediate neighbourhood, at the time of his lordship's death, bore ample testimony to the veracity of the whole affair. the several narratives of the singular occurrence correspond in material points; and the following are the circumstantial particulars written by the gentleman who was at the time on a visit to his lordship:-- "i was at pitt place, epsom, when lord lyttelton died; lord fortescue, mrs. flood, and the two miss amphletts were also present. lord lyttelton had not long been returned from ireland, and frequently had been seized with suffocating fits; he was attacked several times by them in the course of the preceding month, while he was at his house in hill street, berkeley square. it happened that he dreamt, three days before his death, that he saw a fluttering bird, and afterwards a woman appeared to him in white apparel and said to him, 'prepare to die, you will not exist three days!' his lordship was much alarmed, and called to a servant from a closet adjoining, who found him much agitated and in a profuse perspiration; the circumstance had a considerable effect all the next day on his lordship's spirits. on the third day, while his lordship was at breakfast with the above personages, he said, 'if i live over to-night i shall have jockied the ghost, for this is the third day.' the whole party presently set off for pitt place, where they had not long arrived before his lordship was visited by one of his accustomed fits. after a short interval he recovered. he dined at five o'clock that day, and went to bed at eleven, when his servant was about to give him rhubarb and mint-water, but his lordship perceiving him stir it with a toothpick, called him a slovenly dog, and bade him go and fetch a teaspoon; but on the man's return he found his master in a fit, and the pillow being placed high, his chin bore hard upon his neck, when the servant, instead of relieving his master on the instant from his perilous situation, ran in his fright and called out for help, but on his return he found his lordship dead. "in explanation of this strange tale it is said that lord lyttelton acknowledged, previously to his death, that the woman he had seen in his dream was the 'mother' of the two misses amphletts mentioned above, whom, together with a third sister then in ireland, his lordship had seduced and prevailed on to leave their parent, who resided near his country residence in shropshire. it is further stated that mrs. amphlett died of grief through the desertion of her children at the precise time when the female vision appeared to his lordship. the most surprising part of the story, because the most difficult of explanation, yet remains to be related. on the second day miles peter andrews, one of lord lyttelton's most intimate friends, left the dinner-party at an early hour, being called away upon business to dartford, where he was the owner of certain powder-mills. he had all along professed himself one of the most determined sceptics as to the vision, and therefore ceased to think of it. on the third night, however, when he had been in bed about half an hour, and still remained, as he imagined, wide awake, his curtains were suddenly pulled aside, and lord lyttelton appeared before him in his robe-de-chambre and night-cap. mr. andrews gazed at his visitor for some time in silent wonder, and then began to reproach him for so odd a freak in coming down to dartford mills without any previous notice, as he hardly knew how on the emergency to find his lordship the requisite accommodation. 'nevertheless,' said andrews, 'i will get up and see what can be done for you.' with this view he turned aside to ring the bell; but on looking round again he could see no signs of his strange visitor. soon afterwards the bell was rung for his servant, and upon his asking what had become of lord lyttelton, the man, evidently much surprised at the question, replied that he had seen nothing of him since they had left pitt place. 'psha, you fool,' exclaimed mr. andrews, 'he was here this moment at my bedside.' the servant, more astonished than ever, declared that he did not well understand how that could be, since he must have seen him enter; whereupon mr. andrews rose, and having dressed himself, searched the house and grounds, but lord lyttelton was nowhere to be found. still, he could not help believing that his friend, who was fond of practical jokes, had played him this trick for his previously expressed scepticism in the matter of the dream. but he soon viewed the whole affair in a different light. about four o'clock on the same day an express arrived from a friend with the news of lord lyttelton's death, and the whole manner of it, as related by the valet to those who were in the house at the time. in mr. andrews's subsequent visits to pitt place, no solicitations could ever induce him to sleep there; he would invariably return, however late, to the spread eagle inn, at epsom, for the night." remarkable dream of thomas, lord lyttelton.[ ] "on thursday, the th of november, , thomas, lord lyttelton, when he came to breakfast, declared to mrs. flood, wife of frederick flood, esq., of the kingdom of ireland, and to the three miss amphletts, who were lodged in his house in hill street, london (where he then also was), that he had had an extraordinary dream the night before. he said he thought he was in a room which a bird flew into, which appearance was suddenly changed into that of a woman dressed in white, who bade him prepare to die. to which he answered, 'i hope not soon, not in two months.' she replied, 'yes, in three days.' he said he did not much regard it, because he could in some measure account for it; for that a few days before he had been with mrs. dawson when a robin-redbreast flew into her room. "when he had dressed himself that day to go to the house of lords, he said he thought he did not look as if he was likely to die. in the evening of the following day, being friday, he told the eldest miss amphlett that she looked melancholy; but, said he, 'you are foolish and fearful. i have lived two days, and, god willing, i will live out the third.' "on the morning of saturday he told the same ladies that he was very well, and believed he should bilk the ghost. some hours afterwards he went with them, mr. fortescue, and captain wolseley, to pitt place, at epsom; withdrew to his bed-chamber soon after eleven o'clock at night, talked cheerfully to his servant, and particularly inquired of him what care had been taken to provide good rolls for his breakfast the next morning, stepped into his bed with his waistcoat on, and as his servant was pulling it off, put his hand to his side, sunk back and immediately expired without a groan. he ate a good dinner after his arrival at pitt place, took an egg for his supper, and did not seem to be at all out of order, except that while he was eating his soup at dinner he had a rising in his throat, a thing which had often happened to him before, and which obliged him to spit some of it out. his physician, dr. fothergill, told me lord lyttelton had in the summer preceding a bad pain in his side, and he judged that some gut vessel in the part where he felt the pain gave way, and to that he conjectured his death was owing. his declaration of his dream and his expressions above mentioned, consequential thereon, were upon a close inquiry asserted to me to have been so, by mrs. flood, the eldest miss amphlett, captain wolseley, and his valet-de-chambre faulkner,[ ] who dressed him on the thursday; and the manner of his death was related to me by william stuckey, in the presence of mr. fortescue and captain wolseley, stuckey being the servant who attended him in his bed-chamber, and in whose arms he died. "westcote.[ ] "february the th, ." lord lyttelton is also asserted to have appeared to mr. andrews, his friend and boon companion, at the time of his lordship's sudden and mysterious death. of this fact testimony is furnished by mr. plumer ward, m.p., in his "illustrations of human life," from which (vol. i. p. ) the following narrative is taken:-- "i had often heard much and read much of lord lyttelton's seeing a ghost before his death, and of himself as a ghost appearing to mr. andrews; and one evening, sitting near that gentleman, during a pause in the debates in the house of commons, i ventured to ask him whether there was any and what truth in the detailed story so confidently related. mr. andrews, as perhaps i ought to have expected, did not much like the conversation. he looked grave and uneasy, and i asked pardon for my impertinent curiosity. upon this he good-naturedly said, 'it is not a subject i am fond of, and least of all in such a place as this; but if you will come and dine with me, i will tell you what is true and what is false.' i gladly accepted the proposal, and i think my recollection is perfect as to the following narrative:--'mr. andrews in his youth was the boon-companion, not to say fellow-rake, of lord lyttelton, who, as is well known, was a man distinguished for abilities, but also for a profligacy of morals which few could equal. with all this he was remarkable for what may be called unnatural cowardice in one so determinedly wicked. he never repented, yet could never stifle his conscience. he never could allow, yet never could deny, a world to come, and he contemplated with unceasing terror what would probably be his own state in such a world if there was one. he was always melancholy with fear, or mad in defiance; and probably his principal misery here was, that with all his endeavours, he never could extinguish the dread of an hereafter.... andrews was at his house at dartford when lord lyttelton died at pitt place, epsom, thirty miles off. andrews' house was full of company, and he expected lord lyttelton, whom he had left in his usual state of health, to join them the next day, which was sunday. andrews himself feeling much indisposed on the saturday evening, retired early to bed, and requested mrs. pigou, one of his guests, to do the honours of the supper-table. he admitted that, when in bed, he fell into a feverish sleep, but was waked between eleven and twelve by somebody opening his curtains. it was lord lyttelton in a night-gown and cap, which andrews recognized. he also plainly spoke to him, saying he was come to tell him all was over. the world said he informed him there was another state, and bade him repent, &c. that was not so. and i confine myself to the exact words of this relation. "'now it seems that lord lyttelton was fond of horse-play, or what we should call _mauvaise plaisanterie_; and, having often made andrews the subject of it, the latter had threatened him with manual chastisement next time it occurred. on the present occasion, thinking this annoyance renewed, he threw the first thing he could find, which were his slippers, at lord lyttelton's head. the figure retreated towards a dressing-room which had no ingress or egress except through the bed-chamber, and andrews, very angry, leapt out of bed, to follow it into the dressing-room. it was not there. surprised, he returned to the bedroom, which he strictly searched. the door was locked on the inside, yet no lord lyttelton was to be found. he was astonished, but not alarmed, so convinced was he that it was some trick of lord lyttelton, who, he supposed, had arrived, according to his engagement, but after he, andrews, had retired. he therefore rang for his servant, and asked if lord lyttelton was not come. the man said, "no." "you may depend upon it," replied he, out of humour, "he is somewhere in the house, for he was here just now, and is playing some trick." but how he could have got into the bedroom with the door locked puzzled both master and man. convinced, however, that he was somewhere in the house, andrews, in his anger, ordered that no bed should be given him, saying he might go to an inn, or sleep in the stables. be that as it may, he never appeared again, and andrews went to sleep. "'it happened that mrs. pigou was to go to town early the next morning. what was her astonishment, having heard the disturbance of the night before, to hear on her arrival about nine o'clock that lord lyttelton had died the very night he was supposed to have been seen. she immediately sent an express to dartford with the news; upon the receipt of which, andrews, (quite well, and remembering accurately all that had passed,) swooned away. he could not understand it, but it had a most serious effect upon him, so that--to use his own expression--he "was not his own man again for three years."' "such is the celebrated story; stript of its ornamentations and exaggerations; and for one, i own, if not convinced that this was a real message from heaven, which certainly i am not, i at least think the hand of providence was seen in it; working upon the imagination, if you please, and therefore suspending no law of nature (though that after all is an ambiguous term), but still providence, in a character not to be mistaken." the following remarkable occurrence of the spectral appearances of two persons, one recently dead and the other a canonized saint of the roman catholic church, which occurred about thirty years ago, is now published for the first time. it is known as "the weld ghost story:"-- "philip weld was a younger son of mr. james weld of archer's lodge, near southampton, and a nephew of the late cardinal weld, the head of that ancient family, whose chief seat is lulworth castle in dorsetshire.[ ] he was sent by his father in to s. edmund's college, near ware in hertfordshire, for his education. he was a boy of great piety and virtue, and gave not only satisfaction to the masters of studies, but edification to all his fellow-students. it happened that on april , , a play-day or whole holiday, the president of the college gave the boys leave to boat upon the river at ware. "in the morning of that day philip weld had been to the holy communion at the early celebration of mass, having just finished his retreat. in the afternoon of the same day he went with his companions and some of the masters to boat on the river as arranged. this sport he enjoyed very much. when one of the masters remarked that it was time to return to the college, philip asked whether they might not have one more row. the master consented, and they rowed to the accustomed turning-point. on arriving there, and in turning the boat, philip accidentally fell out into a very deep part of the river; and, notwithstanding that every effort was made to save him, was drowned. "his dead body was brought back to the college, and the very rev. dr. cox, the president, was immensely shocked and grieved. he was very fond of philip; but what was most dreadful to him was to have to break this sad news to the boy's parents. he scarcely knew what to do, whether to write by post, or to send a messenger. at last he determined to go himself to mr. weld at southampton. so he set off the same evening, and, passing through london, reached southampton the next day, and drove from thence to archer's lodge, mr. weld's residence. "on arriving there and being shown into his private study, dr. cox found mr. weld in tears. the latter, rising from his seat and taking the doctor by the hand, said, 'my dear sir, you need not tell me what you are come for. i know it already. philip is dead. yesterday i was walking with my daughter katharine on the turnpike road, in broad daylight, and philip appeared to us both. he was standing on the causeway with another young man in a black robe by his side. my daughter was the first to perceive him. she said to me, "look there, papa: there is philip." i looked and saw him. i said to my daughter, "it is philip, indeed; but he has the look of an angel." not suspecting that he was dead, though greatly wondering that he was there, i went towards him with my daughter to embrace him; but a few yards being between us, while i was going up to him a labouring man, who was walking on the same causeway, passed between the apparition and the hedge, and as he went on i saw him pass through their apparent bodies, as if they were transparent. on perceiving this i at once felt sure that they were spirits, and going forward with my daughter to touch them, philip sweetly smiled on us, and then both he and his companion vanished away.'" "the reader may imagine how deeply affected dr. cox was on hearing this remarkable statement. he of course corroborated it by relating to the afflicted father the circumstances attendant on his son's death, which had taken place at the very hour in which he appeared to his father and sister. they all concluded that he had died in the grace of god, and that he was in happiness, because of the placid smile on his face.[ ] "dr. cox asked mr. weld who the young man was in the black robe who had accompanied his son, and who appeared to have a most beautiful and angelic countenance, but he said that he had not the slightest idea. "a few weeks afterwards, however, mr. weld was on a visit to the neighbourhood of stonyhurst in lancashire. after hearing mass one morning in the chapel, he, while waiting for his carriage, was shown into the guest-room, where, walking up to the fireplace, he saw a picture above the chimney-piece, which, as it pleased god, represented a young man in a black robe with the very face, form, and attitude of the companion of philip as he saw him in the vision, and beneath the picture was inscribed 's. stanislaus kostka,'[ ] one of the greatest saints of the jesuit order, and the one whom philip had chosen for his patron saint at his confirmation. his father, overpowered with emotion, fell on his knees, shedding many tears, and thanking god for this fresh proof of his son's blessedness. for in what better company could he be than in that of his patron saint, leading him, as it were, into the presence of his creator and his saviour, from the dangers and temptations of this state of exile to a condition of endless blessedness and happiness?"[ ] this is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable and best-authenticated recent cases of spectral appearances which has ever been narrated. the various independent testimonies dove-tailing together so perfectly, centre in the leading supernatural fact--the actual apparition in the daytime of a person just departed this life by sudden death, seen not by one only, but by two people, simultaneously; and seen in company with the spirit of a very holy and renowned saint, the chosen patron of the youth who had just been drowned. a more clear and conclusive example of the supernatural it would be impossible to obtain. the following case in certain particulars is not unlike that just recorded; for two persons, at a distance of many hundred miles apart, saw the apparition of their departed relative who had just died in australia:-- "circumstances, in the year ," writes a correspondent of the editor, "induced me to allow my youngest daughter to leave england, in order to join a son of mine in australia, who had left home about five years previously, to seek his fortune in that country. in england, at home, he had every opportunity of making his way in life, and settling advantageously, but had availed himself of none that had offered. after leaving school, he was placed under a private tutor's care, and duly entered at oxford. there he did nothing, or next to nothing, and left without taking any degree. soon after this, at his own suggestion, in company with a friend, whose acquaintance he had made at the university, an acquaintance which eventually ripened into a warm friendship, he went to australia; and he did not go empty-handed. a sum of money was placed to his credit with a colonial bank in the city of london having agencies in that colony, and nothing was left undone to secure for him a good start in his self-chosen and new life. i ought to add here that my own wish always had been that he should remain at home, and, after receiving orders, become vicar of a parish, the patronage of which was in the gift of a relation. man proposes, but god disposes. "in australia, as was not otherwise than i myself had anticipated, the manner of life was utterly unlike that to which he had been accustomed. ill-luck and want of success met him at every turn, as we afterwards found out; and not only did want of success meet him, but he had to undergo privations and hardships, which eventually weakened a constitution never too strong. "at the time that i consented to my daughter going out, much of the above was unknown to us. he had written complaining of ill-health and weakness, and she, with great self-denial and sisterly devotion, resolved to go. she went with the understanding that she was soon to return. just before she started, the mail brought us unexceptionally bad news of her brother's weak state of health, written by his college friend. "about six weeks after her departure, i was sitting musing in my arm-chair, on a summer afternoon, close to the window of my library, which looked out upon a lawn, to the left of which were three large and overspreading cedar-trees. all of a sudden i saw the life-like apparition of my son standing below the cedar-trees. he looked very pale, thin, and careworn, much altered, but my very son. he gazed at me intently, and with a mournful gaze, for about the space of two minutes. i could not speak--i could not move--i could not take my eyes off him. i seemed riveted to the spot; and, of course, i was at once convinced of the fact that he had died. then he seemed gradually to fade away. it was weeks before i could get the thoughts of his appearance out of my mind; and nothing that the members of my family could say served to remove the impression so indelibly stamped upon it of our loss. "some months afterwards, we received letters from my daughter (just landed) and his other friends in australia announcing his decease. he had died somewhat suddenly, having expressed the most anxious desire to see me before his death--a desire repeated again and again, and regarding which he seemed to be unquiet. "the most remarkable feature yet to be told in the circumstance was this,--that my daughter, who was reposing in the ladies' cabin of the ship, on her way to australia, saw the apparition of her brother come into the cabin, move round it by a strange motion, and then, after looking at herself with a strained and mournful look, glide out again. "events afterwards showed that these appearances, both on shipboard and at my own home, occurred at or about the very time of my dear boy's death. and nothing will convince me that the record here set down is not one of the most remarkable and undoubted examples of supernatural apparitions. may god almighty join us all together again, after these earthly separations, in his heavenly kingdom!" the following example, which has already appeared in print, is authenticated by a personal acquaintance of the editor, who has kindly written him a letter on the subject. it was first given to dr. william gregory,[ ] who published it about twenty-three years ago. it is said to have occurred in :[ ]-- "an officer occupied the same room with another officer in the west indies. one night he awoke his companion, and asked him if he saw anything in the room, when the latter answered that he saw an old man in the corner whom he did not know. 'that,' said the other, 'is my father, and i am sure he is dead.' in due time news arrived of his death in england at that very time. long afterwards the officer took his friend who had seen the vision to visit the widow, when, on entering the room, he started, and said, '_that is the portrait of the old man i saw_.' it was, in fact, the portrait of the father, whom the friend had never seen except in the vision." "this story," writes dr. gregory, "i have on the best authority; and everyone knows that such stories are not uncommon. it is very easy, but not satisfactory, to laugh at them as incredible ghost stories; but there is a natural truth in them, whatever they may be." examples of apparitions at the time of death to friends and relations are, however, so numerous that a considerable number might readily be printed. here are two, well and duly authenticated. the following statement is vouched for by the person signing the same:-- "in the summer of , my father and mother having retired to bed about nine o'clock, the latter was about to draw down the blind, when she observed the figure of a female approaching their house by a footpath which communicated with the village. thinking the circumstance unusual, she waited till the figure approached sufficiently near to discern its features, when she exclaimed to my father, 'why, here is my sister b----; what can have induced her to come here at this time of the evening?' she was about to prepare to go downstairs to inquire the cause of such a visit at that late time of night, when my mother observed the figure retracing its steps in the same direction by which it had come. the following morning, early, intelligence was brought to my mother that her sister b---- died at the same hour at which her apparition appeared to my mother. this is a simple statement of facts. "signed by the son of the person to whom the apparition appeared. "c. j. hanmer. " , henley street, camp hill, birmingham." the following is another statement of facts vouched for by those who formally testify to its truth:-- "one evening in the autumn of the year , my wife retired to bed early. on my entering the bedroom about midnight, i found her wide awake, and in a very excited state. on inquiring the cause, she stated that she believed most firmly she had seen our old friend mrs. g----, then residing at a distance, whom we believed to be in perfect health. my wife gave a minute description of her dress, which i had remembered to have seen her wear, and at the same time stated that when the apparition appeared to her, every object in the bedroom was strangely but distinctly visible. of course i tried to allay my wife's excitement by assuring her that she was suffering from the effects of an unpleasant dream, but i failed to shake her conviction that she had seen the spirit of our friend. "nothing occurred during the next day, but on the following we received a letter from a relative, stating that mrs. g---- had died the night before about twelve o'clock. "it appears that mrs. g----, while in her garden, was observed to fall upon one of the flower beds. having been taken to her room, medical aid was promptly procured, but without avail: she remained unconscious from that time until the moment of her death, which occurred about twelve o'clock the same evening. "(signed) c. l. hanmer, catherine hanmer (wife of the above). "branch dispensary, camp hill, birmingham, oct. , ." the following account of the apparition of a murdered man, near the place of his death, is very remarkable. it has been published, though in another form, in australia, and is there generally accepted as true. the version given below is from those who are thoroughly competent to furnish a true and faithful account of a very impressive narrative:-- "in australia, about twenty-five years ago, two graziers, who had emigrated from england, and entered into partnership, became, as was generally believed, possessed of considerable property, by an unlooked-for success in their precarious but not unprofitable occupation. one of them all of a sudden was missed, and could nowhere be found. search was made for him in every quarter, likely and unlikely, yet no tidings of him or his whereabouts could be heard. "one evening, about three weeks afterwards, his partner and companion was returning to his hut along a bye-path which skirted a deep and broad sheet of water. the shadows of twilight were deepening, and the setting sun was almost shut out by the tall shrubs, brushwood, and rank grass which grew so thick and wild. in a moment he saw the crouching figure of his companion, apparently as real and life-like as could be, sitting on the ground by the very margin of the deep pond, with his left arm bent, resting on his left knee. he was about to rush forward and speak, when the figure seemed to grow less distinct, and the ashen-coloured face wore an unusually sad and melancholy aspect; so he paused. on this the figure, becoming again more palpable, raised its right arm, and, holding down the index finger of the right hand, pointed to a dark and deep hole, where the water was still and black, immediately beside an overhanging tree. this action was deliberately done, and then twice repeated, after which the figure, growing more and more indistinct, seemed to fade away. "the grazier was mortally terrified and alarmed. for a while he stood riveted to the spot, fearing either to go forward or backward; while the silence of evening and the strange solitude, now for the first time in his australian life thoroughly experienced, overawed him completely. afterwards he turned and went home. night, which came on soon, brought him no sleep. he was restless, agitated, and disquieted. "the next morning, in company with others, the pool was dragged, and the body of his partner discovered, in the very spot towards which the figure of the phantom had twice pointed. it had been weighted and weighed down by a large stone attached to the body; while from the same spot was recovered a kind of axe or hatchet, with which the murder had evidently been committed. this was identified as having belonged to a certain adventurer, who, on being taxed and formally charged with the murder, and found to be possessed of certain valuable documents belonging to the murdered man, eventually confessed his crime, and was executed. "this incident, and its supernatural occurrences, made a deep impression; and, having been abundantly testified to, in a court of justice, as well as in common and general conversation, is not likely to be soon forgotten in the neighbourhood of ballarat, in australia, where it occurred." here, of course, the purpose of the apparition was obvious enough; and the end attained was as just and proper as it was true and righteous; for "whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." the following example of the appearance of the spirit of a dying woman to her children, who were at a distance of some hundreds of miles from her, is a plain unvarnished narrative of facts. it is now published for the first time. "a lady and her husband (who held a position of some distinction in india) were returning home (a.d. ) after an absence of four years, to join a family of young children, when the former was seized in egypt with an illness of a most alarming character; and, though carefully tended by an english physician and nursed with the greatest care, grew so weak that little or no hope of her recovery existed. with that true kindness which is sometimes withheld by those about a dying bed, she was properly and plainly informed of her dangerous state, and bidden to prepare for the worst. of a devout, pious, and reverential mind, she is reported to have made a careful preparation for her latter end, though no clergyman was at hand to minister the last sacrament, or to afford spiritual consolation. the only point which seemed to disturb her mind, after the delirium of fever had passed away, was a deep-seated desire to see her absent children once again, which she frequently expressed to those who attended upon her. day after day, for more than a week, she gave utterance to her longings and prayers, remarking that she would die happily if only this one wish could be gratified. "on the morning of the day of her departure hence, she fell into a long and heavy sleep, from which her attendants found it difficult to arouse her. during the whole period of it she lay perfectly tranquil. soon after noon, however, she suddenly awoke, exclaiming, 'i have seen them all: i have seen them. god be praised for jesus christ's sake!' and then slept again. towards evening, in perfect peace and with many devout exclamations, she calmly yielded up her spirit to god who gave it. her body was brought to england, and interred in the family burying-place. "the most remarkable part of this incident remains to be told. the children of the dying lady were being educated at torquay under the supervision of a friend of the family. at the very time that their mother thus slept, they were confined to the house where they lived, by a severe storm of thunder and lightning. two apartments on one floor, perfectly distinct, were then occupied by them as play and recreation rooms. all were there gathered together. no one of the children was absent. they were amusing themselves with games of chance, books, and toys, in company of a nursemaid who had never seen their parents. all of a sudden their mother, as she usually appeared, entered the larger room of the two, pausing, looked for some moments at each and smiled, passed into the next room, and then vanished away. three of the elder children recognized her at once, but were greatly disturbed and impressed at her appearance, silence, and manner. the younger and the nursemaid each and all saw a lady in white come into the smaller room, and then slowly glide by and fade away." the date of this occurrence, september , , was carefully noted, and it was afterwards found that the two events above recorded happened almost contemporaneously. a record of the event was committed to paper, and transcribed on a fly-leaf of the family bible, from which the above account was taken and given to the editor of this book in the autumn of the year , by a relation of the lady in question, who is well acquainted with the fact of her spectral appearance at torquay, and has vouched for the truth of it in the most distinct and formal manner. the husband, who was reported to have been of a somewhat sceptical habit of mind, was deeply impressed by the occurrence. and though it is seldom referred to now, it is known to have had a very deep and lasting religious effect on more than one person who was permitted directly to witness it.[ ] a personal acquaintance of the editor, whom he has had the pleasure of knowing for twenty years, most kindly furnishes the following example:-- "in the winter of - i was afflicted with a long and severe illness, so severe indeed, that for six weeks i was hovering between life and death. a nurse of great knowledge and intelligence was in attendance on me; she had been brought up as a socinian, and was entirely careless as to religious belief. at the same time she was wholly devoted to her duties, and most attentive and assiduous in the same. two days after her arrival she was sitting up in the adjoining room, the folding-doors between which and the room where i was lying being open, and lights were burning in each apartment. it had struck two o'clock a.m., and from my critical position she was unwilling either to sleep or to secure temporary rest. on looking up at that moment she perceived a form bending over me. the figure was that of an aged person with attenuated features, straggling grey hair, and thin clasped hands, which were placed in the attitude of prayer. for a while she thought it was someone who had entered the room; but, after gazing at it intently, she was smitten with a strange awe, and stood watching it attentively for at least five minutes, when it gradually faded away and disappeared. "on the first opportunity she mentioned this strange occurrence to the people of the house, when she heard for the first time that my father had been lying dangerously ill at his own residence, more than a hundred miles away. at the time of my own and my father's sickness, my dangerous state, for medical and prudential reasons, was not communicated to him, and my illness was made light of, fearing the bad effect upon himself. that it was his spirit which then appeared seems undoubted: for at two o'clock p.m. a relation came to see me from the city where my father had lived, to break to me the sad news of his decease. he had departed this life exactly at the period when his apparition in the attitude of prayer had been seen by my attendant. these facts were not made known to me until some time afterwards."[ ] the following story, no less interesting and impressive, appears in "the life and times of lord brougham, written by himself," published a few years ago by messrs. blackwood and co.:-- "'a most remarkable thing happened to me--so remarkable that i must tell the story from the beginning. after i left the high school [in edinburgh], i went with g----, my most intimate friend, to attend the classes in the university. there was no divinity class, but we frequently in our walks discussed and speculated upon many grave subjects--among others, on the immortality of the soul, and on a future state. this question and the possibility, i will not say of ghosts walking, but of the dead appearing to the living, were subjects of much speculation; and we actually committed the folly of drawing up an agreement, written with our blood, to the effect that whichever of us died first should appear to the other, and thus solve any doubts we had entertained of the "life after death." after we had finished our classes at the college, g---- went to india, having got an appointment there in the civil service. he seldom wrote to me, and after the lapse of a few years i had almost forgotten him; moreover, his family having little connection with edinburgh, i seldom saw or heard anything of them, or of him through them, so that all the old schoolboy intimacy had died out and i had nearly forgotten his existence. i had taken, as i have said, a warm bath; and while in it and enjoying the comfort of the heat after the late freezing i had undergone, i turned my head round towards the chair on which i had deposited my clothes, as i was about to get out of the bath. on the chair sat g----, looking calmly at me. how i got out of the bath i know not, but on recovering my senses i found myself sprawling on the floor. the apparition, or whatever it was that had taken the likeness of g----, had disappeared. the vision produced such a shock that i had no inclination to talk about it, or to speak about it even to stuart; but the impression it made upon me was too vivid to be easily forgotten; and so strongly was i affected by it, that i have here written down the whole history with the date, th december, and all the particulars as they are now fresh before me. no doubt i had fallen asleep; and that the appearance presented so distinctly to my eyes was a dream, i cannot for a moment doubt, yet for years i had had no communication with g----, nor had there been anything to recall him to my recollection; nothing had taken place during our swedish travels either connected with g---- or with india, or with anything relating to him or to any member of his family. i recollected quickly enough our old discussion, and the bargain we had made. i could not discharge from my mind the impression that g---- must have died, and that his appearance to me was to be received by me as a proof of a future state.' this was on december , . in october, , lord brougham added as a postscript:--'i have just been copying out from my journal the account of this strange dream: certissima mortis imago! and now to finish the story, begun about sixty years since. soon after my return to edinburgh there arrived a letter from india announcing g----'s death! and stating that he had died on the th of december.'" the following example of the apparition of a departed friend is, for reasons which will be apparent from the narrative, not unlike the three curious, but independent cases already recorded in the early part of the present chapter, and not altogether unlike that told by the late lord brougham. it comes directly to the editor from the pen of the person who saw the spectral appearance:-- "i was sitting in my library one evening, towards the close of summer, somewhat late. the shadow of evening had been deepening for some time, for the sun had long gone down; and the expansive valley beyond and below my sloping garden was white with mist. within, beyond the heavy folds of the curtains which hung beside a single and rather small and open window, there was a grey darkness which almost enshrouded the corners of the room on either side. i had been musing and meditating on a variety of subjects, theological, metaphysical, and moral, for more than an hour; while i reposed in a low arm-chair on one side of the fire-place. "all of a sudden i saw what seemed to be an elongated perpendicular cloud of foggy-looking grey smoke, collected in the right-hand corner of the room. i could not comprehend what it was. while looking steadily at it, and rubbing my eyes (doubting for a moment whether i was awake or asleep), it seemed to form itself, by a kind of circular rolling motion of the smoke or luminous mist, into a human shape. there, before me, came out slowly, as it were, face, head, body, arms, hands and feet--at first a little indistinct in detail, but eventually so self-evident and clear that it was impossible to doubt the fact--of a figure, which a moment or two afterwards was developed into the exact and unmistakeable form of an old fellow-student at oxford, who had died soon after we left that university, and of whom i had heard nothing whatever since the day of his death about seven years previously,[ ] to that moment. appearing just as he had lived, though death-like and ashen, he looked at me with a fixed and strangely-vacant stare, which appeared to grow alternately vivid and piercing, and dull and nebulous. i seemed to feel the air all at once chill and unearthly; and an indescribable sensation came over me which i had never experienced either before or afterwards. i felt almost paralyzed, and yet not altogether terrified. the form of my old college companion (who had been a very upright, devout and religious man) in a moment smiled at me, and raising his hand, pointed for a few seconds upwards. at this action a very bright mist, not exactly a light, but a luminous mist, seemed to hover over him. i tried to speak, but could not. my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth. then, protecting myself with the sign of the cross, and a mental invocation of the blessed trinity, i sheltered my eyes with my right hand for a few seconds, and then looking up again saw the apparition become more and more indistinct and soon altogether fade away. "this is my ghost story, and i have always connected the appearance with arguments and conversations which, against aggressive objectors, used to be held at oxford in defence of the christian doctrines of the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul, in which my dead friend took so intelligent and earnest a part." not less interesting is the following account of a spectral appearance which occurred in the latter part of the afternoon of a bright autumnal day, well authenticated, and here set forth for the first time:-- "the widow of a well-known bristol merchant was, in , acting as lady housekeeper to a berkshire clergyman. one of her sons was an officer in the indian army, and serving in the madras presidency. it was his custom to write to his mother by every fortnightly mail. he had not missed doing so with punctual regularity. "one evening, however, between six and seven, in the month of october of the above year, the lady in question was walking on the lawn before the house, in company with the curate of the parish, a well-known oxford man, when all of a sudden both of them saw what appeared to be a dog-cart containing three men drive along the lane which skirted the lawn and flower-garden, and which was separated from it by a closely-cut box-hedge, so low as to admit of those who were walking in the garden seeing with ease and distinctness any person approaching the house in a vehicle. it was driven in the direction of the carriage entrance, and, from the sound, appeared to have entered the court-yard of the house. one of the persons in it, he who sat behind, half rose, and looking towards his mother and the clergyman, smiled, and waved his right hand as a greeting. he looked very pale and ashy; otherwise there was nothing remarkable in his appearance. both most distinctly observed the action just mentioned. immediately on seeing it, the lady exclaimed with marked feeling and excitement, 'good heavens! why, there's robert.' she at once rushed through a passage of the house, which led directly to the court-yard, only to find to her amazement and perplexity that no carriage nor dog-cart had arrived, and that the large gates of the house were, as usual, locked and fastened, and moreover had not been opened. "the impression this remarkable incident made was deep and great. no doubt whatever existed in the minds of those who had seen and heard the passing vehicle, that the form on the seat behind was the son of the lady in question. she consequently felt confident that some harm had happened to him, became miserable, and was inconsolable. no remarks or reasoning to the contrary, several of which were attempted, produced the slightest effect. a deep gloom settled over her. the sequel can soon be narrated. in the course of a few weeks the mail _viâ_ southampton, most anxiously looked for, brought two letters to the lady in question, one intimating that her son had been suddenly struck with a most severe fever, was delirious and in great danger; the other intimating his death. this latter occurred on the very day at which the appearance in question was seen, but at a slightly different time." with the following example, as strange in itself as it is painfully interesting, this part of the subject will be brought to a close. it is only right to add that a version of the incident which now follows has already appeared in one of mr. henry spicer's interesting volumes:-- "a young german lady of rank, still alive to tell the story, arriving with her friends at one of the most noted hotels in paris, an apartment of unusual magnificence on the first floor was apportioned to her use. after retiring to rest, she lay awake a long while contemplating, by the dim light of a night lamp, the costly ornaments in the room, when suddenly the folding doors opposite the bed, which she had locked, were thrown open, and amid a flood of unearthly light there entered a young man in the dress of the french navy, having his hair dressed in the peculiar mode _à la titus_. taking a chair, and placing it in the middle of the room, he sat down, and took from his pocket a pistol of an uncommon make, which he deliberately put to his forehead, fired, and fell back dead. at the moment of the explosion, the room became dark and still, and a low voice said softly, 'say an _ave maria_ for his soul.' "the young lady fell back, not insensible, but paralyzed with horror, and remained in a kind of cataleptic trance, fully conscious, but unable to move or speak, until at nine o'clock, no answer having been given to repeated calls of her maid, the doors were forced open. at the same moment, the powers of speech returned, and the poor young lady shrieked out to her attendants that a man had shot himself in the night, and was lying dead on the floor. nothing, however, was to be seen, and they concluded that she was suffering from the effects of a dream. "a short time afterwards, however, the proprietor of the hotel informed a gentleman of the party that the terrible scene witnessed by the young lady had in reality been enacted only three nights previously in that very room, when a young french officer put an end to his life with a pistol of a peculiar description, which, together with the body, was then lying at the morgue, awaiting identification. the gentleman examined them both, and found them exactly correspond with the description of the man and the pistol seen in the apparition. the archbishop of paris, monseigneur sibour, being exceedingly impressed by the story, called upon the young lady; and, directing her attention to the words spoken by the mysterious voice, urged her to embrace the roman catholic faith, to whose teaching, as his grace asserted, it pointed so clearly." the various examples of spectral appearances now given (and they might have been largely augmented) may certainly serve to provide cases, so inherently striking and conclusive in themselves, as to leave little or no doubt of their intrinsic truth. making every allowance for unintentional misconceptions and exaggeration in the record of them, putting aside mere rhetorical ornaments and literary additions, it seems quite impossible, being guided by the ordinary rules of evidence, not to admit the force and value of such striking facts as the above. in the cases already set forth, it is quite irrational to maintain that the disturbed imagination or wild fancy of the persons who are said to have seen the apparitions were the sole foundations of the things seen; more especially as in some instances the appearances were beheld by two or more persons at the same time, and often the same form presented itself to different people upon different occasions. it may be that some own a power of seeing disembodied spirits, which is not possessed by others, and it is tolerably certain that the large majority of people have never beheld anything of the sort. but this, after all, is but negative testimony. that which is positive, covering, it may be, a small area, is of considerable value and importance in aiding those who are open to conviction in coming to a reasonable conclusion. for existing positive evidence cannot be rudely and arrogantly set aside, when found to be, as in the case under consideration, so completely in harmony with many of the plain and specific statements of holy scripture, with the express testimony of the fathers of the christian church, and the almost universal tradition of mankind in every age. haunted houses and localities. "nations civilized as well as uncivilized: barbarians of the rudest type, and christians of the highest and deepest spirituality, have always believed that certain localities were the haunts of unquiet spirits."-_-richard h. froude._ chapter vii. haunted houses and localities. many who are unaffected by the demoralizing and degrading materialistic theories of life, which are now enunciated by some who name themselves, and whom their flattering admirers style "philosophers," will not be unwilling to allow that a considerable amount of evidence[ ] is in existence, indicating that certain localities are troubled by the presence of evil spirits, who from time to time manifest their powers, or sometimes appear to mankind in forms which give a shock to those who are enabled or permitted to perceive them. if christian tradition be accepted, a belief in the official ministry of unfallen spirits,--"the armies of the living god,"--will be held, firmly[ ] and intelligibly, as a most reasonable and beautiful part of almighty god's revelation, who "has ordained and constituted the services of angels and men in a wonderful order." so, by consequence, the existence and action of fallen angels, the legions of satan, and of spirits,[ ] who, at the particular judgment following immediately upon death, have merited the swift and righteous condemnation of an all-just judge, will be fully admitted. the power, activity, and malice of satan is apparent from numerous statements in holy scripture; and most christian writers who have dealt with the subject of evil spirits have maintained that their power and influence are unquestionably greater in some localities than others. it is commonly held, that in lonely deserts, on lofty mountains, where the feet of men seldom tread, as well as in the mines of the earth,[ ] and in vast forests where desolation reigns, the powers of the devil and his angels, being unchecked and uncurbed by the positive energizing activity of christianity, are vast. so, likewise, the universal instinct of mankind has maintained that there are certain places in which the appearances of unquiet or lost souls might be reasonably looked for, rather than in others. deserted houses and lonely roads, where crimes of violence and special wickedness have been perpetrated; deep mines,[ ] localities, unblessed by holy church, where the bodies of christians have been placed to moulder away, instead of in god's holy acre, the consecrated churchyard; battlefields, where it may be that so many have been cut off in deadly sin-- "unhouseled, disappointed, unanealed," have each and all been regarded as the fitting haunts of disquieted and wandering spirits. on this point southey, in "the doctor," with much force thus writes:--"the popular belief that _places_ are haunted where money has been concealed (as if, where the treasure was and the heart had been, there would the miserable soul be also), or where some great and undiscovered crime has been committed, shows how consistent this is with our natural sense of fitness." on a collateral detail of this subject (the constant and malignant activity of evil spirits), mr. john wesley, a thorough believer in the supernatural, put forth his faith and convictions with singular force and lucidity, plainly maintaining the reality and importance of all those explicit statements of holy scripture which so directly and practically bear on the point under treatment. "let us consider," wrote wesley, "what may be the employment of unholy spirits from death to the resurrection. we cannot doubt but the moment they leave the body, they find themselves surrounded by spirits of their own kind, probably human as well as diabolical. what power god may permit these to exercise over them we do not distinctly know. but it is not improbable [that] he may suffer satan to employ them as he does his own angels, in inflicting death or evils of various kinds on the men that know not god. for this end they may raise storms by sea or by land; they may shoot meteors through the air; they may occasion earthquakes; and in numberless ways afflict those whom they are not suffered to destroy. where they are not permitted to take away life, they may inflict various diseases; and many of these, which we may judge to be natural, are undoubtedly diabolical. i believe this is frequently the case with lunatics. it is observable that many of these, mentioned in the scripture, who are called 'lunatics' by one of the evangelists, are termed 'demoniacs' by another. one of the most eminent physicians i ever knew, particularly in cases of insanity, the late dr. deacon, was clearly of opinion that this was the case with many, if not with most lunatics. and it is no valid objection to this, that these diseases are so often cured by natural means; for a wound inflicted by an evil spirit might be cured as any other, unless that spirit were permitted to repeat the blow. may not some of these evil spirits be likewise employed, in conjunction with evil angels, in tempting wicked men to sin, and in procuring occasions for them? yea, and in tempting good men to sin, even after they have escaped the corruption that is in the world. herein, doubtless, they put forth all their strength, and greatly glory if they conquer."[ ] although some may maintain that this passage is perhaps wanting in theological exactness, there can be little doubt that, with much force, it truly and eloquently embodies the belief of all christian people, and gives a simple and forcible explanation of scripture statements regarding the active and untiring energy of the legions of hell. again, the marquis de marsay, a pious french protestant writer of the last century, whose collected works were issued about the year , sets forth from his own point of view a theory regarding the nature and character of spirits, which because it bears directly on the subject of haunted localities, and in some respects follows the teaching of the schoolmen, it may be well to quote here:-- "i believe," he writes, "that there are three kind of spirits, which return to this world, after the death of their bodies. the spirits of such as are in a state of condemnation, and which are in a very miserable condition, hover about, and _haunt the places where they have committed their evil deeds and iniquities_. they remain at these places by divine permission, and do all the evil they can; whilst, at the same time, they suffer intolerable torments and are malignant. some of this kind of spirits occasionally make themselves visible.... the second kind of spirits are those which roam about, because they seek to free themselves from their state of purification[ ] by other means than by resignation to divine justice; hence they seek help from those that fear god, and in so doing, withdraw themselves from the divine order.... these are not evil spirits, but such as are still in their self-will, and therefore refuse to yield to the divine order, by voluntarily submitting themselves to the punishment imposed upon them.... _the third kind of spirits, or rather souls that reappear, are those, whose punishment is to be at some certain place in this world, because they have satisfied their passions in that place, and lived according to their lusts in an idolatrous manner_; for that which now causes a man lust and pleasure, must hereafter serve as his pain and punishment. of this we have several instances; amongst others, that of a pious man, who after his death appeared to his daughter, who was likewise a pious person, and after conversing with her some time on his state, began to turn pale, to tremble, and be much distressed; and said to his daughter that the time was now arrived when he must go and remain for a time in his grave, with his putrefying and corrupting corpse; and that this happened to him every day, because in his life-time he had had too much affection and tenderness for his body." the dissertations of the schoolmen, and of certain english writers of the seventeenth century, are not unlike the above.[ ] so, too, are several of their most reasonable deductions and conclusions. in fact, dr. joseph hall, sometime bishop of exeter (a.d. - , and afterwards of norwich, from until ), maintained that many souls, guilty both of deadly sin (duly repented of during life), and of venial sin, in which not improbably they died, might have to suffer, by lingering, unsatisfied, because away from their creator, and about the places where they sinned in their lifetime, until their temporal punishment was complete; a theory which though from the pen of one suspected of favouring puritanism, is very like that embodied in the faith and practice of the universal church. however this may be, at all events there is scarcely a locality in which some old tradition as regards haunted houses and places does not exist; and which is not more or less accepted and believed in even now. a general rejection of the supernatural may be the case with many, and a shallow desire not to be thought superstitious or over-credulous by more, are obvious reasons why some traditions have become weakened and others obscure. but putting aside all such, half-lost, forgotten, or fading away, and making every allowance for exaggeration and hyperbole, the facts which can still be testified to by credible witnesses, the evidence which is even now on record, coupled with that innate sentiment of awe, so common to many, and often strengthened by a sound religious belief, which gives point to old traditions, are sufficient to induce the calm and the unprejudiced not too hastily to disavow the existence of a principle of almost universal acceptance with mankind, and which neither the lame and limping logic of the sceptic, nor the imperfectly marshalled facts and random conclusions of the materialist can, in the long run, either weaken or destroy. the following curious record, a fair example of numerous others, may now be suitably set forth:-- "elizabeth, the third daughter of sir anthony cooke (preceptor to edward vi.) married sir thomas hobby, of bisham abbey in berkshire, and accompanied him to france, when as ambassador to queen elizabeth he went thither. on his death abroad in lady hobby brought his corpse home to bisham, where he was buried in a mortuary chapel. she afterwards married john, lord russell. by her first husband she had a son, who when quite young is said to have entertained the greatest dislike and antipathy to every kind of learning; and such was his resolute repugnance to acquiring the art of writing that in a fit of obstinacy he would wilfully and deliberately blot his writing-books in the most slovenly manner. such conduct so vexed and angered his mother, who was eminently intellectual, and like her three sisters, lady burleigh, lady bacon, and lady killigrew, an excellent classical scholar, that she beat him again and again on the shoulders and head, and at last so severely and unmercifully that he died. "it is commonly reported that, as a punishment for her unnatural cruelty, her spirit is doomed to haunt the house where this cruel act of manslaughter was perpetrated. several persons have seen the apparition, the likeness of which, both as regards feature and dress, to a pale portrait of her ladyship in antique widow's weeds still remaining at bisham, is said to be exact and lifelike. she is reported to glide through a certain chamber, in the act of washing blood stains from her hands. and on some occasions the apparition is said to have been seen in the grounds of the old mansion. "a very remarkable occurrence in connection with this narrative, took place about thirty years ago. in taking down an old oak window-shutter of the latter part of the sixteenth century, _a packet of antique copy-books of that period were discovered pushed into the wall between the joists of the skirting, and several of these books on which young hobby's name was written, were covered with blots, thus supporting the ordinary tradition_."[ ] creslow in buckinghamshire,[ ] like so many old manor-houses, has its ghost story. it is said to be the disturbed and restless spirit of a lady, which haunts a certain sleeping chamber in the oldest portion of the house. she has been seldom seen but often heard only too plainly by those who have ventured to sleep in this room, or to enter it after midnight. she appears to come up from the old groined crypt, and always enters by the door at the top of the nearest staircase. after entering she is heard to walk about, sometimes in a gentle, stately manner, apparently with a long silk train sweeping the floor. sometimes her motion is quick and hurried, her silk dress rustling violently as if she were engaged in a desperate struggle. this chamber, though furnished as a bedroom, is seldom used, and is said to be never entered without trepidation and awe. occasionally, however, some persons have been found bold enough to dare the harmless noises of the mysterious intruder; and many are the stories current in buckinghamshire respecting such adventures. the following will suffice as a specimen, and may be depended on as authentic:-- "about the year , a gentleman, not many years ago high sheriff of the county, who resides some few miles' distance from creslow, rode over to a dinner-party; and, as the night became exceedingly dark and rainy, he was urged to stay over the night if he had no objection to sleep in the haunted chamber. the offer of a bed in such a room, so far from deterring him, induced him at once to accept the invitation. he was a strong-minded man of a powerful frame and undaunted courage, and like so many others, entertained a sovereign contempt for all haunted chambers, ghosts, and apparitions. the room was prepared for him. he would neither have a fire nor a night-light, but was provided with a box of lucifers that he might light a candle if he wished. arming himself in jest with a cutlass and a brace of pistols, he took a serio-comic farewell of the family and entered his formidable dormitory. "in due course, morning dawned; the sun rose, and a most beautiful day succeeded a very wet and dismal night. the family and their guests assembled in the breakfast-room, and every countenance seemed cheered and brightened by the loveliness of the morning. they drew round the table, when the host remarked that mr. s--, the tenant of the haunted chamber, was absent. a servant was sent to summon him to breakfast, but he soon returned, saying he had knocked loudly at his door, but received no answer, and that a jug of hot water left there was still standing unused. on hearing this, two or three gentlemen ran up to the room, and, after knocking and receiving no answer, opened it and entered. it was empty. inquiry was made of the servants; they had neither seen nor heard anything of him. as he was a county magistrate, some supposed that he had gone to attend the board which met that morning at an early hour. but his horse was still in the stable; so that could not be. while they were at breakfast, however, he came in, and gave the following account of his last night's experiences:--'having entered my room,' said he, 'i locked and bolted both the doors, carefully examined the whole room, and satisfied myself that there was no living creature in it but myself, nor any entrance but those which i had secured. i got into bed, and, with the conviction that i should sleep soundly as usual till six in the morning, was soon lost in a comfortable slumber. suddenly i was awakened, and, on raising my head to listen, i certainly heard a sound resembling the light soft tread of a lady's footstep, accompanied with the rustling as of a silk gown. i sprang out of bed, and having lighted a candle, found that there was nothing either to be seen or heard. i carefully examined the whole room. i looked under the bed, into the fire-place, up the chimney, and at both the doors, which were fastened just as i had left them. i then looked at my watch, and found it was a few minutes past twelve. as all was now perfectly quiet again, i put out the candle, got into bed, and soon fell asleep. i was again aroused. the noise was now louder than before. it appeared like the violent rustling of a stiff silk dress. a second time i sprang out of bed, darted to the spot where the noise was, and tried to grasp the intruder in my arms. my arms met together, but enclosed nothing. the noise passed to another part of the room, and i followed it, groping near the floor to prevent anything passing under my arms. it was in vain, i could feel nothing. the sound died at the doorway to the crypt, and all again was still. i now left the candle burning, though i never sleep comfortably with a light in my room, and went to bed again, but certainly felt not a little perplexed at being unable to detect the cause of the noise, nor to account for its cessation when the candle was lighted.'" so that this gentleman's experience (and as to ghosts, he was a sceptic) only served to strengthen the old and unbroken tradition. of its foundation nothing very certain is known. the general facts, however, are commonly received. another example, unusually curious, relating to the castle at york, is taken from the "memoirs of sir john reresby:"-- "one of my soldiers being on guard about eleven in the night at the gate of clifford tower, the very night after the witch was arraigned, he heard a great noise at the castle; and, going to the porch, he saw there a scroll of paper creep from under the door, which, as he imagined by moonshine, turned first into the shape of a monkey, and thence assumed the form of a turkey-cock, which passed to and fro by him. surprised at this, he went to the prison, and called the under-keeper, who came and saw the scroll dance up and down, and creep under the door, where there was scarce an opening of the thickness of half-a-crown. this extraordinary story i had from the mouth both of one and the other."[ ] an account of the haunting of spedlin's tower was furnished to me by a scotch friend, who asserts and vouches for the authenticity of the tradition:-- "spedlin's tower, the scene of one of the best accredited and most curious ghost stories perhaps ever printed, stands on the south-west bank of the annan, in dumfriesshire. the ghost story is simply this:--sir alexander jardine, of applegarth, in the time of charles ii., had confined in the dungeon of his tower of spedlin's, a miller named porteous, suspected of having wilfully set fire to his own premises. sir alexander being soon after suddenly called away to edinburgh, carried the key of the vault with him, and did not recollect or consider his prisoner's case till he was passing through the west port, where, perhaps, the sight of the warder's keys brought the matter to his mind. he immediately sent back a courier to liberate the man, but porteous had, in the meantime, died of hunger. "no sooner was he dead, than his ghost began to torment the household, and no rest was to be had within spedlin's tower by day or by night. in this dilemma, sir alexander, according to old use and wont, summoned a whole legion of ministers to his aid; and by their strenuous efforts, porteous was at length confined to the scene of his mortal agonies, where, however, he continued to scream occasionally at night, 'let me out, let me out, for i'm deein' o' hunger!' he also used to flutter against the door of the vault, and was always sure to remove the bark from any twig that was sportively thrust through the key-hole. the spell which thus compelled the spirit to remain in bondage was attached to a large black-lettered bible, used by the exorcists, and afterwards deposited in a stone niche, which still remains in the wall of the staircase; and it is certain that, after the lapse of many years, when the family repaired to a newer mansion (jardine hall), built on the other side of the river, the bible was left behind, to keep the restless spirit in order. on one occasion, indeed, the volume requiring to be rebound, was sent to edinburgh; but the ghost, getting out of the dungeon, and crossing the river, made such a disturbance in the new house, hauling the baronet and his lady out of bed, &c., that the bible was recalled before it reached edinburgh, and placed in its former situation. the good woman who told grose this story in , declared that should the bible again be taken off the premises, no consideration whatever should induce her to remain there a single night. but the charm seems to be now broken, or the ghost must have become either quiet or disregarded, for the bible is at present kept at jardine hall." another example from scotland now follows, all the more remarkable, because it is still asserted that in a certain part of the mansion unusual voices, and supernatural footsteps are said to be still heard, a fact to which the late mr. hope scott often testified:--sir walter scott relates a striking occurrence which happened to him at the time abbotsford was in the course of erection. mr. bullock was then employed by him to fit the castle up with proper appurtenances, when during that person's absence in london the following extraordinary circumstance took place:--in a letter to mr. terry in the year scott wrote:--"the night before last we were awakened by a violent noise like drawing heavy boards along the new part of the house. i fancied something had fallen and thought no more about it. this was about two in the morning. last night at the same witching hour the same noise recurred. mrs. s., as you know, is rather timbersome; so up i got with beardy's broadsword under my arm, 'sat bolt upright and ready to fight.' but nothing was out of order; neither could i discover what occasioned the disturbance." now, strangely enough on the morning that mr. terry received this letter he was breakfasting with mr. erskine (afterwards lord kinneder) and the chief subject of their conversation was the sudden death of mr. bullock, which on comparing dates must have happened on the same night and as near as could possibly be ascertained at the same hour, these disturbances occurred at abbotsford. one might be induced to maintain that some drunken workmen or disorderly persons were on the premises, but this method for accounting for the coincidence will at once be exploded on reading the following passage from scott to the same gentleman:--"were you not struck with the fantastical coincidence of our nocturnal disturbance at abbotsford with the melancholy event that followed? i protest to you that the noise resembled half-a-dozen men hard at work pulling up boards and furniture, _and nothing could be more certain than that there was nobody on the premises at the time_." the following account of a haunted locality is from the pen of a scholarly and accomplished clergyman[ ] in the diocese of ripon:--"some years ago i was residing in a village about eleven miles from york, and one mile and a half from another village, in which was the post office for the surrounding district. whenever i had reason to suppose a letter was lying there for me, i used to anticipate the delivery of it on the following morning, by calling for it myself in the evening before. one night, in the latter end of november, i was going, for this purpose, along the path through the fields, and when i was midway between the two villages, i passed through a little hand-gate, and after going about twenty yards from it, i was startled and alarmed by a succession of the most horrible shrieks that can possibly be conceived. they seemed scarcely human, though i felt at the time that they were certainly uttered by some man or woman, imitating the piercing scream of a hog when the fatal knife is being plunged into its throat. the panic that seized me vanished in a moment, as the thought instantaneously flashed across my mind that i was being made the victim of some ploughman's joke. being armed, as i then invariably was, with a particularly tough and stout cudgel, i ran back to the little hand-gate on tip-toe, intending to take condign vengeance on some rustic, whom i felt sure i should find crouching down behind the low hedge. just as i reached the hand-gate, the sounds suddenly ceased, and to my utmost astonishment i could see no one, although it was quite impossible for any person within the distance of two or three hundred yards to have escaped my observation. the full moon was shining brightly, with the very thinnest of fleecy clouds before her face, which did not obscure her light, but only made the whole country distinctly visible in every direction, from the absence of all strongly-defined shadow. then, again, i must confess, an unaccountably superstitious awe crept over me, and, instead of pursuing my intended route, i returned to my own home. "on the following morning, when reflecting on what had happened, i began to take a philosophical and reasonable view of the singular occurrence. in passing through the little gate i might, as i thought, have left it ajar, and that soon after it lost its nice equilibrium, and swung back to its accustomed resting-place. the hinges might have given a creaking sound, which the lonely solitude of the night had intensely magnified in my imagination. so much for the philosophical view. i then determined that i would put this view to the proof, and see if i could by any means get the gate to produce any noise similar to what i fancied i had heard. this was the reasonable view. i took care, however, to put my determination into practice at the earliest period of the evening, just, in fact, as the daylight had departed. accordingly i was at the little gate between five and six o'clock, but in spite of all kinds of efforts it would make no sign, but swung backwards and forwards on its hinges with noiseless smoothness. in the midst of my experiments a very intelligent man, a gardener by calling, came up. he was a resident of my own village, but had been working in the other village, and was then returning home from his day's labour. he expressed some surprise at seeing me there at that time of the evening, and i gave him a brief account of the reason. 'well, sir,' said he; 'if you will walk back with me, i will tell you something more about that little hand-gate.' i consented immediately, and he said to me as follows: 'some years ago, when we were all children at home, my mother had been to the other village, where she remained till night; on her return homewards, just as she passed through the little gate, she saw some kind of figure lying close by it, huddled together in a strange, mysterious manner. she was horror-stricken, and fled from the spot as fast as possible. on reaching her own cottage, she flung open the door, and fell fainting on the ground before her astonished and frightened children. when she came to herself, and was asked what had caused her evident terror, she told what she had seen, and where she had seen it. she could, however, give no definite description of the figure she had seen. she could only say, "it was something hideous." but never could she be induced to pass that place again after night-fall, as long as she lived.' 'well,' said i, 'this is a very remarkable coincidence.' 'yes,' said he, 'but i will tell you something more remarkable still. about forty years ago the land between the two villages was unenclosed. it was nothing more than a wild, uncultivated common. one night, about that period, as the villagers were going to bed, loud and piercing shrieks were heard coming from the common. some of the men dressed themselves hastily, with the intention of going and seeing what was taking place. some woman, as it seemed to them, was evidently being ill-treated. they set off on their kindly-intentioned errand, but as the sounds completely ceased, and the night was very dark, they thought it impossible to reach the exact spot where their services might be required. they went to bed, and slept soundly. on the following morning one of them was going to work at the other village, and as he passed over the common he was almost distilled to a jelly with the effect of fright at the appalling sight that suddenly met his gaze. a woman was lying before him, huddled up on the ground, quite dead, with her throat cut from ear to ear. she had evidently been murdered, on the preceding night. who she was, whence she came, why or by whom she had been murdered, was never known, and probably never will be in this world. when, a short time after this dreadful event, the common was enclosed, it so happened that the little hand-gate was put up close to the spot where the woman's lifeless body was found.' "he finished his narrative. i thanked him for it, and internally resolved never, if i could help it, to pass through those fields alone in the gloom of night, on any account whatever. i scrupulously kept my resolve." the celebrated case of the haunted room in the jewel house of the tower of london created great interest, about fifty-five years ago. additional interest and importance have been given to it by the publication of the following authentic account of mr. e. lenthal swifte,[ ] which in simple but forcible language tells its own story:-- "i have often purposed to leave behind me a faithful record of all that i know personally of this strange story.... forty-three years have passed, and its impression is as vividly before me as on the moment of its occurrence.... in i was appointed keeper of the crown jewels in the tower, where i resided with my family until my retirement in . one saturday night in october, , about 'the witching hour,' i was at supper with my then wife, our little boy, and her sister, in the sitting room of the jewel house, which--then comparatively modernized--is said to have been 'the doleful prison' of anne boleyn, and of the ten bishops whom oliver cromwell piously accommodated therein.... the room was, as it still is, irregularly shaped, having three doors and two windows, which last are cut nearly nine feet deep into the outer wall; between these is a chimney-piece projecting far into the room, and (then) surmounted with a large oil picture. on the night in question the doors were all closed; heavy and dark cloth curtains were let down over the windows, and the only light in the room was that of two candles on the table.... i sate at the foot of the table, my son on my right hand, his mother fronting the chimney-piece, and her sister on the opposite side. i had offered a glass of wine and water to my wife, when, on putting it to her lips, she paused and exclaimed, 'good god, what is that?' i looked up, and saw a cylindrical figure like a glass tube, seemingly about the thickness of my arm, and hovering between the ceiling and the table. its contents appeared to be a dense fluid, white and pale azure, like to the gathering of a summer cloud, and incessantly rolling and mingling within the cylinder. this lasted about two minutes, when it began slowly to move _before_ my sister-in-law, then following the oblong shape of the table, before my son and myself; passing _behind_ my wife it paused for a moment over her right shoulder (observe, there was no mirror opposite to her in which she could then behold it). instantly she crouched down, and, with both hands covering her shoulder, she shrieked out, 'oh, christ! it has seized me.' even now, while writing, i feel the fresh horror of that moment. i caught up my chair, struck at the wainscot behind her, rushed upstairs to the other children's room, and told the terrified nurse what i had seen.... neither my sister-in-law nor my son beheld this 'appearance.'... i am bound to add that shortly before this strange event some young lady residents in the tower had been, i know not wherefore, suspected of making phantasmagorical experiments at their windows, which, be it observed, had no command whatever on any windows in my dwelling. an additional sentry was accordingly posted so as to overlook any such attempt. happening, however, as it might, following hard at heel the visitation of my household, one of the night sentries at the jewel office was, as he said, alarmed by a figure like a huge bear issuing from underneath the door. he thrust at it with his bayonet, which stuck in the door, even as my chair dinted the wainscot. he dropped in a fit, and was carried senseless to the guard-room. his fellow-sentry declared that the man was neither asleep nor drunk, he himself having seen him the moment before awake and sober. of all this i avouch nothing more than that i saw the poor man in the guard-house prostrated with terror, and that in two or three days the fatal result, be it of fact or fancy, was that he died. let it be understood that to _all_ which i have herein set forth _as seen by myself_, i absolutely pledge my faith and my honour.--edmund lenthal swifte." another statement, regarding another apparition in the same part of the tower, stated by mr. offor to have been produced by some instrument, but which latter assertion is pronounced impossible by mr. lenthal swifte, also sufficiently illustrates the facts embodied in it:-- "before the burning of the armouries there was a paved yard in front of the jewel house, from which a gloomy and ghost-like doorway led down a flight of steps to the mint. some strange noises were heard in this gloomy corner; and on a dark night at twelve the sentry saw a figure like a bear cross the pavement and disappear down the steps. this so terrified him that he fell, and in a few hours after, having recovered sufficiently to tell the tale, he died. it was fully believed to have arisen from phantasmagoria.... the soldier bore a high character for bravery and good conduct. i was then in my thirtieth year, and was present when his body was buried with military honours in the flemish burial ground, st. catherine's. "george offor." on this, however, mr. swifte thus writes:-- "when on the morrow i saw the unfortunate soldier in the main guard-room, his fellow sentinel was also there, and testified to having seen him on his post just before the alarm, awake and alert, and even spoken to him. moreover, as i then heard the poor man tell his own story, the figure did not cross the pavement and disappear down the steps of the sally-port; but issued from underneath the jewel room door--as ghostly a door, indeed, as ever was opened to or closed on a doomed man; placed, too, beneath a stone archway as utterly out of the reach of my young friends' apparatus (if any such they had) as were my windows. i saw him once again on the following day, but changed beyond my recognition; in another day or two--_not_ 'in a few hours'--the brave and steady soldier, who would have mounted a breach or led a forlorn hope with unshaken nerves, died at the presence of a shadow, as the weakest woman might have died. "edmund lenthal swifte." the case of a haunted house in northamptonshire may now follow:-- "a house at barby,[ ] a small village about eight miles from rugby, was reputed to be haunted, and this under the following circumstances:--an old woman of the name of webb, a native of the place, and above the usual height, died on march , , at two a.m. aged sixty-seven. late in life she had married a man of some means, who having predeceased her, left her his property, so that she was in good circumstances. her chief and notorious characteristic, however, was excessive penuriousness, being remarkably miserly in her habits; and it is believed by many in the village that she thus shortened her days. two of her neighbours, women of the names of griffin and holding, nursed her during her last illness, and her nephew, mr. hart, a farmer in the village, supplied her temporal needs; in whose favour she had made a will, by which she bequeathed to him all her possessions. "about a month after the funeral mrs. holding, who, with her uncle, lived next door to the house of the deceased (which had been entirely shut up since the funeral), was alarmed and astonished at hearing loud and heavy thumps against the partition wall, and especially against the door of a cupboard in the room wall, while other strange noises, like the dragging of furniture about the rooms (though all the furniture had been removed), and the house was empty. these were chiefly heard about two o'clock in the morning. "early in the month of april a family of the name of accleton, much needing a residence, took the deceased woman's house, the only one in the village vacant, and bringing their goods and chattels, proceeded to inhabit it. the husband was often absent, but he and his wife occupied the room in which mrs. webb had died, while their daughter, a girl about ten years of age, slept in a small bed in the corner. violent noises in the night were heard about two o'clock, thumps, tramps, and tremendous crashes, as if all the furniture had been collected together, and then violently banged on to the floor. one night at two a.m. the parents were suddenly awakened by the violent screams of the child, 'mother, mother, there's a tall woman standing by my bed, a-shaking her head at me!' the parents could see nothing, so did their best to quiet and compose the child. at four o'clock they were again awakened by the child's screams, for she had seen the woman again; in fact she appeared to her no less than seven times, on seven subsequent nights. "mrs. accleton, during her husband's absence, having engaged her mother to sleep with her one night, was suddenly aroused at the same hour of two by a strange and unusual light in her room. looking up she saw quite plainly the spirit of mrs. webb, which moved towards her with a gentle appealing manner, as though it would have said, 'speak, speak!' "this spectre appeared likewise to a mrs. radbourne, a mrs. griffiths, and a mrs. holding. they assert that luminous balls of light hovered about the room during the presence of the spirit, and that streams of light seemed to go up towards a trap-door in the ceiling, which led to the roof of the cottage. each person who saw it testified likewise to hearing a low, unearthly, moaning noise,--'strange and unnatural-like,' but somewhat similar in character to the moans of the woman in her death-agony. "the subject was, of course, discussed; and mrs. accleton suggested that its appearance might not impossibly be connected with the existence of money hoarded up in the roof, an idea which may have arisen from the miserly habits of the dead woman. this hint having been given to and taken by her nephew, mr. hart, the farmer, he proceeded to the house, and with mrs. accleton's personal help made a search. the loft above was totally dark, but by the aid of a candle there was discovered, firstly, a bundle of writings, old deeds, as they turned out to be, and afterwards a large bag of gold and bank-notes, out of which the nephew took a handful of sovereigns, and exhibited them to mrs. accleton. but the knockings, moanings, strange noises, and other disturbances did not cease upon this discovery. they did cease, however, when mr. hart, having found that certain debts were owing by her, carefully and scrupulously paid them. so much for the account of the haunted house at barby. the circumstances were most carefully investigated by sir charles isham, bart., and others, the upshot of which was that the above facts were, to the complete satisfaction of numerous enquirers, completely verified." the following comes to the editor from scotland:-- "there is, without a doubt, a 'haunted room' in glamis castle. access to it now is cut off by a stone wall, and none are supposed to know where it is, except lord strathmore, his eldest son, and the factor on the estate. this wall was built some years ago by the present proprietor. strange, weird, and unearthly noises have been heard from time to time by numbers, and these by many persons wholly unprepared for the same. the following statement is from the lips of a lady who was sleeping in the castle one night, and who knew nothing of the reputation of the house:--she was undressing to retire for the night, when all of a sudden she was alarmed by a most violent noise, which made her fancy that one of the walls of the house had fallen. she rushed out into the passage, but no one but herself had been aroused by it. so she went back, and slept until morning. she mentioned the circumstance at breakfast, but the subject was evidently an unpleasant one. the conversation was at once changed, and she received a hint to take no further notice of it. some members of the family cannot bear the subject to be alluded to, and repel all inquiries." "there is no doubt," writes another correspondent, "about the reality of the noises at glamis castle. on one occasion, some years ago, the head of the family with several companions was determined to investigate the cause one night, when the disturbance was greater and more violent and alarming than usual. his lordship went to the haunted room (before it was walled up), opened the door with the key, and dropped back in a dead swoon into the arms of his companions; nor could he be ever induced to open his lips on the subject afterwards. "on another occasion a lady and her child were staying for a few days at the castle. the child was asleep in an adjoining dressing-room, and the lady, having gone to bed, lay awake for a while. suddenly a cold blast stole into the room, extinguishing the night-light by her bedside, but not affecting the one in the dressing-room beyond, in which her child had its cot. by that light she saw a tall mailed figure pass into the dressing-room from that in which she was lying. immediately thereafter there was a shriek from the child. her maternal instinct was aroused. she rushed into the dressing-room, and found the child in an agony of fear. it described what it had seen as a giant, who came and leant over its face. "an accomplished antiquarian, who has investigated this subject, writes as follows:--there is a tradition that in olden times, during one of the frequent feuds between the lindsays and the ogilvies, a large number of the latter, in flying from their enemies, came to glamis, and claimed hospitality. the master of the castle did not like to deny them the protection of his castle walls. he therefore admitted them; and on plea of hiding them, is reported to have put them into this out-of-the-way chamber. there he let them starve, and it is said that their bones lie there unto this day, the bodies never having been buried. this may have been the sight which startled the late lord strathmore on entering the haunted room--a large number of skeletons lying in the various parts of the place was a sight calculated to startle any man. and these are declared to be peculiarly revolting. some had apparently died in the act of gnawing the flesh off their own arms." the editor is indebted to henry cope caulfeild, esq., of clone house, st. leonard's, for the following:-- "the account here set forth was recently told to me by a captain s----living near cardiff, south wales. "a few miles from cardiff, on the monmouth road, there is a narrow spot held in awe by the peasantry; for a murder was committed there years ago, and it is said to be haunted by unquiet spirits. "the brother of my friend, an officer in the army, who has seen active service in india, was returning with his wife in a dog-cart, some few months ago, from a dinner with some friends in the country a few miles from cardiff. it was late in the night; and as they entered the narrow part of the road just mentioned, they heard the sound of wheels behind them. they looked back, and saw the lights of a carriage, and to avoid being overtaken and passed in such a narrow road, captain s---- whipped his horse, and tried to keep well in front. presently the sounds of wheels ceased; and to their great surprise, indeed consternation, they all of a sudden saw the lights and heard the wheels of a carriage some distance on in front of them. it was evidently the same; and yet it had never passed them! it seemed to stop at the side of the road, and captain s---- drove his dog-cart past the strange carriage. he and his wife saw in it a dim light; there were people in it, and they seemed to be without heads! mrs. s---- was paralysed with terror; her husband told his brother that he would rather face a battery of artillery than go through the horror of that moment; and the horse evidently was in sympathy with them, for he went like one mad. "it appears that the very same spectral figures had been seen by a country surgeon when passing the same place; and that the land-owners in those parts had cut down trees, and clipped and altered the appearance of the hedges on each side of the road, in order to get rid, if possible, of the ghastly horror, and of the hold which it has upon the popular mind. the _appearance_ of the carriage and its occupants, in a dim, hazy light, was to the last degree unearthly and spectral." a correspondent of the editor furnishes him with the following:-- "a brother of mine, a man who is the last person in the world to believe over much, or to be in the least degree superstitious, wishing to be near a particular town, and yet within easy reach of the permanent country residence of his greatest friend, was induced (a.d. ) to take over the remainder of the lease of an old-fashioned furnished mansion in cheshire, where he, with his wife, children, and servants, in due course, went to reside. he was advised to take the place as well because of the reasonableness of the rent--for it was spacious and comfortably furnished--as by the recommendation of the london house-agents, a well-known firm in the west end, with whom the letting of it rested. "soon after the arrival of the family and servants, the latter protested again and again that they were disturbed almost every night by a continual 'tramp, tramp, tramp' of heavy footsteps up the stairs, and along the narrow passage, out of which were the doors which led to their bedrooms. they would have it that the house was haunted. the sounds were sometimes so loud and alarming that, as one of the servants remarked, 'it seemed like a regiment of foot soldiers marching over creaking boards.' complaints were made to my brother, who merely said that the noises must be the result of wind under the joists, or of rats, and he laughed at the whole affair. some of the servants gave warning, and left. still the sounds went on: not always, and every night, but, with certain cessations, from time to time. "in the autumn of the year , a lady, her daughter of fourteen, and a maid, came to stay in the house; and as the former was somewhat of an invalid, a suite of rooms in the west wing, each communicating with the other, was apportioned to them. the second night after their arrival, the lady in question, suddenly awaking, saw in her bedroom a luminous cloud, which gradually appeared to be formed into the shape of an old man, with a most painfully depressing countenance, full of the deepest sorrow, and wearing a large full-bottomed wig. she tried to raise herself in bed, to see if it were not the effect of her half-waking fancy, or the result of a disturbed dream, but could not. the room, in which there was no natural light, seemed to be partially but quite sufficiently illuminated; and she felt confident that a spectre was before her. she gazed at it for some minutes, three at least, hearing the ticking of her watch, and counting the seconds. there the apparition stood, and seemed to be making an effort to speak, while a strange, dull, inarticulate groan seemed to come up as from the floor. upon this, seeing the bell-rope hanging within the folds of the curtains at her right hand, she braced herself up to seize it and give it a most violent pull. immediately she did this, the face of the figure bore an expression of anger, and by degrees it faded away. the bell, which hung some distance away, was heard by no one, and she was compelled to lie alone, for she feared to rise (though the apparition did not reappear) until the church clock near struck four, when, the morning having broken, she rose, and dressed herself. "in the morning, before she had said a word, her daughter, on meeting her, said, 'oh, mamma, an old man in a great wig tramped through my room twice in the night. who could it have been?' "the lady being so impressed by these occurrences, which her host and hostess would persist in saying were only the result of her own fancy, determined on leaving in the course of a few days (as she afterwards stated). on the following night, she slept with a night-light, and the door into her maid's room open. but the noise of tramping, which had been hitherto heard only in the servants' wing of the house, which was opposite, was now heard in the east side of it. 'tramp, tramp, tramp!' the sounds were heard constantly, without cessation; so much so that the master of the house, my brother, rose suddenly that very night, thinking that thieves had broken in, and rushed out to the east passage. but all in a moment, they stopped; nothing was to be heard, nothing seen; all was still. this occurred again and again. "the lady left as arranged. the noises ceased for a while, and then began once more. it was with difficulty that any of the servants could be induced to remain, believing that the house was haunted. "about ten months afterwards, my brother having forgotten all about the supposed spectre and the noises, had been out for the day, and returned home in a dog-cart, some time after midnight, in company with his groom. only the housekeeper had remained out of bed, as his return was quite uncertain. the horse and trap were put up, both the servants had gone to their rooms, and my brother was taking some refreshment in the housekeeper's apartment, by the light of the fire, when all of a sudden, a loud and decisive rap was heard at the door. thinking, of course, that it was one of the servants, he replied, 'come in.' before the words were out of his mouth, the door opened, and the apparition of the old man in a large wig stood before him. my brother was paralysed with terror for a while. he could not speak; he tried hard, as he says, but his mouth was dry and his tongue motionless. 'good god!' he exclaimed at length, 'am i awake or asleep, in my senses or gone mad?' the motionless figure, whose face was intensely sad, looked at him beseechingly. 'in god's name, what do you want, or what can i do for you?' 'too late! nothing,' was the mournful, but somewhat inarticulate response. and with that the spectre suddenly vanished away. at this moment a strong, loud, piercing, bitter wail, as of the voice of a woman, broke the awful silence. it seemed to come from the courtyard outside, and was repeated again and again round the upper part of the house. the scream was said to be like nothing human. the servants heard it, my sister-in-law was awoke by it, and the groom and housekeeper, with the others, as a consequence, came rushing downstairs. my brother, who is as brave and bold as he is remarkable for common sense, does not now dispute the reality of haunted houses. "a few months afterwards, he and his left. and after he had given up possession, he was informed, on good and credible authority, that tradition confidently asserted the mansion to have been the residence of a disreputable dutch hanger-on of william of orange, who is represented to have violently made away with one of his mistresses in that very house, in a room which overlooked the park, now a disused lumber-room, at the east end of the old mansion."[ ] an american clergyman, of what is commonly termed "the protestant episcopal church," sent the following, which, as he writes, "went the round of the newspapers," and for the truth of which he himself vouches:-- "few positions in life can be imagined more disagreeable than that of being imprisoned in a haunted cell in a police station. 'the new orleans times' tells a most unpleasant story of a ghost-infested cell in the fourth precinct police station in that city. it appears that several years ago 'a little old woman,' named ann murphy, committed suicide by hanging herself in this cell; and since that event no fewer than thirteen persons have attempted to destroy themselves in a similar manner; four of these attempts being attended with fatal results. one of those lately cut down before life was extinct was a girl named mary taylor, who, on recovering consciousness, declared that while lying on the floor of the cell she was aroused by a little old white woman in a faded calico dress, with no stockings and down-trodden slippers, with a faded handkerchief tied round her head. her faded dress was bound with a sort of reddish-brown tape, and her hand was long, faded, and wrinkled, while on the fourth finger of her left hand was a plain, thin gold ring. 'this little woman,' said the girl, 'beckoned me to get up, and impelled me by some mysterious power to tear my dress in strips, place one of the strips round my neck, and tie the other to the bars. i lifted my feet from the floor, and fell. i thought i was choking, a thousand lights seemed to flash before my eyes, and i forgot all until i found myself in the room with the doctors and police bending over me. it was not until then that i really comprehended what i had done, and was, i believe, under a kind of trance or influence at the time, over which i had no control.' mary taylor had never heard of the suicide of ann murphy, whose appearance, according to the police, tallied exactly with the description given by the girl. others having complained in a like manner of the ghostly occupant of the cell, the police, to test the real facts of the case, placed a night lodger who had just arrived in the city in this cheerful apartment. being thoroughly tired and worn out, he fell asleep immediately, but shortly afterwards rushed into the office in a state of terrible alarm. he, too, had been visited by the little old woman, and wisely declined to sleep another hour in the station." the following case, as may be seen from an attestation at its conclusion, is likewise well authenticated:-- "an english clergyman, who was seeking a residence in a northern scottish city about ten years ago, had his attention accidentally called to an old-fashioned, pleasant-looking detached house, of some size and convenience, which had been for some time vacant, about a mile and a-half from the city. it had considerable grounds round it well timbered, a high-walled garden, and was in many respects both commodious and comfortable. one attraction, likewise, was the extremely moderate rent which was asked for it. so he secured a lease of it for a short term of years. he and his family and servants came up from england in due course, and took up their abode in it. they were not there long before it soon became evident, to some of them at least, that the house was haunted. noises of the most extraordinary character were heard in various parts. sometimes there came the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs. at others there were knocks, both violent and gentle, at the doors, none of which could be accounted for. at midnight, on several occasions, there was a constant, uninterrupted sound in one room, as if a large sledgehammer (having been wrapped in a blanket folded several times), was steadily and regularly struck against the wall, at the head of the bed in the room, by some particularly powerful arms. 'thump, thump, thump,' it sounded, as though lifted and directed with tremendous force; and this noise often lasted, with only slight intermission, for two or three hours. on other occasions persons on the stairs or in the passages felt the air move, and heard the creaking of the floor close to them, as if someone invisible were passing quickly by. one night, between twelve and two, the master and mistress of the family were awakened by a loud and startling noise, as if all the shutters of the windows of the house had been suddenly and simultaneously burst open with the greatest violence. the crash was literally tremendous; and each believed that thieves were breaking in. so the clergyman, seizing a large presentation sword which hung on the wall of the landing, unsheathed it, and went downstairs with a light, expecting to face the intruders. he first examined the dining-room (from whence the noise seemed chiefly to come), but everything was just as usual. no shutter was open; no cupboards forced. so, too, in hall and library. nothing was moved. then he descended into the large cellars; but there, likewise, everything was untouched, and nothing unusual was seen. a large retriever dog, which lay at the foot of the front stairs, however, was greatly agitated, trembled and howled. but still nothing was to be seen. perfect silence reigned. so the clergyman and his wife returned to their sleeping-room, only to hear, all of a sudden, precisely the same strange noise repeated about ten minutes after their return, with, if anything, even greater violence. it was currently reported, and commonly believed by several residents thereabouts, that many years previously, the cast-off mistress of a scotch nobleman, having been handed over to a physician and university professor for marriage, and the latter having received from the nobleman in consideration of the marriage the gift of the house and lands in question, subsequently murdered the woman, for whom he had conceived a special dislike, and buried her body on the premises. this story, with slight but unimportant variations, was told by several; and it is quite certain that a young female scotch servant, who once lived in the house, following the sound of heavy footsteps up to an attic in the front portion of the house, which she had pledged herself to do when next she heard them, fell down in a swoon or fit at the top of the stairs; from that moment lost her reason, and is now in a lunatic asylum, near the city in question. these are facts testified to by those who know the circumstances.[ ] as to the general accuracy of the foregoing, the editor is enabled, on the testimony of several, to pledge his word thereto. i am indebted for the following narrative to a friend,[ ] who in her own words has given all the details of another remarkable example of a haunted house:-- "monsieur de goumoëns, a magistrate, or a gentleman holding a high judicial position at berne in switzerland, a man of undoubted and well-established character for personal courage, as well as for moral rectitude, related to my father, mr. caulfeild of bath, with whom he was on the most intimate terms of personal friendship, the following circumstance, at once so extraordinary and so painful, which had come within the precincts of his own house, as to drive him from his place of residence. the account was given to my father in the year , when he was residing with his family at berne. noises and disturbances had been frequently heard in m. de goumoëns' bedroom, as of footsteps, the opening and shutting of drawers, and of an escritoire when papers were shuffled about. the heavy curtains of the large old four-posted bed were drawn and undrawn by no human hand, and were sometimes suddenly flung up on to the top of the bed; while the sound of the flapping of the wings of some very large bird was often heard. all these and other sounds so disturbed m. de goumoëns and his wife, that the health of the latter began perceptibly and seriously to fail. examinations of the house made by himself, in conjunction with the police, and special investigations of the bedroom and other adjoining apartments, afforded no solution whatsoever of the mystery. at length madame de goumoëns' maid gave warning to leave her service, complaining that her sleep and peace were completely broken by these supernatural occurrences. while consulting together as to what could be done, and hesitating as to whether they might not be compelled to leave the place, the strange sounds became louder than ever. one night they were suddenly aroused by hearing sharp cries of distress from one of their children, a little boy, who slept in their room, and who in great terror called out fretfully again and again, 'let me alone; let me alone; don't you hurt me!' as he pointed into vacancy. this particular event was the last straw which broke the camel's back, and led the child's parents to determine on leaving the house immediately. "i may add that on a subsequent and more searching examination of the house, one room was found to be both locked and fastened up; regarding the character of which the owner was somewhat reticent. however, the boarding before the door, which had been papered over, was removed, the keys were forthcoming, and the room was carefully examined. on the shutters being opened, it was found just as it had been left since its occupation by a previous tenant, who had gone by the sobriquet of 'the black styger.' he was a nobleman of bad reputation, and had committed suicide in that very apartment by blowing out his brains; the traces of which with blood were found scattered both on wall and floor. it was generally believed that his disturbed spirit haunted the place." one of the most singular recent examples, testified to by two independent eye-witnesses, now deserves to be reproduced. the appearance of a large spectral bird is thus recorded by mr. henry spicer in one of his curious and thoughtfully written volumes entitled "strange things amongst us:"-- "captain morgan, a gentleman of the highest honour and veracity, and who certainly was not over-gifted with ideality, arrived in london one evening in --, in company with a friend, and took up his lodgings in a large old-fashioned house of the last century, to which chance had directed them. captain morgan was shown into a large bed-chamber, with a huge four-posted bed, heavy hangings, and altogether that substantial appearance of good, solid respectability and comfort which associated itself with our ideas of the wealthy burghers and merchants of the time of queen anne and the first george, when so many strange crimes of romantic daring or of deep treachery stained the annals of the day, and the accursed thirst for gold, the bane of every age, appeared to exercise its most terrific influence. "captain morgan retired to bed, and slept, but was very soon awaked by a great flapping of wings close beside him, and a cold, weird-like sensation such as he had never before experienced spread through his frame. he started, and sat upright in bed; when an extraordinary appearance declared itself in the shape of an immense black bird, with outstretched wings, and red eyes flashing as it were with fire. "it was right before him and pecked furiously at his face and eyes so incessantly, that it seemed to him a wonder that he was enabled, with his arms and the pillow, to ward off the creature's determined assaults. during the battle it occurred to him that some large pet bird belonging to the family had effected its escape, and been accidentally shut up in the apartment. "again and again the creature made at him with a malignant ferocity perfectly indescribable; but though he invariably managed to baffle the attack, he noticed that he never once succeeded in _touching_ his assailant. this strange combat having lasted several minutes, the gallant officer, little accustomed to stand so long simply on the defensive, grew irritated, and leaping out of bed, dashed at his enemy. the bird retreated before him. the captain followed in close pursuit, driving his sable foe, fluttering and fighting, towards a sofa which stood in the corner of the room. the moonlight shone full into the chamber, and morgan distinctly saw the creature settle down, as if in terror, upon the embroidered seat of the sofa. "feeling now certain of his prey he paused for a second or two, then flung himself suddenly upon the black object, from which he had never removed his gaze. to his utter amazement it seemed to fade and dissolve under his very fingers. he was clutching the air; and in vain he searched, with lighted lamp, every nook and corner of the apartment, unwilling to believe that his senses could be the victims of so gross a delusion--no bird was to be found. after a long scrutiny the baffled officer once more retired to rest, and met with no further disturbance. "while dressing in the morning, he resolved to make no allusion to what he had seen, but to induce his friend, on some pretext, to change rooms with him. that unsuspecting individual readily complied, and the next day reported, with much disgust, that he had had to contend for possession of the chamber with the most extraordinary and perplexing object[ ] he had ever encountered, to all appearance a huge black bird, which constantly eluded his grasp, and ultimately disappeared, leaving no clue to its mode of exit."[ ] and with this, the present chapter is closed. numerous other cases of haunted localities might have been provided; some which have long been in print, others which have been heard from the lips of those whose experience and good faith testify to the truth of their narratives. in so many examples collected, almost every one owns certain features in common: and all in some measure are alike. repetition, by consequence, becomes wearisome. the cases here put on record, therefore, while sufficiently diversified, serve abundantly to set forth the reality of those facts, to a brief record of which this chapter has been devoted. modern spiritualism. "now the spirit speaketh expressly that, in the latter times, some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils."--_ tim. iv. ._ "many believe that the final assault upon christianity will be made by the enemies of god, bonded and compacted together into an universal kingdom. it may be, as some have held, that another incarnation shall take place; and that the enemy of souls will be permitted to assume man's nature. anyhow, we are told that antichrist shall _reign_. thousands, deluded by false miracles and lying wonders, will become his subjects, his willing votaries; and own him as their king. his worship will be an adroit counterfeit of the worship of the true god--his kingdom a parody of the catholic church; while its doctrines will be at once so attractive and delusive to fallen man as that the predicted apostasy will be great and widespread."--_sermons on antichrist._ chapter viii. modern spiritualism. when, in a country where for at least twelve centuries the christian religion has been accepted, and by which that country has received unknown blessings both temporal and spiritual, schools of thought arise, in which historical christianity is not simply patronized, but put out of court, the phenomenon is both portentous and noteworthy. that this is so at the present time in england with many, need scarcely be pointed out. the scepticism which has deluged the continent, coming upon a people whose religious convictions had been so seriously disturbed by the reformation, and whose conceptions of objective political truth had been so ruthlessly disorganized by the events of the commonwealth and the revolution of , has found the ground well prepared for a scattering of the seeds of doubt. abroad they were sown some generations ago, and brought forth deadly fruit. the french revolution and its horrors followed as a matter of course. events before our eyes tell in very plain language that our own turn has at last come.[ ] the day of trial is now upon us. true, the vulgarity of the eighteenth-century unbelievers is not at present so manifestly apparent; though it exists amongst certain active leaders of the lower classes with whom scepticism is popular. but the tone and temper of public opinion, the bold utterances of serials and newspapers, the public political policy now in vogue and popular, the too general understanding that christianity is to be as far as possible ignored in legislation--all indicate the steady and rapid progress of sceptical liberalism. the broad church party in the established communion has done much, and will no doubt do much more, to eliminate the supernatural from the minds of its admirers and of the people of england. disliking dogma, its teaching, when the fog which surrounds it allows that teaching to be partly comprehended, is of the earth earthy. it dovetails in with the low material views and carnal desires of the money-grubbing many. its ideal of bliss, not always wrapped up in philosophical jargon (and therefore sometimes intelligible), is simply commercial prosperity and temporal wealth; eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, comfort, material pleasure and ease; the conquest of nature by scientific research and progress; an enjoyment of the present and only the present; and a complete banishment of the old-world theology--useful, it may have been, in times gone by, when the world was being educated; but now to be thrown aside as lumber, worn out and valueless. in place of that historical christianity accepted since the days of s. augustine of canterbury, we are promised doubt, disbelief, a refined as well as an unrefined intellectual paganism; and in the end--though such an end may not now be contemplated by all members of that ecclesiastical school--a positive rejection of the distinct nature of god. at present, of course, the figure is decently draped. its ugly proportions and hateful outline are not apparent. its admirers have to accommodate themselves with some skill to the strong prejudices of the age; to tolerate systems which they contemn, to carry out the silent but certain operation of destruction, under the hypocritical desire of assisting mankind to complete the work of temporal progress. all this is before us and around us, if we would but note it. and this being so, the state of thought and of society, as few can fail to observe, is eminently calculated to afford those who disbelieve in the supernatural, good opportunities of advance in the direction of negations. on the other hand, the presence amongst us of a sect of persons who call themselves "spiritualists," and whose notorious words and works may be noted and criticized, is full of moment and importance. spiritualism, when first it appeared and took shape, was treated with contempt. the facts urged by its supporters were denied; the manifestations almost universally disbelieved in. it was declared to be the work of acute knaves, or the offspring of idle and imaginative dreamers. public writers treated it with scornful contempt. reports of its strange proceedings and extraordinary developments were knowingly and deliberately suppressed. it was hastily hustled off the public stage, refused a hearing, and denied a defence. this policy, however convenient to its promoters, has failed. sneers have not killed it. its ideas and theories have been recently reduced to a formal system, while its votaries have increased to an extent scarcely credited. christians and non-christians, roman catholics, church-of-england people and protestants, have ranged themselves under its banner, and accept and propagate its views. to some the existence of spurious coin proves the value of the true; and the portents of these latter times are surely full of warning and value. at all periods, it should be observed, certain classes of leaders of men's thoughts have succeeded in banishing the supernatural from the field of human action. for example, thucydides, representing the world exclusively in its natural aspect, did this. he had neither ear nor eye for the marvellous. in recent times, from the period of locke to the beginning of the present century, a similar course was adopted by a very influential school of writers, remarkable for their careful dismissal of the miraculous, both from ken and consideration. to such, the world was a machine, wound up once for all by its author, and needing no further application of that power which appeared to have spent itself, so to speak, in the act of creation. like s. peter's "scoffers," "walking after their own lusts," they practically declared, "since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation."[ ] but, of course, such a state of thought could only be transitory. the universal convictions of man's conscience, and the most earnest desires of his heart, produced a reversion of opinion. the very dogmatic philosophers soon found themselves at sea. reason and imagination were starved, while the understanding was profoundly flattered. this has so turned out, not once, nor twice, but continually. scepticism has followed superstition, and superstition scepticism. wherever the catholic religion, having once been had, has been deliberately cast out and denied, there, as in scotland at the present day, superstition is more than ordinarily widespread and rampant. the gnosticism and manichæism of the early christian era have reproduced themselves in later times; while materialism has lived side by side with that superstition which, on the surface, it seemed so necessary for the same materialism to deny. the following faithful account of the rise of the modern system of spiritualism is borrowed from a contemporary record:-- "in december, , a respectable farmer and his family, named fox, settled in a house at hydesville, a hamlet near newark, in the state of new york. they were troubled from the first with noises, which in january, , assumed the definite character of knockings, like that of a hammer. two children, since so famous as the misses fox, felt something heavy, like a dog, lie on their feet when in bed, and one of them felt as if a cold hand were passed over her face. the knockings went on increasing in violence, and at length it was observed, on some occasion when farmer fox tried the windows to see if they could be caused by the wind, that the knockings exactly answered the rattle accidentally made by the moving sash. this suggested the idea of inviting the noises, or rather the beings who caused them, to reply by rapping, on repetition of the letters of the alphabet, to questions put to them. this was first tried at a place called rochester, with which the family were connected, whence the term 'rochester knockings' came into use. the experiment succeeded perfectly, and this was the origin of 'spirit-rapping,' which has since grown into a regular system. the neighbours being called in, the affair soon thickened and developed into a 'movement.' the rappings revealed a murder which had taken place in the house when in other hands. public meetings were called, committees of ladies formed to examine the children, and prevent the possibility of deception. similar phenomena began to show themselves in various parts of the country, and under yet more extraordinary conditions. raps were heard on all sorts of objects--ceilings, tables, chairs, &c., and it was discovered that certain persons were better fitted than others to communicate with the spirits, to whom these noises were now attributed. such persons were called _mediums_, a name with which the world is now sufficiently familiar, and when they were present, tables and chairs would move about and rise from the ground. many other astonishing things became common, as drawing and music, executed under this strange influence, by persons who knew nothing of these arts." as to its principles and policy, no better nor fairer exposition of them can be had than from the various publications which are so largely and generally circulated. from a pamphlet written with some system[ ] by mr. t. grant of maidstone, the following extracts, explanatory of the now formulated principles of modern spiritualism, are made:-- "table of media. _outward._ . vibratory medium. . motive medium. . gesticulating medium. . tipping medium. . pantomimic medium. . impersonating medium. _inward._ . pulsatory medium. . manipulating medium. . neurological medium. . sympathetic medium. . clairlative medium. . homo-motor medium. _onward._ . symbolic medium. . psychologic medium. . psychometric medium. . pictorial medium. . duodynamic medium. . developing medium. _upward._ . therapeutic medium. . missionary medium. . telegraphic medium. . speaking medium. . clairvoyant medium. . impressional medium. "the _outward_ stratum includes all kinds of mediumship in which spirits act only on the physical organism, first using simply the electrical or magnetic emanations from the medium and others in the room to produce movements of objects, or concussions called rappings, and to control matter in various ways; and secondly, using portions or the whole of the medium's body by direct action of spirits upon the bodily organs, the medium's spirit being more or less passive, and not taking part in the performance.... "_vibratory mediumship._ i have often met with instances in my experience, and multitudes of persons are sometimes attacked together, with variations in accordance with individual character. the physical excitement and convulsive phenomena often witnessed at revival meetings are chiefly of this kind.... "the _motive medium_ comes next in order; he furnishes the magnetic power by which spirits are enabled to move tables and other material objects.... "the third class is _gesticulating mediumship_, which appears to be a development of the vibratory. it is exhibited by the sect of 'shakers' of the present day in the initiatory stage of their development, and was a form of mediumship common amongst the prophets of the cevennes, the votaries of s. vitus, and in most religious excitements. "_tipping mediumship_ follows next, and this again is a step in advance from the _motive_ mediumship, the movements of tables and other objects being so regulated by the intelligence of spirits as to produce telegraphic communications.... "_pantomimic media_ belong to the fifth class; they are made, by the controlling or guardian spirit, to put themselves in various postures, so as to represent any peculiarity belonging to spirit-friends who are standing by, wishing to make their presence known and to communicate. lecturers on electro-biology produce, to some extent, the same effects. "the last in this stratum is the _impersonating mediumship_, which is a development from the pantomimic. in this case the communicating spirit enters and takes full possession of the medium's body, whilst his own spirit stands aside." the writer then passes on to consider what he terms the "inward stratum," thus:-- "first we have _pulsatory mediumship_, in which the medium receives communications from spirits and answers to mental questions by means of pulsations, like tiny raps, on different parts of the body, or by sounds heard only by himself. these manifestations, although very convincing to the medium himself, afford but little satisfaction to anybody else. "_manipulating mediumship_, which follows, is in fact curative mesmerism, in which, however, the will of the mesmeriser is strengthened and guided by spirits. dr. newton, of america, who visited maidstone in and made several interesting and permanent cures, is a most remarkable and successful medium of this class, many of his cures having, indeed, all the appearance of miracles. "in the next form of mediumship, the _neurological_, the spirit impresses thoughts upon the brain, and the medium puts them into words; thus the communications partake of the peculiarities of the medium, and if the medium is impressed to write, he does so in his own handwriting and mode of diction and spelling. "next comes _sympathetic mediumship_, which is an extension of the neurologic, but in which the spirits enter more intimately into sympathy with the medium. both of these last are transitional forms of mediumship, and not very reliable until carefully developed. "in _clairlative mediumship_, which succeeds in order, scenes of the past are clearly reproduced, or original scenes pictured to the mind, as in dreams and visions.[ ] "the last of this inward group is called the _homo-motor_ medium, one who is in perfect sympathy and under the complete control of one individual spirit only, who, in fact, appears to live a second life on earth in union with him." and then he defines and discusses the "onward stratum":-- "we begin with _symbolic mediumship_, in which the interior vision is opened by spiritual aid, and the medium sees in a vision the almost exact pre-figurations of things which will occur at some future time, or which do in reality now exist, either in germ or in full or partial development. "the second in this group, _psychologic mediumship_, is a very important form. a medium of this class is one who is in a condition to be impressed by a sympathetic spirit with any set of ideas which he desires to represent. it is sometimes done in a pictorial form, when the medium clearly sees and describes scenes which appear to the vision, such as the appearance and movements of an army, a landscape, a congregation in a cathedral, and so forth.... "the _psychometric medium_ has the power of feeling and correctly describing the characteristics of persons with whose spheres he or she is brought into sympathy or contact. the power is generally exercised by placing to the forehead, the perceptive region of the brain, anything which has been intimately connected with the person, as a piece of his hair, his handwriting, or a well-worn article of dress. some will thus read a sealed letter or the mottoes enclosed in nuts.... "_pictorial mediumship_ differs from the symbolic chiefly in the circumstance that the things seen and described by the medium do not in reality exist as material facts, but are only representations, prefiguring or bodying-forth a spiritual or psychical truth.... "the next is the _duodynamic medium_, a word signifying two powers, he being capable of exhibiting two or more forms of mediumship at the same time. these compound media, maturely developed, are said to be comparatively rare. "the last in this onward stratum is the _developing medium_, through whom spirits can very usefully assist in developing the mediumistic faculty in others. they have the power of harmonising the influences which affect them, and of rendering media passive to the action of the spirits who are seeking the control of their organisms." as regards the "upward stratum," the following definitions are given:-- "the _therapeutic medium_ is one who effects the cure of many diseases through the sympathetic power of seeing and describing minutely the disorganized parts of the body, and directing the necessary treatment; sometimes the manipulating mediumship is added, when the medium not only sees the source of mischief, but also makes curative mesmeric passes at the same time. "next, we have the _missionary medium_, who is irresistibly compelled to go, without knowing why or whither, wherever the spirit guides him. under this controlling influence, media have been made to travel nearly all over the civilized world, generally without purse or scrip, or any personal knowledge of the places; the spirits raising up friends and helpers at every step as they are required." writing of a missionary medium known to himself, mr. grant adds the following:--"i am acquainted with a medium of this class in maidstone, who is too weak in body to walk far in his ordinary state, yet, under this influence, he is often made to walk long distances without feeling fatigue, at the most unreasonable hours of day or night, and he has several times been instantaneously transported from one place to another, miles apart." "speaking mediumship," writes the author quoted, "is a most useful and instructive faculty.... in most cases speakers have to be entranced, that is, their spirits have to be removed from the body for a time, in order to give the acting spirit full control; but when this has to be done the medium is but little advanced from the personating mediumship, which is one of the successive stages which a fully-developed speaking medium generally passes through. many of our most celebrated and effective preachers and speakers have been, or are, really speaking media, under the guidance of spirits, without its being suspected or understood even by themselves. this is, indeed, 'inspiration.' "the _clairvoyant medium_ follows next in order, and is in advance of the telegraphic, because he is able to see the scenes that are actually transpiring at the time in another place, no matter how far distant. "the _impressional medium_ is generally one who has advanced through the neurologic, sympathetic, clairlative, and psychologic phases, and thus become so easily and thoroughly impressible by his guardian spirit that the medium appears to live a double life, the conditions and circumstances of both states of existence finding a ready expression through his organism at all times without his being entranced, the spiritual existence becoming as much as the physical his normal state." pp. - . the acts and deeds of mr. daniel home, a scotchman, and of the davenport brothers, americans, who figure very prominently as mediums in the authentic records of the spiritualists, are tolerably well known by report to many. from america, where the signs were first noticed, they came eastwards to england and the european continent, in which places the spiritual manifestations were even more remarkable than those which had occurred and been testified to in the west. under the direction of a medium, people sat round a table, and by a silent invocation of spirits, by "willing"[ ] that they should come, they came, and produced the following amongst other equally strange phenomena.[ ] large tables rose to the ceiling, floating in the atmosphere with a sort of undulating motion, and coming down again to the floor without noise; sprigs of flowers were torn off and presented to people by the spirit; accordions and other musical instruments were played without any visible hand holding or moving them; luminous stars and streaks of light appeared in various places, while "spirit hands" were seen and felt as palpably as mortal flesh and blood could be; answers to questions made, were given by a system of raps or by spelling out words on a child's alphabet placed on the floor. thus conversations, sometimes sensible, but frequently trivial and absurd,[ ] were held with the spirits summoned. spirit hands, using material pens, ink and paper, wrote answers to queries; quoted verses from known authors, or put down original poems. in some cases the narratives published were anonymous, and only authenticated by witnesses who privately testified to the newspaper-editors their accuracy. but in some instances persons of repute and ability came forward in support of their correctness.[ ] dr. gully of malvern, for example, publicly testified that he had seen mr. home float about a room for several minutes, and guaranteed the accuracy of the facts set forth in a most remarkable fashion in an early number of the "cornhill magazine." a well-known clergyman of the high church party in the church of england, gives his testimony to the truth and strangeness of certain appearances and manifestations, in the following communication to the editor of this volume:-- "i was staying in the north of england with the rev. ----, in . during my visit a well-known medium (at that period a clergyman of the diocese of london) spent the evening with us. eight or ten other people were there at the same time. 'table-turning' was the subject of a long and animated discussion, in which those who accepted the facts and those who rejected them were about equally divided. there was nothing to be done, therefore, but to test the question. this was determined on. a circular table about four feet in diameter, of considerable size and weight, was used. seven people sat round it, joining their hands on the table, and after conjointly _willing_ that it should turn itself in one direction or be turned, for about twelve minutes, it began to vibrate strangely and then slowly to move. at first its motion was in circles, then it moved from side to side of the room with dash and rapidity. afterwards it was strangely tilted on the other side. on one occasion later on, it rose several inches from the ground, and remained suspended in the air for nearly two minutes. as to the facts, no one could dispute them. afterwards a variety of questions were put, to which the table replied by knocking on the floor. it was agreed beforehand that one knock should stand for 'no', two for 'yes.' an alphabet was produced, and words in response were spelled out. some of the queries were trivial, some arithmetical, some momentous. the answers were usually accurate, sensible, and intelligible, but not always so. after questions had been put concerning the future state, heaven, hell, purgatory, the happiness of the good and the punishment of the wicked, a question was asked, 'where did the spirit now answering dwell when on earth?' the name of a place in devonshire was spelled out. this reply greatly interested a clergyman present, who some fifteen years previously had been curate in that county. it was followed by another:--'what was the name of the person whose spirit is here?' then the table spelt out, by means of the alphabet, the name of a yeoman who had died impenitent and blaspheming at the period before referred to. this was sufficient for me," writes the above correspondent; "what i had heard and seen convinced me that necromancy was practised. i left the house, protecting myself by the sacred sign, convinced of the sin of the practice. and though i had been a spectator and not an actor, i made a resolution, which i have scrupulously kept, never to see nor sanction such proceedings again." another somewhat similar example is here recorded. a clergyman of the church of england, intimately known to the editor of this volume, supplies the following remarkable narrative regarding the action and authors of spiritualistic manifestations:--"being a perfect and total sceptic as to the supernatural character of so-called 'spiritualism,' and believing that the results asserted to be produced by its votaries were brought about by pre-arranged trickery and the deception of confederates, i for a long time declined to be present at, or to take part in, a _séance_, though earnestly pressed to do so. however, circumstances led me to attend one in the year , at a house in notting hill square, london, in the month of october. prior to the operations, which were managed and conducted by a 'medium,' i was invited to examine both the room where the _séance_ was to be held, and the table by which the operations were to be conducted. conversations, held by a well-known spiritualist, were to be carried on, (by means of an alphabet, raps and knockings,) with the spirits who were presumed to be present, and who were declared to have miraculously moved the table round which, for some time, seven persons, including myself, had been sitting. the room was about ten feet in height, and in the centre was a gas chandelier of three lights, all of which were burning. during the sitting, after the table had made several most remarkable gyrations, tilting one side of itself upwards and downwards at an angle of at least forty-five degrees, at the command of the chief operator it slowly ascended from the floor to the height of at least seven feet, viz. the bottom of the pendent gaselier. its plane having caused the lamp glasses to rattle by contact, the table then with a strange throbbing and vibration and slow movement began to descend. we had all removed our chairs, to give room for its ascent, and standing close to the walls around, saw it slowly come down to its place. i was so shocked and horrified at what i beheld, and now so firmly convinced that the remarkable actions we had witnessed were the result of the invocation and intervention of evil spirits, that i declined, in language most positive and unmistakable, to have any further part in such unlawful performances. when further attempts were made to obtain fresh manifestations, taking from my neck a small silver crucifix, which had been blessed by a high ecclesiastical dignitary, i made a mental act of faith in the blessed trinity, and holding the small crucifix in my closed hand, placed my hand clasping it on the table, saying mentally, 'if this be the work of evil spirits, may god almighty, for christ's sake, stop it!' the moment i did this, the table, which had been moving about strangely in several directions, and by varied singular motions, became suddenly and at once motionless. nor could it be made to stir afterwards. being perfectly convinced that such operations were of the nature of necromancy, forbidden by the church, as scripture plainly testifies, i made an earnest exhortation to those in the room, after the last manifestation, not to cooperate in such deeds any further. some maintained by rather blasphemous arguments that spiritualism was destined to, and would soon, take the place of christianity; and were kind enough to pity my ignorance, narrowness, prejudice, and sectarianism, to which i made no reply. i then left." from another source (a well-known country gentleman in one of the midland counties) has been obtained a series of questions and answers which were put, given, and taken down in the year , at a gathering at which the practice of table-turning and spirit invocation was tested by those whose conviction, in the main, regarding them, as the editor is informed, agrees with that of the correspondents already quoted. similar strange phenomena occurred on this occasion likewise:-- "are you a spirit who inhabited this earth? yes. how long have you been dead? no reply. have you been dead years? no. months? no. weeks? no. days? yes. how many? five days. do you mean five days? yes. did you live in this neighbourhood? yes. did you know any at this table? yes. will you point them out? yes. (it then crossed the room three times violently and stopped before three persons.) will you spell your name? yes. r---- j----[ ] (the way he always spelt it). are you happy? no answer. can we do you any good? no. was the baptist religion true? no. will you spell the true religion? yes--saients. is there a middle state of souls? yes. will the end of the world be soon? yes. will it be the end of the world or the end of wickedness? the end of wickedness? yes. will the world be destroyed by water? no. by fire? no. will it be partly destroyed by fire? yes. shall any of us see the last day? yes. in how many years? twenty-five years. will the last judgment be then? no. will that be the millennium? yes. will enoch and elijah come again? yes. will the jews be restored? yes. will russia conquer england? yes. will it be in the reign of queen victoria? no. in the reign of her successor? yes." the testimony of mr. crookes, the discoverer of a new metal, and a fellow of the royal society, may here be suitably recorded. unlike some other so-called "scientific investigators," he is reported to have resolved upon a careful and thorough examination of the spiritualistic phenomena. he is said to have maintained originally that, even if the alleged facts were true, he might be able to explain them by some natural law. accordingly he thoughtfully pursued his inquiries and investigations over a series of years, taking unusual care to render deception out of the question and impossible. the result has been given to the public in the "quarterly journal of science" for january, ,[ ] from which the following quotations are made:-- "the phenomena i am prepared to attest are so extraordinary and so directly oppose the most firmly-rooted articles of scientific belief--amongst others, the ubiquity and invariable action of the law of gravitation--that, even now, on recalling the details of what i witnessed, there is an antagonism in my mind between _reason_, which pronounces it to be scientifically impossible, and the consciousness that my senses, both of touch and sight--and these corroborated, as they were, by the senses of all who were present--are not lying witnesses when they testify against my preconceptions. but the supposition that there is a sort of mania or delusion which suddenly attacks a whole roomful of intelligent persons who are quite sane elsewhere, and that they all concur to the minutest particulars in the details of the occurrences of which they suppose themselves to be witnesses, seems to my mind more incredible than even the facts they attest" (pp. - ). under the heading of "the phenomena of percussive and other allied sounds," he makes reference to the raps and knocks of various kinds made and heard in different places, "in a living tree, on a sheet of glass, on a stretched iron wire, on a stretched membrane, a tambourine, on the roof of a cab, and on the floor of a theatre," and where no known law, and no contrivance or trickery, could afford any clue to their cause. he then inquires whether the sounds thus heard are the result of some blind, irrational, hidden material force obeying the laws of nature. his conclusion, however, was that the varied phenomena being evidently governed by intelligence, a thinking being must have been concerned in their origination. "the intelligence," he maintains, "is sometimes of such a character as to lead to the belief that it does not emanate from any person present." the movement of heavy substances at a distance from the medium is then discussed, and mr. crookes thus writes:-- "on three successive evenings a small table moved slowly across the room, under conditions which i had specially pre-arranged, so as to answer any objections which might be raised to the evidence" (p. ). again:--"on five separate occasions a heavy dining-table rose between a few inches and one and a half feet off the floor, under special circumstances which rendered trickery impossible. on another occasion a heavy table rose from the floor in full light, while i was holding the medium's hands and feet. on another occasion the table rose from the floor, not only when no person was touching it, but under conditions that i had pre-arranged, so as to assure unquestionable proof of the fact" (p. ). once more:-- "on one occasion i witnessed a chair, with a lady sitting on it, rise several inches from the ground. on another occasion, to avoid the suspicion of this being in some way performed by herself, the lady knelt on the chair in such manner that its four feet were visible to us. it then rose about three inches, remained suspended for about ten seconds, and then slowly descended. at another time two children, on separate occasions, rose from the floor with their chairs, in full daylight, under (to me) most satisfactory conditions; for i was kneeling and keeping close watch upon the feet of the chair, and observing that no one might touch them" (p. ). respecting another class of phenomena, said to be common enough with modern spiritualists, which appeal to the sense of sight, under the head of "luminous appearances," mr. crookes thus writes:-- "under the strictest test conditions i have seen a solid self-luminous body, the size and nearly the shape of a turkey's egg, float noiselessly about the room, at one time higher than anyone present could reach standing on tip-toe, and then gently descend to the floor. it was visible for more than ten minutes, and before it faded away it struck the table three times, with a sound like that of a hard, solid body. during this time the medium was lying back, apparently insensible, in an easy-chair. "i have seen luminous points of light darting about and settling on the heads of different persons; i have had questions answered by the flashing of a bright light a desired number of times in front of my face. i have seen sparks of light rising from the table to the ceiling, and again falling upon the table, striking it with an audible sound. i have had an alphabetical communication given by luminous flashes occurring before me in the air, whilst my hand was moving about amongst them. i have seen a luminous cloud floating upwards to a picture. under the strictest test conditions, i have more than once had a solid, self-luminous crystalline body placed in my hand by a hand which did not belong to any person in the room. in the light, i have seen a luminous cloud hover over a heliotrope on a side-table, break a sprig off, and carry the sprig to a lady; and on some occasions i have seen a similar luminous cloud visibly condense to the form of a hand, and carry small objects about" (p. ). two pages later on the following occurs:-- "i was sitting next to the medium, miss fox, the only other persons present being my wife and a lady relative, and i was holding the medium's two hands in one of mine, whilst her feet were resting on my feet. paper was on the table before us, and my disengaged hand was holding a pencil. a luminous hand came down from the upper part of the room, and after hovering near me for a few seconds, took the pencil from my hand, rapidly wrote on a sheet of paper, threw the pencil down, and then rose up over our heads, gradually fading into darkness" (p. ). and then mr. crookes testifies that not only spirit-hands, but spectres or spirit-persons in their entirety, were seen:-- "in the dusk of the evening, during a _séance_ with mr. home at my house, the curtains of a window about eight feet from mr. home were seen to move. a dark, shadowy, semi-transparent form like that of a man was then seen by all present standing near the window, waving the curtain with his hand. as we looked, the form faded away and the curtain ceased to move. the following is a still more striking instance. as in the former case, mr. home was the medium. a phantom form came from a corner of the room, took an accordion in its hand, and then glided about the room playing the instrument. the form was visible to all present for many minutes, mr. home also being seen at the same time. coming rather close to a lady who was sitting apart from the rest of the company, she gave a slight cry, upon which it vanished" (p. ). in conclusion mr. crookes sets forth five current theories with regard to these and similar phenomena; one of which theories is clearly expressed in the following sentence. these supernatural manifestations, he asserts, some maintain to be "the actions of evil spirits or devils, personifying who or what they please, in order to undermine christianity and to ruin men's souls" (p. ). such a definition, it may be added, is in perfect accordance with ordinary experience, the testimony of scripture, the action and teaching of the living church, as well as a fulfilment of express and definite prophecies regarding "the latter days." modern spiritualism. continued. "superstition, in its grossest form, is the worship of evil spirits."--_john henry newman._ "let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called god, or that is worshipped.... whose coming is after the working of satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth that they might be saved. and for this cause god shall send them a strong delusion that they should believe a lie."--_ thess. ii. - ._ "the greatest intellectual triumph that can be achieved by the devil is gained when men are prepared to believe that he is not."--_sermons_, _rev. t. t. lee_ (a.d. ). chapter ix. modern spiritualism. (continued.) more recently the manifestations have been still further developed. from the "spiritual magazine" the following is quoted:-- "the _séance_ was held by appointment. our object being that of investigation, we limited the number to three, and, i must add, used every precaution we could think of to preclude the possibility of self-deception; we likewise guarded against any possible preparatory arrangement. accordingly, we changed from the library to the dining-room. we were soon seated at a heavy square table. twenty minutes passed without any manifestation; then came gentle raps, followed by the table being lifted, tilted, and gently vibrated. then raps were heard simultaneously in different and opposite parts of the room. at my suggestion, the lamp was partly turned down, when a cold current of air was felt to pass over our hands and faces. a pause ensued. the dining-room table leaf standing in the corner of the room then commenced to vibrate, and one of the leaves being taken from the stand, was passed between mr. home and the table at which we were seated. it was then raised straight up, and passing vertically over my friend, gently touched him; in passing over me, it struck me on the crown of the head, but so gently, that i could hardly realize it to be the heavy leaf of the dining-room table; the touch nevertheless caused the leaf to vibrate all but sonorously. i name this to prove how delicately balanced and suspended in the air the leaf of the table must have been to have produced the vibration. it then passed over to the right, touching my shoulders, and finally was placed upon the table at which we were seated. the distance the leaf was carried i compute at nearly twelve yards (allowing for the circuit made), and at an elevation of six feet. a small round table was then moved from the corner of the room, and placed next to my friend; and in reply to his question '_who it was_,' he received the answer, audible to us all, '_pa, pa,--dear--darling pa_.' an arm-chair behind my friend, and at a distance of three yards, was raised up straight into the air, carried over our heads, and placed upon the dining-room table to my left, a voice clearly and loudly repeating the words, 'papa's chair.' we then observed the wooden box of the accordion being carried from the extreme corner of the room up to my friend. in passing my right hand, i passed my hand under and over the box, as it travelled suspended in the air to my front. i did this to make sure of the fact of its being moved by an invisible agency, and not by means of mechanical aid.... the accordion was then taken from mr. home, carried about in the room, and played. voices were distinctly heard; a low whispering, and voices imitating the break of a wave on the shore. finally, the accordion placed itself upon the table we were seated at, and two luminous hands were distinctly seen resting on the keys of the instrument. they remained luminously visible for from twenty to thirty seconds, and then melted away. i had, in the meantime, and at the request of my friend, taken hold of the accordion; whilst so held by me, an invisible hand laid hold of the instrument, and played for two or three minutes what appeared to me to be sacred music. voices were then heard, a kind of murmuring or low whistling and breathing; at times in imitation of the murmur of the waves of the sea, at other times more plaintively melodious. the accordion was then a second time taken by an invisible power, carried over our heads, and a small piece of sacred music played,--then a hymn, voices in deep sonorous notes singing the hallelujah. i thought i could make out three voices, but my friend said he could speak to four. a jet of light then crossed the room, after which a star or brilliantly illuminated disk, followed by the appearance of a softly luminous column of light, which moved up between me and my friend. i cannot say that i could discern any distinct outline. the luminous column appeared to me to be about five to six feet high, the subdued soft light mounting from it half illumining the room. the column or luminous appearance then passed to my right, and a chair was moved and placed next to me. i distinctly heard the rustling as of a silk dress. instinctively i put my hand forward to ascertain the presence of the guest, when a soft hand seized my hand and wrist. i then felt that the skirt of a dress had covered my knees. i grasped it; it felt like thick silk, and melted away as i firmly clenched my hand on it. by this time i admit i shuddered. a heavy footstep then passed to my right, the floor vibrating to the footfall; the spirit-form now walked up to the fire-place, clapping its hands as it passed me. i then felt something press against the back of my chair; the weight was so great, that as the form leaned on my shoulder, i had to bend forward under the pressure. two hands gently pressed my forehead; i noticed a luminous appearance at my right; i was kissed, and what to me at the time made my very frame thrill again, spoken to in a sweet, low, melodious voice. the words uttered by the spirit were distinctly heard by all present. as the spirit-form passed away, it repeated the words, 'i kissed you, i kissed you,' and i felt three taps on each shoulder, audible to all present, as if in parting to reimpress me with the reality of its presence. i shuddered again, and, in spite of all my heroism, felt very 'uncanny.' my friend now called our attention to his being patted by a soft hand on his head. i heard a kiss, and then the words, 'papa, dear papa.' he said his left hand was being kissed, and that a soft, child-like hand was caressing him. a cloud of light appeared to be standing at his left." another example, from the same publication, deserves to be put on record:-- "the first group of the manifestations (i use the term 'group' to mark the characteristic difference of the phenomena on each occasion,) occurred at a friend's house at great malvern. those present had only incidentally met; and, owing to a prohibition being laid upon mr. home by his medical man against trying his strength, no _séance_ was attempted. i name this as characteristic. raps in different parts of the room, and the movement of furniture, however, soon told the presence of the invisibles. the library in which the party had met communicated with the hall; and the door having been left half open, a broad stream of light from the burners of the gas-lamp lit up the room. at the suggestion of one of the party, the candles were removed. the rapping, which had till then been heard in different parts of the room, suddenly made a pause, and then the unusual phenomena of the appearance of spirit-forms manifested itself. the opening of the half-closed door was suddenly darkened by an invisible agency, the room becoming pitch dark. then the wall opposite became illumined, the library now being lit up by a luminous element, for it cannot be described otherwise. between those present and the opposite and now illumined wall two spirit-forms were seen, their shadowy outline on the wall well defined. the forms moved to and fro. they made an effort to speak; the articulation, however, was too imperfect to permit of the meaning of the words to be understood. the darkening which had obscured the half-closed door was then removed, and the broad light from the hall lamp reappeared, looking quite dim in comparison with the luminous brilliancy of the light that had passed away. again the room became darkened, then illumined, and a colossal head and shoulders appeared to rise from the floor, visible only by the shadow it cast upon the illumined wall. what added to the interest was the apparent darkening and lighting up of the room at will, and that repeatedly, the library door remaining half open all the while. the time occupied by these phenomena was perhaps five to ten minutes, the manifestations terminating quite abruptly." a correspondent of the same serial gives the following facts:-- "on the st october, , i attended a _séance_ at , victoria place, clifton, where the younger mrs. marshall, the well-known medium from london, was staying. "i had previously prepared, as a test, a series of written questions inserted in a book and numbered consecutively; my wife, who was present, was by the usual method put in communication with the spirit of her mother, and the following are a few of the results. it is important to observe that no clue was given to the medium, or to the others present, as to the nature of the answer required, the questions being put in the following form:--'will you answer the question no. ?' &c., and as the answers were occasionally given in a different form from what was anticipated, though still quite correctly, these two facts taken together conclusively prove, as it appears to me, that the answers were neither the result of any knowledge on the part of the medium, nor any 'reflex action' from the mind of the interrogator. "the spirit having been requested to answer the question numbered , viz.:--'will you spell the name of the place where we lived when you left this state?' the reply, spelt through the alphabet, was 'aust.' "question no. having been put in the same manner, viz.:--'where was your body buried?' the reply was, 'saint george's.' "no. .--'while your body was lying in the coffin, was anything put in the hand?'[ ] reply, 'yes.' "no. .--'what was it?' reply, 'a sprig of myrtle.' "no. .--'by whom was it put there?' reply, 'thomas bowman.' "no. .--'who else were present at the time?' reply, 'ann, tommy and mary bowman bryant.' "many other replies were given of an equally satisfactory character, but i must not further trespass on your space. i would merely remark that the answers in each case were quite correct, and that the events referred to occurred upwards of forty years since." again, mr. james howell, of , guildford road, brighton, writes as follows in the "spiritual magazine" for november, :-- "when i was at the marshalls' last summer, a circumstance, unknown to anyone present save myself, was made known to me by unaccountable means. the name of a young lady who suffered and died from spinal complaint in the year was correctly spelled out, and the date of her death given. i was most intimately acquainted with her. she was good, pious, and highly intellectual. to her i owe my knowledge of the french language, and my love of its literature. i was not thinking of her at the time; in fact, she was furthest from my thoughts; yet her name--a very uncommon one, you will admit--was given correctly, 'aletta v----.' now i am honest enough to confess that a million guesses would not have guessed that name. i was astounded and affected; for it brought back to my mind a rush of thoughts, happy and sad, of those evenings when i sat by her bedside listening to her sweet voice, and imbibing the original thoughts which sprang, not only from a well-stored mind, but one instinct with genius. twenty-three years had elapsed from the time of her death; she had often promised to communicate with me from the spirit-world, if it was possible, and now that promise was fulfilled, even in the presence of others." and once more, the same writer gives the following record of facts:-- "i paid a visit on monday, july nd, to mrs. parks, of cornwall terrace, regent's park, then staying at , bedford square. miss purcell, the medium, went with me; and we three had some strong and wonderful manifestations. the table was turned about merrily, and once whirled round in mid-air. it became as animated as a living being; it even ran about when not a single being touched it. knockings were heard all over the room; in chairs, in tables, under the floor, and along the wainscot. we had great trouble to keep the tables from being smashed. "during the evening, the 'blue bells of scotland' and '_marlbrook s'en va-t-en guerre_' were knocked out on the table in a beautiful and correct manner, the table beating and dancing admirable time to each tune. at a previous _séance_ a well-known tune was knocked out, and my wife was requested to dance, the spirits stating that the table should accompany her; but as we could not induce her to do so, we lost the promised _pas de deux_ between a human being and a table. at my request the table also gave a series of knocks, viz. the footman's, the postman's, the tax-gatherer's, and the countryman's, which were perfect, and caused us much amusement. in one part of the room there appeared a silvery, bluish star, shining brilliantly. mrs. parks, strange to say, could not see it, but to the medium and myself it was clearly visible, at the same time too; and a brilliant member of the stellar creation it was, coming and going like those of the sky, when for a moment a veil of clouds passes over them." the conviction that such acts and deeds are the work of evil spirits is put on record in the same serial, a formal organ of the spiritualists, in the following narrative:-- "mr. and mrs. c---- attend a _séance_ at which the spirit of 'a darling child' is manifestly present. they attend a second _séance_, and through the same medium they are confirmed in the conviction of the real presence of their child. mr. c---- then finds that he is himself a medium, and forthwith he purchases a small table for the exercise of his power. "his first experiment proves to him beyond a doubt that an intelligent being, though invisible, is with him; but he speedily begins to suspect that whatever the character may have been of the spirit which first manifested to him through another medium, this, which is now communicating through himself, is an evil spirit. on his 'wishing it to walk to the dining-room, it started at once.' he was struck by its heavy tread, 'so very unlike the footfalls of a young child,' and he exclaimed, 'this is _not_ the spirit of my child, if so, i want no other manifestation.' becoming more and more suspicious of the character of this particular visitant, he said, 'if thou art not the spirit of my child, march out of the house.' 'the table did, indeed, march, making a noise like the loud and well-measured footfalls of a heavy dragoon--literally shaking everything in the room.' "this gentleman then adjured the spirit in a variety of forms, and asked if it was not a bad spirit? and it said, 'yes!' then he said, 'accursed devil! by the living god i adjure thee to speak the truth! has the spirit of my child _ever_ been put in communication with myself or her mother through this or any other table?' the 'accursed devil' said, 'no, never!' then, after similar assurances, mr. c---- made up his mind to believe the devil; and he closed his experiments with an auto-da-fé, by breaking up and burning the table!" mr. chevalier, who was the first witness called before the committee appointed by the dialectical society, gives the following personal version of this experiment, th july, . he stated that he had had seventeen years' experience of spiritualism, but it was not till that he commenced experimenting on tables. he obtained the usual phenomena, such as raps and tiltings and answers to questions. on one occasion, the answer which was given being obviously untrue, the witness peremptorily inquired why a correct answer had not been given, and the spirit in reply said, "because i am beelzebub." mr. chevalier, in continuation, said, "i continued my experiments until i heard of the 'spiritual athenæum.' about that time i lost a child, and heard my wife say she had been in communication with its spirit. i cautioned her, and yet was anxious to communicate also. i placed one finger on the table; it moved, and the name of the child was given. it was a french name. i told a friend of mine what had happened, but was laughed at by him; he however came, sceptic as he was. i placed one hand on the table asking mental questions, which were all answered. he then asked where my child went to school, not knowing himself, and the answer 'fenton' was given; this also was correct. frequently after this, i obtained manifestations in french and english, and messages as a child could send to a parent. at my meals i constantly rested my hand on a small table, and it seemed to join in the conversation. one day the table turned at right angles, and went into the corner of the room. i asked, 'are you my child?' but obtained no answer. i then said, 'are you from god?' but the table was still silent. i then said, 'in the name of the father, son, and holy spirit, i command you to answer--are you from god?' one loud rap, a negative, was then given. 'do you believe,' said i, 'that christ died to save us from sin?' the answer was 'no!' 'accursed spirit,' said i, 'leave the room.' the table then walked across the room, entered the adjoining one and quickened its steps. it was a small tripod table. it walked with a sidelong walk. it went to the door, shook the handle, and i opened it. the table then walked into the passage, and i repeated the adjuration, receiving the same answer. fully convinced that i was dealing with an accursed spirit, i opened the street door, and the table was immediately silent; no movement or rap was heard. i returned alone to the drawing-room, and asked if there were any spirits present. immediately i heard steps like those of a little child outside the door. i opened it, and the small table went into the corner as before, just as my child did when i reproved it for a fault. these manifestations continued until i used the adjuration, and i always found that they changed or ceased when the name of god was mentioned. one night, when sitting alone in my drawing-room, i heard a noise at the top of the house; a servant who had heard it came into the room frightened. i went to the nursery and found that the sounds came from a spot near the bed. i pronounced the adjuration and they instantly ceased. the same sounds were afterwards heard in the kitchen, and i succeeded in restoring quiet as before. "reflecting on these singular facts, i determined to inquire further and really satisfy myself that the manifestations were what i suspected them to be. i went to mrs. marshall, and took with me three clever men, who were not at all likely to be deceived. i was quite unknown; we sat at a table, and had a _séance_: mrs. marshall told me the name of my child. i asked the spirit some questions, and then pronounced the adjuration. we all heard steps, which sounded as if someone was mounting the wall; in a few seconds the sounds ceased, and although mrs. marshall challenged again and again, the spirits did not answer, and she said she could not account for the phenomenon. in this case, i pronounced the adjuration mentally; no person knew what i had done. at a _séance_, held at the house of a friend of mine, at which i was present, manifestations were obtained, and, as i was known to be hostile, i was entreated not to interfere. i sat for two hours a passive spectator. i then asked the name of the spirit, and it gave the name of my child. 'in the name of the father, son, and holy ghost,' said i, 'are you the spirit of my child?' it answered, 'no!' and the word 'devil' was spelled out." dr. edmunds: "how were the names spelled out?" mr. chevalier: "the legs rapped when the alphabet was called over. mrs. marshall used the alphabet herself, and the table rapped when her pencil came to the letters. my opinion of the phenomena is that the intelligence which is put in communication with us is a fallen one. it is the devil, the prince of the powers of the air. i believe we commit the crime of necromancy when we take part in these spiritual _séances_." we obtain from these extracts, which might be multiplied thirty-fold from the authorized publications of the spiritualists, some idea of the nature of their _séances_ and proceedings. our own statement at the outset has been more than justified as regards its moderation and accuracy from the examples provided in the extracts in question. "necromancy" has been well defined to be "the art of communicating with devils and of doing surprising things by means of their aid; particularly that of calling up the dead and extorting answers from them." now this, it seems clear, in one form or another, is precisely that which is carried on by a considerable and increasing section[ ] of people in america, in england, on the continent, and elsewhere. it is practised mainly by persons who were such extreme protestants in previous times that, having almost altogether denied the supernatural, they have been reluctantly won over to a belief in it by communion with evil spirits. father perrone, the distinguished jesuit, has calculated that upwards of two thousand treatises have been published in defence of the system of these manifestations during the past fifteen years. it has been pointedly remarked by an english clergyman, of those people who once, like the ancient sadducees, rejected the idea of the existence of spirits, but who now have accepted the spiritualistic theory, that "they have given up believing in nothing, and have taken to believe in the devil."[ ] and this epigrammatic saying is hardly too pointed. according to perrone, the modern professors of divination frankly allow that the phenomena have passed through three phases. first, that of mesmerism; secondly, artificial somnambulism and clairvoyance; and thirdly, spiritualism, properly so called. he gives five reasons for maintaining his theory of diabolical agency with regard to the same. . from the nature of the phenomena. . from its effects. . from the manner in which mesmerism operates. . from the malice and wickedness of the agent, who frequently utters anti-christian and blasphemous doctrines; and lastly, . from the frank and candid admission of the mediums or operators themselves. in most cases it may be safely assumed that evil spirits personify the souls of the departed. that such spirits are the deadly foes of man so long as he is in his period of probation, may, for all catholic christians, be also assumed. that such spirits, moreover, constantly represent the departed as continually desiring the hand of death to fall upon their earthly friends, in order, as is implied or stated, that a future of unclouded light and everlasting happiness may speedily link them together, can be seen from a careful study of the records of spiritualism. some of the facts already set forth teach this. the principle that men, whether good or bad, righteous or unrighteous, will all be certainly saved, and be for ever hereafter in bliss, is the practical heresy[ ] that spiritualism in its theological aspect has most openly taught, and still continues to teach. "spiritualism," writes mr. william howitt, a convert to it from quakerism, "rejects the doctrine of eternal damnation as alike injurious to god and man. injurious to god's noblest attributes, repugnant to the principles of justice, and unavailing in men as a motive to repentance.... spiritualism knows that there are isolated passages in the gospels and in the words of our saviour capable of being made to bear an appearance favouring the doctrine of eternal punishment, but it knows that the original terms bear no such latitude, and when christ says there is a state 'where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched,' it admits the state, but denies that any of god's creatures will continue in that state a minute longer than is necessary to purge the foulness of sin and the love of sin out of their spiritual constitutions. were the solution of this supposed difficulty much harder than it is, spiritualism would place the love of god and the love of christ, and all the great and gracious attributes of god and his saviour--justice and truth and wisdom, and a charity more immeasurable than god himself recommends to mankind, confidently and courageously against so horrible and senseless a doctrine." now, though spiritualism be ignored by the press, universalism, its own offspring, is constantly and persistently maintained. spiritualism also flatly denies the great christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body:-- "spiritualism teaches, on the authority of scripture and of all spirit-life, that there is no such thing as death: it is but a name given to the issue of the soul from the body. to those in bodies who witness this change, the spirit is invisible, and they only see a body which ceases all its living functions, has lost that intelligence which during so-called 'life' emanated from it, and lies stiff and cold, and to all appearance dead. but even the body is not dead. there is a law of life even in what is called dead matter, which is perpetually changing its particles and converting them into mere black earth and water, and hence into all the articles necessary for the physical life--corn, meat, wine, all foods, all fruits. the same law immediately begins to operate in the dead body, and, if unobstructed, speedily resolves it back into earth, and then forms this again into food and clothing and fresh enveloping forms for fresh human beings. the whole of the universe is in perpetual action, and the ever-revolving wheel of physical is subserving the perpetual evolution of spiritual life."[ ] and again:-- "the church of england and spiritualism accord, but not in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. the spirits all assert with s. paul, that the body which rises from the death-bed is the spiritual body, and that the soul needs no other, much less an earthly body, in its spirit-home--that, in fact, nothing of the earth can ever enter heaven. that if the spirits of just men are _made perfect_, they can be nothing more, and no addition of anything belonging to this earth can add to their happiness, freedom, power, and perfection, but on the contrary. that so far from receiving at some indefinite and, probably, very distant period, their earthly bodies back again, they are continually, as they advance, casting off the subtler particles of matter that have interpenetrated their spiritual bodies."[ ] with regard to the influence of the protestant reformation on that temper of mind and habit of thought which have led sceptics and those whose faith has been overturned by the blasphemies of calvin or the immoral principle of the lutheran systems and their offshoots, to become votaries of spiritualism, we cannot do better than put on record mr. howitt's deliberate judgment, expressed in language which, however painful to read in some parts, is at once forcible and pertinent:-- "by the denial of the intermediate states, the protestant reformers perpetrated a more monstrous outrage on the divine justice, and more frightfully libelled the divine mercy, than by the broadest stretch of imagination one would have thought it possible. by this arbitrary extinction of some of the loveliest regions of creation, by this wiping out of vast kingdoms of god's tolerance and goodness by the sponge of protestant reaction, god's whole being was blackened, and every one of his eternal attributes dislocated and driven pell-mell into the limbo of atheism. i say atheism, for such a god could not possibly exist as this protestant theory would have made him--a god with less justice than the most stupid country squire ever established in the chair of magistracy; with less mercy than an inquisitor or a torturer with his red-hot pincers and iron boots. these atrocities were but the work of moments, but this system made the god of love and the father of jesus christ sitting in endless bliss amid a favoured few, whilst below were incalculable populations suffering the tortures of fires which no period even of millions of years should extinguish, and that without any proportion whatever to the offences of the sufferers! all who were not 'spirits of just men made perfect' were, according to this doctrine, only admissible to this common hell, this common receptacle of the middling, bad, and the most bedevilled of devils! never could any such monstrous, foul, and detestable doctrine issue from any source but that of the hearts of fiends themselves. none but devils could breed up so black a fog of blasphemy to blot out the image of a loving and paternal god from the view of his creatures. and yet the mocking devil induced the zealous protestant fathers to accept this most truly 'doctrine of devils,' as an antidote to popish error. as some glimmering of the direst consequences of this shutting-up of the middle states of the invisible world began to dawn on the protestant mind, it set about to invent remedies and apply palliatives, and by a sort of spiritual hocus-pocus, it taught that if the greatest sinners did but call on christ at the last gasp, they were converted into saints, and found themselves in heaven itself with god and the lamb. this was only making the matter worse, and holding out a premium for the continuance in every sin and selfishness to the last moment. it was an awful temptation to self-deception presented to human selfishness. millions, no doubt, have trusted to this wretched protestant reed.... yet common sense in others rejected and rejects the cruel deceit. a country poet, writing the epitaph of the blacksmith in my native village, expressed the truth on the protestant theory of no middle regions:-- 'too bad for heaven, too good for hell, so where he's gone we cannot tell.'" and now to conclude this portion of our subject, regarding which not a tenth part of the examples of "spiritual" manifestations gathered has been given. to have discussed the facts and theories provided on previous pages, would have occupied several chapters. sufficient, however, is recorded to show that spiritualism is directly antagonistic to the christian religion,[ ] to point out the true character of many of the signs and wonders which exist in this nineteenth century, and which testify and witness to old and unchangeable truths. the ministry of "men and of angels in a wonderful order,"[ ] the practice of exorcism, the facts of diabolical agency, possession by evil spirits, the sins of witchcraft and necromancy, are all more or less intertwined with the divine revelation which god has been pleased to give to man. but the materialism of these latter days is blinding men's eyes, that they cannot see, and successfully destroying their faith in all that is beyond their cramped and narrow temporal range. intellectual paganism, and a positive disbelief in the distinct nature of god, if not openly professed, is indirectly acknowledged; while the faith of pentecost, which for generations has regenerated the world, is cast aside as worn out, effete, and valueless. the possibility of miracle is derided; providence is scouted as the fond dream of an exaggerated human self-love; belief in the power of prayer is asserted to be only a superstition, illustrative of man's ignorance of the scientific conception of law; the hypothesis of absolute invariable law, and the cognate conception of nature as a self-evolved system of self-existent forces and self-existent matter, are ideas advancing with giant strides. side by side with all this, however, stand the portentous phenomena referred to here. let the existence of one course of such facts as those related be granted, and far more follows than the pure materialist or the positivist would for a moment allow. yet none can deny the presence amongst us of such, evil in their essence and mischievous in their operations. the whole cycle represents the works of the devil and his angels--works opposed at every step in theory by the truths of christianity, and in fact by the sacraments of the church universal. man's highest and chiefest duty is to do the will of the most high: the practice of the spiritualists, on the other hand (and let men lay the warning to heart), appears to be an intentional and systematic giving up of their wills to the evil one; an invocation of evil spirits for unlawful purposes, a "willing" for supernatural intervention in things which are not lawful, and a deliberate turning away from him to whom all power is given in heaven and in earth. appendix to chapter ix. spiritualism and science. the following letter appeared in "the times" newspaper a few years ago:-- "sir,--having been named by several of your correspondents as one of the scientific men who believe in spiritualism, you will perhaps allow me to state briefly what amount of evidence has forced the belief upon me. i began the investigation about eight years ago, and i esteem it a fortunate thing that at that time the more marvellous phenomena were far less common and less accessible than they are now, because i was led to experiment largely at my own house, and among friends whom i could trust, and was able to establish to my own satisfaction, by means of a great variety of tests, the occurrence of sounds and movements not traceable to any known or conceivable physical cause. having thus become thoroughly familiar with these undoubtedly genuine phenomena, i was able to compare them with the more powerful manifestations of several public mediums, and to recognize an identity of cause in both by means of a number of minute but highly characteristic resemblances. i was also able, by patient observation, to obtain tests of the reality of some of the more curious phenomena which appeared at the time, and still appear to me, to be conclusive. to go into details as to those experiences would require a volume, but i may, perhaps, be permitted briefly to describe one, from notes kept at the time, because it serves as an example of the complete security against deception which often occurs to the patient observer without seeking for it. "a lady who had seen nothing of the phenomena asked me and my sister to accompany her to a well-known public medium. we went, and had a sitting alone in the bright light of a summer's day. after a number of the usual raps and movements, our lady friend asked if the name of the deceased person she was desirous of communicating with, could be spelt out. on receiving an answer in the affirmative, the lady pointed successively to the letters of a printed alphabet while i wrote down those at which three affirmative raps occurred. neither i nor my sister knew the name the lady wished for, nor even the names of any of her deceased relatives; her own name had not been mentioned, and she had never been near the medium before. the following is exactly what happened, except that i alter the surname, which was a very unusual one, having no authority to publish it. the letters i wrote down were of the following kind:--yrnehnospmoht. after the first three--yrn--had been taken down, my friend said, "this is nonsense, we had better begin again." just then her pencil was at e, and raps came, when a thought struck me (having read of, but never witnessed, a similar occurrence), and i said, 'please go on, i think i see what is meant.' when the spelling was finished i handed the paper to her, but she could see no meaning in it till i divided it at the first h, and asked her to read each portion backwards, when to her intense astonishment the name 'henry thompson' came out, that of a deceased son of whom she had wished to hear, correct in every letter. just about that time i had been hearing _ad nauseam_ of the superhuman acuteness of mediums who detect the letters of the name the deluded visitors expect, notwithstanding all their care to pass the pencil over the letters with perfect regularity. this experience, however (for the substantial accuracy of which as above narrated i vouch), was and is, to my mind, a complete disproof of every explanation yet given of the means by which the names of deceased persons are rapped out. of course i do not expect any sceptic, whether scientific or unscientific, to accept such facts, of which i could give many, on my testimony; but neither must they expect me, nor the thousands of intelligent men to whom equally conclusive tests have occurred, to accept their short and easy methods of explaining them. "if i am not occupying too much of your valuable space i should like to make a few remarks on the misconceptions of many scientific men as to the nature of this inquiry, taking the letters of your correspondent mr. dirks as an example. in the first place, he seems to think that it is an argument against the facts being genuine that they cannot all be produced and exhibited at will; and another argument against them, that they cannot be explained by any known laws. but neither can catalepsy, the fall of meteoric stones, nor hydrophobia be produced at will; yet these are all facts, and none the less so that the first is sometimes imitated, the second was once denied, and the symptoms of the third are often greatly exaggerated, while none of them is yet brought under the domain of strict science; yet no one would make this an argument for refusing to investigate these subjects. again, i should not have expected a scientific man to state, as a reason for not examining it, that spiritualism 'is opposed to every known natural law, especially the law of gravity,' and that it 'sets chymistry, human physiology, and mechanics at open defiance;' when the facts simply are that the phenomena, if true, depend upon a cause or causes which can overcome or counteract the action of these several forces, just as some of these forces often counteract or overcome others; and this should surely be a strong inducement to a man of science to investigate the subject. "while not laying any claim myself to the title of 'a really scientific man,' there are some who deserve that epithet who have not yet been mentioned by your correspondents as at the same time spiritualists. such i consider the late dr. robert chambers, as well as dr. elliotson, professor william gregory, of edinburgh; and professor hare, of philadelphia--all unfortunately deceased; while dr. gully, of malvern, as a scientific physician, and judge edmonds, one of the best american lawyers, have had the most ample means of investigation; yet all these not only were convinced of the reality of the most marvellous facts, but also accepted the theory of modern spiritualism as the only one which would embrace and account for the facts. i am also acquainted with a living physiologist, of high rank as an original investigator, who is an equally firm believer. "in conclusion i may say that, although i have heard a great many accusations of imposture, i have never detected it myself; and, although a large proportion of the more extraordinary phenomena are such that, if impostures, they could only be performed by means of ingenious apparatus or machinery, none has ever been discovered. i consider it no exaggeration to say that the main facts are now as well established and as easily verifiable as any of the more exceptional phenomena of nature which are not yet reduced to law. they have a most important bearing on the interpretation of history, which is full of narratives of similar facts, and on the nature of life and intellect, on which physical science throws a very feeble and uncertain light; and it is my firm and deliberate belief that every branch of philosophy must suffer till they are honestly and seriously investigated, and dealt with as constituting an essential portion of the phenomena of human nature. "i am, sir, yours obediently, "alfred r. wallace." the following review, taken from the "weekly register" of august , , will be read with interest:-- "the may and june numbers of the 'fortnightly review' for , contain two remarkable articles by mr. wallace, the eminent naturalist. they are entitled--'a defence of modern spiritualism.' his aim in these is to prove the objective reality of its phenomena in the first instance, and then to show that the theory which explains them can be accepted by those who, like himself, entirely disbelieve in a supernatural order. he points out that modern spiritualism is not in any way a survival or revival of old superstitions, but a completely new science. the facts upon which it rests have been known and noted from the earliest beginnings of history, but, owing to the influence of superstition, were almost universally misinterpreted. now, at last, these mists are clearing away. we have abundant materials upon which to work, and he looks forward with confidence to the establishment of a satisfactory scientific theory of a future life. such a theory will be a truly regenerating influence, resting, not on arbitrary beliefs, but on established facts, and will, for the first time, make a true religion possible and a pure morality. "at the close of the second essay, there is a sketch of the outline of the theory up to the point which it has reached as yet. of course there is still much which requires to be explained and developed. the science is only in its infancy; but still its principles can be understood and appreciated. it is taken for granted that there are no spirits but human ones, these being the only spirits of which we can have any scientific knowledge. this being assumed, mr. wallace proceeds to give a short analysis of human nature, drawn from generalizations from the 'phenomena in their entirety,' and the communications of the spirits themselves. this is contained in four propositions:-- " . man is a duality, consisting of an organized spiritual form evolved coincidently with and permeating the physical body, and having corresponding organs and development. " . death is the separation of this duality, and effects no change in the spirit, morally or intellectually. " . progressive evolution of the intellectual and moral nature is the destiny of individuals; the knowledge, attainments, and experience of earth-life forming the basis of spirit-life. " . spirits can communicate through properly-endowed mediums. they are attracted to those they love or sympathise with.... but, as follows from clause , their communications will be fallible, and must be judged and tested just as we do those of our fellow-men. "from the acceptance of these propositions will result a far purer morality than any which either religious systems or philosophy have yet put forth, and with sanctions far more powerful and effective--'for the essential teaching of spiritualism is that we are all, in every act and thought, helping to build up a "mental fabric" which will be and constitute ourselves more completely after the death of the body than it does now. just as this fabric is well or ill built will our progress and happiness be aided or retarded. there will be no imposed rewards and punishments; but everyone will suffer the inevitable consequences of a well or ill spent life. the well-spent life is that in which those faculties which concern our personal physical well-being are subordinated to those which regard our social and intellectual well-being and the well-being of others; and that inherent feeling, which is so universal and so difficult to account for, that those latter constitute our higher nature, seems also to point to the conclusion that we are intended for a condition in which the former will be almost wholly unnecessary, and will gradually become rudimentary through disuse, while the latter will receive a corresponding development. this teaching will make a man dread to give way to passion, or falsehood, or a selfish and luxurious life--knowing that the inevitable consequences of such habits are future misery and a long and arduous struggle, in order to develop anew the faculties which had been crippled by long disuse. he will be deterred from crime, knowing that its unforeseen consequences may cause him ages of remorse, and his bad passions perpetual torment, in a state of being in which mental emotions cannot be drowned in the fierce struggles and sensual pleasures of a physical existence. and these beliefs (unlike those of theology) will have a living efficacy, because depending on facts occurring again and again within the family circle, and so bringing home the realities of the future life to the minds of even the most obtuse.' he asks us to 'contrast this system of natural and inevitable reward and retribution, dependent wholly on the proportionate development of our higher mental and moral nature, with the arbitrary system of rewards and punishments dependent on stated acts and beliefs only, as set forth by all dogmatic religions; and who can fail to see that the former is in harmony with the whole order of nature--the latter opposed to it?' we cannot enter on the religious and moral questions which this brief survey of mr. wallace's theory suggests, but we wish to make some remarks on the 'facts' on which it is founded, and his treatment of them. the point that strikes one most in these articles is their evident sincerity. mr. wallace has become a believer in spiritualism in spite of deeply-rooted prejudices against it, and he is anxious to deal thoroughly and impartially with all the facts connected with it as far as he can, without contradicting the first principles of his scientific creed. we can understand this limitation, for we, too, have first principles--first principles of which we are so certain that no seeming contradiction of them by facts could shake our belief. but the difference between our position and his is that our first principles are founded, not on facts of experience, but on a _belief_ that god has spoken to us, and is speaking every day in the church. therefore, whatever god has revealed becomes to us as a first principle, which, _à priori_, cannot contradict facts, and which, as our knowledge increases, we more and more find experimentally to harmonize with them and explain them. but the whole of mr. wallace's theory is founded on the assumption that god does not speak--that he, and all that concerns him, is unknown and unknowable to us; and this assumption rests, he would tell us, on facts--_i. e._ on his view of the order of nature. now, what we wish to point out is, that nothing which thus rests only on experience can, in any true sense, be called a first principle. it is merely a wide generalization, which may, any moment, be displaced by a still wider one. mr. lecky, in his 'history of rationalism,' asserts that the evidence in favour of the reality of witchcraft would be irresistible, were we not convinced, on _à priori_ grounds, that witchcraft is a delusion. once mr. wallace fully shared this conviction, and found himself compelled, in his own words, to 'reject or ignore' all this evidence. now, modern spiritualism has enabled him to accept all these, and other facts of a similar nature; and he expatiates on the relief he feels in being able to open his eyes to a whole host of things which he had hitherto been obliged painfully and laboriously to overlook. there is quite a string of them. socrates' demon, the ancient oracles, all miracles--those of the bible, the lives of the saints, and in the present day, answers to prayer, all the phenomena of second sight, ghosts, and occult disturbances of all sorts. we cannot refer our readers to the articles themselves for the explanations, some of them very curious, of all these things. but we should like to ask whether it may not be possible that there may be some theory yet to be found still more comprehensive than spiritualism, and which may yield a still deeper joy and relief? the one before us seems to us still to require a considerable amount of reserve, to say no more, in dealing with some of the facts. professor huxley objects to the amount of twaddle that is talked by the spirits; but to this mr. wallace replies, very justly, we think, that it is no more than we must expect, considering the mental and moral calibre of the majority of mankind; and, consequently, of spirits, who are not much improved by the mere fact of dying, not to mention that of the spiritualists themselves; and we know that the proverb, 'like attracts like,' is especially applicable to mediums. but we confess that we are surprised when we are told that 'sectarian' spirits continue to maintain special dogmas and doctrines, while yet quite unable to describe themselves as being in any situation which at all corresponds to the orthodox teaching about a future life. we cannot understand what doctrines or dogmas could survive such a _désillusionnement_, whether agreeable or the reverse, as mr. wallace's future life would be to a spirit whose conceptions on the subject had been moulded on any form of christianity. nor can we conceive of any motive, except a diabolical maliciousness, which could prompt spirits to wish to keep up such delusions among their surviving friends. and yet mr. wallace explains the apparitions of our lady, &c., in modern times, as being produced by spirits with strong catholic predilections, knowing that they would be very efficacious in stimulating the cultus which they prefer. and this is said without any moral comment whatever. also allowing, as he does, the reality of the apparitions, though only of human origin, in the bible and lives of the saints, we are at a loss to see how he can say that orthodox notions of heaven are never confirmed by spirits. we should have said that it was precisely by them that most of these had been originated, not to say confirmed. if his spirits are spirits, so are ours, and quite as worthy of credit. these are only a few of the difficulties on the surface of sceptical spiritualism. but we have already exceeded our limits. we will only add that we cannot but hope that, spiritualism being so far an approach to truth that it admits an important class of facts which had lately been very much denied and ignored, may, by the difficulties which they raise, lead some minds to reconsider the position they have taken up with regard to the supernatural. there is no bridge across the chasm which divides faith from unbelief, and yet in this world the edges are so close that it is but a step, and we pass from darkness into light." summary and conclusion. "the angel of the lord tarrieth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them."--_psalm xxxiv. ._ "god sees at one view the whole thread of my existence, not only that part of it which i have already passed through, but that which runs forward into all the depths of eternity. when i lay me down to sleep i recommend myself to his care; when i awake i give myself up to his direction. amidst all the evils that threaten me, i look up to him for help, and question not that he will either avert them, or turn them to my advantage. though i know neither the time nor the manner of the death i am to die, i am not at all solicitous about it: because i am sure that he knows them both, and that he will not fail to comfort and support me under them."--_addison._ "reverence the angels; shun the demons."--_thomas scott._ chapter x. summary and conclusion. before a brief summary is made of the contents and purport of this book, an account of a most remarkable event which occurred at oxford about forty-five years ago may be fitly chronicled. it will be known, in its general outline, by many oxford men; and was given to the editor in the month of june, , by a member of brasenose college, where it had occurred. in the year , a club, known as the "hell-fire club," consisting of members of the university _in statu pupillari_,--formed in some respects on the model of that existing in the last century, which met at medmenham abbey,--was accustomed to meet twice a week at brasenose college, in oxford. unbelief at that time is said to have taken coarser forms there than is the case now. then it was less dangerous, because more gross and revolting. the members of the club, however, were not unsuccessful in their imitation of the blasphemy, drunkenness and other sins which had so notoriously characterized the older society. they met twice a week, and each is reported to have endeavoured to outdo his fellow-member in rampant blasphemy and sceptical daring. the meetings were kept so private, and such judicious care was taken to preserve unity of thought and secrecy amongst the various members, that the college authorities, though partially aware of its existence, were said to be unable to interfere. on the north side of the college runs a narrow lane, connecting the square in which brasenose college faces that of all souls, with turl street. going towards the latter, on the left-hand side stands brasenose, until it is joined by the north portion of lincoln college. on the other side is the high garden wall of exeter college. it is a dreary and dismal-looking thoroughfare at best; and especially so at night. the windows of brasenose college are of a narrow jacobean type, protected both by horizontal as well as perpendicular stanchions. the lower windows, being almost level with the street, were further secured by a coarse wire netting. towards midnight on a day in december in the year above-named, one of the fellows of brasenose college was returning home, when as he approached he saw a tall man apparently draped in a long cloak, and, as he imagined, helping to assist some one to get out of the window. the window belonged to the rooms of one who was reported to be a leading member of the hell-fire club. being one of the authorities of the college, he instinctively rushed forward to detect what he imagined to be the perpetration of a distinct breach of the rules, when (as he himself afterwards declared) a thrill of horror seized him in a moment, and he felt all at once convinced that it was no human being at whom, appalled and fear-stricken, he looked. as he rushed past he saw the owner of the rooms, as he conceived, being forcibly and strugglingly dragged between the iron stanchions. the form, the features,[ ] horribly distorted and stamped with a look of indescribable agony, were vividly before him; and the tall figure seemed to hold the frantic struggler in a strong grasp. he rushed past, round to the chief entrance, knocked at the gate, and then fell to the ground in a swoon. just as the porter opened it, there rose a cry from a crowd of men trooping out from a set of rooms immediately to the right of the porter's lodge. they were members of the notorious hell-fire club. in the middle of a violent speech, as profane as it is said to have been blasphemous, and with a frightful imprecation upon his lips, a chief speaker (the owner of the rooms) had suddenly broken a blood vessel, and was then lying dead on the floor. the club in question, it is reported, never met again.[ ] so much on this point. a few words are perhaps needed upon another. it may be held by some that what has already been written on witchcraft and necromancy is a melancholy instance of grovelling superstition on the part of its author.[ ] be it so. he is quite ready to avow his entire belief in the express statements of holy scripture, and in the general christian tradition and teaching on the subject itself and all that is necessarily involved in it. those who believe in the existence of angels, "the glorious battalions of the living god," and who frankly accept as truth the various records of holy scripture, in which their ministry to mankind is set forth, will likewise believe that s. peter's exhortation to the early christians did not simply embody a sentiment but declared a fact, when he wrote: "be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour."[ ] that the pagan nations owning and serving the prince of this world, and being supernaturally served by him in return, actively practised magic at the time of our blessed saviour's first coming, is generally allowed. and that the christian writers of early times, more particularly s. gregory thaumaturgus, admitted the reality and force of the sorcerers' incantations and powers, is abundantly evident from their words and reasoning. the case of the damsel of thyatira, "possessed with a spirit of divination," who "brought her masters much gain by soothsaying," clearly establishes this point; and so does the apostle's authoritative action:--"paul, being grieved, turned and said to the spirit, i command thee in the name of jesus christ to come out of her. and he came out the same hour."[ ] when, three centuries after the day of pentecost, the church of god commenced numbering up her earliest triumphs, the soothsayers, the diviners, and the dealers with evil spirits began to experience her righteous and beneficent power. constantine, urged to action by those who sat in the seats of the apostles, formally sanctioned the condemnation of magicians; but of course under julian the apostate, magic rites were not only still commonly in vogue, but were publicly patronized. later on, valentinian re-enacted the laws of constantine; and under theodosius the severest penalties were likewise enforced against the practice of magic; and, in truth, against every phase of pagan worship. but a general belief in sorcery and divination remained powerful and active long after the supreme and glorious victory of christianity in the sixth century; and the manner in which the authorities of the christian church met the belief, and, by sacraments and sacramentals, aided the faithful to withstand the legions of the devil and his human allies, is perfectly familiar to the student of history. the well-known conviction that demons had appeared to mankind under the names of sylvans, gnomes, and fauns was common enough amongst the romans prior to the revelation of christianity; while the conviction that these demons had sometimes made women the object of their passion was arrived at by many. justin martyr and s. augustine of hippo[ ] seem to imply something of the sort; and marriage or commerce with demons was a charge frequently made against witches, even from the earliest times.[ ] it was said that these demons owned a remarkable attachment to women with beautiful hair,--a belief possibly founded on the passage in s. paul's first epistle to the corinthians,[ ] in which he exhorts women to cover their heads "because of the angels." in the middle ages the intercourse of philosophers belonging to certain secret societies with sylphs and salamanders was also believed by many:[ ] and, later on, the study of astrology, with its fatalistic theories, and the restoration of the heresies of the manichees, served to aid in more systematically formulating that belief in witchcraft and the supernatural which was for centuries so universal, and which never could have become so without a sure and solid substratum of fact and truth. again, it is impossible to believe that the sorcerers of the oriental nations have been and are impostors. as regards those of modern egypt, mr. lane, in his interesting volume upon that country,[ ] appears to have settled the question by expressing his conviction of the truth and reality of their supernatural performances. and similar conclusions have reluctantly but most certainly been arrived at by those who, with some knowledge and reasonable powers of observation, have witnessed the acts and deeds of the eastern dealers with evil spirits. with reference to egypt, mr. lane's statement on the subject stands thus:-- "a few days after my arrival in this country my curiosity was excited on the subject of magic by a circumstance related to me by mr. salt, our consul-general. having had reason to believe that one of his servants was a thief, from the fact of several articles of property having been stolen from his house, he sent for a celebrated maghrabee magician, with a view of intimidating them, and causing the guilty one, (if any of them were guilty,) to confess his crime. the magician came, and said that he would cause the exact image of the person who had committed the thefts to appear to any youth not arrived at the age of puberty; and desired the master of the house to call in any boy whom he might choose. as several boys were then employed in a garden adjacent to the house, one of them was called for this purpose. in the palm of this boy's right hand, the magician drew with a pen a certain diagram, in the centre of which he poured a little ink. into this ink he desired the boy steadfastly to look. he then burned some incense, and several bits of paper inscribed with charms; and at the same time called for various objects to appear in the ink. the boy declared that he saw all these objects, and, last of all, the image of the guilty person; he described his stature, countenance, and dress; said that he knew him; and directly ran down into the garden, and apprehended one of the labourers, who, when brought before the master, immediately confessed that he was the thief."--p. .[ ] the performers themselves maintain, that they have been instructed in the art by those who have traditionally received the knowledge step by step, and period by period, from the old "magicians of egypt;" and some frankly allow, that they themselves are constantly attended and waited on by a familiar spirit, demon, or genius, who actively aids them in their performances, and who is, under certain circumstances, always prepared to do their bidding. these genii, or "ginn" as they are called in egypt, "are said to be of pre-adamite origin, and in their general properties," remarks mr. lane, "are an intermediate class of beings between angels and men, but inferior in dignity to both, created of fire, and capable of assuming the forms and material fabric of men, brutes, and monsters; and of becoming invisible at pleasure. they eat and drink, propagate their species (like or in conjunction with human beings,) and are subject to death."... "the ginn," continues mr. lane, "are supposed to pervade the solid matter of the earth, as well as the firmament, where, approaching the confines of the lowest heaven, they often listen to the conversation of the angels respecting future things, thus enabling themselves to assist diviners and magicians."--p. . in the twentieth chapter of his interesting and attractive volume, he writes:--"i have met with many persons among the more intelligent of the egyptians who condemn these modern psylli as impostors, but none who has been able to offer a satisfactory explanation of the most common and most interesting of their performances."--p. . in another part of the book mr. lane concludes his chapter on "magic" thus:--"neither i nor others have been able to discover any clue by which to penetrate the mystery."[ ] so likewise as regards india,[ ] it is impossible to set aside the facts, which are testified to not by one but by hundreds, as to the supernatural powers of the jugglers there. identical in kind with the performances of the magicians of egypt before pharaoh and in the presence of moses and aaron, recorded in the book of exodus, the secret of the following "tricks" (familiar to any one who has been in india) has been handed down from father to son from the most remote ages; and we have no reason to doubt that the source of the power by which these acts are done is one and the same. for instance:--the juggler, giving one of the spectators a coin to hold as securely as possible within his hands, after pronouncing incantations in a monotonous voice for some minutes, suddenly stops, still keeping his seat, makes a rapid motion with his right hand, as if in the act of throwing something at the person holding the coin, at the same time breathing with his mouth upon him. instantaneously the hands of the person taking part in the performance are suddenly distended, while a horrible sensation of holding something cold and disagreeable and nasty, is immediately felt, forcing him to cast away the contents of his palms, which, to the horror and disgust of uninitiated persons, turns out to be, not the coin which before was there, but a live snake coiled up! the juggler then rises, and catching the snake, which is now crawling and wriggling on the ground, takes it by the tail, opens his mouth wide, and allows the snake to drop into it. with deliberation he appears by degrees to swallow it, until the whole, tail and all, completely disappears. he opens his mouth for the spectators to investigate; but nothing is to be seen, neither does the snake appear again. here is another instance:--a juggler will be brought to act before, perhaps, many hundreds of people, of all ages, degrees, and religions, including the soldiery of a garrison, in the public yard of a barrack. a guard of soldiers will be placed around him, to prevent either trickery or deception on his part, or interruption from the spectators. a little girl, about eight or nine years old, accompanies the man, who is also provided with a tall, narrow basket, three or four feet high, little more than a foot in width, and open all the way up. the juggler, after some altercation with the child, pretends to get angry, and lashing himself into a fury, seizes hold of the child, and inverts the basket completely over her. thus placed completely at his mercy, and in spite of her screams and entreaties, he draws his sword, and fiercely plunges it down into the basket, and brings it out dripping with blood--or what apparently is such. the child's screams become fainter and fainter, as again and again the sword is thrust through the basket; and at length they gradually cease, and everything is still. then follows a critical moment for the supposed murderer: and the exertions of the guard scarcely serve to save him from the excited soldiery. when order is at length obtained, however, the man, raising his bloody sword for an instant, strikes the basket with it, which falls, and reveals--not a murdered child weltering in blood, but an empty space, with no vestige left of the supposed victim. in a few moments the identical little girl comes rushing--from whence no one can tell--to the feet of the performer, with every sign of affection, and perfectly unhurt. be it observed that these performances commonly take place in india in places where it is impossible for any contrivances or trap-doors to exist, in the centre of court-yards at the various military stations, and before innumerable witnesses. again: in corea and china the practice of necromancy is said to be almost universal. an intelligent modern writer upon china gives an account, in the following passage, of one mode in which questions are put, and answers obtained, by a kind of divination:--written communications from spirits are not unfrequently sought for in the following manner: after the presence and desired offices of some spirit are invoked, "two or more persons support with their hands some object to which a pencil is attached in a vertical position, and extending to a table below covered with sand. it is said that the movements of the pencil, involuntary as far as the persons holding it are concerned, but governed by the influences of spirits, describe certain characters which are easily deciphered, and which often bring to light remarkable disclosures and revelations. many who regard themselves as persons of superior intelligence are firm believers in this mode of consulting spirits."[ ] here, as illustrating the common principles and course of action which are adopted and followed in all parts of the world by those who seek information by forbidden means, the following may be set forth:-- there is a dreary-looking house in one of the london squares which is reported to be haunted. and certainly this opinion, as the editor can testify from a careful personal enquiry, is tolerably current in the neighbourhood. a lady, curious about the fact, was present on an occasion when certain inquiries were made regarding this house by means of "planchette,"--the instrument just referred to as so commonly used in china. it is a small board, in shape like a heart, which is made to run on two wheels or castors, and a hole is provided for a pencil so to be placed with its point downward as that, when put upon a sheet of white paper the point may just touch the surface. after the usual invocation or incantation (or whatever it be), the persons who practise modern divination place their hands on the board. questions are put, and answers given. no one touches the pencil, but the board is so guided, as the necromancers and spiritualists assert, that the pencil is made to write intelligible answers to expressed (and sometimes to mere mental) queries. the following, printed _verbatim et literatim_, are in the handwriting of the lady who witnessed them put and responded to, and are given as a fair specimen of this mode of divination, now so generally practised in england:-- is any house haunted in b---- square? yes. what killed the two people in the haunted room? fright. what frightened them? spirits. what kind of spirits? yourself. how could any one be afraid of me? without your body. did they see them? spirits not visible. how did they know they were there? thought they saw them. did they make them feel them? no. then how did the spirits make themselves known--by what means? mesmeric. were you ever there? no. why do those spirits haunt that house? murder was committed there. who was murdered, a man or a woman? a woman. what was the name of the woman? (writing not intelligible.) who murdered her? (writing not intelligible.) is he alive or dead? dead. is it the woman's spirit, or the man's, who haunts the house? both. was the man hung? no. was the murder found out while he lived? no. are you a bad spirit? bad. is it what the bible calls "divination" to consult you in this way? yes. is it displeasing to god? perhaps. is it wrong? you know. it is only right to add that those who made and obtained the foregoing intelligible responses to intelligible questions, for good and sufficient reasons came to hold such practices to be unlawful and wicked, and threw the instrument by which they had been given into the thames. on this subject, and all its details, no words of warning could be more forcible than the following, which are quoted, in the hope that some who may have been thoughtlessly induced to adopt the practices of modern spiritualism, may be led at once to desist from the same:-- "although good and evil spirits possess a powerful influence in the government of the world, yet it is strictly forbidden, in the divine laws of the old and new testament, to seek any acquaintance with them, or to place ourselves in connection with and relation to them; and it is just as little permitted for citizens of the world of spirits visibly to manifest themselves to those who are still in the present state of existence, without the express command or permission of the lord. he, therefore, that seeks intercourse with the invisible world sins deeply, and will soon repent of it; whilst he that becomes acquainted with it, without his own seeking and by divine guidance, ought to beg and pray for wisdom, courage, and strength, for he has need of all these; and let him that is introduced into such a connection, by means of illness, or the aberration of his physical nature, seek by proper means to regain his health, and detach himself from intercourse with spirits."[ ] yet, with many, and an increasing number, it is to be feared such advice is wholly unheeded. for more than five-and-twenty years the subject of modern spiritualism has been under discussion in england, and the facts on which it has been founded have been before the world; but "having eyes men see not, and having ears they hear not." or, guided by the superficial opinions of those whose one-eyed materialism tinges so many of their hap-hazard theories, they put aside a consideration of the astonishing phenomena of the system of spiritualism, and absolutely deny their existence.[ ] the age is shallow in its very incredulity. the wisdom of the world is foolishness indeed. when it is too late, when thousands upon thousands have become the active votaries of spiritualism, perhaps the bishops and clergy of the church of england may wake up to some realization of the enormous influence for evil,[ ] both dogmatic and moral, which this diabolical system cannot do other than secure, and lift their testimony against it. mahometanism is not more directly anti-christian. yet the numbers of those who believe in spiritualism are daily increasing, and the purblind policy of ignoring its principles and action must very soon come to an end. of course materialists and sceptics reasonably doubt; for otherwise their own infallibility would ignominiously collapse. but for christians, who possess a copy of the "holy bible," and are able to read it, doubt seems to me (i write with all due humility) simply inconsequent and irrational. here, let us turn from shadow to sunshine, from that which is evil to that which is good; from the "lying wonders" of designing evil spirits, to the glorious manifestations of god almighty's power in the christian church--for the one kind are but reasonable correlatives of the other. and, for myself, i am free to confess that the evidence in favour of certain of the recent miracles said to have been wrought in the roman catholic portion of the one family of god is not only convincing, but conclusive. having long given up attributing any value to the slanders and misstatements of protestant and infidel writers, i have attempted for myself to investigate the principle of action, in the reception of evidence and the decision of authority, which is taken at rome, with regard to such events and occurrences; and briefly give it as follows:-- the congregation of rites, which enquires into all miracles which demand sanction, is presided over by the cardinal-vicar. it consists of twenty-one cardinals of various nations, nine official prelates, nine consulting prelates of various nations, all the fourteen papal masters of ceremonies, fourteen ordinary members, one secretary, one deputy-secretary, and one notary and keeper of the archives--in all seventy people. four miracles are required to be distinctly proved for beatification; and two more for canonization. all these must be proved by eye, and not by ear-witnesses. in miracles where diseases have been cured, it is required, st, that the disease must have been of an aggravated nature, and difficult or impossible to be cured; ndly, that it was not on the turn; rdly, that no medicine had been used, or if it had that it had done no good; thly, the cure must be sudden; thly, it must be complete and perfect; and thly, there must have been no crisis. in the process of examination and enquiry, no step is taken, no doubt propounded, no fact allowed, without many of the members of the congregation being present: and a printed report is sent to all who may have been absent. besides the ordinary cross-examinations, which are always of a most scrutinizing character, it is the sole duty of one of the leading members of the congregation, the _promotor fidei_, as he is termed, to raise objections, and if possible to disprove every reported miracle. the members of this congregation are as keen, penetrating and business-like, and have as complete a knowledge of the unconscious delusions of the human heart, as any body of english jurymen. as ecclesiastical scholars they may be truly said to be equal to the same number of english barristers; and the head of the congregation, for shrewdness, acuteness of intellect, and judicial ability, is equal to any judge in england, who by his interpretation of the law, and his particular sentence in a special case, wills away the life or property of any englishman. the subject has been treated at length in the great work of pope benedict xiv. (a.d. - ) "on beatification," &c., as well as in the decrees of pope urban viii. and pope clement xi.; and so sifting and careful has always been the investigation, that alban butler asserts, on the authority of daubenton, that an english gentleman (not a roman catholic) being present and seeing the process of several miracles, maintained them to have been completely proved and perfectly incontestable, but was astonished beyond measure at the scrupulosity of the scrutiny when authoritatively informed that _not one of those which he had heard discussed_ had been allowed by the congregation to have been sufficiently proved. father perrone, the distinguished living theologian, also asserts that having shown the formal process for certain miracles to a lawyer of some eminence (not a roman catholic) who after examination was perfectly satisfied with both the testimony and the reasoning, the latter declared that they would certainly stand before a british jury; but was mightily astonished on hearing that the congregation did not consider that evidence to be sufficiently convincing and conclusive. similar investigations have been made in england, since the reformation, and this by ecclesiastical authority. for example: in the year before his translation to the see of norwich (_i. e._ in ), dr. joseph hall, then bishop of exeter, made a strict and judicial inquiry into all the circumstances of the sudden and miraculous cure of a cripple at s. madron's well, in cornwall, and the following is the recorded conviction of this pious prelate:--"the commerce which we have with the good spirits is not now discerned by the eye, but is, like themselves, spiritual. yet not so, but that even in bodily occasions we have many times insensible helps from them; in such a manner as that by the effects we can boldly say, 'here hath been an angel, though we see him not.' of this kind was that (no less than miraculous) cure which at s. madron's, in cornwall, was wrought upon a poor cripple, john trelille, where (besides the attestation of many hundreds of neighbours), i took a strict and personal examination in that last visitation which i ever did or ever shall hold. this man, that for sixteen years together was fain to walk upon his hands, by reason of the close contraction of the sinews of his legs, (upon three admonitions in a dream to wash in that well) was suddenly so restored to his limbs, that i saw him able to walk and get his own maintenance. i found here was neither art nor collusion: the thing done, the author invisible."[ ] now, whatever may be thought of the principles enunciated in mr. lecky's[ ] volumes on "the rise and influence of rationalism," none can deny either the marvellous faculty exhibited for gathering and marshalling facts; while some portions of his thoughtful reflections do but put into luminous language thoughts and convictions which find a cordial response from many. the following remarkable passage is singularly true and accurate in its estimate of an unmistakeable historical fact, viz., that the oxford movement to a great extent left out of consideration[ ] the continued existence of modern miracles in the christian church. mr. lecky writes thus:--"at oxford these narratives (_i. e._ the record of patristic and mediæval miracles) hardly exercised a serious attention. what little influence they had was chiefly an influence of repression; what little was written in their favour was written for the most part in the tone of an apology, as if to attenuate a difficulty rather than to establish a creed. this was surely a very remarkable characteristic of the tractarian movement, when we remember the circumstances and attainments of its leaders, and the great prominence which miraculous evidence had long occupied in england. it was especially remarkable when we reflect that one of the great complaints which the tractarian party were making against modern theology was, that the conception of the supernatural had become faint and dim, and that its manifestations were either explained away or confined to a distant past. it would seem as if those who were most conscious of the character of their age were unable, in the very midst of their opposition, to free themselves from its tendencies."--vol. i. pp. - . it must be allowed that there is some amount of truth in this temperately-made charge. whatever else may have been pressed forward, and with success, it is obvious that the active energy of the supernatural has been kept somewhat in the background. at all events it has not been made too prominent. even in books of devotion, adapted from roman catholic sources, examples of miracles have been omitted; and so the golden threads which were so rudely broken three centuries and a half ago, are still in the mire; for few have cared to gather them up once more and weave them into a perfect whole. that work has still to be done. not until there be what a modern writer terms "daring faith"--faith which can move mountains--should the work be attempted. and now, fully alive to its imperfections, i bring my book to its close. it has been briefly shown herein what a great influence the materialistic speculations of a few bold and over-confident writers have recently exercised on current thought. at the same time the presence of the supernatural in church history has been made perfectly manifest, and abundant sources pointed out from which additional examples may readily be gathered for consideration by those who may desire to gather them. side by side, however, with that which in the supernatural order is good and beneficial to man, energizes that which is evil. there are angels and there are demons. there is light and there is darkness. numberless armies of glorious spirits, as the divine revelation tells us,[ ] stand, rank by rank and order by order, as the bright ornaments of the city of god. their subtlety, their quickness of penetration, their extensive knowledge of natural things, are undoubtedly perfect in proportion to the excellency of their being, inasmuch as they are pure intelligences, perfect from the hand of their maker. they know the concerns of mortal men.[ ] they are our protectors, our patrons, our guides. for us they lift up their prayers to god, and they are near us in our trials and temptations. their motion is swift as thought, their activity inconceivable. as they are the friends of mankind by god's decree, so specially do they become the guardians of the regenerate and the particular protectors of the innocent and young. and their beneficent actions are not altogether unknown. the old records tell of their charity; man's experience testifies to their presence. and, furthermore, for man's behoof in his time of trial, and for his eternal advantage hereafter, were given those powers and properties which belong to the church by the grace and efficacy of the sacraments. yet, on the other hand, until the number of the elect is accomplished, the enemy of souls, the prince of the powers of the air, is permitted to wield an alarming influence; while too often the natural man, with his will free, wills to remain his servant. yea; and even the baptized, too. for by witchcraft, sorcery, and necromancy satan still works, men being his direct agents and slaves. sometimes in one form, sometimes in another, he dupes those who seek him; while his legions suggest to men's minds evil thoughts, paint dangerous objects to the imagination, frequently direct the active current of the human heart to sin, and finally turn round and accuse their captives at the tribunal of god the judge of all. so must it be to the end, for this life is man's time of probation. of dreams and warnings, omens and presentiments, much has been written. each example must be considered on its own merits; for perhaps no coherent theory will sufficiently cover and explain all the instances here already adduced. so, too, with spectral appearances and haunted localities. while experience testifies to the facts recorded, such glimpses of the supernatural may be well left to tell their own story, to leave their own impression, and set forth their own teaching. to those who possess the grace and habit of faith they will not seem over-strange, for as hamlet remarked to his friend-- "there are more things in heaven and earth, horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy." as i prepare to lay down my pen, i cannot but notice and put on record what amid "the triumphs of science," so frequently start up to confront us, viz. the sad records of calamity brought to notice, and the gloomy scenes of deepest misery which are yet so frequently depicted. "woe is me!" is man's wail still. but with many the supernatural, as we too well know, is bidden to stand aside. the catholic religion is written of as antiquated, out of date, and effete. the truth of the christian revelation is openly denied. yet may not the terrible disasters of which we hear, and the miserable calamities which so constantly occur along the path of "human progress" and "scientific triumph," be permitted by god almighty as an intelligible and richly deserved rebuke to lofty looks and the impious and blasphemous thoughts of the proud?[ ] man's life in this country is certainly not longer than it was eight or ten centuries ago. he dies as he died. nor is the race of englishmen sturdier, finer, or better grown than of old. the tombs of the crusaders tell us this. look at the stately figures of the fitzalans in bedale church, or at those of the marmions in that of tanfield, and it may be that in this practical particular deterioration instead of progress should be more fittingly and faithfully recorded. as is obvious enough, science, with all the boasting of its adherents, can, after all, effect but little. true it is that wonderful discoveries are made in the realms of nature. operations untraced before, are now accurately apprehended; and secrets, long hidden, are triumphantly brought to light. one might imagine from the random confidence of some (as guides more shallow than safe), that science had discovered an appliance for every human weakness, an antidote to every physical evil or disease, an unfailing specific against every want and woe. yet, after all its researches and with all its supposed discoveries (for many may have been known and lost), never were failures so great or misfortunes so heavy. the ugly iron ship of the present day, hideous in form and appearance, yet constructed with all the obtainable skill of modern science, at an enormous sacrifice of expense, fitted with life-boats and patent scientific life-preservers, divided into compartments, after due calculations (on a scientific method), suddenly goes down, where a fisherman of six centuries ago, in his wooden skiff, would have ridden a storm securely, and becomes an iron coffin for five or six hundred corpses, rotting where the seaweed grows. again, war, with scientific appliances--in the invention and preparation of which the great nations are active rivals--marches over a great country, defended by the highest military art and strength, and in a few short months reduces its people to spoliation, tribute, and shame. less than a century ago, nearly a twenty years' struggle would have been made, ere such a sudden and sweeping contest could have been so securely sealed. human art may do something, and science may effect more: but how frequently some little flaw or casualty defeats all! the boastings of science, consequently, become vain and vapid: its works lie in the dust. past ages have had their pride humbled; as tyre and alexandria and babylon too eloquently tell. when god, by the insolence of intellect, is thrust aside, he sometimes, nevertheless, mercifully but efficiently reminds men that he is. when the supernatural is deliberately denied and scornfully rejected, suffering may serve to open the eyes of the blind and make the dumb to speak. the general tendency in these days is to worship mind, intelligence, and power, for might, with too many, is right. literary jargon setting forth this duty may be constantly read. the wisest action for the truly wise is to turn away from such; for the noblest and proudest ambition of a christian's life should consist in being humble worshippers of him the one author of the supernatural and the natural, whose only power is infinite, whose knowledge and wisdom are boundless, and whose abiding love and mercy are over all his works. appendix to chapter x. the claims of science and faith. by my friend mr. hawker's obliging kindness i am enabled to publish the following remarkable letter:-- "to mr. s. j----, merchant, plymouth. "my dear nephew,--you ask me 'to put into one of my nutshells' the pith and marrow of the controversy which at this time pervades the english mind as to the claims of science and faith. let me try: the material universe--so the sages allege--is a vast assemblage of atoms or molecules--'motes in the sunbeam' of science, which has existed for myriads of ages under a perpetual system of evolution, restructure, and change. this mighty mass is traversed by the forces electrical, or magnetic, or with other kindred names; and these by their incessant and indomitable action are adequate to account for all the phenomena of the world of matter, and of man. the upheaval of a continent; the drainage of a sea; the creation of a metal; nay, the origin of life, and the development of a species in plant, or animal, or man; these are the achievements of fixed and natural laws among the atomic materials, under the vibration of the forces alone. thus far the vaunted discoveries of science are said to have arrived. let us indulge them with the theory that these results, for they are nothing more, are accurate and real. but still, a thoughtful mind will venture to demand whence did these atoms derive their existence? and from what, and from whom, do they inherit the propensities wherewithal they are imbued? and tell me, most potent seigniors, what is the origin of these forces? and with whom resides the impulse of their action and the guidance of their control? 'nothing so difficult as a beginning.' your philosopher is mute! he has reached the horizon of his domain, and to him all beyond is doubt, and uncertainty, and guess. we must lift the veil. we must pass into the border-land between two worlds, and there inquire at the oracles of revelation touching the unseen and spiritual powers which thrill through the mighty sacrament of the visible creation. we perceive, being inspired, the realms of surrounding space peopled by immortal creatures of air-- 'myriads of spiritual things that walk unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.' these are the existences, in aspect as 'young men in white garments,' who inhabit the void place between the worlds and their maker, and their god. behold the battalions of the lord of hosts! the workers of the sky! the faithful and intelligent vassals of god the trinity! we have named them in our own poor and meagre language 'the angels,' but this title merely denotes one of their subordinate offices--messengers from on high. the gentiles called them 'gods,' but we ought to honour them by a name that should embrace and interpret their lofty dignity as an intermediate army between the kingdom and the throne; the centurions of the stars, and of men; the commanders of the forces and their guides. these are they that, each with a delegated office, fulfil what their 'king invisible' decrees; not with the dull, inert mechanism of fixed and natural law, but with the unslumbering energy and the rational obedience of spiritual life. they mould the atom; they wield the force; and, as newton rightly guessed, they rule the world of matter beneath the silent omnipotence of god. "'and he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of god ascending and descending on it. and behold the lord stood above it.'--genesis xxviii. . _tolle, lege_, my dear nephew. "your affectionate uncle, "r. s. hawker. "morwenstow vicarage, cornwall." general index. a discerner of spirits, i. abimelech's dream, i. aerolites, i. after-vision of a suicide, ii. alexander macdonald's dream, i. amulet of the grahams, i. ---- of the macdonald lockharts, i. ann thorne bewitched, i. apparition at ballarat, ii. ---- at time of death, ii. ---- in the jewel house, ii. ---- near cardiff, ii. ---- of a college friend, ii. ---- of a crow, ii. ---- of a dying father, ii. ---- of a dying lady to her children, ii. ---- of a father to his son, ii. ---- of a friend, ii. ---- of a sister, ii. ---- of a son to his mother and another, ii. ---- of an officer, ii. ---- of dr. ferrar's daughter, ii. ---- of philip weld, ii. ---- of rev. w. naylor, ii. ---- of s. stanislaus, ii. ---- seven years after death, ii. ---- to a gentleman, ii. ---- to a lady and her child, ii. ---- to a lady and her child, ii. ---- to a sentry, and his death thereupon, ii. ---- to lord brougham, ii. ---- to lord chedworth, ii. ---- to mr. andrews, ii. apparitions at oxford, ii. arrowsmith, trial of rev. e., i. arrowsmith's hand preserved, i. authentication of lamb's cure, i. barony of chedworth, ii. belief in god universal, i. benediction, the principle of, i. beresford apparition, the, ii. bird, the spectral, ii. bisham abbey, ghost at, ii. bishop joseph hall on temporal punishment, ii. bishop ken's hymn, ii. blessing and cursing, power of, i. . bosworth's testimony, mr. t., ii. bridget bishop accused of witchcraft, i. bull of pope innocent viii. against witchcraft, i. captain william dyke, ii. cardan, jerome, i. case of annie milner, i. ---- of martha brossier, i. catharine campbell accused of witchcraft, i. catholic claim to exclusive use of exorcism, i. causation, the law of, i. chamber, john, on "judiciall astrologie," i. charles i., omens concerning, i. , charles ireland bewitched, i. chevalier's testimony concerning spiritualism, mr., ii. "christ is coming" quoted, ii. . christian shaw bewitched, i. christian writers on the supernatural, i. christianity, morse on the decline of, ii. citation, remarkable case of, i. club, the hell-fire, ii. colgarth, the philipsons of, i. collins's sermon, rev. h., i. cometism, the trinity of, i. constantine victorious, i. creslow, haunted chamber at, ii. criticism upon mr. congreve, i. crookes, mr. w., on spiritualism, ii. , , cross of constantine, the, i. ---- fire seen in france in , a, i. cure, miraculous, i. ---- miraculous, by the blessed sacrament, i. , daimonomagia, i. dale-owen, mr., quoted, ii. , death of captain speer, i. ---- of rev. s. b. drury, i. de lisle's, miss, death, supernatural music at, i. de lisle, mr., on the weld ghost story, ii. ---- mr. edwin, on strauss, i. demons, belief in, ii. denial of the supernatural, i. details of the supernatural, i. discovery of a lost will, i. disease of witchcraft, i. double apparition at time of death, ii. ---- in the west indies, ii. dr. lamb, the sorcerer, i. dr. newman on ecclesiastical miracles, i. dr. samuel johnson on the lyttelton story, ii. dr. william harvey's escape from death, i. dream of a child, warning given in the, i. ---- of a dignitary realized, i. ---- of a housekeeper realized, i. ---- of a widow lady, i. ---- of adam rogers, i. ---- of andrew scott, i. ---- of mr. matthew talbot, i. ---- of mr. williams of scorrier, i. ---- of the princess natgotsky, i. ---- of the swaffham tinker, i. ---- prognostication of death in a, i. ---- remarkable, of a clergyman, i. ---- warning given in a, i. ---- warning neglected, i. dreams and visions, i. dreams, nature of, i. ---- of james jessop, i. , ---- recorded in scripture, i. ---- reproduction of thoughts in, i. ---- supernatural, i. dunbar's testimony, rev. dr., ii. dungeon at glamis castle, the, ii. early popes martyrs, the, i. eastern form of exorcism, i. ecclesiastical miracles, i. effect of the supernatural, i. elimination of god, the, i. elizabeth gorham bewitched, i. ---- style accused of witchcraft, i. ---- tibbots bewitched, i. ---- treslar hung for witchcraft, i. ellinor shaw and mary philips, i. emperor julian thwarted, the, i. english canon concerning exorcism, i. ---- statutes against witchcraft, i. "eternal," the term, i. execution of frederick caulfield, i. ---- of lamb's servant, i. exhumation of james quin, i. exorcism, power of, i. , , ---- latin form of, i. ---- oriental form of, i. facts of witchcraft and necromancy, i. faculty of jerome cardan, i. fall of aerolites, i. false reasoning, i. ferrers family, omen concerning, i. florence newton accused of witchcraft, i. friday an unlucky day, i. ghost of bisham abbey, ii. god and his creatures, i. ---- the elimination of, i. guesses of science, the, i. hand of arrowsmith preserved, i. hanmer, mr. c. l., on an apparition, ii. hannah green's testimony, i. haunted houses and localities, ii. ---- chamber at creslow, ii. ---- glamis castle, ii. ---- house at barby, ii. ---- house at berne, ii. ---- house in cheshire, ii. ---- house in scotland, ii. ---- place at york castle, ii. ---- places, ii. ---- police cell, ii. ---- road near cardiff, ii. ---- room at glamis castle, ii. ---- room in the tower, ii. ---- spot in yorkshire, ii. hell-fire club, the, ii. henry spicer's testimony, mr., ii. ---- iv. of france, omen of death to, i. herder on witchcraft, ii. heresies of the modern spiritualists, ii. , home, mr. daniel, ii. , hospitals, christian in their origin, i. howell, mr. j., on spiritualism, ii. , howitt, mr. w., on eternal punishment, ii. , hume on miracles, i. increase mather on the tests of demoniacal possession, i. ---- mather's "cases of conscience," i. inquiries regarding wynyard, ii. jane brookes accused of witchcraft, i. ---- wenham accused of witchcraft, i. johnson, dr. samuel, on the lyttelton ghost, ii. kostka's, s. stanislaus, apparition, ii. ---- picture at stonyhurst, ii. labarum, the, i. lactantius on dreams, i. lady betty cobb, ii. lancashire demoniacs, the, i. lane, mr., on modern necromancy, ii. , laud, omens concerning archbishop, i. law of causation, the, i. lecky, mr. w. h. e., on the oxford movement, ii. legion, the thundering, i. longdon, mary, bewitched, i. lord falkland, omen concerning, i. lord litchfield's note of a presentiment, i. ---- testimony, i. lord westcote's testimony, ii. lyttelton ghost story, ii. , , macdonald's, a., case of second sight, i. macknish on dreams, i. major george sydenham, ii. marquis de marsay on spirits, ii. mary of medicis, omen of death to, i. media, table of spiritual, ii. mines, haunted, ii. ministry of angels, ii. miracles at rome in , i. ---- bishop hall on, ii. ---- examination of at rome, ii. ---- of our lord, i. ---- of prince hohenlohe, i. ---- wrought by the blessed sacrament, i. , miracle at garswood, i. ---- at metz, i. ---- at typasa, i. ---- under marcus aurelius, i. miraculous cure at pontoise, i. ---- facts, tradition of, i. ---- of joseph lamb, i. ---- of mary wood, i. ---- of winifred white, i. mediumship, ii. ---- clairlative, ii. ---- clairvoyant, ii. ---- developing, ii. ---- duodynamic, ii. ---- gesticulating, ii. ---- homo-motor, ii. ---- impersonating, ii. ---- impressional, ii. ---- manipulating, ii. ---- missionary, ii. ---- motive, ii. ---- neurological, ii. ---- pantomimic, ii. ---- pictorial, ii. ---- psychologic, ii. ---- psychometric, ii. ---- pulsatory, ii. ---- speaking, ii. ---- symbolic, ii. ---- sympathetic, ii. ---- therapeutic, ii. ---- tipping, ii. ---- vibratory, ii. miss weld's testimony, ii. modern scientific methods, i. monsignor patterson's testimony, ii. more's "antidote against atheism," i. mr. de lisle on miracles, i. mr. de lisle's testimony, ii. mr. edwin de lisle in reply to strauss, i. mr. e. lenthal swifte's testimony, ii. mr. george fortescue's declaration, ii. mr. henry cope caulfeild's testimony, ii. mr. herbert spencer answered, i. mr. j. g. godwin's declaration, ii. mr. laxon's wife tormented, i. mr. m. p. andrews' declaration, ii. mr. ralph davis on the northampton witches, i. mr. rutherford's declaration, i. mr. william talbot's testimony, i. mrs. baillie-hamilton's testimony, ii. mrs. george lee's testimony, i. mrs. kempson's testimony, i. murder discovered by a dream, i. ---- of maria martin discovered, i. ---- of the crippled and imbecile, i. naturalistic materialism, i. nature of god, i. ---- dreams, i. necromancy recognized by the fathers, i. ---- in china, ii. northamptonshire witches, the, i. notions, reintroduction of pagan, i. old traditions generally accepted, ii. omen concerning archbishop laud, i. ---- concerning king charles i., i. , , ---- concerning lord falkland, i. omens and prognostications, i. ---- the subject of, i. opinions of strauss, i. oracles, the cessation of, i. ostrehan's, captain, testimony, ii. oxenham omen, the, i. pagan notions, reintroduction of, i. patterson's, monsignor, information, ii. perrone, father, on spiritualism, ii. philipsons of colgarth, the, i. planchette, use of, ii. , plumer ward's, mr., account of the lyttelton ghost, ii. plutarch on the "cessation of oracles," i. popes martyrs, the early, i. portrait of s. stanislaus, ii. power and malice of satan, ii. ---- of blessing and cursing, i. ---- of exorcism claimed exclusively, i. presentiment of lieutenant r----, i. ---- of death, i. ---- to lady warre's chaplain, i. principle of benediction, the, i. principles of the broad church party, ii. prognostication of death in a dream, i. ---- of death to captain speer, i. prognostications and omens, i. propriety of a revelation, i. purbrick, rev. e. j., on the weld ghost story, ii. purport of dreams, i. rebuilding of the temple, i. "report on spiritualism" quoted, ii. rev. dr. cox's testimony, ii. rev. dr. j. m. neale's testimony i. rev. edward price on the world of spirits, ii. rev. g. r. winter on the swaffham tinker, i. rev. h. n. oxenham's testimony, i. rev. j. richardson's testimony, i. rev. john wesley on evil spirits, ii. rev. joseph jefferson's testimony, ii. rev. mr. perring's dream realized, i. rev. t. j. morris's testimony, i. "rules for the spirit circle" quoted, ii. s. augustine on miracles, i. s. bernard on dreams, i. s. cyprian on dreams, i. s. cyril on dreams, i. s. irenæus on miracles, i. s. john's college, oxford, founding of, i. s. pacian on miracles, i. s. thomas aquinas on dreams, i. sacrilege discovered by a dream, i. "sadducismus triumphatus" referred to, i. satan, power and malice of, ii. science and faith, rev. r. s. hawker on, ii. science of the pagan oracles, i. "scientific view of modern spiritualism" quoted, ii. scott, dream of andrew, i. scripture on witchcraft and necromancy, i. séance at the marshalls', i. ---- record of, from "spiritual magazine," ii. second sight, treatise on, i. ---- at cardiff, i. ---- at ramsbury, i. ---- jerome cardan's gift of, i. sexton, dr. g., on spiritualism, ii. shakespeare's conception of the supernatural, ii. singular prognostication, i. sir christopher heydon on astrology, i. sir george caulfeild, i. sir henry chauncy trying witches, i. sir henry yelverton and his death, i. sir martin beresford, ii. sir matthew hale's evidence as to witchcraft, i. sir thomas brown's evidence against witchcraft, i. slade's, sir alfred, testimony, ii. somerset omen, the, i. sorcery of dr. lamb, i. _sortes virgilianæ_, the, i. , sound of a drum, the, i. southey on haunted localities, ii. spectral dog, the, i. spectre of lady hobby, the, ii. spedlin's tower haunted, ii. spirits, perturbed, ii. ---- world of, ii. spiritualism despised, ii. ---- modern, ii. , ---- mr. w. crookes on the phenomena of, ii. ---- origin of, ii. spiritualistic manifestations, i. ; ii. , , , , , , , , , , , , , statement of lord lyttelton's valet, ii. stigmatization, i. , , , , , strauss, opinions of, i. successful exorcism by an english clergyman, i. sudden death of ruth pierce, i. supernatural banished, the, ii. ---- basis of life, i. ---- its work, i. ---- noises at abbotsford, ii. ---- religion, i. surey demoniac, the, i. tertullian on dreams, i. testimony to the fulfilment of a solemn curse, i. the chester-le-street apparition, ii. the christian system, i. the lyttelton ghost story, ii. the misses amphlett, ii. the oxenham omen, i. the result of a solemn curse, i. the sound of a drum, i. the spectral dog, i. ---- bird, ii. the use of the sign of the cross, ii. the white bird of the oxenhams, i. theories concerning dreams, i. thirteen to dinner, i. thomas aquinas on miracles, s., i. three men rescued by a dream, i. tichborne dole, the, i. ---- curse and prophecy, the, i. ---- mabella, lady, i. ---- sir henry, i. ---- sir roger, i. tinley, dream of samuel, i. tradition of miraculous powers, i. treatise on second sight, i. trial of rev. e. arrowsmith, i. trinity of comteism, the, i. twice-repeated dream of a sailor, i. tyrone apparition, the, ii. unalterable experience, i. use of the sign of the cross, ii. wallace, mr. a., on spiritualism and science, ii. wandering souls, ii. ward's account of the lyttelton ghost, mr., ii. warning given in a dream, i. , ---- given to a lady by a dream, i. ---- to a lady, i. ---- to a little child, i. ---- to two persons in dreams, i. "weekly register," the, on mr. wallace's theories, ii. weld ghost story, the, ii. ---- philip, drowned, ii. ---- very rev. alfred, s. j., on the weld ghost story, ii. weld's, philip, apparition, ii. westcote, lord, on the lyttelton ghost, i. white's dream, sir thomas, i. witchcraft and necromancy, i. ---- and sorcery, canon melville on, i. ---- common in non-catholic countries, i. ---- condemned in scripture, i. , ---- definition of, i. ---- examples of, i. - ---- george more on, i. ---- herder on, ii. ---- jane wenham accused of, i. ---- joseph glanville on, i. ---- recognized by the fathers, i. ---- rev. john wesley on, i. witches, the northamptonshire, i. "wonders of the invisible world," i. world of spirits, the, ii. wynyard ghost story, the, ii. the end. chiswick press:--printed by whittingham and wilkins, tooks court, chancery lane. footnotes: [ ] here in mr. surtees' record is a remarkable example of the pious and devout use of the sacred sign of the cross, which, having been universal amongst all classes before the reformation, was continued by many for long generations afterwards, and the use of which since the catholic revival in the english church has become common. [ ] "history of durham," by robert surtees, esq.: under "chester-le-street." vol. ii. pp. - . [ ] "nichols' literary illustrations." vol. iv. p. , _et seq._ london, . [ ] arthur orchard, of s. john's college, cambridge, b.a. ; m.a. ; b.d. . [ ] "letters on animal magnetism," by dr. w. gregory, p. . london, . [ ] a member of the noble family of beresford thus wrote (a.d. ) to a friend of the editor, with reference to the above narrative:--"the tradition in our family is entirely in favour of the truth of the spectral appearance, and the account which i have read, and return, is in my opinion a true and faithful narration of it." [ ] the record of this came to the editor, through a friend, from the late rev. w. hastings kelke, m.a., sometime rector of drayton beauchamp, in the county of bucks. [ ] the barony of chedworth was conferred upon john howe, esq., of chedworth, co. gloucester, on may , . he had two sons, john thynne, the nobleman referred to in the above account, and henry frederick, who in turn succeeded him in the title. his daughter mary married alexander wright, esq., whose daughter mary wright is the lady mentioned in the above narrative. miss wright's cousin john inherited as fourth baron, but died unmarried, oct. , , when the peerage became extinct. [ ] another narrative of this remarkable event, which substantially corresponds with those given in the text above is provided here. in certain respects there are discrepancies, and just those kinds of discrepancies which might reasonably have been looked for in accounts drawn up by different hands; but in the main facts, regarding which there can be no reasonable doubt, there is a remarkable and notable identity in all the leading features: "two nights before, on lord lyttelton retiring to bed, after his servant was dismissed and his light extinguished, he had heard a noise resembling the fluttering of a dove at his chamber window. this attracted his attention to the spot; when, looking in the direction of the sound, he saw the figure of an unhappy female whom he had seduced, and who, when deserted, had put a violent end to her own existence, standing in the aperture of the window from which the fluttering sound had proceeded. the form approached the foot of the bed, the room was preternaturally light, the objects of the chamber were distinctly visible. raising her hand and pointing to a dial which stood on the mantlepiece of the chimney, the figure, with a severe solemnity of voice and manner, answered to the appalled and conscience-stricken man that at that very hour, on the third day after the visitation, his life and his sins would be concluded, and nothing but their punishment remain, if he availed himself not of the warning to repentance which he had thus received. the eye of lord lyttelton glanced upon the dial; the hand was on the stroke of twelve: again the apartment was involved in total darkness--the warning spirit disappeared, and bore away at her departure all the lightness of heart and buoyancy of spirit, ready flow of wit, and vivacity of manner, which had formerly been the pride and ornament of the unhappy being to whom she had delivered her tremendous summons. such was the tale that lord lyttelton delivered to his companions. they laughed at his superstition, and endeavoured to convince him that his mind must have been impressed with this idea by some dream of a more consistent nature than dreams generally are, and that he had mistaken the visions of his sleep for the visitation of a spirit. he was consoled, but not convinced; he felt relieved by their distrust, and on the second night after the appearance of the spectre, he retreated to his apartment with his faith in the reality of the transaction somewhat shaken; and his spirits, though not revived, certainly lightened of somewhat of their oppression. on the succeeding day the guests of lord lyttelton, with the connivance of his attendant, had provided that the clocks throughout the house should be advanced an hour; by occupying the host's attention during the whole day with different and successive objects of amusement, they contributed to prevent his discovering the imposture. ten o'clock struck: the nobleman was silent and depressed. eleven struck, the depression deepened, and now not even a smile, or the slightest movement of his eye indicated him to be conscious of the efforts of his associates, as they attempted to dispel his gloom. twelve struck. 'thank god! i am safe,' exclaimed lord lyttelton, 'the ghost was a liar after all. some wine, there. congratulate me, my friends; congratulate me on my reprieve. why, what a fool i was to be cast down by so idle and absurd a circumstance! but, however, it is time for bed. we'll be up early and out with the hounds to-morrow. by my faith, it's half-past twelve, so good night!' and he returned to his chamber convinced of his security, and believing that the threatened hour of peril was now past. his guests remained together to await the completion of the time so ominously designated by the vision. a quarter of an hour had elapsed: they heard the valet descend from his master's room. it was just twelve. lord lyttelton's bell rang violently. the company ran in a body to his apartment. the clock struck one at their entrance, the unhappy nobleman lay extended on the bed before them, pale and lifeless, and his countenance terribly convulsed." in his "memoirs," sir nathaniel wraxall has the following relating to this occurrence:-- "dining at pitt place, about four years after the death of lord lyttelton, in the year , i had the curiosity to visit the bed-chamber, where the casement window, at which lord lyttelton asserted the dove appeared to flutter, was pointed out to me; and at his stepmother's, the dowager lady lyttelton's in portugal street, grosvenor square, who being a woman of very lively imagination, lent an implicit faith to all the supernatural facts which were supposed to have accompanied or produced lord lyttelton's end. i have frequently seen a painting which she herself executed in , especially to commemorate the event: it hung in a conspicuous part of her drawing-room. there the dove appears at the window, while a female figure, habited in white, stands at the foot of the bed, announcing to lord lyttelton his dissolution. every part of the picture was faithfully designed after the description given to her by the valet-de-chambre who attended him, to whom his master related all the circumstances." [ ] copied from a paper in the autograph of lord westcote, entitled "remarkable circumstances attending the death of thomas, lord lyttelton," which the present lord lyttelton most courteously entrusted to the editor of this volume, together with several other original documents relating to the same, as follows:-- . extract from mr. plumer ward's "illustrations of human life," vol. i. p. . . written account given by sir digby neave, bart., to lord lyttelton in . . ms. containing mr. george fortescue's testimony, signed s. l. . the following declaration:--"chiswick, may th, . miles peter andrews told me the story of lord lyttelton's appearance to him, driving with me at wingerworth, many years ago.--anna hunloke." [ ] lord lyttelton's valet made the following statement:--"that lord lyttelton made his usual preparations for bed; that he kept every now and then looking for his watch; that when he got into bed, he ordered his curtains to be closed at the foot. it was now within a minute or two of twelve by his watch; he asked to look at mine, and seemed pleased to find it nearly keep time with his own. his lordship then put them both to his ear, to satisfy himself if they went. when it was more than a quarter after twelve by our watches, he said, 'this mysterious lady is not a true prophetess, i find.' when it was near the real hour of twelve, he said, 'come, i'll wait no longer; get me my medicine, i'll take it, and try to sleep.' i just stepped into the dressing-room to prepare the physic, and had mixed it, when i thought i heard my lord breathing very hard. i ran to him, and found him in the agonies of death."--"gentleman's magazine," vol. lxxxv. part i. p. , a.d. . [ ] in boswell's "life of samuel johnson" (vol. iv. p. ) the doctor is recorded to have said, "it is the most extraordinary occurrence in my days. i heard it from lord westcote, his uncle. i am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world, that i am willing to believe it." [ ] "james weld, esq., seventh son of thomas weld, esq., of lulworth castle, was born april , , married july , , the hon. juliana anne, daughter of robert edward, tenth lord petre, and has had issue, . henry, . francis, a priest, . _philip_, died ; . anna maria, . katharine, . agnes, a nun, . charlotte."--see burke's "landed gentry," vol. ii. art. "weld of lulworth castle." [ ] the right rev. monsignor patterson, the present president of s. edmund's college (a.d. ), kindly informs me that there is a memorial brass in front of the sanctuary of the chapel of that society, on which is figured a floriated cross, rising out of waves, with a label appended to it,--"lord save me." [ ] s. stanislaus kostka was born on oct. , , his parents being john and margaret kostka, polish nobles of wealth and repute. miraculous signs foreshadowed his birth; and the holiness and purity of his early years betokened in a marked manner the favour of god towards this child. in his fourteenth year he went to vienna to finish his studies at the jesuit college. here, his saintliness was so manifested forth by his conduct, that the fathers said, "we have in our seminary an angel under the form of stanislaus." many miraculous favours are said to have been bestowed upon him by the hands of saints and angels, too numerous and lengthy to be recorded. he commenced his noviciate in the jesuit college at rome; where, after a short but edifying sojourn, he joyfully departed this life, aged years, on the morning of august , . [ ] mr. de lisle, of garendon park, leicestershire, in communicating to me the above narrative, writes as follows:--"i send you my account of the apparition of philip weld, according to my promise. i received it back this morning (july , ) from the benedictine convent at athenstone, in warwickshire, where my daughter gwendoline is a nun, and where one of the miss welds, a cousin of philip, is also a nun. she approves the accuracy of my account, and has added a paper with a few notes, which i inclose along with my own article, and from which you can correct mine so far as needed. i add here my affirmation that the above recorded narrative is a true and faithful account of what the very rev. dr. cox, then president of s. edmund's college, related to me and to mrs. de lisle in february, ." the editor is also greatly indebted to the very rev. alfred weld, s.j., for his courteous letters upon the subject of the above narrative, as likewise to the rev. e. j. purbrick, s.j. [ ] "letters on animal magnetism," by dr. w. gregory, pp. - . london, . [ ] "the apparition or spectral appearance of my friend's father to him in the west indies--the old gentleman having died in england, and the fact of two officers having seen it simultaneously, shows that it could not have been the result of their imagination, but that it was an objective appearance; in fact, the dead man's immortal spirit, indicating to one once bound by nature's ties to the living witness of it, that the separation of soul and body had taken place. it is firmly believed by the family, who, however, all shrink from making their names public. so, my dear doctor, you must be content with this."--e. m. c., cambridge, july , . [ ] "the narrative of the spectral appearance of a lady at torquay, forwarded to dr. f. g. lee at his special request, is copied from, and compared with that in, the family bible of h. a. t. baillie-hamilton by the undersigned, "c. margaret balfour, mary baillie-hamilton. witness, j. r. grant. "princes street, edinburgh, october , ." [ ] "the above is a correct and truthful statement. "witness my hand and seal. john gill godwin. [illustration] " , warwick street, south belgravia, nov. , ." [ ] special enquiry, made since the above was penned, shows conclusively that this appearance was seen exactly seven years after the date of death.--editor. [ ] the editor is in no degree concerned with paganism or pagan superstitions, nor has he gathered præ-christian examples. yet such will have been numerous to the ordinary student of classical history. the haunted house of damon, mentioned by plutarch, will be familiar to many. [ ] the following is the original of a most beautiful verse in bishop ken's well-known "evening hymn," either mutilated in the worst of taste in most hymn-books, or else altogether eliminated and suppressed:-- "you, my best guardian, while i sleep close to my bed your vigils keep; your love angelical instil, stop all the avenues of ill." [ ] "what do we know of the world of spirits? little or nothing, beyond what faith and revelation afford. still we know that they surround us; that they hover over us; that they accompany us whithersoever we go; and that even in the innermost tabernacle of the soul they penetrate and have their being. good spirits and bad are around us; good spirits to aid us, to waft our lame and imperfect prayers to heaven, and to protect us in the hour of temptation or peril. 'he shall give his angels charge over thee, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.' bad angels, too, are around us and against us, percolating through every avenue of the soul, inflaming the imagination, warping the judgment, tainting the will, and too often, alas! perverting it to perdition. bad angels are around us, even within the protecting sanctuary of god's church, when summoned, permitted there by the subdued and corrupted will of man. bad angels are around us in every walk and rank and condition and event of life: we see them not, but they hover over us and around us, and they penetrate within the mysterious precincts of the soul, by many a foul and unholy thought, by many an evil suggestion to sin. and they triumph, and they gibber in their unholy glee whenever they tempt and prevail. they triumph, and they laugh the insulting laugh whenever they steep to the lips in sin an unhappy mortal, and fasten upon him the mocking thought and determination of a deathbed repentance. that is their battle ground, the battle ground of victory. the standard of deceit is then triumphant: the captive is delivered bound into their hands to do with as they list, to be tormented according to the refinement of their infernal pleasure. 'he shall be delivered unto the tormentors.'"--rev. edward price. [ ] this belief prevails extensively in sweden, germany, and switzerland. [ ] the souls of the dead, or spirits of some sort, are constantly heard and not unfrequently seen in mines. a shropshire miner informed the editor that, of his own knowledge, he had heard supernatural sounds of moanings and mutterings underground, and had seemed to _feel_ the passing spirits as they swept by. on one occasion, after the violent and sudden death of a comrade, the noises were unusually loud; while the horses employed underground would stand trembling and covered with perspiration whenever the spirits were heard. [ ] "the life of the rev. john wesley, m.a., by robert southey, esq.," vol. ii. p. . london: . [ ] in many places on the continent, especially in france and spain, it was the custom to pray for departed souls, suffering (as their needful purification was incompleted) _in any particular locality_. dr. neale gives an example of this, occurring in a prayer which he saw printed and hung up in a church at braganza in spain, which ran thus:--"we pray, likewise, for the souls which are suffering in any place by the particular chastisement of god." and the following is translated from a french prayer-book of the last century:--"have mercy, o lord god, good and pitiful, on the souls of those who are being chastised for their transgressions in the flesh, in those places where thou willest them to suffer;" an evident reference in both cases to troubled spirits which haunt definite spots. [ ] when the tone of thought in shakspeare's day is compared with that in our own, the contrast between the accurate and explicit religious statements regarding the supernatural, with the shallow and cynical scepticism of modern writers, can hardly be put down to the credit of the modern. at all events those who claim to range themselves on the side of the ancient and the true may be permitted to do so. nothing could more forcibly set forth the current belief of the sixteenth century than the following well-known utterance of the ghost in "hamlet":-- "i am thy father's spirit; doom'd for a certain time to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. but that i am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison-house, i could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porcupine: but this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood." "hamlet," pp. - . oxford: . [ ] the editor is indebted to the late revs. w. hastings kelke and h. roundell of buckingham, for the above curious example. it was intended to have been published some years ago in "the records of bucks." [ ] for an accurate account by the late rev. w. hastings kelke of this curious and interesting old mansion, the property of lord clifford of chudleigh, see "the records of bucks," vol. i. pp. - . aylesbury, . [ ] "memoirs of sir john reresby," p. . [ ] the rev. joseph jefferson, m.a., vicar of north stainley, near ripon, who sent me the above--unaltered, and printed just as it was written--on the nd of june, . [ ] "notes and queries," vol. x. second series, sept. , , pp. - , and sept. , , p. . [ ] barby is a parish in the hundred of fawsley, in the county of northampton, a little more than five miles from daventry. it contains between six and seven hundred inhabitants. [ ] "your account, as about to be printed, is _true and exact_, as to all the facts of the haunted house at ----, which came within my own personal knowledge. don't mention names, or we shall perhaps be damaging the property, and lay ourselves open to an action at law. i may add that the late bishop of chester [dr. graham] is said to have furnished a mutual friend, the late master of trinity, with similar accounts, which had taken place before i knew the place, verifying to an a b c the old and, no doubt, perfectly true tradition. it is strange enough i know, _but it is true_.--yours, &c., h. s. b., november, ." [ ] the wife of the clergyman above alluded to, wrote to the editor as follows:--"having read the account which you contemplate publishing, i can testify of my own personal knowledge that it is _neither understated nor exaggerated, but is in all its details strictly true and accurate_.--june, ." [ ] miss s. f. caulfeild, author of "avenele," "desmond," &c. [ ] it seems that other places are reported to be haunted by appearances of birds. a correspondent informs the editor that this is the case with an old house in dorsetshire, not far from poole, where a wingless bird is sometimes seen. the same is said of a mansion in essex, as another correspondent declares. in one room in an old house in dean street, soho, likewise, several persons have seen a large raven, three times the size of an ordinary raven, perched on the tester of the old-fashioned bed. the inmates of the house, in , whose family had had the lease for eighty years, are said to have been so accustomed to seeing it (though they knew it to be spectral) that they were undisturbed by its frequent appearance. dr. neale's story as follows (not unlike the examples already given), is very singular. regarding it he wrote:--"_it comes to me with a weight of evidence, which, strange as is the tale, i cannot disbelieve_. three friends, not very much distinguished by piety, had been dining together at the residence of one of them in norfolk. after dinner they went out and strolled through the churchyard. 'well,' said a clergyman, one of the three, 'i wonder, after all, if there is any future state or not?' they agreed that whichever died first should appear to the others and inform them. 'in what shape shall it be?' asked one of the friends. at that moment a flight of crows arose from a neighbouring field. 'a crow is as good a shape as any other,' said the clergyman; 'if i should be the first to die, i will appear in that.' he _did_ die first; and some time after his death, the other two had been dining together, and were walking in the garden afterwards. a crow settled on the head of one of them, stuck there pertinaciously, and could only be torn off by main force. and when this gentleman's carriage came to take him home, the crow perched on it, and accompanied him back." [ ] "strange things amongst us." by henry spicer. nd ed., pp. - . london: chapman & hall, . [ ] the following is taken from a small volume which has been gratuitously circulated very widely amongst the clergy and laity. it bears a christian title, but is altogether anti-christian from end to end:-- "the unwise, idolatrous, early christian priests, in their admiration of christ, exalted him in their imagination to be god himself, forgetting the creator god, and exalting in their foolish imagination his blessed mother as the mother of god--folly that has been widely perpetuated down to these days. oh, foolish churches, how great has been your folly, how widely you have departed from the truth; therefore how little you have been able to cope with the wicked heart of man! "in like manner as the israelites, from the crucifixion down to these days, have erred in disbelieving the messiah-ship of christ, so the spurious churches have, during many ages, exalted christ in their imagination to be god. the israelites and the spurious churches being equal in their great error--the one refusing to acknowledge him as the long-promised messiah, the other exalting him in their imagination as being the messiah, the holy ghost, and god the creator also; the israelites refusing to give any glory to christ, the spurious churches madly rushing, in their ancient antagonism towards the jews, to the opposite extreme, by robbing, in their imagination, god the creator of his glory, and giving all glory to the messiah, to the great grief of the messiah. "now clearly understand, oh ye nations of the whole world! it was not god who was born out of the virgin mary, and who was crucified, but the before holy angel christ--understand this, and the holy scriptures will be plain to your comprehension--christians have erred greatly during so many generations, in like manner as the followers of mahomet and of buddah have erred--errors that were carelessly accepted by powerful rulers, evil and ignorant, and forced upon the priests and the people, generation after generation. the time is at hand, even knocking at the door, when your understanding shall be made clear, and neither the professing followers of christ, nor of buddah, nor of mahomet, nor the unwise of other sects, will continue in their many errors."--"christ is coming," pp. - . "yet to-day, if one dare question the value of christianity, what a howl is raised from one end of christendom to the other! we say so advisedly, for it is the howl of fear.... though christianity to-day declines and is losing power and vigour, yet in its day it hath done great and glorious good in the work of human redemption. it was an advance upon the religions which preceded it."--"what of the dead? an address by mr. j. j. morse, in the trance state," p. . london: j. burns. . [ ] st. peter iii. , . [ ] "a scientific view of modern spiritualism: a paper read by mr. t. grant to the maidstone and mid-kent natural history and philosophical society on tuesday, dec. , ." london: j. burns. [ ] a remarkable example of this has been courteously given to me by mr. thomas bosworth, of , high holborn, as follows:--"some seven or eight years ago there appeared in one of the newspapers a story to the following effect:--a commercial firm at bolton, in lancashire, had found that a considerable sum of money which had been sent to their bank by a confidential clerk, had not been placed to their credit. the clerk remembered the fact of taking the money, though not the particulars, but at the bank nothing was known of it. the clerk, feeling that he was liable to suspicion in the matter, and anxious to elucidate it, sought the help of spirit medium. the medium promised to do her best. having heard the story, she presently passed into a kind of trance. shortly after she said, 'i see you on your way to the bank--i see you go into the bank--i see you go to such and such part of the bank--i see you hand some papers to a clerk--i see him put them in such and such a place under some other papers--and i see them there now.' the clerk went to the bank, directed the cashier where to look for the money, and it was found; the cashier afterwards remembering that in the hurry of business he had there deposited it. a relation of mine saw this story in a newspaper at the time, and wrote to the firm in question, the name of which was given, asking whether the facts were as stated. he was told in reply that they were. that gentleman who was applied to, having corrected one or two unimportant details in the above narration, wrote on november , :--'your account is a correct one. i have the answer of the firm to my enquiry at home now.'" [ ] the term "willer" and "necromancer" are used as identical by easterns as well as by the aborigines of new zealand. [ ] there have been published "rules to be observed for the spirit circle," "framed under the direction and impression of spirits," by emma hardinge, from which the following points are gathered. firstly, there is a definition, and it is stated that "the spirit circle is the assembling together of a given number of persons for the purpose of seeking communion with the spirits who have passed away from earth into the higher world of souls." a leading direction enjoins the inquiring votaries to "_avoid strong_ light, which by producing excessive motion in the atmosphere, disturbs the manifestations. a very subdued light is the most favourable for any manifestations of a magnetic character, especially for spiritual magnetism." "strongly positive persons of any kind" and "the dogmatical" should not be admitted. furthermore, these "rules" contain the following:-- "spirit control is often deficient, and at first almost always imperfect. _by often yielding to it, your organism becomes more flexible and the spirit more experienced_; and practice in control is absolutely necessary for spirits as well as mortals. _if dark and evil-disposed spirits manifest to you, never drive them away_, but always strive to elevate them and treat them as you would mortals under similar circumstances. do not always attribute falsehoods to 'lying spirits,' or deceiving mediums. many mistakes occur in the communion of which you cannot always be aware. _strive for truth_, but rebuke error gently, and do not always attribute it to design, but rather to mistake, in so difficult and experimental a stage of the communion as mortals at present enjoy with spirits." [ ] the kind of communication made to those who first consult the spirits, is just of that nature calculated to allure the superficial, the frivolous, the uninformed, triflers, and seekers after novelties; and to lead them on to a more frequent intercourse and a deeper kind of communion. [ ] dr. j. g. davey, m.d., of northwoods, bristol, writes as follows:--"i have satisfied myself not only of the mere abstract truth of spiritualism, but of its great and marvellous power for good, both on moral and religious grounds. the direct and positive communications vouchsafed to me from very many near and dear relatives and friends, said to be dead, have been of the most pleasing yet startling character."--_report on spiritualism_, p. . london: longmans, . [ ] this person, whose name was most accurately given, had died five days previously. he was a servant on the estate, and had belonged to the sect of the anabaptists. [ ] "notes of an enquiry into the phenomena called spiritualism, during the years - ." by william crookes, f.r.s. [ ] "the reader who has not been in the habit of attending _séances_ should be informed that the peculiar phraseology of some of the questions is rendered necessary by the fact that if you ask the spirits, 'where did _you_ die?' or 'where were _you_ buried?' they will sometimes tell you that it was not _they_ who died and were buried, but merely the external shell or material covering of the real man."--note by the editor of the "spiritual magazine." [ ] "there is scarcely a city or a considerable town in continental europe, at the present moment, where spiritualists are not reckoned by hundreds if not by thousands; where regularly established communities do not habitually meet for spiritual purposes: and they reckon among them individuals of every class and avocation."--"scepticism and spiritualism." in a letter to the "spiritual magazine," dated may th, , judge edmunds, of america, estimated the number of spiritualists in the united states at ten millions. "in london, ten years ago," writes mr. r. dale owen, "there was but a single spiritual paper; to-day there are five."--"the debatable land," p. . london: trübner, . [ ] the rev. john edwards, jun., m.a., vicar of prestbury, near cheltenham. [ ] "we do not, either by faith or works, _earn_ heaven, nor are we sentenced, on any day of wrath, to hell. in the next world we simply gravitate to the position for which, by life on earth, we have fitted ourselves; and we occupy that position _because_ we are fitted for it."--"the debatable land," by r. dale owen, p. . london, . [ ] howitt's "what spiritualism has taught," p. . [ ] howitt's "what spiritualism has taught," p. . [ ] "spiritualism is avowedly opposed to the christian religion. 'the creed of the spirits' is published in the shape of a little tract, one of those called 'seed corn,' which active agents love to distribute gratuitously wherever readers can be found, and these are its clauses: 'i believe in god'--'i believe in the immortality of the human soul'--'i believe in right and wrong'--'i believe in the communion of spirits as ministering angels.' nothing more. those well-intending persons, therefore--and we believe that among protestants there are many--who go to _séances_ out of curiosity, and who are sometimes heard to say that if spiritualism be true it must therefore be right, should be warned that they are lending countenance to persons in whose writings the doctrines of the trinity and the divinity of our lord jesus christ are emphatically denied--the holy ghost scoffed at in words too blasphemous for repetition, our blessed lady insulted, and the whole fabric of religion attacked and undermined; and whether this is done by spirits who actually manifest themselves for the purpose of leading people astray, or by impostors who work upon the credulity of their audience, the thing can have but one origin, and that is the same as that of any other work by which the arch-enemy seeks to close the heart of man against the true faith. it is time therefore to use other weapons than that of ridicule against the baneful and, we fear, widely increasing delusion."--"tablet," september , . [ ] collect for the feast of s. michael and all angels, "book of common prayer." [ ] "the soul has a kind of body of a quality of its own."--tertull. cont. marc. lib. v. cap. xv. [ ] this account is current, with slender and unimportant variations, at oxford; or at all events _was_ current in my days there (a.d. - ), and on what could not be regarded as other than good authority. one version is already in print--that given by mr. william maskell, at pp. - of his curious and interesting book, "odds and ends," london, . he seems to imply that it was the late archdeacon of cleveland, the ven. edward churton, who saw the spectral apparitions in brasenose lane; but the archdeacon belonged to christ church, and, as his son, the rev. w. r. churton, of cambridge, informs me, was not resident at oxford at the time of the occurrence. more probably it was the archdeacon's brother, the rev. t. t. churton, sometime fellow of brasenose. [ ] as to the universality of the belief in witchcraft, the reader may consult herder's "philosophy of history," bk. viii. ch. . and as regards the convictions of some of the leading minds of europe in times past on the subject, mr. leckey in his "history of rationalism" (vol. i. p. ), makes the following candid admission: "it is, i think, impossible to deny that the books in defence of the belief are not only far more numerous than the later works against it, but that they also represent far more learning, dialectic skill, and even general ability. for many centuries the ablest men were not merely unwilling to repudiate the superstition; they often pressed forward earnestly and with the most intense conviction to defend it. indeed, during the period when witchcraft was most prevalent there were few writers of real eminence who did not, on some occasion, take especial pains to throw the weight of their authority into the scale. thomas aquinas was probably the ablest writer of the thirteenth century, and he assures us that diseases and tempests are often the direct acts of the devil; that the devil can transport men at his pleasure through the air; and that he can transform them into any shape. gerson, the chancellor of the university of paris, and, as many think, the author of 'the imitation,' is justly regarded as one of the master intellects of his age; and he, too, wrote in defence of the belief. bodin was unquestionably the most original political philosopher who had arisen since machiavelli, and he devoted all his learning and acuteness to crushing the rising scepticism 'on the subject of witches.'" [ ] s. peter v. . [ ] acts xvi. - . [ ] apologia, cap. v. de civit. dei, lib. xv. cap. xxiii. [ ] cor. xi. . [ ] ibid. xi. . [ ] luther, following the current tradition of his day, believed that the devil could beget children on the bodies of women; and declared that he himself had personally come across, and was well acquainted with, one of the devil's offspring. so too did erasmus believe the fact of such generation. it is a tradition in the catholic church, that the last and great antichrist--the final antichrist--may be born of such an alliance. of course mahomet was _a_ great antichrist; for though he borrowed certain christian features and adopted many jewish notions and rabbinical traditions in his system, yet he plainly and undoubtedly fulfilled the prophetic statement of s. john the divine--"_he is antichrist, who denieth the father and the son_." ( s. john ii. .) mahomet's great and leading heresy is expressed in the following dogmatic assertion of the koran: "_god neither begetteth nor is begotten_." now no system has more pertinaciously, successfully, and for so long a time opposed christianity than mahometanism--not even arianism. but modern "liberalism," so called, as still developing amongst ancient christian nations, promises even to outstrip the system of mahomet, and to be as blighting and baneful in its results. [ ] "an account of the manners and customs of the modern egyptians." by e. w. lane. th edition. london: . [ ] see the whole of this chapter, which is full of information and interest. it gives a record of several other similar examples. [ ] in no. of the "quarterly review," there is a criticism on mr. lane's account of these necromancers; but the facts recorded by him are neither satisfactorily accounted for nor successfully explained away. [ ] my brother-in-law, captain ostrehan, of the bombay staff corps, sir alfred slade, bart., and the rev. dr. dunbar, chaplain to bishop claughton, have furnished me with remarkable examples of the power of oriental necromancers. [ ] nevins' "china and the chinese," p. . new york, . [ ] "theory of pneumatology," by j. h. jung-stilling, pp. - . london: longmans, . [ ] dr. sexton in his "defence of modern spiritualism" (london: j. burns), a tractate written with ability and frankness, remarks that "it is too late in the day to sneer at this matter with a sort of self-complacency, which seems to say, 'you are a poor deluded creature: behold my superior wisdom; i don't believe in such nonsense.' here are the facts, and we demand in the true spirit of science to know what is to be done with them. if you have any theory by which they can be explained, let us hear it, in order that we may judge of its merits; if you have not, we are all the more justified in clinging to our own." and, again, referring to the inquiries of a certain dr. hare in america, he writes:--"the question with dr. hare was--did the phenomena occur, and, if so, were they produced by the direct action of those persons in whose presence they took place? the nonsensical notions mooted by unscientific opponents, and which are still urged with as much gravity as though they had been made the subject of mathematical demonstration, that electricity, magnetism, odic, or psychic forces are the agents by which the manifestations are produced, he knew well enough could not bear a moment's investigation. electricity cannot move tables, nor in fact act at all without cumbrous apparatus. magnetism cannot give intelligent responses to questions, and odic force and its twin brother psychic are probably as imaginary as the philosopher's stone; and even if their existence could be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, they could not in the slightest degree help us to the solution of the great problem of the cause of the phenomena designated spiritual." [ ] a thoughtful writer, and one who is evidently far-seeing and awake to the danger, recently made the following pertinent remarks in the _church review_:-- "the presence of superstition is always the sign of a wandering from the true path; the _excess_ of superstition almost invariably the precursor of great intellectual and religious changes, if not absolute convulsions. before the great crash of paganism the necromancers and practisers of curious arts were carrying on an unusually brisk trade among the romans. we all know how prevalent was the belief in witches, wizards, and astrology at the time immediately preceding the (so-called) reformation. before the french revolution the sect founded by cagliostro and lorenza feliciani, which professed a knowledge of the ancient arts of the egyptians, found great numbers of followers. and have we not a sign of a national mental crisis in our own day in the prevalence of 'spiritualism,' which is the form which necromancy at present takes? there may be many people who are utterly unaware how large a number of their fellow-countrymen, and especially of their countrywomen, believe in spiritualism, and attend _séances_. those who do so are not usually very fond of parading their belief, because they have a lurking suspicion that they may get laughed at; but this very reserve makes the bond between the votaries of spiritualism so much the stronger. it is no exaggeration to say that the practice of dealing with familiar spirits is on the increase in great britain at the present moment." (a.d. .) [ ] "on the invisible world," by joseph hall, d.d., &c., book i. sec. . father christopher davenport, better known as "sancta clara," in one of his most remarkable treatises, "paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico," chap. iv. p. (a.d. ), confirms the account in the text of the above-named bishop of exeter, giving all the details of this particular miraculous cure. it seems that both the well and chapel of s. madron were constantly visited by the faithful during the first part of the seventeenth century, especially in the month of may and on the feast of corpus christi. [ ] "history of the rise and influence of the spirit of rationalism in europe," by w. e. h. lecky, m.a. fourth edition in two volumes. london, . [ ] dr. newman will, of course, be excepted; for his remarkable dissertation prefixed to the translation of fleury's "history" is known to many, more especially in its new form,--a volume already referred to at length in chap. ii. pp. - . it is certainly quite unjust to include the tractarian school amongst those who are referred to by mr. lecky in the following passage:--"at present nearly all educated men receive an account of a miracle taking place in their own day, with an absolute and even derisive incredulity which dispenses with all examination of the evidence."--vol. i. p. . though many are reticent, and many more shrink from publicity and rude criticism, it is known that the direct influence of the miraculous and supernatural is by no means unknown in the church of england. [ ] job xxv. . [ ] see a most remarkable letter from the pen of my friend the rev. r. s. hawker, of morwenstow, on "the claims of science and faith," standing as an appendix to this chapter, in which the office of the angels is referred to. [ ] mr. mill, who is now dead, wrote that "this world was a bungled business in which no clear-sighted man [meaning himself apparently, and modestly] could see any signs either of wisdom or of god." mr. matthew arnold, son of dr. arnold of rugby, has written that "the existence of god is an unverifiable hypothesis." a third writer maintains that the "great duty" of the philosophers "should be to eliminate the idea of god from the minds of men," a sentiment not unlike that of mr. congreve, already quoted on p. of vol. i.; while a popular publication, circulated by thousands amongst the lower classes, declares that the mission of its editors is "to teach men to live without the fear of god; to die without the fear of the devil; and to attain salvation without the blood of the lamb." transcriber's note minor punctuation inconsistencies have been silently corrected. variable, archaic and unusual spelling as well as apparent printer's errors have been retained as they appear in the original. the poems "bohemians, hail!" and "sonnet on shares" do not appear in the table of contents. mark up: _italics_ [illustration] spook ballads by w. theodore parkes. _crown vo, cloth gilt, s._ popular edition s. london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent, & co., limited. _and all booksellers._ cheers of the press! "ingoldsby, thomas hood, w. s. gilbert,--these are the names that occur to one in trying to 'place' mr. parkes after reading this volume of rollicking, verbal and pictorial fun. the spook ballads are in no sense imitations of any of those classics of the comic muse, yet we find in them the same thorough abandonment to 'the humour of the thing.'"--_the publisher's circular._ "a substantial volume introducing a comic poet, who in the future may give us a modern ingoldsby. mr. parkes has an intellectual touch to his drollery and his sense of the possible humours of versification is pleasantly keen, the spook ballads is far above the contemporary average of the lighter rhymesters. mr. parkes wields a sprightly pencil, and he has illustrated his verses lavishly and with effect."--_the stage._ "not only are the literary merit of these fantastic ballads of a high order, but the illustrations by the author are of such a humorous nature as to give a unique pleasure to the reader."--_the morning leader._ "well written, well illustrated, and funny is a combination of good qualities not often met with even in the spook world, so messrs. simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent, and co., ought to be well pleased with their publication."--_the illustrated sporting and dramatic news._ "dealing largely with ghosts and legends embracing a dash of diablerie such as would have been dear to the heart of ingoldsby. there is a rugged force in 'the girl of castlebar' that will always make it tell in recitation; and even greater success in this direction has attended 'the fairy queen,' a story unveiling the seamy side, with quaint humour and stern realism. it is specially worthy of note that mr. parkes's skill in versification has received the warmest acknowledgment from those best qualified to appreciate the bright local coloring as well as the blending of fancy and fun."--_lloyd's weekly newspaper._ "a cheery and spirited production, and full of fun; the style reminds one of 'bon gaultier,' the style and illustrations combined inevitably recall the famous 'bab ballads.' indeed it is hard to say which is the most felicitous, the draughtsman or the poet."--_the bookseller._ "in the attractive spook ballads, the talented irish artist has displayed qualities to a remarkable degree. there are many pieces reciters will be glad to lay hold of, while the ballads and illustrations are full of the pleasing humour which characterises all mr. parkes' work, and which will serve to cheer and to amuse many readers."--_the sun._ "as the combined production of a clever pencil and a clever pen, this volume may be said to be unique. these poems are pure fun of the most entirely frolicsome kind, hung upon the peg of a quaint idea. 'the german band' rises to a really tragic pathos. the illustrations are either quaint, droll, or dainty, or partake of broad caricature."--_the citizen._ "it contains a store of humour that will delight and amuse the reader, who will be sure to re-read the many capital lays. just the thing for reciters. the artist, his own illustrator, shines here as conspicuously as in the kindred branch of authorship."--_british and colonial printer and stationer._ "mr. parkes is clever and polished alike in the expression of humour and pathos. indescribably funny is his story of the deluge as told by 'antediluvian pat o'toole,' and a note of grim tragedy is struck in the tale of 'john mckune.' rollicking lays, many of them admirably adapted for recitation, go to make a delightful book, which has the uncommon merit of being well illustrated by mr. parkes, who is as skilful an artist as he is an author."--_photographic journal._ "spook ballads possess an amount of boisterous humour and variety of quaint versification which make them excellent and refreshing reading. the book owes a good deal of its charm to the author's clever and laughable illustrations which are plentifully besprinkled in its pages."--_the weekly sun_. "there is a good store of pleasant humour in spook ballads, by theodore parkes, who also has a happy gift with the pencil, as witness the illustrations, the fare he provides certainly deserves a really grateful 'grace after meat.'"--_the people._ "in his attractive volume, the spook ballads, mr. theodore parkes has shown himself to be not only an author but an artist of considerable talents."--_weekly budget._ "the fun is good humoured and light-hearted, and better than most popular verse as to rhyme and metre. the illustrations are really clever and range from broad farce to charming little head and tail pieces that are graceful and suggestive."--_borderland._ "---- ballads all of which are undeniably clever. a book which will be gratefully turned to by all who seek occasional relaxation in the best of good company."--_the surveyor._ [illustration] "a clever collection of poems illustrated by their author and deserve great popularity. the author is well known in london literary circles in which he has given several of the pieces here presented as recitations."--_the lamp._ "irrespective of the pleasure to be derived from reading the ballads, the book is well worth obtaining for the author's remarkably clever illustrations."--_south london press._ "a facile flow of versification, keen sense of humour, and a good mastery of english as she is spoke by irish, german and other nationalities, as well as how she should be spoken, characterise this book of ballads. the sketches are well adapted to the themes."--_manchester courier._ "'the colonel and the cook' is not only genuine farce in conception, but felicitous anti-pathos in the execution."--_manchester guardian._ "these ballads are as original and racy and facetious as any i have come across for a long time; parkes's pencil is a lively companion for his pen; the two of them rollick and frolic down page after page in a state of hilarity that would dissipate and dispose of the worst attack of 'blues.' the sun does not shine every day, and when the hour is dark and dreary there will be found enlivement and joviality and wholesome entertainment within the covers of this volume."--_free lance in the weekly irish times._ "if any of our readers wish to enjoy a long and pleasant life let them ask for spook ballads! there is abundance of mirth, fun, wit and merriment in this beautiful volume."--_munster express._ "about as laugh-inspiring verse as perhaps ever issued from the press, the spook ballads are one and all conceived in a most exuberant spirit of drollery. there is a laugh almost in every line, fun galore bubbles through every page. where could one find a more touching combination of humour and pathos than the dedication lines 'bohemians hail!' there are lines in it worthy of some of the best touches of poe. the book is a book for _bon vivants_. it is a veritable ode to conviviality, and its pages teeming with most artistic illustrations. alive with ever-recurring flashes of wit and drollery, will afford many a pleasant hour to all to whom a laugh is welcome."--_united ireland._ "a delightful diverting volume, from cover to cover, of the sixty-one ballads before us; not one halts, they are all boisterous with bubbling mirth and frolic. happy the man who in a moment of ill humour, lights on a copy of spook ballads. fun of this kind is contagious, and before he has dipped far into mr. parkes' pages he will have forgotten his temper or his ennui. the book is full too of social satire, with touches of biting realism."--_the freeman's journal._ "most amusingly humorous verses cleverly and quaintly illustrated, and, like all genuine humour, teaches many a needed and important lesson in morals and the conduct of life, and hits sharp blows at hypocrisy and current shams and humbugs. surely the author must have had jabez balfour and the liberator swindle in his mind when he composed the scathing ballad entitled 'the devil in richmond park.'"--_the christian age._ "this is a very charming and winning volume. everything about the book is an incentive to make a prompt acquaintance with its literary merits. mr. parkes is a consummate artist in verse, and through all runs the same vein of drollery, of pungency, of real humour difficult to resist, and which makes us wish for more, and much more from so entertaining a pen."--_the carlow sentinel._ "a collection of humorous verses quaintly and cleverly illustrated by his own pencil. the author has a broad vein of humour."--_evening news_ (_london_). "when parties perusing this volume have completed its pages they will only regret that it is not double its size."--_the irish times._ "the naivete of the wit is most irresistible, and the humour most amusing. 'the ghost of hampton court' and 'the spirit that held him down' are both decidedly clever, but it is to 'the girl of castlebar,' 'the fairy queen' and 'why did ye die?" we turn for all that is most original and sparkling. the volume itself is as tastefully finished outside as it is wittily furnished and illustrated inside."--_king's county chronicle._ "the spook ballads will greatly amuse the class of readers who prefer a good hearty laugh to the emotions produced by 'paradise lost' or 'hamlet.' the book is crammed with fun of the funniest sort, though it contains many passages which possess a value above mere jollity."--_glasgow herald._ "there is no lack of rollicking fun in the spook ballads. the pieces are always amusing in idea, and the free sweep of the verse has a certain buoyancy which carries a reader pleasantly along."--_the scotsman._ "the humourous drawings are charming, and the figure subjects and decorative designs show great versatility and skill. mr. parkes has a wonderful way of introducing odd expressions, quaint conceits, and grotesque imagery. many a hearty laugh will be got out of the spook ballads."--_the aberdeen journal._ "the illustrations by the author copiously strewn throughout the work are exceedingly clever, and are in themselves enough to commend the book, and will appeal to readers endowed with a particle of humour. altogether the book is the kind to cheer the winter fireside or make the summer holiday slide joyously into autumn."--_kirkudbrightshire advertiser._ "the pages abound in illustrations and marginal etchings, and these display rare artistic skill and a genuine spirit of comicality."--_the derry journal._ "john m'kune is racy of the soil, and rests on something stranger than fiction."--_the tyrone constitution._ the spook ballads. the spook ballads [illustration] by wm. theodore parkes _author of "the barney bradey brochures"_ illustrated by the author london: simpkin, marshall, hamilton, kent & co., limited. contents. the spook ballads page the ghosts of hampton court ye filial sacrifice madame stiffin's ghost sonnet on parting his bouquet the girl of castlebar the german band out of plumb a ward in the chancerie the fairy queen the devil in richmond park saved a most remarkable case a tour to svitzerland joy! on seeing a flying spring the mate of the mary anne an umbrella case the spook of rotten row the magic specs ye curious tayle leather versus law heads and tails the colonel and the cook the spirit that held him down his future state a fight in the phoenix park an abdicated crown tears in law he followed the fox the honest young cashier the road to london antediluvian pat o'toole the lucky sixpence a wallflower sonnet paradoxical words a cantabile on music, art and law woman's tears heraldic fruits the polis and the princess granauille a horror of london town a confidential sonnet a tram car ghost margate sands john mckune i'll go for a sojer ode here! the smuggler's fate the late fitz-binks a fugitive kiss the bedroom curse a gun solo the semi-grand piano canticrank an ill wind blew him good a kleptomaniac's doom caught in the breach the ghost of hiram smike why did ye die? a pretty little land i know how they enlist the kindergarten way [illustration: bohemians, hail!] the daylight dreams of many a time, when song, and rhythmic story, were tuned, and voiced for bigot, and in gay bohemian ears, bring welcome wraiths of joyous nights, thro' whirling clouds of glory; the incense of the social weed, o'er spirit cup that cheers. with hail! to cycle speedmen, and the boaters of dunleary, clontarf, and the harmonic, where we sang with midnight chimes, the smokers of conservatives, and liberal unions cheery, i weave regretful tribute to their jovial social times; for autumn gales of life have blown those festal hours asunder, and scattered far by land and sea, the steps of many a one, and some alas! beneath the sod, for evermore gone under, have left a rainbow thro' the mist of grief that they have won. but slantha! to the hearts, and hands, of those who yet remaining, do carry down traditions of that bright bohemian throng, and slantha! to the soulful sheen, of life-light never waning from old eblana's heaven of her social art, and song. and here's to all bohemians, of whatever rank, or station, whatever tint, or black or tan, or creed you are by birth, sweet voices of the earth's romance, of every land, or nation, hail! brothers, in the carnival of music, song, and mirth: so fill we tankards, or the glass, for draught with lusty cheering, of honor to a crowning toast, with greeting heart and hand, as everlasting goal, for letters, art, and song, and beering, hip, hip, hurrah! vive! hoc! and skoal! to fleet street and the strand! [illustration] [illustration: the ghosts of hampton court] in the following verses, a remarkable supernatural interview is narrated. it is now for the first time launched into publicity, on the authority, and with the approbation of a quaint old friend of mine, professor simon chuffkrust, a savant who has daringly groped his way through certain gloomy mysteries of occult science. the confidential and impressive manner of chuffkrust, is jewelled with eyes of sparkling jet, semitoned behind a screen of moonblue spectacles. his voice is of such convincing suasion, that it is a novel and interesting experience to hear him relate with circumstantial enthusiasm, the ghostly interview afforded him by a fortuitous chance within the interesting grounds of hampton court. his is a testimony most reliable, and calculated to establish as a fact the actual presence of supernatural shadows in that historic locality. it also hints at the necessity, and use, of making the ghost a more familiar study, whereby the belated world would rid itself of much unnecessary fright, consequent on the invariable habit of spasmodically avoiding the familiar advances of the common or bedroom spook. in hampton court i wandered on a twilight evening grey, amidst its mazy precincts i had lost my tourist way, and while i cogitated, on a seat of carven stone, i heard beneath an orange tree, an elongated groan! i crinkled with astonishment, 'twas not a fit of fright, for loud elastic wailings, i have heard at twelve at night, the midnight peace disturbing in the lamplit streets below, but this was uttered in an unfamiliar groan of woe, and hampton court i wot had got some questionable nooks, in which it harboured spectres, and disreputable spooks, in which it shrouded headless queens, and shades of evil kings with ill-conditioned titled knaves, in lemans leading strings. [illustration] i listened! 'twas a voice that cried as 'twere from out the dust of time, that clogged its music, with a husk of mould and rust, a voice that once as tenor, might have won a slight repute, but combination now of asthma, whooping cough, and flute. [illustration] i sauntered towards the orange tree, and lo! the gloaming thro' i saw a man in trunk and hose, and silver buckled shoe, with ruffles and embroidered vest, in wig without a hat, inclining to the contour, which is designated fat. just then the waxing moonlight bloomed behind, and lifed the stain of color thro' him, like a saint upon a window pane, i could not spare such noted chance; so stepping from the gloom, i bowed politely and exclaimed "a spectre i presume?" with glad pathetic wondered look, but still in tones of woe, he answered thus, "alack! ah me i am exactly so" and confidential gleam of hope across his features grew, which gave me courage thus to start a social interview. "i pray of thee to speak, alas! why grims it so with thee? some evil canker nips thy peace, divulge thy wrongs to me, that i may give thee hope, for i am one to sympathize with manhood's lamentation, as with womanhood, her sighs, but ha! mayhap it fits your jest, with elongated groan, to seek to fright me, as i'm here in hampton court alone, to wreck my spirits as of old has been the game of spook," the spectre turned upon me with a sad reproachful look. and cried, "alack! that living men, so long have held it good, to flee from ghosts, and hence the ghost is not yet understood, now as for me, i moan it not, for jest of idle sport, my task, it is as murdered ghost, to haunt in hampton court! i play the victim to a spook, who chucked me down a stair, thro' being caught too near my lady's bedroom unaware." "poor shade of ill mischance!" i sobbed, the while a wayward tear, tricked out along my nose, and lodged upon my tunic here, "i pray that thou would'st tell me all, withholding ne'er a jot, for i might do thee service, in some most unlikely spot," "o blessed chance!" the ghost exclaimed, "thou art the only one of all men else, who spoke me so, they always turn and run! thou art the first, that i have seen drop sympathetic tears, responsive to my moanings, aye for full one hundred years! and so i feel that i can speak in unreserving tone, and give thee cause for this alack! my chronic nightly groan! when i was in my thirties, i engaged to mind the spoons, of colonel sir john bouncer, of the sixty-fifth dragoons, and tho' of lowly stature, i am proud i was by half, more manly than the footman, by step, and chest, and calf. with frontispiece well favored, in a frame of powdered wig, i wot amongst the female sex, i joyed a game of tig, i played the captivating spark, till colonel bouncer caught me jesting with my mistress, and he spake with furious haught, expressed him his disfavor loud, unto my lady thus, "an' thou do not discharge the knave, 'twill cause some future fuss, the cock-a-dandy bantam, pillory graduate, and scoff on manhood, give him notice!" but no, she begged me off. * * * * * it was not long thereafter, an early postman bore a warrant for the colonel, to start for singapore, he sailed, and in the august, 'twas just ten months away he stayed, and he was due in town, upon the first of may, twas on that ninth of august at twelve o'clock at night, 'thro bouncer hall i wandered, to see that all was right; and in my course of searching, to check the silver stock, i chanced upon the key, with which my lady wound the clock, a louis clock she valued, it was on the mantel shelf in her boudoir, her habit was to wind it up herself, i brought it to her bedroom, and scratched a single knock, and asked her through the keyhole, if she had wound the clock. [illustration] my words were scarcely uttered, when from another door, i heard a foot, that should have been that night in singapore! i saw an eye, that should have seen that night a foreign shore, "ha! caitiff knave!!" he shouted, 'twas all i heard, no more, he collared me by neck, and breech, and swept me off the floor, and bore me down the corridor, and hoisting me as light as cork, an act i could not check, he flung me down the oaken stair, and wanton cracked my neck! for that he paid the penalty, one day on tyburn tree, alack! it was the sorest deed, the law could wreak for me for when it made a ghost of him, he came, and sought me out, where haunting at my lady's door, i heard the self-same shout, of "caitiff knave!!" the pity on't! he took me unaware, once more by gripping of my breech, and tossed me down the stair! [illustration] night after night he compassed it, nor recked he who was there but by my crop, and grip of trunks, he bumped me down the stair! thus mortified by evil fate, his widow nightly wept, to hear the periodic row, and scarce a wink she slept; she daily sought to lay his ghost by penance and by prayer, and got a brace of saintly monks, to exorcise the scare with holy water sprinked about, a jot he did not care! but seized me with a fiercer grip, and jocked me down the stair! and mocked the frightened monks, who flew, with fringe of standing hair. at last his widow could not reck his evil conduct there, she moved to otherwhere. the only tenants that remained in bouncer hall, were rats, until 'twas taken down, to build some fashionable flats, and when the workmen moved the stair, i wot he was cut up, to see its broken banisters, upon a cart put up. but vengeance of his hate for me, remained a danger yet, to find a suitable resort, to work it out he set, and tapped the telephone, until he heard of that resort; it is an antient oaken stair, that's here in hampton court, 'twas vacant of a ghost, i faith, a lobby to be let, and with some royal spook, he had a ghostly compact set, and then he brought me here to work, his midnight murder yet. an hour ago, accosting me, says he to me, "prepare! be ready! for once more to-night, i'll crock thee down the stair! [illustration] to-night, a cousin german of the noble house of teck will occupy the bedroom, and i'll have to crack thy neck!" in yonder wing, and up the stairs as high as thou canst go, there is the bedroom, with a door, of casement rather low, and if thou stay a night therein, thy sleep might wake for shock, of scratching on the door, and keyhole cry, to wind your clock, and then the shout of "caitiff knave!" and if thou'rt bold and dare, to peer out on that lobby then, he crocks me down the stair! and leaves thee shivering in thy shirt, with fright and besomed hair! i've heard the county council, for the city weal is rife, i'd hold it as a favor, if thou'ds't intimate that life is perilled on that lobby, and suggest in thy report, that lifts would be more suitable, than stairs in hampton court. [illustration] then with a comprehensive wail of anguish at his fate, he gradually vanished thro' the grating of a gate, and left me sorely puzzled, in a sad reflective state, then up a creeping tree, and spout, with stern resolve of hate compressed within my breast for bouncer's evil ghost i clomb, and slipping thro' the window frame with feline caution dumb, i slid behind a folding screen, and with a craning neck, i listened for the snoring of the colonel van der teck, but not a soul had come that night into the room to rest, there was no cousin german, and the bed was yet unpressed; a knavish and mendacious trick it was of bouncer's ghost, to crack his butler's neck again, but with some beans and toast, i picketed behind the door, on eager ear to catch, the slightest human murmur, thro' the keyhole of the latch, at last it came! the midnight yet, was booming from a clock, when lo! a scratching on the door, and half-way thro' the lock, i heard the question, and with shout, i gave the ghosts a shock, by springing to the lobby, like a chip of blasting rock! and bounded twixt the spectres, with the rage of fighting cock, [illustration] then facing colonel bouncer's ghost, "thou caitiff spook" i cried, "was it for this, that shakespeare wrote, and colonel hampden died? for this! that cromwell lopped a royal head as traitor knave? for this! that all his cuirassiers were sworn to pray and shave? was it for this we lost a world! when george the third was king? for this! that laureates have lived of royal deeds to sing? for this! the printing press was made, torpedoes, dynamite? the iron ships, and bullet proof cuirass to scape the fight? was it for this! we've wove around the world a social net of speaking steel, that thou should'st perpetrate thy murder yet? out! out on thee! as traitor of thine oath unto the crown! by gripping of thy butler, by his breech to jock him down, was it for this! that justice wrung thy neck on tyburn tree, to expiate the direful debt to justice due by thee? for this! did lord macaulay write "the lays of antient rome?" for this! did government send out to bring us jabez home? have we been privileged to pay our swollen rates and tax? and legislative rights imposed upon the noble's backs? for this! was england parcelled out amongst the norman few, that thou should'st haunt in hampton court thy noisome work to do? for this! is london soaring up, to babel flights of flats as cross between a poorhouse, and a prison?--are top hats still worn by busmen, beadles, undertakers, men of prayer! that thou should'st cause the lieges to irradiate their hair, with horror at thy felon work? paugh! out upon thee! there! thou misbegotten sprite! was it for this! we fought and flew, on many a bloody battle field, right on to peterloo? thou gall embittered martinet! what boots it if thou crack thy butler's neck? unto that lock, he'll still be harking back, and grow envigorated, by thy ghastly midnight work, like shooting of the chutes, or breezing down the switchback jerk! "psha! that unto thee!" and i snapped my finger at him "bosh! go, give thy vengeful spirit to contrition, for the wash, and with the soap of keen remorse, erase the stain of blood, from out thy soul, and straight atone, with deeds of useful good, go, croak behind the marble arch, or take a flag and stand in grosvenor square, as captain of a hallelujah band, do anything, but mockery of murder, in the dark, ay even spout in windy speech, from wagons in the park, thou thing of misty cobwebine! thou woman frighter go! and never more be seen again, to make thyself a show. for children's fears, or if thou would'st a manly vengeance dare, pick up this fourteen stone of mine, and jock me down the stair thou idiot spook, thou ill-conditioned cloud concocted sprite with the immortal bard i cry, avaunt! and quit my sight!" so fiercely did i thus denounce, his evil midnight trick, the vigour of the vengeful scowl upon his brow grew sick with quail of deep abasement, to behold a mortal's blood on fire, to beard a felon spook, and ghosts were understood, a transposition of remorse, upon his features came, until he shook before me, in an abject wreck of shame, and cried with tones of keen reproach, "adzooks! alack! ah me! oddsbodikins, well well! heigho! that i should die to see, my ghost derided, with contempt of scoffing stock from thee! but of thy clacking caustic tongue, i prithee give no more, i'll take my passage by a breeze, to-night for singapore, or anywhere the wind may blow, japan! or timbuctoo! to rid me of thy clapper jaw, a flout on thee! adieu!" he then evaporated, and with some pride embued, i turned, for an expression of the butler's gratitude, but he was gone! and from his place, with india rubber shoe, a lamp was flashed upon my face, by number , q, they're never where they're wanted, and that blue, belted elf, did hail me up for trespass, and for shouting to myself! [illustration] [illustration: ye filial sacrafice] he was ye wrothful widowere, unto his child spak he, "thou art not wise in this my son, to court with susan lee, a mayde, ye least that's prattled of, ye safer for her fame, bethink thee, thou art jabez gray, respect thy sire, his name! [decoration] "ye reputation of ye mayde, is dewdrop to ye root of wedded life, that canks ye blight, or ripes ye wholesome fruit, then part thee boy, from susan lee, her ways and lightsome game, as jabez gray, behave thee well, respect thy sire, his name!" [illustration: willow oh and wallow!] ah! well a day, for jabez gray, o wallow was his woe, it stung his heart with pain and rue, that mayden lee should go, alack! ah! me, that such should be, but compensation came, for he was true, as jabez gray, unto his sire, his name. he gave unto ye mayde, ye sore, and sorry last farewell, ye pang unto his crinkled heart, was gall of woe to tell! but from his conscience, filial faith, with healing balsam came his heart unto, for he was true, unto his sire, his name. [illustration] o then 'twas his, 'twas jabez gray's reward and recompense, to hear his sire bespeake ye mayde, in fond and future tense, he pry'd it in ye dark of night, beyond ye garden gate, "i'll wed thee sue, myself, to save thy name from evil prate." [decoration] he heard ye sire bespeak ye mayde, in tender guise, ye same, as he did plead, before ye split, to save ye sire, his name. he heard ye parent, tell to sue, ye lack of manly sense, of him, ye son, and with ye kiss, he spake in future tense. [decoration] ye little month did pass, and then, ye parent wed ye mayde, and this, ye counsel to ye son, in confidence he say'd, "ye spinster sue is now ye wife, of fair and goodly fame, be duteous to her, as ye son respect thy sire, his name!" [illustration] [illustration: madam stiffin's ghost] in burton crescent, on the semi-circle apex there, i lodged some little period up a six flight four foot stair, it came about by freak of chance, 'twas in a cul-de-sac, i found myself one morning, and compelled to tramp it back, whilst blessing gates of london town that bar the traffic yet, i saw a window label, lettered, "lodgings to be let," a gloomy habitation 'twas, to give the nerves the creep! but possibly a comfortable roosting place to sleep, of knockers on its oaken door, it bore a double stock, i took those knockers, and i struck duet of double knock, and just as i was rounding off my rallantando din, the door was gently opened and a lady cried "come in!" i must confess, i fluttered with a flick of some surprise, to see a lady so petite, and with such piercing eyes, an artificial bloom was on her cheek, and nose, and neck, her gown was of a quaint brocade in antique floral check. by transmutating hand of time, and his assistant care, the golden sheen to silver light was paling thro' her hair, and from the dentistry of art, that crowned her rippled chin, she greeted me with pearly smile, the moment i stepped in. i noted on her fingers small, some antique diamond rings, and in her slippers russet brown, she tripped as 'twere on springs, a dainty wrap, completed her little quaintly self, she seemed a living watteau, that stepped from off a shelf. she seemed a living watteau, from out a canvas sprung, she wasn't--no, she wasn't--well you could not call her young. she greeted me upsmiling, with business kindled fire, and volunteered the question, "what rooms do you require?" it wasn't my intention, to move upon that day, my humor was to dawdle, in idle sort of way, so left it to her option, if twenty rooms or one, in earth upon the basement, or garret near the sun. she showed her approbation of my eccentric style, and greeted me politely, with confidential smile, "i have a room, the lodger is yet remaining there, but leaving soon--i'll show it, if you will step the stair.-- she mounted up before me, her little cloak, like wings, did supplement her flexor, and her extensor springs, she paused upon each lobby, to note the pleasing scene, of leaves amongst the chimneys, that lent a tint of green. the sanitary question, she settled with some pains, explained, the county council had just been down the drains, [illustration] and thus discussing features, and questions to be met, we landed on the landing of lodging to be let. upon the door with knuckle she struck a low rum-tin, and tardily was answered by husky voice "come in." to purpose of her visit, he gave a mild assent, which somewhat indicated a debt of backward rent. we entered the apartment, and gaunt, and wan, and scared! from tangle of the blankets, blear-eyed, and towsel-haired, a moment rose the lodger, then underneath the clothes, he snapped himself like oyster, and only left his nose. i took a swift synopsis, again we stepped the stair, she bowed me to her parlour, and all around me there, were virtue objects, suited for curioso sale, art of the reign of louis, and good old chippendale, cameo ware of wedgewood, and worcester bric-a-brac, miniatures of beauties, and oriental lac, a cabinet and tables, in marquetry of buhl, and feminine arrangements, of bombazine and tulle. old mezzotint engravings of regent, buck and lord, between the window curtains, an agèd harpsichord.-- the instrument she fingered, and sang an olden rune, she sang with taste, but slightly, the strings were out of tune, she warbled of the regent, of sheridan and burke, buck nash, and of beau brummel, and of the fatal work, enacted in a duel, then struck a broken string, and with a sigh she faltered, and then she ceased to sing. i told her, composition of song, was in my line, then, with a look intended as tender and divine, and mode of days of brummel, in manner and in style, she lauded up the bedroom with captivating smile, electro-biologic, magnetic in her glance, she fixed me like a medium, as tenant in advance! * * * * * i entered occupation, as soon as i could get, and everything in order, was for my comfort set, the room was daily garnished, and swept, my bed was made, in this was comprehended the lot for which i paid, my daily mastication, in public grill was frayed, monotonous, and easy, with quiet self-content, i went and came in silence, in silence came and went, was no domestic welcome when i came in, not one! and in the morning ditto, till i was up and gone. no sound of brush or bucket! no jar of door, or delph! no foot upon the stairs, except the pair i have myself! no smutty wench to greet me with cloud of dusty mat! no snarl of vicious lap dog, or hiss of humping cat! no slavey whiting up the steps, did ever strike my sight! yet everything was fixed for me, when i came home at night! [illustration] but often on my pillow, when darkness was my ward, i heard the muffled numbers of distant harpsichord! i heard a plaintive ballad, to measured cadence set, of long ago, that sounded for lordly minuet! in wierdly notes it fluttered and lingered on the wing, with wailing for the duel! the sigh! and broken string! * * * * * but once when i was taking a smoking circumflex, around the burton crescent, and just at its apex, i heard a voice behind me, that put me on some toast, "look! there's the man, that's living with madame stiffin's ghost!" i turned, and in the lamplight, distinctly i could see, a woman's dexter finger, was indicating me! "he's living as a lodger, above the second floor of yonder house, that's haunted, with double-knockered door, look! isn't he a cough-drop? it's only such a scare, would live in such a lodging, with madam stiffin there!" i never felt so worried at anything before! could scarcely find the keyhole of double-knockered door, and up the stairs i tottered, as in a walking trance, next morning, she'd be coming for payment in advance, next morning, at the striking of twelve upon the clock, i started from my slumber, it was her double knock! i jumped up at the summons, and leaping out of bed, i answered, and she entered, and unto her i said, "i'm here thro' false pretences; _i understand you're dead_!" [illustration] a peal of mocking laughter, the little watteau shook, and with her arms akimbo, an attitude she struck, she made an accusation of drink, and with a glance of keen reproach, demanded, her payment in advance! i had already promised myself, that none should boast, of knowing me in future, as tenant of a ghost, so got my cash, pretending to settle there, and then, and just as she was lifting my eagle pointed pen, said i "perhaps you'll give me receipt for also this?" with that i would have tested her presence with a kiss! i think my arm went thro' her, of that i can't be sure, but with the table circuit, she took the bedroom door, i took it quite as quick, and abreviated sight, i caught of her next landing, and on her hasty flight, from lobby down to lobby i chased her like a hare, i tracked her to the kitchen, but lo! she wasn't there! i flew into the area, back up the stairs i flew, in drawing-room and parlour, in every bedroom too, to overtake and seize her, with skidding foot i sped, and under every sofa, and under every bed, i searched,--it was a marvel!--exploited every flue, unlocked a couple of wardrobes and looked them thro' and thro', until in all its horror, the grim conviction grew, i had in fact been lodging unconscious with a spook! i rushed to get my waistcoat, pants, traps, and took my hook! [illustration] [illustration: sonnet on parting] he travelled by the mail, on incognito scale, with cautious care, and reck, of varied tricks of art. for he had made a bag, of most extensive swag, from bank where he was sec., and didn't want to part. but story of his trick, by telegraphic tick, brought him to book, and check, it gave him quite a start, he had it by a neck, 'twas rough to have to part! [illustration] [illustration: his bouquet] it has been proved by more than one observant social philosopher, that the impressionable star gazer of the music halls is one who often scatters rose leaves, and harvests thorns; let us hear what muffkin moonhead has to sing, concerning his own experience. it cost a florin square, her photo i declare, to wear, with care of uttermost esteem, in pocket of my breast, that picture lay at rest, and blest, with zest, that fluttered thro' my dream; my dream of love, where she was posed, in extacy, of gay phantasmagoria, of beauty unto me. [decoration] ten other bobs, i pay, for hothouse plant bouquet, when she, on tree, of pantomimic treat in semi-raiment stood, as geni of the good, i could, and would, down cast them at her feet. the feet of love where she was posed, in extacy, of bright phantasmagoria, of beauty unto me! i took a numbered seat, in stall select, and neat, to treat my sweet! and when she did appear, i flung the flow'rs i wis, she took them, and with this, o bliss a kiss! that thrilled me, while the cheer of gods applaudingly, did greet with storm of glee, the loved phantasmagoria of beauty unto me! [decoration] sweet osculating scene of bouquet, and my queen, and smug chaste hug, of posies to her nose, as poising on her toe, and then subsiding low, a glow flushed so, on my cheek, like a rose, the while she bowed the knee, then skipped away o.p., that lithe phantasmagoria, of beauty unto me! * * * * * i waited by the door, classic door! out they pour, a score, or more, escorting her, i say! and ha! may i be blest, upon each jerkin breast, confest, were drest, the buds of my bouquet! said she to me "ta ta! go home to your mamma!" it wrought the rude evanishment of love of her from me! the moral it is this, don't dally with such bliss, a miss, is kiss unto thee from the play, a kiss for gods, and stall, the pit, and tier, on all to fall and small the fig, for your bouquet, when it has brought the balm, of the applauding palm, she shares it with the supers, and she gives the chill to thee! [illustration] [illustration: the girl of castlebar] the sun was setting in a gloam of purple and gold, as i basked in the grass on the staball hill one autumn evening, the stirring tuck of the tattoo rolled up the slope from the adjacent barracks; it affected me like a tonic, my blood circulated quicker, the spirit of an amateur ghostly seer took possession of me! i felt as one inspired. a scene of early days of anglo-foreign strife rose before me like a wraith of second sight. the tramp of sea-bound red coats, fifes and drums, the woe-mongering cries of parting wives. i saw two lovers on the staball hill, heard their vows. a rhyming fever tingled to my fingers' ends, my only manuscript medium to hand, the stump of a lead pencil, and blank margin of the morning paper. upon that virgin border i jotted the sketch of the following founded on fact ballad. the reader will perceive in it a beautiful inverse lesson of the mutual commotion of two loving hearts. the bugle horn was sounding through the streets of castlebar, and many a gallant soldier, was bound unto the war, and one upon the staball hill, his sweetheart by his side swore many a rounded warlike oath, that she should be his bride. "o maggie!" cried the corporal, "there's war across the sea, and when i'm parted from thee, i would you'd pray for me, and i will tell you what you'll do, when i am far away, you'll come up to the staball, and kneel for me, and pray." and this to him she promised, and this to him she said, "i'll still be ever true to thee, be thou alive, or dead! i'll still be ever true to thee, and o if thou dost fall, thy soul at eve will find me here, upon the old staball." and then he swore a clinker oath, of what a vengeful doom, would him befal, who dared to win her from him, then the bloom came to her cheek again, "o jim i'll never love but you," "i'm blowed but i'm the same!" he cried, and then they tore in two! [illustration] she saw her soldier leaving, she heard the music sweet, of "the girl i left behind me" sounding sadly up the street, she saw the shrieking engine, that bore him far away, then went back to the staball, to weep for him and pray. and as the summer faded, and gloaming nights came round, a maid anon was kneeling, upon that trysting ground, and fearless of the winter, and of its falling snow, that maiden sweet, and constant, unto her tryst would go. till on a certain evening, a stranger in the town, came sauntering up the staball, and found her kneeling down, he tipped her on the shoulder, and speaking soft, and low, "o what on earth possesses you, to pray upon the snow." she told him all her story then, and why so kneeling there, she told him of her sorrowed heart, the object of her prayer, she told him of her soldier lad, so far across the sea, "i'd like to be a soldier lad, with you to love!" said he. said he "you're very lonely: if you have need to pray, i'll come agrah! and help you, with 'amens' if i may, it's very hard acushla! to pray alone each night," and the colleen shyly answered, "she thought perhaps he might." the tryst became more social for while the colleen prayed, the stranger tooted "amens" unto the kneeling maid, until at last he muttered "this pantomime must stop, i'll buy the ring to-morrow, i've got a watch to pop!" [illustration] at length the war was over, she heard the beaten drum, and up again thro' castlebar, the scarlet men did come, and her heart grew cold within her, to think how wroth he'd be to learn she had been faithless, while he was o'er the sea. then, pleading to her husband "o hide yerself!" she said, "aye even up the chimbledy, or undhernate the bed! for if he ketches howld of you, i don't know what he'll do, it's maybe let his gun go off, an' maybe kill the two! i'll try an' coax the grannies, to brake it to him first, for if he's towld it sudden by me, 'twill be the worst, they'll have to put it softly, i cannot be his bride, so while i'm gone to tell them, do you run off an' hide." * * * * * "o break it to him, grannies, the shocking news," she said "that i have wed another, and him i cannot wed! o put it to him gently, for great will be his pain, that we'll never more be meeting on the staball hill again." they broke it to him softly, 'twas in a public bar, a foaming pint before him, and on his brow a scar, they broke it to him gently, and spoke it to him plain, he needn't think to meet her, on the staball hill again. he swigged the pint before him, then heaved a bitter sigh, "what? blow me, your a chaffin'!" "o divil a word o' lie!" then first he took his shako, and tossed it to the roof, then to each nervous grannie, "here take the bloomin' loof." "come, wots yer shout for liquor? it's dooced well!" cried he, "i'm buckled to a blackimoor, i met beyond the sea, "you've taken a load from off of me! my mind is now at par, she wouldn't have left a ribbon on the girl of castlebar!" [illustration] [illustration: the german band] ve are ze vhandering shermans, ve cooms vrom o'er ze sea, ve plays ze lovely music, of all ze great countree, ve all of us have romance, of life, so bigs to say, i'll sing a verse for each man, ze vile ze band vill play. vings zerring zanzeraza, ve cooms from o'er ze sea, ve plays ze lovely music, of all ze great countree. zare's herr von zingerpofel, no prouder man vos he, zan ven he loved ze fraulien afar in shermanie. but ven he found ze noders golds ring upon her hand, he played on ze thriangles, und left ze sherman land! zare's blunder bogle fogen, vot bangs on ze big dhrum, thought all ze poor, und rich man, should own ze even sum; ze government vos differed, but on ze prison valks, he doubled up ze gaoler, und zen, he valked ze chalks! zare's dreker mandertoofel, ze opheclide he plays, he'll never more see nodings, of all his happiest days; he only blows ze music, because it brings ze cheer, of great big pipes of shmokin', und shugs of lager beer! zare's him vot puffs ze oboe, in oder days vos he, of heidelberg, a student ze pride of shermanie, but he did love der lager, zoo mooch of docter-vien, he killed ze man in duel! und he vos no more seen. zare's mungen val tarara, a sherman born in cork, und he vos von too many, because he vould not vork, he left his home von mornings, mit all his back hair curled, he jangs upon ze cymbals, to bring him round ze vorld. now you vill be imagine, zat i must oondherstand, zat i vill tell ze story of leader of ze band, but if i must, i'll speaks it, all in ze simple rune, so i vill stop ze music, ze tale is out of tune! 'twas i vos vonce a uhlan, who rode mit all ze band, zat von alsace, und lorraine, from vrance vor vaterland, ven in ze pits at gravelotte, i lay von night to die, i voke! for i vos faintings to hear ze voman sigh! und shust vere i vas vounded, i saw ze voman's zere, vos bound mine arm from bleeding, mit her own golden hair! she nursed me through ze danger, und ven zere's peace again, i svore zat i vould ved her, ze fraulein of lorraine. i kissed my love von mornings, her vite face on my heart, mit sobs her eyes vos veeping, ze time vos come to part. ze var vas not yet ended, i heard ze thrompet blow, zat i must rise, und answer, und leave ze sveetheart so! mine blood run cold zat mornings, und i felt somedings here, vos in my throat come choking, und on my cheek ze tear, vor o i vould not lose her, ze glory on me now, zat i vos hope to bless me, mit cosette vor mine frau. i marched avay to paris, vere all around vos dire, mit shmoke, und blood, und thunder, und fret, und woe und fire! und ven ze siege vos over, mit thrumpet und mit dhrum, vonce more again thro' lorraine, ze sherman bands did come. i vent to find ze sveetheart, but grass vos on ze slain, ze cruel var had murdered ze fraulein of lorraine!-- shust vere mine heart is beating, i keep ze treasure zare, mit mine own blood upon it, von braid of golden hair, und all dried up und vithered, und gone to dust again, von flower zat vonce vos jewelled ze grave zats in lorraine. ah vot is deed of glory, ven blood is on ze vings of love, zat makes ze heaven on earth, und vot are kings? auch! i vill have no patience. strike up ze band again, or i grow mad mit dhreamings, vot happened in lorraine! vings zerring zanzaraza, ve cooms from o'er ze sea, ve plays ze lovely music, of all ze great countree. ve all of us have romance of life so bigs to say, vings zerring zanzaraza, ze vile ze band vill play. [illustration: out of plumb.] i laid out pounds, and pounds, in entertainment rounds, and worked a score of credit pretty thick, for i heard she had a plumb, so invited her to come, to the altar at shortest notice quick, when i asked her for my plumb, she was all but deaf and dumb, i found that i was married thro' a trick, to have lifted off the shelf, a maiden without pelf, was unbusiness-like, i felt it was a stick, of the candle, all i had was but the wick, a moody retrospection, makes me sick! [illustration: a ward in the chancerie] he was a cabman grey i feck, all weird and wry to see; his face was ribbed like the turtle's neck, his nose like the strawberrie. if you think he was old, to you i say, your thought obscures the truth-- despite the years that had passed away, he was still in his second youth. "ha! ha!" quoth he, "how fair she looks," one morn, as he did see, a maiden sweet with her school-books, a ward in the chancerie. "how fair she looks!" quoth he, and put a load in his old black clay, and he didn't care if he hadn't a fare, the whole of the live-long day. [illustration] that night he looketh into the glass, with his nose like a strawberrie, "i know they'll say i'm a bloomin' goose but fate is fate you see." and he looketh into the glass once more, where yet was another drain. quoth he, "i've wedded three before," "the fourth i'll wed again." next day he was out in the open street, and standing upon the stand, he heard the trip of her coming feet, 'twas sweet as a german band. and forth he went and accosted her, he could not brook delay, "hey up, look here, little gurl," said he, "i saw you yesterday." "i saw you yesterday. my 'eart went out across your feet, and from your beauty came a dart that fixed me all complete; and all last night i dreamed a dream, to my bedside you came-- you'll marvel at these words of him who does not know your name. "i saw you yesterday. you smile." his eyes, like burning beads, took root in her inmost soul the while, as deep as the ditch-grown weeds. "you smile. ha, ha! to smile and laugh is better than aye to frown it's fitter to whiffle away the chaff that covers a golden crown. "it's better to whittle away the cheat of mankind if you can." and he cracked his whip. "it's a fair deceit and i am a curious man-- yes i am a curious man, my badge is seventeen seventy-seven, but wot is a badge? it's a very small thing to the matches wot's made in heaven!" [illustration] "how sweet he speaks!" the maiden thought "he's a lord in a rough disguise, as a cabman old he's coming to woo and give me a grand surprise; he seeks to hide himself in a mask, with a nose like a strawberrie, but i've read too many of three vol. novs., he couldn't disguise from me. "the lord of burleigh while incog. did wed an humble bride, and legend lore recounteth more of love like his beside. i've heard the ballad of huntingtower, and some i forget by name, and when he's got rid of his strawberrie nose he'll maybe be one of the same!" [illustration] and she fondly looked on him, i ween, sweet as the hawthorn spray, when all in bloom of white and green, it decks the month of may. "oh, dearest cabman," spoke she then, "no brighter fate were mine than this: to be thine own laydee, my life with thee to twine. "but i am poor and lowly born, and never a match for thee-- a girl a man like you would scorn, a ward in the chancerie, with only a hundred thousand pounds, it may be less or more; but do not wreck a confiding heart, it often was done before." [illustration] "wo! ho!" quoth he, and in his sleeve he grinned, "it's a big mistake. the chancerie is only a blind, but, yet, i am wide awake. if a hundred thousand pounds wor her's, she wouldn't be makin' free; i'd have to court her a little bit more, before she'd be courtin' me. "i haven't the smallest doubt of this-- the truth you tell," he began; "but i think that you misunderstand me miss, i am not a marryin' man. i only thought if you wanted a cab that i wouldn't be high in my fare," and he shuffled the nose-bag round the jaw of his patient, hungry mare. she walked away, nor bade good day, while he thought of the probate court. "she's a girl, i twig, could give me a dig of a barrister's wig for sport. [illustration] i have only escaped the courts of law," quoth he, "by a single hair!" as he finished the knot of his canvas bag on the nose of his hungry mare. [illustration: the fairy queen] many an intelligent reader will perceive that the following is a pathetic plaint founded on fact. a moral, conveyed in a polyglot sample of weak passages from many a knowing man's career. in one noted instance, the writer while reciting the ballad, closely escaped the chance of assassination, at the hand of a member of the audience, that he fancied it was a versification of his own particular experience, made public, and brought so circumstantially home to him, that he felt the eyes of all were concentrated upon him as the hero of the ballad. happily he did not carry a revolver, or it would most likely have exploded suddenly in the direction of the platform. but mutual explanations and further enquiry elicited the information that more than one man of that audience occupied the same lamplit boat of retrospect misfortune. corney keegan relates his adventure with the picturesque force, derived from practical experience, and many an aching heart will go out to him in sympathy. his story teaches a comprehensive, solemn, and beautiful lesson. me mother often spoke to me, "corney me boy," siz she, "there's luck in store for you agra! you've been so kind to me! down be the rath in reilly's park they say that larry shawn that's gone away across the say, once cotch a leprechawn. he grabbed him be the scruff so hard, the little crather swore, that if bowld larry'd let him go, he should be poor no more! "just look behind ye larry dear," screeched out the chokin' elf, "there's hapes of goold in buckets there, it's all for larry's self! if larry lets the little man go free again, he'll be no longer poor but rich an' great!" so larry let him free. some say he carried home the goold an' hid it in the aves, but some say when the elf was gone 'twas turned to withered laves. "if larry cotch a leprechawn," me mother then 'ed cry, "why you may ketch a fairy queen, ma bouchal by an' by!" near balligarry now she sleeps, where great o'brien bled, and often since i took a thought, of what me mother said. at last i came to dublin town, to thry an' sell some pigs, and maybe then i didn't cut a quare owld shine of rigs. i sowld me pigs for forty pound, for they wor clane an' fat, an' thin we hadn't american mate, so they wor chape at that! "well now," sez i, "me pocket's full, i'll not go home just yit, i'll take a twist up thro' the town an' thrate meself a bit," i mosey'd round to sackville street, when starin' round me best, i seen a darlin' colleen there, most beautifully dhressed. a posy in her leghorn hat, an' round her neck, a ruff of black cock's feathers, jacket too, of raal expensive stuff, a silver ferruled umberell' in hand with yalla kid, an' thro' a great big hairy muff her other hand was hid, [illustration] o like a sweet come-all-ye, in a waltzin' swing, she swep' the toepath, with the music of her silken skirt, an' step, to see her turn the corner, thro' the lamplight comin' down, you'd think she owned the freehowld of that part of dublin town! you'd think she owned the sky above, it's moon with all the stars, the thraffic in the streets below, their thrams, an' carts, an' cars! you'd think that she was landlady, of all that she could see, an' faith regardin' of meself, she made her own of me! "o corney is it you?" siz she, an' up to me she came, i took a start, to hear her there, pronouncin' out me name; "o corney, there ye are!" siz she wid raal familiar smile, an' thin begar she took me arm, most coaxingly the while; i fluttered like a butterfly, that's born the first of may, wid pride, as if i had the right hand side, the judgment day! i felt as airy as a lark that skies it from the ground, to think she'd walk wid me, poor chap, wid only forty pound! she took me arm, an' thrapsed wid me, all down be sackville sthreet, an' colleens beautifully dhressed, in two's and three's, we meet, an' men that grinned, a greenish grin, of envy from their eye, to see me wid that lady grand, like paycock marchin' by. till comin' to a lamp, i turned, an' gazed into her eyes, me heart that minute took me throat wid lump of glad surprise, siz i, "me jewel, thim two eyes, are sparklin' awful keen, "i'm sure," siz i, "i've come across, me mother's fairy queen!" "o corney yis," siz she, "i am, a fairy queen;" siz she, "an' i can make yer fortune now, if you'll just come with me." wid that, i ups and says "of coorse!" as bowld as i could spake, "an' sure i will me darlin', if its only for your sake." [illustration] well, whin we passed the statutes white, up to o'connell brudge, the fairy queen smiled up at me, an' gev a knowin' nudge, "corney!" siz she, "i want a dhrink!" "do ye me dear?" siz i, an' on the minute faith i felt, meself was shockin' dhry. well then she brought me coorsin off, down be the liffy's walls, an' up a narra gloomy sthreet, up to a palace halls! an' there they wor, all splindid lit, "come in me love," siz she. i thought me heart'ed brake, to hear her spake so kind to me! well in we wint, an' down we sat, behind a marvel schreen, an' there we dhrank, of drink galore, me an' the fairy queen. she spoke by alphabetic signs, siz she, "we'll have j.j. an' whin we swalley'd that, siz she, "l.l. is raal o.k." we tossed them off like milk, siz she, "at these we need'nt stick, d. w. d.'s a quench you'll find, a. i, an' up to dick!" well thin she left the alphabet, an' flying to the sky, "the three star brand's the best" siz she, "to sparkle up your eye," thin "here!" says she "just taste owld tom," but augh! agin me grain it wint! siz she "it's mum's the word, we'll cure it, wid champagne!" i never drank such sortin's, of the drink, in all me life, signs on it, in the mornin', me digestion, was at strife! at last, we qualified our drooth, an' up she got, siz she, "we'll just retire to private life, so corney, come wid me." but just before i stood to go, i siz quite aisy "miss, you might bestow poor corney k. one little simple kiss." "ah! corney tibbey, sure," said she, "two if ye like, ye thrush!" o have ye saw the blackberries, upon the brambly bush? the johnny magory still is bright, whin all the flowers are dead, her hair, was like the blackberries! her dhress, magory red! o have you ever saunthered out upon a winther's night, whin the crispy frost, is on the ground, an' all the stars, are bright? then have you bent your awe sthrick gaze, there, up aginst the skies? the stars are very bright, you think, well thim was just her eyes [illustration] were you ever down at the strawberry beds, an' seen them dhrowned in chrame? well that was her complexion, and her teeth, wor shockin' white! an' the music of her laughin' chaff, was like a beggar's dhrame, whin he hears the silver jingle, and his rags are out of sight! i thought the dhrop of dhrink was free, but throth i had to pay! i thought it quare, but then i thought, it was the fairy's way; "howld on" siz i, "she's thryin' me, have i an open heart, before she makes me fortune," so, begar! i took a start of reckless generosity, an' flung me money round, 'twas scatthered on the table! in her lap, an' on the ground! i seen it glitter in the air, before me wondherin' eyes, like little yalla breasted imps, all dhroppin from the skies! o then i knew that it was threw, she was a fairy queen, the goold, came dhroppin'! whoppin'! hoppin' the like was never seen! i gave a whipping screech of joy! whin, wid a sudden whack, some hidden wizard, riz his wand, an' sthruck me from the back, down came the clout upon the brain, an' froze me senses quite, an' over all me joy at once, there shot the darkest night! * * * * * i knew no more, till i awoke, an' found meself alone, i thrust me hand, to grasp me purse, me forty pounds wor gone! o then, with awful cursin', if i didn't raise the scenes, "bad luck!" siz i, "to leprechauns, bad scran, to fairy queens! bad luck to them, that spreads abroad, such shockin' lyin' tales, bad scran has me, that tears me hair, an' forty pounds bewails!" with that, i seen a man, come up, a dark arch, marchin' thro', as if he hadn't any work, particular to do. he measured me, wid selfish eye, as cat regards a rat, an' whin he spoke, begor i found, 'twas just his price at that! siz he "what's all this squealin' for? what makes ye bawl?" siz he, siz he, "i'm a dissective, so, you'll have to come wid me!" siz he, "yer shouts wor almost loud enough, to crack the delph! an' in the mornin' i must bring ye up, before himself!" "arrah! what for?" siz i, an' thin, i towld him all me woe, an' how i woke, an' found meself asleep, an' lyin' low. i towld him of the whipsther, that had whipped me forty pound, an' left me lyin' fast asleep, in gutther, on the ground. then leerin' like, he turned, and siz, "you're a nice boy! complate! to go wid fairy queens, like that, an' lose yer purse, so nate. corney!" siz he, "go home!" siz he, "she might have sarved ye worse, i'll thry me best, to ketch the fay, an' get you back yer purse. but look! don't shout like that again, it was a shockin' shout, it sthruck me, 'twas a house a-fire! you riz up such a rout. i thought you'd wake me wife! she sleeps, down in a churchyard near!" wid that, the dark dissective turned, an' bursted in a tear! i dhribbled out a few meself, me brow, wid shame i bint, an' like a lamb, from slaughter, slow, wid tottherin' steps i wint, but never, never from that day, was any tidins' seen, of me owld purse, me forty pound! or of the fairy queen! then, whin i thought of norah's wrath, an' what a power she'd say, me fine black hair, riz on me skull, an' grew all grizzle gray! o never more, to dublin town, i'll come, to sell me pigs! i walk a melancholy man, like one, that's got the jigs, an' in the town of limerick, if you ever chance, to meet a haggard man, wid batthered hat, come sthridin down the sthreet, an' if he stops, by fits and starts, an' stares at nothin' keen! say "there goes corney, look he's mad! he cotch a fairy queen." and if you chance in sackville sthreet, or any other way, to meet, all beautifully dhrest, a lovely colleen gay; an' if she chances on the name, that you wor christened by, an' laughs, as if she knew ye, with a cute acquaintance eye, an' if she takes your arm, an' siz, that she's a fairy queen, start back in horror, shout aloud, o woman am i green! am i before a doctor's shop, where coloured bottles be? is there a green light, on my face, that you should spake to me? go home, o fairy queen, go home! at once, an' holus bolus! remimber, corney keegan's purse, an' think of the dublin polis [illustration] [illustration: the devil in richmond park] i was walking about, in a casual way, thro' the ferns, in richmond park, 'twas just at the fringe of the twilight hour, on the skirt, of the time called dark, and the wind was rough, and i couldn't succeed, to kindle my three-penny smoke, when a gentleman stepped from behind a tree, and coughed, and hemmed, and spoke: "you'll pardon me, sir, you're in want of a light," said he, with a bow to me, and straight producing a braided star, he struck it against his knee, and with an expression of much concern, to see that my weed was right, he manipulated the light himself, with a courtesy most polite. i am one, who is quickly impressed, and won, by measure of courteous act, so deeming it right, to appreciate, in response of appropriate tact, i spake to him thus, "it's rare that a man in a gentleman's dress like thine, doth care to assist, the frivolous wants, of a miniature vice like mine, so reckon it not, as a rudeness wrought, of an ignorant wish to know, but i'd certainly like to learn the name, of the gent, who has touched me so! then he glittered a grin, from his cat-like eye, thro' a coal black lash on me, and he bowed, with his lifted silk top hat, "i'm the devil himself!" quoth he. good gracious! yes, i was certainly struck, so suddenly thus to be with the devil himself! but soon, or late, he was bound to appear to me. so screwing my nerves, to concert pitch, to play up my soul, for wealth, with a supplemental proviso made, for excellent mortal health, i offered to scribble my autograph, in blood, old-storied style, to deed, for a compensating line, from his notable strong room pile. but he looked on me, with a pitying glance, i counted somewhat queer, and answered me thus,--in a friendly way, with a slight sarcastic leer. [illustration] it's a long time, sir, i assure you, since i endeavoured, to so combine, my games of spoof, for the human soul, in the bartering oofftish line. i suffered by many a measly cheat, when mortals made those sales, you'll read of their shuffling knavish tricks, thro' the mediæval tales, if you think, that by selling your soul to me, is the way to get rich, it ain't, you'll have to become, a devil yourself, in the garb, of a modern saint. "it's the fashionable way, to play the game, of hypocritical spoof, you have only to tailor your saintly robe, to cover your tell tale hoof, you have only to hypnotise mankind, and teach them, to gaze on high, and while you have mesmerised them thus, with eyes, to the upward sky, "you can plot, exploit, and sneak, and trick, and cram your wallet, with wares, and earthly stocks, as you boom the run, on the new jerusalem shares, you can rob the widow, and orphan child; but reputably go to church, and if, by the clogging of circumstance, your pinched, in the doomdock lurch, the greater the pile of swag, you've made, the fewer the blanks, you'll draw, from the lottery wheel, of the english bench, in the name, of the english law. it's merely a mode, of paying yourself, in advance, a liberal wage, for the government work, you'll have to do, in the broad-arrow-branded stage. say thirty thousands of pounds, you filch, five years, is the time you'll do, six thousand a year, in advance, you see, to enjoy, when you've pulled it thro'. or, seizing your pile, by a dextrous coup, before they have time, to look down, from the castles, in the air, you have built for them there, you can take a foreign ticket from town. "and tho' you are lagged, at the ends of the earth, you'll still find a breach, or a flaw, whereby you can slip, thro' the quips, that confuse, extradition--international law. "now that is how i teach, the quickest way to cure, your impecuniosity complaint, you must collar the swag, as a devil yourself, in the garb, of a modern saint. there's another way to pinch, whereby you may keep, your character, apparently sound, go pray, and exhort, teach the vanity of wealth, and pay, half-a-crown in the pound! "now bear it in mind, if you're wanting to make, let this, be your measureless plaint, the misery of wealth, get a halo, and preach, in the garb, of a modern saint." again he lifted his silk top hat, and bowing an adieu to me, he vanished away, with a lordly crawl, in the trunk, of the nearest tree, and thus, were my mediæval hopes of wealth, by a caustic blow, dispersed, and a lesson of evil taught, by the devil, who touched me so. [illustration: saved!] i pictured out my passion, in florid fretwork fashion, expostulating! waiting! stating, mating we must be, and subtle thought, relating, to scheme, of emigrating, with bride, to land of bashan, was exercising me; when, peering like a picket, or a cricket, from a thicket, thro' the wicket, came another, on the scene, and we were three! 'twas the spinster, in a hurried fit of minorhood, i married, she succoured me from bigamy, said she, "come home to tea!" i went, and drank it boiling,-- a mug of strong bohea!-- i drank it, without sugar, a tannic dose, for me! [illustration: a most remarkable case] 'twas an incident matrimonial, the probate court the place, and 'twas for the co-respondent, a most remarkable case, for good was the leading counsel, and moral the words spake he, and fashionable ladies listened, to writ macfee, q.c. he rose to his feet and setting his most magniloquent frown, he fingered his brief for a moment, a moment, and laid it down, then out of his golden snuffbox, he powdered his pampered nose, and then with a pull back rustle of silk, to its wonted pose, he heliographed to the jury, a glitter of eyeful glee, and as he surveyed the respondent, most rep-re-hen-siv-lee, he mounted his golden pinc-nez, and on this wise spake he. "me lud, and o gents of the jury, it's a most remarkable case! and i don't hesitate for a moment, my cause in your hands to place, for o," said the counsellor, purring, with subtle seductive leer, "i never beheld such a jury, in the length of my long career! i assure you it makes it easy for an advocate like to me, to open the most remarkable case _ver._ tommins, l.r.c.p." then marking his condemnation, with voice like a double bass d. "the co-respond' is a doctor, john tommins, l.r.c.p., a leech of the muddiest water, a pill, that has given the sick, an emetic of truth, a plaister of pitch, with a warrant to stick, it's o when consumptive virtue, is treated by such, you see the ruin, like that enacted by tommins, l.r.c.p. he was called to attend the lady may monica pendigrew, from a fit of the blues he roused her, and prettily pulled her through, but managed her like a pilot, who getting a treacherous grip, sails out into deeper water, to scuttle and sink the ship! o gents, by æsthetical fraud, he played on the lady's mind, with shakespeare collar and fur, a sunflower, and such kind, he called her too utterly too, and posed in a limpish style, and droned in a minorly key, of love, like a fretwork file. me lud, and o gentlemen, gents, the co-respond' may smile, your sympathy thus to win, by means of trover of guile, but no! you will give him a check, whereby you will take your place, as the most remarkable twelve, of the most remarkable case!" [illustration: jury box] 'twas thus, with vigour, and vim, and verve, and casuist glee, the raftered roof re-echoed, the shouts of writ macfee, while envious briefless bees, admired his logic, and gist, accentuate note, and pause, well marked by his thumping fist, he stood on the councillor's seat, with one of his feet--the left, and the stuffy compression of air, with whirling silk he cleft, and this, was his winding up, "o father, brother, and son, oh this is a case, concerning each individual one, and confident of your verdict, now into your hands i place, o gentlemen, gents of the jury, this most remarkable case!" with quiver of deep emotion, one hypnothetical glance, he photophoned to the jury, at tommins he looked askance, then daintily mopped his forehead, some virtuous beads of heat, he sopped in his red bandana, and then he resumed his seat. then "oh!" said the ladies in court, "wasn't that lawyer a treat?" concussion of parasols, sticks, hands, and stamping feet, till the usher expostulated, aloud in a startling shout, "silence!!!" and his ludship sternly threatened, to bundle the audience out, [illustration] poor tommins had then to listen to evidence from the box, and now, and again, it dealt him, a stagger of nasty knocks; acquaintances there subpoenad, identification swore, and others, who sneaked the keyhole, of sitting apartment door. what mattered the osculation, with which he smacked the book, a fig for his indignation, a jot for his injured look, the jury, and judge, decided the damage, and costs, to be three thousand pounds, to the client of writ macfee, q.c. [illustration: extra special most remakable case verdict] * * * * * [illustration] the tweezers of time, had sparsed his hair, when tommins, l.r.c.p. was mooning around, to a neighbouring square, to join in an evening tea, when a tremulous maiden, checked his steps, and cried him, "o mister man, me mother's afeered, that the two pair back, is goin' to kick the can! o mister medical sir, he's sick, an' owin' a quarter's rent, an' that's the most, of the cause for why, of the hurry, that i was sent, o mister medical man, sir please, o please sir folly me quick, you might be able to worry him thro' from the fit of the stiffnin' sick! oh! come sir, please sir, do sir come, o hurry an' come with me quick!" from sympathetic professional heart, for indigent sick alway, he gave a positive kind response, to the girl, who thus did pray, and on thro' court, and alley, and lane, he followed her devious track, then mounting a rickety deal wood stair, he entered a two pair back, and there, in the glim of a halfpenny dipt, he gazed on a ghastly man, and he counted his pulse, said the girl "do you think he's likely to kick the can?" the sick man rose to an elbow prop, at tommins, to blink and stare! he seemed an anatomy, made for show, of eyes, and nose, and hair, he peered awhile thro' the starving glim, and then, with a moan cried he, "o god, have you come to haunt me here, john tommins, l.r.c.p.? o is it with pills, or senna and salts, your 'shake up the bottle' and mess of slops, to avenge for the deed i've done? have mercy and i'll confess! o pester me not to swallow your stuff, i will not allow you to bleed! o spare me tommins, i'm guilty, guilt, is what i'm about to plead!" the doctor shrank with a searching gaze, that clung to the startled ghost, in doubt awhile, for the rounded lines of his manhood's prime were lost, till memory striking the evil past, the doctor's eye did trace, with a shock to his heart, the writ macfee of the most remarkable case! his memory jarred on the probate court, with all its sorrowful shame, disastrous check, to his early hopes, of honor, and medical fame, and with a potion of pity, and hate, he knew the furrowy face of the grim, of the writ macfee, q.c., of the most remarkable case. the bloom of his pampered nose was gone, 'twas shrivelled, and pinched, and shrunk! his adipose peach of cheek, was fled, 'twas lean, and withered, and sunk, a derelict there; by the prosperous port of wealth, and power, and place, he lay the identical writ macfee, of the most remarkable case! [illustration] "o spare me doctor! for i'll confess,--i should have been in your place. as the treacherous co-respondent, of the most remarkable case, t'was i, was the homestead wrecker, but never as writ macfee, i played me, a knave's deception, as tommins, l.r.c.p.! i bought from a needy super, the beard, moustaches, and wig, i managed to coach my tailor, to model me in your rig, and thus i received a welcome, to lunch, and dinner, and tea, as tommins the medical doctor, but never as writ macfee. o doctor tommins have mercy! i beg to legacy thee, with thirty tickets of pawn to name, of writ macfee, q.c. in a brief bag under the bed, tied up in a worn-out wig, you will find a memento there, of mock æsthetical rig, the spats and the collar and vest, i wore when i went to see, the lady monica pendigrew, as tommins, l.r.c.p. o doctor tommins forgive! the cost and the foul disgrace, of debt, for the illsome guilt, of the most remarkable case, o doctor tommins have grace!" he rose with a greedy stare, and gripped with his reedy fists, the mat of his weedy hair! then moaning a hungry sigh, for life, with a choking breath, he fell with accusing cry, "o tommins you've brought me death! but i won't have a pauper's coffin! so give me a decent show-- whew!--eh--what's this? o thunder thun--un--der and lightning----oh! ah!--mercy me lud! o mercy! thun--un--der an' light--ning----oh!! it's a sine die, the morrow for me, ah! mercy me lud, oh!----oh!" the girl ran out of the two pair back, and down the stairs she ran, with shouts, as she took three steps at a time, "the lodger has kicked the can! mother, o mother, we've lost the rent, the lodger has kicked the can! it's just what you said of the two pair back, he's gone an he's kicked the can!" [decoration] [illustration: a tour to svitserland] said she, "the parkinses have gone, and all the doolys, too, the mcriartys, and the dunns, and mrs. old machugh; the dalys and fitzpatricks, with all their kin, and kinds, have mounted crumpled papers, on all their window blinds. ah! stop that old piano, you ding it all the day, it's only when your pupils are here, you make it pay; and all your pupils' parents, and all their kin, and kinds, have all got crumpled papers, on all their cotton blinds." he stopped the old piano, and "vot of zat?" said he, "regarding which, we'll have to do exact the same," said she. "for if we don't, we'll be the talk for many a day to come, that when all others went abroad, the zazels kept at home. it's positively foolish, affects your daughter's hopes--" "vel, zhere," said he, "go pack ze thronk, i'll tie it vit ze ropes; and you discharge ze servong, ze moment zat you find, she's pinned ze crumpled papers, on all ze cotton blind: and put ze gossip on her tongue, for svitzerland ve sail, ze-morrow in ze dover boat, vot brings ze voreign mail; and say, its oh, so secret, by shings, but she vill blow ze news, around ze town, until ze all ze people know." * * * * * [illustration] the dover boat had started, when, lo! prospecting round, a man upon the windows, those crumpled papers found. "hello!" said he, "such houses are always left for me," and crept into the fanlight, and foraged round with glee. he stole away the silver, he stole away the clocks, he augured out the secret, of the children's savings' box; he laughed, and he did chuckle, and cackling "ha!" said he, "the men who leave their houses thus, are men who toil for me." alas! that in my ballads, i have to tune my song, to many flats, and minors, to show where sharps go wrong. [illustration] he donned a suit, next morning, and sought an auctioneer-- "i'm ordered out to china, so harken, and look here; bring up your ivory hammer to the house, where you will see, the blinds in crumpled papers, and cant the lot for me." he auctioned off the carpets, the suites of every room, he canted to a builder, the villa for its doom; he made him sign a docket, to take down every brick, within the shortest notice, so he commenced it quick. they first upset the chimneys, and then unstitched the slates, they lifted off the rafters, and rooted out the grates; the door, and window casings, they took in several hauls, and carted off, the debris of bricks, that made the walls. [illustration] at length a workman picking with crowbar, in the rear, let fall his pipe in terror, his knees went loose with fear, a chill of woe electric, begirt his heart, like lead, he found a row of corpses, and every corpse was dead! i've sketched him, with the crowbar, and falling pipe, to show his awful fright, and sorrow, the fact is, such a blow might paralize his senses, unfit him for his trade-- i hope some kindly ladies, will have collections made. but yet a glamoured beauty was on them all, so nice, he felt like pins and needles, in glass of strawberry ice, he shambled round a corner, "o constable!" he said, "i've found a row of corpses, and every corpse is dead!" i like that honest fellow, tho' poor, with eye forlorn, said he, "o mister pleeceman, i wish i wasn't born"-- i've sought again to sketch him, above their ghastly rest, he indicates a label, on every corpse's breast. [illustration] 'twas down an empty cellar, below the bottle shelves, they looked as they were sleeping, in fact, they looked themselves, the daughters of herr zazel, the wife of zazel, and the pleeceman asked for zazel, was he in switzerland? the oldest native, answered a deputating clutch of specials, that there never before did happen such, and so they wrote sensations, and from the civic band, a posse of detectives, went scoot for switzerland. [illustration] the crowner's morgue was opened, the jurymen were caught, and every man protested, although he didn't ought, they went to view the corpses. "mein gott, vots them?" said one, "votever has there happened, vots been, and gone, and done? i could'nt spare ze money, avay mit me, so many, and so tinks i, i'll mesmer zem all, i vont brings any, i wraps 'em up mit labels, vots tied upon zem zare, ven i comes home, to vake 'em, and sorts 'em up mit care. i vos in my purse, only ze cash enough to stand, for vot you calls, von single man, avay in svitzerland. and so i mesmerised my vife, my daughters, von by von, and now i'll vake 'em all, and zen, by shings, you zee me run!" he party pumped his arms, he made a maze of passes, with flashing eyes of flame, that lit his pinc nez glasses. he clawed with his phalanges as he were going to seize some hidden ghost, when lo! at length, his wife began to sneeze, his wife commenced the sneezing, the girls took up the que, "now zee me run, or you vill find, too moosh vor me to do," he cried, and off he started, and took the tram for home, when peering thro' the twilight, of autumn's evening gloam, he saw a shocking poster, that curdled up his blood, "this ground to let for building," on which his house had stood, he laughed a weird, and woful, idiotic laugh at fate, he took a second tram-car, and sought a barber straight, and sitting down, he uttered a low despairing groan, "i'm vot you calls vor bedlam, so shaves me to ze bone!!" [illustration] [illustration: joy! on seeing a flying spring.] i made him quite at home, in a villa just by rome,-- an italian, of the antient noble style,-- but i saw him 'neath a star, and the tink of his guitar, was an irritating thing, that made me smile, his object, was my spouse for to beguile, but when he caught it hot, with sporting gun, and shot, he took a flying spring, across a stile! his object, was my spouse for to beguile. [illustration: the mate of the mary anne] "i'm the mate," quoth he, "of the 'mary anne,'" as she opened the door to him, and i'm all the way from the state of new york, with a present, i've got from jim!" "o dear!" said she, "it's a pleasure to see a friend, who has known my son, we've a party, enjoying the evening tea, and you're just in time for fun." "ah! thank you," said he, "i would like to explain, the chest, is a cumbersome weight, i'd have brought it myself; but i hadn't the dimes, to cover the cost of the freight. "it's a matter of seventeen shillings and six, but you see, i am one of the crew, i'd have paid it myself, for sake of your son, if i could have lifted my screw." "ah! jim was the very best pal that i knew," she got out the cash for him, "now hang up your hat, and come in to the tea, and tell us a lot about jim." he hung up his hat, and went in to the tea, said he to a girl, who was there, "you're the livin' dead image of my chum jim, regardin' yer figure, and hair." said he to another, "yer like yer mother, but still the expression of jim, is a playin' around yer beautiful smile, a perfeck sister of him. "i guess you are soft, on the ring that i wear," and he 'splayed his horney fist, "i'd like you to wear it, for honor of jim, 'twould almost bangle your wrist! "for savin' his wife, from a shark, i got the trinket, at scooperaboo, from a monarch, who gave it me, out of his nose, i'm proud to present it to you. "the ring is too grand, for my tanned hand, it's a valuable old gew gaw, i'm skeered, i'd be robbed o' the thing some night, in the grip of a lawless claw. "it's a putty gay keepsake, that you've got there, i'd be glad for sake of poor jim--" and he paused, "o yes you may have it," said she, "ah! thanks! when i'm back with him. "i guess he'll be proud to see it, and hear, that i have presented to you, the ring that i got, for savin' the wife, of the monarch of scooperaboo. "i've a bauble that's here, on a link of my chain, it's made of a nugget i got, i never can know it, i'll maybe be darned! or drowned! or skivered! or shot! "it's a nugget to waste, with a fellow like me, to be sportin' it out of the shop, here! take it by gum! you're the mother of jim! or maybe i'd put it in pop." "ah! sir" said the mother "you're far too kind!" as he fastened it on to her chain, "will you keep this locket in place of it? there, i will never require it again," "aha!" said he, "it's a moral, to see you're the spirit of jim all out, i'll have it, and wear it, for honour of jim, without no manner of doubt. "eh! what's the time, i am bound to an hour, i'd like to remain, if i can, but the captain's keepin' the cable taut, on the men of the 'mary anne.' "let somebody travel with me to-night, who will carry the luggage ashore, i'll bring all your compliments out to jim, if i may not see you no more." said a girl, who was there, with auburn hair, who hadn't been talking free, "the weather is dark, and you say the ship, is out some yards at sea, "it's better that two, should travel with you, the journey's a little too far, and one'll take charge of the present from jim, the other, can go for a car." so two of the gentlemen, offered to go, who had been at the evening tea, and they all shook hands, and the three took tramp, to the wall, by the wailing sea. "i guess that we ought to be havin' a quench," said the mate, "for i always do, i never go thirsty, aboard at night," so he went, and treated the two. they sat in a room, at the back of the bar, discussing three tumblers hot, "i'm darned, if we won't have a couple of smokes!" said he, "and i'll settle the shot." "you'll pull a cigar with me, by gum! i'll get them 'and jest you set,'" he went with his purse, to the bar to pay, and they have not seen him yet! but whether he's shot, or whether he's drowned, or darned, the host did say, behind the bar, as he pulled a pint, that "the drink was still to pay!" * * * * * she laughed a laugh, when the twain returned, "you're a mighty discerning pair!" and she posed her nose, with a tilted tip, did the girl, with the auburn hair. they all suggested, a different way, of finding the missing mate, "put out your brains," said the auburn hair, "on a clean, blue pattern plate. "and twig a few of the cobwebs off, from scooperaboo, look there! we've brumagem trinkets, of glass, and brass!" said the girl, of the auburn hair. [illustration: an umbrella case.] i saw a dress! 'twas of my wife, she stepped along with frivol rife, and by her side, a man of strife a guardsman of the line. ha ha! so ho! was here a cause, to agitate the probate laws, for a divorce, i did not pause, with guardsman of the line, i had an umbrella stout, i lifted it, i flung it out, in semicircle, with a shout, at guardsman of the line! ah! me, for an unlucky wight! beneath the sick electric light, she turned, o shock unto my sight! she was no wife of mine! he didn't draw, i wasn't slain, but of that blow, he did complain, and made me wipe away the stain, with legal brief, and twine. a story told by jones [illustration: the spook of rotten row] one evening, as in troubled mood, i sampled rotten row, across my scapula, i got a sharp conclusive blow! a flat concussion of a palm, was quick, and deftly laid, with rude familiar frowardness, against my shoulder blade! the impact curled up my blood; and almost in a thrice, my heart refrigerated, to an imprompt lump of ice! i feared it was a bailiff, and i sprang from off the sod! "i'm but a ghost!" said he, "you need not start" said i "thank god! "i must confess, that i eschew a bailiff's companie, "a ghost, is much more welcome, to a person fixed like me." thus into swift acquaintanship, familiarly did glide, the spook of rotten row, and i, and walking side by side, we chatted in a varied way, and slowly sauntered round, until we came upon a lone, and sparsy plot of ground, then halting there, the spectre cried, in accents like a knell, "t'was here i fought a duel once, and there it was i fell! behold a thistle growing there, and yon a shamrock too, and there in every season past, a little wild rose grew, a nursery in miniature, of sign of kingdoms three, that sprang spontaneous thro' the sod, from blood, that flowed from me, for lo! my sire was rupert smith, my mater was a lynch; my grandmother per pater, was a flora jane mac tinch, an uncle, on the mother's side, a belfast macinfee, this made the union perfect, and embodied thus in me, was typed the british empire, per my consanguinitee. and it's an interesting fact, that wales can share the fame, and pride, of my nativity, for, jones, it was the name, my mother first accepted, as a matrimonial claim; but jones was testily inclined, and all about a myth, in jealous hate, he fell before the blade, of rupert smith! then rupert smith, he minded of the widow's wail, and tear, and in remorse, he married her, as consequence, i'm here! the record of my gallant sire, to hot complexion grew, in me, till i was minded of a cause, for fighting too. i knew a maid, and for her sake, my daily life was fuss, it is not always for a maid, a man's affected thus; but when she wasn't by my side, i felt how lonely, space would be, if man could not behold, a single woman's face. and so i fondled, petted her, and worried, wrote some rhymes, and even got them published, in a small, suburban times, i took some pestilential pains, to learn the minuet, and trained my voice, to harmonise, with her's, in the duet. [illustration] we married were, i faith! it was a festal day, for hope, to care we gave the congè, and to pleasure, extra scope, until one day, my joy was washed away, like scented soap! 'twas on this wise,-- in rotten row, midst fashionable life, i found a promenader there, in converse, with my wife! i parleyed not a moment, but asserting manhood's law, [illustration] i tweaked him by the nose, and cried, "defend thyself and draw!" resenting my impetuous way, the old command, to teach, he roused him to impromptu fire, of indignation speech, and with a sneer, that galled my quick, he swore me, i must die! but with a rough right royal oath, i sneered him back the lie! "thy name?" quoth i, "i am," said he, "a man of deeds, and loans, and auction sales, i come from wales, my name is mervyn jones!" "what? mervyn jones of pontypridd?" "exactly so, the same," said he,--i heard of him before, and quivered at his name! for 'twas the name, thro' which the world had come to hear of me, by pruning blade of smith, on jones; his genealogic tree, "yes i am jones!" quoth he, "by loans, and mortgaged, for her life, thro' debts to me, attorney's power, i hold upon thy wife, so skin thy blade, i'll give thee cause, to tweak my nose!" he saith, "i'll auction thee, unto the bid, of good old broker death!"-- hereditary fate it seemed, that i must fight with jones, i would have shirked it, but for those, his irritating tones, i feared a compensating fate, might strike an even deal, betwixt the house of smith, and jones, but skinning forth my steel, i smote at him, by hip, and thigh, by carte, and aye by tierce, i held him to his guard, with quick, aggressive strokes, and fierce, but lo! the cunning of my wrist, a moment lapsed! with art of subtle fencer, past my guard, he pinked me, in the heart! it skivered me, just like the fork, that spoils a grilling steak, i shivered, with a yell, and then, a woman's cry,--and crake of joy from him, with mighty pang, i leaped in air, and fell! a muffled music thrilled my brain; for me, the passing knell, from numbing toe, and finger tip, the graduating thrill of life's collapse, crept over me, i wriggled, and lay still! then, from the chrysolid of flesh, light spirited i rose, and gazed upon my corse, as on a suit of cast off clothes, my widow shrieked, and fainted, but a golden vinagarette, my slayer lifted from his fob, and to her nose, he set the bauble, while he pinched her, slapped her hands, and brought her to, then speaking to my mortal wreck, said he, "now as for you, i have avenged the slur upon my nose, thy tweak hath wrought, thou art the loser, in the game of combat, that thou sought, but lo! thy widow, will not weep it long, for i may say, she'll shed her weeds, and she will wed with me, the first of may! then, with my spouse upon his arm, he turned, and sneaked away, and left me here, a widowed ghost, aye, even to this day!" my indignation at his wrongs, i told the grateful spook: "gramercy!" cried he, as with misty fist, my hand he shook, and charged me thus, with eager verve, of deep revengeful tones, "if ever thou dost meet a man, who deals in deeds, and loans, who bears the patronymic, and the shield, of mervyn jones, i care not how, by forgery! by fist, or aye by knife! by sneaking of his fiancée, or mayhap of his wife! by burgling of his premises, or pelting him with stones! avenge me, on the offspring, of the man, called mervyn jones!" i sware him, if such christened man, did ever dare my sight, in widest open day, or from the nooks, of darkest night! it mattered not, if extra tall, or what his weight, or width, _i'd borrow from him_, to avenge the wrongs, of rupert smith! "i thank thee well!" the spectre cried, with chuckle, sad, and grim, "adieu!" and lo! he vanished thro' the hazy gloaming dim: he vanished, and i thanked my luck, he left no aching bones! for i'm a male descendant, of the man, called mervyn jones! and mervyn, haps my christian name, a broker, i am he, a windfall fructifaction, of that genealogic tree. * * * * * next evening, when i told this tale, to doctor bolus chuff, incredulous, and unimpressed, with mien, erect, and tough, presenting a prescription, for some tonic tempered pills, said he "thro' too much spirits, you have got d.t.'s and chills!" [illustration: the magic specs] he wrought a specs, with magic rim, of strange, and subtle parts, for by those optics made by him, he saw men's inmost hearts, the grim old sage, 'twas of his fads, to wear those wrysome lamps, for evermore, and find the lads, the worldly-wise, and scamps. he saw the plottings, and the strife, he saw the woes, and tears! the murky glooms of unknown life, the spring of hopes, and fears, the sham of face, the sham of name, the sham of heart within; he sifted all, and wrote for fame, record of unknown sin. "ho, ho!" cried he at length, "i wis, the dross of men is such, 'tis surfeit, thus to seek for this, it palls me overmuch; i'll seek a gem of human hearts, and find it, if i can,"-- he sought at home, and foreign parts, to meet an honest man. in that pursuit, a year and seven, did on his labours fall; "heigho!" cried he, "outside of heaven, they're masks, and faces all! they're masks, and faces all!" quoth he, and from the world he went to bide alone, beside the sea, in selfish self-content. now, this old sage, thro' many a year, had never thought of self, before he used the specs: in fear, his mirror, on a shelf, he set, with face down evermore, lest by a glance, that he should pry into the evil store, of his own villainie. but, fishing in a pool one day, the sage forgot his specs-- to take it from his nose,--and hey! a horror, to perplex his soul with fear, was under him; for, in the glassy wave, he saw his heart reflected grim! he saw his new-made grave: he saw, that he himself was worst, of all that he had seen; by sight of conscience, he was curst, the evil deeds, had been dry rotting in his blackened heart, the place he feared to search, and self-reproach, did send a dart, that knocked him off his perch; the rod and line, fell from his hand, the specs fell off his nose: and he was drowned, in sight of land, in all his sunday clothes. [illustration] [illustration: ye curious tayle of ye uncivil fight of ye civil warre] oddzooks! ye civil war was rough, 'twixt cavalier, and roundhead tough, thence, for thy pale of cheek, and wail, now hearken, to ye curious tayle, ah! me. [illustration: ye fanatick fytte] they met, to meet, was cause for strife and hunger, for each other's life! alack ah! me, that such should be, where posies, pied beneath ye tree, ah! me. [illustration: ye fytte of ye blude thurst] in derring do, they straightway play, and cut, and slash, ye time away; ye evil grue, this derring do, when earth, was wide enough for two, ah! me. lo! one at length, in bonds did pine, ye squirrel came, and nipped ye twine; reproof of spite, from woodland mite, for truce to ye fanatic fight, ah! me. [illustration: ye refreshment fytte] but hey alack! again they rise, and swish their blades, in murderous wise; 'tis pain, to sing, of sword, in swing, where butterflies, did spread ye wing, ah! me. [illustration: ye fytte of ye seconde bout.] [illustration: ye retaliation fytte.] at length, one trussed his foe, but lo! a bat, did cut ye cord, ho! ho! ye moral flat, of gracious bat, that men, should drop ye hate, like that-- ah! me. ye wrath of wrong, is still to do, ye loathsome vengeance, starts anew, o pity! wrong, should wreak so strong, where birds, did pipe ye evensong, ah! me. [illustration: ye nervous fytte.] ye strife waxed hot, in air they spring,-- no fiercer fray, did minstrel sing,-- but why spill here, ye tender tear, for roundhead, or ye cavalier? ah! me. [illustration: ye fytte of ye timely spring.] [illustration: ye fytte of ye discovery] they scuffle, till each wig, and nose, fell off, and nature's truths, disclose, ye wild surprise, doth swiftly rise, ye brows, above ye startled eyes! ah! me. for lo! they recognise each one, each was his father's other son! ye clasping spree, of filial glee, is here depicted, as you see, ah! me. [illustration: ye fraternal fytte.] [illustration: leather versus law] an instance of calculating foresight and prudence is illustrated in the following verses. if men would rely on the mutual study of a spirit of equity, and enter more confidentially into the claims of each, what beautiful pictures, of repentant resignation to a just castigation, would be afforded, by certain of those who misunderstand the rights of property. an excellent lesson of this kind, is taught by the experience of the first tramp. he parted from the farmer, with comprehensive impressions, of the farmer's energy, and application to business, a fact, which he took the earliest opportunity, of advertising in the nearest hospital. thro' the second case, also runs a beautiful lesson, to the farmer, it may not have happed so well, as to the tramp, but the record serves to show, that an action at law, should only result, as a mutual alternative, agreeable to both parties; thereby the air of the law courts, would be considerably purified, of the stuffiness, that oppresses the impetuous litigant. said one tramp, to the second tramp, "the dark is comin' on the sun, do you prowl in to this 'ere barn. and i'll dodge on to yonder one. "i allus likes to sleep alone, besides you see, it runs' em tight, the varmers, when a pair o' tramps turns up, so bill, i'll say good night." the chanticleer, did early trump, a tonic note, upon his pipe, and woke the husbandman, to view, how thick, and tall, his crops, and ripe. and in his barn, he found a tramp! "ho, trespasser, what shall i do?" he cried "shall i evict by law? or take the law myself, on you?" "well varmer, i have had with cranks, of legal jaw, too much," said he, "so with your leave, i'd rather you, would take the law, yourself on me." "ha! that's exactly to my form!" he gripped him by the neck, "here goes! whew! now take this! and that, and this," with that, he gave him all his toes. he kicked him, thro' the barn door, he rolled him, in the grunty stye, and up, and down, and round the yard, and then, he bunged him in the eye! he ducked him, in the horses' pond, he slung him, right across a load of dung, he kicked him thro' the gate, and wiped him up and down the road! he kicked him black! he kicked him blue! he kicked him green! and red and white! he kicked him, till he could not kick, for then the tramp was out of sight! that tramp did never more appear around that neighbourhood, he passed away, just like a whiff of smoke, that scuds before the autumn blast! [illustration] * * * * * a second husbandman that morn, was quick astir, he fancied he did hear, a wailing in his barn, a moan, as of the wild banshee! he thought to catch the female sprite, for truth, he was a festive scamp, but got a sort of snub, when he, discovered but a snoring tramp! the sleep was deep, for with his foot, he had to supplement the blow, or box, he gave him on his ear, and shouted in that ear "hello! you'll pardon me, my friend, but 'ere, i thought, this barn belonged to me! now shall i chuck you out myself, or seek injunct, from chancerie?" the startled tramp, did rub his nose, and stared that farmer, in the eye, then stretched himself, and spoke as he, would fain enjoy a longer lie. "well boss, i've been so often chucked, that it would be relief to stay, and in the court of chancerie, arrange it in a friendly way." they took the case to chancerie, and argued it, from every point, but in the end, they always found, the arguments, were out of joint! the prosecuting counsel, cranked the cogs of all the tramp's defence, and also in his turn, was spanked, and thus, they cribbed the farmer's pence. they argued it, on every side, with judge's whim, and lawyer's yarn. but still the tramp, remains at home, his home, is in the farmer's barn! the case, has not been ended yet, it crops up now, and often then, you cannot tell, when it may crop, it might crop up, next week again, but when that tramp, will have to go, i cannot tell it, nor can he, the farmer cannot, nor can they; the lawyers of the chancerie. thus tho' we may not take the law, into our hands, it's often meet, to serve extemporaneous writ by sharp eviction, from the feet. [illustration] [illustration: heads and tails] twas in the daisy bell, i met him, quite a swell, his style, was very taking, and off hand, "no thanks!" said he "i think we'll toss up, for the drink, i'm independent, as there's in the land!" i tossed him, and i lost, said he "that was a frost, i'll toss you now, a consolation toss, i'll toss you, for a bob" i lost! "i wouldn't rob" said he "i wouldn't see you, at a loss. "by gum! here's what i'll do, i'll toss you now for two, it's double now, or quits, that we will try," again i lost; 'twas queer, again, said he, "look here, your fortune, will be lifting by and by." i thought that it must turn, but soon i had to learn, his way was rather taking, and off hand, a goodly sum was due, said he "i've made off you, six quid, and sixteen tanners, you will stand," "your double coin," said i, "has just now caught my eye, and the dust, from your jacket, i must whack!" his jacket, with malacca, i did crack! his hide, was very taking, at the back! [illustration: the colonel and the cook] oh colonel i could love you, with faithful heart," said she; "but you are far too noble-- too grand a man for me, for you're commander of the horse, and hardly could be higher, while, i am only just a cook, around the kitchen fire." said she "i could not marry you, for you are all so grand; i'd be a most unhappy wife-- the saddest in the land." said he, "i did not ask you; but when i'm far from you, and on the field of battle, i'll see what i can do." said he, "i never thought of it, and only now, i see-- perhaps you are the woman, would suit to wed with me, and that is just the cause of them-- the words, i said to you-- when on the field of battle, i'll see what i can do." [illustration] the town, was all in tumult of women's wail alack! for many a gallant soldier, would never more come back, and even he (the colonel) might fall--the first or last; and that's the chiefest reason, that cook was weeping fast. and tho' it was not proper, to see the colonel, look with visage of dejection, upon a humble cook, yet nature won't be cheated, despite of high degree. "adieu; i'll come back worthy, my love, to wed with thee." and that is how they parted, and those, the words he said: and oft, when she was cooking, it came into her head, the promise he had uttered, of sweetest memory-- "adieu; i'll come back worthy, my love, to wed with thee." [illustration: as this peeves me now at present] she took a thought one morning, and bought a copy-book; said she, i'll study pothooks, they're suited for a cook. i'll write his name, in roundhand, a letter, i will send, with the words "no more at present"-- my pet name, at the end. she wrote his name, in roundhand, a letter, she did send, with "no more now at present," her pet name, at the end. but it never, never reached him, and he did languish yet, for the cook, at home in erin he never could forget. but lo! a taste for learning, is like a taste for drink, while working on the pothooks, she then began to think. and thought, is like a snowball, that gathers every turn; she studied read-'em-easys, while joints began to burn. she studied, night and morning, at languages, and paint, at poetry, and musty prose, and legends, old, and quaint. she wrote a three-vol. novel, and got a fancy price, became a photo beauty; "oh, this," quoth she, "is nice!" she then appeared in drama, while posing there, with grace of gauze, and limelight glowing upon her lovely face; a common soldier, shouted from the olympian rail-- "o 'evans!" its my 'arriet, and turning deadly pale. [illustration] he darted for the stage door, her carriage grand, was there, she was about to enter, with all the fuss, and flare, of mashers buzzing round her; and plunging forth, said he-- "i'm wot was once a colonel, who went across the sea. "of course you must remember, the words, i said to you-- 'when on the field of battle, i'd see what i could do.' i never make a promise, but to my word, i stick. the man, who breaks his promise, is but a broken brick." i'm wot was once a colonel, and for your love, i strove, to be reduced, into the ranks, for sake of you, my love; i ran away in battle, i several times got drunk, was challenged to a duel, and purposely took funk. they whittled my commission, into a major's rank, and still i acted badly, and several times i drank, i managed to get nibbled, down to a sergeant then i stole a pint of whiskey, was put amongst the men. [illustration] "i've been all over europe, a lookin' out for you, i have eschewed my grammar, to prove my 'eart, was true; i've parted with my surname, that all might well combine, which now, i'm private miggins, of the seventy-seventh line. "i've got a vulgar accent, and vulgar sayin's too. i drink, from common pewter. it's all along of you, and generally, my manners, are much about the styles, you'll find amongst the manners, of the people of st. giles. "but here, i say, look, listen! you have not acted straight, but made us yet the victims, of a lobsided fate; while i've been levellin' downwards, to suit with your degree, you've been, and gone, and levelled up, contrarywise to me. "you had not ought to take me, so short as this, i say; you've worked a mean advantage, while i was far away. but still, we'll go to-morrow, and make our love complete." "get out!" she cried, and vanished, in her brougham, down the street. [illustration] [illustration: the spirit that held him down] he was one of the middle age men i wot, a troubadour bedight, who lost himself, in a lonely wood, an exceptional sort of night, for the moon, was only beginning to wax, and the clouds, were muggy, and black, and there wasn't much chance, of finding his way, to the trail, of the beaten track. but troubadours, were stout and strong, of tough, and stubborn, stuff, and took the rough, with the sleek, and smooth, the smooth, with the rusty rough, so up thro' the drift, of the hummocky ruck, of the clouds, he searched for a star, to serenade, with the thringumy-thrang, of the thrum, of his new guitar. the glint of one, thro' a galloping cloud, he caught, and he screwed his wire, and gave a twist, to its patent head, and toned the catgut higher. then flung the cape of his cloak aside, and in an æsthetic strain, he pitched his voice, to the concert key, and twanged on the strings amain. [illustration] but having expressed himself in song, with a quivering verse or two, his favourite string gave out, with a bang, and stopped his impromptu. he muttered a satire upon that string, and sat on a bank, close by, when he heard the trip of a female foot, and lisp of a female sigh! she was one of the guardians, of the piece of ground, that was round him there, an ariel spirit in azure blue, and fluffs of auburn hair, that framed a very attractive face, of cream, and strawberry pink, and she greeted the troubadour bedight, with a captivating wink! "o troubadour, what brings you here, so lone and sad?" said she, just throw your guitar across your back, and wander away with me. i'll show you the fairy dells, of mine, all tricked around with sheen, of glittering gold, and sparkling gems, with electric lights between. [illustration] "i'm a single woman, and never was once in love, with a man, till this!" and then she stooped to his quivering lip, imprinting a dainty kiss. "why don't you get up out of that?" she cried, and make no longer stay. but a spirit within, still held him down, in a magical sort of way. "o troubadour, you're a suitable man, to live in the woods with me, we'll dance to the charms of elphin song, down under the greenwood tree." and she coaxed him again, with a dainty kiss, "oh, sweetheart, come, be gay!" but a spirit within, still held him down, in a magical sort of way. "i hope, that you don't imagine," said she, "that i am a frivolous flirt, i'm the woman, that's new, the fashion to-day, with rational trunks, for skirt, i can ride, on a bicycle, made for two, or 'tec out the sins of town," but all he could do, was give her a grin, from the spirit that held him down! he'd have given the world, to get up out of that, but a tantalising sprite, had taken possession of him, you see, in the early part of the night. the fact of it is, that he couldn't get up, if she gave him a kingly crown, and all he could do, was give her a grin, from the spirit, that held him down! twas woe! to see an attractive maid, so slurred, by a knightly bard, a misery this, for her plaint of love, to be grinned at, snubbed, and marred! yet ever again, did she give him a kiss, and a lingering, coaxing smile, but the spirit within, still held him down, in a magical sort of style! "o come get up out of that!" she cried, and gave his collar a shake, with a kick in the ribs, that bustled him up, and startled him wide awake! and her raiment shrunk to the belted blue, of a burly man, said he, "yer out very late, in a dress like that, so track it along with me." "get up out of that," the constable cried, "and don't make no delay," but the spirit within, still held him down, in a magical sort of way. the spirit within, still held him down, but the constable bent his back, and hooshed him up, and carried him off, at once to the beaten track. [illustration] the troubadour, came into the dock next day, in a crowded court, and the rig of his garb, to the modern herd, was a source of evil sport. but the modern beak had no romance, and the sum of a couple of crown, he fined the unfortunate troubadour, for the spirit that held him down! his future state. i found him, sitting on a seat, with sad reflective mien, a drowsing pathos, in his eye, tinged with a tint of green, i sat him by "good friend" i said, "of pilgrims, the resort, is this a church?" "i wish it wor!" cried he, "it's bow street court!" [illustration] and then again, i looked at him, once more, i spoke him kind, "thy far off gaze, doth indicate, some presence, on thy mind, some haunting thought, of grave import, connected with the fate, perchance, that thou, mayhap, may meet, when in the future state. o speak the burden of thy heart, that i may note it down," "it be's i was a boozin', and i'm fined a quid and crown, my far off look, is for that fine, to dodge the prison gate, and warders' lock on fourteen days, that quads my future state. [illustration: a fight in the phoenix park] a most attractive lady, of middle class degree, when in the ranelagh gardens, was thus addressed, as she beheld a man, she jilted, "theresa mary jane, you didn't think to see me back in town, so soon again; it's most exasperating, that when my back i turn you pace the ranelagh gardens, with cotton-ball o'byrne." the linen draper started, and with indignant shout, said he, "she loves me only, you ferule-fingered lout, your time you're only wasting, so take a thought, and spurn, the idle hopes, that lure ye," said mister pat o'byrne. just then up came a stranger, with bending courtesy, he doffed his triple tilted, "good-night, mam'selle," said he, then turning to o'gorman, and then, to pat o'byrne, "ze manners of ze shentlemans, ze both of you should learn; to wrangle round ze lady, i'm shames of you, by dam! if ye don't know ze fencin' of ze duel, go, and cram, don't bring ze crowds around her, but mit ze mornin' lark, vash out in blood, ze quarrels all in ze phoenix park." "i'm on," said kit o'gorman. "begor, an' so am i," said pat o'byrne. the lady, then gave a tender sigh, she told them each, she loved him, and though her heart did bleed, expressed a wish, he'd combat on a small arabian steed. "the duel's getting prosy, invest it with a fling of tournamental glory, you'll find it's now the thing, to gild, with knightly glamour, your daring feat of strife, and he who kills the other, i'll be his wedded wife; till then i'm queen of beauty," so spake that lady fair, "i give you both a fortnight, that each may well prepare, and then i'll send you chargers, on which to combat so" (her father dealt in horses), "now, sirs, good-night, and go." the fix was fraught with danger, for each of those two men, existence is too precious, man can't be born again; they ne'er had used a weapon, they never strode a horse, it was extremely awkward, and couldn't well be worse. so while o'gorman practised with foil, and mask. o'byrne, was in a circus riding, and then he took his turn, before a fencing-master, to guard, and thrust, and fool, while pat o'gorman, cantered around a riding school. at length the fencing-master, he says to pat o'byrne, "you're perfect mit ze fencing, you've nodings more to learn." the man who taught him riding, did compliment him too, and kit o'gorman also had "nodings" more to do. * * * * * the fortnight was now over, the morning came at last, the rising dawn, was ushered with snow, and biting blast, as on the fifteen acres, all in the phoenix park, the duellists were waiting the arab steeds, when, hark! they heard a distant braying, as 'twere a trump of brass, 'twas followed by a donkey, and then a second ass, came guided by his halter, unto the fated spot, said pat o'byrne and o'gorman, "o, powdhers, this is rot!" but yet a queen of beauty was their's the prize to win. "we better pause no longer, but instantly pitch in," said pat o'byrne, and gorman. they tossed for choice of ass, and pick of blade, then wheeling, they faced upon the grass. i was for kit o'gorman a second on that day, to see the flashing rapiers, to hear the donkeys bray was sight and sound to think of, the sylvan haunts were rife with echoes reverbrated from crash of deadly strife; up went each donkey backwards, while scintillating wales of flashing steels, were echoed, by lashing of their tails, for lo! the fight was doubled, the skittish donkeys sought, to variegate the contest, and capered round, and fought; they gave no chance. the foemen, with awkward clink of steels, struck now and then, while skew-ways the donkeys fought with heels,-- 'twas six o'clock commencing, and now, the strokes of ten, were sounding from the city, and still these mounted men, had not received abrasion, a cut, a prod, or crack, when both were somersaulted, from off each asses' back; the weapons went in splinters, as on the frosty grass, each foeman sprawled a moment, and loudly cursed his ass. the assmen, quickly bounded unto their feet again, and watched the seconds, chasing the donkeys round the plain; and when at length, we caught them, and brought them back once more, with fits of indignation, the baffled foemen swore; "bad scran to it!" said gorman, "o'musha, yis bad scran" cried pat o'byrne, "it's not a fight, for any dacent man, four mortial hours we've struggled--an' i'm all in a sweat!" said gorman "pon me sowl, i got no chance to kill ye yet!" "the fight has been protracted, and divil a thing is done, i vote we go and tell her", said o'byrne, "that it's no fun, to fight, as we've been fighting. tib's eve might come, and go, we'd still be found here fooling her donkeys thro' the snow." * * * * * they felt a queer foreboding of something, going down parkgate-street, on that morning, till journeyed back to town; they sought the girl, to tell her the fix that they were in, when a larky-looking servant in the hall, began to grin. "she's not at home at present, but breakfast sure is laid, she's gone off to be married," outspoke the sneering maid; "le beau, the fencin'-master is now the blissful man; you'll see them soon, they're comin' in a satin-lined sedan." "o, blur-an-owns!" said gorman, "o tear o'war," said byrne, machugh, the other second, and i got quite a turn! the man, who heard them quarrel, in ranelagh-walk that night, was le beau, the man who sent them to phoenix park to fight. he taught them both in fencing, and yet they did not know, that each, was being instructed by his rival, mons. le beau. they tied her pair of donkeys, unto her garden pier, when from the topmost window, that servant shouted "here, a note she left to give you, for both of you to learn." 'twas written: "kit o'gorman, and mister pat o'byrne, i've sent a couple of donkeys, i thought that they might teach what fools you are, for fighting, for what's beyond your reach, but, silly as my donkeys, if both of you remain, remorse for death, will follow, i'm yours, theresa jane." we sought a pub, and pondered, and drank, and sadly swore, we would not be connected, with duels evermore, i drank of stout, o'gorman, and byrne, of harder stuff, they swore of duel fooling, they both had quite enough,-- now, here's the bunch of fives, boys, there is no better rod to 'venge our wounded honour, than the weapons made by god! [illustration] [illustration: the abdicated crown.] he was jolly, round, and fat, and with a bright top hat, a chain beneath his burly bosom set, in good old fashioned way, said he to me, "i say old boy, i have a thing that's to be met, a pressing little debt, the dunner has me set, my pocket is unfurnished, to be let! five bob is all i ask," i 'sponded to the task, that abdicated crown is debit yet! [illustration: tears-in-law] i found him wet with tears, 'tis woe! to see a strong man thus, "o reginald fitz alpine smyke, why, wherefore, whence, this fuss? o is she dead, thy wife? for that, alone can justify, a bearded man to sob, and spring the sentimental eye." he raised his agonised brows, with tears, all steaming hot, "ah woe!" cried he, "you think my wife is gone, alas! she's not, this anniversary seven years, my mother-in-law pegged out, i never pass the day, without a lamentating shout, her wealth is settled on my wife, and thus for some i bid, with wails of woe, i take on so,-- for every filial tear-in-law, she stands a shining quid!" i left him weeping up the stairs, i met his wife below, "i'll call," said i "another day, your husband takes on so," "and so he may take on," she said, "his crocodiles may fall, 'twill drain some water from his brain, and do him good, that's all, to-day in the domestic stocks, he'll find a sudden fall!" alas! for poor fitz alpine smyke, his confidence was meant for me alone, but she was there, in slippers, on the scent! then came an action for divorce, with all its quips, and cranks, and _nisi_ was the laws _decree_ that dropped him to the ranks, and then he sought for many cribs, the cribs he did not suit, but he could well dissimulate, so he became a mute, his wife took the hymeneal bond again, and then she died, and hired mutes with sorry mien, were by her coffin's side. but when the funeral was o'er, the widower he went and greeted one of those--the mutes-- with feeling compliment, he lightly pinched him by the crape "o mister mute, i say, i wish i could have wept the tears, that you have dropped to-day!" "ah! me alack!" the mute exclaimed, "my sorrow was sincere, and were i not the ass i am, we wouldn't both be here; for i am he, fitz alpine smyke, thro' tears, i let her slip, and now by tears, i eke it out in salary and tip." [illustration] [illustration: he followed the fox.] i followed the fox, tally ho! i followed the fox, with a go, by joe! as swift as a swallow, or crow, wo ho! the ditch, is a cropper, hello! i am in it! and out, and a show! am asked to the next, won't go! [illustration: the honest young cashier] he was a courteous manager--a bosser of the bank, he filled the post of chairman, and other seats of rank. but he was never envied, his screw was almost nil-- ten thousand pounds per annum, and chances from the till. one day, when he was wiping his specks, thought he, "i hold, i'm working all for nothing by a heap of solid gold. i'll make of it a custom, a couple of months or so, to leave the strong room open as in and out i go. and fitfully in absence of mind, i'll drop my bunch of keys about, and leave them when going down for lunch. the point of which is plainly, that on a certain night, i'll seize on all the bullion, and fix it out of sight. i will not be suspected, i'll do whate'er i please, for i have clinked the vintage with nobles and m.p.'s; and though i know he's honest, i'll make it so appear, that i will prove the robber, is the honest young cashier. [illustration] they'll pass a vote of censure, that i did leave behind, my keys, and strong room open, but, pshaw! i need not mind. 'twill come out on the trial, i'll make it sure and clear, 'twas all of too much trust in the honest young cashier." he left the strong room open; he left his keys about, upon his mantle-shelf, and desk, anon when he went out-- a custom not unnoticed by him, the young cashier, who got a stick of wax, and what he did with it is clear. one night there was a darkness, like crape upon the land, and such a gust and thunder, a man could hardly stand. the tempest was so fearsome, that if you spoke in shouts, 'twould only be a tangle of tipsy words and doubts. 'twas on that gloomy evening, the honest young cashier, bespoke him to the manager, and "sir," said he, "look here, the staff is nearly idle, and so i think you might excuse me now, i'm wanting to do a thing to-night?" [illustration] "well, you may go and do it." he went, and down he stole into the lonely coal-hole, behind a lump of coal, and trussed him like a hedgehog upon the slack till sure, he heard the distant slamming, that closed the outer door. then stole him from the coal-hole, he stole him up the stairs, he ambushed on the landing, for fear of unawares. he stole into the strong-room, and stealing out his key, he stole it to the keyhole, and opened cautiously. he looted off that evening as much as he could hold, 'twas close on half a million, and all in solid gold. * * * * * [illustration] 'twas on that self-same evening the chairman thought 'twas right, to work his own manoeuvre, 'twas such a roughish night. three overcoats were on him, with pockets every side, ten carpet bags he carried, and all were deep and wide. he also had a hatbox, and novel thought, and bright; he stitched a row of stockings behind him out of sight, he loaned a sealskin wallet, a whalebone gingham tent, and through the garden gate he skid, and down the town he went. he skirmished through the darkness, he skulked against the wind, he spankled by some people, and left them all behind. he slewed around a corner, and up the lane he slank, and shuffled thro' the wicket of the courtyard of the bank. he ducked into the back door, and picking up the stair, he sneaked into the strong room, and, heavens! what was there? the iron door was open, and all the heap of gold was gone! he sank with horror, and to the floor he rolled. [illustration] and from beneath the tables and corners of the room, three coppers scrambled on him, like shadows of his doom. they put him on his trial, and heedless of his rank, he got an awful sentence, for robbing of the bank. it proves that men are mortal, the sequel i have here, the bankers called a meeting, they called the young cashier. said they, "you have impressed us with great integritee, we'll give the future management of all the bank to thee." they made a testimonial, and signed it every one, 'twas cornered with the pictures of specious deeds he'd done; and on the scroll in beauty, of art did there appear, the tribute of their homage to the honest young cashier. when you prepare for robbing, don't leave your keys about, for fear a wax impression be taken while you're out; and do not come in second, or it might be your doom to chance upon three bobbies from the corners of the room. [illustration] [illustration: the road to london.] pretty maiden, all the way, all the way, all the way, pretty maiden, why so gay, on the road, to london? "will you give that rose to me?" "that's the flower, of love," said she, "i'll not give this rose to thee, on the road, to london." "i have got a love, and he, is a good heart, true to me, 'tis for him, this rose you see, on the road, to london." "where is now, that love?" asked he, "he's away from me," cried she, "but he'll soon return to me, on the road, to london." "would you know him, an' he be waiting there, by yonder tree?" "aye would i, on land or sea, or the road, to london!" "then my sweetest, i am he, give that rose of love to me, i have come, to greet with thee, on the road, to london!" then he flung his cloak aside, "i have come to make a bride, of the fairest, far and wide, on the road, to london." then she laughed at him, and chaffed, unromantic, chaffed, and laughed; till he thought, that she was daft, on the road, to london. [illustration] "no!" said she "that's not the way, parted lovers, meet to-day, 'tis by note, or wire, they say 'on the road, to london.' "so 'twere best, thou didst by flight, take thy footsteps, out of sight, lest my love, per fortune, might strike the road, to london! "we've been having shrimps and tea, he's a champion knock out; he could knock spots off you," said she, on the road, to london. "see! my spouse, from yonder gap, cometh like a thunder clap!" "ho! then here's for the first lap! on the road, to london." [illustration] [illustration: antediluvian pat o'toole and all his fleet of sail] while poking my umbrella into the cracks and crannies that serve to vary the monotonous setting of the stones of a certain pyramid of egypt, i scraped away a portion of mortar or cement, and was agreeably surprised, by discovering a roll, of what i fondly hoped might be a bundle of faded bank of england notes; but on closer inspection, it proved to be a scroll of papyrus, thickly covered with curious hieroglyphics. they throw a misty light on the history of the o'tooles, for written in a strange mingling of blank verse, and ballad metre, they purport to give a correct version of the account of the deluge; in which disaster, it appears that a worthy ancestor of the said family played a conspicuous, and important part. an addenda accounting for their presence in the pyramid is appended, and contains the plausible statement, that it was actually a descendant of the said o'toole, who designed and built the tombs of the pharoahs, and adopted this subtle means of sending his name down to these remote ages. some savants and egyptologists will cavil at this startling information, but i happen to be in possession of a three cornered cypher that runs thro' the composition of their architecture, which will be of convincing merit, when i have time to issue the seven folio volumes, which i am not preparing at present, in connection with this important subject. the opening line proves that the ballad must have been composed at a much earlier period than that of the deluge. 'twas in the raal ould antient times, when there wasn't any probability of thruth at all in anything, before the world was dhrownded, an' the people spoke in irish, with a wonderful facility, before their undherstandin's wor be foreign tongues confounded, it was just about this pariod of the fine ould anshint history of the murnful earth, that pat o'toole, the irishman was born, he gev the information, in a noisy intimation of his presence, rather early, on a whitsun monday morn, but it's not all out particular, or anything material, to the thruth consarnin' all about the narrative i've spun, the story of his birth, or the mirth upon this earth, that shook his father's rafthers, with rousin' rounds of fun. * * * * * whin pat at last had come of age, it took a hundred years or so, for then the men lived longer, and a minor wasn't free, to slip out of the chancery, an' from his legal infancy, to come into his property, till the end of a century; well it was just about that time a floatin' big menagerie, was bein' built by noah, in the exhibition thrade,-- he advertised, an' posted it, got editorial puffs on it, explainin' that 'twould be the best, that ever yet was made. he had it pasted up on walls, dhrawn out in yalla, red, an' green, a lion tamer too was dhrew, in puce, an' royal blue, a hairy bowld gorilla new, he got from mossoo doo shalloo, an elephant with thrunk, hooroo! the plaziozarus, and emu, a wild hoopoo, a cockatoo, an' the boxin' kangaroo, he had it hoarded round, away from thim that didn't want to pay, an' guarded all be polis, in a private public park, he paid a man that cried "hooray!" in shouts you'd hear a mile away, "come in, an' see the menagerie, that's cotch for noah's ark, come look at the wild menagerie, before the flood of wet comes down, for thin ye won't have time to see, ye'll all be dhrownded thin! the glass is goin' down to-day an' sure from far americay, a blizzard's on the thrack i hear, so lose no time, come in!" [illustration] twas thin o'toole, the irishman, pushed wid his elbows thro' the crowd, he dhropped his tanner, an' he wint into the show that day, an' as he thrapsed along the decks, an' in the howld, an' up an' down, he sudden got a pleasin' thought, an' thin he went away, he kep' the saycret to himself, an' never towld a single sowl, he kep' it dark, so there was none to budge, or tell the tale, he wint to father mooney, an' he took the pledge agin' the drink, an' in the sheds of his back yard, he built a fleet of sail, he whistled as he worked, an' took a soothin' whiff of honest weed,-- that wasn't 'dultherated wid cabbage laves, or such,-- "i'll prove that noah's out of it," he sung, an' took an airy fit of step dancin', "i'll make a hit, an' lave him on a crutch!" he saw that noah advertised, in notices around about, he'd have to charge the passengers, to save them from the flood, 'twas such a dirty selfish thrick, that nobody could stand to it; but like a thrue born irishman, siz pat, siz he, "i could collect thim all, both great an' small, an' won't give him a chance at all, i'll spoil his speculation, an' i'll save thim from the flood!" [illustration] wid that he wandhered round the world, an' gathered curiosities, of every sortins of the male, an' of the faymale kind, an' thin embarked thim in his fleet, until he had them all complate, he didn't lave a quadruped, or bird, or midge behind, he kep' the saycret to himself, an' never wint upon the dhrink, an' out of every pub, they missed his presence round the town, until the sky was gettin dark, an' thin the hatches of the ark, wor overhauled by noah, an' the wet kem peltin' down, thin japhet, shem, an' ham, stood on the threshowld of their father's ark, an' shouted to the thousands, that wor in the teemin' rain, "shut up yer umberellas quick, an' save yerselves for half-a-crown, ye'll never have a chance like this, in all yer lives again! for if ye want to save yer wives, or if ye'd like to lave yer wives, or maybe wish to save yer lives! it's half a crown, come in, the world will all be dhrownded soon! we know it be the risin' moon, a wheel of mist is round her boys, come in, an' save yer skin!" the charge was rather high, an' so they didn't get a sowl to go, for thin the royal mint was low, an' everyone was poor, "ah! what's the use of bawlin' there?" siz noah, from his aisy chair, "yer only blatherin to the air! come in an' hasp the door," just thin the wathers risin' high, the people all began to cry, an' scrambled to the places dhry, as fast as they could whail; whin all at once they seen a show, for from the distance down below, came captain pat o'toole hooroo! an' all his fleet of sail! [illustration] he scattered life belts in the flood, an' empty casks, an' chunks of wood, an' everything he possibly could, with nets, an' ropes, an' thongs he dhragged thim in by hook, or crook, a tinker, king, a thramp or duke, by fishin' line, or anchor fluke, an' several pairs of tongs, [illustration] the elephant loaned out his thrunk, to male or faymale, in their funk of wather,--without whiskey,--dhrunk; an' risin' thro' the wreck of the cowld deluge, teemin' round, giraffe, an' ostrich, scoured the ground, an' every dhrownin' sowl they found, they saved them by a neck! for pat was known, to bird, an' baste, of kindly heart, an' so a taste, of pleasin' gratitude they placed, for help of captain pat, while fore, an aft, an' every tack, the captain scrambled like a black,-- with freight of men, his punts to pack-- in specks, an' bright top hat. on larboard, or on starboard side, whatever dhrownin' crowds he spied, he dhragged them in wid wholesale pride, as quick as jumpin' cat! the blind an' lame, the short, an' tall, the wild, an' tame, the great, an' small, wid tubs he came, an' saved them all, the skinny, round, an' fat. [illustration] he didn't care, at front or rare, or head or tail, no matther where, he didn't fail, by skin, or hair, whin once he cotch a grip, he hawled thim in with frightened howls, upon the decks, as thick as rowls; till all the world of livin' sowls, wor safe in every ship!! [illustration] he saved the king of snookaroo, he had no trowsers on, its thrue, but what is that to me or you? he saved him all the same, there was no bigotry in pat, an' in the bussel of the king, he stuck a boat hook, with a spring, an' saved him all the same! the rooshan bear he did not shirk, he cotch him on a three-pronged fork, and wrastlin' with a furious turk, he dumped thim on the deck, [illustration] the chinese emperor; he squat around a lamp, siz he to pat, "o captain take me out of that," pat scruffed him be the neck, "o do not save the jap he said, he has no pigtail on his head, the bad pernicious chap!"--but pat hauled in the jap. [illustration] outside a public house, the sign was loaded with the muses nine, they shouted "pat ah! throw a line, we've all been on the dhrink," siz pat "although i'll never brake the pledge meself, here, thry an' take howld of the teeth of this owld rake," and raked thim in like wink! three judges of a county coort, wor by the wathers taken short, o throth, it must have been the sport, to see their dhreepin' wigs! "ketch on to this!" said pat o'toole, an' like a soft, good natured fool, he flung a lawyer's 'lastic rule, an' dhragged thim in like pigs, we'd all be innocent, in bliss, with ne'er a polis, but for this, the judges shouted, "do not miss"--and dashed their dhreepin' wigs, "o save the polismen!" they cried, "there's thirteen on a roof outside;" an' with some knotted sthrips of hide, he mopped them in like pigs, "now ships ahoy!" siz pat, "we may put out to say, without delay, an' while its day, we'll start away, before the rising gale," thin from a bog oak, three-legg'd stool, he took the sun, with a two foot rule, an' round the world, went pat o'toole, an' all his fleet of sail! [illustration] 'twas on st. swithin's day, the wet began, an' rained for forty days, an' forty nights, it blundhered out the thunder, lift an' right, whin like a merricle it stopped, the sun came out, said pat o'toole, "hooroo! there's land ahoy! the tops of wicklow are in sight!" [illustration] an' then he brought his ships around, an' dhropped a cargo everywhere, in counthries where they'd propagate, an' where he thought they'd fit, he made a present to the blacks, of lions and the tigers, and the serpents and the monkeys, and such awkward perquisit, he gev the esquimaux, the bears, an' with the rooshins, left a few, an' dhropped a hungry wolf or two, to make the bargain square, the mustang, and the buffaloe, the red man of the wilderness, to bowld amerikay he gev, an' still you'll find thim there, [illustration] to hindoostan, the elephant, an' hippopotamus he gev, the alligator, crocodile, the simple vulture too, the divil for tasmania, the 'possum, an' the parakeet, he brought out to osthreelia, with the boundin' kangaroo. he left the isle of man the last, an' gev a three-legged cat that passed one day, beneath a fallin' mast, an' cut her tail in two! the only thing he missed, in this regard of all the captain done, he didn't save the irish elk, 'twas dhrownded be the flood, but still we can't find fault with him, he made it up to erin, for he didn't lave a reptile there, an' did a power of good. but while the captain, pat o'toole, was coastin' round, an' dhroppin' men, an' elephants, an' butterflies, behind him in his thrack, the ark with noah, and his wife, an' childer, sthruck on ararat, an' sprung a leak, an' all at once, became a total wrack! whin noah got his specks, an' saw by manes of different telegrams, how pat o'toole had been at work, his heart within him sunk, siz he unto his familee, "let one of you's, sit up for me," thin slipped around the corner, and he dhrank till he got dhrunk. but pat o'toole, he always kep' the pledge, he took before the flood, he lived for eighteen hundred years, a blameless sort of life, and whin he died, the hill of howth was built up for his monument, and ireland's eye was modelled out, in memory of his wife. [illustration] [illustration: sonnet on shares.] to fill his glass as host, was honour i did boast, and he spake to me one day, with a smile, "you wish to make a mark, then to my counsel hark, in the co., for which i'm chairman, put your pile." he was noble, he was good, of the upper ten, his blood �sthetic tint of azure, all the while, a tone to conjure with,--i put my pile. the shares went down, o my! was not a fool to buy; if i had been a savage on the nile, i needn't pen this sonnet, with a sigh! [illustration: the lucky sixpence] you can't exist on nothing, when launched in wedded life-- so a lucky battered sixpence, was all i gave my wife, and said to her one morning, "when another vessel starts i'll scoot, and make my fortune, in romantic foreign parts." and so i went and scooted, but how the thing was done, was not like any pic-nic, or passage made for fun. we had hardly left the channel, and were in the offing yet, when the steward heard me snoring in the quiet lazarette. [illustration: i found a purse] it wasn't quite successful--the voyage--after this, and when we got out foreign, i didn't land in bliss. i worked my passage over, but the captain wasn't kind, and all i got for wages, was a compliment behind! and thus i was a failure, my later life was worse, when twenty years were over, at last i found a purse. it made me sad, and homesick, and tired of foreign life, "i'll start," says i, "for europe, and try and find my wife." i sought her when i landed, but everything was changed, and high and low i wandered, and far and near i ranged; i put her full description in several ads.--at last my flag of hope that fluttered, came half-way down the mast. i went, and i enlisted all in the bluecoat ranks; and took to promenading along the liffey banks. i made a measured survey of curbstones in the squares, and prowled behind the corners, for pouncing unawares. twelve months of measured pacing, had gone since i began; i hadn't run a prisoner, the time was all i ran; and when the year had vanished, said the sergeant, "halt, o'brine! you haven't run a prisoner, you'll have to draw the line." [illustration] that night i went and drew it--'twas peeping through a blind!-- i got some information, of suspicious work behind. the act i had my eye on, was a woman with some lead, i watched her squeeze a sixpence, in wad of toughened bread. a chance of some distinction was here, i could not shirk, i peeled my worsted mittens, and bravely went to work. i double somersaulted the window--'twas a do i picked up in australia, from a foreign kangaroo. [illustration] i lighted on the table, not quite upon my feet, but, ah! her guilty terror was evidence complete. "wot's this," said i, impounding the lead, and bread, and tin; "i've caught you in the act, ma'am, i'll have to run you in." they put her on her trial, and the evidence began, i swore my information, like a polis and a man; i showed a silver sixpence, with a hole in it defined, and showed them how i telescoped my presence thro' the blind. [illustration] the jury found her guilty, the judge condemned her then, to go into retirement, where she couldn't coin again. "o, sure i wasn't coinin', mavourneen judge asthore, 'twas the sixpence of my sweetheart that's on a foreign shore. a lucky one he gave me, he stayed away too long. i wanted for to change it, and thought it wasn't wrong to take its little photograph, for the sake of bein' his wife." said the judge, "it doesn't matter, i've sentenced you for life!" i saw her disappearing, from my eye behind the dock, o, ham an fowl! it's awful, to think upon the shock. i staggered with my baton to the sergeant, and i swore, he had made me run too many, i'd seek a foreign shore. [illustration] [illustration: a wall flower sonnet.] she was charming, full of grace, a hostess, you could place in a higher sphere, than that in which she shone, "i've a partner you should meet, a girl, extremely sweet!" and for the dance she always put me on, but meetings of regret, were maidens that i met, my hostess was a gay designing one, her wallflowers were too plain, the waltz did give me pain, i took a b. and s. and i was gone! she played with me, too often put me on, my hostess was a gay designing one! [illustration] [illustration: paradoxical words] he was up on the hustings, and thrashed with his tongue, the air in a socialistic vein, and as an employer, for the workers he felt, by proxy,--a sympathetic pain! a pang, that the few could wallow in their wealth, whilst many--their brothers--should sweat, "but ha!" shouted he, with a chuckle, and a grin, "you'll be having a millenium of it yet!" he taught that the masters should share with the men, he scouted, with pitiless vim, the right of the master, to more than his man, for his man was the master of him, then they flourished their hats, for the precept, with hope, that to practice, he might be content; but the confidence trick, is a hustings resource, and to part, wasn't just what he meant: he spoke, as a speech is the fashion to-day, in loud paradoxical words, as a titled premier of the commons, would shout, "down down with the house of lords." but still, 'twas a hopeful, and beautiful proof, that the cause of the toiler, was just, and he wouldn't have to wait, very long for a snack, from the sugar ornamented upper crust, in a very little time, he'd be gathering his whack, from the azure-fired diamond--upper dust, "you'll be having a millenium of it yet, working men, put me into parliament, and then, you'll find it a fact, we'll pass every act, for your chums, and your kids, working men, the hours you will work, will be eight, working men, on saturday, not quarter so late, and another holiday, in the middle of the week, we'll give you, by the laws of the state, with a capon, or a duck, on your plate, o put me into parliament, and _wait_! you'll be having the land parcelled out into bits, you'll be all of you fixed in the soil, and spontaniety of crops you will reap, without any trouble or toil. the screw will extend for each working man, employers will have to screw back, till tailored by the act, in polished top hats, you'll all be as gents in the track! we'll cut away the taxes, by the laws that we'll pass! you won't have to pay any rate! you'll be having a millenium of it yet, working men, o put me into parliament, and _wait_!" and thus with emotional foliated flights, he spoke like the clashing of swords, as a titled premier of the commons would shout, "down down with the house of lords!" he finished his speech in a thunder of cheers, the welkin was knocked into splits, and he smuggled off home, by the rear, or his trap, they'd have looted for souvenir bits! * * * * * with the conscience of one, who believes he has done, what was really the best, for himself, he retired into bed, that night, and he fell fast asleep, like a saint on a shelf. it might have been a very short period of time, or maybe it might have been long, when he woke with a buzz like a bee in his ear, or the purr of a tom cat's song. it might be the bizz of a wasp, or the hum, of a foraging blue bottle fly, but no! 'twas the sound of the whizz of a drill! 'twas then that he opened his eye. he jumped up in bed, and he cried with an oath, "what's that, that you're doing, you scamp?" to a burglar brave, who was sampling his room, with a bag, jemmy, brace, and a lamp. then the burglar grinned in an amicable way, for a diplomatic cracker was he, and he wouldn't take offence at the oath of a man, who had only awoke, said he, "i was down at the meetin' an' heerd every word, when you gave out the socialist pay, an' i am a bloke wot swears by the truth of the beautiful words that you say. that's whoy i am here, for my slice of the swag, that you've pinched, by employin' your men. i'm tottin' up the stock, in a confidential way, for an equal division of it then, for mate, i'm a pal of a socialistic turn, wot tries to do everythink straight, we'll halve them between us, the jewels and coin, an' make an even deal of the plate." [illustration] but out from the bed, with a jump in his shirt, the candidate sprang to the floor, said he, "i may preach, but to practice is bosh!" and leaped with a shout to the door. but the cracker of cribs, with a colt in his fist, was first, and with that at the nose of the candidate, muttered "you'll die of the cold, if you don't burrow under the clothes! "so don't make a row," said that burglar brave, "but jerk into bed out of sight, i hate to be put upon when i'm at work, an' boss, this is my busy night! "now jest let me fasten a gag on yer mouth, you know that it's wrong, to alarm your neighbours at night, when they're wantin' to sleep, quick! into this noose with each arm, there! now, with that beautiful knot on your pins, you cawn't say as how yer to blame, if i pinch all i can in the regular way, of the grabber's contemptible game!" he opened the safe, and he smashed the bureau, he looted the drawers, and shelf, of the plate, and the clocks, and the watches, and cash, from the cabinet, quick as an elf. slid everything down to his pal, with a rope, and then he slid down it himself, they drove with the swag, from the terrace amain, in a couple of hired out traps; and the city, was billed on the following day, with the special editions in caps! * * * * * 'twas a reasonable period, from the incident above, that a solemn deputation came down, for the candidate to speak in a socialistic vein, to the voters of the east of london town: "we'll be looking for you there, on waggon no. i. near the arch, that's of marble, in the park," but he pointed to the door "o tell them that i'm dead; for cram it! i am not up to the mark," [illustration: a cantabile on music, art, and law.] ho! there, pumps and castanets for three, we would dance a brief measure. o you will wonder why we're here, and wish that we were far, by wig, and gown, it doth appear, we're members of the bar, and tho' we are, we say to you, we all of us opine, that we may justly claim our due, in an artistic line. we are the type of one, you know, as well as we can tell, he is a burly splendid beau, a stately howling swell!-- a signor of the lyric stage, an operatic don,-- and by similitude, we'll wage that he, and we are one! 'tis true, tho' he is mostly stout, we're nearly always thin, but if you turn us inside out, we're stouter men within. for he is all a puff, and smoke, a sound that dies away; but we are they who crack a joke, that lasts for many a day. he has his crotchets; we do harp, on clients, this, and that, he has his sharps, and we are sharp, his flats, and they are flat; he blows away his notes, but we, are shrewder men by far, the notes we get professionly, we stick them to the bar! his quavers, they are nothing to the rallantando thrills, that shake our clients, when we screw the rosin on their bills. they often simulate, as deaf, when we do charge a case, our time is on the treble cleff, and their's is on the base. we make a loud fortissimo, when pleading in the wrong, and often pianissimo, when we should put it strong, but still we pull our fees the same, tho' suits may not be won, and by our tongue, we conquer fame, like that conceited don. and to the jury, we do plaint, upon a mauling stick, and from our pallets, clap the paint, around their craniums thick, we mould them from their purpose dense, like hods of plastic wax, and sculp into their common sense, and then climb down their backs! our song is done, for we are brief, and we will sing no more,-- and to my own intense relief, i thought they'd take the door, but no! they did not go, and each, put forth his kidded fist, "while we've been trying thus to teach, our fees we almost missed! remember this is christmas eve, three chrismas waits we be, the more the reason you should give, our consultation fee. we have our instruments, and they are of the parchment tough, with which we play, while men do pay, we wot we've said enough. and wherefore, and whereas for this, aforesaid, told to thee, moreover, we must have, we wis, our consultation fee. five guineas unto each of us, refreshers each, a pound,"-- i rose to kick them into bruss, they bolted through the ground! my future suppers, must be free of nightmare risk; the cause of that cantabile of glee, on music, art, and laws; was merely this, that i did run, the danger of such rig, by feeding on a goose, they hatched, inside a lawyer's wig. [illustration] [illustration: woman's tears.] the tears were in her eye, said i "what makes you cry?" and my sympathy was such, that i sighed; for it gives my heart the creep, to see a woman weep,-- especially the one to be my bride. "alas!" said i, "ah! me, it grieveth me, to see that trickle, at your nostril, by the side." "'twas the onions, i was cutting," she replied. [illustration: heradic fruits of a family tree by a lyin' king of arms] [illustration] when cha, the first, was run to ground, an ancestorial mite was found; by rails in pale, at dexter chief, from judges' wig, he pipes his grief. his deeds, of later life, did tend, to prove him of the sinister bend; as boozing charge, he takes his place, from sinister chief, to dexter base. [illustration] [illustration] his son, did charge in sable chief, a sword, or he had come to grief; that chief above, from sinister, part, has got,--per fesse-- that sword in heart! another son, of prudent parts, doth pawn his arms, for peaceful arts; from dexter or, on shield of gu, in pale, reguardant sinister jew. [illustration] [illustration] another son, from want appeald, to art, for charge, on argent shield, and so, upon his coat he drew a garb, that he might dare, and do he sought to void a hen-coup, he is trussed above it, on a tree; couchant, in chief, with spade, in fesse, a sorry wight, he must confess. [illustration] [illustration] at length, an orient pile, he took, then counterchanged, his coat for luck! this dexter treatment, is not right; he's or, on ar, the lawless wight! but ah! at last, his fate was healed and by command, got royal shield; a dexter king, reguardant, won! he dyed, and left an "only son." [illustration] [illustration: the polis and the princess grana uille] the man who confidently seeks to set up a new idea, by upsetting an old theory, or tradition, is one who lives in advance of his time, whereby he forfeits many valued amenities of contemporaneous courtesy. but he is to be extolled for the moral heroism that impells him, to advance new facts, into the study of history, or explode errors so steadfastly grounded on the popular belief, that he finds himself, pen to pen with a hostile army of savants, antiquarians, historians, and critics: some stirred with spirit of envy, others with a craving for notoriety, but all unanimous, and up in arms, with loaded pens and arsenal of inkpots. in this regard i find myself, by placing the correct revision of a popular tradition before my discerning readers. i have to confess that it was not thro' deep and industrious research, that i am thus enabled to challenge the truth, of the accepted records. it was thro' the chance, afforded by an hour of breezing sea-scape recreation, that i discovered the mysterious chronicle. the popular tradition, is thus related by dr. walsh. "the celebrated grana uille or grace o'mally, noted for her piratical depredations in the reign of elizabeth, returning on a certain time from england, where she had paid a visit to the queen, landed at howth, and proceeded to the castle. it was the hour of dinner--but the gates were shut. shocked at an exclusion so repugnant to her notions of irish hospitality, she immediately proceeded to the shore, where the young lord was at nurse, and seizing the child, she embarked with, and sailed to connaught, where her own castle stood. after a time, however, she restored the child; with the express stipulation, that the gates should be thrown open, when the family went to dinner--a practice which is observed to this day." when the hill of howth was covered, by a city great, and grand, and nuggets still were gathered, like cockles on the strand; on the shore, around by sutton, a children's maid was met, who was wheeling of a baby, in a sky blue bassinet. and as that maiden cycled that infant by the sea, down the boreen from the bailey, came number b; and he sudden lit his eye on, he sudden had her set, that slavey, with the baby, in the sky blue bassinet. he held aloft his baton, saluted like a man, said he "i'm almost certain, you're name is mary anne, the sergeant up the boreen, in the distance there is gone, we'll make the distance greater, if you and i move on. for fifty years i've ambushed, and watched around me bate, but never met a sweetheart, that took me so complate, and what's a bate? it's nothin' to a polis, whin he's gone! i'm gone on you me darlin', let you and i move on." "o hoky smoke! avourneen, i never seen yer like, as sure's me name is dooley, with the christian name of mike, i sware it, by this number, on my collar, which you see, i'm shockin' fond of you agra," said no. b. he took that trusting maiden, to the adjacent strand, "a punt is on the shingles, convaynient here to hand, put the bassinet into it," said the blue official fox, "we'll go and look for winkles, thro' seaweed on the rocks." now whether or for winkles, or what it was they went, they stayed away much longer than was their first intent, a thoughtless time, that stranded them in a piteous plight, the tide was in, o moses! the punt was out of sight. upon that woeful morning, the fact we may not shunt, the little lord st. lawrence, was kidnapped by a punt, and reverbrated wailings, of his nurse is echoed still, with oathings of the polis, around ben heder hill! but then it struck that polis, a hopeful thought of mark, and to the weeping servant, he muttered, "whist! an' hark!" then put his index finger, abaft his coral nose, "howld on! i'll go, an' square it, i've got a schame, here goes!" the crafty rogue departed, and told the specious tale, of how the child was stolen by the princess granauille, he told the weeping mother, he almost thought he knew, from information he received, that he had got a clew, when granauille was challenged, it struck her, she could make a profitable bargain, in re her nephew's sake, 'twas just before his teething; his nose was but a blob, like every other baby's, so she could work the job. as tourist come from connaught, she owned that it befel, that she had left her galley, to find a cheap hotel, but when she reached the castle, with appetite, it shocked her, when she found the outer door, at dinner time was locked! she thought it mean, and stingy, the child she lifted then-- and told that subtle polis, she'd give the child again, in safety to its father, if he would leave the door, at dinner, always open, on the latch for evermore. upon lord howth, she fathered her nephew in this way, that he might be ancestor of viscount howth to-day, and if you want a dinner, i'll give you all a tip, there's just a fleeting moment, i've always let it slip,-- the minute hand records it, upon the castle clock, and if you're up that moment, you have no need to knock, walk in, the door is open, and make "a hearty male," and thank that crafty polis, and the princess granauille. * * * * * and now about the baby, his voyaging began, before he'd had his teething, and still he's not a man, he's yet a child! whose ravings across the ocean flew, of "who am i? and where am i? and what am i to do?" [illustration] he's never grown a whisker, he's never known a beard! of hair upon the cranium, he never yet has heard! and so he is not altered, he's still in statu quo, as bald and snub, and chubby, as three hundred years ago! three hundred years are over, and lo! he's living yet, he made a sleeping cabin, from the sky blue bassinet, he made the punt commodious, with wreckage that he found, but of a human sinner, he's never heard a sound! he lives without a purpose, an object or intent, three hundred years of waiting, in ignorance are spent, he lives; and for this reason, because he never knew, of who he is, or where he is, or what he is to do! he never saw a sailor! he never hailed a sail! the pensive penguin harkened unto his lonely wail; the albatross did follow he shrieked him for the clew, "o who am i? and where am i? and what am i to do?" he pleaded to the swallow, and mother cary's chicks, of his expatriation, and in his devilish fix, besought the mild octopus, and all the ocean crew, "o who am i? and where am i? and what am i to do?" he hailed the great sea serpent, the comprehensive whale, the flying fish, to answer, the burden of his wail, of what the deuce had happened, that life was all so blue! "o who am i? and where am i? and what am i to do?" [illustration] he is not dead, it's certain, i'll merely mention here, he may be in mid ocean, or yet he may be near, the north wall boat may hail him, it's prophesied that yet, hell be thrown up at sutton, in the sky blue bassinet. be watching all the papers; for soon or late some day, in leaded type, you'll see it, and with a big display of capitals above it, of claimant, who will know, of what to do, and do it, and one who'll have to go! now most of you will question, the record i recite, to clear your doubts upon it, i think it's only right, to tell you, i was searching for cockles at blackrock, when lo! my heart was fluttered with interesting shock! i saw a feeding bottle, that lay upon the strand, i stooped anon and gripped it, with sympathetic hand, i thought it might be jetsam, of baby that was drowned, but looking thro' the bottle, a manuscript i found. and there in broken irish, it states the fact, that he had sealed it in his bottle, and still he's on the sea, with anxious intimation, that yet he seeks the clew, of who he is? and where he is? and what he is to do? [illustration: marvelous relic a message from the c----] a horror of london town. on london streets by a gin shop door, in the blaze of a noontide sun, with horrible zest of a thirst for gore, was a desperate murder done, on the sainted flags of a christian town, i saw this outrage planned, and three little boys, in crime, sere brown were there with a helping hand. 'twas a group of seven--i counted them all, a group of seven strong men, and summing them up, with the criminals small, their total i think was ten, with umbrellas, and sticks, and stones, they hunted a sad wretch down, mid random of kicks, and ogerous groans, a shame unto london town! but while was fought the unequal fight, that murder of ten to one, there came an ominous venger of right, they call him a copper for fun, and i said he'll be pulling the lot of them; then the villians ha! ha! shall see there are dungeons dark for the murderous ten, in the walls of the old bailee! but no! he paused, and he gravely stood, and the never a stir, stirred he, as he saw them compass the deed of blood, to its end with a ghastly glee, and o 'twas pity to hear the tones, of the suppliant's voice in pain, as he sought to fly from the sticks and stones, and the yells of "hit, hit him again!" a drayman flourished the butt of his whip, i am sure it was loaded with lead, and his laugh was wild, as a terrible clip, he aimed at the victim's head! alas! too sure, by the jugular vein, he was struck, and he dropped and died, and the drayman shook, as he laughed amain, for blood was the caitiff's pride! but o i proved, ere i wandered home, there yet was a friend most true, who bore the corse to a silent tomb, ah! yes, and embalmed it too, a kind purveyor came walking by, and he stopped on the edge of the flag, then turned to his boy, and exclaimed with a sigh, "jim, slip the dead rat in your bag." [decoration] [illustration: a confidential sonnet] i met him one night there, north east of leicester square, within about a quarter of a mile, "i've confidence," said he, "in all humanity, i'll leave my bloomin' purse with thee awhile!" he left it, went away then coming back, "i say," said he, with an insinuating smile, "now lend your watch to me, for i am like yourself without no guile," he took it, went away, and from that evil day, i keep that man's description on my file. [illustration: a tram car ghost.] the last car at night, is a vehicle laden with varied symptoms of mysterious hauntings that more or less oppress the fares, some toned down by the lassitude of overwork, drop gratefully into their seats, and quickly fall into fitful slumber, others seem to court a spasmodic notoriety by loud and disjointed converse. a weary of world expression clouds the features of a few with an unuttered protest, for the disagreeable fact of their birth, whilst others seem by their grumpy glances to suggest a jealous objection to other people's existence. a select few, unconsciously advertise a flippant gratification at the possession of life, and squeeze festivity from it, as colour from a blue rag. but all are haunted with the mysterious workings of unseen spirits, that usually accompany the fares, in the latest car at night. there wasn't a soul in the tramway car, well not that myself could see, but the sad conductor took my arm, and steadfast gazed on me-- then pointing up to the corner seat, "look! that's his regular game, i'm sorry to have it to say of a ghost, but he hasn't a tint of shame!" you'll think the tram conductor was drunk, his breath was sweet as mine, like the orris root, or a tint of mint, or scent of a similar line. it might be a ginger cordial; but the air of the night was strong, and it wouldn't be proper to say i'm sure, i might perhaps be wrong. "will you slack?" said i, but he caught my arm "the man that i killed is there! i hate to have it to say. but no, i can't recover my fare! i asked it from him one winter's night, but full as a tick with drink, the only answer he gave to me, was just a chuckle and wink. with this american tink-a-ting, i couldn't defraud the co., so caught his collar, and chucked him off the back of the tram car, so. there wasn't a soul that saw the deed, not even the driver knew, and there he lay on the tramway track, till the townward car was due. it broke his neck, and his shoulder blade, his legs, and arms, its broke, and laid him out, a squirming trout, 'twas then he awoke, and spoke! said he, "what's up? is the dancing done? the waltz has made me sore!" and wriggling out on the frosty ground, he never spoke no more! heigho! the murder was caused by me, was never a soul who knew, that i am the man, who chucked the man, that the townward tram car slew! and everybody on earth was done with the murdered man, but me! the very next night, in the corner seat, i looked, and there was he! i thought at first that he might be a twin, and asked his thruppeny fare, but he sneered at me, i turned away, and left him sneering there! thinks i, i'll watch him, and jot my tot, and when he is goin' to go, i'll chuck him the same, as i did before, for sake of the tramway co. i calculated the list of fares, then turned around to look, but hey! i'm blowed, if he hadn't gone off, gone! with his bloomin' hook! but how it was done, or whither he went, i never could guess, or think, for the ventilators all were shut, there wasn't an open chink! and i was up at the door so tight, he couldn't have passed me by, i never did close an eye that night, no lid of a bloomin' eye! i hates to see the company done, and that was a cheated fare, i'd rather lose my regular meals, than wrong the company, there! i'd rather work from ante m, six till three of the a.m. clock, than wrong the tramway co. of a coin, that wasn't my legal stock. there's nobody sees the ghost but me, because he's a sneaking sprite, he always comes when i take my turn on the latest car at night. that's him! he's there in the corner seat, the man that i killed is there, i hate to have it to say, but no, i can't recover my fare! i've this american tink-a-ting, and tickets of sortin's three, but that embezzling raw will come to cheat, and sneer at me. i cawnt tell why, but he worry's me so, i'd collar him if i could, he hasn't a scruff, or any a crop, o' the neck, or flesh or blood, he hasn't a waistband, i could grip, nor anythink i could kick, i'd like to fetch him a trip, but ah! to think of it, makes me sick he hasn't a face, to black his eye, or even a hat to block, but all the same, in the corner there, he gives the fares a shock! he dosses himself in the favourite seat, and while he's nestlin' there, the passengers cawnt shove up to the end, to make my regular fare. for some insist that the seat is cold! and others complain it's hot! and some it's damp, and some remark, it's a most infernal spot! and some keep shovin' their sticks above, to let in the atmosphere, while others are closin' them up with a curse, the thing is devilish queer. it's pisonous hard on a man like me, who lives on what he can get, but i'll have to try and see if i cawnt, jest manage to shuffle him yet. ha! there, he's gone! i knew that he would, waltz out of my bloomin' sight! his regular trick with my thruppeny fare, now--jump with the car, good night." [decoration] margate sands. she was five, or six, he four years old, when they met on the margate sands, and he gravely looked in her great blue eyes with hold of her little fat hands, and he said, "i love oo well rosie; i know, dat i'd rather have oo, dan all de lickel girls on de sands to-day, iss, even dan de girl in blue!" "i'm glad oo do; and i love oo too!" thro' a heaven of golden hair, like silvery bells, was her sweet response, on the ozoned rose lit air, and then with his bucket, and spade, he built for his love, on the sand, that day, a castle, and pie, till the tide came in, and washed his castle away. * * * * * in many a year thereafter 'twas, in a box in drury lane, said a gent, as he used his opera glass, "yon lady's remarkably plain!" and the lady exclaimed, at the self-same time, when she saw his glass in hand, "what an ugly fright!" they did not know, they had loved, on the margate sand! [illustration: john mc kune] o paddy murphy--carman of the stand in college green-- you've had your sudden ups and downs, and busy days you've seen, we're waiting for your story; how the mare struck up the tune, of sparks amongst the gravel, on the road to knockmaroon. "o faith an' i may tell you, you will not be waitin' long, whin the piebald mare asooker, is the sweetheart of me song, for sure it was a mastherpiece, of how she dhragged mckune, behind her whiskin' tail, along the road, to knockmaroon. 'twas in the busy period, whin the fenians wor at war, i mopes'd around the dargle, on a newly painted car; whin, creepin' from the ditches, like a bogey in the moon, a man proposed the journey of a dhrive to knockmaroon. he might as well have axed me on the minute, for a run, to roosha or to paykin, or the divil or the sun! he might as well have axed me, for a rocky mountain jaunt; so i bounced him with an answer of the sudden words, "i can't!" the boys to-night are risin' an' i darn't go impugn me car into the danger, of a dhrive to knockmaroon!" [illustration] thin spakin' wid the dacency, of a remorseful tone, "in fact," siz i, "me car's engaged, in bray, by mick malone; besides the mare is nervous, an' me wife expects me soon, for the army's out, i hear, upon the road to knockmaroon!" he didn't stop to parley, but he jumped upon me car, an' showed a livin' pixture, of the brakin' of the war, by pointin' a revolver at me nose! "i'm john mckune, dhrive on," siz he, "i'll guard you on the road to knockmaroon!" i never knew that powdher smelt so flamin' strong before, it smelt as if a whole review, was stinkin' from the bore! the steel of that revolver shone, like bayonets in the moon, of all the british army on the road to knockmaroon! an' hauntin' round its barrel, the ghosts of every sin, i done in all me life before, wor there, in thick an' thin! so like a fiddler in a fight i quickly changed me tune, "bedad!" siz i, "it's i'm yer man, we're off to knockmaroon." "you see, i've got a takin' way," says he, an' with a grin, he put his barker back into his breeches fob, agin, "now whail around, an' thro' the bog,--the featherbed,"--says he, "i'll guard you, by the barracks of the polis, at glencree, an' dhrive, as if yer car was late, to bring the royal mail! whip up! as if the divil sat upon your horse's tail!" i gev the mare a coaxer, of the knots upon me whip, an' rowlin thro' the darkness, where the road begins to dip, i bowled upon me journey, with the load of john mckune, an' fits of wondher, why he dhrove that night to knockmaroon; an' just as we were wheelin' out, beyond the feather bed, the boys put up their lamplight, an' alightin' down, he said some hurried words an' whisperin's, then with a cheer for him, presentin' arms, "dhrive on," they cried, "god speed you wicklow jim!" i dhrove as if the phooka was the horse beneath me whip, we flew, as if the jauntin' car was on a racin' thrip, we scatthered dust, an' whizz of wheels, an' sparks upon the air, when all at once, i pulled her up, at shout of "who comes there?" it was a throop of sojers, an' me heart began to croon, wid jigs, aginst me overcoat! siz he, "i'm john mckune,"-- he sprang from off the cushion, an' a little while was gone, then comin' back, a captain gev the password, to dhrive on! he leaped upon the car again, an' says to me, once more, "now, dhrive me 'cross the grand canal, and on to inchicore," but when we got around a turn, an' in a lonely place, he whipped his waypon out again, to point it at me face! siz he, "yer car is weighty, an' yerself's a dacent bulk, you say the mare is nervous, an' she might begin to sulk; we mustn't let that meddle with the work that i've in hand, so skip your perch this minute, like a lark, at my command, come, hop yer twig, unyoke her, in a slippy lightenin' crack! just double up that rug, an' sthrap it tight across her back, an' shorten up the reins, an' swop yer overcoat an' hat, quick! flutther up, as if you wor a blackbird from a cat!" i never felt so brave, in all me life, me courage rose, to bid him go to blakers!--but the barrel at me nose, brought down me heart like wallop, till i felt it, in me brogue, an' so i done his dirty work, the ugly thievin' rogue! i loosed the crather from the shafts, and sthrapped the rug, an' then, he vaulted on her back, an' faced her up the road again, "you'll find her in the mornin', on the grass in phoenix park," he shouted, as with skelpin' whip, he galloped thro' the dark, an' left me cursin' in a fit, beside me sthranded yoke, as if i got the headache of a mapoplectic sthroke! next night, whin i was frettin', that i'd never see her more, i heard the mare asooker's hoof, beside the stable door; i darted out, she kissed me, with a whinney loud and long, that made her ever afther, as the sweetheart of me song! * * * * * when fifteen years wor over, an' meself was down in cork, i read it on a paper,--in the bowry of new york,-- of a pub around a corner, where a lonely man in june, was sittin', when two men came in, says they, "you're john mckune!" [illustration] he dhropped his glass of cock-tail, with a crash upon the floor; and looked, as if he'd jump the sash, of window, or the door, he looked, as if he'd rather be in hell, or on the moon; said they, "at last we have you, for a traitor, john mckune!" he didn't spake an answer, but he quickly thried to grip, the bright revolver waypon, from the fob, behind his hip, he hadn't time to dhraw it, like a flashin' lightenin' dart, two loaded levelled weapons, wor against his jumpin' heart! "hands up!" they shouted "damn you! ye scaymin' divil's limb; we've come to scotch the serpent, we know as wicklow jim," said they, "at last we have you for oaths you gave to men, an' swore them for your purpose, to bethray, an' sell them then!" he didn't make an answer, but he thried to whip a knife, from collar of his cota--it was there to guard his life-- he hadn't time to dhraw it, for a crack of shots! an' soon, a pool of blood, was spurtin' from the corpse of john mckune. [illustration] [illustration: i'll go for a sojer.] "o where is my johnnie acushla?" says she, he left me last night, an' "maggie" says he, "it's meself an' yerself mam that couldn't agree, be dang but i'll go for a sojer!" he took all the cash that i had in the till, i followed him round to the butt of the hill, "go back, or yerself is the first that i'll kill!" says he, "whin i'm gone for a sojer!" i hung to his neck, an' i axed him to stay, ye might as well ax for the night to be day; but wringin' his neck from me, shoutin' "hooray!" says he "whoo! i'll go for a sojer!" i set the dog afther him, thought that he'd stick in the tail of his coat, he was up to the thrick; for he turned on his heel, an' he skelped him a lick, of the stick, "i am off for a sojer!" "o whisht! arrah there, look he's comin'!" she cried, as far in the distance, her jack she espied, with corporal quirk on the march by his side, he's comin' back home with a sojer. when johnnie came near enough to her to spake, "o johnnie avourneen!" said she, "did ye take the shillin'?" "no faith, for i'm too wide awake, i only wint off for a sojer." [decoration] ode here! i dyed away the grey, from my sparsy head of hair, i buttered up the fur upon my tile, i darned the ventilators in my garments here, and there, and with my go-to-meeting stick, and smile, i went to see a widow, i had courted long ago; she had just been to the probate for a pile! said she, "you are a person that i really do not know" her tone was rather cutting, like a file! a serious alteration in her style; i knew her when a maiden without guile, she wouldn't even loan me from her pile, a widow's mite; it agitates my bile! [illustration: the smuggler's fate] a seaside idyll this; to teach how oft amiss, doth fall the fate of men who would be free: it makes me cry heigho, in minor cadence low, when i do mind me of the fate of three, to shun hymenial perils, and tired of mashing girls, a smuggler's cave, they took beside the sea, and formed a reckless crew, that swallowed their own brew, of whiskey, punch and coffee, beer and tea; [illustration] but most of beer, and whiskey, as you see, and that's the reason that i cry heigho! [illustration] they wrestled with the wave, [illustration] then ran into their cave; [illustration] but telescopes above, were taking stock, thus fate was on their track, and soon alas! alack! the smiles of fate fell on them from the rock, thus mesmerised by mirth, they climbed the rocks, and earth, with fascinated recklessness alack! [illustration] my sympathy to show, again i say heigho! 'twere better to their cave they had gone back. ah! me, the smugglers three, were blind their fate to see, and lo! capitulation followed soon; [illustration] for spite of all their pains, they soon were in the chains, that fettered them in bondage 'neath the moon, [illustration] that shone on double case, of treble spoon; too like the moon, that wanes; and that is why i sing in minor tune, and cry again with sympathy, heigho! thus ever day by day, in bondage still they lay, surrendering provisions, and their brew, [illustration] until the crew did go into the town, and lo! [illustration] a parson had some triple work to do, they're captives now, [illustration] hard labour is their due, alack! the hapless crew; i cry again with sympathy, heigho! the late fitz-binks. it was about an hour they call the small, and the mysterious, an hour wherein the ghosts are wont to take their constitutional, 'twas twenty-four o'clock; an hour that's oftimes deleterious to many a liver wetted swell, pugnacious or emotional. the beggared corporation lights, did flick in the nor'wester gale, that blistering nose, and finger-tips, were loaded well with sleet, when binks harrangued a constable, "good night, it's cold, you're looking pale," from where he backed a lamp-post, at the end of brunswick street. "ah! sergeant," said fitz-binks, "it's late, or i could treat you decently, and 'twouldn't be too dusty, if we had a flying drink; but chap, of vic., is strict, they passed in parliament so recently," the bobbie was a thirsty one, he winked a thirsty wink. "ha! ha!" said binks, "you know the lines, so don't be too particular, there's some back door that's open," said the constable, "you're right; just move an' there thro' yondher lane an' hide up perpendicular, beyant the lamp, i'll folly whin there's nobody in sight." the thing was managed gracefully, and with an open sesamè, the constable had stolen to a quiet bar with binks, produced a clay, said he, "i hope yer honor won't think less of me, to pull a pipe," "by jove! i don't," said binks, and bought the drinks. the moment was so contraband, it gave unto that liquor bar, a zest, he asked the constable to take another neat, but lifting out his ticker, says the bobbie, "well be quick or 'gar! the sergeant might come whop on me! he's out upon his beat." the constable decanted it, said he, "howld on until i look, now fly!" said he, and while they dived again into the night, he fished from out his overcoat, and deftly in his mouth he stuck, a friendly lump of orris root, to make his breath all right. that bobbie was a wily one, the act was rather opportune, for they had scarcely managed to get half-way up the gut when he was made aware that he must coin a whited whopper soon, for hark! it was the tramping of the sergeant's heavy foot! said he, "we must dissimble, or i'm ruined, and a shapable, excuse i'll have to make!" * * * * * * "what brings the two of you down here?" "i'm makin' just a pres'ner, sir, he's dhrunk, an' he's incapable," exclaimed the bobbie, gripping binks, just under binks's ear! 'twas somewhat ominous for binks, though he protested not, he chewed the cud of thought, until he saw that sergeant out of sight; he had not comprehended yet, the patronising turpitude of bobbies, who will take a treat, "well now," said he, "good night," but spake that constable, said he, "good night is best for you, ye see, but it won't answer now for me, i darn't let you go, it's quietly, and aisily, and dacently, you'll come wid me, yer dhrunk, an' yer incapable! i towld the sergeant so." fitz-binks fell plump in mire of doubt, 'twas shocking! thus to realize, such treachery, and subterfuge, of ingrate sneak of sin, but x was bigger in his figure, by a deal of size, and little binks, was little, so the bobbie ran him in! the sergeant,--he who took the charge--was grave, and staid, particular! he entered binks upon his book, and sent him to the cell, and binks did forfeit half a sov., for standing perpendicular, before the beak, and leaving court, he cursed that bobbie well! he said the act was scandalous, and of the gutter order, he,-- that bobbie was, "ah whisht! ye see, an' howld yer tongue, shut up it's fond of me, you ought to be, if i swore ye wor disordherly, it would have cost ye exthra, or you'd maybe be put up!" it used to be a sermonising habit, and methodical, to tag a moral story, with a warning at its end and bobbie entertainments in the midnight, might be quodical! so leave him to his duty, if you'd keep him as a friend. [illustration: a fugitive kiss.] i was on the carpet kneeling, and fondly, and with feeling, i pressed her metacarpus, to my osculating lip, when flexor, and extensor, of stern parental censor, incontinent did greet me, and took me near the hip! i rolled into the fender, with broken silk suspender, and motive movement sharp, as her pater gave the tip! he didn't back the winner, for sport was not his grip. the above brief but touching confession of disastrous failure, recorded by timothy pipkins,--a sporting student of st. jago's hospital,--is indicative of the nemesis from an offended fate, that frequently foils the improvident hunter of matrimonial adventure. [illustration: the bedroom curse and the murdered cockatoo] tim doolin was a well known jock, an active sprite, and light and trim, and time there was, that jocks did funk, to mount, and run the race with him. he won by length, he won by head, he saved the race by nose, and ear, till all the jocks, around their pints, exclaimed the thing was devilish queer. but fortune is a gay coquette; by fickle fortune, doolin lost, till every one who backed him, soon did find him out a fraud and frost. i've seen him lose at punchestown, i've seen him last, at baldoyle too, at fairyhouse i've seen him fall--his colours then were black and blue. he stood and scratched his head amain, beside the stable door one night; he had been drinking tints of malt, and felt as he were almost tight. a race was on to run next day; he totted up his chance to win, when turning thro' the stable-door, he saw a gentleman within! he thought the thing extremely strange, and asked the man, why he was there, and stoutly gave the hint, that he was there, to sneak, and dose the mare. the gentleman, he laughed a laugh. "i've backed the beast myself, by gum! and you must win, or i will be the loser of a tidy sum." "well, look," said doolin, "pon me sowl, i have me doubts that she's in form." the stranger glared at doolin, and with voice, as of a rising storm, accused the jock of practices, that were not meet for honest men, and asked him how he won so oft, and could not pass the post again? "well, yis, yer honor, 'pon me faith, it puzzles me the same as you, that i can't jerk the horse ahead, and win as once i used to do. i never drink before the race. i always pray before i mount: and yet i find it's all the same; my prayers have come to no account!" "i used to curse and swear, but, ah, bedad, my swearing days are done!" "then how on earth could you expect to be the man who could get on?" "i may not dare to curse and swear. i have a rich, religious aunt, i'm in her will, and i would lose the fortune if i did, and shan't. she often heard me curse and swear; but warning me one day, says she: 'if you go on to curse and swear, i'll have no more to do with thee! i've made my will, and left you all my worldly goods, and money, too; i've got it written, signed and sealed, so you be careful what you do!' i promised her, upon my oath, that i would neither curse nor swear, and i have kept my word, and i will keep my word to her, so there! she lent to me a cockatoo, and cautioned me, i must not lack, to treat him well; he's in the room i occupy, till she comes back." "ah, that, indeed. well, here's a tip: when in the morning you get up, keep cursing all the time you dress, and swear at night, before you sup, by this no human ear will catch the oathings that will make you light, and take a load from off your mind, and you will win the race--good night." that very night when he went home, he slyly locked the bedroom door, and up and down around the room he scattered curses, and he swore, he cursed before, he cursed behind, he cursed until his face was red, by dint of cursing, and at last he stripped, and tumbled into bed. next morning many oaths he made, and sandwiched them with many a curse, that sounded weird, and wry, and strange; his oathings they could not possibly be worse. he cursed because he had to rise, he cursed to leave the bed so nice, and warm, and soft, he cursed because the water was as cold as ice. he cursed around the basin-stand, he cursed the water jug, alas! the towel and the soap he cursed, with oath that almost broke the glass. he cursed a button that was loose, he cursed the thread and needle, new, he cursed the irritating starch, he cursed his washerwoman, too. he curbed his braces--they were tied with bits of string, that broke in twain, he fixed them with a pin; it stuck into his spine--he cursed again; he cursed the postman for his knock--'twas by his tailor he was sent; he cursed the landlady who brought the bill; and asked him for the rent. before, behind, above, below, at right or left, he was not loath to drop a detonating curse, or fling an alternating oath. he cursed the razor and the strop, he cursed the wart upon his nose, he cursed his hair that wouldn't grow, he cursed the corns upon his toes. he cursed a stud and button-hole that was too big; and in the street, he saw a burly constable, and cursed the man upon his beat, he cursed the helmet on his head, the number on his collar, too; he cursed the stripe upon his arm, his mittens, and his suit of blue. he cursed his baton right and left, he cursed it also upside down, he cursed him to the county gaol and back again, and into town. he cursed the lining of his sleeve, a bottle in his pocket--who had put it there he could not tell--he cursed his aunt, her cockatoo. he cursed the laces of his boots, the cockatoo he cursed again, again he swore, unlocked the door, and gaily started for the train. hurrah! he won the race that day, and everything for him went right, and surreptitiously he cursed and swore, and cursed again that night. a painful shocking thing, that men should stoop to acts like this, for fame or pelf. thro' all my friends there's not a man would act so shocking but himself. his calender grew bright again with fortune's sunlight o'er it cast, but there must be an end to such, and retribution comes at last. his aunt returned to town again; he gave her back her cockatoo, 'twere better he had slain him first; it's what, i think, and so will you. one day a mortuary note did come--alas! his aunt was dead! he buried her with decent haste, and then her latest will was read. but by that testament, he found that he had not been left her purse, it intimated this, that he had taught her cockatoo to curse! it intimated this, that she thro' that, had met her death, alas; and in a codicil expressed a wish they'd send the bird to grass. no mortal eye but his, beheld the deed he then essayed to do-- 'twas murder! for he wrung the neck of his dead aunt, her cockatoo, no mortal eye beheld the deed; but things again with him went queer, till one day looking down the street, he saw a stranger prowling near. the man who told him thus to swear, 'twas on a dark november eve, he knew that stranger held a secret stone for him inside his sleeve; he knew that he had run a score of heavy debt, was due for sin, and darting back, he closed the door. said he to bridget "i'm not in. just say that i am out," said he, and quickly up the stairs he flew, the stranger knocked. "ah, let me see," and up the stairs he mounted, too. the servant sneaked the key-hole then, and saw a struggle on the bed, then ran below--"mavrone, asthore, come up, agrah, the lodger's dead!" * * * * * the moral is of gentlemen you do not know, you should beware: you should not use your bedroom, for a hiding-place, to curse, and swear. to curse a harmless constable upon his beat, is even worse; 'twas he who caught the jurymen, who gave the verdict on his corse. that shocking room is haunted now; it may not raise a shock in you, but every dark november eve, there comes a shrouded cockatoo, and gliding in his pallid shirt, a wretched spectre doth rehearse, the record of his oathings dire! the cockatoo then shrieks a curse! the man of easy habits then will see the deadly deed anew, of how the neck was wrung by him, who slew his aunt, her cockatoo. the man of easy habits then, will see the evil sprite of gloom, come prowling for his guilty soul, and bear it down the trap of doom. the landlady can never make the lodgers in that room content, they never stay, beyond the day that she has asked them for the rent, but men are not so wicked now; they will not swear an oath for pelf. they're much about the same as you--almost exactly like myself. a gun solo. [illustration] by a lonely dried up fountain, in a purple irish mountain, my talk was interesting, with a female of that spot, when she sprang from off my knees; for rasping thro' the trees, a bullet stopped our jesting, i started at the shot! "it's my husband's gun!" she murmured, i sauntered from the spot!! [illustration: the semi-grand piano] i was walking thro' the darkness of the pleasant town of birr, 'twas late, and very lonely, you could not hear a stir when turning round a corner, i heard the music sweet, of a semi-grand piano, and a singing down the street. you will say it's not uncommon to hear the pleasant sound, of a semi-grand piano upon a midnight round, but o the silver music, of the voice that mingled there, with the semi-grand piano, was wonderful, and rare! i waited on in rapture, and harkened to the strain, i paused until she finished, and commenced the song again, and o the magic pathos, of her voice was such, i say'd "i'll warble when she's finished, an italian serenade." and so anon i warbled a heart bewitching thrill, all in the friendly darkness, beneath her window sill, i thought it might remind her, of the troubadours of old, tho' 'twasn't too romantic, for the night was dev'lish cold! it wasn't all italian, but it was much the same, it was a sweet impromptu, a song without a name, and if it doesn't bore you, i'll sing you just a verse, you'll say it might be better; but i think it might be worse. "o lady who was singing with happy semi-grand, a troubadour is waiting, he's asking for your hand, carrissima! mia! agrah! from other lands i roam, be ready with the trousseau, i'll come, and take you home! recordar, how i love you, this lay of mine will tell, o willow! willow! wirrasthrue! mavrone! i love you well! l'ami l'amo l'amantibus ri foldherando dum, mein fraulein cushla bawn agrah! get up your traps, and come!" it wasn't all italian, this song of mine you see, it wasn't like a tarantelle; 'twasn't like a glee, 'twas thought of on the spur, its thus that brightest songs are made, i think that you'll agree with me, 'twas a compo serenade. i felt the song was working, 'twas amorous, and new, 'twas making an impression, a thing i always do, as tho' the middle ages, were back again in birr, hark! hark behind her lattice, at last i heard a stir! o there's nothing like the feeling that passes through the mind when you know a lovely lady is pulling up her blind, and my heart was all a-flutter, in that lonely street of birr, when i heard the curtains rustle, with the sylphid hand of her. i saw the window open, i saw a face to scarce! i heard a voice that muttered "what are ye doin' there?" and over me was emptied a full and flowing can! which made me hurry homewards, a wet and wiser man! i sang my song that midnight, with voice of dulcet tone, my dulcet voice next morning was like a bagpipe groan, a blanket round my shoulders, my feet were in a pan, some doctor's stuff beside me, a sad and wiser man! [illustration] canticrank. if you have æsthetic notions of the classic beauty rare, you would never for a moment say that nature took the prize, for the elegance of figure, or tint upon her hair, of mother becca canticrank, you wouldn't like her eyes; her nose you couldn't admirate, her teeth are in a chippy state, her voice is like a corncrake, her manner like a knife; a cutting way of dealing with sentimental feeling, you wouldn't altogether care to choose her for a wife. but ah! she is the casket of a compensating excellence, the odour of a sanctity peculiarly her own, she knows she is, without a doubt, intensely moral out and out, and so she sits in judgment on a self-constructed throne. as censor of corruptousness, of nature in voluptousness, she rails in holy horror, with a puritanic rage, that beauty's form is shocking, in semi-raiment mocking, her own upholstered scragginess in picture or on stage. her loathing is the ballet; for lo! from court and alley, the thousand cinderellas are fairy clad and bright, a direr deed of sinning-- by dint of beauty winning their bread, than by the needle, in the murky candlelight, o mother becca canticrank, the ways of earth are very rank; but women live by beauty, intelligence, and toil. and toil is overcrowded, mam, intelligence is got by cram; and what's for lovely sally of the garret, shall she spoil? no! pray for her, and set her, as toiler for the sweater, or freeze her in the winter, on your doorstep in the street, with penance to her bones, by whiting up the stones, that you may moil her handiwork with smirch of dirty feet. or pray for her, and crape her, as vestal to the draper, to do the woful penance, of canticranks to please; till worn out and weary, unto her bedroom eyrie, she staggers up at midnight, then bring her to her knees; do anything, but let her enjoy a way, to better the miserable midnight of her life, into the day of brighter fortune's light; aye, crush her back to night, and teach her how to thank you, by kneeling down to pray. yes, hound away the ballet, destroy the chance of sally, for she has many prizes in the marriage market won. by hypocritic prudity, go boom the semi-nudity, of drawing room and salon, for the first and second son. [illustration: caught in the breach.] of fascinating parts, he played with female hearts; 'twas reprehensible, as you may guess; but still it was his way, continued he to play, until a maiden asked him for redress, and folly bore the fruit, of breach of promise suit, he owns a couple of thousand pounds the less, he's a sorry man to-day, he does confess, and the wily way of woman he does bless, and his pipe is all that he will now caress, he doesn't care to think of it, the mess! [illustration: a kleptomaniac's doom.] the lord of masherdudom wore on his essencèd curls a golden zone of strawberry leaves, and rays with pips of pearls, tho' he was called an englishman his blood was prussian blue, which unto his complexion gave a gallimaufry hue, the earl of masherdudom, he was just as he began, he seemed in perpetuity, a fossil ladies' man, and yet he wasn't what you'd call an absolute success, he hankered to be more, than most; he wasn't, he was less, for he was poisoned with the grip of miser hungered greed, and racking rent upon the screw, he made his tenants bleed. he loved his parson; for he taught that gold was dross, and scutch, to men who of the sinful chink, had not got overmuch; he taught by unctions homily, how really false, the leaven of gold is to a tenant here, compared with gold in heaven; but man with base ingratitude is rife, they did not bless the earl of masherdudom, so he wasn't a success. one day 'twas ruminating thus, alone, and in his club, "my politics do fail" he said "to fail, aye there's the rub, i was a high conservative; i am, what am i now? an india rubber ball of wind, a pinhole in my brow, evaporated of my brain, a shrunken rag, and dust, a something must be done i wot, i wis a something must;" he took a portly bottle up, and from its tinselled neck, he poured the buzzing nectar forth, and without pause or reck, into his æsophagus then decanting it straightway he lit a weed,--he was a man who never smoked a clay,-- "oddsbodkins to that liberal!"--he swore in antient guise of quaintly oath--"he's more than i, i wot, for he is wise unto the leading, and the light that gives to men a glim of what they know is just, i'm but a farthing dip to him," twas thro' his indignation he did make a vulgar slip and coined so rude a simile,--in re the farthing dip; "i find my brains have broken loose, my occiputs to let, but ha! i've got a last resource, that none may wot of yet, i'll take my diamond ring to-night, and use it round his panes, and in a mask i'll burgle him, and steal his liberal brains!" [illustration] he quaffed the glorious fizz again, a swill both deep and strong nor witted he, nor wotted he, it was a lawless wrong to steal another's brains. he then invested in some crape, and putty, thus to make his nose more liberal of shape; he turned his coat, its lining was of party colored trim, and got a life preserver "now i'll go and burgle him!" [illustration] that night he sneaked the toepath o'er, with serpentine device, and round a postal pillar red, he scouted slyly twice, until on india rubber soles, at length he reached the goal, and up the garden wall he clomb, and down the wall he stole! then knotting on his mask of crape, with spry ambition fain, he slid, and worked his diamond ring around the window pane, he crept into the servant's hall, no maid, or cook was there; he took his boots, and gaiters off, and climbed along the stair; he sought to catch the banister, to guide his pilot fist; but headlong down the flight he fell, the banister he missed! and lo! from every room above, the shrieks of horror rose, from girls in papered tresses, bereft of daylight clothes, and full for twenty minutes by the clock, their cries increase, of "ho! police" and "robbers hi!" and "murder ho police!" the butler fired a pistol shot, the cook discharged a spit! the boots let fly a bootjack, and the footman all his kit! the groom ran down the stable stairs with horsey oathings dire, and a constable came knocking said he "are you's on fire?" he put his bull's eye on him "ha! well here's a putty case! you needn't hide, behind that putty nose upon your face; i'm on the 'wanted' tack for you a couple of months or three, so don't you be disorderly, move on, and come with me," they put him on his country, and the evidence was queer, but said his lordship solemnly, "the crime that we have here, is rare in english jurisprud', a noble drinks, and goes with mask of crape upon his eyes, and putty on his nose, to burgle certain premises, but drink being in his head, mistook the house, attacked his own, and burgled it instead! now this is queer; but i have here, a very antient law, and from its context, you will mark, i this deduction draw, that should a man by suicide, attempt to sneak away, from curses that grow thick on him, we make the coward stay, and if a man by putty nose, and mask, and diamond ring, do burgle his own home, it's just a similar sort of thing, and so unto the upper house, for thy remaining years, i sentence thee!" and with his wig, the judge mopped up his tears. [illustration] [illustration: an ill wind blew him good!] i was to the windward walking, of love and marriage talking, when, zephyr like a feather, took my topper on its wing and i hollo'd! and i hollo'd! while another fellow followed, it stopped, they came together, with his foot upon the thing! �sthetic oaths i uttered, a threat for damage muttered, and my popping of the question, had also lifted wing. * * * * * she's wedded to another, and now i cannot smother, my blessing on that zephyr, and that fugitive top hat, for had i not been checked, my happiness was wrecked, i wouldn't be so rosy to-day, and round and fat. the ghost of hiram smike. she was a dainty lady, with golden hair, and cream of roses, her complexion, belike a charming dream. her eyes were sapphire lighted, her lips, with peachen bloom, paterre of pearls were framing, but in her heart a tomb; for many loves lay buried, that cemet'ry below-- o fie on it for ladies, with love, to trifle so. at last unto a stranger, her stony heart, did strike, his wealth was most romantic, his name was hiram smike. 'twas on her mother's sofa he looked at her, said he, "i'm kinder sweet on you, love, will you accept of me? i've travelled half this orange, and never saw your likes; i calculate you oughter join the wigwams of the smikes." his wealth was most romantic, she answered him with tact, said he, "i'm off to-morrow, my trunk is ready packed; i must be off to 'frisco, to see my corn is barned, don't marry in my absence, for if you do, i'm darned! now play some tune, that's proper, to show that you're engaged, expressive of your promise, and how your heart is caged; strike up some soothin ballad, to tell how you'll be true, and i'll work in a chorus, of yankee-doodle-do." her fairy fingers wandered, along the ivory keys, of her new rosewood cottage, like warble thro' the trees; she sang, that she'd be faithful, all in a soothing strain, while he worked in a chorus--and then he crossed the main. it was a level twelve months, a fortnight, and a day, since hiram smike departed, and yet he stayed away; but she did wait no longer, and they were back from church, it was the wedding breakfast, she's left him in the lurch. "a health unto the bridegroom," and up they rose to drink; when hark! a cry was uttered that made the lady think; a voice of an old woman, employed upon that day, to do some extra tending, "look here," said she, "i say, i guess you do not know me because i've shaved my chin, i'm dressed like an old woman, but i'm a man within; i'm hiram smike, your lover, who left the yankee shore, to come back here to wed you, i'm darned for evermore. you've lifted me like thunder, but you shall never boast of how you jilted hiram--i'm off to make a ghost!" he said, tucked up his flounces, and, fluttering through the door, he left them all astounded, and he was seen no more. next morning in the dodder, upon the city side, a man beheld a woman, come floating down the tide. and far away in london, a bride, and bridegroom fled from their hotel at midnight--a ghost was round the bed! they sought a second lodging, but in the room, as host, was waiting to receive them that sad, intruding ghost. they tried a cabman's shelter, but it was all in vain, that tantalizing spectre was by their sides again. aye, even in the daylight, in rotten row, aloud they heard an awful murmur like water thro' the crowd; a moan as from neuralgia did on each tympan strike, "his ghost is on the war path avenging hiram smike." they tried the penny steam-boats, the railway underground, the busses and the tramcars, but still they always found that busy ghost around them, their lives could not be worse. "o thunder!" shrieked the bridegroom, "i'll seek for a divorce." but when the court was opened, the judge refused to sit, for every pleading lawyer had got a sneezing fit; and then there came the earthquake, the ruddy sunsets came, when lo! quite unexpected, one night, they saw a flame. a flash like a vesuvian, did by the table strike, with a satanic whisper, "you're wanted, hiram smike." and from that curious moment, there is no more to tell, they're having every comfort, i hear they're doing well. [decoration] [illustration: why did ye die?] "o pat, the blush is on your face, you're white, an' cowld an' still, i'm all alone, an' by your side, upon the bleak damp hill. the beatin' from your heart is gone! the starlight from your eye, mavrone asthore, o pat agra! arrah! why did ye die? a sthrake of blood is on your breast, an' blood is on your brow, o let me die meself, an' rest, it's all i care for now. i want to go where you are gone, an' in your grave to lie! ah! pat avrone, i'm all alone, arrah! why did ye die? me curse is on the men avick! that brought you out this night, that took you off an' made me sick, an' coaxed ye to the fight, o sure 'twas wrong to give your life, an' lave your wife to cry, ah! pat you should have stayed at home, arrah! why did ye die? you wouldn't take me warnin', pat, an' shun the moonlight boys,"-- "ah! biddy whisht! wake out of that, you're dhramin'! stop yer noise! ye've dhragged the blankets off of me, i'm jammed against the wall, an' you're bawlin' all for nothin' for i'm not dead at all!" [illustration] [illustration: a pretty little land i know] a pretty little land i know, surrounded by the pearly spray; it's where the em'rald shamrocks grow in fertile propagation. the great bear in the polar sky can see it at the fall of day, when peeping with his glistening eye, towards britain's mighty nation. for when the sun is rolling down into the ocean for the night, in all his radiant golden crown, and purple-flecker'd rays; while tucking on his dreaming cap, inside the crimson curtains bright, the great warm-hearted kingly chap, looks back with loving gaze. and where the shining waters dance across the wild atlantic deeps, he takes a sudden, pleasing glance; and when the twilight cometh grey on other shores, with coaxing glow, he winks his eye before he sleeps, upon that charming land i know, that's jewel'd in the pearly spray. there, lore of bravest deeds enshrine great phantoms of historic days; there, myrtle wreaths of memory twine o'er many storied graves; there, many marble brows are bound by sculpture of the poet's bays, the while their souls are still in sound from harp strings to the waves. with glorious wealth of hair in curls, and beauty, real elating, boys, it's there you'll find most darling girls in plentiful diffusion. and cupid, with his bow and darts, his murders perpetrating, boys, don't care at all what crowds of hearts he slays by love's delusion. [illustration: how they enlist] two guardsmen, and a dublin boy were drinking in a bar the dublin boy was standing treat, unto the men of war, and thus to one, he speaketh so-- the taller of the two-- "i wonder how men come to go and list, now how did you? the soldier grinned a stately grin, in military style, he meant it for the dublin boy as patronising smile! "it kind of sort like worries me,-- this was the cause of that, i always liked to feed on lean, i couldn't bolt the fat! "one day, it was at dinner, see, a big disgustin' lump of fat, was dumped upon my plate, i got the bloomin' hump! i merely took the thing upon my fork, and with a sigh, i let my father have the fat whop in his bloomin' eye! "a sign of partnership dissolved between my boss, and me, i took the shillin', and became a guardsman, as you see, but there! my appetite has been most tricky like, and mean, now i can eat a pound of fat, and i detest the lean!" [illustration] [illustration: the kindergarten way.] in a perfumed orange grove, ajacent to cordova, i taught the english grammar unto a lady gay; the verb "to osculate" i taught to conjugate, corporeally depicted, in kindergarten way. but by eavesdropping trick, a caballero quick, with lapse of condescension,-- but where i may not mention,-- in dexter handed flick, the spanish verb to "stick" corporeally inflicted, in kindergarten way. the verb "to do," he did it, for spanish laws forbid it; to translate free, corporeallee, the verb "to love," and practice it, upon the pupil, 'tis unfit, to illustrate, its active state, when passive hate, behind a gate, doth lie in wait, to teach the verb "to suffer," in kindergarten way; he taught the verb "to suffer," by impromt sword display, i learnt the verb "to suffer!" and would not, could not stay, so left upon that day, my fee he did not pay, his ingrate, spanish way! [illustration: curtain] opinions of the press on the barney bradey brochures by wm. theodore parkes. "it is pleasant to turn from these gloomy details to the hearty, rollicking, honest, joyous spirit of barney bradey. he sings the prince's installation to the tune to which _ingoldsby_ sang the queen's coronation, and with very much of the same spirit and success. the details are full of real good humour, and are thus picturesquely concluded with a touch of the ulster king at arms.... barney bradey's eye was pretty well everywhere but it failed to see one incident of the day.... all this is worthy of being sung by such a bard as the author of 'st. patrick's ruction.'"--_athenæum._ "most people know barney bradey, and the more you know of him the better you like him. perhaps very few of your comic poets have achieved such legitimate success as barney, whether in 'st. patrick's ruction' or, the 'queer papers,' or even in the fugitive pieces which come to us from time to time. the whole story of napoleon's war is told in verse, with a genuine irish humour, abounding in good points and suggestive images. the fun is quite of an original kind, and is really _sui generis_. the author has great command of language, expressive yet simple, and manages meter with uncommon skill. the strange inversions, provoking hyberbole, and quaint terms characteristic of irish humour, are here lavishly displayed; and the man who would not laugh with barney, while yet appreciating his satirical truth, must be unhappy indeed. the range of thought, though extensive, is very germane, and the humourist discovers a tinge of that byronic happiness in soaring high and still keeping the game in sight. we regret that we cannot quote a stanza or two from 'the christening cake' to prove to our readers that our praise is as well deserved as it is genuine."--_freeman's journal._ "this is a humourous extravaganza, by the author of 'st. patrick's ruction' and other comic rhymes, and is characterized by the same cleverness and quaint drollery. the 'baptism of fire,' the proclamations, letters, telegrams, projects, and incidents of the war, are represented in fantastic forms of illustration. the effect is as ridiculous as the author intends it to be."--_daily express._ "welcome barney!--in many a quaint, merry, and most grotesque "fytte," our rollicking irish rabelais runs over the most marked opening incidents of the franco-prussian war. all the outlandishness of diction; the funniness of hibernian phonetic spelling; the strange, wild, yet always true, similes and comparisons; the madcap, boisterous, merry-making that characterized 'st. patrick's ruction,' and the 'queer papers,' are repeated, equalled, aye, surpassed in the christening cake. barney's history of the war ends at saarbruck. we long to hear him on weissembourg, sedan, strasbourg, metz, and paris. we lately noticed 'st. patrick's ruction,' a work as full of real irish witticisms as any we ever perused, and one that has won its author unstinted praise. the orthography of the present brochure is as comically outrageous, the similes and comparisons as far-fetched, and yet as true to nature--the whole dainty tome as full of genuine, rollicking, open-hearted irish fun and humour as 'the installation' or 'sods from puncherstown.' it is pathetic, comical--true to nature, true to art."--_tyrone constitution._ "it is seldom in these days that one comes upon anything thoroughly and undeniably irish in the matter of witty writing. but the productions of 'barney bradey' are a refreshing exception to this doleful rule. in 'st. patrick's ruction,' and the 'queer papers,' we rejoiced to find that an original had arisen among us; and now, in another production, we are pleased to see our first opinion verified. the design of the piece lies in the combination of fifteen poems in one 'harmonious whole.' the story ends with the capture of saarbruck, and all throughout runs a vein of most pungent and telling satire."--_post._ "the clever author of 'st. patrick's ruction has presented the public with another exceedingly witty pamphlet. the language is well chosen, and is sure heartily to amuse the reader; there is a vein of well-directed satire in every line that exhibits the thoughtfulness of the apparent careless writer."--_limerick chronicle._ "barney sings in anglo-irish doggrel of the most exquisite and original kind. his readers, whose name is legion, will find him quite as entertaining in those 'queer papers' as when his comet-like genius first blazed upon the world in 'st. patrick's ruction."--_limerick reporter._ "barney bradey is a poet of no ordinary powers. it is not going too far to say that he has acquitted himself to his own satisfaction, and also to that of others. his orthography is peculiar, and his fun and wit are thoroughly irish. the droll and clever barney is a queer character, but he is so full of humour and says so many witty things that he must become a favourite with every one."--_dundalk democrat._ "this poem under notice is merry in the extreme, and displays an accurate knowledge of irish character, and of the peculiar english in which it likes to display itself. the author wishes everybody to be agreeable, and sets a good example himself. here is a description of the ladies present at the installation service, full of the gentlest satire.... in addition, there is prose, entitled 'sods from the turf of puncherstown.' it makes merry, but most good-humouredly, with everybody and everything, and by many readers will be regarded as fully equal to most of artemus ward's attempts. we have not seen his 'tails and ballids,' but it is spoken of highly, and we do not think the present attempt is deserving of less praise."--_portadown news._ "this is a whimsical and clever little production, written in a style of orthography peculiarly its own, and conveying a vast amount of humour. the lines entitled 'o law! there's a star from the sky,' are rich and full of humorous comicality, greatly heightened by their droll versification."--_derry journal._ "the grand processions, crushing, crowding, cheering, are all graphically detailed by the poetic 'barney.' altogether, a very pleasant hour may be spent in company with our facetious friend, 'barney bradey.'"--_carlow sentinel._ "barney bradey has acquired considerable success in his treatment of irish wit and character, partly in prose and partly in poetry: the latter runs on in a clear stream of merriment, while the former, with rollicking fun, possesses an undercurrent of light wit, and occasionally of caustic sarcasm. taken as a whole the little book is exceedingly readable, and as a bold venture on a very delicate field of literature, may be looked on as a decided success."--_herald._ "barney bradey will cause a merry laugh to many by his piquant humour and droll conceits. they display at times an acuteness of observation and a pungency of wit which is heightened by the quaint mode of expression used."--_king's county chronicle._ "over barney bradey's papers every reader is sure to laugh. they are full of fun and jollity. the only fault is their brevity."--_malvern news._ "barney bradey is one gem of the isle. he understands the 'boys,' and expresses their opinions in a very cute sensible way."--_kirkcudbrightshire advertiser._ "barney bradey's papers are so droll that we cannot do better than give our readers the one 'matrimonial.'"--_eastern post._ "barney bradey's papers will afford considerable amusement.'--_ayrshire express._ "barney bradey's papers are full of genuine humour."--_greenwich gazette._ "the facetious style has an excellent exponent in the person of barney bradey."--_brighton daily news._ "prose or verse come equally facile to his exceedingly humorous and racy pen."--_ecclesiastical gazette._ none none sweet rocket books by mary johnston sweet rocket michael forth foes sir mortimer harper & brothers, new york established sweet rocket _by_ mary johnston author of "sir mortimer" "michael forth" "to have and to hold" "foes" etc. [illustration: logo] harper & brothers publishers new york and london sweet rocket copyright, , by mary johnston printed in the united states of america published october, sweet rocket i the woman driving turned the phaeton from the highway into a narrow road. almost immediately the forest through which they had been passing for a mile or more deepened. it was now a rich woodland, little cut, seldom touched by fire. apparently the road knew little use. narrow and in part grass-grown, soft from yesterday's rain, dimmed by many trees, now it bent and now it ran straight, a dun streak, cut always in front by that ancient, exquisite screen of bough and leaf. the highway dropped out of sight and mind. the woman to whom this countryside was new, sitting beside the woman driving, drew a breath of pleasure. "oh, smell it! it goes over you like balm!" "it washes the travel stains away. take off your hat." the other obeyed, turning and placing it upon the back seat beside a large and a small traveling bag. she drew off her gloves, too, then, straightening herself, sighed again with happiness. "how deep it goes ... and quiet! it's thousands of miles away!" "hundreds of thousands, and right at hand!" leaves were beginning to turn. maples had lighted fires, hickories were making gold, dogwood and sumac dyeing with crimson. ironweed, yet blooming, blotched the roadside with purple. joe-pye lifted heads of ashy pink, goldenrod started forth, in places farewell-summer made a low mist of lilac. the road dipped into a dell. the gray horse, the phaeton, crossed a brown streamlet, sliding, murmuring. mint filled the air. the road lifted and ran on again into mystery. blackbirds flew across, a woodpecker tapped and tapped, a squirrel ran up an oak. but for all of faint, stealthy rustle, perpetual low sound and small movements without end, deep, deep, deep rest was the note. rest and solitude. the old, strong, gray horse was named daniel. this was his road since he was a colt. sometimes he might find upon it whitefoot and bess, the farm horses, drawing the farm wagon, but oftenest it was solitary like this--his road--sweet rocket road. the phaeton moving its wheels rolled it, droned it forth--"sweet rocket road--sweet rocket road." "there are five miles of it," said marget. her tone added, "i love it--its solitariness, its ownness!" "it's miraculously beautiful," answered her companion. "it aches, it is so beautiful!" "sweet rocket road--sweet rocket road," said the wheels. "way to sweet rocket--way to sweet rocket." "it is straight and single-minded as an arrow. no one goes but one who wishes to travel to sweet rocket. it is our road in and our road out. there seems to be no other." "'seems'?" "i mean that it is the only road made with spade and pick." they traveled again in silence. the visitor sat, a small, elderly woman, with a thin, strong, intelligent face. something about her, alike of strength and of limitation, said, "teacher for long years." she sat with her hands in her lap, looking at that truly beautiful road and the forest walls. but at last with a sigh of appreciation she turned to talk. "twenty years and more since we last met! but you keep young, marget. i had no difficulty in picking you out of the station crowd." "nor i you, dear miss darcy! but then i've always kept you in mind and heart. i owe you so much!" "ah, marget, not much!" "i owe you learning. it is a good deal to take a country girl, charge scarcely anything for her and see that she gets knowledge and learns how to get more--and more--" "you are of those who reward teaching. don't let us talk about that which was neither load nor task and so is no debt. the 'now' interests me. you look well. your face is a rose under clear brown." "i am well." "and happy?" "yes, happy." "i know that you couldn't be happy unless you were helping." "i don't know how much i help. i help some." "you were never given to long letters. there really is much that i don't at all know about you! and such as they are, i have had very few letters of late years. it was the sheerest accident my finding out that this was your part of the country. i might have gone to the conference and never known that you were not twenty miles away!" "the day before i had your card i knew that something pleasant was going to happen." "well, tell me what you do--" marget land looked over daniel's ears, down the vista of the road. at this point hemlocks grew to either hand, cones of a green that was almost black. between rose sycamores with pale arms and leaves like silky brown hair. at the road edge the farewell-summer made a lacework, and above it glowed the sumac torches. blue sky roofed the autumn earth. the air just flowed, neither hot nor cold, milk warm, happy. summer and winter had made a bargain, struck a compromise, achieved a diagonal. gold autumn, crimson autumn, violet autumn, dusky and tawny autumn--autumn balm--autumn drawn up into a gracious figure--keats's autumn--a goddess! she drew a light, sighing breath. "i told you that i was happy.... isn't it strange--living? isn't it strange and sweet the way things come about? there's magic, all right! sweet rocket.... i was born in the overseer's house at sweet rocket. that was ten years after the war and there wasn't much nor many for my father to oversee. i love my father. he was what the mountain folk call 'a getter-on.' he had ability and a lot of goodness and a lot of kindness. education from books had not come his way, but he knew many things. he had worked hard and saved, and after the war, when he gave up overseeing, or it gave him up, and when he turned merchant in alder, over there, he made money--as we looked at it in virginia in those days. some money, that is. he had ten thousand dollars in bank when old major linden died, and mary linden married and went away, and sweet rocket was sold for debt. he bought it--though he kept a steady face, he was so proud to buy it! i was nine years old when we moved out of the overseer's house into the big house--my mother, my father, my two brothers, and i. i loved it, loved it, loved it--love it, love it, love it!" "i remember the very way in which you used to say it, 'sweet rocket!'" "we became at once land poor. and my father had an illness, and, though he seemed to recover, never did quite recover. when it came to choosing and bargaining, making and laying by, he was never again the man he had been. my mother, too, who had worked so hard when she was young--too hard--began to fail. will, my elder brother, went west. edgar, the younger, wanted to go, too. he did not like it here. you see ... every one still said: 'the old overseer bought it. they were all born in the overseer's house. now they rattle around in the lindens' house! bottom rail--!' it was still called 'the linden place.' as i grew old enough to have cared for what they said i somehow escaped caring. but edgar cared. it was hard on the boy.... but i loved sweet rocket, loved it, love it! i love the overseer's house and the big house--which isn't, of course, very big, for the place was always a simple one--simple and still and out of the way!" she seemed to pause somewhat deeply to vision something within. miss darcy watched the moving walls, now standing close, now a little receding, now opening as it were into gateways through which were seen forest lawns and aisles. they shut in again. a golden bough brushed the phaeton. she who had been speaking put out her hand and touched it. "how could one help but love it? to me it is forever so old and forever so new! i lock with it.... what was i saying? well, edgar did not like it, and my mother failed, and father had less money and less money--and still we went on ... five years, eight years, ten years. then in one year my father died and my mother died.... will came home. he and edgar said that we must sell sweet rocket. i wasn't eighteen. we knew about the mortgage, but we didn't know about some other debts. when it was sold there was hardly anything to divide among us--" "the lindens didn't buy it back, then?" "no, not then. northern people bought it. will went back to wyoming, and edgar with him. i went to my mother's sister--aunt hester--who lived in richmond. i went to her with my two hundred and fifty dollars a year. she's one of the best of women. i never had anything but kindness from her--and one of the greatest was when she spoke of me to you!" she put her hand over miss darcy's hand. "i had been to school a little, of course. there were some books at home, and i had borrowed where i could. but in richmond, to you, i really began to go to school." "you studied as very few study, marget. you studied as though waves of things were coming happily back into memory." "yes. but you released something. always fire is lit from fire. always one comes to any that sit in darkness.... well, i went to school for three years. then off you go from that school to canada, to england, to i don't know where! i stayed in richmond and went to a business school. i learned typewriting and stenography. i began to earn my living." "you were with baker and owen?" "yes. and then i passed into library work. i went to washington. i was in the library there for five years. i saved. i wrote a few papers that were published. i took what they brought me and what i had saved, and i left the library and i went around the world, second class and third class--and at times fourth--and i learned and enjoyed. i taught english here and there, and so i paid as i went. i came back in four years--back to richmond and aunt hester, until i might look about me and see what i could do, for i must earn." "if you had written to me then in new york--" "i felt that. but there is something--don't you know there is something?--that guides us.... i lay one night thinking of sweet rocket. i could always come back here, just as really--come back from the ends of the earth! i came back often. there has always been, along the garden wall, sweet rocket--dame's violet, you know. some of it is white and some is purple--shining clusters growing above your waist. i could gather them in my arms and feel them against my cheek. i could get _into_ the dark cedars that come up from the river. i lay in richmond, more than half feeling, more than half seeing.... there's a country, you know, out of which things come down to you.... it came down--knowledge! i meant to go back to sweet rocket." she paused. "look at that tree--" "it is so splendid! a sugar maple, isn't it? and that one?" "mountain linden. it puts on a clear, pale gold, like the old saints' haloes." "i hear water." "it is the little stream that we cross. see how sweet and clear and sounding it goes! hemlock run. all right, daniel!" daniel bent mouth to water and drank. "no check rein?" "no." gray horse and old phaeton moved again. the wood grew richer and deeper. "we are nearing the river." "and then, in richmond, you heard about sweet rocket?" "aunt hester had a letter from alder. richard linden, old major linden's nephew, had bought sweet rocket. i was glad that some one who must love it was there. aunt hester said that he had visited it once or twice as a young boy. he would remember it then as i remembered it. the second letter said that he was almost blind, and alone on the place save for the colored people. then i saw his advertisement in the richmond papers. he wanted a secretary, one who could read aloud well. so i answered, and was taken--five years ago." "how old a man is he?" "he is forty-seven and i am forty-four." "you have inner youth--higher youth." "yes. childhood there. so has he." "do you love him, marget?" "love him? yes! but not the once-time way, if that is what you mean. as he loves me, but not the once-time way. so we shall not marry, in the once-time way. but we live here together all the same." "well, if it is as fair as this road--" "it is just a simple house in the bent arm of a little river and with hills all around, and behind the hills, mountains. there are fields and an orchard and garden. it is hidden like a lost place, and happy like a place for evermore finding itself." "tell me about mr. linden." "no, let us wait for that. or i can tell outward things--how we live?" "yes." "he has only a small, fixed income. it wouldn't at all go round the year, so we farm. we have an excellent man, roger carter, who lives in the overseer's house. wheat, corn, buckwheat, hay, and apples! so we live and can buy--though with an elegant spareness--books and red-seal victor records and more and more flowers for the flower garden." "of course you have help about the house?" "there are two colored men and a boy, and mimy the cook and zinia the housemaid. but with the home garden and cornfield and orchard and the two cows and the chickens and ducks and daniel and whitefoot and bess there is more than enough to do. you will be surprised to see how much he does himself." "how can he see?" "he can tell light from darkness, and the dim mass of things. and then, when you are blind, you grow so skillful with the other senses! and of course in a measure all of us are eyes to him. he has a great, strong body. he hoes and digs. he knows always what is beneath his fingers. he can weed a garden as well as i can. he gathers fruit and berries and vegetables and knows the perfect from the imperfect. he does no end of things. perhaps he may work with his hands four hours a day." "and then?" "there are letters. i write them, and i keep his accounts, and, of course, the house. then we read. it is a sandwiched business, but we must average three hours a day with books. he gets up very early and walks before breakfast, and usually again in the afternoon. sometimes i drive him on this road. sometimes i walk with him, sometimes he goes alone. after supper we read, or listen to the victor singing and playing, or we talk, or sit by the fire, still and thinking. or on the porch steps when weather is warm, where i can see and he can image the stars." "i see a good life." "we are not without neighbors, though it seems so lonely. and then folk come to us. his blindness was an accident, you know. he has had life in the world as i have had life in the world. we _have_ life in the world." "he is one, then, that may be loved?" "he is a great poet, though he would never call himself so. he just feels and acts so.... i think his face is beautiful." "i think that your face is beautiful," thought miss darcy. the tawny road turned a little east. trees yet green, trees that wore the one color the year round, blended with golden trees and scarlet trees. wild grapes with twisted and shaggy stems and yellowing leaves, with blue grapes hanging over, ran and mounted, held by the forest arms up to the sun. sumac that was somehow like the indian, that seemed to hold memories of the indian in the land, grew in each minute clearing. there arose a little, rustling wind, the ineffable blue air moving lightly. brown butterflies abounded. the sense grew strong of remoteness, of calm that was not indolence, of beauty gathered and at home. miss darcy moved a little. marget land turned toward her. "you feel it, don't you?" "yes." "they that come feel it. they are drawn. there are centers of integration. this is one. i do not know who started it. probably many, working in at different times. but now it is in action." "is that mysticism?" "no. it is fact." the forest stopped with clean decision. the road ran through fields where the corn had been cut and shocked. the shocks stood in rows like brown wigwams. daniel and the phaeton came down to a little river, very clear, falling and murmuring over stones above and below a ford, but at the ford a mirror, reflecting autumn hills and heaven. across the ford stretched a little pebbly beach, crowned with trees and grass, and behind the trees stood a brick house, old-red, not so large as large houses go, but of excellent line. it had a porch with doric pillars, weather-softened. it stood among fine trees in a small valley shut in on all sides by hills and mountains, all forested to the top. only the road and the river seemed to have way out and in, only road and river and air and birds. valley and colored mountain walls were proportioned, modeled, tinted to some wide and deep artist's taste. the tone was rest without weakness, movement without fury, solitude that had all company. "how could you help but love it!" said the visiting woman. "i don't try to help it.... if it burned down--if the hills sank and the wood was destroyed--still it would endure, and still i could come here. now we cross the river. look at the bright stones and the minnows, gliding, darting!" up from the river, across the pebbly shore, rose cedars dark and tall. "they are like warders. only there's nothing, really, to ward out. all things may meet here. we go this way, to the back of the house." "it feels enchanted." "it is so simple. you might call it meek. there are people who pass who say, 'how lonely!'" they were now at the back of the house, where the road skirted the flower garden. here was the back door, with three rounded, moss-grown steps of stone. daniel and the phaeton stood still. the two women left the vehicle. a colored man appeared. "miss darcy, this is mancy. mancy, this is miss darcy, come to stay with us as long as she will." mancy, tall and spare, with an indian great-grandmother, said that he was glad to see her, and took her bags. in the brick kitchen in the yard, mimy was singing: "swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home--" ii "i might stay a week." anna darcy spoke to herself, standing at the window of the room where marget had left her. she looked down upon flowers and out to the southern wall that closed in the valley. the mountains had the tints of desert sands at sunset. they had long wave forms; they were not peaked, nor very high. they were so old, she knew--appalachians--older than apennine or himalaya. they were wearing down here, disintegrating. the weather would be lowering them year by year. they were removing and building elsewhere. they had granaries full of memories, and they must have somewhere, springing like the winter wheat, as many as the blades of wheat, anticipations. down in the garden she saw marigolds and zinnias, late blooming pansies, mignonette, snapdragon and aster and heliotrope, larkspur, mourning bride, and citronalis. a rosy light bathed garden and fields. this was the back of the house. she saw two or three cabins and a barn, stacked hay, and a rail fence worn and lichened, fostering a growth of trumpet vine and traveler's joy. she heard cow bells. a boy with a good-natured ebony face crossed the path below, carrying two milk pails. chickens, turkeys, and guineas walked about in the barnyard. from the kitchen, fifty feet from the house, floated a smell of coffee and of bread in the oven. all the place was clean, friendly. she turned to the large, four-windowed room. the walls had a paper of lavender-gray, on which hung three prints. the bed was a four-poster, with a linen, ball-fringed valance. books stood ranged above an ancient desk; a blue jug held asters. there was a large closet and--modern blessing--a bathroom, white tubbed, pleasant and light. it had been, she saw, an old dressing room between the two chambers upon this side of the hall, with a door for each. both doors being ajar, she saw marget's room, large like this one, furnished not unlike this one. but that, something told her, was really the spare room, and this that she was to dwell in was marget's room. it had the feel of marget. "it is the pleasantest, and so she has given it to me." she bathed and changed her dress. all the time old, happy rhythms ran in her head. dressed, she sat down by one of the western windows, in the yet warm light. she rested her head against the back of the chair, her eyes closed. she was no longer a young woman, and she had had a tiring year, and it was grateful to her to rest thus. rest! it was the word, it was the feeling, that was dwelling in this place. rest, rest, deep rest without idleness. the air was so rare and fine--mountain air. she remembered that they said that the valley itself lay high. mountain air. but even while she thought that she had a sudden sense of sea air, fine and strong and drenched with sun. there would be five or six rooms on this floor. all were large, and the hall between was large. the stairway was very good, the woodwork everywhere good. the ceilings were high. they used lamps and candles. the day had been warm. fire was not needed. but wood was laid in the fireplace and the wood box beside it held chestnut and pine. this window gave upon the west. here were grass and the red and gold trees, and the pebbly beach and the sickle of the water, and the lion-colored fields and the wood through which they had driven, and the amethyst mountains. the sun had set, but the sky stayed aglow. the fatigue went out of the old teacher's face. "'cast thy bread upon the waters, and after many days it shall return to thee!'" she did not consciously repeat this, but the saying overhung her. she had slightly opened the door giving upon the hall, so that marget, returning, might know that she was ready. stair and hall floor were bare wood. a step sounded upon the one and then upon the other. she was sensitive to the way folk trod. "that is mr. linden." he passed her door and she heard him enter his room across the hall. marget presently came for her. "let us go into the garden until the bell rings." the garden lay spread in breadths of violet brocade. they walked on brick paths and smelled box and mignonette. then zinia rang the supper bell. the two entered the lower hall yet drenched with the afterglow. a man, tall and big framed, turned at their step. "miss darcy, this is mr. linden." he put out his hand; the visitor laid hers in it. it was a strong hand, likable. his voice, when he spoke, was the voice for the hand. "i am glad to see you, miss darcy! marget and i are glad." there was light enough to show a strong-featured, clean-shaven face. the eyes were blue-gray. they were not disfigured. she also came to think his face a beautiful one. they went into the dining room, where two lamps were lighted. the mahogany table had a blue bowl of larkspur. zinia, in a blue cotton dress and white apron, waited. there were coffee, delicate rolls, a perfection of butter and of cream, a salad, coddled apples, and sugar cakes. marget sat behind the coffee urn and cups and saucers. richard linden did not take the foot of the table, but sat beside her, at the right. she aided him quietly, perfectly, nor did he need as much aid as might be thought. he was so skillful; eyes must be in fingers. zinia, too, marked his needs, forestalled things. she called him mr. dick. she had for him a low, rich, confidential whisper. "the salt, mr. dick." "cottage cheese, mr. dick." marget called him richard. the three talked of the ring of this valley and of the ring without and around it, of miss darcy's doings and of sweet rocket's, and of everybody's. it seemed that papers, magazines, the news, must come here. earth was the earth of the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century. there was news enough. supper over, they went into the parlor that was opposite the dining room, and was no more parlor than library. it stretched around, a big room with old pictures, old furniture, with books. a fire flamed and sang. they sat in the firelight, richard linden on one side of the hearth and marget on the other, and miss darcy beside the latter. still there was talk. the visitor would have gathered where they stood on questions of the day, then suddenly saw that they stood all round and through, and that the day to them was so old and young that it included yesterday and to-morrow. that being so, their solutions were not always those currently offered. she also found that though they talked they were not talkative. with them conversation became a rhythmic thing--tranquil pause, deep retirement, then again the word. and it startled her almost, how completely they were one. when they had sat by the fire an hour marget, rising, put violin music upon a victrola. hafitz played to them a hebrew melody; kreisler played, and maud powell. the flames danced, the world heightened. then, one after the other, came three songs, and between each, as between the violin pieces, they watched the fire, and the forest and the night wind were felt around. "oh, that we two were maying!" the song ended, the fire burned, they heard the river, the forest was all around. a man's voice was lifted. "oh, that i knew where i might find him, that i might come into his presence!" again the wide and deep pause, and then the third song. "and the world shall go up with a shout unto god." marget shut the victrola. again they sat in that quiet. it was systole and diastole, it was in and out, and inexpressibly it rested! and that was what she wanted, rest. marget lighted a lamp that stood upon the table. linden said, "hadn't you rather not read, to-night?" "no. we won't read long." he turned to the visitor. "do you mind listening?" miss darcy was glad to listen. marget began to read. her old teacher remembered that she had read well twenty years ago. she read better now. the book was lafcadio hearn's _west indies_. "we travel so," said linden. "we take a right journeyer and journey with him." the fire flickered, then seemed to pass into actual fire of sun. they were in martinique, under pelée, in saint pierre, in grand anse. again she was startled to feel how real it was. she touched, she knew, the people of martinique. later, when the book had been closed, when they had said good night, one to the other, when she lay in bed in the dark quiet, she experienced strongly what a certain number of times in her life she had been able to experience faintly. she experienced coherence that was wider than old coherences. she interlocked with this place and her hosts. she held them, they held her. at the end of the week she must go afar. "but never any more so far that i lose the tune--never any more!" she went to sleep with a strange, fair feeling of sea about her. not that the forest, the hills and mountains, were not there, but she felt the sea likewise. "of course it is there, but i never thought to look at it or taste it! the sea and mountains and they and me, threaded together, talking together!" she slept. iii as she dressed, the next morning, she heard mimy singing, but no stir of her hosts. the sun was shining. in at window streamed life-giving air. her mind was upon the evening before and its current of happenings. as she had gone to sleep with the sea, of which they had read, about her, so now the three songs to which they had listened returned to mind, returned almost to sense. that was one remarkable thing about this place--the great vividness and depth of perception.... she knew the difference between usual or even intent thinking and intuition. her intuitions had not been vigorous--she had looked at them with a kind of gray wonder, as at pale children from afar. they came at long intervals, but were never forgotten. it now seemed that this was a good clime for them. she stood still in the middle of her room. her mind opened. "'oh, that we two were maying!' that is man and woman love, time out of mind; love and cry of love! it is romeo and juliet, it is tristan and isolde. 'oh, that i knew where i might find him, that i might come into his presence!' that is religious love that goes up from man and woman love. that is the onward going, the seeking of great lovers. 'and the world shall go up with a shout unto god.' that is when we move and feel and think, not as men and women, but as humanity. the great mating." the little firmament closed like eyelids and hid the greater. she was a small, gray woman, and she had beaten about in the intellect, and when gleams came like this she had taken them and promptly, when the sky closed, had doubted if they had ever existed. but to-day she was less inclined to doubt. there remained a faint luminousness in mind, a sense of depth behind feeling. she thought, "if i could stay in that garden i should indeed know bloom and music!" she moved about the room. "the point is that there _is_ such a garden." she finished dressing, and went downstairs. zinia met her in the hall. "good mahning! i hope you slept well? miss marget says you're to have breakfast on the porch. it's so warm and beautiful this mahning." "she has had hers?" "yes'm. she said tell you sweet rocket was home. i put the table here. but if it's too sunny i can move it." "it's not too sunny. i like sun," said miss darcy. "i like it, too," said zinia, and departed kitchenward. anna darcy sat and slowly ate catawba grapes. the porch was wide, the table placed between high, mellowed pillars. beyond them the autumn turf ran to great trees colored like venetian glass. the river crescent sparkled in light. beyond it she saw the fields and the woods through which they had driven. all was closed by the mountain wall, very soft and gracious in the sun, in the still, warm air. zinia brought coffee and rolls. there was honey upon the table, and an old blue basket-dish filled with red-amber grapes. zinia was very dark, supple, and strong. she had large, kind, african eyes, and beautiful teeth, and she moved with an ample and conscious majesty. miss darcy loved to watch her. the evening before, a collie lay upon the steps. miss darcy asked of him. "tam? he's gone with mr. dick." zinia stood by a pillar, watching with kind eyes the visitor's evident enjoyment of her breakfast. miss darcy had noted before, and noted now, the lack of any servility at sweet rocket. they all seemed too much a part of one another for that. but there was also that fine courtesy and feeling that did not speak out of the way when speech was not wanted. they all seemed to sail upon some inner current of understanding. she finished breakfast, and, rising, helped zinia to carry away the table. dining room and pantry shone clean and simple. zinia had flowers in the pantry, and upon the shelf below the china press an open book. miss darcy glanced. "what are you reading?--_pilgrim's progress?_" "yes'm," said zinia, in her rich voice. "i like that girl mercy." the house was clean and sunny; still, and yet singing somehow, like a great shell held to ear. she walked about, and at last went out into the high morning and the flower garden. the brick paths glistened. box smelled sweet, mignonette and citronalis. around flowed bird life and a vast insect life. multitudinous song and hum and chirr fell into harmony. she walked up and down the paths and partook of garden amusements, then went out by a wicket gate and found herself near the outdoor kitchen. a brown four-year-old was seated on the stone step. she stopped before him. "good morning!" "mahning." "what is your name?" "just so." "just so?" "yass'm." mimy appeared in the doorway. mimy was a small woman with a face like a carved cherry stone for wrinkles. "he's my grandson, ma'am, just so." "i heard you singing," said miss darcy. "i loved it." "singing's like butter on the griddle," said mimy. "it helps you turn things!" she sighed portentously, and then she groaned. "i've had a lot of things to turn! yes'm, i've lived long and turned a lot of things!" her voice was gloom, and yet carried more than a suspicion of rich chuckle. she enjoyed her old woes, disaster had grown so shallow. "i, too," thought the visitor, "have had a lot of things to turn! i, too, have come to where i can stand back and see the drama and feel the play thrill!" just so was a solemn young one. he sat and gazed as though in contemplation of the many things he would have to turn. then a brown hen came by, and he put out a brown toe and dug in the earth, and said, "shoo!" and laughed. miss darcy left him playing with a string of spools and a broken coffee mill. mimy in the kitchen was toasting coffee and singing. the coffee smelled better than good, the singing was without age in the voice. "who built the ark? oh, noah built the ark! it rained forty days, and it rained forty nights! 'there ain't any sun and there ain't any heights!' oh, noah built the ark!" miss darcy's path led on to the barn. cocks and hens, white and red, held the barnyard. she watched them with pleasure, and the sun on the gray walls and the barn swallows going in and out. then she found mancy sitting under a shed, mending a wagon shaft. "good morning!" "good morning!" "it's a lovely day." "it is so, ma'am! you're from the city, aren't you?" "yes." "i hope you like sweet rocket?" "i do. it makes you feel whole." mancy glanced at her. he was a long, brown man, with features between negro and indian. what you liked very much was his smile. it dropped over his face slowly, like sun on brown hills, out of quiet, cloudy weather. "that's a true saying!" he offered. "that's what i think about heaven. we'll just feel and know that we're well and whole." the school-teacher's mind said: "the negro is a religious character. he is always willing to talk of the lord and of heaven." "all the little torn bits coming together," finished mancy. he sat mending the wagon shaft. it came to her, standing watching him, to say something of the distracted and warring earth. his slow smile stole again over his face. "yes'm. we hurt ourselves right often." "you call it that--hurting oneself?" "yes'm. what do you call it?" "i don't know.... i suppose it _is_ hurting one's self--suicidal mania!" she thought. "perhaps all the history i have ever taught has been the story of self hurt and self heal--perhaps we fight our self in europe and asia and america. perhaps, in the tissue wide as space, centers here and centers there are beginning to learn self heal above self hurt--" she stood looking at the mountains while mancy worked on at the wagon shaft. presently she said, "you would say that this was a very lonely place, but i have touched a thousand things since i came that run out and touch everywhere!" "mountains aren't walls," said mancy. she left the barn and walked on to the orchard. the apples had been gathered, but a few red orbs yet hung from the branches. she walked beneath the trees and she thought of old, dull troubles and anxieties that had attended her life. this morning light seemed at work among them, disintegrating them. the sun came down between the trees. the air blew soft and fine. she returned to the house, and upon the porch steps found mrs. cliff with baskets to sell, woven of white-oak splits, in a mountain cabin, by her son and herself. she was waiting for marget and seemed content to wait as long as the sun shone. she wore a faded calico and a brown sunbonnet, and she dipped snuff. "good morning!" "mornin'!" mrs. cliff put her snuffbox in her pocket. "don't you want to buy a basket? these three are fer miss marget." miss darcy examined and admired. "i'd like this little one." mrs. cliff put it aside. "i hain't seen you here before." "i've just come. you've got a lovely country." "yaas. we think so. do you see yon clearing on mountain? i come from thar." miss darcy sat down, and she and the mountain woman talked of basket weaving and of the times, which mrs. cliff said were hard. "what do you think sugar is? an' what you got to give fer a pair of shoes? you've got to sit an' fergit, even while you're rememberin', or you don't git nowhar! i wish jesus christ would come on back!" "he is somewhat needed," anna darcy agreed. "i had a funny thing happen to me yesterday," said mrs. cliff. "i had jest finished that basket. i was setting on the step an' awful tired, an' i shet my eyes an' leaned my head back against the door. an jest like that i thought, 'he's in little bits in all of us, an' we've got to put him together.' an' jest thinking it, all in a minute i felt so big and rested! but it couldn't last. i wish it would come again." marget's voice was heard, speaking to zinia. "she's come back. they're mighty kind folk here!" "i know that." "they _like_ doin' you a good turn," said mrs. cliff, and, getting to her feet, gathered up her baskets. iv in the afternoon the three and tam went for a walk. they crossed the river by a footbridge and walked a mile by waterside. this brought them to valley end. the stream slipped on between close-standing hills, but the strollers turned aside into a glade from which the greater forest had been cut. young trees and tall old trees were set with some spareness. all wore robes like princes; all glowed in a dream of spring behind winter. the ground had gray moss and green moss, and all manner of minute and charming growths. the sun so came into this glade that the wild grape found and took advantage. it leaned its wine-hued, shaggy stem against trunks; it climbed and overran, and made bridges from tree to tree. its festoons shone aloft, its broad leaves and blue clusters dreamed against autumn sky. the air breathed dry and fine. sunshine lay on ground in shafts and plaques of gold. richard linden used a staff. marget kept near him and tam just ahead. walking so, you would not think he was a blind man. indeed, he seemed to have a sixth sense, he moved so easily. the three walked without much speech. the day was the sumptuous speaker; these woods, this feather air, the admirable poise of the year before its journey from hearth fire, the plain chant of the crickets, the trill of the bird. in a roll over his shoulder linden carried a wide and thick plaid. presently marget said: "let us rest before we turn back. miss darcy isn't the tramp that we are!" whereupon they pitched camp for half an hour, spreading the plaid beneath a tree. richard linden, resting against a chance bowlder, locked his hands behind his head and lifted his face to the high, free sky. marget took off her wide hat and lay down beside miss darcy, who sat on a stone. tam had the dry grass and moss and the fringe of the plaid. marget spoke. "we are under a young hickory, richard. it is all gold. there is a dogwood close by, and its leaves are red, and it is very full of berries. wild grape has started by the dogwood and crossed to the hickory. it is far and near and up and down. the leaves are half green and half yellow, and there are a thousand bunches of grapes." "i see!" he said; "and i hear a woodpecker." "it's yonder on a white oak. it's a flicker. there isn't a cloud in the sky, and far, far up, small as a dragon fly, is a buzzard sailing. there's a cedar waxwing in the dogwood stripping berries. there is another--a third! we frightened them away, but they are coming back. they're after the grapes. there will be fifty in a moment--" they kept still and watched, marget's hand on tam. slender, graceful, tawny, crested birds came in a flock. they entered the hickory and the dogwood. with quick movements of head and body they stripped the grapes and the scarlet dogwood berries. they perched and removed, and perched again. they kept up a low talk among themselves and a perpetual flutter of wings. it was as though a wind were in the trees, so continuous was the sound. blue grapes, dogwood berries, dropped upon the ground. for ten minutes the flock fluttered and fed, while with intent, pleased faces the human beings watched or listened. then tam became aware of a rabbit down the glade and started up. away flew the cedar waxwings. "oh, wasn't it lovely?" they sat still. richard linden, resting against the rock, kept his face raised to blue sky. "their life!" he said. "as we enter upon their life--" tam came back, the rabbit having vanished. "lie still, tam, lie still! get into your life-to-be for a little, and be quiet shepherd on a hill instead of shepherd's dog!" "their life--" the visitor to sweet rocket sat still, with her eyes upon the gold fretwork of the hickory. she was thinking of the birds. it was very sunny, very still in the glade. her companions also rested silent. they seemed to be in reverie, to be going where they would in their inner worlds. miss darcy followed the waxwings in their flight. she saw the flock that had been here, and other flocks, stripping wild grape and dogwood and cedar berries. they were far and near, in many a woodland glade. in thousands they twined and turned, they talked in the clan, their wings made a windy sound. and the woodpeckers! hammer and hammer, through the forests of the world! and the thrush that she had heard this morning, and the humming bird in the garden--and the crows that had cawed from a hillside, the hawk and the owl.... suddenly she saw in some space an eagle rise to its nest upon a crag edge. from the one she saw others. eagles in all the lands. for one instant she caught a far glimpse of the idea, the absolute eagle. there was the rush of a loftier sense. then she sank from that, but she saw eagles in all the lands. she saw the great hawks and the condors. green waves were beneath her; with sea birds she skimmed them in the first light, and the cries of her kind were about her. on the ice floes walked the penguins, the albatross winnowed solitude. with heron and flamingo and crane she knew shore and marsh. the white swan and the black swan oared their way through still waters. in their right circle moved the peacock and the pheasant, the lyre bird, the bower bird, and the bird of paradise. the nightingale sang in deep woods, and in southern thickets of yellow jessamine sang the mocking bird. the lark mounted into the air, the cuckoo called from the hedge, the wren built under the eaves. in the gray dawn, from a thousand farms and hamlets, crowed the cocks. over all the earth clucked the hen, peeped the downy chick. the swallows crossed a saffron sky and the whippoorwill cried in the night, and in the morning the quails said "bob white!" migrating hordes, like scuds of clouds, drove before favorable winds, north, south! she was plunged in the life of birds, where they waded between deep water and solid shore, where they lived in a world of green, where they flew aloft and afar, over land, over sea--all their plumage, shapes, and magnitudes. she seemed to hear their cheepings, cries and songs, to hear them and touch them, their sleekness, lightness, threaded beauty! over all the earth spread the passionate wooing, the daylong song. here were the nests, the multitudes, and the eggs, green and blue and white and dark. the nests and eggs became transfigured. the straw of the nests burned lines of white fire, the cup was diamond light, the shell of the egg no more than a window, and through it was seen the bird-past, and the bird desire and will and power. out of the egg the young--she heard the nightingales in the woods, the lark in the sky! "see the love and beauty and power and daring! see the thought and feeling pressing on--see them trooping into fuller being--see them men and women, their tribes and nations! when we have gone far, far on, see their human earth!" it was linden, she thought, who said that. she came back with a great throb of her heart to the earth beneath a golden hickory, to the october sun, in a little virginian valley. yet the two reclining there seemed still in a brown study, gone away. she thought: "i am come into a strange country! are they knowing, feeling all that life more intensely than i, for all that they lie there so quietly, thinking, one would say, of to-morrow's work, of a book they are reading, or of the cedar waxwings?... it is all in the range of perception, could i run like light all over the earth! there are those birds and their life. i only saw what _is_!" but she felt that while she had had a wave of it those two had a whole breadth of ocean. she felt that they were expert, adept. she felt again the breath of wonder. it was at once wonder and homelikeness. "glad--glad--glad that i came! my gray road turns!" richard linden dropped his hands from behind his head and passed them over his eyes. marget rose to her knees. there was deep light in her face. she lifted then let fall her arms. "oh, the _beauty_ when life is seen as a landscape, heard as a symphony, smelled as a garden, tasted as nectar, dwelt in as a house!" she rose to her feet. "the sun is gone from the grass. it is dawn in tibet. come, tam, let us be going home!" they folded the plaid and left the hickory and the dogwood. the glade was turning violet, but the hilltops showed golden and the mountains stood in light. a rich scent breathed from the earth, while the air carried a spear from the north. leaving the wood, they took again the path by the river, that sang toward them, that held pools of light. walking so, marget fell to talking of anna darcy's life, the manner of it, her steadfast work from year to year, and all her kindnesses, and all that she had given. at first miss darcy tried to stop her, but then she could not try any longer, the appreciation was so sweet. her life had been difficult, isolated for all the stir around her, subject to sorrows, a little withered and gray. she felt the exquisite caress of their interest. it was more than that to her; it was recognition. how would it be if all were truly interested in all? if there were general recognition? as she walked, the valley and the hills, the river and warm, dusky air, the collie, the man and woman with her, herself, seemed to shift and quiver into one. walls vanished. there happened rest, understanding, imperviousness to harm, blood warmth, and new and strange aspiration. it was impossible for her to hold the moment. she seemed to herself to sink again to the rigid and small shape of anna darcy, like an egyptian figure graved on stone, a plane figure. but she did not wholly fit back into the figure. she felt that above it was fullness and youth and song, and that they were hers as well as another's. v again, the next morning, she found neither of her hosts. "we breakfast early and work early," marget had said. again zinia served her alone, again she walked in the flower garden, again she went farther afield. the day was brilliantly, vividly clear, white clouds in the sky, and between, great seas of cobalt. she went at once to the river path, but turned this morning up the stream. the day hung joyous, the high and moving clouds, the light and shadow had magnificence. she felt very well; she really looked five years younger. before her, beyond a spur of orchard, she made out the roof of a building. when she came nearer she felt an assurance that this was the overseer's house. "where marget was born," she thought; "where she lived with her father and mother and brothers." presently she stood still to regard the place. the house was a small one, two-storied, frame, painted white with green blinds. it had a small porch with a window to either side. at the back she made out a wider porch, and there were outbuildings. the whole was buried among locust trees and old shrubs, that when she came nearer she recognized for lilac and althea and syringa. door and windows stood open. at first she thought she would turn from the river to the house, but then she said, "no, not till she herself brings me here some day." but the place was plain before her where she stood. when she had moved a few paces she looked full to the door, between locust trees and bushes. she was now beside a giant sycamore, very old, all copper colored as to leaf, with dappled white and brown arms. built around the bole was a wooden bench, old and weather-worn. "she played here when she was a child. they have all set here beneath this tree. she comes here now, i fancy, often." she took her seat. no one came in or out of the house door a stone's throw away. the place was sunny and deserted. there came, as it were, a veil over it. she shut her eyes the better to look at child life here with father and mother and will and edgar. the old overseer, who had fought in the war for the old order, but who, when it came crash! had built in the new; and the mother, elizabeth land, overworked and uncomplaining; and the boys with their desires and broodings and hopes--she felt them all. sitting with her eyes shut, she passed into feeling them very strongly. the place turned to be of thirty, forty years ago. she moved with the overseer as he went to his work and came from it. with marget land's mother she was cooking, sewing, cleaning. she was with the three children, the boys older than the girl, at tasks and in play. swim in the river, swing under the locust tree, go for berries, for persimmons, chinquapins, walnuts, for grapes and haws, go for the cow, work in the garden patch, shell the peas, shuck the corn, look for eggs, pick the currants and gooseberries, split the kindling, gather the chips, wash the dishes, clean the lamps, sit by the fire and study reading, writing, and arithmetic--she was deep in it, deep in a slow, steady current of participation. it did not seem to curve, but now it was her own childhood, her parents and brothers and sisters, an old town house and a leafy town square--life, life, so varied and so the same! deep, deep wash of deep waves, and so pleasant, so sweet, all the pang and ill lost! a past that was winnowed, understood, forgiven, appreciated, loved by mind and heart of farther on, and that was present, gone nowhere, here, in finer space and finer time, a vast country capable of being visited! going into it was to find the deathless taste of eternity. it was not dark; you could fill it with golden light. the forms there were not immovable, not dead. as you understood, they lived and were yourself. as you remembered, you saw that you were remembering, that you were re-collecting from far and near, your self. anna darcy sat very still. "i had to wait till i was fifty-eight years old to see that." as on yesterday it had grown out of a commonplace of imagination and memory. memory and imagination had, by degrees, entered _their_ deeper selves. again, as on yesterday, she could not hold it. increased energy, increased perception, what the ancients called the genius, and the mystic called illumination, or voice of god, and the moderns higher vibration, superconsciousness--whatever it was, and perhaps the name did not much matter, she had touched it and then lost it. but she knew that it had been touched, and that it was desirable to know it or its like again. she was a member of the church, a praying woman. she bent her forehead upon her hands: "o god, let thy kingdom come! as it comes near us, send thy breezes!" presently, rising, she went on up the stream. it was not wide; it just came into the category of river, headwater, she knew, of a greater river. october painted it with russets and golds and reds. midcurrent showed the ineffable blue of the sky, or when clouds drove by the zenith, the clouds. she walked on until before her she saw the eastern gate of the vale. the hills closed in, leaving a bit of grassy meadow on either side the stream. this narrowed. the hills grew loftier, insensibly became mountains. she was in a mountain pass, gray cliff to the right, hemlocks overhanging the water that was broken now by bowlders, débris of an ancient rock. the path was cool and dark and washed by the scent of the conifers. only here and there the climbing sun sent splashing through an intensity of light that showed every fallen needle, every cone or twig or leaf upon the path. not far before her the path turned and went up over the mountain. she thought, "that will be the way to mrs. cliff's." she came upon a fisherman. he sat among the roots of a hemlock, and was engaged in reeling in his line. he was a man neither old nor young, with a long, easy frame, and a short, graying beard. his dress was that of a fisherman who goes forth from the city to fish--but not for the first nor the second nor the third time. nothing that he had on was new, but all was well cut. "good morning!" he said. "good morning!" he worked on at his reel. "each time that i do this i say that it is the last time." "why?" "i grow too damned able--i beg your pardon!--to put myself in the fish's place." "have you caught any?" "this morning? not a ghost of one! yet they say this is a good stream! i think that i warn them off the hook. 'monsieur black bass, or signor trout, as it may be, my desire not to take you is gaining, i feel, upon my desire to take you! your own desire naturally aiding the first, i grow to feel that we make a strong combination!'" he laughed, putting up his rod. then his mustaches went down and his face became serious enough, "so much mangling! i've had my fill." "how did you come? over the mountain?" "yes. i am camping with a dozen new york and washington fellows on another little river over there. the others fish that stream. i'm like mrs. elton. i adore exploring! i slept last night in a mountain cabin--cliff's. can you tell me how far i am from sweet rocket farm?" "less than a mile." "no! i didn't think from what the mountain folk said that it was so near. i knew before i came that he was somewhere in these parts." "do you know mr. linden?" "i was his classmate at the university. then, fifteen years ago, i met him in southern russia. we had a couple of weeks together, and then i must hurry on to constantinople, where i was due. he went into the caucasus. i lost sight of him. it was two years later that i heard of that accident which blinded him, and i've heard since only second-and third-hand things. the other day in the club a man told me that he was living where his people had lived, down here in virginia. i meant to go to see him, but i meant to write first." "i am a visitor at sweet rocket. but i am sure that mr. linden would wish you to come on to the house. had you not better do so?" "why, yes, then, i think that i shall." he stood up from the hemlock roots. "you are very good. my name is curtin--martin curtin." she gave her own. he took up fisherman's paraphernalia and a light coat. they moved out of ravine into meadow strip; before them lay the jewel valley. mr. curtin drew a deep breath. "and he hasn't eyes to look at it!" anna darcy found herself answering with certitude. "he sees it and a thousand places beside." they walked on, mr. curtin gazing at river, hills, and mountains, and quiet valley floor. "i have known of his doing some splendid things in life--simple and splendid--the kind that steals into folk, and they do likewise!" "yes, i should think that." "what is that house?" "in old times it is the overseer's house. now the young farmer who helps him lives there." "'in old times it _is_'--that's an unusual phrase." "i mean that to me, for reasons, it stays that way and _is_." "i agree! when you turn to a thing it _is_. turn with decision enough, and your overseer would come out to meet you. that's a sycamore for you! do you ever feel the indians by these streams? if you can see your overseer you can see your indians, too." they walked on. "is that the house?" "yes." "it's a simple place, too--but i like it. houses, now! i make a specialty of keeping them in duration." anna darcy thought, "a week ago i wouldn't have understood that." the house where she was born, the house facing, across a row of box and a finely wrought iron paling, the old, leafy city square, walked bodily into her. she was through it, up and down, like the air. it seemed to her that there wasn't anything she didn't know about it, and it all came together into an inner aroma, taste and tone, dry, warm, pungent and likable, idiosyncratic, its very own. it had been a loss, a grief, when the city had taken and torn down that house. and all the time it was waiting for her, in a deep reality, to walk in and take possession! she thought: "what is happening? i shall never be lonely again!" mr. curtin looked from side to side of sweet rocket valley. "it's like a beaker of venetian glass! you'd say there was a magic drink in it.... but how clean and drenched with sun is this air!" "yes!" "he never married? archer said he thought not." "no, he didn't marry." "he's rather the kind that marries the world." "yes, i think so. we turn here to the house. have you the time?" "it's almost noon." "he will be home, then. he works upon the farm as though he had eyes." they left the pebbly beach and went by the cedars up to the house. tam came to meet them, and linden rose from the bench upon the porch. vi "and so he was killed," said curtin, speaking with strongly controlled emotion. "and i can tell you that when i heard it i felt physically that shock and crash and mortal bruising. it wasn't only my heart that was wounded. my nerves and my flesh felt it. even now i think that there must be but one body--i got away for a time after he was buried. i went down to hyères. i used to sit there by the sea. he was a lovable fellow, square as they make them. we were brothers and friends, too. well, that is the way it runs! life--death. life--death! i would give a good deal--" he had been thirty-odd hours at sweet rocket. they had sent up mountain to cliff, who took down to his camp news that he would be gone for some days. they had given him the room next to linden, and he had become at once delightfully at home. when with miss darcy he had stepped upon the porch linden had said: "don't think you take me by surprise! i saw you in my looking-glass this morning!" "it is good to find you again, linden! what do you mean by your looking-glass?" linden laughed, his hands upon the old classmate's shoulders. "only that i had been thinking of you. and the other night i was with you by the sea of azof. i thought, 'i should like to see him again!' and you know yourself that when you make a current boats appear upon it!" now, as the four sat about the fire in the big parlor, before the lamp was lighted, he had been telling of the death of his brother, an aviator. there had followed silence; then, "well, let us talk of something else!" said curtin. he took up the pipe he had laid upon the hearth beside him, and raking out a coat from the fire, relit it. "what do you think is going to happen now, linden?" they sat and talked, and the flames leaped, many and small, in the mahogany of the room. at ten they rose to separate for the night. "come look at the sky," said linden. "the first week in october, and diamond clear!" they went out to the porch, and then, so majestic was the night, to the sweep before the house, whence they might see the great expanse. it was very still. the river sounded, but the air rested a thin and moveless veil. it was not cold. richard linden stood bareheaded, his face uplifted to the vault that writes forever its runes before men. "by george! i forgot!" thought curtin. "but doubtless he knows them so well that he knows where they are, season by season." it seemed that it might be so. linden spoke as though he saw. "see the pleiades and capella and aldebaran! the great square is at its height. the cross and the eagle and the lyre. the mountains hide fomalhaut." they walked a little way upon the road. immense and tingling was that view, looking outward, looking inward, upon those stars. at last they came indoors and said good night. martin curtin lay in a big four-poster bed and stared out of window. upon going to bed he had slept quickly and soundly. now he was awake, and he thought it might be past four of the morning. he felt the subtle turn toward the day. he heard a dog bark and a cock crow. he was aware that he had waked suddenly and completely. he was wide awake, and more than that. there was a keenness, an awareness; keen, sharpened, but also wide. his body lying very still, he began to remember, but it was remembering with a deeper and fuller pulse than was ordinarily the case. he remembered that younger brother who was dead, and not him alone, but many another, kindred and friends and associates. the past lived again, but lived with a difference. what multitudes of kindred, and friends, and associates! the meeting went deep and wide. had he touched all those in one life or had it been in many lives? was the whole texture coming alive, and in effect did it include the whole past, the whole dead and gone? however it might be, it was a world transmuted and without pain. he lay still, regarding it. it was strong and light, and he and it grew together with a sense of frictionlessness, of exquisite relief, even with a kind of golden humorousness. none had been truly any better or worse than another, nor in any way miraculously different, and now they could understand and laugh together! the sense of union was exquisite, and the sense of variousness hardly less so. the variousness was without hostility. it glided and turned smoothly, much as personal thought and mood might glide and turn. the sense of well-being flowed in every realm. the perception included environment. remembered, recalled persons meant remembered, recalled houses, towns, country, forest and river, fields and gardens, a thousand, thousand places! where were they all? they were all over the earth--light and golden--loved places and the right people in them! there was nothing rigid--even the places understood one another. curtin felt a profound happiness. this one body, lying at sweet rocket, was not wholly forgot nor relinquished. it came into the pattern of variousness. but curtin himself was moving in a wider consciousness. all these people, all these selves of himself! and he understood their old difficulties and he understood their old misunderstandings. the _piece_ understood, the beautiful tissue! the music understood, the notes moving so richly together! it was throbbing in the present and in the understood, the appropriated past. he never thought, "how grotesque the thought that we are dead!" the thought could not even occur. for one flash, for less than an instant, the plane lifted. there started forth a high, a tremendous sense of unity--presence. it towered, it overflowed him, he was of it--then the instant closed. as it had come like a towering wave, so it sank like a wave. but there was left the lasting thrill of it, and there was left undying aspiration. "ah, to find it again! ah, if it will come again!" where had been sense of the whole, again befell fragmentariness. loss--great loss--and yet was there falling sweetness, exquisiteness still of order! he felt again the wide world that they said was dead, and yet surely was no such thing. there happened again wide and subtle change. out of a stillness, a silence, an isolation, exquisite and tingling, a state of clarity and poise, one spoke to him _within_, "martin!" he answered in that space. "yes, john.... no, grief is absurd!... just because we're ignorant!" "you can be content. we can be content." "yes, i see! we are all in one, who cannot be destroyed." there came no more, but the world was a rhythm, swinging, swinging. there reigned great rest and calm. out of this, with much of it yet clinging, he sank to the square, clean, sparely furnished bedroom at sweet rocket, with the cock crowing, with the old clock in the lower hall striking five. curtin lay very quiet in the big bed. dawn was coming, but his sense was that of an afterglow. he had felt beauty and still wonder like this in high mountains, watching alpine glow. it faded and faded, but there was left with him assurance, rest, the sense of a dawn to be, a consciousness behind this consciousness, another consciousness towering, sun-gilt, in the future. he lay very still, at rest, hardly wondering. the great things, the beautiful things, were the natural things. the wholly full and blissful would be the finally natural. dawn came in rose and amethyst. when it was full light curtin left his bed, dressed, and went downstairs. he thought that he would walk by the river or in the garden. the house was still, the front door open. early though it was, he found linden on the porch starting forth with tam. he had found, he said, that he must see roger carter, who was riding to-day to alder and would be starting presently. "will you walk with me? but you shouldn't miss your breakfast. i've had bread and milk." "i won't go now," answered curtin. "i'll walk up and down before the house for a while. something happened to me last night, or i happened into something. i'd like to talk to you about it, linden--but it won't fade before you come back. i don't indeed think it will ever fade." there was that in linden's remembered face, when linden himself had gone away toward roger carter's, that made curtin think, walking now before the house as they had walked the night before under the stars: "does he know what i felt? could he even have helped--put a shoulder to the wheel, seeing that i was grieved and uncertain?" not so long ago he might have answered, "that's fantastic!" but he did not so answer now. he went into the garden and walked up and down. before seven marget came out to him. "i saw you walking in the dawn like a man in a ballad. could you not sleep?" "i slept till nearly five." they walked by the late asters and the stocks. said curtin: "i remember a line of masefield's: "... the dim room had mind, and seemed to brood. and again: "and felt the hillside thronged by souls unseen who knew the interest in me and were keen that man alive should understand man dead. miss land, do you think that is true?" "yes. surely." "do you think we can be reassured about the dead--all the dead--and ourselves when we die?" "yes, i do. very safe, very sure." "well, i think so this morning." they walked by the marigolds and larkspur. "where do you meet the dead? in this space?" he indicated it with a wide gesture. "no. in space that permeates this space. in added space. when and where we make space. though i think," said marget, "that one day the edges will have so flowed together that we shall say 'in this space.'" "you and richard linden both have that assurance?" "yes. many have it now." she added, "i think, perhaps, that it is more easily felt in some places than in others." he thought, "as we put telescopes on heights." they walked by the wall with the ivy. her quiet, dark eyes were upon him, friendly, kindly. he thought: "no less than linden she hoped such a night for me. perhaps--" a bell rang. "that is for us. miss darcy, too, comes down early now." they went indoors. anna darcy met them in the hall and they went together into the bright dining room, to their pleasant breakfast, and zinia waiting, with "that girl mercy" still at heart. vii the next day was sunday. zinia and mimy and mancy walked early to their church, two miles down the river. marget and miss darcy, linden and curtin, went to alder in the phaeton, drawn by daniel and bess. it was as sunny and still a day as might be found in any autumn land, and most beauteous was that forest through which they drove. anna darcy was glad to see it again. it rested forever in her mind, a true magic approach. marget drove, curtin sitting beside her, miss darcy and richard linden behind them. the jewel miles went by and the pleasant, pleasant air. here rose alder on a green hill, and alder had three streets, a hundred dwelling houses, and three white-spired churches. the houses were brick or frame, with shady yards and late-blooming flowers. they drove by a small, quaint courthouse, a rambling hotel, and several stores, closed to-day. the trees were maples and lombardy poplars and a few ancient mulberries. folk were going to church, and they spoke to sweet rocket and sweet rocket to them. before them rose a church of white frame, set in an ample churchyard, all glowing maples with a mosaic of red and gold leaves underfoot. street before it and bordering lane held horses and buggies and fords and buicks. the second bell had not rung. men and boys waited around the doors, talk and laughter at a sunday pitch. women were entering, some with children in their hands. sweet rocket folk, leaving the phaeton, walking up churchyard path, took and gave greeting. they entered the church, marget's hand upon linden's arm, just guiding him to a pleasant pew by a pleasant, open window, the weather being yet so warm. curtin took his seat, and, turning a little, watched the folk enter. he did not know when he had been in a village church like this, nor, indeed, had he been for long in any church at all, barring the cathedrals and churches abroad, into which he went as artist. a clear, sweet sound, overhead, rang the second bell. men and youths came in; the building filled. a simple place, it was well proportioned and to-day filled with a dreamy, golden, softened light. in that soft, flowing atmosphere, men and women and children were gathered as in a bouquet. the choir assembled, the young woman who was the organist took her place. a woman in the pew behind curtin leaned over and gave him an opened hymn book. the minister appeared, a kindly faced, small, elderly man. the bouquet became more and more sunday. curtin glanced at linden. he sat as always, with ease, and a certain still power. he seemed to curtin as simple and whole as a planet in the sky. this village methodist church seemed within his frontier, as, when you thought of it, all other places seemed within it. curtin remembered. they were talking, he and linden, in odessa, in their hotel, after having been to a great service in a great church. linden was telling him that religion held all religions, and that he, linden, belonged solely to no one church, but liked at times to go sit in any one of them. he had gone on to say other things, but curtin--and curtin remembered this with a certain pang--had yawned, and said that it had been a tiring day and that he would off to bed. "my god, i was crass in those years!" thought curtin. he still watched linden, who could not know that he was being watched; and at the thought linden turned his head and smiled at him. his face said as distinctly as if his voice had uttered it, "yes, that night at odessa!" again curtin, startled at first, felt the startling vanish. he thought--and, as on last night, his thought seemed to lay hold upon and give form to a down-draught from some upper region--"truly the startling should be over mind broken from mind, not over mind beginning to heal!" he sat in a deep study. there came like a picture into his mind jesus of nazareth's parable of the talents. "ability to perceive thought! if the world should take that talent and improve it, a different world we should have anon!" "let us pray," said the minister. when they had prayed, he said, "let us sing hymn number--" they sang: "sun of my soul, thou saviour dear, it is not night if thou be near--" "i will read," said the minister, "from the twenty-fifth chapter of the gospel according to matthew." curtin heard read the parable of the talents. he thought: "intercommunication. it widens and deepens and heightens perpetually. now it gets to be wireless, independent of gesture or the vocal cords, or the handwriting." there thronged echoes of his experience of the other night. "intercommunication becomes communion. communion becomes identity. at last 'we know even as we are known.'" the reading ended. they sang "rock of ages, cleft for me." all the congregation sang; men, women, and children's piping voices. they sat down. the minister took his text from the parable he had read. it was a good, plain sermon, in which the preacher said more than he knew he said. the air came in at window, bees buzzed without, a brown butterfly passed. the congregation breathed gently, rhythmically. the sun gave life to the flowers upon the women's and the children's hats. there were young faces and old faces, dull faces and quick faces, intent faces and wandering faces. some were rich flowers, and others little flowers not far from weeds, but all were in the garden. curtin thought: "they are like the thoughts and moods of a man, many and various, but all in the man. one man.... it was balzac who said, 'there is but one animal.' one man--his name adam-eve, or humanity, as you choose--or, perhaps, when he finds himself, his name is christ." he looked again at linden, sitting with that pleased and quiet light upon his face. the sermon was not extraordinary, the congregation the average village and country congregation, the church had no especial grace of interior or exterior. linden was not habit-bound to it, he did not hug the letter of its creed. any one of those around might say: "no, he does not belong to any church--which is a great pity! no, it isn't his church." yet curtin saw that linden, sitting there, loved this place, the feel of the folk around him, the sense of what they were doing, were striving to do, and, on the whole, were slowly doing. he comprehended that to linden it was very simply his own, as were the other two churches of alder, and the colored church down the river, and the greek church at odessa. he saw that linden's possessive was large--linden's and marget land's. miss darcy sat very still, her thin hands crossed in her lap. at first she had listened to the sermon, but now she was in the old church in the old city, and there was another congregation around her, and another clergyman, a kinsman, in the pulpit. at first it was like opening a potpourri jar, and then warmth and light came back to the rose leaves. "i am there, they are here! never could i do this or feel this until now--or i did it so weakly and palely that it did not seem to count!" the sermon ended. "let us pray.... let us sing." benediction followed, then a moment's pause, and then the folk turned from the pews and moved slowly toward the doors. there were greetings for sweet rocket, and sweet rocket greeted in return. all had a grace of friendliness. anna darcy thought: "that is another thing that has come or is coming! what does it matter now if your name is or is not on the register of a church? it didn't use to be so. something gracious and understanding, invisibly binding, is coming!" she thought: "those two are the most beautiful here, but in their degree all are beautiful. and all move on to completer beauty. oh, life is coming alive!" they drove through alder and by alder highway, and at last upon that lovely forest road to sweet rocket. curtin and linden fell to talk of their student days, of such and such teachers and mates, and such and such happenings. "i had forgotten that!" said curtin, and again, "i had forgotten that!" at last he said, abruptly, "you've got an astounding memory!" linden answered, "oh, we learn how to use and deepen memory!" the smell of the forest, the voice of the forest, circled and penetrated. "i should like to know how you do it," said curtin. "it is like all other things. practice makes perfect." "it is not only remembering. you remember with a strange understanding of things. you direct later light upon the past. the line is there, the form is there, even the color and tone, but you make it understood as i am very certain we did not understand it then! i see now what we were doing! it's intelligent at last, and bigger." "all that you have," said linden, "isn't too much to apply to the past. the past has served you, now serve the past. serve and redeem! bring it up, even and great, into the present! to understand past time is to have present power. only by understanding it can you love it, unless you wish to remain infant and love with infant's love." the many-hued woods went on, the leafy, narrow, remote road, the scents and sounds, the miracle of many centered into sole delight. the air was so fine you could gather what the upper air must be. daniel and bess, the phaeton, the four, stepped and rolled through a magic world, artist world of the ancient of days. here was the river and the flashing water of the ford. that afternoon they walked upstream as far as the overseer's house. it was shining, late afternoon. they saw, seated on the porch and the porch steps, roger carter and his wife, with guy, her brother, who worked on the farm, and old mr. and mrs. morrowcombe, her parents, paying their sunday visit. a little roger, three years old, played absorbedly with a chinquapin string and a rag doll that his grandmother had brought him. "let us go across to them," said marget. "just so did my father and mother use to sit." carters and morrowcombes made them welcome. linden and curtin sat upon the porch steps, tam beside them. miss darcy now played with the young roger and now listened to mrs. morrowcombe's gentle, flowing talk of turkeys, and rag carpets, and sam come home from the war. mary carter had dark eyes and wavy hair, bright color in a round cheek, a shy and tender smile--a murillo face. she sat holding a year-old babe, and she talked shyly and listened with intent eyes. there listened, too, old mr. morrowcombe, with a long, white beard, and a gnarled hand resting on a stick marvelously carved by himself in prison, long ago, in the old war. roger carter proved a quick, dry talker, with not a little wit and power of mimicry. he had a way of throwing what he saw and heard and concluded into a homely story, both telling and amusing. he seemed to love to make linden and marget laugh, and they loved to draw him out. curtin saw with what skill they opened fields to him where he might rejoice in his talent. he saw how they understood fellowship. presently marget asked mary if she might take miss darcy into the house and out on the back porch and to the lilac hedge. "certainly, miss marget, you go right in! it's all straight. go upstairs, too. anywhere you like." the two went. "this was mother's room. here i was born. when i was a little girl i slept in this tiny room next door. the rain on the roof drummed me to sleep. this was the boys' room. this is the back porch, where we did much of the work. it is so lovely and broad! there is the old well. yonder is the lilac clump where once, in may, i saw the spirit of the lilac." when, half an hour later, they walked homeward along the river bank, there renewed itself the question of prolonging a visit. "well, i'm going to stay, anyhow," declared curtin. "i like it better here than at that camp. if you will keep me a month--" "oh, we will!" anna darcy said: "i can't stay that long. but i'll stay just as long as i can." that matter settled, they walked on, quietly, in the amber and violet hour. there was a sound of water, a smell of wood smoke. the house rose before them, richly colored in the sunset. viii the weather changed. on the heel of soft sunshine and quietude came autumn storm, wind and rain, lashed trees, leaden and heavily sagging cloud. in the late afternoon zinia appeared at the parlor door. "miss marget, there are two men on horseback. they've come over rock mountain and missed their way. they say it's getting late, and they say, could we take them in for the night?" "i'll go see," said linden, and left the room. "of course you will?" "yes, of course," answered marget. "i had better go see about the room." curtin and miss darcy, left alone, watched the flame. at last curtin said, abruptly, "had you ever thought of humanity moving on into superhumanity?" "i think that i have been blind and deaf to a great many things! i suppose i thought that there would be slow, general improvement. but i did not think of marked betterment here. i thought of the soul at death springing alive into heaven." "or hell?" "yes, we were taught that." "and it was going to reach heaven or hell at one stride! no degree here, no degree there!" "it was irrational!" "naturally, being yet in time, there are those ahead. some cross the line earlier than others." marget returned. "they are two young men, foresters, i think, from the government purchase on rock mountain. they are wet through. mancy has built them a fire and richard is looking after them." she stood by the window. "the gray rain is chanting up and down the mountains! queen rain and king wind!" curtin put a chair for her as she came to the hearth. she sat down, and bending herself, looked into the fire. she held her hands to the flame and appeared to gather it into them. "the fire!" said marget, "the spirit that is fire, that is will--that are living, endless powers, the host of the lord!" there fell a silence that was voice. then said anna darcy: "i have always said, 'i remember--i remember.' but since i came to sweet rocket i have learned far and away more of how to remember." marget turned toward her with a great sweetness. "when we have found a good thing we so naturally wish to share it! now you must learn the universal man's present sharing--and his future sharing. you who have always said, 'i remember,' and who have been unselfish, will have little trouble." her look included curtin, who sat staring into the fire. he drew a long breath. "two weeks ago i should have said that adventure and youth had passed from my life." "you are just beginning to find them! henceforth you will find rest and romance, salt in life and the true wine and the uncloying honey and the bread of right wheat. you will find water of moses's spring, and the burning bush." the rain and the wind sang against the pane. the fire made shape upon shape. the high, inward vibration lowered, but it left a memory of itself. there was the jericho rose in the sandal box to say, "when there comes moisture again to my root, then shall i bloom again!" linden entered the parlor with the two guests, now with dried clothing, rested and refreshed. it was growing dusk. the room looked warm and bright to them, a happy haven after a battering day. they were young men; twenty-seven, twenty-nine, forestry graduates, resuming forestry after an interlude of war. linden presented them. "mr. randall--mr. drew." the evening closed in stormy. they had supper, a small bright feast, with talk and laughter. randall proved lively, good company. drew was much the quieter of the two. supper over, they returned to the big parlor and the generous fire. the boy jim had brought in a great armful of wood. it was a night to heap logs, as the rain drummed against the pane. randall was talkative. he flowed like a mountain stream, trilled like a care-free bird. forests and forestry came into the room. it appeared that both had had from childhood a taste, not to say a passion, for woodland life. randall had lived in the country, so it came natural. but drew had lived in a city. but forests were a passion with him; he had to get into them, and did so at every chance, and at last left for good a clerkship in a stockbroker's office, and scraped together enough for that course in a forestry school. this gave him surface learning, but he exhibited a deeper knowingness, gained somewhere. "drew's like an indian in the woods!" "no. not like an indian," said drew. linden asked, "like whom, then?" he sat in a corner of the great fireplace, tam, who came indoors upon nights like these, lying at his feet. "drew," said randall, "tell them about that night in france! he's got a curious story. he won't tell it to everybody. but i don't know--somehow we're all at home here." his quick song went on. "you see, my folk and drew's are english. we're just a generation from fields and things that we've heard about all our lives. so when england went in, we thought we'd better go over, and we did. we were in the same company, and this was before verdun. go on, now, drew!" drew began at once, without prelude, his eyes upon the blind man. "it was something that happened to me. sometimes i think that it was a dream, and then i know that it wasn't. i'm more and more certain as time goes on that it wasn't. i've got a kind of feeling about reality, that we are like swallows skimming it. i suppose that now and then a swallow tumbles into it. well, it was a big, dark wood, fairly early in the war. a detachment, sent we did not know by whom nor for what, moved through it from one station to another. i was second lieutenant. well, there came news of a trap, and most of us turned off in a hurry, out of that wood. but--i don't to this day know how it was--as many as twenty were away from the rest, sent to find out something, somewhere. it was night, and there was no path. we got the warning, too, and we swung round and tried to get back to the main body. there came a spattering of shot. there were men besides ourselves in that wood. they rose like partridges and struck like hawks. we struck back. there was fighting. something came down on my head like a falling tree. i remember that i thought it was a falling tree. then everything went black, and it seemed both a long time and a short time till dawn. "it came at last, dawn. i sat up, and it had been a falling tree. my forehead had an aching lump and a gash, but luckily just a branch had struck me and i had rolled clear. it was a very old oak, brought down by the high wind. upon the branch beside me was growing mistletoe. i wouldn't touch it, for i thought, 'it is not for me to touch it, but surely it saved my life!' there was gray light, and one red streak far down the forest where, after a time, would be the sun. and then i remembered that it was lutwyn who had saved my life, crying out, and pushing me away, where i had thrown myself down for one moment's rest. i looked beyond the mistletoe and i saw that the tree had caught and pinned down a man. i crept on hands and knees, for i was dizzy yet, and i found lutwyn. he lay pale and twitching, his leg and part of his body under the trunk of the oak. it was very still and lonely in the forest, and the first cold light made me shiver, and i was afraid of the mistletoe, so near. i got lutwyn from under the tree, and it took all my strength to do it. the spring that we called red deer was hardly a spear throw away. i had on a cap of otter skin, and i filled this with water and brought it back to lutwyn. when i had dashed it over his face and put it between his lips, he sighed, and came to himself, opening his eyes and trying to sit up. he said, 'i thought it would catch you, and i tried to thrust you out of its way--' "i said: 'are you badly hurt? can you walk?' "he tried, but he could only drag himself a little way, holding by a branch of the tree. the light had grown stronger, the red line down the forest was a red splash. we were both thinking of guthlac and his men, who were after us because, being outlaws, we had set upon and stopped a bullock wagon and helped ourselves. we had strong belief that when they found us they would hang us. we had no great start of them. "lutwyn said: 'you go on, oswy! i'll make myself at home here, by the mistletoe.' "that couldn't be. i couldn't carry him. he was, if anything, a little taller and larger than i. he tried again to move, but it was not his leg alone; his body had been hurt, terribly hurt, i now saw. he could not make a step. it was i who drew him back to the tree. he settled down into the hollow made by the trunk and a bough, and i looked at his hurts, but could do little for them. i saw that they were filled with danger. the mistletoe grew so near him. i looked at it, and i wished it would heal. lutwyn said: 'now you go on, oswy! i don't want you to be hanged.' i said, 'save your breath!' and sat down beside him. we rested side by side against the tree, and he said that he was not in pain, but only now and then drowsy. he was very clear in his mind and wanted to talk. i listened for guthlac and his men, and looked at the mistletoe. the sun was up now and it was growing gold--the mistletoe--a great bunch of it. i did not hear guthlac. it was likely to be some time before they found us, having to wait till day to see our track. now and then i felt guthlac's rope around my neck. and then i looked at the mistletoe, and it seemed to be growing by woden's chair. then lutwyn came awake again and we talked. we were twin brothers. we talked of when we were boys, and of our mother, and lutwyn the strong, our father, and of places we had seen and the earth we had trod. the earth that was us, we thought, springing up in us all toward father sun. and all the wrong that we had done went away, and the mistletoe grew more golden. he drowsed away for longer and longer times. "far away i heard guthlac's horn. it blew, and another answered. they had found our track and were drawing together. lutwyn waked, and heard it, too. 'but there's another horn for me,' he said. 'don't you hear that one?' he had slipped from the hollow of the oak and his head was on my knee. the horn blew louder and nearer. the mistletoe was all golden. i could feel guthlac's rope around my neck. but i was glad they would not hang lutwyn. he was dead. "the horn blew louder in the wood. i heard them shouting. the mistletoe was burning gold. i said, 'woden, woden! we be brothers, lutwyn and me!' they broke upon us, shouting, and all went black--" drew stopped speaking. he sat bent over, looking at the fire. putting down a hand he stroked tam. straightening himself, he looked at linden and marget. "all that was actual," he said. "just as actual, just as real, just as day and night and earthly and conscious as this room and the fire and we six and the dog!" he made a movement toward randall. "you tell the rest." randall's voice came in. "the detachment drove the germans out of the wood and chased them a good long way. it was dawn when we stopped and went back to gather up our hurt and dead. there were a dozen dead, germans and us, and a good many hurt, all scattered through that wood that was full of big trees. we found drew propped against a very great, old, fallen tree. he had been struck over the head in the hand-to-hand fighting and had a cut or two besides. nothing odd in that, but what was odd was that he was cherishing a dead german--had his head lying on his knee! of course, enemies lying as close as lovers wasn't any novelty! but drew had crept some little way to this man, and had tried to stop his bleeding, all there in the dark, and had given him water, and then had gathered him into his arms. he said: 'yes, he was drew, but he was one oswy, too. yes, that was a german, but it was lutwyn, too.' he said they were twin brothers. we were used to men out of their heads, so we gathered him up and took him on. he wanted us to stop and bury the german, but there wasn't time for that. the funny thing is that he certainly isn't out of his head now! yet he still believes that story, though he won't tell it to every one...." the rain beat, the fire burned. "i've tried to get back," said drew, "back to guthlac and the bullock wagon and why we were outlaws. if i could find even now what we did--if i could get farther back still, to the point where we decided to do it, and redecide, decide more wisely, having long light upon it, i think that even now i could change in some way the whole world! changing it to lutwyn and me would mean changing the whole texture." "you are right," said linden. "and seeing it that way you have begun to put your change into operation." the fire shined, the rain beat upon the panes, the wind came with the impact of sea in storm. pictures shifted before the inner eye. lands and times held the earth. now they seemed foreign pictures, now there was a faintly conscious participation. "we are earth, to-night," said linden. "all these are in our memory. earth is growing conscious. a conscious spirit. that is what we mean to-day when we say, 'there is a new world just beneath the horizon.'" ix in the night the storm ceased. the household woke to a high, clear, stirring morning, the clouds riding in archipelagoes with, between isles, a sea bluer than the �gean. the shaken trees had spread a persian carpet. all the flowers hung heavy with wet, snails marched on the paths, sweet rocket glistened. randall and drew must ride away, so at ten o'clock jim brought their horses. marget and anna darcy walked through the flower garden. "i am going to mimy's house for a little. will you come, too?" marget had a basket upon her arm. "it is full of silk and cotton scraps for julia's quilts. the day i met you in alder i begged of two or three friends and they gave me all this! it is julia's intense industry and happiness, piecing quilts." "who is julia?" "mimy's lame daughter. lame in her body and just a little lame in her mind." "where does just so come in?" "oh, he's susan's! susan has been away upon a visit, but she's home again. zinia is mimy's niece, and jim is her grandson. mimy and her husband, old uncle jack, who is dead, 'belonged,' as they call it, to the lindens. when richard bought sweet rocket she was living in alder, and she rode over in a wagon one day and told him she wanted to come home--just like me!" said marget, with a happy laugh. "the old cabins were tumbling down. richard built her a real house. he said that any who came and said, 'this is home'--" her dark eyes looked afar to the valley rim. "where does mancy live?" "over there, behind the big field. he and delia, his wife, and william, who is roger carter's right-hand man." mimy, in the kitchen, was singing: "roll, jordan, roll! i want to go to heaven to hear jordan roll. oh, roll, jordan, roll!" marget stopped at the door. "we're going to your house, aunt mimy, with quilt pieces for julia." mimy interrupted her singing. "are you gwine take company?" "well, she isn't company." "you'll find a mighty mess in that house! i don't think i ought to let you go, miss marget! you see, susan's been away, and julia can't get around, and when zinia comes from the big house she wants to _read_! instead of straightening up. i reckon you better not go." marget laughed. "aunt mimy, you know how we'll find the house!" "well, go along!" said mimy, gloomily. "julia'll be glad to get the pieces." they left the kitchen behind them. "and i want to go to heaven to hear jordan roll!" marget's low, warm laughter sounded again. "her house is like a pin, and she's so proud of it, and she wouldn't for anything miss having you see it! the same little rhyme is said to every guest we have. and '_read!_' mimy's so proud to see zinia sit at a table and read! jim can read, too, but he doesn't like to. but zinia is fond of books." mimy's house rose beside the orchard, a pretty cottage with a dooryard filled with cockscomb and larkspur and marigold. at the gate grew a bush of myrrh, and the porch had over it a gourd vine. just so sat in the middle of the path, playing with red and blue blocks. at the sound of voices susan appeared, a clear-brown, neat, and active woman. "just so, don't you clutter up the path like that! come this-a-way, miss marget!" she took them across the porch, where the gourd vine made so pleasant a pattern, into a little parlor, bright as a pin. they sat and talked, and then susan said that she would bring julia, and, leaving the room, reappeared, pushing a wheeled chair. in this sat julia, who was almost a middle-aged woman, and had a slender, pleasing face, and was only a little lame in her mind. marget emptied the basket. "oh, my!" said julia, and again, "oh, my!" with eager fingers she spread the bits of silk and velvet and satin and striped or flowered ribbon. "flower-garden pieces! it will be a flower-garden quilt. i'll make a quilt like they have in heaven!" "shoo! julia!" exclaimed susan. "they don't have quilts in heaven. it ain't cold there!" julia's face took on an imploring, almost a frightened look. she turned to marget. "if they don't have quilts i won't have anything to do!" with all that she knew of marget land, miss darcy could but wonder at the luminous sweetness, the depth and the play with which marget, seated by julia, dealt with the latter's fears. all the bright pieces were spread over the knees of both. "in heaven you'll put rose and blue together, and this violet and green. and look how these flowered pieces go! your quilts are for warmth and beauty, julia, aren't they? shut your eyes and see warmth and beauty, warmth and beauty!" she put her hand over the lame woman's hand. the latter's plaintive look changed, her eyes brightened, and she nodded her head. "yes! to keep us warm; and they are lovely, like the flowers! warm like the sun is!" "yes. warmth and beauty--warmth and beauty! so in heaven you're to keep on with warmth and beauty. and you'll learn, too, how well wisdom goes with them. their quilts aren't just like these quilts, but you won't care for that. you'll be putting together and giving beautiful, bright things!" julia caressed a length of flowered ribbon. "that's what i think. they're warm and beautiful, warm and beautiful! and every one i give a quilt to says, 'i'm so glad i've got one!'" "when you put that piece in, think 'warm and beautiful' for mrs. gray. she gave it to you. and miss lucy allen gave the beautiful blue piece." when they had quitted the porch with the gourd vine, and the dooryard, and the gate by the myrrh bush, and were under the orchard trees, marget said: "she's been making quilts for twenty years. perhaps two a year, and into each one goes i do not know what dim thinking and feeling, warmth and beauty, for such and such a one!" it was miss darcy's habit to rest a little in her own room after dinner. in the midafternoon, coming downstairs, she found the door of linden's study open. linden turned his head, hearing her step. "come in! here are marget and curtin." it was the first time she had entered this room. her eyes took it in as she crossed the threshold, and found it a simple, grave place, as simple and grave and charged with its own aroma and spirit as a pine wood. it spread a large room, with plenty of space for pacing up and down. the bookcases, the desk, the chairs, an old, long cane and wood sofa were for use. the plain walls held a few prints. in one of the deep windows stood a large globe. curtin put miss darcy a chair. "i've just come in," he said. there had grown between them, beginning the morning upon which she found him fishing, or not fishing, in the gorge that closed the valley, a quiet liking and friendship, with a sense, perhaps, of standing even in the inner world. "linden was saying--" marget sat before the desk not far from the fireplace, in which burned a light flame. she had been writing, and linden dictating from his big cane chair by the long window. she had turned from the desk and he had moved his chair to where he sat, half in firelight, half in tawny sunlight. to anna darcy's sense the room had strongly that luminousness which in some sort she found in the whole of sweet rocket, in valleys, hills, house, and folk. the whole made a sun-filled cluster that, acting as a cluster, redoubled so all effects. but undoubtedly linden and marget were the center of the cluster. "i am glad you have come in," said curtin. "linden was speaking of their life here--" "i told you, you remember, driving through the woods, of our outer life," marget said. "sitting here before the fire we had begun to talk of that far larger life within the outer." linden spoke. "martin asked me, and i was telling him as clearly as i could. it is not wholly clear, you must not think, to marget and me, our progression and our life. 'man is a bridge,' says nietzsche. a living bridge that crosses from himself to himself. always the provisional, the halfway, gone afar even while we say, 'here am i!' how to name a thing that travels so fast! the life of marget and me changes and grows, as does yours and yours. the history of one--the history of all. there is at once divine difference, divine sameness. no hand and no word will hold our life!" "i don't know anyone like you," said curtin. "no. but you will presently begin to know more and more who differ from us and yet who belong in the order--the order of those who are aware that present man is a bridge and who begin consciously to act, feel, and know in a larger existence." "and that is still inward?" "the world still calls it inward. to those in that existence inward and outward, past, present, and future, come into one. the old words, then, are but retained words of convenience. as to the ultimate mind martin and richard, marget, anna, are but words of convenience, names for strands of experience. all are comprehended, combined, surpassed." the sun lighted his hair, his bronzed face, his quiet eyes, the sight of which he seemed so little to miss. after a moment's pause he spoke on: "to-day many and many are aware of the richness of destiny. some more so, some less so, but aware! faculties that in a host are but germinal build in and for others realities. the momentary, superficial present, not being the true present, there _are_, not 'there have been' since the dawn of history, many such men and women. very many; a host. there are many to-day; to-morrow there will be more. if you regard with intentness you may see the new humanity forming." "what of those who neither dream, nor divine, nor wish, who come on so slow?" "their not divining nor dreaming nor wishing is more apparent than real. all come on. the slowest, who thinks he has no direction, is drawn unconscious until the day when he discovers the compass." "will any never cross?" "i don't think so." "and when the last human being has crossed?" "then will the others come on into humanity--they that we call the animals. and those behind them will lift to where they were. but our wave goes on into the spiritual world that is the world of subtler matter, vaster energy, understanding at last, love at last, beauty at last. well, marget and i are conscious travelers thitherward, as are you and you." "ah, you are ahead of me!" "and of me!" "in some ways we may be ahead. and in others you may have store of energy and experience that sets you ahead. that matters not in the least. whitman said that when he said: "by my side or back of me, eve following, or in front, and i following her, just the same. like him, too: "content with the present and content with the past, yet lassoing the past and the present with the future!" curtin shook his head. "you have powers that are not mine." "if we have them, they will be yours. marget and i think that we have, as it were, a blueprint. but not yet do we walk in the full and great temple! we do faintly and weakly what one day we shall do with all vigor. and many things that we do not yet dream we shall do! and you also, you and anna. when you begin to feel continuity, when no matter where you move you take possession of yourself--" he rose from his chair, and, standing before them, put a hand upon curtin's shoulder and a hand upon anna darcy's. "'with all your getting, get understanding.' 'the kingdom of heaven is within you.' god is _i am_." the sun struck through the western window, the fire burned, the room was lighted and warmed. flame and stirring air made a low singing. x the next day drew came back. curtin, seated on the porch, saw him cross the river and ride up by the cedars. shutting his book, he descended the steps to meet him. "good day, drew! glad to see you back! nothing wrong?" drew dismounted. "no. i wanted to talk to mr. linden." jim, coming around the house, took the horse. "he's out somewhere on the place," said curtin. "miss land, too. but they will be back by twelve. did you ride from rock mountain this morning?" "yes. it's not so far once you know the way." he took the chair that curtin hospitably pushed forward, and sat apparently in a brown study, while the other speculated. at last said drew: "this is a good, big farm with room, i shouldn't be surprised, for another worker. at any rate, i've ridden over to ask mr. linden to employ me." "do you like farming better than forestry?" "i like it better plus some other things." his eyes swept the hills that shut in the vale. "there is rich forest here. any woodland that he has i could cut and replant. i know something of farming, too, and i can learn more. i'd give good work in return for the other things that they can teach me, and that i want." he regarded curtin with brooding eyes. "ever since i could remember i have been beset by the past. a man told me once that i was conscious there, but hadn't co-ordinated it with the present and the future. it was some time ago, and he went away at once and i never found his like again--until i came here. i don't think there are many of them, living at any one time. the only wisdom i've got is the wisdom of going where i think i may find help." "how about randall?" "i'm very fond of randall. but he can't help me here, nor i him. he thinks it's just my 'queerness.' there's a man in washington who will be mighty glad to get my job. he's a friend, too, of randall's. i want to stay here for a year. then i may go foresting again with randall. i don't want to lose him. if mr. linden can't use another man this winter perhaps he will take me in the spring. in that case i'll go, and come again. i've talked it all out with malcolm smith, our chief at rock mountain. brown in washington will come down right away." at twelve appeared linden. he stood in the hall door. "is it you, drew? i will be down in a moment to shake hands." they heard his step going up to his room. "blind, and not blind!" said curtin. "there's some profound development of sensibility." "i am not a scholar," said drew. "i haven't got the names to give to things. that's a part of my need." marget and miss darcy came up from the river path. they had been, it seemed, to the overseer's house. marget gave her hand to drew. "i am glad to see you again!" there was no surprise in her warm and happy voice. "your room is all ready for you." they had dinner. when it was over drew went with linden into his study. the three others lingered a little in the pleasant, wide hall. the day was again right october; amber and garnet and sapphire; balm with nothing of lethargy. said curtin, "when we come and come, what do you do at last?" marget laughed. "oh, you come and go! you never really go, you know! but you have to take your bodies here and there over earth. but once come, we keep you and you keep us!" "you know people all over the earth?" "yes." "do they write?" "oh, now one and now another writes! but we hardly need letters. that is, they are needed, of course, for minute information, for news of bodily movement. but there is communion whether we write or not." marget returned to the dining room to talk with zinia. anna darcy went up to her chamber for her rest, and curtin took his book to the porch. the books at sweet rocket. he fell to pondering them. there were, perhaps, five thousand, not in one room, but up and down. many were old, and many neither old nor new, and many new. they seemed to touch all subjects. curtin, pondering, going deeper and deeper, fell into some border country of reality. with swiftness, with electric shock, he touched, not thousands of leaves of paper printed over, but conscious, intelligent, and powerful life. or rather, it seemed to touch, to descend upon him, to well through him, coming down, coming from within, occupying space internal to all this tranquil, outer, october space. it was presence, it was personality, overwhelming. books! what were true books? will, desire, intelligence, living, active, not unclothed or unbodied, living presence, present activity, being in mass, active being, present and active here in this valley and present and active elsewhere, present and active throughout he knew not what infinity! he felt again that wide and deep shock of reality. the world lived!--had always lived--only he had not known it. vigor streamed into vein and nerve. he sprang to his feet, and, leaving the porch, moved down past the cedars to the river path, and along it. "it is not richard linden and marget land, nor the one nor the other! it is all of us. it is the whole. the whole has found them and is bringing them in accord." he felt exquisitely a touch of bliss. "it will bring me in accord, too. drew and miss darcy and me--and many others." he felt a satisfaction such as he had never dreamed. "all others. one by one, all accorded, all remembered. the already remembered, forever increasing in strength, gathering, drawing, the scattered and fragmentary and incipient!" he walked, hardly knowing that he walked. "goodness and largeness! the dawn of them is synchronous with the dawn of allness. all our words, mercy, justice, love, wisdom, power, joy, are but terms for the natural, habitual feeling of the one who is whole. it is not that they are 'virtues'! they are the hue and tone and sense of health!" he went up the river as far as the overseer's house. here, upon the bench built around the sycamore, he found old mr. morrowcombe, who had stayed over with the carters. in his old brown clothes, with hair and long beard, pale as the pale patches of the sycamore trunk and boughs, leaning forward upon his stick, he looked, as it were, the huge old tree come forth into human form. curtin sat down beside this old man. the cane upon which the elder leaned was now close to his eye and he saw that it was covered with finely cut words. thick, and shaped like a shepherd's crook, the graving ran all over it. "may i look?" "surely!" said mr. morrowcombe, and gave it into his hand. "the year i was in prison at camp chase i carved around it the twenty-third psalm." curtin examined the quite beautifully done work. "trust and consolation in your hand--walking with them for fifty years!" he sat musing. mr. morrowcombe's old, gentle voice began like the zephyr in the sycamore, whose beginning you could hardly guess. "yes, sir! that staff's me now. just as a good dog that goes with you gets to be you. it's helped me, week days and sundays; that staff i made myself. i made it myself, and i didn't make it. i didn't make the tree that grew it and i didn't make the psalm; nor david that made the psalm. but i cut the staff from the tree and i carved the words there. so i reckon i have my part." "you cut it in prison?" "do you see that piece just thar?" the old finger traced the line. "'_thou settest me a table in the presence of mine enemies._' i cut that deep and fierce!" he looked at the river and then again at curtin. "now, whatever it means, i know it doesn't mean what then i wanted it to mean!" his old, gentle face grew meditative, contemplative. a more tranquil form and face it would have been hard to find. "i kind of sense the meaning, but i can't put it into words. but when you feel at last with folks and things you can't feel against them. when i was young i must have hated a lot of folk! i don't now." "what is your healing herb?" "put yourself in his place. don't oust him from the place, but understand him. flow into him deep! then you'll find that there is something inside or above you and him which understands and straightens out both of you. next thing you find is that you haven't got any real controversy." "do you call that something god?" "that's what i call it. i used to think that you _had_ to call it god. i don't now. but it's a mighty good word! we've hallowed it. it's the biggest word we've got." "mr. morrowcombe, when we join god, don't you think we shall say 'i'?" "_that_ will say 'i.' yes." they sat gazing at the river and the colored hills. "ain't this a lovely place?" said mr. morrowcombe. "it's like beulah land!" "do you ever talk to mr. linden?" "surely! him and marget land. they're of those in our time who are remembered early." he glided into one of his gentle silences. curtin pondered that matter of re-membering, re-collecting, re-storing. said mr. morrowcombe, "i knew marget land when she was a little girl and came to sunday school. she was baptized in our church, but she ain't now one of our church members. that used to grieve and puzzle me--make me a little angry, too, i reckon! now i don't bother about it. she's in the living church, all right." he looked up into the bronze and silver sycamore. "i've sat on this bench in old major linden's time, when john land was overseer and lived in the house yonder. his wife, elizabeth, was just the salt of the earth. those children used to be playing around this tree. i remember marget, a bare-legged, big-eyed little thing. she's sat by me often on this bench and made me tell her stories. now it seems a long time ago, and now it seems yesterday!" his voice sank again into the october sunshiny stillness. his lips closed, but curtin felt him speaking on in thought and consciousness. it came to him, in another of those revelational flashings: "that is the ultra-violet of speech, the high, subtle, inaudible, continual speech! when we begin to catch it, when we begin to hear thought--" he felt again the shock of going together, of rivers pouring into ocean. mr. morrowcombe's lips parted. "the war turned me serious, and i found religion two years after the surrender. i'd tell her bible stories. i had a kind of gift that-a-way. roger carter, that's my nephew as well as my son-in-law, has got the same gift, though it ain't always bible stories that he tells--except i reckon as all true stories are bible stories! i used to tell her about david and jonathan, and joseph and his brethren, and ruth and naomi, and mary and martha and lazarus, in bethany.... mary and martha in yourself, and lazarus who was long dead but could be raised, and christ, who could judge and portion and raise, all in yourself! she used to listen, sitting just there. she had mind then, and she's got mind now--more'n i have in a lot of ways. she and him. mind and goodness, and spirit that is power, and a body that you love to look at! they're the kind of folk that ought to be. yes, sir, i was thinking when you came along of marget sitting there, a little thing, and saying, 'now tell me about the children of israel'--or 'about bethlehem,' as it might be." with distinctness curtin felt that which the old man also seemed to feel, for he turned his head, lowering it and his eyes a little, and smiling. the movement was precisely that of turning and smiling into a child's eyes. again through curtin poured that thrill of a freshness of knowledge. if this tree, this place, were strongly in a consciousness, in a memory, surely then that conscious spirit itself might in some sort be felt here! at any rate, he was aware of marget, though to all outward senses appeared only the warm-colored october air. he had again the sense of etheric life. he lost it. it was so bright, it was so transient! the unquenchable desire was to bring it lasting. he presently walked back to sweet rocket house. drew was on the porch. "i'm going to stay. i'll write to brown, and ride to rock mountain to-morrow to tell mr. smith and randall, and pack up my things." xi the next day drew returned to rock mountain to make his arrangements. "why not ride with him?" linden looked at curtin. "there is a fair trail. you have an extraordinarily fine view from the top." drew urged it likewise. "but i haven't a horse." "roger carter has a good saddle mare. he will be glad, i know, to let you have her." drew, mounted as he came, curtin on dixie, set out before noon for rock mountain. the cliffy crest that gave it its name peered above the southern hills and ridges facing sweet rocket. crossing the river the two kept for some little distance to the alder road, then at a pine tree left it for a just discernible track. "this is where we changed, randall and i, the other day. until we saw the river we thought that we were going to alder, but we were going to sweet rocket instead." the trees closing in behind them, they were plunged into forest. there was now no green save the green of occasional pine or hemlock. all was gold or red or russet. moreover, the earlier trees to turn were fast flinging their mantles upon the earth. the sky met less obstruction, the sunlight spread a royal carpet. the air equaled exhilaration. as curtin rode he thought that he faintly remembered all the forests of the world. "is it infectious? is it because in some sort drew remembers, or is it because i have been--and surely i _have_ been--in all the forests of the world? like him, i remember best the temperate and the northern forests, because in time they are the nearer." for a while they rode in silence. there was only the sound of their own breathing and movement, and the very inner voice of the forest, low speech of branches that brushed them, break of twigs, flutter of wings, tap of woodpeckers, whisk of squirrel, and once, a little way off, the heavy whir of a pheasant. at last drew broke the silence. "my mother died when i was fifteen years old, and my father when i was twenty. i remember my mother's mother and my father's mother and father. i know a good deal about their life after i was born and their life before i was born. i have a fair notion of my grandparents' parents, and i know something of the way of life of the generation behind that one. i have been told and i have read. of course there are presently ancestors of whom i have been told nothing, and behind these countless others. of course i know that people often imaginatively share the experience of parents and kindred. they say: 'it must have been so and so with my mother and my father--or with my grandparents--or my ancestors generally. they had these experiences and they must have felt and done this way. it seems almost as if i were there!' i think when you say that you are beginning. but it's grown to be more than that with me. after all, what are you but your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, and so on? your experience under your immediate name and your experience under your old names--their names. and alike, what are they but you? share and share, comprehend and comprehend, include and include! i tell you that i am aware of the pyramid behind this cleaving point that is talking to you. i _remember_." "do you mean that you remember actually thinking, feeling, doing what men say your ancestors did?" "i don't get it clear. it's all wrought into some kind of unity. i don't remember clearly sharp, isolated experiences--except that one time i told you about, and that was clear and sharp repetition. but i remember, all the same. i don't feel any wall between my father and myself, between my mother and myself, my grandparents and myself. you don't know how curiously i seem to share their life! sometimes, lying still at night, i simply, naturally, am edward drew as well as philip drew. i look out of the edward drew window--or out of the andrew or robert or margaret or janet window--and then i turn and look out of the philip drew window. i had a great-grandfather who was a sailor. i can't tell you what feel of the deck beneath my feet, what a sense of sea by day and by night, i have at times!... but then, of course, in the far back i must join many sailors.... i _am_ those folk. that's my own life they led. i lead their life. wherever they are, they lead mine!" he fell silent, and curtin, too, rode silent. they were now above the valley, their road climbing. overpassing a great hill they came to a threadlike, green vale, and crossing this climbed bear mountain, behind which rose the great head of rock. when they reached a gushing mountain spring they dismounted, and, seated on moss and leaves under a tall mountain linden, all palely gold, ate the bread and cheese and damson tart and drank the cider that sweet rocket had put in the bag they carried. their feast ended, they rested on the springy, fragrant earth. drew began again. "remembrance! if i had a hundred per cent better brain--and i suppose one day the brain of all of us will be a hundred, a thousand per cent, ahead of what it is now--i am convinced that i could remember not only down the stalk of myself, but out into the branches right and left. the tree conscious from leaf to root, from root to leaf! the whole tree conscious, aware up and down and to and fro--and, as somewhere all the forest joins on, the forest conscious and aware up and down of its history. then the forest runs into all the forests high and low. the everlasting forest and all its adventures!" he looked as though he rode in that forest. "out of it comes the tree that sheds the forests! and never once need we lose consciousness in finding that tree! that's what mr. linden said to me. he said: 'you're the ash yggdrasil. you're all things and all people. you share them and they share you. you're to extend, extend, your sense of that. the one is to come down and lay hold upon you--and still you shall find it home and yourself!'" on they rode over bear mountain, and at last up rock. five hundred feet below the top lay a green depression named hall's gap. here a half-dozen cabins made hall's town. the people now owned rock mountain, its rich forests and rushing waters. a road was in the making and that and other department plans brought to hall's gap preliminary groups, the present group being a surveying, engineering, and reporting one, with malcolm smith for head. under him he had cooper and morris, randall and drew, with axmen and spademen hired from the mountain. the cabins in the gap lodged them all. curtin and drew reached this place before sunset. the men were coming in, dogs barked, the smell of coffee and bacon hung in the air. randall welcomed them, and presently malcolm smith appeared and shook hands. they had supper in hall's big double cabin, with hall and mrs. hall and half a dozen flaxen-haired young halls, but after supper they went to a neighboring cabin, for the time being their own. pine knots blazed on the hearth. malcolm smith and cooper and morris, randall and drew and martin curtin stretched tired limbs and smoked and talked. morris and cooper presently played checkers. malcolm smith read the newspaper, but after a little put it down and talked. he talked of aviation, and wireless, and of einstein's notion of space, and of atomic energy. "i've an idea that ideas, ideation generally, imagery, perhaps memory, are simply that energy functioning! we imagine, and that energy has constructed a form in ether. we use it blindly, weakly, unintelligently. but if--" "i see." "but if we used it enormously more strongly--and wisely--we'd be creators all night! it's getting very important to know what we do want to create. if we don't look out, presently we may find that our imaginations have life! we've got to choose, i suppose, what kind of life we'll give; silly or monstrous life, or intelligent, kindly, strong, beautiful life!" curtin enjoyed the evening on rock. flame and odor of burning pine, and the pleasantly grotesque shadows on the cabin walls, made for rich fancies. in one of the easy silences the men grouped in this brown and flame-hued place seemed to him genii, gathered here before they drove their roads over mountains or harnessed their plunging water steeds. he thought: "we are genii! how wonderful it is to be what we are--and shall be!" men at hall's went to bed before ten. curtin found in a small cabin a hard couch and honest sleep. he slept without turning till five of the morning, when he waked with a great sense of refreshment. "where i have been i don't know, but it was where vigor flows!" the stars shone in at his window. he lay still for a few minutes, then rose. the air was not too chill. he found when he was dressed that he was warm enough. opening the cabin door he went out, moving softly so as not to waken drew and randall. the morning star hung in the east, and near it the moon in her last quarter. the cold, first hyacinth of dawn streaked the sky. drew had pointed out the path to the top of the mountain. curtin, finding it, climbed it alone. half an hour brought him to the summit. when he reached it the earth was bathed in the cool and violet first light. he found a great projecting rock, shaped like a chair, and took his seat here. the planet, from gold, was become silver, and the moon hung like a dream canoe. here or there mist hid the vast expanse below, but for the most part earth lay clear. the outthrust rock that was his seat gave him two-thirds of the circle. stillness with depth and power possessed curtin. he looked out, and down, and over. range on range, with narrow vales between, rolled the mountains. in the strengthening light the autumn hue of them gave desert tints; then he picked out clearings, and white points that were hamlets and farmhouses. he turned eyes to where would be sweet rocket, though he could not see that valley. it was dawn. richard linden would be up. perhaps, guessing that curtin might watch dawn brighten from this rock, he might be here in mind and spirit. even as he thought this, the presence of linden not there but here, or both here and there, came to curtin in a wave. he felt company in solitude, doubled life. and not, as he presently perceived, linden only. linden meant thousands of others, as thousands of others meant linden. thousands and thousands.... that was himself ... thousands and thousands. he looked north and east and west; by rising and moving he looked south. the horizon rim lay very far. using knowledge, he let it farther drop away, drop away. underneath him was the bulk of the earth. use power and make it as crystal, penetrable as water or air! overhead and all around was air, thinning afar into ether. he saw his globe in space and time. a ten-minute road of light ran between it and the sun. he sat very still, but within he moved into the land of contemplation. here much time came into no-time, so subtle swift was motion. he entered into touch with much for which he had not yet found name or names. he might say, there is deep water and rich land. he might say, the world is other than we thought it. there are americas ripe for discovery, and there are farther and future americas forming. by degrees might lessened. muscle could not yet hold, nor sense be aware. he came nearer surface. yet still there was vision. phosphor was paling, the moon a dim curve of pearl, and all the spread of earth in stronger light. curtin gazed, and the eyes of the mind outran the eyes of the flesh. not just virginia, but all the forty-eight states. not just the forty-eight, but all america, canada, and mexico, and the islands and the republics of the south. he looked to the atlantic and saw on the farther side europe and africa, and on to the east asia and the pacific. he saw the continents and the nations. it was not so much that he saw their earth, their body, though he saw that, too. but he saw them, touched them, heard them, as persons. the most of them had lately been at fierce war, fibers of each dissenting, but the bulk warring. exhausted from war, haggard and torn, yet still they made gestures with broken weapons. he saw them in the throes of economic and political change, of change from knowledge to knowledge, and of religious change. he saw traits and actions, deep, deep; yesterdays at the point of to-day, and all the morrows being built of yesterdays and to-days. he saw as it were stain and chaff and guilt, and through all these white-running fire and life and upspringing. they were persons, but a greater person held them. light broke. he saw the earth and the world and the heavens as person. upon him broke in deluge the vaster selfhood. the sun rose over rock mountain, the long ranges and the vales. the air had the exquisite fresh energy of hope. curtin moved down the path to the cabins. all his being seemed lit and harmonized. "it is what the old saints called conversion. my times fall into the hand of the one that i am!" the rosy light shone on hall's below him as it shone on sweet rocket and alder and the virginia farms and villages and towns, and the farms and villages and towns of every state, and of all the americas, and of the earth. fragrant smoke rose from the chimneys. he heard the cheerful voices. a great love of the neighbor pervaded curtin's consciousness, and with it entered the neighbor. his consciousness and the neighbor's consciousness became to a degree one. xii the men at work had breakfast at hall's in great beauty of weather. afterward curtin went with them along the proposed line of road. it proved a cheerful group, doing basic work well. the wine of the air and the lift of the earth and the beams of the sun helped amain. axes rang, pick and shovel sounded. there was a center of work and there were outlying explorations. one hallooed to another. morris was a master whistler, and you heard him like a redbird. dave hall had an interminable mountain ballad which he chanted as he worked. the buzz of the whole might be caught a long way over the mountain slope. where they worked would be a great driveway for holiday folk. young and old would pass that way, drinking the great views and the mountain air, pierced by beauty and largeness. young and old, man and woman, a many and a many, through years heaped like sand! "i like public work!" said randall. drew answered: "i like it, too! if a scholar wants to help all and a teacher wants to help all, then going to school and teaching are public works. but i'm coming back to help hold the forests for themselves and the people." the morning went by quickly. at noon they had dinner by indian creek, that rushed and leaped. three young halls brought their food in baskets. it was spread under hemlocks, and they ate as it were in arden. dinner over, for half an hour they smoked and rested, stretched out beneath the trees. "tell us a story, cooper!" "i haven't one. call dave hall over." dave came, tall and lank and brown as ale. "sit under that tree, dave, and tell us a story." "i kin sing you about john horn and betsy at the dance." "no. tell us a story. tell us about the mountain woman you began about the other day when the storm came up." "miss ellice?" "yes, miss ellice." dave settled himself, with his back to the wine-red trunk of a hemlock. he was lean and tanned, wide-eyed, with a rich, drawling voice. "she was a see-er, that woman! this-a-time that i was telling about the mountain barked like a dawg at her, and showed its teeth and tried to bite--because she said an awful thing! she said that a time would come when every man and woman could do the things that jesus did. she said christ was an abstract description of the state of being folks would come to some day, and jesus was a great laborer who got there earlier than 'most anybody else. said he was an example, sure enough, and a shower of the way, and who could help loving and wondering? but, 'cording to her, the best way to love jesus was to _learn_. stop jest do-less wondering, and grow! said that bethlehem and nazareth and galilee and jerusalem and the new jerusalem were where any man or woman was! brother carraway preached against her, and the mountain decided she wasn't healthy for it. she was living all alone, but the mountain decided that her cabin had better be emptier yet. she was a tall woman, about the age of my mother, and when you looked at her you'd think at first she wasn't strong.... "brother carraway, after he had preached, went on home, but james curdy always took what he found in the word and tried to do it. what he found was usually right harsh. james had black eyes pushed 'way in, and long hair that always seemed to me to be blowing in a wind. he was awful fond of the word 'punish.' 'now you're punished!' 'god will punish you!' he used to stride around and do his best to see that god didn't forget it. he was one to see that god did his duty, was james! he couldn't always make the mountain look at things same as he did, but after brother carraway's sermon, and the lightning striking barber's house and killing old mrs. barber, he got two-thirds of it worked right up to his feelings! that was tuesday after sunday, the lightning having struck on saturday, and mrs. barber buried on monday. he got about thirty men and boys together at john williams, and a lot of them had had whisky--i don't know that this air interestin'? i could sing to you about john horn and betsy." "no, go on! they were going to drive miss ellice off the mountain?" "that was the intention. but this very indian creek about a mile from here makes a pool that's called dumb child pool, because little johnny nelson that was dumb was drowned there. he fell in while the children were gathering nuts and he couldn't make them hear. well, those that had had something stronger than water, they were all for seeing if miss ellice wasn't a witch! you know how folk used to prove a witch? that was about twenty of the eager ones, mostly young men. this wasn't very recent. i wasn't living on this mountain, but on stormy mountain over thar. i came here when lucinda nelson and me married. but i've heard all about it." he spat vigorously. "now, this is where her seeing with other eyes than like yourn and mine comes in! and how i come to know about some things that others don't was that that very lucinda nelson that i married happened to be at miss ellice's that day. nelsons ain't afraid of anything, and miss ellice had done them neighborly turns, sitting up with the sick and sharing coffee, and such as that. anyhow, lucinda was there, and miss ellice was braiding a rug and seemed extraordinarily cheerful and sunny. 'long about two of the clock, as it were, she broke off her talk and finished her row, as it might be, without looking at it. then she says to lucinda--and lucinda says she was that still and sunny, like a day that comes sometimes, that she was 'most afraid of her, just as you're 'most afraid sometimes of that kind of day, and yet you want to stay by it and it to stay by you--she says, says she, 'i'd like you to stay longer, lucinda, but i find that i've got something to do! you go along, honey, and if i don't see you again i want you to remember that i like you and think you're on the right road!' and with that she got up and kissed lucinda and stood in the door to watch her down the path. lucinda went along home. well, in about two hours, here they come, james curdy and mat waters and jonathan morgan, and the others, drunk with whisky and with what they thought was the word of god. they had a rope, and they meant the dumb child pool." he spat again. "'twas jonathan morgan that told me, and lucinda the rest of it. he was young and wild in those days. jonathan says he hadn't been drinking, and for all that now and then he shouted with the rest he had never seen a day so sunny and still, and just the minute after he'd shouted he'd see the whole as in a picture--his crowd and the dumb child's pool, and miss ellice's cabin. kind of saw it out of himself as it were, as though he was sitting on the bough of a tree looking, seeing thar as well as here. but the rest of them, i reckon, didn't see nothing but a witch and something exciting to do--unless it was james curdy--and what he saw and felt lord knows! something like a nightmare, i reckon! "miss ellice's cabin was high on the mountain. they stopped shouting when they got nearly up thar. they thought that if before that miss ellice heard them she'd just think it was some jamboree going on alongside of mountain. james curdy had such a rule that he could bring even the drunken ones quiet for a bit. so they stole up the path, and jonathan said that the cabin above them looked like a goldy leaf hanging still, or like an empty nest. so they went up in a string till they got to where the trees stopped and there was just some bushes and grass. and then they spread out, and went on in a bunch, and james curdy cried in a loud voice, 'woman, come forth!' but the shut door didn't open. then he cried it again, and then he opened that tight mouth of his the third time. he had more learning than most of the mountain and he used big words. 'blaspheming atheist, come forth!' but the others wouldn't stay quiet any longer, and they shouted, 'witch! witch!' "the door stayed shut, and jonathan said that the cabin hung like a goldy leaf or a nest high up on a bright, still winter day. jonathan says there was something so still and sunny there that it stilled the shouting. then they opened the door, for it wasn't bolted, and those that could get in went in--james curdy at the head. those outside spread around so's they could catch her if she run out. but miss ellice wasn't at home. she was gone. "thar was her half-braided rug and her chair and a little fire on the hearth. but she wasn't there. it turned out that she had taken a bag and a basket with her clothes, and a little money she had. and then mat waters found the letter on the table, and jonathan morgan read it, because james curdy had left his spectacles at home. and if you'll believe me it was directed to 'james curdy and matthew waters and jonathan morgan and their company.' inside it said just this: 'i've loved this cabin and this mountain. but now i remove myself from among you. yet i love this place where i have been, and am, and shall be. now abideth faith, hope, and charity, but the greatest of these is charity.' and then there was the name, ann ellice. "jonathan said half of them were still drunk and outrageous because they couldn't have their fun at dumb child's pool. a lot didn't even listen to the letter, seeing with their own eyes that miss ellice was gone. james curdy listened, and his face got white and his eyes red coals. 'she's brazen!' says he. 'the devil talks scripture to his own damnation!' he went out of door and looked about him. but most of the rest didn't see anything but that they'd lost something exciting to do. they began to break up the furniture. then some one raked the coals and brands out over the floor and they set the straw bed on fire. but jonathan took the letter and a book or two she had--lucinda's got the books now. but james curdy stood outside and looked down mountain. 'that's harris's cabin a mile over thar. it's likely she's thar.' and he began to go down over mountain side. mat waters and jonathan morgan followed him, and so did about half of the others. the rest stayed to burn the cabin. the witch had gone off on a broomstick for them! "the harrises were a kind of lonely folk that didn't go much to church or nowhar. they mightn't even have heard of brother carraway's sermon. she might be thar, as james curdy thought. but she wasn't. she had been thar, they said, jest a minute. she'd looked in on old aunt viny harris and said she was going away. said she was going to foot of mountain to norwood, whar you get the train. aunt viny asked when she was coming back, and miss ellice smiled and said she didn't think she was coming back. 'whar was she going to live?' she said she didn't exactly know, but she had kinsmen who would take care of her. 'aye,' said aunt viny, 'you're a master weaver and worker, and any folk ought to be glad to have such a handy woman around!' which shows that the harrises hadn't heard anything. and so aunt viny said miss ellice said good-by very friendly, and went on down mountain. james curdy wanted to set a hound of harris's on her track, and the drunk ones shouted at that, and one staggered out to get the dawg. but jonathan, he represented that miss ellice would be 'most down mountain now and out on big road where the tracks would be all mixed up and covered, and anyhow the folk down there wouldn't understand and let it be done. by that time the cabin was burning up on mountain above them. they could see the smoke and light. james curdy had to let it be, though doubtless he had some hard thoughts of the almighty. well, that is the end of it! she didn't ever come back. it ain't much of a story. i don't know why i told it to you." "you don't know where she went?" "no. mountain folk ain't curious in them ways. you'd better have let me sing to you about john horn. lucinda says she took her body away, but not her spirit. says she can feel her any still and sunny day. i reckon jonathan morgan feels the same way. i don't know. it's been a long time ago! brother carraway's dead and jonathan morgan is brother morgan now and preaches in the old church. things air sure changing in this world! last summer i heard him say myself that christ was inside us and not outside--might never have been outside us, so much in the world being parable! james curdy's so old now he couldn't do anything but look mad as an old beast in winter and get right up and go out of church, looking like a snow cloud and talking to himself.... lucinda says people keep on acting and persuading if we see them or if we don't see them!" he lifted himself, long, lank, and brown, and moved from the hemlock. "you air welcome--mr. smith, you'd better speak to jim harris about them logs." xiii malcolm smith, talking with curtin in the cool twilight, before hall's, had no word against drew's departure for sweet rocket. "he's a valuable, likable fellow! there's a curious sense when you are with him of depth or background that he doesn't understand himself. violin wood! he says that this friend of yours has something to teach that he wants to learn. that's all right! i can generally tell when a man's real destiny is ruling him. i've got that feeling now about drew. he needs to buy in a certain city and he's going there. if we're here next year--and there's a lot to do on rock mountain--i'll be glad to take him on again." bedtime came. again curtin slept profoundly, restfully, waked early, and climbed again to crest of mountain to see again the sun rise over so great expanse. he sat in the stone chair and before him hung the morning star and the senescent moon. below them was spread violet and jonquil and one strange sea of blue. again he felt the spiritual sun. he thought: "this is what they have perceived at sweet rocket. they have not waited for death. they live now, and forever, and know it. this body will go from them, but they are building or remembering--i do not know which, and perhaps it is both--a life that will not go from them. and i also, also, though i am a babe yet--" sitting in the hollow of stone at the top of the upraised wave of earth he watched the sunrise from rock mountain.... he conceived that what was true of him was true of others, had been true age after age, was true now over this round earth of others. he thought: "there has always been a fellowship. the eidelweiss does not guess the roses and the heliotrope, nor the violet and the meadow rue. but at last the garden of the earth guesses! it becomes the living garden. the living garden becomes the living man. naught is right, naught is reasonable, until you get it from the whole." the sun rose, the earth turned ruddy. curtin went down the path to hall's, breakfasting there with the men who worked with head and hands. this morning he and drew would start for sweet rocket. drew's slender luggage was going down mountain to norwood, whence the train would take it to alder. every one liked drew, even cooper who laughed at him. "good luck, old farmer! ride over and see us sometime!" the two rode down rock and crossed a vale, like a green and gold ribbon, and went up bear mountain, where the oaks were all deep colored, and down bear and over forested hills and on by the trail that struck into the alder road. they went rather silently, but in a deep, contented companionship. once drew spoke. "he said, 'a good present is one in which the past betters its condition.'" when he said "he" there was meant richard linden. after this there was silence again, both having struck some road within, where is the network composed of all the roads of the world. they approached sweet rocket. the forest fell away. before them shone the river, the wheat and orchard land, and the ruddy house with its pillars of mellowed white, and the hills that inclosed. through part of the day clouds had been driving across the sky. now they were sinking before the southwest wind, leaving the blue arch. they were variformed, castles and towers, bridges, alps, cities, ships, mythical beasts, giants. light embraced them in a spray of colors. crossing to it, for one instant, curtin saw sweet rocket transfigured. all that was strong and fair became a hundredfold stronger, fairer. all that deterred or roughened or overweighted or twisted or weakened vanished in warmth and light. a sheath, or husk, or burr fell away. interior power rousing itself, he saw the place in its seraph aspect, eternal in the heavens. drew seemed to share the perception. he said, abruptly, "there is splendor!" they felt splendor; then it closed, like light withdrawn, warmth screened away. there stood sweet rocket in its earthly estate. that is, they thought it its old earthly estate. but by that much it had become endowed and was not the old earthly estate. they had checked their horses. curtin said, "so it was always in poetry!" the younger man had a curious gesture. "we gather all the household gear into the long ship, and put forth!" but curtin thought, "in the bible noah gathers all the lifeseed into the ark and rides the waters into a new world." they crossed the river and went up the little glistening beach and by the cedars to the house. sweet rocket welcomed them home, the white folk and the colored folk and tam. they found the household increased by two. linden said, "these are my cousins, robert and frances dane, who come for a little while each year to sweet rocket." they were a married pair, a little above forty, perhaps, the mark of the city upon them. they had quick and nervous bodies, thin, lined faces, eyes well apart, burning deep and very steady, lips tending to compression. they seemed tired--about them breathed something of soldiers after a long day's march through hostile elements. this was bivouac, this was rest! at first they were too tired, there was almost resentment. "o god, _how_ can you be still and ageless?" this changed, little by little, at sweet rocket. the overtension disappeared. they were left taut, collected, wary--workers worthy of praise in a dangerous world. at the supper table that evening curtin made out more and more of their life. they had come yesterday, a little before their set time, and anna darcy had the start of him in acquaintanceship. intellectual radicals certainly, members of some group in action, probably of more groups than one, jack of all agitations and master of one. he could hear them speaking, in halls, and under open sky, and he could see the face of the throng to which they spoke. they would be speaking of soviet russia, of guild socialism, of employer and employed and the course of labor that did never yet run smooth. there were causes, not so apparently economic, for which also they would work. he heard them speaking for the suffrage amendment and likewise for the release of conscientious objectors. they belonged here, they belonged there. the one, he was later told, was associate editor of a journal that was making the step from liberalism of the left to communism of the right. the woman was an admirable violinist. he knew that they lived on little and gave much of that little away. they lived where it was possible to live in one big room and three small rooms. they had a son who was doing well at a school they liked in the country. to look at them was to see how hard they worked, and to look into their eyes was to see the beacon that set them and kept them at work. they also had vision of oneness. though in talking linden and marget used in a much less marked degree the terminology used by the newcomers, it seemed to present no difficulties to them. they seemed to understand these guests, as they understood those others who had come to sweet rocket this october, to understand and to travel with them. curtin thought: "they sympathize. it does not occur to them to say, 'do something else, take another road!'" he thought: "that is their strength. they utterly share." frances dane had brought her violin to sweet rocket. yesterday it had been laid in the parlor. now, after supper, sitting by the fire in the old room, the violin spoke. it told of the player's passion for the world, of the man who wrote that music's passion for the world, of the passion for the world of all makers of violins, and of the trees whose wood was used, of the passion for the world that is progression and revolution, of the passion for the world that is the slower rate that is called withstanding progression and revolution, of the passion for the world that is music, of the passion for the world yesterday, to-day, and forever, of the passion for the world that every heart of us knows! xiv "it is something like this," said linden. "we are one being with its mighty potencies. all that comes in comes to us, all that goes forth goes from us. the points that take, ponder, sort, combine, alter to better liking; the mighty poles, the mighty afferent and efferent that flow from pole to pole, all that is movement, that is gravitation, that is cohesion, that is justice, that is harmony, that is love, are ours. we go as we have gone through time, from and toward--the from that is also toward, the toward that is also from. but something beyond time as we have known it, beyond space and causation as we have known them, increases upon us. consciousness in some sort of the whole orb, awareness through and through, is momentously upon us to-day. in the end all desire is desire for that." "we shall move then in four-space?" "if you choose to put it so. it is an allowable figure. all that present language can devise is but a word, a figure, a symbol. what we mean is the next advance in consciousness. when you have it you know it." they were treading a slender path through october fields. now they were in a great, climbing cornfield, all stacked corn like brown wigwams, and here and there upon the brown and stubbly earth the orange of pumpkins. the air folded them in violet and gold dust and faint frankincense. the hills had changed in color, so many leaves being shaken down. on days like this the mountains were evidently entranced. it was indian summer before the indian summer time. "a new consciousness?" said frances dane, walking with curtin. "a farther-on consciousness? it is in the air to-day!" "yes." "wise men saying, 'we have seen his star in the east--' oh, that's a figure!" "there is some reality, or thousands of us would not be hearkening, as we are hearkening.... a new man, a new creature.... it's a consummation devoutly to be desired!" the heaped corn stood around, the orange globes made constellations on the earth. they were now well up the slope, at their feet sweet rocket and the little sliding river. all was reflected, all was veiled, but now and again eyes looked through the veil. reaching the top of the hill they found there a tall, solitary tree--a black gum--and built around it a bench. it linked in curtin's mind with the sycamore before the overseer's house. they sat upon the bench and upon the ring of brown grass that ran around the tree. the view was fair and they rested in silence. it was anna darcy who noticed how much silence there was at sweet rocket--silence that sang, that caressed. moments went by, silence held them, fair solitude, sense of one person here alone. tam moved, coming nearer to linden. the latter's hand dropped to tam's head. anna darcy heard a low sigh of relief and burden lifted. it came, she thought, from frances dane, who sat near her upon the grass. but it might have come from more than frances, from all. stillness and silence deepened. there grew a cathedral sense, a desert, an ocean sense. into that entered a wealth of light and strength. a vast wave of freedom, an access of life, lifted them. they had life and they had it more abundantly. they seemed to themselves to flash together, and of them all was made a god. for an instant there held an intense vision of this valley and of sweet rocket transfigured. color and sound lived, every movement was of joy. that broke away, vanished like the image of a rose into the image of a garden of ten thousand. then that was gone into an image of all the earth, and then that into intense, sheer, mighty living, with small regard to old space and time, abounding, keen, a reality leaving old reality behind. "when it is all done, when it is all known, all felt, when we are fully, completely ourself, when we remember our godhood and live it, when we do not look through storm for the lighthouse ray because we are light, when we do not cry father and son because we are both and know it, when there is glory of home, glory of health, glory of love--" who had spoken they did not know; it seemed their common voice. perhaps it was linden, but if so he spoke as their common voice. into it came not only the voice of the seven there, but the voice of old mr. morrowcombe and the carters, and of mrs. cliff and mimy and zinia and mancy and the others; not just the voice of sweet rocket, but the voice of alder, and of many an alder, big and little, the voice of the city and the country, the land and the sea. "to be well! oh, rise within me, truest self, with healing in thy wings!" the great, golden feeling passed, leaving echoes, leaving memory. these folk were separate again where they had been one, but not so separate. in and out hovered that breath of transfiguration, a day of spring in late winter, dying, but with a tongue to tell of a time when it would not die. where all had been vivid, singing, laughing, now was the wonted gentleness of this valley, a dreaminess shot with gold, taking and giving, but doing it subtly, silently, only now and then bestowing evidence of a vast interpenetrative life, showing like the eyes through the veil of this indian summer day. they went down through the corn and out by a gate, set in the gray and lichened rail fence, where grew sumac and farewell-summer and the feathery traveler's-joy. they walked in meadows by the river, and at last through the orchard, and so to the house. mimy, in the kitchen, was singing: "oh, jesus tell you once befo', babylon's fallin' to rise no mo'. oh, go in peace and sin no mo', babylon's fallin' to rise no mo'!" in the evening frances played again to them, and the rich and sweet music filled the old room. the violin put by, they talked by the fire; then linden said, "read for a little while, marget." she took up a volume of blake, and read. "read that letter to butts." she read: "... over sea, over land my eyes did expand into regions of fire, remote from desire; the light of the morning heaven's mountains adorning; in particles bright, the jewels of light distinct shone and clear. amazed and in fear i each particle gazed, astonished, amazed; for each was a man human formed. swift i ran, for they beckoned to me, remote by the sea, saying: 'each grain of sand, every stone on the land, each rock and each hill, each fountain and rill, each herb and each tree, mountain, hill, earth and sea, cloud, meteor and star, are men seen afar.'... my eyes, more and more, like a sea without shore, continue expanding, the heavens commanding; till the jewels of light, heavenly men beaming bright, appeared as one man, who complacent began my limbs to enfold in his beams of bright gold; like dross purged away all my mire and clay. soft consumed in delight, in his bosom sun bright i remained. soft he smiled. and i heard his voice mild, saying: 'this is my fold, o thou ram horned with gold, who awakest from sleep on the sides of the deep.'..." xv "energy in larger units, affinities gathering strength and flowing together with power!" said curtin. "everyone has seen it and felt it in some wise. when it is blamable, unguided, 'mob spirit'! when it is praised, '_esprit de corps_, mass heroism, mass enthusiasm, conflagration of genius, voice of the people, unity of spirit,' what not! most folk have a glimpse of the fact that there is an ocean of desire, emotion, will, as well as rivers and rivulets." marget came and sat with them on the steps of the little summer-house in the flower garden. she wore a great check apron, denoting housekeeping and helping zinia. she sat down beside them. "what have you been doing, marget?" "once a week zinia and i have a general straightening day. then my mother and i have been visiting together." "truly, truly, marget?" "truly. but in a little wider order, my dear, a little wider order! the order above this order--into which this will melt. mother and father, and will and edgar." "two of those are living and two are dead." marget smiled. "ask wordsworth!" "i see," said anna darcy. "very well. do more than that. _touch!_" with a trail of ivy in her hand she looked past the snapdragon and marigold and larkspur, still blooming, so rich and mild had been this autumn. "then, as the rooms grew clean, i was with my mother in her birthplace, two hundred miles from here. we were there as adults, moving, loving, understanding with a grown mind, but there in her childhood and girlhood as well, loving to contemplate all the past that was us two! mine as hers, hers as mine. mind and feeling ran and caught up with her brothers and sisters, her parents and friends. her parents remembered their parents and those remembered theirs. home rose after home, garden after garden, loved place after loved place." her eyes were upon drew, whose eyes were upon her. "do you not see that you can, that you will, recover it all? all that you have been, and you have been very much; all that you are, and you are very much!" mimy's singing floated to them from the kitchen: "there's a great camp meeting in the promised land, oh, pat yo' foot, chillun, don't you get weary! there's a great camp meeting in the promised land." "and then," said marget, "i was in rome with richard. the sun shone, the wind was in cypress and pine, the fountains made liquid sound. father tiber glided, saint peter's stood. we went to the sistine chapel, and then it was the capitol within and without, and then the appian way and all the campagna--all rome--not to-day alone, but _all_ rome. and then not rome, but starlight nights from the decks of ships. and then--" "this was actuality, while your hands swept and dusted the parlor there?" "my body was in its duty and happy there. yes. actuality, but of another order, an order we are coming into. the order of intensified, guided, _realized_ memory and imagination." "and of reason?" "and of reason. profoundly so. it is reason that is guiding. reason has its higher levels, grows comprehensive, knows longer sequences, completer syntheses. and from the decks of ships we were in the desert watching the stars, shepherds on the hills and shepherds on the plains, shepherds and villagers and wanderers of far days!" she lifted hand and arm in a curious and commanding gesture. "watching the skies above queen rain and king wind! in desert and plain and upon hills and on seas, thousands and thousands of us strewn in time!" for an appreciable moment, to some degree, those listening to her became aware of, made, as it were, junction with their own far wandering, far wondering, savage and barbarian self. it was evident that drew made junction. they touched the mind struggling there, and the lifted gaze. the sense was one of enormous, calm pervasion. they entered into, they aided, their own early man, where he marked the heavens, and around them was the wistfulness of early lands. marget spoke on. "then while i worked we were building pyramids and mountains of the god. we were watching and watching, patterning and naming, comparing, all the skies, the moon, and the planets and the times of the sun, and the white path through the heavens and the great named princes--everywhere, swarthy folk and pale folk! now we were many and many. then in us rose the devoted, the searchers of the skies, seeking from city roofs and temple roofs knowledge of the whole for the whole." their interior self opened its wings and used its eyes. as space expanded, so did time. they were there in the october sunshine, on the summer-house steps, but likewise they attended, and in some vast, liberated way they were that collective effort, that process. they might carry the method over into all processes. there swam across the mind other words--"commerce"--"government"--"family"--many and many a word. marget's voice went on. "now one has made a telescope. our theories change; we stand on dead theories and study on. thousands of us studying, thousands building knowledge, learning vision! we gaze, we watch, we turn to desks and write and figure, we reason, we divine, we better our instruments, we gather results and make fortunate guesses, we hearken to intuition. we stand on a mossy stone in space and study the promised land, the universe that is ours, the ever perpetuating, the ever bettering! time widens. here are mountain summits and the observatories of this day, and the clockwork and the pierced dome, and the great eye that we have made, and the photograph. mind sits at the knee of great mind and learns its alphabet. and all the thousands that were and are and will be are one astronomer, and it is i, still working to know!" she ceased to speak, and sat wrapped in the golden light. said robert dane: "we follow where you step. you make us follow you." "i do not make you. you walk with me because you can walk. we walk. it is your self as it is mine." "we move and we feel, then, where you are. you live there more fully and keenly than we, but we can breathe and feel and see. go on! we would have your life, as you have ours." "then, after the stars, while i wound the clocks, i walked into the minute. again thousands of us working and watching, noting, divining--thousands and thousands, years past and to-day and to-morrow! and one devises the microscope. all the laboratories!... into the cell, into the atom, the infinite dance of relativities and small collections! and the intensed, pointed endeavor, using perception as fine as the millionth part of a hair--we knowing, marking, understanding ourself there, where we are moving clouds! we working there, patient, patient, the god working! the great and the small. we who forever remember and make richer ourself. we the i-- and then i was again with my dead, who are just as much and just as little dead as i myself! and then i came out into the garden." they sat on the summer-house steps, and the marigolds glowed around them. she spoke again. "here and there, throughout the past, and often now i think in our own day, a man or woman lays hold upon faculties that some day all will lay hold upon. _and greater things than these._ forerunners, pioneers! regard this late flood of books describing communion with the dead and giving detail of the life hereafter. what they describe is the widening consciousness here and now! the increasing awareness. one does not wait for death. richard and i would not have you think that we are deep, deep, deep in that realm. were it so nothing could hide it. were we or any full in the next order you would see the shining. we are not there, but we are in motion toward it, as are many to-day. the road thitherward has its great scenery and long, thrilling adventure! and you, too, all of you, too, are in motion toward it. in this day of ours, each day of the sun, more and more are in motion." she rose from the step. "i have rested this body that we call marget land and now i shall put it again to work in the house we call sweet rocket." xvi that evening, after she had played to them, frances fell to telling of a crippled boy, almost a man, living in a poor flat in new york, the father an overworked head clerk, the mother a strong, gadabout, well-meaning person, more apt to reproach than to sustain. there was a sister, a stenographer, who meant to marry, if she could, some employer. this nineteen-year-old boy had a passion for travel, who could rarely travel as far as the street. at intervals, when his father had leisure to accompany him, he went to a movie. if the piece had scenery, country and ocean and strange cities, moving throngs and great buildings and places of which he had read, he was happy. he took the _geographic_, and got travel books from a library. he knew more of the earth's surface than did many a "traveled" person. but it was hot in the city, in his little stuffy room, or it was cold in the city in houses that could never buy coal in quantity. he had a good deal of pain, and his eyes got bigger and bigger. curtin had claimed the small bedroom at the end of the upper hall. drew slept in the dormer-windowed room above. frances and robert dane possessed the large room opposite marget's, next to linden's. here were four windows and each narrow bed placed where it might look forth. this night the danes talked awhile, then addressed themselves to sleep. robert slept, but frances found that she was wakeful. yet she had definitely turned from care and question of the day, from concern for her own work left in suspension, even from the face and incident of sweet rocket. from her pillow she saw the stars as they rimmed and rose above the mountains. at first she seemed to be over there, with the shadow below and the diamond above, but then to herself she left it all. there seemed naught about her but cool space. she lay without fret at wakefulness, though she was intensely awake. she became aware that, waking, she was becoming rested, refreshed, as though she had profoundly slept. she was awake above the old waking. the old waking was dreaminess to this state. vigor poured into her being, and all the past was passed. that is, it was passed in its heaviness and friction, its strain and anxiety. all that seemed to drop away, like dross leaving gold. it was curious, her sense of gold color of all things in a gold light of their own, not from without. she became distinctly aware of influences. they were good. she acquiesced, "yes, i will travel with you." will consenting, her strength was added to those other strengths. in the plane where she now was flashed out co-operation. marget--richard! certainly they were where she had been wont to call "within her." but certainly she felt them, was aware of them, presently saw them, as never had she done before in that "within," though often in memory, thought, and imagination she, like others, had been with marget and richard there "within." she had used those words as a matter of course. even then that "within" had, when you examined it, its own space and time, its own mechanics, warmth, color, and sound. that "within" and this "within" were of a piece, but where that had been faintly real this was vividly real. she had no doubt of its reality. it was so, but reality of another, of a farther on, order. marget that afternoon had talked of another order. it seemed that one might rise or deepen into it. she was consciously there now, though in the order below it she rested at sweet rocket. it was not the plane of tremendous power and illumination, but it was a state of developed powers. it was as far as just then she could go. the boy stuart--stuart black. how many a time had she wished that she could give this boy travel! "if i might take him and let him see!" as he had longed, as he had imagined himself traveling with mr. and mrs. dane. "if i could travel with you!" and now to-night they had somehow caught and held to the ether and were seeing what they wished to see. the influence, the individuality that was marget and richard strongly aided. she was in rome with marget and richard and stuart black. she did not question them nor him, and the boy did not question. they were there, and it was sunny weather, and they were strong and happy. they stayed in no hotel, they depended on no cab nor car, they needed no food of the old sort. when they looked at one another they saw body, since where is still multiplicity must still be body. there was something of old bodies in these bodies, but also there was difference, and all to the good. old defect had vanished. stuart black was no cripple; she herself had lost fatigue. there was translucence, a golden appearance, and where they wished to go they were. she wished for robert, and immediately felt that in wishing she had said to the others, "i wish." they strengthened her wish with theirs. here, then, was robert with them, though intermittently, not on the whole so strongly, but coming as he could answer, sleeping there at sweet rocket. and now and then another joined them, though somewhat dimly, and that was the boy's father, whom he loved and wished to include in his joy. the body of rome, too, was like and not like the old body of rome. rome had a self to match this self of theirs. spirit and body and mind and soul, rome understood itself better. there rose a rome richer, purer; nothing of fair and wonderful lost, all such quality strengthened; the unfair, unwise, unstrong of old, everywhere tending to drop the prefix. yet to the new self rome was herself, singing, enchanted, of the past and present and future. marget and richard, who seemed truly marget-and-richard, one word, had said, "a week in rome," and that was what seemed to pass. they saw as in old travel they had seen, they went about as in old travel they had gone about, they enjoyed as in old times they had enjoyed, but with freedom and power and joy that left the old behind. all was vigor, heightened and transfiguring perception, and yet friendly, homelike, not solemn nor stilted, the boy here enjoying like a boy. frances became aware of a control, keeping experience to a vivid and fair finiteness, not sacrificing current form. that was for the boy's sake, perhaps for her and robert also. and after rome, athens--an athens, too, sublimed. and after athens, for the splendid richness of things and for the boy, the vast north, forest and plain, and an intense exhilaration of life that swept out upon the great sea and encircled the earth. they spent long, bright days in ships and at ports of call. then they went to china, and india, and egypt. they crossed the desert of sahara, and again in a great ship passed between the pillars of hercules. followed ocean days, and that greater will and awareness slowly diminishing, gently returning upon its still habitual self. diminishing, diminishing, slower, slower, a little melancholy, but tranquil, with a subtle smile.... a sense of a giant woman in stone rising from an islet in a harbor--a sense of a familiar city in the year --a sense of dreamy farewells, a quiet darkness and lapse.... frances turned herself in her bed at sweet rocket. starlight flooding the room dimly revealed walls and furniture. across by the other window robert lay sleeping. how much time had passed, or how little, or how widely could you live in no time at all? here was reality, but there, too, had been reality! it had been real, that companionship and that travel. the memory of it was memory of reality. mind had attended there not less, but more than here. the whole compound self had achieved a unity and power. achievement--ungrown wings--first flights! she thought: "the possibilities! o life of life, our possibilities!" old warmth and drowsiness took her. there was a kindly fatigue, as though she had walked on a bright day to mountain top and back and now thrown herself down for rest. she saw the stars through half-open eyes, then slept. the sun was streaming in when she waked; robert already up and dressing. she raised herself upon her arm. "good morning!" "good morning!" she rubbed her eyes. "there is a strange and happy feeling of 'there' being here!" robert said: "that somehow hits it. i had the most vivid dream of long, sunny travel, with you and marget and richard and stuart black! it wasn't like a dream. i feel as if i were just off the ship--had all the memories and a most tremendous refreshment! i could take down any wall this morning!" "why do you put it that way?" "i don't know. we have so walled ourselves in from wide doing--are so afraid of our own landscape!" he stood by the window. "i think i'll ask you a question that never, never would occur to mr. gradgrind to ask! do you remember it, too? for instance, athens and some dim, northern forest--and a lot of islands with palms? do you remember music?" "oh, it was all music--and i think that i'll play it all my life!" dressed, they went down to the others, zinia's bell ringing for coffee, omelet, honey, and cakes. linden and drew had eaten and gone to meet roger carter and william where the winter wood was being cut. marget sat behind the coffee urn. "good morning, robert and frances!" her face of a subtle, moving beauty, more of look than of feature, did not turn upon them with a "do you remember?" it seemed to assume that they remembered. frances thought, "certainly she remembers, and as much more strongly than i as i remember more strongly than robert!" it was of a piece with all that they had talked of. "at last, with all of us, talk passes to action." frances dane drank her coffee. all of them in the room seemed bound in a ribbon, linden and drew also, wherever they might be in the forest, and stuart black in that small, dark room in new york, and how many others! she did not name them, but she knew they were many, in fact all. in a flash she saw how, to marget and richard, might appear not many selves and binding ribbon, but one self. to realize this was to realize that for her, also, there was but one self. xvii three days after this curtin and anna darcy, who often walked together, having gone to the pass of hemlock, cliff and tumbling water, turned in the broken sunlight and shadow back to sweet rocket. the maples of the upper slopes had cast almost all their leaves, but the oaks stood yet in carmine. yesterday had fallen light rain. earth lay moist, and soil and leaf and fern and moss sent out a haunting odor. the sun stood in scorpio. the drama of the year was on the homeward road. it saw ahead the archer and the goat and the water bearer, the fishes of the great deep, and the ram that, springing forth, should take once more the road, the old road, the new road, the old-and-new road! now curtin and anna darcy spoke, and now they were silent. it was a blessed feature of this valley that none need be talkative in order to convey, "i am at home with you." her visit was approaching its end. that was what people would say. "physical presence and metaphysical presence!" said curtin, answering her thought. "physical and above-physical--and the generations to come will find the inclusive word." "oh, i shall be here still--or 'here' will be with me in the city--or it will be both. at any rate, no desolate parting!" they passed from under hemlock and gray rock to beech trees and a dappled path. the small river calmed itself and began to flow through cultivated land. gentian and farewell-summer made a purple fringe for the way. "in old romances one walked into an inn or house by the road--always saying, 'it is by the road that goes on as it went before, and i presently again with it!' but never again as it was before, and never again i as before! for just there befalls the adventure that sets one climbing to a new road." sweet rocket vale opened before them. each time they looked it grew fairer, and that, they had begun to see, was because it was not separated from anything. said anna darcy, presently: "do you know morris's _earthly paradise_? do you remember the story of rhodope? i used to know almost all of it by heart. when rhodope is born the countryman, her father, dreams, and he seems to himself to be standing with the mother, watching "... a little blossom fair to see." then:-- "the day seemed changed to cloudiness and rain, and the sweet flower, whereof they were so fain, was grown a goodly sapling, and they gazed wondering thereat, but loved it nothing less. but as they looked, a bright flame round it blazed, and hid it for a space, and weariness the souls of both the good folk did oppress, and on the earth they lay down side by side, and unto them it was as they had died. "yet did they know that o'er them hung the tree grown mighty, thick-leaved, on each bough did hang crown, sword or ship, or temple fair to see; and therewithal a great wind through it sang, and trumpet blast there was; and armor rang amid that leafy world, and now and then strange songs were sung in tongues of outland men. "it is something like that that i feel for any place--and perhaps now it will be so for this and every place! it was such a blossom and now it is such a tree. all hangs therein, peoples and nations, things past and things to come! when i go away i shall find it so in any place." "that is what you will do--and i also. everywhere that tree, that man, that god!" the vale widened at the overseer's house. the sycamore by the river stretched in the sun its great arms of white and brown, and these and the blue vault made a pattern. a dozen turkeys crossed the path in a stately, slow-stepping procession. mary carter was singing in the house, and little roger singing after her. as they approached the tree and the bench around it other voices reached them; then one voice reading aloud. they saw the two danes seated there--frances, reading a letter. "so i _did_ travel with you and mr. dane. it was so wonderful--it is all around me now! i don't clearly remember little, sharp bits of it, but i remember the whole. it has shown me a lot of things. i don't any longer mind living. it's funny, but father, too--" frances looked up as curtin and anna stepped under the tree. bright tears stood in her eyes. she shook them away and smiled at the two. "it's a letter from the crippled boy i told you about--" the four walked back to sweet rocket house. "robert and i have but a week longer. but this place tempers the wind of the whole year. it drops honey into winter days." curtin asked robert dane, "forth from here you go on with the work you are doing?" "of course. that is a department of this. but i wish to work without bitterness or violence." the day shone about them. rain of the night had brought into late autumn a sense of spring. spring and autumn seemed to touch across shortened winter. the air held a divine, sweet freshness. they were aware of new life, and all objects of perception tossed back vigor and luster. "the world renews--the world renews!" sang the river. a little later robert and frances dane at their window saw, coming up from the river, a somewhat worn automobile. stopping before the porch the driver and owner descended and mounted the steps. "there's an old type!" said robert. "tall and thin, black clothes and soft hat, low collar and string tie, white hair, mustache and imperial--look, frances, it's a picture! once it was the horse, and he swung himself down--then the carriage, and at the door he helped out the ladies. now it's the car. to-morrow he will descend from the airship--just like that!" she looked over his shoulder. "it's old major hereward from oakwood. he was here four years ago, that time i came alone. he's all the past! but that car's symbolic, too. he's all the past beginning to say, 'for all my fighting i begin to find myself, with all i care for, here in the present--perhaps also in the future!' he's beginning to think that it may be so with the airship. there with all that he really, really cares for! 'i always said that they couldn't get along without me, and now i begin to see that neither can i get along without them!'" major hereward appeared at the dinner table. it seemed that he, too, was a cousin of linden's, on the other side from the danes. his place was oakwood, twenty miles away. old major linden and he had been boyhood friends. he breathed knowledge of sweet rocket in ancient days. his manner to marget was delightful, though perhaps he still held in comparison, in a "this--that," sweet rocket house and the overseer's house. his manner to all was delightful--like old wine. robert dane pondered that, and also frances's words of the morning. like others, he could speak as though the past, the present, and the future were islands with nothingness between. but truly he knew it was not so, and he assumed that much self-knowledge in those to whom he spoke. now he had it, in a flash of vision, how the old wine and wheat, how the old strength of man and woman, did go on. all within the whole flashed and changed. but the whole held all. the tangential itself only went so far, then returned, and was met and welcomed. _the prodigal son._ he saw that contrary winds were not so contrary after all. "in the whole, and in the whole only, i am not contrary to him nor he to me. in the end one sail and one wind--and the sail due to arrive and the wind favorable." that afternoon major hereward walked over the place; with him, linden and curtin. "i came to talk to you about something, richard. but we'll leave it till night. i can always pull things together better then--after the day. here's the oak phil linden and i planted the day we heard of first manassas! he was eighteen and i was sixteen. the next year we both went in." they stood beneath the tree. said curtin, "much water has gone over the wheel since then!" major hereward nodded. "much! but phil linden and i seem to stand here together. not just of the mind we were, but together! _and many a foe grew to be a friend._" the bright day declined. the sun set in a coral sea, a crescent moon appeared, earth grew an amethyst, the stars came out. brush was being burned and wood smoke clung in the air, and there was the multitudinous chirping, chirping in grass and bush of late autumn. it was almost november, and they built larger fires. the old parlor gleamed. "it's a dear room, a dear, dear room!" said major hereward. "i don't believe any here can love these portraits as i do. richard may look at them often, but--" he broke off. "i forgot that he is blind! i'm always forgetting it! well, he may see the reality of them." richard entered, and a moment later marget. "it's a night of the gods! how the fire leaps!" they sat around it, anna darcy and curtin and drew and the two danes and major hereward, linden and marget. anna darcy was saying: "i went down to mimy's before supper. the preacher is there for the night--brother robinson." linden answered her. "yes. he will be here presently. he always comes to us for an hour or so. he's a fine fellow." rising, he fetched frances's violin. "what deep and dear pleasure you give, frances!" she played old music and new, into which the old glided, until there seemed neither old nor new, but a content very vast and rich. the wing of the music lifted them; music and flame blended. they sat in reverie, and the wealth of the world flowed, circularly flowed. without, in the night, a lantern passed the windows. "there is brother robinson," said marget. richard went out--they heard his voice in the hall--then he returned with the negro preacher and zinia. he said, "mr. robinson--friends, all of us!" the circle widened. the preacher sat down between linden and robert dane, and zinia sat between marget and frances. "play a little longer, frances!" the music blended with the flame, the wealth of the world flowed, flowed, circularly flowed. the rev. william robinson sat, a gaunt, dark figure, in long-preserved broadcloth, with a rugged, deep brown face. when he spoke his voice had unction--like the voices of most of his people--unction, but not too much of it. by sheer indomitableness he had gained a fair education, and he was a good man and a wise one. in her blue dress zinia sat beside marget land. she kept silence, but her poise was like her poise in the dining room and pantry, or on the porch when miss darcy had taken her breakfasts there. the latter always thought of her standing beside the pillar, or in the clean, airy pantry, by the jar of flowers and the open _pilgrim's progress_, always heard her rich voice, saying, "i like that girl mercy!" it seemed that robert dane had met brother robinson before this at sweet rocket. when the violin was put by the two talked together a little, as folk might talk who liked each other. curtin, from his corner, watched with interest sweet rocket in virginia. a voice from somewhere went through his head: _where there is neither greek nor jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, scythian, bond nor free, but christ is all and in all_. he looked at major hereward, and the old man, who had stiffened at the "mr. robinson" and the seating in the circle about the fire, seemed now to rest at ease, in a brown study, as one who regards the expanse of things. miss darcy spoke. "at mimy's this afternoon you had begun to tell me of the building of your church and schoolhouse down the river. then they called me and i had to go--" "tell them now, brother," said linden. brother robinson told, and what he told had humor and pathos and heroism. there passed, as upon a screen, the littles gathered that were much to spare, quaint efforts at money raising, labor at twilight and dawn given by laboring men, the women's extra work and their festivals. brother robinson was a born raconteur. into the sheaf of his homely narrative fell vast swaths of human effort and aspiration. "and brother linden helped us, and old mr. morrowcombe gave us five dollars." a voice came from the corner of the hearth, from major hereward: "i'd like to help you, too, brother robinson! put me down for ten dollars." they left the material building of the schoolhouse and the church. said brother robinson: "i've got something else i want to tell you. i've had an experience, and it's taken the heart out of my bosom and crumbled it between its fingers and put in a new one! i came to sweet rocket to tell it to you, mr. linden. but i don't see anyone here that i'd be afraid to tell it to." "there isn't any such," said linden. "tell it!" xviii "i was going to preach," said brother robinson, "at piny hill church, that's twelve miles from old lock, where i live. i started out saturday afternoon to walk, counting on a lift or two on the road, and i got them. i was going to sleep at will jones's, who works at the mill on piny creek. the first lift i got was from a wagon full of hay going to cherry farm. that was two miles. then i walked three miles. then a ford came along and said, 'hey, brother robinson, are you going as far as llewellyn?' i said that i was, and farther, and the ford took me to llewellyn. that didn't leave but four miles to do, and that was nothing. so i was a-walking, and the leaves hung red and yellow, and the evening was powerful sweet! i went through the woods by the thessaly place. i was thinking as i was walking. and then, just like that, mr. linden, thinking with words stopped! my old body stopped, too. i just lowered it under a cedar tree and left it there. "but i myself went higher and wider. i was everywhere and all over! i was in and through everything! they were just shapes in me. it was like being air, or like that inside air you told me about, called ether. you told me about that, but when you told it i hadn't experienced, and so it was just words. now i have experienced. everything was right here and now, or there and then, it didn't matter a mite which! "the first thing i felt was just infinite cleanness and coolness. it was me and it was not me. if it was me it was something vast in me that had got the upper hand. there was a me, a self, like a tired, dirty child. to that me the other was god. but god turning out to be me, too. i had preached about god for thirty years, but i never really tasted or touched god till that day. it was cool and whole and pure, and bigger than the sky. and it forgave all my sins, or it saw clean through them. it saw a long way and all at once.... the tired and dirty me was everybody else, too. it was me and it was everybody, and we were healed by our god, and that was us, too, us, and more than we had ever dreamed of in that us! it healed with its might, and the lower part understood and went up.... i can't give you a description. it was awe and joy. the little body of william robinson couldn't have held it, but something bigger than that held it. and then, just as light changes on the mountains here--when you are on top of rock mountain maybe, and see everything below you--and it's all there, but it's got another tone and you feel it in a different way--just so that cool awe and greatness changed a little. it was joy still, but now it was friendly and natural. it was the whole earth looking like a garden, and all mine, all me, and in that me was all i had ever thought was you or him or her, and all that i had ever said was it. the bird and the beast were there, the trees and the grass and the air. and it was lovely; it was just love, and beauty!" he brushed his hand across his eyes. "i can't tell you about that beauty. and we weren't dead; all was living. if you'll think of the very best moment you ever had, when you were deepest friends with yourself and found that it took in everybody, it might be something like that a million times over. it was innocent and wise. and all the times that i'd ever thought i was happy were just plain misery beside it! i couldn't hold it, any more than a young robin can hold the flight he will hold after a while. i reckon we're all fledglings! back i flopped toward william robinson. here was old virginia, and the woods and the road and the hills and the mountains, and old lock, and piny hill church. but just before i settled in i got for just a minute this very country and our daily life in the light and the glow and the music and the wonder! all that was fair kept in and strengthened, and all that was unfair just melted out! i knew then that though we talk about it we haven't begun to love our country. it went, too, into the world. 'for god so loved the world.' ... well, that vanished, too. i was back. i was just the colored preacher, william robinson. i was back, but i could remember! i've touched what it's like to be god." he ceased speaking, and sat bent toward the fire. a little of that luminousness of which he had told seemed to show through his flesh, a dark translucence. he said, under his breath, "'little children, love one another!'" and rested silent, in communion with the flame. "'for all we are members one of another.' feeling that," said linden, "is to feel as one. then the one no longer counts as separate his members. he says i am." stillness held in the old room. the fire gave it crimson and amber life and warmth. the canvases on the walls, the pictured men and women, seemed self-luminous. major hereward spoke abruptly: "where are the dead? where are my brother dick, my son walter, my mother and father?" "they are here. re-member yourself and you shall find them." "where is heaven?" "it is here, the moment you begin to perceive it." "you mean that you perceive the dead, richard?" "yes. do not you?" the old man stared. he drew a long breath. "never before did i think that i did!" robert dane spoke. "you mean that as the great consciousness expands it becomes aware of itself there, too? that that realm becomes open?" "yes. discovery there is within the grasp of our age. it is not so far away as many might think! as power comes through. the 'dead' and the 'living' do meet. they have met all the time. the general recognition and use of the fact is to be strengthened, developed." "it is not the only recognition and use of oneness impending!" "by no means! no. in every field there is ripening corn. how should it not be so?" major hereward's voice came in again. "'the spiritual sense of the dead.' i've heard that phrase. i didn't know what it meant. do you mean that when i seem to myself to move about in company with dick, when things come into my mind that he knew about or that we did together, when i seem, as i go on, to understand his character better and better, and to see life as he did, when he seems here with me or when we are just happy together in old places--that it's _true_? and walter and my mother and father and helen and others--oh, scores of others--they enter my mind and heart just as though they came in at a door! do you mean that when i think of them suddenly and strongly, feel them as it were, that _they_ are doing part of it, that there _is_ intercourse? good lord! i thought it was only myself!" "i mean that," said linden. "it will grow to be more than that. a higher, fuller thing than that." the old man rose. face and voice showed emotion. "i've got what i came for. god bless you, richard, and god bless you, too, brother robinson! oh, we've been little! marget, i'll say good night, my dear. out of my life goes fear and loneliness!" brother robinson likewise, with zinia, rose to say good night. "i'll see you in the morning," said richard. "i want to talk to you about the school." that night curtin, also, increased his sense of life, life that included those that were said to be dead. there had been no repetition of the hour when, lying in the room where now slept robert and frances dane, he had touched with an inward sense that brother who had fallen from the aeroplane, who had been jostled out of the body, but who lived! surely the life was not quite that of the old life, though surely built from that; certainly curtin might not fully understand until he, too, slipped the body. yet there was life and living. he had not experienced that hour again, and he had tried doubting if he had ever experienced it. but doubt did not prove to be a going proposition. memory smiled it down. yet the experience had not been repeated, or rather what had come had diffused itself in the wide awakening of these sweet rocket weeks. nor did its distinctive _klang_ return to-night. there was not the same white keenness. that which beamed about him now was more like that which marget had spoken of on the summerhouse steps. not one now, but many of his dead; not the human only, but the flower and the tree, the bird and the beast, the scene, the water, land and sky. "the old and sweet is here, but chosen, redeemed, gathered up, understood, become immortal! and we have had it all the time. it has been here all the time! just as we had electricity and did not know it." he fell asleep, rocked by the waves of a sunny sea of love and home and kindred. xix major linden spent two days at sweet rocket, chiefly sitting upon the porch in the sunshine or walking about the place, sometimes in company, sometimes alone, but never, curtin noticed, with an old man's look of loneliness, though he thought that at times before this major hereward would have shown that loneliness. but now there was vigor in him, vigor and interest and life. "if they are here, living for me as i for them, talking to me and i talking to them--it is the strangest thing what life does when it comes!" his laughter had a clear and happy ring. "i had thought of all kinds of solutions! and here it is, the needle threaded, while i was still looking for it in the haystack!" he stood beneath the oak he had planted almost sixty years ago. "phil is here. trying, wasn't it, phil, when i said, 'oh, fancy!' or, 'it's just wilmot hereward talking to himself!'" when he met linden on the porch he said: "richard, if it's so with those folk whom we so promptly insisted hadn't any reality in them, isn't it so all over? when i'm pondering bob who's in england, or when i'm thinking of nothing in particular and in he walks into mind and affection--" "yes. it is part of the same truth. it all rests on the oneness of being. that is why you must in some wise grasp that oneness first. a time will come where there will be no saying 'my brother dick,' or 'bob in england,' because they and wilmot hereward and all others will have advanced beyond all such divisions. but on the road there you will meet many a fair power!" the old man went the next morning back to oakwood in his battered car. he went alone and not alone, with a peaceful face. in the afternoon anna and curtin, drew and the two danes, walked down the river, in among the partly forested, partly grassy hills that here closed the valley. indian summer had now stolen over the land. the air hung smoky amethyst, and still as still! no motion was in the fallen leaves, the birds sailed stilly by, the stubble fields dreamed, the river sang low. wood smoke clung in the nostril. turning, coming homeward, the brick house and yellowed pillars stood pictured. they passed through the orchard and by a small cider mill. zinia, on the back porch, poured for each out of an amber pitcher an amber glassful. "_was-hael!_" said drew, and lifted the glass. curtin caught from memory the answering phrase, "_drink-hael!_" a shaft of wonder, like a gleam of light, touched them all with strange fingers. something trembled in the air. if it said aught it said, "so earth begins to _live_ poetry!" drew set down the cup with a sharp, clear sound. "life, everlasting life!" he said. "i see it now! we have always lived!" again evening in the old parlor, the fire and music, tam lying beside linden, marget seated by anna darcy. robert dane spoke. "this finding ourselves in all and all in us, this lifting the all into a mighty i, this is it behind the slowly accelerating movements of the ages, behind all efforts for freedom, for knowledge, for interchange and intercourse, swifter and swifter, subtler and subtler intercourse--this is it?" "yes. behind a hundred shapes of dawn." "effort does not cease?" "no. but effort, too, is finer and far more powerful. you act now from within upon the within." "to touch through and through that we are one! hercules's labor isn't in it!" "yet it is done and to be done. find me if you can an individual to-day who has not some dim perception of it, or who is not in some wise acting toward it! even the most unpromising--look and you will see! it is so tremendous, that finding, it runs through every fiber. we can cut out no pattern, but we move from light to light, from love to love!" in her room that night, when she had put out the lamp, anna darcy, lying in bed, watched the firelight on wall and ceiling. a cricket chirped, she could hear the river. her visit to sweet rocket was ending. "only it will never end; it is immortal within me!" she saw how all life interlocked, how shock to one was taken up by the whole, how joy to one thrilled through all. "what we call space is being; what we call time is our own story, our colored, toned lastingness! give and take, forever and forever, forever and forever! find lovely things to give, and from the other side of us take lovely things, lovelier and lovelier! know thyself--know thyself--know thyself. 'if ye do it unto one, the least of these, ye do it unto me.' 'and all we made one.'" the walls of the room disappeared. anna darcy, a slight, worn, teaching woman, sixty years old, vanished or altered. there was wide life, land and sea, deep life that did not talk in births and deaths, lofty life that said, "better than this wave even, shall you know!" it was strength, it was peace, it was wisdom and balm. across the hall robert dane lay thinking. in his youth he had the passion of a shelley for a regenerate world. older, the vision dulled, and yet he worked on doggedly, heroically, one with thousands of others breaking and making a road for the feet of coming man. he worked heroically, never sparing himself, a devoted life. sometimes the gleam shone fair before him, oftener mists made it faint, sometimes he lost it. then it shone again. he worked on. to-night, lying here at sweet rocket, his youth came back, but higher, fuller, wiser! he saw what might be done, what was doing. he saw the interrelated roads and the travelers upon them, the hosts of travelers. a vision came to him in the night. his body lay very still, but he himself saw clearly a great thing. there was a city that was country also, and sea and land and sky, that was a world, harmonious, great, not a dead thing, not unintellectual, but living, living with a vast fervor and beauty and interest and knowledge, throwing out even, it might be, silver lines toward a world yet more light, more fervent, more living! but it was there, all that he could now image of body and spirit, mind and soul's desire: he saw like a pale film another city that was pale and sorrowful to this. and he saw that city, as it were, send out itself, by rivers and seas and roads, thousands and thousands of paths, upon a journey to the other. there was hardly a point--truly he thought there was not any point--that did not travel. so many living beings, so many ships or rafts, caravans or solitary travelers to that desired haven! all going, some ahead, some behind, but all going. the pale and sorrowful city was moving into that other, and brightening as it moved. that other was drawing it, steadily, steadily! he felt it like a loadstone; he felt it like a mother calling home. the vision passed, but there was left assurance. he lay still in the starry night. the mind kept up an underhumming with words like "reintegration," "superconsciousness," but the spirit dealt only with the bliss of a great coming to itself. he slept at last, and his sleep was dreamless and profoundly renewing. xx "it is the flowering land, it is the music land. you go to it through every moment and incident and encounter of the day. you read, and it is behind the words. you think, and it smiles through. it is the higher us that resolves the discords and reaps the fields. experience it once, and it is miracle and wonder; experience it twice, and you say, 'columbus was not the only discoverer!' experience it thrice, and you work for it day and night! you yourself, drawing yourself out of the old man and the old house. read 'the chambered nautilus.'" "it is religion--" "it always has been religion." "and the gloom and storm of our day?" "it is _not_ gloom, it is _not_ storm. it is the pains of growth. feel the epic and voyage that it is!... every proper and general noun in all dictionaries now and to come is my name, as it is yours. every verb is my doing, as it is yours. the use of language, use and _dis_-use, is mine as it is yours--" they were walking in the orchard beneath the apple trees, whose leaves were slow to fall. there had been, this morning, a heavy frost. the garden flowers were going, the creeper over mimy's house had shed its scarlet leaves, but held its dark-blue berries. the heavens hung a blue crystal. the air had the cool of mountain water. it was the day when anna darcy must leave sweet rocket. after dinner daniel and the phaeton and marget would take her to alder to the north-going train. now, with marget, she went the round of the place, saying good-by. they had been to mimy's, and had talked to mancy at the barn. "come again!" said mancy. "but you ain't really going, you know! sweet rocket will hold you, and you'll hold sweet rocket." they came by the kitchen. mimy was singing: "swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home--" "you gwine back inter the troubled world?" said mimy. "they say hit's awful! but, lord! there ain't any bars ter trouble! i've seen a lot." they walked up the river to the overseer's house, where they were made welcome by mary carter and small roger, and by old mr. morrowcombe, who was staying over from sunday, which was yesterday. he said, much as mancy had said: "i'm sorry you are going! but thar! you ain't going in the old, harsh ways." marget, sitting beside him on the step of the porch, rested her arm upon his knee. her brown, slender hand touched his great horny one. "grandfather morrowcombe!" she said. he answered her: "i see you as a nine-year-old, marget, and i see you as a woman in sweet rocket valley, and i see you as something that stands above child and woman. it isn't any more big than it is subtle-fine. it's puzzling to find words. but when i look at you and think of you i seem to hear the air stirring over the whole world. all kinds of things that i had forgotten, and all kinds of things that i have read...." she and anna sat for five minutes under the sycamore by the water. returning then to sweet rocket, they walked in the garden that was making ready for winter. as it happened, mrs. cliff came this day down mountain to borrow some sugar. she sat on the steps of the back porch, in the violet light of november. "howdy!" she said to miss darcy. "i'm glad you stayed on. when i come here i want to stay on, too. but thar! i take the memory of it up to my home. you wouldn't think how often thar i'm here, too!" to-day she had a braided rug to sell, and marget bought it. mrs. cliff's long, wrinkled hand put the money in her pocket. "times isn't betterin' any, miss marget." marget laughed. "oh, the poor old times!" it startled anna darcy, too, so joyous and care-free and lilting was the voice. mrs. cliff stared at her. the mountain woman's face was not what one would call a cheerful one. whoever was behind it was caught in a network of fine, anxious lines. now these held for a perceptible moment, then faded as though the twine were mist. that one immortally youthful and insouciant looked forth as it had looked from marget. sun came out over meadow, plain, and hill, and mrs. cliff laughed. "i reckon you're right, miss marget! you generally are. i reckon we've seen so much that we can afford to take it tranquil--which ain't to say that we're either do-less or keerless!" she spoke to anna. "you remember my tellin' you about that feeling i had? i 'ain't had it full again. but i've caught glimpses of it, maybe in the day, maybe in the night. i know the minute when anything like it comes my way. when you've had a feeling like that all your life's set to feeling it again." but marget had taken it joyously. when mrs. cliff had said good-by and gone mountainward the two, crossing the pleasant porch, entered the house. they walked from room to room, anna's consciousness gathering each. "any time you may feel me here!" "we shall feel you here all the time." they stood in the study, against the broad mantelshelf. "at first, when i thought of this room, i thought, 'richard linden's study.' but it is of and for and to both of you." "ah yes! to both." she seemed to give forth light. anna thought, "is it only the sun shining on her?" later, in her own room, all packing done, dressed for her journey, anna went and sat beside the window as she had sat the first evening at sweet rocket. she still heard mimy singing, she still saw the garden, though it was dreaming now of spring. "i have been here only a month, but in it i have had years and years." the quiet room filled with a sunny stillness, an eternal assurance. again, as on that first evening, the mountains were here and the wind of the sea was here. love and wisdom and power were here. the boy jim brought daniel and the phaeton to the door below. marget came for her, and they went down, and through the hall to the porch, to find there linden and curtin and robert and frances and drew, and zinia and mimy, and mancy and tam. across the river, at the edge of the wood, marget checked daniel so that anna might look back and see the house again, the house and the trees and the hills, and the holding arms of the mountains. "but you are to come again," said marget. "never part, and come again!" "yes, oh yes!" the wheels turned and went on upon the alder road. they entered the forest, old forest, great trees that sloughed their leaves again and again and again, through centuries past number, sloughed their leaves, sloughed their old bodies, made soil, and stood upon it and builded higher. behind and in and through every stem and leaf rose the subjective forest, and behind and in and through the whole the ideal, the spiritual forest, the divine forest. around and onward went the wheels on the leafy road. anna sat beside marget. the two spoke little, having now no great need of words. the light came down between bare branches. far and near branch and blue air made a marvel of lacework. against this pines and hemlocks stood like pyramids and pillars. song and twitter of a month ago was not now. "the birds go south--the birds go south!" said marget. "but there are enough left for winter company. there is a bluebird on yonder bough!" round went the wheels, making hardly a sound. the forest hung still, so still. for one moment, to anna darcy, it all went away. it was _maya_, illusion, the forest, indian summer, this day of our lord, the phaeton and daniel, sweet rocket and alder and new york, marget land and anna darcy. what was left was fullness of being. did it choose to analyze itself it might be into power, wisdom, and bliss. the revealing flash went as it came, ere one could say, it lightens! _maya_ again, marget land and anna darcy, daniel and the phaeton, the forest, sweet rocket and alder and the train to be met. but each time the sheath thinned and there was left stronger light. the train came, the friends embraced. anna darcy looked from window at marget and then at alder, the fields and hills and rivers and mountains. the train roared through a tunnel, and when it emerged the scenery was changed. there were fields and mountains, but not these fields and mountains. "and yet they run into those. there is no impassable wall nor aching gulf. there are the finest gradations--" marget and daniel and the phaeton went homeward along the alder road. xxi november rains wrapped sweet rocket. november winds rocked and bent the trees. the world was gray, or iron-gray, with rust-hued streakings. indoors they built larger fires. it was five days after anna's departure. unless the storm held him curtin was going on the morrow. in january his profession would take him abroad, to the nearer east. he could not tell when he would be returning. "but sweet rocket goes with me!" "just. as all the east and you flow here." "what kind of a general world are we coming into, linden? what kind of a political, social, economic world? i believe that, as to much of it, robert and frances are far seeing. in the large, those changes are upon us, and in the large they are for the better. they are built into the road we are going. i agree, i welcome! but i would see more completely if i could." linden, in the cane chair by the study window, seemed to pay attention to the storm. at last he spoke. "i cannot see in detail. i think there will be a great simplification. power out of a thousand tortuous channels mingling, running broad and deep! there are signs on every side. the old banks crumble. the great sea lifts other continents." "i see everywhere how we are seeking." "yes. the seeker finds, the finder seeks on, seeks farther. the great ages are ever the seekers." "you would say it is a great age?" "yes. a very great one. who is not in some way aware of it? this friction of opinion on the top is but the wildness of the outermost leaves as the strong wind blows." "and wherever i go i shall find the seeking and the greatness?" "the world is one," said linden. the storm continued. sweet rocket had early supper. zinia and mimy, with raincoats and a huge umbrella, went by the swaying, chanting orchard to their own fireside, to sarah and julia and jim and just so. the danes and curtin and drew, linden and marget, sat or moved about in the old sweet rocket parlor. they might watch the storm from the windows, or they might sit by the fire. the great wind blew through sweet rocket valley. they heard the stream rushing, and the trees had a voice, as though they had taken foot out of ground and were now a herd. the rain was driven against the panes, and the wind hurled dead leaves with the rain. wall and roof and glass shut out the physical rain, but the psychical man cognized it far and near, rain since the world began. and the fire also, and the warm room, and they in company listening to the storm. the momentary outlines shifted. there fell a sense of having done this times and times and times, a sense of hut and cave, so often, so long, in so many lands, that there was a feel of eternity about it. rain and the cave and the fire, and the inner man still busied with his destiny! there was something that awed in the perception that ran from one to another, that held them in a swift, shimmering band. "how old--how old! how long have we done this?" the rhythm of the storm, the rhythm of the room, the rhythm of the fire, passed into a vast, still sense of ordered movement. "of old, and now, and to-morrow--everywhere and all time--until we return above time and place, and division is healed." they felt a lightness, a detachment. the spirit soared with the mind and made it look. "there is the natural man and there is the spiritual man. that last finds himself in all selves, and all selves in him. there is the spiritual man, and there is the divine man who works with power. both are words of inclusion. it is to leave the old small i for the spiritual i, and it is to transcend the last and enter that which is above. then is left the shrunken pond for the ocean! only we say it upside down. it is the ocean that overflows and drinks up the pond." "when god enters life there will still be said i?" "otherwise, still pond and ocean, still separation! who shall lose his life here shall find it. but never sink to thinking that it is what in the past we have meant when we said i! when god enters how shall he not say i? but it is the ocean now that speaks! the pond is gone." they sat still, and the fire played and leaped. through the night the rain beat and the wind blew, but at dawn it cleared. there was wreckage about the world, but life laughed and took her wreckage and built with it anew. valley, hills, and mountains gleamed like precious stones. navies of clouds rode for a while, then melted into the deep azure. the upper sea hung so calm and clear that down through it to the earth bottom ran light that seemed intenser than the light of every day. curtin said good-by, and went. marget and linden drove him to alder. the river ran swollen, the road lay deep in leaves, few leaves now on the trees. the trees stood still in vast ranks. they seemed to be holding something, to be turning it over in mind. there flashed across curtin, "who lifts, all lifts." "yes!" said marget, beside him, as though he had spoken. it was what he carried with him from this valley. linden and marget drove home through the wood. "how still it is! barring foot and wheel on the wet leaves you would say there was no stir. we are passing pine trees. how fragrant!" "a bluebird is watching us from a maple. now here is the great beech. it holds its leaves, though they are brown and curled upon themselves like cocoons. the ground underneath is clean and brown. a grapevine goes over and up with those young trees. there are yet bunches of grapes and they hang so still! there are brown loops for swings for all the forest children, whether they be indians or dryads and fauns." "i see them," said linden, "all the graceful, tawny forest children!" "here is the oak glade with the grass yet green far down it, to where hangs the purple curtain. the outstanding great roots glisten, and the moss holds the water drops. you see a long way. yonder is tree trunk and stone, light and shadow, that looks like a hermit's cell. it is an alley for the whole middle ages to come riding down--for a paladin to come riding down, the red cross knight, or guyon, or galahad, or parsifal--or it might be robin hood in lincoln green!" "i see." "here are green brier and red dogwood berries, and witch-hazel with dull gold fingers. can you hear the water?" "yes. three silver threads of it, like a lute!" "the day is a castle and a church, the day is a city and a star! now we pass the great rock and the two hemlocks, like cathedral spires. here are the little oaks, and there is a guess of crimson about them yet. the birch and the hickory and the tall oaks, and the tops are far and fine and melt into the sky--" they came down to the river, and crossed. "the light washes the pillars, the cedars are little earth clouds. the arch of the sky has none, it springs clear blue. music of home!" "yes. music of home!" after supper, with robert and frances and drew they watched the fire. "anna sends the city to us, and curtin sends the rush of the train and the flying scenery. as we send this place and this mood and this thought to the city and the train!" the violin bow drew across the strings. frances played, and love and release filled the ancient room. the world entered into harmony. the next day rose gray pearl. linden and drew went with the woodcutters. marget sat at her typewriter in the study. robert and frances took a long walk. three days, and they, too, must go cityward. now they walked by the alder road, and at the great pine took the rock mountain trail. the pearly light filled the forest like a water. all sound lay subdued. when a stone rolled underfoot it was not loudly; when a branch broke it was with a slow, deliberate, musing voice. when they saw a wild thing, the wild thing had no motion of flight, but pottered stilly on upon its business of the time. "we are far away! we have crossed to another land. it is as though we died, and this is the quiet ground where we take our reckoning before we find another busy world. oh, a busy world in each of us, and a quiet land!" they rested upon a bowlder half sunken in brown leaves. "there is a touch of eternity about this day.... yet in five days how busy a world for you and me!" "yet i love that as i love this. how happy that we are so rich!" they sat still on the gray bowlder in the gray wood in the pearl-gray air. minutes passed. a bird flew across the path, a gray squirrel ran up an oak. "something is coming down the trail." the something proved to be a man on horseback. the intervening boughs, branches, twigs, made him to be seen like a horseman behind a great window filled with small, leaded panes. he came close, and, seeing them, drew rein. "good day!" "good day!" "from sweet rocket?" "yes, from sweet rocket." "do i speak to mr. linden? my name is smith--malcolm smith from the reserve on rock mountain." robert gave their names. mr. smith said: "have you ever seen a stiller day? it is one of the still days that set you on new action. i thought i would ride over. i want to see drew, and there is something else--" after a minute or two he addressed himself again to the path. "i'll go on, as i have only this afternoon and to-night. i must get back to camp to-morrow." he made no doubt, it might be noticed, of the hospitality of sweet rocket. "i shall see you again?" "yes. we shall turn presently." they watched him along the trail until, as the figure had entered, so it vanished from the leaded window. they sat awhile longer in the gray-pearl world, and then they rose and followed the horseman down to sweet rocket. xxii malcolm smith and drew had their talk, walking by the river in the still, november dusk. drew said: "i was glad to be on rock mountain, and after a few months, if you will have me, i am going there again. but i am glad that i came here. i am growing to see that it is not here nor there, camp on mountain or sweet rocket, that a man goes to find himself. but yet there are helpers.... there's a principle of induction, don't you think, sir? those who find start a wave of finding. the wave caught them, too. there isn't any first or last." turning, they saw fire gleaming through the window. "he says that we (and when he says that he means the whole of us. when he says 'i' it is the other word for 'we.' it is the whole of the many) are growing fast to-day. sometimes he says evolving life, sometimes the principle of integration, or the great synthesis. he may say humanity awake, or going home, or realizing deity, or liberation in god, or becoming real, or fulfilling want, or recollection, or union, or the eternal, including _self_, or love at last. he seems to think that almost any phrase will answer if you know the thing." zinia's bell rang from the porch behind them. they went in to the pleasant supper table, set with wholesome, delicate bread, and fragrant coffee, cottage cheese, and baked apples and cream. the table talk was merry this evening, after the dreamy day. supper over, all walked out to see the night, and found it clearing, with river banks of clouds and stars between like lit craft sailing, sailing. the air breathed exquisitely mild, warm to-night as early october. "let us sit by the river and watch awhile." they took capes and coats and went down to where, before the cedars, was placed a long bench. sitting here, though no entire constellation was visible, yet they pieced out the figures. they sat in silence, watching the ships of the universe. at last said the visitor: "i have been thinking a good deal about you down here by this river, and about drew, and of two or three things mr. curtin said when he was at camp. so i came down. i have been thinking a good deal. look! there is pleiades, a magic island in a sea. i have had my inklings of the way currents arise in this world. let's grant that it is a universe of thought and will and feeling, and that, from ignoring as much as we could that fact, and then from wondering about it, and then from in some wise earning it, we begin to be it--" "just," said linden. "well?" the other continued, "once, when i was recovering from an illness, i found or was found by--and i don't suppose the expressions matter--" "no. they are distinctions without a difference." "once, then, i walked into a state of consciousness that transcended the level that i had thought was the true level. i was there for it might be five seconds of our time. but though again in mass we parted, there remained an influence--like one of those rivers up there. the world has never since been just the old world. but the main experience did not repeat itself, though there have been times when i have met the shadows of it. until the other night. but i will come to that presently. though it was not repeated i have known ever since that there is a consciousness as much above our usual one as the latter is above the ape's. a consciousness that it is profoundly desirable to reach. before that moment i was like almost any european of say . during it--for that one minute--i was in america. after it, though i returned to europe, i could say, there is america!" "yes. just." "but i had fallen out of america and i could never get quite back, though i often tried. and then the other night--" he broke off, and seemed to ponder the sky. "i rode over from rock mountain because the other night i had, not that first experience again, but one that was again in america--new america. from what i have heard i felt certain that this place knows these experiences. i wanted to compare, and be confirmed. so i rode over." he was speaking to linden. "i had meant to ask to talk with you alone, but i see that there is nothing here that jars or makes it difficult. it's a good place, this bench, with the river sounding, and the clouds and the stars." "there is just ourself here." "i was coming down from the top of rock. i had had a still twenty minutes there, watching the sunset. i had thought of nothing in particular, only gathered rest. i was halfway down when this torrent rose and overtook me. i stood still. i remember a pine tree, and beyond that a great wash of sky. but i--i was in the torrent that now seemed ocean, and now seemed air, and now was fire. the combination called malcolm smith was gone into that, like rain into sea or a candle flame into sun. and yet--and that was the miracle of it--there was an i, only it was oceanic, only it was the sun! it held in a sheaf, it sucked out pith and marrow of all the small 'me's' in creation, and soared and rang, an all-person. but what are words? if i could give you that sense--" "perhaps you do. as long ago we developed gesture in order faintly to understand and be at one, and then developed speech, so now the will within is propelling and the will within is receiving these mightier waves. i feel what you would give. go on." "if i could find the words! i passed into a subtle consciousness that went everywhere, and all our old time became space to it. there was motion, as of all the winds of the world brought into one current--only nor air nor fire is swift enough, vast enough! and yet you would say 'quietude.' ... all the movements of our world penetrated, understood, furthered--all the honey fields, all the bees, all the hives--and valhalla and olympus and paradise, where the honey is eaten! and it is all a figure, but what will you have! i can but stammer. i have seen home." he rose, and walked up and down beneath the cedars. "i talk about it so calmly, and yet all that i ever believed or hoped, all that i ever thought or felt or did, is babyhood to that! i am patient, and that astonishes me; i who am back at malcolm smith!" "you are not wholly back. the rising pendulum swings, but now a great part of you is above the old, lower range. and at the last not anticipation, but reality, not light of home, but home!" the river sounded, the stars shone in the upper rivers with the cloud banks. the clouds made rivers, but, the clouds dissolved, there were no more rivers, but ocean, but space, but the eternal fire! "it is all i have to tell," said smith. "it sank with long reverberations, and there was the pine tree, and the camp below, and malcolm smith." they sat in silence. at last, said linden: "america is a term of vastness. they who adventured there and arrived found all manner of experience, but all in america. they sailed in many crafts--and yet in the end all were as one ship, all being for america. they landed north or south, in varying climes; they stayed by the sea or went toward the mountains, but all in america. they met with great variety in adventure, the land being so vast and so rich in might, but all was american adventure.... so it is, i hold, with the new america, the new world now lighting the horizon. it resounds and flames thus to this one, and thus to the other one. but it resounds and flames. the great symphony takes in all the music. feel it as you can, know it as you can! in proportion as you draw the breath of the all, comparisons become odious. you have access as i have access. enter by the door of your inner nature!" "a new man is born?" "yes. everywhere. including and transcending men. men fading into man, men left behind. man moving toward his full consciousness. what in prophecy we have called christ." they watched the clouds and the stars, and they saw, each of them, a new country that was fair and strong and keen and glowing.... at last they rose and went back to the house, and by the fire listened to the violin. xxiii day rose in sapphire, tranquil, pure, still and sunny, white smoke going straight up from morning fires. malcolm smith, mounting his horse, turned again to his mountain. sweet rocket bade him good-by, but linden and marget said, "all who come together in this consciousness part no more!" "i believe that." he rode away, and in the afternoon was back with his work. but the inner eye might view, between mountain and sweet rocket, a shimmering, ethereal highway, a nerve, as it were, thrown from space to space, joining and making one. robert and frances and marget, on this last day of the danes' visit, walked to the hill with the solitary tree atop. the sapphire day continued, quiet and sunny, the air being of an extreme fineness charged with light. far and near the mountains made a cup of amethyst. fields and hillsides at hand were a lighted umber. they saw long rows of stacked corn, and in the meadows hayricks. beyond the orchard they made out the steep roof of the great barn. there were corn and wheat for the mill, there were stored apples. in the wood below them they heard the woodman's ax. "i can see," said robert dane, "i can see that humanity is mastering its own organism. i see that it is lifting toward unitary consciousness. here, now, in this present year as in past years, each year now with greater momentum. reaction and recoil, of course--but back again, and farther! everywhere shows the swift inter-approach. all over, all through, america, europe, asia, africa, australia, and the islands of the sea. the revolutions of our day are woven of it. we are leaving separation and partialness, fortress and dungeon." "yes. all our 'movements' rush into the one. all our vortices approach with a fearful joy the great vortex. the correlation will be established, the summation made. we go to join and strengthen the ancient heavens. the ancient of days draws and redeems and fuses and ones another layer of his being. faster and faster our age begins to see what is happening. the language men use to describe it does not so much matter. the poet names it life, beauty, and joy; the scientific man says knowledge and use; the philosopher says energy and substance in conscious union; the hindu says the _self_; our peoples say god.... all one." they came to the hilltop and stood to look about them. "there is such joy!" went on marget. "pain and pleasure outgrown, now blooms the joy! 'weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.' the being found and the finding. one after another lays hand upon that world, clings, braces himself, draws himself up and over and finds the manna lying around him. joy, wisdom and power! and the taste of them but begun. possession still to be possessed--forever and forever!" they sat beneath the tree and all around sprang the valley and the mountains and virginia and the world. "alive--deathlessly alive! the valley and the mountains, virginia and the world!" frances spoke. "i know a woman who speaks in the terms of the east. is it the principle of sensibility--the buddhic plane?" "yes. atma is yet to arrive. what we see is the light before his face. when he fully comes that is the day of the lord. what all work has been toward, all toil, all hoping. as atma rises in us--as christ rises in us--comes newer and richer life, fuller and fuller, inner powers and principalities, thrones and dominions, and their objective garments. but when we are the lord--i know not! there is light there that is as darkness to us yet." the exquisite valley heightened its values throughout, became richer. the mountains around hung in the eye like the delectable mountains. "if one grows, all things and all places grow with that one?" "inevitably so! the wealth is for all." "the new consciousness that we feel is a pale film to what will be?" "yes. a borderland, the islands fringing the new world. but such as it is it wipes out the old, blind, scattered, little consciousnesses. to what shall be felt and shall be known it is the one leaf of green, it is the olive leaf that the dove brings. but before us are enormous growth, strange and fair adventure, work, joy, love--" through the air they felt the ether, through the sunlight they felt the great sun. light and warmth came to them from the sun behind the sun. it touched, it passed, but each time it came they strengthened. that night by the fire they sat in silence that was full and rich and understanding. "to-morrow night, here at sweet rocket, just richard and marget and drew--and all the rest of us!" the next day dawned, and still it was indian summer. robert and frances went from place to place, as had gone curtin and anna darcy, saying farewell. "we wish and hope to bring our bodies here again next year. but if that is not done, still, still, still we shall have sweet rocket!" "you have access now to all places and times and peoples. you are through the gate, you two! all your good dreams now will come true. if not in this way then in that. every dream that does no injury to the whole." richard and marget, daniel and the phaeton, took them to alder. the still forest was clothed to-day in purple. for much of the way silence held within the phaeton as without. but it was the silence that anna darcy had early noted. it was rhythmic, it was thronged, it was fused and made into the richest solitude. "but such a tide as moving seems asleep, too full for sound or foam, when that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home." now and then they spoke. once robert said, abruptly, "and all the effort of the world is to stand and grow in grace?" "just. all the effort. everywhere! whether it be stone or plant or animal or man or over-man. and where the emerging character is so mighty none is to despise his brother's path or rate of speed. once it was his own. everything has been and is our own. work! but who hates or despises halts and weakens the effort." "but work!" "yes, steadily. in all realms. 'what thy hand findeth to do, do with thy might.' what thy judgment findeth to do. the other name of lubber land was good enough." they came to alder with its churches and sere gardens lying in violet light. here was the little station--in a few moments they heard the train. "good-by!" "good-by!" frances and robert looked through the car window. the platform had men, women, and children upon it. two or three arriving travelers found friends to meet them; there were the workers about the station and the loafers, with country folk and village folk brought by some business, and in the throng richard linden and marget land. just the usual village station. then all of it sprang into light, into music, into significance, into importance. the train moved. there was a cry of "good-by! come again!" all seemed to enter into it, to cry it out. the houses went by, the village street, the hills, the river, and all, all, and this train upon which they found themselves had color and music and significance and importance. "the i that says of every living thing, 'it is i,' says it and means it and understands it and proceeds to live from it, says it of the total objective, and so takes the objective up into the subject--that i is over the verge of the old into the new--" the hills went by, the river gleamed. marget and richard traveled homeward through the purple forest. to-day they hardly used the outer voice. the blind man sat with a smile upon his lips as though he saw, with such a face as could only have come from much seeing. the woman, too, sat still, the body relaxed, the spirit gleaming in the soul. daniel drew them through the forest; nor did daniel, either, lack some sense of growth, dim belief in a higher world, dim will to reach it. below daniel the forest felt that, and below the forest the rock. the utter stream of pilgrims-- the end distributed proofreaders canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (this file was produced from images generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) the wizard's son a novel by mrs. oliphant author of "the curate in charge," "young musgrave," etc. in three volumes vol. ii. london macmillan and co. [_the right of translation and reproduction is reserved_] london: r. clay, sons, and taylor, printers, bread street hill. the wizard's son. chapter i. when walter seated himself beside oona in the boat, and hamish pushed off from the beach, there fell upon both these young people a sensation of quiet and relief for which one of them at least found it very difficult to account. it had turned out a very still afternoon. the heavy rains were over, the clouds broken up and dispersing, with a sort of sullen stillness, like a defeated army making off in dull haste, yet not without a stand here and there, behind the mountains. the loch was dark and still, all hushed after the sweeping blasts of rain, but black with the reflections of gloom from the sky. there was a sense of safety, of sudden quiet, of escape, in that sensation of pushing off, away from all passion and agitation upon this still sea of calm. why oona, who feared no one, who had no painful thoughts or associations to flee from, should have felt this she could not tell. the sense of interest in, and anxiety for, the young man by her side was altogether different. that was sympathetic and definable; but the sensation of relief was something more. she looked at him with a smile and sigh of ease as she gathered the strings of the rudder into her hands. "i feel," she said, "as if i were running away, and had got safe out of reach; though there is nobody pursuing me that i know of," she added, with a faint laugh of satisfaction. the wind blew the end of the white wrapper round her throat towards her companion, and he caught it as she had caught the rudder ropes. "it is i that am pursued," he said, "and have escaped. i have a feeling that i am safe here. the kind water, and the daylight, and you--but how should _you_ feel it? it must have gone from my mind to yours." "the water does not look so very kind," said oona, "except that it separates us from the annoyances that are on land--when there are annoyances." she had never known any that were more than the troubles of a child before. "there is this that makes it kind. if you were driven beyond bearing, a plunge down there and all would be over----" "lord erradeen!" "oh, i don't mean to try. i have no thought of trying; but look how peaceful, how deep, all liquid blackness! it might go down to the mystic centre of the earth for anything one knows." he leant over a little, looking down into those depths profound which were so still that the boat seemed to cut through a surface which had solidity; and in doing this put the boat out of trim, and elicited a growl from hamish. it seemed to oona, too, as if there was something seductive in that profound liquid depth, concealing all that sought refuge there. she put out her hand and grasped his arm in the thrill of this thought. "oh, don't look down," she said. "i have heard of people being caught, in spite of themselves, by some charm in it." the movement was quite involuntary and simple; but, on second thoughts, oona drew away her hand, and blushed a little. "besides, you put the boat out of trim," she said. "if i should ever be in deadly danger," said walter, with the seriousness which had been in his face all along, "will you put out your hand like that, without reflection, and save me?" oona tried to laugh again; but it was not easy; his seriousness gained upon her, in spite of herself. "i think we are talking nonsense, and feeling nonsense; for it seems to me as if we had escaped from something. now hamish is pleased; the boat is trimmed. don't you think," she said, with an effort to turn off graver subjects, "that it is a pity those scientific people who can do everything should not tunnel down through that centre of the earth you were speaking of, straight through to the other side of the world? then we might be dropped through to australia without any trouble. i have a brother there; indeed i have a brother in most places. mamma and i might go and see rob now and then, or he might come home for a dance, poor fellow; he was always very fond of dancing." thus she managed to fill up the time till they reached the isle. it lay upon the surface of that great mirror, all fringed and feathered with its bare trees; the occasional colour in the roofs gleaming back again out of the water; a little natural fastness, safe and sure. as oona was later in returning than had been expected, the little garrison of women in the isle was all astir and watching for her coming. out of one of the upper windows there was the head of a young maid visible, gazing down the loch; and mrs. forrester, in her furred cloak, was standing in the porch, and mysie half way down to the beach, moving from point to point of vision. "they are all about but old cookie," said oona. "it is a terrible business when i am late. they think everything that is dreadful must have happened, and that makes a delightful sensation when i get home safe and well. i am every day rescued from a watery grave, or saved from some dreadful accident on shore, in my mother's imagination. she gives herself the misery of it, and then she has the pleasure of it," cried the girl, with the amused cynicism of youth. "but to-day you bring a real fugitive with you--an escaped--what shall i call myself?--escaped not from harm, but from doing harm--which is the most dangerous of the two." "you will never do harm to the poor folk," said oona, looking at him with kind eyes. "never, while i am in my senses, and know. i want you to promise me something before we land." "you must make haste, then, and ask; for there is mysie ready with the boat-hook," said oona, a little alarmed. "promise me--if it ever occurs that harm is being done in my name, to make me know it. oh, not a mere note sent to my house; i might never receive it like the last; but to make me know. see me, speak to me, think even:--and you will save me." "oh, lord erradeen, you must not put such a responsibility on me. how can i, a girl that is only a country neighbour----" "promise me!" he said. "oh, lord erradeen, this is almost tyrannical. yes, if i can--if i think anything is concealed from you. here i am, mysie, quite safe; and of course mamma has been making herself miserable. i have brought lord erradeen to luncheon," oona said. "eh, my lord, but we're glad to see you," said mysie, with the gracious ease of hospitality. "they said you were going without saying good-bye, but i would never believe it. it is just his lordship, mem, as i said it was," she called to mrs. forrester, who was hastening down the slope. the mistress of the island came down tripping, with her elderly graces, waving her white delicate hands. "oh, oona, my dear, but i'm thankful to see you, and nothing happened," she cried; "and ye are very welcome, lord erradeen. i thought you would never go away without saying good-bye. come away up to the house. it is late, late, for luncheon; but there will be some reason; and i never have any heart to take a meal by myself. everything is ready: if it's not all spoiled?" mrs. forrester added, turning round to mysie, as she shook hands with the unexpected guest. "oh, no fear of that, mem," said the factotum, "we're well enough used to waiting in this house: an hour, half an hour, is just nothing. the trout is never put down to the fire till we see the boat; but i maun away and tell cook." "and you will get out some of the good claret," mrs. forrester cried. "come away--come away, lord erradeen. we have just been wondering what had become of you. it is quite unfriendly to be at auchnasheen and not come over to see us. oona, run, my dear, and take off your things. lord erradeen will take charge of me. i am fain of an arm when i can get one, up the brae. when the boys were at home i always got a good pull up. and where did you foregather, you two? i am glad oona had the sense to bring you with her. and i hope the trout will not be spoiled," she said with some anxiety. "mysie is just too confident--far too confident. she is one that thinks nothing can go wrong on the isle." "that is my creed too," said walter with an awakening of his natural inclination to make himself agreeable, and yet a more serious meaning in the words. "oh fie!" said mrs. forrester, shaking her head, "to flatter a simple person like me! we have but little, very little to offer; the only thing in our favour is that it's offered with real goodwill. and how do you like auchnasheen? and are you just keeping it up as it was in the old lord's time? and how is mary fleming, the housekeeper, that was always an ailing body?" these questions, with others of the same kind, answered the purpose of conversation as they ascended to the house--with little intervals between, for mrs. forrester was a little breathless though she did not care to say so and preferred to make pauses now and then to point out the variations of the landscape. "though i know it so well, i never find it two days the same," she said. none of these transparent little fictions, so innocent, so natural, were unknown to her friends, and the sight of them had a curiously strengthening and soothing effect upon walter, to whom the gentle perseverance of those amiable foibles, so simple and evident, gave a sense of reality and nature which had begun to be wanting in his world. his heart grew lighter as he watched the "ways" of this simple woman, about whose guiles and pretences even there was no mystery at all, and whose little affectations somehow seemed to make her only more real. it gave him a momentary shock, however, when she turned round at her own door, and directed his attention to his old castle lying in lines of black and grey upon the glistening water. he drew her hastily within the porch. "it gets colder and colder," he said; "the wind goes through and through one. don't let me keep you out in the chilly air." "i think you must have caught a little cold," said mrs. forrester, concerned, "for i do not find it so chilly for my part. to be sure, loch houran is never like your quiet landward places in england: we are used up here to all the changes. oona will be waiting for us by this time; and i hope you are ready for your dinner, lord erradeen, for i am sure i am. i should say for your lunch: but when it comes to be so far on in the day as this, these short winter days, oona and me, we just make it our dinner. oh, there you are, my dear! lord erradeen will like to step into ronald's room and wash his hands, and then there will be nothing to wait for but the trout." when they were seated at the table, with the trout cooked to perfection as fish only is where it is caught, mrs. forrester pressing him to eat with old-fashioned anxiety, and even mysie, who waited at table, adding affectionate importunities, walter's heart was touched with a sense of the innocence, the kindness, the gentle nature about him. he felt himself cared for like a child, regarded indeed as a sort of larger child to be indulged with every dainty they could think of, and yet in some ineffable way protected and guided too by the simple creatures round him. the mistress and the maid had little friendly controversies as to what was best for him. "i thought some good sherry wine, mem, and him coming off the water, would be better than yon cauld clairet." "well, perhaps you are right, mysie; but the young men nowadays are all for claret," mrs. forrester said. "just a wee bittie more of the fish, my lord," said mysie, in his ear. "no, no, mysie," cried her mistress. "you know there are birds coming. just take away the trout, it is a little cold, and there's far more nourishment in the grouse." "to my mind, mem," said mysie, "there is nothing better than a loch houran trout." all this had the strangest effect upon walter. to come into this simple house was like coming back to nature, and that life of childhood in which there are no skeletons or shadows. even his mother had never been so sheltering, so safe, so real. mrs. methven had far more intellect and passion than mrs. forrester. it had been impossible to her to bear the failure of her ideal in her boy. her very love had been full of pain and trouble to both. but this other mother was of a different fashion. whatever her children did was good in her eyes; but she protected, fed, took care of, extended her soft wings over them as if they still were in the maternal nest. the innocence of it all moved walter out of himself. "do you know," he said at last, "what i have come from to your kind, sheltering house, mrs. forrester? do you know what everybody, even your daughter, thought of me two hours ago?" "i never thought any harm of you, lord erradeen," said oona, looking up hastily. "harm of him! dear me, oona, you are far, very far, from polite. and what was it they thought of you?" asked mrs. forrester. "oona is so brusque, she just says what she thinks; but sure am i it was nothing but good." "they thought," said walter, with an excitement which grew upon him as he went on, "that i, who have been poor myself all my life, that never had any money or lands till a few weeks ago, that i was going to turn poor women and children out of their houses, out upon the world, out to the wet, cold mountain-side, without a shelter in sight. they thought i was capable of that. an old woman more than eighty, and a lot of little children! they thought i would turn them out! oh, not the poor creatures themselves, but others; even miss oona. is thy servant a dog--" cried the young man in a blaze of fiery agitation, the hot light of pain shining through the involuntary moisture in his eyes. "somebody says that in the bible, i know. is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" "oh, my dear!" cried mrs. forrester, in her sympathy, forgetting all distinctions, and only remembering that he was very like her ronald, and was in trouble, "nobody, nobody thought you would do that. oh no, no, fie no! nobody had such a thought. if i could believe it of oona i would not speak to her--i would--no, no, it was never believed. i, for one, i knew you would never do it. i saw it," cried the kind lady, "in your eyes!" though walter had no real confidence in the independent judgment which she asserted so unhesitatingly, yet he was consoled by the softness of the words, the assurance of the tone. "i did not think such things ever happened in scotland," he said. "it is ireland one thinks of: and that it should be supposed i would do it, has hurt me more than i can say--a stranger who had no one to stand up for me." "that was just the way of it," said mrs. forrester, soothingly. "we think here that there is something strange in english ways. we never know how a thing will appear to them--that is how it was. but i said all through that it was impossible, and i just wrote to you last night (you would get my letter?) that you must not do it--for fear you might not have understood how it was." "but there is another side to it," said oona, "we must not forget, mother. sometimes it is said, you know, that the poor folk can do no good where they are. we can all understand the shock of seeing them turned out of their houses: but then people say they cannot live there--that it would be better for themselves to be forced to go away." "that is true, oona," said her mother, facing round: "it is just a kind of starvation. when old jenny went there first (she was in my nursery when i had one) there was just a perpetual craik about her rent. her man was one of the frasers, and a well-doing, decent man, till he died, poor fellow, as we must all do: and since that i have heard little about it, for i think it was just out of her power to pay anything. duncan fraser, he is a very decent man, but i remember the minister was saying if he was in glasgow or paisley, or some of those places, it would be better for his family. i recollect that the minister did say that." "so, lord erradeen," said oona, "without being cruel you might: but i--we all like you ten times better that you couldn't," said the girl impulsively. "ay, that we do," said her mother, ready to back up every side, "that we do. but i am not surprised. i knew that there was nothing unkind either in your heart or your face." "there was no time," said walter, "to think what was wise, or take into consideration, like a benevolent tyrant, what could be done for their good, without consulting their inclinations: which is what you mean, miss forrester----" oona smiled, with a little heightened colour. it was the commencement of one of those pretty duels which mean mutual attraction rather than opposition. she said, with a little nod of her head, "go on." "but one thing is certain," he said, with the almost solemn air which returned to his face at intervals, "that i will rather want shelter myself than turn another man out of his house, on any argument--far less helpless women and children. did you laugh? i see no laughing in it," the young man cried. "me--laugh!" cried mrs. forrester, though it was at oona he had looked. "if i laughed it was for pleasure. between ourselves, lord erradeen (though they might perhaps be better away), turning out a poor family out of their house is a thing i could never away with. oona may say what she likes--but it is not christian. oh, it's not christian! i would have taken them in, as many as mysie could have made room for: but i never could say that it was according to christianity. oh no, lord erradeen! i would have to be poor indeed--poor, poor indeed--before i would turn these poor folk away." "there would be no blessing upon the rest," said mysie, behind her mistress's chair. "that is settled then," said walter, whose heart grew lighter and lighter. "but that is not all. tell me, if i were a benevolent despot, miss forrester--you who know everything--what should i do now?--for it cannot stop there." "we'll go into the drawing-room before you settle that," said mrs. forrester. "dear me, it is quite dark; we will want the candles, mysie. there is so little light in the afternoon at this time of the year. i am sorry there is no gentleman to keep you in countenance with your glass of wine, lord erradeen. if you had been here when my ronald or jamie, or even rob, was at home! but they are all away, one to every airt, and the house is very lonely without any boys in it. are you coming with us? well, perhaps it will be more cheerful. dear me, mysie, you have left that door open, and we will just be perished with the cold." "let me shut it," walter said. he turned to the open door with a pleasant sense of taking the place of one of those absent boys whom the mother regretted so cheerfully, and with a lighter heart than he could have thought possible a few hours ago. but at the first glance he stood arrested with a sudden chill that seemed to paralyse him. it was almost dark upon the loch; the water gleamed with that polished blackness through which the boat had cut as through something solid; but blacker now, shining like jet against the less responsive gloom of the land and hills. the framework of the doorway made a picture of this night scene, with the more definite darkness of the old castle in the centre, rising opaque against the softer distance. seeing that lord erradeen made a sudden pause, oona went towards him, and looked out too at the familiar scene. she had seen it often before, but it had never made the same impression upon her. "oh, the light--the light again!" she said, with a cry of surprise. it came up in a pale glow as she was looking, faint, but throwing up in distinct revelation the mass of the old tower against the background. walter, who seemed to have forgotten what he had come to do, was roused by her voice, and with nervous haste and almost violence shut the door. there was not much light in the little hall, and they could see each other's faces but imperfectly, but his had already lost the soothed and relieved expression which had replaced its agitated aspect. he scarcely seemed to see her as he turned round, took up his hat from the table, and went on confusedly before her, forgetting ordinary decorums, to the drawing-room, where mrs. forrester had already made herself comfortable in her usual chair, with the intention of for a few moments "just closing her eyes." mysie had not brought the lights, and he stood before the surprised lady like a dark shadow, with his hat in his hand. "i have come to take my leave," he said; "to thank you, and say good-bye." "dear me," said mrs. forrester, rousing herself, "you are in a great hurry, lord erradeen. why should you be so anxious to go? you have nobody at auchnasheen to be kept waiting. toots! you must just wait now you are here for a cup of tea at least, and it will take hamish a certain time to get out the boat." "i must go," he said, with a voice that trembled: then suddenly threw down his hat on the floor and himself upon a low chair close to her, "unless," he said, "unless--you will complete your charity by taking me in for the night. will you keep me for the night? put me in any corner. i don't mind--only let me stay." "let you stay!" cried the lady of the isle. she sprang up as lightly as a girl at this appeal, with no further idea of "closing her eyes." "will i keep you for the night? but that i will, and with all my heart! there is ronald's room, where you washed your hands, just all ready, nothing to do but put on the sheets, and plenty of his things in it in case you should want anything. let you stay!" she cried, with delighted excitement, "it is what i would have asked and pressed you to do. and then we can do something for your cold, for i am sure you have a cold; and oona and you can settle all that business about the benevolent tyrant, which is more than my poor head is equal to. oona, my dear, will you tell mysie?--where is mysie? i will just speak to her myself. we must get him better of his cold, or what will his mother think? he must have some more blankets, or an eiderdown, which will be lighter, and a good fire." if her worst enemy had asked hospitality from mrs. forrester, she would have forgotten all her wrongs and opened her doors wide; how much more when it was a friend and neighbour! the demand itself was a kindness. she tripped away without a thought of her disturbed nap, and was soon heard in colloquy with mysie, who shared all her sentiments in this respect. oona, who stood silent by the fire, with a sense that she was somehow in the secret, though she did not know what it was, had a less easy part. the pang of sympathy she felt was almost intolerable, but she did not know how to express it. the quiet room seemed all at once to have become the scene of a struggle, violent though invisible, which she followed dumbly with an instinct beyond her power to understand. after an interval of silence which seemed endless, he spoke. "it must be intended that we should have something to do with each other," he said, suddenly. "when you are there i feel stronger. if your mother had refused me, i should have been lost." "it was impossible that she should have refused you, lord erradeen." "i wish you would not call me by that ill-omened name. it is a horror to me; and then if all that is true----how is it possible that one man should lord it over an entire race for so long? did you ever hear of a similar case? oh! don't go away. if you knew what an ease it is to speak to you! no one else understands. it makes one feel as if one were restored to natural life to be able to speak of it, to ask advice. nothing," he cried suddenly, getting up, picking up his hat as if about to leave the house, "nothing--shall induce me to go----" "oh, no, no!" she cried, "you must not go;" though she could not have told why. he put down the hat again on the table with a strange laugh. "i was going then," he said, "but i will not. i will do exactly as you say." he came up to her where she stood full of trouble watching him. "i dare say you think i am going wrong in my head, but it is not that. i am being dragged--with ropes. give me your hand to hold by. there! that is safety, that is peace. you hand is as soft--as snow," cried the young man. his own were burning, and the cool fresh touch of the girl's hand seemed to diffuse itself through all his being. oona was as brave in her purity as the other una, the spotless lady of romance, and would have shrunk from no act of succour. but it agitated her to have this strange appeal for help made to her. she did not withdraw her hand, but yet drew away a little, alarmed, not knowing what to do. "you must not think," she said, faltering, "that any one--has more power over another than--he permits them to have." she spoke like one of the oracles, not knowing what she said; and he listened with a slight shake of his head, not making any reply. after a moment he yielded to the reluctance which made itself felt in her, and let her hand go. "will you come with me outside?" he said; "not there, where that place is. i think the cold and the night do one good. can we go out the other way?" oona accepted this alternative gladly. "we can go to the walk, where it is always dry," she said, with an assumption of cheerfulness. "it looks to the south, and that is where the flowers grow best." as she led the way through the hall, walter took up mrs. forrester's furred cloak which hung there, and put it round her with a great deal of tenderness and care. the girl's heart beat as he took this office upon him, as one of her brothers might have done. it was the strangest conjunction. he was not thinking of her at all, she felt, save as affording some mysterious help in those mysterious miseries: and yet there was a sweetness in the thought he took, even at this extraordinary moment, for her comfort. there could have been no such dangerous combination of circumstances for oona, whose heart was full of the early thrill of romance, and that inextinguishable pity and attraction towards the suffering which tells for so much in the life of women. a softness and melting of the heart indescribable came over her as she felt his light touch on her shoulders, and found herself enveloped as it were, in his shadow and the sentiment of his presence. he was not thinking of her, but only of his need of her, fantastic though that might be. but her heart went out towards him with that wonderful feminine impulse which is at once inferior and superior, full of dependence, yet full of help. to follow all his movements and thoughts as well as she could with wistful secondariness; yet to be ready to guide, to save, when need was--to dare anything for that office. there had never been aught in oona's life to make her aware of this strange, sweet, agitating position--the one unchangeable form of conjunction for the two mortal companions who have to walk the ways of earth together. but his mind was pre-occupied with other thoughts than her, while hers were wholly bent upon him and his succour. it was dangerous for her, stealing her heart out of her breast in the interest, the sympathy, the close contact involved; but of none of these things was he aware in the pre-occupation of his thoughts. they walked up and down for a time together, behind the house, along the broad walk, almost a terrace, of the kitchen garden, where there was a deep border filled in summer with every kind of old-fashioned flowers. it was bare now, with naked fruit-trees against the wall, but the moon was hid in clouds, and it was impossible to see anything, except from the end of the terrace the little landing-place below, and the first curves of the walk leading up to the house, and all round the glimmer of the loch. the stillness had been broken by the sound of a boat, but it was on the auchnasheen side, and though oona strained her eyes she had not been able to see it, and concluded that, if coming to the isle at all, it must have touched the opposite point, where there was a less easy, but possible, landing-place. as they reached the end of the terrace, however, she was startled to see a figure detach itself from the gloom and walk slowly towards the house. "the boat must have run in under the bushes, though i cannot see it," she said; "there is some one coming up the walk." walter turned to look with momentary alarm, but presently calmed down. "it is most likely old symington, who takes a paternal charge of me," he said. soon after they heard the steps, not heavy, but distinctly audible, crushing the gravel, and to oona's great surprise, though walter, a stranger to the place, took no notice of the fact, these footsteps, instead of going to the door, as would have been natural, came round the side of the house and approached the young pair in their walk. the person of the new-comer was quite unknown to oona. he took off his hat with an air of well-bred courtesy--like a gentleman, not like a servant--and said-- "i am reluctant to interrupt such a meeting, but there is a boat below for lord erradeen." walter started violently at the sound of the voice, which was, notwithstanding, agreeable and soft, though with a tone of command in it. he came to a sudden stop, and turned round quickly as if he could not believe his ears. "there is a boat below," the stranger repeated, "and it is extremely cold; the men are freezing at their oars. they have not the same delightful inspiration as their master--who forgets that he has business to settle this final night----" walter gave a strange cry, like the cry of a hunted creature. "in god's name," he exclaimed, "what have you to do here?" "my good fellow," said the other, "you need not try your hand at exorcising; others have made that attempt before you. is circe's island shut to all footsteps save yours? but, even then, you could not shut out me. i must not say armida's garden in this state of the temperature----" he said. "who is it?" asked oona in great alarm under her breath. "let me answer you," the intruder said. "it is a sort of a guardian who has the first right to lord erradeen's consideration. love, as even the copybooks will tell, ought to be subordinate to duty." "love!" cried oona, starting from the young man's side. the indignant blood rushed to her face. she turned towards the house in sudden anger and shame and excitement. circe! armida! was it she to whom he dared to apply these insulting names. walter caught her cloak with both hands. "do you not see," he said, "that he wants to take you from me, to drive you away, to have me at his mercy? oona! you would not see a man drown and refuse to hold out your hand?" "this is chivalrous," said the stranger, "to put a woman between you and that--which you are afraid to meet." to describe the state of excited feeling and emotion in which oona listened to this dialogue, would be impossible. she was surprised beyond measure, yet, in the strange excitement of the encounter, could not take time to wonder or seek an explanation. she had to act in the mean time, whatever the explanation might be. her heart clanged in her ears. tenderness, pity, indignation, shame, thrilled through her. she had been insulted, she had been appealed to by the most sacred voice on earth--the voice of suffering. she stood for a moment looking at the two shadows before her, for they were little more. "and if he is afraid why should not he turn to a woman?" she said with an impulse she could scarcely understand. "if he is afraid, i am not afraid. this isle belongs to a woman. come and tell her, if you will, what you want. let my mother judge, who is the mistress of this place. lord erradeen has no right to break his word to her for any man: but if my mother decides that you have a better claim, he will go." "i will abide by every word she says," walter cried. the stranger burst into a laugh. "i am likely to put forth my claim before such a tribunal!" he said. "come, you have fought stoutly for your lover. make a virtue of necessity now, and let him go." "he is not my lover," cried oona; "but i will not let him go." she added after a moment, with a sudden change of tone, coming to herself, and feeling the extraordinary character of the discussion. "this is a very strange conversation to occur here. i think we are all out of our senses. it is like the theatre. i don't know your name, sir, but if you are lord erradeen's guardian, or a friend of his, i invite you to come and see my mother. most likely," she added, with a slight faltering, "she will know you as she knows all the family." then, with an attempt at playfulness, "if it is to be a struggle between this gentleman and the ladies of the isle, lord erradeen, tell him he must give way." the stranger took off his hat and made her a profound bow. "i do so on the instant," he said. the two young people stood close together, their shadows confounded in one, and there did not seem time to draw a breath before they were alone, with no sound or trace remaining to prove that the discussion in which a moment before their hearts had been beating so loudly had ever existed at all. oona looked after the stranger with a gasp. she clung to walter, holding his arm tight. "where has he gone?" she cried in a piercing whisper. she trembled so after her boldness that she would have fallen but for his sustaining arm. "who is he? where has he gone? that is not the way to the beach. call after him, call after him, and tell him the way." walter did not make any reply. he drew her arm closer threw his, and turned with her towards the house. as for oona, she seemed incapable of any thought but that this strange intruder might be left on the isle. "he will get into the orchard and then among the rocks. he will lose himself," she cried; "he may fall into the water. call to him, lord erradeen--or stop, we will send hamish. here is hamish. oh, hamish! the gentleman has taken the wrong way----" "it will just be a boat that has come for my lord," said hamish. "i tellt them my lord was biding all night, but nothing would satisfee them, but i had to come up and get his lordship's last word." "oh, he is not going, hamish! but there is a gentleman--" walter interrupted her with an abruptness that startled oona. "let them see that every one is on board--and return at once," he said. "oh there will just be everybody on board that ever was, for none has come ashore," said hamish. "what was you saying about a gentleman, miss oona? there will be no gentleman. it is joost duncan and another man with him, and they cried upon me, hamish! and i answered them. but there will be no gentleman at all," hamish said. chapter ii. it was very dark upon loch houran that night. whether nature was aware of a dark spirit, more subtle and more powerful than common man, roaming about in the darkness, temporarily baffled by agencies so simple that their potency almost amused while it confounded him--and shrank from the sight of him, who could tell? but it was dark, as a night in which there was a moon somewhere ought never to have been. the moon was on the wane, it was true, which is never like her earlier career, but all trace and influence of her were lost in the low-lying cloud, which descended from the sky like a hood, and wrapped everything in gloom. the water only seemed to throw a black glimmer into the invisible world where all things brooded in silence and cold, unseen, unmoving. the only thing that lived and shone in all this mysterious still universe was one warm window, full of light, that shone from the isle. it was a superstition of the simple mistress of the house that there should be no shutter or curtain there, so that any late "traveller by land or water" might be cheered by this token of life and possible help. had that traveller, needing human succour, been led to claim shelter there, it would have been accorded fearlessly. "exceeding peace had made ben adhem bold." the little innocent household of defenceless women had not a fear. hamish only, who perhaps felt a responsibility as their sole possible defender, might have received with suspicion such an unexpected guest. the mysterious person already referred to--whose comings and goings were not as those of other men, and whose momentary discomfiture by such simple means perplexed yet partially amused him, as has been said, passed by that window at a later hour and stood for a moment outside. the thoughts with which, out of the external cold and darkness, which affected him not at all, he regarded the warm interior where simple human souls, sheltering themselves against the elements, gathered about their fire, were strange enough. the cold, which did not touch him, would have made them shiver; the dark, which to his eyes was as the day, would have confused their imaginations and discouraged their minds; and yet together by their fire they were beyond his power. he looked in upon their simplicity and calm and safety with that sense of the superiority of the innocent which at the most supreme moment will come in to dash all the triumphs of guile, and all the arts of the schemer. what he saw was the simplest cheerful scene, the fire blazing, the lamp burning steadily, a young man and a girl seated together, not in any tender or impassioned conjunction, but soberly discussing, calculating, arguing, thought to thought and face to face; the mother, on the other side, somewhat faded, smiling, not over wise, with her book, to which she paid little attention, looking up from time to time, and saying something far from clever. he might have gone in among them, and she would have received him with that same smile and offered him her best, thinking no evil. he had a thousand experiences of mankind, and knew how their minds could be worked upon and their imaginations inflamed, and their ambitions roused. was he altogether baffled by this simplicity, or was there some lingering of human ruth in him, which kept him from carrying disturbance into so harmless a scene? or was it only to estimate those forces that he stood and watched them, with something to learn, even in his vast knowledge, from this unexpected escape of the fugitive, and the simple means by which he had been baffled for the moment, and his prey taken from him? for the moment!--that was all. "come, come now," mrs. forrester said. "you cannot argue away like that, and fight all night. you must make up your bits of differences, and settle what is to be done; for it is time we had the books, and let the women and hamish get to their beds. they are about all day, and up early in the morning, not like us that sit with our hands before us. oona, you must just cry upon mysie, and let them all come ben. and if you will hand me the big bible that is upon yon table--since you are so kind, lord erradeen." at this simple ceremonial--the kindly servant-people streaming in, the hush upon their little concerns, the unison of voices, from oona's, soft with youth and gentle breeding, to the rough bass of hamish, in words that spectator knew as well as any--the same eyes looked on, with feelings we cannot attempt to fathom. contempt, envy, the wonder of the wise over the everlasting, inexplicable superiority of the innocent, were these the sentiments with which he gazed? but in the night and silence there was no interpreter of these thoughts. how he came or went was his own secret. the window was closed soon after, the lights extinguished, and the darkness received this little community of the living and breathing, to keep them warm and unseen and unconscious till they should be claimed again by the cheerful day. the household, however, though it presented an aspect of such gentle calm, was not in reality so undisturbed as it appeared. in oona's chamber, for one, there was a tumult of new emotions which to the girl were incomprehensible, strange, and terrible, and sweet. lord erradeen was but a new acquaintance, she said to herself, as she sat over her fire, with everything hushed and silent about her; nevertheless the tumult of feeling in her heart was all connected with him. curiously enough, the strange encounter in the garden--of which she had received no explanation--had disappeared from her thoughts altogether. the rise and sudden dawn of a new life in her own being was more near and momentous than any mysterious circumstances, however unlike the common. by-and-by she might come to that--in the mean time a sentiment "_nova, sola, infinita_," occupied all her consciousness. she had known him during the last week only: three times in all, on three several days, had they met; but what a change these three days had made in the life that had been so free and so sweet, full of a hundred interests, without any that was exclusive and absorbing. in a moment, without knowing what was coming, she had been launched into this new world of existence. she was humbled to think of it, yet proud. she felt herself to have become a sort of shadow of him, watching his movements with an anxiety which was without any parallel in her experience, yet at the same time able to interpose for him, when he could not act for himself, to save him. it seemed to oona suddenly, that everything else had slipped away from her, receding into the distance. the things that had occupied her before were now in the background. all the stage of life was filled with him, and the events of their brief intercourse had become the only occupation of her thoughts. she wondered and blushed as she wandered in that maze of recollections, at her own boldness in assuming the guidance of him; yet felt it to be inevitable--the only thing to be done. and the strange new thrill which ran through her veins when he had appealed to her, when he had implored her to stand by him, came back with an acute sweet mixture of pleasure and pain. she declared to herself, yes!--with a swelling of her heart--she would stand by him, let it cost her what it might. there had been no love spoken or thought of between them. it was not love: what was it? friendship, fraternity, the instinctive discovery of one by another, that divination which brings those together who can help each other. it was he, not she, who wanted help--what did it matter which it was? in giving or in receiving it was a new world. but whether it was a demon or an angel that had thus got entrance into that little home of peace and security--who could tell? whatever it was, it was an inmate hitherto unknown, one that must work changes both in earth and heaven. everything that could trouble or disturb had vanished from the dark world outside before oona abandoned her musings--or rather before she felt the chill of the deep night round her, and twisted up her long hair, and drew aside the curtains from her window as was her custom that she might see the sky from her bed. there had been a change in the midnight hours. the clouds at last had opened, and in the chasm made by their withdrawal was the lamp of the waning moon "lying on her back" with a sort of mystic disturbance and ominous clearness, as if she were lighting the steps of some evil enterprise, guiding a traitor or a murderer to the refuge of some one betrayed. oona shivered as she took refuge in the snow-white nest which had never hitherto brought her anything but profound youthful repose, and the airy flitting dreams of a soul at rest. but though this momentary chill was impressed upon her senses, neither fear nor discouragement were in her soul. she closed her eyes only to see more clearly the face of this new influence in her life, to feel her pulses tingle as she remembered all the events of the three days' odyssey, the strange magical history that had sprung into being in a moment, yet was alive with such endless interest, and full of such a chain of incidents. what was to be the next chapter in it? or was it to have another chapter? she felt already with a deep drawing of her breath, and warned herself that all would probably end here, and everything relapse into vacancy--a conclusion inconceivable, yet almost certain, she said to herself. but this consciousness only excited her the more. there was something in it of that whirl of desperation which gives a wild quickening to enjoyment in the sensation of momentariness and possible ending--the snatching of a fearful joy. this sudden end came, however, sooner than she thought; they had scarcely met at the breakfast table when lord erradeen begged mrs. forrester to allow him to send for his servant, and make his arrangements for his departure from the isle, instead of returning to auchnasheen. "i have not felt safe or at ease, save here, since i came to the loch," he said, looking round him with a grateful sense of the cheerful quiet and security. his eyes met those of oona, who was somewhat pale after her long vigil and broken rest. she had recognised at once with a pang the conclusion she had foreseen, the interruption of her new history which was implied in the remorseless unintentional abruptness of this announcement. he was going away; and neither felt any inducement to stay, nor any hesitation in announcing his resolution. she had known it would be so, and yet there was a curious pang of surprise in it which seemed to arrest her heart. notwithstanding, as in duty bound, she met his look with a smile in her eyes. "hoots," said mrs. forrester, "you flatter the isle, lord erradeen. we know that is just nonsense; but for all that, we take it kind that you should like our little house. it will always be found here, just faithful and friendly, whenever you come back. and certainly ye shall send for your man or make what arrangements suits you. there's the library quite free and at your service for any writing you may have to do, and hamish will take any message to auchnasheen, or wherever you please. the only thing that grieves me is that you should be so set on going to-day." "that must be--that must be!" cried walter: and then he began to make excuses and apologies. there were circumstances which made it indispensable--there were many things that made him anxious to leave auchnasheen. no, it was not damp--which was the instant suggestion of mrs. forrester. there were other things. he was going back to sloebury to his mother (mrs. forrester said to england), and it was so recently that he had entered upon his property, that there was still a great deal to do. after he had made this uncompromising statement of the necessities that he had to be guided by, he looked across the table at oona once more. "and miss forrester is so kind as to take in hand for me the settlement of the cotters. it will be her doing. i hope they will not blame me for that alarm yesterday, which was no fault of mine; but the new arrangement will be your doing altogether." "i shall not take the credit," said oona. "i had not even the boldness to suggest it. it was your own thought, and they will bless you so, that wherever you are, at sloebury or the end of the world, you must feel your heart warm----" she said this with great self-command; but she was pale, and there was a curious giddiness stealing over her. she seemed to feel the solid ground slip away from under her feet. "my heart," he said, looking at her with a grateful look, "will always be warm when i think of the isle, and all that has been done for me here." "now, lord erradeen," said mrs. forrester, "you will just make oona and me vain with all these bonnie speeches. we are always glad to be friendly and neighbourlike, but what have we been able to do?--just nothing. when you come back again and let your friends see a little more of you, we will all do what we can to make the loch agreeable. but i hope it will be warmer weather, and more pleasure in moving about. you will be back no doubt, if not sooner, in time for the grouse?" he grew pale in spite of himself, and oona, looking at him, felt the steady earth slip more and more away. "i don't know," he said, hurriedly, "when i may come back--not before i--not sooner than i can----i mean there are a great many things to look after; and my mother----" his eyes seemed to seek hers again as if asking her sympathy, and appealing to her knowledge. "not before i must--not sooner than i can help," that was what he meant to say. oona gave him a faint smile of response. it was so wonderful that when she understood him so completely, he should understand her so little, and never suspect that there was anything cruel in those words. but she made the response he required, and strengthened him by that instinctive comprehension of him in which he put so strange a trust. there was an eagerness in all his preparations for going away which he almost forced upon her notice, so strong was his confidence in her sympathy. he lost no time about any of these arrangements, but sent hamish with his boat to auchnasheen for symington, and wrote down his instructions for shaw, and talked of what he was going to do when he got "home," with the most absolute insensibility to any feeling in the matter save his own. and it seemed to oona that the moments flew, and the quick morning melted away, and before she could collect her thoughts the time came when her mother and she walked down to the beach with him, smiling, to see him off. there had never been a word said between them of that conversation in the garden on the previous night. only when he was just about to leave, he cast a glance towards the walk where that encounter had taken place, and turned to her with a look such as cannot pass between any but those that have some secret link of mutual knowledge. her mother was talking cheerfully of the view and the fine morning after the rain, walking before them, when he gave oona that look of mutual understanding. "i owe you everything," he said, in a low tone of almost passionate fervour. presently she found herself shaking hands with him as if he had been nothing more than the acquaintance of three days which he was, and wishing him a good journey. and so the odyssey came to an end, and the history stopped in the course of making. she stood still for a little, watching the boat and the widening lines it drew along the surface of the water. "sometimes to watch a boat moving off will give you a giddiness," mrs. forrester said. chapter iii. there could be no greater contrast than that which existed between walter methven, lord erradeen, hurrying away with the sense of a man escaped with his life from the shores of loch houran, and oona forrester left behind upon the isle. it was not only that he had all at once become the first object in her life, and she counted for little or nothing in his. that was not the question. she had been for sufficient space of time, and with sufficient stress of circumstances to make the impression one which would not die easily, of the first importance in his thoughts: and no doubt that impression would revive when he had leisure from the overwhelming pre-occupation which was in his mind. but it was that he was himself full of an anxiety and excitement strong enough to dwarf every other feeling, which made the blood course through his veins, and inspired every thought; while she was left in a state more like vacancy than anything else, emptied out of everything that had interested her. the vigorous bend of the rowers to the oars as they carried him away was not more unlike the regretful languor of the women as they stood on the beach, mrs. forrester waving her handkerchief, but oona without even impulse enough in her to do that. as for walter, he was all energy and impulse. he arranged the portmanteaux which symington had brought with his own hands, to leave room for the sweep of the oars, and quicken the crossing. his farewells were but half said. it seemed as if he could scarcely breathe till he got away. every stroke of the oars lightened his heart, and when he was clear of that tragic water altogether, and sprang up upon the rude country waggonette which had been engaged at the inn to carry him to the station, his brow relaxed, and the muscles of his mouth gave way as they had not done since his first day on loch houran. he gave a look almost of hatred at the old castle, and then averted his face. when he reached the railway, the means of communication with the world he had known before, he was a different man. the horses had gone too slowly for him, so did the leisurely friendly trains on the highland railway, with their broad large windows for the sake of the views. travellers, as a rule, did not wish to go too fast while they skirted those gleaming lochs, and ran along under shadow of the mountains: they liked to have somebody to point out which was loch ool and which st. monan's. it was too slow for lord erradeen, but still it was going away. he began to think of all the commonplace accessories of life with a sort of enthusiasm--the great railway stations, the edinburgh hotel, with its ordinary guests. he was so sick of everything connected with his highland property and with its history, that he resolved he would make no pause in edinburgh, and would not go near mr. milnathort. the questions they would no doubt put to him made him impatient even in thought. he would not subject himself to these; he would put away altogether out of his mind, if he could, everything connected with it, and all that he had been seeing and hearing, or, at least, had fancied he heard and saw. but when oona turned away from looking after the boat--which she was indeed the first to do, mrs. forrester waiting almost as long as it was within sight to wave her handkerchief if the departing guest should look back--she felt herself and her life emptied out all at once. when she began to think of it in the cold light of this sudden conclusion, a sense of humiliation came over her. she blushed with hot shame at this altogether unasked, unreasonable, unnecessary resignation of herself and her interests to a stranger. he was nothing but a stranger, she said to herself; there was no remarkable charm in him one way or another. she had not been at all affected by his first appearance. he was not handsome enough or clever enough, nor had he any special attraction to gain him so high a place. somehow she had not thought of walter in her first realisation of the new interest which had pushed away all the other occupations out of her existence: and she had not blushed in the high sense of expanded life and power to help. but now it moved her with a certain shame to think that the sudden departure of a man whom she scarcely knew, and to whom she was nothing, should thus have emptied out her existence and left a bewildering blank in her heart. she went slowly up the walk, and went to her room, and there sat down with a curious self-abandonment. it was all over, all ended and done. when he came into her life it was accidentally, without any purpose in it on either side; and now that he had gone out of it again, there was no anger, no sense of wrong, only a curious consciousness that everything had gone away--that the soil had slipped from her, and nothing was left. no, there was no reason at all to be angry--nobody was to blame. then she laughed a little at herself at this curious, wanton sort of trouble intended by nobody--which neither he had meant to draw her into, nor she to bring upon herself. there was one thing however between her and this vacancy. he had left her a commission which any kind-hearted girl would have thought a delightful one--to arrange with the factor how the cotters were to be most effectually helped and provided for. it had been their thought at first--the young man being little better instructed than the girl on such matters--that to make duncan fraser and the rest the proprietors of their little holdings would be the most effectual way of helping them, and would do the property of lord erradeen very little harm--a thing that walter, unaccustomed to property, and still holding it lightly, contemplated with all the ease of the landless, never thinking of the thorn in the flesh of a piece of alienated land in the midst of an estate, until it suddenly flashed upon him that his estates being all entailed, this step would be impossible. how was it to be done then? they had decided that shaw would know best, and that some way of remitting the rents at least during the lifetime of the present lord erradeen must be settled upon, and secured to them at once. oona had this commission left in her hands. she could have thought of none more delightful a few days ago, but now it seemed to make the future vacancy of life all the more evident by the fact that here was one thing, and only one, before her to do. when that was done, what would happen?--a return upon the pleasant occupations, the amusements, the hundred little incidents which had filled the past? after all, the past was only a week back. can it ever return, and things be again as they were before?----oona had never reasoned or speculated on these matters till this moment. she had never known by experiment that the past cannot return, or that which has been be once more; but she became aware of it in a moment now. then she got up and stood at her window and looked out on the unchanging landscape, and laughed aloud at herself. how ridiculous it was! by this time it made no difference to lord erradeen that she had ever existed. why should it make any difference to her that he had come and gone? the new generation takes a view of such matters which is different from the old-fashioned sentimental view. after yielding to the new influence rashly, unawares, like a romantic girl of any benighted century, oona began to examine it like an enlightened young intelligence of her own. her spirit rose against it, and that vigorous quality which we call a sense of humour. there was something almost ludicrous in the thought that one intelligent creature should be thus subject to another, and that life itself should be altered by an accidental meeting. and if this was absurd to think of in any case, how much more in her own? nobody had ever had a more pleasant, happy life. in her perfect womanliness and submission to all the laws of nature, she was yet as independent as the most free-born soul could desire. there was no path in all the district, whether it led to the loneliest cottage or the millionnaire's palace, that was not free to oona forrester. the loch and the hills were open to her as her mother's garden, to the perfectly dauntless, modest creature, who had never in her life heard a tone or caught a look of disrespect. she went her mother's errands, which were so often errands of charity, far and near, with companions when she cared for them, without companions when she did not. what did it matter? the old cotter people about had a pretty gaelic name for her; and to all the young ones miss oona of the isle was as who should say princess oona, a young lady whom every one was bound to forward upon her way. her mother was not so clever as oona, which was, perhaps, a drawback; but she could not have been more kind, more tender, more loving if she had possessed, as our laureate says, "the soul of shakespeare." all was well about and around this favourite of nature. how was it possible then that she could have come to any permanent harm in two or three days? notwithstanding this philosophical view, however, oona did nothing all that day, and to tell the truth felt little except the sense of vacancy; but next day she announced to her mother that she was going to the manse to consult with mr. cameron about the truach-glas cotters, and that probably she would see mr. shaw there, and be able to do the business lord erradeen had confided to her. mrs. forrester fully approved. "a thing that is to make poor folk more comfortable should never be put off a moment," that kind woman said, "for, poor bodies, they have little enough comfort at the best," and she stood at the porch and waved her hand to her child, as the boat sped out of the shade of the isle into the cold sunshine which had triumphed for an hour or two over the clouds and rain. oona found mr. shaw, as she had anticipated, in the village, and there was a very brisk and not altogether peaceable discussion in the minister's study, over this new idea. the factor, though he was so strongly set against all severe measures, and in reality so much on the side of the cotters, was yet taken aback, as was natural, by the new idea presented to him. he laughed at the notion of making them the owners of their little holdings. "why not give tom patterson his farm too? he finds it just as hard to pay the rent," he cried in minded ridicule and wrath. "there is no difference in the principle though there may be in the circumstances. and what if lord erradeen had a few hundred crofters instead of half-a-dozen? i'm speaking of the principle. of course he cannot do it. it's all entailed, every inch of the land, and he cannot do it; but supposing he could, and that he were treating them all equally? it's just not to be done. it is just shifting the difficulty. it is putting other people at a disadvantage. a man cannot give away his land and his living. it is just a thing that is not to be done." "he knows it is not to be done; he knows it is entailed, therefore----" "oh yes, miss oona; therefore--" cried the factor. "little of it, very little, would have come his way if it had not been entailed. whether or not it is good for the country, there can be no doubt it's the stronghold of a family. very likely there would have been no methvens (and small damage, begging his pardon that is a kind of a new stock), and certainly there would have been no property to keep up a title, but for the entail. it is a strange story, the story of them altogether." shaw continued, "it has been a wonderfully managed property. i must say that for it; no praise to me, so i am free to speak. there was the late lord--the only one i knew. there was very little in him, and yet the way he managed was wonderful; they have just added land to land, and farm to farm. i do not understand it. and now i suppose we've arrived at the prodigal that always appears some time in a family to make the hoards go." "no, no," said the minister, "you must not call the man a prodigal whose wish is to give to the poor." "that is all very well," said shaw; "the poor, where there are half-a-dozen of them, are easily enough managed. give them their land if you like (if it was not criminal to cut a slice out of an estate), it does not matter much; but if there were a hundred? it is the principle i am thinking of. they cannot buy it themselves, and the state will not buy it for them, seeing they are only decent scots lads, not blazing irishmen. i cannot see where the principle will lead to: i am not against the kindness, miss oona, far from that: and these half-a-dozen frasers, what would it matter? but if there were a hundred? the land is just my profession, as the church is mr. cameron's, and i must think of it, all the ways of it; and this is a thing that would not work so far as i can see." "but lord erradeen acknowledges that," said oona. "what he wants to do is only for his time. to set them free of the rent they cannot pay, and to let them feel that nobody can touch them, so long as he lives--" "and the lord grant him wealth of days," said the minister; "a long life and a happy one!" "you will not look at it," cried the factor, "from a common-sense point of view. all that is very pretty, and pleasing to the young man's--what shall i call it?--his kindness and his vanity, for both are involved, no doubt. but it will just debauch the minds of the people. they will learn to think they have a right to it; and when the next heir comes into possession, there will be a burning question raised up, and a bitter sense of wrong if he asks for his own again. oh yes, miss oona, so long as the present condition of affairs lasts it will be their own. a man with a rent of two or three pounds is just as liable as if it were two or three hundred. the principle is the same; and as i am saying, if there were a number of them, you just could not do it: for i suppose you are not a communist, miss oona, that would do away with property altogether?" a sudden smile from among the clouds lit up shaw's ruddy, remonstrative countenance, as he put this question, and oona smiled too. "i don't make any theories," she said; "i don't understand it. i feel as lord erradeen does, that whatever the law may be, i would rather be without a roof to shelter myself than turn one poor creature out of her home. oh, i don't wonder when i remember the horror in his face! think! could you sleep, could you rest--you, young and strong, and well off, when you had turned out the poor folk to the hill?--all for a little miserable money?" cried oona, starting to her feet, "or for the principle, as you call it? i, for one," cried the girl, with flashing eyes, "would never have let him speak to me again." "there you have it, oona; there's a principle, if you like; there is something that will work," cried the old minister, with a tremulous burst of laughter. "just you keep by that, my bonnie dear, and all your kind; and we'll hear of few evictions within the highland line." "that would be all very well," said the factor, "if every landlord was a young lad, like lord erradeen; but even then it might be a hard case, and miss oona would not find it as easy as she thinks; for supposing there were hundreds, as i'm always saying: and supposing there were some among them that could just pay well enough, but took advantage; and supposing a landlord that was poor too, and was losing everything? no, no, miss oona, in this world things are not so simple. my counsel is to let them be--just to let them be. i would bid them pay when they can, and that my lord would not be hard upon them. that is what i would do. i would tell them he was willing to wait, and may be to forgive them what was past, or something like that. after what happened the other day, they will be very sure he will not be hard upon them. and that is what i would advise him to do." "you are not going to wash your hands of it, after all?" the minister said. shaw laughed. "not just this time, mr. cameron. i always thought he was a fine lad. and now that he has good advisers, and amenable----" he added, with a glance at oona, which fortunately she did not see. and after this interview she went home, very silent, depressed as she had no right to be, feeling as if life was over, and all things come to an end. chapter iv. it would be difficult to describe the sensations with which lord erradeen found himself set at liberty, and on his way back, as he thought at first, to the easy mind, the quiet life, the undisturbed and undisturbing circumstances of his previous existence. he scarcely seemed to breathe till he had crossed the border, and was outside of scotland, feeling during that time like a fugitive in full flight, incapable of thinking of anything except that he had eluded his pursuers and had escaped all possible risks and apprehensions. his trial had lasted nights and days, he could not tell how many. now for the first time he had the calm, the leisure, the sense of safety, which were necessary for a review of all that he had gone through: he had seen the moon light up the pale line of the sea at berwick, where tweed falls into the waste of water, and the lights of newcastle, turning into a shining highway the dark crescent of the tyne, and then as the train pounded along through the darkness, with the throb and swing of life and speed, through the silence and night, his faculties seemed to come back to him, and his judgment to be restored. through what a strange episode of existence had he passed since he saw the lights curve round the sides of that river, and the great bridge striding over above the roofs of the sleeping town! and now he had escaped--had he escaped? he had time at least and quiet to think it all out and see where he stood. he had been for nearly three weeks altogether on loch houran, during which time he had gone through the severest mental struggle he had ever known. it seemed years to him now since the moment when he had been suddenly confronted by the strange and mysterious personage who had assumed a tone towards him and claimed a submission which walter had refused to yield. that this man's appearance had awakened in him a sensation of overwhelming excitement mingled with fear, that he had come in an unaccountable way, that he had been seen apparently by no one in the old castle but himself, that nobody had betrayed any consciousness of knowing who he was or how he was there, and yet that he had come and gone with a perfect acquaintance and familiarity with the place, the family, the estates, the story of the race; these were details which, with a tremulous sensation in his mind, as of a panic nearly over, he gathered together to examine and find out, if possible, what they meant. he had been unable during the time that followed, when he had taken refuge in auchnasheen, to exercise any discriminating faculty, or use his own judgment upon these facts. at the moment of seeing and hearing occurrences which disturb the mind, reason is hampered in its action. afterwards you may ask yourself, have you really heard and seen? but not when a definite appearance is before your eyes, or likely to re-appear at any moment, and a distinct voice in your ears. the actual then overmasters the soul; the meaning of it must be got at later. he had seen this man whose faculties and pretensions were alike so extraordinary, he had listened to the claim he made, he had been bidden to yield up his individual will and to obey under threatening of evil if he refused, and promises of pleasure and comfort if he consented. and walter had said "no." he would have said no had an angel out of heaven appeared before him, making the same demand. he had been subjected to this strange trial at the very height of independence and conscious power, when he had newly begun to feel his own importance, and to enjoy its advantages. it had seemed to him absurd, incredible, that such a claim should be made, even while the personality of the strange claimant had filled him with a sensation of terror, which he summoned all his forces to struggle against, without any success. he had been like two men during that struggle. one a craven, eager to fly, willing to promise anything might he but escape; the other struggling passionately against the stranger and refusing--refusing, night and day. when he went to auchnasheen the character of the conflict within him had become more remarkable still. the man who claimed his obedience was no longer visible, but he had been rent asunder between the power of his own resisting spirit and some strange influence which never slackened, which seemed to draw him towards one point with a force which his unwillingness to yield made into absolute agony. still he had resisted, always resisted, though without strength to escape, until the moment had come when by sudden inspiration of natural justice and pity he had broken loose--by that, and by the second soul struggling in him and with him, by oona's hand holding him and her heart sustaining him. this was the history of these two tremendous weeks, the most eventful in his life. and now he had escaped out of the neighbourhood in which he could feel no safety, out of the influence which had moved him so strangely, and was able to think and ask himself what it was. the night was dark, and, as has been said, the moon was on the wane. she shed a pale mist of light over the dark country, where now and then there broke out the red glow of pit or furnace fires. the train swung onwards with a rock of movement, a ploughing and plunging, the dim light in the roof swaying, the two respectable fellow-passengers each in his corner amidst his wraps, slumbering uneasily. walter had no inclination to sleep. he was indeed feverishly awake; all his faculties in wild activity; his mind intensely conscious and living. what did it all mean? the events which had affected him to a passionate height of feeling with which his previous life had been entirely unacquainted--was it possible that there was any other way of accounting for them? to look himself in the face as it were, and confess now at a distance from these influences that the man to whom he had spoken in the language of to-day was one of the fabulous men in whom the ignorant believe, his own early ancestor--the still existing, undying founder of the house, was, he said to himself, impossible. it could not be; anything else--any hypothesis was more credible than this. there was no place for the supernatural in the logic of life as he had learned it. now that he had recovered control of himself, it was time for him to endeavour to make out a reason for the hallucination in which he had almost lost himself and his sober senses. and accordingly he began to do it; and this is what he said to himself. his imagination had been excited by all that had happened to him; the extraordinary change in his circumstances which seemed almost miraculous, and then the succession of incidents, the strange half-communications that had been made to him, the old, ruinous house in which he had been compelled to shut himself up, the wonderful solitude, full of superstitious suggestions, into which he had been plunged. all these details had prepared his mind for something--he knew not what. he felt a hot flush of shame and mortification come over him as he remembered how easily, notwithstanding all his better knowledge, he, a man of his century, acquainted with all the philosophies of the day, had been overcome by those influences. he had expected something out of nature, something terrible and wonderful. and when such a state of mind is reached, it is certain (he thought) that something will arise to take advantage of it. probably all these effects had been calculated upon by the individual, whoever he was, who haunted kinloch houran to excite and exploit these terrors. who was he? even now, so far out of his reach, so emancipated from his influence that he could question and examine it, walter felt a certain giddiness come over his spirit at this thought, and was glad that one of his fellow-passengers stirred and woke, and made a shivering remark, how cold it was, before he again composed himself to sleep. it was very cold. there was an icy chill in the air which penetrated through the closed windows. but nothing else could come in--nothing else! and it could be but a sudden reflection from his past excitement that made walter feel for a moment as if another figure sat opposite to him, gazing at him with calm sarcasm, and eyes that had a smile in them. when the giddiness passed off, and he looked again, there was (of course) no one opposite to him, only the dark blue cushions of the unoccupied place. who was this man then who held a sort of court in kinloch houran, and demanded obedience from its proprietor? he was no creature of the imagination. excited nerves and shaken health might indeed have prepared the mind of the visitor for the effect intended to be produced upon him; but they could not have created the central figure--the powerful personality from whom such influence flowed. who was he? the circumstances were all favourable for a successful imposture, or even a mystification. suppose it to be some member of the family aggrieved by the promotion of a far-off branch, some dependent with so much knowledge of the secrets of the race as to be able to play upon the imagination of a novice, with mysterious threats and promises; perhaps, who could tell, a monomaniac, the leading idea of whose delusion was to take this character upon him? walter's breast lightened a little as he made out one by one these links of explanation. it was characteristic of his time, and the liberality of mind with which modern thought abjures the idea of absolute imposture, that the sudden suggestion of a monomaniac gave him great relief and comfort. that might explain all--a man of superior powers crazed in this one point, who might have convinced himself that he was the person he claimed to be, and that it was the interest of the family he had at heart. such a being, acquainted with all the mysterious passages and hiding-places that exist in such old houses, able to appear suddenly from a secret door or sliding panel, to choose moments when nature herself added to the sense of mystery, hours of twilight and darkness when the half-seen is more alarming than anything fully revealed--this would explain so much, that the young man for the moment drew a long breath of relief, and felt half-consciously that he could afford to ignore the rest. and in the sense of this relief he fell asleep, and dreamed that he stood again at mrs. forrester's door in the isle, and saw the light on the old tower of kinloch houran, and felt the attraction, the drawing and dragging as of some force he could not resist; and woke up with the blow he gave himself against the rail that supported the netting on the opposite side of the carriage, against which he struck his head in his rush towards the place to which he had felt himself called. he staggered back into his seat, giddy and faint, yet thankful to feel that it was only a dream; and then had to begin his self-arguments over again, and trace once more every link of the chain. a monomaniac--yes, that might be the explanation; but whence then that power which drew him, which he had fought against with all the powers of his being at auchnasheen, which he had never given in to, but which, even in the reflection of it given in his dream, was vivid enough to awaken him to a new branch of the question? magnetism, mesmerism, he had heard of, and scorned as other names for charlatanism; but when you are searching anxiously for the means of accounting for mysterious phenomena you are glad to seize upon explanations that at another moment would be little satisfactory. walter said to himself that the madman of kinloch houran--the monomaniac, must possess these strange powers. he might know many secrets, though his wits were gone astray. he might be sane enough to have a purpose, and to cultivate every possible means of affecting the mind he wished to work upon. such curious combinations of madness and wisdom were not beyond human experience. perhaps at the end of all his arguments, having fully convinced himself, the thread of the reasoning escaped him, for he suddenly shuddered and grew pale, and shrank into his corner, drawing his wraps close round him and raising the collar of his coat to his very eyes, as if to shut out some bewildering, overwhelming sight. but by this time the wintry day was breaking, and the stir of awakened life reached the other travellers, who woke and stretched themselves, shivering in the chill of the dawn, and began to prepare for their arrival. one of them spoke to walter, expressing a fear that he was ill, he looked so pale, and offering his services to "see him home." the young man indeed felt as if he had come through a long illness when he stepped forth upon the platform at king's cross, and felt that he had escaped from his fever and his trouble, and had new ways and new thoughts--or rather the repose of old thoughts and old ways--before him for some time to come. he remained in london all day, and after his bath and his breakfast, felt the rising of a new life, and began to remember all the good things which he had partially forgotten, but which surely were more than enough to counterbalance the evil things, of which, when you set your mind to it, after all, so feasible an explanation could be found. london was at its darkest, and nothing invited him in the foggy and murky streets; nevertheless he lingered with that mixture of old habit and mental indolence which wastes so much time and disperses so many admirable resolutions. he went in the morning to see the house which belonged to him in park lane, and which was at present empty. it was one of those which look out from pleasant, large bow-windows upon the brightness of the park and the cheerful thoroughfare. even at such a moment it had a kind of brightness--as much light as could be got in london. it gave walter a real pleasure to think of furnishing it for his mother, of seeing her take her place there and enter upon a larger life, a mode of existence for which he felt--with a glow of pride in her--she was more qualified than for the smaller village routine at sloebury. his energy even went so far as to direct that the house should be put in order and prepared for occupation. and if he had gone home at once after this feat, not all the threatenings of his mysterious enemy would have prevented a pleasant re-beginning of his old life. but he did not; he lingered about the streets, about the hotel to which he had gone in the morning, for no particular reason, and it was late when he started for sloebury--late and dark and cold, and his sleepless night and all the excitements from which he had fled, began to tell upon him. when he reached the familiar station his cheerfulness and good-humour had fled. and all the pleasant anticipations of the home-coming and the comfort with which he had remembered that existence, free of all mystery, in which he had seldom done anything but what seemed good in his own eyes, abandoned him as he stepped into the drizzle of a dark and rainy december night, into the poor and badly-lighted streets that surround a railway everywhere, and turn the worst side of every town to the eyes of strangers. he sent symington and his baggage off before him, and himself set out to walk, with that incomprehensible pleasure in a little further delay which is so general. stepping out into the mean streets had all the effect upon walter's tired frame and capricious and impatient mind, of sudden disenchantment. his imagination perhaps had been affected by the larger atmosphere from which he had come, and he had forgotten the dinginess and poverty, which never before had struck him with the same force. the damp drizzle which was all there was for air, seemed to suffocate him; the pavement was wet and muddy, dirt and wretchedness pervaded everything. then he began to realise, as he walked, the scene he was going to, which he could call up before him with such perfect distinctness of memory. home! it used to be the centre, in books, of all pleasant thoughts--the tired wanderer coming to rest and shelter, the prodigal out of hunger and misery to forgiveness and the fatted calf, the "war-beaten soldier" from his cold sentry's march, the sailor from the wet shrouds and gloomy seas--to good fires and welcomes, kisses and a hot supper. but that primitive symbol of imagination, like so many others, has got perhaps somewhat soiled with ignoble use; and it never was, perhaps, from this point of view that young men of walter methven's type regarded the centre of family life, to which they returned when there was nothing better to do, with a sort of penitential sense of the duties that were considered binding there, and the preposterous things that would be expected of them. lord erradeen, who had been longing for that safe and sensible refuge where no exaggeration or superstition prevailed, suddenly felt it rise before him like a picture of still life as he walked towards it. his mother seated knitting at one side of the fire, with a preoccupied look, listening for his step outside, the evening newspaper and a novel from mudie's on the table. miss merivale opposite working crewel work, and putting a question now and then as to when he was expected: the two lamps burning steadily, the tick of the clock in the foreground, so to speak, the soul of the silent scene. the other accessories of the piece were all conventional ones: fire blazing brightly, now and then breaking into the monologue of the clock with a sudden rush and jet of flame, or dropping of ashes; curtains drawn, sofas and chairs within the glow of the warmth, ready for the new-comer's choice. there would be a sudden springing up, a disturbance of the perfect order of all these arrangements, on his entrance. he would be made to sit down in far too warm a corner; his personal appearance would be commented upon; that he was looking well, or ill, or tired, or as fresh as possible. and then the cross-examination would begin. walter reminded himself that this cross-examination was maddening, and that even as a boy at school he had never been able to bear it. when he had said that he was well, and consented, yes, that he had come home sooner than he expected, but no, that nothing was wrong, what was there more to say? to be sure he had intended to say a great deal more, to pour forth all his troubles into his mother's sympathetic bosom; but that in any case could only have been when the two were alone. and would she understand him if he did so? cousin sophy--he could hear her in imagination--would give a sharp shriek of laughter at the idea of anything mysterious, at any suggestion of the supernatural (in which, of course, by this time walter did not believe himself, but that was another matter). she would shriek even derisively at the idea that mesmerism could have affected any man in his senses. and his mother--what would she do? not shriek with laughter, that was not her way; but smile perhaps with a doubtful look to see whether it was possible that he could be in earnest in this incredible story of his. no, she would not believe him, she would think he was under the influence of some hallucination. she would look at him with a shock of something like contempt, an annoyed dismay that _her_ son should be so credulous, or so weak. walter's imagination leaped back to the other warm and softly-lighted room on the isle, the innocent mother talking, who would have believed everything, the girl standing by who did understand, and that almost without a word. ah, if that indeed were home! thus with a sudden revulsion in his mind, shutting himself up, and double-locking the door of his heart, even before he had come to the door of the house, to which his mother, he knew, would rush to meet him, hearing and distinguishing his step--he went home. mrs. methven, who had been on the watch all day, opened the door to him as he foresaw. she was trembling with anxiety and pleasure, yet self-restrained and anxious not to betray the excitement which probably he would think uncalled for; she took his wraps from him, and helped to take off his great-coat, giving an aid which was quite unnecessary, but which he, on his side commanding himself also, did his best to accept with an appearance of pleasure. "you have not dined," she said, "there is something just ready. we waited half an hour, but i thought you would prefer to come by this train. come in and get thawed, and let me look at you, while they bring up your dinner." she took him by the arm as she spoke, and led him into the drawing-room where everything was exactly as he had imagined. and she drew him, as he had imagined, too close to the fire, and drawing the softest chair, said "sit down, dear, and get warm." "i am not a bit cold. i have walked, you know, from the station. how do you do, cousin sophy? your room is too warm, mother, i always tell you so. however it looks very cheerful after the wet and mud outside," he said, with an attempt to be gracious. "the rain makes everything dismal out of doors. has it been raining all the way? you have had a dreadful journey, my poor boy." "of course it is warmer here than in scotland," said miss merivale. and then there was a pause, and his mother looked at him more closely by the light of the lamp. she was just going to say "you are not looking very well"--when walter broke in. "i hear a tray coming, and i am very hungry. i shall go into the dining-room, mother, and join you by-and-by." "i will go too and wait upon you, walter. i mean to wait upon you myself to-night. i hope your lordship has not grown too fine for that," she said with an attempt at playful ease. it was a relief to leave miss merivale, and have her son all to herself. she put his chair to the table for him, and brought the claret which had been warming, and handed him his plate with a smile of content. "it is pleasant to serve one's boy," she said, "and we don't want any third person. i have so much to hear, and to ask--" an impatient prayer that she would not begin the moment he sat down to worry a fellow with questions was on walter's lips; but he forbore, doing his very best to command himself. to sit in his old place, to feel his old impulse, to find the claret too warm, and the potatoes cold, was almost too much for him; but still like a hero he forbore. and she took advantage of his magnanimity. she never relaxed her watch upon him. that is the penalty one pays for having one's mother to serve one: a servant is silent at least. she asked him if he would not have a little more, just this little piece which was very nicely done? some of the vegetables which were better cooked than usual? a little salad? some stewed fruit with that devonshire cream which he used to like? a little of his favourite cheese? she was not in general a fussy woman, but she was so anxious, after the _rapprochement_ that had taken place on the eve of his going away, to please him, to preserve that tenderer strain of feeling--if it could be done this way! and yet all the time she was restraining herself not to say too much, not to worry him. a woman has to exercise such wiles often enough for her husband's benefit; but it is hard to go through the process again for her son. he bore it all with a devouring impatience, yet self-restraint too--not entreating her in words to let him alone for heaven's sake! as he would so fain have done. perhaps there was something to be said on his side also; his mind was laden with care and anxiety, and wanted repose above all; and this wistful over-anxiety and desire to propitiate by details was irritating beyond description. he did not know how to put up with it. love itself is sometimes very hard to put up with--embarrassing, officious, not capable of perceiving that to let its object alone is the best. mrs. methven did not know how to propitiate him--whether to show her interest or to put on a form of indifference. all her urgency about his dinner, was it not to spare him the questions which she knew he did not love? but that succeeded badly, and her curiosity, or rather her anxiety, was great. "how did you like kinloch houran?" she ventured to say at last. what a question! it seemed to walter that a glance at his face would have shown her how inappropriate it was. "like kinloch houran!" he said. "if you want a categorical answer, mother--and i know you are never satisfied with anything else--not at all!" "i am sorry for that, walter, since it seems a place you must have a great deal to do with. auchnasheen, then, was that better? you must teach me to pronounce the name." "auchnasheen, if possible, was worse," he said. "i shall never be able to endure either the one or the other, or forget the associations--don't make me think of them, please. when i got home i thought i should be able to escape all that." "my dear, i beg your pardon: i did not know. was the weather then so bad? they say it always rains--and the place very dull, of course, so far in the wilds? but you said in your letter that the lake was lovely, and that there were some pleasant people----" he put up his hand, begging her to go no further. "it was lovely enough if you like, but i hate the place; isn't that enough? i shall never go back with my free will." mrs. methven looked at him in astonishment. "i thought--" she said, "you remember how fantastic you thought it, and mediæval--that you had to make a periodical visit to the old home of the race?" his very lips trembled with irritation. he had written about all that in the first days of his absence, and even after his arrival at loch houran, making fun of the old world stipulation. she might have divined, he thought, that it was a very different matter now. "i am sorry to keep you so long here, out of your own comfortable corner," he said. "you never like sitting in the dining-room. it is brutal of me to keep you here." "no, walter, it is my pleasure," she cried; then, poor soul, with that most uncalled-for, unprofitable desire for information, "and there are so many things i want to know----" he commanded himself with a great effort. "mother," he said, "i have not enjoyed my visit to scotland. there are a great many things that perhaps i may be able to talk of hereafter if you will give me time, but that i don't want even to think of now. and i'm tired with my journey; and everything is not _couleur de rose_, as you seem to think. let me alone, if you can, for to-night." "let you alone--if i can!" she was so startled, so bitterly disappointed, that for a moment or two she could not speak. and this aggravated walter still more. "mother," he cried, getting up from his unsatisfactory meal, "i hope you are not going to make a scene the first night." thus, without any intention, with indeed the strongest desire to adopt a better way, this was how young lord erradeen resumed his intercourse with his mother. and yet oona's mother, with all her little gentle affectations, with her kind effusiveness which there was no withstanding, had given him the sincerest sense of home and a refuge from trouble. was it oona's presence that explained all, or was there something more subtle underneath? there followed on this occasion no scene; but when mrs. methven returned to the drawing-room alone, leaving walter, as she said, in peace to smoke his cigar after his dinner, miss merivale's keen eyes perceived at once that the traveller's meal had not been a happy ceremonial. "i dare say he is tired," she said. "yes, he is tired--almost too tired to eat. smoke is the grand panacea," said mrs. methven, with a smile. "the worst of smoke is that it is so unsociable," said miss merivale, cheerfully, picking up her book. "i think i'll go to bed and leave you free for your talk with walter when the cigar's done. oh yes, you will get on better by yourselves. you will get more out of him if you are alone. but i dare say you won't get very much out of him. it will come by scraps--a little at a time; and he will be quite astonished that you don't know--by instinct, i suppose. men are all like that." it was very kind of cousin sophy. mrs. methven gave her a kiss of gratitude as she took her candle and went away. but the expedient after all did little good. walter lingered over his cigar, growing less and less inclined for any confidences, while his mother lingered in the drawing-room, hoping he would come to her; and cousin sophy, by far the most comfortable of the three, established herself cosily in her easy-chair by her bed-room fire, with a yellow novel. miss merivale had aspirations beyond mudie. she thought the french writers far more subtle and searching in their analysis of character than her compatriots ever were, and she liked their boldness, and the distinctness with which they cut away all pretences and showed humanity as it was. she had no opinion of humanity--but yet she was in her way very good-natured, and would even go out of her way to show kindness to one of her fellow-creatures, as she had done to-night. though her own room looked comfortable, and was so indeed up to a certain point, miss merivale, if nobody else, was aware that there was a draught which there was no eluding,--a draught which, whatever you might do, caught you infallibly in the back of the neck. she had taken down the curtains and put them up again. she had changed the position of her seat. she had bought a folding screen. she had even changed her chair and procured a high-backed old-fashioned thing, something like that cushioned sentry-box in which porters delight; but in no way could she escape this draught, except in bed, and it was much too early to go to bed. therefore she had made a distinct sacrifice of personal comfort in coming so soon up-stairs. she sat there and mused, asking herself what boys were born for, or at least by what strange mistake providence ever committed them to the charge of women; and why it was that they could not be happy or natural with the people they belonged to. "i feel almost sure now," she said to herself, "that i shall have a stiff neck to-morrow, to no purpose, and that those two down-stairs are sitting in separate rooms, and will not say a word to each other." it was a curious, very curious reading of an english home, could any spectator have looked through the secure covering of that respectable roof, or through the curtains that veiled the windows, and seen the two rooms in which these two persons sat each alone. how was it? why was it? the mother had no thought but for her son. the son was not unkind or heartless, but full of good qualities. and yet at a moment when he had much to tell, and she was eager to hear, they sat in two separate rooms, as if they were fellow-lodgers and no more. cousin sophy, who was a sensible woman, with much kind feeling towards both, though she was not perhaps the kind of person from whom any high degree of unselfish devotion was to be looked for, sat and shook her head, and "wondered at it," as the ladies at camelot did over elaine. but it was a greater wonder than elaine. was it, perhaps, the beginning of the fulfilment of that threat that everything would go ill with him, which had been made at kinloch houran? but if so it was no new ill, but only the further following out of an evil that had been growing for years. chapter v. something of the same perversity which had turned all his good resolutions to nothing on the night of his arrival, affected walter when he went out next morning into sloebury. the place had narrowed and grown small in every way. there was no horizon, only lines of brick houses; no space, only the breadth of a street; no air to breathe for a man who had come from the wide solitude of the hills, and the keen freshness of the highland breezes. everything here was paltry, and monotonous, and small; the people who met him--and he met everybody, and there was not a man who could claim the slightest acquaintance with him, or a woman who had seen him once in her neighbour's drawing-room who did not now claim acquaintance with lord erradeen--seemed to have dwindled along with the scene. they had never been distinguished by intelligence or originality, but he had not been aware how paltry they were before. had he seen jeremy's new turn-out? all the men inquired of him. he had already heard of it from miss merivale, who had given him a sketch of the history of the town, and what had happened during his absence, at breakfast. it was a high phaeton, "which i suppose must be the fashion," miss merivale said. "you should really see it," cried all the young men, with details about the harness and the high-stepping mare which were endless. what did lord erradeen care for young jeremy's phaeton or the high-stepping mare? but it was the only topic at sloebury--that, and a report which miss merivale had also furnished him with about julia herbert. "your old flame: no doubt it was to console herself in your absence," said cousin sophy. this was disagreeable too. walter did not care to hear that the girl who had distinguished himself and been distinguished by him should make herself remarkable in a flirtation with another man. he did not want her indeed, but he objected to the transfer of her affections. and everything around looked so barren, stale, flat, and unprofitable. perhaps it was the quickening of life which his recent experiences, painful though they had been, had brought him, which made him feel how dead-alive everything was. at loch houran his mind had gone back to the safe and peaceable commonplace of his native town with something like an enthusiasm of preference for its calm common sense, and superiority to the fever and excitements of that life upon the edge of the supernatural. now it seemed to him that superstition itself, not to speak of the heats and chills of human passion, were higher things than this cynic-steadiness, this limit of matter-of-fact. what would sloebury think of those things that had been so real to him, that had rent his very being asunder? he could imagine the inextinguishable laughter with which his story would be greeted, and blushed at the possibility of betraying himself. a seer of ghosts and visions, a victim of mesmerism! he would become in a moment the scorn, as he was at present, the envy, of the town. not a soul of them would understand. his experiences must be buried in his own bosom, and no one here must ever know that he had got beyond that surface of life to which all their knowledge was confined. when he met underwood indeed this determination wavered a little: but then underwood looked at him with an eagerness of inspection which was still more offensive. what did the fellow mean? did he think it likely that he, a stranger, a person whom the better people disapproved, should be chosen as the confidant of lord erradeen? "you have come back very soon," the captain said; as indeed did everybody whom he met. "no--not sooner than i intended," said walter, coldly. "it was business merely that took me there at all." underwood examined his face with a curiosity that had knowledge in it. "i know that country so well," he said. "i should like to know what you think of it. of course you were at auchnasheen? i have been weeks there, with the late lord--and at the old castle too," he added, with a keen look. "you were interested in the architecture, i suppose." underwood said nothing for a moment. then suddenly--"i wish you'd come and talk to me about it!" he cried. "any time that you will come i'll shut out everybody else. i'll keep myself free--" "my dear fellow," walter said in a supercilious tone, "why should i make sloebury pay the penalty, and banish your friends from you for my selfish advantage?" to remember the time when this man had taken notice of him and been his superior, gave him a sense of impatient indignation. "besides, i don't know that there is anything to say." "oh, as you please," said underwood; but when they passed each other, he turned back and laid a hand on walter's sleeve. "i keep early hours now," he said. "after ten i am always free." lord erradeen walked away, half-angry, half-amused, by the man's presumption, who, after all, was a nobody; but yet, he made a secret note in his mind, almost outside of his consciousness. after ten--it might, in the dreadful blank of those hours after ten at sloebury (or even before ten for that matter), be a resource. he had not gone very much further when he fell into another lion's mouth. but how wrong, how cruel, to apply such a phrase to the red and smiling mouth, fresh as the cherries in the song, of miss julia herbert, on her way from the rectory where she paid her old aunt a daily visit, to the cottage in which she was her mother's stay and solace! she had been flirting a great deal in walter's absence, no one could deny. a young wynn, a relation on the other side of the house, had been staying there, on leave from his regiment, and on such an occasion what else was there to do? but young wynn was gone, and his circumstances were not such as to have stood in competition for one moment with lord erradeen. as soon as she saw him, julia began to smile and wave her hand. if there was a little sense of guilt in her, so much the more reason for even an excess of friendliness now. and perhaps there was in walter a certain desire to let the little world about, which had insisted upon her little infidelities, perceive that she was as much under his influence as ever, as soon as he chose to appear. this was not the way in which the world regarded the matter, if walter had known. instead of looking at him as the conquering hero, who had but to show himself, the spectators said pityingly that julia herbert had got hold of poor lord erradeen again. "oh, walter!" she cried; then changed her tone with a very pretty blush, and said, "i ought to have said lord erradeen; but it was the surprise. and so you have come home?" "i have come _back_," he said, with a little emphasis. "i see it all. forgive me that i should be so silly--_back_, of course; that means a few days, that means you have come for your boxes, or to see your mother, or to know her wishes respecting the new furniture of the banqueting hall. shall it be mediæval or renaissance? if you ask my advice----" "i do; of course, i do. it is for that chiefly i am here." "that is what i thought. renaissance, then. there, you have my opinion--with plenty of cupids and good, fat garlands----" she laughed, and walter laughed too, though he was not very much amused. but, of course, he could not speak to a lady as he had spoken to underwood. "come now, tell me about it," the young lady said. "you cannot refuse such a little bit of novelty to one who never sees anything new except a novel: and there is so little novelty in them! about what? oh, about scotland, and the scenery, and the old castle: and who you met, and what you did. mayn't i show a little curiosity--in one whom," she added with that exaggeration of sentiment which leaves room for a laugh, "i have known all my life?" "that, i hope, is not all the claim i have on your interest," said walter in the same tone. "oh, no, not half. there have been moments!--and then the romance of you, lord erradeen! it is delightful to touch upon the borders of romance. and your rank! i feel a great many inches higher, and ever so much elevated in my own estimation, by being privileged to walk by your lordship's side. when are you going to take your seat and help to rule your country? they say the house of commons is to be preferred for that. but there is nothing so delightful as a peer." "how lucky for me that you should think so. i may walk with you, then, to the----" "corner," said julia, "not too far; oh, certainly, not too far: or we shall have all the old ladies, male and female, making comments." "i don't care for the old ladies--or their comments," said walter: the fun was languid, perhaps, but yet it afforded a little occupation when one had nothing else to do. "you? oh, of course not, as you will escape presently, and know all my wiles by heart already, it cannot make much difference to you. it is i who have to be considered, if you please, my lord. they will say there is _that_ julia herbert at her old tricks, trying to take in poor lord erradeen--a poor, innocent young man in the snares of that designing baggage! they will probably add that the police should put a stop to it," miss herbert said. "the deluded old ladies! without knowing that it is exactly the other way----" "now that is the prettiest speech you ever made," said julia. "i never heard you say anything so nice before. you must have been in very good society since you went away. tell me, who was it?" she asked with her most insinuating look. they were old practitioners both. they understood each other: they had flirted since they had been in long clothes, and no harm had ever come of it. this is, no doubt, what miss herbert would have said had any feminine critic interposed; but there was something more serious, as the feminine critic would have divined, at once, in julia's eye. she meant more, not less, than she said; and she was anxious to know, having her eyes upon all contingencies like a wise general, what rivals might have come in the way. "i have met scarcely any one," said walter. "you cannot conceive what a lonely place it is. oh, of course there are people about. i was promised a great many visitors had i stayed. on the other hand, even in winter, it is wonderfully beautiful. coming back to this perfectly flat country, one discovers for the first time how beautiful it is." "yes," said julia, indifferently; the beauty of the country did not excite her. "i have seen a photograph of your old castle. you can only get to it by water, captain underwood says. oh, he has been a great authority on the subject since you went away. one of your castles is on loch houran; but the others----" "if you like to call them castles," said walter, gently flattered by these queries, "there are two of them on loch houran. one i call a ruin, and the other a shooting-box----" "oh, you lucky, lucky person; and a house in town, and another grand place in scotland! aren't you frightened to trust yourself among poor people who have nothing! don't you feel alarmed lest we should rush at you and tear you to pieces, and divide your spoils? i am very romantic. i should have the old castle," she said with a side glance of provocation and invitation. her watchful eyes perceived a change in his countenance as she spoke. there were limits, it was evident, to the topics her flying hand might touch. she went on cleverly without a pause-- "you wonder what i should do with it? restore it, lord erradeen. build the walls up again, and make everything as it used to be. i should enjoy that--and then the furnishing, how delightful! don't you know that the aim and object of every rational being now is to make a little victorian house look like a big queen anne one? or if not that, an eastern harem with quantities of draperies, and mats and cushions. how much more delightful to have the real thing to work upon!" "but my house is not a queen anne house, or an oriental----" "you don't like to say the word, you good, delicate-minded young man! of course not; but a castle like the _mysteries of udolpho_. at all events you must ask mamma and me to pay you a visit, and i shall take my lute like emily in that beautiful story, and a small but well-chosen collection of books; and then whatever happens--suppose even that you shut my lover up in one of your dungeons----" "which i should certainly do; nay, hang him on the gallows-hill." "no, no," she said, "not hang him; let him have the death of a gentleman. here we are at the corner. oh, you are going my way? well, perhaps that makes a difference. you meant to pay your respects to mamma? i don't think that i can in that case, lord erradeen, interfere with the liberty of the subject; for you have certainly a right, if you wish it, to call on mamma." "certainly i have a right. i am prepared to obey you in every other respect; but mrs. herbert has always been very kind to me, and it is one of my objects----" "how much improved you are!" cried julia. "how nice you are! how grateful and condescending! tell me whom you have been consorting with while you have been away. the scotch have good manners, i have always heard. who is your nearest neighbour in your old castle, lord erradeen?" walter cast about in his mind for a moment before he replied. he had no mind to profane the sanctity of the isle by betraying its gentle inmates to any stranger's curiosity. he said--"i think my nearest neighbour is a mr. williamson--not a distinguished name or person--who has a gorgeous great house and everything that money can buy. that means a great deal. it has all been made by sugar, or some equally laudable production." "and mr. williamson--no, it is not distinguished as names go--has a daughter, lord erradeen?" "i believe so, miss herbert." "how solemn we are! it used to be julia--and walter. but never mind, when one gets into the peerage one changes all that. 'one fair daughter, and no more, whom he loved passing well!'" "there is but one, i think; sons in an indefinite number, however, which lessens, i suppose, in a commercial point of view, the value of the lady." "lord erradeen, you fill me with amazement and horror. if that is how you have been taught by your scotch neighbours----" "miss herbert, i am following the lead you have given me--trying humbly to carry out your wishes." and then they looked at each other, and laughed. the wit was not of a high order, but perhaps that is scarcely necessary to make a duel of this kind between a young man and a young woman amusing. it was more than amusing to julia. she was excited, her bosom panted, her eyes shone--all the more that walter's calm was unbroken. it was provoking beyond measure to see him so tranquil, so ready to respond and follow her lead, so entirely unlikely to go any further. he was quite willing to amuse himself, she said to herself, but of feeling in the matter he had none, though there had been moments. and it did not once occur to her that her antagonist was clever enough to have eluded her investigations, or that the smile upon his face was one of secret pleasure in the secret sanctuary whose existence he had revealed to no one--the little isle in the midst of loch houran and the ladies there. he went back to them while all this lively babble went on, seeing them stand and wave their hands to him, as he was carried away over the wintry water. he had come away with relief and eagerness to be gone; but how fair it all looked as he turned back out of this scenery so different from his loch, and from the side of a girl who wanted to "catch" him, walter knew. odious words! which it is a shame to think, much less speak, and yet which are spoken constantly, and, alas! in some cases, are true. notwithstanding this lively consciousness of the young lady's meaning (which in itself is always flattering and propitiates as much as it alarms), walter accompanied julia very willingly to the cottage. he had not thought of going there so soon. it was a kind of evidence of interest and special attraction which he had not meant to give, but that did not occur to him at the moment. the mother and daughter exerted themselves to the utmost to make his visit agreeable. they insisted that he should stay to luncheon, they sang to him and made him sing, and talked and made him talk, and burned delicate incense before him, with jibes and flouts and pretences at mockery. they had the air of laughing at him, yet flattered him all the time. he was such a prize, so well worth taking a little trouble about. the incense tickled his nostrils, though he laughed too, and believed that he saw through them all the time. there was no deception, indeed, on either side; but the man was beguiled and the woman excited. he went away with certain fumes in his brain, and she came down from the little domestic stage upon which she had been performing with a sense of exhaustion, yet success. miss williamson, a country beauty, or perhaps not even a beauty, with red hair and a scotch accent, and nothing but money to recommend her! money was much to ordinary mortals, but surely not enough to sweep away all other considerations from the mind of a young favourite of fortune. no! julia believed in a certain generosity of mind though she was not herself sufficiently well off to indulge in it, and she could not think that money, important as it was, would carry the day. in the mean time, it was apparent to all the world that lord erradeen had spent the greater part of his first day at sloebury, at the cottage; he had stayed to luncheon, he had promised to come back to practise those duets. a young man who has just come into his kingdom, and is therefore in circumstances to marry, and likely in all human probability to be turning his thoughts that way, cannot do such things as this with impunity. if he had not meant something why should he thus have _affiché'd_ his interest in her daughter, mrs. herbert asked herself in polyglot jargon. there was no reason why he should have done so, had he not meant it. thus walter walked into the snare though it was so evident, though he saw it very well, and though the sportswoman herself trailed it on the ground before him and laughed and avowed her deep design. in such cases fun and frankness are more potent than deceit. walter continued in sloebury for two or three weeks. he found the stagnation of every interest intolerable. he had nothing to do, and though this was a condition which he had endured with much composure for years before, it pressed upon him now with a force beyond bearing. and yet he did not go away. he betook himself to the cottage to practise those duets almost every day; and presently he fell into the practice of visiting captain underwood almost every night; but not to confide in him as that personage had hoped. underwood soon learned that a reference to loch houran made his companion silent at once, and that whatever had happened there the young lord meant to keep it to himself. but though walter did not open his heart, he took advantage of the means of amusement opened to him. he suffered captain underwood to discourse to him about the turf; about horses, of which the young man knew nothing; about the way in which both pleasure and profit might be secured, instead of the ruin to which it is generally supposed that pursuit must lead. underwood would have been very willing to "put" his young friend "up" to many things, and indeed did so in learned disquisitions which perhaps made less impression than he supposed upon a brain which was preoccupied by many thoughts. and they played a great deal, that deadly sort of play between two, which is for sheer excitement's sake, and is one of the most dangerous ways of gambling. walter did not lose so much as might have been expected, partly because his interest was apt to flag, and partly that his companion had designs more serious than those of the moment, and was in no hurry to pluck his pigeon--if pigeon it was, of which he was not yet sure. thus the young man held himself up to the disapproval of the town, which, indeed, was ready to forgive a great deal to a peer, but "did not like," as all authorities said, "the way he was going on." he was behaving shamefully to julia herbert, unless he meant to marry her, which she and her mother evidently believed to the derision of all spectators; and to mix himself up so completely with underwood, and abandon the society of his own contemporaries, were things which it was very difficult to forgive. he did not hunt as he had intended, which would have been an amusement suited to his position, partly because there was a good deal of frost, and partly because it was not an exercise familiar to walter, who had never had the means of keeping horses. and the football club belonged to the previous ages, with which he now felt so little connection. therefore, it happened after a time, notwithstanding the charm of his rank, that sloebury felt itself in the painful position of disapproving of lord erradeen. strange to say, he was very little different from walter methven, who was a young fellow who had wasted his time and chances--a kind of good-for-nothing. it was something of an insult to the community in which he lived, that he should be "caught" by the most undisguised flirt, and should have fallen under the influence of the person most like a common adventurer of any in sloebury. he owed it at least to those who had contemplated his elevation with such a rush of friendly feeling that he should be more difficult to inveigle. had he still been plain walter methven, he could not have been more easily led away. the house in which walter was the first interest, and which had risen to such high hopes in his elevation, was held in the strangest state of suspense by this relapse into his old ways. the only element of agreeable novelty in it was the presence of symington, who had taken possession of the house at once, with the most perfect composure and satisfaction to himself. he was the most irreproachable and orderly retainer ever brought into a house by a young man returning home. he gave no trouble, the maids said; he was not proud, but quite willing to take his meals in the kitchen, and did not stand upon his dignity. presently, however, it appeared that he had got everything in his hands. he took the control of the dinner table, made suggestions to the cook, and even to mrs. methven herself when she ordered dinner, and became by imperceptible degrees the chief authority in the house. in this capacity he looked with puzzled and disapproving eyes at his young lord. his first inquiries as to where the horses were kept, and where he was to find his master's hunting things, being answered impatiently, with an intimation that walter possessed neither the one nor the other, symington took a high tone. "you will, no doubt, take steps, my lord, to supply yourself. i hear it's a fine hunting country: and for a young gentleman like you with nothing to do----" "don't you think i can manage my own affairs best?" the young man said. "it's very likely ye think so, my lord," with great gravity, symington said. he was laying the table for luncheon, and spoke sometimes with his back to walter as he went and came. "i suppose you are of a different opinion?" walter said, with a laugh. "not always--not always, my lord. i've seen things in you that were very creditable--and sense too--and sense too!" said symington, waving his hand. "i'm just thinking if i were a young gentleman in your lordship's place, i would get more enjoyment out of my life. but we never know," he added piously, "what we might be capable of, if we were exposed to another's temptations and put in another's place." "let me hear," said walter, with some amusement, "what you would do if you were in my place." "it's what i have often asked mysel'," said symington, turning round, and polishing with the napkin in his hand an old-fashioned silver salt cellar. "supposing ye were rich and great that are at present nobody in particular, what would ye do? it's an awful difficult question. it's far more easy to find fault. we can all do that. your lordship might say to me, 'that silver is no what it ought to be.' and i would probably answer, 'it's been in a woman's hands up till now,' which he had never taken into consideration. and i may misjudge your lordship in the same way." "do you mean to say that i too have been in a woman's hands? but that is uncivil, symington, to my mother." "i would on no hand be unceevil to my lady; and it was not that i was meaning. to my thinking, my lord, you just dinna get enough out of your life. there is a heap of satisfaction to be got out of the life of a lord, when he has plenty of money, and five-and-twenty years of age like you. it is true your lordship is courting, which accounts for many things." "what do you mean by courting? come, we have had enough of this," lord erradeen said. "i did not expect, my lord, that you would bide it long, though you were very good-natured to begin with. courting is just a very well kent amusement, and no ill in it. but i will not intrude my remarks on your lordship. there is one thing though, just one thing," symington said, re-arranging the table with formal care. "you'll no be going north again, my lord, as well as i can reckon, for nigh upon another year?" "what have you to do with my going north?" walter cried impatiently. "your lordship forgets that i will have to go with ye, which gives me a hantle to do with it," said symington imperturbably; "but that will no be at least till it's time for the grouse? it will always be my duty:--and my pleasure, and my pleasure!" he added with a wave of his hand, "to follow your lordship to the place ye ken of, and do my best for you: but in the mean time i'm thinking this place suits me real well, and i will just bide here." "bide here, you old solomon!" walter cried, between laughter and wrath; "how do you know that you are to bide anywhere, or that i mean you to stay with me at all?" symington waved his hand dismissing this question with the contempt it merited. "i am just a person much attached to the family," he said, "and ye would not find it comfortable, my lord, up yonder, without me. but in the mean time ye will get a younger lad with my advice. and i'll just bide where i am with my lady, your mother, who is a lady of great judgment. i am getting an auld man; and your lordship is a young one; and if you are over-quiet at present, which is my opinion, it is no to be expected or desired that the like of that can last. ye will aye find me here, my lord, when you want me. it will suit me far better at my years than running to and fro upon the earth at the tail of a young lad. but as long as i can draw one foot after another, i will go with your lordship _up yonder_, and never fail ye," symington said. chapter vi. the manner of life of which symington disapproved went on till christmas was over, and the new year had begun. it was not a new kind of life, but only the old, heightened in some of its features; less tragical in its folly because the young man was now no longer dependent upon his own exertions, yet more tragical in so far that life had now great opportunities for him, and means of nobler living, had he chosen. he received business letters now and then from mr. milnathort and from shaw at loch houran which he read with impatience or not at all. business disgusted him. he had no desire to take the trouble of making up his mind on this or that question. he let his letters collect in a pile and left them there, while he went and practised his duets, or lighted his cigar with the pink paper of the telegram which called his attention to letters unanswered, and went out to play ecarte with underwood. he did not care for the ecarte. he did not care for the duets. poor julia's devices to secure him became day by day more transparent to him, and underwood's attempts to gain an influence. he saw through them both, yet went on day by day. the herberts, mother and daughter, spoke of him with a secure proprietorship, and julia, though never without that doubt which adventurers know, had almost a certainty of the coronet upon her handkerchief which she worked upon a cigar-case for him by way of making quite sure what a viscount's coronet was. it is a pretty ornament. she was rather ashamed of her old-fashioned name, but that above it made everything right. underwood for his part shook off the doubt which had been in his mind as to whether lord erradeen was a pigeon to be plucked. he thought of a campaign in town carried on triumphantly by means of his noble victim. it was worth waiting for after all. and thus christmas passed. christmas, that season of mirth! there was the usual number of parties, at all of which lord erradeen was a favoured guest, and allowed himself to be exhibited as miss herbert's thrall. in these assemblies she used to talk to him about miss williamson. "oh yes, a lady in scotland, whose wealth is untold; hasn't lord erradeen told you? it is to be a match, i understand," julia would say with a radiant countenance. "sugar--or cotton, i don't remember which. when one has estates in the west highlands, that is part of the programme. one always marries--sugar. that is a much prettier way of putting it than to say one marries money." this tantalised sloebury a little, and painfully mystified mrs. methven, who had never heard miss williamson's name; but it did not change the evident fact that lord erradeen must either be engaged, or on the point of being engaged--or else that he was using julia herbert very ill. when the new year began, and it was suddenly announced that he was going away, there was a flutter and thrill of excitement over all the town. the rector, who met walter on his way to the railway, and who was aware of all the expectations connected with him, stared aghast at the intimation. "going away!" he said, then put forth a tremulous smile. "ah, i see! going on some visits, to pot a few pheasants before the season is over." "i don't think that would tempt me," walter said. "i am going to town, and my mother will follow shortly. it is a removal, i fear----" "you are going from sloebury! but then--but then----" the old clergyman gasped for breath. "my friends think i have wasted a great deal too much time in sloebury," lord erradeen said, and he waved his hand to the rector, who went home with his lower lip dropped, and his cheeks fallen in, in a consternation beyond words. his excitement was as great, though of a different kind, as on that day when he ran in from church with his surplice still on, and the most extraordinary disregard of decorum to carry the news of walter's elevation in rank to his wife. "that fellow is going off without a word," cried mr. wynn. "he has been amusing himself, that's all; but you never will listen to me. the girl has been going too far, a great deal too far, her mother ought not to have allowed it. and now i shall hear nothing else wherever i go," the rector said. he was almost ready to cry, being old and a nervous man by nature. "i thought it was settled this time, and that we should have no further trouble with her," which was a contradiction of himself after the words he had begun with. mrs. wynn soothed him as best she could, though indeed she had been the one who had all along doubted lord erradeen's "intentions," and bade the rash julia beware. "perhaps," she said, "they have come to an understanding, my dear. for it was quite true what he told you: he has wasted too much time in sloebury. a young man in his position should not hang about in a place like this." "a young man in his position--should not raise expectations that are never to come to anything," the rector said; which was a truth so undeniable that even his peace-making wife could find nothing to reply. the change of sentiment which led walter away from sloebury was accomplished almost in a moment. in a capricious and wayward mind, a touch is sometimes enough to change the entire direction of a life. he had been kept indoors by a cold, and for want of something else to do had read his letters, and even answered one or two of them. there were several from shaw relating the course of events at loch houran; but these might not perhaps have moved him, had he not found inclosed in one of them a note, now somewhat out of date, from oona. it was very short and very simple. "i found i was not authorised to do anything with the poor frasers except to tell them you would not be hard upon them: and i took it upon me to assure old jenny that whatever happened you would never take the coo, and granny that she should die in peace in her own house even--which she would like, i think, for the credit of the glen--if she should live to be a hundred. i think you will not disown my agency by doing anything contrary to this. my mother sends her best regards." there was nothing more: but the words acted upon walter's dissatisfied mind like the sudden prick of a lance. it seemed to him that he saw her again standing, with a somewhat wistful look in her eyes, watching him as his boat shot along the gleaming water--her mother with her waving handkerchief, her nodding head, her easy smile, standing by. oona had said nothing, made no movement, had only stood and looked at him. how little she said now! and yet she was the only living creature (he said to himself in the exaggeration of a distracted mind) who had ever given him real help. she had ever given him her hand without hesitation or coquetry or thought of herself, to deliver him from his enemy--a hand that had purity, strength in its touch, that was as soft--as snow, he had said: cool, and pure, and strong. the thought of it gave him a pang which was indescribable. he rose up from where he sat among a litter of paper and books, the accumulations of an idle man, and went hurriedly to the drawing-room, where his mother sat alone by her fire--so much the more alone because he was in the next room, a world apart from her. he came in with a nervous excitement about him. "mother," he said, "i am going to town to-morrow." she put down her book and looked at him. "well, walter?" she said. "you think that is not of much importance; but it is, as it happens. i am going away from sloebury. i shall never do any good here. i can't think why i have stayed--why _we_ have stayed indeed; for it cannot have much attraction for you." she put down the book altogether now. she was afraid to say too much or too little in this sudden, new resolution, and change of front. "i can understand your feeling, walter. you have stayed over christmas out of consideration for----" she would have said "me" if she could, but that was impossible. "for the traditions of the season," she added, with a faint smile. "that is a very charitable and kind way of putting it, mother. i have stayed because i am a fool--because i can't take the trouble to do anything but what suggests itself at the moment. perhaps you think i don't know? oh, i know very well, if that did any good. i am going to get the house ready, and you will join me when it is fit for you to live in." "i, walter?" she said, with a startled tone. her face flushed and then grew pale. she looked at him with a curious mixture of pleasure and pain. it seemed like opening up a question which had been long settled. death is better than the reviving flutters of life when these are but to lead to a little more suffering and a dying over again. she added, somewhat tremulously, "i think perhaps it would be better not to consider the question of removal as affecting me." "mother," he said, almost wildly, his eyes blazing upon her, "your reproaches are more than i can bear." "i mean no reproach," she said, quietly. "it is simple enough. your life should not be fettered by cares which are unnecessary. i am very well here." "we can't go all over it again," he said. "we discussed that before. but you will say i have been as selfish, as careless as ever i was: and it is true--worse. ah, i wonder if this was part of the penalty? worse, in the old way. that would be a sort of a devilish punishment, just like him--if one were so silly as to believe that he had the power." "of whom are you speaking, walter?" asked his mother, startled. "punishment--who can punish you? you have done nothing to put yourself in any one's power." he gazed at her for a moment as she looked at him with anxious eyes, investigating his face to discover, if she could, what he meant. then he burst into an excited laugh. "i am getting melodramatic," he said, "by dint of being wretched, i suppose." "walter, what is this? if there is indeed anything hanging over you, for god's sake tell me." she got up hurriedly and went to him in sudden trouble and alarm, but the sensation of the moment did not carry him any further. he put away her hand almost impatiently. "oh, there is nothing to tell," he said, with irritation. "you take everything _au pied de la lettre_. but i am going to town to-morrow, all the same." and this he did, after a night in which he slept little and thought much. it may be thought that oona forrester's letter was a small instrument to effect so much, but it is not thus that influences can be reckoned. his mother had done a great deal more for him than oona, but nothing she could have done or said could have moved him like the recollection of that small, soft hand by which he had held as if it were the anchor of salvation. it kept him from a sort of despair as he remembered it, through this turbulent night, as he lay awake in the darkness, asking himself could this be what his adversary meant? not misfortune or downfall, which was what he had thought of, feeling himself able to defy such threats: but this self-abandonment to his natural defects, this more and more unsatisfactoriness of which he was conscious to the bottom of his heart. it did not occur to him that in the dread that came over him, and panic-stricken sense of the irresistible, he was giving the attributes of something far more than man to his maniac, or monomaniac, of kinloch houran. it was not the moment now to question what that being was, or how he had it in his power to affect the life and soul of another. the anguish of feeling that he was being affected, that the better part was being paralysed in him and the worse made stronger, was what occupied him now. when he got a little sleep in the midst of his tossings and troublings of mind and body, it was by the soothing recollection of oona's refreshing, strengthening touch, the hand that had been put into his own and had given him the strength of two souls. and so it was that next morning, when he ought to have been practising those duets at julia herbert's side, he was hurrying up to london as fast as steam and an express train could carry him. it was not perhaps the best place to go to for spiritual reformation, but at least it was a beginning of something new. and in the force of this impulse he went on for some time, proceeding at once to park lane, to push forward the preparations of the house, securing for himself a servant in the place of symington, and establishing himself, for the interval that must elapse before the house was ready for him, in chambers. in this way he found occupation for a week or two. he made an effort to answer his letters. he suffered himself to go through certain forms of business with the london lawyers who were the correspondents of mr. milnathort; and so for a short time found himself in the position of having something to do, and, still more strange, of doing it with a lightness of mind and enlivenment of life which was extraordinary, and without a reflection in respect to the duets and the ecarte. they were over, these _délaissements_, and that was all about it. it was not such plain sailing however after the beginning. established in chambers which were pleasant enough, with plenty of money, with youth and health, and what was still more, as he thought, with rank and a title which had the effect of making everybody civil and more than civil to him, lord erradeen suddenly awoke to the fact that he was less than nobody in the midst of that busy world of london in which there are so many people who love a lord. yes; but before you can love a lord, invite him, caress him, make his time pass agreeably, you must know him. and walter knew nobody. the most curious, the most rueful-comic, insignificant-important of all preliminaries! the doors were open, and the entertainment ready, and the guest willing; but there was no master of the ceremonies to bring him within the portals. it had not occurred to him until he was there, nor had he thought, even had his pride permitted him to ask for them, of the need of introductions, and some helping hand to bring him within the reach of society. society, indeed, had as yet scarcely come back to town, but yet there was a sprinkling at the club windows, men were to be seen in pall mall and piccadilly, and even a few carriages with ladies in them frequented the park. but what did that matter to him who knew nobody? he had no club. he was a stranger from the country. no house was open to him; he went about the streets without meeting a face he knew. to be sure, this must not be taken as an absolute fact, for there were people he knew, even relations, one very respectable clan of them, living at norwood, in the highest credit and comfort, who would have received him with open arms. and he knew mr. wynn, the rector's nephew, a moderately successful barrister, who called upon and asked him to dinner with extreme cordiality, as did one or two other people connected with sloebury. but in respect to the society to which he felt himself to belong, walter was like the peri at the gate of paradise. he knew nobody. had ever any young peer with means to keep up his rank, been in such a position before? it gave him a certain pleasure to think upon one other, born to far higher fortunes than himself, who had entered london like this in inconceivable solitude. byron! a magnificent example that went far to reconcile him to his fate. walter thought a great deal of the noble poet in these days, and studied him deeply, and took pleasure in the comparison, and consolation in the feeling that he could enter thoroughly into all those high, scornful-wistful, heroic utterances about mankind. the byronic mood has gone out of fashion; but if you can imagine a youth richly endowed by fortune, feeling that his new honours should open every door to him, and also a little that he was fit to hold his own place with the best, yet perceiving no door move on its hinges, and forced to acknowledge with a pang of surprise and disappointment, and that sense of neglected merit which is one of the most exquisite pangs of youth, that nobody cared to make his acquaintance, or even to inquire who was lord erradeen! it is all very well to smile at these sentiments where there has been no temptation to entertain them. but the young peer, who knew nobody, entered completely into byron's feelings. he pondered upon the extraordinary spectacle of that other young peer strolling haughtily, with his look like a fallen angel, up between the lordly ranks to take his hereditary seat: all the representatives of the old world staring coldly at him, and not one to be his sponsor and introduce him there. the same thing walter felt would have to happen in his own case, if he had courage enough to follow the example of byron; and he felt how hollow were all his honours, how mean the indifferent spectators round him, how little appreciated himself, with all the keenness of youthful passion and would-be cynicism. unfortunately, he was not a byron, and had no way of revenging himself upon that world. this curious and irritating discovery, after all his good resolutions, had, it need scarcely be said, the reverse of an elevating influence upon him. he sought the amusement from which his equals shut him out in other regions. strolling about town in an aimless way, he picked up certain old acquaintances whose renewed friendship was of little advantage. there will always be black sheep everywhere, and it is no unprecedented case for a boy from a public school, or youth from the university, to come across, six or seven years after he has left these haunts of learning, stray wanderers, who in that little time have fallen to the very depth of social degradation. when such a thing happens to a young man, the result may be a noble pity and profound impression of life's unspeakable dangers, and the misery of vice; or it may be after the first shock a sense that his own peccadilloes are not worth thinking of, seeing how infinitely lower down others have fallen. walter stood between these two. he was sincerely sorry, and anxious to succour the fallen; but at the same time he could not but feel that in his position, who never could come to that, the precautions which poor men had to take were scarcely necessary. and what could he do? a young man must have something to amuse himself and occupy his time. it was while he was sliding into the inconceivable muddle of an indolent mind and a vacant life that underwood came to town. the captain's motives and intentions in respect to him were of a very mixed character, and require further elucidation: but the effect of his appearance in the mean time was a rapid acceleration of the downward progress. underwood was "up to" many things which lord erradeen was not "up to" as yet, and the young man did not any longer, except by intervals, despise the society of the elder one, who brought, it could not be denied, a great many fresh excitements and occupations into his life. under captain underwood's instructions he became acquainted with the turf, which, as everybody knows, is enough to give a young man quite enough to do, and a good many things to think of. and now indeed the time had come when the captain began to feel his self-banishment to sloebury, and his patience, and all his exertions, so far as walter was concerned, fully repaid. there was no repetition of that byronic scene in the house of lords. instead of proudly taking his seat alone, and showing the assembled world how little he cared for its notice, walter discovered that he was indifferent to the world altogether, and asked himself, what is the good of it? with the philosophy of a cynic. what was the good of it, indeed? what was it but a solemn farce when you came to look into it? the house of commons might be something, but the house of lords was nothing; and why should a man trouble himself to become a member of it? then as to the clubs. what was the use of struggling to get admission to white's, or boodle's, or any other of those exalted institutions which walter only knew by name--when at underwood's club, where he was received with acclamation, you had the best dinner and the best wine in london, and no petty exclusiveness? walter was not by any means the only titled person in that society. there were quantities indeed of what the captain called "bosses" on its books. why then should lord erradeen take the trouble to sue and wait for admittance elsewhere with these doors so open to him? in the midst of this new influx of life, it is scarcely necessary to say that the house in park lane came to a standstill. it stood through all the season profitless, of use to nobody; and walter's life went on, alas, not to be described by negations, a life without beauty or pleasure; though pleasure was all its aim. at sloebury the commotion made by his departure had been great. at the cottage there had been a moment of blank consternation and silence, even from ill words. then mrs. herbert's energies awoke, and her vivacity of speech. fire blazed from this lady's eyes, and bitterness flowed from her tongue. she fell upon julia (who, indeed, might have been supposed the greatest sufferer) with violent reproaches, bidding her (as was natural) remember that _she_ had always been against it: a reproach in which there was really some truth. julia, too, had a moment of prostration in which she could hold no head at all against the sudden disappointment and overthrow, and still more overwhelming realisation of what everybody would say. she retired to her room for a day, and drew down the blinds and had a headache in all the forms. during that period, no doubt, the girl went through sundry anguishes, both of shame and failure, such as the innocent who make no scheming are free from; while her mother carried fire and flame to the rectory, and even betrayed to various friends her burning sense of wrong, and that julia had been shamefully used. but when julia emerged out of the shelter of that headache she put down all such demonstrations. she showed to sloebury, all on the watch to see "how she took it," a front as dauntless and eyes as bright as ever. in a campaign the true soldier is prepared for anything that can happen, and knows how to take the evil with the good. had she weakly allowed herself to love walter the result might have been less satisfactory; but she had been far too wise to run such a risk. afterwards, when rumours of the sort of life he was leading reached sloebury, she confided to her mother, in the depths of their domestic privacy, that it was just as well he was going a little wrong. "oh, a little wrong!" cried mrs. herbert vindictively. "if all we hear is true it is much more than a little. he is just going to the bad as fast as his legs can carry him--with _that_ captain underwood to help him on; and he richly deserves it, considering how he has behaved to you." "oh, wait a little, mamma," julia said. "i know him better than any one. he will come round again, and then he will be ready to hang himself. and the prodigal will come home, and then----or, perhaps tom herbert will ask me up to town for the end of the season, after all the best is over, as he is sometimes kind enough to do. and i shall carry a little roast veal, just a sort of specimen of the fatted calf, with me to town." thus the young lady kept up her heart and bided her time. mrs. methven bore the remarks of sloebury and answered all its questions with a heavier heart. she could not take any consolation in walter's wrong-doing, neither could she have the relief of allowing that he was to blame. she accounted for the rearrangement of everything, which she had to consent to after taking many measures for removal, by saying that she had changed her mind. "we found the house could not be ready before the end of the season," she said heroically, "and what should i do in london in the height of the summer with nobody there?" she bore a fine front to the world but in reality the poor lady's heart had sunk within her. oddly enough, julia, the wronged, who at heart was full of good nature, was almost her only comforter. julia treated lord erradeen's absence as the most natural thing in the world. "i know what took him away in such a hurry," she said. "it was miss williamson. oh, don't you know about miss williamson? his next neighbour at that lock--something or other, a girl made of money--no, sugar. the next thing we shall hear is that you have a daughter-in-law with red hair. what a good thing that red hair is so fashionable! she is so rich, he was quite ashamed to mention it; that is why he never told you; but walter," she cried, with a laugh, "had no secrets from me." mrs. methven, in dire lack of anything to cling to, caught at miss williamson as at a rock of salvation. if he had fallen in love, did not that account for everything? she could only pray god that it might be true. symington had been bringing in the tea while miss herbert discoursed. when he came back to remove the tea things after she was gone, he "took it upon him," as he said, "to put in his word." "if you will excuse me, my lady," he said (a title which in a sort of poetical justice and amendment of fate symington considered due to my lord's mother), "my lord could not do better than give his attention to miss williamson, who is just the greatest fortune in all the country-side. but, even if it's not that, there is nothing to be out of heart about. if he's taking a bite out of the apples of gomorrah, he'll very soon find the cinders cranshing in his mouth. but whatever he is after, when it comes to be the time to go _up yonder_ there will be an end to all that." "my good symington," said mrs. methven, "do you think it is necessary to excuse my son to me? it would be strange if i did not understand him better than any one." but notwithstanding this noble stand for walter, she got a little consolation both from the thought of miss williamson, and of that mysterious going _up yonder_, which must be a crisis in his life. thus winter ran into summer, and the busy months of the season went over the head of young lord erradeen. it was a very different season from that which he had anticipated. it contained no byronic episode at all. the house of lords never saw its new member, neither did any of those gay haunts of the fashionable world of which he had once dreamed. he went to no balls, or crowded dazzling receptions, or heavy dinners. he did not even present himself at a _levée_. he had indeed fallen out of his rank altogether, that rank which had startled him so, with a kind of awe in the unexpected possession. his only club was that one of indifferent reputation to which underwood had introduced him, and his society, the indifferent company which collected there. he began to be tolerably acquainted with race-courses, great and small, and improved his play both at billiards and whist, so that his guide, philosopher, and friend declared himself ready on all occasions to take odds on erradeen. he spent a great deal of his time in these occupations, and lost a great deal of his money. they were almost the only things that gave him a semblance of an occupation in life. he was due at the club at certain hours to pursue this trade, which, like any other trade, was a support to his mind, and helped to make the time pass. at five-and-twenty one has so much time on hand, that to spend it is a pleasure, like spending money, flinging it to the right hand and the left, getting rid of it: though there is so much to be got out of it that has grown impossible to the old fogeys, no old fogey is ever so glad to throw it away. and thus the days went on. they were full of noise and commotion, and yet, as a matter of fact, they were dullish as they dropped one after another. and sometimes as he came back to his rooms in the blue of the morning, and found as the early sun got up, that sleep was impossible, or on such a moment as a sunday morning, when there was little or nothing "to do," walter's thoughts were not of an agreeable kind. sometimes he would wake from a doze with the beautiful light streaming in at his windows, and the brown london sparrows beginning to twitter, and would jump up in such a restlessness and fierce impatience with himself and everything about him as he could neither repress nor endure. at such moments his life seemed to him intolerable, an insult to reason, a shame to the nature that was made for better things. what was the good of going on with it day after day? the laughter and the noise, who was it that called them the crackling of thorns--a hasty momentary blaze that neither warmed nor lighted? and sometimes, even in the midst of his gaiety, there would suddenly come into his mind a question--was this what was to happen to him if he resisted the will of the dweller on loch houran? psha! he would say to himself, what was happening to him? nothing but his own will and pleasure, the life that most young fellows of his age who were well enough off to indulge in it possessed--the life he would have liked before he became lord erradeen: which was true; and yet it did not always suffice him for an answer. at such times curious gleams of instinct, sudden perceptions as by some light fitfully entering, which made an instantaneous revelation too rapid almost for any profit, and then disappeared again--would glance across walter's soul. on a fine evening in june he was walking with underwood to the club to dine. the streets were cool with the approach of night, the sky all flushed with rose red and every possible modification of heavenly blue, the trees in the squares fluttering out their leaves in the coolness of the evening, and shaking off the dust of day, a sense of possible dew going to fall even in london streets, a softening of sounds in the air. he was going to nothing better than cards, or perhaps, for a caprice, to the theatre, where he had seen the same insane burlesque a dozen times before, no very lively prospect: and was cogitating in his mind whether he should not run off to the continent, as several men were talking of doing, and so escape from underwood and the club, and all the rest of the hackneyed round: which he would have done a dozen times over but for the trouble of it, and his sense of the bore it would be to find something to amuse him under such novel circumstances. as they went along, underwood talking of those experiences which were very fine to the boys in sloebury, but quite flat to walter now--there suddenly appeared to him, standing on the steps of a private hotel, in a light overcoat like a man going to dinner, a middle-aged, rustic-looking individual, with a ruddy, good-humoured countenance, and that air of prosperity and well-being which belongs to the man of money. "i think i have seen that man somewhere before," said walter. underwood looked up, and the eyes of all three met for a moment in mutual recognition. "hallo, captain underwood!" the stranger said. underwood was startled by the salutation; but he stopped, willingly or unwillingly, stopping walter also, whose arm was in his. "mr. williamson! you are an unexpected sight in london," he said. "no, no, not at all," said the good-humoured man, "i am very often in london. i am just going in to my dinner. i wonder if i might make bold, being a countryman and straight from loch houran, to say, though we have never met before, that i am sure this is lord erradeen?" walter replied with a curious sense of amusement and almost pleasure. mr. williamson, the father of the fabulous heiress who had been invented between julia herbert and himself! "i am very glad to make your acquaintance, lord erradeen; you know our lands march, as they say in scotland. are you engaged out to your dinner, gentlemen, may i ask, or are ye free to take pot luck? my daughter katie is with me, and we were thinking--or at least she was thinking--for i am little learned in such matters--of looking in at the theatre to see a small piece of mr. tennyson's that they call the _falcon_, and which they tell me, or rather she tells me, is just most beautiful. come now, be sociable; it was no fault of mine, my lord, that i did not pay my respects to ye when ye were up at loch houran. and katie is very wishful to make your acquaintance. captain underwood knows of old that i am fond of a good dinner. you will come? now that's very friendly. katie, i've brought you an old acquaintance and a new one," he said, ushering them into a large room cloudy with the fading light. the sudden change of destination, the novelty, the amusing associations with this name, suddenly restored walter to a freshness of interest of which the _blasé_ youth on his way to the noisy monotony of the club half an hour before could not have thought himself capable. a young lady rose up from a sofa at the end of the room and came forward, bending her soft brows a little to see who it was. "is it any one i know? for i cannot see them," in simplest tones, with the accent of loch houran, miss williamson said. chapter vii. the room was large with that air of bare and respectable shabbiness which is the right thing in a long-established private hotel--with large pieces of mahogany furniture, and an old-fashioned carpet worn, not bare exactly, but dim, the pattern half-obliterated here and there, which is far more correct and _comme il faut_ than the glaring newness and luxury of modern caravanseries. as mr. williamson, like a true englishman (a scotsman in this particular merely exaggerates the peculiarity), loved the costly all the better for making no show of being costly, it was naturally at one of these grimly expensive places that he was in the habit of staying in london. a large window, occupying almost one entire side of the room, filled it with dim evening light, and a view of roofs and chimneys, against which katie's little figure showed as she came forward asking, "is it any one i know?" it was not a commanding, or even very graceful figure, though round and plump, with the softened curves of youth. when the new-comers advanced to meet her, and she saw behind her father's middle-aged form, the slimmer outlines of a young man, katie made another step forward with an increase of interest. she had expected some contemporaries of papa's, such as he was in the habit of bringing home with him to dinner, and not a personage on her own level. mr. williamson, in his good-humoured cordiality, stepped forward something like a showman, with a new object which he feels will make a sensation. "you will never guess who this is," he said, "so i will not keep ye in suspense, katie. this is our new neighbour at loch houran, lord erradeen. think of me meeting him just by chance on the pavey, as ye may say, of a london street, and us next door to each other, to use a vulgar expression, at home!" "which is the vulgar expression?" said katie. she was very fond of her father, but yet liked people to see that she knew better. she held out her hand frankly to walter, and though she was only a round-about, bread-and-butter little girl with nothing but money, she was far more at her ease than he was. "i am very glad to make your acquaintance, lord erradeen," she said. "we were just wondering whether we should meet you anywhere. we have only been a week in town." "i don't think we should have been likely to meet," said walter with that tone of resentment which had become natural to him, "if i had not been so fortunate as to encounter mr. williamson as he says, on the _pavé_." katie was not pleased by this speech. she thought that walter was rude, and implied that the society which he frequented was too fine for the williamsons, and she also thought that he meant a laugh at her father's phraseology, neither of which offences were at all in the young man's intention. "oh," katie cried, resentful too, "papa and i go to a great many places--unless you mean marlborough house and that sort of thing. oh, captain underwood!" she added next moment in a tone of surprise. the appearance of captain underwood evidently suggested to her ideas not at all in accordance with that of marlborough house. "yes," he said, "miss williamson: you scarcely expected to see me. it is not often that a man is equally intimate with two distinct branches of a family, is it? but i always was a fortunate fellow, and here i am back in your circle again." walter's mind was considerably preoccupied by his own circumstances, and by the novelty of this new meeting; but yet he was quick-witted enough to remark with some amusement the recurrence of the old situation with which he was quite acquainted--the instinctive repugnance of the feminine side everywhere to this companion of his, and the tolerance and even friendliness of the men. katie did all but turn her back upon underwood before his little speech was ended. she said, "will you ring for dinner, papa?" without making the slightest reply to it: and indeed, after another glance from one to the other, retired to the sofa from which she had risen, with a little air of having exhausted this new incident, and indifference to anything that could follow, which piqued walter. had she been a noble person either in fact or in appearance, of an imposing figure and proportions even, it might have seemed less insupportable; but that a little dumpy girl should thus lose all interest in him, classifying him in a moment with his companion, was beyond lord erradeen's patience. he felt bitterly ashamed of underwood, and eager even, in his anger at this presumptuous young woman's hasty judgment, to explain how it was that he was in underwood's company. but as he stood biting his lip in the half-lighted room, he could not but remember how very difficult it would be to explain it. why was he in underwood's company? because he could get admittance to none better. marlborough house! he felt himself grow red all over, with a burning shame, and anger against fate. and when he found himself seated by katie's side at the lighted table, and subject to the questions with which it was natural to begin conversation, his embarrassment was still greater. she asked him had he been here and there. that great ball at the french embassy that everybody was talking about--of course he had been one of the guests? and at the duke's--katie did not consider it necessary to particularise what duke, confident that no christian, connected ever so distantly with loch houran, could have any doubt on the subject. was the decoration of the new dining-room so magnificent as people said? walter's blank countenance, his brief replies, the suppressed reluctance with which he said anything at all, had the strangest effect upon katie. after a while she glanced at captain underwood, who was talking with much volubility to her father, and with a very small, almost imperceptible shrug of her little shoulders, turned away and addressed herself to her dinner. this from a little girl who was nobody, who was not even very pretty, who betrayed her plebeian origin in every line of her plump form and fresh little commonplace face, was more than walter could bear. "you must think me dreadfully ignorant of the events of society," he said, "but the fact is i have not been going out at all. it is not very long, you are aware, since i came into the property, and--there have been a great many things to do." "i have always heard," said katie, daintily consuming a delicate _entrée_, with her eyes upon her plate as if that was her sole interest, "that the erradeen estates were all in such order that there was never anything for the heir to do." "you speak," said walter, "as if they changed hands every year." "oh, not that exactly; but i remember two; and i might have remembered others, for we have only been at loch houran since papa got so rich." "what a pleasant way of remembering dates!" "do you think so, lord erradeen? now i should think that to have been rich always, and your father before you, and never to have known any difference, would be so much more pleasant." "there may perhaps be something to be said on both sides," said walter; "but i am no judge--for the news of my elevation, such as it is, came to me very suddenly, too suddenly to be agreeable, without any warning." katie reconsidered her decision in the matter of lord erradeen; perhaps though he knew nobody, he might not be quite unworthy cultivation, and besides, she had finished her _entrée_. she said, "didn't you know?" turning to him again her once-averted eyes. "i had not the faintest idea; it came upon me like a thunderbolt," he said. "you perceive that you must treat me with a little indulgence in respect to dukes, &c.--even if i had any taste for society, which i haven't," he added, with a touch of bitterness in his tone. "oh," said katie, looking at him much more kindly; then she bent towards him with quite unexpected familiarity, and said, lowering her voice, but in the most distinct whisper, "and where then did you pick up that odious man?" walter could not but laugh as he looked across the table at the unconscious object of this attack. "i observe that ladies never like him," he said; "at home it is the same." "oh, i should think so," cried katie, "everybody thought it was such a pity that lord erradeen took him up--and then to see him with you! oona forrester would be very sorry," katie added after a pause. "miss forrester!" walter felt himself colour high with pleasure at the sound of this name, then feeling this a sort of self-betrayal, coloured yet more. "you know her?" katie turned round upon him with a mixture of amusement and disdain. "know her! is there any one on the loch, or near it, that doesn't know her?" she said. "i beg your pardon," cried walter. "i forgot for the moment." then he too retired within himself for so long a time that it was katie's turn to be affronted. he devoted himself to his dinner too, but he did not eat. at last "why should she be sorry?" he asked curtly as if there had been no pause. "how can i tell you now while he sits there?" said katie, lowering her voice; "some other time perhaps--most likely you will call in the day-time, in the morning, now that we have made your acquaintance." "if you will permit me," walter said. "oh yes, we will permit you. papa has always wanted to know you, and so have i since--if you are allowed to come: but perhaps you will not be allowed to come, lord erradeen." "will not be _allowed_? what does that mean? and since when, may i ask, have you been so kind as to want to know me? i wish i had been aware." "since----well, of course, since you were lord erradeen," said the girl, "we did not know of you before: and people like us who have nothing but money are always very fond of knowing a lord--everybody says so at least. and it is true, in a way. papa likes it very much indeed. he likes to say my friend, the earl of ----, or my friend, the duke of ----. he knows a great many lords, though perhaps you would not think it. he is very popular with fine people. they say he is not at all vulgar considering, and never takes anything upon him. oh, yes, i know it all very well. i am a new person in the other way--i believe it is far more what you call snobbish--but i can't bear the fine people. of course they are very nice to me; but i always remember that they think i am not vulgar considering, and that i never pretend to be better than i am." there was something in this address spoken with a little heat, which touched walter's sense of humour, a faculty which in his better moods made his own position, with all its incongruities, ruefully amusing to him. "i wonder," he said, "if i pretend to be better than i am? but then i should require in the first place to know what i am more distinctly than i do. now you, on that important point, have, i presume, no doubt or difficulty?----" "not the least," she said, interrupting him. "the daughter of a rich glasgow man who is nobody--that is what i am--everybody knows; but you, my lord, you are a noble person of one of the oldest families, with the best blood in your veins, with----" she had been eyeing him somewhat antagonistically, but here she broke off, and fell a laughing. "i don't believe you care a bit about it," she said. "are you going with us to the theatre to see the _falcon_, lord erradeen?" "what is the _falcon_?" he said. "you have not seen it nor heard of it? it is mr. tennyson's," said katie with a little awe. "how is it possible you have not heard? don't you know that lovely story? it is a poor gentleman who has nothing but a falcon, and the lady he loves comes to see him. she is a widow (that takes away the interest a little, but it is beautiful all the same) with a sick child. when he sees her coming he has to prepare an entertainment for her, and there is nothing but his falcon, so he sacrifices it, though it breaks his heart. and oh, to see the terrible stage bird that is brought in, as if that could be his grand hawk! you feel so angry, you are forced to laugh till you cry again. that kind of story should never be brought to the literal, do you think it should?" "and what happens?" said walter, young enough to be interested, though not sufficiently well-read to know. "oh, you might guess. she had come to ask him for his falcon to save her child. what could it be else? it is just the contrariety of things." "you cannot know very much, miss williamson, of the contrariety of things." "oh, do you think so? why shouldn't i? i think i am precisely the person to do so. it seems to me in my experience," she added, fixing a look upon him which seemed to walter's conscience to mean a great deal more than it was possible katie could mean, "that almost everything goes wrong." "that is a most melancholy view to take." "but so is everything melancholy," said the girl. her little simple physiognomy, her rosy cheeks and blue eyes, the somewhat blunted profile (for katie had no features, as she was aware) and altogether commonplace air of the little person who produced these wonderful sentiments amused walter beyond measure. he laughed perhaps more than was strictly decorous, and drew the attention of mr. williamson, who, absorbed in his talk with underwood, had almost forgotten his more important guest. "what is the joke?" he said. "i am glad to see you are keeping his lordship amused, katie, for the captain and me we have got upon other subjects concerning the poor gentleman, your predecessor, lord erradeen. poor fellow! that was a very sad business: not that i would say there was much to be regretted before the present bearer of the title," the rich man added with a laugh; "but at your age you could well have waited a little, and the late lord was a very nice fellow till he fell into that melancholy way." "i told you everything was melancholy," said katie in an undertone. "and i," said the young man in the same suppressed voice, "shall i too fall into a melancholy way?" he laughed as he said so, but it was not a laugh of pleasure. could he do nothing without having this family mystery--family absurdity--thrust into his face? "if you want your cigar, papa--" said katie getting up, "and you can't live without that, any of you gentlemen--i had better go. let laws and learning, wit and wisdom die, so long as you have your cigars. but the carriage is ordered at a quarter to ten, and lord erradeen is coming, he says. in any case _you_ must come, papa, you know. i can't go without you," she said, with a little imperative air. it was enough to make any one laugh to see the grand air of superiority which this little person took upon her, and her father greeted her exit with a loud laugh of enjoyment and admiration. "she is mistress and more, as we say in scotland," he said, "and there must be no trifling where my katie is concerned. we will have to keep to the minute. so you are coming with us, lord erradeen? what will you do, underwood? i'm doubting if what they call the poetical dramaw will be much in your way." to which underwood replied with some embarrassment that it certainly was not at all in his way. he liked nelly somebody in a burlesque, and he was always fond of a good ballet, but as for shakespeare and that sort of thing, he owned it was above him. good mr. williamson disapproved of ballets, utterly, and administered a rebuke on the spot. "i hope you are not leading lord erradeen into the like of that. it is very bad for a young man to lose respect for women, and how you can keep any after those exhibitions is beyond me. well, i will not say i take a great interest, like katie, in poetry and all that. i like a good laugh. so long as it is funny i am like a bairn, i delight in a play: but i am not so sure that i can give my mind to it when it's serious. lord! we've enough of seriousness in real life. and as for your bare-faced love-making before thousands of people, i just can't endure it. you will think me a prejudiced old fogey, lord erradeen. it makes me blush," said the elderly critic, going off into a laugh; but blush he did, through all the honest red upon his natural cheeks, notwithstanding his laugh, and his claret, and his cigar. was he a world behind his younger companion who glanced at him with a sensation of mingled shame, contempt, and respect, or was he a world above him? walter was so confused in the new atmosphere he had suddenly begun to breathe, that he could not tell. but it was altogether new at all events, and novelty is something in the monotony of life. "i'll see you at the club after," said underwood, as they loitered waiting for miss williamson at the hotel door. but walter made no reply. now lord erradeen, though he had been perverse all his life, and had chosen the evil and rejected the good in many incomprehensible ways, was not--or this history would never have been written--without that finer fibre in him which responds to everything that is true and noble. how strange this jumble is in that confusion of good and evil which we call the mind of man! how often may we see the record of a generous action bring tears to the eyes of one whose acts are all selfish, and whose heart is callous to sufferings of which he is the cause: and hear him with noble fervour applaud the self-sacrifice of the man, who in that language by which it is the pleasure of the nineteenth century to make heroism just half-ridiculous, and to save itself from the highflown, "never funked and never lied; i guess he didn't know how:" and how he will be touched to the heart by the purity of a romantic love, he who for himself feeds on the garbage--and all this without any conscious insincerity, the best part of him more true and real all the time than the worst! walter, to whom his own domestic surroundings had been so irksome, felt a certain wholesome novelty of pleasure when he set out between the father and daughter to see what mr. williamson called the "poetical dramaw," a thing hitherto much out of the young man's way. he had been of late in all kinds of unsavoury places, and had done his best to debase his imagination with the burlesques; but yet he had not been able to obliterate his own capacity for better things. and when he stood looking over the head of katie williamson, and saw the lady of the poet's tale come into the poor house of her chivalrous lover, the shock with which the better nature in him came uppermost, gave him a pang in the pleasure and the wonder of it. this was not the sort of heroine to whom he had accustomed himself: but the old italian romancer, the noble english poet, and the fine passion and high perception of the actors, who could understand and interpret both, were not in vain for our prodigal. when that lady paused in the humble doorway clothed in high reverence and poetry, not to speak of the modest splendour of her mature beauty and noble venetian dress, he felt himself blush, like good mr. williamson, to remember all the less lovely images he had seen. he could not applaud; it would have been a profanation. he was still pure enough in the midst of uncleanness, and high enough though familiar with baseness, to be transported for the moment out of himself. the other two formed a somewhat comical counterbalance to walter's emotion; not that they were by any means unfeeling spectators. mr. williamson's interest in the story was unfeigned. as mrs. kendal poured forth that heartrending plea of a mother for her child, the good man accompanied her words by strange muffled sounds which were quite beyond his control; and which called forth looks of alarm from katie, who was his natural guardian, and who herself maintained a dignified propriety as having witnessed this moving scene before. but the running commentary _sotto voce_, which he kept up throughout, might have furnished an amusing secondary comedy to any impartial bystander. "bless us all!" said mr. williamson, "two useless servants doing nothing, and not a morsel in the house! how do ye make that out!" "lordsake! has he killed the hawk? but that's just manslaughter: and a tough morsel i would say, for the lady, when all's done." "what is it she's wanting--just the falcon he's killed for her. tchick! tchick! now i call that an awful pity, katie. poor lady! and poor fellow! and he has to refuse her! well, he should not have been so hasty. after all she did not eat a morsel of it; and what ailed that silly old woman there to toss up a bit omelette or something, to save the bird--and they're so clever at omelettes abroad," the good man said, with true regret. "oh, papa, how material you are! don't you know it's always like that in life?" cried katie. "i know nothing of the kind," said her father, indignantly. "what is the use of being a poet, as you call it, if ye cannot find some other way and not break their hearts? poor lad! now that's a thing i can't understand--a woman like that come pleading to you, and you have to refuse her!" katie looked round upon her father with her little air of oracle. "don't you see, papa, that's the story! it's to wring our hearts he wrote it." mr. williamson paid no attention to this. he went on softly with his "tchick! tchick!" and when all was over dried his eyes furtively and got up with haste, almost impatience, drawing a long breath. "it's just all nonsense," he said. "i'll not be brought here again to be made unhappy. so she's to get _him_ instead of the bird--but, bless me! what good will that do her? _that_ will never save her bairn." "it will satisfy the public, more or less," said a voice behind. walter had been aware that some one else had come into the box, who stood smiling, listening to the conversation, and now bent forward to applaud as if aware that his applause meant something. katie turned half round, with a little nod and smile. "did you hear papa?" she said. "oh, tell mr. tennyson! he is quite unhappy about it. are you unhappy too, lord erradeen? for you don't applaud, or say a word." "applaud!" walter said. "i feel that it would be taking a liberty. applaud what? that beautiful lady who is so much above me, or the great poet who is above all? i should like to go away and draw breath, and let myself down----" "toots!" said mr. williamson, "it is just all nonsense. he should not have been so hasty. and now i would just like to know," he added, with an air of defiance, "what happened to that bairn: to want a falcon and get a stepfather! that was an ill way to cure him. hoots! it's all nonsense. put on your cloak, katie, and let us get away." "but i like you, lord erradeen, for what you say," cried katie. "it was too beautiful to applaud. oh, tell mrs. kendal! she looked like a picture. i should like to make her a curtsey, not clap my hands as you do." "you will bid me tell boccaccio next?" said the new-comer. "these are fine sentiments; but the actors would find it somewhat chilly if they had no applause. they would think nobody cared." "lord innishouran," said katie, "papa has forgotten his manners. he ought to have introduced to you lord erradeen." walter was as much startled as if he had been the veriest cockney whose bosom has ever been fluttered by introduction to a lord. he looked at the first man of his rank (barring those damaged ones at underwoods club) whom he had met, with the strangest sensation. lord innishouran was the son of the duke--the great potentate of those northern regions. he was a man who might make walter's career very easy to him, or, alas! rather might have made it, had he known him on his first coming to london. the sense of all that might be involved in knowing him, made the young man giddy as he stood opposite to his new acquaintance. lord innishouran was not of walter's age. the duke was the patriarch of the highlands, and lived like a man who never meant to die. this gentleman, who at forty-five was still only his father's heir, had taken to the arts by way of making an independent position for himself. he was a _dilettante_ in the best sense of the word, delighting in everything that was beautiful. walter's enthusiasm had been the best possible introduction for him; and what a change there seemed in the young man's world and all his prospects as he walked home after taking leave of the williamsons with innishouran's, not underwood's, arm within his own! "i cannot understand how it is that we have not met before. it would have been my part to seek you out if i had known you were in town," his new friend said. "i hope now you will let me introduce you to my wife. the duke has left town--he never stays a moment longer than he can help. and everything is coming to an end. still i am most happy to have made your acquaintance. you knew the williamsons, i suppose, before? they are excellent people--not the least vulgarity about them, because there's no pretension. and katie is a clever girl, not without ambition. she is quite an heiress, i suppose you know----" "i don't know--any one, or anything," walter said. "come, that is going too far," said the other, with a laugh. "i presume you don't care for society. that is a young man's notion; but society is not so bad a thing. it never answers to withdraw from it altogether. yes, katie is an heiress. she is to have all the loch houran property, i believe, besides a good deal of money." "i thought," said walter, "there were several sons." "one--one only; and he has the business, with the addition also of a good deal of money. money is a wonderful quality--it stands instead of a great many other things to our friends there. i am fond of intellect myself, but it must be allowed that the most cultivated mind would not do for any man what his money does at once for that good neighbour of ours--who is a most excellent fellow all the same." "i have met him for the first time to-day," said walter, "in the most accidental way." "ah! i thought you had known them; but it is true what i say. i look upon money with a certain awe. it is inscrutable. the most perfect of artists--you and i when we most look up to them, do also just a little look down upon them! no, perhaps that is too strong. at all events, they are there on sufferance. they are not of us, and they know it. whether they care for us too much, or whether they don't care at all, there is still that uneasy consciousness. but with this good-natured millionnaire, nothing of the sort. he has no such feeling." "perhaps because his feelings are not so keen. miss williamson has just been telling me what you say--that her family are considered not vulgar because they never pretend to be better than they are." "ah!" cried lord innishouran, startled, "did katie divine that? she is cleverer than i thought--and a very fine fortune, and an ambitious little person. i hope her money will go to consolidate some property at home, and not fall into a stranger's hands. i am all for the highlands, you see, erradeen." "and i know so little about them," said walter. but nevertheless he knew very well what was meant, and there was a curious sensation in his mind which he could not describe to himself, as if some perturbation, whether outside or in he could not tell which, was calmed. he had a great deal of talk with his new friend as they threaded the noisy little circles of the streets, among the shouting link-boys and crowds of carriages, then reached the calm and darkness of the thoroughfares beyond. lord innishouran talked well, and his talk was of a kind so different from that of underwood's noisy coterie, that the charm of the unusual, added to so many other novel sensations, made a great impression upon walter's mind, always sensitive and open to a new influence. he felt a hot flush of shame come over him when walking thus through the purity of the night, and in the society of a man who talked about great names and things, he remembered the noise of the club, the heated air full of smoke and inanities, the jargon of the race-course and the stables. these things filled him with disgust, for the moment at least, just as the duets had given him a sense of disgust and impatience at sloebury. his new friend only left him at the door of his rooms, which happened to lie in lord innishouran's way, and bade him good night, promising to call on him in the morning. walter had not been in his rooms so early for many a day. he hesitated whether or not to go out again, for he had not any pleasure in his own society; but pride came to the rescue, and he blushed at the thought of darting out like a truant schoolboy, as soon as the better influence was withdrawn. pride prevented him from thus running away from himself. he took a book out of the shelves, which he had not done for so long. but soon the book dropped aside, and he began to review the strange circumstances of the evening. in a moment, as it seemed, his horizon had changed. hitherto, except in so far as money was concerned, he had derived no advantage from his new rank. now everything seemed opening before him. he could not be unmoved in this moment of transition. perhaps the life which was called fast had never contained any real temptation to walter. it had come in and invaded the indolence of his mind and filled the vacant house of his soul, swept and garnished but unoccupied, according to the powerful simile of scripture; but there was no tug at his senses now urging him to go back to it. and then he thought, with a certain elation, of lord innishouran, and pleasurably of the williamsons. katie, was that her name? he could not but laugh to himself at the sudden realisation of the visionary miss williamson after all that had been said. what would julia herbert say? but julia herbert had become dim to lord erradeen as if she had been a dozen years away. chapter viii. next morning lord innishouran fulfilled his promise of calling, and made his appearance almost before walter, following the disorderly usages of the society into which he had fallen, was ready to receive him. the middle-aged eldest son was a man of exact virtue, rising early, keeping punctual hours, and in every way conducting himself as became one whose position made him an example to the rest of the world. and he was one who had a deep sense of the duties of his position. it seemed to him that this young man was in a bad way. "he is at a crisis, evidently at a crisis," he had said to his wife, "and a good influence may be everything for him." "he should marry katie williamson," said lady innishouran. "the erradeens may be odd, as you say, but they always manage to do well for themselves." "not always, not always, my dear; the property seems to grow, but the men come to little," innishouran said, shaking his head; and he left his house with the full intention of becoming a "good influence" to walter. he proposed at once to put him up at the most irreproachable and distinguished of clubs, and asked him to dinner on the spot. "i am afraid there is nobody of consequence left whom i can ask to meet you," he said; "but in any case lady innishouran is anxious to make your acquaintance." the innishourans belonged to the ranks of those very great people for whom the season ends much earlier than for others. the duke had gone home early in june, and his son held that in the end of that month there was nobody of consequence left, except, he said to himself, cabinet ministers, who were perhaps something too much for a young highland lord. "and you must take your seat," he said, "that is a matter of duty. if we had met earlier the duke would of course have been one of your supporters. i am sure my father will regret it very much. but, however, it can't be helped, and i, you know, don't occupy the necessary position; but there will be no difficulty in that respect." this was very different from walter's fine misanthropic byronic idea of solitary grandeur, and defiance of the staring ranks of superannuated peers. "i am no politician," he said awkwardly. "i had scarcely thought it was worth the while." "it is always worth while to assume the privileges of your position," lord innishouran said. walter was taken possession of altogether by this good influence. and forthwith his path lay in a course of golden days. it was characteristic of walter that it gave him no trouble to break his old ties, perhaps because of the fact that he had not, so to speak, made them by any exercise of his will, but simply drifted into them by the exertions of those who meant to benefit by his weakness. he did not, perhaps, put this into words, but yet felt it with a sort of interior conviction which was deeper than all those superficial shades of sentiment which bind some men to the companions of the day, even when they care little for them. perhaps it was selfishness, perhaps strength--it is difficult sometimes to discriminate. thus captain underwood, after his interrupted, but latterly almost unbroken, sway over the young man's time and habits, found himself suddenly left in the lurch, and quite powerless over his pupil. the captain tried in the first place the easy tone of use and wont. "come, erradeen," he said, "we shall be late. you forget the engagement you made with so-and-so, and so-and-so--" "i think it was you who made the engagement," walter said. "i am not going to keep it anyhow. i am going with innishouran to----" "with lord innishouran!" the other cried, overawed. "so then," he said, with such a sneer as is often effectual with the young and generous, "now that you have got in with the big-wigs you mean to throw your old friends over." "i don't know much about old friends," walter said. "i don't call the fellows at your club old friends." and then captain underwood made one of those mistakes which persons of inferior breeding are so apt to make. "you were glad enough to have them when you had nobody else to take any notice of you," he said. this was after two or three attempts to recover his old standing, and when he began to feel a certain exasperation. walter, though he was irritable by nature, had so much the best of the argument at this moment that he kept his temper. "i don't think," he said, "that i ever was very glad. i allowed myself to be drawn into it _faute de mieux_." "and now i suppose you think you can throw _me_ off too, like an old glove, in your infernal scotch, cold-blooded way!" cried the captain. "am i scotch?" said lord erradeen. it was not much wonder, perhaps, if underwood lost his temper. but another time he took matters more wisely. he would not give up in a fit of temper the hold he thought he had obtained upon the young man. he was very unwilling, as may be supposed, to resign his _protégé_ and victim, and made spasmodic attempts to regain his "influence." at all times this "influence" had been held precariously, and had it been a virtuous one like that of lord innishouran, walter's mentor and guide might have called forth the sympathy of the spectator; for he had many things to bear from the young man's quick temper, and the constantly recurring dissatisfaction with himself and all things around which made him so difficult to deal with. underwood, however, after his first disappointment, did not despair. the changeable young fellow, upon whom no one could calculate, whose mind was so uncertain, who would shoot off at a tangent in the most unexpected way, might as suddenly, as he had abandoned, turn to him again. miss williamson received her new acquaintance very graciously when he went to see her next day. she met him with all the ease of an old acquaintance. "papa has been so busy," she said, "putting john into the business, that we have only got here at the very end of the season. yes, it is a nuisance; but think how many people there are much better than i, that never come at all. oona forrester for instance. you think perhaps she is too good even to wish to come? not at all; there never was a girl so good as that. besides, i don't think it would be good. a girl ought to see the world as much as a boy. when you don't know the world, it makes you uninteresting--afterwards; you don't know how to talk to people. not oona, you know. i don't think there is any want of interest about her; but most people. well, did you like lord innishouran? he is very kind, and fond of exerting a good influence. i felt that he was the very person for you." "you think then that i stand in need of a good influence?" walter said. "yes, after captain underwood," said katie calmly. "i think it was very lucky that you met papa, and that lord innishouran was at the theatre and came into our box. perhaps you will look back to it and think--if you had not happened to come here, what people call accidentally, as you passed----" "i might go a step further," said walter, "and say if i had not happened to be with captain underwood, who knew your father, i should never have known what good fortune was standing upon these steps, and never have made the acquaintance of miss williamson." "you are making fun of me," said katie. "i do not mind in the very least. but still it is just as well, perhaps, that you made the acquaintance of miss williamson. what were you going to do with yourself? nothing so good i am sure as seeing the _falcon_, and making friends with lord innishouran, who can be of a great deal of use to you. _we_ cannot do much for you, of course. all sorts of people ask us, but still you know we are not of your class. we are only not vulgar, because--i told you last night." walter laughed with guilty amusement, remembering how lord innishouran had justified katie's estimate of the world's opinion. "i do not understand," he said, "how any one can think of you and vulgarity in the same day." "well," said katie, calmly, "that is my own opinion. but still between me and oona forrester there is a great difference. i don't deceive myself about that. and why is it? i am--oh, some hundred times more rich. i can do almost whatever i like; that is to say, i can turn papa, as people say, round my little finger (that is rather vulgar, by the way). i come up here, i go abroad, i meet all kinds of interesting people: and yet i am not like oona when all is said. now how is that? it does not seem quite fair." she looked at him with an honest pair of blue eyes out of a prepossessing, sensible little face, as she asked this question with all the gravity of a philosophical investigator. notwithstanding a little figure which threatened in after life to be dumpy, and a profile of which the lines were by no means distinctly drawn, katie williamson at twenty had enough of the _beauté du diable_ to make her rather an attractive little person. but as walter looked at her, he too seemed to see a vision of the other with whom she compared herself. he always thought of oona as she had stood watching his boat pushed off; his mind at the time had been too hurried and eager to remark her look; but that deeper faculty which garners up a face, a look, an act, which we do not seem to notice at the moment, and makes them afterwards more real and present to us than things that are under our eyes, had taken a picture of oona as she stood in that profoundest deep of emotion, the most poignant moment of her life, with something of the wondering pang in her eyes which was in her heart. how many times since then had he seen her, though he had not seen her at the time! looking at her in his mind's eye, he forgot altogether the question katie was putting to him, and the necessity of protesting politely that she did herself wrong. indeed he was not roused to this till katie herself, after pausing for reply, said with a little sharpness, "you don't make me any answer, lord erradeen: you ought to tell me i have no reason to be so humble-minded, but that i am as good as oona. that is what any polite person would say." thus challenged, walter started with a certain sheepishness, and hastened to inform her, stammering, that comparisons were odious, but that there was nobody who might not be flattered, who ought not to be pleased, who, in short, would not be happy to think themselves on the same level---- katie broke through his embarrassed explanations with a laugh. "you quite agree with me," she said, "and that is what i like you for. i am not a girl who wants compliments. i am an inquirer. and things are so funny in this world: everything about ourselves is so droll--" "what is that you are saying about being droll, katie?" said mr. williamson, coming in. "you do say very daft-like things, my dear, if that is what you mean. and how are you this morning, my lord erradeen? none the worse of that _falcon_? bless me, that falcon--that just set your teeth on edge the very sight of it. i am glad it was not served up to me. but you will stay to your lunch? we are just going to lunch, katie and i; and we are both very fond of company. now just stay. i will take it very kind if you have nothing better to do; and afterwards we'll stroll together to the caledonian club, which you ought to be a member of, lord erradeen, for auld scotland's sake. i will put you up if that is agreeable to you. come, katie, show lord erradeen the way. i have been knocking about all the morning, and i am bound to say i'm very ready for my lunch." and in this way affairs went on. unaccustomed as he was to consider what any change of direction might lead to, it suited walter very well to have a place where he was always welcome within his reach, and to be urged to stay to lunch, to go to the opera and the theatre, to be the audience for katie's philosophies, which amused him. the atmosphere was new, and if not, perhaps, exciting, was fresh and full of variety. he had never in his life encountered anything like the easy wealthiness and homeliness, the power to do whatever they pleased, yet extreme simplicity in doing it, which characterised both father and daughter. and there was so much movement and energy about them that he was kept amused. katie's perfectly just impression of the opinion of the world had no embittering effect upon that little philosopher, whose consciousness of well-being, and of the many ways in which she was better off than her neighbours, gave her a composure and good humour which were delightful. by-and-by, though walter himself was not aware of this, he began to receive invitations to entertainments at which the williamsons were to be present, with that understanding on the part of society which is so instinctive, and which, though sometimes without foundation, rarely fails to realise its purpose. he was not indeed at all dependent upon them for his society. lord innishouran had opened the way, which once open, is so very easy for a young peer, whose antecedents, even if doubtful, have never compelled general disapproval. he who had known nobody, became in a month's time capable of understanding all the allusions, and entering into that curious society-talk which the most brilliant intellects out of it are confused by, and the most shallow within gain a certain appearance of intelligence from. after a little awkwardness at the beginning, easily explained by the benevolent theory that he had only just come to town, and knew nobody, he had speedily picked up the threads of the new existence, and got himself into its routine. to a new mind there is so much that is attractive in it--a specious air of knowing, of living, of greater experience, and more universal interests is diffused over it. and how indeed should it be possible not to know more in the midst of that constant multiplicity of events, and in sight and hearing of those that pull the strings and move the puppets everywhere? there is something in brushing shoulders with a minister of state that widens the apprehension; and even the lightest little _attaché_ gives a feeling that it is cosmopolitan to the circle in which he laughs and denies any knowledge of european secrets. probably the denial is quite true, but nobody believes it, and the young lady with whom he has flirted knows a little more of the world in consequence--that is, of the world as it is understood in those regions which claim that name for themselves. this tone walter acquired so easily that it surprised himself. he did it better than many to the manner born, for to be sure there was to him a novelty in it, which made it feel real, and kept him amused and pleased with himself. he took his seat in the house of lords, not in the byronic way, and thought a great deal more of the house of lords ever after. it seemed to him an important factor in european affairs, and the most august assembly in the world. no--that term perhaps is sacred to the house of commons, or rather was sacred to the house of commons, at the time when there were no other popular chambers of legislators to contest the dignity. but a hereditary legislator may still be allowed to think with awe of that bulwark of the constitution in which he has a share. lord erradeen became one of the immediate circle of the innishourans, where all "the best people" were to be met. he became acquainted with great dignitaries both of church and state. he talked to ambassadors--flirted--but no, he did not flirt very much. it was understood that he was to be asked with the williamsons by all the people who knew them; and even among those who were a little above miss katie's range, it was known that there was an heiress of fabulous wealth, whose possessions would sensibly enlarge those of lord erradeen, and with whom it was an understood thing--so that flirtation with him was gently discouraged by the authorities. and he himself did not perhaps find that amusement necessary; for everything was new to him--his own importance, which had never up to this time been properly acknowledged, and still more the importance of others with whom it was a wonder to the young man to feel himself associating. the underwood crew had always secretly angered him, as undeniably inferior to the society from which he felt himself to be shut out. he had been disgusted by their flattery, yet offended by their familiarity, even when in appearance _bon camarade_. and the sense of internal satisfaction now in having attained unmistakably to "the best people" was very delightful to him, and the air of good society a continual pleasure. probably that satisfaction, too, might fail by and by, and the perennial sameness of humanity make itself apparent. but this did not occur within the first season, which indeed had begun to wane of its early glories as a season, the duke being gone, and other princes, high and mighty, before walter appeared in it at all. there was, however, a great deal to be done still in the remnant of june and the early part of july: the heat, the culmination of all things, the sense that these joys will presently be over, and another season, which, in its way, is like another lifetime, departed into the past--producing a kind of whirl and intoxicating impulse. people met three or four times a day in the quickening of all the social wheels before they stopped altogether--in the park in the morning, at luncheon parties, afternoon receptions, dinners--two or three times in the evening--town growing more and more like the "village," which it is sometimes jocularly called. through all this walter spent a great deal of his time with katie williamson. society flattered the probable match. he had to give her his arm to dinner, to dance with her, to talk to her, to get her shawl and call her carriage; her father, in his large good-humoured way, accepting with much placidity a sort of superior footman in lord erradeen. "you are younger than i am," he would say occasionally, with a laugh. he, too, began to take it for granted. it could not be said that it was lord erradeen's fault. he indeed gave in to it with a readiness which was unnecessary, by those continual visits at the hotel, luncheons, dinners, attendances at theatre and opera, which certainly originated in his own will and pleasure. but all that was so simple and natural. he had a sincere liking for katie. she was a refuge to him from the other society which he had thrown over. why should he refrain from visiting his country neighbours? there seemed nothing in the world against it, but everything in its favour. they asked him, to be sure, or he would not have gone. mr. williamson said--"we'll see you some time to-morrow," when they parted; and even katie began to add--"we are going to the so-and-so's; are you to be there?" nothing could be more natural, more easy. and yet a girl who had been properly on her guard, and a young man particular not to have it said that he had "behaved ill" to a lady, would have taken more care. had katie had a mother, perhaps it would not have been; but even in that case, why not? walter was perfectly eligible. supposing even that there had been a sowing of wild oats, that had not been done with any defiance of the world, and it was now over; and the erradeens were already a great family, standing in no need of katie's fortune to bolster them up. the mother, had she been living, would have had little reason to interfere. it was all perfectly natural, suitable in every way, such a marriage indeed as might have justified the proverb, and been "made in heaven." it would be scarcely correct to say, as is sometimes said, that the last to know of this foregone conclusion, were the parties chiefly concerned. it might indeed be true in respect to walter, but not to the other principal actor, who indeed was perfectly justified in her impression that he was a conscious agent throughout, and intended everything he was supposed to intend. katie, for her part, was not unaware of the progress of events upon which all the world had made up its mind. she expected nothing less than to be called upon to decide, and that without any great delay--perhaps before she left town, perhaps shortly after her return home--whether or not she would be lady erradeen. she did not think of the coronet upon her handkerchief, as julia herbert had done, but of many things which were of more importance. she frankly avowed to herself that she liked lord erradeen; as to being in love with him, that was perhaps a different matter. she was much experienced in the world (or thought herself so) though she was so young; having had no mother, and feeling herself the natural guide of her other less enlightened parent. and she was very fond of her father. she could "turn him round her little finger." wherever she wished to go he went; whatever she wished to do, he was ready to carry out her wishes. she was not at all sure that with a husband she would have half so much of her own way. and katie liked her own way. she could not fancy herself blindly, foolishly in love as people were in books; but she liked lord erradeen. so far as that went it was all simple enough; but on the other hand, there were mysteries about the family, and katie scorned and hated mysteries. suppose he should ask her to believe in the warlock lord? katie knew what would follow; she would laugh in his face, however serious he might be. to her it would be impossible to believe in any such supernatural and antiquated nonsense. she felt that she would scorn even the man who was her husband did he give faith to such fables. she would not listen to any evidence on the subject. sometimes words had dropped from him which sounded like a belief in the possibility of such influences. to think that she, katie, should have to defer to superstition, to be respectful, perhaps, of absurdity such as this! _that_ she would never do. but otherwise she allowed in her sensible, much-reasoning, composed little mind, that there was very little to object to in lord erradeen. walter himself was not half so ready to realise the position. he liked katie, and had not been much accustomed to deny himself what he liked even in his days of poverty. he did not see now why he should not take the good with which the gods provided him in the shape of a girl's society, any more than in any other way. he was a little startled when he perceived by some casual look or word that he was understood by the world in general to be katie's lover. it amused him at first: but he had so just an opinion of katie that he was very sure she had no disposition to "catch" him, such as he had not doubted julia herbert to have. he might be vain, but not beyond reason. indeed it was not any stimulus to vanity to be an object of pursuit to julia herbert. it was apparent enough what it would be to her to marry lord erradeen, whereas it was equally apparent that to marry anybody would be no object, unless she loved him, to katie. and katie, walter was sure, betrayed no tokens of love. but there were many things involved that did not meet the common eye. since he had floated into this new form of "influence," since he had known the girl whom it would be so excellent for the erradeen property that he should marry, a halcyon period had begun for walter. the angry sea of his own being, so often before lashed into angry waves and convulsions, had calmed down. things had gone well with him: he had come into the society of his peers; he had assumed the privileges of the rank which up to this time had been nothing but a burden and contrariety. the change was ineffable, not to be described; nothing disturbed him from outside, but, far more wonderful, nothing irritated him within. he felt tranquil, he felt _good_: he had no inclination to be angry; he was not swayed with movements of irritation and disgust. the superiority of his society was perhaps not sufficient to account for this, for he began to see the little ridicules of society after a month's experience of it. no, it was himself that was changed; his disturbances were calmed; he and his fate were no longer on contrary sides. it seemed to the young man that the change all about and around him was something miraculous. he seemed to stand on a calm eminence and look back upon the angry waters which he had escaped with a shiver at the dangers past, and a sense of relief which was indescribable. if he could get katie to marry him that calm perhaps might become permanent. there would be no guilt in doing this, there would be no wrong to any one. and then he thought of oona on the beach, looking after his boat. what was she thinking then, he wondered? did she ever think of him now? did she remember him at all? had she not rather dismissed that little episode from her mind like a dream? he sighed as he thought of her, and wondered, with wistful half-inquiries; but, after all, there was no ground for inquiries, and no doubt she had forgotten him long ago. other questions altogether came into his mind with the thought of katie williamson. if he married her would not all the elements of evil which he had felt to be so strong, which had risen into such force, and against which he had been unable to contend--would they not all be lulled for ever? it would be no yielding to the power that had somehow, he no longer reasoned how, got him in its clutches: but it would be a compromise. he had not been bidden to seek this wealthy bride, but in his heart he felt that this way peace lay. it would be a compromise. it would be promoting the interests of the family. her wealth would add greatly to the importance of the house of erradeen. and if he made up his mind to a step which had so many advantages, would it not in some sort be the signing of a treaty, the establishment of peace? he thought with a shudder, out of this quiet in which his spirit lay, of those conflicts from which he had escaped. he was like a man on firm land contemplating the horrors of the stormy sea from which he had escaped, but amid which he might be plunged again. it was possible that the disposition in which that sea itself should be braved, rather than accept its alternative, might return to him again. but at the present moment, in full enjoyment of so many more pleasures, and with the struggles of the former period in his mind, he shuddered at the prospect. katie, it seemed to him, would be a compromise with fate. the other person most deeply concerned--to wit, mr. williamson--was in a state of rapture, and chuckled all day long over the prospect. he would have had lord erradeen with them wherever they went. not a doubt on the subject, not a possibility that all was not plain sailing, crossed his mind. there was no courtship indeed between them, such as was usual in his own more animated class and age. it was not the fashion, he said to himself, with a laugh; but what did the young fellow come for so constantly if it were not katie? "it's not for my agreeable conversation," he said to himself, with another guffaw. when a young man was for ever haunting the place where a girl was, there could not be two opinions about his motives. and it would be very suitable. he said this to himself with an elation which made his countenance glow. to think of losing katie had been terrible to him, but this would not be losing katie. auchnasheen was next door to birkenbraes, and they should have birkenbraes if they liked--they should have anything they liked. john was splendidly provided for by the business and all the immense capital invested in it; but katie was his darling, and from her he could not be separated. a pretty title for her, and a very good fellow for a husband, and no separation! he thought, with a sort of delighted horror as of some danger past, that she was just the girl that might have fallen in love with a lad going out to india or to the ends of the earth, and gone with him, whatever any one could say; and to think by the good guiding of providence she had lighted on one so ideally suitable as lord erradeen! the good man went about the world rubbing his hands with satisfaction. it was all he could do, in his great contentment, not to precipitate matters. he had to put force upon himself when he was alone with walter not to bid him take courage, and settle the matter without delay. chapter ix. things went on in this way till nearly the end of july, when the parks were brown like heather, and a great many people already had gone out of town. those who remained kept up their gaieties with a sort of desperation of energy, intent upon getting as much as possible out of the limited time. and what with the drawing closer of the bonds of society, and the additional fervour of the pace at which everything went on, walter spent almost his entire time in katie's society, meeting her everywhere, and being, by universal consent, constituted her partner and escort wherever they did meet. she had half begun to wonder herself that nothing further came of it, and that he did not speak the words which would settle every question, so far at least as he was concerned. miss williamson, for her own part, reserved her personal freedom. she would not say even to herself that she had finally made up her mind. she would see what he had to say for himself, and then----but katie was very prudent, and would not be premature. walter, too, rather wondered at himself that he did nothing conclusive. he perceived for the first time in his life that the position was not one which could be glided over, which he could terminate simply by going away. he had come to that, that katie must cut the knot, not he: or else, which was most likely, bind it closer. she was a girl of whom nobody could think lightly--not a good girl only, but a little personage of distinct importance. no doubt she would make such a wife as a man might be very well satisfied with, and even proud of in his way. she was even pretty--enough: she was clever, and very well able to hold her own. at the head of a table, at the head of a great house, katie, though with in every way a pronounced yet not unrefined scotch accent (as indeed in the wife of a scotch lord was very appropriate), would be quite equal to the position. and peace would come with her: no young man could do more for his family than bring such an accession of fortune into it. it would probably save him from further vexation about small matters of the estate, and those persecutions about leases and investments to which he was now subject. this had been the one drawback of his life since he had known katie. he had been asked to decide on one side and another: he had concluded against peter thomson the sheep farmer, in sheer vexation with shaw's importunity. he had thought more than once that he saw old milnathort shake his head, and was subject to the factor's outspoken blame. but if he brought katie into the family, what would it matter about these small things? one or two unsatisfactory tenants would be little in comparison with that large addition of fortune. and he liked katie. in herself she was very agreeable to him--a companion whom he by no means wished to lose. there was something in her independence, her almost boyishness, her philosophies and questionings, which made her unlike any other girl with whom he had ever been brought into contact. the thing was not that they were in love with each other, but that they could get on quite well together. notwithstanding, walter, being quite content with the circumstances as they were, took no new step, but let the course of events run on day by day. they had gone together to one of the last celebrations of the waning season--the evening reception at the royal academy. everybody who was in town was there; and walter, who had now an abundance of acquaintances, went from one group to another, paying his respects to the ladies, but always keeping somewhere within reach of the williamsons, with whom he had come. katie expected him to be within reach. it had come to be a habit with her to look round for lord erradeen, to beg him to get her what she wanted, to take her to this or that. her father, though always most dutiful in attendance, yet naturally found persons of his own age to talk with; and he was apt to say foolish things about the pictures, and say them at the top of his voice, which made katie cautious not to direct his attention to them more than was necessary; but walter, who on the whole considered her something of an authority on art, and was not unwilling to accept her guidance to some extent, was here a very agreeable companion. she had just intimated to him her desire to look at something of which the artist had been speaking to her--for katie considered it her duty even in presence of society to show a certain regard for the pictures, as the supposed object of the meeting--and taking his arm, was going on to the corner indicated, when somebody all at once made a little movement towards them with a quick exclamation of pleasure, and saying, "walter!" suddenly laid a finger upon lord erradeen's unoccupied arm. this sudden incident produced a curious dramatic effect amid the many groups of this elegant company. some of the bystanders even were attracted, and one enterprising young painter took in his mind's eye an instantaneous sketch of the three figures enacting a scene in the genteel comedy of life. walter in the midst, startled, looking a little guilty, yet not losing his composure, replied readily enough, "julia!" holding out his hand to the somewhat eager stranger, who leaned forward towards him with sparkling eyes, and the most arch and smiling expression of pleasure and interest. katie, on the other hand, held back a little, and looked very gravely at the meeting, with a manifest absence in her countenance of that pleasure which the others expressed, whether they felt it or not. she did not withdraw from walter's arm, or separate herself in any way, but gazed at the new-comer who addressed him so familiarly with a look of grave inspection. katie meant to look dignified, and as a girl should look who was the lawful possessor of the attention to which an illegitimate claimant had thus appeared; but her figure was not adapted for expressing dignity. she was shorter than julia, and less imposing, and her _beauté du diable_ could not bear comparison with miss herbert's really fine features and charming figure. julia was as much, or indeed more, a country girl than the other; but she was much handsomer, and had all the instincts of society. her face was radiant with smiles as she gave her hand to walter, and half-permitted, half-compelled him to hold it a moment longer than was necessary in his. "i thought we could not be long of meeting," she said, "and that you were sure to be here. i am with my cousins the tom herberts. i suppose you know them? they have asked me up for the fag-end of the season. i always told you my season was the very end--and the result is, i am quite fresh when you jaded revellers have had too much of it, and are eager to hurry away." and indeed she looked fresh, glowing, and eager, and full of life and pleasure; her vivid looks seemed to take the colour out of katie, who still stood with her hand upon walter's arm. for his part he did not know what to do. "you would not think, to look round these rooms, that it was the fag-end of the season," he said. "ah! that's your usual benevolence to make me think less of my disadvantages," said julia. "you know i don't encourage illusions on that subject. you must come and see me. you must be made acquainted with my cousins, if you don't know them." "in the mean time, lord erradeen, will you take me to my father, please," said katie, on his arm. "oh," cried julia, "don't let me detain you now. we have just come. you'll find me presently, walter, when you are at liberty. no, go, go, we shall have plenty of time afterwards for our talks. i insist upon your going now." and she dismissed him with a beaming smile, with a little pat on his arm as if it had been she who was his lawful proprietor, not katie. miss williamson said nothing for the moment, but she resisted walter's attempt to direct her towards the picture she had meant to visit. "i think i will go to papa," she said. "i must not detain you, lord erradeen, from your--friend." "that doesn't matter," said walter; "i shall see her again. let us do what we intended to do. what is the etiquette on such an occasion, miss williamson? would it be correct for me, a mere man, to introduce two ladies to each other? you know i am a novice in society. i look for instruction to you." "i can't tell, i am sure," said katie. "i don't think the case has occurred to me before. you seem to know the lady very well, lord erradeen?" "i have known her almost all my life," walter replied, not quite at his ease. "we have played together, i suppose. she comes from sloebury where my mother is living. they have all sorts of fine connections, but they are poor, as you would divine from what she said." "i did not listen to what she said. conversation not addressed to one's self," said katie with some severity, "one has nothing to do with. i could see of course that you were on the most friendly terms." "oh, on quite friendly terms," said walter; he could not for his life have prevented a little laugh from escaping him, a laugh of consciousness and amusement and embarrassment. and katie, who was full of suspicion, pricked up her little ears. "i should have said on terms that were more than friendly," she said in a voice that was not without a certain sharp tone. walter laughed again with that imbecility to which all men are subject when pressed upon such a question. "can anything be better than friendly?" he said. "poor julia! she has a very kind heart. was not this the picture you wanted to see?" "oh," cried katie, "i have forgotten all about the picture! this little incident has put it out of my head. human interest is superior to art. perhaps if you had not left sloebury, if your circumstances had not changed, your friendship might have changed into--something warmer, as people say." "who can tell?" cried walter in his vanity; "but in that case we should have been two poverties together, and that you know would never do." "i am no judge," cried katie; "but at all events you are not a poverty now, and there is no reason--oh, there is papa; he is talking to _that_ ambassador--but never mind. patience for another minute, lord erradeen, till we can make our way to him, and then you shall go." "but i don't want to go," walter said. "oh, that is impossible; when miss--julia--i am sure i beg your pardon, for i don't know her other name--was so kind as to tell you where to find her. you must want to get rid of me. papa, give me your arm; i want to show you something." "eh! what do you want to show me, katie? i'm no judge, you know. you will find it very much better, i'm confident, to show it to young erradeen." "thank you, lord erradeen," said katie, making him a curtsey. she took her father's almost reluctant arm, and turned him suddenly away at once from his ambassador, and from walter, who stood astonished to find himself thus thrown off. "look here, papa, it is in this direction," the young lady said. mr. williamson's voice was rather louder than good manners allowed. "what! is it a tiff?" he said, with a laugh. "that's according to all the rules, katie. i'm astonished you have not had one before." walter heard this speech as well as katie, and it threw the last gleam of reality on the position in which he stood. that he was looked upon by her father as her lover, and no doubt by herself too, or what would the encounter with julia have mattered to her, was plain enough. he had known it vaguely before, but only from his own side of the question, and had debated it as a matter of expediency to himself. but when he saw it from the other side, recognising with a shock that they too had something to say in the matter, and coming right up against that barrier of a _must_, which was so obnoxious to his character, everything took a very different aspect. and julia, too, had assumed an air of property--had made a certain claim of right in respect to him. what! was he to be made a slave, and deprived of free action in respect to the most important act of his life, because he had freely accepted invitations that were pressed upon him? the thing was ridiculous, he said to himself, with some heat. it might be well for him to offer himself to katie, but to have a virtual demand made upon him, and acknowledge a necessity, that was not to be borne. still less was he likely to acknowledge any right on the part of julia herbert. in her case he was altogether without responsibility, he said to himself; and even in the other, was it a natural consequence of mr. williamson's perpetual invitations and hospitality that he should put himself at the disposal of mr. williamson's daughter? he seemed to hear that worthy's laugh pealing after him as he took his way hastily in the opposite direction to that in which he had met julia, with a determination to yield to neither. "a tiff!" and, "according to all the rules?" a lovers' quarrel, that was what the man meant; and who was he that he should venture to assume that lord erradeen was his daughter's lover? walter hurried through the rooms in the opposite direction, till he got near the great staircase, with its carpeted avenue, between the hedges of flowers, and the group of smiling, bowing, picturesque academicians in every variety of beard, still receiving the late, and speeding the parting guests. but fate was too much here for the angry young man. before he had reached the point of exit, he felt once more that tap on his arm. "walter! i believe he is running away," said a voice, close to him; and there was julia, radiant, with her natural protectors beside her, making notes of all that passed. this time he could not escape. he was introduced to lady herbert and sir thomas before he could move a step from amid that brilliant crowd. then julia, like katie, declared that she had something she wished to show him, and led him--half-reluctant, half, in the revulsion of feeling, pleased, to have some one else to turn to--triumphantly away. sir thomas, who was tired, protested audibly against being detained; but his wife, more wise, caught him by the arm, and imposed patience. "can't you see!" she cried in his ear, "what a chance it is for julia--lord erradeen, a most eligible young man. and think the anxiety she is, and that one never can be sure what she may do." "she is a horrid little coquette; and you may be sure the man means nothing serious, unless he is a fool!" growled sir thomas. but his wife replied calmly, "most men are fools; and she is not a bad-hearted creature, though she must have some one dangling after her. don't let us interfere with her chance, poor thing. i shall ask him to dinner," lady herbert said. and sir thomas, though he was rather a tyrant at home, and hated late hours, was kept kicking his heels in the vestibule, snarling at everybody who attempted to approach, for nearly an hour by the clock. so far, even in the most worldly bosoms, do conscientious benevolence and family affection go. "come, quick!" said julia, "out of hearing of maria. she wants to hear everything; and i have so many things to ask you. is it all settled? that was she, of course. how we used to laugh about miss williamson! but i knew all the time it would come true. of course that was _she_," julia said, leaning closely upon his arm and looking up into his face. "i don't know what you mean by _she_. it is miss williamson, certainly," he said. "i was sure of it! she is not so pretty as i should have expected from your good taste. but why should she be pretty? she has so many other charms. indeed, now that i think of it, it would have been mean of her to be pretty--and is it all settled?" julia said. she looked at him with eyes half laughing, half reproachful, full of provocation. she was as a matter of fact slightly alarmed, but not half so much as she said. "i am not aware what there is to settle. we are country neighbours, and i meet them frequently--they go everywhere." "ah! so are we country neighbours, _amis d'enfance_: but i don't go everywhere, lord erradeen. yes, i called you walter; that was for a purpose, to pique her curiosity, to make her ask who was that forward horrid girl. did she? i hope she was piqued." "i heard nothing about any forward, horrid girl. she is not that sort of person. but i prefer to hear about yourself rather than to discuss miss williamson. when did you come? and where are you? what a pity," walter said hypocritically, "that you come so late." "ah, isn't it? but what then? we are too poor to think of the season. this is what one's fine friends always do. they ask us for the last week, when everything is stifled in dust--when all you revellers are dead tired and want nothing so much as to go away--then is the moment for poor relations. but mind that you come to bruton street," julia said. "it gives me consequence. they are not very much in society, and a title always tells." "you do not leave any ground for my vanity. i am not to suppose that i am asked for any other reason." julia pressed his arm a little with her fingers. she sighed and gave him a look full of meaning. "the tom herberts will think a great deal of you," she said; "they will instantly ask you to dinner. as for me--what am i that i should express any feeling? we are country neighbours, as you were saying. but enough of me. let us return to our--lamb," cried julia. "tell me, have you seen a great deal of her? how little i thought when we used to laugh about miss williamson that it would come true." "it has come true, as it began, in your imagination," said walter, provoked, and thinking the reiteration vulgar. he was aware that a great many people who knew him were remarking the air with which this new young lady hung upon his arm. they were not equal in this respect. she had few acquaintances, and did not care, nay, would have been pleased that she should be remarked; whereas he began to throb with impatience and eager desire to get away from the comment he foresaw, and from the situation altogether. julia was very pretty, more pretty and sparkling in the pleasure of having met and secured him thus at the very outset of her too-short and too-late campaign in town, than he had ever known her, and there was nothing that was objectionable in her dress. the tom herberts were people against whom nothing could be said. and yet lord erradeen, himself not much more than a novice, felt that to everybody whom they met, julia would be truly a country neighbour, a girl whom no one knew, and whose object, to secure a recreant lover, would be jumped at by many fine observant eyes. there was no return of tenderness in his sentiments towards her. indeed there had been no tenderness in his sentiments at any time he said to himself with some indignation, which made it all the more hard that he should thus be exhibited as her captive before the eyes of assembled london now. but notwithstanding his impatience he could not extricate himself from julia's toils. when after various little pretences of going to see certain pictures, which she never looked at, she suffered him to take her back to her friends, lady herbert showed herself most gracious to the young man. she begged that as julia and he were, as she heard, very old friends, he would come to bruton street whenever it suited him. would he dine there to-morrow, next day? it would give sir thomas and herself the greatest pleasure. dear julia, unfortunately, had come to town so late: there was scarcely anything going on to make it worth her while: and it would be so great a pleasure to her to see something of her old friend. julia gave him little looks of satirical comment aside while her cousin made these little speeches, and whispers still more emphatic as he accompanied her down-stairs in the train of the herberts, who were too happy to get away after waiting an hour for the young lady. "don't you think it is beautiful to see how concerned she is for my pleasure; and so sorry that i have come so late! the truth is that she is delighted to make your acquaintance. but come, do come, all the same," she said, her cheek almost touching walter's shoulder as she looked up in his face. need it be doubted that, with the usual malign disposition of affairs at such a crisis, the williamsons' carriage drew up behind that of the herberts, and that walter had to encounter the astonished gaze of good mr. williamson, and the amused but not very friendly look of katie, as he appeared in this very intimate conjunction? julia's face so full of delighted and affectionate dependence raised towards him, and his own head stooped towards her to hear what she was saying. he scarcely could turn aside now to give them one deprecating glance, praying for a suspension of judgment. when he had put julia into her cousin's carriage, and responded as best he could to the "now remember to-morrow!" which she called to him from the window, he was just in time to see mr. williamson's honest countenance, with a most puzzled aspect, directed to him from the window of the next carriage as the footman closed the door. the good man waved his hand by way of good-night, but his look was perplexed and uncomfortable. walter stood behind on the steps of burlington house amid all the shouts of the servants and clang of the hoofs and carriages, himself too much bewildered to know what he was doing. after a while he returned to get his coat, and walked home with the sense of having woke out of a most unpleasant dream, which somehow was true. as for katie, she drove home without a remark, while her father talked and wondered, and feared lest they had been "ill bred" to lord erradeen. "he came with us, and he would naturally calculate on coming home with us," the good man said. but katie took no notice. she was "a wilful monkey" as he had often said, and sometimes it would happen to her like this, to take her own way. when they reached the hotel, captain underwood, of all people in the world, was standing in the hall with the sleepy waiter who had waited up for them. "i thought perhaps erradeen might be with you," the captain said apologetically. katie, who on ordinary occasions could not endure him, made some gracious reply, and asked him to come in with the most unusual condescension though it was so late. "lord erradeen is not with us," she said. "he found some friends, people just newly come to town, so far as i could judge, a miss julia--i did not catch her name--somebody from sloebury." "oh!" said underwood, excited by his good fortune, "julia herbert. poor erradeen! just when he wanted to be with you! well that's hard; but perhaps he deserved it." "what did he deserve? i supposed," said katie, "from the way they talked, that they were old friends." underwood did not in his heart wish to injure walter--rather the other way; he wanted him to marry katie, whose wealth was dazzling even to think of. but walter had not behaved well to him, and he could not resist the temptation of revenging himself, especially as he was aware, like all the rest, that a lovers' quarrel is a necessary incident in a courtship. he smiled accordingly and said, "i know: they are such old friends that the lady perhaps has some reason to think that erradeen had used her rather badly. he is that kind of a fellow you know: he must always have some one to amuse himself with. he used to be dangling after her to no end, singing duets, and that sort of thing. sloebury is the dullest place in creation--there was nothing else to do." katie made very little demonstration. she pressed her lips tightly together for a moment and then she said, "you see, papa, it was not ill-bred, but the most polite thing you could have done to leave lord erradeen. good-night, captain underwood." and she swept out of the room with her candle, her silken train rustling after her, as though it was too full of indignation with the world. her father stood somewhat blankly gazing after her. he turned to the other with a plaintive look when she was gone. "man," said mr. williamson, "i would not have said that. don't you see there is a tiff, a kind of a coolness, and it is just making matters worse? will you take anything? no? well, it is late, as you say, and i will bid you good-night." it was thus that the effect produced by julia's appearance was made decisive. walter for his part, walking slowly along in the depth of the night towards his rooms, was in the most curiously complicated state of feeling. he was angry and indignant both at miss herbert's encounter, and the assumption on the part of the williamsons that it was to them that his attention belonged; and he was disturbed and uneasy at the interruption of that very smooth stream which was not indeed true love, but yet was gliding on to a similar consummation. these were his sentiments on the surface; but underneath other feelings found play. the sense that one neutralised the other, and that he was in the position of having suddenly recovered his freedom, filled his mind with secret elation. after he had expended a good deal of irritated feeling upon the girl whom he felt to be pursuing him, and her whom he pursued, there suddenly came before his eyes a vision, soft, and fresh, and cool, which came like the sweet highland air in his face, as he went along the hot london street--oona standing on the beach, looking out from her isle upon the departing guest. what right had he to think of oona? what was there in that dilemma to suggest to him a being so much above it, a creature so frank yet proud, who never could have entered into any such competition? but he was made up of contradictions, and this was how it befell. the streets were still hot and breathless after the beating of the sun all day upon the unshaded pavements and close lines of houses. it was sweet to feel in imagination the ripple of the mountain air, the coolness of the woods and water. but it was only in imagination. oona with her wistful sweet eyes was as far off from him, as far off as heaven itself. and in the mean time he had a sufficiently difficult imbroglio of affairs on hand. next morning lord erradeen had made up his mind. he had passed a disturbed and uneasy night. there was no longer any possibility of delay. oona, after all, was but a vision. two or three days--what was that to fix the colour of a life? he would always remember, always be grateful to her. she had come to his succour in the most terrible moment. but when he rose from his uneasy sleep, there was in him a hurrying impulsion which he seemed unable to resist. something that was not his own will urged and hastened him. since he had known katie all had gone well. he would put it, he thought, beyond his own power to change, he would go to her that very morning and make his peace and decide his life. that she might refuse him did not occur to walter. he had a kind of desire to hurry to the hotel before breakfast, which would have been indecorous and ridiculous, to get it over. indeed, so strong was the impulse in him to do this, that he had actually got his hat and found himself in the street, breakfastless, before it occurred to him how absurd it was. he returned after this and went through the usual morning routine, though always with a certain breathless sense of something that hurried him on. as soon as he thought it becoming, he set out with a half-solemn feeling of self-renunciation, almost of sacrifice. if 'twere done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly. this was not a very lover-like frame of mind. he felt that he was giving up everything that was visionary, the poetry of vague ideals, and even more, the inspiration of that face, the touch of that hand which had been as soft as snow. katie's hand was a very firm and true one. it would give him an honest help in the world; and with her by his side the other kind of aid, he said to himself, would be unnecessary. no conflict with the powers of darkness would be forced upon him. his heated imagination adopted these words in haste, and did not pause to reflect how exaggerated and ridiculous they would sound to any reasonable ear. he found mr. williamson alone in the room where katie was usually ready to receive him in her fresh morning toilette and smile of welcome. the good man wore a puzzled look, and was looking over his bill with his cheque-book beside him on the table. he looked up when lord erradeen came in, with a countenance full of summings up. "yes," he said, "i am just settling everything, which is never very pleasant. you need to be made of money when you come to london. katie is away this morning by skreigh of day. oh, yes, it was a very sudden resolution. she just took it into her little head. and here am i left to pay everything, and follow as soon as i can. it is breaking up our pleasant party. but what am i to do? i tell her she rules me with a rod of iron. i hope we'll see a great deal of you in autumn, when you come to auchnasheen." walter went back to his rooms with a fire of resentment in his veins, but yet a sense of exhilaration quite boyish and ridiculous. whatever might happen, he was free. and now what was to be his next step? to play with fire and julia, or to take himself out of harm's way? he almost ran against underwood as he debated this question, hurrying towards his own door. chapter x. it was late in october, when summer was gone even from the smooth english lanes about sloebury, and autumn, with that brave flourish of flags and trumpets by which she conceals decay, was in full sway over the scotch hills and moors when lord erradeen was next heard of by those interested in him. he had gone abroad at the end of the season, without even returning to sloebury to see his mother, and very little had been known of him during this disappearance. mrs. methven, it is to be supposed, knew something of his movements, but the replies she gave to questions addressed to her were short and vague. she generally answered that he was in switzerland; but that is rather a wide word, as everybody said, and if she was acquainted more particularly with his whereabouts she chose to keep the information to herself. and in scotland there was nothing at all known about him. all kinds of business waited till he should be there, or should answer to the appeals made him. letters elicited no reply, and indeed it was by no means certain that he got the letters that were sent to him. mrs. methven writing to mr. milnathort, avowed, though with reserve, that she was by no means sure of her son's address, as he was travelling about; and at his club they had no information. so that all the details of the management of the estates, about which their proprietor required to be consulted, had accumulated, and lay hopelessly in the edinburgh office, sometimes arranging themselves by mere progress of time, though this the angry lawyer, provoked beyond measure, would not allow. the williamsons had returned to loch houran, to their magnificent modern castle of birkenbraes, in august, for the grouse: it being the habit of the hospitable millionnaire to fill his vast house for those rites of autumnal observance; but neither did they know anything of the wandering peer. "we saw a great deal of young erradeen in london," mr. williamson said; "but at the end he just slipped through our fingers like a knotless thread." "that seems to be his most prominent characteristic," said lord innishouran, who for a time flattered himself that he had "acquired an influence" over this unsatisfactory young man; and the other potentates of the county shook their heads, and remarked that the erradeens were always strange, and that this new man must be just like the rest. there was another too who began to be of the same opinion. notwithstanding the indignant manner in which katie had darted away after discovering the previous relations of walter with julia herbert, and hearing underwood's malicious statement that "he must always have some one to amuse himself with," there was yet in her mind a conviction that something more must be heard of lord erradeen. he would write, she thought, when he found that she had not waited for any explanation from him. it was not possible that after the close intercourse that had existed he would disappear and make no sign. and when months passed by and nothing was heard of him, katie was more surprised than she would confess. he had "slipped away like a knotless thread." nothing could be more true than this description. from the moment when she turned away from him in the great room at burlington house, she had heard or seen nothing more of walter. her heart was quite whole, and there was not any personal wistfulness in her questionings; but she was piqued, and curious, and perhaps more interested in lord erradeen than she had ever been before. in these circumstances it was very natural, almost inevitable, that she should take oona into her confidence. for oona was known, on his first appearance, to have "seen a great deal" of lord erradeen. this she herself explained with some eagerness to mean that she had met him three times--one of these times being the memorable moment of the eviction which he had put a stop to, an incident which had naturally made a great commotion in the country-side. but mrs. forrester had never felt the slightest reluctance to talk of their intercourse with the young lord. she had declared that she took a great interest in him, and that she was his first friend on loch houran: and anticipated with cheerful confidence the certainty of his coming back, "more like one of my own boys than anything else," she said. the fact that the forresters were the first to know, and indeed the only people who had known him, did indeed at the time of his first appearance identify them with lord erradeen in a marked way. the minister and the factor, though not match-makers, had allowed, as has been said, to steal into their minds, that possibility which is more or less in the air when youth and maiden meet. and there were others who had said--some, that oona forrester would make a capital wife for lord erradeen, a young man who was a stranger in the country; some, that it would be a good thing for oona to secure, before any one else knew him, the best match on the loch; and some even, that though mrs. forrester looked such a simple person, she had her wits all about her, and never neglected the interests of her family. in the course of time, as lord erradeen disappeared and was not heard of any more, this gossip drooped and died away. but it left a general impression on the mind of the district that there was a tie of friendship between lord erradeen and the ladies of the isle. they had something to do with him--not love, since he had never come again; but some link of personal knowledge, interest, which nobody else had: any information about him would naturally be carried there first; and katie, having elucidations to ask as well as confidences to make, lost no time in carrying her budget to the isle. the true position of affairs there was unsuspected by any one. the blank which oona anticipated had closed down upon her with a force even stronger than that which she had feared. the void, altogether unknown to any one but herself, had made her sick with shame and distress. it was inconceivable to her that the breaking off of an intercourse so slight (as she said to herself), the absence of an individual of whom she knew so little, not enough even for the most idiotical love at first sight, should have thus emptied out the interests of life, and made such a vacancy about her. it was a thing not to be submitted to, not to be acknowledged even, which she would have died sooner than let any one know, which she despised herself for being capable of. but notwithstanding all this self-indignation, repression, and shame, it was there. life seemed emptied out of all its interest to the struggling, indignant, unhappy girl. why should such a thing be? a chance encounter, no fault of hers, or his, or any one's. a few meetings, to her consciousness quite accidental, which she had neither wished for nor done anything to bring about. and then some strange difficulty, danger, she could not tell what, in which he had appealed to her for her help. she would have refused that help to no one. it was as natural for her to give aid and service as to breathe. but why, why should a thing so simple have brought upon her all this that followed? she was not aware even that she loved the man; no! she said to herself with a countenance ablaze with shame, how could she love him? she knew nothing of him; and yet when he had gone away the light had been drawn out of her horizon, the heart out of her life. it was intolerable, it was cruel; and yet so it was. nobody knew with what a miserable monotony the old routine of existence went on for some time after. she was so indignant, so angry, so full of resistance, that it disturbed her temper a little: and perhaps the irritation did her good. she went on (of course, having no choice in the matter) with all her old occupations just as usual, feeling herself in a sort of iron framework within which she moved without any volition of her own. the winter months passed like one long blank unfeatured day. but when the spring came, oona's elastic nature had at last got the upper hand. there began again to be a little sweetness to her in her existence. all this long struggle, and the slowly acquired victory, had been absolutely unsuspected by those about her. mysie, perhaps, spectator as servants are of the life from which they are a little more apart than the members of a family, divined a disturbance in the being of her young mistress who was at the same time her child; but even she had no light as to what it was; and thus unobserved, unknown, though with many a desperate episode and conflict more than bloody, the little war began to be over. it left the girl with a throbbing experience of pain such as it is extraordinary to think could be acquired in the midst of so much peace, and at the same time with a sort of sickening apprehension now and then of the possibility of a renewal of the conflict. but no, she said to herself, that was not possible. another time she would at least be forewarned. she would put on her armour and look to all her defences. such a cheap and easy conquest should never be made of her again. she had thus regained the command of herself without in the least forgetting what had been, when katie came with her story to claim her advice and sympathy. katie came from her father's castle with what was in reality a more splendid equipage than that which conveyed her with swift prancing horses along the side of the loch. she came attended by a crew of gentlemen, the best in these parts. young tom campbell, of the ellermore family, was her bow oar. he was furthest off, as being hopelessly ineligible, and not having, even in his own opinion, the least right to come to speech of the heiress, for whom he had a hot boyish passion. scott of inverhouran, a campbell too by the mother's side, and not far off the head of his clan, was stroke; and between these two sat the son of a glasgow trader, who could have bought them both up, and an english baronet who had come to birkenbraes nominally for the grouse, really for katie. tom of ellermore was the only one of the crew who might not, as people say, have married anybody, from the duke's daughter downwards. katie was accompanied by a mild, grey-haired lady who had once been her governess, and a pretty little girl of fifteen, not indisposed to accept a passing tribute from the least engaged of the gentlemen. katie deposited her companions and her crew with mrs. forrester, and calling oona aside, rushed up-stairs to that young lady's bed-chamber, where it was evident nobody could pursue them. "oh, oona, never mind _them_," she cried. "your mother will give them their tea and scones; but i want you--i want your advice--or at least i want you to tell me what you think. they will do very well with mrs. forrester." then she drew her friend into the little elbow-chair in the window, oona's favourite seat, and threw herself down on the footstool at her feet. "i want you to tell me--" she said, with a certain solemnity, "what you think of lord erradeen." "of lord erradeen?" said oona, faintly. she was taken so completely by surprise that the shock almost betrayed her. katie fixed upon her a pair of open, penetrating brown eyes. they were both fair, but oona was of a golden tint, and katie of a less distinguished light brownness. katie, with her little profile somewhat blurred and indistinct in the outlines, had an air of common sense and reason, while oona's was the higher type of poetry and romance. "yes; you know him better than any one about here. but first, i will tell you the circumstances. we saw a great deal of him in london. he went everywhere with us, and met us everywhere----" "then, katie," cried oona, with a little burst of natural impatience; "you must know him a great deal better than i." said kate calmly--"i am a quite different person from you, and i saw him only in society. just hear me out, and you will know what i mean. people thought he was coming after me. i thought so myself more or less: but he never said a word. and the last night we met another girl, who took hold of him as some girls do--you know? oh, not taking his arm with her hand, as you or i should do, or looking at him with her eyes; but just with a fling, with the whole of her, as those girls do. i was disgusted, and i sent him away. i don't think yet that he wished it, or cared. but of course he was obliged to go. and then captain--i mean one that knew him--told me--oh, yes, that he was like that; he must always have some one to amuse himself with. i would not see him after: i just came away. now what does it mean? is he a thing of that sort, that is not worth thinking about; or is he--?--oh, no, i am not asking for your advice: i ask you what you think." oona was not able to quench the agitation that rose up in her heart. it was like a sea suddenly roused by an unforeseen storm. "i wish," she said, "you would not ask me such questions. i think nothing at all. i--never saw him--in that light." "what do you think?" said katie, without changing her tone. she did not look in her friend's face to make any discovery, but trifled with the bangles upon her arm, and left oona free. as a matter of fact, she was quite unsuspicious of her companion's agitation; for the question, though very important, was not agitating to herself. she was desirous of having an unbiassed opinion, but even if that were unfavourable, it would not, she was aware, be at all likely to break her heart. oona on her side was used to having her advice asked. in the interval she schooled herself to a consideration of the question. "i will tell you, katie, how i have seen him," she said, "here with my mother, and among the poor cotters in the truach glas. how could i tell from that how he would behave to a girl? he was very pretty, with my mother. i liked him for it. he listened to her and did what she told him, and never put on an air, or looked wearied, as gentlemen will sometimes do. then he was very kind to the cotters, as i have told you. to see them turned out made him wild with indignation. you may judge by that the kind of man he was. it was not like doing them a favour; it was mending a miserable wrong." "i have heard all this before," said katie, with a slight impatience, "but what has that to do with it? you are telling me facts, when i want your opinion. the one has nothing to do with the other. i can put this and that together myself. but what i want is an opinion. what do you _think_? don't put me off any longer, but tell me that," katie cried. "what do you want my opinion about?" asked the other, with also, in her turn, some impatience in her voice. then katie ceased playing with her bangles, and looked up. she had never before met with such an unsatisfactory response from oona. she said with a directness which denoted a natural and hereditary turn for the practical--"whether he will come; and if he comes, what it will be for?" "he will certainly come," said oona, "because he must. you that have lived on the loch so long--you know what the lords of erradeen have to do." "and do you mean to say," cried katie, with indignation, "that an old silly story will bring him--and not me? if that is your opinion, oona! do you know that he is a man like ourselves? lord innishouran thinks very well of him. he thinks there is something in him. for my part, i have never seen that he was clever; but i should think he had some sense. and how could a man who has any sense allow himself to be led into that?" she jumped up from her seat at oona's feet in her indignation. "perhaps you believe in the warlock lord?" she said, with fine scorn. "perhaps _he_ believes in him? if lord erradeen should speak of that to me, i would laugh in his face. with some people it might be excusable, but with a man who is of his century!--the last one was a fool--everybody says so: and had his head full of rubbish, when he was not going wrong. by the by!" katie cried--then stopped, as if struck by a new thought which had not occurred to her before. "what is it?" said oona, who had been listening with mingled resignation and impatience. "when we took lord erradeen up he was with that captain underwood, who used to be with the old lord. i told him you would be sorry to see it. now that i remember, he never asked me the reason why; but captain underwood disappeared. that looks as if he had given great importance to what i said to him. perhaps after all, oona, it is you of whom he was thinking. that, however, would not justify him in coming after me. i am very fond of you, but i should not care to be talked about all over london because a gentleman was in love with _you_!" oona had coloured high, and then grown pale. "you will see, if you think of it, that you must not use such words about me," she said, with an effort to be perfectly calm. "there is no gentleman in love--as you say--with me. i have never put it in any one's power to speak so." as she spoke it was not only once but a dozen times that her countenance changed. with a complexion as clear as the early roses, and blood that ebbs and flows in her veins at every touch of feeling, how can a girl preserve such secrets from the keen perceptions of another? katie kept an eye upon her, watching from under her downcast eyelids. she had the keenest powers of vision, and even could understand, when thus excited, characters of a higher tone than her own. she did not all at once say anything, but paused to take in this new idea and reconcile it with the other ideas that had been in her mind before. "this is very funny," said katie, after an interval. "i never thought anything dramatical was going to happen to me: but i suppose, as they say in books, that your life is always a great deal more near that sort of thing than you suppose." "what sort of thing?" said oona, who felt that she had betrayed herself, yet was more determined than ever not to betray herself or to yield a single step to the curiosity of the world as embodied in this inquiring spirit. she added, with a little flush of courage, "when you, a great heiress, come in the way of a young lord, there is a sort of royal character about it. you will--marry for the sake of the world as well as for your own sake; and all the preliminaries, the doubts, and the difficulties, and the obstacles that come in the way, of course they are all like a romance. this interruption will be the most delightful episode. the course of true love never did run----" "oh stop!" cried katie, "that's all so commonplace. it is far more exciting and original, oona, that we should be rivals, you and i." "you are making a great mistake," said oona, rising with the most stately gravity. "i am no one's rival. i would not be even if----. but in this case it is absurd. i scarcely know lord erradeen, as i have told you. let us dismiss him from the conversation," she added, with a movement of her hands as if putting something away. it had been impossible, however, even to say so much without the sudden flush which said more to the eyes of katie, not herself addicted to blushing, than any words could do to her ears. "it is very interesting," she said. "we may dismiss him from the conversation, but we can't dismiss him from life, you know. and if he is sure to come to kinloch houran, as you say, not for me, nor for you, but for that old nonsense, why then he will be----and we shall be forced to consider the question. for my part, i find it far more interesting than i ever thought it would be. you are proud, and take it in king cambyses' vein. but i'm not proud," said katie, "i am a student of human nature. it will take a great deal of thinking over, and it's very interesting. i am fond of you, oona, and you are prettier and better than i am; but i don't quite think at this moment that i will give in even to you, till----" "if you insist on making a joke, i cannot help it," said oona, still stately, "but i warn you, katie, that you will offend me." "oh, offend you! why should i offend you?" cried katie, putting her arm within that of the princess. "it is no joke, it is a problem. when i came to ask for your opinion i never thought it would be half so interesting. if he has good taste, of course i know whom he will choose." "katie!" cried oona, with a violent blush, "if you think that i would submit to be a candidate--a competitor--for any man to choose----" "how can you help it?" said katie, calmly. "it appears it's nature. we have a great deal to put up with, being women, but we can't help ourselves. of course the process will go on in his own mind. he will not be so brutal as to let us see that he is weighing and considering. and we can have our revenge after, if we like: we can always refuse. come, oona, i am quite satisfied. you and me, that are very fond of each other, we are rivals. we will not say a word about it, but we'll just go on and see what will happen. and i promise you i shall be as fond of you as ever, whatever happens. men would say that was impossible--just as they say, the idiots, that women are never true friends. _that_ is mere folly; but this is a problem, and it will be very interesting to work it out. i wonder if those boys have eaten all the scones," katie said, with the greatest simplicity, as she led oona down-stairs. she was so perfectly at her ease, taking the command of her more agitated companion, and so much pleased with her problem, that oona's proud excitement of self-defence melted away in the humour of the situation. she threw herself into the gaiety of the merry young party down-stairs, among whom mrs. forrester was in her element, dispensing tea and the most liberal supply of scones, which mysie, with equal satisfaction, kept bringing in in ever fresh supplies, folded in the whitest of napkins. katie immediately claimed her share of these dainties, intimating at once, with the decision of a connoisseur, the kind she preferred: but when supplied remained a little serious, paying no attention to "the boys," as she, somewhat contemptuously, entitled her attendants, and thinking over her problem. but oona, in her excitement and self-consciousness, ran over with mirth and spirits. she talked and laughed with nervous gaiety, so that hamish heard the sound of the fun down upon the beach where he watched over the boats, lest a passing shower should come up and wet the cushions of the magnificent vessel from birkenbraes, which he admired and despised. "those glasgow persons," said hamish, "not to be disrespectful, they will just be made of money; but miss oona she'll be as well content with no cushions at all. and if they'll be making her laugh that's a good thing," hamish said. chapter xi. the first to see the subject of so many thoughts was not any one of those to whom his return was of so much importance. neither was it at kinloch houran that walter first appeared. on a cold october evening, in one of the early frosts from which everybody augurs a severe winter, and in the early twilight which makes people exclaim how short the days are getting, he knocked suddenly at the door of mr. milnathort's house in edinburgh. being dark everywhere else, it was darker still in the severe and classic coldness of moray place. the great houses gathered round, drawing, one might have thought, a closer and closer circle; the shrubs in the enclosure shivered before the breeze. up the hill from the firth came the north-east wind, cutting like a scythe. it was a night when even a lighted window gives a certain comfort to the wayfarer; but the edinburgh magnates had scarcely yet returned from the country, and most of the houses were dark, swathed in brown paper and cobwebs. but winter or summer made but little difference to the house of mr. milnathort, and there a certain light of human welcome was almost always to be found. lord erradeen came quickly along the edinburgh streets, which are grim in the teeth of a north-easter. his frame was unstrung and his spirit unsatisfied as of old. he had been "abroad"--that is to say, he had been hurrying from one place to another in search of the unattainable one which should not be dull. most places were dull; there was nothing to do in them. he took in at a draught the capabilities of folly that were there, then passed on in the vain quest. had he been wholly ignoble he would have been more easily satisfied. but he was not satisfied. in the worst he seemed to want something worse, as in the best he wanted something better. he was all astray upon the world, desiring he did not know what, only aware that nothing was sufficient for his desires. underwood, who was his companion, had catered vulgarly for the unhappy young man, who used with scorn the means of distraction provided him, and was not distracted, and upon whom disgust so soon followed novelty that his companion was at his wits' end. and now he had come back, obeying an impulse which he neither understood nor wished to obey. a necessity seemed laid upon him; all in a moment it had risen up in his mind, a sense that he must get back. it was so involuntary, so spontaneous, that it did not even occur to him at first to resist it, or to think of it as anything but a natural impulse. he had not been able to rest after this strange inclination came upon him, and it seemed to him in the heat of it that he had always had the same desire, that all the time this was what he had wanted, to get back. he hurried along over land and water, sometimes in the stream of summer tourists coming home, sometimes crossing the other tide of the sick and feeble going away--and when he touched english soil again, that he should have hurried to edinburgh of all places in the world, was beyond walter's power of explanation even to himself. he had felt a barrier between himself and the home of his youth. his mother was separated altogether from his new existence. she could not comprehend it, he thought, and his heart turned from the explanations that would be necessary. he could not go to her; and to whom could he go? the suggestion that came into his mind was as fantastical as the whole strange story of his recent life. he was nothing indeed but a bundle of caprices, moved and played upon as if by the winds. and it had seemed a sort of relief to his uncertain mind and consuming thoughts when it occurred to him to come to moray place to see the invalid who had known so much about him, while he knew nothing of her. it relieved him, as any resolution relieves an uncertain mind. it was something between him and that future which always failed to his expectations. when he had made up his mind he reflected no more, but went on, and even had an uneasy nap in the railway-carriage as he came north; nor ever asked himself why he was coming till he went up the steps at mr. milnathort's door, and then it was too late for any such question. he mounted the long stone staircase with all the throbbings of fatigue in his brain, the sweep and movement of a long journey. only once before had he been in this house, yet it seemed familiar to him as if it had been his home, and the unchanged aspect of everything affected him as it affects men who have been away for half a life-time--so many things happening to him, and nothing here. this gave him a certain giddiness as he followed the same servant up the same stairs. he was not the same. he had been unconscious of all the peculiarities of his fate when he crossed that threshold before. he had known the good, but not the evil; and now the very carpets, the sound of the door rumbling into the echoes of the tall, silent house, were the same--but he so far from being the same! then in a moment out of the dim night, the half-lighted stair, he came upon the soft blaze of light in which miss milnathort delighted. she lay on her sofa as if she had never stirred, her old-young face in all its soft brightness, her small delicate hands in continual motion. she gave a little cry at the sight of walter, and held out those hands to him. "you have come!" she cried. "i was looking for you;" raising herself on her couch as much as was possible to her, as if she would have thrown herself into his arms. when she felt the pressure of his hands, tears sprang to her eyes. "i knew," she cried, "that you would come. i have been looking for you, and praying for you, lord erradeen." "perhaps," said walter, moved too, he could scarcely tell why, "that is how i have come." "oh, but i am glad, glad to see you," the poor lady said. "you never came back last year; but i will not reproach you--i am too glad to have you here. and where have you been, and what have you been doing? to see you is like a child coming home." "i have been in many different places, and uneasy in all," said walter; "and as for what i have been doing, it has not been much good: wandering about the face of the earth, seeking i don't know what; not knowing, i think, even what i want." she held out her hand to him again: her eyes were full of pity and tenderness. "oh how i wanted you to come back that i might have spoken freely to you. i will tell you what you want, lord erradeen." "stop a little," he said, "i don't wish to plunge into that. let us wait a little. i think i am pleased to come back, though i hate it. i am pleased always more or less to do what i did not do yesterday." "that is because your mind is out of order, which is very natural," she said. "how should it be in order with so much to think of? you will have been travelling night and day?" "rather quickly; but that matters nothing; it is easy enough travelling. i am not so effeminate as to mind being tired; though as a matter of fact i am not tired," he said. "so far as that goes, i could go on night and day." she looked at him with that mingling of pleasure and pain with which a mother listens to the confidences of her child. "have you been home to see your mother?" she asked. walter shook his head. "i have had no thought but how to get to scotland the quickest way. i have felt as if something were dragging me. what is it? all this year i have been struggling with something. i have sometimes thought if i had come back here you could have helped me." "i would--i would! if i could," she cried. "it is not a thing that can be endured," said walter; "it must come to an end. i don't know how or by what means; but one thing is certain, i will not go on bearing it. i will rather make an end of myself." she put a hand quickly upon his arm. "oh do not say that; there is much, much that must be done before you can despair: and _that_ is the thought of despair. some have done it, but you must not. no--not you--not you." "what must i do then?" she caressed his arm with her thin, little, half-transparent hand, and looked at him wistfully with her small face, half child, half old woman, suffused and tremulous. "oh!" she said, "my bonnie lad! you must be good--you must be good first of all." walter laughed; he drew himself back a little out of her reach. "i am not good," he said. "i have never been good. often enough i have been disgusted with myself, and miserable by moments. but if that is the first thing, i do not know how to attain to it, for i am not good." she looked at him without any change in her face while he made this confession. it did not seem to make much impression upon her. "i can tell you," she said, "how to overcome the devil and all his ways; but it costs trouble, lord erradeen. without that you will always be as you are, full of troubles and struggles: but you should thank your god that you cannot be content with ill-doing like those that are the children of perdition. to be content with it--that is the worst of all." "well, then i am in a hopeful way, it appears," said walter with a sort of laugh, "for i am certainly far enough from being content." after a minute's pause he added--"i said we should not plunge into this subject at once; tell me about yourself. are you well? are you better?" "i am well enough," she said, "but never will i be better. i have known that for many years--almost from the moment when, to get away from _him_, i fell off yon old walls, and became what you see." "to get away from--whom?" he glanced round him as she spoke with a look which was half alarmed and half defiant. "i know," he said, in a low voice, "what delusions are about." "from him. what he is, or who he is, i know no more than you. i have thought like you that it was my own delusion. i have wondered from year to year if maybe i had deceived myself. but the upshot of all is what i tell you. i am lying here these thirty years and more, because, being very young, i had no command of myself, but was frightened and flew from him." "it is against all possibility, all good sense, against everything one believes. i will not believe it," cried walter; "you were young as you say, and frightened. and i was--a fool--unprepared, not knowing what to think." miss milnathort shook her head. she made no further reply; and there was a little interval of silence which walter made no attempt to break. what could he say? it was impossible: and yet he had no real scepticism to oppose to this strange story. in words, in mind, he could not allow that either he or she were more than deceived; but in himself he had no doubt on the subject. his intelligence was easily convinced, indeed, that to attribute the events that happened to him to supernatural influence was in contradiction to everything he had ever been taught, and that it was superstition alone which could invest the mysterious inhabitant of kinloch houran with power to act upon his mind across great seas and continents, or to set any occult forces to work for that purpose. superstition beyond all excuse; and yet he was as thoroughly convinced of it in the depths of his being as he was defiant on the surface. there was perfect silence in the room where these two sat together with a sense of fellowship and sympathy. as for lord erradeen, he had no inclination to say anything more. it was impossible, incredible, contrary to everything he believed: and yet it was true: and he did not feel the contradiction to be anything extraordinary, anything to be protested against, in this curious calm of exhaustion in which he was. while he sat thus quite silent miss milnathort began to speak. "thirty years ago," she said, "there was a young lord erradeen that was something like yourself. he was a distant cousin once, that never thought to come to the title. he was betrothed when he was poor to a young girl of his own condition in life. when he became lord erradeen he was bidden to give her up and he refused. oh, if he had lived he would have broken the spell! he would not give up his love. i will not say that he was not terribly beaten down and broken with what he heard and saw, and what he had to bear; but he never said a word to me of what was the chief cause. when the summons came he got us all to go to see the old castle, and perhaps, with a little bravado, to prove that he would never, never yield. how it was that i was left alone i can never remember, for my head was battered and stupid, and it was long, long, before i got the command of my senses again. it was most likely when walter (he was walter too; it is the great methven name) was attending to the others, my brother and my mother, who was living then. i was a romantic bit girlie, and fond of beautiful views and all such things. when i was standing upon the old wall, there suddenly came forward to speak to me a grand gentleman. i thought i had never seen such a one before. you have seen him and you know; often and often have i thought i have seen him since. and it may be that i have," she said, pausing suddenly. it was perhaps the interruption in the soft flowing of her voice that startled walter. he made a sudden movement in his chair, and looked round him as if he too felt another spectator standing by. "i am not frightened now," said the invalid with her calm little voice, "lying here so long putting things together i am frightened no more. sometimes i am sorry for him, and think that it is not all ill that is in that burdened spirit. i have taken it upon me even," she said, folding her little, worn hands, "to say a word about him now and then when i say my prayers. i never thought at that time that he was anything more than the grandest gentleman i ever saw. he began to speak to me about my engagement, and if i thought of the harm i was doing walter, and that it was his duty to think of the family above all. it was like death to hear it, but i had a great deal of spirit in those days, and i argued with him. i said it was better for the family that he should marry me, than marry nobody--and that i had no right to take my troth from him. then he began to argue too. he said that to sacrifice was always best, that i could not love him, if i would not give up everything for him. it might have been scripture. what could i answer to that? i was just dazed by it, and stood and looked in his face: he looked like a prophet of god, and he said i should give up my love, if i knew what true love was. i have little doubt i would have done it, after that; but just then my walter's voice sounded up from where he was calling out to me. 'where are you, where are you? nothing can be done without you,' he cried. oh, how well i remember the sound of his voice filling all the air! i turned round and i said, 'no, no, how can i break his heart':--when there came an awful change upon the face you know. his eyes flared like a great light, he made a step forward as if he would have seized me with his hands. and then terror took hold upon me, a kind of horrible panic. they say i must have started back. i mind nothing more for months and months," the soft little voice said. the young man listened to this strange tragedy with an absorbed and wondering interest; and the sufferer lay smiling at him in a kind of half childlike, half angelic calm. one would have said she had grown no older since that day; and yet had lived for long ages with her little crushed frame and heart. he was overawed by the simplicity of the tale. he said after a pause, "and walter--? how did it end?" for a moment she did not say anything, but lay smiling, not looking at him. at last she answered softly with a great gravity coming over her face--"lord erradeen, after some years and many struggles, married the heiress of the glen oriel family, and brought a great deal of property to the house. he was to me like an angel from heaven. and his heart was broken. but how could i help him, lying crushed and broken here? what he did was well. it was not the best he could have done; because you see he could not give his heart's love again, and that is essential: but he did no harm. there was just an ending of it for one generation when i fell over yon wall. and his son died young, without ever coming to the age to bear the brunt, and the late lord, poor man, was just confused from the commencement, and never came to any good." "what is the best he could have done?" she turned to him with a little eagerness. "i have no instruction," she said, "i have only the sense that comes with much thinking and putting things together, if it is sense. i have lain here and thought it over for years and years, both in the night when everybody was sleeping, and in the day when they were all thinking of their own concerns. i think one man alone will never overcome that man we know. he is too much for you. if i have gleaned a little in my weakness, think what he must have found out in all these years. but i think if there were two, that were but one--two that had their hearts set upon what was good only, and would not listen to the evil part--i think before them he would lose his strength: he could do no more. but oh, how hard to be like that and to find the other? i am afraid you are far, far from it, lord erradeen." "call me walter--like my predecessor," he said. "you are not like him. he was never soiled with the world. his mind was turned to everything that was good. and me, though i was but a small thing, i had it in me to stand by him. two souls that are one! i am thinking--and i have had a long, long time to think in--that this is what is wanted to free the race from that bondage." "do you mean--that there has never been such a pair to do what you say?" "perhaps it is that there never has been a cripple creature like me," she said with a smile, "to find it out. and at the best it is just a guess of mine. i have thought of everything else, but i can find nothing that will do. if you will think, however," said miss milnathort, "you will find it no such a light thing. two of one mind--and that one mind set intent upon good, not evil. they will have to know. they will have to understand. the woman might miss it for want of knowing. she would have to be instructed in the whole mystery, and set her mind to it as well as the man. do you think that is too easy? no, oh, no, it is not so very easy, lord erradeen." "it would be impossible to me," said walter with keen emotion, "my mind is not intent upon good. what i am intent on is--i don't know that there is anything i am intent on: except to pass the time and have my own way." miss milnathort looked at him with the seriousness which changed the character of her face. "he that says that," she said, "is near mending it, lord erradeen." "do you think so?" he cried with a harsh little laugh, "then i have something to teach you still, ignorant as i am. to know you are wrong, alas! is not the same as being on the way to mend it. i have known that of myself for years, but i have never changed. if i have to decide a hundred times i will do just the same, take what i like best." she looked at him wonderingly, folding her hands. "i think you must be doing yourself injustice," she said. "it is you that do human nature more than justice," said walter; "you judge by what you know, by yourself; you prefer what is good; but i--don't do so. it is true: to know what is good does not make one like it, as you think. it is not a mistake of judgment, it is a mistake of the heart." "oh, my dear," said the poor lady, "you must be wronging yourself; your heart is tender and good, your eyes filled when i was telling you my story. i have seen that when there was any talk of fine and generous things your eyes have filled and your countenance changed. you have forgotten by times, and turned away from the right way; but you will not tell me that, looking it in the face, you prefer what is wrong. oh no, lord erradeen, no, no." "perhaps," he said, "i never look anything in the face; that may be the reason or part of the reason; but the fact is that i do not prefer good because it is good. oh no, i cannot deceive you. to be fully convinced that one is wrong is very little argument against one's habits, and the life that one likes. it does not seem worth while to test small matters by such a big standard, and, indeed one does not test them at all, but does--what happens to come in one's way at the moment." a shade of trouble came over the soft little face. she looked up wondering and disturbed at the young man who sat smiling upon her, with a smile that was half scorn, half sympathy. the scorn, perhaps, was for himself; he made no pretence to himself of meaning better, or wishing to do better than his performance. and miss milnathort's distress was great. "i thought," she said, faltering, "that the truth had but to be seen, how good it is, and every heart would own it. oh, my young lord, you have no call to be like one of the careless that never think at all. you are forced to think: and when you see that your weirdless way leads to nothing but subjection and bondage, and that the good is your salvation, as well for this world as the world to come----" "does not every man know that?" cried walter. "is it not instinctive in us to know that if we behave badly, the consequences will be bad one way or another? there is scarcely a fool in the world that does not know that--but what difference does it make? you must find some stronger argument. that is your innocence," he said, smiling at her. at that moment the young man, with his experiences which were of a nature so different from hers, felt himself far more mature and learned in human nature than she; and she, who knew at once so much and so little, was abashed by this strange lesson. she looked at him with a deprecating anxious look, not knowing what to say. "if the victory is to be by means of two whose heart is set on good, it will never be," said walter with a sigh, "in my time. i will struggle and yield, and yield and struggle again, like those that have gone before me, and then, like them, pass away, and leave it to somebody else who will be hunted out from the corners of the earth as i was. and so, for all i can tell, it will go on for ever." here he made a pause, and another tide of feeling stole over him. "if i were a better man," he said with a changed look, "i think i know where--the other--might be found." miss milnathort's soft, aged, childish countenance cleared, the wistful look vanished from her eyes, her smile came back. she raised herself up among her pillows as if she would have sat upright. "oh, my young lord! and does she love you like that?" she cried. walter felt the blood rush to his face; he put up his hands as if to stop the injurious thought. "love me!" he said. to do him justice, the idea was altogether new to him. he had thought of oona often, and wondered what was the meaning of that softness in her eyes as she looked after him; but his thoughts had never ventured so far as this. he grew red, and then he grew pale. "it is a profanity," he said. "how could she think of me at all? i was a stranger, and she was sorry for me. she gave me her hand, and strength came out of it. but if such a woman as that--stood by a true man--pah! i am not a true man; i am a wretched duffer, and good for nothing. and oona thinks as much of me, as little of me as--as little as--she thinks of any pitiful, unworthy thing." he got up from his chair as he spoke, and began to pace about the room in an agitation which made his blood swell in his veins. he was already in so excitable a state that this new touch seemed to spread a sort of conflagration everywhere; his imagination, his heart, all the wishes and hopes--that "indistinguishable throng" that lie dormant so often, waiting a chance touch to bring them to life--all blazed into consciousness in a moment. he who had flirted to desperation with julia herbert, who had been on the point of asking katie williamson to marry him, was it possible all the time that oona, and she only, had been the one woman in the world for him? he remembered how she had come before his thoughts at those moments when he had almost abandoned himself to the current which was carrying his heedless steps away. when he had thought of her standing upon the bank on her isle, looking after him with indefinable mystery and wistful softness in her eyes, all the other objects of his various pursuits had filled him with disgust. he said to himself, in the excitement of the moment, that it was this which had again and again stopped him and made his pleasures, his follies, revolting to him. this was the origin of his restlessness, his sometimes savage temper, his fierce impatience with himself and everybody around him. in fact, this was far from the reality of the case; but in a flood of new sensation that poured over him, it bore a flattering resemblance to truth, which dignified the caprice of his existence, and made him feel himself better than he had thought. if love had, indeed, done all this for him, struggling against every vulgar influence, must it not, then, be capable of much more--indeed, of all? meanwhile miss milnathort lay back upon her pillows, excited, yet pleased and soothed, and believing too that here was all she had wished for, the true love and the helping woman who might yet save erradeen. "oona!" she said to herself, "it's a well-omened name." this strange scene of sentiment, rising into passion, was changed by the sudden entry of mr. milnathort, whose brow was by no means so cloudless or his heart so soft as his sister's. he came in, severe in the consciousness of business neglected, and all the affairs of life arrested by the boyish folly, idleness, and perhaps vice of this young man, with endless arrears of censure to bestow upon him, and of demands to place before him. "i am glad to see you, my lord erradeen," he said briefly. "i have bidden them put forward the dinner, that we may have a long evening; and your things are in your room, and your man waiting. alison, you forget when you keep lord erradeen talking, that he has come off a journey and must be tired." walter had not intended to spend the night in moray place, and indeed had given orders to his servant to take rooms in one of the hotels, and convey his luggage thither; but he forgot all this now, and took his way instinctively up another flight of those tall stairs to the room which he had occupied before. it brought him to himself, however, with the most curious shock of surprise and consternation, when he recognised not the servant whom he had brought with him, but old symington, as precise and serious as ever, and looking as if there had been no break in his punctilious service. he was arranging his master's clothes just as he had done on the winter evening when lord erradeen had first been taken possession of by this zealous retainer of the family. walter was so startled, bewildered, and almost overawed by this sudden apparition, that he said with a gasp-- "you here, symington!" and made no further objection to his presence. "it is just me, my lord," symington said. "i was waiting at the station, though your lordship might not observe me. i just went with your lad to the hotel, and put him in good hands." "and may i ask why you did that without consulting me; and what you are doing here?" walter cried, with a gleam of rising spirit. symington looked at him with a sort of respectful contempt. "and does your lordship think," he said, "that it would be befitting to take a young lad, ignorant of the family, _up yonder_?" with a slight pause of indignant yet gentle reproach, after these words, he added--"will your lordship wear a white tie or a black?" with all the gravity that became the question. chapter xii. there is in the winter season, when the stream of tourists is cut off, a sort of family and friendly character about the highland railways. the travellers in most cases know each other by sight, if no more; and consult over a new-comer with the curiosity of a homely community, amid which a new figure passing in the street excites sentiments of wonder and interest as a novelty. "who do you suppose that will be at this time of the year?" they say; and the little country stations are full of greetings, and everybody is welcomed who comes, and attended by kindly farewells who goes away. there was no doubt this time as to who lord erradeen was as he approached the termination of his journey; and when he had reached the neighbourhood of the loch, a bustle of guards and porters--that is to say, of the one guard belonging to the train, and the one porter belonging to the station, familiarly known by name to all the passengers--ushered up to the carriage in which he was seated the beaming presence of mr. williamson. "so here ye are," said the millionnaire. "lord erradeen! i told tammas he must be making a mistake." "na, na, i was making no mistake," said tammas, in a parenthesis. "and what have ye been making of yourself all this time?" mr. williamson went on. "we have often talked of ye, and wondered if we would see ye again. that was a very sudden parting that we took in london; but katie is just a wilful monkey, and does what she pleases; but she will be well pleased, and so will i, to see you at birkenbraes." and the good man took his place beside the new-comer, and talked to him with the greatest cordiality during the rest of the journey. thus walter was received on his second arrival with the friendly familiarity natural to the country-side. there seemed to him something significant even in the change of association with which his visit began. he had to promise to present himself at once at birkenbraes, and the very promise seemed to revive the feelings and purposes which had been growing in his mind during that interval of social success in london which, on the whole, had been the most comfortable period of his life since he came to his fortune. his mind was occupied by this as he was rowed once more round the half-ruined pile of kinloch houran to his renewed trial. the afternoon was bright and clear, one of those brilliant october days that add a glory of colour to the departing summer; the water reflected every tint of the ruddy woods, thrown up and intensified everywhere by the dark background of the firs. he thought of the encounter before him with a fierce repugnance and indignation, rebellious but impotent; but there were no longer in it those elements of apprehension and mystery which had occupied all his being when he came here for the first time. it had acquired all the reality of an event not to be escaped from, not to be eluded; in itself something almost worse than death, and involving consequences more terrible than death--from which some way of escape must be found if heaven or earth contained any way of salvation. he had banished it from his mind as long as it was possible, and had wasted in endeavouring to forget it the time which he might have occupied in searching for the means of overcoming his enemy: and now the crisis was again near, and he knew scarcely more than at first what he was to do. walter had listened to miss milnathort's suggestion with a momentary elevation of mind and hope; but what was he, a "miserable duffer" as he had truly called himself, to make such an effort? a heart set on good and not evil: he laughed to himself with contemptuous bitterness, when he thought how far this description was from anything he knew of himself. thus it was from the outset impossible that the redemption of his race could be carried out by him. the only alternative then was to yield. was it the only alternative? to conduct his own affairs only as the tool and instrument of another, to sacrifice affection, justice, pity, every generous feeling, to the aggrandisement of his family--walter's heart rose up within him in violent refusal and defiance. and then he thought of katie williamson. the storms in his bosom had been quieted from the moment when he had come into contact with her. the evil circumstances around him had changed; even now a lull came over his mind at the thought of her. it was not the highest or the best course of action. at the utmost it would only be to leave once more to those who should come after him the solution of the problem; but what had he to do with those that came after him, he asked himself bitterly? in all probability it would be a stranger, a distant cousin, some one unknown to him as he had been to his predecessor; and in the mean time he would have peace. as he thought of it, it seemed to him that there was something significant even in that meeting with mr. williamson. when he came to the loch for the first time, with high hopes and purposes in his mind, meaning to leave all the frivolities of life behind him and address himself nobly to the duties of his new and noble position, it was oona forrester whom he had encountered on the threshold of fate. all the circumstances of his intercourse with her flashed through his mind; the strange scene on the isle in which her touch, her presence, her moral support, had saved him from he knew not what, from a final encounter in which, alone, he must have been overthrown. had he not been a coward then and fled, had he remained and, with that soft strong hand in his, defied all that the powers of darkness could do, how different might have been his position now! but he had not chosen that better part. he had escaped and postponed the struggle. he had allowed all better thoughts and purposes to slip from him into the chaos of a disordered life. and now that he was forced back again to encounter once more this tyranny from which he had fled, it was no longer oona that met him. who was he, to expect that oona would meet him, that the angels would come again to his succour? he could not now make that sudden unhesitating appeal to her which he had made in his first need, and to which she had so bravely replied. everything was different; he had forfeited the position on which he could confront his tyrant. but a compromise was very possible, and it seemed to him that peace, and a staving off of trouble, were in katie williamson's hand. it is needless to enter into all the sensations and thoughts with which the young man took possession again of the rooms in which he had spent the most extraordinary crisis of his life. it was still daylight when he reached kinloch houran, and the first thing he did was to make a stealthy and cautious examination of his sitting-room, looking into every crevice in an accidental sort of way, concealing even from himself the scrutiny in which he was engaged. could he have found any trace of the sliding panel or secret entrance so dear to romance, it would have consoled him; but one side of the room was the outer wall, another was the modern partition which separated it from his bed-room, and of the others one was filled up with the bookshelves which he had been examining when his visitor entered on the previous occasion, while the fourth was the wall of the corridor which led into the ruinous part of the castle, and had not a possibility of any opening in it. he made these researches by intervals, pretending other motives to himself, but with the strangest sense that he was making himself ridiculous, and exposing himself to contemptuous laughter, though so far as his senses were cognisant there was nobody there either to see or to laugh. the night, however, passed with perfect tranquillity, and in the morning he set out early on his way to birkenbraes. if it was there that the question was to be solved, it was better that it should be done without delay. chapter xiii. the party at birkenbraes was always large. there were, in the first place, many people staying in the house, for mr. williamson was hospitable in the largest sense of the word, and opened his liberal doors to everybody that pleased him, and was ready to provide everything that might be wanted for the pleasure of his guests--carriages, horses, boats, even special trains on the railway, not to speak of the steam-yacht that lay opposite the house, and made constant trips up and down the loch. his liberality had sometimes an air of ostentation, or rather of that pleasure which very rich persons often take in the careless exhibition of a lavish expenditure, which dazzles and astonishes those to whom close reckonings are necessary. he had a laugh, which, though perfectly good-natured, seemed to have a certain derision in it of the precautions which others took, as he gave his orders. "lord, man, take a special!--what need to hurry? i will send and order it to be in waiting. i have my private carriage, ye see, on the railway--always at the use of my friends." and then he would laugh, as much as to say, what a simple thing this is--the easiest in the world! if ye were not all a poor, little, cautious set of people, you would do the same. not afford it? pooh! a bagatelle like that! all this was in the laugh, which was even more eloquent than _la langue turque_. there were sure to be some sensitive people who did not like it; but they were very hard to please. and the rich man was in fact so truly kind and willing to make everybody comfortable, that the most sensible even of the sensitive people forgave him. and as the majority in society is not sensitive when its own advantage and pleasure is concerned, his house was always full of visitors, among whom he moved briskly, always pleased, always endeavouring to elicit the expression of a wish which he could satisfy. katie took less trouble. she was less conscious of being rich. she was willing to share all her own advantages, but it did not appear to her, as to her father, ridiculous that other people should not be rich too. the house was always full of visitors staying there, and there was not a day that there were not neighbours dropping in to lunch or invited to dinner, keeping up a commotion which delighted mr. williamson and amused katie, who was to the manner born, and understood life only in this way. it happened thus that it was into a large party that walter, coming with a sense that he was under the dominion of fate, and was about to settle the whole tenor of his life, plunged unaware. he heard the sound of many voices before he had got near the great drawing-room, the door of which stood open, giving vent to the murmur of talk from about twenty people within. he had scarcely ever gone up so magnificent a staircase, broad, and light, and bright as became a new palace, with footmen moving noiselessly upon the thick pile of the carpets. "there is a party, i suppose?" he said, hesitating. "no more than usual, my lord," said the elegant functionary in black, who was about to announce him, with a bland and soft smile of superiority and a little pity like his master's for the man who knew no better, "two or three gentlemen have dropped in to lunch." the drawing-room was a large room, with a huge round bow-window giving upon the loch. it was furnished and decorated in the most approved manner, with quantities of pretty things of every costly description: for katie, like her father, betrayed the constitution and temperament of wealth, by loving cost almost more than beauty. she was, however, too well instructed to be led into the mistake of making that luxurious modern room into the semblance of anything ancient or faded, while mr. williamson was too fond of everything bright and fresh to be persuaded even by fashion into such an anachronism. there was a faint suspicion in the mirrors and gilding and all the conveniences and luxuries, of the style of grandeur peculiar to the saloon of a splendid steamer, to which the steam-yacht, which was the chief object in the immediate prospect as seen from the plate-glass window, gave additional likelihood. walter for his part was strangely startled, when, out of the seriousness of his own lonely thoughts, and the sense of having arrived at a great crisis, he suddenly stepped into the flutter and talk of this large assembly, which was composed of some half-dozen neighbours on the loch, most of them young men in more or less attendance upon katie, mingled with strangers of all classes whom mr. williamson had picked up here and there. there was a little pause in the hum of voices at his own name, and a slight stir of interest, various of the guests turning round to look as he came in. the master of the house advanced with a large hand held out, and an effusive welcome; but the little lady of birkenbraes paid walter the much greater compliment of pursuing her conversation undisturbed, without betraying by a movement that she knew he was there. katie was not rude. it was not her habit to pay so little attention to a new-comer: she was profoundly conscious of his entrance, and of every step he made among the groups distributed about; but as the matter was a little serious, and his appearance of some importance, she showed a slight stir of mind and thoughts, which could scarcely be called agitation, in this way. it was only when her father called loudly, "katie, katie, do you not see lord erradeen?" that she turned, not moving from her place, and suddenly held out her hand with a smile. "how do you do? i heard you had come," said katie; and then returned to her talk. "as for the influence of scenery upon the mind of the common people, i think it has more influence in the highlands than anywhere, but very little when all is said. you don't think much of what you see every day, unless, indeed, you think everything of it. you must be totally indifferent, or an enthusiast," said the philosophical young lady. walter meanwhile stood before her, almost awkwardly, feeling the rigidity upon his countenance of a somewhat unmeaning smile. "and to which class does miss williamson belong?" said her companion, who was a virtuous young member of parliament, anxious to study national peculiarities wherever he might happen to be. "to neither," said katie, with a slight coldness, just enough to mark that she did not consider herself as one of the "common people." and she turned to walter with equally marked meaning, "have you seen the forresters since you came, lord erradeen?" "i have seen no one," said walter, slightly startled by the question. "i came only last night, and am here to-day by your father's invitation----" "i know," said katie, with greater cordiality. "you speak as if i wanted you to account for yourself. oh, no! only one must begin the conversation somehow--unless i plunged you at once into my discussion with mr. braithwaite (mr. braithwaite, lord erradeen) about the characteristics of the inhabitants of a mountain country. do you feel up to it?" she added, with a laugh. "but you avoid the question," said the member of parliament. "you say, 'neither.' now, if it is interesting to know what effect these natural phenomena have upon the common mind, it is still more interesting when it is a highly cultivated intelligence which is in question." "help me out!" cried katie, with a glance at walter. "i have never been educated--no woman is, you know. how are we to know what the highly cultured feel! papa is not cultured at all--he does not pretend to it, which is why people approve of him; and as for me!" she spread out her hands like a sort of exclamation. "and lord erradeen cannot give you any information either," she added, demurely, "for he has not known the loch very long--and i think he does not like it. no, but you shall see one who can really be of some use this afternoon. don't you think she is the very person, lord erradeen? oona--for she has lived on the loch, or rather in the loch, all her life." "and when shall i see this--nymph is she, or water goddess?" said the genial member. "that will indeed be to gather knowledge at the fountain-head." "do you think we may say she is a nymph, lord erradeen? oh yes--what do you call those classical ladies that take care of the water--naiads? oona is something of that sort. but better than the classics, for she has water above and water below for a great part of the year. you don't know how many superstitions we have remaining in this wild part of the country. we have ghosts, and wandering jews, and mysterious lights: lord erradeen will tell you----" katie paused with the malice bright in her eyes. she did not mean to affront the recovered attendant who might turn out a suitor, and upon whom it was possible she might be induced to smile; so she paused with a little laugh, and allowed braithwaite to break in. "do you call this a wild part of the country, miss williamson? then what must the cultivated portions look like? i see nothing but beautiful villas and palaces, and all the luxuries of art." "the comforts of the saut market," said katie with a shrug of her shoulders. "it is more easy to carry them about with you than in bailie nicol jarvie's time. but there is luncheon! papa is always formal about our going in, though i tell him that is out of date nowadays. so you must wait, if you please, lord erradeen, and take me." there was then a pause, until, as they brought up the rear of the procession down-stairs, katie said, with the slightest pressure on his arm to call his attention, "that is a member of parliament in search of information and statistics. if you hear me talk more nonsense than usual you will know why." "do you expect miss forrester this afternoon?" asked walter quite irrelevant. katie's heart gave a little jump. she did not like to be beat. it was the healthful instinct of emulation, not any tremor of the affections. she gave him a keen glance half of anger, half of enjoyment, for she loved a fray. "better than that," she cried gaily, "we are going down the loch to see her. don't you remember mrs. forrester's scones, lord erradeen! you are ungrateful, for i know you have eaten them. but you shall come, too." if this had been said on the stairs, walter, probably, would have given a dignified answer to the effect that his engagements would scarcely permit--but they were by this time in the dining-room in the little flutter of taking places which always attends the sitting down of a party, an operation which katie, with little rapid indications of her pleasure, simplified at once; and walter found himself seated by her side and engaged in conversation by the enterprising braithwaite at his other hand before he could utter any remonstrance. mr. braithwaite set it down in his journal that lord erradeen was a dull young fellow, petted by the women because he was a lord, no other reason being apparent--and wondered a little at the bad taste of miss williamson who ought to have known better. as for katie, she exerted herself to smooth down walter's slightly ruffled plumes. there was no use, she thought, in handing him over at once to oona by thus wounding his _amour propre_. she inquired into his travels. she asked where he had disappeared when they all left town. "i expected we should find you at auchnasheen for the th," she said. "you are the only man i know who is philosopher enough not to care for the grouse. one is driven to believe about that time of the year that men can think of nothing else." "perhaps, katie," said young tom of ellermore, "if you were to speak to lord erradeen, whom we don't know as yet, as we have never had the chance of calling" (here the young men exchanged bows, accompanied by a murmur from katie, "mr. tom campbell, ellermore," while the colour rose in young tom's cheek), "perhaps he would be charitable to us others that are not philosophers." "have ye not enough grouse of your own, tom campbell?" cried mr. williamson, who, in a pause of the conversation, had heard this address. "man! if i were you i would think shame to look a bird in the face." "and why?" cried the young fellow; "that was what they were made for. do you think otherwise that they would be allowed to breed like _that_, and eat up everything that grows?" "heather," said the head of the house, "and bracken. profitable crops, my word!" here walter interrupted the discussion by a polite speech to young tom, whose eyes blazed with pleasure and excitement at the offer made him. "but i hope," he said, "you will join us yourself. it will be like stealing a pleasure to have such an enjoyment, and the master of it not there." "i have other work in hand," walter said; at which young tom stared and coloured still more, and a slight movement showed itself along the table, which mr. braithwaite, the knowledge-seeker, being newly arrived, did not understand. tom cried hastily, "i beg your pardon," and many eyes were turned with sudden interest upon lord erradeen. but this was what walter had anticipated as little as the parliamentary inquirer. he grew so red that tom campbell's healthy blush was thrown into the shade. "i ought rather to say," he added hastily, "that my time here is too short for amusement." there was an uneasy little pause, and then everybody burst into talk. both the silence and the conversation were significant. lord erradeen turned to katie with an instinctive desire for sympathy, but katie was occupied, or pretended to be so, with her luncheon. it was not here that sympathy on that point was to be found. "i wonder," said katie, somewhat coldly, "that you do not remain longer when you are here. auchnasheen is very nice, and you ought to know your neighbours, don't you think, lord erradeen? if it is merely business, or duty, that brings you----" "i wish i knew which it was," he said in a low tone. katie turned and looked at him with those eyes of common-sense in which there is always a certain cynicism. "i did not think in this century," she said, "that it was possible for any man not to know why he was doing a thing; but you perhaps like to think that an old family has rules of its own, and ought to keep up the past." "i should think," said mr. braithwaite, not discouraged by the lower tone of this conversation, "that the past must have a very strong hold upon any one who can suppose himself a highland chieftain." "a highland chief!" cried katie, opening her brown eyes wide: and then she laughed, which was a thing strangely offensive to walter, though he could scarcely have told why. "i fear," he said coldly, "that though i am to some extent a highland laird, i have no pretension to be a chief. there is no clan methven that i ever heard of: though indeed i am myself almost a stranger and of no authority." "mrs. forrester will tell you, mr. braithwaite," said katie. "she is a sort of queen of the loch. she is one of the old macnabs who once were sovereign here. these people," she said, waving her hand towards the various scions of the great clan campbell, "are mushrooms in comparison: which is a comfort to our feelings, seeing that we sink into insignificance as creatures of to-day before them. the very original people for highly consolatory to the upstarts, for we are just much the same as the middling-old people to them. they are worlds above us all." here tom of ellermore leant over his immediate neighbours and reminded katie that the days were short in october, and that it was a stiff row to the isle: and the conversation terminated in the hurried retirement of the ladies, and selection of rugs and wrappers to make them comfortable. mr. williamson had, as he said, "more sense," than to set out upon any such ridiculous expedition. he stood and watched the preparations, with his thumbs stuck into the arm-holes of his waistcoat. "ye had much better take the yacht," he said. "she could get up steam in half an hour, and take you there in ten minutes, and there is plenty of room for ye all, and the cabin in case of rain. but as ye like! a wilful man will have his way. if ye would rather work yourselves than have the work done for ye--and a shower in prospect! but it's your own affair." the party, however, preferred the boats, and katie put her father's remonstrance aside with a wave of her hand. "it is all these boys are ever good for," she said, "and why would you stop them? besides, it is far nicer than your mechanical steam, and tea on board, and all the rest of it. lord erradeen, you are to steer. if you don't know the currents i can tell you. here is your place beside me: and you can tell me what you have been doing all this time, for there were so many interruptions at lunch i got no good of you," the young lady said. thus walter was swept along in katie's train. as he was quite unaware of any understanding between the girls he was of course ignorant that any special significance could attach to his arrival in this manner at the isle. and for his own part he was pleased by the thought of seeing oona for the first time in an accidental way, without any responsibility, so to speak, of his own. it was a little chilly for a water-party, but on the lochs people are prepared for that and it interferes with no one's pleasure. the afternoon was full of sunshine, and every bit of broken bank, and every island and feathery crest of fir-trees, was reflected and beautified in the still water, that broke with a ripple the fantastic doubling of every substance, but lent a glory to the colour and brilliancy to every outline. the gay party swept along over reflected woods, themselves all brilliant in reflection, and making the loch as gay as a venetian canal. on the little landing-place at the isle the whole small population was collected to meet them: mrs. forrester in her white cap, shivering slightly, and glad to draw round her the fur cloak which mysie was putting on her shoulders from behind, "for the sun has not the strength it once had," she explained, "now that we are just getting round the corner of the year:" hamish always in his red shirt, kneeling on the little wooden landing which he had wheeled out to receive the party, in order to catch the prow of the first boat; and oona, a little apart, standing looking out, with a faint thrill of excitement about her, consequent on having just heard the news of walter's arrival, but no expectation to make this excitement tangible. they made a pretty show upon the little beach, reflected, too, in the clear depths below--the bit of ribbon on the mother's cap, the knot of pale roses on oona's breast, culminating in mysie's stronger tints on one side, and the red of hamish's garment on the other. "what a pretty picture it would make," katie said. "'hospitality,' you ought to call it, or 'welcome to the isle.' but there ought to be a gentleman to make it perfect; either an old gentleman to represent oona's father, or a young one for her husband. don't you think so, lord erradeen?" it was perhaps at this moment when he was listening with a somewhat distracted look, smiling against the grain, and standing up in the boat to steer, that oona saw him first. it cannot be denied that the shock was great. in her surprise she had almost made a false step on the slippery shingle, and mrs. forrester grasped her dress with an "oona! you'll be in the water if you don't take more care." oona recovered herself with a blush, which she would have given anything in the world to banish from her countenance. it was so then! this man, who had, all unawares, produced so much effect upon her life and thoughts, was coming back within her little circle of existence in katie williamson's train! she smiled to herself a moment after, holding her head high, and with a sense of ridicule pervading the being which had been momentarily transfixed by that keen arrow of surprise and pain. she said to herself that the humour of it was more than any one could have believed, but that all was well. oh, more than well!--for was not this the thing of all others that was good for her, that would put the matter on the easiest footing? all this flew through her mind like lightning while the boat came close, amid the friendly shouts and greetings of the crew, all of them "neighbours' sons." mr. braithwaite, the english observer, sat by admiring while these brotherly salutations were gone through. perhaps he did not note in his diary that the young aborigines called each other by their christian names, but he did make a remark to that effect in his mind. and then there ensued the little tumult of disembarking, in the midst of which oona, holding out her hand, frankly greeted lord erradeen. "we heard you had come back," she said, giving him a look of full and confident composure which puzzled walter. she meant him, and not him only, to perceive the frankness of a reception in which there was not a shade of embarrassment, no recollection of the strange moment they had spent together, or of the encounter that had taken place upon the isle. when one pair of eyes look into another with that momentary demonstration it is a proof of some meaning more than meets the eye. and walter, whose own eyes were full too of a something, subdued and concealed so far as possible--a deprecating wistful look in which there was pardon sought (though he had consciously done her no wrong; but in doing wrong at all had he not offended oona as dante offended beatrice, although she might never know of what sins he had been guilty?) and homage offered--was still more perplexed by that open gaze in which there was nothing of the softness of the look with which oona had watched him going away, and which had so often recurred to his mind since. what did it mean? it gave him welcome, but a welcome that felt like the closing of a door. he was far too much occupied with investigating this problem to remark the corresponding look, the slight, almost imperceptible smile, that passed between oona and katie as they met. in the midst of all the cheerful din, the merry voices on the air, the boats run up upon the beach, the cheerful movement towards the house, such fine shades of feeling and dramatic purpose can make themselves apparent to those who are in the secret, but to no other. a merrier party never ascended the slope, and that is saying much. mrs. forrester led the way in the highest satisfaction. "mysie, ye will stand on no ceremony about following," she said, "but run on before and see that the tea is masked: but not too much, to get that boiled taste. it is perhaps extravagant, but i like to have just what you may call the first flavour of the tea. and let the scones be just ready to bring ben, for miss williamson must not be kept too late on the water at this time of the year. to tell the truth," she said, turning with her smiles to the member of parliament, a functionary for whom she had a great respect, counting him more important than a young lord, who after all was in the position of a "neighbour's son"; "to tell the truth, i have just to be inhospitable at this season and push them away with my own hands: for it is always fresh upon the loch, and a score of young creatures with colds, all because i let them stay half an hour too late, would be a dreadful reflection. this will be your first visit to the loch? oh, i am sure we are delighted to see you, both oona and me. we are always pleased to meet with strangers that have an appreciation. some people would think it was a very lonely life upon the isle; but i assure you if i could give you a list of all the people that come here! it would be rather a good thing to keep a list now that i think of it, you would see some names that would be a pleasure to any one to see. yes, i think i must just set up a visiting-book, as if we were living in some grand place in london, say grosvenor square. what are you saying, katie, my dear? oh yes, i have shaken hands with lord erradeen. i am very glad to see him back, and i hope he will stay longer and let us see more of him than last year. this is one of our finest views. i always stop here to point it out to strangers," she added, pausing, for indeed it was her favourite spot to take breath. and then the group gathered at the turning, and looked out upon kinloch houran, lying in shadow, in the dimness of one of those quick-flying clouds which give so much charm to a highland landscape. the old grey ruin lying upon the dulled surface, steel blue and cold, of the water, which round the island was dancing in sunshine, gave a curious effectiveness to the landscape. "it is the ghost-castle." "it is the haunted house," said one of the visitors, in a whisper, who would have spoken loud enough but for the presence of walter, who stood and looked, with great gravity, upon his place of trial. when katie's voice became audible at his side, advising him in very distinct tones to restore the old place, walter felt himself shrink and grow red, as if some villany had been suggested to him. he made no reply. he had thought himself of something of the same description in his first acquaintance with kinloch houran; but how different his feelings were now! the reader already knows what were mrs. forrester's teas. the party filled the pleasant drawing-room in which a fire was burning brightly, notwithstanding the sunshine without, and the scones arrived in bountiful quantity, one supply after another; mysie's countenance beaming as "a few more" were demanded; while her mistress did nothing but fill out cups of tea and press her young guests to eat. "another cup will not hurt you," she said. "that is just nonsense about nerves. if it was green tea, indeed, and you were indulging in it at night to keep you off your sleep--but in a fine afternoon like this, and after your row. now just try one of these scones; you have not tasted this kind. it is hot from the griddle, and we all think my cook has a gift. mysie, tell margaret that we will have a few more. and, oona, it is the cream scones that katie likes: but you must tell lord erradeen to try this kind, just to please me." thus the kind lady ran on. it gave her the profoundest pleasure to see her house filled, and to serve her young guests with these simple delicacies. "dear me, it is just nothing. i wish it was better worth taking," she answered to mr. braithwaite's compliments, who made the usual pretty speeches of the english tourist as to scotch hospitality. mrs. forrester felt as if these compliments were a half-reproach to her for so simple an entertainment. "you see," she said, "it is all we can do; for, besides that there is no gentleman in the house, which is against dinner-giving, we are not well situated in the isle for evening visits. the nights are cold at this time of the year, and it is not always easy to strike our bit little landing in the dark; so we have to content ourselves with a poor offering to our friends. and i am sure you are very kind to take it so politely. if my boys were at home, i would have it more in my power to show attention; but if you are going further north, i hope you will make your way to eaglescairn and see my son, who will be delighted to show you the country about him," mrs. forrester said. the english m.p. could not but think that it was his reputation which had travelled before him, and gained him so delightful a reception. as for the rest of the party, they were fully entertained by oona, who was more than usually lively and bright. she said very little to lord erradeen, who was by far the most silent of the assembly, but exerted herself for her other guests, with a little flush upon her which was very becoming, and an excitement completely concealed and kept under, which yet acted upon her like a sort of ethereal stimulant quickening all her powers. they were so gay that mrs. forrester's anxiety about their return, which indeed she forgot as soon as they were under her roof, was baffled, and it was not till the glow of the sunset was beginning to die out in the west that the visitors began to move. then there was a hurrying and trooping out, one group following another, to get to the boats. the landscape had changed since they came, and now the upper end of the loch was all cold and chill in the greyness of early twilight, though the sky behind in the southward was still glowing with colour. benlui lay in a soft mist having put off his purple and gold, and drawn about him the ethereal violet tones of his evening mantle; but on the slopes beneath, as they fell towards the margin of the water, all colour had died out. lord erradeen was one of the last to leave the house, and he was at first but vaguely aware of the little movement and sudden pause of the party upon the first turn of the winding path. he did not even understand for a moment the eager whisper which came almost more distinctly than a shout through the clear still evening air. it was the voice of young tom of ellermore. "look there! the light--the light! who says they do not believe in it?" the young fellow said; and then there was a flutter of exclamations and subdued cries of wonder and interest, not without dissentient voices. "i see some sort of a glimmer," said one. "it is as clear as day," cried another. "it must be reflection," a third said. walter raised his eyes; he had no sort of doubt to what they referred. his old house lay dark upon the edge of the dark gleaming loch, silent, deserted, not a sign of life about the ruined walls; but upon the tower shone the phantasm of the light, now waning, now rising, as if some unfelt wind blew about the soft light of an unseen lamp. it brought him to himself in a moment, and woke him up from the maze of vague thoughts which had abstracted him even in the midst of the gay movement and bustle. he listened with strange spectatorship, half-stern, half-amused, to all the murmurs of the little crowd. "if you call that light!" said the voice of katie; "it is some phosphorescence that nobody has examined into, i suppose. who knows what decayed things are there? that sort of glimmer always comes of decay. oh, yes, i once went to chemistry lectures, and i know. besides, it stands to reason. what could it be else?" "you know very well, katie, what they say--that it is the summons of the warlock lord." "i would like to answer the summons," cried katie, with a laugh. "i would send for the health inspector, from glasgow, and clear it all out, every old crevice, and all the perilous stuff. that would be the thing to do. as for the warlock lord, papa shall invite him to dinner if you will find out where he is to be met with, tom." "like the commandant in _don giovanni_," somebody said; and there was an echoing laugh, but of a feeble kind. walter heard this conversation with a sort of forlorn amusement. he was not excited; his blood was rather congealed than quickened in his veins. but he lingered behind, taking no notice of his late companions as they streamed away to the boats. he seemed in a moment to have been parted miles--nay, worlds away from them. when he thought of the interview that was before him, and of the light-hearted strangers making comments upon the legend of the place with laugh and jest, it seemed to him that he and they could scarcely belong to the same race. he lingered, with no heart for the farewells and explanations that would be necessary if he left them formally: and turning round gazed steadfastly towards kinloch houran from behind the shade of the shrubbery. here oona found him, as she rushed back to warn him that the boats were pushing off. she began breathlessly-- "lord erradeen, you are called--" then stopped, looked at him, and said no more. he did not answer her for a moment, but stood still, and listened to the sounds below, the impatient call, the plash of the oars in the water, the grating of the keel of the last boat as it was pushed off. then he looked at oona, with a smile. "i am called--?" he said, "but not that way. now i must go home." her heart beat so that she could scarcely speak. was this spell to take possession of her again, against her will, without any wish of his, like some enchantment? she fought against it with all her might. "if that is so," she said, "hamish will put you across, when you please." he took no notice of these indifferent words. "this time," he said, "it is altogether different. i know what is going to happen, and i am not afraid. but it must come to an end." what was it to her if it came to an end or not? she tried to check the quick-rising sympathy, to offer no response. "they will be late on the water, but i hope they will get home before dark," she replied. then he looked at her wistfully, with a look that melted her very heart. "don't you know that it will never come to an end unless you stand by me?" he cried. chapter xiv. mrs. forrester was most willing to put hamish and the boat, or anything else she possessed, at lord erradeen's service. "it is just the most sensible thing you could do," she said. "they will be very late, and half of them will have colds. oona, you will just let hamish know. but lord erradeen, since you are here, will you not stay a little longer, and get your dinner before you go? no? well, i will not say another word if it is not convenient. just tell hamish, oona, my dear." walter followed her so closely when she went upon that mission that she could not escape him. they stood together in the grey of the evening light, upon the beach, while hamish prepared the boat, oona's mind in a tumult of apprehension and resistance, with an insidious softness behind, which she felt with despair was betraying her over again into the folly she had surmounted. he had not the same commotion in his mind; his thoughts were altogether bent on what was coming. she was his confidant, his support in it, though he had not said a word to her. he took her into account in the matter as a man takes his wife. she was a part of it all, though it was not of her he was thinking. he spoke after a moment in a tone full of this curious claim, which seemed to him at the moment incontestable. "it will never come to an end unless you stand by me," he said. "everything can be done if you will stand by me." oona, in her strange agitation, felt as if she had surprised him thinking aloud; as if he did not address her, but merely repeated to himself a fact which was beyond dispute. he said no more, neither did she make any reply. and once more, as if in repetition of the former scene, he turned round as he stepped into the heavy boat, and looked back upon her as hamish began to ply the oars. she stood and watched him from the beach; there was no wave of the hand, no word of farewell. they were both too much moved for expression of any kind; and everything was different though the same. on the former occasion he had been escaping, and was eager to get free, to get out of reach of an oppression he could not bear; but now was going to his trial, to meet the tyrant, with a certainty that escape was impossible. and for oona there had been the sensation of a loss unspeakable--a loss which she could neither confess nor explain, which took the heart out of her life; whereas now there was a re-awakening, a mysterious beginning which she could not account for or understand. she stood on the beach till the boat had disappeared, and even till the sound of the oars died out in the distance, in an agitation indescribable. the first despairing sense that the influence against which she had struggled was regaining possession of her, was for the moment lost in an overwhelming tide of sympathy and response to the claim he had made. he had no right to make that claim, and it was intolerable that she should have so little power over herself as to yield to it, and allow herself to become thus the subject of another. her pride, her reason, had been in arms against any such thraldom; but for this moment oona was again overcome. she had no power of resistance--her very being seemed to go with him, to add itself to his, as he disappeared across the darkling loch. stand by him! the words went breathing about her in the air, and in her mind, and everything in her echoed and responded--stand by him! yes, to the death. this excitement failed in a sudden chill and shiver, and sense of shame which covered her face with blushes which no one saw, as startled by the gathering dark, and the sound of mysie's step hastening down to the landing-place with a shawl for her, oona turned again and ran swiftly up the winding way. the loch was like lead, with a ripple of mysterious changing lights in the darkness, as the boat shot round under the shadow of kinloch houran. all was as still as in a world of dreams, the sound of hamish's oars in their regular sweep alone breaking the intense stillness. here and there among the trees a light glimmered on the shore--a window of the manse--the door of the little inn standing open and betraying the ruddy warmth within: but no sound near enough to interrupt the stillness. walter felt as though he parted with a certain protection when he stepped upon the bit of mossed causeway which served as a landing pier to the old castle, and, bidding hamish good-night, stood alone in that solitude and watched the boatman's red shirt, which had forced its colour even upon the twilight, grow black as it disappeared. the sensation in walter's mind had little akin with that panic and horror which had once overwhelmed him. no doubt it was excitement that filled up his whole being, and made the pulses throb in his ears, but it was excitement subdued; and all he was conscious of was a sort of saddened expectation--a sense of a great event about to take place which he could not elude or stave off--a struggle in which he might be worsted. "let not him that putteth on his armour boast himself like him that putteth it off." he did not know what might happen to him. but the tremors of his nervous system, or of his agitated soul, or of his physical frame--he could not tell which it was--were stilled. he was intensely serious and sad, but he was not afraid. symington, who had been in waiting, listening for his master's return, opened the door and lighted him up the spiral stairs. the room was already lighted and cheerful, the curtains drawn, the fire blazing brightly. "the days are creeping in," he said, "and there's a nip in the air aneath thae hills--so i thought a fire would be acceptable." in fact the room looked very comfortable and bright, not a place for mysteries. walter sat down between the cheerful fire and the table with its lights. there is often at the very crisis of fate a relaxation of the strain upon the mind--a sudden sense as of peril over, and relief. thus the dying will often have a glimmer in the socket, a sense of betterness and hope before the last moment. in the same way a sensation of relief came on walter at the height of his expectation. his mind was stilled. a feeling without any justification, yet grateful and consoling, came over him, as if the trial were over, or at least postponed--as if something had intervened for his deliverance. he sat and warmed himself in this genial glow, feeling his pulses calmed and his mind soothed--he could not tell how. how long or how short the interval of consolation was, if a few minutes only, or an hour, or half a life-time, he could not tell. he was roused from it by the sound of steps in the corridor outside. it was a passage which ended in nothing--in the gloom of the ruinous portion of the house--and consequently it was not usual to hear any sound in it, the servants invariably approaching lord erradeen's rooms by the stair. on this occasion, however, walter, suddenly roused, heard some one coming from a distance, with steps which echoed into the vacancy as of an empty place, but gradually drawing nearer, sounding, in ordinary measure, a man's footstep, firm and strong, but not heavy, upon the corridor outside. then the door was opened with the usual click of the lock and heavy creak with which it swung upon its hinges. he rose up, scarcely knowing what he did. "you examined everything last night to find a secret passage," said the new-comer with a humorous look, "which indeed might very well have existed in a house of this date. there was actually such a passage once existing, and connected with a secret room which i have found useful in its time. but that was in another part of the house, and the age of concealments and mysteries--of that kind--is past. won't you sit down?" he added, pleasantly. "you see i put myself at my ease at once." walter's heart had given such a bound that the sensation made him giddy and faint. he stood gazing at the stranger, only half comprehending what was happening. all that happened was natural and simple in the extreme. the visitor walked round the table to the other side of the fire, and moving the large chair which stood there into a position corresponding to walter's, seated himself in the most leisurely and easy way. "sit down," he repeated after a moment, more peremptorily, and with almost a tone of impatience. "we have much to talk over. let us do it comfortably, at least." "i can have nothing to talk over," said walter, feeling that he spoke with difficulty, yet getting calm by dint of speaking, "with an undesired and unknown visitor." the other smiled. "if you will think of it you will find that i am far from unknown," he said. "no one can have a larger body of evidence in favour of his reality. what did that poor little woman in edinburgh say to you?" "i wonder," cried walter, unconscious of the inconsistency, "that you can permit yourself to mention her name." "poor little thing," he replied, "i am sincerely sorry for her. had i foreseen what was going to happen i should have guarded against it. you may tell her so. everything that is subject to human conditions is inconsistent and irregular. but on the whole, taking life altogether, there is not so much to be regretted. probably she is happier _there_ than had she embarked, as she was about to do, in a struggle with me. those who contend with me have not an easy career before them." "yet one day it will have to be done," walter said. "yes. you consent then that i am not unknown, however undesired," the stranger said, with a smile. he was so entirely at his ease, at his leisure, as if he had hours before him, that walter, gazing in an impatience beyond words, felt the hopelessness of any effort to hurry through the interview, and dropped into his seat with a sigh of reluctance and despair. "who are you?" he cried; "and why, in the name of god, do you thus torment and afflict a whole race?" "the statement is scarcely correct. i was a highland youth of no pretension once, and you are supposed to be lord erradeen, not only a scotch lord, but an english peer. that is what my tormenting and afflicting have come to, with many solid acres and precious things besides. very few families of our antiquity have even survived these centuries. not one has grown and increased to the point at which we stand. i see a great addition within our reach now." "and what good has it all done?" walter said. "they say that my predecessor was a miserable man, and i know that i--since this elevation, as you think it--have been----" "good for nothing. i allow it fully. what were you before? equally good for nothing; consuming your mother's means, opposing her wishes, faithful to no one. my friend, a man who sets himself against me must be something different from that." to this walter made no reply. he could not be called penitent for the folly of his life; but he was aware of it. and he did not attempt to defend himself. he was entirely silenced for the moment: and the other resumed. "i have always felt it to be probable that some one capable of resistance might arise in time. in the mean time all that has happened has been gain, and my work has been fully successful. it would rather please me to meet one in the course of the ages who was fit to be my conqueror, being my son. it is a contingency which i have always taken into consideration. but it is not likely to be you," he said, with a slight laugh. "i shall know my victor when he comes." "why should it not be i? if it be enough to hate this tyrannical influence, this cruel despotism----" "as you have hated every influence and every rule all your life," said the other with a smile. "that is not the sort of man that does anything. do you think it is agreeable to me to be the progenitor of a race of nobodies? i compensate myself by making them great against their will--the puppets! i allow you to wear my honours out of consideration to the prejudices of society: but they are all mine." "it was not you, however, who got them," said walter. "can a grandfather inherit what was given to his descendants?" "come," said the stranger, "you are showing a little spirit--i like that better. let us talk now of the immediate business in hand. you have something in your power which i did not foresee when i talked to you last. then there were few opportunities of doing anything--nothing in your range that i had observed, but to clear off incumbrances, which, by the way, you refused to do. now a trifling exertion on your part----" "you mean the sacrifice of my life." the stranger laughed--this time with a sense of the ludicrous which made his laugh ring through the room with the fullest enjoyment. "the sacrifice of a life, which has been made happy by ---- and by ---- and by ----. how many names would you like me to produce? you have perhaps a less opinion of women than i have. which of them, if they knew all about it, as i do, would pick up that life and unite their own to it? but happily they don't know. she thinks perhaps--that girl on the isle--that i mean her harm. i mean her no harm--why should i harm her? i harm no one who does not step into my way." "man!" cried walter--"if you are a man--would you hurt her for succouring me? would you treat her as you treated----" "that was an accident," he said quickly. "i have told you already i would have guarded against it had i divined----but your limited life is the very empire of accident; and those who come across my path must take the consequences. it is their own fault if they put themselves in the way of danger. let us return to the subject in hand. the woman whom you must marry----" the words suddenly seemed to close on the air, leaving no sort of echo or thrill in it; and walter, looking round, saw symington come in with the scared look he remembered to have seen in the old man's countenance before, though without any sign in him of seeing the stranger. he asked in a hesitating manner, "did ye ring, my lord? you'll be wanting your dinner. it is just ready to come up." walter was about to send the old servant hastily away; but a slight sign from his visitor restrained him. he said nothing, but watched, with feelings indescribable, the proceedings of the old man, who began to lay the table, moving to and fro, smoothing the damask cloth, folding the napkin, arranging the silver. symington did everything as usual: but there was a tremor in him, unlike his ordinary composure. sometimes he threw an alarmed and tremulous look round the room, as if something terrifying might lurk in any corner; but while doing so brushed past the very person of that strange visitor in the chair without a sign that he knew any one to be there. this mixture of suppressed panic and inconceivable unconsciousness gave walter a suffocating sensation which he could not master. he cried out suddenly, in a loud and sharp tone which was beyond his own control, "symington! is it possible you don't see----" symington let the forks and spoons he was holding drop out of his hands. he cried out, quavering, "lord, have a care of us!" then he stopped trembling to gather up the things he had dropped, which was a great trouble, so nervous and tremulous was he. he collected them all at the very foot of the man who sat smiling in the great chair. "you gave me a terrible fright, my lord," the old man said, raising himself with a broken laugh: "that was what you meant, no doubt. all this water about and damp makes a man nervish. see! what should i see? i am no one of those," symington added, with a great attempt at precision and a watery smile, "that see visions and that dream dreams." "why should you disturb the man's mind for nothing," said the visitor in that penetrating voice which walter felt to go through him, penetrating every sense. he had grown reckless in the strange horror of the circumstances. "don't you hear that?" he cried sharply, catching symington by the arm. the old man gave a cry, his eyes flickered and moved as if they would have leapt from their sockets. he shook so that walter's grasp alone seemed to keep him from falling. but he remained quite unconscious of any special object of alarm. "me! i hear naething," he cried. "there is nothing to hear. you have listened to all those old stories till ye are just out of yourself. but no me," symington said with a quavering voice, but a forced smile. "no me! i am not superstitious. you will no succeed, my lord, in making a fool of me. let me go. the trout is done by this time, and i must bring up my dinner," he cried with feverish impatience, shaking himself free. walter turned round half-dazed to say he knew not what to the occupant of that chair. but when he looked towards it there was no one there: nor in the room, nor anywhere near was the slightest trace of his visitor to be found. chapter xv. it may be supposed that the dinner which was served to lord erradeen after this episode was done but little justice to. the trout was delicious, the bird cooked to perfection; but the young man, seated in sight of the apparently vacant chair, where so lately his visitor had been seated, could scarcely swallow a morsel. was he there still, though no one could see him? or had he departed only to return again when symington and the meal had been cleared away, and the evening was free? there was a sickening sensation at walter's heart as he asked himself these questions, and indeed, throughout this portion of his life, his experience was that the actual presence of this extraordinary person was very much less exciting and confusing than the effect produced during his apparent absence, when the idea that he might still be there unseen, or might appear at any moment, seemed to disturb the mental balance in a far more painful way. in the present case the effect was overpowering. walter had been talking to him almost with freedom: it was impossible, indeed, thus to converse--even though the conversation was something of a struggle, with a man possessed of all the ordinary faculties, and in appearance, though more dignified and stately than most, yet in no way unlike other men--without a gradual cessation of those mysterious tremors with which the soul is convulsed in presence of anything that appears supernatural. the personage who inhabited, or (for it was impossible to think of him as inhabiting a ruin) periodically visited kinloch houran had nothing in him save his stateliness of aspect which need have separated him from ordinary men. he would have attracted attention anywhere, but except as a person of unusual distinction, would have startled no one; and even when the young man so cruelly subject to his influence talked with him, it was impossible to keep up the superstitious terror which nature feels for the inexplainable. but as soon as he withdrew, all this instinctive feeling returned. walter's nerves and imagination sprang up into full play again, and got command of his reason. by moments it seemed to him that he caught a glimpse still of an outline in the chair, of eyes looking at him, of the smile and the voice which expressed so full a knowledge of all his own past history and everything that was in him. this consciousness gave to his eyes the same scared yet searching look which he had seen in those of symington, took his breath from him, made his head whirl, and his heart fail. symington waiting behind his chair, but eagerly on the watch for any sign, saw that his young lord was ghastly pale, and perceived the half stealthy look which he cast around him, and especially the entire failure of his appetite. this is a thing which no scotch domestic can bear. "you are no eating, my lord," he said in a tone of gentle reproach, as he withdrew the plate with the untasted trout. ("that many a poor gentleman would have been glad of!" he said to himself.) "no, i am not particularly hungry," walter said, with a pretence at carelessness. "i can recommend the bird," said symington, "if it's no just a cheeper, for the season is advanced, it's been young and strong on the wing; and good game is rich, fortifying both to the body and spirit. those that have delicate stomachs, it is just salvation to them--and for those that are, as ye may say, in the condition of invalids in the mind----" symington had entirely recovered from his own nervousness. he moved about the room with a free step, and felt himself fully restored to the position of counsellor and adviser, with so much additional freedom as his young master was less in a position to restrain him, and permitted him to speak almost without interruption. indeed walter as he ineffectually tried to eat was half insensible to the monologue going on over his head. "ye must not neglect the body," symington said, "especially in a place like this where even the maist reasonable man may be whiles put to it to keep his right senses. if ye'll observe, my lord, them that see what ye may call visions are mostly half starvit creatures, fasting or ill-nourished. superstition, in my opinion, has a great deal to do with want of meat. but your lordship is paying no attention. just two three mouthfuls, my lord! just as a duty to yourself and all your friends, and to please a faithful auld servant," symington said, with more and more insinuating tones. there was something almost pathetic in the insistance with which he pressed "a breast of pairtridge that would tempt a saint" upon his young master. the humour of it struck walter dully through the confusion of his senses. it was all like a dream to him made up of the laughable and the miserable; until symington at last consented to see that his importunities were unavailing, and after a tedious interval of clearing away, took himself and all his paraphernalia out of the room, and left walter alone. it seemed to lord erradeen that he had not been alone for a long time, nor had any leisure in which to collect his faculties; and for the first few minutes after the door had closed upon his too officious servant a sense of relief was in his mind. he drew a long breath of ease and consolation, and throwing himself back in his chair gave himself up to momentary peace. but this mood did not last long. he had not been alone five minutes before there sprang up within him something which could be called nothing less than a personal struggle with--he could not tell what. there is a quickening of excitement in a mental encounter, in the course of a momentous discussion, which almost reaches the height of that passion which is roused by bodily conflict, when the subject is important enough, or the antagonists in deadly earnest. but to describe how this is intensified when the discussion takes place not between two, but in the spiritual consciousness of one, is almost too much for words to accomplish. lord erradeen in the complete solitude of this room, closed and curtained and shut out from all access of the world, suddenly felt himself in the height of such a controversy. he saw no one, nor did it occur to him again to look for any one. there was no need. had his former visitor appeared, as before, seated opposite to him in the chair which stood so suggestively between the fire and the table, his pulses would have calmed, and his mind become composed at once. but there was nobody to address him in human speech, to oppose to him the changes of a human countenance. the question was discussed within himself with such rapidity of argument and reply, such clash of intellectual weapons, as never occurs to the external hearing. there passed thus under review the entire history of the struggle which had been going on from the time of lord erradeen's first arrival at the home of his race. it ran after this fashion, though with the quickness of thought far swifter than words. "you thought you had conquered me. you thought you had escaped me." "i did; you had no power in the glen, or on the isle." "fool! i have power everywhere, wherever you have been." "to betray me into wickedness?" "to let you go your own way. did i tempt you to evil before ever you heard of me?" "can i tell? perhaps to prepare me for bondage." "at school, at home, abroad, in all relations? self-lover! my object at least is better than yours." "i am no self-lover; rather self-hater, self-despiser." "it is the same thing. self before all. i offer you something better, the good of your race." "i have no race. i refuse!" "you shall not refuse. you are mine, you must obey me." "never! i am no slave. i am my own master." "the slave of every petty vice; the master of no impulse. yield! i can crush you if i please." "never! i am--oona's then, who will stand by me." "oona's! a girl! who when she knows what you are will turn and loathe you." "fiend! you fled when she gave me her hand." "will she touch your hand when she knows what it has clasped before?" then walter felt his heart go out in a great cry. if any one had seen him thus, he would have borne the aspect of a madman. his forehead was knotted as with great cords, his eyes, drawn and puckered together in their sockets, shone with a gleam of almost delirious hatred and passion. he held back, his figure all drawn into angles, in a horrible tension of resistance as if some one with the force of a giant was seizing him. he thought that he shrieked out with all the force of mortal agony. "no! if oona turns from me and all angels--i am god's then at the last!" then there seemed to him to come a pause of perfect stillness in the heart of the battle; but not the cessation of conflict. far worse than the active struggle, it was with a low laugh that his antagonist seemed to reply. "god's! whom you neither love nor obey, nor have ever sought before." the room in which lord erradeen sat was quite still all through the evening, more silent than the night air that ruffled the water and sighed in the trees permitted outside. the servants did not hear a sound. peace itself could not have inhabited a more noiseless and restful place. chapter xvi. in the early morning there is an hour more like paradise than anything else vouchsafed to our mortal senses as a symbol of the better world to come. the evening is infinitely sweet, but it implies labour and rest and consolation, which are ideas not entirely dissevered from pain; but in the first glory of the morning there is an unearthly sweetness, a lustre as of the pristine world, unsoiled, untried, unalloyed, a heavenly life and calm. the sunshine comes upon us with a surprise, with something of that exultant novelty which it must have had to adam; the drops of dew shine like little separate worlds; the birds, most innocent of all the inhabitants of earth, have the soft-breathing universe to themselves: all their sweet domestic intercourses, the prattle of the little families, their trills of commentary touching everything that is going on in earth and heaven get accomplished, as the level line of sunshine penetrates from one glade to another, higher and higher, touching as it passes every bough into life. awakening and vitality are in the very atmosphere which brings a new hope, a new day, a new world of possibility and life. new heavens and a new earth thus present themselves to mortal cognisance, for the most part quite unconscious of them, every day. if only we brought nothing with us from the old world that ended in the night! but, alas, we bring everything--ourselves, that "heritage of woe," our thoughts, our desires, baffled or eager, for other objects than those which are in harmony with that new life and blessedness. when the sun rose visibly into the blue, skimming the surface of loch houran, and waking all the woods, there stood one spectator upon the old battlements of the ruined castle who was altogether out of harmony with the scene. walter had not slept all night. he had not even gone through the form of going to bed. he had come out as soon as there was a glimmer of daylight, which, in october, is long of coming, to get what refreshment was possible from the breath of the morning air, and thus had assisted at the re-awakening of earth, and all the development of the new-born day. from where he stood there lay before him a paradise of sky and water, with everything repeated, embellished, made into an ideal of twofold sweetness, brightness, and purity, in the broad mirror of the lake. the autumn woods, the tracts of green field, or late yellow of the unreaped corn, all showed like another fairy-land underneath, a country still purer, more dazzling, and brilliant, more still and fresh, than the morning land above. "the light that never was on sea or shore" shone in those glorified and softly rippling woods, trending away into the infinite to the point beyond which mortal vision cannot go. what haunts and refuges of happy life might be there! what dreams of poetry beyond the human! that lovely inversion of all things, that more than mortal freshness and sweetness and liquid glow of light, confused the mind with a kind of involuntary bliss, a vision of a place of escape, the never attained country to which the soul, had it wings, might flee away and be at rest. but that soul had no wings which looked out from walter's haggard countenance, as he leant on the half-ruined wall. he gazed at the scene before him like one who had no lot or part in it. its peace and brightness brought but into greater relief the restlessness of his own soul, the gloom and blackness in his heart. he had been struggling all night in a fierce internal controversy which, to his own consciousness, was with another intelligence more powerful than his own, and yet might have been with himself, with the better part that kept up within him a protest for better things, with such representatives of conscience and the higher affections as still existed within him. however it was, he was exhausted with the struggle, his strength was worn out. that lull of pain which does not mean any cure, or even any beginning of healing, but is merely a sign that the power of the sufferer to endure has come to its limit, gave him a kind of rest. but the rest itself was restless and incapable of composure. he moved about like an uneasy spirit along the broken line of the old battlements, pausing here and there to plunge his eyes into the landscape, to take in the morning air with a long inspiration. and so unlike was the mood of his mind to his usual character and habits, that as he moved, walter gave vent to a low moaning, such as gives a kind of fictitious relief to the old and suffering--an involuntary utterance which it was terrible to hear coming with his breathing from a young man's lips, and in the midst of such a scene. was he talking to himself? was he only moaning as a dumb creature moans? by and by he half flung himself, in his weariness, into one of the ruinous embrasures, and remained there, leaning his back against one side of it. and then he said to himself, repeating the words over and over again--"neither god's nor oona's. neither oona's nor god's." lord erradeen had arrived at that lowest depth of self-estimation, which means despair. his own life had been forced upon him, represented before his eyes he could not tell how. he had seen its motives disentangled, its course traced, all its wastes laid bare, with a distinctness against which he could offer no appeal. he could deny nothing; it was true; this was what he had done, with a repetition of folly, of selfishness, of baseness, for which he could offer no sort of excuse, which confounded and abased him. he had known it all, it is true, before; time after time he had pulled himself up and looked at the last scrap of his life, and pronounced it indefensible; then had pushed it from him and gone on again, escaping with all the haste he could from contemplation of the phenomena which were inexplicable, and which he did not desire to attempt to explain even to himself. he had said truly to miss milnathort that to know you are wrong is not always equivalent to being on the way to mend it. he had always known he was wrong; he had never been deficient in moral disapproval of others like himself, or even of himself, when in one of the pauses of his career he was brought face to face with that individual. but he had been able to put a sort of accidental gloss upon his own worst actions. he had not intended them; there had been no motive whatever in what he did; he had done so and so by chance--by indolence, because it happened to be put before him to do it; but he had meant nothing by it. out of this subterfuge he had been driven during the mental conflict of the night. and there was this peculiarity in his state, that he was not thus enlightened and convinced by the exertions of any reformatory influence, by any prophet bidding him repent. conviction came from entirely the other side, and with a motive altogether different. "who are you," his antagonist said, or seemed to say, "to take refuge with a pure woman, you who have never been pure? who are you to lay claim to be god's, after ignoring god's existence altogether; or to be your own master, who have never ruled or guided yourself, but have been the slave of every folly, a feather blown on the wind, a straw carried away by the stream?" all these accusations had been made as plain to him as the daylight. he had not been allowed to escape; the course of his life had been traced so clearly, that he could not protest, or object, or contradict; he was convinced--the most terrible position in which a man can be. whether any man, thoroughly persuaded of his own moral wretchedness and debasement ever does escape despair, is a question full of difficulty. the prodigal's sense that in his father's house every servant has enough and to spare while he perishes of hunger is a different matter. "father, i have sinned, i am no more worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy hired servants." there are still possibilities to a soul in such a position. but one who is driven from stronghold to stronghold, until at length he is forced to allow that there is no inducement which has not been tried and failed with him, that he has no claim to the succour of god or man, or woman, that he has turned his back upon all, neglected all, wronged every power in heaven and earth that could help, what is he to do? he may be forgiven; but forgiveness, in the entire abasement of that discovery, is not what he wants. he wants a renovation for which there seems no means left; he wants, in the old language--that language which we are said to have outgrown--to be born again: and that is impossible--impossible! what is there in heaven or earth that will prevent him from doing all over again what he has done before, the moment his circumstances permit it? so long as he is what he is--nothing: and how shall he be made other than what he is? "ye must be born again." ah, what preacher can know that as he does? but how--but how? neither god's nor oona's--and who, then, was to help him? he had caught at the woman in his despair; he had not even so much as thought of god till the last moment, and then had flown like a coward to a fetish, meaning nothing but to escape. why should god bend down from those spotless heavens to acknowledge the wretched runaway's clutch at his divine garments in the extremity of mortal terror? would oona have given him that hand of hers, had she known how his was stained? and would god attend to that coward's appeal made only when everything else failed? the young man sat in the corner of the embrasure pressing himself against the rough stone-work for support. despair had possession of his soul. what had he to do with the best and highest things, with freedom and love? after all, why should he be his own master, why claim the right to judge for himself? if he had this freedom fully, what would he do with it? throw it away next day in exchange for some nothing, some pleasure that palled in the tasting. pleasure! there was no pleasure, but only make-beliefs and deceptions. the old fellow was right, he began to say to himself, with a certain bitter humour. had he exercised no coercion over the race, had the methvens been left to their own devices, how much of them would have remained now? instead of a peerage and great estates they would have died out in a ditch or in a sponging-house generations ago. their lands would have gone bit by bit: their name would have disappeared--all as he said. and supposing now that walter was left entirely free to do as he pleased, what reason had he to believe that he would not squander everything he could squander, and bring down the posterity of the race into the dust? that is what he would have done if left to himself. he would have resisted all claims of prudence or duty. he would have followed, he knew it, the caprice of the moment, just as he had done now. if no former methvens had ruined the family it was in himself to do it. all these thoughts were in favour of the submission which seemed to him now almost the only thing before him. he thought of miss milnathort and her anxiety for him, and laughed to himself bitterly at her childish hope. two that should be one, and that should be set on everything that was good. what a simpleton she was! he set on everything that was good! he was incapable of anything that was good. and oona--could there be a greater folly than to think that oona, when she knew, would pick him up out of this ruin, and give him a new starting-ground? he laughed at the thought aloud. oona! was not her very name the token of purity, the sign of maidenhood and innocence. and to believe that she would mingle herself in his being which was unclean and false from its very beginning! he laughed at his own folly to think so. in ignorance she had been more kind than ever woman was. she had asked no questions, she had given him her hand, she had stood by him. in ignorance: _but when she knew_! he said to himself that he was not cad enough to let her go on in this ignorance. he would have to tell her what he had been, what he would be again if left to circumstances and his own guidance. he would not deceive her; he was not cad enough for that. and when he had told her, and had given up for ever all hope of really making a stand against the tyrant of his race, or carrying out his theories of happiness, what would remain? what would remain? subjection--misery-- "no," said a voice close by him, "something else--something very good in its way, and with which the greater majority of mankind are quite content, and may be very happy. the second best." walter had started at the sound of this voice. he left his seat with nervous haste; and yet he had no longer any sense of panic. he had a certain doleful curiosity to see the man, whom he had only seen in twilight rooms or by artificial light, in the open air and sunshine. perhaps this strange personage divined his thoughts, for he came forward with a slight smile. there was nothing in his appearance to alarm the most timid. he was, as miss milnathort had called him, a grand gentleman. he had the air of one accustomed to command, with that ease of bearing which only comes to those largely experienced in the world. the path along the ruinous battlements was one that craved wary walking, but he traversed it with the boldest step without a moment's hesitation or doubt. he made a little salutation with his hand as he approached. "you were laughing," he said. "you are taking, i hope, a less highflown view of the circumstances altogether. the absolute does not exist in this world. we must all be content with advantages which are comparative. i always regret," he continued, "resorting to heroic measures. to have to do with some one who will hear and see reason, is a great relief. i follow the course of your thoughts with interest. they are all perfectly just; and the conclusion is one which most wise men have arrived at. men in general are fools. as a rule you are incapable of guiding yourselves; but only the wise among you know it." "i have no pretension to be wise." "you are modest--all at once. so long as you are reasonable that will do. adapt your life now to a new plan. the ideal is beyond your reach. by no fault of circumstances, but by your own, you have forfeited a great deal that is very captivating to the mind of youth, but very empty if you had it all to-morrow. you must now rearrange your conceptions and find yourself very well off with the second best." there was something in his very tone which sent the blood coursing through walter's veins, and seemed to swell to bursting the great currents of life. he cried out-- "you have driven me to despair. you have cut off from me every hope. and now you exhort me to find myself very well off, to adapt my life to a new plan. is that all you know?" his companion smiled. "you would like me better to repeat to you again that you have no ground to stand upon, and are as unworthy as one can be at your age. all that is very true. but one aspect of the matter is not all. in the mean time you will have to live and get on somehow. suicide of course is always open to you, but you are not the sort of man for that; besides, it is begging the question, and solves no problem. no, you must live--on the second level. your ideal has always been impossible, for you have never had heart or will to keep up to it. why you should have had this fit of fantastic wilfulness now, and really believed that by means of vague aspirations you were to get the better of me and all your antecedents, i cannot tell. you must now find out practically how you are to live." walter had reached the lowest depths of despair a little while ago. he had consented that it was all true, that there was no further escape for him; but now again a passionate contradiction surged up within him. "i will not," he said, vehemently, "i will not--take your way." "i think you will--for why? there is no other half so good. you will be very comfortable, and you will have done a great thing for your house. by-and-by you will settle into a conviction that what you have done is the best thing you could have done. it is one of the privileges of mankind. and i promise you that i will not molest you. your coming here will be little more than a formula. you will agree with me: why then should there be any controversy between us? maturity and wealth and well-being will bring you to think with me that a settled advantage like that of one's race is far beyond all evanescent good of the fancy. you will become respectable and happy--yes, quite happy enough--as happy as men have any right to be." there was a half-tone of mockery, as if the speaker scorned the picture he drew; and at every word the resistance which had been almost stilled in walter's mind rose up more warmly. "are you happy yourself," he said, suddenly, "that you recommend this to me?" the stranger paused a little. "the word is a trivial one. i have many gratifications," he said. "i don't know what your gratifications can be. is it worth your while to live through the ages as you say--you, so powerful as you are, with so many great faculties--in a miserable old ruin, to exercise this terrorism upon unoffending men?" then walter's companion laughed aloud. "to live for ages in a miserable old ruin!" he said. "that does not seem a very attractive lot indeed. but set your mind at rest, my kind descendant; i live in a miserable ruin no more than you do. my affairs are everywhere. i have the weakness of a man for my own--perhaps in other regions as well--but that is nothing to you." "it is everything to me. give me some explanation of you. if, as you say, you have lived for centuries impossibly, how have you done it? have you ever come to a blank wall like me--have you ever been abandoned by every hope? or," cried the young man, "am i your superior in this horrible experience? no man could stand as i do--given up to despair: and yet go on living like you." "it depends upon your point of view. when you have taken my advice (as you will do presently) and have come down from your pinnacle and accepted what is the ordinary lot of mankind, you will find no longer any difficulty in living--as long as is possible; you will not wish to shorten your life by a day." "and what is the ordinary lot of mankind?" cried walter, feeling himself once more beaten down, humiliated, irritated by an ascendancy which he could not resist. "i have told you--the second best. in your case a wife with a great deal of wealth, and many other qualities, who will jar upon your imagination (an imagination which has hitherto entertained itself so nobly!) and exasperate your temper perhaps, and leave your being what you call incomplete: but who will give you a great acquisition of importance and set you at peace with me. that alone will tell for much in your comfort; and gradually your mind will be brought into conformity. you will consider subjects in general as i do, from a point of view which will not be individual. you will not balance the interests of the few miserable people who choose to think their comfort impaired, but will act largely for the continued benefit of your heirs and your property. you will avail yourself of my perceptions, which are more extended than your own, and gradually become the greatest landowner, the greatest personage of your district; able to acquire the highest honours if you please, to wield the greatest influence. come, you have found the other position untenable according to your own confession. accept the practicable. i do not hurry you. examine for yourself into the issues of your ideal--now that we have become friends and understand each other so thoroughly--" "i am no friend of yours. i understand no one, not even myself." "you are my son," said the other with a laugh. "you are of my nature; as you grow older you will resemble me more and more. you will speak to your sons as i speak to you. you will point out these duties to them, as i do to you." "in everything you say," cried walter, "i perceive that you acknowledge a better way. your plans are the second best--you say so. is it worth living so long only to know that you are embracing mediocrity after all, that you have nothing to rise to? and yet you acknowledge it," he said. the stranger looked at him with a curious gaze. he who had never shown the smallest emotion before grew slightly paler at this question: but he laughed before he replied. "you are acute," he said. "you can hit the blot. but the question in hand is not my character, but your practical career." the sound of an oar here broke the extreme silence. the morning had fully come, the night coach from "the south" had arrived at the inn, and duncan with the postbag was coming along the still water, which cut like a transparent curd before him, and joined again in eddying reflections behind. duncan bent his back to his oars unconscious of any mystery; his postbag, bringing news of all the world, lay in front of him. he and his boat in every detail of outline and colour swam suspended in the light, in reflection, and swept double over the shining surface. how extraordinary was the contrast between his open-air placidity, his fresh morning countenance, the air of the hills about him, and the haggard countenance of his master, looking upon this country fellow with an envy which was as foolish as it was genuine. duncan did not know anything about the ideal. and yet in his way he followed his conscience, sometimes with pain and trouble, and at the cost of many a struggle--or else neglected its warnings, and took his own way as his master had done. walter did not take this into consideration, but looked down upon his boatsman's ruddy, honest countenance and square frame, stretching contentedly to his oars and thinking of nothing, with envy. would it have been better to be born like that to daily labour and an unawakened intelligence? he turned round to say something, but his visitor had gone. there was not a shadow upon the walls, not the sound of a step. lord erradeen had no longer the faintest movement of fear, but in its place a certain impatience and irritability as if this practical joke might be played upon him too often. and presently into the clear air rang the voice of symington. "for god's sake, my lord, take care! that is just where the poor lady was killed thirty years ago." chapter xvii. the commonplace world has a strange look to a man who has himself come out of any great personal struggle, out of an excitement which no one knows anything about but himself. when he descends, with still the heave of strong emotion in his breast, there is a mixture of contempt and relief in the manner in which he regards the extraordinary stolidity and unimpressionableness of his fellows. he is glad that they are unaware of what has happened to himself, yet cannot help scorning them a little for their want of penetration; and it is a comfort to him to feel himself surrounded with the calm and indifference of strangers, yet he cannot help feeling that had they been of a higher nature, they must have divined the suppressed agitation with which he moves among them, his nerves all trembling with the strain through which they have passed. thus walter, when he landed at the village, met the looks of the country folk with a certain expectation of seeing some traces of the wondering curiosity with which they must be asking themselves what ailed lord erradeen? and felt himself at once baffled and disappointed and relieved to find them full of their usual friendliness and hospitality, but nothing more. "we are real glad to see your lordship back," mrs. macfarlane said at the inn, "and i hope you mean to bide, and no just run away when you are getting acquaint with the country-side." big john, who was looking on while his horses were being cared for, gave a tug to his hat in honour of lord erradeen, but scarcely withdrew his eyes from the other more interesting spectacle. and finally the minister, who was setting out upon one of his visitations, met his noble parishioner with the most cheerful good morning, without any indication of deeper insight. "you are welcome home, lord erradeen," he said as the landlady had said, "and this time i hope we'll see more of you. are you stepping my way? it is just a most beautiful morning for this time of the year, and i am going to one of my outlying corners; but you young gentlemen, what with your shooting, and stalking, and ploys in general, are not generally much addicted to a simple walk." "i am going your way; i am no great sportsman; i want to see shaw who lives somewhere in this direction, i think." "i will show the way with pleasure, lord erradeen; but i doubt you will not find him in. he is out upon his rounds before now. he will be tackling you about peter thomson, and his farm. and i would be glad to say a word, too, if i might. they had been there all their lives; they never believed it possible that they would be sent away. it is very natural you should want to make the best of your property, but it was a blow; and though he was a little behind in his worldly affairs, he was always good to the poor, and an elder, and well-living person. such a one is a loss to the country-side; but it is every man's duty, no doubt, to himself and his posterity, to make the best he can of his estate." this the minister said with an air of polite disapproval, yet acquiescence in a doctrine not to be gainsaid. "political economy," he added, with a laugh, "did not come into my curriculum, although i was at college in adam smith's palmy days." "if you think my actions have anything to do with adam smith!" cried walter. it was a peculiarity of this young man, and perhaps of others beside, to resent above all things the imputation of a prudential motive. "i know nothing about thomson," he added. "i was absent, and i suppose did--whatever i am supposed to have done--on the impulse of the moment, as i am too apt to do." "that is a pity," said the minister, "especially when the well-being of others is concerned. you will pardon me, my lord, who am an old-fashioned person. the good of your property (if ye think this is for the good of your property) is always a motive, and some will think a sound one: but to decide what is of great consequence to other folk without thought, because you happen to be tired, or worried, or in an ill way----" a natural flush of anger came to walter's face: but notwithstanding all his faults there was something generous in him. he bit his lip to restrain a hasty word which was ready to burst forth, and said, after a moment, "the reproof is just. i had no right to be so inconsiderate. still, as you say, the advantage of the property is a motive: there are some," he added bitterly, with a sense that he was speaking at some third person, "who think it the best in the world." "and so it is in the right view," said mr. cameron; "that is what i always think when i read what those misguided creatures are wanting in ireland, to do away with landlords altogether--and some even among ourselves," he added with that sense of the superiority of "ourselves" which dwells so calmly in the scottish bosom. the last was said regretfully, with a shake of the head. "i dare say," said walter, "they have some reason in what they say." "some, but not the best. they have the kind of reason that lies on the surface--in so much as to have a thing of your own is better than hiring it from another. but in that way peter thomson, honest man, would have been doomed without remedy before your time, lord erradeen. he has been getting into troubled waters for some years: he would have had to sell the farm and begone if it had been his: but with a good landlord like what i live in hopes to see--a good man in trouble would be helped over the dangerous moment. he would be backed up when he was feeble. perhaps it was just at all times an ideal: but that was what the old relationship might be." "and the ideal is always problematical," said walter. he was carrying on the same controversy still, taking the other side. "most men i think would prefer to deal with their own even if it meant selling and losing, than to be subject to another man's will--as it appears thomson has been to mine. that seems ridiculous indeed," he cried, with a sudden outburst of feeling, "that a good man, as you say, should depend on the fantastic will of--such a fool as i have been." "my lord erradeen!" cried the minister in consternation. he thought the young man was going out of his wits, and began to be nervous. there was something, now he looked at him, wild in his air. "i have no doubt," he said soothingly, "that your decision--must have seemed very reasonable. i would not, though my feelings are enlisted and though i regret, go so far as to blame it myself." "why?" said walter, turning upon him. "because?--surely every man ought to have the courage of his opinions." "not for that reason," said the old minister, with a slight flush. "i have never been one," he went on with a smile, "that have been much moved by the fear of man. no. it is because now they have been forced to make the move it may be better for themselves; they would have struggled on, and perhaps at the end got through, but in canada they will soon flourish and do well." "not without a struggle there either, i suppose," said walter, with a fanciful disposition to resent the idea that canada was an infallible cure. "not without a struggle--there you are right, my lord. there was first the sore, sore tug to pull up the roots of life that were so deeply implanted here; and the long voyage, which was terrible to the father and mother. it is very likely," he added, "that the old folk will never get over it. transplanting does not do at their age. but then the young ones, they are sure to thrive: and the old will die all the sooner, which perhaps is not to be regretted when we get to the evening of life." "that is surely an inhuman doctrine," walter cried. "do ye think so, my young lord? well! it becomes the young to think so; but for myself i have always seen a foundation of reason in the savage way of making an end of the old and helpless. it is better, far better for the survivors that they should have a horror of it, but for the aged themselves it is not so clear to me. they would be better away. an old man that has outlived all natural love and succour, and that just lives on against his will because he cannot help it, that is a sad sight." "but not revolting, as it is to think of the other." "the other does not revolt me. if my heritors, yourself the first, were to look in some fine day and bid me out to the banks of the loch and give me a heave into it--in deep clear water mind, none of your muddy, weedy bits--i stipulate for clean water," the old minister said with a laugh at his own joke. "if that is all that is to happen to your emigrants," said walter, "they surely would have been as well here." "if that had been possible; but you see, lord erradeen, though there are few things that ye cannot manage to get your way in, on your level of life, on the lower level when we cannot get what we want, we have to put up with what we can get." "why should you think i can get my way? i have to put up with what i can get, as you say, like everybody else." "well, yes," said the minister, "it is a kind of universal rule; and it is just a sign of the disposition that conquers the world, that it will accept what it can get without making a moaning and a fretting over it." "the second best," said walter with a half-smile of irony: it was strange to come from a teacher so dissimilar to this experienced old man and hear the same doctrine once more repeated. mr. cameron nodded his head several times in sign of assent. "what seems to our blindness often the second best; though you may be sure it is the best for us, and chosen for us by a better judge than we are. this is my way, to the right, up glen-dochart, and yonder is shaw's house, the white one among the trees. i am extremely glad to have had this conversation with you, my lord. and if i can be of use to you at any time in any question that may puzzle ye--oh, i do not stand upon my superior enlightenment, or even on my office, with the like of you that probably belong to another church; but i am an old man and have some experience. good day to you, lord erradeen." the old minister looked back after he had left him, and waved his hand with a benevolent smile. lord erradeen walked on. he waved back a kindly salutation; the meeting, the talk with a man who was his equal, his superior, his inferior, all in one, in wholesome human inconsistency, was a kind of event for him, separating him by a distinct interval, from the agitation of the night and morning, the terrible mental struggle, the philosophy that had fallen on his despair, not as healing dew, but like a baptism of fire, scorching his heart. strange that the same reasoning should have come before him in this strange way, so accidental and without premeditation! mr. cameron took everything from a different point of view. the second best to him meant manly resignation, devout religious faith. to accept it "because it was chosen for us by a better guide than we," that was a difference almost incalculable. according to the minister's belief, "what we wanted" was a thing to be given up nobly when it was proved to be god's will so. but this point of view was so unlike the other that it brought a smile to walter's lips as he went on. god's will, what had that to do with petty schemes to enrich a family? if it should so happen that he, driven by persecution, by temptations too strong to be resisted, by the feebleness of a spirit not capable of contending with fate, yielded once more to this influence which had operated so strangely upon his race, would that be god's will?--would it be ever possible to look upon it as "chosen by a better judge"? walter was not used to the discussion of such problems; and he was weak with mental struggles and want of rest. he lingered for a moment before shaw's house as he passed it, then rejected, with the sudden capricious impatience of his nature, the intention, only half formed, of seeing shaw, and walked on with a fantastic sense of relief in having got rid of this disagreeable duty. "another time will do just as well," he said to himself, and hurried on as if his walk had now a more definite, as well as a more agreeable, aim. but, as a matter of fact, he had no aim at all, and did not know where he was going or what he intended. indeed he intended nothing. perhaps he would have said "to think," had he been closely questioned; but it was a stretch of meaning to apply the term to that confusion of his thoughts in which everything seemed to be turning round and round. it was not like the sharp and keen dialogue of last night, in which, though all went on within his own spirit, there were two minds engaged, himself and another. now he was left to himself; no one contending with him--no one helping, even by contention, to keep him to an actual point, and give energy and definiteness to the mental process going on within him. that process was still going on; but it was as if the wheels of a complicated and delicate machine had lost their guiding principle, and were all circling and whirring in space without an object, with the same show of motion as when fully employed, the same creak, and jar, and grind. now and then there would come uppermost a phrase made clear out of the confusion--"the second best":--"something very good in its way; with which the majority of mankind is quite content and may be very happy;" "what we call in our blindness the second best": as his two oracles had said to him. whether it was the practical level which every man must content himself with after the failure of the ideal, or whether it was the real best, chosen for us by "a better judge," this was what both had put before him. the two descriptions, so different, yet both perhaps true, came up before him at intervals with something of strange regularity, as if the words had been printed upon the constantly turning wheels. he walked very quickly along the moorland road, not caring where he went, nor seeing what was round him. the fresh air blew in his face, with the force and keenness which an autumn wind has in a deeply-scooped and somewhat narrow glen among the hills, but seemed only to quicken the pace of the turning wheels, and all that machinery circling giddily, grinding out nothing, making his very soul sick and dizzy as it went on and on. suddenly the whirr and movement in his head calmed and stopped. a homely figure, in colour and aspect like an embodiment of those wild, sheep-feeding, rugged, but not majestic slopes that hemmed in the valley on either side, became visible coming down a path that led to the main road on which walter was. it was that of a man, tall and largely developed, but without any superfluous bulk, roughly clad, roughly shod, lifting his feet high, like one accustomed to bog and heather, with the meditative slow pace of a rustic whose work demanded no hurry, and who had time for thought in all he did. walter, with the quick senses of his youth, quickened still more by the excitement of the circumstances amid which, once and only once, he had seen duncan fraser, recognised him at once, and something like the liveliness of a new impulse moved him. who could tell but that this man of the hills might be an oracle too, and out of the silence of his lowly life might have brought something to help a soul in peril? walter waited till the cotter came up to him, who was not on his part so quick to recognise his landlord, of whom he had seen so little, and thought it might be some "tourist," or some other southland person, ignorant of these parts, and wanting information about the way, which was not inducement enough to make duncan quicken his steps. when they met, he perceived that he had "seen the face before," but went no further, and awaited with a certain air of stolid gravity what the stranger might have to say. "you are--fraser--of that glen up there? i almost forget how you call it--truach-glas." "ay, i am just sae; duncan fraser, at your service," replied the man, not without the slight hauteur of a highlander interrogated imperatively by a personage in whom he acknowledges no right to do so. "you don't remember me, apparently," walter said. "no, i cannot just say that i do; and yet i've seen your face before," said duncan, with a curious look. "never mind that. i want you to tell me if you are contented now, and happy in your glen--now that you are free of all your trouble about rent?" duncan's first impulse was to say, what is that to you, i would like to ken? but the words had already set the slower mechanism of his brain to work; and, after a moment, he took his blue bonnet from his head, and with a bow in which there was a certain rustic dignity, said-- "you'll be the laird, my lord erradeen? i have good cause to ken your face that was once to us all just like the face of an angel out o' heaven." "you make too much of it," said walter, with a smile; for the expression pleased him in spite of himself. "no one could have done otherwise in my place." "the auld wives," said duncan, with a little huskiness in his throat, "do not think sae, sir. they mind you at their books, morning and night." walter did not know very well what "minding him at the books" meant; but he guessed that somehow or other it must refer to prayers; and he said somewhat lightly-- "do you think that will do me much good?" duncan's honest face turned upon him a look of displeasure. the hill-side patriarch put on his bonnet gravely. "it should, if there's truth in scripture," he said, somewhat sternly; "but nae doubt it is just one of the most awfu' mysteries how a wilful soul will baffle baith god's goodwill and gude folk's prayers." this was so curiously unlike anything he had expected, that lord erradeen gave his humble monitor one startled glance, and for the moment was silenced. he resumed, however, a minute after, feeling a certain invigoration come to him from his contact with simple nature. "i acknowledge," he said, "though you are a little hard upon me, fraser, that i have brought this on myself. but i want to know about you, how things are going. are you satisfied with your position now? and is everything made smooth for you by the remittal of the rent?" at this duncan became in his turn confused. "nae doubt," he said, "it has been a great help, sir--my lord. ye'll excuse me, but i'm little used to lordships, and i canna get my mouth about it." "never mind my lordship. i want to know the real truth. your minister has been talking to me about thomson--the man at the farm." walter pointed vaguely to the hill-side, having no idea where peter thomson's farm was, about which so much had been said. "he has been sent away while you have stayed. let me know which has been the best." duncan looked more embarrassed than ever, and shuffled from one foot to the other, looking down upon the wet and brilliant green of the grass on which he stood. "we were all muckle obliged to you, my lord; and no one of us has grudged to say sae," he said. "but that is not the question," walter cried, with a little impatience. "to flit the old folk would have been impossible," said duncan, as if speaking to himself. "it was just a deliverance, and the lord's doing, and wonderful in our eyes. but, sir, there is nothing in this world that is pure good. the soil is cauld: there is little will come out of it: and though we're far out o' the way o' the world in our bit glen, i reckon that what ye ca' progress and a' that, has an effeck whether or no. we want mair than our forbears wanted. no, no just education and advancement: my uncle willie was brought up a minister, and got a' the education my robbie is ettling at, though my grandfather had, maybe, less to spare than me. but just there is a difference in the ways o't. and maybe if it had come to the worse, and ye had driven us out, instead of being sae generous----" "it would have been better for you," said walter, as his companion paused. "i'm not saying that. it was just deliverance. i will tell ye mair, my lord. if i had been driven out, me and my auld mother, and my little bairns, i could have found it in my heart to curse ye, sae young, sae rich, sae well off, and sae inhuman. and the auld wife's death would have lain at your door, and the bairns would never have forgotten it, however well they had prospered, no even when they came to be reasonable men, and could see baith sides of the question like me; they would have carried it with them to yon new world, as they call it; it would have grown to be a tradition and a meesery for ever. now," said duncan, with a hoarse half-laugh of emotion, "the sting is out of it whatever happens." "i am glad of that, anyhow," said walter. "and so am i--and so am i! when ye have a sense of being wranged in your heart, it's like a burnin' wound, like thae puir irish, the lord help them! and what was our pickle siller to the like of you? but----" duncan said, and paused, not knowing how to proceed with due respect and gratitude for what his landlord had done. "but--what you expected has not been realised? the rent, after all, made but a small difference--the relief was not what you hoped?" "i am just incapable, sir, of making ye a right answer," said duncan, with vehemence. "it's just the effeck of the times, and nae fault o' yours or ours--at least that is all i can make of it. we want mair than our forbears wanted. we are no so easy content. the lads at the college canna live as simple as they once lived. that makes it harder for everybody. the callants! i would not bind them to a life like mine; they would have done better for themselves, though it would have killed granny, and been a sore burden upon jeannie and me." "the fact is, duncan, that to have your own way is not much better than to have some one else's way, and that there is nothing worth making a fight about," walter said, with a bitterness which his humble companion did not understand, and still less approved. "no that, my lord," said duncan, "but just that nothing that is mortal is perfect blessedness, except what is said in the psalm, 'that man--that walketh not astray.' life is a struggle for the like of us, and maybe for most other folk. we have just to put the evil and the good against one another, and rejoice when the good is a wee predominant over the evil." he used longer words perhaps than an englishman of his rank would have used; and there was a something of celtic fine manners and natural dignity about him which gave importance to his speech. "that means--a compromise: no ideal in this world, no absolute good, but only a practicable something that we can get along with." walter said this with a scorn of it, yet growing belief in it, which gave strange vehemence to his tone. he did not expect his rustic companion to understand him, nor did he think of any response. "it is just this, sir," said duncan, "that here we have nae continuing ceety, but look for one to come." end of vol. ii. * * * * * [transcriber's note: hyphen variations left as printed.] [the end of _the wizard's son, volume _ by margaret oliphant] distributed proofreaders canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (this file was produced from images generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) the wizard's son a novel by mrs. oliphant author of "the curate in charge," "young musgrave," etc. in three volumes vol. i. london macmillan and co. [_the right of translation and reproduction is reserved_] london: r. clay, sons, and taylor, printers, bread street hill. the wizard's son. chapter i. the methvens occupied a little house in the outskirts of a little town where there was not very much going on of any description, and still less which they could take any share in, being, as they were, poor and unable to make any effective response to the civilities shown to them. the family consisted of three persons--the mother, who was a widow with one son; the son himself, who was a young man of three or four and twenty; and a distant cousin of mrs. methven's, who lived with her, having no other home. it was not a very happy household. the mother had a limited income and an anxious temper; the son a somewhat volatile and indolent disposition, and no ambition at all as to his future, nor anxiety as to what was going to happen to him in life. this, as may be supposed, was enough to introduce many uneasy elements into their joint existence; and the third of the party, miss merivale, was not of the class of the peacemakers to whom scripture allots a special blessing. she had no amiable glamour in her eyes, but saw her friends' imperfections with a clearness of sight which is little conducive to that happy progress of affairs which is called "getting on." the methvens were sufficiently proud to keep their difficulties out of the public eye, but on very many occasions, unfortunately, it had become very plain to themselves that they did not "get on." it was not any want of love. mrs. methven was herself aware, and her friends were in the constant habit of saying, that she had sacrificed everything for walter. injudicious friends are fond of making such statements, by way, it is to be supposed, of increasing the devotion and gratitude of the child to the parent: but the result is, unfortunately, very often the exact contrary of what is desired--for no one likes to have his duty in this respect pointed out to him, and whatever good people may think, it is not in itself an agreeable thought that "sacrifices" have been made for one, and an obligation placed upon one's shoulders from the beginning of time, independent of any wish or claim upon the part of the person served. the makers of sacrifices have seldom the reward which surrounding spectators, and in many cases themselves, think their due. mrs. methven herself would probably have been at a loss to name what were the special sacrifices she had made for walter. she had remained a widow, but that she would have been eager to add was no sacrifice. she had pinched herself more or less to find the means for his education, which had been of what is supposed in england to be the best kind: and she had, while he was a boy, subordinated her own tastes and pleasures to his, and eagerly sought out everything that was likely to be agreeable to him. when they took their yearly journey--as it is considered necessary for him--places that walter liked, or where he could find amusement, or had friends, were eagerly sought for. "women," mrs. methven said, "can make themselves comfortable anywhere; but a boy, you know, is quite different." "quite," miss merivale would say: "oh, if you only knew them as well as we do; they are creatures entirely without resources. you must put their toys into their very hands." "there is no question of toys with walter--he has plenty of resources. it is not that," mrs. methven would explain, growing red. "i hope i am not one of the silly mothers that thrust their children upon everybody: but, of course, a boy must be considered. everybody who has had to do with men--or boys--knows that they must be considered." a woman whose life has been mixed up with these troublesome beings feels the superiority of her experience to those who know nothing about them. and in this way, without spoiling him or treating him with ridiculous devotion, as the king of her fate, walter had been "considered" all his life. for the rest, mrs. methven had, it must be allowed, lived a much more agreeable life in the little society of sloebury when her son was young than she did now that he had come to years, mis-named, of discretion. then she had given her little tea-parties, or even a small occasional dinner, at which her handsome boy would make his appearance when it was holiday time, interesting everybody; or, when absent, would still furnish a very pleasant subject of talk to the neighbours, who thought his mother did a great deal too much for him, but still were pleased to discuss a boy who was having the best of educations, and at a public school. in those days she felt herself very comfortable in sloebury, and was asked to all the best houses, and felt a modest pride in the certainty that she was able to offer something in return. but matters were very different when walter was four-and-twenty instead of fourteen. by that time it was apparent that he was not going to take the world by storm, or set the thames on fire; and, though she had been too sensible to brag, mrs. methven had thought both these things possible, and perhaps had allowed it to be perceived that she considered something great, something out of the way, to be walter's certain career. but twenty-four is, as she said herself, so different! he had been unsuccessful in some of his examinations, and for others he had not been "properly prepared." his mother did not take refuge in the thought that the examiners were partial or the trials unfair; but there was naturally always a word as to the reason why he did not succeed--he had not been "properly prepared." he knew of one only a few days before the eventful moment, and at this time of day, she asked indignantly, when everything is got by competition, how is a young man who has not "crammed" to get the better of one who has? the fact remained that at twenty-four, walter, evidently a clever fellow, with a great many endowments, had got nothing to do; and, what was worse--a thing which his mother, indeed, pretended to be unconscious of, but which everybody else in the town remarked upon--he was not in the least concerned about this fact, but took his doing nothing quite calmly as the course of nature, and neither suffered from it, nor made any effort to place himself in a different position. he "went in for" an examination when it was put before him as a thing to do, and took his failure more than philosophically when he failed, as, as yet, he had always done: and, in the mean time, contentedly lived on, without disturbing himself, and tranquilly let the time go by--the golden time which should have shaped his life. this is not a state of affairs which can bring happiness to any household. there is a kind of parent--or rather it should be said of a mother, for no parent of the other sex is supposed capable of so much folly--to whom everything is good that her child, the cherished object of her affections, does; and this is a most happy regulation of nature, and smooths away the greatest difficulties of life for many simple-hearted folk, without doing half so much harm as is attributed to it; for disapproval has little moral effect, and lessens the happiness of all parties, without materially lessening the sins of the erring. but, unfortunately, mrs. methven was not of this happy kind. she saw her son's faults almost too clearly, and they gave her the most poignant pain. she was a proud woman, and that he should suffer in the opinion of the world was misery and grief to her. she was stung to the heart by disappointment in the failure of her many hopes and projects for him. she was stricken with shame to think of all the fine things that had been predicted of walter in his boyish days, and that not one of them had come true. people had ceased now to speak of the great things that walter would do. they asked "_what_ was he going to do?" in an entirely altered tone, and this went to her heart. her pride suffered the most terrible blow. she could not bear the thought; and though she maintained a calm face to the world, and represented herself as entirely satisfied, walter knew otherwise, and had gradually replaced his old careless affection for his mother by an embittered opposition and resistance to her, which made both their lives wretched enough. how it was that he did not make an effort to escape from her continual remonstrances, her appeals and entreaties, her censure and criticism, it is very difficult to tell. to have gone away, and torn her heart with anxiety, but emancipated himself from a yoke which it was against the dignity of his manhood to bear, would have been much more natural. but he had no money, and he had not the energy to seize upon any way of providing for himself. had such an opportunity fallen at his feet he would probably have accepted it with fervour; but fortune did not put herself out of the way to provide for him, nor he to be provided for. notwithstanding the many scenes which took place in the seclusion of that poor little house, when the mother, what with love, shame, mortification, and impatience, would all but rave in impotent passion, appealing to him, to the pride, the ambition, the principle which so far as could be seen the young man did not possess, walter held upon his way with an obstinate pertinacity, and did nothing. how he managed to do this without losing all self-respect and every better feeling it is impossible to say; but he did so somehow, and was still "a nice enough fellow," notwithstanding that everybody condemned him; and had not even lost the good opinion of the little society, though it was unanimous in blame. the only way in which he responded to his mother's remonstrances and complaints was by seeking his pleasure and such occupation as contented him--which was a little cricket now and then, a little lawn-tennis, a little flirtation--as far away from her as possible; and by being as little at home as possible. his temper was a little spoilt by the scenes which awaited him when he went home; and these seemed to justify to himself his gradual separation from his mother's house: but never induced him to sacrifice, or even modify, his own course. he appeared to think that he had a justification for his conduct in the opposition it met with; and that his pride was involved in the necessity for never giving in. if he had been let alone, he represented to himself, everything would have been different; but to yield to this perpetual bullying was against every instinct. and even the society which disapproved so much gave a certain encouragement to walter in this point of view: for it was mrs. methven whom everybody blamed. it was her ridiculous pride, or her foolish indulgence, or her sinful backing-up of his natural indolence; even some people thought it was her want of comprehension of her son which had done it, and that walter would have been entirely a different person in different hands. if she had not thought it a fine thing to have him appear as a useless fine gentleman above all necessity of working for his living, it was incredible that he could have allowed the years to steal by without making any exertion. this was what the town decided, not without a good deal of sympathy for walter. what could be expected? under the guidance of a foolish mother, a young man always went wrong; and in this case he did not go wrong, poor fellow! he only wasted his existence, nothing worse. sloebury had much consideration for the young man. perhaps it added something to the exasperation with which mrs. methven saw all her efforts fail that she had some perception of this, and knew that it was supposed to be her fault. no doubt in her soul it added to the impatience and indignation and pain with which she contemplated the course of affairs, which she was without strength to combat, yet could not let alone. now and then, indeed, she did control herself so far as to let them alone, and then there was nothing but tranquillity and peace in the house. but she was a conscientious woman, and, poor soul! she had a temper--the very complacency and calm with which her son went upon his way, the approval he showed of her better conduct when she left him to his own devices, struck her in some moments with such sudden indignation and pain, that she could no longer contain herself. he, who might have been anything he pleased, to be nothing! he, of whom everybody had predicted such great things! at such moments the sight of walter smiling, strolling along with his hands in his pockets, excited her almost to frenzy. poor lady! so many women would have been proud of him--a handsome young fellow in flannels, with his cricket bat or his racquet when occasion served. but love and injured pride were bitter in her heart, and she could not bear the sight. all this while, however, nobody knew anything about the scenes that arose in the little house, which preserved a show of happiness and tender union long after the reality was gone. indeed, even miss merivale, who had unbounded opportunities of knowing, took a long time to make up her mind that walter and his mother did not "get on." such was the unfortunate state of affairs at the time when this history begins. the methvens were distantly connected, it was known, with a great family in scotland, which took no notice whatever of them, and, indeed, had very little reason so to do, captain methven being long since dead, and his widow and child entirely unknown to the noble house, from which it was so great an honour to derive a little, much-diluted, far-off drop of blood, more blue and more rich than the common. it is possible that had the connection been by mrs. methven's side she would have known more about it, and taken more trouble to keep up her knowledge of the family. but it was not so, and she had even in her younger days been conscious of little slights and neglects which had made her rather hostile than otherwise to the great people from whom her husband came. "i know nothing about the erradeens," she would say; "they are much too grand to take any notice of us: and i am too proud to seek any notice from them." "i am afraid, my dear, there is a good deal in that," said old mrs. wynn, the wife of the old rector, shaking her white head. this lady was a sort of benign embodiment of justice in sloebury. she punished nobody, but she saw the right and wrong with a glance that was almost infallible, and shook her head though she never exacted any penalty. here miss merivale would seize the occasion to strike in-- "prejudice is prejudice," she said, "whatever form it takes. a lord has just as much chance of being nice as an--apothecary." this was said because the young doctor, newly admitted into his father's business, who thought no little of himself, was within reach, and just then caught miss merivale's eye. "that is a very safe speech, seeing there are neither lords nor apothecaries here," he said with the blandest smile. he was not a man to be beaten at such a game. "but a lord may have influence, you know. for walter's sake i would not lose sight of him," said mrs. wynn. "you cannot lose sight of what you have never seen: besides, influence is of no consequence nowadays. nobody can do anything for you--save yourself," said mrs. methven with a little sigh. her eyes turned involuntarily to where walter was. he was always in the middle of everything that was going on. among the sloebury young people he had a little air of distinction, or so at least his mother thought. she was painfully impartial, and generally, in her anxiety, perceived his bad points rather than his good ones; but as she glanced at the group, love for once allowed itself to speak, though always with an accent peculiar to the character of the thinker. she allowed to herself that he had an air of distinction, a something more than the others--alas, that nothing ever came of it! the others all, or almost all, were already launched in the world. they were doing or trying to do something--whereas walter! but she took care that nobody should hear that irrepressible sigh. "i am very sorry for it," said mrs. wynn, "for there are many people who would never push for themselves, and yet do very well indeed when they are put in the way." "i am all for the pushing people," said miss merivale. "i like the new state of affairs. when every one stands for himself, and you get just as much as you work for, there will be no grudges and sulkings with society. though i'm a tory, i like every man to make his own way." "a lady's politics are never to be calculated upon," said the rector, who was standing up against the fire on his own hearth, rubbing his old white hands. "it is altogether against the principles of toryism, my dear lady, that a man should make his own way. it is sheer democracy. as for that method of examinations, it is one of the most levelling principles of the time--it is one of mr. gladstone's instruments for the destruction of society. when the son of a cobbler is just as likely to come to high command as your son or mine, what is to become of the country?" the old clergyman said, lifting those thin white hands. mr. gladstone's name was as a firebrand thrown into the midst of this peaceable little country community. the speakers all took fire. they thought that there was no doubt about what was going to come of the country. it was going to destruction as fast as fate could carry it. when society had dropped to pieces, and the rabble had come uppermost, and england had become a mere name, upon which all foreign nations should trample, and wild irishmen dance war dances, and americans expectorate, then mr. gladstone would be seen in his true colours. while this was going on, old mrs. wynn sat in her easy-chair and shook her head. she declared always that she was no politician. and young walter methven, attracted by the sudden quickening of the conversation which naturally attended the introduction of this subject, came forward, ready in the vein of opposition which was always his favourite attitude. "mr. gladstone must be a very great man," he said. "i hear it is a sign of being in society when you foam at the mouth at the sound of his name." "you young fellows think it fine to be on the popular side; but wait till you are my age," cried one of the eager speakers. "it will not matter much to me. there will be peace in my days." "but wait," cried another, "and see how you will like it when everything topples down together, the crown and the state, and the aristocracy, and public credit, and national honour, and property, and the constitution, and----" so many anxious and alarmed politicians here spoke together that the general voice became inarticulate, and walter methven, representing the opposition, was at liberty to laugh. "come one, come all!" he cried, backed up by the arm of the sofa, upon which mrs. wynn sat shaking her head. "it would be a fine thing for me and all the other proletarians. something would surely fall our way." his mother watched him, standing up against the sofa, confronting them all, with her usual exasperated and angry affection. she thought, as she looked at him, that there was nothing he was not fit for. he was clever enough for parliament; he might have been prime minister--but he was nothing! nothing, and likely to be nothing, doing nothing, desiring nothing. her eye fell on young wynn, the rector's nephew, who had just got a fellowship at his college, and on the doctor's son, who was just entering into a share of his father's practice, and on mr. jeremy the young banker, whose attentions fluttered any maiden to whom he might address them. they were walter's contemporaries, and not one of them was worthy, she thought, to be seen by the side of her boy; but they had all got before him in the race of life. they were something and he was nothing. it was not much wonder if her heart was sore and angry. when she turned round to listen civilly to something that was said to her, her face was contracted and pale. it was more than she could bear. she made a move to go away before any of the party was ready, and disturbed miss merivale in the midst of a _tête-à-tête_, which was a thing not easily forgiven. walter walked home with them in great good humour, but his mother knew very well that he was not coming in. he was going to finish the evening elsewhere. if he had come in would she have been able to restrain herself? would she not have fallen upon him, either in anger or in grief, holding up to him the examples of young wynn and young jeremy and the little doctor? she knew she would not have been able to refrain, and it was almost a relief to her, though it was another pang, when he turned away at the door. "i want to speak to underwood about to-morrow," he said. "what is there about to-morrow? of all the people in sloebury captain underwood is the one i like least," she said. "why must you always have something to say to him when every one else is going to bed?" "i am not going to bed, nor is he," said walter lightly. mrs. methven's nerves were highly strung. miss merivale had passed in before them, and there was nobody to witness this little struggle, which she knew would end in nothing, but which was inevitable. she grasped him by the arm in her eagerness and pain. "oh, my boy!" she said, "come in, come in, and think of something more than the amusement of to-morrow. life is not all play, though you seem to think so. for once listen to me, walter--oh, listen to me! you cannot go on like this. think of all the others; all at work, every one of them, and you doing nothing." "do you want me to begin to do something now," said walter, "when you have just told me everybody was going to bed?" "oh! if i were you," she cried in her excitement, "i would rest neither night nor day. i would not let it be said that i was the last, and every one of them before me." walter shook himself free of her detaining hold. "am i to be a dustman, or a scavenger, or--what?" he said, contemptuously. "i know no other trades that are followed at this hour." mrs. methven had reached the point at which a woman has much ado not to cry in the sense of impotence and exasperation which such an argument brings. "it is better to do anything than to do nothing," she cried, turning away from him and hastening in at the open door. he paused a moment, as if doubtful what to do; there was something in her hasty withdrawal which for an instant disposed him to follow, and she paused breathless, with a kind of hope, in the half-light of the little hall; but the next moment his footsteps sounded clear and quick on the pavement, going away. mrs. methven waited until they were almost out of hearing before she closed the door. angry, baffled, helpless, what could she do? she wiped a hot tear from the corner of her eye before she went into the drawing-room, where her companion, always on the alert, had already turned up the light of the lamp, throwing an undesired illumination upon her face, flushed and troubled from this brief controversy. "i thought you were never coming in," said miss merivale, "and that open door sends a draught all through the house." "walter detained me for a moment to explain some arrangements he has to make for to-morrow," mrs. methven said with dignity. "he likes to keep me _au courant_ of his proceedings." miss merivale was absolutely silenced by this sublime assumption, notwithstanding the flush of resentment, the glimmer of moisture in the mother's eye. chapter ii. walter walked along the quiet, almost deserted street with a hasty step and a still hastier rush of disagreeable thoughts. there was, he felt, an advantage in being angry, in the sensation of indignant resistance to a petty tyranny. for a long time past he had taken refuge in this from every touch of conscience and sense of time lost and opportunities neglected. he was no genius, but he was not so dull as not to know that his life was an entirely unsatisfactory one, and himself in the wrong altogether; everything rotten in the state of his existence, and a great deal that must be set right one time or another in all his habits and ways. the misfortune was that it was so much easier to put off this process till to-morrow than to begin it to-day. he had never been roused out of the boyish condition of mind in which a certain resistance to authority was natural, and opposition to maternal rule and law a sort of proof of superiority and independence. had this been put into words, and placed before him as the motive of much that he did, no one would have coloured more angrily or resented more hotly the suggestion; and yet in the bottom of his heart he would have known it to be true. all through his unoccupied days he carried with him the sense of folly, the consciousness that he could not justify to himself the course he was pursuing. the daily necessity of justifying it to another was almost the sole thing that silenced his conscience. his mother, who kept "nagging" day after day, who was never satisfied, whose appeals he sometimes thought theatrical, and her passion got up, was his sole defence against that self-dissatisfaction which is the severest of all criticisms. if she would but let him alone, leave him to his own initiative, and not perpetually endeavour to force a change which to be effectual, as all authorities agreed, must come of itself! he was quite conscious of the inadequacy of this argument, and in his heart felt that it was a poor thing to take advantage of it; but yet, on the surface of his mind, put it forward and made a bulwark of it against his own conscience. he did so now as he hurried along, in all the heat that follows a personal encounter. if she would but let him alone! but he could not move a step anywhere, could not make an engagement, could not step into a friend's rooms, as he was going to do now, without her interference. the relations of a parent to an only child are not the same as those that exist between a father and mother and the different members of a large family. it has been usual to consider them in one particular light as implying the closest union and mutual devotion. but there is another point of view in which to consider the question. they are so near to each other, and the relationship so close, that there is a possibility of opposition and contrariety more trying, more absorbing, than any other except that between husband and wife. a young son does not always see the necessity of devotion to a mother who is not very old, who has still many sources of pleasure apart from himself, and who is not capable, perhaps, on her side, of the undiscriminating worship which is grandmotherly, and implies a certain weakness and dimness of perception in the fond eyes that see everything in a rosy, ideal light. this fond delusion is often in its way a moral agent, obliging the object of it to fulfil what is expected of him, and reward the full and perfect trust which is given so unhesitatingly. but in this case it was not possible. the young man thought, or persuaded himself, that his mother's vexatious watch over him, and what he called her constant suspicion and doubt of him, had given him a reason for the disgust and impatience with which he turned from her control. he pictured to himself the difference which a father's larger, more generous sway would have made in him; to that he would have answered, he thought, like a ship to its helm, like an army to its general. but this petty rule, this perpetual fault-finding, raised up every faculty in opposition. even when he meant the best, her words of warning, her reminders of duty, were enough to set him all wrong again. he thought, as a bad husband often thinks when he is conscious of the world's disapproval, that it was her complaints that were the cause. and when he was reminded by others, well-meaning but injudicious, of all he owed to his mother, his mind rose yet more strongly in opposition, his spirit refused the claim. this is a very different picture from that of the widow's son whose earliest inspiration is his sense of duty to his mother, and adoring gratitude for her care and love--but it is perhaps as true a one. a young man may be placed in an unfair position by the excessive claim made upon his heart and conscience in this way, and so walter felt it. he might have given all that, and more, if nothing had been asked of him; but when he was expected to feel so much, he felt himself half justified in feeling nothing. thus the situation had become one of strained and continual opposition. it was a kind of duel, in which the younger combatant at least--the assailed person, whose free-will and independence were hampered by such perpetual requirements--never yielded a step. the other might do so, by turns throwing up her arms altogether, but not he. it was with this feeling strong in his mind, and affecting his temper as nothing else does to such a degree, that he hastened along the street towards the rooms occupied by captain underwood, a personage whom the ladies of sloebury were unanimous in disliking. nobody knew exactly where it was that he got his military title. he did not belong to any regiment in her majesty's service. he had not even the humble claim of a militia officer; yet nobody dared say that there was anything fictitious about him, or stigmatise the captain as an impostor. other captains and colonels and men-at-arms of undoubted character supported his claims; he belonged to one or two well-known clubs. an angry woman would sometimes fling an insult at him when her husband or son came home penniless after an evening in his company, wondering what they could see in an under-bred fellow who was no more a captain (she would say in her wrath) than she was; but of these assertions there was no proof, and the vehemence of them naturally made the captain's partisans more and more eager in his favour. he had not been above six months in sloebury, but everybody knew him. there was scarcely an evening in which half-a-dozen men did not congregate in his rooms, drawn together by that strange attraction which makes people meet who do not care in the least for each other's company, nor have anything to say to each other, yet are possibly less vacant in society than when alone, or find the murmur of many voices, the smoke of many cigars, exhilarating and agreeable. it was not every evening that the cards were produced. the captain was wary; he frightened nobody; he did not wish to give occasion to the tremors of the ladies, whom he would have conciliated even, if he had been able; but there are men against whom the instinct of all women rises, as there are women from whom all men turn. it was only now and then that he permitted play. he spoke indeed strongly against it on many occasions. "what do you want with cards?" he would say. "a good cigar and a friend to talk to ought to be enough for any man." but twice or thrice in a week his scruples would give way. he was a tall, well-formed man, of an uncertain age, with burning hazel eyes, and a scar on his forehead got in that mysterious service to which now and then he made allusion, and which his friends concluded must have been in some foreign legion, or with garibaldi, or some other irregular warfare. there were some who thought him a man, old for his age, of thirty-five, and some who, concluding him young for his age, and well preserved, credited him with twenty years more; but thirty-five or fifty-five, whichever it was, he was erect and strong, and well set up, and possessed an amount of experience and apparent knowledge of the world, at which the striplings of sloebury admired and wondered, and which even the older men respected, as men in the country respect the mention of great names and incidents that have become historical. he had a way of recommending himself even to the serious, and would now and then break forth, as if reluctantly, into an account of some instance of faith or patience on the battlefield or the hospital which made even the rector declare that to consider underwood as an irreligious man was both unjust and unkind. so strong was the prejudice of the women, however, that mrs. wynn, always charitable, and whose silent protest was generally only made when the absent were blamed, shook her head at this testimony borne in favour of the captain. she had no son to be led away, and her husband it need not be said, considering his position, was invulnerable; but with all her charity she could not believe in the religion of captain underwood. his rooms were very nice rooms in the best street in sloebury, and if his society was what is called "mixed," yet the best people were occasionally to be met there, as well as those who were not the best. there was a little stir in the company when walter entered. to tell the truth, notwithstanding the wild mirth and dissipation which the ladies believed to go on in captain underwood's rooms, the society assembled there was at the moment dull and in want of a sensation. there had not been anything said for the course of two minutes at least. there was no play going on, and the solemn puff of smoke from one pair of lips after another would have been the height of monotony had it not been the wildest fun and gratification. the men in the room took pipes and cigars out of their mouths to welcome the new-comer. "hallo, walter!" they all said in different tones; for in sloebury the use of christian names was universal, everybody having known everybody else since the moment of their birth. "here comes methven," said the owner of the rooms (it was one of his charms, in the eyes of the younger men, that he was not addicted to this familiarity), "in the odour of sanctity. it will do us all good to have an account of the rector's party. how did you leave the old ladies, my excellent boy?" "stole away like the fox, by jove," said the hunting man, who was the pride of sloebury. "more like the mouse with the old cats after it," said another wit. now walter had come in among them strong in his sense of right and in his sense of wrong, feeling himself at the same moment a sorry fool and an injured hero, a sufferer for the rights of man; and it would have been of great use to him in both these respects to have felt himself step into a superior atmosphere, into the heat of a political discussion, or even into noisy amusement, or the passion of play--anything which would rouse the spirits and energies, and show the action of a larger life. but to feel his own arrival a sort of godsend in the dulness, and to hear nothing but the heavy puff of all the smoke, and the very poor wit with which he was received, was sadly disconcerting, and made him more and more angry with himself and the circumstances which would give him no sort of support or comfort. "the old ladies," he said, "were rather more lively than you fellows. you look as if you had all been poisoned in your wine, like the men in the opera, and expected the wall to open and the monks and the coffins to come in." "i knew that methven would bring us some excellent lesson," said captain underwood. "remember that we have all to die. think, my friends, upon your latter end." "jump up here and give us a sermon, wat." "don't tease him, he's dangerous." "the old ladies have been too much for him." this went on till walter had settled down into his place, and lighted his pipe like the rest. he looked upon them with disenchanted eyes; not that he had ever entertained any very exalted opinion of his company; but to-night he was out of sympathy with all his surroundings, and he felt it almost a personal offence that there should be so little to attract and excite in this manly circle which thought so much more of itself than of any other, and was so scornful of the old ladies who after all were not old ladies: but the graver members of the community in general, with an ornamental adjunct of young womankind. on ordinary occasions no doubt walter would have chimed in with the rest, but to-night he was dissatisfied and miserable, not sure of any sensation in particular, but one of scorn and distaste for his surroundings. he would have felt this in almost any conceivable case, but in the midst of this poor jesting and would-be wit, the effect was doubled. was it worth while for this to waste his time, to offend the opinion of all his friends? such thoughts must always come in similar circumstances. even in the most brilliant revelry there will be a pause, a survey of the position, a sense, however unwilling that the game is not worth the candle. but here! they were all as dull as ditch water, he said to himself. separately there was scarcely one whom he would have selected as an agreeable companion, and was it possible by joining many dulnesses together to produce a brilliant result? there was no doubt that walter's judgment was jaundiced that evening; for he was not by any means so contemptuous of his friends on ordinary occasions; but he had been eager to find an excuse for himself, to be able to say that here was real life and genial society in place of the affected solemnity of the proper people. when he found himself unable to do this, he was struck as by a personal grievance, and sat moody and abstracted, bringing a chill upon everybody, till one by one the boon companions strolled away. "a pretty set of fellows to talk of dulness," he cried, with a little burst, "as if they were not dull beyond all description themselves." "come, methven, you are out of temper," said captain underwood. "they are good fellows enough when you are in the vein for them. something has put you out of joint." "nothing at all," cried walter, "except the sight of you all sitting as solemn as owls pretending to enjoy yourselves. at the rectory one yawned indeed, it was the genius of the place--but to hear all those dull dogs laughing at that, as if they were not a few degrees worse! is there nothing but dulness in life? is everything the same--one way or another--and nothing to show for it all, when it is over, but tediousness and discontent?" underwood looked at him keenly with his fiery eyes. "so you've come to that already, have you?" he said. "i thought you were too young and foolish." "i am not so young as not to know that i am behaving like an idiot," walter said. perhaps he had a little hope of being contradicted and brought back to his own esteem. but instead of this, captain underwood only looked at him again and laughed. "i know," he said: "the conscience has its tremors, especially after an evening at the rectory. you see how well respectability looks, how comfortable it is." "i do nothing of the sort," walter cried indignantly. "i see how dull you are, you people who scoff at respectability, and i begin to wonder whether it is not better to be dull and thrive than to be dull and perish. they seem much the same thing so far as enjoyment goes." "you want excitement," said the other carelessly. "i allow there is not much of that here." "i want something," cried walter. "cards even are better than nothing. i want to feel that i have blood in my veins." "my dear boy, all that is easily explained. you want money. money is the thing that mounts the blood in the veins. with money you can have as much excitement, as much movement as you like. let people say what they please, there is nothing else that does it," said the man of experience. he took a choice cigar leisurely from his case as he spoke. "a bit of a country town like this, what can you expect from it? there is no go in them. they risk a shilling, and go away frightened if they lose. if they don't go to church on sunday they feel all the remorse of a villain in a play. it's all petty here--everything's petty, both the vices and the virtues. i don't wonder you find it slow. what i find it, i needn't say." "why do you stop here, then?" said walter, not unnaturally, with a momentary stare of surprise. then he resumed, being full of his own subject. "i know i'm an ass," he said. "i loaf about here doing nothing when i ought to be at work. i don't know why i do it; but neither do i know how to get out of it. you, that's quite another thing. you have no call to stay. i wonder you do: why do you? if i were as free as you, i should be off--before another day." "come along then," said underwood, good-humouredly. "i'll go if you'll go." at this walter shook his head. "i have no money you know. i ought to be in an office or doing something. i can't go off to shoot here or fish there, like you." "by and by--by and by. you have time enough to wait." walter gave him a look of surprise. "there is nothing to wait for," he said. "is that why you have said so many things to me about seeing life? i have nothing. we've got no money in the family. i may wait till doomsday, but it will do nothing for me." "don't be too sure of that," said underwood. "oh, you needn't devour me with your eyes. i know nothing of your family affairs. i suppose of course that by and by, in the course of nature----" "you mean," said walter, turning pale, "when my mother dies. no, i'm not such a wretched cad as that: if i didn't know i should get next to nothing then, i----" (his conscience nearly tripped this young man up, running into his way so hurriedly that he caught his foot unawares.) then he stopped and grew red, staring at his companion. "most of what she has dies with her, if that's what you're thinking of. there is nothing in that to build upon. and i'm glad of it," the young man cried. "i beg your pardon, methven," said the other. "but it needn't be that; there are other ways of getting rich." "i don't know any of them, unless by work: and how am i to work? it is so easy to speak. what can i work at? and where am i to get it?--there is the question. i hear enough on that subject--as if i were a tailor or a shoemaker that could find something to do at any corner. there is no reason in it," the young man said, so hotly, and with such a flush of resentful obstinacy, that the fervour of his speech betrayed him. he was like a man who had outrun himself, and paused, out of breath. "you'll see; something will turn up," said underwood, with a laugh. "what can turn up?--nothing. suppose i go to new zealand and come back at fifty with my fortune made--fifty's just the age, isn't it, to begin to enjoy yourself," cried walter, scornfully; "when you have not a tooth left, nor a faculty perfect?" he was so young that the half-century appeared to him like the age of methusaleh, and men who lived to that period as having outlived all that is worth living for. his mentor laughed a little uneasily, as if he had been touched by this chance shot. "it is not such a terrible age after all," he said. "a man can still enjoy himself when he is fifty; but i grant you that at twenty-four it's a long time to wait for your pleasure. however, let us hope something will turn up before then. supposing, for the sake of argument, you were to come in to your fortune more speedily, i wonder what you would do with it--eh? you are such a terrible fellow for excitement. the turf?" "all that is folly," said walter, getting up abruptly. "nothing more, thanks. i am coming in to no fortune. and you don't understand me a bit," he said, turning at the door of the room, to look back upon the scene where he had himself spent so many hours, made piquant by a sense of that wrongdoing which supplies excitement when other motives fail. the chairs standing about as their occupants had thrust them away from the table, the empty glasses upon it, the disorder of the room, struck him with a certain sense of disgust. it was a room intended by nature to be orderly and sober, with heavy country-town furniture, and nothing about it that could throw any grace on disarray. the master of the place stood against the table swaying a somewhat heavy figure over it, and gazing at the young man with his fiery eyes. walter's rudeness did not please him, any more than his abrupt withdrawal. "don't be too sure of that," he said, with an effort to retain his good-humoured aspect. "if i don't understand you, i should like to know who does? and when that fortune comes, you will remember what i say." "pshaw!" walter cried, impatiently turning away. a nod of his head was all the good-night he gave. he hurried down as he had hurried up, still as little contented, as full of dissatisfaction as when he came. this man who thought he understood him, who intended to influence him, revolted the young man's uneasy sense of independence, as much as did the bond of more lawful authority. did underwood, _too_, think him a child not able to guide himself? it was very late by this time, and the streets very silent. he walked quickly home through the wintry darkness of november, with a mind as thoroughly out of tune as it is possible to imagine. he had gone to underwood's in the hot impulse of opposition, with the hope of getting rid temporarily, at least, of the struggle within him; but he had not got rid of it. the dull jokes of the assembled company had only made the raging of the inward storm more sensible, and the jaunty and presumptuous misconception with which his host received his involuntary confidences afterwards, had aggravated instead of soothing his mind. indeed, underwood's pretence at knowing all about it, his guesses and attempts to sound his companion's mind, and the blundering interpretation of it into which he stumbled, filled walter with double indignation and disgust. this man too he had thought much of, and expected superior intelligence from--and all that he had to say was an idiotic anticipation of some miraculous coming into a fortune which walter was aware was as likely to happen to the beggar on the streets as to himself. he had been angry with nature and his mother when he left her door; he was angry with everybody when he returned to it, though his chief anger of all, and the root of all the others, was that anger with himself, which burnt within his veins, and which is the hardest of all others to quench out. chapter iii. walter was very late next morning as he had been very late at night. the ladies had breakfasted long before, and there was a look of reproach in the very table-cloth left there so much after the usual time, and scrupulously cleared of everything that the others had used, and arranged at one end, with the dish kept hot for him, and the small teapot just big enough for one, which was a sermon in itself. his mother was seated by the fire with her weekly books, which she was adding up. she said scarcely anything to him, except the morning greeting, filling out his tea with a gravity which was all the more crushing that there was nothing in it to object to, nothing to resent. adding up accounts of itself is not cheerful work; but naturally the young man resented this seriousness all the more because he had no right to do so. it was intolerable, he felt, to sit and eat in presence of that silent figure partly turned away from him, jotting down the different amounts on a bit of paper, and absorbed in that occupation as if unconscious of his presence. even scolding was better than this; walter was perfectly conscious of all it was in her power to say. he knew by heart her remonstrances and appeals. but he disliked the silence more than all. he longed to take her by the shoulders, and cry, "what is it? what have you got to say to me? what do you mean by sitting there like a stone figure, and _meaning_ it all the same!" he did not do this, knowing it would be foolish, and gave his constant antagonist a certain advantage; but he longed to get rid of some of his own exasperation by such an act. it was with a kind of force over himself that he ate his breakfast, going through all the forms, prolonging it to the utmost of his power, helping himself with deliberate solemnity in defiance of the spectator, who seemed so absorbed in her own occupation, but was, he felt sure, watching his every movement. it was not, however, until he had come to an end of his prolonged meal and of his newspaper, that his mother spoke. "do you think," she said, "that it would be possible for you to write that letter to mr. milnathort of which i have spoken so often, to-day?" "oh, quite possible," said walter, carelessly. "will you do it, then? it seems to me very important to your interests. will you really do it, and do it to-day?" "i'll see about it," walter said. "i don't ask you to see about it. it is nothing very difficult. i ask you to do it at once--to-day." he gazed at her for a moment with an angry obstinacy. "i see no particular occasion for all this haste. it has stood over a good many days. why should you insist so upon it now?" "every day that it has been put off has been a mistake. it should have been done at once," mrs. methven said. "i'll see about it," he said carelessly; and he went out of the room with a sense of having exasperated her as usual, which was almost pleasant. at the bottom of his heart he meant to do what his mother had asked of him: but he would not betray his good intentions. he preferred to look hostile even when he was in the mind to be obedient. he went away to the little sitting-room which was appropriated to him, where his pipes adorned the mantelpiece, and sat down to consider the situation. to write a letter was not a great thing to do, and he fully meant to do it; but after he had mused a little angrily upon the want of perception which made his mother adopt that cold and hectoring tone, when if she had asked him gently he would have done it in a minute, he put forth his hand and drew a book towards him. it was not either a new or an entertaining book, but it secured his idle attention until he suddenly remembered that it was time to go out. the letter was not written, but what did that matter? the post did not go out till the afternoon, and there was plenty of time between that time and this to write half-a-dozen letters. it would do very well, he thought, when he came in for lunch. so he threw down the book and got his hat and went out. mrs. methven, who was on the watch, hearing his every movement, came into his room after he was gone, and looked round with eager eyes to see if the letter was written, if there was any trace of it. perhaps he had taken it out with him to post it, she thought: and though it was injurious to her that she should not know something more about a piece of business in which he was not the sole person concerned, yet it gave her a sort of relief to think that so much at least he had done. she went back to her books with an easier mind. she was far from being a rich woman, but her son had known none of her little difficulties, her efforts to make ends meet. she had thought it wrong to trouble his childhood with such confidences, and he had grown up thinking nothing on the subject, without any particular knowledge of, or interest in, her affairs, taking everything for granted. it was her own fault, she said to herself, and so it was to some extent. she would sometimes think that if she had it to do over again she would change all that. how often do we think this, and with what bitter regret, in respect to the children whom people speak of as wax in our hands, till we suddenly wake up and find them iron! she had kept her difficulties out of walter's way, and instead of being grateful to her for so doing, he was simply indifferent, neither inquiring nor caring to know. her own doing! it was easier to herself, yet bitter beyond telling, to acknowledge it to be so. just at this time, when christmas was approaching, the ends took a great deal of tugging and coaxing to bring them together. a few of walter's bills had come in unexpectedly, putting her poor balance altogether wrong. miss merivale contributed a little, but only a little, to the housekeeping; for mrs. methven was both proud and liberal, and understood giving better than receiving. she went back to the dining-room, where all her books lay upon the table, near the fire. her reckoning had advanced much since she had begun it, with walter sitting at breakfast. her faculties had been all absorbed in him and what he was doing. now she addressed herself to her accounts with a strenuous effort. it is hard work to balance a small sum of money against a large number of bills, to settle how to divide it so as that everybody shall have something, and the mouths of hungry creditors be stopped. perhaps we might say that this was one of the fine arts--so many pounds here, so many there, keeping credit afloat, and the wolf of debt from the door. mrs. methven was skilled in it. she went to this work, feeling all its difficulty and burden: yet, with a little relief, not because she saw any way out of her difficulties, but because walter had written that letter. it was always something done, she thought, in her simplicity, and something might come of it, some way in which he could get the means of exercising his faculties, perhaps of distinguishing himself even yet. walter for his part strolled away through the little town in his usual easy way. it was a fine, bright, winterly morning, not cold, yet cold enough to make brisk walking pleasant, and stir the blood in young veins. there was no football going on, nor any special amusement. he could not afford to hunt, and the only active winter exercise which he could attain was limited to this game--of which there was a good deal at sloebury--and skating, when it pleased providence to send ice, which was too seldom. he looked in upon one or two of his cronies, and played a game of billiards, and hung about the high street to see what was going on. there was nothing particular going on, but the air was fresh, and the sun shining, and a little pleasant movement about, much more agreeable at least than sitting in a stuffy little room writing a troublesome letter which he felt sure would not do the least good. finally, he met captain underwood, who regarded him with a look which walter would have called anxious had he been able to imagine any possible reason why underwood should entertain any anxiety on his account. "well! any news?" the captain cried. "news! what news should there be in this dead-alive place?" walter said. the other looked at him keenly as if to see whether he was quite sincere, and then said, "come and have some lunch." he was free of all the best resorts in sloebury, this mysterious man. he belonged to the club, he was greatly at his ease in the hotel--everything was open to him. walter, who had but little money of his own, and could not quite cut the figure he wished, was not displeased to be thus exhibited as the captain's foremost ally. "i thought you might have come into that fortune, you are looking so spruce," the captain said, and laughed. but though he laughed he kept an eye on the young man as if the pleasantry meant more than appeared. walter felt a momentary irritation with this, which seemed to him a very bad joke; but he went with the captain all the same, not without a recollection of the table at home, at which, after waiting three quarters of an hour or so, and watching at the window for his coming, the ladies would at last sit down. but he was not a child to be forced to attendance at every meal, he said to himself. the captain's attentions to him were great, and it was a very nice little meal that they had together. "i expect you to do great things for me when you come into your fortune. you had better engage me at once as your guide, philosopher, and friend," he said, with a laugh. "of course you will quit sloebury, and make yourself free of all this bondage." "oh, of course," said walter, humouring the joke, though it was so bad a one in every way. he could not quarrel with his host at his own table, and perhaps after all it was more dignified to take it with good humour. "you must not go in for mere expense," the captain said; "you must make it pay. i can put you up to a thing or two. you must not go into the world like a pigeon to be plucked. it would effect my personal honour if a pupil of mine--for i consider you as a pupil of mine, methven, i think i have imparted to you a thing or two. you are not quite the simpleton you used to be, do you think you are?" walter received this with great gravity, though he tried to look as if he were not offended. "was i a simpleton?" he said. "i suppose in one's own case one never sees." "were you a simpleton!" said the other, with a laugh, and then he stopped himself, always keenly watching the young man's face, and perceiving that he was going too far. "but i flatter myself you could hold your own at whist with any man now," the captain said. this pleased the young man; his gravity unbended a little; there was a visible relaxation of the corners of his mouth. to be praised is always agreeable. moral applause, indeed, may be taken with composure, but who could hear himself applauded for his whist-playing without an exhilaration of the heart? he said, with satisfaction, "i always was pretty good at games," at which his instructor laughed again, almost too much for perfect good breeding. "i like to have young fellows like you to deal with," he said, "fellows with a little spirit, that are born for better things. your country-town young man is as fretful and frightened when he loses a few shillings as if it were thousands. but that's one of the reasons why i feel you're born to luck, my boy. i know a man of liberal breeding whenever i see him, he is not frightened about a nothing. that's one of the things i like in you, methven. you deserve a fortune, and you deserve to have me for your guide, philosopher, and friend." all this was said by way of joke; but it was strange to see the steady watch which he kept on the young man's face. one would have said a person of importance whom underwood meant to try his strength with, but guardedly, without going too far, and even on whom he was somehow dependent, anxious to make a good impression. walter, who knew his own favour to be absolutely without importance, and that underwood above all, his host and frequent entertainer, could be under no possible delusion on the subject, was puzzled, yet flattered, feeling that only some excellence on his part, undiscovered by any of his other acquaintances, could account for this. so experienced a person could have "no motive" in thus paying court to a penniless and prospectless youth. walter was perplexed, but he was gratified too. he had not seen many of the captain's kind; nobody who knew so many people or who was so much at his ease with the world. admiration of this vast acquaintance, and of the familiarity with which the captain treated things and people of which others spoke with bated breath, had varied in his mind with a fluctuating sense that underwood was not exactly so elevated a person as he professed to be, and even that there were occasional vulgarities in this man of the world. walter felt these, but in his ignorance represented to himself that perhaps they were right enough, and only seemed vulgar to him who knew no better. and to-day there is no doubt he was somewhat intoxicated by this flattery. it must be disinterested, for what could he do for anybody? he confided to the captain more than he had ever done before of his own position. he described how he was being urged to write to old milnathort. "he is an old lawyer in scotland--what they call a writer--and it is supposed he might be induced to take me into his office, for the sake of old associations. i don't know what the associations are, but the position does not smile upon me," walter said. "your family then is a scotch family?" said the captain with a nod of approval. "i thought as much." "i don't know that i've got a family," said walter. "on the contrary, methven is a very good name. there are half-a-dozen baronets at least, and a peer--you must have heard of him, lord erradeen." "oh yes, i've heard of him," walter said with a conscious look. if he had been more in the world he would have said "he is a cousin of mine," but he was aware that the strain of kindred was very far off, and he was at once too shy and too proud to claim it. his companion waited apparently for the disclosure, then finding it did not come opened the way. "if he's a relation of yours, it's to him you ought to write; very likely he would do something for you. they are a curious family. i've had occasion to know something about them." "i think you know everybody, underwood." "well, i have knocked about the world a great deal; in that way one comes across a great many people. i saw a good deal of the present lord at one time. he was a very queer man--they are all queer. if you are one of them you'll have to bear your share in it. there is a mysterious house they have--you would think i was an idiot if i told you half the stories i have heard----" "about the erradeens?" "about everybody," said the captain evasively. "there is scarcely a family, that, if you go right into it, has not something curious about them. we all have; but those that last and continue keep it on record. i could tell you the wildest tales about so-and-so and so-and-so, very ordinary people to look at, but with stories that would make your hair stand on end." "we have nothing to do with things of that sort. my people have always been straightforward and above-board." "for as much as you know, perhaps; but go back three or four generations and how can you tell? we have all of us ancestors that perhaps were not much to brag of." walter caught underwood's eye as he said this, and perhaps there was a twinkle in it, for he laughed. "it is something," he said, "to have ancestors at all." "if they were the greatest blackguards in the world," the captain said with a responsive laugh, "that's what i think. you don't want any more of my revelations? well, never mind, probably i shall have you coming to me some of these days quite humbly to beg for more information. you are not cut out for an attorney's office. it is very virtuous, of course, to give yourself up to work and turn your back upon life." "virtue be hanged," said walter, with some excitement, "it is not virtue, but necessity, which i take to be the very opposite. i know i'm wasting my time, but i mean to turn over a new leaf. and as the first evidence of that, as soon as i go home i shall write to old milnathort." "not to-day," said underwood, looking at his watch; "the post has gone; twenty-four hours more to think about it will do you no harm." walter started to his feet, and it was with a real pang that he saw how the opportunity had escaped him, and his intention in spite of himself been balked; a flush of shame came over his face. he felt that, if never before, here was a genuine occasion for blame. to be sure, the same thing had happened often enough before, but he had never perhaps so fully intended to do what was required of him. he sat down again with a muttered curse at himself and his own folly. there was nothing to be said for him. he had meant to turn over a new leaf, and yet this day was just like the last. the thought made his heart sick for the moment. but what was the use of making a fuss and betraying himself to a stranger? he sat down again, with a self-disgust which made him glad to escape from his own company. underwood's talk might be shallow enough, perhaps his pretence at knowledge was not very well founded, but he was safer company than conscience, and that burning and miserable sense of moral impotence which is almost worse than the more tragic stings of conscience. to find out that your resolution is worth nothing, after you have put yourself to the trouble of making it, and that habit is more strong than any motive, is not a pleasant thing to think of. better let the captain talk about lord erradeen, or any other lord in the peerage. underwood, being encouraged with a few questions, talked very largely on this subject. he gave the young man many pieces of information, which indeed he could have got in debrett if he had been anxious on the subject; and as the afternoon wore on they strolled out again for another promenade up and down the more populous parts of sloebury, and there fell in with other idlers like themselves; and when the twilight yielded to the more cheerful light of the lamps, betook themselves to whist, which was sometimes played in the captain's rooms at that immoral hour. sloebury, even the most advanced portion of it, had been horrified at the thought of whist before dinner when the captain first suggested it, but that innocent alarm had long since melted away. there was nothing dangerous about it, no stakes which any one could be hurt by losing. when walter, warned by the breaking up of the party that it was the hour for dinner, took his way home also, he was the winner of a sixpence or two, and no more: there had been nothing wrong in the play. but when he turned the corner of underwood's street and found himself with the wind in his face on his way home, the revulsion of feeling from something like gaiety to a rush of disagreeable anticipations, a crowd of uncomfortable thoughts, was pitiful. in spite of all our boastings of home and home influence, how many experience this change the moment they turn their face in the direction of that centre where it is conventional to suppose all comfort and shelter is! there is a chill, an abandonment of pleasant sensations, a preparation for those that are not pleasant. walter foresaw what he would find there with an impatience and resentment which were almost intolerable. behind the curtain, between the laths of the venetian blind, his mother would be secretly on the outlook watching for his return; perhaps even she had stolen quietly to the door, and, sheltered in the darkness of the porch, was looking out; or, if not that, the maid who opened the door would look reproachfully at him, and ask if he was going to dress, or if she might serve the dinner at once: it must have been waiting already nearly half an hour. he went on very quickly, but his thoughts lingered and struggled with the strong disinclination that possessed him. how much he would have given not to go home at all! how little pleasure he expected when he got there! his mother most likely would be silent, pale with anger, saying little, while cousin sophia would get up a little conversation. she would talk lightly about anything that might have been happening, and walter would perhaps exert himself to give sophia back her own, and show his mother that he cared nothing about her displeasure. and then when dinner was over, he would hurry out again, glad to be released. home: this was what it had come to be: and nothing could mend it so far as either mother or son could see. oh, terrible incompatibility, unapproachableness of one soul to another! to think that they should be so near, yet so far away. even in the case of husband and wife the severance is scarcely so terrible; for they have come towards each other out of different spheres, and if they do not amalgamate, there are many secondary causes that may be blamed, differences of nature and training and thought. but a mother with her child, whom she has brought up, whose first opinions she has implanted, who ought naturally to be influenced by her ways of thinking, and even by prejudices and superstitions in favour of her way! it was not, however, this view of the question which moved the young man. it was the fact of his own bondage, the compulsion he was under to return to dinner, to give some partial obedience to the rules of the house, and to confess that he had not written that letter to mr. milnathort. when he came in sight of the house, however, he became aware insensibly, he could scarcely tell how, of some change in its aspect: what was it? it was lighted up in the most unusual way. the window of the spare room was shining not only with candlelight, but with firelight, his own room was lighted up; the door was standing open, throwing out a warm flood of light into the street, and in the centre of this light stood mrs. methven with her white shawl over her head, not at all concealing herself, gazing anxiously in the direction from which he was coming. "i think i will send for him," he heard her say; "he has, very likely, stepped into captain underwood's, and he is apt to meet friends there who will not let him go." her voice was soft--there was no blame in it, though she was anxious. she was speaking to some one behind her, a figure in a great coat. walter was in the shadow and invisible. he paused in his surprise to listen. "i must get away by the last train," he heard the voice of the muffled figure say somewhat pettishly. "oh, there is plenty of time for that," cried his mother; and then she gave a little cry of pleasure, and said, "and, at a good moment, here he is!" he came in somewhat dazzled, and much astonished, into the strong light in the open doorway. mrs. methven's countenance was all radiant and glowing with pleasure. she held out her hand to him eagerly. "we have been looking for you," she cried; "i have had a great surprise. walter, this is mr. milnathort." puzzled, startled, and yet somewhat disappointed, walter paused in the hall, and looked at a tall old man with a face full of crotchets and intelligence, who stood with two great coats unbuttoned, and a comforter half unwound from his throat, under the lamp. his features were high and thin, his eyes invisible under their deep sockets. "now, you will surely take off your coat, and consent to go up-stairs, and make yourself comfortable," said mrs. methven, with a thrill of excitement in her voice. "this is walter. he has heard of you all his life. without any reference to the nature of your communication, he must be glad, indeed, to make your acquaintance--" she gave walter a look of appeal as she spoke. he was so much surprised that it was with difficulty he found self-possession to murmur a few words of civility. a feeling that mr. milnathort must have come to look after that letter which had never been written came in with the most wonderfully confusing, half ludicrous effect into his mind, like one of the inadequate motives and ineffable conclusions of a dream. mr. milnathort made a stiff little bow in reply. "i will remain till the last train. in the mean time the young gentleman had better be informed, mrs. methven." she put out her hands again. "a moment--give us a moment first." the old lawyer stood still and looked from the mother to the son. perhaps to his keen eyes it was revealed that it would be well she should have the advantage of any pleasant revelation. "i will," he said, "madam, avail myself of your kind offer to go up-stairs and unroll myself out of these trappings of a long journey; and in the mean time you will, perhaps, like to tell him the news yourself: he will like it all the better if he hears it from his mother." mrs. methven bowed her head, having, apparently, no words at her command: and stood looking after him till he disappeared on the stairs, following the maid, who had been waiting with a candle lighted in her hand. when he was gone, she seized walter hurriedly by the arm, and drew him towards the little room, the nearest, which was his ordinary sitting-room. her hand grasped him with unnecessary force in her excitement. the room was dark--he could not see her face, the only light in it being the reflection of the lamp outside. "oh, walter!" she cried; "oh, my boy! i don't know how to tell you the news. this useless life is all over for you, and another--oh, how different--another--god grant it happy and great, oh, god grant it! blessed and noble!--" her voice choked with excitement and fast-coming tears. she drew him towards her into her arms. "it will take you from me--but what of that, if it makes you happy and good? i have been no guide to you, but god will be your guide: his leadings were all dark to me, but now i see--" "mother," he cried, with a strange impulse he could not understand, putting his arm round her, "i did not write that letter: i have done nothing i promised or meant to do. i am sick to the heart to think what a fool and a cad i am--for the love of god tell me what it is!" chapter iv. all sloebury was aware next morning that something of the most extraordinary character had happened to young walter methven. the rumour even reached the club on the same evening. first the report was that he had got a valuable appointment, at which the gentlemen shook their heads; next that he had come into a fortune: they laughed with one accord at this. then, as upon a sudden gale of wind, there blew into the smoking-room, then full of tobacco, newspapers, and men, a whisper which made everybody turn pale. this was one reason, if not the chief, why that evening was one of the shortest ever known at the club, which did not indeed generally keep very late hours, but still was occupied by its _habitués_ till ten or eleven o'clock, when the serious members would go away, leaving only the boys, who never could have enough of it. but on that evening even the young men cleared off about ten or so. they wanted to know what it meant. some of them went round to captain underwood's where walter was so often to be found, with a confidence that at least underwood would know; the more respectable members of society went home to their families to spread the news, and half-a-dozen mothers at least went to bed that night with a disagreeable recollection that they had individually and deliberately "broken off" an incipient flirtation or more, in which walter had been one of the parties concerned. but the hopeful ones said to themselves, "lizzie has but to hold up her little finger to bring him back." this was before the whole was known. the young men who had hurried to captain underwood's were received by that gentleman with an air of importance and of knowing more than he would tell, which impressed their imaginations deeply. he allowed that he had always known that there was a great deal of property, and perhaps a title concerned, but declared that he was not at liberty to say any more. thus the minds of all were prepared for a great revelation; and it is safe to say that from one end of sloebury to the other walter's name was in everybody's mouth. it had been always believed that the methvens were people of good connections, and of later years it had been whispered by the benevolent as a reason for walter's inaction that he had grand relations, who at the proper moment would certainly interfere and set everything right for him. others, however, were strenuous in their denial and ridicule of this, asking, was his mother a woman to conceal any advantages she had?--for they did not understand the kind of pride in which mrs. methven was so strong. and then it was clear that not only did the grand relations do nothing for walter, but he did not even have an invitation from them, and went from home only when his mother went to the sea-side. thus there was great doubt and wonder, and in some quarters an inclination to treat the rumour as a canard, and to postpone belief. at the same time everybody believed it, more or less, at the bottom of their hearts, feeling that a thing so impossible must be true. but when it burst fully upon the world next morning along with the pale november daylight, but much more startling, that walter methven had succeeded as the next heir to his distant cousin, who was the head of the family, and was now lord erradeen, a great potentate, with castles in the highlands and fat lands further south, and moors and deer forests and everything that the heart of man could think of, the town was swept not only by a thrill of wonder, but of emotion. nobody was indifferent to this extraordinary romance. some, when they had got over the first bewilderment, received it with delightful anticipations, as if the good fortune which had befallen walter was in some respects good fortune also for themselves; whereas many others were almost angry at this sudden elevation over their heads of one who certainly did not deserve any better, if indeed half so well as they did. but nobody was indifferent. it was the greatest excitement that had visited sloebury for years--even it might be said for generations. lord erradeen! it took away everybody's breath. among the circle of walter's more intimate acquaintance, the impression made was still deeper, as may be supposed. the commotion in the mind of the rector, who indeed was old enough to have taken it with more placidity, was such that he hurried in from morning service without taking off his cassock. he was a good churchman, but not so far gone as to walk about the world in that ecclesiastical garment. "can you imagine what has happened?" he said, bursting in upon mrs. wynn, who was delicate and did not go to church in the winter mornings. "young walter methven, that you all made such a talk about----" this was unfair, because she had never made any talk--being a woman who did not talk save most sparingly. she was tempted for a moment to forestall him by telling him she already knew, but her heart failed her, and she only shook her head a little in protest against this calumny, and waited smilingly for what he had to say. she could not take away from him the pleasure of telling this wonderful piece of news. "why it was only the night before last he was here--most of us rather disapproving of him, poor boy," said the rector. "well, lydia, that young fellow that was a good-for-nothing, you know--doing nothing, never exerting himself: well, my dear! the most extraordinary thing has happened--the most wonderful piece of good fortune----" "don't keep me on tenterhooks, julius; i have heard some buzzing of talk already." "i should think you had! the town is full of it; they tell me that everybody you meet on the streets--lydia!" said the rector with solemnity, drawing close to her to make his announcement more imposing, "that boy is no longer simple mr. walter methven. he is lord erradeen----" "lord what?" cried the old lady. it was part of her character to be a little deaf, or rather hard of hearing, which is the prettier way of stating the fact. it was supposed by some that this was one of the reasons why, when any one was blamed, she always shook her head. "lord er-ra-deen; but bless me, it is not the name that is so wonderful, it is the fact. lord erradeen--a great personage--a man of importance. you don't show any surprise, lydia! and yet it is the most astonishing incident without comparison that has happened in the parish these hundred years." "i wonder what his mother is thinking," mrs. wynn said. "if her head is turned nobody could be surprised. of course, like every other mother, she thinks her son worthy of every exaltation." "i wish she was of that sort," the old lady said. "every woman is of that sort," said the rector with hasty dogmatism; "and, in one way, i am rather sorry, for it will make her feel she was perfectly right in encouraging him, and that would be such a terrible example for others. the young men will all take to idling----" "but it is not the idling, but the fact that there is a peerage in the family----" "you can't expect," cried the rector, who was not lucid, "that boys or women either will reason back so far as that. it will be a bad example: and, in the mean time, it is a most astonishing fact. but you don't seem in the least excited. i thought you would have jumped out of your chair--out of the body almost." "i am too rheumatic for that," said mrs. wynn with a smile: then, "i wonder if she will come and tell me," the old lady said. "i should think she does not know whether she is on her head or her heels," cried the rector; "i don't feel very sure myself. and walter! what a change, to be sure, for that boy! i hope he will make a good use of it. i hope he will not dart off with underwood and such fellows and make a fool of himself. mind, i don't mean that i think so badly of underwood," he added after a moment, for this was a subject on which, being mollified as previously mentioned, the rector took the male side of the question. mrs. wynn received the protest in perfect silence, not even shaking her head. "but if he took a fancy for horses or that sort of thing," mr. wynn added with a moment's hesitation; then he brightened up again--"of course it is better that he should know somebody who has a little experience in any case; and you will perceive, my dear, there is a great difference between a penniless youth like walter methven getting such notions in his head which lead only to ruin, and young lord erradeen dabbling a little in amusements which, after all, have no harm in them if not carried too far, and are natural in his rank--but you women are always prejudiced on such a point." "i did not say anything, my dear," the old lady said. "oh, no, you don't say anything," cried the rector fretfully, "but i see it in every line of your shawl and every frill of your cap. you are just stiff with prejudice so far as underwood is concerned, who really is not at all a bad fellow when you come to know him, and is always respectful to religion, and shows a right feeling--but one might as well try to fly as to convince you when you have taken a prejudice." mrs. wynn made no protest against this. she said only, "it is a great ordeal for a boy to pass through. i wonder if his mother----" and here she paused, not having yet, perhaps, formulated into words the thoughts that arose in her heart. "it is to be hoped that she will let him alone," the rector said; "she has indulged him in everything hitherto; but just now, when he is far better left to himself, no doubt she will be wanting to interfere." "do you think she has indulged him in everything?" said the old lady; but she did not think it necessary to accuse her husband of prejudice. perhaps he understood captain underwood as much better as she understood mrs. methven; so she said nothing more. she was the only individual in sloebury who had any notion of the struggle in which walter's mother had wrecked so much of her own peace. "there cannot be any two opinions on that subject," said the rector. "poor lad! you will excuse me, my dear, but i am always sorry for a boy left to a woman's training. he is either a mere milksop or a ne'er-do-well. walter is not a milksop, and here has providence stepped in, in the most wonderful way, to save him from being the other: but that is no virtue of hers. you will stand up, of course, for your own side." the old lady smiled and shook her head. "i think every child is the better for having both its parents, julius, if that is what you mean." this was not exactly what he meant, but it took the wind out of the rector's sails. "yes, it is an ordeal for him," he said, "but, i am sure, if my advice can do him any good, it is at his service; and, though i have been out of the way of many things for some time, yet i dare say the world is very much what it was, and i used to know it well enough." "he will ask for nobody's advice," said mrs. wynn. "which makes it all the more desirable he should have it," cried the rector; and then he said, "bless me! i have got my cassock on still. tell john to take it down to the vestry--though, by the way, there is a button off, and you might as well have it put on for me, as it is here." mrs. wynn executed the necessary repair of the cassock with her own hands. though she was rheumatic, and did not care to leave her chair oftener than was necessary, she had still the use of her hands, and she had a respect for all the accessories of the clerical profession. she was sitting examining the garment to see if any other feeblenesses were apparent, in which a stitch in time might save after labours, when, with a little eager tap at the door, another visitor came in. this was a young lady of three or four and twenty, with a good deal of the beauty which consists in fresh complexion and pleasant colour. her hair was light brown, warm in tone; her eyes were brown and sparkling; her cheeks and lips bloomed with health. she had a pretty figure, full of life and energy--everything, in short, that is necessary to make up a pretty girl, without any real loveliness or deeper grace. she came in quickly, brimming over, as was evident, with something which burst forth as soon as she had given the old lady the hasty conventional kiss of greeting, and which, as a matter of course, turned out to be the news of which sloebury was full. "did you ever hear anything so wonderful?" she said. "walter methven, that nobody thought anything of--and now he is turned into a live lord! a real peer of parliament! they say. i thought mamma would have fainted when she heard it." "why should your mamma faint when she heard of it, july? it is very pleasant news." "oh, aunt lydia! don't you know why? i am so angry: i feel as if i should never speak to her again. don't you remember? and i always thought you had some hand in it. oh, you sit there and look so innocent, but that is because you are so deep." "am i deep?" the old lady asked with a smile. "you are the deepest person i ever knew: you see through us all, and you just throw in a word; and then, when people act upon it, you look so surprised. i heard you myself remark to mamma how often walter methven was at our house." "yes, i think i did remark it," mrs. wynn said. "and what was the harm? he liked to come, and he liked me; and i hope you don't think i am the sort of person to forget myself and think too much about a man." "i thought you were letting him be seen with you too often, july, that is true." "you thought it might keep others off that were more eligible? well, that is what i supposed you meant, for i never like to take a bad view. but, you see, there was somebody that was eligible; and here has he turned, all at once, into the very best match within a hundred miles. if mamma had only let things alone, what prospects might be opening upon me now!" "half-a-dozen girls, i am afraid, may say just the same," said mrs. wynn. "well, what does that matter? he had nothing else to do. when a young man has nothing to do he must be making up to somebody. i don't blame him a bit; that is what makes us girls always ready for a flirtation. time hangs so heavy on our hands. and only think, aunt lydia, if things had been allowed to go on (and i could always have thrown him off if anything better turned up), only think what might have happened to me now. i might be working a coronet in all my new handkerchiefs," cried the girl: "only imagine! oh, oh, oh!" and she pretended to cry; but there was a sparkle of nervous energy all the same in her eyes, as if she were eager for the chase, and scarcely able to restrain her impatience. mrs. wynn shook her head at her visitor with a smile. "you are not so worldly as you give yourself out to be," she said. "oh, that just shows how little you know. i am as worldly as ever woman was. i think of nothing but how to establish myself, and have plenty of money. we want it so! oh, i know you are very good to us--both my uncle and you; but mamma is extravagant, and i am extravagant, and naturally all that anybody thinks of is to have what is necessary and decent for us. we have to put up with it, but i hate what is necessary and decent. i should like to go in satin and lace to-day even if i knew i should be in rags to-morrow; and to think if you had not interfered that i might have blazed in diamonds, and gone to court, and done everything i want to do! i could strangle you, aunt lydia, and mamma too!" upon which miss july (or julée, which was how her name was pronounced) gave mrs. wynn a sudden kiss and took the cassock out of her hands. "if it wants any mending i will do it," she said; "it will just give me a little consolation for the moment. and you will have time to think and answer this question: is it too late now?" "july, dear, it hurts me to hear you talk so--you are not so wild as you take credit for being." "i am not wild at all, aunt lydia," said the girl, appropriating mrs. wynn's implements, putting on her thimble, threading her needle, and discovering at one glance the little rent in the cassock which the old lady had been searching for in vain, "except with indignation to think what i have lost--if i have lost it. it is all very well to speak, but what is a poor girl to do? yes, i know, to make just enough to live on by teaching, or something of that sort; but that is not what i want. i want to be well off. i am so extravagant, and so is mamma. we keep ourselves down, we don't spend money; but we hate it so! i would go through a great many disagreeables if i could only have enough to spend." "and is walter one of the disagreeables you would go through?" "well, no; i could put up with him very well. he is not at all unpleasant. i don't want him, but i could do with him. do you really think it is too late? don't you think mamma might call upon mrs. methven and say how delighted we are; and just say to him, you know, in a playful way (mamma could manage that very well), 'we cannot hope to see you now in our little house, lord erradeen!' and then of course he would be piqued (for he's very generous), and say, 'why?' and mamma would say, 'oh, we are such poor little people, and you are now a great man.' upon which, as sure as fate, he would be at the cottage the same evening. and then!" july threw back her head, and expanded her brown eyes with a conscious power and sense of capability, as who should say--then it would be in my own hands.--"don't you think that's very good for a plan?" she added, subsiding quickly to the work, which she executed as one to the manner born. "i don't think anything of it as a plan--and neither do you; and your mother would not do it, july," the old lady said. "ah," said july, throwing back her head, "there you have hit the blot, aunt lydia. mamma wouldn't do it! she could, you know. when she likes she is the completest humbug!--but not always. and she has so many notions about propriety, and what is womanly, and so forth--just like you. poor women have no business with such luxuries. i tell her we must be of our time, and all that sort of thing; but she won't see it. no, i am afraid that is just the difficulty. it all depends on mamma--and mamma won't. well, it is a little satisfaction to have had it all out with you. if you had not interfered, you two, and stopped the poor boy coming----" at this juncture john threw open the door, and with a voice which he reserved for the great county ladies, announced "mrs. methven." john had heard the great news too. "--stopped the poor boy coming," july said. the words were but half out of her mouth when john opened the door, and it was next to impossible that the new visitor had not heard them. a burning blush covered the girl's face. she sprang to her feet with the cassock in her arms, and gazed at the new comer. mrs. methven for the first moment did not notice this third person. she came in with the content and self-absorption of one who has a great wonder to tell. the little world of sloebury and all its incidents were as nothing to her. she went up to old mrs. wynn with a noiseless swiftness. "i have come to tell you great news," she said. "let me look at you," said the old lady. "i have heard, and i scarcely could believe it. then it is all true?" "i am sorry i was not the first to tell you. i think such a thing must get into the air. nobody went out from my house last night, and yet everybody knows. i saw even the people in the street looking at me as i came along. mrs. wynn, you always stood up for him; i never said anything, but i know you did. i came first to you. yes, it is all true." the old lady had known it now for several hours, and had been gently excited, no more. now her eyes filled with tears, she could not have told why. "dear boy! i hope god will bless him, and make him worthy and great," she said, clasping her old hands together. "he has always been a favourite with me." "he is a favourite with everybody," said july. no one had noticed her presence, and she was not one that could remain unseen. "everybody is glad; there is not one that doesn't wish him well." did she intend to strike that _coup_ for herself which her mother was not to be trusted to make? mrs. wynn thought so with a great tremor, and interrupted her in a tone that for her was hurried and anxious. "july speaks nothing but the truth, mrs. methven; there is nobody that does not like walter; but i suppose i ought now to drop these familiarities and call him lord erradeen?" "he will never wish his old friends to do that," said mrs. methven. she already smiled with a gracious glance and gesture: and the feeling that these old friends were almost too much privileged in being so near to him, and admitted to such signs of friendship, came into her mind; but she did not care to have july share her expansion. "miss herbert," she said, with a little bow, "is very good to speak so kindly. but everybody is kind. i did not know my boy was so popular. sunshine," she added, with a smile, "brings out all the flowers." she had not sat down, and she evidently did not mean to do so while july remained. there was something grand in her upright carriage, in her air of superiority, which had never been apparent before. she had always been a woman, as sloebury people said, who thought a great deal of herself; but no one had ever acknowledged her right to do so till now. on the other hand, july herbert was well used to the cold shade. her mother was mrs. wynn's niece, but she was none the less poor for that, and as july was not a girl to be easily put down, she was acquainted with every manner of polite snubbing known in the society of the place. this of standing till she should go was one with which she was perfectly familiar, and in many cases it afforded her pleasure to subject the operator to great personal inconvenience; but on the present occasion she was not disposed to exercise this power. she would have conciliated walter's mother if she could have done so, and on a rapid survey of the situation she decided that the best plan was to yield. "i must go and tell mamma the great news," she said. "i am sure she will never rest till she rushes to you with her congratulations; but i will tell her you are tired of congratulations already--for of course it is not a thing upon which there can be two opinions." july laid down the cassock as she spoke. "i have mended all there is to mend, aunt lydia; you need not take any more trouble about it. good-bye for the moment. you may be sure you will see one or other of us before night." they watched her silently as she went out of the room. mrs. methven saying nothing till the door had closed, mrs. wynn with a deprecatory smile upon her face. she did not altogether approve of her grandniece. but neither was she willing to hand her over to blame. the old lady felt the snub july had received more than the girl herself did. she looked a little wistfully after her. she was half angry when as soon as july disappeared mrs. methven sank down upon a chair near her, huge billows of black silk rising about her, for she had put on her best gown. mrs. wynn thought that the mother, whose child, disapproved by the world, had been thus miraculously lifted above its censures, should have been all the more tolerant of the other who had met no such glorious fate. but she reflected that _they never see it_, which was her favourite expression of wonderment, yet explanation of everything. there were so many things that _they_ ought to learn by; but they never saw it. it was thus she accounted with that shake of her head for all the errors of mankind. mrs. methven for her part waited till even the very step of that objectionable julia herbert had died away. she had known by instinct that if _that_ girl should appear she would be on the watch to make herself agreeable to walter's mother. "as if he could ever have thought of her," she said to herself. twenty-four hours before mrs. methven would have been glad to think that walter "thought of" any girl who was at all in his own position. she would have hailed it as a means of steadying him, and making him turn seriously to his life. but everything was now changed, and this interruption had been very disagreeable. she could scarcely turn to her old friend now with the effusion and emotion which had filled her when she came in. she held out her hand and grasped that of the old lady. "i don't need to tell you what i am feeling," she said. "it is all like a tumultuous sea of wonder and thankfulness. i wanted it, for i was at my wits' end." mrs. wynn was a little chilled too, but she took the younger woman's hand. "you did not know what was coming," she said. "you wanted one thing, and providence was preparing another." "i don't know if that is how to state it; but at all events i was getting to feel that i could not bear it any longer, and trying for any way of setting things right: when the good came in this superlative way. i feel frightened when i think of it. after we knew last night i could do nothing but cry. it took all the strength from me. you would have thought it was bad news." "i can understand that." the old lady relinquished the hand which she had been holding. "to be delivered from any anxieties you may have had in such a superlative way, as you say, is not the common lot--most of us have just to fight them out." mrs. methven already felt herself far floated away from those that had to fight it out. the very words filled her heart with an elation beyond speech. "and this morning," she said, "to wake and to feel it must be folly, and then to realise that it was true! one knows so well the other sort of waking when the shock and the pang come all over again. but to wake up to this extraordinary incredible well-being--one might say happiness!" the tears of joy were in her eyes, and in those tears there is something so strange, so rare, that the soul experienced in life looks upon them almost with more awe than upon the familiar ones of grief which we see every day. the old lady melted, and her chill of feeling yielded to a tender warmth. yet what a pity that they never see it! how much more perfect it would have been if the woman in her happiness had been softened and kind to all those whom nothing had happened to! imperceptibly the old lady in her tolerant experience shook her gentle old head. then she gave herself in full sympathy to hear all the wonderful details. chapter v. the sentiments of the spectators in such a grand alteration of fortune may be interesting enough, and it is in general more easy to get at them than at those which fill the mind of the principal actor. in the present case it is better to say of the principal subject of the change, for walter could not be said to be an actor at all. the emotions of the first evening it would indeed be impossible to describe. to come in from his small country-town society, to whom even he was so far inferior that every one of them had facilities of getting and spending money which he did not possess, and to sit down, all tremulous and guilty, feeling himself the poorest creature, opposite to the serious and important personage who came to tell him, with documents as solemn as himself, that this silly youth who had been throwing away his life for nothing, without even the swell of excitement to carry him on, had suddenly become, without deserving it, without doing anything to bring it about, an individual of the first importance--a peer, a proprietor, a great man. walter could have sobbed as his mother did, had not pride kept him back. when they sat down at table in the little dining-room there were two at least of the party who ate nothing, who sat and gazed at each other across the others with white faces and blazing eyes. mr. milnathort made a good dinner, and sat very watchful, making also his observations, full of curiosity and a certain half-professional interest. but cousin sophy was the only one who really got the good of this prodigious event. she asked if they might not have some champagne to celebrate the day. she was in high excitement but quite self-controlled, and enjoyed it thoroughly. she immediately began in her thoughts to talk of my young cousin lord erradeen. it was a delightful advancement which would bring her no advantage, and yet almost pleased her more than so much added on to her income; for miss merivale was not of any distinction in her parentage, and suddenly to find herself cousin to a lord went to her heart: it was a great benefit to the solitary lady fond of society, and very eager for a helping hand to aid her up the ascent. and it was she who kept the conversation going. she even flirted a little, quite becomingly, with the old lawyer, who felt her, it was evident, a relief from the high tension of the others, and was amused by the vivacious middle-aged lady, who for the moment had everything her own way. after dinner there was a great deal of explanation given, and a great many facts made clear, but it is to be doubted whether walter knew very well what was being said. he listened with an air of attention, but it was as if he were listening to some fairy tale. something out of the _arabian nights_ was being repeated before him. he was informed how the different branches of his family had died out one after another. "captain methven was aware that he was in the succession," the lawyer said; and mrs. methven cast a thought back, half-reproachful, half-approving upon her husband, who had been dead so long that his words and ways were like shadows to her, which she could but faintly recall. would it have been better if he had told her? after pursuing this thought a long time she decided that it would not, that he had done wisely--yet felt a little visionary grudge and disappointment to think that he had been able to keep such a secret from her. no doubt it was all for the best. she might have distracted herself with hopes, and worn out her mind with waiting. it was doubtful if the support of knowing what was going to happen would really have done her any good; but yet it seemed a want of trust in her, it seemed even to put her in a partially ridiculous position now, as knowing nothing, not having even an idea of what was coming. but walter did not share any of these goings back upon the past. he had scarcely known his father, nor was he old enough to have had such a secret confided to him for long after captain methven died. he thought nothing of that. he sat with an appearance of the deepest attention, but unaware of what was being said, with a vague elation in his mind, something that seemed to buoy him up above the material earth. he could not bring himself down again. it was what he remembered to have felt when he was a child when some long-promised pleasure was coming--to-morrow. even in that case hindrances might come in. it might rain to-morrow, or some similar calamity might occur. but rain could not affect this. he sat and listened and did not hear a word. next morning walter awoke very early, before the wintry day had fully dawned. he opened his eyes upon a sort of paling and whitening of everything--a grey perception of the walls about him, and the lines of the window marked upon the paleness outside. what was it that made even these depressing facts exhilarate him and rouse an incipient delight in his mind, which for the moment he did not understand? then he sat up suddenly in his bed. it was cold, it was dark. there was no assiduous servant to bring hot water or light his fire--everything was chilling and wretched; and he was not given to early rising. ordinarily it was an affair of some trouble to get him roused, to see that he was in time for a train or for any early occupation. but this morning he found it impossible to lie still; an elasticity in him, an elation and buoyancy, which he almost felt, with a laugh, might float him up to the ceiling, like the mediums, made him jump up, as it were in self-defence. it buoyed him, it carried him as on floating pinions into a limitless heaven. what was it? who was he? the chill of the morning brought him a little to himself, and then he sat down in his shirt-sleeves and delivered himself up to the incredible, and laughed low and long, with a sense of the impossibility of it that brought tears to his eyes. he lord erradeen, lord anything! he a peer, a great man! he with lands and money and wealth of every sort, who last night had been pleased to win two sixpences! after the buoyancy and sensation of rising beyond the world altogether, which was a kind of physical consciousness of something great that had happened before he was awake, came this sense of the ludicrous, this incredulity and confused amusement. he dressed himself in this mood, laughing low from time to time, to himself, as if it were some game which was being played upon him, but of which he was in the secret, and not to be deceived, however artfully it might be managed. but when he was dressed and ready to go down-stairs--by which time daylight had fully struggled forth upon a wet and clammy world--he stopped himself short with a sudden reminder that to-day this curious practical joke was to extend its career and become known to the world. he laughed again, but then he grew grave, standing staring at the closed door of his bedroom, out of which he was about to issue--no longer a nobody--in a new character, to meet the remarks, the congratulations of his friends. he knew that the news would fly through the little town like lightning; that people would stop each other in the streets and ask, "have you heard it?--is it true?" and that throughout the whole place there would be a sort of revolution, a general change of positions, which would confuse the very world. he knew vaguely that whatever else might happen he would be uppermost. the people who had disapproved of him, and treated him _de haut en bas_, would find this to be impossible any longer. he would be in a position which is to be seen on the stage and in books more frequently than in common life--possessed of the power of making retribution, of punishing the wicked, and distributing to the good tokens of his favour. it is a thing we would all like to do, to avenge ourselves (within due christian and social limits) on the persons who have despised us, and to reward those who have believed in us, showing the one how right they were, and the other how wrong they were, with a logic that should be undeniable. there is nobody who has ever endured a snub--and who has not?--who would not delight in doing this; but the most of us never get such a supreme gratification, and walter was to have it. he was going to see everybody abashed and confounded who had ever treated him with contumely. once more he felt that sensation of buoyancy and elation as if he were spurning earth with his foot and ready to soar into some sort of celestial sphere. and then once more he laughed to himself. was it possible? could it be? would anybody believe it? he thought there would be an explosion of incredulous laughter through all the streets; but then, when that was over, both friends and foes would be forced to believe it--as he himself was forced to believe. with that he opened his door, and went down-stairs into the new world. he stumbled over the housemaid's pail, of course, but did not call forth any frown upon that functionary's freckled forehead as he would have done yesterday. on the contrary, she took away the pail, and begged his pardon with awe--being of course entirely blameless. he paused for a moment on the steps as he faced the raw morning air going out, and lo! the early baker, who was having a word with cook at the area over the rolls, turned towards him with a reverential look, and pulled off his cap. these were the first visible signs of walter's greatness; they gave him a curious sort of conviction that after all the thing was true. there was scarcely anybody about the sloebury streets except bakers and milkmen at this hour. it was a leisurely little town, in which nothing particular was doing, no manufactures or business to demand early hours; and the good people did not get up early. why should they? the day was long enough without that: so that walter met no one in his early promenade. but before he got back there were symptoms that the particular baker who had taken off his cap had whispered the news to others of his fraternity, who, having no tie of human connection, such as supplying the family with rolls, to justify a salutation, only stared at him with awe-stricken looks as he went past. he felt he was an object of interest even to the policeman going off duty, who being an old soldier, saluted with a certain grandeur as he tramped by. the young man took an aimless stroll through the half-awakened district. the roads were wet, the air raw: it was not a cheerful morning; damp and discouragement breathed in the air; the little streets looked squalid and featureless in shabby british poverty; lines of low, two-storied brick, all commonplace and monotonous. it was the sort of morning to make you think of the tediousness to which most people get up every day, supposing it to be life, and accepting it as such with the dull content which knows no better; a life made up of scrubbing out of kitchens and sweeping out of parlours, of taking down shutters and putting them up again; all sordid, petty, unbroken by an exhilarating event. but this was not what struck walter as he floated along in his own wonderful atmosphere, seeing nothing, noting everything with the strange vision of excitement. afterwards he recollected with extraordinary vividness a man who stood stretching his arms in shirt sleeves above his head for a long, soul-satisfying yawn, and remembered to have looked up at the shop-window within which he was standing, and read the name of robinson in gilt letters. robinson, yawning in his shirt-sleeves, against a background of groceries, pallid in the early light, remained with him like a picture for many a day. when he got back the breakfast table was spread, and his mother taking her place at it. mr. milnathort had not gone away as he intended by the night train. he had remained in mrs. methven's spare room, surrounded by all the attentions and civilities that a household of women, regarding him with a sort of awe as a miraculous messenger or even creator of good fortune, could show to a bachelor gentleman, somewhat prim and old-fashioned in his habits and ways. it was his intention to leave sloebury by the eleven o'clock train, and he had arranged that walter should meet him in edinburgh within a week, to be made acquainted with several family matters, in which, as the head of the house, it was necessary that he should be fully instructed. neither walter nor his mother paid very much attention to these arrangements, nor even remarked that the old lawyer spoke of them with great gravity. mrs. methven was busy making tea, and full of anxiety that mr. milnathort should breakfast well and largely, after what she had always understood to be the fashion of his country; and as for walter, he was not in a state of mind to observe particularly any such indications of manner. cousin sophia was the only one who remarked the solemnity of his tone and aspect. "one would suppose there was some ordeal to go through," she said in her vivacious way. "a young gentleman who is taking up a large fortune and a great responsibility will have many ordeals to go through, madam," mr. milnathort said in his deliberate tones: but he did not smile or take any other notice of her archness. it was settled accordingly, that after a few days for preparation and leave-taking, young lord erradeen should leave sloebury. "and if i might advise, alone," mr. milnathort said, "the place is perhaps not just in a condition to receive ladies. i would think it wiser on the whole, madam, if you deferred your coming till his lordship there has settled everything for your reception." "_my_ coming?" said mrs. methven. the last twelve hours had made an extraordinary difference in her feelings and faith; but still she had not forgotten what had gone before, nor the controversies and struggles of the past. "we must leave all that for after consideration," she said. walter was about to speak impulsively, but old milnathort stopped him with a skilful interruption-- "it will perhaps be the wisest way," he said; "there will be many things to arrange. when lord erradeen has visited the property, and understands everything about it, then he will be able to----" walter heard the name at first with easy unconsciousness: then it suddenly blazed forth upon him as his own name. his mother at the other end of the table felt the thrill of the same sensation. their eyes met; and all the wonder of this strange new life suddenly gleamed upon them with double force. it is true that the whole condition of their minds was affected by this revelation, that there was nothing about them that was not full of it, and that they were actually at this moment discussing the business connected with it. still it all came to life now as at the first moment at the sound of this name, lord erradeen! walter could not help laughing to himself over his coffee. "i can't tell who you mean," he said. "you must wait a little until i realise what walter methven has got to do with it." mrs. methven thought that this was making too much of the change. she already wished to believe, or at least to persuade mr. milnathort to believe, that she was not so very much surprised after all. "lord erradeen," she said, "is too much amused at present with having got a new name to take the change very seriously." "he will soon learn the difference, madam," said mr. milnathort. "property is a thing that has always to be taken seriously: and of all property the erradeen lands. there are many things connected with them that he will have to set his face to in a way that will be far from amusing." the old lawyer had a very grave countenance--perhaps it was because he was a scotchman. he worked through his breakfast with a steady routine that filled the ladies with respect. first fish, then kidneys, then a leg of the partridge that had been left from dinner last night; finally he looked about the table with an evident sense of something wanting, and though he declared that it was of no consequence, avowed at last, with some shyness, that it was the marmalade for which he was looking: and there was none in the house! mr. milnathort was full of excuses for having made such a suggestion. it was just a scotch fashion he declared; it was of no consequence. mrs. methven, who held an unconscious conviction that it was somehow owing to him that walter had become lord erradeen, was made quite unhappy by the omission. "i shall know better another time," she said regretfully. they were all still under the impression more or less that it was his doing. he was not a mere agent to them, but the god, out of the machinery, who had turned darkness into light. he justified this opinion still more fully before he went away, putting into walter's hand a cheque-book from a london bank, into which a sum of money which seemed to the inexperienced young man inexhaustible, had been paid to his credit. the old gentleman on his side seemed half-embarrassed, half-impatient after a while by the attention shown him. he resisted when walter declared his intention of going to the railway to see him off. "that is just a reversal of our positions," he said. at this mrs. methven became a little anxious, fearing that perhaps walter's simplicity might be going too far. she gave him a word of warning when the cab drove up for mr. milnathort's bag. it was not a very large one, and walter was quite equal to the condescension of carrying it to the station if his mother had not taken that precaution. she could not make up her mind that he was able to manage for himself. "you must remember that after all he is only your man of business," she said, notwithstanding all the worship she had herself been paying to this emissary of fortune. it was a relief to shake hands with him, to see him drive away from the door, leaving behind him such an amazing, such an incalculable change. somehow it was more easy to realise it when he was no longer there. and this was what walter felt when he walked away from the railway, having seen with great satisfaction the grizzled head of the old scotsman nod at him from a window of the departing train. the messenger was gone; the thing which he had brought with him, did that remain? was it conceivable that it was now fixed and certain not to be affected by anything that could be done or said? walter walked steadily enough along the pavement, but he did not think he was doing so. the world around him swam in his eyes once more. he could not make sure that he was walking on solid ground, or mounting up into the air. how different it was from the way in which he had come forth yesterday, idle, half-guilty, angry with himself and everybody, yet knowing very well what to do, turning with habitual feet into the way where all the other idlers congregated, knowing who he should meet and what would happen. he was separated from all that as if by an ocean. he had no longer anything to do with these foolish loungers. his mother had told him a thousand times in often varied tones that they were not companions for him; to-day he recognised the fact with a certain disgust. he felt it more strongly still when he suddenly came across captain underwood coming up eagerly with outstretched hands. "i hope i am the first to congratulate you, lord erradeen," he said. "now you will know why i asked you yesterday, was there any news----" "now i shall know? i don't a bit; what do you mean? do you mean me to believe that _you_ had any hand in it?" walter cried, with a tone of mingled incredulity and disdain. "no hand in it, unless i had helped to put the last poor dear lord out of the way. i could scarcely have had that; but if you mean did i know about it, i certainly did, as you must if you had been a little more in the world." "why didn't you tell me then?" said walter. he added somewhat hotly, with something of the sublime assumption of youth: "waiting for a man to die would never have suited me. i much prefer to have been, as you say, out of the world----" "oh, lord! i didn't mean to offend you," said the captain. "don't get on a high horse. of course, if you'd known your debrett as i do, you would have seen the thing plain enough. however, we needn't quarrel about it. i have always said you were my pupil, and i hope i have put you up to a few things that will be of use on your entry into society." "have you?" said walter. he could not think how he had ever for a moment put up with this under-bred person. underwood stood before him with a sort of jaunty rendering of the appeal with which grooms and people about the stable remind a young man of what in his boyish days they have done for him--an appeal which has its natural issue in a sovereign. but he could not give underwood a sovereign, and it was perhaps just a little ungenerous to turn in the first moment of his prosperity from a man who, from whatever purpose, had been serviceable to him in his poverty. he said, with an attempt to be more friendly: "i know, underwood, you have been very kind." "oh, by jove! kind isn't the word. i knew you'd want a bit of training; the best thoroughbred that ever stepped wants that; and if i can be of any use to you in the future, i will. i knew old erradeen; i've known all about the family for generations. there are a great many curious things about it, but i think i can help you through them," said the captain with a mixture of anxiety and swagger. there had always been something of this same mixture about him, but walter had never been fully conscious what it was till now. "thank you," he said; "perhaps it will be better to let that develop itself in a natural way. i am going to scotland in a week, and then i shall have it at first hand." "then i can tell you beforehand you will find a great many things you won't like," said underwood, abruptly. "it is not for nothing that a family gets up such a reputation. i know two or three of your places. mulmorrel, and the shooting-box on loch etive, and that mysterious old place at kinloch-houran. i have been at every one of them. it was not everybody, i can tell you, that old erradeen would have taken to that place. why, there is a mystery at every corner. there is----" walter held up his hand to stay this torrent. he coloured high with a curious sentiment of proprietorship and the shrinking of pride from hearing that which was his discussed by strangers. he scarcely knew the names of them, and their histories not at all. he put up his hand: "i would rather find out the mysteries for myself," he said. "oh," cried underwood, "if you are standing on your dignity, my lord, as you like, for that matter. i am not one to thrust my company upon any man if he doesn't like it. i have stood your friend, and i would again; but as for forcing myself upon you now that you've come to your kingdom----" "underwood," cried the other, touched in the tenderest point, "if you dare to insinuate that this has changed me, i desire never to speak to you again. but it is only, i suppose, one of the figures of speech that people use when they are angry. i am not such a cad as you make me out. whether my name is methven or erradeen--i don't seem to know very well which it is----" "it is both," the other cried with a great laugh, and they shook hands, engaging to dine together at the hotel that evening. underwood, who was knowing in such matters, was to order the dinner, and two or three of "the old set," were to be invited. it would be a farewell to his former comrades, as walter intended; and with a curious recurrence of his first elation he charged his representative to spare no expense. there was something intoxicating and strange in the very phrase. as he left underwood and proceeded along the high street, where, if he had not waved his hand to them in passing with an air of haste and pre-occupation, at least every second person he met would have stopped him to wish him joy, he suddenly encountered july herbert. she was going home from the vicarage, out of which his mother had politely driven her; and it seemed the most wonderful luck to july to get him to herself, thus wholly unprotected, and with nobody even to see what she was after. she went up to him, not with underwood's eagerness, but with a pretty frank pleasure in her face. "i have heard a fairy tale," she said, "and it is true----" "i suppose you mean about me," said walter. "yes, i am afraid it is true. i don't exactly know who i am at present." "afraid!" cried july. "ah, you know you don't mean that. at all events, you are no longer just the old walter whom we have known all our lives." there was another girl with her whom walter knew but slightly, but who justified the plural pronoun. "on the contrary, i was going to say, when you interrupted me----" "i am so sorry i interrupted you." "that though i did not know who i was in the face of the world, i was always the old walter, &c. a man, i believe, can never lose his christian name." "nor a woman either," said july. "that is the only thing that cannot be taken from us. we are supposed, you know, rather to like the loss of the other one." "i have heard so," said walter, who was not unaccustomed to this sort of fencing. "but i suppose it is not true." "oh," said july, "if it were for the same reason that makes you change your name, i should not mind. but there is no peerage in our family that i know of, and i should not have any chance if there were, alas! good-bye, lord erradeen. it is a lovely name! and may i always speak to you when i meet you, though you are such a grand personage? we do not hope to see you at the cottage now, but mamma will like to know that you still recognise an old friend." "i shall come and ask mrs. herbert what she thinks of it all," walter said. july's brown eyes flashed out with triumph as she laughed and waved her hand to him. she said-- "it will be too great an honour," and curtseyed; then laughed again as she went on, casting a glance at him over her shoulder. he laughed too; he was young, and he was gratified even by this undisguised provocation, though he could not help saying to himself, with a slight beat of his heart, how near he was to falling in love with that girl! what a good thing it was that he did not--_now_! as for july, she looked at him with a certain ferocity, as if she would have devoured him. to think of all that boy had it in his power to give if he pleased, and to think how little a poor girl could do! chapter vi. mrs. methven was conscious of a new revival of the old displeasure when walter informed her of the engagement he had formed for the evening. she was utterly disappointed. she had thought that the great and beneficial shock of this new life would turn his character altogether, and convert him into that domestic sovereign, that object of constant reference, criticism, and devotion which every woman would have every man be. it was a wonderful mortification and enlightenment to find that without even the interval of a single evening devoted to the consideration of his new and marvellous prospects, and that talking over which is one of the sweetest parts of a great and happy event, he should return--to what?--to wallowing in the mire, as the scripture says, to his old billiard-room acquaintances, the idlers and undesirable persons with whom he had formed associations. could there be anything more unsuitable than lord erradeen in the midst of such a party, with underwood, and perhaps worse than underwood. it wounded her pride and roused her temper, and, in spite of all her efforts, it was with a lowering brow that she saw him go away. afterwards, indeed, when she thought of it, as she did for hours together, while cousin sophia talked, and she languidly replied, maintaining a conversation from the lips outward, so poor a substitute for the evening's talking over and happy consultation she had dreamed of--mrs. methven was more just to her son. she tried always to be just, poor lady. she placed before herself all the reasons for his conduct. that he should entertain the men who, much against her wish and his own good, yet in their way had been kind to and entertained him, was natural. but to do it this first evening was hard, and she could not easily accept her disappointment. afterwards she reminded herself with a certain stern philosophy that because walter had owned a touch of natural emotion, and had drawn near to her and confessed himself in the wrong, that was no reason why his character should be changed in a moment. there were numbers of men who on occasion felt and lamented their misdoing, yet went on again in the same way. he had been no doubt startled, as some are by calamity, by the more extraordinary shock of this good fortune; but why should he for that abandon all the tastes and occupations of his former life? it was she, she said to herself, with some bitterness, who was a fool. the fact was that walter meant no harm at all, and that it was merely the first impulse of a half-scornful liberality, impatience of the old associations, which he had tacitly acknowledged were not fit for him, that led him back to his former companions. he felt afterwards that it would have been in better taste had he postponed this for a night. but he was very impatient and eager to shake himself free of them, and enter upon his new career. something of the same disappointed and disapproving sentiment filled mrs. methven's mind when she heard of his visit to the cottage. she knew no reason why he should take a special leave of july herbert; if he knew himself a reason, which he did not disclose, that was another matter. thoughts like this embittered the preparations for his departure, which otherwise would have been so agreeable. she had to see after many things which a young man of more wealth, or more independent habits, would have done for himself--his linen, his portmanteau, most of the things he wanted, except the tailor part of the business; but it was not until the last evening that there was any of the confidential consultation, for which her heart had longed. even on that last day walter had been very little indoors. he had been busy with a hundred trifles, and she had begun to make up her mind to his going away without a word said as to their future relations, as to whether he meant his mother to share any of the advantages of his new position, or to drop her at sloebury as something done with, which he did not care to burden himself with, any more than the other circumstances of his past career. she did so little justice to the real generosity of her son's temper in the closeness of her contest with him, and the heat of personal feeling, that she had begun to make up her mind to this, with what pain and bitterness it is unnecessary to say. she had even began to make excuses for her own desertion in the tumult of endless thought upon this one subject which possessed her. she would be just; after all, was it not better perhaps that she should be left in the little house which was her independent home, for which she owed nothing to any one? if any unnecessary sense of gratitude made him offer her reluctantly a share in his new life, that would be humiliation indeed. if, as was apparent, her society, her advice, her love were nothing to him, was it not far better that both should recognise the situation, and view things in their true light? this the proud woman had made up her mind to, with what depth of wounded tenderness and embittered affection who could say? she had packed for him with her own hands, for all his permanent arrangements were to be made after he had left sloebury, and to change her household in consequence of an alteration of fortune which, according to all appearances, would not concern her, was, she had proudly decided, quite out of the question. she packed for him as in the days when he was going to school, when he was a boy, and liked everything better that had been done by his mother. a woman may be pardoned for feeling such a difference with a passionate soreness and sense of downfall. in those days how she had thought of the time when he would be grown up, when he would understand all her difficulties and share all her cares, and in his own advancement make her triumphant and happy! god forgive me, she said to herself, now he has got advancement far above my hopes, and i am making myself wretched thinking of myself. she stopped and cried a little over his new linen. no, he was right; if it must be allowed that they did not "get on," it was indeed far better in the long run that there should be no false sentiment, no keeping up of an untenable position. thank god she required nothing; she had enough; she wanted neither luxury nor grandeur, and her home, her natural place was here, where she had lived so many years, where she could disarm all comment upon walter's neglect of her, by saying that she preferred the place where she had lived so long, and where she had so many friends. why, indeed, should she change her home at her time of life? no doubt he would come back some time and see her; but after all why should her life be unsettled because his was changed? it was he who showed true sense in his way of judging the matter, she said to herself with a smile, through the hastily dried and momentary tears. walter came in when the packing was just about concluded. he came half way up the stairs and called "mother, where are you?" as he had often done when he was a boy and wanted her at every turn, but as he never did now. this touched and weakened her again in her steady resolution to let him see no repining in her. "are you packing for me?" he called out again; "what a shame while i have been idling! but come down, mother, please, and leave that. you forget we have everything to settle yet." "what is there to settle?" she said, with a certain sharpness of tone which she could not quite suppress, coming out upon the landing. the maids who were going to bed, and who heard all this, thought it was beautiful to hear his lordship speaking like that, quite natural to his mother; but that missus was that hard it was no wonder if they didn't get on; and cousin sophia from her virgin retirement, where she sat in her dressing-gown reading a french novel, and very much alive to every sound, commented in her own mind, closing her book, in the same sense. "now she will just go and hold him at arm's length while the boy's heart is melting, and then break her own," miss merivale said to herself. thus everybody was against her and in favour of the fortunate young fellow who had been supping on homage and flattery, and now came in easy and careless to make everything straight at the last moment. mrs. methven on her side was very tired, and tremulous with the exertion of packing. it would have been impossible for her to banish that tone out of her voice. she stood in the subdued light upon the stairs looking down upon him, leaning on the banister to support herself; while he, with all the light from below upon his face, ruddy with the night air, and the applauses, and his own high well-being, looked up gaily at her. he had shaken off all his old irritability in the confidence of happiness and good fortune that had taken possession of him. after a moment he came springing up the stairs three at a time. "you look tired, mother, while i have been wasting my time. come down, and let us have our talk. i'll do all the rest to-morrow," he said, throwing his arm round her and leading her down-stairs. he brought her some wine first of all and a footstool, and threw himself into the easy task of making her comfortable. "now," he said, "let's talk it all over," drawing a chair to her side. all this was quite new upon walter's part--or rather quite old, belonging to an age which had long ago gone. "isn't it rather late for that?" she said, with a faint smile. "yes, and i am ashamed of myself; but, unfortunately, you are so used to that. we must settle, however, mother. i am to go first of all to kinloch-houran, which milnathort says is not a place for you. indeed, i hear----" here he paused a little as if he would have named his authority, and continued, "that it is a ruinous sort of place; and why i should go there, i don't know." "where did you hear?" she said, with quick suspicion. "well, mother, i would rather not have mentioned his name; but if you wish to know, from underwood. i know you are prejudiced against him. yes, it is prejudice, though i don't wonder at it. i care nothing for the fellow; but still it comes out, which is rather strange, that he knows these places, and a good deal about the erradeens." "is that, then," cried the mother quickly, "the reason of his being here?" "he never said so, nor have i asked him," answered walter, with something of his old sullenness; but then he added--"the same thought has crossed my own mind, mother, and i shouldn't wonder if it were so." "walter," she said, "a man like that can have but one motive--the desire to aggrandise himself. for heaven's sake, don't have anything to do with him; don't let him get an influence over you." "you must have a very poor opinion of me, mother," he said, in an aggrieved tone. she looked at him with a curious gaze, silenced, as it seemed. she loved him more than anything in the world, and thought of him above everything; and yet perhaps in that wrath with those we love which works like madness in the brain, it was true what he said--that she had a poor opinion of him. extremes meet, as the proverb says. however, this was a mystery too deep for walter to enter into. "don't let us waste words about underwood," he said. "i care nothing for the fellow; he is vulgar and presuming--as you always said." partly, no doubt, this avowal was made with the intention of pleasing his mother; at the same time it proved the great moral effect of promotion in rank. lord erradeen saw with the utmost distinctness what walter methven had only glimpsed by intervals. and it is impossible to describe how this speech pleased mrs. methven. her tired eyes began to shine, her heart to return to its brighter hopes. "the thing is, what arrangements you wish me to make," said walter. "what are you going to do? i hear mulmorrel is a handsome house, but it's november, and naturally it is colder in the north. do you think you would care to go there now, or wait till the weather is better? it may want furnishing, for anything i know; and it appears we've got a little house in town." "walter," she said, in a voice which was husky and tremulous, "before you enter upon all this--you must first think, my dear. are you sure it will be for your comfort to have me with you at all? wouldn't you rather be free, and make your own arrangements, and leave me--as i am?" "mother?" the young man cried. he got up suddenly from where he was sitting beside her, and pushed away his chair, and stood facing her, with a sudden paleness and fiery eyes that seemed to dazzle her. he had almost kicked her footstool out of his way in his excitement and wounded feeling. "do you mean to say you want to have nothing to do with me?" he said. "oh! my boy, you could not think so. i thought that was what--you meant. i wish only what is for your good." "would it be for my good to be an unnatural cad?" said the young man, with rising indignation--"a heartless, ill-conditioned whelp, with no sense and no feeling? oh, mother! mother! what a poor opinion you must have of me!" he cried; and so stung was he with this blow that sudden tears sprang to his eyes. "all because i'm a fool and put everything off to the last moment," he added, in a sort of undertone, as if explaining it to himself. "but i'm not a beast for all that," he said, fiercely. she made him no reply, but sat and gazed at him with a remorse and compunction, which, painful sentiments as they are, were to her sweet as the dews from heaven. yes, it appeared that through all her passionate and absorbing tenderness she had had a poor opinion of him. she had done him injustice. the conviction was like a new birth. that he should be lord erradeen was nothing in comparison of being, as he thus proved himself, good and true, open to the influences of affection and nature. she could not speak, but her eyes were full of a thousand things; they asked him mutely to forgive her. they repented, and were abashed and rejoiced all in one glance. the young man who had not been nearly so heartless as she feared, was now not nearly so noble as she thought: but he was greatly touched by the crisis, and by the suggestion of many a miserable hour which was in her involuntary sin against him and in her penitence. he came back again and sat close by her, and kissed her tremulously. "i have been a cad," he said. "i don't wonder you lost all faith in me, mother." "not that, not that," she said faintly; and then there was a moment of exquisite silence, in which, without a word, everything was atoned for, and pardon asked and given. and then began perhaps the happiest hour of mrs. methven's life, in which they talked over everything and decided what was to be done. not to give up the house in sloebury at present, nor indeed to do anything at present, save wait till he had made his expedition into scotland and seen his new property, and brought her full particulars. after he had investigated everything and knew exactly the capabilities of the house, and the condition in which it was, and all the necessities and expediencies, they would then decide as to the best thing to be done; whether to go there, though at the worst time of the year, or to go to london, which was an idea that pleased walter but alarmed his mother. mrs. methven did her best to remember what were the duties of a great landed proprietor and to bring them home to her son. "you ought to spend christmas at your own place," she said. "there will be charities and hospitalities and the poor people to look after." she did not know scotland, nor did she know very well what it was to be a great country magnate. she had been but a poor officer's daughter herself, and had married another officer, and been beaten about from place to place before she settled down on her small income at sloebury. she had not much more experience than walter himself had in this respect; indeed, if the truth must be told, both of them drew their chief information from novels, those much-abused sources of information, in which the life of rural potentates is a favourite subject, and not always described with much knowledge. walter gravely consented to all this, with a conscientious desire to do what was right: but he thought the place would most likely be gloomy for his mother in winter, and that hospitalities would naturally be uncalled for so soon after the death of the old lord. "what i would advise would be park lane," he said, with a judicial tone. "milnathort said that it was quite a small house." "what is a small house in park lane would look a palace at sloebury," mrs. methven said: "and you must not begin on an extravagant footing, my dear." "you will let us begin comfortably, i hope," he said; "and i must look for a nice carriage for you, mother." walter felt disposed to laugh as he said the words, but carried them off with an air of easy indifference as if it were the most natural thing in the world: while his mother on her side could have cried for pleasure and tenderness. "you must not mind me, walter; we must think what is best for yourself," she said, as proud and pleased as if she had twenty carriages. "nothing of the sort," he said. "we are going to be comfortable, and you must have everything that is right first of all." what an hour it was! now and then there will be given to one individual out of a class a full measure of recompense heaped and overflowing, out of which the rest may get a sympathetic pleasure though they do not enjoy it in their own persons. mrs. methven had never imagined that this would come to her, but lo! in a moment it was pouring upon her in floods of consolation. so absorbing was this happy consultation that it was only when her eyes suddenly caught the clock on the mantelpiece, and saw that the hands were marking a quarter to two! that mrs. methven startled awoke out of her bliss. "my poor boy! that i should keep you up to this hour talking, and a long journey before you to-morrow!" she cried. she hustled him up to his room after this, talking and resisting gaily to the very door. he was happy too with that sense of happiness conferred, which is always sweet, and especially to youth in the delightful, easy sense of power and beneficence. when he thought of it he was a little remorseful, to think that he had possessed the power so long and never exercised it, for walter was generous enough to be aware that the house in park lane and the carriage were not the occasions of his mother's blessedness. "poor mother," he said to himself softly. he might have made her a great deal more happy if he had chosen before these fine things were dreamt of. but mrs. methven remembered that no more. she begged pardon of god on her knees for misjudging her boy, and for once in her life was profoundly, undoubtingly happy, with a perfection and fulness of content which perhaps could only come after long experience of the reverse. after such a moment a human creature, if possible, should die, so as to taste nothing less sweet: for the less sweet, to be sure, must come back if life goes on, and at that moment there was not a cloud or a suggestion of darkness upon the firmament. she grudged falling asleep, though she was very tired, and so losing this beautiful hour; but nature is wilful and will seldom abdicate the night for joy, whatever she may do for grief. next morning she went to the station with him to see him away. impossible to describe the devotion of all the officials to lord erradeen's comfort on his journey. the station-master kindly came to superintend this august departure, and the porters ran about contending for his luggage with an excitement which made, at least, one old gentleman threaten to write to the _times_. there was nothing but "my lord" and "his lordship" to be heard all over the station; and so many persons came to bid him good-bye and see the last of him, as they said, that the platform was quite inconveniently crowded. among these, of course, was captain underwood, whose fervent--"god bless you, my boy"--drowned all other greetings. he had, however, a disappointed look--as if he had failed in some object. mrs. methven, whose faculties were all sharpened by her position, and who felt herself able to exercise a toleration which, in former circumstances, would have been impossible to her, permitted him to overtake her as she left the place, and acknowledged his greeting with more cordiality, or, at least, with a less forbidding civility than usual. and then a wonderful sight was seen in sloebury. this _béte noir_ of the feminine world, this man whom every lady frowned upon, was seen walking along the high street, side by side, in earnest conversation with one of the women who had been most unfavourable to him. was she listening to an explanation, a justification, an account of himself, such as he had not yet given, to satisfy the requirements of the respectability of sloebury? to tell the truth, mrs. methven now cared very little for any such explanation. she did not remember, as she ought to have done, that other women's sons might be in danger from this suspicious person, though her own was now delivered out of his power. but she was very curious to know what anybody could tell her of walter's new possessions, and of the family which it was rather humiliating to know so little about. it was she, indeed, who had begun the conversation after his first remark upon walter's departure and the loss which would result to sloebury. "you know something about the erradeens, my son tells me," she said almost graciously. "something! i know about as much as most people. i knew he was the heir, which few, except yourselves, did," the captain said. he cast a keen glance at her when he said, "except yourselves." "indeed," said mrs. methven, "that is scarcely correct, for walter did not know, and i had forgotten. i had, indeed, lost sight of my husband's family and the succession seemed so far off." it was thus that she veiled her ignorance and endeavoured to make it appear that indifference on her part, and a wise desire to keep walter's mind unaffected by such a dazzling possibility, had been her guiding influence. she spoke with such modest gravity that captain underwood, not used to delusion under that form, was tempted into a sort of belief. he looked at her curiously, but her veil was down, and her artifice, if it was an artifice, was of a kind more delicate than any to which he was accustomed. "well!" he said, "then it was not such a surprise to you as people thought? sloebury has talked of nothing else, i need not tell you, for several days; and everybody was of opinion that it burst upon you like a thunderbolt." "upon my son, yes," mrs. methven said with a smile. he looked at her again, and she had the satisfaction of perceiving that this experienced man of the world was taken in. "well, then," he said, "you will join with me in wishing him well out of it: you know all the stories that are about." "i have never been at mulmorrel--my husband's chances in his own lifetime were very small, you know." "it isn't mulmorrel, it is that little ruined place where something uncanny is always said to go on--oh, _i_ don't know what it is; nobody does but the reigning sovereign himself, and some hangers-on, i suppose. i have been there. i've seen the mysterious light, you know. nobody can ever tell what window it shows at, or if it is any window at all. i was once with the late man--the late lord, he who died the other day--when it came out suddenly. we were shooting wildfowl, and his gun fell out of his hands. i never saw a man in such a funk. we were a bit late, and twilight had come on before we knew." "so then you actually saw something of it yourself?" mrs. methven said. she had not the remotest idea what this was, but if she could find out something by any means she was eager enough to take advantage of it. "no more than that; but i can tell you this: erradeen was not seen again for twenty-four hours. whether it was a call to him or what it was i can't undertake to say. he never would stand any questioning about it. he was a good fellow enough, but he never would put up with anything on that point. so i can only wish walter well through it, mrs. methven. in my opinion he should have had some one with him; for he is young, and, i dare say, he is fanciful." "my son, lord erradeen," said mrs. methven with dignity, "is man enough, i hope, to meet an emergency. perhaps you think him younger than he is." she propounded this delicately as, perhaps, a sort of excuse for the presumption of the christian name. underwood grew very red: he was disappointed and irritable. "oh, of course you know best," he said. "as for my lord erradeen (i am sure i beg your pardon for forgetting his dignity), i dare say he is quite old enough to take care of himself--at least, we'll hope so; but a business of that kind will upset the steadiest brain, you know. old erradeen had not a bad spirit of his own, and _he_ funked it. i confess i feel a little anxious for your boy; he's a nice fellow, but he's nervous. i was in a dozen minds to go up with him to stand by him; but, perhaps, it is better not, for the best motives get misconstrued in this world. i can only wish him well out of it," captain underwood said, taking off his hat, and making her a fine bow as he stalked away. it is needless to say that this mysterious intimation of danger planted daggers in mrs. methven's heart. she stopped aghast: and for the moment the idea of running back to the station, and signalling that the train was to be stopped came into her mind. ridiculous folly! wish him well out of it? what, out of his great fortune, his peerage, his elevation in the world? mrs. methven smiled indignantly, and thought of the strange manifestations under which envy shows itself. but she went home somewhat pale, and could not dismiss it from her mind as she wished to do. well out of it! and there were moments when, she remembered, she had surprised a very serious look on the countenance of mr. milnathort. was walter going unwarned, in the elation and happy confidence of his heart, into some danger unknown and unforeseen? this took her confidence away from her, and made her nervous and anxious. but after all, what folly it must be: something uncanny and a mysterious light! these were stories for christmas, to bring a laugh or a shiver from idle circles round the fire. to imagine that they could effect anything in real life was a kind of madness; an old-fashioned, exploded superstition. it was too ridiculous to be worthy a thought. chapter vii. walter arrived in edinburgh on a wintry morning white and chill. a sort of woolly shroud wrapped all the fine features of the landscape. he thought the dingy turrets of the calton jail were the castle, and was much disappointed, as was natural. arthur's seat and the crags were as entirely invisible as if they had been a hundred miles away, and the cold crept into his very bones after his night's journey, although it had been made luxuriously, in a way very different from his former journeyings. also it struck him as strange and uncomfortable that nobody was aware of the change in his position, and that even the railway porter, to whom he gave a shilling (as a commoner he would have been contented with sixpence), only called him "sir," and could not perceive that it would have been appropriate to say my lord. he went to an hotel, as it was so early, and found only a dingy little room to repose himself in, the more important part of the house being still in the hands of the housemaids. and when he gave his name as lord erradeen, the attendants stared at him with a sort of suspicion. they looked at his baggage curiously, and evidently asked each other if it was possible he could be what he claimed to be. walter had a half-consciousness of being an impostor, and trying to take these surprised people in. he thawed, however, as he ate his breakfast, and the mist began to rise, revealing the outline of the old town. he had never been in edinburgh before; he had rarely been anywhere before. it was all new to him, even the sense of living in an inn. there was a curious freedom about it, and independence of all restraint, which pleased him. but it was very strange to be absolutely unknown, to meet the gaze of faces he had never seen before, and to be obliged always to explain who he was. it was clear that a servant was a thing quite necessary to a man who called himself by a title, a servant not so much to attend upon him as to answer for him, and be a sort of guarantee to the world. now that he was here in edinburgh, he was not quite sure what to do with himself. it was too early to do anything. he could not disturb old milnathort at such an hour. he must let the old man get to his office and read his letters before he could descend upon him. so that on the whole walter, though sustained by the excitement of his new position, was altogether chilled and not at all comfortable, feeling those early hours of grim daylight hang very heavily on his hands. he went out after he had refreshed and dressed--and strolled about the fine but foreign street. it looked quite foreign to his inexperienced eyes. the castle soared vaguely through the grey mist; the irregular line of roofs and spires crowning the ridge threw itself up vaguely against a darker grey behind. there was a river of mist between him and that ridge, running deep in the hollow, underneath the nearer bank, which was tufted with spectral bushes and trees, and with still more spectral white statues glimmering through. on the other side of the street, more cheerful and apparent, were the jewellers' shops full of glistening pebbles and national ornaments. everybody knows that it is not these shops alone, but others of every luxurious kind, that form the glory of prince's street. but walter was a stranger and foreigner; and in the morning mists the shining store of cairngorms was the most cheerful sight that met his eye. mr. milnathort's office was in a handsome square, with a garden in the centre of it, and another statue holding possession of the garden. for the first time since he left home, walter felt a little thrill of his new importance when he beheld the respectful curiosity produced among the clerks by the statement of his name. they asked his lordship to step in with an evident sensation. and for walter himself to look into that office where his mother had so strongly desired that he should find a place, had the most curious effect. he felt for the moment as if he were one of the serious young men peeping from beyond the wooden railing that inclosed the office, at the fortunate youth whose circumstances were no different from their own. he did not realise at that moment the unfailing human complacency which would have come to his aid in such circumstances, and persuaded him that the gifts of fortune had nothing to do with real superiority. he thought of the possible reflections upon himself of the other young fellows in their lowly estate as if he had himself been making them. he was sorry for them all, for the contrast they must draw, and the strange sense of human inequality that they must feel. he was no better than they were--who could tell? perhaps not half as good. he felt that to feel this was a due tribute from lord erradeen in his good fortune to those who might have been walter methven's fellow-clerks, but who had never had any chance of being lord erradeen. and then he thought what a good thing it was that he had never written that letter to mr. milnathort, offering himself for a desk in the office. he had felt really guilty on the subject at the time. he had felt that it was miserable of him to neglect the occasion thus put before him of gaining a livelihood. self-reproach, real and unmistakable, had been in his mind; and yet what a good thing he had not done it: and how little one knows what is going to happen! these were very ordinary reflections, not showing much depth; but it must be recollected that walter was still in a sort of primary state of feeling, and had not had time to reach a profounder level. mr. milnathort made haste to receive him, coming out of his own room on purpose, and giving him the warmest welcome. "i might have thought you would come by the night train. you are not old enough to dislike night travelling as i do; but i will take it ill, and so will my sister, if you stay in an hotel, and your room ready for you in our little place. i think you will be more comfortable with us, though we have no grandeur to surround you with. my sister has a great wish to make your acquaintance, my lord erradeen. she has just a wonderful acquaintance with the family, and it was more through her than any one that i knew just where to put my hand upon you, when the time came." "i did not like to disturb you so early," walter said. "well, perhaps there is something in that. we are not very early birds: and as a matter of fact, alison did not expect you till about seven o'clock at night. and here am i in the midst of my day's work. but i'll tell you what i'll do for you. we'll go round to the club, and there your young lordship will make acquaintance with somebody that can show you something of edinburgh. you have never been here before? it is a great pity that there is an easterly haar, which is bad both for you and the objects you are wanting to see. however, it is lifting, and we'll get some luncheon, and then i will put you in the way. that is the best thing i can do for you. malcolm, you will send down all the documents relative to his lordship's affairs to moray place, this afternoon; and you can tell old symington to be in attendance in case lord erradeen should wish to see him. that is your cousin the late lord's body servant. he is a man of great experience, and you might wish--; but all that can be settled later on. if drysdales should send over about that case of theirs, ye will say, malcolm, that i shall be here not later than three in the afternoon; and if old blairallan comes fyking, ye can say i am giving the case my best attention; and if it's that big north-country fellow about his manse and his augmentation----" "i fear that i am unpardonable," said walter, "in interfering with your valuable time." "nothing of the sort. it is not every day that a lord erradeen comes into his inheritance; and as there are, may be, things not over-cheerful to tell you at night, we may as well make the best of it in the morning," said the old lawyer. he got himself into his coat as he spoke, slowly, not without an effort. the sun was struggling through the mist as they went out again into the streets, and the mid-day gun from the castle helped for a moment to disperse the haar, and show the noble cliff on which it rears its head aloft. mr. milnathort paused to look with tender pride along the line--the houses and spires lifting out of the clouds, the sunshine breaking through, the crown of st. giles's hovering like a visible sign of rank over the head of the throned city, awakened in him that keen pleasure and elation in the beauty of his native place which is nowhere more warmly felt than in edinburgh. he waved his hand towards the old town in triumph. "you may have seen a great deal, but ye will never have seen anything finer than that," he said. "i have seen very little," said walter; "but everybody has heard of edinburgh, so that it does not take one by surprise." "ay, that is very wisely said. if it took you by surprise, and you had never heard of it before, the world would just go daft over it. however, it is a drawback of a great reputation that ye never come near it with your mind clear." having said this the old gentleman dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand, and said, in a different tone, "you will be very curious about the family secrets you are coming into, lord erradeen." walter laughed. "i am coming to them with my mind clear," he said. "i know nothing about them. but i don't believe much in family secrets. they belong to the middle ages. nowadays we have nothing to conceal." mr. milnathort listened to this blasphemy with a countenance in which displeasure struggled with that supreme sense that the rash young man would soon know better, which disarms reproof. he shook his head. "you may say we can conceal but little," he said, "which is true enough, but not altogether true either. courage is a fine thing, lord erradeen, and i am always glad to see it; and if you have your imagination under control, that will do ye still better service. in most cases it is not only what we see, but what we think we are going to see, that daunts us. keep you your head cool, that is your best defence in all emergencies. it is better to be too bold than not to be bold enough, notwithstanding the poet's warning to yon warrior-maid of his." these last words made walter stare, for he was not very learned in poetry at the best, and was totally unprepared to hear spenser from the lips of the old scottish lawyer. he was silent for a little in mere perplexity, and then he said, with a laugh-- "you speak of danger as if we were on the eve of a battle. are there giants to encounter or magicians? one would think we were living in the dark ages," walter cried with a little impatience. mr. milnathort said nothing more. he led the young man into one of the great stone palaces which form the line of prince's street, and which was then the seat of the old original club of edinburgh society. here walter found himself in the midst of a collection of men with marked and individual faces, each one of whom ought to be somebody, he thought. many of them were bound about the throat with white ties, like clergymen, but they did not belong to that profession. it gave the young man a sense of his own importance, which generally deserted him in mr. milnathort's presence, and of which he felt himself to stand in need, to perceive that he excited a great deal of interest among these grave and potent signors. there was a certain desire visible to make his acquaintance and to ascertain his political opinions, of which walter was scarcely aware as yet whether he had any. it was suggested at once that he should be put up for the club, and invitations to dinner began to be showered upon him. he was stopped short in his replies to those cordial beginnings of acquaintance by mr. milnathort, who calmly assumed the guidance of his movements. "lord erradeen," he said, "is on his way west. business will not permit him to tarry at this moment. we hope he will be back ere long, and perhaps stay a while in edinburgh, and see what is to be seen in the way of society." this summary way of taking all control of his own movements from him astounded walter so much that he merely stared at his old tyrant or vizier, and in his confusion of surprise and anger did not feel capable of saying anything, which, after all, was the most dignified way; for, he said to himself, it was not necessary to yield implicit obedience even if he refrained from open protest upon these encroachments on his liberty. in the mean time it was evident that the old lawyer did not intend him to have any liberty at all. he produced out of the recesses of the club library a beaming little man in spectacles, to whom he committed the charge of the young stranger. "mr. bannatyne," he said, "knows edinburgh as well as i know my chambers, and he will just take you round what is most worth seeing." when walter attempted to escape with a civil regret to give his new acquaintance trouble he was put down by both with eagerness. "the old town is just the breath of my nostrils," said the little antiquary. "it cannot be said that it's a fragrant breath," said old milnathort; "but since that is so, lord erradeen, you would not deprive our friend of such a pleasure: and we'll look for you by five or six at moray place, or earlier if you weary, for it's soon dark at this time of the year." to find himself thus arrested in the first day of his emancipation and put into the hands of a conductor was so annoying yet so comic that walter's resentment evaporated in the ludicrous nature of the situation and his consciousness that otherwise he would not know what to do with himself. but sight-seeing requires a warmer inspiration than this, and even the amusement of beholding his companion's enthusiasm over all the dark entries and worn-out inscriptions was not enough to keep walter's interest alive. his own life at this moment was so much more interesting than anything else, so much more important than those relics of a past which had gone away altogether out of mortal ken. when the blood is at high pressure in our veins, and the future lying all before us, it is very difficult to turn back, and force our eager eyes into contemplation of scenes with which we ourselves have little or no connection. the antiquary, however, was not to be baulked. he looked at his young companion with his head on one side like a critical bird. "you are paying no attention to me," he said half pathetically; "but 'cod, man (i beg your pardon, my lord!), ye _shall_ be interested before i'm done." with this threat he hurried walter along to the noisiest and most squalid part of that noble but miserable street which is the pride of edinburgh, and stopped short before a small but deep doorway, entering from a short flight of outside stairs. the door was black with age and neglect, and showed a sort of black cave within, out of which all kind of dingy figures were fluttering. the aspect of the muddy stairs and ragged wayfarers was miserable enough, but the mouldings of the lintel, and the spiral staircase half visible at one side, were of a grim antiquity, and so was the lofty tenement above, with its many rows of windows and high-stepped gable. "now just look here," said mr. bannatyne, "these arms will tell their own story." there was a projecting boss of rude, half-obliterated carving on the door. "i cannot make head nor tail of it," said the young man; his patience was beginning to give way. "lord erradeen," cried the other with enthusiasm, "this is worth your fattest farm; it is of more interest than half your inheritance; it is as historical as holyrood. you are just awfully insensible, you young men, and think as little of the relics that gave you your consequences in the world--!" he paused a little in the fervour of his indignation, then added--"but there are allowances to be made for you as you were bred in england, and perhaps are little acquainted--my lord, this is me'even's close, bearing the name even now in its decay. it was my lord methven's lodging in the old time. bless me! can your young eyes not read the motto that many people have found so significant? look here," cried walter's cicerone, tracing with his stick the half-effaced letters, "baithe sune and syne." young lord erradeen began, as was natural, to feel ashamed of himself. he felt a pang of discomfort too, for this certainly bore no resemblance to the trim piece of modern latin about the conquering power of virtue which was on his father's seal. the old possibility that he might turn out an impostor after all gleamed across his mind. "does this belong to me?" he added with some eagerness, to veil these other and less easy sentiments. "i know nothing about that," said mr. bannatyne with a slight tone of contempt. "but it was the lord of methven's lodging in the days when scots lords lived in the canongate of edinburgh." then he added, "there is a fine mantelpiece up-stairs which you had better see. oh nobody will have any objection, a silver key opens every door hereabout. if it should happen to be yours, my lord, and i were you," said the eager little man, "i would clear out the whole clanjamfry and have it thoroughly cleaned, and make a museum of the place. you would pick up many a curious bit as the auld houses go down. this way, to the right, and mind the hole in the wall. the doors are all carved, if you can see them for the dirt, and you'll not often see a handsomer room." it was confusing at first to emerge out of the gloom of the stairs into the light of the great room, with its row of windows guiltless of either blind or curtain, which was in possession of a group of ragged children, squatting about in front of the deep, old-fashioned chimney, over which a series of elaborate carvings rose to the roof. the room had once been panelled, but half of the woodwork had been dragged down, and the rest was in a deplorable state. the contrast of the squalor and wretchedness about him, with the framework of the ancient, half-ruined grandeur, at once excited and distressed walter. there was a bed, or rather a heap of something covered with the bright patches of an old quilt, in one corner, in another an old corner cupboard fixed into the wall, a rickety table and two chairs in the middle of the room. the solemn, unsheltered windows, like so many hollow, staring eyes, gazed out through the cold veil of the mist upon the many windows of an equally tall house on the other side of the street, the view being broken by a projecting pole thrust forth from the middle one, upon which some dingy clothes were hanging to dry. the children hung together, getting behind the biggest of them, a ragged, handsome girl, with wild, elf locks, who confronted the visitors with an air of defiance. the flooring was broken in many places, and dirty beyond description. walter felt it intolerable to be here, to breathe the stifling atmosphere, to contemplate this hideous form of decay. he thought some one was looking at him from behind the torn panels. "this is horrible," he said. "i hope i have nothing to do with it." disgust and a shivering, visionary dread was in his voice. "your race has had plenty to do with it," said the antiquary. "it was here, they say, that the warlock-lord played most of his pliskies. it was his 'warm study of deals' like that they made for john knox on the other side of the street. these walls have seen strange sights: and if you believe in witchcraft, as one of your name ought----" "why should one of my name believe in witchcraft? it appears," he said, with petulance, "that i know very little about my name." "so i should have said," said the antiquary, dryly. "but no doubt you have heard of your great ancestor, the warlock-lord? i am not saying that i admire the character in the abstract; but an ancestor like that is fine for a family. he was mixed up in all the doings of the time, and he made his own out of every one of them. and then he's a grand historical problem to the present day, which is no small distinction. you never heard of that? oh, my lord, that's just not possible! he was the one whose death was never proved nor nothing about him, where he was buried, or the nature of his end, or if he ever came to an end at all; his son would never take the title, and forbade _his_ son to do it: but by the time you have got to the second generation you are not minding so much. i noticed that the late lord would never enter into conversation on the subject. the family has always been touchy about it. it was the most complete disappearance i can recollect hearing of. most historical puzzles clear themselves up in time: but this never was cleared up. of course it has given rise to legends. you will perhaps be more interested in the family legends, lord erradeen?" "not at all," said walter, abruptly. "i have told you i know very little about the family. what is it we came to see?--not this wretched place which makes me sick. the past should carry off its shell with it, and not leave these old clothes to rot here." "oh!" cried little mr. bannatyne, with a shudder. "i never suspected i was bringing in an iconoclast. that mantelpiece is a grand work of art, lord erradeen. look at that serpent twisted about among the drapery--you'll not see such work now; and the ermine on that mantle just stands out in every hair, for all the grime and the smoke. it is the legend beneath the shield that is most interesting in the point of view of the family. it's a sort of rhyming slogan, or rather it's an addition to the old slogan, 'live, me'even,' which everybody knows." walter felt a mingled attraction and repulsion which held him there undecided in front of the great old fireplace, like hercules or any other hero between the symbolical good and evil. he had a great curiosity to know what all this meant mingled with an angry disinclination impossible to put into words. mr. bannatyne, who of course knew nothing of what was going on in his mind, took upon himself the congenial task of tracing the inscription out. it was doggerel, bad enough to satisfy every aspiration of an antiquary. it was as follows:-- "né fleyt atte helle, né fond for heeven, live, me'even." "you will see how it fits in with the other motto," cried the enthusiast. "'baithe sune and syne,' which has a grand kind of indifference to time and all its changes that just delights me. and the other has the same sentiment, 'neither frightened for hell nor keen about heaven.' it is the height of impiety," he said, with a subdued chuckle; "but that's not inappropriate--it's far from inappropriate; it is just, in fact, what might have been expected. the warlock lord----" "i hope you won't think me ungrateful," cried walter, "but i don't think i want to know any more about that old ruffian. there is something in the place that oppresses me." he took out from his pocket a handful of coins. (it was with the pleasure of novelty that he shook them together, gold and silver in one shining heap, and threw half a dozen of them to the little group before the fire.) "for heaven's sake let us get out of this!" he said, nervously. he could not have explained the sentiment of horror, almost of fear, that was in his mind. "if it is mine," he said, as they went down the spiral stair, groping against the black humid wall, "i shall pull it down and let in some air and clear the filth away." "god bless me!" cried the antiquary in horror and distress, "you will never do that. the finest street in christendom, and one of the best houses! no, no, lord erradeen, you will never do that!" when mr. bannatyne got back to the club, he expressed an opinion of lord erradeen, which we are glad to believe further experience induced him to modify. he declared that old bob milnathort had given him such a handful as he had not undertaken for years. "just a young cockney!" he said, "a stupid englishman! with no more understanding of history, or even of the share his own race has had in it, than that collie dog--indeed, yarrow is far more intelligent, and a brute that is conscious of a fine descent. i am not saying that there are not fine lads among some of those english-bred young men, and some that have the sense to like old-fashioned things. but this young fellow is just a cockney, he is just a young cynic. pull down the house, said he? spoil the first street in europe! we'll see what the town council--not to say the woods and forests--will say to that, my young man! and i hope i have bailie brown under my thumb!" the enraged antiquary cried. meantime walter made his way through the dark streets in a tremor of excitement and dislike of which he could give no explanation to himself. why should the old house have affected him so strongly! there was no reason for it that he knew. perhaps there was something in the suddenness of the transition from the comfortable english prose of sloebury to all these old world scenes and suggestions which had a disenchanting effect upon him. he had not been aware that he was more matter of fact than another, less likely to be affected by romance and historical associations. but so it had turned out. the grimy squalor of the place, the bad atmosphere, the odious associations, had either destroyed for him all the more attractive prejudices of long family descent, and a name which had descended through many generations--or else, something more subtle still, some internal influence, had communicated that loathing and sickness of the heart. which was it? he could not tell. he said to himself, with a sort of scorn at himself, that probably the bourgeois atmosphere of sloebury had made him incapable of those imaginative flights for which the highest and the lowest classes have a mutual aptitude. the atmosphere of comfort and respectability was against it. this idea rather exasperated him, and he dwelt upon it with a natural perversity because he hated to identify himself as one of that stolid middle class which is above or beneath fanciful impulses. then he began to wonder whether all this might not be part of a deep-laid scheme on the part of old milnathort to get him, walter, under his power. no doubt it was arranged that he should be brought to that intolerable place, and all the spells of the past called forth to subdue him by his imagination if never through his intellect. what did they take him for? he was no credulous celt, but a sober-minded englishman, not likely to let his imagination run away with him, or to be led by the nose by any _diablerie_, however skilful. they might make up their minds to it, that their wiles of this kind would meet with no success. walter was by no means sure who he meant by _they_, or why they should endeavour to get him into their power; but he wanted something to find fault with--some way of shaking off the burden of a mental weight which he did not understand, which filled him with discomfort and new sensations which he could not explain. he could almost have supposed (had he believed in mesmerism, according to the description given of it in fiction--) that he was under some mesmeric influence, and that some expert, some adept, was trying to decoy him within some fatal circle of impression. but he set his teeth and all his power of resistance against it. they should not find him an easy prey. chapter viii. the drawing-room in moray place seemed in the partial gloom very large and lofty. it must be remembered that walter was accustomed only to the comparatively small rooms of an english country town where there was nobody who was very rich--and the solid, tall edinburgh houses were imposing to him. there was no light but that which came from a blazing fire, and which threw an irregular ruddy illumination upon everything, but no distinct vision. he saw the tall windows indefinitely draped, and looking not unlike three colossal women in abundant vague robes standing against the wall. in a smaller room behind, which opened from this, the firelight was still brighter, but still only partially lit up the darkness. it showed, however, a table placed near the fire, and glowing with bright reflections from its silver and china; and just beyond that, out of the depths of what looked like an elongated easy-chair, a piece of whiteness, which was a female countenance. walter, confused at his entrance, made out after a moment that it was a lady, half reclining on a sort of invalid _chaise longue_, who raised herself slightly to receive him, with a flicker of a pair of white, attenuated hands. "you are very welcome, lord erradeen," she said, in a sweet, feeble voice. "will you excuse my rising--for i'm a great invalid--and come and sit down here beside me? i have been looking for you this half-hour past." the hand which she held out to him was so thin that he scarcely felt its light pressure. "if you have no objection," said miss milnathort, "we will do with the firelight for a little longer. it is my favourite light. my brother sent me word i was to expect you, and after your cold walk you will be glad of a cup of tea." she did not pause for any reply, but went on, drawing the table towards her, and arranging everything with the skill of an accustomed hand. "i am just a cripple creature," she said. "i have had to learn to serve myself in this way, and robert is extraordinarily thoughtful. there is not a mechanical convenience invented but i have it before it is well out of the brain that devised it; and that is how i get on so well with no backbone to speak of. all this is quite new to you," she said, quickly shaking off one subject and taking up another, with a little swift movement of her head. "do you mean--edinburgh, or----" "i mean everything," said the lady. "edinburgh will be just a bit of scenery in the drama that is opening upon you, and here am i just another tableau. i can see it all myself with your young eyes. you can scarcely tell if it is real." "that is true enough," said walter, "and the scenery all turns upon the plot so far: which is what it does not always do upon the stage." "ay!" said miss milnathort, with a tone of surprise, "and how may that be? i don't see any particular significance in holyrood. it is where all you english strangers go, as if edinburgh had no meaning but queen mary." "we did not go to holyrood. we went to lord methven's lodging, as i hear it is called: which was highly appropriate." "dear me," said the lady, "do you mean to tell me that john bannatyne had that sense in him? i will remember that the next time robert calls him an auld foozle. and so you saw the lodging of methven? i have never seen it myself. did it not make your heart sick to see all the poverty and misery in that awful street? oh yes, i'm told it's a grand street: but i never have the heart to go into it. i think the place should die with the age that gave it birth." this was a sentiment so entirely unlike what walter had expected to hear, that for the moment it took from him all power of reply. "that would be hard upon antiquity," he said at length, "and i don't know what the artists would say, or our friend mr. bannatyne." "he would have me burnt for a witch," the invalid said with a sweet little laugh; and then she added, "ah, it is very well to talk about art; but there was great sense in that saying of the old reformers, 'ding down the nest, and the crows will flee away.'" "i expected," said walter, "to find you full of reverence for the past, and faith in mysteries and family secrets, and--how can i tell?--ghosts perhaps." he laughed, but the invalid did not echo his laugh. and this brought a little chill and check to his satisfaction. the sense that one has suddenly struck a jarring note is highly uncomfortable when one is young. walter put back his chair a little, not reflecting that the firelight revealed very little of his sudden blush. "i have had no experience in what you call ghosts," she said, gravely. "i cannot, to tell the truth, see any argument against them, except just that we don't see them; and i think that's a pity, for my part." to this, as it was a view of the subject equally new to him, walter made no reply. "take you care, lord erradeen," she resumed hastily, "not to let yourself be persuaded to adopt that sort of nomenclature." there was a touch of scotch in her accent that naturalised the long word, and made it quite in keeping. "conclude nothing to be a ghost till you cannot account for it in any other way. there are many things that are far more surprising," she said; then, shaking off the subject once more with that little movement of her head, "you are not taking your tea. you must have had a tiring day after travelling all night. that is one of the modern fashions i cannot make up my mind to. they tell me the railway is not so wearying as the long coach journeys we used to make in the old time." "but you--can scarcely remember the old coach journeys? why, my mother----" "very likely i am older than your mother; and i rarely budge out of this corner. i have never seen your mother, but i remember captain methven long long ago, who was not unlike the general outline of you, so far as i can make out. when the light comes you will see i am an old woman. it is just possible that this is why i am so fond of the firelight," she said with a laugh; "for i'm really very young though i was born long ago. robert and me, we remember all our games and plays in a way that people that have had children of their own never do. we are just boy and girl still, and i've known us, after a long talk, forget ourselves altogether, and talk of papa and mamma!" she clapped her hands together at this, and went into a peal of genuine laughter, such as is always infectious. walter laughed too, but in a half-embarrassed, half-unreal way. all was so strange to him, and this curious introduction into a half-seen, uncomprehended world the most curious of all. "i would like to know a little about yourself," she resumed after a moment. "you were not in the secret that it was you who were the kin? it was strange your father should have left you in the dark." "i can't remember my father," said walter, hastily. "that makes little difference; but you were always a strange family. now you, robert tells me, you're not so very much of an erradeen--you take after your mother's side. and i'm very very glad to hear it. it will perhaps be you, if you have the courage, that will put a stop to--many things. there are old rhymes upon that subject, but you will put little faith in old rhymes; i none at all. i believe they are just made up long after the occasion, just for the sake of the fun, or perhaps because some one is pleased with himself to have found a rhyme. now that one that they tell me is in the canongate--that about 'live, me'even--'" "i thought you said you didn't know it?" "i have never seen it; but you don't suppose i am ignorant of the subject, lord erradeen? do you know i have been here stretched out in my chair these thirty years? and what else could i give my attention to, considering all things? well, i do not believe in that. oh, it's far too pat! when a thing is true it is not just so terribly in keeping. i believe it was made up by somebody that knew the story just as we do; probably a hundred years or more after the event." walter did not say that he was quite unacquainted with the event. his interest perhaps, though he was not aware of it, was a little less warm since he knew that miss milnathort was his mother's contemporary rather than his own; but he had come to the conclusion that it was better not to ask any direct questions. the light had faded much, and was now nothing more than a steady red glow in place of the leaping and blazing of the flames. he scarcely saw his entertainer at all. there were two spots of brightness which moved occasionally, and which represented her face and the hands which she had clasped together (when they were not flickering about in incessant gesture) in her lap. but there was something altogether quaint and strange in the situation. it did not irritate him as the men had done. and then she had the good sense to agree with him in some respects, though the _mélange_ of opinions in her was remarkable, and he did not understand what she would be at. there was an interval of quiet in which neither of them said anything, and then a large step was audible coming slowly up-stairs, and through the other drawing room. "here is robert," the invalid said with a smile in her voice. it was nothing but a tall shadow that appeared, looming huge in the ruddy light. "have you got lord erradeen with you, alison? and how are you and he getting on together?" said old milnathort's voice. walter rose hastily to his feet with a feeling that other elements less agreeable were at once introduced, and that his pride was affronted by being discussed in this easy manner over his head. "we are getting on fine, robert. he is just as agreeable as you say, and i have great hopes will be the man. but you are late, and it will soon be time for dinner. i would advise you to show our young gentleman to his room, and see that he's comfortable. and after dinner, when you have had your good meal, we'll have it all out with him." "i am thinking, alison, that there is a good deal we must go over that will be best between him and me." "that must be as you please, robert, my man," said the lady, and walter felt like a small child who is being discussed over his head by grown-up persons, whom he feels to be his natural enemies. he rose willingly, yet with unconscious offence, and followed his host to his room, inwardly indignant with himself for having thus impaired his own liberty by forsaking his inn. the room however was luxuriously comfortable, shining with firelight, and a grave and respectable servant in mourning, was arranging his evening clothes upon the bed. "this is symington," said mr. milnathort, "he was your late cousin's body-servant. the late lord erradeen gave him a very warm recommendation. there might be things perhaps in which he would be of use." "thanks," said walter, impulsively. "i have a man coming. i am afraid the recommendation is a little too late." this unfortunately was not true; but the young man felt that to allow himself to be saddled with a sort of governor in the shape of the late lord's servant was more than could be required of him; and that he must assert himself before it was too late. "you will settle that at your pleasure, my lord," said old milnathort, and he went away shutting the door carefully, his steady, slow step echoing along the passage. the man was not apparently in the least daunted by walter's irritation. he went on mechanically, lightly brushing out a crease, and unfolding the coat with that affectionate care which a good servant bestows upon good clothes. walter longed to have brought his old coat with him that everything should not have been so distressingly new. "that will do," he said, "that will do. it is a pity to give you so much trouble when, as i tell you, i have another man engaged." "it is no trouble, my lord; it is a pleasure. i came out of attachment to the family. i've been many years about my late lord. and however ye may remind yourself that you are but a servant, and service is no heritage, yet it's not easy to keep yourself from becoming attached." "my good man," said walter, half impatient, half touched, "you never saw me in your life before. i can't see how you can have any attachment to me." symington had a long face, with a somewhat lugubrious expression, contradicted by the twinkle of a pair of humorous, deep-set eyes. he gave a glance up at walter from where he stood fondling the lappels of the new coat. "there are many kinds of attachments, my lord," he said oracularly; "some to the person and some to the race. for a number of years past i have, so to speak, just identified myself with the erradeens. it's not common in england, so far as i can hear, but it's just our old scots way. i will take no other service. so, being free, if your lordship pleases, i will just look after your lordship's things till the other man comes." walter perceived in a moment by the way symington said these words that he had no faith whatever in the other man. he submitted accordingly to the ministrations of the family retainer, with a great deal of his old impatience, tempered by a sense of the humour of the situation. it seemed that he was never to have any control over himself. he had barely escaped from the tutelage of home when he fell into this other which was much more rigid. "poor mother!" he said to himself, with an affectionate recollection of her many cares, her anxious watchfulness; and laughed to himself at the thought that she was being avenged. mr. milnathort's table was handsome and liberal; the meal even too abundant for the solitary pair who sat alone at a corner of the large table, amid a blaze of light. miss milnathort did not appear. "she never comes down. she has never sat down at table since she had her accident, and that is thirty years since." there was something in mr. milnathort's tone as he said this that made walter believe that her accident too had something to do with the family. everything tended towards that, or sprang from it. had he been to the manner born, this would no doubt have seemed to him natural enough; but as it was he could not keep himself from the idea either that he was being laughed at, or that some design was hidden beneath this constant reference. the dinner, however, went off quietly. it was impossible to discuss anything of a private character in the presence of milnathort's serious butler, and of the doubly grave apparition of symington, who helped the other to wait. walter had never dined so solemnly before. it must be added, however, that he had seldom dined so well. it was a pity that he was so little knowing in this particular. mr. milnathort encouraged him through the repast by judicious words of advice and recommendation. he was very genial and expansive at this most generous moment of the day. fond of good fare himself he liked to communicate and recommend it, and walter's appetite was excellent, if perhaps his taste was uncultivated. the two noiseless attendants circulating about the table served them with a gravity in perfect keeping with the importance of the event, which was to the old lawyer the most interesting of the day. when they were left alone finally, the aspect of affairs changed a little. mr. milnathort cleared his throat, and laid aside his napkin. he said-- "we must not forget, lord erradeen, that we have a great deal of business to get through. but you have had a fatiguing day, and probably very little sleep last night"-- "i slept very well, i assure you," walter replied cheerfully. "ay, ay, you are young," said mr. milnathort, with a half-sigh. "still all the financial statements, and to give you a just view of all that's coming to you, will take time. with your permission we'll keep that till to-morrow. but there's just a thing or two--. lord save us!" he cried suddenly, "you're not the kind of person for this. there is many a one i know that would have liked it all the better--till they knew--for what's attached to it. i thought as much when i first set eyes upon you. this will be one that will not take it all for gospel, i said to myself--one that will set up his own judgment, and demand the reason why." walter, a little uncertain at first how to take this, ended by being gratified with such an estimate of himself. it showed, he felt, more perception than he had looked for, and he answered, with a little complacency, "i hope you think that is the right way of approaching a new subject." "i am not unbiased myself," said the lawyer, "and i have had to do with it all my life. there are conditions connected with your inheritance, lord erradeen, that may seem out of the way to a stranger. if you had succeeded in the way of nature, as your father's son, they would not have been new to you, and you would have been prepared. in that way it is hard upon you. there was one of your ancestors that laid certain conditions, as i was saying, upon every heir. he was one that had, as you may say, a good right to do that, or whatever else he pleased, seeing he was the making of the family. in old days it was no more than a bit small highland lairdship. it was he that gave it consequence; but he has held a heavy hand upon his successors ever since." "would it be he by any chance of whom mr. bannatyne was discoursing to me," said walter, "under the title of the warlock-lord?" "ah! john bannatyne took that upon him?" cried mr. milnathort with vivacity. his eyes gleamed from under his deep-set brows. "the less a man knows the more ready he is to instruct the world: but i never thought he would take that upon him. so you see, as i was saying, there are certain formalities to go through. it is understood that once a year, wherever he may be, lord erradeen should pass, say a week, say two or three days, in the old castle of kinloch houran, which is the old seat of the family, the original of the methven race." walter had been listening with some anxiety. he drew a long breath as mr. milnathort came to a pause. "is that all?" he cried, with a voice of relief. then he laughed. "i was winding myself up to something heroic, but if it is only a periodical retirement to an old castle--to think, i suppose, upon one's sins and examine one's conscience----" "something very like that," said the old man, somewhat grimly. "well! it might be a great inconvenience; but there is nothing very appalling in the prospect, if that is all." "it is all, lord erradeen--if ye except what passes there, a thing that is your own concern, and that i have never pried into for my part. and just this beside, that you are expected there at once and without delay." "expected--at once and without delay." walter grew red with anger at these peremptory words. "this sounds a little arbitrary," he said. "expected? by whom? and to what purpose? i don't understand----" "nor do i, my young lord. but it's so in the documents, and so has it been with every lord of erradeen up to this period. it is the first thing to be done. before you come into enjoyment of anything, or take your place in the country, there is this visit--if you like to call it a visit: this--sojourn: not a long one, at least, you may be thankful--to be made----" "to what purpose?" walter repeated, almost mechanically. he could not, himself, understand the sudden tempest of resistance, of anger, of alarm that got up within him. "there is reason in everything," he said, growing pale. "what is it for? what am i to do?" "lord erradeen, a minute since you said, was that all? and now you change colour: you ask why, and wherefore--" walter made a great effort to regain command of himself. "it is inconsistent, i allow," he said. "somehow, the order to go now is irritating and unpleasant. i suppose it's simple enough, a piece of tyranny such as people seem to think they may indulge in after they're dead. but it is abominably arbitrary and tyrannical. what good does the old beggar think----" "hold your peace," cried mr. milnathort, with a little trepidation. "we have no right to call names, and i would not like it to be thought----" here he paused with a sort of uneasy smile, and added, "i am speaking nonsense," with a vague glance about him. "i think we might join my sister up-stairs; and, as she knows just as much as i do, or, maybe, more, you can speak as freely as you please before her--oh, quite freely. but, my dear young lord, call no names!" cried mr. milnathort. he got up hurriedly, leaving his wine which he had just filled out, a demonstration of sincerity which made a great impression upon walter: and threw open the door. "putting off the business details till to-morrow, i know nothing else that we cannot discuss before alison," he said. walter was much startled when he went back to the inner drawing-room and found it lighted. miss milnathort did not employ any of those devices by which light is softened to suit the exigencies of beauty which has passed its prime. the light (alas for the prejudices of the æsthetic reader) was gas; and, though it was slightly disguised by means of opal glass, it still poured down in a brilliant flood, and the little room was almost as light as day. she lay in her _chaise longue_ placed under this illumination. her face was preternaturally young, almost childish, small, and full of colour, her hair snow-white. she seemed to have been exempted from the weight of years, in compensation, perhaps, for other sufferings; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled, her eyes full of dewy brightness like those of a girl. her dress, so far as it was visible, was white, made of cashmere or some other woollen material, solid and warm, but with lace at the neck, and pretty ribbons breaking the monotony of the tint. she looked like a girl dressed for some simple party, who had lain there waiting for the little festivity to begin, for no one could imagine how many years. her hands were soft and round and young like her face. the wind had not been allowed to visit her cheek too roughly for a lifetime. what had happened before the event which she and her brother had both referred to as her "accident" belonged to a period which had evidently nothing to do with the present. walter saw at a glance that every possible convenience which could be invented for an invalid surrounded her. she had a set of bookshelves at one side with vacant spaces where she could place the book she was reading. tables that wheeled towards her at a touch, with needlework, with knitting, with drawing materials, were arranged within reach. one of these made into a desk and put itself across her couch by another adaptation. it was evident that the tenderest affection and care had made this prison of hers into a sort of museum of every ingenuity that had ever been called to the help of the suffering. she lay, or rather sat, for that was her general position, with an air of pleasant expectation on her face, and received them with smiles and hands held out. "come away, come away," she said in her soft scotch. "i have been wearying for you." walter thought there was something of age in her voice, but that might have been only the scotch, and the unusual form of her salutation. she pointed out a chair to him carefully placed for her convenience in seeing and hearing. "come and tell me what you think about it all," she said. "i have not heard much," said walter, "to think about: except that i am to go away directly, which does not please me at all, miss milnathort." "oh, you will come back, you will come back," she said. "i hope so: but the reason why i should go doesn't seem very plain. what would happen, i wonder, if i didn't?" walter said, lightly. he was surprised to see how much effect was produced upon his companions by this very simple utterance. miss milnathort put her hands together, as if to clasp them in triumph. her brother stood looking down upon the others, with his back to the light, and an air of alarmed displeasure. "one result would be that certain of the lands would pass to the next heir," he said; "besides, perhaps--other penalties: that i would not incur, lord erradeen, if i were you." "what penalties? but do you think at this time of day," said walter, "that ridiculous conditions of this kind that can mean nothing could really be upheld by the law--now that bequests of all kinds are being interfered with, and even charities?" "robert, that is true. there was the melville mortification that you had so much trouble about, and that was a charity. how much more, as young lord erradeen is saying, when it is just entirely out of reason." "you should hold your peace on legal subjects, alison. what can you know about them? i disapprove of all interference with the will of a testator, lord erradeen. i hold it to be against the law, and against that honour and honesty that we owe to the dead as well as the living. but there has always been a license allowed in respect to charities. so far as they are intended to be for the good of the poor, we have a right to see that the testator's meaning is carried out, even if it be contrary to his stipulations. but in a private case there is no such latitude. and you must always respect the testator's meaning, which is very clear in this case, as even you will allow, alison." "ay, clear enough," cried the young-old lady, shaking her white head. "but i'm on your side, lord erradeen. i would just let them try their worst, and see what would come of it, if, instead of a lame woman, i was a young man, lively and strong like you." "the question is," said walter, "for i have become prudent since i have had property--whether for such an insignificant affair it is worth while losing a substantial advantage, as mr. milnathort says? and then, perhaps, a new man like myself, coming into an antiquated routine, there would be a sort of discourtesy, a want of politeness--" he laughed. "one ought, i suppose, to be on one's best behaviour in such circumstances," he said. miss milnathort's countenance fell a little. she did not make any reply; but she had been listening with an air so eager and full of vivacity, anxious to speak, that the young man at once perceived the disappointment in her expressive little face. he said quickly-- "that does not please you? what would you have me to do?" with an involuntary sense that she had a right to an opinion. mr. milnathort at this moment sat heavily down on the other side, giving great emphasis to his interruption by the sound of his chair drawn forward, a sound which she protested against with a sudden contraction of her forehead, putting up a delicate hand. "i beg your pardon, my dear, for making a noise. you must not consult alison, lord erradeen; she is prejudiced on one side--and i--perhaps i am, if not prejudiced, yet biased, on the other. you must act on your own instinct, which, as far as i can judge, is a just one. it would be a great incivility, as you say, for a far-away collateral, that is really no more than a stranger, to set himself against the traditions of a house." walter did not much like to hear himself described as a far-away collateral. it sounded like a term of reproach, and as he did not choose to say anything more on this matter, he made the best change of subject he could. "i wonder," he said, "what would happen with any of the fantastic old feudal tenures if a new heir, a new man like myself, should simply refuse to fulfil them." "mostly they take a pride and a pleasure in fulfilling them," said the old lawyer. "but suppose," cried walter, "for the sake of argument, that a new duke of marlborough should say, 'what rubbish! why should i send that obsolete old flag to windsor?' that is a modern instance; or suppose----" "just that," cried miss milnathort, striking in with a flicker of her pretty hands. "suppose young glenearn should refuse when he comes of age to hear a word about that secret cha'mer----" "what would happen?" said walter, with a laugh of profane and irreverent youth. mr. milnathort rose to his full height; he pushed back his chair with an indignant movement. "you may as well ask me," he said, "what would happen if the pillars of the earth should give way. it is a thing that cannot be, at least till the end of all things is at hand. i will ring for prayers, alison. my lord erradeen is young; he knows little; but this kind of profane talk is not to be justified from you and me." then the bell was rung; the servants came trooping up-stairs, and symington gave walter a sidelong look as he took his seat behind their backs. it seemed to assert a demure claim of proprietorship, along with a total want of faith in the "other man." young lord erradeen found that it was all he could do to restrain an irreverent laugh. the position was so comic, that his original sense of angry resistance disappeared before it. he was going off against his will to pass through a mysterious ordeal in an old ruined house, under charge of a servant whom he did not want, and in obedience to a stipulation which he disowned. he was not half so free an agent as he had been when he was poor walter methven, knocking about the streets of sloebury and doing much what he liked, though he thought himself in bondage. bondage! he did not know in the old days what the word would mean. chapter ix. the day on which walter set out for kinloch houran was fine and bright, the sky very clear, the sun shining, the hills standing out against the blue, and every line of the tall trees clearly marked upon the transparent atmosphere. it was not till two days after the conversation above recorded--for there had been much to explain, and walter was so little acquainted with business that instructions of various kinds were necessary. miss milnathort was visible much earlier than usual on the morning of his departure, and he was admitted to see her. she was paler than before, and her little soft face was full of agitation; the corners of her mouth turned down, and her upper lip, which was a trifle too long, quivering. this added rather than took away from her appearance of youth. she was like a child who had exhausted itself with crying, and still trembled with an occasional sob. she stretched up her arms to him as if she would have put them round his neck, and bade god bless him with a tremulous voice. "you must have plenty of courage," she said; "and you must never, never give up your own way." walter was touched to the heart by this look of trouble on the innocent, young-old face. "i thought it was always right to give up one's own way," he said, in the light tone which he had come to employ with her. she made an effort to smile in response. "oh yes, oh yes, it's the fashion to say so. you are a self-denying race, to believe yourselves; but this time you must not yield." "to whom am i supposed to be about to yield?" he asked. "you may be sure i sha'n't unless i can't help myself." the tears overflowed her bright old eyes; her hands shook as they held his. "god bless you! god bless you!" she said. "i will do nothing but pray for you, and you will tell me when you come back." he left her lying back upon her cushions sobbing under her breath. all this half-perplexed, half-amused the young man. she was a very strange little creature, he felt, neither old nor young; there was no telling the reason of her emotion. she was so much indulged in all her whims, like a spoiled child, that perhaps these tears were only her regrets for a lost playmate. at the same time walter knew that this was not so, and was angry with himself for the thought. but how find his way out of the perplexity? he shook it off, which is always the easiest way; and soon the landscape began to attract his attention, and he forgot by degrees that there was anything very unusual in the circumstances of his journey. it was not till the first long stage of this journey was over that he was suddenly roused to a recollection of everything involved, by the appearance of symington at the carriage window, respectfully requesting to know whether he had wanted anything. walter had not remembered, or if he had remembered had thought no more of it, that this quietly officious retainer had taken all trouble from him at the beginning of his journey, as he had done during his stay in mr. milnathort's house. "what! are you here?" he said, with surprise, and a mixture of amusement and offence. "i beg your pardon, my lord," said symington, with profound and serious respect, yet always a twinkle in his eye, "but as the other man did not turn up--and your lordship could scarcely travel without some attendance----" he had to rush behind to get his place in the train in the midst of his sentence, and walter was left to think it over alone. in the balance between anger and amusement the latter fortunately won the day. the comic side of the matter came uppermost. it seemed to him very droll that he should be taken possession of, against his will, by the valet who professed an attachment to the race, not to the individual members of it, whose head was garlanded with crape in the quaint scotch way for walter's predecessor, and who had "identified himself with the erradeens." he reminded himself that he was in the country of caleb balderstone and ritchie moniplies, and he resigned himself to necessity. symington's comic yet so respectful consciousness that "the other man" was a mere imagination, was joke enough to secure his pardon, and walter felt that though the need of attendance was quite new in his life, that it might be well on his arrival in a strange country and a lonely ruined house, to have some one with him who was not ignorant either of the locality or the household. the country increased in interest as he went on, and by and by he forgot himself in gazing at the mountains which appeared in glimpses upon the horizon, then seemed to draw nearer, closing in upon the road, which led along by the head of one loch after another, each encompassed by its circle of hills. walter knew very little about scotland. he thought it a barren and wild country, all bleak and gloomy, and the lavish vegetation of the west filled him with surprise and admiration. the sun was near its setting when the railway journey came to an end, and he found himself at a village station, from which a coach ran to kinloch houran. it appeared that there was no other vehicle to be had, and though it was cold there was nothing else for it but to clamber up on the top of the rude coach, which was a sort of _char-à-banc_ without any interior. walter felt that it would become him ill, notwithstanding his new rank, to grumble at the conveyance, upon which there mounted nimbly a girl whom he had remarked when leaving edinburgh, and whom he had watched for at all the pauses of the journey. he thought her the very impersonation of all he had ever heard of scotch beauty, and so would most observers to whom scotland is a new country. the native scot is aware that there are as many brown locks as golden, and as many dark maidens as fair ones in his own country; but notwithstanding, to the stranger it is the fair who is the type. this young lady was warmly clothed in dark tweed, of the ruddy heathery hue which is now so general, not long enough to conceal her well-shod feet, closely fitting, and adapted for constant walking and movement. she seemed to be met by friends all along the route. from the carriage window walter saw her look out with little cries of pleasure. "oh, is that you, jack?" "oh, nelly, where are you going?" "oh, come in here, there is room in this carriage," and such like. she was always leaning out to say a word to somebody, either of farewell or welcome. "you will remember me to your mother," old gentlemen would call to her, as the train went on. walter was greatly in want of amusement, and he was at the age when a girl is always interesting. she became to him the heroine of the journey. he felt that he was collecting a great deal of information about her as they travelled on, and had begun to wonder whether he should ever find out who she was, or see any more of her, when he perceived her, to his delight, getting out, as he himself did, at baldally. she was met by a respectable woman servant, who took possession of her baggage, while the young lady herself ran across the road to the coach, and with a hearty greeting to john the coachman darted up to the seat immediately behind him, where her maid presently joined her. walter, and a personage of the commercial traveller class, shared the coachman's seat in front, and symington and some other humbler passengers sat behind. the coach was adapted for summer traffic, so that there were several lines of empty seats between the two sets of travellers. it gave walter a great deal of pleasure to hear the soft voice of his fellow-traveller pouring forth, low yet quite audible, an account of her journey to her maid, who was evidently on the most confidential terms with her young mistress. "has mamma missed me--much?" she asked after the little odyssey was over. "oh, miss oona, to ask that," cried the woman; "how should we no miss you?" and then there ensued a number of details on the home side. the girl had been on a visit in edinburgh, and had gone to balls, and "seen everything." on the other hand many small matters, faithfully reported, had filled up the time of separation. walter listened to all this innocent interchange with great amusement and interest as the coach made its way slowly up the ascents of the hilly road. it was not in itself an agreeable mode of progression: the wind was icy cold, and swept through and through the unfortunates who faced it in front, sharpening into almost absolute needle points of ice when the pace quickened, and the noisy, jolting vehicle lumbered down the further side of a hill, threatening every moment to pitch the passengers into the heathery bog on one side or the other. he tried to diminish his own discomfort by the thought that he took off the icy edge of the gale and sheltered the little slim creature in her close ulster behind, about whose shoulders the maid had wound the snowy mass of a great white knitted shawl. the low sun was in their faces as they toiled and rattled along, and the clear wintry blue of the sky was already strewn with radiant rosy masses of cloud. when they reached the highest point of the road the dazzling gleam of the great loch lying at their feet and made into a mirror of steel by the last blaze of the sun before it disappeared, dazzled the young man, who could see nothing except the cold intolerable brightness; but in a moment more the scene disclosed itself. hills all purple in the sunset, clothed with that ineffable velvet down which softens every outline, opened out on either side, showing long lines of indistinct green valleys and narrower ravines that ran between, all converging towards the broad and noble inland sea fringed with dark woods and broken with feathery islands, which was the centre of the landscape. the wonderful colour of the sky reflected in the loch, where everything found a reflection, and every knoll and island floated double, changed the character of the scene and neutralised the dazzling coldness of the great water-mirror. walter's involuntary exclamation at this sight stopped for a moment all the conversation going on. "by jove," he said, "how glorious!" they all stopped talking, the coachman, the traveller, the woman behind, and looked at him. big john the driver, who knew everybody, eyed him with a slightly supercilious air, as one who felt that the new-comer could not be otherwise than contemptible, more or less, even though his sentiments were irreproachable. "ay, sir--so that's your opinion? most folk have been beforehand with ye," said john. the commercial traveller added, condescendingly, "it is cold weather for touring, sir; but it's a grand country, as ye say." and then they resumed their conversation. the young lady behind was far more sympathetic. she made a distinct pause, and when she spoke again it was with a flattering adoption of walter's tone to point out to her companion how beautiful the scene was. "the isle is floating too, mysie--look! if we could get there soon enough we might land upon one of those rosy clouds." walter gave a grateful glance behind him, and felt that he was understood. "that is just your poetry, miss oona," said the maid; "but, bless me, i have never told ye: there has been the light lighted in the castle these two nights past. we have just thought upon you all the time, and how much taken up you would be about it, your mamma and me." "the light on the castle!" cried the young lady; and at this the coachman, turning slightly round, entered into the conversation. "that has it," he said; "i can back her up in that; just as clear and as steady as a star. there are many that say they never can see it; but they would be clever that had not seen it these two past nights." "who says they cannot see it?" said the girl, indignantly. john gave a little flick to his leader, which made the whole machine vibrate and roll. "persons of the newfangled kind that believe in nothing," he said. "they will tell ye it cannot be--so how can you see it? though it is glinting in their faces all the time." "you are meaning me, john," said the traveller on the box-seat; "and there's truth in what you say. i've seen what you call the light, and no doubt it has the appearance of a light; but if ye tell me it's something supernatural, there can be no doubt i will answer ye that there's nothing supernatural. if you were to tell me ye had seen a ghost, i would just reply in the same way. no, my man, i'm not impeachin' your veracity. you saw something, i'll allow; but no' a ghost, for there are no ghosts to see." "that's just an awfu' easy way of settlin' the question," said the maid from behind--and then she went on in a lower tone: "this will be the third night since it began, and we've a' seen it on the isle. hamish, he says the new lord maun be of a dour kind to need so many warnings. and he's feared ill will come of it; but i say the new lord, no' bein' here away nor of this country at all, how is he to ken?" the girl's voice was now quite low, almost a whisper: but walter being immediately in front of her could still hear. "has anything been heard," she said, "of the new lord?" "very little, miss oona, only that he's a young lad from the south with no experience, and didna even know that he was the heir; so how could he ken? as i say to hamish. but hamish he insists that it's in the blood, and that he would ken by instinck; and that it shows an ill-will, and ill will come of it." "if i were he," cried the girl, "i would do the same. i would not be called like that from the end of the world wherever i was." "oh, whisht, miss oona. it is such an auld, auld story; how can the like of you say what should be done?" "i would like myself," said the traveller, "to come to the bottom of this business. what is it for, and who has the doing of it? the moment you speak of a light ye pre-suppose a person that lights it and mainy adjuncks and accessories. now there's nobody, or next to nobody, living in that auld ruin. it's some rendeyvouss, i can easily understand that. the days of conspiracies are gone by, or i would say it was something against the state; but whatever it is, it must have a purpose, and mortal hands must do it, seeing there are no other. i have heard since ever i began to travel this country of the kinloch houran light, but i never heard a reason assigned." "it's the living lord," cried the maid, "as everybody knows! that is called to meet with----" here the young lady interfered audibly-- "mysie, not a word!" the woman's voice continued, stifled as if a hand had been laid on her mouth. "with them that are--with ane that is--i'm saying nothing, miss oona, but what all the loch is well aware----" "it's just a ferlie of this part of the world," said john the driver; "nae need of entering into it with them that believe naething. i'm no what ye call credulous mysel'; but when it comes to the evidence of a man's ain senses----" "and what have your senses said to ye, my fine fellow? that there's a queer kind of a glimmer up upon the auld tower? so are there corpse-candles, if i'm not mistaken, seen by the initiated upon your burial isle--what do you call it?" "and wha has a word to say gainst that?" cried the driver angrily; whilst mysie behind murmured--"it's well seen ye have naething to do with any grave there." now walter was as entirely free from superstition as any young man need be; but when he heard the laugh with which the sceptic greeted these protests, he had the greatest mind in the world to seize him by the collar and pitch him into the bog below. why? but the impulse was quite unreasonable and defied explanation. he had as little faith in corpse-candles as any bagman ever had, and the embarrassed and uneasy consciousness he had that the end of his journey was inexplicable, and its purpose ridiculous, led him much more to the conclusion that he was being placed in a ludicrous position, than that there was anything solemnly or awfully mysterious in it. nevertheless, so far from ranging himself upon the side of the enlightened modern who took the common-sense view of these highland traditions, his scorn and impatience of him was beyond words. for his own part he had not been sufficiently self-possessed to join in the discussion; but at this moment he ventured a question-- "is this old castle you speak of--" here he paused not knowing how to shape his inquiry; then added, "uninhabited?" for want of anything better to say. "not altogether," said john; "there is auld macalister and his wife that live half in the water, half out of the water. and it's the story in the parish that there are good rooms; aye ready for my lord. but i can tell ye naething about that, for i'm always on the road, and i see nothing but a wheen tourists in the summer, that are seeking information, and have none to give, puir creatures. there's a new lord just come to the title; ye will maybe have met with him if ye're from the south, for he's just an english lad." "england, my man john, is a wide road," said the traveller; "there are too many for us all to know each other as ye do in a parish; this gentleman will tell ye that." john's satirical explanation that he had not suspected mr. smith, whose northern accent was undoubted, of being an englishman, saved walter from any necessity of making a reply; and by this time the coach was rattling down upon a little homely inn, red-roofed and white-walled, which stood upon a knoll, overlooking the loch, and was reflected in all its brightness of colour in that mirror. the ground shelved rapidly down to the water-side, and there were several boats lying ready to put out into the loch--one a ponderous ferry boat, another a smaller, but still substantial and heavy, cobble, in which a man with a red shirt and shaggy locks was standing up relieved against the light. walter jumped down hurriedly with the hope of being in time to give his hand to the young lady, who perhaps had divined his purpose, for she managed to alight on the other side and so balk him. the landlady of the little inn had come out to the door, and there was a great sound of salutations and exclamations of welcome. "but i mustna keep you, miss oona, and your mamma countin' the moments; and there's two or three parcels," the woman said. the air had begun to grow a little brown, as the italians say, that faint veil of gathering shade which is still not darkness, was putting out by degrees the radiance of the sky, and as walter stood listening all the mingled sounds of the arrival rose together in a similar mist of sound, through which he sought for the soft little accents of the young lady's voice amid the noises of the unharnessing, the horses' hoofs and ostler's pails, and louder tones. presently he saw her emerge from the group with her maid, laden with baskets and small parcels, and embarking under the conduct of the man in the red shirt, whom she greeted affectionately as hamish, assume her place in the stern, and the ropes of the rudder, with evident use and wont. to watch her steer out into the darkening loch, into the dimness and cold, gave the young man a vague sensation of pain. it seemed to him as if the last possible link with the human and sympathetic was detaching itself from him. he did not know her indeed, but it does not take a long time or much personal knowledge to weave this mystic thread between one young creature and another. most likely, he thought, she had not so much as noticed him: but she had come into the half-real dream of his existence, and touched his hand, as it were, in the vague atmosphere which separates one being from another. now he was left with nothing around him but the darkening landscape and the noisy little crowd about the coach; no one who could give him any fellowship or encouragement in the further contact which lay before him with the mysterious and unknown. after a few moments the landlady came towards him, smoothing down her white apron, which made a great point in the landscape, so broad was it and so white. she smiled upon him with ingratiating looks. "will you be going north, sir?" she said; "or will you be biding for the night? before we dish up the dinner and put the sheets on the bed we like to know." "who is that young lady that has just gone away?" said walter, not paying much attention; "and where is she going? it is late and cold for the water. do you ever get frozen here?" "that is miss oona of the isle," said the landlady; "but as i was saying, sir, about the beds----" "are the islands inhabited then?" said walter; "and where is kinloch houran? does one go there by water too?" "no, mistress macgregor," said symington's voice on the other side; "my lord will not bide here to-night. i've been down to the beach, and there is a boat there, but not your lordship's own, any more than there was a carriage waiting at baldally. we must just put our pride in our pockets, my lord, and put up with what we can get. when your lordship's ready we're all ready." by this time big john and all the others were standing in a group staring at lord erradeen with all their eyes. john explained himself in a loud voice, but with an evident secret sense of shame. "hoo was i to ken? a lord has nae business to scour the country like that, like ony gangrel body--sitting on the seat just like the rest of us--mr. smith and him and me. lord! hoo was i to ken? if you hear nae good of yourself, it is just your ain blame. i was thinking of no lord or any such cattle. i was just thinking upon my beasts. as for a lord that gangs about like yon, deceiving honest folk, i wouldna give that for him," john said, snapping his finger and thumb. his voice sank at the end, and the conclusion of the speech was but half audible. mrs. macgregor interposing her round, soft intonation between the speaker and the stranger. "eh, my lord, i just beg your pardon! i had no notion--and i hope your lordship found them a' civil. big john is certainly a little quick with his tongue--" "i hope you're not supposing, mistress macgregor, that his lordship would fash himself about big john," said symington, who had now taken the direction of affairs. walter, to tell the truth, did not feel much inclination to enter into the discussion. the gathering chill of the night had got into his inner man. he went down towards the beach slowly pondering, taking every step with a certain hesitation. it seemed to him that he stood on the boundary between the even ground of reality and some wild world of fiction which he did not comprehend, but had a mingled terror and hatred of. behind him everything was homely and poor enough; the light streamed out of the open doors and uncovered windows, the red roof had a subdued glow of cheerfulness in the brown air, the sounds about were cheerful, full of human bustle and movement, and mutual good offices. the men led the horses away with a certain kindness; the landlady, with her white apron, stopped to say a friendly word to big john, and interchanged civilities with the other humble passengers who were bringing her no custom, but merely passing her door to the ferry-boat that waited to take them across the loch. everywhere there was a friendly interchange, a gleam of human warmth and mutual consolation. but before him lay the dark water, with a dark shadow of mingled towers and trees lying upon it at some distance. he understood vaguely that this was kinloch houran, and the sight of it was not inviting. he did not know what it might be that should meet him there, but whatever it was it repelled and revolted him. he seemed to be about to overpass some invisible boundary of truth and to venture into the false, into regions in which folly and trickery reigned. there was in walter's mind all the sentiment of his century towards the supernatural. he had an angry disbelief in his mind, not the tranquil contempt of the indifferent. his annoyed and irritated scorn perhaps was nearer faith than he supposed; but he was impatient of being called upon to give any of his attention to those fables of the past which imposture only could keep up in the present. he felt that he was going to be made the victim of some trick or other. the country people evidently believed, indeed, as was natural enough to their simplicity; but walter felt too certain that he would see the mechanism behind the most artful veil to believe it possible that he himself could be taken in, even for a moment. and he had no desire to find out the contemptible imposture. he felt the whole business contemptible; the secluded spot, the falling night, the uninhabited place, were all part of the jugglery. should he voluntarily make himself a party to it, and walk into the snare with his eyes open? he felt sure, indeed, that he would remain with his eyes open all the time, and was not in the least likely to submit to any black art that might be exercised upon him. but he paused, and asked himself was it consistent with the dignity of a reasonable creature, a full-grown man, to allow himself to be drawn into any degrading contact with this jugglery at all? the boat lay on the beach with his baggage already in it, and symington standing respectful awaiting his master's pleasure. symington, no doubt, was the god out of the machinery who had the _fin mot_ of everything and all the strings in his hand. what if he broke the spell peremptorily and retired to the ruddy fireside of the inn and defied family tradition? he asked himself again what would come of it? and replied to himself scornfully that nothing could come of it. what law could force him to observe an antiquated superstition? it was folly to threaten him with impossible penalties. and even if a thing so absurd could happen as that he should be punished in purse or property for acting like a man of sense instead of a fool, what then? the mere possibility of the risk made walter more disposed to incur it. it was monstrous and insufferable that he should be made to carry out a tyrannical, antiquated stipulation by any penalty of the law. it would be better to fight it out once for all. all the sense of the kingdom would be with him, and he did not believe that any judge could pronounce against him. here symington called, with a slight tone of anxiety, "we are all ready, my lord, and waiting." this almost decided walter. he turned from the beach, and made a few hasty steps up the slope. but then he paused again, and turning round faced once more the darkening water, the boat lying like a shadow upon the beach, the vague figures of the men about it. the ferry-boat had pushed off and was lumbering over the water with great oars going like bats' wings, and a noisy human load. the other little vessel with that girl had almost disappeared. he thought he could see in the darkness a white speck like a bird, which was the white shawl that wrapped her throat and shoulders. her home lay somewhere in the centre of these dark waters, a curious nest for such a creature. and his? he turned again towards the dark, half-seen towers and gables. some of them were so irregular in outline that they could be nothing but ruins. he began to think of the past, mute, out of date, harmless to affect the life that had replaced it, which had taken refuge there. and he remembered his own argument about the courtesy that the living owed to the dead. well! if it was so, if it was as a politeness, a courtesy to the past, it might be unworthy a gentleman to refuse it. and perhaps when all was said it was just a little cowardly to turn one's back upon a possible danger, upon what at least the vulgar thought a danger. this decided him. he turned once more, and with a few rapid steps reached the boat. next moment they were afloat upon the dark loch. there had been no wind to speak of on shore, but the boat was soon struggling against a strong running current, and a breeze which was like ice. the boatmen showed dark against the gleaming loch, the rude little vessel rolled, the wind blew. in front of them rose the dark towers and woods all black without a sign of human habitation. walter felt his heart rise at last with the sense of adventure. it was the strangest way of entering upon a fine inheritance. chapter x. kinloch houran castle stands out of the very waters of loch houran, with its ruined gables and towers clothed with ivy. from the water it looked like nothing but a roofless and deserted ruin. one tower in the centre stood up above the jagged lines of the walls, with something that looked like a ruined balcony or terrace commanding the landscape. the outline was indistinct, for the trees that had got footing in the ruined chambers below grew high and wild, veiling the means by which it was sustained at that altitude: but the little platform itself was very visible, surrounding the solid block of the tower, which showed no window or opening, but looked as if it might yet outlive centuries. as the boat approached, walter saw the rowers whisper, and give significant looks at symington, who sat respectfully on one of the cross seats, not to put himself in the way of his master, who occupied the other alone. hoarse whispers breathed about the other end of the boat, and symington was progged in the shoulders with an occasional oar. "will ye no' be letting him see't?" the rowers said. walter's faculties were eagerly acute in the strangeness of everything around him; the sense that he was going to an impossible house--to a ruin--on an impossible errand, seemed to keep him on the alert in every particular of his being. he could see through the dusk, he could hear through the whistle of the wind and the lashing of the water upon the boat's side, which was like the roar of a mimic storm; and he was not even insensible to the comic element in symington's face, who waved away the oar with which he was poked, and replied with words and frowns and looks full of such superiority of information, that a burst of sudden nervous laughter at the sight relieved walter's excitement. he felt that a thrill of disapproval at this went through the boat, and the men in the bow shook their bonnets as they rowed. "it's nothing to laugh at, my lord," said old symington, "though i'm not one--and i make no question but your lordship is not one--to lose my presence o' mind. yon's the phenomenon that they wanted me to call your lordship's attention to," he added, jerking his arm, but without turning his head, in the direction of the tower. "the light?" walter said. he had been about to ask what the meaning of it might be. it had not been visible at all when they started, but for the last moment or two had been growing steadily. the daylight was waning every minute, and no doubt (he thought) it was this that made the light more evident. it shone from the balcony or high roof-terrace which surrounded the old tower. it was difficult to distinguish what it was, or identify any lamp or beacon as the origin of it. it seemed to come from the terrace generally, a soft, extended light, with nothing fiery in it, no appearance of any blaze or burning, but a motionless, clear shining, which threw a strange glimmer upwards upon the solid mass of the tower, and downwards upon the foliage, which was black and glistening, and upon the surface of the water. "yon's the phenomenon," said symington, pointing with a jerk of his elbow. the light brought out the whole mass of rugged masonry and trees from the rest of the landscape, and softly defined it against the darker background. "how is it done?" said the young man, simply. he perceived the moment after that his tone was like that of the bagman on the coach, and shivered at the thought. so soft and steady was the light that it had not seemed to him extraordinary at all. "what do you mean by a phenomenon?" he asked, hastily. he remembered suddenly that the young lady on the coach had spoken of this light, and taken it, so to speak, under her protection. "if your lordship has ainy desire to inquire into my opinion," said old symington, "though i doubt that's little likely, i would say it was just intended to work on the imagination. now and then, indeed, it's useful in the way of a sign--like a person waving to you to come and speak; but to work on the imagination, that's what i would say." walter looked up at the light which threw a faint glimmer across the dark water, showing the blackness of the roughened ripple, over which they were making their way, and bringing into curious prominence the dark mass of the building rising out of it. it was not like the moon, it was more distinct than starlight, it was paler than a torch: nor was there any apparent central point from which it came. there was no electric light in those days, nor was loch houran a probable spot for its introduction: but the clear colourless light was of that description. it filled the visitor with a vague curiosity, but nothing more. "to work on--whose imagination? and with what object?" he said. but as he asked the question the boat shot forward into the narrow part of the loch, and rounded the corner of the ruin. anything more hopeless as a place to which living passengers, with the usual encumbrances of luggage, were going, could not well be conceived; but after a few minutes' rowing, the boat ran in to some rude steps on the other side of the castle, where there were traces of a path leading up across the rough grass to a partially visible door. all was so dark by this time that it was with difficulty that walter found the landing; when he had got ashore, and his portmanteau had been put out on the bank, the men in the boat pushed off with an energy and readiness which proved their satisfaction in getting clear of the castle and its traditions. to find himself left there, with an apparently ruined house behind him, his property at his feet, his old servant by his side, night closing in around, and the dark glistening water lapping up on the stones at his feet, was about as forlorn a situation as could be imagined. "are we to pass the night here?" he said, in a voice which could not help being somewhat querulous. the sound of a door opening behind interrupted his words, and turning round he saw an old man standing in the doorway, with a small lamp in his hand. he held it up high over his head to see who the new-comers were; and walter, looking round, saw a bowed and aged figure--a pale old face, which might have been made out of ivory, so bloodless was it, the forehead polished and shining, some grey locks escaping at the side of a black skull-cap, and eyes looking out keenly into the darkness. "it is just his lordship, macalister," said old symington. the young man, who was so strange to it all, stood with a sort of helplessness between the two old men who were familiar with each other and the place and all its customs. "come away, then, come away," cried the guardian of the house, with a shrill voice that penetrated the stillness sharply. "what are ye biding there for in the dark?" "and who's to carry up my lord's portmanteau?" said symington. "his portmanteau!" cried the other, with a sort of eldritch laugh. "has he come to bide?" this colloquy held over him exasperated walter, and he seized the portmanteau hastily, forgetting his dignity. "lend a hand, symington, and let us have no more talk," he said. there is a moment when the most forlorn sensations and the most dismal circumstances become either ludicrous or irritating. the young man shook off his sense of oppression and repugnance as he hastened up the slope to the door, while the lantern, flashing fitfully about, showed now the broken path, now the rough red masonry of the ruin, which was scarcely less unlike a ruin on this side than on the other. the door gave admittance into a narrow passage only, out of which a spiral staircase ascended close to the entrance, the passage itself apparently leading away into the darkness to a considerable distance. at the end of it stood a woman with a lighted candle peering out at the stranger as the man had done. he seemed to realise the stones which every one has read of a belated traveller unwillingly received into some desolate inn, which turns out to be the headquarters of a robber-band, and where the intruder must be murdered ere the morning. "this is your way, my lord," said the shrill old man, leading the way up the spiral stair. the whole scene was like a picture. the woman holding up her light at the end of the long passage, the old man with his lamp, the dark corners full of silence and mystery, the cold wind blowing as through an icy ravine. and the sensations of the young man, who had not even had those experiences of adventure which most young men have in these travelling days, whom poverty and idleness had kept at home in tame domestic comfort, were very strange and novel. he seemed to himself to be walking into a romance, not into any real place, but into some old storybook, a mystery of udolpho, an antiquated and conventional region of gloom and artificial alarms. "come this way, my lord; come this way," said the old man; "the steps are a bit worn, for they're auld, auld--as auld as the house. but we hope you'll find everything as comfortable as the circumstances will permit. we have had just twa three days to prepare, my mistress and me; but we've done our best, as far," he added, "as the circumstances will permit. this way, this way, my lord." at the head of the stair everything was black as night. the old man's lamp threw his own somewhat fantastic shadow upon the wall of a narrow corridor as he held it up to guide the new-comer. close to the top of the staircase, however, there opened a door, through which a warm light was showing, and walter, to his surprise, found himself in a comfortably-furnished room with a cheerful fire, and a table covered for dinner, a welcome end to the discomfort and gloom of the arrival. the room was low, but large, and there were candles on the mantelpiece and table which made a sort of twinkling illumination in the midst of the dark panelled walls and dark furniture. the room was lined with books at one end. it was furnished with comfortable sofas and chairs of modern manufacture. there was a curious dim mirror over the mantelshelf in a heavy gilt frame of old carving, one or two dim old portraits hung opposite, the curtains were drawn, the fire was bright, the white tablecloth with an old-fashioned silver vase in the middle, and the candles burning, made a cheerful centre of light. at the further end was another door, open, which admitted to a bed-room, dim, but comfortable in the firelight. all this was encouraging. walter threw himself into a chair with a sense that the situation altogether was improving. things cannot be so very bad when there is a fire and lights, and a prospect of dinner. he began to laugh at himself, when he had taken off his coat, and felt the warmth of the glowing fire. everything around him was adapted for comfort. there was a little want of light which left all the corners mysterious, and showed the portraits dimly, like half-seen spectators, looking down from the wall; but the comfortable was much more present than the weird and uncanny which had so much predominated on his arrival. and when a dinner, which was very good and carefully cooked, and a bottle of wine, which, though he had not very much skill in that subject, walter knew to be costly and fine, had been served with noiseless care by symington, the young man began to recover his spirits, and to think of the tradition which required his presence here, as silly indeed, but without harm. after dinner he seated himself by the fire to think over the whole matter. it was not yet a fortnight since this momentous change had happened in his life. before that he had been without importance, without use in the world, with little hope, with nothing he cared for sufficiently to induce him to exert himself one way or another. now after he had passed this curious probation, whatever it was, what a life opened before him! he did not even know how important it was, how much worth living. it shone before him indistinctly as a sort of vague, general realisation of all dreams. wealth--that was the least of it; power to do whatever he pleased; to affect other people's lives, to choose for himself almost whatever pleased him. he thought of parliament, even of government, in his ignorance: he thought of travel, he thought of great houses full of gaiety and life. it was not as yet sufficiently realised to make him decide on one thing or another. he preferred it as it was, vague--an indefinite mass of good things and glories to come. only this ordeal, or whatever it was--those few days more or less that he was bound to remain at kinloch houran, stood between him and his magnificent career. and after all, kinloch houran was nothing very terrible. it might be like the mysteries of udolpho outside; but all the mysteries of udolpho turned out, he remembered, quite explainable, and not so very alarming after all; and these rooms, which bore the traces of having been lived in very lately, and which were quite adapted to be lived in, did not seem to afford much scope for the mysterious. there were certain points, indeed, in which they were defective, a want of air, something which occasionally caught at his respiration, and gave him a sort of choked and stifled sensation; but that was natural enough, so carefully closed as everything was, curtains drawn, every draught warded off. sometimes he had an uneasy feeling as if somebody had come in behind him and was hanging about the back of his chair. on one occasion he even went so far as to ask sharply, "is it you, symington?" but, looking back, was ashamed of himself, for of course there was nobody there. he changed his seat, however, so as to face the door, and even went the length of opening it, and looking out to see if there was any one about. the little corridor seemed to ramble away into a darkness so great that the light of his candle did no more than touch its surface--the spiral staircase looked like a well of gloom. this made him shiver slightly, and a half-wish to lock his door came over him, of which he felt ashamed as he turned back into the cheerful light. after all, it was nothing but the sensation of loneliness which made this impression. he went back to his chair and once more resumed his thoughts--or rather was it not his thoughts--nay, his fancies--that resumed him, and fluttered about and around, presenting to him a hundred swiftly changing scenes? he saw visions of his old life, detached scenes which came suddenly up through the darkness and presented themselves before him--a bit of sloebury high street, with a group of his former acquaintances now so entirely separated from him; the little drawing-room at the cottage, with julia herbert singing him a song; underwood's rooms on that particular night when he had gone in, in search of something like excitement, and had found everything so dull and flat. none of these scenes had any connection with his new beginning in life. they all belonged to the past, which was so entirely past and over. but these were the scenes which came with a sort of perversity, all broken, changing like badly managed views in a magic lantern, produced before him without any will of his. there was a sort of bewildering effect in the way in which they swept along, one effacing another, all of them so alien to the scene in which he found himself. he had to get up at last, shaking himself as free of the curious whirl of unwonted imagination as he could. no doubt his imagination was excited; but happily not, he said to himself, by anything connected with the present scene in which he found himself. had it been roused by these strange surroundings, by the darkness and silence that were about him, by the loneliness to which he was so unused, he felt that there was no telling what he might see or think he saw; but fortunately it was not in this way that his imagination worked. his pulse was quick, however, his heart beating, a quite involuntary excitement in all his bodily faculties. he got up hastily and went to the bookshelves, where he found, to his surprise, a large collection of novels and light literature. it seemed to walter that his predecessor, whom he had never seen--the former lord erradeen, who inhabited these rooms not very long ago--had been probably, like himself, anxious to quench the rising of his fancy in the less exciting course of a fictitious drama, the conventional excitements of a story. he looked over the shelves with a curious sympathy for this unknown person, whom indeed he had never thought much upon before. did that unknown know who was to succeed him? did he ever speculate upon walter as walter was now doing upon him? he turned over the books with a strange sense of examining the secrets of his predecessor's mind. they were almost all books of adventure and excitement. he took down, after a moment, a volume of dumas, and returned to his easy-chair by the fire, to lose himself in the breathless ride of d'artagnan and the luckless fortunes of the three companions. it answered the purpose admirably. a sudden lull came over his restless fancy. he was in great comfort externally, warmed and fed and reposing after a somewhat weary day, and the spell of the great story-teller got hold of him. he was startled out of this equable calm when symington came in to light the candles in his bed-room and bring hot water, and offer his services generally. symington regarded him with an approval which he did not think it worth his while to dissemble. "that's right, my lord, that's right," he said. "reading's a very fine thing when you have too much to occupy your thoughts." walter was amused by this deliverance, and happily not impatient of it. "that is a new reason for reading," he said. "but it is a real just one, if your lordship will permit me to say so. keep you to your book, my lord; it's just fine for putting other things out of your head. it's dumas's you're reading? i've tried that french fellow myself, but i cannot say that i made head or tail of him. he would have it that all that has happened in history was just at the mercy of a wheen adventurers, two or three vagrants of frenchmen. no, no. i may believe a great deal, but i'm not likely to believe that." "i see you are a critic, symington; and do you read for the same reason that you have been suggesting to me?--because you have too much to occupy your thoughts?" "well, pairtly, my lord, and pairtly just in my idle hours to pass the time. i have made up your fire and lighted the candles, and everything is in order. will i wait upon your lordship till you're inclined for your bed? or will i----" symington made a significant pause, which it was not very difficult to interpret. "you need not wait," walter said; and then, with an instinct which he was half ashamed of, he asked hurriedly, "whereabouts do you sleep?" "that is just about the difficulty," said old symington. "i'm rather out of call if your lordship should want anything. the only way will just be to come down the stairs, if your lordship will take the trouble, and ring the big bell. it would waken a' the seven sleepers if it was rung at their lug: and i'm not so ill to waken when there is noise enough. but ye have everything to your hand, my lord. if you'll just give a glance into the other room, i can let you see where everything is. there is the spirit-lamp, not to say a small kettle by the fire, and there's----" "that will do," said walter. "i shall not want anything more to-night." the old servant went away with a glance round the room, in which walter thought there was some anxiety, and stopped again at the door to say "good night, my lord. it's not that i am keen for my bed--if your lordship would like me to bide, or even to take a doze upon a chair----" "go to bed, old sym.," said the young man with a laugh. the idea of finding a protector in symington was somewhat ludicrous. but these interruptions disturbed him once more, and brought back his excitement: he felt a sort of pang as he heard the old servant's heavy step going down the winding stair, and echoing far away, as it seemed, into the bowels of the earth. then that extreme and blighting silence which is like a sort of conscious death came upon the place. the thick curtains shut out every sound of wind and water outside as they shut out every glimpse of light. walter heard his pulse in his ears, his heart thumping like the hammer of a machine. the whole universe seemed concentrated in that only living breathing thing, which was himself. he tried to resume his book, but the spell of the story was broken. he could no longer follow the fortunes of athos, porthos, and aramis. walter methven thrust himself in front of these personages, and, though he was not half so amusing, claimed a superior importance by right of those pulses that clanged in his head like drums beating. he said to himself that he was very comfortable, that he had never expected to be so well off. but he could not regain his composure or sense of well-being. it was a little better when he went into his bed-room, the mere movement and passage from one room to another being of use to him. the sense of oppression and stagnation, however, soon became almost greater here than in the sitting-room. one side of the room was entirely draped in close-drawn curtains, so that it was impossible to make out even where the windows were. he drew them aside with some trouble, for the draperies were very heavy, but not to much advantage. at first it seemed to him that there were no windows at all; then he caught sight of something like a recess high in the wall; and climbing up, found the hasp of a rough shutter, which covered a small square window built into a cave of the deep masonry. that this should be the only means of lighting an almost luxurious sleeping chamber, bewildered him more and more; but it would not open, and let in no air, and the atmosphere felt more stifling than ever in this revelation of the impossibility of renewing it. finally, he went to bed with a sort of rueful sense that there was the last citadel and refuge of a stranger beset by imaginations in so weird and mysterious a place. he did not expect to sleep, but he determined that he would not, at least, be the sport of his own fancies. it astonished walter beyond measure to find himself waking in broad daylight, with symington moving softly about the room, and a long window, the existence of which he had never suspected, facing him as he looked up from his pillows, after a comfortable night's sleep. mingled shame and amusement made him burst into an uneasy laugh, as he realised this exceedingly easy end of his tribulations. "mrs. macalister," said symington, "would like well to know when your lordship is likely to be ready, to put down the trout at the right moment: for it's an awful pity to spoil a loch houran trout." chapter xi. to insist upon the difference between an impression made when we arrive, tired and excited at night, in a strange place, and that which the same scene produces in the early freshness and new life of the morning, would be to deliver ourselves over to the reign of the truism. it would, however, have been impossible to feel this with more force than walter felt it. his sensations of alarm and excitement struck him not only as unjustifiable but ludicrous. he laughed once more when he came out of his chamber into the warm and genial room, which had seemed to him so mysterious and dark on the previous night. there were windows upon either side of the fire-place, each in a deep recess like a small room, so great was the thickness of the wall. they looked out upon the mountains, upon the narrow end of the loch, all bubbling and sparkling in the sunshine, and down upon the little grassy slope rough and uncared for, yet green, which was the only practicable entrance to the castle. the windows were not large, and the room still not very light, though the sunshine which poured in at one side made a most picturesque effect of light and shade. the portraits on the wall were better than they had seemed, and had lost the inquisitive air of dissatisfied inspection which walter's imagination had given them. the book-shelves at the end gave relief to the room, with their cheerful gilding and the subdued tone of their bindings. walter thought of the chamber in the _pilgrim's progress_ turned towards the sunrising, the name of which was peace. but peace was not the thing most suggested at kinloch houran by any of the accessories about, and a vision of the chilliness of the gray light in the afternoon, and the force of the east wind when it came, crossed his mind in true nineteenth century criticism of the more poetical view. but in the mean time, the policy of enjoying the present was undeniable, especially when that present took the form of a loch houran trout, fresh from the water, and cooked as fish only are under such conditions. he looked back upon the agitations of the evening, and the reluctant angry sentiment with which he had come to this old house of his family, with amused incredulity and shame. to think that he could be such an impressionable fool! he dismissed it all lightly from his mind as he hurried over his breakfast, with the intention of getting out at once and exploring everything about. he had even newspapers upon his table along with the fresh scones, the new-made butter, all the fresh provisions of the meal. to be sure, it was glasgow and not london from which they came--but the world's history was no less instant in them, flashing from all parts of the world into this home of the ancient ages. his first inspection was of the castle itself, which he undertook under the auspices of old symington and old macalister, both eager to explain and describe what it had been, as well as what it was. what it was did not consist of very much. "my lord's rooms," those in which he had spent the night, were the only habitable portion of the great pile. he was led through the roofless hall, with its musicians' gallery still perched high up and overshadowed with canopies of ashen boughs, vigorous though leafless; the guard-room, the supposed kitchen with its large chimney, the oblong space from east to west which was supposed to have been the chapel. all was a little incoherent in the completeness of ruin. there was little of the stimulation of family pride to be got out of those desolate places. the destruction was too complete to leave room even for the facile web of imagination. the crusader, about whom there was a legend a little too picturesque and romantic to be true, or the lady who was only saved by his sudden appearance from unfaithfulness, were not more easy to conjure up within the inclosure of those shapeless walls than on any unremarkable spot where the story might have been told. walter grew a little weary as symington and the old guardian of the house argued as to which was this division of the castle, and which that. he left them discussing the question, and climbed up by a rude stair which had been half improvised from the ruined projections of the masonry, to the crumbling battlements above. from thence he looked down upon a scene which was older than the oldest ruin, yet ever fresh in perennial youth: the loch stretched out like a great mirror under the wintry blue of the sky and the dazzling blaze of the sunshine, reflecting everything, every speck of cloud above and every feathery twig and minute island below. there was no need to make believe, to simulate unfelt enthusiasm, or endeavour to connect with unreal associations this wonderful and glorious scene. perhaps there was in his mind something more in harmony with the radiance of nature than with the broken fragments of a history which he had no skill to piece up into life again. he stood gazing upon the scene in a rapture of silent delight. the hills in their robes of velvet softness, ethereal air-garments more lovely than any tissue ever woven in mortal loom, drew aside on either hand in the blue space and dazzling atmosphere to open out this liquid vale of light, with its dark specks of islets, its feathery banks, all rustling with leafless trees. every outline and detail within its reach was turned into a line, a touch, more sweet by the flattering glory of the still water in which everything was double. the morning freshness and sheen were still unbroken. it was like a new creation lying contemplating itself in the first ecstasy of consciousness. walter was gazing upon this wonderful scene when the sharp voice of old macalister made him start, and take a step aside which almost had serious consequences: for he stepped back unwarily upon the crumbling wall, and might have fallen but for the violent grip of the old man, who clutched him like a shaky hercules, with a grasp which was vigorous yet trembling. "lord's sake take care," he cried. his face flushed, then paled again with genuine emotion. "do you think we have a store of young lads like you, that you will risk your life like yon? and just in the place where the lady fell. you have given me such a start i canna breathe," he cried. to tell the truth, looking back upon it, walter himself did not like the look of the precipice which he had escaped. "where the lady fell?" he asked with a little eagerness, as he came to the battlement. "oh ay. i seldom bother my head about what's happened, so to speak, two or three days since. it was just there she fell. she has been bedridden ever since, from a' i hear, which just shows the folly of venturing about an auld place without somebody that knows how to take care of ye. what would have come of you yoursel', that is the maister of a', if auld sandy macalister had not been there?" "thank you, macalister, you shall find me grateful," said walter; "but who was this lady? two or three days ago, did you say?" "years--years; did i no say years? oh ay, it may be longer, twenty or thirty. i'm meaning just naething in a life like mine. she had some silly story of being frightened with a gentleman that she thought she saw. they are keen about making up a story--women folk. she was just the sister to the man of business, ye'll have heard of her--a pretty bit thing, if that was of any consequence; but, lord's sake, what's that atween you and me, and you ignorant of everything?" the old man said. "do you see the chimneys yonder, and the gable end with the crow steps, as they call it, just pushing out among the trees? that's just your ain shooting-box--they call it auchnasheen. i'll tell you the meanings of the names another time. out beyond yonder, the big house away at the point, it's a new place built for his diversion by one of your new men. yon island far away that's bare and green is the island of rest, where all the loch was once buried: and atween us and that there's another isle with a gable end among the trees which is just the last place that's left to an auld race to plant their feet upon. it's a bonnie piece of water; you that's come from the south you'll never have seen the like. i'll tell you all the stories of the divers places, and how they're connected with the me'vens that are chiefs of loch houran; for i wouldna give a button for that new-fangled title of the lords erradeen." "it has lasted however for some centuries," said walter, with a sudden sense of displeasure which he felt to be absurd enough. "and what is that in a family?" said old macalister, "i think nothing of it. a hundred years or two that never counts one way nor another; it's nae antiquity. if that nonsense were true about the warlock lord, he would be but twa hundred and fifty at the present speaking, or thereabouts, and a' that have ever thought they saw him represent him as a fine personable man. i have never had that pleasure myself," the old man said with his shrill laugh. "where are you going, my young gentleman? ye'll just go down like a stane and end in a rattle of dust and mortar, if you'll no be guided by me." "let you his lordship alone, sandy," cried the voice of symington, intermingled with pants and sobs as he climbed up to the parapet. "ye must not occupy my lord's time with your old craiks. you would perhaps like, my lord, to visit auchnasheen, where the keeper will be on the outlook: or may be it would be better to organise your day's shooting for to-morrow, when you have lookit a little about you: or ye would perhaps like to take a look at the environs, or see the factor, who is very anxious as soon as your lordship has a moment--" "oh! and there is the minister that can tell ye a' about the antiquities, my lord: and traces out the auld outline of the castle grandly, till ye seem to see it in all its glory--" "or--" symington had begun, when walter turned at bay. he faced the old men with a half-laughing defiance. "i see plenty of boats about," he said. "i am going out to explore the loch. i want no attendance, or any help, but that you will be good enough to leave me to myself." "we'll do that, my lord. i will just run and cry upon duncan that is waiting about--" the end of all this zeal and activity was that when walter found himself at last free and on the shining bosom of the loch, he was in a boat too heavy for his own sole management, sharing the care of it with duncan, who was of a taciturn disposition and answered only when spoken to. this made the arrangement almost as satisfactory as if he had been alone, for duncan was quite willing to obey and yield a hearty service without disturbing his young master with either questions or remarks. he was a large young man, strong and well knit though somewhat heavy, with a broad smiling face, red and freckled, with honest blue eyes under sandy eyelashes, and a profusion of strong and curly reddish hair. he beamed upon lord erradeen with a sort of friendly admiration and awe, answering, "ay, my lord," and "no, my lord," always with the same smile of general benevolence and readiness to comply with every desire. when they had got beyond hail of the castle, from which symington and macalister watched them anxiously, duncan mutely suggested the elevation of a mast and setting of the sail which the vessel was furnished with, to which walter assented with eagerness: and soon they were skimming along before a light wind as if they had wings. and now began perhaps the most pleasurable expedition that walter had ever made in his life. escaped from the ruinous old pile, within which he had feared he knew not what, escaped too from the observation and inspection of the two old men so much better acquainted with the history of his family than himself, whom he felt to be something between keepers and schoolmasters--fairly launched forth upon the world, with nothing to consult but his own pleasure, walter felt his spirits rise to any height of adventure. there was not indeed any very wild adventure probable, but he was not much used to anything of the kind, and the sense of freedom and freshness in everything was intoxicating to the young man. the small boat, the rag of a sail, the lively wind that drove them along, the rushing ripple under their keel, all delighted him. he held the helm with a sense of pleasure almost beyond anything he had ever known, feeling all the exhilaration of a discoverer in a new country, and for the first time the master of himself and his fate. duncan said nothing, but grinned from ear to ear, when the young master in his inattention to, or to tell the truth ignorance of, the capabilities of the boat, turned the helm sharply, bringing her up to the wind in such a way as to threaten the most summary end for the voyage. he kept his eye upon the rash steersman, and walter was not aware of the risks he ran. he directed his little vessel now here, now there, with absolute enjoyment, running in close ashore to examine the village, turning about again in a wild elation to visit an island, running the very nose of the boat into the rocky banks or feathery bushwood. how it was that no harm came as they thus darted from point to point duncan never knew. he stood up roused to watchfulness, with his eyes intent on the movements of his master ready to remedy any indiscretion. it was in the nature of such undeserved vigilance that the object of it was never aware of it, but to be sure duncan had his own life to think of too. they had thus swept triumphantly down the loch, the wind favouring, and apparently watching over the rash voyager as carefully, as and still more disinterestedly than duncan. the motion, the air, the restless career, the novelty, and the freedom enchanted walter. he felt like a boy in his first escapade, with an intoxicating sense of independence and scorn of danger which gave zest to the independence. at every new zigzag he made, duncan but grinned the more. he uttered the gaelic name of every point and isle, briefly, with guttural depth, out of his chest, as they went careering along before the wind. the boat was like an inquisitive visitor, too open for a spy, poking in to every corner. at length they came to an island standing high out of the water, with a rocky beach, upon which a boat lay carefully hauled up, and a feathery crest of trees, fine clumps of fir, fringed and surrounded by a luxuriant growth of lighter wood. in the midst of this fine network of branches, such as we call bare, being leafless, but which in reality are all astir with life restrained, brown purple buddings eager to start and held in like hounds in a leash--rose the solid outline of a house, built upon the ridge of rock, and appearing like a shadow in the midst of all the anatomy of the trees. "that will be joost the leddy's," cried duncan; at which walter's heart, so light in his bosom, gave an additional leap of pleasure. he steered it so close that duncan's vigilance was doubly taxed, for the least neglect would have sent the little vessel ashore. walter examined the little landing, the rocky path that led up the bank, winding among the trees, and as much as could be made out of the house, with keen interest. the man with the red shirt, who had been the young lady's boatman on the previous day, appeared at the further point as they went on. he was fishing from a rock that projected into the water, and turning to gaze upon the unwary boat, with astonished eyes, shouted something in gaelic to duncan, who nodded good-humouredly a great many times, and replied with a laugh in the same tongue-- "yon will joost be hamish," said duncan. "what is he saying?" cried walter. "he will just be telling us to mind where we are going," said duncan, imperturbable. "tell him to mind his own business," cried walter, with a laugh. "and who is hamish, and who is the leddy? come, tell me all about it." his interest in the voyage flagged a little at this point. duncan thus interrogated was more put to it than by the dangerous course they had hitherto been running. "it will joost be the leddy," he said; "and hamish that's her man: and they will joost be living up there like ither persons, and fearing god: fery decent folk--oh, joost fery decent folk." "i never doubted that. but who are they, and what are they? and do you mean to say they _live_ there, on that rock, in winter, so far north?" walter looked up at the dazzling sky, and repented his insinuation: but he was, alas, no better than an englishman, when all was said, and he could not help a slight shiver as he looked back. hamish, who had made a fine point of colour on his projecting rock, had gone from that point, and was visible in his red shirt mounting the high crest of the island with hurried appearances and disappearances as the broken nature of the ground made necessary. he had gone, there seemed little doubt, to intimate to the inhabitants the appearance of the stranger. this gave walter a new thrill of pleasure, but it took away his eagerness about the scenery. he lay back languidly, neglecting the helm, and as he distracted duncan's attention too, they had nearly run aground on the low beach of the next island. when this difficulty was got over, walter suddenly discovered that they had gone far enough, and might as well be making their way homeward, which was more easily said than done; for the wind, which had hitherto served their purpose nobly, was no longer their friend. they made a tack or two, and crept along a little, but afterwards resigned themselves to ship the sail and take to the oars, which was not so exhilarating nor so well adapted to show the beauty of the landscape. it took them some time to make their way once more past the rocky point, and along the edge of the island which attracted walter's deepest interest, but to which he could not persuade duncan to give any name. "it will joost be the leddy's," the boatman insisted on saying, with a beaming face; but either his english or his knowledge was at fault, and he went no further. walter's heart beat with a kind of happy anxiety, a keen but pleasant suspense, as he swept his oar out of the water, and glanced behind him to measure how near they were to the landing, at which he had a presentiment something more interesting than hamish might be seen. and as it turned out, he had not deceived himself. but what he saw was not what he expected to see. the lady on the bank was not his fellow-traveller of yesterday. she was what walter to himself, with much disappointment, called an old lady, wrapped in a large furred mantle and white fleecy wrap about her head and shoulders. she stood and waved her hand as walter's boat came slowly within range. "you will be joost the leddy," said duncan of the few words; and with one great sweep of his oar he turned the boat towards the landing. it was the man's doing, not the master's; but the master was not sorry to take advantage of this sudden guidance. it was all done in a moment, without intention. hamish stood ready to secure the boat, and before he had time to think, walter found himself on the little clearing above the stony bit of beach, hat in hand, glowing with surprise and pleasure, and receiving the warmest of welcomes. "you will forgive me for just stopping you on your way," the lady said; "but i was fain to see you, lord erradeen, for your father and i were children together. i was violet montrose. you must have heard him speak of me." "i hope," said walter, with his best bow, and most ingratiating tone, "that you will not consider it any fault of mine; but i don't remember my father; he died when i was a child." "dear me," cried the lady; "how could i be so foolish! looking at you again, i see you would not be old enough for that: and, now i remember, he married late, and died soon after. well, there is no harm done. we are just country neighbours, and as i was great friends with walter methven some five-and-forty years ago----" "i hope," said the young man with a bow and smile, "that you will be so good as to be friends with walter methven now: for that is the name under which i know myself." "oh, lord erradeen," the lady said with a little flutter of pleasure. such a speech would be pretty from any young man; but made by a young lord, in all the flush of his novel honours, and by far the greatest potentate of the district, there was no one up the loch or down the loch who would not have been gratified. "it is just possible," she said, after a momentary pause, "that having been brought up in england, and deprived of your father so early, you may not know much about your neighbours, nor even who we are, in this bit island of ours. we are the forresters of eaglescairn, whom no doubt ye have heard of; and i am one of the last of the montroses--alas! that i should say so. i have but one of a large family left with me; and oona and me, we have just taken advantage of an old family relic that came from my side of the house, and have taken up our habitation here. i hear she must have travelled with you yesterday on the coach, not thinking who it was. oh, yes; news travels fast at this distance from the world. i think the wind blows it, or the water carries it. all the loch by this time is aware of lord erradeen's arrival. indeed," she added, with a little laugh, "you know, my lord, we all saw the light." she was a woman over fifty, but fair and slight, with a willowy figure, and a complexion of which many a younger woman might have been proud; and there was a little airiness of gesture and tread about her, which probably thirty years before had been the pretty affectations, half-natural, half-artificial, of a beauty, and which still kept up the tradition of fascinating powers. the little toss of her head, the gesture of her hands, as she said the last words, the half-apologetic laugh as if excusing herself for a semi-absurdity, were all characteristic and amusing. "you know," she added, "in the highlands we are allowed to be superstitious," and repeated the little laugh at herself with which she deprecated offence. "what is it supposed to mean?" walter asked somewhat eagerly. "of course there is some natural explanation which will be simple enough. but i prefer to take the old explanation, if i knew what it was." "and so do we," she said quickly. "we are just ready to swear to it, man and woman of us on the loch. some say it is a sign the head of the house is coming--some that it is a call to him to come and meet--dear me, there is oona calling. and where is hamish? i will not have the child kept waiting," said the lady, looking round her with a little nervous impatience. she had begun to lead the way upward by a winding path among the rocks and trees, and now paused, a little breathless, to look down towards the landing-place, and clap her hands impatiently. "hamish is away, mem," said the woman whom walter had seen on the coach, and who now met them coming down the winding path. she looked at him with a cordial smile, and air of kindly welcome. it was evident that it did not occur to mysie that her salutations might be inappropriate. "you're very welcome, sir, to your ain country," she said with a courtesy, which was polite rather than humble. walter felt that she would have offered him her hand, on the smallest encouragement, with a kindly familiarity which conveyed no disrespect. "you should say my lord, mysie," her mistress remarked. "deed, mem, and so i should; but when you're no much in the way o't, ye get confused. i said, as soon as i heard the news, that it would be the young gentleman on the coach, and i had just a feeling a' the time that it was nae tourist, but a kent face. hamish is away, mem. i tell him he hears miss oona's foot on the bank, before ever she cries upon him; and yonder he is just touching the shore, and her ready to jump in." the party had reached a little platform on the slope. the path was skilfully engineered between two banks, clothed with ferns and grasses, and still luxuriant with a vivid green, though the overhanging trees were all bare. here and there a little opening gave a point of repose and extended view. mrs. forrester paused and turned round to point out to her visitor the prospect that now lay before them. she was a little breathless and glad of the pause, but it did not suit her character to say so. she pointed round her with a little triumph. they were high enough to see the loch on either side, looking down upon it through the fringe of branches. opposite to this was the mainland which at that spot formed a little bay, thickly wooded with the dark green of the fir woods, amid which appeared the gables of a sort of ornamental cottage. nearer the eye was the road, and underneath the road on the beach stood a little slight figure in the closely-fitting garb which walter recognised. she had evidently been set down from a waggonette full of a lively party which waited on the high road to see her embark. it was impossible to hear what they were saying, but the air was full of a pleasant murmur of voices. "it is the young campbells of ellermore," said mrs. forrester, waving her handkerchief towards the group. "oona has been spending last night with them, and they have brought her back. they will all be astonished, mysie, to see me standing here with a gentleman. dear me, they will all be saying who has mrs. forrester got with her?" "they will think," said mysie, "just that it's mr. james or mr. ronald come home." "ah, mysie, if that could be!" said the lady of the isle: and she put her hands together, which were thin and white, and ornamented by a number of rings, with a pretty conventional gesture of maternal regret. walter stood looking on with mingled amazement and pleasure: pleased as if he were at a play with all the new indications of domestic history which were opening to him, and with a sense of enjoyment through all his being. when the girl sprang into the boat, and hamish, conspicuous in his red shirt, pushed off into the loch, the tumult of good-byes became almost articulate. he laughed to himself under his breath, remembering all the greetings he had heard along the line of railway, the recognitions at every station. "your daughter seems to know everybody," he said. "and how could she help knowing every person," cried mysie, taking the words, as it were, out of her mistress's mouth, "when she was born and brought up on the loch, and never one to turn her back upon a neebor, gentle or simple, but just adored wherever she goes?" "oh, whisht, mysie, whisht! we are partial," said mrs. forrester with her little antiquated graces; and then she invited lord erradeen to continue his walk. it was the full blaze of day, and the view extended as they went higher up to the crest of rock upon which the house was set. it was built of irregular reddish stone, all cropped with lichens where it was visible, but so covered with clinging plants that very little of the walls could be seen. the rustic porch was built something like a bee-hive, with young, slim-growing saplings for its pillars, and chairs placed within its shelter. there were some flower-beds laid out around, in which a few autumn crocuses had struggled into pale bloom--and a number of china roses hung half opened against the sides of the house. the roofs were partly blue slates, that most prosaic of comfortable coverings, and partly the rough red tiles of the country, which shone warm through the naked boughs. "every hardy plant could bear loch katrine's keen and searching air," was garlanded about the house, the little lawn was as green as velvet, the china roses were pale but sweet. behind the house were the mossed apple-trees of a primitive orchard among the rocky shelves. it lay smiling in the sun, with the silver mirror of the lake all round, and every tint and outline doubled in the water. from the door the dark old castle of kinloch houran stood out against the silent darkness of the hill. little rocky islets, like a sport of nature, too small to be inhabited by anything bigger than rabbits, lay all reflected in broken lines of rock and brushwood, between walter's old castle and this romantic house. they were so visible, one to the other, that the mere position seemed to form a link of connection between the inhabitants. "we cannot but take an interest in you, you see, lord erradeen, for we can never get out of sight of you," said mrs. forrester. "and i think the old place looks better from here than any other view i have seen," walter added almost in the same breath. they laughed as they spoke together. it was not possible to be more entirely "country neighbours." the young man had a fantastic feeling that it was a sort of flattery to himself that his house should be so entirely the centre of the landscape. he followed the lady into the house with a little reluctance, the scene was so enchanting. inside, the roofs were low, but the rooms well-sized and comfortable. they were full of curiosities of every kind: weapons from distant countries, trophies of what is called "the chase," hung upon the wall of the outer hall. the drawing-room was full of articles from india and china, carved ivories, monsters in porcelain, all the wonders that people used to send home before we got japanese shops at every corner. an air of gentle refinement was everywhere, with something, too, in the many ornaments, little luxuries, and daintinesses which suggested the little _minauderies_ of the old beauty, the old-fashioned airs and graces that had been irresistible to a previous generation. "you will just stay and eat your luncheon with us, lord erradeen. i might have been but poor company, an old woman as i'm getting; but, now that oona is coming, i need not be too modest; for, though there will not be a grand luncheon, there will be company, which is always something. and sit down and tell me something about your father and the lady he married, and where you have been living all this time." walter laughed. "is it all my humble history you want me to tell you?" he said. "it is not very much. i don't remember my father, and the lady he married is--my mother, you know. the best mother----but i have not been the best of sons. i was an idle fellow, good-for-nothing a little while ago. nobody knew what was going to come of me. i did nothing but loaf, if you know what that means." "ah, that i do," said mrs. forrester; "that was just like my jamie. but now they tell me he is the finest officer----" walter paused, but the lady was once more entirely attention, listening with her hands clasped, and her head raised to his with an ingratiating sidelong look. he laughed. "they all made up their minds i was to be good-for-nothing----" "yes," murmured mrs. forrester, softly, half closing her eyes and shaking her head, "that was just like my bob--till he took a thought: and now he is planting coffee in ceylon and doing well. yes? and then?" "an old man arrived one evening," said walter, half laughing, "and told me--that i was lord erradeen. and do you know, from that moment nobody, not even i myself, would believe that i had ever loafed or idled or been good-for-nothing." there was a pause, in which walter thought he heard some one move behind him. but no sound reached mrs. forrester, who responded eagerly-- "my son, the present eaglescairn, was just of the same kind," she said, reflectively. she had a comparison ready for every case that could be suggested--"till he came of age. it was in the will that they were to come of age only at twenty-five, and till then i had a sore time. oh, oona, my dear, is that you? and had you a pleasant evening. here is young lord erradeen that has come in, most kindly, i'm sure, to tell me about his father, that i knew so well. and it appears you met upon the coach yesterday. come away, my dear, come away! and that was just most curious that, knowing nothing of one another, you should meet upon the coach." oona came in lightly, in her out-door dress. she gave walter a look which was very friendly. she had paused for a moment at the door, and she had heard his confession. it seemed to oona that what he said was generous and manly. she was used to forming quick impressions. she had been annoyed when she had heard from hamish of the visitor, but her mind changed when she heard what he said. she came up to him and held out her hand. the fresh air was in her face, which walter thought was like the morning, all bright and fresh and full of life. she made him a little curtsey with much gravity, and said in the pretty voice which was so fresh and sweet, and with that novelty of accent which had amused and delighted the young man, "you are welcome to your own country lord erradeen." "now that is very pretty of you, oona," cried her mother. "i never thought you would remember to pay your little compliment, as a well-bred person should; for, to tell the truth, she is just too brusque--it is her fault." "hamish told me what to say," said oona, with a glance of provocation. "he is a very well-bred person. he told me i was to bid my lord welcome to his own." "oh, my dear, you need not take away the merit of it, as if you had not thought of it yourself," said the mother, aggrieved; "but run away and take off your hat, and let us have our lunch, for lord erradeen has been all the morning on the water and he will be hungry, and you are all blown about with the wind." the young people exchanged looks, while mrs. forrester made her little protest. there was a sort of laughing interchange between them, in which she was mocking and he apologetic. why, neither could have said. they understood each other, though they by no means clearly understood each what he and she meant. there was to be a little war between them, all in good-humour and good-fellowship, not insipid agreement and politeness. the next hour was, walter thought, the most pleasant he had ever spent in his life. he had not been ignorant of such enjoyments before. when we said that various mothers in sloebury had with the first news of his elevation suffered a sudden pang of self-reproach, to think how they had put a stop to certain passages, the end of which might now have been to raise a daughter to the peerage, it must have been understood that walter was not altogether a novice in the society of women; but this had a new flavour which was delightful to him. it had been pleasant enough in the cottage, when julia herbert sang, and on other occasions not necessary to enter into. but on this romantic isle, where the sound of the loch upon the rocks made a soft accompaniment to everything, in a retirement which no vulgar interruption could reach, with the faded beauty on one side, scarcely able to forget the old pretty mannerisms of conquest even in her real maternal kindness and frank highland hospitality, and the girl, with her laughing defiance on the other, he felt himself to have entered a new chapter of history. the whole new world into which he had come became visible to him in their conversation. he heard how he himself had been looked for, and how "the whole loch" had known something about him for years before he had ever heard of loch houran. "we used to know you as the 'english lad,'" oona said, with her glance of mischief. all this amused walter more than words can say. the sun was dropping towards the west before--escorted to the landing-place by both the ladies, and taken leave of as an old friend--he joined the slow-spoken duncan, and addressed himself to the homeward voyage. duncan had not been slow of speech in the congenial company of hamish. they had discussed the new-comer at length, with many a shaft of humour and criticism, during the visit which duncan had paid to the kitchen. he blushed not now, secure in the stronghold of his unknown tongue, to break off in a witty remark at walter's expense as he turned to his master his beaming smile of devotion. they set off together, master and man, happy yet regretful, upon their homeward way. and it was a tough row back to kinloch houran against the fresh and not too quiet highland wind. chapter xii. the castle looked more grim and ruined than ever as walter set foot once more upon the rough grass of the mound behind. he dismissed the smiling duncan with regret. as he went up to the door, which now stood open, he thought to himself with relief that another day would finish his probation here, and that already it was more than half over; but next moment remembered that the end of his stay at kinloch houran would mean also an end of intercourse with his new friends, which gave a different aspect to the matter altogether. at the door of the castle old macalister was waiting with a look of anxiety. "ye'll have had no luncheon," he said, "and here's mr. shaw the factor waiting to see ye." macalister had not the manners of symington, and walter already felt that it was a curious eccentricity on the part of the old man to leave out his title. the factor was seated waiting in the room up-stairs; he was a middle-aged man, with grizzled, reddish locks, the prototype in a higher class of duncan in the boat. he got up with a cordial friendliness which walter began to feel characteristic, but which was also perhaps less respectful than might have been supposed appropriate, to meet him. he had a great deal to say of business which to walter was still scarcely intelligible. there were leases to renew, and there was some question about a number of crofter families, which seemed to have been debated with the former lord, and to have formed the subject of much discussion. "there is that question about the crofters at the truach-glas," mr. shaw said. "what crofters? or rather what are crofters? and what is the question and where is the truach-glas?" lord erradeen said. he pronounced it, alas! truack, as he still called loch, lock--which made the sensitive natives shudder. mr. shaw looked at him with a little disapproval. he felt that the english lad should have been more impressed by his new inheritance, and more anxious to acquire a mastery of all the facts connected with it. if, instead of wandering about the loch all the morning, he had been looking up the details of the business and the boundaries of the estate, and studying the map! but that not being the case, of course there was nothing to be done but to explain. "i had thought that mr. milnathort would have put the needs of the estate more clearly before you. there are several questions to be settled. i don't know what may be your views as to a landlord's duties, lord erradeen----" "i have no views," said walter; "i am quite impartial. you must recollect that i have only been a landlord for a fortnight." "but i suppose," said the factor somewhat severely, "that the heir to such a fine property has had some kind of a little training?" "i have had no training--not the slightest. i had no information even that i was the heir to any property. you must consider me as entirely ignorant, but ready to learn." shaw looked at him with some surprise, but severely still. "it is very curious," he said, as if that too had been walter's fault, "that you did not know you were the heir. we knew very well here; but the late lord was like most people, not very keen about his successor; and then he was a comparatively young man when he died." "i know nothing of my predecessor," said walter. "what was the cause of his death? i should like to hear something about him. several of them must have died young, i suppose, or i, so far off, could never have become the heir." the factor looked at him keenly, but with doubtful eyes. "there are secrets in all families, my lord erradeen," he said. "are there? i thought that was rather an old-fashioned sentiment. i don't think, except that i was not always virtuously occupied, that there was any secret in mine." "and i am sure there is no secret in mine," said mr. shaw, energetically; "but then you see i am not, and you were not till a very recent date, lord erradeen. there is a kind of something in the race that i will not characterise. it is a kind of a melancholy turn; the vulgar rumours ye will have heard, to which i attach no credence. it is little worth while living in the nineteenth century," the factor said with emphasis, "if ye are to be subject to delusions like that." "i tell you i am quite ignorant; and, except by hints which i could not understand, mr. milnathort did not give me any information. speak plainly, i want to know what the mystery is; why am i here in this tumble-down old place?" walter cried with an accent of impatience. shaw kept a watchful eye upon him, with the air of a man whom another is trying to deceive. "it is something in the blood, i'm thinking," the factor said. "they all seem to find out there's a kind of contrariety in life, which is a thing we all must do to be sure, but generally without any fatal effects. after a certain age they all seem to give way to it. i hope that _you_, my lord, being out of the direct line, will escape: the populace--if ye can accept their nonsense--say it's a--well, something supernatural--a kind of an influence from him they call the warlock lord." shaw laughed, but somewhat uneasily, apologetically. "i think shame to dwell upon such absurdity," he said. "it does sound very absurd." "that is just it--nonsense! not worth the consideration of sensible men. and i may say to you, that are, i hope, of a more wholesome mind, that they are terribly given up to caprice in this family. the truach-glas crofters have been up and down twenty times. the late lord made up his mind he would let them stay, and then that they must go, and again that he would just leave them their bits of places, and then that he would help them to emigrate; and after all, i had the order that they were to be turned out, bag and baggage. i could not find it in my heart to do it. i just put off, and put off, and here he is dead; and another," said shaw, with a suppressed tone of satisfaction, "come to the throne. and you're a new man and a young man, and belong to your own century, not to the middle ages," the factor cried with a little vehemence. then he stopped himself, with a "i beg your pardon, my lord; i am perhaps saying more than i ought to say." walter made no reply. he was not sure that he did not think the factor was going too far, for though he knew so little of his family, he already felt that it was something not to be subjected to discussion by common men. these animadversions touched his pride a little; but he was silent, too proud to make any remark. he said, after a pause-- "i don't know that i can give my opinion without a further acquaintance with the facts. if i were to do so on so slight a knowledge, i fear you might think that a caprice too." the factor looked at him with a still closer scrutiny, and took the hint. there is nothing upon which it is so necessary to understand the permitted limit of observation as in the discussion of family peculiarities. though he was so little responsible for this, and even so little acquainted with them, it was impossible that lord erradeen should not associate himself with his race. mr. shaw got out his papers, and entered upon the questions in which the opinion of the new proprietor was important, without a word further about the late lord and the family characteristics. he explained to walter at length the position of the crofters, with their small holdings, who in bad seasons got into arrears with their rents, and sometimes became a burden upon the landlord, in whom, so far north, there was some admixture of a highland chief. the scheme of the estate altogether was of a mixed kind. there were some large sheep farms and extensive moors still intermingled with glens more populated than is usual in these regions. some of them were on lands but recently acquired, and the crofters in particular were a burden transmitted by purchase, which the father of the last lord had made. it was believed that there had been some covenant in the sale by which the rights of the poor people were secured, but this had fallen into forgetfulness, and there was no reason in law why lord erradeen should not exercise all the rights of a proprietor and clear the glen, as so many glens had been cleared. this was the first question that the new lord would have to decide. the humble tenants were all under notice to leave, and indeed were subject to eviction as soon as their landlord pleased. it was with a kind of horror that walter listened to this account of his new possibilities. "eviction!" he said; "do you mean the sort of thing that happens in ireland?" he held his breath in unfeigned dismay and repugnance. "i thought there was nothing of the sort here." "ireland is one thing, and scotland another," said the factor. "we are a law-abiding people. no man will ever be shot down behind a hedge by a highlander: so if you should resolve to turn them out to-morrow, my lord, ye need stand in no personal fear." walter put aside this somewhat contemptuous assurance with a wave of his hand. "i have been told of a great many things i could do," he said, "in this last fortnight; but i never knew before that i could turn out a whole village full of people if i chose, and make their houses desolate." it was a new view altogether of his new powers. he could not help returning in thought to all the prepossessions of his former middle-class existence, where arbitrary power was unknown, and where a mild, general beneficence towards "the poor" was the rule. he said, half to himself, "what would my mother say?" and in the novelty of the idea, half laughed. what a thrill it would send through the district visitors, the managers of the soup kitchen, all the charitable people! there suddenly came up before him a recollection of many a conversation he had heard, and taken no note of--of consultations how to pay the rent of a poor family here and there, how to stop a cruel landlord's mouth. and that he should appear in the character of a cruel landlord! no doubt it would have been easy to show that the circumstances were quite different. but in the mean time the son of mrs. methven could not throw off the traditions in which he had been brought up. he contemplated the whole matter from a point of view altogether different even from that of mr. shaw, the factor. shaw was prepared to prove that on the whole the poor crofters were not such bad tenants, and that sheep farms and deer forests, though more easily dealt with, had some disadvantages too; for there was paterson of inverchory that had been nearly ruined by a bad lambing season, and had lost the half of his flock; and as for the shootings, was there not the dreadful example before them of the moors at finlarig, where everything had been shot down, and the game fairly exterminated by a set of fellows that either did not know what they were doing, or else were making money of it, and not pleasure. the very veins in shaw's forehead swelled when he spoke of this. "i would like to have had the ducking of him," he cried; "a man with a grand name and the soul of a henwife, that swept out the place as if he had done it with a broom, and all for the london market; grant me patience! you will say," added shaw, "that the thing to do at inverchory is to get a man with more capital now that john paterson's tack is done; and that there's few sportsmen like sir john. that's all very true; but it just shows there are risks to be run in all ways, and the poor folk at truach-glas would never lead you into losses like that." walter, however, did not pay much attention even to this view. his mind had not room at the moment for paterson of inverchory, who was behind with the rent, or sir john, who had devastated the moors. he did not get beyond the primitive natural horror of what seemed to him an outrage of all natural laws and kindness. he had not been a landowner long enough to feel the sacred right of property. he turn the cottagers out of their poor little homes for the sake of a few pounds more or less of which he stood in no need? the very arguments against taking this step made him angry. could anybody suppose he could do it? he, walter methven! as for the erradeen business, and all this new affair altogether--good heavens, if anybody thought he would purchase it by that! in short, the young man, who was not born a grand seigneur, boiled up in righteous wrath, and felt it high scorn and shame that it could be supposed of him that he was capable, being rich, of oppressing the poor--which was the way in which he put it, in his limited middle-class conditions of thought. mr. shaw was half-gratified, half-annoyed by the interview. he said to the minister with whom he stopped to dine, and who was naturally much interested about the new young man, that assuredly the young fellow had a great deal of good in him, but he was a trifle narrow in his way of looking at a question, "which is probably just his english breeding," the factor said. "i would have put the crofter question before him in all its bearings; but he was just out of himself at the idea of eviction--like what happened in ireland, he said. i could not get him to go into the philosophy of it. he just would not hear a word. nothing of the kind had ever come his way before, one could see, and he was just horrified at the thought." "i don't call that leemited, i call it christian," the minister said, "and i am not surprised he should have a horror of it. i will go and see him in the morning, if you think it will be well taken, for i'm with him in that, heart and soul." "yes, yes, that's all in your way," said mr. shaw; "but i am surprised at it in a young man. there is a kind of innocence about it. but i would not wonder after a little if he should change his mind, as others have done." "do you form any theory in your own thoughts, shaw," said the minister, "as to what it is that makes them so apt to change?" "not i," cried the factor, with a shrug of his shoulders; and then he added hurriedly, "you've given me a capital dinner, and that whisky is just excellent: but i think i must be going my ways, for already it's later than i thought." mr. cameron, who was minister of the parish, was, like walter, a stranger to the district and its ways. he was a great antiquary and full of curiosity about all the relics of the past, and he had an enlightened interest in its superstitions too. but shaw was a loch houran man. he had a reverence for the traditions which of course he vowed he did not believe, and though he was very ready to make this statement in his own person he did not like to hear outsiders, as he called the rest of the world, discussing them disrespectfully? so he desired his dog-cart to be "brought round," and drove home in the clear, cold night, warm at his heart, good man, because of the good news for the crofters, but a little dissatisfied in his mind that the new lord should be doing this simply as a matter of sentiment, and not from a reasonable view of the situation. "provided even that he keeps of that mind," the factor said to himself. walter subsided out of his just indignation when the business part of the interview ended, and he came out to the open air to see mr. shaw away. "this must all be put in order," he said, as he accompanied his visitor to the boat. shaw looked at him with a little curiosity mingled with a slight air of alarm. "auchnasheen being so near," he said, "which is a very comfortable place, there has never been much notice taken of the old castle." "but i mean to take a great deal of notice of it," the young man said with a laugh. "i shall have some of the antiquaries down and clear out all the old places." his laugh seemed to himself to rouse the echoes, but it called forth no responsive sound from his companion, and he caught a glimpse of old macalister in the distance shaking his old head. this amused yet slightly irritated walter, in the sense of power which alternated with a sense of novelty and unreality in his mind. "so you object to that?" he said to the old man. "you don't like your privileges invaded?" "it's no that," said macalister; "but ye'll never do it. i've a lang, lang acquaintance with the place, and i've witnessed many a revolution, if i may say sae. one was to pull down the auld wa's altogether; another was to clean it a' out like you. but it's never been done. and it'll never be done. i'm just as sure o' that as your young lordship is that you have a' the power in your hands." walter turned away with a little disdain in his laugh. it was not worth while arguing out the matter with macalister. who should prevent him from doing what he liked with his old house? he could not but reflect upon the curious contradictions with which he was beset. he was supposed to be quite capable of turning out a whole village out of their homes, and making them homeless and destitute; but he was not supposed capable of clearing out the blocked-up passage and rooms of an old ruin! he smiled with a kind of scornful indignation as he went up to his sitting-room. by this time the afternoon had lost all light and colour. it was not dark, but neither was it day. a greyness had come into the atmosphere; the shadows were black, and had lost all transparency. the two windows made two bars of a more distinct greyness in the room, with a deep line of shade in the centre between, which was coloured, but scarcely lighted up, by the fire. he could not but think with a sense of relief that the three days which were all he believed that were necessary for his stay at kinloch houran were half over at least. another night and then he would be free to go. he did not mean to go any further than to auchnasheen, which was exactly opposite to the island; and then, with a smile creeping about the corners of his mouth, he said to himself, that he could very well amuse himself for a few days, what with the shooting and what with---- and it would be comfortable to get out of this place, where the air, he could not tell why, seemed always insufficient. the wainscot, the dark hangings, the heavy old walls, seemed to absorb the atmosphere. he threw up the window to get a little air, but somehow the projecting masonry of the old walls outside seemed to intercept it. he felt an oppression in his breast, a desire to draw long breaths, to get more air into his lungs. it was the same sensation which he had felt last night, and he did not contemplate with any pleasure the idea of another long evening alone in so strange an atmosphere. however, he must make the best of it. he went to the bookshelf and got down again his _trois mousquetaires_. when the candles were lighted, he would write a dutiful long letter to his mother, and tell her all that had been going on about him, especially that barbarous suggestion about the cottagers. "fancy me in the character of a rapacious landlord, turning a whole community out of doors!" he said to himself, concocting the imaginary letter, and laughed aloud with a thrill of indignation. next moment he started violently, and turned round with a wild rush of blood to his head, and that sort of rallying and huddling together of all the forces of his mind which one feels in a sudden catastrophe. it was, however, no loud alarm that had sounded. it was the clear and distinct vibration of a voice close to him, replying calmly to his thought. "is there anything special in you to disqualify you for doing a disagreeable duty?" some one said. walter had started back at the first sound, his heart giving a bound in him of surprise--perhaps of terror. he had meant to take that great chair by the fire as soon as he had taken his book from the shelf, so that it must (he said to himself in instantaneous self-argument) have been vacant then. it was not vacant now. a gentleman sat there, with his face half turned towards the light looking towards the young man; his attitude was perfectly easy, his voice a well-bred and cultivated voice. there seemed neither hurry nor excitement about him. he had not the air of a person newly entered, but rather of one who had been seated there for some time at his leisure, observing what was going on. he lifted his hand with a sort of deprecating yet commanding gesture. "there is no occasion," he said, in his measured voice, "for alarm. i have no intention of harming you, or any one. indeed i am not aware that i have any power of harm." never in his life before had walter's soul been swept by such violent sensations. he had an impulse of flight and of deadly overwhelming terror, and then of sickening shame at his own panic. why should he be afraid? he felt dimly that this moment was the crisis of his life, and that if he fled or retreated he was lost. he stood his ground, grasping the back of a chair to support himself. "who are you?" he said. "that is a searching question," said the stranger, with a smile. "we will come to it by and by. i should like to know in the first place what there is in you which makes it impossible to act with justice in certain circumstances?" the air of absolute and calm superiority with which he put this question was beyond description. walter felt like a criminal at the bar. "who are you?" he repeated hoarsely. he stood with a curious sense of being supported only by the grasp which he had taken of the back of the chair, feeling himself a mere bundle of impulses and sensations, hardly able to keep himself from flight, hardly able to keep from falling down at the feet of this intruder, but holding to a sort of self-restraint by his grasp upon the chair. naturally, however, his nerves steadied as the moments passed. the first extreme shock of surprise wore away. there was nothing to alarm the most timid in the countenance upon which he gazed. it was that of a handsome man who had scarcely turned middle age, with grey but not white hair very thin on the forehead and temples, a high delicate aquiline nose, and colourless complexion. his mouth closed somewhat sternly, but had a faint melting of a smile about it, by movements which were ingratiating and almost sweet. the chief thing remarkable about the stranger, however, besides the extraordinary suddenness of his appearance, was the perfect composure with which he sat, like a man who not only was the most important person wherever he went, but also complete master of the present scene. it was the young man who was the intruder, not he. "i will tell you presently who i am," he said. "in the mean time explain to me why you should be horrified at a step which better men than yourself take every day. sit down." the stranger allowed himself to smile with distinct intention, and then said in a tone of which it is impossible to describe the refined mockery, "you are afraid?" walter came to himself with another sensible shock: his pride, his natural spirit, a certain impulse of self-defence which never forsakes a man, came to his aid. he was inclined to say "no," with natural denial of a contemptuous accusation; but rallying more and more every moment, answered with something like defiance, "yes--or rather i am not afraid. i am startled. i want to know how you come here, and who you are who question me--in my own house." "you are very sure that it is your own house? you mean to have it restored and made into a piece of sham antiquity--if nothing prevents?" "what can prevent? if i say it is to be done," cried the young man. his blood seemed to curdle in his veins when he heard the low laugh with which alone the stranger replied. "may i ask you--to withdraw or to tell me who you are?" he said. his voice trembled in spite of himself. the words left his lips quite sturdily, but quivered when they got into the air, or so in the fantastic hurry of his mind he thought. "if i refuse, what then?" the stranger said. these two individuals confronted each other, defying each other, one angry and nervous, the other perfectly calm. in such circumstances only one result is sure: that he who retains his self-possession will have the mastery. walter felt himself completely baffled. he could not turn out with violence a dignified and serious visitor, who assumed indeed an intolerable superiority, and had come in without asking leave, but yet was evidently a person of importance--if nothing more. he stared at him for a moment, gradually becoming familiarized with the circumstances. "you are master of the situation," he said, with a hard-drawn breath. "i suppose i can do nothing but submit. but if politeness on my part requires this of me, it requires on yours some information. your name, your object?" they looked at each other once more for a moment. "when you put it in that way, i have nothing to say," said the stranger, with great courtesy; "but to acknowledge your right to require--" at that moment the door opened hurriedly, and symington came in. "your lordship will be wanting something?" he said. "i heard your voice. was it to light the lights? or would it be for tea, or----" he gave a sort of scared glance round the room, and clung to the handle of the door, but his eyes did not seem to distinguish the new-comer in the failing twilight. "i did not call; but you may light the candles," walter said, feeling his own excitement, which had been subsiding, spring up again, in his curiosity to see what symington's sensations would be. the old man came in reluctantly. he muttered something uneasily in his throat. "i would have brought a light if i had known. you might have cried down the stairs. it's just out of all order to light the lights this gate," he muttered. but he did not disobey. he went round the room lighting one after another of the twinkling candles in the sconces. now and then he gave a scared and tremulous look about him; but he took no further notice. the stranger sat quite composedly, looking on with a smile while this process was gone through. then symington came up to the table in front of which walter still stood. "take a seat, my lord, take a seat," he said. "it's no canny to see you standing just glowering frae ye, as we say in the country. you look just as if you were seeing something. and take you your french fallow that you were reading last night. it's better when you're by yourself in an auld house like this, that has an ill-name, always to do something to occupy your thoughts." walter looked at the stranger, who made a little gesture of intelligence with a nod and smile; and old symington followed the look, still with that scared expression on his face. "your lordship looks for all the world as if you were staring at something in that big chair; you must be careful to take no fancies in your head," the old servant said. he gave a little nervous laugh, and retreated somewhat quickly towards the door. "and talk no more to yourself; it's an ill habit," he added, with one more troubled glance round him as he closed the door. chapter xiii. "and so you have made acquaintance with the young lord--tell us what kind of person he is, mrs. forrester--tell us what you think of him, oona." this was the unanimous voice which rose from the party assembled on the second day after walter's visit in the drawing-room in the isle. it was by no means out of the world, though to all appearances so far removed from its commotions. a low cottage-mansion on the crest of a rock, in the middle of loch houran, six miles from the railway at the nearest spot on which you could land, and with a mile or so of water, often rough, between you and the post-office, is it possible to imagine a more complete seclusion? and yet it was not a seclusion at all. oona cared very little for the roughness of the water between the isle and the post-office, and hamish nothing at all, and news came as constantly and as regularly to the two ladies on their island as to any newspaper--news from all quarters of the world. the mail days were almost as important to them--in one way far more important than to any merchant in his office. budgets came and went every week, and both oona and her mother would be busy till late at night, the little gleam of their lighted windows shining over the dark loch, that no one might miss his or her weekly letter. these letters went up into the hill countries in india, far away to the borders of cashmere, round the world to australia, dropt midway into the coffee groves of ceylon. when one of the boys was quartered in canada, to which there is a mail three times a week, _that_ looked like next parish, and they thought nothing of it. neither need it be supposed that this was the only enlivenment of their lives. the loch, though to the tourist it looks silent enough, was in fact fringed by a number of houses in which the liveliest existence was going on. the big new house at the point, which had been built by a wealthy man of glasgow, with every possible splendour, threw the homelier houses of the native gentry a little into the shade; but nobody bore him any malice, his neighbours being all so well aware that their own "position" was known and unassailable, that his finery and his costliness gave them no pang. they were all a little particular about their "position:" but then nobody on the loch could make any mistake about that, or for a moment imagine that mr. williamson from glasgow could rival the scotts of inverhouran, the campbells of ellermore, of glentruan, and half a dozen names beside, or the forresters of eaglescairn, or the old montroses, who, in fact, were a branch of the macnabs, and held their house on the isle from that important but extinct clan. this was so clearly understood that there was not an exception made to the williamsons, who knew their place, and were very nice, and made a joke of their money, which was their social standing ground. they had called their house, which was as big as a castle, in the most unobtrusive manner, birkenbraes, thus proving at once that they were new people and lowlanders: so much better taste, everybody said, than any pretence at highland importance or name. and this being once acknowledged, the gentry of the loch adopted the williamsons cordially, and there was not a word to be said. but all the campbells about, and those excellent williamsons, and a few families who were not campbells, yet belonged to loch houran, kept a good deal of life "on the loch," which was a phrase that meant in the district generally. and the isle was not a dull habitation, whatever a stranger might think. there was seldom a day when a boat or two was not to be seen, sometimes for hours together, drawn up upon the rocky beach. and the number of persons entertained by mrs. forrester at the early dinner which was politely called luncheon would have appeared quite out of proportion with her means by any one unacquainted with highland ways. there was trout from the loch, which cost nothing except hamish's time, a commodity not too valuable, and there was grouse during the season, which cost still less, seeing it came from all the sportsmen about. and the scones, of every variety known in scotland, which is a wide word, were home-made. so that hospitality reigned, and yet mrs. forrester, who was a skilled housekeeper, and mysie, to whom the family resources were as her own, and its credit still more precious than her own, managed somehow to make ends meet. on this particular afternoon the drawing-room with all its slim sofas and old-fashioned curiosities was full of campbells, for young colin of ellermore was at home for his holiday, and it was a matter of course that his sisters and tom, the youngest, who was at home reading (very little) for his coming examination, should bring him to the isle. colin was rather a finer gentleman than flourished by nature upon the loch. he had little company ways which made his people laugh; but when he had been long enough at home to forget these he was very nice they all said. he was in london, and though in trade, in "tea," which is rather aristocratic, he was in society too. "what kind of person is he, mrs. forrester? tell us what you think of him, oona," was what this youthful band said. "well, my dears," said mrs. forrester, "he is just a very nice young man. i don't know how i can describe him better, for young men now-a-days are very like one another. they all wear the same clothes--not but what," she added graciously, "i would know colin anywhere for a london gentleman with his things all so well made: but lord erradeen was just in a kind of tweed suit, and nothing remarkable. and his hands in his pockets, like all of ye. but he answered very nicely when i spoke to him, and said he was more used to walter methven than to any other name, and that to be neighbourlike would just be his pleasure. it is not possible to be more pleasant and well-spoken than the young man was." "oh, but i want a little more," cried marjorie campbell; "that tells nothing; is he fair, or is he dark? is he tall or is he little--is he--" "he couldn't be little," cried janet, indignantly, "or he would not be a hero: and i've made up my mind he's to be a hero. he'll have to do something grand, but i don't know what: and to spoil it all with making him small--" "heroes are all short," said tom, "and all the great generals. you don't want weedy, long-legged fellows like colin and the rest of them. but you know they all run to legs in our family, all but me." "all this is irrelevant," said colin with a smile which was somewhat superior, "and you prevent mrs. forrester from giving us the masterly characterisation which i know is on her lips." "you are just a flatterer," said that simple lady, shaking her finger at him; "there was no character coming from my lips. he is just a fine simple-hearted young man. it appears he never knew what he was heir to, and has no understanding even now, so far as i could learn, about the erradeens. he told me he had been a thoughtless lad, and, as well as i could judge just a handful to his poor mother; but that all that was over and gone." "you are going too far, mamma," said oona. "he said he had 'loafed.' loafing means no harm, does it, colin? it means mere idleness, and no more." "why should you think i am an authority on the subject?" said colin. "i never loaf: i go to the city every day. when i come back i have to keep up society, so far as i can, and hunt about for invitations, otherwise i should never be asked out. that is not loafing, it is hard work." "ask me, oona," said young tom; "i can tell you. it is the nicest thing in the world. it means just doing nothing you are wanted to do, taking your own way, watching nature, don't you know, and studying men, and that sort of thing, which all the literary people say is better than cramming. but only it does not pay in an exam." "oh, hold your tongue, tommy," cried his sister. "you will fail again, you know you will, and papa will be in despair. for you are not like colin, who is clever; you are good for nothing but soldiering, and next year you will be too old." "it's a shame," cried tom hotly, "to make a fellow's commission depend upon his spelling. what has spelling to do with it? but i'm going into the militia, and then i shall be all right." "and did erradeen," said colin to mrs. forrester, "let out any of the secrets of his prison-house?" "bless me, he looked just as cheerful as yourself or even as tom. there was nothing miserable about him," mrs. forrester replied. "he had been all the morning enjoying himself on the loch, and he came up and ate his lunch just very hearty, and as happy as possible, with oona and me. he was just very like my own ronald or rob: indeed i think there's something in his complexion and his way of holding himself that is very like rob; and took my opinion about the old castle, and what was the meaning of the light on the tower. indeed," added mrs. forrester with a laugh, "i don't know if it is anything in me that draws people to tell me their stories, but it is a very general thing, especially for young persons, to ask for my advice." "because you're so kind," said janet campbell, who was romantic and admired the old beauty. "because you're so clever," said marjorie, who had a turn for satire. oona, whose ear was very quick for any supposed or possible ridicule, such as her mother's little foibles occasionally laid her open to, turned quickly round from tom, leaving him speaking, and with a little heightened colour interposed. "we are opposite to the castle night and day," she said. "we cannot go out to the door or gather a flower without seeing it; and at night there it is in the moonlight. so naturally we are better acquainted with what happens than anybody else can be." "and do you really, really believe in the light?" said marjorie. ellermore lay quite at the other end of the great loch, among another range of hills, and was shut out from personal acquaintance with the phenomena of kinloch houran. colin gave a slight laugh, the faintest possible indication of incredulity, to repeat with an increase of force the doubt in his sister's tone. oona was not without a healthful little temper, which showed in the flash of her eye and the reddening of her cheek. but she answered very steadily, with much suppressed feeling in her tone-- "what do you call believing?" she said. "you believe in things you cannot see? then i don't believe in the kinloch houran light. because i see it, and have seen it a hundred times as clear as day." at this there was a little pause among the party of visitors, that pause of half-amused superiority and scepticism, with which all believers in the mysterious are acquainted. and then marjorie, who was the boldest, replied-- "papa says it is a sort of phosphorescence, which is quite explainable: and that where there is so much decaying matter, and so much damp, and so much----" "faith, perhaps," said colin, with that slight laugh; "but we are outsiders, and we have no right to interfere with the doctrines of the loch. oona, give us that credit that we are outside the circle, and you must not send us to the stake." "oh, my dears," said mrs. forrester, "and that is quite true. i have heard very clever men say that there was nothing made so much difference in what you believed as just the place you were born in, and that people would go the stake, as you say, on one side of the border for a thing they just laughed at on the other." this, which was a very profound deliverance for mrs. forrester, she carried off at the end with a pretty profession of her own disabilities. "i never trust to my own judgment," she said. "but oona is just very decided on the subject, and so are all our people on the isle, and i never put myself forward one way or another. are you sure you will not take a cup of tea before you go? a cup of tea is never out of place. it is true that the day is very short, and colin, after his town life, will be out of the way of rowing. you are just going across by the ferry, and then driving? well, that is perhaps the best way. and in that case there is plenty of time for a cup of tea. just ring the bell, or perhaps it will be safer, oona, if you will cry upon mysie and tell her to lose no time. just the tea, and a few of the cream scones, and a little cake. she need not spread the table as there is so little time." the interlude of the tea and the cream scones made it late before the visitors got away. their waggonette was visible waiting for them on the road below auchnasheen, and five minutes were enough to get them across, so that they dallied over this refreshment with little thought of the waning afternoon. then there was a little bustle to escort them down to the beach, to see them carefully wrapped up, to persuade marjorie that another "hap" would be desirable, and janet that her "cloud" should be twisted once more about her throat. the sunset was waning when at last they were fairly off, and the loch lay in a still, yellow radiance, against which every tree and twig, every rock and stone, stood out dark in full significance of outline. it was cold, and mrs. forrester shivered in her furred cloak. "the shore looks so near that you could touch it," she said; "there will be rain to-morrow, oona." "what does it matter about to-morrow?" cried the girl; "it's beautiful to-night. go in, mamma, to the fireside; but i will stay here and see them drive away." the mother consented to this arrangement, which was so natural; but a moment afterwards came back and called from the porch, where she stood sheltered from the keen and eager air. "oona! come in, my dear. that colin one, with his london ways, will think you are watching him." there was something sublime in the fling of oona's head, and the erection of her slim figure, as she rejected the possibility. "watching _him_!" she was too proud even to permit herself to resent it. "ah! but you never can tell what a silly lad may take into his head," said mrs. forrester; and, having thus cleared her conscience, she went in and took off her cloak, and shut the drawing-room door, and made herself very comfortable in her own cosy chair in the ruddy firelight. she laid her head back upon the soft cushions and looked round her with a quiet sense of content. everything was so comfortable, so pretty and homelike; and by-and-by she permitted herself, for ten minutes or so, to fall into a soft oblivion. "i just closed my eyes," was mrs. forrester's little euphemism to herself. meanwhile oona stood and looked at sky and sea and shore. the soft plash of the oars came through the great stillness, and, by-and-by, there was the sound of the boat run up upon the shingle, and the noise of the disembarkation, the voices swelling out in louder tones and laughter. as they waved their hands in a final good-night to the watcher on the isle before they drove away, the young people, as mrs. forrester had said, laughed and assured colin that it was not for them oona stood out in the evening chill. but, as a matter of fact, there was nothing so little in oona's mind. she was looking round her with that sort of exaltation which great loneliness and stillness and natural beauty so naturally give: the water gleaming all round, the sky losing its orange glow and melting into soft primrose tints the colour of the daffodil. "the holy time is quiet as a nun breathless with adoration." all the sensations that belong to such a moment are exquisite; a visionary elevation above the earth and all things earthly, a soft pensiveness, an elation, yet wistful longing of the soul. before her the old castle of kinloch houran lay gloomy and dark on the edge of the water. if she thought of anything it was of the young neighbour, to whom she felt so strangely near in wonder and sympathy. who might be with him at that moment in the ghostly quiet? what thoughts, what suggestions, were being placed before him? oona put her hands together, and breathed into the still air a wish of wondering and wistful pity which was almost a prayer. and then, rousing herself with a slight shiver and shake, she turned and went in, shutting out behind her the lingering glory of the water and sky. mysie was lighting the candles when she went in, and mrs. forrester had opened her eyes. two candles on the mantelpiece and two on the table were all the ladies allowed themselves, except on great occasions, when the argand lamp, which was the pride of the household, was lighted in honour of a visitor. the warmth of this genial interior was very welcome after the cold of the twilight, and oona brought her work to the table, and the book from which her mother was in the habit of reading aloud. mrs. forrester thought she improved her daughter's mind by these readings; but, to tell the truth, oona's young soul, with all the world and life yet before it, often fled far enough away while her mother's soft voice, with the pretty tricks of elocution, which were part of her old-fashioned training, went on. never was there a prettier indoor scene. in the midst of that great solitude of woods and water, the genial comfort of this feminine room, so warm, so softly lighted, so peaceful and serene, struck the imagination like a miracle. such a tranquil retirement would have been natural enough safely planted amid the safeguards and peaceful surroundings of a village: but in being here there was a touching incongruity. the little play of the mother's voice as she read with innocent artifice and the simple vanity which belonged to her, the pretty work, of no great use, with which the girl was busy, both heightened the sense of absolute trust with which they lived in the bosom of nature. a sudden storm, one could not but think, might have swept them away into the dark gleaming water that hemmed them round. they were not afraid: they were as safe as in a citadel. they were like the birds in their nests; warm and soft, though in the heart of loch houran. mrs. forrester was reading a historical novel, one of the kind which she thought so good for improving oona's mind; amusing, yet instructing her. but oona's mind, refusing to be improved, was giving only a mechanical attention. it was away making a little pilgrimage of wonder about the mystic house which was so near them, longing to know, and trying to divine, what was going on there. but when the afternoon closes in at four o'clock, and the candles are lighted shortly after, the night is long. it seemed endless on this occasion, because of the too early tea, which mrs. forrester had thought it would be "just a farce" to produce again at six o'clock, their usual hour; and from half-past four till nine, when the small and light repast known in the house under the pleasantly indefinite name of "the tray" made its appearance, is a long time. there had been two or three interruptions of a little talk, and the book had been laid down and resumed again, and oona's work had dropped two or three times upon her knee, when mysie, coming in, announced that it was just an uncommon fine night, though all the signs (including the glass, which, however, does not always count in the west of scotland) pointed to rain, and that hamish was going to take advantage of the moonlight to do an errand at the village above auchnasheen. would miss oona like to go? it was just awfu' bonny, and with plenty of haps she could take no harm, mysie said. to see how the girl sprang from her seat was a proof of the gentle tedium that had stolen upon her soul. "but, my dear, it will be cold, cold. i am afraid of you catching cold, oona," mrs. forrester cried. "oh, mother, no. i never catch cold; and besides, if i did, what would it matter? tell him i'm coming, mysie; tell him to wait for me. i'll put on my thick ulster, or the fur cloak, if you like." "certainly, the fur cloak, oona. i will not hear of it without that. but, my dear, just think, hamish will have to leave you in the boat while he goes to the village; and what would you do, oona, if there is any one on the road?" "do, mamma? look at them, to see if i knew them. and, if it was a stranger, just sit still and say nothing." "but, my dear! it might be somebody that would speak to you, and--annoy you, oona." "there is no person up the loch or down the loch that would dare to do that, mem," said mysie, composedly. "how can we tell? it might be some tourist or gangrel body." "annoy _me_!" said oona, as if indeed this suggestion was too far-fetched for possibility. "if anything so ridiculous happened i would just push out into the loch. don't you trouble, mother, about me." mrs. forrester got up to envelop her child's throat in fold after fold of the fleecy white "cloud." she shook her head a little, but she was resigned, for such little controversies occurred almost daily. the evening had changed when oona ran lightly down the bank to the boat in which hamish was waiting. everything about was flooded with the keen, clear white moonlight, which in its penetrating chilly fashion was almost more light than day. the loch was shining like silver, but with a blackness behind the shining, and all the shadows were like midnight profound in inky gloom. the boat seemed to hang suspended in the keen atmosphere rather than to float, and the silence was shrill, and seemed to cut into the soul. it was but a few minutes across the cold white glittering strait that lay between the isle and the mainland. hamish jumped out with an exaggerated noise upon the slippery shingle, and fastened the boat with a rattle of the ring to which it was attached, which woke echoes all around both from land and water, everything under the mingled influence of winter and night being so still. a chance spectator would have thought that the mother had very good cause for her alarm, and that to sit there in the rough boat absolutely alone, like the one living atom in a world all voiceless and asleep, was not a cheerful amusement for a girl. but oona had neither fear nor sense of strangeness in an experience which she had gone through so often. she called out lightly to hamish to make haste, and looked after him as he set out on the white road, the peculiarities of his thick-set figure coming out drolly in the curious dab of foreshortened shadow flung upon the road by his side. she laughed at this to herself, and the laugh ran all about with a wonderful cheerful thrill of the silence. how still it was! when her laugh ceased, there was nothing but the steps of hamish in all the world--and by and by even the steps ceased, and that stillness which could be felt settled down. there was not a breath astir, not enough to cause the faintest ripple on the beach. now and then a pebble which had been pushed out of its place by the man's foot toppled over, and made a sound as if something great had fallen. otherwise not a breath was stirring; the shadows of the fir-trees looked as if they were gummed upon the road. and oona held her breath; it seemed almost profane to disturb the intense and perfect quiet. she knew every hue of every rock, and the profile of every tree. and presently, which no doubt was partly because of this perfect acquaintance, and partly because of some mesmeric consciousness in the air, such as almost invariably betrays the presence of a human being, her eyes fixed upon one spot where the rock seemed higher than she had been used to. was it possible that somebody was there? she changed her place to look more closely; and so fearless was the girl that she had nearly jumped out of the boat to satisfy herself whether it was a man or a rock. but just when she was about making up her mind to do so, the figure moved, and came down towards the beach. oona's heart gave a jump; several well-authenticated stories which she had heard from her childhood came into her mind with a rush. she took the end of the rope softly in her hand so as to be able to detach it in a moment. to row back to the isle was easy enough. "is it you, miss forrester?" a voice said. oona let go the rope, and her heart beat more calmly. "i might with more reason cry out, is it you, lord erradeen? for if you are at the old castle you are a long way from home, and i am quite near." "i am at auchnasheen," he said. a great change had come over his tone; it was very grave; no longer the airy voice of youth which had jested and laughed on the isle. he came down and stood with his hand on the bow of the boat. he looked very pale, very serious, but that might be only the blackness of the shadows and the whiteness of the light. "did you ever see so spiritual a night?" said oona. "there might be anything abroad; not fairies, who belong to summer, but serious things." "do you believe then in--ghosts?" he said. "ghosts is an injurious phrase. why should we call the poor people so who are only--dead?" said oona. "but that is a false way of speaking too, isn't it? for it is not because they are dead, but living, that they come back." "i am no judge," he said, with a little shiver. "i never have thought on the subject. i suppose superstition lingers longer up among the mountains." "superstition!" said oona, with a laugh. "what ugly words you use!" once more the laugh seemed to ripple about, and break the solemnity of the night. but young lord erradeen was as solemn as the night, and his countenance was not touched even by a responsive smile. his gravity produced upon the girl's mind that feeling of visionary panic and distrust which had not been roused by the external circumstances. she felt herself grow solemn too, but struggled against it. "hamish has gone up with some mysterious communication to the game-keeper," she said; "and in these long nights one is glad of a little change. i came out with him to keep myself from going to sleep." which was not perhaps exactly true: but there had arisen a little embarrassment in her mind, and she wanted something to say. "and i came out--" he said; then paused. "the night is not so ghostly as the day," he added, hurriedly; "nor dead people so alarming as the living." "you mean that you disapprove of our superstitions, as you call them," said oona. "most people laugh and believe a little; but i know some are angry and think it wrong." "i----angry! that was not what i meant. i meant----it is a strange question which is living and which is----to be sure, you are right, miss forrester. what is dead cannot come in contact with us, only what is living. it is a mystery altogether." "you are not a sceptic then?" said oona. "i am glad of that." "i am not----anything. i don't know how to form an opinion. how lovely it is, to be sure," he burst out all at once; "especially to have some one to talk to. that is the great charm." "if that is all," said oona, trying to speak cheerfully, "you will soon have dozens of people to talk to, for everybody in the county--and that is a wide word--is coming to call. they will arrive in shoals as soon as they know." "i think i shall go--in a day or two," he said. at this moment the step of hamish, heard far off through the great stillness, interrupted the conversation. it had been as if they two were alone in this silent world; and the far-off step brought in a third and disturbed them. they were silent, listening as it came nearer and nearer, the sound growing with every repetition. when hamish appeared in the broad white band of road coming from between the shadows of the trees the young man dropped his hand from the bow of the boat. he had not spoken again, nor did oona feel herself disposed to speak. hamish quickened his pace when he saw another figure on the beach. "ye'll no' have been crying upon me, miss oona," he said, with a suspicious look at the stranger. "oh no, hamish!" cried oona, cheerfully. "i have not been wearying at all, for this is lord erradeen that has been so kind as to come and keep me company." "oh, it'll be my lord erradeen?" said hamish, with a curious look into walter's face. then there was a repetition of the noises with which the still loch rang, the rattle of the iron ring, the grating of the bow on the shingle as she was pushed off. hamish left no time for leave-taking. there were a few yards of clear water between the boat and the beach when oona waved her hand to the still figure left behind. "my mother will like to see you to-morrow," she cried, with an impulse of sympathy. "good night." he took his hat off, and waved his hand in reply, but said nothing, and stood motionless till they lost sight of him round the corner of the isle. then hamish, who had been exerting himself more than usual, paused a little. "miss oona," he said, "yon will maybe be the young lord, but maybe no. i would not be speaking to the first that comes upon the loch side----" "oh, if you are beginning to preach propriety----" the girl cried. "it'll not be propriety, it will just be that they're a family that is not canny. who will tell you if it's one or if it's the other? did ye never hear the tale of the leddy that fell off the castle wall?" "but this is not the castle," cried oona, "and i know him very well--and i'm sorry for him, hamish. he looks so changed." "oh, what would you do being sorry for him? he has nothing ado with us--nothing ado with us," hamish said. and how strange it was to come in again from that brilliant whiteness and silence--the ghostly loch, the visionary night--into the ruddy room full of firelight and warmth, all shut in, sheltered, full of companionship. "come away, come away to the fire; you must be nearly frozen, oona, and i fear ye have caught your death of cold," her mother said. oona remembered with a pang the solitary figure on the water's edge, and wondered if he were still standing there forlorn. a whole chapter of life seemed to have interposed between her going and coming, though she had been but half an hour away. chapter xiv. two days after this night scene there was a gathering such as was of weekly occurrence in the manse of loch houran parish. the houses were far apart, and those of the gentry who were old-fashioned enough to remain for the second service, were in the habit of spending the short interval between in the minister's house, where an abundant meal, called by his housekeeper a cold collation, was spread in the dining-room for whosoever chose to partake. as it was the fashion in the country to dine early on sunday, this repast was but sparingly partaken of, and most of the company, after the glass of wine or milk, the sandwich or biscuit, which was all they cared to take, would sit round the fire in the minister's library, or examine his books, or, what was still more prized, talk to him of their own or their neighbours' affairs. the minister of loch houran was one of those celibates who are always powerful ecclesiastically, though the modern mind is so strongly opposed to any artificial manufacture of them such as that which the church of rome in her wisdom has thought expedient. we all know the arguments in favour of a married clergy, but those on the other side of the question it is the fashion to ignore. he who has kept this natural distinction by fair means, and without compulsion, has however an unforced advantage of his own which the most protestant and the most matrimonial of polemics will scarcely deny. he is more safe to confide in, being one, not two. he is more detached and individual; it is more natural that all the world about him should have a closer claim upon the man who has no nearer claims to rival those of his spiritual children. mr. cameron was one of this natural priesthood. if he had come to his present calm by reason of passion and disappointment in his past, such as we obstinately and romantically hope to have founded the tranquillity of subdued, sunny, and sober age, nobody could tell. an old minister may perhaps be let off more easily in this respect than an old monk; but he was the friend and consoler of everybody; the depositary of all the secrets of the parish; the one adviser of whose disinterestedness and secrecy every perplexed individual was sure. he did all that man could do to be absolutely impartial and divide himself, as he divided his provisions, among his guests as their needs required. but flesh is weak, and mr. cameron could not disown one soft place in his heart for oona forrester, of which that young person was quite aware. oona was his pupil and his favourite, and he was, if not her spiritual director, which is a position officially unknown to his church, at least her confidant in all her little difficulties, which comes to much the same thing: and this notwithstanding the fact that mrs. forrester attended the parish church under protest, and prided herself on belonging to the scottish episcopal community, the church of the gentry, though debarred by providence from her privileges. mrs. forrester at this moment, with her feet on the fender, was employed in bewailing this sad circumstance with another landed lady in the same position; but oona was standing by the old ministers side, with her hand laid lightly within his arm, which was a pretty way she had when she was with her oldest friend. it did not interfere with this attitude, that he was exchanging various remarks with other people, and scarcely talking to oona at all. he looked down upon her from time to time with a sort of proud tenderness, as her grandfather might have done. it pleased the old man to feel the girl's slim small fingers upon his arm. and as there were no secrets discussed in this weekly assembly her presence interrupted nothing. she added her word from time to time, or the still readier comment of smiles and varying looks that changed like the highland sky outside, and were never for two minutes the same. it was not, however, till mr. shaw, the factor, came in, that the easy superficial interest of all the parish talk quickened into something more eager and warm in her sympathetic countenance. shaw's ruddy face was full of care; this was indeed its usual expression, an expression all the more marked from the blunt and open simplicity of its natural mood to which care seemed alien. the puckers about his hazel grey eyes, the lines on his forehead which exposure to the air had reddened rather than browned, were more than usually evident. those honest eyes seemed to be remonstrating with the world and fate. they had an appearance half-comic to the spectator, but by no means comic to their own consciousness of grieved interrogation as if asking every one on whom they turned, "why did you do it?" "why did you let it be done?" it was this look which he fixed upon the minister, who indeed was most innocent of all share in the cause of his trouble. "i told you," he said, "the other day, about the good intentions of our young lord. i left various things with him to be settled that would bide no delay--things that had been waiting for the late lord erradeen from day to day. and all this putting off has been bad, bad. there's those poor crofters that will have to be put out of their bits of places to-morrow. i can hold off no longer without his lordship's warrant. and not a word from him--not a word!" cried the good man, with that appealing look, to which the natural reply was, it is not my fault. but the minister knew better, and returned a look of sympathy, shaking his white head. "what has become of the young man? they tell me he has left the castle." "he is not far off--he is at auchnasheen; but he is just like all the rest, full of goodwill one day, and just inaccessible the next--just inaccessible!" repeated the factor. "and what am i to do? i am just wild to have advice from somebody. what am i to do?" "can you not get at him to speak to him?" the minister asked. "i have written to know if he will see me. i have said i was waiting an answer, but there's no answer comes. they say he's on the hill all day, though the keepers know nothing about his movements, and he does not even carry a gun. what am i to do? he sees nobody; two or three have called, but cannot get at him. he's always out--he's never there. that old symington goes about wringing his hands. what says he? he says, 'this is the worst of a'; this is the worst of a'. he's just got it on him----'" "what does that mean?" "can i tell what that means? according to the old wives it is the weird of the methvens; but you don't believe such rubbish, nor do i. it has, maybe, something to do with the drainage, or the water, or the sanitary arrangements, one way or the other!" cried the factor with a harsh and angry laugh. then there was a momentary pause, and the hum of the other people's talk came in, filling up with easier tones of conversation the somewhat strained feeling of this: "he's a good shot and a fine oar, and just a deevil for spunk and courage: and yet because he's a little vague in his speaking!" "but, i say, we must put up with what we can get, and though it's a trial the surplice is not just salvation." "and it turned out to be measles, and not fever at all, and nothing to speak of; so we just cheated the doctors." these were the broken scraps that came in to fill up the pause. "i saw lord erradeen the other night," said oona, whose light grasp on the old minister's arm had been tightening and slackening all through this dialogue, in the interest she felt. both of the gentlemen turned to look at her inquiringly, and the girl blushed--not for any reason, as she explained to herself indignantly afterwards, but because it was a foolish way she had; but somehow the idea suggested to all their minds was not without an effect upon the events of her after-life. "and what did he say to you? and what is he intending? and why does he shut himself up and let all the business hang suspended like yon fellow machomet's coffin?" cried the factor, with a guttural in the prophet's name which was due to the energy of his feelings. he turned upon oona those remonstrating eyes of his, as if he had at last come to the final cause of all the confusion, and meant to demand of her, without any quibbling, an answer to the question, why did you do it? on the spot. "indeed, he said very little to me, mr. shaw. he looked like a ghost, and he said--he was going away in a day or two." sudden reflection in the midst of what she was saying made it apparent to oona that it was unnecessary to give all the details of the interview. mr. cameron, for his part, laid his large, soft old hand tenderly upon hers which was on his arm, and said, in the voice which always softened when he addressed her-- "and where would that be, my bonnie oona, that you met with lord erradeen?" "it was on the beach below auchnasheen," said oona, with an almost indignant frankness, holding her head high, but feeling, to her anger and distress, the blush burn upon her cheek. "hamish had some errand on shore, and i went with him in the boat. i was waiting for him, when some one came down from the road and spoke to me. i was half-frightened, for i did not know any one was there. it was lord erradeen." "and what?--and why?--and--" the factor was too much disturbed to form his questions reasonably, even putting aside the evident fact that oona had no answer to give him. but at this moment the little cracked bell began to sound, which was the warning that the hour of afternoon service approached. the ladies rose from their seats round the fire, the little knots of men broke up. "oona, my dear, will ye come and tie my bonnet? i never was clever at making a bow," said mrs. forrester; and the minister left his guests to make his preparations for church. mr. shaw felt himself left in the lurch. he kept hovering about oona with a quick decision in his own mind, which was totally unjustified by any foundation; he went summarily through a whole romance, and came to its conclusion in the most matter-of-fact and expeditious way. "if that comes to pass now!" he said to himself. "_she's_ no me'ven; there's no weird on her; he can give her the management of the estates, and all will go well. she has a head upon her shoulders, though she is nothing but a bit girlie--and there will be me to make everything plain!" such was the brief epitome of the situation that passed in the factor's mind. he was very anxious to get speech of oona on the way to church, and it is to be feared that mr. cameron's excellent afternoon discourse (which many people said was always his best, though as it was listened to but drowsily the fact may be doubted) made little impression upon shaw, though he was a serious man, who could say his say upon religious subjects, and was an elder, and had sat in the assembly in his day. he had his opportunity when the service was over, when the boats were being pushed off from the beach, and the carriages got under way, for those who had far to go. mrs. forrester had a great many last words to say before she put on her furred mantle and her white cloud, and took her place in the boat; and mysie, who stood ready with the mantle to place it on her mistress's shoulders, had also her own little talks to carry on at that genial moment when all the parish--or all the loch, if you like the expression better--stood about exchanging friendly greetings and news from outlying places. while all the world was thus engaged, oona fell at last into the hands of the factor, and became his prey. "miss oona," he said, "if ye will accord me a moment, i would like well, well, to know what's your opinion about lord erradeen." "but i have no opinion!" cried oona, who had been prepared for the attack. she could not keep herself from blushing (so ridiculous! but i will do it, she said to herself, as if that "i" was an independent person over whom she had no control), but otherwise she was on her guard. "how could i have any opinion when i have only seen lord erradeen twice--thrice?" she added, with a heightening of the blush, as she remembered the adventure of the coach. "twice--thrice; but that gives you facilities--and ladies are so quick-witted. i've seen him but once," said the factor. "i was much taken with him, that is the truth, and was so rash as to think our troubles were over; but here has everything fallen to confusion in the old way. miss oona, do you use your influence if you should see his lordship again." "but, mr. shaw, there is no likelihood that i shall see him again--and i have no influence." "oh no, you'll not tell me that," said the factor, shaking his head, with a troubled smile. "them that are like you, young and bonnie, have always influence, if they like to use it. and as for seeing him again, he will never leave the place, miss oona, without going at least to bid you good-bye." "lord erradeen may come to take leave of my mother," said oona, with dignity. "it is possible, though he did not say so; but even if he does, what can i do? i know nothing about his affairs, and i have no right to say anything to him--no right, more than any one else who has met him three times." "which is just no person--except yourself, so far as i can learn," the factor said. "after all, when you come to think of it, it is only once i have seen him," said oona, "for the night on the loch was by chance, and the day on the coach i did not know him; so that after all i have only, so to speak, seen him once, and how could i venture to speak to him about business? oh no, that is out of the question. yes, mamma, i am quite ready. mr. shaw wishes, if lord erradeen comes to bid us good-bye that we should tell him----" "yes?" said mrs. forrester, briskly, coming forward, while mysie arranged around her her heavy cloak. "i am sure i shall be very glad to give lord erradeen any message. he is a very nice young man, so far as i can judge; people think him very like my ronald, mr. shaw. perhaps it has not struck you? for likenesses are just one of the things that no two people see. but we are very good friends, him and me: he is just a nice simple gentlemanly young man--oh, very gentlemanly. he would never go away without saying good-bye. and i am sure i shall be delighted to give him any message. that will do, mysie, that will do; do not suffocate me with that cloak. dear me, you have scarcely left me a corner to breathe out of. but, mr. shaw, certainly--any message----" "i am much obliged to you; but i will no doubt see lord erradeen myself, and i'll not trouble a lady about business," said the factor. he cast a look at oona, in which with more reason than usual his eyes said, how could you do it? and the girl was a little compunctious. she laughed, but she felt guilty, as she took her mother's arm to lead her to the boat. mrs. forrester had still a dozen things to say, and waved her hands to the departing groups on every side, while shaw, half-angry, stood grimly watching the embarkation. "there are the kilhouran campbells driving away, and i have not had a word with them: and there is old jess, who always expects to be taken notice of: and the ellermore folk, that i had no time to ask about tom's examination: and mr. cameron himself, that i never got a chance of telling how well i liked the sermon. dear me, oona, you are always in such a hurry! and take care now, take care; one would think you took me for your own age. but i am not wanting to be hoisted up either, as if i were too old to know how to step into a boat. good-bye, mr. shaw, good-bye," mrs. forrester added cheerfully, waving her hand as she got herself safely established in the bow, and hamish, not half so picturesque as usual in his sunday clothes, pushed off the boat. "good-bye, and i'll not forget your message." she even kissed her hand, if not to him, to the parish in general, in the friendliness of her heart. mr. shaw had very nearly shaken his clenched fist in reply. old fool he called her in his heart, and even launched an expletive (silently) at oona, "the heartless monkey," who had betrayed him to her mother. he went back to the manse with mr. cameron, when all the little talks and consultations were over and everybody gone, and once more poured out the story of his perplexities. "if i do not hear from him, i'll have to proceed to extremities to-morrow, and it is like to break my heart," he said. "for the poor folk have got into their heads that i will stand their friend whatever happens, and they are just keeping their minds easy." "but, man, they should pay their rents," said mr. cameron, who, when all was said that could be said in his favour, was not a loch houran man. "rents! where would you have them get the siller? their bit harvest has failed, and the cows are dry for want of fodder. if they have a penny laid by they must take it to live upon. they have enough ado to live, without thinking of rents." "but in that case, shaw," said the minister, gravely--"you must not blame me for saying so, it's what all the wise men say--would they not do better to emigrate, and make a new start in a new country, where there's plenty of room?" "oh, i know that argument very well," said shaw, with a snort of indignation. "i have it all at my fingers' ends. i've preached it many a day. but what does it mean, when all's done? it means just sheep or it means deer, and a pickle roofless houses standing here and there, and not a soul in the glen. there was a time even when i had just an enthusiasm for it--and i've sent away as many as most. but after all, they're harmless, god-fearing folk; the land is the better of them, and none the worse. there's john paterson has had great losses with his sheep, and there's yon english loon that had the shooting, and shot every feather on the place; both the one and the other will be far more out of his lordship's pocket than my poor bit crofters. i laid all that before him; and he showed a manful spirit, that i will always say. no, minister, it was not to argue the case from its foundations that i came to you. i know very well what the economists say. i think they're not more than half right, though they're so cocksure. but if you'll tell me what i should do----" this, however, was what mr. cameron was not capable of. he said, after an interval, "i will go to-morrow and try if i can see him, if you think it would not be ill taken." "to-morrow is the last day," said the factor gloomily: and after a little while he followed the example of all the others, and sent for his dog-cart and drove himself away. but a more anxious man did not traverse any road in great britain on that wintry afternoon: and bitter thoughts were in his heart of the capricious family, whose interests were in his hands, and to whom he was almost too faithful a servant. "oh, the weird of the me'vens!" said mr. shaw to himself, "if they were not so taken up with themselves and took more thought for other folk we would hear little of any weirds. i have no time for weirds. i have just my work to do and i do it. the lord preserve us from idleness, and luxury, and occupation with ourselves!" here the good man in his righteous wrath and trouble and disappointment was unjust, as many a good man has been before. when hamish had pushed off from the beach, and the little party were afloat, oona repented her of that movement of mingled offence and _espièglerie_ which had made her transfer the factor's appeal from herself to her mother: and it was only then that mrs. forrester recollected how imperfect the communication was. "bless me," mrs. forrester said, "i forgot to ask after all what it was he wanted me to say. that was a daft like thing, to charge me with a message and never to tell me what it was. and how can i tell my lord erradeen! i suppose you could not put back, hamish, to inquire?--but there's nobody left yonder at the landing that i can see, so it would be little use. how could you let me do such a silly thing, oona, my dear?" "most likely, mamma, we shall not see lord erradeen and so no harm will be done." "not see lord erradeen! do ye think then, oona, that he has no manners, or that he's ignorant how to behave? i wonder what has made ye take an ill-will at such a nice young man. there was nothing in him to justify it, that i could see. and to think i should have a message for him and not know what it is! how am i to give him the message when it was never given to me? i just never heard of such a dilemma. something perhaps of importance, and me charged to give it, and not to know what it was!" "maybe, mem," said mysie from the other end of the boat, with that serene certainty that her mistress's affairs were her own, which distinguishes an old scotch family retainer, "maybe miss oona will ken." "oh, yes, i suppose i know," said oona, reluctantly. "it is something about the cotters at the truach-glas, who will be turned out to-morrow unless lord erradeen interferes; but why should we be charged with that? we are very unlikely to see lord erradeen, and to-morrow is the day." this piece of information caused a great excitement in the little party. the cotters to be turned out! "but no, no, that was just to frighten you. he will never do it," said mrs. forrester, putting on a smile to reassure herself after a great flutter and outcry. "no, no; it must just have been to give us all a fright. john shaw is a very decent man. i knew his father perfectly well, who was the minister at rannoch, and a very good preacher. no, no, oona, my dear--he could never do it; and yon fine lad that is so like my ronald (though you will not see it) would never do it. you need not look so pale. it is just his way of joking with you. many a man thinks it pleasant to tell a story like that to a lady just to hear what she says." "eh, but it's ill joking with poor folks' lives," cried mysie, craning over hamish's shoulder to hear every word. "it's none joking," said hamish, gruffly, between the sweep of his oars. "it's none joking, say ye? na, it's grim earnest, or i'm sair mistaken," said the woman. "eh, miss oona, but i would gang round the loch on my bare feet, sabbath though it be, rather than no give a message like yon." "how can we do it?" cried oona; "how are we to see lord erradeen? i am sure he will not come to call; and even if he did come to-morrow in the afternoon it would be too late." "my dear," said mrs. forrester, "we will keep a look out in the morning. hamish will just be fishing at the point, and hail him as soon as he sees him. for it was in the morning he came before." "oh, mem!" cried mysie, "but would you wait for that? it's ill to lippen to a young man's fancy. he might be late of getting up (they're mostly lazy in the morning), or he might be writing his letters, or he might be seeing to his guns, or there's just a hundred things he might be doing. what would ye say if, may-be, miss oona was to write one of her bonnie little notties on that awfu' bonnie paper, with her name upon't, and tell him ye wanted to see him at ten o'clock or eleven o'clock, or whatever time you please?" "or we might go over to-night in the boat," said hamish, laconically. mrs. forrester was used to take much counsel. she turned from one to the other with uncertain looks. "but, oona," she said, "you are saying nothing! and you are generally the foremost. if it is not just nonsense and a joke of john shaw's----" "i think," said oona, "that mr. shaw will surely find some other way; but it was no joke, mother. who would joke on such a subject? he said if lord erradeen called we were to use our influence." "that would i," said mrs. forrester, "use my influence. i would just tell him, you must not do it. bless me, a young man new in the country to take a step like that and put every person against him! no, no, it is not possible: but a lady," she added, bridling a little with her smile of innocent vanity, "a lady may say anything--she may say things that another person cannot. i would just tell him, you must not do it! and that would be all that would be needed. but bless me, oona, how are we to use our influence unless we can see him?--and i cannot see how we are to get at him." "oh, mem!" cried mysie, impeding hamish's oars as she stretched over his shoulder, "just one of miss oona's little notties!" but this was a step that required much reflection, and at which the anxious mother shook her head. chapter xv. it had rained all night, and the morning was wet and cold; the water dull like lead, the sky a mass of clouds; all the bare branches of the trees dropping limp in the humid air. mrs. forrester, on further thought, had not permitted oona to write even the smallest of her "bit notties" to lord erradeen; for, though she lived on an isle in loch houran, this lady flattered herself that she knew the world. she indited a little epistle of her own, in which she begged him to come and see her upon what she might call a matter of business--a thing that concerned his own affairs. this was carried by hamish, but it received no reply. lord erradeen was out. where could he be out on a sabbath day at night, in a place where there were no dinner parties, nor any club, nor the temptations of a town, but just a lonely country place? nor was there any answer in the morning, which was more wonderful still. it was ill-bred, mrs. forrester thought, and she was more than ever glad that her daughter had not been involved in the matter. but hamish had information which was not communicated to the drawing-room, and over which mysie and he laid their heads together in the kitchen. the poor young gentleman was off his head altogether, the servants said. the door was just left open, and he came in, nobody knew when. he could not bear that anybody should say a word to him. there had been thoughts among them of sending for his mother, and old symington showed to hamish a telegram prepared for mr. milnathort, acquainting him with the state of affairs, which he had not yet ventured to send--"for he will come to himself soon or syne," the old man said; "it's just the weird of the me'vens that is upon him." symington was indifferent to the fate of the poor crofters. he said "the factor will ken what to do." he was not a loch houran man. on the monday, however, the feeling of all the little population on the isle ran very high. the wet morning, the leaden loch, the low-lying clouds oppressed the mental atmosphere, and the thought of the poor people turned out of their houses in the rain, increased the misery of the situation in a way scarcely to be expected in the west, where it is supposed to rain for ever. at eleven o'clock oona appeared in her thickest ulster and her strongest boots. "i am going up to see old jenny," she said, with a little air of determination. "my dear, you will be just wet through; and are you sure your boots are thick enough? you will come back to me with a heavy cold, and then what shall we all do? but take some tea and sugar in your basket, oona," said her mother. she went with the girl to the door in spite of these half-objections, which did not mean anything. "and a bottle of my ginger cordial might not be amiss--they all like it, poor bodies! and, oona, see, my dear, here are two pound notes. it's all i have of change, and it's more than i can afford; but if it comes to the worst----but surely, surely john shaw, that is a very decent man, and comes of a good family, will have found the means to do something!" the kind lady stood at the door indifferent to the wet which every breath of air shook from the glistening branches. it had ceased to rain, and in the west there was a pale clearness, which made the leaden loch more chilly still, yet was a sign of amelioration. mrs. forrester wrung her hands, and cast one look at the glistening woods of auchnasheen, and another at the dark mass, on the edge of the water, of kinloch houran. she did not know whether to be angry with lord erradeen for being so ill-bred, or to compassionate him for the eclipse which he had sustained. but, after all, he was a very secondary object in her mind in comparison with oona, whose course she watched in the boat, drawing a long line across the leaden surface of the water. she was just like the dove out of the ark, mrs. forrester thought. the little hamlet of truach-glas was at some distance from the loch. oona walked briskly along the coach road for two miles or thereabouts, then turned up to the left on a road which narrowed as it ascended till it became little more than a cart track, with a footway at the side. in the broader valley below a substantial farmhouse, with a few outlying cottages, was the only point of habitation, and on either side of the road a few cultivated fields, chiefly of turnips and potatoes, were all that broke the stretches of pasture, extending to the left as high as grass would grow, up the dark slopes of the hills. but the smaller glen on the right had a more varied and lively appearance, and was broken into small fields bearing signs of cultivation tolerably high up, some of them still yellow with the stubble of the late harvest, the poor little crop of oats or barley which never hoped to ripen before october, if then. a mountain stream, which was scarcely a thread of water in the summer, now leaped fiercely enough, turbid and swollen, from rock to rock in its rapid descent. the houses clustered on a little tableland at some height above the road, where a few gnarled hawthorns, rowans, and birches were growing. they were poor enough to have disgusted any social reformer, or political economist; grey growths of rough stones, which might have come together by chance, so little shape was there in the bulging walls. only a few of them had even the rough chimney at one end wattled with ropes of straw, which showed an advanced civilisation. the others had nothing but the hole in the roof, which is the first and homeliest expedient of primitive ventilation. it might have been reasonably asked what charm these hovels could have to any one to make them worth struggling for. but reason is not lord of all. there was no appearance of excitement about the place when oona, walking quickly, and a little out of breath, reached the foremost houses. the men and boys were out about their work, up the hill, or down the water, in the occupations of the day; and indeed there were but few men, at any time, about the place. three out of the half-dozen houses were tenanted by "widow women," one with boys who cultivated her little holding, one who kept going with the assistance of a hired lad, while the third lived upon her cow, which the neighbours helped her to take care of. the chief house of the community, and the only one which bore something of a comfortable aspect, was that of duncan fraser, who had the largest allotment of land, and who, though he had fallen back so far with his rent as to put himself in the power of the law, was one of the class which as peasant proprietors are thought to be the strength of france. if the land had been his own he would have found existence very possible under the hard and stern conditions which were natural to him, and probably would have brought up for the church, robbie his eldest boy, who had got all the parish school could give him, and was still dreaming, as he cut the peats or hoed the potatoes, of glasgow college and the world. of the other two houses, one was occupied by an old pair whose children were out in the world, and who managed, by the contributions of distant sons and daughters, to pay their rent. the last was in the possession of a "weirdless" wight, who loved whisky better than home or holding, and whose wife and children toiled through as best they could the labour of their few fields. there were about twenty children in the six houses, all ruddy, weatherbeaten, flaxen-haired, the girls tied up about their shoulders in little tartan shawls, and very bare about their legs; the boys in every kind of quaint garments, little bags of trousers, cobbled out of bigger garments by workwomen more frugal than artistic. the rent had failed, for how was money to be had on these levels? but the porridge had never altogether failed. a few little ones were playing "about the doors" in a happy superiority to all prejudices on the subject of mud and puddles. one woman was washing her clothes at her open door. old jenny, whom oona had come to see, was out upon her doorstep, gazing down the glen to watch the footsteps of her precious "coo," which a lass of ten with streaming hair was leading out to get a mouthful of wet grass. jenny's mind was always in a flutter lest something should happen to the cow. "ye would pass her by upon the road, miss oona," the old woman said, "and how would ye think she was looking? to get meat to her, it's just a' my thought; but i canna think she will be none the worse for a bit mouthfu' on the hill." "but, jenny, have you nothing to think of but the cow? it will not be true then, that the time of grace is over, and that the sheriff's officers are coming to turn you all out?" "the sheriff's officers!" cried jenny. she took the edge of her apron in her hand and drew the hem slowly through her fingers, which was a sign of perplexity: but yet she was quite composed. "na, na, miss oona, they'll never turn us out. what wad i be thinking about but the coo? she's my breadwinner and a' my family. hoots no, they'll never turn us out." "but mr. shaw was in great trouble yesterday. he said this was the last day----" "i never fash'd my thoom about it," said jenny. "the last day! it's maybe the last, or the first, i would never be taking no notice. for the factor, he's our great friend, and he would not be letting them do it. no, no; it would but be his jokes," the old woman said. was it his jokes? this was the second time the idea had been presented to her; but oona remembered the factor's serious face. "you all seem very quiet here," she said; "not as if any trouble was coming. but has there not been trouble, jenny, about your rent or something?" "muckle trouble," said jenny; "they were to have taken the coo. what would have become of me if they had ta'en the coo? duncan, they have ta'en his, puir lad. to see it go down the brae was enough to break your heart. but john shaw he's a kind man; he would not be letting them meddle with us. he just said 'it's a lone woman; my lord can do without it better than the old wife can do without it,' he said. he's a kind man, and so my bonnie beast was saved. i was wae for duncan; but still, miss oona, things is no desperate so lang as you keep safe your ain coo." "that is true," said oona with a little laugh. there must, she thought, be some mistake, or else mr. shaw had found lord erradeen, and without the help of any influence had moved him to pity the cotters. under this consolation she got out her tea and sugar, and other trifles which had been put into the basket. it was a basket that was well known in the neighbourhood, and had conveyed many a little dainty in time of need. jenny was grateful for the little packets of tea and sugar which she took more or less as a right, but looked with a curious eye at the "ginger cordial" for which mrs. forrester was famous. it was not a wicked thing like whisky, no, no: but it warmed ye on a cold day. jenny would not have objected to a drop. while she eyed it there became audible far off voices down the glen, and sounds as of several people approaching, sounds very unusual in this remote corner of the world. jenny forgot the ginger cordial and oona ran to the door to see what it was, and the woman who had been washing paused in her work, and old nancy robertson, she whose rent was paid, and who had no need to fear any sheriff's officers, came out to her door. even the children stopped in their game. the voices were still far off, down upon the road, upon which there was a group of men, scarcely distinguishable at this distance. simon fraser's wife, she who had been washing, called out that it was duncan talking to the factor; but who were those other men? a sense of approaching trouble came upon the women. nelly fraser wiped the soapsuds from her arms, and wrung her hands still fresh from her tub. she was always prepared for evil, as is natural to a woman with a "weirdless" husband. old jenny, for her part, thought at once of the coo. she flew, as well as her old legs would carry her, to the nearest knoll, and shrieked to the fair-haired little lass who was slowly following that cherished animal to bring brockie back. "bring her back, ye silly thing. will ye no be seeing--but i mauna say that," she added in an undertone. "bring back the coo! bring her back! jessie, my lamb, bring back the coo." what with old jenny shrieking, and the voices in the distance, and something magnetic and charged with disorder in the air, people began to appear from all the houses. one of the widow's sons, a red and hairy lad, came running in, in his heavy boots, from the field where he was working. duncan fraser's daughter set down a basket of peat which she was carrying in, and called her mother to the door. "there's my father with the factor and twa-three strange men," said the girl, "and oh, what will they be wanting here?" thus the women and children looked on with growing terror, helpless before the approach of fate, as they might have done two centuries before, when the invaders were rapine and murder, instead of calm authority and law. when oona made her appearance half an hour before everything had been unquestioning tranquillity and peace. now, without a word said, all was alarm. the poor people did not know what was going to happen, but they felt that something was going to happen. they had been living on a volcano, easily, quietly, without thinking much of it. but now the fire was about to blaze forth. through the minds of those that were mothers there ran a calculation as swift as light. "what will we do with the bairns? what will we do with granny? and the bits of plenishing?" they said to each other. the younger ones were half pleased with the excitement, not knowing what it was. meantime duncan and mr. shaw came together up the road, the poor man arguing with great animation and earnestness, the factor listening with a troubled countenance and sometimes shaking his head. behind them followed the servants of the law, those uncomfortable officials to whom the odium of their occupation clings, though it is no fault of theirs. "no, mr. shaw, we canna pay. you know that as well as i do; but oh, sir, give us a little time. would you turn the weans out on the hill and the auld folk? what would i care if it was just to me? but think upon the wake creatures--my auld mother that is eighty, and the bairns. if my lord will not let us off there's some of the other gentry that are kind and will lend us a helping hand. oh, give us time! my lord that is young and so well off, he canna surely understand. what is it to him? and to us it's life and death." "duncan, my man," said the factor, "you are just breaking my heart. i know all that as well as you; but what can i do? it is the last day, and we have to act or we just make fools of ourselves. my lord might have stopped it, but he has not seen fit. for god's sake say no more for i cannot do it. ye just break my heart!" by this time the women were within hearing, and stood listening with wistful faces, turning from one to another. when he paused they struck in together, moving towards him eagerly. "oh, mr. shaw, you've always been our friend," cried duncan's wife; "you canna mean that you've come to turn us out to the hill, with all the little ones and granny?" "oh, sir!" cried the other, "have pity upon me that has nae prop nor help but just a weirdless man." "me, i have nae man ava, but just thae hands to travail for my bairns," said a third. and then there came a shriller tone of indignation. "the young lord, he'll just get a curse--he'll get no blessing." the factor made a deprecating gesture with his hands "i can do nothing, i can do nothing," he said. "take your bairns down the glen to my housekeeper marg'ret; take them down to the town, the rest of ye--they shall not want. whatever i can do, i'll do. but for god's sake do not stop us with your wailin', for it has to be done; it is no fault of mine." this appeal touched one of the sufferers at least with a movement of fierce irony. duncan uttered a short, sharp laugh, which rung strangely into the air, so full of passion. "haud your tongues, women," he cried, "and no vex mr. shaw; you're hurting his feelings," with a tone impossible to describe, in which wrath and misery and keen indignation and ridicule contended for the mastery. he was the only man in the desolate group. he drew a few steps apart and folded his arms upon his breast, retiring in that pride of despair which a cotter ruined may experience no less than a king vanquished, from further struggle or complaint. the women neither understood nor noted the finer meaning in his words. they had but one thought, the misery before them. they crowded round the factor, all speaking in one breath, grasping his arm to call his attention--almost mobbing him with distracted appeals, with the wild natural eloquence of their waving hands and straining eyes. meanwhile there were other elements, some comic enough, in the curious circle round. old nancy robertson had not left the doorstep where she stood keenly watching in the composure and superiority of one whom nobody could touch, who had paid her rent, and was above the world. it was scarcely possible not to be a little complacent in the superiority of her circumstances, or to refrain from criticising the unseemly excitement of the others. she had her spectacles on her nose, and her head projected, and she thought they were all like play-actors with their gesticulations and cries. "i wouldna be skreighin' like that--no me," she said. round about the fringe of children gaped and gazed, some stolid with amaze, some pale in a vague sympathetic misery, none of them quite without a certain enjoyment of this extraordinary episode and stimulation of excitement. and old jenny, awakened to no alarm about her cottage, still stood upon her knoll, with her whole soul intent upon the fortunes of brockie, who had met the sheriff's officers in full career. the attempts of her little guardian to turn the cow back from her whiff of pasture had only succeeded in calling the special attention of these invaders. they stopped short, and one of them taking a piece of rope from his pocket secured it round the neck of the frightened animal, who stood something like a woman in a similar case, looking to left and to right, not knowing in her confusion which way to bolt, though the intention was evident in her terrified eyes. at this jenny gave a shriek of mingled rage and terror, which in its superior force and concentrated passion rang through all the other sounds, silencing for the moment even the wailing of the women--and flung herself into the midst of the struggle. she was a dry, little, withered old woman, nimble and light, and ran like a hare or rabbit down the rough road without a pause or stumble. "my coo!" cried jenny, "ye sallna tak' her; ye sall tak' my heart's blood first. my coo! miss oona, miss oona, will you just be standing by, like nothing at all, and letting them tak' my coo? g'way, ye robbers," jenny shrieked, flinging one arm about the neck of the alarmed brute, while she pushed away its captor with the other. her arm was still vigorous, though she was old. the man stumbled and lost his hold of the rope; the cow, liberated, tossed head and tail into the air and flung off to the hill-side like a deer. the shock threw jenny down and stunned her. this made a little diversion in the dismal scene above. and now it became evident that whatever was to be done must be done, expression being exhausted on the part of the victims, who stood about in a blank of overwrought feeling awaiting the next move. the factor made a sign with his hand, and sat down upon a ledge of rock opposite the cottages, his shaggy eyebrows curved over his eyes, his hat drawn down upon his brows. a sort of silent shock ran through the beholders when the men entered the first cottage: and when they came out again carrying a piece of furniture, there was a cry, half savage in its wild impotence. unfortunately the first thing that came to their hands was a large wooden cradle, in which lay a baby tucked up under the big patchwork quilt, which bulged out on every side. as it was set down upon its large rockers on the uneven ground the little sleeper gave a startled wail; and then it was that that cry, sharp and keen, dividing the silence like a knife, burst from the breasts of the watching people. it was nelly fraser's baby, who had the "weirdless" man. she stood with her bare arms wrapped in her apron beside her abandoned washing-tub, and gazed as if incapable of movement, with a face like ashes, at the destruction of her home. but while the mother stood stupefied, a little thing of three or four, which had been clinging to her skirts in keen baby wonder and attention, when she saw the cradle carried forth into the open air immediately took the place of guardian. such an incident had never happened in all little jeanie's experience before. she trotted forth, abandoning all alarm, to the road in which it was set down, and, turning a little smiling face of perfect content to the world, began to rock it softly with little coos of soothing and rills of infant laughter. the sombre background round, with all its human misery, made a dismal foil to this image of innocent satisfaction. the factor jumped up and turned his back upon the scene altogether, biting his nails and lowering his brows in a fury of wretchedness. and at last the poor women began to stir and take whispered counsel with each other. there was no longer room for either hope or entreaty; the only thing to be thought of now was what to do. the next cottage was that of nancy robertson, who still held her position on her doorstep, watching the proceedings with a keen but somewhat complacent curiosity. they gave her an intense sense of self-importance and superiority, though she was not without feeling. when, however, the men, who had warmed to their work, and knew no distinction between one and another, approached her, a sudden panic and fury seized the old woman. she defied them shrilly, flying at the throat of the foremost with her old hands. the wretchedness of the poor women whose children were being thrust out shelterless did not reach the wild height of passion of her whose lawful property was threatened. "villains!" she shrieked, "will ye break into my hoose? what right have ye in my hoose? i'll brack your banes afore you put a fit into my hoose." "whist, whist, wife," said one of the men; "let go now, or i'll have to hurt ye. you canna stop us. you'll just do harm to yourself." "john shaw, john shaw," shrieked nancy, "do ye see what they're doing? and me that has paid my rent, no like those weirdless fuils. do ye hear me speak? i've paid my rent to the last farden. i've discharged a' my debts, as i wuss ithers would discharge their debts to me." her voice calmed down as the factor turned and made an impatient sign to the men. "ye see," said nancy, making a little address to her community, "what it is to have right on your side. they canna meddle with me. my man's auld, and i have everything to do for mysel', but they canna lay a hand on me. "oh, hold your tongue, woman," cried duncan fraser. "if ye canna help us, ye can let us be." "and wha says that i canna help ye? i am just saying--i pay my debts as i wuss that ithers should pay their debts to me: and that's scripter," said nancy; but she added, "i never said i would shut my door to a neebor: ye can bring in granny here; i'm no just a heart of stane like that young lord." the women had not waited to witness nancy's difficulties. most of them had gone into their houses, to take a shawl from a cupboard, a book from the "drawers-head." one or two appeared with the family bible under their arm. "the lord kens where we are to go, but we must go somewhere," they said. there was a little group about oona and her two pound notes. the moment of excitement was over, and they had now nothing to do but to meet their fate. the factor paced back and forward on the path, going out of his way to avoid here and there a pile of poor furniture. and the work of devastation went on rapidly: it is so easy, alas, to dismantle a cottage with its but and ben. duncan fraser did not move till two or three had been emptied. when he went in to bring out his mother, there was a renewed sensation among the worn-out people who were scarcely capable of any further excitement. granny was granny to all the glen. she was the only survivor of her generation. they had all known her from their earliest days. they stood worn and sorrow-stricken, huddled together in a little crowd, waiting before they took any further steps, till granny should come. but it was not granny who came first. some one, a stranger even to the children, whose attention was so easily attracted by any novelty, appeared suddenly round a corner of the hill. he paused at the unexpected sight of the little cluster of habitations; for the country was unknown to him; and for a moment appeared as if he would have turned back. but the human excitement about this scene caught him in spite of himself. he gazed at it for a moment trying to divine what was happening, then came on slowly with hesitating steps. he had been out all the morning, as he had been for some days before. his being had sustained a great moral shock, and for the moment all his holds on life seemed gone. this was the first thing that had moved him even to the faintest curiosity. he came forward slowly, observed by no one. the factor was still standing with his back to the woeful scene, gloomily contemplating the distant country, while oona moved about in the midst of the women, joining in their consultations, and doing her best to rouse poor nelly, who sat by her baby's cradle like a creature dazed and capable of no further thought. there was, therefore, no one to recognise lord erradeen as he came slowly into the midst of this tragedy, not knowing what it was. the officials had recovered their spirits as they got on with their work. natural pity and sympathetic feeling had yielded to the carelessness of habit and common occupation. they had begun to make rough jokes with each other, to fling the cotters' possessions carelessly out of the windows, to give each other catches with a "hi! tak' this," flinging the things about. lord erradeen had crossed the little bridge, and was in the midst of the action of the painful drama, when they brought out from duncan's house his old mother's chair. it was cushioned with pillows, one of which tumbled out into the mud and was roughly caught up by the rough fellow who carried it, and flung at his companion's head, with a laugh and jest. it was he who first caught sight of the stranger, a new figure among the disconsolate crowd. he gave a whistle to his comrade to announce a novelty, and rattled down hastily out of his hands the heavy chair. walter was wholly roused by the strangeness of this pantomime. it brought back something to his mind, though he could scarcely tell what. he stepped in front of the man and asked, "what does this mean?" in a hasty and somewhat imperious tone; but his eyes answered his question almost before he had asked it. nelly fraser with her pile of furniture, her helpless group of children, her stupefied air of misery, was full in the foreground, and the ground was strewed with other piles. half of the houses in the hamlet were already gutted. one poor woman was lifting her bedding out of the wet, putting it up upon chairs; another stood regarding hers helplessly, as if without energy to attempt even so small a salvage. "what is the meaning of all this?" the young man cried imperiously again. his voice woke something in the deep air of despondency and misery which had not been there before. it caught the ear of oona, who pushed the women aside in sudden excitement. it roused--was it a faint thrill of hope in the general despair? last of all it reached the factor, who, standing gloomily apart, had closed himself up in angry wretchedness against any appeal. he did not hear this, but somehow felt it in the air, and turned round, not knowing what the new thing was. when he saw lord erradeen, shaw was seized as with a sudden frenzy. he turned round upon him sharply, with an air which was almost threatening. "what does it mean?" he said. "it means your will and pleasure, lord erradeen, not mine. god is my witness, no will of mine. you brute!" cried the factor, suddenly, "what are you doing? stand out of the way, and let the honest woman pass. get out of her way, i tell you, or i'll send ye head foremost down the glen!" this sudden outcry, which was a relief to the factor's feelings, was addressed not to walter, but to the man who, coming out again with a new armful, came rudely in the way of the old granny, to whom all the glen looked up, and who was coming out with a look of bewilderment on her aged face, holding by her son's arm. granny comprehended vaguely, if at all, what was going on. she gave a momentary glance of suspicion at the fellow who pushed against her, then looked out with a faint smile at the two gentlemen standing in front of the door. her startled mind recurred to its old instincts with but a faint perception of anything new. "sirs," she said, in her feeble old voice, "i am distressed i canna ask ye in; but i'm feckless mysel, being a great age, and there's some flitting going on, and my good-daughter she is out of the way." "do you hear that, my lord?" cried shaw; "the old wife is making her excuses for not asking you into a house you are turning her out of at the age of eighty-three. oh, i am not minding if i give ye offence! i have had enough of it. find another factor, lord erradeen. i would rather gather stones upon the fields than do again what i have done this day." walter looked about like a man awakened from a dream. he said, almost with awe-- "is this supposed to be done by me? i know nothing of it, nor the reason. what is the reason? i disown it altogether as any act of mine." "oh, my lord," cried shaw, who was in a state of wild excitement, "there is the best of reasons. rent--your lordship understands that--a little more money lest your coffers should not be full enough. and as for these poor bodies, they have so much to put up with, a little more does not matter. they have not a roof to their heads, but that's nothing to your lordship. you can cover the hills with sheep, and they can--die--if they like," cried the factor, avenging himself for all he had suffered. he turned away with a gesture of despair and fury. "i have done enough; i wash my hands of it," he cried. walter cast around him a bewildered look. to his own consciousness he was a miserable and helpless man; but all the poor people about gazed at him, wistful, deprecating, as at a sort of unknown, unfriendly god, who had their lives in his hands. the officers perhaps thought it a good moment to show their zeal in the eyes of the young lord. they made a plunge into the house once more, and appeared again, one carrying duncan's bed, a great, slippery, unwieldy sack of chaff, another charged with the old, tall, eight-day clock, which he jerked along as if it had been a man hopping from one foot to another. "we'll soon be done, my lord," the first said in an encouraging tone, "and then a' the commotion will just die away." lord erradeen had been lost in a miserable dream. he woke up now at this keen touch of reality, and found himself in a position so abhorrent and antagonistic to all his former instincts and traditions, that his very being seemed to stand still in the horror of the moment. then a sudden passionate energy filled all his veins. the voice in which he ordered the men back rang through the glen. he had flung himself upon one of them in half-frantic rage, before he was aware what he was doing, knocking down the astounded official, who got up rubbing his elbow, and declaring it was no fault of his; while walter glared at him, not knowing what he did. but after this encounter with flesh and blood lord erradeen recovered his reason. he turned round quickly, and with his own hands carried back granny's chair. the very weight of it, the touch of something to do, brought life into his veins. he took the old woman from her son's arm, and led her in reverently, supporting her upon his own: then going out again without a word, addressed himself to the manual work of restoration. from the moment of his first movement, the whole scene changed in the twinkling of an eye. the despairing apathy of the people gave way to a tumult of haste and activity. duncan fraser was the first to move. "my lord!" he cried; "if you are my lord," his stern composure yielding to tremulous excitement, "if it's your good will and pleasure to let us bide, that's all we want. take no trouble for us; take no thought for that." walter gave him a look, almost without intelligence. he had not a word to say. he was not sufficiently master of himself to express the sorrow and anger and humiliation in his awakened soul; but he could carry back the poor people's things, which was a language of nature not to be misunderstood. he went on taking no heed of the eager assistance offered on all sides. "i'll do it, my lord. oh, dinna you trouble. it's ower much kindness. ye'll fyle your fingers; ye'll wear out your strength. we'll do it; we'll do it," the people cried. the cottagers' doors flew open as by magic; they worked all together, the women, the children, and duncan fraser, and lord erradeen. even oona joined, carrying the little children back to their homes, picking up here a bird in a cage, there a little stunted geranium or musk in a pot. in half an hour it seemed, or less, the whole was done, and when the clouds that had been lowering on the hills and darkening the atmosphere broke and began to pour down torrents of rain upon the glen, the little community was housed and comfortable once more. while this excitement lasted walter was once more the healthful and vigorous young man who had travelled with oona on the coach, and laughed with her on the isle. but when the storm was over, and they walked together towards the loch, she became aware of the difference in him. he was very serious, pale, almost haggard now that the excitement was over. his smiling lips smiled no longer, there was in his eyes, once so light-hearted and careless, a sort of hunted, anxious look. "no," he said, in answer to her questions, "i have not been ill; i have had--family matters to occupy me: and of this i knew nothing. letters? i had none, i received nothing. i have been occupied, too much perhaps, with--family affairs." upon this no comment could be made, but his changed looks made so great a claim upon her sympathy that oona looked at him with eyes that were almost tender in their pity. he turned round suddenly and met her glance. "you know," he said, with a slight tremble in his voice, "that there are some things--they say in every family--a little hard to bear. but i have been too much absorbed--i was taken by surprise. it shall happen no more." he held his head high, and looked round him as if to let some one else see the assurance he was giving her. "i promise you," he added, in a tone that rang like a defiance, "it shall happen no more!" then he added hurriedly with a slight swerve aside, and trembling in his voice, "do you think i might come with you? would mrs. forrester have me at the isle?" end of vol. i. * * * * * [transcriber's note: hyphen variations left as printed.] [the end of _the wizard's son, volume _ by margaret oliphant] supernatural religion: an inquiry into the reality of divine revelation. by walter richard cassels in three volumes: vol. ii. complete edition. carefully revised. london: longmans, greenland co., . pg editor's note: this file has been provided with an image of the original scan for each page which is linked to the page number in the html file. nearly every page in the text has many greek passages which have been indicated where they occur by [���] as have many complex tables; these passages may be viewed in the page images. some of the pages have only a few lines of text and then the rest of the page is taken up with complex footnotes in english, greek and hebrew. the reader may click on the page numbers in the html file to see the entire page with the footnotes. �dw an inquiry into the reality of divine revelation part ii. chapter v. the clementines--the epistle to diognetus we must now as briefly as possible examine the evidence furnished by the apocryphal religious romance generally known by the name of "the clementines," and assuming, falsely of course,( ) to be the composition of the roman clement. the clementines are composed of three principal works, the homilies, recognitions, and a so-called epitome. the homilies, again, are prefaced by a pretended epistle addressed by the apostle peter to james, and another from clement. these homilies were only known in an imperfect form till , when dressel( ) published a complete greek text. of the recognitions we only possess a latin translation by rufinus (a.d. ). { } although there is much difference of opinion regarding the claims to priority of the homilies and recognitions, many critics assigning that place to the homilies,( ) whilst others assert the earlier origin of the recognitions,( ) all are agreed that the one is merely a version of the other, the former being embodied almost word for word in the latter, whilst the epitome is a blending of the other two, probably intended to purge them from heretical doctrine. these works, however, which are generally admitted to have emanated from the ebionitic party of the early church,( ) are supposed to be based upon older petrine writings, such as the "preaching of peter" [------], and the "travels of peter" [------].( ) { } it is not necessary for our purpose to go into any analysis of the character of the clementines. it will suffice to say that they almost entirely consist of discussions between the apostle peter and simon the magician regarding the identity of the true mosaic and christian religions. peter follows the magician from city to city for the purpose of exposing and refuting him, the one, in fact, representing apostolic doctrine and the other heresy, and in the course of these discussions occur the very numerous quotations of sayings of jesus and of christian history which we have to examine. the clementine recognitions, as we have already remarked, are only known to us through the latin translation of rufinus; and from a comparison of the evangelical quotations occurring in that work with the same in the homilies, it is evident that rufinus has assimilated them in the course of translation to the parallel passages of our gospels. it is admitted, therefore, that no argument regarding the source of the quotations can rightly be based upon the recognitions, and that work may, consequently, be entirely set aside,( ) and the clementine homilies alone need occupy our attention. we need scarcely remark that, unless the date at which these homilies were composed can be ascertained, their value as testimony for the existence of our synoptic gospels is seriously affected. the difficulty of arriving at a correct conclusion regarding this point, great under almost any circumstances, is of course increased by the fact that the work is altogether apocryphal, and most certainly not held by any one to have { } been written by the person whose name it bears. there is in fact nothing but internal evidence by which to fix the date, and that internal evidence is of a character which admits of very wide extension down the course of time, although a sharp limit is set beyond which it cannot mount upwards. of external evidence there is almost none, and what little exists does not warrant an early date. origen, it is true, mentions [------],( ) which, it is conjectured, may either be the same work as the [------], or recognitions, translated by rufinus, or related to it, and epiphanius and others refer to [------];( ) but our clementine homilies are not mentioned by any writer before pseudo-athanasius.( ) the work, therefore, can at the best afford no substantial testimony to the antiquity and apostolic origin of our gospels. hilgenfeld, following in the steps of baur, arrives at the conclusion that the homilies are directed against the gnosticism of marcion (and also, as we shall hereafter see, against the apostle paul), and he, therefore, necessarily assigns to them a date subsequent to a.d. . as reuss, however, inquires: upon this ground, why should a still later date not be named, since even tertullian wrote vehemently against the same gnosis.( ) there can be little doubt that the author was a representative of ebionitic gnosticism, which had once been the purest form of primitive christianity, but later, through its own development, though still more through the rapid growth around it of paulinian doctrine, had { } assumed a position closely verging upon heresy. it is not necessary for us, however, to enter upon any exhaustive discussion of the date at which the clementines were written; it is sufficient to show that there is no certain ground upon which a decision can be based, and that even an approximate conjecture can scarcely be reasonably advanced. critics variously date the composition of the original recognitions from about the middle of the second century to the end of the third, though the majority are agreed in placing them at least in the latter century.( ) they assign to the homilies an origin at different dates within a period commencing about the middle of the second century, and extending to a century later. in the homilies there are very numerous quotations { } of sayings of jesus and of gospel history, which are generally placed in the mouth of peter, or introduced with such formulae as: "the teacher said," "jesus said," "he said," "the prophet said," but in no case does the author name the source from which these sayings and quotations are derived. that he does, however, quote from a written source, and not from tradition, is clear from the use of such expressions as "in another place [------]( ) he has said," which refer not to other localities or circumstances, but another part of a written history.( ) there are in the clementine homilies upwards of a hundred quotations of sayings of jesus or references to his history, too many by far for us to examine in detail here; but, notwithstanding the number of these passages, so systematically do they vary, more or less, from the parallels in our canonical gospels, that, as in the case of justin, apologists are obliged to have recourse to the elastic explanation, already worn so threadbare, of "free quotation from memory" and "blending of passages" to account for the remarkable phenomena presented. it must, however, be evident that the necessity for such an apology at all shows the insufficiency of the evidence furnished by these quotations. de wette says: "the quotations of evangelical works and histories in the pseudo-clementine writings, from their nature free and inaccurate, permit only an uncertain conclusion to be { } drawn as to their written source."( ) critics have maintained very different and conflicting views regarding that source. apologists, of course, assert that the quotations in the homilies are taken from our gospels only.( ) others ascribe them to our gospels, with a supplementary apocryphal work: the gospel according to the hebrews, or the gospel according to peter.( ) some, whilst admitting a subsidiary use of some of our gospels, assert that the author of the homilies employs, in preference, the gospel according to peter;( ) whilst others, recognizing also the similarity of the phenomena presented by these quotations with those of justin's, conclude that the author does not quote our gospels at all, but makes use of the gospel according to peter, or the gospel according to the hebrews.( ) evidence permitting of such divergent conclusions manifestly cannot be of a decided character. we may affirm, however, that few of those who are { } willing to admit the use of our synoptics by the author of the homilies along with other sources, make that concession on the strength of the absolute isolated evidence of the homilies themselves, but they are generally moved by antecedent views on the point. in an inquiry like that which we have undertaken, however, such easy and indifferent judgment would obviously be out of place, and the point we have to determine is not whether an author may have been acquainted with our gospels, but whether he furnishes testimony that he actually was in possession of our present gospels and regarded them as authoritative. we have already mentioned that the author of the clementine homilies never names the source from which his quotations are derived. of these very numerous quotations we must again distinctly state that only two or three, of a very brief and fragmentary character, literally agree with our synoptics, whilst all the rest differ more or less widely from the parallel passages in those gospels. some of these quotations are repeated more than once with the same persistent and characteristic variations, and in several cases, as we have already seen, they agree more or less closely with quotations of justin from the memoirs of the apostles. others, again, have no parallels at all in our gospels, and even apologists are consequently compelled to admit the collateral use of an apocryphal gospel. as in the case of justin, therefore, the singular phenomenon is presented of a vast number of quotations of which only one or two brief phrases, too fragmentary to avail as evidence, perfectly agree with our gospels; whilst of the rest, which all vary more or less, some merely resemble combined passages of two gospels, others merely contain the sense, some { } present variations likewise found in other writers or in various parts of the homilies are repeatedly quoted with the same variations, and others are not found in our gospels at all. such phenomena cannot be fairly accounted for by any mere theory of imperfect memory or negligence. the systematic variation from our synoptics, variation proved by repetition not to be accidental, coupled with quotations which have no parallels at all in our gospels, more naturally point to the use of a different gospel. in no case can the homilies be accepted as furnishing evidence even of the existence of our gospels. as it is impossible here to examine in detail all of the quotations in the clementine homilies, we must content ourselves with this distinct statement of their character, and merely illustrate briefly the different classes of quotations, exhausting, however, those which literally agree with passages in the gospels. the most determined of recent apologists do not afford us an opportunity of testing the passages upon which they base their assertion of the use of our synoptics, for they simply assume that the author used them without producing instances.( ) the first quotation agreeing with a passage in our synoptics occurs in hom. iii. : "and he cried, saying: come unto me all ye that are weary," which agrees with the opening words of matt. xi. , but the phrase does teschendorf only devotes a dozen linos, with a note, to the clemontinos, and only in connection with our fourth gospel, which shall hero-after have our attention. wann wurden u. s. w., p. . in the same way canon westcott passes them over in a short paragraph, merely asserting the allusions to our gospels to be "generally admitted," and only directly referring to one supposed quotation from mark which we shall presently examine, and one which he affirms to be from the fourth gospel. on the canon, p. f. [in the th edition he has enlarged his remarks, p. ff.] { } not continue, and is followed by the explanation: "that is, who are seeking the truth and not finding it."( ) it is evident, that so short and fragmentary a phrase cannot prove anything.( ) the next passage occurs in hom. xviii. : "for isaiah said: i will open my mouth in parables, and i will utter things that have been kept secret from the foundation of the world."( ) now this passage, with a slightly different order of words, is found in matt. xiii. . after giving a series of parables, the author of the gospel says (v. ), "all these things spake jesus unto the multitudes in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them; (v. ) that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet (isaiah), saying: i will open my mouth in parables, &c." there are two peculiarities which must be pointed out in this passage. it is not found in isaiah, but in psalm lxxviii. ,( ) and it presents a variation from the version of the lxx. both the variation and the erroneous reference to isaiah, therefore, occur also in the homily. the first part of the sentence agrees with, but the latter part is quite different from, the greek of the lxx., which reads: "i will utter problems from the beginning," [------].( ) the psalm from which the quotation is really taken is, by its superscription, ascribed to asaph, who, in the septuagint version of ii. chronicles xxix. , is called a { } prophet.( ) it was, therefore, early asserted that the original reading of matthew was "asaph," instead of "isaiah." porphyry, in the third century, twitted christians with this erroneous ascription by their inspired evangelist to isaiah of a passage from a psalm, and reduced the fathers to great straits. eusebius, in his commentary on this verse of the psalm, attributes the insertion of the words, "by the prophet isaiah," to unintelligent copyists, and asserts that in accurate mss. the name is not added to the word prophet. jerome likewise ascribes the insertion of the name isaiah for that of asaph, which was originally written, to an ignorant scribe,( ) and in the commentary on the psalms, generally, though probably falsely, ascribed to him, the remark is made that many copies of the gospel to that day had the name "isaiah," for which porphyry had reproached christians,( ) and the writer of the same commentary actually allows himself to make the assertion that asaph was found in all the old codices, but ignorant men had removed it.( ) the fact is, that the reading "asaph" for "isaiah" is not found in any extant ms., and, although "isaiah" has disappeared from all but a few obscure codices, it cannot be denied that the name anciently stood in the text.( ) in the sinaitic codex, which is probably the earliest ms. extant, and which is assigned to the fourth century, "the prophet _isaiah_" stands in the text by the first hand, but is erased by the second (b). { } the quotation in the homily, however, is clearly not from our gospel. it is introduced by the words "for isaiah says:" and the context is so different from that in matthew, that it seems most improbable that the author of the homily could have had the passage suggested to him by the gospel. it occurs in a discussion between simon the magician and peter. the former undertakes to prove that the maker of the world is not the highest god, and amongst other arguments he advances the passage: "no man knew the father, &c.," to show that the father had remained concealed from the patriarchs, &c., until revealed by the son, and in reply to peter he retorts, that if the supposition that the patriarchs were not deemed worthy to know the father was unjust, the christian teacher was himself to blame, who said: "i thank thee, lord of heaven and earth, that what was concealed from the wise thou hast revealed to suckling babes." peter argues that in the statement of jesus: "no man knew the father, &c.," he cannot be considered to indicate another god and father from him who made the world, and he continues: "for the concealed things of which he spoke may be those of the creator himself; for isaiah says: 'i will open my mouth, &c.' do you admit, therefore, that the prophet was not ignorant of the things concealed,"( ) and so on. there is absolutely nothing in this argument to indicate that the passage was suggested by the gospel, but, on the contrary, it is used in a totally different way, and is quoted not as an evangelical text, but as a saying from the old testament, and treated in connection with the prophet himself, and not with its supposed fulfilment in jesus. it may be remarked, that in the corresponding part of { } the recognitions, whether that work be of older or more recent date, the passage does not occur at all. now, although it is impossible to say how and where this erroneous reference to a passage of the old testament first occurred, there is no reason for affirming that it originated in our first synoptic, and as little for asserting that its occurrence in the clementine homilies, with so different a context and object, involves the conclusion that their author derived it from the gospel, and not from the old testament or some other source. on the contrary, the peculiar argument based upon it in the homilies suggests a different origin, and it is very probable that the passage, with its erroneous reference, was derived by both from another and common source. another passage is a phrase from the "lord's prayer," which occurs in hom. xix. : "but also in the prayer which he commended to us, we have it said: deliver us from the evil one" [------]. it need scarcely be said, however, that few gospels can have been composed without including this prayer, and the occurrence of this short phrase demonstrates nothing more than the mere fact, that the author of the homilies was acquainted with one of the most universally known lessons of jesus, or made use of a gospel which contained it. there would have been cause for wonder had he been ignorant of it. the only other passage which agrees literally with our gospels is also a mere fragment from the parable of the talents, and when the other references to the same parable are added, it is evident that the quotation is not from our gospels. in hom. iii. , the address to the good servant is introduced: "well done, good and faithful servant" [------], which agrees { } with the words in matt. xxv. . the allusion to the parable of the talents in the context is perfectly clear, and the passage occurs in an address of the apostle peter to overcome the modest scruples of zaccheus, the former publican, who has been selected by peter as his successor in the church of caesarea when he is about to leave in pursuit of simon the magician. anticipating the possibility of his hesitating to accept the office, peter, in an earlier part of his address, however, makes fuller allusions to the same parable of the talents, which we must contrast with the parallel in the first synoptic. "but if any of those present, having the ability to instruct the ignorance of men, shrink back from it, considering only his own ease, then let him expect to hear:" [--table--] { } the homily does not end here, however, but continues in words not found in our gospels at all: "and reasonably: 'for,' he says, 'it is thine, o man, to put my words as silver with exchangers, and to prove them as money/"( ) this passage is very analogous to another saying of jesus, frequently quoted from an apocryphal gospel, by the author of the homilies, to which we shall hereafter more particularly refer, but here merely point out: "be ye approved money-changers" [------].( ) the variations from the parallel passages in the first and third gospels, the peculiar application of the parable to the _words_ of jesus, and the addition of a saying not found in our gospels, warrant us in denying that the quotations we are considering can be appropriated by our canonical gospels, and, on the contrary, give good reason for the conclusion, that the author derived his knowledge of the parable from another source. there is no other quotation in the clementine homilies which literally agrees with our gospels, and it is difficult, without incurring the charge of partial selection, to illustrate the systematic variation in such very numerous passages as occur in these writings. it would be tedious and unnecessary to repeat the test applied to the quotations of justin, and give in detail the passages from the sermon on the mount which are found in the homilies. some of these will come before us presently, but with regard to the whole, which are not less than fifty, we may broadly and positively state that they all more or less differ from our gospels. to take the { } severest test, however, we shall compare those further passages which are specially adduced as most closely following our gospels, and neglect the vast majority which most widely differ from them. in addition to the passages which we have already examined, credner( ) points out the following. the first is from hom. xix. .( ) "if satan cast out satan he is divided against himself: how then can his kingdom stand?" in the first part of this sentence, the homily reads, [------] for the [------] of the first gospel, and the last phrase in each is as follows:-- [------] the third gospel differs from the first as the homily does from both. the next passage is from hom. xix. .s "for thus, said our father, who was without deceit: out of abundance of heart mouth speaketh." the greek compared with that of matt. xii. . [------] the form of the homily is much more proverbial. the next passage occurs in hom. iii. : "every plant which the heavenly father did not plant shall be rooted up." this agrees with the parallel in matt. xv. , with the important exception, that although in the mouth of jesus, "_the_ heavenly father" is substituted for the "_my_ heavenly father" of the gospel. the last passage pointed out by credner, is from hom. viii. : "but also 'many,' he said, 'called, but few chosen;'" which may be compared with matt. xx. , &c. [------] { } we have already fully discussed this passage of the gospel in connection with the "epistle of barnabas,"[ ] and need not say more here. the variations in these passages, it may be argued, are not very important. certainly, if they were the exceptional variations amongst a mass of quotations perfectly agreeing with parallels in our gospels, it might be exaggeration to base upon such divergences a conclusion that they were derived from a different source. when it is considered, however, that the very reverse is the case, and that these are passages selected for their closer agreement out of a multitude of others either more decidedly differing from our gospels or not found in them at all, the case entirely changes, and variations being the rule instead of the exception, these, however slight, become evidence of the use of a gospel different from ours. as an illustration of the importance of slight variations in connection with the question as to the source from which quotations are derived, the following may at random be pointed out. the passage "see thou say nothing to any man, but go thy way, show thyself to the priest" [------] occurring in a work like the homilies would, supposing our second gospel no longer extant, be referred to matt viii. , with which it entirely agrees with the exception of its containing the one extra word [------]. it is however actually taken from mark i. , and not from the first gospel. then again, supposing that our first gospel had shared the fate of so many others of the [------] of luke, and in some early work the following passage were found: "a prophet is not without honour except in his own country { } and in his own house" [------]t this passage would undoubtedly be claimed by apologists as a quotation from mark vi. , and as proving the existence and use of that gospel. the omission of the words "and among his own kin" [------] would at first be explained as mere abbreviation, or defect of memory, but on the discovery that part or all of these words are omitted from some mss., that for instance the phrase is erased from the oldest manuscript known, the cod. sinaiticus, the derivation from the second gospel would be considered as established. the author notwithstanding might never have seen that gospel, for the quotation is taken from matt. xiii. .( ) we have already quoted the opinion of de wette as to the inconclusive nature of the deductions to be drawn from the quotations in the pseudo-clementine writings regarding their source, but in pursuance of the plan we have adopted we shall now examine the passages which he cites as most nearly agreeing with our gospels.( ) the first of these occurs in hom. iii. : "the scribes and the pharisees sit upon moses' seat; all things therefore, whatsoever they speak to you, hear them," which is compared with matt, xxiii. , : "the scribes and the pharisees sit upon moses' seat; all things therefore, whatsoever they say to you, do and observe." we subjoin the greek of the latter half of these passages. { } that the variation in the homily is deliberate and derived from the gospel used by the author is clear from the continuation: "hear _them_ [------], he said, as entrusted with the key of the kingdom, which is knowledge, which alone is able to open the gate of life, through which alone is the entrance to eternal life. but verily, he says: they possess the key indeed, but to those who wish to enter in they do not grant it."( ) the [------] is here emphatically repeated, and the further quotation and reference to the denunciation of the scribes and pharisees continues to differ distinctly from the account both in our first and third gospels. the passage in matt, xxiii. , reads: "but woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye go not in yourselves neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in."( ) the parallel in luke xi. is not closer. there the passage regarding moses' seat is altogether wanting, and in ver. , where the greatest similarity exists, the "lawyers" instead of the "scribes and pharisees" are addressed. the verse reads: "woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered."( ) the first gospel has not the direct image of the key at all: the scribes and pharisees "shut the kingdom of { } heaven;" the third has "the key of knowledge" [------] taken away by the lawyers, and not by the scribes and pharisees, whilst the gospel of the homilies has the key of the kingdom [------], and explains that this key is knowledge [------]. it is apparent that the first gospel uses an expression more direct than the others, whilst the third gospel explains it, but the gospel of the homilies has in all probability the simpler original words: the "key of the kingdom," which both of the others have altered for the purpose of more immediate clearness. in any case it is certain that the passage does not agree with our gospel.( ) the next quotation referred to by de wette is in hom. iii. : "and also that he said: 'i am not come to destroy the law.... the heaven and the earth will pass away, but one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass from the law.'" this is compared with matt. v. , :( ) "think not that i am come to destroy the law or the prophets: i am not come to destroy but to fulfil, (v. ) for verily i say unto you: till heaven and earth pass away one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." the greek of both passages reads as follows:-- [------] { } that the omissions and variations in this passage are not accidental is proved by the fact that the same quotation occurs again literally in the epistle from peter( ) which is prefixed to the homilies in which the [------] is repeated, and the sentence closes at the same point the author in that place adds: "this he said that all might be fulfilled" [------]. hilgenfeld considers this epistle of much more early date than the homilies, and that this agreement bespeaks a particular text.( ) the quotation does not agree with our gospels, and must be assigned to another source. the next passage pointed out by de wette is the erroneous quotation from isaiah which we have already examined.( ) that which follows is found in hom. viii. : "for on this account our jesus himself said to one who frequently called him lord, yet did nothing which he commanded: why dost thou say to me lord, lord, and doest not the things which i say?" this is compared with luke vi. :( ) "but why call ye me lord, lord, and do not the things which i say?" [------] this passage differs from our gospels in having the second person singular instead of the plural, and in substituting [------] for [------] in the first phrase. the homily, moreover, in accordance with the use of the second person singular, distinctly states that the saying was addressed to a person who frequently called jesus "lord," whereas in the gospels it forms part of the sermon on the mount with a totally impersonal application to the multitude. { } the next passage referred to by de wette is in hom. xix. : "and he declared that he saw the evil one as lightning fall from heaven." this is compared with luke x. , which has no parallel in the other gospels: "and he said to them, i beheld satan as lightning fall from heaven." [------] the substitution of [-------] for [-------], had he found the latter in his gospel, would be all the more remarkable from the fact that the author of the homilies has just before quoted the saying "if satan cast out satan,"( ) &c. and he continues in the above words to show that satan had been cast out, so that the evidence would have been strengthened by the retention of the word in luke had he quoted that gospel. the variations, however, indicate that he quoted from another source.( ) the next passage pointed out by de wette likewise finds a parallel only in the third gospel. it occurs in hom. ix. : "nevertheless, though all demons with all the diseases flee before you, in this only is not to be your rejoicing, but in that, through grace, your names, as of the ever-living, are recorded in heaven." this is compared with luke x. : "notwithstanding, in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rejoice that your names are written in the heavens." [------] { } the differences between these two passages are too great and the peculiarities of the homily too marked to require any argument to demonstrate that the quotation cannot be successfully claimed by our third gospel. on the contrary, as one of so many other passages systematically varying from the canonical gospels, it must rather be assigned to another source. de wette says: "a few others (quotations) presuppose (voraussetzen) the gospel of mark,"( ) and he gives them. the first occurs in hom. ii. : "there is a certain justa( ) amongst us, a syrophoenician, a canaantte by race, whose daughter was affected by a sore disease, and who came to our lord crying out and supplicating that he would heal her daughter. but he being also asked by us, said: 'it is not meet to heal the gentiles who are like dogs from their using different meats and practices, whilst the table in the kingdom has been granted to the sons of israel.' but she, hearing this and exchanging her former manner of life for that of the sons of the kingdom, in order that she might, like a dog, partake of the crumbs falling from that same table, obtained, as she desired, healing for her daughter."( ) this is compared with mark vii. -- ,( ) as it is the only gospel which calls the woman a syrophoenician. the homily, however, not only calls her so, a very unimportant point, but gives her name as "justa." { } if, therefore, it be argued that the mention of her nationality supposes that the author found the fact in his gospel, and that as we know no other but mark( ) which gives that information, that he therefore derived it from our second gospel, the additional mention of the name of "justa" on the same grounds necessarily points to the use of a gospel which likewise contained it, which our gospel does not. nothing can be more decided than the variation in language throughout this whole passage from the account in mark, and the reply of jesus is quite foreign to our gospels. in mark (vii. ) the daughter has "an unclean spirit" [------]; in matthew (xv. ) she is "grievously possessed by a devil" [------], but in the homily she is "affected by a sore disease" [------]. the second gospel knows nothing of any intercession on the part of the disciples, but matthew has: "and the disciples came and besought him [------] saying: 'send her away, for she crieth after us,'"( ) whilst the homily has merely "being also asked by us," [------] in the sense of intercession in her favour. the second gospel gives the reply of jesus as follows: "let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the bread of the children, and to cast it to the dogs. and she answered and said unto him: 'yea, lord, for the dogs also eat under the table of the crumbs of the children. and he said unto her: for this saying go thy way; the devil is gone out of thy daughter."( ) the nature of the reply of the woman is, { } in the gospels, the reason given for granting her request; but in the homily the woman's conversion to judaism,( ) that is to say judeo-christianity, is prominently advanced as the cause of her successful pleading. it is certain from the whole character of this passage, the variation of the language, and the reply of jesus which is not in our gospels at all, that the narrative cannot rightly be assigned to them, but the more reasonable inference is that it was derived from another source.( ) the last of de wette's( ) passages is from hom. iii. : "hear, o israel; the lord thy( ) god is one lord." this is a quotation from deuteronomy vi. , which is likewise quoted in the second gospel, xii. , in reply to the question, "which is the first commandment of all? jesus answered: the first is, hear, o israel; the lord our god is one lord, and thou shalt love the lord thy god," &c. &c. in the homily, however, the quotation is made in a totally different connection, for there is no question of commandments at all, but a clear statement of the circumstances under which the passage was used, which excludes the idea that this quotation was derived from mark xii. . the context in the homily is as follows: "but to those who were beguiled to imagine many gods as the scriptures say, he said: hear, o israel," &c, &c.( ) there is no hint of the assertion of many gods in the gospels; but, on the contrary, the question is put by one of the scribes in mark to whom jesus says: "thou art not far from the kingdom of god." the quotation, { } therefore, beyond doubt, cannot be legitimately appropriated by the second synoptic, but may with much greater probability be assigned to a different gospel. we may here refer to the passage, the only one pointed out by him in connection with the synoptics, the discovery of which canon westcott affirms, "has removed the doubts which had long been raised about those (allusions) to st. mark."( ) the discovery referred to is that of the codex ottobonianus by dressel, which contains the concluding part of the homilies, and which was first published by him in . canon westcott says: "though st mark has few peculiar phrases, one of these is repeated verbally in the concluding part of the th homily."( ) the passage is as follows: hom. xix. : "wherefore also he explained to his disciples privately the mysteries of the kingdom of the heavens." this is compared with mark iv. .... "and privately to his own disciples, he explained all things." [------] we have only a few words to add to complete the whole of dr. westcott's remarks upon the subject. he adds after the quotation: "this is the only place where [------] occurs in the gospels."( ) we may, however, point out that it occurs also in acts xix. and peter i. . it is upon the coincidence of this word that { } canon westcott rests his argument that this passage is a reference to mark. nothing, however, could be more untenable than such a conclusion from such an indication. the phrase in the homily presents a very marked variation from the passage in mark. the "all things" [------] of the gospel, reads: "the mysteries of the kingdom of the heavens" [------] in the homily. the passage in mark iv. , to which dr. westcott does not refer, reads [------]. there is one very important matter, however, which our apologist has omitted to point out, and which, it seems to us, decides the case--the context in the homily. the chapter commences thus: "and peter said: we remember that our lord and teacher, as commanding, said to us: 'guard the mysteries for me, and the sons of my house.' wherefore also he explained to his disciples privately," &c.:(l) and then comes our passage. now, here is a command of jesus, in immediate connection with which the phrase before us is quoted, which does not appear in our gospels at all, and which clearly establishes the use of a different source. the phrase itself which differs from mark, as we have seen, may with all right be referred to the same unknown gospel. it must be borne in mind that all the quotations which we have hitherto examined are those which have been selected as most closely approximating to passages in our gospels. space forbids our giving illustrations of the vast number which so much more widely differ from parallel texts in the synoptics. we shall confine { } ourselves to pointing out in the briefest possible manner some of the passages which are persistent in their variations or recall similar passages in the memoirs of justin. the first of these is the injunction in hom. iii. : "let your yea be yea, your nay nay, for whatsoever is more than these cometh of the evil one." the same saying is repeated in hom. xix. with the sole addition of "and." we subjoin the greek of these, together with that of the gospel and justin with which the homilies agree. [------] as we have already discussed this passage( ) we need not repeat our remarks here. that this passage comes from a source different from our gospels is rendered still more probable by the quotation in hom. xix. being preceded by another which has no parallel at all in our gospels. "and elsewhere he said, 'he who sowed the bad seed is the devil' [------]( ): and again: 'give no pretext to the evil one.'( ) [------]. but in exhorting he prescribes: 'let your yea be yea.'" &c. the first of these phrases differs markedly from our gospels; the second is not in them at all; the third, which we are considering, differs likewise in an important degree in common with justin's quotation, and there is every reason for supposing that the whole were derived from the same unknown source.( ) in the same homily, xix. , there occurs also the passage which exhibits variations likewise found in justin, which we have already examined,( ) and now { } merely point out: "begone into the darkness without, which the father hath prepared for the devil and his angels."( ) the quotation in justin (dial. ) agrees exactly with this, with the exception that justin has [------] instead of [------], which is not important, whilst the agreement in the marked variation from the parallel in the first gospel establishes the probability of a common source different from ours.( ) we have also already( ) referred to the passage in hom. xvii. . "no one knew [------] the father but the son, even as no one knoweth the son but the father and those to whom the son is minded to reveal him." this quotation differs from matt. xi. in form, in language, and in meaning, but agrees with justin's reading of the same text, and as we have shown the use of the aorist here, and the transposition of the order, were characteristics of gospels used by gnostics and other parties in the early church, and the passage with these variations was regarded by them as the basis of some of their leading doctrines.( ) that the variation is not accidental, but a deliberate quotation from a written source, is proved by this, and by the circumstance that the author of the homilies repeatedly quotes it elsewhere in the same form.( ) it is unreasonable to suppose that the quotations in these homilies are so systematically and consistently erroneous, and not only can they not, from their actual variations, be legitimately referred to the synoptics exclusively, but, considering all the circumstances, the { } only natural conclusion is that they are derived from a source different from our gospels.( ) another passage occurs in hom. iii. : "wherefore ye do err, not knowing the true things of the scriptures; and on this account ye are ignorant of the power of god." this is compared with mark xii. :( ) "do ye not therefore err, not knowing the scriptures nor the power of god?" the very same quotation is made both in hom. ii. and xviii. , and in each case in which the passage is introduced it is in connection with the assertion that there are true and false scriptures, and that as there are in the scriptures some true sayings and some false, jesus by this saying showed to those who erred by reason of the false the cause of their error. there can scarcely be a doubt that the author of the homilies quotes this passage from a gospel different from ours, and this is demonstrated both by the important variation from our text and also by its consistent repetition, and by the context in which it stands.( ) upon each occasion, also, that the author of the homilies quotes the foregoing passage he likewise quotes another saying of jesus which is foreign to our gospels: "be ye approved money-changers," [------].( ) the saying is thrice quoted without { } variation, and each time, together with the preceding passage, it refers to the necessity of discrimination between true and false sayings in the scriptures, as for instance: "and peter said: if, therefore, of the scriptures some are true and some are false, our teacher rightly said: 'be ye approved money-changers,' as in the scriptures there are some approved sayings and some spurious."( ) this is one of the best known of the apocryphal sayings of jesus, and it is quoted by nearly all the fathers,( ) by many as from holy scripture, and by some ascribed to the gospel of the nazarenes, or the gospel according to the hebrews. there can be no question here that the author quotes an apocryphal gospel.( ) there is, in immediate connection with both the preceding passages, another saying of jesus quoted which is not found in our gospels: "why do ye not discern the good reason of the scriptures?" "[------]; "( ) this passage also comes from a gospel different from ours,( ) and the connection and sequence of these quotations is very significant. one further illustration, and we have done. we find the following in hom. iii. : "and to those who ( ) think that god tempts, as the scriptures say, he said: 'the evil one is the tempter,' who also tempted himself. "l this short saying is not found in our gospels. it probably occurred in the gospel of the homilies in connection with the temptation of jesus. it is not improbable that the writer of the epistle of james, who shows acquaintance with a gospel different from ours,( ) also knew this saying.( ) we are here again directed to the ebionite gospel. certainly the quotation is derived from a source different from our gospels.( ) these illustrations of the evangelical quotations in the clementine homilies give but an imperfect impression of the character of the extremely numerous passages which occur in the work. we have selected for our examination the quotations which have been specially cited by critics as closest to parallels in our gospels, and have thus submitted the question to the test which is most favourable to the claims of our synoptics. space forbids our adequately showing the much wider divergence which exists in the great majority of cases between them and the quotations in the homilies. to sum up the case: out of more than a hundred of these quotations only four brief and fragmentary phrases really agree with parallels in our synoptics, and these, we have shown, are either not used in the same context as in our gospels or are of a nature far from special to them. of the rest, all without exception systematically vary more or less from our gospels, and many in their variations agree with similar quotations in other writers, { } or on repeated quotation always present the same peculiarities, whilst others, professed to be direct quotations of sayings of jesus, have no parallels in our gospels at all. upon the hypothesis that the author made use of our gospels, such systematic divergence would be perfectly unintelligible and astounding. on the other hand, it must be remembered that the agreement of a few passages with parallels in our gospels cannot prove anything. the only extraordinary circumstance is that, even using a totally different source, there should not have been a greater agreement with our synoptics. but for the universal inaccuracy of the human mind, every important historical saying, having obviously only one distinct original form, would in all truthful histories have been reported in that one unvarying form. the nature of the quotations in the clementine homilies leads to the inevitable conclusion that their author derived them from a gospel different from ours; at least, since the source of these quotations is never named throughout the work, and there is not the faintest direct indication of our gospels, the clementine homilies cannot be considered witnesses of any value as to the origin and authenticity of the canonical gospels. that this can be said of a work written a century and a half after the establishment of christianity, and abounding with quotations of the discourses of jesus, is in itself singularly suggestive. it is scarcely necessary to add that the author of the homilies has no idea whatever of any canonical writings but those of the old testament, though even with regard to these some of our quotations have shown that he held peculiar views, and believed that they contained spurious elements. there is no reference in the { } homilies to any of the epistles of the new testament.( ) one of the most striking points in this work, on the other hand, is its determined animosity against the apostle paul. we have seen that a strong anti-pauline tendency was exhibited by many of the fathers, who, like the author of the homilies, made use of judeo-christian gospels different from ours. in this work, however, the antagonism against the "apostle of the gentiles" assumes a tone of peculiar virulence. there cannot be a doubt that the apostle paul is attacked in it, as the great enemy of the true faith, under the hated name of simon the magician,( ) whom peter follows everywhere for the purpose of unmasking and confuting him. he is robbed of his title of "apostle of the gentiles," which, together with the honour of founding the church of antioch, of laodicaæ, and of rome, is ascribed to peter. all that opposition to paul which is implied in the epistle to the galatians and elsewhere( ) is here realized and exaggerated, and { } the personal difference with peter to which paul refers( ) is widened into the most bitter animosity. in the epistle of peter to james which is prefixed to the homilies, peter says, in allusion to paul: "for some among the gentiles have rejected my lawful preaching and accepted certain lawless and foolish teaching of the hostile man."( ) first expounding a doctrine of duality, as heaven and earth, day and night, life and death,( ) peter asserts that in nature the greater things come first, but amongst men the opposite is the case, and the first is worse and the second better.( ) he then says to clement that it is easy according to this order to discern to what class simon (paul) belongs, "who came before me to the gentiles, and to which i belong who have come after him, and have followed him as light upon darkness, as knowledge upon ignorance, as health upon disease."( ) he continues: "if he had been known he would not have been believed, but now, not being known, he is wrongly believed; and though by his acts he is a hater, he has been loved; and although an enemy, he has been welcomed as a friend; and though he is death, he has been desired as a saviour; and though fire, esteemed as light; and though a deceiver, he is listened to as speaking the truth."( ) there is much more of this acrimonious abuse put into the mouth of peter.( ) the indications that it is paul who is really attacked under the name of simon are much too clear to admit of doubt. in hom. xi. , peter, warning the church against false { } teachers, says: "he who hath sent us, our lord and prophet, declared to us that the evil one.... announced that he would send from amongst his followers apostles( ) to deceive. therefore, above all remember to avoid every apostle, or teacher, or prophet, who first does not accurately compare his teaching with that of james called the brother of my lord, and to whom was confided the ordering of the church of the hebrews in jerusalem," &c., lest this evil one should send a false preacher to them, "as he has sent to us simon preaching a counterfeit of truth in the name of our lord and disseminating error."( ) further on he speaks more plainly still. simon maintains that he has a truer appreciation of the doctrines and teaching of jesus because he has received his inspiration by supernatural vision, and not merely by the common experience of the senses,( ) and peter replies: "if, therefore, our jesus indeed was seen in a vision, was known by thee, and conversed with thee, it was only as one angry with an adversary.... but can any one through a vision be made wise to teach? and if thou sayest: 'it is possible,' then wherefore did the teacher remain and discourse for a whole year to us who were awake? and how can we believe thy story that he was seen by thee? and how could he have been seen by thee when thy thoughts are contrary to his teaching? but if seen and taught by him for a single hour thou becamest an apostle:( ) preach his words, interpret his sayings, love his { } apostles, oppose not me who consorted with him. for thou hast directly withstood me who am a firm rock, the foundation of the church. if thou hadst not been an adversary thou wouldst not have calumniated me, thou wouldst not have reviled my teaching in order that, when declaring what i have myself heard from the lord. i might not be believed, as though i were condemned.... but if thou callest me condemned, thou speakest against god who revealed christ to me,'"( ) &c. this last phrase: "if thou callest me condemned" [------] is an evident allusion to galat. ii. ii: "i withstood him to the face, because he was condemned" [------]. we have digressed to a greater extent than we intended, but it is not unimportant to show the general character and tendency of the work we have been examining. the clementine homilies,--written perhaps about the end of the second century, which never name nor indicate any gospel as the source of the author's knowledge of evangelical history, whose quotations of sayings of jesus, numerous as they are, systematically differ from the parallel passages of our synoptics, or are altogether foreign to them, which denounce the apostle paul as an impostor, enemy of the faith, and disseminator of false doctrine, and therefore repudiate his epistles, at the same time equally ignoring all the other writings of the new testament,--can scarcely be considered as giving much support to any theory of the early formation of the new testament canon, or as affording evidence even of the existence of its separate books. { } . among the writings which used formerly to be ascribed to justin martyr, and to be published along with his genuine works, is the short composition commonly known as the "epistle to diognetus." the ascription of this composition to justin arose solely from the fact that in the only known ms. of the letter there is an inscription [------] which, from its connection, was referred to justin.( ) the style and contents of the work, however, soon convinced critics that it could not possibly be written by justin,( ) and although it has been ascribed by various isolated writers to apollos, clement, marcion, quadratus, and others, none of these guesses have been seriously supported, and critics are almost universally agreed in confessing that the author of the epistle is entirely unknown. such being the case, it need scarcely be said that the difficulty of assigning a date to the work with any degree of certainty is extreme, if it be not absolutely impossible to do so. this difficulty, however, is increased by several circumstances. the first and most important of these is the fact that the epistle to diognetus is neither quoted nor mentioned by any ancient { } writer, and consequently there is no external evidence whatever to indicate the period of its composition.( ) moreover, it is not only anonymous but incomplete, or, at least, as we have it, not the work of a single writer. at the end of chapter x. a break is indicated, and the two concluding chapters are unmistakably by a different and later hand.( ) it is not singular, therefore, that there exists a wide difference of opinion as to the date of the first ten chapters, although all agree regarding the later composition of the concluding portion. it is assigned by critics to various periods ranging from about the end of the first quarter of the second century to the end of the third century or later,( ) whilst some denounce it as a mere modern forgery.( ) nothing can be more insecure in one { } direction than the date of a work derived alone from internal evidence. allusions to actual occurrences may with certainty prove that a work could only have been written after they had taken place. the mere absence of later indications in an anonymous epistle only found in a single ms. of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, however, and which may have been, and probably was, written expressly in imitation of early christian feeling, cannot furnish any solid basis for an early date. it must be evident that the determination of the date of this epistle cannot therefore be regarded as otherwise than doubtful and arbitrary. it is certain that the purity of its greek and the elegance of its style distinguish it from all other christian works of the period to which so many assign it.( ) the epistle to diognetus, however, does not furnish any evidence even of the existence of our synoptics, for it is admitted that it does not contain a single direct quotation from any evangelical work.( )we shall hereafter have to refer to this epistle in connection with the fourth gospel, but in the meantime it may be well to add that in chapter xii., one of those, it will be remembered, which are admitted to be of later date, a brief quotation is made from cor. viii. , introduced merely by the words, [------]. chapter vi. basilides--valentinus. we must now turn back to an earlier period, and consider any evidence regarding the synoptic gospels which may be furnished by the so-called heretical writers of the second century. the first of these who claims our attention is basilides, the founder of a system of gnosticism, who lived in alexandria about the year of our era.( ) with the exception of a very few brief fragments,( ) none of the writings of this gnostic have been preserved, and all our information regarding them is, therefore, derived at second-hand from ecclesiastical writers opposed to him and his doctrines; and their statements, especially where acquaintance with, and the use of, the new testament scriptures are assumed, must be received with very great caution. the uncritical and inaccurate character of the fathers rendered them peculiarly liable to be misled by foregone devout conclusions. eusebius states that agrippa castor, who had written a refutation of the doctrines of basilides: "says that he had composed twenty-four books upon the gospel."( ) { } this is interpreted by tischendorf, without argument, and in a most arbitrary and erroneous manner, to imply that the work was a commentary upon our four canonical gospels;( ) a conclusion the audacity of which can scarcely be exceeded. this is, however, almost surpassed by the treatment of canon westcott, who writes regarding basilides: "it appears, moreover, that he himself published a gospel--a 'life of christ' as it would perhaps be called in our days, or 'the philosophy of christianity,( )--but he admitted the historic truth of all the facts contained in the canonical gospels, and used them as scripture. for, in spite of his peculiar opinions, the testimony, of basilides to our 'acknowledged' books is comprehensive and clear. in the few pages of his writings which remain there are certain references to the gospels of st. matthew, st. luke, and st. john,"( ) &c. now in making, in such a manner, these assertions: in totally ignoring the whole of the discussion with regard to the supposed quotations of basilides in the work commonly ascribed to hippolytus and the adverse results of learned criticism: in the unqualified assertions thus made and the absence either of explanation of the facts or the reasons for the conclusion: this statement must be condemned as only calculated to mislead readers who must generally be ignorant of the actual facts of the case. we know from the evidence of antiquity that basilides made use of a gospel, written by himself it is said, but certainly called after his own name.( ) an attempt has these names are pure inventions of dr. westcott's fancy, of course. on the canon, p. f. [since these remarks were first made, dr. westcott has somewhat enlarged his account of basilides, but we still consider that his treatment of the subject is deceptive and incomplete.] { } been made to explain this by suggesting that perhaps the work mentioned by agrippa castor may have been mistaken for a gospel;( ) but the fragments of that work which are still extant( ) are of a character which precludes the possibility that any writing of which they formed a part could have been considered a gospel.( ) various opinions have been expressed as to the exact nature of the gospel of basilides. neander affirmed it to be the gospel according to the hebrews which he brought from syria to egypt;( ) whilst schneckenburger held it to be the gospel according to the egyptians.( ) others believe it to have at least been based upon one or other of these gospels.( ) there seems most reason for the hypothesis that it was a form of the gospel according to the hebrews, which was so generally in use. returning to the passage already quoted, in which eusebius states, on the authority of agrippa castor, whose works are no longer extant, that basilides had composed a work in twenty-four books on the gospel { } [------], and to the unwarrantable inference that this must have been a work on our four gospels, we must add that, so far from deriving his doctrines from our gospels or other new testament writings, or acknowledging their authority, basilides professed that he received his knowledge of the truth from glaucias, "the interpreter of peter," whose disciple he claimed to be,( ) and thus practically sets gospels aside and prefers tradition.( ) basilides also claimed to have received from a certain matthias the report of private discourses which he had heard from the saviour for his special instruction.( ) agrippa castor further stated, according to eusebius, that in his [------] basilides named for himself, as prophets, barcabbas and barcoph (parchor( )), as well as invented others who never existed, and claimed their authority for his doctrines.( ) with regard to all this canon westcott writes: "since basilides lived on the verge of the apostolic times, it is not surprising that he made use of other sources of christian doctrine besides the canonical books. the belief in divine inspiration was still fresh and real,"( ) &c. it is apparent, however, that basilides, in basing his doctrines upon tradition and { } upon these apocryphal books as inspired, and in having a special gospel called after his own name, which, therefore, he clearly adopts as the exponent of his ideas of christian truth, completely ignores the canonical gospels, and not only does not offer any evidence for their existence, but proves, on the contrary, that he did not recognize any such works as of authority. there is no ground, therefore, for tischendorfs assumption that the commentary of basilides "on the gospel" was written upon our gospels, but that idea is negatived in the strongest way by all the facts of the case.( ) the perfectly simple interpretation of the statement is that long ago suggested by valesius,( ) that the commentary of basilides was composed upon his own gospel,( ) whether it was the gospel according to the hebrews or the egyptians. moreover, it must be borne in mind that basilides used the word "gospel" in a peculiar sense. hippolytus, in the work usually ascribed to him, writing of the basilidians and describing their doctrines, says: "when therefore it was necessary, he (?) says, that we, the children of god, should be revealed, in expectation of whose revelation, he says, the creation groaned and travailed, the gospel came into the world, and passed through every principality and power and dominion, and every name that is named."( ) "the gospel, therefore, { } came first from the sonship, he says, through the son, sitting by the archon, to the archon, and the archon learnt that he was not the god of all things but begotten,"( ) &c. "the gospel, according to them, is the knowledge of supramundane matters,"( ) &c. this may not be very intelligible, but it is sufficient to show that "the gospel" in a technical sense( ) formed a very important part of the system of basilides. now there is nothing whatever to show that the twenty-four books which he composed "on the gospel" were not in elucidation of the gospel as technically understood by him, illustrated by extracts from his own special gospel and from the tradition handed down to him by glaucias and matthias. the emphatic assertion of canon westcott that basilides "admitted the historic truth of all the facts contained in the canonical gospels," is based solely upon the following sentence of the work attributed to hippolytus; jesus, however, was generated according to these (followers of basilides) as we have already said.( ) but when the generation which has already been declared had taken place, all things regarding the saviour, according to them, occurred in like manner as they have been written in the gospel."( ) there are, however, several important points to be borne in mind in reference to this passage. the statement in question is not made in { } connection with basilides himself, but distinctly in reference to his followers, of whom there were many in the time of hippolytus and long after him. it is, moreover, a general observation the accuracy of which we have no means of testing, and upon the correctness of which there is no special reason to rely. the remark, made at the beginning of the third century, however, that the followers of basilides believed that the actual events of the life of jesus occurred in the way in which they have been written in the gospels, is no proof whatever that either they or basilides used or admitted the authority of our gospels. the exclusive use by any one of the gospel according to the hebrews, for instance, would be perfectly consistent with the statement. no one who considers what is known of that gospel, or who thinks of the use made of it in the first half of the second century by perfectly orthodox fathers, can doubt this. the passage is, therefore, of no weight as evidence for the use of our gospels. canon westcott himself admits that in the extant fragments of isidorus, the son and disciple of basilides, who "maintained the doctrines of his father," he has "noticed nothing bearing on the books of the new testament.."( ) on the supposition that basilides actually wrote a commentary on our gospels, and used them as scripture, it is indeed passing strange that we have so little evidence on the point. we must now, however, examine in detail all of the quotations, and they are few, alleged to show the use of our gospels, and we shall commence with those of tischendorf. the first passage which he points out is found in the stromata of clement of alexandria. tischendorf guards himself, in reference to these quotations, { } by merely speaking of them as "basilidian" (basilidianisch),( ) but it might have been more frank to have stated clearly that clement distinctly assigns the quotation to the followers of basilides [------],( ) and not to basilides himself.( ) the supposed quotation, therefore, however surely traced to our gospels, could really not prove anything in regard to basilides. the passage itself compared with the parallel in matt. xix. , , is as follows:-- [------] now this passage in its affinity to, and material variation from, our first gospel might be quoted as evidence for the use of another gospel, but it cannot reasonably be cited as evidence for the use of matthew. apologists in their anxiety to grasp at the faintest analogies as testimony seem altogether to ignore the history of the creation of written gospels, and to forget the very existence of the [------] of luke.( ) the next passage referred to by tischendorf( ) is one { } quoted by epiphanius( ) which we subjoin in contrast with the parallel in matt. vii. :-- [------] here, again, the variation in order is just what one might have expected from the use of the gospel according to the hebrews or a similar work, and there is no indication whatever that the passage did not end here, without the continuation of our first synoptic. what is still more important, although teschendorf does not mention the fact, nor otherwise hint a doubt than by the use, again, of an unexplained description of this quotation as "basilidianisch" instead of a more direct ascription of it to basilides himself, this passage is by no means attributed by epiphanius to that heretic. it is introduced into the section of his work directed against the basilidians, but he uses, like clement, the indefinite [------], and as in dealing with all these heresies there is continual interchange of reference to the head and the later followers, there is no certainty who is referred to in these quotations and, in this instance, nothing to indicate that this passage is ascribed to basilides himself, his name is mentioned in the first line of the first chapter of this "heresy," but not again before this [------] occurs in chapter v. teschendorf does not claim any other quotations. { } canon westcott states: "in the few pages of his (basilides') writings which remain there are certain references to the gospels of st. matthew, st. luke,"( ) &c. one might suppose from this that the "certain" references occurred in actual extracts made from his works, and that the quotations, therefore, appeared sc( ) (sp.) in a context of his own words. this impression is strengthened when we read as an introduction to the instances: "the following examples will be sufficient to show his method of quotation."( ) the fact is, however, that these examples are found in the work of hippolytus, in an epitome of the views of the school by that writer himself, with nothing more definite than a subjectless [------] to indicate who is referred to. the only examples canon westcott can give of these "certain references" to our first and third synoptics, do not show his "method of quotation" to much advantage. the first is not a quotation at all, but a mere reference to the magi and the star. "but that every thing, he says [------], has its own seasons, the saviour sufficiently teaches when he says:... and the magi having seen the star,"( ) &c. this of course canon westcott considers a reference to matt. ii. , , but we need scarcely point out that this falls to the ground instantly, if it be admitted, as it must be, that the star and the magi may have been mentioned in other gospels than the first synoptic. we have already seen, when examining the evidence of justin, that this is the case. the only quotation asserted to be taken from luke is the phrase: "the holy spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow { } thee,"( ) which agrees with luke i. . this again is introduced by hippolytus with another subjectless "he says," and apart from the uncertainty as to who "he" is, this is very unsatisfactory evidence as to the form of the quotation in the original text, for it may easily have been corrected by hippolytus, consciously or unconsciously, in the course of transfer to his pages. we have already met with this passage as quoted by justin from a gospel different from ours. as we have already stated, however, none of the quotations which we have considered are directly referred to basilides himself, but they are all introduced by the utterly vague expression, "he says," [------] without any subject accompanying the verb. now it is admitted that writers of the time of hippolytus, and notably hippolytus himself, made use of the name of the founder of a sect to represent the whole of his school, and applied to him, apparently, quotations taken from unknown and later followers.( ) the passages which he cites, therefore, and which appear to indicate the use of gospels, instead of being extracted from the works of the founder himself, in all probability were taken from writings of gnostics of his own time. canon westcott himself admits the possibility of this, in writing of other early heretics. he says: "the evidence that has been collected from { } the documents of these primitive sects is necessarily somewhat vague. it would be more satisfactory to know the exact position of their authors, and the precise date of their being composed. it is just possible that hippolytus made use of writings which were current in his own time without further examination, and transferred to the apostolic age forms of thought and expression which had been the growth of two, or even of three generations."( ) so much as to the reliance to be placed on the work ascribed to hippolytus. it is certain, for instance, that in writing of the sect of naaseni and ophites, hippolytus perpetually quotes passages from the writings of the school, with the indefinite [------],( ) as he likewise does in dealing with the peratici,( ) and docetæ,( ) no individual author being named; yet he evidently quotes various writers, passing from one to another without explanation, and making use of the same unvarying [------] in one place,( ) where he has "the greeks say," [------] he gives, without further indication, a quotation from pindar.( ) a still more apt instance of his method is that pointed out by volkmar,( ) where hippolytus, writing of "marcion, or some one of his hounds," uses, without further explanation, the subjectless [------] to introduce matter from the later followers of marcion.( ) now, with regard to { } basilides, hippolytus directly refers not only to the heretic chief, but also to his disciple isidorus and all their followers,( ) [------] and then proceeds to use the indefinite "he says," interspersed with references in the plural to these heretics, exhibiting the same careless method of quotation, and leaving the same complete uncertainty as to the speaker's identity as in the other cases mentioned.( ) on the other hand, it has been demonstrated by hilgenfeld, that the gnosticism ascribed to basilides by hippolytus, in connection with these quotations, is of a much later and more developed type than that which basilides himself held,( ) as shown in the actual fragments of his own writings which are still extant, and as reported by irenæus,( ) clement of alexandria,( ) and the work "adversus omnes hæreses," annexed to the "præscriptio hæreticorum" of tertullian, which is { } considered to be the epitome of an earlier work of hippolytus. the fact probably is that hippolytus derived his views of the doctrines of basilides from the writings of his later followers, and from them made the quotations which are attributed to the founder of the school.( ) in any case there is no ground for referring these quotations with an indefinite [------] to basilides himself. of all this there is not a word from canon westcott,( ) but he ventures to speak of "the testimony of basilides to our 'acknowledged' books," as "comprehensive and clear."( ) we have seen, however, that the passages referred to have no weight whatever as evidence for the use of our synoptics. the formulae (as [------] to that compared with luke i. , and [------] with references compared with some of the epistles) which accompany these quotations, and to which canon westcott points as an indication that the new testament writings were already recognized as holy scripture,( ) need no special attention, because, as it cannot be shown that the expressions were used by basilides himself at all, they do not come into question. if anything, however, were required to complete the evidence that these quotations are not from the works of basilides himself, but from later writings by his followers, it would be the use of such formulae, for as the writings of pseudo-ignatius, polycarp, justin martyr, papias, hegesippus, { } and others of the fathers in several ways positively demonstrate, the new testament writings were not admitted, even amongst orthodox fathers, to the rank of holy scripture, until a very much later period.( ) . much of what has been said with regard to the claim which is laid to basilides, by some apologists, as a witness for the gospels and the existence of a new testament canon, and the manner in which that claim is advanced, likewise applies to valentinus, another gnostic leader, who, about the year , came from alexandria to rome and flourished till about a.d. .( ) very little remains of the writings of this gnostic, and we gain our only knowledge of them from a few short quotations in the works of clement of alexandria, and some doubtful fragments preserved by others. we shall presently have occasion to refer more directly to these, and need not here more particularly mention them. tischendorf, the self-constituted modern defensor fidei,( ) asserts, with an assurance which can scarcely be characterized otherwise than as an unpardonable calculation upon the ignorance of his readers, that valentinus used { } the whole of our four canonical gospels. to do him full justice, we shall as much as possible give his own words; and, although we set aside systematically all discussion regarding the fourth gospel for separate treatment hereafter, we must, in order to convey the full sense of dr. tischendorf s proceeding, commence with a sentence regarding that gospel. referring to a statement of irenæus, that the followers of valentinus made use of the fourth gospel, tischendorf continues: "hippolytus confirms and completes the statement of irenæus, for he quotes several expressions of john, which valentinus employed. this most clearly occurs in the case of john x. ; for hippolytus writes: 'because the prophets and the law, according to the doctrine of valentinus, were only filled with a subordinate and foolish spirit, valentinus says: on account of this, the saviour says: all who came before me were thieves and robbers.'"(l) now this, to begin with, is a practical falsification of the text of the philosophumena, which reads: "therefore all the prophets and the law spoke under the influence of the demiurge, a foolish god, he says, (they themselves being) foolish, knowing nothing. on this account, he says, the saviour saith: all who came before me," &c. &c.( ) there is no mention whatever of the name of valentinus in the passage, and, as we shall presently { } show, there is no direct reference in the whole chapter to valentinus himself. the introduction of his name in this manner into the text, without a word of explanation, is highly reprehensible. it is true that in a note tischendorf gives a closer translation of the passage, without, however, any explanation; and here again he adds, in parenthesis to the "says he," "namely, valentinus." such a note, however, which would probably be unread by a majority of readers, does not rectify the impression conveyed by so positive and emphatic an assertion as is conveyed by the alteration in the text. tischendorf continues: "and as the gospel of john, so also were the other gospels used by valentinus. according to the statement of irenæus (i. , § ), he found the said subordinate spirit, which he calls demiurge, masterworker, emblematically represented by the centurion of capernaum (matt. viii. , luke vii. ); in the dead and resuscitated daughter of jairus, when twelve years old, (luke viii. ), he recognized a symbol of his 'wisdom' (achamoth), the mother of the masterworker (i. , § ); in like manner, he saw represented in the history of the woman who had suffered twelve years from the bloody issue, and was cured by the lord (matt. ix. ), the sufferings and salvation of his twelfth primitive spirit (aeon) (i. , § ); the expression of the lord (matt. v. ) on the numerical value of the iota ('the smallest letter') he applied to his ten aeons in repose."l now, in every instance where tischendorf here speaks of valentinus by the singular "he," irenæus uses the plural "they," referring not to the original founder of the sect, but to his followers in his own day, and the { } text is thus again in every instance falsified by the pious zeal of the apologist. in the case of the centurions "they say" [------] that he is the demiurge;( ) "they declare" [------] that the daughter of jairus is the type of achamoth;( ) "they say" [------] that the apostasy of judas points to the passion in connection with the twelfth aeon, and also the fact that jesus suffered in the twelfth month after his baptism; for they will have it [------] that he only preached for one year. the case of the woman with the bloody issue for twelve years, and the power which went forth from the son to heal her, "they will have to be horos" [------]{ } in like manner they assert that the ten aeons are indicated [------] by the letter "iota," mentioned in the saviour's expression, matt v. .( ) at the end of these and numerous other similar references in this chapter to new testament expressions and passages, irenæus says: "thus they interpret," &c. [------].( ) the plural "they" is employed throughout. tischendorf proceeds to give the answer to his statement which is supposed to be made by objectors.: "they say: all that has reference to the gospel of john was not advanced by valentinus himself, but by his disciples. and in fact, in irenæus, 'they--the valen-tinians--say,' occurs much oftener than 'he--valentinus--says.' but who is there so sapient as to draw the line between what the master alone says, and that which the disciples state without in the least repeating the { } master?"( ) tischendorf solves the difficulty by referring everything indiscriminately to the master. now, in reply to these observations, we must remark in the first place that the admission here made by tischendorf, that irenæus much more often uses "they say" than "he says" is still quite disingenuous, inasmuch as invariably, and without exception, irenæus uses the plural in connection with the texts in question. secondly, it is quite obvious that a gnostic, writing about a.d. - , was likely to use arguments which were never thought of by a gnostic, writing at the middle of the second century at the end of the century, the writings of the new testament had acquired consideration and authority, and gnostic writers had therefore a reason to refer to them, and to endeavour to show that they supported their peculiar views, which did not exist at all at the time when valentinus propounded his system. tischendorf, however, cannot be allowed the benefit even of such a doubt as he insinuates, as to what belongs to the master, and what to the followers. such doubtful testimony could not establish anything, but it is in point of fact also totally excluded by the statement of irenæus himself. in the preface to the first book of his great work, irenæus clearly states the motives and objects for which he writes. he says: "i considered it necessary, having read the commentaries [------] _of the disciples of valentinus_, as they call themselves, and having had personal intercourse with some of them and acquired full knowledge of their opinions, to unfold to thee," &c., and he goes on to say that he intends to set forth "the opinions of those who are _now_ teaching heresy; i speak { } particularly of the followers of ptolemæus, whose system is an offshoot of the school of valentinus."( ) nothing could be more explicit than this statement that irenæus neither intended nor pretended to write upon the works of valentinus himself, but upon the commentaries of his followers of his own time, with some of whom he had had personal intercourse, and that the system which he intended to attack was that actually being taught in his day by ptolemæus and his school, the offshoot from valentinus. all the quotations to which tischendorf refers are made within a few pages of this explicit declaration. immediately after the passage about the centurion, he says: "such is their system" [------, and three lines below he states that they derive their views from unwritten sources [------].( ) the first direct reference to valentinus does not occur until after these quotations, and is for the purpose of showing the variation of opinion of his followers. he says: "let us now see the uncertain opinions of these heretics, for there are two or three of them, how they do not speak alike of the same things, but contradicted one another in facts and names." then he continues: "for the first of them, valentinus, having derived his principles from the so-called gnostic heresy, and adapted them to the peculiar character of his school declared this:" &c., &c. and { } after a brief description of his system, in which no scriptural allusion occurs, he goes on to compare the views of the rest, and in chap. xii. he returns to ptolemæus and his followers [------]. in the preface to book ii, he again says that he has been exposing the falsity of the followers of valentinus (qui sunt a valentino) and will proceed to establish what he has advanced; and everywhere he uses the plural "they," with occasional direct references to the followers of valentinus (qui sunt a valentino).( ) the same course is adopted in book iii., the plural being systematically used, and the same distinct definition introduced at intervals.( ) and again, in the preface to book iv. he recapitulates that the preceding books had been written against these, "qui sunt a valentino" (§ ). in fact, it would almost be impossible for any writer more frequently and emphatically to show that he is not, as he began by declaring, dealing with the founder of the school himself, but with his followers living and teaching at the time at which he wrote. canon westcott, with whose system of positively enunciating unsupported and controverted statements we are already acquainted, is only slightly outstripped by the german apologist in his misrepresentation of the evidence of valentinus. it must be stated, however, that, acknowledging, as no doubt he does, that irenæus never refers to valentinus himself, canon westcott passes over in complete silence the supposed references upon { } which teschendorf relies as his only evidence for the use of the synoptics by that gnostic. he, however, makes the following extraordinary statement regarding valentinus: "the fragments of his writings which remain show the same natural and trustful use of scripture as other christian works of the same period; and there is no diversity of character in this respect between the quotations given in hippolytus and those found in clement of alexandria. he cites the epistle to the ephesians as 'scripture,' and refers clearly to the gospels of st. matthew, st. luke, and st. john, to the epistles to the romans,"( ) &c. we shall now give the passages which he points out in support of these assertions.( ) the first two are said to occur in the stromata of the alexandrian clement, who professes to quote the very words of a letter of valentinus to certain people regarding the passions, which are called by the followers of basilides "the appendages of the soul." the passage is as follows: "but one only is good, whose presence is the manifestation through the son, and on the canon, p. f. [in the th ed. of his work, published since the above remarks were made, dr. westcott has modified or withdrawn his assertions regarding valentinus. as we cannot well omit the above passage, it is right to state that the lines quoted now read: "the few unquestionable fragments of valentinus contain but little which points to passages of scripture. if it were clear that the anonymous quotations in hippolytus were derived from valentinus himself, the list would be much enlarged, and include a citation of the epistle to the ephesians as 'scripture,' and clear references to the gospels of st. luke and st. john, to corinthians, perhaps also to the epistle to the hebrews, and the first epistle of st. john," (p. f.). in a note he adds: "but a fresh and careful examination of the whole section of hippolytus makes me feel that the evidence is so uncertain, that i cannot be sure in this case, as in the case of basilides, that hippolytus is quoting the words of the founder" (p. , n. ). under these circumstances the statements even in the amended edition present many curious features.] { } through him alone will the heart be enabled to become pure, by the expulsion of every evil spirit from the heart. for many spirits dwelling in it do not allow it to be pure, but each of them, while in divers parts they riot there in unseemly lusts, performs its own works. and, it seems to me, the heart is somewhat like an inn. for that, also, is both bored and dug into, and often filled with the ordure of men, who abide there in revelry, and bestow not one single thought upon the place, seeing it is the property of another. and in such wise is it with the heart, so long as no thought is given to it, being impure, and the dwelling-place of many demons, but as soon as the alone good father has visited it, it is sanctified and shines through with light, and the possessor of such a heart becomes so blessed, that he shall see god."( ) according to canon westcott this passage contains two of the "clear references" to our gospels upon which he bases his statement, namely to matt. v. , and to matt. xix. . now it is clear that there is no actual quotation from any evangelical work in this passage from the epistle of valentinus, and the utmost for which the most zealous apologist could contend is, that there is a slight similarity with some words in the gospel, and canon { } westcott himself does not venture to call them more than "references." that such distant coincidences should be quoted as evidence for the use of the first gospel shows how weak is his case. at best such vague allusions could not prove anything, but when the passages to which reference is supposed to be made are examined, it will be apparent that nothing could be more unfounded or arbitrary than the claim of reference specially to our gospel, to the exclusion of the other gospels then existing, which to our knowledge contained both passages. we may, indeed, go still further, and affirm that if these coincidences are references to any gospel at all, that gospel is not the canonical, but one different from it. the first reference alluded to consists of the following two phrases: "but one only is good [------]..... the alone good father" [------]. this is compared with matt. xix. :{ } "why askest thou me concerning good? there is one that is good" [------].( ) now the passage in the epistle, if a reference to any parallel episode, such as matt. xix. , indicates with certainty the reading: "one is good the father" [------]. there is no such reading in any of our gospels. but although this reading does not exist in any of the canonical gospels, it is well known that it did exist in uncanonical gospels no longer extant, and that the passage was one upon which various sects of so-called heretics laid great stress. irenseus quotes it as one of { } the texts to which the marcosians, who made use of apocryphal gospels,( ) and notably of the gospel according to the hebrews, gave a different colouring: [------]( ) epiphanius also quotes this reading as one of the variations of the marcionites: [------].( ) origen, likewise, remarks that this passage is misused by some heretics: "velut proprie sibi datum scutum putant (hæretici) quod dixit dominus in evangelio: nemo bonus nisi unus deus pater."( ) justin martyr quotes the same reading from a source different from our gospels,( ) [------]( ) and in agreement with the repeated similar readings of the clementine homilies, which likewise derived it from an extra canonical source,( ) [------. the use of a similar expression by clement of alexandria, as well as by origen, only serves to prove the existence of the reading in extinct gospels, although it is not found in any ms. of any of our gospels. the second of the supposed references is more diffuse: "one is good and through him alone will the heart be enabled to become pure [------]... but when the alone good father has visited it, it is sanctified and shines through with light, and the possessor of such a heart becomes so blessed, that he shall see god" [------] { } [------]. this is compared( ) with matthew v. : "blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see god" [------]. it might be argued that this is quite as much a reference to psalm xxiv. - as to matt. v. , but even if treated as a reference to the sermon on the mount, nothing is more certain than the fact that this discourse had its place in much older forms of the gospel than our present canonical gospels,( ) and that it formed part of the gospel according to the hebrews and other evangelical writings in circulation in the early church. such a reference as this is absolutely worthless as evidence of special acquaintance with our first synoptic.( ) tischendorf does not appeal at all to these supposed references contained in the passages preserved by clement, but both the german and the english apologist join in relying upon the testimony of hippolytus,( ) with regard to the use of the gospels by valentinus, although it must be admitted that the former does so with greater fairness of treatment than canon westcott. tischendorf does refer to, and admit, some of the difficulties of the case, as we shall presently see, whilst canon westcott, as in the case of basilides, boldly makes his assertion, and totally ignores all adverse facts. the only gospel { } reference which can be adduced even in the philosophumena, exclusive of one asserted to be to the fourth gospel, which will be separately considered hereafter, is advanced by canon westcott, for teschendorf does not refer to it, but confines himself solely to the supposed reference to the fourth gospel. the passage is the same as one also imputed to basilides: "the holy spirit shall come upon thee and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee;" which happens to agree with the words in luke i. ; but, as we have seen in connection with justin, there is good reason for concluding that the narrative to which it belongs was contained in other gospels.( ) in this instance, however, the quotation is carried further and presents an important variation from the text of luke. "the holy spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee; therefore the thing begotten of thee shall be called holy"( ) [------]. the reading of luke is: "therefore also the holy thing begotten shall be called the son of god" [------]. it is probable that the passage referred to in connection with the followers of basilides may have ended in the same way as this, and been derived from the same source. nothing, however, can be clearer than the fact that this quotation, by whoever made, is not taken from our third synoptic, inasmuch as there does not exist a single ms. which contains such a passage. we again, however, come to the question: who really made the quotations which hippolytus introduces so indefinitely? we have already, in speaking of basilides, { } pointed out the loose manner in which hippolytus and other early writers, in dealing with different schools of heretics, indifferently quote the founder or his followers without indicating the precise person quoted. this practice is particularly apparent in the work of hippolytus when the followers of valentinus are in question. tischendorf himself is obliged to admit this. he asks: "even though it be also incontestable that the author (hippolytus) does not always sharply distinguish between the sect and the founder of the sect, does this apply to the present case"?( ) he denies that it does in the instance to which he refers, but he admits the general fact. in the same way another apologist of the fourth gospel (and as the use of that gospel is maintained in consequence of a quotation in the very same chapter as we are now considering, only a few lines higher up, both the third and fourth are in the same position) is forced to admit: "the use of the gospel of john by valentinus cannot so certainly be proved from our refutation-writing (the work of hippolytus). certainly in the statement of these doctrines it gives abstracts, which contain an expression of john (x. ), and there cannot be any doubt that this is taken from some writing of the sect. but the apologist, in his expressions regarding the valentinian doctrines, does not seem to confine himself to one and the same work, but to have alternately made use of different writings of the school, for which reason we cannot say anything as to the age of this quotation, and from this testimony, therefore, we merely have further confirmation that the gospel was early( ) (?) used in the why "early"? since hippolytus writes about a.d. . { } school of the valentinians,"( ) &c. of all this not a word from canon westcott, who adheres to his system of bare assertion. now we have already quoted( ) the opening sentence of book vi. , of the work ascribed to hippolytus, in which the quotation from john x. , referred to above occurs, and ten line further on, with another intermediate and equally indefinite "he says" [------], occurs the supposed quotation from luke i. , which, equally with that from the fourth gospel, must, according to weizsäcker, be abandoned as a quotation which can fairly be ascribed to valentinus himself, whose name is not once mentioned in the whole chapter. a few lines below the quotation, however, a passage occurs which throws much light upou the question. after explaining the views of the valentinians regarding the verse: "the holy ghost shall come upon thee," &c., the writer thus proceeds: "regarding this there is among them [------] a great question, a cause both of schism and dissension. and hence their [------] teaching has become divided, and the one teaching according to them [------] is called eastern ['------] and the other italian. they from italy, of whom is heracleon and ptolemæus, say [------] that the body of jesus was animal, and on account of this, on the occasion of the baptism, the holy spirit like a dove came down--that is, the logos from the mother above, sophia--and became joined to the animal, and raised him from the dead. this, _he says_ [------] is the declaration [------],"--and here be it observed we come to another of the "clear { } references" which canon westcott ventures, deliberately and without a word of doubt, to attribute to valentinus himself,( )--"this, he says, is the declaration: 'he who raised christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies,'( ) that is animal. for the earth has come under a curse: 'for dust, he says [------] thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.'( ) on the other hand, those from the east [------], of whom is axionicus and bardesanes, say [------] that the body of the saviour was spiritual, for the holy spirit came upon mary, that is the sophia and the power of the highest."( ) &c. in this passage we have a good illustration of the mode in which the writer introduces his quotations with the subjectless "he says." here he is conveying the divergent opinions of the two parties of valentinians, and explaining the peculiar doctrines of the italian school "of whom is heracleon and ptolemæus," and he suddenly departs from the plural "they" to quote the passage from romans viii. , in support of their views with the singular "he says." nothing can be more obvious than that "he" cannot possibly be valentinus himself, for the schism is represented as taking place { } amongst his followers, and the quotation is evidently made by one of them to support the views of his party in the schism, but whether hippolytus is quoting from heraclcon or ptolemæus or some other of the italian( ) school, there is no means of knowing. of all this, again, nothing is said by canon westcott, who quietly asserts without hesitation or argument, that valentinus himself is the person who here makes the quotation. we have already said that the name of valentinus does not occur once in the whole chapter (vi. ) which we have been examining, and if we turn back we find that the preceding context confirms the result at which we have arrived, that the [------] has no reference to the founder himself, but is applicable only to some later member of his school, most probably contemporary with hippolytus. in vi. , hippolytus discusses the heresy of valentinus, which he traces to pythagoras and plato, but in ch. he passes from direct reference to the founder to deal entirely with his school. this is so manifest, that the learned editors of the work of hippolytus, professors duncker and schneidewin, alter the preceding heading at that part from "valentinus" to "valentiniani." at the beginning of ch. hippolytus writes: "valentinus, therefore, and heracleon and ptolemæus and the whole school of these (heretics)... have laid down as the fundamental principle of their teaching the arithmetical system. for according to these," &c. and a few lines lower down: "there is discernible amongst them, however, considerable difference of opinion. for many of them, in order that the quotation from an epistle to the romans by the italian school is appropriate. { } the pythagorean doctrine of valentinus may be wholly pure, suppose, &c., but others," &c. he shortly after says that he will proceed to state their doctrines as they themselves teach them [------]. he then continues: "there is, he says [------]" &c. &c., quoting evidently one of these followers who want to keep the doctrine of valentinus pure, or of the "others," although without naming him, and three lines further on again, without any preparation, returning to the plural "they say" [------] and so on through the following chapters, "he says" alternating with the plural, as the author apparently has in view something said by individuals or merely expresses general views. in the chapter ( ) preceding that which we have principally been examining, hippolytus begins by referring to "the quaternion according to valentinus," but after five lines on it, he continues: "this is what they say: [------]"( ) and then goes on to speak of "their whole teaching" [------], and lower down he distinctly sets himself to discuss the opinions of the school in the plural: "thus these (valentinians) subdivide the contents of the pleroma," &c. [------], and continues with an occasional "according to them "[------] until, without any name being mentioned, he makes use of the indefinite "he says" to introduce the quotation referred to by canon westcott as a citation by valentinus himself of "the epistle to the ephesians as scripture."( ) "this is, he says, what is written in scripture," and there follows a quotation which, it may merely be mentioned as canon westcott says nothing of it, differs considerably from the passage in the epistle { } iii. -- . immediately after, another of canon west-cott's quotations from cor. ii. , is given, with the same indefinite "he says," and in the same way, without further mention of names, the quotations in ch. compared with john x. , and luke i. . there is, therefore, absolutely no ground whatever for referring these [------] to valentinus himself; but, on the contrary, hippolytus shows in the clearest way that he is discussing the views of the later writers of the sect, and it is one of these, and not the founder himself, whom in his usual indefinite way he thus quotes. we have been forced by these bald and unsupported assertions of apologists to go at such length into these questions at the risk of being very wearisome to our readers, but it has been our aim as much as possible to make no statements without placing before those who are interested the materials for forming an intelligent opinion. any other course would be to meet mere assertion by simple denial, and it is only by bold and unsubstantiated statements which have been simply and in good faith accepted by ordinary readers who have not the opportunity, if they have even the will, to test their veracity, that apologists have so long held their ground. our results regarding valentinus so far may be stated as follows: the quotations which without any explanation are so positively imputed to valentinus are not made by him, but by later writers of his school;( ) and, moreover, the passages which are indicated by the english apologist as references to our two synoptic gospels not only do ( ) not emanate from valentinus, but do not agree with our gospels, and are apparently derived from other sources.( ) the remarks of canon westcott with regard, to the connection of valentinus with our new testament are on a par with the rest of his assertions. he says: "there is no reason to suppose that valentinus differed from catholic writers on the canon of the new testament."( ) we might ironically adopt this sentence, for as no writer whatever of the time of valentinus, as we have seen, recognized any new testament canon at all, he certainly did not in this respect differ from the other writers of that period. canon westcott relies upon the statement of tertullian, but even here, although he quotes the latin passage in a note, he does not fully give its real sense in his text. he writes in immediate continuation of the quotation given above: "tertullian says that in this he differed from marcion, that he at least professed to accept 'the whole instrument,' perverting the interpretation, where marcion mutilated the text." now the assertion of tertullian has a very important modification, which, to any one acquainted with the very unscrupulous boldness of the "great african" in dealing with religious controversy, is extremely significant. he does not make the assertion positively and of his own knowledge, but modifies it by saying: "nor, indeed, if valentinus seems to use the on the canon, p. . [dr. westcott omits these words from his th ed., but he uses others here and elsewhere which imply very nearly the same assertion.] { } whole instrument, (neque enim si valentinus integro instrumento uti videtur),"( ) &c. tertullian evidently knew very little of valentinus himself, and had probably not read his writings at all.( ) his treatise against the valentinians is avowedly not original, but, as he himself admits, is compiled from the writings of justin, miltiades, irenæus, and proclus.( ) tertullian would not have hesitated to affirm anything of this kind positively, had there been any ground for it, but his assertion is at once too uncertain, and the value of his statements of this nature much too small, for such a remark to have any weight as evidence.( ) besides, by his own showing valentinus altered scripture (sine dubio emen-dans),( ) which he could not have done had he recognized it as of canonical authority.( ) we cannot, however, place any reliance upon criticism emanating from tertullian. all that origen seems to know on this subject is that the followers of valentinus [------] have altered the form of the gospel [------].( ) clement of alexandria, however, informs us that valentinus, like basilides, professed to have direct traditions from the apostles, his teacher being theodas, a disciple of the apostle paul.( ) if he had known any gospels which he believed to have apostolic authority, there would clearly not have been any need of such tradition. hippolytus distinctly affirms that valentinus derived his system from pythagoras and plato, { } and "not from the gospels" [-----], and that consequently he might more properly be considered a pythagorean and platonist than a christian.( ) irenæus, in like manner, asserts that the valentinians derive their views from unwritten sources [------],( ) and he accuses them of rejecting the gospels, for after enumerating them,( ) he continues: "when, indeed, they are refuted out of the scriptures, they turn round in accusation of these same scriptures, as though they were not correct, nor of authority.... for (they say) that it (the truth) was not conveyed by written records but by the living voice."( ) in the same chapter he goes on to show that the valen-tinians not only reject the authority of scripture, but also reject ecclesiastical tradition. he says: "but, again, when we refer them to that tradition which is from the apostles, which has been preserved through a succession of presbyters in the churches, they are opposed to tradition, affirming themselves wiser not only than presbyters, but even than the apostles, in that they have discovered the uncorrupted truth. for (they say) the apostles mixed up matters which are of the law with the words of the saviour, &c.... it comes to this, they neither consent to scripture nor to tradition. (evenit itaque, neque scripturis jam, neque traditioni consentire eos.)"( ) we find, therefore, that even in the time of irenæus the valentinians rejected the writings { } of the new testament as authoritative documents, which they certainly would not have done had the founder of their sect himself acknowledged them. so far from this being the case, there was absolutely no new testament canon for valentinus himself to deal with,( ) and his perfectly orthodox contemporaries recognized no other holy scriptures than those of the old testament. irenæus, however, goes still further, and states that the valentinians of his time not only had many gospels, but that they possessed one peculiar to themselves. "those indeed who are followers of valentinus," he says, "again passing beyond all fear, and putting forth their own compositions, boast that they have more gospels than there actually are. indeed they have proceeded so far in audacity that they entitle their not long written work, agreeing in nothing with the gospels of the apostles, the gospel of truth, so that there cannot be any gospel among them without blasphemy."( ) it follows clearly, from the very name of the valentinian gospel, that they did not consider that others contained the truth,( ) and indeed irenæus himself perceived this, for he continues: "for if what is published by them be the gospel of truth, yet is dissimilar from those which have been delivered to us by the apostles, any may perceive who please, as is demonstrated by these very scriptures, that that which has been handed down from the apostles is not the gospel of truth."( ) these passages speak for { } themselves. it has been suggested that the "gospel of truth" was a harmony of the four gospels.( ) this, however, cannot by any possibility have been the case, inasmuch as irenæus distinctly says that it did not agree in anything with the gospels of the apostles. we have been compelled to devote too much space to valentinus, and we now leave him with the certainty that in nothing does he afford any evidence even of the existence of our synoptic gospels. { } chapter vii. marcion we must now turn to the great heresiarch of the second century, marcion, and consider the evidence regarding our gospels which may be derived from what we know of him. the importance, and at the same time the difficulty, of arriving at a just conclusion from the materials within our reach have rendered marcion's gospel the object of very elaborate criticism, and the discussion of its actual character has continued with fluctuating results for nearly a century. marcion was born at sinope, in pontus, of which place his father was bishop,( ) and although it is said that he aspired to the first place in the church of rome,( ) the presbyters refused him communion on account of his peculiar views of christianity. we shall presently more fully refer to his opinions, but here it will be sufficient to say that he objected to what he considered the debasement of true christianity by jewish elements, and he upheld the teaching of paul alone, in opposition to that of all the other apostles, whom he accused of mixing { } up matters of the law with the gospel of christ, and falsifying christianity,( ) as paul himself had protested.( ) he came to rome about a.d. -- ,( ) and continued teaching for some twenty years.( ) his high personal character and elevated views produced a powerful effect upon his time,( ) and, although during his own lifetime and long afterwards vehemently and with every opprobrious epithet denounced by ecclesiastical writers, his opinions were so widely adopted that in the time of epiphanius his followers were to be found throughout the whole world.( ) marcion is said to have recognized as his sources of christian doctrine, besides tradition, a single gospel and ten epistles of paul, which in his collection stood in the following order;--epistle to galatians, corinthians ( ), romans, thessalonians ( ), ephesians (which he had with { } the superscription "to the laodiceans"),( ) colossians, philippians, and philemon.( ) none of the other books which now form part of the canonical new testament were either mentioned or recognized by marcion.( ) this is the oldest collection of apostolic writings of which there is any trace,( ) but there was at that time no other "holy scripture" than the old testament, and no new testament canon had yet been imagined. marcion neither claimed canonical authority for these writings,( ) nor did he associate with them any idea of divine inspiration.( ) we have already seen the animosity expressed by contemporaries of marcion against the apostle paul. the principal interest in connection with the collection of marcion, however, centres in his single gospel, the nature, origin, and identity of which have long been actively and minutely discussed by learned men of all shades of opinion with very varying results. the work itself is unfortunately no longer extant, and our only knowledge of it is derived from the bitter and very inaccurate opponents of marcion. it seems to have borne much the same analogy to our third canonical gospel which existed between the gospel according to { } the hebrews and our first synoptic.( ) the fathers, whose uncritical and, in such matters, prejudiced character led them to denounce every variation from their actual texts as a mere falsification, and without argument to assume the exclusive authenticity and originality of our gospels, which towards the beginning of the third century had acquired wide circulation in the church, vehemently stigmatized marcion as an audacious adulterator of the gospel, and affirmed his evangelical work to be merely a mutilated and falsified version of the "gospel according to luke."( ) this view continued to prevail, almost without question or examination, till towards the end of the eighteenth century, when biblical criticism began to exhibit the earnestness and activity which have ever since more or less characterized it. semler first abandoned the prevalent tradition, and, after analyzing the evidence, he concluded that marcion's gospel and luke's were different versions of an earlier work,( ) and that the so-called heretical gospel was one of the numerous gospels from amongst which the canonical had been selected by the church.( ) griesbach about the same time also rejected the ruling opinion, and denied the close relationship usually asserted to exist between the two gospels.( ) loffler( ) and corrodi( ) strongly supported sender's { } conclusion, that marcion was no mere falsifier of luke's gospel, and j. e. c. schmidt( ) went still further, and asserted that marcion's gospel was the genuine luke, and our actual gospel a later version of it with alterations and additions. eichhorn,( ) after a fuller and more exhaustive examination, adopted similar views; he repudiated the statements of tertullian regarding marcion's gospel as utterly untrustworthy, asserting that he had not that work itself before him at all, and he maintained that marcion's gospel was the more original text and one of the sources of luke. bolten,( ) bertholdt,( ) schleiermacher,( ) and d. schulz( ) likewise maintained that marcion's gospel was by no means a mutilated version of luke, but, on the contrary, an independent original gospel a similar conclusion was arrived at by gieseler,( ) but later, after hahn's criticism, he abandoned it, and adopted the opinion that marcion's gospel was constructed out of luke.( ) on the other hand, the traditional view was maintained by storr,( ) arneth,( ) hug,( ) neander,( ) and gratz,( ) although with little originality of investigation or argument; and { } paulus( ) sought to reconcile both views by admitting that marcion had before him the gospel of luke, but denying that he mutilated it, arguing that tertullian did not base his arguments on the actual gospel of marcion, but upon his work, the "antitheses." hahn,( ) however, undertook a more exhaustive examination of the problem, attempting to reconstruct the text of marcion's gospel( ) from the statements of tertullian and epiphanius, and he came to the conclusion that the work was a mere version, with omissions and alterations made by the heresiarch in the interest of his system, of the third canonical gospel. olshausen( ) arrived at the same result, and with more or less of modification but no detailed argument, similar opinions were expressed by credner,( ) de wette,( ) and others.( ) not satisfied, however, with the method and results of { } hahn and olshausen, whose examination, although more minute than any previously undertaken, still left much to be desired, ritschl(l) made a further thorough investigation of the character of mansion's gospel, and decided that it was in no case a mutilated version of luke, but, on the contrary, an original and independent work, from which the canonical gospel was produced by the introduction of anti-marcionitish passages and readings. baur( ) strongly enunciated similar views, and maintained that the whole error lay in the mistake of the fathers, who had, with characteristic assumption, asserted the earlier and shorter gospel of marcion to be an abbreviation of the later canonical gospel, instead of recognizing the latter as a mere extension of the former. schwegler( ) had already, in a remarkable criticism of marcion's gospel declared it to be an independent and original work, and in no sense a mutilated luke, but, on the contrary, probably the source of that gospel. kostlin,( ) while stating that the theory that marcion's gospel was an earlier work and the basis of that ascribed to luke was not very probable, affirmed that much of the marcionitish text was more original than the canonical, and that both gospels must be considered versions of the same original, although luke's was the later and more corrupt. these results, however, did not satisfy volkmar,( ) who entered afresh upon a searching examination of the whole subject, and concluded that whilst, on the one hand, the { } gospel of marcion was not a mere falsified and mutilated form of the canonical gospel, neither was it, on the other, an earlier work, and still less the original gospel of luke, but merely a gnostic compilation from what, so far as we are concerned, may be called the oldest codex of luke's gospel, which itself is nothing more than a similar pauline edition of the original gospel. volkmar's analysis, together with the arguments of hilgenfeld, succeeded in convincing ritschl,{ } who withdrew from his previous opinions, and, with those critics, merely maintained some of marcion's readings to be more original than those of luke,{ } and generally defended marcion from the aspersions of the fathers, on the ground that his procedure with regard to luke's gospel was precisely that of the canonical evangelists to each other;{ } luke himself being clearly dependent both on mark and matthew.{ } baur was likewise induced by volkmar's and hilgenfeld's arguments to modify his views;{ } but although for the first time he admitted that marcion had altered the original of his gospel frequently for dogmatic reasons, he still maintained that there was an older form of the gospel without the earlier chapters, from which both marcion and luke directly constructed their gospels;--both of them stood in the same line in regard to the original; both altered it; the one abbreviated, the other extended it.{ } encouraged by this success, but not yet satisfied, volkmar immediately undertook a further and more exhaustive examination of the text of marcion, in the hope of finally settling the { } discussion, and he again, but with greater emphasis, confirmed his previous results.( ) in the meantime hilgenfeld( ) had seriously attacked the problem, and, like hahn and volkmar, had sought to reconstruct the text of marcion, and, whilst admitting many more original and genuine readings in the text of marcion, he had also decided that his gospel was dependent on luke, although he further concluded that the text of luke had subsequently gone through another, though slight, manipulation before it assumed its present form. these conclusions he again fully confirmed after a renewed investigation of the subject.( ) this brief sketch of the controversy which has so long occupied the attention of critics will at least show the uncertainty of the data upon which any decision is to be based. we have not attempted to give more than the barest outlines, but it will appear as we go on that most of those who decide against the general independence of mansion's gospel, at the same time admit his partial originality and the superiority of some of his readings over those of the third synoptic, and justify his treatment of luke as a procedure common to the evangelists, and warranted not only by their example but by the fact that no gospels had in his time emerged from the position of private documents in limited circulation. marcion's gospel not being any longer extant, it is important to establish clearly the nature of our knowledge regarding it, and the exact value of the data from which various attempts have been made to reconstruct the text. it is manifest that the evidential force of any deductions from a reconstructed text is almost wholly { } dependent on the accuracy and sufficiency of the materials from which that text is derived. the principal sources of our information regarding marcion's gospel are the works of his most bitter denouncers tertullian and epiphanius, who, however, it must be borne in mind, wrote long after his time,--the work of tertullian against marcion having been composed about a.d. ,( ) and that of epiphanius a century later. we may likewise merely mention here the "_dialogus de recta in deum fide_," commonly attributed to origen, although it cannot have been composed earlier than the middle of the fourth century.( ) the first three sections are directed against the marcionites, but only deal with a late form of their doctrines.( ) as volkmar admits that the author clearly had only a general acquaintance with the "antitheses," and principal proof passages of the marcionites, but, although he certainly possessed the epistles, had not the gospel of marcion itself,( ) we need not now more particularly consider it. we are, therefore, dependent upon the "dogmatic and partly blind and unjust adversaries"( ) of marcion for our only knowledge of the text they stigmatize; and when the character of polemical discussion in the early centuries of our era is considered, it is certain that great caution must be exercised, and not too much weight attached to the statements of opponents who regarded a heretic with abhorrence, and attacked him with an acrimony which carried them far beyond the limits of fairness and truth. their religious controversy bristles with { } misstatements, and is turbid with pious abuse. tertullian was a master of this style, and the vehement vituperation with which he opens( ) and often interlards his work against "the impious and sacrilegious marcion" offers anything but a guarantee of fair and legitimate criticism. epiphanius was, if possible, still more passionate and exaggerated in his representations against him.( ) undue importance must not, therefore, be attributed to their statements.( ) not only should there be caution exercised in receiving the representations of one side in a religious discussion, but more particularly is such caution necessary in the case of tertullian, whose trustworthiness is very far from being above suspicion, and whose inaccuracy is often apparent.( ) "son christianisme," says reuss, "est ardent, sincere, profondément ancré dans son âme. l'on voit qu'il en vit. mais ce christianisme est âpre, insolent, brutal, ferrailleur. ii est sans onction et sans charité, quelquefois merae sans loyauté, des qu'il se trouve en face d'une opposition quelconque. c'est un soldat qui ne sait que se battre et qui oublie, tout en se battant, qu'il faut aussi respecter son ennemi. dialecticien subtil et rusé, il excelle h, ridiculiser ses adversaires. l'injure, le sarcasme, un langage qui rappelle parfois en vérité le genre de rabelais, une effronterie d'affirmation dans les moments de faiblesse qui frise et atteint meme la mauvaise foi, voila ses armes. je sais ce qu'il faut en cela mettre surde compte de l'époque.... si, au second siècle, { } tous les partis, sauf quelques gnostiques, sont intolerants, tertullian test plus que tout le monde."( ) the charge of mutilating and interpolating the gospel of luke is first brought against marcion by irenæus,( ) and it is repeated with still greater vehemence and fulness by tertullian,( ) and epiphanius;( ) but the mere assertion by fathers at the end of the second and in the third centuries, that a gospel different from their own was one of the canonical gospels falsified and mutilated, can have no weight whatever in itself in the inquiry as to the real nature of that work.( ) their arbitrary assumption of exclusive originality and priority for the four gospels of the church led them, without any attempt at argument, to treat every other evangelical work as an offshoot or falsification of these. the arguments by which tertullian endeavours to establish that the gospels of luke and the other canonical evangelists were more ancient than that of marcion( ) show that he had no idea of historical or critical evidence.( ) we are, however, driven back upon such actual data regarding the text and contents of marcion's gospel as are given by the fathers, as the only basis, in the absence of the gospel itself, upon which any hypothesis as to its real character can be built. the question therefore is: are these data sufficiently ample and trustworthy for a decisive judgment { } from internal evidence? if indeed internal evidence in such a case can be decisive at all. all that we know, then, of marcion's gospel is simply what tertullian and epiphanius have stated with regard to it. it is, however, undeniable, and indeed is universally admitted, that their object in dealing with it at all was entirely dogmatic, and not in the least degree critical( ). the spirit of that age was indeed so essentially uncritical( ) that not even the canonical text could waken it into activity. tertullian very clearly states what his object was in attacking marcion's gospel. after asserting that the whole aim of the heresiarch was to prove a disagreement between the old testament and the new, and that for this purpose he had erased from the gospel all that was contrary to his opinion, and retained all that he had considered favourable, tertullian proceeds to examine the passages retained,( ) with the view of proving that the heretic has shown the same "blindness of heresy" both in that which he has erased and in that which he has retained, inasmuch as the passages which marcion has allowed to remain are as opposed to his system, as those which he has omitted. he conducts the controversy in a free and discursive manner, and whilst he appears to go through marcion's gospel with some regularity, it will be apparent, as we proceed, that { } mere conjecture has to play a large part in any attempt to reconstruct, from his data, the actual text of marcion. epiphanius explains his aim with equal clearness. he had made a number of extracts from the so-called gospel of marcion which seemed to him to refute the heretic, and after giving a detailed and numbered list of these passages, which he calls [------], he takes them consecutively and to each adds his "refutation." his intention is to show how wickedly and disgracefully marcion has mutilated and falsified the gospel, and how fruitlessly he has done so, inasmuch as he has stupidly, or by oversight, allowed much to remain in his gospel by which he may be completely refuted.( ) as it is impossible within our limits fully to illustrate the procedure of the fathers with regard to marcion's gospel, and the nature and value of the materials they supply, we shall as far as possible quote the declarations of critics, and more especially of volkmar and hilgenfeld, who, in the true and enlightened spirit of criticism, impartially state the character of the data available for the understanding of the text. as these two critics have, by their able and learned investigations, done more than any others to educe and render possible a decision of the problem, their own estimate of the materials upon which a judgment has to be formed is of double value. with regard to tertullian, volkmar explains that his desire is totally to annihilate the most dangerous heretic of his time,--first (books i.--iii.), to overthrow marcion's system in general as expounded in his "antitheses,"--and then (book iv.) to show that even the gospel of marcion { } only contains catholic doctrine (he concludes, "_christus jesus in evangelio tuo mens est_" c. ); and therefore he examines the gospel only so far as may serve to establish his own view and refute that of marcion. "to show," volkmar continues, "wherein this gospel was falsified or mutilated, _i.e._, varied from his own, on the contrary, is in no way his design, for he perceives that marcion could retort the reproach of interpolation, and in his time proof from internal grounds was hardly possible, so that only exceptionally, where a variation seems to him remarkable, does he specially mention it."( ) on the other hand volkmar remarks that tertullian's latin rendering of the text of marcion which lay before him,--which, although certainly free and having chiefly the substance in view, is still in weightier passages verbally accurate,--directly indicates important variations in that text. he goes on to argue that the silence of tertullian may be weighty testimony for the fact that passages which exist in luke, but which he does not mention, were missing in marcion's gospel, but he does so with considerable reservation. "but his silence _alone_," he says, "can only under certain conditions represent with diplomatic certainty an omission in marcion. it is indeed probable that he would not lightly have passed over a passage in the gospel of marcion which might in any way be contradictory to its system, if one altogether similar had not preceded it, all the more as he frequently drags in by force such proof passages from marcion's text, and often plainly with but a certain sophistry tries to refute his adversary out of the words of his own gospel. but it remains always possible that in his eagerness he has { } overlooked much; and besides, he believes that by his replies to particular passages he has already sufficiently dealt with many others of a similar kind; indeed, avowedly, he will not willingly repeat himself. a certain conclusion, therefore, can only be deduced from the silence of tertullian when special circumstances enter."(l) volkmar, however, deduces with certainty from the statements of tertullian that, whilst he wrote, he had not before him the gospel of luke, but intentionally laid it aside, and merely referred to the marcionitish text, and further that, like all the fathers of the third century, he preferred the gospel according to matthew to the other synoptics, and was well acquainted with it alone, so that in speaking of the gospel generally he only has in his memory the sense, and the sense alone of luke except in so far as it agrees or seems to agree with matthew.( ) with regard to the manner in which tertullian performed the work he had undertaken, hilgenfeld remarks: "as tertullian, in going through the marcionitish gospel, has only the object of refutation in view, he very rarely states explicitly what is missing in it; and as, on the one hand, we can only venture to conclude from the silence of tertullian that a passage is wanting, when it is altogether inexplicable that he should not have made use of it for the purpose of refutation; so, on the other, we must also know how marcion used and interpreted the gospel, and should never lose sight of tertullian's refutation and defence."( ) hahn substantially expresses the same opinions. he { } says: "inasmuch as tertullian goes through the mar-cionitish text with the view of refuting the heretic out of that which he accepts, and not of critically pointing out all variations, falsifications, and passages rejected, he frequently quotes the falsified or altered marcionitish text without expressly mentioning the variations.( )... yet he cannot refrain--although this was not his object--occasionally, from noticing amongst other things any falsifications and omissions which, when he perhaps examined the text of luke or had a lively recollection of it, struck and too grievously offended him."( ) volkmar's opinion of the procedure of epiphanius is still more unfavourable. contrasting it with that of tertullian, he characterizes it as "more superficial," and he considers that its only merit is its presenting an independent view of marcion's gospel. further than this, however, he says: "how far we can build upon his statements, whether as regards their completeness or their trustworthiness is not yet made altogether clear."( ) volk-mar goes on to show how thoroughly epiphanius intended to do his work, and yet that, although from what he himself leads us to expect, we might hope to find a complete statement of marcion's sins, the father himself disappoints such an expectation by his own admission of incompleteness. he complains generally of his free and misleading method of quotation, such, for instance, as his alteration of the text without explanation; alteration of the same passage on different occasions in more than one way; abbreviations, and omissions of parts of quotations; the sudden breaking off of passages just commenced with { } the indefinite [------], without any indication how much this may include.( ) volkmar, indeed, explains that epiphanius is only thoroughly trustworthy where, and _so far as_, he wishes to state in his scholia an omission or variation in marcion's text from his own canonical gospel, in which case he minutely registers the smallest point, but this is to be clearly distinguished from any charge of falsification brought against marcion in his refutations; for only while earlier drawing up his scholia had he the mar-cionitish gospel before him and compared it with luke; but in the case of the refutations, on the contrary, which he wrote later, he did not at least again compare the gospel of luke. "it is, however, altogether different," continues volkmar, "as regards the statements of epiphanius concerning the part of the gospel of luke which is preserved in marcion. whilst he desires to be _strictly literal_ in the account of the _variations_, and also with two exceptions _is_ so, he so generally adheres _only to the purport_ of the passages retained by marcion, that altogether literal quotations are quite exceptional; _throughout_, however, where passages of greater extent are referred to, these are not merely abbreviated, but also are quoted in _very free_ fashion, and nowhere can we reckon that the passage in marcion ran verbally as epiphanius quotes it."( ) and to this we may add a remark made further on: "we cannot in general rely upon the accuracy of his statements in regard to that which marcion had in common with luke."( ) on the other hand volkmar had previously { } said: "absolute completeness in regard to that which marcion's gospel did not contain is not to be reckoned upon in his scholia. he has certainly not intended to pass over anything, but in the eagerness which so easily renders men superficial and blind much has escaped him."(l) hahn bears similar testimony to the incompleteness of epiphanius. "it was not his purpose," he says, "fully to notice all falsifications, variations, and omissions, although he does mark most of them, but merely to extract from the gospel of marcion, as well as from his collection of epistles, what seemed to him well suited for refutation."( ) but he immediately adds: "when he quotes a passage from marcion's text, however, in which such falsifications occur, he generally,--but not always,--notes them more or less precisely, and he had himself laid it down as a subsidiary object of his work to pay attention to such falsifications."( ) a little further on he says: "in the quotations of the remaining passages which epiphanius did not find different from the gospel of luke, and where he therefore says nothing of falsification or omission, he is often very free, neither adhering strictly to the particular words, nor to their arrangement, but his favourite practice is to give their substance and sense for the purpose of refuting his opponent. he presupposes the words known from the gospel of luke."( ) it must be stated, however, that both volkmar( ) and hilgenfeld( ) consider that the representations of { } tertullian and epiphanius supplement each other and enable the contents of marcion's gospel to be ascertained with tolerable certainty. yet a few pages earlier volkmar had pointed out that: "the ground for a certain fixture of the text of the marcionitish gospel, however, seems completely taken away by the fact that tertullian and epiphanius, in their statements regarding its state, not merely repeatedly seem to, but in part actually do, directly contradict each other."( ) hahn endeavours to explain some of these contradictions by imagining that later marcionites had altered the text of their gospel, and that epiphanius had the one form and tertullian another;( ) but such a doubt only renders the whole of the statements regarding the work more uncertain and insecure. that it is not without some reason, however, appears from the charge which tertullian brings against the disciples of marcion: "for they daily alter it (their gospel) as they are daily refuted by us."( ) in fact, we have no assurance whatever that the work upon which tertullian and epiphanius base their charge against marcion of falsification and mutilation of luke was marcion's original gospel at all, and we certainly have no historical evidence on the point.( ) the question even arises, whether tertullian, and indeed epiphanius, had marcion's gospel in any shape before them when they wrote, or merely his work the { } "antitheses."( ) in commencing his onslaught on marcion's gospel, terlullian says: "marcion seems (videtur) to have selected luke, to mutilate it."( ) this is the first serious introduction of his "mutilation hypothesis," which he thenceforward presses with so much assurance, but the expression is very uncertain for so decided a controversialist, if he had been able to speak more positively.( ) we have seen that it is admitted that epiphanius wrote without again comparing the gospel of marcion with luke, and it is also conceded that tertullian at least had not the canonical gospel, but in professing to quote luke evidently does so from memory, and approximates his text to matthew, with which gospel, like most of the fathers, he was better acquainted. this may be illustrated by the fact that both tertullian and epiphanius reproach marcion with erasing passages from the gospel of luke, which never were in luke at all.( ) in one place tertullian says: "marcion, you must also remove this from the gospel: 'i am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of israel,'( ) and: 'it is not meet to take the children's bread, and give it to dogs,'( ) in order, be it known, that christ may not seem to be an israelite."( ) the "great african" { } thus taunts his opponent, evidently under the impression that the two passages were in luke, immediately after he had accused marcion of having actually expunged from that gospel, "as an interpolation,"( ) the saying that christ had not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them,( ) which likewise never formed part of it. he repeats a similar charge on several other occasions.( ) epiphanius commits the same mistake of reproaching marcion with omitting from luke what is only found in matthew.( ) we have, in fact, no certain guarantee of the accuracy or trustworthiness of their statements. we have said enough, we trust, to show that the sources for the reconstruction of a text of marcion's gospel are most unsatisfactory, and no one who attentively studies the analysis of hahn, ritschl, volkmar, hilgenfeld, and others, who have examined and systematized the data of the fathers, can fail to be struck by the uncertainty which prevails throughout, the almost continuous vagueness and consequent opening, nay, necessity, for conjecture, and the absence of really sure indications. the fathers had no intention of showing what marcion's text actually was, and their object being solely dogmatic and not critical, their statements are very insufficient for the purpose.( ) the materials have had to be ingeniously collected and sifted from polemical writings whose authors, so far from professing to furnish them, were only bent upon seeking in marcion's gospel such points as could legitimately, or by sophistical skill, be used against him. passing observations, general { } remarks, as well as direct statements, have too often been the only indications guiding the patient explorers and, in the absence of certain information, the silence of the angry fathers has been made the basis for important conclusions. it is evident that not only is such a procedure necessarily uncertain and insecure, but that it rests upon assumptions with regard to the intelligence, care and accuracy of tertullian and epiphanius, which are not sufficiently justified by that part of their treatment of marcion's text which we can examine and appreciate. and when all these doubtful landmarks have failed, too many passages have been left to the mere judgment of critics, as to whether they were too opposed to marcion's system to have been retained by him, or too favourable to have been omitted. the reconstructed texts, as might be expected, differ from each other, and one editor finds the results of his predecessors incomplete or unsatisfactory, although naturally at each successive attempt, the materials previously collected and adopted have contributed to an apparently more complete result. after complaining of the incompleteness and uncertainty of the statements of tertullian and epiphanius, ritschl affirms that they furnish so little solid material on which to base a hypothesis, that rather by means of a hypothesis must we determine the remains of the gospel from tertullian.( ) hilgenfeld quotes this with approval, and adds, that at least ritschl's opinion is so far right, that all the facts of the case can no longer be settled from external data, and that the general view regarding the { } gospel only can decide many points.( ) this means of course that hypothesis is to supply that which is wanting in the fathers. volkmar, in the introduction to his last comprehensive work on marcion's gospel, says: "and, in fact, it is no wonder that critics have for so long, and substantially to so little effect, fought over the protean question, for there has been so much uncertainty as to the very basis (fundament) itself,--the precise text of the remarkable document,--that baur has found full ground for rejecting, as unfounded, the supposition on which that finally-attained decision (his previous one) rested."( ) critics of all shades of opinion are forced to admit the incompleteness of the materials for any certain reconstruction of marcion's text and, consequently, for an absolute settlement of the question from internal evidence,( ) although the labours of volkmar and hilgenfeld have materially increased our knowledge of the contents of his gospel. we must contend, however, that, desirable and important as it is to ascertain as perfectly as possible the precise nature of marcion's text, the question of its origin and relation to luke would not by any means be settled even by its final reconstruction. there would, as we shall presently show, remain unsolved the problem of its place in that successive manipulation of materials by which a few gospels gradually absorbed and displaced the rest. our own synoptics { } exhibit unmistakable traces of the process, and clearly forbid our lightly setting aside the claim of marcion's gospel to be considered a genuine work, and no mere falsification and abbreviation of luke. before proceeding to a closer examination of marcion's gospel and the general evidence bearing upon it, it may be well here briefly to refer to the system of the heresiarch whose high personal character exerted so powerful an influence upon his own time,( ) and whose views continued to prevail widely for a couple of centuries after his death. it was the misfortune of marcion to live in an age when christianity had passed out of the pure morality of its infancy, when, untroubled by complicated questions of dogma, simple faith and pious enthusiasm had been the one great bond of christian brotherhood, into a phase of ecclesiastical development in which religion was fast degenerating into theology, and complicated doctrines were rapidly assuming that rampant attitude which led to so much bitterness, persecution, and schism. in later times marcion might have been honoured as a reformer, in his own he was denounced as a heretic.( ) austere and ascetic in his opinions, he aimed at superhuman purity, and although his clerical adversaries might scoff at his impracticable doctrines regarding marriage and the subjugation of the flesh, they have had their parallels amongst those whom the church has since most delighted to honour; and at least the whole tendency of his system was markedly towards the side of virtue.( ) it would of course be foreign to our { } purpose to enter upon any detailed statement of its principles, and we must confine ourselves to such particulars only as are necessary to an understanding of the question before us. as we have already frequently had occasion to mention, there were two broad parties in the primitive church, and the very existence of christianity was in one sense endangered by the national exclusiveness of the people amongst whom it originated. the one party considered christianity a mere continuation of the law, and dwarfed it into an isrealitish institution, a narrow sect of judaism; the other represented the glad tidings as the introduction of a new system applicable to all and supplanting the mosaic dispensation of the law by a universal dispensation of grace. these two parties were popularly represented in the early church by the apostles peter and paul, and their antagonism is faintly revealed in the epistle to the galatians. marcion, a gentile christian, appreciating the true character of the new religion and its elevated spirituality, and profoundly impressed by the comparatively degraded and anthropomorphic features of judaism, drew a very sharp line of demarcation between them, and represented christianity as an entirely new and separate system abrogating the old and having absolutely no connection with it. jesus was not to him the messiah of the jews, the son of david come permanently to establish the law and the prophets, but a divine being sent to reveal to man a wholly new spiritual religion, and a hitherto unknown god of goodness and grace. the creator [------], { } the god of the old testament, was different from the god of grace who had sent jesus to reveal the truth, to bring reconciliation and salvation to all, and to abrogate the jewish god of the world and of the law, who was opposed to the god and father of jesus christ as matter is to spirit, impurity to purity. christianity was in distinct antagonism to judaism, the spiritual god of heaven, whose goodness and love were for the universe, to the god of the world, whose chosen and peculiar people were the jews, the gospel of grace to the dispensation of the old testament. christianity, therefore, must be kept pure from the judaistic elements humanly thrust into it, which were so essentially opposed to its whole spirit. marcion wrote a work called "antitheses" [------], in which he contrasted the old system with the new, the god of the one with the god of the other, the law with the gospel, and in this he maintained opinions which anticipated many held in our own time. tertullian attacks this work in the first three books of his treatise against marcion, and he enters upon the discussion of its details with true theological vigour: "now, then, ye hounds, yelping at the god of truth, whom the apostle casts out,( ) to all your questions! these are the bones of contention which ye gnaw!"( ) the poverty of the "great african's" arguments keeps pace with his abuse. marcion objected: if the god of the old testament be good, prescient of the future, and able to avert evil, why did he allow man, made in his own image, to be deceived { } by the devil, and to fall from obedience of the law into sin and death?( ) how came the devil, the origin of lying and deceit, to be made at all?( ) after the fall, god became a judge both severe and cruel; woman is at once condemned to bring forth in sorrow and to serve her husband, changed from a help into a slave; the earth is cursed which before was blessed, and man is doomed to labour and to death.( ) the law was one of retaliation and not of justice,--lex talionis--eye for eye, tooth for tooth, stripe for stripe.( ) and it was not consistent, for in contravention of the decalogue, god is made to instigate the israelites to spoil the egyptians, and fraudulently rob them of their gold and silver;( ) to incite them to work on the sabbath by ordering them to carry the ark for eight days round jericho;( ) to break the second commandment by making and setting up the brazen serpent and the golden cherubim.( ) then god is inconstant, electing men, as saul and solomon, whom he subsequently rejects;( ) repenting that he had set up saul, and that he had doomed the ninevites,( ) and so on. god calls out: adam, where art thou? inquires whether he had eaten the forbidden fruit; asks of cain where his brother was, as if he had not yet heard the blood of abel crying from the ground, and did not already know all these things.( ) anticipating the results of modem criticism, marcion denies the applicability to jesus of the so-called messianic prophecies. the emmanuel of { } isaiah (vii. , cf. viii. ) is not christ;( ) the "virgin" his mother is simply a "young woman" according to jewish phraseology;( ) and the sufferings of the servant of god (isaiah lii. --liii. ) are not predictions of the death of jesus.( ) there is a complete severance between the law and the gospel, and the god of the latter is the antithesis of that of the former.( ) "the one was perfect, pure, beneficent, passionless; the other, though not unjust by nature, infected by matter,--subject to all the passions of man,--cruel, changeable; the new testament, especially as remodelled by marcion,( ) was holy, wise, amiable; the old testament, the law, barbarous, inhuman, contradictory, and detestable."( ) marcion ardently maintained the doctrine of the impurity of matter, and he carried it to its logical conclusion, both in speculation and practice. he, therefore, asserting the incredibility of an incarnate god, denied the corporeal reality of the flesh of christ. his body was a mere semblance and not of human substance, was not born of a human mother, and the divine nature was not degraded by contact with the flesh.( ) marcion finds in paul the purest promulgator of the truth as he understands it, and emboldened by the epistle to the galatians, in which that apostle rebukes even apostles for "not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel," he accuses the other apostles of having depraved the pure form of the gospel doctrines delivered to them by we give this quotation as a resume by an english historian and divine, but the idea of the "new testament remodelled by marcion," is a mere ecclesiastical imagination. { } jesus,( ) "mixing up matters of the law with the words of the saviour."( ) tertullian reproaches marcion with having written the work in which he details the contrasts between judaism and christianity, of which we have given the briefest sketch, as an introduction and encouragement to belief in his gospel, which he ironically calls "the gospel according to the antitheses;"( ) and the charge which the fathers bring against marcion is that he laid violent hands on the canonical gospel of luke, and manipulated it to suit his own views. "for certainly the whole object at which he laboured in drawing up the 'antitheses.'" says tertullian, "amounts to this: that he may prove a disagreement between the old and new testament, so that his own christ may be separated from the creator, as of another god, as alien from the law and the prophets. for this purpose it is certain that he has erased whatever was contrary to his own opinion and in harmony with the creator, as if interpolated by his partisans, but has retained everything consistent with his own opinion."( ) the whole hypothesis that marcion's gospel is a mutilated version of our third synoptic in fact rested upon this accusation. it is obvious that if it cannot be shown that marcion's gospel was our canonical gospel merely garbled by the heresiarch for dogmatic reasons in the interest of his system,--for there could not be any other conceivable { } reason for tampering with it,--the claim of marcion's gospel to the rank of a more original and authentic work than luke's acquires double force. we must, therefore, inquire into the character of the variations between the so-called heretical, and the canonical gospels, and see how far the hypothesis of the fathers accord with the contents of marcion's gospel so far as we are acquainted with it. at the very outset we are met by the singular phenomenon, that both tertullian and epiphanius, who accuse marcion of omitting everything which was unfavourable, and retaining only what was favourable to his views, undertake to refute him out of what remains in his gospel. tertullian says: "it will then be proved that he has shown the same defect of blindness of heresy both in that which he has erased and that which he has retained."( ) epiphanius also confidently states that, out of that which marcion has allowed to remain of the gospel, he can prove his fraud and imposture, and thoroughly refute him.( ) now if marcion mutilated luke to so little purpose as this, what was the use of his touching it at all? he is known as an able man, the most influential and distinguished of all the heretical leaders of the second century, and it seems unreasonable to suppose that, on the theory of his erasing or altering all that contradicted his system, he should have done his work so imperfectly.( ) the fathers say that he endeavours to get rid of the contradictory passages which remain by a system of false interpretation; but surely he would not have allowed himself to be driven { } to this extremity, leaving weapons in the hands of his opponents, when he might so easily have excised the obnoxious texts along with the rest? it is admitted by critics, moreover, that passages said to have been omitted by marcion are often not opposed to his system at all, and sometimes, indeed, even in favour of it;( ) and on the other hand, that passages which were retained are contradictory to his views.( ) this is not intelligible upon any theory of arbitrary garbling of a gospel in the interest of a system. it may be well to give a few instances of the anomalies presented, upon this hypothesis, by marcion's text. some critics believe that the verses luke vii. -- , were wanting in marcion's gospel.( ) hahn accounts for the omission of verses , , regarding the baptism of john, because they represented the relation of the baptist to jesus in a way which marcion did not admit.( ) but as he allowed the preceding verses to remain, such a proceeding was absurd. in verse he calls john a prophet, and much more than a prophet, and in the next verse ( ) quotes respecting him the words of { } malachi iii. : "this is he of whom it is written: behold i send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee." it is impossible on any reasonable ground to account for the retention of such honourable mention of the baptist, if verses , were erased for such dogmatic reasons.( ) still more incomprehensible on such a hypothesis is the omission of luke vii. -- , where that generation is likened unto children playing in the market-place and calling to each other: "we piped unto you and ye danced not," and jesus continues: "for john is come neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, he hath a devil ( ). the son of man is come, eating and drinking; and ye say: behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." hahn attributes the omission of these verses to the sensuous representation they give of jesus as eating and drinking.( ) what was the use of eliminating these verses when he allowed to remain unaltered verse of the same chapter,( ) in which jesus is invited to eat with the pharisee, and goes into his house and sits down to meat? or v. -- ,( ) in which jesus accepts the feast of levi, and defends his disciples for eating and drinking against the murmurs of the scribes and pharisees? or xv. ,( ) { } where the pharisees say of him: "this man receiveth sinners and eateth with them?" how absurdly futile the omission of the one passage for dogmatic reasons, while so many others were allowed to remain unaltered.( ) the next passage to which we must refer is one of the most important in connection with marcion's docetic doctrine of the person of jesus. it is said that he omitted viii. : "and his mother and his brethren came to him and could not come at him for the crowd," and that he inserted in verse , [------]; making the whole episode in his gospel read ( ): "and it was told him by certain which said: thy mother and thy brethren stand without desiring to see thee: . but he answered and said unto them: who are my mother and brethren? my mother and my brethren are these," &c. the omission of verse is said to have been made because, according to marcion, christ was not born like an ordinary man, and consequently had neither mother nor brethren.( ) the mere fact, however, that marcion retains verse , in which the crowd simply state as a matter fully recognized, the relationship of those who were seeking jesus, renders the omission of the preceding verse useless,( ) except on the ground of mere redundancy. marcion is reported not to have had the word [------] in x. ,( ) "so that the question of the lawyer simply ran: { } "master, what shall i do to inherit life?" the omission of this word is supposed to have been made in order to make the passage refer back to the god of the old testament, who promises merely long life on earth for keeping the commandments, whilst it is only in the gospel that _eternal_ life is promised.( ) but in the corresponding passage, xviii. ,( ) the [------] is retained, and the question of the ruler is: "good master, what shall i do to inherit eternal life?" it has been argued that the introduction of the one thing still lacking (verse ) after the keeping of the law and the injunction to sell all and give to the poor, changes the context, and justifies the use there of _eternal_ life as the reward for fulfilment of the higher commandment.( ) this reasoning, however, seems to us without grounds, and merely an ingenious attempt to account for an embarrassing fact. in reality the very same context occurs in the other passage, for, explaining the meaning of the word "neighbour," love to whom is enjoined as part of the way to obtain "life," jesus inculcates the very same duty as in xviii. , of distributing to the poor (cf. x. -- ). there seems, therefore, no reasonable motive for omitting the word from the one passage whilst retaining it in the other.( ) the passage in luke xi. -- , from the concluding words of verse , "but the sign of the prophet jonah" { } was not found in marcion's gospel.( ) this omission is accounted for on the ground that such a respectful reference to the old testament was quite contrary to the system of marcion.( ) verses -- of the same chapter, containing the saying of the "wisdom of god," regarding the sending of the prophets that the jews might slay them, and their blood be required of that generation, were also omitted.( ) the reason given for this omission is, that the words of the god of the old testament are too respectfully quoted and adopted to suit the views of the heretic.( ) the words in verses -- , "and a greater than solomon--than jonah is here," might well have been allowed to remain in the text, for the superiority of christ over the kings and prophets of the old testament which is asserted directly suits and supports the system of marcion. how much less, however, is the omission of these passages to be explained upon any intelligent dogmatic principle, when we find in marcion's text the passage in which jesus justifies his conduct on the sabbath by the example of david (vi. -- ),( ) and that in which he assures the disciples of the greatness of their reward in heaven for the persecutions they were to endure: { } "for behold your reward is great in heaven: for after the same manner did their fathers unto the prophets" (vi. ).( ) as we have seen, jesus is also allowed to quote an old testament prophecy (vii. ) as fulfilled in the coming of john to prepare the way for himself. the questions which jesus puts to the scribes (xx. -- ) regarding the christ being david's son, with the quotation from ps. ex. , which marcion is stated to have retained,( ) equally refute the supposition as to his motive for "omitting" xi. ff. it has been argued with regard to the last passage that jesus merely uses the words of the old testament to meet his own theory,( ) but the dilemma in which jesus places the scribes is clearly not the real object of his question: its aim is a suggestion of the true character of the christ. but amongst his other sins with regard to luke's gospel, marcion is also accused of interpolating it. and in what way? why the heresiarch, who is so averse to all references to the old testament that he is supposed to erase them, actually, amongst his few interpolations, adds a reference to the old testament. between xvii. and (some critics say in verse ) marcion introduced the verse which is found in luke iv. : "and many lepers were in israel in the time of elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed saving naaman, the syrian."( ) now is it conceivable that a man who inserts, as it is said, references to the { } old testament into his text so gratuitously, can have been so inconsistent as to have omitted these passages because they contain similar references? we must say that the whole of the reasoning regarding these passages omitted and retained, and the fine distinctions which are drawn between them, are anything but convincing. a general theory being adopted, nothing is more easy than to harmonise everything with it in this way; nothing is more easy than to assign some reason, good or bad, apparently in accordance with the foregone conclusion, why one passage was retained, and why another was omitted, but in almost every case the reasoning might with equal propriety be reversed if the passages were so, and the retention of the omitted passage as well as the omission of that retained be quite as reasonably justified. the critics who have examined marcion's gospel do not trouble themselves to inquire if the general connection of the text be improved by the absence of passages supposed to be omitted, but simply try whether the supposed omissions are explainable on the ground of a dogmatic tendency in marcion. in fact, the argument throughout is based upon foregone conclusions, and rarely upon any solid grounds whatever. the retention of such passages as we have quoted above renders the omission of the other for dogmatic reasons quite purposeless.( ) the passage, xii. , , which argues that as the sparrows are not forgotten before god, and the hairs of our head are numbered, the disciples need not fear, was not found in mansion's gospel.( ) the supposed omission { } is explained on the ground that, according to marcion's system, god does not interest himself about such trifles as sparrows and the hairs of our head, but merely about souls.( ) that such reasoning is arbitrary, however, is apparent from the fact, that marcion's text had verse of the same chapter:( ) "consider the ravens," &c., &c., and "god feedeth them:" &c., and also v. ,( ) "but if god so clothe the grass," &c., &c., "how much more will he clothe you, o! ye of little faith?" as no one ventures to argue that marcion limited the providence of god to the ravens, and to the grass, but excluded the sparrows and the hair, no dogmatic reason can be assigned for the omission of the one, whilst the other is retained.( ) the first nine verses of ch. xiii. were likewise absent from marcion's text,( ) wherein jesus declares that like the galilæans, whose blood pilate had mixed with their sacrifices (v. , ), and the eighteen upon whom the tower in siloam fell (v. ), "except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish," (v. and ), and then recites the parable of the unfruitful fig-tree (v. -- ), which the master of the vineyard orders to be cut down (v. ), but then spares for a season (v. , ). the theory advanced to account for the asserted "omission" of these { } verses is that they could not be reconciled with marcion's system, according to which the good god never positively punishes the wicked, but merely leaves them to punish themselves in that, by not accepting the proffered grace, they have no part in the blessedness of christians.( ) in his earlier work, volkmar distinctly admitted that the whole of this passage might be omitted without prejudice to the text of luke, and that he could not state any ground, in connection with marcion's system, which rendered its omission either necessary or even conceivable. he then decided that the passage was not contained at all in the version of luke, which marcion possessed, but was inserted at a later period in our codices.( ) it was only on his second attempt to account for all omissions on dogmatic grounds that he argued as above. in like manner hilgenfeld also, with rettig, considered that the passage did not form part of the original luke, so that here again marcion's text was free from a very abrupt passage, not belonging to the more pure and primitive gospel.( ) baur recognizes not only that there is no dogmatic ground to explain the omission, but on the contrary, that the passage fully agrees with the system of marcion.( ) the total insufficiency of the argument to explain the omission, however, is apparent from the numerous passages, which were allowed to remain in the text, which still more clearly outraged this part of marcion's system. in the parable of the great supper, xiv. -- , the lord is angry (v. ), and declares that none of those who were { } bidden should taste of his supper (v. ). in xii. , jesus warns his own disciples: "fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, i say unto you: fear him." it is not permissible to argue that marcion here understands the god of the old testament, the creator, for he would thus represent his christ as forewarning his own disciples to fear the power of that very demiurge, whose reign he had come to terminate. then again, in the parable of the wise steward, and the foolish servants, xii. ff, he declares (v. ), that the lord of the foolish servant "will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers," and (vs. , ) that the servants shall be beaten with stripes, in proportion to their fault. in the parable of the nobleman who goes to a far country and leaves the ten pounds with his servants, xix. ff, the lord orders his enemies, who would not that he should reign over them, to be brought and slain before him (v. ). then, how very much there was in the epistles of paul, which he upheld, of a still more contradictory character. there is no dogmatic reason for such inconsistency.( ) marcion is accused of having falsified xiii. in the following manner: "there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see _all the just_ [------] in the kingdom of god, but you yourselves being thrust, _and bound_ [------] without." the substitution of "all the just" for "abraham, isaac, and jacob, and all the prophets," is one of those variations which the supporter of the dogmatic theory greedily lays hold of, as bearing evident tokens of falsification in anti-judaistic interest.( ) but marcion had in his gospel { } the parable of the rich man and lazarus, xvi. -- , where the beggar is carried up into abraham's bosom.( ) and again, there was the account of the transfiguration, ix. -- , in which moses and elias are seen in converse with jesus.( ) the alteration of the one passage for dogmatic reasons, whilst the parable of lazarus is retained, would have been useless. hilgenfeld, however, in agreement with baur and ritschl, has shown that marcion's reading [------] is evidently the contrast to the [------] of the preceding verse, and is superior to the canonical version, which was either altered after matth. viii. , or with the anti-marcionitish object of bringing the rejected patriarchs into recognition.( ) the whole theory in this case again goes into thin air, and it is consequently weakened in every other. marcion's gospel did not contain the parable of the prodigal son, xv. -- .( ) the omission of this passage, { } which is universally recognized as in the purest paulinian spirit, is accounted for partly on the ground that a portion of it (v. -- ) was repugnant to the ascetic discipline of marcion, to whom the killing of the fatted calf, the feasting, dancing and merry-making, must have been obnoxious, and, partly because, understanding under the similitude of the elder son the jews, and of the younger son the gentiles, the identity of the god of the jews and of the christians would be recognized.( ) there is, however, the very greatest doubt admitted as to the interpretation which marcion would be likely to put upon this parable, and certainly the representation which it gives of the gentiles, not only as received completely on a par with the jews, but as only having been lost for a time, and found again, is thoroughly in harmony with the teaching of paul, who was held by marcion to be the only true apostle. it could not, therefore, have been repugnant to him. any points of disagreement could very easily have been explained away, as his critics are so fond of asserting to be his practice in other passages.( ) as to the supposed dislike of marcion for the festive character of the parable, what object could he have had for omitting this, when he retained the parable of the { } great supper, xiv. -- ; the feast in the house of levi, v. -- ; the statements of jesus eating with the pharisees, vii. , xv. ? if marcion had any objection to such matters, he had still greater to marriage, and yet jesus justifies his disciples for eating and drinking by the similitude of a marriage feast, himself being the bridegroom: v. , , "can ye make the sons of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them: then will they fast in those days." and he bids his disciples to be ready "like men that wait for their lord, when he shall return from the wedding," (xii. ), and makes another parable on a wedding feast (xiv. -- ). leaving these passages, it is impossible to see any dogmatic reason for excluding the others.( ) the omission of a passage in every way so suitable to marcion's system as the parable of the vineyard, xx. -- , is equally unintelligible upon the dogmatic theory. marcion is accused of falsifying xvi. , by altering [------],( ) making the passage read: "but it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than for one tittle of my words to fail." the words in the canonical gospel, it is argued, were too repugnant to him to be allowed to remain unaltered, representing as they do the permanency of "the law" to which he was opposed.( ) upon this hypothesis, why did he leave { } x. f. (especially v. ) and xviii. ff, in which the keeping of the law is made essential to life? or xvii. , where jesus bids the lepers conform to the requirements of the law? or xvi. , where the answer is given to the rich man pleading for his relatives: "they have moses and the prophets, let them hear them"?(l) hilgenfeld, however, with others, points out that it has been fully proved that the reading in marcion's text is not an arbitrary alteration at all, but the original expression, and that the version in luke xvi. , on the contrary, is a variation of the original introduced to give the passage an anti-marcionitish tendency.( ) here, again, it is clear that the supposed falsification is rather a falsification on the part of the editor of the third canonical gospel.( ) one more illustration may be given. marcion is accused of omitting from xix. the words: "forasmuch as he also is a son of abraham," [------] leaving merely: "and jesus said unto him: this day is salvation come to this house." marcion's system, it is said, could not tolerate the phrase which was erased.( ) it was one, however, eminently in the spirit of his apostle paul, and in his favourite epistle to the galatians he retained the very parallel { } passage iii. , "ye know, therefore, that they which are of faith, these are the sons of abraham."( ) how could he, therefore, find any difficulty in such words addressed to the repentant zacchaeus, who had just believed in the mission of christ? moreover, why should he have erased the words here, and left them standing in xiii. , in regard to the woman healed of the "spirit of infirmity:" "and ought not this woman, _being a daughter of abraham_, whom satan hath bound, lo! these eighteen years, to be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?" no reasoning can explain away the substantial identity of the two phrases. upon what principle of dogmatic interest, then, can marcion have erased the one while he retained the other?( ) we have taken a very few passages for illustration, and treated them very briefly, but it may roundly be said that there is scarcely a single variation of marcion's text regarding which similar reasons are not given, and which do not present similar anomalies in consequence of what has elsewhere been retained.( ) as we have already stated, much that is really contradictory to marcion's system was found in his text, and much which either is not opposed or is favourable to it is omitted { } and cannot be set down to arbitrary alteration. moreover, it has never been shown that the supposed alterations were made by marcion himself,( ) and till this is done the pith of the whole theory is wanting. there is no principle of intelligent motive which can account for the anomalies presented by marcion's gospel, considered as a version of luke mutilated and falsified in the interest of his system. the contrast of what is retained with that which is omitted reduces the hypothesis _ad absurdum_. marcion was too able a man to do his work so imperfectly, if he had proposed to assimilate the gospel of luke to his own views. as it is avowedly necessary to explain away by false and forced interpretations requiring intricate definitions( ) very much of what was allowed to remain in his text, it is inconceivable that he should not have cut the gordian knot with the same unscrupulous knife with which it is asserted he excised the rest the ingenuity of most able and learned critics endeavouring to discover whether a motive in the interest of his system cannot be conceived for every alteration is, notwithstanding the evident scope afforded by the procedure, often foiled. yet a more elastic hypothesis could not possibly have been advanced, and that the text obstinately refuses to fit into it, is even more than could have been expected. marcion is like a prisoner at the bar without witnesses, who is treated from the first as guilty, attacked by able and passionate adversaries who warp every possible circumstance against him, and yet who cannot be convicted. the foregone conclusion by which every supposed omission from his gospel is explained, is, as we have shown, almost in { } every case contradicted by passages which have been allowed to remain, and this is rendered more significant by the fact, which is generally admitted, that marcion's text contains many readings which are manifestly superior to, and more original than, the form in which the passages stand in our third synoptic.( ) the only one of these to which we shall refer is the interesting variation from the passage in luke xi. , in the substitution of a prayer for the holy spirit for the "hallowed be thy name,"--[------]. the former is recognized to be the true original reading. this phrase is evidently referred to in v. . we are, therefore, indebted to marcion for the correct version of "the lord's prayer."( ) there can be no doubt that marcion's gospelbore great analogy to our luke, although it was very considerably shorter. it is, however, unnecessary to repeat that there were many gospels in the second century which, although nearly related to those which have become canonical, were independent works, and the most favourable interpretation which can be given of the relationship between our three synoptics leaves them very much in a line with marcion's work. his gospel was chiefly distinguished { } by a shorter text,( ) but besides large and important omissions there are a few additions,( ) and very many variations of text. the whole of the first two chapters of luke, as well as all the third, was wanting, with the exception of part of the first verse of the third chapter, which, joined to iv. , formed the commencement of the gospel. of chapter iv. verses -- , -- and were likewise probably absent. some of the other more important omissions are xi. -- , -- , xiii. -- , -- , xv. -- , xvii. -- (probably), xviii. -- , xix. -- , xx. -- , -- , xxi. -- , , -- > xxii. -- , -- , -- , -- , and there is great doubt about the concluding verses of xxiv. from to the end, but it may have terminated with v. . it is not certain whether the order was the same as luke,( ) but there are instances of decided variation, especially at the opening. as the peculiarities of the opening variations have had an important effect in inclining some critics towards the acceptance of the mutilation hypothesis,( ) it may be well for us briefly to examine the more important amongst them. marcion's gospel is generally said to have commenced thus: "in the fifteenth year of the reign of tiberius cæsar, jesus came down to capernaum, a city of galilee."( ) { } there are various slightly differing readings of this. epiphanius gives the opening words, [------]. tertullian has: anno quintodecimo principatus tiberiani.... de-scendisse in civitatem galilsææ capharnaum."( ) the [-------]s of epiphanius has permitted the conjecture that there might have been an additional indication of the time, such as "pontius pilate being governor of judæa,"( ) but this has not been generally adopted.( ) it is not necessary for us to discuss the sense in which the "came down" [------] was interpreted, since it is the word used in luke. marcion's gospel then proceeds with iv. : "and taught them on the sabbath days, (v. ), and they were exceedingly astonished at his teaching, for his word was power." then follow vs. -- containing the healing of the man with an unclean spirit,( ) and of simon's wife's mother, with the important omission of the expression "of nazareth" (najapipc) after "jesus" in the cry of the possessed (v. ). the vs. -- immediately _follow_ iv. , with important { } omissions and variations. in iv. , where jesus comes to nazareth, the words "where he had been brought up" are omitted, as is also the concluding phrase "and stood up to read."( ) verses -- , in which jesus reads from isaiah, are altogether wanting.( ) volkmar omits the whole of v. , hilgenfeld only the first half down to the sitting down, retaining the rest; hahn retains from "and he sat down" to the end.( ) of v. only: "he began to speak to them" is retained.( ) from v. the concluding phrase: "and said: is not this joseph's son" is omitted,( ) as are also the words "in thy country" from v. .( ) verse , containing the proverb: "a prophet has no honour" is wholly omitted,( ) but the best critics differ regarding the two following verses -- ; they are omitted according to hahn, ritschl and de wette,( ) but retained by volkmar and hilgenfeld.( ) verse , { } referring to the leprosy of naaman, which, it will be remembered, is interpolated at xvii. , is omitted here by most critics, but retained by vojkmar.( ) verses -- come next,( ) and the four verses iv. -- , which then immediately follow, complete the chapter. this brief analysis, with the accompanying notes, illustrates the uncertainty of the text, and, throughout the whole gospel, conjecture similarly plays the larger part. we do not propose to criticise minutely the various conclusions arrived at as to the state of the text, but must emphatically remark that where there is so little certainty there cannot be any safe ground for delicate deductions regarding motives and sequences of matter. nothing is more certain than that, if we criticise and compare the synoptics on the same principle, we meet with the most startling results and the most irreconcileable difficulties.( ) the opening of marcion's gospel is more free from abruptness and crudity than that of luke. it is not necessary to show that the first three chapters of luke present very many differences from the other synoptics. mark omits them altogether, and they do not even agree with the account in matthew. some of the oldest gospels of which we have any knowledge, such as the gospel according to the hebrews, are said not to have had the narrative of the first two chapters at all,( ) and there is much more than doubt as to their originality. the mere omission of the history of { } the infancy, &c., from mark, however, renders it unnecessary to show that the absence of these chapters from marcion's gospel has the strongest support and justification. now luke's account of the early events and geography of the gospel history is briefly as follows: nazareth is the permanent dwelling-place of joseph and mary,( ) but on account of the census they travel to bethlehem, where jesus is born;( ) and after visiting jerusalem to present him at the temple,( ) they return "to their own city nazareth."( ) after the baptism and temptation jesus comes to nazareth "where he had been brought up,"( ) and in the course of his address to the people he says: "ye will surely say unto me this proverb: physician heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in capernaum do also here in thy country."( ) no mention, however, has before this been made of capernaum, and no account has been given of any works done there; but, on the contrary, after escaping from the angry mob at nazareth, jesus goes for the first time to capernaum, which, on being thus first mentioned, is particularized as "a city of galilee,"( ) where he heals a man who had an unclean spirit, in the synagogue, who addresses him as "jesus of nazareth;"( ) and the fame of him goes throughout the country.( ) he cures simon's wife's mother of a fever( ) and when the sun is set they bring the sick and he heals them.( ) the account in matthew contradicts this in many points, some of which had better be indicated here. jesus is born in bethlehem, which is the ordinary { } dwelling-place of the family;( ) his parents fly thence with him into egypt,( ) and on their return, they dwell "in a city called nazareth; that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets: he shall be called a nazarene."( ) after john's imprisonment, jesus leaves nazareth, and goes to dwell in capernaum.( ) from that time he begins to preach.( ) here then, he commences his public career in capernaum. in mark, jesus comes from nazareth to be baptized,( ) and after the imprisonment of john, he comes into galilee preaching.( ) in capernaum, he heals the man of the unclean spirit, and simon's wife's mother,( ) and then retires to a solitary place,( ) returns after some days to capernaum( ) without going to nazareth at all, and it is only at a later period that he comes to his own country, and quotes the proverb regarding a prophet.( ) it is evident from this comparison, that there is very considerable difference between the three synoptics, regarding the outset of the career of jesus, and that there must have been decided elasticity in the tradition, and variety in the early written accounts of this part of the gospel narrative. luke alone commits the error of making jesus appear in the synagogue at nazareth, and refer to works wrought at capernaum, before any mention had been made of his having preached or worked wonders there to justify the allusions ii. . we need not pause here to point out that there is no such prophecy known in the old testament. the reference may very probably bo a singularly mistaken application of the word in isaiah xi. , the hebrew word for branch being [----] nazer. { } and the consequent agitation. it is obvious that there has been confusion in the arrangement of the third synoptic and a transposition of the episodes, clearly pointing to a combination of passages from other sources.( ) now marcion's gospel did not contain these anomalies. it represented jesus as first appearing in capernaum, teaching in the synagogue, and performing mighty works there, and _then_ going to nazareth, and addressing the people with the natural reference to the previous events at capernaum, and in this it is not only more consecutive, but also adheres more closely to the other two synoptics. that luke happens to be the only one of our canonical gospels, which has the words with which marcion's gospel commences, is no proof that these words were original in that work, and not found in several of the writings which existed before the third synoptic was compiled. indeed, the close relationship between the first three gospels is standing testimony to the fact that one gospel was built upon the basis of others previously existing. this which has been called "the chief prop of the mutilation hypothesis,"( ) has really no solid ground to stand on beyond the accident that only one of three gospels survives out of many which may have had the phrase. the fact that marcion's gospel really had the words of luke, moreover, is mere conjecture, inasmuch as epiphanius, who alone gives the greek, shows a distinct variation of reading. he has: [------] cf. luke iv. ; matt. viii. ; mark vi. -- . we do not go into the question as to the sufficiency of the motives ascribed for the agitation at nazareth, or the contradiction between the facts narrated as to the attempt to kill jesus, and the statement of their wonder at his gracious words, v. , &o. there is no evidence where the various discrepancies arose, and no certain conclusions can be based upon such arguments. { } [------].( ) luke reads: [------]. we do not of course lay much stress upon this, but the fact that there is a variation should be noticed. critics quietly assume, because there is a difference, that epiphanius has abbreviated, but that is by no means sure. in any case, instances could be multiplied to show that if one of our synoptic gospels were lost, one of the survivors would in this manner have credit for passages which it had in reality either derived from the lost gospel, or with it drawn from a common original source. now starting from the undeniable fact that the synoptic gospels are in no case purely original independent works, but are based upon older writings, or upon each other, each gospel remodelling and adding to already existing materials, as the author of the third gospel, indeed, very frankly and distinctly indicates,( ) it seems a bold thing to affirm that marcion's gospel must necessarily have been derived from the latter. ewald has made a minute analysis of the synoptics assigning the materials of each to what he considers their original source. we do not of course attach any very specific importance to such results, for it is clear that they must to a great extent be arbitrary and incapable of proof, but being effected without any reference to the question before us, it may be interesting to compare ewald's conclusions regarding the parallel part of luke, with the first chapter of marcion's gospel. ewald details the materials from which our synoptic gospels luke i. -- . he professes to write in order the things in which theophilus had already been instructed, not to tell something new, but merely that he might know the certainty thereof. { } were derived, and the order of their composition as follows, each synoptic of course making use of the earlier materials: i. the oldest gospel. ii. the collection of discourses (spruchsammlung). iii. mark. iv. the book of earlier history. v. our present matthew. vi. the sixth recognizable book. vii. the seventh book. viii. the eighth book; and ix. luke.( ) now the only part of our third canonical gospel corresponding with any part of the first chapter of marcion's gospel which ewald ascribes to the author of our actual luke is the opening date.( ) the passage to which the few opening words are joined, and which constitute the commencement of marcion's gospel, luke iv. -- , is a section commencing with verse , and extending to the end of the chapter, thereby including verses -- , which ewald assigns to mark.( ) verses -- , which immediately follow, also form a complete and isolated passage assigned by ewald, to the "sixth recognizable book."( ) verses -- , also are the whole the verses iv. -- , which. volkmar wished to include, but which all other critics reject (see p. , note ), from marcion's text, ewald likewise identifies as an isolated couple of verses by the author of our luke inserted between episodes derived from other written sources. cf. ewald, . c. { } of another isolated section attributed by ewald, to the "book of earlier history," whilst -- , in like manner form another complete and isolated episode, assigned by him to the "eighth recognizable book."( ) according to ewald, therefore, luke's gospel at this place is a mere patchwork of older writings, and if this be in any degree accepted, as in the abstract, indeed, it is by the great mass of critics, then the gospel of marcion might be an arrangement different from luke of materials not his, but previously existing, and of which, therefore, there is no warrant to limit the use and reproduction to the canonical gospel. the course pursued by critics, with regard to marcion's gospel, is necessarily very unsatisfactory. they commence with a definite hypothesis, and try whether all the peculiarities of the text may not be more or less well explained by it. on the other hand, the attempt to settle the question by a comparison of the reconstructed text with luke's is equally inconclusive. the determination of priority of composition from internal evidence, where there are no chronological references, must as a general rule be arbitrary, and can rarely be accepted as final. internal evidence would, indeed, decidedly favour the priority of marcion's gospel. the great uncertainty of the whole system, even when applied under the most favourable circumstances, is well illustrated by the contradictory results at which critics have arrived as to the order of production and dependence on each other of our three synoptics. without going into details, we may say that critics who are all agreed upon the mutual dependence of those gospels have variously arranged them in the following order: i. matthew-- { } mark--luke.( ) ii. matthew--luke--mark.( ) iii. mark--matthew--luke.( ) iv. mark--luke--matthew.( ) v. luke--matthew--mark.( ) vi. all three out of common written sources.( ) were we to state the various theories still more in detail, we might largely increase the variety of conclusions. these, however, suffice to show the uncertainty of results derived from internal evidence. it is always assumed that marcion altered a gospel to suit his own particular system, but as one of his most orthodox critics, while asserting that luke's narrative lay at the basis of his gospel, admits: "it is not equally clear that all the changes were due to marcion himself;"( ) and, although he considers that "some of the omissions can be explained by his peculiar doctrines," he continues: "others are unlike arbitrary corrections, and must be considered as various readings of the greatest interest, dating as they do from a time anterior to all of course we only pretend to indicate a few of the critics who adopt each order. so bengel, bolton, ebrard, grotius, hengstenberg, hug, hilgenfeld, holtzmann, mill, seiler, townson, wetstein. so ammon, baur, bleek, delitzsch, fritzsche, gfrorer, griesbach, kern, eostlin, neudecker, saunier, schwarz, schwegler, sieffert, stroth, theilo, owon, paulus, de wette. so credner, ewald, hitzig, lachmann, (?) xteuss, bitschl, meyer, storr, thiersch. b. bauer, hitzig (?) schnockonburger, volkmar, weisse, wilke. busching, eyanson. bortholdt, le clerc, corrodi, eichhorn, gratz, hanlein, koppe, kuinoel, leasing, marsh, michaelis, niemeyer, semler, schleiermacher, schmidt, weber. this view was partly shared by many of those mentioned under other orders. { } other authorities in our possession."( ) now, undoubtedly, the more developed forms of the gospel narrative were the result of additions, materially influenced by dogmatic and other reasons, made to earlier and more fragmentary works, but it is an argument contrary to general critical experience to affirm that a gospel, the distinguishing characteristic of which is greater brevity, was produced by omissions in the interest of a system from a longer work. in the earlier editions of this work, we contended that the theory that marcion's gospel was a mutilated form of our third synoptic had not been established, and that more probably it was an earlier work, from which our gospel might have been elaborated. we leave the statement of the case, so far, nearly in its former shape, in order that the true nature of the problem and the varying results and gradual development of critical opinion may be better understood. since the sixth edition of this work was completed, however, a very able examination of marcion's gospel has been made by dr. sanday,( ) which has convinced us that our earlier hypothesis is untenable, that the portions of our third synoptic excluded from marcion's gospel were really written by the same pen which composed the mass of the work and, consequently, that our third synoptic existed in his time, and was substantially in the hands of marcion. this conviction is mainly the result of the linguistic analysis, sufficiently indicated by dr. sanday and, since, exhaustively carried out for ourselves. we still consider the argument based upon the mere dogmatic views of marcion, which has hitherto been almost { } exclusively relied on, quite inconclusive by itself, but the linguistic test, applied practically for the first time in this controversy by dr. sanday, must, we think, prove irresistible to all who are familiar with the comparatively limited vocabulary of new testament writers. throughout the omitted sections, peculiarities of language and expression abound which clearly distinguish the general composer of the third gospel, and it is, consequently, not possible reasonably to maintain that these sections are additions subsequently made by a different hand, which seems to be the only legitimate course open to those who would deny that marcion's gospel originally contained them. here, then, we find evidence of the existence of our third synoptic about the year , and it may of course be inferred that it must have been composed at least some time before that date. it is important, however, to estimate aright the facts actually before us and the deductions which may be drawn from them. the testimony of marcion does not throw any light upon the authorship or origin of the gospel of which he made use. its superscription was simply: "the gospel," or, "the gospel of the lord" [------],( ) and no author's name was attached to it. the heresiarch did not pretend to have written it himself, nor did he ascribe it to any other person. tertullian, in fact, reproaches him with its anonymity. "and here { } already i might make a stand," he says at the very opening of his attack on marcion's gospel, "contending that a work should not be recognized which does not hold its front erect... which does not give a pledge of its trustworthiness by the fulness of its title, and the due declaration of its author."( ) not only did marcion himself not in any way connect the name of luke with his gospel, but his followers repudiated the idea that luke was its author.( ) in establishing the substantial identity of marcion's gospel and our third synoptic, therefore, no advance is made towards establishing the authorship of luke. the gospel remains anonymous still. on the other hand we ascertain the important fact that, so far from its having any authoritative or infallible character at that time, marcion regarded our synoptic as a work perverted by jewish influences, and requiring to be freely expurgated in the interests of truth.( ) amended by very considerable omissions and alterations, marcion certainly held it in high respect as a record of the teaching of jesus, but beyond this circumstance, and the mere fact of its existence in his day, we learn nothing from the evidence of marcion. it can scarcely be maintained that this does much to authenticate the third synoptic as a record of miracles and a witness for the reality of divine revelation. { } there is no evidence whatever that marcion had any knowledge of the other canonical gospels in any form.( ) none of his writings are extant, and no direct assertion is made even by the fathers that he knew them, although from their dogmatic point of view they assume that these gospels existed from the very first, and therefore insinuate that as he only recognized one gospel, he rejected the rest.( ) when irenæus says: "he persuaded his disciples that he himself was more veracious than were the apostles who handed down the gospel, though he delivered to them not the gospel, but part of the gospel,"( ) it is quite clear that he speaks of the gospel--the good tidings--christianity--and not of specific written gospels. in another passage which is referred to by apologists, irenæus says of the marcionites that they have asserted: "that even the apostles proclaimed the gospel still under the influence of jewish sentiments; but that they themselves are more sound and more judicious than the apostles. wherefore also marcion and his followers have had recourse to mutilating the scriptures, not recognizing some books at all, but curtailing the gospel according to luke and the epistles of paul; these they say are alone authentic which they themselves have abbreviated."( ) { } these remarks chiefly refer to the followers of marcion, and as we have shown, when treating of valentinus, irenæus is expressly writing against members of heretical sects living in his own day and not of the founders of those sects.( ) the marcionites of the time of irenæus no doubt deliberately rejected the gospels, but it does, not by any means follow that marcion himself knew anything of them. as yet we have not met with any evidence even of their existence. the evidence of tertullian is not a whit more valuable. in the passage usually cited, he says: "but marcion, lighting upon the epistle of paul to the gaia-tians, in which he reproaches even apostles for not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, as well as accuses certain false apostles of perverting the gospel of christ, tries with all his might to destroy the status of those gospels which are put forth as genuine and under the name of apostles or at least of contemporaries of the apostles, in order, be it known, to confer upon his own the credit which he takes from them."( ) now here again it is clear that tertullian is simply applying, by inference, marcion's views with regard to the preaching of the gospel by the two parties in the church, represented by the apostle paul and the "pillar" apostles whose leaning to jewish doctrines he condemned, to the written gospels recognized in his day though not in marcion's. "it is uncertain," says even canon westcott, { } "whether tertullian in the passage quoted speaks from a knowledge of what marcion may have written on the subject, or simply from his own point of sight."( ) any doubt is, however, removed on examining the context, for tertullian proceeds to argue that if paul censured peter, john and james, it was for changing their company from respect of persons, and similarly, "if false apostles crept in," they betrayed their character by insisting on jewish observances. "so that it was _not on account of their preaching_, but of their conversation that they were pointed out by paul,"( ) and he goes on to argue that if marcion thus accuses apostles of having depraved the gospel by their dissimulation, he accuses christ in accusing those whom christ selected.( ) it is palpable, therefore, that marcion, in whatever he may have written, referred to the preaching of the gospel, or christianity, by apostles who retained their jewish prejudices in favour of circumcision and legal observances, and not to written gospels. tertullian merely assumes, with his usual audacity, that the church had the four gospels from the very first, and therefore that marcion, who had only one gospel, knew the others and deliberately rejected them. { } chapter viii. tatian--dionysius of corinth from marcion we now turn to tatian, another so-called heretic leader. tatian, an assyrian by birth,( ) embraced christianity and became a disciple of justin martyr( ) in rome, sharing with him, as it seems, the persecution excited by crescens the cynic( ) to which justin fell a victim. after the death of justin, tatian, who till then had continued thoroughly orthodox, left rome, and joined the sect of the encratites, of which, however, he was not the founder,( ) and became the leading exponent of their austere and ascetic doctrines.( ) the only one of his writings which is still extant is his "oration to the greeks"[------]. this work was written after the death of justin, for in it he refers to that event,( ) and it is generally dated between { } a. d. - . (l) teschendorf does not assert that there is any quotation in this address taken from the synoptic gospels;( ) and canon westcott only affirms that it contains a clear reference" to "a parable recorded by st. matthew," and he excuses the slightness of this evidence by adding: "the absence of more explicit testimony to the books of the new testament is to be accounted for by the style of his writing, and not by his unworthy estimate of their importance."( ) this remark is without foundation, as we know nothing whatever with regard to tatian's estimate of any such books. the supposed "clear reference" is as follows: "for by means of a certain hidden treasure [------] he made himself lord of all that we possess, in digging for which though we were covered with dust, yet we give it the occasion of falling into our hands and abiding with us."( ) this is claimed as a reference to matt. xiii. : "the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hidden [------] in the field, which a man found and hid, and for his joy he goeth and selleth all that he hath and buyeth that field." so faint a similarity could not prove anything, but it is evident that there are decided differences here. were the probability fifty times greater than it is that tatian had in his mind the parable, which is reported in our first gospel, nothing could be more unwarrantable than the deduction that he must have derived it from our matthew, and not from any other of the numerous gospels which we know to have early been in circulation. ewald ascribes the parable in matthew originally to the "spruchsammlung" or collection of discourses, the second of the four works out of which he considers our first synoptic to have been compiled.( ) as evidence even for the existence of our first canonical gospel, no such anonymous allusion could have the slightest value. although neither tischendorf nor canon westcott think it worth while to refer to it, some apologists claim another passage in the oration as a reference to our third synoptic. "laugh ye: nevertheless you shall weep."( ) this is compared with luke vi. : "woe unto you that laugh now: for ye shall mourn and weep,"( ) here again, it is impossible to trace a reference in the words of tatian specially to our third gospel, and manifestly nothing could be more foolish than to build upon such vague similarity any hypothesis of tatian's acquaintance with luke. if there be one part of the gospel which was more known than another in the first ages of christianity, it was the sermon on the mount, and there can be no doubt that many evangelical works now lost contained versions of it. ewald likewise assigns this passage of luke originally to the spruchsammlung, and no one can doubt that the saying was recorded long before the writer of the third gospel { } undertook to compile evangelical history, as so many had done before him. further on, however, canon westcott says: "it can be gathered from clement of alexandria... that he (tatian) endeavoured to derive authority for his peculiar opinions from the epistles to the corinthians and galatians, and probably from the epistle to the ephesians, and the gospel of st. matthew."( ) the allusion here is to a passage in the stromata of clement, in which reference is supposed by the apologist to be made to tatian. no writer, however, is named, and clement merely introduces his remark by the words: "a certain person," [------] and then proceeds to give his application of the saviour's words "not to treasure upon earth where moth and rust corrupt" [------].( ) the parallel passage in matthew vi. , reads: "lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt," [------]. canon westcott, it is true, merely suggests that "probably" this may be ascribed to tatian, but it is almost absolutely certain that it was not attributed to him by clement. tatian is several times referred to in the course of the same chapter, and his words are continued by the use of [------] or [------], and it is in the highest degree improbable that clement should introduce another quotation from him in such immediate context by the vague and distant reference "a certain person" [------]. on the other hand reference is made in the chapter to on the canon, p. . [in the th edition dr. westcott has altered the "probably" of the above sentence to "perhaps," and in a note has added: "these two last references are from an anonymous citation [------] which has been commonly assigned to tatian." p. , n. .] { } other writers and sects, to one of whom with infinitely greater propriety this expression applies. no weight, therefore, could be attached to any such passage in connection with tatian. moreover the quotation not only does not agree with our synoptic, but may much more probably have been derived from the gospel according to the hebrews.( ) it will be remembered that justin martyr quotes the same passage, with the same omission of "[------]," from a gospel different from our synoptics.( ) tatian, however, is claimed by apologists as a witness for the existence of our gospels--more than this he could not possibly be--principally on the ground that his gospel was called by some diatessaron [------] or "by four," and it is assumed to have been a harmony of four gospels. the work is no longer extant and, as we shall see, our information regarding it is of the scantiest and most unsatisfactory description. critics have arrived at very various conclusions with regard to the composition of the work. some of course affirm, with more or less of hesitation nevertheless, that it was nothing else than a harmony of our four canonical gospels;( ) many of these, however, are constrained to admit that it was also partly based upon the gospel according to the hebrews.( ) some maintain that it was { } a harmony of our three synoptics together with the gospel according to the hebrews;( ) whilst many deny that it was composed of our gospels at all,( ) and either declare it to have been a harmony of the gospel according to the hebrews with three other gospels whose identity cannot be determined, or that it was simply the gospel according to the hebrews itself,( ) by which name, as epiphanius states, it was called by some in his day.( ) tatian's gospel, however, was not only called diatessaron, but, according to victor of capua, it was also called diapente [------] "by five,"( ) a complication which shows the incorrectness of the ecclesiastical theory of its composition. tischendorf, anxious to date tatian's gospel as early as possible, says that in all probability it was composed earlier than the address to the greeks.( ) of this, however, he does not offer any evidence, and upon { } examination it is very evident that the work was, on the contrary, composed or adopted after the oration and his avowal of heretical opinions. theodoret states that tatian had in it omitted the genealogies and all other passages showing that christ was born of david according to the flesh, and he condemned the work, and caused it to be abandoned, on account of its evil design.( ) if the assumption be correct, therefore, as tischendorf maintains, that tatian altered our gospels, and did not merely from the first, like his master justin, make use of gospels different from those which afterwards became canonical, he must have composed the work after the death of justin, up to which time he is stated to have remained quite orthodox.( ) the date may with much greater probability be set between a.d. -- .( ) the earliest writer who mentions tatian's gospel is eusebius,( ) who wrote some century and a half after its supposed composition, without, however, having himself seen the work at all, or being really acquainted with its nature and contents.( ) eusebius says: "tatian, however, their former chief, having put together a certain amalgamation and collection, i know not how, of the gospels, named this the diatessaron, which even now is current with some."( ) { } it is clear that such hearsay information is not to be relied on. neither irenæus, clement of alexandria, nor jerome, who refer to other works of tatian, make any mention of this one. epiphanius, however, does so, but, like eusebius, evidently without having himself seen it.( ) this second reference to tatian's gospel is made upwards of two centuries after its supposed composition. epiphanius says: "it is said that he (tatian) composed the diatessaron, which is called by some the gospel according to the hebrews."( ) it must be observed that it is not said that tatian himself gave this gospel the name of diates-saron,( ) but on the contrary the expression of epiphanius implies that he did not do so,( ) and the fact that it was also called by some the gospel according to the hebrews, and diapente, shows that the work had no superscription from tatian of a contradictory character. theodoret, bishop of cyrus (+ ), is the next writer who mentions tatian's gospel, and he is the only one who had personally seen it he says: "he (tatian) also composed the gospel which is called _diatessaron_, excising the genealogies and all the other parts which declare that the lord was born of the seed of david according to the flesh. this was used not only by those of his own sect, but also by those who held the apostolic doctrines, who did not perceive the evil of the composition, but made use of the book in simplicity on account of its conciseness. i myself found upwards of two hundred such books held in honour among our churches, and collecting them all together, i had them put aside and, instead, introduced the gospels of the four evangelists." again it must be observed that theodoret does not say that the gospel of tatian _was_ a diatessaron, but merely that it was called so [------].( ) after quoting this passage, and that from epiphanius, canon westcott says with an assurance which, considering the nature of the evidence, is singular:--"not only then was the diatessaron grounded on the four canonical gospels, but in its general form it was so orthodox as to enjoy a wide ecclesiastical popularity. the heretical character of the book was not evident upon the surface of it, and consisted rather in faults of defect than in erroneous teaching. theodoret had certainly examined it, and he, like earlier writers, regarded it as a compilation from the four gospels. he speaks of omissions which were at least in part natural in a harmony, but notices no such apocryphal additions as would have found place in any gospel not derived from canonical sources."( ) now it must be remembered that the evidence regarding tatian's gospel is of the very vaguest description. it is not mentioned by any writer until a century and a half after the date of its supposed on the canon, p. . [in the th edition, the first sentence in the above passage is altered to: "from this statement it is clear that the diatessaron was so orthodox as to enjoy a wide ecclesiastical popularity." p. .] { } composition, and then only referred to by eusebius, who had not seen the work, and candidly confesses his ignorance with regard to it, so that a critic who is almost as orthodox as canon westcott himself acknowledges: "for the truth is that we know no more about tatian's work than what eusebius, who never saw it, knew."( ) the only other writer who refers to it, epiphanius, had not seen it either, and while showing that the title of diatessaron had not been given to it by tatian himself, he states the important fact that some called it the gospel according to the hebrews. theodoret, the last writer who mentions it, and of whom dr. donaldson also says: "theodoret's information cannot be depended upon,"( ) not only does not say that it is based upon our four gospels, but, on the contrary, points out that tatian's gospel did not contain the genealogies and passages tracing the descent of jesus through the race of david, which our synoptics possess, and he so much condemned the mischievous design of the work that he confiscated the copies in circulation in his diocese as heretical. canon westcott's assertion that theodoret regarded it as a compilation of our four gospels is most arbitrary. omissions, as he himself points out, are natural to a harmony, and conciseness certainly would be the last quality for which it could have been so highly prized, if every part of the four gospels had been retained. the omission of the parts referred to, which are equally omitted from the canonical fourth gospel, could not have been sufficient to merit the condemnation of the work as heretical, and had tatian's gospel not been different in various respects from our four gospels, such summary treatment would have been totally { } unwarrantable. the statement, moreover, that in place of tatian's gospel, theodoret "introduced the gospels of the four evangelists," seems to indicate that the displaced gospel was not a compilation from them, but a substantially different work. had this not been the case, theodoret would naturally have qualified such an expression. speaking of the difficulty of distinguishing tatian's harmony from others which must, the writer supposes, have been composed in his time, dr. donaldson points out: "and then we must remember that the harmony of tatian was confounded with the gospel according to the hebrews; and it is not beyond the reach of possibility that theodoret should have made some such mistake."( ) that is to say, that the only writer who refers to tatian's gospel who professes to have seen the work is not only "not to be depended on," but may actually have mistaken for it the gospel according to the hebrews. there is, therefore, no authority for saying that tatian's gospel was a harmony of four gospels at all, and the name diatessaron was not only not given by tatian himself to the work, but was probably the usual foregone conclusion of the christians of the third and fourth centuries, that everything in the shape of evangelical literature must be dependent on the gospels adopted by the church. those, however, who called the gospel used by tatian the gospel according to the hebrews must apparently have read the work, and all that we know confirms their conclusion. the gospel was, in point of fact, found in wide circulation precisely in the places in which, earlier, the gospel according to the hebrews was more particularly current.( ) the singular { } fact that the earliest reference to tatian's "harmony," is made a century and a half after its supposed composition, and that no writer before the fifth century had seen the work itself, indeed that only two writers before that period mention it at all, receives its natural explanation in the conclusion that tatian did not compose any harmony at all, but simply made use of the same gospel as his master justin martyr, namely, the gospel according to the hebrews,( ) by which name his gospel had been actually called by those best informed. although theodoret, writing in the fifth century, says in the usual arbitrary manner of early christian writers, that tatian "excised" from his gospel the genealogies and certain passages found in the synoptics, he offers no explanation or proof of his assertion, and the utmost that can be received is that tatian's gospel did not contain them.( ) did he omit them or merely use a gospel which never included them? the latter is the more probable conclusion. neither justin's gospel nor the gospel according to the hebrews contained the genealogies or references to the son of david, and why, as credner suggests, should tatian have taken the trouble to prepare a harmony with these omissions when he already found one such as he desired in justin's gospel? tatian's gospel, like that of his master justin, or the gospel according to the hebrews, was different from, yet nearly related to, our canonical gospels, and as we have already seen, justin's gospel, like tatian's, was considered by many to be a harmony of our gospels.( ) no { } one seems to have seen tatian's "harmony," probably for the very simple reason that there was no such work, and the real gospel used by him was that according to the hebrews, as some distinctly and correctly called it. the name diatessaron is first heard of in a work of the fourth century, when it is naturally given by people accustomed to trace every such work to our four gospels, but as we have clearly seen, there is not up to the time of tatian any evidence even of the existence of three of our gospels, and much less of the four in a collected form. here is an attempt to identify a supposed, but not demonstrated, harmony of gospels whose separate existence has not been heard of. even dr. westcott states that tatian's diatessaron "is apparently the first recognition of a fourfold gospel,"( ) but, as we have seen, that recognition emanates only from a writer of the fourth century who had not seen the work of which he speaks. no such modern ideas, based upon mere foregone conclusions, can be allowed to enter into a discussion regarding a work dating from the time of tatian.( ) the fact that the work found by theodoret in his diocese was used by orthodox christians without dr. lightfoot (contemp. rev., - , p. ) refers to an apocryphal work, "the doctrine of addai," recently edited and published by dr. phillips, in which it is stated that a large multitude assembled daily at edessa for prayer and the reading of the old testament, "and the new of the diatessaron." dr. lightfoot assumes that this is tatian's gospel. even if it were so, however, we cannot discover in this any addition to our information regarding the composition of the work. we have already the fuller statement of theodoret respecting the use of tatian's work in the churches of his diocese, so that beyond an interesting reference, no fresh light is thrown upon the question by the phrase quoted. but we cannot see any ground for asserting that the diatessaron here spoken of was tatian's gospel. on the contrary, it seems perfectly clear that the writer speaks only of the four gospels of the new testament. { } consciousness of its supposed heterodoxy, is quite consistent with the fact that it was the gospel according to the hebrews, which at one time was in very general use, but later gradually became an object of suspicion and jealousy in the church as our canonical gospels took its place. the manner in which theodoret dealt with tatian's gospel, or that "according to the hebrews," recalls the treatment by serapion of another form of the same work: the gospel according to peter. he found that work in circulation and greatly valued amongst the christians of rhossus, and allowed them peaceably to retain it for a time, until, alarmed at the docetic heresy, he more closely examined the gospel, and discovered in it what he considered heretical matter.( ) the gospel according to the hebrews, which narrowly missed a permanent place in the canon of the church, might well seem orthodox to the simple christians of cyrus, yet as different from, though closely related to, the canonical gospels, it would seem heretical to their bishop. as different from the gospels of the four evangelists, it was doubtless suppressed by theodoret with perfect indifference as to whether it were called tatian's gospel or the gospel according to the hebrews. it is obvious that there is no evidence of any value connecting tatian's gospel with those in our canon. we know so little about the work in question, indeed, that as dr. donaldson frankly admits, "we should not be able to identify it, even if it did come down to us, unless it told us something reliable about itself."( ) its earlier history is enveloped in obscurity, and as canon westcott observes: "the later history of the diatessaron is { } involved in confusion."( ) we have seen that in the sixth century it was described by victor of capua as diapente, "by five," instead of "by four." it was also confounded with another harmony written, not long after tatian's day, by ammonius of alexandria (+ ). dionysius bar-salibi,( ) a writer of the latter half of the twelfth century, mentions that the syrian ephrem, about the middle of the fourth century, wrote a commentary on the diatessaron of tatian, which diatessaron commenced with the opening words of the fourth gospel: "in the beginning was the word." the statement of bar-salibi, however, is contradicted by gregory bar-hebraeus, bishop of tagrit, who says that ephrem syrus wrote his commentary on the diatessaron of ammonius, and that this diatessaron commenced with the words of the fourth gospel: "in the beginning was the word."( ) the syrian ebed-jesu (+l ) held tatian and ammonius to be one and the same person; and it is probable that dionysius mistook the harmony of ammonius for that of tatian. it is not necessary further to follow this discussion, for it in no way affects our question, and no important deduction can be derived from it.( ) we allude to the point for the mere sake of showing that, up to the last, we have no certain information throwing light on the composition of tatian's gospel. all that we do know of it,--what it did not contain--the places where it largely circulated, and the name by which it was { } called, tends to identify it with the gospel according to the hebrews. for the rest, tatian had no idea of a new testament canon, and evidently did not recognize as inspired, any scriptures except those of the old testament.( ) it is well known that the sect of the encratites made use of apocryphal gospels until a much later period, and rejected the authority of the apostle paul, and tatian himself is accused of repudiating some of the pauline epistles, and of altering and mutilating others.( ) . dionysius of corinth need not detain us long. eusebius informs us that he was the author of seven epistles addressed to various christian communities, and also of a letter to chrysophora, "a most faithful sister." eusebius speaks of these writings as catholic epistles, and briefly characterizes each, but with the exception of a few short fragments preserved by him, none of these fruits of the "inspired industry" [------] of dionysius are now extant.( ) these fragments are all from an epistle said to have been addressed to soter, bishop of rome, and give us a clue to the time at which they were written. the bishopric of soter is generally dated between a.d. -- ,( ) during which years the epistle must have been composed. it could not have { } been written, however, until after dionysius became bishop of corinth in a.d. ,( ) and it was probably written some years after.( ) no quotation from, or allusion to, any writing of the new testament occurs in any of the fragments of the epistles still extant; nor does eusebius make mention of any such reference in the epistles which have perished. as testimony for our gospels, therefore, dionysius is an absolute blank. some expressions and statements, however, are put forward by apologists which we must examine. in the few lines which tischendorf accords to dionysius he refers to two of these. the first is an expression used, not by dionysius himself, but by eusebius, in speaking of the epistles to the churches at amastris and at pontus. eusebius says that dionysius adds some "expositions of divine scriptures" [------].( ) there can be no doubt, we think, that this refers to the old testament only, and tischendorf himself does not deny it.( ) the second passage which tischendorf( ) points out, and which he claims with some other apologists as evidence of the actual existence of a new testament canon when dionysius wrote, occurs in a fragment from the epistle { } to soter and the romans which is preserved by eusebius. it is as follows: "for the brethren having requested me to write epistles, i wrote them. and the apostles of the devil have filled these with tares, both taking away parts and adding others; for whom the woe is destined. it is not surprising then if some have recklessly ventured to adulterate the scriptures of the lord [------] when they have formed designs against these which are not of such importance."( ) regarding this passage, canon westcott, with his usual boldness, says: "it is evident that the 'scriptures of the lord'--the writings of the new testament--were at this time collected, that they were distinguished from other books, that they were jealously guarded, that they had been corrupted for heretical purposes."( ) we have seen, however, that there has not been a trace of any new testament canon in the writings of the fathers before and during this age, and it is not permissible to put such an interpretation upon the remark of dionysius. dr. donaldson, with greater critical justice and reserve, remarks regarding the expression "scriptures of the on the canon, p. . dr. westcott, in the first instance, translates the expression: [------] "the scriptures of the new testament." in a note to his fourth edition, however, he is kind enough to explain: "of course it is not affirmed that the collection here called [------] was identical with our 'new testament,' but simply that the phrase shows that a collection of writings belonging to the new testament existed," p. , n. . such a translation, in such a work, assuming as it does the whole question, and concealing what is doubtful, is most unwarrantable. the fact is that not only is there no mention of the new testament at all, but the words as little necessarily imply a "collection" of writings as they do a "collection" of the epistles of dionyaius. { } lord:" "it is not easy to settle what this term means," although he adds his own personal opinion, "but most probably it refers to the gospels as containing the sayings and doings of the lord. it is not likely, as lardner supposes, that such a term would be applied to the whole of the new testament"( ) the idea of our collected new testament being referred to is of course quite untenable, and although it is open to argument that dionysius may have referred to evangelical works, it is obvious that there are no means of proving the fact, and much less that he referred specially to our gospels. in fact, the fragments of dionysius present no evidence whatever of the existence of our synoptics. in order further to illustrate the inconclusiveness of the arguments based upon so vague an expression, we may add that it does not of necessity apply to any gospels or works of christian history at all, and may with perfect propriety have indicated the scriptures of the old testament. we find justin martyr complaining in the same spirit as dionysius, through several chapters, that the old testament scriptures, and more especially those relating to the lord, had been adulterated, that parts had been taken away, and others added, with the intention of destroying or weakening their application to christ.( ) justin's argument throughout is, that the whole of the old testament scriptures refer to christ, and tryphon, his antagonist, the representative of jewish opinion, is made to avow that the jews not only wait for christ, but, he adds: "we admit that all the scriptures which you have cited refer to him."( ) not only, therefore, were the scriptures of the old testament { } closely connected with their lord by the fathers and, at the date of which we are treating, were the only "holy scriptures" recognised, but they made the same complaints which we meet with in dionysius that these scriptures were adulterated by omissions and interpolations.( ) the expression of eusebius regarding "expositions of divine scriptures" [------] added by dionysius, which applied to the old testament, tends to connect the old testament also with this term "scriptures of the lord." if the term "scriptures of the lord," however, be referred to gospels, the difficulty of using it as evidence continues undiminished. we have no indication of the particular evangelical works which were in the bishop's mind. we have seen that other gospels were used by the fathers, and in exclusive circulation amongst various communities, and even until much later times many works were regarded by them as divinely inspired which have no place in our canon. the gospel according to the hebrews for instance was probably used by some at least of the apostolic fathers,( ) by pseudo-ignatius,( ) polycarp,( ) papias,( ) hegesippus,( ) justin martyr,( ) and at least employed along with our gospels by clement of alexandria, origen, and jerome.( ) the fact that serapion, in the third century allowed the gospel of peter to be used in the church of rhossus( ) shows at the same time the consideration in which it was held, and the incompleteness of the canonical position of the new testament writings. so does the circumstance this charge is made with insistance throughout the clementine homilies. { } that in the fifth century theodoret found the gospel according to the hebrews, or tatians gospel, widely circulated and held in honour amongst orthodox churches in his diocese.( ) the pastor of hermas, which was read in the churches and nearly secured a permanent place in the canon, was quoted as inspired by irenæus.( ) the epistle of barnabas was held in similar honour, and quoted as inspired by clement of alexandria( ) and by origen,( ) as was likewise the epistle of the roman clement. the apocalypse of peter was included by clement of alexandria in his account of the canonical scriptures and those which are disputed, such as the epistle of jude and the other catholic epistles,( ) and it stands side by side with the apocalypse of john in the canon of muratori, being long after publicly read in the churches of palestine.( ) tischendorf indeed conjectures that a blank in the codex sinaiticus after the new testament was formerly filled by it. justin, clement of alexandria, and lactantius quote the sibylline books as the word of god, and pay similar honour to the book of hystaspes.( ) so great indeed was the consideration and use of the sibylline books in the church of the second and third centuries, that christians from that fact were nicknamed sibyllists.( ) it is unnecessary to multiply, as justin, apol., i. , ; clem. al., strom., vi. , §§ , ; ladantius, instit. div., i. , , vii. , . clement of alexandria quotes with perfect faith and seriousness some apocryphal book, in which, he says, the apostle paul recommends the hellenic books, the sibyl and the books of hystaspes, as giving notably clear prophetic descriptions of the son of god. strom., vi. , § , . { } might so easily be done, these illustrations; it is too well known that a vast number of gospels and similar works, which have been excluded from the canon, were held in the deepest veneration by the church in the second century, to which the words of dionysius may apply. so vague and indefinite an expression at any rate is useless as evidence for the existence of our canonical gospels. canon westcott's deduction from the words of dionysius, that not only were the writings of the new testament already collected, but that they were "jealously guarded," is imaginative indeed. it is much and devoutly to be wished that they had been as carefully guarded as he supposes, but it is well known that this was not the case, and that numerous interpolations have been introduced into the text. the whole history of the canon and of christian literature in the second and third centuries displays the most deplorable carelessness and want of critical judgment on the part of the fathers. "whatever was considered as conducive to christian edification was blindly adopted by them, and a vast number of works were launched into circulation and falsely ascribed to apostles and others likely to secure for them greater consideration. such pious fraud was rarely suspected, still more rarely detected in the early ages of christianity, and several of such pseudographs have secured a place in our new testament. the words of dionysius need not receive any wider signification than a reference to well-known epistles. it is clear from the words attributed to the apostle paul in thess. ii. , iii. , that his epistles were falsified, and setting aside some of those which bear his name in our canon, spurious epistles were long { } ascribed to him, such as the epistle to the laodiceans and a third epistle to the corinthians. we need not do more than allude to the second epistle falsely bearing the name of clement of rome, as well as the clementine homilies and recognitions, the apostolical constitutions, and the spurious letters of ignatius, the letters and legend of abgarus quoted by eusebius, and the epistles, of paul and seneca, in addition to others already pointed out, as instances of the wholesale falsification of that period, many of which gross forgeries were at once accepted as genuine by the fathers, so slight was their critical faculty and so ready their credulity.( ) in one case the church punished the author who, from mistaken zeal for the honour of the apostle paul, fabricated the _acta pauli et theclæ_ in his name,( ) but the forged production was not the less made use of in the church. there was, therefore, no lack of falsification and adulteration of works of apostles and others of greater note than himself to warrant the remark of dionysius, without any forced application of it to our gospels or to a new testament canon, the existence of which there is nothing to substantiate, but on the contrary every reason to discredit. before leaving this passage we may add that although even tischendorf does not, canon westcott does find in it references to our first synoptic, and to the apocalypse. "the short fragment just quoted," he says, "contains two obvious allusions, one to the gospel of st matthew, and one to the apocalypse."( ) the words: "the apostles of the devil have filled these with tares," are, he supposes, the epistle of jude quotes as genuine the assumption of moses, and also the book of enoch, and the defence of the authenticity of the latter by tertullian (de cultu fem., i. ) will not be forgotten. { } an allusion to matt. xiii. ff. but even if the expression were an echo of the parable of the wheat and tares, it is not permissible to refer it in this arbitrary way to our first gospel, to the exclusion of the numerous other works which existed, many of which doubtless contained it obviously the words have no evidential value. continuing his previous assertions, however, canon westcott affirms with equal boldness: "the allusion in the last clause"--to the "scriptures of the lord"--"will be clear when it is remembered that dionysius 'warred against the heresy of marcion and defended the rule of truth '" [------].( ) tischendorf, who is ready enough to strain every expression into evidence, recognizes too well that this is not capable of such an interpretation. dr. westcott omits to mention that the words, moreover, are not used by dionysius at all, but simply proceed from eusebius.( ) dr. donaldson distinctly states the fact that, "there is no reference to the bible in the words of eusebius: he defends the rule of the truth "( ) [------]. there is only one other point to mention. canon westcott refers to the passage in the epistle of dionysius, which has already been quoted in this work regarding the reading of christian writings in churches. "today," he writes to soter, "we have kept the lord's holy day, in which we have read your epistle, from the reading of which we shall ever derive admonition, as we do from the former one written to us by clement."( ) it is evident that there was no idea, in selecting the works to be read at the weekly assembly of christians, of any { } canon of a new testament. we here learn that the epistles of clement and of soter were habitually read, and while we hear of this, and of the similar reading of justin's "memoirs of the apostles,"( ) of the pastor of hermas,( ) of the apocalypse of peter,( ) and other apocryphal works, we do not at the same time hear of the public reading of our gospels. { } chapter ix. melito of sardis--claudius apollinaris--athenagoras--the epistle of vienne and lyons. we might here altogether have passed over melito, bishop of sardis in lydia, had it not been for the use of certain fragments of his writings made by canon westcott. melito, naturally, is not cited by tischendorf at all, but the english apologist, with greater zeal, we think, than critical discretion, forces him into service as evidence for the gospels and a new testament canon. the date of melito, it is generally agreed, falls after a.d. , a phrase in his apology presented to marcus antoninus preserved in eusebius(l) [------] indicating that commodus had already been admitted to a share of the government.( ) canon westcott affirms that, in a fragment preserved by eusebius, melito speaks of the books of the new testament in a collected form. he says: "the words of melito on the other hand are simple and casual, and yet their meaning can scarcely be mistaken. he writes to onesimus, a fellow-christian who had urged him 'to { } make selections for him from the law and the prophets concerning the saviour and the faith generally, and furthermore desired to learn the accurate account of the old [------] books;' 'having gone therefore to the east,' melito says, 'and reached the spot where [each thing] was preached and done, and having learned accurately the books of the old testament, i have sent a list of them.' the mention of 'the old books'--'the books of the old testament,' naturally implies a definite new testament, a written antitype to the old; and the form of language implies a familiar recognition of its contents."( ) this is truly astonishing! the "form of language" can only refer to the words: "concerning the saviour and the faith generally," which must have an amazing fulness of meaning to convey to canon west-cott the implication of a "familiar recognition" of the contents of a supposed already collected new testament, seeing that a simple christian, not to say a bishop, might at least know of a saviour and the faith generally from the oral preaching of the gospel, from a single epistle of paul, or from any of the [------] of luke. this reasoning forms a worthy pendant to his argument that because melito speaks of the books of the old testament he implies the existence of a definite collected new testament. such an assertion is calculated to mislead a large class of readers.( ) the fragment of melito is as follows: "melito to his on the canon, p. . [in the fourth edition dr. westcott omits the last phrase, making a full stop at "old." p. .] it must be said, however, that canon westcott merely follows and exaggerates lardner, here, who says: "from this passage i would conclude that there was then also a volume or collection of books called the new testament, containing the writings of apostles and apostolical men, but we cannot from hence infer the names or the exact number of those books." credibility, &c., works, ii. p. . { } brother onesimus, greeting. as thou hast frequently desired in thy zeal for the word [------] to have extracts made for thee, both from the law and the prophets concerning the saviour and our whole faith; nay, more, hast wished to learn the exact statement of the old books [------], how many they are and what is their order, i have earnestly endeavoured to accomplish this, knowing thy zeal concerning the faith, and thy desire to be informed concerning the word [------], and especially that thou preferrest these matters to all others from love towards god, striving to gain eternal salvation. having, therefore, gone to the east, and reached the place where this was preached and done, and having accurately ascertained the books of the old testament [------], i have, subjoined, sent a list of them unto thee, of which these are the names"--then follows a list of the books of the old testament, omitting, however, esther. he then concludes with the words: "of these i have made the extracts dividing them into six books."( ) canon westcott's assertion that the expression "old books," "books of the old testament," involves here by antithesis a definite _written_ new testament, requires us to say a few words as to the name of "testament" as applied to both divisions of the bible. it is of course well known that this word came into use originally from the translation of the hebrew word "covenant" [------], or compact made between god and the israelites,( ) in the septuagint version, by the greek word [------], which in a legal sense also means a will or testament,( ) and that word is adopted throughout the new the legal sense of [------] as a will or testament is distinctly intended in heb. ix. . "for where a testament [------] is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator" [------]. the same word [------] is employed throughout the whole passage. heb. ix. -- . { } testament.(l) the vulgate translation, instead of retaining the original hebrew signification, translated the word in the gospels and epistles, "testamentum" and [------] became "vetus testamentum" instead of "vetus foedus" and whenever the word occurs in the english version it is almost invariably rendered "testament" instead of covenant. the expression "book of the covenant," or "testament," [------], frequently occurs in the lxx version of the old testament and its apocrypha,( ) and in jeremiah xxxi. - ,( ) the prophet speaks of making a "new covenant" [------] with the house of israel, which is indeed quoted in hebrews viii. . it is the doctrinal idea of the new covenant, through christ confirming the former one made to the israelites, which has led to the distinction of the old and new testaments. generally the old testament was, in the first ages of christianity, indicated by the simple expressions "the books" [------], "holy scriptures" [------],( ) or "the scriptures" [------,( ) but the preparation for the distinction of "old testament" began very early in the development of the doctrinal idea of the new testament of christ, before there was any part of the new testament books written at all. the expression "new testament," derived thus { } antithetically from the "old testament," occurs constantly throughout the second part of the bible. in the epistle to the hebrews viii. - , the mosaic dispensation is contrasted with the christian, and jesus is called the mediator of a better testament [------].( ) the first testament not being faultless, is replaced by the second, and the writer quotes the passage from jeremiah to which we have referred regarding a new testament, winding up his argument with the words, v. : "in that he saith a new (testament) he hath made the first old." again, in our first gospel, during the last supper, jesus is represented as saying: "this is my blood of the new testament" [------];( ) and in luke he says: "this cup is the new testament [------] in my blood."( ) there is, therefore, a very distinct reference made to the two testaments as "new" and "old," and in speaking of the books of the law and the prophets as the "old books" and "books of the old testament," after the general acceptance of the gospel of jesus as the new testament or covenant, there was no antithetical implication whatever of a written new testament, but a mere reference to the doctrinal idea. we might multiply illustrations showing how ever-present to the mind of the early church was the contrast of the mosaic and christian covenants as old and new. two more we may venture to point out. in romans ix. , and gal. iv. , the two testaments or covenants [------], typified by sinai and the heavenly jerusalem, are discussed, and the superiority of the latter asserted. there is, however, a passage, still more clear and decisive. paul says in corinthians iii. : "who also (god) made us sufficient to be ministers of the new { } testament [------] not of the letter, but of the spirit" [------]. why does not canon westcott boldly claim this as evidence of a definite written new testament, when not only is there reference to the name, but a distinction drawn between the letter and the spirit of it, from which an apologist might make a telling argument? but proceeding to contrast the glory of the new with the old dispensation, the apostle, in reference to the veil with which moses covered his face, says: "but their understandings were hardened: for until this very day remaineth the same veil in the reading of the old testament" [------];(l ) and as if to make the matter still clearer he repeats in the next verse: "but even unto this day when moses is read, the veil lieth upon their heart." now here the actual reading of the _old_ testament [------] is distinctly mentioned, and the expression quite as aptly as that of melito, "implies a definite new testament, a written antitype to the old," but even canon westcott would not dare to suggest that, when the second epistle to the corinthians was composed, there was a "definite written new testament" in existence. this conclusively shows that the whole argument from melito's mention of the books of the old testament is absolutely groundless. on the contrary, canon westcott should know very well that the first general designation for the new testament collection was "the gospel" [------] and "the apostle" [------], for the two portions of the collection, in contrast with the divisions of the old testament, the law and the prophets [------] { } [------],( ) and the name new testament occurs for the very first time in the third century, when tertullian called the collection of christian scriptures _novum instrumentum and novum testamentum._( ) the term [------] is not, so far as we are aware, applied in the greek to the "new testament" collection in any earlier work than origen's _de principiis_, iv. . it was only in the second half of the third century that the double designation [------] was generally abandoned.( ) as to the evidence for a new testament canon, which dr. westcott supposes he gains by his unfounded inference from melito's expression, we may judge of its value from the fact that he himself, like lardner, admits: "but there is little evidence in the fragment of melito to show what writings he would have included in the new collection."( ) little evidence? there is none at all. there is, however, one singular and instructive point in this fragment to which canon westcott does not in any way refer, but which well merits attention as { } illustrating the state of religious knowledge at that time, and, by analogy, giving a glimpse of the difficulties which beset early christian literature. we are told by melito that onesimus had frequently urged him to give him exact information as to the number and order of the books of the old testament, and to have extracts made for him from them concerning the saviour and the faith. now it is apparent that melito, though a bishop, was not able to give the desired information regarding the number and order of the books of the old testament himself, but that he had to make a journey to collect it. if this was the extent of knowledge possessed by the bishop of sardis of what was to the fathers the only holy scripture, how ignorant his flock must have been, and how unfitted, both, to form any critical judgment as to the connection of christianity with the mosaic dispensation. the formation of a christian canon at a period when such ignorance was not only possible but generally prevailed, and when the zeal of believers led to the composition of such a mass of pseudonymic and other literature, in which every consideration of correctness and truth was subordinated to a childish desire for edification, must have been slow indeed and uncertain; and in such an age fortuitous circumstances must have mainly led to the canonization or actual loss of many a work. so far from affording any evidence of the existence of a new testament canon, the fragment of melito only shows the ignorance of the bishop of sardis as to the canon even of the old testament. we have not yet finished with melito in connection with canon westcott, however, and it is necessary to follow him further in order fully to appreciate the nature of the evidence for the new testament canon, which, in default { } of better, he is obliged to offer. eusebius gives a list of the works of melito which have come to his knowledge, and in addition to the fragment already quoted, he extracts a brief passage from melito's work on the passover, and some much longer quotations from his apology, to which we have in passing referred.( ) with these exceptions, none of melito's writings are now extant. dr. cureton, however, has published a syriac version, with translation, of a so-called "oration of meliton, the philosopher, who was in the presence of antoninus caesar," together with five other fragments attributed to melito.( ) with regard to this syriac oration, canon westcott says: "though if it be entire, it is not the apology with which eusebius was acquainted, the general character of the writing leads to the belief that it is a genuine book of melito of sardis;"( ) and he proceeds to treat it as authentic. in the first place, we have so little of melito's genuine compositions extant, that it is hazardous indeed to draw any positive deduction from the "character of the writing." cureton, bunsen, and others maintain that this apology is not a fragment, and it cannot be the work mentioned by eusebius, for it does not contain the quotations from the authentic orations which he has preserved, and which are considerable. it is, however, clear from the substance of the composition that it cannot have been spoken before the emperor,( ) and, moreover, it has in no way the character of an "apology," for there is not a single word in it about either christianity or christians. there is { } every reason to believe that it is not a genuine work of melito.( ) there is no ground whatever for supposing that he wrote two apologies, nor is this ascribed to him upon any other ground than the inscription of an unknown syriac writer. this, however, is not the only spurious work attributed to melito. of this work canon westcott says: "like other apologies, this oration contains only indirect references to the christian scriptures. the allusions in it to the gospels are extremely rare, and except so far as they show the influence of st. john's writings, of no special interest."( ) it would have been more correct to have said that there are no allusions in it to the gospels at all. canon westcott is somewhat enthusiastic in speaking of melito and his literary activity as evinced in the titles of his works recorded by eusebius, and he quotes a fragment, said to be from a treatise "on faith," amongst these syriac remains, and which he considers to be "a very striking expansion of the early historic creed of the church."( ) as usual, we shall give the entire fragment: "we have made collections from the law and the prophets relative to those things which have been declared respecting our lord jesus christ, that we may prove to your love that he is perfect reason, the word of god; who was begotten before the light; who was creator together with the father; who was the fashioner of man; who was all in all; who among the patriarchs was patriarch; who in the law was the law; among the priests chief priest; among kings governor; among the prophets the prophet; { } among the angels archangel; in the voice the word; among spirits spirit; in the father the son; in god god the king for ever and ever. for this was he who was pilot to noah; who conducted abraham; who was bound with isaac; who was in exile with jacob; who was sold with joseph; who was captain with moses; who was the divider of the inheritance with jesus the son of nun; who in david and the prophets foretold his own sufferings; who was incarnate in the virgin; who was born at bethlehem; who was wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger; who was seen of shepherds; who was glorified of angels; who was worshipped by the magi; who was pointed out by john; who assembled the apostles; who preached the kingdom; who healed the maimed; who gave light to the blind; who raised the dead; who appeared in the temple; who was not believed by the people; who was betrayed by judas; who was laid hold of by the priests; who was condemned by pilate; who was pierced in the flesh; who was hanged upon the tree; who was buried in the earth; who rose from the dead; who appeared to the apostles; who ascended to heaven; who sitteth on the right hand of the father; who is the rest of those who are departed; the recoverer of those who are lost; the light of those who are in darkness; the deliverer of those who are captives; the finder of those who have gone astray; the refuge of the afflicted; the bridegroom of the church; the charioteer of the cherubim; the captain of the angels; god who is of god; the son who is of the father; jesus christ, the king for ever and ever. amen."(l) { } canon westcott commences his commentary upon this passage with the remark: "no writer could state the fundamental truths of christianity more unhesitatingly, or quote the scriptures of the old and new testaments with more perfect confidence."( ) we need not do more than remark that there is not a single quotation in the fragment, and that there is not a single one of the references to gospel history or to ecclesiastical dogmas which might not have been derived from the epistles of paul, from any of the forms of the gospel according to the hebrews, the protevangelium of james, or from many another apocryphal gospel, or the oral teaching of the church. it is singular, however, that the only hint which canon westcott gives of the more than doubtful authenticity of this fragment consists of the introductory remark, after alluding to the titles of his genuine and supposititious writings: "of these multifarious writings very few fragments remain in the original greek, but the general tone of them is so decided in its theological character as to go far to establish the genuineness of those which are preserved in the syriac translation."( ) now, the fragment "on faith" which has just been quoted is one of the five syriac pieces of dr. cureton to which we have referred, and which even apologists agree "cannot be regarded as genuine."( ) it is well known that there were other writers in the early church bearing the names of melito and miletius or meletius,( ) { } which were frequently confounded. of these five syriac fragments one bears the superscription: "of meliton, bishop of the city of attica," and another, "of the holy meliton, bishop of utica," and cureton himself evidently leant to the opinion that they are not by our melito, but by a meletius or melitius, bishop of sebastopolis in pontus.( ) the third fragment is said to be taken from a discourse "on the cross," which was unknown to eusebius, and from its doctrinal peculiarities was probably written after his time.( ) another fragment purports to be from a work on the "soul and body;" and the last one from the treatise "on faith," which we are discussing. the last two works are mentioned by eusebius, but these fragments, besides coming in such suspicious company, must for other reasons be pronounced spurious.( ) they have in fact no attestation whatever except that of the syriac translator, who is unknown, and which therefore is worthless, and, on the other hand, the whole style and thought of the fragments are unlike anything else of melito's time, and clearly indicate a later stage of theological development.( ) moreover, in the mechitarist library at venice there is a shorter version of the same passage in a syriac ms., and an armenian version of the extract as given above, with some variation of the opening lines, in both of which the passage is distinctly ascribed to irenæus.( ) besides the oration and the five syriac fragments, we have other two works extant falsely attributed to melito, one, "de transitu virginis mariæ," describing the miraculous presence of the apostles at the { } death of mary;( ) and the other, "de actibus joannis apostoli," relates the history of miracles performed by the apostle john. both are universally admitted to be spurious,( ) as are a few other fragments also bearing his name. melito did not escape from the falsification to which many of his more distinguished predecessors and contemporaries were victims, through the literary activity and unscrupulous religious zeal of the first three or four centuries of our era. . very little is known regarding claudius apollinaris to whom we must now for a moment turn. eusebius informs us that he was bishop of hierapolis,( ) and in this he is supported by the fragment of a letter of serapion bishop of antioch preserved to us by him, which refers to apollinaris as the "most blessed."( ) tischendorf, without any precise date, sets him down as contemporary with tatian and theophilus (the latter of whom, he thinks, wrote his work addressed to autolycus about a.d. -- ).( ) eusebius( ) mentions that, like his somewhat earlier contemporary melito of sardis, apollinaris presented an "apology" to the emperor marcus antoninus, and he gives us further materials for a date( ) by stating that claudius apollinaris, probably in his apology, refers to it is worthy of remark that the virgin is introduced into all these fragments in a manner quite foreign to the period at which melito lived. eusebius himself sets him down in his chronicle as flourishing in the eleventh year of marcus, or a.d. , a year later than he dates melito. { } the miracle of the "thundering legion," which is said to have occurred during the war of marcus antoninus against the marcomanni in a.d. .( ) the date of his writings may, therefore, with moderation be fixed between a.d. -- .( ) eusebius and others mention various works composed by him,( ) none of which, however, are extant; and we have only to deal with two brief fragments in connection with the paschal controversy, which are ascribed to apollinaris in the paschal chronicle of alexandria. this controversy, as to the day upon which the christian passover should be celebrated, broke out about a.d. , and long continued to divide the church.( ) in the preface to the paschal chronicle, a work of the seventh century, the unknown chronicler says: "now even apollinaris, the most holy bishop of hiera-polis, in asia, who lived near apostolic times, taught the like things in his work on the passover, saying thus: 'there are some, however, who through ignorance raise contentions regarding these matters in a way which eusebius, h. e., v. ; mosheim, inst. hist. ecclee., book i. cent. ii. part. i. ch. i. § . apollinaris states that in consequence of this miracle, the emperor had bestowed upon the legion the name of the "thundering legion." we cannot here discuss this subject, but the whole story illustrates the rapidity with which a fiction is magnified into truth by religious zeal, and is surrounded by false circumstantial evidence. cf. tertullian, apol. , ad scapulam, ; dion cassius, lib. ; scaliyer, animadv. in euseb., p. f.; cf. donaldson, hist. chr. lit. and doctr., iii. p. f. { } should be pardoned, for ignorance does not admit of accusation, but requires instruction. and they say that the lord, together with his disciples, ate the sheep [------] on the th nisan, but himself suffered on the great day of unleavened bread. and they state [------] that matthew says precisely what they have understood; hence their understanding of it is at variance with the law, and according to them the gospels seem to contradict each other.'"( ) the last sentence is interpreted as pointing out that the first synoptic gospel is supposed to be at variance with our fourth gospel. this fragment is claimed by teschendorf( ) and others as evidence of the general acceptance at that time both of the synoptics and the fourth gospel. canon westcott, with obvious exaggeration, says: "the gospels are evidently quoted as books certainly known and recognized; their authority is placed on the same footing as the old testament.:( ) the gospels are referred to merely for the settlement of the historical fact as to the day on which the last passover had been eaten, a narrative of which they contained. there are, however, very grave reasons for doubting the authenticity of the two fragments ascribed to { } apollinaris, and we must mention that these doubts are much less those of german critics, who, on the whole, either do not raise the question at all, or hastily dispose of it, than doubts entertained by orthodox apologists, who see little ground for accepting them as genuine.( ) eusebius, who gives a catalogue of the works of apol-linaris which had reached him,( ) was evidently not acquainted with any writing of his on the passover. it is argued, however, that "there is not any sufficient ground for doubting the genuineness of these fragments 'on easter,' in the fact that eusebius mentions no such book by apollinaris."( ) it is quite true that eusebius does not pretend to give a complete list of these works, but merely says that there are many preserved by many, and that he mentions those with which he had met.( ) at the same time, entering with great interest, as he does, into the paschal controversy, and acquainted with the principal writings on the subject,( ) it would indeed have been strange had he not met with the work itself, or at least with some notice of it in the works of others. eusebius gives an account of the writings of melito and apollinaris together. he was acquainted with the work of melito on the passover, and quotes it,( ) and it is extremely improbable that he could have been ignorant of a treatise by his distinguished contemporary westcott, on the canon, p. , note ; cf. baur, unters. kan. evv., p. f. this is the only remark which dr. westcott makes as to any doubt of the authenticity of these fragments. tischendorf does not mention a doubt at all. { } on the same subject, had he actually written one. not only, however, does eusebius seem to know nothing of his having composed such a work, but neither do theodoret,( ) jerome,( ) nor photius,( ) who refer to his writings, mention it; and we cannot suppose that it was referred to in the lost works of irenæus or clement of alexandria on the passover. eusebius, who quotes from them,( ) would in that case have probably mentioned the fact, as he does the statement by clement regarding melito's work, or at least would have been aware of the existence of such a writing, and alluded to it when speaking of the works of apollinaris. this silence is equally significant whether we regard apollinaris as a quartodeciman or as a supporter of the views of victor and the church of rome. on the one hand, eusebius states that "all the churches of asia"( ) kept the th nisan, and it is difficult to believe that, had apollinaris differed from this practice and, more especially, had he written against it, the name of so eminent an exception would not have been mentioned. the views of the bishop of hierapolis, as a prominent representative of the asiatic church, must have been quoted in many controversial works on the subject, and even if the writing itself had not come into their hands, eusebius and others could scarcely fail to become indirectly acquainted with it. on the other hand, supposing apollinaris to have been a quartodeciman, whilst the ignorance of eusebius and others regarding any contribution by him to the discussion is scarcely less remarkable, it is still more surprising that no allusion is made to { } him by polycrates( ) when he names so many less distinguished men of asia, then passed away, who kept the th nisan, such as thaseas of eumenia, sagoris of laodicea, papirius of sardis, and the seven bishops of his kindred, not to mention polycarp of smyrna and the apostles philip and john. he also cites melito of sardis: why does he not refer to apollinaris of hierapolis? if it be argued that he was still living, then why does eusebius not mention him amongst those who protested against the measures of victor of rome?( ) there has been much discussion as to the view taken by the writer of these fragments, hilgenfeld and others( ) maintaining that he is opposed to the quartodeciman party. into this it is not necessary for us to enter, as our contention simply is that in no case can the authenticity of the fragments be established. supposing them, however, to be directed against those who kept the th nisan, how can it be credited that this isolated convert to the views of victor and the roman church, could write of so vast and distinguished a majority of the churches of asia, including polycarp and melito, as "some who through ignorance raised contentions" on the point, when they really raised no new contention at all, but, as polycrates represented, followed the tradition handed down to them from their fathers, and authorized by the practice of the apostle john himself? none of his contemporaries nor writers about his own time seem to have known that apollinaris wrote any work from which these fragments can have been taken, and there is absolutely no independent evidence that he { } ever took any part in the paschal controversy at all. the only ground we have for attributing these fragments to him is the preface to the paschal chronicle of alexandria, written by an unknown author of the seventh century, some five hundred years after the time of apollinaris, whose testimony has rightly been described as "worth almost nothing."( ) most certainly many passages preserved by him are inauthentic, and generally allowed to be so.( ) the two fragments have by some been conjecturally ascribed to pierius of alexandria,( ) a writer of the third century, who composed a work on easter, but there is no evidence on the point in any case, there is such exceedingly slight reason for attributing these fragments to claudius apollinaris, and so many strong grounds for believing that he cannot have written them, that they have no material value as evidence for the antiquity of the gospels. . we know little or nothing of athenagoras. he is not mentioned by eusebius, and our only information regarding him is derived from a fragment of philip sidetes, a writer of the fifth century, first published by dr. donaldson rightly calls a fragment in the chronicle ascribed to melito, "unquestionably spurious." hist. chr. lit. and doctr., iii. p. . { } dodwell.( ) philip states that he was the first leader of the school of alexandria during the time of hadrian and antoninus, to the latter of whom he addressed his apology, and he further says that clement of alexandria was his disciple, and that pantsenus was the disciple of clement. part of this statement we know to be erroneous, and the christian history of philip, from which the fragment is taken, is very slightingly spoken of both by socrates( ) and photius.( ) no reliance can be placed upon this information.( ) the only works ascribed to athenagoras are an apology--called an embassy, [------]--bearing the inscription: "the embassy of athenagoras the athenian, a philosopher and a christian, concerning christians, to the emperors marcus aurelius antoninus and lucius aurelius commodus, armeniaci sarmatici and, above all, philosophers"; and further, a treatise: "on the resurrection of the dead," a quotation from the apology by methodius in his work on the resurrection of the body, is preserved by epiphanius( ) and photius,( ) and this, the mention by philip sidetes, and the inscription by an unknown hand, just quoted, are all the evidence we possess regarding the apology. we have no evidence at all regarding the treatise on the resurrection, beyond the inscription. the authenticity of neither, therefore, stands on very sure grounds.( ) the address of the apology and internal evidence furnished by it, into which we need not go, show that it could not { } have been written before a.d. -- , the date assigned to it by most critics,( ) although there are many reasons for dating it some years later. in the six lines which tischendorf devotes to athenagoras, he says that the apology contains "several quotations from matthew and luke,"( ) without, however, indicating them. in the very few sentences which canon westcott vouchsafes to him, he says: "athenagoras quotes the words of our lord as they stand in st. matthew four times, and appears to allude to passages in st. mark and st. john, but he nowhere mentions the name of an evangelist."( ) here the third synoptic is not mentioned. in another place he says: "athenagoras at athens, and theophilus at antioch, make use of the same books generally, and treat them with the same respect;" and in a note: "athenagoras quotes the gospels of st matthew and st. john."( ) here it will be observed that also the gospel of mark is quietly dropped out of sight, but still the positive manner in which it is asserted that athenagoras quotes from "the gospel of st. matthew," without further explanation, is calculated to mislead. we shall refer to each of the supposed quotations. athenagoras not only does not mention any gospel, but singularly enough he never once introduces the { } name of "christ" into the works ascribed to him, and all the "words of the lord" referred to are introduced simply by the indefinite "he says," [------], and without any indication whatever of a written source.( ) the only exception to this is an occasion on which he puts into the mouth of "the logos" a saying which is not found in any of our gospels. the first passage to which canon westcott alludes is the following, which we contrast with the supposed parallel in the gospel:-- [------] it is scarcely possible to imagine a greater difference in language conveying a similar idea than that which exists between athenagoras and the first gospel, and the parallel passage in luke is in many respects still more distant. no echo of the words in matthew has lingered in the ear of the writer, for he employs utterly different phraseology throughout, and nothing can be more certain { } than the fact that there is not a linguistic trace in it of acquaintance with our synoptics. the next passage which is referred to is as follows: [------] the same idea is continued in the next chapter, in which the following passage occurs: [------] there is no parallel at all in the first gospel to the phrase "and lend to them that lend to you," and in luke vi. , the passage reads: "and if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye?" { } [------]; it is evident, therefore, that there are decided variations here, and that the passage of athenagoras does not agree with either of the synoptics. we have seen the persistent variation in the quotations from the "sermon on the mount" which occur in justin,( ) and there is no part of the discourses of jesus more certain to have been preserved by living christian tradition, or to have been recorded in every form of gospel. the differences in these passages from our synoptic present the same features as mark the several versions of the same discourse in our first and third gospels, and indicate a distinct source. the same remarks also apply to the next passage: [------] the omission of [------], "with her," is not accidental, but is an important variation in the sense, which we have already met with in the gospel used by justin martyr.( ) there is another passage, in the next chapter, the parallel to which follows closely on this in the great sermon as reported in our first gospel, to which canon westcott does not refer, but which we must point out: [------] { } [------] it is evident that the passage in the apology is quite different from that in the "sermon on the mount" in the first synoptic. if we compare it with matt. xix. , there still remains the express limitation [------], which athenagoras does not admit, his own express doctrine being in accordance with the positive declaration in his text. in the immediate context, indeed, he insists that even to marry another wife after the death of the first is cloaked adultery. we find in luke xvi. , the reading of athenagoras,( ) but with important linguistic variations: [------] it cannot, obviously, be rightly affirmed that athenagoras must have derived this from luke, and the sense of the passage in that gospel, compared with the passage in matthew xix. , on the contrary, rather makes it certain that the reading of athenagoras was derived from a source combining the language of the one and the thought of the other. in mark x. , the reading is nearer that of athenagoras and confirms this conclusion; and the addition there of [------] "against her" after { } [------], further tends to prove that his source was not that gospel. we may at once give the last passage which is supposed to be a quotation from our synoptics, and it is that which is affirmed to be a reference to mark. athenagoras states in almost immediate context with the above: "for in the beginning god formed one man and one woman."( ) this is compared with mark x. : "but from the beginning of the creation god made them male and female": [------] now this passage differs materially in every way from the second synoptic. the reference to "one man" and "one woman" is used in a totally different sense, and enforces the previous assertion that a man may only marry one wife. such an argument directly derived from the old testament is perfectly natural to one who, like athenagoras, derived all his authority from it alone. it is not permissible to claim it as evidence of the use of mark. now we must repeat that athenagoras does not name any source from which he derives his knowledge of the sayings of jesus. these sayings are all from the sermon on the mount, and are introduced by the indefinite phrase [------], and it is remarkable that all differ distinctly from the parallels in our gospels. the whole must be taken together as coming from one source, and while the decided variation excludes the inference that they must have been taken from our gospels, there is reasonable ground for assigning them to a different { } source. dr. donaldson states the case with great fairness: "athenagoras makes no allusion to the inspiration of any of the new testament writers. he does not mention one of them by name, and one cannot be sure that he quotes from any except paul. all the passages taken from the gospels are parts of our lord's discourses, and may have come down to athenagoras by tradition."( ) he might have added that they might also have been derived from the gospel according to the hebrews or many another collection now unhappily lost. one circumstance strongly confirming this conclusion is the fact already mentioned, that athenagoras, in the same chapter in which one of these quotations occurs, introduces an apocryphal saying of the logos, and connects it with previous sayings by the expression "the logos again [------] saying to us." this can only refer to the sayings previously introduced by the indefinite [------]. the sentence, which is in reference to the christian salutation of peace, is as follows: "the logos again saying to us: 'if any one for this reason kiss a second time because it pleased him (he sins);' and adding: 'thus the kiss or rather the salutation must be used with caution, as, if it be defiled even a little by thought, it excludes us from the life eternal.'"( ) this saying, which is directly attributed to the logos, is not found in our gospels. the only natural deduction is that it comes from the same source as the other sayings, and that source was not our synoptic gospels. { } the total absence of any allusion to new testament scriptures in athenagoras, however, is rendered more striking and significant by the marked expression of his belief in the inspiration of the old testament.( ) he appeals to the prophets for testimony as to the truth of the opinions of christians: men, he says, who spoke by the inspiration of god, whose spirit moved their mouths to express god's will as musical instruments are played upon:( ) "but since the voices of the prophets support our arguments, i think that you, being most learned and wise, cannot be ignorant of the writings of moses, or of those of isaiah and jeremiah and of the other prophets, who being raised in ecstasy above the reasoning that was in themselves, uttered the things which were wrought in them, when the divine spirit moved them, the spirit using them as a flute player would blow into the flute."( ) he thus enunciates the theory of the mechanical inspiration of the writers of the old testament, in the clearest manner,( ) and it would indeed have been strange, on the supposition that he extended his views of inspiration to any of the scriptures of the new testament, that he never names a single one of them, nor indicates to the emperors in the same way, as worthy of their attention, any of these scriptures along with the law and the prophets. there can be no doubt that he nowhere gives reason for supposing that he regarded any other writings than the old testament as inspired or "holy scripture."( ) in the treatise on the resurrection there are no arguments derived from scripture. { } . in the th year of the reign of marcus aurelius, between the th march, - , a fierce persecution was, it is said,( ) commenced against the christians in gaul, and more especially at vienne and lyons, during the course of which the aged bishop pothinus, the predecessor of irenæus, suffered martyrdom for the faith. the two communities some time after addressed an epistle to their brethren in asia and phrygia, and also to eleutherus, bishop of rome,( ) relating the events which had occurred, and the noble testimony which had been borne to christ by the numerous martyrs who had been cruelly put to death. the epistle has in great part been preserved by eusebius,( ) and critics generally agree in dating it about a.d. ,( ) although it was most probably not written until the following year.( ) no writing of the new testament is mentioned in this epistle,( ) but it is asserted that there are "unequivocal coincidences of language"( ) with the gospel of luke, and others of its books. the passage which is referred to as { } showing knowledge of our synoptic, is as follows. the letter speaks of one of the sufferers, a certain vettius epagathus, whose life was so austere that, although a young man, "he was thought worthy of the testimony [------] borne by the elder [------] zacharias. he had walked, of a truth, in all the commandments and ordinances of the lord blameless, and was untiring in every kind office towards his neighbour; having much zeal for god and being fervent in spirit."( ) this is compared with the description of zacharias and elizabeth in luke i. : "and they were both righteous before god, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the lord blameless."( ) a little further on in the epistle it is said of the same person: "having in himself the advocate [------], the spirit [------], more abundantly than zacharias," &c.( ) which again is referred to luke i. , "and his father zacharias was filled with the holy spirit and prophesied, saying," &c.( ) a few words must be said regarding the phrase [------], "the testimony of the presbyter zacharias." this, of course, may either be rendered: "the testimony borne to zacharias," that is to say, borne by others to his holy life; or, "the { } testimony borne by zacharias," his own testimony to the faith: his martyrdom. we adopt the latter rendering for various reasons. the epistle is an account of the persecution of the christian community of vienne and lyons, and vettius epagathus is the first of the martyrs who is named in it: [------] was at that time the term used to express the supreme testimony of christians--martyrdom, and the epistle seems here simply to refer to the martyrdom, the honour of which he shared with zacharias. it is, we think, very improbable that, under such circumstances, the word [------] would have been used to express a mere description of the character of zacharias given by some other writer. the interpretation which we prefer is that adopted by tischendorf. we must add that the zacharias here spoken of is generally understood to be the father of john the baptist, and no critic, so far as we can remember, has suggested that the reference in luke xi. , applies to him.( ) since the epistle, therefore, refers to the martyrdom of zacharias, the father of john the baptist, when using the expressions which are supposed to be taken from our third synoptic, is it not reasonable to suppose that those expressions were derived from some work which likewise contained an account of his death, which is not found in the synoptic? when we examine the matter more closely, we find that, although none of the canonical gospels, except the third, gives any narrative of the birth of john the baptist, that portion of the gospel, in which are the words we are discussing, cannot be considered an original the great majority of critics consider it a reference to chron. xxiv., , though some apply it to a later zacharias. { } production by the third synoptist, but like the rest of his work is merely a composition based upon earlier written narratives.( ) ewald, for instance, assigns the whole of the first chapters of luke (i. --ii. ) to what he terms "the eighth recognizable book."( ) however this may be, the fact that other works existed at an earlier period in which the history of zacharias the father of the baptist was given, and in which not only the words used in the epistle were found but also the martyrdom, is in the highest degree probable, and, so far as the history is concerned, this is placed almost beyond doubt by the protevangclium jacobi which contains it. tischendorf, who does not make use of this epistle at all as evidence for the scriptures of the new testament, does refer to it, and to this very allusion in it to the martyrdom of zacharias, as testimony to the existence and use of the protevangelium jacobi, a work whose origin he dates so far back as the first three decades of the second century,( ) and which he considers was also used by justin, as hilgenfeld had already observed.( ) tischendorf and hilgenfeld, therefore, agree in affirming that the reference to zacharias which we have quoted, indicates acquaintance with a different gospel from our third synoptic. hilgenfeld rightly maintains that the protevangelium jacobi in its present shape is merely an { } altered form of an older work,( ) which he conjectures to have been the gospel according to peter, or the gnostic work [------],( ) and both he and tischendorf show that many of the fathers( ) were either acquainted with the protevangelium itself or the works on which it was based. the state of the case, then, is as follows: we find a coincidence in a few words in connection with zacharias between the epistle and our third gospel, but so far from the gospel being in any way indicated as their source, the words in question are connected with a reference to events unknown to our gospel, but which were indubitably chronicled elsewhere. as part of the passage in the epistle, therefore, could not have been derived from our third synoptic, the natural inference is that the whole emanates from a gospel, different from ours, which likewise contained that part in any case, the agreement of these few words, without the slightest mention of the third synoptic in the epistle, cannot be admitted as proof that they must necessarily have been derived from it and from no other source. { } chapter x. ptolemÆus and heracleon--celsus--the canon of muratori--results. we have now reached the extreme limit of time within which we think it in any degree worth while to seek for evidence as to the date and authorship of the synoptic gospels, and we might now proceed to the fourth gospel; but before doing so it may be well to examine one or two other witnesses whose support has been claimed by apologists, although our attention may be chiefly confined to an inquiry into the date of such testimony, upon which its value, even if real, mainly depends so far as we are concerned. the first of these whom we must notice are the two gnostic leaders, ptolemæus and heracleon. epiphanius has preserved a certain "epistle to flora" ascribed to ptolemseus, in which, it is contended, there are "several quotations from matthew, and one from the first chapter of john."( ) what date must be assigned to this epistle? in reply to those who date it about the end of the second century, tischendorf produces the evidence for an earlier period to which he assigns it. he says: "he (ptolemæus) appears in all the oldest sources tischendorf wann wurden, u. s. w., p. . canon westcott with greater caution says: "he quoted words of our lord recorded by st. matthew, the prologue of st. john's gospel, &c." on the canon, p. . { } as one of the most important, most influential of the disciples of valentinus. as the period at which the latter himself flourished falls about , do we say too much when we represent ptolemæus as working at the latest about ? irenæus (in the nd book) and hippolytus name him together with heracleon; likewise pseudo-tertullian (in the appendix to de præscriptionibus hæreticorum) and philastrius make him appear immediately after valentinus. irenæus wrote the first and second books of his great work most probably (hochst warscheinlich) before , and in both he occupies himself much with ptolemæus."( ) canon westcott, beyond calling ptolemæus and heracleon disciples of valentinus, does not assign any date to either, and does not of course offer any further evidence on the point, although, in regard to heracleon, he admits the ignorance in which we are as to all points of his history,( ) and states generally, in treating of him, that "the exact chronology of the early heretics is very uncertain."( ) let us, however, examine the evidence upon which tischendorf relies for the date he assigns to ptolemæus. he states in vague terms that ptolemæus appears "in all the oldest sources" (in alien den altesten quellen) as one of the most important disciples of valentinus. we shall presently see what these sources are, but must now follow the argument: "as the date of valentinus falls about , do we say too much when we represent ptolemæus as working at the latest about ?" it is obvious that there is no evidence here, but merely assumption, and the manner in which the period "about " is begged, is a clear admission that there are no certain data. the year { } might with equal propriety upon those grounds have been put ten years earlier or ten years later. the deceptive and arbitrary character of the conclusion, however, will be more apparent when we examine the grounds upon which the relative dates and rest. tischendorf here states that the time at which valentinus flourished falls about a.d. , but the fact is that, as all critics are agreed,( ) and as even tischendorf himself elsewhere states,( ) valentinus came out of egypt to rome in that year, when his public career practically commenced, and he continued to flourish for at least twenty years after.( ) tischendorf s pretended moderation, therefore, consists in dating the period when valentinus flourished from the very year of his first appearance, and in assigning the active career of ptolemseus to when valentinus was still alive and teaching. he might on the same principle be dated , and even in that case there could be no reason for ascribing the epistle to flora to so early a period of his career. tischendorf never even pretends to state any ground upon which ptolemæus must be connected with any precise part of the public life of valentinus, and still less for discriminating the period of the career of ptolemæus at which the epistle may have been composed. it is obvious that a wide limit for date thus exists. after these general statements tischendorf details the only evidence which is available. ( ) "irenæus (in the nd book) and hippolytus name him together with heracleon; likewise ( ) pseudo-tertullian (in the { } appendix to _de præscriptionibus hæreticorum_) and philastrius make him appear immediately after valentinus," &c. we must first examine these two points a little more closely in order to ascertain the value of such statements. with regard to the first ( st) of these points, we shall presently see that the mention of the name of ptolemseus along with that of heracleon throws no light upon the matter from any point of view, inasmuch as tischendorf has as little authority for the date he assigns to the latter, and is in as complete ignorance concerning him, as in the case of ptolemseus. it is amusing, moreover, that tischendorf employs the very same argument, which sounds well although it means nothing, inversely to establish the date of heracleon. here, he argues: "irenæus and hippolytus name him (ptolemæus) together with heracleon;"(l) there, he reasons: "irenæus names heracleon together with ptolemæus,"( ) &c. as neither the date assigned to the one nor to the other can stand alone, he tries to get them into something like an upright position by propping the one against the other, an expedient which, naturally, meets with little success. we shall in dealing with the case of heracleon show how untenable is the argument from the mere order in which such names are mentioned by these writers; meantime we may simply say that irenæus only once mentions the name of heracleon in his works, and that the occasion on which he does so, and to which reference is here made, is merely an allusion to the Æons "of ptolemseus himself, and of heracleon, and all the rest who hold these views."( ) this phrase might have been used, exactly as it stands, with { } perfect propriety even if ptolemæus and heracleon had been separated by a century. the only point which can be deduced from this mere coupling of names is that, in using the present tense, irenæus is speaking of his own contemporaries. we may make the same remark regarding hippolytus, for, if his mention of ptolemæus and heracleon has any weight at all, it is to prove that they were flourishing in his time: "those who are of italy, of whom is heracleon and ptolemæus, say..."( ) &c. we shall have to go further into this point presently. as to ( ) pseudo-tertullian and philastrius we need only say that even if the fact of the names of the two gnostics being coupled together could prove anything in regard to the date, the repetition by these writers could have no importance for us, their works being altogether based on those of irenæus and hippolytus,( ) and scarcely, if at all, conveying independent information.( ) we have merely indicated the weakness of these arguments in passing, but shall again take them up further on. the next and final consideration advanced by tischendorf is the only one which merits serious attention. "irenæus wrote the first and second book of his great work most probably before , and in both he occupies himself much with ptolemæus." before proceeding to examine the accuracy of this statement regarding the time at which irenæus wrote, we may ask what conclusion would be involved if irenæus really did compose the two books in a.d. in which he mentions indeed the direct and avowed dependence of hippolytus himself upon the work of irenæus deprives the philosophumena, in many parts, of all separate authority. { } our gnostics in the present tense? nothing more than the simple fact that ptolemæus and heracleon were promulgating their doctrines at that time. there is not a single word to show that they did not continue to flourish long after; and as to the "epistle to flora" irenæus apparently knows nothing of it, nor has any attempt been made to assign it to an early part of the gnostic's career. tischendorf, in fact, does not produce a single passage nor the slightest argument to show that irenæus treats our two gnostics as men of the past, or otherwise than as heretics then actively disseminating their heterodox opinions, and, even taken literally, the argument of tischendorf would simply go to prove that about a.d. irenseus wrote part of a work in which he attacks ptolemæus and mentions heracleon. when did irenæus, however, really write his work against heresies? although our sources of credible information regarding him are exceedingly limited, we are not without materials for forming a judgment on the point irenæus was probably born about a.d. - , and is generally supposed to have died at the beginning of the third century (a.d. ).( ) we know that he was deputed by the church of lyons to bear to eleutherus, then bishop of rome, the epistle of that christian community describing their sufferings during the persecution commenced against them in the seventeenth year of the reign of marcus aurelius antoninus ( th march, -- ).( ) it is very improbable that this journey was undertaken, in any case, before the spring of a.d. at the earliest, and, indeed, in accordance with the given data, the { } persecution itself may not have commenced earlier than the beginning of that year, so that his journey need not have been undertaken before the close of or the spring of , to which epoch other circumstances might lead us.( ) there is reason to believe that he remained some time in rome. baronius states that irenæus was not appointed bishop of lyons till a.d. , for he says that the see remained vacant for that period after the death of pothinus in consequence of the persecution. now certain expressions in his work show that irenæus did not write it until he became bishop.( ) it is not known how long irenæus remained in rome, but there is every probability that he must have made a somewhat protracted stay, for the purpose of making himself acquainted with the various tenets of gnostic and other heretics then being actively taught, and the preface to the first book refers to the pains he took. he wrote his work in gaul, however, after his return from this visit to rome. this is apparent from what he himself states in the preface to the first book: "i have thought it necessary," he says, "after having read the memoirs [------] of the disciples of valentinus as they call themselves, and _having had personal intercourse with some of them_ and acquired full knowledge of their opinions, to unfold to thee,"( ) &c. a little further on, he claims from the friend to whom he addresses his work indulgence for any defects of style on the score of his being resident amongst the keltæ.( ) irenæus no doubt during his stay in rome came in { } contact with the school of ptolemæus and heracleon, if not with the gnostic leaders themselves, and shocked as he describes himself as being at the doctrines which they insidiously taught, he undertook, on his return to lyons, to explain them that others might be exhorted to avoid such an "abyss of madness and blasphemy against christ."( ) irenæus gives us other materials for assigning a date to his work. in the third book he enumerates the bishops who had filled the episcopal chair of rome, and the last whom he names is eleutherus (a.d. -- ), who, he says, "now in the twelfth place from the apostles, holds the inheritance of the episcopate."( ) there is, however, another clue which, taken along with this, leads us to a close approximation to the actual date. in the same book, irenæus mentions theodotion's version of the old testament: "but not as some of those say," he writes, "who now [------] presume to alter the interpretation of the scripture: 'behold the young woman shall conceive, and bring forth a son,' as theodotion, the ephesian, translated it, and aquila of pontus, both jewish proselytes."( ) now we are informed by epiphanius that theodotion published his translation during the reign of the emperor commodus( ) (a.d. -- ). the chronicon paschale adds that it was during the consulship of marcellus, or as massuet( ) proposes to read marullus, who, jointly with Ælianus, assumed office a.d. . these dates decidedly agree with the passage of irenæus and with the other data, all of which lead { } us to about the same period within the episcopate of eleutherus (+ c. ).( ) we have here, therefore, a clue to the date at which irenæus wrote. it must be remembered that at that period the multiplication and dissemination of books was a very slow process. a work published about or could scarcely have come into the possession of irenæus in gaul till some years later, and we are, therefore, brought towards the end of the episcopate of eleutherus as the earliest date at which the first three books of his work against heresies can well have been written, and the rest must be assigned to a later period under the episcopate of victor (+ -- ).( ) at this point we must pause and turn to the evidence which tischendorf offers regarding the date to be assigned to heracleon.( ) as in the case of ptolemæus, we shall give it entire and then examine it in detail. to the all-important question: "how old is heracleon?" tischendorf replies: "irenæus names heracleon, together canon westcott adds no separate testimony. he admits that: "the history of heracleon, the great valentinian commentator, is full of uncertainty. nothing is known of his country or parentage." on the canon, p. , and in a note: "the exact chronology of the early heretics is very uncertain," p. , note . p { } with ptolemaeus ii. , § , in a way which makes them appear as well-known representatives of the valentinian school. this interpretation of his words is all the more authorized because he never again mentions heracleon. clement, in the th book of his stromata, written shortly after the death of commodus ( ), recalls an explanation by heracleon of luke xii. , when he calls him the most noted, man of the valentinian school [------] is clement's expression). origen, at the beginning of his quotation from heracleon, says that he was held to be a friend of valentinus [------]. hippolytus mentions him, for instance, in the following way: (vi. ); 'valentinus, and heracleon, and ptolemæus, and the whole school of these, disciples of pythagoras and plato....' epiphanius says (hser. ): 'cerdo (the same who, according to irenæus iii. , § , was in rome under bishop hyginus with valentinus) follows these (the ophites, kainites, sethiani), and heracleon.' after all this heracleon certainly cannot be placed later than to . the expression which origen uses regarding his relation to valentinus must, according to linguistic usage, be understood of a personal relation."( ) we have already pointed out that the fact that the names of ptolemæus and heracleon are thus coupled together affords no clue in itself to the date of either, and their being mentioned as leading representatives of the school of valentinus does not in any way involve the inference that they were not contemporaries of irenæus, living and working at the time he wrote. the way in which irenæus mentions them in this the only passage throughout his whole work in which he names { } heracleon, and to which tischendorf pointedly refers, is as follows: "but if it was not produced, but was generated by itself, then that which is void is both like, and brother to, and of the same honour with, that father who has before been mentioned by valentinus; but it is really more ancient, having existed long before, and is more exalted than the rest of the Æons of ptolemseus himself, and of heracleon, and all the rest who hold these views."( ) we fail to recognize anything special, here, of the kind inferred by tischendorf, in the way in which mention is made of the two later gnostics. if anything be clear, on the contrary, it is that a distinction is drawn between valentinus and ptolemaeus and heracleon, and that irenæus points out inconsistencies between the doctrines of the founder and those of his later followers. it is quite irrelevant to insist merely, as tischendorf does, that irenæus and subsequent writers represent ptolemaeus and heracleon and other gnostics of his time as of "the school" of valentinus. the question simply is, whether in doing so they at all imply that these men were not contemporaries of irenæus, or necessarily assign their period of independent activity to the lifetime of valentinus, as tischendorf appears to argue? most certainly they do not, and tischendorf does not attempt to offer any evidence that they do so. we may perceive how utterly worthless such a fact is for the purpose of affixing an early date by merely considering the quotation which tischendorf himself makes from hippolytus: "valentinus, therefore, and heracleon and ptolemæus, and { } the whole school of these, disciples of pythagoras and plato.... "(l) if the statement that men are of a certain school involves the supposition of coincidence of time, the three gnostic leaders must be considered contemporaries of pythagoras or plato, whose disciples they are said to be. again, if the order in which names are mentioned, as teschendorf contends by inference throughout his whole argument, is to involve strict similar sequence of date, the principle applied to the whole of the early writers would lead to the most ridiculous confusion. teschendorf quotes epiphanius: "cerdo follows these (the ophites, kainites, sethiani), and heracleon." why he does so it is difficult to understand, unless it be to give the appearance of multiplying testimonies, for two sentences further on he is obliged to admit: "epiphanius has certainly made a mistake, as in such things not unfrequently happens to him, when he makes cerdo, who, however, is to be placed about , follow heracleon."( ) this kind of mistake is, indeed, common to all the writers quoted, and when it is remembered that such an error is committed where a distinct and deliberate affirmation of the point is concerned, it will easily be conceived how little dependence is to be placed on the mere mention of names in the course of argument. we find irenæus saying that "neither valentinus, nor marcion, nor saturninus, nor basilides" possesses certain knowledge,( ) and elsewhere: "of such an one as valentinus, or ptolemæus, or basilides."( ) to base { } an argument as to date on the order in which names appear in such writers is preposterous. tischendorf draws an inference from the statement that heracleon was said to be a [------] of valentinus, that origen declares him to have been his friend, holding personal intercourse with him. origen, however, evidently knew nothing individually on the point, and speaks from mere hearsay, guardedly using the expression "said to be" [------]. but according to the later and patristic use of the word, [------] meant nothing more than a "disciple," and it cannot here be necessarily interpreted into a "contemporary."( ) under no circumstances could such a phrase, avowedly limited to hearsay, have any weight. the loose manner in which the fathers repeat each other, even in serious matters, is too well known to every one acquainted with their writings to require any remark. their inaccuracy keeps pace with their want of critical judgment we have seen one of the mistakes of epiphanius, admitted by tischendorf to be only too common with him, which illustrates how little such data are to be relied on. we may point out another of the same kind committed by him in common with hippolytus, pseudo-tertullian and philastrius. mistaking a passage of irenæus,( ) regarding the sacred tetrad (kol-arbas) of the valentinian gnosis, hippolytus supposes irenæus to refer to another heretic leader. he at once treats the tetrad as such a leader named "kolarbasus," and after dealing (vi. ) with the doctrines of secundud, and ptolemæus, and heracleon, he proposes, § , to show "what are the opinions held by marcus and { } kolarbasus."( ) at the end of the same book he declares that irenæus, to whom he states that he is indebted for a knowledge of their inventions, has completely refuted the opinions of these heretics, and he proceeds to treat of basilides, considering that it has been sufficiently demonstrated "whose disciples are marcus and kolarbasus, the successors of the school of valentinus."( ) at an earlier part of the work he had spoken in a more independent way in reference to certain who had promulgated great heresies: "of these," he says, "one is kolarbasus, who endeavours to explain religion by measures and numbers."( ) the same mistake is committed by pseudo-tertullian,( ) and philastrius,( ) each of whom devotes a chapter to this supposed heretic. epiphanius, as might have been expected, fell into the same error, and he proceeds elaborately to refute the heresy of the kolarbasians, "which is heresy xv." he states that kolarbasus follows marcus and ptolemæus,( ) and after discussing the opinions of this mythical heretic he devotes the next chapter, "which is heresy xvi.," to the heracleonites, commencing it with the information that: "a certain heracleon follows after kolarbasus."( ) this absurd mistake( ) shows how little these writers { } knew of the gnostics of whom they wrote, and how the one ignorantly follows the other. the order, moreover, in which they set the heretic leaders varies considerably. it will be sufficient for us merely to remark here that while pseudo-tertullian( ) and philastrius( ) adopt the following order after the valentinians: ptolemæus, secundus, heracleon, marcus, and kolarbasus, epiphanius( ) places them: secundus, ptolemæus, marcosians, kolarbasus, and heracleon; and hippolytus( ) again: secundus, ptolemæus, heracleon, marcus, and kolarbasus. the vagueness of irenæus had left some latitude here, and his followers were uncertain. the somewhat singular fact that irenæus only once mentions heracleon whilst he so constantly refers to ptolemæus, taken in connection with this order, in which heracleon is always placed after ptolemæus,( ) and by epiphanius after marcus, may be reasonably explained by the fact that whilst ptolemæus had already gained considerable notoriety when irenæus wrote, heracleon may only have begun to come into notice. since tischendorf lays so much stress upon pseudo-tertullian and philastrius making ptolemaeus appear immediately after valentinus, this explanation is after his own principle. we have already pointed out that there is not a single passage in irenæus, or any other early writer, assigning ptolemæus and heracleon to a period anterior to the time when irenæus undertook to refute their opinions. indeed, tischendorf has not attempted to show that { } they do, and he has merely, on the strength of the general expression that these gnostics were of the school of valentinus, boldly assigned to them an early date. now, as we have stated, he himself admits that valentinus only came from egypt to rome in a.d. , and continued teaching till ,( ) and these dates are most clearly given by irenæus himself.( ) why then should ptolemæus and heracleon, to take an extreme case, not have known valentinus in their youth, and yet have flourished chiefly during the last two decades of the second century? irenæus himself may be cited as a parallel case, which tischendorf at least cannot gainsay. he is never tired of telling us that irenæus was the disciple of polycarp,( ) whose martyrdom he sets about a.d. , and he considers that the intercourse of irenæus with the aged father must properly be put about a.d. ,( ) yet he himself dates the death of irenæus, a.d. ,( ) and nothing is more certain than that the period of his greatest activity and influence falls precisely in the last twenty years of the second century. upon his own data, therefore, that valentinus may have taught for twenty years after his first appearance in rome in a.d. --and there is no ground whatever for asserting that he did not teach for even a much longer period--ptolemaeus and heracleon might well have personally sat at the feet of valentinus in their youth, as irenseus is said to have done about the very same period at those of polycarp, and yet, like him, have flourished chiefly towards the end of the century. { } although there is not the slightest ground for asserting that ptolemæus and heraclcon were not contemporaries with irenæus, flourishing like him towards the end of the second century, there are, on the other hand, many circumstances which altogether establish, the conclusion that they were. "we have already shown, in treating of valentinus,( ) that irenæus principally directs his work against the followers of valentinus living at the time he wrote, and notably of ptolemæus and his school.( ) in the preface to the first book, having stated that he writes after personal intercourse with some of the disciples of valentinus,( ) he more definitely declares his purpose: "we will, then, to the best of our ability, clearly and concisely set forth the opinions of those who are now [------] teaching heresy, _i speak particularly of the disciples of ptolemæus_ [------] whose system is an offshoot from the school of valentinus."( ) nothing could be more explicit. irenæus in this passage distinctly represents ptolemæus as teaching at the time he is writing, and this statement alone is decisive, more especially as there is not a single known fact which is either directly or indirectly opposed to it. tischendorf lays much stress on the evidence of hippolytus in coupling together the names of ptolemæus and heracleon with that of valentinus; similar testimony of the same writer, fully confirming the above statement of irenæus, will, therefore, have the greater force. hippolytus says that the valentinians differed materially among themselves regarding certain points which led to divisions, one party being called the { } oriental and the other the italian. "they of the italian party, of whom is heracleon and ptolemæus, say, &c.... they, however, who are of the oriental party, of whom is axionicus and bardesanes, maintain," &c.( ) now, ptolemæus and heracleon are here quite clearly represented as being contemporary with axionicus and bardesanes, and without discussing whether hippolytus does not, in continuation, describe them as all living at the time he wrote,( ) there can be no doubt that some of them were, and that this evidence confirms again the statement of irenæus. hippolytus, in a subsequent part of his work, states that a certain prepon, a marcionite, has introduced something new, and "now in our own time [------] has written a work regarding the heresy in reply to bardesanes."( ) the researches of hilgenfeld have proved that bardesanes lived at least over the reign of heliogabalus ( -- ), and the statement of hippolytus is thus confirmed.( ) axionicus again was still flourishing when tertullian wrote his work against the valentinians { } ( -- ). tertullian says: "axionicus of antioch alone to the present day (ad hodiernum) respects the memory of valentinus, by keeping fully the rules of his system."( ) although on the whole they may be considered to have flourished somewhat earlier, ptolemæus and heracleon are thus shown to have been for a time at least contemporaries of axionicus and bardesanes.( ) moreover, it is evident that the doctrines of ptolemæus and heracleon represent a much later form of gnosticism than that of valentinus. it is generally admitted that ptolemæus reduced the system of valentinus to consistency,( ) and the inconsistencies which existed between the views of the master and these later followers, and which indicate a much more advanced stage of development, are constantly pointed out by irenæus and the fathers who wrote in refutation of heresy. origen also represents heracleon as amongst those who held opinions sanctioned by the church,( ) and both he and ptolemæus must indubitably be classed amongst the latest gnostics.( ) it is clear, therefore, that ptolemæus and heracleon were contemporaries of irenæus( ) at the time he composed his work against heresies ( -- ), both, and especially { } the latter, flourishing and writing towards the end of the second century.( ) we mentioned, in first speaking of these gnostics, that epiphanius has preserved an epistle, attributed to ptolemæus, which is addressed to flora, one of his disciples.( ) this epistle is neither mentioned by irenæus nor by any other writer before epiphanius. there is nothing in the epistle itself to show that it was really written by ptolemæus himself. assuming it to be by him, however, the epistle was in all probability written towards the end of the second century, and it does not, therefore, come within the scope of our inquiry. we may, however, briefly notice the supposed references to our gospels which it contains. the writer of the epistle, without any indication whatever of a written source from which he derived them, quotes sayings of jesus for which parallels are found in our first gospel. these sayings are introduced by such expressions as "he said," "our saviour declared," but never as quotations from any scripture. now, in affirming that they are taken from the gospel according to matthew, apologists exhibit their usual arbitrary haste, for we must clearly and decidedly state that there is not a single one of the passages which does not present decided variations from the parallel passages in our first synoptic. we subjoin for comparison in parallel columns the passages from the epistle and gospel:-- [------] [------] { } it must not be forgotten that iræneus makes very explicit statements as to the recognition of other sources of evangelical truth than our gospels by the valentinians, regarding which we have fully written when discussing the founder of that sect.( ) we know that they professed to have direct traditions from the apostles through theodas, a disciple of the apostle paul;( ) and in the { } epistle to flora allusion is made to the succession of doctrine received by direct tradition from the apostles.( ) irenæus says that the valentinians profess to derive their views from unwritten sources,( ) and he accuses them of rejecting the gospels of the church,( ) but, on the other hand, he states that they had many gospels different from what he calls the gospels of the apostles.( ) with regard to heracleon, it is said that he wrote commentaries on the third and fourth gospels. the authority for this statement is very insufficient. the assertion with reference to the third gospel is based solely upon a passage in the stromata of the alexandrian clement. clement quotes a passage found in luke xii. , , , and says: "expounding this passage, heracleon, the most distinguished of the school of valentinus, says as follows," &c.( ) this is immediately interpreted into a quotation from a commentary on luke.( ) we merely point out that from clement's remark it by no means follows that heracleon wrote a commentary at all, and further there is no evidence that the passage commented upon was actually from our third gospel.( ) the stromata of clement were not written until after a.d. , and in them we find the first and only reference to this supposed commentary. "we need not here refer to the commentary on the fourth gospel, which is merely { } inferred from references in origen (c. a.d. ), but of which we have neither earlier nor fuller information.( ) we must, however, before leaving this subject, mention that origen informs us that heracleon quotes from the preaching of peter [------], pesedicatio petri), a work which, as we have already several times mentioned, was cited by clement of alexandria as authentic and inspired holy scripture.( ) the epoch at which ptolemæus and heracleon flourished would in any case render testimony regarding our gospels of little value. the actual evidence which they furnish, however, is not of a character to prove even the existence of our synoptics, and much less does it in any way bear upon their character or authenticity. . a similar question of date arises regarding celsus, who wrote a work, entitled [------], true doctrine, which is no longer extant, of which origen composed an elaborate refutation. the christian writer takes the arguments of celsus in detail, presenting to us, therefore, its general features, and giving many extracts; and as celsus professes to base much of his accusation upon the writings in use amongst christians, although he does not name a single one of them, it becomes desirable to ascertain what those works were, and the date at which { } celsus wrote. as usual, we shall state the case by giving the reasons assigned for an early date. arguing against volkmar and others, who maintain, from a passage at the close of his work, that oligen, writing about the second quarter of the third century, represents celsus as his contemporary,( ) tischendorf, referring to the passage, which we shall give in its place, proceeds to assign an earlier date upon the following grounds: "but indeed, even in the first book, at the commencement of the whole work, origen says: 'therefore, i cannot compliment a christian whose faith is in danger of being shaken by celsus, who yet does not even [------] still [------] live the common life among men, but already and long since [------] is dead.'... in the same first book origen says: 'we have heard that there were two men of the name of celsus, epicureans, the first under nero; this one' (that is to say, ours) 'under hadrian and later.' it is not impossible that origen mistakes when he identified his celsus with the epicurean living 'under hadrian and later;' but it is impossible to convert the same celsus of whom origen says this into a contemporary of origen. or would origen himself in the first book really have set his celsus 'under hadrian ( -- ) and later,' yet in the eighth have said: 'we will wait (about ), to see whether he will still accomplish this design of making another work follow?' now, until some better discovery regarding celsus is attained, it will be well to hold to the old opinion that celsus wrote his book about the middle of the second century, probably between -- ," &c.( ) { } it is scarcely necessary to point out that the only argument advanced by tischendorf bears solely against the assertion that celsus was a contemporary of origen, "about ," and leaves the actual date entirely unsettled. he not only admits that the statement of origen regarding the identity of his opponent with the epicurean of the reign of hadrian "and later," may be erroneous, but he tacitly rejects it, and having abandoned the conjecture of origen as groundless and untenable, he substitutes a conjecture of his own, equally unsupported by reasons, that celsus probably wrote between - . indeed, he does not attempt to justify this date, but arbitrarily decides to hold by it until a better can be demonstrated. he is forced to admit the ignorance of origen on the point, and he does not conceal his own. now it is clear that the statement of origen in the preface to his work, quoted above, that celsus, against whom he writes, is long since dead,( ) is made in the belief that this celsus was the epicurean who lived under hadrian,( ) { } which tischendorf, although he avoids explanation of the reason, rightly recognizes to be a mistake. origen undoubtedly knew nothing of his adversary, and it obviously follows that, his impression that he is celsus the epicurean being erroneous, his statement that he was long since dead, which is based upon that impression, loses all its value. origen certainly at one time conjectured his celsus to be the epicurean of the reign of hadrian, for he not only says so directly in the passage quoted, but on the strength of his belief in the fact, he accuses him of inconsistency: "but celsus," he says, "must be convicted of contradicting himself; for he is discovered from other of his works to have been an epicurean, but here, because he considered that he could attack the word more effectively by not avowing the views of epicurus, he pretends, &c.... remark, therefore, the falseness of his mind," &c.( ) and from time to time he continues to refer to him as an epicurean,( ) although it is evident that in the writing before him he constantly finds evidence that he is of a wholly different school. beyond this belief, founded avowedly on mere hearsay, origen absolutely knows nothing whatever as to the personality of celsus, or the time at which he wrote,( ) and he sometimes very naively expresses his uncertainty regarding him. referring in one place to certain passages which seem to imply a belief in magic on the part of celsus, origen adds: "i do not know whether he is the same who has written several books { } against magic."( ) elsewhere he says: "... the epicurean celsus (if he be the same who composed two other books against christians)," &c.( ) not only is it apparent that origen knows nothing of the celsus with whom he is dealing, however, but it is almost impossible to avoid the conviction that during the time he was composing his work his impressions concerning the date and identity of his opponent became considerably modified. in the earlier portion of the first book( ) he has heard that his celsus is the epicurean of the reign of hadrian, but a little further on,( ) he confesses his ignorance as to whether he is the same celsus who wrote against magic, which celsus the epicurean actually did. in the fourth book( ) he expresses uncertainty as to whether the epicurean celsus had composed the work against christians which he is refuting, and at the close of his treatise he seems to treat him as a contemporary. he writes to his friend ambrosius, at whose request the refutation of celsus was undertaken: "know, however, that celsus has promised to write another treatise after this one.... if, therefore, he has not fulfilled his promise to write a second book, we may well be satisfied with the eight books in reply to his discourse. if, { } however, he has commenced and finished this work also, seek it and "send it in order that we may answer it also, and confute the false teaching in it," &c.( ) from this passage, and supported by other considerations, volkmar and others assert that celsus was really a contemporary of origen.( ) to this, as we have seen, tischendorf merely replies by pointing out that origen in the preface says that celsus was already dead, and that he was identical with the epicurean celsus who flourished under hadrian and later. the former of these statements, however, was made under the impression that the latter was correct, and as it is generally agreed that origen was mistaken in supposing that celsus the epicurean was the author of the [------],( ) and tischendorf himself admits the fact, the two earlier statements, that celsus flourished under hadrian and consequently that he had long been dead, fall together, whilst the subsequent doubts regarding his identity not only stand, but { } rise into assurance at the close of the work in the final request to ambrosius.( ) there can be no doubt that the first statements and the closing paragraphs are contradictory, and whilst almost all critics pronounce against the accuracy of the former, the inferences from the latter retain full force, confirmed as they are by the intermediate doubts expressed by origen himself. even those who, like tischendorf, in an arbitrary manner assign an early date to celsus, although they do not support their conjectures by any satisfactory reasons of their own, all tacitly set aside these of origen.( ) it is generally admitted by these, with lardner( ) and michaelis,( ) that the epicurean celsus to "whom origen was at one time disposed to refer the work against christianity, was the writer of that name to whom lucian, his friend and contemporary, addressed his alexander or pseudomantis, and who really wrote against magic,( ) as origen mentions.( ) but although on this account lardner assigns to him the date of a.d. , the fact is that lucian did not write his pseudomantis, as lardner is obliged to admit,( ) until the reign of the { } emperor commodus ( -- ), and even upon the supposition that this celsus wrote against christianity, of which there is not the slightest evidence, there would be no ground whatever for dating the work before a.d. . on the contrary, as lucian does not in any way refer to such a writing by his friend, there would be strong reason for assigning the work, if it be supposed to be written by him, to a date subsequent to the pseudo-mantis. it need not be remarked that the references of celsus to the marcionites,( ) and to the followers of marcellina,( ) only so far bear upon the matter as to exclude an early date.( ) it requires very slight examination of the numerous extracts from, and references to, the work which origen seeks to refute, however, to convince any impartial mind that the doubts of origen were well founded as to whether celsus the epicurean were really the author of the [------]. as many critics of all shades of opinion have long since determined, so far from being an epicurean, the celsus attacked by origen, as the philosophical opinions which he everywhere expresses clearly show, was a neo-platonist.( ) indeed, although origen seems to retain some impression that his antagonist must be an epicurean, as he had heard, and frequently refers to him as such, he does not point out epicurean { } sentiments in his writings, but on the contrary, not only calls upon him no longer to conceal the school to which he belongs and avow himself an epicurean,( ) which celsus evidently does not, but accuses him of expressing views inconsistent with that philosophy,( ) or of so concealing his epicurean opinions that it might be said that he is an epicurean only in name.( ) on the other hand, origen is clearly surprised to find that he quotes so largely from the writings, and shows such marked leaning towards the teaching, of plato, in which celsus indeed finds the original and purer form of many christian doctrines,( ) and origen is constantly forced to discuss plato in meeting the arguments of celsus. the author of the work which origen refuted, therefore, instead of being an epicurean, as origen supposed merely from there having been an epicurean of the same name, was undoubtedly a neo-platonist, as mosheim long ago demonstrated, of the school of ammonius, who founded the sect at the close of the second century.( ) the promise of celsus to write a second book with practical rules for living in accordance with the philosophy he promulgates, to which origen refers at the close of his work, confirms this conclusion, and indicates a new and recent system of philosophy.( ) an epicurean would not have thought of such a work--it would have been both appropriate and necessary in connection with neo-platonism. we are, therefore, constrained to assign the work of { } celsus to at least the early part of the third century, and to the reign of septimius severus. celsus repeatedly accuses christians, in it, of teaching their doctrines secretly and against the law, which seeks them out and punishes them with death,( ) and this indicates a period of persecution. lardner, assuming the writer to be the epicurean friend of lucian, from this clue supposes that the persecution referred to must have been that under marcus aurelius (f ), and practically rejecting the data of origen himself, without advancing sufficient reasons of his own, dates celsus a.d. .( ) as a neo-platonist, however, we are more accurately led to the period of persecution which, from embers never wholly extinct since the time of marcus aurelius, burst into fierce flame more especially in the tenth year of the reign of severus( ) (a.d. ), and continued for many years to afflict christians. it is evident that the dates assigned by apologists are wholly arbitrary, and even if our argument for the later epoch were very much less conclusive than it is, the total absence of evidence for an earlier date would completely nullify any testimony derived from celsus. it is sufficient for us to add that, whilst he refers to incidents of gospel history and quotes some sayings which have pandlels, with more or less of variation, in our gospels, celsus nowhere mentions the name of any christian book, unless we except the book of enoch;( ) and he accuses christians, not without reason, of interpolating the books of the sibyl, whose authority, he states, some of them acknowledged.( ) { } . the last document which we need examine in connection with the synoptic gospels is the list of new testament and other writings held in consideration by the church, which is generally called, after its discoverer and first editor, the canon of muratori. this interesting fragment, which was published in by muratori in his collection of italian antiquities,( ) at one time belonged to the monastery of bobbio, founded by the irish monk columban, and was found by muratori in the ambrosian library at milan in a ms. containing extracts of little interest from writings of eucherius, ambrose, chrysostom, and others. muratori estimated the age of the ms. at about a thousand years, but so far as we are aware no thoroughly competent judge has since expressed any opinion upon the point. the fragment, which is defective both at the commencement and at the end, is written in an apologetic tone, and professes to give a list of the writings which are recognised by the christian church. it is a document which has no official character,( ) but which merely conveys the private views and information of the anonymous writer, regarding whom nothing whatever is known. from any point of view, the composition is of a nature permitting the widest differences of opinion. it is by some affirmed to be a complete treatise on the books received by the church, from which fragments have been lost;( ) whilst { } others consider it a mere fragment in itself.( ) it is written in latin which by some is represented as most corrupt,( ) whilst others uphold it as most correct.( ) the text is further rendered almost unintelligible by every possible inaccuracy of orthography and grammar, which is ascribed diversely to the transcriber, to the translator, and to both.( ) indeed such is the elastic condition of the text, resulting from errors and obscurity of every imaginable description, that by means of ingenious conjectures critics are able to find in it almost any sense they desire.( ) considerable difference of opinion exists as to the original language of the fragment, the greater number of critics maintaining that the composition is a translation from the greek,( ) whilst others assert it to { } have been originally written in latin.( ) its composition is variously attributed to the church of africa( ) and to a member of the church in rome.( ) the fragment commences with the concluding portion of a sentence.... "quibus tamen interfuit et ita posuit"--"at which nevertheless he was present, and thus he placed it." the ms. then proceeds: "third book of the gospel according to luke. luke, that physician, after the ascension of christ when paul took him with him..., wrote it in his name as he deemed best (ex opinione)--nevertheless he had not himself seen the lord in the flesh,--and he too, as far as he could obtain information, also begins to speak from the nativity of john." the text, at the sense of which this is a closely approximate guess, though several other { } interpretations might be maintained, is as follows: tertio evangelii librum secundo lucan lucas iste medicus post ascensum christi cum eo paulus quasi ut juris studiosum secundum adsumsisset numeni suo ex opinione concribset dominum tamen nec ipse vidit in carne et idem prout asequi potuit ita et ad nativitate johannis incipet dicere. the ms. goes on to speak in more intelligible language "of the fourth of the gospels of john, one of the disciples." (quarti evangeliorum johannis ex decipolis) regarding the composition of which the writer relates a legend, which we shall quote when we come to deal with that gospel the fragment then proceeds to mention the acts of the apostles,--which is ascribed to luke--thirteen epistles of paul in peculiar order, and it then refers to an epistle to the laodiceans and another to the alexandrians, forged, in the name of paul, after the heresy of marcion, "and many others which cannot be received by the catholic church, as gall must not be mixed with vinegar." the epistle to the ephesians bore the name of epistle to the laodiceans in the list of marcion, and this may be a reference to it.( ) the epistle to the alexandrians is generally identified with the epistle to the hebrews,( ) although some critics think this doubtful, or deny the fact, and consider both epistles referred to pseudographs { } attributed to the apostle paul. the epistle of jude, and two (the second and third) epistles of john are, with some tone of doubt, mentioned amongst the received books, and so is the book of wisdom. the apocalypses of john and of peter only are received, but some object to the latter being read in church. the epistle of james, both epistles of peter, the epistle to the hebrews (which is, however, probably indicated as the epistle to the alexandrians), and the first epistle of john are omitted altogether, with the exception of a quotation which is supposed to be from the last-named epistle, to which we shall hereafter refer. special reference is made to the pastor of hermas, which we shall presently discuss, regarding which the writer expresses his opinion that it should be read privately but not publicly in church, as it can neither be classed amongst the books of the prophets nor of the apostles. the fragment concludes with the rejection of the writings of several heretics.( ) it is inferred that, in the missing commencement of the fragment, the first two synoptics must have been mentioned. this, however, though of course most probable, cannot actually be ascertained, and so far as these gospels are concerned, therefore, the "canon of muratori" only furnishes conjectural evidence. the statement regarding the third synoptic merely proves the existence of that gospel at the time the fragment { } was composed, and we shall presently endeavour to form some idea of that date, but beyond this fact the information given anything but tends to establish the unusual credibility claimed for the gospels. it is declared by the fragment, as we have seen, that the third synoptic was written by luke, who had not himself seen the lord, but narrated the history as best he was able. it is worthy of remark, moreover, that even the apostle paul, who took luke with him after the ascension, had not been a follower of jesus either, nor had seen him in the flesh, and certainly he did not, by the showing of his own epistles, associate much with the other apostles, so that luke could not have had much opportunity while with him of acquiring from them any intimate knowledge of the events of gospel history. it is undeniable that the third synoptic is not the narrative of an eye-witness, and the occurrences which it records did not take place in the presence, or within the personal knowledge, of the writer, but were derived from tradition, or from written sources. such testimony, therefore, could not in any case be of much service to our third synoptic; but when we consider the uncertainty of the date at which the fragment was composed, and the certainty that it could not have been written at an early period, it will become apparent that the value of its evidence is reduced to a minimum. we have already incidentally mentioned that the writer of this fragment is totally unknown, nor does there exist any clue by which he can be identified. all the critics who have assigned an early date to the composition of the fragment have based their conclusion, almost solely, upon a statement made by the author regarding the pastor of hennas. he says: "hermas in { } truth composed the pastor very recently in our times in the city of rome, the bishop pius his brother, sitting in the chair of the church of the city of rome. and, therefore, it should indeed be read, but it cannot be published in the church to the people, neither being among the prophets, whose number is complete, nor amongst the apostles in the latter days." "pastorem vero nuperrime temporibus nostris in urbe roma herma conscripsit sedente cathedra urbis romæ ecclesiæ pio episcopus fratre ejus et ideo legi eum quidem oportet se publicare vero in ecclesia populo neque inter prophetas completum numero neque inter apostolos in fine temporum potest."( ) muratori, the discoverer of the ms., conjectured for various reasons, which need not be here detailed, that the fragment was written by caius the roman presbyter, who flourished at the end of the second (c. a.d. ) and beginning of the third century, and in this he was followed by a few others.( ) the great mass of critics, however, have rejected this conjecture, as they have likewise negatived the fanciful ascription of the composition by simon de magistris to papias of hierapolis,( ) and by bunsen to hegesippus.( ) such attempts to identify the unknown author are obviously mere speculation, and it is impossible to suppose that, had papias, hegesippus, or any other well-known writer of the same period composed such a list, eusebius could have failed to refer to { } it, as so immediately relevant to the purpose of his work. thiersch even expressed a suspicion that the fragment was a literary mystification on the part of muratori himself.( ) the mass of critics, with very little independent consideration, have taken literally the statement of the author regarding the composition of the pastor "very recently in our times" (nuperrime temporibus nostris), during the episcopate of pius (a.d. -- ), and have concluded the fragment to have been written towards the end of the second century, though we need scarcely say that a few writers would date it even earlier.( ) on the other hand, and we consider with reason, many critics, { } including men who will not be accused of opposition to an early canon, assign the composition to a later period, between the end of the second or beginning of the third century and the fourth century.( ) when we examine the ground upon which alone an early date can be supported, it becomes apparent how slight the foundation is. the only argument of any weight is the statement with regard to the composition of the pastor, but with the exception of the few apologists who do not hesitate to assign a date totally inconsistent with the state of the canon described in the fragment, the great majority of critics feel that they are forced to place the composition at least towards the end of the second century, at a period when the statement in the composition may agree with the actual opinions in the church, and yet in a sufficient degree accord with the expression "very recently in our times," as applied to the period of pius of rome, -- . it must be evident that, taken literally, a very arbitrary interpretation is given to this indication, and in supposing that the writer may have appropriately used the phrase thirty or forty years after the time of pius, so much licence is taken that there is absolutely no reason why a still greater interval may not be allowed. with this sole exception, there is not a single word or statement in the fragment which would oppose our assigning the { } composition to a late period of the third century. volkmar has very justly pointed out, however, that in saying "very recently in our times" the writer merely intended to distinguish the pastor of hermas from the writings of the prophets and apostles: it cannot be classed amongst the prophets whose number is complete, nor amongst the apostles, inasmuch as it was only written in our post-apostolic time. this is an accurate interpretation of the expression,( ) which might with perfect propriety be used a century after the time of pius. we have seen that there has not appeared a single trace of any canon in the writings of any of the fathers whom we have examined, and that the old testament has been the only holy scripture they have acknowledged; and it is therefore unsafe, upon the mere interpretation of a phrase which would be applicable even a century later, to date this anonymous fragment, regarding which we know nothing, earlier than the very end of the second or beginning of the third century, and it is still more probable that it was not written until an advanced period of the third century. the expression used with regard to pius: "sitting in the chair of the church," is quite unprecedented in the second century or until a very much later date.( ) it is argued that the fragment is imperfect, and that sentences have fallen out; and in regard to this, and to the assertion that it is a translation from the greek, it has been well remarked by a writer whose judgment on the point will scarcely be called prejudiced: "if it is thus mutilated, why might it not also be interpolated? if moreover the translator { } was so ignorant of latin, can we trust his translation? and what guarantee have we that he has not paraphrased and expanded the original? the force of these remarks is peculiarly felt in dealing with the paragraph which gives the date. the pastor of hermas was not well known to the western church, and it was not highly esteemed. it was regarded as inspired by the eastern, and read in the eastern churches. we have seen, moreover, that it was extremely unlikely that hermas was a real personage. it would be, therefore, far more probable that we have here an interpolation, or addition by a member of the roman or african church, probably by the translator, made expressly for the purpose of serving as proof that the pastor of hennas was not inspired. the paragraph itself bears unquestionable mark of tampering,"( ) &c. it would take us too far were we to discuss the various statements of the fragment as indications of date, and the matter is not of sufficient importance. it contains nothing involving an earlier date than the third century. the facts of the case may be briefly summed up as follows, so far as our object is concerned. the third synoptic is mentioned by a totally unknown writer, at an unknown, but certainly not early, date, in all probability during the third century, in a fragment which we possess in a very corrupt version very far from free from suspicion of interpolation in the precise part from which the early date is inferred. the gospel is attributed to luke, who was not one of the followers of jesus, and of whom it is expressly said that "he himself had not seen the lord in the flesh," but wrote "as he deemed best (ex opinione)," and followed his history as he was able (et { } idem prout assequi potuit).( ) if the fragment of muratori, therefore, even came within our limits as to date, its evidence would be of no value, for, instead of establishing the trustworthiness and absolute accuracy of the narrative of the third synoptic, it distinctly tends to discredit it, inasmuch as it declares it to be the composition of one who undeniably was not an eye-witness of the miracles reported, but collected his materials, long after, as best he could.( ) . we may now briefly sum up the results of our examination of the evidence for the synoptic gospels. after having exhausted the literature and the testimony bearing on the point, we have not found a single distinct trace of any of those gospels, with the exception of the third, during the first century and a half after the death of jesus. only once during the whole of that period do we find even a tradition that any of our evangelists composed a gospel at all, and that tradition, so far from favouring our synoptics, is fatal to the claims of the first and second. papias, about the middle of the passage is freely rendered thus by canon westcott: "the gospel of st. luke, it is then said, stands third in order [in the canon], having been written by 'luke the physician,' the companion of st. paul, who, not being himself an eye-witness, based his narrative on such information as he could obtain, beginning from tho birth of john." on the canon, p. . we do not propose, to consider the ophites and peratici, obscure gnostic sects towards the end of the second century. there is no direct evidence regarding them, and the testimony of writers in the third century, like hippolytus, is of no value for the gospels. { } the second century, on the occasion to which we refer, records that matthew composed the discourses of the lord in the hebrew tongue, a statement which totally excludes the claim of our greek gospel to apostolic origin. mark, he said, wrote down from the casual preaching of peter the sayings and doings of jesus, but without orderly arrangement, as he was not himself a follower of the master, and merely recorded what fell from the apostle. this description, likewise, shows that our actual second gospel could not, in its present form, have been the work of mark. there is no other reference during the period to any writing of matthew or mark, and no mention at all of any work ascribed to luke. the identification of marcion's gospel with our third synoptic proves the existence of that work before a.d. , but no evidence is thus obtained either as to the author or the character of his work, but on the contrary the testimony of the great heresiarch is so far unfavourable to that gospel, as it involves a charge against it, of being interpolated and debased by jewish elements. the freedom with which marcion expurgated and altered it clearly shows that he did not regard it either as a sacred or canonical work. any argument for the mere existence of our synoptics based upou their supposed rejection by heretical leaders and sects has the inevitable disadvantage, that the very testimony which would show their existence would oppose their authenticity. there is no evidence of their use by heretical leaders, however, and no direct reference to them by any writer, heretical or orthodox, whom we have examined. it is unnecessary to add that no reason whatever has been shown for accepting the testimony of these gospels as sufficient to establish the reality of { } miracles and of a direct divine revelation.( ) it is not pretended that more than one of the synoptic gospels was written by an eye-witness of the miraculous occurrences reported, and whilst no evidence has been, or can be, produced even of the historical accuracy of the narratives, no testimony as to the correctness of the inferences from the external phenomena exists, or is now even conceivable. the discrepancy between the amount of evidence required and that which is forthcoming, however, is greater than under the circumstances could have been thought possible. a comparison of the contents of the three synoptics would have confirmed this conclusion, but this is not at present necessary, and we must hasten on. { } part iii. the fourth gospel chapter i. the external evidence "we shall now examine, in the same order, the witnesses already cited in connection with the synoptics, and ascertain what evidence they furnish for the date and authenticity of the fourth gospel apologists do not even allege that there is any reference to the fourth gospel in the so-called epistle of clement of rome to the corinthians.( ) a few critics( ) pretend to find a trace of it in the epistle of barnabas, in the reference to the brazen serpent as a type of jesus. tischendorf states the case as follows:-- { } "and when in the same chapter xii. it is shown how moses in the brazen serpent made a type of jesus 'who should suffer (die) and yet himself make alive,' the natural inference is that barnabas connected therewith john iii. , f. even if the use of this passage in particular cannot be proved. although this connection cannot be affirmed, since the author of the epistle, in this passage as in many others, may be independent, yet it is justifiable to ascribe the greatest probability to its dependence on the passage in john, as the tendency of the epistle in no way required a particular leaning to the expression of john. the disproportionately more abundant use of express quotations from the old testament in barnabas is, on the contrary, connected most intimately with the tendency of his whole composition."( ) it will be observed that the suggestion of reference to the fourth gospel is here advanced in a very hesitating way, and does not indeed go beyond an assertion of probability. we might, therefore, well leave the matter without further notice, as the reference in no case could be of any weight as evidence. on examination of the context, however, we find that there is every reason to conclude that the reference to the brazen serpent is made direct to the old testament. the author who delights in typology is bent upon showing that the cross is prefigured in the old testament. he gives a number of instances, involving the necessity for a display of ridiculous ingenuity of explanation, which should prepare us to find the comparatively simple type of the brazen serpent naturally selected. after pointing out that moses, with his arms stretched out in prayer that the israelites might prevail in the fight, was a type of the { } cross, he goes on to say: "again moses makes a type of jesus, that he must suffer and himself make alive [------], whom they will appear to have destroyed, in a figure, while israel was falling;"(l) and connecting the circumstance that the people were bit by serpents and died with the transgression of eve by means of the serpent, he goes on to narrate minutely the story of moses and the brazen serpent, and then winds up with the words: "thou hast in this the glory of jesus; that in him are all things and for him."( ) no one can read the whole passage carefully without seeing that the reference is direct to the old testament.( ) there is no ground for supposing that the author was acquainted with the fourth gospel. to the pastor of hermas tischendorf devotes only two lines, in which he states that "it has neither quotations from the old nor from the new testament."( ) canon { } westcott makes the same statement,( ) but, unlike the german apologist, he proceeds subsequently to affirm that hermas makes "clear allusions to st. john;" which few or no apologists support. this assertion he elaborates and illustrates as follows:-- "the view which hermas gives of christ's nature and work is no less harmonious with apostolic doctrine, and it offers striking analogies to the gospel of st. john. not only did the son 'appoint angels to preserve each of those whom the father gave to him;' but 'he himself toiled very much and suffered very much to cleanse our sins.... and so when he himself had cleansed the sins of the people, he showed them the paths of life by giving them the law which he received from his. father.'( ) he is 'a rock higher than the mountains, able to hold the whole world, ancient, and yet having a new gate.'( ) 'his name is great and infinite, and the whole world is supported by him.'( ) 'he is older than creation, so that he took counsel with the father about the { } creation which he made.'( ) 'he is the sole way of access to the lord; and no one shall enter in unto him otherwise than by his son.'"( ) this is all canon westcott says on the subject.( ) he does not attempt to point out any precise portions of the fourth gospel with which to compare these "striking analogies," nor does he produce any instances of similarity of language, or of the use of the same terminology as the gospel in this apocalyptic allegory. it is evident that such evidence could in no case be of any value for the fourth gospel. when we examine more closely, however, it becomes certain that these passages possess no real analogy with the fourth gospel, and were not derived from it. there is no part of them that has not close parallels in writings antecedent to our gospel, and there is no use of terminology peculiar to it. the author does not even once use the term logos. canon westcott makes no mention of the fact that the doctrine of the logos and of the pre-existence of jesus was enunciated long before the composition of the fourth gospel, with almost equal clearness and fulness, and that its development can be traced through the septuagint translation, the "proverbs of solomon," some of the apocryphal works of the old testament, the writings of philo, and in the apocalypse, epistle to the hebrews, as well as the pauline epistles. to any one who examines the passages cited from the works of hennas, and still more to any one acquainted with the history of the logos doctrine, it will, we fear, { } seem wasted time to enter upon any minute refutation of such imaginary "analogies." we shall, however, as briefly as possible refer to each passage quoted. the first is taken from an elaborate similitude with regard to true fasting, in which the world is likened to a vineyard and, in explaining his parable, the shepherd says: "god planted the vineyard, that is, he created the people and gave them to his son: and the son appointed his angels over them to keep them: and he himself cleansed their sins, having suffered many things and endured many labours.... he himself, therefore, having cleansed the sins of the people, showed them the paths of life by giving them the law which he received from his father."( ) it is difficult indeed to find anything in this passage which is in the slightest degree peculiar to the fourth gospel, or apart from the whole course of what is taught in the epistles, and more especially the epistle to the hebrews. we may point out a few passages for comparison: heb. i. - ; ii. - ; v. - ; vii. , - ; viii. - ; x. - ; romans viii. - ; matt. xxi. ; mark xii. ; isaiah v. , liii. the second passage is taken from an elaborate parable on the building of the church: [------] "and in the middle of the plain he showed me a great white rock which had risen out of the plain, and the rock was higher than the mountains, rectangular so as to be able to hold the whole world, but that rock was old having a gate [------] hewn out of it, and the hewing out of the gate [------] seemed to me to be recent."( ) upon this rock the tower of the church is built. further on an explanation is given of the similitude, in which occurs another of the { } passages referred to.[------] "this rock [------] and this gate [------] are the son of god. 'how, lord,' i said, 'is the rock old and the gate new?' 'listen,' he said, 'and understand, thou ignorant man. [------] the son of god is older than all of his creation [------], so that he was a councillor with the father in his work of creation; and for this is he old.' [------] 'and why is the gate new, lord?' i said; 'because,' he replied, 'he was manifested at the last days [------] of the dispensation; for this cause the gate was made new, in order that they who shall be saved might enter by it into the kingdom of god.'"( ) and a few lines lower down the shepherd further explains, referring to entrance through the gate, and introducing another of the passages cited: [------] "'in this way,' he said, 'no one shall enter into the kingdom of god unless he receive his holy name. if, therefore, you cannot enter into the city unless through its gate, so also,' he said, 'a man cannot enter in any other way into the kingdom of god than by the name of his son beloved by him'... 'and the gate [------] is the son of god. this is the one entrance to the lord.' in no other way, therefore, shall any one enter in to him, except through his son."( ) now with regard to the similitude of a rock we need scarcely say that the old testament teems with it; and we need not point to the parable of the house built upon a rock in the first gospel.( ) a more apt illustration is the famous saying with regard to peter: "and upon this rock [------] i will build my church," upon which { } indeed the whole similitude of hermas turns; and in cor. x. , we read: "for they drank of the spiritual rock accompanying them; but the rock was christ" [------]. there is no such similitude in the fourth gospel at all. we then have the "gate," on which we presume canon westcott chiefly relies. the parable in john x. -- is quite different from that of hermas,( ) and there is a persistent use of different terminology. the door into the sheepfold is always [------], the gate in the rock always [------]. "i am the door,"( ) [------] is twice repeated in the fourth gospel. "the gate is the son of god" [------] is the declaration of hermas. on the other hand, there are numerous passages, elsewhere, analogous to that in the pastor of hermas. every one will remember the injunction in the sermon on the mount: matth. vii. , . "enter in through the strait gate [------], for wide is the gate [------], &c., . because narrow is the gate [------] and straitened is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."( ) the limitation to the one way of entrance into the kingdom of god: "by the name of his son," is also found everywhere throughout the epistles, and likewise in the acts of the apostles; as for instance: acts iv. , "and there is no salvation in any other: for neither is there any other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved." the reasons given why the rock is old and the gate new [------] have anything but special analogy with compare the account of the new jerusalem, rev. xxi. ff.; cf. xxii. , . in simil. ix. , it is insisted that, to enter into the kingdom, not only "his name" must be borne, but that we must put on certain clothing. { } the fourth gospel. we are, on the contrary, taken directly to the epistle to the hebrews in which the pre-existence of jesus is prominently asserted, and between which and the pastor, as in a former passage, we find singular linguistic analogies. for instance, take the whole opening portion of heb. i. : "god having at many times and in many manners spoken in times past to the fathers by the prophets, . at the end of these days [------] spake to us in the son whom he appointed heir [------]( ) of all things, by whom he also made the worlds, . who being the brightness of his glory and the express image of his substance, upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had made by himself a cleansing of our sins sat down at the right hand of majesty on high, . having become so much better than the angels,"( ) &c., &c; and if we take the different clauses we may also find them elsewhere constantly repeated, as for instance: [------] the son older than all his creation: compare tim. i. , colossiansi. ("who is... the first born of all creation"--[------], , , , rev. iii. , x. . the works of philo are full of this representation of the logos. for example: "for the word of god is over all the universe, and the oldest and most universal of all things created" [------] { } [------].( ) again, as to the second clause, that he assisted the father in the work of creation, compare heb. ii. , i. , xi. , rom. xi. , cor. viii. , coloss. i. , .( ) the only remaining passage is the following: "the name of the son of god is great and infinite and supports the whole world." for the first phrase, compare tim. iv. , heb. i. ; and for the second part of the sentence, heb. i. , coloss. i. , and many other passages quoted above.( ) the whole assertion( ) is devoid of foundation, and might well have been left unnoticed. the attention called to it, however, may not be wasted in observing the kind of evidence with which apologists are compelled to be content. tischendorf points out two passages in the epistles of pseudo-ignatius which, he considers, show the use of the fourth gospel.( ) they are as follows--epistle to the romans vii.: "i desire the bread of god, the bread of { } heaven, the bread of life, which is the flesh of jesus christ the son of god, who was born at a later time of the seed of david and abraham; and i desire the drink of god [------], that is his blood, which is love incorruptible, and eternal life" [------].( ) this is compared with john vi. : "i am the bread which came down from heaven" .... "i am the bread of life," .... "and the bread that i will give is my flesh;" . "he who eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath everlasting life" [------]. scholten has pointed out that the reference to jesus as "born of the seed of david and abraham" is not in the spirit of the fourth gospel; and the use of [------] for the [------] of vi. , and [------]; instead of [------] are also opposed to the connection with that gospel.( ) on the other hand, in the institution of the supper, the bread is described as the body of jesus, and the wine as his blood; and reference is made there, and elsewhere, to eating bread and drinking wine in the kingdom of god,( ) and the passage seems to be nothing but a development of this teaching.( ) nothing could be proved by such an analogy.( ) the second passage referred to by tischendorf is in the epistle to the philadelphians vii.: "for if some { } would have led me astray according to the flesh, yet the spirit is not led astray, being from god, for it knoweth whence it cometh and whither it goeth, and detecteth the things that are hidden."( ) teschendorf considers that these words are based upon john iii. -- , and the last phrase: "and detecteth the hidden things," upon verse . the sense of the epistle, however, is precisely the reverse of that of the gospel, which reads: "the wind bloweth where it listeth; and thou hearest the sound thereof but _knowest not_ whence it cometh and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit;"( ) whilst the epistle does not refer to the wind at all, but affirms that the spirit of god does know whence it cometh, &c. the analogy in verse is still more remote: "for every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be detected."( ) in cor. ii. , the sense is found more closely: "for the spirit searcheth all things, yea, even the deep things of god."( ) it is evidently unreasonable to assert from such a passage the use of the fourth gospel.( ) even tischendorf recognizes that in themselves the phrases which he points out in pseudo-ignatius could not, unsupported by other corroboration, possess much weight as testimony for the use of our gospels. he says: "were these allusions of ignatius to matthew and john a wholly isolated phenomenon, and one which perhaps other undoubted results { } of inquiry wholly contradicted, they would hardly have any conclusive weight. but--."( ) canon westcott says: "the ignatian writings, as might be expected, are not without traces of the influence of st. john. the circumstances in which he was placed required a special enunciation of pauline doctrine; but this is not so expressed as to exclude the parallel lines of christian thought. love is 'the stamp of the christian.' (ad magn. v.) 'faith is the beginning and love the end of life.' (ad ephes. xiv.) 'faith is our guide upward' [------], but love is the road that 'leads to god.' (ad eph. ix.) 'the eternal [------] word is the manifestation of god' (ad magn. viii.), 'the door by which we come to the father' (ad philad. ix., cf. john x. ), 'and without him we have not the principle of true life' (ad trail, ix.: [------]. cf. ad eph. iii.: [------]. the true meat of the christian is the 'bread of god, the bread of heaven, the bread of life, which is the flesh of jesus christ,' and his drink is 'christ's blood, which is love incorruptible' (ad rom. vii., cf. john vi. , , ). he has no love of this life; 'his love has been crucified, and he has in him no burning passion for the world, but living water (as the spring of a new life) speaking within him, and bidding him come to his father' (ad rom. . c). meanwhile his enemy is the enemy of his master, even the 'ruler of this age.' (ad rom. . c, [------]. cf. john xii. , xvi. : [------] and see cor. ii. , .( ))" part of these references we have already considered; { } others of them really do not require any notice whatever, and the only one to which we need to direct our attention for a moment may be the passage from the epistle to the philadelphians ix., which reads: "he is the door of the father, by which enter in abraham, isaac, and jacob and the prophets, and the apostles, and the church."(l) this is compared with john x. . "therefore said jesus again: verily, verily, i say unto you, i am the door of the sheep" [------]. we have already referred, a few pages back,( ) to the image of the door. here again it is obvious that there is a marked difference in the sense of the epistle from that of the gospel. in the latter jesus is said to be the door into the sheepfold;( ) whilst in the epistle, he is the door into the father, through which not only the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles enter, but also the church itself. such distant analogy cannot warrant the conclusion that the passage shows any acquaintance with the fourth gospel.( ) as for the other phrases, they are not only without special bearing upon the fourth gospel, but they are everywhere found in the canonical epistles, as well as elsewhere. regarding love and faith, for instance, compare gal. v. , , ; rom. xii. , , viii. , xiii. ; cor. ii. , viii. ; ephea iii. , v. , , vi. ; philip, i. , ii. ; thess. iii. ; tim. i. , vi. ; tim. i. ; heb. x. f., xi., &c., &c. we might point out many equally close analogies in { } the works of philo,( ) but it is unnecessary to do so, although we may indicate one or two which first present themselves. philo equally has "the eternal logos" [------],( ) whom he represents as the manifestation of god in every way. "the word is the likeness of god, by whom the universe was created" [------].( ) he is "the vicegerent" [------] of god,( ) "the heavenly incorruptible food of the soul," "the bread [------] from heaven." in one place he says: "and they who inquired what is the food of the soul... learnt at last that it is the word of god, and the divine logos.... this is the heavenly nourishment, and it is mentioned in the holy scriptures... saying, 'lo! i rain upon you bread [------] from heaven.' (exod. xvi. .) 'this is the bread [------] which the lord has given them to eat'" (exod. xvi. ).( ) and again: "for the one indeed raises his eyes towards the sky, contemplating the manna, the divine word, the heavenly incorruptible food of the longing soul."( ) elsewhere: "... but it is { } taught by the hierophant and prophet moses, who will say: 'this is the bread [------], the nourishment which god gave to the soul'--that he offered his own word and his own logos; for this is bread [------] which he has given us to eat, this is the word [------]."( ) he also says: "therefore he exhorts him that can run swiftly to strive with breathless eagerness towards the divine word who is above all things, the fountain of wisdom, in order that by drinking of the stream, instead of death he may for his reward obtain eternal life"( ) it is the logos who guides us to the father, god "by the same logos both creating all things and leading up [------] the perfect man from the things of earth to himself."( ) these are very imperfect examples, but it may be asserted that there is not a representation of the logos in the fourth gospel which has not close parallels in the works of philo. we have given these passages of the pseudo-ignatian epistles which are pointed out as indicating acquaintance with the fourth gospel, in order that the whole case might be stated and appreciated. the analogies are too distant to prove anything, but were they fifty times more close, they could do little or nothing to establish an early origin for the fourth gospel, and nothing at all to elucidate the question as to its character and authorship.( ) in general the epistles follow the synoptic narratives, and not the account of the fourth gospel. see for instance the reference to the anointing of jesus, ad eph. xvii., cf. matt. xxvi. ff.; mark ziy. flf.; cf. john xii. ff. { } the epistles in which the passages occur are spurious and of no value as evidence for the fourth gospel. only-one of them is found in the three syriac epistles. we have already stated the facts connected with the so-called epistles of ignatius,( ) and no one who has attentively examined them can fail to see that the testimony of such documents cannot be considered of any historic weight, except for a period when evidence of the use of the fourth gospel ceases to be of any significance. there are fifteen epistles ascribed to ignatius--of these eight are universally recognized to be spurious. of the remaining seven, there are two greek and latin versions, the one much longer than the other. the longer version is almost unanimously rejected as interpolated. the discovery of a still shorter syriac version of "the three epistles of ignatius," convinced the majority of critics that even the shorter greek version of seven epistles must be condemned, and that whatever matter could be ascribed to ignatius himself, if any, must be looked for in these three epistles alone. the three martyrologies of ignatius are likewise universally repudiated as mere fictions. from such a mass of forgery, in which it is impossible to identify even a kernel of truth, no testimony could be produced which could in any degree establish the apostolic origin and authenticity of our gospels. it is not pretended that the so-called epistle of polycarp to the philippians contains any references to the fourth gospel. tischendorf, however, affirms that it is weighty testimony for that gospel, inasmuch as he discovers in it a certain trace of the first "epistle of { } john," and as he maintains that the epistle and the gospel are the works of the same author, any evidence for the one is at the same time evidence for the other.( ) we shall hereafter consider the point of the common authorship of the epistles and fourth gospel, and here confine ourselves chiefly to the alleged fact of the reference. the passage to which teschendorf alludes we subjoin, with the supposed parallel in the epistle.[------] { } this passage does not occur as a quotation, and the utmost that can be said of the few words with which it opens is that a phrase somewhat resembling, but at the same time materially differing from, the epistle of john is interwoven with the text of the epistle to the philippians. if this were really a quotation from the canonical epistle, it would indeed be singular that, considering the supposed relations of polycarp and john, the name of the apostle should not have been mentioned, and a quotation have been distinctly and correctly made.( ) on the other hand, there is no earlier trace of the canonical epistle, and, as volkmar argues, it may well be doubted whether it may not rather be dependent on the epistle to the philippians, than the latter upon the epistle of john.( ) we believe with scholten that neither is dependent on the other, but that both adopted a formula in use in the early church against various heresies, the superficial coincidence of which is without any weight as evidence for the use of either epistle by the writer of the other. moreover, it is clear that the writers refer to different classes of heretics. polycarp attacks the docetæ who deny that jesus christ has come in the flesh, that is with a human body of flesh and blood; whilst the epistle of john is directed against those who deny that jesus who has come in the flesh is the { } christ the son of god.( ) volkmar points out that in polycarp the word "antichrist" is made a proper name, whilst in the epistle the expression used is the abstract "spirit of antichrist." polycarp in fact says that whoever denies the flesh of christ is no christian but antichrist, and volkmar finds this direct assertion more original than the assertion of the epistle; "every spirit that confesseth that jesus christ is come in the flesh is of god,"( ) &c. in any case it seems to us clear that in both writings we have only the independent enunciation, with decided difference of language and sense, of a formula current in the church, and that neither writer can be held to have originated the condemnation, in these words, of heresies which the church had begun vehemently to oppose, and which were merely an application of ideas already well known, as we see from the expression of the epistle in reference to the "spirit of antichrist, of which ye have heard that it cometh." whether this phrase be an allusion to the apocalypse xiii., or to thessalonians ii., or to traditions current in the church, we need not inquire; it is sufficient that the epistle of john avowedly applies a prophecy regarding antichrist already known amongst christians, which was equally open to the other writer and probably familiar in the church. this cannot under any circumstances be admitted as evidence of weight for the use of the st epistle of john. there is no testimony whatever of the existence of the epistles ascribed to john previous to this date, and that fact would have to { } be established on sure grounds before the argument we are considering can have any value. on the other hand, we have already seen( ) that there is strong reason to doubt the authenticity of the epistle attributed to polycarp, and a certainty that in any case it is, in its present form, considerably interpolated. even if genuine in any part, the use of the st epistle of john, if established, could not be of much value as evidence for the fourth gospel, of which the writing does not show a trace. so far from there being any evidence that polycarp knew the fourth gospel, however, everything points to the opposite conclusion. about a.d. - we find him taking part in the paschal controversy,( ) contradicting the statements of the fourth gospel,( ) and supporting the synoptic view, contending that the christian festival should be celebrated on the th nisan, the day on which he affirmed that the apostle john himself had observed it.( ) irenæus, who represents polycarp as the disciple of john, says of him: "for neither was anicetus able to persuade polycarp not to observe it (on the th) because he had always observed it with john the disciple of our lord, and with the rest of the apostles with whom he consorted."( ) not only, therefore, does polycarp not refer to the fourth gospel, but he is on the the date has, hitherto, generally been fixed at a.d. , but the recent investigations referred to in vol. i. p. f. have led to the adoption of this earlier date, and the visit to rome must, therefore, probably have taken place just after the accession of anicetus to the roman bishopric. cf. lipsius, zeitschr. w. theol. , p. f. { } contrary an important witness against it as the work of john, for he represents that apostle as practically contradicting the gospel of which he is said to be the author. the fulness with which we have discussed the character of the evangelical quotations of justin martyr renders the task of ascertaining whether his works indicate any acquaintance with the fourth gospel comparatively easy. the detailed statements already made enable us without preliminary explanation directly to attack the problem, and we are freed from the necessity of making extensive quotations to illustrate the facts of the case. whilst apologists assert with some boldness that justin made use of our synoptics, they are evidently, and with good reason, less confident in maintaining his acquaintance with the fourth gospel. canon westcott states: "his references to st john are uncertain; but this, as has been already remarked, follows from the character of the fourth gospel. it was unlikely that he should quote its peculiar teaching in apologetic writings addressed to jews and heathens; and at the same time he exhibits types of language and doctrine which, if not immediately drawn from st. john, yet mark the presence of his influence and the recognition of his authority."( ) this apology for the neglect of the fourth gospel { } illustrates the obvious scantiness of the evidence furnished by justin. tischendorf, however, with his usual temerity, claims justin as a powerful witness for the fourth gospel. he says: "according to our judgment there are convincing grounds of proof for the fact that john also was known and used by justin, provided that an unprejudiced consideration be not made to give way to the antagonistic predilection against the johannine gospel." in order fully and fairly to state the case which he puts forward, we shall quote his own words, but to avoid repetition we shall permit ourselves to interrupt him by remarks and by parallel passages from other writings for comparison with justin. tischendorf says: "the representation of the person of christ altogether peculiar to john as it is given particularly in his prologue i. (" in the beginning was the word and the word was with god, and the word was god"), and verse ("and the word became flesh"), in the designation of him as logos, as the word of god, unmistakably re-echoes in not a few passages in justin; for instance:( ) 'and jesus christ is alone the special son begotten by god, being his word and first-begotten and power.'"( ) with this we may compare another passage of justin from the second apology. "but his son, who alone is rightly called son, the word before the works of creation, tischendorf uses great liberty in translating some of these passages, abbreviating and otherwise altering them as it suits him. we shall therefore give his german translation below, and we add the greek which tischendorf does not quote--indeed he does not, in most cases, even state where the passages are to be found. { } who was both with him and begotten when in the beginning he created and ordered all things by him,"( ) &c. now the same words and ideas are to be found throughout the canonical epistles and other writings, as well as in earlier works. in the apocalypse,( ) the only book of the new testament mentioned by justin, and which is directly ascribed by him to john,( ) the term logos is applied to jesus "the lamb," (xix. ): "and his name is called the word of god" [------]. elsewhere (iii. ) he is called "the beginning of the creation of god" [------]; and again in the same book (i. ) he is "the first-begotten of the dead" [------]. in heb. i he is the "first-born" [------], as in coloss. i. he is "the first-born of every creature" [------]; and in cor. i. we have: "christ the power of god and the wisdom of god"[------], and it will be remembered that "wisdom" was the earlier term which became an alternative with "word" for the intermediate being. in heb. i. , god is represented as speaking to us "in the son.... by whom he also made the worlds" [------]. in tim. i. , he is "before all worlds" [------], cf. heb. l , ii. , kom. xi. , cor. viii. , ephes. iii. . the works of philo are filled with similar representations of the logos, but we must restrict ourselves to a very { } few. god as a shepherd and king governs the universe "having appointed his true logos, his first begotten son, to have the care of this sacred flock, as the vicegerent of-a great king."( ) in another place philo exhorts men to strive to become like god's "first begotten word" [------],( ) and he adds, a few lines further on: "for the most ancient word is the image of god" [------]. the high priest of god in the world is "the divine word, his first-begotten son" [------].( ) speaking of the creation of the world philo says: "the instrument by which it was formed is the word of god" [------].( ) elsewhere: "for the word is the image of god by which the whole world was created" [------].( ) these passages might be indefinitely multiplied. tischendorf's next passage is: "the first power [------] after the father of all and god the lord, and son, is the word [------]; in what manner having been made flesh [------] he became man, we shall in what follows relate."( ) { } we find everywhere parallels for this passage without seeking them in the fourth gospel. in cor. i. , "christ the power [------] of god and the wisdom of god;" cf. heb. i. , , , , ; ii. . in heb. ii. -- , there is a distinct account of his becoming flesh; cf. verse . in phil. ii. -- : "who (jesus christ) being in the form of god, deemed it not grasping to be equal with god, ( ) but gave himself up, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men," &c. in rom. viii. we have: "god sending his own son in the likeness of the flesh of sin," &c. [------] it must be borne in mind that the terminology of john i. , "and the word became flesh" [------] is different from that of justin, who uses the word [------]. the sense and language here is, therefore, quite as close as that of the fourth gospel we have also another parallel in tim. iii. , "who (god) was manifested in the flesh" [------], cf. cor. xv. , . in like manner we find many similar passages in the works of philo. he says in one place that man was not made in the likeness of the most high god the father of the universe, but in that of the "second god who is his word" [------].( ) in another place the logos is said to be the interpreter of the highest god, and he continues: "that must be god of us imperfect beings" [------].( ) elsewhere he says: "but the { } divine word which is above these (the winged cherubim).... but being itself the image of god, at once the most ancient of all conceivable things, and the one placed nearest to the only true and absolute existence without any separation or distance between them ";( ) and a few lines further on he explains the cities of refuge to be: "the word of the governor (of all things) and his creative and kingly power, for of these are the heavens and the whole world."( ) "the logos of god is above all things in the world, and is the most ancient and the most universal of all things which are."( ) the word is also the "ambassador sent by the governor (of the universe) to his subject (man)" [------].( ) such views of the logos are everywhere met with in the pages of philo. tischendorf continues: "the word (logos) of god is his son."( ) we have already in the preceding paragraphs abundantly illustrated this sentence, and may proceed to the next: "but since they did not know all things concerning the logos, which is christ, they have frequently contradicted each other."( ) these words are { } used with reference to lawgivers and philosophers. justin, who frankly admits the delight he took in the writings of plato( ) and other greek philosophers, held the view that socrates and plato had in an elementary form enunciated the doctrine of the logos,( ) although he contends that they borrowed it from the writings of moses, and with a largeness of mind very uncommon in the early church, and indeed, we might add, in any age, he believed socrates and such philosophers to have been christians, even although they had been considered atheists.( ) as they did not of course know christ to be the logos, he makes the assertion just quoted. now the only point in the passage which requires notice is the identification of the logos with jesus, which has already been dealt with, and as this was asserted in the apocalypse xix. , before the fourth gospel was written, no evidence in its favour is deducible from the statement. we shall have more to say regarding this presently. tischendorf continues: "but in what manner through the word of god, jesus christ our saviour having been made flesh,"( ) &c. it must be apparent that the doctrine here is not that of the fourth gospel which makes "the word become flesh" simply, whilst justin, representing a less advanced form, and more uncertain stage, of its development, draws a distinction between the logos and jesus, and describes jesus christ as being made flesh by the power { } of the logos. this is no accidental use of words, for he repeatedly states the same fact, as for instance: "but why through the power of the word, according to the will of god the father and lord of all, he was born a man of a virgin,"( ) &c. tischendorf continues: "to these passages out of the short second apology we extract from the first (cap. ).( ) by the spirit, therefore, and power of god (in reference to luke i. : 'the holy spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee') we have nothing else to understand but the logos, which is the first-born of god."( ) here again we have the same difference from the doctrine of the fourth gospel which we have just pointed out, which is, however, so completely in agreement with the views of philo,( ) and characteristic of a less developed form of the idea. we shall further refer to the terminology hereafter, and meantime we proceed to the last illustration given by tischendorf. "out of the dialogue (c. ): 'for that he was the only-begotten of the father of all, in peculiar wise begotten of him as word and power [------], and afterwards became man through the virgin, as we have learnt from the memoirs, i have already stated.'"( ) { } the allusion here is to the preceding chapters of the dialogue, wherein, with special reference (c. ) to the passage which has a parallel in luke i. , quoted by tischendorf in the preceding illustration, justin narrates the birth of jesus. this reference very appropriately leads us to a more general discussion of the real source of the terminology and logos doctrine of justin. we do not propose, in this work, to enter fully into the history of the logos doctrine, and we must confine ourselves strictly to showing, in the most simple manner possible, that not only is there no evidence whatever that justin derived his ideas regarding it from the fourth gospel, but that, on the contrary, his terminology and doctrine may be traced to another source. now, in the very chapter ( ) from which this last illustration is taken, justin shows clearly whence he derives the expression: "only-begotten." in chap. he refers to the ps. xxii. (sept. xxi.) as a prophecy applying to jesus, quotes the whole psalm, and comments upon it in the following chapters; refers to ps. ii. : "thou art my son, this day have i begotten thee," uttered by the voice at the baptism, in ch. , in illustration of it; and in ch. he arrives, in his exposition of it, at verse : "deliver my soul from the sword, and my( ) only-begotten [------] from the hand of the dog." then follows the passage we are discussing, in which justin affirms that this should probably be "thy." { } he has proved that he was the only-begotten [------] of the father, and at the close he again quotes the verse as indicative of his sufferings. the memoirs are referred to in regard to the fulfilment of this prophecy, and his birth as man through the virgin. the phrase in justin is quite different from that in the fourth gospel, i. : "and the word became flesh [------] and tabernacled among us, find we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten from the father" [------], &c. in justin he is "the only-begotten of the father of all" [------], and he "became man [------] through the virgin," and justin never once employs the peculiar terminology of the fourth gospel, [------], in any part of his writings. there can be no doubt that, however the christian doctrine of the logos may at one period of its development have been influenced by greek philosophy, it was in its central idea mainly of jewish origin, and the mere application to an individual of a theory which had long occupied the hebrew mind. after the original simplicity which represented god as holding personal intercourse with the patriarchs, and communing face to face with the great leaders of israel, had been outgrown, an increasing tendency set in to shroud the divinity in impenetrable mystery, and to regard him as unapproachable and undiscernible by man. this led to the recognition of a divine representative and substitute of the highest god and father, who communicated with his creatures, and through whom alone he revealed himself. a new system of interpretation of the ancient traditions of the nation was rendered necessary, and in the septuagint translation of the bible we are fortunately able to trace { } the progress of the theory which culminated in the christian doctrine of the logos. wherever in the sacred records god had been represented as holding intercourse with man, the translators either symbolized the appearance or interposed an angel, who was afterwards understood to be the divine word. the first name under which the divine mediator was known in the old testament was wisdom [------], although in its apocrypha the term logos was not unknown. the personification of the idea was very rapidly effected, and in the book of proverbs, as well as in the later apocrypha based upon it: the wisdom of solomon, and the wisdom of sirach, "ecclesiasticus:" we find it in ever increasing clearness and concretion. in the school of alexandria the active jewish intellect eagerly occupied itself with the speculation, and in the writings of philo especially we find the doctrine of the logos--the term which by that time had almost entirely supplanted that of wisdom--elaborated to almost its final point, and wanting little or nothing but its application in an incarnate form to an individual man to represent the doctrine of the earlier canonical writings of the new testament, and notably the epistle to the hebrews,--the work of a christian philo,( )--the pauline epistles, and lastly the fourth gospel( ) { } in proverbs viii. ff., we have a representation of wisdom corresponding closely with the prelude to the fourth gospel, and still more so with the doctrine enunciated by justin: . "the lord created me the beginning of his ways for his works. . before the ages he established me, in the beginning before he made the earth. . and before he made the abysses, before the springs of the waters issued forth. . before the mountains were settled, and before all the hills he begets me. . the lord made the lands, both those which are uninhabited and the inhabited heights of the earth beneath the sky. . when he prepared the heavens i was present with him, and when he set his throne upon the winds, , and made strong the high clouds, and the deeps under the heaven made secure, , and made strong the foundations of the earth, , i was with him adjusting, i was that in which he delighted; daily i rejoiced in his presence at all times."( ) in the "wisdom of solomon" we find the writer addressing god: ix. ... "who madest all things by thy word" [------]; and further on in the same chapter, v. , "and wisdom was with thee who knoweth thy works, and was present when thou madest the world, and knew what was acceptable { } in thy sight, and right in thy commandments. "( ) in verse , the writer prays: "give me wisdom that sitteth by thy thrones" [-----].( ) in a similar way the son of sirach makes wisdom say (ecclesiast. xxiv. ): "he (the most high) created me from the beginning before the world, and as long as the world i shall not fail."( ) we have already incidentally seen how these thoughts grew into an elaborate doctrine of the logos in the works of philo. now justin, whilst he nowhere adopts the terminology of the fourth gospel, and nowhere refers to its introductory condensed statement of the logos doctrine, closely follows philo and, like him, traces it back to the old testament in the most direct way, accounting for the interposition of the divine mediator in precisely the same manner as philo, and expressing the views which had led the seventy to modify the statement of the hebrew original in their greek translation. he is, in fact, thoroughly acquainted with the history of the logos doctrine and its earlier enunciation under the symbol of wisdom, and his knowledge of it is clearly independent of, and antecedent to, the statements of the fourth gospel. referring to various episodes of the old testament in which god is represented as appearing to moses and the patriarchs, and in which it is said that "god went up from abraham,"( ) or "the lord spake to moses,"( ) or "the lord came down to behold the town," &c.,( ) or "god { } shut noah into the ark,"( ) and so on, justin warns his antagonist that he is not to suppose that "the unbegotten god" [------] did any of these things, for he has neither to come to any place, nor walks, but from his own place, wherever it may be, knows everything although he has neither eyes nor ears. therefore he. could not talk with anyone, nor be seen by anyone, and none of the patriarchs saw the father at all, but they saw "him who was according to his will both his son (being god) and the angel, in that he ministered to his purpose, whom also he willed to be born man by the virgin, who became fire when he spoke with moses from the bush."( ) he refers throughout his writings to the various appearances of god to the patriarchs, all of which he ascribes to the pre-existent jesus, the word,( ) and in the very next chapter, after alluding to some of these, he says: "he is called angel because he came to men, since by him the decrees of the father are announced to men... at other times he is also called man and human being, because he appears clothed in these forms as the father wills, and they call him logos because { } he bears the communications of the father to mankind."( ) justin, moreover, repeatedly refers to the fact that he was called wisdom by solomon, and quotes the passage we have indicated in proverbs. in one place he says, in proof of his assertion that the god who appeared to moses and the patriarchs was distinguished from the father, and was in fact the word (ch. -- ): "another testimony i will give you, my friends, i said, from the scriptures that god begat before all of the creatures [------] a beginning [------],( ) a certain rational power [------] out of himself, who is called by the holy spirit, now the glory of the lord, then the son, again wisdom, again angel, again god, and again lord and logos;" &c., and a little further on: "the word of wisdom will testify to me, who is himself this god begotten of the father of the universe, being word, and wisdom, and power [------], and the glory of the begetter," &c.,( ) and he quotes, from the septuagint version, proverbs viii. -- , part of which we have given above, and indeed, elsewhere (ch. ), he quotes the passage a second time as evidence, with a similar context. justin refers to it { } again in the next chapter, and the peculiarity of his terminology in all these passages, so markedly different from, and indeed opposed to, that of the fourth gospel, will naturally strike the reader: "but this offspring [------] being truly brought forth by the father was with the father before all created beings [------], and the father communes with him, as the logos declared through solomon, that this same, who is called wisdom by solomon, had been begotten of god before all created beings [------], both beginning [------] and offspring [------]," &c.( ) in another place after quoting the words: "no man knoweth the father but the son, nor the son but the father, and they to whom the son will reveal him," justin continues: "therefore he revealed to us all that we have by his grace understood out of the scriptures, recognizing him to be indeed the first-begotten [------] of god, and before all creatures [------].... and calling him son, we have understood that he proceeded from the father by his power and will before all created beings [------], for in one form or another he is spoken of in the writings of the prophets as wisdom," &c.;( ) and again, in two other places he refers to the same fact.( ) on further examination, we find on every side still { } stronger confirmation of the conclusion that justin derived his logos doctrine from the old testament and philo, together with early new testament writings. we have quoted several passages in which justin details the various names of the logos, and we may add one more. referring to ps. lxxii., which the jews apply to solomon, but which justin maintains to be applicable to christ, he says: "for christ is king, and priest, and god, and lord, and angel, and man, and captain, and stone, and a son born [------], &c. &c., as i prove by all of the scriptures."( ) now these representations, which are constantly repeated throughout justin's writings, are quite opposed to the spirit of the fourth gospel, but are on the other hand equally common in the works of philo, and many of them also to be found in the philonian epistle to the hebrews. taking the chief amongst them we may briefly illustrate them. the logos as king, justin avowedly derives from ps. lxxii., in which he finds that reference is made to the "everlasting king, that is to say christ."( ) we find this representation of the logos throughout the writings of philo. in one place already briefly referred to,( ) but which we shall now more fully quote, he says: "for god as shepherd and king governs according to law and justice like a flock of sheep, the earth, and water, and air, and fire, and all the plants and living things that are in them, whether they be mortal or divine, as well as the course of heaven, and the periods of sun and moon, and the variations and harmonious revolutions of the other stars; having appointed his true word [------] { } [------] his first-begotten son [------] to have the care of this sacred flock as the vicegerent of a great king;"( ) and a little further on, he says: "very reasonably, therefore, he will assume the name of a king, being addressed as a shepherd."( ) in another place, philo speaks of the "logos of the governor, and his creative and kingly power, for of these is the heaven and the whole world."( ) then if we take the second epithet, the logos as priest [------], which is quite foreign to the fourth gospel, we find it repeated by justin, as for instance: "christ the eternal priest" [------],( ) and it is not only a favourite representation of philo, but is almost the leading idea of the epistle to the hebrews, in connection with the episode of melchisedec, in whom also both philo,( ) and justin,( ) recognize the logos. in the epistle to the hebrews, vii. , speaking of melchisedec: "but likened to the son of god, abideth a priest for ever:"( ) again in iv. : "seeing then that we have a great high priest that is passed through the heavens, jesus the son { } of god," &c.;( ) ix. : "christ having appeared a high priest of the good things to come;"( ) xii. : "thou art a priest for ever."( ) the passages are indeed far too numerous to quote.( ) they are equally numerous in the writings of philo. in one place already quoted,( ) he says: "for there are as it seems two temples of god, one of which is this world, in which the high priest is the divine word, his first-begotten son" [------].( ) elsewhere, speaking of the period for the return of fugitives, the death of the high priest, which taken literally would embarrass him in his allegory, philo says: "for we maintain the high priest not to be a man, but the divine word, who is without participation not only in voluntary but also in involuntary sins;"( ) and he goes on to speak of this priest as "the most sacred word" [------].( ) indeed, in many long passages he descants upon the "high priest word" [------].( ) proceeding to the next representations of the logos { } as "god and lord," we meet with the idea everywhere. in hebrews i. : "but regarding the son he saith: thy throne, o god, is for ever and ever" [------], and again in the epistle to the philippians, ii. , "who (jesus christ) being in the form of god, deemed it not grasping to be equal with god" [------].( ) philo, in the fragment preserved by eusebius, to which we have already referred,( ) calls the logos the "second god" [------].( ) in another passage he has: "but he calls the most ancient god his present logos," &c. [------];( ) and a little further on, speaking of the inability of men to look on the father himself: "thus they regard the image of god, his angel word, as himself" [------].( ) elsewhere discussing the possibility of god's swearing by himself, which he applies to the logos, he says: "for in regard to us imperfect beings he will be a god, but in regard to wise and perfect beings the first. and yet moses, in awe of the superiority of the unbegotten [------] god, says: 'and thou shalt swear by his name,' not by himself; for it is sufficient for the creature to receive assurance and testimony by the divine word."( ) it must be remarked, however, that both justin and { } philo place the logos in a position more clearly secondary to god the father, than the prelude to the fourth gospel i. . both justin and philo apply the term [------] to the logos without the article. justin distinctly says that christians worship jesus christ as the son of the true god, holding him in the second place [------],( ) and this secondary position is systematically defined through justin's writings in a very decided way, as it is in the works of philo by the contrast of the begotten logos with the unbegotten god. justin speaks of the word as "the first-born of the unbegotten god" [------],( ) and the distinctive appellation of the "unbegotten god" applied to the father is most common throughout his writings.( ) we may in continuation of this remark point out another phrase of justin which is continually repeated, but is thoroughly opposed both to the spirit and to the terminology of the fourth gospel, and which likewise indicates the secondary consideration in which he held the logos. he calls the word constantly "the first-born of all created beings" [------] "the first-born of all creation," echoing the expression of col. i. . (the son) "who is the image of the invisible god, the first-born of all creation" [------]. this is a totally different view from that of the fourth gospel, which in so emphatic a manner { } enunciates the doctrine: "in the beginning was the word and the word was with god, and the word was god," a statement which justin, with philo, only makes in a very modified sense. to return, however, the next representation of the logos by justin is as "angel." this perpetually recurs in his writings.( ) in one place, to which we have already referred, he says: "the word of god is his son, as we have already stated, and he is also called messenger [------] and apostle, for he brings the message of all we need to know, and is sent an apostle to declare all the message contains."( ) in the same chapter reference is again made to passages quoted for the sake of proving: "that jesus christ is the son of god and apostle, being aforetime the word and having appeared now in the form of fire, and now in the likeness of incorporeal beings;"( ) and he gives many illustrations.( ) the passages, however, in which the logos is called angel, are too numerous to be more fully dealt with here. it is scarcely necessary to point out that this representation of the logos as angel, is not only foreign to, but opposed to the spirit of, the fourth gospel, although it is thoroughly in harmony with the writings of philo. before illustrating this, however, we may incidentally remark that the ascription to the logos of the name "apostle" which occurs in the two passages just quoted above, as well as in other parts of the writings of justin,( ) { } is likewise opposed to the fourth gospel, although it is found in earlier writings, exhibiting a less developed form of the logos doctrine; for the epistle to the hebrews iii. , has: "consider the apostle and high priest of our confession, jesus," &c. [------]. we are, in fact, constantly directed by the remarks of justin to other sources of the logos doctrine, and never to the fourth gospel, with which his tone and terminology do not agree. everywhere in the writings of philo we meet with the logos as angel. he speaks "of the angel word of god" in a sentence already quoted,( ) and elsewhere in a passage, one of many others, upon which the lines of justin which we are now considering (as well as several similar passages)( ) are in all probability moulded. philo calls upon men to "strive earnestly to be fashioned according to god's first-begotten word, the eldest angel, who is the archangel bearing many names, for he is called { } the beginning [------], and name of god, and logos, and the man according to his image, and the seer of israel."( ) elsewhere, in a remarkable passage, he says: "to his archangel and eldest word, the father, who created the universe, gave the supreme gift that having stood on the confine he may separate the creature from the creator. the same is an intercessor on behalf of the ever wasting mortal to the immortal; he is also the ambassador of the ruler to his subjects. and he rejoices in the gift, and the majesty of it he describes, saying: 'and i stood in the midst between the lord and you' (numbers xvi ); being neither unbegotten like god, nor begotten like you, but between the two extremes," &c.( ) we have been tempted to give more of this passage than is necessary for our immediate purpose, because it affords the reader another glimpse of philo's doctrine of the logos, and generally illustrates its position in connection with the christian doctrine. the last of justin's names which we shall here notice is the logos as "man" as well as god. in another place justin explains that he is sometimes called a man and human being, because he appears in these forms as the father wills.( ) but here confining ourselves merely { } to the concrete idea, we find a striking representation of it in tim. ii. : "for there is one god and one mediator between god and man, the man christ jesus; [------]; and again in rom. v. : "... by the grace of the one man jesus christ" [------], as well as other passages.( ) we have already seen in the passage quoted above from "de confus. ling." § , that philo mentions, among the many names of the logos, that of "the man according to (god's) image" [------],( ) or "the typical man"). if, however, we pass to the application of the logos doctrine to jesus, we have the strongest reason for inferring justin's total independence of the fourth gospel. we have already pointed out that the title of logos is given to jesus in new testament writings earlier than the fourth gospel. we have remarked that, although the passages are innumerable in which justin speaks of the word having become man through the virgin, he never once throughout his writings makes use of the peculiar expression of the fourth gospel: "the word became flesh" [------]. on the few occasions on which he speaks of the word having been _made_ flesh, he uses the term [------].( ) in one instance he has [------],( ) and speaking of the eucharist justin once explains that it is in memory of christ's having made himself _body_, [------] justin's most common phrase, { } however, and he repeats it in numberless instances, is that the logos submitted to be born, and become man [------], by a virgin, or he uses variously the expressions: [------].( ) in several places he speaks of him as the first production or offspring [------] of god before all created beings, as, for instance: "the logos... who is the first offspring of god" [------];( ) and again, "and that this offspring was begotten of the father absolutely before all creatures the word was declaring" [------].( ) we need not say more of the expressions: "first-born" [------], "first-begotten" [------], so constantly applied to the logos by justin, in agreement with philo; nor to "only begotten" [------], directly derived from ps. xxii*. (ps. xxi. , sept.). it must be apparent to everyone who seriously examines the subject, that justin's terminology is markedly different from, and in spirit sometimes opposed to, that of the fourth gospel, and in fact that the peculiarities of the gospel are not found in justin's writings at all.( ) on the { } other hand, his doctrine of the logos is precisely that of philo,( ) and of writings long antecedent to the fourth gospel, and there can be no doubt, we think, that it was derived from them.( ) { } we may now proceed to consider other passages adduced by tischendorf to support his assertion that justin made use of the fourth gospel. he says: "passages of the johannine gospel, however, are also not wanting to which passages in justin refer back. in the dialogue, ch. , he writes of john the baptist: 'the people believed that he was the christ, but he cried to them: i am not the christ, but the voice of a preacher.' this is connected with john i. and ; for no other evangelist has reported the first words in the baptist's reply."( ) now the passage in justin, with its context, reads as follows: "for john sat by the jordan [------] and preached the baptism of repentance, wearing only a leathern girdle and raiment of camel's hair, and eating nothing but locusts and wild honey; men supposed [------] him to be the christ, wherefore he himself cried to them: 'i am not the christ, but the voice of one crying: for he shall come [------] who is stronger than i, whose shoes i am not meet [------] to bear.'"( ) now the only ground upon which this passage can be compared with the fourth gospel is the reply: "i am not the christ" [------], which in john i. reads:[------] { } [------]: and it is perfectly clear that, if the direct negation occurred in any other gospel, the difference of the whole passage in the dialogue would prevent even an apologist from advancing any claim to its dependence on that gospel. in order to appreciate the nature of the two passages, it may be well to collect the nearest parallels in the gospel, and compare them with justin's narrative. [------] { } the introductory description of john's dress and habits is quite contrary to the fourth gospel, but corresponds to some extent with matt. iii. . it is difficult to conceive two accounts more fundamentally different, and the discrepancy becomes more apparent when we consider the scene and actors in the episode. in justin, it is evident that the hearers of john had received the impression that he was the christ, and the baptist becoming aware of it voluntarily disabused their minds of this idea. in the fourth gospel the words of john are extracted from him ("he confessed and denied not") by emissaries sent by the pharisees of jerusalem specially to question him on the subject. the account of justin betrays no knowledge of any such interrogation. the utter difference is brought to a climax by the concluding statement of the fourth gospel:-- [------] in fact the scene in the two narratives is as little the same as their details. one can scarcely avoid the conclusion, in reading the fourth gospel, that it quotes some other account and does not pretend to report the scene direct. for instance, i. , "john beareth witness of him, and cried, saying: 'this was he _of whom i said_: he that cometh after me is become before me, because he was before me,'" &c. v. : "and this is the testimony of john, _when the jews sent priests and levites from jerusalem to ask him: who art thou?_ and he confessed and denied not, and confessed that i am not the christ," &c. now, as usual, the gospel which justin uses more nearly approximates to our first synoptic { } than the other gospels, although it differs in very important points from that also--still, taken in connection with the third synoptic, and acts xiii. , this indicates the great probability of the existence of other writings combining the particulars as they occur in justin. luke iii. , reads: "and as the people were in expectation, and all mused in their hearts concerning john whether he were the christ, . john answered, saying to them all: i indeed baptize you with water, but he that is stronger than i cometh, the latchet of whose shoes i am not worthy to unloose: he shall baptize you with the holy spirit and with fire," &c. whilst, however, with the sole exception of the simple statement of the baptist that he was not the christ, which in all the accounts is clearly involved in the rest of the reply, there is no analogy whatever between the parallel in the fourth gospel and the passage in justin, many important circumstances render it certain that justin did not derive his narrative from that source. we have already( ) fully discussed the peculiarities of justin's account of the baptist, and in the context to the very passage before us there are details quite foreign to our gospels which show that justin made use of another and different work. when jesus stepped into the water to be baptized a fire was kindled in the jordan, and the voice from heaven makes use of words not found in our gospels; but both the incident and the words are known to have been contained in the gospel according to the hebrews and other works. justin likewise states, in immediate continuation of the passage before us, that jesus was considered the son of { } joseph the carpenter, and himself was a carpenter and accustomed to make ploughs and yokes.( ) the evangelical work of which justin made use was obviously different from our gospels, therefore, and the evident conclusion to which any impartial mind must arrive is, that there is not only not the slightest ground for affirming that justin quoted the passage before us from the fourth gospel, from which he so fundamentally differs, but every reason on the contrary to believe that he derived it from a gospel different from ours.( ) the next point advanced by tischendorf is, that on two occasions he speaks of the restoration of sight to persons born blind, the only instance of which in our gospels is that recorded, john ix. . the references in justin are very vague and general. in the first place he is speaking of the analogies in the life of jesus with events believed in connection with mythological deities, and he says that he would appear to relate acts very similar to those attributed to Æsculapius when he says that jesus "healed the lame and paralytic, and the maimed from birth [------], and raised the dead."( ) in the dialogue, again referring to Æsculapius, he says that christ "healed those who were from birth and according to the flesh blind [------], and deaf, and lame."( ) in the fourth gospel { } the born-blind is described as [------]. there is a variation it will be observed in the term employed by justin, and that such a remark should be seized upon as an argument for the use of the fourth gospel serves to show the poverty of the evidence for the existence of that work. without seeking any further, we might at once reply that such general references as those of justin might well be referred to the common tradition of the church, which certainly ascribed all kinds of marvellous cures and miracles to jesus. it is moreover unreasonable to suppose that the only gospel in which the cure of one born blind was narrated was that which is the fourth in our canon. such a miracle may have formed part of a dozen similar collections extant at the time of justin, and in no case could such an allusion be recognized as evidence of the use of the fourth gospel. but in the dialogue, along with this remark, justin couples the statement that although the people saw such cures: "they asserted them to be magical illusion; for they also ventured to call him a magician and deceiver of the people."( ) this is not found in our gospels, but traces of the same tradition are met with elsewhere, as we have already mentioned;( ) and it is probable that justin either found all these particulars in the gospel of which he made use, or that he refers to traditions familiar amongst the early christians. tischendorfs next point is that justin quotes the words of zechariah xii. , with the same variation from the text of the septuagint as john xix. --"they shall look on him whom they pierced" [------] { } [------] instead of [------], arising out of an emendation of the translation of the hebrew original. tischendorf says: "nothing can be more opposed to probability, than the supposition that john and justin have here, independently of each other, followed a translation of the hebrew text which elsewhere has remained unknown to us."( ) the fact is, however, that the translation which has been followed is not elsewhere unknown. we meet with the same variation, much earlier, in the only book of the new testament which justin mentions, and with which, therefore, he was beyond any doubt well acquainted, rev. i. : "behold he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him [------], and they which pierced [------] him, and all the tribes of the earth shall bewail him. yea, amen." this is a direct reference to the passage in zech. xii. . it will be remembered that the quotation in the gospel: "they shall look upon him whom they pierced," is made solely in reference to the thrust of the lance in the side of jesus, while that of the apocalypse is a connection of the prophecy with the second coming of christ, which, except in a spiritual sense, is opposed to the fourth gospel. now, justin upon each occasion quotes the whole passage also in reference to the second coming of christ as the apocalypse does, and this alone settles the point so far as these two sources are concerned. if justin derived his variation from either of the canonical works, { } therefore, we should be bound to conclude that it must have been from the apocalypse. the correction of the septuagint version, which has thus been traced back as far as a.d. when the apocalypse was composed, was noticed by jerome in his commentary on the text;( ) and aquila, a contemporary of irenæus, and later symmachus and theodotion, as well as others, similarly adopted [------]. ten important mss., of the septuagint, at least, have the reading of justin and of the apocalypse, and these mss. likewise frequently agree with the other peculiarities of justin's text. in all probability, as credner, who long ago pointed out all these circumstances, conjectured, an emendation of the rendering of the lxx. had early been made, partly in christian interest and partly for the critical improvement of the text,( ) and this amended version was used by justin and earlier christian writers. ewald( ) and some others suggest that probably [------] originally stood in the septuagint text. every consideration is opposed to the dependence of justin upon the fourth gospel for the variation.( ) the next and last point advanced by tischendorf is a passage in apol. i. , which is compared with john iii. { } -- , and in order to show the exact character of the two passages, we shall at once place them in parallel columns:--[------] this is the most important passage by which apologists endeavour to establish the use by justin of the { } fourth gospel, and it is that upon which the whole claim may be said to rest. we shall be able to appreciate the nature of the case by the weakness of its strongest evidence. the first point which must have struck any attentive reader, must have been the singular difference of the language of justin, and the absence of the characteristic peculiarities of the johannine gospel. the double "verily, verily," which occurs twice even in these three verses, and constantly throughout the gospel( ), is absent in justin; and apart from the total difference of the form in which the whole passage is given (the episode of nicodemus being entirely ignored), and omitting minor differences, the following linguistic variations occur: justin has: [------] indeed it is almost impossible to imagine a more complete difference, both in form and language, and it seems to us that there does not exist a single linguistic trace by which the passage in justin can be connected with the fourth gospel. the fact that justin knows nothing of the expression [------] ("born from above"), upon which the whole statement in the fourth gospel turns, but uses a totally different word, [------] (born again), { } is of great significance. tischendorf wishes to translate [------] "anew" (or again), as the version of luther and the authorised english translation read, and thus render the [------] of justin a fair equivalent for it; but even this would not alter the fact that so little does justin quote the fourth gospel, that he has not even the test word of the passage. the word [------], however, certainly cannot here be taken to signify anything but "from above"(l)--from god, from heaven,--and this is not only its natural meaning, but the term is several times used in other parts of the fourth gospel, always with this same sense,( ) and there is nothing which warrants a different interpretation in this place. on the contrary, the same signification is manifestly indicated by the context, and forms the point of the whole lesson. "except a man be born of water and _of spirit_( ) he cannot enter into the kingdom of god. . that which hath been born of the flesh is flesh, and that which hath been born of the spirit is spirit. . marvel not that i said unto thee: ye must be born from above" [------]. the explanation of [------] is given in verse . the birth "of the spirit" is the birth "from above," which is essential to entrance into the kingdom of god.( ) { } the sense of the passage in justin is different and much more simple. he is speaking of regeneration through baptism, and the manner in which converts are consecrated to god when they are made new [------] through christ. after they are taught to fast and pray for the remission of their sins, he says: "they are then taken by us where there is water, that they may be regenerated ("born again," [------]), by the same manner of regeneration (being born again, [------]) by which we also were regenerated (born again, [------]. for in the name of the father of the universe the lord god, and of our saviour jesus christ, and of the holy spirit they then make the washing with the water. for the christ also said, 'unless ye be born again [------], ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven., now that it is impossible for those who have once been born to go into the matrices of the parents is evident to all." and then he quotes isaiah i. -- , "wash you, make you clean, &c.," and then proceeds: "and regarding this (baptism) we have been taught this reason. since at our first birth we were born without our knowledge, and perforce, &c., and brought up in evil habits and wicked ways, therefore in order that we should not continue children of necessity and ignorance, but become children of election and knowledge, and obtain in the water remission of sins which we had previously committed, the name of the father of the universe and lord god is pronounced over him who desires to be born again [------], and has repented of his sins, &c."( ) now it is clear that whereas justin speaks simply of regeneration by baptism, the fourth gospel indicates a later development of the doctrine by spiritualizing the idea, { } and requiring not only regeneration through the water ("except a man be born of water"), but that a man should be born from above ("and of the spirit"), not merely [------], but [------]. the word used by justin is that which was commonly employed in the church for regeneration, and other instances of it occur in the new testament.( ) the idea of regeneration or being born again, as essential to conversion, was quite familiar to the jews themselves, and lightfoot gives instances of this from talmudic writings: "if any one become a proselyte he is like a child 'new born.' the gentile that is made a proselyte and the servant that is made free he is like a child new born."( ) this is, of course, based upon the belief in special privileges granted to the jews, and the gentile convert admitted to a share in the benefits of the messiah became a jew by spiritual new birth. justin in giving the words of jesus clearly professed to make an exact quotation:( ) "for christ also said: unless ye be born again, &c." it must be remembered, however, that justin is addressing the roman emperors, who would not understand the expression that it was necessary to be "born again" in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. he, therefore, explains that he does not mean a physical new birth by men already born; and this explanation may be regarded as natural, under the circumstances, and independent of any written source. in any case, the striking difference of his language from that of the fourth gospel at least forbids the inference that it must necessarily have been derived from that gospel. { } to argue otherwise would be to assume the utterly untenable premiss that sayings of jesus which are maintained to be historical were not recorded in more than four gospels, and indeed in this instance were limited to one. this is not only in itself inadmissible, but historically untrue,( ) and a moment of consideration must convince every impartial mind that it cannot legitimately be asserted that an express quotation of a supposed historical saying must have been taken from a parallel in one of our gospels, from which it differs so materially in language and circumstance, simply because that gospel happens to be the only one now surviving which contains particulars somewhat similar. the express quotation fundamentally differs from the fourth gospel, and the natural explanation of justin which follows is not a quotation at all, and likewise fundamentally differs from the johannine parallel. justin not only ignores the peculiar episode in the fourth gospel in which the passage occurs, but neither here nor anywhere throughout his writings makes any mention of nicodemus. the accident of survival is almost the only justification of the affirmation that the fourth gospel is the source of justin's quotation. on the other hand, we have many strong indications of another source. in our first synoptic (xviii. ), we find traces of another version of the saying of jesus, much more nearly corresponding with the quotation of justin: "and he said, verily i say unto you: except ye be turned and become as the little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."( ) the last phrase of this saying is literally the same as the quotation of justin, { } and gives his expression, "kingdom of heaven," so characteristic of his gospel, and so foreign to the johannine. we meet with a similar quotation in connection with baptism, still more closely agreeing with justin, in the clementine homilies, xi. : "verily i say unto you: except ye be born again [------] by living water in the name of father, son, and holy spirit, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."( ) here again we have both the [------], and the [------] as well as the reference only to water in the baptism, and this is strong confirmation of the existence of a version of the passage, different from the johannine, from which justin quotes. as both the author of the clementines and justin probably made use of the gospel according to the hebrews, some most competent critics have, with reason, adopted the conclusion that the passage we are discussing was probably derived from that gospel; at any rate it cannot be maintained as a quotation from our fourth gospel,( ) and it is, therefore, of no value as evidence even { } for its existence. "were it successfully traced to that work, however, the passage would throw no light on the authorship and character of the fourth gospel. if we turn for a moment from this last of the points of evidence adduced by tischendorf for the use of the fourth gospel by justin, to consider how far the circumstances of the history of jesus narrated by justin bear upon this quotation, we have a striking confirmation of the results we have otherwise attained. not only is there a total absence from his writings of the peculiar terminology and characteristic expressions of the fourth gospel, but there is not an allusion made to any one of the occurrences exclusively narrated by that gospel, although many of these, and many parts of the johannine discourses of jesus, would have been peculiarly suitable for his purpose. we have already pointed out the remarkable absence of any use of the expressions by which the logos doctrine is stated in the prologue. we may now point out that justin makes no reference whatever to any of the special miracles of the fourth gospel. he is apparently quite ignorant even of the raising of lazarus: on the other hand, he gives representations of the birth, life, and death of jesus, which are ignored by the johannine gospel, and are indeed opposed to its whole conception of jesus as the logos; and when he refers to circumstances which are also narrated in that gospel, his account is different from that which it gives. justin perpetually refers to the birth of jesus by the virgin of the race of david and the patriarchs; his logos thus becomes man,( ) (not "flesh"--[------],not [------]); he is born in a cave in bethlehem;( ) he grows in stature and intellect by the use of ordinary means like other men; he is accounted { } the son of joseph the carpenter and mary: he himself works as a carpenter, and makes ploughs and yokes.( ) when jesus is baptized by john, a fire is kindled in jordan; and justin evidently knows nothing of john's express declaration in the fourth gospel, that jesus is the messiah, the son of god.( ) justin refers to the change of name of simon in connection with his recognition of the master as "christ the son of god,"( ) which is narrated quite differently in the fourth gospel (i. -- ), where, indeed, such a declaration is put into the mouth of nathaniel (i. ), which justin ignores. justin does not mention nicodemus either in connection with the statement regarding the necessity of being "born from above," or with the entombment (xix. ). he has the prayer and agony in the garden,( ) which the fourth gospel excludes, as well as the cries on the cross, which that gospel ignores. then, according to justin, the last supper takes place on the th nisan,( ) whilst the fourth gospel, ignoring the passover and last supper, represents the last meal as eaten on the th nisan (john xiii. f., cf. xviii. ). he likewise contradicts the fourth gospel, in limiting the work of jesus to one year. in fact, it is impossible for writings, so full of quotations of the words of jesus and of allusions to the events of his life, more completely to ignore or vary from the fourth gospel throughout; and if it could be shown that justin was acquainted with such a work, it would follow certainly that he did not consider it an apostolical or authoritative composition. "and it is written that on the day of the passover you seized him, and likewise during the passover you crucified him." dial., ill; cf. dial. ; matt, xxvi. , ff., , . { } we may add that, as justin so distinctly and directly refers to the apostle john as the author of the apocalypse,( ) there is confirmation of the conclusion, otherwise arrived at, that he did not, and could not, know the gospel and also ascribe it to him. finally, the description which justin gives of the manner of teaching of jesus excludes the idea that he knew the fourth gospel. "brief and concise were the sentences uttered by him: for he was no sophist, but his word was the power of god."( ) no one could for a moment assert that this description applies to the long and artificial discourses of the fourth gospel, whilst, on the other hand, it eminently describes the style of teaching in the synoptics, with which the numerous gospels in circulation amongst early christians were, of course, more nearly allied. the inevitable conclusion at which we must arrive is that, so far from indicating any acquaintance with the fourth gospel, the writings of justin not only do not furnish the slightest evidence of its existence, but offer presumptive testimony against its apostolical origin. tischendorf only devotes a short note to hegesippus,( ) and does not pretend to find in the fragments of his writings, preserved to us by eusebius, or the details of his life which he has recorded, any evidence for our gospels. apologists generally admit that this source, at least, is barren of all testimony for the fourth gospel, but canon westcott cannot renounce so important a witness without an effort, and he therefore boldly says: "when he, (hegesippus) speaks of 'the door of jesus' in his account of the death of st. james, there can be little { } doubt that he alludes to the language of our lord recorded by st. john."( ) the passage to which canon westcott refers, but which he does not quote, is as follows:--"certain, therefore, of the seven heretical parties amongst the people, already described by me in the memoirs, inquired of him, what was the door of jesus; and he declared this ([------]--jesus) to be the saviour. from which some believed that jesus is the christ. but the aforementioned heretics did not believe either a resurrection, or that he shall come to render to every one according to his works. as many as believed, however, did so, through james." the rulers fearing that the people would cause a tumult, from considering jesus to be the messiah [------], entreat james to persuade them concerning jesus, and prevent their being deceived by him; and in order that he may be heard by the multitude, they place james upon a wing of the temple, and cry to him: "o just man, whom we all are bound to believe, inasmuch as the people are led astray after jesus, the crucified, declare plainly to us what is the door of jesus."( ) to find in this a reference to the fourth gospel, requires a good deal of apologetic ingenuity. it is perfectly clear that, as an allusion to john x. , : "i am the door," the question: "what is the door of jesus?" is mere nonsense, and the reply of james totally irrelevant. such a question in reference to the discourse { } in the fourth gospel, moreover, in the mouths of the antagonistic scribes and pharisees, is quite inconceivable, and it is unreasonable to suppose that it has any connection with it. various emendations of the text have been proposed to obviate the difficulty of the question, but none of these have been adopted, and it has now been generally accepted, that [------] is used in an idiomatic sense. the word is very frequently employed in such a manner, or symbolically, in the new testament,( ) and by the fathers. the jews were well acquainted with a similar use of the word in the old testament, in some of the messianic psalms, as for instance: ps. cxviii. , (cxvii. , sept.). ," open to me the gates [------] of righteousness; entering into them, i will give praise to the lord;" , "this is the gate [------] of the lord, the righteous shall enter into it"( ) quoting this passage, clement of alexandria remarks: "but explaining the saying of the prophet, barnabas adds: many gates [------] being open, that which is in righteousness is in christ, in which all those who enter are blessed."( ) grabe explains the passage of hegesippus, by a reference to the frequent allusions in scripture to the two ways: one of light, the other of darkness; the one leading to life, the other to death; as well as the simile of two gates which is coupled with them, as in matt. vil ff. he, therefore, explains the question of the rulers: "what is the door of jesus?" as an inquiry into the judgment of james concerning him: { } whether he was a teacher of truth or a deceiver of the people; whether belief in him was the way and gate of life and salvation, or of death and perdition.( ) he refers as an illustration to the epistle of barnabas, xviii.: "there are two ways of teaching and of power: one of light, the other of darkness. but there is a great difference between the two ways."( ) the epistle, under the symbol of the two ways, classifies the whole of the moral law.( ) in the clementine homilies, xviii. , there is a version of the saying, matt. vii. f, derived from another source, in which "way" is more decidedly even than in our first synoptic made the equivalent of "gate:" "enter ye through the narrow and straitened way [------] through which ye shall enter into life." eusebius himself, who has preserved the fragment, evidently understood it distinctly in the same sense, and he gave its true meaning in another of his works, where he paraphrases the question into an enquiry, as to the opinion which jamas held concerning jesus [------].( ) this view is supported by many learned men, and routh has pointed out that ernesti considered he would have been right in making [------], doctrine, teaching, the equivalent of [------], although he admits that eusebius does not once use it in his history, in connection with christian doctrine.( ) { } he might, however, have instanced this passage, in which it is clearly used in this sense, and so explained by eusebius. in any other sense the question is simple nonsense. there is evidently no intention on the part of the scribes and pharisees here to ridicule, in asking: "what is the door of jesus?" but they desire james to declare plainly to the people, what is the teaching of jesus, and his personal pretension. to suppose that the rulers of the jews set james upon a wing of the temple, in order that they might ask him a question, for the benefit of the multitude, based upon a discourse in the fourth gospel, unknown to the synoptics, and even in relation to which such an inquiry as: "what is the door of jesus?" becomes mere ironical nonsense, surpasses all that we could have imagined even of apologetic zeal. we have already( ) said all that is necessary with regard to hegesippus, in connection with the synoptics, and need not add more here. it is certain that had he said anything interesting about our gospels and, we may say, particularly about the fourth, the fact would have been recorded by eusebius. nor need we add much to our remarks regarding papias of hierapolis.( ) it is perfectly clear that the works of matthew and mark,( ) regarding which he records it is evident that papias did not regard the works by "matthew" and "mark" which he mentions, as of any authority. indeed, all that he reports regarding the latter is merely apologetic, and in deprecation of criticism. { } such important particulars, are not the gospels in our canon, which pass under their names; he does not seem to have known anything of the third synoptic; and there is no reason to suppose that he referred to the fourth gospel or made use of it. he is, therefore, at least, a total blank so far as the johannine gospel and our third synoptic are concerned, but he is more than this, and it may, we think, be concluded that papias was not acquainted with any such gospels which he regarded as apostolic compositions, or authoritative documents. had he said anything regarding the composition or authorship of the fourth gospel, eusebius would certainly have mentioned the fact, and this silence of papias is strong presumptive evidence against the johannine gospel.( ) tischendorfs argument in regard to the phrygian bishop is mainly directed to this point, and he maintains that the silence of eusebius does not make papias a witness against the fourth gospel, and does not involve the conclusion that he did not know it, inasmuch as it was not, he affirms, the purpose of eusebius to record the mention or use of the books of the new testament which were not disputed.( ) it might be contended that this reasoning is opposed to the practice and express declaration of eusebius himself, who says: "but in the course of the history i shall, with the successions (from the apostles), carefully intimate what ecclesiastical writers of the various periods made use of { } the antilegomena (or disputed writings), and which of them, and what has been stated by these as well regarding the collected [------] and homologumena (or accepted writings), as regarding those which are not of this kind."( ) it is not worth while, however, to dwell upon this, here. the argument in the case of papias stands upon a broader basis. it is admitted that eusebius engages carefully to record what ecclesiastical writers state regarding the homologumena, and that he actually does so. now papias has himself expressed the high value he attached to tradition, and his eagerness in seeking information from the presbyters. the statements regarding the gospels composed by matthew and mark, quoted by eusebius, are illustrative at once both of the information collected by papias and of that cited by eusebius. how comes it, then, that nothing whatever is said about the fourth gospel, a work so peculiar and of such exceptional importance, said to be composed by the apostle whom jesus loved? is it possible to suppose that when papias collected from the presbyter the facts which he has recorded concerning matthew and mark he would not also have inquired about a gospel by john had he known of it? is it possible that he could have had nothing interesting to tell about a work presenting so many striking and distinctive features? had he collected any information on the subject he would certainly have recorded it, and as certainly eusebius would have quoted what he said,( ) as he did the account of the other two gospels, for he even mentions that papias { } made use of the st epistle of john, and st epistle of peter, two equally accepted writings. the legitimate presumption, therefore, is that, as eusebius did not mention the fact, he did not find anything regarding the fourth gospel in the work of papias, and that papias was not acquainted with it. this presumption is confirmed by the circumstance that when eusebius writes, elsewhere (h. e. iii. ), of the order of the gospels, and the composition of john's gospel, he has no greater authority to give for his account than mere tradition: "they say" [------]. proceeding from this merely negative argument, tischendorf endeavours to show that not only is papias not a witness against the fourth gospel, but that he presents testimony in its favour. the first reason he advances is that eusebius states: "the same (papias) made use of testimonies out of the first epistle of john, and likewise out of that of peter."(l) on the supposed identity of the authorship of the epistle and gospel, tischendorf, as in the case of polycarp, claims this as evidence for the fourth gospel. eusebius, however, does not quote the passages upon which he bases this statement, and knowing his inaccuracy and the hasty and uncritical manner in which he and the fathers generally jump at such conclusions, we must reject this as sufficient evidence that papias really did use the epistle, and that eusebius did not adopt his opinion from a mere superficial analogy of passages.( ) but if it were certain that papias actually quoted from the epistle, it does not in the least follow that he { } ascribed it to the apostle john, and the use of the epistle would scarcely affect the question as to the character and authorship of the fourth gospel the next testimony advanced by tischendorf is indeed of an extraordinary character. there is a latin ms. (vat. alex. ) in the vatican, which tischendorf assigns to the ninth century, in which there is a preface by an unknown hand to the gospel according to john, which commences as follows: "evangelium iohannis manifestatum et datum est ecclesiis ab iohannc ad hue in corpore constituto, sicut papias nomine hicrapolitanus discipulus iohannis carus in exotericis id est in extremis quinque libris retulit." "the gospel of john was published and given to the churches by john whilst he was still in the flesh, as papias, named of hierapolis, an esteemed disciple of john, related in his 'exoterics' that is his last five books." tischendorf says: "there can, therefore, be no more decided declaration made of the testimony of papias for the johannine gospel."( ) he wishes to end the quotation here, and only refers to the continuation, which he is obliged to admit to be untenable, in a note. the passage proceeds: "disscripsit vero evangelium dictante iohanne recte." "he (papias) indeed wrote out the gospel, john duly dictating;" then follows another passage regarding marcion, representing him also as a contemporary of john, which tischendorf likewise confesses to be untrue.( ) now tischendorf admits that the writer desires it to be understood that he derived the information that papias wrote the fourth gospel at the dictation of john likewise from the work of papias, and as it is perfectly impossible, by his own admissions, that papias, who was not a { } contemporary of the apostle, could have stated this, the whole passage is clearly fabulous and written by a person who never saw the book at all. this extraordinary piece of evidence is so obviously absurd that it is passed over in silence by other critics, even of the strongest apologetic tendency, and it stands here a pitiable instance of the arguments to which destitute criticism can be reduced. in order to do full justice to the last of the arguments of tischendorf, we shall give it in his own words: "before we separate from papias, we have still to consider one testimony for the gospel of john which irenæus, v. , § , quotes out of the very mouth of the presbyters, those high authorities of papias: 'and therefore, say they, the lord declared: in my father's house are many mansions( ) (john xiv. ). as the presbyters set this declaration in connection with the blessedness of the righteous in the city of god, in paradise, in heaven, according as they bear thirty, sixty, or one hundred-fold fruit, nothing is more probable than that irenæus takes this whole declaration of the presbyters, which he gives, §§ - , like the preceding description of the thousand years' reign, from the work of papias. but whether this be its origin or not, the authority of the presbyters is in any case higher than that of papias," &c.( ) now in the quotation from irenseus given in this { } passage, tischendorf renders the oblique construction of the text by inserting "say they," referring to the presbyters of papias, and, as he does not give the original, he should at least have indicated that these words are supplementary. we shall endeavour as briefly as possible to state the facts of the case. irenæus, with many quotations from scripture, is arguing that our bodies are preserved, and that the saints who have suffered so much in the flesh shall in that flesh receive the fruits of their labours. in v. , § , he refers to the saying given in matt. xix. (luke xviii. , ) that whosoever has left lands, &c., because of christ shall receive a hundred-fold in this world, and in the next, eternal life; and then, enlarging on the abundance of the blessings in the millennial kingdom, he affirms that creation will be renovated, and the earth acquire wonderful fertility, and he adds: § , "as the presbyters who saw john the disciple of the lord, remember that they heard from him, how the lord taught concerning those times and said:" &c. ("quemadmodum pres-byteri meminerunt, qui joannem discipulum domini viderunt, audisse se ab eo, quemadmodum de temporibus illis docebat dominus, et dicebat," &c.), and then he quotes the passage: "the days will come in which vines will grow each having ten thousand branches," &c.; and "in like manner that a grain of wheat would produce ten thousand ears," &c. with regard to these he says, at the beginning of the next paragraph, v. , § , "these things are testified in writing by papias, a hearer of john and associate of polycarp, an ancient { } man, in the fourth of his books: for there were five books composed by him.( ) and he added saying: 'but these things are credible to believers. and judas the traitor not believing, and asking how shall such growths be effected by the lord, the lord said: they who shall come to them shall see.' prophesying of these times, therefore, isaiah says: 'the wolf also shall feed with the lamb,' &c. &c. (quoting isaiah xi. -- ), and again he says, recapitulating: 'wolves and lambs shall then feed together,'" &c. (quoting isaiah lxv. ), and so on, continuing his argument. it is clear that irenæus introduces the quotation from papias, and ending his reference at: "they who shall come to them shall see," he continues, with a quotation from isaiah, his own train of reasoning. we give this passage to show the manner in which irenæus proceeds. he then continues with the same subject, quoting (v. , ) isaiah, ezekiel, jeremiah, daniel, the apocalypse, and sayings found in the new testament bearing upon the millennium. in c. he argues that the prophecies he quotes of isaiah, jeremiah, and the apocalypse must not be allegorized away, but that they literally describe the blessings to be enjoyed, after the coming of antichrist and the resurrection, in the new jerusalem on earth, and he quotes isaiah vi. , lx. , , and a long passage from baruch iv. , v. (which he ascribes to jeremiah), isaiah xlix. , gala-tians iv. , rev. xxi. , xx. -- , xxi. -- , all descriptive, as he maintains, of the millennial kingdom prepared for the saints; and then in v. , the last chapter of his work on heresies, as if resuming his eusebius has preserved the greek of this passage (h. e., iii. ), and goes on to contradict the statement of irenæus that papias was a hearer and contemporary of the apostles. eusebius states that papias in his prefaco by no means asserts that he was. { } previous argument, he proceeds:( ) § . "and that these things shall ever remain without end isaiah says: 'for like as the new heaven and the new earth which i make remain before me, saith the lord, so shall your seed and your name continue,'( ) and as the presbyters say, then those who have been deemed worthy of living in heaven shall go thither, and others shall enjoy the delights of paradise, and others shall possess the glory of the city; for everywhere the saviour shall be seen as those who see him shall be worthy. § . but that there is this distinction of dwelling [------] of those bearing fruit the hundred fold, and of the (bearers) of the sixty fold, and of the (bearers of) the thirty fold: of whom some indeed shall be taken up into the heavens, some shall live in paradise, and some shall inhabit the city, and that for this reason [------] propter hoc) the lord declared: in the... (plural) of my father are many mansions [------].( ) for all things are of god, who prepares for all the fitting habitation, as his word says, that distribution is made to all by the father according { } as each is or shall be worthy. and this is the couch upon which they recline who are invited to banquet at the wedding. the presbyters disciples of the apostles state that this is the order and arrangement of those who are saved, and that by such steps they advance,"( ) &c. &c. now it is impossible for any one who attentively considers the whole of this passage, and who makes himself acquainted with the manner in which irenæus conducts his argument, and interweaves it with quotations, to assert that the phrase we are considering must have been taken from a book referred to three chapters earlier, and was not introduced by irenæus from some other source. in the passage from the commencement of the second paragraph irenæus enlarges upon, and illustrates, what "the presbyters say" regarding the blessedness of the saints, by quoting the view held as to the distinction between those bearing fruit thirty fold, sixty fold, and one hundred fold,( ) and the interpretation given of the { } saying regarding "many mansions," but the source of his quotation is quite indefinite, and may simply be the exegesis of his own day. that this is probably the case is shown by the continuation: "and this is the couch upon which they recline who are invited to banquet at the wedding"--an allusion to the marriage supper upon which irenæus had previously enlarged;( ) immediately after which phrase, introduced by irenæus himself, he says: "the presbyters, the disciples of the apostles, state that this is the order and arrangement of those who are saved," &c. now, if the preceding passages had been a mere quotation from the presbyters of papias, such a remark would have been out of place and useless, but being the exposition of the prevailing views, irenæus confirms it and prepares to wind up the whole subject by the general statement that the presbyters, the disciples of the apostles, affirm that this is the order and arrangement of those who are saved, and that by such steps they advance and ascend through the spirit to the son, and through the son to the father, &c., and a few sentences after he closes his work. in no case, however, can it be legitimately affirmed that the citation of "the presbyters," and the "presbyters, disciples of the apostles," is a reference to the work of papias. when quoting "the presbyters who saw john the disciple of the lord," three chapters before, irenæus distinctly states that papias testifies what he quotes in writing in the fourth of his books, but there is nothing whatever to indicate that "the presbyters," and "the presbyters, disciples of the apostles," subsequently referred to, after a complete change of context, have anything to do with papias. the references to presbyters in this { } work of irenæus are very numerous, and when we remember the importance which the bishop of lyons attached to "that tradition which comes from the apostles, which is preserved in the churches by a succession of presbyters,"( ) the reference before us assumes a very different complexion. in one place, irenæus quotes "the divine presbyter" [------], "the god-loving presbyter" [------],( ) who wrote verses against the heretic marcus. elsewhere he supports his extraordinary statement that the public career of jesus, instead of being limited to a single year, extended over a period of twenty years, and that he was nearly fifty when he suffered,( ) by the appeal: "as the gospel and all the presbyters testify, who in asia met with john the disciple of the lord (stating) that these things were transmitted to them by john. for he continued among them till the times of trajan."( ) that these presbyters are not quoted from the work of papias may be inferred from the fact that eusebius, who had his work, quotes the passage from irenseus without allusion to papias, and as he adduces two witnesses only, irenæus and clement of alexandria, to prove the assertion regarding john, he would certainly have referred to the earlier authority, had the work of papias contained the statement, as he does for the stories regarding the { } daughters of the apostle philip; the miracle in favour of justus, and other matters.( ) we need not refer to clement, nor to polycarp, who had been "taught by apostles," and the latter of whom irenæus knew in his youth.( ) irenæus in one place also gives a long account of the teaching of some one upon the sins of david and other men of old, which he introduces: "as i have heard from a certain presbyter, who had heard it from those who had seen the apostles, and from those who learnt from them."( ) &c. further on, speaking evidently of a different person, he says: "in this manner also a presbyter disciple of the apostles, reasoned regarding the two testaments:"( ) and quotes fully. in another place irenæus, after quoting gen. ii. , "and god planted a paradise eastward in eden," &c., states: "wherefore the presbyters who are disciples of the apostles [------], say that those who were translated had been translated thither," there to remain till the consummation of all things awaiting immortality, and irenæus explains that it was into this paradise that paul was caught up ( cor. xii. ).( ) it seems highly probable that these "presbyters the disciples of the apostles" who are quoted on paradise, are the same "presbyters the disciples of the apostles" referred to on the same subject (v. , §§ , ) whom we { } are discussing, but there is nothing whatever to connect them with papias. he also speaks of the scptuagint translation of the bible as the version of the "presbyters,"( ) and on several occasions he calls luke "the follower and disciple of the apostles" (sectator et discipulus apostolorum)( ), and characterizes mark as "the interpreter and follower of peter" (interpres et sectator petri)( ), and refers to both as having learnt from the words of the apostles.( ) here is, therefore, a wide choice of presbyters, including even evangelists, to whom the reference of irenæus may with equal right be ascribed,( ) so that it is unreasonable to claim it as an allusion to the work of papias.( ) in fact, dr. tischendorf and canon westcott( ) stand almost alone in in the new testament the term presbyter is even used in reference to patriarchs and prophets. heb. xi. ; cf. matt xv. ; mark vii. , . with regard to the presbyters quoted by irenæus generally. cf. routh, reliq. sacrse, i. p. ff. { } advancing this passage as evidence that either papias or his presbyters( ) were acquainted with the fourth gospel, and this renders the statement which is made by them without any discussion all the more indefensible. scarcely a single writer, however apologetic, seriously cites it amongst the external testimonies for the early existence of the gospel, and the few who do refer to the passage merely mention, in order to abandon, it.( ) so far as the question as to whether the fourth gospel was mentioned in the work of papias is concerned, the passage has practically never entered into the controversy at all, the great mass of critics having recognized that it is of no evidential value whatever, and, by common consent, tacitly excluded it.( ) it is { } admitted that the bishop of hierapolis cannot be shown to have known the fourth gospel, and the majority affirm that he actually was not acquainted with it. being, therefore, so completely detached from papias, it is obvious that the passage does not in any way assist the fourth gospel, but becomes assignable to vague tradition, and subject to the cumulative force of objections, which prohibit an early date being ascribed to so indefinite a reference. before passing on there is one other point to mention: andrew of cæsarea, in the preface to his commentary on the apocalypse, mentions that papias maintained "the credibility" [------] of that book, or in other words, its apostolic origin.( ) his strong millenarian opinions would naturally make such a composition stand high in his esteem, if indeed it did not materially contribute to the formation of his views, which is still more probable. apologists admit the genuineness of this statement, nay, claim it as undoubted evidence of the acquaintance of papias with the apocalypse.( ) canon westcott, for instance, says: "he maintained, moreover, 'the divine inspiration' of the apocalypse, and commented, at least, upon part of it."( ) now, he must, therefore, have recognized the book as the work of the apostle john, and we shall, hereafter, show that it is impossible that the author of the apocalypse is the author of the gospel; therefore, in this way also, papias { } is a witness against the apostolic origin of the fourth gospel. we must now turn to the clementine homilies, although, as we have shown,( ) the uncertainty as to the date of this spurious work, and the late period which must undoubtedly he assigned to its composition, render its evidence of very little value for the canonical gospels. the passages pointed out in the homilies as indicating acquaintance with the fourth gospel were long advanced with hesitation, and were generally felt to be inconclusive, but on the discovery of the concluding portion of the work and its publication by dressel in , it was found to contain a passage which apologists now claim as decisive evidence of the use of the gospel, and which even succeeded in converting some independent critics.( ) tischendorf( ) and canon westcott,( ) in the few lines devoted to the clementines, do not refer to the earlier proof passages, but rely entirely upon that last discovered. with a view, however, to making the whole of the evidence clear, we shall give all of the supposed allusions to the fourth gospel, confronting them with the text. the first is as follows:-- [------] { } [------] the first point which is apparent here is that there is a total difference both in the language and real meaning of these two passages. the homily uses the word [------] instead of the [------] of the gospel, and speaks of the gate of life, instead of the door of the sheepfold. we have already( ) discussed the passage in the pastor of hernias in which similar reference is made to the gate [------] into the kingdom of god, and need not here repeat our argument. in matt. vii. , , we have the direct description of the gate [------] which leads to life [------], and we have elsewhere quoted the messianic psalm cxviii. , : "this is the gate of the lord [------],( ) the righteous shall enter into it." in another place, the author of the homilies, referring to a passage parallel to, but differing from, matt. xxiii. , which we have elsewhere considered,( ) and which is derived from a gospel different from ours, says: "hear _them_ (scribes and pharisees who sit upon moses' seat), he said, as entrusted with the key of the kingdom which is knowledge, which alone is able to open the gate of life [------], through which alone is the entrance to eternal life."( ) now in the very next chapter to that in which the saying which we are discussing occurs, a very few lines after it indeed, we have the following passage: "indeed he said further: 'i am he { } concerning whom moses prophesied, saying: 'a prophet shall the lord our god raise up to you from among your brethren as also (he raised) me; hear ye him regarding all things, but whosoever will not hear that prophet he shall die.'"( ) there is no such saying in the canonical gospels or other books of the new testament attributed to jesus, but a quotation from deuteronomy xviii. f., materially different from this, occurs twice in the acts of the apostles, once being put into the mouth of peter applied to jesus,( ) and the second time also applied to him, being quoted by stephen.( ) it is quite clear that the writer is quoting from uncanonical sources, and here is another express declaration regarding himself: "i am he," &c., which is quite in the spirit of the preceding passage which we are discussing, and probably derived from the same source. in another place we find the following argument: "but the way is the manner of life, as also moses says: 'behold i have set before thy face the way of life, and the way of death'( ) and in agreement the teacher said: 'enter ye through the narrow and straitened way through which ye shall enter into life,' and in another place a certain person inquiring: 'what shall i do to inherit eternal life?' he intimated the commandments of the law."( ) it has to be observed that the homilies teach the doctrine { } that the spirit in jesus christ had already appeared in adam, and by a species of transmigration passed through moses and the patriarchs and prophets: "who from the beginning of the world, changing names and forms, passes through time [------] until, attaining his own seasons, being on account of his labours anointed by the mercy of god, he shall have rest for ever."( ) just in the same way, therefore, as the homilies represent jesus as quoting a prophecy of moses, and altering it to a personal declaration: "i am the prophet," &c., so here again they make him adopt this saying of moses and, "being the true prophet," declare: "i am the gate or the way of life,"--inculcating the same commandments of the law which the gospel of the homilies represents jesus as coming to confirm and not to abolish. the whole system of doctrine of the clementines, as we shall presently see, indicated here even by the definition of "the true prophet," is so fundamentally opposed to that of the fourth gospel that there is no reasonable ground for supposing that the author made use of it, and this brief saying, varying as it does in language and sense from the parallel in that work, cannot prove acquaintance with it. there is good reason to believe that the author of the fourth gospel, who most undeniably derived materials from earlier evangelical works, may have drawn from a source likewise used by the gospel according to the hebrews, and thence many analogies might well be presented with quotations from that or kindred gospels.( ) we find, further, this community of source in the fact, { } that in the fourth gospel, without actual quotation, there is a reference to moses, and, no doubt, to the very passage (deut. xviii. ), which the gospel of the clementines puts into the mouth of jesus, john v. : "for had ye believed moses ye would believe me, for he wrote of me." whilst the ebionite gospel gave prominence to this view of the case, the dogmatic system of the logos gospel did not permit of more than mere reference to it. the next passage pointed out as derived from the johannine gospel occurs in the same chapter: "my sheep hear my voice." [------] there was no more common representation amongst the jews of the relation between god and his people than that of a shepherd and his sheep,( ) nor any more current expression than: hearing his voice. this brief anonymous saying was in all probability derived from the same source as the preceding,( ) which cannot be identified with the fourth gospel. tradition, and the acknowledged existence of other written records of the teaching of jesus oppose any exclusive claim to this fragmentary saying. we have already discussed the third passage regarding the new birth in connection with justin,( ) and may therefore pass on to the last and most important passage, to which we have referred as contained in the concluding portion of the homilies first published by dressel in { } . we subjoin it in contrast with the parallel in the fourth gospel [------] it is necessary that we should consider the context of this passage in the homily, the characteristics of which are markedly opposed to the theory that it was derived from the fourth gospel we must mention that, in the clementines, the apostle peter is represented as maintaining that the scriptures are not all true, but are mixed up with what is false, and that on this account, and in order to inculcate the necessity of distinguishing between the true and the false, jesus taught his disciples, "be ye approved money changers,"( ) an injunction not found in our gospels. one of the points which peter denies is the fall of adam, a doctrine which, as neander remarked, "he must combat as blasphemy."( ) at the part we are { } considering he is discussing with simon,--under whose detested personality, as we have elsewhere shown, the apostle paul is really attacked,--and refuting the charges he brings forward regarding the origin and continuance of evil. the apostle peter in the course of the discussion asserts that evil is the same as pain and death, but that evil does not exist eternally and, indeed, does not really exist at all, for pain and death are only accidents without permanent force--pain is merely the disturbance of harmony, and death nothing but the separation of soul from body.( ) the passions also must be classed amongst the things which are accidental, and are not always to exist; but these, although capable of abuse, are in reality beneficial to the soul when properly restrained, and carry out the will of god. the man who gives them unbridled course ensures his own punishment.( ) simon inquires why men die prematurely and periodical diseases come, and also visitations of demons and of madness and other afflictions; in reply to which peter explains that parents by following their own pleasure in all things and neglecting proper sanitary considerations, produce a multitude of evils for their children, and this either through { } carelessness or ignorance.( ) and then follows the passage we are discussing: "wherefore also our teacher," &c., and at the end of the quotation, he continues: "and truly such sufferings ensue in consequence of ignorance," and giving an instance,( ) he proceeds: "now the sufferings which you before mentioned are the consequence of ignorance, and certainly not of an evil act, which has been committed,"( ) &c. now it is quite apparent that the peculiar variation from the parallel in the fourth gospel in the latter part of the quotation is not accidental, but is the point upon which the whole propriety of the quotation depends. in the gospel of the clementines the man is not blind from his birth, "that the works of god might be made manifest in him,"--a doctrine which would be revolting to the author of the homilies,--but the calamity has befallen him in consequence of some error of ignorance on the part of his parents which brings its punishment; but "the power of god" is made manifest in healing the sins of ignorance. the reply of jesus is a professed quotation, and it varies very substantially from the parallel in the gospel, presenting evidently a distinctly different version of the episode. the substitution of [------] for [------] in the opening is also significant, more especially as justin likewise in his general remark, which we have discussed, uses the same word. assuming the passage in the fourth gospel to be the account of a historical episode, as apologists, of course, maintain, the case stands thus:--the author of the homilies introduces a narrative of a historical { } incident in the life of jesus, which may have been, and probably was, reported in many early gospels in language which, though analogous to, is at the same time decidedly different, in the part which is a professed quotation, from that of the fourth gospel, and presents another and natural comment upon the central event. the reference to the historical incident is, of course, no evidence whatever of dependence on the fourth gospel, which, although it may be the only accidentally surviving work which contains the narrative, had no prescriptive and exclusive property in it, and so far from the partial agreement in the narrative proving the use of the fourth gospel, the only remarkable point is, that all narratives of the same event and reports of words actually spoken do not more perfectly agree, while, on the other hand, the very decided variation in the reply of jesus, according to the homily, from that given in the fourth gospel leads to the distinct presumption that it is not the source of the quotation. it is perfectly unreasonable to assert that such a reference, without the slightest indication of the source from which the author derived his information, must be dependent on one particular work, more especially when the part which is given as distinct quotation substantially differs from the record in that work. we have already illustrated this on several occasions, and may once more offer an instance. if the first synoptic had unfortunately perished, like so many other gospels of the early church, and in the clementines we met with the quotation: "blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" [------], apologists would certainly assert, according to the principle upon which they act in { } the present case, that this quotation was clear evidence of the use of luke vi. : "blessed are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of god." [------], more especially as a few codices actually insert [------], the slight variations being merely ascribed to free quotation from memory. in point of fact, however, the third synoptic might not at the time have been in existence, and the quotation might have been derived, as it is, from matt. v. . nothing is more certain and undeniable than the fact that the author of the fourth gospel made use of materials derived from oral tradition and earlier records for its composition.( ) it is equally undeniable that other gospels had access to the same materials, and made use of them; and a comparison of our three synoptics renders very evident the community of materials, including the use of the one by the other, as well as the diversity of literary handling to which those materials were subjected. it is impossible with reason to deny that the gospel according to the hebrews, for instance, as well as other earlier evangelical works now lost, may have drawn from the same sources as the fourth gospel, and that narratives derived from the one may, therefore, present analogies with the other whilst still perfectly independent of it.( ) whatever private opinion, therefore, any one may form as to the source of the anonymous quotations which we have been considering, it is evident that they are totally insufficient to prove that the author of { } the clementine homilies must have made use of the fourth gospel, and consequently they do not establish even the contemporary existence of that work. if such quotations, moreover, could be traced with fifty times greater probability to the fourth gospel, it is obvious that they could do nothing towards establishing its historical character and apostolic origin. leaving, however, the few and feeble analogies by which apologists vainly seek to establish the existence of the fourth gospel and its use by the author of the pseudo-clementine homilies, and considering the question for a moment from a wider point of view, the results already attained are more than confirmed. the doctrines held and strongly enunciated in the clementines seem to us to exclude the supposition that the author can have made use of a work so fundamentally at variance with all his views as the fourth gospel, and it is certain that, holding those opinions, he could hardly have regarded such a gospel as an apostolic and authoritative document. space will not permit our entering adequately into this argument, and we must refer our readers to works more immediately devoted to the examination of the homilies for a close analysis of their dogmatic teaching,( ) but we may in the briefest manner point out some of their more prominent doctrines in contrast with those of the johannine gospel. { } one of the leading and most characteristic ideas of the clementine homilies is the essential identity of judaism and christianity. christ revealed nothing new with regard to god, but promulgated the very same truth concerning him as adam, moses, and the patriarchs, and in fact the right belief is that moses and jesus were essentially one and the same.( ) indeed, it may be said that the teaching of the homilies is more jewish than christian.( ) in the preliminary epistle of the apostle peter to the apostle james, when sending the book, peter entreats that james will not give it to any of the gentiles,( ) and james says: "necessarily and rightly our peter reminded us to take precautions for the security of the truth, that we should not communicate the books of his preachings, sent to us, indiscriminately to all, but to him who is good and discreet and chosen to teach, and who is _circumcised_,( ) being faithful."( ) &c. clement also is represented as describing his conversion to christianity in the following terms: "for this cause i fled for refuge to the holy god and law of the jews, with faith in the certain conclusion that, by the righteous judgment of god, both the law is prescribed, and the soul beyond doubt everywhere receives { } the desert of its actions."( ) peter recommends the inhabitants of tyre to follow what are really jewish rites, and to hear "as the god-fearing jews have heard "( ) the jew has the same truth as the christian: "for as there is one teaching by both (moses and jesus), god accepts him who believes either of these."( ) the law was in fact given by adam as a true prophet knowing all things, and it is called "eternal," and neither to be abrogated by enemies nor falsified by the impious.( ) the author, therefore, protests against the idea that christianity is any new thing, and insists that jesus came to confirm, not abrogate, the mosaic law.( ) on the other hand the author of the fourth gospel represents christianity in strong contrast and antagonism to judaism.( ) in his antithetical system, the religion of jesus is opposed to judaism as well as all other belief, as light to darkness and life to death.( ) the law which moses gave is treated as merely national, and neither of { } general application nor intended to be permanent, being only addressed to the jews. it is perpetually referred to as the "law of the jews," "your law,"--and the jewish festivals as feasts of the jews, and jesus neither held the one in any consideration nor did he scruple to shew his indifference to the other.( ) the very name of "the jews" indeed is used as an equivalent for the enemies of christ.( ) the religion of jesus is not only absolute, but it communicates knowledge of the father which the jews did not previously possess.( ) the inferiority of mosaism is everywhere represented: "and out of his fulness all we received, and grace for grace. because the law was given through moses; _grace and truth_ came through jesus christ."( ) "verily verily i say unto you: moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but my father giveth you the true bread from heaven."( ) the fundamental difference of christianity from judaism will further appear as we proceed. the most essential principle of the clementines, again, is monotheism,--the absolute oneness of god,--which the author vehemently maintains as well against the ascription of divinity to christ as against heathen polytheism and the gnostic theory of the demiurge as distinguished from the supreme god.( ) christ not only is not god, { } but he never asserted himself to be so.( ) he wholly ignores the doctrine of the logos, and his speculation is confined to the [------], the wisdom of proverbs viii., &c., and is, as we shall see, at the same time a less developed and very different doctrine from that of the fourth gospel.( ) the idea of a hypostatic trinity seems to be quite unknown to him, and would have been utterly abhorrent to his mind as sheer polytheism. on the other hand, the fourth gospel proclaims the doctrine of a hypostatic trinity in a more advanced form than any other writing of the new testament. it is, indeed, the fundamental principle of the work,( ) as the doctrine of the logos is its most characteristic feature. in the beginning the "word not only was with god, but "the word was god" [------].( ) he is the "only begotten god" [------],( ) equivalent to the "second god" [------] of philo, and, throughout, his absolutely divine nature is asserted both by the evangelist, and in express terms in the discourses of jesus.( ) nothing could be more opposed to the principles of the clementines. { } according to the homilies, the same spirit, the [------], appeared in adam, enoch, noah, abraham, isaac, jacob, moses, and finally in jesus, who are the only "true prophets" and are called the seven pillars [------] of the world.( ) these seven( ) persons, therefore, are identical, the same true prophet and spirit" who from the beginning of the world, changing names and forms, passes through time,"( ) and these men were thus essentially the same as jesus.( ) as neander rightly observes, the author of the homilies "saw in jesus a new appearance of that adam whom he had ever venerated as the source of all the true and divine in man."( ) we need not point out how different these views are from the logos doctrine of the fourth gospel.( ) in other points there is an equally wide gulf between the clementines and the fourth gospel. according to the author of the homilies, the chief dogma of it is very uncertain by what means the author of the homilies considered this periodical reappearance to be effected, whether by a kind of transmigration or otherwise. critics consider it very doubtful whether he admitted the supernatural birth of jesus (though some hold it to be probable), but at any rate he does not explain the matter: uhlhorn, die homilien, p. f.; neander, k. g., ii. p. , anm. ; credner thought that he did not admit it, . c. p. ; schliemann, whilst thinking that he did admit it, considers that in that case he equally attributed a supernatural birth to the other seven prophets: die clementinen, p. ff. { } true religion is monotheism. belief in christ, in the specific johannine sense, is nowhere inculcated, and where belief is spoken of, it is merely belief in god. no dogmatic importance whatever is attached to faith in christ or to his sufferings, death, and resurrection, and of the doctrines of atonement and redemption there is nothing in the homilies,( )--everyone must make his own reconciliation with god, and bear the punishment of his own sins.( ) on the other hand, the representation of jesus as the lamb of god taking away the sins of the world,( ) is the very basis of the fourth gospel. the passages are innumerable in which belief in jesus is insisted upon as essential. "he that believeth in the son hath eternal life, but he that believeth not the son shall not see life, but the wrath of god abideth on him "( )...."for if ye believe not that i am he, ye shall die in your sins."( ) in fact, the "whole of christianity according to the author of the fourth gospel is concentrated in the possession of faith in christ.( ) belief in god alone is never held to be sufficient; belief in christ is necessary for salvation; he died for the sins of the world, and is the object of faith, by which alone forgiveness and justification before god can be secured.( ) the same discrepancy is apparent in smaller details. in the clementines the apostle peter { } is the principal actor, and is represented as the chief amongst the apostles. in the epistle of clement to james, which precedes the homilies, peter is described in the following terms: "simon, who, on account of his true faith and of the principles of his doctrine, which were most sure, was appointed to be the foundation of the church, and for this reason his name was by the unerring voice of jesus himself changed to peter; the first-fruit of our lord; the first of the apostles to whom first the father revealed the son; whom the christ deservedly pronounced blessed; the called and chosen and companion and fellow-traveller (of jesus); the admirable and approved disciple, who as fittest of all was commanded to enlighten the west, the darker part of the world, and was enabled to guide it aright," &c.( ) he is here represented as the apostle to the heathen, the hated apostle paul being robbed of that honourable title, and he is, in the spirit of this introduction, made to play, throughout, the first part amongst the apostles.( ) in the fourth gospel, however, he is assigned a place quite secondary to john,( ) who is the disciple whom jesus loved and who leans on his bosom.( ) we shall only mention one "other point the homilist, when attacking the apostle paul, under the { } name of simon the magician, for his boast that he had not been taught by man, but by a revelation of jesus christ,( ) whom he had only seen in a vision, inquires: why, then, did the teacher remain and discourse a whole year to us who were awake, if you became his apostle after a single hour of instruction?( ) as neander aptly remarks: "but if the author had known from the johannine gospel that the teaching of christ had continued for _several years_, he would certainly have had particularly good reason instead of one year to set _several_."( ) it is obvious that an author with so vehement an animosity against paul would assuredly have strengthened his argument, by adopting the more favourable statement of the fourth gospel as to the duration of the ministry of jesus, had he been acquainted with that work. our attention must now be turned to the anonymous composition, known as the "epistle to diognetus," general particulars regarding which we have elsewhere given.( ) this epistle, it is admitted, does not contain any quotation from any evangelical work, but on the strength of some supposed references it is claimed by apologists as evidence for the existence of the fourth gospel. tischendorf, who only devotes a dozen lines to this work, states his case as follows: "although this short apologetic epistle contains no precise quotation from any gospel, yet it contains repeated references to evangelical, and particularly to johannine, passages. for when the author writes, ch. : 'christians dwell in the world, but they are not of the world;' and in { } ch. : 'for god has loved men, for whose sakes he made the world.... to whom he sent his only begotten son,' the reference to john xvii. ('but they are in the world'); ('the world hateth them, for they are not of the world'); ('they are not of the world as i am not of the world'); and to john iii. ('god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son'), is hardly to be mistaken."( ) dr. westcott still more emphatically claims the epistle as evidence for the fourth gospel, and we shall, in order impartially to consider the question, likewise quote his remarks in full upon the point, but as he introduces his own paraphrase of the context in a manner which does not properly convey its true nature to a reader who has not the epistle before him, we shall take the liberty of putting the actual quotations in italics, and the rest must be taken as purely the language of canon westcott. we shall hereafter show also the exact separation which exists between phrases which are here, with the mere indication of some omission, brought together to form the supposed references to the fourth gospel. canon westcott says: "in one respect the two parts of the book are united,( ) inasmuch as they both exhibit a combination of the teaching of st. paul and st. john. the love of god, it is said in the letter to diognetus, is the source of love in the christian, who must needs 'love god who thus first loved him' [------], and find an expression for this love by loving his neighbour, { } whereby he will be '_an imitator of god!_' for god loved men, for whose sakes he made the world, to whom he subjected all things that are in the earth.... unto whom [------] he sent his only begotten son, to whom he promised the kingdom in heaven [------], _and will give it to those who love him._' god's will is mercy; '_he sent his son as wishing to save [------].... and not to condemn'_ and as witnesses of this, '_christians dwell in the world, though they are not of the world!_( ) at the close of the paragraph he proceeds: "the presence of the teaching of st. john is here placed beyond all doubt. there are, however, no direct references to the gospels throughout the letter, nor indeed any allusions to our lord's discourses."( ) it is clear that as there is no direct reference to any gospel in the epistle to diognetus, even if it were ascertained to be a composition dating from the middle of the second century, which it is not, and even if the indirect allusions were ten times more probable than they are, this anonymous work could do nothing towards establishing the apostolic origin and historical character { } of the fourth gospel. written, however, as we believe it to have been, at a much later period, it scarcely requires any consideration here. we shall, however, for those who may be interested in more minutely discussing the point, at once proceed to examine whether the composition even indicates the existence of the gospel, and for this purpose we shall take each of the passages in question and place them with their context before the reader; and we only regret that the examination of a document which, neither from its date nor evidence can be of any real weight, should detain us so long. the first passage is: "christians dwell in the world but are not of the world" [------]. dr. westcott, who reverses the order of all the passages indicated, introduces this sentence (which occurs in chapter vi.) as the consequence of a passage following it in chapter vii. by the words "and as witnesses of this: christians," &c.... the first parallel which is pointed out in the gospel reads, john xvii. : "and i am no more in the world, and these are in the world [------], and i come to thee, holy father keep them,"&c. now it must be evident that in mere direct point of language and sense there is no parallel here at all. in the gospel, the disciples are referred to as being left behind in the world by jesus who goes to the father, whilst, in the epistle, the object is the antithesis that while christians _dwell_ in the world they are not of the world. in the second parallel, which is supposed to complete the analogy, the gospel reads: v. , "i have given them thy word: and the world hated them because they are not of the world, [------] even as i am not of the world." here, again, the parallel words are merely introduced as a reason why the world hated them, and not antithetically, and from this very connection we shall see that the resemblance between the epistle and the gospel is merely superficial. in order to form a correct judgment regarding the nature of the passage in the epistle, we must carefully examine the context. in chapter v. the author is speaking of the manners of christians, and he says that they are not distinguished from others either { } by country or language or by their customs, for they have neither cities nor speech of their own, nor do they lead a singular life. they dwell in their native countries, but only as sojourners [------], and the writer proceeds by a long sequence of antithetical sentences to depict their habits. "every foreign land is as their native country, yet the land of their birth is a foreign land" [------], and so on. now this epistle is in great part a mere plagiarism of the pauline and other canonical epistles, whilst professing to describe the actual life of christians, and the fifth and sixth chapters, particularly, are based upon the epistles of paul and notably the nd epistle to the corinthians, from which even the antithetical style is derived. we may give a specimen of this in referring to the context of the passage before us, and it is important that we should do so. after a few sentences like the above the fifth chapter continues: "they are in the flesh, but do not live according to the flesh. they continue on earth, but are citizens of heaven "[------].( ) it is very evident here, and throughout the epistle, that the epistles of paul chiefly, together with the other canonical epistles, are the sources of the writer's inspiration. the next chapter (vi) begins and proceeds as follows: "to say all in a word: what the soul is in the body, that christians are in the world. the soul is dispersed throughout all the members of the body, and christians throughout all the cities of the world. the soul dwells in the body but is not of the body, and christians dwell in the world, but are not of the world. [------]. the invisible soul is kept in the visible body, and christians are known, indeed, to be in the world, but their worship of god remains invisible. the flesh hates the soul and wages war against it, although in no way wronged by it, because it is restrained from indulgence in sensual pleasures, and the world hates christians, { } although in no way wronged by them, because they are opposed to sensual pleasures [------]. the soul loves the flesh that hates it, and the members, and christians love those who hate them "[------]. and so on with three or four similar sentences, one of which, at least, is taken from the epistle to the corinthians,( ) to the end of the chapter. now the passages pointed out as references to the fourth gospel, it will be remembered, distinctly differ from the parallels in the gospel, and it seems to us clear that they arise naturally out of the antithetical manner which the writer adopts from the epistles of paul, and are based upon passages in those epistles closely allied to them in sense and also in language. the simile in connection with which the words occur is commenced at the beginning of the preceding chapter, where christians are represented as living as strangers even in their native land, and the very essence of the passage in dispute is given in the two sentences: "they are in the flesh, but do not live according to the flesh" [------], which is based upon cor. x. , "for we walk in the flesh, but do not war( ) according to the flesh" [------], and similar passages abound; as for instance, rom. viii. ... "in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit; . but ye are not in the flesh but in the spirit [------]: ... so then, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh, that we should live after the flesh" [------] &c., &c. (cf. , .). and the second: "they continue on earth but are citizens of heaven" [------], which recall philip, iii. : "for our country (our citizenship) is in heaven" [------].( ) the sense of the passage is everywhere found, and nothing is more natural than { } the use of the words arising both out of the previous reference to the position of christians as mere sojourners in the world, and as the antithesis to the preceding part of the sentence: "the soul dwells in the body, but is not of the body," and: "christians dwell in the world but are not of the world." cf. cor. ii. ; vii. ; cor. l . gal. iv. , v. ff. , , vi. . rom. viii. ff. ephes. ii. , , ff. coloss. iii. ff: titus ii. . james i. . there is one point, however, which we think shows that the words were not derived from the fourth gospel. the parallel with the epistle can only be made by taking a few words out of xvii. and adding to them a few words in verse , where they stand in the following connection "and the world hated them, because they are not of the world" [------]. in the epistle, in a passage quoted above, we have: "the flesh hates the soul, and wages war against it, although unjustly, because it is restrained from indulgence in sensual pleasures, and the world hates christians, _although in no way wronged by them, because they are opposed to sensual pleasures_." [------].now nothing could more clearly show that these analogies are mere accidental coincidence, and not derived from the fourth gospel, than this passage. if the writer had really had the passage in the gospel in his mind, it is impossible that he could in this manner have completely broken it up and changed its whole context and language. the phrase: "they are not of the world" would have been introduced here as the reason for the hatred, instead of being used with quite different context elsewhere in the passage. in fact, in the only place in which the words would have presented a true parallel with the gospel, they are not used. not the slightest reference is made throughout the epistle to diognetus to any of the discourses of jesus. on the other hand, we have seen that the whole of the passage in the epistle in which these sentences occur is based both in matter, and in its peculiar antithetical form, upon the epistles of paul, and in these and other canonical epistles again, we find the source of the sentence just quoted: gal. iv. . "but as then, he that was born after the flesh { } persecuted him (that was born) after the spirit, even so it is now."( ) v. . "walk by the spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. . for the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh: for these are contrary the one to the other, that ye may not do the things that ye would."( ) there are innumerable passages in the pauline epistles to the same effect. we pass on now to the next passage in the order of the epistle. it is not mentioned at all by tischendorf: dr. west-cott introduces it with the words: "god's will is mercy," by which we presume that he means to paraphrase the context "he sent his son as wishing to save [------].... and not to condemn."( ) this sentence, however, which is given as quotation without any explanation, is purely a composition by canon westcott himself out of different materials which he finds in the epistle, and is not a quotation at all. the actual passage in the epistle, with its immediate context, is as follows: "this (messenger--the truth, the holy word) he sent to them; now, was it, as one of men might reason, for tyranny and to cause fear and consternation? not so, but in clemency and gentleness, as a king sending his son [------] a king, he sent [------]; as god he sent (him); as towards men he sent; as saving he sent[------] (him); as persuading [------], not forcing, for violence has no place with god. he sent as inviting, not vindictively pursuing; he sent as loving, not condemning [------]. for he will send him to judge, and who shall abide his presence?"( ) the supposed parallel in the gospel is as follows (john iii. ): "for god sent not his son into the world that he might condemn the { } world, but that the world through him might be saved"( ) [------]. now, it is obvious at a glance that the passage in the epistle is completely different from that in the gospel in every material point of construction and language, and the only similarity consists in the idea that god's intention in sending his son was to save and not to condemn, and it is important to notice that the letter does not, either here or elsewhere, refer to the condition attached to salvation so clearly enunciated in the preceding verse: "that whosoever believeth in him might not perish." the doctrine enunciated in this passage is the fundamental principle of much of the new testament, and it is expressed with more especial clearness and force, and close analogy with the language of the letter, in the epistles of paul, to which the letter more particularly leads us, as well as in other canonical epistles, and in these we find analogies with the context quoted above, which confirm our belief that they, and not the gospel, are the source of the passage--rom. v. : "but god proveth his own love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners christ died for us. . much more then....... shall we be saved [------] through him from the wrath (to come).'" cf. , . rom. viii. : "there is, therefore, now no condemnation [------] to them which are in christ jesus.( ) .... god sending his own son" [------] &c. and coming to the very nd epistle to the corinthians, from which we find the writer borrowing wholesale, we meet with the different members of the passage we have quoted: v. .... "god was reconciling the world unto himself in christ, not reckoning unto them their trespasses..... . on christ's behalf, then, we are ambassadors, as though god were entreating by us; we pray on christ's behalf: be reconciled to god. v. . for we must all appear before the judgment seat of christ, &c. . knowing, then, the fear of { } the lord, we persuade [------] men," &c. galatians iv. : "but when the fulness of time came, god sent out his son [------], . that he might redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons,"( ) &c. ephes. ii. . "but god being rich in mercy because of his great love wherewith he loved us, . even when we were dead in our trespasses, quickened us together with christ--by grace ye have been saved"--cf. verses , . thess. v. . "for god appointed us not to wrath, but to the obtaining salvation [------] through our lord jesus christ." tim. i. . "this is a faithful saying.... that christ jesus came into the world to save sinners" [------]. tim. ii. . "for this is good and acceptable in the sight of god our saviour [------]. . who willeth all men to be saved "[------]. cf. v. , . tim. i. . "who saved us [------], and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose, and the grace which was given to us in christ jesus before time began; . but hath been made manifest by the appearing of our saviour [------] jesus christ" these passages might be indefinitely multiplied; and they contain the sense of the passage, and in many cases the language, more closely than the fourth gospel, with which the construction and form of the sentence has no analogy. now, with regard to the logos doctrine of the epistle to { } diognetus, to which we may appropriately here refer, although we must deal with it in the briefest manner possible, so far is it from connecting the epistle with the fourth gospel, that it much more proves the writer's ignorance of that gospel. the peculiar terminology of the prologue to the gospel is nowhere found in the epistle, and we have already seen that the term logos was applied to jesus in works of the new testament, acknowledged by all to have been written long before the fourth gospel. indeed, it is quite certain, not only historically, but also from the abrupt enunciation of the doctrine in the prologue, that the theory of the logos was well known and already applied to jesus before the gospel was composed. the author knew that his statement would be understood without explanation. although the writer of the epistle makes use of the designation "logos," he shows his greek culture by giving the precedence to the term truth or reason. it has indeed been remarked( ) that the name jesus or christ does not occur anywhere in the epistle. by way of showing the manner in which "the word" is spoken of, we will give the entire passage, part of which is quoted above; the first and only one in the first ten chapters in which the term is used: "for, as i said, this was not an earthly invention which was delivered to them (christians), neither is it a mortal system which they deem it right to maintain so carefully; nor is an administration of human mysteries entrusted to them, but the almighty and invisible god himself, the creator of all things [------] has implanted in men, and established in their hearts from heaven, the truth and the word, the holy and incomprehensible [------], not as one might suppose, sending to men some servant or angel or ruler [------], or one of those ordering earthly affairs, or one of those entrusted with the government of heavenly things, but the artificer and creator of the universe [------] himself, by whom he created the heavens [------];( ) by { } whom he confined the sea within its own bounds; whose commands [------] all the stars [------]--elements) faithfully observe; from whom (the sun) has received the measure of the daily course to observe; whom the moon obeys, being bidden to shine at night; whom the stars obey, following in the course of the moon; by whom all things have been arranged and limited and subjected, the heavens and the things in the heavens, the earth and the things in the earth, the sea and the things in the sea [------], fire, air, abyss, the things in the heights, the things in the depths, the things in the space between. this (messenger--the truth, the word) he sent to them. now, was it, as one of men might reason, for tyranny and to cause fear and consternation? not so, but in clemency and gentleness, as a king sending his son, a king, he sent; as god he sent (him); as towards men he sent, as saving he sent (him); as persuading," &c., &c.( ) the description here given, how god in fact by reason or wisdom created the universe, has much closer analogy with earlier representations of the doctrine than with that in the fourth gospel, and if the writer does also represent the reason in a hypostatic form, it is by no means with the concreteness of the gospel doctrine of the logos, with which linguistically, moreover, as we have observed, it has no similarity. there can be no doubt that his christology presents differences from that of the fourth gospel.( ) we have already seen how jesus is called the word in works of the new testament earlier than the fourth gospel,( ) and how the doctrine is constantly referred to in the pauline epistles and the epistle to the hebrews, and it is to these, and not to the fourth gospel, that the account in the epistle to diognetus may be more properly traced. heb. l . "the son of god by whom also he made the worlds. . the heavens are works of thy hands" [------]. xi. . "by faith we understand that the worlds were framed [------], by the word of god" [------]. cor. viii. . "jesus christ by whom are all things" [------]. coloss. i. . "... the { } son of his love: . who is the image of the invisible god [------] the first-born of all creation; . because in him were all things created, the things in the heavens, and the things in the earth, the things visible and the things invisible [------] whether they be thrones or dominions, or principalities, or powers; all things have been created by him and for him [------]. . and he is before all things, and in him all things subsist. . and he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning( ) [------]; the first-born from the dead; that in all things he might be the first. . because he was well pleased that in him should all the fulness dwell. . and through him to reconcile all things unto himself," &c., &c. these passages might be greatly multiplied, but it is unnecessary, for the matter of the letter is substantially here. as to the titles of king and god they are everywhere to be found. in the apocalypse, the lamb whose name is "the word of god" [------], (xix. ) has also his name written (xix. ), "king of kings and lord of lords" [------].( ) we have already quoted the views of philo regarding the logos, which also merit comparison with the passage of the epistle, but we cannot repeat them here. the last passage to which we have to refer is the following: "for god loved men, for whose sakes he made the world, to whom he subjected all things that are in the earth... unto whom [------] he sent his only-begotten son, to whom he promised the kingdom in heaven [------] and will give it to those who love him."( ) the context is as follows: "for god loved men [------] for whose sake he made the world, to whom he subjected all things that are in it, to whom he gave reason and intelligence, to whom alone he granted the right of looking towards him, whom he formed after his own image, to whom he sent his only begotten son [------], to whom he has promised the kingdom in heaven, and will give it to those who have loved him. and when you know this, with what { } gladness, think you, you will be filled? or how will you love him, who beforehand so loved you? [------]. but if you love, you will be an _imitator of his kindness_," &c. [------].( ) this is claimed as a reference to john iii. f. "for god so loved the world [------] that he gave his only begotten son [------] that whosoever believeth in him might not perish," &c. . "for god sent not his son into the world that he might judge the world," &c. [------]. here, again, a sentence is patched together by taking fragments from the beginning and middle of a passage, and finding in them a superficial resemblance to words in the gospel. we find parallels for the passage, however, in the epistles from which the unknown writer obviously derives so much of his matter. rom. v. : "but god giveth proof of his love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners christ died for us. .... through the death of his son." chap. viii. , "god sending his son, &c. .... them he also foreordained to bear the likeness of the image of his son, &c. . he that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all," &c. . (nothing can separate us) "from the love of god which is in christ jesus our lord." gal. ii. .... "by the faith of the son of god who loved me and gave himself for me." chap. iv. . "god sent out his son [------] .... that he might redeem," &c. ephes. ii. . "but god being rich in mercy because of his great love wherewith he loved us. . even when we were dead in our trespasses hath quickened us together with christ. . that he might show forth the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness [------] towards us in christ jesus." chap. iv. . "be ye kind [------] one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as god also in christ forgave you."* chap. v. . "beye therefore imitators [------] of god as beloved children. . and walk { } in love [------] even as christ also loved you [------], and gave himself for us," &c., &c. titus iii. . "but when the kindness [------] and love towards men [------] of our saviour god was manifested. ... according to his mercy he saved us.... .... through jesus christ our saviour. . that being justified by his grace, we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." the words: "or how will you love him who so beforehand loved you?" [------], canon westcott refers to john iv. , "we love god( ) because he first loved us" [------]. the linguistic differences, however, and specially the substitution of [------], distinctly oppose the claim. the words are a perfectly natural comment upon the words in ephesians, from which it is obvious the writer derived other parts of the sentence, as the striking word "kindness" [------], which is commonly used in the pauline epistles, but nowhere else in the new testament,( ) shows. dr. westcott "cannot call to mind, a parallel to the phrase 'the kingdom in heaven'"( ) which occurs above in the phrase "to whom he has promised the kingdom in heaven, and will give it to those who have loved him" [------]. this also we find in the epistles to which the writer exclusively refers in this letter: james il , "heirs of the kingdom which he promised to them that love him" [------] i. . "... he shall receive the crown of life which he promised to them that love him" [------]. in tim. iv. , we have: "the lord... shall preserve me safe unto his heavenly kingdom" [------]( ) the very fact that there is no exact parallel to the phrase "kingdom in heaven" in our gospels is unfavourable to the argument that they were used by the author. whatever evangelical works he may have read, { } it is indisputable that the writer of this epistle does not quote any of them, and he uses no expressions and no terminology which warrants the inference that he must have been acquainted with the fourth gospel. as we have already stated, the writer of the epistle to diognetus is unknown; diognetus, the friend to whom it is addressed, is equally unknown; the letter is neither mentioned nor quoted by any of the fathers, nor by any ancient writer, and there is no external evidence as to the date of the composition. it existed only in one codex, destroyed at strasburg during the franco-german war, the handwriting of which was referred to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, but it is far from certain that it was so old. the last two chapters are a falsification by a later writer than the author of the first ten. there is no internal evidence whatever in this brief didactic composition requiring or even suggesting its assignment to the second or third centuries, but on the contrary, we venture to assert that there is evidence, both internal and external, justifying the belief that it was written at a comparatively recent date. apart from the uncertainty of date, however, there is no allusion in it to any gospel. even if there were, the testimony of a letter by an unknown writer at an unknown period could not have any weight, but under the actual circumstances the epistle to diognetus furnishes absolutely no testimony at all for the apostolical origin and historical character of the fourth gospel.( ) the fulness with which we have discussed the supposed testimony of basilides( ) renders it unnecessary for us to re-enter at any length into the argument as to his knowledge of the fourth gospel. tischendorf( ) and { } canon westcott(l) assert that two passages, namely: "the true light which lighteth every man came into the world," corresponding with john i. , and: "mine hour is not yet come," agreeing with john ii. , which are introduced by hippolytus in his work against heresies( ) with a subjectless [------]" he says,"are quotations made in some lost work by basilides. we have shown that hippolytus and other writers of his time were in the habit of quoting passages from works by the founders of sects and by their later followers without any distinction, an utterly vague [------] doing service equally for all. this is the case in the present instance, and there is no legitimate reason for assigning these passages to basilides himself,( ) but on the contrary many considerations which forbid our doing so, which we have elsewhere detailed. these remarks most fully apply to valentinus, whose supposed quotations we have exhaustively discussed,( ) as well as the one passage given by hippolytus containing a sentence found in john x. ,( ) the only one which can be pointed out. "we have distinctly proved that the quotations in question are not assignable to valentinus himself, a fact which even apologists admit. there is no just ground for asserting that his terminology was derived from the fourth gospel, the whole having been in current use long before that gospel was composed. { } there is no evidence whatever that valentin us was acquainted with such a work.( ) we must generally remark, however, with regard to basilides, valentinus and all such heresiarchs and writers, that, even if it could be shown, as actually it cannot, that they were acquainted with the fourth gospel, the fact would only prove the existence of the work at a late period in the second century, but would furnish no evidence of the slightest value regarding its apostolic origin, or towards establishing its historical value. on the other hand, if, as apologists assert, these heretics possessed the fourth gospel, their deliberate and total rejection of the work furnishes evidence positively antagonistic to its claims. it is difficult to decide whether their rejection of the gospel, or their ignorance of its existence is the more unfavourable alternative. the dilemma is the very same in the case of marcion. we have already fully discussed his knowledge of our gospels,( ) and need not add anything here. it is not pretended that he made any use of the fourth gospel, and the only ground upon which it is argued that he supplies evidence even of its existence is the vague general statement of tertullian, that marcion rejected the gospels "which are put forth as genuine, and under the name of apostles or at least of contemporaries of the apostles," denying their truth and integrity, and maintaining the sole { } authority of his own gospel.( ) we have shown( ) how unwarrantable it is to affirm from such data that marcion knew, and deliberately repudiated, the four canonical gospels. the fathers, with uncritical haste and zeal, assumed that the gospels adopted by the church at the close of the second and beginning of the third centuries must equally have been invested with canonical authority from the first, and tertullian took it for granted that marcion, of whom he knew very little, must have actually rejected the four gospels of his own canon. even canon westcott admits that: "it is uncertain whether tertullian in the passage quoted speaks from a knowledge of what marcion may have written on the subject, or simply from his own point of sight."( ) there is not the slightest evidence that marcion knew the fourth gospel,( ) and if he did, it is perfectly inexplicable that he did not adopt it as peculiarly favourable to his own views.( ) if he was acquainted with the work and, nevertheless, rejected it as false and adulterated, his testimony is obviously opposed to the apostolic origin and historical accuracy of the fourth gospel, and the critical acumen which he exhibited in his selection of the pauline epistles renders his judgment of greater weight than that of most of the fathers. we have now reached an epoch when no evidence regarding the fourth gospel can have much weight, { } and the remaining witnesses need not detain us long. "we have discussed at length the diatessaron of tatian,( ) and shown that whilst there is no evidence that it was based upon our four gospels, there is reason to believe that it may have been identical with the gospel according to the hebrews, by which name, as epiphanius( ) states, it was actually called. we have only now briefly to refer to the address to the greeks [------], and to ascertain what testimony it bears regarding the fourth gospel. it was composed after the death of justin, and scarcely dates earlier than the beginning of the last quarter of the second century. no gospel and no work of the new testament is mentioned in this composition, but tischendorf( ) and others point out one or two supposed references to passages in the fourth gospel. the first of these in order, is one indicated by canon westcott,( ) but to which tischendorf does not call attention: "god was in the beginning, but we have learned that the beginning is the power of reason [------]. for the lord of the universe [------] being himself the substance [------] of all, in that creation had not been accomplished was alone, but inasmuch as he was all power, and himself the substance of things visible and invisible, all things were with him [------]. with him by means of rational power the reason [------] itself also which was in him subsisted. but by the will of his simplicity, reason [------] springs forth; but the reason [------] not { } proceeding in vain, because the first-born work [------] of the father. him we know to be the beginning of the world [------]. but he came into existence by division, not by cutting off, for that which is cut off is separated from the first: but that which is divided, receiving the choice of administration, did not render him defective from whom it was taken, &c., &c. and as the logos (reason), in the beginning begotten, begat again our creation, himself for himself creating the matter [------], so i," &c., &c.( ) it is quite evident that this doctrine of the logos is not that of the fourth gospel, from which it cannot have been derived. tatian himself( ) seems to assert that he derived it from the old testament. we have quoted the passage at length that it might be clearly { } understood; and with the opening words, we presume, for he does not quote at all but merely indicates the chapter, canon westcott compares john i. : "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god" [------]. the statement of tatian is quite different; _god_ was in the beginning" [------], and he certainly did not identify the word with god, so as to transform the statement of the gospel into this simple affirmation. in all probability his formula was merely based upon genesis i. : "in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth" [------].( ) the expressions: "but we have learned that the beginning [------] was the power of reason," &c., "but the reason [------] not proceeding in vain became the first-born work [------] of the father. him we know to be the beginning [------] of the world," recall many early representations of the logos, to which we have already, referred: pro v. viii. : "the lord created me the beginning [------] of ways for his works [------], . before the ages he established me, in the beginning [------] before he made the earth," &c., &c. in the apocalypse also the word is called "the beginning [------] of the creation of god," and it will be remembered that justin gives testimony from prov. viii. if. "that god begat before all the creatures a beginning [------] a certain rational power [------], out of himself," &c., &c., and elsewhere: "as the logos declared through solomon, that this same.... had been begotten of god, before all created beings, both beginning [------]" &c.( ) we need not, however, refer to { } the numerous passages in philo and in justin, not derived from the fourth gospel, which point to a different source for tatian's doctrine. it is sufficient that both his opinions and his terminology differ distinctly from that gospel.( ) the next passage we at once subjoin in contrast with the parallel in the fourth gospel: [------] the context to this passage in the oration is as follows: tatian is arguing about the immortality of the soul, and he states that the soul is not in itself immortal but mortal, but that nevertheless it is possible for it not to die. if it do not know the truth it dies, but rises again at the end of the world, receiving eternal death as a punishment. "again, however, it does not die, though it be for a time dissolved, if it has acquired knowledge of god; for in itself it is darkness, and there is nothing luminous in it, and this, therefore, is (the meaning of) the saying: the darkness comprehends not the light. for the soul [------] did not itself save the spirit [------], but was saved by it, and the light comprehended the darkness. the logos (reason) truly is the light of god, but the ignorant soul is darkness [------]. for this reason, if it remain we have already mentioned that the gospel according to peter contained the doctrine of the logos. { } alone, it tends downwards to matter, dying with the flesh," &c., &c.( ) the source of "the saying" is not mentioned, and it is evident that, even if it were taken to be a reference to the fourth gospel, nothing would thereby be proved but the mere existence of the gospel. "the saying," however, is distinctly different in language from the parallel in the gospel, and it may be from a different gospel. we have already remarked that philo calls the logos "the light,"( ) and quoting in a peculiar form ps. xxvi. : "for the lord is my light [------] and my saviour," he goes on to say that, as the sun divides day and night, so, moses says, "god divides light and darkness" [------].( ) when we turn away to things of sense we use "another light," which is in no way different from "darkness."( ) the constant use of the same similitude of light and darkness in the canonical epistles( ) shows how current it was in the church; and nothing is more certain than the fact that it was neither originated by, nor confined to, the fourth gospel. the third and last passage is as follows: [------] { } tatian here speaks of god, and not of the logos, and in this respect, as well as in language and context, the passage differs from the fourth gospel. the phrase is not introduced as a quotation, and no reference is made to any gospel. the purpose for which the words are used, again, rather points to the first chapters of genesis than to the dogmatic prologue enunciating the doctrine of the logos.( ) under all these circumstances, the source from which the expression may have been derived cannot with certainty be ascertained and, as in the preceding instance, even if it be assumed that the words show acquaintance with the fourth gospel, nothing could be proved but the mere existence of the work about a century and a half after the events which it records. it is obvious that in no case does tatian afford the slightest evidence of the apostolic origin or historical veracity of the fourth gospel. dr. lightfoot points out another passage, § , [------], which he compares with john iv. , where the same words occur. it is right to add that he himself remarks: "if it had stood alone i should certainly not have regarded it as decisive. but the epigrammatic form is remarkable, and it is a characteristic passage of the fourth gospel.( ) neither tischendorf nor dr. westcott refer to it. the fact is, however, that the epigrammatic form only exists when the phrase is quoted without its context. "god is a spirit, not pervading matter, but the creator of material spirits, and of the forms that are in it. he is invisible and impalpable," &c. &c. further on, tatian says (§ ), "for the perfect god is without flesh, but man is flesh." &c. a large { } part of the oration is devoted to discussing the nature of god, and the distinction between spirit [------] and soul [------], and it is unreasonable to assert that a man like tatian could not make the declaration that god is a spirit without quoting the fourth gospel. we have generally discussed the testimony of dionysius of corinth,( ) melito of sardis,( ) and claudius apol-linaris,( ) and need not say more here. the fragments attributed to them neither mention nor quote the fourth gospel, but in no case could they furnish evidence to authenticate the work. the same remarks apply to athenagoras.( ) canon westcott only ventures to say that he "appears to allude to passages in st. mark and st. john, but they are all anonymous."( ) the passages in which he speaks of the logos, which are those referred to here, are certainly not taken from the fourth gospel, and his doctrine is expressed in terminology which is different from that of the gospel, and is deeply tinged with platonism.( ) he appeals to proverbs viii. , already so frequently quoted by us, for confirmation by the prophetic spirit of his exposition of the logos doctrine.( ) he nowhere identifies the logos with jesus;( ) indeed he does not once make use of the name of christ in his works. he does not show the slightest knowledge of the doctrine of salvation so constantly enunciated in the fourth gospel. there can be no doubt, as we have already shown,( ) that he considered the old testament to { } be the only inspired holy scriptures. not only does he not mention nor quote any of our gospels, but the only instance in which he makes any reference to sayings of jesus, otherwise than by the indefinite [------] "he says," is one in which he introduces a saying which is not found in our gospels by the words: "the logos again saying to us:" [------], &c. from the same source, which was obviously not our canonical gospels, we have, therefore, reason to conclude that athenagoras derived all his knowledge of gospel history and doctrine. we need not add that this writer affords no testimony whatever as to the origin or character of the fourth gospel. it is scarcely worth while to refer to the epistle of vienne and lyons, a composition dating at the earliest a.d. - , in which no direct reference is made to any writing of the new testament.( ) acquaintance with the fourth gospel is argued from the following passage: [------] now such a passage cannot prove the use of the fourth gospel. no source is indicated in the epistle from which the saying of jesus, which of course apologists assert to be historical, was derived. it presents decided variations from the parallel in the fourth gospel; and in the { } synoptics we find sufficient indications of similar discourses l to render it very probable that other gospels may have contained the passage quoted in the epistle. in no case could an anonymous reference like this be of any weight as evidence for the apostolic origin of the fourth gospel. we need not further discuss ptolemoeus and heracleon. we have shown( ) that the date at which these heretics flourished places them beyond the limits within which we propose to confine ourselves. in regard to ptolemæus all that is affirmed is that, in the epistle to flora ascribed to him, expressions found in john i. are used. the passage as it is given by epiphanius is as follows: "besides, that the world was created by the same, the apostle states (saying all things have been made [------] by him and without him nothing was made)." [------].( ) now the supposed quotation is introduced here in a parenthesis interrupting the sense, and there is every probability that it was added as an illustration by epiphanius, and was not in the epistle to flora at all. omitting the parenthesis, the sentence is a very palpable reference to the apostle paul, and coloss. i. .( ) in regard to heraclcon, it is asserted from the unsupported references of origen( ) that he wrote a commentary on the fourth gospel. even if this be a fact, there is not a single word of it preserved by origen which in the least degree bears upon the apostolic origin { } and trustworthiness of the gospel. neither of these heresiarchs, therefore, is of any value as a witness for the authenticity of the fourth gospel. the heathen celsus, as we have shown,( ) wrote at a period when no evidence which he could well give of his own could have been of much value in supporting our gospels. he is pressed into service,( ) however, because after alluding to various circumstances of gospel history he says: "these things, therefore, being taken out of your own writings, we have no need of other testimony, for you fall upon your own swords,"( ) and in another place he says that certain christians "alter the gospel from its first written form in three-fold, four-fold, and many-fold ways, and re-mould it in order to have the means of contradicting the arguments (of opponents)." ( ) this is supposed to refer to the four canonical gospels. apart from the fact that origen replies to the first of these passages, that celsus has brought forward much concerning jesus which is not in accordance with the narratives of the gospels, it is unreasonable to limit the accusation of "many-fold" corruption to four gospels, when it is undeniable that the gospels and writings long current in the church were very numerous. in any case, what could such a statement as this do towards establishing the apostolic origin and credibility of the fourth gospel? we might pass over the _canon of muratori_ entirely, { } as being beyond the limit of time to which we confine ourselves,( ) but the unknown writer of the fragment gives a legend with regard to the composition of the fourth gospel which we may quote here, although its obviously mythical character renders it of no value as evidence regarding the authorship of the gospel. the writer says: quarti euangeliorum iohannis ex decipolis cohortantibus condescipulis et episcopis suis dixit conieiunate mihi hodie triduo et quid cuique fuerit reuelatum alterutrum nobis ennarremus eadem nocte reue latum andrew ex apostolis ut recognis centibus cunctis iohannis suo nomine cuncta describeret et ideo ( ) licit uaria sin culis euangeliorum libris principia docoantur nihil tamen diffort creden tium fidei cum uno ac principali spiritu de clarata sint in omnibus omnia de natiui tate de passione de resurrectione de conuersatione cum decipulis suis ac de gemino eius aduentu primo in humilitate dispectus quod fo... .u ( ) secundum potestate regali... pre clarum quod futurum est ( ) quid ergo minim si iohannes tarn constanter sincula etiam in epistulis suis proferat dicens in semeipsu quae uidimus oculis nostris et auribus audiuimus et manus nostra palpauerunt heec scripsimus nobis sic enim non solum uisurem sed et auditorem sed et scriptorem omnium mirabilium domini per ordi nem profetetur { } "the fourth of the gospels, of john, one of the disciples. to his fellow-disciples and bishops (episcopis) urging him he said: 'fast with me to-day for three days, and let us relate to each other that which shall be revealed to each.' on the same night it was revealed to andrew, one of the apostles, that, with the supervision of all, john should relate all things in his own name. and, therefore, though various principles (principia) are taught by each book of the gospels, nevertheless it makes no difference to the faith of believers, since, in all, all things are declared by one ruling spirit concerning the nativity, concerning the passion, concerning the resurrection, concerning the intercourse with the disciples, and concerning his double advent; the first in lowliness of estate, which has taken place, the second in regal power and splendour, which is still future. what wonder, therefore, if john should so constantly bring forward each thing (singula) also in his epistles, saying in regard to himself: the things which we have seen with our eyes, and have heard with our ears, and our hands have handled, these things have we written unto you. for thus he professes himself not only an eye-witness and hearer, but also a writer of all the wonders of the lord in order." it is obvious that in this passage we have an apologetic defence of the fourth gospel,( ) which unmistakably implies antecedent denial of its authority and apostolic origin. the writer not only ascribes it to john, but he clothes it with the united authority of the rest of the apostles, in { } a manner which very possibly aims at explaining the supplementary chapter xxi., with its testimony to the truth of the preceding narrative. in his zeal, the writer goes so far as to falsify a passage of the epistle, and convert it into a declaration by the author of the letter himself that he had written the gospel. "'the things which we have seen, &c., these things have we written unto you' (hæc scripsi-mus vobis).( ) for thus he professes himself not only an eye-witness and hearer, but also a writer of all the wonders of the lord in order." credner argues that in speaking of john as "one of the disciples" (ex discipulis), and of andrew as "one of the apostles," the writer intends to distinguish between john the disciple, who wrote the gospel and epistle, and john the apostle, who wrote the apocalypse, and that it was for this reason that he sought to dignify him by a special revelation, through the apostle andrew, selecting him to write the gospel. credner, therefore, concludes that here we have an ancient ecclesiastical tradition ascribing the gospel and first epistle to one of the disciples of jesus different from the apostle john.( ) into this, however, we need not enter, nor is it necessary for us to demonstrate the mythical nature of this narrative regarding the origin of the gospel. we have merely given this extract from the fragment to make our statement regarding it complete. not only is the evidence of the fragment of no value, from the lateness of its date and the uncritical character of its author, but a vague and fabulous tradition recorded by an unknown writer could not, in any case, furnish testimony calculated to establish the apostolic origin and trustworthiness of the fourth gospel. { } chapter ii. authorship and character of the fourth gospel the result of our inquiry into the evidence for the fourth gospel is sufficiently decided to render further examination unnecessary. we have seen that, for some century and a half after the events recorded in the work, there is not only no testimony whatever connecting the fourth gospel with the apostle john, but no certain trace even of the existence of the gospel. there has not been the slightest evidence in any of the writings of the fathers which we have examined even of a tradition that the apostle john had composed any evangelical work at all, and the claim advanced in favour of the christian miracles to contemporaneous evidence of extraordinary force and veracity by undoubted eye-witnesses so completely falls to the ground, that we might here well bring this part of our inquiry to a close. there are, however, so many peculiar circumstances connected with the fourth gospel, both in regard to its authorship and to its relationship with the three synoptics, which invite further attention, that we propose briefly to review some of them. we must, however, carefully restrict ourselves to the limits of our inquiry, and resist any temptation to enter upon an exhaustive discussion of the problem presented by the fourth gospel from a more general literary point of view. { } the endeavour to obtain some positive, or at least negative, information regarding the author of the fourth gospel is facilitated by the fact that several other works in the new testament canon are ascribed to him. these works present such marked and distinct characteristics that, apart from the fact that their number extends the range of evidence, they afford an unusual opportunity of testing the tradition which assigns them all to the apostle john, by comparing the clear indications which they give of the idiosyncrasies of their author with the independent data which we possess regarding the history and character of the apostle. it is asserted by the church that john the son of zebedee, one of the disciples of jesus, is the composer of no less than five of our canonical writings, and it would be impossible to select any books of our new testament presenting more distinct features, or more widely divergent views, than are to be found in the apocalypse on the one hand, and the gospel and three epistles on the other. whilst a strong family likeness exists between the epistles and the gospel, and they exhibit close analogies both in thought and language, the apocalypse, on the contrary, is so different from them in language, in style, in religious views and terminology, that it is almost impossible to believe that the writer of the one could be the author of the other. the translators of our new testament have laboured, and not in vain, to eliminate as far as possible all individuality of style and language, and to reduce the various books of which it is composed to one uniform smoothness of diction. it is, therefore, impossible for the mere english reader to appreciate the immense difference which exists between the harsh and hebraistic greek of the apocalypse and the polished { } elegance of the fourth gospel, and it is to be feared that the rarity of critical study has prevented any general recognition of the almost equally striking contrast of thought between the two works. the remarkable peculiarities which distinguish the apocalypse and gospel of john, however, were very early appreciated, and almost the first application of critical judgment to the canonical books of the new testament is the argument of dionysius bishop of alexandria, about the middle of the third century, that the author of the fourth gospel could not be the writer of the book of revelation.( ) the dogmatic predilections which at that time had begun to turn against the apocalypse, the nonfulfilment of the prophecies of which disappointed and puzzled the early church, led dionysius to solve the difficulty by deciding in favour of the authenticity of the gospel, but at least he recognized the dilemma which has since occupied so much of biblical criticism. it is not necessary to enter upon any exhaustive analysis of the apocalypse and gospel to demonstrate anew that both works cannot have emanated from the same mind. this has already been conclusively done by others. some apologetic writers,--greatly influenced, no doubt, by the express declaration of the church, and satisfied by analogies which could scarcely fail to exist between two works dealing with a similar theme,--together with a very few independent critics, have asserted the authenticity of both works.( ) the great majority of { } critics, however, have fully admitted the impossibility of recognizing a common source for the fourth gospel and the apocalypse of john.( ) the critical question regarding the two works has, in fact, reduced itself to the dilemma which may be expressed as follows, in the words of llicke: "either the gospel and the first epistle are genuine writings of the apostle john, and in that case the apocalypse is no genuine work of that apostle, or the inverse."( ) after an elaborate comparison of the two writings, the same writer, who certainly will not be suspected of wilfully subversive criticism, resumes: "the difference between the language, way { } of expression, and mode of thought and doctrine of the apocalypse and the rest of the johannine writings, is so comprehensive and intense, so individual and so radical; the affinity and agreement, on the contrary, are so general, and in details so fragmentary and uncertain (zuruckweichend), that the apostle john, if he really he the author of the gospel and of the epistle--which we here assume--cannot have composed the apocalypse either before or after the gospel and the epistle. if all critical experience and rules in such literary questions are not deceptive, it is certain that the evangelist and apocalyptist are two different persons of the name of john,"(l) &c. de wette, another conservative critic, speaks with equal decision. after an able comparison of the two works, he says: "from all this it follows (and in new testament criticism no result is more certain), that the apostle john, if he be the author of the fourth gospel and of the johannine epistles, did not write the apocalypse, or, if the apocalypse be his work, that he is not the author of the other writings."( ) ewald is equally positive: "above all," he says, "we should err in tracing this work (the gospel) to the apostle, if the apocalypse of the new testament were by him. that this much earlier writing cannot have been composed by the author of the later is an axiom which i consider i have already, (in - ) so convincingly demonstrated, that it would be superfluous now to return to it, especially as, since then, all men capable of forming a judgment are of the same opinion, and what has been brought forward by a few writers against it too clearly depends upon { } influences foreign to science."( ) we may, therefore, consider the point generally admitted, and proceed very briefly to discuss the question upon this basis. the external evidence that the apostle john wrote the apocalypse is more ancient than that for the authorship of any book of the new testament, excepting some of the epistles of paul, and this is admitted even by critics who ultimately deny the authenticity of the work.( ) passing over the very probable statement of andrew of cæsarea,( ) that papias recognized the apocalypse as an inspired work, and the inference drawn from this fact that he referred it to the apostle, we at once proceed to justin martyr, who affirms in the clearest and most positive manner the apostolic origin of the work. he speaks to tryphon of "a certain man whose name was john, one of the apostles of christ, who prophesied by a revelation made to him," of the millennium, and subsequent general resurrection and judgment.( ) the statement of justin is all the more important from the fact that he does not name any other writing of the new testament, and that the old testament was still for him the only holy scripture. the genuineness of this { } testimony is not called in question by any one. eusebius states that melito of sardis wrote a work on the apocalypse of john,( ) and jerome mentions the treatise.( ) there can be no doubt that had melito thrown the slightest doubt on the apostolic origin of the apocalypse, eusebius, whose dogmatic views led him to depreciate that writing, would have referred to the fact. eusebius also mentions that apollonius, a presbyter of ephesus, quoted the apocalypse against the montanists, and there is reason to suppose that he did so as an apostolic work.( ) eusebius further states that theophilus of antioch made use of testimony from the apocalypse of john;( ) but although, as eusebius does not mention anything to the contrary, it is probable that theophilus really recognized the book to be by john the apostle, the uncritical haste of eusebius renders his vague statement of little value. we do not think it worth while to quote the evidence of later writers. although irenæus, who repeatedly assigns the apocalypse to john, the disciple of the lord,( ) is cited by apologists as a very important witness, more especially from his intercourse with polycarp, we do not attribute any value to his testimony, both from the late date at which he wrote, and from the uncritical and credulous character of his mind. although he appeals to the testimony of those "who saw john face to face" with regard to the number of the name of the beast, his own utter ignorance of the interpretation shows how little information he can have derived from polycarp.( ) the same remarks apply still more strongly to tertullian, who, however, most { } unhesitatingly assigns the apocalypse to the apostle john.( ) it would be useless more particularly to refer to later evidence, however, or quote even the decided testimony in its favour of clement of alexandria,( ) or origen.( ) the first doubt cast upon the authenticity of the apocalypse occurs in the argument of dionysius of alexandria, one of the disciples of origen, in the middle of the third century. he mentions that some had objected to the whole work as without sense or reason, and as displaying such dense ignorance, that it was impossible that an apostle or even one in the church, could have written it, and they assigned it to cerinthus, who held the doctrine of the reign of christ on earth.( ) these objections, it is obvious, are merely dogmatic, and do not affect to be historical. they are in fact a good illustration of the method by which the canon was formed. if the doctrine of any writing met with the approval of the early church, it was accepted with unhesitating faith, and its pretension to apostolic origin was admitted as a natural consequence; but if, on the other hand, the doctrine of the writing was not clearly that of the community, it was rejected without further examination. it is an undeniable fact, that not a single trace exists of the application of historical criticism to any book of the new testament in the early ages of christianity. the case of the apocalypse is most intelligible:--so long as the expectation and hope of a second advent and of a personal reign of the risen and glorified christ, of the prevalence of which we have abundant testimony in the pauline epistles and other early works, continued to animate the church, the { } apocalypse which excited and fostered them was a popular volume: but as years passed away and the general longing of christians, eagerly marking the signs of the times, was again and again disappointed, and the hope of a millennium began either to be abandoned or indefinitely postponed, the apocalypse proportionately lost favour, or was regarded as an incomprehensible book misleading the world by illusory promises. its history is that of a highly dogmatic treatise esteemed or contemned in proportion to the ebb and flow of opinion regarding the doctrines which it expresses. the objections of dionysius, resting first upon dogmatic grounds and his inability to understand the apocalyptic utterances of the book, took the shape we have mentioned of a critical dilemma:--the author of the gospel could not at the same time be the author of the apocalypse. dogmatic predilection decided the question in favour of the apostolic origin of the fourth gospel, and the reasoning by which that decision is arrived at has, therefore, no critical force or value. the fact still remains that justin martyr distinctly refers to the apocalypse as the work of the apostle john and, as we have seen, no similar testimony exists in support of the claims of the fourth gospel. as another most important point, we may mention that there is probably not another work of the new testament the precise date of the composition of which, within a very few weeks, can so positively be affirmed. no result of criticism rests upon a more secure basis and is now more universally accepted by all competent critics than the fact that the apocalypse was written in a.d. - .( ) the writer distinctly and repeatedly mentions his name: i. , "the revelation of jesus christ.... { } unto his servant john;"( ) i. , "john to the seven churches which are in asia;"( ) and he states that the work was written in the island of patmos where he was "on account of the word of god and the testimony of jesus."( ) ewald, who decides in the most arbitrary manner against the authenticity of the apocalypse and in favour of the johannine authorship of the gospel, objects that the author, although he certainly calls himself john, does not assume to be an apostle, but merely terms himself the servant [------] of christ like other true christians, and distinctly classes himself amongst the prophets( ) and not amongst the apostles.( ) we find, however, that paul, who was not apt to waive his claims to the apostolate, was content to call himself: "paul a servant [------] of jesus christ, called to be an apostle," in writing to the romans; (i. ) and the superscription of the epistle to the philippians is: "paul and timothy servants [------] of christ jesus."( ) there was, moreover, reason why { } the author of the book of revelation, a work the form of which was decidedly based upon that of daniel and other jewish apocalyptic writings, should rather adopt the character of prophet than the less suitable designation of apostle upon such an occasion. it is clear that he counted fully upon being generally known under the simple designation of "john," and when we consider the unmistakeable terms of authority with which he addresses the seven churches, it is scarcely possible to deny that the writer either was the apostle, or distinctly desired to assume his personality. it is not necessary for us here to enter into any discussion regarding the "presbyter john," for it is generally admitted that even he could not have had at that time any position in asia minor which could have warranted such a tone. if the name of apostle, therefore, be not directly assumed--and it was not necessary to assume it--the authority of one is undeniably inferred. ewald, however, argues that, on the contrary, the author could not more clearly express that he was not one of the twelve, than when he imagines (apoc. xxi. ) the names of the 'twelve apostles of the lamb' shining upon the twelve foundation stones of the wall of the future heavenly jerusalem. he considers that no intelligent person could thus publicly glorify himself or anticipate the honour which god alone can bestow. "and can any one seriously believe," he indignantly inquires, "that one of the twelve, yea, that even he whom we know as the most delicate and refined amongst them could have written this of himself?"( ) now, in the first place, we must remark that in this discussion { } it is not permissible to speak of our knowing john the apostle as distinguished above all the rest of the twelve for such qualities. nowhere do we find such a representation of him except in the fourth gospel, if even there, but, as we shall presently see, rather the contrary, and the fourth gospel cannot here be received as evidence. we might, by way of retort, point out to those who assert the inspiration of the apocalypse, that the symbolical representation of the heavenly jerusalem is held to be practically objective, a revelation of things that "must shortly come to pass," and not a mere subjective sketch coloured according to the phantasy of the writer. passing on, however, it must be apparent that the whole account of the heavenly city is typical, and that in basing its walls upon the twelve, he does not glorify himself personally, but simply gives its place to the idea which was symbolised when jesus is represented as selecting twelve disciples, the number of the twelve tribes, upon whose preaching the spiritual city was to be built up. the jewish belief in a special preference of the jews before all nations doubtless suggested this, and it forms a leading feature in the strong hebraistic form of the writer's christianity. the heavenly city is simply a glorified jerusalem; the twelve apostles, representatives of the twelve tribes, set apart for the regeneration of israel, are the foundation-stones of the new city with its twelve gates, on which are written the names of the twelve tribes of israel( ) for whom the city is more particularly provided. for , of israel are first sealed, , of each of the twelve tribes before the seer beholds the great multitude of all nations and tribes and peoples.( ) the whole description is a { } mere allegory characterized by the strongest jewish dogmatism, and it is of singular value for the purpose of identifying the author. moreover, the apparent glorification of the twelve is more than justified by the promise which jesus is represented by the synoptics(l) as making to them in person. when peter, in the name of the twelve, asks what is reserved for those who have forsaken all and followed him, jesus replies: "verily i say unto you that ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall be set upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of israel."( ) ewald himself, in his distribution of the materials of our existing first synoptic to the supposed original sources, assigns this passage to the very oldest gospel.( ) what impropriety is there, and what improbability, therefore, that an apostle, in an apocalyptic allegory, should represent the names of the twelve apostles as inscribed upon the twelve foundation stones of the spiritual jerusalem, as the names of the twelve tribes of israel were inscribed upon the twelve gates of the city? on the contrary, we submit that it is probable under the circumstances that an apostle should make such a representation, and in view of the facts regarding the apostle john himself which we have from the synoptics, it is particularly in harmony with his character, and these characteristics directly tend to establish his identity with the author. "how much less is it credible of the apostle john," says ewald, elsewhere, pursuing the same argument, "who, as a writer, is so incomparably modest and { } delicate in feeling, and does not in a single one of the writings really emanating from him name himself as the author, or even proclaim his own praise."(l) this is merely sentimental assumption of facts to which we shall hereafter allude, but if the "incomparable modesty" of which he speaks really existed, nothing could more conclusively separate the author of the fourth gospel from the son of zebedee whom we know in the synoptics, or more support the claims of the apocalypse. in the first place, we must assert that, in writing a serious history of the life and teaching of jesus, full of marvellous events and astounding doctrines, the omission of his name by an apostle can not only not be recognized as genuine modesty, but must be condemned as culpable neglect. it is perfectly incredible that an apostle could have written such a work without attaching his name as the guarantee of his intimate acquaintance with the events and statements he records. what would be thought of a historian who published a history without a single reference to recognized authorities, and yet who did not declare even his own name as some evidence of his truth? the fact is, that the first two synoptics bear no author's name because they are not the work of any one man, but the collected materials of many; the third synoptic only pretends to be a compilation for private use; and the fourth gospel bears no simple signature because it is neither the work of an apostle, nor of an eye-witness of the events and hearer of the teaching it records. if it be considered incredible, however, that an apostle could, even in an allegory, represent the names of the twelve as written on the foundation stones of the new jerusalem, and the incomparable modesty and delicacy { } of feeling of the assumed author of the fourth gospel be contrasted with it so much to the disadvantage of the writer of the apocalypse, we ask whether this reference to the collective twelve can be considered at all on a par with the self-glorification of the disguised author of the gospel, who, not content with the simple indication of himself as john a servant of jesus christ, and with sharing distinction equally with the rest of the twelve, assumes to himself alone a pre-eminence in the favour and affection of his master, as well as a distinction amongst his fellow disciples, of which we first hear from himself, and which is anything but corroborated by the three synoptics? the supposed author of the fourth gospel, it is true, does not plainly mention his name, but he distinguishes himself as "the disciple whom jesus loved," and represents himself as "leaning on jesus' breast at supper."( ) this distinction assumed to himself, and this preference over the other disciples in the love of him whom he represents as god, is much greater self-glorification than that of the author of the apocalypse. we shall presently see how far ewald is right in saying, moreover, that the author does not clearly indicate the person for whom at least he desires to be mistaken. we must conclude that these objections have no weight, and that there is no internal evidence whatever against the supposition that the "john" who announces himself as the author of the apocalypse was the apostle. on the contrary, the tone of authority adopted throughout, and the evident certainty that his identity would everywhere be recognized, denote a position in the church which no other person of the name of john could well have held at the time when the apocalypse was written. { } the external evidence, therefore, which indicates the apostle john as the author of the apocalypse is quite in harmony with the internal testimony of the book itself. we have already pointed out the strong colouring of judaism in the views of the writer. its imagery is thoroughly jewish, and its allegorical representations are entirely based upon jewish traditions, and hopes. the heavenly city is a new jerusalem; its twelve gates are dedicated to the twelve tribes of israel; god and the lamb are the temple of it; and the sealed of the twelve tribes have the precedence over the nations, and stand with the lamb on mount zion (xiv. ) having his name and his father's written on their foreheads. the language in which the book is written is the most hebraistic greek of the new testament, as its contents are the most deeply tinged with judaism. if, finally, we seek for some traces of the character of the writer, we see in every page the impress of an impetuous fiery spirit, whose symbol is the eagle, breathing forth vengeance against the enemies of the messiah and impatient till it be accomplished, and the whole of the visions of the apocalypse proceed to the accompaniment of the rolling thunders of god's wrath. we may now turn to examine such historical data as exist regarding john the son of zebedee, and to inquire whether they accord better with the character and opinions of the author of the apocalypse or of the evangelist. john and his brother james are represented by the synoptics as being the sons of zebedee and salome. they were fishermen on the sea of galilee, and at the call of jesus they left their ship and their father and followed him.( ) their fiery and impetuous character led { } jesus to give them the surname of [------]: "sons of thunder,"( ) an epithet justified by several incidents which are related regarding them. upon one occasion, john sees one casting out devils in his master's name, and in an intolerant spirit forbids him because he did not follow them, for which he is rebuked by jesus.( ) another time, when the inhabitants of a samaritan village would not receive them, john and james angrily turn to jesus and say: "lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as elijah did?"( ) a remarkable episode will have presented itself already to the mind of every reader, which the second synoptic gospel narrates as follows: mark x. , "and james and john the sons of zebedee come unto him saying unto him: teacher, we would that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall ask thee. . and he said unto them: what would ye that i should do for you? . they said unto him: grant that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left hand in thy glory. . but jesus said to them: ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink the cup that i drink? or be baptized with the baptism that i am baptized with? . and they said unto him: we can. and jesus said unto them: the cup that i drink ye shall drink; and with the baptism that i am baptized withal shall ye be baptized: . but to sit on my right hand or on my left hand is not mine to give, but for whom it has been prepared. . and when the ten heard it they began to be much displeased with james and john." it is difficult to say whether the { } effrontery and selfishness of the request, or the assurance with which the brethren assert their power to emulate the master is more striking in this scene. apparently, the grossness of the proceeding already began to be felt when our first gospel was edited, for it represents the request as made by the mother of james and john; but that is a very slight decrease of the offence, inasmuch as the brethren are obviously consenting, if not inciting, parties to the prayer, and utter their "we can," with the same absence of "incomparable modesty."( ) after the death of jesus, john remained in jerusalem,( ) and chiefly confined his ministry to the city and its neighbourhood.( ) the account which hegesippus gives of james the brother of jesus who was appointed overseer of the church in jerusalem will not be forgotten,( ) and we refer to it merely in illustration of primitive christianity. however mythical elements are worked up into the narrative, one point is undoubted fact, that the christians of that community were but a sect of judaism, merely superadding to mosaic doctrines belief in the actual advent of the messiah whom moses and the prophets had foretold; and we find, in the acts of the apostles, peter and john represented as "going up into the temple at the hour of prayer,"( ) like other jews. in the epistle of paul to the galatians, we have most valuable evidence with regard to the apostle john. paul found him still in jerusalem on the occasion of the visit referred to in that letter, about a.d. -- . we need not quote at length the important passage gal. ii. ff., but the fact { } is undeniable, and stands upon stronger evidence than almost any other particular regarding the early church, being distinctly and directly stated by paul himself: that the three "pillar" apostles representing the church there were james, peter, and john. peter is markedly termed the apostle of the circumcision, and the differences between him and paul are evidence of the opposition of their views. james and john are clearly represented as sharing the views of peter, and whilst paul finally agrees with them that he is to go to the gentiles, the three [------] elect to continue their ministry to the circumcision.( ) here is john, therefore, clearly devoted to the apostleship of the circumcision as opposed to paul, whose views, as we gather from the whole of paul's account, were little more than tolerated by the [------]. before leaving new testament data, we may here point out the statement in the acts of the apostles that peter and john were known to be "unlettered and ignorant men"( ) [------]. later tradition mentions one or two circumstances regarding john to which we may briefly refer. irenæus states: "there are those who heard him (polycarp) say that john, the disciple of the lord, going to bathe at ephesus and perceiving cerinthus within, rushed forth from the bath-house without bathing, but crying out: 'let us fly lest the bath-house fall down: cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, being within it.'... so great was the care which the apostles and their disciples took not to hold even verbal intercourse with any of the corrupters of the truth,"( ) &c. polycrates, who was bishop of ephesus { } about the beginning of the third century, states that the apostle john wore the mitre and petalon of the high priest [------],( ) a tradition which agrees with the jewish tendencies of the apostle of the circumcision as paul describes him.( ) now if we compare these data regarding john the son of zebedee with the character of john the author of the apocalypse, as we trace it in the work itself, it is impossible not to be struck by the singular agreement. the hebraistic greek and abrupt inelegant diction are natural to the unlettered fisherman of galilee, and the fierce and intolerant spirit which pervades the book is precisely that which formerly forbade the working of miracles, even in the name of the master, by any not of the immediate circle of jesus, and which desired to consume an inhospitable village with fire from heaven.( ) the judaistic form of christianity which is represented throughout the apocalypse, and the jewish elements which enter so largely into its whole composition, are precisely those we need not refer to any of the other legends regarding john, but it may be well to mention the tradition common amongst the fathers which assigned to him the cognomen of "the virgin." one codex gives as the superscription of the apocalypse: "t[------]" and we know that it is reported in early writings that, of all the apostles, only john and the apostle paul remained unmarried, whence probably, in part, this title. in connection with this we may point to the importance attached to virginity in the apocalypse, xiv. ; cf. schwegler, das naohap. zeit, ii. p. ; lilcke, comm. lib. d. br. joh., , p. f.; craftier, einl. n. t., i. p. . the very objection of ewald regarding the glorification of the twelve, if true, would be singularly in keeping with the audacious request of john and his brother, to sit on the right and left hand of the glorified jesus, for we find none of the "incomparable modesty" which the imaginative critic attributes to the author of the fourth gospel in the john of the synoptics. { } which we might expect from john the apostle of the circumcision and the associate of james and of peter in the very centre of judaism. parts of the apocalypse, indeed, derive a new significance when we remember the opposition which the apostle of the gentiles met with from the apostles of the circumcision, as plainly declared by paul in his epistle to the galatians ii. . ff., and apparent in other parts of his writings. we have already seen the scarcely disguised attack which is made on paul in the clementine homilies under the name of simon the magician, the apostle peter following him from city to city for the purpose of denouncing and refuting his teaching. there can be no doubt that the animosity against paul which was felt by the ebionitic party, to which john as well as peter belonged, was extreme, and when the novelty of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, taught by him, is considered, it is very comprehensible. in the apocalypse, we find undeniable traces of it which accord with what paul himself says, and with the undoubted tradition of the early church. not only is paul silently excluded from the number of the apostles, which might be intelligible when the typical nature of the number twelve is considered, but allusion is undoubtedly made to him, in the epistles to the churches. it is clear that paul is referred to in the address to the church of ephesus: "and thou didst try them which say that they are apostles and are not, and didst find them false;"( ) and also in the words to the church of smyrna: "but i have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the teaching of balaam, who taught { } balak to cast a stumbling block before the sons of israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols,"( ) &c., as well as elsewhere.( ) without dwelling on this point, however, we think it must be apparent to every unprejudiced person that the apocalypse singularly corresponds in every respect--language, construction, and thought--with what we are told of the character of the apostle john by the synoptic gospels and by tradition, and that the internal evidence, therefore, accords with the external in attributing the composition of the apocalypse to that apostle. } we may without hesitation affirm, at least, that with the exception of one or two of the epistles of paul there is { } no work of the new testament which is supported by such close evidence. we need not discuss the tradition as to the residence of the apostle john in asia minor, regarding which much might be said. those who accept the authenticity of the apocalypse of course admit its composition in the neighbourhood of ephesus,( ) and see in this the confirmation of the wide-spread tradition that the apostle spent a considerable period of the latter part of his life in that city. we may merely mention, in passing, that a historical basis for the tradition has occasionally been disputed, and has latterly again been denied by some able critics.( ) the evidence for this, as for everything else connected with the early ages of christianity, is extremely unsatisfactory. nor need we trouble ourselves with the dispute as to the presbyter john, to whom many ascribe the composition, on the one hand, of the apocalypse and, on the other, of the gospel, according as they finally accept the one or the other alternative of the critical dilemma which we have explained. we have only to do with the apostle john and his connection with either of the two writings. if we proceed to compare the character of the apostle john, as we have it depicted in the synoptics and other writings to which we have referred, with that of the author of the fourth gospel, and to contrast the peculiarities of both, we have a very different result. instead of the hebraistic greek and harsh diction which might { } be expected from the unlettered and ignorant fisherman of galilee, we find, in the fourth gospel, the purest and least hebraistic greek of any of the gospels (some parts of the third synoptic, perhaps, alone excepted), and a refinement and beauty of composition whose charm has captivated the world, and in too many cases prevented the calm exercise of judgment instead of the fierce and intolerant temper of the son of thunder, we find a spirit breathing forth nothing but gentleness and love. instead of the judaistic christianity of the apostle of circumcision who merely tolerates paul, we find a mind which has so completely detached itself from judaism that the writer makes the very appellation of "jew" equivalent to that of an enemy of the truth. not only are the customs and feasts of the jews disregarded and spoken of as observances of a people with whom the writer has no concern, but he anticipates the day when neither on mount gerizim nor yet at jerusalem men shall worship the father, but when it shall be recognized that the only true worship is that which is offered in spirit and in truth. faith in jesus christ and the merits of his death is the only way by which man can attain to eternal life, and the mosaic law is practically abolished. we venture to assert that, taking the portrait of john the son of zebedee, which is drawn in the synoptics and the epistle of paul to the galatians, supplemented by later tradition, to which we have referred, and comparing it with that of the writer of the fourth gospel, no unprejudiced mind can fail to recognize that there are not two features alike. it is the misfortune of this case, that the beauty of the gospel under trial has too frequently influenced the decision of the judges, and men who have, in other { } matters, exhibited sound critical judgment, in this abandon themselves to sheer sentimentality, and indulge in rhapsodies when reasons would be more appropriate. bearing in mind that we have given the whole of the data regarding john the son of zebedee furnished by new testament writings,--excluding merely the fourth gospel itself, which, of course, cannot at present be received in evidence,--as well as the only traditional information possessing, from its date and character, any appreciable value, it will become apparent that every argument which proceeds on the assumption that john was the beloved disciple, and possessed of characteristics quite different from those we meet with in the writings to which we have referred, is worthless and a mere petitio principii. we can, therefore, appreciate the state of the case when, for instance, we find an able man like credner commencing his inquiry as to who was the author of the fourth gospel, with such words as the following: "were we entirely without historical data regarding the author of the fourth gospel, who is not named in the writing itself, we should still, from internal grounds in the gospel itself--from the nature of the language, from the freshness and perspicacity of the narrative, from the exactness and precision of the statements, from the peculiar.manner of the mention of the baptist and of the sons of zebedee, from the love and fervour rising to ecstacy which the writer manifests towards jesus, from the irresistible charm which is poured out over the whole ideally-composed evangelical history, from the philosophical considerations with which the gospel begins--be led to the result: that the author of such a gospel can only be a native of palestine, can only be a direct eye-witness, can only be an apostle, can { } only be a favourite of jesus, can only be that john whom jesus held captivated to himself by the whole heavenly spell of his teaching, that john who rested on the bosom of jesus, stood beneath his cross, and whose later residence in a city like ephesus proves that philosophical speculation not merely attracted him, but that he also knew how to maintain his place amongst philosophically cultivated greeks."( ) it is almost impossible to proceed further in building up theory upon baseless assumption; but we shall hereafter see that he is kept in countenance by ewald, who outstrips him in the boldness and minuteness of his conjectures. we must now more carefully examine the details of the case. the language in which the gospel is written, as we have already mentioned, is much less hebraic than that of the other gospels, with the exception of parts of the gospel according to luke, and its hebraisms are not on the whole greater than was almost invariably the case with hellenistic greek, but its composition is distinguished by peculiar smoothness, grace, and beauty, and in this respect it is assigned the first rank amongst the gospels. it may be remarked that the connection which credner finds between the language and the apostle john arises out of the supposition, that long residence in ephesus had enabled him to acquire that fecility of composition in the greek language which is one of its characteristics. ewald, who exaggerates the hebraism of the work, resorts nevertheless to the conjecture, which we shall hereafter more fully consider, that the gospel was written from dictation by young friends of john in ephesus, who put the aged apostle's thoughts, in many places, into purer greek as they { } wrote them down.( ) the arbitrary nature of such an explanation, adopted in one shape or another by many apologists, requires no remark, but we shall at every turn meet with similar assumptions advanced to overcome difficulties. now, although there is no certain information as to the time when, if ever, the apostle removed into asia minor, it is at least pretty certain that he did not leave palestine before a.d. .( ) we find him still at jerusalem about a.d. -- , when paul went thither, and he had not at that time any intention of leaving, but, on the contrary, his dedication of himself to the ministry of the circumcision is distinctly mentioned by the apostle.( ) the "unlettered and ignorant" fisherman of galilee, therefore, had obviously attained an age when habits of thought and expression have become fixed, and when a new language cannot without great difficulty be acquired. if we consider the apocalypse to be his work, we find positive evidence of such markedly different thought and language actually existing when the apostle must have been between sixty and seventy years of age, that it is quite impossible to conceive that he could have subsequently acquired the language and mental characteristics of the fourth gospel.( ) it would be perfectly absurd, so far as language goes, to find in the fourth gospel the slightest indication of the apostle john, of whose language we have no information whatever except from the apocalypse, a composition { } which, if accepted as written by the apostle, would at once exclude all consideration of the gospel as his work. there are many circumstances, however, which seem clearly to indicate that the author of the fourth gospel was neither a native of palestine nor a jew, and to some of these we must briefly refer. the philosophical statements with which the gospel commences, it will be admitted, are anything but characteristic of the son of thunder, the ignorant and unlearned fisherman of galilee who, to a comparatively advanced period of life, continued preaching in his native country to his brethren of the circumcision. attempts have been made to trace the logos doctrine of the fourth gospel to the purely hebraic source of the old testament, but every impartial mind must perceive that here there is no direct and simple transformation of the theory of wisdom of the proverbs and old testament apocrypha, and no mere development of the later memra of the targums, but a very advanced application to christianity of alexandrian philosophy, with which we have become familiar through the writings of philo, to which reference has so frequently been made. it is quite true that a decided step beyond the doctrine of philo is made when the logos is represented as [------] in the person of jesus, but this argument is equally applicable to the jewish doctrine of wisdom, and that step had already been taken before the composition of the gospel. in the alexandrian philosophy everything was prepared for the final application of the doctrine, and nothing is more clear than the fact that the writer of the fourth gospel was well acquainted with the teaching of the alexandrian school, from which he derived his philosophy, and its elaborate and systematic application to jesus alone indicates a late { } development of christian doctrine, which we maintain could not have been attained by the judaistic son of zebedec.( ) we have already on several occasions referred to the attitude which the writer of the fourth gospel assumes towards the jews. apart from the fact that he places christianity generally in strong antagonism to judaism, as light to darkness, truth to a lie, and presents the doctrine of a hypostatic trinity in the most developed form to be found in the new testament, in striking contrast to the three synoptics, and in contradiction to hebrew monotheism, he writes at all times as one who not only is not a jew himself, but has nothing to do with their laws and customs. he speaks everywhere of the feasts "of the jews," "the passover of the jews," "the manner of the purifying of the jews," "the jews' feast of tabernacles," "as the manner of the jews is to bury," "the jews' preparation day," and so on.( ) the law of moses is spoken of as "your law," "their law," as of a people with which the writer was not connected.( ) moreover, the jews are represented as continually in virulent opposition to jesus, and seeking to kill him; and the word "jew" is the unfailing indication of the enemies of the truth, and the persecutors of the christ.( ) the jews are not once spoken of as the favoured people of god, but they are denounced as "children of the devil," who is "the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning."( ) the author makes caiaphas and the chief most critics agree that the characteristics of the fourth gospel render the supposition that it was the work of an old man untenable. { } priests and pharisees speak of the jewish people not as [------], but as [------], the term employed by the jews to designate the gentiles.( ) we need scarcely point out that the jesus of the fourth gospel is no longer of the race of david, but the son of god. the expectation of the jews that the messiah should be of the seed of david is entirely set aside, and the genealogies of the first and third synoptics tracing his descent are not only ignored, but the whole idea absolutely excluded. then the writer calls annas the high priest, although at the same time caiaphas is represented as holding that office.( ) the expression which he uses is: "caiaphas being the high priest that year"[------]. this statement, made more than once, indicates the belief that the office was merely annual, which is erroneous. josephus states with regard to caiaphas, that he was high priest for ten years from a.d. -- .( ) ewald and others argue that the expression "that year" refers to the year in which the { } death of jesus, so memorable to the writer, took place, and that it does not exclude the possibility of his having been high priest for successive years also.( ) this explanation, however, is quite arbitrary and insufficient, and this is shown by the additional error in representing annas as also high priest at,the same time. the synoptists know nothing of the preliminary examination before annas, and the reason given by the writer of the fourth gospel why the soldiers first took jesus to annas: "for he was father-in-law to caiaphas, who was high priest that same year,"( ) is inadmissible. the assertion is a clear mistake, and it probably originated in a stranger, writing of facts and institutions with which he was not well acquainted, being misled by an error equally committed by the author of the third gospel and of the acts of the apostles. in luke iii. , the word of god is said to come to john the baptist: "in the high priesthood of annas and caiaphas" [------], and again, in acts iv. , annas is spoken of as the high priest when peter and john healed the lame man at the gate of the temple which was called "beautiful," and caiaphas is mentioned immediately after: "and annas the high priest, and caiaphas, and john, and alexander, and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest." such statements, erroneous in themselves and not understood by the author of the fourth gospel, may have led to the confusion in the narrative. annas had previously been high priest, as we know from josephus,( ) but nothing is more certain than the fact that the title was not continued after the office was resigned; aud ishmael { } eleazar, and simon, who succeeded annas and separated his term of office from that of caiaphas, did not subsequently bear the title. the narrative is a mistake, and such an error could not have been committed by a native of palestine,( ) and much less by an acquaintance of the high priest.( ) there are also several geographical errors committed which denote a foreigner. in i. , the writer speaks of a "bethany beyond jordan, where john was baptizing." the substitution of "bethabara," mentioned by origen, which has erroneously crept into the vulgar text, is of course repudiated by critics, "bethany" standing in all the older codices. the alteration was evidently proposed to obviate the difficulty that, even in origen's time, there did not exist any trace of a bethany beyond jordan in peræa. the place could not be the bethany near { } jerusalem, and it is supposed that the writer either mistook its position or, inventing a second bethany, which he described as "beyond jordan," displayed an ignorance of the locality improbable either in a jew or a palestinian.( ) again, in iii. , the writer says that "john was baptizing in Ænon, near to salim, because there was much water there." this Ænon near to salim was in judaea, as is clearly stated in the previous verse. the place, however, was quite unknown even in the third century, and the nearest locality which could be indicated as possible was in the north of samaria and, therefore, differing from the statements in iii. , iv. .( ) Ænon, however, signifies "springs," and the question arises whether the writer of the fourth gospel, not knowing the real meaning of the word, did not simply mistake it for the name of a place.( ) in any case, there seems to be here another error into which the author of the fourth gospel, had he been the apostle john, could not have fallen.( ) { } the account of the miracle of the pool of bethesda is a remarkable one for many reasons. the words which most pointedly relate the miraculous phenomena characterizing the pool, are rejected by many critics as an interpolation. in the following extract we put them in italics: v. .--"in these (five porches) lay a multitude of the sick, halt, withered, _waiting for the moving of the water. . for an angel went down at certain seasons into the pool and was troubling the water: he, therefore, who first went in after the troubling of the water was made whole of whatsoever disease he had_." we maintain, however, that the obnoxious passage is no spurious interpolation, but that there is ample evidence, external and internal, to substantiate its claim to a place in the text. it is true that the whole passage is omitted by the sinaitic and vatican codices, and by c: that a( ), l, , and others omit the last phrase of verse , and that d, , which contain that phrase, omit the whole of verse , together with , and some other mss.: that in many codices in which the passage is found it is marked by an asterisk or obelus, and that it presents considerable variation in readings. it is also true that it is omitted by cureton's syriac, by the thebaic, and by most of the memphitic versions. but, on the other hand, it exists in the alexandrian codex, c , e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, it, v, r, a and other mss( ), and it forms part of the peschito, jerusalem syriac, vulgate, watkin's memphitic, Æthiopic and armenian versions.( ) { } more important still is the fact that it existed in the ancient latin version of tertillian, who refers to the passage;( ) and it is quoted by didymus, chrysostom, cyril, ambrose, theophylact, euthymius, and other fathers. its presence in the alexandrian codex alone might not compensate for the omission of the passage by the sinaitic and vatican codices and c, d, but when the alexandrian ms. is supported by the version used by tertullian, which is a couple of centuries older than any of the other authorities, as well as by the peschito, not to mention other codices, the balance of external evidence is distinctly in its favour. the internal evidence is altogether on the side of the authenticity of the passage. it is true that there are a considerable number of [------] in the few lines: [------] and perhaps [------]; but it must be remembered that the phenomena described are exceptional, and may well explain exceptional phraseology. on the other hand, [------] is specially a johannine word, used v. and six times more in the fourth gospel, but only five times in the rest of the new testament; and [------] with [------] occurs in v. , , , , and with [------] in v. , , vii. and nowhere else. [------] also may be indicated as employed in v. , and five times more in other parts of the gospel, and only eleven times in the rest of the new testament, and the use of [------] in v. is thus perhaps naturally { } accounted for. the context, however, forbids the removal of this passage. it is in the highest degree improbable that verse could have ended with "withered" [------], and although many critics wish to retain the last phrase in verse , in order to explain verse , this only shows the necessity, without justifying the arbitrary maintenance, of these words, whilst verse , which is still better attested, is excluded to get rid of the inconvenient angel. it is evident, however, that the expression: "when the water was troubled" [------] of the undoubted verse is unintelligible without the explanation that the angel "was troubling the water," [------] of verse , and also that the statement of the verse , "but while i am coming, another goeth down before me" [------] absolutely requires the account: "he, therefore, who first went in &c." [------] of verse . the argument that the interpolation was made to explain the statement in verse is untenable, for that statement necessarily presupposes the account in the verses under discussion, and cannot be severed from it. even if the information that the water was "troubled" at certain seasons only could have been dispensed with, it is obvious that the explanation of the condition of healing, given in verse , is indispensable to the appreciation of the lame man's complaint in verse , for without knowing that priority was essential, the reason for the protracted waiting is inconceivable. it is also argued, that the passage about the angel may have been interpolated to bring out^the presence of supernatural agency, but it is much more reasonable to believe that attempts have been made to omit these verses, of which there is such ancient attestation, in order to eliminate an embarrassing excess of { } supernatural agency, and get rid of the difficulty presented by the fact, for which even tertullian( ) endeavoured to account, that the supposed pool had ceased to exhibit any miraculous phenomena. this natural explanation is illustrated by the alacrity with which apologists at the present day abandon the obnoxious passage.( ) the combined force of the external and internal evidence, however, cannot, we think, be fairly resisted.( ) now, not only is the pool of bethesda totally unknown at the present day, but although possessed of such miraculous properties, it was not known even to josephus, or any other writer of that time. it is inconceivable that, were the narrative genuine, the phenomena could have been unknown and unmentioned by the jewish historian.( ) there is here evidently neither the narrative of an apostle nor of an eye-witness. another very significant mistake occurs in the account of the conversation with the samaritan woman, which is said to have taken place (iv. ) near "a city of samaria "the biblical critic is glad that he can remove these words from the record, and cannot be called upon to explain them."--rev. h. w. watkins, m.a., in "a new test. commentary for english readers," edited by charles john ellicott, d.d., lord bishop of gloucester and bristol, i. p. . { } which is called sychar." it is evident that there was no such place--and apologetic ingenuity is severely taxed to explain the difficulty. the common conjecture has been that the town of sichem is intended, but this is rightly rejected by delitzsch,( ) and ewald.( ) credner,( ) not unsupported by others, and borne out in particular by the theory of ewald, conjectures that sychar is a corruption of sichem, introduced into the gospel by a greek secretary to whom this part of the gospel was dictated, and who mistook the apostle's pronunciation of the final syllable. we constantly meet with this elastic explanation of difficulties in the gospel, but its mere enunciation displays at once the reality of the difficulties and the imaginary nature of the explanation. hengstenberg adopts the view, and presses it with pious earnestness, that the term is a mere nickname for the city of sichem, and that, by so slight a change in the pronunciation, the apostle called the place a city of lies [------] a lie), a play upon words which he does not consider unworthy.( ) the only support which this latter theory can secure from internal evidence is to be derived from the fact that the whole discourse with the woman is ideal. hengstenberg( ) conjectures that the five husbands of the woman are typical of the gods of the five nations with which the king of assyria peopled samaria, ii. kings, xvii. -- , and which they worshipped instead of the god of israel, and as the actual god of the samaritans was not recognized as the true god by the jews, nor their { } worship of him on mount gerizim held to be valid, he considers that under the name of the city of sychar, their whole religion, past and present, was denounced as a lie. there can be little doubt that the episode is allegorical, but such a defence of the geographical error, the reality of which is everywhere felt, whilst it is quite insufficient on the one hand, effectually destroys the historical character of the gospel on the other.( ) the inferences from all of the foregoing examples are strengthened by the fact that, in the quotations from the old testament, the fourth gospel in the main follows the septuagint version, or shows its influence, and nowhere can be shown directly to translate from the hebrew. these instances might be multiplied, but we must proceed to examine more closely the indications given in the gospel as to the identity of its author. we need not point out that the writer nowhere clearly states who he is, nor mentions his name, but expressions are frequently used which evidently show the desire that a particular person should be understood. he generally calls himself "the other disciple," or "the disciple whom jesus loved."( ) it is universally understood that he { } represents himself as having previously been a disciple of john the baptist (i. ff.),( ) and also that he is "the other disciple" who was acquainted with the high priest (xviii. , ),( ) if not an actual relative as ewald and others assert.( ) the assumption that the disciple thus indicated is john, rests principally on the fact that whilst the author mentions the other apostles, he seems studiously to avoid directly naming john, and also that he never distinguishes john the baptist by the appellation [------], whilst he carefully distinguishes the two disciples of the name of judas, and always speaks of the apostle peter as "simon peter," or "peter," but rarely as "simon" only.( ) without pausing to consider the slightness of this evidence, it is obvious that, supposing the disciple indicated to be john the son of zebedee, the fourth gospel gives a representation of him quite different from the synoptics and other writings. in the fourth gospel (i. ff.) the calling of the apostle is described in a peculiar manner. john (the baptist) is standing with two of his disciples, and points out jesus to them as "the lamb of god," whereupon the two disciples follow jesus and, finding out where he lives, { } abide with him that day and subsequently attach themselves to his person. in verse it is stated: "one of the two which heard john speak, and followed him, was andrew, simon peter's brother." we are left to imagine who was the other, and the answer of critics is: john. now, the "calling" of john is related in a totally different manner in the synoptics--jesus, walking by the sea of galilee, sees "two brethren, simon called peter and andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishers, and he saith unto them: follow me, and i will make you fishers of men. and they straightway left their nets and followed him. and when he had gone from thence, he saw other two brethren, james the son of zebedee and john his brother, in the ship with zebedee their father mending their nets; and he called them. and they immediately left the ship and their father and followed him."( ) these accounts are in complete contradiction to each other, and both cannot be true. we see, from the first introduction of "the other disciple" on the scene, in the fourth gospel, the evident design to give him the precedence before peter and the rest of the apostles. we have above given the account of the first two synoptists of the calling of peter, according to which he is the first of the disciples who is selected, and he is directly invited by jesus to follow him and become, with his brother andrew, "fishers of men." james and john are not called till later in the day, and without the record of any special address. in the third gospel, the calling of peter is introduced with still more important details. jesus enters the boat of simon and bids him push out into the lake and let down his net, and the miraculous draught of fishes is taken: "when simon peter { } saw it, he fell down at jesus' knees, saying: depart from me, for i am a sinful man, o lord. for he was astonished, and all that were with him, at the draught of fishes which they had taken." the calling of the sons of zebedee becomes even less important here, for the account simply continues: "and so was also james and john, the sons of zebedee, who were partners with simon." jesus then addresses his invitation to simon, and the account concludes: "and when they had brought their boats to land, they forsook all, and followed him."( ) in the fourth gospel, the calling of the two disciples of john is first narrated, as we have seen and the first call of peter is from his brother andrew, and not from jesus himself. "he (andrew) first findeth his own brother simon, and saith unto him: we have found the messias (which is, being interpreted, christ), and he brought him to jesus. jesus looked on him and said: thou art simon, the son of jonas;( ) thou shalt be called cephas (which is by interpretation, peter)."( ) this explanation of the manner in which the cognomen peter is given, we need not point out, is likewise contradictory to the synoptics, and betrays the same purpose of suppressing the prominence of peter. the fourth gospel states that "the other disciple," who is declared to be john, the author of the gospel, was known to the high priest, another trait amongst many others elevating him above the son of zebedee as he is depicted elsewhere in the new testament. the { } account which the fourth gospel gives of the trial of jesus is in very many important particulars at variance with that of the synoptics. we need only mention here the point that the latter know nothing of the preliminary examination by annas. we shall not discuss the question as to where the denial of peter is represented as taking place in the fourth gospel, but may merely say that no other disciple but peter is mentioned in the synoptics as having followed jesus; and peter enters without difficulty into the high priest's palace.( ) in the fourth gospel, peter is made to wait without at the door until john, who is a friend of the high priest and freely enters, obtains permission for peter to go in, another instance of the precedence which is systematically given to john. the synoptics do not in this particular case give any support to the statement in the fourth gospel, and certainly in nothing that is said of john elsewhere do they render his acquaintance with the high priest in the least degree probable. it is, on the contrary, improbable in the extreme that the young fisherman of galilee, who shows very little enlightenment in the anecdotes told of him in the synoptics, and who is described as an "unlettered and ignorant" man in the acts of the apostles, could have any acquaintance with the high priest. ewald, who, on the strength of the word [------],( ) at once elevates him into a relation of the high priest, sees in the statement of polycrates that late in life he wore the priestly [------], a confirmation of the supposition that he was of the high priest's race and family.( ) the { } evident judaistic tendency, however, which made john wear the priestly mitre may distinguish him as author of the apocalypse, but it is fatal to the theory which makes him author of the fourth gospel, in which there is so complete a severance from judaism. a much more important point, however, is the designation of the author of the fourth gospel, who is identified with the apostle john, as "the disciple whom jesus loved." it is scarcely too much to say, that this suggestive appellation alone has done more than any arguments to ensure the recognition of the work, and to overcome doubts as to its authenticity. religious sentimentality, evoked by the influence of this tender epithet, has been blind to historical incongruities, and has been willing to accept with little question from the "beloved disciple" a portrait of jesus totally unlike that of the synoptics, and to elevate the dogmatic mysticism and artificial discourses of the one over the sublime morality and simple eloquence of the other. it is impossible to reflect seriously upon this representation of the relations between one of the disciples and jesus without the conviction that every record of the life of the great teacher must have borne distinct traces of the preference, and that the disciple so honoured must have attracted the notice of every early writer acquainted with the facts. if we seek for any evidence, however, that john was distinguished with such special affection,--that he lay on the breast of jesus at supper--that even the apostle peter recognised his superior intimacy and influence( )--and that he received at the foot of the cross the care of his mother from the dying jesus,( )--we seek in vain. the synoptic gospels, which minutely record the details { } of the last supper and of the crucifixion, so far from reporting any such circumstances or such distinction of john, do not even mention his name, and peter everywhere has precedence before the sons of zebedee. almost the only occasions upon which any prominence is given to them are episodes in which they incur the master's displeasure, and the cognomen of "sons of thunder" has certainly no suggestion in it of special affection, nor of personal qualities likely to attract the great teacher. the selfish ambition of the brothers who desire to sit on thrones on his right and on his left, and the intolerant temper which would have called down fire from heaven to consume a samaritan village, much rather contradict than support the representation of the fourth gospel. upon one occasion, indeed, jesus in rebuking them, adds: "ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of."( ) it is perfectly undeniable that john nowhere has any such position accorded to him in the synoptics as this designation in the fourth gospel implies. in the lists of the disciples he is always put in the fourth place,( ) and in the first two gospels his only distinguishing designation is that of "the brother of james," or one of the sons of zebedee. the apostle peter in all of the synoptics is the leader of the disciples. he it is who alone is represented as the mouth-piece of the twelve or as holding conversation with jesus; and the only occasions on which the sons of zebedee address jesus are those to which we have referred, upon which luke ix. . these words are omitted from some of the oldest mss., but they are in cod. d (bezae) and many other very important texts, as well as in some of the oldest torsions, besides being quoted by the fathers. they were probably omitted after the claim of john to be the "beloved disciple" became admitted. { } his displeasure was incurred. the angel who appears to the women after the resurrection desires them to tell his disciples "and peter" that jesus will meet them in galilee,( ) but there is no message for any "disciple whom he loved." if peter, james, and john accompany the master to the mount of transfiguration, and are witnesses of his agony in the garden, regarding which, however, the fourth gospel is totally silent, the two brethren remain in the back ground, and peter alone acts a prominent part. if we turn to the epistles of paul, we do not find a single trace of acquaintance with the fact that jesus honoured john with any special affection, and the opportunity of referring to such a distinction was not wanting when he writes to the galatians of his visit to the "pillar" apostles in jerusalem. here again, however, we find no prominence given to john, but the contrary, his name still being mentioned last and without any special comment. in none of the pauline or other epistles is there any allusion, however distant, to any disciple whom jesus specially loved. the apocalypse, which, if any book of the new testament can be traced to him, must be ascribed to the apostle john, makes no claim whatever to such a distinction. in none of the apocryphal gospels is there the slightest indication of knowledge of the fact, and if we come to the fathers even, it is a striking circumstance that there is not a trace of it in any early work, and not the most remote indication of any independent tradition that jesus distinguished john or any other individual disciple with peculiar friendship. the roman clement, in referring to the example of the apostles, only mentions peter and paul.( ) polycarp, who is described as a disciple of the { } apostle john, apparently knows nothing of his having been especially loved by jesus. pseudo-ignatius does not refer to him at all in the syriac epistles, or in either version of the seven epistles.( ) papias, in describing his interest in hearing what the apostles said, gives john no prominence: "i inquired minutely after the words of the presbyters: what andrew, or what peter said, or what philip or what thomas or james, or what john or matthew, or what any other of the disciples of the lord, and what aristion and the presbyter john, the disciples of the lord, say,"( ) &c. as a fact, it is undenied and undeniable that the representation of john, or of any other disciple, as specially beloved by jesus, is limited solely and entirely to the fourth gospel, and that there is not even a trace of independent tradition to support the claim, whilst on the other hand the total silence of the earlier gospels and of the other new testament writings on the point, and indeed their data of a positive and unmistakeable character, oppose rather than support the correctness of the later and mere personal assertion. those who abandon sober criticism, and indulge in mere sentimental rhapsodies on the impossibility of the author of the fourth gospel being any other than "the disciple whom jesus loved," strangely ignore the fact that we have no reason whatever, except the assurance of the author himself, to believe that jesus specially loved any disciple, and much less john the son of zebedee. indeed, the statements of the fourth gospel itself on the subject are indeed in the universally repudiated epistles, beyond the fact that two are addressed to john, in which he is not called "the disciple whom jesus loved," the only mention of him is the statement, "john was banished to patmos." ad tars., iii. { } so indirect and intentionally vague that it is not absolutely clear what disciple is indicated as "the beloved," and it has even been maintained that not john the son of zebedee, but andrew the brother of simon peter was "the disciple whom jesus loved," and consequently the supposed author of the fourth gospel.( ) we have hitherto refrained from referring to one of the most singular features of the fourth gospel, the chapter xxi., which is by many cited as the most ancient testimony for the authenticity of the work, and which requires particular consideration. it is obvious that the gospel is brought to a conclusion by verses , of chapter xx., and critics are universally agreed at least that, whoever may be its author, chapter xxi. is a supplement only added after an interval. by whom was it written? as may be supposed, critics have given very different replies to this important question. many affirm, and with much probability, that chapter xxi. was subsequently added to the gospel by the author himself.( ) a few, however, exclude the last two verses, which they consider to have been added by another hand.( ) a much larger number assert that the whole { } chapter is an ancient appendix to the gospel by a writer who was not the author of the gospel.( ) a few likewise reject the last two verses of the preceding chapter. in this supplement (v. ), "the disciple whom jesus loved, who also leaned on his breast at the supper and said: lord, which is he that betrayeth thee?" is (v. ) identified with the author of the gospel. we may here state the theory of ewald with regard to the composition of the fourth gospel, which is largely deduced from considerations connected with the last chapter, and which, although more audaciously minute in its positive and arbitrary statement of details than any other with which we are acquainted, introduces more or less the explanations generally given regarding the composition of chapter xxi. out of all the indications in the work, ewald decides: " . that the gospel, completed at the end of chapter xx., was composed by the apostle about the year , with the free help of friends, not to be immediately circulated { } throughout the world, but to remain limited to the narrower circle of friends until his death, and only then to be published as his legacy to the whole of christendom. in this position it remained ten years, or even longer. . as the preconceived opinion regarding the life or death of the apostle (xxi. ) had perniciously spread itself throughout the whole of christendom, the apostle himself decided, even before his death, to counteract it in the right way by giving a correct statement of the circumstances. the same friends, therefore, assisted him to design the very important supplement, chapter xxi., and this could still be very easily added, as the book was not yet published. his friends proceeded, nevertheless, somewhat more freely in its composition than previously in writing the book itself, and allowed their own hand more clearly to gleam through, although here, as in the rest of the work, they conformed to the will of the apostle, and did not, even in the supplement, openly declare his name as the author. as the supplement, however, was to form a closely connected part of the whole work, they gave at its end (verses f.), as it now seemed to them suitable, a new conclusion to the augmented work. . as the apostle himself desired that the preconceived opinion regarding him, which had been spread abroad to the prejudice of christendom, should be contradicted as soon as possible, and even before his death, he now so far departed from his earlier wish, that he permitted the circulation of his gospel before his death. we can accept this with all certainty, and have therein trustworthy testimony regarding the whole original history of our book. . when the gospel was thus published it was for { } the first time gradually named after our apostle, even in its external superscription: a nomination which had then become all the more necessary and permanent for the purpose of distinction, as it was united in one whole with the other gospels. the world, however, has at all times known it only under this wholly right title, and could in no way otherwise know it and otherwise name it."( ) in addressing ourselves to each of these points in detail, we shall be able to discuss the principal questions connected with the fourth gospel. the theory of ewald, that the fourth gospel was written down with the assistance of friends in ephesus, has been imagined solely to conciliate certain phenomena presented throughout the gospel, and notably in the last chapter, with the foregone conclusion that it was written by the apostle john. it is apparent that there is not a single word in the work itself explaining such a mode of composition, and that the hypothesis proceeds purely from the ingenious imagination of the critic. the character of the language, the manner in which the writer is indirectly indicated in the third person, and the reference, even in the body of the work (xix. ), to the testimony of a third person, combined with the similarity of the style of the supplementary chapter, which is an obvious addition intended, however, to be understood as written by a different hand, have rendered these conjectures necessary to reconcile such obvious incongruities with the ascription of the work to the apostle. the substantial identity of the style and vocabulary of chapter xxi. with the rest of the gospel is asserted by a multitude of the most competent critics. ewald, whilst he recognizes the great { } similarity, maintains at the same time a real dissimilarity, for which he accounts in the manner just quoted. the language, ewald admits, agrees fully in many rare _nuances_ with that of the rest of the gospel, but he does not take the trouble to prove the decided dissimilarities which, he asserts, likewise exist. a less difference than that which he finds might, he thinks, be explained by the interval which had elapsed between the writing of the work and of the supplement, but "the wonderful similarity, in the midst of even greater dissimilarity, of the whole tone and particularly of the style of the composition is not thereby accounted for. this, therefore, leads us," he continues, "to the opinion: the apostle made use, for writing down his words, of the hand and even of the skill of a trusted friend who later, on his own authority (fur sich allein), wrote the supplement. the great similarity, as well as dissimilarity, of the style of both parts in this way becomes intelligible: the trusted friend (probably a presbyter in ephesus) adopted much of the language and mode of expression of the youthful old apostle, without, however, where he wrote more in his own person, being carefully solicitous of imitating them. but even through this contrast, and the definite declaration in v. , the apostolical origin of the book itself becomes all the more clearly apparent; and thus the supplement proves from the most diverse sides how certainly this gospel was written by the trusted disciple."( ) elsewhere, ewald more clearly explains the share in the work which he assigns to the apostle's disciple: "the proposition that the apostle composed in a unique way our likewise unique gospel is to be understood only with the { } important limitation upon which i have always laid so much stress: for john himself did not compose this work quite so directly as paul did most of his epistles, but the young friend who wrote it down from his lips, and who, in the later appendix, chapter xxi., comes forward in the most open way, without desiring in the slightest to conceal his separate identity, does his work at other times somewhat freely, in that he never introduces the narrator speaking of himself and his participation in the events with 'i' or 'we' but only indirectly indicates his presence at such events and, towards the end, in preference refers to him, from his altogether peculiar relation to christ, as 'the disciple whom the lord loved,' so that, in one passage, in regard to an important historical testimony (xix. ), he even speaks of him as of a third person." ewald then maintains that the agreement between the gospel and the epistles, and more especially the first, which he affirms, without vouchsafing a word of evidence, to have been written down by a different hand, proves that we have substantially only the apostle's very peculiar composition, and that his friend as much as possible gave his own words.( ) it is obvious from this elaborate explanation, which we need scarcely say is composed of mere assumptions, that, in order to connect the apostle john with the gospel, ewald is obliged to assign him a very peculiar position in regard to it: he recognizes that some of the characteristics of the work exclude the supposition that the apostle could himself have written the gospel, so he represents him as dictating it, and his secretary as taking considerable liberties with the composition as he writes it { } down, and even as introducing references of his own; as, for instance, in the passage to which he refers, where, in regard to the statement that at the crucifixion a soldier pierced the side of the already dead jesus and that forthwith there came out blood and water (xix. ), it is said: "and he that saw it hath borne witness, and his witness is true; and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye may believe."( ) it is perfectly clear that the writer refers to the testimony of another person( )--the friend who is writing down the narrative, says herr ewald, refers to the apostle who is actually dictating it. again, in the last chapter, as elsewhere throughout the work, "the disciple whom jesus loved," who is the author, is spoken of in the third person, and also in verse : "this is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things" [------]. this, according to ewald, is the same secretary, now writing in his own person. the similarity between this declaration and the appeal to the testimony of another person in xix. , is certainly complete, and there can be no doubt that both proceed from the same pen; but beyond the assertion of herr ewald there is not the slightest evidence that a secretary wrote the gospel from the dictation of another, and ventured to interrupt the narrative by such a reference to testimony, which, upon the supposition that the { } apostle john was known as the actual author, is singularly out of place. if john wrote the gospel, why should he appeal in utterly vague terms to his own testimony, and upon such a point, when the mere fact that he himself wrote the statement was the most direct testimony in itself? an author who composed a work which he desired to ascribe to a "disciple whom jesus loved" might have made such a reference as xix. , in his anxiety to support such an affirmation, without supposing that he had really compromised his design, and might have naturally added such a statement as that in the last two verses, but nothing but the foregone conclusion that the apostle john was the real author could have suggested such an explanation of these passages. it is throughout assumed by ewald and others, that john wrote in the first instance, at least, specially for a narrow circle of friends, and the proof of this is considered to be the statement of the object with which it was written: "that ye may believe,"(l) &c., a phrase, we may remark, which is identical with that of the very verse (xix. ) with which the secretary is supposed to have had so much to do. it is very remarkable, upon this hypothesis, that in xix. , it is considered necessary even for this narrow circle, who knew the apostle so well, to make such an appeal, as well as to attach at its close (xxi. ), for the benefit of the world in general as ewald will have it, a certificate of the trustworthiness of the gospel upon no hypothesis which supposes the apostle john the author of the fourth gospel is such an explanation credible. that the apostle himself could have written of himself the words in xix. is impossible. after { } having stated so much that is much more surprising and contradictory to all experience without reference to any witness, it would indeed have been strange had he here appealed to himself as to a separate individual, and on the other hand it is quite inadmissible to assume that a mend to whom he is dictating should interrupt the narrative to introduce a passage so inappropriate to the work, and so unnecessary for any circle acquainted with the apostolic author. if, as ewald argues, the peculiarities of his style of composition were so well known that it was unnecessary for the writer more clearly to designate himself either for the first readers or for the christian world, the passages we are discussing are all the more inappropriate. that any guarantee of the truth of the gospel should have been thought desirable for readers who knew the work is to be composed by the apostle john, and who believed him to be "the disciple whom jesus loved," is inconceivable, and that any anonymous and quite indirect testimony to its genuineness should either have been considered necessary or of any value is still more incredible. it is impossible that nameless presbyters of ephesus could venture to accredit a gospel written by the apostle john; and any intended attestation must have taken the simple and direct course of stating that the work had been composed by the apostle. the peculiarities we are discussing seem to us explicable only upon the supposition that the unknown writer of the gospel desired that it should be understood to be written by a certain disciple whom jesus loved, but did not choose distinctly to name him or directly to make such an affirmation. it is, we assert, impossible that an apostle who composed a history of the life and teaching of jesus could { } have failed to attach his name, naturally and simply, as testimony of the trustworthiness of his statements, and of his fitness as an eye-witness to compose such a record. as the writer of the fourth gospel does not state his name, herr ewald ascribes the omission to the "incomparable modesty and delicacy of feeling" of the apostle john. we must further briefly examine the validity of this explanation. it is universally admitted, and by ewald himself, that although the writer does not directly name himself, he very clearly indicates that he is "the other disciple" and "the disciple whom jesus loved." we must affirm that such a mode of indicating himself is incomparably less modest than the simple statement of his name, and it is indeed a glorification of himself beyond anything in the apocalypse. but not only is the explanation thus discredited but, in comparing the details of the gospel with those of the synoptics, we find still more certainly how little modesty had to do with the suppression of his name. in the synoptics a very marked precedence of the rest of the disciples is ascribed to the apostle peter; and the sons of zebedee are represented in all of them as holding a subordinate place. this representation is confirmed by the pauline epistles and by tradition. in the fourth gospel, a very different account is given, and the author studiously elevates the apostle john,--that is to say, according to the theory that he is the writer of the gospel, himself,--in every way above the apostle peter. apart from the general pre-eminence claimed for himself in the very name of "the disciple whom jesus loved," we have seen that he deprives peter in his own favour of the honour of being the first of the disciples who was called; he suppresses the account of the circumstances under which { } that apostle was named peter, and gives another and trifling version of the incident, reporting elsewhere indeed in a very subdued and modified form, and without the commendation of the master, the recognition of the divinity of jesus, which in the first gospel is the cause of his change of name.( ) he is the intimate friend of the master, and even peter has to beg him to ask at the supper who was the betrayer. he describes himself as the friend of the high priest, and while peter is excluded, he not only is able to enter into his palace, but he is the means of introducing peter. the denial of peter is given without mitigation, but his bitter repentance is not mentioned. he it is who is singled out by the dying jesus and entrusted with the charge of his mother. he outruns peter in their race to the sepulchre, and in the final appearance of jesus (xxi. ) the more important position is assigned to the disciple whom jesus loved. it is, therefore, absurd to speak of the incomparable modesty of the writer, who, if he does not give his name, not only clearly indicates himself, but throughout assumes a pre-eminence which is not supported by the authority of the synoptics and other writings, but is heard of alone from his own narrative. ewald argues that chapter xxi. must have been written, and the gospel as we have it, therefore, have been completed, before the death of the apostle john. he considers the supplement to have been added specially to contradict the report regarding john (xxi. ). "the supplement must have been written whilst john still lived," he asserts, "for only before his death was it worth while to contradict such a false hope; and if his death had actually taken place, the result itself would { } have already refuted so erroneous an interpretation of the words of christ, and it would then have been much more appropriate to explain afresh the sense of the words 'till i come.' moreover, there is no reference here to the death as having already occurred, although a small addition to that effect in ver. would have been so easy. but if we were to suppose that john had long been dead when this was written, the whole rectification as it is given would be utterly without sense."( ) on the contrary, we affirm that the whole history of the first two centuries renders it certain that the apostle was already dead, and that the explanation was not a rectification of false hopes during his lifetime, but an explanation of the failure of expectations which had already taken place, and probably excited some scandal. we know how the early church looked for the immediate coming of the glorified christ, and how such hopes sustained persecuted christians in their sorrow and suffering. this is very clearly expressed in thess. iv. -- , where the expectation of the second coming within the lifetime of the writer and readers of the epistle is confidently stated, and elsewhere, and even in john ii. , the belief that the "last times" had arrived is expressed. the history of the apocalypse in relation to the canon illustrates the case. so long as the belief in the early consummation of all things continued strong, the apocalypse was the favourite writing of the early church, but when time went on, and the second coming of christ did not take place, the opinion of christendom regarding the work changed, and disappointment, as well as the desire to explain the non-fulfilment of prophecies upon which so much hope had been based, led many to reject the apocalypse { } as an unintelligible and fallacious book. we venture to conjecture that the tradition that john should not die until the second coming of jesus may have originated with the apocalypse, where that event is announced to john as immediately to take place, xxii. , , , and the words with which the book ends are of this nature, and express the expectation of the writer, : "he which testifieth these things saith: surely i come quickly. amen. come, lord jesus." it was not in the spirit of the age to hesitate about such anticipations, and so long as the apostle lived, such a tradition would scarcely have required or received contradiction from any one, the belief being universal that the coming of jesus might take place any day, and assuredly would not be long delayed. when the apostle was dead, however, and the tradition that it had been foretold that he should live until the coming of the lord exercised men's minds, and doubt and disappointment at the non-fulfilment of what may have been regarded as prophecy produced a prejudicial effect upon christendom, it seemed to the writer of this gospel a desirable thing to point out that too much stress had been laid upon the tradition, and that the words which had been relied upon in the first instance did not justify the expectations which had been formed from them. this also contradicts the hypothesis that the apostle john was the author of the gospel. such a passage as xix. , received in any natural sense, or interpreted in any way which can be supported by evidence, shows that the writer of the gospel was not an eye-witness of the events recorded, but appeals to the testimony of others. it is generally admitted that the expressions in ch. i. are of universal application, and capable of being adopted by all christians, and, { } consequently, that they do not imply any direct claim on the part of the writer to personal knowledge of jesus. we must now examine whether the gospel itself bears special marks of having been written by an eye-witness, and how far in this respect it bears out the assertion that it was written by the apostle john. it is constantly asserted that the minuteness of the details in the fourth gospel indicates that it must have been written by one who was present at the scenes he records. with regard to this point we need only generally remark, that in the works of imagination of which the world is full, and the singular realism of many of which is recognized by all, we have the most minute and natural details of scenes which never occurred, and of conversations which never took place, the actors in which never actually existed. ewald admits that it is undeniable that the fourth gospel was written with a fixed purpose, and with artistic design and, indeed, he goes further and recognizes that the apostle could not possibly so long have recollected the discourses of jesus and verbally reproduced them, so that, in fact, we have only, at best, a substantial report of the matter of those discourses coloured by the mind of the author himself.( ) details of scenes at which we were not present may be admirably supplied by imagination, and as we cannot compare what is here described as taking place with what actually took place, the argument that the author must have been an eyewitness because he gives such details is without validity. moreover, the details of the fourth gospel in many cases do not agree with those of the three synoptics, and it is an undoubted fact that the author of the fourth gospel gives the details of scenes at which the apostle john was not { } present, and reports the discourses and conversations on such occasions, with the very same minuteness as those at which he is said to have been present; as, for instance, the interview between jesus and the woman of samaria. it is perfectly undeniable that the writer had other gospels before him when he composed his work, and that he made use of other materials than his own.( ) it is by no means difficult, however, to point out very clear indications that the author was not an eye-witness, but constructed his scenes and discourses artistically and for effect. we shall not, at present, dwell upon the almost uniform artifice adopted in most of the dialogues, in which the listeners either misunderstand altogether the words of jesus, or interpret them in a foolish and material way, and thus afford him an opportunity of enlarging upon the theme. for instance, nicodemus, a ruler of the jews, misunderstands the expression of jesus, that in order to see the kingdom of god a man must be born from above, and asks: "how can a man be born when he is old? can he enter a second time into his mothers womb and be born?"( ) now, as it is well known, and as we have already shown, the common expression used in regard to a proselyte to judaism was that of being born again, with which every jew, and more especially every "ruler of the jews," must have been well acquainted. the stupidity which he displays { } in his conversation with jesus, and with which the author endowed all who came in contact with him, in order, by the contrast, to mark more strongly the superiority of the master, even draws from jesus the remark: "art thou the teacher of israel and understandest not these things?"(l) there can be no doubt that the scene was ideal, and it is scarcely possible that a jew could have written it. in the synoptics, jesus is reported as quoting against the people of his own city, nazareth, who rejected him, the proverb: "a prophet has no honour in his own country."( ) the appropriateness of the remark here is obvious. the author of the fourth gospel, however, shows clearly that he was neither an eye-witness nor acquainted with the subject or country when he introduces this proverb in a different place. jesus is represented as staying two days at sychar after his conversation with the samaritan woman. "now after the two days he departed thence into galilee. for [------] jesus himself testified that a prophet hath no honour in his own country. when, therefore [------], he came into galilee, the galilaeans received him, having seen all the things that he did in jerusalem, at the feast--for they also went unto the feast."( ) now it is manifest that the quotation here is quite out of place, and none of the ingenious but untenable explanations of apologists can make it appropriate. he is made to go into galilee, which was his country, because a prophet has no honour in his country, and the galilaeans are represented as receiving him, which is a contradiction of the proverb. the writer evidently misunderstood the facts of the case or { } deliberately desired to deny the connection of jesus with nazareth and galilee, in accordance with his evident intention of associating the logos only with the holy city. we must not pause to show that the author is generally unjust to the galilaeans, and displays an ignorance regarding them very unlike what we should expect from the fisherman of galilee.( ) we have already alluded to the artificial character of the conversation with the woman of samaria, which, although given with so much detail, occurred at a place totally unknown (perhaps allegorically called the "city of lies"), at which the apostle john was not present, and the substance of which was typical of samaria and its five nations and false gods. the continuation in the gospel is as unreal as the conversation. another instance displaying personal ignorance is the insertion into a discourse at the last supper, and without any appropriate connection with the context, the passage "verily, verily, i say unto you: he that receiveth whomsoever i send, receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me."( ) in the synoptics, this sentence is naturally represented as part of the address to the disciples who are to be sent forth to preach the gospel;( ) but it is clear that its insertion here is a mistake.( ) again, a very obvious slip, which betrays that what was intended for realistic detail is nothing but a reminiscence of some earlier gospel misapplied, occurs in a later part { } of the discourses very inappropriately introduced as being delivered on the same occasion. at the end of xiv. , jesus is represented, after saying that he would no more talk much with the disciples, as suddenly breaking off with the words: "arise, let us go hence" [------]. they do not, however, arise and go thence, but, on the contrary, jesus at once commences another long discourse: "i am the true vine," &c. the expression is merely introduced artistically to close one discourse, and enable the writer to begin another, and the idea is taken from some earlier work. for instance, in our first synoptic, at the close of the agony in the garden which the fourth gospel ignores altogether, jesus says to the awakened disciples: "rise, let us go" [------].( ) we need not go on with these illustrations, but the fact that the author is not an eyewitness recording scenes which he beheld and discourses which he heard, but a writer composing an ideal gospel on a fixed plan, will become more palpable as we proceed. it is not necessary to enter upon any argument to prove the fundamental difference which exists in every respect between the synoptics and the fourth gospel. this is admitted even by apologists, whose efforts to reconcile the discordant elements are totally unsuccessful. "it is impossible to pass from the synoptic gospels to that of st john," says canon westcott, "without feeling that the transition involves the passage from one world of thought to another. no familiarity with the general teaching of the gospels, no wide conception of the character of the saviour is sufficient to destroy the { } contrast which exists in form and spirit between the earlier and later narratives."(l) the difference between the fourth gospel and the synoptics, not only as regards the teaching of jesus but also the facts of the narrative, is so great that it is impossible to harmonize them, and no one who seriously considers the matter can fail to see that both cannot be accepted as correct. if we believe that the synoptics give a truthful representation of the life and teaching of jesus, it follows of necessity that, in whatever category we may decide to place the fourth gospel, it must be rejected as a historical work. the theories which are most in favour as regards it may place the gospel in a high position as an ideal composition, but sober criticism must infallibly pronounce that they exclude it altogether from the province of history. there is no option but to accept it as the only genuine report of the sayings and doings of jesus, rejecting the synoptics, or to remove it at once to another department of literature. the synoptics certainly contradict each other in many minor details, but they are not in fundamental disagreement with each other and evidently present the same portrait of jesus, and the same view of his teaching derived from the same sources. the vast difference which exists between the representation of jesus in the fourth gospel and in the synoptics is too well recognized to require minute demonstration. we must, however, point out some of the distinctive features. we need not do more here than refer to the fact that, whilst the synoptics relate the circumstances of the birth of jesus, two of them at least, and give some history of his family and origin, the fourth gospel, ignoring all this, introduces the great { } teacher at once as the logos who from the beginning was with god and was himself god. the key-note is struck from the first, and in the philosophical prelude to the gospel we have the announcement to those who have ears to hear, that here we need expect no simple history, but an artistic demonstration of the philosophical postulate. according to the synoptics, jesus is baptized by john, and as he goes out of the water the holy ghost descends upon him like a dove. the fourth gospel says nothing of the baptism, and makes john the baptist narrate vaguely that he saw the holy ghost descend like a dove and rest upon jesus, as a sign previously indicated to him by god by which to recognize the lamb of god.( ) from the very first, john the baptist, in the fourth gospel, recognizes and declares jesus to be "the christ,"( ) "the lamb of god which taketh away the sins of the world."( ) according to the synoptics, john comes preaching the baptism of repentance, and so far is he from making such declarations, or forming such distinct opinions concerning jesus, that even after he has been cast into prison and just before his death,--when in fact his preaching was at an end,--he is represented as sending disciples to jesus, on hearing in prison of his works, to ask him: "art thou he that should come, or look we for another?" ( ) jesus carries on his ministry and baptizes simultaneously with john, according to the fourth gospel, but his public career, according to the synoptics, does not begin until after the baptist's has concluded, and john is cast into prison.( ) the synoptics clearly { } represent the ministry of jesus as having been limited to a single year,( ) and his preaching is confined to galilee and jerusalem, where his career culminates at the fatal passover. the fourth gospel distributes the teaching of jesus-between galilee, samaria, and jerusalem, makes it extend at least over three years, and refers to three passovers spent by jesus at jerusalem.( ) the fathers felt this difficulty and expended a good deal of apologetic ingenuity upon it; but no one is now content with the explanation of eusebius, that the synoptics merely intended to write the history of jesus during the one year after the imprisonment of the baptist, whilst the fourth evangelist recounted the events of the time not recorded by the others, a theory which is totally contradicted by the four gospels themselves.( ) the fourth gospel represents the expulsion of the money-changers by jesus as taking place at the very outset of his career,( ) when he could not have been known, and when such a proceeding is incredible; whilst the synoptics place it at the very close of his ministry, after his triumphal entry into jerusalem, when, if ever, such an act, which might have contributed to the final catastrophe, becomes conceivable.( ) the variation from the parallels in the synoptics, moreover, is exceedingly instructive, and further indicates the amplification of a later writer imperfectly acquainted with the circumstances. the { } first and second synoptists, in addition to the general expression "those buying and selling in the temple," mention only that jesus overthrew the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those selling doves. the third synoptist does not even give these particulars. the author of the fourth gospel, however, not only-makes jesus expel the sellers of doves and the moneychangers, but adds: "those selling oxen and sheep." now, not only is there not the slightest evidence that sheep and oxen were bought and sold in the temple, but it is obvious that there was no room there to do so. on the contrary, it is known that the market for cattle was not only distant from the temple, but even from the city.( ) the author himself betrays the foreign element in his account by making jesus address his words, when driving them all out, only "to them selling doves." why single these out and seem to exclude the sellers of sheep and oxen? he has apparently forgotten his own interpolation. in the first gospel, the connection of the words of jesus with the narrative suggests an explanation: xxi. "... and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats _of those selling doves, and saith to them_, &c." upon the occasion of this episode, the fourth gospel represents jesus as replying to the demand of the jews for a sign why he did such things: "destroy this temple, and within three days i will raise it up," which the jews understand very naturally only in a material sense, and which even the disciples only comprehended and believed "after the resurrection." the synoptists not only know nothing of this, but represent the saying as the false testimony which the false witnesses bare { } against jesus.( ) no such charge is brought against jesus at all in the fourth gospel. so little do the synoptists know of the conversation of jesus with the samaritan woman, and his sojourn for two days at sychar, that in his instructions to his disciples, in the first gospel, jesus positively forbids them either to go to the gentiles or to enter into any city of the samaritans.( ) the fourth gospel has very few miracles in common with the synoptics, and those few present notable variations. after the feeding of the five thousand, jesus, according to the synoptics, constrains his disciples to enter a ship and to go to the other side of the lake of gennesaret, whilst he himself goes up a mountain apart to pray. a storm arises, and jesus appears walking to them over the sea, whereat the disciples are troubled, but peter says to him: "lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee over the water," and on his going out of the ship over the water, and beginning to sink, he cries: "lord save me;" jesus stretched out his hand and caught him, and when they had come into the ship, the wind ceased, and they that were in the ship came and worshipped him, saying: "of a truth thou art the son of god." ( ) the fourth gospel, instead of representing jesus as retiring to the mountain to pray, which would have been opposed to the authors idea of the logos, makes the motive for going thither the knowledge of jesus that the people "would come and take him by force that they might make him a king."( ) the writer altogether ignores the episode of peter walking on the sea, and adds a new miracle by stating that, as soon as jesus was received on { } board, "the ship was at the land whither they were going."( ) the synoptics go on to describe the devout excitement and faith of all the country round, but the fourth gospel, limiting the effect on the multitude in the first instance to curiosity as to how jesus had crossed the lake, represents jesus as upbraiding them for following him, not because they saw miracles, but because they had eaten of the loaves and been filled,( ) and makes him deliver one of those long dogmatic discourses, interrupted by, and based upon, the remarks of the crowd, which so peculiarly distinguish the fourth gospel. without dwelling upon such details of miracles, however, we proceed with our slight comparison. whilst the fourth gospel from the very commencement asserts the foreknowledge of jesus as to who should betray him, and makes him inform the twelve that one of them is a devil, alluding to judas iscariot,( ) the synoptists represent jesus as having so little foreknowledge that judas should betray him that, shortly before the end and, indeed, according to the third gospel, only at the last supper, jesus promises that the disciples shall sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of israel,( ) and it is only at the last supper, after judas has actually arranged with the chief priests, and apparently from knowledge of the fact, that jesus for the first time speaks of his betrayal by him.( ) on his way to jerusalem, two days before the passover,( ) jesus comes to bethany where, { } according to the synoptics, being in the house of simon the leper, a woman with an alabaster box of very precious ointment came and poured the ointment upon his head, much to the indignation of the disciples, who say: "to what purpose is this waste? for this might have been sold for much, and given to the poor."( ) in the fourth gospel the episode takes place six days before the passover,( ) in the house of lazarus, and it is his sister mary who takes a pound of very costly ointment, but she anoints the feet of jesus and wipes his feet with her hair. it is judas iscariot, and not the disciples, who says: "why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence and given to the poor?" and jesus makes a similar reply to that in the synoptics, showing the identity of the occurrence described so differently.( ) the synoptics represent most clearly that jesus on the evening of the th nisan, after the custom of the jews, ate the passover with his disciples,( ) and that he was arrested in the first hours of the th nisan, the day on which he was put to death. nothing can be more distinct than the statement that the last supper was the paschal feast. "they made ready the passover [------], and when the hour was come, he sat down and the apostles with him, and he said to them: with desire i desired to eat this passover with you before i suffer" [------].( ) the fourth gospel, however, in accordance with the principle which is dominant throughout, represents the last repast { } which jesus eats with his disciples as a common supper [------], which takes place, not on the th, but on the th nisan, the day "before the feast of the passover" [------],( ) and his death takes place on the th, the day on which the paschal lamb was slain. jesus is delivered by pilate to the jews to be crucified about the sixth hour of "the preparation of the passover" [------],( ) and because it was "the preparation," the legs of the two men crucified with jesus were broken, that the bodies might not remain on the cross on the great day of the feast.( ) the fourth gospel totally ignores the institution of the christian festival at the last supper, but, instead, represents jesus as washing the feet of the disciples, enjoining them also to wash each other's feet: "for i gave you an example that ye should do according as i did to you."( ) the synoptics have no knowledge of this incident. immediately after the warning to peter of his future denial, jesus goes out with the disciples to the garden of gethsemane and, taking peter and the two sons of zebedee apart, began to be sorrowful and very depressed and, as he prayed in his agony that if possible the cup might pass from him, an angel comforts him. instead of this, the fourth gospel represents jesus as delivering, after the warning to peter, the longest discourses in the gospel: "let not your heart be troubled," &c; "i am the true vine,"( ) &c; and, although said to be written by one of the sons of zebedee who were with jesus on the occasion, the fourth gospel does not mention the agony in the garden but, on the contrary, makes jesus utter the long { } prayer xvii. -- , in a calm and even exulting spirit very far removed from the sorrow and depression of the more natural scene in gethsemane. the prayer, like the rest of the prayers in the gospel, is a mere didactic and dogmatic address for the benefit of the hearers. the arrest of jesus presents a similar contrast. in the synoptics, judas comes with a multitude from the chief priests and elders of the people armed with swords and staves, and, indicating his master by a kiss, jesus is simply arrested and, after the slight resistance of one of the disciples, is led away.( ) in the fourth gospel, the case is very different. judas comes with a band of men from the chief priests and pharisees, with lanterns and torches and weapons, and jesus--"knowing all things which were coming to pass"--himself goes towards them and asks: "whom seek ye?" judas plays no active part, and no kiss is given. the fourth evangelist is, as ever, bent on showing that all which happens to the logos is predetermined by himself and voluntarily encountered. as soon as jesus replies: "i am he," the whole band of soldiers go backwards and fall to the ground, an incident thoroughly in the spirit of the early apocryphal gospels still extant, and of an evidently legendary character. he is then led away first to annas, who sends him to caiaphas, whilst the synoptics naturally know nothing of annas, who was not the high priest and had no authority. we need not follow the trial, which is fundamentally different in the synoptics and fourth gospel; and we have already pointed out that, in the synoptics, jesus is crucified on the th nisan, whereas in the fourth gospel he is put to death--the spiritual paschal lamb--on the th nisan. according { } to the fourth gospel, jesus bears his own cross to calvary,( ) but the synoptics represent it as being borne by simon of cyrene.( ) as a very singular illustration of the inaccuracy of all the gospels, we may point to the circumstance that no two of them agree even about so simple a matter of fact as the inscription on the cross, assuming that there was one at all. they give it respectively as follows: "this is jesus the king of the jews;" "the king of the jews;" "this (is) the king of the jews;" and the fourth gospel: "jesus the nazarene the king of the jews."( ) the occurrences during the crucifixion are profoundly different in the fourth gospel from those narrated in the synoptics. in the latter, only the women are represented as beholding afar off,( ) but "the beloved disciple" is added in the fourth gospel, and instead of being far off, they are close to the cross; and for the last cries of jesus reported in the synoptics we have the episode in which jesus confides his mother to the disciple's care. we need not at present compare the other details of the crucifixion and resurrection, which are differently reported by each of the gospels. we have only indicated a few of the more salient differences between the fourth gospel and the synoptics, which are rendered much more striking, in the gospels themselves, by the profound dissimilarity of the sentiments uttered by jesus. we merely point out, in passing, the omission of important episodes from the fourth { } gospel, such as the temptation in the wilderness; the transfiguration, at which, according to the synoptics, the sons of zebedee were present; the last supper; the agony in the garden; the mournful cries on the cross; and, we may add, the ascension; and if we turn to the miracles of jesus, we find that almost all of those narrated by the synoptics are ignored, whilst an almost entirely new series is introduced. there is not a single instance of the cure of demoniacal possession in any form recorded in the fourth gospel. indeed the number of miracles is reduced in that gospel to a few typical cases; and although at the close it is generally said that jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, these alone are written with the declared purpose: "that ye might believe that jesus is the christ, the son of god."( ) we may briefly refer in detail to one miracle of the fourth gospel--the raising of lazarus. the extraordinary fact that the synoptists are utterly ignorant of this the greatest of the miracles attributed to jesus has been too frequently discussed to require much comment here. it will be remembered that, as the case of the daughter of jairus is, by the express declaration of jesus, one of mere suspension of consciousness,( ) the only instance in which a dead person is distinctly said, in any of the synoptics, to have been restored to life by jesus is that of the son of the widow of nain.( ) it is, therefore, quite impossible to suppose that the synoptists could have known of the raising of lazarus and wilfully omitted it. it is equally impossible to believe that the authors of the synoptic gospels, from whatever sources they may have drawn their materials, { } could have been ignorant of such a miracle had it really-taken place. this astounding miracle, according to the fourth gospel, created such general excitement that it was one of the leading events which led to the arrest and crucifixion of jesus.( ) if, therefore, the synoptics had any connection with the writers to whom they are referred, the raising of lazarus must have been personally known to their reputed authors either directly or through the apostles who are supposed to have inspired them, or even if they have any claim to contemporary origin the tradition of the greatest miracle of jesus must have been fresh throughout the church, if such a wonder had ever been performed.( ) the total ignorance of such a miracle displayed by the whole of the works of the new testament, therefore, forms the strongest presumptive evidence that the narrative in the fourth gospel is a mere imaginary scene, illustrative of the dogma: "i am the resurrection and the life," upon which it is based. this conclusion is confirmed by the peculiarities of the narrative itself. when jesus first hears, from the message of the sisters, that lazarus whom he loved was sick, he declares, xi. : "this sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of god, that the son of god may be glorified thereby;" and v. : "when, therefore [------], he heard that he was sick, at that time he continued two days in the place where he was." after that time he proposes to go into judaea, and explains to the disciples, v. : "our friend lazarus is fallen asleep; but i go that i may awake him out of sleep." the disciples reply, with the stupidity with which the fourth evangelist endows all those who hold colloquy with jesus, { } v. : "lord, if he is fallen asleep, he will recover. howbeit, jesus spake of his death; but they thought that he was speaking of the taking of rest in sleep. then said jesus unto them plainly: lazarus is dead, and i am glad for your sakes that i was not there, to the intent that ye may believe." the artificial nature of all this introductory matter will not have escaped the reader, and it is further illustrated by that which follows. arrived at bethany, they find that lazarus has lain in the grave already four days. martha says to jesus (v. £): "lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. and i know that even now whatsoever thou shalt ask of god, god will give thee. jesus saith unto her: they brother shall rise again." martha, of course, as usual, misunderstands this saying as applying to "the resurrection at the last day," in order to introduce the reply: "i am the resurrection and the life," &c. when they come to the house, and jesus sees mary and the jews weeping, "he groaned in spirit and troubled himself," and on reaching the grave itself (v. . f.), "jesus wept: then said the jews: behold how he loved him!" now this representation, which has ever since been the admiration of christendom, presents the very strongest marks of unreality. jesus, who loves lazarus so much, disregards the urgent message of the sisters and, whilst openly declaring that his sickness is not unto death, intentionally lingers until his friend dies. when he does go to bethany, and is on the very point of restoring lazarus to life and dissipating the grief of his family and friends he actually weeps and groans in his spirit. there is so total an absence of reason for such grief at such a moment that these tears, to any sober reader, are unmistakably mere theatrical adjuncts of a scene { } elaborated out of the imagination of the writer. the suggestion of the bystanders (v. ), that he might have prevented the death, is not more probable than the continuation (v. ): "jesus, therefore, again groaning in himself cometh to the grave." there, having ordered the stone to be removed, he delivers a prayer avowedly intended merely for the bystanders (v. ff): "and jesus lifted up his eyes and said, father, i thank thee that thou hast heard me, and i knew that thou hearest me always: but for the sake of the multitude which stand around i said this, that they may believe that thou hast sent me." this prayer is as evidently artificial as the rest of the details of the miracle but, as in other elaborately arranged scenic representations, the charm is altogether dispelled when closer examination shows the character of the dramatic elements. a careful consideration of the narrative and of all the facts of the case must, we think, lead to the conclusion that this miracle is not even a historical tradition of the life of jesus, but is wholly an ideal composition by the author of the fourth gospel. this being the case, the other miracles of the gospel need not detain us. if the historical part of the fourth gospel be in irreconcilable contradiction to the synoptics, the didactic is infinitely more so. the teaching of the one is totally different from that of the others, in spirit, form, and terminology; and although there are undoubtedly fine sayings throughout the work, in the prolix discourses of the fourth gospel there is not a single characteristic of the simple eloquence of the sermon on the mount. in the diffuse mysticism of the logos, we can scarcely recognise a trace of the terse practical wisdom of jesus of nazareth. it must, of course, be apparent even to the most superficial { } observer that, in the fourth gospel, we are introduced to a perfectly new system of instruction, and to an order of ideas of which there is not a vestige in the synoptics. instead of short and concise lessons full of striking truth and point, we find nothing but long and involved dogmatic discourses of little practical utility. the limpid spontaneity of that earlier teaching, with its fresh illustrations and profound sentences uttered without effort and untinged by art, is exchanged for diffuse addresses and artificial dialogues, in which labour and design are everywhere apparent. from pure and living morality couched in brief incisive sayings, which enter the heart and dwell upon the ear, we turn to elaborate philosophical orations without clearness or order, and to doctrinal announcements unknown to the synoptics. to the inquiry: "what shall i do to inherit eternal life?" jesus replies, in the synoptics: "thou shalt love the lord thy god with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself,... this do, and thou shalt live."( ) in the fourth gospel, to the question: "what must we do, that we may work the works of god?" jesus answers, "this is the work of god, that ye should believe in him whom he sent."( ) the teaching of jesus, in the synoptics, is almost wholly moral and, in the fourth gospel, it is almost wholly dogmatic. if christianity consist of the doctrines preached in the fourth gospel, it is not too much to say that the synoptics do not teach christianity at all. the extraordinary phenomenon is presented of three gospels, each professing to be complete in itself and to convey the good tidings of salvation to man, { } which have actually omitted the doctrines which are the condition of that salvation. the fourth gospel practically expounds a new religion. it is undeniable that morality and precepts of love and charity for the conduct of life are the staple of the teaching of jesus in the synoptics, and that dogma occupies so small a place that it is regarded as a subordinate and secondary consideration. in the fourth gospel, however, dogma is the one thing needful, and forms the whole substance of the preaching of the logos. the burden of his teaching is: "he that believeth on the son, hath eternal life, but he that believeth not the son, shall not see life, but the wrath of god abideth on him."( ) it is scarcely possible to put the contrast between the synoptics and the fourth gospel in too strong a light if we possessed the synoptics without the fourth gospel, we should have the exposition of pure morality based on perfect love to god and man. if we had the fourth gospel without the synoptics, we should have little more than a system of dogmatic theology without morality. not only is the doctrine and the terminology of the jesus of the fourth gospel quite different from that of the jesus of the synoptics, but so is the teaching of john the baptist. in the synoptics, he comes preaching the baptism of repentance( ) and, like the master, inculcating principles of morality;( ) but in the fourth gospel he has adopted the peculiar views of the author, proclaims "the lamb of god which taketh away the sins of the world,"( ) and bears witness that he is "the son of god."( ) we hear of the paraclete for the first time in the fourth gospel it is so impossible to ignore the distinct individuality { } of the jesus of the fourth gospel, and of his teaching, that even apologists are obliged to admit that the peculiarities of the author have coloured the portrait, and introduced an element of subjectivity into the discourses. it was impossible, they confess, that the apostle could remember verbally such long orations for half a century, and at best that they can only be accepted as substantially correct reports of the teaching of jesus.( ) "above all," says ewald, "the discourses of christ and of others in this gospel are clothed as by an entirely new colour: on this account also scepticism has desired to conclude that the apostle cannot have composed the gospel; and yet no conclusion is more unfounded. when the apostle at so late a period determined to compose the work, it was certainly impossible for him to reproduce all the words exactly as they were spoken, if he did not perhaps desire not merely to recall a few memorable sentences but, in longer discussions of more weighty subjects, to charm back all the animation with which they were once given. so he availed himself of that freedom in their revivification which is both quite intelligible in itself, and sufficiently warranted by the precedent of so many great examples of antiquity: and where the discourses extend to greater length, there entered involuntarily into the structure much of that fundamental conception and language regarding the { } manifestation of christ, which had long become deeply rooted in the apostle's soul. but as certainly as these discourses bear upon them the colouring of the apostle's mind, so certainly do they agree in their substantial contents with his best recollections--because the spruchsammlung proves that the discourses of christ in certain moments really could rise to the full elevation, which in john only surprises us throughout more than in matthew. to deny the apostolical authorship of the gospel for such reasons, therefore, were pure folly, and in the highest degree unjust. moreover, the circumstance that, in the drawing up of such discourses, we sometimes see him reproduce or further develop sayings which had already been recorded in the older gospels, can prove nothing against the apostolical origin of the gospel, as he was indeed at perfect liberty, if he pleased, to make use of the contents of such older writings when he considered it desirable, and when they came to the help of his own memory of those long passed days: for he certainly retained many or all of such expressions also in his own memory."( ) elsewhere, he describes the work as "glorified gospel history," composed out of "glorified recollection."( ) another strenuous defender of the authenticity of the fourth gospel wrote of it as follows: "nevertheless, everything is reconcilable," says gfrörer, "if one accepts that testimony of the elders as true. for as john must have written the gospel as an old man, that is to say not before the year -- of our era, there is an interval of more than half a century between the time { } when the events which he relates really happened, and the time of the composition of his book,--space enough certainly to make a few mistakes conceivable, even presupposing a good memory and unshaken love of truth. let us imagine, for instance, that to-day (in ) an old man of eighty to ninety years of age should write down from mere memory the occurrences of the american war (of independence), in which he himself in his early youth played a part. certainly in his narrative, even though it might otherwise be true, many traits would be found which would not agree with the original event. moreover, another particular circumstance must be added in connection with the fourth gospel. two-thirds of it consist of discourses, which john places in the mouth of jesus christ. now every day's experience proves that oral impressions are much more fleeting than those of sight. the happiest memory scarcely retains long orations after three or four years: how, then, could john with verbal accuracy report the discourses of jesus after fifty or sixty years! we must be content if he truly render the chief contents and spirit of them, and that he does this, as a rule, can be proved. it has been shown above that already, before christ, a very peculiar philosophy of religion had been formed among the egyptian jews, which found its way into palestine through the essenes, and also numbered numerous adherents amongst the jews of the adjacent countries of syria and asia minor. the apostle paul professed this: not less the evangelist john. undoubtedly, the latter allowed this theosophy to exercise a strong influence upon his representation of the life-history of jesus,"( ) &c. { } now all such admissions, whilst they are absolutely requisite to explain the undeniable phenomena of the fourth gospel, have one obvious consequence: the fourth gospel, by whomsoever written,--even if it could be traced to the apostle john himself,--has no real historical value, being at best the "glorified recollections" of an old man, written down half a century after the events recorded. the absolute difference between the teaching of this gospel and of the synoptics becomes perfectly intelligible, when the long discourses are recognized to be the result of alexandrian philosophy artistically interwoven with developed pauline christianity, and put into the mouth of jesus. it will have been remarked that along with the admission of great subjectivity in the report of the discourses, and the plea that nothing beyond the mere substance of the original teaching can reasonably be looked for, there is, in the extracts we have given, an assertion that there actually is a faithful reproduction in this gospel of the original substance. there is not a shadow of proof of this, but on the contrary the strongest reason for denying the fact; for, unless it be admitted that the synoptics have so completely omitted the whole doctrinal part of the teaching of jesus, have so carefully avoided the very peculiar terminology of the logos gospel, and have conveyed so unhistorical and erroneous an impression of the life and religious system of jesus that, without the fourth gospel, we should not actually have had an idea of his fundamental doctrines, we must inevitably recognize that the fourth gospel cannot possibly be a true reproduction of his teaching. it is impossible that jesus can have had two such diametrically opposed systems of teaching,--one purely moral, the other wholly dogmatic; one expressed in { } wonderfully terse, clear, brief sayings and parables, the other in long, involved, and diffuse discourses; one clothed in the great language of humanity, the other concealed in obscure philosophic terminology;--and that these should have been kept so distinct as they are in the synoptics, on the one hand, and the fourth gospel, on the other. the tradition of justin martin applies solely to the system of the synoptics: "brief and concise were the sentences uttered by him: for he was no sophist, but his word was the power of god."( ) we have already pointed out the evident traces of artificial construction in the discourses and dialogues of the fourth gospel, and the more closely these are examined, the more clear does it become that they are not genuine reports of the teaching of jesus, but mere ideal compositions by the author of the fourth gospel. the speeches of john the baptist, the discourses of jesus, and the reflections of the evangelist himself,( ) are marked by the same peculiarity of style and proceed from the same mind. it is scarcely possible to determine where the one begins and the other ends.( ) it is quite clear, for instance, that the author himself, without a break, continues the words which he puts into the mouth of jesus, in the colloquy with nicodemus, but it is not easy to determine where. the whole dialogue is artificial in the extreme, and is certainly not genuine, and this is apparent not only from the replies attributed to the "teacher of israel," but to the irrelevant manner in which the reflections loosely ramble from the new birth to the dogmatic statements in the thirteenth and following verses, which are the never-failing resource of the { } evangelist when other subjects are exhausted. the sentiments and almost the words either attributed to jesus, or added by the writer, to which we are now referring, iii. ff., we find again in the very same chapter, either put into the mouth of john the baptist, or as reflections of the author, verses -- , for again we add that it is difficult anywhere to discriminate the speaker. indeed, while the synoptics are rich in the abundance of practical counsel and profound moral insight, as well as in variety of illustrative parables, it is remarkable how much sameness there is in all the discourses of the fourth gospel, a very few ideas being constantly reproduced. whilst the teaching of jesus in the synoptics is singularly universal and impersonal, in the fourth gospel it is purely personal, and rarely passes beyond the declaration of his own dignity, and the inculcation of belief in him as the only means of salvation. there are certainly some sayings of rare beauty which tradition or earlier records may have preserved, but these may easily be distinguished from the mass of the work. a very distinct trace of ideal composition is found in xvii. : "and this is eternal life, to know thee the only true god, and him whom thou didst send, even jesus christ." even apologists admit that it is impossible that jesus could speak of himself as "jesus christ." we need not, however, proceed further with such analysis. we believe that no one can calmly and impartially examine the fourth gospel without being convinced of its artificial character. if some portions possess real charm, it is of a purely ideal kind, and their attraction consists chiefly in the presence of a certain vague but suggestive mysticism. the natural longing of humanity for any revelation regarding a future state has not been { } appealed to in vain. that the diffuse and often monotonous discourses of this gospel, however, should ever have been preferred to the grand simplicity of the teaching of the synoptics, illustrated by such parables as the wise and foolish virgins, the sower, and the prodigal son, and culminating in the sermon on the mount, each sentence of which is so full of profound truth and beauty, is little to the credit of critical sense and judgment. the elaborate explanations by which the phenomena of the fourth gospel are reconciled with the assumption that it was composed by the apostle john are in vain, and there is not a single item of evidence within the first century and a half which does not agree with internal testimony in opposing the supposition. to one point, however, we must briefly refer in connection with this statement. it is asserted that the gospel and epistles--or at least the first epistle--of the canon ascribed to the apostle john are by one author, although this is not without contradiction,( ) and very many of those who agree as to the identity of authorship by no means admit the author to have been the apostle john. it is argued, therefore, that the use of the epistle by polycarp and papias is evidence of the apostolic origin of the gospel. we have, however, seen, that not only is it very uncertain that polycarp made use of the epistle at all, but that he does not in any case mention its author's name. there is not a particle of evidence that he ascribed the epistle, even supposing he knew it, to the { } apostle john. with regard to papias, the only authority for the assertion that he knew the epistle is the statement of eusebius already quoted and discussed, that: "he used testimonies out of john's first epistle,"( ) there is no evidence, however, even supposing the statement of eusebius to be correct, that he ascribed it to the apostle. the earliest undoubted references to the epistle, in fact, are by irenæus and clement of alexandria, so that this evidence is of little avail for the gospel. there is no name attached to the first epistle, and the second and third have the superscription of "the presbyter," which, applying the argument of ewald regarding the author of the apocalypse, ought to be conclusive against their being written by an apostle. as all three are evidently by the same writer, and intended to be understood as by the author of the gospel, and that writer does not pretend to be an apostle, but calls himself a simple presbyter, the epistles likewise give presumptive evidence against the apostolic authorship of the gospel. there is another important testimony against the johannine origin of the fourth gospel to which we must briefly refer. we have pointed out that, according to the fourth gospel, jesus did not eat the paschal supper with his disciples, but that being arrested on the th nisan, he was put to death on the th, the actual day upon which the paschal lamb was sacrificed. the synoptics, on the contrary, represent that jesus ate the passover with his disciples on the evening of the th, and was crucified on the th nisan. the difference of opinion indicated by these contradictory accounts actually prevailed in various churches, and in the { } second half of the second century a violent discussion arose as to the day upon which "the true passover of the lord" should be celebrated, the church in asia minor maintaining that it should be observed on the th nisan,--the day on which, according to the synoptics, jesus himself celebrated the passover and instituted the christian festival,--whilst the roman church as well as most other christians,--following the fourth gospel, which represents jesus as not celebrating the last passover, but being himself slain upon the th nisan, the true paschal lamb,--had abandoned the day of the jewish feast altogether, and celebrated the christian festival on easter sunday, upon which the resurrection was supposed to have taken place. polycarp, who went to rome to represent the churches of asia minor in the discussions upon the subject, could not be induced to give up the celebration on the th nisan, the day which, according to tradition, had always been observed, and he appealed to the practice of the apostle john himself in support of that date. eusebius quotes from irenæus the statement of the case: "for neither could anicetus persuade polycarp not to observe it (the th nisan), because he had ever observed it with john the disciple of our lord, and with the rest of the apostles with whom he consorted."( ) towards the end of the century, polycrates, the bishop of ephesus, likewise appeals to the practice of "john who reclined upon the bosom of the lord," as well as of the apostle philip and his daughters, and of polycarp and others in support of the same day: "all these observed { } the th day of the passover, according to the gospel, deviating from it in no respect, but following according to the rule of the faith."(l) now it is evident that, according to this undoubted testimony, the apostle john by his own practice, ratified the account of the synoptics, and contradicted the data of the fourth gospel, and upon the supposition that he so long lived in asia minor it is probable that his authority largely contributed to establish the observance of the th nisan there. we must, therefore, either admit that the apostle john by his practice reversed the statement of his own gospel, or that he was not its author, which of course is the natural conclusion. without going further into the discussion, which would detain us too long, it is clear that the paschal controversy is opposed to the supposition that the apostle john was the author of the fourth gospel.( ) we have seen that, whilst there is not one particle of evidence during a century and a half after the events recorded in the fourth gospel that it was composed by the son of zebedee, there is, on the contrary, the strongest reason for believing that he did not write it. the first writer who quotes a passage of the gospel with the mention of his name is theophilus of antioch, who gives the few words: "in the beginning was the word and the word was with god," as spoken by "john," whom he considers amongst the divinely inspired [------] { } [------],( ) though even he does not distinguish. him as the apostle. we have seen the legendary nature of the late traditions regarding the composition of the gospel, of which a specimen was given in the defence of it in the canon of muratori, and we must not further quote them. the first writer who distinctly classes the four gospels together is irenæus; and the reasons which he gives for the existence of precisely that number in the canon of the church illustrate the thoroughly uncritical character of the fathers, and the slight dependence which can be placed upon their judgments. "but neither can the gospels be more in number than they are," says irenæus, "nor, on the other hand, can they be fewer. for as there are four quarters of the world in which we are, and four general winds [------], and the church is disseminated throughout all the world, and the gospel is the pillar and prop of the church and the spirit of life, it is right that she should have four pillars, on all sides breathing out immortality and revivifying men. from which it is manifest that the word, the maker of all, he who sitteth upon the cherubim and containeth all things, who was manifested to man, has given to us the gospel, four-formed but possessed by one spirit; as david also says, supplicating his advent: 'thou that sittest between the cherubim, shine forth.' for the cherubim also are four-faced, and their faces are symbols of the working of the son of god.... and the gospels, therefore, are in harmony with these amongst which christ is seated. for the gospel according to john relates his first effectual and glorious generation from the father, saying: 'in the ad autolyc, ii. . tischendorf dates this work about a.d. . wann wurden, a. s. w., p. , anm. . { } beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god,' and 'all things were made by him, and without him nothing was made.' on this account also this gospel is full of all trustworthiness, for such is his person.( ) but the gospel according to luke, being as it were of priestly character, opened with zacharias the priest sacrificing to god.... but matthew narrates his generation as a man, saying: 'the book of the generation of jesus christ, the son of david, the son of abraham,' and 'the birth of jesus christ was on this wise,' this gospel, therefore, is anthropomorphic, and on this account a man, humble and mild in character, is presented throughout the gospel. but mark makes his commencement after a prophetic spirit coming down from on high unto men, saying: 'the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ, as it is written in isaiah the prophet;' indicating the winged form of the gospel; and for this reason he makes a compendious and precursory declaration, for this is the prophetic character.... such, therefore, as was the course of the son of god, such also is the form of the living creatures; and such as is the form of the living creatures, such also is the character of the gospel. for quadriform are the living creatures, quadriform is the gospel, and quadriform the course of the lord. and on this account four covenants were given to the human race.... these things being thus: vain and ignorant and, moreover, audacious are those who set aside the form of the gospel, and declare the aspects of the gospels as either more or less than has been said."( ) as such principles of criticism presided the greek of this rather unintelligible sentence is not preserved. the latin version reads as follows: propter hoc et omni fiducia plenum est evangelium istud; talis est enim persona ejus. { } over the formation of the canon, it is not singular that so many of the decisions of the fathers have been reversed. irenæus himself mentioned the existence of heretics who rejected the fourth gospel,( ) and epiphanius( ) refers to the alogi, who equally denied its authenticity, but it is not needful for us further to discuss this point. enough has been said to show that the testimony of the fourth gospel is of no value towards establishing the truth of miracles and the reality of divine revelation. end of vol. ii. supernatural religion: an inquiry into the reality of divine revelation. in three volumes. vol. iii. complete edition. carefully revised. london: longmans, green, and co., . [the right of translation is reserved.] "credulity is as real, if not so great, a sin as unbelief." archbishop trench. "the abnegation of reason is not the evidence of faith, but the confession of despair." canon lightfoot. pg editor's note: this file has been provided with an image of the original scan for each page which is linked to the page number in the html file. nearly every page in the text has many greek passages which have been indicated where they occur by [���] as have many complex tables; these passages may be viewed in the page images. some of the pages have only a few lines of text and then the rest of the page is taken up with complex footnotes in english, greek and hebrew. the reader may click on the page numbers in the html file to see the entire page with the footnotes. �dw supernatural religion: an inquiry into the reality of divine revelation part iv. the acts of the apostles chapter i. the external evidence before we proceed to examine the evidence for miracles and the reality of divine revelation which is furnished by the last historical book of the new testament, entitled the "acts of the apostles," it is well that we should briefly recall to mind some characteristics of the document, which most materially affect the value of any testimony emanating from it. whilst generally asserting the resurrection of jesus, and his bodily ascension, regarding which indeed it adds fresh details, this work presents to us a new cycle of miracles, and so profusely introduces supernatural agency into the history of the early church that, in comparison with it, the gospels seem almost sober narratives. the apostles are instructed and comforted by visions and revelations, and they, and all who believe, are filled with the holy spirit and speak with other tongues. the apostles are delivered from { } prison and from bonds by angels or by an earthquake. men fall dead or are smitten with blindness at their rebuke. they heal the sick, raise the dead, and handkerchiefs brought from their bodies cure diseases and expel evil spirits. as a general rule, any document so full of miraculous episodes and supernatural occurrences would, without hesitation, be characterized as fabulous and incredible, and would not, by any sober-minded reader, be for a moment accepted as historical. there is no other testimony for these miracles. let the reader endeavour to form some conception of the nature and amount of evidence necessary to establish the truth of statements antecedently so incredible, and compare it with the testimony of this solitary and anonymous document, the character and value of which we shall now proceed more closely to examine. it is generally admitted, and indeed it is undeniable, that no distinct and unequivocal reference to the acts of the apostles, and to luke as their author, occurs in the writings of fathers before one by irenæus( ) about the end of the second century. passages are, however, pointed out in earlier writings as indicating the use and consequent existence of our document, all of which we shall now examine. { } several of these occur in the "epistle to the corinthian s," ascribed to clement of rome. the first, immediately compared with the passage to which it is supposed to be a reference,( ) is as follows:-- [------] the words of the epistle are not a quotation, but merely occur in the course of an address. they do not take the form of an axiom, but are a comment on the conduct of the corinthians, which may have been suggested either by written or oral tradition, or by moral maxims long before current in heathen philosophy. it is unnecessary to enter minutely into this, however, or to indicate the linguistic differences between the two passages, for one point alone settles the question. in the acts: the saying, "it is more blessed to give than to receive," is distinctly introduced as a quotation of { } "words of the lord jesus," and the exhortation "to remember" them, conveys the inference that they were well known. they must either have formed part of gospels now no longer extant, as they are not found in ours, or have been familiar as the unwritten tradition of sayings of the master. in either case, if the passage in the epistle be a reference to these words at all, it cannot reasonably be maintained that it must necessarily have been derived from a work which itself distinctly quotes the words from another source. it would be against every principle of evidence, under such circumstances, to affirm the passage to be an allusion to this special work, of whose previous existence we have no independent evidence.( ) the slight coincidence in the expression, without indication that any particular passage is in the mind of the author, and without any mention of the acts, therefore, is no evidence of the existence of that work. a few critics point to some parts of the following passage as showing acquaintance with acts:--"through jealousy paul also pointed out the way to the prize of patience, having borne chains seven times, having been put to flight, having been stoned; having become a preacher both in the east and in the west, he gained the noble renown due to his faith; having taught the whole world righteousness, and come to the extremity of the west, and having suffered martyrdom by command of the rulers, he was thus removed from the world and went to the holy place, having become a most eminent { } example of patience."( ) the slightest impartial consideration, however, must convince any one that this passage does not indicate the use of the "acts of the apostles." the epistle speaks of seven imprisonments, of some of which the acts make no mention, and this must, therefore, have been derived from another source.( ) the reference to his "coming to the extremity of the west" [------], whatever interpretation be put upon it, and to his death, obviously carries the history further than the acts, and cannot have been derived from that document. the last passage, which, it is affirmed,( ) shows acquaintance with the acts of the apostles is the following: "but what shall we say regarding david who hath obtained a good report [------]? unto whom [------] god said: 'i found a man after mine own heart, david, the son of jesse: in everlasting mercy i anointed him.'"( ) this is said to be derived from acts xiii. : "and when he removed him he raised up to them david for king; to whom also he { } gave testimony [------]: i found david the son of jesse, a man after mine own heart, who will do all my will."( ) the passage, however, is compounded of two quotations loosely made from the septuagint version of the old testament, from which all the quotations in the epistle are taken. ps. lxxxviii. : "i found david my servant; in holy mercy i anointed him."( ) and sam. xiii. : "a man after his own heart."( ) clement of alexandria quotes this passage from the epistle, and for "in everlasting mercy" reads "with holy oil" [------] as in the psalm.( ) although, therefore, our alexandrian ms. of the epistle has the reading which we have given above, even if we suppose that the alexandrian clement may have found a more correct version in his ms., the argument would not be affected. the whole similarity lies in the insertion of "the son of jesse," but this was a most common addition to any mention of david, and by the completion of the passage from the psalm, the omission of "who will do all my will," the peculiar phrase of the acts, as well as the difference of introductory expressions, any connection between the two is severed, and it is apparent that the quotation of the epistle may legitimately be referred to the septuagint,( ) with which it agrees much more closely { } than with the acts. in no case could such slight coincidences prove acquaintance with the acts of the apostles.( ) only one passage of the "epistle of barnabas" is referred to by any one( ) as indicating acquaintance with the acts. it is as follows, c. : "if therefore the son of god, being lord, and about to judge quick and dead [------] suffered," &c. this is compared with acts x. ... "and to testify that it is he who has been appointed by god judge of quick and dead" [------]. lardner, who compares the expression of the epistle with acts, equally compares it with that in tim. iv. ... "and christ jesus who is about to judge the quick and dead" [------], to which it is more commonly referred,( ) and pet. iv. ... "to him who is ready to judge quick and dead" [------]. he adds, however: "it is not possible to say, what text he refers to, though that in timothy has (he same words. but perhaps there is no proof that he refers to any. this was an article known to every common christian; whereas this writer (whoever he be) was able to teach the christian religion, and that without respect to any written gospels or epistles."( ) it is scarcely { } necessary to add anything to this. there is of course no trace of the use of acts in the epistle.( ) it is asserted that there is a "clear allusion"( ) to acts in the pastor of hermas. the passages may be compared as follows:-- [------] the slightest comparison of these passages suffices to show that the one is not dependent on the other. the old testament is full of passages in which the name of the lord is magnified as the only source of safety and salvation. in the pauline epistles likewise there are numerous passages of a similar tenour. for instance, the passage from joel ii. , is quoted rom. x. : "for whosoever shall call on the name of the lord shall be saved" [------]( ) there was in fact no formula more current either amongst the jews or in the early church; and there is no legitimate ground for tracing such an expression to the acts of the apostles.( ) { } the only other passage which is quoted( ) as indicating acquaintance with acts is the following, which we at once contrast with the supposed parallel:-- [------] here again a formula is employed which is common throughout the new testament, and which, applied as it is here to those who were persecuted, we have reason to believe was in general use in the early church. it is almost unnecessary to point out any examples. everywhere "the name" of god or of jesus is the symbol used to represent the concrete idea, and in the heavenly jerusalem of the apocalypse the servants of god and of the lamb are to have "his name" on their foreheads. the one expression, however, which is peculiar in the passage: "counted worthy,"--in the acts [------], and in the pastor [------],--is a perfectly natural and simple one, the use of which cannot be exclusively conceded to the acts of the apostles. it is found frequently in the pauline epistles, as for instance in thes. i. , where, after saying that they give thanks to god for them and glory in the churches of god for the patience and faith with which the thessalonians endure { } persecutions, the writer continues: "which is a token of the righteous judgment of god, that ye may he counted worthy [------] of the kingdom of god, for which ye also suffer [------];" and again, in the same chapter, v. , , "wherefore we also pray always for you that our god may count you worthy [------] of the calling, and fulfil all good pleasure of goodness and work of faith with power; _that the name of our lord jesus may he glorified in you_ [------]" &c. the passage we are examining cannot be traced to the "acts of the apostles."( ) it must be obvious to all that the pastor of hennas does not present any evidence even of the existence of the acts at the time it was written.( ) only two passages in the epistles of pseudo-ignatius are pointed out as indicating acquaintance with the acts, and even these are not advanced by many critics. we have already so fully discussed these epistles that no more need now be said. we must pronounce them spurious in all their recensions and incapable of affording evidence upon any point earlier than towards the end of the second century. those, however, who would still receive as genuine the testimony of the three syriac epistles must declare that they do not present any trace of the existence of the acts, inasmuch as the two passages adduced to show the use of that work do not occur in those letters. they are found in the shorter recension of the epistles to the smyrnæans and philadelphians. we might, therefore, altogether refuse to examine the { } passages, but in order to show the exact nature of the case made out by apologists, we shall briefly refer to them. we at once compare the first with its supposed parallel.( ) [------] there is nothing in this passage which bears any peculiar analogy to the acts, for the statement is a simple reference to a tradition which is also embodied both in the third synoptic( ) and in the fourth gospel;( ) and the mere use of the common words [------] and [------] could not prove anything. the passage occurs in the epistle immediately after a quotation, said by jerome to be taken from the gospel according to the hebrews, relating an appearance of jesus to "those who were with peter," in which jesus is represented as making them handle him in order to convince them that he is not an incorporeal spirit.( ) the quotation bears considerable affinity to the narrative in the third synoptic (xxiv. ), at the close of which jesus is represented as eating with the disciples. it is highly probable that the gospel from which the writer of the epistle quoted contained the same detail, to which this would naturally be a direct { } descriptive reference. in any case it affords no evidence of the existence of the acts of the apostles.( ) the second passage, which is still more rarely advanced,( ) is as follows:-- [------] the only point of coincidence between these two passages is the use of the word "wolves." in the epistle the expression is [------], whilst in acts it is [------]. now the image is substantially found in the sermon on the mount, one form of which is given in the first synoptic, vii. , , and which undeniably must have formed part of many of the gospels which are mentioned by the writer of the third synoptic. we find justin martyr twice quoting another form of the saying: "for many [------] shall arrive in my name, outwardly indeed clothed in sheep's skins, but inwardly being ravening wolves [------]."( ) the use of the term as applied to men was certainly common in the early church. the idea expressed in the epistle is more closely found in timothy iii. ff., in the description of those who are to come in the last days, and who will (v. ) "creep into the houses and make captive [------] silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts." { } the passage cannot be traced to the acts,( ) and the ignatian epistles, spurious though they be, do not present any evidence of the existence of that work.( ) only two sentences are pointed out in the "epistle of polycarp" as denoting acquaintance with the acts. the first and only one of these on which much stress is laid is the following:( ) [------] it will be obvious to all that, along with much similarity, there is likewise divergence between these sentences. in the first phrase the use of [------] in the epistle separates it from the supposed parallel, in which the word is [------]. the number of passages in the pauline epistles corresponding with it are legion (e.g. cor. iv. , ephes. i. ). the second member of the sentence, which is of course the more important, is in reality, we contend, a reference to the very psalm quoted in acts immediately after the verse before us, couched in not unusual phraseology. psalm xvi. (sept. xv.), reads: { } "for thou wilt not leave my soul in hell" [------].( ) in ps. xviii. (sept. xvii. ) we have, "the pains of hell [------] compassed me about."( ) the difference between the [------] of the epistle and the [------] of the acts is so distinct that, finding a closer parallel in the psalms to which reference is obviously made in both works, it is quite impossible to trace the phrase necessarily to the acts. such a passage cannot prove the use of that work,( ) but, if it could, we might inquire what evidence for the authorship and trustworthiness of the acts could be deduced from the circumstance?( ) the second passage, referred to by a few writers,( ) is as follows:-- [------] it is not necessary to do more than contrast these passages to show how little the "epistle of polycarp" can witness for the "acts of the apostles." we have already examined another supposed reference to this very passage, and the expressions in the epistle, whilst scarcely presenting a single point of linguistic analogy to { } the sentence in the acts, only tend to show how common and natural such language was in the early church in connection with persecution. whilst we constantly meet with the thought expressed by the writer of the epistle throughout the writings of the new testament, we may more particularly point to the first petrine epistle for further instances of this tone of exhortation to those suffering persecution for the cause. for instance, pet. ii. ff, and again iii. ,( ) "but if ye even suffer [------] for righteousness' sake, blessed are ye." in the next chapter the tone is still more closely analogous. speaking of persecutions, the writer says, iv. , ".... but according as ye are partakers of christ's sufferings rejoice," &c. &c. . "if ye are reproached in christ's name [------] blessed are ye, for the spirit of glory and of god resteth upon you." . "for let none of you suffer [------] as a murderer," &c. &c. . "but if as a christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him praise god in this name [------]" &c. &c. nothing but evidential destitution could rely upon the expression in the "epistle of polycarp" to show acquaintance with acts. few apologists point out with confidence any passages from the voluminous writings of justin martyr, as indicating the use of the acts of the apostles. we may, however, quote such expressions as the more undaunted amongst them venture to advance. the first of these is the following:( ) "for the jews having the prophecies and ever expecting the christ to come knew him not [------], and not only so, but they also maltreated him. but { } the gentiles, who had never heard any thing regarding the christ until his apostles, having gone forth from jerusalem, declared the things concerning him, and delivered the prophecies, having been filled with joy and faith, renounced their idols and dedicated themselves to the unbegotten god through the christ"( ) this is compared with acts xiii. , "for they that dwell at jerusalem and their rulers not knowing this (man) [------] nor yet the voices of the prophets which are read every sabbath day, fulfilled them by their judgment of him," &c. . "but the gentiles, hearing, rejoiced and glorified the word of the lord," &c.( ) we may at once proceed to give the next passage. in the dialogue with trypho, justin has by quotations from the prophets endeavoured to show that the sufferings of christ, and also the glory of his second advent had been foretold, and trypho replies: "supposing these things to be even as thou sayest, and that it was foretold that christ was to suffer [------], and has been called a stone, and after his first coming, in which it had been announced that he was to suffer, should come in glory, and become judge of all, and eternal king and priest;" &c.,( ) and in another place, "for { } if it had been obscurely declared by the prophets that the christ should suffer [------] and after these things be lord of all," &c.( ) this is compared with acts xxvi. , ".... saying nothing except those things which the prophets and moses said were to come to pass, ( ) whether the christ should suffer [------], whether, the first out of the resurrection from the dead, he is about to proclaim light unto the people and to the gentiles."( ) it is only necessary to quote these passages to show how unreasonable it is to maintain that they show the use of the acts by justin. he simply sets forth from the prophets, direct, the doctrines which formed the great text of the early church. some of the warmest supporters of the canon admit the "uncertainty" of such coincidences, and do not think it worth while to advance them. there are one or two still more distant analogies sometimes pointed out which do not require more particular notice.( ) there is no evidence whatever that justin was acquainted with the acts of the apostles.( ) { } some apologists( ) claim hegesippus as evidence for the existence of the acts, on the strength of the following passages in the fragment of his book preserved by eusebius. he puts into the mouth of james the just, whilst being martyred, the expression: "i beseech (thee) lord god, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." this is compared with the words said to have been uttered by the martyr stephen, acts vii. , "lord, lay not this sin to their charge.,, the passage is more commonly advanced as showing acquaintance with luke xxiii. , and we have already discussed it.( ) lardner apparently desires it to do double duty, but it is scarcely worth while seriously to refer to the claim here. the passage more generally relied upon, though that also is only advanced by a few,( ) is the following, "this man was a faithful witness both to jews and greeks that jesus is the christ,"( ) [------]. this is compared with acts xx. , where paul is represented as saying of himself, ".... testifying fully both to jews and greeks repentance toward god, and faith toward our lord jesus christ" [------]. the two passages are totally different both in sense and language, and that the use of acts is deduced from so distant an analogy only serves to show the slightness of the evidence with which apologists have to be content. { } papias need not long detain us, for it is freely admitted by most divines that he does not afford evidence of any value that he was acquainted with the acts. for the sake of completeness we may however refer to the points which are sometimes mentioned. a fragment of the work of papias is preserved giving an account of the death of judas, which differs materially both from the account in the first synoptic and in acts i. f.( ) judas is represented as having gone about the world a great example of impiety, for his body having swollen so much that he could not pass where a waggon easily passed, he was crushed by the waggon so that his entrails emptied out [------]. apollinaris of laodicæa quotes this passage to show that judas did not die when he hung himself, but subsequently met with another fate, in this way reconciling the statements in the gospel and acts.( ) he does not say that papias used the story for this purpose, and it is fundamentally contradictory to the account in acts i. , . "now this man purchased a field with the reward of the unrighteousness, and falling headlong burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out" [------]. it is scarcely necessary to argue that the passage does not indicate any acquaintance with acts( ) as some few critics are inclined to assert.( ) the { } next analogy pointed out is derived from the statement of eusebius that papias mentions a wonderful story which he had heard from the daughters of philip (whom eusebius calls "the apostle,") regarding a dead man raised to life.( ) in acts xxi. , , it is stated that philip the evangelist had four daughters. it is hardly conceivable that this should be advanced as an indication that papias knew the acts. the last point is that eusebius says: "and again (he narrates) another marvel regarding justus who was surnamed barsabas; how he drank a baneful poison and by the grace of the lord sustained no harm. but that this justus, after the ascension of the saviour, the holy apostles appointed with matthias, and that they prayed (on the occasion) of the filling up of their number by lot instead of the traitor judas, the scripture of the acts thus relates: 'and they appointed two, joseph called barsabas, who was surnamed justus, and matthias. and they prayed and said,' &c."( ) whatever argument can be deduced from this, obviously rests entirely upon the fact that papias is said to have referred to justus who was named barsabas, for of course the last sentence is added by eusebius himself, and has nothing to do with papias. this is fairly admitted by lardner and others. lardner says: "papias does undoubtedly give some confirmation to the history of the acts of the apostles, in what he says of philip; and especially in what he says of justus, called { } barsabas. but i think it cannot be affirmed, that he did particularly mention, or refer to, the book of the acts. for i reckon, it is eusebius himself who adds that quotation out of the acts, upon occasion of what papias had written of the before-mentioned barsabas."( ) there is no evidence worthy of attention that papias was acquainted with the acts.( ) no one seriously pretends that the clementine homilies afford any evidence of the use or existence of the acts; and few, if any, claim the epistle to diognetus as testimony for it.( ) we may, however, quote the only passage which is pointed out. ".... these who hold the view that they present them (offerings) to god as needing them might more rightly esteem it foolishness and not worship of god. for he who made the heaven and the earth, and all things in them, and who supplies to us all whatever we need, can himself be in need of none of those things which he himself presents to those who imagine that they give (to him)."( ) this is { } compared with acts xvii. : "the god that made the world and all things in it, he being lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; ( ) neither is served by men's hand as though he needed anything, seeing he himself giveth to all life and breath and all things."( ) there is nothing here but a coincidence of sense, though with much variation between the two passages, but the epistle argues from a different context, and this illustration is obvious enough to be common to any moralist. there is not a single reason which points to the acts as the source of the writer's argument. basilides and valentinus are not claimed at all by apologists as witnesses for the existence of the acts of the apostles, nor is marcion, whose canon, however, of which it formed no part, is rather adverse to the work than merely negative. tertullian taunts marcion for receiving paul as an apostle, although his name is not mentioned in the gospel, and yet not receiving the acts of the apostles in which alone his history is narrated;( ) but it does not in the least degree follow from this that marcion knew the work and deliberately rejected it. a passage of tatian's oration to the greeks is pointed out by some( ) as showing his acquaintance with the acts. it is as follows: "i am not willing to worship the creation { } made by him for us. sun and moon are made for us: how, therefore, shall i worship my own servants? how can i declare stocks and stones to be gods?... but neither should the unnameable [------] god be presented with bribes; for he who is without need of anything [------] must not be calumniated by us as needy [------]."(l) this is compared with acts xvii. , , quoted above, and it only serves to show how common such language was. lardner himself says of the passage: "this is much the same thought, and applied to the same purpose, with paul's, acts xvii. , _as though he needeth anything_. but it is a character of the deity so obvious, that i think it cannot determine us to suppose he had an eye to those words of the apostle."( ) the language, indeed, is quite different and shows no acquaintance with the acts.( ) eusebius states that the severians who more fully established tatian's heresy rejected both the epistles of paul and the acts of the apostles.( ) dionysius of corinth is rarely adduced by any one as testimony for the acts. the only ground upon which he is at all referred to is a statement of eusebius in mentioning his epistles. speaking of his epistle to the athenians, eusebius says: "he relates, moreover, that dionysius the areopagite who was converted to the faith by paul the apostle, according to the account given in the { } acts, was appointed the first bishop of the church of the athenians."( ) even apologists admit that it is doubtful how far dionysius referred to the acts,( ) the mention of the book here being most obviously made by eusebius himself. melito of sardis is not appealed to by any writer in connection with our work, nor can claudius apollinaris be pressed into this service. athenagoras is supposed by some to refer to the very same passage in acts xvii. , , which we have discussed when dealing with the work of tatian. athenagoras says: "the creator and father of the universe is not in need of blood, nor of the steam of burnt sacrifices, nor of the fragrance of flowers and of incense, he himself being the perfect fragrance, inwardly and outwardly without need."( ) and further on: "and you kings indeed build palaces for yourselves; but the world is not made as being needed by god."( ) these passages occur in the course of a defence of christians for not offering sacrifices, and both in language and context they are quite independent of the acts of the apostles. in the epistle of the churches of vienne and lyons, giving an account of the persecution against them, it is said that the victims were praying for those from whom they suffered cruelties: "like stephen the perfect martyr: { } 'lord, lay not this sin to their charge.' but if he was supplicating for those who stoned him, how much more for the brethren?"(l) the prayer here quoted agrees with that ascribed to stephen in acts vii. . there is no mention of the acts of the apostles in the epistle, and the source from which the writers obtained their information about stephen is of course not stated. if there really was a martyr of the name of stephen, and if these words were actually spoken by him, the tradition of the fact, and the memory of his noble saying, may well have remained in the church, or have been recorded in writings then current, from one of which, indeed, eminent critics conjecture that the author of acts derived his materials, and in this case the passage obviously does not prove the use of the acts. if, on the other hand, there never was such a martyr by whom these words were spoken, and the whole story must be considered an original invention by the author of acts, then, in that case, and in that case only, the passage does show the use of the acts.( ) supposing that the use of acts be held to be thus indicated, what does this prove? merely that the acts of the apostles were in existence in the year - , when the epistle of { } vienne and lyons was written. no light whatever would thus be thrown upon the question of its authorship; and neither its credibility nor its sufficiency to prove the reality of a cycle of miracles would be in the slightest degree established. ptolemæus and heracleon ueed not detain us, as it is not alleged that they show acquaintance with the acts, nor is celsus claimed as testimony for the book. the canon of muratori contains a very corrupt paragraph regarding the acts of the apostles. we have already discussed the date and character of this fragment,( ) and need not further speak of it here. the sentence in which we are now interested reads in the original as follows: "acta autem omnium apostolorum sub uno libro scribta sunt lucas obtime theofile conprindit quia sub præsentia eius singula gerebantur sicute et semote pas-sionem petri euidenter declarat sed et profectionem pauli ab urbes ad spania proficescentis." it is probable that in addition to its corruption some words may have been lost from the concluding phrase of this passage, but the following may perhaps sufficiently represent its general sense: "but the acts of all the apostles were written in one book. luke included (in his work) to the excellent theophilus only the things which occurred in his own presence, as he evidently shows by omitting the martyrdom of peter and also the setting forth of paul from the city to spain." whilst this passage may prove the existence of the acts about the end of the second century, and that the authorship of the work was ascribed to luke, it has no further value. no weight can be attached to the statement of { } the unknown writer beyond that of merely testifying to the currency of such a tradition, and even the few words quoted show how uncritical he was. nothing could be less appropriate to the work before us than the assertion that it contains the acts of _all_ the apostles, for it must be apparent to all, and we shall hereafter have to refer to the point, that it very singularly omits all record of the acts of most of the apostles, occupies itself chiefly with those of peter and paul, and devotes considerable attention to stephen and to others who were not apostles at all. we shall further have occasion to show that the writer does anything but confine himself to the events of which he was an eye-witness, and we may merely remark, in passing, as a matter. which scarcely concerns us here, that the instances given by the unknown writer of the fragment to support his assertion are not only irrelevant, but singularly devoid themselves of historical attestation. irenæus( ) assigns the acts of the apostles to luke, as do clement of alexandria,( ) tertullian,( ) and origen,( ) although without any statements giving special weight to their mention of him as the author in any way counterbalancing the late date of their testimony. beyond showing that tradition, at the end of the second century and beginning of the third, associated the name of luke with this writing and the third gospel, the evidence of these fathers is of no value to us. we have already incidentally mentioned that some heretics either ignored or rejected the book, and to the marcionites and severians { } we may now add the ebionites( ) and manichæans.( ) chrysostom complains that in his day the acts of the apostles were so neglected that many were ignorant of the existence of the book and of its authors.( ) doubts as to its authorship were expressed in the ninth century, for photius states that some ascribed the work to clement of rome, others to barnabas, and others to luke the evangelist.( ) if we turn to the document itself, we find that it professes to be the second portion of a work written for the information of an unknown person named theophilus, the first part being the gospel, which, in our canonical new testament, bears the name of "gospel according to luke." the narrative is a continuation of the third synoptic, but the actual title of "acts of the apostles," or "acts of apostles" [------],( ) attached to this [------] is a later addition, and formed no part of the original document. the author's name is not given in any of the earlier mss., and the work is entirely anonymous. that in the prologue to the acts the writer clearly assumes to be the author of the gospel does not in any way identify him, inasmuch as the third synoptic itself is equally anonymous. the tradition assigning both works to luke the follower of paul, as we have seen, is first met with { } towards the end of the second century, and very little weight can be attached to it. there are too many instances of early writings, several of which indeed have secured a place in our canon, to which distinguished names have been erroneously ascribed. such tradition is notoriously liable to error. we shall presently return to the question of the authorship of the third synoptic and acts of the apostles, but at present we may so far anticipate as to say that there are good reasons for affirming that they could not have been written by luke.( ) confining ourselves here to the actual evidence before us, we arrive at a clear and unavoidable conclusion regarding the acts of the apostles. after examining all the early christian literature, and taking every passage which is referred to as indicating the use of the book, we see that there is no certain trace even of its existence till towards the end of the second century; and, whilst the writing itself is anonymous, we find no authority but late tradition assigning it to luke or to any other author. we are absolutely without evidence of any value as to its accuracy or trustworthiness, and, as we shall presently see, the epistles of paul, so far from accrediting it, tend to cast the most serious doubt upon its whole character. this evidence we have yet to examine, when considering the contents of the acts, and we base our present remarks solely on the external testimony for the date and authorship of the book. the position, therefore, is simply this: we are asked to believe in the reality of a great number of miraculous and supernatural the reader is referred to an article by the author in the fortnightly rev., , p. ff., in which some indications of date, and particularly those connected with the use of writings of josephus, are discussed. { } occurrences which, obviously, are antecedently incredible, upon the assurance of an anonymous work of whose existence there is no distinct evidence till more than a century after the events narrated, and to which an author's name--against which there are strong objections--is first ascribed by tradition towards the end of the second century. of the writer to whom the work is thus attributed we know nothing beyond the casual mention of his name in some pauline epistles. if it were admitted that this luke did actually write the book, we should not be justified in believing the reality of such stupendous miracles upon his bare statement as the case stands, however, even taking it in its most favourable aspect, the question scarcely demands serious attention, and our discussion might at once be ended by the unhesitating rejection of the acts of the apostles as sufficient, or even plausible, evidence for the miracles which it narrates. chapter ii. evidence regarding the authorship if we proceed further to discuss the document before us, it is from no doubt as to the certainty of the conclusion at which we have now arrived, but from the belief that closer examination of the contents of the acts may enable us to test this result, and more fully to understand the nature of the work and the character of its evidence. not only will it be instructive to consider a little closely the contents of the acts, and to endeavour from the details of the narrative itself to form a judgment regarding its historical value, but we have in addition external testimony of very material importance which we may bring to bear upon it. we happily possess some undoubted epistles which afford us no little information concerning the history, character, and teaching of the apostle paul, and we are thus enabled to compare the statements in the work before us with contemporary evidence of great value. it is unnecessary to say that, wherever the statements of the unknown author of the acts are at variance with these epistles, we must prefer the statements of the apostle. the importance to our inquiry of such further examination as we now propose to undertake consists chiefly in the light which it may throw on the credibility of the work. if it be found that such { } portions as we are able to investigate are inaccurate and untrustworthy, it will become still more apparent that the evidence of such a document for miracles, which are antecedently incredible, cannot even be entertained. it may be well also to discuss more fully the authorship of the acts, and to this we shall first address ourselves. it must, however, be borne in mind that it is quite foreign to our purpose to enter into any exhaustive discussion of the literary problem presented by the acts of the apostles. we shall confine ourselves to such points as seem sufficient or best fitted to test the character of the composition, and we shall not hesitate to pass without attention questions of mere literary interest, and strictly limit our examination to such prominent features as present themselves for our purpose. it is generally admitted, although not altogether without exception,( ) that the author of our third synoptic gospel likewise composed the acts of the apostles. the linguistic and other peculiarities which distinguish the gospel are equally prominent in the acts. this fact, whilst apparently offering greatly increased facilities for identifying the author, and actually affording valuable material for estimating his work, does not, as we have already remarked, really do much towards solving the problem of the authorship, inasmuch as the gospel, like its continuation, is anonymous, and we possess no more precise or direct evidence in connection with the one than in the case of the other. we have already so fully examined the testimony for the third gospel that it is unnecessary for us to recur to it. from about the end of the second century we find the gospel and acts of the { } apostles ascribed by ecclesiastical writers to luke, the companion of the apostle paul. the fallibility of tradition, and the singular phase of literary morality exhibited during the early ages of christianity, render such testimony of little or no value, and in the almost total absence of the critical faculty a rank crop of pseudonymic writings sprang up and flourished during that period.( ) some of the earlier chapters of this work have given abundant illustrations of this fact. it is absolutely certain, with regard to the works we are considering, that irenæus is the earliest writer known who ascribes them to luke, and that even tradition, therefore, cannot be traced beyond the last quarter of the second century. the question is--does internal evidence confirm or contradict this tradition? luke, the traditional author, is not mentioned by name in the acts of the apostles.( ) in the epistle to philemon his name occurs, with those of others, who send greeting, verse , "there salute thee epaphras, my fellow-prisoner in christ jesus; . marcus, aristarchus, demas, luke, my fellow-labourers." in the epistle to the colossians, iv. , mention is also made of him:--"luke, the beloved physician,( ) salutes you, and demas." and again, in the epistle to timothy, iv. :--"for { } demas forsook me, having loved this present world, and departed into thessalouica, crescens to galatia, titus unto dalmatia: . only luke is with me." he is not mentioned elsewhere in the new testament;( ) and his name is not again met with till irenæus ascribes to him the authorship of the gospel and acts. there is nothing in these pauline epistles confirming the statement of the fathers, but it is highly probable that these references to him largely contributed to suggest his name as the author of the acts, the very omission of his name from the work itself protecting him from objections connected with the passages in the first person to which other followers of paul were exposed, upon the traditional view of the composition. irenæus evidently knew nothing about him, except what he learnt from these epistles, and derives from his theory that luke wrote the acts, and speaks as an eye-witness in the passages where the first person is used. from these he argues that luke was inseparable from paul, and was his fellow-worker in the gospel, and he refers, in proof of this, to acts xvi. ff.,( ) ff., xx. ff., and the later chapters, all the details of which he supposes luke to have carefully written down. he then continues: "but that he was not only a follower, but likewise a fellow-worker of the apostles, but particularly of paul, paul himself has also clearly shown in the epistles, saying:..." and he quotes tim. iv. , , ending: "only luke is with me," and then adds, "whence he shows that he was { } always with him and inseparable from him, &c, ac."( ) the reasoning of the zealous father deduces a great deal from very little, it will be observed, and in this elastic way tradition "enlarged its borders" and assumed unsubstantial dimensions. later writers have no more intimate knowledge of luke, although eusebius states that he was born at antioch,( ) a tradition likewise reproduced by jerome.( ) jerome further identifies luke with "the brother, whose praise in the gospel is throughout all the churches" mentioned in cor. viii. , as accompanying titus to corinth.( ) at a later period, when the church required an early artist for its service, luke the physician was honoured with the additional title of painter.( ) epiphanius,( ) followed later by some other { } writers, represented him to have been one of the seventy-two disciples, whose mission he alone of all new testament writers mentions. the view of the fathers, arising out of the application of their tradition to the features presented by the gospel and acts, was that luke composed his gospel, of the events of which he was not an eye-witness, from information derived from others, and his acts of the apostles from what he himself, at least in the parts in which the first person is employed, had witnessed. it is generally supposed that luke was not born a jew, but was a gentile christian. some writers endeavour to find a confirmation of the tradition, that the gospel and acts were written by luke "the beloved physician," by the supposed use of peculiarly technical medical terms,( ) but very little weight is attached by any one to this feeble evidence which is repudiated by most serious critics, and it need not detain us. as there is no indication, either in the gospel or the acts, of the author's identity proceeding from himself, and tradition does not offer any alternative security, what testimony can be produced in support of the ascription of { } these writings to "luke"? to this question ewald shall reply: "in fact," he says, "we possess only one ground for it, but this is fully sufficient. it lies in the designation of the third gospel as that 'according to luke' which is found in all mss. of the four gospels. for the quotations of this particular gospel under the distinct name of luke, in the extant writings of the fathers, begin so late that they cannot be compared in antiquity with that superscription; and those known to us may probably themselves only go back to this superscription. we thus depend almost alone on this superscription."( ) ewald generally does consider his own arbitrary conjectures "fully sufficient," but it is doubtful, whether in this case, any one who examines this evidence will agree with him. he himself goes on to admit, with all other critics, that the superscriptions to our gospels do not proceed from the authors themselves, but were added by those who collected them, or by later readers to distinguish them.( ) there was no author's name attached to marcion's gospel, as we learn from tertullian.( ) chrysostom very distinctly asserts that the evangelists did not inscribe their names at the head of their works,( ) and he recognizes that, but for the authority of the primitive church which added those names, the superscriptions could not have proved the authorship of the gospels. he conjectures that the sole superscription which may { } have been placed by the author of the first synoptic was simply [------].( ) it might be argued, and indeed has been, that the inscription [------], "according to luke," instead of [------] "gospel of luke," does not actually indicate that "luke" wrote the work any more than the superscription to the gospels "according to the hebrews" [------] "according to the egyptians" [------] has reference to authorship. the epistles, on the contrary, are directly connected with their writers, in the genitive, [------], and so on. this point, however, we merely mention _en passant_. by his own admission, therefore, the superscription is simply tradition in another form, but instead of carrying us further back, the superscription on the most ancient extant mss., as for instance the sinaitic and vatican codices of the gospels, does not on the most sanguine estimate of their age, date earlier than the fourth century.( ) as for the acts of the apostles, the book is not ascribed to luke in a single uncial ms., and it only begins to appear in various forms in later codices. the variation in the titles of the gospels and acts in different mss. alone shows the uncertainty of the superscription. it is clear that the "one ground," upon which ewald admits that the evidence for luke's authorship is based, is nothing but sand, and cannot support his tower. he is on the slightest consideration thrown back upon the quotations of the fathers, which begin too late for the { } purpose, and it must be acknowledged that the ascription of the third gospel and acts to luke rests solely upon late and unsupported tradition. let it be remembered that, with the exception of the three passages in the pauline epistles quoted above, we know absolutely nothing about luke. as we have mentioned, it has even been doubted whether the designation "the beloved physician" in the epistle to the colossians, iv. , does not distinguish a different luke from the person of that name in the epistles to philemon and timothy. if this were the case, our information would be further reduced; but supposing that the same luke is referred to, what does our information amount to? absolutely nothing but the fact that a person named luke was represented by the writer of these letters,( ) whoever he was, to have been with paul in rome, and that he was known to the church of colossæ. there is no evidence whatever that this luke had been a travelling companion of paul, or that he ever wrote a line concerning him or had composed a gospel. he is not mentioned in epistles written during this journey and, indeed, the rarity and meagreness of the references to him would much rather indicate that he had not taken any distinguished part in the proclamation of the gospel. if luke be [------] and be numbered amongst the apostle's [------], tychicus is equally "the beloved brother and faithful minister and fellow-servant in the lord."( ) onesimus the "faithful and beloved brother,"( ) we cannot discuss the authenticity of these epistles in this place, nor is it very important that we should do so. nor can we pause to consider whether they were written in rome, as a majority of critics think, or elsewhere. { } and aristarchus, mark the cousin of barnabas, justus and others are likewise his [------].( ) there is no evidence, in fact, that paul was acquainted with luke earlier than during his imprisonment in rome, and he seems markedly excluded from the apostle's work and company by such passages as cor. i. .( ) the simple theory that luke wrote the acts supplies all the rest of the tradition of the fathers, as we have seen in the case of irenæus, and to this mere tradition we are confined in the total absence of more ancient testimony. the traditional view, which long continued to prevail undisturbed, and has been widely held up to our own day,( ) represents luke as the author of the acts, and, in { } the passages where the first person is employed, considers that he indicates himself as an actor and eye-witness. these passages, where [------] is introduced, present a curious problem which has largely occupied the attention of critics, and it has been the point most firmly disputed in the long controversy regarding, the authorship of the acts. into this literary labyrinth we must not be tempted to enter beyond a very short way; for, however interesting the question may be in itself, we are left so completely to conjecture that no result is possible which can materially affect our inquiry, and we shall only refer to it sufficiently to illustrate the uncertainty which prevails regarding the authorship. we shall, however, supply abundant references for those who care more minutely to pursue the subject. after the narrative of the acts has, through fifteen chapters, proceeded uninterruptedly in the third person, an abrupt change to the first person plural occurs in the sixteenth chapter.( ) paul, and at least timothy, are represented as going through phrygia and galatia, and at length "they came down to troas," where a vision appears to paul beseeching him to come over into macedonia. then, xvi. , proceeds: "and after he saw the vision, immediately we endeavoured [------] to go forth into macedonia, concluding that god had called us [------] to preach the gospel unto them." after verse , the direct form of narrative is as suddenly dropped as it was taken up, and does not reappear until xx. , when, without explanation, it is resumed and continued for ten verses. it is then again abandoned, and recommenced in xxi. - , and xxvii. , xxviii. . it is unnecessary to discuss whether xiv. belongs to the [------] sections or not. { } it is argued by those who adopt the traditional view,( ) that it would be an instance of unparalleled negligence, in so careful a writer as the author of the third synoptic and acts, to have composed these sections from documents lying before him, written by others, leaving them in the form of a narrative in the first person, whilst the rest of his work was written in the third, and that, without doubt, he would have assimilated such portions to the form of the rest. on the other hand, that he himself makes distinct use of the first person in luke i. - and acts i. , and consequently prepares the reader to expect that, where it is desirable, he will resume the direct mode of communication; and in support of this supposition, it is asserted that the very same peculiarities of style and language exist in the [------] passages as in the rest of the work. the adoption of the direct form of narrative in short merely indicates that the author himself was present and an eye-witness of what he relates,( ) and that writing as he did for the information of theophilus, who was well aware of his personal participation in the journeys he records, it was not necessary for him to give any explanation of his occasional use of the first person. is the abrupt and singular introduction of the first person in these particular sections of his work, without a word of explanation, more intelligible and reasonable upon the traditional theory of their being by the author himself as an eye-witness? on the contrary, it is maintained, the phenomenon on that hypothesis becomes much more some writers also consider as one of the reasons why luke, the supposed author, uses the first person, that where he begins to do so he himself becomes associated with paul in his work, and first begins to preach the gospel. thiersch, die kirche im ap. zeit., p. ; baumgarfen, die apostelgeschichte, i. p. . { } inexplicable. on examining the [------] sections it will be observed that they consist almost entirely of an itinerary of journeys, and that while the chronology of the rest of the acts is notably uncertain and indefinite, these passages enter into the minutest details of daily movements (xvi. , ; xx. , , , ; xxi. , , , , , , ; xxvii. ; xxviii. , , ); of the route pursued, and places through which often they merely pass (xvi. , ; xx. , , , ; xxi. - , ; xxvii. ff.; xxviii. - ), and record the most trifling circumstances (xvi. ; xx. ; xxi. , , ; xxviii. , ). the distinguishing feature of these sections in fact is generally asserted to be the stamp which they bear, above all other parts of the acts, of intimate personal knowledge of the circumstances related. is it not, however, exceedingly remarkable that the author of the acts should intrude his own personality merely to record these minute details of voyages and journeys? that his appearance as an eye-witness should be almost wholly limited to the itinerary of paul's journeys and to portions of his history which are of very subordinate interest? the voyage and shipwreck are thus narrated with singular minuteness of detail, but if any one who reads it only consider the matter for a moment, it will become apparent that this elaboration of the narrative is altogether disproportionate to the importance of the voyage in the history of the early church. the traditional view indeed is fatal to the claims of the acts as testimony for the great mass of miracles it contains, for the author is only an eye-witness of what is comparatively unimportant and commonplace. the writer's intimate acquaintance with the history of paul, and his claim to participation in his work, begin and end with his actual { } journeys. with very few exceptions, as soon as the apostle stops anywhere, he ceases to speak as an eyewitness and relapses into vagueness and the third person. at the very time when minuteness of detail would have been most interesting, he ceases to be minute. a very long and important period of paul's life is covered by the narrative between xvi. , where the[------] sections begin, and xxviii. , where they end; but, although the author goes with such extraordinary detail into the journeys to which they are confined, how bare and unsatisfactory is the account of the rest of paul's career during that time!(l) how eventful that career must have been we learn from cor. xi. - . in any case, the author who could be so minute in his record of an itinerary, apparently could not, or would not, be minute in his account of more important matters in his history. in the few verses, ix. - , chiefly occupied by an account of paul's conversion, is comprised all that the author has to tell of three years of the apostle's life, and into xi. --xiv. are compressed the events of fourteen years of his history (cf. gal. ii. l).( ) if the author of those portions be the same writer who is so minute in his daily itinerary in the [------] sections, his sins of omission and commission are of a very startling character. to say nothing more severe here, upon the traditional theory he is an elaborate trifler. does the use of the first person in luke i. - and acts i. in any way justify or prepare( ) the way for the { } sudden and unexplained introduction of the first person in the sixteenth chapter? certainly not. the [------] in these passages is used solely in the personal address to theophilus, is limited to the brief explanation contained in what may be called the dedication or preface, and is at once dropped when the history begins. if the prologue of the gospel be applied to the acts, moreover, the use of earlier documents is at once implied, which would rather justify the supposition that these passages are part of some diary, from which the general editor made extracts.( ) besides, there is no explanation in the acts which in the slightest degree connects the [------] with the [------].( ) to argue that explanation was unnecessary, as theophilus and early readers were well acquainted with the fact that the author was a fellow-traveller with the apostle, and therefore at once understood the meaning of "we,"( ) would destroy the utility of the direct form of communication altogether; for if theophilus knew this, there was obviously no need to introduce the first person at all, in so abrupt and singular a way, more especially to chronicle minute details of journeys which possess comparatively little interest. moreover, writing for theophilus, we might reasonably expect that he should have stated where and when he became associated with paul, and explained the reasons why he again left and rejoined him.( ) ewald suggests that possibly the author intended to have indicated his name more distinctly at the end of his work;( ) but this merely shows that, argue as he will, { } he feels the necessity for such an explanation. the conjecture is negatived, however, by the fact that no name is subsequently added. as in the case of the fourth gospel, of course the "incomparable modesty" theory is suggested as the reason why the author does not mention his own name, and explain the adoption of the first person in the [------] passages;( ) but to base theories such as this upon the modesty or elevated views of a perfectly unknown writer is obviously too arbitrary a proceeding to be permissible.( ) there is, besides, exceedingly little modesty in a writer forcing himself so unnecessarily into notice, for he does not represent himself as taking any active part in the events narrated; and, as the mere chronicler of days of sailing and arriving, he might well have remained impersonal to the end. on the other hand, supposing the general editor of the acts to have made use of written sources of information, and amongst others of the diary of a companion of the apostle paul, it is not so strange that, for one reason or another, he should have allowed the original direct form of communication to stand whilst incorporating parts of it with his work. instances have been pointed out in which a similar retention of the first or third person, in a narrative generally written otherwise, is accepted as the indication of a different written source, as for instance in ezra vii. --ix; nehemiah viii.--x.; in the book of tobit i. - , iii. ff., and other places;s and schwanbeck has { } pointed out many instances of a similar kind amongst the chroniclers of the middle ages.( ) there are various ways in which the retention of the first person in these sections, supposing them to have been derived from some other written source, might be explained. the simple supposition that the author, either through carelessness or oversight, allowed the [------] to stand( ) is not excluded, and indeed some critics, although we think without reason, maintain both the third gospel and the acts to be composed of materials derived from various sources and put together with little care or adjustment.( ) the author might also have inserted these fragments of the diary of a fellow-traveller of paul, and retained the original form of the document to strengthen the apparent credibility of his own narrative; or, as many critics believe, he may have allowed the first person of the original document to remain, in order himself to assume the character of eyewitness, and of companion of the apostle.( ) as we shall see in the course of our examination of the acts, the general procedure of the author is by no means of a character to discredit such an explanation. we shall not enter into any discussion of the sources from which critics maintain that the author compiled his { } work. it is sufficient to say that, whilst some profess to find definite traces of many documents, few if any writers deny that the writer made more or less use of earlier materials. it is quite true that the characteristics of the general author's style are found throughout the whole work. the acts are no mere aggregate of scraps collected and rudely joined together, but the work of one author in the sense that whatever materials he may have used for its composition were carefully assimilated, and subjected to thorough and systematic revision to adapt them to his purpose.( ) but however completely this process was carried out, and his materials interpenetrated by his own peculiarities of style and language, he did not succeed in entirely obliterating the traces of independent written sources. some writers maintain that there is a very apparent difference between the first twelve { } chapters and the remainder of the work, and profess to detect a much more hebraistic character in the language of the earlier portion,( ) although this is not received without demur.( ) as regards the [------] sections, whilst it is admitted that these fragments have in any case been much manipulated by the general editor, and largely contain his general characteristics of language, it is at the same time affirmed that they present distinct foreign peculiarities, which betray a borrowed document.( ) even critics who maintain the [------] sections to be by the same writer who composed the rest of the book point out the peculiarly natural character and minute knowledge displayed in these passages, as distinguishing them from the rest of the acts.( ) this of course they attribute to the fact that the author there relates his personal experiences; but even with this explanation it is apparent that all who maintain the traditional view do recognize peculiarities in these sections, by which they justify the ascription of them to an eye-witness. for the reasons which have been very briefly indicated, therefore, and upon other { } strong grounds, some of which will be presently stated, a very large mass of the ablest critics have concluded that the [------] sections were not composed by the author of the rest of the acts, but that they are part of the diary of some companion of the apostle paul, of which the author of acts made use for his work,( ) and that the general writer of the work, and consequently of the third synoptic, was not luke at all.( ) { } a careful study of the contents of the acts cannot, we think, leave any doubt that the work could not have been written by any companion or intimate friend of the apostle paul.( ) in here briefly indicating some of the reasons for this statement, we shall be under the necessity of anticipating, without much explanation or argument, points which will be more fully discussed farther on, and which now, stated without preparation, may not be sufficiently clear to some readers. they may hereafter seem more conclusive. it is unreasonable to suppose that a friend or companion could have written so unhistorical and defective a history of the apostle's life and teaching. the pauline epistles are nowhere directly referred to, but where we can compare the narrative and representations of acts with the statements of the apostle, they are strikingly contradictory.( ) { } his teaching in the one scarcely presents a trace of the strong and clearly defined doctrines of the other, and the character and conduct of the paul of acts are altogether different from those of paul of the epistles. according to paul himself (gal. i. -- ), after his conversion, he communicated not with flesh and blood, neither went up to jerusalem to those who were apostles before him, but immediately went away into arabia, and returned to damascus, and only after three years he went up to jerusalem to visit kephas, and abode with him fifteen days, during which visit none other of the apostles did he see "save james, the brother of the lord." if assurance of the correctness of these details were required, paul gives it by adding (v. ): "now the things which i am writing to you, behold before god i lie not." according to acts (ix. -- ), however, the facts are quite different. paul immediately begins to preach in damascus, does not visit arabia at all, but, on the contrary, goes to jerusalem, where, under the protection of barnabas (v. , ), he is introduced to the apostles, and "was with them going in and out." according to paul (gal. i. ), his face was after that unknown unto the churches of judaea, whereas, according to acts, not only was he "going in and out" at jerusalem with the apostles, but (ix. ) preached boldly in the name of the lord, and (acts xxvi. ) "in jerusalem and throughout all the region of judaea," he urged to repentance. according to paul (gal. ii. ff.), after fourteen years he went up again to jerusalem with barnabas and titus, { } "according to a revelation," and "privately" communicated his gospel "to those who seemed to be something," as, with some irony, he calls the apostles. in words still breathing irritation and determined independence, paul relates to the galatians the particulars of that visit--how great pressure had been exerted to compel titus, though a greek, to be circumcised, "that they might bring us into bondage," to whom, "not even for an hour did we yield the required subjection." he protests, with proud independence, that the gospel which he preaches was not received from man (gal. i. , ), but revealed to him by god (verses , ); and during this visit (ii. , ) "from those seeming to be something [------], whatsoever they were it maketh no matter to me--god accepteth not man's person--for to me those who seemed [------] communicated nothing additional." according to acts, after his conversion, paul is taught by a man named ananias what he must do (ix. , xxii. ); he makes visits to jerusalem (xi. , xii. , &c), which are excluded by paul's own explicit statements; and a widely different report is given (xv. ff.) of the second visit. paul does not go, "according to a revelation," but is deputed by the church of antioch, with barnabas, in consequence of disputes regarding the circumcision of gentiles, to lay the case before the apostles and elders at jerusalem. it is almost impossible in the account here given of proceedings characterised throughout by perfect harmony, forbearance, and unanimity of views, to recognize the visit described by paul. instead of being private, the scene is a general council of the church. the fiery independence of paul is transformed into meekness and submission. there is not a word of the { } endeavour to compel him to have titus circumcised--all is peace and undisturbed good-will. peter pleads the cause of paul, and is more pauline in his sentiments than paul himself, and, in the very presence of paul, claims to have been selected by god to be apostle of the gentiles (xv. -- ). not a syllable is said of the scene at antioch shortly after (gal. ii. ff.), so singularly at variance with the proceedings of the council, when paul withstood cephas to the face. then, who would recognize the paul of the epistles in the paul of acts, who makes such repeated journeys to jerusalem to attend jewish feasts (xviii. , xix. , xx. , xxiv. , , ); who, in his journeys, halts on the days when a jew may not travel (xx. , ); who shaves his head at cenchrea because of a vow (xviii. ); who, at the recommendation of the apostles, performs that astonishing act of nazariteship in the temple (xxi. ), and afterwards follows it up by a defence of such "excellent dissembling" [------]; who circumcises timothy, the son of a greek and of a jewess, with his own hands (xvi. -- , cf. gal. v. ); and who is so little the apostle of the uncircumcision that he only tardily goes to the gentiles when rejected by the jews (cf. xviii. (j). paul is not only robbed of the honour of being the first apostle of the gentiles, which is conferred upon peter, but the writer seems to avoid even calling him an apostle at all,( ) the only occasions upon which he does so being indirect (xiv. , ); and the title equally applied to barnabas, whose claim to it is more than doubted. the { } passages in which this occurs, moreover, are not above suspicion, "the apostles" being omitted in cod. d. (bezae) from xiv. . the former verse in that codex has important variations from other mss. if we cannot believe that the representation actually given of paul in the acts could proceed from a friend or companion of the apostle, it is equally impossible that such a person could have written his history with so many extraordinary imperfections and omissions. we have already pointed out that between chs. ix.--xiv. are compressed the events of seventeen of the most active years of the apostle's life, and also that a long period is comprised within the [------] sections, during which such minute details of the daily itinerary are given. the incidents reported, however, are quite disproportionate to those which are omitted. we have no record, for instance, of his visit to arabia at so interesting a portion of his career (gal. i. ), although the particulars of his conversion are repeated with singular variations no less than three times (ix. xxii. xxvi.); nor of his preaching in illyria (rom. xv. ); nor of the incident referred to in rom. xvi. , . the momentous adventures in the cause of the gospel spoken of in cor. xi. ff. receive scarcely any illustration in acts, nor is any notice taken of his fighting with wild beasts at ephesus ( cor. xv. ), which would have formed an episode full of serious interest. what, again, was "the affliction which happened in asia," which so overburdened even so energetic a nature as that of the apostle that "he despaired even of life?" ( cor. ii. f.) some light upon these points might reasonably have been expected from a companion of paul. then, xvii. -- , xviii. contradict thess. iii. , , in a way scarcely possible in such a { } companion, present with the apostle at athens; and in like manner the representation in xxviii. - is inconsistent with such a person, ignoring as it does the fact that there already was a christian church in rome (ep. to romans). we do not refer to the miraculous elements so thickly spread over the narrative of the acts, and especially in the episode xvi. ff., which is inserted in the first [------] section, as irreconcilable with the character of an eye-witness, because it is precisely the miraculous portion of the book which is on its trial; but we may ask whether it would have been possible for such a friend, acquainted with the apostle's representations in cor. xiv. ff., cf. xii.--xiv., and the phenomena there described, to speak of the gift of "tongues" at pentecost as the power of speaking different languages (ii. -- , cf. x. , xix. ) it will readily be understood that we have here merely rapidly and by way of illustration referred to a few of the points which seem to preclude the admission that the general author of the acts could be an eyewitness,( ) or companion of the apostle paul, and this will become more apparent as we proceed, and more closely examine the contents of the book. who that author was, there are now no means of ascertaining. the majority of critics who have most profoundly examined the problem presented by the acts, however, and who do not admit luke to be the general author, are agreed that the author compiled the [------] sections from a diary kept by some companion of the apostle paul during the journeys and voyages to which they relate, but opinion is very divided as to the person { } to whom that diary must be ascribed. it is of course recognized that the various theories regarding his identity are merely based upon conjecture, but they have long severely exercised critical ingenuity. a considerable party adopt the conclusion that the diary was probably written by luke.( ) this theory has certainly the advantage of whatever support may be derived from tradition; and it has been conjectured, not without probability, that this diary, being either written by, or originally attributed to, luke, may possibly have been the source from which, in course of time, the whole of the acts, and consequently the gospel, came to be ascribed to luke.( ) the selection of a comparatively less known name than that of timothy, titus or silas,( ) for instance, may thus be explained; but, besides, it has the great advantage that, the name of luke never being mentioned in the acts, he is not exposed to criticism, which has found serious objections to the claims of other better known followers of paul. there are, however, many critics who find difficulties in the way of accepting luke as the author of the "we" sections, and who adopt the theory that they were pro- { } probably composed by timothy.( ) it is argued that, if luke had been the writer of this diary, he must have been in very close relations to paul, having been his companion during the apostle's second mission journey, as well as during the later european journey, and finally during the eventful journey of paul as a prisoner from caesarea to rome. under these circumstances, it is natural to expect that paul should mention him in his earlier epistles, written before the roman imprisonment, but this he nowhere does. for instance, no mention whatever is made of luke in either of the letters to the corinthians nor in those to the thessalonians; but on the other hand, timothy's name, together with that of silvanus (or silas), is joined to paul's in the two letters to the thessalonians, besides being mentioned in the body of the first epistle (iii. , ); and he is repeatedly and affectionately spoken of in the earlier letter to the corinthians ( cor. iv. , xvi. ), and his name is likewise combined with the apostle's in the second epistle ( cor. i. ), as well as mentioned in the body of the letter, along with that of silvanus, as a fellow-preacher with paul. in the epistle to the philippians, later, the name of luke does not appear, although, had he been the companion of the apostle from troas, he must have been known to the philippians, but on the other hand, timothy is again associated in the opening greeting of that epistle. timothy is known to have { } been a fellow-worker with the apostle, and to have accompanied him in his missionary journeys, and he is repeatedly mentioned in the acts as the companion of paul, and the first occasion is precisely where the [------] sections commence.( ) in connection with acts xv. , xvi. , , it is considered that luke is quite excluded from the possibility of being the companion who wrote the diary we are discussing, by the apostle's own words in cor. i. :( ) "for the son of god, christ jesus, who was preached among you by us, by me and silvanus and timothy," &c, &c. the eye-witness who wrote the journal from which the [------] sections are taken must have been with the apostle in corinth, and, it is of course always asserted, must have been one of his [------], and preached the gospel.( ) is it possible, on the supposition that this fellow-labourer was luke, that the apostle could in so marked a manner have excluded his name by clearly defining that "us" only meant himself and silvanus and timothy? mayerhoff( ) has gone even further than the critics we have referred to, and maintains timothy to be the author of the third synoptic and of acts. we may briefly add that some writers have conjectured silas to be the author of the [------] sections,( ) and others { } have referred them to titus.( ) it is evident that whether the [------] sections be by the unknown author of the rest of the acts, or be part of a diary by some unknown companion of paul, introduced into the work by the general editor, they do not solve the problem as to the identity of the author, who remains absolutely unknown. we have said enough to enable the reader to understand the nature of the problem regarding the author of the third synoptic and of the acts of the apostles, and whilst for our purpose much less would have sufficed, it is evident that the materials do not exist for identifying him. the stupendous miracles related in these two works, therefore, rest upon the evidence of an unknown writer, who from internal evidence must have composed them very long after the events recorded. externally, there is no proof even of the existence of the acts until towards the end of the second century, when also for the first time we hear of a vague theory as to the name and identity of the supposed author, a theory which declares luke not to have himself been an eye-witness of the occurrences related in the gospel, and which reduces his participation even in the events narrated in the acts to a very small and modest compass, leaving the great mass of the miracles described in the work without even his personal attestation. the theory, however, we have seen to be not only unsupported by evidence, but to be contradicted by many potent circumstances. we propose now, without exhaustively examining the contents of the acts, which would itself require a separate treatise, at least to { } consider some of its main points sufficiently to form a fair judgment of the historical value of the work, although the facts which we have already ascertained are clearly fatal to the document as adequate testimony for miracles, and the reality of divine revelation. chapter iii. design and composition the historical value of the acts of the apostles has very long been the subject of vehement discussion, and the course of the controversy has certainly not been favourable to the position of the work. for a considerable time the traditional view continued to prevail, and little or no doubt of the absolute credibility of the narrative was ever expressed. when the spirit of independent and enlightened criticism was finally aroused, it had to contend with opinions which habit had rendered stereotype, and prejudices which took the form of hereditary belief. a large body of eminent critics, after an exhaustive investigation of the acts, have now declared that the work is not historically accurate, and cannot be accepted as a true account of the acts and teaching of the apostles.( ) { } the author of the acts has been charged with having written the work with a distinct design to which he subordinated historical truth, and in this view many critics have joined, who ultimately do not accuse him absolutely of falsifying history, but merely of making a deliberate selection of his materials with the view of placing events in the light most suitable for his purpose. most of those, however, who make this charge maintain that, in carrying out the original purpose of the acts, the writer so freely manipulated whatever materials he had before him, and so dealt with facts whether by omission, transformation or invention, that the historical value of his narrative has been destroyed or at least seriously affected by it. on the other hand, many apologetic writers altogether deny the existence of any design on the part of the { } author such as is here indicated, which could have led him to suppress or distort facts,( ) and whilst some of them advance very varied and fanciful theories as to the historical plan upon which the writer proceeds, and in accordance with which the peculiarities of his narrative are explained, they generally accept the work as the genuine history of the acts of the apostles so far as the author possessed certain information. the design most generally ascribed to the writer of the acts may, with many minor variations, be said to be apologetic and conciliatory: an attempt to reconcile the two parties in the early church by representing the difference between the views of peter and paul as slight and unimportant, pauline sentiments being freely placed in the mouth of peter, and the apostle of the gentiles being represented as an orthodox adherent of the church of jerusalem, with scarcely such advanced views of christian universality as peter; or else, an effort of gentile christianity to bring itself into closer union with the primitive church, surrendering, in so doing, all its distinctive features and its pauline origin, and representing the universalism by which it exists, as a principle adopted and promulgated from the very first by peter and the twelve. it is not necessary, however, for us to enter upon any minute discussion of this point, nor is it requisite, for the purposes of our inquiry, to determine whether the peculiar character { } of the writing which we are examining is the result of a perfectly definite purpose controlling the whole narrative and modifying every detail, or naturally arises from the fact that it is the work of a pious member of the church writing long after the events related, and imbuing his materials, whether of legend or ecclesiastical tradition, with his own thoroughly orthodox views: history freely composed for christian edification. we shall not endeavour to construct any theory to account for the phenomena before us, nor to discover the secret motives or intentions of the writer, but taking them as they are, we shall simply examine some of the more important portions of the narrative, with a view to determine whether the work can in any serious sense be regarded as credible history. no one can examine the contents of the acts without perceiving that some secret motive or influence did certainly govern the writer's mind, and guide him in the selection of topics, and this is betrayed by many peculiarities in his narrative. quite apart from any attempt to discover precisely what that motive was, it is desirable that we should briefly point out some of these peculiarities. it is evident that every man who writes a history must commence with a distinct plan, and that the choice of subjects to be introduced or omitted must proceed upon a certain principle. this is of course an invariable rule wherever there is order and arrangement. no one has ever questioned that in the acts of the apostles both order and arrangement have been deliberately adopted and the question naturally arises: what was the plan ol the author? and upon what principle did he select, from the mass of facts which might have been related regarding the church in the apostolic ages, precisely those { } which he has inserted, to the exclusion of the rest?( ) what title will adequately represent the contents of the book? for it is admitted by almost all critics that the actual name which the book bears neither was given to it by its author nor properly describes its intention and subject.( ) the extreme difficulty which has been felt in answering these questions, and in constructing any hypothesis which may fairly correspond with the actual contents of the acts, constitutes one of the most striking commentaries on the work, and although we cannot here detail the extremely varied views of critics upon the subject, they are well worthy of study.( ) no one now advances the theory which was anciently current that the author simply narrated that of which he was an eye-witness.( ) its present title [------] would lead us to expect an account of the doings of the apostles in general, but we have nothing like this in the book. peter and paul occupy the principal parts of the narrative, and the other apostles are scarcely mentioned. { } james is introduced as an actor in the famous council, and represented as head of the church in jerusalem, but it is much disputed that he was either an apostle, or one of the twelve. the death of james the brother of john is just mentioned. john is represented on several occasions during the earlier part of the narrative as the companion of peter, without, however, being prominently brought forward; and the rest of the twelve are left in complete obscurity. it is not a history of the labours of peter and paul, for not only is considerable importance given to the episodes of stephen and philip the evangelist, but the account of the two great apostles is singularly fragmentary. after a brief chronicle of the labours of peter, he suddenly disappears from the scene, and we hear of him no more. paul then becomes the prominent figure in the drama; but we have already pointed out how defective is the information given regarding him, and he is also abandoned as soon as he is brought to rome: of his subsequent career and martyrdom, nothing whatever is said. the work is not, as luther suggested, a gloss on the epistles of paul and the inculcation of his doctrine of righteousness through faith, for the narrative of the acts, so far as we can compare it with the epistles, which are nowhere named in it, is generally in contradiction to them, and the doctrine of justification by faith is conspicuous by its absence. it is not a history of the first christian missions, for it ignores entirely the labours of most of the apostles, omits all mention of some of the most interesting missionary journeys, and does not even give a report of the introduction of christianity into rome. it is not in any sense a paulinian history of the church, for if, on the one side, it describes the apostles of the circumcision as { } promulgating the universalism which paul preached, it robs him of his originality, dwarfs his influence upon the development of christianity, and is, on the other hand, too defective to represent church history, whether from a paulinian or any other standpoint. the favourite theory: that the writer designed to relate the story of the spread of christianity from jerusalem to rome, can scarcely be maintained, although it certainly has the advantage of a vagueness of proportions equally suitable to the largest and most limited treatment of history. but, in such a case, we have a drama with the main incident omitted; for the introduction of the gospel into rome is not described at all, and whilst the author could not consider the personal arrival at rome of the apostle paul the climax of his history, he at once closes his account where the final episode ought to have commenced. from all points of view, and upon any hypothesis, the acts of the apostles is so obviously incomplete as a history, so fragmentary and defective as biography, that critics have to the present day failed in framing any theory which could satisfactorily account for its anomalies, and have almost been forced to explain them by supposing a partial, apologetic or conciliatory, design, which removes the work from the region of veritable history. the whole interest of the narrative, of course, centres in the two representative apostles, peter and paul, who alternately fill the scene. it is difficult to say, however, whether the account of the apostle of the circumcision or of paul is the more capriciously partial and incomplete. after his miraculous liberation from the prison into which he had been cast by herod, the doings of peter are left unchronicled, and although he is reintroduced for a moment to plead the cause of the { } gentiles at the council in jerusalem, he then finally retires from the scene, to give place to paul. the omissions from the history of paul are very remarkable, and all the more so from the extreme and unnecessary detail of the itinerary of some of his journeys, and neither the blanks, on the one hand, nor the excessive minuteness, on the other, are to be explained by any theory connected with personal knowledge on the part of theophilus. of the general history of the primitive church and the life and labours of the twelve, we are told little or nothing. according to the author the propagation of the gospel was carried on more by angelic agency than apostolic enthusiasm. there is a liberal infusion of miraculous episodes in the history, but a surprising scarcity of facts. even where the author is best informed, as in the second part of the acts, the narrative of paul's labours and missionary journeys, while presenting striking omissions, is really minute and detailed only in regard to points of no practical interest, leaving both the distinctive teaching of the apostle, and the internal economy of the church almost entirely unrepresented. does this defective narrative of the acts of the apostles proceed from poverty of information, or from the arbitrary selection of materials for a special purpose? as we proceed, it will become increasingly evident that, limited although the writer's materials are, the form into which they have been moulded has undoubtedly been determined either by a dominant theory, or a deliberate design, neither of which is consistent with the composition of sober history. this is particularly apparent in the representation which is given of the two principal personages of the narrative. critics have long clearly recognised that the { } author of the acts has carefully arranged his materials so as to present as close a parallelism as possible between the apostles peter and paul.( ) we shall presently see how closely he assimilates their teaching, ascribing the views of paul to peter, and putting petrine sentiments in the mouth of paul, but here we shall merely refer to points of general history. if peter has a certain pre-eminence as a distinguished member of the original apostolic body, the equal claim of paul to the honours of the apostolate, whilst never directly advanced, is prominently suggested by the narration, no less than three times, of the circumstances of his conversion and direct call to the office by the glorified jesus. the first miracle ascribed to peter is the healing of "a certain man lame from his mother's womb" [------] at the beautiful gate of the temple,( ) and the first wonder performed by paul is also the healing of "a certain man lame from his mother's womb" [------] at lystra;( ) ananias and sapphira are punished through the instrumentality of peter,( ) and elymas is smitten with blindness at the word of paul;( ) the sick are laid in the streets that the shadow of peter may fall upon them, and they are healed, as are also those { } vexed with unclean spirits;(l) handkerchiefs or aprons are taken to the sick from the body of paul, and they are healed, and the evil spirits go out of them;( ) peter withstands simon the sorcerer,( ) as paul does the sorcerer elymas and the exorcists at ephesus;( ) if peter heals the paralytic Æneas at lydda,( ) paul restores to health the fever-stricken father of publius at melita;( ) peter raises from the dead tabitha, a disciple at joppa,( ) and paul restores to life the disciple eutychus at troas;( ) cornelius falls at the feet of peter, and worships him, peter preventing him, and saying: "rise up! i myself also am a man,"( ) and in like manner the people of lystra would have done sacrifice to paul, and he prevents them, crying out: "we also are men of like passions with you;"( ) peter lays his hands on the people of samaria, and they receive, the holy ghost and the gift of tongues,( ) and paul does the same for believers at ephesus;( ) peter is brought before the council,( ) and so is paul;( ) the one is imprisoned and twice released by an angel,( ) and the other is delivered from his bonds by a great earthquake;( ) if peter be scourged by order of the council,( ) paul is beaten with many stripes at the command of the magistrates of philippi.( ) it is maintained that the desire to equalise the sufferings of the two apostles in the cause of the gospel, as he has equalised their miraculous displays, probably led the author to omit all mention of those { } perils and persecutions to which the apostle paul refers in support of his protest, that he had laboured and suffered more than all the rest.( ) if paul was called by a vision to the ministry of the gentiles,( ) so peter is represented as having been equally directed by a vision to baptize the gentile cornelius;( ) the double vision of peter and cornelius has its parallel in the double vision of paul and ananias. it is impossible to deny the measured equality thus preserved between the two apostles, or to ignore the fact that parallelism like this is the result of premeditation, and cannot claim the character of impartial history. the speeches form an important element in the acts of the apostles, and we shall now briefly examine them, reserving, however, for future consideration their dogmatic aspect. few, if any writers, however apologetic, maintain that these discourses can possibly have been spoken exactly as they are recorded in the acts. the utmost that is asserted is that they are substantially historical, and fairly represent the original speeches.( ) they were derived, it is alleged, either from written sources, or oral { } tradition, and many, especially in the second part, are supposed to have been delivered in the presence of the author of the work. this view is held, of course, with a greater or less degree of assurance as to the closeness of the relation which our record bears to the original addresses; but, without here very closely scrutinizing hesitation or reticence, our statement fairly renders the apologetic position. a large body of able critics, however, deny the historical character of these speeches,( ) and consider them mere free compositions by the author of the acts, at the best being on a par with the speeches which many ancient writers place in the mouths of their historical personages, and giving only what the writer supposed that the speaker would say under the circumstances. that the writer may have made use of such materials as were within his reach, or endeavoured to embody the ideas which tradition may broadly have preserved, may possibly be admitted, but that these discourses can seriously be accepted as conveying a correct report of anything actually spoken by the persons in whose mouths they are put is, of course, denied. it is, { } obviously, extremely improbable that any of these speeches could have been written down at the time.( ) taking even the supposed case that the author of the acts was luke, and was present when some of the speeches of paul were delivered, it is difficult to imagine that he immediately recorded his recollection of them, and more than this he could not have done. he must continually have been in the habit of hearing the preaching of paul, and therefore could not have had the inducement of novelty to make him write down what he heard. the idea of recording them for posterity could not have occurred to such a person, with the belief in the approaching end of all things then prevalent. the author of the acts was not the companion of paul, however, and the contents of the speeches, as we shall presently see, are not of a character to make it in the least degree likely that they could have been written down for separate circulation. many of the speeches in the acts, moreover, were delivered under circumstances which render it specially unlikely that they could have { } been reported with any accuracy. at no time an easy task correctly to record a discourse of any length, it is doubly difficult when those speeches, like many in acts, were spoken under circumstances of great danger or excitement. the experience of modern times, before the application of systems of short-hand, may show how imperfectly speeches were taken down, even where there was deliberate preparation and set purpose to do so, and if it be suggested that some celebrated orations of the last century have so been preserved, it is undeniable that what has been handed down to us not only does not represent the original, but is really almost a subsequent composition, preserving little more than some faint echoes of the true utterance. the probability that a correct record of speeches made, under such circumstances, in the middle of the first century could have been kept, seems exceedingly small. even, if it could be shown that the author of the acts took these speeches substantially from earlier documents, it would not materially tend to establish their authenticity; for the question would still remain perfectly open as to the closeness of those documents to the original discourses; but in the absence of all evidence, whether as to the existence or origin of any such sources, the conjecture of their possible existence can have no weight. we have nothing but internal testimony to examine, and that, we shall see, is totally opposed to the claim to historical value made for those discourses. apologists scarcely maintain that we have in the acts a record of the original discourses in their completeness, but in claiming substantial accuracy most of them include the supposition at least of condensation.( ) the longest { } discourse in the acts would not have taken more than six or seven minutes to deliver,( ) and it is impossible to suppose that what is there given can have been the whole speech delivered on many of the occasions described. for instance, is it probable that king agrippa who desires to hear paul, and who comes "with great pomp" with berenice to do so, should only have heard a speech lasting some five minutes. the author himself tells us that paul was not always so brief in his addresses as any one might suppose from the specimens here presented.( ) it is remarkable, however, that not the slightest intimation is given that the speeches are either merely substantially reported or are abridged, and their form and character are evidently designed to convey the impression of complete discourses. if the reader examine any of these discourses, it will be clear that they are concise compositions, betraying no marks of abridgment, and having no fragmentary looseness, but, on the contrary, that they are highly artificial and finished productions, with a continuous argument. they certainly are singularly inadequate, many of them, to produce the impressions described; but at least it is not possible to discover that material omissions have been made, or that their periods were originally expanded by large, or even any, amplification. if these speeches be regarded as complete, and with little or no condensation, another strong element is added to the suspicion as to their authenticity, for such extreme baldness and brevity in the declaration of a new religion, { } requiring both explanation and argument, cannot be conceived, and in the case of paul, with whose system of teaching and doctrine we are well acquainted through his epistles, it is impossible to accept such meagre and onesided addresses, as representations of his manner. the statement that the discourses are abridged, and a mere _résumé_ of those originally delivered, however, rests upon no authority, is a mere conjecture to account for an existing difficulty, and is in contradiction to the actual form of the speeches in acts. regarded as complete, their incongruity is intensified, but considered as abridged, they have lost in the process all representative character and historical fitness. it has been argued, indeed, that the different speeches bear evidence to their genuineness from their suitability to the speakers, and to the circumstances under which they are said to have been spoken; but the existence of anything but the most superficial semblance of idiosyncratic character must be denied. the similarity of form, manner, and matter in all the speeches is most remarkable, as will presently be made more apparent, and the whole of the doctrine enunciated amounts to little more than the repetition, in slightly varying words, of the brief exhortation to repentance and belief in jesus, the christ. that salvation may be obtained,( ) with references to the ancient history of the jews, singularly alike in all discourses. very little artistic skill is necessary to secure a certain suitability of the word to the action, and the action to the word; and certainly evidence is reduced to a very low ebb when such agreement as is presented in the acts is made an argument for authenticity. not only is the consistency of the sentiments uttered by { } the principal speakers, as compared with what is known of their opinions and character, utterly disputed, but it must be evident that the literary skill of the author of the acts was quite equal to so simple a task as preserving" at least such superficial fitness as he displays, and a very much greater amount of verisimilitude might have been attained, as in many works of fiction, without necessarily involving the inference of genuineness. it has been freely admitted by critics of all schools that the author's peculiarities of style and language are apparent in all the speeches of the acts,( ) and this has been so often elaborately demonstrated that it is unnecessary minutely to enter upon it again. it may not be out of place to quote a few lines from the work of one of the ablest and most eminent advocates of the general authority of the acts. speaking of the speeches of paul, lekebusch says:--"the speeches of our book, in fact, are calculated, perhaps more than anything, to excite doubt regarding its purely historical character. but here everything depends upon an unbiassed judgment. we are sufficiently free from prejudice to make the admission to recent criticism that the speeches are not verbally given as they were originally delivered, but are composed by the author of the acts of the { } apostles. schleiermacher, certainly, has confidently asserted their originality. he thinks: 'if the speeches were separately reported they could not but appear just as we find them in the acts of the apostles.' but his remarks, however ingenious and acute they may be, do not stand the test of a thorough examination of the individual speeches. no one who impartially compares these, one with another, and particularly their style with the mode of expression of the author in the other sections, can help agreeing with eichhorn, when, in consonance with his view regarding the uniform character of the acts, on the grounds quoted, page , he ascribes the composition of the speeches to the writer from whom the whole book in all its parts proceeds."( ) to this impartial expression of opinion, lekebusch adds a note:--"in saying this, it is naturally not suggested that our author simply _invented_ the speeches, independently, without any historical intimation whatever as to the substance of the original; the_ form_ only, which certainly is here very closely connected with the substance, is hereby ascribed to him."( ) lekebusch then merely goes on to discuss the nature of the author's design in composing these speeches. the reasons given by eichhorn, which lekebusch quotes at "page ," referred to above, had better be added to complete this testimony. after referring to the result of eichhorn's "very careful examination" of the internal character of the acts, lekebusch says:--"he finds, however, that, 'throughout the whole acts of the apostles there prevails the same style, the same manner, the same method and mode of expression' (ii. ). not { } even the speeches, which one at first might take for inserted documents, seem to him 'from a strange hand, but elaborated by the same from which the whole book, with its three parts, proceeds.' 'various peculiarities existing in the speeches' prove this to him, independent of the similarity of the style, and that, 'although they are put into the mouths of different persons, they nevertheless follow one and the same type, make use of one and the same mode of argument, and have so much that is common to them that they thereby prove themselves to be speeches of one and the same writer' (ii. ). from these circumstances, therefore, it seems to eichhorn 'in the highest degree probable, that luke, throughout the whole acts of the apostles, writes as an independent author, and apart from all extraneous works.' and in this view he is 'strengthened by the resemblance of the style which runs through the whole acts of the apostles, through speeches, letters, and historical sections,' as well as by the fact that, 'through the whole book, in the quotations from the old testament, a similar relation prevails between the greek text of the septuagint and that of luke' (ii. )."( ) we have thought it well to quote these independent opinions from writers who range themselves amongst the defenders of the historical character of the acts, rather than to burden our pages with a mass of dry detail in proof of the assertion that the peculiarities of the author pervade all the speeches indifferently, to a degree which renders it obvious that. they proceed from his pen. without entering into mere linguistic evidence of this, which will be found in the works to which we have { } referred,( ) we may point out a few general peculiarities of this nature which are worthy of attention. the author introduces the speeches of different persons with the same expression:--"he opened his mouth," or something similar. philip "opened his mouth" [------]( ) and addressed the ethiopian (viii. ). peter "opened his mouth (and) said" [------], when he delivered his discourse before the baptism of cornelius (x. ). again, he uses it of paul:--"and when paul was about to open his mouth [------], gallio said," &c. (xviii. ). the words with which the speech of peter at pentecost is introduced deserve more attention:--"peter lifted up his voice and said unto them" [------] (ii. ). the verb [------] occurs again (ii. ) in the account of the descent of the holy spirit and the gift of tongues, and it is put into the mouth of paul (xxvi. ) in his reply to festus, but it occurs nowhere else in the new testament. the favourite formula( ) with which all speeches open is, "men (and) brethren" [------], or [------] coupled with some other term, as "men (and) israelites" [------], or simply[------] without addition. [------], occurs no less than thirteen times. it is used thrice by peter,( ) six times by paul,( ) as well as by { } stephen,( ) james,( ) the believers at pentecost,( ) and the rulers of the synagogue.( ) the angels at the ascension address the disciples as "men (and) galileans" [------].( ) peter makes use of [------] twice,( ) and it is likewise employed by paul,( ) by gamaliel,( ) and by the jews of asia.( ) peter addresses those assembled at pentecost as [------].( ) paul opens his athenian speech with [------],( ) and the town-clerk begins his short appeal to the craftsmen of ephesus: [------].( ) stephen begins his speech to the council with men, brethren and fathers, hear [------], and paul uses the very same words in addressing the multitude from the stairs of the temple.( ) in the speech which peter is represented as making at pentecost, he employs in an altogether peculiar way (ii. -- ) psalm xvi., quoting it in order to prove that the resurrection of jesus the messiah was a necessary occurrence, which had been foretold by david. this is principally based upon the tenth verse of the psalm: "because thou wilt not leave my soul in hades, neither wilt thou give thy holy one [------] to see corruption [------]."( ) peter argues that david both died and was buried, and that his sepulchre is with them to that day, but that, being a prophet, he foresaw and spake here of the resurrection of christ, "that neither was he left in hades nor did his flesh see { } corruption {------}."( ) is it not an extremely singular circumstance that peter, addressing an audience of jews in jerusalem, where he might naturally be expected to make use of the vernacular language, actually quotes the sep-tuagint version of the old testament, and bases his argument upon a mistranslation of the psalm, which, we may add, was in all probability not composed by david at all?( ) the word translated "holy one," should be in the plural: "holy ones,"{ } that is to say: "thy saints," and the word rendered [------]corruption, really signifies "grave" or "pit." the poet, in fact, merely expresses his confidence that he will be preserved alive. the best critics recognize that ps. xvi. is not properly a messianic psalm { } at all,( ) and many of those who, from the use which is made of it in acts, are led to assert that it is so, recognize in the main that it can only be applied to the messiah indirectly, by arguing that the prophecy was not fulfilled in the case of the poet who speaks of himself, but was fulfilled in the resurrection of jesus. this reasoning, however, totally ignores the sense of the original, and is opposed to all legitimate historical interpretation of the psalm. not dwelling upon this point at present, we must go on to point out that, a little further on (xiii. -- ), the apostle paul is represented as making use of the very same argument which peter here employs, and quoting the same passage from ps. xvi. to support it this repetition of very peculiar reasoning, coupled with other similarities which we shall presently point out, leads to the inference that it is merely the author himself who puts this argument into their mouths,( ) and this conclusion is strengthened by the circumstance that, throughout both gospel and acts, he always quotes from the septuagint,( ) and even when that version departs from { } the sense of the original it may be well to give both passages in juxta-position, in order that the closeness of the analogy may be more easily realized. for this purpose we somewhat alter the order of the verses:-- [------] not only is this argument the same in both discourses, but the whole of paul's speech, xiii. ff., is a mere reproduction of the two speeches of peter, ii. ff. and iii. ff., with such alterations as the writer could introduce to vary the fundamental sameness of ideas and expressions. it is worth while to show this in a similar way:-- [------] { } [------] { } [------] { } paul's address likewise hears close analogy with the speech of stephen, vii. ff., commencing with a historical survey of the earlier traditions of the people of israel, and leading up to the same accusation that, as their fathers disregarded the prophets, so they had persecuted and slain the christ. the whole treatment of the subject betrays the work of the same mind in both discourses. bleek, who admits the similarity between these and other speeches in acts, argues that: "it does not absolutely follow from this that these speeches are composed by one and the same person, and are altogether unhistorical;" for it is natural, he thinks, that in the apostolical circle, and in the first christian church, there should have existed a certain uniform type in the application of messianic passages of the old testament, and in quotations generally, to which different teachers might conform without being dependent on each other. he thinks also that, along with the close analogy, there is also much which is characteristic in the different speeches. not only is this typical system of quotation, however, a mere conjecture to explain an actual difficulty, but it is totally inadequate to account for the phenomena. if we suppose, for instance, that paul had adopted the totally unhistorical application of the sixteenth psalm to the messiah, is it not a very extraordinary thing that in all the arguments in his { } epistles, he does not once refer to it? even if this be waived, and it be assumed that he had adopted this interpretation of the psalm, it will scarcely be asserted that paul, whose independence and originality of mind are so undeniable, and whose intercourse with the apostolical circle at any time, and most certainly up to the period when this speech was delivered, was very limited,( ) could so completely have caught the style and copied the manner of peter that, on an important occasion like this, his address should be a mere reproduction of peter's two speeches delivered so long before, and when paul certainly was not present. the similarity of these discourses does not consist in the mere application of the same psalm, but the whole argument, on each occasion, is repeated with merely sufficient transposition of its various parts to give a superficial appearance of variety. words and expressions, rare or unknown elsewhere, are found in both, and the characteristic differences which bleek finds exist only in his own apologetic imagination. let it be remembered that the form of the speeches and the language are generally ascribed to the author of the acts. can any unprejudiced critic deny that the ideas in the speeches we are considering are also substantially the same? is there any appreciable trace of the originality of paul in his discourses? there is no ground whatever, apart from the antecedent belief that the various speeches were actually delivered by the men to whom they are ascribed, for asserting that we have here the independent utterances of peter and paul. it is internal evidence alone, and no avowal on the part of the author, which leads to the conclusion that the form of the speeches is the author's, and there is no internal evidence { } which requires us to stop at the mere form, and not equally ascribe the substance to the same source. the speeches in the acts, generally, have altogether the character of being the composition of one mind endeavouring to impart variety of thought and expression to various speakers, but failing signally either from poverty of invention or from the purpose of instituting a close parallel in views, as well as actions, between the two representative apostles. further to illustrate this, let us take another speech of peter which he delivers on the occasion of the conversion of cornelius, and it will be apparent that it also contains all the elements, so far as it goes, of paul's discourse. [------] { } [------] again, to take an example from another speaker, we find james represented as using an expression which had just before been put into the mouth of paul, and it is not one in the least degree likely to occur independently to each. the two passages are as follows:-- [------] the fundamental similarity between these different speeches cannot possibly be denied;( ) and it cannot be { } reasonably explained in any other way than by the fact that they were composed by the author himself, who had the earlier speeches ascribed to peter still in his memory when he wrote those of paul,( ) and who, in short, had not sufficient dramatic power to create altogether distinct characters, but simply made his different personages use his own vocabulary to express his own somewhat limited range of ideas. setting his special design aside, his inventive faculty only permitted him to represent peter speaking like paul, and paul like peter. it is argued by some, however, that in the speeches of peter, for instance, there are peculiarities of language and expression which show analogy with the first epistle bearing his name in the new testament canon,( ) and, on the other hand, traces of translation in some of them which indicate that these speeches were delivered originally in aramaic, and that we have only a version of them by the author of the acts, or by some one from whom he derived them.( ) as regards the first of these suppositions, a few phrases only have been pointed out, but they are of no force under any circumstances, and the whole theory is quite groundless.( ) we do not con- { } consider it worth while to enter upon the discussion, and those who desire to do so are referred to the works just indicated. there are two potent reasons which render such an argument of no force, even if the supposed analogies were in themselves both numerous and striking, which actually they are not the authenticity of the epistles bearing the name of peter is not only not established, but is by very many eminent critics absolutely denied; and there is no certainty whatever that any of the speeches of peter were delivered in greek, and the probability is that most, if not all, of that apostle's genuine discourses must have been spoken in aramaic. it is in fact asserted by apologists that part or all of the speeches ascribed to him in the acts must have been originally aramaic, although opinion may differ as to the language in which some of them were spoken. whether they were delivered in aramaic, or whether there be uncertainty on the point, any conclusion from linguistic analogies with the epistles is obviously excluded. one thing is quite undeniable: the supposed analogies are few, and the peculiarities distinguishing the author of acts in these speeches are extremely numerous and general. even so thorough an apologist as tholuck candidly acknowledges that the attempt to prove the authenticity of the speeches from linguistic analogies is hopeless. he says: "nevertheless, a comparison of the language of the apostles in their epistles and in these speeches must in many respects be less admissible than that of the character and historical circumstances, for indeed if the language and their peculiarities be compared, it must first be established that all the reported speeches were delivered in the greek language, which is improbable, and of one of which (xxii. , ) the contrary is expressly { } stated willingly admitting that upon this point difference of opinion is allowable, we express as the view which we have hitherto held that, from ch. xx. onwards, the speeches delivered by paul are reported more in the language of luke than in that of paul."( ) this applies with double force to peter,( ) whose speeches there is still greater reason to believe were delivered in aramaic, and there is difference of opinion amongst the critics we have referred to even as to whether these speeches were translated by the author of the acts, or were already before him in a translated form, and were subsequently re-edited by him. we have already shown cause for believing that the whole discussion is groundless, from the fact that the speeches in acts were simply composed by the author himself, and are not in any sense historical, and this we shall hereafter further illustrate. it may be worth while to consider briefly the arguments advanced for the theory that some of the speeches show marks of translation. it is asserted that the speech of peter at pentecost, ii. ff., was delivered in aramaic.( ) of course it will be understood that we might { } be quite prepared to agree to this statement as applied to a speech actually delivered by peter; but the assertion, so far as the speeches in acts are concerned, is based upon what we believe to be the erroneous supposition that they are genuine reports of discourses. on the contrary, we maintain that these speeches are mere compositions by the author of the work. the contention is, however, that the speech attributed to peter is the translation of a speech originally delivered in aramaic. in ii. , peter is represented as saying: "whom god raised up having loosed the pains of death [------], because it is not possible that he should be held [------] by it." it is argued by bleek and others( ) that, as the context proves, the image intended here was evidently the "snares" or "cords" of death, a meaning which is not rendered by the greek word [------]. the confusion is explained, they contend, when it is supposed that, in his aramaic speech, peter made use of a hebrew expression, equally found in aramaic, which means as well "snares" or "cords" as "pains" of death. the greek translator, probably misled by the septuagint,( ) adopted the latter signification of the hebrew word in question, and rendered it [------] "pains," which is absolutely inappropriate, for, they argue, it is very unnatural to say of one who had already suffered death, like christ, that he had been held prisoner by the "pains" of death, and loosed from them by the resurrection. there is, however, very little unanimity { } amongst apologists about this passage. ebrard( ) asserts that [------] "pains" is the correct translation of the hebrew expression, as in ps. xviii. , and that the hebrew word used always expresses pains of birth, the plural of the similar word for "cord" or "snare" being different. ebrard, therefore, contends that the psalm (xviii. ) does not mean bonds or snares of death but literally "birth-pains of death," by which the soul is freed from the natural earthly existence as by a second birth to a glorified spiritual life. we need not enter further into the discussion of the passage, but it is obvious that it is mere assumption to assert, on the one hand, that peter made use of any specific expression, and, on the other, that there was any error of translation on the part of the author of acts. but agreeing that the hebrew is erroneously rendered,( ) the only pertinent question is: by whom was the error in question committed? and the reply beyond any doubt is: by the lxx. who translate the hebrew expression in this very way. it is therefore inadmissible to assert from this phrase the existence of an aramaic original of the speech, for the phrase itself is nothing but a quotation from the sep-tuagint.( ) the expression [------] occurs no less than three times in that version: ps. xvii. (a. v. xviii.), cxiv. (a. v. cxvi.) and sam. xxii. ; and in job { } xxxix. , we have [------]. when it is remembered that the author of acts always quotes the septuagint version, even when it departs from the sense of the hebrew original, and in all probability was only acquainted with the old testament through it, nothing is more natural than the use of this expression taken from that version; but with the error already existing there, to ascribe it afresh and independently to the author of acts, upon no other grounds than the assumption that peter may have spoken in aramaic, and used an expression which the author misunderstood or wrongly rendered, is not permissible. indeed, we have already pointed out that, in this very speech, there are quotations of the old testament according to the lxx. put into the mouth of peter, in which that version does not accurately render the original.( ) the next trace of translation advanced by bleek( ) is found in ii. ,( ) where peter speaks of christ as exalted: "[------]." there can be no doubt, bleek argues, that there is here a reference to psalm ex. , and that the apostle intends to speak of christ's elevation "_to_ the right (hand) of god;" whereas the greek expression rather conveys the interpretation: "_by_ the right (hand) of god." this expression certainly comes, he asserts, from a not altogether suitable translation of the hebrew. to this on the other hand, much may be objected. winer,( ) followed by others, defends the construction, and affirms that the passage may without { } hesitation, be translated "_to_ the right (hand) of god."( ) in which case there is no error at all, and the argument falls to the ground. if it be taken, however, either that the rendering should be or was intended to be "by the right (hand) of god"( ) i.e., by the power of god, that would not involve the necessity of admitting an aramaic original,( ) because there is no error at all, and the argument simply is, that being exalted by the right hand of god, jesus had poured forth the holy spirit; and in the next verse the passage in ps. ex. (sept. cix.) is accurately quoted from the septuagint version: "sit thou on my right (hand)" [------]. in fact, after giving an account of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of jesus, the speaker ascribes his subsequent exaltation to the power of god.( ) we have seen that at least the form of the speeches in acts is undoubtedly due to the author of the book, and that he has not been able to make the speeches of the different personages in his drama differ materially from each other. we shall hereafter have occasion to examine further the contents of some of these speeches, and the circumstances under which it is alleged that they were spoken, and to inquire whether these do not confirm { } the conclusion hitherto arrived at, that they are not historical, but merely the free composition of the author of acts, and never delivered at all. before passing on, however, it may be well to glance for a moment at one of these speeches, to which we may not have another opportunity of referring, in order that we may see whether it presents any traces of inauthenticity and of merely ideal composition. in the first chapter an account is given of a meeting of the brethren in order to elect a successor to the traitor judas. peter addresses the assembly, i. if., and it may be well to quote the opening portion of his speech: . "men (and) brethren, this scripture must needs have been fulfilled, which the holy spirit by the mouth of david spake before concerning judas, who became guide to them that took jesus, . because he was numbered with us and obtained the lot of this ministry. . now [------] this man purchased a field with the wages of the iniquity [------], and falling headlong he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out; . and [------] it became known( ) unto all the dwellers at jerusalem, so that that field was called in their own tongue [------] acheldamach, that is: field of blood. . for [------] it is written in the book of psalms: 'let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein,' and 'his office let another take,'" &c, &c. now let it be remembered that peter is supposed to be addressing an audience of jews in jerusalem, in the hebrew or aramaic language, a few { } weeks after the crucifixion. is it possible, therefore, that he should give such an account as that in vs. , , of the end of judas, which he himself, indeed, says was known to all the dwellers at jerusalem? is it possible that, speaking in aramaic to jews, probably in most part living at and near jerusalem, he could have spoken of the field being so called by the people of jerusalem "in their own tongue?" is it possible that he should, to such an audience, have translated the word acheldamach? the answer of most unprejudiced critics is that peter could not have done so.( ) as de wette remarks: "in the composition of this speech the author has not considered historical decorum."( ) this is felt by most apologists, and many ingenious theories are advanced to explain away the difficulty. some affirm that verses and are inserted as a parenthesis by the author of the acts,( ) whilst a larger number contend that only v. is parenthetic.( ) a very cursory examination of the passage, however, is sufficient to show that the verses cannot be separated. verse is connected with the preceding by the [------], with by [------], and verse refers to , as indeed it also does to and , without which the passage from the psalm, as applied to judas, would be unintelligible. most critics, therefore, { } are agreed that none of the verses can be considered parenthetic.( ) some apologists, however, who feel that neither of the obnoxious verses can be thus explained, endeavour to overcome the difficulty by asserting that the words: "in their own tongue" [------] and: "that is: the field of blood" [------] in verse , are merely explanatory and inserted by the author of acts.( ) it is unnecessary to say that this explanation is purely arbitrary, and that there is no ground, except the difficulty itself, upon which their exclusion from the speech can be based. in the cases to which we have hitherto referred, the impossibility of supposing that peter could have spoken in this way has led writers to lay the responsibility of unacknowledged interpolations in the speech upon the author of acts, thus at once relieving the apostle. there are some apologists, however, who do not adopt this expedient, but attempt to meet the difficulty in other ways, while accepting the whole as a speech of peter. according to one theory, those who object that peter could not have thus related the death of judas to people who must already have been well acquainted with the circumstances have totally overlooked the fact, that a peculiar view of what has occurred is taken in the narrative, and that this peculiar view is the principal point of it according to the statement made, judas met his miserable end in the very field which he had bought with { } the price of blood. it is this circumstance, it appears, which peter brings prominently forward and represents as a manifest and tangible dispensation of divine justice.( ) unfortunately, however, this is clearly an imaginary moral attached to the narrative by the apologist, and is not the object of the supposed speaker, who rather desires to justify the forced application to judas of the quotations in verse , which are directly connected with the preceding by [------]. moreover, no explanation is here offered of the extraordinary expressions in verse addressed to citizens of jerusalem by a jew in their own tongue. another explanation, which includes these points, is still more striking. with regard to the improbability of peter's relating, in such a way, the death of judas, it is argued that, according to the evangelists, the disciples went from jerusalem back to galilee some eight days after the resurrection, and only returned, earlier than usual, before pentecost to await the fulfilment of the promise of jesus. peter and his companions, it is supposed, only after their return became acquainted with the fate of judas, which had taken place during their absence, and the matter was, therefore, quite new to them; besides, it is added, a speaker is often obliged on account of some connection with his subject to relate facts already known.( ) it is true that some of the evangelists represent this return to galilee( ) as having taken place, but the author of the third gospel and the acts not only mt. xxviii. , ; mk. xvi. ; john xxi. . i)r. farrar, somewhat pertinently, asks: "why did they (the disciples) not go to galilee immediately on receiving our lord's message? the circumstance is unexplained... perhaps the entire message of jesus to them is not recorded; perhaps they awaited the end of the feast." life of christ, ii. p. , note . { } does not do so but excludes it.( ) in the third gospel (xxiv. ), jesus commands the disciples to remain in jerusalem until they are endued with power from on high, and then, after blessing them, he is parted from them, and they return from bethany to jerusalem.( ) in acts, the author again takes up the theme, and whilst evidently giving later traditions regarding the appearances after the resurrection, he adheres to his version of the story regarding the command to stay in jerusalem. in i. , he says: "and being assembled together with them he commanded them not to depart from jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the father," etc.; and here again, verse , the disciples are represented, just before peter's speech is supposed to have been delivered, as returning from the mount of olives to jerusalem. the author of acts and of the third synoptic, therefore, gives no countenance to this theory. besides, setting all this aside, the apologetic hypothesis we are discussing is quite excluded upon other grounds. if we suppose that the disciples did go into galilee for a time, we find them again in jerusalem at the election of the successor to judas, and there is no reason to believe that they had only just returned. the acts not only allow of no interval at all for the journey to galilee between i. - and ff., but by the simple statement we shall hereafter have to go more fully into this, and shall not discuss it here. the third gospel really represents the ascension as taking place on the day of the resurrection; and acts, whilst giving later tradition, and making the ascension occur forty days after, does not amend, but confirms the previously enunciated view that the disciples had been ordered to stay in jerusalem. { } with which our episode commences, v. : "and in these days" [------], peter conveys anything but the impression of any very recent return to jerusalem. if the apostles had been even a few days there, the incongruity of the speech would remain undiminished; for the brethren who are said to have been present must chiefly have been residents in jerusalem, and cannot be. supposed also to have been absent, and, in any case, events which are represented as so well known to all the dwellers in jerusalem, must certainly have been familiar to the small christian community, whose interest in the matter was so specially great. moreover, according to the first synoptic, as soon as judas sees that jesus is condemned, he brings the money back to the chief priests, casts it down and goes and hangs himself, xxvii. ff. this is related even before the final condemnation of jesus and before his crucifixion, and the reader is led to believe that judas at once put an end to himself, so that the disciples, who are represented as being still in jerusalem for at least eight days after the resurrection, must have been there at the time. with regard to the singular expressions in verse , this theory goes on to suppose that, out of consideration for greek fellow-believers, peter had probably already begun to speak in the greek tongue; and when he designates the language of the dwellers in jerusalem as "their own dialect," he does not thereby mean hebrew in itself, but their own expression, the peculiar confession of the opposite party, which admitted the cruel treachery towards jesus, in that they named the piece of ground hakel damah.( ) here, again, what assumptions! it is generally recognized that peter must have spoken in { } aramaic, and even if he did not, [------]( ) cannot mean anything but the language of "all the-dwellers at jerusalem." in a speech delivered at jerusalem, in any language, to an audience consisting at least in considerable part of inhabitants of the place, and certainly almost entirely of persons whose native tongue was aramaic, to tell them that the inhabitants called a certain field "in their own tongue" acheldamach, giving them at the same time a translation of the word, is inconceivable to most critics, even including apologists. there is another point which indicates not only that this theory is inadequate to solve the difficulty, but that the speech could not have been delivered by peter a few weeks after the occurrences related. it is stated that the circumstances narrated were so well known to the inhabitants of jerusalem, that the field was called in their own tongue acheldamach. the origin of this name is not ascribed to the priests or rulers, but to the people, and it is not to be supposed that a popular name could have become attached to this field, and so generally adopted as the text represents, within the very short time which could have elapsed between the death of judas and the delivery of this speech. be it remembered that from the time of the crucifixion to pentecost the interval was in all only about seven weeks, and that this speech was made some time before pentecost, how long we cannot tell, but in any case, the interval was much too brief to permit of the popular adoption of the name.( ) the whole passage has much more the character of a narrative of { } events which had occurred at a time long past, than of circumstances which had taken place a few days before. the obvious conclusion is that this speech was never spoken by peter, but is a much later composition put into his mouth, and written for greek readers, who required to be told about judas, and for whose benefit the hebrew name of the field, inserted for local colouring, had to be translated. this is confirmed by several circumstances, to which we may refer. we shall not dwell much upon the fact that peter is represented as applying to judas two passages quoted from the septuagint version of ps. lxix. (sept lxviii.) and ps. cix. (sept cviii.) which, historically, cannot for a moment be sustained as referring to him.( ) the first of these psalms is quoted freely, and moreover the denunciations in the original being against a plurality of enemies, it can only be made applicable to judas by altering the plural "their" [------] to "his habitation" [------], a considerable liberty to take with prophecy. the holy spirit is said to have { } spoken this prophecy "concerning judas" "by the mouth of david," but modern research has led critics to hold it as most probable that neither ps. lxix.( ) nor ps. cix.( ) was composed by david at all. as we know nothing of peter's usual system of exegesis, however, very little weight as evidence can be attached to this. on the other hand, it is clear that a considerable time must have elapsed before these two passages from the psalms could have become applied to the death of judas.( ) the account which is given of the fate of judas is contradictory to that given in the first synoptic and cannot be reconciled with it, but follows a different tradition.( ) according to the first synoptic (xxvii. ff.), judas brings back the thirty pieces of silver, casts them down in the temple, and then goes and hangs himself. the chief priests take the money and buy with it the potter's field, which is not said to have had any other connection with judas, as a place for the burial of strangers. in the acts, judas himself buys a field as a private possession, and instead { } of committing suicide by hanging, he is represented as dying from a fall in this field, which is evidently regarded as a special judgment upon him for his crime. the apologetic attempts to reconcile these two narratives,( ) are truly lamentable. beyond calling attention to this amongst other phenomena presented in this speech, however, we have not further to do with the point at present we have already devoted too much space to peter's first address, and we now pass on to more important topics. chapter iv. primitive christianity. we now enter upon a portion of our examination of the acts which is so full of interest in itself that peculiar care will be requisite to restrain ourselves within necessary limits. hitherto our attention has been mainly confined to the internal phenomena presented by the document before us, with comparatively little aid from external testimony, and although the results of such criticism have been of no equivocal character, the historical veracity of the acts has not yet been tested by direct comparison with other sources of information. we now propose to examine, as briefly as may be, some of the historical statements in themselves, and by the light of information derived from contemporary witnesses of unimpeachable authority, and to confront them with well-established facts in the annals of the first two centuries. this leads us to the borders not only of one of the greatest controversies which has for half a century occupied theological criticism, but also of still more important questions regarding the original character and systematic development of christianity itself. the latter we must here resolutely pass almost unnoticed, and into the former we shall only enter so far as is absolutely necessary to the special object of our inquiry. the document before us professes to give a narrative of the progress of the { } primitive church from its first formation in the midst of mosaism, with strong judaistic rules and prejudices, up to that liberal universalism which freely admitted the christian gentile, upon equal terms, into communion with the christian jew. the question with which we are concerned is strictly this: is the account in the acts of the apostles of the successive steps by which christianity emerged from judaism, and, shaking off the restrictions and obligations of the mosaic law, admitted the gentiles to a full participation of its privileges historically true? is the representation which is made of the conduct and teaching of the older apostles on the one hand, and of paul on the other, and of their mutual relations an accurate one? can the acts of the apostles, in short, be considered a sober and veracious history of so important and interesting an epoch of the christian church? this has been vehemently disputed or denied, and the discussion, extending on every side into important collateral issues, forms in itself a literature of voluminous extent and profound interest. our path now lies through this debatable land; but although the controversy as to the connection of paul with the development of christianity and his relation to the apostles of the circumcision cannot be altogether avoided, it only partially concerns us. we are freed from the necessity of advancing any particular theory, and have here no further interest in it than to inquire whether the narrative of the acts is historical or not. if, therefore, avoiding many important but unnecessary questions, and restricting ourselves to a straight course across the great controversy, we seem to deal insufficiently with the general subject, it must be remembered that the argument is merely incidental to our inquiry, and that we not only do not { } pretend to exhaust it, but distinctly endeavour to reduce our share in it to the smallest limits compatible with our immediate object. according to the narrative of the acts of the apostles, the apostolic age presents a most edifying example of concord and moderation. the emancipation of the church from mosaic restrictions was effected without strife or heart-burning, and the freedom of the gospel, if not attained without hesitation, was finally proclaimed with singular largeness of mind and philosophic liberality. the teaching of paul differed in nothing from that of the elder apostles. the christian universalism, which so many suppose to have specially characterized the great apostle of the gentiles, was not only shared, but even anticipated, by the elder apostles. so far from opposing the free admission of the gentiles to the christian community, peter declares himself to have been chosen of god that by his voice they should hear the gospel,( ) proclaims that there is no distinction between jew and gentile,( ) and advocates the abrogation, in their case at least, of the mosaic law.( ) james, whatever his private predilections may be, exhibits almost equal forbearance and desire of conciliation. in fact, whatever anomalies and contradictions may be discoverable, upon close examination, beneath this smooth and brilliant surface, the picture superficially presented is one of singular harmony and peace. on the other hand, instead of that sensitive independence and self-reliance of character which has been ascribed to the apostle paul, we find him represented in the acts as submissive to the authority of the "pillars" of the church, ready to conform to their { } counsels and bow to their decrees, and as seizing every opportunity of visiting jerusalem, and coming in contact with that stronghold of judaism. instead of the apostle of the gentiles, preaching the abrogation of the law, and more than suspected of leading the jews to apostatize from moses,( ) we find a man even scrupulous in his observance of mosaic customs, taking vows upon him, circumcising timothy with his own hand, and declaring at the close of his career, when a prisoner at rome, that he "did nothing against the people or the customs of the fathers."( ) there is no trace of angry controversy, of jealous susceptibility, of dogmatic difference in the circle of the apostles. the intercourse of paul with the leaders of the judaistic party is of the most unbroken pleasantness and amity. of opposition to his ministry, or doubt of his apostleship, whether on the part of the three, or of those who identified themselves with their teaching, we have no hint. we must endeavour to ascertain whether this is a true representation of the early development of the church, and of the momentous history of the apostolic age. in the epistles of paul we have, at least to some extent, the means of testing the accuracy of the statements of the acts with regard to him and the early history of the church. the epistles to the galatians, to the corinthians ( ), and to the romans are generally admitted to be genuine,( ) and can be freely used for this purpose. to these we shall limit our attention, excluding other epistles, whose authenticity is either questioned or denied, but in doing so no material capable of really affecting the result is set aside. for the same reason, we { } must reject any evidence to be derived from the so-called epistles of peter and james, at least so far as they are supposed to represent the opinions of peter and james, but here again it will be found that they do not materially affect the points immediately before us. the veracity of the acts of the apostles being the very point which is in question, it is unnecessary to say that we have to subject the narrative to examination, and by no means to assume the correctness of any statements we find in it. at the same time it must be our endeavour to collect from this document such indications--and they will frequently be valuable--of the true history of the occurrences related, as may be presented between the lines of the text. in the absence of fuller information, it must not be forgotten that human nature in the first century of our era was very much what it is in the nineteenth, and certain facts being clearly established, it will not be difficult to infer many details which cannot now be positively demonstrated. the epistle to the galatians, however, will be our most invaluable guide. dealing, as it does, with some of the principal episodes of the acts, we are enabled by the words of the apostle paul himself, which have all the accent of truth and vehement earnestness, to control the narrative of the unknown writer of that work. and where this source fails, we have the unsuspected testimony of his other epistles, and of later ecclesiastical history to assist our inquiry. the problem then which we have to consider is the manner in which the primitive church emerged from its earliest form, as a jewish institution with mosaic restrictions and israelitish exclusiveness, and finally opened wide its doors to the uncircumcised gentile, and assumed { } the character of a universal religion. in order to understand the nature of the case, and be able to estimate aright the solution which is presented by the narrative in the acts of the apostles, it is necessary that we should obtain a clear view of the actual characteristics of christianity at the period when that history begins. we must endeavour to understand precisely what view the apostles had formed of their position in regard to judaism, and of the duty which devolved upon them of propagating the gospel. it is obvious that we cannot rightly appreciate the amount of persuasion requisite to transform the primitive church from jewish exclusive-ness to christian universality, without ascertaining the probable amount of long rooted conviction and religious prejudice or principle which had to be overcome before that great change could be effected. we shall not here enter upon any argument as to the precise views which the founder of christianity may have held as to his own person and work, nor shall we attempt to sift the traditions of his life and teaching which have been handed down to us, and to separate the genuine spiritual nucleus from the grosser matter by which it has been enveloped and obscured. we have much more to do with the view which others took of the matter, and, looking at the gospels as representations of that which was accepted as the orthodox view regarding the teaching of jesus, they are almost as useful for our present purpose as if they had been more spiritual and less popular expositions of his views. what the master was understood to teach is more important for the history of the first century than what he actually taught without being understood. nothing is more certain than the fact that christianity, originally, was { } developed out of judaism, and that its advent was historically prepared by the course of the mosaic system, to which it was so closely related.( ) in its first stages during the apostolic age, it had no higher ambition than to be, and to be considered, the continuation and the fulfilment of judaism, its final and triumphant phase. the substantial identity of primitive christianity with true judaism was at first never called in question; it was considered a mere internal movement of judaism, its development and completion, but by no means its mutilation. the idea of christianity as a new religion never entered the minds of the twelve or of the first believers, nor, as we shall presently see, was it so regarded by the jews themselves. it was in fact, originally, nothing more than a sect of judaism, holding a particular view of one point in the creed and, for a very long period, it was considered so by others, and was in no way distinguished from the rest of mosaism.( ) even in the acts there are traces of this, paul being called "a ringleader of the sect [------] of the nazarenes,"( ) and the jews of rome being represented as referring to christianity by this term.( ) paul before the council not { } only does not scruple to call himself "a pharisee, the son of a pharisee," but the pharisees take part with him against the more unorthodox and hated sect of the sadducees.( ) for eighteen centuries disputes have fiercely raged over the creed of christendom, and the ingenuity of countless divines has been exhausted in deducing mystic dogmas from the primitive teaching, but if there be one thing more remarkable than another in that teaching, according to the synoptics, it is its perfect simplicity. jesus did not appear with a ready-made theology, and imposed no elaborate system of doctrine upon his disciples. throughout the prophetic period of mosaism, one hope had sustained the people of israel in all their sufferings and reverses: that the fortunes of the nation should finally be retrieved by a scion of the race of david, under whose rule it should be restored to a future of unexampled splendour and prosperity. the expectation of the messiah, under frequently modified aspects, had formed a living part in the national faith of israel. primitive christianity, sharing but recasting this ancient hope, was only distinguished from judaism, with whose worship it continued in all points united, by a single doctrine, which was in itself merely a modification of the national idea: the belief that jesus of nazareth was actually the christ, the promised messiah. this was substantially the whole of its creed.( ) { } the synoptic gospels, and more especially the first,( ) are clearly a history of jesus as the messiah of the house of david, so long announced and expected, and whose life and even his death and resurrection are shown to be the fulfilment of a series of old testament prophecies.( ) when his birth is announced to mary, he is described as the great one, who is to sit on the throne of david his father, and reign over the house of jacob for ever,( ) and the good tidings of great joy to all the people [------], that the messiah is born that day in the city of david, are proclaimed by the angel to the shepherds of the plain.( ) synieon takes the child in his arms and blesses god that the words of the holy spirit are accomplished, that he should not die before he had seen the lord's anointed, the messiah, the consolation of israel.( ) the magi come to his cradle in bethlehem, the birthplace of the messiah indicated by the prophet,( ) to do homage to him who is born king of the jews,( ) and there herod seeks to destroy him,( ) fulfilling another { } prophecy.( ) his flight into egypt and return to nazareth are equally in fulfilment of prophecies.( ) john the baptist, whose own birth as the forerunner of the messiah had been foretold,( ) goes before him preparing the way of the lord, and announcing that the messianic kingdom is at hand. according to the fourth gospel, some of the twelve had been disciples of the baptist, and follow jesus on their master's assurance that he is the messiah. one of these, andrew, induces his brother simon peter also to go after him by the announcement:--"we have found the messiah, which is, being interpreted, the christ" (i. ff. ). and philip tells nathaniel:--"we have found him of whom moses in the law and the prophets did write: jesus, the son of joseph, who is from nazareth" (i. ). when he has commenced his own public ministry, jesus is represented as asking his disciples:--"who do men say that i am?" and setting aside the popular conjectures that he is john the baptist, elijah, jeremiah, or one of the prophets, by the still more direct question:--"and whom do ye say that i am? simon peter answered and said:--thou art the christ, the son of the living god." and in consequence of this recognition of his messiahship, jesus rejoins:--"and i say unto thee that thou art peter, and upon this rock i will build my church."( ) { } it is quite apart from our present object to point out the singular feats of exegesis and perversions of historical s nse by which passages of the old testament are forced to show that every event in the history, and even the startling novelty of a suffering and crucified messiah, which to jews was a stumbling-block and to gentiles folly,( ) had been foretold by the prophets. from first to last the gospels strive to prove that jesus was the messiah, and connect him indissolubly with the old testament. the messianic key-note, which is struck at the outset, regulates the strain to the close. the disciples on the way to emmaus, appalled by the ignominious death of their master, sadly confide to the stranger their vanished hope that jesus of nazareth, whom they now merely call "a prophet mighty in word and deed before god and all the people," was the christ "who was about to redeem israel," and jesus himself replies:--"o foolish and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spake! was it not needful that the christ (messiah) should suffer these things and enter into his glory? and, beginning at moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself."( ) then, again, when he appears to the eleven, immediately after, at jerusalem, he says:--"'these are the words that i spake unto you while i was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which are written in the law of moses and the prophets and the psalms concerning me.' then opened he their understanding that they might understand the scriptures, and said unto them:--'thus it is written, that the christ should suffer and rise from the dead the third day.'"( ) { } the crucifixion and death of jesus introduced the first elements of rupture with judaism, to which they formed the great stumbling-block.( ) the conception of a suffering and despised messiah could naturally never have occurred to a jewish mind.( ) the first effort of christianity, therefore, was to repair the apparent breach by proving that the suffering messiah had actually been foretold by the prophets; and to re-establish the messianic character of jesus, by the evidence of his resurrection.( ) but, above all, the momentary deviation from orthodox jewish ideas regarding the messiah was retraced by the representation of a speedy second advent, in glory, of the once rejected messiah to restore the kingdom of israel, by which the ancient hopes of the people became reconciled with the new expectation of christians. even before the ascension, the disciples are represented in the acts as asking the risen jesus:--"lord, dost thou at this time restore the kingdom to israel?"( ) there can be no doubt of the reality and { } universality of the belief, in the apostolic church, in the immediate return of the glorified messiah and speedy "end of all things."( ) the substance of the preaching of the apostles in acts, simply is that jesus is the christ,( ) the expected messiah.( ) their chief aim is to prove that his sufferings and death had been foretold by the prophets,( ) and that his resurrection establishes his claim to the title.( ) the simplicity of the creed is illustrated by the rapidity with which converts are made. after a few words, on one occasion, three thousand( ) and, on another, five thousand( ) are at once converted. no lengthened instruction or preparation was requisite for admission into the church.( ) as soon as a jew acknowledged jesus to be the messiah he thereby became a christian.( ) as soon as the { } three thousand converts at pentecost made this confession of faith they were baptized.( ) the ethiopian is converted whilst passing in his chariot, and is immediately baptized,( ) as are likewise cornelius and his household after a short address from peter.( ) the new faith involved no abandonment of the old. on the contrary, the advent of the messiah was so essential a part of judaic belief, and the messianic claim of jesus was so completely based by the apostles on the fulfilment of prophecy--"showing by the scriptures that jesus is the christ,"--that recognition of the fact rather constituted firmer adhesion to mosaism, and deeper faith in the inviolable truth of the covenant with israel. if there had been no mosaism, so to say, there could have been no messiah. so far from being opposed either to the form or spirit of the religion of israel, the proclamation of the messiah was its necessary complement, and could only be intelligible by confirmation of its truth and maintenance of its validity. christianity--belief in the messiah--in its earlier phases, drew its whole nourishment from roots that sank deeply into mosaism. it was indeed nothing more than mosaism in a developed form. the only difference between the jew and the christian was that the latter believed the messiah to have already appeared in jesus, whilst the former still expected him in the future;( ) though even this difference { } was singularly diminished, in appearance at least, by the christian expectation of the second advent. it is exceedingly important to ascertain, under these circumstances, what was the impression of the apostles as to the relation of believers to judaism and to mosaic observances, although it must be clear to any one who impartially considers the origin and historical antecedents of the christian faith, that very little doubt can have existed in their minds on the subject. the teaching of jesus, as recorded in the synoptic gospels, is by no means of a doubtful character, more especially when the sanctity of the mosaic system in the eyes of a jew is borne in mind. it must be apparent that, in order to remove the obligation of a law and form of worship believed to have been, in the most direct sense, instituted by god himself, the most clear, strong, and reiterated order would have been requisite. no one can reasonably maintain that a few spiritual expressions directed against the bare letter and abuse of the law, which were scarcely understood by the hearers, could have been intended to abolish a system so firmly planted, or to overthrow jewish institutions of such antiquity and national importance, much less that they could be taken in this sense by the disciples. a few passages in the gospels, therefore, which may bear the interpretation of having foreseen the eventual supersession of mosaism by his own more spiritual principles, must not be strained to support the idea that jesus taught disregard of the law. his very distinct and positive lessons, conveyed both by precept and practice, show, on the contrary, that not only he did not intend to attack pure mosaism, but that he was understood both directly and by inference to recognise and confirm it. in the sermon on the mount, jesus { } states to the disciples in the most positive manner:--"think not that i came to destroy the law or the prophets; i came not to destroy but to fulfil. for verily i say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall not pass from the law, till all be accomplished."( ) whether the last phrase be interpreted: till all the law be accomplished, or till all things appointed to occur be accomplished, the effect is the same. one clear explicit declaration like this, under the circumstances, would outweigh a host of doubtful expressions. not only does jesus in this passage directly repudiate any idea of attacking the law and the prophets, but, in representing his mission as their fulfilment, he affirms them, and associates his own work in the closest way with theirs. if there were any uncertainty, however, as to the meaning of his words it would be removed by the continuation:--"whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these commandments, even the least, and shall teach men so, he shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whosoever shall do and teach them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven."( ) it would be difficult for teaching to be more decisive in favour of the maintenance of the law, and this instruction, according to the first synoptic, was specially directed to the disciples.( ) when jesus goes on to show that their righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and pharisees, and to add to the letter of the law, as interpreted by those of old, his own profound interpretation of its { } spirit, he only intensifies, without limiting, the operation of the law; he merely spiritualises it. he does no more than this in his lessons regarding the observance of the sabbath. he did not in point of fact attack the genuine mosaic institution of the day of rest at all, but merely the intolerable literalism by which its observance had been made a burden instead of "a delight." he justified his variation from the traditional teaching and practice of his time, however, by appeals to scriptural precedent.( ) as a recent writer has said: "....the observance of the sabbath, which had been intended to secure for weary men a rest full of love and peace and mercy, had become a mere national fetish--a barren custom fenced in with the most frivolous and senseless restrictions."( ) jesus restored its original significance. in restricting some of the permissive clauses of the law, on the other hand, he acted precisely in the same spirit. he dealt with the law not with the temper of a revolutionist, but of a reformer, and his reforms, so far from affecting its permanence, are a virtual confirmation of the rest of the code.( ) ritschl, whose views on this point will have some weight with apologists, combats the idea that jesus merely confirmed the mosaic moral law, and abolished the ceremonial law. referring to one particular point of importance, he says:--"he certainly contests the duty of the sabbath rest, the value of purifications and sacrifices, and the validity of divorce; on the other hand, he leaves unattacked the value of circumcision, whose regulation is generally reckoned as part of the { } ceremonial law; and nothing justifies the conclusion that jesus estimated it in the same way as justin martyr, and the other gentile christian church teachers, who place it on the same line as the ceremonies. the only passage in which jesus touches upon circumcision (john vii. ) rather proves that, as an institution of the patriarchs, he attributes to it peculiar sanctity. moreover, when jesus, with unmistakable intention, confines his own personal ministry to the israelitish people (mk. vii. , mt. x. , ), he thereby recognises their prior right of participation in the kingdom of god, and also, indirectly, circumcision as the sign of the preference of this people. the distinction of circumcision from ceremonies, besides, is perfectly intelligible from the old testament. through circumcision, to wit, is the israelite, sprung from the people of the covenant, indicated as sanctified by god; through purification, sacrifice, sabbath-rest must he continually sanctify himself for god. so long, therefore, as the conception of the people of the covenant is maintained, circumcision cannot be abandoned, whilst even the prophets have pointed to the merely relative importance of the mosaic worship."( ) jesus everywhere in the gospels recognises the divine origin of the law,( ) and he quotes the predictions of the prophets as absolute evidence of his own pretensions. to those who ask him the way to eternal life he indicates its commandments,( ) and he even enjoins the observance of its ceremonial rites.( ) jesus did not abrogate the { } mosaic law; but, on the contrary, by his example as well as his precepts, he practically confirmed it.( ) according to the statements of the gospels, jesus himself observed the prescriptions of the mosaic law.( ) from his birth he had been brought up in its worship.( ) he was circumcised on the eighth day.( ) "and when the days of their purification were accomplished, according to the law of moses, they brought him up to jerusalem to present him to the lord, even as it is written in the law of the lord: every male, &c, &c, and to give a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the lord," &c, &c.( ) every year his parents went to jerusalem at the feast of the passover,( ) and this practice he continued till the close of his life. "as his custom was, he went into the synagogue (at nazareth) and stood up to read."( ) according to the fourth gospel, jesus goes up to jerusalem for the various festivals of the jews,( ) and the feast of the passover, according to the synoptics, was the last memorable supper eaten { } with his disciples,( ) the third synoptic representing him as saying: "with desire i desired to eat this passover with you before i suffer; for i say unto you that i shall not any more eat it until it be fulfilled hi the kingdom of god."( ) however exceptional the character of jesus, and however elevated his views, it is undeniable that he lived and died a jew, conforming to the ordinances of the mosaic law in all essential points, and not holding himself aloof from the worship of the temple which he purified. the influence which his adherence to the forms of judaism must have exerted over his followers( ) can scarcely be exaggerated, and the fact must ever be carefully borne in mind in estimating the conduct of the apostles and of the primitive christian community after his death. as befitted the character of the jewish messiah, the sphere of the ministry of jesus and the arrangements for the proclamation of the gospel were strictly and even intensely, judaic. jesus attached to his person twelve disciples, a number clearly typical of the twelve tribes of the people of israel;( ) and this reference is distinctly adopted when jesus is represented, in the synoptics, as promising that, in the messianic kingdom, "when the son { } of man shall sit on the throne of his glory," the twelve also "shall sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of israel;"( ) a promise which, according to the third synoptist, is actually made during the last supper.( ) in the apocalypse, which, "of all the writings of the new testament is most thoroughly jewish in its language and imagery,"( ) the names of the twelve apostles of the lamb are written upon the twelve foundations of the wall of the heavenly jerusalem, upon the twelve gates of which, through which alone access to the city can be obtained, are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of israel.( ) jesus himself limited his teaching to the jews, and was strictly "a minister of the circumcision for the truth of god, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers."( ) to the prayer of the canaanitish woman: "have mercy on me, o lord, son of david," unlike his gracious demeanour to her of the bloody issue,( ) jesus, at first, it is said, "answered her not a word;" and even when besought by the disciples--not to heal her daughter, but--to "send her away," he makes the emphatic declaration: "i was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of israel."( ) to her continued appeals he lays { } down the principle: "it is not lawful to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs." if after these exclusive sentences the boon is finally granted, it is as of the crumbs( ) which fall from the master's table.( ) the modified expression( ) in the second gospel: "let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs;" does not affect the case, for it equally represents exclusion from the privileges of israel, and the messianic idea fully contemplated a certain grace to the heathen when the children were filled. the expression regarding casting, the children's bread "to the dogs" is clearly in reference to the gentiles, who were so called by the jews.( ) a similar, though still stronger use of such expressions, might be pointed out in the sermon on the mount in the first { } gospel (vii. ): "give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before swine." it is certain that the jews were in the habit of speaking of the heathen both as dogs and swine--unclean animals,--and hilgenfeld,( ) and some other critics, see in this verse a reference to the gentiles. we do not, however, press this application which is, and may be, disputed, but merely mention it and pass on. there can be no doubt, however, of the exclusive references to the gentiles in the same sermon, and other passages, where the disciples are enjoined to practise a higher righteousness than the gentiles. "do not even the publicans... do not even the gentiles or sinners the same things."( ) "take no thought, &c, for after all these things do the gentiles seek; but seek ye, &c, &c."( ) the contrast is precisely that put with some irony by paul, making use of the common jewish expression "sinner" as almost equivalent for "gentile;"( ) in another place the first synoptic represents jesus as teaching his disciples how to deal with a brother who sins against them, and as the final resource, when every effort at reconciliation and justice has failed, he says: "let him be unto thee as the gentile [------] and the publican." (mt. xviii. .) he could not express in a stronger way to a jewish mind the idea of social and religious excommunication. the instructions which jesus gives in sending out the twelve, however, express the exclusiveness of the { } messianic mission, in the first instance at least, to the jews, in a very marked manner. jesus commands his disciples: "go not into a way of the gentiles [------] and into a city of the samaritans enter ye not; but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of israel. and as ye go, preach, saying: the kingdom of heaven is at hand."( ) as if more emphatically to mark the limitation of the mission, the assurance is seriously added: "for verily i say unto you, ye shall not have gone over the cities of israel, till the son of man come."( ) it will be observed that jesus here charges the twelve to go rather "to the lost sheep of the house of israel" in the same words that he employs to the canaanitish woman to describe the exclusive destination of his own ministry.( ) in coupling the samaritans with the gentiles there is merely an expression of the intense antipathy of the jews against them, as a mixed and, we may say, renegade race, excluded from the jewish worship although circumcised, intercourse with whom is to this day almost regarded as pollution.( ) the third gospel, which omits the restrictive instructions of jesus to the twelve given by the first synoptist, introduces another episode of the same description: the appointment and mission of seventy disciples,( ) to which we must very briefly refer. no mention whatever is made of this incident in the other gospels, and these disciples are not referred to in any other part of the new testament.( ) even eusebius remarks that no { } catalogue of them is anywhere given,( ) and, after naming a few persons, who were said by tradition to have been of their number, he points out that more than seventy disciples appear, for instance, according to the testimony of paul.( ) it will be observed that the instructions, at least in considerable part, supposed to be given to the seventy in the third. synoptic are, in the first, the very instructions given to the twelve. there has been much discussion regarding the whole episode, which need not here be minutely referred to. for various reasons the majority of critics impugn its historical character.( ) a large number of these, as well as other writers, consider that the narrative of this appointment of seventy disciples, the number of the nations of the earth according to jewish ideas, was introduced in pauline universalistic interest,( ) or, at least, that the number is { } typical of gentile conversion, in contrast with that of the twelve who represent the more strictly judaic limitation of the messianic mission; and they seem to hold that the preaching of the seventy is represented as not confined to judaea, but as extending to samaria, and that it thus denoted the destination of the gospel also to the gentiles. on the other hand, other critics, many, though by no means all, of whom do not question the authenticity of the passage, are disposed to deny the pauline tendency, and any special connection with a mission to the gentiles, and rather to see in the number seventy a reference to well-known judaistic institutions.( ) it is true that the number of the nations was set down at seventy by jewish tradition,( ) but, on the other hand, it was the number of the elders chosen by moses from amongst the children of israel by god's command to help him, and to whom god gave of his spirit( )s and also of the national { } sanhedrin, which, according to the mischna,( ) still represented the mosaic council. this view receives confirmation from the clementine recognitions in the following passage: "he therefore chose us twelve who first believed in him, whom he named apostles; afterwards seventy-two other disciples of most approved goodness, that even in this way recognising the similitude of moses the multitude might believe that this is the prophet to come whom moses foretold."( ) the passage here referred to is twice quoted in the acts: "moses indeed said: a prophet will the lord our god raise up unto you from among your brethren, like unto me," &c.( ) on examination, we do not find that there is any ground for the assertion that the seventy disciples were sent to the samaritans or gentiles, or were in any way connected with universalistic ideas. jesus had "stedfastly set his face to go to jerusalem," and sent messengers before him who "went and entered into a village of the samaritans to make ready for him," but they repulsed him, "because his face was as though he would go to jerusalem."( ) there is a decided break, however, before the appointment of the seventy. "after these things [------] the lord appointed seventy others also, and sent them two and two before his face into every city and place whither he himself was about to come."( ) there is not a single word in the instructions ( } given to them which justifies the conclusion that they were sent to samaria, and only the inference from the number seventy, taken as typical of the nations, suggests it. that inference is not sufficiently attested, and the slightness of the use made of the seventy disciples in the third gospel--this occasion being the only one on which they are mentioned, and no specific intimation of any mission to all people being here given--does not favour the theory of pauline tendency. so far as we are concerned, however, the point is unimportant. those who assert the universalistic character of the episode generally deny its authenticity; most of those who accept it as historical deny its universalism. the order to go and teach all nations, however, by no means carries us beyond strictly messianic limits. whilst the jews expected the messiah to restore the people of israel to their own holy land and crown them with unexampled prosperity and peace, revenging their past sorrows upon their enemies, and granting them supremacy over all the earth, they likewise held that one of the messianic glories was to be the conversion of the gentiles to the worship of jahveh. this is the burden of the prophets, and it requires no proof. the jews, as the people with whom god had entered into covenant, were first to be received into the kingdom. "let the children first be filled,"( ) and then the heathen might partake of the bread. regarding the ultimate conversion of the gentiles, therefore, there was no doubt; the only questions were as to the time and the conditions of admission into the national fellowship. as to the time, there never had been any expectation that the heathen could be turned to jahveh in numbers before the appearance of the { } messiah, but converts to judaism had been made in all ages, and after the dispersion, especially, the influence of the jews upon the professors of the effete and expiring religions of rome, of greece, and of egypt was very great, and numerous proselytes adopted the faith of israel,( ) and were eagerly sought for( ) in spite of the abusive terms in which the talmudists spoke of them.( ) the conditions on the other hand were perfectly definite. the case of converts had been early foreseen and provided for in the mosaic code. without referring to minor points, we may at once say that circumcision was indispensable to admission into the number of the children of israel.( ) participation in the privileges of the covenant could only be secured by accepting the mark of that covenant. very many, however, had adopted judaism to a great extent, who were not willing to undergo the rite requisite to full admission into the nation, and a certain modification had gradually been introduced by which, without it, strangers might be admitted into partial communion with israel. there were, therefore, two classes of proselytes,( ) the first called proselytes of the covenant or of righteousness, who were circumcised, obeyed the whole mosaic law, and { } were fully incorporated with israel, and the other called proselytes of the gate,( ) or worshippers of jahveh, who in the new testament are commonly called [------]. these had not undergone the rite of circumcision, and therefore were not participators in the covenant, but merely worshipped the god of israel,( ) and were only compelled to observe the seven noachian prescriptions. these proselytes of the gate, however, were little more than on sufferance. they were excluded from the temple, and even the acts of the apostles represent it to be pollution for a jew to have intercourse with them: it requires direct divine intervention to induce peter to go to cornelius, and to excuse his doing so in the eyes of the primitive church.( ) nothing short of circumcision and full observance of the mosaic law could secure the privileges of the covenant with israel to a stranger, and in illustration of this we may again point to the acts, where certain who came from judaea, members of the primitive church, teach the christians of antioch: "except ye have been circumcised after the custom of moses ye cannot be saved."( ) we need not discuss the chronology of this class. it is scarcely necessary to speak of the well-known case of lzates, king of adiabene, related by josephus. the jewish merchant ananias, who teaches him to worship god according to the religion of the jews, is willing, evidently from the special emergency of the case and the danger of forcing izates fully to embrace judaism in the face of his people, to let him remain a mere jahveh worshipper, only partially conforming to the law, and remaining uncircumcised'; but another jew from galilee, eleazer, versed in jewish learning, points out to him that, in neglecting circumcision, he breaks the principal point of the law. izates then has himself circumcised. josephus, antiq. xx. , § f. acts x. ff, xi. ft. dr. lightfoot says: "the apostles of the circumcision, even st. peter himself, had failed hitherto to comprehend the wide purpose of god. with their fellow-countrymen they still held it unlawful for a jew to keep company with an alien' (acts x. )." galatians, p. . { } this will be more fully shown as we proceed. the conversion of the gentiles was not, therefore, in the least degree an idea foreign to judaism, but, on the contrary, formed an intimate part of the messianic expectation of the later prophets. the conditions of admission to the privileges and promises of the covenant, however, were full acceptance of the mosaic law, and submission to the initiatory rite.( ) that small and comparatively insignificant people, with an arrogance that would have been ridiculous if, in the influence which they have actually exerted over the world, it had not been almost sublime, not only supposed themselves the sole and privileged recipients of the oracles of god, as his chosen and peculiar people, but they contemplated nothing short of universal submission to the mosaic code, and the supremacy of israel over all the earth. we are now better able to estimate the position of the twelve when the death of their master threw them on their own resources, and left them to propagate his gospel as they themselves understood it. born a jew of the race of david, accepting during his life the character of the promised messiah, and dying with the mocking title "king of the jews" written upon his cross, jesus had left his disciples in close communion with the mosaism which he had spiritualized and ennobled, but had not abolished. he himself had taught them that "it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness," and, from his youth upwards, had set them the example of { } enlightened observance of the mosaic law. his precept had not belied his example, and whilst in strong terms we find him inculcating the permanence of the law, it is certain that he left no order to disregard it. he confined his own preaching to the jews; the first ministers of the messiah represented the twelve tribes of the people of israel;.and the first christians were of that nation, with no distinctive worship, but practising as before the whole mosaic ritual. what neander savs of "many," may, we think, be referred to all: "that jesus faithfully observed the form of the jewish law served to them as evidence that this form should ever preserve its value."( ) as a fact, the apostles and the early christians continued as before assiduously to practise all the observances of the mosaic law, to frequent the temple( ) and adhere to the usual strict forms of judaism.( ) in addition to the influence of the example of jesus and the powerful effect of national habit, there were many strong reasons which obviously must to jews have rendered abandonment of the law as difficult as submission to its full requirements must have been to gentiles. holding as they did the divine origin of the old testament, in which the observance of the law was inculcated on almost every page, { } it would have been impossible, without counter-teaching of the most peremptory and convincing character, to have shaken its supremacy; but beyond this, in that theocratic community mosaism was not only the condition of the covenant, and the key of the temple, but it was also the diploma of citizenship, and the bond of social and political life. to abandon the observance of the law was not only to resign the privilege and the distinctive characteristic of israel, to relinquish the faith of the patriarchs who were the glory of the nation, and to forsake a divinely appointed form of worship, without any recognized or even indicated substitute, but it severed the only link between the individual and the people of israel, and left him in despised isolation, an outcast from the community. they had no idea, however, that any such sacrifice was required of them. they were simply jews believing in the jewish messiah, and they held that all things else were to proceed as before, until the glorious second coining of the christ.( ) the apostles and primitive christians continued to hold the national belief that the way to christianity lay through judaism, and that the observance of the law was obligatory and circumcision necessary to complete communion.( ) paul describes with unappeased { } irritation the efforts made by the community of jerusalem, whose "pillars" were peter, james, and john, to force titus, a gentile christian, to be circumcised,( ) and even the acts represent james and all the elders of the church of jerusalem as requesting paul, long after, to take part with four jewish christians, who had a vow and were about to purify themselves and shave their heads and, after the accomplishment of the days of purification, make the usual offering in the temple, in order to convince the "many thousands there of those who have believed and are all zealous for the law," that it is untrue that he teaches: "all the jews who are among the gentiles apostacy [------] from moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs," and to show, on the contrary, that he himself walks orderly and keeps the law.( ) as true israelites, with opinions fundamentally unchanged by belief that jesus was the messiah, they held that the gospel was specially intended for the people of the covenant, and they confined their teaching to the jews.( ) a gentile whilst still uncircumcised, even although converted, could not, they thought, be received on an gal ii. ff. as we shall more fully discuss this episode hereafter, it is not necessary to do so here. acts xxi. -- ; cf. xv. i. paul is also represented as saying to the jews of rome that he has done nothing" against the customs of their fathers." dr. lightfoot says: "meanwhile at jerusalem some years past away before the barrier of judaism was assailed. the apostles still observed the mosaic ritual; they still confined their preaching to jews by birth, or jews by adoption, the proselytes of the covenant," &c. paul's ep. to gal. p. . paley says: "it was not yet known to the apostles, that they were at liberty to propose the religion to mankind at large. that 'mystery,' as st. paul calls it (eph. iii. - ), and as it then was, was revealed to peter by an especial miracle." a view of the evidence, &c, ed. potts, , p. . { } equality with the jew, but defiled him by contact.( ) the attitude of the christian jew to the merely christian gentile, who had not entered the community by the portal of judaism, was, as before, simply that of the jew to the proselyte of the gate. the apostles could not upon any other terms have then even contemplated the conversion of the gentiles. jesus had limited his own teaching to the jews, and, according to the first gospel, had positively prohibited, at one time at least, their going to the gentiles, or even to the samaritans, and if there had been an order given to preach to all nations it certainly was not accompanied by any removal of the conditions specified in the law.( ) it has been remarked that neither party, in the great discussion in the church regarding the terms upon which gentiles might be admitted to the privileges of christianity, ever appealed in support of their views to specific instructions of jesus on the subject.( ) the reason is intelligible enough. the petrine party, supported as they were by the whole weight of the law and of holy scripture, as well as by the example and tacit approval of the master, could not have felt even that degree of doubt which precedes an appeal to authority. dr. lightfoot says: "the master himself had left no express instructions. he had charged them, it is true, to preach the gospel to all nations, but how this injunction was to be carried out, by what changes a national church must expand into an universal church, they had not been told. he had indeed asserted the sovereignty of the spirit over the letter; he had enunciated the great principle--as wide in its application as the law itself--that' man was not made for the sabbath, but the sabbath for man.' he had pointed to the fulfilment of the law in the gospel. so fer he had discredited the law, but he had not deposed it or abolished it. it was left to the apostles themselves under the guidance of the spirit, moulded by circumstances and moulding them in turn, to work out the great change." st. paul's ep. to gal. . { } the party of paul, on the other hand, had nothing in their favour to which a specific appeal could have been made; but in his constant protest that he had not received his doctrine from man, but had been taught it by direct revelation, the apostle of the gentiles, who was the first to proclaim a substantial difference between christianity and judaism,( ) in reality endeavoured to set aside the authority of the judaistic party by an appeal from the earthly to the spiritualized messiah. even after the visit of paul to jerusalem about the year , the elder apostles still retained the views which we have shown to have been inevitable under the circumstances, and, as we learn from paul himself, they still continued mere "apostles of the circumcision," limiting their mission to the jews.( ) the apostles and the primitive christians, therefore, after the death of their master, whom they believed to be the messiah of the jews, having received his last instructions, and formed their final impressions of his views, remained jews, believing in the continued obligation to observe the law and, consequently, holding the initiatory rite essential to participation in the privileges of the covenant. they held this not only as jews believing in the divine origin of the old testament and of the law, but as christians confirmed by the example and the teaching of their christ, whose very coming was a substantial ratification of the ancient faith of israel. in this position they stood when the { } gospel, without their intervention, and mainly by the exertions of the apostle paul, began to spread amongst the gentiles, and the terms of their admission came into question. it is impossible to deny that the total removal of conditions, advocated by the apostle paul with all the vehemence and warmth of his energetic character, and involving nothing short of the abrogation of the law and surrender of all the privileges of israel, must have been shocking not only to the prejudices but also to the deepest religious convictions of men who, although christians, had not ceased to be jews, and, unlike the apostle of the gentiles, had been directly and daily in contact with jesus, without having been taught such revolutionary principles. from this point we have to proceed with our examination of the account in the acts of the relation of the elder apostles to paul, and the solution of the difficult problem before them. chapter v. stephen the martyr before the apostle of the gentiles himself comes on the scene, and is directly brought in contact with the twelve, we have to study the earlier incidents narrated in the acts, wherein, it is said, the emancipation of the church from jewish exclusiveness had already either commenced or been clearly anticipated. the first of these which demands our attention is the narrative of the martyrdom of stephen. this episode, although highly interesting and important in itself, might, we consider, have been left unnoticed in connection with the special point now engaging our attention, but such significance has been imparted to it by the views which critics have discovered in the speech of stephen, that we cannot pass it without attention. if this detention be, on the one hand, to be regretted, it will on the other be compensated by the light which may be thrown on the composition of the acts. we read(l) that in consequence of murmurs amongst the hellenists against the hebrews, that their widows were neglected in the daily distribution of alms, seven deacons were appointed specially to attend to such ministrations. amongst these, it is said, was stephen,( ) { } "a man full of faith and of the holy spirit." stephen, it appears, by no means limited his attention to the material interests of the members of the church, but being "full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs [------] amongst the people." "but there arose certain of those of the synagogue which is called (the synagogue) of the libertines( ) and cyrenians and alexandrians and of them of cilicia and of asia, disputing with stephen; and they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by which he spake. then they suborned men who said: we have heard him speak blasphemous words against moses and god. and they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes, and came upon him, and seized him, and brought him to the council, and set up false witnesses who said: this man ceaseth not to speak words against the holy place and the law; for we have heard him say, that jesus, this naza-rene, shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which moses delivered to us." the high-priest asks him: are these things so? and stephen delivers an address, which has since been the subject of much discussion amongst critics and divines. the contents of the speech taken by themselves do not present any difficulty, so far as the sense is concerned, but regarded as a reply to the accusations brought against him by the false witnesses, the defence of stephen has perhaps been interpreted in a greater variety of ways than any other part of the new testament. its shadowy outlines have been used as a setting for the pious thoughts of subsequent { } generations, and every imaginable intention has been ascribed to the proto-martyr, every possible or impossible reference detected in the phrases of his oration. this has mainly arisen from the imperfect nature of the account in the acts, and the absence of many important details which has left criticism to adopt that "divinatorisch-combinatorische" procedure which is so apt to evolve any favourite theory from the inner consciousness. the prevailing view, however, amongst the great majority of critics of all schools is, that stephen is represented in the acts as the forerunner of the apostle paul, anticipating his universalistic principles, and proclaiming with more or less of directness the abrogation of mosaic ordinances and the freedom of the christian church.( ) this view was certainly advanced by augustine, and lies at the base of his famous saying: "si sanctus stephanus sic non oras-set, ecclesia paulum non haberet,"( ) but it was first clearly enunciated by baur, who subjected the speech of stephen to detailed analysis,( ) and his interpretation has to a large extent been adopted even by apologists. it must be clearly understood that adherence to this reading of the aim and meaning of the speech, as it is given in the acts, by no means involves an admission of its authenticity, which, on the contrary, is impugned by baur himself, and by a large number of independent critics. we have the misfortune of differing most materially from the prevalent view regarding the contents of the speech, and we maintain that, as it stands in the acts, there is not a { } word in it which can be legitimately construed into an attack upon the mosaic law, or which anticipates the christian universalism of paul. space, however, forbids our entering here upon a discussion of this subject, but the course which we must adopt with regard to it renders it unnecessary to deal with the interpretation of the speech. we consider that there is no reason for believing that the discourse put into the mouth of stephen was ever actually delivered, but on the contraiy that there is every ground for holding that it is nothing more than a composition by the author of the acts. we shall endeavour clearly to state the reasons for this conclusion. with the exception of the narrative in the acts, there is no evidence whatever that such a person as stephen ever existed. the statements of the apostle paul leave no doubt that persecution against the christians of jerusalem must have broken out previous to his conversion, but no details are given, and it can scarcely be considered otherwise than extraordinary, that paul should not in any of his own writings have referred to the proto-martyr of the christian church, if the account which is given of him be historical. it may be argued that his own share in the martyrdom of stephen made the episode an unpleasant memory, which the apostle would not readily recall. considering the generosity of paul's character on the one hand, however, and the important position assigned to stephen on the other, this cannot be admitted as an explanation, and it is perfectly unaccountable that, if stephen really be a historical personage, no mention of him occurs elsewhere in the new testament. moreover, if stephen was, as asserted, the direct forerunner of paul, and in his hearing enunciated { } sentiments like those ascribed to him, already expressing much more than the germ--indeed the full spirit--of pauline universality, it would be passing strange that paul not only tacitly ignores all that he owes to the proto-martyr, but vehemently protests: "but i make known unto you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not after man. for neither did i receive it from man, nor was taught it, but by revelation of jesus christ."( ) there is no evidence whatever that such a person exercised any such influence on paul.( ) one thing only is certain, that the speech and martyrdom of stephen made so little impression on paul that, according to acts, he continued a bitter persecutor of christianity, "making havoc of the church." the statement, vi. , that "stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people" is not calculated to increase confidence in the narrative as sober history; and as little is the assertion, vi. , that "all who sat in the council, looking stedfastly on him, saw his face as it had been the face of an angel." this, we think, is evidently an instance of christian subjective opinion made objective.( ) how, we might ask, could it be known to the writer that all who sat at the council saw this? neander replies that probably it is the evidence of members of the sanhedrin of the impression made on them by the aspect of stephen.( ) the intention of the writer, however, obviously is to describe a supernatural it is further very remarkable, if it be assumed that the vision, acts vii. , actually was seen, that, in giving a list of those who have seen the risen jesus ( cor. xv. -- ), which he evidently intends to be complete, he does not include stephen. { } phenomenon,( ) and this is in his usual manner in this book, where miraculous agency is more freely employed than in any other in the canon. the session of the council commences in a regular manner,( ) but the previous arrest of stephen,( ) and the subsequent interruption of his defence, are described as a tumultuous proceeding, his death being. unsanctioned by any sentence of the council.( ) the sanhed-rin, indeed, could not execute any sentence of death without the ratification of the roman authorities,( ) and nothing is said in the narrative which implies that any regular verdict was pronounced; but, on the contrary, the tumult described in v. f. excludes such a supposition. olshausen( ) considers that, in order to avoid any collision with the roman power, the sanhedrin did not pronounce any formal judgment, but connived at the execution which some fanatics carried out. this explanation, however, is inadmissible, because it is clear that the members of the council themselves, if also the audience, { } attacked and stoned stephen.( ) the actual stoning( ) is carried out with all regard to legal forms;( ) the victim being taken out of the city,( ) and the witnesses casting the first stone,( ) and for this purpose taking off their outer garments. the whole account, with its singular mixture of utter lawlessness and formality, is extremely improbable,( ) and more especially when the speech itself is considered. the proceedings commence in an orderly manner, and the high priest calls upon stephen for his defence. the council and audience listen patiently and quietly to his speech, and no interruption takes place until he has said all that he had to sav, for it must be apparent that when the speaker abandons narrative and argument and breaks into direct invective, there could not have been any intention to prolong the address, as no expectation of calm attention after such denunciations could have been natural. the tumult cuts short the oration precisely where the author had exhausted his { } subject, and by temporary lawlessness overcomes the legal difficulty of a sentence which the sanhedrin, without the ratification of the roman authority, could not have carried out. as soon as the tumult has effected these objects, all becomes orderly and legal again; and, consequently, the witnesses can lay their garments "at a young man's feet whose name was saul." the principal actor in the work is thus dramatically introduced. as the trial commences with a supernatural illumination of the face of stephen, it ends with a supernatural vision, in which stephen sees heaven opened, and the son of man standing at the right hand of god. such a trial and such an execution present features which are undoubtedly not historical. this impression is certainly not lessened when we find how many details of the trial and death of stephen are based on the accounts in the gospels of the trial and death of jesus.( ) the irritated adversaries of stephen stir up the people and the elders and scribes, and come upon him and lead him to the council.( ) they seek false witness against him;( ) and these false witnesses accuse him of speaking against the temple and the law.( ) the false witnesses who are set up against jesus with similar testimony, according to the first two synoptics, are strangely omitted by the third. the reproduction of this trait here has much that is suggestive. the high priest asks: "are these things so?"( ) stephen, at { } the close of his speech, exclaims: "i see the heavens opened, and the son of man standing on the right hand of god." jesus says: "henceforth shall the son of man be seated on the right hand of the power of god."( ) whilst he is being stoned, stephen prays, saying: "lord jesus, receive my spirit;" and, similarly, jesus on the cross cries, with a loud voice: "father, into thy hands i commend my spirit; and, having said this, he expired."( ) stephen, as he is about to die, cries, with a loud voice: "lord, lay not this sin to their charge; and when he said this he fell asleep;" and jesus says: "father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."( ) these two sayings of jesus are not given anywhere but in the third synoptic,( ) and their imitation by stephen, in another work of the same evangelist, is a peculiarity which deserves attention. it is argued by apologists( ) that nothing is more natural than that the first martyrs should have the example of the suffering jesus in their minds, and die with his expressions of love and resignation on their lips. on the other hand, taken along with other most suspicious circumstances which we have already pointed out, and with the fact, which we shall presently demonstrate, that the speech of stephen is nothing more { } than a composition by the author of acts, the singular analogies presented by this narrative with the trial and last words of jesus in the gospels seem to us an additional indication of its inauthenticity. as baur( ) and zeller( ) have well argued, the use of two expressions of jesus only found in the third synoptic is a phenomenon which is much more naturally explained by attributing them to the author, who of course knew that gospel well, than to stephen who did not know it at all.( ) the prominence which is given to this episode of the first christian martyrdom is intelligible in itself, and it acquires fresh significance when it is considered as the introduction of the apostle paul, whose perfect silence regarding the proto-martyr, however, confirms the belief which we otherwise acquire, that the whole narrative and speech, whatever unknown tradition may have suggested them, are, as we have them, to be ascribed to the author of the acts. on closer examination, one of the first questions which arises is: how could such a speech have been reported? although neander( ) contends that we are not justified in asserting that all that is narrated regarding stephen in the acts occurred in a single day, we think it cannot be doubted that the intention is to describe the arrest, trial, and execution as rapidly following each other on the same day. "they came upon him, and seized him, and { } brought him to the council, and set up false witnesses, who said," &c.( ) there is no ground here for interpolating any imprisonment, and if not, then it follows clearly that stephen, being immediately called upon to answer for himself, is, at the end of his discourse, violently carried away without the city to be stoned. no preparations could have been made even to take notes of his speech, if upon any ground it were reasonable to assume the possibility of an intention to do so; and indeed it could not, under the circumstances, have been foreseen that he should either have been placed in such a position, or have been able to make a speech at all. the rapid progress of all the events described, and the excitement consequent on such tumultuous proceedings, render an ordinary explanation of the manner in which such a speech could have been preserved improbable, and it is difficult to suppose that it could have been accurately remembered, with all its curious details, by one who was present. improbable as it is, however, this is the only suggestion which can possibly be advanced. the majority of apologists suppose that the speech was heard and reported by the apostle paul himself,( ) or at least that it was communicated or written down either by a member of the sanhedrin, or by some one who was present.( ) as there is no information on the point, there is ample scope for imagination, but when we come to consider its linguistic and other peculiarities, it must be borne in { } mind that the extreme difficulty of explaining the preservation of such a speech must be an element in judging whether it is not rather a composition by the author of acts. the language in which it was delivered, again, is the subject of much difference of opinion, many maintaining that it must have originally been spoken in aramaic,( ) whilst others hold that it was delivered in greek.( ) still, a large number of critics and divines of course assert that the speech attributed to stephen is at least substantially authentic. as might naturally be expected in a case where negative criticism is arrayed against a canonical work upheld by the time-honoured authority of the church, those who dispute its authenticity( ) are in the minority. it is maintained by the latter that the language is more or less that of the writer of the rest of the work, and that the speech in fact as it lies before us is a later composition by the author of the acts of the apostles. before examining the linguistic peculiarities of the speech, we may very briefly point out that, in the course of the historical survey, many glaring contradictions of the statements of the old testament occur.( ) stephen says { } (vs. , ) that the order to abraham to leave his country was given to him in mesopotamia before he dwelt in haran; but, according to genesis (xii. ff) the call is given whilst he was living in haran. the speech (v. ) represents abraham leaving haran after the death of his father, but this is in contradiction to genesis, according to which( ) abraham was when he left haran. now, as he was born when his father terah was ,( ) and terah lived years,( ) his father was only at the time indicated, and afterwards lived years. in v. it is stated that abraham had no possession in the promised land, not even so much as to set his foot on; but, according to genesis,( ) he bought the field of ephron in machpelah. it is said (v. ) that jacob went down into egypt with souls, whereas, in the old testament, it is repeatedly said that the number was .( ) in v. , it is stated that jacob was buried in schechem in a sepulchre bought by abraham of the sons of emmor in schechem, whereas in genesis( ) jacob is said to have been buried in machpelah; the sepulchre in schechem, in which { } the bones of joseph were buried, was not bought by abraham, but by jacob.( ) moses is described (v. ) as mighty in words, but in exodus( ) he is said to be the very reverse, and aaron in fact is sent with him to speak words for him. these are some of the principal variations. it used to be argued that such mistakes were mere errors of memory, natural in a speech delivered under such circumstances and without preparation,( ) and that they are additional evidence of its authenticity, inasmuch as it is very improbable that a writer deliberately composing such a speech could have committed them. it is very clear, however, that the majority of these are not errors of memory at all, but either the exegesis prevailing at the time amongst learned jews, or traditions deliberately adopted, of which many traces are elsewhere found.( ) the form of the speech is closely similar to other speeches found in the same work. we have already in passing pointed out the analogy of parts of it to the address of peter in solomon's porch, but the speech of paul at antioch bears a still closer resemblance to it, and has been called "a mere echo of the speeches of peter and stephen."( ) we must refer the reader to our general comparison of the two speeches of peter and paul in question,( ) which sufficiently showed, we think, { } that they were not delivered by independent speakers, but on the contrary that they are nothing more than compositions by the author of the acts. these addresses which are such close copies of each other, are so markedly cast in the same mould as the speech of stephen, that they not only confirm our conclusions as to their own origin, but intensify suspicions of its authenticity. it is impossible, without reference to the speeches themselves, to shew how closely that of paul at antioch is traced on the lines of the speech of stephen, and this resemblance is much greater than can be shown by mere linguistic examination. the thoughts correspond where the words differ. there is a constant recurrence of words, however, even where the sense of the passages is not the same, and the ideas in both bear the stamp of a single mind. we shall not attempt fully to contrast these discourses here, for it would occupy too much space, and we therefore content ourselves with giving a few illustrations, begging the reader to examine the speeches themselves. [------] { } [------] { } [------] it is argued that the speech of stephen bears upon it { } the stamp of an address which was actually delivered.( ) we are not able to discover any special indication of this. such an argument, at the best, is merely the assertion of personal opinion, and cannot have any weight. it is quite conceivable that an oration actually spoken might lose its spontaneous character in a report, and on the other hand that a written composition might acquire oratorical reality from the skill of the writer. it would indeed exhibit great want of literary ability if a writer, composing a speech which he desires to represent as having actually been spoken, altogether failed to convey some impression of this. to have any application to the present case, however, it must not only be affirmed that the speech of stephen has the stamp of an address really spoken, but that it has the character of one delivered under such extraordinary circumstances, without premeditation and in the midst of tumultuous proceedings. it cannot, we think, be reasonably asserted that a speech like this is peculiarly characteristic of a man suddenly arrested by angry and excited opponents, and hurried before a council which, at its close, rushes upon him and joins in stoning him. unless the defence attributed to stephen be particularly characteristic of this, the argument in question falls to the ground. on the contrary, if the speech has one feature more strongly marked than another, it is the deliberate care with which the points referred to in the historical survey are selected and bear upon each other, and the art with which the climax is attained. in showing, as we have already done, that the speech betrays the handy work of the author of the acts, we have to a large extent disposed of any claim { } to peculiar individuality in the defence, and the linguistic analysis which we shall now make will conclusively settle the source of the composition. we must point out here in continuation that, as in the rest of the work, all the quotations in the speech are from the septuagint, and that the author follows that version even when it does not fairly represent the original.( ) we may now proceed to analyse the language of the whole episode from vi. to the end of the seventh chapter, in order to discover what linguistic analogy it bears to the rest of the acts and to the third synoptic, which for the sake of brevity we shall simply designate "luke." with the exception of a very few words in general use, every word employed in the section will be found in the following analysis, based upon bruder's 'concordance,'( ) and which is arranged in the order of the verses, although for greater clearness the whole is divided into categories. we shall commence with a list of the words in this section which are not elsewhere used in the new testament. they are as follows:--[------], vi. ; [------]t vi. ; [------], vii. ;( ) [------], vii. , but [------], occurs several times in acts, see below, vii. ; [------], vii. ; [------], vii. ; [------], vii. , this word, which is common amongst { } greek writers,( ) is used in lxx. chron. xxxi. ; [------], vii. . these nine words are all that can strictly be admitted as [------], but there are others, which, although not found in any other part of the acts or of the gospel, occur in other writings of the new testament, and which must here be noted. [------], vi. , occurring tim. i. , tim. iii. , pet. il , rev. xiii. ; [------], however, is used four times in acts, thrice in luke, and frequently elsewhere, and [------] in luke v. . [------] vi. , used rev. ii. , xxi. ; [------], vi. , rom. i. , ' cor. xv. , , gal. iv. , heb. i. , almost purely a pauline word; [------], vii. , elsewhere fourteen times; [------], vii. , also gal. i. , heb. vii. , xi. twice (lxx. gen. v. ), jude ; [------], vii. , also pet. ii. ; [------], vii. , also john vi. , tim. ii. , james iv. ; [------], vii. , also rom. iii. , heb. v. , pet. iv. ; [------], vii. , also cor. ii. , phil. ii. ; [------], vii. , also rom. xiii. , cf. gal. iii. , but the writer makes use of [------], see vii. , below; [------], vii. , also rom. xiii. , eph. iv. , , col. iii. , heb. xii. , james i. , pet, ii. . if we add these ten words to the preceding, the proportion of [------] is by no means excessive for the verses, especially when the peculiarity of the subject is considered, and it is remembered that the number of words employed in the third gospel, for instance, which are not elsewhere found, greatly exceeds that of the other gospels, and that this linguistic richness is characteristic of the author. there is another class of words which may now be { } dealt with: those which, although not elsewhere found either in the acts or gospel, are derived from the sep-tuagint version of the old testament. the author makes exclusive use of that version, and in the historical survey, of which so large a portion of the speech is composed, his mind very naturally recalls its expressions even where he does not make direct quotations, but merely gives a brief summary of its narratives. in the following list where words are not clearly taken from the septuagint version( ) of the various episodes referred to, the reasons shall be stated:-- { } we shall now, by way of disposing of them, take the words which require little special remark, but are used as well in the rest of the acts and in the gospel as in other writings of the new testament:-- [------] { } [------] { } [------] we shall now give the words which may either be regarded as characteristic of the author of the acts and gospel, or the use of which is peculiar or limited to him:-- [------] { } [------] { } [------] { } [------] to this very remarkable list of words we have still to add a number of expressions which further betray the author of the acts and gospel:-- { } [------] { } [------] { } [------] it is impossible, we think, to examine this analysis, in which we might fairly have included other points which we have passed over, without feeling the certain conviction that the speech of stephen was composed by the author of the rest of the acts of the apostles. it may not be out of place to quote some remarks of lekebusch at the close of an examination of the language of the acts in general, undertaken for the purpose of ascertaining the literary characteristics of the book, which, although originally having no direct reference to this episode in particular, may well serve to illustrate our own results:--"an unprejudiced critic must have acquired the conviction from the foregoing linguistic examination that, throughout the whole of the acts of the apostles, and partly also the { } gospel, the same style of language and expression generally prevails, and therefore that our book is an original work, independent of written sources on the whole, and proceeding from a single pen. for when the same expressions are everywhere found, when a long row of words which only recur in the gospel and acts, or comparatively only very seldom in other works of the new testament, appear equally in all parts, when certain forme of words, peculiarities of word-order, construction and phraseology, indeed even whole sentences, recur in the different sections, a compilation out of documents by different earlier writers can no longer be thought of, and it is 'beyond doubt, that we have to consider our writing as the work of a single author, who has impressed upon it the stamp of a distinct literary style' (zeller, theol. jahrb.. , p. ). the use of written sources is certainly not directly excluded by this, and probably the linguistic peculiarities, of which some of course exist in isolated sections of our work, may be referred to this. but as these peculiarities consist chiefly of [------], which may rather be ascribed to the richness of the author's vocabulary than to his talent for compilation, and in comparison with the great majority of points of agreement almost disappear, we must from the first be prepossessed against the theory that our author made use of written sources, and only allow ourselves to be moved to such a conclusion by further distinct phenomena in the various parts of our book, especially as the prologue of the gospel, so often quoted for the purpose, does not at all support it. but in any case, as has already been remarked, _the_ opinion that, in the acts of the apostles, the several parts are strung together almost without { } alteration, is quite irreconcilable with the result of our linguistic examination. zeller rightly says:--'were the author so dependent a compiler, the traces of such a proceeding must necessarily become apparent in a thorough dissimilarity of language and expression. and this dissimilarity would be all the greater if his sources, as in that case we could scarcely help admitting, belonged to widely separated spheres as regards language and mode of thought. on the other hand, it would be altogether inexplicable that, in all parts of the work, the same favourite expressions, the same turns, the same peculiarities of vocabulary and syntax should meet us. this phenomenon only becomes conceivable when we suppose that the contents of our work were brought into their present form by one and the same person, and that the work as it lies before us was not merely _compiled_ by some one, but was also _composed_ by him.'"( ) should an attempt be made to argue that, even if it be conceded that the language is that of the author of acts, the sentiments may be those actually expressed by stephen, it would at once be obvious that such an explanation is not only purely arbitrary and incapable of proof, but opposed to the facts of the case. it is not the language only which can be traced to the author of the rest of the acts but, as we have shown, the whole plan of the speech is the same as that of others in different parts of the work. stephen speaks exactly as peter does before him and paul at a later period. there is just that amount of variety which a writer of not unlimited resources can introduce to express the views of { } different men under different circumstances, but there is so much which is nevertheless common to them all, that community of authorship cannot be denied. on the other hand, the improbabilities of the narrative, the singular fact that stephen is not mentioned by the apostle paul, and the peculiarities which may be detected in the speech itself receive their very simple explanation when linguistic analysis so clearly demonstrates that, whatever small nucleus of fact may lie at the basis of the episode, the speech actually ascribed to the martyr stephen is nothing more than a later composition put into his mouth by the author of the acts. chapter vi. philip and the eunuch. peter and cornelius. we have been forced to enter at such length into the discussion of the speech and martyrdom of stephen, that we cannot afford space to do more than merely glance at the proceedings of his colleague philip, as we pass on to more important points in the work before us. the author states that a great persecution broke out at the time of stephen's death, and that all [------] the community of jerusalem were scattered abroad "except the apostles" [------]. that the heads of the church, who were well known, should remain unmolested in jerusalem, whilst the whole of the less known members of the community were persecuted and driven to flight, is certainly an extraordinary and suspicious statement.( ) even apologists are obliged to admit that the account of the dispersion of the whole church is hyperbolic;( ) but exaggeration and myth enter so largely and persistently into the composition of the acts of the apostles, that it is difficult, after any attentive scrutiny, seriously to treat the work as in any strict sense historical at all. it has been { } conjectured by some critics, as well in explanation of this statement as in connection with theories regarding the views of stephen, that the persecution in question was limited to the hellenistic community to which stephen belonged, whilst the apostles and others, who were known as faithful observers of the law and of the temple worship,( ) were not regarded as heretics by the orthodox jews.( ) the narrative in the acts does not seem to support the view that the persecution was limited to the hellenists;( ) but beyond the fact vouched for by paul that about this time there was a persecution, we have no data whatever regarding that event. philip, it is said, went down to the city of samaria, and "was preaching the christ"( ) to them. as the statement that "the multitudes with one accord gave heed to the things spoken" to them by philip is ascribed to the miracles which he performed there, we are unable to regard the narrative as historical, and still less so when we consider the supernatural agency by which his further proceedings are directed and aided. we need only remark that the samaritans, although only partly of jewish origin, and rejecting the jewish scriptures with the exception of the pentateuch, worshipped the same god as the jews, were circumcised, and were equally prepared as a nation to accept the messiah. the statement that the apostles peter and john went to samaria, in order, by the imposition of hands, to bestow the gift of the holy spirit to the { } converts baptized by philip, does not add to the general credibility of the history.( ) as bleek( ) has well remarked, nothing is known or said as to whether the conversion of the samaritans effected any change in their relations towards the jewish people and the temple in jerusalem; and the mission of philip to the samaritans, as related in the acts, cannot in any case be considered as having any important bearing on the question before us. we shall not discuss the episode of simon at all, although, in the opinion of eminent critics, it contains much that is suggestive of the true character of the acts of the apostles. an "angel of the lord" [------] speaks to philip, and desires him to go to the desert way from jerusalem to gaza,( ) where the spirit tells him( ) to draw near and join himself to the chariot of a man of ethiopia who had come to worship at jerusalem, and was then returning home. philip runs thither, and hearing him read isaiah, expounds the passage to him, and at his own request the eunuch is at once baptized. "and when they came up out of the water, the spirit of the lord caught away [------] philip, and the eunuch saw him no more; for he went on his way rejoicing; but philip was found at azotus."( ) attempts have of course been made to explain naturally the supernatural features of this narrative.( ) ewald, who is master of the art of rationalistic explanation, says, with regard to the order given by the angel: "he felt impelled as by the power and the clear voice of an angel" to go in that { } direction; and the final miracle is disposed of by a contrast of the disinterestedness of philip with the conduct of gehazi, the servant of elisha: it was the desire to avoid reward, "which led him all the more hurriedly to leave his new convert"; "and it was as though the spirit of the lord himself snatched him from him another way," &c, &c. "from gaza philip repaired rapidly northward to ashdod, &c."(l) the great mass of critics reject such evasions, and recognise that the author relates miraculous occurrences. the introduction of supernatural agency in this way, however, removes the story from the region of history. such statements are antecedently, and, indeed, coming from an unknown writer and without corroboration, are absolutely incredible, and no means exist of ascertaining what original tradition may have assumed this mythical character. zeller supposes that only the personality and nationality of the eunuch are really historical.( ) all that need here be added is, that the great majority of critics agree that the ethiopian was probably at least a proselyte of the gate,( ) as his going to jerusalem to worship seems clearly to indicate.( ) in any { } case, the mythical elements of this story, as well as the insufficiency of the details, deprive the narrative of historical value.( ) the episodes of stephen's speech and martyrdom and the mission of philip are, in one respect especially, unimportant for the inquiry on which we are now more immediately engaged. they are almost completely isolated from the rest of the acts: that is to say, no reference whatever is subsequently made to them as forming any precedent for the guidance of the church in the burning question which soon arose within it. peter, as we shall see, when called upon to visit and baptize cornelius, exhibits no recollection of his own mission to the samaritans, and no knowledge of the conversion of the ethiopian. moreover, as stephen plays so small a part in the history, and philip does not reappear upon the scene after this short episode, no opportunity is afforded of comparing one part of their history with the rest. in passing on to the account of the baptism of cornelius, we have at least the advantage of contrasting the action attributed to peter with his conduct on earlier and later occasions, and a test is thus supplied which is of no small value for ascertaining the truth of the whole representation. to this narrative we must now address ourselves. as an introduction to the important events at cæsarea, the author of the acts relates the particulars of a visit which peter pays to lydda and joppa, during the course of which he performs two very remarkable miracles. at the former town he finds a certain man named Æneas, { } paralysed, who had lain on a bed for eight years. peter said to him: "Æneas, jesus the christ healeth thee; arise and make thy bed." and he arose immediately.( ) as the consequence of this miracle, the writer states that: "all who dwelt at lydda and the sharon saw him, who turned to the lord."( ) the exaggeration of such a statement( ) is too palpable to require argument the effect produced by the supposed miracle is almost as incredible as the miracle itself, and the account altogether has little claim to the character of sober history. this mighty work, however, is altogether eclipsed by a miracle which peter performs about the same time at joppa. a certain woman, a disciple, named tabitha, who was "full of good works," fell sick in those days and died, and when they washed her, they laid her in an upper chamber, and sent to peter at lydda, beseeching him to come to them without delay. when peter arrived they took him into the upper chamber, where all the widows stood weeping, and showed coats and garments which dorcas used to make while she was with them. "but peter put them all out, and kneeled down and prayed; and, turning to the body, said: tabitha, arise. and she opened her eyes, and when she saw peter she sat up. and he gave her his hand, and raised her up, and when he called the saints and the widows, he presented her alive." apparently, the raising of the dead did not produce as much effect as the cure of the paralytic, for the writer only adds here: "and it was known throughout all joppa; and many believed in the lord."( ) we shall hereafter have to speak of the perfect calmness and absence of surprise with which these early writers relate { } the most astonishing miracles. it is evident from the manner in which this story is narrated that the miracle was anticipated.( ) the [------] in which the body is laid cannot have been the room generally used for that purpose, but is probably the single upper chamber of such a house which the author represents as specially adopted in anticipation of peter's arrival.( ) the widows who stand by weeping and showing the garments made by the deceased complete the preparation. as peter is sent for after dorcas had died, it would seem as though the writer intimated that her friends expected him to raise her from the dead. the explanation of this singular phenomenon, however, becomes clear when it is remarked that the account of this great miracle is closely traced from that of the raising of jairus' daughter in the synoptics,( ) and more especially in the second gospel.( ) in that instance jesus is sent for; and, on coming to the house, he finds people "weeping and wailing greatly." he puts them all forth, like peter; and, taking the child by the hand, says to her: "'talitha koum,' which is being interpreted: maiden, i say unto thee, arise. and immediately the maiden arose and walked."( ) baur and others( ) conjecture that even the name "tabitha, which by { } interpretation is called dorcas," was suggested by the words [------], above quoted. the hebrew original of [------] signifies "gazelle," and they contend that it was used, like [------], in the sense generally of: maiden.(l) these two astonishing miracles, reported by an unknown writer, and without any corroboration, are absolutely incredible, and cannot prepossess any reasonable mind with confidence in the narrative to which they form an introduction, and the natural distrust which they awaken is folly confirmed when we find supernatural agency employed at every stage of the following history. we are told( ) that a certain devout centurion, named cornelius, "saw in a vision plainly" [------] an angel of god, who said to him: "thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a memorial before god. and now send men to joppa, and call for one simon, who is surnamed peter, whose house is by the sea side." after giving these minute directions, the angel departed, [------] { } and cornelius sent three messengers to joppa. just as they approached the end of their journey on the morrow, peter went up to the housetop to pray about the sixth hour, the usual time of prayer among the jews.( ) he became very hungry, and while his meal was being prepared he fell into a trance and saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending as it had been a great sheet let down by four corners, in which were all four-footed beasts and creeping things of the earth and birds of the air. "and there came a voice to him: rise, peter; kill and eat. but peter said: not so lord; for i never ate anything common or unclean. and the voice came unto him again a second time: what god cleansed call not thou common. this was done thrice; and straightway the vessel was taken up into heaven." while peter "was doubting in himself" what the vision which he had seen meant, the men sent by cornelius arrived, and "the spirit said unto him: behold men are seeking thee; but arise and get thee down and go with them doubting nothing, for i have sent them." peter went with them on the morrow, accompanied by some of the brethren, and cornelius was waiting for them with his kinsmen and near friends whom he had called together for the purpose. "and as peter was coming in, cornelius met him, and fell at his feet and worshipped. but peter took him up, saying: arise; i myself also am a man."( ) going in, he finds many persons assembled, to whom he said: "ye know how it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a jew to keep company with, or come unto one of another nation; and yet god showed me that i should not call { } any man common or unclean. therefore also i came without gainsaying when sent for. i ask, therefore, for what reason ye sent for me?" cornelius narrates the particulars of his vision and continues: "now, therefore, we are all present before god to hear all the things that have been commanded thee of the lord. then peter opened his mouth and said: of a truth i perceive that god is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to him," and soon. while peter is speaking, "the holy spirit fell on all those who heard the word. and they of the circumcision who believed were astonished, as many as came with peter, because that on the gentiles also has been poured out the gift of the holy spirit; for they heard them speak with tongues and magnify god. then answered peter: can any one forbid the water that these should not be baptized, which have received the holy spirit as well as we? and he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the lord." we shall not waste time discussing the endeavours of kuinoel, neander, lange, ewald, and others, to explain away as much as possible the supernatural elements of this narrative, for their attempts are repudiated by most apologists, and the miraculous phenomena are too clearly described and too closely connected with the course of the story to be either ignored or eliminated. can such a narrative, heralded by such miracles as the instantaneous cure of the paralytic Æneas, and the raising from the dead of the maiden dorcas, be regarded as sober history? of course many maintain that it can, and comparatively few have declared themselves against this.( ) we have, however, merely the { } narrative of an unknown author to set against unvarying experience, and that cannot much avail. we must now endeavour to discover how far this episode is consistent with the rest of the facts narrated in this book itself, and with such trustworthy evidence as we can elsewhere bring to bear upon it. we have already in an earlier part of our inquiry pointed out that in the process of exhibiting a general parallelism between the apostles peter and paul, a very close _pendant_ to this narrative has been introduced by the author into the history of paul. in the story of the conversion of paul, the apostle has his vision on the way to damascus,( ) and about the same time the lord in a vision desires ananias ("a devout man, according to the law, having a good report of all the jews that dwell" in damascus),( ) "arise, and go to the street which is called straight, and inquire in the house of judas for one named saul of tarsus; for behold he prayeth, and saw in a vision a man named ananias coming in and putting his hand on him that he might receive sight." on this occasion also the gift of the holy spirit is conferred and saul is baptized.( ) whilst such miraculous agency is so rare elsewhere, it is so common in the acts of the apostles that the employment of visions and of angels, under every circumstance, is one of the characteristics of the author, and may therefore be set down to his own imagination. no one who examines this episode attentively, we { } think, can doubt that the narrative before us is composed in apologetic interest,( ) and is designed to have a special bearing upon the problem as to the relation of the pauline gospel to the preaching of the twelve, baur( ) has acutely pointed out the significance of the very place assigned to it in the general history, and its insertion immediately after the conversion of paul, and before the commencement of his ministry, as a legitimation of his apostleship of the gentiles. one point stands clearly out of the strange medley of jewish prejudice, christian liberalism, and supernatural interference which constitute the elements of the story: the actual conviction of peter regarding the relation of the jew to the gentile, that the gospel is addressed to the former and that the gentile is excluded,( ) which has to be removed by a direct supernatural revelation from heaven. the author recognises that this was the general view of the primitive church, and this is the only particular in which we can perceive historical truth in the narrative. the complicated machinery of visions and angelic messengers is used to justify the abandonment of jewish restrictions, which was preached by paul amidst so much virulent opposition. peter anticipates and justifies paul in his ministry of the uncircumcision, and the overthrow of mosaic barriers has the sanction and seal of a divine command. we have to see whether the history itself { } does not betray its mythical character, not only in its supernatural elements, but in its inconsistency with other known or narrated incidents in the apostolical narrative. there has been much difference of opinion as to whether the centurion cornelius had joined himself in any recognised degree to the jewish religion before this incident, and a majority of critics maintain that he is represented as a proselyte of the gate.( ) the terms in which he is described, [------], certainly seem to indicate this, and probably the point would not have been questioned but for the fact that the writer evidently intends to deal with the subject of gentile conversion, with which the representation that cornelius was already a proselyte would somewhat clash.( ) whether a proselyte or not, the roman centurion is said to be "devout and fearing god with all his house, giving much alms to the people, and praying to god always;"( ) and probably the ambiguity as to whether he had actually become affiliated in any way to mosaism is intentional. when peter, however, with his scruples removed by the supernatural communication with which he had just been favoured, indicates their previous strength by the statement: "ye know how it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a jew to keep company with or come unto { } one of another nation,"( ) the author evidently oversteps the mark, and betrays the unhistorical nature of the narrative; for such an affirmation not only could not have been made by peter, but could only have been advanced by a writer who was himself a gentile, and writing at a distance from the events described. there is no injunction of the mosaic law declaring such intercourse unlawful,( ) nor indeed is such a rule elsewhere heard of, and even apologists who refer to the point have no show of authority by which to support such a statement( ) not only was there no legal prohibition, but it is impossible to conceive that there was any such exclusiveness practised by traditional injunction.( ) as de wette appropriately remarks, moreover, even if such a prohibition existed as regards idolaters, it would still be inconceivable how it could apply to cornelius: "a righteous man and fearing god, and of good report among all the nation of the jews."( ) it is also inconsistent with the zeal for proselytism displayed by the pharisees,( ) the strictest sect of the jews; and the account given by josephus of the { } conversion of izates of adiabene is totally against it.( ) there is a slight trait which, added to others, tends to complete the demonstration of the unhistorical character of this representation. peter is said to have lived many days in joppa with one simon, a tanner, and it is in his house that the messengers of cornelius find him.( ) now the tanner's trade was considered impure amongst the jews,( ) and it was almost pollution to live in simon's house. it is argued by some commentators that the fact that peter lodged there is mentioned to show that he had already emancipated himself from jewish prejudices.( ) however this may be, it is strangely inconsistent that a jew who has no objection to live with a tanner should, at the same time, consider it unlawful to hold intercourse of any kind with a pious gentile, who, if not actually a proselyte of the gate, had every qualification for becoming one. this indifference to the unclean and polluting trade of the tanner, moreover, is inconsistent with the reply which peter gives to the voice which bids him slay and eat:--"not so, lord, for i never ate anything common or unclean." no doubt the intercourse to which peter refers indicates, or at least includes, eating and drinking with one of another country, and this alone could present any intelligible difficulty, for the mere transaction of business or conversation with strangers must have been daily necessary to the jews. it must be remarked, however, that, when peter makes the statement which we are discussing, nothing whatever is said of eating with the centurion or sitting with him { } at table. this leads to a striking train of reflection upon the whole episode. it is a curious thing that the supernatural vision, which is designed to inform peter and the apostles that the gentiles might be received into the church, should take the form of a mere intimation that the distinction of clean and unclean animals was no longer binding, and that he might indifferently kill and eat one might have thought that, on the supposition that heaven desired to give peter and the church a command to admit the gentiles unconditionally to the benefits of the gospel, this would be simply and clearly stated. this was not done at all, and the intimation by which peter supposes himself justified in considering it lawful to go to cornelius is, in the first place, merely on the subject of animals defined as clean and unclean. doubtless the prohibition as to certain meats might tend to continue the separation between jew and gentile, and the disregard of such distinctions of course promoted general intercourse with strangers; but this by no means explains why the abrogation of this distinction is made the intimation to receive gentiles into the church. when peter returns to jerusalem we are told that "they of the circumcision"--that is to say, the whole church there, since at that period all were "of the circumcision," and this phrase further indicates that the writer has no historical stand-point--contended with him. the subject of the contention we might suppose was the baptism of gentiles; but not so: the charge brought against him was:--"thou wentest in to men uncircumcised, and didst eat with them."( ) the subject of paul's dispute with peter at antioch simply was that, "before that certain came from james, he did eat with { } the gentiles; but when they came he withdrew, fearing them of the circumcision."( ) that the whole of these passages should turn merely on the fact of eating with men who were uncircumcised, is very suggestive, and as the church at jerusalem make no allusion to the baptism of uncircumcised gentiles, it would lead to the inference that nothing was known of such an event, and that the circumstance was simply added to some other narrative; and this is rendered all the more probable by the fact that, in the affair at antioch as well as throughout the epistle to the galatians, peter is very far from acting as one who had been the first to receive uncircumcised gentiles freely into the church. it is usually asserted that the vision of peter abrogated the distinction of clean and unclean animals so long existing in the mosaic law,( ) but there is no evidence that any subsequent gradual abandonment of the rule was ascribed to such a command; and it is remarkable that peter himself not only does not, as we shall presently see, refer to this vision as authority for disregarding the distinction of clean and unclean meats, and for otherwise considering nothing common or unclean, but acts as if such a vision had never taken place. the famous decree of the council of jerusalem, moreover, makes no allusion to any modification of the mosaic law in the case of jewish christians, whatever relaxation it may seem to grant to gentile converts, and there is no external evidence of any kind whatever that so important an { } abolition of ancient legal prescriptions was thus introduced into christendom. we have, however, fortunately one test of the historical value of this whole episode, to which we have already briefly referred, but which we must now more closely apply. paul himself, in his epistle to the galatians, narrates the particulars of a scene between himself and peter at antioch, of which no mention is made in the acts of the apostles, and we think that no one can fairly consider that episode without being convinced that it is utterly irreconcilable with the supposition that the vision which we are now examining can ever have appeared to peter, or that he can have played the part attributed to him in the conversion and baptism of uncircumcised gentiles. paul writes: "but when cephas came to antioch, i withstood him to the face, because he was condemned. for before that certain came from james, he did eat with the gentiles, but when they came he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them of the circumcision, and the other jews also joined in his hypocrisy."( ) it will be remembered that, in the case of cornelius, "they of the circumcision" in jerusalem, at the head of whom was james, from whom came those "of the circumcision" of whom peter was afraid at antioch, contended with peter for going in "to men uncircumcised and eating with them,"( ) the very thing which was in question at antioch. in the acts, peter is represented as defending his conduct by relating the divine vision under the guidance of which he acted, and the author states as the result that, "when they heard these things they held their peace and glorified god, saying: then to the gentiles also god gave repentance { } unto life."( ) this is the representation of the author of the vision and of the conversion of cornelius, but very different is peter's conduct as described by the apostle paul, very dissimilar the phenomena presented by a narrative upon which we can rely. the "certain who came from james" can never have heard of the direct communication from heaven which justified peter's conduct, and can never have glorified god in the manner described, or peter could not have had any reason to fear them; for a mere reference to his vision, and to the sanction of the church of jerusalem, must have been sufficient to reconcile them to his freedom. then, is it conceivable that after such a vision, and after being taught by god himself not to call any man or thing common or unclean, peter could have acted as he did for fear of them of the circumcision? his conduct is convincing evidence that he knew as little of any such vision as those who came from james. on the other hand, if we require further proof it is furnished by the apostle paul himself. is it conceivable that, if such an episode had ever really occurred, the apostle paul would not have referred to it upon this occasion? what more appropriate argument could he have used, what more legitimate rebuke could he have administered, than merely to have reminded peter of his own vision? he both rebukes him and argues, but his rebuke and his argument have quite a different complexion; and we confidently affirm that no one can read that portion of the epistle to the galatians without feeling certain that, had the writer been aware of such a divine communication--and we think it must be conceded without question that, if it had taken place, he { } must have been aware of it( )--he would have referred to bo direct and important an authority. neither here nor in the numerous places where such an argument would have been so useful to the apostle does paul betray the slightest knowledge of the episode of cornelius. the historic occurrence at antioch, so completely ignored by the author of the acts, totally excludes the mythical story of cornelius.( ) there are merely one or two other points in connection with the episode to which we must call attention. in his address to cornelius, peter says: "of a truth i perceive that god is no respecter of persons" [------]. now this is not only a thoroughly pauline sentiment, but paul has more than once made use of precisely the same expression. rom. ii. . "for there is no respect of persons with god "[------], and, again, gal. ii. ," god respecteth no man's person," [------].( ) the author of the acts was certainly acquainted with the epistles of paul, and the very manner in which he represents peter as employing this expression betrays the application of a sentiment previously in his mind, "of a truth i perceive," &c. the circumstance confirms what paul had already said.( ) then, in the defence of his conduct at jerusalem, peter is represented as saying: "and i remembered the word of the lord, indeed the reference to this case, supposed to be made by peter himself, in paul's presence, excludes the idea of ignorance, if the acts be treated as historical. compare further x. ff. with rom. ii. iii., &o. the sentiments and even the words are pauline. { } how he said, john indeed baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the holy spirit."(l) now these words are by all the gospels put into the mouth of john the baptist, and not of jesus,( ) but the author of the acts seems to put them into the mouth of jesus at the beginning of the work,( ) and their repetition here is only an additional proof of the fact that the episode of cornelius, as it stands before us, is not historical, but is merely his own composition. the whole of this narrative, with its complicated series of miracles, is evidently composed to legitimate the free reception into the christian church of gentile converts and, to emphasize the importance of the divine ratification of their admission, peter is made to repeat to the church of jerusalem the main incidents which had just been fully narrated. on the one hand, the previous jewish exclusiveness both of peter and of the church is displayed, first, in the resistance of the apostle, which can only be overcome by the vision and the direct order of the holy spirit, and by the manifest outpouring of the spirit upon the centurion and his household; and second, in the contention of them of the circumcision, which is only overcome by an account of the repeated signs of divine purpose and approval. the universality of the gospel could not be more broadly proclaimed than in the address of peter to cornelius. not the jews alone, "but in every nation, he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to him." pauline principles are thus anticipated and, as we have pointed out, are expressed almost in the words of the apostle of the gentiles.( ) the jews who go with { } peter were astonished because that on the gentiles also had been poured out the gift of the holy spirit,( ) and the church of jerusalem, on hearing of these things, glorified god that repentance unto life had been given to the gentiles. it is impossible that the admission of the gentiles to the privileges of the church could be more prominently signified than by this episode, introduced by prodigious miracles and effected by supernatural machinery. where, however, are the consequences of this marvellous recognition of the gentiles? it does not in the slightest degree preclude the necessity for the council, which we shall presently consider; it does not apparently exercise any influence on james and the church of jerusalem; peter, indeed, refers vaguely to it, but as a matter out of date and almost forgotten; paul, in all his disputes with the emissaries of the church of jerusalem, in all his pleas for the freedom of his gentile converts, never makes the slightest allusion to it; it remains elsewhere unknown and, so far as any evidence goes, utterly without influence upon the primitive church.( ) this will presently become more apparent; but already it is clear enough to those who will exercise calm reason that it is impossible to consider this narrative with its tissue of fruitless miracles as a historical account of the development of the church. chapter vii. paul the apostle of the gentiles we have now arrived at the point in our examination of the acts in which we have the inestimable advantage of being able to compare the narrative of the unknown author with the distinct statements of the apostle paul. in doing so, we must remember that the author must have been acquainted with the epistles which are now before us, and supposing it to be his purpose to present a certain view of the transactions in question, whether for apologetic or conciliatory reasons or for any other cause, it is obvious that it would not be reasonable to expect divergencies of so palpable a nature that any reader of the letters must at once too clearly perceive such contradictions. when the acts were written, it is true, the author could not have known that the epistles of paul were to attain the high canonical position which they now occupy, and might, therefore, use his materials more freely; still a certain superficial consistency it would be natural to expect. unfortunately, our means of testing the statements of the author are not so minute as is desirable, although they are often of much value, and seeing the great facility with which, by apparently slight alterations and omissions, a different complexion can be given to circumstances regarding which no very { } full details exist elsewhere, we must be prepared to seize every indication which may enable us to form a just estimate of the nature of the writing which we are examining. in the first two chapters of his epistle to the galatians, the apostle paul relates particulars regarding some important epochs of his life, which likewise enter into the narrative of the acts of the apostles. the apostle gives an account of his own proceedings immediately after his conversion, and of the visit which about that time he paid to jerusalem; and, further, of a second visit to jerusalem fourteen years later, and to these we must now direct our attention. we defer consideration of the narrative of the actual conversion of paul for the present, and merely intend here to discuss the movements and conduct of the apostle immediately subsequent to that event. the acts of the apostles represent paul as making five journeys to jerusalem subsequent to his joining the christian body. the first, ix. ff., takes place immediately after his conversion; the second, xi. , xii. , is upon an occasion when the church at antioch are represented as sending relief to the brethren of judæa by the hands of barnabas and saul, during a time of famine; the third visit to jerusalem, xv. ff., paul likewise pays in company with barnabas, both being sent by the church of antioch to confer with the apostles and elders as to the necessity of circumcision, and the obligation to observe the mosaic law in the case of gentile converts; the fourth, xviii. ff, when he goes to ephesus with priscilla and aquila, "having shaved his head in cenchrea, for he had a vow;" and the fifth and last, xxi. ff, when the disturbance took place in the temple which led to his arrest and journey to rome. { } the circumstances and general character of these visits to jerusalem, and more especially of that on which the momentous conference is described as having taken place, are stated with so much precision, and they present features of such marked difference, that it might have been supposed there could not have been any difficulty in identifying, with certainty, at least the visits to which the apostle refers in his letter, more especially as upon both occasions he mentions important particulars which characterised those visits. it is a remarkable fact, however, that, such are the divergences between the statements of the unknown author and of the apostle, upon no point has there been more discussion amongst critics and divines from the very earliest times, or more decided difference of opinion. upon general grounds, we have already seen, there has been good reason to doubt the historical character of the acts. is it not a singularly suggestive circumstance that, when it is possible to compare the authentic representations of paul with the narrative of the acts, even apologists perceive so much opening for doubt and controversy? the visit described in the ninth chapter of the acts is generally( ) identified with that which is mentioned in the first chapter of the epistle. this unanimity, however, arises mainly from the circumstance that both writers clearly represent that visit as the first which paul paid to jerusalem after his conversion, for the details of the two narratives are anything but in agreement with each other. although, therefore, critics are forced to agree as to the bare identity of the visit, this harmony is immediately disturbed on examining the two accounts, and whilst the one party find the statements in the acts there have, however, been differences of opinion also regarding this. { } reconcilable with those of paul, a large body more or less distinctly declare them to be contradictory, and unhistorical.( ) in order that the question at issue may be fairly laid before the reader, we shall give the two accounts in parallel columns. [------] { } [------] now, it is obvious that the representation in the acts of what paul did after his conversion differs very widely from the account which the apostle himself gives of the matter. in the first place, not a word is said in the former of the journey into arabia; but, on the contrary, it is excluded, and the statement which replaces it directly contradicts that of paul. the apostle says that after his conversion: "immediately(l) [------] i conferred not with flesh and blood," but "went away into arabia," the author of the acts says that he spent "some days" [------] with the disciples in damascus, and "immediately" [------] began to preach in the synagogues. paul's feelings are so completely misrepresented that, instead of that desire for retirement and solitude which his { } words express,( ) he is described as straightway plunging into the vortex of public life in damascus. the general apologetic explanation is, that the author of the acts either was not aware of the journey into arabia, or that, his absence there having been short, he did not consider it necessary to mention it there are no data for estimating the length of time which paul spent in arabia, but the fact that the apostle mentions it with so much emphasis proves not only that he attached considerable weight to the episode, but that the duration of his visit could not have been unimportant. in any case, the author of the acts, whether ignorantly or not, boldly describes the apostle as doing precisely what he did not. to any ordinary reader, moreover, his whole account of paul's preaching at damascus certainly excludes altogether the idea of such a journey, and the argument that it can be. inserted anywhere is purely arbitrary. there are many theories amongst apologists, however, as to the part of the narrative in acts, in which the arabian journey can be placed. by some it is assigned to a period before he commenced his active labours, and therefore before ix. ,( ) from which the.words of the author repulse it with singular clearness; others intercalate it with even less reason between ix. and ;( ) a few discover some indication of it in the [------] of ver. ,( ) an expression, however, which refuses to be forced into such service; a greater number place it in the[------] of ver. ,( ) making that elastic phrase embrace this as well { } as other difficulties till it snaps under the strain. it seems evident to an unprejudiced reader that the [------] are represented as passed in damascus.( ) and, lastly, some critics place it after ix. , regardless of paul's statement that from arabia he returned again to damascus, which, under the circumstances mentioned in acts, he was not likely to do, and indeed it is obvious that he is there supposed to have at once gone from damascus to jerusalem. these attempts at reconciliation are useless. it is of no avail to find time into which a journey to arabia and the stay there might be forcibly thrust. there still remains the fact that so far from the arabian visit being indicated in the acts, the [------] of ix. , compared with the [------] of gal. i. , positively excludes it, and proves that the narrative of the former is not historical.( ) there is another point in the account in acts which further demands attention. the impression conveyed by the narrative is that paul went up to jerusalem not very long after his conversion. the omission of the visit to arabia shortens the interval before he did so, by removing causes of delay, and whilst no expressions are used which imply a protracted stay in damascus, incidents are introduced which indicate that the purpose of the writer was to represent the apostle as losing no time after his conversion before associating himself with the elder we shall not discuss the indication given in cor. xi. of the cause of his leaving damascus, although several contradictory statements seem to be made in it. { } apostles and obtaining their recognition of his ministry; and this view, we shall see, is confirmed by the peculiar account which is given of what took place at jerusalem. the apostle distinctly states, i. , that three years after his conversion he went up to visit peter.( ) in the acts he is represented as spending "some days" [------] with the disciples, and the only other chronological indication given is that, after "many days" [------], the plot occurred which forced him to leave damascus. it is argued that [------] is an indefinite period, which may, according to the usage of the author( ) indicate a considerable space of time, and certainly rather express a long than a short period.( ) the fact is, however, that the instances cited are evidence, in themselves, against the supposition that the author can have had any intention of expressing a period of three years by the words [------]. we suppose that no one has ever suggested that peter staid three years in the house of simon the tanner at joppa (ix. ); or, that when it is said that paul remained "many days" at corinth after the insurrection of the jews, the author intends to speak of some years, when in fact the [------] contrasted with the expression (xviii. ): "he continued there a year and six months," used regarding his stay previous to that disturbance, evidently reduces the "yet many days" subsequently spent there to a very small compass. again, has any one ever suggested that in the "the 'straightway' of ver. leads to this conclusion: 'at first i conferred not with flesh and blood, it was only after the lapse of three years that i went to jerusalem.'" lightfoot, oalatians, p. . "the difference between the vague 'many days' of the acts and the definite 'three years' of the epistle is such as might be expected from the circumstances of the two writers." lightfoot, lb., p. , note . { } account of paul's voyage to rome, where it is said (xxvii. ) that, after leaving myrra "and sailing slowly many days" [------], they had scarcely got so far as cnidus, an interval of months, not to say years, is indicated? it is impossible to suppose that, by such an expression, the writer intended to indicate a period of three years.( ) that the narrative of the acts actually represents paul as going up to jerusalem soon after his conversion, and certainly not merely at the end of three years, is obvious from the statement in ver. , that when paul arrived at jerusalem, and was assaying to join himself to the disciples, all were afraid of him, and would not believe in his conversion. the author could certainly not have stated this, if he had desired to imply that paul had already been a christian, and publicly preached with so much success at damascus, for three years.( ) indeed, the statements in ix. are irreconcilable with the declaration of the apostle, whatever view be taken of the previous narrative of the acts. if it be assumed that the author wishes to describe the visit to jerusalem as taking place three years after his conversion, then the ignorance of that event amongst the brethren there and their distrust of paul are utterly inconsistent and incredible; whilst if, on the other hand, he represents the apostle as going to jerusalem with but little delay in damascus, as we contend he does, then there is no escape from the conclusion that the acts, whilst thus giving a narrative consistent with itself, { } distinctly contradicts the deliberate assertions of the apostle. it is absolutely incredible that the conversion of a well-known persecutor of the church (viii. ff.), effected in a way which is represented as so sudden and supernatural, and accompanied by a supposed vision of the lord, could for three years have remained unknown to the community of jerusalem. so striking a triumph for christianity must have been rapidly circulated throughout the church, and the fact that he who formerly persecuted was now zealously preaching the faith which once he destroyed must long have been generally known in jerusalem, which was in such constant communication with damascus. the author of the acts continues in the same strain, stating that barnabas, under the circumstances just described, took paul and brought him to the apostles [------], and declared to them the particulars of his vision and conversion, and how he had preached boldly at damascus.( ) no doubt is left that this is the first intimation the apostles had received of such extraordinary events. after this, we are told that paul was with them coming in and going out at jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the lord. here again the declaration of paul is explicit, and distinctly contradicts this story both in the letter and the spirit. he makes no mention of barnabas. he states that he went to jerusalem specially with the view of making the acquaintance of peter, with whom he remained fifteen days; but he emphatically says:--"but other of the apostles saw i not, save [------] james, the lord's brother;" and then he adds the solemn declaration { } regarding his account of this visit:--"now the things which i write unto you, behold, before god, i lie not." an asseveration made in this tone excludes the supposition of inaccuracy or careless vagueness, and the specific statements have all the force of sworn evidence. instead of being presented "to the apostles," therefore, and going in and out with them at jerusalem, we have here the emphatic assurance that, in addition to peter, paul saw no one except "james, the lord's brother." there has been much discussion as to the identity of this james, and whether he was an apostle or not, but into this it is unnecessary for us to enter. most writers agree at least that he is the same james, the head of the church at jerusalem, whom we again frequently meet with in the pauline epistles and in the acts, and notably in the account of the apostolic council. the exact interpretation to be put upon the expression [------] has also been the subject of great controversy, the question being whether james is here really called an apostle or not; whether [------] is to be understood as applying solely to the verb, in which case the statement would mean that he saw no other of the apostles, but only james;( ) or to the whole phrase, which would express that he had seen no other of the apostles save james.( ) it is admitted by many of those who think that in this case the latter signification must be adopted that grammatically either interpretation is permissible. even supposing that { } rightly or wrongly james is here referred to as an apostle, the statement of the acts is, in spirit, quite opposed to that of the epistle; for when we are told that paul is brought "to the apostles" [------], the linguistic usage of the writer implies that he means much more than merely peter and james. it seems impossible to reconcile the statement, ix. , with the solemn assurance of paul,( ) and if we accept what the apostle says as truth, and we cannot doubt it, it must be admitted that the account in the acts is unhistorical. we arrive at the very same conclusion on examining the rest of the narrative. in the acts, paul is represented as being with the apostles going in and out, preaching openly in jerusalem, and disputing with the grecian jews.( ) no limit is here put to his visit, and it is difficult to conceive that what is narrated is intended to describe a visit of merely fifteen days. a subsequent statement in the acts, however, explains and settles the point paul is represented as declaring to king agrippa, xxvi. f.: "wherefore, king agrippa, i was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision, but first unto those in damascus, and throughout all the region of judaea, and to the gentiles, i was declaring that they should repent { } and turn to god," &c. however this may be, the statement of paul does not admit the interpretation of such public ministry. his express purpose in going to jerusalem was, not to preach, but to make the acquaintance of peter; and it was a marked characteristic of paul to avoid preaching in ground already occupied by the other apostles before him.( ) not only is the account in acts apparently excluded by such considerations and by the general tenor of the epistle, but it is equally so by the direct words of the apostle (i. ):--"i was unknown by face unto the churches of judaea." it is argued that the term: "churches of judæa" excludes jerusalem.( ) it might possibly be asserted with reason that such an expression as "the churches of jerusalem" might exclude the churches of judæa, but to say that the apostle, writing elsewhere to the galatians of a visit to jerusalem, and of his conduct at that time, intends, when speaking of the "churches of judæa," to exclude the principal city, seems to us arbitrary and unwarrantable. the whole object of the apostle is to show the privacy of his visit and his independence of the elder apostles. he does not use the expression as a contrast to jerusalem. nothing in his account leads one to think of any energetic preaching during the visit, and the necessity of finding some way of excluding jerusalem from the apostle's expression is simply thrust upon apologists by the account in acts. two passages are referred to as supporting the exclusion of jerusalem from "the churches of judaea." in john iii. , we read: "after { } these things came jesus and his disciples into the land of judæa." in the preceding chapter he is described as being at jerusalem. we have already said enough about the geographical notices of the author of the fourth gospel.( ) even those who do not admit that he was not a native of palestine are agreed that he wrote in another country and for foreigners. "the land of judæa," was therefore a natural expression superseding the necessity of giving a more minute local indication which would have been of little use. the second instance appealed to, though more doubtfully,( ) is heb. xiii. : "they from italy salute you." we are at a loss to understand how this is supposed to support the interpretation adopted. it is impossible that if paul went in and out with the apostles, preached boldly in jerusalem, and disputed with the hellenistic jews, not to speak of what is added, acts xxvi. f., he could say that he was unknown by face to the churches of judæa. there is nothing, we may remark, which limits his preaching to the grecian jews. whilst apologists maintain that the two accounts are reconcilable, many of them frankly admit that the account in acts requires correction from that in the epistle;( ) but, on the other hand, a still greater number of critics prouounce the narrative in the acts contradictory to the statements of paul.( ) { } there remains another point upon which a few remarks must be made. in acts ix. f. the cause of paul's hurriedly leaving jerusalem is a plot of the grecian jews to kill him. paul does not in the epistle refer to any such matter, but, in another part of the acts, paul is represented as relating, xxii. f.: "and it came to pass, that, when i returned to jerusalem and was praying in the temple, i was in a trance and saw him saying unto me: make haste, and get thee quickly out of jerusalem, for they will not receive thy witness concerning me," &c, &c. this account differs, therefore, even from the previous narrative in the same book, yet critics are agreed that the visit during which the apostle is said to have seen this vision was that which we are discussing.( ) the writer is so little a historian working from substantial facts that he forgets the details of his own previous statements; and in the account of the conversion of paul, for instance, he thrice repeats the story with emphatic and irreconcilable contradictions. we have already observed his partiality for visions, and such supernatural agency is so ordinary a matter with him that, in the first account of this visit, he altogether omits the vision, although he must have known of it then quite as much as on the second occasion. the apostle, in his authentic and solemn account of this visit, gives no hint of any vision, and leaves no suggestion even of that public preaching which is described in the earlier, and referred to in the later, narrative in the acts.( ) if we { } had no other grounds for rejecting the account as unhistorical this miraculous vision, added as an after-thought, would have warranted our doing so. passing on now to the second chapter of the epistle to the galatians, we find that paul writes:--"then, after fourteen years, again i went up to jerusalem..." [------]. he states the particulars of what took place upon the occasion of this second visit with a degree of minuteness which ought, one might have supposed, to have left no doubt of its identity, when compared with the same visit historically described elsewhere; but such are the discrepancies between the two accounts that, as we have already mentioned, the controversy upon the point has been long and active.( ) the acts, it will be remembered, relate a second visit of paul to jerusalem, after that which we have discussed, upon which occasion it is stated (xi. ) that he was sent with barnabas to convey to the community, during a time of famine, the contributions of the church of antioch. the third visit of the acts is that (xv.) when paul and barnabas are said to have been deputed to confer with the apostles regarding the { } conditions upon which gentile converts should be admitted into the christian brotherhood. the circumstances of this visit, more nearly than any other, correspond with those described by the apostle himself in the epistle (ii. ff.), but there are grave difficulties in the way of identifying them. if this visit be identical with that described acts xv., and if paul, as he states, paid no intermediate visit to jerusalem, what becomes of the visit interpolated in acts xi. ? the first point which we must endeavour to ascertain is exactly what the apostle intends to say regarding the second visit which he mentions. the purpose of paul is to declare his complete independence from those who were apostles before him, and to maintain that his gospel was not of man, but directly revealed to him by jesus christ. in order to prove his independence, therefore, he categorically states exactly what had been the extent of his intercourse with the elder apostles. he protests that, after his conversion, he had neither conferred with flesh and blood nor sought those who had been apostles before him, but, on the contrary, that he had immediately gone away to arabia. it was not until three years had elapsed that he had gone up to jerusalem, and then only to make the acquaintance of peter, with whom he had remained only fifteen days, during which he had not seen other of the apostles save james, the lord's brother. only after the lapse of fourteen years did he again go up to jerusalem. it is argued( ) that when paul says, "he went up again," [------], the word [------] has not the force of [------], and that, so far from excluding any intermediate journey, it merely signifies a { } repetition of what had been done before, and might have been used of any subsequent journey. even if this were so, it is impossible to deny that, read with its context, [------] is used in immediate connection with the former visit which we have just discussed. the sequence is distinctly marked by the [------] "then," and the adoption of the preposition [------]--which may properly be read "after the lapse of,"( )--instead of [------], seems clearly to indicate that no other journey to jerusalem had been made in the interval. this can be maintained linguistically; but the point is still more decidedly settled when the apostle's intention is considered. it is obvious that his purpose would have been totally defeated had he passed over in silence an intermediate visit. even if, as is argued, the. visit referred to in acts xi. had been of very brief duration, or if he had not upon that occasion had any intercourse with the apostles, it is impossible that he could have ignored it under the circumstances, for by so doing he would have left the retort in the power of his enemies that he had, on other occasions than those which he had enumerated, been in jerusalem and in contact with the apostles. the mere fact that a visit had been unmentioned would have exposed him to the charge of having suppressed it, and suspicion is always ready to assign unworthy motives. if paul had paid such a hasty visit as is suggested, he would naturally have mentioned the fact and stated the circumstances, whatever they were. these and other reasons convince the majority of critics that the apostle here enumerates all the visits which he had paid to jerusalem since his conversion.( ) the visit referred to in gal. ii. ff. { } must be considered the second occasion on which the apostle paul went to jerusalem. this being the case, can the visit be identified as the second visit described in acts xi. ? the object of that journey to jerusalem, it is expressly stated, was to carry to the brethren in jerusalem the contributions of the church of antioch during a time of famine; whereas paul explicitly says that he went up to jerusalem, on the occasion we are discussing, in consequence of a revelation, to communicate the gospel which he was preaching among the gentiles. there is not a word about contributions. on the other hand, chronologically it is impossible that the second visit of the epistle can be the second of the acts. there is some difference of opinion as to whether the fourteen years are to be calculated from the date of his conversion,( ) or from the previous journey.( ) the latter seems to be the more reasonable supposition, but in either case it is obvious that the identity is excluded. from various data,--the famine under claudius, and the time of herod agrippa's { } death,--the date of the journey referred to in acts xi. is assigned to about a.d. . if, therefore, we count back fourteen or seventeen years, we have as the date of the conversion, on the first hypothesis, a.d. , and on the second, a.d. , neither of which of course is tenable. in order to overcome this difficulty, critics( ) at one time proposed, against the unanimous evidence of mss., to read instead of [------] in gal. ii. , [------] "after four years;" but this violent remedy is not only generally rejected, but, even if admitted for the sake of argument, it could not establish the identity, inasmuch as the statements in gal. ii. ff. imply a much longer period of missionary activity amongst the gentiles than paul could possibly have had at that time, about which epoch, indeed, barnabas is said to have sought him in tarsus, apparently for the purpose of first commencing such a career;a certainly the account of his active ministry begins in the acts only in ch. xiii. then, it is not possible to suppose that, if such a dispute regarding circumcision and the gospel of the uncircumcision as is sketched in gal. ii. had taken place on a previous occasion, it could so soon be repeated, acts xv., and without any reference to the former transaction. comparatively few critics, therefore, have ventured to maintain that the second visit recorded in the epistle is the same as the second mentioned in the acts (xi. ), and in modern times the theory is almost entirely abandoned. if, therefore, it be admitted that paul mentions all the journeys which he had made to jerusalem up to the time at which he wrote, and that his second visit was not the second visit { } of the acts, but must be placed later, it follows clearly upon the apostle's own assurance that the visit mentioned in acts xi. , xii. , cannot have taken place and is unhistorical, and this is the conclusion of the majority of critics,( ) including many apologists, who, whilst suggesting that, for some reason, barnabas may alone have gone to jerusalem without paul, or otherwise deprecating any imputation of conscious inaccuracy to the author, still substantially confirm the result that paul did not on that occasion go to jerusalem, and consequently that the statement is not historical. on the other hand, it is suggested that the additional visit to jerusalem is inserted by the author with a view to conciliation, by representing that paul was in constant communication with the apostles and community of jerusalem, and that he acted with their approval and sympathy. it is scarcely possible to observe the peculiar variations between the narratives of the acts and of paul without feeling that the author of the former deliberately sacrifices the independence and individuality of the great apostle of the gentiles. the great mass of critics agree in declaring that the { } second visit described in the epistle is identical with the third recorded in the acts (xv.), although a wide difference of opinion exists amongst them as to the historical value of the account contained in the latter. this general agreement renders it unnecessary for us to enter at any length into the arguments which establish the identity, and we shall content ourselves with very concisely stating some of the chief reasons for this conclusion. the date in both cases corresponds, whilst there are insuperable chronological objections to identifying the second journey of the epistle with any earlier or later visit mentioned in acts. we have referred to other reasons against its being placed earlier than the third visit of acts, and there are still stronger objections to its being dated after the third. it is impossible, considering the object of the apostle, that he could have passed over in silence such a visit as that described acts xv., and the only alternative would be to date it later than the composition of the epistle, to which the narrative of the acts as well as all other known facts would be irreconcilably opposed. on the other hand, the date, the actors, the cause of dispute, and probably the place (antioch) in which that dispute originated, so closely correspond, that it is incredible that such a coincidence of circumstances should again have occurred. "without anticipating our comparison of the two accounts of this visit, we must here at least remark that the discrepancies are so great that not only have apologetic critics, as we have indicated, adopted the theory that the second visit of the epistle is not the same as the third of the acts, but is identical with the second (xi. ), of which so few particulars are given, but { } some, and notably wieseler,( ) have maintained it to have been the same as that described in acts xviii. ff., whilst paley and others( ) have been led to the hypothesis that the visit in question does not correspond with any of the visits actually recorded in the acts, but is one which is not referred to at all in that work. these { } theories have found very little favour, however, and we mention them solely to complete our statement of the general controversy. considering the fulness of the report of the visit in acts xv. and the peculiar nature of the facts stated by the apostle himself in his letter to the galatians, the difficulty of identifying the particular visit referred to is a phenomenon which cannot be too much considered. is it possible, if the narrative in the acts were really historically accurate, that any reasonable doubt could ever have existed as to its correspondence with the apostle's statements? we may here at once say that, although many of the critics who finally decide that the visit described in acts xv. is the same as that referred to in the second chapter of the epistle argue that the obvious discrepancies and contradictions between the two accounts may be sufficiently explained and reconciled, this is for very strong reasons disputed, and the narrative in the acts, when tested by the authentic statements of the apostle, pronounced inaccurate and unhistorical. it is only necessary to read the two accounts in order to understand the grounds upon which even apologists like paley and wieseler feel themselves compelled { } to suppose that the apostle is describing transactions which occurred during some visit either unmentioned or not fully related in the acts, rather than identify it with the visit reported in the fifteenth chapter, from which it so essentially differs. a material difference is not denied by any one, and explanations with a view to reconciliation have never been dispensed with. thiersch, who has nothing better than the usual apologetic explanations to offer, does not hesitate to avow the apparent incongruities of the two narratives. "the journey," he says, "is the same, but no human ingenuity can make out that also the conference and the decree resulting from it are the same."( ) of course he supposes that the problem is to be solved by asserting that the apostle speaks of the private, the historian of the public, circumstances of the visit. all who maintain the historical character of the acts must of course more or less thoroughly adopt this argument, but it is obvious that, in doing so, they admit on the one hand the general discrepancy, and on the other, if successful in establishing their position, they could do no more than show that the epistle does not absolutely exclude the account in the acts. both writers profess to describe events which occurred during the same visit; both record matters of the highest interest closely bearing on the same subject; yet the two accounts are so different from each other that they can only be rescued from complete antagonism by complete separation. supposing the author of the acts to be really acquainted with the occurrences of this visit, and to have intended to give a plain unvarnished account of them, the unconscious ingenuity with which he has omitted the important facts mentioned by paul and { } eliminated the whole of the apostle's individuality would indeed be as remarkable as it is unfortunate. but supposing the apostle paul to have been aware of the formal proceedings narrated in the acts, characterized by such unanimity and liberal christian feeling, it would be still more astonishing and unfortunate that he has not only silently passed them over, but has conveyed so singularly different an impression of his visit.( ) as the apostle certainly could not have been acquainted with the acts, his silence regarding the council and its momentous decree, as well as his ignorance of the unbroken harmony which prevailed are perfectly intelligible. he of course only knew and described what actually occurred. the author of the acts, however, might and must have known the epistle to the galatians, and the ingenuity with which the tone and details of the authentic report are avoided or transfigured cannot be ascribed to mere accident, but must largely be attributed to design, although also partly, it may be, to the ignorance and the pious imagination of a later age. is it possible, for instance, that the controversy regarding the circumcision of titus, and the dispute with peter at antioch, which are so prominently related in the epistle, but present a view so different from the narrative of acts, can have been undesignedly omitted? the violent apologetic reconciliation which is effected between the two accounts is based upon the foregone conclusion that the author of the canonical acts, however he may seem to deviate from the apostle, cannot possibly contradict him or be "our difficulty in reading this page of history arises not so much from the absence of light as from the perplexity of cross lights. the narratives of st. luke and st. paul only then cease to conflict, when we take into account the different positions of the writers and the different objects they had in view." lightfoot, st paul's ep. to the gal., p. . { } in error; but the preceding examination has rendered such a position untenable, and here we have not to do with a canonized "st. luke," but with an unknown writer whose work must be judged by the ordinary rules of criticism. according to the acts, a most serious question is raised at antioch. certain men from judaea came thither teaching: "except ye have been circumcised after the manner of moses ye cannot be saved." after much dissension and disputation the church of antioch appoint that paul and barnabas, "and certain others of them" shall go up to jerusalem unto the apostles and elders about this question. the motive of the journey is here most distinctly and definitely described. paul is solemnly deputed by the church to lay before the mother church of jerusalem a difficult question, upon the answer to which turns the whole future of christianity. paul's account, however, gives a very different complexion to the visit:--"then, after fourteen years, i went up again to jerusalem with barnabas, taking titus also with me. but i went up according to revelation [------] and communicated to them the gospel which i preach among the gentiles," &c. paley might well say:--"this is not very reconcilable."( ) it is argued,( ) that the two { } statements may supplement each other; that the revelation may have been made to the church of antioch and have led to the mission; or that, being made to paul, it may have decided him to undertake it. if however, we admit that the essence of truth consists not in the mere letter but in the spirit of what is stated, it seems impossible to reconcile these accounts. it might be granted that a historian, giving a report of events which had occurred, might omit some secret motive actuating the conduct even of one of the principal persons with whom he has to do; but that the apostle, under the actual circumstances, and while protesting: "now the things which i am writing unto you, behold, before god, i lie not!" should altogether suppress the important official character of his journey to jerusalem, and give it the distinct colour of a visit voluntarily and independently made [------], is inconceivable. as we proceed, it will become apparent that the divergence between the two accounts is systematic and fundamental; but we may here so far anticipate as to point out that the apostle explicitly excludes an official visit not only by stating an "inward motive," and omitting all mention of a public object, but by the expression:--"and communicated to them the gospel which i preach among the gentiles, but privately to those who," &c. to quote paley's words: "if by 'that gospel,' he meant the immunity of the gentile christians from the jewish law (and i know not what else it can mean), it is not easy to conceive how he should communicate that privately, which was the subject of his public message;"( ) and { } we may add, how he should so absolutely alter the whole character of his visit. in the acts, he is an ambassador charged with a most important mission; in the epistle, he is paul the apostle, moved solely by his own reasons again to visit jerusalem. the author of the acts, however, who is supposed to record only the external circumstances, when tested is found to do so very imperfectly, for he omits all mention of titus, who is conjectured to be tacitly included in the "certain others of them," who were appointed by the church to accompany paul, and he is altogether silent regarding the strenuous effort to enforce the rite of circumcision in his case, upon which the apostle lays so much stress. the apostle, who throughout maintains his simply independent attitude, mentions his taking titus with him as a purely voluntary act, and certainly conveys no impression that he also was delegated by the church. we shall presently see how significant the suppression of titus is in connection with the author's transformation of the circumstances of the visit. in affirming that he went up "according to revelation," paul proceeds in the very spirit in which he began to write this epistle. he continues simply to assert his independence, and equality with the elder apostles. in speaking of his first journey he has this object in view, and he states precisely the duration of his visit and whom he saw. if he had suppressed the official character of this second visit and the fact that he submitted for the decision of the apostles and elders the question of the immunity of the gentile converts from circumcision, and thus curtly ascribed his going to a revelation, he would have compromised himself in a very serious manner, and exposed himself to a charge of disingenuousness of which his enemies would not have { } failed to take advantage. but, whether we consider the evidence of the apostle himself in speaking of this visit, the absence of all external allusion to the supposed proceedings when reference to them would have been not only most appropriate but was almost necessary, the practical contradiction of the whole narrative implied in the subsequent conduct of peter at antioch, or the inconsistency of the conduct attributed in it to paul himself, we are forced back to the natural conclusion that the apostle does not suppress anything, and does not give so absurdly partial an account of his visit as would be the case if the narrative in the acts be historical, but that, in a few rapid powerful lines, he completes a suggestive sketch of its chief characteristics. this becomes more apparent at every step we take in our comparison of the two narratives. if we pass on to the next stage of the proceedings, we find an equally striking divergence between the two writers, and it must not escape attention that the variations are not merely incidental but are thorough and consecutive. according to the acts, there was a solemn congress held in jerusalem, on which occasion the apostles and elders and the church being assembled, the question whether it was necessary that the gentiles should be circumcised and bound to keep the law of moses was fully discussed, and a formal resolution finally adopted by the meeting. the proceedings in fact constitute what has always been regarded as the first council of the christian church. the account in the epistle does not seem to betray any knowledge of such a congress.( ) the apostle himself says merely:--"but i { } went according to revelation and communicated to them [------] the gospel which i preach among the gentiles, but privately to them which seemed (to be something) [------]."( ) the usual apologetic explanation, as we have already mentioned, is that whilst more or less distinctly the author of acts indicates private conferences, and paul a public assembly, the former chiefly confines his attention to the general congress and the latter to the more private incidents of his visit.( ) the opinion that the author of acts "alludes in a general way to conferences and discussions preceding the congress,"( ) is based upon the statement xv. , : "and when they came to jerusalem they were received by the church and by the apostles and the elders, and declared all that god did with them. but there rose up certain of the sect of the pharisees, who believed, saying: that it is necessary to circumcise them and to command them to keep the law of moses. and the apostles and the elders came together to see regarding this matter. and when there had been much disputation, peter rose up and said," &c. if it were admitted that more than one meeting is here indicated, it is clear that the words cannot be legitimately strained into a reference to more { } than two conferences. the first of these is a general meeting of the apostles and elders and of the church to receive the delegates from antioch, and the second is an equally general and public conference (verse ): not only are the apostles and elders present but also the general body of christians, as clearly appears from the statement (ver. ) that, after the speech of peter, "all the multitude [------] kept silence."(l) the "much disputation" evidently takes place on the occasion when the apostles and elders are gathered together to consider the matter. if, therefore, two meetings can be maintained from the narrative in acts, both are emphatically public and general, and neither, therefore, the private conference of the epistle. the main fact that the author of the acts describes a general congress of the church as taking place is never called in question. on the other hand, few who appreciate the nature of the discrepancy which we are discussing will feel that the difficulty is solved by suggesting that there is space for the insertion of other incidents in the apostle's narrative. it is rather late now to interpolate a general council of the church into the pauses of the galatian letter. to suppose that the communications of paul to the "pillar" apostles, and the distressing debate regarding the circumcision of titus, may be inferred between the lines of the account in the acts, is a bold effort of imagination; but it is far from being as hopeless as an attempt to reconcile the discrepancy by thrusting the important public congress into some corner of the { } apostle's statement. in so far as any argument is advanced in support of the assertion that paul's expression implies something more than the private conference, it is based upon the reference intended in the words [------]. when paul says he went up to jerusalem and communicated "to them" his gospel, but privately [------], whom does he mean to indicate by the [------]? does he refer to the christian community of jerusalem, or to the apostles themselves? it is pretty generally admitted that either application is permissible; but whilst a majority of apologetic, together with some independent, critics adopt the former,( ) not a few consider, as chrysostom, oecumenius, and calvin did before them, that paul more probably referred to the apostles.( ) in favour of the former there is the fact, it is argued, that the [------] is used immediately after the statement that the apostle went up "to jerusalem," and that it may be more natural to conclude that he speaks of the christians there, more especially as he seems to distinguish between the communication made [------] and [------];( ) and, in support of this, "they" { } in gal. i. , , is, though we think without propriety, referred to. it is, on the other hand, urged that it is very unlikely that the apostle would in such a way communicate his gospel to the whole community, and that in the expressions used he indicates no special transaction, but that the [------] is merely an indefinite statement for which he immediately substitutes the more precise [------]( ) it is quite certain that there is no mention of the christian community of jerusalem to which the [------] can with any real grammatical necessity be referred; but when the whole purport of the first part of the apostle's letter is considered the reference to the apostles in the [------] becomes clearer. paul is protesting the independence of his gospel, and that he did not receive it from man but from jesus christ. he wishes to show that he was not taught by the apostles nor dependent upon them. he states that after his conversion he did not go to those who were apostles before him, but, on the contrary, went away to arabia, and only three years after he went up to jerusalem, and then only for the purpose of making the acquaintance of peter, and on that occasion other of the apostles saw he none save james the lord's brother. after fourteen years, he continues to recount, he again went up to jerusalem, but according to revelation, and communicated to them, i.e. to the apostles, the gospel which he preached among the gentiles. the apostles { } have been in the writer's mind throughout, but in the impetuous flow of his ideas, which in the first two chapters of this epistle outrun the pen, the sentences become involved. it must be admitted, finally, that the reference intended is a matter of opinion and cannot be authoritatively settled. if we suppose it to refer to the community of jerusalem, taking thus the more favourable construction, how would this affect the question? can it be maintained that in this casual and indefinite "to them" we have any confirmation of the general congress of the acts, with its debates, its solemn settlement of that momentous proposition regarding the gentile christians, and its important decree? it is impossible to credit that, in saying that he "communicated to them" the gospel which he preached amongst the gentiles, the apostle referred to a council like that described in the acts, to which, as a delegate from the church of antioch, he submitted the question of the conditions upon which the gentiles were to be admitted into the church, and tacitly accepted their decision.( ) even if it be assumed that the apostle makes this slight passing allusion to some meeting different from his conference with the pillar apostles, it could not have been a general congress assembled for the purpose stated in the acts and characterised by such proceedings. the discrepancy between the two narratives is not lessened by any supposed indication either in the epistle or in the acts of other incidents than those actually described. the suggestion that the dispute about titus involved some { } publicity does not avail, for the greater the publicity and importance of the episode the greater the difficulty of explaining the total silence regarding it of the author of acts. the more closely the two statements are compared the more apparent does it become that the author describes proceedings which are totally different in general character, in details, and in spirit, from those so vividly sketched by the apostle paul. we shall have more to say presently regarding the irreconcilable contradiction in spirit between the whole account which is given in the acts of this council and the writings of paul; but it may be more convenient, if less effective, if we for the present take the chief points in the narrative as they arise and consider how far they are supported or discredited by other data. we shall refer later to the manner in which the question which leads to the council is represented as arising and at once proceed to the speech of peter. after there had been much disputation as to whether the gentile christians must necessarily be circumcised and required to observe the mosaic law, it is stated that peter rose up and said: xv. . "men (and) brethren, ye know that a good while ago god made choice among you that the gentiles by my mouth should hear the word of the gospel and believe. . and god which knoweth the hearts bare them witness, giving them the holy spirit even as unto us; . and put no distinction between us and them, having purified their hearts by the faith. . now, therefore, why tempt ye god, to put a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? . but by the grace of our lord jesus we believe we are saved even as also they."( ) { } the liberality of the sentiments thus put into the mouth of peter requires no demonstration, and there is here an explicit expression of convictions, which we must, from his own words, consider to be the permanent and mature views of the apostle, dating as they do "from ancient days" [------] and originating in so striking and supernatural a manner. we may, therefore, expect that whenever we meet with an authentic record of peter's opinions and conduct elsewhere, they should exhibit the impress of such advanced and divinely imparted views. the statement which peter makes: that god had a good while before selected him that the gentiles by his voice should hear the gospel, is of course a reference to the case of cornelius, and this unites the fortunes of the speech and proceedings of the council with that episode. we have seen how little ground there is for considering that narrative, with its elaborate tissue of miracles, historical. the speech which adopts it is thus discredited, and all other circumstances confirm the conclusion that the speech is not authentic.( ) if the name of peter were erased and that of paul substituted, the sentiments expressed would be singularly appropriate. we should have the { } divinely appointed apostle of the gentiles advocating complete immunity from the mosaic law, and enunciating pauline principles in peculiarly pauline terms. when peter declares that "god put no distinction between us (jews) and them (gentiles), purifying their hearts by faith,( ) but by the grace [------] of our lord jesus christ we believe we are saved even as also they," do we not hear paul's sentiments, so elaborately expressed in the epistle to the romans and elsewhere? "for there is no difference between jew and greek; for the same lord of all is rich unto all that call upon him. for whosoever shall call upon the name of the lord shall be saved"( ).... "justified freely by his grace [------] through the redemption that is in christ jesus."( ) and when peter exclaims: "why tempt ye god to put a yoke [------] upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?" have we not rather a paraphrase of the words in the epistle to the galatians? "with liberty christ made us free; stand fast, therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke [------] of bondage. behold, i paul say unto you that if ye be circumcised christ will profit you nothing. but i testify again to every man who is circumcised that he is a debtor to do the whole law.( )... for as many as are of works of law are under a curse," &c( ) these are only a few sentences of which the speech in acts is an echo, but no attentive reader can fail to perceive that it contains in germ the whole of pauline universalism. { } from the pauline author of the acts this might fairly be expected, and if we linguistically examine the speech, we have additional evidence that it is simply, like others which we have considered, a composition from his own pen. we shall, as briefly as possible, refer to every word which is not of too common occurrence to require notice, and point out where they are elsewhere used. the opening [------] occurs elsewhere in the acts times, as we have already pointed out, being the favourite phrase placed in the mouth of all speakers; [------], x. , xviii. , xix. , , xx. , xxii. , xxiv. , xxvi. , , and elsewhere only times. the phrase [------] at the beginning of a sentence has been pointed out, in connection with a similar way of expressing the personal pronoun in x. , [------], and [------], as consequently characteristic of peter, and considered "important as showing that these reports are not only according to the _sense_ of what was said, but the words spoken, _verbatim_."( ) this is to overlook the fact that the very same words are put into the mouth of paul. peter commences his speech, xv. : [------] paul begins his speech at miletus, xx. : [------]; and at ephesus, demetrius the silversmith commences his address, xix. : [------] cf. xxiii. . [------], xv. , xxi. ; luke ix. , ; elsewhere times; the expression [------] does not elsewhere occur in the new testament, but [------] is common in the septuagint. cf. ps. xliii. , lxxvi. , cxlii. , isaiah xxxvii. , lament, i. , ii. , &c, &c. [------], i. , , vi. , xiii. , xv. , ; luke { } times, elsewhere times, and of these the following with inf., act* i. f., xv. , , ephes. l . with the phrase [------]( ) may be compared that of paul, xiii. ,[------], and cor. i. , in which [------] occurs twice, as well as again in the next verse, . [------] i. , in. , ; iv. ; luke i. ; and the whole phrase [------], may be compared with the words put into paul's mouth, xxii. : [------] xx. , in paul's epistles ( ) times, and elsewhere times. verse . [------] only occurs here and in i. , [------] where it forms part of the prayer at the election of the successor to judas. we have fully examined the speech of peter, i. ffi, and shown its unhistorical character, and that it is a free composition by the author of the acts; the prayer of the assembly is not ascribed to peter in the work itself, though apologists, grasping at the [------], assert that it must have been delivered by that apostle; but, with the preceding speech, the prayer also must be attributed to the pen of the author; and if it be maintained that peter spoke in the aramaic tongue( ) it is useless to discuss the word at all, which of course in that case must be allowed to belong to the author. [------], acts - times, luke , rest frequently; with the phrase [------] may be compared paul's words in xiii. , [------]. verse , [------], x. , xi. , , paul times, &c { } [------], xii. , xiii. ; luke xi. , xvi. ; rest times. [------], acts times, luke , paul , rest times; re... [------]acts times, luke , paul , rest times--[------] is clearly characteristic of the author, [------], acts , luke times, rest very frequently. [------], x. , xi. ; luke , and elsewhere times, [------], x. , xvi. , xxiii. ; an expression not found elsewhere in the new testament, and which is also indicative of the author's composition. verse , [------], v. , xvi. , xxiv. ; luke iv. , xi. , xx. , rest frequently; the question of jesus in luke and the parallel passages, [------]; will occur to every one. [------], acts , luke times, the rest frequently. [------] does not occur elsewhere, either in the acts or third gospel, but it is used precisely in the same sense by paul, gal. v. , in a passage to which we have called attention a few pages back( ) in connection with this speech. [------], xx. , luke xv. , xvii. ; romans xvi. , matth. xviii. , mark ix. ; [------] occurs times, [------], vi. , xix. , , xxv. , xxvii. ; luke times and elsewhere times. [------], iii. , ix. , xxi. ; luke , paul , rest times. verse , [------] acts ? times, luke , paul times, rest frequently. [------], acts , luke times, rest frequently. [------], acts , luke times, rest frequently, [------], is also put into the mouth of paul, xxvii. , and is not elsewhere found in the new testament; [------], i. , vii. ; luke xiii. ; matth. xxiii. , tim. iii. . [------], v. , xviii. ; luke xi. , , xx. , xxii. and elsewhere in the new testament times. it cannot be doubted that the language of this speech is that of the author of the acts, and no serious attempt has ever { } been made to show that it is the language of peter. if it be asserted that, in the form before us, it is a translation, there is not the slightest evidence to support the assertion; and it has to contend with the unfortunate circumstance that, in the supposed process, the words of peter have not only become the words of the author, but his thoughts the thoughts of paul. we may now inquire whether we find in authentic records of the apostle peter's conduct and views any confirmation of the liberality which is attributed to him in the acts. he is here represented as proposing the emancipation of gentile converts from the mosaic law: does this accord with the statements of the apostle paul and with such information as we can elsewhere gather regarding peter? very much the contrary. peter in this speech claims that, long before, god had selected him to make known the gospel to the gentiles, but paul emphatically distinguishes him as the apostle of the circumcision; and although, accepting facts which had actually taken place and could not be prevented, peter with james and john gave paul right hands of fellowship, he remained, as he had been before, apostle of the circumcision( ) and, as we shall see. did not practise the liberality which he is said to have preached. very shortly after the council described in the acts, there occurred the celebrated dispute between him and paul which the latter proceeds to describe immediately after the visit to jerusalem: "but when cephas came to antioch," he writes, "i withstood him to the face, for he was condemned. for before certain came from james, he did eat with the gentiles; but when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, { } fearing those of the circumcision. and the other jews also joined in his hypocrisy, insomuch that even barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy. but when i saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, i said unto cephas before all: if thou being a jew livest [------] after the manner of gentiles and not after the manner of jews, how compellest [------] thou the gentiles to adopt the customs of the jews? [------]"( ) it is necessary to say a few words as to the significance of peter's conduct and of paul's rebuke, regarding which there is some difference of opinion.( ) are we to understand from this that peter, as a general rule, at antioch and elsewhere, with enlightened emancipation from jewish prejudices, lived as a gentile and in full communion with gentile christians?( ) meyer( ) and others argue that by the use of the present [------], the apostle indicates a continuous practice based upon principle, and that the [------] is not the mere moral life, but includes the external social observances of christian community: the object, in fact, being to show that upon principle peter held the advanced liberal views of paul, and that the fault which he committed in withdrawing from free intercourse with the gentile christians was momentary, and merely the result of "occasional timidity and weakness." this theory cannot bear the test of examination. the account of paul is clearly this: _when cephas came to antioch_, the { } stronghold of gentile christianity, _before certain men came from james_, he ate with the gentiles, but as soon as these emissaries arrived he withdrew, "fearing those of the circumcision." had his normal custom been to live like the gentiles, how is it possible that he could, on this occasion only, have feared those of the circumcision? his practice must have been notorious; and had he, moreover, actually expressed such opinions in the congress of jerusalem, his confession of faith having been so publicly made, and so unanimously approved by the church, there could not have been any conceivable cause for such timidity. the fact evidently is, on the contrary, that peter, under the influence of paul, was induced for the time to hold free communion with the gentile christians; but as soon as the emissaries of james appeared on the scene, he became alarmed at this departure from his principles, and fell back again into his normal practice. if the present [------] be taken to indicate continuous habit of life, the present [------] very much more than neutralizes it. paul with his usual uncompromising frankness rebukes the vacillation of peter: by adopting even for a time fellowship with the gentiles, peter has practically recognised its validity, has been guilty of hypocrisy in withdrawing from his concession on the arrival of the followers of james, and is condemned; but after such a concession he cannot legitimately demand that gentile converts should "judaize." it is obvious that whilst peter lived as a gentile, he could not have been compelling the gentiles to adopt judaism. paul, therefore, in saying: "why compellest thou [------] the gentiles to adopt the customs of the jews? [------]," very distinctly intimates that the normal practice of peter was to compel { } gentile christians to adopt judaism. there is no escaping this conclusion for, after all specious reasoning to the contrary is exhausted, there remains the simple fact that peter, when placed in a dilemma on the arrival of the emissaries of james, and forced to decide whether he will continue to live as a gentile or as a jew, adopts the latter alternative, and as paul tells us "compels" (in the present) the gentiles to judaize. a stronger indication of his views could scarcely have been given. not a word is said which implies that peter yielded to the vehement protests of paul, but on the contrary we must undoubtedly conclude that he did not; for it is impossible to suppose that paul would not have stated a fact so pertinent to his argument, had the elder apostle been induced by his remonstrance to walk uprightly according to the truth of the gospel which paul preached, and both to teach and practice christian universalism. we shall have abundant reason, apart from this, to conclude that peter did not yield, and it is no false indication of this, that, a century after, we find the clementine homilies expressing the bitterness of the petrine party against the apostle of the gentiles for this very rebuke, and representing peter as following his course from city to city for the purpose of refuting paul's unorthodox teaching. it is contended that peter's conduct at antioch is in harmony with his denial of his master related in the gospels, and, therefore, that such momentary and characteristic weakness might well have been displayed even after his adoption of liberal principles. those who argue in this way, however, forget that the denial of jesus, as described in the gospels, proceeded from the fear of death, and that such a reply to a merely compromising question { } which did not directly involve principles, is a very different thing from conduct like that at antioch where, under one influence, a line of action was temporarily adopted which ratified views upon which the opinion of the church was divided, and then abandoned merely from fear of the disapproval of those of the circumcision. the author of the acts passes over this altercation in complete silence. no one has ever called in question the authenticity of the account which paul gives of it. if peter had the courage to make such a speech at the council in the very capital of judaic christianity, and in the presence of james and the whole church, how could he possibly, from fear of a few men from jerusalem, have shown such pusillanimity in antioch, where paul and the mass of christians supported him? if the unanimous decision of the council had really been a fact, how easily he might have silenced any objections by an appeal to that which had "seemed good to the holy spirit" and to the church! but there is not the slightest knowledge of the council and its decree betrayed either by those who came from james, or by peter, or paul. the episode at antioch is inconsistent with the conduct and words ascribed to peter in the acts, and contradicts the narrative in the fifteenth chapter which we are examining.( ) the author of the acts states that after peter had spoken, "all the multitude kept silence and were hearing { } barnabas and paul declaring what signs and wonders god had wrought among the gentiles by them."( ) we shall not at present pause to consider this statement, nor the _rôle_ which paul is made to play in the whole transaction, beyond pointing out that, on an occasion when such a subject as the circumcision of the gentiles and their subjection to the mosaic law was being discussed, nothing could be more opposed to nature than to suppose that a man like the author of the epistle to the galatians could have assumed so passive, and subordinate an attitude.( ) after barnabas and paul had spoken, james is represented as saying: "men (and) brethren, hear me. simeon declared how god at first did visit the gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. and with this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written: 'after this i will return, and will build again the tabernacle of david which has fallen down; and i will build again the ruins thereof, and will set it up: that the residue of men may seek after the lord, and all the gentiles, upon whom my name has been called, saith the lord who doeth these things, known from the beginning.' wherefore, i judge that we trouble not those from among the gentiles who are turning to god; but that we write unto them that they abstain from the pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood. for moses from generations of old hath in every city those who preach him, being read in the synagogues every sabbath."( ) there are many reasons for which this { } speech also must be pronounced inauthentic.( ) it may be observed, in passing, that james completely disregards the statement which barnabas and paul are supposed to make as to what god had wrought by them among the gentiles; and, ignoring their intervention, he directly refers to the preceding speech of peter claiming to have first been selected to convert the gentiles. we shall reserve discussion of the conditions which james proposes to impose upon gentile christians till we come to the apostolic decree which embodies them. the precise signification of the sentence with which (ver. ) he concludes has been much debated, but need not detain us long. whatever may be said of the liberal part of the speech it is obvious that the author has been more true to the spirit of the time in conceiving this and other portions of it, than in composing the speech of peter. the continued observance of the mosaic ritual, and the identity of the synagogue with the christian church are correctly indicated; and when james is again represented (xxi. ff.) as advising paul to join those who had avow, in order to prove that he himself walked orderly and was an observer of the law, and did not teach the jews to apostatize from moses and abandon the rite of circumcision, he is consistent in his portrait it is nevertheless clear that, however we may read the restrictions which { } james proposes to impose upon gentile christians, the author of acts intends them to be considered as a most liberal and almost complete concession of immunity. "i judge," he makes james say, "that we trouble not those from among the gentiles who are turning to god;" and again, on the second occasion of which we have just been speaking, in referring to the decree, a contrast is drawn between the christian jews, from whom observance of the law is demanded, and the gentiles, who are only expected to follow the prescriptions of the decree. james is represented as supporting the statement of peter how god visited the gentiles by "the words of the prophets," quoting a passage from amos. ix. , . it is difficult to see how the words, even as quoted, apply to the case at all, but this is immaterial. loose reasoning can certainly not be taken as a mark of inauthenticity. it is much more to the point that james, addressing an assembly of apostles and elders in jerusalem, quotes the prophet amos freely from the septuagint version,( ) which differs widely in the latter and more important part from the hebrew text.( ) the passage in the hebrew reads: ix. . "in that day will i raise up the tabernacle of david that is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and i will raise up his ruins, and i will build it as in the days of old, . that they may possess the remnant of { } edom, and of all the heathen upon whom my name is called, saith the lord that doeth this." the authors of the septuagint version altered the twelfth verse into: "that the residue of men may seek after the lord and all the gentiles upon whom my name is called, saith the lord who doeth these things."( ) it is perfectly clear that the prophet does not, in the original, say what james is here represented as stating, and that his own words refer to the national triumph of israel, and not to the conversion of the gentiles. amos in fact prophesies that the lord will restore the former power and glory of israel, and that the remnant of edom and the other nations of the theocracy shall be re-united, as they were under david. no one questions the fact that the original prophecy is altered, and those who desire to see the singular explanations of apologists may refer to some of the works indicated.( ) the question as to whether james or the author of the acts is responsible for the adoption of the septuagint version is felt to be a serious problem. some critics affirm that in all probability james must have spoken in aramaic;( ) whilst others maintain that he delivered this { } address in greek.( ) in the one case, it is supposed that he quoted the original hebrew and that the author of the acts or the document from which he derived his report may have used the septuagint; and in the other, it is suggested that the lxx. may have had another and more correct reading before them, for it is supposed impossible that james himself could have quoted a version which was actually different from the original hebrew. these and many other similar explanations, into which we need not go, do little to remove the difficulty presented by the fact itself. to suppose that our hebrew texts are erroneous in order to justify the speech is a proceeding which does not require remark. it will be remembered that, in the acts, the septuagint is always employed in quotations from the old testament, and that this is by no means the only place in which that version is used when it departs from the original. it is difficult to conceive that any intelligent jew could have quoted the hebrew of this passage to support a proposal to free gentile christians from the necessity of circumcision and the observance of the mosaic law. it is equally difficult to suppose that james, a bigoted leader of the judaistic party and the head of the church of jerusalem, could have quoted the septuagint version of the holy scriptures, differing from the hebrew, to such an assembly. it is useless to examine here the attempts to make the passage quoted a correct interpretation of the prophet's meaning, or seriously to consider the proposition that this alteration of a prophetic utterance is adopted as better { } expressing "the mind of the spirit." if the original prophecy did not express that mind, it is rather late to amend the utterances of the prophets in the acts of the apostles. we may now briefly examine the speech linguistically. verse : the opening as usual is [------], but the whole phrase [------] is put into the mouth of paul in xxii. , [------], and with but little variation again in xiii. . cf. ii. . the use of the hebrew form [------] in speaking of peter, has been pointed out by bleek( ) and others, after lightfoot,( ) as a characteristic peculiarity showing the authenticity of the speech. the same form occurs in pet. i. , but its use in that spurious epistle is scarcely calculated to give weight to its use here. if it be characteristic of anyone, however, its use is characteristic of the author of the third gospel and the acts, and in no case is it peculiarly associated with james. in addition to the instance referred to above, and apoc. vii. , where the tribe of simeon is thus named, the jewish form [------] of the name simon occurs four times only in the new testament, and they are conflned to our author: acts xiii. ; luke ii. , , iii. . being acquainted with the jewish form of the name, he made use of it in this speech probably for the effect of local colouring. [------], xv. , xxi. ; luke xxiv. , and nowhere else except john i. --it is peculiar to the author, [------], acts , luke times, and elsewhere frequently, [------], iii. , vii. , xi. , xiii. , xxvi. ; luke times; jam. iii. ; paul times, rest frequently. [------], vi. , vii. , xv. ; luke i. , { } , vii. ; matth. xxv. , , hebr. ii. , jam. i. , that is to say times used by the author and only times in the rest of the new testament; compare especially luke i. , and vii. . [------] opposed to [------], xxvi. , . the expression [------] occurs ii. , iv. , , v. , ; luke ix. , , xxi. , xxiv. , and only times in the rest of the new testament. verse : [------], v. ; luke v. , and matth. xviii. , xx. , only. verse : in this quotation from amos, for the i[------] of the septuagint, the author substitutes [------], which phrase occurs elsewhere in acts vii. , xiii. , xviii. ; luke v. , x. , xii. , xvii. , xviii. . [------], v. and times elsewhere. verse : [------], i. , ii. , iv. , , ix. , xiii. , xix. , xxviii. , = times in acts; luke i. , xxiii. ; elsewhere only in rom. i. , john xviii. , ,--a characteristic word. so likewise is the expression [------], iii. , luke i. ; [------] occurs in ephes. iii. , col. i. . these words are added to the passage quoted from the septuagint. verse : [------] is used times in acts; luke i. , vii. ; by paul times, ep. jam. twice, and elsewhere times. [------], times in acts; luke times, paul times, ep. jam. , and elsewhere times, [------] is not found elsewhere in the new testament. [------], acts , luke , jam. v. , , rest times; the phrase [------] is a favourite and characteristic expression of the author, who uses it ix. , xi. , xiv. , xxvi. , and luke i. , and it does not occur elsewhere in the new testament except in pet. ii. . verse : [------], xxi. , and hebr. xiii. only. [------] xv. , luke vi. , vii. , xv. , xxiv. , thess. iv. , v. , tim. iv. , pet. ii. , and { } elsewhere times; in both passages of the ep. to the thess. it is used with [------] as here. [------] is not elsewhere found. [------], vii. ; times by paul, and elsewhere : it occurs very frequently in the septuagint. [------], xv. , xxi. ; paul , elsewhere times. [------], xv. , xxi. , a technical word. [------], acts , luke times, rest frequently, [------], ii. , viii. , xiii. , xiv. ; luke times, matth. , mk. , rest times. [------], xv. , xxi. ; luke ix. , , elsewhere times. [------], xv. , xx. , xxiv. ; luke viii. , , xiii. , and elsewhere only in tit. i. . [------], viii. , ix. , x. , , xix. , xx. , xxviii. ; luke , paul , elsewhere times. [------], acts , luke , rest times, the whole phrase [------] occurs again in the acts, being put into the mouth of paul xiii. , and [------] being used by the writer in xviii. . [------], acts ; luke , rest times, [------], viii. , twice, , xiii. , xv. , xxiii. ; luke , and elsewhere times. this analysis confirms the conclusion that the speech of james at the council proceeds likewise from the pen of the general author, and the incomprehensible liberality of the sentiments expressed, as well as the peculiarity of the quotation from amos according to the septuagint, thus receive at once their simple explanation. if we now compare the account of james's share in granting liberal conditions to gentile christians with the statements of paul, we arrive at the same result. it is in consequence of the arrival of "certain men from james" [------] that peter through fear of them withdrew from communion with the { } gentiles. it will be remembered that the whole discussion is said to have arisen in antioch originally from the judaistic teaching of certain men who came "from judæa," who are disowned in the apostolic letter.( ) it is unfortunate, however, to say the least of it, that so many of those who systematically opposed the work of the apostle paul claimed to represent the views of james and the mother church.( ) the contradiction of the author of the acts, with his object of conciliation, has but small weight before the statements of paul and the whole voice of tradition. at any rate, almost immediately after the so-called apostolic council, with its decree adopted mainly at the instigation of james, his emissaries caused the defection of peter in antioch and the rupture with paul. it is generally admitted, in the face of the clear affirmation of paul, that the men in question must in all probability have been actually sent by james. it is obvious that, to justify the fear of so leading an apostle as peter, not only must they have been thus deputed, but must have been influential men, "of the judaizers who are denounced in st. paul's epistles this much is certain, that they exalted the authority of the apostles of the circumcision; and that, in some instances at least, as members of the mother church, they had direct relations with james, the lord's brother. but when we attempt to define those relations, we are lost in a maze of conjecture." lightfoot, ep. to the gal., p. . { } representing authoritative and prevalent judaistic opinions. we shall not attempt to divine the object of their mission, but we may say that it is impossible to separate them from the judaistic teachers who urged circumcision upon the galatian christians and opposed the authority of the apostle paul. not pursuing this further at present, however, it is obvious that the effect produced by these emissaries is quite incompatible with the narrative that, so short a time before, james and the church of jerusalem had unanimously promulgated conditions, under which the gentile christians were freely admitted into communion, and which fully justified peter in eating with them. the incident at antioch, as connected with james as well as with peter, excludes the supposition that the account of the council contained in the acts can be considered historical. the apostolic letter embodying the decree of the council now demands our attention. it seemed good to the apostles and the elders with the whole church to choose two leading men among the brethren, and to send them to antioch with paul and barnabas, and they wrote by them (xv. ):--"the apostles and brethren which are elders unto the brethren which are of the gentiles in antioch and syria and cilicia, greeting. . forasmuch as we heard that certain which went out from us troubled you with words, subverting your souls, to whom we gave no commandment, . it seemed good unto us, having become of one mind, to choose out and send men unto you with our beloved barnabas and paul, . men that have given up their lives for the name of our lord jesus christ. . we have, therefore, sent judas and silas, who shall also tell you the same things by word of mouth. . for it seemed good to the holy spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary { } things: . that ye abstain from meats offered to idols and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves ye shall do well. fare ye well." l it is argued that the simplicity of this composition, its brevity and the absence of hierarchical tendency, prove the authenticity and originality of the epistle. nothing, however, could be more arbitrary than to assert that the author of the acts, composing a letter supposed to be written under the circumstances, would have written one different from this. we shall, on the contrary, see good reason for affirming that he actually did compose it, and that it bears the obvious impress of his style. besides, zeller( ) has pointed out that, in a document affirmed to be so removed from all calculation or object, verse could hardly have found a place. the reference to "our beloved" barnabas and paul, as "men that have given up their lives for the name of our lord jesus christ," is scarcely consistent with the primitive brevity and simplicity which are made the basis of such an argument. in the absence of better evidence, apologists grasp at extremely slight indications of authenticity, and of this nature seems to us the mark of genuineness which bleek and others( ) consider that they find in the fact, { } that the name of barnabas is placed before that of paul in this document. it is maintained that, from the th chapter, the author commences to give the precedence to paul, but that, in reverting to the former order, the synodal letter gives evidence both of its antiquity and genuineness. if any weight could be attached to such an indication, it is unfortunate for this argument that the facts are not as stated, for the order "barnabas and paul" occurs at xiv. and , and even in the very account of the council at xv. . the two names are mentioned together in the acts sixteen times, barnabas being named first eight times (xi. , xii. , xiii. , , , xiv. , , xv. ), and paul as frequently (xiii. , , , xv. twice, , , ). apologists like lekebusch( ) and oertel( ) reject bleek's argument. the greeting [------] with which the letter opens, and which, amongst the epistles of the new testament, is only found in that bearing the name of james (i. ), is said to be an indication that the letter of the council was written by james himself.( ) before such an argument could avail, it would be necessary, though difficult, to prove the authenticity of the epistle of james, but we need not enter upon such a question. [------] is the ordinary greek form of greeting in all epistles,( ) and the author of acts, who writes purer greek than any { } other writer in our canon, naturally adopts it. not only does he do so here, however, but he makes use of the same [------] in the letter of the chief captain lysias (xxiii. ),( ) which also evidently proceeds from his hand. moreover, the word is used as a greeting in luke i. , and not unfrequently elsewhere in the new testament, as mattli. xxvi. , xxvii. , xxviii. , mark xv. , john xix. , john , . lekebusch,( ) meyer,( ) and oertel( ) reject the argument, and we may add that if [------] prove anything, it proves that the author of acts, who uses the word in the letter of lysias, also wrote the synodal letter. in what language must we suppose that the epistle was originally written? oertel maintains an aramaic original,( ) but the greater number of writers consider that the original language was greek.( ) it cannot be denied that the composition, as it stands, contains many of the peculiarities of style of the author of acts;( ) and these are, indeed, so marked that even apologists like lekebusch and oertel, whilst maintaining the substantial authenticity of the epistle, admit that at least its actual form must be ascribed to the general author. the originality of the form being abandoned, it is difficult to perceive any ground for asserting the originality and genuineness of { } the substance. that assertion rests solely upon a vague traditional confidence in the author of acts, which is shown to be without any solid foundation. the form of this epistle clearly professes to be as genuine as the substance, and if the original language was greek, there is absolutely no reason why the original letter should have been altered. the similarity of the construction to that of the prologue to the third gospel, in which the personal style of the writer may be supposed to have beeu most unreservedly shown, has long been admitted:-- [------] a more detailed linguistic examination of the epistle, however, confirms the conclusion already stated. verse : [------], ii. , v. , vii. , xi. , xiv. , xix. , , and elsewhere the expression is only met with in mark vi. ; the phrase [------] finds a parallel in xi. , [------], k. t. x. the characteristic expression [------], is repeated, xi. , xvi. , xxvii. , , . verse : [------], xiii. , xiv. , luke vii. , xi. , cf. i. ; paul , rest only times. [------], xvii. , , luke i. , xxiv. , elsewhere thirteen times. [------] is not found elsewhere, but the preference of our writer for compounds of [------], and [------] is marked, and of these consists a large proportion of his [------], acts , luke times, and frequently elsewhere; the phrase [------], may be compared with xiv. , [------], cf. xiv. . [------] { } not elsewhere found in acts, but it occurs matth. xvi. , mark v. , vii. twice, viii. , ix. , and heb. xii. . verse : [------], acts , luke , paul times, elsewhere frequently. [------], i. , ii. , , iv. , v. , xii. , viii. , xii. , xviii. , xix. ; so that this word, not in very common use even in general greek literature, occurs times elsewhere in the acts, but, except in rom. xv. , is not employed by any other new testament writer. [------], i. , , vi. , xiii. , xv. , , luke vi. , x. , xiv. , and elsewhere times, [------], acts , luke times, elsewhere common, [------] is not elsewhere used in acts, but is found in luke iii. , ix. , xx. , paul times, and is common elsewhere. verse : [------], acts , luke times, and common elsewhere, [------], xxi. , v. , ix. , rom. i. , john . verse : [------], acts , luke times, elsewhere very frequently. [------], xv. . [------], acts , luke , rest times, [------], luke vi. , ; [------], acts i. , ii. , , iii. , iv. , xiv. ; luke vi. , xvii. . verse : [------], acts , luke , paul , elsewhere times; the same expression, [------]... is also found in luke iii. . [------], acts , luke , elsewhere times. [------] is not elsewhere met with in acts, but occurs matt. xx. , cor. iv. , gal. vi. , thes. il , apoc. ii. . [------], viii. , xx. , xxvii. , luke , elsewhere times. [------] is not elsewhere found in the new testament. verse : [------], xv. , luke vi. , vii. , xv. , xxiv. , elsewhere times. [------], xxi. , cor. viii. , , , , x. , , apoc. ii. , . [------] occurs only in luke ii. . [------], acts , luke , paul , elsewhere times only, [------], this { } usual greek formula for the ending of a letter, [------], is nowhere else used in the new testament, except at the close of the letter of lysias, xxiii. . turning now from the letter to the spirit of this decree, we must endeavour to form some idea of its purport and bearing. the first point which should be made clear is, that the question raised before the council solely affected the gentile converts, and that the conditions contained in the decree were imposed upon that branch of the church alone. no change whatever in the position of jewish christians was contemplated; they were left as before, subject to the mosaic law.( ) this is very apparent in the reference which is made long after to the decree, ch. xxi. ff., , when the desire is expressed to paul by james, who proposed the decree, and the elders of jerusalem, that he should prove to the many thousands of believing jews all zealous of the law, that he did not teach the jews who were among the gentiles apostasy from moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs. paul, who is likewise represented, in the acts, as circumcising with his own hand, after the decision of the council had been adopted, timothy the son of a greek, whose mother was a jewess, consents to give the jews of jerusalem the required proof. we have already shown at the commencement of this section, that { } nothing was further from the minds of the jewish christians than the supposition that the obligation to observe the mosaic law was weakened by the adoption of christianity; and the representation in the acts is certainly so far correct, that it does not pretend that jewish christians either desired or sanctioned any relaxation of mosaic observances on the part of believing jews. this cannot be too distinctly remembered in considering the history of primitive christianity. the initiatory rite was essential to full participation in the covenant. it was left for paul to preach the abrogation of the law and the abandonment of circumcision. if the speech of peter seems to suggest the abrogation of the law even for jews, it is only in a way which shows that the author had no clear historical fact to relate, and merely desired to ascribe, vaguely and indefinitely, pauline sentiments to the apostle of the circumcision. no remark whatever is made upon these strangely liberal expressions of peter, and neither the proposition of james nor the speech in which he makes it takes the slightest notice of them. the conduct of peter at antioch and the influence exercised by james through his emissaries restore us to historical ground. whether the author intended to represent that the object of the conditions of the decree was to admit the gentile christians to full communion with the jewish, or merely to the subordinate position of proselytes of the gate, is uncertain, but it is not necessary to discuss the point. there is not the slightest external evidence that such a decree ever existed, and the more closely the details are examined the more evident does it become that it has no historical consistency. how, and upon what principle, were these singular conditions selected? their heterogeneous character is at once apparent, but not so the { } reason for a combination which is neither limited to jewish customs nor sufficiently representative of moral duties. it has been argued, on the one hand, that the prohibitions of the apostolic decree are simply those, reduced to a necessary minimum, which were enforced in the case of heathen converts to judaism who did not join themselves fully to the people of the covenant by submitting to circumcision, but were admitted to imperfect communion as proselytes of the gate.( ) the conditions named, however, do not fully represent the rules framed for such cases, and many critics consider that the conditions imposed, although they may have been influenced by the noachiaii prescriptions, were rather moral duties which it was, from special circumstances, thought expedient to specify.( ) "we shall presently refer to some of these conditions, but bearing in mind the views which were dominant amongst primitive christians, and more especially, as is obvious, amongst the christians of jerusalem where this decree is supposed to have been unanimously adopted, bearing in mind the teaching which is said to have led to the council, the episode at antioch, and the systematic judaistic opposition which retarded the work of paul and subsequently affected his reputation, it may be instructive { } to point out not only the vagueness which exists as to the position which it was intended that the gentiles should acquire, as the effect of this decree, but also its singular and total inefficiency. an apologetic writer, having of course in his mind the fact that there is no trace of the operation of the decree, speaks of its conditions as follows: "the miscellaneous character of these prohibitions showed that, taken as a whole, they had no binding force independently of the circumstances which dictated them. they were a temporary expedient framed to meet a temporary emergency. their object was the avoidance of offence in mixed communities of jew and gentile converts. beyond this recognised aim and general understanding implied therein, the limits of their application were not defined." in fact the immunity granted to the gentiles was thus practically almost unconditional. it is obvious, however, that every consideration which represents the decree as more completely emancipating gentile christians from mosaic obligations, and admitting them into free communion with believers amongst the jews, places it in more emphatic contradiction to historical facts and the statements of the apostle paul. the unanimous adoption of such a measure in jerusalem, on the one hand, and, on the other, the episode at antioch, the fear of peter, the silence of paul, and the attitude of james become perfectly inconceivable. if on the contrary the conditions were seriously imposed and really meant anything, a number of difficulties spring up of which we shall presently speak. that the prohibitions, in the opinion of the author of the acts, constituted a positive and binding obligation can scarcely be doubted by anyone who considers the terms in which they are laid down. if { } they are represented as a concession they are nevertheless recognised as a "burden," and they are distinctly stated to be the obligations which "it seemed good to the holy spirit" as well as to the council to impose. the qualification, that the restrictive clauses had no binding force "independently of the circumstances which dictated them," in so far as it has any meaning beyond the unnecessary declaration that the decree was only applicable to the class for whom it was framed, seems to be inadmissible. the circumstance which dictated the decree was the counter-teaching of jewish christians, that it was necessary that the gentile converts should be circumcised and keep the law of moses. the restrictive clauses are simply represented as those which it was deemed right to impose; and, as they are stated without qualification, it is holding the decision of the "holy spirit" and of the church somewhat cheap to treat them as mere local and temporary expedients. this is evidently not the view of the author of the acts. would it have been the view of anyone else if it were not that, so far as any external trace of the decree is concerned, it is an absolute myth? the prevalence of practices to which the four prohibitions point is quite sufficiently attested to show that, little as there is any ground for considering that such a decree was framed in such a manner, the restrictive clauses are put forth as necessary and permanently binding. the very doubt which exists as to whether the prohibitions were not intended to represent the conditions imposed on proselytes of the gate shows their close analogy to them, and it cannot be reasonably asserted that the early christians regarded those conditions either as obsolete or indifferent. the decree is clearly intended to set forth the terms upon which gentile christians were { } to be admitted into communion, and undoubtedly is to be taken as applicable not merely to a few districts, but to the gentiles in general. the account which paul gives of his visit not only ignores any such decree, but excludes it. in the first place, taking into account the apostle's character and the spirit of his epistle, it is impossible to suppose that paul had any intention of submitting, as to higher authority, the gospel which he preached, for the judgment of the elder apostles and of the church of jerusalem.( ) nothing short of this is involved in the account in the acts, and in the form of the decree which promulgates, in an authoritative manner, restrictive clauses which "seemed good to the holy spirit" and to the council. the temper of the man is well shown in paul's indignant letter to the galatians. he receives his gospel, not from men, but by direct revelation from jesus christ and, so far is he from submission of the kind implied, that he says: "but even though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached to you, let him be accursed. as we have said before, so say i now again: if any man preach any gospel to you other than that ye received, let him be accursed."( ) that the apostle here refers to his own peculiar teaching, and does so in contradistinction to the gospel preached by the judaizers, is evident from the preceding words: "i marvel that ye are so soon removing from him that called you in the grace of christ unto a different gospel; which is not another, only there are { } some that trouble you, and desire to pervert the gospel of christ."( ) passing from this, however, to the restrictive clauses in general, how is it possible that paul could state, as the result of his visit, that the "pillar" apostles "communicated nothing" after hearing his gospel, if the four conditions of this decree had thus been authoritatively "communicated"? on the contrary, paul distinctly adds that, in acknowledging his mission, but one condition had been attached: "only that we should remember the poor; which very thing i also was forward to do."( ) as one condition is here mentioned, why not the others, had any been actually imposed? it is argued that the remembrance of the poor of jerusalem which is thus inculcated was a recommendation personally made to paul and barnabas, but it is clear that the apostle's words refer to the result of his communication of his gospel, and to the understanding under which his mission to the gentiles was tolerated. we have already pointed out how extraordinary it is that such a decision of the council should not have been referred to in describing his visit, and the more we go into details the more striking and inexplicable, except in one way, is such silence. in relating the struggle regarding the circumcision of titus, for instance, and stating that he did not yield, no, not for an hour, to the demands made on the subject, is it conceivable that, if the exemption of all gentile christians from the initiatory rite had { } been unanimously conceded, paul would not have added to his statement about titus, that not only he himself had not been compelled to give way in this instance, but that his representations had even convinced those who had been apostles before him, and secured the unanimous adoption of his own views on the point? the whole of this epistle is a vehement and intensely earnest denunciation of those judaizers who were pressing the necessity of the initiatory rite upon the galatian converts.( ) is it possible that the apostle could have left totally unmentioned the fact that the apostles and the very church of jerusalem had actually declared circumcision to be unnecessary? it would not have accorded with paul's character, it is said, to have appealed to the authority of the elder apostles or of the church in a matter in which his own apostolic authority and teaching were in question. in that case, bow can it be supposed that he ever went at all up to jerusalem to the apostles and elders about this question? if he was not too proud to lay aside his apostolic dignity and, representing the christians of antioch, to submit the case to the council at jerusalem, and subsequently to deliver its decree to various communities, is it consistent with reason or common sense to assert that he was too proud to recall the decision of that council to the christians of galatia? it must, we think, be obvious that, if such an explanation of paul's total silence as to the decree be at all valid, it is absolutely fatal to the account of paul's visit in the acts. this reasoning is not confined to the epistle to the galatians but, as paley "turning from antioch to galatia, we meet with judaic teachers who urged circumcision on the gentile converts, and, as the best means of weakening the authority of st. paul, asserted for the apostles of the circumcision the exclusive right of dictating to the church." lightfoot, ep. to the gal. p. . { } points out, applies to the other epistles of paul, in all of which the same silence is preserved. moreover, the apologetic explanation altogether fails upon other grounds. without appealing to the decree as an authority, we must feel sure that the apostle would at least have made use of it as a logical refutation of his adversaries. the man who did not hesitate to attack peter openly for inconsistency, and charge him with hypocrisy, would not have hesitated to cite the decree as evidence, and still less to fling it in the faces of those judaizers who, so short a time after that decree is supposed to have been promulgated, preached the necessity of circumcision and mosaic observances in direct opposition to its terms, whilst claiming to represent the views of the very apostles and church which had framed it. paul, who never denies the validity of their claim, would most certainly have taunted them with gross inconsistency and retorted that the church of jerusalem, the apostles, and the judaizers who now troubled him and preached circumcision and the mosaic law had, four or five years previously, declared as the deliberate decision of the holy spirit and the council, that they were no longer binding on the gentile converts. by such a reference "the discussion would have been foreclosed." none of the reasons which are suggested to explain the undeniable fact that there is no mention of the decree can really bear examination, and that fact remains supported by a great many powerful considerations, leading to the very simple explanation which reconciles all difficulties, that the narrative of the acts is not authentic. we arrive at the very same results when we examine the apostle's references to the practices which the conditions of the decree were intended to control. instead of recognising the authority of the decree, or enforcing its { } prescriptions, he does not even allow us to infer its existence, and he teaches disregard at least of some of its restrictions. the decree enjoins the gentile christians to abstain from meats offered to idols. paul tells the corinthians to eat whatever meat is sold in the shambles without asking questions for conscience sake, for an idol is nothing in the world, "neither if we eat are we the better, nor if we eat not are we the worse."( ) it is not conceivable that the apostle could so completely have ignored the prohibition of the decree if he had actually submitted the question to the apostles, and himself so distinctly acquiesced in their decision as to distribute the document amongst the various communities whom he subsequently visited. to argue that the decree was only intended to have force in antioch, and syria, and cilicia, to which, as the locality in which the difficulty had arisen which had originally led to the council, the decree was, in the first instance, addressed, is highly arbitrary; but, when proceeding further, apologists( ) draw a distinction between those churches "which had already been founded, and which had felt the pressure of jewish prejudice (acts xvi. )," and "brotherhoods afterwards formed and lying beyond the reach of such influences," as a reason why no notice of the decree is taken in the case of the corinthians and romans, the special pleading ignores very palpable facts. "jewish prejudices" are represented in the acts of the apostles themselves as being more than usually strong in corinth. there was a jewish synagogue there, augmented probably by the jews expelled from rome under claudius,( ) and their violence against { } paul finally obliged him to leave the place.( ) living in the midst of an idolatrous city, and much exposed to the temptations of sacrificial feasts, we might naturally expect excessive rigour against participation, on the one hand, and perhaps too great indifference, on the other; and this we actually find to have been the case. it is in consequence of questions respecting meats offered to idols that paul writes to the corinthians, and whilst treating the matter in itself as one of perfect indifference, merely inculcates consideration for weak consciences.( ) it is clear that there was a decided feeling against the practice; it is clear that strong jewish prejudices existed in the jewish colony at corinth, and wherever there were jews the eating of meats offered to idols was an abomination. the sin of israel at baalpeor( ) lived in the memory of the people, and abstinence from such pollution( ) was considered a duty. if the existence of such "jewish prejudices" was a reason for publishing the decree, we have, in fact, more definite evidence of them in corinth than we have in antioch, for, apart from this specific mention of the subject of eating sacrificial meats, the two apostolic letters abundantly show the existence and activity of judaistic parties there, which opposed the work of paul, and desired to force mosaic observances upon his converts. it is impossible to admit that, supposing such a decree to have been promulgated as the mind of the holy spirit, there could be any reason why it should have been unknown at corinth so short a time after it was adopted. when, therefore, we find the apostle not only ignoring it, but actually declaring that to be a matter of indifference, abstinence from which it had just seemed { } good to the holy spirit to enjoin, the only reasonable conclusion is that paul himself was totally ignorant of the existence of any decree containing such a prohibition. there is much difference of opinion as to the nature of the [------] referred to in the decree, and we need not discuss it; but in all the apostle's homilies upon the subject there is the same total absence of all allusion to the decision of the council. nowhere can any practical result from the operation of the decree be pointed out, nor any trace even of its existence. the assertions and conjectures, by which those who maintain the authenticity of the narrative in the acts seek to explain the extraordinary absence of all external evidence of the decree, labour under the disadvantage of all attempts to account for the total failure of effects from a supposed cause, the existence of which is in reality only assumed. it is customary to reply to the objection that there is no mention of the decree in the epistles of paul or in any other contemporary writing, that this is a mere argument _a silentio_. is it not, however, difficult to imagine any other argument, from contemporary sources, regarding what is affirmed to have had no existence, than that from silence do apologists absolutely demand that, with prophetic anticipation of future controversies, the apostle paul should obligingly have left on record that there actually was no council such as a writer would subsequently describe, and that the decree which he { } would put forward as the result of that council must not he accepted as genuine? it is natural to expect that, when writing of the very visit in question, and dealing with subjects and discussions in which, whether in the shape of historical allusion, appeal to authority, taunt for inconsistency, or assertion of his own influence, some allusion to the decree would have been highly appropriate, if not necessary, the apostle paul should at least have given some hint of its existence. his not doing so constitutes strong presumptive evidence against the authenticity of the decree, and all the more so as no more positive evidence than silence could possibly be forthcoming of the non-existence of that which never existed. the supposed decree of the council of jerusalem cannot on any ground be accepted as a historical fact.( ) we may now return to such further consideration of the statements of the epistle as may seem necessary for the object of our inquiry. no mention is made by the apostle of any official mission on the subject of circumcision, and the discussion of that question arises in a merely incidental manner from the presence of titus, an uncircumcised gentile christian. there has been much discussion as to whether titus actually was circumcised or not, and there { } can be little doubt that the omission of the negative [------] from gal. ii. , has been in some cases influenced by the desire to bring the apostle's conduct upon this occasion into harmony with the account, in acts xvi. , of his circumcising timothy.( ) we shall not require to enter into any controversy on the point, for the great majority of critics are agreed that the apostle intended to say that titus was not circumcised, although the contrary is affirmed by a few writers.( ) it is obvious from the whole of the apostle's narrative that great pressure was exerted to induce titus to submit, and that paul, if he did not yield even for an hour the required subjection, had a long and severe struggle to maintain his position. even when relating the circumstances in his letter to the galatians, the recollection of his contest profoundly stirs the apostle's indignation; his utterance becomes vehement, but cannot keep pace with his impetuous thoughts, and the result is a narrative in broken and abrupt sentences whose very incompleteness is eloquent, and betrays the irritation which has not even yet entirely subsided. how does this accord with the whole tone of the account in the acts? it is customary with apologists to insert so much between the lines of that narrative, partly from imagination and partly from the statements of the epistle, that they almost convince themselves and others that such additions are actually suggested by the author of the acts himself. if we take the account of the acts, however, without such transmutations, it is certain that not only is there not the slightest indication of any struggle regarding the { } circumcision of titus, "in which st. paul maintained at one time almost single-handed the cause of gentile freedom,"( ) but no suggestion that there had ever been any hesitation on the part of the leading apostles and the mass of the church regarding the point at issue. the impression given by the author of the acts is undeniably one of unbroken and undisturbed harmony: of a council in which the elder apostles were of one mind with paul, and warmly agreed with him that the gentiles should be delivered from the yoke of the mosaic law and from the necessity of undergoing the initiatory rite. what is there in such an account to justify in any degree the irritation displayed by paul at the mere recollection of this visit, or to merit the ironical terms with which he speaks of the "pillar" apostles? we may, however, now consider the part which the apostles must have taken in the dispute regarding the circumcision of titus. is it possible to suppose that, if the circumcision of paul's follower had only been demanded by certain of the sect of the pharisees who believed, unsupported by the rest, there could ever have been any considerable struggle on the point? is it possible, further, to suppose that, if paul had received the cordial support of james and the leading apostles in his refusal to concede the circumcision of titus, such a contest could have been more than momentary and trifling? is it possible that the apostle paul could have spoken of "certain of the sect of the pharisees who believed" in such terms as: "to whom we yielded by the submission [------] no not for an hour?"( ) or that he could have used this expression if those who pressed the demand upon him had not been in a position { } of authority, which naturally suggested a subjection which paul upon this occasion persistently refused? it is not possible. of course many writers who seek to reconcile the two narratives, and some of whom substitute for the plain statements of the acts and of the apostle, an account which is not consistent with either, suppose that the demand for the circumcision of titus proceeded solely from the "false brethren,"( ) although some of them suppose that at least these false brethren may have thought they had reason to hope for the support of the elder apostles.( ) it is almost too clear for dispute, however, that the desire that titus should be circumcised was shared or pressed by the elder apostles.( ) according to the showing of the acts, nothing could be more natural than the fact that james and the elders of jerusalem who, so long after (xxi. if.), advised paul to prove his continued observance of the law and that he did not teach the jews to abandon circumcision, should on this occasion have pressed him to circumcise titus. the conduct of peter at antioch, and the constant opposition which paul met with from emissaries { } of james and of the apostles of the circumcision upon the very point of gentile circumcision, all support the inevitable conclusion, that the pressure upon paul in the matter of titus was not only not resisted by the apostles, but proceeded in no small degree from them. this is further shown by the remainder of paul's account of his visit and by the tone of his remarks regarding the principal apostles, as well as by the historical data which we possess of his subsequent career. we need not repeat that the representation in the acts both of the council and of the whole intercourse between paul and the apostles is one of "unbroken unity."( ) the struggle about titus and the quarrel with peter at antioch are altogether omitted, and the apostolic letter speaks merely of "our beloved barnabas and paul, men that have given up their lives for the name of our lord jesus christ"( ) the language of paul is not so pacific and complimentary. immediately after his statement that he had "yielded by the submission, no, not for an hour," paul continues: "but from those who seem to be something [------]--whatsoever they were it maketh no matter to me: god accepteth not man's person;--for to me those who seem [------] (to be something) communicated nothing, but, on the contrary, &c. &c., and when they knew the grace that was given to me, james and cephas and john, who seem to be pillars [------], gave to me and barnabas right hands of fellowship that we (should go) unto the gentiles," &c. &c.( ) the tone and language of this passage are certainly { } depreciatory of the elder apostles,( ) and, indeed, it is difficult to understand how any one could fail to perceive and admit the fact. it is argued by some who recognise the irony of the term [------] applied to the apostles, that the disparagement which is so transparent in the form [------], "those who seem to be something," is softened again in the new turn which is given to it in ver. , [------], "those who seem to be pillars," in which, it is said, "the apostle expresses the real greatness and high authority of the twelve in their separate field of labour."( ) it seems to us that this interpretation cannot be sustained. paul is ringing the changes on [------], and contrasting with the position they assumed and the estimation in which they were held, his own experience of them, and their inability to add anything to him. "those who seem to be something," he commences, but immediately interrupts himself, after having thus indicated the persons whom he meant, with the more direct protest of irritated independence:--"whatsoever they were it maketh no matter to me: god accepteth not man's person." these [------] communicated nothing to him, but, on the contrary, when they knew the grace given to him, "those who seem to be pillars" gave him hands of fellowship, but nothing more, and they went their different ways, he to the gentiles and they to the circumcision. if the { } expression: [------] be true, as well as ironically used, it cannot be construed into a declaration of respect, but forms part of a passage whose tone throughout is proudly depreciatory. this is followed by such words as "hypocrisy" [------] and "condemned" [------] applied to the conduct of peter at antioch, as well as the mention of the emissaries of james as the cause of that dispute, which add meaning to the irony. this is not, however, the only occasion on which paul betrays a certain bitterness against the elder apostles. in his second letter to the corinthians, xi. , he says, "for i reckon that i am not a whit behind the over much apostles" [------], and again, xii. , "for in nothing was i behind the over much apostles" [------]; and the whole of the vehement passage in which these references are set shows the intensity of the feeling which called them forth. to say that the expressions in the galatian epistle and here are "depreciatory, not indeed of the twelve themselves, but of the extravagant and exclusive claims set up for them by the judaizers,"( ) is an extremely arbitrary distinction. they are directly applied to the apostles, and [------] cannot be taken as irony against those who over-estimated them, but against the [------] themselves. paul's blows generally go straight to their mark. meyer argues that the designation of the apostles as [------] is purely historical, and cannot be taken as ironical, inasmuch as it would be inconsistent to suppose that paul could adopt a depreciatory tone when he is relating his recognition as a colleague by the elder apostles;( ) and others consider that { } ver. , , contain evidence of mutual respect and recognition between paul and the twelve. even if this were so, it could not do away with the actual irony of the expressions; but do the facts support such a statement? we have seen that, in spite of the picture of unbroken unity drawn by the author of the acts, and the liberal sentiments regarding the gentiles which he puts into the mouth of peter and of james, paul had a severe and protracted struggle to undergo in order to avoid circumcising titus. we have already stated the grounds upon which it seems certain that the pressure upon that occasion came as well from the elder apostles as the "false brethren," and critics who do not go so far as to make this positive affirmation, at least recognise the passive, and therefore to a large extent compliant, attitude which the apostles must have held. it is after narrating some of the particulars of this struggle that paul uses the terms of depreciation which we have been discussing; and having added, "for to me those who seem (to be something) communicated nothing," he says, "_but, on the contrary_, when they saw that i have been entrusted with the gospel of the uncircumcision, even as peter with that of the circumcision (for he that wrought for peter unto the apostleship of the circumcision, wrought also for me unto the gentiles); and when they knew the grace that was given unto me, james and cephas and john, who seem to be pillars, gave to me and barnabas right hands of fellowship, that we (should go) unto the gentiles, and they unto the circumcision: only that we should remember the poor; which very thing i also was forward to do." it will be observed that, after saying they "communicated nothing" to him, the apostle adds, in opposition, "but, on the { } contrary" [------]. in what does this opposition consist? apparently in this, that, instead of strengthening the hands of paul, they left him to labour alone. they said: "take your own course; preach the gospel of the uncircumcision to gentiles, and we will preach the gospel of the circumcision to jews."( ) in fact, when paul returned to jerusalem for the second time after fourteen years, he found the elder apostles not one whit advanced towards his own uni-versalism; they retained their former jewish prejudices, and remained as before apostles of the circumcision.( ) notwithstanding the strong pauline sentiments put into peter's mouth by the author of the acts, and his claim to have been so long before selected by god that by his mouth the gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe, paul singles out peter as specially entrusted with the gospel of the circumcision; and, in the end, after paul has exerted all his influence, peter and the rest remain unmoved, and allow paul to go to the gentiles, while they confine their ministry as before to the jews. the success of paul's work amongst the heathen was too palpable a fact to be ignored, but there is no reason to believe that the conversion of the gentiles, upon his terms, was more than tolerated at that time, or the gentile christians admitted to more than such imperfect communion with the jewish christians as that of proselytes of the gate in relation to judaism. this is shown by the conduct of peter at antioch after the supposed council, and of the jews with him, and even of barnabas, { } through fear of the emissaries of james, whose arrival certainly could not have produced a separation between jewish and gentile christians had the latter been recognised as in full communion. the "hands of fellowship" clearly was a mere passive permission of paul's mission to the gentiles, but no positive and hearty approval of it testified by active support.( ) it must, we think, be evident to any one who attentively considers the passage we are examining, that there is no question whatever in it of a recognition of the apostolate of paul.( ) the elder apostles consent to his mission to the gentiles, whilst they themselves go to the circumcision; but there is not a syllable which indicates that paul's claim to the title of apostle was ever either acknowledged or discussed. it is not probable that paul would have submitted such a point to their consideration. it is difficult to see how the elder apostles could well have done less than they did, and the extent of their fellowship seems to have simply amounted to toleration of what they could not prevent. the pressure for the circumcision of the gentile converts was an attempt to coerce, and to suppress the peculiar principle of the gospel of uncircumcision; and though that effort failed through the determined resistance of paul, { } it is clear, from the final resolve to limit their preaching to the circumcision, that the elder apostles in no way abandoned their view of the necessity of the initiatory rite. the episode at antioch is a practical illustration of this statement. hilgenfeld ably remarks:--"when we consider that peter was afraid of the circumcised christians, there can be no doubt _that james, at the head of the primitive community, made the attempt to force heathen christians to adopt the substance of jewish legitimacy, by breaking off ecclesiastical community with them_."( ) the gentile christians were virtually excommunicated on the arrival of the emissaries of james, or at least treated as mere proselytes of the gate; and the pressure upon the galatian converts of the necessity of circumcision by similar judaizing emissaries, which called forth the vehement and invaluable epistle before us, is quite in accordance with the circumstances of this visit. the separation agreed upon between paul and the elder apostles was not in any sense geographical, but purely ethnological.( ) it was no mere division of labour,( ) no suitable apportionment of work. the elder apostles determined, like their master before them, to confine their ministry to jews, whilst paul, if he pleased, might go to the gentiles; and the mere fact that peter subsequently goes to antioch, as well as many other { } circumstances, shows that no mere separation of localities, but a selection of race was intended. if there had not been this absolute difference of purpose, any separation would have been unnecessary, and all the apostles would have preached one gospel indifferently to all who had ears to hear it; such strange inequality in the partition of the work could never have existed: that paul should go unaided to the gigantic task of converting the heathen, while the twelve reserved themselves for the small but privileged people. all that we have said at the beginning of this section of the nature of primitive christianity, and of the views prevalent amongst the disciples at the death of their master, is verified by this attitude of the three during the famous visit of the apostle of the gentiles to jerusalem, and paul's account is precisely in accordance with all that historical probability and reason, unwarped by the ideal representations of the acts, prepare us to expect. the more deeply we go into the statements of paul the more is this apparent, and the more palpable does the inauthenticity of the narrative of the council appear. the words of paul in describing the final understanding are very remarkable and require further consideration. the decision that they should go to the circumcision and paul to the gentiles is based upon the recognition of a different gospel entrusted to him, the gospel of the uncircumcision, as the gospel of the circumcision is entrusted to peter. it will be remembered that paul states that, on going up to jerusalem upon this occasion, he communicated to them the gospel which he preached among the gentiles, and it is probable that he made the journey more especially for this purpose. it appears from the account that this gospel was not only new to them, but was { } distinctly diflferent from that of the elder apostles. if paul preached the same gospel as the rest, what necessity could there have been for communicating it at all? what doubt that by any means he might be running, or had run, in vain? he knew perfectly well that he preached a diflferent gospel from the apostles of the circumcision, and his anxiety probably was to secure an amicable recognition of the gentile converts whom he had taught to consider circumcision unnecessary and the obligation of the law removed. of course there was much that was fundamentally the same in the two gospels, starting as they both did with the recognition of jesus as the messiah; but their points of divergence were very marked and striking, and more especially in directions where the prejudices of the apostles of the circumcision were the strongest avoiding all debatable ground, it is clear that the gospel of the uncircumcision, which proclaimed the abrogation of the law and the inutility of the initiatory rite, must have been profoundly repugnant to jews, who still preached the obligation of circumcision and the observance of the law. "christ redeemed us from the curse of the law"( ) said the gospel of the uncircumcision. "behold, i, paul, say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, christ will profit you nothing.... for in christ jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love."( ) "for neither circumcision is anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature."( ) the teaching which was specially designated the gospel of the circumcision, in contradistinction to this gospel of the uncircumcision, held very diflferent language. there is no gainsaying the { } main fact--and that fact, certified by paul himself and substantiated by a host of collateral circumstances, is more conclusive than all conciliatory apologetic reasoning--that, at the date of this visit to jerusalem (c. a.d. - ), the three, after hearing all that paul had to say, allowed him to go alone to the gentiles, but themselves would have no part in the mission, and turned as before to the circumcision. there is another point to which we must very briefly refer. the statements of paul show that, antecedent to this visit to jerusalem, paul had been the active apostle of the gentiles, preaching his gospel of the uncircumcision, and that subsequently he returned to the same field of labour. if we examine the narrative of the acts, we do not find him represented in any special manner as the apostle of the gentiles, but, on the contrary, whilst peter claims the honour of having been selected that by his voice the gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe, paul is everywhere described as going to the jews, and only when his teaching is rejected by them does he turn to the gentiles. it is true that ananias is represented as being told by the lord that paul is a chosen vessel "to bear my name both before gentiles and kings, and the sons of israel;"( ) and paul subsequently recounts how the lord had said to himself, "go, for i will send thee far hence unto gentiles."( ) the author of the acts, however, everywhere conveys the impression that paul very reluctantly fulfils this mission, and that if he had but been successful amongst the jews he never would have gone to the gentiles at all. immediately after his conversion, he preaches in the synagogues at damascus and confounds the jews,( ) as he { } again does during his visit to jerusalem.( ) when the holy spirit desires the church at antioch to separate barnabas and saul for the work whereunto he has called them, they continue to announce the word of god "in the synagogues of the jews,"( ) and in narrating the conversion of the roman proconsul at paphos, it is said that it is sergius paulus himself who calls for barnabas and saul, and seeks to hear the word of god.( ) when they came to antioch in pisidia, they go into the synagogue of the jews( ) as usual, and it is only after the jews reject them that paul and barnabas are described as saying:--"it was necessary that the word of god should first be spoken to you: seeing that ye thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the gentiles."( ) in iconium, to which they next proceed, however, they go into the synagogue of the jews,( ) and later, it is stated that paul, on arriving at thessalonica, "as his custom was," went into the synagogue of the jews, and for three sabbaths discoursed to them.( ) at corinth, it was only when the jews opposed him and blasphemed, that paul is represented as saying: "your blood be upon your own head; i will henceforth, with a pure conscience, go unto the gentiles." it is impossible to distinguish from this narrative any difference between the ministry of paul and that of the other apostles. they all address themselves mainly and primarily to the jews, although if gentiles desire to eat of "the crumbs which fall from the children's bread" they are not rejected. even the pharisees stirred heaven and earth to make proselytes. in no sense can { } the paul of the acts be considered specially an apostle of the gentiles, and the statement of the epistle to the galatians( ) has no significance, if interpreted by the historical work. apologists usually reply to this objection, that the practice of paul in the acts is in accordance with his own words in the epistle to the romans, i. , in which, it is asserted, he recognizes the right of the jews to precedence. in the authorised version this passage is rendered as follows:--"for i am not ashamed of the gospel of christ: for it is the power of god unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the jew first and also to the greek."( ) [------] as a matter of fact we may here at once state that the word [------] "first," is not found in codices b and g, and that it is omitted from the latin rendering of the verse quoted by tertullian.( ) that the word upon which the controversy turns should not be found in so important a ms. as the vatican codex or in so ancient a version as tertullian's is very significant, but proceeding at once to the sense of the sentence, we must briefly state the reasons which seem to us conclusively to show that the usual reading is erroneous. the passage is an emphatic statement of the principles of paul. he declares that he is not ashamed of the gospel, and he immediately states the reason: "for it is a power of god unto salvation to everyone that believeth."( ) he is not ashamed of the gospel because he recognizes its universality; for, in { } opposition to the exclusiveness of judaism, he maintains that all are "sons of god through faith in christ jesus... there is neither jew nor greek... for ye are all one man in christ jesus. and if ye be christ's then are ye abraham's seed, heirs according to promise."( ) "for in christ jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but faith working through love."( ) the reason which he gives is that which lies at the basis of the whole of his special teaching; but we are asked to believe that, after so clear and comprehensive a declaration, he at once adds the extraordinary qualification: [------], rendered "to the jew first and also to the greek." what is the meaning of such a limitation? if the gospel be a power of god unto salvation "to every one that believeth" [------], in what manner can it possibly be so "to the jew first"? can it be maintained that there are comparative degrees in salvation? "salvation" is obviously an absolute term. if saved at all, the jew cannot be more saved than the greek. if, on the other hand, the expression be interpreted as an assertion that the jew has a right of precedence either in the offer or the attainment of salvation before the greek, the manner of its realization is almost equally inconceivable, and a host of difficulties, especially in view of the specific pauline teaching, immediately present themselves. there can be no doubt that the judaistic view distinctly was that israel must first be saved, before the heathen could obtain any part in the messianic kingdom, and we have shown that this idea dominated primitive christianity; and inseparable from this was the belief that the only way to a participation in its benefits lay through judaism. the { } heathen could only obtain admission into the family of israel, and become partakers in the covenant, by submitting to the initiatory rite. it was palpably under the influence of this view, and with a conviction that the messianic kingdom was primarily destined for the children of israel, that the elder apostles, even after the date of paul's second visit to jerusalem, continued to confine their ministry "to the circumcision." paul's view was very different. he recognized and maintained the universality of the gospel and, in resolving to go to the heathen, he practically repudiated the very theory of jewish preference which he is here supposed to advance. if the gospel, instead of being a power of god to salvation to every man who believed, was for the jew first, the apostolate of the gentiles was a mere delusion and a snare. what could be the advantage of so urgently offering salvation to the greek, if the gift, instead of being "for every one that believeth," was a mere prospective benefit, inoperative until the jew had first been saved? "salvation to the jew first and also to the greek," if it have any significance whatever of the kind argued,--involving either a prior claim to the offer of salvation, or precedence in its distribution,--so completely destroys all the present interest in it of the gentile, that the gospel must to him have lost all power. to suppose that such an expression simply means, that the gospel must first be preached to the jews in any town to which the apostle might come before it could legitimately be proclaimed to the gentiles of that town, is childish. we have no reason to suppose that paul held the deputy sergius paulus, who desired to hear the word of god and believed, in suspense until the jews of paphos had { } rejected it. the cases of the ethiopian eunuch and cornelius throw no light upon any claim of the jew to priority in salvation. indeed, not to waste time in showing the utter incongruity of the ordinary interpretation, we venture to affirm that there is not a single explanation, which maintains a priority assigned to the jew in any way justifying the reference to this text, which is capable of supporting the slightest investigation. if we linguistically examine the expression [------], we arrive at the same conclusion, that [------] is an interpolation, for we must maintain that [------] with [------] and [------] must be applied equally both to "jew" and "greek," and cannot rightly be appropriated to the jew only, as implying a preference over the greek.( ) the sense, therefore, can only be properly and intelligibly given by disregarding [------] and simply translating the words: "both to jew and greek."( ) this was the rendering of the ancient latin version quoted by tertullian in his work against marcion: "itaque et hie, cum dicit: non enim me pudet evangelii, virtus enim dei est in salutem omni credenti, judæo et græco, quia justitia dei in eo revelatur ex fide in fidem.,,( ) we are not left without further examples of the very same expression, and an examination of the context will amply demonstrate that paul used it in no other sense. in the { } very next chapter the apostle twice uses the same words. after condemning the hasty and unrighteous judgment of man, he says: "for we know that the judgment of god is according to truth.... who will render to every one according to his works; to them who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honour and incorruption, eternal life: but unto them that act out of factious spirit and do not obey the truth but obey unrighteousness, anger, and wrath: affliction and distress upon every soul of man that worketh evil, both of jew and of greek [------], a. v. "of the jew first, and also of the gentile"; but glory and honour and peace to every one that worketh good, both to jew and to greek [------], a. v. "to the jew first, and also to the gentile"). for there is no respect of persons with god."( ) how is it possible that, if the apostle had intended to assert a priority of any kind accorded to the jew before the gentile, he could at the same time have added: "for there is no respect of persons with god "? if salvation be "to the jew first," there is very distinctly respect of persons with god. the very opposite, however, is repeatedly and emphatically asserted by paul in this very epistle. "for there is no difference between jew and greek" [------], he says, "for the same lord of all is rich unto all them that call upon him. for whosoever shall call upon the name of the lord shall be saved."( ) here, we have the phrase without [------]. nothing could be more clear and explicit. the precedence of the jew is directly excluded. at the end of the second chapter, moreover, he explains his idea of a jew: { } "for he is not a jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outwardly in flesh, but he is a jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, in spirit not letter."( ) if anything further were required to prove that the apostle does not by the expression: [------], intend to indicate any priority accorded to the jew, it is supplied by the commencement of the third chapter. "what then is the advantage of the jew? or what the profit of circumcision?" it is obvious that if the apostle had just said that the gospel was the power of god unto salvation, "to jew first and also to greek," he had stated a very marked advantage to the jew, and that such an inquiry as the above would have been wholly unnecessary. the answer which he gives to his own question, however, completes our certainty. "much every way," he replies; but in explaining what the "much" advantage was, we hear no more of "to jew first:" "much every way: for first indeed they were entrusted with the oracles of god."( ) and, after a few words, he proceeds: "what then? are we better? not at all; for we before brought the charge that both jews and greeks [------] are all under sin."( ) here, again, there is no [------]. there can be no doubt in the mind of any one who understands what paul's teaching was, and what he means by claiming the special title of "apostle to the gentiles," that in going "to the heathen" after his visit to jerusalem, as before it, there was no purpose in his mind to preach to the jews first and only on being rejected by them to turn to the gentiles, as the acts would have us suppose; but that the principle which regulated his proclamation of the gospel was that which we have { } already quoted: "for there is no difference between jew and greek; for the same lord of all is rich unto all them that call upon him. for whosoever shall call upon the name of the lord shall be saved."( ) still more incongruous is the statement of the acts that paul took timothy and circumcised him because of the jews. according to this narrative, shortly after the supposed council of jerusalem at which it was decided that circumcision of gentile converts was unnecessary; immediately after paul had in spite of great pressure refused to allow titus to be circumcised; and after it had been agreed between the apostle of the gentiles and james and cephas and john that while they should go to the circumcision, he, on the contrary, should go to the heathen, paul actually took and circumcised timothy. apologists, whilst generally admitting the apparent contradiction, do not consider that this act involves any real inconsistency, and find reasons which, they affirm, sufficiently justify it. some of these we shall presently examine, but we may at once say that no apologetic arguments seem to us capable of resisting the conclusion arrived at by many independent critics, that the statement of the acts with regard to timothy is opposed to all that we know of paul's views, and that for unassailable reasons it must be pronounced unhistorical.( ) the author of the acts says: "and he (paul) came to derbe and lystra. and behold a certain disciple was there, named timothy, son of a { } believing jewish woman, but of a greek father; who was well reported of by the brethren in lystra and iconium. him would paul have to go forth with him; and took and circumcised him because of the jews which were in those places [------]; for they all knew that his father was a greek [------]."( ) the principal arguments of those who maintain the truth and consistency of this narrative briefly are: paul resisted the circumcision of titus because he was a greek, and because the subject then actually under consideration was the immunity from the jewish rite of gentile christians, which would have been prejudiced had he yielded the point. on the other hand, timothy was the son of a jewish mother, and whilst there was no principle here in question, paul circumcised the companion whom he had chosen to accompany him in his missionary journey, both as a recognition of his jewish origin and to avoid offence to the jews whom they should encounter in the course of their ministry, as well as to secure for him access to the synagogues which they must visit: paul in this instance, according to all apologists putting in practice his own declaration ( cor. ix. - ): "for being free from all men, i made myself servant unto all that i might gain the more; and unto the jews i became as a jew, that i might gain jews." it must be borne in mind that the author who chronicles the supposed circumcision of timothy makes no allusion to the refusal of paul to permit titus to be circumcised; an omission which is not only singular in itself, but significant when we find him, immediately after, narrating so singular a concession of which the { } apostle makes no mention. of course it is clear that paul could not have consented to the circumcision of titus, and we have only to consider in what manner the case of timothy differed so as to support the views of those who hold that paul, who would not yield to the pressure brought to bear upon him in the case of titus, might, quite consistently, so short a time after, circumcise timothy with his own hand. it is true that the necessity of circumcision for gentile christians came prominently into question, during paul's visit to jerusalem, from the presence of his uncircumcised follower titus, and no doubt the abrogation of the rite must have formed a striking part of the exposition of his gospel, which paul tells us he made upon this occasion; but it is equally certain that the necessity of circumcision long continued to be pressed by the judaistic party in the church. it cannot fairly be argued that, at any time, paul could afford to relax his determined and consistent attitude as the advocate for the universality of christianity and the abrogation of a rite, insistence upon which, he had been the first to recognise, would have been fatal to the spread of christianity. to maintain that he could safely make such a concession of his principles and himself circumcise timothy, simply because at that precise moment there was no active debate upon the point, is inadmissible; for his epistles abundantly prove that the topic, if it ever momentarily subsided into stubborn silence, was continually being revived with renewed bitterness. pauline views could never have prevailed if he had been willing to sacrifice them for the sake of conciliation, whenever they were not actively attacked. the difference of the occasion cannot be admitted { } as a valid reason; let us, therefore, see whether any difference in the persons and circumstances removes the contradiction. it is argued that such a difference exists in the fact that, whilst titus was altogether a gentile, timothy, on the side of his mother at least, was a jew; and thiersch, following a passage quoted by wetstein, states that, according to talmudic prescriptions, the validity of mixed marriages between a jewess and a gentile was only recognized upon the condition that the children should be brought up in the religion of the mother. in this case, he argues, paul merely carried out the requirement of the jewish law by circumcising timothy, which others had omitted to do, and thus secured his admission to the jewish synagogues to which much of his ministry was directed, but from which he would have been excluded had the rite not been performed.( ) even meyer, however, in reference to this point, replies that paul could scarcely be influenced by the talmudic canon, because timothy was already a christian and beyond judaism.( ) besides, in point of fact, by such a marriage the jewess had forfeited jewish privileges. timothy, in the eyes of the mosaic law, was not a jew, and held, in reality, no better position than the greek titus. he had evidently been brought up as a heathen, and the only question which could arise in regard to him was whether he must first become a jew before he could be fully recognized as a christian. the supposition that the circumcision of timothy, the son of a greek, after he had actually become a christian without having passed through judaism, { } could secure for him free access to the synagogues of the jews, may show how exceedingly slight at that time was the difference between the jew and the christian, but it also suggests the serious doubt whether the object of the concession, in the mind of the author of the acts, was not rather to conciliate the judaic christians, than to represent the act as one of policy towards the unbelieving jews. the statement of the acts is that paul circumcised timothy "because of the jews which were in those places; for they knew all that his father was a greek." if the reason which we are discussing were correct, the expression would more probably have been: "for they knew that his mother was a jewess." the greek father might, and probably did, object to the circumcision of his son, but that was no special reason why paul should circumcise him. on the other hand, the fact that the jews knew that his father was a greek made the action attributed to paul a concession which the author of the acts thus represented in its most conciliatory light. the circumcision of timothy was clearly declared unnecessary by the apostolic decree, for the attempt to show that he was legitimately regarded as a jew utterly fails. it is obvious that, according to pauline doctrine, there could be no obligation for anyone who adopted christianity to undergo this initiatory rite. it is impossible reasonably to maintain that any case has been made out to explain why timothy, who had grown into manhood without being circumcised, and had become a christian whilst uncircumcised, should at that late period be circumcised. beyond the reference to a talmudic prescription, in fact, with which there is not the slightest evidence that paul was acquainted, and which, even if he did know of it, could not possibly have been recognised by him as { } authoritative, there has not been a serious attempt made to show that the case of timothy presents exceptional features which reconcile the contradiction otherwise admitted as apparent. the whole apologetic argument in fact sinks into one of mere expediency: timothy, the son of a jewess and of a greek, and thus having a certain affinity both to jews and gentiles, would become a much more efficient assistant to paul if he were circumcised and thus had access to the jewish synagogues; therefore paul, who himself became as a jew that he might win the jews, demanded the same sacrifice from his follower. but can this argument bear any scrutiny by the light of paul's own writings? it cannot. paul openly claims to be the apostle of the gentiles, and just before the period at which he is supposed to circumcise timothy, he parts from the elder apostles with the understanding that he is to go to the gentiles who are freed from circumcision. it is a singular commencement of his mission, to circumcise the son of a greek father after he had become a christian. such supposed considerations about access to synagogues and conciliation of the jews would seem more suitable to a missionary to the circumcision, than to the apostle of the gentiles. it must be apparent to all that in going more specially to the gentiles, as he avowedly was, the alleged expediency of circumcising timothy falls to the ground, and on the contrary that such an act would have compromised his whole gospel. paul's characteristic teaching was the inutility of circumcision, and upon this point he sustained the incessant attacks of the emissaries of james and the judaistic party without yielding or compromise. what could have been more ill-advised under { } such circumstances than the circumcision with his own hands of a convert who, if the son of a jewess, was likewise the son of a greek, and had remained uncircumcised until he had actually embraced that faith which, paul taught, superseded circumcision? the apostle who declared: "behold, i paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, christ will profit you nothing,"( ) could not have circumcised the christian timothy; and if any utterance of paul more distinctly and explicitly applicable to the present case be required, it is aptly supplied by the following: "was any man called being circumcised? let him not become uncircumcised. hath any man been called in uncircumcision? let him not be circumcised.... let each abide in the same calling wherein he was called."( ) apologists quote very glibly the saying of paul: "unto the jews i became as a jew, that i might gain jews," as sufficiently justifying the act which we are considering; but it is neither applicable to the case, nor is the passage susceptible of such interpretation. the special object of paul at that time, according to his own showing,( ) was not to gain jews but to gain gentiles; and the circumcision of timothy would certainly not have tended to gain gentiles. if we quote the whole passage from which the above is extracted, the sense at once becomes clear and different from that assigned to it: "for being free from all men, i made myself servant unto all, that i might gain the more; and unto the jews i became as a jew that i might gain jews; to them under law, as under law, not being myself under law, that i might gain them under law; to them without law, as without law,--not being without law to god, but under law to christ,-- { } that i might gain them without law; to the weak i became weak that i might gain the weak: i am become all things to all men, that i may by all means save some. and all things i do for the gospel's sake, that i may become a partaker thereof with them."(l) it is clear that a man who could become "all things to all men," in the sense of yielding any point of principle, must be considered without principle at all, and no one could maintain that paul was apt to concede principles. judged by his own statements, indeed, his character was the very reverse of this. there is no shade of conciliation when he declares: "but though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach any gospel unto you other than that we preached unto you, let him be accursed.... for am i now making men my friends, or god? or am i seeking to please men? if i were still pleasing men, i should not be a servant of christ."( ) the gospel of which he speaks, and which he protests "is not after men," but received "through a revelation of jesus christ,"( ) is that gospel which paul preached among the gentiles, and which proclaimed the abrogation of the law and of circumcision. paul might in one sense say that "circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing, but keeping the commandments of god;"( ) but such a statement, simply intended to express that there was neither merit in the one nor in the other, clearly does not apply to the case before us, and no way lessens the force of the words we have quoted above: "if ye be circumcised, christ will profit you nothing." in paul such a concession would have been in the highest degree a sacrifice of principle, and one which he not only refused to make in the case of titus, "that the truth of the { } gospel might abide," but equally maintained in the face of the pillar apostles, when he left them and returned to the gentiles whilst they went back to the circumcision. paul's idea of being "all things to all men" is illustrated by his rebuke to peter,--once more to refer to the scene at antioch. peter apparently practised a little of that conciliation, which apologists, defending the unknown author of the acts at the expense of paul, consider to be the sense of the apostle's words. paul repudiated such an inference, by withstanding peter to the face as condemned, and guilty of hypocrisy. paul became all things to all men by considering their feelings, and exhibiting charity and forbearance, in matters indifferent he was careful not to make his liberty a stumbling block to the weak. "if food maketh my brother to offend, i will eat no flesh for ever lest i make my brother to offend."( ) self-abnegation in the use of enlightened liberty, however, is a very different thing from the concession of a rite, which it was the purpose of his whole gospel to discredit, and the labour of his life to resist. once more we repeat that the narrative of the acts regarding the circumcision of timothy is contradictory to the character and teaching of paul as ascertained from his epistles, and like so many other portions of that work which we have already examined must, as it stands, be rejected as unhistorical. we have already tested the narrative of the author of the acts by the statements of paul in the first two chapters of the galatians at such length that, although the subject is far from exhausted, we must not proceed further. we think that there can be no doubt that the role assigned to the apostle paul in acts xv. is unhistorical,( ) { } and it is unnecessary for us to point out the reasons which led the writer to present him in such subdued colours. we must, however, before finally leaving the subject, very briefly point out a few circumstances which throw a singular light upon the relations which actually existed between paul and the elder apostles, and tend to show their real, if covert, antagonism to the gospel of the uncircumcision. we may at the outset remark, in reference to an objection frequently made that paul does not distinctly refer to the apostles as opposing his teaching and does not personally attack them, that such a course would have been suicidal in the apostle of the gentiles, whilst on the other hand it could not but have hindered the acceptance of his gospel, for which he was ever ready to endure so much. the man who wrote: "if it be possible, as much as dependeth on you, be at peace with all men,"( ) could well be silent in such a cause. paul, in venturing to preach the gospel of the uncircumcision, laboured under the singular disadvantage of not having, like the twelve, been an immediate disciple of the master. he had been "as the one born out of due time,"( ) and although he claimed that his gospel had not been taught to him by man but had been received by direct revelation from jesus, there can be no doubt that his apostolic position was constantly assailed. the countenance of the elder apostles, even if merely tacit, was of great { } importance to the success of his work; and he felt this so much that, as he himself states, he went up to jerusalem to communicate to them the gospel which he preached among the gentiles: "lest by any means i might be running or did run in vain."( ) any open breach between them would have frustrated his labours. had paul been in recognized enmity with the twelve who had been selected as his special disciples by the master, and been repudiated and denounced by them, it is obvious that his position would have been a precarious one. he had no desire for schism. his gospel, besides, was merely a development of that of the elder apostles; and, however much they might resent his doctrine of the abrogation of the law and of the inutility of circumcision, they could still regard his gentile converts as at least in some sort proselytes of the gate. with every inducement to preserve peace if by any means possible, and to suppress every expression of disagreement with the twelve, it is not surprising that we find so little direct reference to the elder apostles in his epistles. during his visit to jerusalem he did not succeed in converting them to his views. they still limited their ministry to the circumcision, and he had to be content with a tacit consent to his work amongst the heathen. but although we have no open utterance of his irritation, the suppressed impatience of his spirit, even at the recollection of the incidents of his visit, betrays itself in abrupt sentences, unfinished expressions, and grammar which breaks down in the struggle of repressed emotion. we have already said enough regarding his ironical references to those "who seem to be something," to the "overmuch apostles," and we need not again point { } to the altercation between paul and cephas at antioch, and the strong language used by the former. nothing is more certain than the fact that, during his whole career, the apostle paul had to contend with systematic opposition from the judaic christian party;( ) and the only point regarding which there is any difference of opinion is the share in this taken by the twelve. as we cannot reasonably expect to find any plain statement of this in the writings of the apostle, we are forced to take advantage of such indications as can be discovered. upon one point we are not left in doubt. the withdrawal of peter and the others at antioch from communion with the gentile christians, and consequently from the side of paul, was owing to the arrival of certain men from james, for the apostle expressly states so. no surprise is expressed, however, at the effect produced by these [------], and the clear inference is that they represented the views of a naturally antagonistic party, an inference which is in accordance with all that we elsewhere read of james. it is difficult to separate the [------] from the [------] of the preceding chapter (i. ) who "trouble" the galatians, and "desire to pervert the gospel of christ," asserting the necessity of circumcision, against whom the epistle is directed. again we meet with the same vague and cautious designation of judaistic opponents in his second epistle to the corinthians (iii. ), where { } "some" [------] bearers of "letters of commendation" [------] from persons unnamed, were attacking the apostle and endeavouring to discredit his teaching. by whom were these letters written? we cannot of course give an authoritative reply, but we may ask: by whom could letters of commendation possessing an authority which could have weight against that of paul be written, except by the elder apostles?' we have certain evidence in the first epistle to the corinthians that parties had arisen in the church of corinth in opposition to paul. these parties were distinguished, as the apostle himself states, by the cries: "i am of paul, and i of apollos, and i of cephas, and i of christ."( ) [------]. whatever differences of opinion there may be as to the precise nature of these parties, there can be no doubt that both the party "of cephas" and the party "of christ" held strong judaistic views and assailed the teaching of paul, and his apostolic authority. it is very evident that the persons to whom the apostle refers in connection with "letters of commendation" were of these parties. apologists argue that: "in claiming cephas as the head of their party they had probably neither more nor { } less ground than their rivals who sheltered themselves under the names of apollos and of paul."( ) it is obvious, however, that, in a church founded by paul, there could have been no party created with the necessity to take his name as their watchword, except as a reply to another party which, having intruded itself, attacked him, and forced those who maintained the views of their own apostle to raise such a counter-cry. the parties "of cephas" and "of christ" were manifestly aggressive, intruding themselves, as the apostle complains, into "other men's labours,"( ) and this in some manner seems to point to that convention between the apostle and the three, that he should go to the gentiles and they to the circumcision which, barely more than passive neutrality at the beginning, soon became covertly antagonistic. the fact that the party "of paul" was not an organized body, so to say, directed by the apostle as a party leader, in no way renders it probable that the party of cephas, which carried on active and offensive measures, had not much more ground in claiming cephas as their head. one point is indisputable, that no party ever claims any man as its leader who is not clearly associated with the views it maintains. the party "of cephas," representing judaistic views, opposing the teaching of paul, and joining in denying his apostolic claims, certainly would not have taken peter's name as their watch-cry if he had been known to hold and express such pauline sentiments as are put into his mouth in the acts, or had not, on the contrary, been intimately identified with judaistic principles. to illustrate the case by a modern instance: is it possible to suppose that, in any considerable city in this country, { } a party holding ritualistic opinions could possibly claim the present archbishop of canterbury as its leader, or one professing "broad-church" views could think of sheltering itself under the name of the archbishop of york? religious parties may very probably mistake the delicate details of a leader's teaching, but they can scarcely be wrong in regard to his general principles. if peter had been so unfortunate as to be flagrantly misunderstood by his followers and, whilst this party preached in his name judaistic doctrines and anti-pauline opinions, the apostle himself advocated the abrogation of the law, as a burden which the jews themselves were not able to bear, and actively shared pauline convictions, is it possible to suppose that paul would not have pointed out the absurdity of such a party claiming such a leader? the fact is, however, that paul never denies the claim of those who shelter themselves under the names of peter and james, never questions their veracity, and never adopts the simple and natural course of stating that, in advancing these names, they are imposters or mistaken. on the contrary, upon all occasions he evidently admits, by his silence, the validity of the claim.( ) we are not left to mere inference that the adopted head of the party actually shared the views of the party. paul himself distinguishes peter as the head of the party of the circumcision in a passage in his letter to the galatians already frequently referred to,( ) and the episode at antioch confirms the description, and leaves no doubt that peter's permanent practice was to force the gentiles to judaize. for reasons which we have already stated, paul could not but have desired to preserve peace, or even the { } semblance of it, with the elder apostles, for the gospel's sake; and he, therefore, wisely leaves them as much as possible out of the question and deals with their disciples. it is obvious that policy must have dictated such a course. by ignoring the leaders and attacking their followers, he suppressed the chief strength of his opponents and kept out of sight the most formidable argument against himself: the concurrence with them of the elder apostles. on the one hand, the epistles of paul bear no evidence to any active sympathy and co-operation with his views and work on the part of the elder apostles. on the other, paul is everywhere assailed by judaistic adversaries who oppose his gospel and deny his apostle-ship, and who claim as their leaders the elder apostles. if, even without pressing expressions to their extreme and probable point, we take the contrast drawn between his own gospel and that of the circumcision, the reality of the antagonism must be apparent. "for we are not as the many [------]( ) which adulterate the word of god; but as of sincerity, but as of god, before god, speak we in christ."( ) later on in the letter, after referring to the intrusion of the opposite party into the circle of his labours, paul declares that his impatience and anxiety proceed from godly jealousy at the possible effect of the judaistic intruders upon the corinthians. "but i fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled eve through his subtlety, your thoughts should { } be corrupted from the simplicity and the purity that is in christ. for if he that cometh preacheth another jesus whom we did not preach, or if ye receive another spirit which ye received not, or another gospel which ye did not accept, ye bear well with him. for i think i am not a whit behind the overmuch apostles [------]."( ) this reference to the elder apostles gives point to much of the epistle which is ambiguous, and more especially when the judaistic nature of the opposition is so clearly indicated a few verses further on: "are they hebrews? so am i. are they israelites? so am i. are they abraham's seed? so am i. are they ministers of christ? (i speak as a fool), i am more; in labours more abundantly, in prisons exceedingly, in deaths often," &c, &c.( ) it is argued that the twelve had not sufficient authority over their followers to prevent such interference with paul, and that the relation of the apostle to the twelve was: "separation, not opposition, antagonism of the followers rather than of the leaders, personal antipathy of the judaizers to st. paul, rather than of st. paul to the twelve."( ) it is not difficult to believe that the antipathy of paul to the judaizers was less than that felt by them towards him. the superiority of the man must have rendered him somewhat callous to such dislike.( ) but the mitigated form of difference between paul and the twelve here assumed, although still very different from the representations of the acts, { } cannot be established, but on the contrary must be much widened before it can justly be taken as that existing between paul and the elder apostles. we do not go so far as to say that there was open enmity between them, or active antagonism of any distinct character on the part of the twelve to the apostle of the gentiles, but there is every reason to believe that they not only disliked his teaching, but endeavoured to counteract it by their own ministry of the circumcision. they not only did not restrain the opposition of their followers, but they abetted them in their counter-assertion of judaistic views. had the twelve felt any cordial friendship for paul, and exhibited any active desire for the success of his ministry of the uncircumcision, it is quite impossible that his work could have been so continuously and vexatiously impeded by the persecution of the jewish christian party. the apostles may not have possessed sufficient influence or authority entirely to control the action of adherents, but it would be folly to suppose that, if unanimity of views had prevailed between them and paul, and a firm and consistent support had been extended to him, such systematic resistance as he everywhere encountered from the party professing to be led by the "pillar" apostles could have been seriously maintained, or that he could have been left alone and unaided to struggle against it. if the relations between paul and the twelve had been such as are intimated in the acts of the apostles, his epistles must have presented undoubted evidence of the fact both negatively and positively they testify the absence of all support, and the existence of antagonistic influence on the part of the elder apostles, and external evidence fully confirms the impression which the epistles produce.( ) { } from any point of view which may be taken, the apocalypse is an important document in connection with this point. if it be accepted as a work of the apostle john--the preponderance of evidence and critical opinion assigns it to him--this book, of course, possesses the greatest value as an indication of his views. if it be merely regarded as a contemporary writing, it still is most interesting as an illustration of the religious feeling of the period. the question is: does the apocalypse contain any reference to the apostle paul, or throw light upon the relations between him and the elder apostles? if it does so, and be the work of one of the [------], nothing obviously could be more { } instructive. in the messages to the seven churches, there are references and denunciations which, in the opinion of many able critics, are directed against the apostle of the gentiles and his characteristic teaching.( ) who but paul and his followers can be referred to in the epistle to the church of ephesus: "i know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and that thou canst not bear wicked persons: and didst try them which say they are apostles and are not, and didst find them liars"?( ) paul himself informs us not only of his sojourn in ephesus, where he believed that "a great and effectual door" was opened to him, but adds, "there are many adversaries" [------].( ) the foremost charge brought against the churches is that they have those that hold the teaching of balaam, who taught balak to cast a stumbling-block before the sons of israel, "to eat things offered unto idols."( ) the teaching of paul upon this point is { } well known, cor. viii. ff., x. ff., rom. xiv. ff., and the reference here cannot be mistaken; and when in the epistle to the church of thyatira, after denouncing the teaching "to eat things offered unto idols," the apocalyptist goes on to encourage those who have not this teaching, "who knew not the depths of satan, [------],( ) as they say" the expression of paul himself is taken to denounce his doctrine; for the apostle, defending himself against the attacks of those parties "of cephas" and "of christ" in corinth, writes: "but god revealed (them) to us through his spirit; for the spirit searcheth all things, even the depths of god" [------]--"the depths of satan" rather, retorts the judaistic author of the apocalypse. [------] does not occur elsewhere in the new testament again, in the address to the churches of smyrna and philadelphia, when the writer denounces those "who say that they are jews, and are not, but a synagogue of satan,"( ) whom has he in view but those christians whom paul had taught to consider circumcision unnecessary and the law abrogated? we find paul in the epistle to the corinthians, so often quoted, obliged to defend himself against these judaising parties upon this very point: "are they hebrews? so am i. are they israelites? so am i. are they abraham's seed? so am i."( ) it is manifest that his adversaries had vaunted their own jewish origin as a title of superiority over the apostle of the gentiles. we { } have, however, further evidence of the same attack upon paul regarding this point. epiphanius points out that the ebionites denied that paul was a jew, and asserted that he was born of a gentile father and mother, but that, having gone up to jerusalem, he became a proselyte and submitted to circumcision in the hope of marrying a daughter of the high priest. but afterwards, according to them, enraged at not securing the maiden for his wife, paul wrote against circumcision and the sabbath and the law.( ) the apostle paul, whose constant labour it was to destroy the particularism of the jew, and raise the gentile to full, free, and equal participation with him in the benefits of the new covenant, could not but incur the bitter displeasure of the apocalyptist, for whom the gentiles were, as such, the type of all that was common and unclean. in the utterances of the seer of patmos we seem to hear the expression of all that judaistic hatred and opposition which pursued the apostle who laid the axe to the root of mosaism and, in his efforts to free christianity from trammels which, more than any other, retarded its triumphant development, aroused against himself all the virulence of jewish illiberality and prejudice. the results at which we have arrived might be singularly confirmed by an examination of the writings of the first two centuries, and by observing the attitude { } assumed towards the apostle of the gentiles by such men as justin martyr, papias, hegesippus, and the author of the clementines; but we have already devoted too much space to this subject, and here we must reluctantly leave it. the steps by which christianity was gradually freed from the trammels of judaism and became a religion of unlimited range and universal fitness were clearly not those stated in the acts of the apostles. its emancipation from mosaism was not effected by any liberal action or enlightened guidance on the part of the elder apostles. at the death of their master, the twelve remained closely united to judaism, and evidently were left without any understanding that christianity was a new religion which must displace mosaic institutions, and replace the unbearable yoke of the law by the divine liberty of the gospel. to the last moment regarding which we have any trustworthy information, the twelve, as might have been expected, retained all their early religious customs and all their jewish prejudices. they were simply jews believing that jesus was the messiah; and if the influence of paul enlarged their views upon some minor points, we have no reason to believe that they ever abandoned their belief in the continued obligation of the law, and the necessity of circumcision for full participation in the benefits of the covenant. the author of the acts would have us believe that they required no persuasion, but anticipated paul in the gospel of uncircumcision. it is not within the scope of this work to inquire how paul originally formed his views of christian universalism. once formed, it is easy to understand how rapidly they must have been developed and confirmed by experience amongst { } the gentiles. whilst the twelve still remained in the narrow circle of judaism and could not be moved beyond the ministry of the circumcision, paul, in the larger and freer field of the world, must daily have felt more convinced that the abrogation of the law and the abandonment of circumcision were essential to the extension of christianity amongst the gentiles. he had no easy task, however, to convince others of this, and he never succeeded in bringing his elder colleagues over to his views. to the end of his life, paul had to contend with bigoted and narrow-minded opposition within the christian body, and if his views ultimately triumphed, and the seed which he sowed eventually yielded a rich harvest, he himself did not live to see the day, and the end was attained only by slow and natural changes. the new religion gradually extended beyond the limits of judaism. gentile christians soon outnumbered jewish believers. the twelve whose names were the strength of the judaistic opposition one by one passed away; but, above all, the fall of jerusalem and the dispersion of the christian community secured the success of pauline principles and the universalism of christianity. the church of jerusalem could not bear transplanting. in the uncongenial soil of pella it gradually dwindled away, losing first its influence and soon after its nationality. the divided members of the jewish party, scattered amongst the gentiles, and deprived of their influential leaders, could not long retard the progress of the liberalism which they still continued to oppose and to misrepresent. in a word, the emancipation of christianity was not effected by the twelve, was no work of councils, and no result of dreams; but, receiving its first great impulse from the genius and the energy of paul, its ultimate { } achievement was the result of time and natural development. we have now patiently considered the "acts of the apostles," and although it has in no way been our design exhaustively to examine its contents, we have more than sufficiently done so to enable the reader to understand the true character of the document. the author is unknown, and it is no longer possible to identify him. if he were actually the luke whom the church indicates, our results would not be materially affected; but the mere fact that the writer is unknown is obviously fatal to the acts as a guarantee of miracles. a cycle of supernatural occurrences could scarcely, in the estimation of any rational mind, be established by the statement of an anonymous author, and more especially one who not only does not pretend to have been an eye-witness of most of the miracles, but whose narrative is either uncorroborated by other testimony or inconsistent with itself, and contradicted on many points by contemporary documents. the phenomena presented by the acts of the apostles become perfectly intelligible when we recognize that it is the work of a writer living long after the occurrences related, whose pious imagination furnished the apostolic age with an elaborate system of supernatural agency, far beyond the conception of any other new testament writer, by which, according to his view, the proceedings of the apostles were furthered and directed, and the infant church miraculously fostered. on examining other portions of his narrative, we find that they present the features which the miraculous elements rendered antecedently probable. the speeches attributed to { } different speakers are all cast in the same mould, and betray the composition of one and the same writer. the sentiments expressed are inconsistent with what we know of the various speakers. and when we test the circumstances related by previous or subsequent incidents and by trustworthy documents, it becomes apparent that the narrative is not an impartial statement of facts, but a reproduction of legends or a development of tradition, shaped and coloured according to the purpose or the pious views of the writer. the acts of the apostles, therefore, is not only an anonymous work, but upon due examination its claims to be considered sober and veracious history must be emphatically rejected. it cannot strengthen the foundations of supernatural religion, but, on the contrary, by its profuse and indiscriminate use of the miraculous it discredits miracles, and affords a clearer insight into their origin and fictitious character. part v. the direct evidence for miracles chapter i. the epistles and the apocalypse turning from the acts of the apostles to the other works of the new testament, we shall be able very briefly to dispose of the catholic epistles, the epistle to the hebrews and the apocalypse. the so-called epistles of james, jude, and john, do not contain any evidence which, even supposing them to be authentic, really bears upon our inquiry into the reality of miracles and divine revelation; and the testimony of the apocalypse affects it quite as little. we have already, in examining the fourth gospel, had occasion to say a good deal regarding both the so-called epistles of john and the apocalypse. it is unnecessary to enter upon a more minute discussion of them here. "seven books of the new testament," writes dr. westcott, "as is well known, have been received into the canon on evidence less complete than that by which the others are supported."( ) these are "the epistles of james, jude, peter, and john, to the hebrews, and the apocalypse." we have already furnished the means of judging of the nature of the { } evidence upon which some of the other books have been received into the canon, and the evidence for most of these being avowedly "less complete," its nature may be conceived. works which for a long period were classed amongst the antilegomena, or disputed books, and which only slowly acquired authority as, in the lapse of time, it became more difficult to examine their claims, could not do much to establish the reality of miracles. with regard to the epistle to the hebrews, we may remark that we are freed from any need to deal at length with it, not only by the absence of any specific evidence in its contents, but by the following consideration. if the epistle be not by paul,--and it not only is not his, but does not even pretend to be so,--the author is unknown, and therefore the document has no weight as testimony. on the other hand, if assigned to paul, we shall have sufficient ground in his genuine epistles for considering the evidence of the apostle, and it could not add anything even if the epistle to the hebrews were included in the number. the first epistle of peter might have required more detailed treatment, but we think that little could be gained by demonstrating that the document is not authentic, or showing that, in any case, the evidence which it could furnish is not of any value. on the other hand, we are averse to protract the argument by any elaboration of mere details which can be avoided. if it could be absolutely proved that the apostle peter wrote the epistle circulating under his name, the evidence for miracles would only be strengthened by the fact that, incidentally, the doctrine of the resurrection of jesus is maintained. no historical details are given, and no explanation of the reasons for which the writer believed in it. { } nothing more would be proved than the point that peter himself believed in the resurrection. it would certainly be a matter of very deep interest if we possessed a narrative written by the apostle himself, giving minute and accurate details of the phenomena in consequence of which he believed in so miraculous an event; but since this epistle does nothing more than allow us to infer the personal belief of the writer, unaccompanied by corroborative evidence, we should not gain anything by accepting it as genuine. we are quite willing to assume, without further examination, that the apostle peter in some way believed in the resurrection of his master. for the argument regarding the reality of that stupendous miracle, upon which we are about to enter, this is tantamount to assuming the authenticity of the epistle. coming to the epistles of paul, it will not be necessary to go into the evidence for the various letters in our new testament which are ascribed to him, nor shall we require to state the grounds upon which the authenticity of many of them is denied. accepting the epistles to the galatians, corinthians and romans in the main as genuine compositions of the apostle, the question as to the origin of the rest, so far as our inquiry is concerned, has little or no interest. from these four letters we obtain the whole evidence of paul regarding miracles, and this we now propose carefully to examine. one point in particular demands our fullest attention. it is undeniable that paul preached the doctrine of the resurrection and ascension of jesus, and believed in those events. whilst, therefore, we shall not pass over his supposed testimony for the possession of miraculous powers, we shall chiefly devote our attention to his evidence for the central dogmas of supernatural religion, the resurection and ascension of { } jesus. we shall not, however, limit our examination to the testimony of paul, but, as the climax of the historical argument for miracles, endeavour to ascertain the exact nature of the evidence upon which belief is claimed for the actual occurrence of those stupendous events. for this, our inquiry into the authorship and credibility of the historical books of the new testament has at length prepared us, and it will be admitted that, in subjecting these asserted miracles to calm and fearless scrutiny--untinged by irreverence or disrespect, if personal earnestness and sincere sympathy with those who believe are any safeguards,--the whole theory of christian miracles will be put to its final test. chapter ii. the evidence of paul it is better, before proceeding to examine the testimony of paul for the resurrection, to clear the way by considering his evidence for miracles in general, apart from that specific instance. in an earlier portion of this work( ) the following remark was made: "throughout the new testament, patristic literature, and the records of ecclesiastical miracles, although we have narratives of countless wonderful works performed by others than the writer, and abundant assertion of the possession of miraculous power by the church, there is no instance whatever, that we can remember, in which a writer claims to have himself performed a miracle."( ) it is asserted that this statement is erroneous, and that paul does advance this claim.( ) it may be well to quote the moderate { } words in which a recent able writer states the case, although not with immediate reference to the particular passage which we have quoted. "... in these undoubted writings st. paul certainly shows by incidental allusions, the good faith of which cannot be questioned, that he believed himself to be endowed with the power of working miracles, and that miracles, or what were thought to be such, were actually wrought both by him and by his contemporaries. he reminds the corinthians that 'the signs of an apostle were wrought among them... in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds' [------]--the usual words for the higher forms of miracle-- cor. xii. ). he tells the romans that 'he will not dare to speak of any of those things which christ hath not wrought by( ) him to make the gentiles obedient, by word and deed, through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the spirit of god' [------]. he asks the { } galatians whether 'he that ministereth to them the spirit, and worketh miracles [------] among them, doeth it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?' (gal. iii. .) in the first epistle to the corinthians, he goes somewhat elaborately into the exact place in the christian economy that is to be assigned to the working of miracles and gifts of healing ( cor. xii. , , )."( ) we shall presently examine these passages, but we must first briefly deal with the question whether, taken in any sense, they furnish an instance "in which a writer claims to have himself performed _a miracle_." it must be obvious to any impartial reader, that the remark made in the course of our earlier argument precisely distinguished the general "assertion of the possession of miraculous power by the church," from the explicit claim to have personally performed "a miracle" in the singular. if, therefore, it were even admitted "that st. paul treats the fact of his working miracles as a matter of course, _to which a passing reference is sufficient_," such "incidental allusions" would not in the least degree contradict the statement made, but, being the only instances producible, would in fact completely justify it. general and vague references of this kind have by no means the force of a definite claim to have performed some particular miracle. they partake too much of that indiscriminate impression of the possession and common exercise of miraculous powers which characterized the "age of miracles" to have any force. the desired instance, which is not forthcoming, and to which alone reference was made, was a case in which, instead of vague expressions, a writer, stating with precision the particulars, related that he himself had, { } for instance, actually raised some person from the dead. as we then added, even if apostles had chronicled their miracles, the argument for their reality would not have been much advanced; but it is a curious phenomenon not undeserving of a moment's attention that apologists can only refer to such general passages, and cannot quote an instance in which a specific miracle is related in detail by the person who is supposed to have performed it. passing references on a large scale to the exercise of miraculous power, whilst betraying a suspicious familiarity with phenomena of an exceptional nature, offer too much latitude for inaccuracy and imagination to have the weight of an affirmation in which the mind has been sobered by concentration to details. "signs and wonders," indefinitely alluded to, may seem much more imposing and astonishing than they really are, and it may probably be admitted by everyone that, if we knew the particulars of the occurrences which are thus vaguely indicated and which may have been considered miraculous in a superstitious age, they might to us possibly appear no miracles at all. general expressions are liable to an exaggeration from which specific allegations arc more frequently free. if it be conceded that the apostle paul fully believed in the possession by himself and the church of divine charismata, the indefinite expression of that belief, in any form, must not be made equivalent to an explicit claim to have performed a certain miracle, the particulars of which are categorically stated. passing from this, however, to the more general question, the force of some of these objections will be better understood when we consider the passages in the epistles which are quoted as expressing paul's belief in miracles, and endeavour to ascertain his real views: what it is he { } actually says regarding miracles; and what are the phenomena which are by him considered to be miraculous. we shall not waste time in considering how, partly through the influence of the septuagint, the words [------], and [------] came to be used in a peculiar manner by new testament writers to indicate miracles. it may, however, be worth while to pause for a moment to ascertain the sense in which paul, who wrote before there was a "new testament" at all, usually employed these words. in the four epistles of paul the word [------] occurs six times. in rom. iv. abraham is said to have received the "sign [------] of circumcision," in which there is nothing miraculous. in cor. i. it is said: "since both jews require signs [------]( ) and greeks seek after wisdom;" and again, cor. xiv. : "wherefore the tongues are for a sign [------] not to the believing but to the unbelieving," &c. we shall have more to say regarding these passages presently, but just now we merely quote them to show the use of the word. the only other places in which it occurs( ) are those pointed out, and which are the subject of our discussion. in rom. xv. the word is used in the plural and combined with [------]: "in the power of signs and wonders" [------]; and in the second passage, cor. xii. , it is employed twice, "the signs [------] of the apostle "and the second time again in combination with [------] and [------], "both in signs" [------], &c. the word [------] is only twice met with in paul's writings; that is to say, in rom. xv. and cor. xii. ; and on both occasions, as we { } have just mentioned, it is combined with [------].( ) on the other hand, paul uses [------] no less than times( ) and, leaving for the present out of the question the passages cited, upon every occasion, except one, perhaps, the word has the simple signification of "power." the one exception is rom. viii. , where it occurs in the plural: [------] "powers," the apostle expressing his persuasion that nothing will be able to separate us from the love of god, "nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers [------], nor height, nor depth," &c., &c. in cor. xiv. , where the authorized version renders the original: "therefore, if i know not the meaning [------] of the voice," it has still the same sense. before discussing the passages before us we must point out that there is so much doubt, at least, regarding the authenticity of the last two chapters of the epistle to the romans that the passage, rom. xv. , , can scarcely be presented as evidence on such a point as the reality of miracles. we do not intend to debate the matter closely, but shall merely state a few of the facts of the case and pass on, for it would not materially affect our argument if the passage were altogether beyond suspicion. the epistle, in our authorized text, ends with a long and somewhat involved doxology, xvi. - ; and we may point out here that it had already seemed to be brought to a close not only at the end of chapter xv. ( ) but also at xvi. . the doxology, xvi. - , which { } more particularly demands our attention, is stated by origen( ) to be placed in some mss at the end of ch. xiv.; and a similar statement is made by cyril, chrysostom, theodoret, theophylact and others. we find these verses actually so placed in l, and in upwards of out of cursive mss. of byzantine origin, in an account of ancient mss. in cod. , in most of the greek lection-aries, in the slavonic and later syriac versions as also in the gothic, arabic, (in the polyglot and triglot text) and some mss. of the armenian. they are inserted both at the end of xiv. and at the end of the epistle by the alexandrian codex,( ) one of the most ancient manuscripts extant, and by some other mss.( ) now, how came this doxology to be placed at all at the end of chapter xiv.? the natural inference is that it was so placed because that was the end of the epistle. subsequently, chapters xv. and xvi. being added, it is supposed that the closing doxology was removed from the former position and placed at the end of the appended matter. this inference is supported by the important fact that, as we learn from origen,( ) the last two { } chapters of the epistle to the romans, including the doxology (xvi. - ) did not exist in marcion's text, the most ancient form of it of which we have any knowledge. tertullian, who makes no reference to these two chapters, speaks of the passage, rom. xiv. , as at the close (in clausula) of the epistle,( ) and he does not call any attention to their absence from marcion's epistle. is it not reasonable to suppose that they did not form part of his copy? in like manner irenæus, who very frequently quotes from the rest of the epistle, nowhere shows acquaintance with these chapters. the first writer who distinctly makes use of any part of them is clement of alexandria. it has been argued both that marcion omitted the two chapters because they contain what was opposed to his views, and because they had no dogmatic matter to induce him to retain them; but, whilst the two explanations destroy each other, neither of them is more than a supposition to account for the absence of what, it may with equal propriety be conjectured, never formed part of his text. the external testimony, however, does not stand alone, but is supported by very strong internal evidence. we shall only indicate one or two points, leaving those who desire to go more deeply into the discussion to refer to works more particularly concerned with it, which we shall sufficiently indicate. it is a very singular thing that all, who, when he wrote this epistle had never been in rome, should be intimately acquainted with so many persons there. the fact that there was much intercourse { } between rome and other countries by no means accounts for the simultaneous presence there of so many of the apostle's personal friends. aquila and priscilla, who are saluted (xvi. ), were a short time before ( cor. xvi. ) in ephesus.( ) it may, moreover, be remarked as a suggestive fact that when, according to the acts (xxviii. ff.), paul very soon afterwards arrived in rome, most of these friends seem to have disappeared,( ) and the chief men of the jews called together by paul do not seem to be aware of the existence of a christian body at rome.( ) another point is connected with the very passage which has led to this discussion, xv. , read: . "for i will not dare to speak of any of those things which christ hath not wrought by me, in order to [------] the obedience of the gentiles, by word and deed, . in the power of signs and wonders [------] in the power of the spirit [------]; so that from jerusalem and round about unto illyricum, i have fully preached the gospel of christ;" &c. the statement that "from jerusalem" he had "fully preached" the gospel is scarcely in agreement with the statement in the epistle to the galatians i. - , ii. ff moreover, there is no confirmation anywhere of the apostle's having preached as far as illyricum, which was then almost beyond the limits of civilization. baur suggests that in making his ministry commence at jerusalem, there is too evident a concession made to the jewish christians, according to whom every preacher of the gospel must naturally commence his career at the holy city. it would detain us much too long to enter upon an analysis of these two { } chapters, and to show the repetition in them of what has already been said in the earlier part of the epistle; the singular analogies presented with the epistles to the corinthians, not of the nature of uniformity of style, but of imitation; the peculiarity of the mention of a journey to spain as the justification of a passing visit to rome, and perhaps a further apology for even writing a letter to the church there which another had founded; the suspicious character of the names which are mentioned in the various clauses of salutation; and to state many other still more important objections which various critics have advanced, but which would require more elaborate explanation than can possibly be given here. it will suffice for us to mention that the phenomena presented by the two chapters are so marked and curious that for a century they have largely occupied the attention of writers of all shades of opinion, and called forth very elaborate theories to account for them; the apparent necessity for which in itself shows the insecure position of the passage. semler,( ) without denying the pauline authorship of the two chapters, considered they did not properly belong to the epistle to the romans. he supposed xvi. - to have been merely for the messenger who carried the epistle, as a list of the persons to whom salutations were to be given, and to these, ch. xv. was to be specially delivered and considered ch. xv. to be a separate letter, addressed to the leaders of the roman church, as an epistle to the community in general, being sealed up and ready for any opportunity of transmission, but none presenting itself before { } his arrival in corinth, the apostle there, upon an additional sheet, wrote xvi. and entrusted it with the letter to phoebe. eichhorn( ) supposed that the parchment upon which the epistle was written was finished at xiv. ; and, as paul and his scribe had only a small sheet at hand, the doxology only, xvi. - , was written upon the one side of it, and on the other the greetings and the apostolic benediction, xvi. - , and thus the letter was completed; but, as it could not immediately be forwarded, the apostle added a fly-leaf with ch. xv. bertholdt( ) guericke( ) and others adopted similar views more or less modified, representing the close of the epistle to have been formed by successive postscripts. more recently, renan( ) has affirmed the epistle to be a circular letter addressed to churches in rome, ephesus, and other places, to each of which only certain portions were transmitted with appropriate salutations and endings, which have all been collected into the one epistle in the form in which we have it. david schulz conjectured that xvi. - was an epistle written from rome to the church at ephesus; and this theory was substantially adopted by ewald,--who held that xvi. - was part of a lost epistle to ephesus,--and by many other critics.( ) of course the virtual authenticity of the xv.-xvi. chapters, nearly or exactly as they are, is affirmed by many writers. baur, however, after careful investigation, pronounced the two chapters inauthentic, and in this he is followed by able critics.( ) under all these circumstances it is obvious { } that we need not occupy ourselves much with the passage in rom. xv. , , but our argument will equally apply to it. in order to complete this view of the materials we may simply mention, as we pass on, that the authenticity of cor. xii. has likewise been impugned by a few critics, and the verse, or at least the words [------], as well as rom. xv. , declared an interpolation.( ) this cannot, however, so far as existing evidence goes, be demonstrated; and, beyond the mere record of the fact, this conjecture does not here require further notice. it may be well, before proceeding to the epistles to the corinthians, which furnish the real matter for discussion, first to deal with the passage cited from gal iii. , which is as follows:--"he then that supplieth to you the spirit and worketh powers [------] within you [------], (doeth he it) from works of law or from hearing of faith?"( ) the authorised version reads: "and worketh miracles among you;" but this cannot be maintained, and [------] must be rendered "within you," the [------] certainly retaining its natural signification when used with [------], the primary meaning of which is itself to in-work. the vast majority of critics of all schools agree in this view.( ) there is an evident reference to iii , { } and to the reception of the spirit, here further characterised as producing such effects within the minds of those who receive it,( ) the worker who gives the spirit being god. the opinion most commonly held is that reference is here made to the "gifts" [------], regarding which the apostle elsewhere speaks,( ) and which we shall presently discuss, but this is by no means certain and cannot be determined. it is equally probable that he may refer to the spiritual effect produced upon the souls of the galatians by the gospel which he so frequently represents as a "power" of god. in any case, it is clear that there is no external miracle referred to here, and even if allusion to charismata be understood we have yet to ascertain precisely what these were. we shall endeavour to discover whether there was anything in the least degree miraculous in these "gifts," but there is no affirmation in this passage which demands special attention, and whatever general significance it { } may have will be met when considering the others which are indicated. the first passage in the epistles to the corinthians, which is pointed out as containing the testimony of paul both to the reality of miracles in general and to the fact that he himself performed them, is the following, cor. xii. : "truly the signs [------] of the apostle were wrought in you [------] in all patience, both in signs and wonders and powers [------]"( ) we have to justify two departures in this rendering from that generally received. the first of these is the adoption of "wrought in you," instead of "wrought among you" and the second the simple use of "powers" for [------], instead of "mighty works." we shall take the second first we have referred to every passage except cor. xii. , , , in which paul makes use of the word [------], and fortunately they are sufficiently numerous to afford us a good insight into his practice. it need not be said that the natural sense of [------] is in no case "mighty works" or miracles, and that such an application of the greek word is peculiar to the new testament and, subsequently, to patristic literature. there is, however, no ground for attributing this use of the word to paul. it is not so used in the septuagint, and it is quite evident that the apostle does not employ it to express external effects or works, but spiritual phenomena or potentiality. in the passage, gal. iii. , which we have just discussed, where the word occurs in the plural, as here, it is understood to express "powers." we may quote the rendering of that passage by the bishop of gloucester: { } "he then, _i say_, that ministereth to you the spirit and worketh _mighty_ powers within you, _doeth he it_ by the works of the law or by the report of faith?"( ) why "mighty" should be inserted it is difficult to understand, but the word is rightly printed in italics to show that it is not actually expressed in the greek. "what was the exact nature of these 'powers'... it is impossible to determine," observes another scholar quoted above,( ) on the same passage. in cor. xii. , , , where the plural [------] again occurs, the intention to express "powers"( ) and not external results--miracles--is perfectly clear, the word being in the last two verses used alone to represent the "gifts." in all of these passages the word is the representative of the "powers" and not of the "effects."( ) this interpretation is rendered more clear by, and at the same time confirms, the preceding phrase, "were wrought in you "[------]. 'powers' [------], as in gal. iii. , are worked "within you," and the rendering of that passage being so settled, it becomes authoritative for this. if, however, direct confirmation of paul's meaning be required we have it in rom. vii. , where we find the same verb used with [------] in this sense: "but sin.... wrought in me [------] all manner of coveting," &c.; and with this may also be compared cor. vii. .... "what earnestness it wrought in you" [------]( ) { } [------]. it was thus paul's habit to speak of spiritual effects wrought "within," and as he referred to the "powers" [------] worked "within" the souls of the galatians, so he speaks of them here as "wrought in" the corinthians. it will become clear as we proceed that the addition to [------] of "signs and wonders" does not in the least affect this interpretation. in cor. xiv. , the apostle speaks of the gift of "tongues" as "a sign" [------]. upon the supposition that paul was affirming the actual performance of miracles by himself, how extraordinary becomes the statement that they "were wrought in all patience," for it is manifest that "in all patience" [------] does not form part of the signs, as some have argued, but must be joined to the verb [------].( ) it may be instructive to quote a few words of olshausen upon the point:--"the [------] is not altogether easy. it certainly cannot be doubtful that it is to be joined to [------] and not to what follows; but for what reason does paul here make it directly prominent that he wrought his signs in all patience? it seems to me probable that in this there may be a reproof to the corinthians, who, in spite of such signs, still showed themselves wavering regarding the authority of the apostle. in such a position, paul would say, he had, patiently waiting, allowed his light to shine amongst them, certain of ultimate triumph."( ) this will hardly be accepted by any one as a satisfactory solution of the difficulty, which is a real one if it be assumed that paul, claiming to have performed { } miracles, wrought them "in all patience." besides the matter is complicated, and the claim to have himself performed a miracle still more completely vanishes, when we consider the fact that the passive construction of the sentence does not actually represent paul as the active agent by whom the signs were wrought. "truly the signs of the apostle were wrought," but how wrought? clearly he means by the spirit, as he distinctly states to the gala- tians. to them "jesus christ (the messiah) was fully set forth crucified," and he asks them: was it from works of the law or from hearing in faith the gospel thus preached to them that they "received the spirit"? and that he who supplies the spirit "and worketh powers" in them does so? from faith, of course.( ) the meaning of paul, therefore, was this: his gospel was preached among them "in all patience," which being received by the hearing of faith, the spirit was given to them, and the signs of the apostle were thus wrought among them. the representation is made throughout the acts that the apostles lay their hands on those who believe, and they receive the holy spirit and speak with tongues. if any special "sign of the apostle" can be indicated at all, it is this; and in illustration we may point to one statement made in the acts. philip, the evangelist, who was not an apostle, is represented as going into samaria and preaching the messiah to the samaritans, who give heed to the things spoken by him, and multitudes are baptized (viii. , , ), but there was not the outpouring of the holy spirit which usually accompanied the apostolic baptism. "and the apostles in jerusalem, having heard that samaria had received the word of god, sent unto them peter and john; who { } when they came down prayed for them that they might receive the holy spirit--for as yet he had fallen upon none of them, but they had only been baptized into the name of the lord jesus. then laid they (the apostles) their hands on them and they received the holy spirit."( ) we may further refer to the episode at ephesus (acts xix. iff.) where paul finds certain disciples who, having only been baptized into john's baptism, had not received the holy spirit, nor even heard whether there was a holy spirit, (xix. .) "and paul having laid his hands upon them, the holy spirit came on them, and they were speaking with tongues and prophesying." when we examine paul's epistles to the corinthians we find ample assurance that the interpretation here given of this passage is correct, and that he does not refer, as apologists have maintained, to miracles wrought by himself, but to the charismata, which were supposed to have been bestowed upon the corinthians who believed, and which thus were the signs of his apostleship. the very next verse to that which is before us shows this: "truly the signs of the apostle were wrought in you in all patience.... . for [------] what is there wherein ye were inferior to the other churches, except it be that i myself was not burdensome to you?" the mere performance of signs and wonders did not constitute their equality; but in the possession of the charismata,--regarding which so much is said in the first epistle, and which were the result of his preaching,--they were not inferior to the other churches, and only inferior, paul says with his fine irony, in not having, like the other churches with their apostles, been called upon to acquire the merit of { } bearing his charges. what could be more distinct than the apostle's opening address in the first epistle: "i thank my god always, on your behalf, for the grace of god which was given you in christ jesus; that in everything ye were enriched by him (at the time of their conversion( ), in all utterance and in all knowledge: even as the testimony of christ was confirmed in you: _so that ye come behind in no gift_ [------]," &c. for this reason they were not inferior to the other churches, and those were the signs of the apostle which were wrought in them. paul very distinctly declares the nature of his ministry amongst the corinthians and the absence of other "signs": cor. i. f. "since both jews demand signs [------] and greeks seek after wisdom, but we [------] preach christ crucified, unto jews a stumbling-block and unto gentiles foolishness, but unto those who are called, both jews and greeks, christ the power [------] of god and the wisdom of god." the contrast is here clearly drawn between the requirement of jews (signs) and of greeks (wisdom) and paul's actual ministry: no signs, but a scandal [------] to the jew, and no wisdom, but foolishness to the greek, but this word of the cross [------] "to us who are being saved is the power [------] of god" (i. ).( ) the apostle tells us what he considers the "sign of the apostle," when, more directly defending himself against the opponents who evidently denied his apostolic claims, he says vehemently: cor. ix. flf. "am i not free? am i not an apostle? have i not seen jesus our lord? _are not ye my work in the lord?_ if i be not an apostle unto others, yet doubtless i am to you: _for the seal { } [------] of my apostleship are ye in the lord_."( ) it cannot, we think, be doubted, when the passage cor. xii. is attentively considered, that paul does not refer to external miracles performed by him, but to the charismata which he supposed to be conferred upon the corinthian christians on their acceptance of the gospel which the apostle preached. these charismata, however, are advanced as miraculous, and the passages cor. xii. , , are quoted in support of the statement we are discussing, and these now demand our attention. it may be well at once to give the verses which are referred to, and in which it is said that paul "goes somewhat elaborately into the exact place in the christian economy that is to be assigned to the working of miracles and gifts of healing" ( cor. xii. , , ). it is necessary for the full comprehension of the case that we should quote the context: xii. . "now there are diversities of gifts [------], but the same spirit; . and there are diversities of ministries [------], and the same lord; . and there are diversities of workings [------], but it is the same god who worketh the all in all [------]: . but to each is given the manifestation of the spirit [------] for profit; . for to one is given by the spirit a word of wisdom [------]; to another a word of knowledge [------] according to the same spirit; . to another faith [------] in the same spirit, to another gifts of healings [------] in the one spirit; . to another (inward) workings of powers [------] { } [------]; to another prophecy [------]; to another discerning of spirits [------]; to another kinds of tongues [------]; to another interpretation of tongues [------]; . but all these worketh [------] the one and the same spirit, dividing to each severally as he wills." after illustrating this by showing the mutual dependence of the different members and senses of the body, the apostle proceeds: v. . "and god set some in the church, first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, after that powers [------], after that gifts of healings [------], helpings [------], governings [------], kinds of tongues [------]. . are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all powers [------]? . have all gifts of healings [------]? do all speak with tongues [------]? do all interpret [------]?" before we commence an examination of this interesting and important passage, it is essential that we should endeavour to disabuse our minds of preconceived ideas. commentators are too prone to apply to the apostle's remarks a system of interpretation based upon statements made by later and less informed writers, and warped by belief in the reality of a miraculous element pervading all apostolic times, which have been derived mainly from post-apostolic narratives. what do we really know of the phenomena supposed to have characterized the apostolic age, and which were later, and are now, described as miraculous? with the exception of what we glean from the writings of paul, we know absolutely nothing from any contemporary writer and eye-witness. in the gospels and in the acts of the apostles, we have detailed accounts of many miracles said { } to have been performed by the apostles and others; but these narratives were all written at a much later period, and by persons who are unknown, and most of whom are not even affirmed to have been eye-witnesses.( ) in the acts of the apostles, we have an account of some of the very charismata referred to by paul in the passage above quoted, and we shall thus have the advantage of presently comparing the two accounts. we must, however, altogether resist any attempt to insert between the lines of the apostle's writing ideas and explanations derived from the author of the acts and from patristic literature, and endeavour to understand what it is he himself says and intends to say. it must not be supposed that we in the slightest degree question the fact that the apostle paul believed in the reality of supernatural intervention in mundane affairs, or that he asserted the actual occurrence of certain miracles. our desire is as far as possible to ascertain what paul himself has to say upon specific phenomena, now generally explained as miraculous, and thus, descending from vague generalities to more distinct statements, to ascertain the value of his opinion regarding the character of such phenomena. it cannot fail to be instructive to determine something of the nature of charismata from an eye-witness who believed them to have been supernatural. his account, as we have seen, is the most precious evidence of the church to the reality of the miraculous. the first point which must be observed in connection with the charismata referred to by paul in the passage before us is that, whilst there are diversities amongst them, all the phenomena described are ascribed to it is suggestive that the curious passage mk. xvi. -- is not even by the author of the second gospel, but a later addition. { } "one and the same spirit dividing to each severally as he wills;" and, consequently, that, although there may be differences in their form and value, a supernatural origin is equally assigned to all the "gifts" enumerated. what then are these charismata? "a word of wisdom," "a word of knowledge," and "faith" are the first three mentioned. what the precise difference was, in paul's meaning, between the utterance of wisdom [------] and of knowledge [------] it is impossible now with certainty to say, nor is it very essential for us to inquire. the two words are combined in rom. xi. : "o the depths of the riches and wisdom [------] and knowledge [------] of god!" and in this very epistle some varying use is made of both words. paul tells the corinthians ( , i. ) that christ did not send him "in wisdom of word "[------] or utterance: and (ii. ) "not with excellency of word or wisdom" [------], cf. ii. ); and further on he says (i. ) that christ jesus "was made unto us wisdom [------] from god." the most suggestive expressions,( ) however, are the following, we think: cor. ii. . "but we speak wisdom [------] among the perfect, yet not the wisdom [------] of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, that come to nought, . but we speak god's wisdom [------] in mystery, the hidden wisdom, which god ordained before the ages unto our glory, . which none of the rulers of this age has known, for had they known it, they would not have crucified the lord of glory. . but as it is written, 'what eye saw not/ &c. &c. . but unto us god revealed them through the spirit....... .... { } even so also the things of god knoweth no one but the spirit of god. . but we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from god, that we might know the things that are freely given us by god; . which things also we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual things to the spiritual"( ) [------]. it is quite clear from all the antecedent context that paul's preaching was specially the messiah crucified, "christ the power of god and the wisdom [------] of god," and we may conclude reasonably that the [------] of our passage was simply the eloquent utterance of this doctrine. in like manner, we may get some insight into the meaning which paul attached to the word "knowledge" [------]. it will be remembered that at the very opening of the first epistle to the corinthians paul expresses his thankfulness that in everything they were enriched in christ jesus: i. . "in all utterance [------] and in all knowledge [------], . even as the testimony of the christ was confirmed in you;" that is to say, according to commentators, by these very charismata. later, speaking of "tongues," he says ( cor. xiv. ): "... what shall i profit you, except i shall speak to you either in revelation or in knowledge [------], or in prophecy, or in teaching?" we obtain a clearer insight into his meaning in the second epistle, in the passage cor. ii. - , and still more in iv. - and x. , where he describes metaphorically his weapons as not carnal, but strong through god, "casting down reasonings and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of god, and bringing into { } _captivity_ every thought to the obedience of the christ;" and if we ventured to offer an opinion, it would be that paul means by [------] simply christian theology. we merely offer this as a passing suggestion. little need be said with regard to the gift of "faith" (marts), which is perfectly intelligible. apologists argue that by these three gifts" some supernatural form of wisdom, knowledge, and faith is expressed, and we shall have something more to say on the point presently; but here we merely point out that there is no ground whatever for such an assertion except the fact that the apostle ascribes to them a supernatural origin, or, in fact, believes in the inspiration of such qualities. all that can be maintained is that paul accounts for the possession of characteristics which we now know to be natural, by asserting that they are the direct gift of the holy spirit. there is not the faintest evidence to show that these natural capabilities did not antecedently exist in the corinthians, and were not merely stimulated into action in christian channels by the religious enthusiasm and zeal accompanying their conversion; but, on the contrary, every reason to believe this to be the case, as we shall further see.( ) in fact, according to the apostolic church, every quality was a supernatural gift, and all ability or excellence in practical life directly emanated from the action of the holy spirit. we may now proceed to "gifts of healings" [------]( ) which it will be noted are doubly in the plural, { } indicating, as is supposed, a variety of special gifts, each having reference probably to special diseases. what is there to show that there was anything more miraculous in "gifts of healings" than in the possession of an utterance of wisdom, an utterance of knowledge, or faith? nothing whatever. on the contrary, everything, from the unvarying experience of the world, to the inferences which we shall be able to draw from the whole of this information regarding the charismata, shows that there was no miraculous power of healing either possessed or exercised. reference is frequently made to the passage in the so-called epistle of james as an illustration of this, v. : "is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, having anointed him with oil in the name of the lord: . and the prayer of faith shall save the afflicted, and the lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, it shall be forgiven him." the context, however, not only shows that in this there is no allusion to any gift of healing or miraculous power, but seems to ignore the existence of any such gift. the epistle continues: v. . "confess therefore your sins one to another, and pray for one another that ye may be healed. the supplication of a righteous man availeth much when it is working." and then the successful instance of the prayer of elijah that it might not rain and again that it might rain is given. the passage is merely an assertion of the efficacy of prayer, and if, as is not unfrequently done, it be argued that the gifts of healings were probably applied by means of earnest prayer for the sick, it may be said that this is the only "gift" which is supposed to have descended to our times. it does not require much argument, however, to show that the reality of a miraculous gift cannot be demonstrated { } by appealing to the objective efficacy of prayer. we may, in passing, refer apologists who hold the authenticity of the epistles to the philippians and to timothy to indications which do not quite confirm the supposition that a power of miraculous healing actually existed in the apostolic church. in the epistle to the philippians, ii. ff., paul is represented as sending epaphroditus to them (v. ) "since he was longing after you all and was distressed because ye heard that he was sick. . for, indeed, he was sick nigh unto death; but god had mercy on him; and not on him only, but on me also, that i might not have sorrow upon sorrow. i sent him, therefore, the more anxiously, that, when ye see him, ye may rejoice again, and that i may be the less sorrowful." the anxiety felt by the philippians, and the whole language of the writer, in this passage, are rather inconsistent with the knowledge that miraculous power of healing was possessed by the church, and of course by paul, which would naturally have been exerted for one in whom so many were keenly interested. then, in tim. iv. , the writer says: "trophimus i left at miletus sick." if miraculous powers of healing existed, why were they not exerted in this case? if they were exerted and failed for special reasons, why are these not mentioned? it is unfortunate that there is so little evidence of the application of these gifts. on the other hand, we may suggest that medical art scarcely existed at that period in such communities, and that the remedies practised admirably lent themselves to the theory of "gifts" of healings, rather than to any recognition of the fact that the accurate diagnosis of disease and successful treatment of it can only be the result of special study and experience. the next gift mentioned is (v. ) "workings of powers" { } [------] very unwarrantably rendered in our "authorized" version "the working of miracles." we have already said enough regarding paul's use of [------]. the phrase before us would be even better rendered in-or inward-workings of powers( ) and the use made of [------] by paul throughout his epistles would confirm this. it may be pointed out that as the gifts just referred to are for "healings" it is difficult to imagine any class of "miracles" which could well be classed under a separate head as the special "working of miracles" contemplated by apologists. infinitely the greater number of miracles related in the gospels and acts are "healings" of disease. is it possible to suppose that paul really indicated by this expression a distinct order of "miracles" properly so called? certainly not neither the words themselves used by paul, properly understood, nor the context permit us to suppose that he referred to the working of miracles at all. we have no intention of conjecturing what these "powers" were supposed to be; it is sufficient that we show they cannot rightly be exaggerated into an assertion of the power of working miracles. it is much more probable that, in the expression, no external working by the gifted person is implied at all, and that the gift referred to "in-workings of powers" within his own mind, producing the ecstatic state, with its usual manifestations, or those visions and supposed revelations to which paul himself was subject. demonaics, or persons supposed to be possessed of evil spirits, were called [------] and it is easy to conceive how anyone under strong religious { } impressions, at that epoch of most intense religious emotion, might, when convulsed by nervous or mental excitement, be supposed the subject of inward workings of powers supernaturally imparted. every period of religious zeal has been marked by such phenomena.( ) these conclusions are further corroborated by the next gifts enumerated. the first of these is "prophecy" [------], by which is not intended the mere foretelling of events, but speaking "unto men edification and exhortation and comfort," as the apostle himself says (xiv. ); and an illustration of this may be pointed out in acts iv. where the name barnabas = "son of prophecy," being interpreted is said to be "son of exhortation" [------]. to this follows the "discerning (or judging) of spirits" [------], a gift which, if we are to judge by paul's expressions elsewhere, was simply the exercise of natural intelligence and discernment. in an earlier part of the first epistle, rebuking the corinthians for carrying their disputes before legal tribunals, he says, vi. : "is it so that there is not even one wise man among you who shall be able to discern [------] between his brethren?" again, in xi. , "but if we discerned [------] we should not be judged [------]" (cf vv. , ), and in xiv. , "let prophets speak two or three, and let the others discern" [------]. we reserve the "kinds of tongues" and "interpretation of tongues" for separate treatment, and proceed to vv. ff. in which, after illustrating his meaning by the analogy of the body, the apostle resumes his { } observations upon the charismata, and it is instructive to consider the rank he ascribes to the various gifts. he classes them: "first, apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, after that powers, after that gifts of healings, helpings, governings, kinds of tongues." these so-called miraculous gifts are here placed in a lower class than those of exhortation and teaching, which is suggestive; for it is difficult to suppose that even a man like paul could have regarded the possession of such palpable and stupendous power as the instantaneous and miraculous healing of disease, or the performance of other miracles, below the gift of teaching or exhortation. it is perfectly intelligible that the practice of medicine as it was then understood, and the skill which might have been attained in particular branches of disease by individuals, not to speak of those who may have been supposed to be performing miracles when they dealt with cases of hysteria or mental excitement, might appear to the apostle much inferior to a gift for imparting spiritual instruction and admonition; but the actual possession of supernatural power, the actual exercise of what was believed to be the personal attribute of god, must have been considered a distinction more awful and elevated than any gift of teaching. it will be noticed also that other charismata are here introduced, whilst "discerning of spirits" is omitted. the new gifts, "helpings" and "governings," have as little a miraculous character about them as any that have preceded them. is it not obvious that all special ability, all official capacity, is simply represented as a divine gift, and regarded as a "manifestation of the spirit?" it is important in the highest degree to remember that the supposed miraculous charismata are not merely conferred upon a few persons, but are bestowed upon all { } the members of the apostolic church.( ) "the extraordinary charismata which the apostles conferred through their imposition of hands," writes dr. von dollinger, "were so diffused and distributed, that nearly every one, or at any rate many, temporarily at least, had a share in one gift or another. this was a solitary case in history, which has never since repeated itself, and which, in default of experience, we can only approximately picture to ourselves. one might say: the metal of the church was still glowing, molten, formless, and presented altogether another aspect than, since then, in the condition of the cold and hardened casting."( ) the apologetic representation of the case is certainly unique in history and, therefore, in its departure from all experience might, one might have thought, have excited suspicion. difficult as it is to picture such a state, it is worth while to endeavour to do so to a small extent. let us imagine communities of christians, often of considerable importance, in all the larger cities as well as in smaller towns, all or most of the members of which were endowed with supernatural { } gifts, and, amongst others, with power to heal diseases and to perform miracles; all the intellectual and religious qualities requisite for the guidance, edification, and government of the communities supplied abundantly and specially by the holy spirit; the ordinary dependence of society on the natural capacity and power of its leaders dispensed with, and every possible branch of moral culture and physical comfort provided with inspired and miraculously-gifted ministries; the utterance of wisdom and knowledge, exhortation and teaching, workings of healings, discernment of spirits, helpings, governings, kinds of tongues supernaturally diffused throughout the community by god himself. as a general rule, communities have to do as well as they can without such help, and eloquent instructors and able administrators do not generally fail them. the question, therefore, intrudes itself: why were ordinary and natural means so completely set aside, and the qualifications which are generally found adequate for the conduct and regulation of life supplanted by divine charismata? at least, we may suppose that communities endowed with such supernatural advantages, and guided by the direct inspiration of the holy spirit, must have been distinguished in every way from the rest of humanity, and must have presented a spectacle of the noblest life, free from the weakness and inconsistency of the world, and betraying none of the moral and intellectual frailties of ordinary society. at the very least, and without exaggeration, communities in every member of which there existed some supernatural manifestation of the holy spirit might be expected to show very marked superiority and nobility of character. when we examine the epistles of paul and other ancient documents, we find anything but supernatural { } qualities in the churches supposed to be endowed with such miraculous gifts. on the contrary, it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the intensely human character of the conduct of such communities, their fickleness, the weakness of their fidelity to the gospel of paul, their wavering faith, and the ease and rapidity with which they are led astray, their petty strifes and discords; their party spirit, their almost indecent abuse of some of their supposed gifts, such as "tongues," for which paul rebukes them so severely. the very epistles, in fact, in which we read of the supernatural endowments and organization of the church are full of evidence that there was nothing supernatural in them. the primary cause, apparently, for which the first letter was written to the corinthians was the occurrence of divisions and contentions amongst them (i. ff.), parties of paul, of apollos, of cephas, of christ, which make the apostle give thanks (i. ) that he had baptized but few of them, that no one might say that they were baptized into his name. paul had not been able to speak to them as spiritual but as carnal, mere babes in christ (iii. f.); he fed them with milk, not meat, for they were not yet able, "nor even now are ye able," he says, "for ye are yet carnal. for whereas there is among you envying and strife; are ye not carnal?" he continues in the same strain throughout the letter, admonishing them in no flattering terms. speaking of his sending timothy to them, he says (iv. f.): "but some of you were puffed up, as though i were not coming to you; but i will come to you shortly, if it be the lord's will, and will know, not the speech of them who are puffed up, but the power." there is serious sin amongst them, which they show no readiness to purge { } away. moreover these corinthians have lawsuits with each other (vi. ff.), and, instead of taking advantage of those supernatural charismata, they actually take their causes for decision before the uninspired tribunals of the heathen rather than submit them to the judgment of the saints. their own members, who have gifts of wisdom and of knowledge, discerning of spirits and governings, have apparently so little light to throw upon the regulation of social life, that the apostle has to enter into minute details for their admonition and guidance. he has even to lay down rules regarding the head-dresses of women in the churches (xi. ff.). even in their very church assemblies there are divisions of a serious character amongst them (xi. ff.). they misconduct themselves in the celebration of the lord's supper, for they make it, as it were, their own supper, "and one is hungry and another is drunken." "what!" he indignantly exclaims, "have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of god?" to the galatians paul writes, marvelling that they are so soon removing from him that called them in the grace of christ unto a different gospel (i. ). "o foolish galatians," he says (iii. ), "who bewitched you?" in that community also, opposition to paul and denial of his authority had become powerful. if we turn to other ancient documents, the epistles to the seven churches do not present us with a picture of supernatural perfection in those communities, though doubtless, like the rest, they had received these gifts. the other epistles of the new testament depict a state of things which by no means denotes any extraordinary or abnormal condition of the members. we may quote a short passage to show that we do not strain { } this representation unduly. "but certainly," says dr. von dollinger, "in spite of a rich outpouring of spiritual gifts vouchsafed to it, a community could fall into wanton error. paul had in corinth, contemporaneously with his description of the charismatic state of the church there, to denounce sad abuses. in the galatian community, judaistic seduction, and the darkening of christian doctrine through the delusion as to the necessity of the observance of the law, had so much increased that the apostle called them fools and senseless, but at the same time he appealed to the proof which was presented by the spiritual gifts and miraculous powers, in which they had participated not through the observance of the law, but through faith in christ (gal. iii. , ). now at that time the charismata of teaching and knowledge must already have been weakened or extinguished in these communities, otherwise so strong an aberration would not be explicable. nowhere, however, in this epistle is there any trace of an established ministry; on the contrary, at the close, the 'spiritual' among them are instructed to administer the office of commination. but, generally, from that time forward, the charismatic state in the church more and more disappeared, though single charismata, and individuals endowed with the same, remained. in the first epistle to the believers in thessalonica, paul had made it specially prominent that his gospel had worked there, not as mere word, but with demonstration of the power of the holy spirit (i. ). in the epistles to the philippians and colossians, there is no longer the slightest intimation of, or reference to, the charismata, although in both communities the occasion for such an allusion was very appropriate--in philippi through the jewish opponents, { } and in colossæ on account of the heretical dangers and the threatening gnostic asceticism. on the other hand, in the epistle to the philippians, bishops and deacons are already mentioned as ministers of the community. then, in the pastoral epistles, not only is there no mention of the charismata, but a state of the community is set forth which is wholly different from the charismatic. the communities in asia minor, the ephesian first of all, are partly threatened, partly unsettled by gnostic heresies, strifes of words, foolish controversies, empty babbling about matters of faith, of doctrines of demons, of an advancing godlessness corroding like a gangrene ( tim. iv. - , vi. ff. , tim. ii. ff.). all the counsels which are here given to timothy, the conduct in regard to these evils which is recommended to him, all is of a nature as though charismata no longer existed to any extent, as though, in lieu of the first spiritual soaring and of the fulness of extraordinary powers manifesting itself in the community, the bare prose of the life of the church had already set in."( ) regarding this it is not necessary for us to say more than that the representation which is everywhere made, in the acts and elsewhere, and which seems to be confirmed by paul, is that all the members of these christian communities received the holy spirit, and the divine charismata, but that nowhere have we evidence of any supernatural results produced by them. if, however, the view above expressed be accepted, the difficulty is increased; for, except in the allusions of the apostle to charismata, it is impossible to discover any difference between communities which had received miraculous spiritual "gifts" and those which had not done so. on the contrary, it { } might possibly be shown that a church which had not been so endowed, perhaps on the whole exhibited higher spiritual qualities than another which was supposed to possess the charismata. in none are we able to perceive any supernatural characteristics, or more than the very ordinary marks of a new religious life. it seems scarcely necessary to depart from the natural order of nature, and introduce the supernatural working of a holy spirit to produce such common-place results. we venture to say that there is nothing whatever to justify the assertion of supernatural agency here, and that the special divine charismata existed only in the pious imagination of the apostle, who referred every good quality in man to divine grace. we have reserved the gift of "tongues" for special discussion, because paul enters into it with a fulness with which he does not treat any of the other charismata, and a valuable opportunity is thus afforded us of ascertaining something definite with regard to the nature of the gift; and also because we have a narrative in the acts of the apostles of the first descent of the holy spirit, manifesting itself in "tongues," with which it may be instructive to compare the apostle's remarks. we may mention that, in the opinion of many, the cause which induced the apostle to say so much regarding charismata in his first letter to the corinthians was the circumstance, that many maintained the gift of tongues to be the only form of "the manifestation of the spirit." this view is certainly favoured by the narrative in the acts, in which not only at the first famous day of pentecost, but on almost every occasion of the imposition of the apostle's hands, this is the only gift mentioned as accompanying the reception of the holy { } spirit. in any case, it is apparent from the whole of the apostle's homily on the subject, that the gift of tongues was especially valued in the church of corinth.( ) it is difficult to conceive, on the supposition that amongst the charismata there were comprised miraculous gifts of healings, and further power of working miracles, that these could have been held so cheap in comparison with the gift of tongues; but in any case, a better comprehension of what this "gift" really was cannot fail to assist us in understanding the true nature of the whole of the charismata. it is evident that the apostle paul himself does not rank the gift of tongues very highly, and indeed, that he seems to value prophecy more than all the other charismata (xiv. ff.); but the simple yet truly noble eloquence with which (xiii. ff.) he elevates above all these gifts the possession of spiritual love is a subtle indication of their real character. probably paul would have termed christian charity a gift of the spirit as much as { } he does "gifts of healings" or "workings of powers;" but, however rare may be the virtue, it is not now recognized as miraculous, although it is here shown to be more desirable and precious than all the miraculous gifts. even apostolic conceptions of the supernatural cannot soar above the range of natural morality. the real nature of the "gift of tongues" has given rise to an almost interminable controversy, and innumerable treatises have been written upon the subject. it would have been impossible for us to have exhaustively entered upon such a discussion in this work, for which it only possesses an incidental and passing interest; but fortunately such a course is rendered unnecessary by the fact that, so far as we are concerned, the miraculous nature of the "gift" alone comes into question, and may be disposed of without any elaborate analysis of past controversy or minute reference to disputed points. those who desire to follow the course of the voluminous discussion will find ample materials in the treatises which we shall at least indicate in the course of our remarks, and we shall adhere as closely as possible to our own point of view. in cor. xii. , the apostle mentions, amongst the other charismata, "kinds of tongues" [------] and "interpretation of tongues" [------], as two distinct gifts. in v. he again uses the expression [------], and in a following verse he inquires: "do all speak with tongues" [------]( ) "do all interpret" [------]? he says shortly after, xiii. : "if i speak with the tongues of men and of angels [------] and have not love," &c. in the following chapter the expressions used in discussing the gift vary. { } in xiv. he says: "he that speaketh with a tongue"( ) [------]( ) using the singular; and again (v. ), of "the tongues" [------], being a sign; and in v. , each "hath a tongue" [------]. the word [------] or [------] has several significations in greek. the first and primary meaning "the tongue": as a mere member of the body, the organ of speech; next, a tongue, or language; and further, an obsolete or foreign word not in ordinary use. if we inquire into the use of [------] in the new testament, we find that, setting aside the passages in acts, mark, and cor. xii.-xiv., in which the phenomenon we are discussing is referred to, the word is invariably used in the first sense, "the tongue,"( ) except in the apocalypse, where the word as "language" typifies different nations.( ) any one who attentively considers all the passages in which the charisma is discussed will observe that no uniform application of any one signification throughout is possible. we may briefly say that all the attempts which have been made philologically to determine the true nature of the phenomenon which the apostle discusses have failed to produce any really satisfactory result, or to secure the general adhesion of critics. it is we think obvious that paul does not apply the word, either in the plural or in the singular, in its ordinary senses, but makes use of [------] to describe phenomena connected with speech, without intending strictly to apply it either to the tongue or to a definite language. we { } merely refer to this in passing, for it is certain that no philological discussion of the word can materially affect the case; and the argument is of no interest for our inquiry. each meaning has been adopted by critics and been made the basis for a different explanation of the phenomenon. philology is incapable of finally solving such a problem. from the time of irenæus,( ) or at least of origen, the favourite theory of the fathers, based chiefly upon the narrative in acts of the descent of the holy spirit on the day of pentecost, was that the disciples suddenly became super-naturally endowed with power to speak other languages which they had not previously learned, and that this gift was more especially conferred to facilitate the promulgation of the gospel throughout the world. augustine went so far as to believe that each of the apostles was thus enabled to speak all languages.( ) the opinion that the "gift of tongues" consisted of the power, miraculously conferred by the holy ghost, to speak in a language or languages previously unknown to the speaker long continued to prevail, and it is still the popular, as well as the orthodox, view of the subject.( ) as soon as { } the attention of critics was seriously directed to the question, however, this interpretation became rapidly modified, or was altogether abandoned. it is unnecessary for us to refer in detail to the numerous explanations which have been given of the phenomenon, or to enumerate the extraordinary views which have been expressed regarding it; it will be sufficient if, without reference to minor differences of opinion respecting the exact form in which it exhibited itself, we broadly state that a great majority of critics, rejecting the theory that [------] means to speak languages previously unknown to the speakers, pronounce it to be the speech of persons in a state of ecstatic excitement, chiefly of the nature of prayer or praise, and unintelligible to ordinary hearers.( ) whether { } this speech consisted of mere inarticulate tones, of excited ejaculations, of obsolete or uncommon expressions and provincialisms, of highly poetical rhapsodies, of prayer in slow scarcely audible accents, or of chaunted mysterious phrases, fragmentary and full of rapturous intensity, as these critics variously suppose, we shall not pause to inquire. it is clear that, whatever may have been the form of the speech, if instead of being speech in unlearnt languages supernaturally communicated, [------] was only the expression of religious excitement, however that may be supposed to have originated, the pretentions of the gift to a miraculous character shrink at once into exceedingly small proportions. every unprejudiced mind must admit that the representation that the gift of "tongues," of which the apostle speaks in his epistle to the corinthians, conferred upon the recipient the power to speak foreign languages before unknown to him, may in great part be traced to the narrative in acts of the descent of the holy spirit on the day of pentecost. although a few apologists advance the plea that there may have been differences in the manifestation, it is generally recognized on both sides that, however differently described by the two writers, the [------] of paul and of the acts is, in reality, one and the same phenomenon. the impression conveyed by the narrative has been applied to the didactic remarks of paul, and a meaning forced upon them which they cannot possibly bear. it is not too much to say that, but for the mythical account in the acts, no one would ever have supposed that the [------] of paul was the gift of speaking foreign languages without previous study or practice. in the interminable controversy regarding the phenomenon, moreover, it seems to us to have been a { } fundamental error, on both sides too often, to have considered it necessary to the acceptance of any explanation that it should equally suit both the remarks of paul and the account in acts.( ) the only right course is to test the narrative by the distinct and authoritative statements of the apostle; but to adopt the contrary course is much the same procedure as altering the natural interpretation of an original historical document in order to make it agree with the romance of some unknown writer of a later day. the apostle paul writes as a contemporary and eye-witness of phenomena which affected himself, and regarding which he gives the most valuable direct and indirect information. the unknown author of the acts was not an eye-witness of the scene which he describes, and his narrative bears upon its very surface the clearest marks of traditional and legendary treatment. the ablest apologists freely declare that the evidence of paul is of infinitely greater value than that of the unknown and later writer, and must be preferred before it. the majority of those who profess to regard the narrative as historical explain away its clearest statements with startling ingenuity, or conceal them beneath a cloud of words. the references to the phenomenon in later portions of the acts are in themselves quite inconsistent with the earlier narrative in ch. ii. the detailed criticism of paul is the only contemporary, and it is certainly the only trustworthy, account we possess regarding the gift of "tongues."( ) we must, therefore, dismiss from our minds, if possible, the bias which the narrative in the acts has unfortunately { } created, and attend solely to the words of the apostle. if his report of the phenomenon discredit that of the unknown and later writer, so much the worse for the latter. in any case it is the testimony of paul which is referred to and which we are called upon to consider, and later writers must not be allowed to invest it with impossible meanings. even if we had not such undeniable reasons for preferring the statements of paul to the later and untrustworthy narrative of an unknown writer, the very contents of the latter, contrasted with the more sober remarks of the apostle, would consign it to a very subordinate place. discussing the miracle of pentecost in acts, which he, of course, regards as the instantaneous communication of ability to speak in foreign languages, zeller makes the following remarks: "the supposition of such a miracle is opposed to a right view of divine agency, and of the relation of god to the world, and, in this case in particular, to a right view of the constitution of the human mind. the composition and the properties of a body may be altered through external influence, but mental acquirements are attained only through personal activity, through practice; and it is just in this that spirit distinguishes itself from matter: that it is free, that there is nothing in it which it has not itself spontaneously introduced. the external and instantaneous in-pouring of a mental acquirement is a representation which refutes itself." in reply to those who object to this reasoning he retorts: "the assertion that such a miracle actually occurred contradicts the analogy of all attested experience, that it is invented by an individual or by tradition corresponds with it; when, therefore, the historical writer has only the choice between these two { } alternatives, he must according to the laws of historical probability, under all the circumstances, unconditionally decide for the second. he must do this even if an eyewitness of the pretended miracle stood before him; he must all the more do so if he has to do with a statement which, beyond doubt not proceeding from an eye-witness, is more possibly separated by some generations from the event in question."( ) these objections are not confined to rationalistic critics and do not merely represent the arguments of scepticism. neander expresses similar sentiments,( ) and after careful examination pronounces the narrative in acts untrustworthy, and, adhering to the representations of paul, rejects the theory that [------] was speech in foreign languages supernaturally imparted. meyer, who arrives at much the same result as neander, speaks still more emphatically. he says: "_this_ supposed gift of tongues (all languages), however, was in the apostolic age, partly _unnecessary_ for the preaching of the gospel, as the preachers thereof only required to be able to speak hebrew and greek; partly _too general_, as amongst the assembly there were certainly many who were not called to be teachers. and, on the other hand, again, it would also have been _premature_, as, before all, paul the apostle of the gentiles would have required it, in whom nevertheless there is as little trace of any _subsequent_ reception of it as that he preached otherwise than in hebrew and greek. _but now, how is the event to be historically judged?_ regarding this the following is to be observed: as the instantaneous bestowal of facility in a foreign language is neither logically possible nor psychologically { } and morally conceivable, and as not the slightest intimation of such a thing in the apostles is perceptible in their epistles and elsewhere (on the contrary, comp. xiv. ); as, further, if it was only momentary, the impossibility increases, and as peter himself in his speech does not once make the slightest reference to the foreign languages: therefore,--whether, without any intimation in the text, one consider that pentecost assembly as a representation of all future christianity, or not--the occurrence, as luke relates it, cannot be transmitted in its actual historical circumstance."( ) let us a little examine the particulars of the narrative in acts ii. all the brethren were assembled in one place, a house [------], on the morning of the day of pentecost. in the preceding chapter (i. ) we learn that the number of disciples was then about , and the crowd which came together when the miraculous occurrence took place must have been great, seeing that it is stated that , souls were baptized and added to the church upon the occasion (ii. ). passing over the statement as to the numbers of the disciples, which might well surprise us after the information given by the gospels, we may ask in what house in jerusalem could such a multitude have assembled? apologists have exhausted their ingenuity in replying to the question, but whether placing the scene in one of the halls or courts of the temple, or in an imaginary house in one of the streets leading to the temple, the explanation is equally vague and unsatisfactory. how did the multitude so rapidly know of what was passing in a private house? we shall say nothing at present of the sound of the { } "rushing mighty wind" which filled all the house, nor of the descent of the "tongues as of fire," nor of the various interpretations of these phenomena by apologetic writers. these incidents do not add to the historical character of the narrative, nor can it be pronounced either clear or consistent. the brethren assembled "were all filled with the holy spirit and began to speak with other tongues [------], as the spirit gave them utterance."( ) apologists, in order somewhat to save the historical credit of the account and reconcile it with the statements of paul, have variously argued that there is no affirmation made in the narrative that speech in foreign languages previously unknown was imparted. the members of the fifteen nations who hear the galilaeans speaking "in our own language wherein we were born" [------] are disposed of with painful ingenuity; but, passing over all this, it is recognized by unprejudiced critics on both sides that at least the author of acts, in writing this account, intended to represent the brethren as instantaneously speaking those previously unknown foreign languages. a few writers represent the miracle to have been one of hearing rather than of speaking, the brethren merely praising god in their own tongue, the aramaic, but the spectators understanding in their various languages.( ) this only shifts the difficulty from the speakers to the hearers, and the explanation is generally repudiated. it is, however, freely granted by all that history does not exhibit a single instance of such a gift of tongues having ever been made useful for the purpose of { } preaching the gospel.( ) paul, who claimed the possession of the gift of tongues in a superlative degree ( cor. xiv. ), does not appear to have spoken more languages than aramaic and greek. he writes to the romans in the latter tongue and not in latin, and to the galatians in the same language instead of their own. peter, who appears to have addressed the assembled nations in greek on this very occasion, does not in his speech either refer to foreign languages or claim the gift himself, for in v. he speaks only of others: "for _these_ [------] are not drunken." every one remembers the ancient tradition recorded by papias, and generally believed by the fathers, that mark accompanied peter as his "interpreter" [------].( ) the first epistle bearing the name of peter, and addressed to some of the very nations mentioned in acts, to sojourners "in pontus, galatia, cappadocia, asia, and bithynia," is written in greek; and so is the "epistle to the hebrews" and the other works of the new testament. few will be inclined to deny that, to take only one language for instance, the greek of the writings of the new testament leaves something to be desired, and that, if the writers possessed such a supernatural gift, they evidently did not speak even so important and current a language with absolute purity. "le style des ecrivains sacred," writes a modern { } apologist, "montre clairement qu'ils ont appris la langue grecque et qu'ils ne la possedent pas de droit divin et par inspiration, car ils l'ecrivent sans correction, en la surchargeant de locutions hebraiques."( ) in fact, as most critics point out, there never was a period at which a gift of foreign tongues was less necessary for intercourse with the civilized world, greek being almost everywhere current. as regards the fifteen nations who are supposed to have been represented on this great occasion, neander says: "it is certain that amongst the inhabitants of towns in cappadocia, in pontus, in asia minor, phrygia, pamphylia, cyrene, and in the parts of libya and egypt peopled by greek and jewish colonies, the greek language was in great part more current than the old national tongue. there remain, out of the whole catalogue of languages, at most the persian, syriac, arabic, greek, and latin. the more rhetorical than historical stamp of the narrative is evident."( ) this rhetorical character, as contradistinguished from sober history, is indeed painfully apparent throughout. the presence in jerusalem of jews, devout men "from every nation under heaven" is dramatically opportune, and thus representatives of the fifteen nations are prepared to appear in the house and hear their own languages in which they were born spoken in so supernatural, though useless, a manner by the brethren. they are all said to have been "confounded" at the phenomenon, and the writer adds, ii. f: "and they were all amazed and marvelled, saying, behold, are not all these which speak galilaeans? and how hear we every man in our own { } language wherein we were born?" &c. did all the multitude say this? or is not this the writer ascribing, according to his view, probable sentiments to them? how again did they know that the hundred and twenty or more brethren were galilaean? further on, the writer adds more of the same kind, v. , : "and they were all amazed and were in doubt, saying one to another: what may this mean? but others mocking said, they are full of sweet wine." is it not a strange manner of accounting for such a phenomenon as (v. ) hearing people speaking in their own tongues the great works of god to suppose that they are drunken? people speaking with tongues, in paul's sense ( cor. xiv. , , ), and creating an unintelligible tumult, might well lead strangers to say that they were either mad or drunken, but the praise of god in foreign language, understood by so many, could not convey such an impression. peter does not, in explanation, simply state that they are speaking foreign languages which have just been supernaturally imparted to them, but argues (v. ) that "these are not drunken, as ye suppose, for it is the third hour of the day,"--too early to be "full of sweet wine," and proceeds to assert that the phenomenon is, on the contrary, a fulfilment of a prophecy of joel in which, although the pouring out of god's spirit upon all flesh is promised "in the last days," and as a result that: "your sons and your daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams," not a single word is said of any gift of "tongues," foreign or otherwise. the miraculous phenomenon in question is not mentioned in the prophecy of which it is supposed to be the accomplishment. it does not much help matters to argue that the miracle, although not for future use, was intended as a { } sign. we shall see what paul says regarding [------] as a sign, but we may here merely point out that the effect produced in the corinthian church is rather an impression of madness, whilst here it leads to a mocking accusation of drunkenness. the conversion of the , is by no means referred to the speaking with tongues, but simply to the speech of peter (ii. £ ). from every point of view, there is no cohesion between the different parts of the narrative; it is devoid of verisimilitude. it is not surprising that so many critics of all shades of opinion recognize unhistorical elements in the narrative in acts,( ) not to use a stronger term. to allow such an account to influence our interpretation of paul's statements regarding the gift of tongues is quite out of the question; and no one who appreciates the nature of the case and who carefully examines the narrative of the unknown writer can, we think, hesitate to reject his theory of a supernatural bestowal of power to speak foreign languages, before unknown. it is not difficult to trace the origin of the account in acts and, although we cannot here pause to do so with any minuteness, we may at least indicate the lines upon which the narrative is based. there is no doubt that then, as now, the jews commemorated at the feast of pentecost the giving of the law on sinai.( ) it seemed { } good to the author of acts that the prophet like unto moses,( ) who was to abrogate that law and replace it by a dispensation of grace, should inaugurate the new law of love and liberty( ) with signs equally significant and miraculous. it is related in exodus xix. that the lord descended upon sinai "in fire," and that the whole mount quaked greatly. the voice of god pronounced the decalogue and, as the septuagint version renders our ex. xx. : "all the people saw the voice, and the lightnings and the voice of the trumpet and the mountain smoking."( ) according to rabbinical tradition, however, when god came down to give the law to the israelites, he appeared not to israel alone, but to all the other nations, and the voice in which the law was given went to the ends of the earth and was heard of ail peoples.( ) it will be remembered that the number of the nations was supposed to be seventy, each speaking a different language, and the law was given in the one sacred hebrew tongue. the rabbins explained, however: "the voice from sinai was divided into voices and languages, so that all nations of the earth heard (the law), and each heard it actually in its own language."( ) and again: "although the ten commandments were promulgated with one single tone, yet it is said (exod. xx. ), 'all people heard the voices' (in the plural and not the voice in the singular); "the reason is: as the voice went forth it was divided into seven voices, { } and then into seventy tongues, and every people heard the law in its own mother-tongue."( ) the same explanation is given of ps. lxviii. , and the separation of the voice into seven voices and seventy tongues is likened to the sparks beaten by a hammer from molten metal on the anvil.( ) philo expresses the same ideas in several places. we can only extract one passage in which, speaking of the giving of the law on sinai, and discussing the manner in which god proclaimed the decalogue, he says: "for god is not like a man in need of a voice and of a tongue... but it seems to me that at that time he performed a most holy and beseeming wonder, commanding an invisible voice to be created in air, more wonderful than all instruments,.... not lifeless, but neither a form of living creature composed of body and soul, but a reasonable soul full of clearness and distinctness, which formed and excited the air and transformed it into flaming fire, and sounded forth such an articulated voice, like breath through a trumpet, that it seemed to be equally heard by those who were near and those furthest off."( ) a little further on he says: "but from the midst of the fire streaming from heaven, a most awful voice sounded forth, the flame being articulated to language familiar to the hearers, which made that which was said so vividly clear, as to seem rather seeing than { } hearing it."( ) it requires no elaborate explanation to show how this grew into the miracle at pentecost at the inauguration of the christian dispensation, when suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind which filled all the house where the disciples were, and there appeared to them tongues as of fire parting asunder which sat upon each of them, and they were all filled with the holy spirit and began to speak with other tongues, even as the spirit gave them utterance, so that devout men from every nation under heaven heard them speaking, everyone in his own language wherein he was born, the great works of god.( ) when we turn to the other passages in the acts where the gift of tongues is mentioned, we find that the interpretation of foreign languages supernaturally imparted is quite out of place. when peter is sent to cornelius, as he is addressing the centurion and his household, and even before they are baptized (x. ), "the holy spirit fell on all them who hear the word;" and the sign of it is (v. ) that they are heard "speaking with tongues and magnifying god" [------], precisely like the disciples at pentecost (cf ii. , xi. f.). now as this gift fell on all who heard the word (x. ), it could not be a sign to unbelievers; and the idea that cornelius and his house immediately began to speak in foreign languages, which, as in the case { } of the corinthians, probably no one understood, instead of simply "magnifying god" in their own tongue, which everyone understood, is almost ludicrous, if without offence we may venture to say so. the same remarks apply to xix. . we must again allow an eminent apologist, who will not be accused of irreverence, to characterise such a representation. "now in such positions and such company, speech in foreign tongues would be something altogether without object and without meaning. where the consciousness of the grace of salvation, and of a heavenly life springing from it, is first aroused in man, his own mother tongue verily, not a foreign language, will be the natural expression of his feelings. or we must imagine a magical power which, taking possession of men, like instruments without volition, forces them to utter strange tones--a thing contradicting all analogy in the operations of christianity."( ) the good sense of the critic revolts against the natural submission of the apologist. we have diverged so far in order prominently to bring before the reader the nature and source of the hypothesis that the gift of "tongues" signifies instantaneous power to speak unlearnt foreign languages. such an interpretation is derived almost entirely from the mythical narrative in the acts of the apostles. we shall now proceed to consider the statements of the apostle paul, and endeavour to ascertain what the supposed miraculous charisma really is. that it is something very different from what the unknown writer represents it in the episode of pentecost cannot be doubted. "whoever has, even once, read with attention what paul writes of the speaking with tongues in the corinthian community," writes thiersch, "knows that the difference between that gift of tongues { } and this (of acts ii.) could scarcely be greater. there, a speech which no mortal can understand without interpretation, and also no philologist, but the holy spirit alone can interpret; here, a speech which requires no interpretation. that gift serves only for the edification of the speaker, this clearly also for that of the hearer. the one is of no avail for the instruction of the ignorant; the other, clearly, is imparted wholly for that purpose."( ) it may be well that we should state a few reasons which show that paul, in his first letter to the corinthians, does not intend, in speaking of [------], to represent speech in foreign languages. in the very outset of his dissertation on the subject (xiv. ), paul very distinctly declares as the principal reason for preferring prophecy to the gift of tongues: "for he that speaketh with a tongue [------] speaketh not unto men but unto god: for no one understandeth( ) [------]." how could this be said if [------] meant merely speaking a foreign language? the presence of a single person versed in the language spoken would in such a case vitiate the whole of paul's argument. the statement made is general, it will be observed, and not limited, to one community, but applied to a place like corinth, one of the greatest commercial cities, in which merchants, seamen, and visitors of all countries were to be found, it would have been unreasonable to have characterized a foreign tongue as absolutely unintelligible. in xiv. , paul says: "so likewise ye, unless ye utter by the tongue [------] words { } easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye will be speaking into air." how could paul use the expression "by the tongue" if he meant a foreign language in v. and elsewhere? he is comparing [------] in the preceding verses with the sounds of musical instruments, and the point reached in v. clearly brings home the application of his argument: the [------] is unintelligible, like the pipe or harp, and unless the tongue utter words which have an understood meaning, it is mere speaking into air. is it possible that paul would call speech in a language, foreign to him, perhaps, but which nevertheless was the mother tongue of some nation, "speaking into air"? in such a case, he must have qualified his statement by obvious explanations, of which not a word appears throughout his remarks. that he does not speak of foreign languages is made still more clear by the next two verses, v. : in which, continuing his argument from analogy, he actually compares [------] with speech in foreign languages, and ends, v. : "if, therefore, i know not the meaning of the voice, i shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian (foreigner) and he that speaketh a barbarian (foreigner) in my judgment."' paul's logic is certainly not always beyond reproach, but he cannot be accused of perpetrating such an antithesis as contrasting a thing with itself. he, therefore, explicitly distinguishes (v. ) [------] "kinds of languages"( ) from (xii. , , &c.) [------] "kinds of tongues." in xiv. , paul says: "if i come unto you speaking with tongues [------] what shall i profit you, unless i shall { } speak to you either in revelation, or in knowledge, or in prophecy, or in teaching?" [------]; and then he goes on to compare such unintelligible speech with musical instruments. now it is obvious that revelation, knowledge, prophecy and teaching might equally be expressed in foreign languages, and, therefore, in "speaking with tongues" it is no mere difficulty of expression which makes it unprofitable, but that general unintelligibility which is the ground of the whole of paul's objections. paul exclaims (v. ): "i thank god i speak with a tongue [------]( ) more than ye all, ( ) but in a church i would rather speak five words with my understanding, that i may teach others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue [------]."( ) we have already pointed out that there is no evidence whatever that paul could speak many languages. so far as we have any information, he only made use of greek and aramaic, and never even preached where those languages were not current. he always employed the former in his epistles, whether addressed to corinth, galatia, or rome, and his knowledge even of that language was certainly not perfect. speaking "with a tongue" cannot, for reasons previously given, mean a foreign language; and this is still more obvious from what he says in v. , just quoted, in which he distinguishes speaking with a tongue from speaking with his understanding. five words so spoken are better than ten thousand in a tongue, because he speaks { } with the understanding in the one case and without it in the second. it is clear that a man speaks with his understanding as much in one language as another, but it is the main characteristic of the speech we are discussing that it is throughout opposed to understanding: cf. vv. , . it would be inconceivable that, if this gift really signified power to speak foreign languages, paul could on the one hand use the expressions in this letter with regard to it, and on the other that he could have failed to add remarks consistent with such an interpretation. for instance is it possible that the apostle in repressing the exercise of the charisma, as he does, could have neglected to point out some other use for it than mere personal edification? could he have omitted to tell some of these speakers with tongues that, instead of wasting their languages in a church where no one understood them, it would be well for them to employ them in the instruction of the nations whose tongues had been supernaturally imparted to them? as it is, paul checks the use of a gift bestowed by the holy spirit, and reduces its operation to the smallest limits, without once indicating so obvious a sphere of usefulness for the miraculous power. we need not, however, proceed to further arguments upon this branch of the subject; although, in treating other points, additional evidence will constantly present itself. for the reasons we have stated, and many others, the great majority of critics are agreed that the gift of tongues, according to paul, was not the power of speaking foreign languages previously unknown.( ) but for the narrative in acts ii. no one would ever have thought of such an interpretation. { } coming now to consider the two charismata, "kinds of tongues" and "the interpretation of tongues," more immediately in connection with our inquiry, as so-called miraculous gifts of the holy spirit, we shall first endeavour to ascertain some of their principal characteristics. the theory of foreign languages supernaturally imparted without previous study may be definitively laid aside. the interpretation of tongues may go with it, but requires a few observations. it is clear from paul's words throughout this dissertation that the interpretation of tongues not only was not invariably attached to the gift of tongues( ) ( cor. xiv. , , ), but was at least often a separate gift possessed without the kinds of tongues (cf. xii. , , xiv. , ). nothing can be more specific than xii. "... to another kinds of tongues; and to another interpretation of tongues;" and again, v. : "do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?" this is indeed presaged by the "diversities of gifts," &c, of xii. ff. upon the hypothesis of foreign languages, this would presuppose that some spoke languages which they could not interpret, and consequently could not understand, and that others understood languages which they could not speak. the latter point is common enough in ordinary life; but, in this instance, the miracle of supernaturally receiving a perfect knowledge of { } languages, instantaneously and without previous study, is as great as to receive the power to speak them. the anomaly in the miracle, merely to point out a suggestive discrepancy where all is anomalous, is that the gift of tongues should ever have been separated from the gift of interpretation. if a man understand the foreign language he speaks he can interpret it; if he cannot interpret it, he cannot understand it; and if he cannot understand it, can he possibly speak it? certainly not, without his having been made a perfectly mechanical instrument through which, apart from the understanding and the will, sounds are involuntarily produced, which is not to be entertained. still pursuing the same hypothesis,--the one gift is to speak languages which no one understands, the other to understand languages which no one speaks. paul never even assumes the probability that the "tongue" spoken is understood by any one except the interpreter. the interpretation of such obscure tongues must have been a gift very little used,--never, indeed, except as the complement to the gift of tongues. the natural and useful facility in languages is apparently divided into two supernatural and useless halves. the idea is irresistibly suggested, as apparently it was to the apostle himself, whether it would not have been more for the good of mankind and for the honour of christianity, if, instead of these two miraculously incomplete gifts, a little natural good sense, five words even, to be spoken in the vernacular tongue and requiring no interpretation had been imparted. if, instead of foreign languages, we substitute the utterance of ecstatic religious excitement, the anomaly of speaking a language without understanding it or being understood becomes intelligible; and equally so the interpretation, { } unaccompanied by the power of speaking. it is obvious in both cases that, as no one understands the tongue, no one can determine whether the interpretation of it be accurate or not. but it is easily conceivable that a sympathetic nervous listener might suppose that he understood the broken and incoherent speech of ecstasy and might interpret it according to his own stimulated imagination. the mysterious and unknown are suggestive texts, and there is nothing more infectious than religious excitement. in all this, however, is there anything miraculous? we need not further demonstrate that the chief and general characteristic of "kinds of tongues" was that they were unintelligible (cf. cor. xiv. , - , - ). speaking with the spirit [------] is opposed to speaking with the understanding [------] (cf. vv. - , &c). they were not only unintelligible to others, but the speaker himself did not understand what he uttered: v. . "for if i pray with a tongue [------] my spirit [------] prayeth, but my understanding [------] is unfruitful" (cf. f. ). we have already pointed out that paul speaks of these charismata in general, and not as affecting the corinthians only; and we must now add that he obviously does not even insinuate that the "kinds of tongues" possessed by that community was a spurious charisma, or that any attempt had been made to simulate the gift; for nothing could have been more simple than for the apostle to denounce such phenomena as false, and to distinguish the genuine from the imitated speech with tongues. the most convincing proof that his remarks refer to the genuine charisma is that the apostle applies to himself the very same restrictions in the use of "tongues" as he enforces upon the corinthians { } (vv. - , , &c), and characterises his own gift precisely as he does theirs (vv. , , , , ). now what was the actual operation of this singular miraculous gift, and its utility whether as regards the community or the gifted individual? paul restricts the speaking of "tongues" in church because, being unintelligible, it is not for edification (xiv. ff. f. , , ). he himself does not make use of his gift for the assemblies of believers (vv. , ). another ground upon which he objects to the use of "kinds of tongues" in public is that all the gifted apparently speak at once (vv. , f. ). it will be remembered that all the charismata and their operations are described as due to the direct agency of the holy spirit (xii. ff.); and immediately following their enumeration, ending with "kinds of tongues" and "interpretation of tongues," the apostle resumes: v. . "but all these worketh the one and the same spirit, dividing to each severally as he wills;" and in acts ii. the brethren are represented as speaking with tongues "as the spirit gave them utterance." now the first thought which presents itself is: how can a gift which is due to the direct working of the holy spirit possibly be abused? we must remember clearly that the speech is not expressive of the understanding of the speaker. the [------] spoke under the inspiration of the supernatural agent, what neither they nor others understood. is it permissible to suppose that the holy spirit could inspire speech with tongues at an unfitting time? can we imagine that this spirit can actually have prompted many people to speak at one and the same time to the utter disturbance of order? is not such a gift of tongues more like the confusion of tongues in babel( ) { } than a christian charisma? "and the lord said:...go to, let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."( ) in spite of his abstract belief in the divine origin of the charisma, paul's language unconsciously betrays practical doubt as to its character. does not such sarcasm as the following seem extremely indecorous when criticising a result produced directly by the holy spirit? (xiv. ) "if, therefore, the whole church be come into one place and all speak with tongues, and there come in unlearned and unbelieving persons will they not say that ye are mad?" at pentecost such an assembly was supposed to be drunken.( ) the whole of the counsel of the apostle upon this occasion really amounts to an injunction to quench the spirit. it is quite what might be expected in the case of the excitement of ecstatic religion, that the strong emotion should principally find vent in the form of prayer and praise (vv. ff.), equally so that it should be unintelligible and that no one should know when to say "amen" (v. ), and that all should speak at once, and still more so that the practical result should be tumult (vv. , ). all this, it might appear, could be produced without the intervention of the holy spirit. so far, is there and utility in the miracle? but we are told that it is "for a sign." paul argues upon this point in a highly eccentric manner. he quotes (v. ) isaiah xxviii. , , in a form neither agreeing with the septuagint nor with the hebrew, a passage which has merely a superficial and verbal analogy with the gift of tongues, but whose real { } historical meaning has no reference to it whatever: "in the law it is written, that with men of other tongues and with the lips of others will i speak unto this people; and yet for all that they will not hear me, saith the lord." the apostle continues with singular logic: "so that [------] the tongues are for a sign [------] not to those who believe but to the unbelieving; but prophecy is not for the unbelieving but for those who believe. if, therefore, the whole church be come into one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in unlearned or unbelieving persons, will they not say that ye are mad? but if all prophesy and there come in an unbeliever... he is convicted by all... and so falling on his face he will worship god, reporting that god is indeed in you." the apostle himself shows that the tongues cannot be considered a sign by unbelievers, upon whom, apparently, they produce no other impression than that the speakers are mad or drunken. under any circumstances, the "kinds of tongues" described by the apostle are a very sorry specimen of the "signs and wonders and powers" of which we have heard so much. it is not surprising that the apostle prefers exhortation in a familiar tongue. in an ecstatic state, men are incapable of edifying others: we shall presently see how far they can edify themselves. paul utters the pith of the whole matter at the very outset of his homily, when he prefers exhortation to kinds of tongues: v. . "for he that speaketh with a tongue speaketh not unto men but unto god: for no one under-standeth, but in spirit he speaketh mysteries" [------]. it is not possible to read his words without the impression that the apostle treats the whole subject with suppressed impatience. his mind was too prone to believe in spiritual mysteries, and his nervous { } nature too susceptible to religious emotion and enthusiasm to permit him clearly to recognize the true character of the gift of "tongues;" but his good sense asserted itself and, after protesting that he would rather speak five words with his understanding than ten thousand words in a tongue, he breaks off with the characteristic exclamation (v. ): "brethren, become not children in your minds" [------]. the advice is not yet out of place. what was the private utility or advantage of the supernatural gift? how did he who spoke with a tongue edify himself? (v. .) paul clearly states that he does not edify the church (vv. ff.). in the passage just quoted the apostle, however, says that the speaker "with a tongue" "speaketh to god"; and further on (vv. , ) he implies that, although he himself does not use the gift in public, he does so in private. he admonishes (v. ) any one gifted with tongues, if there be no interpreter present, to "keep silence in a church, but let him speak to himself and to god." but in what does the personal edification of the individual consist? in employing language, which he does not comprehend, in private prayer and praise? in addressing god in some unintelligible jargon, in the utterance of which his understanding has no part? many strange purposes and proceedings have been attributed to the supreme being, but probably none has been imagined more incongruous than a gift of tongues unsuitable for the edification of others, and not intelligible to the recipient, but considered an edifying substitute in private devotion for his own language. this was certainly not the form of prayer which jesus taught his disciples.( ) and this gift was valued { } more highly in the corinthian church than all the rest! do we not get an instructive insight into the nature of the other charismata from this suggestive fact? the reality of miracles does not seem to be demonstrated by these chapters.( ) we have already stated that the vast majority of critics explain [------] as speech in an ecstatic condition;( ) and all the phenomena described by paul closely correspond with the utterance of persons in a state of extreme religious enthusiasm, and excitement, of which many illustrations might be given from other religions before and since the commencement of our era, as well as in the history of christianity in early and recent times. every one knows of the proceedings of the heathen oracles, the wild writhings and cries of the pythoness and the mystic utterances of the sibyl. in the old testament there is allusion to the ecstatic emotion of the prophets in the account of saul, sara. xix. ; cf. isaiah viii. , xxix. . the montanists exhibited similar phenomena, and tertullian has recorded several instances of such religious excitement, to which we have elsewhere referred. chrysostora had to repress paroxysms of pious excitement closely resembling these in the fourth century;( ) and even down to our own times instances have never been wanting of this form of hysterical religion. into none of this can we enter here. enough, we trust, has been said to show the true character of the supposed supernatural charismata of paul from his own account of them, and the information contained in his epistles. { } although we have been forced to examine in considerable detail the passages in the writings of paul cited by apologists in support of miracles, the study is one of great value to our inquiry. these are the only passages which we possess in which a contemporary and eye-witness describes what he considers supernatural phenomena, and conveys to us his impression of miraculous agency. instead of traditional reports of miracles narrated by writers who are unknown, and who did not witness the occurrences in question, we have here a trustworthy witness dealing with matters in which he was personally interested, and writing a didactic homily upon the nature and operation of charismata, which he believed to be miraculous and conferred upon the church by the immediate agency of the holy spirit. the nineteenth century here comes into direct contact with the age of miracles, but at the touch the miracles vanish, and that which, seen through the golden mist of pious tradition, seems to possess unearthly power and beauty, on closer examination dwindles into the prose of every day life. the more minutely reported miracles are scanned, the more unreal they are recognized to be. the point to which we now desire to call attention, however, is the belief and the mental constitution of paul. we have seen something of the nature and operation of the gift of tongues. that the phenomena described proceeded from an ecstatic state, into which persons of highly excitable nervous organization are very liable to fall under the operation of strong religious impressions, can scarcely be doubted. eminent apologists( ) have gravely illustrated the phenomena by the analogy of mesmerism, { } somnambulism and the effects of magnetism. paul asserts that he was subject to the influence, whatever it was, more than anyone, and there is nothing which is more credible than the statement, or more characteristic of the apostle. we desire to speak of him with the profoundest respect and admiration. we know more, from his epistles, of the intimate life and feelings of the great apostle of the gentiles than of any other man of the apostolic age, and it is impossible not to feel warm sympathy with his noble and generous character. the history of christianity, after the death of its founder, would sink almost into common-place if the grand figure of paul were blotted from its pages. but it is no detraction to recognize that his nervous temperament rendered him peculiarly susceptible of those religious impressions which result in conditions of ecstatic trance, to which, as we actually learn from himself, he was exceptionally subject. the effects of this temperament probably first made him a christian; and to his enthusiastic imagination we owe most of the supernatural dogmas of the religion which he adopted and transformed. one of these trances the apostle himself recounts,( ) always with the cautious reserve: "whether in the body or out of the body i know not, god knoweth," how he was caught up to the third heaven, and in paradise heard unutterable words which it is not lawful for a man to speak; in immediate connection with which he continues: "and lest i should be exalted above measure by the excess of the revelations, there was given to me a stake [------] in the flesh, an angel of satan to buffet me"( ) this was one of { } the "visions [------] and revelations [------] of the lord" of which he speaks, and of which he had such an excess to boast. can any one doubt that this was nearly akin to the state of ecstatic trance in which he spoke with tongues more than all the corinthians? does any one suppose that paul, "whether in the body or out of the body," was ever actually caught up into "the third heaven," wherever that may be? or doubt that this was simply one of the pious hallucinations which visit those who are in such a state? if we are seriously to discuss the point,--it is clear that evidence of such a thing is out of the question; that paul himself admits that he cannot definitely describe what happened; that we have no other ground for considering the matter than the apostle's own mysterious utterance; that it is impossible for a person subject to such visions and hallucinations to distinguish between reality and seeming; that this narrative has not only all the character of hallucination, but no feature of sober fact; and finally that, whilst it accords with all experiences of visionary hallucination, it contradicts all experience of practical life. we have seen that paul believes in the genuineness and supernatural origin of the divine charismata, and he in like manner believes in the reality of his visions and revelations. he has equal reason, or want of reason, in both cases. what, however, was the nature of the "stake in the flesh" which, upon the theory of the diabolical origin of disease, he calls "an angel of satan to buffet me"? there have been many conjectures offered, but one explanation which has been advanced by able critics has special force and probability. it is suggested that this "stake in the flesh," which almost all now at { } least recognise to have been some physical malady, and very many suppose to have been headache or some other similar periodical and painful affection, was in reality a form of epilepsy.( ) it has been ably argued that the representation of the malady as "an angel of satan" to buffet him, directly connects it with nervous disorders like epilepsy, which the jews especially ascribed to diabolical influence; and the mention of this [------] in immediate continuation of his remarks on "visions" and "revelations," which a tendency to this very malady would so materially assist in producing, further confirms the conjecture.( ) no one can deny, and medical and psychological annals prove, that many men have been subject to visions and hallucinations which have never been seriously attributed to supernatural causes. there is not one single valid reason removing the ecstatic visions and trances of the apostle paul from this class. we do not yet discuss the supposed vision in which he saw the risen jesus, though it is no exception to the rest, but reserve it for the next chapter. at present, it suffices that we point out the bearing of our examination of paul's general testimony to miracles upon our future consideration of his evidence for the resurrection. if it be admitted that his judgment as to the miraculous character of the charismata is fallacious, and that what he considered miraculous were simply natural phenomena, the theory of the reality of miracles { } becomes less tenable than ever. and if, further, it be recognized, as we think it necessarily must be, that paul was subject to natural ecstatic trances, with all their accompanying forms of nervous excitement: "kinds of tongues," visions, and religious hallucinations, a strong and clear light will fall upon his further testimony for miraculous occurrences which we shall shortly have before us. part vi. the resurrection and ascension chapter i. the relation of evidence to subject when the evidence of the gospels regarding the great central dogmas of ecclesiastical christianity is shown to be untrustworthy and insufficient, apologists appeal with confidence to the testimony of the apostle paul. we presume that it is not necessary to show that, in fact, the main weight of the case rests upon his epistles, as undoubted documents of the apostolic age, written some thirty or forty years after the death of the master. the retort has frequently been made to the earlier portion of this work that, so long as the evidence of paul remains unshaken, the apologetic position is secure. we may quote a few lines from an able work, part of a passage discussed in the preceding chapter, as a statement of the case: "in the first place, merely as a matter of historical attestation, the gospels are not the strongest evidence for the christian miracles. only one of the four, in its present shape, is claimed as the work of an apostle, and of that the genuineness is disputed. the acts of the apostles stand upon very much the { } same footing with the synoptic gospels, and of this book, we are promised a further examination. but we possess at least some undoubted writings of one who was himself a chief actor in the events which followed immediately upon those recorded in the gospels; and in these undoubted writings st. paul certainly shows by incidental allusions, the good faith of which cannot be questioned, that he believed himself to be endowed with the power of working miracles, and that miracles, or what were thought to be such, were actually wrought by him and by his contemporaries..... besides these allusions, st. paul repeatedly refers to the cardinal miracles of the resurrection and ascension; he refers to them as notorious and unquestionable facts at a time when such an assertion might have been easily refuted. on one occasion he gives a very circumstantial account of the testimony on which the belief in the resurrection rested ( cor. xv. - ). and not only does he assert the resurrection as a fact, but he builds upon it a whole scheme of doctrine: 'if christ be not risen,' he says, 'then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.' we do not stay now to consider the exact philosophical weight of this evidence. it will be time enough to do this when it has received the critical discussion that may be presumed to be in store for it but as external evidence, in the legal sense, it is probably the best that can be produced, and it has been entirely untouched so far."( ) we have already disposed of the "allusions" above referred to. we shall in due time deal with the rest of the statements in this passage, but at present it is sufficient to agree at { } least with the remark that, "as external evidence," the testimony of paul "is probably the best that can be produced." we know at least who the witness really is, which is an advantage denied us in the case of the gospels. it would be premature to express surprise, however, that we find the case of miracles, and more especially of such stupendous miracles as the resurrection and ascension, practically resting upon the testimony of a single witness. this thought will intrude itself, but cannot at present be pursued. the allegation which we have to examine is that the founder of christianity, after being dead and buried, rose from the dead and did not again die, but after remaining sometime with his disciples ascended with his body into heaven.( ) it is unnecessary to complicate the question by adding the other doctrines regarding the miraculous birth and divine origin and personality of jesus. in the problem before us, certain objective facts are asserted which admit of being judicially tested. we have nothing to do here with the vague modern representation of these events, by means of which the objective facts vanish, and are replaced by subjective impressions and tricks of consciousness or symbols of spiritual life. those who adopt such views have, of course, abandoned all that is real and supernatural in the supposed events. the resurrection and ascension which we have to deal with are events precisely as objective and real as the in the articles of the church of england this is expressed as follows: art. ii. ".....who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, &c., &c." art. iii. "as christ died for us, and was buried; so also it is to be believed that he went down into hell." art iv. "christ did truly rise again from death, and took again hie body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man's nature, wherewith he ascended into heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all men at the last day." { } death and burial,--no ideal process figured by the imagination or embodiments of christian hope, but tangible realities, historical occurrences in the sense of ordinary life. if jesus, after being crucified, dead and buried, did not physically rise again from the dead, and in the flesh,( ) without again dying, "ascend into heaven," the whole case falls to the ground. these incidents, although stupendous miracles, must have been actual occurrences. if they did not really take place, our task is at an end. if it be asserted that they really did take place their occurrence must be attested by adequate evidence. apologists, whilst protesting that the occurrences in question are believed upon ordinary historical evidence, and that christianity requires no indulgence, but submits itself to the same tests as any other affirmation, do not practically act upon this principle; but, as soon as it is enunciated, introduce a variety of special pleas which remove the case from the domain of history into that of theology, and proceed upon one assumption after another until the fundamental facts become enveloped and, so to say, protected from judicial criticism by a cloud of religious dogmas and hypotheses.( ) by confining our attention to the simple facts which form the basis of the whole superstructure of ecclesiastical christianity, we may avoid much confusion of ideas, and the disappearance of the body from the sepulchre, a point much insisted upon, could have had no significance or reality if the body did not rise and afterwards ascend. a work of this kind may be mentioned in illustration: dr. west-cott's "gospel of the resurrection." the argument of this work is of unquestionable ability, but it is chiefly remarkable, we think, for the manner in which the direct evidence is hurried over, and a mass of assertions and assumptions, the greater part of which is utterly untenable and inadmissible, is woven into specious and eloquent pleading, and does duty for substantial testimony. { } restrict the field of inquiry to reasonable limits. we propose, therefore, to limit our investigation to the evidence for the reality of the resurrection and ascension. what evidence could be regarded as sufficient to establish the reality of such supposed occurrences? the question is one which demands the serious attention and consideration of every thoughtful man. it is obvious that the amount of evidence requisite to satisfy our minds as to the truth of any statement should be measured by the nature of the statement made and, we may as well add, by its practical importance to ourselves. the news that a man was married or a child born last week is received without doubt, because men are married and children are born every day; and although such pieces of gossip are frequently untrue, nothing appears more natural or in accordance with our experience. if we take more distant and less familiar events we have no doubt that a certain monarch was crowned, and that he subsequently died some centuries ago. if we ask for the evidence for the statement, nothing may be forthcoming of a very minute or indubitable nature. no absolute eye-witness of the coronation may have left a clear and detailed narrative of the ceremony; and possibly there may no longer be extant a sufficiently attested document proving with certainty the death of the monarch. there are several considerations, however, which make us perfectly satisfied with the evidence, incomplete as it may be. monarchs are generally crowned and invariably die; and the statement that any one particular monarch was crowned and died is so completely in conformity with experience, that we have no hesitation in believing it in the specific case. we are satisfied to believe such { } ordinary statements upon very slight evidence, both because our experience prepares us to believe that they are true, and because we do not much care whether they are true or not. if life, or even succession to an estate, depended upon either event, the demand for evidence, even in such simple matters, would be immensely intensified. the converse of the statement, however, would not meet with the same reception. would anyone believe the affirmation that alfred the great, for instance, did not die at all? what amount of evidence would be required before such a statement could be pronounced sufficiently attested? universal experience would be so uniformly opposed to the assertion that such a phenomenon had taken place, that probably no evidence which could readily be conceived could ensure the belief of more than a credulous few. the assertion that a man actually died and was buried, and yet afterwards rose from the dead, is still more at variance with human experience. the prolongation of life to long periods is comparatively consistent with experience; and if a life extending to several centuries be incredible it is only so in degree, and is not absolutely contrary to the order of nature, which certainly under present conditions does not favour the supposition of such lengthened existence, but still does not fix hard and fast limits to the life of man. the resurrection of a man who has once been absolutely dead, however, is contrary to all human experience, and to all that we know of the order of nature. if to this we add the assertion that the person so raised from the dead never again died, but after continuing some time longer on earth, ascended bodily to some invisible and inconceivable place called heaven, there to "sit at the right hand of god," the shock to reason and common { } sense becomes so extreme, that it is difficult even to realize the nature of the affirmation. it would be hopeless to endeavour to define the evidence which could establish the reality of the alleged occurrences. as the central doctrines of a religion upon which the salvation of the human race is said to depend, we are too deeply interested to be satisfied with slight evidence or no evidence at all. it has not unfrequently been made a reproach that forensic evidence is required of the reality of divine revelation. such a course is regarded as perfectly preposterous, whether the test be applied to the primary assertion that a revelation has been made at all, or to its contents. what kind of evidence then are we permitted decorously to require upon so momentous a subject? apparently, just so much as apologists can conveniently set before us, and no more. the evidence deemed necessary for the settlement of a scotch peerage case, or a disputed will, is, we do not hesitate to say, infinitely more complete than that which it is thought either pious or right to expect in the case of religion. the actual occurrence of the resurrection and ascension, however, is certainly a matter of evidence and, to retort, it is scarcely decent that any man should be required to believe what is so opposed to human experience, upon more imperfect evidence than is required for the transfer of land or the right to a title, simply because ecclesiastical dogmas are founded upon them, and it is represented that unless they be true "our hope is vain." the testimony requisite to establish the reality of such stupendous miracles can scarcely be realized. proportionately, it should be as unparalleled in its force as those events are in fact. one point, moreover, must never be forgotten. human testimony is exceedingly fallible at its { } best it is liable to error from innumerable causes, and most of all, probably, when religious excitement is present, and disturbing elements of sorrow, fear, doubt, or enthusiasm interfere with the calmness of judgment. when any assertion is made which contradicts unvarying experience, upon evidence which experience knows to be universally liable to error, there cannot be much hesitation in disbelieving the assertion and preferring belief in the order of nature. and when evidence proceeds from an age not only highly exposed to error, from ignorance of natural laws, superstition, and religious excitement, but prolific in fabulous reports and untenable theories, it cannot be received without the gravest suspicion. we make these brief remarks, in anticipation, as nothing is more essential in the discussion upon which we are about to enter than a proper appreciation of the allegations which are to be tested, and of the nature of the testimony required for their belief. we shall not limit our inquiry to the testimony of paul, but shall review the whole of the evidence adduced for the resurrection and ascension. hitherto, our examination of the historical books of the new testament has been mainly for the purpose of ascertaining their character, and the value of their evidence for miracles and the reality of divine revelation. it is unnecessary for us here minutely to recapitulate the results. the acts of the apostles, we have shown, cannot be received as testimony of the slightest weight upon any of the points before us. written by an unknown author, who was not an eye-witness of the miracles related; who describes events not as they occurred, but as his pious imagination supposed they ought to have occurred; who seldom touches history without transforming it by legend until the { } original elements can scarcely be distinguished; who puts his own words and sentiments into the mouths of the apostles and other persons of his narrative; and who represents almost every phase of the church in the apostolic age as influenced, or directly produced, by means of supernatural agency; such a work is of no value as evidence for occurrences which are in contradiction to all human experience. briefly to state the case of the gospels in other words than our own, we repeat the honest statement of the able writer quoted at the beginning of this chapter: "in the first place, merely as a matter of historical attestation, the gospels are not the strongest evidence for the christian miracles. only one of the four, in its present shape, is claimed as the work of an apostle, and of that the genuineness is disputed."(l) we may add that the third synoptic does not, in the estimation of any one who has examined the acts of the apostles, gain additional credibility by being composed by the same author as the latter work. the writers of the four gospels are absolutely unknown to us, and in the case of three of them, it is not even affirmed that they were eyewitnesses of the resurrection and ascension and other miracles narrated. the undeniably doubtful authorship of the fourth gospel, not to make a more positive statement here, renders this work, which was not written until upwards of half a century, at the very least, after the death of jesus, incapable of proving anything in regard to the resurrection and ascension. a much stronger statement might be made, but we refer readers to our former volumes, and we shall learn something more of the character of the gospel narratives as we proceed. although we cannot attach any value to the gospels { } as evidence, we propose, before taking the testimony of paul, to survey the various statements made by them regarding the astounding miracles we are discussing. enough has been said to show that we cannot accept any statement as true simply because it is made by a gospel or gospels. when it is related in the first synoptic, for instance, that pilate took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, "i am innocent of this man's blood: see ye to it,"( )--an incident to which no reference, be it said in passing, is made by the other evangelists, although it is sufficiently remarkable to have deserved notice,--we cannot of course assume that pilate actually said or did anything of the kind. a comparison of the various accounts of the resurrection and ascension, however, and careful examination of their details, will be of very great use, by enabling us to appreciate the position of the case apart from the evidence of paul. the indefinite impression fostered by apologists, that the evidence of the gospels supplements and completes the evidence of the apostle, and forms an aggregate body of testimony of remarkable force and volume, must be examined, and a clear conception formed of the whole case. one point may at once be mentioned before we enter upon our examination of the gospels. the evangelists narrate such astonishing occurrences as the resurrection and ascension with perfect composure and absence of surprise. this characteristic is even made an argument for the truth of their narrative. the impression made upon our minds, however, is the very reverse of that which apologists desire us to receive. the writers do not in the least degree seem to have realised the { } exceptional character of the occurrences they relate, and betray the assurance of persons writing in an ignorant and superstitious age, whose minds have become too familiar with the supernatural to be at all surprised either by a resurrection from the dead or a bodily ascension. miracles in their eyes have lost their strangeness and seem quite common-place. it will be seen as we examine the narratives that a stupendous miracle, or a convulsion of nature, is thrown in by one or omitted by another as a mere matter of detail. an earthquake and the resurrection of many bodies of saints are mere trifles which can be inserted without wonder or omitted without regret the casual and momentary expression of hesitation to believe, which is introduced, is evidently nothing more than a rhetorical device to heighten the reality of the scene. it would have been infinitely more satisfactory had we been able to perceive that these witnesses, instead of being genuine denizens of the age of miracles, had really understood the astounding nature of the occurrences they report, and did not consider a miracle the most natural thing in the world. chapter ii. the evidence of the gospels in order more fully to appreciate the nature of the narratives which the four evangelists give of the last hours of the life of jesus, we may take them up at the point where, mocked and buffeted by the roman soldiers, he is finally led away to be crucified. let no one suppose that, in freely criticising the gospels, we regard without emotion the actual incidents which lie at the bottom of these narratives. no one can form to himself any adequate conception of the terrible sufferings of the master, maltreated and insulted by a base and brutal multitude, too degraded to understand his noble character, and too ignorant to appreciate his elevated teaching, without pain; and to follow his course from the tribunal which sacrificed him to jewish popular clamour to the spot where he ended a brief but self-sacrificing life by the shameful death of a slave may well make sympathy take the place of criticism. profound veneration for the great teacher, however, and earnest interest in all that concerns his history rather command serious and unhesitating examination of the statements made with regard to him, than discourage an attempt to ascertain the truth; and it would be anything but respect for his memory to accept without question the gospel accounts of his life { } simply because they were composed with the desire to glorify him. according to the synoptics, when jesus is led away to be crucified, the roman guard entrusted with the duty of executing the cruel sentence find a man of cyrene, simon by name, and compel him to carry the cross.( ) it was customary for those condemned to crucifixion to carry the cross, or at least the main portion of it, themselves to the place of execution, and no explanation is given by the synoptists for the deviation from this practice which they relate. the fourth gospel, however, does not appear to know anything of this incident or of simon of cyrene, but distinctly states that jesus bore his own cross.( ) on the way to golgotha, according to the third gospel, jesus is followed by a great multitude of the people, and of women who were bewailing and lamenting him, and he addresses to them a few prophetic sentences.( ) we might be surprised at the singular fact that there is no reference to this incident in any other gospel, and that words of jesus, so weighty in themselves and spoken at so supreme a moment, should not elsewhere have been recorded, but for the fact that, from internal evidence, the address must be assigned to a period subsequent to the destruction of jerusalem. the other evangelists may, therefore, well ignore it. { } it was the custom to give those about to be crucified a draught of wine containing some strong opiate, which in some degree alleviated the intense suffering of that mode of death. mark( ) probably refers to this (xv. ) when he states that, on reaching the place of execution, "they gave him wine [------] mingled with myrrh." the fourth gospel has nothing of this. matthew says (xxvii. ): "they gave him vinegar [------] to drink mingled with gall"( ) [------]. even if, instead of [------] with the alexandrian and a majority of mss., we read [------], "wine," with the sinaitic, vatican, and some other ancient codices, this is a curious statement, and is well worthy of a moment's notice as suggestive of the way in which these narratives were written. the conception of a suffering messiah, it is well known, was more particularly supported, by new testament writers, by attributing a messianic character to ps. xxii., lxix., and isaiah liii., and throughout the narrative of the passion we are perpetually referred to these and other scriptures as finding their fulfilment in the sufferings of jesus. the first synoptist found in ps. lxix. (sept. lxviii. ): "they gave me also gall [------] for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar [------] to drink;" and apparently in order to make the supposed fulfilment correspond as closely as possible, he combined the "gall" of the food with the vinegar or wine in strangely literal fashion,( ) very characteristic, however, of we shall, for the sake of brevity, call the gospels by the names assigned to them in the canon. there have been many attempts to explain away [------], and to make it mean either a species of vermuth or any bitter substance (olahausen, leidensgeech., ); but the great mass of critics rightly retain its meaning, "gall." so ewald, meyer, bleek, strauss, weisse, schenkel, yolk-mar, alford, wordsworth, &c, &c. { } the whole of the evangelists. luke, who seems not to have understood the custom known perhaps to mark, represents (xxiii. ) the soldiers as mocking jesus by "offering him vinegar "(l) [------]; he omits the gall, but probably refers to the same psalm without being so falsely literal as matthew. we need not enter into the discussion as to the chronology of the passion week, regarding which there is so much discrepancy in the accounts of the fourth gospel and of the synoptics, nor shall we pause minutely to deal with the irreconcilable difference which, it is admitted,( ) exists in their statement of the hours at which the events of the last fatal day occurred. the fourth gospel (xix. ) represents pilate as bringing jesus forth to the jews "about the sixth hour" (noon). mark (xv. ), in obvious agreement with the other synoptics as further statements prove, distinctly says: "and it was the third hour ( o'clock a.m.), and they crucified him." at the sixth hour (noon), according to the three synoptists, there was darkness over the earth till about the ninth hour ( o'clock p.m.), shortly after which time luke omits the subsequent offer of "vinegar" (probably the pasco of the roman soldiers) mentioned by the other evangelists. we presume the reference in xxiii. to be the same as the act described in mt xxvii. and mk. xv. . { } jesus expired.( ) as, according to the fourth gospel, the sentence was not even passed before midday, and some time must be allowed for preparation and going to the place of execution, it is clear that there is a very wide discrepancy between the hours at which jesus was crucified and died, unless, as regards the latter point, we take agreement in all as to the hour of death. in this case, commencing at the hour of the fourth gospel and ending with that of the synoptics, jesus must have expired after being less than three hours on the cross. according to the synoptics, and also, if we assign a later hour for the death, according to the fourth gospel, he cannot have been more than six hours on the cross. we shall presently see that this remarkably rapid death has an important bearing upon the history and the views formed regarding it. it is known that crucifixion, besides being the most shameful mode of death, and indeed chiefly reserved for slaves and the lowest criminals, was one of the most lingering and atrociously cruel punishments ever invented by the malignity of man. persons crucified, it is stated and admitted,( ) generally lived for at least twelve hours, and sometimes even survived the excruciating tortures of the cross for three days. we shall not further anticipate remarks which must hereafter be made regarding this. we need not do more than again point out that no two of the gospels agree upon so simple, yet important, a point as the inscription on the cross.( ) it is argued that "a close { } examination of the narratives furnishes no sufficient reason for supposing that all proposed to give the same or the entire inscription," and, after some curious reasoning, it is concluded that "there is at least no possibility of showing any inconsistency on the strictly literal interpretation of the words of the evangelist."( ) on the contrary, we had ventured to suppose that, in giving a form of words said to have been affixed to the cross, the evangelists intended to give the form actually used, and consequently "the same" and "entire inscription," which must have been short; and we consider it quite inconceivable that such was not their deliberate intention, however imperfectly fulfilled. we pass on merely to notice a curious point in connection with an incident related by all the gospels. it is stated that the roman soldiers who crucified jesus divided his garments amongst them, casting lots to determine what part each should take. the clothing of criminals executed was the perquisite of the soldiers who performed the duty, and there is nothing improbable in the story that the four soldiers decided by lot the partition of the garments--indeed there is every reason to suppose that such was the practice. the incident is mentioned as the direct fulfilment of the. ps. xxii. , which is quoted literally from the septuagint version (xxi. ) by the author of the fourth gospel. he did not, however, understand the passage, or disregarded its true meaning,( ) and in order to make the incident accord { } better, as he supposed, with the prophetic psalm, he represents that the soldiers amicably parted the rest of his garments amongst them without lot, but cast lots for the coat, which was without seam: xix. . "they said, therefore, among themselves: let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be; that the scripture might be fulfilled: they parted my garments among them, and for my vesture they cast lots. these things, therefore, the soldiers did." the evangelist does not perceive that the two parts of the sentence in the psalm really refer to the same action, but exhibits the partition of the garments and the lots for the vesture as separately fulfilled. the synoptists apparently divide the whole by lot.( ) they do not expressly refer to the psalm, however, except in the received text of matth. xxvii. , into which and some other mss. the quotation has been interpolated.( ) that the narrative of the gospels, instead of being independent and genuine history, is constructed upon the lines of supposed messianic psalms and passages of the old testament will become increasingly evident as we proceed. it is stated by all the gospels that two malefactors--the first and second calling them "robbers"--were crucified with jesus, the one on the right hand and the other on the left. the statement in mark xv. , that this fulfilled isaiah liii. , which is found in our received text, is omitted by all the oldest codices, and is an interpolation,( ) but we shall hereafter have to speak of this point in connection with another matter, and we now "certainly an interpolation." wettcott, int. to study of gospels, p. , n. . "certainly an interpolation." westcott, lb. p. , n. . { } merely point out that, though the verse was thus inserted here, it is placed in the mouth of jesus himself by the third synoptist (xxii. ), and the whole passage from which it was taken has evidently largely influenced the composition of the narrative before us. according to the first and second gospels,( ) the robbers joined with the chief priests and the scribes and elders and those who passed by in mocking and reviling jesus. this is directly contradicted by the third synoptist, who states that only one of the malefactors did so (xxiii. flf.): "but the other answering rebuked him and said: dost thou not even fear god seeing thou art in the same condemnation? and we indeed justly; for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man did nothing amiss. and he said: jesus, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom. and he said unto him: verily, i say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in paradise." it requires very little examination to detect that this story is legendary,( ) and cannot be maintained as historical. those who dwell upon its symbolical character( ) do nothing to establish its veracity. this exemplary robber speaks like an apostle, and in praying jesus as the messiah to remember him when he came into his kingdom, he shows much more than apostolic appreciation of the claims and character of jesus. the { } reply of jesus, moreover, contains a statement not only wholly contradictory of jewish belief as to the place of departed spirits, but of all christian doctrine at the time as to the descent of jesus into hades. into this, however, it is needless for us to go.( ) not only do the other gospels show no knowledge of so interesting an episode, but, as we have pointed out, the first and second synoptics positively exclude it. we shall see, moreover, that there is a serious difficulty in understanding how this conversation on the cross, which is so exclusively the property of the third synoptist, could have been reported to him. the synoptics represent the passers by and the chief priests, scribes, and elders, as mocking jesus as he hung on the cross. the fourth gospel preserves total silence as to all this. it is curious, also, that the mocking is based upon that described in the psalm xxii., to which we have already several times had to refer. in v. f. we have: "all they that see me laughed me to scorn: they shot out the lip; they shook the head (saying), . he trusted on the lord, let him deliver him, let him save him (seeing) that he delighteth in him."( ) compare with this mt. xxvii. ff., mk. xv. ff., luke xxiii . is it possible to suppose that the chief priests and elders and scribes could actually have quoted the words of this psalm, there put into the mouth of the psalmist's enemies, as the first synoptist represents (xxvii )?( ) it is obvious that the speeches ascribed { } to the chief priests and elders can be nothing more than the expressions which the writers considered suitable to them, and the fact that they seek their inspiration in a psalm which they suppose to be messianic is suggestive. we have already mentioned that the fourth gospel says nothing of any mocking speeches. the author, however, narrates an episode (xix. - ) in which the dying jesus is represented as confiding his mother to the care of "the disciple whom he loved," of which in their turn the synoptists seem to be perfectly ignorant. we have already elsewhere remarked that there is no evidence whatever that there was any disciple whom jesus specially loved, except the repeated statement in this gospel. no other work of the new testament contains a hint of such an individual, and much less that he was the apostle john. nor is there any evidence that any one of the disciples took the mother of jesus to his own home. there is, therefore, no external confirmation of this episode; but there is, on the contrary, much which leads to the conclusion that it is not historical.( ) there has been much discussion as to whether four women are mentioned (xix. ), or whether "his mother's sister" is represented as "mary, the wife of clopas," or was a different person. there are, we think, reasons for concluding that there were four, but in the doubt we shall not base any argument on the point. the synoptics( ) distinctly state that "the women that followed him from galilee," among which were "mary magdalene and mary { } the mother of james and joseph and the mother of zebedee's sons,"(l) and, as the third synoptic says, "all his acquaintance"( ) were standing "afar off" [------]. they are unanimous in saying this, and there is every reason for supposing that they are correct.( ) this is consequently a contradiction of the account in the fourth gospel that john and the women were standing "by the cross of jesus." olshausen, lucke and others suggest that they subsequently came from a distance up to the cross, but the statement of the synoptists is made at the close, and after this scene is supposed to have taken place. the opposite conjecture, that from standing close to the cross they removed to a distance has little to recommend it. both explanations are equally arbitrary and unsupported by evidence. it may be well, in connection with this, to refer to the various sayings and cries ascribed by the different evangelists to jesus on the cross. we have already mentioned the conversation with the "penitent thief," which is peculiar to the third gospel, and now that with the "beloved disciple," which is only in the fourth. the third synoptic( ) states that, on being crucified, jesus said, "father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," a saying which is in the spirit of jesus and worthy of him, but of which the other gospels do not take any notice.( ) the fourth gospel again has a cry (xix. ): "after this, jesus knowing that all things are now fulfilled, that the scripture might be accomplished, saith: { } i thirst."( ) the majority of critics( ) understand by this that "i thirst" is said in order "that the scripture might be fulfilled" by the offer of the vinegar, related in the following verse. the scripture referred to is of course ps. lxix. : "they gave me also gall for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar [------] to drink;" which we have already quoted in connection with matth. xxvii. . the third synoptic (xxiii. ) represents the vinegar as being offered in mockery at a much earlier period, and matthew and mark( ) connect the offer of the vinegar with quite a different cry from that in the fourth gospel. nothing could be more natural than that, after protracted agony, the patient sufferer should cry: "i thirst," but the dogmatic purpose, which dictates the whole narrative in the fourth gospel, is rendered obvious by the reference of such a cry to a supposed messianic prophecy. this is further displayed by the statement (v. ) that the sponge with vinegar was put "upon hyssop" [------],--the two synoptics have "on a reed" [------],--which the author probably uses in association with the paschal lamb,( ) an idea present to his mind throughout the { } passion. the first and second synoptics( ) represent the last cry of jesus to have been a quotation from ps. xxii. : "eli (or mk., eloi), eli, lema sabacthani? that is to say: my god, my god, why didst thou forsake me?" this, according to them, evidently, was the last articulate utterance of the expiring master, for they merely add that "when he cried again with a loud voice," jesus yielded up his spirit.( ) neither of the other gospels has any mention of this cry. the third gospel substitutes: "and when jesus cried with a loud voice, he said: father, into thy hands i commend my spirit, and having said this he expired."( ) this is an almost literal quotation from the septuagint version of ps. xxxi. . the fourth gospel has a totally different cry (xix. ), for, on receiving the vinegar, which accomplished the scripture, he represents jesus as saying: "it is finished" [------], and immediately expiring. it will be observed that seven sayings are attributed to jesus on the cross, of which the first two gospels have only one, the third synoptic three, and the fourth gospel three. we do not intend to express any opinion here in favour of any of these, but we merely point out the remarkable fact that, with the exception of the one cry in the first two synoptics, each gospel has ascribed different sayings to the dying master, and not only no two of them agree, but in some important instances the statement of the one evangelist seems absolutely to exclude the accounts of the others. every one knows the hackneyed explanation of apologists, but in works which repeat each other so much elsewhere, it certainly is a curious phenomenon that there is so little { } agreement here. if all the master's disciples "forsook him and fled,"( ) and his few friends and acquaintances stood "afar off" regarding his sufferings, it is readily conceivable that pious tradition had unlimited play. we must, however, return to the cry recorded in matthew and mark,( ) the only one about which two witnesses agree. both of them give this quotation from ps. xxii. in aramaic: eli (mark: eloi), eli,( ) lema sabacthani. the purpose is clearly to enable the reader to understand what follows, which we quote from the first gospel: "and some of them that stood there, when they heard it said: this man calleth for elijah.... the rest said, let be, let us see whether elijah cometh to save him."( ) it is impossible to confuse "eli" or "eloi" with "elijahu"( ) and the explanations suggested by apologists are not sufficient to remove a difficulty which seems to betray the legendary character of the statement. the mistake of supposing that jesus called for elijah could not possibly have been made by those who spoke aramaic; that strangers not perfectly understanding aramaic should be here intended cannot be maintained, for the suggestion is represented as adopted by "the rest." the roman soldiers had probably never heard of elijah; and there is nothing whatever to support the allegation of mockery( ) as accounting for the singular { } episode. the verse of the psalm was too well known to the jews to admit of any suggested play upon words. the three synoptics state that, from the sixth hour (mid-day) to the ninth ( o'clock), "there was darkness over all the earth" [------].( ) the third gospel adds: "the sun having failed" [------]( ) by the term "all the earth" some critics( ) maintain that the evangelist merely meant the holy land,( ) whilst others hold that he uses the expression in its literal sense.( ) the fourth gospel takes no notice of this darkness. such a phenomenon is not a trifle to be ignored in any account of the crucifixion, if it actually occurred. the omission of all mention of it either amounts to a denial of its occurrence or betrays most suspicious familiarity with supernatural interference. there have been many efforts made to explain this darkness naturally, or at least to find some allusion to it in contemporary history, all of which have signally failed. as the moon was at the full, it is admitted that the darkness could not have been an eclipse.( ) the fathers { } appealed to phlegon the chronicler, who mentions( ) an eclipse of the sun about this period accompanied by an earthquake, and also to a similar occurrence referred to by eusebius,( ) probably quoted from the historian thallus, but, of course, modern knowledge has dispelled the illusion that these phenomena have any connection with the darkness we are discussing, and the theory that the evangelists are confirmed in their account by this evidence is now generally abandoned.( ) it is apart from our object to show how common it was amongst classical and other writers to represent nature as sympathising with national or social disasters;( ) and as a poetical touch this remarkable darkness of the synoptists, of which no one else knows anything, is quite intelligible. the statement, however, is as seriously and deliberately made as any other in their narrative, and does not add to its credibility. it is palpable that the account is mythical,( ) and it bears a strange likeness to passages in the old testament, from the imagery of which the representation in all probability was derived.( ) the first and second gospels state that when jesus { } cried with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit, "the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom."( ) the third synoptic associates this occurrence with the eclipse of the sun, and narrates it before the final cry and death of the master.( ) the fourth gospel takes no notice of so extraordinary a phenomenon. the question might be asked: how could the chief priests, who do not appear to have been at all convinced by such a miracle, but still continued their invincible animosity against the christian sect, reveal the occurrence of such a wonder, of which there is no mention elsewhere? here again the account is legendary and symbolical,( ) and in the spirit of the age of miracles.( ) the first synoptist, however, has further marvels to relate. he states in continuation of the passage quoted above: "and the earth was shaken [------] and the rocks were rent and the sepulchres were opened, and many bodies of the saints who slept were raised; and they came out of the sepulchres after his resurrection, and entered into the holy city and appeared unto many."( ) how great must be the amazement of anyone who may have been inclined to suppose the gospels soberly historical works, on finding that the other three evangelists do not even mention these { } astounding occurrences related by the first synoptist! an earthquake [------]( ) and the still more astounding resurrection of many saints who appeared unto "many," and, therefore, an event by no means secret and unknown to all but the writer, and yet three other writers, who give accounts of the crucifixion and death of jesus, and who enter throughout into very minute details, do not even condescend to mention them! nor does any other new testament writer chronicle them. it is unnecessary to say that the passage has been a very serious difficulty for apologists; and one of the latest writers of this school, reproducing the theories of earlier critics, deals with it in a life of christ, which "is avowedly and unconditionally the work of a believer,"( ) as follows: "an earthquake shook the earth and split the rocks, and as it rolled away from their places the great stones which closed and covered the cavern sepulchres of the jews, so it seemed to the imaginations of many to have disimprisoned the spirits of the dead, and to have filled the air with ghostly visitants, who after christ had risen appeared to linger in the holy city." in a note he adds "only in some such way as this can i account for the singular and wholly isolated allusion of matt. xxvii. , ."( ) it is worthy of note, and we may hereafter { } refer to the point, that learned divines thus do not scruple to adopt the "vision hypothesis" of the resurrection. even if the resurrection of the saints so seriously related by the evangelist be thus disposed of, and it be assumed that the other gospels, likewise adopting the "vision" explanation, consequently declined to give an objective place in their narrative to what they believed to be a purely subjective and unreal phenomenon, there still remains the earthquake, to which supernatural incident of the crucifixion none of the other evangelists think it worth while to refer. need we argue that the earthquake( ) is as mythical as the resurrection of the saints?( ) in some apocryphal writings even the names of some of these risen saints are given.( ) as the case actually stands, with these marvellous incidents related solely by the first synoptist and ignored by the other evangelists, it would seem superfluous to enter upon more detailed criticism of the passage, and to point out the incongruity of the { } fact that these saints are said to be raised from the dead just as the messiah expires, or the strange circumstance that, although the sepulchres are said to have been opened at that moment and the resurrection to have then taken place, it is stated that they only came out of their graves after the resurrection of jesus. the allegation, moreover, that they were raised from the dead at that time, and before the resurrection of jesus, virtually contradicts the saying of the apocalypse (i. ) that jesus was the "first begotten of the dead," and of paul ( cor. xv. ) that he was "the first fruits of them who have fallen asleep."( ) paul's whole argument is opposed to such a story; for he does not base the resurrection of the dead upon the death of jesus, but, in contradistinction, upon his resurrection only. the synoptist evidently desires to associate the resurrection of the saints with the death of jesus to render that event more impressive, but delays the completion of it in order to give a kind of precedence to the resurrection of the master. the attempt leads to nothing but confusion. what could be the object of such a resurrection? it could not be represented as any effect produced by the death of jesus, nor even by his alleged resurrection, for what dogmatic connection could there be between that event and the fact that a few saints only were raised from their graves, whilst it was not pretended that the dead "saints" generally participated in this resurrection? no intimation is given that their appearance to many was for any special purpose, and certainly no practical result has ever been traced to it. finally we might ask: what became of these saints raised from the dead? did they die again? or did they also "ascend into heaven?"( ) can the author of the apocalypse, or paul, ever have heard of the raising of lazarus? { } a little reflection will show that these questions are pertinent. it is almost inconceivable that any serious mind could maintain the actual truth of such a story, upon such evidence. its objective truth not being maintainable, however, the character of the work which advances such an unhesitating statement is determined, and at least the value of its testimony can without difficulty be settled. the continuation of this episode in the first synoptic is quite in keeping with its commencement. it is stated: "but when the centurion and they that were with him watching jesus saw the earthquake [------] and the things that were done [------] they feared greatly, saying, truly this was a son of god" [------].( ) in mark the statement is very curiously varied: "and when the centurion who stood over against him saw that he so expired, he said: truly this man was a son of god."( ) it is argued on the one hand that the centurion's wonder here was caused by jesus dying with so loud a cry, and the reading of many mss. would clearly support this;( ) and on the other that the cause of his exclamation was the unexpectedly rapid death of jesus. whichever view be taken, the centurion's deduction, it must be admitted, rests upon { } singularly inconclusive reasoning. we venture to think that it is impossible that a roman soldier could either have been led to form such an opinion upon such grounds, or to express it in such terms. in luke, we have a third reading: "but when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified god, saying: certainly this man was righteous"( ) [------]. there is nothing here about the "son of god;" but when the writer represents the roman soldier as glorifying god, the narrative does not seem much more probable than that of the other synoptists. the fourth evangelist of course does not refer to any such episode, but, as usual, he introduces a very remarkable incident of his own, of which the synoptists, who record such peculiar details of what passed, seem very strangely to know nothing. the fourth evangelist states: "the jews, therefore, because it was the preparation, that the bodies might not remain upon the cross on the sabbath, (for that sabbath-day was a high day), besought pilate that their legs might be broken and they might be taken away. so the soldiers came and brake the legs of the first, and of the other who was crucified with him, but when they came to jesus, as they saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs; but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith there came out blood and water. and he that hath seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true: and that man knoweth that he saith what is true, that ye also may believe. for these things came to pass that the scripture might be fulfilled: a bone of him shall not be broken. and again another scripture saith: they shall look on him whom they pierced."( ) it is inconceivable that, if this { } actually occurred, and occurred more especially that the "scripture might be fulfilled," the other three evangelists could thus totally ignore it all.( ) the second synoptist does more: he not only ignores but excludes it, for (xv. f.) he represents joseph as begging the body of jesus from pilate "when evening was now come." "and pilate marvelled if he were already dead; and calling unto him the centurion, he asked him whether he had been long dead. and when he knew it of the centurion he gave the corpse to joseph."( ) now, although there could be no doubt on the point, the fourth gospel clearly states (xix. , [------] that joseph made his request for the body after the order had been given by pilate to break the legs of the crucified, and after it had been executed as above described. if pilate had already given the order to break the legs, how is it possible he could have marvelled, or acted as he is described in mark to have done? it is well known that the crurifragium, which is here applied, was not usually an accompaniment of crucifixion, though it may have been sometimes employed along with it,( ) but that it was a distinct punishment. it consisted in breaking, with hammers or clubs, the bones of the condemned from the hips to the feet. we shall not discuss whether in the present case this measure really was adopted or not. the representation is that the jews requested pilate to break the legs of the crucified that the bodies might be removed before the sabbath, and { } that the order was given and executed. the first point to be noted is the very singular manner in which the leg-breaking was performed. the soldiers are said to have broken the legs of the first and then of the other who was crucified with jesus, thus passing over jesus in the first instance; and then the evangelist says: "_but when they came to jesus_, as they saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs, but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side." this order of procedure is singular; but the whole conduct of the guard is so extraordinary that such details become comparatively insignificant. an order having been given to the roman soldiers, in accordance with the request of the jews, to break the legs of the crucified, we are asked to believe that they did not execute it in the case of jesus! it is not reasonable to suppose, however, that roman soldiers either were in the habit of disregarding their orders, or could have any motive for doing so in this case, and subjecting themselves to the severe punishment for disobedience inflicted by roman military law. it is argued that they saw that jesus was already dead, and therefore that it was not necessary to break his legs; but soldiers are not in the habit of thinking in this way: they are disciplined to obey. the fact is, however, that the certainty that jesus was dead already did not actually exist in their minds, and could scarcely have existed seeing that the death was so singularly rapid, for in that case why should the soldier have pierced his side with a spear? the only conceivable motive for doing so was to make sure that jesus really was dead;( ) but is it possible to suppose that a roman soldier, being in the slightest doubt, actually chose to assure himself in { } this way when he might still more effectually have done so by simply obeying the order of his superior and breaking the legs? the whole episode is manifestly un-historical.( ) it is clear that to fulfil in a marked way the prophecies which the writer had in his mind, and wished specially to apply to jesus, it was necessary that, in the first place, there should have been a distinct danger of the bones being broken, and at the same time of the side not being pierced. the order to break the legs of the crucified is therefore given, but an extraordinary exception is made in favour of jesus, and a thrust with the lance substituted, so that both passages of the scripture are supposed to be fulfilled.( ) what scriptures, however, are fulfilled? the first: "a bone of him shall not be broken," is merely the prescription with regard to the paschal lamb, ex. xii. ,( ) and the dogmatic view of the fourth evangelist leads him throughout to represent jesus as the true paschal lamb. the second is zech. xii. ,( ) and any one who reads the passage, even without the assistance of learned exegesis, may perceive that it has no such application as our evangelist gives it. we shall pass over, as not absolutely necessary for our immediate purpose, very many important details of the episode; but regarding this part of the subject we may say that we consider it evident that, if an order was given to break the legs of the crucified upon this occasion, that { } order must have been executed upon jesus equally with any others who may have been crucified with him. there has been much discussion as to the intention of the author in stating that, from the wound made by the lance, there forthwith came out "blood and water" [------]; and likewise as to whether the special testimony here referred to in the third person is to attest more immediately the flow of blood and water, or the whole episode.( ) in regard to the latter point, we need not pause to discuss the question.( ) as to the "blood and water," some see in the statement made an intention to show the reality of the death of jesus,( ) whilst others more rightly regard the phenomenon described as a representation of a supernatural and symbolical incident,( ) closely connected with the whole dogmatic view of the gospel. it is impossible not to see in this the same idea as that expressed in john v. : "this is he that came by water and blood, jesus christ; not in the water only, but in the water and the blood."( ) as a natural incident it cannot be entertained, for in no sense but mere quibbling could it be said that "blood and water" could flow from such a wound, and as a supernatural { } phenomenon it must be rejected. as a proof of the reality of the death of jesus, it could only have been thought of at a time when gross ignorance prevailed upon all medical subjects. we shall not here discuss the reality of the death of jesus, but we may merely point out that the almost unprecedentedly rapid decease of jesus was explained by origen( ) and some of the fathers as miraculous. it has been argued that the thrust of the lance may have been intended to silence those objectors who might have denied the actual death on the ground that the legs of jesus were not broken like those of the two malefactors,( ) and it certainly is generally quoted as having assured the fact of death. the statement that blood flowed from the wound, however, by no means supports the allegation and, although we may make little use of the argument, it is right to say that there is no evidence of any serious kind advanced of the reality of the death of jesus, here or in the other gospels.( ) the author of the fourth gospel himself seems to betray that this episode is a mere interpolation of his own into a narrative to which it does not properly belong.( ) according to his own account (xix. ), the jews besought pilate that the legs might be broken and that the bodies "might be taken away" [------], the order to do this was obviously given, it has likewise been thought that the representation in mark xv. , that pilate marvelled at the rapid death of jesus, and sent for the centurion to ascertain the fact, was made to meet similar doubts, or at least to give assurance of the reality of the death. { } for the legs are forthwith broken and of coarse, immediately after, the bodies in pursuance of the same order would have been taken away. as soon as the evangelist has secured his purpose of showing how the scriptures were fulfilled by means of this episode, he takes up the story as though it had not been interrupted, and proceeds v. : "after these things" [------], that is to say after the legs of the malefactors had been broken and the side of jesus pierced, joseph besought pilate that he might take away the body of jesus, and pilate gave leave. but, if v. f. be historical, the body must already have been taken away. all the synoptics agree with the fourth gospel in stating that joseph of arimathaea begged for and obtained the body of jesus from pilate.( ) the second and third synoptics describe him as belonging to the council, but the first gospel merely calls him "a rich man," whilst the fourth omits both of these descriptions. they all call him a disciple of jesus--secretly for fear of the jews, the fourth gospel characteristically adds--although the term that he was "waiting for the kingdom of god," used by the second and third gospels, is somewhat vague. the fourth gospel, however, introduces a second personage in the shape of nicodemus, "who at the first came to him by night,"( ) and who, it will be remembered, had previously been described as "a ruler of the jews."( ) the synoptics do not once mention such a person, either in the narrative of the passion or in the earlier chapters, and there are more than doubts as to his historical character.( ) the accounts of the entombment given by the three according to luke xxiii. , joseph actually "took down" the body. { } synoptists, or at least by the second and third, distinctly exclude the narrative of the fourth gospel, both as regards nicodemus and the part he is represented as taking. the contradictions which commence here between the account of the fourth gospel and the synoptics, in fact, are of the most glaring and important nature, and demand marked attention. the fourth gospel states that, having obtained permission from pilate, joseph came and took the body of jesus away. "and there came also nicodemus,... bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pound weight. they took, therefore, the body of jesus, and wound it in linen cloths with the spices, as the manner of the jews is to bury. now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulchre wherein was never man yet laid. there, therefore, on account of the preparation of the jews [------], they laid jesus, for the sepulchre was at hand" [------].( ) according to the first synoptic, when joseph took the body, he simply wrapped it "in clean linen" [------] and "laid it in his own new sepulchre, which he hewed in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed."( ) there is no mention of spices or any anointing of the body,( ) and the statement that the women provide for this is not made in this gospel. according to the writer, the burial is complete, and the sepulchre finally closed. mary magdalene and the other mary come merely "to behold the sepulchre" at the end of the { } sabbath.( ) the fourth evangelist apparently does not know anything of the sepulchre being joseph's own tomb, and the body is, according to him, although folly embalmed, only laid in the sepulchre in the garden on account of the sabbath and because it was at hand. we shall refer to this point, which must be noted, further on. there are very striking differences between these two accounts, but the narratives of the second and third synoptists are still more emphatically contradictory of both. in mark,( ) we are told that joseph "bought linen, and took him down and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which had been hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone against the door of the sepulchre." there is no mention here of any embalming performed by joseph or nicodemus, nor are any particulars given as to the ownership of the sepulchre, or the reasons for its selection. we are, however, told:( ) "and when the sabbath was past, mary magdalene and mary the mother of james, and salome, bought spices that they might come and anoint him." it is distinctly stated in connection with the entombment, moreover, in agreement with the first synoptic:( ) "and mary magdalene and mary the mother of joses beheld where he was laid."( ) according to this account and that of the first gospel, the women, having remained to the last and seen the body deposited in the sepulchre, knew so little of its having been embalmed by joseph and nicodemus, that they actually purchase the spices and come to perform that office themselves. in luke, the statement is still more specific, in { } agreement with mark, and in contradiction to the fourth gospel. joseph took down the body "and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.... and women who had come with him out of galilee followed after, and beheld the sepulchre _and how his body was laid_. and they returned and prepared spices and ointments." upon the first day of the week, the author adds: "they came unto the sepulchre bringing the spices which they had prepared."( ) which of these accounts are we to believe? according to the first gospel, there is no embalmment at all; according to the second and third gospels, the embalmment is undertaken by the women, and not by joseph and nicodemus, but is never carried out; according to the fourth gospel, the embalmment is completed on friday evening by joseph and nicodemus, and not by the women. according to the first gospel, the burial is completed on friday evening; according to the second and third, it is only provisional; and according to the fourth, the embalmment is final, but it is doubtful whether the entombment is final or temporary; several critics consider it to have been only provisional.( ) in mark, the women buy the spices "when the sabbath was past" [------];( ) in luke before it has begun;( ) and in matthew and john they do not buy them at all. in the first and fourth gospels, the women come after the sabbath merely to behold the sepulchre,( ) and in the second and third, they bring the spices to complete the burial. { } amid these conflicting statements we may suggest one consideration. it is not probable, in a hot climate, that a wounded body, hastily laid in a sepulchre on friday evening before six o'clock, would be disturbed again on sunday morning for the purpose of being anointed and embalmed. corruption would, under the circumstances, already have commenced. besides, as keim(l) has pointed out, the last duties to the dead were not forbidden amongst the jews on the sabbath, and there is really no reason why any care for the body of the master which reverence or affection might have dictated should not at once have been bestowed. the enormous amount of myrrh and aloes--"about a hundred pound weight" [------]--brought by nicodemus has excited much discussion, and adds to the extreme improbability of the story related by the fourth evangelist.( ) to whatever weight the [------] may be reduced, the quantity specified is very great; and it is a question whether the body thus enveloped "as the manner of the jews is to bury" could have entered the sepulchre. the practice of embalming the dead, although well known amongst the jews, and invariable in the case of kings and noble or very wealthy persons, was by no means generally prevalent in the burial of gamaliel the elder, chief of the party of the pharisees, it is stated that over pounds of balsam were burnt in his honour by the proselyte onkelos;( ) but this quantity, which was considered very { } remarkable, is totally eclipsed by the provision of nicodemus. the key to the whole of this history of the burial of jesus, however, is to be found in the celebrated chapt. liii. of "isaiah." we have already, in passing, pointed out that, in the third gospel (xxii. ), jesus is represented as saying: "for i say unto you, that this which is written must be accomplished in me: and he was reckoned among transgressors." the same quotation from is. liii. is likewise interpolated in mk. xv. . now the whole representation of the burial and embalmment of jesus is evidently based upon the same chapter, and more especially upon v. , which is wrongly rendered both in the authorized version and in the septuagint, in the latter of which the passage reads: "i will give the wicked for his grave and the rich for his death."( ) the evangelists taking this to be the sense of the passage, which they suppose to be a messianic prophecy, have represented the death of jesus as being with the wicked, crucified as he is between two robbers; and through joseph of arimathaea, significantly called "a rich man" [------] by the first synoptist, especially according to the fourth evangelist by his addition of the counsellor nicodemus and his hundred pounds weight of mingled myrrh and aloes, as being "with the rich in his death." unfortunately, the passage in the "prophecy" does not mean what the evangelists have been led to understand, and the ablest hebrew scholars and critics are now agreed that both phrases quoted refer, in true hebrew manner, to one representation, and that the word above { } translated "rich" is not used in a favourable sense, but that the passage must be rendered: "and they made his grave with the wicked and his sepulchre with the evil-doers," or words to that effect.( ) without going minutely into the details of opinion on the subject of the "servant of jehovah" in this writing of the old testament, we may add that upon one point at least the great majority of critics are of one accord: that is. liii. and other passages of "isaiah" describing the sufferings of the "servant of jehovah" have no reference to the messiah.( ) as we have { } touched upon this subject it may not be out of place to add that psalms xxii.( ) and lxix.,( ) which are so frequently quoted in connection with the passion, and represented by new testament and other early writers as messianic, are determined by sounder principles of criticism applied to them in modern times not to refer to the messiah at all. we have elsewhere spoken of other supposed messianic psalms quoted in the new testament.( ) "we now come to a remarkable episode which is peculiar to the first synoptic and strangely ignored by all the other gospels. it is stated that the next day--that is to say, on the sabbath--the chief priests and the pharisees came together to pilate, saying: "sir, we remember that that deceiver said while he was yet alive: after three { } days i am raised [------]. command, therefore, that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come and steal him away and say unto the people: he is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the first. pilate said unto them: ye have a guard [------]: go, make it as sure as ye can. so they went and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, with the guard."(l) not only do the other evangelists pass over this strange proceeding in total silence, but their narratives exclude it, at least those of the second and third synoptists do so. the women came with their spices to embalm the body, in total ignorance of there being any guard to interfere with their performance of that last sad office for the master. we are asked to believe that the chief priests and the pharisees actually desecrated the sabbath by sealing the stone, and visited the house of the heathen pilate on so holy a day, for the purpose of asking for the guard.( ) these priests are said to have remembered and understood a prophecy of jesus regarding his resurrection, of which his disciples are represented to be in ignorance.( ) the remark about "the last error," moreover, is very suspicious. the ready acquiescence of pilate is quite incredible.( ) that he should employ roman soldiers to watch the sepulchre of a man who had been crucified cannot be entertained; and his friendly: "go, make it as sure as ye { } can," is not in the spirit of pilate. it is conceivable that to satisfy their clamour he may, without much difficulty, have consented to crucify a jew, more especially as his crime was of a political character represented as in some degree affecting the roman power; but, once crucified, it is not in the slightest degree likely that pilate would care what became of his body, and still less that he would employ roman soldiers to mount guard over it. it may be as well to dispose finally of this episode, so we at once proceed to its conclusion. when the resurrection takes place, it is stated that some of the guard went into the city, and, instead of making their report to pilate, as might have been expected, told the chief priests all that had occurred. a council is held, and the soldiers are largely bribed, and instructed: "say that his disciples came by night and stole him while we slept. and if this come to the governor's ears we will persuade him and make you free from care. so they took the money and did as they were taught."( ) nothing could be more simple than the construction of the story, which follows the usual broad lines of legend. the idea of roman soldiers confessing that they slept whilst on watch, and allowed that to occur which they were there to prevent! and this to oblige the chief priests and elders, at the risk of their lives! then are we to suppose that the chief priests and council believed this story of the earthquake and angel, and yet acted in this way? and if they did not believe it, would not the very story itself have led to the punishment of the men, and to the confirmation of the report they desired to spread, that the disciples had stolen the body? the large bribe seems to have been very ineffectual, however, since the christian historian is able to report precisely what the { } chief priests and elders instruct them to say.( ) is it not palpable that the whole story is legendary?( ) if it be so, and we think it cannot be doubted, a conclusion which the total silence of the other gospels seems to confirm, very suggestive consequences may be deduced from it. the first synoptist, referring to the false report which the sanhedrin instruct the soldiers to make, says: "and this saying was spread among the jews unto this day."( ) the probable origin of the legend, therefore, may have been an objection to the christian affirmation of the resurrection to the above effect; but it is instructive to find that christian tradition was equal to the occasion, and invented a story to refute it. it is the tendency to this very system of defence and confirmation, everywhere apparent, which renders early christian tradition so mythical and untrustworthy. we now enter upon the narrative of the resurrection itself. the first synoptist relates that mary magdalene and the other mary came to behold the sepulchre "at the close of the sabbath, as it began to dawn into the first day of the week" [------],( ) that is to say, shortly after six o'clock on the evening of saturday, the end of the sabbath, the dawn of the next day being marked by the { } glimmer of more than one star in the heavens.( ) the second synoptic represents that, "when the sabbath was past," mary magdalene, and mary the mother of james, and salome bought spices, and that they came to the sepulchre "very early on the first day of the week after the rising of the sun" [------].( ) the third synoptist states that the women who came with jesus from galilee came to the sepulchre, but he subsequently more definitely names them: "mary magdalene, and joanna, and mary the mother of james, and the other women with them,"( )--a larger number of women,--and they came "upon the first day of the week at early dawn" [------]. the fourth evangelist represents that mary magdalene only( ) came to the sepulchre, on the first day of the week, "early, while it was yet dark" [------].( ) the first evangelist indubitably makes the hour at which the women come to the sepulchre different and much earlier than the others, and at the same time he represents them as witnessing the actual removal of the stone, which, in the other three gospels, the women already find rolled away from the mouth of the sepulchre.( ) it will, therefore, be interesting to follow the first synoptic. it is here stated: . "and behold there was a great earthquake [------]: for an angel of the lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. . his appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as { } snow. . and for fear of him the keepers did shake and became as dead men. . and the angel answered and said unto the women: fear ye not, for i know that ye seek jesus, who hath been crucified. . he is not here: for he was raised [------] as he said: come, see the place where he lay. . and go quickly, and tell his disciples that he was raised [------] from the dead, and behold he goeth before you into galilee: there shall ye see him: behold, i have told you. . and they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and ran to tell his disciples."( ) we have here in the first place another earthquake and apparently, on the theory of the course of cosmical phenomena held during the "age of miracles," produced by the angel who descended to roll away the stone from the sepulchre. this earthquake, like the others recorded in the first synoptic, appears to be quite unknown to the other evangelists, and no trace of it has been pointed out in other writings. with the appearance of the angel we obviously arrive upon thoroughly unhistorical ground. can we believe, because this unknown writer tells us so, that "an angel,"( ) causing an earthquake, actually descended and took such a part in this transaction? upon the very commonest compare his description with dan. x. . it is worthy of consideration also that when daniel is cast into the den of lions a stone is rolled upon the mouth of the den, and sealed with the signet of the king and his lords, vi. . { } principles of evidence, the reply must be an emphatic negative. every fact of science, every lesson of experience excludes such an assumption, and we may add that the character of the author, with which we are now better acquainted, as well as the course of the narrative itself, confirms the justice of such a conclusion.( ) if the introduction of the angel be legendary, must not also his words be so? proceeding, however, to examine the narrative as it stands, we must point out a circumstance which may appropriately be mentioned here, and which is well worthy of attention. the women and the guard are present when the stone is rolled away from the sepulchre, but they do not witness the actual resurrection. it is natural to suppose that, when the stone was removed, jesus, who, it is asserted, rises with his body from the dead, would have come forth from the sepulchre: but not so; the angel only says, v. : "he is not here: for he was raised [------];" and he merely invites the women to see the place where he lay. the actual resurrection is spoken of as a thing which had taken place before, and in any case it was not witnessed by any one. in the other gospels, the resurrection has already occurred before any one arrives at the sepulchre; and the remarkable fact is, therefore, absolutely undeniable, that there was not, and that it is not even pretended that there was, a single eye-witness of the actual resurrection. the empty grave, coupled with the supposed subsequent appearances of jesus, is the only evidence of the resurrection. we shall not, however, pursue this further at present. the removal of the stone is not followed by any visible result. the inmate of the sepulchre is not { } observed to issue from it, and yet he is not there. may we not ask what was the use, in this narrative, of the removal of the stone at all? as no one apparently came forth, the only purpose seems to have been to permit those from without to enter and see that the sepulchre was empty. another remarkable point is that the angel desires the women to go quickly and inform the disciples: "he goeth before you into galilee: there shall ye see him." one is tempted to inquire why, as he rose from the dead in jerusalem and, in spite of previous statements, the disciples are represented as being there also,( ) jesus did not appear to them in the holy city, instead of sending them some three days' journey off to galilee. at the same time, jesus is represented by the first two synoptics as saying at the last supper, when warning the disciples that they will all be offended at him that night and be scattered: "but after i shall have been raised, i will go before you into galilee."( ) at present we have only to call attention to the fact that the angel gives the order. with how much surprise, therefore, do we not immediately after read that, as the women departed quickly to tell the disciples in obedience to the angel's message, v. : "behold jesus met them, saying, hail. and they came up to him and laid hold of his feet, and worshipped him. . then saith jesus unto them: be not afraid: go, tell my brethren that they depart into galilee, and there they shall see me."( ) what was the use of the angel's message since jesus himself immediately after appears and delivers the very same instructions in person? this sudden and apparently unnecessary appearance has all the character of an afterthought. one point, { } however, is very clear: that the order to go into galilee and the statement that there first jesus is to appear to the disciples are unmistakable, repeated and peremptory. we must now turn to the second gospel. the women going to the sepulchre with spices that they might anoint the body of jesus--which, according to the fourth gospel, had already been fully embalmed and, in any case, had lain in the sepulchre since the friday evening--are represented as saying amongst themselves: "who will roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?"( ) this is a curious dramatic speculation, but very suspicious. these women are apparently not sufficiently acquainted with joseph of arimathaea to be aware that, as the fourth gospel asserts, the body had already been embalmed, and yet they actually contemplate rolling the stone away from the mouth of a sepulchre which was his property.( ) keim has pointed out that it was a general rule( ) that, after a sepulchre had been closed in the way described, it should not again be opened. generally, the stone was not placed against the opening of the sepulchre till the third day, when corruption had already commenced; but here the sepulchre is stated by all the gospels to have been closed on the first day, and the unhesitating intention of the women to remove the stone is not a happy touch on the part of the second synoptist. they find the stone already rolled away.( ) ver. : "and entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were mk. xvi. . the continuation: "for it was very great" [-- ----], is peculiar, but of course intended to represent the difficulty of its removal. { } affrighted. . and he saith unto them: be not affrighted: ye seek jesus of nazareth, the crucified: he was raised [------]; he is not here; behold the place where they laid him. . but go, tell his disciples and peter that he goeth before you into galilee; there shall ye see him, as he said unto you. . and they went out and fled from the sepulchre: for trembling and astonishment seized them, and they said nothing to any one; for they were afraid."( ) in matthew, the angel rolls away the stone from the sepulchre and sits upon it, and the women only enter to see where jesus lay, upon his invitation. here, they go in at once, and see the angel ("a young man") sitting at the right side, and are affrighted. he re assures them and, as in the other narrative, says: "he was raised." he gives them the same message to his disciples and to peter, who is specially named, and the second synoptic thus fully confirms the first in representing galilee as the place where jesus is to be seen by them. it is curious that the women should say nothing to anyone about this wonderful event, and in this the statements of the other gospels are certainly not borne out. there is one remarkable point to be noticed, however, that, according to the second synoptist also, not only is there no eye-witness of the resurrection, but the only evidence of that marvellous occurrence which it contains is the information of the "young man," which is clearly no evidence at all. there is no appearance of jesus to any one narrated, and it would seem as though the appearance described in { } matt, xxviii. f. is excluded. it is well known that mark xvi. - did not form part of the original gospel and is inauthentic. it is unnecessary to argue a point so generally admitted. the verses now appended to the gospel are by a different author and are of no value as evidence. we, therefore, exclude them from consideration. in luke, as in the second synoptic, the women find the stone removed, and here it is distinctly stated that "on entering in they found not the body of the lord jesus. . and it came to pass as they were perplexed thereabout, behold two men stood by them in shining garments; . and as they were afraid, and bowed their faces to the earth, they said unto them: why seek ye the living among the dead? . he is not here, but was raised [------]; remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in galilee, . saying, that the son of man must be delivered up into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified and the third day rise again. . and they remembered his words, . and returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven and to all the rest.... . and these words appeared to them as an idle tale, and they believed them not."( ) the author of the third gospel is not content with one angel, like the first two synoptists, but introduces "two men in shining garments," who seem suddenly to stand beside the women, and instead of re-assuring them, as in the former narratives, rather adopt a tone of reproof (v. ). they inform the women that "jesus was raised;" and here again not only has no one been an eye-witness of the resurrection, but the women only hear of it from the angels. there is one striking peculiarity in the above { } account. there is no mention whatever of jesus going before his disciples into galilee to be seen of them, nor indeed of his being seen at all; but "galilee" is introduced by way of a reminiscence. instead of the future, the third synoptist substitutes the past and, as might be expected, he gives no hint of any appearances of jesus to the disciples beyond the neighbourhood of jerusalem. when the women tell the disciples what they have seen and heard, they do not believe them. the thief on the cross, according to the writer, was more advanced in his faith and knowledge than the apostles. setting aside mat. xxviii. , , we have hitherto no other affirmation of the resurrection than the statement that the sepulchre was found empty, and the angels announced that jesus was raised from the dead. the account of the fourth evangelist, however, differs completely from the narratives of all the synoptists. according to him, mary magdalene alone comes to the sepulchre and sees the stone taken away. she therefore runs and comes to simon peter and to "the other disciple whom jesus loved," saying: "they took [------] the lord out of the sepulchre and we know not [------]( ) where they laid [------] him. . peter, therefore, went forth and the other disciple, and came to the sepulchre. . and the two ran together; and the other disciple outran peter and came first to the sepulchre; . and stooping down, looking in, he seeth the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in. c. then cometh simon peter following him and went into the from the use of this plural, as we have already pointed out, it is argued that there were others with mary who are not named. this by no means follows, but if it were the case the peculiarity of the narrative becomes all the more apparent. { } sepulchre and beholdeth the linen clothes lying, . and the napkin that was on his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped in one place by itself. . then went in, therefore, the other disciple also, who came first to the sepulchre, and he saw and believed. . for as yet they knew not the scriptures, that he must rise again from the dead. . so the disciples went away to their own homes."( ) critics have long ago pointed out the careful way in which the actions of "the beloved disciple" and peter are balanced in this narrative. if the "other disciple" outstrips peter, and first looks into the sepulchre, peter first actually enters; and if peter first sees the careful arrangement of the linen clothes, the other sees and believes. the evident care with which the writer metes out a share to each disciple in this visit to the sepulchre, of which the synoptics seem totally ignorant, is very suggestive of artistic arrangement, and the careful details regarding the folding and position of the linen clothes, which has furnished so much matter for apologetic reasoning, seems to us to savour more of studied composition than natural observation. so very much is passed over in complete silence which is of the very highest importance, that minute details like these, which might well be composed in the study, do not produce so much effect as some critics think they should do. there is some ambiguity as to what the disciple "believed," according to v. , when he went into the sepulchre; and some understand that he simply believed what mary magdalene had told them (v. ), whilst others hold that he believed in the resurrection, which, taken in connection with the following verse, seems undoubtedly to be the author's meaning. if the former were the reading it would be too trifling a point to be so { } prominently mentioned, and it would not accord with the contented return home of the disciples. accepting the latter sense, it is instructive to observe the very small amount of evidence with which "the beloved disciple" is content. he simply finds the sepulchre empty and the linen clothes lying, and although no one even speaks of the resurrection, no one professes to have been an eye-witness of it, and "as yet they know not the scriptures, that he must rise again from the dead," he is nevertheless said to see and believe. it will have been observed that as yet, although the two disciples have both entered the sepulchre, there has been no mention whatever of angels: they certainly did not see any. in immediate continuation of the narrative, however, we learn that when they have gone home, mary magdalene, who was standing without at the tomb weeping, stooped down and, looking into the sepulchre,--where just before the disciples had seen no one,--she beheld "two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of jesus lay. . they say unto her: woman, why weepest thou? she saith unto them: because they took away [------] my lord, and i know not where they laid him."( ) this again is a very different representation and conversation from that reported in the other gospels. do we acquire any additional assurance as to the reality of the angels and the historical truth of their intervention from this narrative? we think not. mary magdalene repeats to the angels almost the very words she had said to the disciples, v. . are we to suppose that "the beloved disciple," who saw and believed, did not communicate his conviction to the others, and that mary was left { } precisely in the same doubt and perplexity as before, without an idea that anything had happened except that the body had been taken away and she knew not where it had been laid? she appears to have seen and spoken to the angels with singular composure. their sudden appearance does not even seem to have surprised her. we must, however, continue the narrative, and it is well to remark the maintenance, at first, of the tone of affected ignorance, as well as the dramatic construction of the whole scene: v. . "having said this, she turned herself back and beholdeth jesus standing, and knew not that it was jesus. . jesus saith unto her: woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? she, supposing that it was the gardener, saith unto him: sir, if thou didst bear him hence, tell me where thou didst lay him, and i will take him away. . jesus saith unto her: mary. she turned herself, and saith unto him in hebrew:( ) rabboni, which is to say, master. . jesus saith unto her: touch me not [------]; for i have not yet ascended to the father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them: i ascend unto my father and your father, and my god and your god. . mary magdalene cometh announcing to the disciples that she has seen the lord, and he spake these things unto her."( ) to those who attach weight to these narratives and consider them historical, it must appear astonishing that mary, who up to the very last had been closely associated with jesus, does not recognise him when he thus appears to her, but supposes him at first to be the gardener. as part of the evidence of the gospel, however, this is the reading of the vatican and sinaitic codices, besides d and many other important mss. { } such a trait is of much importance, and must hereafter be alluded to. after a couple of days not know jesus whom she had daily seen for so long! the interpretation of the reply of jesus, v. : "touch me not," &c, has long been a bone of contention among critics, but it does not sufficiently affect the inquiry upon which we are engaged to require discussion here.( ) only one point may be mentioned in passing, that if, as has been supposed in connection with mt. xxviii. , jesus be understood to repel, as premature, the worship of mary, that very passage of the first gospel, in which there is certainly no discouragement of worship, refutes the theory. we shall not say more about the construction of this dialogue, but we may point out that, as so many unimportant details are given throughout the narrative, it is somewhat remarkable that the scene terminates so abruptly, and leaves so much untold that it would have been of the utmost consequence for us to know. what became of jesus, for instance? did he vanish suddenly? or did he bid mary farewell, and leave her like one in the flesh? did she not inquire why he did not join the brethren? whither he was going? it is scarcely possible to tell us less than the writer has done; and as it cannot be denied that such minor points as where the linen clothes { } lay, or whether mary "turned herself back" (v. ) or "turned herself" (v. ) merely, cannot be compared in interest and importance to the supposed movements and conduct of jesus under such circumstances, the omission to relate the end of the interview, or more particular details of it, whilst those graphic touches are inserted, is singularly instructive. it is much more important to notice that here again there is no mention of galilee, nor, indeed, of any intention to show himself to the disciples anywhere, but simply the intimation sent to them: "i ascend unto my father and your father," &c, a declaration which seems emphatically to exclude further "appearances," and to limit the vision of the risen jesus to mary magdalene. certainly this message implies in the clearest way that the ascension was then to take place, and the only explanation of the abrupt termination of the scene immediately after this is said is, that, as he spoke, jesus then ascended. the subsequent appearances related in this gospel must, consequently, either be regarded as an after-thought, or as visions of jesus after he had ascended. this demands serious attention. we shall see that after sending this message to his disciples he is represented as appearing to them on the evening of the very same day. according to the third synoptic, the first appearance of jesus to any one after the resurrection was not to the women, and not to mary magdalene, but to two brethren,( ) who were not apostles at all, the name of one of whom, we are told, was cleopas.( ) the story of the walk to emmaus is very dramatic and interesting, but it is clearly legendary.( ) none of the other evangelists { } seem to know anything of it. it is difficult to suppose that jesus should after his resurrection appear first of all to two unknown christians in such a manner, and accompany them in such a journey. the particulars of the story are to the last degree improbable, and in its main features incredible, and it is indeed impossible to consider them carefully without perceiving the transparent inauthenticity of the narrative. the two disciples were going to a village called emmaus threescore furlongs distant from jerusalem, and while they are conversing jesus joins them, "but their eyes were holden that they should not know him." he asks the subject of their discourse, and pretends ignorance, which surprises them. hearing the expression of their perplexity and depression, he says to them: . "o foolish and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spake. . was it not necessary that the christ should suffer these things, and enter into his glory? . and beginning at moses and at all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself." when they reach the village, he pretends to be going further (v. ), but they constrain him to stay. . "and it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them he took the bread and blessed and brake, and gave to them; . and their eyes were opened, and they knew him, and he vanished out of their sight." now why all this mystery? why were their eyes holden that they should not know him? why pretend ignorance? why make "as though he would go further?" considering the nature and number of the alleged appearances of jesus, this episode seems most disproportionate and { } inexplicable. the final incident completes our conviction of the unreality of the whole episode: after the sacramental blessing and breaking of bread, jesus vanishes in a manner which removes the story from the domain of history. on their return to jerusalem, the synoptist adds that they find the eleven, and are informed that "the lord was raised and was seen by simon." of this appearance we are not told anything more. whilst the two disciples from emmaus were relating these things to the eleven, the third synoptist states that jesus himself stood in the midst of them: v. . "but they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they saw a spirit." the apparent intention is to represent a miraculous sudden entry of jesus into the midst of them, just as he had vanished at emmaus; but, in order to re-assure them, jesus is represented as saying: v. . "behold my hands and my feet, that it is i myself; handle me and behold, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me having. . and while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said unto them: have ye here any food? . and they gave him a piece of a broiled fish.( ) . and he took it and did eat before them," the care with which the writer demonstrates that jesus rose again with his own body is remarkable, for not only does he show his hands and feet, we may suppose for the purpose of exhibiting the wounds made by the nails by which he was affixed to the cross, but he eats, and thereby proves himself to be still possessed of his human organism. it is apparent, however, that there is direct contradiction between this and the representation of his vanishing at emmaus, { } and standing in the midst of them now. the synoptist who is so lavish in his use of miraculous agency naturally sees no incongruity here. one or other alternative must be adopted:--if jesus possessed his own body after his resurrection and could eat and be handled, he could not vanish; if he vanished, he could not have been thus corporeal. the aid of a miracle has to be invoked in order to reconcile the representations. we need not here criticise the address which he is supposed to make to the disciples,( ) but we must call attention to the one point that jesus (v. ) commands the disciples to tarry in jerusalem until they be "clothed with power from on high." this completes the exclusion of all appearances in galilee, for the narrative proceeds to say, that jesus led them out towards bethany and lifted up his hands and blessed them: v. . "and it came to pass, while blessing them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven;" whilst they returned to jerusalem, where they "were continually in the temple" praising god. we shall return to the ascension presently, but, in the meantime, it is well that we should refer to the accounts of the other two gospels. according to the fourth gospel, on the first day of the week, after sending to his disciples the message regarding his ascension, which we have discussed, when it was evening: xx. . "and the doors having been shut where the disciples were, for fear of the jews, jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them: peace be unto you. . and having said this, he the statement in xxiv. , however, is suggestive as showing how the fulfilment of the prophets and psalms is in the mind of the writer. we have seen how much this idea influenced the account of the passion in the gospels. { } showed unto them both his hands and his side. the disciples, therefore, rejoiced when they saw the lord. . so then he said to them again: peace be unto you: as the father hath sent me, i also send you. . and when he said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, receive ye the holy spirit: . whosesoever sins ye forgive they are forgiven unto them; whosesoever ye retain they are retained." this appearance of jesus to the eleven bears so far analogy to that in the third gospel, which we have just examined, that it occurs upon the same day and to the same persons. is it probable that jesus appeared twice upon the same evening to the eleven disciples? the account in the fourth gospel itself confirms the only reasonable reply: that he did not do so; but the narrative in the third synoptic renders the matter certain. that appearance was the first to the eleven (xxiv. f.), and he then conducted them towards bethany, and ascended into heaven (v. f.). how then, we may inquire, could two accounts of the same event differ so fundamentally? it is absolutely certain that both cannot be true. is it possible to suppose that the third synoptist could forget to record the extraordinary powers supposed to have been on this occasion bestowed upon the ten apostles to forgive sins and to retain them? is it conceivable that he would not relate the circumstance that jesus breathed upon them, and endowed them with the holy ghost? indeed, as regards the latter point, he seems to exclude it, v. , and in the acts (ii.) certainly represents the descent of the holy spirit as taking place at pentecost. on the other hand, can we suppose that the fourth evangelist would have ignored the walk to bethany and the solemn parting there? or the injunction to remain in jerusalem? { } not to mention other topics. the two episodes cannot be reconciled. in the fourth gospel, instead of showing his hands and feet, jesus is represented as exhibiting "his hands and his side," and that this is not accidental is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that thomas, who is not present, refuses to believe (v. ) unless he see and put his finger into the print of the nails in his hands and put his hand into his side; and jesus, when he appears again, allows him (v. ) to put his finger into his hands and his hand into his side. in the synoptic, the wound made by that mythical lance is ignored and, in the fourth gospel, the wounds in the feet. the omission of the whole episode of the leg-breaking and lance-thrust by the three synoptics thus gains fresh significance. on the other hand, it may be a question whether, in the opinion of the fourth evangelist, the feet of jesus were nailed to the cross at all, or whether, indeed, they were so in fact. it was at least as common, not to say more, that the hands alone of those who were crucified were nailed to the cross, the legs being simply bound to it by cords. opinion is divided as to whether jesus was so bound or whether the feet were likewise nailed, but the point is not important to our examination and need not be discussed, although it has considerable interest in connection with the theory that death did not actually ensue on the cross, but that, having fainted through weakness, jesus, being taken down after so unusually short a time on the cross, subsequently recovered. there is no final evidence upon the point. none of the explanations offered by apologists remove the contradiction between the statement that jesus bestowed the holy spirit upon this occasion and that of the { } third synoptic and acts. there is, however, a curious point to notice in connection with this: thomas is said to have been absent upon this occasion, and the representation, therefore, is that the holy spirit was only bestowed upon ten of the apostles. was thomas excluded? was he thus punished for his unbelief? are we to suppose that an opportunity to bestow the holy spirit was selected when one of the apostles was not present?(l) we have, however, somewhat anticipated the narrative (xx. if.), which relates that upon the occasion above discussed thomas, one of the twelve, was not present, and hearing from the rest that they have seen the lord, he declares that he will not believe without palpable proof by touching his wounds. the evangelist continues: v. . "and after eight days again his disciples were within, and thomas was with them. jesus cometh, the doors having been shut [------], and stood in the midst and said: peace be unto you. . then saith he to thomas: reach hither thy finger and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand and put it into my side, and be not unbelieving but believing. . thomas answered and said unto him: my lord and my god. . jesus saith unto him: because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed." the third synoptic gives evidence that the risen jesus is not incorporeal by stating that he not only permitted himself to be handled, but actually ate food in their presence. the fourth evangelist attains the same result in a more artistic manner through the doubts of thomas, but in allowing him actually to put his finger into the prints of the nails in his hands, and his hand into the { } wound in his side, he asserts that jesus rose with the same body as that which had hung on the cross. he, too, however, whilst doing this, actually endows him with the attribute of incorporeality; for, upon both of the occasions which we are discussing, the statement is markedly made that, when jesus came and stood in the midst, the doors were shut where the disciples were. it can scarcely be doubted that the intention of the writer is to represent a miraculous entry.( ) we are asked, however, to believe that when thomas had convinced himself that it was indeed jesus in the flesh who stood before him, he went to the opposite extreme of belief and said to jesus: [------] "my lord and my god!" in representing that jesus, even before the ascension, was addressed as "god" by one of the twelve, the evangelist commits one of those anachronisms with which we are familiar, in another shape, in the works of great painters, who depict pious bishops of their own time as actors in the scenes of the passion. these touches, however, betray the hand of the artist, and remove the account from the domain of sober history. in the message sent by jesus to his disciples he spoke of ascending "to your god and my god," but the evangelist at the close of his gospel strikes the same note as that upon which he commenced his philosophical prelude. we shall only add one further remark regarding this episode, and it is the repetition of one already made. it is much to be regretted that the writer does not inform us how these interviews of jesus with his disciples terminated. we are told of his entry, but not { } of his mode of departure. did he vanish suddenly? did he depart like other men? then, it would be important to know where jesus abode during the interval of eight days. did he ascend to heaven after each appearance? or did he remain on earth? why did he not consort as before with his disciples? these are not jeering questions, but serious indications of the scantiness of the information given by the evangelists, which is not compensated by some trifling detail of no value occasionally inserted to heighten the reality of a narrative. this is the last appearance of jesus related in the fourth gospel; for the character of ch. xxi. is too doubtful to permit it to rank with the gospel. the appearance of jesus therein related is in fact more palpably legendary than the others. it will be observed that in this gospel, as in the third synoptic, the appearances of jesus are confined to jerusalem and exclude galilee. these two gospels are, therefore, clearly in contradiction with the statement of the first two synoptics.( ) it only remains for us to refer to one more appearance of jesus: that related in the first synoptic, xxviii. ff. in obedience to the command of jesus, the disciples are represented as having gone away into galilee, "unto the mountain where jesus had appointed them." we have not previously heard anything of this specific appointment. the synoptist continues: v. . "and when they saw him they worshipped him, but some doubted. . and jesus came and spake unto them, saying: all authority was given to me [------] in heaven and on earth. . go ye and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit; . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever i commanded you; and lo, i am with { } you all the days, unto the end of the world." this appearance not only is not mentioned in the other gospels, but it excludes the appearances in judaea, of which the writer seems to be altogether ignorant. if he knew of them, he practically denies them. there has been some discussion as to what the doubt mentioned in v. refers, some critics maintaining that "some doubted" as to the propriety of worshipping jesus, whilst others more correctly consider that they doubted as to his identity,( ) but we need not mention the curious apologetic explanations offered.( ) are we to regard the mention of these doubts as an "inestimable proof of the candour of the evangelists"? if so, then we may find fault with the omission to tell us whether, and how, those doubts were set at rest. as the narrative stands, the doubts were not resolved. was it possible to doubt without good reason of the identity of one with whom, until a few days previously, the disciples had been in daily and hourly contact at least for a year, if not longer? doubt in such a case is infinitely more decisive than belief. we can regard the expression, however, in no other light than as a mere rhetorical device in a legendary narrative. the rest of the account ueed have little further discussion here. the extraordinary statement in v. ( ) seems as clearly the expression of later theology as the baptismal formula { } in v. , where the doctrine of the trinity is so definitely expressed. some critics suppose that the eleven were not alone upon this occasion, but that either all the disciples of jesus were present, or at least the brethren l to whom paul refers, cor. xv. g. this mainly rests on the statement that "some doubted," for it is argued that, after the two previous appearances to the disciples in jerusalem mentioned by the other evangelists, it is impossible that the eleven could have felt doubt, and consequently that others must have been present who had not previously been convinced. it is scarcely necessary to point out the utter weakness of such an argument. it is not permissible, however, to patch on to this gospel scraps cut out of the others. it must be clear to every unprejudiced student that the appearances of jesus narrated by the four gospels in galilee and judæa cannot be harmonised,( ) and we have shown that they actually exclude each other.( ) the first synoptist records (v. ) the order for the disciples to go into galilee, and with no further interruption than the { } mention of the return of the discomfited guard from the sepulchre to the chief priest, he (v. ) states that they went into galilee, where they saw jesus in the manner just described. no amount of ingenuity can insert the appearances in jerusalem here without the grossest violation of all common sense. this is the only appearance to the eleven recorded in matthew. we must here again point out the singular omission to relate the manner in which this interview was ended. the episode and the gospel, indeed, are brought to a very artistic close by the expression, "lo, i am with you all the days unto the end of the world," but we must insist that it is a very suggestive fact that it does not occur to these writers to state what became of jesus. no point could have been more full of interest than the manner in which jesus here finally leaves the disciples, and is dismissed from the history. that such an important part of the narrative is omitted is in the highest degree remarkable and significant. had a formal termination to the interview been recounted, it would have been subject to criticism, and by no means necessarily evidence of truth; but it seems to us that the circumstance that it never occurred to these writers to relate the departure of jesus is a very strong indication of the unreality and shadowy nature of the whole tradition. we are thus brought to consider the account of the ascension, which is at least given by one evangelist. in the appendix to the second gospel, as if the later writer felt the omission and desired to complete the narrative, it is vaguely stated: xvi. . "so then after the lord spake unto them he was taken up into heaven and sat on the right hand of god."( ) the { } writer, however, omits to state how he was taken up into heaven; and sitting "at the right hand of god" is an act and position which those who assert the "personality of god" may possibly understand, but which we venture to think betrays that the account is a mere theological figment. the third synoptist, however, as we have incidentally shown, gives an account of the ascension. jesus having, according to the narrative in xxiv. ff., led the disciples out to bethany, lifted up his hands and blessed them: v. . "and it came to pass while blessing them he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven."( ) the whole of the appearances narrated in the third synoptic, therefore, and the ascension are thus said to occur on the same day as the resurrection.( ) in matthew, there is a different representation made, for the time consumed in the journey of the disciples to galilee obviously throws back the ascension to a later date. in mark, there is no appearance at all recorded, but the command to the disciples to go into galilee confirms the first synoptic. in the fourth gospel, jesus revisits the eleven a second time after eight days; and, therefore, the ascension is here { } necessarily later still. in neither of these gospels, however, is there any account of an ascension at all. we may here point out that there is no mention of the ascension in any of the genuine writings of paul, and it would appear that the theory of a bodily ascension, in any shape, did not form part of the oldest christian tradition.( ) the growth of the legend of the ascension is apparent in the circumstance that the author of the third gospel follows a second tradition regarding that event, when composing acts.( ) whether he thought a fuller and more detailed account desirable, or it seemed necessary to prolong the period during which jesus remained on earth after his resurrection and to multiply his appearances, it is impossible to say, but the fact is that he does so. he states in his second work: that to the apostles jesus "presented himself alive after he suffered by many proofs, being seen [------] by them during forty days, and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of god." it is scarcely possible to doubt that the period of forty days is suggested by the old testament( ) and the hebrew use of that number, of which indeed we already find examples in the new testament in the forty days temptation of jesus in the wilderness,( ) and his fasting forty days and forty nights.( ) why { } jesus remained on earth this typical period we are not told,( ) but the representation evidently is of much more prolonged and continuous intercourse with his disciples than any statements in the gospels have led us to suppose, or than the declaration of paul renders in the least degree probable. if indeed the account in acts were true, the numbered appearances recited by paul show singular ignorance of the phenomena of the resurrection. we need not discuss the particulars of the last interview with the apostles, (i. if.) although they are singular enough, and are indeed elsewhere referred to, but at once proceed to the final occurrences: v. . "and when he had spoken these things, while they are looking he was lifted up; and a cloud received him out of their sight. . and as they were gazing stedfastly into the heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; . which also said: men of galilee [------], why stand ye looking into the heaven? this jesus, who was taken up from you into the heaven, shall come in like manner as ye saw him going into the heaven. . then returned they into jerusalem," &c. a definite statement is here made of the mode in which jesus finally ascended into heaven, and it presents some of the incongruities which might have beeu expected. the bodily ascension up the sky in a cloud, apart from the miraculous nature of such an occurrence, seems singularly to localise "heaven," and to present views of cosmical and celestial phenomena suitable certainly to the age of the writer, but which are not endorsed by modern science. the testimony of the epistle of barnabas (c. xv.) does not agree with this. { } the sudden appearance of the "two men in white apparel," the usual description of angels, is altogether in the style of the author of acts, but does it increase the credibility of the story? it is curious that the angels open their address to the apostles in the same form as almost every other speaker in this book. one might ask, indeed, why such an angelic interposition should have taken place? for its utility is not apparent, and in the short sentence recorded nothing which is new is embodied. no surprise is expressed at the appearance of the angels, and nothing is said of their disappearance. they are introduced, like the chorus of a greek play, and are left unceremoniously, with an indifference which betrays complete familiarity with supernatural agency. can there be any doubt that the whole episode is legendary?( ) it may not seem inappropriate to mention here that the idea of a bodily ascension does not originate with the author of the third synoptic and acts, nor is it peculiar to christianity. the translation of enoch( ) had long been chronicled in the sacred books; and the ascent of elijah( ) in his whirlwind and chariot of fire before the eyes of elisha was another well-known instance. the vision of daniel (vii. ), of one like the "son of man" coming with the clouds of heaven, might well have suggested the manner of his departure, but another mode has been suggested.( ) the author of acts was, we maintain, well acquainted with the works of josephus.( ) { } we know that the prophet like unto moses was a favourite representation in acts of the christ. now, in the account which josephus gives of the end of moses, he states that, although he wrote in the holy books that he died lest they should say that he went to god, this was not really his end. after reaching the mountain abarim he dismissed the senate; and as he was about to embrace eleazar, the high priest, and joshua, "a cloud suddenly having stood over him he disappeared in a certain valley."( ) this, however, we merely mention in passing. our earlier examination of the evidence for the origin and authorship of the historical books of the new testament very clearly demonstrated that the testimony of these works for miracles and the reality of divine revelation, whatever that testimony might seem to be, could not be considered of any real value. we have now examined the accounts which the four evangelists actually give of the passion, resurrection, and ascension, and there can be no hesitation in stating as the result that, as might have been expected from works of such uncertain character, these narratives must be pronounced mere legends, embodying vague and wholly unattested tradition. as { } evidence for such stupendous miracles, they are absolutely of no value. no reliance can be placed on a single detail of their story. the aim of the writers has obviously been to make their narrative of the various appearances of jesus as convincing as possible,( ) and they have freely inserted any details which seemed to them calculated to give them impressiveness, force, and verisimilitude. a recent apologetic writer has said: "any one who will attentively read side by side the narratives of these appearances on the first day of the resurrection, will see that they have only been preserved for us in general, interblended and scattered notices (see matt, xxviii. ; luke xxiv. ; acts i. ), which, in strict exactness, render it impossible, without many arbitrary suppositions, to produce from them a _certain_ narrative of the order of events. the lacuna, the compressions, the variations, the actual differences, _the subjectivity of the narrators as affected by spiritual revelations_, render all harmonies at the best uncertain."( ) passing over without comment, the strange phrase in this passage which we have italicised, and which seems to claim divine inspiration for the writers, it must be obvious to any one who has carefully read the preceding pages that this is an exceedingly moderate description of the wild statements and irreconcilable contradictions of the different narratives we have examined. but such as it is, with all the glaring inconsistencies and impossibilities of the accounts even thus subdued, is it possible for any one who has formed even a faint idea of the extraordinary nature of the allegations which have to be attested, to { } consider such documents really evidence for the resurrection and bodily ascension? the usual pleas which are advanced in mitigation of judgment against the gospels for these characteristics are of no avail. it may be easy to excuse the writers for their mutual contradictions, but the pleas themselves are an admission of the shortcomings which render their evidence valueless. "the differences of purpose in the narrative of the four evangelists,"( ) may be fancifully set forth, or ingeniously imagined, but no "purpose" can transform discordant and untrustworthy narratives into evidence for miracles. unless the prologue to the third gospel be considered a condemnation of any of the other synoptics which may have existed before it, none of the evangelists makes the smallest reference to any of his brethren or their works. each gospel tacitly professes to be a perfectly independent work, giving the history of jesus, or at { } least of the active part of his life, and of his death and resurrection. the apologetic theory, derived from the fathers, that the evangelists designed to complete and supplement each other, is totally untenable. each work was evidently intended to be complete in itself; but when we consider that much the greater part of the contents of each of the synoptics is common to the three, frequently with almost literal agreement, and generally without sufficient alteration to conceal community of source or use of each other, the poverty of christian tradition becomes painfully evident. we have already pointed out the fundamental difference between the fourth gospel and the synoptics. in no part of the history does greater contradiction and disagreement between the three synoptics themselves and likewise between them and the fourth gospel exist, than in the account of the passion, resurrection and ascension. it is impossible to examine the four narratives carefully without feeling that here tradition, for natural reasons, has been more than usually wavering and insecure. each writer differs essentially from the rest, and the various narratives not only disagree but exclude each other. the third synoptist, in the course of some years, even contradicts himself. the phenomena which are related, in fact, were too subjective and unsubstantial for sober and consistent narrative, and free play was allowed for pious imagination to frame details by the aid of supposed messianic utterances of the prophets and psalmists of israel. such a miracle as the resurrection, startling as it is in our estimation, was common-place enough in the view of these writers. we need not go hack to discuss the story of the widow's son restored to { } life by elijah,( ) nor that of the dead man who revived on touching the bones of elisha.( ) the raising from the dead of the son of the widow of nain( ) did not apparently produce much effect at the time, and only one of the evangelists seems to have thought it worth while to preserve the narrative. the case of jairus' daughter,( ) whatever it was, is regarded as a resurrection of the dead and is related by two of the synoptists; but the raising of lazarus is only recorded by the fourth evangelist. the familiarity of the age with the idea of the resurrection of the dead, however, according to the synoptists, is illustrated by the representation which they give of the effect produced by the fame of jesus upon herod and others. we are told by the first synoptist that herod said unto his servants: "this is john the baptist; he was raised from the dead; and therefore the powers work in him."( ) the second synoptist repeats the same statement, but adds: "but others said that it is elijah; and others said that it is a prophet like one of the prophets."( ) the statement of the third synoptist is somewhat different. he says: "now herod the tetrarch heard all that was occurring: and he was perplexed because it was said by some that john was raised from the dead, and by some that elijah appeared, and by others that one of the old prophets rose up. and herod { } said: john i beheaded, but who is this of whom i hear such things, and he sought to see him."() the three synoptists substantially report the same thing; the close verbal agreement of the first two being an example of the community of matter of which we have just spoken. the variations are instructive as showing the process by which each writer made the original form his own. are we to assume that these things were really said? or must we conclude that the sayings are simply the creation of later tradition? in the latter case, we see how unreal and legendary are the gospels. in the former case, we learn how common was the belief in a bodily resurrection. how could it seem so strange to the apostles that jesus should rise again, when the idea that john the baptist or one of the old prophets had risen from the dead was so readily accepted by herod and others? how could they so totally misunderstand all that the chief priests, according to the first synoptic, so well understood of the teaching of jesus on the subject of his resurrection, since the world had already become so familiar with the idea and the fact? then, the episode of the transfiguration must have occurred to every one, when jesus took with him peter and james and john into a high mountain apart, "and he was transfigured before them; and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment became white as the light. and behold, there was seen [------] by them moses and elijah { } talking with him;" and then "a bright cloud overshadowed them" and "a voice came out of the cloud: this is my beloved son," &c. "and when the disciples heard they fell on their face and were sore afraid."( ) the third synoptist even knows the subject of their conversation: "they were speaking of his decease which he was about to fulfil in jerusalem."( ) this is related by all as an objective occurrence.( ) are we to accept it as such? then how is it possible that the disciples could be so obtuse and incredulous as they subsequently showed themselves to be regarding the person of jesus, and his resurrection? how could the announcement of that event by the angels to the women seem to them as an idle tale, which they did not believe?( ) here were moses and elijah before them, and in jesus, we are told, they recognized one greater than moses and elijah. the miracle of the resurrection was here again anticipated and made palpable to them. are we to regard the transfiguration as a subjective vision? then why not equally so the appearances of jesus after his passion? we can regard the transfiguration, however, as nothing more than an allegory without either objective or subjective reality. into this at present we cannot further go. it is sufficient to repeat that our examination has shown the gospels to possess no value as evidence for the resurrection and ascension. chapter iii. the evidence of paul we may now proceed to examine the evidence of paul. "on one occasion," it is affirmed in a passage already quoted, "he gives a very circumstantial account of the testimony upon which the belief in the resurrection rested ( cor. xv. -- )."( ) this account is as follows: cor. xv. . "for i delivered unto you first of all that which i also received, that christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, . and that he was buried, and that he has been raised [------] the third day according to the scriptures, . and that he was seen by cephas, then by the twelve. . after that, he was seen by above five hundred brethren at once [------], of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. . after that, he was seen by james; then by all the apostles. . and last of all he was seen by me also as the one born out of due time."( ) can this be considered a "very circumstantial account"? it may be exceedingly unreasonable, but we must at once acknowledge that we are not satisfied. the testimony { } upon which the belief in the resurrection rests comprised in a dozen lines! for we may so far anticipate as to say that this can scarcely be regarded as a _resume_ of evidence which we can find elsewhere. we shall presently point out a few circumstances which it might be useful to know. the apostle states, in this passage, that the doctrines which he had delivered to the corinthians he had himself "received." he does not pretend to teach them from his own knowledge, and the question naturally arises: from whom did he "receive" them? formerly, divines generally taught that paul received these doctrines by revelation, and up to recent times apologists have continued to hold this view, even when admitting the subsidiary use of tradition.( ) if this claim were seriously made, the statements of the apostle, so far as our inquiry is concerned, would certainly not gain in value, for it is obvious that revelation could not be admitted to prove revelation. it is quite true that paul himself professed to have received his gospel not from men, but from god by direct revelation, and we shall hereafter have to consider this point and the inferences to be drawn from such pretensions. at present, the argument need not be complicated by any such supposition, for certainly paul does not here advance any such claim himself, and apologetic and other critics agree in declaring the source of his statements to be natural historical tradition.( ) the points which he { } delivered and which he had also received are three in number: ( ) that christ died for our sins; ( ) that he was buried; and ( ) that he has been raised the third day. in strictness the [------] might oblige us to include, "and that he appeared to cephas, then to the twelve," after which the construction of the sentence is changed. it is not necessary to press this, however, and it is better for the present to separate the dogmatic statements from those which are more properly evidential. it will be observed that, although the death, burial, and resurrection are here taught as "received," evidence only of one point is offered: that jesus "was seen by" certain persons. we have already pointed out that the gospels do not pretend that any one was an eye-witness of the resurrection itself, and it is important to notice that paul, the earliest and most trustworthy witness produced, entirely passes over the event itself, and relies solely on the fact that jesus was supposed to have been seen by certain persons to prove that he died, was buried, and had actually risen the third day. the only inference which we here wish to draw from this is, that the alleged appearances are thus obviously separated from the death and burial by a distinct gulf. a dead body, it is stated, or one believed to be dead, is laid in a sepulchre: after a certain time, it is alleged that the dead person has been seen alive. supposing the first statement to be correct, the second, being in itself, according to all our experience, utterly incredible, leaves further a serious gap in the continuity of evidence. what occurred in the interval between the burial and the supposed apparition? if it be asserted--as in the gospels it is--that, before the { } apparition, the sepulchre was found empty and the body gone, not only may it be replied that this very circumstance may have assisted in producing a subjective vision, but that, in so far as the disappearance of the body is connected with the appearance of the person apparently alive, the fact has no evidential value. the person supposed to be dead, for instance, may actually not have been so, but have revived; for, although we have no intention ourselves of adopting this explanation of the resurrection, it is, as an alternative, certainly preferable to belief in the miracle. or, in the interval, the body may have been removed from a temporary to a permanent resting place unknown to those who are surprised to find the body gone;--and in the gospels the conflicting accounts of the embalming and hasty burial, as we have seen, would fully permit of such an argument if we relied at all on those narratives. many other means of accounting for the absence of the body might be advanced, any one of which, in the actual default of testimony to the contrary, would be irrefutable. the mere surprise of finding a grave empty which was supposed to contain a body betrays a blank in the knowledge of the persons, which can only be naturally filled up. this gap, at least, would not have existed had the supposed resurrection occurred in the presence of those by whom it is asserted jesus "was seen." as it is, no evidence whatever is offered that jesus really died; no evidence that the sepulchre was even found empty; no evidence that the dead body actually arose and became alive again; but skipping over the intermediate steps, the only evidence produced is the statement that, being supposed to be dead, he is said to have been seen by certain persons.( ) { } there is a peculiarity in the statement to which we must now refer. the words, "according to the scriptures" [------] are twice introduced into the brief recapitulation of the teaching which paul had received and delivered: ( ) "that christ died for our sins according to the scriptures," and ( ) "that he has been raised the third day according to the scriptures." it is evident that mere historical tradition has only to do with the fact "that christ died," and that the object: "for our sins," is a dogmatic addition. the scriptures supply the dogma. in the second point, the appeal to scripture is curious, and so far important as indicating that the resurrection on the third day was supposed to be a fulfilment of prophecy; and we have thus an indication, regarding which we must hereafter speak, of the manner in which the belief probably originated. the double reference to the scriptures is peculiarly marked, and we have already more than once had occasion to point out that the narratives of the gospels betray the very strong and constant influence of parts of the old testament supposed to relate to the messiah. it cannot, we think, be doubted by any independent critic, that the details of these narratives were to a large extent traced from those prophecies. it is in the highest degree natural to suppose that the early christians, once accepting the idea of a suffering messiah, should, in the absence of positive or minute knowledge, assume that prophecies which they believed to have reference to him should actually have been fulfilled, and that in fact the occurrences corresponded minutely with the prophecies. too little is known of what really took place, and it is { } probable that christian tradition generally was moulded from foregone conclusions. what were the "scriptures," according to which "christ died for our sins," and "has been raised the third day?" the passages which are generally referred to, and which paul most probably had in view, are well known: as regards the death for our sins,--isaiah liii., ps. xxii. and lxix,; and for the resurrection,--ps. xvi. , and hosea vi. . we have already pointed out that historical criticism has shown that the first four passages just indicated are not messianic prophecies at all,( ) and we may repeat that the idea of a suffering messiah was wholly foreign to the jewish prophets and people. the messiah "crucified," as paul himself bears witness, was "to jews a stumbling block,"( ) and modern criticism has clearly established that the parts of scripture by which the early christians endeavoured to show that such a messiah had been foretold can only be applied by a perversion of the original signification. in the case of the passages supposed to foretell the resurrection, the misapplication is particularly flagrant. we have already discussed the use of ps. xvi. , which in acts( ) is put into the mouth of the apostles peter and paul, and shown that the proof passage rests upon a mistranslation of the original in the septuagint.( ) any reader who will refer to hosea vi. will see that the passage in no way applies to the messiah,( ) although undoubtedly it has influenced the formation of the doctrine { } of the resurrection. the "sign of the prophet jonah," which in mt. xii. is put into the mouth of jesus is another passage used with equal incorrectness, and a glimpse of the manner in which christian tradition took shape, and the gospels were composed, may be obtained by comparing with the passage in the first synoptic the parallel in the third (xi. -- ).( ) we shall have more to say presently regarding the resurrection" on the third day." we may now proceed to examine the so-called "very circumstantial account of the testimony on which the belief in the resurrection rested." "and that he was seen by cephas, then by the twelve. after that he was seen by above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. after that he was seen by james, then by all the apostles, and last of all he was seen by me also."( ) there can be no doubt, we think, from the terms in which this statement is made, that paul intended to give the appearances in chronological order.( ) it would likewise be a fair inference that he intended to mention all the appearances of which he was aware. so far, the account may possibly merit the epithet "circumstantial," but in all other respects it is scarcely possible to conceive any statement less circumstantial. as to where the risen jesus was seen by these persons, in what manner, and under what circumstances, and at what time, we are not vouchsafed a single particular. moreover, the apostle was not { } present on any of these occasions, excepting of course his own vision, and consequently merely reports appearances of which he has been informed by others, but he omits to mention the authority upon which he makes these statements, or what steps he took to ascertain their accuracy and reality. for instance, when jesus is said to have been seen by five hundred brethren at once, it would have been of the highest importance for us to know the exact details of the scene, the proportion of inference to fact, the character of the apostle's informant, the extent of the investigation into the various impressions made upon the individuals composing the five hundred, as opposed to the collective affirmation. we confess that we do not attach much value to such appeals to the experience of persons at once. it is difficult to find out what the actual experience of the individuals was, and each individual is so apt to catch the infection of his neighbour, and join in excitement, believing that, though he does not himself see or feel anything, his neighbour does, that probably, when inquiry is pressed home, the aggregate affirmation of a large number may resolve itself into the actual experience of very few. the fact is, however, that in this "very circumstantial account" we have nothing whatever except a mere catalogue by paul of certain appearances which he did not himself see--always excepting his own vision, which we reserve--but merely had "received" from others, without a detail or information of any kind. if we compare these appearances with the instances recorded in the gospels, the result is by no means satisfactory. the first appearance is said to be to cephas. it is argued that paul passes in silence over the appearances to women, both because the testimony of women was { } not received in jewish courts, and because his own opinions regarding the active participation of women in matters connected with the church were of a somewhat exclusive character.( ) the appearance to cephas is generally identified with that mentioned, luke xxiv. .( ) nothing could be more cursory than the manner in which this appearance is related in the synoptic. the disciples from emmaus, returning at once to jerusalem, found the eleven and those who were with them saying: "the lord was raised indeed, and was seen by simon." not another syllable is said regarding an appearance which, according to paul, was the first which had occurred. the other gospels say still less, for they ignore the incident altogether. it is difficult to find room for such an appearance in the gospel narratives. if we take the report of paul to be true, that jesus was first seen by cephas, the silence of three evangelists and their contradictory representations, on the one hand, and the remarkable way in which the third gospel avoids all but the mere indirect reference to the occurrence, on the other, are phenomena which we leave apologists to explain.( ) he is next seen "by the twelve." this vision is identified with that narrated in john xx. flf. and luke xxiv. ff,,( ) to which, as thomas was absent on the first occasion, some critics understand the episode in john xx. c if. to be added. on reference to our discussion of { } these accounts, it will be seen that they have few or no elements of credibility. if the appearance to the twelve mentioned by paul be identified with these episodes, and their details be declared authentic, the second item in paul's list becomes discredited. the appearance to brethren at once is not mentioned in any of the gospels, but critics, and especially apologetic critics, assert with more or less of certainty the identity of the occasion with the scene described in matth. xxviii. ff.( ) we remarked whilst discussing the passage that this is based chiefly on the statement that "some doubted," which would have been inconsistent, it is thought, had jesus already appeared to the eleven.( ) the identity is, however, denied by others. the narrative in the first synoptic would scarcely add force to the report in the epistle. is it possible to suppose, however, that, had there been so large a number of persons collected upon that occasion, the evangelist would not have mentioned the fact? on the other hand, does it not somewhat discredit the statement that jesus was seen by so large a number at once, that no record of such a remarkable occurrence exists elsewhere?( ) how could the tradition of such an event, witnessed by so many, have so completely perished that neither in the gospels nor acts, { } nor in any other writing, is there any reference to it, and our only knowledge of it is this bare statement, without a single detail? there is only one explanation: that the assembly could not have recognized in the phenomenon, whatever it was, the risen jesus,( ) or that subsequently an explanation was given which dispelled some temporary illusion. in any case, we must insist that the total absence of all confirmation of an appearance to persons at once alone renders such an occurrence more than suspicious. the statement that the greater number were still living when paul wrote does not materially affect the question. paul doubtless believed the report that such an appearance had taken place, and that the majority of witnesses still survived, but does it necessarily follow that the report was true? the survivors were certainly not within reach of the corinthians, and could not easily be questioned. the whole of the argument of paul which we are considering, as well as that which follows, was drawn from him by the fact that, in corinth, christians actually denied a resurrection, and it is far from clear that this denial did not extend to denying the resurection of jesus himself.( ) that they did deny this we think certain, from the care with which paul gives what he considers evidence for the fact. another point may be mentioned. where could so many as disciples have been collected at one time? the author of acts states (i. ) the number of the christian community gathered together to elect a successor to judas as "about ." apologists, therefore, either suppose the appearance to to have taken place in jerusalem, when numbers of pilgrims { } from galilee and other parts were in the holy city, or that it occurred in galilee itself, where they suppose believers to have been more numerous.( ) this is the merest conjecture; and there is not even ground for asserting that there were so many as brethren in any one place, by whom jesus could have been seen. the appearance to james is not mentioned in any of our gospels. jerome preserves a legend from the gospel of the hebrews, which states that james, after having drunk the cup of the lord, swore that he would not eat bread until he should see him risen from the dead. when jesus rose, therefore, he appeared to james; and, ordering a table and bread to be brought, blessed and broke the bread, and gave it to james.( ) beyond this legendary story there is no other record of the report given by paul. the occasion on which he was seen by "all the apostles" is indefinite, and cannot be identified with any account in the gospels. it is asserted, however, that, although paul does not state from whom he "received" the report of these appearances of the risen jesus, he must have heard them from the apostles themselves. at any rate, it is added, paul professes that his preaching on the death, burial, and resurrection is the same as that of the other apostles.( ) that the other apostles preached the resurrection of jesus may be a fact, but we have no information as to the precise statements they made. we shall presently discuss the doctrine from this point of view, but here we must confine ourselves to paul. it is undeniable that paul { } neither enters into details nor cites authority for the particular appearances which he mentions. as for the inference that, associating with the apostles, he must have been informed by them of the appearances of jesus, we may say that this by no means follows so clearly as is supposed. paul was singularly independent, and in his writings he directly disclaims all indebtedness to the elder apostles. he claims that his gospel is not after man, nor was it taught to him by man, but through revelation of jesus christ( ) now paul himself informs us of his action after it pleased god to reveal his son in him that he might preach him among the gentiles. it might, indeed, have been reasonably expected that paul should then have sought out those who could have informed him of all the extraordinary occurrences supposed to have taken place after the death of jesus. paul does nothing of the kind. he is apparently quite satisfied with his own convictions. "immediately," he says, in his wondrously human and characteristic letter to the galatians, "i communicated not with flesh and blood; neither went i away to jerusalem to them who were apostles before me, but i went away to arabia, and returned again unto damascus. then after three years i went up to jerusalem to visit cephas, and abode with him fifteen days; but other of the apostles saw i none, save james the brother of the lord. now the things which i write, behold before god i lie not.... then after fourteen years i went up again to jerusalem,"( )--upon which occasion, we know, his business was not of a nature to allow us to suppose he obtained much information regarding the resurrection. we may ask: is there that thirst for information { } regarding the facts and doctrines of christianity displayed here, which entitles us to suppose that paul eagerly and minutely investigated the evidence for them? we think not. paul made up his own mind in his own way and, having waited three years without asking a question, it is not probable that the questions which he then asked were of any searching nature. the protest that he saw none of the other apostles may prove his independence, but it certainly does not prove his anxiety for information. when paul went up to make the acquaintance of cephas his object clearly was not to be taught by him, but to place himself in communication with the man whom he believed to be the chief of the apostles and, we may assume, largely with a view to establish a friendly feeling, and secure his recognition of his future ministry. we should not, of course, be justified in affirming that the conversation between the two great apostles never turned upon the subject of the resurrection, but we think that it is obvious that paul's visit was not in the least one of investigation. he believed; he believed that certain events had occurred "according to the scriptures;" and the legitimate inference from paul's own statements must be that, in this visit after three years, his purpose was in no way connected with a search for evidential information. the author of acts, it will be remembered, represents him as, before any visit to jerusalem, publicly and boldly preaching in damascus that jesus is the son of god, and "confounding the jews.... proving that this is the christ."( ) this representation, it will be admitted, shows an advanced condition of belief little supporting the idea of subsequent investigation. when all conjectures are exhausted, however, we have the one distinct fact { } remaining, that paul gives no authority for his report that jesus was seen by the various persons mentioned, nor does he furnish any means by which we can judge of the nature and reality of the alleged phenomena. we continue here to speak of the appearances to others, reserving the appearance to himself, as standing upon a different basis, for separate examination. what is the value of this evidence? the fact to be proved is that, after a man had been crucified, dead, and buried, he actually rose from the dead, and appeared alive to many persons. the evidence is that paul, writing some twenty years after the supposed miraculous occurrences, states, without detailed information of any kind, and without pretending to have himself been an eyewitness of the phenomena, that he has been told that jesus was, after his death and burial, seen alive on the occasions mentioned! as to the apostle paul himself, let it be said in the strongest and most emphatic manner possible that we do not suggest the most distant suspicion of the sincerity of any historical statement he makes. we implicitly accept the historical statements, as distinguished from inferences, which proceed from his pen. it cannot be doubted that paul was told that such appearances had taken place. we do not question the fact that he believed them to have taken place; and we shall hereafter discuss the weight to be attached to this circumstance. does this, however, guarantee the truth of the reports or inferences of those who informed the apostle? does the mere passage of any story or tradition through paul necessarily transmute error into truth--self-deception or hallucination into objective fact? are we--without any information as to what was really stated to paul, as to the personality and character of his { } informants, as to the details of what was believed, to have occurred, as to the means taken or which it might have been possible to take to test the reality of the alleged phenomena, without an opportunity of judging for ourselves on a single point--to believe in the reality of these appearances simply because paul states that he has been informed that they occurred, and himself believes the report? so far as the belief of paul is concerned, we may here remark that his views as to the miraculous charismata in the church do not prepare us to feel any confidence in the sobriety of his judgment in connection with alleged supernatural occurrences. we have no reliance upon his instinctive mistrust of such statements, or his imperative requirement of evidence, but every reason to doubt them. on the other hand, without in any way imputing wilful incorrectness or untruth to the reporters of such phenomena, let it be remembered how important a part inference has to play in the narrative of every incident, and how easy it is to draw erroneous inferences from bare facts.( ) in proportion as persons are ignorant, on the one hand, and have their minds disturbed, on the other, by religious depression or excitement, hope, fear, or any other powerful emotion, they are liable to confound facts and inferences, and both to see and analyse wrongly. in the case of a supposed appearance we may merely in passing refer to the case of mary magdalene in the fourth gospel. she sees a figure standing beside her, and infers that it is the gardener:--presently something else occurs which leads her to infer that she was mistaken in her first inference, and to infer next, that it is jesus. it is a narrative upon which no serious argument can be based, but had she at first turned away, her first inference would have remained, and, according to the narrative, have been erroneous. we might also argue that, if further examination had taken place, her second inference might have proved as erroneous as the first is declared to have been. { } alive of a person believed to be dead, it will scarcely be disputed, there are many disturbing elements, especially when that person has just died by a cruel and shameful death, and is believed to be the messiah. the occurrence which we at any time see is, strictly speaking, merely a series of appearances, and the actual nature of the thing seen is determined in our minds by inferences. how often are these inferences correct? we venture to say that the greater part of the proverbial incorrectness and inaccuracy which prevails arises from the circumstance that inferences are not distinguished from facts, and are constantly erroneous. now in that age, under such circumstances, and with oriental temperaments, it is absolutely certain that there was exceptional liability to error; and the fact that paul repeats the statements of unknown persons, dependent so materially upon inference, cannot possibly warrant us in believing them when they contradict known laws which express the results of universal experience. it is infinitely more probable that these persons were mistaken, than that a dead man returned to life again, and appeared to them. we shall presently consider how much importance is to be attached to the mere belief in the occurrence of such phenomena, but with regard to the appearances referred to by paul, except in so far as they attest the fact that certain persons may have believed that jesus appeared to them, such evidence has not the slightest value, and is indeed almost ludicrously insufficient to establish the reality of so stupendous a miracle as the resurrection. it will have been observed that of the ascension there is not a word--obviously, for paul the resurrection and ascension were one act. having so far discussed paul's report that jesus rose { } from the dead and was seen by others, we turn to his statement that, last of all, he was seen also by himself. in the former cases, we have had to complain of the total absence of detailed information as to the circumstances under which he was supposed to have been seen; but it may be expected that, at least in his own case, we shall have full and minute particulars of so interesting and extraordinary a phenomenon. here again we are disappointed. paul does not give us a single detail. he neither tells us when, where, nor how he saw jesus. it was all the more important that he should have entered into the particulars of this apparition, because there is one peculiarity in his case which requires notice. whereas it may be supposed that in the other instances jesus is represented as being seen immediately after the resurrection and before his ascension, the appearance to paul must be placed years after that occurrence is alleged to have taken place. the question, therefore, arises: was the appearance to paul of the same character as the former? paul evidently considers that it was. he uses the very same word when he says "he was seen [------] by me," that he employs in stating that "he was seen [------] by cephas" and the rest, and he classes all the appearances together in precisely the same way. if, therefore, paul knew anything of the nature of the appearances to the others, and yet considers them to have been of the same nature as his own, an accurate account of his own vision might have enabled us in some degree to estimate that of the others. even without this account, it is something to know that paul believed that there was no difference between the earlier and later appearances. and yet, if we reflect that in the appearances immediately after the resurrection the representation is that jesus possessed the very same body that had { } hung on the cross and been laid in the sepulchre, and that, according to the gospels, he exhibited his wounds, allowed them to be touched, assured the disciples of his corporeality by permitting himself to be handled, and even by eating food in their presence, and that in the case of paul the appearance took place years after jesus is said to have ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of god, the identity of the apparitions becomes a suggestive feature. the testimony of paul must at least override that of the gospels, and whatever may have been the vision of paul, we may fairly assume that the vision of peter and the rest was like it. beyond this inference, however, paul gives us no light with regard to the appearance of jesus to himself. he merely affirms that jesus did appear to him. "have i not seen jesus our lord?" he says in one place.( ) elsewhere he relates: "but when he was pleased, who set me apart from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his son in me, that i might preach him among the gentiles; immediately, i communicated not with flesh and blood.... but i went away into arabia and returned again unto damascus."( ) various opinions have been expressed regarding the rendering of [------]. the great majority of critics agree that the direct and natural sense must be adopted: "to reveal his son in me," that is to say, "within me," "in my spirit."( ) others maintain that [------] must be { } rendered "through me,"( ) giving [------] the sense of [------]; but in that case the following context would be quite unnecessary. hilgenfeld( ) thinks that the meaning is "in his person;" and ruckert( ) and a few others read "to me." the liberties taken by interpreters of the new testament with the preposition [------], too frequently from preconceived dogmatic reasons, are remarkable. the importance of this passage chiefly lies in the question whether the revelation here referred to is the same as the appearance to him of jesus of the corinthian letter. some critics incline to the view that it is so,( ) whilst others consider that paul does not thus speak of his vision, but rather of the doctrine concerning jesus which formed his gospel, and which paul claimed to have received, not from man, but by revelation from god.( ) upon this point we have only a few remarks to make. if it be understood that paul refers to the appearance to him of jesus, it is clear that he represents it in these words as a subjective vision, within his own consciousness. if, on the other hand, he do not refer to the appearance, then the passage loses all distinct reference to that occurrence. we do not intend to lay any further stress upon the expression than this, and it is fair to add that we do not think there is any special reference to the apparition of jesus in the { } passage, but simply an allusion to his conversion to christianity, which the apostle considered a revelation in his mind of the true character and work of the christ which had previously been so completely misunderstood by him. we may as well say at once that we desire to take the argument in its broadest form, without wasting time by showing that paul himself uses language which seems to indicate that he recognised the appearance of jesus to have been merely subjective. the only other passage which we need now mention is the account which paul gives, cor. xii. ff, of his being caught up to the third heaven. a few critics consider that this may be the occasion on which jesus appeared to him, to which he refers in the passage of the former letter which we are considering,( ) but the great majority are opposed to the supposition. in any case there is no evidence that the occasions are identical, and we therefore are not entitled to assume that they are so. it will have been observed that we have hitherto confined our attention wholly to the undoubted writings of paul. were there no other reason than the simple fact that we are examining the evidence of paul himself, and have, therefore, to do with that evidence alone, we should be thoroughly justified in this course. it is difficult to clear the mind of statements regarding paul and his conversion which are made in the acts of the apostles, but it is absolutely essential that we should understand clearly what paul himself tells us and what he does not, for the present totally excluding acts. what then does paul himself tell us of the circumstances under which he saw jesus? { } absolutely nothing. the whole of his evidence for the resurrection consists in the bare statement that he did see jesus. now can the fact that any man merely affirms, without even stating the circumstances, that a person once dead and buried has risen from the dead and been seen by him, be seriously considered satisfactory evidence for so astounding a miracle? is it possible for any one of sober mind, acquainted with the nature of the proposition, on the one hand, and with the innumerable possibilities of error, on the other, to regard such an affirmation even as evidence of much importance in such a matter? we venture to say that, in such a case, an affirmation of this nature, even made by a man of high character and ability, would possess little weight. if the person making it, although of the highest honour, were known to suppose himself the subject of constant revelations and visions, and if, perhaps, he had a constitutional tendency to nervous excitement and ecstatic trance, his evidence would have no weight at all. we shall presently have to speak of this more in detail in connection with paul. such an allegation even supported by the fullest information and most circumstantial statement could not establish the reality of the miracle; without them, it has no claim to belief. what is the value of a person's testimony who simply makes an affirmation of some important matter, unaccompanied by particulars, and the truth of which cannot be subjected to the test of even the slightest cross-examination? it is worth nothing. it would not be received at all in a court of justice. if we knew the whole of the circumstances of the apparition to paul, from which he inferred that he had seen the risen jesus, the natural explanation of the supposed miracle might be { } easy. there were no other witnesses of it. this is clear; for, had there been, paul must have mentioned them as he mentioned the five hundred. we have only the report of a man who states that he had seen.jesus, unconfirmed by any witnesses. under no circumstances could isolated evidence like this be ol much value. facts and inferences are alike uncorroborated, but on the other hand are contradicted by universal experience. when we analyse the evidence, it is reduced to this: paul believed that he had seen jesus. this belief constitutes the whole evidence of paul himself for the resurrection. it is usual to argue that the powerful effect which this belief produced upon paul's life and teaching renders this belief of extraordinary force as evidence. this we are not prepared to admit. if the assertion that jesus appeared to him had not been believed by paul, it would not have secured a moment's attention. that this belief affected his life was the inevitable consequence of such belief. paul eminently combined works with faith in his own life. when he believed jesus to be an impostor, he did not content himself with sneering at human credulity, but vigorously persecuted his followers. when he came to believe jesus to be the messiah, he was not more inactive, but became the irrepressible apostle of the gentiles. he acted upon his convictions in both cases; but his mere persecution of christianity no more proved jesus to be an impostor than his mere preaching of christianity proved jesus to be the messiah. it only proved that he believed so. he was as earnest in the one case as in the other. we repeat, therefore, that the evidence of paul for the resurrection amounts to { } nothing more than the unfeigned belief that jesus had been seen by him. we shall presently further examine the value of this belief as evidence for so astounding a miracle. we must not form exaggerated conceptions of the effect upon paul of the appearance to him of jesus. that his convictions and views of christianity were based upon the reality of the resurrection is undeniable, and that they received powerful confirmation and impulse through his vision of jesus is also not to be doubted, but let us clear our minds of representations derived from other sources and clearly understand what paul himself does and does not say of this vision, and for this purpose we must confine ourselves to the undoubted writings of the apostle. does paul himself ascribe his conversion to christianity to the fact of his having seen jesus? most certainly not. that is a notion derived solely from the statements in acts. the sudden and miraculous conversion of paul is a product of the same pen which produced the story of the sudden conversion of the thief on the cross, an episode equally unknown to other writers. paul neither savs when nor where he saw jesus. the revelation of god's son in him not being an allusion to this vision of jesus, but merely a reference to the light which dawned upon paul's mind as to the character and mission of jesus, there is no ground whatever, from the writings of the apostle himself, to connect the appearance of jesus with the conversion of paul. the statement in the epistle to the galatians simply amounts to this: when it pleased him who elected him from his mother's womb, and called him by his grace, to reveal to his mind the truth concerning his son, that he might preach { } him among the gentiles, he communicated not with flesh and blood, neither did he go up to jerusalem to those who were apostles before him, but immediately went away to arabia, and after that returned again to damascus. it can scarcely be doubted that paul here refers to his change of views--to his conversion--but as little can it be doubted that he does not ascribe that conversion to the appearance to him of jesus spoken of in the corinthian letter. let any reader who honestly desires to ascertain the exact position of the case ask himself the simple question whether, supposing the acts of the apostles never to have existed, it is possible to deduce from this, or any other statement of paul, that he actually ascribes his conversion to the fact that jesus appeared to him in a supernatural manner. he may possibly in some degree base his apostolic claims upon that appearance, although it may be doubted how far he does even this; if he did so, it would only prove the reality of his belief, but not the reality of the vision; but there is no evidence whatever in the writings of paul that he connected his conversion with the appearance of jesus. all that we can legitimately infer seems to be that, before his adoption of christianity, he had persecuted the church;( ) and further it may be gathered from the passage in the galatian letter, that at the time when this change occurred he. was at damascus. at least he says that from arabia he "returned again to damascus," which seems to imply that he first went from that city to arabia. when we consider the expressions in the two letters, it becomes apparent that paul does not set forth any instantaneous conversion of the { } character related elsewhere. to the galatians he describes his election from his mother's womb and call by the grace of god as antecedent to the revelation of his son in him: "when he who separated me from my mother's womb and called me by his grace was pleased to reveal his son in me, that i might preach him among the gentiles," &c. and if the reading "through me" be adopted, the sense we are pointing out becomes still more apparent. in the corinthian letter again, the expressions should be remarked: v. . "and last of all he was seen by me also, as the one born out of due time. . for i am the least of the apostles, that am not fit to be called an apostle, because i persecuted the church of god: . but by the grace of god i am what i am: and his grace which was (bestowed) upon me was not in vain, but i laboured more abundantly than they all, yet not i, but the grace of god with me. . whether, therefore, it were i or they, so we preach, and so ye believed."( ) peter sees jesus first, paul sees him last; and as the thought uppermost in his mind in writing this epistle was the parties in the corinthian church, and the opposition to himself and denial even of his apostleship, the mention of his having seen jesus immediately leads him to speak of his apostolic claims. "am i not an apostle? have i not seen jesus our lord?" he had just before exclaimed, and proceeded to defend himself against his opponents: here again he reverts to the same }{ subject, with proud humility calling himself, on the one hand, "the least of the apostles," but, on the other, asserting that he had "laboured more than they all." he is led to contrast his past life with his present; the time when he persecuted the church with that in which he built it up. there is, however, no allusion to any miraculous conversion when he says: "by the grace of god i am what i am." he may consider his having seen the lord and become a witness of his resurrection one part of his qualification for the apostolate, but assuredly he does not represent this as the means of his conversion. we shall not pause to discuss at length how far being a witness for the resurrection really was made a necessary qualification for the apostolic office. the passages, luke xxiv. , acts i. , ii. , upon which the theory mainly rests, are not evidence of the fact which can for a moment be accepted. it is obvious that the twelve were apostles from having been chosen disciples of the master from the commencement of his active career, and not from any fortuitous circumstance at its close. if paul says: "am i not an apostle? have i not seen jesus our lord?" he continues: "are ye not my work in the lord? if i am not an apostle unto others, yet i am at least to you: for the seal of mine apostleship are ye in the lord. my defence to them that examine me is this."( ) there can be no doubt that the claims of paul to the apostolate were, during his life, constantly denied, and his authority rejected. as we have elsewhere pointed out, there is no evidence that his apostleship was ever recognised by the elder apostles, nor that his claim was ever submitted to them. even in the { } second century, the clementine homilies deny him the honour, and make light of his visions and revelations. all the evidence we possess shows that paul's vision of jesus did not secure for him much consideration in his own time, a circumstance which certainly does not tend to establish its reality. what weight can we, then, attach to the representation in the acts of the apostles of the conversion of paul? our examination of that work has sufficiently shown that none of its statements can be received as historical. where we have been able to compare them with the epistles of paul, they have not been in agreement. nothing could be more obvious than the contradiction between the narrative of paul's conduct after his conversion, according to acts, and the account which paul gives in the galatian letter. we need not repeat the demonstration here. where we possess the means of comparison, we discover the inaccuracy of acts. why should we suppose that which we cannot compare more accurate? so far as our argument is concerned, it matters very little whether we exclude the narrative of the conversion of acts or not. we point out, however, that there is no confirmation whatever in the writings of paul of the representation of his conversion by means of a vision of jesus, which, upon all considerations, may much more reasonably be assigned to a somewhat later period. if we ventured to conjecture, we should say that the author of acts has expanded the scattered sayings of paul into this narrative, making the miraculous conversion by a personal interposition of jesus, which he therefore relates no less than three times, counterbalance the disadvantage of his not having followed jesus in the { } flesh.( ) it is curious that he has introduced the bare statement into the third synoptic, that jesus "was seen by simon" [------],( ) which none of the other evangelists mentions, but which he may have found, without farther particulars, [------], in the epistle whence he derived, perhaps, materials for the other story. in no case can the narrative in acts be received as evidence of the slightest value; but in order not to pass over even such statements in silence, we shall very briefly examine it. the narrative is repeated thrice: in the first instance (ix. ff.) as a historical account of the transaction; next (xxii. if.) introduced into a speech supposed to be delivered by paul to the jews when taken prisoner in consequence of their uproar on finding him in the temple purifying himself with the four men who had a vow,--a position which cannot historically be reconciled with the character and views of paul; and, thirdly, again put into the mouth of the apostle (xxvi. ff.) when he pleads his cause before king agrippa. paul is represented in the headlong career of persecuting the church, and going with letters from the high priest empowering him to bring christian men and women bound unto jerusalem. "and as he journeyed, it came to pass that he drew nigh to damascus, and suddenly there shone round about him a light out of the heaven, and he fell upon the earth and heard a voice saying unto him: saul, saul, why persecutest thou me? and he said, who art thou, lord? and he said, i am jesus whom thou persecutest. but rise and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do."( ) in the second account, there is so far { } no very wide discrepancy, but there, as in the third, the time is said to be about noon. there is a very considerable difference in the third account, however, more especially in the report of what is said by the voice: xxvi. . "at midday, o king, i saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and those journeying with me; . and when we all fell to the earth, i heard a voice saying unto me in the hebrew tongue: saul, saul, why persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against pricks. . and i said: who art thou, lord? and the lord said: i am jesus whom thou persecutest. . but rise and stand upon thy feet; for i was seen by thee for this purpose, to choose thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou sawest, and of the things in which i will appear unto thee; . delivering thee from the people and from the gentiles, unto whom i send thee; . to open their eyes, that they may turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of satan unto god, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and a lot among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me."( ) { } it will be admitted that this address is widely different from that reported in the two earlier accounts. apologists argue that, in this third narrative, paul has simply transferred from ananias to jesus the message delivered to him by the former, according to the second account. let us first see what ananias is there represented as saying. acts xxii. : "and he said: the god of our fathers chose thee, to know his will and to see the righteous one'( ) . for thou shalt be a witness to him unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard." ( ) now paul clearly professes in the speech which he is represented as delivering before agrippa to state what the voice said to him: "and he said," "and i said," "and he said," distinctly convey the meaning that the report is to be what actually was said. if the sense of what ananias said to him is embodied in part of the address ascribed to the voice, it is strangely altered and put into the first person; but, beyond this, there is much added which neither appears in the speech of ananias nor anywhere else in any of the narratives. if we further compare the instructions given to ananias in the vision of the first narrative with his words in the second and those ascribed to the voice in the third, we shall see that these again differ very materially. acts ix. . "but the lord said unto him: go; for this man is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before gentiles and kings, and the sons of israel: . for i will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake."( ) it will be remembered that this epithet occurs in acts iii. , vii. , and nowhere else in the new testament. { } what must we think of a writer who deals so freely with his materials, and takes such liberties even with so serious a matter as this heavenly vision and the words of the glorified jesus? in the third account, jesus is represented as saying: "it is hard for thee to kick against pricks."( ) this is a well-known proverbial saying, frequently used by classical greek and latin authors,( ) and not altogether strange to hebrew. it is a singularly anthropomorphic representation to put such a saying into the mouth of the divine apparition, and it assists in betraying the mundane origin of the whole scene. another point deserving consideration is, that paul is not told what he is to do by the voice of jesus, but is desired to go into the city to be there instructed by ananias. this is clearly opposed to paul's own repeated asseverations. "for neither did i receive it from man nor was taught it, but through a revelation of jesus christ,"( ) is his statement. the details of the incident itself, moreover, are differently stated in the various accounts and cannot be reconciled. according to the first account, the companions of paul "stood speechless" (ix. ); in the third, they "all fell to the earth" (xxvi. ). the explanation, that they first fell to the ground and then rose up, fails { } satisfactorily to harmonise the two statements; as does likewise the suggestion that the first expression is simply an idiomatic mole of saying that they were speechless, independent of position. then again, in the first account, it is said that the men stood speechless, "hearing the voice [------] but seeing no one."' in the second we are told: "and they that were with me saw indeed the light; but they heard not the voice [------] of him speaking to me."( ) no two statements could be more contradictory. the attempt to reconcile them by explaining the verb [------] in the one place "to hear" and in the other "to understand" is inadmissible, because wholly arbitrary. it is quite obvious that the word is used in the same sense in both passages, the difference being merely the negative. in the third account, the voice is described as speaking "in the hebrew tongue,"( ) which was probably the native tongue of the companions of paul from jerusalem. if they heard the voice speaking hebrew, they must have understood it the effort to make the vision clearly objective, and, at the same time, to confine it to paul, leads to these complications. the voice is heard, though the speaker is not seen, by the men, in the one story, whilst the light is seen, and the voice not heard, in the other, and yet it speaks in hebrew according to the third, and even makes use of classical proverbs, and uses language wondrously similar to that of the author of acts. we may remark here that paul's gospel was certainly not revealed to him upon this occasion; and, therefore, the expressions in his epistles upon this subject must be referred to other revelations. there is, however, { } another curious point to be observed. paul is not described as having actually seen jesus in the vision. according to the first two accounts, a light shines round about him and he falls to the ground and hears a voice; when he rises he is blind.( ) if in the third account, he sees the light from heaven above the brightness of the sun shining round about him and his companions,( ) they equally see it, according to the second account.( ) the blindness, therefore, is miraculous and symbolic, for the men are not blinded by the light.( ) it is singular that paul nowhere refers to this blindness in his letters. it cannot be doubted that the writer's purpose is to symbolise the very change from darkness to light, in the case of paul, which, after old testament prophecies, is referred to in the words ascribed, in the third account,( ) to the voice. paul, thus, only sees the light which surrounds the glorified jesus, but not his own person, and the identification proceeds only from the statement: "i am jesus whom thou persecutest." it is true that the expression is strangely put into the mouth of jesus, in the third account: "for i was seen by thee [------] for this purpose," &c,( ) but the narrative excludes the actual sight of the speaker, and it is scarcely possible to read the words just quoted, and their context, without being struck by their incongruity. we need not indicate the sources of this representation of light shrouding the heavenly vision, so common in the old testament. before proceeding to the rest of the account, we may point out in passing the similarity of the details of this scene to the vision of daniel x. - . { } returning, however, to the first narrative, we are told that, about the same time as this miracle was occurring to paul, a supernatural communication was being made to ananias in damascus: ix. . "and to him said the lord in a vision: ananias. and he said, behold i am here, lord. . and the lord said unto him: rise and go to the street which is called straight, and inquire in the house of judas for one called saul, of tarsus; for, behold he prayeth; . and he saw a man named ananias who came in and put his hand on him that he might receive sight. . but ananias answered, lord, i heard from many concerning this man, how much evil he did to thy saints in jerusalem: . and here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name. . but the lord said, go, &c. (quoted above). . and ananias went away, and entered into the house; and having put his hands on him said: brother saul, the lord hath sent me, even jesus that appeared unto thee in the way by which thou earnest, that thou mightest receive sight and be filled with the holy spirit. . and immediately there fell from his eyes as it were scales; and he received sight, rose up, and was baptized, and having taken food was strengthened." we have already had occasion to point out, in connection with the parallelism kept up in acts between the apostle of the gentiles and the apostle of the circumcision, that a similar double vision is narrated by the author as occurring to peter and cornelius. some further vision is referred to in v. ; for in no form of the narrative of paul's vision on the way to damascus is he represented as seeing a man named ananias coming to him for the purpose described. many questions are { } suggested by the story just quoted. how did ananias know that paul had authority from the chief priests to arrest any one? how could he argue in such a way with the lord? did he not then know that jesus had appeared to paul on the way? how did he get that information? is it not an extraordinary thing that paul never mentions ananias in any of his letters, nor in any way refers to these miracles? we have already referred to the symbolic nature of the blindness, and recovery of sight on receiving the holy spirit and being baptized, and this is rendered still more apparent by the statement: v. . "and he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink." we may further point out that in immediate connection with this episode paul is represented, in the second account, as stating that, on going to jerusalem, he has another vision of jesus:xxii. . "and it came to pass that, when i returned to jerusalem and was praying in the temple, i was in a trance, . and saw him saying unto me: make haste, and get thee quickly out of jerusalem; for they will not receive thy witness concerning me. . and i said: lord, they themselves know that i was wont to imprison and beat in every synagogue them that believe on thee. . and when the blood of stephen, thy witness, was shed, i also was standing by and consenting, and keeping the garments of them that slew him. . and he said unto me: go, for i will send thee far hence unto the gentiles." it seems impossible, considering the utter silence of paul, that the apparition to which he refers can have spoken to him at length as described upon these occasions.( ) we have elsewhere remarked { } that there is not the slightest evidence in his own or other writings connecting stephen with paul, and it may be appropriate to add here that, supposing him to have been present when the martyr exclaimed: "lo, i behold the heavens opened, and the son of man standing on the right hand of god,"( ) it is singular that he does not name him as one of those by whom jesus "was seen." to resume this discussion, however: we have already shown that the statements of the acts regarding paul's conduct after this alleged vision are distinctly in contradiction with the statements of paul. the explanation here given of the cause of paul's leaving jerusalem, moreover, is not in agreement with acts ix. f., and much less with gal. i. ff. the three narratives themselves are full of irreconcilable differences and incongruities, which destroy all reasonable confidence in any substantial basis for the story. it is evident that the three narratives are from the same pen, and betray the composition of the author of acts.( ) they cannot be regarded as true history.( ) the hand of the composer is very apparent in the lavish use of the miraculous, so characteristic of the whole work. { } it is worth while to catalogue the supernatural incidents of this episode. the vision; companions hearing the voice but seeing no man, or not hearing the voice but seeing the light; paul's blindness; vision of ananias; restoration of sight to paul; trance of paul in jerusalem. such a narrative cannot be received in evidence. the whole of the testimony before us, then, simply amounts to this: paul believed that he had seen jesus some years after his death: there is no evidence that he ever saw him during his life.( ) he states that he had "received" that he was seen by various other persons, but he does not give the slightest information as to who told him, or what reasons he had for believing the statements to be correct. and still less does he narrate the particulars of the alleged appearances or even of his own vision. although we have no detailed statements of these extraordinary phenomena, we may assume that, as paul himself believed that he had seen jesus, certain other people of the circle of his disciples likewise believed that they had seen the risen master. the whole of the evidence for the resurrection reduces itself to an undefined belief on the part of a few persons, in a notoriously superstitious age, that after jesus had died and been buried they had seen him alive. these visions, it is admitted, occurred at a time of the most intense religious excitement, and under circumstances of wholly exceptional mental agitation and distress. the wildest alternations of fear, doubt, hope and { } indefinite expectation added their effects to oriental imaginations already excited by indignation at the fate of their master, and sorrow or despair at such a dissipation of their messianic dreams. there was present every element of intellectual and moral disturbance. now must we seriously ask again whether this bare and wholly unjustified belief can be accepted as satisfactory evidence for so astounding a miracle as the resurrection? can the belief of such men, in such an age, establish the reality of a phenomenon which contradicts universal experience? it comes to us in the form of bare belief from the age of miracles, unsupported by facts, uncorroborated by evidence, unaccompanied by proof of investigation, and unprovided with material for examination. what is such belief worth? we have no.hesitation in saying that it is absolutely worth nothing. we might here well bring our inquiry to a close, for we have no further evidence to deal with. the problem, however, is so full of interest that we cannot yet lay it down, and although we must restrain our argument within certain rigid limits, and wholly refrain from entering into regions of mere speculation, we may further discuss the origin and nature of the belief in the resurrection. recognizing the fact that, although its nature and extent are very indefinite, there existed an undoubted belief that, after his death, jesus was seen alive; the argument is advanced that there must have been a real basis for this belief. { } "the existence of a christian society," says an apologetic writer, "is the first and (if rightly viewed) the final proof of the historic truth of the miracle on which it was founded. it may indeed be said that the church was founded upon the belief in the resurrection, and not upon the resurrection itself: and that the testimony must therefore be limited to the attestation of the belief, and cannot reach to the attestation of the fact. but belief expressed in action is for the most part the strongest evidence which we can have of any historic event. unless, therefore, it can be shown that the origin of the apostolic belief in the resurrection, with due regard to the fulness of its characteristic form, and the breadth and rapidity of its propagation can be satisfactorily explained on other grounds, the belief itself is a sufficient proof of the fact."( ) this is obviously paley's argument of the twelve men( ) in a condensed form. belief in action may be the strongest evidence which we can have of any historic event; but when the historic event happens to be an event in religious history, and an astounding miracle like the resurrection, such bare evidence, emanating from such an age, is not very strong evidence, after all. the breadth and rapidity of its propagation absolutely prove nothing but belief in the report of those who believed; although it is very far from evident that people embraced christianity from a rational belief in the resurrection. no one pretends that the gentiles who believed made a preliminary examination of the truth of the resurrection. if breadth { } and rapidity of propagation be taken as sufficient proof of the truth of facts, we might consider buddhism and mahomedanism as satisfactorily attested creeds. there could not be a greater fallacy than the supposition that the origin of a belief must be explained upon other grounds, or that belief itself accepted as a sufficient proof of the fact asserted. the truth or falsehood of any allegation is determined by a balance of evidence, and the critic is no more bound to account for the formation of erroneous belief than he is bound to believe because he may not, after a great lapse of time, be able so clearly to demonstrate the particular manner in which that erroneous belief originated, that any other mode is definitely excluded. the belief that a dead man rose from the dead and appeared to several persons alive is at once disposed of upon abstract grounds. the alleged occurrence is contrary to universal experience; but on the other hand the prevalence of defective observation, mistaken inference, self-deception and credulity, any of which might lead to such belief, are only too well known to it. is it necessary to define which peculiar form of error is present in every false belief, before, with this immense preponderance of evidence against it, we finally reject it? we think not. any explanation consistent with universal experience must be adopted, rather than a belief which is contradictory to it. there are two theories which have been advanced to explain the origin of the apostolic belief in the resurrection, to which we may now briefly refer; but it must be clearly understood that the suggestion of an explanation is quite apart from our examination of the actual evidence for the resurrection. fifty { } explanations might be offered and be considered unsatisfactory without in the least degree altering the fact, that the testimony for the final miracle of christianity is totally insufficient, and that the allegation that it actually occurred cannot be maintained. the first explanation, adopted by some able critics, is that jesus did not really die on the cross, but being taken down alive, and his body being delivered to friends, he subsequently revived. in support of this theory, it is argued that jesus is represented by the gospels as expiring after having been but three to six hours upon the cross, which would have been an un-precedentedly rapid death. it is affirmed that only the hands and not the feet were nailed to the cross. the crurifragium, not usually accompanying crucifixion, is dismissed as unknown to the three synoptists, and only inserted by the fourth evangelist for dogmatic reasons, and of course the lance-thrust disappears with the leg-breaking. thus the apparent death was that profound faintness which might well fall upon such an organization after some hours of physical and mental agony on the cross, following the continued strain and fatigue of the previous night. as soon as he had sufficiently recovered, it is supposed that jesus visited his disciples a few times to re-assure them, but with precaution on account of the jews, and was by them believed to have risen from the dead, as indeed he himself may likewise have supposed, reviving as he had done from the faintness of death.( ) { } seeing, however, that his death had set the crown upon his work, the master withdrew into impenetrable obscurity and was heard of no more. we have given but the baldest outline of this theory; for it would occupy too much space to represent it adequately and show the ingenuity with which it is worked out, and the very considerable support which it receives from statements in the gospels, and from inferences deducible from them. we do not ourselves adopt this explanation, although it must be clearly repeated that, were the only alternative to do so, or to fall back upon the hypothesis of a miracle, we should consider it preferable. a serious objection brought against the theory seems to be, that it is not natural to suppose that, after such intense and protracted fatigue and anxiety followed by the most cruel agony on the cross, agony both of soul and body,( ) ending in unconsciousness only short of death, jesus could within a short period have presented himself to his disciples with such an aspect as could have conveyed to them the impression of { } victory over death by the prince of life. he must still, it is urged, have presented the fresh traces of suffering and weakness little calculated to inspire them with the idea of divine power and glory. this is partly, but not altogether, true. there is no evidence, as we shall presently show, that the appearances of jesus occurred so soon as is generally represented; and, in their astonishment at again seeing the master whom they supposed to be dead, the disciples could not have been in a state minutely to remark the signs of suffering,( ) then probably, with the power of a mind like that of jesus over physical weakness, little apparent. time and imagination would doubtless soon have effaced from their minds any such impressions, and left only the belief that he had risen from the dead to develop and form the christian doctrine. a more powerful objection seems to us the disappearance of jesus. we cannot easily persuade ourselves that such a teacher could have renounced his work and left no subsequent trace of his existence. still, it must be admitted that many explanations might be offered on this head, the most obvious being that death, whether as the result of the terrible crisis through which he had passed, or from some other cause, may soon after have ensued. we repeat, however, that we neither advance this explanation nor think it worth while to discuss it seriously, not because we think it untenable, although we do not adopt it, but because we consider that there is another explanation of the origin of belief in the resurrection which the repeated statement in the gospels that the women and his disciples did not at first recognize the risen jesus, are quoted in connection with this point. { } is better, and which is in our opinion the true one. we mean that which is usually called the "vision-hypothesis." the phenomenon which has to be accounted for is the apostolic belief that, after he had been dead and buried, jesus "was seen" [------] by certain persons. the explanation which we offer, and which has long been adopted in various forms by able critics, is, that doubtless jesus was seen, but the vision was not real ^and objective, but illusory and subjective; that is to say: jesus was not himself seen, but only a representation of jesus within the minds of the beholders. this explanation not only does not impeach the veracity of those who affirmed that they had seen jesus, but, accepting to a certain extent a subjective truth as the basis of the belief, explains upon well-known and natural principles the erroneous inference deduced from the subjective vision. it seems to us that the points to be determined are simple and obvious: is it possible for a man to mistake subjective impressions for objective occurrences? is it possible that any considerable number of persons can at the same time receive similar subjective impressions and mistake them for objective facts? if these questions can be answered affirmatively, { } and it can be shown that the circumstances, the characters, the constitution of those who believed in the first instance, favoured the reception of such subjective impressions, and the deduction of erroneous inferences, it must be admitted that a satisfactory explanation can thus be given of the apostolic belief, on other grounds than the reality of a miracle opposed to universal experience. no sooner is the first question formulated than it becomes obvious to every one who is acquainted with psychological and physiological researches, or who has even the most elementary knowledge of the influence of the mind upon the body, that it must at once be answered in the affirmative. indeed the affirmation that subjective impressions, in connection with every sense, can be mistaken for, and believed to be, actual objective effects, is so trite that it seems almost superfluous to make it. every reader must be well acquainted with illustrations of the fact. the only difficulty is to deal authoritatively with such a point within moderate compass. we must limit ourselves to the sense of sight "there are abundant proofs," says sir benjamin brodie, "that impressions may be made in the brain by other causes simulating those which are made on it by external objects through the medium of the organs of sense, thus producing false perceptions, which may, in the first instance, and before we have had time to reflect on the subject, be mistaken for realities."( ) the limitation here introduced: "before we have had time to reflect on the subject," is of course valid in the case of those whose reason is capable of rejecting the false perceptions, whether on the ground of natural { } law or of probability; but, in anyone ignorant of natural law, familiar with the idea of supernatural agency and the occurrence of miraculous events, it is obvious, reflection, if reflection of a sceptical kind can even be assumed, would have little chance of arriving at any true discrimination of phenomena. speaking of the nervous system and its functions, and more immediately of the relation of the cerebrum to the sensorium and the production of spectral illusions, dr. carpenter says, in his work on the "principles of mental physiology," which is well worth the study of those interested in the question we are discussing: "still stronger evidence of the same associated action of the cerebrum and sensorium, is furnished by the study of the phenomena designated as spectral illusions. these are clearly sensorial states not excited by external objects; and it is also clear that they frequently originate in cerebral changes, since they represent creations of the mind, and are not mere reproductions of past sensations." dr. carpenter refers in illustration to a curious illusion to which sir john herschel was subject, "in the shape of the involuntary occurrence of visual impressions, into which geometrical regularity of form enters as the leading character. these were not of the nature of those ocular spectra which may be attributed with probability to retinal changes."( ) dr. carpenter then continues: "we have here not a reproduction of sensorial impressions formerly received; but a construction of new forms, by a process which, if it had been carried on consciously, we should have called imagination. and it is difficult to see { } how it is to be accounted for in any other way, than by an unconscious action of the cerebrum; the products of which impress themselves on the sensorial consciousness, just as, in other cases, they express themselves through the motor apparatus."( ) the illusions described by sir john herschel who, as he himself says, was "as little visionary as most people" should be referred to. of the production of sensations by ideas there can be no possible doubt( ) and, consequently, as little of the realisation by the person in whom they are produced of subjective impressions exactly as though they were objective. with regard to false perceptions, dr. carpenter says: "it has been shown that the action of ideational states upon the sensorium can modify or even produce sensations. but the action of pre-existing states of mind is still more frequently shown in modifying the interpretation which we put upon our sense-impressions. for since almost every such interpretation is an act of judgment based upon experience, that judgment will vary according to our mental condition at the time it is delivered; and will be greatly affected by any dominant idea or feeling, so as even to occasion a complete mis-interpretation of the objective source of the sense-impression, as often occurs in what is termed 'absence of mind.' the following case, mentioned by dr. tuke( ) as occurring within his own knowledge, affords a good example of this fallacy:--'a lady was walking one day from penryn to falmouth, and her mind being at that time, or recently, occupied by the subject of drinking-fountains, thought she saw { } in the road a newly-erected fountain, and even distinguished an inscription upon it, namely--"_if any man thirst let him come unto me and drink_." some time afterwards, she mentioned the fact with pleasure to the daughters of a gentleman who was supposed to have erected it. they expressed their surprise at her statement, and assured her that she must be quite mistaken. perplexed with the contradiction between the testimony of her senses and of those who would have been aware of the fact had it been true, and feeling that she could not have been deceived (" for seeing is believing "), she repaired to the spot, and found to her astonishment that no drinking-fountain was in existence--only a few scattered stones, which had formed the foundation upon which the suggestion of an expectant imagination had built the superstructure. the subject having previously occupied her attention, these sufficed to form, not only a definite erection, but one inscribed by an appropriate motto corresponding to the leading idea.'"( ) we may give as another illustration an illusion which presented itself to sir walter scott( ) he had been reading, shortly after the death of lord byron, an account in a publication professing to detail the habits and opinions of the poet. as scott had been intimate with lord byron he was deeply interested in the publication, which contained some particulars relative to himself and other friends. "their sitting-room opened into an entrance hall, rather fantastically fitted up with articles of armour, skins of wild animals, and the like. it was when laying down his book, { } and passing into this hall, through which the moon was beginning to shine, that the individual of whom i speak saw, right before him, and in a standing posture, the exact representation of his departed friend whose recollection had been so strongly brought to his imagination. he stopped for a single moment, so as to notice the wonderful accuracy with which fancy had impressed upon the bodily eye the peculiarities of dress and posture of the illustrious poet. sensible, however, of the delusion, he felt no sentiment save that of wonder at the extraordinary accuracy of the resemblance, and stepped onward towards the figure, which resolved itself, as he approached, into the various materials of which it was composed. these were merely a screen, occupied by great-coats, shawls, plaids and such other articles as usually are found in a country entrance-hall. the spectator returned to the spot from which he had seen the illusion, and endeavoured, with all his power, to recall the image which had been so singularly vivid. but this was beyond his capacity," &c. although sir walter scott might be sensible of the delusion, it may be more than doubted whether, in the first century of our era, such an apparition proceeding from or connected with religious agitation of mind would have been considered so. dr. abercrombie( ) mentions many instances of spectral illusions, "some of the most authentic facts" relating to which he classes under the head of "intense mental conceptions so strongly impressed upon the mind as, for the moment, to be believed to have a real existence." { } we cannot, however, venture to quote illustrations.( ) dr. hibbert, in whose work on apparitions many interesting instances are to be found, thus concludes his consideration of the conditions which lead to such illusions: "i have at length concluded my observations on what may be considered as the leading mental laws which are connected with the origin of spectral impressions. the general inference to be drawn from them is,--that _apparitions are nothing more than morbid symptoms, which are indicative of an intense excitement of the renovated feelings of the mind_."( ) subjective visions, believed to have had objective reality, abound in the history of the world. they are familiar to all who have read the lives of the saints, and they have accompanied the progress of christianity in various forms from the trances of montanism to the vision of the "immaculate conception" in the grotto of lourdes. if we turn to the inquiry whether a similar subjective impression can be received by many persons at one time and be mistaken by them for an objective reality, an equally certain reply in the affirmative must unhesitatingly be given. the contagiousness of emotion is well known,( ) and the rapidity with which panic, for instance, spreads from a single individual to the mass is remarked every day. the most trifling incident, unseen by more than a few and, therefore, more pliant in the imagination every one remembers the case of luther and his visions of the devil. { } of the many, has instantaneously convinced multitudes of the most erroneous inferences. we need not refer, moreover, to the numerous religious and other mental epidemics which have swept over the face of the world, infecting society with the wildest delusions. from montanism to camp meetings and revivals in our own day, it has been demonstrated that religious excitement and dominant ideas have spread with astonishing rapidity and power amongst the circles in which they have arisen. in certain states of nervous expectation, false impressions are instantaneously transmitted from one to another in a religious assembly. dr. carpenter says: "moreover, if not only a single individual, but several persons should be 'possessed' by one and the same idea or feeling, the same misinterpretation may be made by all of them; and in such a case the concurrence of their testimony does not add the least strength to it.--of this we have a good example in the following occurrence cited by dr. tuke, as showing the influence of a 'dominant idea' in falsifying the perceptions of a number of persons at once:--'during the conflagration at the crystal palace in the winter of - , when the animals were destroyed by the fire, it was supposed that the chimpanzee had succeeded in escaping from his cage. attracted to the roof, with this expectation in full force, men saw the unhappy animal holding on to it, and writhing in agony to get astride one of the iron ribs. it need not be said that its struggles were watched by those below with breathless suspense, and as the newspapers informed us 'with sickening dread.' but there was no animal whatever there; and all this feeling was thrown away upon a tattered piece of blind, so torn as to resemble to the eye of fancy, the body, arms, and legs of an ape!' (op. cit., p. .) another { } example of a like influence affecting several individuals simultaneously in a similar manner is mentioned by dr. hibbert in his well-known treatise on apparitions:--'a whole ship's company was thrown into the utmost consternation by the apparition of a cook who had died a few days before. he was distinctly seen walking a-head of the ship, with a peculiar gait by which he was distinguished when alive, through having one of his legs shorter than the other. on steering the ship towards the object, it was found to be a piece of floating wreck.' many similar cases might be referred to, in which the imagination has worked up into 'apparitions' some common-place objects, which it has invested with attributes derived from the previous mental state of the observer; and the belief in such an apparition as a reality, which usually exists in such cases, unless antagonized by an effort of the reason, constitutes a _delusion_."( ) we must maintain indeed that a number of persons assembled under the influence of strong similar ideas, and excited by the same active religious emotion are more likely to be affected by similar subjective impressions to the extent of believing them to be objective than one or two would be. the excitement of each acts upon the whole body, and is itself increased by reaction from the aggregate emotion. each receives impressions from the other, which are vividly felt even without being verified by personal experience. the most nervous temperament in the assembly gives the final impetus to the excited imagination of the rest. in moments of supreme expectation and doubt, enthusiasm overcomes reason. if one man see, if one man hear, the mental impression is credited with an objective cause, even when unfelt by others, and then a { } similar impression is soon carried from the brain to the sensorium of all. this does not involve the supposition of a diseased mind in ordinary cases, and in the instances which we have in view the false perceptions were, obviously, determined and encouraged by foregone conclusions of a nature rarely possible and, when existing, rarely resisted. "there are many persons," adds dr. carpenter, "quite sane upon ordinary matters, and even (it may be) distinguished by some special form of ability, who are yet affected with what the writer once heard mr. carlyle term a 'diluted insanity;' allowing their minds to become so completely 'possessed' by 'dominant ideas,' that their testimony as to what they declare themselves to have witnessed--even when several individuals concur in giving exactly the same account of it--must be regarded as utterly untrustworthy."( ) that subjective impressions can, in the opinion of eminent apologists, be recorded by an evangelist as objective reality, we have already pointed out in connection with the statement of the first synoptist, that "many bodies of the saints were raised; and they came out of the sepulchres after his resurrection and appeared unto many." (xxvii. f.) dean milman and canon farrar explain this by the supposition that the earthquake "seemed to have filled the air with ghostly visitants, who after christ had risen appeared to linger in the holy city."( ) it follows as a logical consequence that, as this subjective impression felt by many at once is described in the gospel as objective, these writers not only admit the possibility of such a mistake on the part { } of the observers, but that the gospel, in adopting that mistake, may be suspected of a similar course in recording the appearances of jesus. we have thus replied to the question whether the "vision hypothesis" could explain the belief of five hundred, or even of eleven persons who supposed they had seen jesus at once, and we do not think that any one who seriously considers the age, and the circumstances under which the phenomenon is alleged to have occurred, can doubt that such belief could very easily have resulted from merely subjective impressions. before going further into the discussion of the matter, however, we must again, with a little more minuteness, call attention to the date of the actual statements upon which the whole argument turns. the apostle paul writes about a quarter of a century after the time when it is said that jesus "was seen" by those whom he names. whatever opinion may be formed as to the amount of information obtained by paul during the visit he paid to jerusalem for the purpose of making the acquaintance of peter, it is undeniable that some years had elapsed between the time when jesus is supposed to have been seen and the time when paul could have received information regarding these appearances from any of the apostles. if we date the death of jesus in the year , almost the latest date assigned to it by any eminent critic, and the conversion of paul about a.d. - ,( ) it will be remembered that the { } apostle himself states that he did not go to jerusalem till three years after, which brings us to a.d. - as the earliest time when paul first came in personal contact with peter and james. he did not go up to jerusalem again for fourteen years after that, and we have no reason for believing that he met any of the apostles in the interval, but the contrary, from his own account of that second visit, gal. ii. . he could not, therefore, have heard anything of the appearances of jesus even from peter and james till some eight to ten years after they had taken place. from the other apostles, in all probability, he cannot have heard anything till nearly twenty years had elapsed since they supposed they, had seen jesus. where did he get his information regarding the brethren at once? from whom did he get it? if the supposed appearance took place, as so many suppose, in galilee, the date of his information is still more uncertain. if, on the other hand, it occurred in jerusalem, whilst so many of the numbers were visitors only, it is obvious that the greater part must subsequently have left the holy city and become scattered to their respective homes. the difficulty of obtaining information from more than a few of the becomes obvious. in any case, from no authority which we are entitled to assume could paul have been minutely informed of these appearances less than eight to ten years after they occurred, and then of the vision of the eleven, only from one of the number to whom the first vision occurred. now, no one who considers the operation of memory, even in persons of more than usual sobriety of imagination, dealing with circumstances not likely to be exaggerated or distorted by feeling in the course of time, can doubt that, in ten years, { } all the circumstances of such occasions, amidst which much excitement certainly prevailed, must have assumed a very different aspect from what they originally bore. we may be permitted to quote a few words on this subject: "though we are accustomed to speak of memory as if it consisted in an exact reproduction of past states of consciousness, yet experience is continually showing us that this reproduction is very often inexact, through the modification which the 'trace' has undergone in the interval. sometimes the trace has been partially obliterated; and what remains may serve to give a very erroneous (because imperfect) view of the occurrence..... and where it is one in which our own feelings are interested, we are extremely apt to lose sight of what goes against them, so that the representation given by memory is altogether one-sided. this is continually demonstrated by the entire dissimilarity of the accounts of the same occurrence or conversation, which shall be given by two or more parties concerned in it, even when the matter is fresh in their minds, and they are honestly desirous of telling the truth. and this diversity will usually become still more pronounced with the lapse of time: the trace becoming gradually but unconsciously modified by the habitual course of thought and feeling; so that when it is so acted on after a lengthened interval as to bring up a reminiscence of the original occurrence, that reminiscence really represents, not the actual occurrence, but the modified trace of it."( ) this is specially likely to occur where, as in our case, there were old testament prophecies supposed to describe minutely the sufferings, death, and resurrection of the messiah, to furnish lines which the transformation of memory must { } insensibly follow. unconsciously, we may be certain, the misty outlines of the original transaction would acquire consistency and take form according to the tenor of so infallible an index. it would require a memory of iron and of more than stubborn doggedness to resist the unobtrusive influence of supposed prophecies. be it clearly understood that we speak of an unconscious process, which is perfectly consistent with complete belief that the transformed trace exactly represents what originally took place. but adhering more closely to the point before us, can we suppose that the account which paul received of these appearances, after that lapse of time, was a perfectly sober and unwarped description of what actually took place? we think not. is it possible that the vision of the , for instance, had escaped the maturing influence of time? or that of the eleven? we believe that it is not possible. however, paul does not give a single detail, and consequently this argument mainly affects the abstract value of all such evidence whether at first or second hand, but it likewise makes more vague the original transaction, so indefinitely sketched for us, which we have to explain. what was it the really saw? "jesus," says the report matured by time; and modern divines taking the statement in its most objective sense, demand an explanation of the unknown phenomenon which led to believe that they actually saw the risen. master. did the originally think anything of the kind? what impression did the individuals receive? did any two receive precisely the same impressions? there is not the slightest evidence that they did. although paul gives the most meagre report of these appearances that could well be conceived, it must be remembered that the { } impression made upon his own mind was not by the events themselves, but by the narrative of the events recounted at least eight or ten years afterwards. there can be po doubt that, earlier, paul the persecutor must also frequently have heard of the resurrection, and of alleged occasions when jesus had been seen after his death and burial, from persecuted members of the christian community, but beyond the undefined certainty of this we are not entitled to go. that what he heard must have received warmth of colouring from the fire of persecution is most probable. of this, however, we shall speak presently. it is not necessary further to enlarge upon the superstition of the age of which we write. we have elsewhere quoted the opinion of an orthodox divine and hebrew scholar on the character of the jewish people about that period. "not to be more tedious, therefore, in this matter," he says, "let two things only be observed: i. that the nation under the second temple, was given to magical arts beyond measure; and ii. that it was given to an easiness of believing all manner of delusions beyond measure."( ) and again: "it is a disputable case whether the jewish nation were more mad with superstition in matters of religion, or with superstition in curious arts."( ) even supposing the twelve to have been men of superior intelligence to most of their fellow countrymen of the period, it cannot reasonably be questioned that they were "men of like passions" and failings with the rest, and that, as were the most eminent men of all countries for centuries after, they were ignorant of the true order of nature, full of superstitious ideas regarding cosmical phenomena, and ready at all times to { } believe in miracles and supernatural interference with the affairs of life. as jews, moreover, they had inherited belief in angelic agency, and divine apparitions. the old testament is full of narratives in which jehovah appears to the patriarchs and lawgivers of israel. celestial visions had been familiar to every jew from his infancy, and the constant personal communications of the almighty with his peculiar people were still the most sacred traditions of the nation. nursed in the prevalent superstition of the time, educated by the law and the prophets to familiarity with the supernatural, and prepared by the fervid imagination of their race to recognize wonders in heaven and earth,( ) the disciples were naturally prepared for the great christian miracle. the special circumstances in which they were placed at the death of jesus conduced in the highest degree to excite that expectant attention which, in their state of profound agitation, rendered them readily susceptible of extraordinary impressions. the disciples had for a long period followed jesus and felt the influence of his elevated character. it may be doubted how far they had entered into the spirit of his sublime teaching, or understood the spiritual wisdom which lay beneath the noble simplicity of his language, but it cannot be doubted that his personal greatness must have produced a profound effect upon their minds. when they came at last to understand, if in a material and imperfect way, his views as to his messianic character, they can have had little difficulty in believing, in spite of the mysterious lowliness and humility of his aspect, although probably in a sense widely different from his own, that { } the hope of israel had at last come, and that the hour of her redemption was at hand. it is probable that, as the enmity of the priests and rulers increased, and the danger of his position became more apparent, whilst he disdained unworthily to shrink from his public work, he must have felt all the peril before him, and observed the anxiety of his followers. it may be conceived that, under such circumstances, his teachings may have assumed even a higher spirituality than before and, rising above the clouds of the present, soared out into that calmer future when the religion he founded would be accepted by men, and become a light to the gentiles and the glory of his people israel. it is probable that he may have spoken of his death in spiritual terms as a sacrifice for them and for the world, which would secure the triumph of his work and regenerate mankind. comforting those who had left all and followed him, but from whom he might so soon be parted, and knowing their doubts and fears, he must have re-assured their minds by inspiriting views of the inseparable nature of his union with those who loved him and did his commandments; his spirit dwelling within them and leading them safely through the world, in the peace and security of souls raised by the truth beyond the reach of its corruption and its wrong. that they must have felt the strongest conviction of his messianic character, we think cannot be doubted, however confused may have been their ideas of the exact nature of his office and of the manner in which his coming was to secure the triumph of israel the shock to their expectations and the utter dissipation of their hopes which must have been felt in the first moment of his arrest, hurried trial, and cruel { } condemnation can well be imagined. it is probable that in that first moment of terror and bewilderment the disciples indeed all forsook him and fled. no one who had consorted with the great teacher, however, and felt the influence of his mind, could long have resisted the reaction to nobler thoughts of him. in all the bitterness of sorrow for the loss of their master and friend, in horror at his agonizing and shameful death, and in doubt, consternation, and almost despair, they must have gathered together again and spoken of these strange events. believing jesus to have been the messiah, how could they interpret his death on the cross? if he was the messiah could he thus die?( ) if enoch and elijah, if moses, precursors of the messiah, had not seen death, how could that prophet like unto moses whom jehovah had raised up end his career by a shameful death on the cross? throughout that time of fiery trial and supreme mental agitation, they must have perpetually sought in their own minds some explanation of the terrible events then occurring and seeming to blast all their hopes, and doubtless mystic utterances of jesus must have assumed new meanings, meanings probably different from his own. in the accounts of the coming messiah in the prophets, they must have searched for some light by which to solve the inexplicable problem. is it not conceivable that, in that last time of danger and darkness, when he saw the persecution against him become more vehement, and felt that the path which he had chosen led him through danger and distress perhaps to death, jesus may, in the bitter contemplation of that fanatical opposition of bigotry and { } superstition have applied to himself the description of the suffering servant of jehovah, suffering--as all noble souls have done who are in advance of their age, and preach great truths which condemn either directly or by implication the vices and follies of their time,--"the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely," and, worse still, the ignoble insults of popular ignorance and fickleness? here might seem to them the solution of the enigma; and returning from that first flight of terror and bewilderment, feeling all the intense reaction of affection and grief and faith in the master quickened by shame at their abandonment of him in his moment of supreme danger and affliction, still believing that he must be the messiah, and in mute longing and expectation of the next events which were to confirm or confound their hopes, the disciples must have been in the climax of nervous agitation and excitement, and ready to receive any impression which might be suggested in their embarrassment.( ) according to paul it was peter who first saw the risen jesus. according to the first and fourth gospels, the first appearance was to the women, and notably, in the latter, to mary magdalene out of whom had been cast "seven devils," and whose temperament probably rendered her unusually susceptible of all such impressions. did paul intentionally omit all mention of the appearances to the women, or did he not know of them? in the latter case, we have an instructive light thrown on the gospel tradition; in the former, the first suggestion ewald points out that, according to the belief of the period, the souls of the dead hovered for a time between heaven and earth, and he considers that the belief undeniably played an important part in this sphere of visions of the christ gesch. d. v. isr., vi. p. a. { } of the resurrection becomes even more clearly intelligible. it will be observed that in all this explanation we are left chiefly to conjecture, for the statements in the gospels cannot, upon any point, be used with the slightest confidence. on the other hand, all that is demanded is that a probable or possible explanation of the origin of the belief in the resurrection should be given; and in the total absence of historical data we are entitled to draw inferences as to the course of events at the time. it may well be that a mistake as to the sepulchre, rendered not improbable if any hint of the truth be conveyed in the conflicting traditions of the gospel, or one of many other suggestions which might be advanced, might lead the women or peter to believe that the sepulchre was empty. or some other even trifling circumstance, which we no longer can indicate with precision, might convey to the women or to peter, in their state of nervous excitement, the last impulse wanting to cause that rapid revulsion from extreme depression, which is so suitable to the state which we may perhaps be allowed to call creative subjectivity. if we are to accept the indications scattered about the new testament, the impetuous ardent temperament of peter was eminently one to bound into sudden ecstatic enthusiasm, and in all probability some commonplace or trifling incident may have been the spark which kindled into flame the materials already at glowing heat. the strong subjective impression that jesus had risen would create a vision of him which, at once confirming previous conclusions, resolving perplexing doubts and satisfying feverish expectations, would be accepted by each mind with little or no question as an objective reality. if peter, or even the { } women, brought to the disciples the assurance that they had seen the lord, we cannot doubt that, in the unparalleled position in which they were then placed, under all the circumstances of intense feeling and religious excitement at the moment, such emotions would be suddenly called into action as would give to these men the impression that they had seen the master whom they had lost. these subjective impressions would be strengthened daily and unconsciously into ever more objective consistency, and being confirmed by supposed prophecy would be affirmed with a confidence insensibly inspired by dogmatic considerations. that the news would fly from believer to believer, meeting everywhere excited attention and satisfying eager expectancy, is certain; and that these devout souls, swayed by every emotion of glad and exultant enthusiasm, would constantly mistake the suggestions of their own thoughts for objective realities is probable. jesus died, was buried, and rose again "according to the scriptures." this would harden every timid supposition into assurance; and as time went on, what was doubtful would become certain, what was mysterious, clear; and those who had seen nothing would take up and strengthen the tradition of those who had seen the lord. it is argued that there was not time for the preparation of the disciples to believe in the resurrection of jesus between his crucifixion and "the third day," when that event is alleged to have occurred, and, consequently, no probability of subjective impressions of so unexpected a nature being received. to those { } apologists who adopt this argument we might point to many passages in the gospels, which affirm that the resurrection on the third day was predicted. these, however, we assign of course to a later date. the argument assumes that there was no preparation in the teaching of jesus, which, as we have endeavoured to suggest, is not the case. if there had been no other, the mere assurance that he was the messiah must have led to reflections, which demanded some other sequel to his career than the death of a slave. the mere suggestion of such a problem as must have proposed itself to the minds of the disciples: if all is to end here, jesus was not the messiah: if he was the messiah, what will now happen?--must have led to expectant attention. but there was much more than this. in such moments as those of the passion, thought works feverishly and fast. it is not to be supposed that peter and the rest did not foresee the end, when jesus was led away prisoner in the hands of his enemies. it is still less to be imagined that their minds were not ceaselessly revolving that problem, on the solution of which depended their fondest hopes and highest aspirations. it is most probable, indeed, that no time could have found the disciples in a state so ripe for strong impressions as that immediately succeeding the death of their master. there are, however, other aspects in which this point may be placed. what evidence is there that jesus was seen, or supposed to have been seen, on the third day? absolutely none worthy of the name. paul does not say that he was, and as for the gospels their { } statement is of no value, and the tradition which they record may be set down as a foregone dogmatic con-elusion. paul very distinctly shows this. he says: "for i delivered unto you first of all that which i also received, that christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he has been raised the third day, according to the scriptures."( ) the repetition of the phrase "according to the scriptures" is very marked, and points to the fact that the purpose for which jesus died--"for our sins"--and the date of his resurrection--"the third day"--are statements directly based upon scripture. we have mentioned that the scriptures supposed to indicate the third day, do not really apply to the messiah at all, but this does not affect the question before us. now believing this epoch to be defined in prophecy, this is precisely one of those points upon which memory would, in the lapse of time, be most likely to adjust itself to the prophecy. we will assume that jesus was not "seen" before the third day. it is obvious that if he was seen forty days after, it might be affirmed that he had been actually raised long before, on the third day. the vision occurring on the third day itself, even, could not prove that he had not "risen" before. there is, in fact, no way that we can see of fixing the third day except the statement ol "scripture," and, the moment we accept that, we must recognize the force of dogmatic influence.( ) the fact that the third day has from early we do not go into any argument based on the order given in the first two synoptics to go into galilee--a three days' journey at least--where the disciples were to see jesus. nor need we touch upon other similar points which arise out of the narratives of the gospels. { } times been set apart as the christian sabbath, does not prove anything. if the third day was believed to be the day indicated by "scripture" for the resurrection, of course that day would be selected as the time at which it must have occurred, and on which it should be commemorated. so far as the vision hypothesis is concerned, the day is of no consequence whatever, and the objection upon this point has no force. there is another consideration which we must mention, which is not only important in connection with an estimate of the evidence for the resurrection, but the inferences from which clearly support the explanation we are proposing. before stating it we may, in passing, again refer to the fact that it is nowhere affirmed that anyone was an eye-witness of the actual resurrection. it is supposed to be proved by the circumstance that jesus was subsequently "seen." observe, however, that the part of this miracle which could not well have been ascribed to subjective impressions--the actual resurrection--is, naturally enough, not seen by anyone, but that which comes precisely within the scope of such subjective action is said to have been seen by many. to come at once to our point, however, neither paul, nor the gospels, nor christian tradition in any form, pretends that jesus was seen by any one but his disciples and those who believed in him. in fact, jesus only appeared to those who were prepared by faith and expectant attention to see him in the manner we assert. we are at present merely speaking of the earlier appearances, and reserving paul for separate discussion. why, we may inquire, did jesus not appear to his { } enemies as well as to his friends?( ) nothing of course could have been more intelligible than his desire to comfort and reassure those who believed in and mourned for him, but to do this by no means excluded a wider manifestation of himself, supposing him to have actually risen from the dead. on the hypothesis that he only rose again and was seen through the yearning and enthusiastic faith of his followers, the reason why he was not seen by others is not hard to find. yet it might be thought that the object of at once establishing beyond doubt his supernatural mission, and convincing his enemies of their crime, and the jews of their blindness and folly, was important enough. had he shown himself to the chief priests and elders, and confounded the pharisees with the vision of him whom they had so cruelly nailed to the accursed tree, how might not the future of his followers have been smoothed, and the faith of many made strong! or if he had stood again in the courts of the roman procurator, no longer a prisoner buffeted and spat upon, but the glorious messiah, beyond the reach of jewish malignity or roman injustice. but no, he was seen by none but those devoted to him. we shall of course be told by apologists that this also was "for the trial of our faith;" though to anyone who earnestly reflects, it must seem childish to ask men to believe what is beyond their reason, yet conceal the evidence by which reason is supposed to be guided. the reply, however, is clear: for the trial of our faith or for any other reason, it is nevertheless certain that this evidence does not exist. { } when the argument which we are now discussing was first advanced long ago by celsus, origen had no better refutation than, after admitting the fact that jesus was not after his resurrection seen as before publicly and by all men, to take refuge in the belief that the passage of paul regarding his appearances contains wonderful mysteries which, if understood, would explain why jesus did not show himself after that event as he had done before it.( ) we must now proceed to show that the vision of paul is satisfactorily explained by the same hypothesis.( ) we have already proved that there is no evidence of any value that paul's conversion was due to his having seen jesus in a manner which he believed to be objective and supernatural. to represent the arch persecutor paul transformed in a moment, by a miraculous vision of jesus, into the apostle of the gentiles was highly characteristic of the author of contra cels., ii. . it is curious that, in an earlier chapter, origen, discussing the question of celsus,--whether any one who had been actually dead had ever risen with a real body, says that if celsus had been a jew who believed that elijah and elisha had raised little children he could not have advanced this objection. origen adds that he thinks the reason why jesus appeared to no other nation but the jews was, that they had become accustomed to miracles, and could, by comparing the works of jesus and what was told of him with what had been done before, recognize that he was greater than all who had preceded him. ii. . { } acts, who further represents paul as immediately preaching publicly in damascus and confounding the jews. widely different is the statement of paul. he distinctly affirms that he did not communicate with flesh and blood, nor went he up to jerusalem to them which were apostles before him, but that he immediately went away into arabia. the fathers delighted in representing this journey to arabia as an instance of paul's fervour and eagerness to preach the gospel in lands over which its sound had not yet gone forth. there can be no doubt, however, we think, that paul's journey to arabia and his sojourn there were for the purpose of reflection.( ) it is only in legends that instantaneous spiritual revolutions take place. in sober history the process is more slow and progressive. we repeat that there is no evidence which can at all be accepted that paul's conversion was effected by a vision, and that it is infinitely more probable that it was, so to say, merely completed and crowned by seeing jesus; but, at the same time, even if the view be held that this vision was the decisive circumstance which induced paul at once to resign his course of persecution and embrace christianity, our argument is not materially affected. in any case, much silent, deep, and almost unconscious preparation for the change must long before have proceeded in the mind of paul, which was finally matured in the arabian waste. upon no view that is taken can this be excluded; upon every ground of common sense, experience, and necessary inference, it must be admitted. { } indifference is the only great gulf which separates opinions. there was no stolid barrier of apathy between saul of tarsus and belief in the messiah-ship of jesus. in persecuting christianity, paul proved two things: the earnestness and energy of his convictions, and the fact that his attention was keenly directed to the new sect. both points contributed to the result we are discussing. paul's judaism was no mere formalism. it was the adoption, heart and soul, of the religion of his people; which was to him no dead principle, but a living faith stimulating that eager impetuous character to defend its integrity with "fire and sword." he did not, like so many of his countrymen, turn away with scorn from the followers of the despised nazarene and leave them to their delusion; but turned to them, on the contrary, with the fierce attraction of the zealot whose own belief is outraged by the misbelief of others. the earnest jew came into sharp collision with the earnest christian. the earnestness of each was an element of mutual respect. the endurance and firmness of the one might not melt the bigoted resolution of the other, but it arrested his attention and commanded his unconscious sympathy. just so would the persecutor have endured and resisted persecution; so, subsequently, he actually did meet it. and what was the main difference between the persecutor and the persecuted? it consisted in that which constituted the burden of the apostolic preaching: the belief that "this was the christ." the creed of the new sect at least was not complicated. it was little more at that time than a question of identity, until paul himself developed it into an elaborate system of theology. { } in this question of identity, however, there was comprised a vast change of national ideas. to the devout jew,--looking for the hope of israel, yearning and praying for the advent of that son of david who was to sit upon the throne of his fathers, restore the fortunes of the people, drive out the heathen and subdue the nations again to the yoke of israel, establishing the worship of jehovah in its purity and turning the gentiles to the service of the god of gods,--it was an abhorrent thought that the lowly peasant who had died a shameful death on golgotha should be represented as the messiah, the promised king of the jews. still there was something sufficiently startling in the idea to excite reflection. a political aspirant, who pretended to play the part, and after some feeble attempt at armed insurrection had been crushed by the heel of the roman, could not have attracted attention. in that, there would have been no originality to astonish, and no singularity to require explanation. this man, on the contrary, who was said to be the messiah, assumed no earthly dignity; claimed no kingdom in this world; had not even a place to lay his head; but ended a short and unambitious career as the teacher of a simple but profound system of morality by death on a cross. there was no vulgar imitation here. this was the reverse of the messiah of the jews. in spite of so much dissimilarity, however, there was in the two parties a fundamental agreement of belief. the jew expected the messiah; the christian believed he had now come. the messiah expected by the jew was certainly a very different saviour from the despised and rejected jesus of nazareth, but at the root of the { } christian faith lay belief in a messiah. it was a thoroughly jewish belief, springing out of the covenant with the fathers, and based upon the law and the prophets. the difference was not one of principle but one of details. their interpretation of the promises was strangely dissimilar, but the trust of both was in the god of israel. to pass from one to the other did not involve the adoption of a new religion, but merely a modification of the views of the old. once convinced that the messiah was not a political ruler but a spiritual guide, not a victorious leader, but a suffering servant of jehovah, the transition from judaic hopes to recognition of jesus was almost accomplished. it is clear that paul in his capacity of persecutor must have become well acquainted with the views of the christians, and probably must have heard them repeatedly expounded by his captives before the jewish sanhedrin. he must have heard the victims of his blind religious zeal affirming their faith with all that ecstatic assurance which springs out of persecution. the vision of peter contributed to the vision of paul. there can be no doubt that paul must have become aware of the application to jesus of old testament prophecies, and of the new conception thence derived of a suffering messiah. the political horizon was certainly not suggestive of the coming of the lord's anointed. never had the fortunes of israel been at a lower ebb. the hope of a prince of the house of david to restore dominion to the fallen race was hard to entertain. the suggestion of an alternative theory based upon a new interpretation of the prophets, if startling, was not untimely, when the old confidence { } was becoming faint in many minds, and the hope of his coming seemed so distant and unsure. if we do not misjudge the character of paul, however shocked he may have been at first by the substitution of a crucified nazarene for the triumphant messiah of his earlier visions, there must have been something profoundly pleasing to his mind in the conception of a spiritual messiah. as he became familiar with the idea, it is probable that flashes of doubt must have crossed his mind as to the correctness of his more material views. if the belief were true, which christians professed, that this jesus, despised and rejected of men, was actually the suffering servant of jehovah, and this servant of jehovah the messiah! if the claim of this jesus who had been esteemed smitten of god and afflicted, had been verified by his rising again from the dead and ascending to the right hand of god! this aspect of the messianic idea had a mystery and significance congenial to the soul of paul. the supernatural elements could have presented no difficulties to him. belief in the resurrection was part of his creed as a pharisee. that the risen messiah should have been seen by many, the fundamental idea once admitted, could not surprise the visionary jew. we can well imagine the conflict which went on in the ardent mind of paul when doubts first entered it; his resistance and struggle for the faith of his youth; the pursuance as duty of the course he had begun, whilst the former conviction no longer strengthened the feverish energy; the excitement of religious zeal in the mad course of persecution, not to be arrested in a moment, but become, by growing doubt, bitterness and pain to him; the suffering { } inflicted sending its pang into his own flesh. there was ample preparation in such a situation for the vision of paul. the constitution and temperament of the apostle were eminently calculated to receive impressions of the strongest description.( ) we have mentioned the conjecture of many able men that his "stake in the flesh" was a form of epilepsy. it is, of course, but a conjecture, though one which has great probability,( ) and we must not treat it otherwise; but, if it could be proved correct, much light would be thrown upon paul's visions. we have discussed the apostle's statements regarding the supernatural charismata in the church, and have seen his extreme readiness to believe in the lavish bestowal of miraculous gifts where others could recognise but ordinary qualities. that paul should be able to claim the power of speaking with tongues more than all the corinthians, whose exercise of that spiritual gift he so unceremoniously restrains, is in perfect keeping with all that we elsewhere learn about him. everywhere we find the keenly impressionable nature so apt to fall into the ecstatic state when brought under the influence of active religious emotion. "i must glory," he exclaims with irresistible impulse on coming to a theme so congenial to him, "i must glory; it is not indeed expedient, but i will come to visions and revelations of the lord."( ) even when he speaks of the stake in his flesh, which he does in such suggestive connection with his visions, he describes it as sent lest he should "be exalted above measure by the { } excess of the revelations."( ) we have so repeatedly had to refer to paul's claim to have received his gospel by special revelation that we need not again speak of it here. if we could quote acts as a genuine representation of christian tradition regarding paul, we might point out the visions and revelations therein so freely ascribed to him, but his own writings are amply sufficient for our purpose. even his second journey to jerusalem is attributed to the direction of revelation.( ) the only vision regarding which the apostle gives any particulars is that referred to, cor. xii. : "i know a man in christ above fourteen years ago (whether in the body i know not, whether out of the body i know not, god knoweth), such an one caught up even unto the third heaven. . and i know such a man (whether in the body or out of the body i know not, god knoweth), . that he was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter. . for such an one will i boast," etc.( ) it has been argued from this passage and the repetition of the expression "whether in the body or out of the body i know not," that paul himself could clearly distinguish objective facts from subjective impressions.( ) no interpretation could well be more erroneous. it is evident that paul has no doubt whatever of his having been in the third heaven and in paradise, and as little of { } his having heard the unspeakable words. that is quite objectively real to him. his only doubt is whether the body was caught up with his soul upon this occasion.( ) no one who has carefully considered such phenomena and examined the statements here made can have any doubt as to the nature of this vision. the conception of being caught up into "the third heaven," "into paradise," and there hearing these "unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter," betrays in no doubtful manner the source of the subjective impressions. of course, divines who are prepared to see in this passage the account of an actual objective event will not consider it evidence that paul had subjective visions which he believed to have been objective facts; but to those who, more rightly and reasonably, we think, recognize the subjective character of the vision, it must at once definitely settle the point that paul could mistake subjective impressions for objective realities, and consequently the argument for the similar subjectivity of the vision of jesus becomes complete. the possibility of such a mistake is precisely what apologists question. here is an instance in which the mistake has clearly been made by paul. the apostle's own statements show him to have been superlatively visionary and impressionable, with restless nervous energy it is true, but, at the same time, with keen physical and mental susceptibility. liable to be uplifted by "the excess of revelations," glorying in "visions and revelations of the lord," possessing ecstatic { } powers more than all others, subjecting his very movements, his visits to jerusalem, to the direction of impulses which he supposed to be revelations: there has never been a case in which both temperament and religious belief more thoroughly combined to ascribe, with perfect conviction, objective reality to subjective impressions connected with divine things then occupying his mind. paul moreover lived in a time when the messianic longing of the jews led them to be profoundly interested students of the later apocalyptic writings, which certainly made a deep impression upon the apostle, and in which he must have been struck by the image of the promised messiah, like the son of man, coming on the clouds of heaven (dan. vii. , cf. cor. xv. ).( ) at no time was such a vision more likely to present itself to him, than when his mind was fixed upon the messianic idea with all the intensity of one who had been persecuting those who asserted that the messiah had already come. here was reason for all that concentration of thought upon the subject which produces such visions: and when doubt and hesitation entered into that eager intense spirit, the conflict must have been sharp and the nerves highly strung. the jesus whom he saw with his mind's eye was the climax of conviction in such a nature; and the vision vividly brought to him his own self-reproachful thoughts for cruelly mistaken zeal, and the remorse of noble souls which bounds to reparation. he devoted himself as eagerly to christianity, as he had previously done to judaism. he changed the contents but not the form of his mind.( ) paul the { } christian was the same man as paul the jew; and in abandoning the conception of a messiah "according to the flesh," and placing his whole faith in one "according to the spirit," he displayed the same characteristics as before. the revolution in his mind, of which so much is said, was merely one affecting the messianic idea. he did not at a bound become the complete apostle of the gentiles, but accepting at first nothing more than belief in a messiah according to the spirit, his comprehensive and peculiar system of theology was, "of course, only the result of subsequent reflection. that his conviction should have been completed by a subjective vision is no more strange than that he should believe in supernatural charismata, miraculous speaking with tongues, and being actually caught up into the third heaven, into paradise, and hearing there unutterable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter. paul evidently never questioned the source of his visions. they were simply accepted as divine revelations, and they excited all the less of misgiving in his soul from the fact that, without doubt, they expressed the expected solution of problems which intensely occupied his mind, and reflected conclusions already practically formed by his own thoughts.( ) there remain two points to be briefly considered. { } the first of these is the assertion, constantly made in various shapes, that the cardinal miracles of the resurrection and ascension were proclaimed as unquestionable facts, without contradiction, at a time when such an assertion might have been easily refuted. the production of the body, the still occupied sepulchre, it is said, would have set such pretensions at rest it is unnecessary to say that the proclamation of the resurrection and ascension as facts proved nothing beyond the belief, perhaps, of those who asserted them. so far as paul is concerned, we may seek in vain for any assertion of a bodily ascension. but there is not the slightest evidence to show when the resurrection and ascension were first publicly proclaimed as unquestionable facts. even the gospels do not state that they were mentioned beyond the circle of disciples. the second synoptist, who does not state that jesus himself was seen by any one, makes the curious affirmation at the close of his gospel as we have it, that the women, on receiving the announcement of the resurrection from the angels, and the command for the disciples and peter to go into galilee, "went out and fled from the sepulchre; for trembling and astonishment seized them, and they said nothing to any one; for they were afraid."( ) in the fourth gospel, although the "beloved disciple" went into the sepulchre, "and he saw and believed," it is related of him and peter: "so the disciples went away again unto their own home."( ) the eleven, in fact, who all forsook their master and fled--who are represented as meeting with closed doors "for fear of the jews"--with closed doors after eight days, it is again said, although, a week before, ten of them are said to have seen jesus--were not likely to expose { } themselves to the fate of jesus by rushing into the highways and asserting the resurrection. beyond the statement of the gospels, the value of which we have seen, and a statement accompanied by so many confused circumstances, there is no evidence whatever that the sepulchre was found empty. there is no evidence that the sepulchre was really known to the disciples, none of whom, probably, was present at the crucifixion; and it might well be inferred that the women, who are represented as ignorant that the body had already been embalmed, yet who are the chief supposed witnesses for the empty sepulchre and the informants of the disciples, were equally ignorant of the sepulchre in which the body was laid. we might ask whether the brethren who are said to have seen jesus at the same time came from galilee, or wherever they were, and examined the state of the sepulchre? we have already said, however, that if the sepulchre had been shown to be empty, the very last thing which could be proved by that circumstance would be the correctness of the assertion that it had become so in consequence of a stupendous miracle. on the other hand, if it had been shown that it was occupied by a body, it is exceedingly doubtful whether the fact would have convinced any one not previously sure that jesus could not have risen from the dead, and he would not have required such evidence. when the resurrection was publicly proclaimed as a fact, the body could no longer have been recognizable, and the idea that any of those in authority could have thought such demonstration necessary to refute a story whispered about amongst an obscure sect in jerusalem, or even more courageously asserted, is a product of later times. when jesus of nazareth, the head of the nascent sect, was suppressed { } by a shameful death, his humble and timid followers were obviously for a time despised; and there is little reason to suppose that the chief priests and rulers of the jews would have condescended to any public contradiction of their affirmations, if they had even felt indifference to the defilement of exposing for such a purpose a decaying body to the gaze of jerusalem. this kind of refutation is possible only in the imagination of divines. besides, what evidence is there that even a single indifferent person found the sepulchre empty? there is not an iota of proof. on the contrary, there is the very strongest evidence that when the assertion of the resurrection and ascension as "unquestionable facts" was made, it was contradicted in the only practical and practicable way conceivable: ( .) by all but universal disbelief in jerusalem; ( .) by actual persecution of those who asserted it. it is a perfectly undeniable fact that the great mass of the jews totally denied the truth of the statement by disbelieving it, and that the converts to christianity who soon swelled the numbers of the church and spread its influence amongst the nations were not the citizens of jerusalem, who were capable of refuting such assertions, but strangers and gentiles. the number of the community of jerusalem after the forty days seems to be stated by the author of acts as "about ," and although the numbers added to the church, according to this document, are evidently fabulous, the converts at pentecost are apparently chiefly from amongst the devout men of every nation upon earth congregated at jerusalem. to this hour the jews have retained as their inheritance the denial by their forefathers of the asserted facts. the assertion, secondly, was emphatically denied by the persecution, as soon as it { } became worth any one's while to persecute, of those who made it. it was in this way denied by paul himself, at a time when verification was infinitely more possible than when he came to join in the assertion. are we to suppose that the apostle took no trouble to convince himself of the facts before he began to persecute? he was in the confidence of the high priests it seems, can he ever have heard the slightest doubt from them on the subject? is it not palpable that paul and his party, by their very pursuit of those who maintained such allegations, stigmatized them as falsehoods, and perhaps as imposture? if it be said that paul became convinced of his mistake, it is perfectly obvious that his conversion was not due to local and circumstantial evidence, but to dogmatic considerations and his supposed vision of jesus. he disbelieved when the alleged occurrences were recent and, as it is said, capable of refutation; he believed when the time for such refutation had passed. the second point to which we have referred is the vague and final objection of apologists that, if the vision of jesus was merely subjective, the fabric of the church and even of christianity is based upon unreality and self-deception. is this possible? they ask. is it possible that for eighteen centuries the resurrection and ascension have been proclaimed and believed by millions, with no other original foundation than self-delusion? the vagueness and apparent vastness of this objection, perhaps, make it a formidable _argumentum ad hominem_, but it vanishes into very small proportions as we approach it. must we then understand that the dogmas of all religions which have been established must have been objective truths? and that this is a necessary inference from their wide adoption? if so, then all { } historical religions before christianity, and after it, must take rank as substantially true. in that case the religion of the veda, of buddha, of zoroaster, of mahomet, for instance, can as little be based on unreality and self-deception as christianity. they have secured wide acceptance from mankind. millions have for centuries devoutly held their tenets, and to this day the followers of sakya muni are as numerous as the believers in the religion of paul. if not, the objection at once falls to the ground as an argument, and the problem becomes a simple matter of evidence, which has been fully discussed and disposed of. when we analyse the fact, it becomes apparent that, ultimately, belief in the resurrection and ascension resolves itself into the belief of a few or of one. it requires very little reflection to perceive that the christian church is founded much more upon belief in the resurrection than on the fact itself.( ) nothing is more undeniable than the circumstance that not more than a very small number of men are even alleged to have seen the risen jesus. the mass of those who have believed in the resurrection have done so because of the assurance of these few men, and perhaps because they may have been led to think that the event was predicted in scripture. up to this day, converts to the dogma are made, if made at all, upon the assurance of paul and the gospels. the vast question at last dwindles down to the inquiry: can a few men, can one man, draw erroneous inferences and be honestly deceived by something supposed to have been seen? we presume that there can be no hesitation in giving an affirmative reply. the rest follows as a matter of { } course. others simply believe the report of those who have believed before them. in course of time, so many believe that it is considered almost outrageous to disbelieve or demand evidence. the number of those who have believed is viewed at last as an overwhelming proof of the truth of the creed. it is a most striking and extraordinary fact that the life and teaching of jesus have scarcely a place in the system of paul. had we been dependent upon him we should have had no idea of the great master who preached the sermon on the mount, and embodied pure truths in parables of such luminous simplicity. his noble morality would have remained unknown, and his lessons of rare spiritual excellence have been lost to the world. paul sees no significance in that life, but concentrates all interest in the death and resurrection of his messiah. in the sepulchre hewn out of the rock are deposited the teaching and example of jesus, and from it there rises a mystic christ lost in a halo of theology. the ecclesiastical christianity which was mainly paul's work has almost effaced the true work of jesus. too little can now be traced of that teaching, and few are the genuine records of his work which have survived the pious enthusiasm evoked by his character. theology has done its worst with the life; and that death, which will ever be the darkest blot upon history, has been represented as the climax of divine beneficence. the resurrection and ascension have deified jesus of nazareth; but they have done so at the expense of all that was most truly sublime in his work. { } the world will gain when it recognises the real character and source of such dogmas, and resigns this inheritance from the age of miracles. for, although we lose a faith which has long been our guide in the past, we need not now fear to walk boldly with truth in the future, and turning away from fancied benefits to be derived from the virtue of his death, we may find real help and guidance from more earnest contemplation of the life and teaching of jesus. { } conclusions. we have seen that divine revelation could only be necessary or conceivable for the purpose of communicating to us something which we could not otherwise discover, and that the truth of communications which are essentially beyond and undiscoverable by reason cannot be attested in any other way than by miraculous signs distinguishing them as divine. it is admitted that no other testimony could justify our believing the specific revelation which we are considering, the very substance of which is supernatural and beyond the criticism of reason, and that its doctrines, if not proved to be miraculous truths, must inevitably be pronounced "the wildest delusions." "by no rational being could a just and benevolent life be accepted as proof of such astonishing announcements." on examining the alleged miraculous evidence for christianity as divine revelation, however, we find that even if the actual occurrence of the supposed miracles could be substantiated, their value as evidence would be destroyed by the necessary admission that miracles are not limited to one source and are not exclusively associated with truth, but are performed by various spiritual beings, satanic as well as divine, and are not always evidential, but are sometimes to be regarded as delusive and for the trial of faith. as the doctrines supposed to be revealed { } are beyond reason, and cannot in any sense be intelligently approved by the human intellect, no evidence which is of so doubtful and inconclusive a nature could sufficiently attest them. this alone would disqualify the christian miracles for the duty which miracles alone are capable of performing. the supposed miraculous evidence for the divine revelation, moreover, is not only without any special divine character, being avowedly common also to satanic agency, but it is not original either in conception or details. similar miracles are reported long antecedently to the first promulgation of christianity, and continued to be performed for centuries after it. a stream of miraculous pretension, in fact, has flowed through all human history, deep and broad as it has passed through the darker ages, but dwindling down to a thread as it has entered days of enlightenment. the evidence was too hackneyed and commonplace to make any impression upon those before whom the christian miracles are said to have been performed, and it altogether failed to convince the people to whom the revelation was primarily addressed. the selection of such evidence for such a purpose is much more characteristic of human weakness than of divine power. the true character of miracles is at once betrayed by the fact that their supposed occurrence has thus been confined to ages of ignorance and superstition, and that they are absolutely unknown in any time or place where science has provided witnesses fitted to appreciate and ascertain the nature of such exhibitions of supernatural power. there is not the slightest evidence that any attempt was made to investigate the supposed miraculous occurrences, or to justify the inferences so freely drawn from them, nor is there any reason to { } believe that the witnesses possessed, in any considerable degree, the fulness of knowledge and sobriety of judgment requisite for the purpose. no miracle has yet established its claim to the rank even of apparent reality, and all such phenomena must remain in the dim region of imagination. the test applied to the largest class of miracles, connected with demoniacal possession, discloses the falsity of all miraculous pretension. there is no uncertainty as to the origin of belief in supernatural interference with nature. the assertion that spurious miracles have sprung up round a few instances of genuine miraculous power has not a single valid argument to support it. history clearly demonstrates that, wherever ignorance and superstition have prevailed, every obscure occurrence has been attributed to supernatural agency, and it is freely acknowledged that, under their influence, inexplicable and miraculous are convertible terms. on the other hand, in proportion as knowledge of natural laws has increased, the theory of supernatural interference with the order of nature has been dispelled, and miracles have ceased. the effect of science, however, is not limited to the present and future, but its action is equally retrospective, and phenomena which were once ignorantly isolated from the sequence of natural cause and effect, are now restored to their place in the unbroken order. ignorance and superstition created miracles; knowledge has for ever annihilated them. to justify miracles, two assumptions are made: first, an infinite personal god; and second, a divine design of revelation, the execution of which necessarily involves supernatural action. miracles, it is argued, are not contrary to nature, or effects produced without adequate { } causes, but on the contrary are caused by the intervention of this infinite personal god for the purpose of attesting and carrying out the divine design. neither of the assumptions, however, can be reasonably maintained. the assumption of an infinite personal god: a being at once limited and unlimited, is a use of language to which no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself. moreover, the assumption of a god working miracles is emphatically excluded by universal experience of the order of nature. the allegation of a specific divine cause of miracles is further inadequate from the fact that the power of working miracles is avowedly not limited to a personal god, but is also ascribed to other spiritual beings, and it must, consequently, always be impossible to prove that the supposed miraculous phenomena originate with one and not with another. on the other hand, the assumption of a divine design of revelation is not suggested by antecedent probability, but is derived from the very revelation which it is intended to justify, as is likewise the assumption of a personal god, and both are equally vicious as arguments. the circumstances which are supposed to require this divine design, and the details of the scheme, are absolutely incredible, and opposed to all the results of science. nature does not countenance any theory of the original perfection and subsequent degradation of the human race, and the supposition of a frustrated original plan of creation, and of later impotent endeavours to correct it, is as inconsistent with divine omnipotence and wisdom as the proposed punishment of the human race and the mode devised to save some of them are opposed to justice and morality. such assumptions are essentially inadmissible, and totally fail to explain and justify miracles. { } whatever definition be given of miracles, such exceptional phenomena must at least be antecedently incredible. in the absence of absolute knowledge, human belief must be guided by the balance of evidence, and it is obvious that the evidence for the uniformity of the order of nature, which is derived from universal experience, must be enormously greater than can be the testimony for my alleged exception to it. on the other hand, universal experience prepares us to consider mistakes of the senses, imperfect observation and erroneous inference as not only possible, but eminently probable on the part of the witnesses of phenomena, even when they are perfectly honest and truthful, and more especially so when such disturbing causes as religious excitement and superstition are present. when the report of the original witnesses only reaches us indirectly and through the medium of tradition, the probability of error is further increased. thus the allegation of miracles is discredited, both positively by the invariability of the order of nature, and negatively by the fallibility of human observation and testimony. the history of miraculous pretension in the world, and the circumstances attending the special exhibition of it which we are examining, suggest natural explanations of the reported facts which wholly remove them from the region of the supernatural. when we proceed to examine the direct witnesses for the christian miracles, we do not discover any exceptional circumstances neutralizing the preceding considerations. on the contrary, we find that the case turns not upon miracles substantially before us, but upon the mere narratives of miracles said to have occurred over eighteen hundred years ago. it is obvious that, for such narratives to possess any real force and validity, it is essential that { } their character and authorship should be placed beyond all doubt. they must proceed from eye-witnesses capable of estimating aright the nature of the phenomena. our four gospels, however, are strictly anonymous works. the superscriptions which now distinguish them are undeniably of later origin than the works themselves, and do not proceed from the composers of the gospels. of the writers to whom these narratives are traditionally ascribed only two are even said to have been apostles, the alleged authors of the second and third synoptics neither having been personal followers of jesus, nor eyewitnesses of the events they describe. under these circumstances, we are wholly dependent upon external evidence for information regarding the authorship and trustworthiness of the four canonical gospels. in examining this evidence, we proceeded upon clear and definite principles. without forming or adopting any theory whatever as to the date or origin of our gospels, we simply searched the writings of the fathers, during a century and a half after the events in question, for information regarding the composition and character of these works, and even for any certain traces of their use, although, if discovered, these could prove little beyond the mere existence of the gospels used at the date of the writer. in the latter and minor investigation, we were guided by canons of criticism previously laid down, and which are based upon the simplest laws of evidence. we found that the writings of the fathers, during a century and a half after the death of jesus, are a complete blank so far as any evidence regarding the composition and character of our gospels is concerned, unless we except the tradition preserved by papias, after the middle of the second century, the details of which fully justify { } the conclusion that our first and second synoptics, in their present form, cannot be the works said to have been composed by matthew and mark. there is thus no evidence whatever directly connecting any of the canonical gospels with the writers to whom they are popularly attributed, and later tradition, of little or no value in itself, is separated by a long interval of profound silence from the epoch at which they are supposed to have been composed. with one exception, moreover, we found that, during the same century and a half, there is no certain and unmistakable trace even of the anonymous use of any of our gospels in the early church. this fact, of course, does not justify the conclusion that none of these gospels was actually in existence during any part of that time, nor have we anywhere suggested such an inference, but strict examination of the evidence shows that there is no positive proof that they were. the exception to which we refer is marcion's gospel, which was, we think, based upon our third synoptic, and consequently must be accepted as evidence of the existence of that work. marcion, however, does not give the slightest information as to the authorship of the gospel, and his charges against it of adulteration cannot be considered very favourable testimony as to its infallible character. the canonical gospels continue to the end anonymous documents of no evidential value for miracles. they do not themselves pretend to be inspired histories, and they cannot escape from the ordinary rules of criticism. internal evidence does not modify the inferences from external testimony. apart from continual minor contradictions throughout the first three gospels, it is impossible to reconcile the representations of the synoptics with those of the fourth gospel. they mutually destroy each other as evidence. they must { } be pronounced mere narratives compiled long after the events recorded, by unknown persons who were neither eye-witnesses of the alleged miraculous occurrences, nor hearers of the statements they profess to report. they cannot be accepted as adequate testimony for miracles and the reality of divine revelation. applying similar tests to the acts of the apostles, we arrived at similar results. acknowledged to be composed by the same author who produced the third synoptic, that author's identity is not thereby made more clear. there is no evidence of the slightest value regarding its character, but, on the other hand, the work itself teems to such an extent with miraculous incidents and supernatural agency, that the credibility of the narrative requires an extraordinary amount of attestation to secure for it any serious consideration. when the statements of the author are compared with the emphatic declarations of the apostle paul, and with authentic accounts of the development of the early christian church, it becomes evident that the acts of the apostles, as might have been supposed, is a legendary composition of a later day, which cannot be regarded as sober and credible history, and rather discredits than tends to establish the reality of the miracles with which its pages so suspiciously abound. the remaining books of the new testament canon required no separate examination, because, even if genuine, they contain no additional testimony to the reality of divine revelation, beyond the implied belief in such doctrines as the incarnation and resurrection. it is unquestionable, we suppose, that in some form or other the apostles believed in these miracles, and the assumption that they did so, supersedes the necessity for { } examining the authenticity of the catholic epistles and apocalypse. in like manner, the recognition as genuine of four epistles of paul, which contain his testimony to miracles, renders it superfluous to discuss the authenticity of the other letters attributed to him. the general belief in miraculous power and its possession by the church is brought to a practical test in the case of the apostle paul. after elaborate consideration of his letters, we came to the unhesitating conclusion that, instead of establishing the reality of miracles, the unconscious testimony of paul clearly demonstrates the facility with which erroneous inferences convert the most natural phenomena into supernatural occurrences. as a final test, we carefully examined the whole of the evidence for the cardinal dogmas of christianity, the resurrection and ascension of jesus. first taking the four gospels, we found that their accounts of these events are not only full of legendary matter, but that they even contradict and exclude each other, and so far from establishing the reality of such stupendous miracles, they show that no reliance is to be placed on the statements of the unknown authors. taking next the testimony of paul, which is more important as at least authentic and proceeding from an apostle of whom we know more than of any other of the early missionaries of christianity, we saw that it was indefinite and utterly insufficient. his so-called "circumstantial account of the testimony upon which the belief in the resurrection rested" consists merely of vague and undetailed hearsay, differing, so far as it can be compared, from the statements in the gospels, and without other attestation than the bare fact that it is repeated by paul, who doubtless believed it, although he had not himself been a witness { } of any of the supposed appearances of the risen jesus which he so briefly catalogues. paul's own personal testimony to the resurrection is limited to a vision of jesus, of which we have no authentic details, seen many years after the alleged miracle. considering the peculiar and highly nervous temperament of paul, of which he himself supplies abundant evidence, there can be no hesitation in deciding that this vision was purely subjective, as were likewise, in all probability, the appearances to the excited disciples of jesus. the testimony of paul himself, before his imagination was stimulated to ecstatic fervour by the beauty of a spiritualized religion, was an earnest denial of the great christian dogma emphasized by the active persecution of those who affirmed it, and a vision, especially in the case of one so constituted, supposed to be seen many years after the fact of the resurrection had ceased to be capable of verification, is not an argument of convincing force. we were compelled to pronounce the evidence for the resurrection and ascension absolutely and hopelessly inadequate to prove the reality of such stupendous miracles, which must consequently be unhesitatingly rejected. there is no reason given, or even conceivable, why allegations such as these, and dogmas affecting the religion and even the salvation of the human race, should be accepted upon evidence which would be declared totally insufficient in the case of any common question of property or title before a legal tribunal on the contrary, the more momentous the point to be established, the more complete must be the proof required. if we test the results at which we have arrived by general considerations, we find them everywhere confirmed and established. there is nothing original in the { } claim of christianity to be regarded as divine revelation, and nothing new either in the doctrines said to have been revealed, or in the miracles by which it is alleged to have been distinguished. there has not been a single historical religion largely held amongst men which has not pretended to be divinely revealed, and the written books of which have not been represented as directly inspired. there is not a doctrine, sacrament or rite of christianity which has not substantially formed part of earlier religions; and not a single phase of the supernatural history of the christ, from his miraculous conception, birth and incarnation to his death, resurrection and ascension, which has not had its counterpart in earlier mythologies. heaven and hell, with characteristic variation of details, have held an important place in the eschatology of many creeds and races. the same may be said even of the moral teaching of christianity, the elevated precepts of which, although in a less perfect and connected form, had already suggested themselves to many noble minds and been promulgated by ancient sages and philosophers. that this inquiry into the reality of divine revelation has been limited to the claim of christianity has arisen solely from a desire to condense it within reasonable bounds, and confine it to the only religion in connection with which it could practically interest us now. there is nothing in the history and achievements of christianity which can be considered characteristic of a religion divinely revealed for the salvation of mankind. originally said to have been communicated to a single nation, specially selected as the peculiar people of god, and for whom distinguished privileges were said to be reserved, it was almost unanimously rejected by that { } nation at the time, and it has continued to be repudiated by its descendants with singular unanimity to the present day. after more than eighteen centuries, this divine scheme of salvation has not obtained even the nominal adhesion of more than a third of the human race,( ) and if, in a census of christendom, distinction could now be made of those who no longer seriously believe in it as supernatural religion, christianity would take a much lower numerical position. sakya muni, a teacher only second in nobility of character to jesus, and who, like him, proclaimed a system of elevated morality, has even now almost twice the number of followers, although his missionaries never sought converts in the west. considered as a scheme divinely devised as the best, if not only, mode of redeeming the human race, and saving them from eternal damnation, promulgated by god himself incarnate in human form, and completed by his own actual death upon the cross for the sins of the world, such results as these can only be regarded as practical { } failure, although they may not be disproportionate for a system of elevated morality. we shall probably never be able to determine how far the great teacher may through his own speculations or misunderstood spiritual utterances have suggested the supernatural doctrines subsequently attributed to him, and by which his whole history and system soon became transformed; but no one who attentively studies the subject can fail to be struck by the absence of such dogmas from the earlier records of his teaching. it is to the excited veneration of the followers of jesus, however, that we owe most of the supernatural elements so characteristic of the age and people. we may look in vain even in the synoptic gospels for the doctrines elaborated in the pauline epistles and the gospel of ephesus. the great transformation of christianity was effected by men who had never seen jesus, and who were only acquainted with his teaching after it had become transmuted by tradition. the fervid imagination of the east constructed christian theology. it is not difficult to follow the development of the creeds of the church, and it is certainly most instructive to observe the progressive boldness with which its dogmas were expanded by pious enthusiasm. the new testament alone represents several stages of dogmatic evolution. before his first followers had passed away the process of transformation had commenced. the disciples, who had so often misunderstood the teaching of jesus during his life, piously distorted it after his death. his simple lessons of meekness and humility were soon forgotten. with lamentable rapidity, the elaborate structure of ecclesiastical christianity, following stereotyped lines of human superstition, and deeply coloured by alexandrian { } philosophy, displaced the sublime morality of jesus. doctrinal controversy, which commenced amongst the very apostles, has ever since divided the unity of the christian body. the perverted ingenuity of successive generations of churchmen has filled the world with theological quibbles, which have naturally enough culminated of late in doctrines of immaculate conception, and papal infallibility. it is sometimes affirmed, however, that those who proclaim such conclusions not only wantonly destroy the dearest hopes of humanity, but remove the only solid basis of morality; and it is alleged that, before existing belief is disturbed, the iconoclast is bound to provide a substitute for the shattered idol. to this we may reply that speech or silence does not alter the reality of things. the recognition of truth cannot be made dependent on consequences, or be trammelled by considerations of spurious expediency. its declaration in a serious and suitable manner to those who are capable of judging can never be premature. its suppression cannot be effectual, and is only a humiliating compromise with conscious imposture. in so far as morality is concerned, belief in a system of future rewards and punishments, although of an intensely degraded character, may, to a certain extent, have promoted observance of the letter of the law in darker ages and even in our own, but it may, we think, be shown that education and civilization have done infinitely more to enforce its spirit. how far christianity has promoted education and civilization, we shall not here venture adequately to discuss. we may emphatically assert, however, that whatever beneficial effect christianity has produced has been due, not to its supernatural dogmas, but to its simple morality. dogmatic theology, { } on the contrary, has retarded education and impeded science. wherever it has been dominant civilization has stood still. science has been judged and suppressed by the light of a text or a chapter of genesis. almost every great advance which has been made towards enlightenment has been achieved in spite of the protest or the anathema of the church. submissive ignorance, absolute or comparative, has been tacitly fostered as the most desirable condition of the popular mind. "except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven," has been the favourite text of doctors of divinity with a stock of incredible dogmas difficult of assimilation by the virile mind. even now, the fiction of theological resistance is a constant waste of intellectual power. the early enunciation of so pure a system of morality, and one so intelligible to the simple as well as profound to the wise, was of great value to the world, but experience being once systematized and codified, if higher principles do not constrain us, society may safely be left to see morals sufficiently observed. it is true that, notwithstanding its fluctuating rules, morality has hitherto assumed the character of a divine institution, but its sway has not, in consequence, been more real than it must be as the simple result of human wisdom, and the outcome of social experience. the choice of a noble life is no longer a theological question, and ecclesiastical patents of truth and uprightness have finally expired. morality, which has ever changed its complexion and modified its injunctions according to social requirements, will necessarily be enforced as part of human evolution, and is not dependent on religious terrorism or superstitious persuasion. if we are disposed to say: { } _cui bono?_ and only practise morality, or be ruled by right principles, to gain a heaven or escape a hell, there is nothing lost, for such grudging and calculated morality is merely a spurious imitation which can as well be produced by social compulsion. but if we have ever been really penetrated by the pure spirit of morality, if we have in any degree attained that elevation of mind which instinctively turns to the true and noble and shrinks from the baser level of thought and action, we shall feel no need of the stimulus of a system of rewards and punishments in a future state which has for so long been represented as essential to christianity. as to the other reproach, let us ask what has actually been destroyed by such an inquiry pressed to its logical conclusion. can truth by any means be made less true? can reality be melted into thin air? the revelation not being a reality, that which has been destroyed is only an illusion, and that which is left is the truth. losing belief in it and its contents, we have lost absolutely nothing but that which the traveller loses when the mirage, which has displayed cool waters and green shades before him, melts swiftly away. there were no cool fountains really there to allay his thirst, no flowery meadows for his wearied limbs; his pleasure was delusion, and the wilderness is blank. rather the mirage with its pleasant illusion, is the human cry, than the desert with its barrenness. not so, is the friendly warning; seek not vainly in the desert that which is not there, but turn rather to other horizons, and to surer hopes. do not waste life clinging to ecclesiastical dogmas which represent no eternal verities, but search elsewhere for truth which may haply be found. what should we think of the man who persistently repulsed { } the persuasion that two and two make four from the ardent desire to believe that two and two make five? whose fault is it that two and two do make four and not five? whose folly is it that it should be more agreeable to think that two and two make five than to know that they only make four? this folly is theirs who represent the value of life as dependent on the reality of special illusions, which they have religiously adopted. to discover that a former belief is unfounded is to change nothing of the realities of existence. the sun will descend as it passes the meridian whether we believe it to be noon or not. it is idle and foolish, if human, to repine because the truth is not precisely what we thought it, and at least we shall not change reality by childishly clinging to a dream. the argument so often employed by theologians that divine revelation is necessary for man, and that certain views contained in that revelation are required by our moral consciousness, is purely imaginary and derived from the revelation which it seeks to maintain. the only thing absolutely necessary for man is truth; and to that, and that alone, must our moral consciousness adapt itself. reason and experience forbid the expectation that we can acquire any knowledge otherwise than through natural channels. we might as well expect to be supernaturally nourished as supernaturally informed. to complain that we do not know all that we desire to know is foolish and unreasonable. it is tantamount to complaining that the mind of man is not differently constituted. to attain the full altitude of the knowable, whatever that may be, should be our earnest aim, and more than this is not for humanity. we may be certain that information which is beyond the ultimate { } reach of reason is as unnecessary as it is inaccessible. man may know all that man requires to know. we gain more than we lose by awaking to find that our theology is human invention and our eschatology an unhealthy dream. we are freed from the incubus of base hebrew mythology, and from doctrines of divine government which outrage morality and set cruelty and injustice in the place of holiness. if we have to abandon cherished anthropomorphic visions of future blessedness, the details of which are either of unseizable dimness or of questionable joy, we are at least delivered from quibbling discussions of the meaning of [------], and our eternal hope is unclouded by the doubt whether mankind is to be tortured in hell for ever and a day, or for a day without the ever. at the end of life there may be no definite vista of a heaven glowing with the light of apocalyptic imagination, but neither will there be the unutterable horror of a purgatory or a hell lurid with flames for the helpless victims of an unjust but omnipotent creator. to entertain such libellous representations at all as part of the contents of "divine revelation," it was necessary to assert that man was incompetent to judge of the ways of the god of revelation, and must not suppose him endowed with the perfection of human conceptions of justice and mercy, but submit to call wrong right and right wrong at the foot of an almighty despot. but now the reproach of such reasoning is shaken from our shoulders, and returns to the jewish superstition from which it sprang. as myths lose their might and their influence when discovered to be baseless, the power of supernatural christianity will doubtless pass away, but the effect of the revolution must not be exaggerated, although it { } cannot here be fully discussed. if the pictures which have filled for so long the horizon of the future must vanish, no hideous blank can rightly be maintained in their place. we should clearly distinguish between what we know and know not, but as carefully abstain from characterising that which we know not as if it were really known to us. that mysterious unknown or unknowable is no cruel darkness, but simply an impenetrable distance into which we are impotent to glance, but which excludes no legitimate speculation and forbids no reasonable hope. three more john silence stories by algernon blackwood to m.l.w. the original of john silence and my companion in many adventures contents case i: secret worship case ii: the camp of the dog case iii: a victim of higher space case i: secret worship harris, the silk merchant, was in south germany on his way home from a business trip when the idea came to him suddenly that he would take the mountain railway from strassbourg and run down to revisit his old school after an interval of something more than thirty years. and it was to this chance impulse of the junior partner in harris brothers of st. paul's churchyard that john silence owed one of the most curious cases of his whole experience, for at that very moment he happened to be tramping these same mountains with a holiday knapsack, and from different points of the compass the two men were actually converging towards the same inn. now, deep down in the heart that for thirty years had been concerned chiefly with the profitable buying and selling of silk, this school had left the imprint of its peculiar influence, and, though perhaps unknown to harris, had strongly coloured the whole of his subsequent existence. it belonged to the deeply religious life of a small protestant community (which it is unnecessary to specify), and his father had sent him there at the age of fifteen, partly because he would learn the german requisite for the conduct of the silk business, and partly because the discipline was strict, and discipline was what his soul and body needed just then more than anything else. the life, indeed, had proved exceedingly severe, and young harris benefited accordingly; for though corporal punishment was unknown, there was a system of mental and spiritual correction which somehow made the soul stand proudly erect to receive it, while it struck at the very root of the fault and taught the boy that his character was being cleaned and strengthened, and that he was not merely being tortured in a kind of personal revenge. that was over thirty years ago, when he was a dreamy and impressionable youth of fifteen; and now, as the train climbed slowly up the winding mountain gorges, his mind travelled back somewhat lovingly over the intervening period, and forgotten details rose vividly again before him out of the shadows. the life there had been very wonderful, it seemed to him, in that remote mountain village, protected from the tumults of the world by the love and worship of the devout brotherhood that ministered to the needs of some hundred boys from every country in europe. sharply the scenes came back to him. he smelt again the long stone corridors, the hot pinewood rooms, where the sultry hours of summer study were passed with bees droning through open windows in the sunshine, and german characters struggling in the mind with dreams of english lawns--and then the sudden awful cry of the master in german-- "harris, stand up! you sleep!" and he recalled the dreadful standing motionless for an hour, book in hand, while the knees felt like wax and the head grew heavier than a cannon-ball. the very smell of the cooking came back to him--the daily _sauerkraut_, the watery chocolate on sundays, the flavour of the stringy meat served twice a week at _mittagessen_; and he smiled to think again of the half-rations that was the punishment for speaking english. the very odour of the milk-bowls,--the hot sweet aroma that rose from the soaking peasant-bread at the six-o'clock breakfast,--came back to him pungently, and he saw the huge _speisesaal_ with the hundred boys in their school uniform, all eating sleepily in silence, gulping down the coarse bread and scalding milk in terror of the bell that would presently cut them short--and, at the far end where the masters sat, he saw the narrow slit windows with the vistas of enticing field and forest beyond. and this, in turn, made him think of the great barnlike room on the top floor where all slept together in wooden cots, and he heard in memory the clamour of the cruel bell that woke them on winter mornings at five o'clock and summoned them to the stone-flagged _waschkammer_, where boys and masters alike, after scanty and icy washing, dressed in complete silence. from this his mind passed swiftly, with vivid picture-thoughts, to other things, and with a passing shiver he remembered how the loneliness of never being alone had eaten into him, and how everything--work, meals, sleep, walks, leisure--was done with his "division" of twenty other boys and under the eyes of at least two masters. the only solitude possible was by asking for half an hour's practice in the cell-like music rooms, and harris smiled to himself as he recalled the zeal of his violin studies. then, as the train puffed laboriously through the great pine forests that cover these mountains with a giant carpet of velvet, he found the pleasanter layers of memory giving up their dead, and he recalled with admiration the kindness of the masters, whom all addressed as brother, and marvelled afresh at their devotion in burying themselves for years in such a place, only to leave it, in most cases, for the still rougher life of missionaries in the wild places of the world. he thought once more of the still, religious atmosphere that hung over the little forest community like a veil, barring the distressful world; of the picturesque ceremonies at easter, christmas, and new year; of the numerous feast-days and charming little festivals. the _beschehr-fest_, in particular, came back to him,--the feast of gifts at christmas,--when the entire community paired off and gave presents, many of which had taken weeks to make or the savings of many days to purchase. and then he saw the midnight ceremony in the church at new year, with the shining face of the _prediger_ in the pulpit,--the village preacher who, on the last night of the old year, saw in the empty gallery beyond the organ loft the faces of all who were to die in the ensuing twelve months, and who at last recognised himself among them, and, in the very middle of his sermon, passed into a state of rapt ecstasy and burst into a torrent of praise. thickly the memories crowded upon him. the picture of the small village dreaming its unselfish life on the mountain-tops, clean, wholesome, simple, searching vigorously for its god, and training hundreds of boys in the grand way, rose up in his mind with all the power of an obsession. he felt once more the old mystical enthusiasm, deeper than the sea and more wonderful than the stars; he heard again the winds sighing from leagues of forest over the red roofs in the moonlight; he heard the brothers' voices talking of the things beyond this life as though they had actually experienced them in the body; and, as he sat in the jolting train, a spirit of unutterable longing passed over his seared and tired soul, stirring in the depths of him a sea of emotions that he thought had long since frozen into immobility. and the contrast pained him,--the idealistic dreamer then, the man of business now,--so that a spirit of unworldly peace and beauty known only to the soul in meditation laid its feathered finger upon his heart, moving strangely the surface of the waters. harris shivered a little and looked out of the window of his empty carriage. the train had long passed hornberg, and far below the streams tumbled in white foam down the limestone rocks. in front of him, dome upon dome of wooded mountain stood against the sky. it was october, and the air was cool and sharp, woodsmoke and damp moss exquisitely mingled in it with the subtle odours of the pines. overhead, between the tips of the highest firs, he saw the first stars peeping, and the sky was a clean, pale amethyst that seemed exactly the colour all these memories clothed themselves with in his mind. he leaned back in his corner and sighed. he was a heavy man, and he had not known sentiment for years; he was a big man, and it took much to move him, literally and figuratively; he was a man in whom the dreams of god that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly died the death. he came back into this little neglected pocket of the years, where so much fine gold had collected and lain undisturbed, with all his semispiritual emotions aquiver; and, as he watched the mountain-tops come nearer, and smelt the forgotten odours of his boyhood, something melted on the surface of his soul and left him sensitive to a degree he had not known since, thirty years before, he had lived here with his dreams, his conflicts, and his youthful suffering. a thrill ran through him as the train stopped with a jolt at a tiny station and he saw the name in large black lettering on the grey stone building, and below it, the number of metres it stood above the level of the sea. "the highest point on the line!" he exclaimed. "how well i remember it--sommerau--summer meadow. the very next station is mine!" and, as the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks in the dusk. they stared at him like dead faces in a dream. queer, sharp feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in his heart. "there's the hot, white road we walked along so often with the two brüder always at our heels," he thought; "and there, by jove, is the turn through the forest to '_die galgen_,' the stone gallows where they hanged the witches in olden days!" he smiled a little as the train slid past. "and there's the copse where the lilies of the valley powdered the ground in spring; and, i swear,"--he put his head out with a sudden impulse--"if that's not the very clearing where calame, the french boy, chased the swallow-tail with me, and bruder pagel gave us half-rations for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting in our mother tongues!" and he laughed again as the memories came back with a rush, flooding his mind with vivid detail. the train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man in a dream. it seemed half a century since he last waited there with corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for strassbourg and home after the two years' exile. time dropped from him like an old garment and he felt a boy again. only, things looked so much smaller than his memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances seemed on a curiously smaller scale. he made his way across the road to the little gasthaus, and, as he went, faces and figures of former schoolfellows,--german, swiss, italian, french, russian,--slipped out of the shadowy woods and silently accompanied him. they flitted by his side, raising their eyes questioningly, sadly, to his. but their names he had forgotten. some of the brothers, too, came with them, and most of these he remembered by name--bruder röst, bruder pagel, bruder schliemann, and the bearded face of the old preacher who had seen himself in the haunted gallery of those about to die--bruder gysin. the dark forest lay all about him like a sea that any moment might rush with velvet waves upon the scene and sweep all the faces away. the air was cool and wonderfully fragrant, but with every perfumed breath came also a pallid memory.... yet, in spite of the underlying sadness inseparable from such an experience, it was all very interesting, and held a pleasure peculiarly its own, so that harris engaged his room and ordered supper feeling well pleased with himself, and intending to walk up to the old school that very evening. it stood in the centre of the community's village, some four miles distant through the forest, and he now recollected for the first time that this little protestant settlement dwelt isolated in a section of the country that was otherwise catholic. crucifixes and shrines surrounded the clearing like the sentries of a beleaguering army. once beyond the square of the village, with its few acres of field and orchard, the forest crowded up in solid phalanxes, and beyond the rim of trees began the country that was ruled by the priests of another faith. he vaguely remembered, too, that the catholics had showed sometimes a certain hostility towards the little protestant oasis that flourished so quietly and benignly in their midst. he had quite forgotten this. how trumpery it all seemed now with his wide experience of life and his knowledge of other countries and the great outside world. it was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three hundred. there were only two others besides himself at supper. one of them, a bearded, middle-aged man in tweeds, sat by himself at the far end, and harris kept out of his way because he was english. he feared he might be in business, possibly even in the silk business, and that he would perhaps talk on the subject. the other traveller, however, was a catholic priest. he was a little man who ate his salad with a knife, yet so gently that it was almost inoffensive, and it was the sight of "the cloth" that recalled his memory of the old antagonism. harris mentioned by way of conversation the object of his sentimental journey, and the priest looked up sharply at him with raised eyebrows and an expression of surprise and suspicion that somehow piqued him. he ascribed it to his difference of belief. "yes," went on the silk merchant, pleased to talk of what his mind was so full, "and it was a curious experience for an english boy to be dropped down into a school of a hundred foreigners. i well remember the loneliness and intolerable heimweh of it at first." his german was very fluent. the priest opposite looked up from his cold veal and potato salad and smiled. it was a nice face. he explained quietly that he did not belong here, but was making a tour of the parishes of wurttemberg and baden. "it was a strict life," added harris. "we english, i remember, used to call it _gefängnisleben_--prison life!" the face of the other, for some unaccountable reason, darkened. after a slight pause, and more by way of politeness than because he wished to continue the subject, he said quietly-- "it was a flourishing school in those days, of course. afterwards, i have heard--" he shrugged his shoulders slightly, and the odd look--it almost seemed a look of alarm--came back into his eyes. the sentence remained unfinished. something in the tone of the man seemed to his listener uncalled for--in a sense reproachful, singular. harris bridled in spite of himself. "it has changed?" he asked. "i can hardly believe--" "you have not heard, then?" observed the priest gently, making a gesture as though to cross himself, yet not actually completing it. "you have not heard what happened there before it was abandoned--?" it was very childish, of course, and perhaps he was overtired and overwrought in some way, but the words and manner of the little priest seemed to him so offensive--so disproportionately offensive--that he hardly noticed the concluding sentence. he recalled the old bitterness and the old antagonism, and for a moment he almost lost his temper. "nonsense," he interrupted with a forced laugh, "_unsinn_! you must forgive me, sir, for contradicting you. but i was a pupil there myself. i was at school there. there was no place like it. i cannot believe that anything serious could have happened to--to take away its character. the devotion of the brothers would be difficult to equal anywhere--" he broke off suddenly, realising that his voice had been raised unduly and that the man at the far end of the table might understand german; and at the same moment he looked up and saw that this individual's eyes were fixed upon his face intently. they were peculiarly bright. also they were rather wonderful eyes, and the way they met his own served in some way he could not understand to convey both a reproach and a warning. the whole face of the stranger, indeed, made a vivid impression upon him, for it was a face, he now noticed for the first time, in whose presence one would not willingly have said or done anything unworthy. harris could not explain to himself how it was he had not become conscious sooner of its presence. but he could have bitten off his tongue for having so far forgotten himself. the little priest lapsed into silence. only once he said, looking up and speaking in a low voice that was not intended to be overheard, but that evidently _was_ overheard, "you will find it different." presently he rose and left the table with a polite bow that included both the others. and, after him, from the far end rose also the figure in the tweed suit, leaving harris by himself. he sat on for a bit in the darkening room, sipping his coffee and smoking his fifteen-pfennig cigar, till the girl came in to light the oil lamps. he felt vexed with himself for his lapse from good manners, yet hardly able to account for it. most likely, he reflected, he had been annoyed because the priest had unintentionally changed the pleasant character of his dream by introducing a jarring note. later he must seek an opportunity to make amends. at present, however, he was too impatient for his walk to the school, and he took his stick and hat and passed out into the open air. and, as he crossed before the gasthaus, he noticed that the priest and the man in the tweed suit were engaged already in such deep conversation that they hardly noticed him as he passed and raised his hat. he started off briskly, well remembering the way, and hoping to reach the village in time to have a word with one of the brüder. they might even ask him in for a cup of coffee. he felt sure of his welcome, and the old memories were in full possession once more. the hour of return was a matter of no consequence whatever. it was then just after seven o'clock, and the october evening was drawing in with chill airs from the recesses of the forest. the road plunged straight from the railway clearing into its depths, and in a very few minutes the trees engulfed him and the clack of his boots fell dead and echoless against the serried stems of a million firs. it was very black; one trunk was hardly distinguishable from another. he walked smartly, swinging his holly stick. once or twice he passed a peasant on his way to bed, and the guttural "gruss got," unheard for so long, emphasised the passage of time, while yet making it seem as nothing. a fresh group of pictures crowded his mind. again the figures of former schoolfellows flitted out of the forest and kept pace by his side, whispering of the doings of long ago. one reverie stepped hard upon the heels of another. every turn in the road, every clearing of the forest, he knew, and each in turn brought forgotten associations to life. he enjoyed himself thoroughly. he marched on and on. there was powdered gold in the sky till the moon rose, and then a wind of faint silver spread silently between the earth and stars. he saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light. the mountain air was indescribably sweet. the road shone like the foam of a river through the gloom. white moths flitted here and there like silent thoughts across his path, and a hundred smells greeted him from the forest caverns across the years. then, when he least expected it, the trees fell away abruptly on both sides, and he stood on the edge of the village clearing. he walked faster. there lay the familiar outlines of the houses, sheeted with silver; there stood the trees in the little central square with the fountain and small green lawns; there loomed the shape of the church next to the gasthof der brüdergemeinde; and just beyond, dimly rising into the sky, he saw with a sudden thrill the mass of the huge school building, blocked castlelike with deep shadows in the moonlight, standing square and formidable to face him after the silences of more than a quarter of a century. he passed quickly down the deserted village street and stopped close beneath its shadow, staring up at the walls that had once held him prisoner for two years--two unbroken years of discipline and homesickness. memories and emotions surged through his mind; for the most vivid sensations of his youth had focused about this spot, and it was here he had first begun to live and learn values. not a single footstep broke the silence, though lights glimmered here and there through cottage windows; but when he looked up at the high walls of the school, draped now in shadow, he easily imagined that well-known faces crowded to the windows to greet him--closed windows that really reflected only moonlight and the gleam of stars. this, then, was the old school building, standing foursquare to the world, with its shuttered windows, its lofty, tiled roof, and the spiked lightning-conductors pointing like black and taloned fingers from the corners. for a long time he stood and stared. then, presently, he came to himself again, and realised to his joy that a light still shone in the windows of the bruderstube. he turned from the road and passed through the iron railings; then climbed the twelve stone steps and stood facing the black wooden door with the heavy bars of iron, a door he had once loathed and dreaded with the hatred and passion of an imprisoned soul, but now looked upon tenderly with a sort of boyish delight. almost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building. and the long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid sense of reality that he positively shivered. it was like the magic bell in the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of time and summons the figures from the shadows of the dead. he had never felt so sentimental in his life. it was like being young again. and, at the same time, he began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious importance. he was a big man from the world of strife and action. in this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut something of a figure? "i'll try once more," he thought after a long pause, seizing the iron bell-rope, and was just about to pull it when a step sounded on the stone passage within, and the huge door slowly swung open. a tall man with a rather severe cast of countenance stood facing him in silence. "i must apologise--it is somewhat late," he began a trifle pompously, "but the fact is i am an old pupil. i have only just arrived and really could not restrain myself." his german seemed not quite so fluent as usual. "my interest is so great. i was here in ' ." the other opened the door wider and at once bowed him in with a smile of genuine welcome. "i am bruder kalkmann," he said quietly in a deep voice. "i myself was a master here about that time. it is a great pleasure always to welcome a former pupil." he looked at him very keenly for a few seconds, and then added, "i think, too, it is splendid of you to come--very splendid." "it is a very great pleasure," harris replied, delighted with his reception. the dimly lighted corridor with its flooring of grey stone, and the familiar sound of a german voice echoing through it,--with the peculiar intonation the brothers always used in speaking,--all combined to lift him bodily, as it were, into the dream-atmosphere of long-forgotten days. he stepped gladly into the building and the door shut with the familiar thunder that completed the reconstruction of the past. he almost felt the old sense of imprisonment, of aching nostalgia, of having lost his liberty. harris sighed involuntarily and turned towards his host, who returned his smile faintly and then led the way down the corridor. "the boys have retired," he explained, "and, as you remember, we keep early hours here. but, at least, you will join us for a little while in the _bruderstube_ and enjoy a cup of coffee." this was precisely what the silk merchant had hoped, and he accepted with an alacrity that he intended to be tempered by graciousness. "and to-morrow," continued the bruder, "you must come and spend a whole day with us. you may even find acquaintances, for several pupils of your day have come back here as masters." for one brief second there passed into the man's eyes a look that made the visitor start. but it vanished as quickly as it came. it was impossible to define. harris convinced himself it was the effect of a shadow cast by the lamp they had just passed on the wall. he dismissed it from his mind. "you are very kind, i'm sure," he said politely. "it is perhaps a greater pleasure to me than you can imagine to see the place again. ah,"--he stopped short opposite a door with the upper half of glass and peered in--"surely there is one of the music rooms where i used to practise the violin. how it comes back to me after all these years!" bruder kalkmann stopped indulgently, smiling, to allow his guest a moment's inspection. "you still have the boys' orchestra? i remember i used to play 'zweite geige' in it. bruder schliemann conducted at the piano. dear me, i can see him now with his long black hair and--and--" he stopped abruptly. again the odd, dark look passed over the stern face of his companion. for an instant it seemed curiously familiar. "we still keep up the pupils' orchestra," he said, "but bruder schliemann, i am sorry to say--" he hesitated an instant, and then added, "bruder schliemann is dead." "indeed, indeed," said harris quickly. "i am sorry to hear it." he was conscious of a faint feeling of distress, but whether it arose from the news of his old music teacher's death, or--from something else--he could not quite determine. he gazed down the corridor that lost itself among shadows. in the street and village everything had seemed so much smaller than he remembered, but here, inside the school building, everything seemed so much bigger. the corridor was loftier and longer, more spacious and vast, than the mental picture he had preserved. his thoughts wandered dreamily for an instant. he glanced up and saw the face of the bruder watching him with a smile of patient indulgence. "your memories possess you," he observed gently, and the stern look passed into something almost pitying. "you are right," returned the man of silk, "they do. this was the most wonderful period of my whole life in a sense. at the time i hated it--" he hesitated, not wishing to hurt the brother's feelings. "according to english ideas it seemed strict, of course," the other said persuasively, so that he went on. "--yes, partly that; and partly the ceaseless nostalgia, and the solitude which came from never being really alone. in english schools the boys enjoy peculiar freedom, you know." bruder kalkmann, he saw, was listening intently. "but it produced one result that i have never wholly lost," he continued self-consciously, "and am grateful for." "_ach! wie so, denn?_" "the constant inner pain threw me headlong into your religious life, so that the whole force of my being seemed to project itself towards the search for a deeper satisfaction--a real resting-place for the soul. during my two years here i yearned for god in my boyish way as perhaps i have never yearned for anything since. moreover, i have never quite lost that sense of peace and inward joy which accompanied the search. i can never quite forget this school and the deep things it taught me." he paused at the end of his long speech, and a brief silence fell between them. he feared he had said too much, or expressed himself clumsily in the foreign language, and when bruder kalkmann laid a hand upon his shoulder, he gave a little involuntary start. "so that my memories perhaps do possess me rather strongly," he added apologetically; "and this long corridor, these rooms, that barred and gloomy front door, all touch chords that--that--" his german failed him and he glanced at his companion with an explanatory smile and gesture. but the brother had removed the hand from his shoulder and was standing with his back to him, looking down the passage. "naturally, naturally so," he said hastily without turning round. "_es ist doch selbstverständlich_. we shall all understand." then he turned suddenly, and harris saw that his face had turned most oddly and disagreeably sinister. it may only have been the shadows again playing their tricks with the wretched oil lamps on the wall, for the dark expression passed instantly as they retraced their steps down the corridor, but the englishman somehow got the impression that he had said something to give offence, something that was not quite to the other's taste. opposite the door of the _bruderstube_ they stopped. harris realised that it was late and he had possibly stayed talking too long. he made a tentative effort to leave, but his companion would not hear of it. "you must have a cup of coffee with us," he said firmly as though he meant it, "and my colleagues will be delighted to see you. some of them will remember you, perhaps." the sound of voices came pleasantly through the door, men's voices talking together. bruder kalkmann turned the handle and they entered a room ablaze with light and full of people. "ah,--but your name?" he whispered, bending down to catch the reply; "you have not told me your name yet." "harris," said the englishman quickly as they went in. he felt nervous as he crossed the threshold, but ascribed the momentary trepidation to the fact that he was breaking the strictest rule of the whole establishment, which forbade a boy under severest penalties to come near this holy of holies where the masters took their brief leisure. "ah, yes, of course--harris," repeated the other as though he remembered it. "come in, herr harris, come in, please. your visit will be immensely appreciated. it is really very fine, very wonderful of you to have come in this way." the door closed behind them and, in the sudden light which made his sight swim for a moment, the exaggeration of the language escaped his attention. he heard the voice of bruder kalkmann introducing him. he spoke very loud, indeed, unnecessarily,--absurdly loud, harris thought. "brothers," he announced, "it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce to you herr harris from england. he has just arrived to make us a little visit, and i have already expressed to him on behalf of us all the satisfaction we feel that he is here. he was, as you remember, a pupil in the year ' ." it was a very formal, a very german introduction, but harris rather liked it. it made him feel important and he appreciated the tact that made it almost seem as though he had been expected. the black forms rose and bowed; harris bowed; kalkmann bowed. every one was very polite and very courtly. the room swam with moving figures; the light dazzled him after the gloom of the corridor, there was thick cigar smoke in the atmosphere. he took the chair that was offered to him between two of the brothers, and sat down, feeling vaguely that his perceptions were not quite as keen and accurate as usual. he felt a trifle dazed perhaps, and the spell of the past came strongly over him, confusing the immediate present and making everything dwindle oddly to the dimensions of long ago. he seemed to pass under the mastery of a great mood that was a composite reproduction of all the moods of his forgotten boyhood. then he pulled himself together with a sharp effort and entered into the conversation that had begun again to buzz round him. moreover, he entered into it with keen pleasure, for the brothers--there were perhaps a dozen of them in the little room--treated him with a charm of manner that speedily made him feel one of themselves. this, again, was a very subtle delight to him. he felt that he had stepped out of the greedy, vulgar, self-seeking world, the world of silk and markets and profit-making--stepped into the cleaner atmosphere where spiritual ideals were paramount and life was simple and devoted. it all charmed him inexpressibly, so that he realised--yes, in a sense--the degradation of his twenty years' absorption in business. this keen atmosphere under the stars where men thought only of their souls, and of the souls of others, was too rarefied for the world he was now associated with. he found himself making comparisons to his own disadvantage,--comparisons with the mystical little dreamer that had stepped thirty years before from the stern peace of this devout community, and the man of the world that he had since become,--and the contrast made him shiver with a keen regret and something like self-contempt. he glanced round at the other faces floating towards him through tobacco smoke--this acrid cigar smoke he remembered so well: how keen they were, how strong, placid, touched with the nobility of great aims and unselfish purposes. at one or two he looked particularly. he hardly knew why. they rather fascinated him. there was something so very stern and uncompromising about them, and something, too, oddly, subtly, familiar, that yet just eluded him. but whenever their eyes met his own they held undeniable welcome in them; and some held more--a kind of perplexed admiration, he thought, something that was between esteem and deference. this note of respect in all the faces was very flattering to his vanity. coffee was served presently, made by a black-haired brother who sat in the corner by the piano and bore a marked resemblance to bruder schliemann, the musical director of thirty years ago. harris exchanged bows with him when he took the cup from his white hands, which he noticed were like the hands of a woman. he lit a cigar, offered to him by his neighbour, with whom he was chatting delightfully, and who, in the glare of the lighted match, reminded him sharply for a moment of bruder pagel, his former room-master. "_es ist wirklich merkwürdig_," he said, "how many resemblances i see, or imagine. it is really _very_ curious!" "yes," replied the other, peering at him over his coffee cup, "the spell of the place is wonderfully strong. i can well understand that the old faces rise before your mind's eye--almost to the exclusion of ourselves perhaps." they both laughed presently. it was soothing to find his mood understood and appreciated. and they passed on to talk of the mountain village, its isolation, its remoteness from worldly life, its peculiar fitness for meditation and worship, and for spiritual development--of a certain kind. "and your coming back in this way, herr harris, has pleased us all so much," joined in the bruder on his left. "we esteem you for it most highly. we honour you for it." harris made a deprecating gesture. "i fear, for my part, it is only a very selfish pleasure," he said a trifle unctuously. "not all would have had the courage," added the one who resembled bruder pagel. "you mean," said harris, a little puzzled, "the disturbing memories--?" bruder pagel looked at him steadily, with unmistakable admiration and respect. "i mean that most men hold so strongly to life, and can give up so little for their beliefs," he said gravely. the englishman felt slightly uncomfortable. these worthy men really made too much of his sentimental journey. besides, the talk was getting a little out of his depth. he hardly followed it. "the worldly life still has _some_ charms for me," he replied smilingly, as though to indicate that sainthood was not yet quite within his grasp. "all the more, then, must we honour you for so freely coming," said the brother on his left; "so unconditionally!" a pause followed, and the silk merchant felt relieved when the conversation took a more general turn, although he noted that it never travelled very far from the subject of his visit and the wonderful situation of the lonely village for men who wished to develop their spiritual powers and practise the rites of a high worship. others joined in, complimenting him on his knowledge of the language, making him feel utterly at his ease, yet at the same time a little uncomfortable by the excess of their admiration. after all, it was such a very small thing to do, this sentimental journey. the time passed along quickly; the coffee was excellent, the cigars soft and of the nutty flavour he loved. at length, fearing to outstay his welcome, he rose reluctantly to take his leave. but the others would not hear of it. it was not often a former pupil returned to visit them in this simple, unaffected way. the night was young. if necessary they could even find him a corner in the great _schlafzimmer_ upstairs. he was easily persuaded to stay a little longer. somehow he had become the centre of the little party. he felt pleased, flattered, honoured. "and perhaps bruder schliemann will play something for us--now." it was kalkmann speaking, and harris started visibly as he heard the name, and saw the black-haired man by the piano turn with a smile. for schliemann was the name of his old music director, who was dead. could this be his son? they were so exactly alike. "if bruder meyer has not put his amati to bed, i will accompany him," said the musician suggestively, looking across at a man whom harris had not yet noticed, and who, he now saw, was the very image of a former master of that name. meyer rose and excused himself with a little bow, and the englishman quickly observed that he had a peculiar gesture as though his neck had a false join on to the body just below the collar and feared it might break. meyer of old had this trick of movement. he remembered how the boys used to copy it. he glanced sharply from face to face, feeling as though some silent, unseen process were changing everything about him. all the faces seemed oddly familiar. pagel, the brother he had been talking with, was of course the image of pagel, his former room-master, and kalkmann, he now realised for the first time, was the very twin of another master whose name he had quite forgotten, but whom he used to dislike intensely in the old days. and, through the smoke, peering at him from the corners of the room, he saw that all the brothers about him had the faces he had known and lived with long ago--röst, fluheim, meinert, rigel, gysin. he stared hard, suddenly grown more alert, and everywhere saw, or fancied he saw, strange likenesses, ghostly resemblances,--more, the identical faces of years ago. there was something queer about it all, something not quite right, something that made him feel uneasy. he shook himself, mentally and actually, blowing the smoke from before his eyes with a long breath, and as he did so he noticed to his dismay that every one was fixedly staring. they were watching him. this brought him to his senses. as an englishman, and a foreigner, he did not wish to be rude, or to do anything to make himself foolishly conspicuous and spoil the harmony of the evening. he was a guest, and a privileged guest at that. besides, the music had already begun. bruder schliemann's long white fingers were caressing the keys to some purpose. he subsided into his chair and smoked with half-closed eyes that yet saw everything. but the shudder had established itself in his being, and, whether he would or not, it kept repeating itself. as a town, far up some inland river, feels the pressure of the distant sea, so he became aware that mighty forces from somewhere beyond his ken were urging themselves up against his soul in this smoky little room. he began to feel exceedingly ill at ease. and as the music filled the air his mind began to clear. like a lifted veil there rose up something that had hitherto obscured his vision. the words of the priest at the railway inn flashed across his brain unbidden: "you will find it different." and also, though why he could not tell, he saw mentally the strong, rather wonderful eyes of that other guest at the supper-table, the man who had overheard his conversation, and had later got into earnest talk with the priest. he took out his watch and stole a glance at it. two hours had slipped by. it was already eleven o'clock. schliemann, meanwhile, utterly absorbed in his music, was playing a solemn measure. the piano sang marvellously. the power of a great conviction, the simplicity of great art, the vital spiritual message of a soul that had found itself--all this, and more, were in the chords, and yet somehow the music was what can only be described as impure--atrociously and diabolically impure. and the piece itself, although harris did not recognise it as anything familiar, was surely the music of a mass--huge, majestic, sombre? it stalked through the smoky room with slow power, like the passage of something that was mighty, yet profoundly intimate, and as it went there stirred into each and every face about him the signature of the enormous forces of which it was the audible symbol. the countenances round him turned sinister, but not idly, negatively sinister: they grew dark with purpose. he suddenly recalled the face of bruder kalkmann in the corridor earlier in the evening. the motives of their secret souls rose to the eyes, and mouths, and foreheads, and hung there for all to see like the black banners of an assembly of ill-starred and fallen creatures. demons--was the horrible word that flashed through his brain like a sheet of fire. when this sudden discovery leaped out upon him, for a moment he lost his self-control. without waiting to think and weigh his extraordinary impression, he did a very foolish but a very natural thing. feeling himself irresistibly driven by the sudden stress to some kind of action, he sprang to his feet--and screamed! to his own utter amazement he stood up and shrieked aloud! but no one stirred. no one, apparently, took the slightest notice of his absurdly wild behaviour. it was almost as if no one but himself had heard the scream at all--as though the music had drowned it and swallowed it up--as though after all perhaps he had not really screamed as loudly as he imagined, or had not screamed at all. then, as he glanced at the motionless, dark faces before him, something of utter cold passed into his being, touching his very soul.... all emotion cooled suddenly, leaving him like a receding tide. he sat down again, ashamed, mortified, angry with himself for behaving like a fool and a boy. and the music, meanwhile, continued to issue from the white and snakelike fingers of bruder schliemann, as poisoned wine might issue from the weirdly fashioned necks of antique phials. and, with the rest of them, harris drank it in. forcing himself to believe that he had been the victim of some kind of illusory perception, he vigorously restrained his feelings. then the music presently ceased, and every one applauded and began to talk at once, laughing, changing seats, complimenting the player, and behaving naturally and easily as though nothing out of the way had happened. the faces appeared normal once more. the brothers crowded round their visitor, and he joined in their talk and even heard himself thanking the gifted musician. but, at the same time, he found himself edging towards the door, nearer and nearer, changing his chair when possible, and joining the groups that stood closest to the way of escape. "i must thank you all _tausendmal_ for my little reception and the great pleasure--the very great honour you have done me," he began in decided tones at length, "but i fear i have trespassed far too long already on your hospitality. moreover, i have some distance to walk to my inn." a chorus of voices greeted his words. they would not hear of his going,--at least not without first partaking of refreshment. they produced pumpernickel from one cupboard, and rye-bread and sausage from another, and all began to talk again and eat. more coffee was made, fresh cigars lighted, and bruder meyer took out his violin and began to tune it softly. "there is always a bed upstairs if herr harris will accept it," said one. "and it is difficult to find the way out now, for all the doors are locked," laughed another loudly. "let us take our simple pleasures as they come," cried a third. "bruder harris will understand how we appreciate the honour of this last visit of his." they made a dozen excuses. they all laughed, as though the politeness of their words was but formal, and veiled thinly--more and more thinly--a very different meaning. "and the hour of midnight draws near," added bruder kalkmann with a charming smile, but in a voice that sounded to the englishman like the grating of iron hinges. their german seemed to him more and more difficult to understand. he noted that they called him "bruder" too, classing him as one of themselves. and then suddenly he had a flash of keener perception, and realised with a creeping of his flesh that he had all along misinterpreted--grossly misinterpreted all they had been saying. they had talked about the beauty of the place, its isolation and remoteness from the world, its peculiar fitness for certain kinds of spiritual development and worship--yet hardly, he now grasped, in the sense in which he had taken the words. they had meant something different. their spiritual powers, their desire for loneliness, their passion for worship, were not the powers, the solitude, or the worship that _he_ meant and understood. he was playing a part in some horrible masquerade; he was among men who cloaked their lives with religion in order to follow their real purposes unseen of men. what did it all mean? how had he blundered into so equivocal a situation? had he blundered into it at all? had he not rather been led into it, deliberately led? his thoughts grew dreadfully confused, and his confidence in himself began to fade. and why, he suddenly thought again, were they so impressed by the mere fact of his coming to revisit his old school? what was it they so admired and wondered at in his simple act? why did they set such store upon his having the courage to come, to "give himself so freely," "unconditionally" as one of them had expressed it with such a mockery of exaggeration? fear stirred in his heart most horribly, and he found no answer to any of his questionings. only one thing he now understood quite clearly: it was their purpose to keep him here. they did not intend that he should go. and from this moment he realised that they were sinister, formidable and, in some way he had yet to discover, inimical to himself, inimical to his life. and the phrase one of them had used a moment ago--"this _last_ visit of his"--rose before his eyes in letters of flame. harris was not a man of action, and had never known in all the course of his career what it meant to be in a situation of real danger. he was not necessarily a coward, though, perhaps, a man of untried nerve. he realised at last plainly that he was in a very awkward predicament indeed, and that he had to deal with men who were utterly in earnest. what their intentions were he only vaguely guessed. his mind, indeed, was too confused for definite ratiocination, and he was only able to follow blindly the strongest instincts that moved in him. it never occurred to him that the brothers might all be mad, or that he himself might have temporarily lost his senses and be suffering under some terrible delusion. in fact, nothing occurred to him--he realised nothing--except that he meant to escape--and the quicker the better. a tremendous revulsion of feeling set in and overpowered him. accordingly, without further protest for the moment, he ate his pumpernickel and drank his coffee, talking meanwhile as naturally and pleasantly as he could, and when a suitable interval had passed, he rose to his feet and announced once more that he must now take his leave. he spoke very quietly, but very decidedly. no one hearing him could doubt that he meant what he said. he had got very close to the door by this time. "i regret," he said, using his best german, and speaking to a hushed room, "that our pleasant evening must come to an end, but it is now time for me to wish you all good-night." and then, as no one said anything, he added, though with a trifle less assurance, "and i thank you all most sincerely for your hospitality." "on the contrary," replied kalkmann instantly, rising from his chair and ignoring the hand the englishman had stretched out to him, "it is we who have to thank you; and we do so most gratefully and sincerely." and at the same moment at least half a dozen of the brothers took up their position between himself and the door. "you are very good to say so," harris replied as firmly as he could manage, noticing this movement out of the corner of his eye, "but really i had no conception that--my little chance visit could have afforded you so much pleasure." he moved another step nearer the door, but bruder schliemann came across the room quickly and stood in front of him. his attitude was uncompromising. a dark and terrible expression had come into his face. "but it was _not_ by chance that you came, bruder harris," he said so that all the room could hear; "surely we have not misunderstood your presence here?" he raised his black eyebrows. "no, no," the englishman hastened to reply, "i was--i am delighted to be here. i told you what pleasure it gave me to find myself among you. do not misunderstand me, i beg." his voice faltered a little, and he had difficulty in finding the words. more and more, too, he had difficulty in understanding _their_ words. "of course," interposed bruder kalkmann in his iron bass, "_we_ have not misunderstood. you have come back in the spirit of true and unselfish devotion. you offer yourself freely, and we all appreciate it. it is your willingness and nobility that have so completely won our veneration and respect." a faint murmur of applause ran round the room. "what we all delight in--what our great master will especially delight in--is the value of your spontaneous and voluntary--" he used a word harris did not understand. he said "_opfer_." the bewildered englishman searched his brain for the translation, and searched in vain. for the life of him he could not remember what it meant. but the word, for all his inability to translate it, touched his soul with ice. it was worse, far worse, than anything he had imagined. he felt like a lost, helpless creature, and all power to fight sank out of him from that moment. "it is magnificent to be such a willing--" added schliemann, sidling up to him with a dreadful leer on his face. he made use of the same word--"_opfer_." "god! what could it all mean?" "offer himself!" "true spirit of devotion!" "willing," "unselfish," "magnificent!" _opfer, opfer, opfer!_ what in the name of heaven did it mean, that strange, mysterious word that struck such terror into his heart? he made a valiant effort to keep his presence of mind and hold his nerves steady. turning, he saw that kalkmann's face was a dead white. kalkmann! he understood that well enough. _kalkmann_ meant "man of chalk": he knew that. but what did "_opfer_" mean? that was the real key to the situation. words poured through his disordered mind in an endless stream--unusual, rare words he had perhaps heard but once in his life--while "_opfer_," a word in common use, entirely escaped him. what an extraordinary mockery it all was! then kalkmann, pale as death, but his face hard as iron, spoke a few low words that he did not catch, and the brothers standing by the walls at once turned the lamps down so that the room became dim. in the half light he could only just discern their faces and movements. "it is time," he heard kalkmann's remorseless voice continue just behind him. "the hour of midnight is at hand. let us prepare. he comes! he comes; bruder asmodelius comes!" his voice rose to a chant. and the sound of that name, for some extraordinary reason, was terrible--utterly terrible; so that harris shook from head to foot as he heard it. its utterance filled the air like soft thunder, and a hush came over the whole room. forces rose all about him, transforming the normal into the horrible, and the spirit of craven fear ran through all his being, bringing him to the verge of collapse. _asmodelius! asmodelius!_ the name was appalling. for he understood at last to whom it referred and the meaning that lay between its great syllables. at the same instant, too, he suddenly understood the meaning of that unremembered word. the import of the word "_opfer_" flashed upon his soul like a message of death. he thought of making a wild effort to reach the door, but the weakness of his trembling knees, and the row of black figures that stood between, dissuaded him at once. he would have screamed for help, but remembering the emptiness of the vast building, and the loneliness of the situation, he understood that no help could come that way, and he kept his lips closed. he stood still and did nothing. but he knew now what was coming. two of the brothers approached and took him gently by the arm. "bruder asmodelius accepts you," they whispered; "are you ready?" then he found his tongue and tried to speak. "but what have i to do with this bruder asm--asmo--?" he stammered, a desperate rush of words crowding vainly behind the halting tongue. the name refused to pass his lips. he could not pronounce it as they did. he could not pronounce it at all. his sense of helplessness then entered the acute stage, for this inability to speak the name produced a fresh sense of quite horrible confusion in his mind, and he became extraordinarily agitated. "i came here for a friendly visit," he tried to say with a great effort, but, to his intense dismay, he heard his voice saying something quite different, and actually making use of that very word they had all used: "i came here as a willing _opfer_," he heard his own voice say, "and _i am quite ready_." he was lost beyond all recall now! not alone his mind, but the very muscles of his body had passed out of control. he felt that he was hovering on the confines of a phantom or demon-world,--a world in which the name they had spoken constituted the master-name, the word of ultimate power. what followed he heard and saw as in a nightmare. "in the half light that veils all truth, let us prepare to worship and adore," chanted schliemann, who had preceded him to the end of the room. "in the mists that protect our faces before the black throne, let us make ready the willing victim," echoed kalkmann in his great bass. they raised their faces, listening expectantly, as a roaring sound, like the passing of mighty projectiles, filled the air, far, far away, very wonderful, very forbidding. the walls of the room trembled. "he comes! he comes! he comes!" chanted the brothers in chorus. the sound of roaring died away, and an atmosphere of still and utter cold established itself over all. then kalkmann, dark and unutterably stern, turned in the dim light and faced the rest. "asmodelius, our _hauptbruder_, is about us," he cried in a voice that even while it shook was yet a voice of iron; "asmodelius is about us. make ready." there followed a pause in which no one stirred or spoke. a tall brother approached the englishman; but kalkmann held up his hand. "let the eyes remain uncovered," he said, "in honour of so freely giving himself." and to his horror harris then realised for the first time that his hands were already fastened to his sides. the brother retreated again silently, and in the pause that followed all the figures about him dropped to their knees, leaving him standing alone, and as they dropped, in voices hushed with mingled reverence and awe, they cried, softly, odiously, appallingly, the name of the being whom they momentarily expected to appear. then, at the end of the room, where the windows seemed to have disappeared so that he saw the stars, there rose into view far up against the night sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. a kind of grey glory enveloped it so that it resembled a steel-cased statue, immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendour; while, at the same time, the face was so spiritually mighty, yet so proudly, so austerely sad, that harris felt as he stared, that the sight was more than his eyes could meet, and that in another moment the power of vision would fail him altogether, and he must sink into utter nothingness. so remote and inaccessible hung this figure that it was impossible to gauge anything as to its size, yet at the same time so strangely close, that when the grey radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and mournful, beat down upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the powers of spiritual evil, he felt almost as though he were looking into a face no farther removed from him in space than the face of any one of the brothers who stood by his side. and then the room filled and trembled with sounds that harris understood full well were the failing voices of others who had preceded him in a long series down the years. there came first a plain, sharp cry, as of a man in the last anguish, choking for his breath, and yet, with the very final expiration of it, breathing the name of the worship--of the dark being who rejoiced to hear it. the cries of the strangled; the short, running gasp of the suffocated; and the smothered gurgling of the tightened throat, all these, and more, echoed back and forth between the walls, the very walls in which he now stood a prisoner, a sacrificial victim. the cries, too, not alone of the broken bodies, but--far worse--of beaten, broken souls. and as the ghastly chorus rose and fell, there came also the faces of the lost and unhappy creatures to whom they belonged, and, against that curtain of pale grey light, he saw float past him in the air, an array of white and piteous human countenances that seemed to beckon and gibber at him as though he were already one of themselves. slowly, too, as the voices rose, and the pallid crew sailed past, that giant form of grey descended from the sky and approached the room that contained the worshippers and their prisoner. hands rose and sank about him in the darkness, and he felt that he was being draped in other garments than his own; a circlet of ice seemed to run about his head, while round the waist, enclosing the fastened arms, he felt a girdle tightly drawn. at last, about his very throat, there ran a soft and silken touch which, better than if there had been full light, and a mirror held to his face, he understood to be the cord of sacrifice--and of death. at this moment the brothers, still prostrate upon the floor, began again their mournful, yet impassioned chanting, and as they did so a strange thing happened. for, apparently without moving or altering its position, the huge figure seemed, at once and suddenly, to be inside the room, almost beside him, and to fill the space around him to the exclusion of all else. he was now beyond all ordinary sensations of fear, only a drab feeling as of death--the death of the soul--stirred in his heart. his thoughts no longer even beat vainly for escape. the end was near, and he knew it. the dreadfully chanting voices rose about him in a wave: "we worship! we adore! we offer!" the sounds filled his ears and hammered, almost meaningless, upon his brain. then the majestic grey face turned slowly downwards upon him, and his very soul passed outwards and seemed to become absorbed in the sea of those anguished eyes. at the same moment a dozen hands forced him to his knees, and in the air before him he saw the arm of kalkmann upraised, and felt the pressure about his throat grow strong. it was in this awful moment, when he had given up all hope, and the help of gods or men seemed beyond question, that a strange thing happened. for before his fading and terrified vision there slid, as in a dream of light,--yet without apparent rhyme or reason--wholly unbidden and unexplained,--the face of that other man at the supper table of the railway inn. and the sight, even mentally, of that strong, wholesome, vigorous english face, inspired him suddenly with a new courage. it was but a flash of fading vision before he sank into a dark and terrible death, yet, in some inexplicable way, the sight of that face stirred in him unconquerable hope and the certainty of deliverance. it was a face of power, a face, he now realised, of simple goodness such as might have been seen by men of old on the shores of galilee; a face, by heaven, that could conquer even the devils of outer space. and, in his despair and abandonment, he called upon it, and called with no uncertain accents. he found his voice in this overwhelming moment to some purpose; though the words he actually used, and whether they were in german or english, he could never remember. their effect, nevertheless, was instantaneous. the brothers understood, and that grey figure of evil understood. for a second the confusion was terrific. there came a great shattering sound. it seemed that the very earth trembled. but all harris remembered afterwards was that voices rose about him in the clamour of terrified alarm-- "a man of power is among us! a man of god!" the vast sound was repeated--the rushing through space as of huge projectiles--and he sank to the floor of the room, unconscious. the entire scene had vanished, vanished like smoke over the roof of a cottage when the wind blows. and, by his side, sat down a slight un-german figure,--the figure of the stranger at the inn,--the man who had the "rather wonderful eyes." * * * * * when harris came to himself he felt cold. he was lying under the open sky, and the cool air of field and forest was blowing upon his face. he sat up and looked about him. the memory of the late scene was still horribly in his mind, but no vestige of it remained. no walls or ceiling enclosed him; he was no longer in a room at all. there were no lamps turned low, no cigar smoke, no black forms of sinister worshippers, no tremendous grey figure hovering beyond the windows. open space was about him, and he was lying on a pile of bricks and mortar, his clothes soaked with dew, and the kind stars shining brightly overhead. he was lying, bruised and shaken, among the heaped-up débris of a ruined building. he stood up and stared about him. there, in the shadowy distance, lay the surrounding forest, and here, close at hand, stood the outline of the village buildings. but, underfoot, beyond question, lay nothing but the broken heaps of stones that betokened a building long since crumbled to dust. then he saw that the stones were blackened, and that great wooden beams, half burnt, half rotten, made lines through the general débris. he stood, then, among the ruins of a burnt and shattered building, the weeds and nettles proving conclusively that it had lain thus for many years. the moon had already set behind the encircling forest, but the stars that spangled the heavens threw enough light to enable him to make quite sure of what he saw. harris, the silk merchant, stood among these broken and burnt stones and shivered. then he suddenly became aware that out of the gloom a figure had risen and stood beside him. peering at him, he thought he recognised the face of the stranger at the railway inn. "are _you_ real?" he asked in a voice he hardly recognised as his own. "more than real--i'm friendly," replied the stranger; "i followed you up here from the inn." harris stood and stared for several minutes without adding anything. his teeth chattered. the least sound made him start; but the simple words in his own language, and the tone in which they were uttered, comforted him inconceivably. "you're english too, thank god," he said inconsequently. "these german devils--" he broke off and put a hand to his eyes. "but what's become of them all--and the room--and--and--" the hand travelled down to his throat and moved nervously round his neck. he drew a long, long breath of relief. "did i dream everything--everything?" he said distractedly. he stared wildly about him, and the stranger moved forward and took his arm. "come," he said soothingly, yet with a trace of command in the voice, "we will move away from here. the high-road, or even the woods will be more to your taste, for we are standing now on one of the most haunted--and most terribly haunted--spots of the whole world." he guided his companion's stumbling footsteps over the broken masonry until they reached the path, the nettles stinging their hands, and harris feeling his way like a man in a dream. passing through the twisted iron railing they reached the path, and thence made their way to the road, shining white in the night. once safely out of the ruins, harris collected himself and turned to look back. "but, how is it possible?" he exclaimed, his voice still shaking. "how can it be possible? when i came in here i saw the building in the moonlight. they opened the door. i saw the figures and heard the voices and touched, yes touched their very hands, and saw their damned black faces, saw them far more plainly than i see you now." he was deeply bewildered. the glamour was still upon his eyes with a degree of reality stronger than the reality even of normal life. "was i so utterly deluded?" then suddenly the words of the stranger, which he had only half heard or understood, returned to him. "haunted?" he asked, looking hard at him; "haunted, did you say?" he paused in the roadway and stared into the darkness where the building of the old school had first appeared to him. but the stranger hurried him forward. "we shall talk more safely farther on," he said. "i followed you from the inn the moment i realised where you had gone. when i found you it was eleven o'clock--" "eleven o'clock," said harris, remembering with a shudder. "--i saw you drop. i watched over you till you recovered consciousness of your own accord, and now--now i am here to guide you safely back to the inn. i have broken the spell--the glamour--" "i owe you a great deal, sir," interrupted harris again, beginning to understand something of the stranger's kindness, "but i don't understand it all. i feel dazed and shaken." his teeth still chattered, and spells of violent shivering passed over him from head to foot. he found that he was clinging to the other's arm. in this way they passed beyond the deserted and crumbling village and gained the high-road that led homewards through the forest. "that school building has long been in ruins," said the man at his side presently; "it was burnt down by order of the elders of the community at least ten years ago. the village has been uninhabited ever since. but the simulacra of certain ghastly events that took place under that roof in past days still continue. and the 'shells' of the chief participants still enact there the dreadful deeds that led to its final destruction, and to the desertion of the whole settlement. they were devil-worshippers!" harris listened with beads of perspiration on his forehead that did not come alone from their leisurely pace through the cool night. although he had seen this man but once before in his life, and had never before exchanged so much as a word with him, he felt a degree of confidence and a subtle sense of safety and well-being in his presence that were the most healing influences he could possibly have wished after the experience he had been through. for all that, he still felt as if he were walking in a dream, and though he heard every word that fell from his companion's lips, it was only the next day that the full import of all he said became fully clear to him. the presence of this quiet stranger, the man with the wonderful eyes which he felt now, rather than saw, applied a soothing anodyne to his shattered spirit that healed him through and through. and this healing influence, distilled from the dark figure at his side, satisfied his first imperative need, so that he almost forgot to realise how strange and opportune it was that the man should be there at all. it somehow never occurred to him to ask his name, or to feel any undue wonder that one passing tourist should take so much trouble on behalf of another. he just walked by his side, listening to his quiet words, and allowing himself to enjoy the very wonderful experience after his recent ordeal, of being helped, strengthened, blessed. only once, remembering vaguely something of his reading of years ago, he turned to the man beside him, after some more than usually remarkable words, and heard himself, almost involuntarily it seemed, putting the question: "then are you a rosicrucian, sir, perhaps?" but the stranger had ignored the words, or possibly not heard them, for he continued with his talk as though unconscious of any interruption, and harris became aware that another somewhat unusual picture had taken possession of his mind, as they walked there side by side through the cool reaches of the forest, and that he had found his imagination suddenly charged with the childhood memory of jacob wrestling with an angel,--wrestling all night with a being of superior quality whose strength eventually became his own. "it was your abrupt conversation with the priest at supper that first put me upon the track of this remarkable occurrence," he heard the man's quiet voice beside him in the darkness, "and it was from him i learned after you left the story of the devil-worship that became secretly established in the heart of this simple and devout little community." "devil-worship! here--!" harris stammered, aghast. "yes--here;--conducted secretly for years by a group of brothers before unexplained disappearances in the neighbourhood led to its discovery. for where could they have found a safer place in the whole wide world for their ghastly traffic and perverted powers than here, in the very precincts--under cover of the very shadow of saintliness and holy living?" "awful, awful!" whispered the silk merchant, "and when i tell you the words they used to me--" "i know it all," the stranger said quietly. "i saw and heard everything. my plan first was to wait till the end and then to take steps for their destruction, but in the interest of your personal safety,"--he spoke with the utmost gravity and conviction,--"in the interest of the safety of your soul, i made my presence known when i did, and before the conclusion had been reached--" "my safety! the danger, then, was real. they were alive and--" words failed him. he stopped in the road and turned towards his companion, the shining of whose eyes he could just make out in the gloom. "it was a concourse of the shells of violent men, spiritually developed but evil men, seeking after death--the death of the body--to prolong their vile and unnatural existence. and had they accomplished their object you, in turn, at the death of your body, would have passed into their power and helped to swell their dreadful purposes." harris made no reply. he was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon the sweet and common things of life. he even thought of silk and st. paul's churchyard and the faces of his partners in business. "for you came all prepared to be caught," he heard the other's voice like some one talking to him from a distance; "your deeply introspective mood had already reconstructed the past so vividly, so intensely, that you were _en rapport_ at once with any forces of those days that chanced still to be lingering. and they swept you up all unresistingly." harris tightened his hold upon the stranger's arm as he heard. at the moment he had room for one emotion only. it did not seem to him odd that this stranger should have such intimate knowledge of his mind. "it is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their photographs upon surrounding scenes and objects," the other added, "and who ever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon? it is unfortunate. but the wicked passions of men's hearts alone seem strong enough to leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too lukewarm." the stranger sighed as he spoke. but harris, exhausted and shaken as he was to the very core, paced by his side, only half listening. he moved as in a dream still. it was very wonderful to him, this walk home under the stars in the early hours of the october morning, the peaceful forest all about them, mist rising here and there over the small clearings, and the sound of water from a hundred little invisible streams filling in the pauses of the talk. in after life he always looked back to it as something magical and impossible, something that had seemed too beautiful, too curiously beautiful, to have been quite true. and, though at the time he heard and understood but a quarter of what the stranger said, it came back to him afterwards, staying with him till the end of his days, and always with a curious, haunting sense of unreality, as though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he could recall only faint and exquisite portions. but the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled; and when they reached the railway inn, somewhere about three o'clock in the morning, harris shook the stranger's hand gratefully, effusively, meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart, and went up to his room, thinking in a hazy, dream-like way of the words with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as they left the confines of the forest-- "and if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint." but harris, the silk merchant, slept better than might have been expected, and with a soundness that carried him half-way through the day. and when he came downstairs and learned that the stranger had already taken his departure, he realised with keen regret that he had never once thought of asking his name. "yes, he signed the visitors' book," said the girl in reply to his question. and he turned over the blotted pages and found there, the last entry, in a very delicate and individual handwriting-- "_john silence_, london." case ii: the camp of the dog i islands of all shapes and sizes troop northward from stockholm by the hundred, and the little steamer that threads their intricate mazes in summer leaves the traveller in a somewhat bewildered state as regards the points of the compass when it reaches the end of its journey at waxholm. but it is only after waxholm that the true islands begin, so to speak, to run wild, and start up the coast on their tangled course of a hundred miles of deserted loveliness, and it was in the very heart of this delightful confusion that we pitched our tents for a summer holiday. a veritable wilderness of islands lay about us: from the mere round button of a rock that bore a single fir, to the mountainous stretch of a square mile, densely wooded, and bounded by precipitous cliffs; so close together often that a strip of water ran between no wider than a country lane, or, again, so far that an expanse stretched like the open sea for miles. although the larger islands boasted farms and fishing stations, the majority were uninhabited. carpeted with moss and heather, their coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy bays, with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the water's edge and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and mystery into the very heart of primitive forest. the particular islands to which we had camping rights by virtue of paying a nominal sum to a stockholm merchant lay together in a picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea. the fourth, which we selected because it enclosed a little lagoon suitable for anchorage, bathing, night-lines, and what-not, shall have what description is necessary as the story proceeds; but, so far as paying rent was concerned, we might equally well have pitched our tents on any one of a hundred others that clustered about us as thickly as a swarm of bees. it was in the blaze of an evening in july, the air clear as crystal, the sea a cobalt blue, when we left the steamer on the borders of civilisation and sailed away with maps, compasses, and provisions for the little group of dots in the skägård that were to be our home for the next two months. the dinghy and my canadian canoe trailed behind us, with tents and dunnage carefully piled aboard, and when the point of cliff intervened to hide the steamer and the waxholm hotel we realised for the first time that the horror of trains and houses was far behind us, the fever of men and cities, the weariness of streets and confined spaces. the wilderness opened up on all sides into endless blue reaches, and the map and compasses were so frequently called into requisition that we went astray more often than not and progress was enchantingly slow. it took us, for instance, two whole days to find our crescent-shaped home, and the camps we made on the way were so fascinating that we left them with difficulty and regret, for each island seemed more desirable than the one before it, and over all lay the spell of haunting peace, remoteness from the turmoil of the world, and the freedom of open and desolate spaces. and so many of these spots of world-beauty have i sought out and dwelt in, that in my mind remains only a composite memory of their faces, a true map of heaven, as it were, from which this particular one stands forth with unusual sharpness because of the strange things that happened there, and also, i think, because anything in which john silence played a part has a habit of fixing itself in the mind with a living and lasting quality of vividness. for the moment, however, dr. silence was not of the party. some private case in the interior of hungary claimed his attention, and it was not till later--the th of august, to be exact--that i had arranged to meet him in berlin and then return to london together for our harvest of winter work. all the members of our party, however, were known to him more or less well, and on this third day as we sailed through the narrow opening into the lagoon and saw the circular ridge of trees in a gold and crimson sunset before us, his last words to me when we parted in london for some unaccountable reason came back very sharply to my memory, and recalled the curious impression of prophecy with which i had first heard them: "enjoy your holiday and store up all the force you can," he had said as the train slipped out of victoria; "and we will meet in berlin on the th--unless you should send for me sooner." and now suddenly the words returned to me so clearly that it seemed i almost heard his voice in my ear: "unless you should send for me sooner"; and returned, moreover, with a significance i was wholly at a loss to understand that touched somewhere in the depths of my mind a vague sense of apprehension that they had all along been intended in the nature of a prophecy. in the lagoon, then, the wind failed us this july evening, as was only natural behind the shelter of the belt of woods, and we took to the oars, all breathless with the beauty of this first sight of our island home, yet all talking in somewhat hushed voices of the best place to land, the depth of water, the safest place to anchor, to put up the tents in, the most sheltered spot for the camp-fires, and a dozen things of importance that crop up when a home in the wilderness has actually to be made. and during this busy sunset hour of unloading before the dark, the souls of my companions adopted the trick of presenting themselves very vividly anew before my mind, and introducing themselves afresh. in reality, i suppose, our party was in no sense singular. in the conventional life at home they certainly seemed ordinary enough, but suddenly, as we passed through these gates of the wilderness, i saw them more sharply than before, with characters stripped of the atmosphere of men and cities. a complete change of setting often furnishes a startlingly new view of people hitherto held for well-known; they present another facet of their personalities. i seemed to see my own party almost as new people--people i had not known properly hitherto, people who would drop all disguises and henceforth reveal themselves as they really were. and each one seemed to say: "now you will see me as i am. you will see me here in this primitive life of the wilderness without clothes. all my masks and veils i have left behind in the abodes of men. so, look out for surprises!" the reverend timothy maloney helped me to put up the tents, long practice making the process easy, and while he drove in pegs and tightened ropes, his coat off, his flannel collar flying open without a tie, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was cut out for the life of a pioneer rather than the church. he was fifty years of age, muscular, blue-eyed and hearty, and he took his share of the work, and more, without shirking. the way he handled the axe in cutting down saplings for the tent-poles was a delight to see, and his eye in judging the level was unfailing. bullied as a young man into a lucrative family living, he had in turn bullied his mind into some semblance of orthodox beliefs, doing the honours of the little country church with an energy that made one think of a coal-heaver tending china; and it was only in the past few years that he had resigned the living and taken instead to cramming young men for their examinations. this suited him better. it enabled him, too, to indulge his passion for spells of "wild life," and to spend the summer months of most years under canvas in one part of the world or another where he could take his young men with him and combine "reading" with open air. his wife usually accompanied him, and there was no doubt she enjoyed the trips, for she possessed, though in less degree, the same joy of the wilderness that was his own distinguishing characteristic. the only difference was that while he regarded it as the real life, she regarded it as an interlude. while he camped out with his heart and mind, she played at camping out with her clothes and body. none the less, she made a splendid companion, and to watch her busy cooking dinner over the fire we had built among the stones was to understand that her heart was in the business for the moment and that she was happy even with the detail. mrs. maloney at home, knitting in the sun and believing that the world was made in six days, was one woman; but mrs. maloney, standing with bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was another; and peter sangree, the canadian pupil, with his pale skin, and his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a knife. she ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, too, with willing pleasure, for in spite of his general appearance of debility he was as happy to be in camp as any of them. but more than any other member of the party, joan maloney, the daughter, was the one who seemed a natural and genuine part of the landscape, who belonged to it all just in the same way that the trees and the moss and the grey rocks running out into the water belonged to it. for she was obviously in her right and natural setting, a creature of the wilds, a gipsy in her own home. to any one with a discerning eye this would have been more or less apparent, but to me, who had known her during all the twenty-two years of her life and was familiar with the ins and outs of her primitive, utterly un-modern type, it was strikingly clear. to see her there made it impossible to imagine her again in civilisation. i lost all recollection of how she looked in a town. the memory somehow evaporated. this slim creature before me, flitting to and fro with the grace of the woodland life, swift, supple, adroit, on her knees blowing the fire, or stirring the frying-pan through a veil of smoke, suddenly seemed the only way i had ever really seen her. here she was at home; in london she became some one concealed by clothes, an artificial doll overdressed and moving by clockwork, only a portion of her alive. here she was alive all over. i forget altogether how she was dressed, just as i forget how any particular tree was dressed, or how the markings ran on any one of the boulders that lay about the camp. she looked just as wild and natural and untamed as everything else that went to make up the scene, and more than that i cannot say. pretty, she was decidedly not. she was thin, skinny, dark-haired, and possessed of great physical strength in the form of endurance. she had, too, something of the force and vigorous purpose of a man, tempestuous sometimes and wild to passionate, frightening her mother, and puzzling her easy-going father with her storms of waywardness, while at the same time she stirred his admiration by her violence. a pagan of the pagans she was besides, and with some haunting suggestion of old-world pagan beauty about her dark face and eyes. altogether an odd and difficult character, but with a generosity and high courage that made her very lovable. in town life she always seemed to me to feel cramped, bored, a devil in a cage, in her eyes a hunted expression as though any moment she dreaded to be caught. but up in these spacious solitudes all this disappeared. away from the limitations that plagued and stung her, she would show at her best, and as i watched her moving about the camp i repeatedly found myself thinking of a wild creature that had just obtained its freedom and was trying its muscles. peter sangree, of course, at once went down before her. but she was so obviously beyond his reach, and besides so well able to take care of herself, that i think her parents gave the matter but little thought, and he himself worshipped at a respectful distance, keeping admirable control of his passion in all respects save one; for at his age the eyes are difficult to master, and the yearning, almost the devouring, expression often visible in them was probably there unknown even to himself. he, better than any one else, understood that he had fallen in love with something most hard of attainment, something that drew him to the very edge of life, and almost beyond it. it, no doubt, was a secret and terrible joy to him, this passionate worship from afar; only i think he suffered more than any one guessed, and that his want of vitality was due in large measure to the constant stream of unsatisfied yearning that poured for ever from his soul and body. moreover, it seemed to me, who now saw them for the first time together, that there was an unnamable something--an elusive quality of some kind--that marked them as belonging to the same world, and that although the girl ignored him she was secretly, and perhaps unknown to herself, drawn by some attribute very deep in her own nature to some quality equally deep in his. this, then, was the party when we first settled down into our two months' camp on the island in the baltic sea. other figures flitted from time to time across the scene, and sometimes one reading man, sometimes another, came to join us and spend his four hours a day in the clergyman's tent, but they came for short periods only, and they went without leaving much trace in my memory, and certainly they played no important part in what subsequently happened. the weather favoured us that night, so that by sunset the tents were up, the boats unloaded, a store of wood collected and chopped into lengths, and the candle-lanterns hung round ready for lighting on the trees. sangree, too, had picked deep mattresses of balsam boughs for the women's beds, and had cleared little paths of brushwood from their tents to the central fireplace. all was prepared for bad weather. it was a cosy supper and a well-cooked one that we sat down to and ate under the stars, and, according to the clergyman, the only meal fit to eat we had seen since we left london a week before. the deep stillness, after that roar of steamers, trains, and tourists, held something that thrilled, for as we lay round the fire there was no sound but the faint sighing of the pines and the soft lapping of the waves along the shore and against the sides of the boat in the lagoon. the ghostly outline of her white sails was just visible through the trees, idly rocking to and fro in her calm anchorage, her sheets flapping gently against the mast. beyond lay the dim blue shapes of other islands floating in the night, and from all the great spaces about us came the murmur of the sea and the soft breathing of great woods. the odours of the wilderness--smells of wind and earth, of trees and water, clean, vigorous, and mighty--were the true odours of a virgin world unspoilt by men, more penetrating and more subtly intoxicating than any other perfume in the whole world. oh!--and dangerously strong, too, no doubt, for some natures! "ahhh!" breathed out the clergyman after supper, with an indescribable gesture of satisfaction and relief. "here there is freedom, and room for body and mind to turn in. here one can work and rest and play. here one can be alive and absorb something of the earth-forces that never get within touching distance in the cities. by george, i shall make a permanent camp here and come when it is time to die!" the good man was merely giving vent to his delight at being under canvas. he said the same thing every year, and he said it often. but it more or less expressed the superficial feelings of us all. and when, a little later, he turned to compliment his wife on the fried potatoes, and discovered that she was snoring, with her back against a tree, he grunted with content at the sight and put a ground-sheet over her feet, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to fall asleep after dinner, and then moved back to his own corner, smoking his pipe with great satisfaction. and i, smoking mine too, lay and fought against the most delicious sleep imaginable, while my eyes wandered from the fire to the stars peeping through the branches, and then back again to the group about me. the rev. timothy soon let his pipe go out, and succumbed as his wife had done, for he had worked hard and eaten well. sangree, also smoking, leaned against a tree with his gaze fixed on the girl, a depth of yearning in his face that he could not hide, and that really distressed me for him. and joan herself, with wide staring eyes, alert, full of the new forces of the place, evidently keyed up by the magic of finding herself among all the things her soul recognised as "home," sat rigid by the fire, her thoughts roaming through the spaces, the blood stirring about her heart. she was as unconscious of the canadian's gaze as she was that her parents both slept. she looked to me more like a tree, or something that had grown out of the island, than a living girl of the century; and when i spoke across to her in a whisper and suggested a tour of investigation, she started and looked up at me as though she heard a voice in her dreams. sangree leaped up and joined us, and without waking the others we three went over the ridge of the island and made our way down to the shore behind. the water lay like a lake before us still coloured by the sunset. the air was keen and scented, wafting the smell of the wooded islands that hung about us in the darkening air. very small waves tumbled softly on the sand. the sea was sown with stars, and everywhere breathed and pulsed the beauty of the northern summer night. i confess i speedily lost consciousness of the human presences beside me, and i have little doubt joan did too. only sangree felt otherwise, i suppose, for presently we heard him sighing; and i can well imagine that he absorbed the whole wonder and passion of the scene into his aching heart, to swell the pain there that was more searching even than the pain at the sight of such matchless and incomprehensible beauty. the splash of a fish jumping broke the spell. "i wish we had the canoe now," remarked joan; "we could paddle out to the other islands." "of course," i said; "wait here and i'll go across for it," and was turning to feel my way back through the darkness when she stopped me in a voice that meant what it said. "no; mr. sangree will get it. we will wait here and cooee to guide him." the canadian was off in a moment, for she had only to hint of her wishes and he obeyed. "keep out from shore in case of rocks," i cried out as he went, "and turn to the right out of the lagoon. that's the shortest way round by the map." my voice travelled across the still waters and woke echoes in the distant islands that came back to us like people calling out of space. it was only thirty or forty yards over the ridge and down the other side to the lagoon where the boats lay, but it was a good mile to coast round the shore in the dark to where we stood and waited. we heard him stumbling away among the boulders, and then the sounds suddenly ceased as he topped the ridge and went down past the fire on the other side. "i didn't want to be left alone with him," the girl said presently in a low voice. "i'm always afraid he's going to say or do something--" she hesitated a moment, looking quickly over her shoulder towards the ridge where he had just disappeared--"something that might lead to unpleasantness." she stopped abruptly. "_you_ frightened, joan!" i exclaimed, with genuine surprise. "this is a new light on your wicked character. i thought the human being who could frighten you did not exist." then i suddenly realised she was talking seriously--looking to me for help of some kind--and at once i dropped the teasing attitude. "he's very far gone, i think, joan," i added gravely. "you must be kind to him, whatever else you may feel. he's exceedingly fond of you." "i know, but i can't help it," she whispered, lest her voice should carry in the stillness; "there's something about him that--that makes me feel creepy and half afraid." "but, poor man, it's not his fault if he is delicate and sometimes looks like death," i laughed gently, by way of defending what i felt to be a very innocent member of my sex. "oh, but it's not that i mean," she answered quickly; "it's something i feel about him, something in his soul, something he hardly knows himself, but that may come out if we are much together. it draws me, i feel, tremendously. it stirs what is wild in me--deep down--oh, very deep down,--yet at the same time makes me feel afraid." "i suppose his thoughts are always playing about you," i said, "but he's nice-minded and--" "yes, yes," she interrupted impatiently, "i can trust myself absolutely with him. he's gentle and singularly pure-minded. but there's something else that--" she stopped again sharply to listen. then she came up close beside me in the darkness, whispering-- "you know, mr. hubbard, sometimes my intuitions warn me a little too strongly to be ignored. oh, yes, you needn't tell me again that it's difficult to distinguish between fancy and intuition. i know all that. but i also know that there's something deep down in that man's soul that calls to something deep down in mine. and at present it frightens me. because i cannot make out what it is; and i know, i _know_, he'll do something some day that--that will shake my life to the very bottom." she laughed a little at the strangeness of her own description. i turned to look at her more closely, but the darkness was too great to show her face. there was an intensity, almost of suppressed passion, in her voice that took me completely by surprise. "nonsense, joan," i said, a little severely; "you know him well. he's been with your father for months now." "but that was in london; and up here it's different--i mean, i feel that it may be different. life in a place like this blows away the restraints of the artificial life at home. i know, oh, i know what i'm saying. i feel all untied in a place like this; the rigidity of one's nature begins to melt and flow. surely _you_ must understand what i mean!" "of course i understand," i replied, yet not wishing to encourage her in her present line of thought, "and it's a grand experience--for a short time. but you're overtired to-night, joan, like the rest of us. a few days in this air will set you above all fears of the kind you mention." then, after a moment's silence, i added, feeling i should estrange her confidence altogether if i blundered any more and treated her like a child-- "i think, perhaps, the true explanation is that you pity him for loving you, and at the same time you feel the repulsion of the healthy, vigorous animal for what is weak and timid. if he came up boldly and took you by the throat and shouted that he would force you to love him--well, then you would feel no fear at all. you would know exactly how to deal with him. isn't it, perhaps, something of that kind?" the girl made no reply, and when i took her hand i felt that it trembled a little and was cold. "it's not his love that i'm afraid of," she said hurriedly, for at this moment we heard the dip of a paddle in the water, "it's something in his very soul that terrifies me in a way i have never been terrified before,--yet fascinates me. in town i was hardly conscious of his presence. but the moment we got away from civilisation, it began to come. he seems so--so _real_ up here. i dread being alone with him. it makes me feel that something must burst and tear its way out--that he would do something--or i should do something--i don't know exactly what i mean, probably,--but that i should let myself go and scream--" "joan!" "don't be alarmed," she laughed shortly; "i shan't do anything silly, but i wanted to tell you my feelings in case i needed your help. when i have intuitions as strong as this they are never wrong, only i don't know yet what it means exactly." "you must hold out for the month, at any rate," i said in as matter-of-fact a voice as i could manage, for her manner had somehow changed my surprise to a subtle sense of alarm. "sangree only stays the month, you know. and, anyhow, you are such an odd creature yourself that you should feel generously towards other odd creatures," i ended lamely, with a forced laugh. she gave my hand a sudden pressure. "i'm glad i've told you at any rate," she said quickly under her breath, for the canoe was now gliding up silently like a ghost to our feet, "and i'm glad you're here, too," she added as we moved down towards the water to meet it. i made sangree change into the bows and got into the steering seat myself, putting the girl between us so that i could watch them both by keeping their outlines against the sea and stars. for the intuitions of certain folk--women and children usually, i confess--i have always felt a great respect that has more often than not been justified by experience; and now the curious emotion stirred in me by the girl's words remained somewhat vividly in my consciousness. i explained it in some measure by the fact that the girl, tired out by the fatigue of many days' travel, had suffered a vigorous reaction of some kind from the strong, desolate scenery, and further, perhaps, that she had been treated to my own experience of seeing the members of the party in a new light--the canadian, being partly a stranger, more vividly than the rest of us. but, at the same time, i felt it was quite possible that she had sensed some subtle link between his personality and her own, some quality that she had hitherto ignored and that the routine of town life had kept buried out of sight. the only thing that seemed difficult to explain was the fear she had spoken of, and this i hoped the wholesome effects of camp-life and exercise would sweep away naturally in the course of time. we made the tour of the island without speaking. it was all too beautiful for speech. the trees crowded down to the shore to hear us pass. we saw their fine dark heads, bowed low with splendid dignity to watch us, forgetting for a moment that the stars were caught in the needled network of their hair. against the sky in the west, where still lingered the sunset gold, we saw the wild toss of the horizon, shaggy with forest and cliff, gripping the heart like the motive in a symphony, and sending the sense of beauty all a-shiver through the mind--all these surrounding islands standing above the water like low clouds, and like them seeming to post along silently into the engulfing night. we heard the musical drip-drip of the paddle, and the little wash of our waves on the shore, and then suddenly we found ourselves at the opening of the lagoon again, having made the complete circuit of our home. the reverend timothy had awakened from sleep and was singing to himself; and the sound of his voice as we glided down the fifty yards of enclosed water was pleasant to hear and undeniably wholesome. we saw the glow of the fire up among the trees on the ridge, and his shadow moving about as he threw on more wood. "there you are!" he called aloud. "good again! been setting the night-lines, eh? capital! and your mother's still fast asleep, joan." his cheery laugh floated across the water; he had not been in the least disturbed by our absence, for old campers are not easily alarmed. "now, remember," he went on, after we had told our little tale of travel by the fire, and mrs. maloney had asked for the fourth time exactly where her tent was and whether the door faced east or south, "every one takes their turn at cooking breakfast, and one of the men is always out at sunrise to catch it first. hubbard, i'll toss you which you do in the morning and which i do!" he lost the toss. "then i'll catch it," i said, laughing at his discomfiture, for i knew he loathed stirring porridge. "and mind you don't burn it as you did every blessed time last year on the volga," i added by way of reminder. mrs. maloney's fifth interruption about the door of her tent, and her further pointed observation that it was past nine o'clock, set us lighting lanterns and putting the fire out for safety. but before we separated for the night the clergyman had a time-honoured little ritual of his own to go through that no one had the heart to deny him. he always did this. it was a relic of his pulpit habits. he glanced briefly from one to the other of us, his face grave and earnest, his hands lifted to the stars and his eyes all closed and puckered up beneath a momentary frown. then he offered up a short, almost inaudible prayer, thanking heaven for our safe arrival, begging for good weather, no illness or accidents, plenty of fish, and strong sailing winds. and then, unexpectedly--no one knew why exactly--he ended up with an abrupt request that nothing from the kingdom of darkness should be allowed to afflict our peace, and no evil thing come near to disturb us in the night-time. and while he uttered these last surprising words, so strangely unlike his usual ending, it chanced that i looked up and let my eyes wander round the group assembled about the dying fire. and it certainly seemed to me that sangree's face underwent a sudden and visible alteration. he was staring at joan, and as he stared the change ran over it like a shadow and was gone. i started in spite of myself, for something oddly concentrated, potent, collected, had come into the expression usually so scattered and feeble. but it was all swift as a passing meteor, and when i looked a second time his face was normal and he was looking among the trees. and joan, luckily, had not observed him, her head being bowed and her eyes tightly closed while her father prayed. "the girl has a vivid imagination indeed," i thought, half laughing, as i lit the lanterns, "if her thoughts can put a glamour upon mine in this way"; and yet somehow, when we said good-night, i took occasion to give her a few vigorous words of encouragement, and went to her tent to make sure i could find it quickly in the night in case anything happened. in her quick way the girl understood and thanked me, and the last thing i heard as i moved off to the men's quarters was mrs. maloney crying that there were beetles in her tent, and joan's laughter as she went to help her turn them out. half an hour later the island was silent as the grave, but for the mournful voices of the wind as it sighed up from the sea. like white sentries stood the three tents of the men on one side of the ridge, and on the other side, half hidden by some birches, whose leaves just shivered as the breeze caught them, the women's tents, patches of ghostly grey, gathered more closely together for mutual shelter and protection. something like fifty yards of broken ground, grey rock, moss and lichen, lay between, and over all lay the curtain of the night and the great whispering winds from the forests of scandinavia. and the very last thing, just before floating away on that mighty wave that carries one so softly off into the deeps of forgetfulness, i again heard the voice of john silence as the train moved out of victoria station; and by some subtle connection that met me on the very threshold of consciousness there rose in my mind simultaneously the memory of the girl's half-given confidence, and of her distress. as by some wizardry of approaching dreams they seemed in that instant to be related; but before i could analyse the why and the wherefore, both sank away out of sight again, and i was off beyond recall. "unless you should send for me sooner." ii whether mrs. maloney's tent door opened south or east i think she never discovered, for it is quite certain she always slept with the flap tightly fastened; i only know that my own little "five by seven, all silk" faced due east, because next morning the sun, pouring in as only the wilderness sun knows how to pour, woke me early, and a moment later, with a short run over soft moss and a flying dive from the granite ledge, i was swimming in the most sparkling water imaginable. it was barely four o'clock, and the sun came down a long vista of blue islands that led out to the open sea and finland. nearer by rose the wooded domes of our own property, still capped and wreathed with smoky trails of fast-melting mist, and looking as fresh as though it was the morning of mrs. maloney's sixth day and they had just issued, clean and brilliant, from the hands of the great architect. in the open spaces the ground was drenched with dew, and from the sea a cool salt wind stole in among the trees and set the branches trembling in an atmosphere of shimmering silver. the tents shone white where the sun caught them in patches. below lay the lagoon, still dreaming of the summer night; in the open the fish were jumping busily, sending musical ripples towards the shore; and in the air hung the magic of dawn--silent, incommunicable. i lit the fire, so that an hour later the clergyman should find good ashes to stir his porridge over, and then set forth upon an examination of the island, but hardly had i gone a dozen yards when i saw a figure standing a little in front of me where the sunlight fell in a pool among the trees. it was joan. she had already been up an hour, she told me, and had bathed before the last stars had left the sky. i saw at once that the new spirit of this solitary region had entered into her, banishing the fears of the night, for her face was like the face of a happy denizen of the wilderness, and her eyes stainless and shining. her feet were bare, and drops of dew she had shaken from the branches hung in her loose-flying hair. obviously she had come into her own. "i've been all over the island," she announced laughingly, "and there are two things wanting." "you're a good judge, joan. what are they?" "there's no animal life, and there's no--water." "they go together," i said. "animals don't bother with a rock like this unless there's a spring on it." and as she led me from place to place, happy and excited, leaping adroitly from rock to rock, i was glad to note that my first impressions were correct. she made no reference to our conversation of the night before. the new spirit had driven out the old. there was no room in her heart for fear or anxiety, and nature had everything her own way. the island, we found, was some three-quarters of a mile from point to point, built in a circle, or wide horseshoe, with an opening of twenty feet at the mouth of the lagoon. pine-trees grew thickly all over, but here and there were patches of silver birch, scrub oak, and considerable colonies of wild raspberry and gooseberry bushes. the two ends of the horseshoe formed bare slabs of smooth granite running into the sea and forming dangerous reefs just below the surface, but the rest of the island rose in a forty-foot ridge and sloped down steeply to the sea on either side, being nowhere more than a hundred yards wide. the outer shore-line was much indented with numberless coves and bays and sandy beaches, with here and there caves and precipitous little cliffs against which the sea broke in spray and thunder. but the inner shore, the shore of the lagoon, was low and regular, and so well protected by the wall of trees along the ridge that no storm could ever send more than a passing ripple along its sandy marges. eternal shelter reigned there. on one of the other islands, a few hundred yards away--for the rest of the party slept late this first morning, and we took to the canoe--we discovered a spring of fresh water untainted by the brackish flavour of the baltic, and having thus solved the most important problem of the camp, we next proceeded to deal with the second--fish. and in half an hour we reeled in and turned homewards, for we had no means of storage, and to clean more fish than may be stored or eaten in a day is no wise occupation for experienced campers. and as we landed towards six o'clock we heard the clergyman singing as usual and saw his wife and sangree shaking out their blankets in the sun, and dressed in a fashion that finally dispelled all memories of streets and civilisation. "the little people lit the fire for me," cried maloney, looking natural and at home in his ancient flannel suit and breaking off in the middle of his singing, "so i've got the porridge going--and this time it's _not_ burnt." we reported the discovery of water and held up the fish. "good! good again!" he cried. "we'll have the first decent breakfast we've had this year. sangree'll clean 'em in no time, and the bo'sun's mate--" "will fry them to a turn," laughed the voice of mrs. maloney, appearing on the scene in a tight blue jersey and sandals, and catching up the frying-pan. her husband always called her the bo'sun's mate in camp, because it was her duty, among others, to pipe all hands to meals. "and as for you, joan," went on the happy man, "you look like the spirit of the island, with moss in your hair and wind in your eyes, and sun and stars mixed in your face." he looked at her with delighted admiration. "here, sangree, take these twelve, there's a good fellow, they're the biggest; and we'll have 'em in butter in less time than you can say baltic island!" i watched the canadian as he slowly moved off to the cleaning pail. his eyes were drinking in the girl's beauty, and a wave of passionate, almost feverish, joy passed over his face, expressive of the ecstasy of true worship more than anything else. perhaps he was thinking that he still had three weeks to come with that vision always before his eyes; perhaps he was thinking of his dreams in the night. i cannot say. but i noticed the curious mingling of yearning and happiness in his eyes, and the strength of the impression touched my curiosity. something in his face held my gaze for a second, something to do with its intensity. that so timid, so gentle a personality should conceal so virile a passion almost seemed to require explanation. but the impression was momentary, for that first breakfast in camp permitted no divided attentions, and i dare swear that the porridge, the tea, the swedish "flatbread," and the fried fish flavoured with points of frizzled bacon, were better than any meal eaten elsewhere that day in the whole world. the first clear day in a new camp is always a furiously busy one, and we soon dropped into the routine upon which in large measure the real comfort of every one depends. about the cooking-fire, greatly improved with stones from the shore, we built a high stockade consisting of upright poles thickly twined with branches, the roof lined with moss and lichen and weighted with rocks, and round the interior we made low wooden seats so that we could lie round the fire even in rain and eat our meals in peace. paths, too, outlined themselves from tent to tent, from the bathing places and the landing stage, and a fair division of the island was decided upon between the quarters of the men and the women. wood was stacked, awkward trees and boulders removed, hammocks slung, and tents strengthened. in a word, camp was established, and duties were assigned and accepted as though we expected to live on this baltic island for years to come and the smallest detail of the community life was important. moreover, as the camp came into being, this sense of a community developed, proving that we were a definite whole, and not merely separate human beings living for a while in tents upon a desert island. each fell willingly into the routine. sangree, as by natural selection, took upon himself the cleaning of the fish and the cutting of the wood into lengths sufficient for a day's use. and he did it well. the pan of water was never without a fish, cleaned and scaled, ready to fry for whoever was hungry; the nightly fire never died down for lack of material to throw on without going farther afield to search. and timothy, once reverend, caught the fish and chopped down the trees. he also assumed responsibility for the condition of the boat, and did it so thoroughly that nothing in the little cutter was ever found wanting. and when, for any reason, his presence was in demand, the first place to look for him was--in the boat, and there, too, he was usually found, tinkering away with sheets, sails, or rudder and singing as he tinkered. 'nor was the "reading" neglected; for most mornings there came a sound of droning voices form the white tent by the raspberry bushes, which signified that sangree, the tutor, and whatever other man chanced to be in the party at the time, were hard at it with history or the classics. and while mrs. maloney, also by natural selection, took charge of the larder and the kitchen, the mending and general supervision of the rough comforts, she also made herself peculiarly mistress of the megaphone which summoned to meals and carried her voice easily from one end of the island to the other; and in her hours of leisure she daubed the surrounding scenery on to a sketching block with all the honesty and devotion of her determined but unreceptive soul. joan, meanwhile, joan, elusive creature of the wilds, became i know not exactly what. she did plenty of work in the camp, yet seemed to have no very precise duties. she was everywhere and anywhere. sometimes she slept in her tent, sometimes under the stars with a blanket. she knew every inch of the island and kept turning up in places where she was least expected--for ever wandering about, reading her books in sheltered corners, making little fires on sunless days to "worship by to the gods," as she put it, ever finding new pools to dive and bathe in, and swimming day and night in the warm and waveless lagoon like a fish in a huge tank. she went bare-legged and bare-footed, with her hair down and her skirts caught up to the knees, and if ever a human being turned into a jolly savage within the compass of a single week, joan maloney was certainly that human being. she ran wild. so completely, too, was she possessed by the strong spirit of the place that the little human fear she had yielded to so strangely on our arrival seemed to have been utterly dispossessed. as i hoped and expected, she made no reference to our conversation of the first evening. sangree bothered her with no special attentions, and after all they were very little together. his behaviour was perfect in that respect, and i, for my part, hardly gave the matter another thought. joan was ever a prey to vivid fancies of one kind or another, and this was one of them. mercifully for the happiness of all concerned, it had melted away before the spirit of busy, active life and deep content that reigned over the island. every one was intensely alive, and peace was upon all. * * * * * meanwhile the effect of the camp-life began to tell. always a searching test of character, its results, sooner or later, are infallible, for it acts upon the soul as swiftly and surely as the hypo bath upon the negative of a photograph. a readjustment of the personal forces takes place quickly; some parts of the personality go to sleep, others wake up: but the first sweeping change that the primitive life brings about is that the artificial portions of the character shed themselves one after another like dead skins. attitudes and poses that seemed genuine in the city drop away. the mind, like the body, grows quickly hard, simple, uncomplex. and in a camp as primitive and close to nature as ours was, these effects became speedily visible. some folk, of course, who talk glibly about the simple life when it is safely out of reach, betray themselves in camp by for ever peering about for the artificial excitements of civilisation which they miss. some get bored at once; some grow slovenly; some reveal the animal in most unexpected fashion; and some, the select few, find themselves in very short order and are happy. and, in our little party, we could flatter ourselves that we all belonged to the last category, so far as the general effect was concerned. only there were certain other changes as well, varying with each individual, and all interesting to note. it was only after the first week or two that these changes became marked, although this is the proper place, i think, to speak of them. for, having myself no other duty than to enjoy a well-earned holiday, i used to load my canoe with blankets and provisions and journey forth on exploration trips among the islands of several days together; and it was on my return from the first of these--when i rediscovered the party, so to speak--that these changes first presented themselves vividly to me, and in one particular instance produced a rather curious impression. in a word, then, while every one had grown wilder, naturally wilder, sangree, it seemed to me, had grown much wilder, and what i can only call unnaturally wilder. he made me think of a savage. to begin with, he had changed immensely in mere physical appearance, and the full brown cheeks, the brighter eyes of absolute health, and the general air of vigour and robustness that had come to replace his customary lassitude and timidity, had worked such an improvement that i hardly knew him for the same man. his voice, too, was deeper and his manner bespoke for the first time a greater measure of confidence in himself. he now had some claims to be called nice-looking, or at least to a certain air of virility that would not lessen his value in the eyes of the opposite sex. all this, of course, was natural enough, and most welcome. but, altogether apart from this physical change, which no doubt had also been going forward in the rest of us, there was a subtle note in his personality that came to me with a degree of surprise that almost amounted to shock. and two things--as he came down to welcome me and pull up the canoe--leaped up in my mind unbidden, as though connected in some way i could not at the moment divine--first, the curious judgment formed of him by joan; and secondly, that fugitive expression i had caught in his face while maloney was offering up his strange prayer for special protection from heaven. the delicacy of manner and feature--to call it by no milder term--which had always been a distinguishing characteristic of the man, had been replaced by something far more vigorous and decided, that yet utterly eluded analysis. the change which impressed me so oddly was not easy to name. the others--singing maloney, the bustling bo'sun's mate, and joan, that fascinating half-breed of undine and salamander--all showed the effects of a life so close to nature; but in their case the change was perfectly natural and what was to be expected, whereas with peter sangree, the canadian, it was something unusual and unexpected. it is impossible to explain how he managed gradually to convey to my mind the impression that something in him had turned savage, yet this, more or less, is the impression that he did convey. it was not that he seemed really less civilised, or that his character had undergone any definite alteration, but rather that something in him, hitherto dormant, had awakened to life. some quality, latent till now--so far, at least, as we were concerned, who, after all, knew him but slightly--had stirred into activity and risen to the surface of his being. and while, for the moment, this seemed as far as i could get, it was but natural that my mind should continue the intuitive process and acknowledge that john silence, owing to his peculiar faculties, and the girl, owing to her singularly receptive temperament, might each in a different way have divined this latent quality in his soul, and feared its manifestation later. on looking back to this painful adventure, too, it now seems equally natural that the same process, carried to its logical conclusion, should have wakened some deep instinct in me that, wholly without direction from my will, set itself sharply and persistently upon the watch from that very moment. thenceforward the personality of sangree was never far from my thoughts, and i was for ever analysing and searching for the explanation that took so long in coming. "i declare, hubbard, you're tanned like an aboriginal, and you look like one, too," laughed maloney. "and i can return the compliment," was my reply, as we all gathered round a brew of tea to exchange news and compare notes. and later, at supper, it amused me to observe that the distinguished tutor, once clergyman, did not eat his food quite as "nicely" as he did at home--he devoured it; that mrs. maloney ate more, and, to say the least, with less delay, than was her custom in the select atmosphere of her english dining-room; and that while joan attacked her tin plateful with genuine avidity, sangree, the canadian, bit and gnawed at his, laughing and talking and complimenting the cook all the while, and making me think with secret amusement of a starved animal at its first meal. while, from their remarks about myself, i judged that i had changed and grown wild as much as the rest of them. in this and in a hundred other little ways the change showed, ways difficult to define in detail, but all proving--not the coarsening effect of leading the primitive life, but, let us say, the more direct and unvarnished methods that became prevalent. for all day long we were in the bath of the elements--wind, water, sun--and just as the body became insensible to cold and shed unnecessary clothing, the mind grew straightforward and shed many of the disguises required by the conventions of civilisation. and in each, according to temperament and character, there stirred the life-instincts that were natural, untamed, and, in a sense--savage. iii so it came about that i stayed with our island party, putting off my second exploring trip from day to day, and i think that this far-fetched instinct to watch sangree was really the cause of my postponement. for another ten days the life of the camp pursued its even and delightful way, blessed by perfect summer weather, a good harvest of fish, fine winds for sailing, and calm, starry nights. maloney's selfish prayer had been favourably received. nothing came to disturb or perplex. there was not even the prowling of night animals to vex the rest of mrs. maloney; for in previous camps it had often been her peculiar affliction that she heard the porcupines scratching against the canvas, or the squirrels dropping fir-cones in the early morning with a sound of miniature thunder upon the roof of her tent. but on this island there was not even a squirrel or a mouse. i think two toads and a small and harmless snake were the only living creatures that had been discovered during the whole of the first fortnight. and these two toads in all probability were not two toads, but one toad. then, suddenly, came the terror that changed the whole aspect of the place--the devastating terror. it came, at first, gently, but from the very start it made me realise the unpleasant loneliness of our situation, our remote isolation in this wilderness of sea and rock, and how the islands in this tideless baltic ocean lay about us like the advance guard of a vast besieging army. its entry, as i say, was gentle, hardly noticeable, in fact, to most of us: singularly undramatic it certainly was. but, then, in actual life this is often the way the dreadful climaxes move upon us, leaving the heart undisturbed almost to the last minute, and then overwhelming it with a sudden rush of horror. for it was the custom at breakfast to listen patiently while each in turn related the trivial adventures of the night--how they slept, whether the wind shook their tent, whether the spider on the ridge pole had moved, whether they had heard the toad, and so forth--and on this particular morning joan, in the middle of a little pause, made a truly novel announcement: "in the night i heard the howling of a dog," she said, and then flushed up to the roots of her hair when we burst out laughing. for the idea of there being a dog on this forsaken island that was only able to support a snake and two toads was distinctly ludicrous, and i remember maloney, half-way through his burnt porridge, capping the announcement by declaring that he had heard a "baltic turtle" in the lagoon, and his wife's expression of frantic alarm before the laughter undeceived her. but the next morning joan repeated the story with additional and convincing detail. "sounds of whining and growling woke me," she said, "and i distinctly heard sniffing under my tent, and the scratching of paws." "oh, timothy! can it be a porcupine?" exclaimed the bo'sun's mate with distress, forgetting that sweden was not canada. but the girl's voice had sounded to me in quite another key, and looking up i saw that her father and sangree were staring at her hard. they, too, understood that she was in earnest, and had been struck by the serious note in her voice. "rubbish, joan! you are always dreaming something or other wild," her father said a little impatiently. "there's not an animal of any size on the whole island," added sangree with a puzzled expression. he never took his eyes from her face. "but there's nothing to prevent one swimming over," i put in briskly, for somehow a sense of uneasiness that was not pleasant had woven itself into the talk and pauses. "a deer, for instance, might easily land in the night and take a look round--" "or a bear!" gasped the bo'sun's mate, with a look so portentous that we all welcomed the laugh. but joan did not laugh. instead, she sprang up and called to us to follow. "there," she said, pointing to the ground by her tent on the side farthest from her mother's; "there are the marks close to my head. you can see for yourselves." we saw plainly. the moss and lichen--for earth there was hardly any--had been scratched up by paws. an animal about the size of a large dog it must have been, to judge by the marks. we stood and stared in a row. "close to my head," repeated the girl, looking round at us. her face, i noticed, was very pale, and her lip seemed to quiver for an instant. then she gave a sudden gulp--and burst into a flood of tears. the whole thing had come about in the brief space of a few minutes, and with a curious sense of inevitableness, moreover, as though it had all been carefully planned from all time and nothing could have stopped it. it had all been rehearsed before--had actually happened before, as the strange feeling sometimes has it; it seemed like the opening movement in some ominous drama, and that i knew exactly what would happen next. something of great moment was impending. for this sinister sensation of coming disaster made itself felt from the very beginning, and an atmosphere of gloom and dismay pervaded the entire camp from that moment forward. i drew sangree to one side and moved away, while maloney took the distressed girl into her tent, and his wife followed them, energetic and greatly flustered. for thus, in undramatic fashion, it was that the terror i have spoken of first attempted the invasion of our camp, and, trivial and unimportant though it seemed, every little detail of this opening scene is photographed upon my mind with merciless accuracy and precision. it happened exactly as described. this was exactly the language used. i see it written before me in black and white. i see, too, the faces of all concerned with the sudden ugly signature of alarm where before had been peace. the terror had stretched out, so to speak, a first tentative feeler toward us and had touched the hearts of each with a horrid directness. and from this moment the camp changed. sangree in particular was visibly upset. he could not bear to see the girl distressed, and to hear her actually cry was almost more than he could stand. the feeling that he had no right to protect her hurt him keenly, and i could see that he was itching to do something to help, and liked him for it. his expression said plainly that he would tear in a thousand pieces anything that dared to injure a hair of her head. we lit our pipes and strolled over in silence to the men's quarters, and it was his odd canadian expression "gee whiz!" that drew my attention to a further discovery. "the brute's been scratching round my tent too," he cried, as he pointed to similar marks by the door and i stooped down to examine them. we both stared in amazement for several minutes without speaking. "only i sleep like the dead," he added, straightening up again, "and so heard nothing, i suppose." we traced the paw-marks from the mouth of his tent in a direct line across to the girl's, but nowhere else about the camp was there a sign of the strange visitor. the deer, dog, or whatever it was that had twice favoured us with a visit in the night, had confined its attentions to these two tents. and, after all, there was really nothing out of the way about these visits of an unknown animal, for although our own island was destitute of life, we were in the heart of a wilderness, and the mainland and larger islands must be swarming with all kinds of four-footed creatures, and no very prolonged swimming was necessary to reach us. in any other country it would not have caused a moment's interest--interest of the kind we felt, that is. in our canadian camps the bears were for ever grunting about among the provision bags at night, porcupines scratching unceasingly, and chipmunks scuttling over everything. "my daughter is overtired, and that's the truth of it," explained maloney presently when he rejoined us and had examined in turn the other paw-marks. "she's been overdoing it lately, and camp-life, you know, always means a great excitement to her. it's natural enough, if we take no notice she'll be all right." he paused to borrow my tobacco pouch and fill his pipe, and the blundering way he filled it and spilled the precious weed on the ground visibly belied the calm of his easy language. "you might take her out for a bit of fishing, hubbard, like a good chap; she's hardly up to the long day in the cutter. show her some of the other islands in your canoe, perhaps. eh?" and by lunch-time the cloud had passed away as suddenly, and as suspiciously, as it had come. but in the canoe, on our way home, having till then purposely ignored the subject uppermost in our minds, she suddenly spoke to me in a way that again touched the note of sinister alarm--the note that kept on sounding and sounding until finally john silence came with his great vibrating presence and relieved it; yes, and even after he came, too, for a while. "i'm ashamed to ask it," she said abruptly, as she steered me home, her sleeves rolled up, her hair blowing in the wind, "and ashamed of my silly tears too, because i really can't make out what caused them; but, mr. hubbard, i want you to promise me not to go off for your long expeditions--just yet. i beg it of you." she was so in earnest that she forgot the canoe, and the wind caught it sideways and made us roll dangerously. "i have tried hard not to ask this," she added, bringing the canoe round again, "but i simply can't help myself." it was a good deal to ask, and i suppose my hesitation was plain; for she went on before i could reply, and her beseeching expression and intensity of manner impressed me very forcibly. "for another two weeks only--" "mr. sangree leaves in a fortnight," i said, seeing at once what she was driving at, but wondering if it was best to encourage her or not. "if i knew you were to be on the island till then," she said, her face alternately pale and blushing, and her voice trembling a little, "i should feel so much happier." i looked at her steadily, waiting for her to finish. "and safer," she added almost in a whisper; "especially--at night, i mean." "safer, joan?" i repeated, thinking i had never seen her eyes so soft and tender. she nodded her head, keeping her gaze fixed on my face. it was really difficult to refuse, whatever my thoughts and judgment may have been, and somehow i understood that she spoke with good reason, though for the life of me i could not have put it into words. "happier--and safer," she said gravely, the canoe giving a dangerous lurch as she leaned forward in her seat to catch my answer. perhaps, after all, the wisest way was to grant her request and make light of it, easing her anxiety without too much encouraging its cause. "all right, joan, you queer creature; i promise," and the instant look of relief in her face, and the smile that came back like sunlight to her eyes, made me feel that, unknown to myself and the world, i was capable of considerable sacrifice after all. "but, you know, there's nothing to be afraid of," i added sharply; and she looked up in my face with the smile women use when they know we are talking idly, yet do not wish to tell us so. "_you_ don't feel afraid, i know," she observed quietly. "of course not; why should i?" "so, if you will just humour me this once i--i will never ask anything foolish of you again as long as i live," she said gratefully. "you have my promise," was all i could find to say. she headed the nose of the canoe for the lagoon lying a quarter of a mile ahead, and paddled swiftly; but a minute or two later she paused again and stared hard at me with the dripping paddle across the thwarts. "you've not heard anything at night yourself, have you?" she asked. "i never hear anything at night," i replied shortly, "from the moment i lie down till the moment i get up." "that dismal howling, for instance," she went on, determined to get it out, "far away at first and then getting closer, and stopping just outside the camp?" "certainly not." "because, sometimes i think i almost dreamed it." "most likely you did," was my unsympathetic response. "and you don't think father has heard it either, then?" "no. he would have told me if he had." this seemed to relieve her mind a little. "i know mother hasn't," she added, as if speaking to herself, "for she hears nothing--ever." * * * * * it was two nights after this conversation that i woke out of deep sleep and heard sounds of screaming. the voice was really horrible, breaking the peace and silence with its shrill clamour. in less than ten seconds i was half dressed and out of my tent. the screaming had stopped abruptly, but i knew the general direction, and ran as fast as the darkness would allow over to the women's quarters, and on getting close i heard sounds of suppressed weeping. it was joan's voice. and just as i came up i saw mrs. maloney, marvellously attired, fumbling with a lantern. other voices became audible in the same moment behind me, and timothy maloney arrived, breathless, less than half dressed, and carrying another lantern that had gone out on the way from being banged against a tree. dawn was just breaking, and a chill wind blew in from the sea. heavy black clouds drove low overhead. the scene of confusion may be better imagined than described. questions in frightened voices filled the air against this background of suppressed weeping. briefly--joan's silk tent had been torn, and the girl was in a state bordering upon hysterics. somewhat reassured by our noisy presence, however,--for she was plucky at heart,--she pulled herself together and tried to explain what had happened; and her broken words, told there on the edge of night and morning upon this wild island ridge, were oddly thrilling and distressingly convincing. "something touched me and i woke," she said simply, but in a voice still hushed and broken with the terror of it, "something pushing against the tent; i felt it through the canvas. there was the same sniffing and scratching as before, and i felt the tent give a little as when wind shakes it. i heard breathing--very loud, very heavy breathing--and then came a sudden great tearing blow, and the canvas ripped open close to my face." she had instantly dashed out through the open flap and screamed at the top of her voice, thinking the creature had actually got into the tent. but nothing was visible, she declared, and she heard not the faintest sound of an animal making off under cover of the darkness. the brief account seemed to exercise a paralysing effect upon us all as we listened to it. i can see the dishevelled group to this day, the wind blowing the women's hair, and maloney craning his head forward to listen, and his wife, open-mouthed and gasping, leaning against a pine tree. "come over to the stockade and we'll get the fire going," i said; "that's the first thing," for we were all shaking with the cold in our scanty garments. and at that moment sangree arrived wrapped in a blanket and carrying his gun; he was still drunken with sleep. "the dog again," maloney explained briefly, forestalling his questions; "been at joan's tent. torn it, by gad! this time. it's time we did something." he went on mumbling confusedly to himself. sangree gripped his gun and looked about swiftly in the darkness. i saw his eyes aflame in the glare of the flickering lanterns. he made a movement as though to start out and hunt--and kill. then his glance fell on the girl crouching on the ground, her face hidden in her hands, and there leaped into his features an expression of savage anger that transformed them. he could have faced a dozen lions with a walking stick at that moment, and again i liked him for the strength of his anger, his self-control, and his hopeless devotion. but i stopped him going off on a blind and useless chase. "come and help me start the fire, sangree," i said, anxious also to relieve the girl of our presence; and a few minutes later the ashes, still growing from the night's fire, had kindled the fresh wood, and there was a blaze that warmed us well while it also lit up the surrounding trees within a radius of twenty yards. "i heard nothing," he whispered; "what in the world do you think it is? it surely can't be only a dog!" "we'll find that out later," i said, as the others came up to the grateful warmth; "the first thing is to make as big a fire as we can." joan was calmer now, and her mother had put on some warmer, and less miraculous, garments. and while they stood talking in low voices maloney and i slipped off to examine the tent. there was little enough to see, but that little was unmistakable. some animal had scratched up the ground at the head of the tent, and with a great blow of a powerful paw--a paw clearly provided with good claws--had struck the silk and torn it open. there was a hole large enough to pass a fist and arm through. "it can't be far away," maloney said excitedly. "we'll organise a hunt at once; this very minute." we hurried back to the fire, maloney talking boisterously about his proposed hunt. "there's nothing like prompt action to dispel alarm," he whispered in my ear; and then turned to the rest of us. "we'll hunt the island from end to end at once," he said, with excitement; "that's what we'll do. the beast can't be far away. and the bo'sun's mate and joan must come too, because they can't be left alone. hubbard, you take the right shore, and you, sangree, the left, and i'll go in the middle with the women. in this way we can stretch clean across the ridge, and nothing bigger than a rabbit can possibly escape us." he was extraordinarily excited, i thought. anything affecting joan, of course, stirred him prodigiously. "get your guns and we'll start the drive at once," he cried. he lit another lantern and handed one each to his wife and joan, and while i ran to fetch my gun i heard him singing to himself with the excitement of it all. meanwhile the dawn had come on quickly. it made the flickering lanterns look pale. the wind, too, was rising, and i heard the trees moaning overhead and the waves breaking with increasing clamour on the shore. in the lagoon the boat dipped and splashed, and the sparks from the fire were carried aloft in a stream and scattered far and wide. we made our way to the extreme end of the island, measured our distances carefully, and then began to advance. none of us spoke. sangree and i, with cocked guns, watched the shore lines, and all within easy touch and speaking distance. it was a slow and blundering drive, and there were many false alarms, but after the best part of half an hour we stood on the farther end, having made the complete tour, and without putting up so much as a squirrel. certainly there was no living creature on that island but ourselves. "i know what it is!" cried maloney, looking out over the dim expanse of grey sea, and speaking with the air of a man making a discovery; "it's a dog from one of the farms on the larger islands"--he pointed seawards where the archipelago thickened--"and it's escaped and turned wild. our fires and voices attracted it, and it's probably half starved as well as savage, poor brute!" no one said anything in reply, and he began to sing again very low to himself. the point where we stood--a huddled, shivering group--faced the wider channels that led to the open sea and finland. the grey dawn had broken in earnest at last, and we could see the racing waves with their angry crests of white. the surrounding islands showed up as dark masses in the distance, and in the east, almost as maloney spoke, the sun came up with a rush in a stormy and magnificent sky of red and gold. against this splashed and gorgeous background black clouds, shaped like fantastic and legendary animals, filed past swiftly in a tearing stream, and to this day i have only to close my eyes to see again that vivid and hurrying procession in the air. all about us the pines made black splashes against the sky. it was an angry sunrise. rain, indeed, had already begun to fall in big drops. we turned, as by a common instinct, and, without speech, made our way back slowly to the stockade, maloney humming snatches of his songs, sangree in front with his gun, prepared to shoot at a moment's notice, and the women floundering in the rear with myself and the extinguished lanterns. yet it was only a dog! really, it was most singular when one came to reflect soberly upon it all. events, say the occultists, have souls, or at least that agglomerate life due to the emotions and thoughts of all concerned in them, so that cities, and even whole countries, have great astral shapes which may become visible to the eye of vision; and certainly here, the soul of this drive--this vain, blundering, futile drive--stood somewhere between ourselves and--laughed. all of us heard that laugh, and all of us tried hard to smother the sound, or at least to ignore it. every one talked at once, loudly, and with exaggerated decision, obviously trying to say something plausible against heavy odds, striving to explain naturally that an animal might so easily conceal itself from us, or swim away before we had time to light upon its trail. for we all spoke of that "trail" as though it really existed, and we had more to go upon than the mere marks of paws about the tents of joan and the canadian. indeed, but for these, and the torn tent, i think it would, of course, have been possible to ignore the existence of this beast intruder altogether. and it was here, under this angry dawn, as we stood in the shelter of the stockade from the pouring rain, weary yet so strangely excited--it was here, out of this confusion of voices and explanations, that--very stealthily--the ghost of something horrible slipped in and stood among us. it made all our explanations seem childish and untrue; the false relation was instantly exposed. eyes exchanged quick, anxious glances, questioning, expressive of dismay. there was a sense of wonder, of poignant distress, and of trepidation. alarm stood waiting at our elbows. we shivered. then, suddenly, as we looked into each other's faces, came the long, unwelcome pause in which this new arrival established itself in our hearts. and, without further speech, or attempt at explanation, maloney moved off abruptly to mix the porridge for an early breakfast; sangree to clean the fish; myself to chop wood and tend the fire; joan and her mother to change their wet garments; and, most significant of all, to prepare her mother's tent for its future complement of two. each went to his duty, but hurriedly, awkwardly, silently; and this new arrival, this shape of terror and distress stalked, viewless, by the side of each. "if only i could have traced that dog," i think was the thought in the minds of all. but in camp, where every one realises how important the individual contribution is to the comfort and well-being of all, the mind speedily recovers tone and pulls itself together. during the day, a day of heavy and ceaseless rain, we kept more or less to our tents, and though there were signs of mysterious conferences between the three members of the maloney family, i think that most of us slept a good deal and stayed alone with his thoughts. certainly, i did, because when maloney came to say that his wife invited us all to a special "tea" in her tent, he had to shake me awake before i realised that he was there at all. and by supper-time we were more or less even-minded again, and almost jolly. i only noticed that there was an undercurrent of what is best described as "jumpiness," and that the merest snapping of a twig, or plop of a fish in the lagoon, was sufficient to make us start and look over our shoulders. pauses were rare in our talk, and the fire was never for one instant allowed to get low. the wind and rain had ceased, but the dripping of the branches still kept up an excellent imitation of a downpour. in particular, maloney was vigilant and alert, telling us a series of tales in which the wholesome humorous element was especially strong. he lingered, too, behind with me after sangree had gone to bed, and while i mixed myself a glass of hot swedish punch, he did a thing i had never known him do before--he mixed one for himself, and then asked me to light him over to his tent. we said nothing on the way, but i felt that he was glad of my companionship. i returned alone to the stockade, and for a long time after that kept the fire blazing, and sat up smoking and thinking. i hardly knew why; but sleep was far from me for one thing, and for another, an idea was taking form in my mind that required the comfort of tobacco and a bright fire for its growth. i lay against a corner of the stockade seat, listening to the wind whispering and to the ceaseless drip-drip of the trees. the night, otherwise, was very still, and the sea quiet as a lake. i remember that i was conscious, peculiarly conscious, of this host of desolate islands crowding about us in the darkness, and that we were the one little spot of humanity in a rather wonderful kind of wilderness. but this, i think, was the only symptom that came to warn me of highly strung nerves, and it certainly was not sufficiently alarming to destroy my peace of mind. one thing, however, did come to disturb my peace, for just as i finally made ready to go, and had kicked the embers of the fire into a last effort, i fancied i saw, peering at me round the farther end of the stockade wall, a dark and shadowy mass that might have been--that strongly resembled, in fact--the body of a large animal. two glowing eyes shone for an instant in the middle of it. but the next second i saw that it was merely a projecting mass of moss and lichen in the wall of our stockade, and the eyes were a couple of wandering sparks from the dying ashes i had kicked. it was easy enough, too, to imagine i saw an animal moving here and there between the trees, as i picked my way stealthily to my tent. of course, the shadows tricked me. and though it was after one o'clock, maloney's light was still burning, for i saw his tent shining white among the pines. it was, however, in the short space between consciousness and sleep--that time when the body is low and the voices of the submerged region tell sometimes true--that the idea which had been all this while maturing reached the point of an actual decision, and i suddenly realised that i had resolved to send word to dr. silence. for, with a sudden wonder that i had hitherto been so blind, the unwelcome conviction dawned upon me all at once that some dreadful thing was lurking about us on this island, and that the safety of at least one of us was threatened by something monstrous and unclean that was too horrible to contemplate. and, again remembering those last words of his as the train moved out of the platform, i understood that dr. silence would hold himself in readiness to come. "unless you should send for me sooner," he had said. * * * * * i found myself suddenly wide awake. it is impossible to say what woke me, but it was no gradual process, seeing that i jumped from deep sleep to absolute alertness in a single instant. i had evidently slept for an hour and more, for the night had cleared, stars crowded the sky, and a pallid half-moon just sinking into the sea threw a spectral light between the trees. i went outside to sniff the air, and stood upright. a curious impression that something was astir in the camp came over me, and when i glanced across at sangree's tent, some twenty feet away, i saw that it was moving. he too, then, was awake and restless, for i saw the canvas sides bulge this way and that as he moved within. the flap pushed forward. he was coming out, like myself, to sniff the air; and i was not surprised, for its sweetness after the rain was intoxicating. and he came on all fours, just as i had done. i saw a head thrust round the edge of the tent. and then i saw that it was not sangree at all. it was an animal. and the same instant i realised something else too--it was _the_ animal; and its whole presentment for some unaccountable reason was unutterably malefic. a cry i was quite unable to suppress escaped me, and the creature turned on the instant and stared at me with baleful eyes. i could have dropped on the spot, for the strength all ran out of my body with a rush. something about it touched in me the living terror that grips and paralyses. if the mind requires but the tenth of a second to form an impression, i must have stood there stockstill for several seconds while i seized the ropes for support and stared. many and vivid impressions flashed through my mind, but not one of them resulted in action, because i was in instant dread that the beast any moment would leap in my direction and be upon me. instead, however, after what seemed a vast period, it slowly turned its eyes from my face, uttered a low whining sound, and came out altogether into the open. then, for the first time, i saw it in its entirety and noted two things: it was about the size of a large dog, but at the same time it was utterly unlike any animal that i had ever seen. also, that the quality that had impressed me first as being malefic was really only its singular and original strangeness. foolish as it may sound, and impossible as it is for me to adduce proof, i can only say that the animal seemed to me then to be--not real. but all this passed through my mind in a flash, almost subconsciously, and before i had time to check my impressions, or even properly verify them, i made an involuntary movement, catching the tight rope in my hand so that it twanged like a banjo string, and in that instant the creature turned the corner of sangree's tent and was gone into the darkness. then, of course, my senses in some measure returned to me, and i realised only one thing: it had been inside his tent! i dashed out, reached the door in half a dozen strides, and looked in. the canadian, thank god! lay upon his bed of branches. his arm was stretched outside, across the blankets, the fist tightly clenched, and the body had an appearance of unusual rigidity that was alarming. on his face there was an expression of effort, almost of painful effort, so far as the uncertain light permitted me to see, and his sleep seemed to be very profound. he looked, i thought, so stiff, so unnaturally stiff, and in some indefinable way, too, he looked smaller--shrunken. i called to him to wake, but called many times in vain. then i decided to shake him, and had already moved forward to do so vigorously when there came a sound of footsteps padding softly behind me, and i felt a stream of hot breath burn my neck as i stooped. i turned sharply. the tent door was darkened and something silently swept in. i felt a rough and shaggy body push past me, and knew that the animal had returned. it seemed to leap forward between me and sangree--in fact, to leap upon sangree, for its dark body hid him momentarily from view, and in that moment my soul turned sick and coward with a horror that rose from the very dregs and depths of life, and gripped my existence at its central source. the creature seemed somehow to melt away into him, almost as though it belonged to him and were a part of himself, but in the same instant--that instant of extraordinary confusion and terror in my mind--it seemed to pass over and behind him, and, in some utterly unaccountable fashion, it was gone. and the canadian woke and sat up with a start. "quick! you fool!" i cried, in my excitement, "the beast has been in your tent, here at your very throat while you sleep like the dead. up, man! get your gun! only this second it disappeared over there behind your head. quick! or joan--!" and somehow the fact that he was there, wide-awake now, to corroborate me, brought the additional conviction to my own mind that this was no animal, but some perplexing and dreadful form of life that drew upon my deeper knowledge, that much reading had perhaps assented to, but that had never yet come within actual range of my senses. he was up in a flash, and out. he was trembling, and very white. we searched hurriedly, feverishly, but found only the traces of paw-marks passing from the door of his own tent across the moss to the women's. and the sight of the tracks about mrs. maloney's tent, where joan now slept, set him in a perfect fury. "do you know what it is, hubbard, this beast?" he hissed under his breath at me; "it's a damned wolf, that's what it is--a wolf lost among the islands, and starving to death--desperate. so help me god, i believe it's that!" he talked a lot of rubbish in his excitement. he declared he would sleep by day and sit up every night until he killed it. again his rage touched my admiration; but i got him away before he made enough noise to wake the whole camp. "i have a better plan than that," i said, watching his face closely. "i don't think this is anything we can deal with. i'm going to send for the only man i know who can help. we'll go to waxholm this very morning and get a telegram through." sangree stared at me with a curious expression as the fury died out of his face and a new look of alarm took its place. "john silence," i said, "will know--" "you think it's something--of that sort?" he stammered. "i am sure of it." there was a moment's pause. "that's worse, far worse than anything material," he said, turning visibly paler. he looked from my face to the sky, and then added with sudden resolution, "come; the wind's rising. let's get off at once. from there you can telephone to stockholm and get a telegram sent without delay." i sent him down to get the boat ready, and seized the opportunity myself to run and wake maloney. he was sleeping very lightly, and sprang up the moment i put my head inside his tent. i told him briefly what i had seen, and he showed so little surprise that i caught myself wondering for the first time whether he himself had seen more going on than he had deemed wise to communicate to the rest of us. he agreed to my plan without a moment's hesitation, and my last words to him were to let his wife and daughter think that the great psychic doctor was coming merely as a chance visitor, and not with any professional interest. so, with frying-pan, provisions, and blankets aboard, sangree and i sailed out of the lagoon fifteen minutes later, and headed with a good breeze for the direction of waxholm and the borders of civilisation. iv although nothing john silence did ever took me, properly speaking, by surprise, it was certainly unexpected to find a letter from stockholm waiting for me. "i have finished my hungary business," he wrote, "and am here for ten days. do not hesitate to send if you need me. if you telephone any morning from waxholm i can catch the afternoon steamer." my years of intercourse with him were full of "coincidences" of this description, and although he never sought to explain them by claiming any magical system of communication with my mind, i have never doubted that there actually existed some secret telepathic method by which he knew my circumstances and gauged the degree of my need. and that this power was independent of time in the sense that it saw into the future, always seemed to me equally apparent. sangree was as much relieved as i was, and within an hour of sunset that very evening we met him on the arrival of the little coasting steamer, and carried him off in the dinghy to the camp we had prepared on a neighbouring island, meaning to start for home early next morning. "now," he said, when supper was over and we were smoking round the fire, "let me hear your story." he glanced from one to the other, smiling. "you tell it, mr. hubbard," sangree interrupted abruptly, and went off a little way to wash the dishes, yet not so far as to be out of earshot. and while he splashed with the hot water, and scraped the tin plates with sand and moss, my voice, unbroken by a single question from dr. silence, ran on for the next half-hour with the best account i could give of what had happened. my listener lay on the other side of the fire, his face half hidden by a big sombrero; sometimes he glanced up questioningly when a point needed elaboration, but he uttered no single word till i had reached the end, and his manner all through the recital was grave and attentive. overhead, the wash of the wind in the pine branches filled in the pauses; the darkness settled down over the sea, and the stars came out in thousands, and by the time i finished the moon had risen to flood the scene with silver. yet, by his face and eyes, i knew quite well that the doctor was listening to something he had expected to hear, even if he had not actually anticipated all the details. "you did well to send for me," he said very low, with a significant glance at me when i finished; "very well,"--and for one swift second his eye took in sangree,--"for what we have to deal with here is nothing more than a werewolf--rare enough, i am glad to say, but often very sad, and sometimes very terrible." i jumped as though i had been shot, but the next second was heartily ashamed of my want of control; for this brief remark, confirming as it did my own worst suspicions, did more to convince me of the gravity of the adventure than any number of questions or explanations. it seemed to draw close the circle about us, shutting a door somewhere that locked us in with the animal and the horror, and turning the key. whatever it was had now to be faced and dealt with. "no one has been actually injured so far?" he asked aloud, but in a matter-of-fact tone that lent reality to grim possibilities. "good heavens, no!" cried the canadian, throwing down his dishcloths and coming forward into the circle of firelight. "surely there can be no question of this poor starved beast injuring anybody, can there?" his hair straggled untidily over his forehead, and there was a gleam in his eyes that was not all reflection from the fire. his words made me turn sharply. we all laughed a little short, forced laugh. "i trust not, indeed," dr. silence said quietly. "but what makes you think the creature is starved?" he asked the question with his eyes straight on the other's face. the prompt question explained to me why i had started, and i waited with just a tremor of excitement for the reply. sangree hesitated a moment, as though the question took him by surprise. but he met the doctor's gaze unflinchingly across the fire, and with complete honesty. "really," he faltered, with a little shrug of the shoulders, "i can hardly tell you. the phrase seemed to come out of its own accord. i have felt from the beginning that it was in pain and--starved, though why i felt this never occurred to me till you asked." "you really know very little about it, then?" said the other, with a sudden gentleness in his voice. "no more than that," sangree replied, looking at him with a puzzled expression that was unmistakably genuine. "in fact, nothing at all, really," he added, by way of further explanation. "i am glad of that," i heard the doctor murmur under his breath, but so low that i only just caught the words, and sangree missed them altogether, as evidently he was meant to do. "and now," he cried, getting on his feet and shaking himself with a characteristic gesture, as though to shake out the horror and the mystery, "let us leave the problem till to-morrow and enjoy this wind and sea and stars. i've been living lately in the atmosphere of many people, and feel that i want to wash and be clean. i propose a swim and then bed. who'll second me?" and two minutes later we were all diving from the boat into cool, deep water, that reflected a thousand moons as the waves broke away from us in countless ripples. we slept in blankets under the open sky, sangree and i taking the outside places, and were up before sunrise to catch the dawn wind. helped by this early start we were half-way home by noon, and then the wind shifted to a few points behind us so that we fairly ran. in and out among a thousand islands, down narrow channels where we lost the wind, out into open spaces where we had to take in a reef, racing along under a hot and cloudless sky, we flew through the very heart of the bewildering and lonely scenery. "a real wilderness," cried dr. silence from his seat in the bows where he held the jib sheet. his hat was off, his hair tumbled in the wind, and his lean brown face gave him the touch of an oriental. presently he changed places with sangree, and came down to talk with me by the tiller. "a wonderful region, all this world of islands," he said, waving his hand to the scenery rushing past us, "but doesn't it strike you there's something lacking?" "it's--hard," i answered, after a moment's reflection. "it has a superficial, glittering prettiness, without--" i hesitated to find the word i wanted. john silence nodded his head with approval. "exactly," he said. "the picturesqueness of stage scenery that is not real, not alive. it's like a landscape by a clever painter, yet without true imagination. soulless--that's the word you wanted." "something like that," i answered, watching the gusts of wind on the sails. "not dead so much, as without soul. that's it." "of course," he went on, in a voice calculated, it seemed to me, not to reach our companion in the bows, "to live long in a place like this--long and alone--might bring about a strange result in some men." i suddenly realised he was talking with a purpose and pricked up my ears. "there's no life here. these islands are mere dead rocks pushed up from below the sea--not living land; and there's nothing really alive on them. even the sea, this tideless, brackish sea, neither salt water nor fresh, is dead. it's all a pretty image of life without the real heart and soul of life. to a man with too strong desires who came here and lived close to nature, strange things might happen." "let her out a bit," i shouted to sangree, who was coming aft. "the wind's gusty and we've got hardly any ballast." he went back to the bows, and dr. silence continued-- "here, i mean, a long sojourn would lead to deterioration, to degeneration. the place is utterly unsoftened by human influences, by any humanising associations of history, good or bad. this landscape has never awakened into life; it's still dreaming in its primitive sleep." "in time," i put in, "you mean a man living here might become brutal?" "the passions would run wild, selfishness become supreme, the instincts coarsen and turn savage probably." "but--" "in other places just as wild, parts of italy for instance, where there are other moderating influences, it could not happen. the character might grow wild, savage too in a sense, but with a human wildness one could understand and deal with. but here, in a hard place like this, it might be otherwise." he spoke slowly, weighing his words carefully. i looked at him with many questions in my eyes, and a precautionary cry to sangree to stay in the fore part of the boat, out of earshot. "first of all there would come callousness to pain, and indifference to the rights of others. then the soul would turn savage, not from passionate human causes, or with enthusiasm, but by deadening down into a kind of cold, primitive, emotionless savagery--by turning, like the landscape, soulless." "and a man with strong desires, you say, might change?" "without being aware of it, yes; he might turn savage, his instincts and desires turn animal. and if"--he lowered his voice and turned for a moment towards the bows, and then continued in his most weighty manner--"owing to delicate health or other predisposing causes, his double--you know what i mean, of course--his etheric body of desire, or astral body, as some term it--that part in which the emotions, passions and desires reside--if this, i say, were for some constitutional reason loosely joined to his physical organism, there might well take place an occasional projection--" sangree came aft with a sudden rush, his face aflame, but whether with wind or sun, or with what he had heard, i cannot say. in my surprise i let the tiller slip and the cutter gave a great plunge as she came sharply into the wind and flung us all together in a heap on the bottom. sangree said nothing, but while he scrambled up and made the jib sheet fast my companion found a moment to add to his unfinished sentence the words, too low for any ear but mine-- "entirely unknown to himself, however." we righted the boat and laughed, and then sangree produced the map and explained exactly where we were. far away on the horizon, across an open stretch of water, lay a blue cluster of islands with our crescent-shaped home among them and the safe anchorage of the lagoon. an hour with this wind would get us there comfortably, and while dr. silence and sangree fell into conversation, i sat and pondered over the strange suggestions that had just been put into my mind concerning the "double," and the possible form it might assume when dissociated temporarily from the physical body. the whole way home these two chatted, and john silence was as gentle and sympathetic as a woman. i did not hear much of their talk, for the wind grew occasionally to the force of a hurricane and the sails and tiller absorbed my attention; but i could see that sangree was pleased and happy, and was pouring out intimate revelations to his companion in the way that most people did--when john silence wished them to do so. but it was quite suddenly, while i sat all intent upon wind and sails, that the true meaning of sangree's remark about the animal flared up in me with its full import. for his admission that he knew it was in pain and starved was in reality nothing more or less than a revelation of his deeper self. it was in the nature of a confession. he was speaking of something that he knew positively, something that was beyond question or argument, something that had to do directly with himself. "poor starved beast" he had called it in words that had "come out of their own accord," and there had not been the slightest evidence of any desire to conceal or explain away. he had spoken instinctively--from his heart, and as though about his own self. and half an hour before sunset we raced through the narrow opening of the lagoon and saw the smoke of the dinner-fire blowing here and there among the trees, and the figures of joan and the bo'sun's mate running down to meet us at the landing-stage. v everything changed from the moment john silence set foot on that island; it was like the effect produced by calling in some big doctor, some great arbiter of life and death, for consultation. the sense of gravity increased a hundredfold. even inanimate objects took upon themselves a subtle alteration, for the setting of the adventure--this deserted bit of sea with its hundreds of uninhabited islands--somehow turned sombre. an element that was mysterious, and in a sense disheartening, crept unbidden into the severity of grey rock and dark pine forest and took the sparkle from the sunshine and the sea. i, at least, was keenly aware of the change, for my whole being shifted, as it were, a degree higher, becoming keyed up and alert. the figures from the background of the stage moved forward a little into the light--nearer to the inevitable action. in a word this man's arrival intensified the whole affair. and, looking back down the years to the time when all this happened, it is clear to me that he had a pretty sharp idea of the meaning of it from the very beginning. how much he knew beforehand by his strange divining powers, it is impossible to say, but from the moment he came upon the scene and caught within himself the note of what was going on amongst us, he undoubtedly held the true solution of the puzzle and had no need to ask questions. and this certitude it was that set him in such an atmosphere of power and made us all look to him instinctively; for he took no tentative steps, made no false moves, and while the rest of us floundered he moved straight to the climax. he was indeed a true diviner of souls. i can now read into his behaviour a good deal that puzzled me at the time, for though i had dimly guessed the solution, i had no idea how he would deal with it. and the conversations i can reproduce almost verbatim, for, according to my invariable habit, i kept full notes of all he said. to mrs. maloney, foolish and dazed; to joan, alarmed, yet plucky; and to the clergyman, moved by his daughter's distress below his usual shallow emotions, he gave the best possible treatment in the best possible way, yet all so easily and simply as to make it appear naturally spontaneous. for he dominated the bo'sun's mate, taking the measure of her ignorance with infinite patience; he keyed up joan, stirring her courage and interest to the highest point for her own safety; and the reverend timothy he soothed and comforted, while obtaining his implicit obedience, by taking him into his confidence, and leading him gradually to a comprehension of the issue that was bound to follow. and sangree--here his wisdom was most wisely calculated--he neglected outwardly because inwardly he was the object of his unceasing and most concentrated attention. under the guise of apparent indifference his mind kept the canadian under constant observation. there was a restless feeling in the camp that evening and none of us lingered round the fire after supper as usual. sangree and i busied ourselves with patching up the torn tent for our guest and with finding heavy stones to hold the ropes, for dr. silence insisted on having it pitched on the highest point of the island ridge, just where it was most rocky and there was no earth for pegs. the place, moreover, was midway between the men's and women's tents, and, of course, commanded the most comprehensive view of the camp. "so that if your dog comes," he said simply, "i may be able to catch him as he passes across." the wind had gone down with the sun and an unusual warmth lay over the island that made sleep heavy, and in the morning we assembled at a late breakfast, rubbing our eyes and yawning. the cool north wind had given way to the warm southern air that sometimes came up with haze and moisture across the baltic, bringing with it the relaxing sensations that produced enervation and listlessness. and this may have been the reason why at first i failed to notice that anything unusual was about, and why i was less alert than normally; for it was not till after breakfast that the silence of our little party struck me and i discovered that joan had not yet put in an appearance. and then, in a flash, the last heaviness of sleep vanished and i saw that maloney was white and troubled and his wife could not hold a plate without trembling. a desire to ask questions was stopped in me by a swift glance from dr. silence, and i suddenly understood in some vague way that they were waiting till sangree should have gone. how this idea came to me i cannot determine, but the soundness of the intuition was soon proved, for the moment he moved off to his tent, maloney looked up at me and began to speak in a low voice. "you slept through it all," he half whispered. "through what?" i asked, suddenly thrilled with the knowledge that something dreadful had happened. "we didn't wake you for fear of getting the whole camp up," he went on, meaning, by the camp, i supposed, sangree. "it was just before dawn when the screams woke me." "the dog again?" i asked, with a curious sinking of the heart. "got right into the tent," he went on, speaking passionately but very low, "and woke my wife by scrambling all over her. then she realised that joan was struggling beside her. and, by god! the beast had torn her arm; scratched all down the arm she was, and bleeding." "joan injured?" i gasped. "merely scratched--this time," put in john silence, speaking for the first time; "suffering more from shock and fright than actual wounds." "isn't it a mercy the doctor was here?" said mrs. maloney, looking as if she would never know calmness again. "i think we should both have been killed." "it has been a most merciful escape," maloney said, his pulpit voice struggling with his emotion. "but, of course, we cannot risk another--we must strike camp and get away at once--" "only poor mr. sangree must not know what has happened. he is so attached to joan and would be so terribly upset," added the bo'sun's mate distractedly, looking all about in her terror. "it is perhaps advisable that mr. sangree should not know what has occurred," dr. silence said with quiet authority, "but i think, for the safety of all concerned, it will be better not to leave the island just now." he spoke with great decision and maloney looked up and followed his words closely. "if you will agree to stay here a few days longer, i have no doubt we can put an end to the attentions of your strange visitor, and incidentally have the opportunity of observing a most singular and interesting phenomenon--" "what!" gasped mrs. maloney, "a phenomenon?--you mean that you know what it is?" "i am quite certain i know what it is," he replied very low, for we heard the footsteps of sangree approaching, "though i am not so certain yet as to the best means of dealing with it. but in any case it is not wise to leave precipitately--" "oh, timothy, does he think it's a devil--?" cried the bo'sun's mate in a voice that even the canadian must have heard. "in my opinion," continued john silence, looking across at me and the clergyman, "it is a case of modern lycanthropy with other complications that may--" he left the sentence unfinished, for mrs. maloney got up with a jump and fled to her tent fearful she might hear a worse thing, and at that moment sangree turned the corner of the stockade and came into view. "there are footmarks all round the mouth of my tent," he said with excitement. "the animal has been here again in the night. dr. silence, you really must come and see them for yourself. they're as plain on the moss as tracks in snow." but later in the day, while sangree went off in the canoe to fish the pools near the larger islands, and joan still lay, bandaged and resting, in her tent, dr. silence called me and the tutor and proposed a walk to the granite slabs at the far end. mrs. maloney sat on a stump near her daughter, and busied herself energetically with alternate nursing and painting. "we'll leave you in charge," the doctor said with a smile that was meant to be encouraging, "and when you want us for lunch, or anything, the megaphone will always bring us back in time." for, though the very air was charged with strange emotions, every one talked quietly and naturally as with a definite desire to counteract unnecessary excitement. "i'll keep watch," said the plucky bo'sun's mate, "and meanwhile i find comfort in my work." she was busy with the sketch she had begun on the day after our arrival. "for even a tree," she added proudly, pointing to her little easel, "is a symbol of the divine, and the thought makes me feel safer." we glanced for a moment at a daub which was more like the symptom of a disease than a symbol of the divine--and then took the path round the lagoon. at the far end we made a little fire and lay round it in the shadow of a big boulder. maloney stopped his humming suddenly and turned to his companion. "and what do you make of it all?" he asked abruptly. "in the first place," replied john silence, making himself comfortable against the rock, "it is of human origin, this animal; it is undoubted lycanthropy." his words had the effect precisely of a bombshell. maloney listened as though he had been struck. "you puzzle me utterly," he said, sitting up closer and staring at him. "perhaps," replied the other, "but if you'll listen to me for a few moments you may be less puzzled at the end--or more. it depends how much you know. let me go further and say that you have underestimated, or miscalculated, the effect of this primitive wild life upon all of you." "in what way?" asked the clergyman, bristling a trifle. "it is strong medicine for any town-dweller, and for some of you it has been too strong. one of you has gone wild." he uttered these last words with great emphasis. "gone savage," he added, looking from one to the other. neither of us found anything to reply. "to say that the brute has awakened in a man is not a mere metaphor always," he went on presently. "of course not!" "but, in the sense i mean, may have a very literal and terrible significance," pursued dr. silence. "ancient instincts that no one dreamed of, least of all their possessor, may leap forth--" "atavism can hardly explain a roaming animal with teeth and claws and sanguinary instincts," interrupted maloney with impatience. "the term is of your own choice," continued the doctor equably, "not mine, and it is a good example of a word that indicates a result while it conceals the process; but the explanation of this beast that haunts your island and attacks your daughter is of far deeper significance than mere atavistic tendencies, or throwing back to animal origin, which i suppose is the thought in your mind." "you spoke just now of lycanthropy," said maloney, looking bewildered and anxious to keep to plain facts evidently; "i think i have come across the word, but really--really--it can have no actual significance to-day, can it? these superstitions of mediaeval times can hardly--" he looked round at me with his jolly red face, and the expression of astonishment and dismay on it would have made me shout with laughter at any other time. laughter, however, was never farther from my mind than at this moment when i listened to dr. silence as he carefully suggested to the clergyman the very explanation that had gradually been forcing itself upon my own mind. "however mediaeval ideas may have exaggerated the idea is not of much importance to us now," he said quietly, "when we are face to face with a modern example of what, i take it, has always been a profound fact. for the moment let us leave the name of any one in particular out of the matter and consider certain possibilities." we all agreed with that at any rate. there was no need to speak of sangree, or of any one else, until we knew a little more. "the fundamental fact in this most curious case," he went on, "is that the 'double' of a man--" "you mean the astral body? i've heard of that, of course," broke in maloney with a snort of triumph. "no doubt," said the other, smiling, "no doubt you have;--that this double, or fluidic body of a man, as i was saying, has the power under certain conditions of projecting itself and becoming visible to others. certain training will accomplish this, and certain drugs likewise; illnesses, too, that ravage the body may produce temporarily the result that death produces permanently, and let loose this counterpart of a human being and render it visible to the sight of others. "every one, of course, knows this more or less to-day; but it is not so generally known, and probably believed by none who have not witnessed it, that this fluidic body can, under certain conditions, assume other forms than human, and that such other forms may be determined by the dominating thought and wish of the owner. for this double, or astral body as you call it, is really the seat of the passions, emotions and desires in the psychical economy. it is the passion body; and, in projecting itself, it can often assume a form that gives expression to the overmastering desire that moulds it; for it is composed of such tenuous matter that it lends itself readily to the moulding by thought and wish." "i follow you perfectly," said maloney, looking as if he would much rather be chopping firewood elsewhere and singing. "and there are some persons so constituted," the doctor went on with increasing seriousness, "that the fluid body in them is but loosely associated with the physical, persons of poor health as a rule, yet often of strong desires and passions; and in these persons it is easy for the double to dissociate itself during deep sleep from their system, and, driven forth by some consuming desire, to assume an animal form and seek the fulfilment of that desire." there, in broad daylight, i saw maloney deliberately creep closer to the fire and heap the wood on. we gathered in to the heat, and to each other, and listened to dr. silence's voice as it mingled with the swish and whirr of the wind about us, and the falling of the little waves. "for instance, to take a concrete example," he resumed; "suppose some young man, with the delicate constitution i have spoken of, forms an overpowering attachment to a young woman, yet perceives that it is not welcomed, and is man enough to repress its outward manifestations. in such a case, supposing his double be easily projected, the very repression of his love in the daytime would add to the intense force of his desire when released in deep sleep from the control of his will, and his fluidic body might issue forth in monstrous or animal shape and become actually visible to others. and, if his devotion were dog-like in its fidelity, yet concealing the fires of a fierce passion beneath, it might well assume the form of a creature that seemed to be half dog, half wolf--" "a werewolf, you mean?" cried maloney, pale to the lips as he listened. john silence held up a restraining hand. "a werewolf," he said, "is a true psychical fact of profound significance, however absurdly it may have been exaggerated by the imaginations of a superstitious peasantry in the days of unenlightenment, for a werewolf is nothing but the savage, and possibly sanguinary, instincts of a passionate man scouring the world in his fluidic body, his passion body, his body of desire. as in the case at hand, he may not know it--" "it is not necessarily deliberate, then?" maloney put in quickly, with relief. "--it is hardly ever deliberate. it is the desires released in sleep from the control of the will finding a vent. in all savage races it has been recognised and dreaded, this phenomenon styled 'wehr wolf,' but to-day it is rare. and it is becoming rarer still, for the world grows tame and civilised, emotions have become refined, desires lukewarm, and few men have savagery enough left in them to generate impulses of such intense force, and certainly not to project them in animal form." "by gad!" exclaimed the clergyman breathlessly, and with increasing excitement, "then i feel i must tell you--what has been given to me in confidence--that sangree has in him an admixture of savage blood--of red indian ancestry--" "let us stick to our supposition of a man as described," the doctor stopped him calmly, "and let us imagine that he has in him this admixture of savage blood; and further, that he is wholly unaware of his dreadful physical and psychical infirmity; and that he suddenly finds himself leading the primitive life together with the object of his desires; with the result that the strain of the untamed wild-man in his blood--" "red indian, for instance," from maloney. "red indian, perfectly," agreed the doctor; "the result, i say, that this savage strain in him is awakened and leaps into passionate life. what then?" he looked hard at timothy maloney, and the clergyman looked hard at him. "the wild life such as you lead here on this island, for instance, might quickly awaken his savage instincts--his buried instincts--and with profoundly disquieting results." "you mean his subtle body, as you call it, might issue forth automatically in deep sleep and seek the object of its desire?" i said, coming to maloney's aid, who was finding it more and more difficult to get words. "precisely;--yet the desire of the man remaining utterly unmalefic--pure and wholesome in every sense--" "ah!" i heard the clergyman gasp. "the lover's desire for union run wild, run savage, tearing its way out in primitive, untamed fashion, i mean," continued the doctor, striving to make himself clear to a mind bounded by conventional thought and knowledge; "for the desire to possess, remember, may easily become importunate, and, embodied in this animal form of the subtle body which acts as its vehicle, may go forth to tear in pieces all that obstructs, to reach to the very heart of the loved object and seize it. _au fond_, it is nothing more than the aspiration for union, as i said--the splendid and perfectly clean desire to absorb utterly into itself--" he paused a moment and looked into maloney's eyes. "to bathe in the very heart's blood of the one desired," he added with grave emphasis. the fire spurted and crackled and made me start, but maloney found relief in a genuine shudder, and i saw him turn his head and look about him from the sea to the trees. the wind dropped just at that moment and the doctor's words rang sharply through the stillness. "then it might even kill?" stammered the clergyman presently in a hushed voice, and with a little forced laugh by way of protest that sounded quite ghastly. "in the last resort it might kill," repeated dr. silence. then, after another pause, during which he was clearly debating how much or how little it was wise to give to his audience, he continued: "and if the double does not succeed in getting back to its physical body, that physical body would wake an imbecile--an idiot--or perhaps never wake at all." maloney sat up and found his tongue. "you mean that if this fluid animal thing, or whatever it is, should be prevented getting back, the man might never wake again?" he asked, with shaking voice. "he might be dead," replied the other calmly. the tremor of a positive sensation shivered in the air about us. "then isn't that the best way to cure the fool--the brute--?" thundered the clergyman, half rising to his feet. "certainly it would be an easy and undiscoverable form of murder," was the stern reply, spoken as calmly as though it were a remark about the weather. maloney collapsed visibly, and i gathered the wood over the fire and coaxed up a blaze. "the greater part of the man's life--of his vital forces--goes out with this double," dr. silence resumed, after a moment's consideration, "and a considerable portion of the actual material of his physical body. so the physical body that remains behind is depleted, not only of force, but of matter. you would see it small, shrunken, dropped together, just like the body of a materialising medium at a seance. moreover, any mark or injury inflicted upon this double will be found exactly reproduced by the phenomenon of repercussion upon the shrunken physical body lying in its trance--" "an injury inflicted upon the one you say would be reproduced also on the other?" repeated maloney, his excitement growing again. "undoubtedly," replied the other quietly; "for there exists all the time a continuous connection between the physical body and the double--a connection of matter, though of exceedingly attenuated, possibly of etheric, matter. the wound _travels_, so to speak, from one to the other, and if this connection were broken the result would be death." "death," repeated maloney to himself, "death!" he looked anxiously at our faces, his thoughts evidently beginning to clear. "and this solidity?" he asked presently, after a general pause; "this tearing of tents and flesh; this howling, and the marks of paws? you mean that the double--?" "has sufficient material drawn from the depleted body to produce physical results? certainly!" the doctor took him up. "although to explain at this moment such problems as the passage of matter through matter would be as difficult as to explain how the thought of a mother can actually break the bones of the child unborn." dr. silence pointed out to sea, and maloney, looking wildly about him, turned with a violent start. i saw a canoe, with sangree in the stern-seat, slowly coming into view round the farther point. his hat was off, and his tanned face for the first time appeared to me--to us all, i think--as though it were the face of some one else. he looked like a wild man. then he stood up in the canoe to make a cast with the rod, and he looked for all the world like an indian. i recalled the expression of his face as i had seen it once or twice, notably on that occasion of the evening prayer, and an involuntary shudder ran down my spine. at that very instant he turned and saw us where we lay, and his face broke into a smile, so that his teeth showed white in the sun. he looked in his element, and exceedingly attractive. he called out something about his fish, and soon after passed out of sight into the lagoon. for a time none of us said a word. "and the cure?" ventured maloney at length. "is not to quench this savage force," replied dr. silence, "but to steer it better, and to provide other outlets. this is the solution of all these problems of accumulated force, for this force is the raw material of usefulness, and should be increased and cherished, not by separating it from the body by death, but by raising it to higher channels. the best and quickest cure of all," he went on, speaking very gently and with a hand upon the clergyman's arm, "is to lead it towards its object, provided that object is not unalterably hostile--to let it find rest where--" he stopped abruptly, and the eyes of the two men met in a single glance of comprehension. "joan?" maloney exclaimed, under his breath. "joan!" replied john silence. * * * * * we all went to bed early. the day had been unusually warm, and after sunset a curious hush descended on the island. nothing was audible but that faint, ghostly singing which is inseparable from a pinewood even on the stillest day--a low, searching sound, as though the wind had hair and trailed it o'er the world. with the sudden cooling of the atmosphere a sea fog began to form. it appeared in isolated patches over the water, and then these patches slid together and a white wall advanced upon us. not a breath of air stirred; the firs stood like flat metal outlines; the sea became as oil. the whole scene lay as though held motionless by some huge weight in the air; and the flames from our fire--the largest we had ever made--rose upwards, straight as a church steeple. as i followed the rest of our party tent-wards, having kicked the embers of the fire into safety, the advance guard of the fog was creeping slowly among the trees, like white arms feeling their way. mingled with the smoke was the odour of moss and soil and bark, and the peculiar flavour of the baltic, half salt, half brackish, like the smell of an estuary at low water. it is difficult to say why it seemed to me that this deep stillness masked an intense activity; perhaps in every mood lies the suggestion of its opposite, so that i became aware of the contrast of furious energy, for it was like moving through the deep pause before a thunderstorm, and i trod gently lest by breaking a twig or moving a stone i might set the whole scene into some sort of tumultuous movement. actually, no doubt, it was nothing more than a result of overstrung nerves. there was no more question of undressing and going to bed than there was of undressing and going to bathe. some sense in me was alert and expectant. i sat in my tent and waited. and at the end of half an hour or so my waiting was justified, for the canvas suddenly shivered, and some one tripped over the ropes that held it to the earth. john silence came in. the effect of his quiet entry was singular and prophetic: it was just as though the energy lying behind all this stillness had pressed forward to the edge of action. this, no doubt, was merely the quickening of my own mind, and had no other justification; for the presence of john silence always suggested the near possibility of vigorous action, and as a matter of fact, he came in with nothing more than a nod and a significant gesture. he sat down on a corner of my ground-sheet, and i pushed the blanket over so that he could cover his legs. he drew the flap of the tent after him and settled down, but hardly had he done so when the canvas shook a second time, and in blundered maloney. "sitting in the dark?" he said self-consciously, pushing his head inside, and hanging up his lantern on the ridge-pole nail. "i just looked in for a smoke. i suppose--" he glanced round, caught the eye of dr. silence, and stopped. he put his pipe back into his pocket and began to hum softly--that underbreath humming of a nondescript melody i knew so well and had come to hate. dr. silence leaned forward, opened the lantern and blew the light out. "speak low," he said, "and don't strike matches. listen for sounds and movements about the camp, and be ready to follow me at a moment's notice." there was light enough to distinguish our faces easily, and i saw maloney glance again hurriedly at both of us. "is the camp asleep?" the doctor asked presently, whispering. "sangree is," replied the clergyman, in a voice equally low. "i can't answer for the women; i think they're sitting up." "that's for the best." and then he added: "i wish the fog would thin a bit and let the moon through; later--we may want it." "it is lifting now, i think," maloney whispered back. "it's over the tops of the trees already." i cannot say what it was in this commonplace exchange of remarks that thrilled. probably maloney's swift acquiescence in the doctor's mood had something to do with it; for his quick obedience certainly impressed me a good deal. but, even without that slight evidence, it was clear that each recognised the gravity of the occasion, and understood that sleep was impossible and sentry duty was the order of the night. "report to me," repeated john silence once again, "the least sound, and do nothing precipitately." he shifted across to the mouth of the tent and raised the flap, fastening it against the pole so that he could see out. maloney stopped humming and began to force the breath through his teeth with a kind of faint hissing, treating us to a medley of church hymns and popular songs of the day. then the tent trembled as though some one had touched it. "that's the wind rising," whispered the clergyman, and pulled the flap open as far as it would go. a waft of cold damp air entered and made us shiver, and with it came a sound of the sea as the first wave washed its way softly along the shores. "it's got round to the north," he added, and following his voice came a long-drawn whisper that rose from the whole island as the trees sent forth a sighing response. "the fog'll move a bit now. i can make out a lane across the sea already." "hush!" said dr. silence, for maloney's voice had risen above a whisper, and we settled down again to another long period of watching and waiting, broken only by the occasional rubbing of shoulders against the canvas as we shifted our positions, and the increasing noise of waves on the outer coast-line of the island. and over all whirred the murmur of wind sweeping the tops of the trees like a great harp, and the faint tapping on the tent as drops fell from the branches with a sharp pinging sound. we had sat for something over an hour in this way, and maloney and i were finding it increasingly hard to keep awake, when suddenly dr. silence rose to his feet and peered out. the next minute he was gone. relieved of the dominating presence, the clergyman thrust his face close into mine. "i don't much care for this waiting game," he whispered, "but silence wouldn't hear of my sitting up with the others; he said it would prevent anything happening if i did." "he knows," i answered shortly. "no doubt in the world about that," he whispered back; "it's this 'double' business, as he calls it, or else it's obsession as the bible describes it. but it's bad, whichever it is, and i've got my winchester outside ready cocked, and i brought this too." he shoved a pocket bible under my nose. at one time in his life it had been his inseparable companion. "one's useless and the other's dangerous," i replied under my breath, conscious of a keen desire to laugh, and leaving him to choose. "safety lies in following our leader--" "i'm not thinking of myself," he interrupted sharply; "only, if anything happens to joan to-night i'm going to shoot first--and pray afterwards!" maloney put the book back into his hip-pocket, and peered out of the doorway. "what is he up to now, in the devil's name, i wonder!" he added; "going round sangree's tent and making gestures. how weird he looks disappearing in and out of the fog." "just trust him and wait," i said quickly, for the doctor was already on his way back. "remember, he has the knowledge, and knows what he's about. i've been with him through worse cases than this." maloney moved back as dr. silence darkened the doorway and stooped to enter. "his sleep is very deep," he whispered, seating himself by the door again. "he's in a cataleptic condition, and the double may be released any minute now. but i've taken steps to imprison it in the tent, and it can't get out till i permit it. be on the watch for signs of movement." then he looked hard at maloney. "but no violence, or shooting, remember, mr. maloney, unless you want a murder on your hands. anything done to the double acts by repercussion upon the physical body. you had better take out the cartridges at once." his voice was stern. the clergyman went out, and i heard him emptying the magazine of his rifle. when he returned he sat nearer the door than before, and from that moment until we left the tent he never once took his eyes from the figure of dr. silence, silhouetted there against sky and canvas. and, meanwhile, the wind came steadily over the sea and opened the mist into lanes and clearings, driving it about like a living thing. it must have been well after midnight when a low booming sound drew my attention; but at first the sense of hearing was so strained that it was impossible exactly to locate it, and i imagined it was the thunder of big guns far out at sea carried to us by the rising wind. then maloney, catching hold of my arm and leaning forward, somehow brought the true relation, and i realised the next second that it was only a few feet away. "sangree's tent," he exclaimed in a loud and startled whisper. i craned my head round the corner, but at first the effect of the fog was so confusing that every patch of white driving about before the wind looked like a moving tent and it was some seconds before i discovered the one patch that held steady. then i saw that it was shaking all over, and the sides, flapping as much as the tightness of the ropes allowed, were the cause of the booming sound we had heard. something alive was tearing frantically about inside, banging against the stretched canvas in a way that made me think of a great moth dashing against the walls and ceiling of a room. the tent bulged and rocked. "it's trying to get out, by jupiter!" muttered the clergyman, rising to his feet and turning to the side where the unloaded rifle lay. i sprang up too, hardly knowing what purpose was in my mind, but anxious to be prepared for anything. john silence, however, was before us both, and his figure slipped past and blocked the doorway of the tent. and there was some quality in his voice next minute when he began to speak that brought our minds instantly to a state of calm obedience. "first--the women's tent," he said low, looking sharply at maloney, "and if i need your help, i'll call." the clergyman needed no second bidding. he dived past me and was out in a moment. he was labouring evidently under intense excitement. i watched him picking his way silently over the slippery ground, giving the moving tent a wide berth, and presently disappearing among the floating shapes of fog. dr. silence turned to me. "you heard those footsteps about half an hour ago?" he asked significantly. "i heard nothing." "they were extraordinarily soft--almost the soundless tread of a wild creature. but now, follow me closely," he added, "for we must waste no time if i am to save this poor man from his affliction and lead his werewolf double to its rest. and, unless i am much mistaken"--he peered at me through the darkness, whispering with the utmost distinctness--"joan and sangree are absolutely made for one another. and i think she knows it too--just as well as he does." my head swam a little as i listened, but at the same time something cleared in my brain and i saw that he was right. yet it was all so weird and incredible, so remote from the commonplace facts of life as commonplace people know them; and more than once it flashed upon me that the whole scene--people, words, tents, and all the rest of it--were delusions created by the intense excitement of my own mind somehow, and that suddenly the sea-fog would clear off and the world become normal again. the cold air from the sea stung our cheeks sharply as we left the close atmosphere of the little crowded tent. the sighing of the trees, the waves breaking below on the rocks, and the lines and patches of mist driving about us seemed to create the momentary illusion that the whole island had broken loose and was floating out to sea like a mighty raft. the doctor moved just ahead of me, quickly and silently; he was making straight for the canadian's tent where the sides still boomed and shook as the creature of sinister life raced and tore about impatiently within. a little distance from the door he paused and held up a hand to stop me. we were, perhaps, a dozen feet away. "before i release it, you shall see for yourself," he said, "that the reality of the werewolf is beyond all question. the matter of which it is composed is, of course, exceedingly attenuated, but you are partially clairvoyant--and even if it is not dense enough for normal sight you will see something." he added a little more i could not catch. the fact was that the curiously strong vibrating atmosphere surrounding his person somewhat confused my senses. it was the result, of course, of his intense concentration of mind and forces, and pervaded the entire camp and all the persons in it. and as i watched the canvas shake and heard it boom and flap i heartily welcomed it. for it was also protective. at the back of sangree's tent stood a thin group of pine trees, but in front and at the sides the ground was comparatively clear. the flap was wide open and any ordinary animal would have been out and away without the least trouble. dr. silence led me up to within a few feet, evidently careful not to advance beyond a certain limit, and then stooped down and signalled to me to do the same. and looking over his shoulder i saw the interior lit faintly by the spectral light reflected from the fog, and the dim blot upon the balsam boughs and blankets signifying sangree; while over him, and round him, and up and down him, flew the dark mass of "something" on four legs, with pointed muzzle and sharp ears plainly visible against the tent sides, and the occasional gleam of fiery eyes and white fangs. i held my breath and kept utterly still, inwardly and outwardly, for fear, i suppose, that the creature would become conscious of my presence; but the distress i felt went far deeper than the mere sense of personal safety, or the fact of watching something so incredibly active and real. i became keenly aware of the dreadful psychic calamity it involved. the realisation that sangree lay confined in that narrow space with this species of monstrous projection of himself--that he was wrapped there in the cataleptic sleep, all unconscious that this thing was masquerading with his own life and energies--added a distressing touch of horror to the scene. in all the cases of john silence--and they were many and often terrible--no other psychic affliction has ever, before or since, impressed me so convincingly with the pathetic impermanence of the human personality, with its fluid nature, and with the alarming possibilities of its transformations. "come," he whispered, after we had watched for some minutes the frantic efforts to escape from the circle of thought and will that held it prisoner, "come a little farther away while i release it." we moved back a dozen yards or so. it was like a scene in some impossible play, or in some ghastly and oppressive nightmare from which i should presently awake to find the blankets all heaped up upon my chest. by some method undoubtedly mental, but which, in my confusion and excitement, i failed to understand, the doctor accomplished his purpose, and the next minute i heard him say sharply under his breath, "it's out! now watch!" at this very moment a sudden gust from the sea blew aside the mist, so that a lane opened to the sky, and the moon, ghastly and unnatural as the effect of stage limelight, dropped down in a momentary gleam upon the door of sangree's tent, and i perceived that something had moved forward from the interior darkness and stood clearly defined upon the threshold. and, at the same moment, the tent ceased its shuddering and held still. there, in the doorway, stood an animal, with neck and muzzle thrust forward, its head poking into the night, its whole body poised in that attitude of intense rigidity that precedes the spring into freedom, the running leap of attack. it seemed to be about the size of a calf, leaner than a mastiff, yet more squat than a wolf, and i can swear that i saw the fur ridged sharply upon its back. then its upper lip slowly lifted, and i saw the whiteness of its teeth. surely no human being ever stared as hard as i did in those next few minutes. yet, the harder i stared the clearer appeared the amazing and monstrous apparition. for, after all, it was sangree--and yet it was not sangree. it was the head and face of an animal, and yet it was the face of sangree: the face of a wild dog, a wolf, and yet his face. the eyes were sharper, narrower, more fiery, yet they were his eyes--his eyes run wild; the teeth were longer, whiter, more pointed--yet they were his teeth, his teeth grown cruel; the expression was flaming, terrible, exultant--yet it was his expression carried to the border of savagery--his expression as i had already surprised it more than once, only dominant now, fully released from human constraint, with the mad yearning of a hungry and importunate soul. it was the soul of sangree, the long suppressed, deeply loving sangree, expressed in its single and intense desire--pure utterly and utterly wonderful. yet, at the same time, came the feeling that it was all an illusion. i suddenly remembered the extraordinary changes the human face can undergo in circular insanity, when it changes from melancholia to elation; and i recalled the effect of hascheesh, which shows the human countenance in the form of the bird or animal to which in character it most approximates; and for a moment i attributed this mingling of sangree's face with a wolf to some kind of similar delusion of the senses. i was mad, deluded, dreaming! the excitement of the day, and this dim light of stars and bewildering mist combined to trick me. i had been amazingly imposed upon by some false wizardry of the senses. it was all absurd and fantastic; it would pass. and then, sounding across this sea of mental confusion like a bell through a fog, came the voice of john silence bringing me back to a consciousness of the reality of it all-- "sangree--in his double!" and when i looked again more calmly, i plainly saw that it was indeed the face of the canadian, but his face turned animal, yet mingled with the brute expression a curiously pathetic look like the soul seen sometimes in the yearning eyes of a dog,--the face of an animal shot with vivid streaks of the human. the doctor called to him softly under his breath-- "sangree! sangree, you poor afflicted creature! do you know me? can you understand what it is you're doing in your 'body of desire'?" for the first time since its appearance the creature moved. its ears twitched and it shifted the weight of its body on to the hind legs. then, lifting its head and muzzle to the sky, it opened its long jaws and gave vent to a dismal and prolonged howling. but, when i heard that howling rise to heaven, the breath caught and strangled in my throat and it seemed that my heart missed a beat; for, though the sound was entirely animal, it was at the same time entirely human. but, more than that, it was the cry i had so often heard in the western states of america where the indians still fight and hunt and struggle--it was the cry of the redskin! "the indian blood!" whispered john silence, when i caught his arm for support; "the ancestral cry." and that poignant, beseeching cry, that broken human voice, mingling with the savage howl of the brute beast, pierced straight to my very heart and touched there something that no music, no voice, passionate or tender, of man, woman or child has ever stirred before or since for one second into life. it echoed away among the fog and the trees and lost itself somewhere out over the hidden sea. and some part of myself--something that was far more than the mere act of intense listening--went out with it, and for several minutes i lost consciousness of my surroundings and felt utterly absorbed in the pain of another stricken fellow-creature. again the voice of john silence recalled me to myself. "hark!" he said aloud. "hark!" his tone galvanised me afresh. we stood listening side by side. far across the island, faintly sounding through the trees and brushwood, came a similar, answering cry. shrill, yet wonderfully musical, shaking the heart with a singular wild sweetness that defies description, we heard it rise and fall upon the night air. "it's across the lagoon," dr. silence cried, but this time in full tones that paid no tribute to caution. "it's joan! she's answering him!" again the wonderful cry rose and fell, and that same instant the animal lowered its head, and, muzzle to earth, set off on a swift easy canter that took it off into the mist and out of our sight like a thing of wind and vision. the doctor made a quick dash to the door of sangree's tent, and, following close at his heels, i peered in and caught a momentary glimpse of the small, shrunken body lying upon the branches but half covered by the blankets--the cage from which most of the life, and not a little of the actual corporeal substance, had escaped into that other form of life and energy, the body of passion and desire. by another of those swift, incalculable processes which at this stage of my apprenticeship i failed often to grasp, dr. silence reclosed the circle about the tent and body. "now it cannot return till i permit it," he said, and the next second was off at full speed into the woods, with myself close behind him. i had already had some experience of my companion's ability to run swiftly through a dense wood, and i now had the further proof of his power almost to see in the dark. for, once we left the open space about the tents, the trees seemed to absorb all the remaining vestiges of light, and i understood that special sensibility that is said to develop in the blind--the sense of obstacles. and twice as we ran we heard the sound of that dismal howling drawing nearer and nearer to the answering faint cry from the point of the island whither we were going. then, suddenly, the trees fell away, and we emerged, hot and breathless, upon the rocky point where the granite slabs ran bare into the sea. it was like passing into the clearness of open day. and there, sharply defined against sea and sky, stood the figure of a human being. it was joan. i at once saw that there was something about her appearance that was singular and unusual, but it was only when we had moved quite close that i recognised what caused it. for while the lips wore a smile that lit the whole face with a happiness i had never seen there before, the eyes themselves were fixed in a steady, sightless stare as though they were lifeless and made of glass. i made an impulsive forward movement, but dr. silence instantly dragged me back. "no," he cried, "don't wake her!" "what do you mean?" i replied aloud, struggling in his grasp. "she's asleep. it's somnambulistic. the shock might injure her permanently." i turned and peered closely into his face. he was absolutely calm. i began to understand a little more, catching, i suppose, something of his strong thinking. "walking in her sleep, you mean?" he nodded. "she's on her way to meet him. from the very beginning he must have drawn her--irresistibly." "but the torn tent and the wounded flesh?" "when she did not sleep deep enough to enter the somnambulistic trance he missed her--he went instinctively and in all innocence to seek her out--with the result, of course, that she woke and was terrified--" "then in their heart of hearts they love?" i asked finally. john silence smiled his inscrutable smile. "profoundly," he answered, "and as simply as only primitive souls can love. if only they both come to realise it in their normal waking states his double will cease these nocturnal excursions. he will be cured, and at rest." the words had hardly left his lips when there was a sound of rustling branches on our left, and the very next instant the dense brushwood parted where it was darkest and out rushed the swift form of an animal at full gallop. the noise of feet was scarcely audible, but in that utter stillness i heard the heavy panting breath and caught the swish of the low bushes against its sides. it went straight towards joan--and as it went the girl lifted her head and turned to meet it. and the same instant a canoe that had been creeping silently and unobserved round the inner shore of the lagoon, emerged from the shadows and defined itself upon the water with a figure at the middle thwart. it was maloney. it was only afterwards i realised that we were invisible to him where we stood against the dark background of trees; the figures of joan and the animal he saw plainly, but not dr. silence and myself standing just beyond them. he stood up in the canoe and pointed with his right arm. i saw something gleam in his hand. "stand aside, joan girl, or you'll get hit," he shouted, his voice ringing horribly through the deep stillness, and the same instant a pistol-shot cracked out with a burst of flame and smoke, and the figure of the animal, with one tremendous leap into the air, fell back in the shadows and disappeared like a shape of night and fog. instantly, then, joan opened her eyes, looked in a dazed fashion about her, and pressing both hands against her heart, fell with a sharp cry into my arms that were just in time to catch her. and an answering cry sounded across the lagoon--thin, wailing, piteous. it came from sangree's tent. "fool!" cried dr. silence, "you've wounded him!" and before we could move or realise quite what it meant, he was in the canoe and half-way across the lagoon. some kind of similar abuse came in a torrent from my lips, too--though i cannot remember the actual words--as i cursed the man for his disobedience and tried to make the girl comfortable on the ground. but the clergyman was more practical. he was spreading his coat over her and dashing water on her face. "it's not joan i've killed at any rate," i heard him mutter as she turned and opened her eyes and smiled faintly up in his face. "i swear the bullet went straight." joan stared at him; she was still dazed and bewildered, and still imagined herself with the companion of her trance. the strange lucidity of the somnambulist still hung over her brain and mind, though outwardly she appeared troubled and confused. "where has he gone to? he disappeared so suddenly, crying that he was hurt," she asked, looking at her father as though she did not recognise him. "and if they've done anything to him--they have done it to me too--for he is more to me than--" her words grew vaguer and vaguer as she returned slowly to her normal waking state, and now she stopped altogether, as though suddenly aware that she had been surprised into telling secrets. but all the way back, as we carried her carefully through the trees, the girl smiled and murmured sangree's name and asked if he was injured, until it finally became clear to me that the wild soul of the one had called to the wild soul of the other and in the secret depths of their beings the call had been heard and understood. john silence was right. in the abyss of her heart, too deep at first for recognition, the girl loved him, and had loved him from the very beginning. once her normal waking consciousness recognised the fact they would leap together like twin flames, and his affliction would be at an end; his intense desire would be satisfied; he would be cured. and in sangree's tent dr. silence and i sat up for the remainder of the night--this wonderful and haunted night that had shown us such strange glimpses of a new heaven and a new hell--for the canadian tossed upon his balsam boughs with high fever in his blood, and upon each cheek a dark and curious contusion showed, throbbing with severe pain although the skin was not broken and there was no outward and visible sign of blood. "maloney shot straight, you see," whispered dr. silence to me after the clergyman had gone to his tent, and had put joan to sleep beside her mother, who, by the way, had never once awakened. "the bullet must have passed clean through the face, for both cheeks are stained. he'll wear these marks all his life--smaller, but always there. they're the most curious scars in the world, these scars transferred by repercussion from an injured double. they'll remain visible until just before his death, and then with the withdrawal of the subtle body they will disappear finally." his words mingled in my dazed mind with the sighs of the troubled sleeper and the crying of the wind about the tent. nothing seemed to paralyse my powers of realisation so much as these twin stains of mysterious significance upon the face before me. it was odd, too, how speedily and easily the camp resigned itself again to sleep and quietness, as though a stage curtain had suddenly dropped down upon the action and concealed it; and nothing contributed so vividly to the feeling that i had been a spectator of some kind of visionary drama as the dramatic nature of the change in the girl's attitude. yet, as a matter of fact, the change had not been so sudden and revolutionary as appeared. underneath, in those remoter regions of consciousness where the emotions, unknown to their owners, do secretly mature, and owe thence their abrupt revelation to some abrupt psychological climax, there can be no doubt that joan's love for the canadian had been growing steadily and irresistibly all the time. it had now rushed to the surface so that she recognised it; that was all. and it has always seemed to me that the presence of john silence, so potent, so quietly efficacious, produced an effect, if one may say so, of a psychic forcing-house, and hastened incalculably the bringing together of these two "wild" lovers. in that sudden awakening had occurred the very psychological climax required to reveal the passionate emotion accumulated below. the deeper knowledge had leaped across and transferred itself to her ordinary consciousness, and in that shock the collision of the personalities had shaken them to the depths and shown her the truth beyond all possibility of doubt. "he's sleeping quietly now," the doctor said, interrupting my reflections. "if you will watch alone for a bit i'll go to maloney's tent and help him to arrange his thoughts." he smiled in anticipation of that "arrangement." "he'll never quite understand how a wound on the double can transfer itself to the physical body, but at least i can persuade him that the less he talks and 'explains' to-morrow, the sooner the forces will run their natural course now to peace and quietness." he went away softly, and with the removal of his presence sangree, sleeping heavily, turned over and groaned with the pain of his broken head. and it was in the still hour just before the dawn, when all the islands were hushed, the wind and sea still dreaming, and the stars visible through clearing mists, that a figure crept silently over the ridge and reached the door of the tent where i dozed beside the sufferer, before i was aware of its presence. the flap was cautiously lifted a few inches and in looked--joan. that same instant sangree woke and sat up on his bed of branches. he recognised her before i could say a word, and uttered a low cry. it was pain and joy mingled, and this time all human. and the girl too was no longer walking in her sleep, but fully aware of what she was doing. i was only just able to prevent him springing from his blankets. "joan, joan!" he cried, and in a flash she answered him, "i'm here--i'm with you always now," and had pushed past me into the tent and flung herself upon his breast. "i knew you would come to me in the end," i heard him whisper. "it was all too big for me to understand at first," she murmured, "and for a long time i was frightened--" "but not now!" he cried louder; "you don't feel afraid now of--of anything that's in me--" "i fear nothing," she cried, "nothing, nothing!" i led her outside again. she looked steadily into my face with eyes shining and her whole being transformed. in some intuitive way, surviving probably from the somnambulism, she knew or guessed as much as i knew. "you must talk to-morrow with john silence," i said gently, leading her towards her own tent. "he understands everything." i left her at the door, and as i went back softly to take up my place of sentry again with the canadian, i saw the first streaks of dawn lighting up the far rim of the sea behind the distant islands. and, as though to emphasise the eternal closeness of comedy to tragedy, two small details rose out of the scene and impressed me so vividly that i remember them to this very day. for in the tent where i had just left joan, all aquiver with her new happiness, there rose plainly to my ears the grotesque sounds of the bo'sun's mate heavily snoring, oblivious of all things in heaven or hell; and from maloney's tent, so still was the night, where i looked across and saw the lantern's glow, there came to me, through the trees, the monotonous rising and falling of a human voice that was beyond question the sound of a man praying to his god. case iii: a victim of higher space "there's a hextraordinary gentleman to see you, sir," said the new man. "why 'extraordinary'?" asked dr. silence, drawing the tips of his thin fingers through his brown beard. his eyes twinkled pleasantly. "why 'extraordinary,' barker?" he repeated encouragingly, noticing the perplexed expression in the man's eyes. "he's so--so thin, sir. i could hardly see 'im at all--at first. he was inside the house before i could ask the name," he added, remembering strict orders. "and who brought him here?" "he come alone, sir, in a closed cab. he pushed by me before i could say a word--making no noise not what i could hear. he seemed to move so soft like--" the man stopped short with obvious embarrassment, as though he had already said enough to jeopardise his new situation, but trying hard to show that he remembered the instructions and warnings he had received with regard to the admission of strangers not properly accredited. "and where is the gentleman now?" asked dr. silence, turning away to conceal his amusement. "i really couldn't exactly say, sir. i left him standing in the 'all--" the doctor looked up sharply. "but why in the hall, barker? why not in the waiting-room?" he fixed his piercing though kindly eyes on the man's face. "did he frighten you?" he asked quickly. "i think he did, sir, if i may say so. i seemed to lose sight of him, as it were--" the man stammered, evidently convinced by now that he had earned his dismissal. "he come in so funny, just like a cold wind," he added boldly, setting his heels at attention and looking his master full in the face. the doctor made an internal note of the man's halting description; he was pleased that the slight signs of psychic intuition which had induced him to engage barker had not entirely failed at the first trial. dr. silence sought for this qualification in all his assistants, from secretary to serving man, and if it surrounded him with a somewhat singular crew, the drawbacks were more than compensated for on the whole by their occasional flashes of insight. "so the gentleman made you feel queer, did he?" "that was it, i think, sir," repeated the man stolidly. "and he brings no kind of introduction to me--no letter or anything?" asked the doctor, with feigned surprise, as though he knew what was coming. the man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and finally produced an envelope. "i beg pardon, sir," he said, greatly flustered; "the gentleman handed me this for you." it was a note from a discerning friend, who had never yet sent him a case that was not vitally interesting from one point or another. "please see the bearer of this note," the brief message ran, "though i doubt if even you can do much to help him." john silence paused a moment, so as to gather from the mind of the writer all that lay behind the brief words of the letter. then he looked up at his servant with a graver expression than he had yet worn. "go back and find this gentleman," he said, "and show him into the green study. do not reply to his question, or speak more than actually necessary; but think kind, helpful, sympathetic thoughts as strongly as you can, barker. you remember what i told you about the importance of _thinking_, when i engaged you. put curiosity out of your mind, and think gently, sympathetically, affectionately, if you can." he smiled, and barker, who had recovered his composure in the doctor's presence, bowed silently and went out. there were two different reception-rooms in dr. silence's house. one (intended for persons who imagined they needed spiritual assistance when really they were only candidates for the asylum) had padded walls, and was well supplied with various concealed contrivances by means of which sudden violence could be instantly met and overcome. it was, however, rarely used. the other, intended for the reception of genuine cases of spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic nature, was entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep green, calculated to induce calmness and repose of mind. and this room was the one in which dr. silence interviewed the majority of his "queer" cases, and the one into which he had directed barker to show his present caller. to begin with, the arm-chair in which the patient was always directed to sit, was nailed to the floor, since its immovability tended to impart this same excellent characteristic to the occupant. patients invariably grew excited when talking about themselves, and their excitement tended to confuse their thoughts and to exaggerate their language. the inflexibility of the chair helped to counteract this. after repeated endeavours to drag it forward, or push it back, they ended by resigning themselves to sitting quietly. and with the futility of fidgeting there followed a calmer state of mind. upon the floor, and at intervals in the wall immediately behind, were certain tiny green buttons, practically unnoticeable, which on being pressed permitted a soothing and persuasive narcotic to rise invisibly about the occupant of the chair. the effect upon the excitable patient was rapid, admirable, and harmless. the green study was further provided with a secret spy-hole; for john silence liked when possible to observe his patient's face before it had assumed that mask the features of the human countenance invariably wear in the presence of another person. a man sitting alone wears a psychic expression; and this expression is the man himself. it disappears the moment another person joins him. and dr. silence often learned more from a few moments' secret observation of a face than from hours of conversation with its owner afterwards. a very light, almost a dancing, step followed barker's heavy tread towards the green room, and a moment afterwards the man came in and announced that the gentleman was waiting. he was still pale and his manner nervous. "never mind, barker" the doctor said kindly; "if you were not psychic the man would have had no effect upon you at all. you only need training and development. and when you have learned to interpret these feelings and sensations better, you will feel no fear, but only a great sympathy." "yes, sir; thank you, sir!" and barker bowed and made his escape, while dr. silence, an amused smile lurking about the corners of his mouth, made his way noiselessly down the passage and put his eye to the spy-hole in the door of the green study. this spy-hole was so placed that it commanded a view of almost the entire room, and, looking through it, the doctor saw a hat, gloves, and umbrella lying on a chair by the table, but searched at first in vain for their owner. the windows were both closed and a brisk fire burned in the grate. there were various signs--signs intelligible at least to a keenly intuitive soul--that the room was occupied, yet so far as human beings were concerned, it was empty, utterly empty. no one sat in the chairs; no one stood on the mat before the fire; there was no sign even that a patient was anywhere close against the wall, examining the bocklin reproductions--as patients so often did when they thought they were alone--and therefore rather difficult to see from the spy-hole. ordinarily speaking, there was no one in the room. it was undeniable. yet dr. silence was quite well aware that a human being _was_ in the room. his psychic apparatus never failed in letting him know the proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being. even in the dark he could tell that. and he now knew positively that his patient--the patient who had alarmed barker, and had then tripped down the corridor with that dancing footstep--was somewhere concealed within the four walls commanded by his spy-hole. he also realised--and this was most unusual--that this individual whom he desired to watch knew that he was being watched. and, further, that the stranger himself was also watching! in fact, that it was he, the doctor, who was being observed--and by an observer as keen and trained as himself. an inkling of the true state of the case began to dawn upon him, and he was on the verge of entering--indeed, his hand already touched the door-knob--when his eye, still glued to the spy-hole, detected a slight movement. directly opposite, between him and the fireplace, something stirred. he watched very attentively and made certain that he was not mistaken. an object on the mantelpiece--it was a blue vase--disappeared from view. it passed out of sight together with the portion of the marble mantelpiece on which it rested. next, that part of the fire and grate and brass fender immediately below it vanished entirely, as though a slice had been taken clean out of them. dr. silence then understood that something between him and these objects was slowly coming into being, something that concealed them and obstructed his vision by inserting itself in the line of sight between them and himself. he quietly awaited further results before going in. first he saw a thin perpendicular line tracing itself from just above the height of the clock and continuing downwards till it reached the woolly fire-mat. this line grew wider, broadened, grew solid. it was no shadow; it was something substantial. it defined itself more and more. then suddenly, at the top of the line, and about on a level with the face of the clock, he saw a round luminous disc gazing steadily at him. it was a human eye, looking straight into his own, pressed there against the spy-hole. and it was bright with intelligence. dr. silence held his breath for a moment--and stared back at it. then, like some one moving out of deep shadow into light, he saw the figure of a man come sliding sideways into view, a whitish face following the eye, and the perpendicular line he had first observed broadening out and developing into the complete figure of a human being. it was the patient. he had apparently been standing there in front of the fire all the time. a second eye had followed the first, and both of them stared steadily at the spy-hole, sharply concentrated, yet with a sly twinkle of humour and amusement that made it impossible for the doctor to maintain his position any longer. he opened the door and went in quickly. as he did so he noticed for the first time the sound of a german band coming in gaily through the open ventilators. in some intuitive, unaccountable fashion the music connected itself with the patient he was about to interview. this sort of prevision was not unfamiliar to him. it always explained itself later. the man, he saw, was of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe--his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. pleasant--that is, good--vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met dr. silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind and brain. there was evidently something wholly out of the usual in the state of his thoughts. yet, though strange, it was not altogether distressing; it was not the impression that the broken and violent atmosphere of the insane produces upon the mind. dr. silence realised in a flash that here was a case of absorbing interest that might require all his powers to handle properly. "i was watching you through my little peep-hole--as you saw," he began, with a pleasant smile, advancing to shake hands. "i find it of the greatest assistance sometimes--" but the patient interrupted him at once. his voice was hurried and had odd, shrill changes in it, breaking from high to low in unexpected fashion. one moment it thundered, the next it almost squeaked. "i understand without explanation," he broke in rapidly. "you get the true note of a man in this way--when he thinks himself unobserved. i quite agree. only, in my case, i fear, you saw very little. my case, as you of course grasp, dr. silence, is extremely peculiar, uncomfortably peculiar. indeed, unless sir william had positively assured me--" "my friend has sent you to me," the doctor interrupted gravely, with a gentle note of authority, "and that is quite sufficient. pray, be seated, mr.--" "mudge--racine mudge," returned the other. "take this comfortable one, mr. mudge," leading him to the fixed chair, "and tell me your condition in your own way and at your own pace. my whole day is at your service if you require it." mr. mudge moved towards the chair in question and then hesitated. "you will promise me not to use the narcotic buttons," he said, before sitting down. "i do not need them. also i ought to mention that anything you think of vividly will reach my mind. that is apparently part of my peculiar case." he sat down with a sigh and arranged his thin legs and body into a position of comfort. evidently he was very sensitive to the thoughts of others, for the picture of the green buttons had only entered the doctor's mind for a second, yet the other had instantly snapped it up. dr. silence noticed, too, that mr. mudge held on tightly with both hands to the arms of the chair. "i'm rather glad the chair is nailed to the floor," he remarked, as he settled himself more comfortably. "it suits me admirably. the fact is--and this is my case in a nutshell--which is all that a doctor of your marvellous development requires--the fact is, dr. silence, i am a victim of higher space. that's what's the matter with me--higher space!" the two looked at each other for a space in silence, the little patient holding tightly to the arms of the chair which "suited him admirably," and looking up with staring eyes, his atmosphere positively trembling with the waves of some unknown activity; while the doctor smiled kindly and sympathetically, and put his whole person as far as possible into the mental condition of the other. "higher space," repeated mr. mudge, "that's what it is. now, do you think you can help me with _that_?" there was a pause during which the men's eyes steadily searched down below the surface of their respective personalities. then dr. silence spoke. "i am quite sure i can help," he answered quietly; "sympathy must always help, and suffering always owns my sympathy. i see you have suffered cruelly. you must tell me all about your case, and when i hear the gradual steps by which you reached this strange condition, i have no doubt i can be of assistance to you." he drew a chair up beside his interlocutor and laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. his whole being radiated kindness, intelligence, desire to help. "for instance," he went on, "i feel sure it was the result of no mere chance that you became familiar with the terrors of what you term higher space; for higher space is no mere external measurement. it is, of course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner development, and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of the world at the present stage of evolution. higher space is a mythical state." "oh!" cried the other, rubbing his birdlike hands with pleasure, "the relief it is to be able to talk to some one who can understand! of course what you say is the utter truth. and you are right that no mere chance led me to my present condition, but, on the other hand, prolonged and deliberate study. yet chance in a sense now governs it. i mean, my entering the condition of higher space seems to depend upon the chance of this and that circumstance. for instance, the mere sound of that german band sent me off. not that all music will do so, but certain sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite pitch, and off i go. wagner's music always does it, and that band must have been playing a stray bit of wagner. but i'll come to all that later. only first, i must ask you to send away your man from the spy-hole." john silence looked up with a start, for mr. mudge's back was to the door, and there was no mirror. he saw the brown eye of barker glued to the little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without a word and snapped down the black shutter provided for the purpose, and then heard barker snuffle away along the passage. "now," continued the little man in the chair, "i can begin. you have managed to put me completely at my ease, and i feel i may tell you my whole case without shame or reserve. you will understand. but you must be patient with me if i go into details that are already familiar to you--details of higher space, i mean--and if i seem stupid when i have to describe things that transcend the power of language and are really therefore indescribable." "my dear friend," put in the other calmly, "that goes without saying. to know higher space is an experience that defies description, and one is obliged to make use of more or less intelligible symbols. but, pray, proceed. your vivid thoughts will tell me more than your halting words." an immense sigh of relief proceeded from the little figure half lost in the depths of the chair. such intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way was a new experience to him, and it touched his heart at once. he leaned back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms, and began in his thin, scale-like voice. "my mother was a frenchwoman, and my father an essex bargeman," he said abruptly. "hence my name--racine and mudge. my father died before i ever saw him. my mother inherited money from her bordeaux relations, and when she died soon after, i was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom. i had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in the world to look after me. i grew up, therefore, utterly without education. this much was to my advantage; i learned none of that deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn when i awakened to my true love--mathematics, higher mathematics and higher geometry. these, however, i seemed to know instinctively. it was like the memory of what i had deeply studied before; the principles were in my blood, and i simply raced through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the same with geometry. afterwards, when i read the books on these subjects, i understood how swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to me. it was simply memory. it was simply _re-collecting_ the memories of what i had known before in a previous existence and required no books to teach me." in his growing excitement, mr. mudge attempted to drag the chair forward a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he resigned himself instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew into the recital of his singular "disease." "the audacious speculations of bolyai, the amazing theories of gauss--that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel to a given line; the possibility that the angles of a triangle are together _greater_ than two right angles, if drawn upon immense curvatures--the breathless intuitions of beltrami and lobatchewsky--all these i hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the verge of my--my new world, my higher space possibilities--in a word, my disease! "how i got there," he resumed after a brief pause, during which he appeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, "is more than i can put intelligibly into words. i can only hope to leave your mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what i say. "here, however, came a change. at this point i was no longer absorbing the fruits of studies i had made before; it was the beginning of new efforts to learn for the first time, and i had to go slowly and laboriously through terrible work. here i sought for the theories and speculations of others. but books were few and far between, and with the exception of one man--a 'dreamer,' the world called him--whose audacity and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond description, i found no one to guide or help. "you, of course, dr. silence, understand something of what i am driving at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet guess what depths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an acquaintance with a new development of space should prove a source of misery and terror." mr. racine mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did the next best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the attentive man facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions, crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though he saw into this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and might any moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair and disappear form view. john silence, separated from him by three paces, sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting every word and every gesture with deep attention. "this room we now sit in, dr. silence, has one side open to space--to higher space. a closed box only _seems_ closed. there is a way in and out of a soap bubble without breaking the skin." "you tell me no new thing," the doctor interposed gently. "hence, if higher space exists and our world borders upon it and lies partially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions of all objects. we never see their true and complete shape. we see their three measurements, but not their fourth. the new direction is concealed from us, and when i hold this book and move my hand all round it i have not really made a complete circuit. we only perceive those portions of any object which exist in our three dimensions; the rest escapes us. but, once we learn to see in higher space, objects will appear as they actually are. only they will thus be hardly recognisable! "now, you may begin to grasp something of what i am coming to." "i am beginning to understand something of what you must have suffered," observed the doctor soothingly, "for i have made similar experiments myself, and only stopped just in time--" "you are the one man in all the world who can hear and understand, _and_ sympathise," exclaimed mr. mudge, grasping his hand and holding it tightly while he spoke. the nailed chair prevented further excitability. "well," he resumed, after a moment's pause, "i procured the implements and the coloured blocks for practical experiment, and i followed the instructions carefully till i had arrived at a working conception of four-dimensional space. the tessaract, the figure whose boundaries are cubes, i knew by heart. that is to say, i knew it and saw it mentally, for my eye, of course, could never take in a new measurement, or my hands and feet handle it. "so, at least, i thought," he added, making a wry face. "i had reached the stage, you see, when i could imagine in a new dimension. i was able to conceive the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically different to all we know--the shape of the tessaract. i could perceive in four dimensions. when, therefore, i looked at a cube i could see all its sides at once. its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther side and base invisible. i saw the whole thing out flat, so to speak. and this tessaract was bounded by cubes! moreover, i also saw its content--its insides." "you were not yourself able to enter this new world," interrupted dr. silence. "not then. i was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like and how exactly it must look. later, when i slipped in there and saw objects in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor three measurements, i very nearly lost my life. for, you see, space does not stop at a single new dimension, a fourth. it extends in all possible new ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of new dimensions. in other words, there is no space at all, but only a spiritual condition. but, meanwhile, i had come to grasp the strange fact that the objects in our normal world appear to us only partially." mr. mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on the very edge of the chair. "from this starting point," he resumed, "i began my studies and experiments, and continued them for years. i had money, and i was without friends. i lived in solitude and experimented. my intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for intellectually it was all unthinkable. never was the limitation of mere reason more plainly demonstrated. it was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that i began to advance. and what i learnt, and knew, and did is all impossible to put into language, since it all describes experiences transcending the experiences of men. it is only some of the results--what you would call the symptoms of my disease--that i can give you, and even these must often appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes. "i can only tell you, dr. silence"--his manner became exceedingly impressive--"that i reached sometimes a point of view whence all the great puzzle of the world became plain to me, and i understood what they call in the yoga books 'the great heresy of separateness'; why all great teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as himself; how men are all really one; and why the utter loss of self is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the soul." he paused a moment and drew breath. "your speculations have been my own long ago," the doctor said quietly. "i fully realise the force of your words. men are doubtless not separate at all--in the sense they imagine--" "all this about the very much higher space i only dimly, very dimly, conceived, of course," the other went on, raising his voice again by jerks; "but what did happen to me was the humbler accident of--the simpler disaster--oh, dear, how shall i put it--?" he stammered and showed visible signs of distress. "it was simply this," he resumed with a sudden rush of words, "that, accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, i one day slipped bodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions, yet without knowing precisely how i got there, or how i could get back again. i discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body was but an expression--a projection--of my higher four-dimensional body! "now you understand what i meant much earlier in our talk when i spoke of chance. i cannot control my entrance or exit. certain people, certain human atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts, desires even--the radiations of certain combinations of colour, and above all, the vibrations of certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into a state of what i can only describe as an intense and terrific inner vibration--and behold i am off! off in the direction at right angles to all our known directions! off in the direction the cube takes when it begins to trace the outlines of the new figure! off into my breathless and semi-divine higher space! off, _inside myself_, into the world of four dimensions!" he gasped and dropped back into the depths of the immovable chair. "and there," he whispered, his voice issuing from among the cushions, "there i have to stay until these vibrations subside, or until they do something which i cannot find words to describe properly or intelligibly to you--and then, behold, i am back again. first, that is, i disappear. then i reappear." "just so," exclaimed dr. silence, "and that is why a few--" "why a few moments ago," interrupted mr. mudge, taking the words out of his mouth, "you found me gone, and then saw me return. the music of that wretched german band sent me off. your intense thinking about me brought me back--when the band had stopped its wagner. i saw you approach the peep-hole and i saw barker's intention of doing so later. for me no interiors are hidden. i see inside. when in that state the content of your mind, as of your body, is open to me as the day. oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear!" mr. mudge stopped and again mopped his brow. a light trembling ran over the surface of his small body like wind over grass. he still held tightly to the arms of the chair. "at first," he presently resumed, "my new experiences were so vividly interesting that i felt no alarm. there was no room for it. the alarm came a little later." "then you actually penetrated far enough into that state to experience yourself as a normal portion of it?" asked the doctor, leaning forward, deeply interested. mr. mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply. "i did," he whispered, "undoubtedly i did. i am coming to all that. it began first at night, when i realised that sleep brought no loss of consciousness--" "the spirit, of course, can never sleep. only the body becomes unconscious," interposed john silence. "yes, we know that--theoretically. at night, of course, the spirit is active elsewhere, and we have no memory of where and how, simply because the brain stays behind and receives no record. but i found that, while remaining conscious, i also retained memory. i had attained to the state of continuous consciousness, for at night i regularly, with the first approaches of drowsiness, entered _nolens volens_ the four-dimensional world. "for a time this happened regularly, and i could not control it; though later i found a way to regulate it better. apparently sleep is unnecessary in the higher--the four-dimensional--body. yes, perhaps. but i should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the knowledge. for, unable to control my movements, i wandered to and fro, attracted, owing to my partial development and premature arrival, to parts of this new world that alarmed me more and more. it was the awful waste and drift of a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we know and see that i cannot even hint at the nature of the sights and objects and beings in it. more than that, i cannot even remember them. i cannot now picture them to myself even, but can recall only the _memory of the impression_ they made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of it all. to be in several places at once, for instance--" "perfectly," interrupted john silence, noticing the increase of the other's excitement, "i understand exactly. but now, please, tell me a little more of this alarm you experienced, and how it affected you." "it's not the disappearing and reappearing _per se_ that i mind," continued mr. mudge, "so much as certain other things. it's seeing people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete shapes, that is so distressing. it introduces me to a world of monsters. horses, dogs, cats, all of which i loved; people, trees, children; all that i have considered beautiful in life--everything, from a human face to a cathedral--appear to me in a different shape and aspect to all i have known before. i cannot perhaps convince you why this should be terrible, but i assure you that it is so. to hear the human voice proceeding from this novel appearance which i scarcely recognise as a human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. to see inside everything and everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing. to be so confused in geography as to find myself one moment at the north pole, and the next at clapham junction--or possibly at both places simultaneously--is absurdly terrifying. your imagination will readily furnish other details without my multiplying my experiences now. but you have no idea what it all means, and how i suffer." mr. mudge paused in his panting account and lay back in his chair. he still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him in the world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again released his left hand in order to mop his face. he looked very thin and white and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into this other space he had been talking about. john silence, too, felt warm. he had listened to every word and had made many notes. the presence of this man had an exhilarating effect upon him. it seemed as if mr. racine mudge still carried about with him something of that breathless higher-space condition he had been describing. at any rate, dr. silence had himself advanced sufficiently far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a basis of truth for their origin. after a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red cover. it had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and proceeded to open the covers. the bright eyes of mr. mudge never left him for a single second. "it almost seems a pity," he said at length, "to cure you, mr. mudge. you are on the way to discovery of great things. though you may lose your life in the process--that is, your life here in the world of three dimensions--you would lose thereby nothing of great value--you will pardon my apparent rudeness, i know--and you might gain what is infinitely greater. your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the other. also, i rather imagine, though i cannot be certain of this from any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the terror you speak of." the perspiring son of the essex bargeman and the woman of normandy bent his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply. "some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct inner experience. none of the knowledge you have foreshadowed has come to you through the senses, of course." mr. mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly. a wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it curiously in motion like a field of grass. "you are merely talking to gain time," he said hurriedly, in a shaking voice. "this thinking aloud delays us. i see ahead what you are coming to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. a band is again coming down the street, and if it plays--if it plays wagner--i shall be off in a twinkling." "precisely. i will be quick. i was leading up to the point of how to effect your cure. the way is this: you must simply learn to _block the entrances_." "true, true, utterly true!" exclaimed the little man, dodging about nervously in the depths of the chair. "but how, in the name of space, is that to be done?" "by concentration. they are all within you, these entrances, although outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards them. these external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and closed channels. you will no longer be able to find the way." "quick, quick!" cried the bobbing figure in the chair. "how is this concentration to be effected?" "this little book," continued dr. silence calmly, "will explain to you the way." he tapped the cover. "let me now read out to you certain simple instructions, composed, as i see you divine, entirely from my own personal experiences in the same direction. follow these instructions and you will no longer enter the state of higher space. the entrances will be blocked effectively." mr. mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and john silence cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct voice. but before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. a sound of street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for a band had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the house--the march from _tannhäuser_. odd as it may seem that a german band should twice within the space of an hour enter the same mews and play wagner, it was nevertheless the fact. mr. racine mudge heard it. he uttered a sharp, squeaking cry and twisted his arms with nervous energy round the chair. a piteous look that was not far from tears spread over his white face. grey shadows followed it--the grey of fear. he began to struggle convulsively. "hold me fast! catch me! for god's sake, keep me here! i'm on the rush already. oh, it's frightful!" he cried in tones of anguish, his voice as thin as a reed. dr. silence made a plunge forward to seize him, but in a flash, before he could cover the space between them, mr. racine mudge, screaming and struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility. he disappeared like an arrow from a bow propelled at infinite speed, and his voice no longer sounded in the external air, but seemed in some curious way to make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the doctor's own being. it was almost like a faint singing cry in his head, like a voice of dream, a voice of vision and unreality. "alcohol, alcohol!" it cried, "give me alcohol! it's the quickest way. alcohol, before i'm out of reach!" the doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and even more rapid action, remembered that a brandy flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less than a second he had seized it and was holding it out towards the space above the chair recently occupied by the visible mudge. then, before his very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though some one were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within. "thanks! enough! it deadens the vibrations!" cried the faint voice in his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the mantelpiece. he understood that in mudge's present condition one side of the flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the stopper. he could hardly have had a more interesting proof of what he had been hearing described at such length. but the next moment--the very same moment it almost seemed--the german band stopped midway in its tune--and there was mr. mudge back in his chair again, gasping and panting! "quick!" he shrieked, "stop that band! send it away! catch hold of me! block the entrances! block the entrances! give me the red book! oh, oh, oh-h-h-h!!!" the music had begun again. it was merely a temporary interruption. the _tannhäuser_ march started again, this time at a tremendous pace that made it sound like a rapid two-step as though the instruments played against time. but the brief interruption gave dr. silence a moment in which to collect his scattering thoughts, and before the band had got through half a bar, he had flung forward upon the chair and held mr. racine mudge, the struggling little victim of higher space, in a grip of iron. his arms went all round his diminutive person, taking in a good part of the chair at the same time. he was not a big man, yet he seemed to smother mudge completely. yet, even as he did so, and felt the wriggling form underneath him, it began to melt and slip away like air or water. the wood of the arm-chair somehow disentangled itself from between his own arms and those of mudge. the phenomenon known as the passage of matter through matter took place. the little man seemed actually to get mixed up in his own being. dr. silence could just see his face beneath him. it puckered and grew dark as though from some great internal effort. he heard the thin, reedy voice cry in his ear to "block the entrances, block the entrances!" and then--but how in the world describe what is indescribable? john silence half rose up to watch. racine mudge, his face distorted beyond all recognition, was making a marvellous inward movement, as though doubling back upon himself. he turned funnel-wise like water in a whirling vortex, and then appeared to break up somewhat as a reflection breaks up and divides in a distorting convex mirror. he went neither forward nor backwards, neither to the right nor the left, neither up nor down. but he went. he went utterly. he simply flashed away out of sight like a vanishing projectile. all but one leg! dr. silence just had the time and the presence of mind to seize upon the left ankle and boot as it disappeared, and to this he held on for several seconds like grim death. yet all the time he knew it was a foolish and useless thing to do. the foot was in his grasp one moment, and the next it seemed--this was the only way he could describe it--inside his own skin and bones, and at the same time outside his hand and all round it. it seemed mixed up in some amazing way with his own flesh and blood. then it was gone, and he was tightly grasping a draught of heated air. "gone! gone! gone!" cried a thick, whispering voice, somewhere deep within his own consciousness. "lost! lost! lost!" it repeated, growing fainter and fainter till at length it vanished into nothing and the last signs of mr. racine mudge vanished with it. john silence locked his red book and replaced it in the cabinet, which he fastened with a click, and when barker answered the bell he inquired if mr. mudge had left a card upon the table. it appeared that he had, and when the servant returned with it, dr. silence read the address and made a note of it. it was in north london. "mr. mudge has gone," he said quietly to barker, noticing his expression of alarm. "he's not taken his 'at with him, sir." "mr. mudge requires no hat where he is now," continued the doctor, stooping to poke the fire. "but he may return for it--" "and the humbrella, sir." "and the umbrella." "he didn't go out _my_ way, sir, if you please," stuttered the amazed servant, his curiosity overcoming his nervousness. "mr. mudge has his own way of coming and going, and prefers it. if he returns by the door at any time remember to bring him instantly to me, and be kind and gentle with him and ask no questions. also, remember, barker, to think pleasantly, sympathetically, affectionately of him while he is away. mr. mudge is a very suffering gentleman." barker bowed and went out of the room backwards, gasping and feeling round the inside of his collar with three very hot fingers of one hand. it was two days later when he brought in a telegram to the study. dr. silence opened it, and read as follows: "bombay. just slipped out again. all safe. have blocked entrances. thousand thanks. address cooks, london.--mudge." dr. silence looked up and saw barker staring at him bewilderingly. it occurred to him that somehow he knew the contents of the telegram. "make a parcel of mr. mudge's things," he said briefly, "and address them thomas cook & sons, ludgate circus. and send them there exactly a month from to-day and marked 'to be called for.'" "yes, sir," said barker, leaving the room with a deep sigh and a hurried glance at the waste-paper basket where his master had dropped the pink paper. the upper berth by f. marion crawford g. p. putnam's sons new york west twenty-third st. london bedford st., strand the knickerbocker press copyright, by g. p. putnam's sons publishers' note. the two stories by mr. crawford, presented in this volume, have been in print before, having been originally written for two christmas annuals which were issued some years back. with the belief that the stories are, however, still unknown to the larger portion of mr. crawford's public, and in the opinion that they are well worthy of preservation in more permanent form, the publishers have decided to reprint them as the initial volume of the "autonym" library. the autonym library. small works by representative writers, whose contributions will bear their signatures. mo, limp cloth, each cents. the autonym library is published in co-operation with mr. t. fisher unwin, of london. i. the upper berth, by f. marion crawford. ii. by reef and palm, by louis becke. with introduction by the earl of pembroke. this will be followed by volumes by s. r. crockett, and others. the upper berth _the upper berth._ somebody asked for the cigars. we had talked long, and the conversation was beginning to languish; the tobacco smoke had got into the heavy curtains, the wine had got into those brains which were liable to become heavy, and it was already perfectly evident that, unless somebody did something to rouse our oppressed spirits, the meeting would soon come to its natural conclusion, and we, the guests, would speedily go home to bed, and most certainly to sleep. no one had said anything very remarkable; it may be that no one had anything very remarkable to say. jones had given us every particular of his last hunting adventure in yorkshire. mr. tompkins, of boston, had explained at elaborate length those working principles, by the due and careful maintenance of which the atchison, topeka, and santa fé railroad not only extended its territory, increased its departmental influence, and transported live stock without starving them to death before the day of actual delivery, but, also, had for years succeeded in deceiving those passengers who bought its tickets into the fallacious belief that the corporation aforesaid was really able to transport human life without destroying it. signor tombola had endeavoured to persuade us, by arguments which we took no trouble to oppose, that the unity of his country in no way resembled the average modern torpedo, carefully planned, constructed with all the skill of the greatest european arsenals, but, when constructed, destined to be directed by feeble hands into a region where it must undoubtedly explode, unseen, unfeared, and unheard, into the illimitable wastes of political chaos. it is unnecessary to go into further details. the conversation had assumed proportions which would have bored prometheus on his rock, which would have driven tantalus to distraction, and which would have impelled ixion to seek relaxation in the simple but instructive dialogues of herr ollendorff, rather than submit to the greater evil of listening to our talk. we had sat at table for hours; we were bored, we were tired, and nobody showed signs of moving. somebody called for cigars. we all instinctively looked towards the speaker. brisbane was a man of five-and-thirty years of age, and remarkable for those gifts which chiefly attract the attention of men. he was a strong man. the external proportions of his figure presented nothing extraordinary to the common eye, though his size was above the average. he was a little over six feet in height, and moderately broad in the shoulder; he did not appear to be stout, but, on the other hand, he was certainly not thin; his small head was supported by a strong and sinewy neck; his broad muscular hands appeared to possess a peculiar skill in breaking walnuts without the assistance of the ordinary cracker, and, seeing him in profile, one could not help remarking the extraordinary breadth of his sleeves, and the unusual thickness of his chest. he was one of those men who are commonly spoken of among men as deceptive; that is to say, that though he looked exceedingly strong he was in reality very much stronger than he looked. of his features i need say little. his head is small, his hair is thin, his eyes are blue, his nose is large, he has a small moustache, and a square jaw. everybody knows brisbane, and when he asked for a cigar everybody looked at him. "it is a very singular thing," said brisbane. everybody stopped talking. brisbane's voice was not loud, but possessed a peculiar quality of penetrating general conversation, and cutting it like a knife. everybody listened. brisbane, perceiving that he had attracted their general attention, lit his cigar with great equanimity. "it is very singular," he continued, "that thing about ghosts. people are always asking whether anybody has seen a ghost. i have." "bosh! what, you? you don't mean to say so, brisbane? well, for a man of his intelligence!" a chorus of exclamations greeted brisbane's remarkable statement. everybody called for cigars, and stubbs the butler suddenly appeared from the depths of nowhere with a fresh bottle of dry champagne. the situation was saved; brisbane was going to tell a story. i am an old sailor, said brisbane, and as i have to cross the atlantic pretty often, i have my favourites. most men have their favourites. i have seen a man wait in a broadway bar for three-quarters of an hour for a particular car which he liked. i believe the bar-keeper made at least one-third of his living by that man's preference. i have a habit of waiting for certain ships when i am obliged to cross that duck-pond. it may be a prejudice, but i was never cheated out of a good passage but once in my life. i remember it very well; it was a warm morning in june, and the custom house officials, who were hanging about waiting for a steamer already on her way up from the quarantine, presented a peculiarly hazy and thoughtful appearance. i had not much luggage--i never have. i mingled with the crowd of passengers, porters, and officious individuals in blue coats and brass buttons, who seemed to spring up like mushrooms from the deck of a moored steamer to obtrude their unnecessary services upon the independent passenger. i have often noticed with a certain interest the spontaneous evolution of these fellows. they are not there when you arrive; five minutes after the pilot has called "go ahead!" they, or at least their blue coats and brass buttons, have disappeared from deck and gangway as completely as though they had been consigned to that locker which tradition unanimously ascribes to davy jones. but, at the moment of starting, they are there, clean-shaved, blue-coated, and ravenous for fees. i hastened on board. the _kamtschatka_ was one of my favourite ships. i say was, because she emphatically no longer is. i cannot conceive of any inducement which could entice me to make another voyage in her. yes, i know what you are going to say. she is uncommonly clean in the run aft, she has enough bluffing off in the bows to keep her dry, and the lower berths are most of them double. she has a lot of advantages, but i won't cross in her again. excuse the digression. i got on board. i hailed a steward, whose red nose and redder whiskers were equally familiar to me. "one hundred and five, lower berth," said i, in the businesslike tone peculiar to men who think no more of crossing the atlantic than taking a whisky cocktail at downtown delmonico's. the steward took my portmanteau, great coat, and rug. i shall never forget the expression of his face. not that he turned pale. it is maintained by the most eminent divines that even miracles cannot change the course of nature. i have no hesitation in saying that he did not turn pale; but, from his expression, i judged that he was either about to shed tears, to sneeze, or to drop my portmanteau. as the latter contained two bottles of particularly fine old sherry presented to me for my voyage by my old friend snigginson van pickyns, i felt extremely nervous. but the steward did none of these things. "well, i'm d----d!" said he in a low voice, and led the way. i supposed my hermes, as he led me to the lower regions, had had a little grog, but i said nothing, and followed him. one hundred and five was on the port side, well aft. there was nothing remarkable about the state-room. the lower berth, like most of those upon the _kamtschatka_, was double. there was plenty of room; there was the usual washing apparatus, calculated to convey an idea of luxury to the mind of a north-american indian; there were the usual inefficient racks of brown wood, in which it is more easy to hang a large-sized umbrella than the common tooth-brush of commerce. upon the uninviting mattresses were carefully folded together those blankets which a great modern humorist has aptly compared to cold buckwheat cakes. the question of towels was left entirely to the imagination. the glass decanters were filled with a transparent liquid faintly tinged with brown, but from which an odor less faint, but not more pleasing, ascended to the nostrils, like a far-off sea-sick reminiscence of oily machinery. sad-coloured curtains half-closed the upper berth. the hazy june daylight shed a faint illumination upon the desolate little scene. ugh! how i hate that state-room! the steward deposited my traps and looked at me, as though he wanted to get away--probably in search of more passengers and more fees. it is always a good plan to start in favour with those functionaries, and i accordingly gave him certain coins there and then. "i'll try and make yer comfortable all i can," he remarked, as he put the coins in his pocket. nevertheless, there was a doubtful intonation in his voice which surprised me. possibly his scale of fees had gone up, and he was not satisfied; but on the whole i was inclined to think that, as he himself would have expressed it, he was "the better for a glass." i was wrong, however, and did the man injustice. ii. nothing especially worthy of mention occurred during that day. we left the pier punctually, and it was very pleasant to be fairly under way, for the weather was warm and sultry, and the motion of the steamer produced a refreshing breeze. everybody knows what the first day at sea is like. people pace the decks and stare at each other, and occasionally meet acquaintances whom they did not know to be on board. there is the usual uncertainty as to whether the food will be good, bad, or indifferent, until the first two meals have put the matter beyond a doubt; there is the usual uncertainty about the weather, until the ship is fairly off fire island. the tables are crowded at first, and then suddenly thinned. pale-faced people spring from their seats and precipitate themselves towards the door, and each old sailor breathes more freely as his sea-sick neighbour rushes from his side, leaving him plenty of elbow room and an unlimited command over the mustard. one passage across the atlantic is very much like another, and we who cross very often do not make the voyage for the sake of novelty. whales and icebergs are indeed always objects of interest, but, after all, one whale is very much like another whale, and one rarely sees an iceberg at close quarters. to the majority of us the most delightful moment of the day on board an ocean steamer is when we have taken our last turn on deck, have smoked our last cigar, and having succeeded in tiring ourselves, feel at liberty to turn in with a clear conscience. on that first night of the voyage i felt particularly lazy, and went to bed in one hundred and five rather earlier than i usually do. as i turned in, i was amazed to see that i was to have a companion. a portmanteau, very like my own, lay in the opposite corner, and in the upper berth had been deposited a neatly folded rug with a stick and umbrella. i had hoped to be alone, and i was disappointed; but i wondered who my room-mate was to be, and i determined to have a look at him. before i had been long in bed he entered. he was, as far as i could see, a very tall man, very thin, very pale, with sandy hair and whiskers and colourless grey eyes. he had about him, i thought, an air of rather dubious fashion; the sort of man you might see in wall street, without being able precisely to say what he was doing there--the sort of man who frequents the café anglais, who always seems to be alone and who drinks champagne; you might meet him on a race-course, but he would never appear to be doing anything there either. a little over-dressed--a little odd. there are three or four of his kind on every ocean steamer. i made up my mind that i did not care to make his acquaintance, and i went to sleep saying to myself that i would study his habits in order to avoid him. if he rose early, i would rise late; if he went to bed late, i would go to bed early. i did not care to know him. if you once know people of that kind they are always turning up. poor fellow! i need not have taken the trouble to come to so many decisions about him, for i never saw him again after that first night in one hundred and five. i was sleeping soundly when i was suddenly waked by a loud noise. to judge from the sound, my room-mate must have sprung with a single leap from the upper berth to the floor. i heard him fumbling with the latch and bolt of the door, which opened almost immediately, and then i heard his footsteps as he ran at full speed down the passage, leaving the door open behind him. the ship was rolling a little, and i expected to hear him stumble or fall, but he ran as though he were running for his life. the door swung on its hinges with the motion of the vessel, and the sound annoyed me. i got up and shut it, and groped my way back to my berth in the darkness. i went to sleep again; but i have no idea how long i slept. when i awoke it was still quite dark, but i felt a disagreeable sensation of cold, and it seemed to me that the air was damp. you know the peculiar smell of a cabin which has been wet with sea water. i covered myself up as well as i could and dozed off again, framing complaints to be made the next day, and selecting the most powerful epithets in the language. i could hear my room-mate turn over in the upper berth. he had probably returned while i was asleep. once i thought i heard him groan, and i argued that he was sea-sick. that is particularly unpleasant when one is below. nevertheless i dozed off and slept till early daylight. the ship was rolling heavily, much more than on the previous evening, and the grey light which came in through the porthole changed in tint with every movement according as the angle of the vessel's side turned the glass seawards or skywards. it was very cold--unaccountably so for the month of june. i turned my head and looked at the porthole, and saw to my surprise that it was wide open and hooked back. i believe i swore audibly. then i got up and shut it. as i turned back i glanced at the upper berth. the curtains were drawn close together; my companion had probably felt cold as well as i. it struck me that i had slept enough. the state-room was uncomfortable, though, strange to say, i could not smell the dampness which had annoyed me in the night. my room-mate was still asleep--excellent opportunity for avoiding him, so i dressed at once and went on deck. the day was warm and cloudy, with an oily smell on the water. it was seven o'clock as i came out--much later than i had imagined. i came across the doctor, who was taking his first sniff of the morning air. he was a young man from the west of ireland--a tremendous fellow, with black hair and blue eyes, already inclined to be stout; he had a happy-go-lucky, healthy look about him which was rather attractive. "fine morning," i remarked, by way of introduction. "well," said he, eying me with an air of ready interest, "it's a fine morning and it's not a fine morning. i don't think it's much of a morning." "well, no--it is not so very fine," said i. "it's just what i call fuggly weather," replied the doctor. "it was very cold last night, i thought," i remarked. "however, when i looked about, i found that the porthole was wide open. i had not noticed it when i went to bed. and the state-room was damp, too." "damp!" said he. "whereabouts are you?" "one hundred and five----" to my surprise the doctor started visibly, and stared at me. "what is the matter?" i asked. "oh--nothing," he answered; "only everybody has complained of that state-room for the last three trips." "i shall complain too," i said. "it has certainly not been properly aired. it is a shame!" "i don't believe it can be helped," answered the doctor. "i believe there is something--well, it is not my business to frighten passengers." "you need not be afraid of frightening me," i replied. "i can stand any amount of damp. if i should get a bad cold i will come to you." i offered the doctor a cigar, which he took and examined very critically. "it is not so much the damp," he remarked. "however, i dare say you will get on very well. have you a room-mate?" "yes; a deuce of a fellow, who bolts out in the middle of the night and leaves the door open." again the doctor glanced curiously at me. then he lit the cigar and looked grave. "did he come back?" he asked presently. "yes. i was asleep, but i waked up and heard him moving. then i felt cold and went to sleep again. this morning i found the porthole open." "look here," said the doctor, quietly, "i don't care much for this ship. i don't care a rap for her reputation. i tell you what i will do. i have a good-sized place up here. i will share it with you, though i don't know you from adam." i was very much surprised at the proposition. i could not imagine why he should take such a sudden interest in my welfare. however, his manner as he spoke of the ship was peculiar. "you are very good, doctor," i said. "but really, i believe even now the cabin could be aired, or cleaned out, or something. why do you not care for the ship?" "we are not superstitious in our profession, sir," replied the doctor. "but the sea makes people so. i don't want to prejudice you, and i don't want to frighten you, but if you will take my advice you will move in here. i would as soon see you overboard," he added, "as know that you or any other man was to sleep in one hundred and five." "good gracious! why?" i asked. "just because on the last three trips the people who have slept there actually have gone overboard," he answered, gravely. the intelligence was startling and exceedingly unpleasant, i confess. i looked hard at the doctor to see whether he was making game of me, but he looked perfectly serious. i thanked him warmly for his offer, but told him i intended to be the exception to the rule by which every one who slept in that particular state-room went overboard. he did not say much, but looked as grave as ever, and hinted that before we got across i should probably reconsider his proposal. in the course of time we went to breakfast, at which only an inconsiderable number of passengers assembled. i noticed that one or two of the officers who breakfasted with us looked grave. after breakfast i went into my state-room in order to get a book. the curtains of the upper berth were still closely drawn. not a word was to be heard. my room-mate was probably still asleep. as i came out i met the steward whose business it was to look after me. he whispered that the captain wanted to see me, and then scuttled away down the passage as if very anxious to avoid any questions. i went toward the captain's cabin, and found him waiting for me. "sir," said he, "i want to ask a favour of you." i answered that i would do anything to oblige him. "your room-mate has disappeared," he said. "he is known to have turned in early last night. did you notice anything extraordinary in his manner?" the question coming, as it did, in exact confirmation of the fears the doctor had expressed half an hour earlier, staggered me. "you don't mean to say he has gone overboard?" i asked. "i fear he has," answered the captain. "this is the most extraordinary thing----" i began. "why?" he asked. "he is the fourth, then?" i explained. in answer to another question from the captain, i explained, without mentioning the doctor, that i had heard the story concerning one hundred and five. he seemed very much annoyed at hearing that i knew of it. i told him what had occurred in the night. "what you say," he replied, "coincides almost exactly with what was told me by the room-mates of two of the other three. they bolt out of bed and run down the passage. two of them were seen to go overboard by the watch; we stopped and lowered boats, but they were not found. nobody, however, saw or heard the man who was lost last night--if he is really lost. the steward, who is a superstitious fellow, perhaps, and expected something to go wrong, went to look for him this morning, and found his berth empty, but his clothes lying about, just as he had left them. the steward was the only man on board who knew him by sight, and he has been searching everywhere for him. he has disappeared! now, sir, i want to beg you not to mention the circumstance to any of the passengers; i don't want the ship to get a bad name, and nothing hangs about an ocean-goer like stories of suicides. you shall have your choice of any one of the officers' cabins you like, including my own, for the rest of the passage. is that a fair bargain?" "very," said i; "and i am much obliged to you. but since i am alone, and have the state-room to myself, i would rather not move. if the steward will take out that unfortunate man's things, i would as leave stay where i am. i will not say anything about the matter, and i think i can promise you that i will not follow my room-mate." the captain tried to dissuade me from my intention, but i preferred having a state-room alone to being the chum of any officer on board. i do not know whether i acted foolishly, but if i had taken his advice i should have had nothing more to tell. there would have remained the disagreeable coincidence of several suicides occurring among men who had slept in the same cabin, but that would have been all. that was not the end of the matter, however, by any means. i obstinately made up my mind that i would not be disturbed by such tales, and i even went so far as to argue the question with the captain. there was something wrong about the state-room, i said. it was rather damp. the porthole had been left open last night. my room-mate might have been ill when he came on board, and he might have become delirious after he went to bed. he might even now be hiding somewhere on board, and might be found later. the place ought to be aired and the fastening of the port looked to. if the captain would give me leave, i would see that what i thought necessary were done immediately. "of course you have a right to stay where you are if you please," he replied, rather petulantly; "but i wish you would turn out and let me lock the place up, and be done with it." i did not see it in the same light, and left the captain, after promising to be silent concerning the disappearance of my companion. the latter had had no acquaintances on board, and was not missed in the course of the day. towards evening i met the doctor again, and he asked me whether i had changed my mind. i told him i had not. "then you will before long," he said, very gravely. iii. we played whist in the evening, and i went to bed late. i will confess now that i felt a disagreeable sensation when i entered my state-room. i could not help thinking of the tall man i had seen on the previous night, who was now dead, drowned, tossing about in the long swell, two or three hundred miles astern. his face rose very distinctly before me as i undressed, and i even went so far as to draw back the curtains of the upper berth, as though to persuade myself that he was actually gone. i also bolted the door of the state-room. suddenly i became aware that the porthole was open, and fastened back. this was more than i could stand. i hastily threw on my dressing-gown and went in search of robert, the steward of my passage. i was very angry, i remember, and when i found him i dragged him roughly to the door of one hundred and five, and pushed him towards the open porthole. "what the deuce do you mean, you scoundrel, by leaving that port open every night? don't you know it is against the regulations? don't you know that if the ship heeled and the water began to come in, ten men could not shut it? i will report you to the captain, you blackguard, for endangering the ship!" i was exceedingly wroth. the man trembled and turned pale, and then began to shut the round glass plate with the heavy brass fittings. "why don't you answer me?" i said, roughly. "if you please, sir," faltered robert, "there's nobody on board as can keep this 'ere port shut at night. you can try it yourself, sir. i ain't a-going to stop hany longer on board o' this vessel, sir; i ain't, indeed. but if i was you, sir, i'd just clear out and go and sleep with the surgeon, or something, i would. look 'ere, sir, is that fastened what you may call securely, or not, sir? try it, sir, see if it will move a hinch." i tried the port, and found it perfectly tight. "well, sir," continued robert, triumphantly, "i wager my reputation as a a steward, that in 'arf an hour it will be open again; fastened back, too, sir, that's the horful thing--fastened back!" i examined the great screw and the looped nut that ran on it. "if i find it open in the night, robert, i will give you a sovereign. it is not possible. you may go." "soverin' did you say, sir? very good, sir. thank ye, sir. good night, sir. pleasant reepose, sir, and all manner of hinchantin' dreams, sir." robert scuttled away, delighted at being released. of course, i thought he was trying to account for his negligence by a silly story, intended to frighten me, and i disbelieved him. the consequence was that he got his sovereign, and i spent a very peculiarly unpleasant night. i went to bed, and five minutes after i had rolled myself up in my blankets the inexorable robert extinguished the light that burned steadily behind the ground-glass pane near the door. i lay quite still in the dark trying to go to sleep, but i soon found that impossible. it had been some satisfaction to be angry with the steward, and the diversion had banished that unpleasant sensation i had at first experienced when i thought of the drowned man who had been my chum; but i was no longer sleepy, and i lay awake for some time, occasionally glancing at the porthole, which i could just see from where i lay, and which, in the darkness, looked like a faintly-luminous soup-plate suspended in blackness. i believe i must have lain there for an hour, and, as i remember, i was just dozing into sleep when i was roused by a draught of cold air and by distinctly feeling the spray of the sea blown upon my face. i started to my feet, and not having allowed in the dark for the motion of the ship, i was instantly thrown violently across the state-room upon the couch which was placed beneath the porthole. i recovered myself immediately, however, and climbed upon my knees. the porthole was again wide open and fastened back! now these things are facts. i was wide awake when i got up, and i should certainly have been waked by the fall had i still been dozing. moreover, i bruised my elbows and knees badly, and the bruises were there on the following morning to testify to the fact, if i myself had doubted it. the porthole was wide open and fastened back--a thing so unaccountable that i remember very well feeling astonishment rather than fear when i discovered it. i at once closed the plate again and screwed down the loop nut with all my strength. it was very dark in the state-room. i reflected that the port had certainly been opened within an hour after robert had at first shut it in my presence, and i determined to watch it and see whether it would open again. those brass fittings are very heavy and by no means easy to move; i could not believe that the clump had been turned by the shaking of the screw. i stood peering out through the thick glass at the alternate white and grey streaks of the sea that foamed beneath the ship's side. i must have remained there a quarter of an hour. suddenly, as i stood, i distinctly heard something moving behind me in one of the berths, and a moment afterwards, just as i turned instinctively to look--though i could, of course, see nothing in the darkness--i heard a very faint groan. i sprang across the state-room, and tore the curtains of the upper berth aside, thrusting in my hands to discover if there were any one there. there was some one. i remember that the sensation as i put my hands forward was as though i were plunging them into the air of a damp cellar, and from behind the curtain came a gust of wind that smelled horribly of stagnant sea-water. i laid hold of something that had the shape of a man's arm, but was smooth, and wet, and icy cold. but suddenly, as i pulled, the creature sprang violently forward against me, a clammy, oozy mass, as it seemed to me, heavy and wet, yet endowed with a sort of supernatural strength. i reeled across the state-room, and in an instant the door opened and the thing rushed out. i had not had time to be frightened, and quickly recovering myself, i sprang through the door and gave chase at the top of my speed, but i was too late. ten yards before me i could see--i am sure i saw it--a dark shadow moving in the dimly lighted passage, quickly as the shadow of a fast horse thrown before a dog-cart by the lamp on a dark night. but in a moment it had disappeared, and i found myself holding on to the polished rail that ran along the bulkhead where the passage turned towards the companion. my hair stood on end, and the cold perspiration rolled down my face. i am not ashamed of it in the least: i was very badly frightened. still i doubted my senses, and pulled myself together. it was absurd, i thought. the welsh rare-bit i had eaten had disagreed with me. i had been in a nightmare. i made my way back to my state-room, and entered it with an effort. the whole place smelled of stagnant sea-water, as it had when i had waked on the previous evening. it required my utmost strength to go in and grope among my things for a box of wax lights. as i lighted a railway reading lantern which i always carry in case i want to read after the lamps are out, i perceived that the porthole was again open, and a sort of creeping horror began to take possession of me which i never felt before, nor wish to feel again. but i got a light and proceeded to examine the upper berth, expecting to find it drenched with sea-water. but i was disappointed. the bed had been slept in, and the smell of the sea was strong; but the bedding was as dry as a bone. i fancied that robert had not had the courage to make the bed after the accident of the previous night--it had all been a hideous dream. i drew the curtains back as far as i could and examined the place very carefully. it was perfectly dry. but the porthole was open again. with a sort of dull bewilderment of horror, i closed it and screwed it down, and thrusting my heavy stick through the brass loop, wrenched it with all my might, till the thick metal began to bend under the pressure. then i hooked my reading lantern into the red velvet at the head of the couch, and sat down to recover my senses if i could. i sat there all night, unable to think of rest--hardly able to think at all. but the porthole remained closed, and i did not believe it would now open again without the application of a considerable force. the morning dawned at last, and i dressed myself slowly, thinking over all that had happened in the night. it was a beautiful day and i went on deck, glad to get out in the early, pure sunshine, and to smell the breeze from the blue water, so different from the noisome, stagnant odour from my state-room. instinctively i turned aft, towards the surgeon's cabin. there he stood, with a pipe in his mouth, taking his morning airing precisely as on the preceding day. "good-morning," said he, quietly, but looking at me with evident curiosity. "doctor, you were quite right," said i. "there is something wrong about that place." "i thought you would change your mind," he answered, rather triumphantly. "you have had a bad night, eh? shall i make you a pick-me-up? i have a capital recipe." "no, thanks," i cried. "but i would like to tell you what happened." i then tried to explain as clearly as possible precisely what had occurred, not omitting to state that i had been scared as i had never been scared in my whole life before. i dwelt particularly on the phenomenon of the porthole, which was a fact to which i could testify, even if the rest had been an illusion. i had closed it twice in the night, and the second time i had actually bent the brass in wrenching it with my stick. i believe i insisted a good deal on this point. "you seem to think i am likely to doubt the story," said the doctor, smiling at the detailed account of the state of the porthole. "i do not doubt it in the least. i renew my invitation to you. bring your traps here, and take half my cabin." "come and take half of mine for one night," i said. "help me to get at the bottom of this thing." "you will get to the bottom of something else if you try," answered the doctor. "what?" i asked. "the bottom of the sea. i am going to leave the ship. it is not canny." "then you will not help me to find out----" "not i," said the doctor, quickly. "it is my business to keep my wits about me--not to go fiddling about with ghosts and things." "do you really believe it is a ghost?" i inquired, rather contemptuously. but as i spoke i remembered very well the horrible sensation of the supernatural which had got possession of me during the night. the doctor turned sharply on me---- "have you any reasonable explanation of these things to offer?" he asked. "no; you have not. well, you say you will find an explanation. i say that you won't, sir, simply because there is not any." "but, my dear sir," i retorted, "do you, a man of science, mean to tell me that such things cannot be explained?" "i do," he answered, stoutly. "and, if they could, i would not be concerned in the explanation." i did not care to spend another night alone in the state-room, and yet i was obstinately determined to get at the root of the disturbances. i do not believe there are many men who would have slept there alone, after passing two such nights. but i made up my mind to try it, if i could not get any one to share a watch with me. the doctor was evidently not inclined for such an experiment. he said he was a surgeon, and that in case any accident occurred on board he must always be in readiness. he could not afford to have his nerves unsettled. perhaps he was quite right, but i am inclined to think that his precaution was prompted by his inclination. on inquiry, he informed me that there was no one on board who would be likely to join me in my investigations, and after a little more conversation i left him. a little later i met the captain, and told him my story. i said that if no one would spend the night with me i would ask leave to have the light burning all night, and would try it alone. "look here," said he, "i will tell you what i will do. i will share your watch myself, and we will see what happens. it is my belief that we can find out between us. there may be some fellow skulking on board, who steals a passage by frightening the passengers. it is just possible that there may be something queer in the carpentering of that berth." i suggested taking the ship's carpenter below and examining the place; but i was overjoyed at the captain's offer to spend the night with me. he accordingly sent for the workman and ordered him to do anything i required. we went below at once. i had all the bedding cleared out of the upper berth, and we examined the place thoroughly to see if there was a board loose anywhere, or a panel which could be opened or pushed aside. we tried the planks everywhere, tapped the flooring, unscrewed the fittings of the lower berth and took it to pieces--in short, there was not a square inch of the state-room which was not searched and tested. everything was in perfect order, and we put everything back in its place. as we were finishing our work, robert came to the door and looked in. "well, sir--find anything, sir?" he asked with a ghastly grin. "you were right about the porthole, robert," i said, and i gave him the promised sovereign. the carpenter did his work silently and skilfully, following my directions. when he had done he spoke. "i'm a plain man, sir," he said. "but it's my belief you had better just turn out your things and let me run half a dozen four inch screws through the door of this cabin. there's no good never came o' this cabin yet, sir, and that's all about it. there's been four lives lost out o' here to my own remembrance, and that in four trips. better give it up, sir--better give it up!" "i will try it for one night more," i said. "better give it up, sir--better give it up! it's a precious bad job," repeated the workman, putting his tools in his bag and leaving the cabin. but my spirits had risen considerably at the prospect of having the captain's company, and i made up my mind not to be prevented from going to the end of the strange business. i abstained from welsh rare-bits and grog that evening, and did not even join in the customary game of whist. i wanted to be quite sure of my nerves, and my vanity made me anxious to make a good figure in the captain's eyes. iv. the captain was one of those splendidly tough and cheerful specimens of seafaring humanity whose combined courage, hardihood, and calmness in difficulty leads them naturally into high positions of trust. he was not the man to be led away by an idle tale, and the mere fact that he was willing to join me in the investigation was proof that he thought there was something seriously wrong, which could not be accounted for on ordinary theories, nor laughed down as a common superstition. to some extent, too, his reputation was at stake, as well as the reputation of the ship. it is no light thing to lose passengers overboard, and he knew it. about ten o'clock that evening, as i was smoking a last cigar, he came up to me and drew me aside from the beat of the other passengers who were patrolling the deck in the warm darkness. "this is a serious matter, mr. brisbane," he said. "we must make up our minds either way--to be disappointed or to have a pretty rough time of it. you see, i cannot afford to laugh at the affair, and i will ask you to sign your name to a statement of whatever occurs. if nothing happens to-night we will try it again to-morrow and next day. are you ready?" so we went below, and entered the state-room. as we went in i could see robert the steward, who stood a little further down the passage, watching us, with his usual grin, as though certain that something dreadful was about to happen. the captain closed the door behind us and bolted it. "supposing we put your portmanteau before the door," he suggested. "one of us can sit on it. nothing can get out then. is the port screwed down?" i found it as i had left it in the morning. indeed, without using a lever, as i had done, no one could have opened it. i drew back the curtains of the upper berth so that i could see well into it. by the captain's advice i lighted my reading-lantern, and placed it so that it shone upon the white sheets above. he insisted upon sitting on the portmanteau, declaring that he wished to be able to swear that he had sat before the door. then he requested me to search the state-room thoroughly, an operation very soon accomplished, as it consisted merely in looking beneath the lower berth and under the couch below the porthole. the spaces were quite empty. "it is impossible for any human being to get in," i said, "or for any human being to open the port." "very good," said the captain, calmly. "if we see anything now, it must be either imagination or something supernatural." i sat down on the edge of the lower berth. "the first time it happened," said the captain, crossing his legs and leaning back against the door, "was in march. the passenger who slept here, in the upper berth, turned out to have been a lunatic--at all events, he was known to have been a little touched, and he had taken his passage without the knowledge of his friends. he rushed out in the middle of the night, and threw himself overboard, before the officer who had the watch could stop him. we stopped and lowered a boat; it was a quiet night, just before that heavy weather came on; but we could not find him. of course his suicide was afterwards accounted for on the ground of his insanity." "i suppose that often happens?" i remarked, rather absently. "not often--no," said the captain; "never before in my experience, though i have heard of it happening on board of other ships. well, as i was saying, that occurred in march. on the very next trip--what are you looking at?" he asked, stopping suddenly in his narration. i believe i gave no answer. my eyes were riveted upon the porthole. it seemed to me that the brass loop-nut was beginning to turn very slowly upon the screw--so slowly, however, that i was not sure it moved at all. i watched it intently, fixing its position in my mind, and trying to ascertain whether it changed. seeing where i was looking, the captain looked too. "it moves!" he exclaimed, in a tone of conviction. "no, it does not," he added, after a minute. "if it were the jarring of the screw," said i, "it would have opened during the day; but i found it this evening jammed tight as i left it this morning." i rose and tried the nut. it was certainly loosened, for by an effort i could move it with my hands. "the queer thing," said the captain, "is that the second man who was lost is supposed to have got through that very port. we had a terrible time over it. it was in the middle of the night, and the weather was very heavy; there was an alarm that one of the ports was open and the sea running in. i came below and found everything flooded, the water pouring in every time she rolled, and the whole port swinging from the top bolts--not the porthole in the middle. well, we managed to shut it, but the water did some damage. ever since that the place smells of sea-water from time to time. we supposed the passenger had thrown himself out, though the lord only knows how he did it. the steward kept telling me that he could not keep anything shut here. upon my word--i can smell it now, cannot you?" he inquired, sniffing the air suspiciously. "yes--distinctly," i said, and i shuddered as that same odour of stagnant sea-water grew stronger in the cabin. "now, to smell like this, the place must be damp," i continued, "and yet when i examined it with the carpenter this morning everything was perfectly dry. it is most extraordinary--hallo!" my reading-lantern, which had been placed in the upper berth, was suddenly extinguished. there was still a good deal of light from the pane of ground glass near the door, behind which loomed the regulation lamp. the ship rolled heavily, and the curtain of the upper berth swung far out into the state-room and back again. i rose quickly from my seat on the edge of the bed, and the captain at the same moment started to his feet with a loud cry of surprise. i had turned with the intention of taking down the lantern to examine it, when i heard his exclamation, and immediately afterwards his call for help. i sprang towards him. he was wrestling with all his might, with the brass loop of the port. it seemed to turn against his hands in spite of all his efforts. i caught up my cane, a heavy oak stick i always used to carry, and thrust it through the ring and bore on it with all my strength. but the strong wood snapped suddenly, and i fell upon the couch. when i rose again the port was wide open, and the captain was standing with his back against the door, pale to the lips. "there is something in that berth!" he cried, in a strange voice, his eyes almost starting from his head. "hold the door, while i look--it shall not escape us, whatever it is!" but instead of taking his place, i sprang upon the lower bed, and seized something which lay in the upper berth. it was something ghostly, horrible beyond words, and it moved in my grip. it was like the body of a man long drowned, and yet it moved, and had the strength of ten men living; but i gripped it with all my might--the slippery, oozy, horrible thing. the dead white eyes seemed to stare at me out of the dusk; the putrid odour of rank sea-water was about it, and its shiny hair hung in foul wet curls over its dead face. i wrestled with the dead thing; it thrust itself upon me and forced me back and nearly broke my arms; it wound its corpse's arms about my neck, the living death, and overpowered me, so that i, at last, cried aloud and fell, and left my hold. as i fell the thing sprang across me, and seemed to throw itself upon the captain. when i last saw him on his feet his face was white and his lips set. it seemed to me that he struck a violent blow at the dead being, and then he, too, fell forward upon his face, with an inarticulate cry of horror. the thing paused an instant, seeming to hover over his prostrate body, and i could have screamed again for very fright, but i had no voice left. the thing vanished suddenly, and it seemed to my disturbed senses that it made its exit through the open port, though how that was possible, considering the smallness of the aperture, is more than any one can tell. i lay a long time upon the floor, and the captain lay beside me. at last i partially recovered my senses and moved, and i instantly knew that my arm was broken--the small bone of the left forearm near the wrist. i got upon my feet somehow, and with my remaining hand i tried to raise the captain. he groaned and moved, and at last came to himself. he was not hurt, but he seemed badly stunned. * * * * * well, do you want to hear any more? there is nothing more. that is the end of my story. the carpenter carried out his scheme of running half a dozen four-inch screws through the door of one hundred and five; and if ever you take a passage in the _kamtschatka_, you may ask for a berth in that state-room. you will be told that it is engaged--yes--it is engaged by that dead thing. i finished the trip in the surgeon's cabin. he doctored my broken arm, and advised me not to "fiddle about with ghosts and things" any more. the captain was very silent, and never sailed again in that ship, though it is still running. and i will not sail in her either. it was a very disagreeable experience, and i was very badly frightened, which is a thing i do not like. that is all. that is how i saw a ghost--if it was a ghost. it was dead, anyhow. by the waters of paradise _by the waters of paradise._ i remember my childhood very distinctly. i do not think that the fact argues a good memory, for i have never been clever at learning words by heart, in prose or rhyme; so that i believe my remembrance of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. perhaps i am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions i received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. a long series of little misfortunes, connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when i was a boy that, before i was of age, i sincerely believed myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole family, and every individual who bore my name. i was born in the old place where my father, and his father, and all his predecessors had been born, beyond the memory of man. it is a very old house, and the greater part of it was originally a castle, strongly fortified, and surrounded by a deep moat supplied with abundant water from the hills by a hidden aqueduct. many of the fortifications have been destroyed, and the moat has been filled up. the water from the aqueduct supplies great fountains, and runs down into huge oblong basins in the terraced gardens, one below the other, each surrounded by a broad pavement of marble between the water and the flower-beds. the waste surplus finally escapes through an artificial grotto, some thirty yards long, into a stream, flowing down through the park to the meadows beyond, and thence to the distant river. the buildings were extended a little and greatly altered more than two hundred years ago, in the time of charles ii., but since then little has been done to improve them, though they have been kept in fairly good repair, according to our fortunes. in the gardens there are terraces and huge hedges of box and evergreen, some of which used to be clipped into shapes of animals, in the italian style. i can remember when i was a lad how i used to try to make out what the trees were cut to represent, and how i used to appeal for explanations to judith, my welsh nurse. she dealt in a strange mythology of her own, and peopled the gardens with griffins, dragons, good genii and bad, and filled my mind with them at the same time. my nursery window afforded a view of the great fountains at the head of the upper basin, and on moonlight nights the welshwoman would hold me up to the glass and bid me look at the mist and spray rising into mysterious shapes, moving mystically in the white light like living things. "it's the woman of the water," she used to say; and sometimes she would threaten that if i did not go to sleep the woman of the water would steal up to the high window and carry me away in her wet arms. the place was gloomy. the broad basins of water and the tall evergreen hedges gave it a funereal look, and the damp-stained marble causeways by the pools might have been made of tombstones. the gray and weather-beaten walls and towers without, the dark and massively-furnished rooms within, the deep, mysterious recesses and the heavy curtains, all affected my spirits. i was silent and sad from my childhood. there was a great clock tower above, from which the hours rang dismally during the day, and tolled like a knell in the dead of night. there was no light nor life in the house, for my mother was a helpless invalid, and my father had grown melancholy in his long task of caring for her. he was a thin, dark man, with sad eyes; kind, i think, but silent and unhappy. next to my mother, i believe he loved me better than anything on earth, for he took immense pains and trouble in teaching me, and what he taught me i have never forgotten. perhaps it was his only amusement, and that may be the reason why i had no nursery governess or teacher of any kind while he lived. i used to be taken to see my mother every day, and sometimes twice a day, for an hour at a time. then i sat upon a little stool near her feet, and she would ask me what i had been doing, and what i wanted to do. i daresay she saw already the seeds of a profound melancholy in my nature, for she looked at me always with a sad smile, and kissed me with a sigh when i was taken away. one night, when i was just six years old, i lay awake in the nursery. the door was not quite shut, and the welsh nurse was sitting sewing in the next room. suddenly i heard her groan, and say in a strange voice, "one--two--one--two!" i was frightened, and i jumped up and ran to the door, barefooted as i was. "what is it, judith?" i cried, clinging to her skirts. i can remember the look in her strange dark eyes as she answered. "one--two leaden coffins, fallen from the ceiling!" she crooned, working herself in her chair. "one--two--a light coffin and a heavy coffin, falling to the floor!" then she seemed to notice me, and she took me back to bed and sang me to sleep with a queer old welsh song. i do not know how it was, but the impression got hold of me that she had meant that my father and mother were going to die very soon. they died in the very room where she had been sitting that night. it was a great room, my day nursery, full of sun when there was any: and when the days were dark it was the most cheerful place in the house. my mother grew rapidly worse, and i was transferred to another part of the building to make place for her. they thought my nursery was gayer for her, i suppose; but she could not live. she was beautiful when she was dead, and i cried bitterly. "the light one, the light one--the heavy one to come," crooned the welshwoman. and she was right. my father took the room after my mother was gone, and day by day he grew thinner and paler and sadder. "the heavy one, the heavy one--all of lead," moaned my nurse, one night in december, standing still, just as she was going to take away the light after putting me to bed. then she took me up again and wrapped me in a little gown, and led me away to my father's room. she knocked, but no one answered. she opened the door, and we found him in his easy-chair before the fire, very white, quite dead. so i was alone with the welshwoman till strange people came, and relations whom i had never seen; and then i heard them saying that i must be taken away to some more cheerful place. they were kind people, and i will not believe that they were kind only because i was to be very rich when i grew to be a man. the world never seemed to be a very bad place to me, nor all the people to be miserable sinners, even when i was most melancholy. i do not remember that any one ever did me any great injustice, nor that i was ever oppressed or ill-treated in any way, even by the boys at school. i was sad, i suppose, because my childhood was so gloomy, and, later, because i was unlucky in everything i undertook, till i finally believed i was pursued by fate, and i used to dream that the old welsh nurse and the woman of the water between them had vowed to pursue me to my end. but my natural disposition should have been cheerful, as i have often thought. among lads of my age i was never last, or even among the last, in anything; but i was never first. if i trained for a race, i was sure to sprain my ankle on the day when i was to run. if i pulled an oar with others, my oar was sure to break. if i competed for a prize, some unforeseen accident prevented my winning it at the last moment. nothing to which i put my hand succeeded, and i got the reputation of being unlucky, until my companions felt it was always safe to bet against me, no matter what the appearances might be. i became discouraged and listless in everything. i gave up the idea of competing for any distinction at the university, comforting myself with the thought that i could not fail in the examination for the ordinary degree. the day before the examination began i fell ill; and when at last i recovered, after a narrow escape from death, i turned my back upon oxford, and went down alone to visit the old place where i had been born, feeble in health and profoundly disgusted and discouraged. i was twenty-one years of age, master of myself and of my fortune; but so deeply had the long chain of small unlucky circumstances affected me that i thought seriously of shutting myself up from the world to live the life of a hermit, and to die as soon as possible. death seemed the only cheerful possibility in my existence, and my thoughts soon dwelt upon it altogether. i had never shown any wish to return to my own home since i had been taken away as a little boy, and no one had ever pressed me to do so. the place had been kept in order after a fashion, and did not seem to have suffered during the fifteen years or more of my absence. nothing earthly could affect those old grey walls that had fought the elements for so many centuries. the garden was more wild than i remembered it; the marble causeways about the pools looked more yellow and damp than of old, and the whole place at first looked smaller. it was not until i had wandered about the house and grounds for many hours that i realised the huge size of the home where i was to live in solitude. then i began to delight in it, and my resolution to live alone grew stronger. the people had turned out to welcome me, of course, and i tried to recognise the changed faces of the old gardener and the old housekeeper, and to call them by name. my old nurse i knew at once. she had grown very grey since she heard the coffins fall in the nursery fifteen years before, but her strange eyes were the same, and the look in them woke all my old memories. she went over the house with me. "and how is the woman of the water?" i asked, trying to laugh a little. "does she still play in the moonlight?" "she is hungry," answered the welshwoman, in a low voice. "hungry? then we will feed her." i laughed. but old judith turned very pale, and looked at me strangely. "feed her? ay--you will feed her well," she muttered, glancing behind her at the ancient housekeeper, who tottered after us with feeble steps through the halls and passages. i did not think much of her words. she had always talked oddly, as welshwomen will, and though i was very melancholy i am sure i was not superstitious, and i was certainly not timid. only, as in a far-off dream, i seemed to see her standing with the light in her hand and muttering, "the heavy one--all of lead," and then leading a little boy through the long corridors to see his father lying dead in a great easy-chair before a smouldering fire. so we went over the house, and i chose the rooms where i would live; and the servants i had brought with me ordered and arranged everything, and i had no more trouble. i did not care what they did provided i was left in peace, and was not expected to give directions; for i was more listless than ever, owing to the effects of my illness at college. i dined in solitary state, and the melancholy grandeur of the vast old dining-room pleased me. then i went to the room i had selected for my study, and sat down in a deep chair, under a bright light, to think, or to let my thoughts meander through labyrinths of their own choosing, utterly indifferent to the course they might take. the tall windows of the room opened to the level of the ground upon the terrace at the head of the garden. it was in the end of july, and everything was open, for the weather was warm. as i sat alone i heard the unceasing plash of the great fountains, and i fell to thinking of the woman of the water. i rose, and went out into the still night, and sat down upon a seat on the terrace, between two gigantic italian flower-pots. the air was deliciously soft and sweet with the smell of the flowers, and the garden was more congenial to me than the house. sad people always like running water and the sound of it at night, though i cannot tell why. i sat and listened in the gloom, for it was dark below, and the pale moon had not yet climbed over the hills in front of me, though all the air above was light with her rising beams. slowly the white halo in the eastern sky ascended in an arch above the wooded crests, making the outlines of the mountains more intensely black by contrast, as though the head of some great white saint were rising from behind a screen in a vast cathedral, throwing misty glories from below. i longed to see the moon herself, and i tried to reckon the seconds before she must appear. then she sprang up quickly, and in a moment more hung round and perfect in the sky. i gazed at her, and then at the floating spray of the tall fountains, and down at the pools, where the water-lilies were rocking softly in their sleep on the velvet surface of the moon-lit water. just then a great swan floated out silently into the midst of the basin, and wreathed his long neck, catching the water in his broad bill, and scattering showers of diamonds around him. suddenly, as i gazed, something came between me and the light. i looked up instantly. between me and the round disk of the moon rose a luminous face of a woman, with great strange eyes, and a woman's mouth, full and soft, but not smiling, hooded in black, staring at me as i sat still upon my bench. she was close to me--so close that i could have touched her with my hand. but i was transfixed and helpless. she stood still for a moment, but her expression did not change. then she passed swiftly away, and my hair stood up on my head, while the cold breeze from her white dress was wafted to my temples as she moved. the moonlight, shining through the tossing spray of the fountain, made traceries of shadow on the gleaming folds of her garments. in an instant she was gone and i was alone. i was strangely shaken by the vision, and some time passed before i could rise to my feet, for i was still weak from my illness, and the sight i had seen would have startled any one. i did not reason with myself, for i was certain that i had looked on the unearthly, and no argument could have destroyed that belief. at last i got up and stood unsteadily, gazing in the direction in which i thought the face had gone; but there was nothing to be seen--nothing but the broad paths, the tall, dark evergreen hedges, the tossing water of the fountains and the smooth pool below. i fell back upon the seat and recalled the face i had seen. strange to say, now that the first impression had passed, there was nothing startling in the recollection; on the contrary, i felt that i was fascinated by the face, and would give anything to see it again. i could retrace the beautiful straight features, the long dark eyes, and the wonderful mouth most exactly in my mind, and when i had reconstructed every detail from memory i knew that the whole was beautiful, and that i should love a woman with such a face. "i wonder whether she is the woman of the water!" i said to myself. then rising once more, i wandered down the garden, descending one short flight of steps after another, from terrace to terrace by the edge of the marble basins, through the shadow and through the moonlight; and i crossed the water by the rustic bridge above the artificial grotto, and climbed slowly up again to the highest terrace by the other side. the air seemed sweeter, and i was very calm, so that i think i smiled to myself as i walked, as though a new happiness had come to me. the woman's face seemed always before me, and the thought of it gave me an unwonted thrill of pleasure, unlike anything i had ever felt before. i turned, as i reached the house, and looked back upon the scene. it had certainly changed in the short hour since i had come out, and my mood had changed with it. just like my luck, i thought, to fall in love with a ghost! but in old times i would have sighed, and gone to bed more sad than ever, at such a melancholy conclusion. to-night i felt happy, almost for the first time in my life. the gloomy old study seemed cheerful when i went in. the old pictures on the walls smiled at me, and i sat down in my deep chair with a new and delightful sensation that i was not alone. the idea of having seen a ghost, and of feeling much the better for it, was so absurd that i laughed softly, as i took up one of the books i had brought with me and began to read. that impression did not wear off. i slept peacefully, and in the morning i threw open my windows to the summer air and looked down at the garden, at the stretches of green and at the coloured flower-beds, at the circling swallows and at the bright water. "a man might make a paradise of this place," i exclaimed. "a man and a woman together!" from that day the old castle no longer seemed gloomy, and i think i ceased to be sad; for some time, too, i began to take an interest in the place, and to try and make it more alive. i avoided my old welsh nurse, lest she should damp my humour with some dismal prophecy, and recall my old self by bringing back memories of my dismal childhood. but what i thought of most was the ghostly figure i had seen in the garden that first night after my arrival. i went out every evening and wandered through the walks and paths; but, try as i might, i did not see my vision again. at last, after many days, the memory grew more faint, and my old moody nature gradually overcame the temporary sense of lightness i had experienced. the summer turned to autumn, and i grew restless. it began to rain. the dampness pervaded the gardens, and the outer halls smelled musty, like tombs; the grey sky oppressed me intolerably. i left the place as it was and went abroad, determined to try anything which might possibly make a second break in the monotonous melancholy from which i suffered. ii. most people would be struck by the utter insignificance of the small events which, after the death of my parents, influenced my life and made me unhappy. the gruesome forebodings of a welsh nurse, which chanced to be realised by an odd coincidence of events, should not seem enough to change the nature of a child, and to direct the bent of his character in after years. the little disappointments of schoolboy life, and the somewhat less childish ones of an uneventful and undistinguished academic career, should not have sufficed to turn me out at one-and-twenty years of age a melancholic, listless idler. some weakness of my own character may have contributed to the result, but in a greater degree it was due to my having a reputation for bad luck. however, i will not try to analyse the causes of my state, for i should satisfy nobody, least of all myself. still less will i attempt to explain why i felt a temporary revival of my spirits after my adventure in the garden. it is certain that i was in love with the face i had seen, and that i longed to see it again; that i gave up all hope of a second visitation, grew more sad than ever, packed up my traps, and finally went abroad. but in my dreams i went back to my home, and it always appeared to me sunny and bright, as it had looked on that summer's morning after i had seen the woman by the fountain. i went to paris. i went further, and wandered about germany. i tried to amuse myself, and i failed miserably. with the aimless whims of an idle and useless man, come all sorts of suggestions for good resolutions. one day i made up my mind that i would go and bury myself in a german university for a time, and live simply like a poor student. i started with the intention of going to leipsic, determined to stay there until some event should direct my life or change my humour, or make an end of me altogether. the express train stopped at some station of which i did not know the name. it was dusk on a winter's afternoon, and i peered through the thick glass from my seat. suddenly another train came gliding in from the opposite direction, and stopped alongside of ours. i looked at the carriage which chanced to be abreast of mine, and idly read the black letters painted on a white board swinging from the brass handrail: berlin--cologne--paris. then i looked up at the window above. i started violently, and the cold perspiration broke out upon my forehead. in the dim light, not six feet from where i sat, i saw the face of a woman, the face i loved, the straight, fine features, the strange eyes, the wonderful mouth, the pale skin. her head-dress was a dark veil, which seemed to be tied about her head and passed over the shoulders under her chin. as i threw down the window and knelt on the cushioned seat, leaning far out to get a better view, a long whistle screamed through the station, followed by a quick series of dull, clanking sounds; then there was a slight jerk, and my train moved on. luckily the window was narrow, being the one over the seat, beside the door, or i believe i would have jumped out of it then and there. in an instant the speed increased, and i was being carried swiftly away in the opposite direction from the thing i loved. for a quarter of an hour i lay back in my place, stunned by the suddenness of the apparition. at last one of the two other passengers, a large and gorgeous captain of the white konigsberg cuirassiers, civilly but firmly suggested that i might shut my window, as the evening was cold. i did so, with an apology, and relapsed into silence. the train ran swiftly on, for a long time, and it was already beginning to slacken speed before entering another station, when i roused myself and made a sudden resolution. as the carriage stopped before the brilliantly lighted platform, i seized my belongings, saluted my fellow-passengers, and got out, determined to take the first express back to paris. this time the circumstances of the vision had been so natural that it did not strike me that there was anything unreal about the face, or about the woman to whom it belonged. i did not try to explain to myself how the face, and the woman, could be travelling by a fast train from berlin to paris on a winter's afternoon, when both were in my mind indelibly associated with the moonlight and the fountains in my own english home. i certainly would not have admitted that i had been mistaken in the dusk, attributing to what i had seen a resemblance to my former vision which did not really exist. there was not the slightest doubt in my mind, and i was positively sure that i had again seen the face i loved. i did not hesitate, and in a few hours i was on my way back to paris. i could not help reflecting on my ill luck. wandering as i had been for many months, it might as easily have chanced that i should be travelling in the same train with that woman, instead of going the other way. but my luck was destined to turn for a time. i searched paris for several days. i dined at the principal hotels; i went to the theatres; i rode in the bois de boulogne in the morning, and picked up an acquaintance, whom i forced to drive with me in the afternoon. i went to mass at the madeleine, and i attended the services at the english church. i hung about the louvre and notre dame. i went to versailles. i spent hours in parading the rue de rivoli, in the neighbourhood of meurice's corner, where foreigners pass and repass from morning till night. at last i received an invitation to a reception at the english embassy. i went, and i found what i had sought so long. there she was, sitting by an old lady in grey satin and diamonds, who had a wrinkled but kindly face and keen grey eyes that seemed to take in everything they saw, with very little inclination to give much in return. but i did not notice the chaperon. i saw only the face that had haunted me for months, and in the excitement of the moment i walked quickly towards the pair, forgetting such a trifle as the necessity for an introduction. she was far more beautiful than i had thought, but i never doubted that it was she herself and no other. vision or no vision before, this was the reality, and i knew it. twice her hair had been covered, now at last i saw it, and the added beauty of its magnificence glorified the whole woman. it was rich hair, fine and abundant, golden, with deep ruddy tints in it like red bronze spun fine. there was no ornament in it, not a rose, not a thread of gold, and i felt that it needed nothing to enhance its splendour; nothing but her pale face, her dark strange eyes, and her heavy eyebrows. i could see that she was slender too, but strong withal, as she sat there quietly gazing at the moving scene in the midst of the brilliant lights and the hum of perpetual conversation. i recollected the detail of introduction in time, and turned aside to look for my host. i found him at last. i begged him to present me to the two ladies, pointing them out to him at the same time. "yes--uh--by all means--uh--" replied his excellency with a pleasant smile. he evidently had no idea of my name, which was not to be wondered at. "i am lord cairngorm," i observed. "oh--by all means," answered the ambassador with the same hospitable smile. "yes--uh--the fact is, i must try and find out who they are; such lots of people, you know." "oh, if you will present me, i will try and find out for you," said i, laughing. "ah, yes--so kind of you--come along," said my host. we threaded the crowd, and in a few minutes we stood before the two ladies. "'lowmintrduce l'd cairngorm," he said; then, adding quickly to me, "come and dine to-morrow, won't you?" he glided away with his pleasant smile and disappeared in the crowd. i sat down beside the beautiful girl, conscious that the eyes of the duenna were upon me. "i think we have been very near meeting before," i remarked, by way of opening the conversation. my companion turned her eyes full upon me with an air of inquiry. she evidently did not recall my face, if she had ever seen me. "really--i cannot remember," she observed, in a low and musical voice. "when?" "in the first place, you came down from berlin by the express, ten days ago. i was going the other way, and our carriages stopped opposite each other. i saw you at the window." "yes--we came that way, but i do not remember----" she hesitated. "secondly," i continued, "i was sitting alone in my garden last summer--near the end of july--do you remember? you must have wandered in there through the park; you came up to the house and looked at me----" "was that you?" she asked, in evident surprise. then she broke into a laugh. "i told everybody i had seen a ghost; there had never been any cairngorms in the place since the memory of man. we left the next day, and never heard that you had come there; indeed, i did not know the castle belonged to you." "where were you staying?" i asked. "where? why, with my aunt, where i always stay. she is your neighbour, since it _is_ you." "i--beg your pardon--but then--is your aunt lady bluebell? i did not quite catch----" "don't be afraid. she is amazingly deaf. yes. she is the relict of my beloved uncle, the sixteenth or seventeenth baron bluebell--i forget exactly how many of them there have been. and i--do you know who i am?" she laughed, well knowing that i did not. "no," i answered frankly. "i have not the least idea. i asked to be introduced because i recognised you. perhaps--perhaps you are a miss bluebell?" "considering that you are a neighbour, i will tell you who i am," she answered. "no; i am of the tribe of bluebells, but my name is lammas, and i have been given to understand that i was christened margaret. being a floral family, they call me daisy. a dreadful american man once told me that my aunt was a bluebell and that i was a harebell--with two l's and an e--because my hair is so thick. i warn you, so that you may avoid making such a bad pun." "do i look like a man who makes puns?" i asked, being very conscious of my melancholy face and sad looks. miss lammas eyed me critically. "no; you have a mournful temperament. i think i can trust you," she answered. "do you think you could communicate to my aunt the fact that you are a cairngorm and a neighbour? i am sure she would like to know." i leaned towards the old lady, inflating my lungs for a yell. but miss lammas stopped me. "that is not of the slightest use," she remarked. "you can write it on a bit of paper. she is utterly deaf." "i have a pencil," i answered; "but i have no paper. would my cuff do, do you think?" "oh, yes!" replied miss lammas, with alacrity; "men often do that." i wrote on my cuff: "miss lammas wishes me to explain that i am your neighbour, cairngorm." then i held out my arm before the old lady's nose. she seemed perfectly accustomed to the proceeding, put up her glasses, read the words, smiled, nodded, and addressed me in the unearthly voice peculiar to people who hear nothing. "i knew your grandfather very well," she said. then she smiled and nodded to me again, and to her niece, and relapsed into silence. "it is all right," remarked miss lammas. "aunt bluebell knows she is deaf, and does not say much, like the parrot. you see, she knew your grandfather. how odd, that we should be neighbours! why have we never met before?" "if you had told me you knew my grandfather when you appeared in the garden, i should not have been in the least surprised," i answered rather irrelevantly. "i really thought you were the ghost of the old fountain. how in the world did you come there at that hour?" "we were a large party and we went out for a walk. then we thought we should like to see what your park was like in the moonlight, and so we trespassed. i got separated from the rest, and came upon you by accident, just as i was admiring the extremely ghostly look of your house, and wondering whether anybody would ever come and live there again. it looks like the castle of macbeth, or a scene from the opera. do you know anybody here?" "hardly a soul! do you?" "no. aunt bluebell said it was our duty to come. it is easy for her to go out; she does not bear the burden of the conversation." "i am sorry you find it a burden," said i. "shall i go away?" miss lammas looked at me with a sudden gravity in her beautiful eyes, and there was a sort of hesitation about the lines of her full, soft mouth. "no," she said at last, quite simply, "don't go away. we may like each other, if you stay a little longer--and we ought to, because we are neighbours in the country." i suppose i ought to have thought miss lammas a very odd girl. there is, indeed, a sort of freemasonry between people who discover that they live near each other, and that they ought to have known each other before. but there was a sort of unexpected frankness and simplicity in the girl's amusing manner which would have struck any one else as being singular, to say the least of it. to me, however, it all seemed natural enough. i had dreamed of her face too long not to be utterly happy when i met her at last, and could talk to her as much as i pleased. to me, the man of ill luck in everything, the whole meeting seemed too good to be true. i felt again that strange sensation of lightness which i had experienced after i had seen her face in the garden. the great rooms seemed brighter, life seemed worth living; my sluggish, melancholy blood ran faster, and filled me with a new sense of strength. i said to myself that without this woman i was but an imperfect being, but that with her i could accomplish everything to which i should set my hand. like the great doctor, when he thought he had cheated mephistopheles at last, i could have cried aloud to the fleeting moment, _verweile doch, du bist so schön!_ "are you always gay?" i asked, suddenly. "how happy you must be!" "the days would sometimes seem very long if i were gloomy," she answered, thoughtfully. "yes, i think i find life very pleasant, and i tell it so." "how can you 'tell life' anything?" i inquired. "if i could catch my life and talk to it, i would abuse it prodigiously, i assure you." "i daresay. you have a melancholy temper. you ought to live out of doors, dig potatoes, make hay, shoot, hunt, tumble into ditches, and come home muddy and hungry for dinner. it would be much better for you than moping in your rook tower, and hating everything." "it is rather lonely down there," i murmured, apologetically, feeling that miss lammas was quite right. "then marry, and quarrel with your wife," she laughed. "anything is better than being alone." "i am a very peaceable person. i never quarrel with anybody. you can try it. you will find it quite impossible." "will you let me try?" she asked, still smiling. "by all means--especially if it is to be only a preliminary canter," i answered, rashly. "what do you mean?" she inquired, turning quickly upon me. "oh--nothing. you might try my paces with a view to quarrelling in the future. i cannot imagine how you are going to do it. you will have to resort to immediate and direct abuse." "no. i will only say that if you do not like your life, it is your own fault. how can a man of your age talk of being melancholy, or of the hollowness of existence? are you consumptive? are you subject to hereditary insanity? are you deaf, like aunt bluebell? are you poor, like--lots of people? have you been crossed in love? have you lost the world for a woman, or any particular woman for the sake of the world? are you feeble-minded, a cripple, an outcast? are you--repulsively ugly?" she laughed again. "is there any reason in the world why you should not enjoy all you have got in life?" "no. there is no reason whatever, except that i am dreadfully unlucky, especially in small things." "then try big things, just for a change," suggested miss lammas. "try and get married, for instance, and see how it turns out." "if it turned out badly it would be rather serious." "not half so serious as it is to abuse everything unreasonably. if abuse is your particular talent, abuse something that ought to be abused. abuse the conservatives--or the liberals--it does not matter which, since they are always abusing each other. make yourself felt by other people. you will like it, if they don't. it will make a man of you. fill your mouth with pebbles, and howl at the sea, if you cannot do anything else. it did demosthenes no end of good you know. you will have the satisfaction of imitating a great man." "really, miss lammas, i think the list of innocent exercises you propose----" "very well--if you don't care for that sort of thing, care for some other sort of thing. care for something, or hate something. don't be idle. life is short, and though art may be long, plenty of noise answers nearly as well." "i do care for something--i mean, somebody," i said. "a woman? then marry her. don't hesitate." "i do not know whether she would marry me," i replied. "i have never asked her." "then ask her at once," answered miss lammas. "i shall die happy if i feel i have persuaded a melancholy fellow-creature to rouse himself to action. ask her, by all means, and see what she says. if she does not accept you at once, she may take you the next time. meanwhile, you will have entered for the race. if you lose, there are the 'all-aged trial stakes,' and the 'consolation race.'" "and plenty of selling races into the bargain. shall i take you at your word, miss lammas?" "i hope you will," she answered. "since you yourself advise me, i will. miss lammas, will you do me the honour to marry me?" for the first time in my life the blood rushed to my head and my sight swam. i cannot tell why i said it. it would be useless to try to explain the extraordinary fascination the girl exercised over me, nor the still more extraordinary feeling of intimacy with her which had grown in me during that half-hour. lonely, sad, unlucky as i had been all my life, i was certainly not timid, nor even shy. but to propose to marry a woman after half an hour's acquaintance was a piece of madness of which i never believed myself capable, and of which i should never be capable again, could i be placed in the same situation. it was as though my whole being had been changed in a moment by magic--by the white magic of her nature brought into contact with mine. the blood sank back to my heart, and a moment later i found myself staring at her with anxious eyes. to my amazement she was as calm as ever, but her beautiful mouth smiled, and there was a mischievous light in her dark-brown eyes. "fairly caught," she answered. "for an individual who pretends to be listless and sad you are not lacking in humour. i had really not the least idea what you were going to say. wouldn't it be singularly awkward for you if i had said 'yes'? i never saw anybody begin to practise so sharply what was preached to him--with so very little loss of time!" "you probably never met a man who had dreamed of you for seven months before being introduced." "no, i never did," she answered, gaily. "it smacks of the romantic. perhaps you are a romantic character, after all. i should think you were if i believed you. very well; you have taken my advice, entered for a stranger's race and lost it. try the all-aged trial stakes. you have another cuff, and a pencil. propose to aunt bluebell; she would dance with astonishment, and she might recover her hearing." iii. that was how i first asked margaret lammas to be my wife, and i will agree with any one who says i behaved very foolishly. but i have not repented of it, and i never shall. i have long ago understood that i was out of my mind that evening, but i think my temporary insanity on that occasion has had the effect of making me a saner man ever since. her manner turned my head, for it was so different from what i had expected. to hear this lovely creature, who, in my imagination, was a heroine of romance, if not of tragedy, talking familiarly and laughing readily was more than my equanimity could bear, and i lost my head as well as my heart. but when i went back to england in the spring, i went to make certain arrangements at the castle--certain changes and improvements which would be absolutely necessary. i had won the race for which i had entered myself so rashly, and we were to be married in june. whether the change was due to the orders i had left with the gardener and the rest of the servants, or to my own state of mind, i cannot tell. at all events, the old place did not look the same to me when i opened my window on the morning after my arrival. there were the grey walls below me, and the grey turrets flanking the huge building; there were the fountains, the marble causeways, the smooth basins, the tall box hedges, the water-lilies and the swans, just as of old. but there was something else there, too--something in the air, in the water, and in the greenness that i did not recognise--a light over everything by which everything was transfigured. the clock in the tower struck seven, and the strokes of the ancient bell sounded like a wedding chime. the air sang with the thrilling treble of the songbirds, with the silvery music of the plashing water and the softer harmony of the leaves stirred by the fresh morning wind. there was a smell of new-mown hay from the distant meadows, and of blooming roses from the beds below, wafted up together to my window. i stood in the pure sunshine and drank the air and all the sounds and the odours that were in it; and i looked down at my garden and said: "it is paradise, after all." i think the men of old were right when they called heaven a garden, and eden, a garden inhabited by one man and one woman, the earthly paradise. i turned away, wondering what had become of the gloomy memories i had always associated with my home. i tried to recall the impression of my nurse's horrible prophecy before the death of my parents--an impression which hitherto had been vivid enough. i tried to remember my old self, my dejection, my listlessness, my bad luck, and my petty disappointments. i endeavoured to force myself to think as i used to think, if only to satisfy myself that i had not lost my individuality. but i succeeded in none of these efforts. i was a different man, a changed being, incapable of sorrow, of ill luck, or of sadness. my life had been a dream, not evil, but infinitely gloomy and hopeless. it was now a reality, full of hope, gladness, and all manner of good. my home had been like a tomb; to-day it was paradise. my heart had been as though it had not existed; to-day it beat with strength and youth, and the certainty of realised happiness. i revelled in the beauty of the world, and called loveliness out of the future to enjoy it before time should bring it to me, as a traveller in the plains looks up to the mountains, and already tastes the cool air through the dust of the road. here, i thought, we will live and live for years. there we will sit by the fountain towards evening and in the deep moonlight. down those paths we will wander together. on those benches we will rest and talk. among those eastern hills we will ride through the soft twilight, and in the old house we will tell tales on winter nights, when the logs burn high, and the holly berries are red, and the old clock tolls out the dying year. on these old steps, in these dark passages and stately rooms, there will one day be the sound of little pattering feet, and laughing child-voices will ring up to the vaults of the ancient hall. those tiny footsteps shall not be slow and sad as mine were, nor shall the childish words be spoken in an awed whisper. no gloomy welshwoman shall people the dusky corners with weird horrors, nor utter horrid prophecies of death and ghastly things. all shall be young, and fresh, and joyful, and happy, and we will turn the old luck again, and forget that there was ever any sadness. so i thought, as i looked out of my window that morning and for many mornings after that, and every day it all seemed more real than ever before, and much nearer. but the old nurse looked at me askance, and muttered odd sayings about the woman of the water. i cared little what she said, for i was far too happy. at last the time came near for the wedding. lady bluebell and all the tribe of bluebells, as margaret called them, were at bluebell grange, for we had determined to be married in the country, and to come straight to the castle afterwards. we cared little for travelling, and not at all for a crowded ceremony at st. george's in hanover square, with all the tiresome formalities afterwards. i used to ride over to the grange every day, and very often margaret would come with her aunt and some of her cousins to the castle. i was suspicious of my own taste, and was only too glad to let her have her way about the alterations and improvements in our home. we were to be married on the thirtieth of july, and on the evening of the twenty-eighth margaret drove over with some of the bluebell party. in the long summer twilight we all went out into the garden. naturally enough, margaret and i were left to ourselves, and we wandered down by the marble basins. "it is an odd coincidence," i said; "it was on this very night last year that i first saw you." "considering that it is the month of july," answered margaret with a laugh, "and that we have been here almost every day, i don't think the coincidence is so extraordinary, after all." "no, dear," said i, "i suppose not. i don't know why it struck me. we shall very likely be here a year from to-day, and a year from that. the odd thing, when i think of it, is that you should be here at all. but my luck has turned. i ought not to think anything odd that happens now that i have you. it is all sure to be good." "a slight change in your ideas since that remarkable performance of yours in paris," said margaret. "do you know, i thought you were the most extraordinary man i had ever met." "i thought you were the most charming woman i had ever seen. i naturally did not want to lose any time in frivolities. i took you at your word, i followed your advice, i asked you to marry me, and this is the delightful result--what's the matter?" margaret had started suddenly, and her hand tightened on my arm. an old woman was coming up the path, and was close to us before we saw her, for the moon had risen, and was shining full in our faces. the woman turned out to be my old nurse. "it's only old judith, dear--don't be frightened," i said. then i spoke to the welshwoman: "what are you about, judith? have you been feeding the woman of the water?" "ay--when the clock strikes, willie--my lord, i mean," muttered the old creature, drawing aside to let us pass, and fixing her strange eyes on margaret's face. "what does she mean?" asked margaret, when we had gone by. "nothing, darling. the old thing is mildly crazy, but she is a good soul." we went on in silence for a few moments, and came to the rustic bridge just above the artificial grotto through which the water ran out into the park, dark and swift in its narrow channel. we stopped, and leaned on the wooden rail. the moon was now behind us, and shone full upon the long vista of basins and on the huge walls and towers of the castle above. "how proud you ought to be of such a grand old place!" said margaret, softly. "it is yours now, darling," i answered. "you have as good a right to love it as i--but i only love it because you are to live in it, dear." her hand stole out and lay on mine, and we were both silent. just then the clock began to strike far off in the tower. i counted--eight--nine--ten--eleven--i looked at my watch--twelve--thirteen--i laughed. the bell went on striking. "the old clock has gone crazy, like judith," i exclaimed. still it went on, note after note ringing out monotonously through the still air. we leaned over the rail, instinctively looking in the direction whence the sound came. on and on it went. i counted nearly a hundred, out of sheer curiosity, for i understood that something had broken, and that the thing was running itself down. suddenly there was a crack as of breaking wood, a cry and a heavy splash, and i was alone, clinging to the broken end of the rail of the rustic bridge. i do not think i hesitated while my pulse beat twice. i sprang clear of the bridge into the black rushing water, dived to the bottom, came up again with empty hands, turned and swam downwards through the grotto in the thick darkness, plunging and diving at every stroke, striking my head and hands against jagged stones and sharp corners, clutching at last something in my fingers, and dragging it up with all my might. i spoke, i cried aloud, but there was no answer. i was alone in the pitchy blackness with my burden, and the house was five hundred yards away. struggling still, i felt the ground beneath my feet, i saw a ray of moonlight--the grotto widened, and the deep water became a broad and shallow brook as i stumbled over the stones and at last laid margaret's body on the bank in the park beyond. "ay, willie, as the clock struck!" said the voice of judith, the welsh nurse, as she bent down and looked at the white face. the old woman must have turned back and followed us, seen the accident, and slipped out by the lower gate of the garden. "ay," she groaned, "you have fed the woman of the water this night, willie, while the clock was striking." i scarcely heard her as i knelt beside the lifeless body of the woman i loved, chafing the wet white temples, and gazing wildly into the wide-staring eyes. i remember only the first returning look of consciousness, the first heaving breath, the first movement of those dear hands stretching out towards me. * * * * * that is not much of a story, you say. it is the story of my life. that is all. it does not pretend to be anything else. old judith says my luck turned on that summer's night, when i was struggling in the water to save all that was worth living for. a month later there was a stone bridge above the grotto, and margaret and i stood on it and looked up at the moonlit castle, as we had done once before, and as we have done many times since. for all those things happened ten years ago last summer, and this is the tenth christmas eve we have spent together by the roaring logs in the old hall, talking of old times; and every year there are more old times to talk of. there are curly-headed boys, too, with red-gold hair and dark-brown eyes like their mother's, and a little margaret, with solemn black eyes like mine. why could not she look like her mother, too, as well as the rest of them? the world is very bright at this glorious christmas time, and perhaps there is little use in calling up the sadness of long ago, unless it be to make the jolly firelight seem more cheerful, the good wife's face look gladder, and to give the children's laughter a merrier ring, by contrast with all that is gone. perhaps, too, some sad-faced, listless, melancholy youth, who feels that the world is very hollow, and that life is like a perpetual funeral service, just as i used to feel myself, may take courage from my example, and having found the woman of his heart, ask her to marry him after half an hour's acquaintance. but, on the whole, i would not advise any man to marry, for the simple reason that no man will ever find a wife like mine, and being obliged to go further, he will necessarily fare worse. my wife has done miracles, but i will not assert that any other woman is able to follow her example. margaret always said that the old place was beautiful, and that i ought to be proud of it. i daresay she is right. she has even more imagination than i. but i have a good answer and a plain one, which is this--that all the beauty of the castle comes from her. she has breathed upon it all, as the children blow upon the cold glass window-panes in winter; and as their warm breath crystallises into landscapes from fairyland, full of exquisite shapes and traceries upon the blank surface, so her spirit has transformed every grey stone of the old towers, every ancient tree and hedge in the gardens, every thought in my once melancholy self. all that was old is young, and all that was sad is glad, and i am the gladdest of all. whatever heaven may be, there is no earthly paradise without woman, nor is there anywhere a place so desolate, so dreary, so unutterably miserable that a woman cannot make it seem heaven to the man she loves and who loves her. i hear certain cynics laugh, and cry that all that has been said before. do not laugh, my good cynic. you are too small a man to laugh at such a great thing as love. prayers have been said before now by many, and perhaps you say yours, too. i do not think they lose anything by being repeated, nor you by repeating them. you say that the world is bitter, and full of the waters of bitterness. love, and so live that you may be loved--the world will turn sweet for you, and you shall rest like me by the waters of paradise. the incognito library. a series of small books by representative writers, whose names will for the present not be given. in this series will be included the authorized american editions of the future issues of mr. unwin's "pseudonym library," which has won for itself a noteworthy prestige. i. the shen's pigtail, and other cues of anglo-china life, by mr. m----. ii. young sam and sabina, by the author of "gentleman upcott's daughter." these will be followed by the hon. stanbury and others, by two. helen, by vocs. lesser's daughter, etc. mo, limp cloth, each cents. generously made available by the internet archive/american libraries.) day and night stories by algernon blackwood author _of_ "ten minute stories," "julius le vallon," "the wave," etc. [illustration] new york e. p. dutton & co. fifth avenue copyright, , by e. p. dutton & co. printed in the united states of america contents chapter page i. the tryst ii. the touch of pan iii. the wings of horus iv. initiation v. a desert episode vi. the other wing vii. the occupant of the room viii. cain's atonement ix. an egyptian hornet x. by water xi. h. s. h. xii. a bit of wood xiii. a victim of higher space xiv. transition xv. the tradition day and night stories i the tryst "_je suis la première au rendez-vous. je vous attends._" as he got out of the train at the little wayside station he remembered the conversation as if it had been yesterday, instead of fifteen years ago--and his heart went thumping against his ribs so violently that he almost heard it. the original thrill came over him again with all its infinite yearning. he felt it as he had felt it _then_--not with that tragic lessening the interval had brought to each repetition of its memory. here, in the familiar scenery of its birth, he realised with mingled pain and wonder that the subsequent years had not destroyed, but only dimmed it. the forgotten rapture flamed back with all the fierce beauty of its genesis, desire at white heat. and the shock of the abrupt discovery shattered time. fifteen years became a negligible moment; the crowded experiences that had intervened seemed but a dream. the farewell scene, the conversation on the steamer's deck, were clear as of the day before. he saw the hand holding her big hat that fluttered in the wind, saw the flowers on the dress where the long coat was blown open a moment, recalled the face of a hurrying steward who had jostled them; he even heard the voices--his own and hers: "yes," she said simply; "i promise you. you have my word. i'll wait----" "till i come back to find you," he interrupted. steadfastly she repeated his actual words, then added: "here; at home--that is." "i'll come to the garden gate as usual," he told her, trying to smile. "i'll knock. you'll open the gate--as usual--and come out to me." these words, too, she attempted to repeat, but her voice failed, her eyes filled suddenly with tears; she looked into his face and nodded. it was just then that her little hand went up to hold the hat on--he saw the very gesture still. he remembered that he was vehemently tempted to tear his ticket up there and then, to go ashore with her, to stay in england, to brave all opposition--when the siren roared its third horrible warning ... and the ship put out to sea. * * * * * fifteen years, thick with various incident, had passed between them since that moment. his life had risen, fallen, crashed, then risen again. he had come back at last, fortune won by a lucky coup--at thirty-five; had come back to find her, come back, above all, to keep his word. once every three months they had exchanged the brief letter agreed upon: "i am well; i am waiting; i am happy; i am unmarried. yours----." for his youthful wisdom had insisted that no "man" had the right to keep "any woman" too long waiting; and she, thinking that letter brave and splendid, had insisted likewise that he was free--if freedom called him. they had laughed over this last phrase in their agreement. they put five years as the possible limit of separation. by then he would have won success, and obstinate parents would have nothing more to say. but when the five years ended he was "on his uppers" in a western mining town, and with the end of ten in sight those uppers, though changed, were little better, apparently, than patched and mended. and it was just then, too, that the change which had been stealing over him betrayed itself. he realised it abruptly, a sense of shame and horror in him. the discovery was made unconsciously--it disclosed itself. he was reading her letter as a labourer on a californian fruit farm: "funny she doesn't marry--some one else!" he heard himself say. the words were out before he knew it, and certainly before he could suppress them. they just slipped out, startling him into the truth; and he knew instantly that the thought was fathered in him by a hidden wish.... he was older. he had lived. it was a memory he loved. despising himself in a contradictory fashion--both vaguely and fiercely--he yet held true to his boyhood's promise. he did not write and offer to release her, as he knew they did in stories. he persuaded himself that he meant to keep his word. there was this fine, stupid, selfish obstinacy in his character. in any case, she would misunderstand and think he wanted to set free--himself. "besides--i'm still--awfully fond of her," he asserted. and it was true; only the love, it seemed, had gone its way. not that another woman took it; he kept himself clean, held firm as steel. the love, apparently, just faded of its own accord; her image dimmed, her letters ceased to thrill, then ceased to interest him. subsequent reflection made him realise other details about himself. in the interval he had suffered hardships, had learned the uncertainty of life that depends for its continuance on a little food, but that food often hard to come by, and had seen so many others go under that he held it more cheaply than of old. the wandering instinct, too, had caught him, slowly killing the domestic impulse; he lost his desire for a settled place of abode, the desire for children of his own, lost the desire to marry at all. also--he reminded himself with a smile--he had lost other things: the expression of youth _she_ was accustomed to and held always in her thoughts of him, two fingers of one hand, his hair! he wore glasses, too. the gentlemen-adventurers of life get scarred in those wild places where he lived. he saw himself a rather battered specimen well on the way to middle age. there was confusion in his mind, however, _and_ in his heart: a struggling complex of emotions that made it difficult to know exactly what he did feel. the dominant clue concealed itself. feelings shifted. a single, clear determinant did not offer. he was an honest fellow. "i can't quite make it out," he said. "what is it i really feel? and why?" his motive seemed confused. to keep the flame alight for ten long buffeting years was no small achievement; better men had succumbed in half the time. yet something in him still held fast to the girl as with a band of steel that _would_ not let her go entirely. occasionally there came strong reversions, when he ached with longing, yearning, hope; when he loved her again; remembered passionately each detail of the far-off courtship days in the forbidden rectory garden beyond the small, white garden gate. or was it merely the image and the memory he loved "again"? he hardly knew himself. he could not tell. that "again" puzzled him. it was the wrong word surely.... he still wrote the promised letter, however; it was so easy; those short sentences could not betray the dead or dying fires. one day, besides, he would return and claim her. he meant to keep his word. and he had kept it. here he was, this calm september afternoon, within three miles of the village where he first had kissed her, where the marvel of first love had come to both; three short miles between him and the little white garden gate of which at this very moment she was intently thinking, and behind which some fifty minutes later she would be standing, waiting for him.... he had purposely left the train at an earlier station; he would walk over in the dusk, climb the familiar steps, knock at the white gate in the wall as of old, utter the promised words, "i have come back to find you," enter, and--keep his word. he had written from mexico a week before he sailed; he had made careful, even accurate calculations: "in the dusk, on the sixteenth of september, i shall come and knock," he added to the usual sentences. the knowledge of his coming, therefore, had been in her possession seven days. just before sailing, moreover, he had heard from her--though not in answer, naturally. she was well; she was happy; she was unmarried; she was waiting. and now, as by some magical process of restoration--possible to deep hearts only, perhaps, though even by them quite inexplicable--the state of first love had blazed up again in him. in all its radiant beauty it lit his heart, burned unextinguished in his soul, set body and mind on fire. the years had merely veiled it. it burst upon him, captured, overwhelmed him with the suddenness of a dream. he stepped from the train. he met it in the face. it took him prisoner. the familiar trees and hedges, the unchanged countryside, the "field-smells known in infancy," all these, with something subtly added to them, rolled back the passion of his youth upon him in a flood. no longer was he bound upon what he deemed, perhaps, an act of honourable duty; it was love that drove him, as it drove him fifteen years before. and it drove him with the accumulated passion of desire long forcibly repressed; almost as if, out of some fancied notion of fairness to the girl, he had deliberately, yet still unconsciously, said "no" to it; that _she_ had not faded, but that he had decided, "_i_ must forget her." that sentence: "why doesn't she marry--some one else?" had not betrayed change in himself. it surprised another motive: "it's not fair to--her!" his mind worked with a curious rapidity, but worked within one circle only. the stress of sudden emotion was extraordinary. he remembered a thousand things--yet, chief among them, those occasional reversions when he had felt he "loved her again." had he not, after all, deceived himself? had she ever really "faded" at all? had he not felt he ought to let her fade--release her that way? and the change in himself?--that sentence on the californian fruit-farm--what did they mean? which had been true, the fading or the love? the confusion in his mind was hopeless, but, as a matter of fact, he did not think at all: he only _felt_. the momentum, besides, was irresistible, and before the shattering onset of the sweet revival he did not stop to analyse the strange result. he knew certain things, and cared to know no others: that his heart was leaping, his blood running with the heat of twenty, that joy recaptured him, that he must see, hear, touch her, hold her in his arms--and marry her. for the fifteen years had crumbled to a little thing, and at thirty-five he felt himself but twenty, rapturously, deliciously in love. he went quickly, eagerly down the little street to the inn, still feeling only, not thinking anything. the vehement uprush of the old emotion made reflection of any kind impossible. he gave no further thought to those long years "out there," when her name, her letters, the very image of her in his mind, had found him, if not cold, at least without keen response. all that was forgotten as though it had not been. the steadfast thing in him, this strong holding to a promise which had never wilted, ousted the recollection of fading and decay that, whatever caused them, certainly _had_ existed. and this steadfast thing now took command. this enduring quality in his character led him. it was only towards the end of the hurried tea he first received the singular impression--vague, indeed, but undeniably persistent--the strange impression that he was _being_ led. yet, though aware of this, he did not pause to argue or reflect. the emotional displacement in him, of course, had been more than considerable: there had been upheaval, a change whose abruptness was even dislocating, fundamental in a sense he could not estimate--shock. yet he took no count of anything but the one mastering desire to get to her as soon as possible, knock at the small, white garden gate, hear her answering voice, see the low wooden door swing open--take her. there was joy and glory in his heart, and a yearning sweet delight. at this very moment she was expecting him. and he--had come. behind these positive emotions, however, there lay concealed all the time others that were of a negative character. consciously, he was not aware of them, but they were there; they revealed their presence in various little ways that puzzled him. he recognised them absentmindedly, as it were; did not analyse or investigate them. for, through the confusion upon his faculties, rose also a certain hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. there was a touch of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. it lay, perhaps, in that tinge of sadness which accompanies the twilight of an autumn day, when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past. some trick of memory connected it with a scene of early boyhood, when, meaning to see the sunrise, he overslept, and, by a brief half-hour, was just--too late. he noted it merely, then passed on; he did not understand it; he hurried all the more, this hurry the only sign that it _was_ noted. "i must be quick," flashed up across his strongly positive emotions. and, due to this hurry, possibly, were the slight miscalculations that he made. they were very trivial. he rang for sugar, though the bowl stood just before his eyes, yet when the girl came in he forgot completely what he rang for--and inquired instead about the evening trains to london. and, when the time-table was laid before him, he examined it without intelligence, then looked up suddenly into the maid's face with a question about flowers. were there flowers to be had in the village anywhere? what kind of flowers? "oh, a bouquet or a"--he hesitated, searching for a word that tried to present itself, yet was not the word _he_ wanted to make use of--"or a wreath--of some sort?" he finished. he took the very word he did not want to take. in several things he did and said, this hesitancy and miscalculation betrayed themselves--such trivial things, yet significant in an elusive way that he disliked. there was sadness, insecurity somewhere in them. and he resented them, aware of their existence only because they qualified his joy. there was a whispered "no" floating somewhere in the dusk. almost--he felt disquiet. he hurried, more and more eager to be off upon his journey--the final part of it. moreover, there were other signs of an odd miscalculation--dislocation, perhaps, properly speaking--in him. though the inn was familiar from his boyhood days, kept by the same old couple, too, he volunteered no information about himself, nor asked a single question about the village he was bound for. he did not even inquire if the rector--her father--still were living. and when he left he entirely neglected the gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece of plush, dusty pampas-grass in waterless vases on either side. it did not matter, apparently, whether he looked well or ill, tidy or untidy. he forgot that when his cap was off the absence of thick, accustomed hair must alter him considerably, forgot also that two fingers were missing from one hand, the right hand, the hand that she would presently clasp. nor did it occur to him that he wore glasses, which must change his expression and add to the appearance of the years he bore. none of these obvious and natural things seemed to come into his thoughts at all. he was in a hurry to be off. he did not think. but, though his mind may not have noted these slight betrayals with actual sentences, his attitude, nevertheless, expressed them. this was, it seemed, the _feeling_ in him: "what could such details matter to her _now_? why, indeed, should he give to them a single thought? it was himself she loved and waited for, not separate items of his external, physical image." as well think of the fact that she, too, must have altered--outwardly. it never once occurred to him. such details were of to-day.... he was only impatient to come to her quickly, very quickly, instantly, if possible. he hurried. there was a flood of boyhood's joy in him. he paid for his tea, giving a tip that was twice the price of the meal, and set out gaily and impetuously along the winding lane. charged to the brim with a sweet picture of a small, white garden gate, the loved face close behind it, he went forward at a headlong pace, singing "nancy lee" as he used to sing it fifteen years before. with action, then, the negative sensations hid themselves, obliterated by the positive ones that took command. the former, however, merely lay concealed; they waited. thus, perhaps, does vital emotion, overlong restrained, denied, indeed, of its blossoming altogether, take revenge. repressed elements in his psychic life asserted themselves, selecting, as though naturally, a dramatic form. the dusk fell rapidly, mist rose in floating strips along the meadows by the stream; the old, familiar details beckoned him forwards, then drove him from behind as he went swiftly past them. he recognised others rising through the thickening air beyond; they nodded, peered, and whispered; sometimes they almost sang. and each added to his inner happiness; each brought its sweet and precious contribution, and built it into the reconstructed picture of the earlier, long-forgotten rapture. it was an enticing and enchanted journey that he made, something impossibly blissful in it, something, too, that seemed curiously--inevitable. for the scenery had not altered all these years, the details of the country were unchanged, everything he saw was rich with dear and precious association, increasing the momentum of the tide that carried him along. yonder was the stile over whose broken step he had helped her yesterday, and there the slippery plank across the stream where she looked above her shoulder to ask for his support; he saw the very bramble bushes where she scratched her hand, a-blackberrying, the day before ... and, finally, the weather-stained signpost, "to the rectory." it pointed to the path through the dangerous field where farmer sparrow's bull provided such a sweet excuse for holding, leading--protecting her. from the entire landscape rose a steam of recent memory, each incident alive, each little detail brimmed with its cargo of fond association. he read the rough black lettering on the crooked arm--it was rather faded, but he knew it too well to miss a single letter--and hurried forward along the muddy track; he looked about him for a sign of farmer sparrow's bull; he even felt in the misty air for the little hand that he might take and lead her into safety. the thought of her drew him on with such irresistible anticipation that it seemed as if the cumulative drive of vanished and unsated years evoked the tangible phantom almost. he actually felt it, soft and warm and clinging in his own, that was no longer incomplete and mutilated. yet it was not he who led and guided now, but, more and more, he who was being led. the hint had first betrayed its presence at the inn; it now openly declared itself. it had crossed the frontier into a positive sensation. its growth, swiftly increasing all this time, had accomplished itself; he had ignored, somehow, both its genesis and quick development; the result he plainly recognised. she was expecting him, indeed, but it was more than expectation; there was calling in it--she summoned him. her thought and longing reached him along that old, invisible track love builds so easily between true, faithful hearts. all the forces of her being, her very voice, came towards him through the deepening autumn twilight. he had not noticed the curious physical restoration in his hand, but he was vividly aware of this more magical alteration--that _she_ led and guided him, drawing him ever more swiftly towards the little, white garden gate where she stood at this very moment, waiting. her sweet strength compelled him; there was this new touch of something irresistible about the familiar journey, where formerly had been delicious yielding only, shy, tentative advance. he realised it--inevitable. his footsteps hurried, faster and ever faster; so deep was the allurement in his blood, he almost ran. he reached the narrow, winding lane, and raced along it. he knew each bend, each angle of the holly hedge, each separate incident of ditch and stone. he could have plunged blindfold down it at top speed. the familiar perfumes rushed at him--dead leaves and mossy earth and ferns and dock leaves, bringing the bewildering currents of strong emotion in him all together as in a rising wave. he saw, then, the crumbling wall, the cedars topping it with spreading branches, the chimneys of the rectory. on his right bulked the outline of the old, grey church; the twisted, ancient yews, the company of gravestones, upright and leaning, dotting the ground like listening figures. but he looked at none of these. for, on his left, he already saw the five rough steps of stone that led from the lane towards a small, white garden gate. that gate at last shone before him, rising through the misty air. he reached it. he stopped dead a moment. his heart, it seemed, stopped too, then took to violent hammering in his brain. there was a roaring in his mind, and yet a marvellous silence--just behind it. then the roar of emotion died away. there was utter stillness. this stillness, silence, was all about him. the world seemed preternaturally quiet. but the pause was too brief to measure. for the tide of emotion had receded only to come on again with redoubled power. he turned, leaped forward, clambered impetuously up the rough stone steps, and flung himself, breathless and exhausted, against the trivial barrier that stood between his eyes and--hers. in his wild, half violent impatience, however, he stumbled. that roaring, too, confused him. he fell forward, it seemed, for twilight had merged in darkness, and he misjudged the steps, the distances he yet knew so well. for a moment, certainly, he lay at full length upon the uneven ground against the wall; the steps had tripped him. and then he raised himself and knocked. his right hand struck upon the small, white garden gate. upon the two lost fingers he felt the impact. "i am here," he cried, with a deep sound in his throat as though utterance was choked and difficult. "i have come back--to find you." for a fraction of a second he waited, while the world stood still and waited with him. but there was no delay. her answer came at once: "i am well.... i am happy.... i am waiting." and the voice was dear and marvellous as of old. though the words were strange, reminding him of something dreamed, forgotten, lost, it seemed, he did not take special note of them. he only wondered that she did not open instantly that he might see her. speech could follow, but sight came surely first! there was this lightning-flash of disappointment in him. ah, she was lengthening out the marvellous moment, as often and often she had done before. it was to tease him that she made him wait. he knocked again; he pushed against the unyielding surface. for he noticed that it was unyielding; and there was a depth in the tender voice that he could not understand. "open!" he cried again, but louder than before. "i have come back to find you!" and as he said it the mist struck cold and thick against his face. but her answer froze his blood. "i cannot open." and a sudden anguish of despair rose over him; the sound of her voice was strange; in it was faintness, distance--as well as depth. it seemed to echo. something frantic seized him then--the panic sense. "open, open! come out to me!" he tried to shout. his voice failed oddly; there was no power in it. something appalling struck him between the eyes. "for god's sake, open. i'm waiting here! open, and come out to me!" the reply was muffled by distance that already seemed increasing; he was conscious of freezing cold about him--in his heart. "i cannot open. you must come in to me. i'm here and--waiting--always." he knew not exactly then what happened, for the cold grew deeper and the icy mist was in his throat. no words would come. he rose to his knees, and from his knees to his feet. he stooped. with all his force he knocked again; in a blind frenzy of despair he hammered and beat against the unyielding barrier of the small, white garden gate. he battered it till the skin of his knuckles was torn and bleeding--the first two fingers of a hand already mutilated. he remembers the torn and broken skin, for he noticed in the gloom that stains upon the gate bore witness to his violence; it was not till afterwards that he remembered the other fact--that the hand had already suffered mutilation, long, long years ago. the power of sound was feebly in him; he called aloud; there was no answer. he tried to scream, but the scream was muffled in his throat before it issued properly; it was a nightmare scream. as a last resort he flung himself bodily upon the unyielding gate, with such precipitate violence, moreover, that his face struck against its surface. from the friction, then, along the whole length of his cheek he knew that the surface was not smooth. cold and rough that surface was; but also--it was not of wood. moreover, there was writing on it he had not seen before. how he deciphered it in the gloom, he never knew. the lettering was deeply cut. perhaps he traced it with his fingers; his right hand certainly lay stretched upon it. he made out a name, a date, a broken verse from the bible, and the words, "died peacefully." the lettering was sharply cut with edges that were new. for the date was of a week ago; the broken verse ran, "when the shadows flee away ..." and the small, white garden gate was unyielding because it was of--stone. * * * * * at the inn he found himself staring at a table from which the tea things had not been cleared away. there was a railway time-table in his hands, and his head was bent forwards over it, trying to decipher the lettering in the growing twilight. beside him, still fingering a shilling, stood the serving-girl; her other hand held a brown tray with a running dog painted upon its dented surface. it swung to and fro a little as she spoke, evidently continuing a conversation her customer had begun. for she was giving information--in the colourless, disinterested voice such persons use: "we all went to the funeral, sir, all the country people went. the grave was her father's--the family grave...." then, seeing that her customer was too absorbed in the time-table to listen further, she said no more but began to pile the tea things on to the tray with noisy clatter. ten minutes later, in the road, he stood hesitating. the signal at the station just opposite was already down. the autumn mist was rising. he looked along the winding road that melted away into the distance, then slowly turned and reached the platform just as the london train came in. he felt very old--too old to walk six miles.... ii the touch of pan an idiot, heber understood, was a person in whom intelligence had been arrested--instinct acted, but not reason. a lunatic, on the other hand, was some one whose reason had gone awry--the mechanism of the brain was injured. the lunatic was out of relation with his environment; the idiot had merely been delayed _en route_. be that as it might, he knew at any rate that a lunatic was not to be listened to, whereas an idiot--well, the one he fell in love with certainly had the secret of some instinctual knowledge that was not only joy, but a kind of sheer natural joy. probably it was that sheer natural joy of living that reason argues to be untaught, degraded. in any case--at thirty--he married her instead of the daughter of a duchess he was engaged to. they lead to-day that happy, natural, vagabond life called idiotic, unmindful of that world the majority of reasonable people live only to remember. though born into an artificial social clique that made it difficult, heber had always loved the simple things. nature, especially, meant much to him. he would rather see a woodland misty with bluebells than all the châteaux on the loire; the thought of a mountain valley in the dawn made his feet lonely in the grandest houses. yet in these very houses was his home established. not that he under-estimated worldly things--their value was too obvious--but that it was another thing he wanted. only he did not know precisely _what_ he wanted until this particular idiot made it plain. her case was a mild one, possibly; the title bestowed by implication rather than by specific mention. her family did not say that she was imbecile or half-witted, but that she "was not all there" they probably did say. perhaps she saw men as trees walking, perhaps she saw through a glass darkly. heber, who had met her once or twice, though never yet to speak to, did not analyse her degree of sight, for in him, personally, she woke a secret joy and wonder that almost involved a touch of awe. the part of her that was not "all there" dwelt in an "elsewhere" that he longed to know about. he wanted to share it with her. she seemed aware of certain happy and desirable things that reason and too much thinking hide. he just felt this instinctively without analysis. the values they set upon the prizes of life were similar. money to her was just stamped metal, fame a loud noise of sorts, position nothing. of people she was aware as a dog or bird might be aware--they were kind or unkind. her parents, having collected much metal and achieved position, proceeded to make a loud noise of sorts with some success; and since she did not contribute, either by her appearance or her tastes, to their ambitions, they neglected her and made excuses. they were ashamed of her existence. her father in particular justified nietzsche's shrewd remark that no one with a loud voice can listen to subtle thoughts. she was, perhaps, sixteen--for, though she looked it, eighteen or nineteen was probably more in accord with her birth certificate. her mother was content, however, that she should dress the lesser age, preferring to tell strangers that she was childish, rather than admit that she was backward. "you'll never marry at all, child, much less marry as you might," she said, "if you go about with that rabbit expression on your face. that's not the way to catch a nice young man of the sort we get down to stay with us now. many a chorus-girl with less than you've got has caught them easily enough. your sister's done well. why not do the same? there's nothing to be shy or frightened about." "but i'm not shy or frightened, mother. i'm bored. i mean _they_ bore me." it made no difference to the girl; she was herself. the bored expression in the eyes--the rabbit, not-all-there expression--gave place sometimes to another look. yet not often, nor with anybody. it was this other look that stirred the strange joy in the man who fell in love with her. it is not to be easily described. it was very wonderful. whether sixteen or nineteen, she then looked--a thousand. * * * * * the house-party was of that up-to-date kind prevalent in heber's world. husbands and wives were not asked together. there was a cynical disregard of the decent (not the stupid) conventions that savoured of abandon, perhaps of decadence. he only went himself in the hope of seeing the backward daughter once again. her millionaire parents afflicted him, the smart folk tired him. their peculiar affectation of a special language, their strange belief that they were of importance, their treatment of the servants, their calculated self-indulgence, all jarred upon him more than usual. at bottom he heartily despised the whole vapid set. he felt uncomfortable and out of place. though not a prig, he abhorred the way these folk believed themselves the climax of fine living. their open immorality disgusted him, their indiscriminate love-making was merely rather nasty; he watched the very girl he was at last to settle down with behaving as the tone of the clique expected over her final fling--and, bored by the strain of so much "modernity," he tried to get away. tea was long over, the sunset interval invited, he felt hungry for trees and fields that were not self-conscious--and he escaped. the flaming june day was turning chill. dusk hovered over the ancient house, veiling the pretentious new wing that had been added. and he came across the idiot girl at the bend of the drive, where the birch trees shivered in the evening wind. his heart gave a leap. she was leaning against one of the dreadful statues--it was a satyr--that sprinkled the lawn. her back was to him; she gazed at a group of broken pine trees in the park beyond. he paused an instant, then went on quickly, while his mind scurried to recall her name. they were within easy speaking range. "miss elizabeth!" he cried, yet not too loudly lest she might vanish as suddenly as she had appeared. she turned at once. her eyes and lips were smiling welcome at him without pretence. she showed no surprise. "you're the first one of the lot who's said it properly," she exclaimed, as he came up. "everybody calls me elizabeth instead of elspeth. it's idiotic. they don't even take the trouble to get a name right." "it is," he agreed. "quite idiotic." he did not correct her. possibly he had said elspeth after all--the names were similar. her perfectly natural voice was grateful to his ear, and soothing. he looked at her all over with an open admiration that she noticed and, without concealment, liked. she was very untidy, the grey stockings on her vigorous legs were torn, her short skirt was spattered with mud. her nut-brown hair, glossy and plentiful, flew loose about neck and shoulders. in place of the usual belt she had tied a coloured handkerchief round her waist. she wore no hat. what she had been doing to get in such a state, while her parents entertained a "distinguished" party, he did not know, but it was not difficult to guess. climbing trees or riding bareback and astride was probably the truth. yet her dishevelled state became her well, and the welcome in her face delighted him. she remembered him, she was glad. he, too, was glad, and a sense both happy and reckless stirred in his heart. "like a wild animal," he said, "you come out in the dusk----" "to play with my kind," she answered in a flash, throwing him a glance of invitation that made his blood go dancing. he leaned against the statue a moment, asking himself why this young cinderella of a parvenu family delighted him when all the london beauties left him cold. there was a lift through his whole being as he watched her, slim and supple, grace shining through the untidy modern garb--almost as though she wore no clothes. he thought of a panther standing upright. her poise was so alert--one arm upon the marble ledge, one leg bent across the other, the hip-line showing like a bird's curved wing. wild animal or bird, flashed across his mind: something untamed and natural. another second, and she might leap away--or spring into his arms. it was a deep, stirring sensation in him that produced the mental picture. "pure and natural," a voice whispered with it in his heart, "as surely as _they_ are just the other thing!" and the thrill struck with unerring aim at the very root of that unrest he had always known in the state of life to which he was called. she made it natural, clean, and pure. this girl and himself were somehow kin. the primitive thing broke loose in him. in two seconds, while he stood with her beside the vulgar statue, these thoughts passed through his mind. but he did not at first give utterance to any of them. he spoke more formally, although laughter, due to his happiness, lay behind: "they haven't asked you to the party, then? or you don't care about it? which is it?" "both," she said, looking fearlessly into his face. "but i've been here ten minutes already. why were you so long?" this outspoken honesty was hardly what he expected, yet in another sense he was not surprised. her eyes were very penetrating, very innocent, very frank. he felt her as clean and sweet as some young fawn that asks plainly to be stroked and fondled. he told the truth: "i couldn't get away before. i had to play about and----" when she interrupted with impatience: "_they_ don't really want you," she exclaimed scornfully. "i do." and, before he could choose one out of the several answers that rushed into his mind, she nudged him with her foot, holding it out a little so that he saw the shoelace was unfastened. she nodded her head towards it, and pulled her skirt up half an inch as he at once stooped down. "and, anyhow," she went on as he fumbled with the lace, touching her ankle with his hand, "you're going to marry one of them. i read it in the paper. it's idiotic. you'll be miserable." the blood rushed to his head, but whether owing to his stooping or to something else, he could not say. "i only came--i only accepted," he said quickly, "because i wanted to see _you_ again." "of course. i made mother ask you." he did an impulsive thing. kneeling as he was, he bent his head a little lower and suddenly kissed the soft grey stocking--then stood up and looked her in the face. she was laughing happily, no sign of embarrassment in her anywhere, no trace of outraged modesty. she just looked very pleased. "i've tied a knot that won't come undone in a hurry----" he began, then stopped dead. for as he said it, gazing into her smiling face, another expression looked forth at him from the two big eyes of hazel. something rushed from his heart to meet it. it may have been that playful kiss, it may have been the way she took it; but, at any rate, there was a strength in the new emotion that made him unsure of who he was and of whom he looked at. he forgot the place, the time, his own identity and hers. the lawn swept from beneath his feet, the english sunset with it. he forgot his host and hostess, his fellow guests, even his father's name and his own into the bargain. he was carried away upon a great tide, the girl always beside him. he left the shore-line in the distance, already half forgotten, the shore-line of his education, learning, manners, social point of view--everything to which his father had most carefully brought him up as the scion of an old-established english family. this girl had torn up the anchor. only the anchor had previously been loosened a little by his own unconscious and restless efforts.... where was she taking him to? upon what island would they land? "i'm younger than you--a good deal," she broke in upon his rushing mood. "but that doesn't matter a bit, does it? we're about the same age really." with the happy sound of her voice the extraordinary sensation passed--or, rather, it became normal. but that it had lasted an appreciable time was proved by the fact that they had left the statue on the lawn, the house was no longer visible behind them, and they were walking side by side between the massive rhododendron clumps. they brought up against a five-barred gate into the park. they leaned upon the topmost bar, and he felt her shoulder touching his--edging into it--as they looked across to the grove of pines. "i feel absurdly young," he said without a sign of affectation, "and yet i've been looking for you a thousand years and more." the afterglow lit up her face; it fell on her loose hair and tumbled blouse, turning them amber red. she looked not only soft and comely, but extraordinarily beautiful. the strange expression haunted the deep eyes again, the lips were a little parted, the young breast heaving slightly, joy and excitement in her whole presentment. and as he watched her he knew that all he had just felt was due to her close presence, to her atmosphere, her perfume, her physical warmth and vigour. it had emanated directly from her being. "of course," she said, and laughed so that he felt her breath upon his face. he bent lower to bring his own on a level, gazing straight into her eyes that were fixed upon the field beyond. they were clear and luminous as pools of water, and in their centre, sharp as a photograph, he saw the reflection of the pine grove, perhaps a hundred yards away. with detailed accuracy he saw it, empty and motionless in the glimmering june dusk. then something caught his eye. he examined the picture more closely. he drew slightly nearer. he almost touched her face with his own, forgetting for a moment whose were the eyes that served him for a mirror. for, looking intently thus, it seemed to him that there was a movement, a passing to and fro, a stirring as of figures among the trees.... then suddenly the entire picture was obliterated. she had dropped her lids. he heard her speaking--the warm breath was again upon his face: "in the heart of that wood dwell i." his heart gave another leap--more violent than the first--for the wonder and beauty of the sentence caught him like a spell. there was a lilt and rhythm in the words that made it poetry. she laid emphasis upon the pronoun and the nouns. it seemed the last line of some delicious runic verse: "in the _heart_ of the _wood_--dwell _i_...." and it flashed across him: that living, moving, inhabited pine wood was her thought. it was thus she saw it. her nature flung back to a life she understood, a life that needed, claimed her. the ostentatious and artificial values that surrounded her, she denied, even as the distinguished house-party of her ambitious, masquerading family neglected her. of course she was unnoticed by them, just as a swallow or a wild-rose were unnoticed. he knew her secret then, for she had told it to him. it was his own secret too. they were akin, as the birds and animals were akin. they belonged together in some free and open life, natural, wild, untamed. that unhampered life was flowing about them now, rising, beating with delicious tumult in her veins and his, yet innocent as the sunlight and the wind--because it was as freely recognised. "elspeth!" he cried, "come, take me with you! we'll go at once. come--hurry--before we forget to be happy, or remember to be wise again----!" his words stopped half-way towards completion, for a perfume floated past him, born of the summer dusk, perhaps, yet sweet with a penetrating magic that made his senses reel with some remembered joy. no flower, no scented garden bush delivered it. it was the perfume of young, spendthrift life, sweet with the purity that reason had not yet stained. the girl moved closer. gathering her loose hair between her fingers, she brushed his cheeks and eyes with it, her slim, warm body pressing against him as she leaned over laughingly. "in the darkness," she whispered in his ear; "when the moon puts the house upon the statue!" and he understood. her world lay behind the vulgar, staring day. he turned. he heard the flutter of skirts--just caught the grey stockings, swift and light, as they flew behind the rhododendron masses. and she was gone. he stood a long time, leaning upon that five-barred gate.... it was the dressing-gong that recalled him at length to what seemed the present. by the conservatory door, as he went slowly in, he met his distinguished cousin--who was helping the girl he himself was to marry to enjoy her "final fling." he looked at his cousin. he realised suddenly that he was merely vicious. there was no sun and wind, no flowers--there was depravity only, lust instead of laughter, excitement in place of happiness. it was calculated, not spontaneous. his mind was in it. without joy it was. he was not natural. "not a girl in the whole lot fit to look at," he exclaimed with peevish boredom, excusing himself stupidly for his illicit conduct. "i'm off in the morning." he shrugged his blue-blooded shoulders. "these millionaires! their shooting's all right, but their mixum-gatherum week-ends--bah!" his gesture completed all he had to say about this one in particular. he glanced sharply, nastily, at his companion. "_you_ look as if you'd found something!" he added, with a suggestive grin. "or have you seen the ghost that was paid for with the house?" and he guffawed and let his eyeglass drop. "lady hermione will be asking for an explanation--eh?" "idiot!" replied heber, and ran upstairs to dress for dinner. but the word was wrong, he remembered, as he closed his door. it was lunatic he had meant to say, yet something more as well. he saw the smart, modern philanderer somehow as a beast. it was nearly midnight when he went up to bed, after an evening of intolerable amusement. the abandoned moral attitude, the common rudeness, the contempt of all others but themselves, the ugly jests, the horseplay of tasteless minds that passed for gaiety, above all the shamelessness of the women that behind the cover of fine breeding aped emancipation, afflicted him to a boredom that touched desperation. he understood now with a clarity unknown before. as with his cousin, so with these. they took life, he saw, with a brazen effrontery they thought was freedom, while yet it was life that they denied. he felt vampired and degraded; spontaneity went out of him. the fact that the geography of bedrooms was studied openly seemed an affirmation of vice that sickened him. their ways were nauseous merely. he escaped--unnoticed. he locked his door, went to the open window, and looked out into the night--then started. for silver dressed the lawn and park, the shadow of the building lay dark across the elaborate garden, and the moon, he noticed, was just high enough to put the house upon the statue. the chimney-stacks edged the pedestal precisely. "odd!" he exclaimed. "odd that i should come at the very moment----!" then smiled as he realised how his proposed adventure would be misinterpreted, its natural innocence and spirit ruined--if he were seen. "and some one would be sure to see me on a night like this. there are couples still hanging about in the garden." and he glanced at the shrubberies and secret paths that seemed to float upon the warm june air like islands. he stood for a moment framed in the glare of the electric light, then turned back into the room; and at that instant a low sound like a bird-call rose from the lawn below. it was soft and flutey, as though some one played two notes upon a reed, a piping sound. he had been seen, and she was waiting for him. before he knew it, he had made an answering call, of oddly similar kind, then switched the light out. three minutes later, dressed in simpler clothes, with a cap pulled over his eyes, he reached the back lawn by means of the conservatory and the billiard-room. he paused a moment to look about him. there was no one, although the lights were still ablaze. "i am an idiot," he chuckled to himself. "i'm acting on instinct!" he ran. the sweet night air bathed him from head to foot; there was strength and cleansing in it. the lawn shone wet with dew. he could almost smell the perfume of the stars. the fumes of wine, cigars and artificial scent were left behind, the atmosphere exhaled by civilisation, by heavy thoughts, by bodies overdressed, unwisely stimulated--all, all forgotten. he passed into a world of magical enchantment. the hush of the open sky came down. in black and white the garden lay, brimmed full with beauty, shot by the ancient silver of the moon, spangled with the stars' old-gold. and the night wind rustled in the rhododendron masses as he flew between them. in a moment he was beside the statue, engulfed now by the shadow of the building, and the girl detached herself silently from the blur of darkness. two arms were flung about his neck, a shower of soft hair fell on his cheek with a heady scent of earth and leaves and grass, and the same instant they were away together at full speed--towards the pine wood. their feet were soundless on the soaking grass. they went so swiftly that they made a whir of following wind that blew her hair across his eyes. and the sudden contrast caused a shock that put a blank, perhaps, upon his mind, so that he lost the standard of remembered things. for it was no longer merely a particular adventure; it seemed a habit and a natural joy resumed. it was not new. he knew the momentum of an accustomed happiness, mislaid, it may be, but certainly familiar. they sped across the gravel paths that intersected the well-groomed lawn, they leaped the flower-beds, so laboriously shaped in mockery, they clambered over the ornamental iron railings, scorning the easier five-barred gate into the park. the longer grass then shook the dew in soaking showers against his knees. he stooped, as though in some foolish effort to turn up something, then realised that his legs, of course, were bare. _her_ garment was already high and free, for she, too, was barelegged like himself. he saw her little ankles, wet and shining in the moonlight, and flinging himself down, he kissed them happily, plunging his face into the dripping, perfumed grass. her ringing laughter mingled with his own, as she stooped beside him the same instant; her hair hung in a silver cloud; her eyes gleamed through its curtain into his; then, suddenly, she soaked her hands in the heavy dew and passed them over his face with a softness that was like the touch of some scented southern wind. "now you are anointed with the night," she cried. "no one will know you. you are forgotten of the world. kiss me!" "we'll play for ever and ever," he cried, "the eternal game that was old when the world was yet young," and lifting her in his arms he kissed her eyes and lips. there was some natural bliss of song and dance and laughter in his heart, an elemental bliss that caught them together as wind and sunlight catch the branches of a tree. she leaped from the ground to meet his swinging arms. he ran with her, then tossed her off and caught her neatly as she fell. evading a second capture, she danced ahead, holding out one shining arm that he might follow. hand in hand they raced on together through the clean summer moonlight. yet there remained a smooth softness as of fur against his neck and shoulders, and he saw then that she wore skins of tawny colour that clung to her body closely, that he wore them too, and that her skin, like his own, was of a sweet dusky brown. then, pulling her towards him, he stared into her face. she suffered the close gaze a second, but no longer, for with a burst of sparkling laughter again she leaped into his arms, and before he shook her free she had pulled and tweaked the two small horns that hid in the thick curly hair behind, and just above, the ears. and that wilful tweaking turned him wild and reckless. that touch ran down him deep into the mothering earth. he leaped and ran and sang with a great laughing sound. the wine of eternal youth flushed all his veins with joy, and the old, old world was young again with every impulse of natural happiness intensified with the earth's own foaming tide of life. from head to foot he tingled with the delight of spring, prodigal with creative power. of course he could fly the bushes and fling wild across the open! of course the wind and moonlight fitted close and soft about him like a skin! of course he had youth and beauty for playmates, with dancing, laughter, singing, and a thousand kisses! for he and she were natural once again. they were free together of those long-forgotten days when "pan leaped through the roses in the month of june...!" with the girl swaying this way and that upon his shoulders, tweaking his horns with mischief and desire, hanging her flying hair before his eyes, then bending swiftly over again to lift it, he danced to join the rest of their companions in the little moonlit grove of pines beyond.... they rose somewhat pointed, perhaps, against the moonlight, those english pines--more with the shape of cypresses, some might have thought. a stream gushed down between their roots, there were mossy ferns, and rough grey boulders with lichen on them. but there was no dimness, for the silver of the moon sprinkled freely through the branches like the faint sunlight that it really was, and the air ran out to meet them with a heady fragrance that was wiser far than wine. the girl, in an instant, was whirled from her perch on his shoulders and caught by a dozen arms that bore her into the heart of the jolly, careless throng. whisht! whew! whir! she was gone, but another, fairer still, was in her place, with skins as soft and knees that clung as tightly. her eyes were liquid amber, grapes hung between her little breasts, her arms entwined about him, smoother than marble, and as cool. she had a crystal laugh. but he flung her off, so that she fell plump among a group of bigger figures lolling against a twisted root and roaring with a jollity that boomed like wind through the chorus of a song. they seized her, kissed her, then sent her flying. they were happier with their glad singing. they held stone goblets, red and foaming, in their broad-palmed hands. "the mountains lie behind us!" cried a figure dancing past. "we are come at last into our valley of delight. grapes, breasts, and rich red lips! ho! ho! it is time to press them that the juice of life may run!" he waved a cluster of ferns across the air and vanished amid a cloud of song and laughter. "it is ours. use it!" answered a deep, ringing voice. "the valleys are our own. no climbing now!" and a wind of echoing cries gave answer from all sides. "life! life! life! abundant, flowing over--use it, use it!" a troop of nymphs rushed forth, escaped from clustering arms and lips they yet openly desired. he chased them in and out among the waving branches, while she who had brought him ever followed, and sped past him and away again. he caught three gleaming soft brown bodies, then fell beneath them, smothered, bubbling with joyous laughter--next freed himself and, while they sought to drag him captive again, escaped and raced with a leap upon a slimmer, sweeter outline that swung up--only just in time--upon a lower bough, whence she leaned down above him with hanging net of hair and merry eyes. a few feet beyond his reach, she laughed and teased him--the one who had brought him in, the one he ever sought, and who for ever sought him too.... it became a riotous glory of wild children who romped and played with an impassioned glee beneath the moon. for the world was young and they, her happy offspring, glowed with the life she poured so freely into them. all intermingled, the laughing voices rose into a foam of song that broke against the stars. the difficult mountains had been climbed and were forgotten. good! then, enjoy the luxuriant, fruitful valley and be glad! and glad they were, brimful with spontaneous energy, natural as birds and animals that obeyed the big, deep rhythm of a simpler age--natural as wind and innocent as sunshine. yet, for all the untamed riot, there was a lift of beauty pulsing underneath. even when the wildest abandon approached the heat of orgy, when the recklessness appeared excess--there hid that marvellous touch of loveliness which makes the natural sacred. there was coherence, purpose, the fulfilling of an exquisite law: there was worship. the form it took, haply, was strange as well as riotous, yet in its strangeness dreamed innocence and purity, and in its very riot flamed that spirit which is divine. for he found himself at length beside her once again; breathless and panting, her sweet brown limbs aglow from the excitement of escape denied; eyes shining like a blaze of stars, and pulses beating with tumultuous life--helpless and yielding against the strength that pinned her down between the roots. his eyes put mastery on her own. she looked up into his face, obedient, happy, soft with love, surrendered with the same delicious abandon that had swept her for a moment into other arms. "you caught me in the end," she sighed. "i only played awhile." "i hold you for ever," he replied, half wondering at the rough power in his voice. it was here the hush of worship stole upon her little face, into her obedient eyes, about her parted lips. she ceased her wilful struggling. "listen!" she whispered. "i hear a step upon the glades beyond. the iris and the lily open; the earth is ready, waiting; we must be ready too! _he_ is coming!" he released her and sprang up; the entire company rose too. all stood, all bowed the head. there was an instant's subtle panic, but it was the panic of reverent awe that preludes a descent of deity. for a wind passed through the branches with a sound that is the oldest in the world and so the youngest. above it there rose the shrill, faint piping of a little reed. only the first, true sounds were audible--wind and water--the tinkling of the dewdrops as they fell, the murmur of the trees against the air. this was the piping that they heard. and in the hush the stars bent down to hear, the riot paused, the orgy passed and died. the figures waited, kneeling then with one accord. they listened with--the earth. "he comes.... he comes ..." the valley breathed about them. there was a footfall from far away, treading across a world unruined and unstained. it fell with the wind and water, sweetening the valley into life as it approached. across the rivers and forests it came gently, tenderly, but swiftly and with a power that knew majesty. "he comes.... he comes...!" rose with the murmur of the wind and water from the host of lowered heads. the footfall came nearer, treading a world grown soft with worship. it reached the grove. it entered. there was a sense of intolerable loveliness, of brimming life, of rapture. the thousand faces lifted like a cloud. they heard the piping close. and so he came. but he came with blessing. with the stupendous presence there was joy, the joy of abundant, natural life, pure as the sunlight and the wind. he passed among them. there was great movement--as of a forest shaking, as of deep water falling, as of a cornfield swaying to the wind, yet gentle as of a harebell shedding its burden of dew that it has held too long because of love. he passed among them, touching every head. the great hand swept with tenderness each face, lingered a moment on each beating heart. there was sweetness, peace, and loveliness; but above all, there was--life. he sanctioned every natural joy in them and blessed each passion with his power of creation.... yet each one saw him differently: some as a wife or maiden desired with fire, some as a youth or stalwart husband, others as a figure veiled with stars or cloaked in luminous mist, hardly attainable; others, again--the fewest these, not more than two or three--as that mysterious wonder which tempts the heart away from known familiar sweetness into a wilderness of undecipherable magic without flesh and blood.... to two, in particular, he came so near that they could feel his breath of hills and fields upon their eyes. he touched them with both mighty hands. he stroked the marble breasts, he felt the little hidden horns ... and, as they bent lower so that their lips met together for an instant, he took her arms and twined them about the curved, brown neck that she might hold him closer still.... again a footfall sounded far away upon an unruined world ... and he was gone--back into the wind and water whence he came. the thousand faces lifted; all stood up; the hush of worship still among them. there was a quiet as of the dawn. the piping floated over woods and fields, fading into silence. all looked at one another.... and then once more the laughter and the play broke loose. "we'll go," she cried, "and peep upon that other world where life hangs like a prison on their eyes!" and, in a moment, they were across the soaking grass, the lawn and flower-beds, and close to the walls of the heavy mansion. he peered in through a window, lifting her up to peer in with him. he recognised the world to which outwardly he belonged; he understood; a little gasp escaped him; and a slight shiver ran down the girl's body into his own. she turned her eyes away. "see," she murmured in his ear, "it's ugly, it's not natural. they feel guilty and ashamed. there is no innocence!" she saw the men; it was the women that he saw chiefly. lolling ungracefully, with a kind of boldness that asserted independence, the women smoked their cigarettes with an air of invitation they sought to conceal and yet showed plainly. he saw his familiar world in nakedness. their backs were bare, for all the elaborate clothes they wore; they hung their breasts uncleanly; in their eyes shone light that had never known the open sun. hoping they were alluring and desirable, they feigned a guilty ignorance of that hope. they all pretended. instead of wind and dew upon their hair, he saw flowers grown artificially to ape wild beauty, tresses without lustre borrowed from the slums of city factories. he watched them manoeuvring with the men; heard dark sentences; caught gestures half delivered whose meaning should just convey that glimpse of guilt they deemed to increase pleasure. the women were calculating, but nowhere glad; the men experienced, but nowhere joyous. pretended innocence lay cloaked with a veil of something that whispered secretly, clandestine, ashamed, yet with a brazen air that laid mockery instead of sunshine in their smiles. vice masqueraded in the ugly shape of pleasure; beauty was degraded into calculated tricks. they were not natural. they knew not joy. "the forward ones, the civilised!" she laughed in his ear, tweaking his horns with energy. "_we_ are the backward!" "unclean," he muttered, recalling a catchword of the world he gazed upon. they were the civilised! they were refined and educated--advanced. generations of careful breeding, mate cautiously selecting mate, laid the polish of caste upon their hands and faces where gleamed ridiculous, untaught jewels--rings, bracelets, necklaces hanging absurdly from every possible angle. "but--they are dressed up--for fun," he exclaimed, more to himself than to the girl in skins who clung to his shoulders with her naked arms. "_un_dressed!" she answered, putting her brown hand in play across his eyes. "only they have forgotten even that!" and another shiver passed through her into him. he turned and hid his face against the soft skins that touched his cheek. he kissed her body. seizing his horns, she pressed him to her, laughing happily. "look!" she whispered, raising her head again; "they're coming out." and he saw that two of them, a man and a girl, with an interchange of secret glances, had stolen from the room and were already by the door of the conservatory that led into the garden. it was his wife to be--and his distinguished cousin. "oh, pan!" she cried in mischief. the girl sprang from his arms and pointed. "we will follow them. we will put natural life into their little veins!" "or panic terror," he answered, catching the yellow panther skin and following her swiftly round the building. he kept in the shadow, though she ran full into the blaze of moonlight. "but they can't see us," she called, looking over her shoulder a moment. "they can only feel our presence, perhaps." and, as she danced across the lawn, it seemed a moonbeam slipped from a sapling birch tree that the wind curved earthwards, then tossed back against the sky. keeping just ahead, they led the pair, by methods known instinctively to elemental blood yet not translatable--led them towards the little grove of waiting pines. the night wind murmured in the branches; a bird woke into a sudden burst of song. these sounds were plainly audible. but four little pointed ears caught other, wilder notes behind the wind and music of the bird--the cries and ringing laughter, the leaping footsteps and the happy singing of their merry kin within the wood. and the throng paused then amid the revels to watch the "civilised" draw near. they presently reached the trees, halted, looked about them, hesitated a moment--then, with a hurried movement as of shame and fear lest they be caught, entered the zone of shadow. "let's go in here," said the man, without music in his voice. "it's dry on the pine needles, and we can't be seen." he led the way; she picked up her skirts and followed over the strip of long wet grass. "here's a log all ready for us," he added, sat down, and drew her into his arms with a sigh of satisfaction. "sit on my knee; it's warmer for your pretty figure." he chuckled; evidently they were on familiar terms, for though she hesitated, pretending to be coy, there was no real resistance in her, and she allowed the ungraceful roughness. "but are we _quite_ safe? are you sure?" she asked between his kisses. "what does it matter, even if we're not?" he replied, establishing her more securely on his knees. "but, as a matter of fact, we're safer here than in my own house." he kissed her hungrily. "by jove, hermione, but you're divine," he cried passionately, "divinely beautiful. i love you with every atom of my being--with my soul." "yes, dear, i know--i mean, i know you do, but----" "but what?" he asked impatiently. "those detectives----" he laughed. yet it seemed to annoy him. "my wife is a beast, isn't she?--to have me watched like that," he said quickly. "they're everywhere," she replied, a sudden hush in her tone. she looked at the encircling trees a moment, then added bitterly: "i hate her, simply _hate_ her." "i love you," he cried, crushing her to him, "that's all that matters now. don't let's waste time talking about the rest." she contrived to shudder, and hid her face against his coat, while he showered kisses on her neck and hair. and the solemn pine trees watched them, the silvery moonlight fell on their faces, the scent of new-mown hay went floating past. "i love you with my very soul," he repeated with intense conviction. "i'd do anything, give up anything, bear anything--just to give you a moment's happiness. i swear it--before god!" there was a faint sound among the trees behind them, and the girl sat up, alert. she would have scrambled to her feet, but that he held her tight. "what the devil's the matter with you to-night?" he asked in a different tone, his vexation plainly audible. "you're as nervy as if _you_ were being watched, instead of me." she paused before she answered, her finger on her lip. then she said slowly, hushing her voice a little: "watched! that's exactly what i did feel. i've felt it ever since we came into the wood." "nonsense, hermione. it's too many cigarettes." he drew her back into his arms, forcing her head up so that he could kiss her better. "i suppose it is nonsense," she said, smiling. "it's gone now, anyhow." he began admiring her hair, her dress, her shoes, her pretty ankles, while she resisted in a way that proved her practice. "it's not _me_ you love," she pouted, yet drinking in his praise. she listened to his repeated assurances that he loved her with his "soul" and was prepared for any sacrifice. "i feel so safe with you," she murmured, knowing the moves in the game as well as he did. she looked up guiltily into his face, and he looked down with a passion that he thought perhaps was joy. "you'll be married before the summer's out," he said, "and all the thrill and excitement will be over. poor hermione!" she lay back in his arms, drawing his face down with both hands, and kissing him on the lips. "you'll have more of him than you can do with--eh? as much as you care about, anyhow." "i shall be much more free," she whispered. "things will be easier. and i've got to marry some one----" she broke off with another start. there was a sound again behind them. the man heard nothing. the blood in his temples pulsed too loudly, doubtless. "well, what is it this time?" he asked sharply. she was peering into the wood, where the patches of dark shadow and moonlit spaces made odd, irregular patterns in the air. a low branch waved slightly in the wind. "did you hear that?" she asked nervously. "wind," he replied, annoyed that her change of mood disturbed his pleasure. "but something moved----" "only a branch. we're quite alone, quite safe, i tell you," and there was a rasping sound in his voice as he said it. "don't be so imaginative. i can take care of you." she sprang up. the moonlight caught her figure, revealing its exquisite young curves beneath the smother of the costly clothing. her hair had dropped a little in the struggle. the man eyed her eagerly, making a quick, impatient gesture towards her, then stopped abruptly. he saw the terror in her eyes. "oh, hark! what's that?" she whispered in a startled voice. she put her finger up. "oh, let's go back. i don't like this wood. i'm frightened." "rubbish," he said, and tried to catch her by the waist. "it's safer in the house--my room--or yours----" she broke off again. "there it is--don't you hear? it's a footstep!" her face was whiter than the moon. "i tell you it's the wind in the branches," he repeated gruffly. "oh, come on, _do_. we were just getting jolly together. there's nothing to be afraid of. can't you believe me?" he tried to pull her down upon his knee again with force. his face wore an unpleasant expression that was half leer, half grin. but the girl stood away from him. she continued to peer nervously about her. she listened. "you give me the creeps," he exclaimed crossly, clawing at her waist again with passionate eagerness that now betrayed exasperation. his disappointment turned him coarse. the girl made a quick movement of escape, turning so as to look in every direction. she gave a little scream. "that _was_ a step. oh, oh, it's close beside us. i heard it. we're being watched!" she cried in terror. she darted towards him, then shrank back. he did not try to touch her this time. "moonshine!" he growled. "you've spoilt my--spoilt our chance with your silly nerves." but she did not hear him apparently. she stood there shivering as with sudden cold. "there! i saw it again. i'm sure of it. something went past me through the air." and the man, still thinking only of his own pleasure frustrated, got up heavily, something like anger in his eyes. "all right," he said testily; "if you're going to make a fuss, we'd better go. the house _is_ safer, possibly, as you say. you know my room. come along!" even that risk he would not take. he loved her with his "soul." they crept stealthily out of the wood, the girl slightly in front of him, casting frightened backward glances. afraid, guilty, ashamed, with an air as though they had been detected, they stole back towards the garden and the house, and disappeared from view. and a wind rose suddenly with a rushing sound, poured through the wood as though to cleanse it, swept out the artificial scent and trace of shame, and brought back again the song, the laughter, and the happy revels. it roared across the park, it shook the windows of the house, then sank away as quickly as it came. the trees stood motionless again, guarding their secret in the clean, sweet moonlight that held the world in dream until the dawn stole up and sunshine took the earth with joy. iii the wings of horus binovitch had the bird in him somewhere: in his features, certainly, with his piercing eye and hawk-like nose; in his movements, with his quick way of flitting, hopping, darting; in the way he perched on the edge of a chair; in the manner he pecked at his food; in his twittering, high-pitched voice as well; and, above all, in his mind. he skimmed all subjects and picked their heart out neatly, as a bird skims lawn or air to snatch its prey. he had the bird's-eye view of everything. he loved birds and understood them instinctively; could imitate their whistling notes with astonishing accuracy. their one quality he had not was poise and balance. he was a nervous little man; he was neurasthenic. and he was in egypt by doctor's orders. such imaginative, unnecessary ideas he had! such uncommon beliefs! "the old egyptians," he said laughingly, yet with a touch of solemn conviction in his manner, "were a great people. their consciousness was different from ours. the bird idea, for instance, conveyed a sense of deity to them--of bird deity, that is: they had sacred birds--hawks, ibis, and so forth--and worshipped them." and he put his tongue out as though to say with challenge, "ha, ha!" "they also worshipped cats and crocodiles and cows," grinned palazov. binovitch seemed to dart across the table at his adversary. his eyes flashed; his nose pecked the air. almost one could imagine the beating of his angry wings. "because everything alive," he half screamed, "was a symbol of some spiritual power to them. your mind is as literal as a dictionary and as incoherent. pages of ink without connected meaning! verb always in the infinitive! if you were an old egyptian, you--you"--he flashed and spluttered, his tongue shot out again, his keen eyes blazed--"you might take all those words and spin them into a great interpretation of life, a cosmic romance, as they did. instead, you get the bitter, dead taste of ink in your mouth, and spit it over us like that"--he made a quick movement of his whole body as a bird that shakes itself--"in empty phrases." khilkoff ordered another bottle of champagne, while vera, his sister, said half nervously, "let's go for a drive; it's moonlight." there was enthusiasm at once. another of the party called the head waiter and told him to pack food and drink in baskets. it was only eleven o'clock. they would drive out into the desert, have a meal at two in the morning, tell stories, sing, and see the dawn. it was in one of those cosmopolitan hotels in egypt which attract the ordinary tourists as well as those who are doing a "cure," and all these russians were ill with one thing or another. all were ordered out for their health, and all were the despair of their doctors. they were as unmanageable as a bazaar and as incoherent. excess and bed were their routine. they lived, but none of them got better. equally, none of them got angry. they talked in this strange personal way without a shred of malice or offence. the english, french, and germans in the hotel watched them with remote amazement, referring to them as "that russian lot." their energy was elemental. they never stopped. they merely disappeared when the pace became too fast, then reappeared again after a day or two, and resumed their "living" as before. binovitch, despite his neurasthenia, was the life of the party. he was also a special patient of dr. plitzinger, the famous psychiatrist, who took a peculiar interest in his case. it was not surprising. binovitch was a man of unusual ability and of genuine, deep culture. but there was something more about him that stimulated curiosity. there was this striking originality. he said and did surprising things. "i could fly if i wanted to," he said once when the airmen came to astonish the natives with their biplanes over the desert, "but without all that machinery and noise. it's only a question of believing and understanding----" "show us!" they cried. "let's see you fly!" "he's got it! he's off again! one of his impossible moments." these occasions when binovitch let himself go always proved wildly entertaining. he said monstrously incredible things as though he really did believe them. they loved his madness, for it gave them new sensations. "it's only levitation, after all, this flying," he exclaimed, shooting out his tongue between the words, as his habit was when excited; "and what is levitation but a power of the air? none of you can hang an orange in space for a second, with all your scientific knowledge; but the moon is always levitated perfectly. and the stars. d'you think they swing on wires? what raised the enormous stones of ancient egypt? d'you really believe it was heaped-up sand and ropes and clumsy leverage and all our weary and laborious mechanical contrivances? bah! it was levitation. it was the powers of the air. believe in those powers, and gravity becomes a mere nursery trick--true where it is, but true nowhere else. to know the fourth dimension is to step out of a locked room and appear instantly on the roof or in another country altogether. to know the powers of the air, similarly, is to annihilate what you call weight--and fly." "show us, show us!" they cried, roaring with delighted laughter. "it's a question of belief," he repeated, his tongue appearing and disappearing like a pointed shadow. "it's in the heart; the power of the air gets into your whole being. why should i show you? why should i ask my deity to persuade your scoffing little minds by any miracle? for it is deity, i tell you, and nothing else. i _know_ it. follow one idea like that, as i follow my bird idea--follow it with the impetus and undeviating concentration of a projectile--and you arrive at power. you know deity--the bird idea of deity, that is. _they_ knew that. the old egyptians knew it." "oh, show us, show us!" they shouted impatiently, wearied of his nonsense-talk. "get up and fly! levitate yourself, as they did! become a star!" binovitch turned suddenly very pale, and an odd light shone in his keen brown eyes. he rose slowly from the edge of the chair where he was perched. something about him changed. there was silence instantly. "i _will_ show you," he said calmly, to their intense amazement; "not to convince your disbelief, but to prove it to myself. for the powers of the air are with me here. i believe. and horus, great falcon-headed symbol, is my patron god." the suppressed energy in his voice and manner was indescribable. there was a sense of lifting, upheaving power about him. he raised his arms; his face turned upward; he inflated his lungs with a deep, long breath, and his voice broke into a kind of singing cry, half prayer, half chant: "o horus, bright-eyed deity of wind, [ ]feather my soul though earth's thick air, to know thy awful swiftness----" [ ] the russian is untranslatable. the phrase means, "give my life wings." he broke off suddenly. he climbed lightly and swiftly upon the nearest table--it was in a deserted card-room, after a game in which he had lost more pounds than there are days in the year--and leaped into the air. he hovered a second, spread his arms and legs in space, appeared to float a moment, then buckled, rushed down and forward, and dropped in a heap upon the floor, while every one roared with laughter. but the laughter died out quickly, for there was something in his wild performance that was peculiar and unusual. it was uncanny, not quite natural. his body had seemed, as with mordkin and nijinski, literally to hang upon the air a moment. for a second he gave the distressing impression of overcoming gravity. there was a touch in it of that faint horror which appals by its very vagueness. he picked himself up unhurt, and his face was as grave as a portrait in the academy, but with a new expression in it that everybody noticed with this strange, half-shocked amazement. and it was this expression that extinguished the claps of laughter as wind that takes away the sound of bells. like many ugly men, he was an inimitable actor, and his facial repertory was endless and incredible. but this was neither acting nor clever manipulation of expressive features. there was something in his curious russian physiognomy that made the heart beat slower. and that was why the laughter died away so suddenly. "you ought to have flown farther," cried some one. it expressed what all had felt. "icarus didn't drink champagne," another replied, with a laugh; but nobody laughed with him. "you went too near to vera," said palazov, "and passion melted the wax." but his face twitched oddly as he said it. there was something he did not understand, and so heartily disliked. the strange expression on the features deepened. it was arresting in a disagreeable, almost in a horrible, way. the talk stopped dead; all stared; there was a feeling of dismay in everybody's heart, yet unexplained. some lowered their eyes, or else looked stupidly elsewhere; but the women of the party felt a kind of fascination. vera, in particular, could not move her sight away. the joking reference to his passionate admiration for her passed unnoticed. there was a general and individual sense of shock. and a chorus of whispers rose instantly: "look at binovitch! what's happened to his face?" "he's changed--he's changing!" "god! why he looks like a--bird!" but no one laughed. instead, they chose the names of birds--hawk, eagle, even owl. the figure of a man leaning against the edge of the door, watching them closely, they did not notice. he had been passing down the corridor, had looked in unobserved, and then had paused. he had seen the whole performance. he watched binovitch narrowly, now with calm, discerning eyes. it was dr plitzinger, the great psychiatrist. for binovitch had picked himself up from the floor in a way that was oddly self-possessed, and precluded the least possibility of the ludicrous. he looked neither foolish nor abashed. he looked surprised, but also he looked half angry and half frightened. as some one had said, he "ought to have flown farther." that was the incredible impression his acrobatics had produced--incredible, yet somehow actual. this uncanny idea prevailed, as at a séance where nothing genuine is expected to happen, and something genuine, after all, does happen. there was no pretence in this: binovitch had flown. and now he stood there, white in the face--with terror and with anger white. he looked extraordinary, this little, neurasthenic russian, but he looked at the same time half terrific. another thing, not commonly experienced by men, was in him, breaking out of him, affecting _directly_ the minds of his companions. his mouth opened; blood and fury shone in his blazing eyes; his tongue shot out like an ant-eater's, though even in that the comic had no place. his arms were spread like flapping wings, and his voice rose dreadfully: "he failed me, he failed me!" he tried to bellow. "horus, my falcon-headed deity, my power of the air, deserted me! hell take him! hell burn his wings and blast his piercing sight! hell scorch him into dust for his false prophecies! i curse him--i curse horus!" the voice that should have roared across the silent room emitted, instead, this high-pitched, bird-like scream. the added touch of sound, the reality it lent, was ghastly. yet it was marvellously done and acted. the entire thing was a bit of instantaneous inspiration--his voice, his words, his gestures, his whole wild appearance. only--here was the reality that caused the sense of shock--the expression on his altered features was genuine. _that_ was not assumed. there was something new and alien in him, something cold and difficult to human life, something alert and swift and cruel, of another element than earth. a strange, rapacious grandeur had leaped upon the struggling features. the face looked hawk-like. and he came forward suddenly and sharply toward vera, whose fixed, staring eyes had never once ceased watching him with a kind of anxious and devouring pain in them. she was both drawn and beaten back. binovitch advanced on tiptoe. no doubt he still was acting, still pretending this mad nonsense that he worshipped horus, the falcon-headed deity of forgotten days, and that horus had failed him in his hour of need; but somehow there was just a hint of too much reality in the way he moved and looked. the girl, a little creature, with fluffy golden hair, opened her lips; her cigarette fell to the floor; she shrank back; she looked for a moment like some smaller, coloured bird trying to escape from a great pursuing hawk; she screamed. binovitch, his arms wide, his bird-like face thrust forward, had swooped upon her. he leaped. almost he caught her. no one could say exactly what happened. play, become suddenly and unexpectedly too real, confuses the emotions. the change of key was swift. from fun to terror is a dislocating jolt upon the mind. some one--it was khilkoff, the brother--upset a chair; everybody spoke at once; everybody stood up. an unaccountable feeling of disaster was in the air, as with those drinkers' quarrels that blaze out from nothing, and end in a pistol-shot and death, no one able to explain clearly how it came about. it was the silent, watching figure in the doorway who saved the situation. before any one had noticed his approach, there he was among the group, laughing, talking, applauding--between binovitch and vera. he was vigorously patting his patient on the back, and his voice rose easily above the general clamour. he was a strong, quiet personality; even in his laughter there was authority. and his laughter now was the only sound in the room, as though by his mere presence peace and harmony were restored. confidence came with him. the noise subsided; vera was in her chair again. khilkoff poured out a glass of wine for the great man. "the czar!" said plitzinger, sipping his champagne, while all stood up, delighted with his compliment and tact. "and to your opening night with the russian ballet," he added quickly a second toast, "or to your first performance at the moscow théâtre des arts!" smiling significantly, he glanced at binovitch; he clinked glasses with him. their arms were already linked, but it was palazov who noticed that the doctor's fingers seemed rather tight upon the creased black coat. all drank, looking with laughter, yet with a touch of respect, toward binovitch, who stood there dwarfed beside the stalwart austrian, and suddenly as meek and subdued as any mole. apparently the abrupt change of key had taken his mind successfully off something else. "of course--'the fire-bird,'" exclaimed the little man, mentioning the famous russian ballet. "the very thing!" he exclaimed. "for _us_," he added, looking with devouring eyes at vera. he was greatly pleased. he began talking vociferously about dancing and the rationale of dancing. they told him he was an undiscovered master. he was delighted. he winked at vera and touched her glass again with his. "we'll make our début together," he cried. "we'll begin at covent garden, in london. i'll design the dresses and the posters 'the hawk and the dove!' _magnifique!_ i in dark grey, and you in blue and gold! ah, dancing, you know, is sacred. the little self is lost, absorbed. it is ecstasy, it is divine. and dancing in air--the passion of the birds and stars--ah! they are the movements of the gods. you know deity that way--by living it." he went on and on. his entire being had shifted with a leap upon this new subject. the idea of realising divinity by dancing it absorbed him. the party discussed it with him as though nothing else existed in the world, all sitting now and talking eagerly together. vera took the cigarette he offered her, lighting it from his own; their fingers touched; he was as harmless and normal as a retired diplomat in a drawing-room. but it was plitzinger whose subtle manoeuvring had accomplished the change so cleverly, and it was plitzinger who presently suggested a game of billiards, and led him off, full now of a fresh enthusiasm for cannons, balls, and pockets, into another room. they departed arm in arm, laughing and talking together. their departure, it seemed, made no great difference at first. vera's eyes watched him out of sight, then turned to listen to baron minski, who was describing with gusto how he caught wolves alive for coursing purposes. the speed and power of the wolf, he said, was impossible to realise; the force of their awful leap, the strength of their teeth, which could bite through metal stirrup-fastenings. he showed a scar on his arm and another on his lip. he was telling truth, and everybody listened with deep interest. the narrative lasted perhaps ten minutes or more, when minski abruptly stopped. he had come to an end; he looked about him; he saw his glass, and emptied it. there was a general pause. another subject did not at once present itself. sighs were heard; several fidgeted; fresh cigarettes were lighted. but there was no sign of boredom, for where one or two russians are gathered together there is always life. they produce gaiety and enthusiasm as wind produces waves. like great children, they plunge whole-heartedly into whatever interest presents itself at the moment. there is a kind of uncouth gambolling in their way of taking life. it seems as if they are always fighting that deep, underlying, national sadness which creeps into their very blood. "midnight!" then exclaimed palazov, abruptly, looking at his watch; and the others fell instantly to talking about that watch, admiring it and asking questions. for the moment that very ordinary timepiece became the centre of observation. palazov mentioned the price. "it never stops," he said proudly, "not even under water." he looked up at everybody, challenging admiration. and he told how, at a country house, he made a bet that he would swim to a certain island in the lake, and won the bet. he and a girl were the winners, but as it was a horse they had bet, he got nothing out of it for himself, giving the horse to her. it was a genuine grievance in him. one felt he could have cried as he spoke of it. "but the watch went all the time," he said delightedly, holding the gun-metal object in his hand to show, "and i was twelve minutes in the water with my clothes on." yet this fragmentary talk was nothing but pretence. the sound of clicking billiard-balls was audible from the room at the end of the corridor. there was another pause. the pause, however, was intentional. it was not vacuity of mind or absence of ideas that caused it. there was another subject, an unfinished subject that each member of the group was still considering. only no one cared to begin about it till at last, unable to resist the strain any longer, palazov turned to khilkoff, who was saying he would take a "whisky-soda," as the champagne was too sweet, and whispered something beneath his breath; whereupon khilkoff, forgetting his drink, glanced at his sister, shrugged his shoulders, and made a curious grimace. "he's all right now"--his reply was just audible--"he's with plitzinger." he cocked his head sidewise to indicate that the clicking of the billiard-balls still was going on. the subject was out: all turned their heads; voices hummed and buzzed; questions were asked and answered or half answered; eyebrows were raised, shoulders shrugged, hands spread out expressively. there came into the atmosphere a feeling of presentiment, of mystery, of things half understood; primitive, buried instinct stirred a little, the kind of racial dread of vague emotions that might gain the upper hand if encouraged. they shrank from looking something in the face, while yet this unwelcome influence drew closer round them all. they discussed binovitch and his astonishing performance. pretty little vera listened with large and troubled eyes, though saying nothing. the arab waiter had put out the lights in the corridor, and only a solitary cluster burned now above their heads, leaving their faces in shadow. in the distance the clicking of the billiard-balls still continued. "it was not play; it was real," exclaimed minski vehemently. "i can catch wolves," he blurted; "but birds--ugh!--and human birds!" he was half inarticulate. he had witnessed something he could not understand, and it had touched instinctive terror in him. "it was the way he leaped that put the wolf first into my mind, only it was not a wolf at all." the others agreed and disagreed. "it was play at first, but it was reality at the end," another whispered; "and it was no animal he mimicked, but a bird, and a bird of prey at that!" vera thrilled. in the russian woman hides that touch of savagery which loves to be caught, mastered, swept helplessly away, captured utterly and deliciously by the one strong enough to do it thoroughly. she left her chair and sat down beside an older woman in the party, who took her arm quietly at once. her little face wore a perplexed expression, mournful, yet somehow wild. it was clear that binovitch was not indifferent to her. "it's become an _idée fixe_ with him," this older woman said. "the bird idea lives in his mind. he lives it in his imagination. ever since that time at edfu, when he pretended to worship the great stone falcons outside the temple--the horus figures--he's been full of it." she stopped. the way binovitch had behaved at edfu was better left unmentioned at the moment, perhaps. a slight shiver ran round the listening group, each one waiting for some one else to focus their emotion, and so explain it by saying the convincing thing. only no one ventured. then vera abruptly gave a little jump. "hark!" she exclaimed, in a staccato whisper, speaking for the first time. she sat bolt upright. she was listening. "hark!" she repeated. "there it is again, but nearer than before. it's coming closer. i hear it." she trembled. her voice, her manner, above all her great staring eyes, startled everybody. no one spoke for several seconds; all listened. the clicking of the billiard-balls had ceased. the halls and corridors lay in darkness, and gloom was over the big hotel. everybody was in bed. "hear what?" asked the older woman soothingly, yet with a perceptible quaver in her voice, too. she was aware that the girl's arm shook upon her own. "do you not hear it, too?" the girl whispered. all listened without speaking. all watched her paling face. something wonderful, yet half terrible, seemed in the air about them. there was a dull murmur, audible, faint, remote, its direction hard to tell. it had come suddenly from nowhere. they shivered. that strange racial thrill again passed into the group, unwelcome, unexplained. it was aboriginal; it belonged to the unconscious primitive mind, half childish, half terrifying. "_what_ do you hear?" her brother asked angrily--the irritable anger of nervous fear. "when he came at me," she answered very low, "i heard it first. i hear it now again. listen! he's coming." and at that minute, out of the dark mouth of the corridor, emerged two human figures, plitzinger and binovitch. their game was over: they were going up to bed. they passed the open door of the card-room. but binovitch was being half dragged, half restrained, for he was apparently attempting to run down the passage with flying, dancing leaps. he bounded. it was like a huge bird trying to rise for flight, while his companion kept him down by force upon the earth. as they entered the strip of light, plitzinger changed his own position, placing himself swiftly between his companion and the group in the dark corner of the room. he hurried binovitch along as though he sheltered him from view. they passed into the shadows down the passage. they disappeared. and every one looked significantly, questioningly, at his neighbour, though at first saying no word. it seemed that a curious disturbance of the air had followed them audibly. vera was the first to open her lips. "you heard it _then_," she said breathlessly, her face whiter than the ceiling. "damn!" exclaimed her brother furiously. "it was wind against the outside walls--wind in the desert. the sand is driving." vera looked at him. she shrank closer against the side of the older woman, whose arm was tight about her. "it was _not_ wind," she whispered simply. she paused. all waited uneasily for the completion of her sentence. they stared into her face like peasants who expected a miracle. "wings," she whispered. "it was the sound of enormous wings." * * * * * and at four o'clock in the morning, when they all returned exhausted from their excursion into the desert, little binovitch was sleeping soundly and peacefully in his bed. they passed his door on tiptoe. but he did not hear them. he was dreaming. his spirit was at edfu, experiencing with that ancient deity who was master of all flying life those strange enjoyments upon which his own troubled human heart was passionately set. safe with that mighty falcon whose powers his lips had scorned a few hours before, his soul, released in vivid dream, went sweetly flying. it was amazing, it was gorgeous. he skimmed the nile at lightning speed. dashing down headlong from the height of the great pyramid, he chased with faultless accuracy a little dove that sought vainly to hide from his terrific pursuit beneath the palm trees. for what he loved must worship where he worshipped, and the majesty of those tremendous effigies had fired his imagination to the creative point where expression was imperative. then suddenly, at the very moment of delicious capture, the dream turned horrible, becoming awful with the nightmare touch. the sky lost all its blue and sunshine. far, far below him the little dove enticed him into nameless depths, so that he flew faster and faster, yet never fast enough to overtake it. behind him came a great thing down the air, black, hovering, with gigantic wings outstretched. it had terrific eyes, and the beating of its feathers stole his wind away. it followed him, crowding space. he was aware of a colossal beak, curved like a scimitar and pointed wickedly like a tooth of iron. he dropped. he faltered. he tried to scream. through empty space he fell, caught by the neck. the huge spectral falcon was upon him. the talons were in his heart. and in sleep he remembered then that he had cursed. he recalled his reckless language. the curse of the ignorant is meaningless; that of the worshipper is real. this attack was on his soul. he had invoked it. he realised next, with a touch of ghastly horror, that the dove he chased was, after all, the bait that had lured him purposely to destruction, and awoke with a suffocating terror upon him, and his entire body bathed in icy perspiration. outside the open window he heard a sound of wings retreating with powerful strokes into the surrounding darkness of the sky. the nightmare made its impression upon binovitch's impressionable and dramatic temperament. it aggravated his tendencies. he related it next day to mme. de drühn, the friend of vera, telling it with that somewhat boisterous laughter some minds use to disguise less kind emotions. but he received no encouragement. the mood of the previous night was not recoverable; it was already ancient history. russians never make the banal mistake of repeating a sensation till it is exhausted; they hurry on to novelties. life flashes and rushes with them, never standing still for exposure before the cameras of their minds. mme. de drühn, however, took the trouble to mention the matter to plitzinger, for plitzinger, like freud of vienna, held that dreams revealed subconscious tendencies which sooner or later must betray themselves in action. "thank you for telling me," he smiled politely, "but i have already heard it from him." he watched her eyes for a moment, really examining her soul. "binovitch, you see," he continued, apparently satisfied with what he saw, "i regard as that rare phenomenon--a genius without an outlet. his spirit, intensely creative, finds no adequate expression. his power of production is enormous and prolific; yet he accomplishes nothing." he paused an instant. "binovitch, therefore, is in danger of poisoning--himself." he looked steadily into her face, as a man who weighs how much he may confide. "now," he continued, "_if_ we can find an outlet for him, a field wherein his bursting imaginative genius can produce results--above all, _visible_ results"--he shrugged his shoulders--"the man is saved. otherwise"--he looked extraordinarily impressive--"there is bound to be sooner or later----" "madness?" she asked very quietly. "an explosion, let us say," he replied gravely. "for instance, take this horus obsession of his, quite wrong archæologically though it is. _au fond_ it is megalomania of a most unusual kind. his passionate interest, his love, his worship of birds, wholesome enough in itself, finds no satisfying outlet. a man who _really_ loves birds neither keeps them in cages nor shoots them nor stuffs them. what, then, can he do? the commonplace bird-lover observes them through glasses, studies their habits, then writes a book about them. but a man like binovitch, overflowing with this intense creative power of mind and imagination, is not content with that. he wants to know them from within. he wants to feel what they feel, to live their life. he wants to _become_ them. you follow me? not quite. well, he seeks to be identified with the object of his sacred, passionate adoration. all genius seeks to know the thing itself from its own point of view. it desires union. that tendency, unrecognised by himself, perhaps, and therefore subconscious, hides in his very soul." he paused a moment. "and the sudden sight of those majestic figures at edfu--that crystallisation of his _idée fixe_ in granite--took hold of this excess in him, so to speak--and is now focusing it toward some definite act. binovitch sometimes--feels himself a bird! you noticed what occurred last night?" she nodded; a slight shiver passed over her. "a most curious performance," she murmured; "an exhibition i never want to see again." "the most curious part," replied the doctor coolly, "was its truth." "its truth!" she exclaimed beneath her breath. she was frightened by something in his voice and by the uncommon gravity in his eyes. it seemed to arrest her intelligence. she felt upon the edge of things beyond her. "you mean that binovitch did for a moment--hang--in the air?" the other verb, the right one, she could not bring herself to use. the great man's face was enigmatical. he talked to her sympathy, perhaps, rather than to her mind. "real genius," he said smilingly, "is as rare as talent, even great talent, is common. it means that the personality, if only for one second, becomes everything; becomes the universe; becomes the soul of the world. it gets the flash. it is identified with the universal life. being everything and everywhere, all is possible to it--in that second of vivid realisation. it can brood with the crystal, grow with the plant, leap with the animal, fly with the bird: genius unifies all three. that is the meaning of 'creative.' it is faith. knowing it, you can pass through fire and not be burned, walk on water and not sink, move a mountain, fly. because you _are_ fire, water, earth, air. genius, you see, is madness in the magnificent sense of being superhuman. binovitch has it." he broke off abruptly, seeing he was not understood. some great enthusiasm in him he deliberately suppressed. "the point is," he resumed, speaking more carefully, "that we must try to lead this passionate constructive genius of the man into some human channel that will absorb it, and therefore render it harmless." "he loves vera," the woman said, bewildered, yet seizing this point correctly. "but would he marry her?" asked plitzinger at once. "he is already married." the doctor looked steadily at her a moment, hesitating whether he should utter all his thought. "in that case," he said slowly after a pause, "it is better he or she should leave." his tone and manner were exceedingly impressive. "you mean there's danger?" she asked. "i mean, rather," he replied earnestly, "that this great creative flood in him, so curiously focused now upon his horus-falcon-bird idea, may result in some act of violence----" "which would be madness," she said, looking hard at him. "which would be disastrous," he corrected her. and then he added slowly: "because in the mental moment of immense creation he might overlook material laws." * * * * * the costume ball two nights later was a great success. palazov was a bedouin, and khilkoff an apache; mme. de drühn wore a national head-dress; minski looked almost natural as don quixote; and the entire russian "set" was cleverly, if somewhat extravagantly, dressed. but binovitch and vera were the most successful of all the two hundred dancers who took part. another figure, a big man dressed as a pierrot, also claimed exceptional attention, for though the costume was commonplace enough, there was something of dignity in his appearance that drew the eyes of all upon him. but he wore a mask, and his identity was not discoverable. it was binovitch and vera, however, who must have won the prize, if prize there had been, for they not only looked their parts, but acted them as well. the former in his dark grey feather tunic, and his falcon mask, complete even to the brown hooked beak and tufted talons, looked fierce and splendid. the disguise was so admirable, yet so entirely natural, that it was uncommonly seductive. vera, in blue and gold, a charming head-dress of a dove upon her loosened hair, and a pair of little dove-pale wings fluttering from her shoulders, her tiny twinkling feet and slender ankles well visible, too, was equally successful and admired. her large and timid eyes, her flitting movements, her light and dainty way of dancing--all added touches that made the picture perfect. how binovitch contrived his dress remained a mystery, for the layers of wings upon his back were real; the large black kites that haunt the nile, soaring in their hundreds over cairo and the bleak mokattam hills, had furnished them. he had procured them none knew how. they measured four feet across from tip to tip; they swished and rustled as he swept along; they were true falcons' wings. he danced with nautch-girls and egyptian princesses and rumanian gipsies; he danced well, with beauty, grace, and lightness. but with vera he did not dance at all; with her he simply flew. a kind of passionate abandon was in him as he skimmed the floor with her in a way that made everybody turn to watch them. they seemed to leave the ground together. it was delightful, an amazing sight; but it was peculiar. the strangeness of it was on many lips. somehow its queer extravagance communicated itself to the entire ball-room. they became the centre of observation. there were whispers. "there's that extraordinary bird-man! look! he goes by like a hawk. and he's always after that dove-girl. how marvellously he does it! it's rather awful. who is he? i don't envy _her_." people stood aside when he rushed past. they got out of his way. he seemed forever pursuing vera, even when dancing with another partner. word passed from mouth to mouth. a kind of telepathic interest was established everywhere. it was a shade too real sometimes, something unduly earnest in the chasing wildness, something unpleasant. there was even alarm. "it's rowdy; i'd rather not see it; it's quite disgraceful," was heard. "_i_ think it's horrible; you can see she's terrified." and once there was a little scene, trivial enough, yet betraying this reality that many noticed and disliked. binovitch came up to claim a dance, programme clutched in his great tufted claws, and at the same moment the big pierrot appeared abruptly round the corner with a similar claim. those who saw it assert he had been waiting, and came on purpose, and that there was something protective and authoritative in his bearing. the misunderstanding was ordinary enough--both men had written her name against the dance--but "no. , tango" also included the supper interval, and neither hawk nor pierrot would give way. they were very obstinate. both men wanted her. it was awkward. "the dove shall decide between us," smiled the hawk politely, yet his taloned fingers working nervously. pierrot, however, more experienced in the ways of dealing with women, or more bold, said suavely: "i am ready to abide by her decision"--his voice poorly cloaked this aggravating authority, as though he had the right to her--"only i engaged this dance before his majesty horus appeared upon the scene at all, and therefore it is clear that pierrot has the right of way." at once, with a masterful air, he took her off. there was no withstanding him. he meant to have her and he got her. she yielded meekly. they vanished among the maze of coloured dancers, leaving the hawk, disconsolate and vanquished, amid the titters of the onlookers. his swiftness, as against this steady power, was of no avail. it was then that the singular phenomenon was witnessed first. those who saw it affirm that he changed absolutely into the part he played. it was dreadful; it was wicked. a frightened whisper ran about the rooms and corridors: "an extraordinary thing is in the air!" some shrank away, while others flocked to see. there were those who swore that a curious, rushing sound was audible, the atmosphere visibly disturbed and shaken; that a shadow fell upon the spot the couple had vacated; that a cry was heard, a high, wild, searching cry: "horus! bright deity of wind," it began, then died away. one man was positive that the windows had been opened and that something had flown in. it was the obvious explanation. the thing spread horribly. as in a fire-panic, there was consternation and excitement. confusion caught the feet of all the dancers. the music fumbled and lost time. the leading pair of tango dancers halted and looked round. it seemed that everybody pressed back, hiding, shuffling, eager to see, yet more eager not to be seen, as though something dangerous, hostile, terrible, had broken loose. in rows against the wall they stood. for a great space had made itself in the middle of the ball-room, and into this empty space appeared suddenly the pierrot and the dove. it was like a challenge. a sound of applause, half voices, half clapping of gloved hands, was heard. the couple danced exquisitely into the arena. all stared. there was an impression that a set piece had been prepared, and that this was its beginning. the music again took heart. pierrot was strong and dignified, no whit nonplussed by this abrupt publicity. the dove, though faltering, was deliciously obedient. they danced together like a single outline. she was captured utterly. and to the man who needed her the sight was naturally agonizing--the protective way the pierrot held her, the right and strength of it, the mastery, the complete possession. "he's got her!" some one breathed too loud, uttering the thought of all. "good thing it's not the hawk!" and, to the absolute amazement of the throng, this sight was then apparent. a figure dropped through space. that high, shrill cry again was heard: "feather my soul ... to know thy awful swiftness!" its singing loveliness touched the heart, its appealing, passionate sweetness was marvellous, as from the gallery this figure of a man, dressed as a strong, dark bird, shot down with splendid grace and ease. the feathers swept; the swings spread out as sails that take the wind. like a hawk that darts with unerring power and aim upon its prey, this thing of mighty wings rushed down into the empty space where the two danced. observed by all, he entered, swooping beautifully, stretching his wings like any eagle. he dropped. he fixed his point of landing with consummate skill close beside the astonished dancers. he landed. it happened with such swiftness it brought the dazzle and blindness as when lightning strikes. people in different parts of the room saw different details; a few saw nothing at all after the first startling shock, closing their eyes, or holding their arms before their faces as in self-protection. the touch of panic fear caught the entire room. the nameless thing that all the evening had been vaguely felt was come. it had suddenly materialised. for this incredible thing occurred in the full blaze of light upon the open floor. binovitch, grown in some sense formidable, opened his dark, big wings about the girl. the long grey feathers moved, causing powerful draughts of wind that made a rushing sound. an aspect of the terrible was about him, like an emanation. the great beaked head was poised to strike, the tufted claws were raised like fingers that shut and opened, and the whole presentment of his amazing figure focused in an attitude of attack that was magnificent and terrible. no one who saw it doubted. yet there were those who swore that it was not binovitch at all, but that another outline, monstrous and shadowy, towered above him, draping his lesser proportions with two colossal wings of darkness. that some touch of strange divinity lay in it may be claimed, however confused the wild descriptions afterward. for many lowered their heads and bowed their shoulders. there was terror. there was also awe. the onlookers swayed as though some power passed over them through the air. a sound of wings was certainly in the room. then some one screamed; a shriek broke high and clear; and emotion, ordinary human emotion, unaccustomed to terrific things, swept loose. the hawk and vera flew. beaten back against the wall as by a stroke of whirlwind, the pierrot staggered. he watched them go. out of the lighted room they flew, out of the crowded human atmosphere, out of the heat and artificial light, the walled-in, airless halls that were a cage. all this they left behind. they seemed things of wind and air, made free happily of another element. earth held them not. toward the open night they raced with this extraordinary lightness as of birds, down the long corridor and on to the southern terrace, where great coloured curtains were hung suspended from the columns. a moment they were visible. then the fringe of one huge curtain, lifted by the wind, showed their dark outline for a second against the starry sky. there was a cry, a leap. the curtain flapped again and closed. they vanished. and into the ball-room swept the cold draught of night air from the desert. but three figures instantly were close upon their heels. the throng of half-dazed, half-stupefied onlookers, it seemed, projected them as though by some explosive force. the general mass held back, but, like projectiles, these three flung themselves after the fugitives down the corridor at high speed--the apache, don quixote, and, last of them, the pierrot. for khilkoff, the brother, and baron minski, the man who caught wolves alive, had been for some time keenly on the watch, while dr. plitzinger, reading the symptoms clearly, never far away, had been faithfully observant of every movement. his mask tossed aside, the great psychiatrist was now recognised by all. they reached the parapet just as the curtain flapped back heavily into place; the next second all three were out of sight behind it. khilkoff was first, however, urged forward at frantic speed by the warning words the doctor had whispered as they ran. some thirty yards beyond the terrace was the brink of the crumbling cliff on which the great hotel was built, and there was a drop of sixty feet to the desert floor below. only a low stone wall marked the edge. accounts varied. khilkoff, it seems, arrived in time--in the nick of time--to seize his sister, virtually hovering on the brink. he heard the loose stones strike the sand below. there was no struggle, though it appears she did not thank him for his interference at first. in a sense she was beside--outside--herself. and he did a characteristic thing: he not only brought her back into the ball-room, but he _danced_ her back. it was admirable. nothing could have calmed the general excitement better. the pair of them danced in together as though nothing was amiss. accustomed to the strenuous practice of his cossack regiment, this young cavalry officer's muscles were equal to the semi-dead weight in his arms. at most the onlookers thought her tired, perhaps. confidence was restored--such is the psychology of a crowd--and in the middle of a thrilling viennese waltz he easily smuggled her out of the room, administered brandy, and got her up to bed. the absence of the hawk, meanwhile, was hardly noticed; comments were made and then forgotten; it was vera in whom the strange, anxious sympathy had centred. and, with her obvious safety, the moment of primitive, childish panic passed away. don quixote, too, was presently seen dancing gaily as though nothing untoward had happened; supper intervened; the incident was over; it had melted into the general wildness of the evening's irresponsibility. the fact that pierrot did not appear again was noticed by no single person. but dr. plitzinger was otherwise engaged, his heart and mind and soul all deeply exercised. a death-certificate is not always made out quite so simply as the public thinks. that binovitch had died of suffocation in his swift descent through merely sixty feet of air was not conceivable; yet that his body lay so neatly placed upon the desert after such a fall was stranger still. it was not crumpled, it was not torn; no single bone was broken, no muscle wrenched; there was no bruise. there was no indenture in the sand. the figure lay sidewise as though in sleep, no sign of violence visible anywhere, the dark wings folded as a great bird folds them when it creeps away to die in loneliness. beneath the horus mask the face was smiling. it seemed he had floated into death upon the element he loved. and only vera had seen the enormous wings that, hovering invitingly above the dark abyss, bore him so softly into another world. plitzinger, that is, saw them, too, but he said firmly that they belonged to the big black falcons that haunt the mokattam hills and roost upon these ridges, close beside the hotel, at night. both he and vera, however, agreed on one thing: the high, sharp cry in the air above them, wild and plaintive, was certainly the black kite's cry--the note of the falcon that passionately seeks its mate. it was the pause of a second, when she stood to listen, that made her rescue possible. a moment later and she, too, would have flown to death with binovitch. iv initiation a few years ago, on a black sea steamer heading for the caucasus, i fell into conversation with an american. he mentioned that he was on his way to the baku oilfields, and i replied that i was going up into the mountains. he looked at me questioningly a moment. "your first trip?" he asked with interest. i said it was. a conversation followed; it was continued the next day, and renewed the following day, until we parted company at batoum. i don't know why he talked so freely to me in particular. normally, he was a taciturn, silent man. we had been fellow travellers from marseilles, but after constantinople we had the boat pretty much to ourselves. what struck me about him was his vehement, almost passionate, love of natural beauty--in seas and woods and sky, but above all in mountains. it was like a religion in him. his taciturn manner hid deep poetic feeling. and he told me it had not always been so with him. a kind of friendship sprang up between us. he was a new york business man--buying and selling exchange between banks--but was english born. he had gone out thirty years before, and become naturalised. his talk was exceedingly "american," slangy, and almost western. he said he had roughed it in the west for a year or two first. but what he chiefly talked about was mountains. he said it was in the mountains an unusual experience had come to him that had opened his eyes to many things, but principally to the beauty that was now everything to him, and to the--insignificance of death. he knew the caucasus well where i was going. i think that was why he was interested in me and my journey. "up there," he said, "you'll feel things--and maybe find out things you never knew before." "what kind of things?" i asked. "why, for one," he replied with emotion and enthusiasm in his voice, "that living and dying ain't either of them of much account. that if you know beauty, i mean, and beauty is in your life, you live on in it and with it for others--even when you're dead." the conversation that followed is too long to give here, but it led to his telling me the experience in his own life that had opened his eyes to the truth of what he said. "beauty is imperishable," he declared, "and if you live with it, why, you're imperishable too!" the story, as he told it verbally in his curious language, remains vividly in my memory. but he had written it down, too, he said. and he gave me the written account, with the remark that i was free to hand it on to others if i "felt that way." he called it "initiation." it runs as follows. in my own family this happened, for arthur was my nephew. and a remote alpine valley was the place. it didn't seem to me in the least suitable for such occurrences, except that it was catholic, and the "church," i understand--at least, scholars who ought to know have told me so--has subtle pagan origins incorporated unwittingly in its observations of certain saints' days, as well as in certain ceremonials. all this kind of thing is dutch to me, a form of poetry or superstition, for i am interested chiefly in the buying and selling of exchange, with an office in new york city, just off wall street, and only come to europe now occasionally for a holiday. i like to see the dear old musty cities, and go to the opera, and take a motor run through shakespeare's country or round the lakes, get in touch again with london and paris at the ritz hotels--and then back again to the greatest city on earth, where for years now i've been making a good thing out of it. repton and cambridge, long since forgotten, had their uses. they were all right enough at the time. but i'm now "on the make," with a good fat partnership, and have left all that truck behind me. my half-brother, however--he was my senior and got the cream of the family wholesale chemical works--has stuck to the trade in the old country, and is making probably as much as i am. he approved my taking the chance that offered, and is only sore now because his son, arthur, is on the stupid side. he agreed that finance suited my temperament far better than drugs and chemicals, though he warned me that all american finance was speculative and therefore dangerous. "arthur is getting on," he said in his last letter, "and will some day take the director's place you would be in now had you cared to stay. but he's a plodder, rather." that meant, i knew, that arthur was a fool. business, at any rate, was not suited to his temperament. five years ago, when i came home with a month's holiday to be used in working up connections in english banking circles, i saw the boy. he was fifteen years of age at the time, a delicate youth, with an artist's dreams in his big blue eyes, if my memory goes for anything, but with a tangle of yellow hair and features of classical beauty that would have made half the young girls of my new york set in love with him, and a choice of heiresses at his disposal when he wanted them. i have a clear recollection of my nephew then. he struck me as having grit and character, but as being wrongly placed. he had his grandfather's tastes. he ought to have been, like him, a great scholar, a poet, an editor of marvellous old writings in new editions. i couldn't get much out of the boy, except that he "liked the chemical business fairly," and meant to please his father by "knowing it thoroughly" so as to qualify later for his directorship. but i have never forgotten the evening when i caught him in the hall, staring up at his grandfather's picture, with a kind of light about his face, and the big blue eyes all rapt and tender (almost as if he had been crying) and replying, when i asked him what was up: "_that_ was worth living for. he brought beauty back into the world!" "yes," i said, "i guess that's right enough. he did. but there was no money in it to speak of." the boy looked at me and smiled. he twigged somehow or other that deep down in me, somewhere below the money-making instinct, a poet, but a dumb poet, lay in hiding. "you know what i mean," he said. "it's in you too." the picture was a copy--my father had it made--of the presentation portrait given to baliol, and "the grandfather" was celebrated in his day for the translations he made of anacreon and sappho, of homer, too, if i remember rightly, as well as for a number of classical studies and essays that he wrote. a lot of stuff like that he did, and made a name at it too. his _lives of the gods_ went into six editions. they said--the big critics of his day--that he was "a poet who wrote no poetry, yet lived it passionately in the spirit of old-world, classical beauty," and i know he was a wonderful fellow in his way and made the dons and schoolmasters all sit up. we're proud of him all right. after twenty-five years of successful "exchange" in new york city, i confess i am unable to appreciate all that, feeling more in touch with the commercial and financial spirit of the age, progress, development and the rest. but, still, i'm not ashamed of the classical old boy, who seems to have been a good deal of a pagan, judging by the records we have kept. however, arthur peering up at that picture in the dusk, his eyes half moist with emotion, and his voice gone positively shaky, is a thing i never have forgotten. he stimulated my curiosity uncommonly. it stirred something deep down in me that i hardly cared to acknowledge on wall street--something burning. and the next time i saw him was in the summer of , when i came to europe for a two months' look around--my wife at newport with the children--and hearing that he was in switzerland, learning a bit of french to help him in the business, i made a point of dropping in upon him just to see how he was shaping generally and what new kinks his mind had taken on. there was something in arthur i never could quite forget. whenever his face came into my mind i began to think. a kind of longing came over me--a desire for beauty, i guess, it was. it made me dream. i found him at an english tutor's--a lively old dog, with a fondness for the cheap native wines, and a financial interest in the tourist development of the village. the boys learnt french in the mornings, possibly, but for the rest of the day were free to amuse themselves exactly as they pleased and without a trace of supervision--provided the parents footed the bills without demur. this suited everybody all round; and as long as the boys came home with an accent and a vocabulary, all was well. for myself, having learned in new york to attend strictly to my own business--exchange between different countries with a profit--i did not deem it necessary to exchange letters and opinions with my brother--with no chance of profit anywhere. but i got to know arthur, and had a queer experience of my own into the bargain. oh, there was profit in it for me. i'm drawing big dividends to this day on the investment. i put up at the best hotel in the village, a one-horse show, differing from the other inns only in the prices charged for a lot of cheap decoration in the dining-room, and went up to surprise my nephew with a call the first thing after dinner. the tutor's house stood some way back from the narrow street, among fields where there were more flowers than grass, and backed by a forest of fine old timber that stretched up several thousand feet to the snow. the snow at least was visible, peeping out far overhead just where the dark line of forest stopped; but in reality, i suppose, that was an effect of foreshortening, and whole valleys and pastures intervened between the trees and the snow-fields. the sunset, long since out of the valley, still shone on those white ridges, where the peaks stuck up like the teeth of a gigantic saw. i guess it meant five or six hours' good climbing to get up to them--and nothing to do when you got there. switzerland, anyway, seemed a poor country, with its little bit of watch-making, sour wines, and every square yard hanging upstairs at an angle of degrees used for hay. picture postcards, chocolate and cheap tourists kept it going apparently, but i dare say it was all right enough to learn french in--and cheap as hoboken to live in! arthur was out; i just left a card and wrote on it that i would be very pleased if he cared to step down to take luncheon with me at my hotel next day. having nothing better to do, i strolled homewards by way of the forest. now what came over me in that bit of dark pine forest is more than i can quite explain, but i think it must have been due to the height--the village was , feet above sea-level--and the effect of the rarefied air upon my circulation. the nearest thing to it in my experience is rye whisky, the queer touch of wildness, of self-confidence, a kind of whooping rapture and the reckless sensation of being a tin god of sorts that comes from a lot of alcohol--a memory, please understand, of years before, when i thought it a grand thing to own the earth and paint the old town red. i seemed to walk on air, and there was a smell about those trees that made me suddenly--well, that took my mind clean out of its accustomed rut. it was just too lovely and wonderful for me to describe it. i had got well into the forest and lost my way a bit. the smell of an old-world garden wasn't in it. it smelt to me as if some one had just that minute turned out the earth all fresh and new. there was moss and tannin, a hint of burning, something between smoke and incense, say, and a fine clean odour of pitch-pine bark when the sun gets on it after rain--and a flavour of the sea thrown in for luck. that was the first i noticed, for i had never smelt anything half so good since my camping days on the coast of maine. and i stood still to enjoy it. i threw away my cigar for fear of mixing things and spoiling it. "if that could be bottled," i said to myself, "it'd sell for two dollars a pint in every city in the union!" and it was just then, while standing and breathing it in, that i got the queer feeling of some one watching me. i kept quite still. some one was moving near me. the sweat went trickling down my back. a kind of childhood thrill got hold of me. it was very dark. i was not afraid exactly, but i was a stranger in these parts and knew nothing about the habits of the mountain peasants. there might be tough customers lurking around after dark on the chance of striking some guy of a tourist with money in his pockets. yet, somehow, that wasn't the kind of feeling that came to me at all, for, though i had a pocket browning at my hip, the notion of getting at it did not even occur to me. the sensation was new--a kind of lifting, exciting sensation that made my heart swell out with exhilaration. there was happiness in it. a cloud that _weighed_ seemed to roll off my mind, same as that light-hearted mood when the office door is locked and i'm off on a two months' holiday--with gaiety and irresponsibility at the back of it. it was invigorating. i felt youth sweep over me. i stood there, wondering what on earth was coming on me, and half expecting that any moment some one would come out of the darkness and show himself; and as i held my breath and made no movement at all the queer sensation grew stronger. i believe i even resisted a temptation to kick up my heels and dance, to let out a flying shout as a man with liquor in him does. instead of this, however, i just kept dead still. the wood was black as ink all round me, too black to see the tree-trunks separately, except far below where the village lights came up twinkling between them, and the only way i kept the path was by the soft feel of the pine-needles that were thicker than a brussels carpet. but nothing happened, and no one stirred. the idea that i was being watched remained, only there was no sound anywhere except the roar of falling water that filled the entire valley. yet some one was very close to me in the darkness. i can't say how long i might have stood there, but i guess it was the best part of ten minutes, and i remember it struck me that i had run up against a pocket of extra-rarefied air that had a lot of oxygen in it--oxygen or something similar--and that was the cause of my elation. the idea was nonsense, i have no doubt; but for the moment it half explained the thing to me. i realised it was all _natural_ enough, at any rate--and so moved on. it took a longish time to reach the edge of the wood, and a footpath led me--oh, it was quite a walk, i tell you--into the village street again. i was both glad and sorry to get there. i kept myself busy thinking the whole thing over again. what caught me all of a heap was that million-dollar sense of beauty, youth, and happiness. never in my born days had i felt anything to touch it. and it hadn't cost a cent! well, i was sitting there enjoying my smoke and trying to puzzle it all out, and the hall was pretty full of people smoking and talking and reading papers, and so forth, when all of a sudden i looked up and caught my breath with such a jerk that i actually bit my tongue. there was grandfather in front of my chair! i looked into his eyes. i saw him as clear and solid as the porter standing behind his desk across the lounge, and it gave me a touch of cold all down the back that i needn't forget unless i want to. he was looking into my face, and he had a cap in his hand, and he was speaking to me. it was my grandfather's picture come to life, only much thinner and younger and a kind of light in his eyes like fire. "i beg your pardon, but you _are_--uncle jim, aren't you?" and then, with another jump of my nerves, i understood. "you, arthur! well, i'm jiggered. so it is. take a chair, boy. i'm right glad you found me. shake! sit down." and i shook his hand and pushed a chair up for him. i was never so surprised in my life. the last time i set eyes on him he was a boy. now he was a young man, and the very image of his ancestor. he sat down, fingering his cap. he wouldn't have a drink and he wouldn't smoke. "all right," i said, "let's talk then. i've lots to tell you and i've lots to hear. how are you, boy?" he didn't answer at first. he eyed me up and down. he hesitated. he was as handsome as a young greek god. "i say, uncle jim," he began presently, "it _was_ you--just now--in the wood--wasn't it?" it made me start, that question put so quietly. "i _have_ just come through that wood up there," i answered, pointing in the direction as well as i could remember, "if that's what you mean. but why? _you_ weren't there, were you?" it gave me a queer sort of feeling to hear him say it. what in the name of heaven did he mean? he sat back in his chair with a sigh of relief. "oh, that's all right then," he said, "if it _was_ you. did you see," he asked suddenly; "did you see--anything?" "not a thing," i told him honestly. "it was far too dark." i laughed. i fancied i twigged his meaning. but i was not the sort of uncle to come prying on him. life must be dull enough, i remembered, in this mountain village. but he didn't understand my laugh. he didn't mean what i meant. and there came a pause between us. i discovered that we were talking different lingoes. i leaned over towards him. "look here, arthur," i said in a lower voice, "what is it, and what do you mean? i'm all right, you know, and you needn't be afraid of telling me. what d'you mean by--did i see anything?" we looked each other squarely in the eye. he saw he could trust me, and i saw--well, a whole lot of things, perhaps, but i felt chiefly that he liked me and would tell me things later, all in his own good time. i liked him all the better for that too. "i only meant," he answered slowly, "whether you really _saw_--anything?" "no," i said straight, "i didn't see a thing, but, by the gods, i _felt_ something." he started. i started too. an astonishing big look came swimming over his fair, handsome face. his eyes seemed all lit up. he looked as if he'd just made a cool million in wheat or cotton. "i knew--you were that sort," he whispered. "though i hardly remembered what you looked like." "then what on earth was it?" i asked. his reply staggered me a bit. "it was just that," he said--"the earth!" and then, just when things were getting interesting and promising a dividend, he shut up like a clam. he wouldn't say another word. he asked after my family and business, my health, what kind of crossing i'd had, and all the rest of the common stock. it fairly bowled me over. and i couldn't change him either. i suppose in america we get pretty free and easy, and don't quite understand reserve. but this young man of half my age kept me in my place as easily as i might have kept a nervous customer quiet in my own office. he just refused to take me on. he was polite and cool and distant as you please, and when i got pressing sometimes he simply pretended he didn't understand. i could no more get him back again to the subject of the wood than a customer could have gotten me to tell him about the prospects of exchange being cheap or dear--when i didn't know myself but wouldn't let him see i didn't know. he was charming, he was delightful, enthusiastic and even affectionate; downright glad to see me, too, and to chin with me--but i couldn't draw him worth a cent. and in the end i gave up trying. and the moment i gave up trying he let down a little--but only a very little. "you'll stay here some time, uncle jim, won't you?" "that's my idea," i said, "if i can see you, and you can show me round some." he laughed with pleasure. "oh, rather. i've got lots of time. after three in the afternoon i'm free till--any time you like. there's a lot to see," he added. "come along to-morrow then," i said. "if you can't take lunch, perhaps you can come just afterwards. you'll find me waiting for you--right here." "i'll come at three," he replied, and we said good-night. he turned up sharp at three, and i liked his punctuality. i saw him come swinging down the dusty road; tall, deep-chested, his broad shoulders a trifle high, and his head set proudly. he looked like a young chap in training, a thoroughbred, every inch of him. at the same time there was a touch of something a little too refined and delicate for a man, i thought. that was the poetic, scholarly vein in him, i guess--grandfather cropping out. this time he wore no cap. his thick light hair, not brushed back like the london shop-boys, but parted on the side, yet untidy for all that, suited him exactly and gave him a touch of wildness. "well," he asked, "what would you like to do, uncle jim? i'm at your service, and i've got the whole afternoon till supper at seven-thirty." i told him i'd like to go through that wood. "all right," he said, "come along. i'll show you." he gave me one quick glance, but said no more. "i'd like to see if i feel anything this time," i explained. "we'll locate the very spot, maybe." he nodded. "you know where i mean, don't you?" i asked, "because you saw me there?" he just said yes, and then we started. it was hot, and air was scarce. i remember that we went uphill, and that i realised there was considerable difference in our ages. we crossed some fields first--smothered in flowers so thick that i wondered how much grass the cows got out of it!--and then came to a sprinkling of fine young larches that looked as soft as velvet. there was no path, just a wild mountain side. i had very little breath on the steep zigzags, but arthur talked easily--and talked mighty well, too: the light and shade, the colouring, and the effect of all this wilderness of lonely beauty on the mind. he kept all this suppressed at home in business. it was safety valves. i twigged _that_. it was the artist in him talking. he seemed to think there was nothing in the world but beauty--with a big b all the time. and the odd thing was he took for granted that i felt the same. it was cute of him to flatter me that way. "daulis and the lone cephissian vale," i heard; and a few moments later--with a sort of reverence in his voice like worship--he called out a great singing name: "_astarte!_" "day is her face, and midnight is her hair, and morning hours are but the golden stair by which she climbs to night." it was here first that a queer change began to grow upon me too. "steady on, boy! i've forgotten all my classics ages ago," i cried. he turned and gazed down on me, his big eyes glowing, and not a sign of perspiration on his skin. "that's nothing," he exclaimed in his musical, deep voice. "you know it, or you'd never have felt things in this wood last night; and you wouldn't have wanted to come out with me _now_!" "how?" i gasped. "how's that?" "you've come," he continued quietly, "to the only valley in this artificial country that has atmosphere. this valley is _alive_--especially this end of it. there's superstition here, thank god! even the peasants know things." i stared at him. "see here, arthur," i objected. "i'm not a cath. and i don't know a thing--at least it's all dead in me and forgotten--about poetry or classics or your gods and pan--pantheism--in spite of grandfather----" his face turned like a dream face. "hush!" he said quickly. "don't mention _him_. there's a bit of him in you as well as in me, and it was here, you know, he wrote----" i didn't hear the rest of what he said. a creep came over me. i remembered that this ancestor of ours lived for years in the isolation of some swiss forest where he claimed--he used that setting for his writing--he had found the exiled gods, their ghosts, their beauty, their eternal essences--or something astonishing of that sort. i had clean forgotten it till this moment. it all rushed back upon me, a memory of my boyhood. and, as i say, a creep came over me--something as near to awe as ever could be. the sunshine on that field of yellow daisies and blue forget-me-nots turned pale. that warm valley wind had a touch of snow in it. and, ashamed and frightened of my baby mood, i looked at arthur, meaning to choke him off with all this rubbish--and then saw something in his eyes that scared me stiff. i admit it. what's the use? there was an expression on his fine big face that made my blood go curdled. i got cold feet right there. it mastered me. in him, behind him, near him--blest if i know which, _through_ him probably--came an enormous thing that turned me insignificant. it downed me utterly. it was over in a second, the flash of a wing. i recovered instantly. no mere boy should come these muzzy tricks on me, scholar or no scholar. for the change in me was on the increase, and i shrank. "see here, arthur," i said plainly once again, "i don't know what your game is, but--there's something queer up here i don't quite get at. i'm only a business man, with classics and poetry all gone dry in me twenty years ago and more----" he looked at me so strangely that i stopped, confused. "but, uncle jim," he said as quietly as though we talked tobacco brands, "you needn't be alarmed. it's natural you should feel the place. you and i belong to it. we've both got _him_ in us. you're just as proud of him as i am, only in a different way." and then he added, with a touch of disappointment: "i thought you'd like it. you weren't afraid last night. you felt the beauty _then_." flattery is a darned subtle thing at any time. to see him standing over me in that superior way and talking down at my poor business mind--well, it just came over me that i was laying my cards on the table a bit too early. after so many years of city life----! anyway, i pulled myself together. "i was only kidding you, boy," i laughed. "i feel this beauty just as much as you do. only, i guess, you're more accustomed to it than i am. come on now," i added with energy, getting upon my feet, "let's push on and see the wood. i want to find that place again." he pulled me with a hand of iron, laughing as he did so. gee! i wished i had his teeth, as well as the muscles in his arm. yet i felt younger, somehow, too--youth flowed more and more into my veins. i had forgotten how sweet the winds and woods and flowers could be. something melted in me. for it was spring, and the whole world was singing like a dream. beauty was creeping over me. i don't know. i began to feel all big and tender and open to a thousand wonderful sensations. the thought of streets and houses seemed like death.... we went on again, not talking much; my breath got shorter and shorter, and he kept looking about him as though he expected something. but we passed no living soul, not even a peasant; there were no chalets, no cattle, no cattle shelters even. and then i realised that the valley lay at our feet in haze and that we had been climbing at least a couple of hours. "why, last night i got home in twenty minutes at the outside," i said. he shook his head, smiling. "it seemed like that," he replied, "but you really took much longer. it was long after ten when i found you in the hall." i reflected a moment. "now i come to think of it, you're right, arthur. seems curious, though, somehow." he looked closely at me. "i followed you all the way," he said. "you followed me!" "and you went at a good pace too. it was your feelings that made it seem so short--you were singing to yourself and happy as a dancing faun. we kept close behind you for a long way." i think it was "we" he said, but for some reason or other i didn't care to ask. "maybe," i answered shortly, trying uncomfortably to recall what particular capers i had cut. "i guess that's right." and then i added something about the loneliness, and how deserted all this slope of mountain was. and he explained that the peasants were afraid of it and called it no man's land. from one year's end to another no human foot went up or down it; the hay was never cut; no cattle grazed along the splendid pastures; no chalet had even been built within a mile of the wood we slowly made for. "they're superstitious," he told me. "it was just the same a hundred years ago when _he_ discovered it--there was a little natural cave on the edge of the forest where he used to sleep sometimes--i'll show it to you presently--but for generations this entire mountain-side has been undisturbed. you'll never meet a living soul in any part of it." he stopped and pointed above us to where the pine wood hung in mid-air, like a dim blue carpet. "it's just the place for them, you see." and a thrill of power went smashing through me. i can't describe it. it drenched me like a waterfall. i thought of greece--mount ida and a thousand songs! something in me--it was like the click of a shutter--announced that the "change" was suddenly complete. i was another man; or rather a deeper part of me took command. my very language showed it. the calm of halcyon weather lay over all. overhead the peaks rose clear as crystal; below us the village lay in a bluish smudge of smoke and haze, as though a great finger had rubbed them softly into the earth. absolute loneliness fell upon me like a clap. from the world of human beings we seemed quite shut off. and there began to steal over me again the strange elation of the night before.... we found ourselves almost at once against the edge of the wood. it rose in front of us, a big wall of splendid trees, motionless as if cut out of dark green metal, the branches hanging stiff, and the crowd of trunks lost in the blue dimness underneath. i shaded my eyes with one hand, trying to peer into the solemn gloom. the contrast between the brilliant sunshine on the pastures and this region of heavy shadows blurred my sight. "it's like the entrance to another world," i whispered. "it is," said arthur, watching me. "we will go in. you shall pluck asphodel...." and, before i knew it, he had me by the hand. we were advancing. we left the light behind us. the cool air dropped upon me like a sheet. there was a temple silence. the sun ran down behind the sky, leaving a marvellous blue radiance everywhere. nothing stirred. but through the stillness there rose power, power that has no name, power that hides at the foundations somewhere--foundations that are changeless, invisible, everlasting. what do i mean? my mind grew to the dimensions of a planet. we were among the roots of life--whence issues that _one thing_ in infinite guise that seeks so many temporary names from the protean minds of men. "you shall pluck asphodel in the meadows this side of erebus," arthur was chanting. "hermes himself, the psychopomp, shall lead, and malahide shall welcome us." malahide...! to hear him use that name, the name of our scholar-ancestor, now dead and buried close upon a century--the way he half chanted it--gave me the goose-flesh. i stopped against a tree-stem, thinking of escape. no words came to me at the moment, for i didn't know what to say; but, on turning to find the bright green slopes just left behind, i saw only a crowd of trees and shadows hanging thick as a curtain--as though we had walked a mile. and it was a shock. the way out was lost. the trees closed up behind us like a tide. "it's all right," said arthur; "just keep an open mind and a heart alive with love. it has a shattering effect at first, but that will pass." he saw i was afraid, for i shrank visibly enough. he stood beside me in his grey flannel suit, with his brilliant eyes and his great shock of hair, looking more like a column of light than a human being. "it's all quite right and natural," he repeated; "we have passed the gateway, and hecate, who presides over gateways, will let us out again. do not make discord by feeling fear. this is a pine wood, and pines are the oldest, simplest trees; they are true primitives. they are an open channel; and in a pine wood where no human life has ever been you shall often find gateways where hecate is kind to such as us." he took my hand--he must have felt mine trembling, but his own was cool and strong and felt like silver--and led me forward into the depths of a wood that seemed to me quite endless. it felt endless, that is to say. i don't know what came over me. fear slipped away, and elation took its place.... as we advanced over ground that seemed level, or slightly undulating, i saw bright pools of sunshine here and there upon the forest floor. great shafts of light dropped in slantingly between the trunks. there was movement everywhere, though i never could see what moved. a delicious, scented air stirred through the lower branches. running water sang not very far away. figures i did not actually see; yet there were limbs and flowing draperies and flying hair from time to time, ever just beyond the pools of sunlight.... surprise went from me too. i was on air. the atmosphere of dream came round me, but a dream of something just hovering outside the world i knew--a dream wrought in gold and silver, with shining eyes, with graceful beckoning hands, and with voices that rang like bells of music.... and the pools of light grew larger, merging one into another, until a delicate soft light shone equably throughout the entire forest. into this zone of light we passed together. then something fell abruptly at our feet, as though thrown down ... two marvellous, shining sprays of blossom such as i had never seen in all my days before! "asphodel!" cried my companion, stooping to pick them up and handing one to me. i took it from him with a delight i could not understand. "keep it," he murmured; "it is the sign that we are welcome. for malahide has dropped these on our path." and at the use of that ancestral name it seemed that a spirit passed before my face and the hair of my head stood up. there was a sense of violent, unhappy contrast. a composite picture presented itself, then rushed away. what was it? my youth in england, music and poetry at cambridge and my passionate love of greek that lasted two terms at most, when malahide's great books formed part of the curriculum. over against this, then, the drag and smother of solid worldly business, the sordid weight of modern ugliness, the bitterness of an ambitious, over-striving life. and abruptly--beyond both pictures--a shining, marvellous beauty that scattered stars beneath my feet and scarved the universe with gold. all this flashed before me with the utterance of that old family name. an alternative sprang up. there seemed some radical, elemental choice presented to me--to what i used to call my soul. my soul could take or leave it as it pleased.... i looked at arthur moving beside me like a shaft of light. what had come over me? how had our walk and talk and mood, our quite recent everyday and ordinary view, our normal relationship with the things of the world--how had it all slipped into this? so insensibly, so easily, so naturally! "was it worth while?" the question--_i_ didn't ask it--jumped up in me of its own accord. was "what" worth while? why, my present life of commonplace and grubbing toil, of course; my city existence, with its meagre, unremunerative ambitions. ah, it was this new beauty calling me, this shining dream that lay beyond the two pictures i have mentioned.... i did not argue it, even to myself. but i understood. there was a radical change in me. the buried poet, too long hidden, rushed into the air like some great singing bird. i glanced again at arthur moving along lightly by my side, half dancing almost in his brimming happiness. "wait till you see them," i heard him singing. "wait till you hear the call of artemis and the footsteps of her flying nymphs. wait till orion thunders overhead and selene, crowned with the crescent moon, drives up the zenith in her white-horsed chariot. the choice will be beyond all question then...!" a great silent bird, with soft brown plumage, whirred across our path, pausing an instant as though to peep, then disappearing with a muted sound into an eddy of the wind it made. the big trees hid it. it was an owl. the same moment i heard a rush of liquid song come pouring through the forest with a gush of almost human notes, and a pair of glossy wings flashed past us, swerving upwards to find the open sky--blue-black, pointed wings. "his favourites!" exclaimed my companion with clear joy in his voice. "they all are here! athene's bird, procne and philomela too! the owl--the swallow--and the nightingale! tereus and itys are not far away." and the entire forest, as he said it, stirred with movement, as though that great bird's quiet wings had waked the sea of ancient shadows. there were voices too--ringing, laughing voices, as though his words woke echoes that had been listening for it. for i heard sweet singing in the distance. the names he had used perplexed me. yet even i, stranger as i was to such refined delights, could not mistake the passion of the nightingale and the dart of the eager swallow. that wild burst of music, that curve of swift escape, were unmistakable. and i struck a stalwart tree-stem with my open hand, feeling the need of hearing, touching, sensing it. my link with known, remembered things was breaking. i craved the satisfaction of the commonplace. i got that satisfaction; but i got something more as well. for the trunk was round and smooth and comely. it was no dead thing i struck. somehow it brushed me into intercourse with inanimate nature. and next the desire came to hear my voice--my own familiar, high-pitched voice with the twang and accent the new world climate brings, so-called american: "exchange place, noo york city. i'm in that business, buying and selling of exchange between the banks of two civilised countries, one of them stoopid and old-fashioned, the other leading all creation...!" it was an effort; but i made it firmly. it sounded odd, remote, unreal. "sunlit woods and a wind among the branches", followed close and sweet upon my words. but who, in the name of wall street, said it? "england's buying gold," i tried again. "we've had a private wire. cut in quick. first national is selling!" great-faced hephæstus, how ridiculous! it was like saying, "i'll take your scalp unless you give me meat." it was barbaric, savage, centuries ago. again there came another voice that caught up my own and turned it into common syntax. some heady beauty of the earth rose about me like a cloud. "hark! night comes, with the dusk upon her eyelids. she brings those dreams that every dew-drop holds at dawn. daughter of thanatos and hypnos...!" but again--who said the words? it surely was not arthur, my nephew arthur, of to-day, learning french in a swiss mountain village! i felt--well, what did i feel? in the name of the stock exchange and wall street, what was the cash surrender of amazing feelings? and, turning to look at him, i made a discovery. i don't know how to tell it quite; such shadowy marvels have never been my line of goods. he looked several things at once--taller, slighter, sweeter, but chiefly--it sounds so crazy when i write it down--grander is the word, i think. and all spread out with some power that flowed like spring when it pours upon a landscape. eternally young and glorious--young, i mean, in the sense of a field of flowers in the spring looks young; and glorious in the sense the sky looks glorious at dawn or sunset. something big shone through him like a storm, something that would go on for ever just as the earth goes on, always renewing itself, something of gigantic life that in the human sense could never age at all--something the old gods had. but the figure, so far as there was any figure at all, was that old family picture come to life. our great ancestor and arthur were one being, and that one being was vaster than a million people. yet it was malahide i saw.... "they laid me in the earth i loved," he said in a strange, thrilling voice like running wind and water, "and i found eternal life. i live now for ever in their divine existence. i share the life that changes yet can never pass away." i felt myself rising like a cloud as he said it. a roaring beauty captured me completely. if i could tell it in honest newspaper language--the common language used in flats and offices--why, i guess i could patent a new meaning in ordinary words, a new power of expression, the thing that all the churches and poets and thinkers have been trying to say since the world began. i caught on to a fact so fine and simple that it knocked me silly to think i'd never realised it before. i had read it, yes; but now i _knew_ it. the earth, the whole bustling universe, was nothing after all but a visible production of eternal, living powers--spiritual powers, mind you--that just happened to include the particular little type of strutting creature we called mankind. and these powers, as seen in nature, were the gods. it was our refusal of their grand appeal, so wild and sweet and beautiful, that caused "evil." it was this barrier between ourselves and the rest of ... my thoughts and feelings swept away upon the rising flood as the "figure" came upon me like a shaft of moonlight, melting the last remnant of opposition that was in me. i took my brain, my reason, chucking them aside for the futile little mechanism i suddenly saw them to be. in place of them came--oh, god, i hate to say it, for only nursery talk can get within a mile of it, and yet what i need is something simpler even than the words that children use. under one arm i carried a whole forest breathing in the wind, and beneath the other a hundred meadows full of singing streams with golden marigolds and blue forget-me-nots along their banks. upon my back and shoulders lay the clouded hills with dew and moonlight in their brimmed, capacious hollows. thick in my hair hung the unaging powers that are stars and sunlight; though the sun was far away, it sweetened the currents of my blood with liquid gold. breast and throat and face, as i advanced, met all the rivers of the world and all the winds of heaven, their strength and swiftness melting into me as light melts into everything it touches. and into my eyes passed all the radiant colours that weave the cloth of nature as she takes the sun. and this "figure," pouring upon me like a burst of moonlight, spoke: "they all are in you--air, and fire, and water...." "and i--my feet stand--on the _earth_," my own voice interrupted, deep power lifting through the sound of it. "the earth!" he laughed gigantically. he spread. he seemed everywhere about me. he seemed a race of men. my life swam forth in waves of some immense sensation that issued from the mountain and the forest, then returned to them again. i reeled. i clutched at something in me that was slipping beyond control, slipping down a bank towards a deep, dark river flowing at my feet. a shadowy boat appeared, a still more shadowy outline at the helm. i was in the act of stepping into it. for the tree i caught at was only air. i couldn't stop myself. i tried to scream. "you have plucked asphodel," sang the voice beside me, "and you shall pluck more...." i slipped and slipped, the speed increasing horribly. then something caught, as though a cog held fast and stopped me. i remembered my business in new york city. "arthur!" i yelled. "arthur!" i shouted again as hard as i could shout. there was frantic terror in me. i felt as though i should never get back to myself again. death! the answer came in his normal voice: "keep close to me. i know the way...." the scenery dwindled suddenly; the trees came back. i was walking in the forest beside my nephew, and the moonlight lay in patches and little shafts of silver. the crests of the pines just murmured in a wind that scarcely stirred, and through an opening on our right i saw the deep valley clasped about the twinkling village lights. towering in splendour the spectral snowfields hung upon the sky, huge summits guarding them. and arthur took my arm--oh, solidly enough this time. thank heaven, he asked no questions of me. "there's a smell of myrrh," he whispered, "and we are very near the undying, ancient things." i said something about the resin from the trees, but he took no notice. "it enclosed its body in an egg of myrrh," he went on, smiling down at me; "then, setting it on fire, rose from the ashes with its life renewed. once every five hundred years, you see----" "what did?" i cried, feeling that loss of self stealing over me again. and his answer came like a blow between the eyes: "the phoenix. they called it a bird, but, of course, the true ..." "but my life's insured in that," i cried, for he had named the company that took large yearly premiums from me; "and i pay ..." "your life's insured in _this_," he said quietly, waving his arms to indicate the earth. "your love of nature and your sympathy with it make you safe." he gazed at me. there was a marvellous expression in his eyes. i understood why poets talked of stars and flowers in a human face. but behind the face crept back another look as well. there grew about his figure an indeterminate extension. the outline of malahide again stirred through his own. a pale, delicate hand reached out to take my own. and something broke in me. i was conscious of two things--a burst of joy that meant losing myself entirely, and a rush of terror that meant staying as i was, a small, painful, struggling item of individual life. another spray of that awful asphodel fell fluttering through the air in front of my face. it rested on the earth against my feet. and arthur--this weirdly changing arthur--stooped to pick it for me. i kicked it with my foot beyond his reach ... then turned and ran as though the furies of that ancient world were after me. i ran for my very life. how i escaped from that thick wood without banging my body to bits against the trees i can't explain. i ran from something i desired and yet feared. i leaped along in a succession of flying bounds. each tree i passed turned of its own accord and flung after me until the entire forest followed. but i got out. i reached the open. upon the sloping field in the full, clear light of the moon i collapsed in a panting heap. the earth drew back with a great shuddering sigh behind me. there was this strange, tumultuous sound upon the night. i lay beneath the open heavens that were full of moonlight. i was myself--but there were tears in me. beauty too high for understanding had slipped between my fingers. i had lost malahide. i had lost the gods of earth.... yet i had seen ... and felt. i had not lost all. something remained that i could never lose again.... i don't know how it happened exactly, but presently i heard arthur saying: "you'll catch your death of cold if you lie on that soaking grass," and felt his hand seize mine to pull me to my feet. "i feel safer on earth," i believe i answered. and then he said: "yes, but it's such a stupid way to die--a chill!" i got up then, and we went downhill together towards the village lights. i danced--oh, i admit it--i sang as well. there was a flood of joy and power about me that beat anything i'd ever felt before. i didn't think or hesitate; there was no self-consciousness; i just let it rip for all there was, and if there had been ten thousand people there in front of me, i could have made them feel it too. that was the kind of feeling--power and confidence and a sort of raging happiness. i think i know what it was too. i say this soberly, with reverence ... all wool and no fading. there was a bit of god in me, god's power that drives the earth and pours through nature--the imperishable beauty expressed in those old-world nature-deities! and the fear i'd felt was nothing but the little tickling point of losing my ordinary two-cent self, the dread of letting go, the shrinking before the plunge--what a fellow feels when he's falling in love, and hesitates, and tries to think it out and hold back, and is afraid to let the enormous tide flow in and drown him. oh, yes, i began to think it over a bit as we raced down the mountain-side that glorious night. i've read some in my day; my brain's all right; i've heard of dual personality and subliminal uprush and conversion--no new line of goods, all that. but somehow these stunts of the psychologists and philosophers didn't cut any ice with me just then, because i'd _experienced_ what they merely _explained_. and explanation was just a bargain sale. the best things can't be explained at all. there's no real value in a bargain sale. arthur had trouble to keep up with me. we were running due east, and the earth was turning, therefore, with us. we all three ran together at _her_ pace--terrific! the moonlight danced along the summits, and the snow-fields flew like spreading robes, and the forests everywhere, far and near, hung watching us and booming like a thousand organs. there were uncaged winds about; you could hear them whistling among the precipices. but the great thing that i knew was--beauty, a beauty of the common old familiar earth, and a beauty that's stayed with me ever since, and given me joy and strength and a source of power and delight i'd never guessed existed before. * * * * * as we dropped lower into the thicker air of the valley i sobered down. gradually the ecstasy passed from me. we slowed up a bit. the lights and the houses and the sight of the hotel where people were dancing in a stuffy ballroom, all this put blotting-paper on something that had been flowing. now you'll think this an odd thing too--but when we reached the village street, i just took arthur's hand and shook it and said good-night and went up to bed and slept like a two-year-old till morning. and from that day to this i've never set eyes on the boy again. perhaps it's difficult to explain, and perhaps it isn't. i can explain it to myself in two lines--i was afraid to see him. i was afraid he might "explain." i was afraid he might explain "away." i just left a note--he never replied to it--and went off by a morning train. can you understand that? because if you can't you haven't understood this account i've tried to give of the experience arthur gave me. well--anyway--i'll just let it go at that. arthur's a director now in his father's wholesale chemical business, and i--well, i'm doing better than ever in the buying and selling of exchange between banks in new york city as before. but when i said i was still drawing dividends on my swiss investment, i meant it. and it's not "scenery." everybody gets a thrill from "scenery." it's a darned sight more than that. it's those little wayward patches of blue on a cloudy day; those blue pools in the sky just above trinity church steeple when i pass out of wall street into lower broadway; it's the rustle of the sea-wind among the battery trees; the wash of the waves when the ferry's starting for staten island, and the glint of the sun far down the bay, or dropping a bit of pearl into the old east river. and sometimes it's the strip of cloud in the west above the jersey shore of the hudson, the first star, the sickle of the new moon behind the masts and shipping. but usually it's something nearer, bigger, simpler than all or any of these. it's just the certainty that, when i hurry along the hard stone pavements from bank to bank, i'm walking on the--earth. it's just that--_the earth_! v a desert episode "better put wraps on now. the sun's getting low," a girl said. it was the end of a day's expedition in the arabian desert, and they were having tea. a few yards away the donkeys munched their _barsim_; beside them in the sand the boys lay finishing bread and jam. immense, with gliding tread, the sun's rays slid from crest to crest of the limestone ridges that broke the huge expanse towards the red sea. by the time the tea-things were packed the sun hovered, a giant ball of red, above the pyramids. it stood in the western sky a moment, looking out of its majestic hood across the sand. with a movement almost visible it leaped, paused, then leaped again. it seemed to bound towards the horizon; then, suddenly, was gone. "it _is_ cold, yes," said the painter, rivers. and all who heard looked up at him because of the way he said it. a hurried movement ran through the merry party, and the girls were on their donkeys quickly, not wishing to be left to bring up the rear. they clattered off. the boys cried; the thud of sticks was heard; hoofs shuffled through the sand and stones. in single file the picnickers headed for helouan, some five miles distant. and the desert closed up behind them as they went, following in a shadowy wave that never broke, noiseless, foamless, unstreaked, driven by no wind, and of a volume undiscoverable. against the orange sunset the pyramids turned deep purple. the strip of silvery nile among its palm trees looked like rising mist. in the incredible egyptian afterglow the enormous horizons burned a little longer, then went out. the ball of the earth--a huge round globe that bulged--curved visibly as at sea. it was no longer a flat expanse; it turned. its splendid curves were realised. "better put wraps on; it's cold and the sun is low"--and then the curious hurry to get back among the houses and the haunts of men. no more was said, perhaps, than this, yet, the time and place being what they were, the mind became suddenly aware of that quality which ever brings a certain shrinking with it--vastness; and more than vastness: that which is endless because it is also beginningless--eternity. a colossal splendour stole upon the heart, and the senses, unaccustomed to the unusual stretch, reeled a little, as though the wonder was more than could be faced with comfort. not all, doubtless, realised it, though to two, at least, it came with a staggering impact there was no withstanding. for, while the luminous greys and purples crept round them from the sandy wastes, the hearts of these two became aware of certain common things whose simple majesty is usually dulled by mere familiarity. neither the man nor the girl knew for certain that the other felt it, as they brought up the rear together; yet the fact that each _did_ feel it set them side by side in the same strange circle--and made them silent. they realised the immensity of a moment: the dizzy stretch of time that led up to the casual pinning of a veil; to the tightening of a stirrup strap; to the little speech with a companion; the roar of the vanished centuries that have ground mountains into sand and spread them over the floor of africa; above all, to the little truth that they themselves existed amid the whirl of stupendous systems all delicately balanced as a spider's web--that they were _alive_. for a moment this vast scale of reality revealed itself, then hid swiftly again behind the débris of the obvious. the universe, containing their two tiny yet important selves, stood still for an instant before their eyes. they looked at it--realised that they belonged to it. everything moved and had its being, _lived_--here in this silent, empty desert even more actively than in a city of crowded houses. the quiet nile, sighing with age, passed down towards the sea; there loomed the menacing pyramids across the twilight; beneath them, in monstrous dignity, crouched that shadow from whose eyes of battered stone proceeds the nameless thing that contracts the heart, then opens it again to terror; and everywhere, from towering monoliths as from secret tombs, rose that strange, long whisper which, defying time and distance, laughs at death. the spell of egypt, which is the spell of immortality, touched their hearts. already, as the group of picnickers rode homewards now, the first stars twinkled overhead, and the peerless egyptian night was on the way. there was hurry in the passing of the dusk. and the cold sensibly increased. "so you did no painting after all," said rivers to the girl who rode a little in front of him, "for i never saw you touch your sketch-book once." they were some distance now behind the others; the line straggled; and when no answer came he quickened his pace, drew up alongside and saw that her eyes, in the reflection of the sunset, shone with moisture. but she turned her head a little, smiling into his face, so that the human and the non-human beauty came over him with an onset that was almost shock. neither one nor other, he knew, were long for him, and the realisation fell upon him with a pang of actual physical pain. the acuteness, the hopelessness of the realisation, for a moment, were more than he could bear, stern of temper though he was, and he tried to pass in front of her, urging his donkey with resounding strokes. her own animal, however, following the lead, at once came up with him. "you felt it, perhaps, as i did," he said some moments later, his voice quite steady again. "the stupendous, everlasting thing--the--_life_ behind it all." he hesitated a little in his speech, unable to find the substantive that could compass even a fragment of his thought. she paused, too, similarly inarticulate before the surge of incomprehensible feelings. "it's--awful," she said, half laughing, yet the tone hushed and a little quaver in it somewhere. and her voice to his was like the first sound he had ever heard in the world, for the first sound a full-grown man heard in the world would be beyond all telling--magical. "i shall not try again," she continued, leaving out the laughter this time; "my sketch-book is a farce. for, to tell the truth"--and the next three words she said below her breath--"i dare not." he turned and looked at her for a second. it seemed to him that the following wave had caught them up, and was about to break above her, too. but the big-brimmed hat and the streaming veil shrouded her features. he saw, instead, the universe. he felt as though he and she had always, always been together, and always, always would be. separation was inconceivable. "it came so close," she whispered. "it--shook me!" they were cut off from their companions, whose voices sounded far ahead. her words might have been spoken by the darkness, or by some one who peered at them from within that following wave. yet the fanciful phrase was better than any he could find. from the immeasurable space of time and distance men's hearts vainly seek to plumb, it drew into closer perspective a certain meaning that words may hardly compass, a formidable truth that belongs to that deep place where hope and doubt fight their incessant battle. the awe she spoke of was the awe of immortality, of belonging to something that is endless and beginningless. and he understood that the tears and laughter were one--caused by that spell which takes a little human life and shakes it, as an animal shakes its prey that later shall feed its blood and increase its power of growth. his other thoughts--really but a single thought--he had not the right to utter. pain this time easily routed hope as the wave came nearer. for it was the wave of death that would shortly break, he knew, over him, but not over her. him it would sweep with its huge withdrawal into the desert whence it came: her it would leave high upon the shores of life--alone. and yet the separation would somehow not be real. they were together in eternity even now. they were endless as this desert, beginningless as this sky ... immortal. the realisation overwhelmed.... the lights of helouan seemed to come no nearer as they rode on in silence for the rest of the way. against the dark background of the mokattam hills these fairy lights twinkled brightly, hanging in mid-air, but after an hour they were no closer than before. it was like riding towards the stars. it would take centuries to reach them. there were centuries in which to do so. hurry has no place in the desert; it is born in streets. the desert stands still; to go fast in it is to go backwards. now, in particular, its enormous, uncanny leisure was everywhere--in keeping with that mighty scale the sunset had made visible. his thoughts, like the steps of the weary animal that bore him, had no progress in them. the serpent of eternity, holding its tail in its own mouth, rose from the sand, enclosing himself, the stars--and her. behind him, in the hollows of that shadowy wave, the procession of dynasties and conquests, the great series of gorgeous civilisations the mind calls past, stood still, crowded with shining eyes and beckoning faces, still waiting to arrive. there is no death in egypt. his own death stood so close that he could touch it by stretching out his hand, yet it seemed as much behind as in front of him. what man called a beginning was a trick. there was no such thing. he was with this girl--_now_, when death waited so close for him--yet he had never really begun. their lives ran always parallel. the hand he stretched to clasp approaching death caught instead in this girl's shadowy hair, drawing her in with him to the centre where he breathed the eternity of the desert. yet expression of any sort was as futile as it was unnecessary. to paint, to speak, to sing, even the slightest gesture of the soul, became a crude and foolish thing. silence was here the truth. and they rode in silence towards the fairy lights. then suddenly the rocky ground rose up close before them; boulders stood out vividly with black shadows and shining heads; a flat-roofed house slid by; three palm trees rattled in the evening wind; beyond, a mosque and minaret sailed upwards, like the spars and rigging of some phantom craft; and the colonnades of the great modern hotel, standing upon its dome of limestone ridge, loomed over them. helouan was about them before they knew it. the desert lay behind with its huge, arrested billow. slowly, owing to its prodigious volume, yet with a speed that merged it instantly with the far horizon behind the night, this wave now withdrew a little. there was no hurry. it came, for the moment, no farther. rivers knew. for he was in it to the throat. only his head was above the surface. he still could breathe--and speak--and see. deepening with every hour into an incalculable splendour, it waited. in the street the foremost riders drew rein, and, two and two abreast, the long line clattered past the shops and cafés, the railway station and hotels, stared at by the natives from the busy pavements. the donkeys stumbled, blinded by the electric light. girls in white dresses flitted here and there, arabîyehs rattled past with people hurrying home to dress for dinner, and the evening train, just in from cairo, disgorged its stream of passengers. there were dances in several of the hotels that night. voices rose on all sides. questions and answers, engagements and appointments were made, little plans and plots and intrigues for seizing happiness on the wing--before the wave rolled in and caught the lot. they chattered gaily: "you _are_ going, aren't you? you promised----" "of course i am." "then i'll drive you over. may i call for you?" "all right. come at ten." "we shan't have finished our bridge by then. say ten-thirty." and eyes exchanged their meaning signals. the group dismounted and dispersed. arabs standing under the lebbekh trees, or squatting on the pavements before their dim-lit booths, watched them with faces of gleaming bronze. rivers gave his bridle to a donkey-boy, and moved across stiffly after the long ride to help the girl dismount. "you feel tired?" he asked gently. "it's been a long day." for her face was white as chalk, though the eyes shone brilliantly. "tired, perhaps," she answered, "but exhilarated too. i should like to be there now. i should like to go back this minute--if some one would take me." and, though she said it lightly, there was a meaning in her voice he apparently chose to disregard. it was as if she knew his secret. "will you take me--some day soon?" the direct question, spoken by those determined little lips, was impossible to ignore. he looked close into her face as he helped her from the saddle with a spring that brought her a moment half into his arms. "some day--soon. i will," he said with emphasis, "when you are--ready." the pallor in her face, and a certain expression in it he had not known before, startled him. "i think you have been overdoing it," he added, with a tone in which authority and love were oddly mingled, neither of them disguised. "like yourself," she smiled, shaking her skirts out and looking down at her dusty shoes. "i've only a few days more--before i sail. we're both in such a hurry, but you are the worst of the two." "because my time is even shorter," ran his horrified thought--for he said no word. she raised her eyes suddenly to his, with an expression that for an instant almost convinced him she had guessed--and the soul in him stood rigidly at attention, urging back the rising fires. the hair had dropped loosely round the sun-burned neck. her face was level with his shoulder. even the glare of the street lights could not make her undesirable. but behind the gaze of the deep brown eyes another thing looked forth imperatively into his own. and he recognised it with a rush of terror, yet of singular exultation. "it followed us all the way," she whispered. "it came after us from the desert--where it _lives_." "at the houses," he said equally low, "it stopped." he gladly adopted her syncopated speech, for it helped him in his struggle to subdue those rising fires. for a second she hesitated. "you mean, if we had not left so soon--when it turned cold. if we had not hurried--if we had remained a little longer----" he caught at her hand, unable to control himself, but dropped it again the same second, while she made as though she had not noticed, forgiving him with her eyes. "or a great deal longer," she added slowly--"for ever?" and then he was certain that she _had_ guessed--not that he loved her above all else in the world, for that was so obvious that a child might know it, but that his silence was due to his other, lesser secret; that the great executioner stood waiting to drop the hood about his eyes. he was already pinioned. something in her gaze and in her manner persuaded him suddenly that she understood. his exhilaration increased extraordinarily. "i mean," he said very quietly, "that the spell weakens here among the houses and among the--so-called living." there was masterfulness, triumph, in his voice. very wonderfully he saw her smile change; she drew slightly closer to his side, as though unable to resist. "mingled with lesser things we should not understand completely," he added softly. "and that might be a mistake, you mean?" she asked quickly, her face grave again. it was his turn to hesitate a moment. the breeze stirred the hair about her neck, bringing its faint perfume--perfume of young life--to his nostrils. he drew his breath in deeply, smothering back the torrent of rising words he knew were unpermissible. "misunderstanding," he said briefly. "if the eye be single----" he broke off, shaken by a paroxysm of coughing. "you know my meaning," he continued, as soon as the attack had passed; "you feel the difference _here_," pointing round him to the hotels, the shops, the busy stream of people; "the hurry, the excitement, the feverish, blinding child's play which pretends to be alive, but does not know it----" and again the coughing stopped him. this time she took his hand in her own, pressed it very slightly, then released it. he felt it as the touch of that desert wave upon his soul. "the reception must be in complete and utter resignation. tainted by lesser things, the disharmony might be----" he began stammeringly. again there came interruption, as the rest of the party called impatiently to know if they were coming up to the hotel. he had not time to find the completing adjective. perhaps he could not find it ever. perhaps it does not exist in any modern language. eternity is not realised to-day; men have no time to know they are alive for ever; they are too busy.... they all moved in a clattering, merry group towards the big hotel. rivers and the girl were separated. there was a dance that evening, but neither of these took part in it. in the great dining-room their tables were far apart. he could not even see her across the sea of intervening heads and shoulders. the long meal over, he went to his room, feeling it imperative to be alone. he did not read, he did not write; but, leaving the light unlit, he wrapped himself up and leaned out upon the broad window-sill into the great egyptian night. his deep-sunken thoughts, like to the crowding stars, stood still, yet for ever took new shapes. he tried to see behind them, as, when a boy, he had tried to see behind the constellations--out into space--where there is nothing. below him the lights of helouan twinkled like the pleiades reflected in a pool of water; a hum of queer soft noises rose to his ears; but just beyond the houses the desert stood at attention, the vastest thing he had ever known, very stern, yet very comforting, with its peace beyond all comprehension, its delicate, wild terror, and its awful message of immortality. and the attitude of his mind, though he did not know it, was one of prayer.... from time to time he went to lie on the bed with paroxysms of coughing. he had overtaxed his strength--his swiftly fading strength. the wave had risen to his lips. nearer forty than thirty-five, paul rivers had come out to egypt, plainly understanding that with the greatest care he might last a few weeks longer than if he stayed in england. a few more times to see the sunset and the sunrise, to watch the stars, feel the soft airs of earth upon his cheeks; a few more days of intercourse with his kind, asking and answering questions, wearing the old familiar clothes he loved, reading his favourite pages, and then--out into the big spaces--where there is nothing. yet no one, from his stalwart, energetic figure, would have guessed--no one but the expert mind, not to be deceived, to whom in the first attack of overwhelming despair and desolation he went for final advice. he left that house, as many had left it before, knowing that soon he would need no earthly protection of roof and walls, and that his soul, if it existed, would be shelterless in the space behind all manifested life. he had looked forward to fame and position in this world; had, indeed, already achieved the first step towards this end; and now, with the vanity of all earthly aims so mercilessly clear before him, he had turned, in somewhat of a nervous, concentrated hurry, to make terms with the infinite while still the brain was there. and had, of course, found nothing. for it takes a lifetime crowded with experiment and effort to learn even the alphabet of genuine faith; and what could come of a few weeks' wild questioning but confusion and bewilderment of mind? it was inevitable. he came out to egypt wondering, thinking, questioning, but chiefly wondering. he had grown, that is, more childlike, abandoning the futile tool of reason, which hitherto had seemed to him the perfect instrument. its foolishness stood naked before him in the pitiless light of the specialist's decision. for--"who can by searching find out god?" to be exceedingly careful of over-exertion was the final warning he brought with him, and, within a few hours of his arrival, three weeks ago, he had met this girl and utterly disregarded it. he took it somewhat thus: "instead of lingering i'll enjoy myself and go out--a little sooner. i'll _live_. the time is very short." his was not a nature, anyhow, that could heed a warning. he could not kneel. upright and unflinching, he went to meet things as they came, reckless, unwise, but certainly not afraid. and this characteristic operated now. he ran to meet death full tilt in the uncharted spaces that lay behind the stars. with love for a companion now, he raced, his speed increasing from day to day, she, as he thought, knowing merely that he sought her, but had not guessed his darker secret that was now his _lesser_ secret. and in the desert, this afternoon of the picnic, the great thing he sped to meet had shown itself with its familiar touch of appalling cold and shadow, familiar, because all minds know of and accept it; appalling because, until realised close, and with the mental power at the full, it remains but a name the heart refuses to believe in. and he had discovered that its name was--life. rivers had seen the wave that sweeps incessant, tireless, but as a rule invisible, round the great curve of the bulging earth, brushing the nations into the deeps behind. it had followed him home to the streets and houses of helouan. he saw it _now_, as he leaned from his window, dim and immense, too huge to break. its beauty was nameless, undecipherable. his coughing echoed back from the wall of its great sides.... and the music floated up at the same time from the ball-room in the opposite wing. the two sounds mingled. life, which is love, and death, which is their unchanging partner, held hands beneath the stars. he leaned out farther to drink in the cool, sweet air. soon, on this air, his body would be dust, driven, perhaps, against her very cheek, trodden on possibly by her little foot--until, in turn, she joined him too, blown by the same wind loose about the desert. true. yet at the same time they would always be together, always somewhere side by side, continuing in the vast universe, _alive_. this new, absolute conviction was in him now. he remembered the curious, sweet perfume in the desert, as of flowers, where yet no flowers are. it was the perfume of life. but in the desert there is no life. living things that grow and move and utter, are but a protest against death. in the desert they are unnecessary, because death there _is_ not. its overwhelming vitality needs no insolent, visible proof, no protest, no challenge, no little signs of life. the message of the desert is immortality.... he went finally to bed, just before midnight. hovering magnificently just outside his window, death watched him while he slept. the wave crept to the level of his eyes. he called her name.... * * * * * and downstairs, meanwhile, the girl, knowing nothing, wondered where he was, wondered unhappily and restlessly; more--though this she did not understand--wondered motheringly. until to-day, on the ride home, and from their singular conversation together, she had guessed nothing of his reason for being at helouan, where so many come in order to find life. she only knew her own. and she was but twenty-five.... then, in the desert, when that touch of unearthly chill had stolen out of the sand towards sunset, she had realised clearly, astonished she had not seen it long ago, that this man loved her, yet that something prevented his obeying the great impulse. in the life of paul rivers, whose presence had profoundly stirred her heart the first time she saw him, there was some obstacle that held him back, a barrier his honour must respect. he could never tell her of his love. it could lead to nothing. knowing that he was not married, her intuition failed her utterly at first. then, in their silence on the homeward ride, the truth had somehow pressed up and touched her with its hand of ice. in that disjointed conversation at the end, which reads as it sounded, as though no coherent meaning lay behind the words, and as though both sought to conceal by speech what yet both burned to utter, she had divined his darker secret, and knew that it was the same as her own. she understood then it was death that had tracked them from the desert, following with its gigantic shadow from the sandy wastes. the cold, the darkness, the silence which cannot answer, the stupendous mystery which is the spell of its inscrutable presence, had risen about them in the dusk, and kept them company at a little distance, until the lights of helouan had bade it halt. life which may not, cannot end, had frightened her. his time, perhaps, was even shorter than her own. none knew his secret, since he was alone in egypt and was caring for himself. similarly, since she bravely kept her terror to herself, her mother had no inkling of her own, aware merely that the disease was in her system and that her orders were to be extremely cautious. this couple, therefore, shared secretly together the two clearest glimpses of eternity life has to offer to the soul. side by side they looked into the splendid eyes of love and death. life, moreover, with its instinct for simple and terrific drama, had produced this majestic climax, breaking with pathos, at the very moment when it could not be developed--this side of the stars. they stood together upon the stage, a stage emptied of other human players; the audience had gone home and the lights were being lowered; no music sounded; the critics were a-bed. in this great game of consequences it was known where he met her, what he said and what she answered, possibly what they did and even what the world thought. but "what the consequence was" would remain unknown, untold. that would happen in the big spaces of which the desert in its silence, its motionless serenity, its shelterless, intolerable vastness, is the perfect symbol. and the desert gives no answer. it sounds no challenge, for it is complete. life in the desert makes no sign. it _is_. in the hotel that night there arrived by chance a famous international dancer, whose dahabîyeh lay anchored at san giovanni, in the nile below helouan; and this woman, with her party, had come to dine and take part in the festivities. the news spread. after twelve the lights were lowered, and while the moonlight flooded the terraces, streaming past pillar and colonnade, she rendered in the shadowed halls the music of the masters, interpreting with an instinctive genius messages which are eternal and divine. among the crowd of enthralled and delighted guests, the girl sat on the steps and watched her. the rhythmical interpretation held a power that seemed, in a sense, inspired; there lay in it a certain unconscious something that was pure, unearthly; something that the stars, wheeling in stately movements over the sea and desert know; something the great winds bring to mountains where they play together; something the forests capture and fix magically into their gathering of big and little branches. it was both passionate and spiritual, wild and tender, intensely human and seductively non-human. for it was original, taught of nature, a revelation of naked, unhampered life. it comforted, as the desert comforts. it brought the desert awe into the stuffy corridors of the hotel, with the moonlight and the whispering of stars, yet behind it ever the silence of those grey, mysterious, interminable spaces which utter to themselves the wordless song of life. for it was the same dim thing, she felt, that had followed her from the desert several hours before, halting just outside the streets and houses as though blocked from further advance; the thing that had stopped her foolish painting, skilled though she was, because it hides behind colour and not in it; the thing that veiled the meaning in the cryptic sentences she and he had stammered out together; the thing, in a word, as near as she could approach it by any means of interior expression, that the realisation of death for the first time makes comprehensible--immortality. it was unutterable, but it _was_. he and she were indissolubly together. death was no separation. there was no death.... it was terrible. it was--she had already used the word--awful, full of awe. "in the desert," thought whispered, as she watched spellbound, "it is impossible even to conceive of death. the idea is meaningless. it simply is not." the music and the movement filled the air with life which, being there, must continue always, and continuing always can have never had a beginning. death, therefore, was the great revealer of life. without it none could realise that they are alive. others had discovered this before her, but she did not know it. in the desert no one can realise death: it is hope and life that are the only certainty. the entire conception of the egyptian system was based on this--the conviction, sure and glorious, of life's endless continuation. their tombs and temples, their pyramids and sphinxes surviving after thousands of years, defy the passage of time and laugh at death; the very bodies of their priests and kings, of their animals even, their fish, their insects, stand to-day as symbols of their stalwart knowledge. and this girl, as she listened to the music and watched the inspired dancing, remembered it. the message poured into her from many sides, though the desert brought it clearest. with death peering into her face a few short weeks ahead, she thought instead of--life. the desert, as it were, became for her a little fragment of eternity, focused into an intelligible point for her mind to rest upon with comfort and comprehension. her steady, thoughtful nature stirred towards an objective far beyond the small enclosure of one narrow lifetime. the scale of the desert stretched her to the grandeur of its own imperial meaning, its divine repose, its unassailable and everlasting majesty. she looked beyond the wall. eternity! that which is endless; without pause, without beginning, without divisions or boundaries. the fluttering of her brave yet frightened spirit ceased, aware with awe of its own everlastingness. the swiftest motion produces the effect of immobility; excessive light is darkness; size, run loose into enormity, is the same as the minutely tiny. similarly, in the desert, life, too overwhelming and terrific to know limit or confinement, lies undetailed and stupendous, still as deity, a revelation of nothingness because it is all. turned golden beneath its spell that the music and the rhythm made even more comprehensible, the soul in her, already lying beneath the shadow of the great wave, sank into rest and peace, too certain of itself to fear. and panic fled away. "i am immortal ... because i _am_. and what i love is not apart from me. it is myself. we are together endlessly because we _are_." yet in reality, though the big desert brought this, it was love, which, being of similar parentage, interpreted its vast meaning to her little heart--that sudden love which, without a word of preface or explanation, had come to her a short three weeks before.... she went up to her room soon after midnight, abruptly, unexpectedly stricken. some one, it seemed, had called her name. she passed his door. the lights had been turned up. the clamour of praise was loud round the figure of the weary dancer as she left in a carriage for her dahabîyeh on the nile. a low wind whistled round the walls of the great hotel, blowing chill and bitter between the pillars of the colonnades. the girl heard the voices float up to her through the night, and once more, behind the confused sound of the many, she heard her own name called, but more faintly than before, and from very far away. it came through the spaces beyond her open window; it died away again; then--but for the sighing of that bitter wind--silence, the deep silence of the desert. and these two, paul rivers and the girl, between them merely a floor of that stone that built the pyramids, lay a few moments before the wave of sleep engulfed them. and, while they slept, two shadowy forms hovered above the roof of the quiet hotel, melting presently into one, as dreams stole down from the desert and the stars. immortality whispered to them. on either side rose life and death, towering in splendour. love, joining their spreading wings, fused the gigantic outlines into one. the figures grew smaller, comprehensible. they entered the little windows. above the beds they paused a moment, watching, waiting, and then, like a wave that is just about to break, they stooped.... and in the brilliant egyptian sunlight of the morning, as she went downstairs, she passed his door again. she had awakened, but he slept on. he had preceded her. it was next day she learned his room was vacant.... within the month she joined him, and within the year the cool north wind that sweetens lower egypt from the sea blew the dust across the desert as before. it is the dust of kings, of queens, of priests, princesses, lovers. it is the dust no earthly power can annihilate. it, too, lasts for ever. there was a little more of it ... the desert's message slightly added to: immortality. vi the other wing it used to puzzle him that, after dark, some one _would_ look in round the edge of the bedroom door, and withdraw again too rapidly for him to see the face. when the nurse had gone away with the candle this happened: "good night, master tim," she said usually, shading the light with one hand to protect his eyes; "dream of me and i'll dream of you." she went out slowly. the sharp-edged shadow of the door ran across the ceiling like a train. there came a whispered colloquy in the corridor outside, about himself, of course, and--he was alone. he heard her steps going deeper and deeper into the bosom of the old country house; they were audible for a moment on the stone flooring of the hall; and sometimes the dull thump of the baize door into the servants' quarters just reached him, too--then silence. but it was only when the last sound, as well as the last sign of her had vanished, that the face emerged from its hiding-place and flashed in upon him round the corner. as a rule, too, it came just as he was saying, "now i'll go to sleep. i won't think any longer. good night, master tim, and happy dreams." he loved to say this to himself; it brought a sense of companionship, as though there were two persons speaking. the room was on the top of the old house, a big, high-ceilinged room, and his bed against the wall had an iron railing round it; he felt very safe and protected in it. the curtains at the other end of the room were drawn. he lay watching the firelight dancing on the heavy folds, and their pattern, showing a spaniel chasing a long-tailed bird towards a bushy tree, interested and amused him. it was repeated over and over again. he counted the number of dogs, and the number of birds, and the number of trees, but could never make them agree. there was a plan somewhere in that pattern; if only he could discover it, the dogs and birds and trees would "come out right." hundreds and hundreds of times he had played this game, for the plan in the pattern made it possible to take sides, and the bird and dog were against him. they always won, however; tim usually fell asleep just when the advantage was on his own side. the curtains hung steadily enough most of the time, but it seemed to him once or twice that they stirred--hiding a dog or bird on purpose to prevent his winning. for instance, he had eleven birds and eleven trees, and, fixing them in his mind by saying, "that's eleven birds and eleven trees, but only ten dogs," his eyes darted back to find the eleventh dog, when--the curtain moved and threw all his calculations into confusion again. the eleventh dog was hidden. he did not quite like the movement; it gave him questionable feelings, rather, for the curtain did not move of itself. yet, usually, he was too intent upon counting the dogs to feel positive alarm. opposite to him was the fireplace, full of red and yellow coals; and, lying with his head sideways on the pillow, he could see directly in between the bars. when the coals settled with a soft and powdery crash, he turned his eyes from the curtains to the grate, trying to discover exactly which bits had fallen. so long as the glow was there the sound seemed pleasant enough, but sometimes he awoke later in the night, the room huge with darkness, the fire almost out--and the sound was not so pleasant then. it startled him. the coals did not fall of themselves. it seemed that some one poked them cautiously. the shadows were very thick before the bars. as with the curtains, moreover, the morning aspect of the extinguished fire, the ice-cold cinders that made a clinking sound like tin, caused no emotion whatever in his soul. and it was usually while he lay waiting for sleep, tired both of the curtain and the coal games, on the point, indeed, of saying, "i'll go to sleep now," that the puzzling thing took place. he would be staring drowsily at the dying fire, perhaps counting the stockings and flannel garments that hung along the high fender-rail when, suddenly, a person looked in with lightning swiftness through the door and vanished again before he could possibly turn his head to see. the appearance and disappearance were accomplished with amazing rapidity always. it was a head and shoulders that looked in, and the movement combined the speed, the lightness and the silence of a shadow. only it was not a shadow. a hand held the edge of the door. the face shot round, saw him, and withdrew like lightning. it was utterly beyond him to imagine anything more quick and clever. it darted. he heard no sound. it went. but--it had seen him, looked him all over, examined him, noted what he was doing with that lightning glance. it wanted to know if he were awake still, or asleep. and though it went off, it still watched him from a distance; it waited somewhere; it knew all about him. _where_ it waited no one could ever guess. it came probably, he felt, from beyond the house, possibly from the roof, but most likely from the garden or the sky. yet, though strange, it was not terrible. it was a kindly and protective figure, he felt. and when it happened he never called for help, because the occurrence simply took his voice away. "it comes from the nightmare passage," he decided; "but it's _not_ a nightmare." it puzzled him. sometimes, moreover, it came more than once in a single night. he was pretty sure--not _quite_ positive--that it occupied his room as soon as he was properly asleep. it took possession, sitting perhaps before the dying fire, standing upright behind the heavy curtains, or even lying down in the empty bed his brother used when he was home from school. perhaps it played the curtain game, perhaps it poked the coals; it knew, at any rate, where the eleventh dog had lain concealed. it certainly came in and out; certainly, too, it did not wish to be seen. for, more than once, on waking suddenly in the midnight blackness, tim knew it was standing close beside his bed and bending over him. he felt, rather than heard, its presence. it glided quietly away. it moved with marvellous softness, yet he was positive it moved. he felt the difference, so to speak. it had been near him, now it was gone. it came back, too--just as he was falling into sleep again. its midnight coming and going, however, stood out sharply different from its first shy, tentative approach. for in the firelight it came alone; whereas in the black and silent hours, it had with it--others. and it was then he made up his mind that its swift and quiet movements were due to the fact that it had wings. it flew. and the others that came with it in the darkness were "its little ones." he also made up his mind that all were friendly, comforting, protective, and that while positively _not_ a nightmare, it yet came somehow along the nightmare passage before it reached him. "you see, it's like this," he explained to the nurse: "the big one comes to visit me alone, but it only brings its little ones when i'm _quite_ asleep." "then the quicker you get to sleep the better, isn't it, master tim?" he replied: "rather! i always do. only i wonder where they come _from_!" he spoke, however, as though he had an inkling. but the nurse was so dull about it that he gave her up and tried his father. "of course," replied this busy but affectionate parent; "it's either nobody at all, or else it's sleep coming to carry you away to the land of dreams." he made the statement kindly but somewhat briskly, for he was worried just then about the extra taxes on his land, and the effort to fix his mind on tim's fanciful world was beyond him at the moment. he lifted the boy on to his knee, kissed and patted him as though he were a favourite dog, and planted him on the rug again with a flying sweep. "run and ask your mother," he added; "she knows all that kind of thing. then come back and tell me all about it--another time." tim found his mother in an arm-chair before the fire of another room; she was knitting and reading at the same time--a wonderful thing the boy could never understand. she raised her head as he came in, pushed her glasses on to her forehead, and held her arms out. he told her everything, ending up with what his father said. "you see, it's _not_ jackman, or thompson, or any one like that," he exclaimed. "it's some one real." "but nice," she assured him, "some one who comes to take care of you and see that you're all safe and cosy." "oh, yes, i know that. but----" "i think your father's right," she added quickly. "it's sleep, i'm sure, who pops in round the door like that. sleep _has_ got wings, i've always heard." "then the other thing--the little ones?" he asked. "are they just sorts of dozes, you think?" mother did not answer for a moment. she turned down the page of her book, closed it slowly, put it on the table beside her. more slowly still she put her knitting away, arranging the wool and needles with some deliberation. "perhaps," she said, drawing the boy closer to her and looking into his big eyes of wonder, "they're dreams!" tim felt a thrill run through him as she said it. he stepped back a foot or so and clapped his hands softly. "dreams!" he whispered with enthusiasm and belief; "of course! i never thought of that." his mother, having proved her sagacity, then made a mistake. she noted her success, but instead of leaving it there, she elaborated and explained. as tim expressed it she "went on about it." therefore he did not listen. he followed his train of thought alone. and presently, he interrupted her long sentences with a conclusion of his own: "then i know where she hides," he announced with a touch of awe. "where she lives, i mean." and without waiting to be asked, he imparted the information: "it's in the other wing." "ah!" said his mother, taken by surprise. "how clever of you, tim!"--and thus confirmed it. thenceforward this was established in his life--that sleep and her attendant dreams hid during the daytime in that unused portion of the great elizabethan mansion called the other wing. this other wing was unoccupied, its corridors untrodden, its windows shuttered and its rooms all closed. at various places green baize doors led into it, but no one ever opened them. for many years this part had been shut up; and for the children, properly speaking, it was out of bounds. they never mentioned it as a possible place, at any rate; in hide-and-seek it was not considered, even; there was a hint of the inaccessible about the other wing. shadows, dust, and silence had it to themselves. but tim, having ideas of his own about everything, possessed special information about the other wing. he believed it _was_ inhabited. who occupied the immense series of empty rooms, who trod the spacious corridors, who passed to and fro behind the shuttered windows, he had not known exactly. he had called these occupants "they," and the most important among them was "the ruler." the ruler of the other wing was a kind of deity, powerful, far away, ever present yet never seen. and about this ruler he had a wonderful conception for a little boy; he connected her, somehow, with deep thoughts of his own, the deepest of all. when he made up adventures to the moon, to the stars, or to the bottom of the sea, adventures that he lived inside himself, as it were--to reach them he must invariably pass through the chambers of the other wing. those corridors and halls, the nightmare passage among them, lay along the route; they were the first stage of the journey. once the green baize doors swung to behind him and the long dim passage stretched ahead, he was well on his way into the adventure of the moment; the nightmare passage once passed, he was safe from capture; but once the shutters of a window had been flung open, he was free of the gigantic world that lay beyond. for then light poured in and he could see his way. the conception, for a child, was curious. it established a correspondence between the mysterious chambers of the other wing and the occupied, but unguessed chambers of his inner being. through these chambers, through these darkened corridors, along a passage, sometimes dangerous, or at least of questionable repute, he must pass to find all adventures that were _real_. the light--when he pierced far enough to take the shutters down--was discovery. tim did not actually think, much less say, all this. he was aware of it, however. he felt it. the other wing was inside himself as well as through the green baize doors. his inner map of wonder included both of them. but now, for the first time in his life, he knew who lived there and who the ruler was. a shutter had fallen of its own accord; light poured in; he made a guess, and mother had confirmed it. sleep and her little ones, the host of dreams, were the daylight occupants. they stole out when the darkness fell. all adventures in life began and ended by a dream--discoverable by first passing through the other wing. and, having settled this, his one desire now was to travel over the map upon journeys of exploration and discovery. the map inside himself he knew already, but the map of the other wing he had not seen. his mind knew it, he had a clear mental picture of rooms and halls and passages, but his feet had never trod the silent floors where dust and shadows hid the flock of dreams by day. the mighty chambers where sleep ruled he longed to stand in, to see the ruler face to face. he made up his mind to get into the other wing. to accomplish this was difficult; but tim was a determined youngster, and he meant to try; he meant, also, to succeed. he deliberated. at night he could not possibly manage it; in any case, the ruler and her host all left it after dark, to fly about the world; the wing would be empty, and the emptiness would frighten him. therefore he must make a daylight visit; and it was a daylight visit he decided on. he deliberated more. there were rules and risks involved: it meant going out of bounds, the danger of being seen, the certainty of being questioned by some idle and inquisitive grown-up: "where in the world have you been all this time"--and so forth. these things he thought out carefully, and though he arrived at no solution, he felt satisfied that it would be all right. that is, he recognised the risks. to be prepared was half the battle, for nothing then could take him by surprise. the notion that he might slip in from the garden was soon abandoned; the red bricks showed no openings; there was no door; from the courtyard, also, entrance was impracticable; even on tiptoe he could barely reach the broad window-sills of stone. when playing alone, or walking with the french governess, he examined every outside possibility. none offered. the shutters, supposing he could reach them, were thick and solid. meanwhile, when opportunity offered, he stood against the outside walls and listened, his ear pressed against the tight red bricks; the towers and gables of the wing rose overhead; he heard the wind go whispering along the eaves; he imagined tiptoe movements and a sound of wings inside. sleep and her little ones were busily preparing for their journeys after dark; they hid, but they did not sleep; in this unused wing, vaster alone than any other country house he had ever seen, sleep taught and trained her flock of feathered dreams. it was very wonderful. they probably supplied the entire county. but more wonderful still was the thought that the ruler herself should take the trouble to come to his particular room and personally watch over him all night long. that was amazing. and it flashed across his imaginative, inquiring mind: "perhaps they take me with them! the moment i'm asleep! that's why she comes to see me!" yet his chief preoccupation was, how sleep got out. through the green baize doors, of course! by a process of elimination he arrived at a conclusion: he, too, must enter through a green baize door and risk detection. of late, the lightning visits had ceased. the silent, darting figure had not peeped in and vanished as it used to do. he fell asleep too quickly now, almost before jackman reached the hall, and long before the fire began to die. also, the dogs and birds upon the curtains always matched the trees exactly, and he won the curtain game quite easily; there was never a dog or bird too many; the curtain never stirred. it had been thus ever since his talk with mother and father. and so he came to make a second discovery: his parents did not really believe in his figure. she kept away on that account. they doubted her; she hid. here was still another incentive to go and find her out. he ached for her, she was so kind, she gave herself so much trouble--just for his little self in the big and lonely bedroom. yet his parents spoke of her as though she were of no account. he longed to see her, face to face, and tell her that _he_ believed in her and loved her. for he was positive she would like to hear it. she cared. though he had fallen asleep of late too quickly for him to see her flash in at the door, he had known nicer dreams than ever in his life before--travelling dreams. and it was she who sent them. more--he was sure she took him out with her. one evening, in the dusk of a march day, his opportunity came; and only just in time, for his brother jack was expected home from school on the morrow, and with jack in the other bed, no figure would ever care to show itself. also it was easter, and after easter, though tim was not aware of it at the time, he was to say good-bye finally to governesses and become a day-boarder at a preparatory school for wellington. the opportunity offered itself so naturally, moreover, that tim took it without hesitation. it never occurred to him to question, much less to refuse it. the thing was obviously meant to be. for he found himself unexpectedly in front of a green baize door; and the green baize door was--swinging! somebody, therefore, had just passed through it. it had come about in this wise. father, away in scotland, at inglemuir, the shooting place, was expected back next morning; mother had driven over to the church upon some easter business or other; and the governess had been allowed her holiday at home in france. tim, therefore, had the run of the house, and in the hour between tea and bed-time he made good use of it. fully able to defy such second-rate obstacles as nurses and butlers, he explored all manner of forbidden places with ardent thoroughness, arriving finally in the sacred precincts of his father's study. this wonderful room was the very heart and centre of the whole big house; he had been birched here long ago; here, too, his father had told him with a grave yet smiling face: "you've got a new companion, tim, a little sister; you must be very kind to her." also, it was the place where all the money was kept. what he called "father's jolly smell" was strong in it--papers, tobacco, books, flavoured by hunting crops and gunpowder. at first he felt awed, standing motionless just inside the door; but presently, recovering equilibrium, he moved cautiously on tiptoe towards the gigantic desk where important papers were piled in untidy patches. these he did not touch; but beside them his quick eye noted the jagged piece of iron shell his father brought home from his crimean campaign and now used as a letter-weight. it was difficult to lift, however. he climbed into the comfortable chair and swung round and round. it was a swivel-chair, and he sank down among the cushions in it, staring at the strange things on the great desk before him, as if fascinated. next he turned away and saw the stick-rack in the corner--this, he knew, he was allowed to touch. he had played with these sticks before. there were twenty, perhaps, all told, with curious carved handles, brought from every corner of the world; many of them cut by his father's own hand in queer and distant places. and, among them, tim fixed his eye upon a cane with an ivory handle, a slender, polished cane that he had always coveted tremendously. it was the kind he meant to use when he was a man. it bent, it quivered, and when he swished it through the air it trembled like a riding-whip, and made a whistling noise. yet it was very strong in spite of its elastic qualities. a family treasure, it was also an old-fashioned relic; it had been his grandfather's walking stick. something of another century clung visibly about it still. it had dignity and grace and leisure in its very aspect. and it suddenly occurred to him: "how grandpapa must miss it! wouldn't he just love to have it back again!" how it happened exactly, tim did not know, but a few minutes later he found himself walking about the deserted halls and passages of the house with the air of an elderly gentleman of a hundred years ago, proud as a courtier, flourishing the stick like an eighteenth century dandy in the mall. that the cane reached to his shoulder made no difference; he held it accordingly, swaggering on his way. he was off upon an adventure. he dived down through the byways of the other wing, inside himself, as though the stick transported him to the days of the old gentleman who had used it in another century. it may seem strange to those who dwell in smaller houses, but in this rambling elizabethan mansion there were whole sections that, even to tim, were strange and unfamiliar. in his mind the map of the other wing was clearer by far than the geography of the part he travelled daily. he came to passages and dim-lit halls, long corridors of stone beyond the picture gallery; narrow, wainscoted connecting-channels with four steps down and a little later two steps up; deserted chambers with arches guarding them--all hung with the soft march twilight and all bewilderingly unrecognised. with a sense of adventure born of naughtiness he went carelessly along, farther and farther into the heart of this unfamiliar country, swinging the cane, one thumb stuck into the arm-pit of his blue serge suit, whistling softly to himself, excited yet keenly on the alert--and suddenly found himself opposite a door that checked all further advance. it was a green baize door. and it was swinging. he stopped abruptly, facing it. he stared, he gripped his cane more tightly, he held his breath. "the other wing!" he gasped in a swallowed whisper. it was an entrance, but an entrance he had never seen before. he thought he knew every door by heart; but this one was new. he stood motionless for several minutes, watching it; the door had two halves, but one half only was swinging, each swing shorter than the one before; he heard the little puffs of air it made; it settled finally, the last movements very short and rapid; it stopped. and the boy's heart, after similar rapid strokes, stopped also--for a moment. "some one's just gone through," he gulped. and even as he said it he knew who the some one was. the conviction just dropped into him. "it's grandfather; he knows i've got his stick. he wants it!" on the heels of this flashed instantly another amazing certainty. "he sleeps in there. he's having dreams. that's what being dead means." his first impulse, then, took the form of, "i must let father know; it'll make him burst for joy"; but his second was for himself--to finish his adventure. and it was this, naturally enough, that gained the day. he could tell his father later. his first duty was plainly to go through the door into the other wing. he must give the stick back to its owner. he must _hand_ it back. the test of will and character came now. tim had imagination, and so knew the meaning of fear; but there was nothing craven in him. he could howl and scream and stamp like any other person of his age when the occasion called for such behaviour, but such occasions were due to temper roused by a thwarted will, and the histrionics were half "pretended" to produce a calculated effect. there was no one to thwart his will at present. he also knew how to be afraid of nothing, to be afraid without ostensible cause, that is--which was merely "nerves." he could have "the shudders" with the best of them. but, when a real thing faced him, tim's character emerged to meet it. he would clench his hands, brace his muscles, set his teeth--and wish to heaven he was bigger. but he would not flinch. being imaginative, he lived the worst a dozen times before it happened, yet in the final crash he stood up like a man. he had that highest pluck--the courage of a sensitive temperament. and at this particular juncture, somewhat ticklish for a boy of eight or nine, it did not fail him. he lifted the cane and pushed the swinging door wide open. then he walked through it--into the other wing. the green baize door swung to behind him; he was even sufficiently master of himself to turn and close it with a steady hand, because he did not care to hear the series of muffled thuds its lessening swings would cause. but he realised clearly his position, knew he was doing a tremendous thing. holding the cane between fingers very tightly clenched, he advanced bravely along the corridor that stretched before him. and all fear left him from that moment, replaced, it seemed, by a mild and exquisite surprise. his footsteps made no sound, he walked on air; instead of darkness, or the twilight he expected, a diffused and gentle light that seemed like the silver on the lawn when a half-moon sails a cloudless sky, lay everywhere. he knew his way, moreover, knew exactly where he was and whither he was going. the corridor was as familiar to him as the floor of his own bedroom; he recognised the shape and length of it; it agreed exactly with the map he had constructed long ago. though he had never, to the best of his knowledge, entered it before, he knew with intimacy its every detail. and thus the surprise he felt was mild and far from disconcerting. "i'm here again!" was the kind of thought he had. it was _how_ he got here that caused the faint surprise, apparently. he no longer swaggered, however, but walked carefully, and half on tiptoe, holding the ivory handle of the cane with a kind of affectionate respect. and as he advanced, the light closed softly up behind him, obliterating the way by which he had come. but this he did not know, because he did not look behind him. he only looked in front, where the corridor stretched its silvery length towards the great chamber where he knew the cane must be surrendered. the person who had preceded him down this ancient corridor, passing through the green baize door just before he reached it, this person, his father's father, now stood in that great chamber, waiting to receive his own. tim knew it as surely as he knew he breathed. at the far end he even made out the larger patch of silvery light which marked its gaping doorway. there was another thing he knew as well--that this corridor he moved along between rooms with fast-closed doors, was the nightmare corridor; often and often he had traversed it; each room was occupied. "this is the nightmare passage," he whispered to himself, "but i know the ruler--it doesn't matter. none of them can get out or do anything." he heard them, none the less, inside, as he passed by; he heard them scratching to get out. the feeling of security made him reckless; he took unnecessary risks; he brushed the panels as he passed. and the love of keen sensation for its own sake, the desire to feel "an awful thrill," tempted him once so sharply that he raised his stick and poked a fast-shut door with it! he was not prepared for the result, but he gained the sensation and the thrill. for the door opened with instant swiftness half an inch, a hand emerged, caught the stick and tried to draw it in. tim sprang back as if he had been struck. he pulled at the ivory handle with all his strength, but his strength was less than nothing. he tried to shout, but his voice had gone. a terror of the moon came over him, for he was unable to loosen his hold of the handle; his fingers had become a part of it. an appalling weakness turned him helpless. he was dragged inch by inch towards the fearful door. the end of the stick was already through the narrow, crack. he could not see the hand that pulled, but he knew it was terrific. he understood now why the world was strange, why horses galloped furiously, and why trains whistled as they raced through stations. all the comedy and terror of nightmare gripped his heart with pincers made of ice. the disproportion was abominable. the final collapse rushed over him when, without a sign of warning, the door slammed silently, and between the jamb and the wall the cane was crushed as flat as if it were a bulrush. so irresistible was the force behind the door that the solid stick just went flat as a stalk of a bulrush. he looked at it. it _was_ a bulrush. he did not laugh; the absurdity was so distressingly unnatural. the horror of finding a bulrush where he had expected a polished cane--this hideous and appalling detail held the nameless horror of the nightmare. it betrayed him utterly. why had he not always known really that the stick was not a stick, but a thin and hollow reed...? then the cane was safely in his hand, unbroken. he stood looking at it. the nightmare was in full swing. he heard another door opening behind his back, a door he had not touched. there was just time to see a hand thrusting and waving dreadfully, familiarly, at him through the narrow crack--just time to realise that this was another nightmare acting in atrocious concert with the first, when he saw closely beside him, towering to the ceiling, the protective, kindly figure that visited his bedroom. in the turning movement he made to meet the attack, he became aware of her. and his terror passed. it was a nightmare terror merely. the infinite horror vanished. only the comedy remained. he smiled. he saw her dimly only, she was so vast, but he saw her, the ruler of the other wing at last, and knew that he was safe again. he gazed with a tremendous love and wonder, trying to see her clearly; but the face was hidden far aloft and seemed to melt into the sky beyond the roof. he discerned that she was larger than the night, only far, far softer, with wings that folded above him more tenderly even than his mother's arms; that there were points of light like stars among the feathers, and that she was vast enough to cover millions and millions of people all at once. moreover, she did not fade or go, so far as he could see, but spread herself in such a way that he lost sight of her. she spread over the entire wing.... and tim remembered that this was all quite natural really. he had often and often been down this corridor before; the nightmare corridor was no new experience; it had to be faced as usual. once knowing what hid inside the rooms, he was bound to tempt them out. they drew, enticed, attracted him; this was their power. it was their special strength that they could suck him helplessly towards them, and that he was obliged to go. he understood exactly why he was tempted to tap with the cane upon their awful doors, but, having done so, he had accepted the challenge and could now continue his journey quietly and safely. the ruler of the other wing had taken him in charge. a delicious sense of carelessness came on him. there was softness as of water in the solid things about him, nothing that could hurt or bruise. holding the cane firmly by its ivory handle, he went forward along the corridor, walking as on air. the end was quickly reached: he stood upon the threshold of the mighty chamber where he knew the owner of the cane was waiting; the long corridor lay behind him, in front he saw the spacious dimensions of a lofty hall that gave him the feeling of being in the crystal palace, euston station, or st. paul's. high, narrow windows, cut deeply into the wall, stood in a row upon the other side; an enormous open fireplace of burning logs was on his right; thick tapestries hung from the ceiling to the floor of stone; and in the centre of the chamber was a massive table of dark, shining wood, great chairs with carved stiff backs set here and there beside it. and in the biggest of these throne-like chairs there sat a figure looking at him gravely--the figure of an old, old man. yet there was no surprise in the boy's fast-beating heart; there was a thrill of pleasure and excitement only, a feeling of satisfaction. he had known quite well the figure would be there, known also it would look like this exactly. he stepped forward on to the floor of stone without a trace of fear or trembling, holding the precious cane in two hands now before him, as though to present it to its owner. he felt proud and pleased. he had run risks for this. and the figure rose quietly to meet him, advancing in a stately manner over the hard stone floor. the eyes looked gravely, sweetly down at him, the aquiline nose stood out. tim knew him perfectly: the knee-breeches of shining satin, the gleaming buckles on the shoes, the neat dark stockings, the lace and ruffles about neck and wrists, the coloured waistcoat opening so widely--all the details of the picture over father's mantelpiece, where it hung between two crimean bayonets, were reproduced in life before his eyes at last. only the polished cane with the ivory handle was not there. tim went three steps nearer to the advancing figure and held out both his hands with the cane laid crosswise on them. "i've brought it, grandfather," he said, in a faint but clear and steady tone; "here it is." and the other stooped a little, put out three fingers half concealed by falling lace, and took it by the ivory handle. he made a courtly bow to tim. he smiled, but though there was pleasure, it was a grave, sad smile. he spoke then: the voice was slow and very deep. there was a delicate softness in it, the suave politeness of an older day. "thank you," he said; "i value it. it was given to me by my grandfather. i forgot it when i----" his voice grew indistinct a little. "yes?" said tim. "when i--left," the old gentleman repeated. "oh," said tim, thinking how beautiful and kind the gracious figure was. the old man ran his slender fingers carefully along the cane, feeling the polished surface with satisfaction. he lingered specially over the smoothness of the ivory handle. he was evidently very pleased. "i was not quite myself--er--at the moment," he went on gently; "my memory failed me somewhat." he sighed, as though an immense relief was in him. "_i_ forget things, too--sometimes," tim mentioned sympathetically. he simply loved his grandfather. he hoped--for a moment--he would be lifted up and kissed. "i'm _awfully_ glad i brought it," he faltered--"that you've got it again." the other turned his kind grey eyes upon him; the smile on his face was full of gratitude as he looked down. "thank you, my boy. i am truly and deeply indebted to you. you courted danger for my sake. others have tried before, but the nightmare passage--er----" he broke off. he tapped the stick firmly on the stone flooring, as though to test it. bending a trifle, he put his weight upon it. "ah!" he exclaimed with a short sigh of relief, "i can now----" his voice again grew indistinct; tim did not catch the words. "yes?" he asked again, aware for the first time that a touch of awe was in his heart. "--get about again," the other continued very low. "without my cane," he added, the voice failing with each word the old lips uttered, "i could not ... possibly ... allow myself ... to be seen. it was indeed ... deplorable ... unpardonable of me ... to forget in such a way. zounds, sir...! i--i ..." his voice sank away suddenly into a sound of wind. he straightened up, tapping the iron ferrule of his cane on the stones in a series of loud knocks. tim felt a strange sensation creep into his legs. the queer words frightened him a little. the old man took a step towards him. he still smiled, but there was a new meaning in the smile. a sudden earnestness had replaced the courtly, leisurely manner. the next words seemed to blow down upon the boy from above, as though a cold wind brought them from the sky outside. yet the words, he knew, were kindly meant, and very sensible. it was only the abrupt change that startled him. grandfather, after all, was but a man! the distant sound recalled something in him to that outside world from which the cold wind blew. "my eternal thanks to you," he heard, while the voice and face and figure seemed to withdraw deeper and deeper into the heart of the mighty chamber. "i shall not forget your kindness and your courage. it is a debt i can, fortunately, one day repay.... but now you had best return and with dispatch. for your head and arm lie heavily on the table, the documents are scattered, there is a cushion fallen ... and my son is in the house.... farewell! you had best leave me quickly. see! _she_ stands behind you, waiting. go with her! go now...!" the entire scene had vanished even before the final words were uttered. tim felt empty space about him. a vast, shadowy figure bore him through it as with mighty wings. he flew, he rushed, he remembered nothing more--until he heard another voice and felt a heavy hand upon his shoulder. "tim, you rascal! what are you doing in my study? and in the dark, like this!" he looked up into his father's face without a word. he felt dazed. the next minute his father had caught him up and kissed him. "ragamuffin! how did you guess i was coming back to-night?" he shook him playfully and kissed his tumbling hair. "and you've been asleep, too, into the bargain. well--how's everything at home--eh? jack's coming back from school to-morrow, you know, and ..." jack came home, indeed, the following day, and when the easter holidays were over, the governess stayed abroad and tim went off to adventures of another kind in the preparatory school for wellington. life slipped rapidly along with him; he grew into a man; his mother and his father died; jack followed them within a little space; tim inherited, married, settled down into his great possessions--and opened up the other wing. the dreams of imaginative boyhood all had faded; perhaps he had merely put them away, or perhaps he had forgotten them. at any rate, he never spoke of such things now, and when his irish wife mentioned her belief that the old country house possessed a family ghost, even declaring that she had met an eighteenth century figure of a man in the corridors, "an old, old man who bends down upon a stick"--tim only laughed and said: "that's as it ought to be! and if these awful land-taxes force us to sell some day, a respectable ghost will increase the market value." but one night he woke and heard a tapping on the floor. he sat up in bed and listened. there was a chilly feeling down his back. belief had long since gone out of him; he felt uncannily afraid. the sound came nearer and nearer; there were light footsteps with it. the door opened--it opened a little wider, that is, for it already stood ajar--and there upon the threshold stood a figure that it seemed he knew. he saw the face as with all the vivid sharpness of reality. there was a smile upon it, but a smile of warning and alarm. the arm was raised. tim saw the slender hand, lace falling down upon the long, thin fingers, and in them, tightly gripped, a polished cane. shaking the cane twice to and fro in the air, the face thrust forward, spoke certain words, and--vanished. but the words were inaudible; for, though the lips distinctly moved, no sound, apparently, came from them. and tim sprang out of bed. the room was full of darkness. he turned the light on. the door, he saw, was shut as usual. he had, of course, been dreaming. but he noticed a curious odour in the air. he sniffed it once or twice--then grasped the truth. it was a smell of burning! fortunately, he awoke just in time.... he was acclaimed a hero for his promptitude. after many days, when the damage was repaired, and nerves had settled down once more into the calm routine of country life, he told the story to his wife--the entire story. he told the adventure of his imaginative boyhood with it. she asked to see the old family cane. and it was this request of hers that brought back to memory a detail tim had entirely forgotten all these years. he remembered it suddenly again--the loss of the cane, the hubbub his father kicked up about it, the endless, futile search. for the stick had never been found, and tim, who was questioned very closely concerning it, swore with all his might that he had not the smallest notion where it was. which was, of course, the truth. vii the occupant of the room he arrived late at night by the yellow diligence, stiff and cramped after the toilsome ascent of three slow hours. the village, a single mass of shadow, was already asleep. only in front of the little hotel was there noise and light and bustle--for a moment. the horses, with tired, slouching gait, crossed the road and disappeared into the stable of their own accord, their harness trailing in the dust; and the lumbering diligence stood for the night where they had dragged it--the body of a great yellow-sided beetle with broken legs. in spite of his physical weariness the schoolmaster, revelling in the first hours of his ten-guinea holiday, felt exhilarated. for the high alpine valley was marvellously still; stars twinkled over the torn ridges of the dent du midi where spectral snows gleamed against rocks that looked like solid ink; and the keen air smelt of pine forests, dew-soaked pastures, and freshly sawn wood. he took it all in with a kind of bewildered delight for a few minutes, while the other three passengers gave directions about their luggage and went to their rooms. then he turned and walked over the coarse matting into the glare of the hall, only just able to resist stopping to examine the big mountain map that hung upon the wall by the door. and, with a sudden disagreeable shock, he came down from the ideal to the actual. for at the inn--the only inn--there was no vacant room. even the available sofas were occupied.... how stupid he had been not to write! yet it had been impossible, he remembered, for he had come to the decision suddenly that morning in geneva, enticed by the brilliance of the weather after a week of rain. they talked endlessly, this gold-braided porter and the hard-faced old woman--her face was hard, he noticed--gesticulating all the time, and pointing all about the village with suggestions that he ill understood, for his french was limited and their _patois_ was fearful. "_there!_"--he might find a room, "or _there_! but we are, _hélas_ full--more full than we care about. to-morrow, perhaps--if so-and-so give up their rooms----!" and then, with much shrugging of shoulders, the hard-faced old woman stared at the gold-braided porter, and the porter stared sleepily at the schoolmaster. at length, however, by some process of hope he did not himself understand, and following directions given by the old woman that were utterly unintelligible, he went out into the street and walked towards a dark group of houses she had pointed out to him. he only knew that he meant to thunder at a door and ask for a room. he was too weary to think out details. the porter half made to go with him, but turned back at the last moment to speak with the old woman. the houses sketched themselves dimly in the general blackness. the air was cold. the whole valley was filled with the rush and thunder of falling water. he was thinking vaguely that the dawn could not be very far away, and that he might even spend the night wandering in the woods, when there was a sharp noise behind him and he turned to see a figure hurrying after him. it was the porter--running. and in the little hall of the inn there began again a confused three-cornered conversation, with frequent muttered colloquy and whispered asides in _patois_ between the woman and the porter--the net result of which was that, "if monsieur did not object--there _was_ a room, after all, on the first floor--only it was in a sense 'engaged.' that is to say----" but the schoolmaster took the room without inquiring too closely into the puzzle that had somehow provided it so suddenly. the ethics of hotel-keeping had nothing to do with him. if the woman offered him quarters it was not for him to argue with her whether the said quarters were legitimately hers to offer. but the porter, evidently a little thrilled, accompanied the guest up to the room and supplied in a mixture of french and english details omitted by the landlady--and minturn, the schoolmaster, soon shared the thrill with him, and found himself in the atmosphere of a possible tragedy. all who know the peculiar excitement that belongs to high mountain valleys where dangerous climbing is a chief feature of the attractions, will understand a certain faint element of high alarm that goes with the picture. one looks up at the desolate, soaring ridges and thinks involuntarily of the men who find their pleasure for days and nights together scaling perilous summits among the clouds, and conquering inch by inch the icy peaks that for ever shake their dark terror in the sky. the atmosphere of adventure, spiced with the possible horror of a very grim order of tragedy, is inseparable from any imaginative contemplation of the scene; and the idea minturn gleaned from the half-frightened porter lost nothing by his ignorance of the language. this englishwoman, the real occupant of the room, had insisted on going without a guide. she had left just before daybreak two days before--the porter had seen her start--and ... she had not returned! the route was difficult and dangerous, yet not impossible for a skilled climber, even a solitary one. and the englishwoman was an experienced mountaineer. also, she was self-willed, careless of advice, bored by warnings, self-confident to a degree. queer, moreover; for she kept entirely to herself, and sometimes remained in her room with locked doors, admitting no one, for days together: a "crank," evidently, of the first water. this much minturn gathered clearly enough from the porter's talk while his luggage was brought in and the room set to rights; further, too, that the search party had gone out and _might_, of course, return at any moment. in which case---- thus the room was empty, yet still hers. "if monsieur did not object--if the risk he ran of having to turn out suddenly in the night----" it was the loquacious porter who furnished the details that made the transaction questionable; and minturn dismissed the loquacious porter as soon as possible, and prepared to get into the hastily arranged bed and snatch all the hours of sleep he could before he was turned out. at first, it must be admitted, he felt uncomfortable--distinctly uncomfortable. he was in some one else's room. he had really no right to be there. it was in the nature of an unwarrantable intrusion; and while he unpacked he kept looking over his shoulder as though some one were watching him from the corners. any moment, it seemed, he would hear a step in the passage, a knock would come at the door, the door would open, and there he would see this vigorous englishwoman looking him up and down with anger. worse still--he would hear her voice asking him what he was doing in her room--her bedroom. of course, he had an adequate explanation, but still----! then, reflecting that he was already half undressed, the humour of it flashed for a second across his mind, and he laughed--_quietly_. and at once, after that laughter, under his breath, came the sudden sense of tragedy he had felt before. perhaps, even while he smiled, her body lay broken and cold upon those awful heights, the wind of snow playing over her hair, her glazed eyes staring sightless up to the stars.... it made him shudder. the sense of this woman whom he had never seen, whose name even he did not know, became extraordinarily real. almost he could imagine that she was somewhere in the room with him, hidden, observing all he did. he opened the door softly to put his boots outside, and when he closed it again he turned the key. then he finished unpacking and distributed his few things about the room. it was soon done; for, in the first place, he had only a small gladstone and a knapsack, and secondly, the only place where he could spread his clothes was the sofa. there was no chest of drawers, and the cupboard, an unusually large and solid one, was locked. the englishwoman's things had evidently been hastily put away in it. the only sign of her recent presence was a bunch of faded _alpenrosen_ standing in a glass jar upon the washhand stand. this, and a certain faint perfume, were all that remained. in spite, however, of these very slight evidences, the whole room was pervaded with a curious sense of occupancy that he found exceedingly distasteful. one moment the atmosphere seemed subtly charged with a "just left" feeling; the next it was a queer awareness of "still here" that made him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him. altogether, the room inspired him with a singular aversion, and the strength of this aversion seemed the only excuse for his tossing the faded flowers out of the window, and then hanging his mackintosh upon the cupboard door in such a way as to screen it as much as possible from view. for the sight of that big, ugly cupboard, filled with the clothing of a woman who might then be beyond any further need of covering--thus his imagination insisted on picturing it--touched in him a startled sense of the incongruous that did not stop there, but crept through his mind gradually till it merged somehow into a sense of a rather grotesque horror. at any rate, the sight of that cupboard was offensive, and he covered it almost instinctively. then, turning out the electric light, he got into bed. but the instant the room was dark he realised that it was more than he could stand; for, with the blackness, there came a sudden rush of cold that he found it hard to explain. and the odd thing was that, when he lit the candle beside his bed, he noticed that his hand trembled. this, of course, was too much. his imagination was taking liberties and must be called to heel. yet the way he called it to order was significant, and its very deliberateness betrayed a mind that has already admitted fear. and fear, once in, is difficult to dislodge. he lay there upon his elbow in bed and carefully took note of all the objects in the room--with the intention, as it were, of taking an inventory of everything his senses perceived, then drawing a line, adding them up finally, and saying with decision, "that's all the room contains! i've counted every single thing. there is nothing more. _now_--i may sleep in peace!" and it was during this absurd process of enumerating the furniture of the room that the dreadful sense of distressing lassitude came over him that made it difficult even to finish counting. it came swiftly, yet with an amazing kind of violence that overwhelmed him softly and easily with a sensation of enervating weariness hard to describe. and its first effect was to banish fear. he no longer possessed enough energy to feel really afraid or nervous. the cold remained, but the alarm vanished. and into every corner of his usually vigorous personality crept the insidious poison of a _muscular_ fatigue--at first--that in a few seconds, it seemed, translated itself into _spiritual_ inertia. a sudden consciousness of the foolishness, the crass futility, of life, of effort, of fighting--of all that makes life worth living, shot into every fibre of his being, and left him utterly weak. a spirit of black pessimism that was not even vigorous enough to assert itself, invaded the secret chambers of his heart.... every picture that presented itself to his mind came dressed in grey shadows: those bored and sweating horses toiling up the ascent to--nothing! that hard-faced landlady taking so much trouble to let her desire for gain conquer her sense of morality--for a few francs! that gold-braided porter, so talkative, fussy, energetic, and so anxious to tell all he knew! what was the use of them all? and for himself, what in the world was the good of all the labour and drudgery he went through in that preparatory school where he was junior master? what could it lead to? wherein lay the value of so much uncertain toil, when the ultimate secrets of life were hidden and no one knew the final goal? how foolish was effort, discipline, work! how vain was pleasure! how trivial the noblest life!... with a fearful jump that nearly upset the candle minturn pulled himself together. such vicious thoughts were usually so remote from his normal character that the sudden vile invasion produced a swift reaction. yet, only for a moment. instantly, again, the black depression descended upon him like a wave. his work--it could lead to nothing but the dreary labour of a small headmastership after all--seemed as vain and foolish as his holiday in the alps. what an idiot he had been, to be sure, to come out with a knapsack merely to work himself into a state of exhaustion climbing over toilsome mountains that led to nowhere--resulted in nothing. a dreariness of the grave possessed him. life was a ghastly fraud! religion childish humbug! everything was merely a trap--a trap of death; a coloured toy that nature used as a decoy! but a decoy for what? for nothing! there was no meaning in anything. the only _real_ thing was--death. and the happiest people were those who found it soonest. _then why wait for it to come?_ he sprang out of bed, thoroughly frightened. this was horrible. surely mere physical fatigue could not produce a world so black, an outlook so dismal, a cowardice that struck with such sudden hopelessness at the very roots of life? for, normally, he was cheerful and strong, full of the tides of healthy living; and this appalling lassitude swept the very basis of his personality into nothingness and the desire for death. it was like the development of a secondary personality. he had read, of course, how certain persons who suffered shocks developed thereafter entirely different characteristics, memory, tastes, and so forth. it had all rather frightened him. though scientific men vouched for it, it was hardly to be believed. yet here was a similar thing taking place in his own consciousness. he was, beyond question, experiencing all the mental variations of--_some one else_! it was un-moral. it was awful. it was--well, after all, at the same time, it was uncommonly interesting. and this interest he began to feel was the first sign of his returning normal self. for to feel interest is to live, and to love life. he sprang into the middle of the room--then switched on the electric light. and the first thing that struck his eye was--the big cupboard. "hallo! there's that--beastly cupboard!" he exclaimed to himself, involuntarily, yet aloud. it held all the clothes, the swinging skirts and coats and summer blouses of the dead woman. for he knew now--somehow or other--that she _was_ dead.... at that moment, through the open windows, rushed the sound of falling water, bringing with it a vivid realisation of the desolate, snow-swept heights. he saw her--positively _saw_ her!--lying where she had fallen, the frost upon her cheeks, the snow-dust eddying about her hair and eyes, her broken limbs pushing against the lumps of ice. for a moment the sense of spiritual lassitude--of the emptiness of life--vanished before this picture of broken effort--of a small human force battling pluckily, yet in vain, against the impersonal and pitiless potencies of inanimate nature--and he found himself again, his normal self. then, instantly, returned again that terrible sense of cold, nothingness, emptiness.... and he found himself standing opposite the big cupboard where her clothes were. he wanted to see those clothes--things she had used and worn. quite close he stood, almost touching it. the next second he had touched it. his knuckles struck upon the wood. why he knocked is hard to say. it was an instinctive movement probably. something in his deepest self dictated it--ordered it. he knocked at the door. and the dull sound upon the wood into the stillness of that room brought--horror. why it should have done so he found it as hard to explain to himself as why he should have felt impelled to knock. the fact remains that when he heard the faint reverberation inside the cupboard, it brought with it so vivid a realisation of the woman's presence that he stood there shivering upon the floor with a dreadful sense of anticipation: he almost expected to hear an answering knock from within--the rustling of the hanging skirts perhaps--or, worse still, to see the locked door slowly open towards him. and from that moment, he declares that in some way or other he must have partially lost control of himself, or at least of his better judgment; for he became possessed by such an overmastering desire to tear open that cupboard door and see the clothes within, that he tried every key in the room in the vain effort to unlock it, and then, finally, before he quite realised what he was doing--rang the bell! but, having rung the bell for no obvious or intelligent reason at two o'clock in the morning, he then stood waiting in the middle of the floor for the servant to come, conscious for the first time that something outside his ordinary self had pushed him towards the act. it was almost like an internal voice that directed him ... and thus, when at last steps came down the passage and he faced the cross and sleepy chambermaid, amazed at being summoned at such an hour, he found no difficulty in the matter of what he should say. for the same power that insisted he should open the cupboard door also impelled him to utter words over which he apparently had no control. "it's not _you_ i rang for!" he said with decision and impatience, "i want a man. wake the porter and send him up to me at once--hurry! i tell you, hurry----!" and when the girl had gone, frightened at his earnestness, minturn realised that the words surprised himself as much as they surprised her. until they were out of his mouth he had not known what exactly he was saying. but now he understood that some force foreign to his own personality was using his mind and organs. the black depression that had possessed him a few moments before was also part of it. the powerful mood of this vanished woman had somehow momentarily taken possession of him--communicated, possibly, by the atmosphere of things in the room still belonging to her. but even now, when the porter, without coat or collar, stood beside him in the room, he did not understand _why_ he insisted, with a positive fury admitting no denial, that the key of that cupboard must be found and the door instantly opened. the scene was a curious one. after some perplexed whispering with the chambermaid at the end of the passage, the porter managed to find and produce the key in question. neither he nor the girl knew clearly what this excited englishman was up to, or why he was so passionately intent upon opening the cupboard at two o'clock in the morning. they watched him with an air of wondering what was going to happen next. but something of his curious earnestness, even of his late fear, communicated itself to them, and the sound of the key grating in the lock made them both jump. they held their breath as the creaking door swung slowly open. all heard the clatter of that other key as it fell against the wooden floor--within. the cupboard had been locked _from the inside_. but it was the scared housemaid, from her position in the corridor, who first saw--and with a wild scream fell crashing against the bannisters. the porter made no attempt to save her. the schoolmaster and himself made a simultaneous rush towards the door, now wide open. they, too, had seen. there were no clothes, skirts or blouses on the pegs, but, all by itself, from an iron hook in the centre, they saw the body of the englishwoman hanging by the neck, the head bent horribly forwards, the tongue protruding. jarred by the movement of unlocking, the body swung slowly round to face them.... pinned upon the inside of the door was a hotel envelope with the following words pencilled in straggling writing: "tired--unhappy--hopelessly depressed.... i cannot face life any longer.... all is black. i must put an end to it.... i meant to do it on the mountains, but was afraid. i slipped back to my room unobserved. this way is easiest and best...." viii cain's atonement so many thousands to-day have deliberately put self aside, and are ready to yield their lives for an ideal, that it is not surprising a few of them should have registered experiences of a novel order. for to step aside from self is to enter a larger world, to be open to new impressions. if powers of good exist in the universe at all, they can hardly be inactive at the present time.... the case of two men, who may be called jones and smith, occurs to the mind in this connection. whether a veil actually was lifted for a moment, or whether the tension of long and terrible months resulted in an exaltation of emotion, the experience claims significance. smith, to whom the experience came, holds the firm belief that it was real. jones, though it involved him too, remained unaware. it is a somewhat personal story, their peculiar relationship dating from early youth: a kind of unwilling antipathy was born between them, yet an antipathy that had no touch of hate or even of dislike. it was rather in the nature of an instinctive rivalry. some tie operated that flung them ever into the same arena with strange persistence, and ever as opponents. an inevitable fate delighted to throw them together in a sense that made them rivals; small as well as large affairs betrayed this malicious tendency of the gods. it showed itself in earliest days, at school, at cambridge, in travel, even in house-parties and the lighter social intercourse. though distant cousins, their families were not intimate, and there was no obvious reason why their paths should fall so persistently together. yet their paths did so, crossing and recrossing in the way described. sooner or later, in all his undertakings, smith would note the shadow of jones darkening the ground in front of him; and later, when called to the bar in his chosen profession, he found most frequently that the learned counsel in opposition to him was the owner of this shadow, jones. in another matter, too, they became rivals, for the same girl, oddly enough, attracted both, and though she accepted neither offer of marriage (during smith's lifetime!), the attitude between them was that of unwilling rivals. for they were friends as well. jones, it appears, was hardly aware that any rivalry existed; he did not think of smith as an opponent, and as an adversary, never. he did notice, however, the constantly recurring meetings, for more than once he commented on them with good-humoured amusement. smith, on the other hand, was conscious of a depth and strength in the tie that certainly intrigued him; being of a thoughtful, introspective nature, he was keenly sensible of the strange competition in their lives, and sought in various ways for its explanation, though without success. the desire to find out was very strong in him. and this was natural enough, owing to the singular fact that in all their battles he was the one to lose. invariably jones got the best of every conflict. smith always paid; sometimes he paid with interest. occasionally, too, he seemed forced to injure himself while contributing to his cousin's success. it was very curious. he reflected much upon it; he wondered what the origin of their tie and rivalry might be, but especially why it was that he invariably lost, and why he was so often obliged to help his rival to the point even of his own detriment. tempted to bitterness sometimes, he did not yield to it, however; the relationship remained frank and pleasant; if anything, it deepened. he remembered once, for instance, giving his cousin a chance introduction which yet led, a little later, to the third party offering certain evidence which lost him an important case--jones, of course, winning it. the third party, too, angry at being dragged into the case, turned hostile to him, thwarting various subsequent projects. in no other way could jones have procured this particular evidence; he did not know of its existence even. that chance introduction did it all. there was nothing the least dishonourable on the part of jones--it was just the chance of the dice. the dice were always loaded against smith--and there were other instances of similar kind. about this time, moreover, a singular feeling that had lain vaguely in his mind for some years past, took more definite form. it suddenly assumed the character of a conviction, that yet had no evidence to support it. a voice, long whispering in the depths of him, became much louder, grew into a statement that he accepted without further ado: "i'm paying off a debt," he phrased it, "an old, old debt is being discharged. i owe him this--my help and so forth." he accepted it, that is, as just; and this certainty of justice kept sweet his heart and mind, shutting the door on bitterness or envy. the thought, however, though it recurred persistently with each encounter, brought no explanation. when the war broke out both offered their services; as members of the o.t.c., they got commissions quickly; but it was a chance remark of smith's that made his friend join the very regiment he himself was in. they trained together, were in the same retreats and the same advances together. their friendship deepened. under the stress of circumstances the tie did not dissolve, but strengthened. it was indubitably real, therefore. then, oddly enough, they were both wounded in the same engagement. and it was here the remarkable fate that jointly haunted them betrayed itself more clearly than in any previous incident of their long relationship--smith was wounded in the act of protecting his cousin. how it happened is confusing to a layman, but each apparently was leading a bombing-party, and the two parties came together. they found themselves shoulder to shoulder, both brimmed with that pluck which is complete indifference to self; they exchanged a word of excited greeting; and the same second one of those rare opportunities of advantage presented itself which only the highest courage could make use of. neither, certainly, was thinking of personal reward; it was merely that each saw the chance by which instant heroism might gain a surprise advantage for their side. the risk was heavy, but there _was_ a chance; and success would mean a decisive result, to say nothing of high distinction for the man who obtained it--if he survived. smith, being a few yards ahead of his cousin, had the moment in his grasp. he was in the act of dashing forward when something made him pause. a bomb in mid-air, flung from the opposing trench, was falling; it seemed immediately above him; he saw that it would just miss himself, but land full upon his cousin--whose head was turned the other way. by stretching out his hand, smith knew he could field it like a cricket ball. there was an interval of a second and a half, he judged. he hesitated--perhaps a quarter of a second--then he acted. he caught it. it was the obvious thing to do. he flung it back into the opposing trench. the rapidity of thought is hard to realise. in that second and a half smith was aware of many things: he saved his cousin's life unquestionably; unquestionably also jones seized the opportunity that otherwise was his cousin's. but it was neither of these reflections that filled smith's mind. the dominant impression was another. it flashed into actual words inside his excited brain: "i must risk it. i owe it to him--and more besides!" he was, further, aware of another impulse than the obvious one. in the first fraction of a second it was overwhelmingly established. and it was this: that the entire episode was familiar to him. a subtle familiarity was present. all this had happened before. he had already--somewhere, somehow--seen death descending upon his cousin from the air. yet with a difference. the "difference" escaped him; the familiarity was vivid. that he missed the deadly detonators in making the catch, or that the fuse delayed, he called good luck. he only remembers that he flung the gruesome weapon back whence it had come, and that its explosion in the opposite trench materially helped his cousin to find glory in the place of death. the slight delay, however, resulted in his receiving a bullet through the chest--a bullet he would not otherwise have received, presumably. it was some days later, gravely wounded, that he discovered his cousin in another bed across the darkened floor. they exchanged remarks. jones was already "decorated," it seemed, having snatched success from his cousin's hands, while little aware whose help had made it easier.... and once again there stole across the inmost mind of smith that strange, insistent whisper: "i owed it to him ... but, by god, i owe more than that ... i mean to pay it too...!" there was not a trace of bitterness or envy now; only this profound conviction, of obscurest origin, that it was right and absolutely just--full, honest repayment of a debt incurred. some ancient balance of account was being settled; there was no "chance"; injustice and caprice played no role at all.... and a deeper understanding of life's ironies crept into him; for if everything was _just_, there was no room for whimpering. and the voice persisted above the sound of busy footsteps in the ward: "i owe it ... i'll pay it gladly...!" through the pain and weakness the whisper died away. he was exhausted. there were periods of unconsciousness, but there were periods of half-consciousness as well; then flashes of another kind of consciousness altogether, when, bathed in high, soft light, he was aware of things he could not quite account for. he _saw_. it was absolutely real. only, the critical faculty was gone. he did not question what he saw, as he stared across at his cousin's bed. he knew. perhaps the beaten, worn-out body let something through at last. the nerves, over-strained to numbness, lay very still. the physical system, battered and depleted, made no cry. the clamour of the flesh was hushed. he was aware, however, of an undeniable exaltation of the spirit in him, as he lay and gazed towards his cousin's bed.... across the night of time, it seemed to him, the picture stole before his inner eye with a certainty that left no room for doubt. it was not the cells of memory in his brain of to-day that gave up their dead, it was the eternal self in him that remembered and understood--the soul.... with that satisfaction which is born of full comprehension, he watched the light glow and spread about the little bed. thick matting deadened the footsteps of nurses, orderlies, doctors. new cases were brought in, "old" cases were carried out; he ignored them; he saw only the light above his cousin's bed grow stronger. he lay still and stared. it came neither from the ceiling nor the floor; it unfolded like a cloud of shining smoke. and the little lamp, the sheets, the figure framed between them--all these slid cleverly away and vanished utterly. he stood in another place that had lain behind all these appearances--a landscape with wooded hills, a foaming river, the sun just sinking below the forest, and dusk creeping from a gorge along the lonely banks. in the warm air there was a perfume of great flowers and heavy-scented trees; there were fire-flies, and the taste of spray from the tumbling river was on his lips. across the water a large bird, flapped its heavy wings, as it moved down-stream to find another fishing place. for he and his companion had disturbed it as they broke out of the thick foliage and reached the river-bank. the companion, moreover, was his brother; they ever hunted together; there was a passionate link between them born of blood and of affection--they were twins.... it all was as clear as though of yesterday. in his heart was the lust of the hunt; in his blood was the lust of woman; and thick behind these lurked the jealousy and fierce desire of a primitive day. but, though clear as of yesterday, he knew that it was of long, long ago.... and his brother came up close beside him, resting his bloody spear with a clattering sound against the boulders on the shore. he saw the gleaming of the metal in the sunset, he saw the shining glitter of the spray upon the boulders, he saw his brother's eyes look straight into his own. and in them shone a light that was neither the reflection of the sunset, nor the excitement of the hunt just over. "it escaped us," said his brother. "yet i know my first spear struck." "it followed the fawn that crossed," was the reply. "besides, we came down wind, thus giving it warning. our flocks, at any rate, are safer----" the other laughed significantly. "it is not the safety of our flocks that troubles me just now, brother," he interrupted eagerly, while the light burned more deeply in his eyes. "it is, rather, that _she_ waits for me by the fire across the river, and that i would get to her. with your help added to my love," he went on in a trusting voice, "the gods have shown me the favour of true happiness!" he pointed with his spear to a camp-fire on the farther bank, turning his head as he strode to plunge into the stream and swim across. for an instant, then, the other felt his natural love turn into bitter hate. his own fierce passion, unconfessed, concealed, burst into instant flame. that the girl should become his brother's wife sent the blood surging through his veins in fury. he felt his life and all that he desired go down in ashes.... he watched his brother stride towards the water, the deer-skin cast across one naked shoulder--when another object caught his practised eye. in mid-air it passed suddenly, like a shining gleam; it seemed to hang a second; then it swept swiftly forward past his head--and downward. it had leaped with a blazing fury from the overhanging bank behind; he saw the blood still streaming from its wounded flank. it must land--he saw it with a secret, awful pleasure--full upon the striding figure, whose head was turned away! the swiftness of that leap, however, was not so swift but that he could easily have used his spear. indeed, he gripped it strongly. his skill, his strength, his aim--he knew them well enough. but hate and love, fastening upon his heart, held all his muscles still. he hesitated. he was no murderer, yet he paused. he heard the roar, the ugly thud, the crash, the cry for help--too late ... and when, an instant afterwards, his steel plunged into the great beast's heart, the human heart and life he might have saved lay still for ever.... he heard the water rushing past, an icy wind came down the gorge against his naked back, he saw the fire shine upon the farther bank ... and the figure of a girl in skins was wading across, seeking out the shallow places in the dusk, and calling wildly as she came.... then darkness hid the entire landscape, yet a darkness that was deeper, bluer than the velvet of the night alone.... and he shrieked aloud in his remorseful anguish: "may the gods forgive me, for i did not mean it! oh, that i might undo ... that i might repay...!" that his cries disturbed the weary occupants in more than one bed is certain, but he remembers chiefly that a nurse was quickly by his side, and that something she gave him soothed his violent pain and helped him into deeper sleep again. there was, he noticed, anyhow, no longer the soft, clear, blazing light about his cousin's bed. he saw only the faint glitter of the oil-lamps down the length of the great room.... and some weeks later he went back to fight. the picture, however, never left his memory. it stayed with him as an actual reality that was neither delusion nor hallucination. he believed that he understood at last the meaning of the tie that had fettered him and puzzled him so long. the memory of those far-off days of shepherding beneath the stars of long ago remained vividly beside him. he kept his secret, however. in many a talk with his cousin beneath the nearer stars of flanders no word of it ever passed his lips. the friendship between them, meanwhile, experienced a curious deepening, though unacknowledged in any spoken words. smith, at any rate, on his side, put into it an affection that was a brave man's love. he watched over his cousin. in the fighting especially, when possible, he sought to protect and shield him, regardless of his own personal safety. he delighted secretly in the honours his cousin had already won. he himself was not yet even mentioned in dispatches, and no public distinction of any kind had come his way. his v.c. eventually--well, he was no longer occupying his body when it was bestowed. he had already "left." ... he was now conscious, possibly, of other experiences besides that one of ancient, primitive days when he and his brother were shepherding beneath other stars. but the reckless heroism which saved his cousin under fire may later enshrine another memory which, at some far future time, shall reawaken as a "hallucination" from a past that to-day is called the present.... the notion, at any rate, flashed across his mind before he "left." ix an egyptian hornet the word has an angry, malignant sound that brings the idea of attack vividly into the mind. there is a vicious sting about it somewhere--even a foreigner, ignorant of the meaning, must feel it. a hornet is wicked; it darts and stabs; it pierces, aiming without provocation for the face and eyes. the name suggests a metallic droning of evil wings, fierce flight, and poisonous assault. though black and yellow, it sounds scarlet. there is blood in it. a striped tiger of the air in concentrated form! there is no escape--if it attacks. in egypt an ordinary bee is the size of an english hornet, but the egyptian hornet is enormous. it is truly monstrous--an ominous, dying terror. it shares that universal quality of the land of the sphinx and pyramids--great size. it is a formidable insect, worse than scorpion or tarantula. the rev. james milligan, meeting one for the first time, realised the meaning of another word as well, a word he used prolifically in his eloquent sermons--devil. one morning in april, when the heat began to bring the insects out, he rose as usual betimes and went across the wide stone corridor to his bath. the desert already glared in through the open windows. the heat would be afflicting later in the day, but at this early hour the cool north wind blew pleasantly down the hotel passages. it was sunday, and at half-past eight o'clock he would appear to conduct the morning service for the english visitors. the floor of the passage-way was cold beneath his feet in their thin native slippers of bright yellow. he was neither young nor old; his salary was comfortable; he had a competency of his own, without wife or children to absorb it; the dry climate had been recommended to him; and--the big hotel took him in for next to nothing. and he was thoroughly pleased with himself, for he was a sleek, vain, pompous, well-advertised personality, but mean as a rat. no worries of any kind were on his mind as, carrying sponge and towel, scented soap and a bottle of scrubb's ammonia, he travelled amiably across the deserted, shining corridor to the bathroom. and nothing went wrong with the rev. james milligan until he opened the door, and his eye fell upon a dark, suspicious-looking object clinging to the window-pane in front of him. and even then, at first, he felt no anxiety or alarm, but merely a natural curiosity to know exactly what it was--this little clot of an odd-shaped, elongated thing that stuck there on the wooden framework six feet before his aquiline nose. he went straight up to it to see--then stopped dead. his heart gave a distinct, unclerical leap. his lips formed themselves into unregenerate shape. he gasped: "good god! what is it?" for something unholy, something wicked as a secret sin, stuck there before his eyes in the patch of blazing sunshine. he caught his breath. for a moment he was unable to move, as though the sight half fascinated him. then, cautiously and very slowly--stealthily, in fact--he withdrew towards the door he had just entered. fearful of making the smallest sound, he retraced his steps on tiptoe. his yellow slippers shuffled. his dry sponge fell, and bounded till it settled, rolling close beneath the horribly attractive object facing him. from the safety of the open door, with ample space for retreat behind him, he paused and stared. his entire being focused itself in his eyes. it was a hornet that he saw. it hung there, motionless and threatening, between him and the bathroom door. and at first he merely exclaimed--below his breath--"good god! it's an egyptian hornet!" being a man with a reputation for decided action, however, he soon recovered himself. he was well schooled in self-control. when people left his church at the beginning of the sermon, no muscle of his face betrayed the wounded vanity and annoyance that burned deep in his heart. but a hornet sitting directly in his path was a very different matter. he realised in a flash that he was poorly clothed--in a word, that he was practically half naked. from a distance he examined this intrusion of the devil. it was calm and very still. it was wonderfully made, both before and behind. its wings were folded upon its terrible body. long, sinuous things, pointed like temptation, barbed as well, stuck out of it. there was poison, and yet grace, in its exquisite presentment. its shiny black was beautiful, and the yellow stripes upon its sleek, curved abdomen were like the gleaming ornaments upon some feminine body of the seductive world he preached against. almost, he saw an abandoned dancer on the stage. and then, swiftly in his impressionable soul, the simile changed, and he saw instead more blunt and aggressive forms of destruction. the well-filled body, tapering to a horrid point, reminded him of those perfect engines of death that reduce hundreds to annihilation unawares--torpedoes, shells, projectiles, crammed with secret, desolating powers. its wings, its awful, quiet head, its delicate, slim waist, its stripes of brilliant saffron--all these seemed the concentrated prototype of abominations made cleverly by the brain of man, and beautifully painted to disguise their invisible freight of cruel death. "bah!" he exclaimed, ashamed of his prolific imagination. "it's only a hornet after all--an insect!" and he contrived a hurried, careful plan. he aimed a towel at it, rolled up into a ball--but did not throw it. he might miss. he remembered that his ankles were unprotected. instead, he paused again, examining the black and yellow object in safe retirement near the door, as one day he hoped to watch the world in leisurely retirement in the country. it did not move. it was fixed and terrible. it made no sound. its wings were folded. not even the black antennae, blunt at the tips like clubs, showed the least stir or tremble. it breathed, however. he watched the rise and fall of the evil body; it breathed air in and out as he himself did. the creature, he realised, had lungs and heart and organs. it had a brain! its mind was active all this time. it knew it was being watched. it merely waited. any second, with a whiz of fury, and with perfect accuracy of aim, it might dart at him and strike. if he threw the towel and missed--it certainly would. there were other occupants of the corridor, however, and a sound of steps approaching gave him the decision to act. he would lose his bath if he hesitated much longer. he felt ashamed of his timidity, though "pusillanimity" was the word thought selected owing to the pulpit vocabulary it was his habit to prefer. he went with extreme caution towards the bathroom door, passing the point of danger so close that his skin turned hot and cold. with one foot gingerly extended, he recovered his sponge. the hornet did not move a muscle. but--it had seen him pass. it merely waited. all dangerous insects had that trick. it knew quite well he was inside; it knew quite well he must come out a few minutes later; it also knew quite well that he was--naked. once inside the little room, he closed the door with exceeding gentleness, lest the vibration might stir the fearful insect to attack. the bath was already filled, and he plunged to his neck with a feeling of comparative security. a window into the outside passage he also closed, so that nothing could possibly come in. and steam soon charged the air and left its blurred deposit on the glass. for ten minutes he could enjoy himself and pretend that he was safe. for ten minutes he did so. he behaved carelessly, as though nothing mattered, and as though all the courage in the world were his. he splashed and soaped and sponged, making a lot of reckless noise. he got out and dried himself. slowly the steam subsided, the air grew clearer, he put on dressing-gown and slippers. it was time to go out. unable to devise any further reason for delay, he opened the door softly half an inch--peeped out--and instantly closed it again with a resounding bang. he had heard a drone of wings. the insect had left its perch and now buzzed upon the floor directly in his path. the air seemed full of stings; he felt stabs all over him; his unprotected portions winced with the expectancy of pain. the beast knew he was coming out, and was waiting for him. in that brief instant he had felt its sting all over him, on his unprotected ankles, on his back, his neck, his cheeks, in his eyes, and on the bald clearing that adorned his anglican head. through the closed door he heard the ominous, dull murmur of his striped adversary as it beat its angry wings. its oiled and wicked sting shot in and out with fury. its deft legs worked. he saw its tiny waist already writhing with the lust of battle. ugh! that tiny waist! a moment's steady nerve and he could have severed that cunning body from the directing brain with one swift, well-directed thrust. but his nerve had utterly deserted him. human motives, even in the professedly holy, are an involved affair at any time. just now, in the rev. james milligan, they were quite inextricably mixed. he claims this explanation, at any rate, in excuse of his abominable subsequent behaviour. for, exactly at this moment, when he had decided to admit cowardice by ringing for the arab servant, a step was audible in the corridor outside, and courage came with it into his disreputable heart. it was the step of the man he cordially "disapproved of," using the pulpit version of "hated and despised." he had overstayed his time, and the bath was in demand by mr. mullins. mr. mullins invariably followed him at seven-thirty; it was now a quarter to eight. and mr. mullins was a wretched drinking man--"a sot." in a flash the plan was conceived and put into execution. the temptation, of course, was of the devil. mr. milligan hid the motive from himself, pretending he hardly recognised it. the plan was what men call a dirty trick; it was also irresistibly seductive. he opened the door, stepped boldly, nose in the air, right over the hideous insect on the floor, and fairly pranced into the outer passage. the brief transit brought a hundred horrible sensations--that the hornet would rise and sting his leg, that it would cling to his dressing-gown and stab his spine, that he would step upon it and die, like achilles, of a heel exposed. but with these, and conquering them, was one other stronger emotion that robbed the lesser terrors of their potency--that mr. mullins would run precisely the same risks five seconds later, unprepared. he heard the gloating insect buzz and scratch the oil-cloth. but it was behind him. _he_ was safe! "good morning to you, mr. mullins," he observed with a gracious smile. "i trust i have not kept you waiting." "mornin'!" grunted mullins sourly in reply, as he passed him with a distinctly hostile and contemptuous air. for mullins, though depraved, perhaps, was an honest man, abhorring parsons and making no secret of his opinions--whence the bitter feeling. all men, except those very big ones who are supermen, have something astonishingly despicable in them. the despicable thing in milligan came uppermost now. he fairly chuckled. he met the snub with a calm, forgiving smile, and continued his shambling gait with what dignity he could towards his bedroom opposite. then he turned his head to see. his enemy would meet an infuriated hornet--an egyptian hornet!--and might not notice it. he might step on it. he might not. but he was bound to disturb it, and rouse it to attack. the chances were enormously on the clerical side. and its sting meant death. "may god forgive me!" ran subconsciously through his mind. and side by side with the repentant prayer ran also a recognition of the tempter's eternal skill: "i hope the devil it will sting him!" it happened very quickly. the rev. james milligan lingered a moment by his door to watch. he saw mullins, the disgusting mullins, step blithely into the bathroom passage; he saw him pause, shrink back, and raise his arm to protect his face. he heard him swear out aloud: "what's the d----d thing doing here? have i really got 'em again----?" and then he heard him laugh--a hearty, guffawing laugh of genuine relief---- "it's _real_!" the moment of revulsion was overwhelming. it filled the churchly heart with anguish and bitter disappointment. for a space he hated the whole race of men. for the instant mr. mullins realised that the insect was not a fiery illusion of his disordered nerves, he went forward without the smallest hesitation. with his towel he knocked down the flying terror. then he stooped. he gathered up the venomous thing his well-aimed blow had stricken so easily to the floor. he advanced with it, held at arm's length, to the window. he tossed it out carelessly. the egyptian hornet flew away uninjured, and mr. mullins--the mr. mullins who drank, gave nothing to the church, attended no services, hated parsons, and proclaimed the fact with enthusiasm--this same detestable mr. mullins went to his unearned bath without a scratch. but first he saw his enemy standing in the doorway across the passage, watching him--and understood. that was the awful part of it. mullins would make a story of it, and the story would go the round of the hotel. the rev. james milligan, however, proved that his reputation for self-control was not undeserved. he conducted morning service half an hour later with an expression of peace upon his handsome face. he conquered all outward sign of inward spiritual vexation; the wicked, he consoled himself, ever flourish like green bay trees. it was notorious that the righteous never have any luck at all! that was bad enough. but what was worse--and the rev. james milligan remembered for very long--was the superior ease with which mullins had relegated both himself and hornet to the same level of comparative insignificance. mullins ignored them both--which proved that he felt himself superior. infinitely worse than the sting of any hornet in the world: he really _was_ superior. x by water the night before young larsen left to take up his new appointment in egypt he went to the clairvoyante. he neither believed nor disbelieved. he felt no interest, for he already knew his past and did not wish to know his future. "just to please me, jim," the girl pleaded. "the woman is wonderful. before i had been five minutes with her she told me your initials, so there _must_ be something in it." "she read your thought," he smiled indulgently. "even i can do that!" but the girl was in earnest. he yielded; and that night at his farewell dinner he came to give his report of the interview. the result was meagre and unconvincing: money was coming to him, he was soon to make a voyage, and--he would never marry. "so you see how silly it all is," he laughed, for they were to be married when his first promotion came. he gave the details, however, making a little story of it in the way he knew she loved. "but was that all, jim?" the girl asked it, looking rather hard into his face. "aren't you hiding something from me?" he hesitated a moment, then burst out laughing at her clever discernment. "there _was_ a little more," he confessed, "but you take it all so seriously; i----" he had to tell it then, of course. the woman had told him a lot of gibberish about friendly and unfriendly elements. "she said water was unfriendly to me; i was to be careful of water, or else i should come to harm by it. _fresh_ water only," he hastened to add, seeing that the idea of shipwreck was in her mind. "drowning?" the girl asked quickly. "yes," he admitted with reluctance, but still laughing; "she did say drowning, though drowning in no ordinary way." the girl's face showed uneasiness a moment. "what does that mean--drowning in no ordinary way?" she asked, a catch in her breath. but that he could not tell her, because he did not know himself. he gave, therefore, the exact words: "you will drown, but will not know you drown." it was unwise of him. he wished afterwards he had invented a happier report, or had kept this detail back. "i'm safe in egypt, anyhow," he laughed. "i shall be a clever man if i can find enough water in the desert to do me harm!" and all the way from trieste to alexandria he remembered the promise she had extracted--that he would never once go on the nile unless duty made it imperative for him to do so. he kept that promise like the literal, faithful soul he was. his love was equal to the somewhat quixotic sacrifice it occasionally involved. fresh water in egypt there was practically none other, and in any case the natrum works where his duty lay had their headquarters some distance out into the desert. the river, with its banks of welcome, refreshing verdure, was not even visible. months passed quickly, and the time for leave came within measurable distance. in the long interval luck had played the cards kindly for him, vacancies had occurred, early promotion seemed likely, and his letters were full of plans to bring her out to share a little house of their own. his health, however, had not improved; the dryness did not suit him; even in this short period his blood had thinned, his nervous system deteriorated, and, contrary to the doctor's prophecy, the waterless air had told upon his sleep. a damp climate liked him best, and once the sun had touched him with its fiery finger. his letters made no mention of this. he described the life to her, the work, the sport, the pleasant people, and his chances of increased pay and early marriage. and a week before he sailed he rode out upon a final act of duty to inspect the latest diggings his company were making. his course lay some twenty miles into the desert behind el-chobak and towards the limestone hills of guebel haidi, and he went alone, carrying lunch and tea, for it was the weekly holiday of friday, and the men were not at work. the accident was ordinary enough. on his way back in the heat of early afternoon his pony stumbled against a boulder on the treacherous desert film, threw him heavily, broke the girth, bolted before he could seize the reins again, and left him stranded some ten or twelve miles from home. there was a pain in his knee that made walking difficult, a buzzing in his head that troubled sight and made the landscape swim, while, worse than either, his provisions, fastened to the saddle, had vanished with the frightened pony into those blazing leagues of sand. he was alone in the desert, beneath the pitiless afternoon sun, twelve miles of utterly exhausting country between him and safety. under normal conditions he could have covered the distance in four hours, reaching home by dark; but his knee pained him so that a mile an hour proved the best he could possibly do. he reflected a few minutes. the wisest course was to sit down and wait till the pony told its obvious story to the stable, and help should come. and this was what he did, for the scorching heat and glare were dangerous; they were terrible; he was shaken and bewildered by his fall, hungry and weak into the bargain; and an hour's painful scrambling over the baked and burning little gorges must have speedily caused complete prostration. he sat down and rubbed his aching knee. it was quite a little adventure. yet, though he knew the desert might not be lightly trifled with, he felt at the moment nothing more than this--and the amusing description of it he would give in his letter, or--intoxicating thought--by word of mouth. in the heat of the sun he began to feel drowsy. a soft torpor crept over him. he dozed. he fell asleep. it was a long, a dreamless sleep ... for when he woke at length the sun had just gone down, the dusk lay awfully upon the enormous desert, and the air was chilly. the cold had waked him. quickly, as though on purpose, the red glow faded from the sky; the first stars shone; it was dark; the heavens were deep violet. he looked round and realised that his sense of direction had gone entirely. great hunger was in him. the cold already was bitter as the wind rose, but the pain in his knee having eased, he got up and walked a little--and in a moment lost sight of the spot where he had been lying. the shadowy desert swallowed it. "ah," he realised, "this is not an english field or moor. i'm in the desert!" the safe thing to do was to remain exactly where he was; only thus could the rescuers find him; once he wandered he was done for. it was strange the search-party had not yet arrived. to keep warm, however, he was compelled to move, so he made a little pile of stones to mark the place, and walked round and round it in a circle of some dozen yards' diameter. he limped badly, and the hunger gnawed dreadfully; but, after all, the adventure was not so terrible. the amusing side of it kept uppermost still. though fragile in body, his spirit was not unduly timid or imaginative; he _could_ last out the night, or, if the worst came to the worst, the next day as well. but when he watched the little group of stones, he saw that there were dozens of them, scores, hundreds, thousands of these little groups of stones. the desert's face, of course, is thickly strewn with them. the original one was lost in the first five minutes. so he sat down again. but the biting cold, and the wind that licked his very skin beneath the light clothing, soon forced him up again. it was ominous; and the night huge and shelterless. the shaft of green zodiacal light that hung so strangely in the western sky for hours had faded away; the stars were out in their bright thousands; no guide was anywhere; the wind moaned and puffed among the sandy mounds; the vast sheet of desert stretched appallingly upon the world; he heard the jackals cry.... and with the jackals' cry came suddenly the unwelcome realisation that no play was in this adventure any more, but that a bleak reality stared at him through the surrounding darkness. he faced it--at bay. he was genuinely lost. thought blocked in him. "i must be calm and think," he said aloud. his voice woke no echo; it was small and dead; something gigantic ate it instantly. he got up and walked again. why did no one come? hours had passed. the pony had long ago found its stable, or--had it run madly in another direction altogether? he worked out possibilities, tightening his belt. the cold was searching; he never had been, never could be warm again; the hot sunshine of a few hours ago seemed the merest dream. unfamiliar with hardship, he knew not what to do, but he took his coat and shirt off, vigorously rubbed his skin where the dried perspiration of the afternoon still caused clammy shivers, swung his arms furiously like a london cabman, and quickly dressed again. though the wind upon his bare back was fearful, he felt warmer a little. he lay down exhausted, sheltered by an overhanging limestone crag, and took snatches of fitful dog's-sleep, while the wind drove overhead and the dry sand pricked his skin. one face continually was near him; one pair of tender eyes; two dear hands smoothed him; he smelt the perfume of light brown hair. it was all natural enough. his whole thought, in his misery, ran to her in england--england where there were soft fresh grass, big sheltering trees, hemlock and honeysuckle in the hedges--while the hard black desert guarded him, and consciousness dipped away at little intervals under this dry and pitiless egyptian sky.... it was perhaps five in the morning when a voice spoke and he started up with a horrid jerk--the voice of that clairvoyante woman. the sentence died away into the darkness, but one word remained: _water!_ at first he wondered, but at once explanation came. cause and effect were obvious. the clue was physical. his body needed water, and so the thought came up into his mind. he was thirsty. this was the moment when fear first really touched him. hunger was manageable, more or less--for a day or two, certainly. but thirst! thirst and the desert were an evil pair that, by cumulative suggestion gathering since childhood days, brought terror in. once in the mind it could not be dislodged. in spite of his best efforts, the ghastly thing grew passionately--because his thirst grew too. he had smoked much; had eaten spiced things at lunch; had breathed in alkali with the dry, scorched air. he searched for a cool flint pebble to put into his burning mouth, but found only angular scraps of dusty limestone. there were no pebbles here. the cold helped a little to counteract, but already he knew in himself subconsciously the dread of something that was coming. what was it? he tried to hide the thought and bury it out of sight. the utter futility of his tiny strength against the power of the universe appalled him. and then he knew. the merciless sun was on the way, already rising. its return was like the presage of execution to him.... it came. with true horror he watched the marvellous swift dawn break over the sandy sea. the eastern sky glowed hurriedly as from crimson fires. ridges, not noticeable in the starlight, turned black in endless series, like flat-topped billows of a frozen ocean. wide streaks of blue and yellow followed, as the sky dropped sheets of faint light upon the wind-eaten cliffs and showed their under sides. they did not advance; they waited till the sun was up--and then they moved; they rose and sank; they shifted as the sunshine lifted them and the shadows crept away. but in an hour there would be no shadows any more. there would be no shade!... the little groups of stones began to dance. it was horrible. the unbroken, huge expanse lay round him, warming up, twelve hours of blazing hell to come. already the monstrous desert glared, each bit familiar, since each bit was a repetition of the bit before, behind, on either side. it laughed at guidance and direction. he rose and walked; for miles he walked, though how many, north, south, or west, he knew not. the frantic thing was in him now, the fury of the desert; he took its pace, its endless, tireless stride, the stride of the burning, murderous desert that is--waterless. he felt it alive--a blindly heaving desire in it to reduce him to its conditionless, awful dryness. he felt--yet knowing this was feverish and _not_ to be believed--that his own small life lay on its mighty surface, a mere dot in space, a mere heap of little stones. his emotions, his fears, his hopes, his ambition, his love--mere bundled group of little unimportant stones that danced with apparent activity for a moment, then were merged in the undifferentiated surface underneath. he was included in a purpose greater than his own. the will made a plucky effort then. "a night and a day," he laughed, while his lips cracked smartingly with the stretching of the skin, "what is it? many a chap has lasted days and days...!" yes, only he was not of that rare company. he was ordinary, unaccustomed to privation, weak, untrained of spirit, unacquainted with stern resistance. he knew not how to spare himself. the desert struck him where it pleased--all over. it played with him. his tongue was swollen; the parched throat could not swallow. he sank.... an hour he lay there, just wit enough in him to choose the top of a mound where he could be most easily seen. he lay two hours, three, four hours.... the heat blazed down upon him like a furnace.... the sky, when he opened his eyes once, was empty ... then a speck became visible in the blue expanse; and presently another speck. they came from nowhere. they hovered very high, almost out of sight. they appeared, they disappeared, they--reappeared. nearer and nearer they swung down, in sweeping stealthy circles ... little dancing groups of them, miles away but ever drawing closer--the vultures.... he had strained his ears so long for sounds of feet and voices that it seemed he could no longer hear at all. hearing had ceased within him. then came the water-dreams, with their agonising torture. he heard _that_ ... heard it running in silvery streams and rivulets across green english meadows. it rippled with silvery music. he heard it splash. he dipped hands and feet and head in it--in deep, clear pools of generous depth. he drank; with his skin he drank, not with mouth and throat alone. ice clinked in effervescent, sparkling water against a glass. he swam and plunged. water gushed freely over back and shoulders, gallons and gallons of it, bathfuls and to spare, a flood of gushing, crystal, cool, life-giving liquid.... and then he stood in a beech wood and felt the streaming deluge of delicious summer rain upon his face; heard it drip luxuriantly upon a million thirsty leaves. the wet trunks shone, the damp moss spread its perfume, ferns waved heavily in the moist atmosphere. he was soaked to the skin in it. a mountain torrent, fresh from fields of snow, foamed boiling past, and the spray fell in a shower upon his cheeks and hair. he dived--head foremost.... ah, he was up to the neck ... and _she_ was with him; they were under water together; he saw her eyes gleaming into his own beneath the copious flood. the voice, however, was not hers.... "you will drown, yet you will not know you drown...!" his swollen tongue called out a name. but no sound was audible. he closed his eyes. there came sweet unconsciousness.... a sound in that instant _was_ audible, though. it was a voice--voices--and the thud of animal hoofs upon the sand. the specks had vanished from the sky as mysteriously as they came. and, as though in answer to the sound, he made a movement--an automatic, unconscious movement. he did not know he moved. and the body, uncontrolled, lost its precarious balance. he rolled; but he did not know he rolled. slowly, over the edge of the sloping mound of sand, he turned sideways. like a log of wood he slid gradually, turning over and over, nothing to stop him--to the bottom. a few feet only, and not even steep; just steep enough to keep rolling slowly. there was a--splash. but he did not know there was a splash. they found him in a pool of water--one of these rare pools the desert bedouin mark preciously for their own. he had lain within three yards of it for hours. he was drowned ... but he did not know he drowned.... xi h. s. h. in the mountain club hut, to which he had escaped after weeks of gaiety in the capital, delane, young travelling englishman, sat alone, and listened to the wind that beat the pines with violence. the firelight danced over the bare stone floor and raftered ceiling, giving the room an air of movement, and though the solid walls held steady against the wild spring hurricane, the cannonading of the wind seemed to threaten the foundations. for the mountain shook, the forest roared, and the shadows had a way of running everywhere as though the little building trembled. delane watched and listened. he piled the logs on. from time to time he glanced nervously over his shoulder, restless, half uneasy, as a burst of spray from the branches dashed against the window, or a gust of unusual vehemence shook the door. over-wearied with his long day's climb among impossible conditions, he now realised, in this mountain refuge, his utter loneliness; for his mind gave birth to that unwelcome symptom of true loneliness--that he was not, after all, alone. continually he heard steps and voices in the storm. another wanderer, another climber out of season like himself, would presently arrive, and sleep was out of the question until first he heard that knocking on the door. almost--he expected some one. he went for the tenth time to the little window. he peered forth into the thick darkness of the dropping night, shading his eyes against the streaming pane to screen the firelight in an attempt to see if another climber--perhaps a climber in distress--were visible. the surroundings were desolate and savage, well named the devil's saddle. black-faced precipices, streaked with melting snow, rose towering to the north, where the heights were hidden in seas of vapour; waterfalls poured into abysses on two sides; a wall of impenetrable forest pressed up from the south; and the dangerous ridge he had climbed all day slid off wickedly into a sky of surging cloud. but no human figure was, of course, distinguishable, for both the lateness of the hour and the elemental fury of the night rendered it most unlikely. he turned away with a start, as the tempest delivered a blow with massive impact against his very face. then, clearing the remnants of his frugal supper from the table, he hung his soaking clothes at a new angle before the fire, made sure the door was fastened on the inside, climbed into the bunk where white pillows and thick austrian blankets looked so inviting, and prepared finally for sleep. "i must be over-tired," he sighed, after half an hour's weary tossing, and went back to make up the sinking fire. wood is plentiful in these climbers' huts; he heaped it on. but this time he lit the little oil lamp as well, realising--though unwilling to acknowledge it--that it was not over-fatigue that banished sleep, but this unwelcome sense of expecting some one, of being not quite alone. for the feeling persisted and increased. he drew the wooden bench close up to the fire, turned the lamp as high as it would go, and wished unaccountably for the morning. light was a very pleasant thing; and darkness now, for the first time since childhood, troubled him. it was outside; but it might so easily come in and swamp, obliterate, extinguish. the darkness seemed a positive thing. already, somehow, it was established in his mind--this sense of enormous, aggressive darkness that veiled an undesirable hint of personality. some shadow from the peaks or from the forest, immense and threatening, pervaded all his thought. "this can't be entirely nerves," he whispered to himself. "i'm not so tired as all that!" and he made the fire roar. he shivered and drew closer to the blaze. "i'm out of condition; that's part of it," he realised, and remembered with loathing the weeks of luxurious indulgence just behind him. for delane had rather wasted his year of educational travel. straight from oxford, and well supplied with money, he had first saturated his mind in the latest continental thought--the science of france, the metaphysics and philosophy of germany--and had then been caught aside by the gaiety of capitals where the lights are not turned out at midnight by a sunday school police. he had been surfeited, physically, emotionally, and intellectually, till his mind and body longed hungrily for simple living again and simple teaching--above all, the latter. the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom--for certain temperaments (as blake forgot to add), of which delane was one. for there was stuff in the youth, and the reaction had set in with violent abruptness. his system rebelled. he cut loose energetically from all soft delights, and craved for severity, pure air, solitude and hardship. clean and simple conditions he must have without delay, and the tonic of physical battling. it was too early in the year to climb seriously, for the snow was still dangerous and the weather wild, but he had chosen this most isolated of all the mountain huts in order to make sure of solitude, and had come, without guide or companion, for a week's strenuous life in wild surroundings, and to take stock of himself with a view to full recovery. and all day long as he climbed the desolate, unsafe ridge, his mind--good, wholesome, natural symptom--had reverted to his childhood days, to the solid worldly wisdom of his church-going father, and to the early teaching (oh, how sweet and refreshing in its literal spirit!) at his mother's knee. now, as he watched the blazing logs, it came back to him again with redoubled force; the simple, precious, old-world stories of heaven and hell, of a paternal deity, and of a daring, subtle, personal devil---- the interruption to his thoughts came with startling suddenness, as the roaring night descended against the windows with a thundering violence that shook the walls and sucked the flame half-way up the wide stone chimney. the oil lamp flickered and went out. darkness invaded the room for a second, and delane sprang from his bench, thinking the wet snow had loosened far above and was about to sweep the hut into the depths. and he was still standing, trembling and uncertain, in the middle of the room, when a deep and sighing hush followed sharp upon the elemental outburst, and in the hush, like a whisper after thunder, he heard a curious steady sound that, at first, he thought must be a footstep by the door. it was then instantly repeated. but it was not a step. it was some one knocking on the heavy oaken panels--a firm, authoritative sound, as though the new arrival had the right to enter and was already impatient at the delay. the englishman recovered himself instantly, realising with keen relief the new arrival--at last. "another climber like myself, of course," he said, "or perhaps the man who comes to prepare the hut for others. the season has begun." and he went over quickly, without a further qualm, to unbolt the door. "forgive!" he exclaimed in german, as he threw it wide, "i was half asleep before the fire. it is a terrible night. come in to food and shelter, for both are here, and you shall share such supper as i possess." and a tall, cloaked figure passed him swiftly with a gust of angry wind from the impenetrable blackness of the world beyond. on the threshold, for a second, his outline stood full in the blaze of firelight with the sheet of darkness behind it, stately, erect, commanding, his cloak torn fiercely by the wind, but the face hidden by a low-brimmed hat; and an instant later the door shut with resounding clamour upon the hurricane, and the two men turned to confront one another in the little room. delane then realised two things sharply, both of them fleeting impressions, but acutely vivid: first, that the outside darkness seemed to have entered and established itself between him and the new arrival; and, secondly, that the stranger's face was difficult to focus for clear sight, although the covering hat was now removed. there was a blur upon it somewhere. and this the englishman ascribed partly to the flickering effect of firelight, and partly to the lightning glare of the man's masterful and terrific eyes, which made his own sight waver in some curious fashion as he gazed upon him. these impressions, however, were but momentary and passing, due doubtless to the condition of his nerves and to the semi-shock of the dramatic, even theatrical entrance. delane's senses, in this wild setting, were guilty of exaggeration. for now, while helping the man remove his cloak, speaking naturally of shelter, food, and the savage weather, he lost this first distortion and his mind recovered sane proportion. the stranger, after all, though striking, was not of appearance so uncommon as to cause alarm; the light and the low doorway had touched his stature with illusion. he dwindled. and the great eyes, upon calmer subsequent inspection, lost their original fierce lightning. the entering darkness, moreover, was but an effect of the upheaving night behind him as he strode across the threshold. the closed door proved it. and yet, as delane continued his quieter examination, there remained, he saw, the startling quality which had caused that first magnifying in his mind. his senses, while reporting accurately, insisted upon this arresting and uncommon touch: there was, about this late wanderer of the night, some evasive, lofty strangeness that set him utterly apart from ordinary men. the englishman examined him searchingly, surreptitiously, but with a touch of passionate curiosity he could not in the least account for nor explain. there were contradictions of perplexing character about him. for the first presentment had been of splendid youth, while on the face, though vigorous and gloriously handsome, he now discerned the stamp of tremendous age. it was worn and tired. while radiant with strength and health and power, it wore as well this certain signature of deep exhaustion that great experience rather than physical experience brings. moreover, he discovered in it, in some way he could not hope to describe, man, woman, and child. there was a big, sad earnestness about it, yet a touch of humour too; patience, tenderness, and sweetness held the mouth; and behind the high pale forehead intellect sat enthroned and watchful. in it were both love and hatred, longing and despair; an expression of being ever on the defensive, yet hugely mutinous; an air both hunted and beseeching; great knowledge and great woe. delane gave up the search, aware that something unalterably splendid stood before him. solemnity and beauty swept him too. his was never the grotesque assumption that man must be the highest being in the universe, nor that a thing is a miracle merely because it has never happened before. he groped, while explanation and analysis both halted. "a great teacher," thought fluttered through him, "or a mighty rebel! a distinguished personality beyond all question! who can he be?" there was something regal that put respect upon his imagination instantly. and he remembered the legend of the country-side that ludwig of bavaria was said to be about when nights were very wild. he wondered. into his speech and manner crept unawares an attitude of deference that was almost reverence, and with it--whence came this other quality?--a searching pity. "you must be wearied out," he said respectfully, busying himself about the room, "as well as cold and wet. this fire will dry you, sir, and meanwhile i will prepare quickly such food as there is, if you will eat it." for the other carried no knapsack, nor was he clothed for the severity of mountain travel. "i have already eaten," said the stranger courteously, "and, with my thanks to you, i am neither wet nor tired. the afflictions that i bear are of another kind, though ones that you shall more easily, i am sure, relieve." he spoke as a man whose words set troops in action, and delane glanced at him, deeply moved by the surprising phrase, yet hardly marvelling that it should be so. he found no ready answer. but there was evidently question in his look, for the other continued, and this time with a smile that betrayed sheer winning beauty as of a tender woman: "i saw the light and came to it. it is unusual--at this time." his voice was resonant, yet not deep. there was a ringing quality about it that the bare room emphasised. it charmed the young englishman inexplicably. also, it woke in him a sense of infinite pathos. "you are a climber, sir, like myself," delane resumed, lifting his eyes a moment uneasily from the coffee he brewed over a corner of the fire. "you know this neighbourhood, perhaps? better, at any rate, than i can know it?" his german halted rather. he chose his words with difficulty. there was uncommon trouble in his mind. "i know all wild and desolate places," replied the other, in perfect english, but with a wintry mournfulness in his voice and eyes, "for i feel at home in them, and their stern companionship my nature craves as solace. but, unlike yourself, i am no climber." "the heights have no attraction for you?" asked delane, as he mingled steaming milk and coffee in the wooden bowl, marvelling what brought him then so high above the valleys. "it is their difficulty and danger that fascinate me always. i find the loneliness of the summits intoxicating in a sense." and, regardless of refusal, he set the bread and meat before him, the apple and the tiny packet of salt, then turned away to place the coffee pot beside the fire again. but as he did so a singular gesture of the other caught his eyes. before touching bowl or plate, the stranger took the fruit and brushed his lips with it. he kissed it, then set it on the ground and crushed it into pulp beneath his heel. and, seeing this, the young englishman knew something dreadfully arrested in his mind, for, as he looked away, pretending the act was unobserved, a thing of ice and darkness moved past him through the room, so that the pot trembled in his hand, rattling sharply against the hearthstone where he stooped. he could only interpret it as an act of madness, and the myth of the sad, drowned monarch wandering through this enchanted region, pressed into him again unsought and urgent. it was a full minute before he had control of his heart and hand again. the bowl was half emptied, and the man was smiling--this time the smile of a child who implores the comfort of enveloping and understanding arms. "i am a wanderer rather than a climber," he was saying, as though there had been no interval, "for, though the lonely summits suit me well, i now find in them only--terror. my feet lose their sureness, and my head its steady balance. i prefer the hidden gorges of these mountains, and the shadows of the covering forests. my days"--his voice drew the loneliness of uttermost space into its piteous accents--"are passed in darkness. i can never climb again." he spoke this time, indeed, as a man whose nerve was gone for ever. it was pitiable almost to tears. and delane, unable to explain the amazing contradictions, felt recklessly, furiously drawn to this trapped wanderer with the mien of a king yet the air and speech sometimes of a woman and sometimes of an outcast child. "ah, then you have known accidents," delane replied with outer calmness, as he lit his pipe, trying in vain to keep his hand as steady as his voice. "you have been in one perhaps. the effect, i have been told, is----" the power and sweetness in that resonant voice took his breath away as he heard it break in upon his own uncertain accents: "i have--fallen," the stranger replied impressively, as the rain and wind wailed past the building mournfully, "yet a fall that was no part of any accident. for it was no common fall," the man added with a magnificent gesture of disdain, "while yet it broke my heart in two." he stooped a little as he uttered the next words with a crying pathos that an outcast woman might have used. "i am," he said, "engulfed in intolerable loneliness. i can never climb again." with a shiver impossible to control, half of terror, half of pity, delane moved a step nearer to the marvellous stranger. the spirit of ludwig, exiled and distraught, had gripped his soul with a weakening terror; but now sheer beauty lifted him above all personal shrinking. there seemed some echo of lost divinity, worn, wild yet grandiose, through which this significant language strained towards a personal message--for himself. "in loneliness?" he faltered, sympathy rising in a flood. "for my kingdom that is lost to me for ever," met him in deep, throbbing tones that set the air on fire. "for my imperial ancient heights that jealousy took from me----" the stranger paused, with an indescribable air of broken dignity and pain. outside the tempest paused a moment before the awful elemental crash that followed. a bellowing of many winds descended like artillery upon the world. a burst of smoke rushed from the fireplace about them both, shrouding the stranger momentarily in a flying veil. and delane stood up, uncomfortable in his very bones. "what can it be?" he asked himself sharply. "who is this being that he should use such language?" he watched alarm chase pity, aware that the conversation held something beyond experience. but the pity returned in greater and ever greater flood. and love surged through him too. it was significant, he remembered afterwards, that he felt it incumbent upon himself to stand. curious, too, how the thought of that mad, drowned monarch haunted memory with such persistence. some vast emotion that he could not name drove out his subsequent words. the smoke had cleared, and a strange, high stillness held the world. the rain streamed down in torrents, isolating these two somehow from the haunts of men. and the englishman stared then into a countenance grown mighty with woe and loneliness. there stood darkly in it this incommunicable magnificence of pain that mingled awe with the pity he had felt. the kingly eyes looked clear into his own, completing his subjugation out of time. "i would follow you," ran his thought upon its knees, "follow you with obedience for ever and ever, even into a last damnation. for you are sublime. you shall come again into your kingdom, if my own small worship----" then blackness sponged the reckless thought away. he spoke in its place a more guarded, careful thing: "i am aware," he faltered, yet conscious that he bowed, "of standing before a great one of some world unknown to me. who he may be i have but the privilege of wondering. he has spoken darkly of a kingdom that is lost. yet he is still, i see, a monarch." and he lowered his head and shoulders involuntarily. for an instant, then, as he said it, the eyes before him flashed their original terrific lightnings. the darkness of the common world faded before the entrance of an outer darkness. from gulfs of terror at his feet rose shadows out of the night of time, and a passionate anguish as of sudden madness seized his heart and shook it. he listened breathlessly for the words that followed. it seemed some wind of unutterable despair passed in the breath from those non-human lips: "i am still a monarch, yes; but my kingdom is taken from me, for i have no single subject. lost in a loneliness that lies out of space and time, i am become a throneless ruler, and my hopelessness is more than i can bear." the beseeching pathos of the voice tore him in two. the deity himself, it seemed, stood there accused of jealousy, of sin and cruelty. the stranger rose. the power about him brought the picture of a planet, throned in mid-heaven and poised beyond assault. "not otherwise," boomed the startling words as though an avalanche found syllables, "could i now show myself to--you." delane was trembling horribly. he felt the next words slip off his tongue unconsciously. the shattering truth had dawned upon his soul at last. "then the light you saw, and came to----?" he whispered. "was the light in your heart that guided me," came the answer, sweet, beguiling as the music in a woman's tones, "the light of your instant, brief desire that held love in it." he made an opening movement with his arms as he continued, smiling like stars in summer. "for you summoned me; summoned me by your dear and precious belief: how dear, how precious, none can know but i who stand before you." his figure drew up with an imperial air of proud dominion. his feet were set among the constellations. the opening movement of his arms continued slowly. and the music in his tones seemed merged in distant thunder. "for your single, brief belief," he smiled with the grandeur of a condescending emperor, "shall give my vanished kingdom back to me." and with an air of native majesty he held his hand out--to be kissed. the black hurricane of night, the terror of frozen peaks, the yawning horror of the great abyss outside--all three crowded into the englishman's mind with a slashing impact that blocked delivery of any word or action. it was not that he refused, it was not that he withdrew, but that life stood paralysed and rigid. the flow stopped dead for the first time since he had left his mother's womb. the god in him was turned to stone and rendered ineffective. for an appalling instant god was _not_. he realised the stupendous moment. before him, drinking his little soul out merely by his presence, stood one whose habit of mind, not alone his external accidents, was imperial with black prerogative before the first man drew the breath of life. august procedure was native to his inner process of existence. the stars and confines of the universe owned his sway before he fell, to trifle away the dreary little centuries by haunting the minds of feeble men and women, by hiding himself in nursery cupboards, and by grinning with stained gargoyles from the roofs of city churches.... and the lad's life stammered, flickered, threatened to go out before the enveloping terror of the revelation. "i called to you ... but called to you in play," thought whispered somewhere deep below the level of any speech, yet not so low that the audacious sound of it did not crash above the elements outside; "for ... till now ... you have been to me but a ... coated bogy ... that my brain disowned with laughter ... and my heart thought picturesque. if you are here ... _alive_! may god forgive me for my ..." it seemed as though tears--the tears of love and profound commiseration--drowned the very seed of thought itself. a sound stopped him that was like a collapse in heaven. some crashing, as of a ruined world, passed splintering through his little timid heart. he did not yield, but he understood--with an understanding which seemed the delicate first sign of yielding--the seductiveness of evil, the sweet delight of surrendering the will with utter recklessness to those swelling forces which disintegrate the heroic soul in man. he remembered. it was true. in the reaction from excess he _had_ definitely called upon his childhood's teaching with a passing moment of genuine belief. and now that yearning of a fraction of a second bore its awful fruit. the luscious capitals where he had rioted passed in a coloured stream before his eyes; the wine, the woman, and the song stood there before him, clothed in that power which lies insinuatingly disguised behind their little passing show of innocence. their glamour donned this domino of regal and virile grandeur. he felt entangled beyond recovery. the idea of god seemed sterile and without reality. the one real thing, the one desirable thing, the one possible, strong and beautiful thing--was to bend his head and kiss those imperial fingers. he moved noiselessly towards the hand. he raised his own to take it and lift it towards his mouth---- when there rose in his mind with startling vividness a small, soft picture of a child's nursery, a picture of a little boy, kneeling in scanty night-gown with pink upturned soles, and asking ridiculous, audacious things of a shining figure seated on a summer cloud above the kitchen-garden walnut tree. the tiny symbol flashed and went its way, yet not before it had lit the entire world with glory. for there came an absolutely routing power with it. in that half-forgotten instant's craving for the simple teaching of his childhood days, belief had conjured with two immense traditions. this was the second of them. the appearance of the one had inevitably produced the passage of its opposite.... and the hand that floated in the air before him to be kissed sank slowly down below the possible level of his lips. he shrank away. though laughter tempted something in his brain, there still clung about his heart the first aching, pitying terror. but size retreated, dwindling somehow as it went. the wind and rain obliterated every other sound; yet in that bare, unfurnished room of a climber's mountain hut, there was a silence, above the roar, that drank in everything and broke the back of speech. in opposition to this masquerading splendour delane had set up a personal, paternal deity. "i thought of you, perhaps," cried the voice of self-defence, "but i did not call to you with real belief. and, by the name of god, i did not summon you. for your sweetness, as your power, sickens me; and your hand is black with the curses of all the mothers in the world, whose prayers and tears----" he stopped dead, overwhelmed by the cruelty of his reckless utterance. and the other moved towards him slowly. it was like the summit of some peaked and terrible height that moved. he spoke. he changed appallingly. "but _i_ claim," he roared, "your heart. i claim you by that instant of belief you felt. for by that alone you shall restore to me my vanished kingdom. you shall worship me." in the countenance was a sudden awful power; but behind the stupefying roar there was weakness in the voice as of an imploring and beseeching child. again, deep love and searching pity seared the englishman's heart as he replied in the gentlest accents he could find to master: "and i claim _you_," he said, "by my understanding sympathy, and by my sorrow for your god-forsaken loneliness, and by my love. for no kingdom built on hate can stand against the love you would deny----" words failed him then, as he saw the majesty fade slowly from the face, grown small and shadowy. one last expression of desperate energy in the eyes struck lightnings from the smoky air, as with an abandoned movement of the entire figure, he drew back, it seemed, towards the door behind him. delane moved slowly after him, opening his arms. tenderness and big compassion flung wide the gates of love within him. he found strange language, too, although actual, spoken words did not produce them further than his entrails where they had their birth. "toys in the world are plentiful, sire, and you may have them for your masterpiece of play. but you must seek them where they still survive; in the churches, and in isolated lands where thought lies unawakened. for they are the children's blocks of make-believe whose palaces, like your once tremendous kingdom, have no true existence for the thinking mind." and he stretched his hands towards him with the gesture of one who sought to help and save, then paused as he realised that his arms enclosed sheer blackness, with the emptiness of wind and driving rain. for the door of the hut stood open, and delane balanced on the threshold, facing the sheet of night above the abyss. he heard the waterfalls in the valley far below. the forest flapped and tossed its myriad branches. cold draughts swept down from spectral fields of melting snow above; and the blackness turned momentarily into the semblance of towers and bastions of thick beaten gloom. above one soaring turret, then, a space of sky appeared, swept naked by a violent, lost wind--an opening of purple into limitless distance. for one second, amid the vapours, it was visible, empty and untenanted. the next, there sailed across its small diameter a falling star. with an air of slow and endless leisure, yet at the same time with terrific speed, it dived behind the ragged curtain of the clouds, and the space closed up again. blackness returned upon the heavens. and through this blackness, plunging into that abyss of woe whence he had momentarily risen, the figure of the marvellous stranger melted utterly away. delane, for a fleeting second, was aware of the earnestness in the sad, imploring countenance; of its sweetness and its power so strangely mingled; of it mysterious grandeur; and of its pathetic childishness. but, already, it was sunk into interminable distance. a star that would be baleful, yet was merely glorious, passed on its endless wandering among the teeming systems of the universe. behind the fixed and steady stars, secure in their appointed places, it set. it vanished into the pit of unknown emptiness. it was gone. "god help you!" sighed across the sea of wailing branches, echoing down the dark abyss below. "god give you rest at last!" for he saw a princely, nay, an imperial being, homeless for ever, and for ever wandering, hunted as by keen remorseless winds about a universe that held no corner for his feet, his majesty unworshipped, his reign a mockery, his court unfurnished, and his courtiers mere shadows of deep space.... and a thin, grey dawn, stealing up behind clearing summits in the east, crept then against the windows of the mountain hut. it brought with it a treacherous, sharp air that made the sleeper draw another blanket near to shelter him from the sudden cold. for the fire had died out, and an icy draught sucked steadily beneath the doorway. xii a bit of wood he found himself in meran with some cousins who had various slight ailments, but, being rich and imaginative, had gone to a sanatorium to be cured. but for its sanatoria, meran might be a cheerful place; their ubiquity reminds a healthy man too often that the air is really good. being well enough himself, except for a few mental worries, he went to a gasthaus in the neighbourhood. in the sanatorium his cousins complained bitterly of the food, the ignorant "sisters," the inattentive doctors, and the idiotic regulations generally--which proves that people should not go to a sanatorium unless they are really ill. however, they paid heavily for being there, so felt that something was being accomplished, and were annoyed when he called each day for tea, and told them cheerfully how much better they looked--which proved, again, that their ailments were slight and quite curable by the local doctor at home. with one of the ailing cousins, a rich and pretty girl, he believed himself in love. it was a three weeks' business, and he spent his mornings walking in the surrounding hills, his mind reflective, analytical, and ambitious, as with a man in love. he thought of thousands of things. he mooned. once, for instance, he paused beside a rivulet to watch the buttercups dip, and asked himself, "will she be like this when we're married--so anxious to be well that she thinks fearfully all the time of getting ill?" for if so, he felt he would be bored. he knew himself accurately enough to realise that he never could stand _that_. yet money was a wonderful thing to have, and he, already thirty-five, had little enough! "am i influenced by her money, then?" he asked himself ... and so went on to ask and wonder about many things besides, for he was of a reflective temperament and his father had been a minor poet. and doubt crept in. he felt a chill. he was not much of a man, perhaps, thin-blooded and unsuccessful, rather a dreamer, too, into the bargain. he had £ a year of his own and a position in a philanthropic institution (due to influence) with a nominal salary attached. he meant to keep the latter after marriage. he would work just the same. nobody should ever say _that_ of him----! and as he sat on the fallen tree beside the rivulet, idly knocking stones into the rushing water with his stick, he reflected upon those banal truisms that epitomise two-thirds of life. the way little unimportant things can change a person's whole existence was the one his thought just now had fastened on. his cousin's chill and headache, for instance, caught at a gloomy picnic on the campagna three weeks before, had led to her going into a sanatorium and being advised that her heart was weak, that she had a tendency to asthma, that gout was in her system, and that a treatment of x-rays, radium, sun-baths and light baths, violet rays, no meat, complete rest, with big daily fees to experts with european reputations, were imperative. "from that chill, sitting a moment too long in the shadow of a forgotten patrician's tomb," he reflected, "has come all this"--"all this" including his doubt as to whether it was herself or her money that he loved, whether he could stand living with her always, whether he need _really_ keep his work on after marriage, in a word, his entire life and future, and her own as well--"all from that tiny chill three weeks ago!" and he knocked with his stick a little piece of sawn-off board that lay beside the rushing water. upon that bit of wood his mind, his mood, then fastened itself. it was triangular, a piece of sawn-off wood, brown with age and ragged. once it had been part of a triumphant, hopeful sapling on the mountains; then, when thirty years of age, the men had cut it down; the rest of it stood somewhere now, at this very moment, in the walls of the house. this extra bit was cast away as useless; it served no purpose anywhere; it was slowly rotting in the sun. but each tap of the stick, he noticed, turned it sideways without sending it over the edge into the rushing water. it was obstinate. "it doesn't want to go in," he laughed, his father's little talent cropping out in him, "but, by jove, it shall!" and he pushed it with his foot. but again it stopped, stuck end-ways against a stone. he then stooped, picked it up, and threw it in. it plopped and splashed, and went scurrying away downhill with the bubbling water. "even that scrap of useless wood," he reflected, rising to continue his aimless walk, and still idly dreaming, "even that bit of rubbish may have a purpose, and may change the life of someone--somewhere!"--and then went strolling through the fragrant pine woods, crossing a dozen similar streams, and hitting scores of stones and scraps and fir cones as he went--till he finally reached his gasthaus an hour later, and found a note from _her_: "we shall expect you about three o'clock. we thought of going for a drive. the others feel so much better." it was a revealing touch--the way she put it on "the others." he made his mind up then and there--thus tiny things divide the course of life--that he could never be happy with such an "affected creature." he went for that drive, sat next to her consuming beauty, proposed to her passionately on the way back, was accepted before he could change his mind, and is now the father of several healthy children--and just as much afraid of getting ill, or of _their_ getting ill, as she was fifteen years before. the female, of course, matures long, long before the male, he reflected, thinking the matter over in his study once.... and that scrap of wood he idly set in motion out of impulse also went its destined way upon the hurrying water that never dared to stop. proud of its new-found motion, it bobbed down merrily, spinning and turning for a mile or so, dancing gaily over sunny meadows, brushing the dipping buttercups as it passed, through vineyards, woods, and under dusty roads in neat, cool gutters, and tumbling headlong over little waterfalls, until it neared the plain. and so, finally, it came to a wooden trough that led off some of the precious water to a sawmill where bare-armed men did practical and necessary things. at the parting of the ways its angles delayed it for a moment, undecided which way to take. it wobbled. and upon that moment's wobbling hung tragic issues--issues of life and death. unknowing (yet assuredly not unknown), it chose the trough. it swung light-heartedly into the tearing sluice. it whirled with the gush of water towards the wheel, banged, spun, trembled, caught fast in the side where the cogs just chanced to be--and abruptly stopped the wheel. at any other spot the pressure of the water must have smashed it into pulp, and the wheel have continued as before; but it was caught in the _one_ place where the various tensions held it fast immovably. it stopped the wheel, and so the machinery of the entire mill. it jammed like iron. the particular angle at which the double-handed saw, held by two weary and perspiring men, had cut it off a year before just enabled it to fit and wedge itself with irresistible exactitude. the pressure of the tearing water combined with the weight of the massive wheel to fix it tight and rigid. and in due course a workman--it was the foreman of the mill--came from his post inside to make investigations. he discovered the irritating item that caused the trouble. he put his weight in a certain way; he strained his hefty muscles; he swore--and the scrap of wood was easily dislodged. he fished the morsel out, and tossed it on the bank, and spat on it. the great wheel started with a mighty groan. but it started a fraction of a second before he expected it would start. he overbalanced, clutching the revolving framework with a frantic effort, shouted, swore, leaped at nothing, and fell into the pouring flood. in an instant he was turned upside down, sucked under, drowned. he was engaged to be married, and had put by a thousand _kronen_ in the _tiroler sparbank._ he was a sober and hard-working man.... there was a paragraph in the local paper two days later. the englishman, asking the porter of his gasthaus for something to wrap up a present he was taking to his cousin in the sanatorium, used that very issue. as he folded its crumpled and recalcitrant sheets with sentimental care about the precious object his eye fell carelessly upon the paragraph. being of an idle and reflective temperament, he stopped to read it--it was headed "unglücksfall," and his poetic eye, inherited from his foolish, rhyming father, caught the pretty expression "fliessandes wasser." he read the first few lines. some fellow, with a picturesque tyrolese name, had been drowned beneath a mill-wheel; he was popular in the neighbourhood, it seemed; he had saved some money, and was just going to be married. it was very sad. "our readers' sympathy" was with him.... and, being of a reflective temperament, the englishman thought for a moment, while he went on wrapping up the parcel. he wondered if the man had really loved the girl, whether she, too, had money, and whether they would have had lots of children and been happy ever afterwards. and then he hurried out towards the sanatorium. "i shall be late," he reflected. "such little, unimportant things delay one...!" xiii a victim of higher space "there's a hextraordinary gentleman to see you, sir," said the new man. "why 'extraordinary'?" asked dr. silence, drawing the tips of his thin fingers through his brown beard. his eyes twinkled pleasantly. "why 'extraordinary,' barker?" he repeated encouragingly, noticing the perplexed expression in the man's eyes. "he's so--so thin, sir. i could hardly see 'im at all--at first. he was inside the house before i could ask the name," he added, remembering strict orders. "and who brought him here?" "he come alone, sir, in a closed cab. he pushed by me before i could say a word--making no noise not what i could hear. he seemed to move so soft like----" the man stopped short with obvious embarrassment, as though he had already said enough to jeopardise his new situation, but trying hard to show that he remembered the instructions and warnings he had received with regard to the admission of strangers not properly accredited. "and where is the gentleman now?" asked dr. silence, turning away to conceal his amusement. "i really couldn't exactly say, sir. i left him standing in the 'all----" the doctor looked up sharply. "but why in the hall, barker? why not in the waiting-room?" he fixed his piercing though kindly eyes on the man's face. "did he frighten you?" he asked quickly. "i think he did, sir, if i may say so. i seemed to lose sight of him, as it were----" the man stammered, evidently convinced by now that he had earned his dismissal. "he come in so funny, just like a cold wind," he added boldly, setting his heels at attention and looking his master full in the face. the doctor made an internal note of the man's halting description; he was pleased that the slight signs of psychic intuition which had induced him to engage barker had not entirely failed at the first trial. dr. silence sought for this qualification in all his assistants, from secretary to serving man, and if it surrounded him with a somewhat singular crew, the drawbacks were more than compensated for on the whole by their occasional flashes of insight. "so the gentleman made you feel queer, did he?" "that was it, i think, sir," repeated the man stolidly. "and he brings no kind of introduction to me--no letter or anything?" asked the doctor, with feigned surprise, as though he knew what was coming. the man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and finally produced an envelope. "i beg pardon, sir," he said, greatly flustered; "the gentleman handed me this for you." it was a note from a discerning friend, who had never yet sent him a case that was not vitally interesting from one point or another. "please see the bearer of this note," the brief message ran, "though i doubt if even you can do much to help him." john silence paused a moment, so as to gather from the mind of the writer all that lay behind the brief words of the letter. then he looked up at his servant with a graver expression than he had yet worn. "go back and find this gentleman," he said, "and show him into the green study. do not reply to his question, or speak more than actually necessary; but think kind, helpful, sympathetic thoughts as strongly as you can, barker. you remember what i told you about the importance of _thinking_, when i engaged you. put curiosity out of your mind, and think gently, sympathetically, affectionately, if you can." he smiled, and barker, who had recovered his composure in the doctor's presence, bowed silently and went out. there were two different reception-rooms in dr. silence's house. one (intended for persons who imagined they needed spiritual assistance when really they were only candidates for the asylum) had padded walls, and was well supplied with various concealed contrivances by means of which sudden violence could be instantly met and overcome. it was, however, rarely used. the other, intended for the reception of genuine cases of spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic nature, was entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep green, calculated to induce calmness and repose of mind. and this room was the one in which dr. silence interviewed the majority of his "queer" cases, and the one into which he had directed barker to show his present caller. to begin with, the arm-chair in which the patient was always directed to sit, was nailed to the floor, since its immovability tended to impart this same excellent characteristic to the occupant. patients invariably grew excited when talking about themselves, and their excitement tended to confuse their thoughts and to exaggerate their language. the inflexibility of the chair helped to counteract this. after repeated endeavours to drag it forward, or push it back, they ended by resigning themselves to sitting quietly. and with the futility of fidgeting there followed a calmer state of mind. upon the floor, and at intervals in the wall immediately behind, were certain tiny green buttons, practically unnoticeable, which on being pressed permitted a soothing and persuasive narcotic to rise invisibly about the occupant of the chair. the effect upon the excitable patient was rapid, admirable, and harmless. the green study was further provided with a secret spy-hole; for john silence liked when possible to observe his patient's face before it had assumed that mask the features of the human countenance invariably wear in the presence of another person. a man sitting alone wears a psychic expression; and this expression is the man himself. it disappears the moment another person joins him. and dr. silence often learned more from a few moments' secret observation of a face than from hours of conversation with its owner afterwards. a very light, almost a dancing, step followed barker's heavy tread towards the green room, and a moment afterwards the man came in and announced that the gentleman was waiting. he was still pale and his manner nervous. "never mind, barker," the doctor said kindly; "if you were not psychic the man would have had no effect upon you at all. you only need training and development. and when you have learned to interpret these feelings and sensations better, you will feel no fear, but only a great sympathy." "yes, sir; thank you, sir!" and barker bowed and made his escape, while dr. silence, an amused smile lurking about the corners of his mouth, made his way noiselessly down the passage and put his eye to the spy-hole in the door of the green study. this spy-hole was so placed that it commanded a view of almost the entire room, and, looking through it, the doctor saw a hat, gloves, and umbrella lying on a chair by the table, but searched at first in vain for their owner. the windows were both closed and a brisk fire burned in the grate. there were various signs--signs intelligible at least to a keenly intuitive soul--that the room was occupied, yet so far as human beings were concerned, it was empty, utterly empty. no one sat in the chairs; no one stood on the mat before the fire; there was no sign even that a patient was anywhere close against the wall, examining the böcklin reproductions--as patients so often did when they thought they were alone--and therefore rather difficult to see from the spy-hole. ordinarily speaking, there was no one in the room. it was undeniable. yet dr. silence was quite well aware that a human being _was_ in the room. his psychic apparatus never failed in letting him know the proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being. even in the dark he could tell that. and he now knew positively that his patient--the patient who had alarmed barker, and had then tripped down the corridor with that dancing footstep--was somewhere concealed within the four walls commanded by his spy-hole. he also realised--and this was most unusual--that this individual whom he desired to watch knew that he was being watched. and, further, that the stranger himself was also watching! in fact, that it was he, the doctor, who was being observed--and by an observer as keen and trained as himself. an inkling of the true state of the case began to dawn upon him, and he was on the verge of entering--indeed, his hand already touched the door-knob--when his eye, still glued to the spy-hole, detected a slight movement. directly opposite, between him and the fireplace, something stirred. he watched very attentively and made certain that he was not mistaken. an object on the mantelpiece--it was a blue vase--disappeared from view. it passed out of sight together with the portion of the marble mantelpiece on which it rested. next, that part of the fire and grate and brass fender immediately below it vanished entirely, as though a slice had been taken clean out of them. dr. silence then understood that something between him and these objects was slowly coming into being, something that concealed them and obstructed his vision by inserting itself in the line of sight between them and himself. he quietly awaited further results before going in. first he saw a thin perpendicular line tracing itself from just above the height of the clock and continuing downwards till it reached the woolly fire-mat. this line grew wider, broadened, grew solid. it was no shadow; it was something substantial. it defined itself more and more. then suddenly, at the top of the line, and about on a level with the face of the clock, he saw a round luminous disc gazing steadily at him. it was a human eye, looking straight into his own, pressed there against the spy-hole. and it was bright with intelligence. dr. silence held his breath for a moment--and stared back at it. then, like some one moving out of deep shadow into light, he saw the figure of a man come sliding sideways into view, a whitish face following the eye, and the perpendicular line he had first observed broadening out and developing into the complete figure of a human being. it was the patient. he had apparently been standing there in front of the fire all the time. a second eye had followed the first, and both of them stared steadily at the spy-hole, sharply concentrated, yet with a sly twinkle of humour and amusement that made it impossible for the doctor to maintain his position any longer. he opened the door and went in quickly. as he did so he noticed for the first time the sound of a german band coming in gaily through the open ventilators. in some intuitive, unaccountable fashion the music connected itself with the patient he was about to interview. this sort of prevision was not unfamiliar to him. it always explained itself later. the man, he saw, was of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe--his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. pleasant--that is, good--vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met dr. silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind and brain. there was evidently something wholly out of the usual in the state of his thoughts. yet, though strange, it was not altogether distressing; it was not the impression that the broken and violent atmosphere of the insane produces upon the mind. dr. silence realised in a flash that here was a case of absorbing interest that might require all his powers to handle properly. "i was watching you through my little peep-hole--as you saw," he began, with a pleasant smile, advancing to shake hands. "i find it of the greatest assistance sometimes----" but the patient interrupted him at once. his voice was hurried and had odd, shrill changes in it, breaking from high to low in unexpected fashion. one moment it thundered, the next it almost squeaked. "i understand without explanation," he broke in rapidly. "you get the true note of a man in this way--when he thinks himself unobserved. i quite agree. only, in my case, i fear, you saw very little. my case, as you of course grasp, dr. silence, is extremely peculiar, uncomfortably peculiar. indeed, unless sir william had positively assured me----" "my friend has sent you to me," the doctor interrupted gravely, with a gentle note of authority, "and that is quite sufficient. pray, be seated, mr.----" "mudge--racine mudge," returned the other. "take this comfortable one, mr. mudge," leading him to the fixed chair, "and tell me your condition in your own way and at your own pace. my whole day is at your service if you require it." mr. mudge moved towards the chair in question and then hesitated. "you will promise me not to use the narcotic buttons," he said, before sitting down. "i do not need them. also i ought to mention that anything you think of vividly will reach my mind. that is apparently part of my peculiar case." he sat down with a sigh and arranged his thin legs and body into a position of comfort. evidently he was very sensitive to the thoughts of others, for the picture of the green buttons had only entered the doctor's mind for a second, yet the other had instantly snapped it up. dr. silence noticed, too, that mr. mudge held on tightly with both hands to the arms of the chair. "i'm rather glad the chair is nailed to the floor," he remarked, as he settled himself more comfortably. "it suits me admirably. the fact is--and this is my case in a nutshell--which is all that a doctor of your marvellous development requires--the fact is, dr. silence, i am a victim of higher space. that's what's the matter with me--higher space!" the two looked at each other for a space in silence, the little patient holding tightly to the arms of the chair which "suited him admirably," and looking up with staring eyes, his atmosphere positively trembling with the waves of some unknown activity; while the doctor smiled kindly and sympathetically, and put his whole person as far as possible into the mental condition of the other. "higher space," repeated mr. mudge, "that's what it is. now, do you think you can help me with _that_?" there was a pause during which the men's eyes steadily searched down below the surface of their respective personalities. then dr. silence spoke. "i am quite sure i can help," he answered quietly; "sympathy must always help, and suffering always owns my sympathy. i see you have suffered cruelly. you must tell me all about your case, and when i hear the gradual steps by which you reached this strange condition, i have no doubt i can be of assistance to you." he drew a chair up beside his interlocutor and laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. his whole being radiated kindness, intelligence, desire to help. "for instance," he went on, "i feel sure it was the result of no mere chance that you became familiar with the terrors of what you term higher space; for higher space is no mere external measurement. it is, of course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner development, and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of the world at the present stage of evolution. higher space is a mythical state." "oh!" cried the other, rubbing his birdlike hands with pleasure, "the relief it is to be to talk to some one who can understand! of course what you say is the utter truth. and you are right that no mere chance led me to my present condition, but, on the other hand, prolonged and deliberate study. yet chance in a sense now governs it. i mean, my entering the condition of higher space seems to depend upon the chance of this and that circumstance. for instance, the mere sound of that german band sent me off. not that all music will do so, but certain sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite pitch, and off i go. wagner's music always does it, and that band must have been playing a stray bit of wagner. but i'll come to all that later. only, first, i must ask you to send away your man from the spy-hole." john silence looked up with a start, for mr. mudge's back was to the door, and there was no mirror. he saw the brown eye of barker glued to the little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without a word and snapped down the black shutter provided for the purpose, and then heard barker shuffle away along the passage. "now," continued the little man in the chair, "i can begin. you have managed to put me completely at my ease, and i feel i may tell you my whole case without shame or reserve. you will understand. but you must be patient with me if i go into details that are already familiar to you--details of higher space, i mean--and if i seem stupid when i have to describe things that transcend the power of language and are really therefore indescribable." "my dear friend," put in the other calmly, "that goes without saying. to know higher space is an experience that defies description, and one is obliged to make use of more or less intelligible symbols. but, pray, proceed. your vivid thoughts will tell me more than your halting words." an immense sigh of relief proceeded from the little figure half lost in the depths of the chair. such intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way was a new experience to him, and it touched his heart at once. he leaned back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms, and began in his thin, scale-like voice. "my mother was a frenchwoman, and my father an essex bargeman," he said abruptly. "hence my name--racine and mudge. my father died before i ever saw him. my mother inherited money from her bordeaux relations, and when she died soon after, i was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom. i had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in the world to look after me. i grew up, therefore, utterly without education. this much was to my advantage; i learned none of that deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn when i awakened to my true love--mathematics, higher mathematics and higher geometry. these, however, i seemed to know instinctively. it was like the memory of what i had deeply studied before; the principles were in my blood, and i simply raced through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the same with geometry. afterwards, when i read the books on these subjects, i understood how swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to me. it was simply memory. it was simply _re-collecting_ the memories of what i had known before in a previous existence and required no books to teach me." in his growing excitement, mr. mudge attempted to drag the chair forward a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he resigned himself instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew into the recital of his singular "disease." "the audacious speculations of bolyai, the amazing theories of gauss--that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel to a given line; the possibility that the angles of a triangle are together _greater_ than two right angles, if drawn upon immense curvatures-the breathless intuitions of beltrami and lobatchewsky--all these i hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the verge of my--my new world, my higher space possibilities--in a word, my disease! "how i got there," he resumed after a brief pause, during which he appeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, "is more than i can put intelligibly into words. i can only hope to leave your mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what i say. "here, however, came a change. at this point i was no longer absorbing the fruits of studies i had made before; it was the beginning of new efforts to learn for the first time, and i had to go slowly and laboriously through terrible work. here i sought for the theories and speculations of others. but books were few and far between, and with the exception of one man--a 'dreamer,' the world called him--whose audacity and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond description, i found no one to guide or help. "you, of course, dr. silence, understand something of what i am driving at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet guess what depths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an acquaintance with a new development of space should prove a source of misery and terror." mr. racine mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did the next best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the attentive man facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions, crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though he saw into this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and might any moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair and disappear from view. john silence, separated from him by three paces, sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting every word and every gesture with deep attention. "this room we now sit in, dr. silence, has one side open to space--to higher space. a closed box only _seems_ closed. there is a way in and out of a soap bubble without breaking the skin." "you tell me no new thing," the doctor interposed gently. "hence, if higher space exists and our world borders upon it and lies partially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions of all objects. we never see their true and complete shape. we see their three measurements, but not their fourth. the new direction is concealed from us, and when i hold this book and move my hand all round it i have not really made a complete circuit. we only perceive those portions of any object which exist in our three dimensions; the rest escapes us. but, once we learn to see in higher space, and objects will appear as they actually are. only they will thus be hardly recognisable! "now, you may begin to grasp something of what i am coming to." "i am beginning to understand something of what you must have suffered," observed the doctor soothingly, "for i have made similar experiments myself, and only stopped just in time----" "you are the one man in all the world who can hear and understand, _and_ sympathise," exclaimed mr. mudge, grasping his hand and holding it tightly while he spoke. the nailed chair prevented further excitability. "well," he resumed, after a moment's pause, "i procured the implements and the coloured blocks for practical experiment, and i followed the instructions carefully till i had arrived at a working conception of four-dimensional space. the tessaract, the figure whose boundaries are cubes, i knew by heart. that is to say, i knew it and saw it mentally, for my eye, of course, could never take in a new measurement, or my hands and feet handle it. "so, at least, i thought," he added, making a wry face. "i had reached the stage, you see, when i could _imagine_ in a new dimension. i was able to conceive the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically different to all we know--the shape of the tessaract. i could perceive in four dimensions. when, therefore, i looked at a cube i could see all its sides at once. its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther side and base invisible. i saw the whole thing out flat, so to speak. and this tessaract was bounded by cubes! moreover, i also saw its content--its insides." "you were not yourself able to enter this new world," interrupted dr. silence. "not then. i was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like and how exactly it must look. later, when i slipped in there and saw objects in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor three measurements, i very nearly lost my life. for, you see, space does not stop at a single new dimension, a fourth. it extends in all possible new ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of new dimensions. in other words, there is no space at all, but only a spiritual condition. but, meanwhile, i had come to grasp the strange fact that the objects in our normal world appear to us only partially." mr. mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on the very edge of the chair. "from this starting point," he resumed, "i began my studies and experiments, and continued them for years. i had money, and i was without friends. i lived in solitude and experimented. my intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for intellectually it was all unthinkable. never was the limitation of mere reason more plainly demonstrated. it was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that i began to advance. and what i learnt, and knew, and did is all impossible to put into language, since it all describes experiences transcending the experiences of men. it is only some of the results--what you would call the symptoms of my disease--that i can give you, and even these must often appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes. "i can only tell you, dr. silence"--his manner became exceedingly impressive--"that i reached sometimes a point of view whence all the great puzzle of the world became plain to me, and i understood what they call in the yoga books 'the great heresy of separateness'; why all great teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as himself; how men are all really _one_; and why the utter loss of self is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the soul." he paused a moment and drew breath. "your speculations have been my own long ago," the doctor said quietly. "i fully realise the force of your words. men are doubtless not separate at all--in the sense they imagine----" "all this about the very much higher space i only dimly, very dimly, conceived, of course," the other went on, raising his voice again by jerks; "but what did happen to me was the humbler accident of--the simpler disaster--oh, dear, how shall i put it----?" he stammered and showed visible signs of distress. "it was simply this," he resumed with a sudden rush of words, "that, accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, i one day slipped bodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions, yet without knowing precisely how i got there, or how i could get back again. i discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body was but an expression--a projection--of my higher four-dimensional body! "now you understand what i meant much earlier in our talk when i spoke of chance. i cannot control my entrance or exit. certain people, certain human atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts, desires even--the radiations of certain combinations of colour, and above all, the vibrations of certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into a state of what i can only describe as an intense and terrific inner vibration--and behold i am off! off in the direction at right angles to all our known directions! off in the direction the cube takes when it begins to trace the outlines of the new figure! off into my breathless and semi-divine higher space! off, _inside myself_, into the world of four dimensions!" he gasped and dropped back into the depths of the immovable chair. "and there," he whispered, his voice issuing from among the cushions, "there i have to stay until these vibrations subside, or until they do something which i cannot find words to describe properly or intelligibly to you--and then, behold, i am back again. first, that is, i disappear. then i reappear." "just so," exclaimed dr. silence, "and that is why a few----" "why a few moments ago," interrupted mr. mudge, taking the words out of his mouth, "you found me gone, and then saw me return. the music of that wretched german band sent me off. your intense thinking about me brought me back--when the band had stopped its wagner. i saw you approach the peep-hole and i saw barker's intention of doing so later. for me no interiors are hidden. i see inside. when in that state the content of your mind, as of your body, is open to me as the day. oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear!" mr. mudge stopped and again mopped his brow. a light trembling ran over the surface of his small body like wind over grass. he still held tightly to the arms of the chair. "at first," he presently resumed, "my new experiences were so vividly interesting that i felt no alarm. there was no room for it. the alarm came a little later." "then you actually penetrated far enough into that state to experience yourself as a normal portion of it?" asked the doctor, leaning forward, deeply interested. mr. mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply. "i did," he whispered, "undoubtedly i did. i am coming to all that. it began first at night, when i realised that sleep brought no loss of consciousness----" "the spirit, of course, can never sleep. only the body becomes unconscious," interposed john silence. "yes, we know that--theoretically. at night, of course, the spirit is active elsewhere, and we have no memory of where and how, simply because the brain stays behind and receives no record. but i found that, while remaining conscious, i also retained memory. i had attained to the state of continuous consciousness, for at night i regularly, with the first approaches of drowsiness, entered _nolens volens_ the four-dimensional world. "for a time this happened regularly, and i could not control it; though later i found a way to regulate it better. apparently sleep is unnecessary in the higher--the four-dimensional--body. yes, perhaps. but i should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the knowledge. for, unable to control my movements, i wandered to and fro, attracted, owing to my partial development and premature arrival, to parts of this new world that alarmed me more and more. it was the awful waste and drift of a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we know and see that i cannot even hint at the nature of the sights and objects and beings in it. more than that, i cannot even remember them. i cannot now picture them to myself even, but can recall only the _memory of the impression_ they made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of it all. to be in several places at once, for instance----" "perfectly," interrupted john silence, noticing the increase of the other's excitement, "i understand exactly. but now, please, tell me a little more of this alarm you experienced, and how it affected you." "it's not the disappearing and reappearing _per se_ that i mind," continued mr. mudge, "so much as certain other things. it's seeing people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete shapes, that is so distressing. it introduces me to a world of monsters. horses, dogs, cats, all of which i loved; people, trees, children; all that i have considered beautiful in life--everything, from a human face to a cathedral--appear to me in a different shape and aspect to all i have known before. i cannot perhaps convince you why this should be terrible, but i assure you that it is so. to hear the human voice proceeding from this novel appearance which i scarcely recognise as a human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. to see inside everything and everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing. to be so confused in geography as to find myself one moment at the north pole, and the next at clapham junction--or possibly at both places simultaneously--is absurdly terrifying. your imagination will readily furnish other details without my multiplying my experiences now. but you have no idea what it all means, and how i suffer." mr. mudge paused in his panting account and lay back in his chair. he still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him in the world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again released his left hand in order to mop his face. he looked very thin and white and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into this other space he had been talking about. john silence, too, felt warm. he had listened to every word and had made many notes. the presence of this man had an exhilarating effect upon him. it seemed as if mr. racine mudge still carried about with him something of that breathless higher-space condition he had been describing. at any rate, dr. silence had himself advanced sufficiently far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a basis of truth for their origin. after a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red cover. it had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and proceeded to open the covers. the bright eyes of mr. mudge never left him for a single second. "it almost seems a pity," he said at length, "to cure you, mr. mudge. you are on the way to discovery of great things. though you may lose your life in the process--that is, your life here in the world of three dimensions--you would lose thereby nothing of great value--you will pardon my apparent rudeness, i know--and you might gain what is infinitely greater. your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the other. also, i rather imagine, though i cannot be certain of this from any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the terror you speak of." the perspiring son of the essex bargeman and the woman of normandy bent his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply. "some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct inner experience. none of the knowledge you have foreshadowed has come to you through the senses, of course." mr. mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly. a wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it curiously in motion like a field of grass. "you are merely talking to gain time," he said hurriedly, in a shaking voice. "this thinking aloud delays us. i see ahead what you are coming to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. a band is again coming down the street, and if it plays--if it plays wagner--i shall be off in a twinkling." "precisely. i will be quick. i was leading up to the point of how to effect your cure. the way is this: you must simply learn to _block the entrances_." "true, true, utterly true!" exclaimed the little man, dodging about nervously in the depths of the chair. "but how, in the name of space, is that to be done?" "by concentration. they are all within you, these entrances, although outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards them. these external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and closed channels. you will no longer be able to find the way." "quick, quick!" cried the bobbing figure in the chair. "how is this concentration to be effected?" "this little book," continued dr. silence calmly, "will explain to you the way." he tapped the cover. "let me now read out to you certain simple instructions, composed, as i see you divine, entirely from my own personal experiences in the same direction. follow these instructions and you will no longer enter the state of higher space. the entrances will be blocked effectively." mr. mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and john silence cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct voice. but before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. a sound of street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for a band had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the house--the march from _tannhäuser_. odd as it may seem that a german band should twice within the space of an hour enter the same mews and play wagner, it was nevertheless the fact. mr. racine mudge heard it. he uttered a sharp, squeaking cry and twisted his arms with nervous energy round the chair. a piteous look that was not far from tears spread over his white face. grey shadows followed it--the grey of fear. he began to struggle convulsively. "hold me fast! catch me! for god's sake, keep me here! i'm on the rush already. oh, it's frightful!" he cried in tones of anguish, his voice as thin as a reed. dr. silence made a plunge forward to seize him, but in a flash, before he could cover the space between them, mr. racine mudge, screaming and struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility. he disappeared like an arrow from a bow propelled at infinite speed, and his voice no longer sounded in the external air, but seemed in some curious way to make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the doctor's own being. it was almost like a faint singing cry in his head, like a voice of dream, a voice of vision and unreality. "alcohol, alcohol!" it cried, "give me alcohol! it's the quickest way. alcohol, before i'm out of reach!" the doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and even more rapid action, remembered that a brandy flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less than a second he had seized it and was holding it out towards the space above the chair recently occupied by the visible mudge. then, before his very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though some one were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within. "thanks! enough! it deadens the vibrations!" cried the faint voice in his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the mantelpiece. he understood that in mudge's present condition one side of the flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the stopper. he could hardly have had a more interesting proof of what he had been hearing described at such length. but the next moment--the very same moment it almost seemed--the german band stopped midway in its tune--and there was mr. mudge back in his chair again, gasping and panting! "quick!" he shrieked, "stop that band! send it away! catch hold of me! block the entrances! block the entrances! give me the red book! oh, oh, oh-h-h-h!!!" the music had begun again. it was merely a temporary interruption. the _tannhäuser_ march started again, this time at a tremendous pace that made it sound like a rapid two-step as though the instruments played against time. but the brief interruption gave dr. silence a moment in which to collect his scattering thoughts, and before the band had got through half a bar, he had flung forward upon the chair and held mr. racine mudge, the struggling little victim of higher space, in a grip of iron. his arms went all round his diminutive person, taking in a good part of the chair at the same time. he was not a big man, yet he seemed to smother mudge completely. yet, even as he did so, and felt the wriggling form underneath him, it began to melt and slip away like air or water. the wood of the arm-chair somehow disentangled itself from between his own arms and those of mudge. the phenomenon known as the passage of matter through matter took place. the little man seemed actually to get mixed up in his own being. dr. silence could just see his face beneath him. it puckered and grew dark as though from some great internal effort. he heard the thin, reedy voice cry in his ear to "block the entrances, block the entrances!" and then--but how in the world describe what is indescribable? john silence half rose up to watch. racine mudge, his face distorted beyond all recognition, was making a marvellous inward movement, as though doubling back upon himself. he turned funnel-wise like water in a whirling vortex, and then appeared to break up somewhat as a reflection breaks up and divides in a distorting convex mirror. he went neither forward nor backwards, neither to the right nor the left, neither up nor down. but he went. he went utterly. he simply flashed away out of sight like a vanishing projectile. all but one leg! dr. silence just had the time and the presence of mind to seize upon the left ankle and boot as it disappeared, and to this he held on for several seconds like grim death. yet all the time he knew it was a foolish and useless thing to do. the foot was in his grasp one moment, and the next it seemed--this was the only way he could describe it--inside his own skin and bones, and at the same time outside his hand and all round it. it seemed mixed up in some amazing way with his own flesh and blood. then it was gone, and he was tightly grasping a draught of heated air. "gone! gone! gone!" cried a thick, whispering voice, somewhere deep within his own consciousness. "lost! lost! lost!" it repeated, growing fainter and fainter till at length it vanished into nothing and the last signs of mr. racine mudge vanished with it. john silence locked his red book and replaced it in the cabinet, which he fastened with a click, and when barker answered the bell he inquired if mr. mudge had left a card upon the table. it appeared that he had, and when the servant returned with it, dr. silence read the address and made a note of it. it was in north london. "mr. mudge has gone," he said quietly to barker, noticing his expression of alarm. "he's not taken his 'at with him, sir." "mr. mudge requires no hat where he is now," continued the doctor, stooping to poke the fire. "but he may return for it----" "and the humbrella, sir." "and the umbrella." "he didn't go out _my_ way, sir, if you please," stuttered the amazed servant, his curiosity overcoming his nervousness. "mr. mudge has his own way of coming and going, and prefers it. if he returns by the door at any time remember to bring him instantly to me, and be kind and gentle with him and ask no questions. also, remember, barker, to think pleasantly, sympathetically, affectionately of him while he is away. mr. mudge is a very suffering gentleman." barker bowed and went out of the room backwards, gasping and feeling round the inside of his collar with three very hot fingers of one hand. it was two days later when he brought in a telegram to the study. dr. silence opened it, and read as follows: "bombay. just slipped out again. all safe. have blocked entrances. thousand thanks. address cooks, london.--mudge." dr. silence looked up and saw barker staring at him bewilderingly. it occurred to him that somehow he knew the contents of the telegram. "make a parcel of mr. mudge's things," he said briefly, "and address them thomas cook & sons, ludgate circus. and send them there exactly a month from to-day and marked 'to be called for.'" "yes, sir," said barker, leaving the room with a deep sigh and a hurried glance at the waste-paper basket where his master had dropped the pink paper. xiv transition john mudbury was on his way home from the shops, his arms full of christmas presents. it was after six o'clock and the streets were very crowded. he was an ordinary man, lived in an ordinary suburban flat, with an ordinary wife and four ordinary children. _he_ did not think them ordinary, but everybody else did. he had ordinary presents for each one, a cheap blotter for his wife, a cheap air-gun for the eldest boy, and so forth. he was over fifty, bald, in an office, decent in mind and habits, of uncertain opinions, uncertain politics, and uncertain religion. yet he considered himself a decided, positive gentleman, quite unaware that the morning newspaper determined his opinions for the day. he just lived--from day to day. physically, he was fit enough, except for a weak heart (which never troubled him); and his summer holiday was bad golf, while the children bathed and his wife read "garvice" on the sands. like the majority of men, he dreamed idly of the past, muddled away the present, and guessed vaguely--after imaginative reading on occasions--at the future. "i'd like to survive all right," he said, "provided it's better than this," surveying his wife and children, and thinking of his daily toil. "otherwise----!" and he shrugged his shoulders as a brave man should. he went to church regularly. but nothing in church _convinced_ him that he did survive, just as nothing in church enticed him into hoping that he would. on the other hand, nothing in life persuaded him that he didn't, wouldn't, couldn't. "i'm an evolutionist," he loved to say to thoughtful cronies (over a glass), having never heard that darwinism had been questioned.... and so he came home gaily, happily, with his bunch of christmas presents "for the wife and little ones," stroking himself upon their keen enjoyment and excitement. the night before he had taken "the wife" to see _magic_ at a select london theatre where the intellectuals went--and had been extraordinarily stirred. he had gone questioningly, yet expecting something out of the common. "it's _not_ musical," he warned her, "nor farce, nor comedy, so to speak"; and in answer to her question as to what the critics had said, he had wriggled, sighed, and put his gaudy necktie straight four times in quick succession. for no "man in the street," with any claim to self-respect, could be expected to understand what the critics had said, even if he understood the play. and john had answered truthfully: "oh, they just said things. but the theatre's always full--and that's the only test." and just now, as he crossed the crowded circus to catch his 'bus, it chanced that his mind (having glimpsed an advertisement) was full of this particular play, or, rather, of the effect it had produced upon him at the time. for it had _thrilled_ him--inexplicably: with its marvellous speculative hint, its big audacity, its alert and spiritual beauty.... thought plunged to find something--plunged after this bizarre suggestion of a bigger universe, after this quasi-jocular suggestion that man is not the only--then dashed full-tilt against a sentence that memory thrust beneath his nose: "science does _not_ exhaust the universe"--and at the same time dashed full-tilt against destruction of another kind as well...! how it happened, he never exactly knew. he saw a monster glaring at him with eyes of blazing fire. it was horrible! it rushed upon him. he dodged.... another monster met him round the corner. both came at him simultaneously.... he dodged again--a leap that might have cleared a hurdle easily, but was too late. between the pair of them--his heart literally in his gullet--he was mercilessly caught.... bones crunched.... there was a soft sensation, icy cold and hot as fire. horns and voices roared. battering-rams he saw, and a carapace of iron.... then dazzling light.... "always _face_ the traffic!" he remembered with a frantic yell--and, by some extraordinary luck, escaped miraculously on to the opposite pavement.... there was no doubt about it. by the skin of his teeth he had dodged a rather ugly death. first ... he felt for his presents--all were safe. and then, instead of congratulating himself and taking breath, he hurried homewards--_on foot_, which proved that his mind had lost control a bit!--thinking only how disappointed the wife and children would have been if--if anything had happened.... another thing he realised, oddly enough, was that he no longer really _loved_ his wife, but had only great affection for her. what made him think of that, heaven only knows, but he _did_ think of it. he was an honest man without pretence. this came as a discovery somehow. he turned a moment, and saw the crowd gathered about the entangled taxicabs, policemen's helmets gleaming in the lights of the shop windows ... then hurried on again, his thoughts full of the joy his presents would give ... of the scampering children ... and of his wife--bless her silly heart!--eyeing the mysterious parcels.... and, though he never could explain _how_, he presently stood at the door of the jail-like building that contained his flat, having walked the whole three miles! his thoughts had been so busy and absorbed that he had hardly noticed the length of weary trudge.... "besides," he reflected, thinking of the narrow escape, "i've had a nasty shock. it was a d----d near thing, now i come to think of it...." he did feel a bit shaky and bewildered.... yet, at the same time, he felt extraordinarily jolly and light-hearted.... he counted his christmas parcels ... hugged himself in anticipatory joy ... and let himself in swiftly with his latchkey. "i'm late," he realised, "but when she sees the brown-paper parcels, she'll forget to say a word. god bless the old faithful soul." and he softly used the key a second time and entered his flat on tiptoe.... in his mind was the master impulse of that afternoon--the pleasure these christmas presents would give his wife and children.... he heard a noise. he hung up hat and coat in the pokey vestibule (they never called it "hall") and moved softly towards the parlour door, holding the packages behind him. only of them he thought, not of himself--of his family, that is, not of the packages. pushing the door cunningly ajar, he peeped in slyly. to his amazement, the room was full of people! he withdrew quickly, wondering what it meant. a party? and without his knowing about it! extraordinary!... keen disappointment came over him. but, as he stepped back, the vestibule, he saw, was full of people too. he was uncommonly surprised, yet somehow not surprised at all. people were congratulating him. there was a perfect mob of them. moreover, he knew them all--vaguely remembered them, at least. and they all knew him. "isn't it a game?" laughed some one, patting him on the back. "_they_ haven't the least idea...!" and the speaker--it was old john palmer, the bookkeeper at the office--emphasised the "they." "not the least idea," he answered with a smile, saying something he didn't understand, yet knew was right. his face, apparently, showed the utter bewilderment he felt. the shock of the collision had been greater than he realised evidently. his mind was wandering.... possibly! only the odd thing was--he had never felt so clear-headed in his life. ten thousand things grew simple suddenly. but, how thickly these people pressed about him, and how--familiarly! "my parcels," he said, joyously pushing his way across the throng. "these are christmas presents i've bought for them." he nodded toward the room. "i've saved for weeks--stopped cigars and billiards and--and several other good things--to buy them." "good man!" said palmer with a happy laugh. "it's the heart that counts." mudbury looked at him. palmer had said an amazing truth, only--people would hardly understand and believe him.... would they? "eh?" he asked, feeling stuffed and stupid, muddled somewhere between two meanings, one of which was gorgeous and the other stupid beyond belief. "if you _please_, mr. mudbury, step inside. they are expecting you," said a kindly, pompous voice. and, turning sharply, he met the gentle, foolish eyes of sir james epiphany, a director of the bank where he worked. the effect of the voice was instantaneous from long habit. "they are?" he smiled from his heart, and advanced as from the custom of many years. oh, how happy and gay he felt! his affection for his wife was real. romance, indeed, had gone, but he needed her--and she needed him. and the children--milly, bill, and jean--he deeply loved them. life _was_ worth living indeed! in the room was a crowd, but--an astounding silence. john mudbury looked round him. he advanced towards his wife, who sat in the corner arm-chair with milly on her knee. a lot of people talked and moved about. momentarily the crowd increased. he stood in front of them--in front of milly and his wife. and he spoke--holding out his packages. "it's christmas eve," he whispered shyly, "and i've--brought you something--something for everybody. look!" he held the packages before their eyes. "of course, of course," said a voice behind him, "but you may hold them out like that for a century. they'll _never_ see them!" "of course they won't. but i love to do the old, sweet thing," replied john mudbury--then wondered with a gasp of stark amazement why he said it. "_i_ think----" whispered milly, staring round her. "well, _what_ do you think?" her mother asked sharply. "you're always thinking something queer." "i think," the child continued dreamily, "that daddy's already here." she paused, then added with a child's impossible conviction, "i'm sure he is. i _feel_ him." there was an extraordinary laugh. sir james epiphany laughed. the others--the whole crowd of them--also turned their heads and smiled. but the mother, thrusting the child away from her, rose up suddenly with a violent start. her face had turned to chalk. she stretched her arms out--into the air before her. she gasped and shivered. there was an awful anguish in her eyes. "look!" repeated john, "these are the presents that i brought." but his voice apparently was soundless. and, with a spasm of icy pain, he remembered that palmer and sir james--some years ago--had died. "it's magic," he cried, "but--i love you, jinny--i love you--and--and i have always been true to you--as true as steel. we need each other--oh, can't you see--we go on together--you and i--for ever and ever----" "_think_," interrupted an exquisitely tender voice, "don't shout! _they_ can't hear you--now." and, turning, john mudbury met the eyes of everard minturn, their president of the year before. minturn had gone down with the _titanic_. he dropped his parcels then. his heart gave an enormous leap of joy. he saw her face--the face of his wife--look through him. but the child gazed straight into his eyes. she _saw_ him. the next thing he knew was that he heard something tinkling ... far, far away. it sounded miles below him--inside him--he was sounding himself--all utterly bewildering--like a bell. it _was_ a bell. milly stooped down and picked the parcels up. her face shone with happiness and laughter.... but a man came in soon after, a man with a ridiculous, solemn face, a pencil, and a notebook. he wore a dark blue helmet. behind him came a string of other men. they carried something ... something ... he could not see exactly what it was. but when he pressed forward through the laughing throng to gaze upon it, he dimly made out two eyes, a nose, a chin, a deep red smear, and a pair of folded hands upon an overcoat. a woman's form fell down upon them then, and ... he heard ... soft sounds of children weeping strangely ... and other sounds ... sounds as of familiar voices ... laughing ... laughing gaily. "they'll join us presently. it goes like a flash...." and, turning with great happiness in his heart, he saw that sir james had said it, holding palmer by the arm as with some natural yet unexpected love of sympathetic friendship. "come on," said palmer, smiling like a man who accepts a gift in universal fellowship, "let's help 'em. they'll never understand.... still, we can always try." the entire throng moved up with laughter and amusement. it was a moment of hearty, genuine life at last. delight and joy and peace were everywhere. then john mudbury realised the truth--that he was _dead_. xv the tradition the noises outside the little flat at first were very disconcerting after living in the country. they made sleep difficult. at the cottage in sussex where the family had lived, night brought deep, comfortable silence, unless the wind was high, when the pine trees round the duck-pond made a sound like surf, or if the gale was from the south-west, the orchard roared a bit unpleasantly. but in london it was very different; sleep was easier in the daytime than at night. for after nightfall the rumble of the traffic became spasmodic instead of continuous; the motor-horns startled like warnings of alarm; after comparative silence the furious rushing of a taxi-cab touched the nerves. from dinner till eleven o'clock the streets subsided gradually; then came the army from theatres, parties, and late dinners, hurrying home to bed. the motor-horns during this hour were lively and incessant, like bugles of a regiment moving into battle. the parents rarely retired until this attack was over. if quick about it, sleep was possible then before the flying of the night-birds--an uncertain squadron--screamed half the street awake again. but, these finally disposed of, a delightful hush settled down upon the neighbourhood, profounder far than any peace of the countryside. the deep rumble of the produce wagons, coming in to the big london markets from the farms--generally about three a.m.--held no disturbing quality. but sometimes in the stillness of very early morning, when streets were empty and pavements all deserted, there was a sound of another kind that was startling and unwelcome. for it was ominous. it came with a clattering violence that made nerves quiver and forced the heart to pause and listen. a strange resonance was in it, a volume of sound, moreover, that was hardly justified by its cause. for it was hoofs. a horse swept hurrying up the deserted street, and was close upon the building in a moment. it was audible suddenly, no gradual approach from a distance, but as though it turned a corner from soft ground that muffled the hoofs, on to the echoing, hard paving that emphasised the dreadful clatter. nor did it die away again when once the house was reached. it ceased as abruptly as it came. the hoofs did not go away. it was the mother who heard them first, and drew her husband's attention to their disagreeable quality. "it is the mail-vans, dear," he answered. "they go at four a. m. to catch the early trains into the country." she looked up sharply, as though something in his tone surprised her. "but there's no sound of wheels," she said. and then, as he did not reply, she added gravely, "you have heard it too, john. i can tell." "i have," he said. "i have heard it--twice." and they looked at one another searchingly, each trying to read the other's mind. she did not question him; he did not propose writing to complain in a newspaper; both understood something that neither of them understood. "i heard it first," she then said softly, "the night before jack got the fever. and as i listened, i heard him crying. but when i went in to see he was asleep. the noise stopped just outside the building." there was a shadow in her eyes as she said this, and a hush crept in between her words. "i did not hear it _go_." she said this almost beneath her breath. he looked a moment at the ground; then, coming towards her, he took her in his arms and kissed her. and she clung very tightly to him. "sometimes," he said in a quiet voice, "a mounted policeman passes down the street, i think." "it is a horse," she answered. but whether it was a question or mere corroboration he did not ask, for at that moment the doctor arrived, and the question of little jack's health became the paramount matter of immediate interest. the great man's verdict was uncommonly disquieting. all that night they sat up in the sick room. it was strangely still, as though by one accord the traffic avoided the house where a little boy hung between life and death. the motor-horns even had a muffled sound, and heavy drays and wagons used the wide streets; there were fewer taxicabs about, or else they flew by noiselessly. yet no straw was down; the expense prohibited that. and towards morning, very early, the mother decided to watch alone. she had been a trained nurse before her marriage, accustomed when she was younger to long vigils. "you go down, dear, and get a little sleep," she urged in a whisper. "he's quiet now. at five o'clock i'll come for you to take my place." "you'll fetch me at once," he whispered, "if----" then hesitated as though breath failed him. a moment he stood there staring from her face to the bed. "if you hear anything," he finished. she nodded, and he went downstairs to his study, not to his bedroom. he left the door ajar. he sat in darkness, listening. mother, he knew, was listening, too, beside the bed. his heart was very full, for he did not believe the boy could live till morning. the picture of the room was all the time before his eyes--the shaded lamp, the table with the medicines, the little wasted figure beneath the blankets, and mother close beside it, listening. he sat alert, ready to fly upstairs at the smallest cry. but no sound broke the stillness; the entire neighbourhood was silent; all london slept. he heard the clock strike three in the dining-room at the end of the corridor. it was still enough for that. there was not even the heavy rumble of a single produce wagon, though usually they passed about this time on their way to smithfield and covent garden markets. he waited, far too anxious to close his eyes.... at four o'clock he would go up and relieve her vigil. four, he knew, was the time when life sinks to its lowest ebb.... then, in the middle of his reflections, thought stopped dead, and it seemed his heart stopped too. far away, but coming nearer with extraordinary rapidity, a sharp, clear sound broke out of the surrounding stillness--a horse's hoofs. at first it was so distant that it might have been almost on the high roads of the country, but the amazing speed with which it came closer, and the sudden increase of the beating sound, was such, that by the time he turned his head it seemed to have entered the street outside. it was within a hundred yards of the building. the next second it was before the very door. and something in him blenched. he knew a moment's complete paralysis. the abrupt cessation of the heavy clatter was strangest of all. it came like lightning, it struck, it paused. it did not go away again. yet the sound of it was still beating in his ears as he dashed upstairs three steps at a time. it seemed in the house as well, on the stairs behind him, in the little passage-way, _inside the very bedroom_. it was an appalling sound. yet he entered a room that was quiet, orderly, and calm. it was silent. beside the bed his wife sat, holding jack's hand and stroking it. she was soothing him; her face was very peaceful. no sound but her gentle whisper was audible. he controlled himself by a tremendous effort, but his face betrayed his consternation and distress. "hush," she said beneath her breath; "he's sleeping much more calmly now. the crisis, bless god, is over, i do believe. i dared not leave him." he saw in a moment that she was right, and an untenable relief passed over him. he sat down beside her, very cold, yet perspiring with heat. "you heard----?" he asked after a pause. "nothing," she replied quickly, "except his pitiful, wild words when the delirium was on him. it's passed. it lasted but a moment, or i'd have called you." he stared closely into her tired eyes. "and his words?" he asked in a whisper. whereupon she told him quietly that the little chap had sat up with wide-opened eyes and talked excitedly about a "great, great horse" he heard, but that was not "coming for him." "he laughed and said he would not go with it because he 'was not ready yet.' some scrap of talk he had overheard from us," she added, "when we discussed the traffic once...." "but you heard nothing?" he repeated almost impatiently. no, she had heard nothing. after all, then, he _had_ dozed a moment in his chair.... four weeks later jack, entirely convalescent, was playing a restricted game of hide-and-seek with his sister in the flat. it was really a forbidden joy, owing to noise and risk of breakages, but he had unusual privileges after his grave illness. it was dusk. the lamps in the street were being lit. "quietly, remember; your mother's resting in her room," were the father's orders. she had just returned from a week by the sea, recuperating from the strain of nursing for so many nights. the traffic rolled and boomed along the streets below. "jack! do come on and hide. it's your turn. i hid last." but the boy was standing spellbound by the window, staring hard at something on the pavement. sybil called and tugged in vain. tears threatened. jack would not budge. he declared he saw something. "oh, you're always seeing something. i wish you'd go and hide. it's only because you can't think of a good place, really." "look!" he cried in a voice of wonder. and as he said it his father rose quickly from his chair before the fire. "look!" the child repeated with delight and excitement. "it's a great big horse. and it's perfectly white all over." his sister joined him at the window. "where? where? i can't see it. oh, _do_ show me!" their father was standing close behind them now. "i heard it," he was whispering, but so low the children did not notice him. his face was the colour of chalk. "straight in front of our door, stupid! can't you see it? oh, i do wish it had come for me. it's _such_ a beauty!" and he clapped his hands with pleasure and excitement. "quick, quick! it's going away again!" but while the children stood half-squabbling by the window, their father leaned over a sofa in the adjoining room above a figure whose heart in sleep had quietly stopped its beating. the great white horse had come. but this time he had not only heard its wonderful arrival. he had also heard it go. it seemed he heard the awful hoofs beat down the sky, far, far away, and very swiftly, dying into silence, finally up among the stars. the end. transcriber's note spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been retained as in the original publication except as follows: page in the familar scenery _changed to_ in the familiar scenery page that the search partly had gone _changed to_ that the search party had gone page which disintegrate the herioc soul _changed to_ which disintegrate the heroic soul page where they had their birth: _changed to_ where they had their birth. page this tessaract was bounded _changed to_ this tessaract was bounded phantom of the forest by lee francis [transcriber note: this etext was produced from amazing stories november . extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the u.s. copyright on this publication was renewed.] [sidenote: every year men slaughter deer by the thousands; it seems only fitting that the tables be turned once in a while....] the automobile reached the crest of the hill, skidded and started toward the ditch. earl robinson twisted the wheel savagely, got the feel of the ice hidden under the snow, and deftly straightened the car. roy starr awakened at his side and sat up. his eyes were narrowed with sleep. "lord," he groaned, "how much farther?" robinson spoke through gritted teeth. "about three miles. might as well be a million." the car was moving forward about twenty miles per hour. three people slept in the rear seat. they were packed under pieces of equipment. there were half a dozen guns stacked across their feet. the snow came down thickly, endlessly. it drifted across the road. almost eight inches had fallen since sundown. tomorrow, there won't be any traffic moving, robinson thought, not without a plow to break the trail. the valley will be a lost world. "shangrila," he said softly. "huh?" roy starr was almost asleep once more. robinson said, "skip it." he was thinking about the war, and the deep, lost valleys he flew into when he flew the "hump." he tried to concentrate on the road once more. they had come six miles from indian river. the road was just a white line, leading up and down long rows of dark evergreens. the snow filled the air, tangling his thoughts, filling the world with stinging, blinding particles of white. the snow actually seemed to hurt his eyes. it seemed to be hitting his eyeballs. he shook his head angrily. _sleep_ was stinging his eyes. he watched the trackless road with an intensity of a man hovering between life and death. sleep--and death. trying desperately to avoid both. one more long hill. taking a long chance, he pressed the gas pedal down as far as it would go. the motor roared, protested and the car leaped ahead like a monster alive. the speedometer said fifty--then fifty-five. sixty. at sixty they hit the sharp incline. roy starr was wide awake now, holding tightly to the door-handle, as though it insured him against an accident. someone stirred in the back seat. "almost there?" it was a girl's voice, sleepy and disinterested. "almost," earl robinson said, and twisted the wheel again. the car went crosswise with the road. it slid forward, up the hill, careened wildly and straightened its course once more. robinson sighed. "close," he said. "_earl, for god's sake, stop!!_" roy starr's voice welled out of him, filled with stark horror. robinson saw the weird, shadowy form on the road just in time. he pressed hard on the brake and the car jerked into the ditch, and stopped with a sickening jolt. the girl in the rear seat clawed her way forward, clutching starr's shoulder. "a man on the road," she cried. "earl, you hit him." she started sobbing as though her heart were breaking. "shut up," robinson snapped. his nerves had reached the breaking point. then, in a gentler voice. "there's a man there all right, marge. i didn't hit him. get hold of yourself. glenn, glenn, take care of her, will you?" * * * * * all three people in the rear seat were wide awake now. glenn starr, dark, serious, in full control of his wits, drew the sobbing girl back beside him. "take it easy, kid," he said. "earl will take care of everything. we haven't done anything wrong." the other man, sitting on the far side of the car, pushed the door open and climbed out. "man, this is a storm, and i don't mean perhaps. nice little ditch we got ourselves into." robinson and roy starr got out. roy pulled his collar up tightly around his neck. he walked back a few paces and kneeled beside the snow buried corpse. earl robinson, tall, solid, stood over him as he pushed away the snow. "nobody i know," roy said, and turned away so he wouldn't have to stare at the dead, frozen face. robinson bent over and pushed more snow away. "i'll be damned." the chest was badly crushed. blood had frozen in the snow next to the wound. "hit sometime before the snow came," robinson said. roy starr was brushing snow away from the corpse. "maybe," he said softly. "a car never hit him, though. there aren't any blood tracks. the hole is in the direct center of his chest. the ribs aren't crushed on either side." robinson's voice was a little hushed. "that's what i was thinking. looks like a bear might have mauled him." roy starr came slowly to his feet. "look," he said, "we aren't kidding ourselves. something hit him, hard, in the chest. it wasn't a car because it didn't break in the whole bone structure. it wasn't a bear, because a bear would have done a more thorough job of it. shooting is out. that isn't a bullet wound." robinson shrugged. "what's left?" "the same thing that's been killing hunters for the past five years," starr said grimly. "for lack of a better name, the phantom buck." robinson turned away, looking toward the car. "you're crazy," he said. "let's say we're both crazy. our imaginations are running riot. i think the rest of the party ought to know about the _automobile accident_. we can't do any good here. we'll go on to rosewood if we can get the buggy out of the ditch. we can call the sheriff from there. this is the sheriff's job, not ours." the three people who had ridden in the rear seat were in the ditch, pushing snow away from the wheels. glenn starr was saying quietly: "we ought to get him out of the road." robinson went to work with the shovel, digging the right rear wheel out of the snow and the thick, half-frozen mud. "forget all about it," he said. "no one will be driving through here tonight. we'll call the sheriff from rosewood. outside of that, it's none of our business. automobile accident. wasn't our fault. we've done all we can." they worked hard, all of them trying to forget the body on the road and concentrate on the task of freeing the car from the ditch. in twenty minutes they were on their way, crawling slowly down the opposite side of the hill into the cup-like valley where a country store, church and schoolhouse had been flatteringly named "village of rosewood!" marjorie wrenn was still crying softly. glenn tried to comfort her, but the girl was exhausted mentally and physically. the snow still blotted out everything but a few yards of the road. once in the valley, robinson released his grip on the wheel and relaxed. "roy," he said softly. "yea?" "about that phantom buck story. i wouldn't talk too much. on the square, though i'm inclined to wonder." roy starr's voice sank to a whisper. "you think--maybe...?" "yea," robinson answered, "i think--maybe...." * * * * * the electric light flashed on, making the world of swirling snow friendly once more. the car was parked beside the house, close to the barn. the place was a huge country store with the living quarters attached like a toad-stool to the side of it. there was a wood-pile in the yard, hidden under a foot of snow, looking like a crouching, white monster. a single pole had been buried in the ground, and from it hung a six-point buck. the deer had been gutted, and blood made little red blobs on the snow. glenn starr climbed out and helped marjorie wrenn to the ground. he saw the overcoated figure emerging from the woodshed. "norm, you old horse. got any snake bite medicine?" norm boody, a well fed duplicate of slim summerville, was clad in a heavy overcoat drawn over a flannel night-shirt. his feet were hidden in vast, felt slippers. "thought you people weren't gonna get here. it's almost three in the morning. about those snake bites. what's the matter? snow snakes biting tonight?" the others were getting stiffly out of the car. earl robinson said solemnly: "those snow snakes bite before you can go ten feet. we had a little trouble, norm." boody found a half filled bottle in his coat and passed it around. "bad country to drive in a storm," he said. "worse than usual," robinson said. "there is a dead man laying down the road a mile or two." norm boody gulped from the bottle, choked and spewed the whiskey on the snow. "it--wasn't bill, was it?" robinson shook his head. "no one i know. dressed in hunter's outfit. didn't find his gun. probably buried under the snow." boody sighed. he looked uncertain. "bill went into indian river for some stuff. he didn't come back." "look," glenn said suddenly. "marge is freezing and we're all tired out. we better get inside." norm boody sprang toward the door and held it open. "sure, sure," he said. "the wife's got both coffee pots steaming by now. i oughta be shot for not getting this poor girl inside the minute she came. it ain't fit weather...." robinson smiled. "let's get to that coffee." inside, they all greeted mrs. boody. while she poured coffee into the cups on the kitchen table, robinson cornered norm boody and led him into the living room. it was a low-ceilinged, warm, homey place. a telephone hung on the far wall. robinson dialed the sheriff's number at indian river, put the receiver back in place, lifted it and tried again. he shook his head. "trouble?" boody asked. "the line must be down. phone won't work. guess we'll sleep tonight and make that call in the morning." the two men sat down in the darkness of the living room. mrs. boody, a grey headed, smiling woman who looked as though she might be anyone's mother, came in with two steaming cups. "you better drink before you freeze," she said. "that darned stove takes so long to heat up." she turned to her husband. "norm, what's wrong?" norm boody grimaced. "man dead down the road. something mauled him. killed before the snow came this evening. earl most ran over him." * * * * * the room was deathly silent for a moment. then the woman's voice came, almost in a sob. "norm, norm, it wasn't bill, was it?" robinson said quickly: "it wasn't bill. i saw the face. no one i've ever seen before." "thank god for that," mrs. boody said. "you called the sheriff?" "can't," norm boody said. "line's out of order. we'll get in touch with town in the morning." "i don't think we'll sleep much tonight," a soft voice said from the door. earl robinson chuckled. it was an attempt to put the whole thing off lightly. it didn't sound very sincere. "you'll sleep all right, marjorie. after that trip, we'll all sleep." the girl smiled wanly. "i hope so. it's hard--thinking of that--that...." daylight brought a peaceful, untroubled look to the valley. for ten miles, without a track save for the animals who had moved during the night, the valley stretched upward on all sides to the wooded hills. the big general store, schoolhouse and country church nestled in the center of the snow cup, with trackless roads leading away to the four points of the compass. blue-gray smoke lifted straight upward from the house, drifted two hundred feet into the sky and wafted away into nothingness. robinson came out of the woodshed with his black and red plaid coat wrapped tightly around him. it was a grand hunting morning, and he didn't intend to let last night's incident spoil it. the country was beautiful but there was nothing gentle about it. you had to face violence and forget it--quickly. death wasn't easy to look at, but here, people learned that when it came, there was no point in letting it interfere with their life. bill boody hadn't come in last night. his car wasn't to be seen. robinson went back into the woodshed. he climbed the steps to the kitchen and walked in quietly behind mrs. boody, who was bent over the kitchen stove. "where's norm?" he asked. mrs. boody looked worn and tired, as though she hadn't slept. "milking the cows. bill didn't come home last night." he knew that she was still suspicious of him. she wasn't sure that he told the truth about the body on the road. "bill will be okay," he said. "are any of the others up?" mrs. boody smiled. "roy came out a few minutes ago. he took one look at the thermometer outside the kitchen window, groaned and went back to bed." robinson started for the bedroom. "you better let marge sleep," mrs. boody said. "she was all worn out. she needs the rest." "earl," the woman at the stove said. there was a quality of urgency in her voice that stopped him short. he pivoted. "yes?" "you think the phantom buck might have done the killing?" here it was again, he thought. they weren't satisfied to let the whole thing pass as an accident. they had to bring up dead dogs, fall back on superstition. everything was perfect for hunting, and they had to spoil the spirit of the thing. "that phantom buck business is a damned fairy tale," he said. "_but you think it was the phantom buck, all the same._" robinson said nothing. the woman pushed the coffee pot back on the stove and went to the window. she stared out at the snowy world. "bill _saw_ the phantom buck once." "i know," robinson said. he wished she wouldn't talk about it. she was getting herself all excited. "probably bill had been drinking some of that snake bite medicine." mrs. boody shook her head. "bill don't touch a drop." her face was very red, maybe from the stove. "bill said the buck was the biggest deer he'd ever seen. he went right by bill, and disappeared, right in broad daylight. bill looked for tracks after he was gone, and there weren't any." she wet her lips and went back to the stove. "i wouldn't worry, mrs. boody," robinson said. she looked up then with frantic eyes. "_it isn't bill, out there on the road, dead?_" he went swiftly to her and put one hand on her shoulder. "i wouldn't lie to you. it wasn't him." she seemed to relax for the first time since last night. "i guess you're telling the truth. i wish bill would come home, though. they used to say that anyone who saw the phantom buck was getting ready for an early death." * * * * * norm boody came up from the barn with two steaming pails of milk. roy starr was getting dressed in the kitchen, close to the stove. he was muttering threats against his brother, glenn. "never let a guy sleep," he groaned. "always the first guy up and the only man on earth who can't let other people stay in bed when they want to." glenn starr and marjorie were already at the breakfast table. the others drifted in and sat down. a girl and a husky, sleepy-eyed man came down from upstairs. roy starr greeted the girl by chasing her around the stove and left her alone only after she picked up the poker and threatened to use it on him. robinson introduced the fifth member of the hunting party at the breakfast table. "pete larson hasn't hunted before," he said. "pete, you know our own bunch. you know norm and mrs. boody now. the tall, fair damsel holding the coffee pot is norma, mrs. boody's best assistant housekeeper and daughter. the sleepy eyed creature at her side is her husband, floyd." larson himself was heavy set, and a slightly ponderous man who wore light rimmed glasses and a rather awed look on his face. "i guess i've let myself in for some rugged country and some heavy eating," he said. "anyhow, i always did like a fifth cup of coffee and the supply looks adequate." "it _was_ rugged last night, all right," roy starr said. instantly there was silence. norma, the tall, slim girl, looked at her mother questioningly. robinson broke in before she had time to speak. "we found a dead man on the road last night. nobody we knew." he heard norma and her husband catch their breaths quickly. then the telephone rang and he was on his feet. norm boody was closer to the phone and answered it. the remainder of the group went on eating, but every ear was tuned to the conversation. "yes?" he listened for a time, then said: "i got a party of hunters who came in last night. they saw him on the road. we tried to call you but the wires were dead." then: "oh? so that was it. okay, we'll keep an eye open. haven't seen bill, have you? he's coming in behind the plough? good. we were worried about him." "telephone linemen came through this morning," he explained. "they picked up the body. that was sheriff walt beardsly calling. he ain't blaming you boys. says your tracks went right around the body. says a bear must have mauled the guy. they found his gun in the ditch." earl robinson said: "yea, that's what happened all right. bill's okay, isn't he?" boody nodded. "spent the night at the sheriff's house. couldn't drive in. he's coming in a couple of hours." mrs. boody went out for some more coffee. larson, managing a smile, said: "guess we can go hunting without worrying about anything--except bear." norma tickled her husband between well padded ribs. "take floyd along. he'll chase all the bears to the other side of the mountain." floyd grinned. "guess you boys can take care of yourselves." roy starr hadn't taken an active part in the conversation for some time. he brought his fist down on the table with a bang. "to hell with the phantom," he stood up. "ten minutes ago you were all tied up inside with a damned silly superstition. now you're kidding yourselves that everything is okay. you're _still_ ready to believe in ghosts and goblins at a moment's notice. what's the matter? we all too scared to think clearly for ourselves?" robinson got up. "come on, roy," he said. "let's go out and get chains on the car. we'll need them to make that south hill." roy starr was trembling. something had slipped inside him. something that made him angry at all of them. who did they think he was? could they handle him like a ten year old kid? "you want to lead junior outside and give him a lecture," he snapped. "please don't scare these good people. well, you can all go to hell. i'm going after a deer. if it turns out to be the phantom buck, i'll get _him_. i'm going alone and i don't need you or the car or anything else. i still got two good feet." they sat there and watched him go. robinson sat down a little weakly. they heard roy pick up his rifle in the kitchen and waited until his footsteps faded beyond the woodshed. "well," robinson said at last, "i guess junior is on the warpath." * * * * * glenn starr looked at his watch. he halted in the protection of the evergreen grove and turned his back to the wind. marjorie wrenn caught up with him. "better rest," glenn said. "it's after noon." he found some sandwiches in his pocket and passed her one. the girl's face was very pale. "the tracks didn't come out of the swamp," she said. "forget the tracks," glenn said gently. "it's been snowing since ten o'clock. they were roy's tracks all right. the snow drifted in and covered them up. he probably headed for home hours ago." "i--can't eat, glenn. let's go back. let's try to find the tracks again. i'm scared, glenn. i'm so scared my teeth are chattering." glenn took her rifle. "follow me," he said abruptly. "you're all done in. i'll take the shortest route." the girl took half a dozen faltering steps and sank down into the snow. when he reached her side, she was out cold. he rubbed her wrists and cheeks until her eyes, full of tears, opened slowly. "you're gonna be all right," he said, and picked her up in his arms. slowly, for he knew it was going to be a rough trail, he headed across the valley toward home. earl robinson moved more slowly now. he and larson had swung down from the north and crossed the three sets of tracks. larson, puffing from his first day of marching, came behind him. robinson stopped finally. he waited for larson to catch up. he pointed at the almost covered tracks. "here's where they missed his trail," he said. "i think we can still follow it if we take our time." "look," larson said abruptly, "you don't believe that phantom buck business, do you?" robinson didn't answer. he started away through the swamp, watching for a broken twig here, an almost buried footprint there. it took him two long hours to find the end of the trail. it had started to snow again. the boy was half covered with the drift. a thick growth of cedars had protected him from the full force of the storm. his eyes were wide open and he showed signs of recognizing robinson as the big man bent over him. he tried to smile, but he couldn't. there was blood around his lips and his jacket was torn open to reveal a deep, bloody gash in his chest. robinson built a fire hurriedly and larson kept the blaze alive with dry logs. robinson swore softly as he found bandages in his kit and administered first aid. he swore at the cold, and the snow, and the thing that had done this to the kid. they carried roy starr out that night, and it was close to midnight before they met norm boody and the party who had come in search of them. mrs. boody had coffee on the stove when they got in. robinson, once roy starr was warm and fairly safe once more, fell into a chair and slept like a child. an hour later, he was on his feet again, staggering, half dead from exhaustion, giving orders to the doctor who had come from indian river. * * * * * roy spoke in a whisper. "earl?" he was in pain. bad pain. earl took his hand. "it's okay, kid. i'm with you. it's all over." "earl," the voice was a sob. "earl, it's true about the phantom. i saw him." "i know," robinson said softly. "keep quiet. we found you in the swamp. larson and i brought you in. the doc says you're okay. few days rest." roy felt all choked up and hot inside. he squeezed earl's hand. "tell larson he's okay. you're okay. earl, we got to get out'a here." his fever was rising. "listen, junior," robinson said sternly, "i said everything's okay, and it is. lay still and sleep." roy wasn't hearing him now. he tried to force himself up on one elbow. his eyes were filled with memories--of terror. "i was a sap, earl. i tell you i saw him. he was big and beautiful, big as a nightmare. he snorted right close to me and there was fire shooting out of his nostrils. he hit me like lightning, earl. i--don't remember--after--that." he sank back, breathing hard. glenn starr came in from the bedroom. "how's roy?" "he's going to sleep now, aren't you roy?" earl asked. "yea--i'm gonna sleep." "_i_ can't sleep," glenn starr said. "if we'd kept him here this morning, he'd have been all right." "is bill up?" earl asked. "yea! he's talking with the doc in the kitchen. doctor hasn't left yet." "send in bill and tell doc to wait a little while," robinson said grimly. bill boody came into the darkened room and sat down quietly by the couch. "how's roy?" "okay, bill," robinson said. "i been doing some thinking." "about what?" bill boody was tall, slim, and well put together. his face, burned dark from sun and rain, was sensitive and mirrored friendliness and intelligence. "about the phantom buck," robinson said. "we all have," boody said. "norm told you i saw the phantom once, didn't he?" robinson nodded. "why didn't the phantom attack you, bill?" boody shook his head. "i don't know. it was the phantom all right. he was big--and grand, like sort of a god." neither of them said anything for a while. roy was sleeping. his breathing came easier now. "i guess i sound a little corny," boody said. "i don't mean to." "no," robinson answered. "no, i wasn't thinking of that. roy says it was the phantom that attacked him. he felt kinda like you do about it." robinson stood up and walked to the window. he stared upward toward the dark, moonlit forest. "when did you see the phantom?" bill looked thoughtful. "it was just before dusk...." "i guess i'm not making my question clear," robinson interrupted. "i mean, was it during hunting season?" "it was last spring. we were plowing the north field." "were you carrying a gun?" "no," boody said, puzzled. "that's what i thought." doctor peterson was a frosty looking old chap with black rimmed specs and a grey beard. "you about ready to go back to town, doc?" robinson asked. peterson grinned. "after i drink all the coffee in sight," he said. "and it looks like i have." mrs. boody was with them in the kitchen. the house was quiet. "i've got to get gas and oil. guess i'll follow you in," robinson said. "good. the boy's all right. i'll be out again tomorrow. ready to go?" outside the snow had finally stopped falling. the early morning was clear, with a promise of a bright day to come. robinson started his car and warmed it up. the doctor said good night to mrs. boody and came out to climb into his model t. robinson backed out slowly and followed the car down the road toward indian river. * * * * * it was just daylight. robinson left the car a mile from rosewood and entered the woods. he had taken his time in town, found an all-night gas station to refuel his car and parked it here just as the sun came up, coloring the frosty, blue-gray hills above him. half a mile from the road he turned and entered the swamp where he had found roy the day before. he started walking swiftly. he was weaponless, having left the rifle in his car. two hours passed and he had penetrated deeply into the swamp. he was cold. he had seen no fresh trails. a black squirrel chattered at him, and hid itself on the far side of a cedar tree. a fox hurried across his trail, a red blurr against the snow. far away, he heard the sudden dry "snap" of a twig. he found a stump and seated himself. he was very quiet. suddenly an icy coldness penetrated his entire body. it wasn't the wind or the natural cold that troubled him now. it was the feeling of death--sudden death--poised only seconds away. death--behind him, and he dared not look around. he waited perhaps sixty seconds, and they seemed like hours. he stood up very slowly and started to move his arms rhythmatically in a back and forth motion as though to restore circulation. at the same time, he made it evident to anyone--_anything_, looking at him, that he carried no weapon. then, without betraying fear, he turned. not ten feet away, poised with every splendid muscle tense and alert, was the biggest buck he had ever seen. the great animal stared at him without fear. its antlers were held high. the eyes frightened robinson. they weren't soft, brown deer eyes. they were, instead, black and beady, like twin windows to hell. [illustration: there was the baleful glint of hell in the monster eyes] the head swung back. the hooves pawed at the snow. with a snort, the creature sprang into the air. robinson ducked quickly to one side, but there was no reason for him to flee. the phantom buck, for he was sure the animal _was_ a phantom, moved past him with incredible speed and was gone in the forest. he was aware of a terrific burst of speed--of a perfectly proportioned body, and that was all. [illustration: with a burst of speed, the magnificent buck rushed past him] for a long time, robinson stood there by the stump. all the education that goes into a man, to bring him culture, was reviewing itself in his mind. all the hunter instinct drained out of him. there was only humbleness left, and respect for wild things. he knew he would find no tracks, even though he forced himself to look for them. six inches of untouched snow covered the spot where the phantom had stood. robinson shrugged and started back along the lengthy, circular trail to his car. norm boody came out of the house with roy starr's rifle. they were all gathered beside the car. roy, a trifle pale, was wrapped snugly, and resting on the rear seat. glenn starr sat beside roy, his arm about marjorie. norma smiled at glenn. "i know a secret," she said. "better not tell it," glenn made a pass at her with his open palm. norma stepped back and laughed loudly. "glenn's a hero. he carried marge out of the cruel woods. he carried her three miles, and now she's consented to marry him." glenn gave a war-whoop and started after her. norma ran into the house and slammed the door. "you may as well face it," robinson said. "roy isn't so weak that he can't kid the daylights out of you all the way home." pete larson spoke from the far corner of the front seat. * * * * * "how about the little secret _you're_ keeping, earl. that was quite a little research trip you took into the woods this morning." robinson looked startled. "you didn't..." larson chuckled. "when you and the doctor left last night, i was suspicious. i went down the road this morning and located your car. _i_ took along a gun for protection. spent an hour in the swamp. got tired of tracking you after that." norm boody had been studying them curiously. "bill said you were asking a lot of questions last night, earl." larson spoke again before robinson could answer. "of course we all go at things a little differently," he admitted. "however, i got an idea that the phantom wouldn't attack a man who didn't carry a gun. earl left his in the car when he went into the swamp." robinson nodded. "i went into the swamp," he admitted. "i had an idea the phantom might be sort of a ghostly protector of the herd. we have quite a slaughter of deer up here every fall. it must be hard on them if they have any feeling at all. what's so damn much different between men killing deer, or a deer killing a man? if the phantom exists, he's sort of a protecting angel--or a god. if i had met him ..." "you didn't?" norm boody asked sharply. earl grinned. "if i _had_ met him," he went on, "i guess i'd do something about it. i guess i'd think he was a pretty grand old guy, standing up to fight for his kind. i'd probably look him over and pray for mercy, and get the hell out of his domain. if i hunted again next year, i'd either find new territory, or prepare to get myself killed." norm boody looked solemn. "well, i ain't much for hunting myself," he admitted. "but if i _did_ like to hunt, and i _believed_ a story like that, i'd leave my gun at home when i went into the woods. ain't that the general idea?" roy starr said weakly: "gosh, i'm getting awfully weak already. how about a shot of snakebite medicine." glenn found a half bottle and passed it around. "might as well finish it. my wife-to-be says i gotta stop drinking as soon as we're married." "and where are _you_ hunting next year, larson," robinson asked. larson grinned. "how about a good week hunting jack-rabbits? i don't think i'd be very scared if i met the god of the jack-rabbits, even if he did shoot fire out of the corner of his nostrils."